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Ancient Greek literature
Greek
theatre
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GREEK THEATRE
Franz von Matsch (1861-1942)
Greek Theatre
Drama represented the peak of Greek
civilization and has remained a huge
influence on the Western tradition.
Anyone who comes to Greek tragedy with
prior knowledge of, for example,
Shakespeare will find it strikingly
familiar.
Greek drama originated as a religious ritual performed at
festivals such as the Athenian festival of Dionysus,
consisting mainly of songs sung by a chorus. (Music was an
important part of Classical drama, but no legacy survives
today.) Through the work of the three great tragic
playwrights, it evolved into a new art. The subject matter
remained traditional religious myths, but was reinterpreted
to engender a profound investigation of human fate and the
relationship between gods and human beings. Several plays
were performed in one evening, including comedies, which
were sometimes extremely coarse.
Aristophanes "Lysistrata"
Illustrations by
Aubrey Beardsley,
Norman Lindsay and Arthur Boyd
Aristophanes
The greatest author of comedies was
Aristophanes
(died c.380
B.C.), equally adept at crude jokes and heavenly lyric
poetry.
The 'new comedy' of Menander and others in the late
4th century is the direct ancestor of the "comedy of
manners". Drama was extremely popular among most classes. As
Arthur Miller noted, the Greek theatre at Syracuse could
hold 14,000 people.
Aeschylus
Aeschylus
The first of the great tragic triumvirate,
Aeschylus was
born near Athens in 525 B.C. and fought in the Persian Wars.
He wrote nearly 100 plays, including satyrs (comedies about
satyrs, not necessarily "satires" in the modern sense).
Seven complete plays have survived, including Persians,
Seven Against Thebes and the Oresteia trilogy about the
doomed House of Atreus, which won the last of his many drama
prizes in 458 B.C. Regarded as the founder of Greek tragedy,
he introduced individual actors and dramatic dialogue,
adopted stage costume and 'special effects', and, although
Sophocles is said to have first introduced it, he seems to
have used scenery. His themes are grand and solemn, dealing
with destiny and the irresistible working of fate. His
language is vivid, and as a lyric poet he is unsurpassed.
Legend has it he was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise
on his head.
Sophocles
("Antigone")
Sophocles
A generation younger than
Aeschylus,
Sophocles (b.496 B.C.),
lived throughout the greatest years of Athenian prosperity
and through its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. He wrote
even more plays than
Aeschylus, but only seven (all
tragedies) have survived. Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at
Colonnus (first produced after his death by his grandson,
another
Sophocles) and Electra are all still frequently
performed.
Sophocles, who first won the drama prize in 468 B.C.,
defeating Aeschylus amid great popular excitement, was
responsible for important developments in drama, including
the introduction of a third actor and greater exploitation
of scenery. He gave up the tradition of compiling plays as
part of a trilogy, writing each one as complete in itself.
He generally gave greater weight to human will, rather than
the will of the gods, who were more remote, though no less
respected, and action tended to grow from character rather
than arbitrary events.
Sophocles is thus the founder of the
concept of the tragic hero, a great man ruined by his
faults. Oedipus Rex is perhaps the most influential play
ever written. Aristotle took it as the model tragedy in his
Poetics.
Sigmund Freud found in it the basis of his famous
theory of the 'Oedipus complex'.
Sophocles was a handsome, charming and popular man. Though
neither a politician nor a soldier, his fame brought him
high office in Athens, and after his death at the age of 90
he was recognized as semi-divine.
"Now let the bloodstained god of war
Whose savage music I hear Though no swords clash or shields
ring, Be driven from our city, where the only song Is the
groan of the dying, the whimper of fear. Rout him, the
man-slayer, let him fly In disorder, let him hide his head
In some bleak Thracian bay, Or ease himself in Amphitrite's
bed. Now, whoever survives the night Dies at first light.
Great Father Zeus, you who punish with fire, Incinerate the
god of war Before we all lie dead."
Sophocles Oedipus Rex
(trans. Don Taylor, 1986)
Euripides
("Electra",
"Medea")
Euripides
Though no less successful,
Euripides, born in 480 B.C., was
a less genial, more reclusive figure than
Sophocles. He
wrote at least 80 plays, of which 18 have survived more or
less intact. Among those still performed today are Medea,
Trojan Women, Orestes, Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia in
Tauris, Andromache and Electra. His work is closer to
everyday life than that of his two great predecessors, and
was more controversial, for Euripides was prepared to
question traditional morality as well as contemporary
society. His lyric verse, especially his descriptions of
nature, is more charming than grand in the manner of
Aeschylus. His plays tend to show people in the grip of
powerful and conflicting passions, but his language is more
natural, less high-flown. Even more than
Sophocles, he
excelled in portraits of women, whether heroines or
villains.
Like
Aeschylus and
Sophocles,
Euripides came in for some
amusing mockery at the hands of
Aristophanes (for instance
in The Frogs), but he was generally regarded with immense
respect.
Plutarch related several stories of his popularity;
for instance, that the Spartan generals about to destroy
Athens in 404 B.C. were dissuaded by someone singing the
first chorus from Electra.
Euripides spent his last years at
the Macedonian royal court and died a victim, according to
legend, of some misguided hunting dogs.
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Menander
born c.
342 bc
died c. 292 bc
Athenian dramatist whom ancient critics
considered the supreme poet of Greek New
Comedy—i.e., the last flowering of
Athenian stage comedy. During his life,
his success was limited; although he
wrote more than 100 plays, he won only
eight victories at Athenian dramatic
festivals.
Comedy
had by his time abandoned public affairs
and was concentrating instead on
fictitious characters from ordinary
life; the role of the chorus was
generally confined to the performance of
interludes between acts. Actors’ masks
were retained but were elaborated to
provide for the wider range of
characters required by a comedy of
manners and helped an audience without
playbills to recognize these characters
for what they were. Menander, who wrote
in a refined Attic, by his time the
literary language of the Greek-speaking
world, was masterly at presenting such
characters as stern fathers, young
lovers, greedy demimondaines, intriguing
slaves, and others.
Menander’s nicety of touch and skill at
comedy in a light vein is clearly
evident in the Dyscolus in the character
of the gruff misanthrope Knemon, while
the subtle clash and contrast of
character and ethical principle in such
plays as Perikeiromenē (interesting for
its sympathetic treatment of the
conventionally boastful soldier) and
Second Adelphoe constitute perhaps his
greatest achievement.
Menander’s works were much adapted by
the Roman writers Plautus and Terence,
and through them he influenced the
development of European comedy from the
Renaissance. Their work also supplements
much of the lost corpus of his plays, of
which no complete text exists, except
that of the Dyscolus, first printed in
1958 from some leaves of a papyrus codex
acquired in Egypt.
The
known facts of Menander’s life are few.
He was allegedly rich and of good
family, and a pupil of the philosopher
Theophrastus, a follower of Aristotle.
In 321 Menander produced his first play,
Orgē (“Anger”). In 316 he won a prize at
a festival with the Dyscolus and gained
his first victory at the Dionysia
festival the next year. By 301 Menander
had written more than 70 plays. He
probably spent most of his life in
Athens and is said to have declined
invitations to Macedonia and Egypt. He
allegedly drowned while swimming at the
Piraeus (Athens’ port).
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Tragedy
Tragedy may have developed from the dithyramb, the
choral cult song of the god Dionysus. Arion of
Lesbos, who is said to have worked at Corinth in
about 600, is credited with being the first to write
narrative poetry in this medium. Thespis (6th
century bc), possibly combining with dithyrambs
something of the Attic ritual of Dionysus of
Eleutherae, is credited with having invented tragedy
by introducing an actor who conversed with the
chorus. These performances became a regular feature
of the great festival of Dionysus at Athens about
534 bc.
Aeschylus introduced a second actor, though
his drama was still centred in the chorus, to whom,
rather than to each other, his actors directed
themselves.
At the tragic contests at the Dionysia each of
three competing poets produced three tragedies and a
satyr play, or burlesque, in which there was a
chorus of satyrs.
Aeschylus, unlike later poets,
often made of his three tragedies a dramatic whole,
treating a single story, as in the Oresteia, the
only complete trilogy that has survived. His main
concern was not dramatic excitement and the
portrayal of character but rather the presentation
of human action in relation to the overriding
purpose of the gods.
His successor was
Sophocles, who abandoned for
the most part the practice of writing in unified
trilogies, reduced the importance of the chorus, and
introduced a third actor. His work too was based on
myth, but whereas
Aeschylus tried to make more
intelligible the working of the divine purpose in
its effects on human life,
Sophocles was readier to
accept the gods as given and to reveal the values of
life as it can be lived within the traditional
framework of moral standards.
Sophocles’ skill in
control of dramatic movement and his mastery of
speech were devoted to the presentation of the
decisive, usually tragic, hours in the lives of men
and women at once “heroic” and human, such as
Oedipus.
Euripides, last of the three great tragic poets,
belonged to a different world. When he came to
manhood, traditional beliefs were scrutinized in the
light of what was claimed by Sophist philosophers,
not always unjustifiably, to be reason; and this was
a test to which much of Greek religion was highly
vulnerable. The whole structure of society and its
values was called into question. This movement of
largely destructive criticism was clearly not
uncongenial to
Euripides. But as a dramatic poet he
was bound to draw his material from myths, which,
for him, had to a great extent lost their meaning.
He adapted them to make room for contemporary
problems, which were his real interest. Many of his
plays suffer from a certain internal disharmony, yet
his sensibilities and his moments of psychological
insight bring him far closer than most Greek writers
to modern taste. There are studies, wonderfully
sympathetic, of wholly unsympathetic actions in the
Medea and Hippolytus; a vivid presentation of the
beauty and horror of religious ecstasy in the
Bacchants; in the Electra, a reduction to absurdity
of the values of a myth that justifies matricide; in
Helen and Iphigenia Among the Taurians, melodrama
with a faint flavour of romance.
Comedy
Like tragedy, comedy arose from a ritual in honour
of Dionysus, in this case full of abuse and
obscenity connected with averting evil and
encouraging fertility. The parabasis, the part of
the play in which the chorus broke off the action
and commented on topical events and characters, was
probably a direct descendant of such revels. The
dramatic element may have been derived from the
secular Dorian comedy without chorus, said to have
arisen at Megara, which was developed at Syracuse by
Epicharmus (c. 530–c. 440). Akin to this kind of
comedy seems to have been the mime, a short
realistic sketch of scenes from everyday life. These
were written rather later by Sophron of Syracuse;
only fragments have survived but they were important
for their influence on Plato’s dialogue form and on
Hellenistic mime. At Athens, comedy became an
official part of the celebrations of Dionysus in 486
bc. The first great comic poet was Cratinus. About
50 years later Aristophanes and Eupolis refined
somewhat the wild robustness of the older poet. But
even so, for boldness of fantasy, for merciless
invective, for unabashed indecency, and for freedom
of political criticism, there is nothing like the
Old Comedy of Aristophanes, whose work alone has
survived. Cleon the politician,
Socrates
the
philosopher,
Euripides the poet were alike the
victims of his masterly unfairness, the first in
Knights; the second in Clouds; and the third in
Women at the Thesmophoria and Frogs; whereas in
Birds the Athenian democracy itself was held up to a
kindlier ridicule. Aristophanes survived the fall of
Athens in 404, but the Old Comedy had no place in
the revived democracy.
The gradual change from Old to Middle Comedy took
place in the early years of the 4th century. Of
Middle Comedy, no fully developed specimen has
survived. It seems to have been distinguished by the
disappearance of the chorus and of outspoken
political criticism and by the growth of social
satire and of parody; Antiphanes and Alexis were the
two most distinguished writers. The complicated
plots in some of their plays led to the development
of the New Comedy at the end of the century, which
is best represented by Menander. One complete play,
the Dyscolus, and appreciable fragments of others
are extant on papyrus. New Comedy was derived in
part from Euripidean tragedy; its characteristic
plot was a translation into terms of city life of
the story of the maiden—wronged by a god—who bears
her child in secret, exposes it, and recognizes it
years after by means of the trinkets she had put
into its cradle.
Herodotus
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THE HISTORIANS
There are earlier examples of "historical" writing in the
chronicles of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and in the Book
of Genesis, but history as a matter of recorded fact began
with the Greeks.
Herodotus, the "father" of history, who
wrote about the Persian Wars, was the first to break away
from myth and legend in pursuit of facts. He was certainly
not a scientific historian: his plentiful and fascinating
digressions included highly improbable episodes, although he
was usually careful to say that they were things he had been
told, rather than things that were true.
Herodotus makes
interesting and informative reading, but
Thucydides is considered
the greater historian. His history of the Peloponnesian War
is one of the great classics of historiography. He was
writing contemporary history, having held a high command in
the war himself, and he employed both documentary and oral
sources, but he used them with discrimination, assessing
them for accuracy, looking for causes as well as relating
events, and displaying shrewd judgment of what was
significant and what was not. Like his successors, he was
essentially concerned with human behaviour, its influence on
history, and the conclusions about human nature that may be
drawn from history. The fact that he was also a marvellous
writer explains why some people, even now, know more about a
civil war in Greece 2,400 years ago than they do about the
far greater conflicts of their own era.
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History
The first great writer of history was
Herodotus of
Halicarnassus, who was also a geographer and
anthropologist. The theme of his history, written in
large part for Athenian readers, is the clash
between Europe and Asia culminating in the Persian
War. The account of the war itself, which occupies
roughly the second half of the work, must have been
composed by means of laborious inquiry from those
whose memories were long enough to recall events
that happened when
Herodotus was a child or earlier.
The whole history, though in places badly put
together, is magnificent in its compass and unified
by the consciousness of an overriding power keeping
the universe and humankind in check.
Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400) was perhaps the first
person to apply a first-class mind to a prolonged
examination of the nature of political power and the
factors by which policies of states are determined.
As a member of the board of generals he acquired
inside knowledge of the way policy is shaped. After
his failure to save Amphipolis in 424, he spent 20
years in exile, which he used as an opportunity for
getting at the truth from both sides. The result was
a history of the war narrowly military and political
but of the most penetrating quality.
Thucydides
investigated the effect on individuals and nations
both of psychological characteristics and of chance.
His findings were interpreted through the many
speeches given to his characters.
Just as
Thucydides had linked his work to the
point at which
Herodotus had stopped, so Xenophon
(c. 430–died before 350) began his Hellenica where
Thucydides’ unfinished history breaks off in 411. He
carried his history down to 362. His work was
superficial by comparison with that of
Thucydides,
but he wrote with authority of military affairs and
appears at his best in the Anabasis, an account of
his participation in the enterprise of the Greek
mercenary army, with which the Persian prince Cyrus
tried to expel his brother from the throne, and of
the adventurous march of the Greeks, after the
murder of their leaders by the Persians, from near
Babylon to the Black Sea coast. Xenophon also wrote
works in praise of Socrates, of whom his
understanding was superficial. No other historical
writing of the 4th century has survived except for a
substantial papyrus fragment containing a record of
events of the years 396–395.
"So little trouble do men take in the
search after truth, they prefer to accept whatever comes
first to hand. Yet anyone who, upon the evidence which I
have given, arrives at some such conclusion as my own about
those ancient times, would not be far wrong. He must not put
more reliance in the exaggerated embellishments of the
poets, or in the tales of chroniclers who composed their
work to please the ear rather than to speak the truth."
Thucydides The
Veloponnesian War
(trans. Jowett, rev. Brunt)
Xenophon
Greek historian
born c. 430 bc, Attica, Greece
died shortly before 350, Attica
Main
Greek historian and philosopher whose numerous surviving
works are valuable for their depiction of late Classical
Greece. His Anabasis (“Upcountry March”) in particular was
highly regarded in antiquity and had a strong influence on
Latin literature.
Life
Xenophon’s life history before 401 is scantily recorded; at
that time, prompted by a Boeotian friend, he left postwar
Athens, joined the Greek mercenary army of the Achaemenian
prince Cyrus the Younger, and became involved in Cyrus’s
rebellion against his brother, the Persian king Artaxerxes
II. After Cyrus’s defeat at Cunaxa (about 50 miles [80 km]
from Babylon in what is now Iraq), the Greeks (later known
as the Ten Thousand) returned to Byzantium via Mesopotamia,
Armenia, and northern Anatolia. Xenophon was one of the men
selected to replace five generals seized and executed by the
Persians. The persistence and skill of the Greek soldiers
were used by proponents of Panhellenism as proof that the
Persians were vulnerable. Initially viewed with hostility by
Sparta (the current Greek hegemonic power), the mercenaries
found employment in the winter of 400–399 with the Thracian
prince Seuthes but then entered Spartan service for a war to
liberate Anatolian Greeks from Persian rule. Unpersuaded by
Seuthes’s offers of land and marriage to his daughter and
evidently disinclined (despite protestations to the
contrary) to return home, Xenophon remained with his
comrades. Although the Anabasis narrative stops at this
point and further details are lacking, he clearly became
closely involved with senior Spartans, notably (after 396)
King Agesilaus II. When a Greek coalition, including Athens,
rebelled against Spartan hegemony in mainland Greece,
Xenophon fought (at Coronea in 394) for Sparta.
Whether his service to Sparta caused or reflected his
formal exile from Athens remains a matter of some dispute,
but exiled he certainly was. The Spartans gave him somewhere
to live at Scillus (across the Alpheus River from Olympia),
a small city in the Triphylian state created after Sparta’s
defeat of Elis in 400. During his years there, Xenophon
served as Sparta’s representative at Olympia, and he sent
his sons to Sparta for their education. Some historians
believe that he also made a trip to Sicily during this
period. He certainly used his mercenary booty to buy land
and erect a small-scale copy of Artemis’s famous temple at
Ephesus. (In Anabasis, Book V, there is a well-known
description of this sacred estate and of the annual
quasi-civic festival celebrated there.) Too prominent to be
unscathed by Sparta’s loss of authority after the Battle of
Leuctra (371), Xenophon was expelled from Scillus and is
said to have settled in Corinth—though here, as elsewhere,
the biographical tradition is of debatable authority, since
the episode does not appear in Xenophon’s own writings. The
claim that his exile was formally repealed is another case
in point, but his Hipparchicus (Cavalry Commander) and
Vectigalia (Ways and Means) suggest that Xenophon had a
sympathetic interest in Athens’s fortunes, and rapprochement
is reflected in his sons’ service in the Athenian cavalry at
the second Battle of Mantinea (362). The death of Xenophon’s
son Gryllus there unleashed such a profusion of eulogies
that Aristotle later gave the subtitle Gryllus to a dialogue
that criticized Isocrates’ views of rhetoric. At the time of
his own death, Xenophon’s standing—as author of a
considerable oeuvre and hero of an adventure nearly five
decades old but ideologically vivid in a Greek world defined
by its relationship to Persia—had never been higher.
Posthumously his place in the canon of ancient authors was
secure; he was a historian, philosopher, and man of action,
a perfect model for the young (a view expressed, for
example, by Dion Chrysostom [Dio Cocceianus]) and an object
of systematic literary imitation by Arrian.
Works » General characteristics
Xenophon produced a large body of work, all of which
survives to the present day. (Indeed, the manuscript
tradition includes Constitution of the Athenians, which is
not by Xenophon.) The great majority of his works were
probably written during the last 15 to 20 years of his life,
but their chronology has not been decisively established.
His output was formally varied—the main categories were long
historical or ostensibly historical narratives, Socratic
texts, and short technical, biographical, or political
treatises—but these had common features, as enumerated
below.
First, Xenophon’s work is characterized by novelty. His
output includes the earliest or earliest surviving examples
of the short nonmedical treatise and of autobiographical
narrative (Anabasis). Other works, although not without
precedent in genre, are unusual in various ways; this is
true of the idiosyncratic contemporary history of Hellenica
(“Greek History”) and the fictive history of Cyropaedia
(“Education of Cyrus”); the second-order, philosophically
nontechnical response to (or exploitation of) Socratic
literature found in Memorabilia, Symposium (“Drinking
Party”), Oeconomicus (“Household Management”), and Apology;
and the novel form of encomiastic biography exemplified by
Agesilaus.
Second, the subject matter reflects Xenophon’s personal
experiences. Anabasis and Cyropaedia flowed from the
adventure of 401–400; the Socratic writings stemmed from
youthful association with a charismatic teacher; Hellenica
arose from a personal take on the politico-military history
of his times; treatises on military command, horsemanship,
household management, and hunting derived from prolonged
personal experience of each; Ways and Means was inspired by
concern about Athens’s finances and political fortunes; and
Hiero may have originated in a visit to Sicily.
Third, Xenophon’s agenda was essentially didactic
(usually with direct or indirect reference to military or
leadership skills), and it was often advanced through the
use of history as a source of material. As a narrative
historian Xenophon has a reputation for inaccuracy and
incompleteness, but he clearly assumed that people and
events from the past were tools for promoting political and
ethical improvement. His ethical system contained little
that jars in modern terms; but in today’s cynical world, the
apparent ingenuousness of its expression strikes some as by
turns bland and irritating. The system’s interconnection
with the gods may challenge readers who either disavow the
divine or are not reconciled to a pagan theological
environment, simply because—in ethical contexts, though not
in specific ritual ones (as illustrated in Anabasis, Book
VII)—divine power in Xenophon is frequently anonymous and
often singular or because he could apparently take a
pragmatic attitude (e.g., posing a question to the Delphic
oracle that was framed to produce the “right” answer). His
contemporaries perhaps saw things differently: for them the
gods were unproblematic (not that everyone thought the same
way about them, but Xenophon’s terms of reference were
readily understood), and his insistence on a moral component
to practical and (broadly) political skills may have been
distinctive.
Fourth, charges of ingenuousness have been partly fueled
by Xenophon’s style. Judged in antiquity to be plain, sweet,
persuasive, graceful, poetic, and a model of Attic purity,
it now strikes some as jejune. A more charitable, and
fairer, description would be that his style is
understated—the range of stylistic figures is modest, and
the finest effects are produced by his simplicity of
expression. Rereading a famous passage in which the Ten
Thousand first glimpse the sea, one is struck by the
disproportion between its remembered impact and its brevity
and indirect approach. Xenophon does not describe seeing the
sea; instead he describes, first, his gradual realization
that a commotion up ahead is caused by the shouts of those
who have seen the sea and, second, the scenes of celebration
as men embrace with tears and laughter, build a huge cairn
of stones, and shower gifts upon their local guide.
Works » Historical themes
Hellenica is a seven-book account of 411–362 in two distinct
(perhaps chronologically widely separated) sections: the
first (Book I and Book II through chapter 3, line 10)
“completes” Thucydides (in largely un-Thucydidean fashion)
by covering the last years of the Peloponnesian War (i.e.,
411–404); the second (the remainder) recounts the long-term
results of Spartan victory, ending with Greece in an
unabated state of uncertainty and confusion after the
indecisive second Battle of Mantinea (362). It is an
idiosyncratic account, notable for omissions, an unexpected
focus, a critical attitude to all parties, and a hostility
to hegemonic aspirations—an intensely personal reaction to
the period rather than an orderly history.
Anabasis, which probably initially circulated
pseudonymously (under the name Themistogenes of Syracuse),
tells the story of the Ten Thousand in a distinctive
version, one in which Xenophon himself plays a central role
in Books III–VII. The work provides a narrative that is
varied and genuinely arresting in its own right, but it also
invites the reader to think about the tactical, strategic,
and leadership skills of those involved. On a political and
ethnocultural front, it expresses a general view of Greek
superiority to “barbarians,” but, although it evokes
Panhellenism (the thesis that Persia was vulnerable to
concerted attack—and should therefore be attacked), it does
not provide unambiguous support for that view.
In Cyropaedia Xenophon investigated leadership by
presenting the life story of Cyrus II, founder of the
Persian Empire. Because the story differs flagrantly from
other sources and the narrative’s pace and texture are
unlike those of ordinary Greek historiography, many analysts
have classed the work as fiction. Story line is certainly
subordinate to didactic agenda, but Xenophon may have drawn
opportunistically on current versions of the Cyrus story
rather than pure imagination. The result is fictive history,
more analogous to Socratic literature than to the Greek
novel (to which it is sometimes pictured as antecedent). In
the Cyropaedia, techniques of military and political
leadership are exposed both through example and through
direct instruction; but Cyrus’s achievement (i.e., absolute
autocracy) is not an unambiguous (or readily transferable)
good, and the final chapter recalls that, Cyrus
notwithstanding, Persia had declined. (As is often the case
in the stories of Classical Greece, barbarian achievements
worthy of respect lie in the past.)
Works » Socratic works
Xenophon’s longest Socratic work is Memorabilia, a four-book
collection whose often charming conversational vignettes
depict a down-to-earth Socrates dispensing practical wisdom
on all manner of topics. The work also refutes the charges
of corruption and religious deviance advanced at Socrates’
trial (also addressed in Apology—a work very different from
Plato’s) by showing someone whose views on religion,
friendship, personal relations, ambition, education,
theology, temperance, and justice were entirely proper.
Symposium narrates a party where conversation,
interspersed with cabaret, shifts continually between
frivolity and seriousness. Personal relationships are a
common theme in the two most substantial sections (the
guests’ quirky accounts of their own most prized assets and
Socrates’ speech on physical and spiritual love) and
elsewhere. The work’s conclusion—a suggestive tableau of
Dionysus and Ariadne has the guests going home full of
libidinous thoughts—typically challenges the earnestness of
what has just preceded, while leaving a distinct, if
tantalizing, feeling that it is not all simply a joke. “What
good men do when having fun is as interesting as their
serious activities,” Xenophon wrote at the beginning of the
work; the beautifully realized, rather brittle comedy of
manners that ensues certainly justifies this assertion.
In Oeconomicus Socrates discusses agriculture and
household management. Leadership (“a harder skill than
agriculture”) is often the real subject. The most famous
section is an account of how the rich Ischomachus trains his
ingenuous young wife for an important role in running their
home. That there was a real Ischomachus who lost his fortune
and whose wife and daughter became involved in a squalid
sexual ménage with Callias (the host of Symposium) poses a
typical Xenophontic puzzle. His Socratic world often
resembles a sanitized version of reality; Xenophon created a
fictive history in which propositions about the pursuit of
virtue—though they derive authority from being rooted in the
past—acquire either a mythical aura or an intriguing
piquancy through the use of a deviant version of that past.
Works » Other writings
Six other works came from Xenophon’s pen. Cynegeticus (“On
Hunting”) offers technical advice on hunting (on foot, with
dogs and nets, the usual prey being a hare); Xenophon sees
the pursuit as a pleasurable and divinely ordained means of
promoting military, intellectual, and moral excellence
(something neither sophists nor politicians can match). De
re equestri (“On Horsemanship”) deals with various aspects
of horse ownership and riding, and Cavalry Commander is a
somewhat unsystematic (but serious) discussion of how to
improve the Athenian cavalry corps. Also Athenocentric is
Ways and Means, a plan to alleviate the city’s financial
problems (and remove excuses for aggressive imperialism) by
paying citizens a dole from taxes on foreign residents and
from the profits generated by using state-owned slaves in
the silver mines.
In Hiero the location is Syracuse (on the east coast of
Sicily), perhaps in allusion to contemporary Syracusan
tyrants. The 5th-century tyrant Hiero bewails the
unpleasantness of his situation, prompting the praise-poet
Simonides to suggest that things could improve if Hiero were
to adopt some recognizably Xenophontic leadership principles
and become a benevolent and much-loved autocrat. There are
shades of Cyropaedia (except that the story does not suggest
that Hiero’s transformation happened) and of the warnings
praise-poets sometimes offered tyrants (except that they
tried to check tyrannical self-confidence, whereas
Xenophon’s Simonides wants both to enhance and to eliminate
it). When defining leadership modes tyrants make good cases.
So do Spartan kings, or at least the “completely good man”
whose virtues are presented through narrative and analysis
in Agesilaus.
Finally, Respublica Lacedaemoniorum (“Constitution of the
Spartans”) celebrates the rational eccentricity of the
Lycurgan system while admitting its failure to maintain
Spartan values—a failure some find perceptibly implicit in
the system itself. In this work are shades of the Cyropaedia
again, and here the reader may see another example of the
slippery nature of the lessons of history.
Assessment
In post-Renaissance Europe Xenophon continued to be highly
valued as long as the valuation by antiquity retained its
authority. His works were widely edited and translated, and
the environment was one in which, for example, the esteem in
which Cyropaedia had been held by Romans such as Scipio
Aemilianus found an echo. More generally, Xenophon’s moral
posture and his conviction that proper instruction, both
practical and moral, could achieve human improvement had an
appeal even in a world of secular enlightenment.
By the 19th century the onset of the critical study of
historical sources, a growing preference for epistemology
over ethics, and the general professionalization of research
on the Classical world did Xenophon no favours. It became
harder to find much relevance in his practical treatises,
and a political philosophy that appeared monarchic rather
than republican was out of tune with the times. He remained
an author commonly read by those learning Greek, but he
ceased to be intellectually fashionable both among academics
and the wider educated public.
In the late 20th century his reputation began to rise
again. Scholars became more interested in early 4th-century
history and increasingly concerned with socioeconomic
structures, social institutions, and gender issues. They
also became more sensitive to the pitfalls of biographical
or quasi-biographical discourse in antiquity. There was a
considerable increase in the quantity and sophistication of
historical work on Persia and Sparta, and war studies
regained its status as a respectable branch of sociocultural
history. All these trends made Xenophon an author of crucial
importance and encouraged more-discriminating reading of his
works.
Xenophon was long characterized as a second-rate
practitioner of other people’s literary trades, but
more-sympathetic study suggests that the artfully simple
style masks a writer of some sophistication. Xenophon was in
the early 21st century starting to be taken seriously as a
distinctive voice on the history, society, and intellectual
attitudes of the later Classical era.
Christopher J. Tuplin
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Rhetoric and oratory
In few societies has the power of fluent and
persuasive speech been more highly valued than it
was in Greece, and even in Homer there are speeches
that are pieces of finished rhetoric. But it was the
rise of democratic forms of government that provided
a great incentive to study and instruction in the
arts of persuasion, which were equally necessary for
political debate in the assembly and for attack and
defense in the law courts.
The formal study of rhetoric seems to have
originated in Syracuse c. 460 bc with Corax and his
pupils Tisias and Gorgias (died c. 376); Gorgias was
influential also in Athens. Corax is reputed to have
been the first to write a handbook on the art of
rhetoric, dealing with such topics as arguments from
probability and the parts into which speeches should
be divided. Most of the Sophists had pretensions as
teachers of the art of speaking, especially
Protagoras, who postulated that the weaker of two
arguments could by skill be made to prevail over the
stronger, and Prodicus of Ceos.
Antiphon (c. 480–411), the first professional
speech writer, was an influential opponent of
democracy. Three speeches of his, all dealing with
homicide cases, have been preserved, as have three
“tetralogies,” sets of two pairs of speeches
containing the arguments to be used on both sides in
imaginary cases of homicide. In them ideas are
expressed concerning bloodguilt and the duty of
vengeance. Antiphon’s style is bare and rather
crudely antithetical. Gorgias from Sicily, who
visited Athens in 427, introduced an elaborate
balance and symmetry emphasized by rhyme and
assonance. Thrasymachus of Chalcedon made a more
solid contribution to the evolution of a periodic
and rhythmical style.
Andocides (c. 440–died after 391), an orator who
spent much of his life in exile from Athens, wrote
three speeches containing vivid narrative; but as an
orator he was admittedly amateurish. Lysias (c.
455–died after 380) lived at Athens for many years
as a resident alien and supported himself by writing
speeches when he lost his wealth. His speeches, some
of them written for litigants of humble station,
show dexterous adaptation to the character of the
speaker, though the most interesting of all is his
own attack on Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty
Tyrants imposed on Athens by the Spartans in 404 bc.
The 12 extant speeches of Isaeus, who was active
in the first half of the 4th century bc, throw light
on aspects of Athenian law. Isocrates, who was
influential in Athens for half a century before his
death in 338, perfected a periodic prose style that,
through the medium of Latin, was widely accepted as
a pattern; and he helped give rhetoric its
predominance in the educational system of the
ancient world. In his writings, which took the form
of speeches but were more like pamphlets, Isocrates
shows some insight into the political troubles
besetting Greece, with its endless bickering between
cities incapable of cooperation.
The greatest of the orators was Demosthenes
(384–322), supreme in vehemence and power, though
lacking in some of the more delicate shadings of
rhetorical skill. His speeches were mainly
political, and he is best remembered for his
energetic opposition to the rise of Macedonia under
its king Philip II, embodied in the three
“Philippics.” After Demosthenes, oratory faded,
together with the political setting to which it owed
its preeminence. Three more 4th-century-bc writers
need only be mentioned: Aeschines (390–c. 314; the
main political opponent of Demosthenes), Hyperides
(c. 390–322), and Lycurgus (c. 390–324).
Late forms of poetry
The creative period of the Hellenistic Age was
practically contained within the span of the 3rd
century bc. To this period belonged three
outstanding poets: Theocritus, Callimachus, and
Apollonius of Rhodes.
Theocritus (c. 310–250), born
at Syracuse, is best known as the inventor of
bucolic mime, or pastoral poetry, in which he
presented scenes from the lives of shepherds and
goatherds in Sicily and southern Italy. He also
dramatized scenes from middle-class life; and in his
second idyll the character Simaetha, who tries by
incantations to recover the love of the man who has
deserted her, touches the fringe of tragedy. He also
used another Hellenistic form, the epyllion, a short
scene of heroic narrative poetry in which heroic
stature is often reduced by playful realism and
delicate psychology. In his hands the hexameter
attained a lyric purity and sweetness unrivaled
elsewhere. He was the first of the nature poets,
succeeded by Moschus and Bion.
Callimachus (flourished about 260) was a scholar
as well as a poet. His most famous work, of which
substantial fragments survive, was the Aitia, an
elegiac poem describing the origins of various rites
and customs. It was heavy with learning but
diversified by passages of entertaining narrative.
His six hymns show immense poetic expertise but no
religious feeling, for the gods of Olympus had long
since become obsolete. Callimachus also wrote
epigrams, and fragments survive of iambi (“iambs”).
The form was widely used throughout the 3rd century
to denounce the vanities of the world. Sometimes, in
a mixture of prose and verse, these pieces had links
with satire; and their chief exponents were Bion the
Borysthenite, Menippus of Gadara, Cercidas of
Megalopolis, and Phoenix of Colophon. Callimachus avoided epic in favour of the greater
intensity possible in shorter works.
The last
surviving Classical Greek epic was written by his
successor at Alexandria, Apollonius of Rhodes (born
about 295). Apollonius’ account of the voyage of the
Argonauts is so full of local legend that the
coherence of the poem is lost; but the story of
Medea’s wild passion for Jason, the leader of the
Argonauts, is marked by a new sort of romantic
awareness that is fully realized in the episode of
Dido’s passion for Aeneas in
Virgil’s Aeneid.
The desire to combine learning with poetry led to
the revival of didactic verse. The Phaenomena of
Aratus of Soli (c. 315–c. 245) is a versification of
a treatise on the stars by Eudoxus of Cnidus (c.
390–c. 340). Chance has preserved the poems of
Nicander (probably 2nd century) on the unlikely
subjects of cures for bites and antidotes to
poisons.
The mimes of Herodas (3rd century), short
realistic sketches of low life in iambic verse, have
affinities with the non-pastoral mimes of
Theocritus. They perhaps give a hint as to the
character of the literature of popular
entertainment, now largely lost. Mime, especially
pantomime, was the main entertainment throughout the
early Roman Empire.
After the middle of the 3rd century, poetic
activity largely died away, though the great period
of scholarship at Alexandria and at Pergamum was
still to come. The names of a few poets are known:
Euphorion (born about 275) of Chalcis and Parthenius
(flourished 1st century bc), the teacher of
Virgil.
Thereafter Greek poetry practically ceased, apart
from a sporadic revival in the 4th century ad. An
exception exists in the case of epigrammatic poetry
in elegiac couplets, surviving mainly in two
compilations, the Planudean and Palatine
anthologies.
Theocritus
born c.
300 bc, Syracuse, Sicily [Italy]
died after 260 bc
Greek poet, the creator of pastoral
poetry. His poems were termed eidyllia
(“idylls”), a diminutive of eidos, which
may mean “little poems.”
There are no certain facts as to
Theocritus’s life beyond those supplied
by the idylls themselves. Certainly he
lived in Sicily and at various times in
Cos and Alexandria and perhaps in
Rhodes. The surviving poems by
Theocritus that are generally held to be
authentic comprise bucolics (pastoral
poetry), mimes with either rural or
urban settings, brief poems in epic or
lyric metres, and epigrams.
The
bucolics are the most characteristic and
influential of Theocritus’s works. They
introduced the pastoral setting in which
shepherds wooed nymphs and shepherdesses
and held singing contests with their
rivals. They were the sources of
Virgil’s Eclogues and much of the poetry
and drama of the Renaissance and were
the ancestors of the famous English
pastoral elegies, John Milton’s
“Lycidas,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
“Adonais,” and Matthew Arnold’s
“Thyrsis.” Among the best known of his
idylls are Thyrsis (Idyll 1), a lament
for Daphnis, the original shepherd poet,
who died of unrequited love; Cyclops, a
humorous depiction of ugly Polyphemus
vainly wooing the sea nymph Galatea; and
Thalysia (“Harvest Home,” Idyll 7),
describing a festival on the island of
Cos. In this the poet speaks in the
first person and introduces contemporary
friends and rivals in the guise of
rustics.
Theocritus’s idylls have none of the
artificial prettiness of the pastoral
poetry of a later age. They have been
criticized as attributing to peasants
sentiments and language beyond their
capacity, but Theocritus’s realism was
intentionally partial and selective. He
was not trying to write documentaries of
peasant life. Even so, comparison with
modern Greek folk songs, which owe
little to literary influences, reveals
striking resemblances between them and
Theocritus’s bucolics, and there can be
little doubt that both derive from real
life.
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Callimachus
born c.
305 bc, Cyrene, North Africa [now
Shaḥḥāt, Libya]
died c. 240
Greek
poet and scholar, the most
representative poet of the erudite and
sophisticated Alexandrian school.
Callimachus migrated to Alexandria,
where King Ptolemy II Philadelphus of
Egypt gave him employment in the Library
of Alexandria, the most important in the
Hellenistic world. Of Callimachus’s
voluminous writings, only 6 hymns, about
60 epigrams, and fragments survive, many
of them discovered in the 20th century.
His most famous poetical work,
illustrative of his antiquarian
interests, was the Aitia (Causes),
probably produced between 270 and 245
bc. This work is a narrative elegy in
four books, containing a medley of
recondite tales from Greek mythology and
history by which the author seeks to
explain the legendary origin of obscure
customs, festivals, and names. The
structure of the poem, with its short
episodes loosely connected by a common
theme, became the model for the Fasti
and Metamorphoses of the Roman poet
Ovid. Of his elegies for special
occasions, the best known is the Lock of
Berenice (itself included in the Aitia
as the last episode of the collection),
a polished piece of court poetry later
freely adapted into Latin by Catullus.
Callimachus’s other works include the
Iambi, 13 short poems on occasional
themes; the Hecale, a small-scale epic,
or epyllion, which set a new poetic
fashion for concise, miniaturistic
detail; and the Ibis, a polemical poem
that was directed against an unknown
enemy (ancient biography identified him
with the poet’s former pupil Apollonius
of Rhodes). Callimachus himself insisted
on the exercise of consummate literary
craftsmanship and virtuosity within
poems of relatively short length. He
raised the hexameter to new heights of
order and euphony, and his poetry may
well be considered the peak of
refinement of Greek verse of the period.
In the Hymns, Callimachus adapted the
traditional religious form of the
Homeric Hymns to an original and purely
literary use. The Epigrams treat a
variety of personal themes with
consummate artistry. Of his prolific
prose works, certainly the most famous
was the Pinakes (“Tablets”) in 120
books. This work consisted of an
elaborate critical and biographical
catalog of the authors of the works held
in the Library of Alexandria.
Discoveries in the 19th and 20th
centuries of ancient Egyptian papyruses
confirm the fame and popularity of
Callimachus; no other Greek poet except
Homer is so often quoted by the
grammarians of late antiquity. He was
taken as a model by many Roman poets,
notably Catullus and Propertius, and by
the most sophisticated Greek poets, from
Euphorion, Nicander, and Parthenius to
Nonnus and his followers in the 5th
century ad.
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Late forms of prose
Almost all of the great mass of Hellenistic
prose—and later prose, historical, scholarly, and
scientific—has perished. Among historians Polybius
(c. 200–c. 118 bc), the most outstanding, has
survived in a fragmentary condition. Present at Rome
when it was succumbing to the first influences of
Greek literature, he wrote mainly of events of which
he had direct experience, often with great insight;
his work covered the period from 264 to 146.
Diodorus Siculus’ universal history (1st century bc)
is important for the sources quoted there. The most
considerable of lost historians was Timaeus (c.
356–c. 260), whose history of the Greeks in the west
down to 264 provided Polybius with his starting
point. Later historians were Dionysius of
Halicarnassus (flourished about 20 bc); Appian of
Alexandria (2nd century ad), who wrote on Rome and
its conquests; and Arrian (c. ad 96–c. 180) from
Bithynia, who is the most valuable source on
Alexander the Great.
The most important works of criticism, of which
little has survived, were by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus and the obscure Longinus. Longinus’
treatise On the Sublime (c. ad 40) is exceptional in
its penetrating analysis of creative literature. The
Bibliotheca attributed to Apollodorus (c. 180 bc) is
a handy compendium of mythology.
Scientific work such as the astronomy and
geography of Eratosthenes (c. 276–c. 194) of
Alexandria is known mainly from later summaries; but
much that was written by the mathematicians,
especially Euclid (flourished c. 300 bc) and
Archimedes (c. 287–212), has been preserved.
Much survives of the writings of the physician
Galen (ad 129–199). His contemporary Sextus
Empiricus is an important source for the history of
Greek philosophy. The survey of the Mediterranean by
Strabo in the time of Augustus preserved much
valuable information; and so, in a more limited
field, did the description of Greece by Pausanias
(2nd century ad). Greek achievement in astronomy and
geography was summed up in the work of Ptolemy of
Alexandria in the 2nd century ad.
Greek became the language of the large settlement
of Jews at Alexandria, and the Septuagint, the Greek
version of the
Old Testament, was completed by about
the end of the 2nd century bc. Much of the Apocrypha
was composed in Greek, and the
New Testament was
written in popular Greek (Koine). Of the early
Christian writers in Greek the most notable were
Clement of Alexandria (c. ad 150–c. 215) and Origen
(c. ad 185–c. 254), together with Clement I and
Ignatius of Antioch.
The most popular classical writer during the Renaissance was
Plutarch
(died c.125), a Greek, whose "Lives",
in the translation by Sir Thomas North (1579), were the
chief source for
Shakespeare's
Roman plays.
The Parallel Lives of famous Greeks and Romans by
Plutarch (c. ad 46–c. 119) of Chaeronea in Boeotia
was for centuries one of the formative books for
educated Europeans. Great figures from an idealized
past are presented for the edification of the lesser
people of his own day; and the anecdotes with which
the Lives abound are of various degrees of
credibility. They belong to biography rather than to
history, though they are an important source for
historians. A number of shorter works on a wide
variety of subjects have come down under the Latin
title Moralia (Greek Ethica), which show the
intellectual tide of Greece on the ebb.
There was much concern over a question that had
been argued ever since the days when Athens had
ceased to be a free city: to what extent was Attic
prose a norm that writers and especially orators
were bound to follow? Many had shunned it in favour
of a more ornamental Asiatic style. But at the end
of the 1st century ad there was a revival of the
Attic dialect. Speeches and essays were written for
wide circulation. This revival is known as the
Second Sophistic movement, and chief among its
writers were Dion Chrysostom (1st century ad),
Aelius Aristides (2nd century), and Philostratus
(early 3rd century). The only writer of consequence,
however, was Lucian (c. 120–c. 190). His works are
mainly slight and satirical; but his gift of humour,
even though repetitive, cannot be denied. Lives and
Opinions of Eminent Philosophers was a valuable work
of the 3rd century by
Diogenes Laërtius, a writer
otherwise unknown.
Philosophical activity in the early empire was
mainly confined to moralizings based on Stoicism, a
philosophy advocating a life in harmony with nature
and indifference to pleasure and pain. Epictetus
(born about ad 55) influenced especially the
philosophic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180),
whose Meditations have taken their place beside
works of Christian devotion. Many of
Plutarch’s
Moralia were Platonic, with vaguely mystical
tendencies; but Plotinus (c. 205–260/270) was the
last major thinker in the Classical world, giving
new direction to Platonic and Pythagorean mysticism.
The latest creation of the Greek genius was the
novel, or erotic romance. It may have originated as
early as the 1st century bc; but its roots reach
back to such plays of triumphant love as the lost
Andromeda of Euripides, to the New Comedy, to
Xenophon’s daydreams about the education of Cyrus,
and to the largely fictitious narratives that were
one extreme of what passed for history from the 3rd
century bc onward. Of these last, the best known
examples are the Alexander romances, a wildly
distorted and embroidered version of the exploits of
Alexander the Great, which supplied some of the
favourite reading of the Middle Ages. Erotic elegy
and epigram may have contributed something and so
may the lost Milesian Tales of Aristides of Miletus
(c. 100 bc), though these last appear to have
depended on a pornographic interest that is almost
completely absent from the Greek romances. Only
fragments survive of the Ninus romance (dealing with
the love of Ninus, legendary founder of Nineveh),
which was probably of the 1st century bc; but
full-length works survive by Chariton (2nd century
ad), Achilles Tatius (2nd century ad), Xenophon of
Ephesus (2nd or 3rd century ad), and Heliodorus (3rd
century ad or later). All deal with true lovers
separated by innumerable obstacles of human
wickedness and natural catastrophe and then finally
united.
Daphnis and Chloe by
Longus (between 2nd and
3rd century ad) stands apart from the others because
of its pastoral, rather than quasi-historical,
setting. The works of Dictys Cretensis and Dares
Phrygius belong to the same period. They claim to
give a pre-Homeric account of the Trojan War. The
Greek originals are almost wholly lost, but the
Latin version was for the Middle Ages the main
source for the story of Troy.
Donald William Lucas
Ed.
Longus
("The Pastorals, or the Loves
of Daphnis and Chloe")
Illustrations by Marc Chagall
PART I,
PART II
Longus "The Pastorals, or the Loves of Daphnis and Chloe"
illustrations by Marc Chagall
Polybius
born c.
200 bc, Megalopolis, Arcadia, Greece
died c. 118
Greek
statesman and historian who wrote of the
rise of Rome to world prominence.
Early
life
Polybius was the son of Lycortas, a
distinguished Achaean statesman, and he
received the upbringing considered
appropriate for a son of rich
landowners. His youthful biography of
Philopoemen reflected his admiration for
that great Achaean leader, and an
interest in military matters found
expression in his lost book, Tactics. He
enjoyed riding and hunting, but his
knowledge of literature was rather
specialized (apart from the historians)
and his acquaintance with philosophy
superficial.
Before
170/169, when he was hipparch (cavalry
commander) in the Achaean Confederation,
almost nothing is known of his career.
But he then became involved in critical
events. Encumbered by their war with
Perseus of Macedonia, the Romans were
watching for disloyalty in the Greek
states. Although Polybius declared for
open support of Rome and was sent as an
envoy to the consul Quintus Marcius
Philippus, Achaean help was rejected.
After Perseus’ defeat at Pydna in 168,
Polybius was one of 1,000 eminent
Achaeans who were deported to Rome and
detained in Italy without trial.
Residence in Rome
At Rome, Polybius had the good fortune
to attract the friendship of the great
Roman general Scipio Aemilianus; he
became Scipio’s mentor and through his
family’s influence was allowed to remain
in Rome. It is probable that Polybius
accompanied Scipio to Spain in 151, went
with him to Africa (where he saw the
Numidian king Masinissa), and crossed
the Alps in Hannibal’s footsteps on his
way back to Italy. Shortly afterward,
when his political detention had ended,
Polybius joined Scipio at Carthage and
was present at its siege and destruction
in 146; and it is likely that he then
undertook a voyage of exploration in the
Atlantic, which is related in Pliny the
Elder’s Natural History.
Meanwhile, hostilities had broken out
between Achaea and Rome, and Polybius
was in Corinth shortly after its
destruction, in 146. He devoted himself
to securing as favourable a settlement
as possible for his countrymen and to
reestablishing order; and, as the
geographer Pausanias states, Achaean
gratitude found expression in the
erection of statues in his honour at
Tegea, Pallantium, Mantineia,
Lycosura—where the inscription declared
that “Greece would never have come to
grief, had she obeyed Polybius in all
things, and having come to grief, she
found succour through him alone”—and
Megalopolis, where it was recorded that
“he had roamed over all the earth and
sea, had been the ally of the Romans,
and had quenched their wrath against
Greece.”
Of
Polybius’ life after 146 little is
known. At some date he visited
Alexandria and Sardis. He is known to
have discussed political problems with
Scipio and Panaetius of Rhodes. He wrote
a history of the Numantine War,
evidently after 133 bc, and also a
treatise on the habitability of the
equatorial region; but when he composed
the latter is unknown.
Polybius’ history of Rome
The Histories on which his reputation
rests consisted of 40 books, the last
being indexes. Books I–V are extant. For
the rest there are various excerpts,
including those contained in the
collection of passages from Greek
historians assembled in the 10th century
and rediscovered and published by
various editors from the 16th to the
19th century.
Polybius’ original purpose was to
narrate the history of the 53 years
(220–168 bc)—from Hannibal’s Spanish
campaign to the Battle of Pydna—during
which Rome had made itself master of the
world. Books I–II form an introduction
covering Roman history from the crossing
into Sicily against the Carthaginians in
264 and including events in various
other parts of the world (especially
Achaea) between 264 and 220. In Book
III, Polybius sketches a modified plan,
proposing to add an account of how the
Romans exercised their supremacy and to
extend coverage to the destruction of
Carthage, in 146.
The
events of 168–146 were related in Books
XXX–XXXIX. Polybius probably conceived
his revision after 146, having by this
date completed his narrative down to the
end of the Second Punic War. At least
Books I–VI seem to have been published
by about 150; there is no information as
to when the rest of the work, including
the revised plan in Book III, appeared.
Conception of history
“All historians,” according to Polybius,
have
insisted that the soundest education and
training for political activity is the
study of history, and that the surest
and indeed the only way to learn how to
bear bravely the vicissitudes of fortune
is to recall the disasters of others.
Practical experience and fortitude in
facing calamity are the rewards of
studying history and are stressed
repeatedly throughout the work. History
is essentially didactic. Pleasure is not
to be wholly excluded, but the scale
comes down sharply on the side of
profit. To be really profitable, history
must deal with political and military
matters; and this is pragmatiké
historia, in contrast to other sorts of
history (IX, 1–2)—genealogies and
mythical stories, appealing to the
casual reader, and accounts of colonies,
foundations of cities, and ties of
kindred, which attract the man with
antiquarian interests. Its nature is
austere, though it may include
contemporary developments in art and
science. He stands in contrast to the
sensationalism of many of his
predecessors, who confuse history with
tragedy.
In Book
II, in which he attacks the Greek
historian Phylarchus for practices that
might be called unprofessional today,
Polybius states:
A
historian should not try to astonish his
readers by sensationalism, nor, like the
tragic poets, seek after men’s probable
utterances and enumerate all the
possible consequences of the events
under consideration, but simply record
what really happened and was said,
however commonplace. For the object of
history is the very opposite of that of
tragedy. The tragic writer seeks by the
most plausible language to thrill and
charm the audience temporarily; the
historian by real facts and real
speeches seeks to instruct and convince
serious students for all time. There it
is the probable that counts, even though
it be false, the object being to beguile
the spectator; here it is the truth, the
object being to benefit the student.
This
attack on Phylarchus is not isolated.
Similar faults are castigated in other
historians judged guilty of
sensationalism (cf. II, 16, 13–15; III,
48, 8; VII, 7, 1–2; XV, 34, 1–36). Nor
are these their only weaknesses. Many
historians are prone to exaggeration—and
that for a special reason. As writers of
monographs whose subjects are simple and
monotonous, they are driven “to magnify
small matters, to touch up and elaborate
brief statements and to transform
incidents of no importance into
momentous events and actions” (XXIX, 12,
3). In contrast to such practices,
Polybius stresses the universal
character of his own theme, which is to
narrate “how and thanks to what kind of
constitution the Romans in under 53
years have subjected nearly the whole
inhabited world to their sole
government—a thing unique in history”
(I, 1, 5).
Polybius believed that he had a
particular reason for adopting a
comprehensive view of history, apart
from his own predilection for such a
view. He wrote:
Hitherto the affairs of the world had
been as it were dispersed . . .; since
this date [220 bc] history has formed an
organic whole, and the affairs of Italy
and Africa have been interlinked with
those of Greece and Asia, all tending
towards one end (I, 3, 3–4).
Indeed,
only universal history is capable of
adequately treating Rome’s rise to world
power—the historian’s synoptic view
matches the organic character of history
itself:
What
gives my work its peculiar quality, and
is nowadays most remarkable, is this.
Tyche [Fortune] having guided almost all
the world’s affairs in one direction and
having inclined them to one and the same
goal, so the historian must bring under
one conspectus for his readers the
operations by which she has accomplished
her general purpose. For it was chiefly
this consideration, coupled with the
fact that none of my contemporaries has
attempted a general history, which
incited and encouraged me to undertake
my task (I, 4, 1–2).
The
role here allotted to Fortune is
somewhat unusual. For clearly the value
of history as a source of practical
lessons is diminished if cause and
effect are at the mercy of an
incalculable and capricious power.
Usually, although Polybius uses Fortune
to cover a variety of phenomena, ranging
from pure chance to something very like
a purposeful providence, much of the
apparent inconsistency springs from his
use of purely verbal elaboration or the
careless adoption of current Hellenistic
terminology, which habitually made
Fortune a goddess. Here, however,
Fortune seems to be a real directive
power, which raised Rome to world
dominion—because Rome deserved it.
Normally, Polybius lays great emphasis
on causality, and his distinction (III,
6) between the causes of an event
(aitiai) and its immediate origins
(archai) is useful up to a point, though
it is more mechanical than that of the
great Greek historian Thucydides and
allows nothing for the dialectical
character of real historical situations.
An
important place in Polybius’ work is
occupied by his study of the Roman
constitution and army and the early
history of the city in Book VI. His
analysis of the mixed constitution,
which had enabled Rome to avoid the
cycle of change and deterioration to
which simple constitutional forms were
liable, is full of problems, but it has
exercised widespread influence, from
Cicero’s De republica down to
Machiavelli and Montesquieu.
Sources of information
Polybius defines the historian’s task as
the study and collation of documents,
acquaintance with relevant geographical
features, and, finally, political
experience (XII, 25e); of these the last
two are the most essential. And he
practiced what he preached, for he
possessed good political and military
experience and had traveled widely
throughout the Mediterranean and beyond.
Nor did he neglect written sources;
indeed, for his introductory books,
covering the period from 264 to 220,
they were essential. For the main part
of his history, from 220 onward, he
consulted many writers, Greek and Roman,
but, following precedent, he rarely
names them.
He had
access to private sources; for example,
Publius Cornelius Scipio’s letter to
Philip V of Macedonia describing the
capture in Spain, in 209 bc, of New
Carthage (X, 9, 3), and a letter of
Scipio Nasica to some Hellenistic king
about the campaigns of the Third
Macedonian War (XXIX, 14, 3). He almost
certainly consulted the Achaean record
office and must have drawn on Roman
records for such material as the treaty
between Carthage and Philip V (VII, 9).
It has not been proved that he had
access to the Rhodian records. His
detailed figures for Hannibal’s troop
formations in Italy came from an
inscription left by Hannibal, which he
found in the Temple of Juno on the
Lacinian promontory.
Polybius regarded oral sources as his
most important, and the questioning of
witnesses as the most vital part of a
historian’s task; indeed, this is one
reason why he chose to begin his main
history at the year 220. Anything else
would be “hearsay at one remove,” a safe
foundation for neither judgments nor
statements.
Style and qualities as a historian
Writing in the 1st century bc, Dionysius
of Halicarnassus reckons Polybius among
those who “have left behind them
compositions which no one endures to
read to the end”; that his successors
shared this view of Polybius’ style is
confirmed by the failure of his works to
survive except in an incomplete form.
The infelicity of Polybius’ Greek (which
frequently reproduces the conventional
phrases of the Hellenistic chancelleries
familiar from contemporary inscriptions)
lies in its awkward use of long and
cumbersome circumlocutions, vague
abstract nouns, and pedantic
repetitions. To the scholar his style
is, however, no great obstacle; and,
though in his anxiety to improve his
reader he moralizes and belabours the
obvious, the perennial interest and
importance of his theme will always
ensure him a following among those who
can enjoy a historian who is accurate,
serious, and sensible, who understands
the events of which he writes, and,
above all, who asks the right questions.
Frank W. Walbank
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Dionysius of
Halicarnassus
Greek Dionysios
flourished c. 20 bc, Halicarnassus,
Caria, Asia Minor [now in Turkey]
Greek
historian and teacher of rhetoric whose
history of Rome is, with Livy’s, the
most valuable source from early Roman
history. This work, called Rhōmaïke
archaiologia (Roman Antiquities), treats
Rome from its origins to the First Punic
War. Though clearly written from a
pro-Roman standpoint, it was carefully
researched.
Dionysius migrated to Rome in 30 bc, and
his history, which sought to justify the
Romans to the Greeks, began to appear in
7 bc. Of its 20 books, only the first 11
(to 441 bc) survive in complete form. He
is believed to have used this work as a
practical demonstration of rhetorical
principles. Peri mimēseos (On Imitation;
in three books) survives in fragments
and seems to have influenced the great
Roman educator Quintilian. Dionysius’s
individual essays on the 4th-century-bc
Attic orators Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus,
and Demosthenes begin with a praise of
Roman writers for turning away from
Hellenistic Greek models (Asianism)
toward Classical authors (Atticism). He
discussed the eminent historian
Thucydides in an important essay and in
a letter to his friend Ammaeus. His
essay “Peri syntheseos onomaton” (“On
the Arrangement of Words” ; often cited
by its Latin title, “De compositione
verborum” ) is the only extant ancient
discussion of word order. Dionysius was
a mediocre historian but a first-rate
literary critic who examined authors’
style and historical context.
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Apollodorus
died after 120 bc
Greek
scholar of wide interests who is best
known for his Chronika (Chronicle) of
Greek history. Apollodorus was a
colleague of the Homeric scholar
Aristarchus of Samothrace (both served
as librarians of the great library in
Alexandria, Egypt). Apollodorus left
Alexandria about 146 for Pergamum and
eventually settled at Athens. The
Chronicle, written in the iambic
trimeter used in Greek comedy, covers
the period from the fall of Troy (1184
bc) to 144 bc in three books and was
later continued to 119 bc in a fourth
book.
Apollodorus’s publications extended to
philology, geography, and mythology. He
wrote commentaries (in at least 4 books)
on the Sicilian author of mimes Sophron
and (in 10 books) on the playwright
Epicharmus, as well as a work that
consisted of glosses explaining rare
words. Much of his 12-book commentary on
the “Catalogue of Ships” in Book II of
Homer’s Iliad survives in the work of
the ancient geographer Strabo
(Geography, Books VIII–X). His work Peri
theōn (On the Gods), in 24 books, was
scholarly in character and influenced
the Epicurean Philodemus. A compendium
to Greek mythology, called Bibliothēke
(often Latinized as Bibliotheca; The
Library), extant under his name, is in
fact not by him but was composed in the
1st or 2nd century ad, as was a (lost)
guidebook in comic trimeters, A Map of
the Earth.
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Eucleides of Megara
Euclid (or Eucleides) of Megara, a Greek Socratic
philosopher who lived around 400 BC, founded the Megarian
school of philosophy. Editors and translators in the Middle
Ages often confused him with Euclid of Alexandria when
discussing the latter's Elements. Most modern translations
of Plato's Theaetetus render his name "Euclides."
The Megaric sect was instituted by Euclides of Megara,
and took its name from the place which gave birth to its
founder. From its disputatious character, it also received
the appellation of Eristic ( Eristiki, from erizein, " to
contend") ; and it was likewise termed the Dialectic, not
because it gave rise to dialectics or logical debates, which
had before this time exercised the ingenuity of
philosophers, particularly in the Eleatic school, but
because the discourses and writings of this class of
philosophers commonly took the form of a dialogue.
Euclides was a native of Megara, the capital of the
district of Megaris. According to some less probable
accounts, he was born at Gela, in Sicily. He was one of the
chief disciples of Socrates, but, before becoming such, he
had studied the doctrines, and especially the dialectics of
the Eleatics. Socrates on one occasion reproved him for his
fondness for subtle and captious disputes. On the death of
Socrates, Euclides, with most of the other pupils of that
philosopher, took refuge in Megara, and there established a
school which distinguished itself by the cultivation of
dialectics. The doctrines of the Eleatics formed the basis
of his philosophical system. With these he blended the
ethical and dialectical principles of Socrates. The Eleatic
dogma, that there is one universal, unchangeable existence,
he viewed in a moral aspect, calling this one existence the
Good, but giving it also other names (as Reason,
Intelligence, etc.), perhaps for the purpose of explaining
how the real, though one, appeared to be many. He rejected
demonstration, attacking not so much the premises assumed as
the conclusions drawn, and also reasoning from analogy. He
is said to have been a man of a somewhat indolent and
procrastinating disposition. Euclides was the author of six
dialogues, no one of which, however, has come down to us. He
has frequently been erroneously confounded with the
mathematician of the same name.
Euclides introduced new subtleties into the art of
disputation, several of which, though often mentioned as
examples of great ingenuity, deserve only to be remembered
as proofs of egregious trifling. Of these sophistical modes
of reasoning, called by Aristotle Eristic syllogisms, a few
examples may suffice.
1. The Lying sophism : If, when you speak the truth, you
say, you lie, you lie : but you say you lie, when you speak
the truth ; therefore, in speaking the truth, you lie.
2. The Occult : Do you know your father ? Yes. Do you know
this man who is veiled ? No. Then you do not know your
father, for it is your father who is veiled.
3. The Sorties : Is one grain a heap ? No. Two grains ? No.
Three grains ? No. Go on, adding one by one ; and, if one
grain be not a heap, it will be impossible to say what
number of grains make a heap.
In such high repute were these silly inventions for
perplexing plain truth, that Chrysippus wrote six books upon
the first of these sophisms ; and Philetas, a Coan, died of
consumption, which he had contracted by the close study that
he had bestowed upon it.
Euclides' philosophy was a synthesis of Eleatic and
Socratic ideas. He identified the Eleatic idea of "The One"
with the Socratic "Form of the Good," which he called
"Reason," "God," "Mind," "Wisdom," etc. This was the true
essence of being, and was eternal and unchangeable. As he
said, "The Good is One, but we can call it by several names,
sometimes as wisdom, sometimes as God, sometimes as Reason,"
and he declared, "the opposite of Good does not exists."
While these doctrines may appear to contradict empirical
reality, he argued that, since non-being cannot exist
without becoming a species of being (i.e., no longer
"non-being"), and since the essence of Being is the Good,
the opposite of the Good cannot exist. His doctrinal heirs,
the Stoic logicians, inaugurated the most important school
of logic in antiquity other than Aristotle's peripatetics.
Euclides had three important pupils: Eubulides of
Miletus, Ichtyas – the second leader of the Megarian school
– and Thrasymachus of Corinth. This last one was the master
of Stilpo, who was the master of Zeno of Citium, the founder
of the stoic school.
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Archimedes
Archimedes Thoughtful by Fetti
born c. 290–280 bce, Syracuse, Sicily
[now in Italy]
died 212/211 bce, Syracuse
the
most famous mathematician and inventor
of ancient Greece. Archimedes is
especially important for his discovery
of the relation between the surface and
volume of a sphere and its
circumscribing cyclinder. He is known
for his formulation of a hydrostatic
principle (known as Archimedes’
principle) and a device for raising
water, still used in developing
countries, known as the Archimedes
screw.
His
life
Archimedes probably spent some time in
Egypt early in his career, but he
resided for most of his life in
Syracuse, the principal Greek city-state
in Sicily, where he was on intimate
terms with its king, Hieron II.
Archimedes published his works in the
form of correspondence with the
principal mathematicians of his time,
including the Alexandrian scholars Conon
of Samos and Eratosthenes of Cyrene. He
played an important role in the defense
of Syracuse against the siege laid by
the Romans in 213 bce by constructing
war machines so effective that they long
delayed the capture of the city. When
Syracuse eventually fell to the Roman
general Marcus Claudius Marcellus in the
autumn of 212 or spring of 211 bce,
Archimedes was killed in the sack of the
city.
Far
more details survive about the life of
Archimedes than about any other ancient
scientist, but they are largely
anecdotal, reflecting the impression
that his mechanical genius made on the
popular imagination. Thus, he is
credited with inventing the Archimedes
screw, and he is supposed to have made
two “spheres” that Marcellus took back
to Rome—one a star globe and the other a
device (the details of which are
uncertain) for mechanically representing
the motions of the Sun, the Moon, and
the planets. The story that he
determined the proportion of gold and
silver in a wreath made for Hieron by
weighing it in water is probably true,
but the version that has him leaping
from the bath in which he supposedly got
the idea and running naked through the
streets shouting “Heurēka!” (“I have
found it!”) is popular embellishment.
Equally apocryphal are the stories that
he used a huge array of mirrors to burn
the Roman ships besieging Syracuse; that
he said, “Give me a place to stand and I
will move the Earth”; and that a Roman
soldier killed him because he refused to
leave his mathematical diagrams—although
all are popular reflections of his real
interest in catoptrics (the branch of
optics dealing with the reflection of
light from mirrors, plane or curved),
mechanics, and pure mathematics.
According to Plutarch (c. 46–119 ce),
Archimedes had so low an opinion of the
kind of practical invention at which he
excelled and to which he owed his
contemporary fame that he left no
written work on such subjects. While it
is true that—apart from a dubious
reference to a treatise, “On
Sphere-Making”—all of his known works
were of a theoretical character, his
interest in mechanics nevertheless
deeply influenced his mathematical
thinking. Not only did he write works on
theoretical mechanics and hydrostatics,
but his treatise Method Concerning
Mechanical Theorems shows that he used
mechanical reasoning as a heuristic
device for the discovery of new
mathematical theorems.
His works
There are nine extant treatises by
Archimedes in Greek. The principal
results in On the Sphere and Cylinder
(in two books) are that the surface area
of any sphere of radius r is four times
that of its greatest circle (in modern
notation, S = 4πr2) and that the volume
of a sphere is two-thirds that of the
cylinder in which it is inscribed
(leading immediately to the formula for
the volume, V = 4/3πr3). Archimedes was
proud enough of the latter discovery to
leave instructions for his tomb to be
marked with a sphere inscribed in a
cylinder. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43
bce) found the tomb, overgrown with
vegetation, a century and a half after
Archimedes’ death.
Measurement of the Circle is a fragment
of a longer work in which π (pi), the
ratio of the circumference to the
diameter of a circle, is shown to lie
between the limits of 3 10/71 and 3 1/7.
Archimedes’ approach to determining π,
which consists of inscribing and
circumscribing regular polygons with a
large number of sides (see the
animation), was followed by everyone
until the development of infinite series
expansions in India during the 15th
century and in Europe during the 17th
century. This work also contains
accurate approximations (expressed as
ratios of integers) to the square roots
of 3 and several large numbers.
On
Conoids and Spheroids deals with
determining the volumes of the segments
of solids formed by the revolution of a
conic section (circle, ellipse,
parabola, or hyperbola) about its axis.
In modern terms, these are problems of
integration. (See calculus.) On Spirals
develops many properties of tangents to,
and areas associated with, the spiral of
Archimedes—i.e., the locus of a point
moving with uniform speed along a
straight line that itself is rotating
with uniform speed about a fixed point.
It was one of only a few curves beyond
the straight line and the conic sections
known in antiquity.
On the
Equilibrium of Planes (or Centres of
Gravity of Planes; in two books) is
mainly concerned with establishing the
centres of gravity of various
rectilinear plane figures and segments
of the parabola and the paraboloid. The
first book purports to establish the
“law of the lever” (magnitudes balance
at distances from the fulcrum in inverse
ratio to their weights), and it is
mainly on the basis of this treatise
that Archimedes has been called the
founder of theoretical mechanics. Much
of this book, however, is undoubtedly
not authentic, consisting as it does of
inept later additions or reworkings, and
it seems likely that the basic principle
of the law of the lever and—possibly—the
concept of the centre of gravity were
established on a mathematical basis by
scholars earlier than Archimedes. His
contribution was rather to extend these
concepts to conic sections.
Quadrature of the Parabola demonstrates,
first by “mechanical” means (as in
Method, discussed below) and then by
conventional geometric methods, that the
area of any segment of a parabola is 4/3
of the area of the triangle having the
same base and height as that segment.
This is, again, a problem in
integration.
The
Sand-Reckoner is a small treatise that
is a jeu d’esprit written for the
layman—it is addressed to Gelon, son of
Hieron—that nevertheless contains some
profoundly original mathematics. Its
object is to remedy the inadequacies of
the Greek numerical notation system by
showing how to express a huge number—the
number of grains of sand that it would
take to fill the whole of the universe.
What Archimedes does, in effect, is to
create a place-value system of notation,
with a base of 100,000,000. (This was
apparently a completely original idea,
since he had no knowledge of the
contemporary Babylonian place-value
system with base 60.) The work is also
of interest because it gives the most
detailed surviving description of the
heliocentric system of Aristarchus of
Samos (c. 310–230 bce) and because it
contains an account of an ingenious
procedure that Archimedes used to
determine the Sun’s apparent diameter by
observation with an instrument.
Method
Concerning Mechanical Theorems describes
a process of discovery in mathematics.
It is the sole surviving work from
antiquity, and one of the few from any
period, that deals with this topic. In
it Archimedes recounts how he used a
“mechanical” method to arrive at some of
his key discoveries, including the area
of a parabolic segment and the surface
area and volume of a sphere. The
technique consists of dividing each of
two figures into an infinite but equal
number of infinitesimally thin strips,
then “weighing” each corresponding pair
of these strips against each other on a
notional balance to obtain the ratio of
the two original figures. Archimedes
emphasizes that, though useful as a
heuristic method, this procedure does
not constitute a rigorous proof.
On
Floating Bodies (in two books) survives
only partly in Greek, the rest in
medieval Latin translation from the
Greek. It is the first known work on
hydrostatics, of which Archimedes is
recognized as the founder. Its purpose
is to determine the positions that
various solids will assume when floating
in a fluid, according to their form and
the variation in their specific
gravities. In the first book various
general principles are established,
notably what has come to be known as
Archimedes’ principle: a solid denser
than a fluid will, when immersed in that
fluid, be lighter by the weight of the
fluid it displaces. The second book is a
mathematical tour de force unmatched in
antiquity and rarely equaled since. In
it Archimedes determines the different
positions of stability that a right
paraboloid of revolution assumes when
floating in a fluid of greater specific
gravity, according to geometric and
hydrostatic variations.
Archimedes is known, from references of
later authors, to have written a number
of other works that have not survived.
Of particular interest are treatises on
catoptrics, in which he discussed, among
other things, the phenomenon of
refraction; on the 13 semiregular
(Archimedean) polyhedra (those bodies
bounded by regular polygons, not
necessarily all of the same type, that
can be inscribed in a sphere); and the
“Cattle Problem” (preserved in a Greek
epigram), which poses a problem in
indeterminate analysis, with eight
unknowns. In addition to these, there
survive several works in Arabic
translation ascribed to Archimedes that
cannot have been composed by him in
their present form, although they may
contain “Archimedean” elements. These
include a work on inscribing the regular
heptagon in a circle; a collection of
lemmas (propositions assumed to be true
that are used to prove a theorem) and a
book, On Touching Circles, both having
to do with elementary plane geometry;
and the Stomachion (parts of which also
survive in Greek), dealing with a square
divided into 14 pieces for a game or
puzzle.
Archimedes’ mathematical proofs and
presentation exhibit great boldness and
originality of thought on the one hand
and extreme rigour on the other, meeting
the highest standards of contemporary
geometry. While the Method shows that he
arrived at the formulas for the surface
area and volume of a sphere by
“mechanical” reasoning involving
infinitesimals, in his actual proofs of
the results in Sphere and Cylinder he
uses only the rigorous methods of
successive finite approximation that had
been invented by Eudoxus of Cnidus in
the 4th century bce. These methods, of
which Archimedes was a master, are the
standard procedure in all his works on
higher geometry that deal with proving
results about areas and volumes. Their
mathematical rigour stands in strong
contrast to the “proofs” of the first
practitioners of integral calculus in
the 17th century, when infinitesimals
were reintroduced into mathematics. Yet
Archimedes’ results are no less
impressive than theirs. The same freedom
from conventional ways of thinking is
apparent in the arithmetical field in
Sand-Reckoner, which shows a deep
understanding of the nature of the
numerical system.
In
antiquity Archimedes was also known as
an outstanding astronomer: his
observations of solstices were used by
Hipparchus (flourished c. 140 bce), the
foremost ancient astronomer. Very little
is known of this side of Archimedes’
activity, although Sand-Reckoner reveals
his keen astronomical interest and
practical observational ability. There
has, however, been handed down a set of
numbers attributed to him giving the
distances of the various heavenly bodies
from the Earth, which has been shown to
be based not on observed astronomical
data but on a “Pythagorean” theory
associating the spatial intervals
between the planets with musical
intervals. Surprising though it is to
find these metaphysical speculations in
the work of a practicing astronomer,
there is good reason to believe that
their attribution to Archimedes is
correct.
His influence
Given the magnitude and originality of
Archimedes’ achievement, the influence
of his mathematics in antiquity was
rather small. Those of his results that
could be simply expressed—such as the
formulas for the surface area and volume
of a sphere—became mathematical
commonplaces, and one of the bounds he
established for π, 22/7, was adopted as
the usual approximation to it in
antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, his mathematical work was
not continued or developed, as far as is
known, in any important way in ancient
times, despite his hope expressed in
Method that its publication would enable
others to make new discoveries. However,
when some of his treatises were
translated into Arabic in the late 8th
or 9th century, several mathematicians
of medieval Islam were inspired to equal
or improve on his achievements. This
holds particularly in the determination
of the volumes of solids of revolution,
but his influence is also evident in the
determination of centres of gravity and
in geometric construction problems.
Thus, several meritorious works by
medieval Islamic mathematicians were
inspired by their study of Archimedes.
The
greatest impact of Archimedes’ work on
later mathematicians came in the 16th
and 17th centuries with the printing of
texts derived from the Greek, and
eventually of the Greek text itself, the
Editio Princeps, in Basel in 1544. The
Latin translation of many of Archimedes’
works by Federico Commandino in 1558
contributed greatly to the spread of
knowledge of them, which was reflected
in the work of the foremost
mathematicians and physicists of the
time, including Johannes Kepler
(1571–1630) and Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642). David Rivault’s edition and
Latin translation (1615) of the complete
works, including the ancient
commentaries, was enormously influential
in the work of some of the best
mathematicians of the 17th century,
notably René Descartes (1596–1650) and
Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665). Without
the background of the rediscovered
ancient mathematicians, among whom
Archimedes was paramount, the
development of mathematics in Europe in
the century between 1550 and 1650 is
inconceivable. It is unfortunate that
Method remained unknown to both Arabic
and Renaissance mathematicians (it was
only rediscovered in the late 19th
century), for they might have fulfilled
Archimedes’ hope that the work would
prove useful in the discovery of
theorems.
Gerald J. Toomer
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Sextus Empiricus
Greek philosopher
flourished 3rd century
Main
ancient Greek philosopher-historian who produced the only
extant comprehensive account of Greek Skepticism in his
Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Against the Dogmatists.
As a major exponent of Pyrrhonistic “suspension of
judgment,” Sextus elaborated the 10 tropes of Aenesidemus
and attacked syllogistic proofs in every area of speculative
knowledge. Almost all details of his life are conjectural
except that he was a medical doctor and headed a Skeptical
school during the decline of Greek Skepticism. The
republication of his Hypotyposes in 1562 had far-reaching
effects on European philosophical thought. Indeed, much of
the philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries can be
interpreted in terms of diverse efforts to grapple with the
ancient Skeptical arguments handed down through Sextus.
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