Introduction

Apollodoros has now established that Neaira is non-Athenian. He has sketched her past as a slave and prostitute in Corinth, detailed a number of her lovers, and shown how she came to live with Stephanos in Athens. Now that it has been proved that Neaira is non-Athenian, Apollodoros has to prove that she is living with Stephanos as his wife. A formal betrothal was normally validated by witnesses and the marriage itself confirmed by cohabitation to produce legitimate heirs. Apollodoros, however, produces no evidence of the birth of children to Neaira and Stephanos. In the absence of evidence from such children, Apollodoros concentrates on establishing the marriage of Stephanos and Neaira in other ways. The most important evidence is that Stephanos attempted to pass off Neaira's children as if they were his own children (as he indeed boasted that he would do at 12. I.).

In World of Athens: divorce and dowry 5.11, 16, 19.

Proving identity

Athenians had no birth certificates and no state registry of births. Nor were scientific methods of proof available to decide paternity. Instead, legitimacy and citizenship were most easily demonstrated to the satisfaction of a large citizen jury by producing witnesses who would testify to a child's introduction as an infant into a phratry at the Apatouria festival and into the deme at the age of majority.

Introduction

The questioning of traditional morality, which could be seen either as a new humanism or as moral degeneracy, was popularly associated with the influence of people like Socrates and the sophists. Socrates had a profound influence on Greek thought of his time, and the philosopher Plato, from whose writings we derive much of our idea of Socrates, was one of his most ardent disciples. Others, however, regarded him as a pernicious influence on Athenian society, and the claims that he ‘corrupted the young’ and ‘believed in strange gods’ led to his trial and execution in 399.

In his portayal of Socrates in his comedy Clouds (423), Aristophanes exploits all the humorous possibilities of popular prejudice against ‘intellectuals’ with their ‘new-fangled’ ideas and their arguments which are ‘too clever by half’.

In World of Athens: Greek comedy 8.67–80; festivals 8.45, cf. 3.44; Socrates 8.33.

Note

The Greek you have been reading so far has been adapted very heavily from original sources. The ideas and original vocabulary have been kept, but the sentence construction has been noticeably different.

From now on, you will, for the most part, be reading continuous extracts from single works (rather than collations of sources), and the Greek of the text will approximate more and more closely to the original. For example, Strepsiades' first ten words in this extract are the actual opening of the Clouds, though it must be emphasized that Aristophanes was a poet and composed in verse, not (as would appear from these extracts) prose.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE

408. Greek belongs to the great family of Indo-European languages. These include English, Welsh, Irish, Latin, Russian, Lithuanian, Albanian, and most modern European languages (notable exceptions being Basque, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish), as well as Armenian, Persian and the languages of north India. Important extinct languages that belong to the same family include Hittite and Tocharian. Greek has the longest recorded history of any of them, running from the fourteenth century B. C. down to the present day. Its apparent similarity to Latin is due, not to any specially close relationship, but to the fact that both languages ultimately derive from the same source and are recorded at an early date; Greek and Latin are both strikingly close to the classical language of India, Sanskrit, and to the language of Darius I and Xerxes, Old Persian.

The earliest record of the Greek language is contained in the clay tablets written in the script called ‘Linear B’ in the palaces of Knossos, on Crete, and Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns and Thebes, on the mainland in the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries. This script is not alphabetic but syllabic, i.e. each sign represents not a single sound (e.g. ‘t’, ‘p’) but a syllable (e.g. ‘do’, ‘sa’, ‘mu’). Mycenaean (as the language of the Linear B tablets is called) represents an archaic form of the language, but demonstrates firmly that Greek had developed as a separate language – and, indeed, split into dialects – well before this date.

Introduction

Section Nine, the story of Adrastos, is taken from Herodotus. All places referred to will be found on the map. Croesus is king of Lydia, whose capital city was Sardis. The story takes place c. 590. For the previous 150 years, Asia Minor had seen many different peoples come and go. The Lydians and Phrygians between them now controlled most of the mainland, but the Greeks, through assiduous colonisation, had established a firm foothold on the coastal regions and were (generally) welcomed by the locals. It was through this crucial contact with Near East culture that Greek art, literature and philosophy developed as they did. Croesus was especially well-disposed to the Greeks and had adopted a number of their customs.

Croesus' wealth was legendary (cf. ‘as rich as Croesus’). The tale you are about to read, one of the most powerful and tragic in the whole of Herodotus, is just one incident in the saga of Croesus' life which Herodotus uses at the very start of his Histories to tell us about the way in which gods deal with men. The ‘reason’ that Herodotus propounds for Croesus' tragedy will be found in the translation of the episode immediately prior to the Adrastos story (given below) – the visit of the great Athenian politician and law-giver Solon to Croesus' court.

Introduction

The narrative returns to Dikaiopolis, who continues on his way through the city with the rhapsode. They meet Euelpides and Peisetairos, two friends who plan to escape from Athens and its troubles and found a new city, Cloudcuckooland (Νεφελοκοκνγία), a Utopia in the sky with the birds (Section 8). ‘Utopia’ (a word confected in 1516 by Sir Thomas More to describe an ideal society) = οὐ τόπος ‘no place’ – or should that be εὖ τοπος (Eutopia)?

We have already seen some of the troubles they want to escape – the war, the plague, increasing lawlessness and disrespect for the gods and human institutions, the collapse of morality and the challenge of the sophists – but Euelpides mentions another, the Athenian obsession with law-suits, a theme which is comically explored in scenes from Aristophanes' Wasps (Section 9).

Peisetairos and Euelpides have already decided on their plan of escape, but Aristophanes provides two other possible comic solutions: in Lysistrata (Section 10) the women of Athens stage a sex-strike to end the war, and in Akharnians (Section 11) Dikaiopolis finally finds his own solution to the problems of Athens at war.

There is one criterion, and one only, by which a course for the learners of a language no longer spoken should be judged: the efficiency and speed with which it brings them to the stage of reading texts in the original language with precision, understanding and enjoyment. The setting-up of the Greek Project by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers was the product of a conviction that it was possible to compose an Ancient Greek course which would satisfy that criterion substantially better than any course already existing.

There would have been little point in such a project if the current decline of Greek in schools had clearly reflected a general, growing and irreversible failure on the part of modern society to respond aesthetically and intellectually to Greek culture; but there has been no such failure of response, for the popularity of Greek literature in translation and of courses in Greek art and history has continued to increase. It seemed to the Joint Association that there was a gap waiting for a bridge. Bridges cost money, and when an appeal for £40,000 was launched at the beginning of 1974 by Dr Michael Ramsey and others it was legitimate to wonder how the cause of Greek would fare in competition with louder claims. But the optimists were justified: by November £63,000 had been contributed, a sum which more than compensated for the effect of inflation after the original costing of the project, and in 1976 an appeal for the money required for a fourth and final year of work brought in more than £15,000.

Introduction

Odysseus has left Troy for home with his contingent of ships, but is swept off course and, in a series of adventures with such mythical creatures as the Cyclopes, the Lotus Eaters, Kirke, the Sirens and Skylla and Kharybdis, loses all his ships and men. He himself is washed up on the island of the demi-goddess Kalypso, where he is kept against his will for a number of years. Eventually, the gods order his release and Odysseus builds himself a boat and sets sail for his home, Ithaka. But Poseidon the sea-god, still enraged at Odysseus for blinding his son the Cyclops, wrecks the boat. Odysseus swims to land and arrives at Scheria, where he hauls himself ashore and collapses joyfully under a bush to sleep. Meanwhile his patron goddess, Athene, is working on his behalf to arrange a welcome for him amongst the Phaiakians, who inhabit the island.

The interleaved translation is by Richmond Lattimore.

In World of Athens: Homer 1.10–11, 17, 8.1; dreams 3.8, 12, 14–16; display and reputation 4.5–8.

There is a good edition by Janet Watson, Homer: Odyssey VI and VII (Bristol 2005); and for more advanced students by AF Garvie, Homer: Odyssey VI–VIII (Cambridge 1994).

While Odysseus sleeps, Athene visits Nausikaa, the daughter of Alkinoös (king of the Phaiakians), in a dream and suggests that she should go to the river next day to wash the royal linen.

Introduction

Whether Aristarkhos was telling the truth or not (and it was probably six of one and half a dozen of the other), the fact was that the actual working of justice could be a slow, messy and unsatisfactory business – slow because of the variety of claims and counter-claims that could be lodged, messy because it was always up to individuals to bring cases, gather evidence, present the case and enforce the verdict, and unsatisfactory because the scanty rules of legal process made dikasts liable to be swayed by purely emotional or personal appeals. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the law was an intensely personal concern for a Greek (far more, perhaps, than it is for us with our batteries of solicitors, policemen, barristers and judges) and that the Greeks regarded the laws, by means of which justice was upheld, as the absolute heart and soul of the πόλις. Indeed, Greek citizens actually made the laws by their vote in the ἐκκλησία; and, as we have seen, thousands of citizens could be daily involved in the process of law as dikasts. The word νόμος also had much deeper associations for a Greek than ‘law’ does for us, because it meant much more than statutory law: it meant also ‘custom’, ‘convention’, the collected wisdom of the past, the ‘accepted inheritance which formed the permanent background of [a Greek's] life’ (Dodds).

The following passage is taken from Plato's dialogue Protagoras. Socrates has asked Protagoras, the great sophist and thinker, whether it is possible to teach people to be good citizens, a skill that Protagoras himself claimed to teach.

Introduction

Section Twenty, the final section of the first half of the Course, introduces Homer through the story of Odysseus and Nausikaa. The shift of emphasis apparent in Section Nineteen, which took you away from the secular society of Neaira and Aristarkhos to an interpretation of history which depended on the intervention of the gods in man's affairs, is continued here. Homer's world is one in which the gods move easily amongst the (mortal) heroes of the Greeks (whom the gods are made, in many ways, to resemble), and heroes are quite often, as a result, called ‘godlike’. Yet there is a deeper sense of the value of mere humanity in Homer than perhaps in any other Greek writer.

Homer and his poems

The Iliad and Odyssey are the very first works of literature of Western civilisation, and some would say they are rivalled only by Shakespeare. In reading them, you will be placing yourself in a mainstream of human experience which stretches back for some 2,700 years, and will stretch forward for as long as books are read. No other works have made, directly or indirectly, such a profound impact upon Western literature, or exercised such a compelling grip upon the human imagination over so long a period.

The two poems had probably reached the form in which we now have them by about 700. Tradition tells us that their composer was Homer and that he was blind.