Oh, how I relished the picture of the Greeks I drew as a kid. Philosophers, poets, democrats, scientists -- thinkers all. And what were the Romans? A bunch of newly arrived imperialists.
It wasn't until I sat through Donald Kagan's "Introduction to Greek History" on Yale Open Courses that I realized that they were constantly at battle -- not just with invading alien armies -- but with each other.
The presenter is a polite and affable young Assistant Professor of Classics from Warwick who takes us on a tour of artifacts and tablets from Ancient Greece (~ 500 AD) and walks us around modern Athens.
At that time the Greeks lived in small towns called "polis" (as in "metropolis") and were forced to sign treaties and pacts with one another for mutual aid in case of war. The men were all physically fit. They had to be, because every male citizen was a soldier in wartime. They practiced a martial art -- "pankreatis" -- that was pretty rough, although I don't know that it beats what I was put through in boot camp. That was the skill you used when the battle was in full sway and your weapons were lost.
The toughest bunch of all were the Spartans. Men and women both tried to be physically perfect. At six, the boys were removed from their homes and placed in a military academy. The women also needed to be "perfect" in the sense that they would be willing to kill any babies that the Spartan Council judged too weak to be of use to the state. Premature newborns and the sickly were dumped down wells or left to die in the wild. Abandonment like that isn't as uncommon as we might think. I speak to you as your anthropologist. And my own son, an adopted Korean who suffered from infantile encephalitis, was found abandoned in a railway station in Taegu. He wouldn't have made it in Sparta.
One of the more interesting points made is that the worship of the gods -- Zeus, Aphrodite, and the rest -- were so much woven into everyday life that there was no room for a word like "religion." They couldn't separate it. Yet at the same time, they were actively involved in science and medicine. Their medicine wasn't made up only of faith healing or herbs. We get to see an array of scalpels and curettes too and they look spookily similar to today's. The reason is simple: the scalpel and curette had achieved perfect form and couldn't be improved upon. (How would you improve a hammer?)
The Greeks could see no contradiction between religion and science. That perspective is one gift that the Greeks apparently did not pass on to today's society, in which evolution is denied in Congress and rumors about the evil effects of measles vaccinations flourish.
The men were, well, sort of pansexual. Older men would go to great trouble to court boys in their early teens. I knew this was a rule in Sparta but it was news to me that it was also common in Athens and presumably elsewhere. Buried in our collective unconscious we must know about it because a common joke is: "Did you hear about the Greek who found love by accident? He backed into it."
I was tempted to check the box indicating spoilers because, collectively, Americans seem to share less and less of the common data base that was once taken for granted. (One out of five of us can't name the nation we achieved our independence from.) So, for some of us, this will not only add to what we know but, I suspect, may induce some kind of crazy paradigmatic shift in our grasp of cultural relativity, of what's going on. There's a good deal to be gained from watching this episode and, after all, it's only an hour long.
It wasn't until I sat through Donald Kagan's "Introduction to Greek History" on Yale Open Courses that I realized that they were constantly at battle -- not just with invading alien armies -- but with each other.
The presenter is a polite and affable young Assistant Professor of Classics from Warwick who takes us on a tour of artifacts and tablets from Ancient Greece (~ 500 AD) and walks us around modern Athens.
At that time the Greeks lived in small towns called "polis" (as in "metropolis") and were forced to sign treaties and pacts with one another for mutual aid in case of war. The men were all physically fit. They had to be, because every male citizen was a soldier in wartime. They practiced a martial art -- "pankreatis" -- that was pretty rough, although I don't know that it beats what I was put through in boot camp. That was the skill you used when the battle was in full sway and your weapons were lost.
The toughest bunch of all were the Spartans. Men and women both tried to be physically perfect. At six, the boys were removed from their homes and placed in a military academy. The women also needed to be "perfect" in the sense that they would be willing to kill any babies that the Spartan Council judged too weak to be of use to the state. Premature newborns and the sickly were dumped down wells or left to die in the wild. Abandonment like that isn't as uncommon as we might think. I speak to you as your anthropologist. And my own son, an adopted Korean who suffered from infantile encephalitis, was found abandoned in a railway station in Taegu. He wouldn't have made it in Sparta.
One of the more interesting points made is that the worship of the gods -- Zeus, Aphrodite, and the rest -- were so much woven into everyday life that there was no room for a word like "religion." They couldn't separate it. Yet at the same time, they were actively involved in science and medicine. Their medicine wasn't made up only of faith healing or herbs. We get to see an array of scalpels and curettes too and they look spookily similar to today's. The reason is simple: the scalpel and curette had achieved perfect form and couldn't be improved upon. (How would you improve a hammer?)
The Greeks could see no contradiction between religion and science. That perspective is one gift that the Greeks apparently did not pass on to today's society, in which evolution is denied in Congress and rumors about the evil effects of measles vaccinations flourish.
The men were, well, sort of pansexual. Older men would go to great trouble to court boys in their early teens. I knew this was a rule in Sparta but it was news to me that it was also common in Athens and presumably elsewhere. Buried in our collective unconscious we must know about it because a common joke is: "Did you hear about the Greek who found love by accident? He backed into it."
I was tempted to check the box indicating spoilers because, collectively, Americans seem to share less and less of the common data base that was once taken for granted. (One out of five of us can't name the nation we achieved our independence from.) So, for some of us, this will not only add to what we know but, I suspect, may induce some kind of crazy paradigmatic shift in our grasp of cultural relativity, of what's going on. There's a good deal to be gained from watching this episode and, after all, it's only an hour long.
