Introduction%20to%20Western%20Literature

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Introduction to Western Literature
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The Ancient World of Western Literature (1)

• Time roughly from 800 B.C.E. to 400 B.C.E.
• Place The Mediterranean Basin
• The literature of this period was written in
  three languages Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
• The Roman Conquest brought the civilizations of
  these three languages into contact with one
  another and produced a fusion of their typical
  attitudes that formed the basis of later European
  thought.

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The Ancient World of Western Literature (2)

• The three separate lines meet in the figure of
  St. Augustine (November 13, 354 August 28, 430)
  
• the intellectual honesty and curiosity of the
  Greeks,
• the social seriousness and sense of order of the
  Romans, and
• The Hebrews feeling of human inadequacy and
  Gods omnipotent justice.

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The Ancient World of Western Literature (3)

• Mediterranean civilization began not on the
  coasts but east and south of the sea Babylon and
  Egypt (in the valleys of Euphrates and Tigris
  rivers and in the valley of the Nile).
• However, the cultural history of the ancient
  world came to medieval and Renaissance Europe not
  in the languages of Babylon and Egypt but in
  Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

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The Ancient World of Western Literature (4)

• The cultures of the ancient world passed down to
  later ages were dominated by two major
  traditions
• the Greco-Roman (Pantheist) tradition and
• the Judeo-Christian (Monotheist) tradition.

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The Hebrews (1)

• The Hebrews progressed from their beginnings as a
  pastoral tribe to their high point as a kingdom
  with a splendid capital in Jerusalem.
• Their later history was a bitter and unsuccessful
  struggle for freedom against foreign
  mastersBabylon, Greek, and Roman.

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The Hebrews (2)

• After the period of the great kings David and
  Solomon (1005-925 B.C.E.), the kingdom fell apart
  again into warring factions.
• The period of exile (the deportation of the
  population to Babylon, 586-539 B.C.E.) was a
  formative for Hebrew religious thought.

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The Hebrews (3)

• The return to Palestine was crowned by the
  rebuilding of the Temple and the creation of the
  canonical version of the Pentateuch or Torah, the
  first five books of the Hebrew Bible.
• Around 300 B.C.E. Palestine became part of a
  Hellenistic Greek-speaking kingdom, and was
  absorbed by the Roman Empire in 63 B.C.E.

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The Hebrews (4)

• A second revolt against the Roman Empire resulted
  in the diaspora, the scattering of the Hebrew
  people.
• The Hebrew people remained stateless until the
  creation of the state of Israel in1948.
• The religious literature of the ancient Hebrews
  was probably written down between the 8th and the
  2nd centuries B.C.E.
• It is founded on the idea of one God, the creator
  of all things, all-powerful and just.

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The Greeks (1)

• The origin of the peoples who called themselves
  Hellenes is still a mystery.
• The language they spoke belongs to the
  Indo-European family.
• The second millennium B.C.E. saw a brilliant
  culture, called Minoan after the mythical king
  Minos, flourishing on the large island of Crete.

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The Greeks (2)

• The citadel of Mycenae and the palace at Pylos
  show that mainland Greece had centers of wealth
  and power.
• In the last century of the 2nd millennium, the
  great palaces were destroyed by fire.
• With them disappeared not only the Mycenean arts
  and skills but even the system of writing.

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The Greeks (3)

• For the next few hundred years the Greeks were
  illiterate this period is called the Dark Age of
  Greece.
• It produced a body of oral epic poetry that was
  the raw material Homer shaped into two great
  poems, the Iliad and Odyssey.
• They became the basis of an education and of a
  whole culture.
• The great characters of the epic serve as models
  of conduct for later generations of Greeks.

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The Greeks (4)

• The Hebrew conception of God emphasizes those
  aspects of the universe that imply a harmonious
  order the Greeks conceived their gods as an
  expression of the disorder of the world in which
  they lived.
• The Olympian gods in Homers epics represented
  the blind forces of the universe.
• Morality is a human creation.

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The Greeks (5)

• There is a double standard, one for gods and one
  for mortals.
• Homer imposed on Greek literature the
  anthropocentric emphasis that is its
  distinguishing mark and its great contribution to
  the Western mind.
• The stories told in Homers poems are set in the
  12th century B.C.E.
• They were probably written between the 10th and
  the 8th B.C.E (the so-called Dark Age).

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The Greeks (6)

• The Dark Age was the time which saw the growth of
  many small independent cities.
• These cities differed from each other in custom,
  political constitution, and even dialect.
• They were constantly at war with one another.
• It was in the cities founded on the Asian coast
  that the Greeks adapted to their own language the
  Phoenician system of writing, adding signs for
  the vowels to create their alphabet.

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The Greeks (7)

• Literacy became a general condition all over the
  Greek world in the 7th century B.C.E.
• By the beginning of the 5th century B.C.E., the
  two most prominent city-state were Athens and
  Sparta.
• These two cities led the combined Greek
  resistance to the Persian invasion in the years
  490-479 B.C.E.

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The Greeks (8)

• Athens at this time was a democracy and the
  leader of a naval alliance.
• Sparta was rigidly conservative in government and
  policy.
• Its citizens were reared and trained for war, and
  its land army was superior to any other in
  Greece.
• These two cities became enemies when the external
  danger was eliminated.

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The Greeks (9)

• The war between these two cities, known as the
  Peloponnesian War, began in 431 B.C.E. and ended
  in 404 B.C.E. with the total defeat of Athens.
• By the end of the 5th century B.C.E. Athens was
  divided internally as well as defeated
  externally.
• An intellectual revolution occurred it was a
  critical reevaluation of accepted ideas in every
  sphere of thought and action.

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The Greeks (10)

• Democratic institutions had created a demand for
  an education that would prepare men for public
  life.
• The demand was met by the appearance of the
  professional teacher, the Sophist.
• The Sophists were great teachers they produced a
  generation that had been trained to see both
  sides of any question and to argue the weaker
  side as effectively as the stronger, the false as
  effectively as the true.

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The Greeks (11)

• The Sophists taught how to argue inferentially
  from probability in the absence of concrete
  evidence, to appeal to the audiences sense of
  its own advantage rather than to accept moral
  standards.
• The Sophist methods dominated the thinking of the
  Athenians of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E.
• Human reason became a critical weapon for an
  attack on myth and on traditional conceptions of
  the gods.

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The Greek (12)

• The shifts in worldview and moral beliefs led to
  new forms of creativity in art, literature, and
  thought.
• In the last quarter of the 5th century B.C.E.,
  Plato and Aristotle revolutionized philosophy and
  laid the foundations for later ancient and
  European philosophical thought.
• Their predecessor is Socrates.

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The Greeks (13)

• Socrates used dialectic, a search for truth
  through questions and answers, to discuss the
  nature of justice, of truth, and of piety.
• He believed in absolute standards and believed
  that they could be discovered by a process of
  logical inquiry and supported by logical proof.
• The Athenians sentenced him to death on a charge
  of impiety.

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The Greeks (14)

• In the next century Athens became the center for
  a large group of philosophical schools, all ot
  them claiming to develop and interpret the ideas
  of Socrates.
• When Alexander the Great died at Babylon in 323
  B.C.E., his empire broke up into a number of
  independent kingdoms ruled by his generals
  modern scholars refer to this period (323-31
  B.C.E.) as the Hellenistic Age.

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The Greeks (15)

• One of his generals, Ptolemy, founded a Greek
  dynasty that ruled Egypt.
• At Alexandria in Egypt, the Ptolemies formed a
  Greek library to preserve the texts of Greek
  literature.

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Rome (1)

• When Alexander died, the city of Rome was engaged
  in a struggle for the control of the surrounding
  areas.
• There were three Carthaginian (or Punic) Wars
  between Rome and Carthage.
• Rome emerged from the second Punic War (218-201
  B.C.E.) not merely victorious but a world power.
• By the end of the first century B.C.E., Rome was
  the capital of a great empire.

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Rome (2)

• This empire gave peace and orderly government to
  the Mediterranean area for the next two
  centuries.
• When it finally went down, the empire left behind
  it the ideal of the world-state, an ideal that
  was to be taken over by the medieval church,
  which ruled from the same center, Rome, and which
  claimed a spiritual authority as great as the
  secular authority it replaced.

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Rome (3)

• The great body of Roman law is one of the Romans
  greatest contributions to Western civilization.
• The quality Romans most admired was gravitas,
  seriousness of attitude and purpose.
• Latin literature began with a translation of the
  Odyssey, made by a Greek prisoner of war.
• With the exception of satire, until Latin
  literature became Christian the model was always
  Greek.

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Rome (4)

• While the Roman empire flourished in the 2nd
  century C.E., the old religion offered no comfort
  to those who looked beyond mere material ends.
• New religions arose or were imported from the
  East.
• The worship of the Hebrew prophet Jesus finally
  triumphed and became the official and later the
  exclusive religion of the Roman world.

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Rome (5)

• Under the never-ending invasions by peoples from
  the north, the church, with its center and
  spiritual head in Rome, converted the new
  inhabitants and so made possible the preservation
  of much of that Latin and Greek literature that
  was to serve the European Middle Ages and
  Renaissance as a model and a basis for their own
  great achievements in the arts and letters.

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Source

• The above points are abstracted from the chapter
  The Ancient World in The Norton Anthology of
  Western Literature Vol. 1, The Ancient World
  through the Renaissance. 8th ed. New York
  Norton, 2006.