HIST 110 HISTORY OF CIVILIZATIONS Week 5 October 23, 2015 The Greek Civilization Antiquity on the thresholds model It is are situated along the second, the Agrarian threshold: from left to right along this threshold, you might see (a) early farmers = non-state agricultural societies; (b) the first state societies based on agriculture = Early Land Empires = ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt etc = the first phase of Antiquity (Minoan civilization) (c) ON A SLIGHTLY RAISED STEP ABOVE THE MAIN THRESHOLD : Mediterranean Antiquity = ancient Greece and Rome = precocious maritime-commercial civilizations with a relatively high degree of urbanization; (d) THEN AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THIS RAISED STEP AND ITS REVERSION TO THE MAIN THRESHOLD : Medieval European and comparable / roughly contemporaneous agricultural societies extending rightwards along the Agrarian threshold Heterogeneity of Ancient History Ancient History was marked by a relatively high degree of heterogeneity and eclecticism; having more of a hodge podge character, comprising : (i) the first (and primary) civilizations Mesopotamia Sumer civilization (6500 BCE) Indus valley Bhirrana civilization (7500 BCE) Egypt Khemet, unified Egypt (3200 BCE) China Erlitou civilization (3000 BCE) 1
(ii) then a process of the rise of further civilizations which are mostly secondary / derivative in character because they arise through a process of the spread of civilization; Mesopotamia Akkadian Empire (2300 BCE) Indus valley Harappan civilization (3300 BCE) Egypt Achaemenid dynasty (343 BCE) China Shang dynasty (1500 BCE) (iii) especially among or within category (ii), a further distinction between the Early Land Empires and the precocious maritime, or slave-commercial, civilizations of the Mediterranean (= Mediterranean Antiquity) (iv) meanwhile, vast areas outside the scope of the expanding multiple-loci of civilization i.e. tribal, non-state societies, many of which are early farmers (v) but also, many tribal societies which are still hunter-gatherers Emergence of Cities: Basic definition of a city : * a type or unit of human settlement that essentially does not produce (all, or most, or enough of) its own food, * and therefore has to import it from the outside (whether from its immediate vicinity, or over longer distances) * hence, a non-agricultural demographic composition City is a 'complex society' : there are no farmers or peasants in the city, instead; (a) the maintainers of order, i.e. the military and bureaucratic components of the state or the ruling classes; (b) men of religion : priests / priesthoods, ecclesiastics, clergymen; (c) people involved in buying and selling : large and small merchants, traders, petty shopkeepers; (d) industrial producers, i.e. craftsmen, artisans; (e) some professions or professionals serving all the rest such as lawyers, doctors, apothecaries (not very developed and diversified until the advent of modernity) 2
Preconditions for the emergence of cities : the emergence of surplus production, leading to large food surpluses that could be transferred to and stored in urban warehouses Characteristics: In overwhelmingly agrarian (tributary) states and societies * cities were either few or small, or both * large cities were mostly capitals of vast empires, benefiting from this politically privileged position * for a long time there were no medium-sized cities * provisioning was difficult * preferred locations were on waterways * the larger cities usually owed their size to the presence of ruling elites, who held land and exploited peasants in the countryside, but chose to live in urban centres * the corollary is that cities were not necessarily centres for economic production or exchange * their ceremonial or administrative or religious functions could easily predominate Comparison between Mesopotamian and Greek cities Given all of the above, there could be significant differences in the way towns fitted into particular societies, and therefore in what they harboured. Mesopotamian cities Archeological findings have shown that Mesopotamian cities basically comprised : a temple and ziggurat; a palace or palaces; storerooms for surplus grain and other forms of agricultural tribute; workshops for craftsmen employed by the state, and paid out of these food surpluses; dwellings for these kinds of people *** significantly, there was no marketplace *** neither were there other forms or embodiments of public space Greek city-states Greek cities or city-states have comprised many of the above. In terms of difference, they had : a sacred precinct, such as the Acropolis in Athens, 'housing' the temples of the various gods and goddesses 3
***most significantly, they had : marketplaces gymnasia amphitheatres law courts etc. In these spaces, citizens could meet and do business and talk in their leisure time * in other words, they had : 1) economic spaces related to production and exchange on the market 2) they also had other forms of public space Important concepts / events: the Peloponnesian War : A series of wars and rebellions in Ancient Greece, fought in two great ten-year tranches : over 431-421 and 414-404 BC, primarily between Athens (as a maritime power leading the Delian League) and Sparta (as a land power leading the Peloponnesian League), but also between them and those allies of theirs who kept revolting against them * ended with the defeat of Athens * though then Sparta could not establish a firm hegemony either from Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War The whole of Hellas used once to carry arms, their habitations being unprotected, and their communication with each other unsafe; indeed, to wear arms was as much a part of everyday life with them as with the barbarians. And the fact that the people in these parts of Hellas are still living in the old way points to a time when the same mode of life was once equally common to all. And there are many other points in which a likeness might be shown between the life of the Hellenic world of old and the barbarian of to-day. (Analysis of the quote) * The State of Greece from the Earliest Times to the Commencement of the Peloponnesian War * 5 th century BC the beginnings of History the emergence of the individual citizen-historian 4
the search for truth, for evidence, for realistic explanation: empiricalinductive Historian today s barbarians = the Hellenes of old Thucydides as a comparative-evolutionary anthropologist precocious maritime civilizations : a way of referring to Ancient Greece and Rome, which are being thereby described / defined as having been characterized by an early and extraordinary level of commercial development in the very special circumstances of the Mediterranean, enabling them to attain degrees of urbanization (such as 15 or even 25-30 percent) unprecedented at the time, and unequalled by other pre-modern peasant societies until deep into the Early Modern Era littoral zone : A coastal area which (probably because of its highly indented, strung-withislands character) develops such a high degree of maritime communications and exchange networks, that coastal communities come to share much more with one another than with their respective hinterlands * example : the entire Aegean basin at the time of ancient Greek civilization and the Hellenistic era * concrete demonstration : how Hippocrates of Kos could go all around the Aegean practicing professional (commercial) medicine in various towns that had a common language, a common pantheon, a common economy, and a common political culture demokratia : There are some basic requirements for democracy, or for citizen politics in public space. First of all, people (electorate) must know about their choices (candidates, parties, etc), their programs and policies, what they advocate or stand for. Hence, : 1. there must be adequate information flow; news must get around 2. there must be compactness in terms of city's material conditions 3. there must be relative homogeneity in material and cultural conditions *** Wherever modern transport and communications technology (including at least printed if not electronic media) do not exist, these three can be possible only on a very small scale : In other words, in small cities that permit the talk of the town to get around in the physical embodiments of public space in the agora, the gymnasium, 5
the amphitheatre, and so on and so forth. These conditions of smallness, compactness, relative cultural homogeneity, and the existence of public space(s) existed in Antiquity only within small units like Greek city-states. Contrast (ex. Persian Empire) in a vast and heterogeneous empire, that spread over tens of thousands of square kilometers, and comprising not only some cities (that were very far from each other) but also many illiterate and information-less tribes as well as an oceans of illiterate and information-less peasants ** there could be no question of democracy in any shape or form from Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. (Analysis of the quote) * This is from the funeral oration that Pericles delivered in 430 BC in honour of the Athenians who died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War * we do not have the actual text, but rather the historian Thucydides s account or version of it * nevertheless, what we have here is a good description and defense of the principles of ancient demokratia of citizen politics in public space by one of its foremost proponents, i.e. somebody who had internalized democratic ideology * look how much its sounds like 20 th century schoolbook accounts of equality before the law, equal opportunity, etc * the point is that it is not Pericles who sounds modern; it is modern political ideology that sounds like Pericles * for like other aspects of the Greek demokratia (and the Roman res publica), this, too, has become part of the ideological legacy which has been drawn upon, and used again and again, in the process of constructing modern democracy 6
polis : literally means city in Greek. also refers to citizens, citizenship but it is often translated as 'city-state' It brings together city, state, and citizenship. Plato analyzes the polis in The Republic, whose Greek title, Πολιτεία (Politeia), itself derives from the word polis. The best form of government of the polis for Plato is the one that leads to the common good. from Aristotle, Politics Because it is the completion of associations existing by nature, every polis exists by nature From these considerations it is evident that the polis belongs to the class of things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis. He who is without a polis, by reason of his own nature and not of some accident, is either a poor sort of being, or a being higher than man : he is like the man of whom Homer wrote in denunciation : Clanless and lawless and hearthless is he. * 4th century BC the beginnings of Political Science / Political Theory, too, in Ancient Greece theoricistic-deductive Political Theory all related to the birth of public space, and of citizen politics in public space (a) there is something to theorize about (b) there are individual citizen-thinkers to theorize about it he recognizes the centrality of the polis, the city-state (to the Greek society of his time, or to civilization) at the same time he naturalizes it using an essentialistic/naturalist sort of man, by nature explanation from Hippocrates, Oath (Hipokrat Yemini) Whenever I go into a house, I will go to help the sick and never with the intention of doing harm or injury. I will not abuse my position to indulge in sexual contacts with the bodies of women or 7
of men, whether they be freemen or slaves. oath taken by graduating doctors of medicine to this day * Hippocrates of Cos, accepted to have been born in 460 BC, started out as part of a medical clan or guild ritually serving his own city-state, but eventually broke away from this relatively collectivistic framework in order to travel around the Aegean, practicing commercial medicine (i.e. earning money in return for his services) on an individual basis * hence, one of the cornerstones of his reputation as the Father of Medicine is that he embodies the emergence of the individual citizen-physician (in the same sense that Herodotus or Thucydides as the so-called Fathers of History exemplify the emergence of the individual citizenhistorian) * the other cornerstone of Hippocrates s reputation is the invention of a methodology of empirical observation; (something comparable is also true of Herodotus and Thucydides in the sense of a search for the most original or closest-to-the-truth sources possible) * this sort of individual, market-oriented practice of medicine also brings with it questions of the invasion of domestic space and of privacy, with the doctor now coming to establish a very special relationship with his patient * it is the fears of abuse of this special relationship, or of the very special power of the doctor over the patient, which are addressed in this paragraph 8