Europe: A History (26 page)
EPIC
H
omer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
were traditionally regarded in Europe not merely as the oldest examples of European literature but as the earliest form of high literature anywhere. In 1872, however, following excavations of clay tablets from the palace library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, the capital of ancient Assyria, the world was introduced to the
Epic of Gilgamesh
.
Gilgamesh
was already venerable by the time that Homer’s poems were composed. Indeed, it can be traced back through a Mesopotamian literary tradition into the third millennium BC. It begins:
[Of him who] found out all things, I shall tell the land,
[Of him who] experienced everything, [I shall teach] the whole.
He searched [?] lands [?] everywhere.
He who experienced the whole gained complete wisdom.
He found out what was secret, and uncovered what was hidden.
He brought back a tale of times before the flood.
He had journeyed far and wide, weary and at last resigned,
He engraved all his toils on memorial tablets of stone.
1
Initial interest in the Babylonian epic centred on its biblical connections, notably on its narration of the Flood and the Ark and the story of Creation. But it was not long before scholars noticed echoes of Homer. After all, the chronological coincidence was close enough. Assurbanipal was building his library at Nineveh in the last quarter of the seventh century
BC;
Nineveh was destroyed in 612, in much the same era that the Homeric poems must have found their final form. (See Appendix III, p. 1216.)
Many textual similarities can be explained by the oral conventions practised by all pre-literate epic poets. But many things cannot be so easily explained. The opening invocation of
Gilgamesh
resembles the opening lines of the
Odyssey
both in tone and sentiment:
Goddess of song, teach me the story of a hero. This was the man of wide-ranging spirit who had sacked the sacred city of Troy and who had wandered afterwards long and far. Many were those whose cities he viewed and whose minds he came to know, many the trouble that vexed his heart… Goddess, daughter of Zeus, impart to me in turn some knowledge of all these things, beginning where you will.
2
Stronger still is the case that can be made for the influence of
Gilgamesh
on the
Iliad
. Both epics turn on a dramatic twist of the plot which occurs with the death of one of two inseparable friends. Gilgamesh mourns for Enkidu as Achilles mourns for Patroclus. Other episodes, such as that where the gods draw lots for the division of the earth, sea, and sky, are strikingly similar. What was once rated as ‘a possible Greek debt to Assyria’ must now be upgraded to a probability.
3
If this supposition is
correct, the Homeric epics not only supply a link between Classical Letters and the countless generations of
aoidoi
, the unlettered bards of the immemorial tradition. They also span the gap between the conventional western literary canon and the far more ancient writings of non-European literature.
(Everything’s laughter, everything dust, everything nothing. I Out of unreason comes everything that exists.)
11
and of epitaphs:
(Tell them in Lakedaemon, passer-by. | That we kept the rules, resolved to die.)
12
Greek drama evolved out of the ceremonies of religious festivals. The concept of
tragodia
, literally ‘goat-song’, was originally connected with ritual sacrifice. The first Athenian dramas were performed at the festival of Dionysus. Like the Games, they were staged in the spirit of competition. The stylized dialogue between the players and the chorus provided a vehicle for exploring the most terrible psychological and spiritual conflicts. Between them the triad of tragedians, Aeschylus (525–456), Sophocles (
c
.496–406), and Euripides (
c
.480–406), turned tribal myth and legend into the foundation-stones of world literature.
Seven Against Thebes
, the
Oresteia
, and
Prometheus Bound; Oedipus the King, Electro
, and
Antigone; Iphigenia among the Taurians, Medea
, and
Hippolytus
, represent the remnants of a much larger repertoire.
[OEDIPUS]
Only thirty-two tragedies have survived; but they continue to be performed the world over. They are specially needed by the horror-struck twentieth century. ‘Tragedy enables us to live through the unbearable.’ ‘The greatest Greek tragedies are a constant education in [the] nightmare possibility… that we will all end in darkness and despair and suicide.’ ‘Having boldly looked right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called World History, as well as the cruelty of nature, the Greek comforts himself…. Art saves him, and through art—life.’
13
The comedians, led by Aristophanes (
c
.450–385), felt free to poke fun at everyone from philosophers to politicians.
The Knights, The Birds, The Clouds, The
Wasps, The Frogs
, whose fantastic plots are laced with lavatorial and sexual humour, still raise roars of laughter from audiences the world over. Aristophanes had a matchless talent for coining unforgettable phrases. He is the inventor of
Nephelokokkugia
, ‘Cloudcuckooland’. [
scholastikos]
It is no exaggeration to say that Greek letters form the launch-pad of the
humanist tradition. ‘Wonders are many,’ wrote Sophocles; ‘but nothing more wonderful than man’:
CADMUS
C
ADMUS,
son of Agenor, King of Phoenicia, and brother of Europa, features in numerous Greek myths. He was honoured as founder of Boeotian Thebes, and as importer of the alphabet. Wandering the earth in search of his abducted sister, Cadmus consulted the oracle at Delphi. He was told to build a city ‘wherever a cow would rest’. So he followed a likely bovine from Phocis into the plain of Boeotia. He marked the spot where it finally lay down beside a hillock, and started to build the
Cadmea
, the oval acropolis of Thebes. The city’s inhabitants were born from the teeth of a dragon which Cadmus had slain on the advice of Athena. Athena made him their governor, and Zeus gave him a wife, Harmonia.
Birthplace of Dionysus and Hercules, of the seer, Tiresias, and of the magical musician, Amphion, Thebes was also the scene of the tragedy of
Oedipus
and of the
Seven Against Thebes
. It was the neighbour and hereditary rival of Athens; it was the ally and then the destroyer of Sparta; and it was destroyed itself by Alexander.
[OEDIPUS]
The Phoenician alphabet, which Cadmus reputedly brought to Greece, was phonetic but purely consonantal. It is known in its basic form from before 1200 BC, having, like its partner, Hebrew, supplanted the earlier hieroglyphs. A simple system, easily learned by children, it broke the monopoly in arcane writing which had been exercised for millennia by the priestly castes of previous Middle Eastern civilizations. The names of the letters passed almost unchanged into Greek:
aleph (alpha)
= ‘ox’,
beth (beta) =
‘house’;
gimel (gamma)
= ‘camel’;
daleth (delta)
= ‘tent door’. The old Greek alphabet was produced by adding five vowels to the original sixteen Phoenician consonants. It also doubled for use as numerals. In due course, it became the ancestor of the main branches of European writing—modern Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Glagolitic, and Cyrillic.
1
(See Appendix III, p. 1218)
The earliest manifestations of the Latin alphabet date from the sixth century BC. It was based on a script found in the Chalcidian colonies, such as Cumae, in Magna Graecia. It was subsequently adopted and adapted by all the languages of western Christendom, from Irish to Finnish, and in recent times for many non-European languages, including Turkish.
The Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets were developed from the Greek in Byzantine times for the purpose of writing certain Slavonic languages. In Orthodox Serbia, ‘Serbo-Croat’ is written in Cyrillic; in Croatia the same language is written in the Latin alphabet.
[ILLYRIA]
The angular style of Phoenician, Greek, and Roman scripts was dictated by the art of the stone-chisel. The gradual evolution of cursive styles was made possible by use of the stylus on wax and of quill on parchment.
Latin minuscules, which are the basis of modern ‘small letters’, emerged around
AD
600, although the Roman majuscules, or ‘capitals’, have also been retained.
[PALAEO]
Letters and literature are one of the glories of European civilization. The story of Cadmus hints that their roots lay in Asia.
CHORUS.
Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these
Is man, who rides the ocean …
He is master of the ageless earth, to his own will bending
The immortal mother of gods…
He is lord of all living things…
The use of language, the wind-swift motion of brain
He learnt; found out the laws of living together
In cities…
There is nothing beyond his power…
14
Greek oratory was an art fostered both by the theatre and by the tradition of open-air law-courts and political assemblies. Rhetoric, first expounded in
The Art of Words
by Corax of Syracuse (
fl. c
.465
BC),
was studied as a formal subject. Of the ‘Ten Attic Orators’ from Antiphon to Dinarchus of Corinth, none matched the skill of Demosthenes (384–322). In his youth an orphan and a stammerer, he overcame all difficulties, drove his arch-rival Aeschines (389–314) into exile, and became the acknowledged master both of public speaking and of prose style. His series of
Philippics
argued eloquently and passionately for resistance to Philip of Macedon. His oration
On the Crown
, delivered in his defence at a trial in 330
BC,
was modestly described by Macaulay as ‘the ne plus ultra of human art’.
Greek art, too, experienced its great awakening—what one leading scholar has dared to call ‘the greatest and most astonishing revolution in the whole history of Art’.
15
Modern appreciation is influenced no doubt by those forms which have best survived, notably sculpture in stone, architecture, and figure-painting on ceramic vases. Even so, the sudden leap from the stiff and gloomy styles of older antiquity, the explosive flowering which took place in the sixth and fifth centuries, is remarkable. Strongly inspired by spiritual and religious motives, Greek artists paid special attention to the human body, seeking, as Socrates urged, ‘to represent the workings of the soul’ by observing the effect of people’s inner feelings on the body in action. The two most celebrated statues of Phidias (
c
.490–415
BC)
are only known from later copies; but the Parthenon friezes, dubiously salvaged by Lord Elgin, speak for themselves.
[LOOT]
A century later Praxiteles (
fl. c
.350
BC),
a sculptor of almost ethereal ease and grace, was no more fortunate than Pheidias
in the survival of his masterworks, though the Hermes of Olympia and the Aphrodite of Arles attest to his talent. These, together with figures of the later period such as the bronze Apollo Belvedere, or the Aphrodite of Melos, better known as the ‘Venus de Milo’, have often been taken as ideal models for male and female beauty. By the era of Alexander the Great, the Greeks had created ‘the pictorial language of half the world’.
16
MOUSIKE
T
he
Greek term
mousike
embraced both poetry and the art of contrived sound. Both have a long history.
Ancient Greek music was built on ‘modes’. A musical mode, like a scale, is a fixed sequence of notes whose intervals provide the basis for melodic invention. The Greeks were familiar with six of them; and Pythagorean mathematicians correctly calculated the frequencies which underlie their component tones, semitones and quarter-tones. The modal system, however, does not operate in quite the same manner as the later system of keys and scales. A change of mode alters the configuration of the intervals in a melodic line, whilst a change of key only alters the pitch.
In the fourth century St Ambrose selected four so-called ‘authentic modes’ for ecclesiastical use, to which Gregory the Great added four more so-called ‘plagal modes’, making eight ‘church modes’ in all. These formed the basis of plainsong
[CANTUS]
.
In the sixteenth century the Swiss monk Henry of Glarus (Glareanus) set out a full table of twelve modes, giving them a confusing series of names which, with one exception, did not coincide with the ancient originals:
| No . | Glareanus | Greek name | Range | Final | Dominant |
| I | Dorian | Phrygian | D–D | D | A |
| II | Hypodonian | — | A–A | D | F |
| III | Phrygian | Dorian | E–E | E | C |
| IV | Hypophrygian | — | B–B | E | A |
| V | Lydian | Syntonolydian | F–F | F | C |
| VI | Hypolydian | — | C–C | F | A |
| VII | Mixolydian | Ionian | G–G | G | D |
| VIII | Hypomixolydian | — | D–D | G | C |
| IX | Aeolian | Aeolian | A–A | A | E |
| X | Hypoaeolian | — | E–E | A | G |
| XI | Ionian | Lydian | C–C | C | C |
| XII | Hypoionian | — | G–G | C | E 1 |
The development of modern harmony rendered most of the ancient modes redundant. But two of them, XI and IX, the Lydian and the Aeolian, survived. Known from the seventeenth century onwards as the major and the minor variants of the twelve key scales, they supply the twin aspects, the ‘joyful’ and the ‘mournful’, of the melodic system on which most European ‘classical music’ is based. Together with time and harmony, they constitute one of three basic grammatical elements in the musical language which marks Europe off from its Asian and African neighbours.
Given that Europe has never acquired a universal spoken language, i.e. a common verbal
musike
, Europe’s musical idiom, its non-verbal
musike
, must be reckoned the longest and strongest thread of its common culture. Indeed, since it extends from Spain to Russia but not to India or to the Islamic world, one is tempted to suggest that it is the only universal medium of pan-European communication.