Lately, I have been following a fascinating history podcast called the Hellenistic Age Podcast, a detailed look at a very fascinating and often overlooked period of world history. In particular, I am listening to the set of episodes regarding Hellenistic-era philosophy:
It’s a great show, and lots of fun to delve into so many different, fascinating schools of thought. But, then inevitably, you have to come down. Enjoying ancient philosophy is great until you realize that sooner or later, you need put it down in order to eat, shit, sleep, work, deal with getting sick, etc.
Much of this applies to many other aspects of life. Sooner or later, we have to come down and deal with mundane hassles of life, no matter how much we try to escape from them. This applies to any kind of escape we do.
I think this is why the Zen tradition in Buddhism adopted such a strongly anti-intellectual streak, a reaction to the high-minded Buddhist-philosophical traditions from India: the Madhyamika, the Yogacara, and the native Chinese traditions of Hua-yan and Tian-Tai.
For example, a famous story attributed to a Chinese Zen master named Baizhang (百丈, 720–814, pronounced bye-jong):
When asked what the secret of Zen was, he told one disciple, “When hungry, eat – when tired, sleep.”
The anti-intellectual streak in Zen, especially modern Zen (and in some strains of Pure Land Buddhism), tends to rub me the wrong way. Maybe it’s just the nerd in me. But at the same time, I can’t deny that as much fun as philosophy is, including Buddhist religion, it is all just mental games compared with the reality of life itself. Life intrudes on us, and keeps us grounded, for better or for worse. 🤷🏽♂️
It also illustrates that the mind isn’t entirely reliable either. High-minded ideals will go right out the window when we are tired, hungry, etc.
All the more reason to stay grounded, and keep a watchful eye on one’s own mind.
Many years ago, when I was studying abroad in Hanoi, Vietnam for a summer as part of an ill-fated effort to get into graduate school (tl;dr I dropped out and went into IT), I was at a museum dedicated to Ho Chi Minh, when I was approach by a Vietnamese man about my age. He really wanted to practice his English, and desperately wanted me to sit and practice with him. I felt weirded out at the time, and lied saying we could meet after I got out of the museum. We never met after that and chances are, the guards hussled him away after making a big scene, or he gave up.
Looking back many years later, I feel bad about it now. Knowing English in today’s world can really make or break someone’s career outside of the Anglophone world, and since English speakers were so rare in Hanoi at the time, unlike the more cosmopolitan Ho Chi Minh City, it might have been a rare opportunity for him to actually learn it from a native speaker, and not from rote memorization.
Long, long before English became the international language to learn by countless hopeful students, though, there was another widely spoken language that could make or break people’s careers: Akkadian.
(Disclaimer: A lot of information in this blog post is based on information contained in the Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. If you like ancient languages, definitely get the book.)
Akkadian was one of several languages that existed in the ancient Middle East:
Sumerian – the language of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) and such great cities as Ur, Babylon, Assur and Nineveh. Sumerian, is an isolate, meaning it was no known “genetic” relation to any other language we know of. Sumerian is also the oldest written language in the world. This is important as we’ll see.
Akkadian – the language of the Akkadian Empire (remember Sargon of Akkad?) that eventually supplanted Sumerian city-states. It is also the oldest of the Semitic languages which include modern Hebrew and Arabic.
Elamite – spoken by the Elamite people in south-western Iran. The Elamites were frequent rivals of the Sumerians among other peoples.
Hurrian – spoken by various peoples north of Mesopotamia, the most famous being the Mitanni.
Urartian – spoken by the kingdom of Urartu in eastern Turkey, and ultimately replaced Hurrian.
Luwian – spoken in south-west Turkey, this important language is pretty obscure now but once dominated a large region, and may have been spoken by the ancient Trojans.
Hittite – spoken by the Hittite Empire in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and the Levant. Interestingly, the Hittites called themselves the Hatti (after their capitol Hattusa), but the term “Hittite” has been mis-applied by modern-day scholars who conflated them with another group.
Because Sumerian developed a sophisticated writing system called Cuneiform, and because of their central place in middle-eastern culture, the other languages above all adopted cuneiform with varying degrees of success despite being totally unrelated languages. This is important as we’ll see shortly.
Anyhow, back in the 24th century BCE Sargon of Akkad conquered Mesopotamia and setup what was probably the first empire in history: the Akkadian Empire. But he didn’t wipe out the Sumerians, and in fact Sumerian urban culture was highly revered by the Akkadians, who did their best to import things like the writing system, literature, religion and so on.
However, because Akkadian language and Sumerian were so different, this import wasn’t an easy one. Cuneiform uses a mix of ideograms (similar to Chinese characters) mixed with phonetic letters that only made sense in Sumerian. For example, 𒅅could mean a “door” (e.g. an ideogram), but phonetically it could be pronounced like ig in Sumerian. In Akkadian, this would become ig, ik, or iq. Elsewhere, sounds that could be distinguished in Sumerian could not be distinguished in Akkadian, and vice-versa.
Thus, the poor Akkadian scribes needed dictionaries to map Akkadian words to Sumerian Cuneiform text, like the one shown here.
Other languages in the list above had similar challenges, but cuneiform eventually became the writing system of choice for many centuries. Thus, in spite of the fact that these languages had no real relation to one another, they all used cuneiform based off of Sumerian.
Meanwhile, as the Akkadian Empire continued, Sumerian as a language gradually faded from conversation, and by 1600 BC it wasn’t spoke anymore, but was preserved as a sacred language and a language of literature. Meanwhile, Akkadian became more and more widely used, not just within the Empire, but among it’s neighbors. Even after the Empire fell, and newer empires such as the Babylonians and Assyrians briefly conquered,1 Akkadian was still widely used because it was already well-known by the populace and just easier than trying to supplant with yet another language.
The use of Akkadian as an internal language extended as far away as Egypt, where the Pharoah Akhenaten wrote a series of letters in Akkadian to subjects far away in Canaan (think modern Israel). Note that these “Amarna Letters” were written in the 14th century BCE, already 1000 years after Sargon of Akkad.
Even 1000 after that, Akkadian was still used, this time by the Hellenistic Greeks. Antiochus I Soter one of Alexander the Great’s generals who founded the Seleucid dynasty had this inscription made using Akkadian:
The Cylinder of Antiochus with translation, courtesy of Wikipedia
So…. what happened to Akkadian then? In short, it was replaced starting in the 8th century BCE by a rural language, first spoken by Aramean people around modern-day Damascus, called Aramaic. Aramaic, by the way, was the same language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. The brutal Assyrian Empire had a policy of subjugating people by forcibly uprooting them and moving them to other areas of the Empire, where they would serve the Empire as soldiers or some other capacity. This had the unintended effect of spreading Aramaic among the population, and because Aramaic had an easier writing system the path of least-resistance was for people to use Aramaic more.
Small side note: once Akkadian became replaced as a spoken language, even Sumerian which had been closely tied to it as a literary language, disappeared with it.
Just as Sumerian withdrew more and more as a language of literature and religious ceremony, Akkadian similarly became less and less common except for official roles. By the time of Antiochus I Soter, it had largely disappeared from day to day usage, but still had a lot of cultural weight, hence the Cylinder of Antiochus. The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, also used it a few centuries earlier in his bronze steles and proclamations. Writings in Akkadian still appeared as late as the 1st century AD (not BC, AD) but by this point the language had been in active use for 2,500 years!
Anyhow, looking back Akkadian was an amazing language in its own right. Here is an inscription from the Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi, a poem composed in 14th century BCE by a priest about the misfortunes of a wealthy, powerful man at the time. This version is provided by the University of Yale in their Cuneiform Commentaries Project, though I have removed the priest’s commentary lines in between for easier readability:
If a man has bought silver or gold, a male or a female slave, an ox, a sheep, or a donkey—or anything for that matter— from another man or from another man’s slave without witnesses or contract, or if he accepted something for safekeeping without same, then this man is a thief and hence to be killed.
Rough pronunciation guide: š is like English “sh”
But who knows, maybe Akkadian will be cool again someday. 😎
1 Much of ancient Mesopotamian history can be summed up by one empire conquering after another, holding territory for 100-200 years, and then being conquered by someone else. They may eventually come back as a newer, stronger, but the general pattern repeated itself. As an amateur history nerd, I think a lot of this had to do with a combination of terrain (flat, open, hard to defend) and unstable governments patterned off of personal charisma. Good leaders conquered, lousy leaders got conquered.
Bust of Serapis. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek original from the 4th century BC, stored in the Serapaeum of Alexandria. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
The Hellenistic Period of history was marked by a number of Greek kingdoms that vied for power after the death of Alexander the Great, with Egypt being among the most powerful. Egypt under the Ptolemy Dynasty, descendants of Ptolemy the First, Soter1, one of Alexander’s generals, was a very tightly-regulated society. The Greek minority ruled over a much larger Egyptian population, but apart from the coastal areas, they rarely intermingled. Instead, they carefully engineered Egyptian society for maximum agricultural output in order to fund their wars with other Hellenistic kingdoms, particularly the Seleucids.
The coastal regions of Egypt had a comparatively larger Greek population and the Ptolemies invested a lot in developing these communities, particularly at the city of Alexandria, in order to develop a uniquely “Ptolemaic” culture that was essentially Greek but enhanced with Egyptian “exoticness”.
For example, the Ptolemies heavily proselytized the Egyptian deity Isis, who was already beloved by the Egyptian people, and soon Isis had a major cult following throughout the Hellenistic world. Followers across the Mediterranean viewed her as a kind of mother-savior goddess, master of magic and secret knowledge, etc. Increasingly she took on characteristics that made her something of an “uber-goddess” among an already crowded field of goddesses across the Hellenistic world.
But the Ptolemies decided that Isis needed a partner, so they basically made up one named Serapis or Sarapis. Sarapis was a god created during the reign of the first Ptolemy, Ptolemy I Soter. Greeks living in Ptolemaic Egypt already worshipped a syncretic Egyptian deity that combined Osiris (Isis’s original consort) and the bull Apis based in the city of Memphis. As the Greeks already worshipped Zeus in the form of a bull, this probably wasn’t so far-fetched, and syncretic deities were a common religious pattern in Egypt. So for example Re-Horakhty, an alternate form of the God Horus. The name of this deity also evolved over time from Osor-Hapi, then Oserapis, and finally Sarapis.
What made the deity “Ptolemaic” was that the Ptolemies adopted this syncretic deity as the patron deity of their dynasty. The intended audience wasn’t so much Egyptian, since they already had a pretty venerable religious tradition, and weren’t overly enthusiastic in adopting the culture of their Hellenistic overlords, but rather Greeks living in Egypt, and abroad.2Alexandria, which was a major center of the new Greco-Egyptian culture of Ptolemaic Egypt, was the new center of worship and an elaborate temple was built called the Sarapeum.
Greek engineers were hired to build and design strange wonders at the Sarapeum. According to Michael Grant in From Alexander to Cleopatra: The Hellenistic World, the temple included sites such as an iron statue of the god of war, Ares, launching toward a lodestone (read: magnetic) statue of the goddess of love, Aphrodite, with hidden wires and everything in a passionate embrace. Hydraulics caused trumpets to blare, altar fires to burst “miraculously” and even an image of Sarapis to fly out and greet audiences. It was straight out of a 1940’s B-movie, but was designed in the 4th century BCE!
In time Sarapeum temples sprang up in other parts of Hellenistic world too, such as Italy and Asia Minor, and writers of the time spoke of miraculous cures, oracles, etc. Isis and Sarapis were the “Brangelina” of the Hellenistic religious world for a time.
But, like all things, worship of Sarapis and Isis faded into history. Few people now have even heard of Sarapis, let alone know anything about the wave of religious devotion to Sarapis that swept the Hellenistic world at the time. Still, it’s amazing to think that one man could for a time dream up a syncretic deity like this, and not only establish a cult in his home territory, but even gain the mass-marketing appeal necessary to establish temples abroad too.
The parallels to modern cults, both religious and cults of personality, and how easy it is to manufacture a deity and convince many people to pin their hopes on it is striking, and a good lesson for us all perhaps.
1 The Ptolemies had an unusual naming scheme for their monarchs since every monarch had the name Ptolemy or Ptolemaios (Πτολεμαῖος .. the “P” was pronounced”). What distinguished one Ptolemy king from another was their nicknames. Ptolemy I was named “Soter” (savior), Ptolemy II was nicknamed “Philadelphus” (who loves his sister) … an allusion to marrying his sister Arsinoe II. Inter-marriage was very common between the Ptolemies in keeping with Egyptian tradition, apparently. Ptolemy III was named “Euergetes” (benefactor) and so on. Historia Civilis pokes fun at this naming scheme a few times in this video.
2 Michael Grant also points out that this was a way for the Ptolemies to counterbalance the religious power of cult centers at Memphis among other places in Egypt.
The great hall in Eleusis, Telesterion, one of the primary centers of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Photo by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany [CC BY-SA]. Link to Wikipedia
While reading about the Hellenistic Period of ancient history, and the later Roman history, I have been curious about the gradual evolution and decline of the ancient Greek religion, centered around the Olympian gods.
As history shows, the Roman Empire gradually transitioned from a pagan Imperial religion to Christianity, becoming official with the reign of Emperor Constatine. Subsequent emperors such as Theodosius then purged the remains of Greco-Roman religion across the Empire, including Greece itself.
But I got to thinking, why? What the heck happened?
The classic Greek religion, which people learn through school and mythology was best defined in the Homeric epics (the Iliad and the Odyssey) as well as Hesiod’s Theogony. These epics and poems captured the larger Greek religious culture at the time, but also gave it structure and formed a basis for later religion, which in turn was later synthesized with the ancient Roman religion and disseminated further. This “Olympian” religion was never a particularly organized one. Instead, it was based on a loose network of “cults” centered around the local deity of a city-state with festivals and rituals unique to that locale. For example, Artemis was widely worshiped all over Greece, but each place had its own local legends and festivals. Athena was frequently a patron-deity of city-states such as Sparta, Athens, Argos, etc. Then there were certain cult centers, such as the Pythia (a.k.a. the Oracle of Delphi), that were famous across all Greece.
Magic “tablets” with inscriptions, courtesy of Wikipedia.
But the story didn’t end with the “Olympian gods”. Magic and superstition were very common beliefs too, as manifested in a goddess named Tyche (Fortune). Fortune was, as the name implies, entirely unpredictable, and could change at any moment. Further, there was a palpable (and somewhat contradictory) sense at the time that one’s own fate was written in the stars and could not be avoided. While modern day views of ancient Greece centers around the Olympian gods, they were only one part of a larger religious outlook at the time.
During the Hellenistic Period, after Alexander the Great’s conquests spread Greek culture to a much wider geographic area, Greek society also came into much more direct contact with other religions as well. This led to a much more syncretic culture (sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental), where Greeks were confronted with other deities and teachings to address their anxiety about the world around them. The reason, as Michael Grant points out in From Alexander to Cleopatra: The Hellenistic World, was that the Hellenistic World was much more uncertain than the classic “city-state” culture (e.g. Sparta, Athens, Thebes, etc). The Greek world was suddenly thrust into a much larger one and while people became more affluent and educated, they also became increasingly concerned with personal salvation. Classic Greek beliefs viewed life as fleeting and uncertain, while the afterlife, reflected in the Odyssey and other sources, for the vast, vast majority would be to simply dwell in the Underworld as flitting spirits, memories of their former lives all but forgotten.
This concern with avoiding a dismal fate manifested in “mystery cults” starting with the worship of Demeter at Eleusis. As Michael Grant writes:
Magic might change your destiny, but initiation — musterion, so that these were called Mystery religions — raised you outside its clutches altogether; and the soul of the initiate was elevated beyond the reach of the hateful stars….This miracle was affected by personal union with a Savior God, who was often himself believed to have died and risen again in the past.
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These Eleusinian Mysteries involved re-enacting the legend of Demeter’s daughter, Persephone: descending into the Underworld, marriage to Hades, and then reuniting with her mother. As they were a closely guarded secret, know one knows what exactly
Fresco of the mystery ritual, right, Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, Italy. Courtesy of Wikipedia
happened, but many Roman and Greek villas have scenes painted of the various initiation ceremonies. Another, perhaps even more popular, mystery cult surrounded the “foreign god” Dionysus. Dionysus was particularly venerated by Alexander the Great’s army as they marched east, re-enacting his legendary conquests in the East before he laid down his sword and gave himself over to the gentler pursuits in life. Dionysus’s story of his death by the Titans and rebirth through his mother Semele became an important element in the cult, and followers believed that they too would be reborn just as Dionysus had. The fact that Dionysus was also associated with joy and the spring of life was not lost on followers either. As with the Eleusinian Mysteries, scenes of the Dionysian Mysteries could be found on wall-paintings such as those at the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii.
Further, foreign cults gained much prominence. By far the most famous was the
Io (left, with horns) is welcomed in Egypt by Isis (sitting). Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Naples) and courtesy of Wikipedia.
Egyptian goddess Isis, who was worshipped as something like a “supreme goddess”. By the time the Greeks encountered Isis, the Egyptian myths and rituals were already well-developed and the syncretic Hellenistic culture at the time quickly found common ground between the two. Isis’s consort, Osiris (in the form Sarapis), was thought to be Dionysus, and Isis was loosely conflated with the Greek deity Aphrodite. However, in addition to a series of public rituals and festivals, the cult of Isis also had its contemplative side as well as promises of salvation which helped it spread rapidly in the Hellenistic world. Isis exemplified pity and compassion toward her followers as well as deep wisdom. Even the Buddha had a connection to Isis via Indian expats.
Indeed, as Michael Grant summarizes:
Pagan religion was not already dying and dead when Christianity overtook it; it had remained very lively indeed. But it had deviated, and continued to deviate throughout the Hellenistic age, from the traditional mainstream of the classical Olympian cults. They continued, it is true, to receive impressive ceremonial worship, but a person of this epoch no longer pinned his or her faith on those gods, but on a number of Divine Saviours. These Saviours were relied on, passionately, for two quite distinct miraculous gifts, of which their various cults held out hopes in varying proportions: the conferment of strength and holiness to endure the present life upon this earth, and the gift of immortality and happiness after death.
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This syncretism and need for answers was not limited to “popular religion” either. Many of traditional Greek schools of philosophy, which had maintained a flippant and disdaining view of religion and superstition, absorbed monotheistic elements from Persian culture and gradually transformed themselves into “new”, more grandiose explanations of the world. Platonic philosophy became (what we now call) Neoplatonism, Phythagoras’s belief in the unifying importance of mathematics took in increasingly deistic tones. All of these trended toward a more monotheistic outlook on life, where the original Olympian gods played less and less of a significant role.
In short, it seems that in a larger, uncertain world such as the Hellenistic Era followed by the Roman Empire, that the traditional Olympian gods no longer fulfilled people’s needs, and that this greater awareness of mortality, fate and the afterlife led many to pursue other, more personal faiths, and with so many different cultures and ideas suddenly within reach, a great explosion of ideas and faiths spread across the Mediterranean until the Olympian gods (and their Roman counterparts) were relegated to public rituals only.
Who doesn’t love the Spartans? Those wacky, ripped super-men of few words and huge enslaved underclass that built an entire society around warfare and preservation of their way of life. Laconophilia, or a love of Sparta and Spartan culture (named after Lacedaemon Λακεδαίμων, an alternate name of Sparta), has been an underlying current of the Western world since antiquity (and even among politicians now), and even a movie of dubious historicity.
But even with the questionable history around the Spartans, the image of Sparta is a persistent one. However, one thing that many people are unaware of is the fate of Sparta after their high-water mark of power in the 4th century BCE, during the Peloponnesian Wars and their stand against Persia.
In the short-term, Sparta lost a critical battle in 371 BCE called the Battle of Leuctra to another major city-state named Thebes which was an oligarchic society, and a frequent foe of both Sparta and Athens. The victorious general, Epaminondas, knew he would have trouble dealing with the power Spartan phalanx head-on, so he employed unconventional tactics to attack the right-flank of the Spartan military and causing the rest of the line to collapse. The Spartan military was powerful, but inflexible, and this became a theme of the Spartan downfall I believe.
Let’s take a step back and look at Spartan society, which was basically divided into two classes: the spartiatés (Σπᾰρτῐᾱ́της) who were full-citizens and the helots (εἵλωτες) who were the enslaved underclass. Spartan society was built around the idea that the helots would do all the menial labor so the Spartiates (namely, men) could focus all their time and honing their military skills. Other social classes existed somewhere in the middle (for example conquered peoples who were neither Spartiates nor Helots), but were sidelined by Spartan society. This social structure did not always exist, but was designed as a kind of social-experiment by one Lycurgus after a period of societal collapse around the 7th or 8th century.
In order to be a Spartiates, this meant that you had to be descended Spartan citizens, but also that you had to pay a membership “fee” which helped fund the training schools, communal mess halls, etc. At its height, Sparta may have had around 25,000-30,000 such citizens.
What happened though was that after Sparta lost wars such as the Battle of Leuctra, it couldn’t replace its losses very quickly. The bar for being a Spartiates was so high, that even Spartiates sometimes lost their status and were demoted. Generations later, the Spartans couldn’t field more than 1000 soldiers at most. Further, Sparta’s economic system was unusual. Its currency was iron bars, not coins as other Greek city-states used, and due to unusual inheritance laws, its wealth by and by was concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of wealthy land-holders. Other Spartan citizens became mired in debt (and unable to generate new avenues of wealth due to Sparta’s backwards economic system) and lost their citizen status as a result. By the reign of King Agis IV (see below), there were no more than 700 Spartiates left, and thousands had recently lost their status.
Sparta eventually came to realize that its highly elite social structure also meant that it was inflexible (not to mention strangled innovation), and certain kings attempted to introduce reforms during the Hellenistic Period. The first, King Agis IV (r.244 – 241 BC), attempted a sweeping land-reform that would correct the wealth imbalance that plagued Sparta, while also increasing the pool of Spartiates by allowing Perioikoi (Περίοικος, conquered people who were partial Spartan citizens) to be Spartiates. As Michael Grant writes in From Alexander to Cleopatra: The Hellenistic World:
Opposition, however, was strong. The owners of the large properties, though glad enough to have their debts cancelled, were naturally hostile to the redistribution of their own land; and some of ephors, horrified at what sounded like a recipe for revolution, supported these objections. Moreover, even by having their debts cancelled, found it very distasteful to have perioikoi as fellow-citizens and sharers in their new property.
King Agis IV didn’t last much longer and was ultimately killed by the opposition, particularly by his co-monarch King Leonidas II.1 Soon after came Cleomenes III (r.235 – 219 BC), son of Leonidas II. Cleomenes started his rule with some forceful military victories but then turned his attention back to Sparta and abolished the ephors altogether and cancelled debts, enlisted perioikoi and even allowed some helots to buy their freedom. All the while, he redistributed land holdings as well. As Michael Grant writes, these measures were drastic, but intended to increase the Spartan army enough to take on the rival Achaean League. Despite these efforts, the Spartan army was almost entirely destroyed in the year 222, and Cleomenes fled to Egypt. Cleomenes’ rule was popular with the poor, but tyrannical and ultimately self-destructive. Finally, came Nabis (r.207 – 192 BC) who attempted to revive the reforms of Cleomenes and liberated even more helot slaves, but his reckless foreign policy against Rome and the Achaean League made him no friends and was soon killed by a former ally.
Michael Grant explains the decline and failure to revive Sparta like so:
The Spartan ‘revolutions’ had failed, because they were backward-looking and made no attempt to create new wealth, of with there was not enough to go round.
Sparta was conquered not long after and became a literal tourist-trap for Romans and later visitors. Romans at the time would often holiday there and see its weird, exotic traditions, but ultimately that was the end of Sparta as an independent state.
While the idea of Sparta might be fascinating, in practice it was an odd social-experiment that didn’t really pan out. Sparta’s social structure looked good on paper, but eventually lost as its enemies adapted and the weight of its own hard-headed (not to mention oppressive) traditions stifled it. Compare with the Roman military of the early Republic which lost many, many times, but eventually defeated its enemies because they were willing to experiment and take their lumps until they got it right. Each time, they faced a new threat, they adapted and pushed back.
Sparta, by contrast, remained proudly conservative in the face of change, and ultimately just petered out until it was irrelevant.
P.S. Compare with the city-state of Athens, which gradually reformed itself multiple times until it became the democratic system we all know.
1 Sparta was unusual as it was a diarchy, not a monarchy. The two kings ruled equally, and took turns, with the Ephors keeping both in line.
People often imagine ancient Greek philosophy and imagine such great minds as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle preaching something deep and insightful as disciples sit at their feet basking in the light of wisdom.
At least, that’s what I had imagined in the back of my mind…
I spent some time recently, while researching the Hellenistic Period, to also acquaint myself with ancient Greek philosophy in greater detail and what I found was this amorphous blob of people, places and ideas that were sometimes insightful, sometimes amusing and other times just plain nutters. Eidolon has a great tongue-in-cheek article about some of these more eccentric philosophies, but I also wanted to give a brief (not to mention probably inaccurate) summary of some of the major philosophical schools and a few of the more eccentric ones. This is not a comprehensive list, or a thorough understanding, just one man’s impressions of the myriad schools of thought.
Plato and Platonic Philosophy
Plato was one of several disciples of Socrates, who himself never established a school (Xenophon is another major disciple, btw). Plato’s philosophy could possible be summarized by the famous Allegory of the Cave wherein people are fooled by shadows of forms, unable to see the real form. Plato spent much time contemplating the transcendent “true form” of things, which he felt arose from Goodness as the ultimate source. That which was true was inherently good, and those who pursued good would come to the truth.
By the Hellenistic Period, Plato’s school had taken on a more mystical tone under Plotinus and is now known as Neo-Platonism. Here, the source of all things is the One, who also is the source of all goodness. In keeping with the transcendent nature of Plato’s philosophy, followers of Neoplatonism sought to reunite with the One, shedding crude matter in the process.
Peripatetics
The Peripatetics were the followers of, and the name of the school of Aristotle’s philosophy. Aristotle had been a student of Plato but had also gone his own way more and more as the years went on. Unlike, Plato who focused on forms and transcendence, Aristotle’s philosophy was ground more in empirical experience, and that the physical, material world was the basis of all things. Not surprisingly, this was an important inspiration in later European history in the pursuit of sciences and the Enlightenment era.
Like Plato, Aristotle and the Peripatetics regarded virtue as the ultimate goal, and the means of happiness though they different with the Platonic school over what exactly virtue was. In time, the Peripatetics were eclipsed by the Neoplatonists (and Christians) above. It is also noteworthy that the Peripatetics had a strict “no-girls” policy as Aristotle was generally pretty critical of women relative to other Greek philosophers.1
Stoics
The Stoics were a later school that had a major heyday during the Hellenistic Period and even as far as the Roman Empire. Many people will note that famous Romans such as Cicero, Seneca the Younger and Emperor Marcus Aurelius (e.g. “Markie A”) were all devotees. The Stoics were begun by Zeno of Citium who had previously been a follower of the Cynics, but didn’t agree with some of their practices.
Like Plato and Aristotle, Zeno and later Stoics felt that virtue was the highest good, but that this virtue would be best achieved by learning to live according to nature or one’s fate. This is where we get the idea of being rational or “stoic” in the face of calamity. Stoics emphasized that maintaining virtue even in the face challenging circumstances was the only real means of attaining peace of mind (eudaimonia εὐδαιμονία) and be in touch with the world-soul (something also espoused by the Platonists).
One interesting note that Michael Grant writes in From Alexander to Cleopatra: The Hellenistic World is that the Stoics tended to be favored by aristocratic social conservatives due to their practice of maintaining a sense of equanimity in the face of social order (i.e. not upsetting it).
Epicureans
The Epicureans were another late, Hellenistic-period, school that for a time was immensely influential. Roman-era Stoics used to gripe how Epicureanism was a big fad in Rome among other places.
Epicurus the founder, in some ways like Aristotle, had very grounded view of the world, including a belief that while the gods existed, they were so enraptured in their own lives that they had zero involvement in the lives of men. For him the highest good was a sense of equanimity (ataraxia ἀταραξία) through pleasure, but not necessarily pleasure in the sense of sensual pleasure. Instead Epicurus advocated things like companionship of friends, freedom from troubles, etc. Epicurus’s ideal was a kind of quietist, self-sufficient ascetic life free from entanglements like politics, sex, etc, and so the Epicurean approach to life was to engage in activities that work toward that end.
Epicureanism had a kind of “calculating” approach to life, ethics and virtue and that tended to paint a big target on its back from other philosophies. Stoics in particular hated the Epicureans.
Cynics
The Cynics were a somewhat older school of philosophy that Stoicism clearly was based off of. It was founded by yet another Socrates disciple, Antisthenes. The Cynics proposed virtue through living naturally, totally free from “artificial” social conventions. This mean things like walking around naked, living in a large clay pot, as Diogenes did, and speaking to authority figures with plain, not honorific, speech. Diogenes apparently also had some run-ins with Plato, evidentially and allegedly with Alexander the Great, too.
Such an impractical and immodest life eventually turned off Zeno of Citium and thus leading to his Stoic school. Cynicism as a school eventually died out by the 3rd century, but during its heyday, according to Michael Grant, it was one of the few schools that actively decried social injustices in Hellenistic society such as poverty and slavery. Unlike some of the more cerebral philosophies, Cynicism had a broader, counter-cultural appeal even if few people were actually able to put it into practice.
Pythagoreanism
Arguably one of the oldest schools of Greek philosophy, its founder Pythagoreas, the famous mathematician, not surprisingly applied a philosophical/mathematical view of the Universe. In other words, through the study of mathematics and numerology, one could better understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the harmonious Universe. Pythagoreanism was also noteworthy for its teaching of reincarnation (though this was not exclusively a Pythagorean teaching). At its core, the Pythagoreans were an ascetic community (back before it was trendy), and eventually were eclipsed by the Cynics until it revived centuries later as Neopythagoreanism which deified the “one” more than before, but still kept to its mathematical roots.
Pyrrhonism
This school, founded by Pyrrho of Ellis, had a strongly skeptical outlook to life and other philosophical schools while emphasizing pragmatism. By withholding belief, and questioning things, one could avoid the mental disturbances caused by erroneous or misleading viewpoints and attain a sense of equanimity (see Epicurianism above). At its heart Pyrrhonism was about peace through avoiding “mind games” and just embracing things as they are. 🙂
Not surprisingly, the Skeptics avoided writing their teachings down much in order to avoid later generations from getting caught up in dogma.
Conclusion
What makes Ancient Greek Philosophy so interesting is that there were so many different approaches to the same basic problems of happiness and well-being. As Michael Grant writes:
The Hellenistic age, as we have seen, devoted a new, sympathetic attention to the individual man and woman. In consequence, an enormous proportion of the best thought of the time was concerned with analyzing the extensive problems and predicaments that disturbed him and her, in order to solve them and dispel the anxieties that they caused. (ch. 4)
But what’s really fascinating is that this was not limited to the Mediterranean.
Shakyamuni Buddha during his ministry in India (7th-6th century BCE) was similarly surrounded by rival schools the new Śramaṇa tradition that had grown beyond the singular devotion to the gods of the Vedas, and like the Greeks, strove to make sense of the Universe. Prior to his enlightenment, the Buddha had even studied under some of these schools, and later these same schools sent their best and brightest to debate with him. In a Buddhist text, the Brahmajāla Sutta (DN1 of the Pali Canon), the Buddha listed 62 other rivals schools of thought.
In China too, there was a similar explosion of thought at the time including Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, Legalism, etc. Each of these competing ideas had certain fundamental cultural assumptions such as the Yellow Emperor, Heaven as a model of order and goodness, and Nature, but each sought a way to organize Man along the will of Heaven and thereby prosper in a chaotic period.
Each society was geographically cut off from the other, but as each one grew and flourished beyond simple survival, they began to look around them and ask deeper questions, and those theories, conjectures and teachings still shape our world today.
1 Ancient Greek culture in general was pretty misogynistic. Women lived cloistered lives and even ate in separate rooms from the men. During the Hellenistic Period, this rapidly changed and women started to take more control of their own lives, participate in social activities more and even have some economic and political influence of their own. Also, compare with Roman women who enjoyed relatively equal status with men than their Greek counterparts.
When most people think of Ancient Greece, they think of ancient Athens with its democracy and philosophers, or Sparta with its militaristic culture.1 But Greece was a much larger and more complex culture, and no where is this more evident than in the Hellenistic Period.
The Hellenistic Period, covers a broad period from the death of Alexander the Great in the 4th century, to Cleopatra’s reign in the 1st century BCE. During this period, Alexander’s conquest quickly devolved into multiple, powerful Hellenized (Greek) kingdoms that vied one another for domination in the four Wars of the Diadochoi, followed by a breakup of the empire into distinct kingdoms, each with their strengths and challenges. Many were ruled by a former companion of Alexander, and their dynasties lasted for centuries, others were existing Greek colonies that navigated the complex Hellenistic world through alliances and building armies of their own.
These powerful kingdoms included, but were not limited to:
Ptolemies who ruled Egypt, including the famous city of Alexandria.
Seleucids who ruled the vast lands once ruled by the Persians including Babylon, Judea, and for a time the lands next to India (present day Pakistan and Afghanistan).
Attalids who ruled the powerful, dynamic city-state of Pergamum.
Antigonids who reigned in Greece and Macedon after Alexander’s death.
The powerful western colony of Syracuse, home of Archimedes
The powerful Kingdom of Pontus surrounding today’s Crimean peninsula.
An example of Greco-Buddhist art in Gandhara (modern day Pakistan), showing the Buddha and flanked by guardian Vajrapani, whose depiction clearly borrows from the Greek hero Herakles. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
A lot of aspects that people are vaguely aware of about the ancient Greek world are often found within the Hellenistic Period, including things referenced in the Bible, the Buddhist tradition, major philosophical schools, venerable works of art, and rivals to the later Roman Empire. Eventually, the Roman Empire defeated all but the most eastern regions (who fell to the Parthians and other conquerors), but the legacy they left behind has persisted through the centuries even up until now.
I’ve been reading a lot about this period from an excellent book called From Alexander to Cleopatra: The Hellenistic World by Michael Grant. This book covers every facet of life in the Hellenistic World: history, structure, life, art, architecture, philosophy, etc.
What’s most fascinating about the Hellenistic Period is how diverse the different characters and regions of the larger Greek world were, and yet how each had distinctive Greek influence. For example, the city-state of Syracuse, home of Archimedes, on the island of Sicily was a remote Greek colony yet it was also a great center of learning with additional influences from the Carthage and Roman culture. On the other end of the Hellenistic world was the city of Seleucia, which was built deep in the heart of Mesopotamia had much cultural exchange particularly in the fields of mathematics and astronomy between the Greeks and the native Mesopotamian culture. Everywhere the Greeks and their colonies went, they left their mark upon the world, but the native cultures left their marks on the Greeks as well.
The book and its contents are much too broad and complex to cover in this blog post, but it’s well worth a read, and I will likely be revisiting this topic again soon in subsequent posts covering different aspects of the Hellenistic Period.
While this period is not well known to general audiences, the Hellenistic Period represents the high-water mark of Greek culture, but also reflects a deeply cosmopolitan and dynamic period of history where changes to society and ideas were emerging, and in ways not previously seen in western culture, yet with lasting effect.
P.S. If you’d like to learn more about the Hellenstic Age, I highly recommend the Hellenistic Age Podcast. I’ve been enjoying this for months and it is top-notch.
1 The myths of Sparta present a lot of problems and misconceptions. Movies like 300 are a joke, and not remotely accurate to life in actual Sparta, but that’s a rant for another day.
As my studies of Ancient Greek continue, thanks to the Greek 101 course available at The Great Courses, I have been translating small sections of ancient text, The Iliad, as part of the homework. You can see my crazy chicken-scratch above for lines 17-27 in the first book. For today’s post, I wanted to draw attention to lines 26-32 of Book 1 of the Iliad, wherein, Agamemnon lord of the Achaean Greeks, rebuffs the priest Chryses‘s efforts to ransom his daughter back. The original Greek text below is provided in full in the courtesy of Tufts University:
The 1898 translation by Samuel Butler translates this as:
“Old man,” said he, “let me not find you tarrying about our ships, nor yet coming hereafter. Your scepter of the god and your wreath shall profit you nothing. I will not free her. She shall grow old in my house at Argos far from her own home, busying herself with her loom and visiting my couch; so go, and do not provoke me or it shall be the worse for you.”
But there’s some wordplay here being left out of the translation (which I learned about more in the Greek 101 course) in line 31:
ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένην
Butler simply translates this as “working the loom”. However, according to Tufts University online dictionaries, the word ἱστός(histos, 2nd declension masculine, expressed above in accusative form) can mean anything that is “upright”. This can mean the beam of a loom, but other things too. Further, ἐποίχομαι (epoikhomai, expressed above as a feminine-accusative participle) is a deponent verb meaning to “go over” or “ply”. So, while in the literal sense it means “ply the loom”, it’s pretty obvious that Agamemnon is also making a lewd joke about Chryses’s daughter to her dad’s face.
Even by the standards of the day, when women were frequently captured in war and enslaved, this was pretty rude and obnoxious. Other Greek myths outside the Iliad about Agamemnon do not paint a better picture. In one story, Agamemnon offends the goddess Artemis prior to sailing off to the Trojan War, and different plays explain why: in Electra it is because he sacrificed a sacred animal to Artemis, and boasted of his own skill in hunting. In the play Agamemnon, Artemis is angry at Agamemnon because he will throw many lives away for the sake of punishing the Trojans.
In any case, between the Iliad and the later Greek plays, it’s clear that King Agamemnon was the archetypal arrogant and powerful king who ignored the gods and the well-being of others, at his own peril.
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields 
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