On the Modern-day Pandora’s Box : 2. Beginning our Voyage – The Greek Genesis


This is the third instalment in Haroun's essay series on the impact of technology on human civilisation; you can find the previous essay here: https://wbgslookingglass.blogspot.com/2022/01/on-modern-day-pandoras-box-1-voyage.html

HAROUN DUGSIE

The Greek Genesis

Well, we can turn the metaphorical clock back to when the Greeks had just settled into their Bronze Age, at the turn of 2000 BCE, during the Minoan era. This ‘Minoan Greece’ is mysterious in its unknown tales and stories as we aren’t sure what an average life was like then (we only have an idea of what the average Greek life would be like when we skip forwards to Archaic Greece, but we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves). Scholars and academics are in fact debating if the infamous tales of the Minotaur of the Greek Mythology actually came from that mysterious Minoan period.

The later Mycenaean (widely pronounced as ‘My-can-ean’ or ‘Mice-a-Neeyan’) Period around 1750 to 1100 BCE holds a similar period of mystery and distance in our understanding of that era. Additionally, Mycenaean Greece is also where most of the Greek Tragedies and events in mythology occur, such as the Trojan War, the events in the Iliad, and events in the Odyssey along with being the setting of many other elements of Greek Literature.

But after the Greek Dark Age, (where we lose any connection to, or any remnants of, stories or events that happened at that time, except for oral stories passed down by word of mouth), we reach the point in time where we collectively visualise the concept and civilisation of “Ancient Greece”. Undoubtedly, the invention of the first truly alphabetical writing system by the Phoenicians influenced this critical turning point. 

Now that we reach the period where this civilisation has gotten a hold on what its past is, we can begin exploring the events and stories that occur in Ancient Greece. But this time period is split into three: Archaic Greece (from 800 BCE to the middle of the Persian Wars), Classical Greece (from the Persian Wars to the arrival of Phillip II of Macedonia and his son Alexander the Great), and Hellenistic Greece (from Alexander’s death in 323 BCE to the Battle of Corinth in 146 BCE and/or the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE). There is a vast number of stories and events that define Ancient Greece as a civilisation, so let’s explore this eventful period of Greece’s history.

Archaic Greece (800 BCE to 480 BCE) was the period of Ancient Greece’s history when the invention of ‘polis’ became prominent therein. As the Archaic Period of the Ancient Greek state was starting off, hundreds and hundreds of small to medium-sized independent 'polis', or city-states, appeared and developed. A city-state was an autonomous society organised around a city and its neighbouring farmland, ruled by its own government. The political framework and structure differed vastly from one city state to another. An example of an independent city state is the well-known state of Athens, which was in fact rather small compared to the other cities of Sparta, Corinth, Argos, Thebes, and Eretria that were also present.

As noted, the various city states had numerous and vastly differing political frameworks and structures that were used to run and manage the individual provinces. For example, Athens favoured a now infamous method of political governing structure, Athenian Democracy, which allowed Athenian men over the age of 25 to vote (but not women, slaves, or non-Athenian citizens, which bends the definition of democracy a little bit). Various oligarchies and numerous aristocracies were also employed, to name the few main forms of governments. In contrast Sparta decided to create and form the Peloponnesian League in around 600 to 400 BCE.

But as the decades went on, the arrival of Persia with its approach into Ionia (an eastern geographical region of Greece in what is now Turkey) came in around 500 BCE, where this era of history started to become much more eventful, beginning with the Greco-Persian Wars of 492 BCE.

The Greco-Persian Wars

The basic outline of the Greco-Persian Wars is that Persia approached the eastern side of the Greek mainland and took over the regions of Ionia and other surrounding regions as it wanted to expand its territory. The Ionians started to revolt and the Persian King Darius became enraged and marched his troops and forces towards the Greek mainland in order to subjugate the region and punish the people for their revolt. This started the 1st Persian War.

The Persians arrived at the cities of Thrace and Macedon, and they succeeded in re-subjugating both cities. However, a sudden storm forced the Persians to retreat and not return until the following year. Darius then sent ambassadors to each Greek city and ordered for their submission. Almost all of the cities submitted except two: Sparta, and Athens. The Persians then declared their intent to march over to the Greek mainland.

 As they reached the city of Marathon, the Persians faced the Athenian army and navy, and to say the Athenian army and navy were fewer in number is a large understatement. With the Persian force numbering over 25,000 and the Athenians between 9,00 and 10,000, it would seem that the Persians would win the battle, but with various tactics and strategic positioning, along with the geography and landscape of the city of Marathon, the Athenians managed to drive off the Persians and prevent further expansion. This enraged the Persian King Darius who left to retry later on. The battle of Marathon was won by the Athenians, but the cities of Thrace and Macedon were reclaimed by the Persians and they lost the first war.

As the Archaic Period of the Ancient Greek ended and the Classical Period of Greece began, the Persians came back to the Greek mainland and marched down the central and southern parts of Greece towards the city state of Thrace and eventually Athens. Athens then created an alliance with several other city states, but roughly only 70 city states in Greece accepted and joined the alliance to fight Persia in the Second Persian War. Various battles were fought, including the Battles of Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale.

Starting with the Battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium, the Persians descended down the Greek Mainland and set their sights on conquering Athens and the entirety of Greece for their actions in the Ionian Revolt, and humiliating them in the Battle of Marathon. So, they sent both their army and their navy to achieve this. However, now, the Greeks had to simultaneously prevent the Persian Army and the Persian Navy from aiding and communicating with each other. In essence, the Greeks had to stop and separate the Persian army from reaching Athens but also prevent the navy from surrounding and flanking the Greek army from behind while they were preoccupied with the army ahead. The Persians and the Greeks fought in the twin battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium, with the outcome of both being a draw. After these conflicts, the Achaemenid Army captured the cities of Thespiae and Plataea as well as plundering, razing, and destroying the city of Athens, torching the Temple of Athena and the Parthenon in September 480 BCE. Fortunately, this was not before the Athenians managed to flee and evacuate the citizens to the Isthmus of Corinth and station their forces in the city of Salamis.

However, the Persians would not win for long as the Greek alliance started to turn the tide in their favour, with their most significant battle being the Battle of Salamis. And with the twin Greek army and navy victories of Plataea and Mycale respectively, this led to the Greeks winning the Persian Wars and driving the Persian forces out from the Greek Mainland.

So now that the Persian Wars are over, Athens decides to create a league of Greek city states to aid and fight against the Persians if they decide ever to try again. Athens also decides to conquer nearby islands in the Aegean Sea, and asks the city states to collectively provide money and/or ships for a defence fund to be secured in the island of Delos. This leads to the creation of the Delian League, on account of the defence fund being stored in the island of Delos.

We note also, however, that this had an arguable benefit for Athens as the Greek Alliance was enraged at Sparta due to one of their generals (Pausanias) being suspected of conspiring with the Persians and allying with the enemy (Persia). This increasing animosity and tension between Athens (becoming more imperialistic) and Sparta came to a head and kicked off the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). After the Peloponnesian War, the Greek Alliance in the Greco-Persian Wars expanded and became the Hellenic League, and when Phillip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great conquered Greece and beyond, it became known as the Hellenistic Era/Age. And this is where we witness Ancient Greek philosophy taking place.

The Pre-Socratic Era

Ancient Greece in the Archaic and Classical Periods was starting to reject and question the conventional dogma of religious texts being the literal source of all human knowledge and began to propose and come up with new and novel theories and ideas, unbounded by religion or dogmatic and irrational thinking and logic. Various emerging philosophers made their mark on the field, with Thales being credited as the first person to prove a mathematical theorem (Thales' Theorem). Of course, there was also the somewhat more mystical Pythagoras; his teachings and the theories held and postulated in his school of thought have led it to be more accurately described as a (possibly fanatic) religious cult of Pythagorean beliefs. Then there was the immense leap for the field of natural philosophy (otherwise known now as science) with Democritus’ theory of "atomos" (small indivisible blocks of matter that all things in the physical world are made up of). His theory of ‘atomos’ was in fact developed while Greece was fighting itself in the Peloponnesian War.

However, others disagreed with the philosophers’ obsessions with an objective and universal truth and argued for the teaching of argumentation and rhetoric, and so these people, often called Sophists, decided to fund and charge large sums of money, in the endeavour of claiming that they could teach and educate any student to be able to argue any point and any opinion as if it was logically sound when it was more akin to a straw-man fallacy. This led to a conflict and an animosity between the Philosophers and the Sophists, and this is where Socrates enters the philosophical stage.

Socrates, and his influence on the field of philosophy

With the arrival of Socrates, debating theories and rational arguments became more refined in their oral and written dialogues and discourses, and shifted from the earlier aim to now proposing theories to critique. The goal was to expose illogical holes in various arguments so that both people, one person giving arguments supporting their views and the other giving counter-arguments, could begin to gain a clearer understanding of the topic being debated. This became an art known eponymously as "Socratic questioning" or Socratic philosophy. Socrates also founded a school of thought, of which Plato and others attended as students initially. Of course later in their lives they became philosophers in their own right. In the next essay, we will explore the contributions made by Plato and Aristotle that defined the fields of philosophy and political theory in the Ancient World, and start to gain an understanding of why all this matters to technology and the modern world.