Beautiful painting by Denton Lund of a goddess and an owl From my screen saver The Goddesses. Created by JEANIE

 

www.lonvig.dk/bent-skov-owl.htm

 

 

----Original Message Follows----

From: "Shea, Christine R." <cshea@bsu.edu>

To: <seeshea@hotmail.com>

Subject: Greek stuff

Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 11:50:00 -0500

 

1 What were the religious beliefs people had in ancient Greece ?

 

As you already know, the ancient Greeks believed in many gods (they were polytheists).  The chief gods and goddesses were called the Olympian gods, that is, they were thought to live on Mount Olympus, the tallest mountain in Greece.  Some of these gods are:  Zeus (say “Zoos”), king of gods and men and the god of storms and lightning; Hera, the queen of the gods and goddess of women’s things like marriage; Athena, daughter of Zeus, born from his head, goddess of wisdom, righteous war, handcrafts, and special goddess of the city of Athens; Artemis and Apollo, the twin-gods, children of Zeus--she’s the goddess of hunting and protector of animals; he’s the god of the sun, the arts, and foretelling the future; Poseidon, brother of Zeus and Hera, god of the sea and earthquakes; Aphrodite (say “Afrow-die-tee”), goddess of love and beauty; Hephaestus (say “Hefestus”), god of metalwork and crafts.

 

     2 In ancient Greece what was the land like?

 

Greece is really a very poor country.  Only about 20% of the land in Greece can be used to grow agricultural products (96% of Indiana can!).  Most Greek farms are ten acres or less.  Most of Greece is very hilly, with some mountains about the size of the Great Smoky Mountains in the U. S.  This makes travel on land difficult, and there is very little good pasture for animals like horses and cattle.  So the most important stock animals in Greece are sheep and goats, which can climb high to eat without hurting themselves!

 

Greece is also poor in natural resources.  There is very little gold or silver (but an important silver strike helped the Greeks defeat the Persian invaders!), or even copper or tin.  Also, the ancients often did not protect the environment very well: they cut down too many of their trees, so even wood is scarce in many places.  When you think about what natural resources the Greeks have, remember that the great city of Athens had as its most important export product pottery, which is, after all, baked dirt.

 

Greece also has water problems, like southern California, we could say.  First of all, they don’t get enough rain, and then the rain falls mostly in the winter when the crops aren’t in the field.  Also, because Greece is sitting on mostly limestone, a rock which lets water erode it and run through it, much of the rain that does fall goes down very deep and can be hard to pull up by wells.  In addition, because the Greeks cut down so many of their trees, there are no plants to sink down deep roots and bring up the water to the surface that way.  And, since a year’s rain falls in only a short time (a “rainy season”), water can flood down the hills to the Mediterranean Sea, taking soil with it.  There are few trees to keep the soil in place.  Erosion continues to be a big problem for the Greeks.

 

There is a plus side to all this: because land which can be used in so scarce, the Greeks decided to live together in city-states (see #3 “government”) and not so much on individual family farms.  Because in a land where there isn’t enough rain, there’s plenty of sun, the Greeks learned to leave their homes and interact all day with their neighbors outside in the beautiful weather.  This bonded the citizens together and helped the development of democracy.

 

     3 How was the government run in ancient Greece?

 

For the Greeks, the natural form of political union was the city-state, that is, the city that acts like a whole nation or state of a nation.  (Hong Kong or Singapore are modern nation-states, we could say.  In our country, Washington, D. C. is perhaps something like an ancient city-state--what state is it in?)  So, when you were little and colored the whole country of Greece blue (perhaps), you were thinking of Greece in a very different way from the way the ancients thought about it.  Since Greece is so mountainous, two cities which are only 20 miles apart as the crow flies might really have very little contact with each other.  It’s hard to get over those mountains with just a wagon and oxen!  So, our two cities had different laws, used different money, and may have made war on each other.  Imagine if you had to have a passport to go from Muncie to Anderson!  Imagine if Yorktown attacked Daleville!  So, if we wanted to color a map of ancient Greece, then, we’d have to have dozens of little splotches of different colors. (Of course, cities did form alliances and band together many times.)

 

What makes the Greeks Greeks then?  Well, as the “Father of History” Herodotus said, all Greeks had in common three very important things:  they spoke the same language (or close enough), they worshipped the same gods, and they practiced the same customs (they marry and bury the same way, as anthropologists say).  So, Greek city-states had different forms of government.  But, we could add something to Herodotus’ list:  most of the Greek city-states had some democratic elements in their government.  They had some kind of body, like our Senate, which let citizens express their desires and opinions by some kind of voting.

 

Of course, we call the Greeks the inventors of democracy.  When we say that, we really mean the Greeks who lived in the city of Athens, the biggest, wealthiest, and most important city and the city about which we know the most (because of writers like Herodotus).  The Athenians practiced what we call a “radical democracy” in the fifth century (the 400’s) BC.  In other words, they really did what we always say we should do: they picked names of citizens “out of the phone book” and made them public officials.  They also invited every citizen to come to the assembly and vote on (almost) every issue.

 

But, hold on a minute!   Before we think the Athenians had it better than we do, notice I said “citizen”.  And who were the citizens of ancient Athens?  Well, first of all, they were all male (so 51% of the population was not eligible), then, they were all free-born (and remember most Athenian middle-class families had at least 2 or 3 slaves), and, for most of Athens’ history, your father had to have been an Athenian citizen and your mother’s father had to have been one.  How many people in your class could grow up to be a citizen of your town if these were the requirements?

 

     4 What did people do in day to day lives in ancient Greece?

 

The great majority of the Greeks (more than 50%) were small farmers.  And farming, as you know, takes lots of time, from both sexes.  The major crops were barley, wheat, grapes (wine is important to the ancients, since they don’t have Pepsi, Sunny-D, Seven-Up, or even very much milk), and olives (olives supply all the kinds of oil the ancients use--they use it for skin-softening, for oiling hinges, for medicine, for burning in lamps, as well as on bread like butter or in salads).

 

In the city, adult men usually spent all day out of the house, since men do the public chores for the family.  (They even do the shopping.)  Citizens are supposed to attend the governance of the city-state, train with the military, sit on juries and committees (at least in ancient Athens).  They have slaves to perform many of the tasks of the household.  Middle- class and lower-class men might have jobs, of course.  Some of these are:  cobbler (shoemaker), potter (they make those wonderful pots from ancient Athens), blacksmith, woodworker.  There are factories in Athens which employ several hundred workers.  In the evening, men often attend men-only dinner parties in private homes where they dine, discuss politics and philosophy, and enjoy musical performances or dramatic readings.

 

Respectable women in Athens spend most of the day indoors, in the special women’s rooms in every house.  There they watch over and teach children under the age of 7, do the household mending and sewing, supervise the household slaves, cook, and visit with their female friends.  They often also fetched the household’s water from the public fountain.  This gave them a chance to get out and talk to their friends.  You would not want to be a respectable woman in Athens!  Women who are not respectable (slaves, for example) sometimes have jobs as dancers or musicians who perform at the men-only dinner parties that take place almost every night.  In general, we don’t know that much about the lives of women, since they were part of the private life of the family.

 

Boy children older than 7 were brought to school by a paidagogos (say, “Pie-da-GO-gus”), a slave who went everywhere with them and helped them with their schoolwork.  Usually schools were in the private homes of the teachers.  There the boys learned to read and write, and, particularly, to speak in public, since they might have to defend themselves in court one day.  They also were encouraged to exercise (since they would have to be soldiers), and so gym classes occupied a lot of time every day.  Some of their favorite sports are now events in the modern Olympic Games (wrestling, throwing the discus and the javelin, jumping, running).

 

We don’t know much about the education of girl children.  They were probably taught by their mothers how to run a household, how to cook, how to supervise slaves, etc.  Girls of the middle and upper class probably were taught to read and do arithmetic.  Athenian girls did not exercise in public, but the girls of the great city of Sparta did.  (The Spartans believed that strong girls had strong babies.)  Girl children were usually fourteen or fifteen when they married.

 

     5 How did people dress that lived in ancient Greece?

 

The ancient Greeks, like most of the people of the ancient Mediterranean region (like Julius Caesar, for example, or Jesus), dressed in simple, loose clothing that allowed a lot of air circulation in a warm climate.  Essentially, the ancients had one outfit: they took two rectangles of wool or linen, one for the back, one for the front, sewed them together at the shoulders, left room for the head and arms, and sewed them up the sides.  This was called a “tunic.”  When a man or boy wore it, it fell to the knee.  When a woman wore it, it fell to the ankle.  The ancients did not fit clothes to individual bodies and did not tailor clothes.  If your tunic was too wide, you belted it.

 

If the weather was cold, you could wear a big rectangle of wool or linen wrapped around you (draped over your left shoulder, hanging to your ankles, and leaving your right arm free, usually).  If you were a soldier, this cloak or chlamys (say, “KLA-mees) was thicker and shorter.  If you were a woman, you were usually wrapped up in a cloak in public.

 

Men did not wear underwear!  Women wore a kind of diaper.  Both men and women wore light shoes.  Men wore sturdy laced boots in bad weather, in the army, or while traveling.  Women often wore headscarves.  Men while traveling wore hats that looked Mexican sombreros (like the hat the god Mercury is wearing in the FTD symbol!).  Children wore little versions of adult clothing.

 

We usually think of ancients as dressed all in white, and so they often were, since white is the natural color of wool or flax, and since that color repels heat.  But they often wore other colors, too, usually solid colors, not prints of any kind.

 

     6 In ancient Greece what kind of economy did they have?

 

Actually, the ancient Greeks had a much simpler economy than ours.  It’s the Romans who thought up things like stock markets or commodities futures.  In the early days, almost every kind of trade or transaction was conducted by barter, that is, by trading something you had a lot of for something you had a little of.  If you wanted a wagon and had a lot of olives, you had to find someone who had a wagon and wanted olives (or make a lot of intermediate trades until you acquired something that wagon-owner did want).  This took a lot of time and trouble and led to quarrels and fights.  Also, it made it impossible to get anything really big.  (How many people could afford a house if they had to pay for it all on one day?  and in olives or barley?)  And sometimes your crop would rot before you could find anyone who was willing to trade for what you needed.

 

So, until coins were introduced to Greece about 680 BC, the Greek economy was pokey and small.  Coins made it possible to save money, to lend money, to borrow money.  It made it possible to raise “capital” for really big projects.

 

But, still, in general, the Greeks do not organize their monetary system so they can get the most out of it, and many, many transactions are still conducted by barter.

 

     7 What kinds of people fought and how did they fight in ancient Greece?

 

In general, boys of citizen families went off to two years' of military training at age 18.  At age 20, then, they were ready for the army (and most Greek city-states were regularly engaged in fighting).  They usually left the army at about age 28 to marry and have children, but they could be called up to active service until about age 45, usually.  But, in the great war between the city-states of Athens and Sparta, some men were called up at age 60.

 

Service in the army and navy was regarded as a privilege of citizenship, not just a duty. 

 

     8 What people that lived in ancient Greece contributed to the world today and how did they contribute?

 

Every day you do, think, and say things that mark you as an heir to the culture of the ancient Greeks.  When you spend an average of 3 hours per day watching television, as long as you are watching what could be called "fiction"--drama or comedy--you're enjoying two of the gifts of the ancient Athenians.  And the creators/authors of such shows as "Saturday Night Live" and "Law and Order" know perfectly well that they're producing and writing Greek comedy and drama, believe me!  That's why their shows are set up the way they are, that's why the plots are structured the way they are ... the creators all studied ancient Greece and its gifts, just as you are doing right now!

 

The Greek philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates contributed mightily to the way education is conducted in the U. S. as well.  That we as Americans believe all our fellow citizens should be educated at government expense, that we think thinking about thinking is important, that we think children are often best taught by reading about and trying to imitate good people of the past are all marks of Greek philosophy and its influence.  One thing the Greeks thought we sometimes neglect, however--the Greeks thought math was THE most important subject!  (The word "math" means "the thing to study"--so get busy!)

 

But, Greek philosophy is still alive in the way we talk about the world and think about the world.  Every time you use the word "idea" (a Greek word) or the word "perfect" you are thinking in the way Socrates and Plato taught us first to think back there in old Athens.  And Christianity owes a lot to Plato and Socrates.

 

     9 What type of houses did people live in in ancient Greece?

 

Because the climate of Greece is so mild, the Greeks don't really spend a lot of time, money, or energy on their houses.  They are, for the most part, perfectly happy in small houses made of natural materials like mud brick (something like adobe) with a few simple pieces of furniture.  That's why most ancient Greek houses haven't survived.  If you would like to know more about a Greek house, look up the city of OLYNTHOS or OLYNTHUS on you web search engine.  That will give you a reconstruction of the best preserved houses we have from the classical period.

 

     10 When was the Olympic games held and why were they held?

 

The Greeks believed they had held the Olympic Games every four years since 776 BC.  For us, of course, the Games are mostly a sporting event, although we also understand that we’re saying something about the brotherhood of humans or about international politics when we participate.  For the Greeks, the Olympics involved religious events in honor of the king of the gods, Zeus, and his son Heracles (Hercules, to the Romans), a marketplace for trading goods and services, and contests in speaking, philosophy, and poetry, as well as athletic events.

 

The Games provided the city-states a place to show off their best and most able citizens.  The athletic competitions especially featured events for soldiers:  the race in armor, the throwing of the javelin—the ancient war-spear, for example, make that clear.   Because of that, the Games are somehow about war, and the city-states may have been talking to each other about war as they competed.  The time of the Olympics was a time for truce, and the city-states which were at war had to stop for the length of the Games.  This is really a very civilized idea, that people who would be throwing spears at each for months or years should come together to run peaceful foot-races.  It is this aspect of the Games which has always been so appealing to the world community in our day.

 

In our time the Olympics celebrate how much all humans have in common, no matter where we live or what language we speak or how odd our customs may seem to others.  The Greeks were saying something about this, too, although on a smaller scale.  They were saying, “We are all Greeks, even though we live in city-states as far away as Italy or Egypt or the Ukraine, and even though we often fight each other.  Let’s honor our Greekness with these games:  our gods, our heroes, our language, our customs.”