2.3 Greek Culture -T-

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AGE 2. The Time of Greeks and Romans

2.3 Greek Culture

What is this lesson about?

The Ancient Greeks had a rich culture. They lived with the gods as they did with other people. The presence of the gods is seen in sports (Olympic Games), the theatre (Greek tragedies) and in the arts (mythology, etc.).

Word Duty

columns / pillars: round straight stone constructions that can carry the roof of a temple or similar building

Olympic Games: games that were held every four years at Olympia, to honour Zeus

 Pan-Hellenic: games that were held for all the Greeks. (pan = all, every, whole, all-inclusive, Hellas = Greece)

mythology: stories of the gods and demi-gods

philosophers: people who make a living just by thinking and talking about all sorts of things

comedies: Greek theatre plays that ridicule politics or philosophy

tragedies: Greek theatre plays that are about people and the gods. Normally they do not end well

KEY WORDS

Important dates in this lesson:

776 BC: first Olympic Games held at Olympia

What you can explain /  do after this lesson

• that the Greeks created literature, that is still read today
• that the Greeks developed scientific and architectural ideas that are still used today
• how Greek culture spread beyond Greece in the time of Hellenism
• where the Olympic Games come from

Introduction

There are still many things in our everyday lives that come from the Ancient Greeks. Maybe you have heard of Pythagoras in your maths class, or been to a play written by an Ancient Greek. Or maybe you noticed a fancy building with columns or just watched the Olympic Games on TV. All these things come from the Ancient Greeks.

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Only Greek men competed in the ancient Olympic games whereas the modern games include women athletes and athletes from many countries. (Composite: Dennis Lan. Image Sources: iStock; Wikimedia Commons/tompagenet.)

Greek games

Have you ever wondered why the Olympic Games have this name? Well, the Olympic Games were created to honour Zeus, the king of the Gods. In Olympia there was a big temple for Zeus, and this is where the games were held.

Just like today, the Olympic Games were a big sporting event. Back then, only men were allowed to compete and they did so in the nude. Some poleis thought that women should not see all this male nudity, so they only allowed men to watch. Other poleis did not mind and left it to the women to decide if they wanted to go to the games and watch. Starting in 776 BC, the games were held once every four years, because there were three other Pan-Hellenic games, big occasions that all Greeks could attend. There were also events like music competitions and speaking contests. All were in honour of the gods.

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The Olympic flame lighting ceremony at Olympia, Greece, 2003

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A sporting event on a Greek vase.

Mythology

You may have heard the term Olympic Gods, but that has nothing to do with the Olympic Games. The Olympic Gods are the gods that lived on Mount Olympus, according to the Ancient Greeks. The most important gods in Greek mythology were the twelve Olympic Gods and Hades, who was lord of the underworld and did not live on Mount Olympus.

Mythology is another word for all the stories of the gods and half-gods. The Greeks had all sorts of stories to do with the gods, like stories to explain why a certain god was connected to a certain polis, how disease and bad things came into the world and where thunder comes from.

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Fragment of a Hellenistic relief (1st century BC–1st century AD) depicting the twelve Olympians carrying their attributes in procession; from left to right: Hestia (scepter), Hermes (winged cap and staff), Aphrodite (veiled), Ares (helmet and spear), Demeter (scepter and wheat sheaf), Hephaestus (staff), Hera (scepter), Poseidon (trident), Athena (owl and helmet), Zeus (thunderbolt and staff), Artemis (bow and quiver), Apollo (lyre), from the Walters Art Museum.[1]

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modern video explaining the Greek gods in the Percy Jackson series.

Living with the gods

Many of the Greek stories about people would include the gods. For instance the tragedies, but also great epics like the Iliad. In ancient Greece, people lived with the gods very much in mind, believing they were a lot like humans with very human emotions, like lust, greed and anger. So you could influence the actions of the gods by offering them gifts, or sacrifices. Then the gods would show you how they felt by signs or by giving you luck or misfortune. If you were pretty, it showed the gods liked you. If you were robbed, Hermes was angry. If your ship sank you should have offered more to Poseidon. So if you have a test coming up, you would better give something to Athena (the goddess of wisdom) soon, or you may fail!

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scene of a sacrifice. Painted on a Greek vase, 4th century BC

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The goddess Athena (left) during the Trojan War. 

Greek vase, 4th century BC

Sometimes there are more than one word for one thing, like pillars.

Some people call them columns. If you like to have options, you can use a Thesaurus. A thesaurus lists synonyms.

Greek architecture

To honour the gods, the Greeks constructed temples. They took great care to make the temples look great, by decorating them with stories from mythology for example. Sometimes they gave them great columns that matched the personality of the god the temple was for and made sure that the pillars looked straight. You see, if you make really long pillars, it can look as if they are thinner at the top because of the perspective. The Greeks thought that looked bad and made a correction to avoid this effect.

The Greeks also constructed many theatres: semicircles around a stage. They made sure they had great acoustics, but they also wanted to make things easier on themselves. So often they would look for a natural place that already looked a bit like a theatre. For instance they would use the slope of a hill to build the seats on. In this way they did not have to build all of the structure.

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Greek theatre in Pargamon. The  rulers of Pergamon wanted to show they were very cultured (3rd century BC).

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The Parthenon, a temple on the Athenian Acropolis. Its construction began in 477 BC.

Greek theatricals

The Ancient Greeks thought it was very important to be able to speak well and make your point with a bit of flair. Maybe you would call that theatrical, but it is a bit like the way American politicians go about their jobs today.

As you read in lesson 2.2, there were a lot of debates going on in society, because it was thought that everyone should be involved in politics. Philosophers even made a living just by thinking and talking about all sorts of things. Famous philosophers include Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but there were many others. In the Hellenistic period there were even professional scholars, who did research, like Eratosthenes who lived in Alexandria and calculated the circumference of the Earth in 230 BC.

Not everybody agreed with the philosophers and would show this, either by debating with them or like Euripides, by writing theatre plays. We call these plays, that ridicule politics or philosophy, comedies. The Greeks also wrote tragedies: plays about people and the gods. Because these tragedies often would not end well for people, the word tragedy has come to mean just that in modern speech: something that does not end well.

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A play is being performed in a Greek theater. 19th century illustration

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The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Socrates was visited by friends in his last night at prison. His discussion with them gave rise to Plato's Crito and Phaedo.

Scholars and scientists

The Greeks believed that certain things happened because of the Gods: When people got ill, for example. Then the Greeks started to think, what is it that the Gods do? Can we change this somehow? People like the famous doctor Hippocrates (469-399 BC) thought that it was possible to find the ‘bad liquids’ that made you ill. Today every doctor still swears the oath of Hippocrates. It is a promise to help people if they can.

Other Greeks looked for general truths, like those in maths. Pythagoras (c. 530 BC) discovered there is a relation between the sides and length of a triangle. Archimedes (287-212 BC) discovered buoyancy, an upward force in a fluid. This is known as Archimedes' principle. Eratosthenes (275-194 BC) even calculated the circumference of the Earth. Aristotle (384-322 BC) is the father of Western logic. He was also the tutor of the famous king Alexander the Great. Because of this, Hellenistic rulers also wanted to have famous thinkers around them. So they created museums and libraries for the scholars. It was a great age for Greek thinkers and artists. These thinkers would create the foundation for Western science, because they started the process of looking for general truths in the world: Truths that also worked if you did not believe in the old gods at all.

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the Pythagoras' theorem, a formula to calculate the diagonal side of a right-angled triangle.

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The exclamation "Eureka!" (meaning "I have found it") is attributed to the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes. He reportedly proclaimed "Eureka! Eureka!" after he had stepped into a bath and noticed that the water level rose, whereupon he suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged.  He is said to have been so eager to share his discovery that he leapt out of his bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse.

16th century drawing.

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Films about Greek mythology

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