We Need to Consider the Fact That Ancient Greece Never Existed
Then Why Do We Insist on Speaking About Ancient Greece? Because the Ancient Greeks Did.
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A valuable fact about history that is worth remembering: No one in the Middle Ages knew he was living in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages is a derogatory term invented in the Italian Renaissance to refer to the period between the fall of Roman Empire and the re-birth of the Classical Period in Europe. Those one thousand years of so-called darkness.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), the quintessential medieval poet, admired the Classical period but never doubted that God willed the Christian era into existence in order to surpass it. It is enough to join Date to the first circle of hell in his Divina Commedia and to meet there all the great minds of the ancient period.
With that idea in mind, we can approach the classification of the period in history we call Ancient Greece. Looking at the names of the different periods in the history of Ancient Greece we see that they themselves are borrowed from different domains of knowledge.
The earliest period, the Mycenaean age is named after the Mycenaean culture. It is the birthplace of the mythological hero Agamemnon. The king of the city of Mycenae and the leader of the Greek army in the Trojan war.
The Classical period is the most famous of the different periods. While the Athenian Democracy was founded, the First and Second Peloponnesian Wars were fought, and Sparta became a hegemony; The name "Classical" originally referred to Greek art.
Even demarcating different periods in Greek history is arbitrary. Historians agrees that the Classical period started with the victory on the Persians and ended with the death of Alexander the Great, but it was actually his father, Philip II that subjugated the Greek peninsula.
As you can see, the end of the chronological existence of Ancient Greece is when the first emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus won the decisive battle at Actium and effectively ended the Roman Civil Wars. The Roman Republic was now to be an Empire.
The Empire absorbed the last major Hellenistic kingdom, founded after the death of Alexander by Ptolemy I, one of Alexander’s generals. Yet long after the battle of Actium, in the eastern empire of the Roman Empire Greek was the everyday language of most of the population.
Much of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire worshiped the Greek Gods (Zeus came to be called Jupiter in Roman Mythology, Ares became Mars and so on) but the Hellenistic kingdoms were no more. The great Roman poets such as Virgil and Ovid even saw themselves as writing about Greek mythology – just in Latin.
The Romans claimed Aeneas of Troy as their ancestor. The Ancient Greeks never resorted to Monogenetic thinking. They did not hold one shared ancestor, or even one geographical point of origin. Their fluid and adaptable concept of identity precede our fluid concept of identity.
Scouting out the historical maps in search of Ancient Greece is a pointless exercise. Most Greeks lived as a part of a maritime civilization near the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Plato thought of his fellow Greeks as living 'like frogs around a pond' (Plato Phaedo 109b).
Until the invention of the Koine Greek in the Hellenistic period no common Greek language was spoken, and the many dialects and the different local variations of those could seriously hinder two Greeks of different polies from understanding each other.
So, what made Ancient Greece more than mere abstraction? First and foremost, the Greeks themselves. Yes, they might see themselves as belonging to any number of hundreds of other city-states, but also participating in the somewhat vague notion of Hellas. They worshiped the same Greek Pantheon of Gods, even if their worship was different in each polis. They participated in the Olympic Games, and most importantly define themselves as different from non-Greek speakers (all those Barbarians).
We should also not forget the influence of specific and important figures to the creation of "spiritual" Greece. One example I'm especially fond of is that of Aristotle and Greek Drama. While Aristotle was born in Stagira (ancient Greek city located near the eastern coast of the peninsula of Chalkidice), he moved at the age of seventeen or eighteen to Athens to continue his education at Plato's Academy. It is obvious he was proud of his connection to that city. Later, when he became an adopted Macedonian of sort – serving as a mentor to Alexander, King's Philip's son and future heir – he composed his great theoretical work on literature. In the Poetics Aristotle talked about Greek Drama, though he knew perfectly well that this was an Athenian invention (like so many others). To this day we still take about the Greek theater, often neglecting to consider the fact that it was invented in a city that just recently became a military empire. The figures and stories we find in the plays might have been taken from Greek Mythology, with Homer as a towering influence, but the adaptation and changes reflected Athenian concerns.
Winston Churchill joked once that if he picks up the phone and calls Europe, who picks up the phone on other side? For Ancient Greece – there wasn’t any ancient equivalent – no United States of Greece. Before the creation of the state of modern Greece in 1821, no country existed. The ancient Greeks lived in hundreds of communities called poleis (plural for polis, the Greek city-state) that stretched from the modern-day Georgia east to the Black Sea to Spain in the west.
Before the founding of the state of Israel it was said that the Jews have too much history and not enough geography. The Ancient Greeks had both in abundance.
Helpful reminders! I do wonder, though, about Greeks from different regions having trouble understanding each other. After all, the great sophists came to Athens from far afield in the Greek-speaking world - Gorgias of Leontini, Hippias of Elis, etc, and their students such as Meno from Thessaly - are there some texts to which you can point me, about difficulties with different accents/dialects? Thank you.
That's true. Ancient Greece was an idea. Now the greek-nation state has taken over as the most prominent of the two and it's really hard to say what constitutes a modern-day Greek. Myself as an example.