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Lesson 1.1: Before Virtue
19 Plays4 months ago
This is the introductory lesson to PHIL 111: Ancient/Medieval Philosophy.
Topics discussed:
- Basic details about the material
- The running theme of the course
- Historical context for understanding Iron Age Greece
For more information, visit theluxuryofvirtue.com.
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Transcript
Overview of Philosophical Journey
00:00:02
Speaker
This is supposed to be an introductory course to ancient Greek philosophy, ancient Western philosophy. And we're supposed to move up until the Middle Ages, right? wherere We're talking about 1300. As a matter of fact, if you were to look at the course description,
00:00:20
Speaker
in our college's catalog, what I'm supposed to do is go from the year 600-ish to about 1300, right? So 600 BCE all the way to 1300 CE, 2000 years-ish. Now that is a massive, massive timescale. And not only is it the case that there are multiple momentous events in the history of Western thought during that time period,
00:00:50
Speaker
But on top of that, it's almost the case that philosophy is different things throughout these different time frames. So this is a very difficult class to teach. Not
Ancient vs. Modern Ethics
00:01:01
Speaker
only is the breadth of the class very, very large, but on top of that, there's almost no common method used in philosophy during these time periods. So it's not like we can use the same techniques throughout. However,
00:01:19
Speaker
I do have an idea here to kind of weave together these you know disparate types or in approaches to philosophy that we're gonna be covering. So here it is. What I think we should do is focus on something that, well, let's call it lifestyle philosophies.
00:01:41
Speaker
It just turns out that in the early ah stages of Western philosophy, and most philosophers found it important to talk about not only how it is that we know things, that's epistemology, and what exists, what is reality like, that's metaphysics, but they also thought very hard about the question, how should I live?
00:02:07
Speaker
They wanted to know what the good life is. That's another way to express the same sort of inquiry. What is the good life? The word that philosophers use for this type of inquiry into how it is that one should live is ethics. OK, so why didn't I just go ahead and start off by saying we're going to focus on ethics?
00:02:31
Speaker
Well, the word is a little loaded, right? Sometimes, especially if you take a class nowadays in contemporary moral philosophy, what they mean by ethics is not necessarily what the ancients meant by ethics.
00:02:48
Speaker
So today, if you take a class, you can you can take my class, Ethics and Society, and the emphasis will be moral principles, essentially after the work of an important German philosopher named Immanuel Kant.
00:03:03
Speaker
The field kind of turned towards an emphasis on moral principles. These are principles that are, at least on Kant's way of looking at things, derived from reason itself. They are commands from reason, right? If you are a rational person, you have to abide by these. And they are supposed to be universally legislative. What that means is that they apply in all contexts at all times, always.
00:03:32
Speaker
That's what people mean by morality nowadays. They talk about moral principles. But ethics in the ancient world is not exactly like that. Actually, to it's not at all like that in many cases. The basic idea is not what do I have to do, right? That's Kantian morality. But what do I have to do to live well? Now, if you notice, that's an entirely different question.
00:04:02
Speaker
Embedded in the ancient conception of ethics is this idea that I want to figure out not only what I should do, sure, morality does play a role here, but what do I have to do to be happy, to thrive? Beyond that, there's also typically a therapeutic element to Greek ethics.
00:04:28
Speaker
For example, what practices should I engage in to avoid emotional distress? How do I deal with social anxiety? How do I deal with people that I don't like? These are all questions that the Greeks asked themselves, and they came up with little practices and rituals that you can engage in to sort of train your mind so as to be able to deal with these stressors on a day-to-day basis.
Philosophical Schools of Thought
00:04:57
Speaker
Now, this is not something that you always see in contemporary ah moral philosophy. And that's why I think it's interesting to include these and and really focus on them actually in this course, because you don't get much of this in a regular ethics class.
00:05:15
Speaker
So that'll be our focus. And I'm guessing that you actually already know about some of these ancient Greek ethical schools. So a very popular one to this very day is known as Stoicism.
00:05:31
Speaker
So you've probably heard about that, basically has to do with emotional regulation, controlling your emotional reactions. But we're going to look at some schools that are not at all popular, maybe even you've never heard about them. For example, perhaps you've never heard of the cynics or Epicureanism.
00:05:52
Speaker
Maybe you've heard of Pythagoras. There's a famous principle of geometry named after him, the Pythagorean theorem, but he had his own ethical worldview too. So we'll look at the Pythagorean brotherhood and some famous Pythagoreans to see how they lived.
Ethics Across Eras
00:06:10
Speaker
And that's sort of what I wanna do throughout this course. It'll be sure, looking at the major views of you know philosophers starting from around 600 BCE,
00:06:21
Speaker
but will always make it a point to look at their ethics too. Now, what I want to do today is basically pave the way to hit the ground running next time.
00:06:32
Speaker
And so two things are on the docket for the day. Number one, I sort of just want to give you a general you know warning. I want to flag something kind of weird about ancient ancient philosophers. And the second thing I want to do is sort of give you some historical background that I think will help you understand what's going on ah with ancient Greek ethics and ancient Greek philosophy in general. So let's start with the yeah warning. If you take a philosophy class today, you're going to get a philosophy professor that is
00:07:08
Speaker
you know, very likely well-dressed, middle class probably. Obviously very well-educated, has gone to at least get a master's degree, oftentimes a PhD, and you sort of know what you're expecting, right? You might not get what I got when I was in undergraduate and graduate studies, typically male with the sports jacket with the elbow pads, I'm not kidding, I did actually have teachers like that, but it's fairly predictable what you're gonna get.
00:07:38
Speaker
This is so very not the case in the ancient world. The range of what counts as a philosopher varied widely during the ancient period. So let's begin maybe with, ah let's begin with socioeconomic status. Okay.
00:07:58
Speaker
Well, ah you can have a philosopher that is at the very low end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Take, for example, Diogenes of Sinop.
00:08:12
Speaker
He goes sometimes by the nickname, The Dog. And he was a homeless man who willingly gave up all his possessions in large part um because he believed that being happy ought to be independent of any possessions, right? Being happy ought to be entirely within your power. You shouldn't need anything to thrive, to be well. And so he got rid of everything.
00:08:42
Speaker
ah He lived apparently just in a tub, as in a bathtub. And that was it. He would spend his time disrupting lectures, apparently, and trying to teach people that they don't need luxuries to be happy. Okay, well, that's Diogenes, a dog. On the high end of the socioeconomic spectrum,
00:09:07
Speaker
There are philosophers who were emperors, right? The most famous example is, of course, Marcus Aurelius, a very famous Stoic philosopher, but also emperor of Rome. It doesn't get any higher in status than that during this time period.
00:09:30
Speaker
And it turns out, by the way, that a couple of emperors had at least Stoic tutors. Maybe they weren't philosophers, but they had Stoic tutors. The very first emperor, Augustus, did have some Stoic tutors and apparently wrote a little treatise in philosophy, which we have lost. We don't have it. too But there you go. There is the high end of the socioeconomic status, well represented in what counts as a philosopher in the ancient world.
00:09:59
Speaker
Well, that's one way that philosophers vary widely. It actually gets um even weirder. I do want to say weird here because this is something that I am personally both fascinated by, but also slightly off-put. But of course, we're going to have an open mind throughout all this, don't worry.
00:10:23
Speaker
We have something that's called the doxographical tradition. Basically, a bunch of people decided that it would be good to keep intellectual histories. That is, they kept track of all the different philosophers and what they believed. And so we have one person who is very useful to us in reconstructing the views of philosophers from the past. His name is Diogenes Laertius, another Diogenes, by the way.
00:10:52
Speaker
And his book is the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers. And so he just gives you, you know, as I said, a doxography, a history, an intellectual history of various philosophers. What is very interesting about his history is that it includes people that, for all intents and purposes, they're just not what you typically consider a philosopher nowadays. There are diviners, right people that can see the future. There's people that, I don't know what else to call them other than magicians, right they could cure the sick or perform some kind of other miracle.
00:11:36
Speaker
There are people who would, you know, I think it's more appropriate to call them priests and sages and shamans, people that would lock themselves in caves to communicate with the divine realm. There are people who are in mystery cults. Now, if you don't know what a mystery cult is, stay tuned. We'll cover that in a second. But for now, let's just say that it looks like they took some sort of psychedelic substance and had visions. So let's put it this way, some philosophers were part of drug cults. And as if all of that isn't weird enough, some philosophers sort of marketed themselves as being able to provide secret knowledge. They had secret connections with the divine and they can teach them to you. As you can tell, these are wild and crazy times in the history of philosophy.
00:12:37
Speaker
But all of the above, from homeless man to Roman emperor to magician to, well, some philosophers who claim they were a god. They all count as philosophers here. And what I want to say to you at this point is that even though some aspects of their biography and are, to me at least, concerning,
00:13:05
Speaker
It turns out that when you dig in, this is not incompatible with having very profound, very interesting, very illuminating views on how it is that we should live.
00:13:16
Speaker
I mean, I wish it was the case that when someone claims that they're, you know, a god and they can resurrect people, we can just say, okay, well, that guy, you know, we don't have to listen to anything he says, except we do. It turns out that they have, in multiple cases, people that make these claims contributed significantly to the history of thought, Western thought, ideas that You and I, my dear listener, ah hold.
Mycenaean Civilization's Impact
00:13:45
Speaker
So even though they might seem a little suspect, we will go through them and we will discover that there is something there.
00:14:23
Speaker
Let's dive now into the history of the period, a little bit of historical background. ah This time period is, well, I suppose it's called the Iron Age. ah We're, again, beginning around 600 BCE. But in order for you to figure out what that was like, what that time period was really like, we're going to go back. Oh, why not? Let's go back to 1500 BCE.
00:14:52
Speaker
So we're talking about 3,500 years ago, and this is called The Bronze Age by historians. The reason why we're beginning with 1500 BCE in particular is because a new player on the international scene hits a stage, so During this time period, there's a system of, let's call them interconnected political powers, right? There's different centers of power. There's the Minoans, the Hittites, the Cypriots, the Canaanites, which are in modern day Israel and Palestine, the Egyptians in North Africa, the Assyrians, the Babylonians.
00:15:34
Speaker
and into this system that had pretty nice thing going for them, they were trading with each other, into the system enter the Mycenaean civilization.
00:15:45
Speaker
The Mycenaeans were, well, they spoke a language that we now call Greek. It's an early form of Greek. And let's give you a little bit of background on the language itself because this will turn out to be very important for the history of, well, Western civilization, really. So when those are the stakes, let's make sure to be thorough about this.
00:16:10
Speaker
Greek is a descendant of a language called Proto-Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European, sometimes abbreviated as just Pi. This language originated in the Eurasian step. If you want to figure out where that is, go find the Black Sea and, you know, just kind of go a little bit
Linguistic Evolution and Influence
00:16:34
Speaker
north. And there you are. Parts of the world that are today, Russia, Ukraine, that's the region we're talking about.
00:16:42
Speaker
And linguists have discovered that Proto-Indo-European is the common answer to all kinds of modern language families. It's honestly kind of mind boggling how influential this language was. Let me give you a list here.
00:17:00
Speaker
It is the ancestor to Hellenic. Hellenic, of course, includes the language of Greek. It is also the ancestor to Germanic. Germanic includes English, German, Yiddish. By the way, I'm just naming a few from each language family just to understand how influential Proto-Indo-European has been.
00:17:23
Speaker
Proto-Indo-European is also the ancestor language to the Indo-Iranian language family. Hindi and Persian are two languages that come from this family. Also Russian, the Russian language family, the Italic language family. Italic, of course, includes Latin and Latin is the ancestor to French, Spanish, Portuguese, right? We can go on.
00:17:50
Speaker
and many, many others. right So i'm I'm not even giving you an exhaustive list of the languages that Proto-Indo-European has spawned. It has been massively influential. right So how did this happen?
00:18:07
Speaker
Well, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European just had a very good period. 5,000 years ago is, it you know, the the the golden era, let's call it. During this time period, they essentially domesticated the horse and they were able to benefit immensely from it. Because of sort of, you know, genetic accidents, the horses that they had were more amenable to domestication. They were bigger, they were stronger, they had more of them. And this obviously seems to be very beneficial. You can do many things with lots of big, strong horses. Here's the first one, you can raid. So the Proto-Indo-Europeans were nomadic pastoralists. They wouldn't really stick around in one region, they would just take their
00:18:59
Speaker
flocks, wherever it was propitious for them, wherever um their herds had something to eat. And if they encountered a settled people, well, they had some good horses and they were excellent riders, so they could raid.
00:19:16
Speaker
Another thing you can do when you encounter settled people is trade. You know what you have? Big, strong horses. And that means you can drive a hard bargain when you are trading with settled people. And for these reasons and some other ones, ah the Proto-Indo-Europeans became very wealthy. If you want to know the full story, ah there is a wonderful book. I have it right here in front of me. It's called it The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.
00:19:43
Speaker
It's a book by David Anthony. And in it, he defends his view of how it is that Proto-Indo-European began and spread. And I think it's a fairly well-received book. It seems to be kind of the predominant view in linguistics about that. So you can check that out.
Bronze Age Collapse
00:20:02
Speaker
For our purposes, the punchline is this, the proto Europeans were very wealthy, they were good at trading, they were good at war or raiding, and this caused their political infrastructure to become very robust. In other words, they had all those social organizational tools to be able to be effective in the geopolitical realm.
00:20:29
Speaker
And the part that matters to us is that this means they could manage migrations. So they began to migrate to different parts of the world. ah They began obviously in, you know, what they call the Eurasian step around the Black Sea. And they went East and they went West. And so we're going to pick up that story when they went West.
00:20:53
Speaker
These Proto-Indo-Europeans arrived in mainland Greece, ballpark between 2300 and 1900 BCE. And so over a couple of centuries, Proto-Indo-European kind of blended with the existing native languages in the area. And what came out of that boiling cauldron, what came out of that mix is Greek or an ancient form of Greek.
00:21:23
Speaker
And so by 1300, a couple of centuries after there was an influx of Proto-Indo-Europeans along with their language, you get the Mycenaean civilization. Now these are speakers of Greek. They had, it seems, some of the cultural practices of the Proto-Indo-Europeans infused into them.
00:21:46
Speaker
And they're coming into the ascendance here, right? They're becoming geopolitically important. So you had all these other players that were already established, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, et cetera. And the Mycenaeans enter this world and start to become pretty dominant. They become key players in this inter-regional system of trade.
00:22:10
Speaker
We know quite a bit about the Mycenaean culture, most relevant for our purposes. It seems like they had a real sort of emphasis on mythologizing their heroes. This is not surprising. The Proto-Indo-Europeans were very patriarchal and they tended to celebrate great men in their culture. And this is what we get also in the Mycenaean worldview.
00:22:37
Speaker
If you are an important figure in Mycenaean culture, when you die, you get stories and poetry written about you. ah You get monuments built in your honor. Rituals are created to make sure that you are not forgotten.
00:22:54
Speaker
And it seems that this culture was, well, it was influential. It was well-liked in this interregional system of trade. Not only are Mycenaean goods being traded, and of course they are receiving goods from other regions, it turns out that Greek names were becoming popular and parts of the world besides where the Greeks were, right? That suggests to us that these Mycenaean Greeks were influential. Their culture was seen as having high status. So some people that were not Greek, ethnically speaking, adopted their names, at least.
00:23:32
Speaker
Good as things were for this inter-regional system of trade, eventually it did collapse. Historians and archaeologists are beginning to piece together how it is that this happened and why it happened. If you are interested in this topic, the archaeologist slash historian, Eric Klein, has a couple of books on the topic.
00:23:56
Speaker
1177 BCE is one of them, and then after 1177, which is basically part two, the sequel. And here is what we know. ah One important factor was definitely climate. And by the way, there's so many interesting histories coming out as climate science comes into its own. It kind of shows us how important climate has been for the rise and fall of empires. In this case, in the case of the Mycenaean culture, the climate took a turn for the worst. This caused drought.
00:24:31
Speaker
If you don't have water, it turns out you don't have food. So this caused famines. And this was a serious shock to the Mycenaean system. As if this weren't bad enough, the same thing was happening in other parts of this system, North Africa, right? Also the Levant, where the Assyrians and Babylonians were. um And so not only were you not able to feed your own population, but other nearby political powers also couldn't feed their populations. And so there was lots of movement, lots of, let's call them climate refugees, people looking for basic resources.
00:25:17
Speaker
That's already bad enough, but it gets worse. Earthquakes, disease breaks out during this time period. Natural disaster. This was very likely not a nice time to live in.
00:25:33
Speaker
historians and archeologists have weighed in on why this caused a system-wide collapse. Eric Klein, for his part, says that he thinks if you were to just get one of these stressors, just for example, famine, maybe any one of these powers could have weathered that storm. They could have made it through. It was the collection of all these stressors happening around the same time.
00:26:00
Speaker
That's what collectively brought down all these different powers. As I said, this was very likely not a nice time to be alive. If you can just imagine you know warfare and earthquakes, that's already not pleasant at all, to say the least. But it gets worse. Let's just say that you're not a fighting age, right? um And you're somewhere where that's relatively protected from raiders and invaders. It's still not nice to live in this time period. I was trying to figure out how it is that I can convey this to you.
00:26:34
Speaker
What I thought would be a good idea is to think about what happens when you have a collapse of the system of trade that gets you, you know, the basic necessities and and luxuries of life. So what I wanted to do was go through my house and pick out all the things that were not made in the United States, right, and where I live.
00:26:59
Speaker
And after a little bit of time, I realized I can't i can't do that. you know I can't even do one room because so very little that I own is made exclusively in the United States. I have some things that are made you know in Asia.
00:27:15
Speaker
and Europe in some cases actually, in in Latin America, in Mexico, I have some things that are assembled in the US, but they have parts from Asia or Latin America or whatever. So very little that I have actually is from the USA. Now, what you can do is just the same thing. Go through one room in your house and try to figure out what, if anything, you can get just from your country or maybe a neighboring country.
00:27:47
Speaker
And just kind of point those things out if you want, put them in a pile. It's not going to be a very big pile. So what you get when this vast interregional system of trade collapses is that you no longer have access to these things.
00:28:04
Speaker
You have to live only with those things that your region can produce or maybe some nearby power, right? In my case, I live right next to Mexico. I live in Southern California. So, you know, I would have to do only with the goods that I can get in California and maybe in Northern Mexico, and that's about it. So even if I don't have to fight war and even if I avoid getting sick,
00:28:29
Speaker
And even if I survive the earthquakes and and other natural disasters, my life is still being very much negatively affected by the sort of goods that I can acquire. It's very limited.
00:28:46
Speaker
It turns out that many of the political structures in this interregional system of trade that collapsed also collapse. In other words, various empires that were a part of this system are no longer around after 1177 BCE.
Resurgence of Greek City-States
00:29:05
Speaker
The Hittite Empire, for example, just completely collapses.
00:29:11
Speaker
The Egyptians, they don't collapse, but they're essentially never the same. They go into a period of political instability. They lose control of regions that they had controlled for centuries. ah They end up going to go into fairly embarrassing diplomatic alliances just to make sure that they are somewhat stable.
00:29:37
Speaker
And for a while they become a hot potato, right? Different invaders take over and they essentially never become the geopolitical power and that they were during the Bronze Age. One of the regions that perhaps got it the worst is the Mycenaean civilization, the Greek civilization.
00:30:01
Speaker
In fact, some scholars call this the Greek Dark Age or the First Dark Age. Depending on the region, you get a massive drain on the population.
00:30:12
Speaker
somewhere between 50 to 90% of the population in some cities just is gone. Some of them perhaps die, right? Warfare disease, what have you. And some of them just leave because it's just no longer the case that the city that you live in is viable. Some of them head over to Cyprus, an island that's nearby, or perhaps the Levant, the Canaanite region. So people just leave. That's how bad it is.
00:30:42
Speaker
One of the most interesting things that I read about during this time period is if the Trojan War did happen, then it happened around this time period. And typically, if you don't know the story, the traditional version is that this is when Sparta goes to war with Troy to recover Helen, who sort of left, eloped might be the right word,
00:31:10
Speaker
with a very handsome prince named Paris. So they go to war for honor, right? Well, that story is very likely not true. Not only is it a mythological war, but when you look at what actually happened, it might have been much less flattering.
00:31:30
Speaker
It might be the case that while this collapse of Greek civilization was taking place, some cities were hit harder than others. And the city that is known as Troy was maybe a city that was kind of weathering the storm. They still had the basic resources necessary to make life you know somewhat okay. And other Greek city-states were not in such an enviable position. So what they did is, well, they just saw Troy as a target. And what the Trojan War really is, is a gigantic raid. All these different city-states go after the last city standing inc in the region to take their goods.
00:32:20
Speaker
This is extremely revisionary, right? This is not as gallant and honorable as the poem that we get by Homer, but this might have been what life was really like at the time. You had to resort to raiding and stealing and murder just to get by.
00:32:54
Speaker
the rebound took centuries, right? So we're we're talking around 1200 BCE is when the collapse happened and it won't be until ah around 800 BCE that you get another you know somewhat complex system of interregional trade going on.
00:33:14
Speaker
During this time period, you see the Greeks begin to once again set up colonies around the Mediterranean Sea. Again, many cities had been abandoned.
00:33:25
Speaker
And so they had to set up new cities ah in different places to set up a system of trade once more. What's important about this is that it's not like they went in there with an existing political infrastructure in place. Again, some cities had been abandoned and some colonies were initiated in a place where you know there had been no city before. And so what the Greeks had to do was they had to negotiate, they had to debate their political organization. This is going to be massively important for what happens early on in our story. and Here's the punchline, because of the collapse
00:34:08
Speaker
There were no monarchs. There was no way of doing things when initiating a city. And so what the Greeks had to do was talk, debate, argue for what way of doing things is better. These are, in other words, the beginning of a dialectical tradition, a tradition of arguing, a tradition of rational persuasion.
00:34:36
Speaker
And these are the seeds of what would eventually become philosophical argumentation about politics, political philosophy. Another thing that's important to note about these city-states as they are emerging is that they were intensely freedom-loving. Now, maybe this is a consequence of having it be the case that they organized themselves, right? They decided what the city is like.
00:35:03
Speaker
But for whatever reason, these city states didn't like being influenced by other city states, right? And sometimes they would go to war with each other to preserve their autonomy. They didn't want anyone else other than themselves running things, right? They decided how to run their city-state. And by the way, it will remain this way for the foreseeable future. The Greek city-states are constantly going to war with each other. And most of the time, it is just for this to preserve their autonomy. Another topic that will be very important in our story later on, especially when we talk about the Peloponnesian War, is slavery.
00:35:50
Speaker
This is a time period full of warfare. And when there's war, there are prisoners and these often become slaves. And depending on the city-states, there were more or less slaves. In Sparta, which is a very famous city-state, there was something like a seven to one ratio of slave to free. Just so that you can think about how bonkers that is, it's about 88% slave, 12% free. Now this famously allowed the free population to be full-time soldiers. And so Sparta had the most formidable army out of all the city-states, but it came at a cost, right? It came at the price of subjugating
00:36:49
Speaker
an overwhelming majority of the population, and essentially having them there in chains, always resentful, always just waiting. for something bad to happen so they can revolt. And that will be an important part of our story later on. Athens for their part is, well, it's been estimated to be around 50% slaves. Maybe that's very incongruent with what we typically think about Athens as you know being someone like us, yeah first democracy.
00:37:20
Speaker
But that is the case. That just is the way that life was back then. One last thing that I should mention about these Greek city-states is that water was very important to them. Or maybe I should put it this way. Water was important in enabling the sort of intellectual development that would happen later on. Places like Athens were hubs.
00:37:49
Speaker
Not only would people go there to trade, but people would stop there in the middle of a longer voyage to go a trade somewhere. So for this reason, lots of ideas were going around in Athens. And of course, that will contribute to to the birth of philosophy. Not only that, all of this access to waterways being surrounded by water actually helps philosophy progress. Now that might sound a little weird, but hear me out here.
00:38:23
Speaker
if you have some controversial political idea or some controversial philosophical idea or something that just might erode people the wrong way, some controversial religious idea. Well, if you're in a place that's landlocked and you have no easy way to escape, then you might keep that idea to yourself.
00:38:48
Speaker
But if you're in a place where you can easily get away, go somewhere safer after you present your controversial idea, then you're more likely to share that idea. That's exactly what we see in various Greek city
Alphabet and Literacy Expansion
00:39:03
Speaker
-states. People would say what they had to say, and if things got kind of hot for them, they would just leave. We see this over and over again in the history of philosophy.
00:39:17
Speaker
Let's come back to the topic of language. Before this collapse that we've been talking about, the Mycenaean Greeks used a system of writing that we call Linear B.
00:39:29
Speaker
Now, Linear B was a continental alphabet. What that essentially means is that there's no vowels in it and it was very, well, it lacked expressive power. That's the way I would put it. So let me give you an example here. Suppose that you get a transcript of what I'm saying here and you remove all the vowels. Would it be easy to figure out what it is that I'm trying to say?
00:39:59
Speaker
Probably not. Just you know think about this set of words, bag, beg, big, and bug. These would all be written, BG.
00:40:12
Speaker
This kind of alphabet is not very conducive to expressing complex ideas. ah In particular, it seems like most states at the time, if they use writing at all, it was mostly to document their subjects, right? The historian James C. Scott in his book, Seeing Like a State, talks about how writing didn't start so that, you know, we can write history and philosophy and science, anything like that.
00:40:43
Speaker
Writing began as a way for the elite to keep track of the subjects of the state. You wanted to keep track of debts and who owned what land and how many subjects you had, etc., etc.
00:41:00
Speaker
So writing was you know very, very utilitarian, very just pragmatic from the state point of view, from the yeah point of view of the political elite. That's what it was for. So maybe this language, Linear B, it suited its purpose. It did what it was meant to do, but it couldn't do any of the higher functions, we might call them, that we associate with written language today.
00:41:29
Speaker
And so after the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, writing goes away, writing is forgotten. And it took centuries before an alphabet was again adopted around 800 BCE. That's when the Greeks adopted an alphabet from a nearby people, the Phoenicians. Now the Phoenicians are in modern day Israel and Palestine, right? The Levant region, as I've called it before.
00:41:58
Speaker
And their language is Semitic. So what the Greeks did is they took this Semitic alphabet, this Phoenician alphabet, and they basically put their own sounds on it. Now, there were 20 characters in the Phoenician alphabet. And it turns out that at the end, the Greeks had leftover symbols, right? They just didn't need all the symbols. OK, so what do you do?
00:42:25
Speaker
Well, they did what they usually did. They only use the symbols for consonants, but what they did with the leftover symbols is said, hey, what the heck? Let's use these for the vowels. And in the end, they actually had to invent a new symbol, but what they had in effect was the first ever phonetic alphabet. Now it turns out you can write out complex ideas and and have them read reliably.
00:42:55
Speaker
In other words, you don't have to write bag and bag and big just with the letters BG. Now you can write B-A-G, B-E-G, B-U-G, right? So now ideas can be expressed clearly, reliably. Even complex ideas could be expressed now. Not only that, a system of 21 characters, that's something that the population can learn.
00:43:22
Speaker
The old system of writing, you know, that was so complicated that essentially only very well-trained scribes knew how to write. But this kind of system was efficient and it was feasible that the whole population could learn it. And because of that, you see literacy rates spread at this point. The system of writing was so useful that it was adopted by many other regions and it became massively influential. Big parts of Eurasia, massive regions adopted this new writing system. And you can actually tell this later on when the Romans come on the scene, giant pockets of the Roman Empire, just speak Greek,
00:44:11
Speaker
And so it was very natural to sort of divide the Roman Empire into Latin speaking regions and Greek speaking regions. I actually made a list here of the places where Greek spread. Of course, Greece is in their Austria, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey, Northern Africa, parts of the Levant, right? Modern day Israel and Palestine, as I've mentioned many times now. All of these places spoke Greek.
00:44:42
Speaker
So this is all a massive deal for many, many reasons. The first one I think is fairly obvious. There's a clear advantage to being able to express ideas with precision. Not only that, you can spread those ideas with a good amount of precision, right? Now your writings can go wherever you want them to go. And there's not as much of a need for interpretation, right? What you're writing is more easy to interpret without having to figure out, did he mean bug or bag? I don't know. Now there's a couple of reasons why this is a massive deal. Let's go with the first one. Those higher functions of language, they can now be reached, right? Now it is the case that you can express an intellectual treatise with this vocabulary, with this alphabet, I should say. ah So you can write history, science, philosophy,
00:45:38
Speaker
and it could be interpretable or it is interpreted by not only those that are around you, but you can send your ideas you know to faraway places. Before long, this became sort of a status symbol or the standard for civilization. That's why many regions adopted this language. It's because it showed that you were civilized.
00:46:05
Speaker
And if all of that isn't important enough for you, here is, you know, something that I'll just drop in here into the conversation. Why not? Many books of the Christian Bible.
00:46:17
Speaker
The way that we have access to these books is because of Greek, the Greek written language. Several books of the Bible were first written in Greek, and that's how they spread. And several of our earliest surviving manuscripts are written in Greek. So in other words, the only reason why we have some very old copy of some book of the Bible is because it survived in Greek.
00:46:47
Speaker
So the Greek language here is a massive
Religion and Daily Life
00:46:51
Speaker
deal. Now that it has a phonetic alphabet that it can be attached to, we can write intellectual treatises, we can send information far from its point of origin, and we can preserve ideas in a written form in a language that is known and used in many, many different regions.
00:47:14
Speaker
Speaking of religion, I think it's important to take a brief look at what religion was like during this time period. And just like it's a wild and crazy time for what counts as a philosopher, um The religion of this time period is very foreign to modern ears and eyes. During this time period, medicine, magic, philosophy, politics, and religion are all very hard to disentangle. So let me just give you some basic bullet points about religion in the ancient world.
00:47:51
Speaker
For starters, this is a relationship between humans and gods that is very, very transactional. right ah The reason why the gods demand your sacrifice is because they need it. And the reason why you sacrifice of the gods is because you need things from the gods. So that's why you do it. Sure, maybe you think they're cool, but it's not essentially founded upon love or a benevolent attitude or or thinking that the gods are really worthy in a moral sense of you know gifts.
00:48:30
Speaker
you offer things up to the gods because you need them to be happy so that you can continue to thrive. So very transactional is the way I'd put it. In Greece, of course, Zeus is a supreme god. As I said earlier, these are not morally praiseworthy gods. Zeus in particular is a bit of a tyrant, prone to anger. If I am not misremembering,
00:48:58
Speaker
If the other gods would wake him up, he would beat them. I think I have that right. I think that's by Hesiod, anyway. Another thing that kind of clashes with our modern conception of religion is that the gods of the ancient world were ubiquitous, right? It might be the case nowadays that you sort of you know cordon off, you demarcate, you ah you separate your religious life with your secular life, right?
00:49:28
Speaker
You go to school, you go to work, and and, you know, religion is not in those spheres. Religion is for maybe the home and, of course, your place of worship. But in the ancient world, the gods were everywhere, everywhere. So I just want to take you through a little tour of an ancient Greek household so you can kind of get a feel for what it's like. Let's just say we're walking up and you know we're on the street walking towards the household. The very first thing you'll see on the street is probably Hermes. Hermes adorns the road to the house. He offers protection. And so that's where you'll usually see him. Just outside the house, there's probably a shrine for Apollo.
00:50:17
Speaker
And there might be another Hermes right when you enter the house, right at the entrance. Again, for protection. Remember all of this is very transactional, right? So everything, every shrine that you see is ultimately so that something good happens to you or continues to happen to you.
00:50:36
Speaker
All right, let's keep going here. There's usually a Zeus somewhere in the household. There's actually lots of versions of Zeus, lots of different representations of Zeus. The one that protects the household, I actually found the recipe for how to make him. So if this sounds weird to you, it sounds weird to me too. But here's how you prepare the Zeus that watches over your property.
00:51:02
Speaker
First, you get a jar, nice big jar, nice one, right an elegant looking one probably. And you have to adorn the handles with wool, right? So it has to be ah nicely adorned.
00:51:17
Speaker
You put things in from the household, right? A bunch of things that represent the household. And then you fill it up with ambrosia. Ambrosia, by the way, it's a bunch of seeds. I couldn't figure out what kind of seeds, but it's seeds, olive oil, and pure water. And that's how you prepare the Zeus that protects your household. So you have that in some special place somewhere throughout the house.
00:51:41
Speaker
By the way, there's another Zeus in a different form in the, I guess you could call it the patio area or the courtyard, whatever you want to call it. And that's not it, right? There is already Hermes, Apollo, and Zeus, but there's also ancestral gods.
00:51:57
Speaker
So the ancients tended to worship their dead ancestors. And this is not unlike some practices that are still going on. For example, I am of Mexican heritage and every November we do something called Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos. And during that time period, you sort of you know remember your loved ones that have passed on and maybe you might make food that they used to like to eat. And that's sort of how you celebrate that.
00:52:28
Speaker
Well, the ancients did something very similar, except they sort of worshiped them. They went a little further than merely remembering them. And this is called the ancestral religion. And in fact, the head of the household is the head of this ancestral religion, always a male. This is a very patriarchal society that we're talking about.
00:52:51
Speaker
And when the oldest son is old enough, then usually the duty of head of the ancestral religion gets passed on to him. These ancestral gods offer guidance, and if you you know treat them the right way, they might you know do nice things for you.
00:53:11
Speaker
There's also Hestia, who's at the hearth of the house, right? So the the hearth is sort of the center of your house. it You might have a fireplace there that might be where you all meet. And there's typically the goddess Hestia there, represented by, in some form, a figurine or some other way.
00:53:28
Speaker
There's also the gods of marriage. Those are in the bedroom. By the way, marriage during these days is arranged. So that's a little fun fact there. And basically, that's how it is throughout the household. You know, there's a ah god figurine at the threshold of the door. And wherever you go, there's there's a you know a god there protecting you, performing some role.
00:53:53
Speaker
When I was thinking about presenting this ah matter of religion, I thought to myself, well, this is so strange, right? It's a very weird practice to our eyes. But then I was thinking about it further and I realized that, at least again, you know, from my Mexican heritage, this is not that foreign.
00:54:12
Speaker
except you have to change the gods, right, or the religious figures. But I've been to some, again, Mexican households. I don't know about other ethnic groups, although I'm sure something like this is true. But the very same practices that we see in the ancient world, we also see them in some contemporary households. So I'm thinking of You know, there being a crucifix right above the bed in some, again, Hispanic households. There's also a Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is very popular in Latin American cultures, in particular in Mexico. I think it's a little extra strong in Mexico.
00:54:55
Speaker
And you typically you know bless yourself when you get to the portrait of Mother Mary. It's oftentimes either at a stairwell or by the door. And that's when you do before you leave the house and when you come back into the house. So this is not unlike what the ancients used to do. Maybe that's kind of helpful for you to imagine what's going on here in the ancient world.
00:55:23
Speaker
Let's talk about sacrifice now. Sacrifice was central to ancient religion. And there's a couple of different types of sacrifice. And it was practiced widely, by the way. I mean, you get this in the Levant regions, the Judeans used to do things like this. You see this in Northern Africa. So you see it throughout all the regions that we'll be talking about here. um But again, there's three kinds of sacrifice. The most common is you know some sort of animal sacrifice that is an impetus for a shared community meal. So basically, you take the animal, you butcher it. Part of it is for the gods. So that part gets burnt until it's completely gone.
00:56:07
Speaker
And the other part is for the for the community. So the idea here is that the gods get their share and the rest is for the humans to eat and enjoy. Les, do you think this is a you know sort of a useless waste of an animal?
00:56:22
Speaker
Remember that in the ancient world, people didn't eat meat that often. It's not it's more of a luxury or a little treat than the stuff of daily living. We eat way more meat than the ancients ever did. And it might even be the case that the ancients had a more reverential attitude towards animal you know consumption.
00:56:47
Speaker
because we get our animals you know at the grocery store shrink-wrapped. And that's not exactly very reverential, right? But there was a whole ritual behind the consumption of animal flesh in the ancient world. And you might even make the case that they were more you know appreciative and there's more of a sense of dignity being imparted on the animal and that kind of thing. So you know I just wanted to share that little nugget of information there.
00:57:13
Speaker
There's also the kind of sacrifice where the whole offering is burnt up to the gods. ah This is sometimes an animal where the whole thing goes up to the gods. Sometimes it's a human.
00:57:26
Speaker
right These are in the cases where we need to get some kind of atonement from the gods, but we need to get forgiveness right for something that the humans did. And so that's when you offer the whole thing to the gods. The third kind is very um peculiar in one way of looking at it. There's one aspect of it that's very strange and another aspect that's actually very ah familiar to us, but there's something called a sacramental sacrifice.
00:57:54
Speaker
What that basically means is that what is being sacrificed is actually the God or goddess. What this means is that there is a sort of ritual where you consume the God. Now, the most famous instance of this sort of practice is probably that of the cult of Dionysus.
00:58:17
Speaker
In their case, remember that Dionysus is the god of intoxication and, by the way, a couple of other things. But if you are to you know consume this particular god, well, you are probably going to get intoxicated. So the way this ritual worked,
00:58:34
Speaker
is that Dionysus was embodied by some kind of intoxicant, usually wine. And in consuming the wine, you are consuming the God. and So the part that is very familiar to us, of course, is you know the resemblance to Christianity. Of course, when you consume the bread and wine in a Christian mass, you are, at least according to the Catholics, actually literally consuming the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
00:59:03
Speaker
And so that's exactly what the ancients believed as well, at least with the case of Dionysus. The part that might be a little less foreign to us is that you know the sort of the purpose of the ritual was to get intoxicated. And sometimes the wine would be spiked with psychedelics, more on that in a second. But it really was part of the ritual to get drunk or or have some kind of um intoxication occur.
00:59:34
Speaker
I do want to talk about birdwatching just because it comes up at a couple of different points in our story. And so I think I might as well present it now. But this was sometimes referred to as taking the auspices. And essentially, you can get messages from the gods through birds and many important historical figures you know engaged in this kind of communication with the gods. Xenophon, for example, who is a student of Socrates said he did some birdwatching in order to decide whether or not to take a certain military position. and So I guess what you're supposed to do during these birdwatching sessions
01:00:18
Speaker
is you're supposed to have the question that you want answered in mind, and then you watch the birds. And depending on what they do, the answer is either yes or no. So that's what's going on with birdwatching. Roman generals would engage in birdwatching, right? So this is a very widespread practice. ah More than I initially thought, the more I looked into it, the more pervasive it seemed. Speaking of communicating with the gods, let's talk about oracles.
01:00:49
Speaker
oracles were the mediums through which the gods could give advice or or prophesy, you know make predictions about the future. These were very, very popular. In fact, one of the authors that I read about this says they were probably busy year round. As long as the weather was okay, it looks like the oracles were busy. They had some kind of visitor, you know, trying to get some information about what the gods are planning. And the temples that these oracles were stationed at were very popular, right? So in fact, there were yearly festivals.
01:01:26
Speaker
And you might be familiar with at least one of them. The Olympic Games began at the temple at Mount Olympia, and that's a temple that was intended to honor Zeus.
Unity Through Religion and War
01:01:39
Speaker
And of course, this is when elites would compete with each other in some kind of athletic competition.
01:01:46
Speaker
This is, by the way, a good thing because for most of the year, you know the elites, the political elites were were going to war with each other, right? The Greek city states were always warring with each other. So it's nice that they were resolving their differences with sport instead of with war.
01:02:02
Speaker
Not to be outdone, the Olympic Games also had competition from the temple at Delphi. Those are called the Pythian Games. But whether it be at Delphi or at Olympia, the process was roughly the same.
01:02:18
Speaker
There was a priestess on duty and both the inquirer and the person, you know, going to ask for advice from the gods and the priestess had to engage in some kind of ritual cleansing routine. And, you know, there's also some other things that the weather it had to be okay and there was an animal sacrifice, but they had to check out the animal, make sure nothing weird was going on with it. And so if everything checked out,
01:02:47
Speaker
Then the inquirer asks you know the priestess whatever he's looking into, whatever he's seeking advice on, and the priestess would you know utter some enigmatic phrase that if you interpret it correctly, you know would guide you in the right direction.
01:03:07
Speaker
All right, the next thing we're going to talk about is the mystery cults. So we've already kind of touched on these a little bit. I mentioned that there are some philosophers during this time period who are part of these drug cults. And that's essentially what these are. But let me give you some more detail that way, you know.
01:03:25
Speaker
You can kind of have your ideas straight about this whole thing. Mystery cults are not native to Greece. They actually began much earlier. the I think it's the earliest evidence that we have of a mystery cult is over in Goblecke Tepe, which is today in southeastern Turkey.
01:03:48
Speaker
This is an archaeological site where you know archaeologists have figured out that it was in use from around 10,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE-ish. This is a very long period of time, but this was not a center for settled people.
01:04:07
Speaker
This was actually a pilgrimage site. In other words, people that lived in the area or, you know, maybe they were nomads, they they traveled around the area, they would come once a year to Goblecke Tepe and they would engage in this ritual.
01:04:25
Speaker
There were massive stone pillars for the whole ritual to take place, and no one has any idea how they were built. But what the ritual seemed to be comprised of is some sort of interaction with deceased loved ones.
01:04:42
Speaker
There were lots of skulls found, which means that maybe we're speculating here, but it seems like that was your way to communicate with loved ones that have passed on. And there are signs that there was some kind of beer being a imbibed and this beer might have some hallucinogenic inside of it. And so, you know, just think about it as as an LSD beer. And if you take this LSD beer and you have a bunch of skulls of your loved ones around you
01:05:20
Speaker
Well, guess what? When you start tripping out, you might feel that you are communicating with them, and maybe you're getting advice from them, figuring out you know what to do for the year, et cetera, et cetera. And so this seems to be what the ritual was all about. Just like Proto-Indo-European before, this ritual seemed to have spread. It went east, and we see traces of it in the Vedic tradition in Hinduism.
01:05:49
Speaker
And of course, we see it in Greece. And that's not the only place. We see it in many other regions. We're going to focus, of course, in Greece. And yeah, let's get into Greek mystery cults. As far as we can tell, these were around from 1600 BCE all the way to 392 CE.
01:06:11
Speaker
And the reason why we know this date with exactitude is because that's when the emperor Theodosius banned the mysteries, right? So he was a Christian emperor, and these were very not Christian cults, and so he banned them.
01:06:28
Speaker
Even had he not banned them, it would have been very difficult to get information about these because, well, once you were initiated, there was a death penalty if you divulged the secret information that you learned. And so for that reason, we don't have much information about what the practice was all about. There are some attempted reconstructions, but nothing can be known with certainty about these.
01:06:56
Speaker
We do know that the preparation for the initiation took quite a long time. It's not that just people got together and did a bunch of drugs. There was a whole course of preparation that might take as long as 18 months.
01:07:11
Speaker
And so during this time period, you are preparing yourself for what you are going to undergo. You are having a plan for what it is that you're going to ask the God perhaps. And this is taken very seriously, right? This isn't people were taking mushrooms and, you know,
01:07:27
Speaker
ah waxing philosophical in someone's basement. These are taken very seriously and many of the people who underwent initiation would later describe it as one of the most important events in their life, right? This is this is a big deal. Massive names in the history of philosophy were part of this. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, to name a few.
01:07:49
Speaker
And as we already mentioned with the cult of Dionysus, the goal, the idea was that you are consuming the God. So again, in the case of Dionysus, you consume the wine, and that is Dionysus.
01:08:01
Speaker
Okay, let's leave the mystery religions at that for the moment. They will come back later on into the discussion. But let's just say, in general, as a way of summing up our our talk of religion, is that there were lots of sanctuaries and temples ah across the Greek world, everywhere that Greeks went,
01:08:23
Speaker
you know, there would be a temple set up. Because again, the gods were ubiquitous,
Cultural Epics and Values
01:08:29
Speaker
they were everywhere. And so you needed places where they can, you know, their their practices can sort of reside and and where they can be represented more fully and all that. And this big network of temples and shrines and all that, they are actually what created or or gave rise to a sort of Greek ethnos, a shared Greek identity.
01:08:51
Speaker
Now, again, they fought all the time, but there was a sense in which they all knew they were Greek. There was a shared identity there.
01:09:03
Speaker
All right, let's recap everything we've looked at so far. So in this course, we're focusing on the good life, right? Greek ethics. And this has to do with not only what you should do to be a good person, but also what you should do to live well and what you should do it to avoid emotional distress, right? There's a therapeutic element. That's what we'll be focusing on.
01:09:27
Speaker
Another thing we talked about is how what philosopher means during this time period is very difficult to pin down. There's magicians in the mix. There's also what we would call you know a traditional philosopher, someone who taught at a school.
01:09:42
Speaker
And everything in between, to be honest, you know like a homeless man who would disrupt lectures, that's a philosopher that we'll actually cover. So it's very hard to pin down what a philosopher is during this time period. So we won't try. We'll just you know look at all of the above.
01:09:58
Speaker
We also talked about the Bronze Age collapse and the rebound as it occurred in Greece. We saw how despite the constant warring between the different Greek city-states, there was still a shared identity. Nonetheless, each Greek city-state found their autonomy to be sacred. They would fight over it.
01:10:23
Speaker
We also talked in depth about the Phoenician alphabet that was adopted for the Greek language and how this revolutionary step was what enabled you know the writing of intellectual treatises, a method for ideas to be communicated in faraway places. And on top of all this, it was a way to secure ideas for the future. And of course, we talked about religion for a bit.
01:10:48
Speaker
Religion in the ancient world is in some ways very unlike modern religion, but in other ways, it's actually a little familiar. Let's close with a discussion of poetry. and Now, it's probably the case that you already know some famous poets from this time period. ah what We're talking about Homer, you know, Iliad, Odyssey, those are his major works. But I already misspoke there, right? There's a lot of mystery behind the Iliad and the Odyssey. Let me begin with this. It's supposed to be part of an oral tradition.
01:11:26
Speaker
but it would take three days to recite these. right So what kind of oral tradition is this where you have to memorize three days worth of material? You can't quite imagine how it got passed down from generation to generation. On top of all that, the name Homer,
01:11:46
Speaker
who is traditionally considered to be the author of the these poems. Well, it actually doesn't show up until about 500 BCE. e And that's two centuries, a whole 200 years after the poems began to be you know circulated in a written form. So how can these poems have been going around for such a long time?
01:12:10
Speaker
and the name Homer only pops up a few centuries later. What some scholars think is very likely is that these poems are the work of various poets over several generations.
01:12:26
Speaker
And the reason why they think this is because the poems depict events and you know practices that range archaeologists now know over several centuries. We're talking 1500 to 700 BCE. So no one person could remember all of this,
01:12:49
Speaker
But if it were the work of several poets over several generations, well, then you can see that maybe that's the only way this actually makes any sense.
01:13:02
Speaker
Nonetheless, even if there is no consensus about whether or not Homer actually existed, we do know that reading and talking about and understanding this poetry was seen as a key marker of a good education. If you wanted to know, if you wanted an indicator of whether or not someone was you know learned, you would ask, do they know they're Homer? If the answer is yes, ah they they must be learned, right?
01:13:32
Speaker
And beyond that, some people actually sought some kind of mystical revelation within the verses of the poems. And this continued for thousands of years. In fact, a thousand years after the time period where we're gonna start this story, we would see Christians trying to read Homer to see if maybe inside the poetry there was a yeah biblical revelations that were foreshadowed.
01:14:03
Speaker
So lots of people over many centuries would look into these verses to try to figure out you some kind of divine revelation. From Homer, we learn a little bit about Greek culture during the Bronze Age. We know that the gods are transregional, as we've already discussed. These temples from across all these different regions kind of connected the Greeks in a shared identity, even if they were always fighting with each other. Even the Trojans are said to worship the same gods as the Spartans when we're talking about the Trojan War.
01:14:46
Speaker
We also learned that the Greek gods didn't seem to, you know, show any special concern for the Greeks just because they were Greeks. This is very different from the Jewish tradition. Of course, the Jews are the chosen people, so Yahweh cares for them. They are important and special to him. But the Greek gods didn't feel this way about the Greeks. The Greek gods, sure, they might you know look favorably upon some people, but it was only because those people sacrificed in the right way to these gods.
01:15:21
Speaker
Homer tells us that the gods live on Mount Olympus and basically that the general culture was one of honor. It is honorable to die in battle. It is even better to be remembered for dying in battle. And the way that your memory is preserved is through the songs that people write in your honor.
01:15:47
Speaker
So we can already see that the Greek language here is seen as special by the Greeks. It is through language that we see the key to immortality. It is by your deeds on earth, your honorable deeds, your martial valor, your courage on the battlefield that people will be inspired to write songs about you. And through these songs, you will continue to live.
01:16:15
Speaker
We also see from the poems that life was precarious. Bad things could happen at any time. Your village or your town might get sacked by invaders. And just in general, raiding, stealing, coercion, murder, whatever, these are parts of life. This is something that might happen to you eventually, or it's something that you might have to engage in at some point. It's just something that people had to do sometimes.
01:16:47
Speaker
That's what we learned from Homer. Let's transition now over to Hesiod. Hesiod is for some reason less known than Homer, but we do have many of his works in their complete form. And I'm gonna talk about one called the Theogony. Now in the Theogony, Hesiod talks about the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe.
01:17:14
Speaker
And he says that in the beginning, there was chaos. The word chaos has come into the English language. And for us, it means, you know, disorder. But that's not the only way to interpret this, especially in the ancient Greek that Hesiod spoke. Another way to think about what the meaning of chaos is, is as nothingness.
01:17:44
Speaker
By nothingness, we mean here that nothing can be said about this time period. And out of this nothingness, eventually everything came out. So Hesiod here is describing the origins of the universe as going from nothingness to what we see today, and but that nothing much can be said about this.
01:18:08
Speaker
Now, here is one fairly straightforward interpretation of this. Hesiod is telling us that he doesn't know how it is that the world came out of nothingness. And this seems, you know at first glance, almost honorable, right? If you don't know what they don't say. But here's where things get a little mysterious. Hesiod actually attributed his poetry to the Muses.
01:18:35
Speaker
What that means is that Hesiod is basically saying, I'm not writing this. I am simply a vessel through which the gods are speaking in particular the Muses.
01:18:51
Speaker
And so here's another way to interpret what Hesiod is saying. Hesiod is saying not only that he doesn't know how it is that the universe came out of nothingness,
01:19:04
Speaker
What he is saying is that it is impossible to know how the world came to be. Not only is it unknown, it is unknowable.
01:19:19
Speaker
Now, when you put it like that, this sounds like a challenge, right? When you put it this way, you are making a universal claim about what is knowable.
01:19:31
Speaker
Not only do I not know how this came to be, but no one can know.
01:19:40
Speaker
Framed this way, some people took issue. And these are fighting words, right? So it was only a matter of time before someone rolled around and said to Hesiod, you say, I can't figure this out. Watch me.