Hello again, and welcome to our course on the ancient Greeks. We are going to be doing a lot of time travel, going back a couple of millennia. But before we do that, we should locate ourselves more firmly In the real world, the world where the Greeks themselves lived. And that world, was in the Mediterranean sea. This is a huge body of water, it extends 2400 miles from the west, at the Strait of Gibraltar, to the east at the Levant, that's about 3,800 kilometers. And from its widest expanse, north to south, it's almost 1,000 miles, or 1,600 kilometers. It's a vast, vast area. People had been talking about Mediterranean civilization, but recently this has come under question. Because we can't really be sure that, in a region this huge, there are any real things that hold them together, that hold the various societies together. So it's not that useful a concept. As we're talking, we will be going through the major events, as we've said, and the major personalities of the ancient Greeks and we'll also be looking at different ways we have come to understand them. Let's get a little bit more precise. Greece itself Is a peninsula, in the Southern Balkans. On one side, it has what is called the Aegean Sea. But it's worth remembering that Greek civilization was, from the very beginning, more expansive than just the mainland. It encompassed the islands, Crete, here to the south, the coast of Turkey, modern day Turkey which was then known as Ionia. They had settlements on the shores of the Black Sea and they had Greek communities as far as southern Italy and Sicily. What is Greece like in terms of it's climate? It's a Mediterranean climate, that we can say with some confidence. In other words, long, dry, hot summers, shorter, wetter winters, cooler winters. The geology is primarily limestone, with a lot of other minerals mixed in, especially marble. And the soil is generally fairly good, although very, very stony. We find numerous complaints in ancient Greek literature about how people were trying to plow rocks. The geography of Greece is, as I said, a peninsula, and it's cut almost in half by the gulf of Corinth here. As we'll see this north, south divide plays a great role in Greek history. Within Greece itself the landscape is fairly rugged, although none of the mountains are really huge, they're pretty impressive. Here's a lovely 19th century painting by Edward Dodwell, an English artist, of Mount Parnassus, which was the mythical home of the muses and historically the site of one of the most important Greek religious shrines, that of Delphi. We'll be coming back to that any number of times during our course. And here's a modern view of the same mountain. There are very few navigable rivers. What we have instead, is valleys separated by these mountains. It's hard to think of geography as destiny, but certainly one reason that Greek community organization took the form that it did, of relatively small compact, autonomous units called City-States or Polis, probably had a lot to do with the landscape. What was life like? A lot of it had to do with the sea. There is no area in Greece that is farther than some 80 kilometers from the sea. And the Greek coastline is shot through, is carved up I should say, with lots of these small bays and coves, perfect harbors for the ancient sailing ships. The Greeks were always sea peoples. When they weren't at sea, they farmed. And here we meet the famous Mediterranean triad, the three staple elements of the ancient Greek diet, olives, grapes, and grain. Olive trees are relatively hardy, they require some tending, but not too much. They yield one year off, one year on. You can plant other plants among them, like herbs and vegetables, and they can survive for hundreds of years. The olive was terribly important for the ancient Greeks. In myth it was Athena's gift of the olive tree to the Athenians that won her the position as their principal deity. Olives could be eaten for food, they could be cured in brine, and of course they could be pressed for oil, which was used both as a foodstuff and as a cosmetic, and even as a lighting source, because you can burn it in a lamp. In addition to olives, there are grapes. The Greek climate and the Greek landscape are hospitable to olives and vineyards. And the grape itself was, of course, used for wine. And this was under the special protection of the god Dionysus. I've mentioned already that the Greek landscape is very stony. In terms of the larger geography there are not very many big areas for cultivation, there's some up north, in the area of Macedon and Thessaly, some down south, around ancient Sparta. But mainly, Greek farming took place on small subsistence plots. Here we have a wonderful black figure painting from the Louvre, showing some people farming, it's actually plowing the land. Olives, and wine, and grain, wheat, barley, and some corn, these formed the staples, these were the bases of the Greek diet. It's also worth remembering, that from the beginning and throughout Greek history the society had an agricultural base. Even in the highly sophisticated urbanized Athens of the golden age, agriculture was the heart of the community. Looking at this wonderful pot then, also leads us to our next topic, which is how do we know about the events of the ancient past? Much of our evidence is in the form of physical remains, material culture as it's called. Archaeology is what we rely on for what we know about the earliest and indeed most of Greek civilization. Texts are relatively late, and we'll come to that in a little while. Bu when we're dealing with archaeology of course, we are dealing only with durable materials, only with those things that can survive a couple of millenia in the ground. I sometimes joke with my students about what they are wearing, what of what they have on would survive 2000 years in the ground, not much. Metal perhaps, plastics maybe, but everything else, things that we look to like cloth or leather, almost all gone. So what we have is durable remains like metal, like this wonderful pot handle. Sometimes, although this is rather elegant, it's completely functional, and sometimes of course they are magnificently decorative, like this gold diodin. But for our purposes the most important source of information is probably pottery. Pots are remarkably durable, they last for a very long time, unless you deliberately grind them up and destroy them, they'll just stay where they are. And even if they're broken up we can use them to trace developments by seeing what else appears alongside them within the layers of the ground. Then, as I said a moment ago, we do have some texts, and these are texts of all kinds. Some of them are official, documents on stone, inscriptions from various cities or even occasionally from individuals. Sometimes we, or later on, we have literary texts, which we can use for information. But no matter what we're using, what we always have to do is to find some way to weave all of these things together into a story, into a narrative. It requires interpretation and one of the things that we'll be talking about throughout this course is various ways that we interpret the evidence that we have. I like to think about this in a way that a great 19th century or early 20th century classical scholar Francis Cornford did. He said that the classics are like the sky, they're always the same, but always changing. Because, after all, the planets, the other, the stars, the solar system, the, oh, what am I trying to think of? The galaxies, remain pretty much the same, but our understanding of them changes and keeps changing and we keep re-interpreting them. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to put together a story about the ancient Greeks and the first place we're going to go is the island of Crete. And the great palace site at Knossos and that's where we're going to go to next.[BLANK_AUDIO]
