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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 20, 2019 14:01:29 GMT -8
“The Life of Greece” by Will Durant
This is the second of Durant’s eleven volume, “The Story of Civilization.” “The Story of Civilization” is a massive undertaking which attempts to present, for the educated reader, the history of the world in a relatively concise package. The set was very popular when I was young and was one of those embellishments, such as encyclopedias and massive dictionaries, one saw in many upper- middle-class homes in the 1950s and 1960s. Being such, one had the suspicion that it was more admired than read. I know that I never read one of the nine volumes which I inherited from my parents, until now. So, before reaching my dotage, I decided to pull out a volume and start the long jog through Durant’s world history.
“The Life of Greece” starts in the misty days some 5,000 years back in the attempt to find the origins of Greece and its culture. Durant gives some pages to the important part Crete played in the rise of Greece and its culture. He also goes into the influences of Asia and Egypt, both of which were in constant interplay with the Greek world. As one would expect, Durant gives due respect to both the Iliad and Odyssey, both of which dealt with the “Heroic” age when such heroes as Achilles and Agamemnon walked the earth. Homer, writing many years later, is given credit for both literary masterpieces, but Durant believes that it is unlikely the same person wrote both, given the different styles of Greek and sensibilities of each epic.
The great stories of the Trojan War and wanderings of Odysseus come from this period which historians place at around 1200 B.C. These stories cannot be confirmed in the historic sense and have different variations, but they are fundamental to understanding the development of Greece. The people, Achaeans, were warlike, violent and something less than honest in their dealings with others. Human sacrifice was still practiced and whole villages and towns were slaughtered or sold into slavery if conquered. Durant writes that to the Achaeans, “A bad man is not one that drinks too much, lies, murders, and betrays; he is one that is cowardly, stupid, or weak. There were Nietzscheans long before Nietzsche.”
As nothing remains static, other peoples migrated to Greece, and the Dorians came from the north and settled as far south as Crete. The Dorians were called the Heracleidae (descendants of Heracles who claimed that they were reclaiming land which had rightfully belonged to Heracles and therefore to them.) These people would appear to have been Celts or proto-Celts of the Hallstatt Culture and had developed the use of iron. With this, they conquered the Achaeans took the Peloponnese and pushed aside the previous Mycenaean Culture. They got rid of the old elites and enslaved the rest of the population making them helots/serfs. From such men came the Spartans.
One thing which Durant makes clear is that we cannot be sure of how much of these tales of the Heroic Age is actual history and how much are myth.
I will continue this review later.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 20, 2019 14:16:50 GMT -8
I think I read some of one of the later volumes, but I don't recall much. My family had a set of the Great Books, and I read at least some in it.
The Ionian Greeks, which included Athens and the Greeks of the Asia Minor coast, were Achaeans who escaped the Dorian conquest.
Richard Powell wrote a novel on the Trojan War, Whom the Gods Destroy, which featured many of the heroes (and his rather negative take on most of them) and included a visit to a Dorian tribe. In his author's note, he pointed out the differences in the societies portrayed in Homer's works, The Odyssey showing a more primitive one than The Iliad.
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Post by artraveler on Jun 20, 2019 15:47:24 GMT -8
For a good feel of the Greeks I recommend, A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson
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Post by timothylane on Jun 20, 2019 17:18:29 GMT -8
That's about the Peloponnesian War, isn't it? If so, I read it, and it is indeed good. Even better is the 4-volume history by Donald Kagan, which covers the First Peloponnesian War (about 460-445 BC) as well as the Second (the Archidamian War) and Third (the Athenian invasion of Sicily and the Persian intervention). Of course, it is 4 large volumes.(The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, The Archidamian War, The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Invasion, and The Fall of the Athenian Empire).
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 20, 2019 18:01:00 GMT -8
I have Hanson's "A War Like No Other" and read it a couple of years back. I thought it a good book, but will have to go back and have a look at it once again.
Durant covers the Peloponnesian War in his chapter titled "The Suicide of Greece," which I will be covering later in this book review.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 12, 2019 14:44:37 GMT -8
While reading this book, I left a few book marks on pages which contained particularly interesting information. I just opened the volume at one of those book marks and read this about Isocrates of Athens who lived from 436 to 338 B.C. Talking about the corruption of Athenian democracy through imperialism he said to its citizens;
"Whenever you deliberate on the business of the state you distrust and dislike men of superior intelligence, and cultivate instead the most depraved of the orators who come before you; you prefer...those who are drunk to those who are sober, those who are witless to those who are wise, and those who dole out the public money to those who perform public services at their own expense."
Democracy was established in Athens around 500 B.C. and Isocrates saw its demise just a couple of months before his death.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 12, 2019 15:52:29 GMT -8
No one can prove the events of the Iliad or the Odyssey, but the places existed and could be located using them -- e.g., Schliemann's discovery of Troy, or the commonly accepted linkage of the Land of the Lotos Eaters to the Jerba Isles of Tunisia. But of course they could simply be historical novels. As for Homer, so little is known about him (several different Greek cities claimed to be his birthplace) that we can say that he's just a name associated with the books.
The Dorians conquered Boeotia (e.g., Thebes) as well as the Peloponnesus. Athens and the Ionian cities on the coast of Asian Minor (and perhaps the island states as well) escaped the Dorian conquest. (Powell, in Whom the Gods Destroy, was very careful never to refer to the Achaeans as Greeks or Hellenes.)
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Post by timothylane on Aug 12, 2019 18:00:33 GMT -8
Well, I could hardly recognize a particular location on the road to Corinth (presumably from Athens), but I certainly saw the Parthenon (I visited it twice, once as a family and once on a school trip), Lycabettus (though we never set foot on it), and the Corinth Canal. (That is awfully narrow, isn't it? I don't think I recall seeing any boats traversing it.)
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 12, 2019 18:05:14 GMT -8
Neither could I, but it was pasted to the page in the photo album so it came with the canal.
Lycabettus was a very pleasant place. As I recall, they had a number of restaurants and coffee houses, cafes around the hill and one could espy beautiful scenes of the city.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 12, 2019 18:19:33 GMT -8
I've read about the facilities atop Lycabettus. I never saw any sign of that sort of thing when we were there, but that was at least 55 years ago. I recall the scrub or whatever on the lower part and the bare upper part, and nothing on top of it. But since we were looking from the street below, there might have been something out of our sight.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 12, 2019 18:42:09 GMT -8
I can only vaguely recall the cafes or restaurants. And the main reason I do, is probably because a friend had told me about them before I visited Athens and recommended I walk up the hill. Still, the shadow of a very pleasant memory stays with me.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 16, 2019 17:34:06 GMT -8
I am 4/5ths through Durant's "The Age of Faith" and thought I would make a few comments and sprinkle a few quotes from the book. The generally agreed upon date of the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West is 476. This is the year that Odoacer deposed the last Roman Emperor of the West. He ruled as King of Italy until the Emperor in Constantinople arranged forces against him by offering Italy to Theodoric the Great, an Ostrogoth. Durant characterizes the fall in the West thusly: No one appears to have seen in this event the "fall of Rome", on the contrary, it seemed to be a blessed unification of the Empire, as formerly under Constantine. The Roman Senate saw it so, and raised a statue to Zeno in Rome. The Germanization of the Italian army, government, and peasantry, and the natural multiplication of the Germans in Italy, had proceeded so long that the political consequences seemed to be negligible shifts on the surface of the national scene.
In effect, the Germans had conquered Italy as Gaiseric (a Vandal) had conquered Africa, as the Visigoths had conquered Spain, as the Angles and Saxons were conquering Britain, as the Franks were conquering Gaul. In the West the great Empire was no more.Almost forty years ago, after I moved to Asia, whenever I returned to the West for business or a vacation, people here and in Europe would ask me what the difference was between the West and the East. I told them that "the East was not built on Judeo-Christian ethics and Greco-Roman rationalism." Over the last ten years or so, I have come to the conclusion that I left out one other main ingredient, which is the huge influence of the Germanic race on all of Western Europe, particularly in the role they played as elites. I believe Durant confirms that in this volume. Now that the Germanic peoples are withering away, I would say that the West is in a very similar situation to that of the later Roman Empire. The stoic Latins of the old order gave up for what ever reason, and were replaced by Teutons.
___________________
Continuing my history on the low regard in which society has held actors throughout the ages, Durant writes:
"Chrysostom condemned dancing as exciting passion, but Constantinople danced. The Church continued to refuse baptism to actors, but the Byzantine stage continued to display its suggestive pantomimes; people must be consoled for monogamy and prose."
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Post by timothylane on Sept 16, 2019 18:23:30 GMT -8
A good comparison to Odoacer's removal of the last West Roman emperor (Romulus Augustulus, I think) is Napoleon's decision to decree the end of the Holy Roman Empire in the early 19th Century. Then he named himself Emperor of France. (Shortly afterward, Francis of Austria named himself Emperor of Austria.) In both cases, it was merely the burial of a zombie. (One account I read when young referred to getting rid of the HRE as laying a ghost.) The West Roman Empire was effectively dead already once Gaul, Hispania, Brittania, and North Africa were irredeemably lost. I'm not sure how much of the rest they still controlled. It was probably effectively dead by around AD 450. By then, Rome had been plundered twice (by Alaric of the Visigoths and Gaiseric of the Vandals), and then ransomed to Attila the Hun.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 17, 2019 15:35:02 GMT -8
During the sixth century after Christ, a series of wars between the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires laid the foundation of Islam's expansion in the East. By the time the Islamic hoards burst out of Arabia, the Roman/Byzantine/Greek and Persian/Sassanian Empires were much weakened from the decades of constant fighting. (And internal problems) The Christian Byzantine and Zoroastrian Sassanian Empires became the prey of the Islamic Arabs.
I thought the following quote would give the reader a good idea of the viciousness which reigned in such ancient warfare. Khosru Parvez, the Sassanian emperor who brought the empire to its greatest power and helped cause its destruction, almost destroyed the Byzantine Empire.
Durant describes it thusly:
As is the wont of history, things changed. Durant writes further.
The wheel of history turned and contrary to what today's illiterates might believe, Christians were not the worst actors riding on it. There has always been plenty of cruelty to go around.
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Post by timothylane on Sept 17, 2019 16:42:05 GMT -8
I read a multi-volume biographical novel about Heraclius, the Byzantine equivalent of emperor Aurelian. It was probably by Harry Turtledove, whose academic specialty was Byzantine history, but there are others who could have done it, too.
I seem to recall that a King of Judah who rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar had his sons killed in front of him before being blinded and taken off to Babylon as a prisoner. I think this was also when they tore down the walls and razed the Temple.
For that matter, there's the story of how Hannibal learned that his brother Hasdrubal had been defeated by the Romans (Battle of the Metaurus). They tossed Hasdrubal's head into his camp.
And, of course, there's Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer, who sent several thousand Bulgar prisoners back to their king in groups of 100, each group with a single eye among them.
For that matter, where does anyone think the term "Carthaginian peace" comes from and what it originally referred to? Oh, wait, who today has even heard the term?
And none of that can compare to the actions of Genghis Khan. His war against Quarezum was basically a punitive war against their shah for executing Mongol ambassadors. A force of 20,000 followed him almost literally to the death. In one case they razed a captured city, then came back a while later to wipe out the survivors. As I recall, 30 survived out of a very large city.
And let us not forget that great environmentalist hero Timur the Lame, who showed an early grasp of recycling with his unique renewable (and probably biodegradable) construction material for pyramids. (My favorite story about Timur concerned his great battle against the Golden Horde. When the Khan of the Golden Horde was leading a flank attack that was likely to defeat Timur, his standard-bearer let the banner fall, indicating that the Khan was dead and leading to victory for Timur. I wonder how much he bribed the standard-bearer to do that.)
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Post by timothylane on Sept 17, 2019 18:03:36 GMT -8
I checked in wikipedia, and the Heraclius series is actually a 4-volume subseries in Turtledove's Videssos alternate history megaseries, which follows various phases of Byzantine history, The Time of Troubles. It starts in the time of Maurice and then covers Heraclius (and the Sassanids, who had their own troubles).
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 17, 2019 18:34:13 GMT -8
That is a good partial list of some of history's more unsavory characters. I have always had a special place in my heart for Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane as Marlowe called him. He was always looking for new ways to to combine ecological awareness with wreaking death and destruction on humanity.
Given the extensive list available, I always wonder how people come to the conclusion that Hitler was the most evil man in history. What would Tamerlane have done had he controlled the apparatus that Hitler did?
I think General MacArthur had it correct when he said the thing that was especially shocking about Hitler, was that he acted like an Asian tyrant thus betrayed Western civilization and mores, or something to that effect.
Unfortunately, history is full of mass murderers, thieves and psychopaths who gain power by whatever means necessary and misuse it once they have attained it. I am convinced there are people alive today who are just as evil as Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Fortunately, we have been (so far) lucky that none of them have been able to do anything like the damage done by the three modern-day Tamerlanes.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 17, 2019 18:36:48 GMT -8
If you are interested in the history of Byzantium, I can recommend a three-volume set by John Julius Norwich.
This is the same set and binding which I have. I bought it from the Folio Society about 10 years ago.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 17, 2019 18:47:13 GMT -8
Such treachery and betrayal are common throughout history. The number of times a city fell to a siege due to traitors opening the gates is huge. There are always those in any society who hate it and are willing to sell it out for cash or out of resentment. We should never forget this as there are plenty of such presently residing in the USA. It is part of the human condition.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 17, 2019 19:05:56 GMT -8
Let us skip a few hundred years to AD 969 when the Fatimids took control of Egypt.
Durant writes:
When writing about how great a capital Cairo became under the Fatimids, Durant notes that
Yet,
The reader should recall that this volume was published in 1950 so the dollar amounts are vastly understated in today's values.
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