classical antiquity in context

I guess it's a sign of my era that I had thorough schooling in Indian and Chinese civilization, but never studied Greek or Roman history.

My autodidactic attempt to remediate has me reading The Columbia History of the World. (By the way, sesquipedalian is autological, as is grandiloquence.)

Like many books of its kind, it was written by dozens of different authors, which gives it an eclectic feel, both in writing style and implicit ideology. One thing that is painfully obvious is that everyone is writing about economics and none of these people know any economic theory, though some of them might think they do.

I'm enjoying the book, both despite and because of my quarrels with the authors.

Here are some samples of choice paragraphs on Ancient Greek history:

Intellectually, [the Greek cities along the west coast of Asia Minor] had been the foremost area of the Greek world. Here the Homeric poems had taken shape; here the lyric poets had sung. Here, too, philosophy had begun about 585, with the speculations of Thales as to the possible origin of all things from some single element. This element, he thought, was water. That he was wrong is trivial. The important thing was his attempt to conceive nature as an intelligible order, a "cosmos." This intellectual daring was, in Ionia, fused with the new idea of individualism, that a man does well to disagree with common opinion. A philosopher says: "I have sought out for myself," a historian: "The stories told by the Greeks are many and ridiculous; I write what in my opinion is true." And Sappho writes: "Some say one thing is most beautiful, some another, but I say it is what you love." (p. 168)

Notice that the above paragraph talks about philosophy and individualism, side by side, but does not talk about philosophical individualism -- the understanding that only individuals act, and that therefore only individuals can have rights and responsibilities. The individualism referred to, without explicit qualification, is what I've taken to calling aesthetic individualism. (I posted an earlier example last week about the poet Archilochus.)

Even when I took Philosophy 101 my first year of college, we read Plato and Aristotle without reference to the historical context. My college philosophy department claimed to take "An Historical Approach" to philosophy, but what they seem to have meant by history was pure history of thought: which thinker was responding to which other thinker, never the surrounding historical context of the various great thinkers. I suspect we students were the victims of a corrective -- that our professors' generation had been beaten over the head with history. I get that too much focus on the philosopher (rather than the philosophy) can become an implicit ad hominem approach, but I would have appreciated a greater understanding of the political and economic context behind the history of thought. (That is a complaint, of sorts, but I really do recommend the teaching of my Phil 101 prof, which you can now buy on CD from Barnes & Noble Portable Professor: "The Birth of Western Philosophy".)

Anyway, back to my recent reading.

Here's one that fans of Heinlein and Hoppe should appreciate:

Athens' [sic] acquisition of an empire abroad and her development of democracy at home were complementary. The empire paid directly for half of the city's ships; indirectly, as a preferential trading area, it paid more. This money paid the citizens who participated in Athens' assemblies and the jurors who served in her courts. Without pay the poor could not have attended to these offices. Above all the navy had to have oarsmen, and oarsmen had to be paid. [Footnote: Sailing boats were for trade. Ships fought by ramming each other; in such a fight a sail boat had no chance against a more maneuverable oared ship.] The wages of the oarsmen -- 36,000 for 200 ships -- came from the empire. Since the oarsmen were the poor, the poor favored imperialism. (p. 171, emphasis added)

Finally, here is an interesting take on commerce and culture, and the invention of bourgeois art:

Novelty in human institutions is always a matter of degree. There had previously been big cities and influential bourgeoisies. But about 50,000 Athenians governed an empire. Of these, perhaps 15,000 were well-to-do. They constituted a new kind of market and power. The art created for them is radically different from that created for the rulers of Egypt, Assyria, and Persia, because, by comparison with those rulers, even the wealthiest Athenians were almost indigent. Alcibiades, one of the richest men in the city, had an estate of less than 75 acres. The high officials of the state and its honored guests dined at the public table; the piece de resistance was a barley loaf with goat's milk and cheese. On festival days there was meat, the loaf was wheat, and there might even be a sesame cake. Such austerity transformed art and aesthetics; limited means necessitated simplicity. To simplicity, already characteristic of Greek elegance, Athenian art added a delicacy of feeling, a lighter touch, and an interest in sentiment. This more economical and appealing art, for these reasons, became "classic." (p. 172)