Introduction to the Humanities Pt. 2 The Greeks

0:00 everybody welcome to the second chapter in our humanities class last week we studied the beginnings of the origins of religion we saw this in Mesopotamia we looked at the Epic of Gilgamesh we went into Egypt Egyptian religion and Egyptian culture we saw how Karma and Dharma and the Atman and the Brahman work in and achieving the state of nirvana in the uh in India and we also saw ancestor worship and how that operated and also working within nature in Taoism

0:48 we began the last chapter looking at animism and Shamanism also we will be returning to religion here with the Greeks as we look at the Greek gods and then in chapter four we will see modern religions forming in Judaism Christianity and Islam so we're going to first go through the Greeks through our chapter and then you have a reading assignment the assessment make sure that you are complete in answering your assignments and that they are coming from the textbook the landmarks of the humanities by Gloria k Fierro you'll have a discussion assignment

1:34 which will be Plato's allegory of a cave and we will see a short animation that has Orson Welles as the narrator teaching us what it is to see Shadows rather than to see reality in a cave so let's start our journey get back to the beginning of this here all right let's start with a map of the Aegean and who are the Greeks so we're going to look at the Greeks in three different sections four different

2:20 sections uh the Minoans the Mycenaeans the great warrior uh mythical group from peloponnesia who are the ones of the uh the Trojan War Fame and the Trojan War and the Iliad and the Odyssey will become the great epic poems that describe Greek culture uh disseminate Greek language also at the same time and then we will get into after the two Wars with the Persians we will look at the city-state of Athens and what is known as Classical Greece so we we use the term classical for two different ways we talk about classicism being the

3:07 ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans around 450 BC to the end of Rome around 470 A.D but when we talk about the Greeks we have the Minoans from Crete the earliest great civilization the Mycenaeans from peloponnesia then we have the city-state of Athens and then we will have hellenization from Alexander the Great of Macedonia who will then create an empire that will expand off the map here into present-day turkey and Persia or Iran uh and into parts of India and also Northern Africa the world we become hellenized and we will find Greek

3:54 theaters Greek building Greek culture Greek philosophy spread around the known world but to understand what it is to be Greek is to understand that these are seafaring people in the Aegean Sea and that they are traitors they are trading in Lebanon they are trading with Egypt they are trading in North Africa uh and also they are building cities in North Africa um Alexandria will be built in uh in Egypt and is named after Alexander and again will become a kind of great City in its own right that is built as a kind of uniquely Greek City on top of the

4:40 history that we've already studied from Egypt so to be Greek is to be part of the Cyclades to be from Crete to be Peloponnesian to be on the Greek mainland continent all of this is Greek and they share a common history they share a common language and they are also trading and also going to war uh with each other so the Greeks are the foundation of classicism that are laid out during the Bronze Age and as we looked at in our last chapter uh the Bronze Age is that age of from around oh gosh around 3000

5:25 BC with metal urgy use of copper and Tin to make bronze weapons to make this bronze statue that we're looking at here um and will be replaced around a thousand BC with the Iron Age a stronger metal that also does not require trading to be able to make the metal copper and Tin were not in any one country so to make bronze you had to trade to make it iron ore can basically be found anywhere so starting with the Cyclades so when we look at the ancient uh a Aegean civilizations from around 3 000

6:13 to 1200 BC the Bronze Age we have the great culture of the Minoans and we also have these Cyclades and again this notion of being Greek and to be Greek is profoundly influenced by Hellenic Notions like reason and Beauty and the good life these all bear stamps on the the Greek society the Cyclades were a group of kind of circular formed Islands between Greece and Turkey we don't know a lot about them but we do find evidence of settlements as early as 5000 BC and we have found evidence of art that they made these small marble

7:01 figurines here that you can find at the Getty it a Getty Malibu in Los Angeles in fact I think they they have this specific one here we don't know much about them because they were put on the black market and they were were sold when archeology had very kind of shady practices if you've ever seen Raiders of the Lost Ark you kind of know what I'm hinting at here so these we don't know exactly where from the Cyclades these came we don't know what strata of soil that they came from we simply know that they are from the area and they have similar features um they look very modern in terms of geometry they are human but faceless

7:49 they don't have a dramatic kind of anatomy but what you do see here is that it's female there's a triangular vulvic symbol here we know that these are knees they look closer maybe to the Venus of velendorf than they will look like the Greek classical sculptures of Dory of the um of the the the the the 400s and and the the classical age of the Greeks the Minoans so the Minoans were on the island of Crete they had a very great successful society that by the way is documented

8:35 really well in this documentary cavemen to Kings there are three episodes of this and I have the the I believe the first or the second one here episode one and it does a really good job of explaining how important the Minoans and the Mycenaeans were very often we only talk about classical and the uh the alexandrian age of Hellenism but here we see a very thriving Community an artistic Community they are trading uh they're doing really well and probably around 1400 BC their civilization is either absorbed or destroyed by the Mycenaeans

9:20 they were thought to be legendary until we are have a discovery of nosos the um the the legendary castle of the Minoans in King Minos so this uh ultimate kind of uh three Palace three-story palace here was a Labyrinth of masonary dozens of rooms and corridors around his Central Courtyard and it was probably uh mostly about ceremonial possessions uh processions and other aspects of cretan life and also famous for some of their frescoes one of the Fresco which has been restored here is the leaping bull

10:06 fresco so we believe that this is a kind of sport where you Vault over the bull so when you get the bull to charge you grab its horns and you flip over the bull unscathed we also know that they had a writing system called linear a and Linear B but both I believe both of these have not been deciphered yet so the rediscovery of nosos is from Arthur Evans and again maybe probably some kind of shoddy archaeological and restoration processes here another thing that we find in the minoan

10:53 archaeological sites from around 1600 BC is this Priestess who I believe in the restoration they added the arms with the snakes so we often call it the snake goddess but that is something that was added on later and might not be necessarily true one of the great Legends of nosos is the Minotaur the half bull half man that was born in a union with meiosis queen and a sacred white bull according to this story that comes much later a clever Athenian hero Theseus is aided by the King's Daughter erande and they make their way through the minotaurs

11:38 Labyrinth and kill the monster which frees Athens from its ancient bondage to the Minoans so this is kind of An Origin myth that more than likely doesn't have much truth to it directly the next great civilization are the Mycenaeans from around 1600 to 1200 BC they are militant they are aggressive they are challenging through their warships Traders for control of the Eastern Mediterranean and their city is a really famous for how massive the walls are and in fact so massive that it was believed later that they were built by a mythical race of

12:25 giants known as the Cyclops so we have found beehive shaped tombs we've found weapons and jewelry and also um we know a bit about Agamemnon who is the legendary King who will be involved in the great Trojan War so the Trojan War is kind of part about what it is into be Greek so in the Trojan War um from around uh maybe uh around uh 1200 um we believe that the Mycenaeans attack Troy and the commercial stronghold on

13:13 the northwest coast of Asia Minor where turkey is and it's a 10-year war between the mycenaea and the Trojans that is the context for The Iliad so being Greek is being involved in this war speaking the language and here we're seeing a map of Homer the writer the legendary blind poet who writes The Iliad and the Odyssey and we're getting an idea of what Greek society is from the second book The Odyssey starring Odysseus who is one of the heroes of The Iliad he is trying to get back home to his wife the gods are against him and he is blown off course and we believe that this is the

14:01 course that he takes ultimately to get back home and again this story gives us this idea of it's kind of like a travel log which gives us an idea of what the expanse of these seafaring people were in the Aegean and in the Mediterranean so the war around 1200 BC uh we have the Trojans the Trojans are around here in the Aegean they are ultimately going to lose the war and much of what we know about the Trojans is about the writing that comes approximately 400 years later describing

14:47 the war so the war had been a oral tale that is not written down until 400 years later uh Troy is well fortified and the gods the Greek gods are all involved in this war and meddling at every turn and sometimes some of them are on the side of the Trojan for various selfish reasons and other gods are on the the side of the Greeks so this history that we get from Homer is not a history as we know it this is a history that everything has some relationship to the Greek gods and we'll

15:33 get to the Greek gods in a moment so in the heroic age from 1200 to 750 BC we have a powerful um iron-bearing tribes the dorians Greek speaking people from the north who will destroy the Mycenaean civilization during a long period of political and social turmoil the storytellers are keeping alive the story of the make great Trojan War ultimately written down somewhere maybe around 800 BC by Homer now Homer probably is not a singular person but probably an organization or a group of

16:19 poets who agreed to write down the parts that they know about the Trojan War and the Iliad and the Odyssey and then combine them together it seems highly unlikely that a blind poet would be able to write this down certainly without a scribe doing it for him so I think the idea that it's a blind poet is kind of the group winking at us and letting us know that it's not a singular person but more of a group of people so in The Iliad The Iliad takes place in the last days of the Trojan War and the hero is Achilles who is moved to anger and is petty even though he's a great warrior

17:06 he can take out hundreds and he decides that he is not going to join the war because of a slight that he feels and his best friend perhaps lover patroclus is going to of course be in the war and when he dies uh Achilles is going to be filled with such grief and rage that he is going to kill the person that killed his friend Hector and he's so mad that rather than killing Hector and then moving on and honoring Hector as a warrior he is going to drag his naked body around the walls of Troy until finally they agree to a temporary

17:52 truce so part of what you get in Greek stories is the idea that even the most powerful and brilliant people still have failings often morally and in fact you'd never really want to be like a Greek God as opposed to say the monoethical god of Judaism Christianity and Islam this God is a perfect being in Morality and ethics and you're striving to be like them with the Greeks you don't want to be like the gods they're Petty they are selfish um and yet they are very powerful and can cause great destruction even though they have these really human parts to

18:40 them and I think we find the same thing as a lesson kind of with Achilles as well the second book is the Odyssey so the Odyssey is the Journey Back Home taken by Odysseus the clever and resourceful hero of the Trojan War he is trying to reassert his authority as the king of Ithaca and much like in the Epic of Gilgamesh The Iliad and the Odyssey uh belongs to the dynamic history of rugged young uh culture um but in the Epic of gilgamage Gilgamesh we find that the theme is the

19:26 pursuit of everlasting life the Greek epic deals with the Quest for individual honor and Glory so The Iliad is a robust tale of War but its true subject is Achilles and in uh with Achilles he is the personification of youthful bravery a superhero but he is psychologically complex more so than Gilgamesh is he is exhibiting anger love rage and grief he is totally human in his pettiness Odysseus is going to uh fall in favor with a few Gods fall out of favor with other gods and ultimately be blown off

20:12 course and have all these amazing Journeys one of the most famous that is Illustrated here is him and his men are going to be taken captive by a giant Cyclops ultimately the Cyclops is going to get drunk and blinded and then the men are going to get out of the sealed cave under the bellies of the giant sheep then Odysseus finally is going to get back home he is going to find that his wife has many suitors and he is going to arrive disguised as a beggar enduring abuse and insult from the suitors and then ultimately he will reveal himself and reunite with his loving wife Penelope

20:59 so Greek gods in Homer the Greek gods are personalizing every aspect of the Greek World both natural and cultural and their experiences in it the Earth the sea the mountains the rivers custom law and one share in society are all seen as personal as well as naturalistic terms the gods prefer peace on Olympus to helping their worshipers and no matter how well you worship one of these gods they will still turn on you at any given time It is believed that Zeus the strongest of the Gods had favored the Trojans in the Great War while Hera the goddage of marriage had favored the Greeks

21:44 so even though the strongest god was on the side of the Trojans they still fell now the history of the Greek gods and the principal Greek gods so there are kind of a few phases of Greek god history and we find these in the Greek writer hessiad that in the beginning there were these primordial gods and chaos and ultimately chaos is going to turn the uh Abyss into a a personification of the world through the goddess Gaia and then there will be 12 Titans six male six female Cronus and um the youngest one being Cronus or time uh Gaius did not like how your Uranus

22:31 treated her children she becomes furious with Uranus and decides to take revenge she asks her other children the Titans to cut Uranus's genitals and overthrow him from the drops of his blood that fell on Gaia the furies and the Giants and the Titans are born the next state of gods are the Olympian gods the great Greek gods that we would find in Athens so we find the personification of Zeus his wife Hera you'll notice six men Six Women the Greek gods are always about procreation the god of water Poseidon we have Athena the god of wisdom and War

23:17 um we have aphroditees the god of love and beauty Artemis uh the god of the hunt and wild animals and they are all able to change themselves Poseidon is the god of the sea Zeus is the god of the the sky throwing lightning bolts whenever he needs to and uh also Apollo is the God of Light medicine and music and that'll be important I think when we are studying art so we learn about these Gods from hesiad and his theogeny this is where we get an idea of who the gods are how they behave

24:03 and what their histories are also the Greeks also are worshiping the Gods in various forms and we find many temples dedicated to specific gods and we also have Adelphi at Delphi we have a uh a a place for divining the future so according to Legend Zeus and um uh uh Zeus sent two Eagles and they cross over Delphi where the navel of Gaia was found it is known as kind of the navel or the belly button of the world uh Apollo will slay a python a dragon uh

24:50 that was protecting the navel of the earth and then as that dragon is rotting um the fumes from the dragon are something that uh priestesses will a Sybil will uh smell the gases fall into a trance Apollo will possess her spirit and while she's raving she is predicting future events and so the delphic Oracle has a lot of influence and leaders and Generals are not making major excursions without consulting the oracles so the Greek city-states and the Persian

25:35 Wars so the Persian Wars uh began in uh 490 um there is a Greek force of 11 000 men that meets the Persian army twice as many numbers as the Greeks and defeat them only losing 192 men Persian casualties exceed six thousand Legend has it that the Greek Herald who brought the news of victory at Marathon to Athens died upon completing a 26 mile run where the term marathon comes from in the second war the Persians build the fleet of Warships and in 480 they

26:23 um are ultimately defeated uh by uh or defeated the Persian Armada uh at salamis in one of the final battles of the Persian War the Golden Age of of the Greeks is going to come after the second Persian War um and the second Persian War and these Persian Wars after the second Persian War all the Greek states are going to come together to defeat the Persians and a golden age from 4th 80 BC to 430 BC is going to emerge after the great Persian War the uh the Greek

27:08 states are going to form the Delian League and they are going to pool their money and resources to make sure that they can Finance any future Wars that they will need and that's going to cause ultimately a war called the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens because Sparta is kind of upset how much money that the per that the Athenians are spending on the uh the treasury known as the Parthenon and we know something about the Peloponnesian War um from uh history uh that is um writing history in a very modern way without Greek gods in it maybe the very first kind of modern history tells us

27:55 about the Peloponnesian War and the Peloponnesian War is also in Greek literature like lisistrada where the women between the Spartans and the Athenians get together and decide that they will withhold sex until the men decide that they will stop fighting great kind of story in the great classical age we know about Pericles and the funeral oration and that he is praising the Dead from the wars against the uh the Persians and that he is announcing that uh Athens um the Athenians

28:40 um is a school of the helles and he says I doubt if the world can produce a man who who where he only has himself to depend on is equal to so many emergencies and Grace by so happier versatility as the Athenians so he is kind of announcing this great Greek classical age that is beginning and again the age of the um the Delian League Greek government so Greek government is based on a polis and the polis is run by Greek citizens

29:25 uh the Athenian Greek polis is a a way of governing in a kind of democracy and we know about this democracy because it's written about by uh um from Plato called The Republic and this is where we get the word polis that the best form of government is one that leads to the common good for everybody later on Aristotle will go so far as to say that it is a middle class who is best suited to rule because wealthy people have an agenda poor people have an agenda but middle class people are more likely to be in it for common good now this government is on the surface very

30:11 Democratic but only run by people who are male and also own land there are slaves there are out of state worker and women they ultimately have no power in the government what Plato believes is that there are um five economic classes and four virtues the economic classes are producers Merchants Sailors ship owners retail Traders and wage earners and the virtues of a just good City include wisdom courage moderation and Justice and the Greeks are all about moderation and a middle path you should never be a

30:58 bully but you should never be a coward you should have courage we know about Athenian democracy also where it begins from Solon and also uh clistophenes that we have this new way of getting rid of wealthy people and kind of Kings in favor of a democracy that ensures a type of equality and that also by having citizens there maybe is less corruption possibly even though I think it's still probably exists now non-citizens and Athenian women they don't have it quite as good

31:43 um Athenian women although we find them heralded as goddesses we find them as heroes in Greek literature we find writers in poetry like sapphos we do not see women involved in government and in fact mostly housewives are kept in seclusion not allowed to mingle with men in any setting there was a saying by Greek women that it was better to be invisible than have anybody say anything about you now kind of cultures that are happening in Athens so we have the Olympic Games the Olympic Games or the all-greek

32:29 panhellenic festival is instituted in 776 BC in honor of the Greek gods located in Olympia one of the religious centers in Greece the festival takes place every four years even during wartime truces were guaranteed for these uh games women are not allowed to participate and prowess rather than cunning is valued in all games wrestling hair pulling and finger bending are permitted but biting and finger breaking are forbidden the match is terminated when either wrestler gave up lost Consciousness or felt dead and then also the Olympics the the major event in the

33:15 Olympics is a thousand yard dash the men are competing nude and the Greeks love male youth they love the muscular body and we see this say in their art here we're looking at some Greek Ceramics from the classical age where we know this as the red style and you'll notice in the pottery the figures are elongated their muscularity is not necessarily totally realistic and stylized and it is in remarkable contrast versus Greek sculpture from the era that we'll be looking at in a little bit another great part of Greek culture is

34:02 Greek Theater in Athens theatrical performances are happening twice annually we have masters of of drama we have writing by Aristotle in how theater and drama is supposed to operate and Greek Theater is growing out of these complex rituals associated with the worship of Dionysus the god of wine and vegetation and seasonal regeneration in other words we farmed now we have we've harvested let's party a little bit and let's consider what it is to be Greek so the Advent of theater begins with the

34:47 poet thespus at 534 BC the actor and the chorus the performers seem to become separated from those who simply are viewing the action the audience initially the uh the chorus would have been the audience itself but these are going to become professional actors we also have Greek comedies that are developing out of um reveling celebration and seasonal rebirth in these comedies the early comedies before Ashley's um or or um uh um the the comics of Aristophanes mostly are body a lot of penis phallus

35:36 jokes and then in the second half of the fourth Century we get new comedy from menendr and in his comedy we are getting comedy that deals with private and Family Life Social tensions and the Triumph of love in very and we are looking at theater that has masks that will have uh sets that are built um all creating this kind of um really wonderful kind of uh setting in the setting we have these amphitheaters and we see these amphitheaters all over the hellenized world as well and in the um in the theater epidarius

36:21 we see a theater that was designed by polyclitos the younger polyclydos is the sculptor who creates the classical Greek sculptures of realistic looking Anatomy we have a uh a theater that is built specifically for Acoustics and can have thousands of Spectators the double Amphitheater is what modern sports stadiums are based on seder plays are also part of the Greek Theater World these are the tragedy comedy body satires and burlesque the half goat half men who are

37:11 kind of body kind of naughty kind of silly a little bit and every single cycle of play would include seder plays dramas and comedies and there would be a contest that would announce who the winning playwrights would be and there are a number of playwrights but only 44 plays have survived by four playwrights so we are limited in what we know but we are pretty convinced that these playwrights were very important these were not minor playwrights and probably their plays had been Rewritten past Antiquity to survive into today

37:59 so Aristophanes was the comic playwright 11 of his 30 plays survive uh his um his uh old comedy is uh broad characteristics um topicality festivity complexity and he also contributes to a dramatic structure in his plays but it is his poetic rhythms and meters uh that is kind of the greatness of the writing and I think that's the greatness in writing generally that you don't want to just read a summary of a great book you want to read the book because the story is of course important but it is the dialogue

38:45 it is the wittiness of the characters that ultimately make up the joy I think of reading anything in literature is one of Aristophanes maybe best known plays and this is the play I talked about earlier that women decide that they're sick of the Peloponnesian War and will not have sex with their men until they quit euripides was a traginian of classic Athens uh and in the Hellenistic age he is a Cornerstone of literary education along with Homer's um demositines and menendar

39:32 he is um known for the bakay concerned with the two opposite sides of men's nature the rational and civilized side and then also the instinctive side represented by Dionysus the god of wine in his drunkenness Medea is one of the best known plays by euripides it is about a jilted wife who her desire for revenge is going to bring down the house but also shows that the disadvantages that exist for women in a patriarchal society from the tragedies of echelus we get a

40:19 second actor the chorus has a principal role in his dramas and one of his most important dramas is Prometheus bound Prometheus is a Titan who decides that he wants mankind to survive even though uh Zeus wants to kill off human beings and he will bring humans fire and he will also teach us writing medicine mathematics astrology Metallurgy architecture and Agriculture and these things that are taught to us infuriates Zeus that we will possibly survive and so he condemns Prometheus

41:05 the Titan to be chained to a rock in perpetuity and to every day have his liver eaten out by a giant eagle and then every night this liver will grow back and he will be tortured again so Prometheus lives in Eternal torture for helping us to survive and the other great playwright is Sophocles Antigone and a dip Oedipus he is writing about the ancient uh the Ancient King of Thebes and in these tragedies he's individualizing the characters for us he's giving us moments of psychological intimacy as well

41:51 from Aristotle we learn how a a story is supposed to unravel so you should have a plot you should have conflict uh the two types of conflicts would be an internal and an external conflict the entire story should take place in one day and then there are four basic parts to the plot Exposition the basic situation a conflict a climax and then ultimately a resolution we have rising action and then falling action that closes the climax of The Story So the stories have very specific ways to

42:38 be considered credible in Greek society in which they should be written Greek poetry of course we know much about poetry from the epic poetry we have lyrical poetry we also have Odes and hymns lyrical poetry should be accompanied by a liar we find this guitar like liar in ancient Mesopotamia and is also implied that these poems also have musical accompaniment to them one of the greatest of the lyrical poets is sappho from maybe 610 to 580 BC we don't know a lot about her but she led a

43:25 group of women to The Cult of aphroditees she trained women in the production of love poetry and music and she also had homoerotic attachments to the women of Lesbos as well so poem in our textbook I'll read just a couple lines for you he is more than a hero he is a God In My Eyes the man who is allowed to sit beside you he who listens intimately to the Sweet murmur of your voice the enticing laughter that makes my own heart beat fast if I meet you suddenly I can't speak my tongue is broken a thin flame runs under my skin seeing nothing and

44:12 there goes on a little bit more but that's just a little bit of kind of how that translates into English not very important aspect of the Greeks is their philosophy before the Greeks we see writing in Mesopotamia and from the Egyptians but mostly concerning gods the Greeks are considered are are really interested in what is it to be human the early Greek philosophers are known as the naturalists they are interested in what is everything made of um what is permanent what is the permanence of society so for example

44:58 heraclitus is arguing that um there is no permanence but rather what reality is is everything is in flux from Talus we get the idea that permanent elements include fire water and air and flux is a a basis of reality now heraclitus believe that the underlying form of Greek society permeates nature the idea that resembles a resembles a Hindu pantheism anticipating the Christian concept found in the Gospel of John of great intelligence governing the beginning of time some sort of immortal

45:45 Force impersonal Universal and eternal from Democritus we get this belief that the invisible particle substance of the world is reality and he calls these invisible bodies atoms Pythagoras I think is also really important he believes that both from material and non-material views of the universe he's departing from material and non-material views of the universe he believes that proportion and numbers are the true basis of reality so he is going to come up with essential Concepts in Geometry he's considered the

46:31 father of pure mathematics and he also discovers the relationship between musical harmonics and numbers and again gives us this sense that mathematical proportion is what creates Beauty another form of philosophy is the sophists and what the sophists are interested in is metaphysics how do we know what we know can we be sure of anything that we know and so they are exploring the Mind establishing the humanistic direction of Greek Philosophy for about two centuries so the sophists were concerned about defining the limits of human knowledge

47:16 and that um knowledge could not exceed human opinion reality is incomprehensible and so skepticism is a common form or a common trait in the sofas and that they are also arguing that truth and Justice are not absolute they are absolutely relative Socrates is a legendary Greek philosopher Socrates is interested in um not the clever arguments of the sophist who are kind of can it's like a debate team where they can take any side and debate he is interested rather in

48:04 virtue a condition of the psyche and that to no good is to do good he was a warrior in the Peloponnesian War a stonemation by profession and kind of a professional agitator he creates the dialectical method of questions and answers we also know him as creating the inductive reasoning method so in an inductive reasoning you go from a specific to a general theory later on from Aristotle we are going to get deductive reasoning where we go from General theories and then find specific ways to prove the theories

48:52 ultimately in his dialectics he is exchanging ideas and uniting the silence the the citizens of the polis but he also made many enemies and ultimately he is sentenced to death for making the wrong people upset he um is sentenced to death and in and by the way the only reason we know anything about him is his student Plato writes about him Socrates much like Christ uh does not write anything himself it was Christ's followers and people who believed in Christ and wanted to write down the stories and myths around Christ who wrote Socrates is kind

49:38 of the same way in Plato's Credo we find out that Socrates could maybe Escape his punishment but Plato tells us that Socrates believes that that would not be virtuous he believes in the government he believes in the polis he has been um by law he has been sentenced to death and that for him to get out of his death although it would be easier that would be going against everything that he stood for so from his student Plato uh who probably is writing somewhere between 428 and 347 BC he's born in Athens

50:23 during the Peloponnesian War he is benefiting from the Golden Era along with the insecurities of the post-war era and he is writing dozens of treats us most of which are cast in the dialectic in the Republic he's asking questions like what are the meaning of Justice what's the nature of a just Society he asserts the existence of a two-level reality one consisting of consisting changing particulars to our senses and the other is unchanging unchanging Eternal truths understood by the intellect he believes that all sensory objects are imitations of the

51:10 pure forms that come from the mind like the simplest mathematic equations that are imperishable and forever true for example the circle and the sphere exist independently of any particular Circle or sphere he's also believes that in the forms there is such a thing as universal forms like justice love and beauty and that these things stand eternally and exist perfectly in the mind rather than in the physical world in his allegory of a cave we find this dualistic spirit and matter from prisoners who are chained to a wall and

51:57 condemned to only see Shadows of objects that pass by Plato releases one of these prisoners and they are able to turn and see that the reality that they thought was real is in fact simply an illusion simply a shadow and we begin to get this idea that perhaps that we all live in a world of our own shadows and I think the cartoon that we're going to look at for our discussion I think adelves into this really really well Aristotle so Aristotle is ultimately going to

52:43 tutor Alexander the Great uh Aristotle was a student of Plato and Aristotle gives us the Poetics that we looked at when we were looking at theater he is creating the empirical method for science in other words you cannot be sure about anything unless you directly observe it and this empirical method is a way of doing this so he is using induction and um the syllogism the the syllogism is a deductive scheme where he presents major and minor premise from which conclusion may be drawn so for example all men are mortal

53:29 Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal so from this kind of reasoning we begin to kind of start to get into what will ultimately be the empirical method of the Enlightenment uh and the era of science that happens around that he also writes about ethics and he totally is all about this golden mean the golden mean is living in moderation moderation is everything living in correct proportions he talks about the udomania or the good life and living a

54:15 good life ultimately should be your goal and fulfilling your function whatever your function in life is it's a very Taoist kind of idea finding that path finding that River and floating down it efforts effortlessly is a Taoist idea he also is writing about politics and he also asserts that the best run government is a government run by the middle class art so when it comes to Greek art much of it is very influential still today so the older Styles like the archaic Pottery we

55:03 are seeing this before the classical age um so around we're looking at the diplon master here from around 760 to 750 BC working in Athens and this is the black style of pottery so when we get into the classical Style again because of Pythagoras proportion and Order are very important so we want humanism we want the action of humans in our art we want a realistic art that is faithful to Nature and we also want to go beyond nature to an idealization and a Perfection of humanism that surpasses nature but we don't see that exactly in

55:50 the early work here in the early Pottery we instead are seeing very stylized forms that are painted on in Black we're looking at a funeral procession here and then in the classical age again around the Persian Wars we start to see the red style where they are painting the black in the negative space and then the red space is the red clay when it fires and we are not getting maybe as exactly uh the exact human proportions and bodies that we'll see in sculpture but we can see that they are definitely falling into something that is a little

56:35 more humanistic is a little more realistic and again still idealized at the same time and a lot of Greek pottery is decorating uh Greek literature and Greek mythology for us in sculpture the archaic sculpture before the classical age we have the kuros and the Corey so the koros are boys the Corey are female they have idealized faces and these really unique smiles to them that remind me also of Etruscan uh sculptures that we'll be seeing when we study the Romans and so they're very Egyptian if you remember Egyptian sculpture with the one foot in front of the other the hands

57:21 down at the side that we see from pharaohick sculpture again the nude male the female clothed and not any one kind of person but an overall idealization of the face a face based on math based on symmetry based on proportions that had broken into thirds from the eyebrow to the top of the head from the eyebrow to the bottom of the nose from the bottom of the nose to the chin um all of this is an archaic sculpture that was usually used to decorate um uh grave grave air cemeteries and this era is about 700 to 480 BC in 480 BC we get polyclydose and his

58:12 Canon so here we get the approach of realism and again idealism humans being represented in various forms in often in an athletic state of contraposto where the weight of this young athlete is on one leg the other leg is at rest and then we are seeing an idealized face and a body that is perfected by math the same thing kind of based on musical scales where we find the proportions will base um in Fibonacci numbers for example the first knuckle of the finger is one the second knuckle of the finger is one

58:57 together the two make up the third knuckle two from the knuckle and the knuckles at the beginning of the hand to the wrist would be a length of three in the units and then from three to five to the elbow and then from five to eight in the shoulder and again similar things happening in the legs as well so when you look at a classical Greek sculpture you're semi-obligated to count it's about math we also find in the classical Age 2 nude female sculptures as well so the cloth Corey now has been changed into nude females nude males and again the more

59:43 naturalistic contrapposto uh Style with the idealized face no individuality this is what classical sculpture is Greek architecture and classical Greek architecture we get the Parthenon the Parthenon is built after the Greek war it is a Doric Temple of post and lentils we have a architrave we have um around the architrave we have triglyphs we have metopes and pictoral panels and then we would have a thatched roof this was the treasury for the

1:00:31 Delian League and named after Athena Athens the namesake of Athens this would have been built on that is built on a Canticle Hill called the Acropolis where there were many different temples there and could be seen throughout Athens in the pediment where we find um great sculptures that were built by phidius phidius is also the architect of the building as well and these sculptures began to show us like how masterful the Greeks were in creating their realistic sculpture inside probably phidius's greatest sculpture is a 30 foot tall

1:01:20 covered in a a covered in a gold sheeting uh image of Athena and this sculpture has long uh been looted and the gold plates are gone um everything else has been removed after the Greeks were destroyed by the Romans and the Ottomans and everybody else is is going to get in on it Greek music and Greek dance so we know that music existed and I talk about that in our Shaman lecture the earliest music is probably around a campfire human voices rattles drums we

1:02:08 saw from Mesopotamia that we had stringed instruments like liars and then we also have the alos or the flute this kind of double flute and then also we know that they were playing in range of tones in Scales called modes and again these modes are all based on Pythagoras accurately determining the numerical relationship between strings and tones and different pitches we also know of Greek dances as well and the dances and music would have been going on in Greek festivals here's a little bit of what a Greek dance might have looked like

1:02:59 obviously classical Greek clothing Greek hairstyles foreign notice here another place for women in a society that is basically closed to women for the most part and here's a little bit of the double flute instrument and what it sounds like [Music] um sounds a little bit like a kazoo

1:03:46 and then the last great age to wrap this up so the last great age is the Hellenistic age from 323 to 30 BC so the kind of turbulent era of the fourth Century marked by rivalry and warfare the Peloponnesian War is ultimately going to lead to the rise of the macedonians from the north Philip of Macedonia will defeat the Greeks in 330 338 BC he will be assassinated and his 20 year old son Alexander who lives from 356 to 323 BC will assume the Macedonian Throne he is a student of Aristotle he understands Greek philosophy and within

1:04:34 12 years he is going to stretch the Macedonian Empire to the Greek Empire to Asia Minor to Persia to India and to Northern Egypt and create the city after his name and from him we get that last great age of hellenization so from Helen hellenization we get the spreading of Greek culture across the world and we get a new kind of Greek sculpture the classical Greek sculptures that we had looked at here were all standing still they were not in motion there was no emotion in their face when we get to the Hellenistic

1:05:21 sculptures notice the opposite is true in the laquan group here which is about a Trojan priest laquan who is ultimately going to want to um uh defeat the Greeks by telling the Trojan generals that this Trojan Horse you should not let this tribute into the city because it will destroy the city and ultimately the um the uh the the the priest and his sons are going to be killed when um on the goddess the god of the sea in Neptune is going to bring these python

1:06:09 these um serpents in and they're going to kill them uh him and his sons and we see that action happening here this is in action it is not still the figures are elongated rather than perfectly mathematical now we don't see any individuality they're still idealized but we see a range of human emotions here as they are struggling unsuccessfully for their life so in Hellenistic sculpture emotion and also movement and the final thing that I want to leave you with is the conflux of culture in Alexandria where in this

1:06:56 um this coffin here of artemindoros we find a mummified body that has the Egyptian forms of burial we see a Egyptian gods and symbols here but then we see a a death portrait that is very Roman Roman in terms of Greeks don't do this the Romans do these death portraits that are idealized of what the younger person in the coffin might have looked like and we also know that he has a Greek name so we're seeing here in Northern Egypt Roman Greek and Egyptian culture all coming together okay so you'll do your reading again

1:07:42 make sure that you're reading that the test the assessment that you are writing completely all parts of the answer from our textbook and I would also like you for our discussion to watch this about eight minute video uh narrated by the Great American filmmaker Orson Welles the animation is drawn by dick Odin who started the illustration program at CSU Long Beach and I think it's a very good cartoon but it also I think has some really nice points about Plato's philosophic inquiry what do you personally accept as true what do you question how do you know

1:08:27 what you know and I would like you after watching this to kind of begin to answer these questions yourself okay so that's it today for the Greeks uh their next lecture will be on the Romans we'll talk to you soon bye-bye