Greek architecture succeeded in harnessing immense technical skill to exquisite sensibility. The art of building, which in Mesopotamia and in Egypt had largely sought to impress by means of its colossal scale, now aimed to exhibit more spiritual values. The finely proportioned harmonies of the Doric temples, with their subtly tapered colonnades and sculptured plinths and pediments, could convey either heavyweight muscular power, as at the Temple of Poseidon at Posidonia (Paestum), or effortless elegance, as in the white Pentelic marble of the Athenian Parthenon. The tone and the mood of the temple could be tuned to the special characteristics of whatever deity inhabited the enclosed
cella
or ‘sanctuary’ behind the soaring columns. Of the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’, as listed in the second century
BC
by Antipater of Sidon for the first generation of classical tourists, five were masterpieces of Greek architecture. After the Pyramids of Egypt and the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis at Babylon, these were: the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the (third) Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos or Lighthouse of Alexandria.
[ZEUS]
Greek science was simply a branch of general philosophy. Most philosophers were concerned with both the physical and the abstract sciences. Thales of Miletus (
c
.636–546), who held that everything derived from water, died fittingly by falling down a well. He measured the flood levels of the Nile, the distances between ships, and the height of mountains, and he was credited with predicting solar eclipses. Heraclitus of Ephesus (
fl. c
.500), in contrast, considered fire to be the primary form of all matter, which was constantly in flux. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (
c
.500–428), the teacher of Pericles, argued for the existence of a supreme Mind or
nous
which animated all living things and which, by exerting its force on infinitely divisible ‘seeds’, enabled them to combine into all forms of matter. He claimed that the planets were stones torn from the earth, and that the sun was red-hot through motion.
Empedocles of Acragas (
c
.493–433) proposed that the earth is made of four ‘elements’: fire, earth, air, and water, and that these elements are constantly merging and separating under the contrary stresses of love and strife. He reputedly leapt into the crater of Mount Etna in order to test his capacity for reincarnation. But the volcano obliged by returning only one sandal. Democritus of Abdera (
c
.460–361) refined the atomic theory of Leucippus, holding that all physical matter could be explained in terms of the random collisions of tiny particles which he called
atoma
or ‘unbreakables’. He was popularly known as the laughing philosopher, because of his amusement at human folly.
OEDIPUS
O
EDIPUS
‘the Swollen-Foot’, King of Thebes, is one of the most ubiquitous characters of ancient Greek myth and literature. He also furnishes a prime illustration of the Classical Tradition which derives from them.
The story of Oedipus is that of a Theban outcast who, being rejected by his royal parents, is doomed to take the most terrible, though involuntary, revenge. Exposed to die as an infant because his father, King Laius, feared a bad omen about him, he is saved by a shepherd and is fostered in nearby Corinth by people unaware of his origins. Consulting the oracle at Delphi, he is told that he will kill his father and marry his mother. For which reason he flees Corinth and comes again to Thebes. He kills Laius during a chance meeting; solves the riddle of the Sphinx; rids the city of its terror, and as a reward, is given the King’s widow, Jocasta, his own mother, to wife. After fathering four children through this unwittingly incestuous union, he discovers the truth, and sees Jocasta hang herself in despair. Thereon he blinds himself, and is led into exile by his daughter, Antigone. His end comes, at Colonus in Attica, where the tragic wanderer disappears into a sacred grove.
Homer mentions Oedipus in both
Iliad
and
Odyssey
. But it is the lost epic,
Thebais
, which was probably the main source of the later story. It then becomes the centrepiece of the Theban trilogy of Sophocles, and the background to Aeschylus’
Seven Against Thebes
and to Euripides’
Suppliants
and
Phoenician Women
.
Oedipus recurs throughout subsequent European literature. The Roman poet Statius wrote an epic
Thebaid
which in turn was the model for Racine’s first play
La Thébaide
(1665). The Roman tragedian Seneca composed a variation on Sophocles’
Oedipus
, inspiring further versions by Corneille (1659) and by André Gide (1950) and a loose adaptation by the contemporary poet, Ted Hughes. Sophocles’
Oedipus at Colonnus
provides the basis both for T. S. Eliot’s verse drama
The Elder Statesman
(1952) and Jean Cocteau’s
Infernal Machine
(1934). His
Antigone
has been followed by dramas of the same name and subject by Cocteau, Jean Anouilh (1944), and Brecht (1947). Anthony Burgess wrote an Oedipus novel entitled
MF
(1971). There are two paintings of
Oedipus and the Sphinx
(1808) by Ingres. There is an opera-oratorio
Oedipus-Rex
(1927) by Stravinsky set to Cocteau’s Latin libretto, and a film,
Oedipus-Rex
(1967) by Pasolini.
1
By far the best known use of the legend, however, was made by Sigmund Freud who gave the label of ‘Oedipus Complex’ to the repressed hostility of boys to their fathers. Deriving from the rivalry of father and son
for the mother’s affection, the syndrome can lead in later life to a pathological mother-fixation.
The Classical Tradition, which may be defined as the creative reworking of ancient themes for contemporary purposes, draws on thousands of such examples. Nourished since the Renaissance by five centuries of education in Greek and Latin, it has supplied a body of knowledge with which all educated Europeans have been familiar. Together with Christianity, it has provided a stream within ‘the bloodstream of European Culture’ and ‘a code of instant recognition’. Its decline in the late 20th century has been precipitated by changing social and educational priorities. Its advocates argue that its survival is essential if European civilization is not to wither from alienation.
SCHOLASTIKOS
T
he
Philogelos
or ‘Love of Laughter’, once attributed to Philagrius of Alexandria and the fifth century
AD,
is a collection of much older Greek witticisms. It features the original
scholastikos
or ‘absent-minded professor’, together with the men of Abdera and Cumae, butts of early forms of the Irish (or Polish) joke.
• A
scholastikos
who wanted to see what he looked like when asleep stood in front of a mirror with his eyes shut.
• A
scholastikos
met a friend and said, ‘I heard you’d died.’ ‘But you see I’m alive.’ ‘Yes, but the man who told me was much more reliable than you.’
• A Cumaean went to the embalmer’s to collect the body of his dead father. The embalmer, looking for the right corpse, asked if it had any distinctive features. ‘A bad cough.’
• A Cumaean was selling honey. A passer-by tasted it, and found it excellent. ‘Yes,’ said the Cumaean, ‘I wouldn’t be selling it at all if a mouse hadn’t fallen into it.’
• A Scottish
scholastikos
decided to economize by training his donkey not to eat, so he gave it no food. When the animal had starved to death, the owner complained, ‘And just when it was learning to live without eating.’
1
Collectors of folk-tales have recorded versions of the last story in Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Swedish, English, Spanish, Catalan, Walloon, German, Italian, Slovene, Serbo-Croat, Russian, and Greek. Malcolm Bradbury uses it in
Rates of Exchange
, as part of the heritage of his imaginary East European country, ‘Slaka’.
2
Hippocrates of Cos (
c
.460–357) took medicine out of the realm of religion and magic. Numerous treatises on public health, hygiene, patient care, and surgery were attributed to him. The Hippocratic Oath, whereby doctors dedicated their lives to the welfare of their patients, remained the corner-stone of medical practice until quite recently. His book of aphorisms begins with the line: ‘Life is short, Art is long.’
[HYSTERIA]
Eudoxus of Cnidus
(fl. c
.350) taught the motions of the planets round the sun, whilst inventing the sundial. Aristotle wrote systematic works in both physics and biology. His classification of animal species forms the basis of all subsequent zoology. His
Politics
begins with the inimitable remark: ‘Man is above all a political animal.’ Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus of Lesbos (
c
.370–288), applied the same methods of classification to botany. His treatise on
Characters
can be seen as the founding text of analytical psychology.
From the historian’s point of view, Heraclitus was probably the most important of these pioneers. Heraclitus reasoned that everything in the world is subject to perpetual change and decay: also that change is caused by the inevitable clash of opposites—in other words, by dialectics. In so doing he unwrapped the two basic ideas of the historian’s trade: change over time, and causation. His favourite aphorism was: ‘You cannot step into the same river twicé.’
[ELEKTRON]
Greek mathematics developed under the influence both of speculative thought and of religious mysticism. Thales had supposedly learned the rudiments of arithmetic and geometry in Egypt. But it was Pythagoras of Samos (
c
.572–497) who, in addition to compiling the results of his predecessors, made a number of original advances. He launched the Theory of Numbers, formulated the theorem about the square of the hypotenuse of the right-angle triangle, and, most interestingly, worked out the mathematical basis of musical harmony. He may be the author of the beautiful but mistaken theory of ‘the music of the spheres’. Eudoxus discovered the Theory of Proportions, and the method of exhaustion for measuring curvilinear surfaces. His disciple, Menaechmus, discovered conic sections.
All these researches prepared the way for Euclides of Alexandria
(fl. c
.300), whose
Elements
is said to have reigned supreme for longer than any book save the Bible. Euclid was the great mathematical systematizer, who set out to provide lasting proofs for all existing knowledge. When asked by the ruler of Egypt whether geometry could not be made more simple, he replied that there was ‘no royal road’. The next generation was dominated by Archimedes and by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276–196), who, in calculating the earth’s diameter at 252,000 stades or 7,850 miles, erred by less than 1 per cent. Lastly there was Apollonius of Perge (
fl. c
.220
BC),
who wrote a vast eight-volume study of Conies and found an approximation for
pi
that was even closer than that of Archimedes.
[ARCHIMEDES]
Greek moral philosophy, divided in the later centuries into several rival schools, greatly modified the teachings of traditional religion. The Sceptics, founded by Pyrrho of Elis, whose dates are not known, asserted that it is not possible to attain
certain knowledge about anything, and hence that man’s sole object should be the pursuit of virtue. He was an anti-speculative speculator, who exerted an important influence on the Athenian Academy after Plato’s death.
HYSTERIA
A
CCORDING
to various Hippocratic treatises on medicine, hysteria was exclusively a woman’s disease associated with uterine disorders.
Hystera
in Greek meant ‘womb’; and the state of nervous agitation was caused when menstrual blood was unable to escape:
Whenever the menses are suppressed or cannot find a way out, illness results. This happens if the mouth of the womb is closed or if some part of [the] vagina is prolapsed … Whenever two months’ menses are accumulated in the womb, they move off into the lungs where they are prevented from exiting.
1
In another variant, the womb itself was thought to become displaced and to wander round the body cavity. By pressing on the heart or brain, it provoked anxiety and eventually uncontrollable panic. Religious taboos forbade human dissection; and the internal workings of women’s (and of men’s) bodies were not understood until modern times. In the view of one analyst, however, ancient attitudes to women survived even when ancient anatomical theories had been discounted. ‘The notion persisted that women’s minds could be adversely affected by their reproductive tracts.’
2
The history of women’s bodies is a complicated subject. Over the ages, their size, weight, shape, muscular development, menstruation, child-bearing capacity, maturing, ageing, and disease patterns have varied considerably, as have their symbolism, their religious connotation, their aesthetic appreciation, their decoration, clothing, and display. Women’s awareness of their physical potential has been particularly constrained. So much so that a standard textbook on the subject can seriously ask: ‘Could any woman enjoy sex before 1900?’
3
Histories of the male body do not ask such things.
As for the wonderful workings of the womb, modern research suggests that the interdependence of the female nervous and reproductive systems is extremely sophisticated. A survey of women’s health conducted during the prolonged Siege of Budapest in 1944–5, for example, revealed unusually high levels of
amenorrhea
. Menstruation was suspended through well-grounded anxieties, not through hysteria. The womb does not need to be told that a minimal birthrate makes very good sense in times of maximum danger.
ELEKTRON
E
LEKTRON,
‘bright stone’, was the ancient Greek name for amber. The Greeks knew that, when rubbed, it generated a force which attracted other objects, such as feathers. Thales of Miletus said it had ‘psyche’. Electra, ‘the Bright One’, was the name given to two women prominent in Greek myth. One, the daughter of Atlas, was a favourite paramour of Zeus. The other, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and sister to Orestes, figures in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
The invisible physical force which repels and attracts had no name until William Gilbert, the ‘father of magnetism’, called it ‘electric’ in his treatise
De Magnete
(1600). ‘Earth’, he wrote, ‘is nothing but a large magnet.’
Advances in the study of electricity and magnetism were made by A. M. Ampère, H. C. Oersted, and Michael Faraday, until J. C. Maxwell (1831–79) combined the two into the theory of electromagnetic force. H. R. Hertz (1857–94) demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic waves filling a spectrum of different frequencies. Application of electricity had moved on from the dynamo and the electric motor to radio and X-rays. Finally, in 1891, the British physicist J. D. Stoney needed a label for the negatively charged particles which constitute the smallest component of matter and which, in the company of positively charged protons and non-charged neutrons, orbit round the nucleus of an atom on the scale of a pinhead in St Peter’s dome. He called them electrons.
1
(See Appendix III, p. 1272.)