Dr. Vincent Piazza
Literature Part 1:
What is Humanities? It refers to the cultural creativity handed down from generation to generation. This human creativity was the product of responses to conditions on earth that confronted people for throughout history: their attempt to survive by achieving harmony with nature through their inventiveness and ingenuity.Humanities is an interdisciplinary course that uses context to describe the historical and cultural environment of several civilizations. This creative legacy is what our course will focus on: literature; history (in its literary evolution; philosophy, science; religion; music and the visual arts. The term culture – making wide use of it – refers to the sum total of all things – traditions, goods, symbols, religions – that people invented and transmitted.
The course is based on a theme: “A World as One:” a survey of the evolution of works of art, literature, philosophy, and history from prehistory to the early Nineteenth-Century, and how they bring different civilizations together. The course, being itself thematic, is based on the identification of those values that reveal similarities among different civilizations. You will form a thorough understanding of the interrelatednessof various modes of expression—from the arts to literature.
Example:
As one reads through the history of Western humanistic achievements, it is clear that certain products of human genius are looked to by subsequent generations as source of inspiration; they have a surplus meaning. Thus the Romans’ achievement in architecture with the dome of the Pantheon both symbolized their skill in architecture and became a reference point for every major dome built in the west since. The dome of the Pantheon finds echoes in the 6th C. dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople; in Jerusalem in the 7thC. (Muslim, the Dome of the Rock) in 15th C. Florence (the Duomo of Brunelleschi); in 16th C. Rome (St. Peter’s Basilica); and in 18th C. Washington DC (the Capitol)…etc. Our objective is to understand how the dome in itself was interpreted by different civilizations, the differences and similarities in its function, whether structural or social-political-religious.
Overview of Mesopotamian history: The Epics of Gilgamesh
The Region: The Middle East has had an enormous impact on our lives: it was the birth place of Western Civilization. Among the earliest inventions in this part of the world – starting in 4500BC - was metallurgy, sailboats, the wheel, the potter’s wheel, the plow, mathematics, standardization of weights, urbanization, and measurements, and above all, writing. This happened between 4500 and 3000BC when people began to cultivate a broad curve of land that stretched from the Persian Gulf to the shores of the Mediterranean. This arc, the Fertile Crescent, has been called the cradle of civilization. The ancient Greeks called this region“Mesopotamia”, or land between rivers, emphasizing the importance of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, giving life to the area. The earliest cities in the world were located in the southern part of Mesopotamia. (see map, pg. 8, fg. 1.2)
Life in ancient Mesopotamia was harsh but manageable. Summer temperatures reached a sweltering 120 degrees, and the region received a meager average rainfall per year. Yet the slow running Euphrates created a vast marshland that stayed muddy and wet even during dry season. The rivers, at time evil and unpredictable, provided these ancient civilizations with the “fuel” needed to run ordinary life; from irrigation water, to reeds for the production of baskets, and mud turned into bricks and pottery.
The cultures of Mesopotamia reveals a succession of different peoples, each with their own language, religion, and customs, producing a variety of achievements. This makes it difficult to generalize about Mesopotamian culture, making it even more difficult when we look at people bordering the limits of Mesopotamia that will conquer this area in the near future: Hittites and Assyrians.
A statuette representing a Sumerian scribe, which occupied a high status in Mesopotamian society. Marble.
Furthermore, the history can be divided into two major periods: the Sumerian (3500-2350BC), and the Semitic(2350-612BC). The Sumerian and Semitic people differed in their racial origins and languages; the term Semitic is derived from the name Shem, one of the sons of Noah, and is generally used to refer to people speaking a Semitic language (i.e. Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Hebrews. In about 3000BC, aclimatic change occurred that forced the southern Mesopotamians to alter their way of life. As they did so, they created a more complex society that we call Sumerian – the earliest civilization. The rivers no longer flooded as much of the land as before: people were now forced to use ingenuity that, together with mathematics and calendars, led them to introduce modern irrigation and urbanization. Therefore, it is in Mesopotamia (land between two rivers), that the earliest Bronze Era Civilization appeared.
Religion in ancient Mesopotamia: Sumerians were a highly animist people, meaning that their environment “stamped” their cultural and religious values. Religiously speaking they were polytheist, believing in a myriad of Gods all associated with nature (see chart). By looking at the figure below, a terra cotta painted plaque, we understand that their God and Goddesses were anthropomorphic, half human and half animal. Their approach towards their Gods, however, was quite pessimistic, maybe caused by their natural surroundings.
Sumerian Goddess, Ishtar, goddess of fertility and war. Terra cotta plaque, 1800 BC. Note the wings, bird's talons, and honred helmet.
The area of Sumer was subject to fierce climatic changes, such as long periods of draught, unpredictable flooding of both rivers, and the absence of hills or natural barriers for protection against wind and invaders. In simple terms, the men and women of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley believed that all parts of the natural world were invested with the will of their deities. For example, if a river flooded, the event was interpreted as an act of the Gods. People also viewed intercity warfare as a clash between each city’s God. Furthermore, people viewed themselves as slaves of the Gods and provided the deities with everything they needed – from sacrifices to incense to music – to try to keep order in their uncertain world. (see chart of Gods pg. 19)
Example: We look at the Cylinder Seal of Adda, 2200BC (greenstone, sculpted in
Cylinder Seal of Akkad. Greenstone, 2200BC.
relief): The Gods can be recognized by the pointed hats with multiple horns. The figure with two wings standing on a mountain is Ishtar, Goddess of love and War.
Weapons rise from her shoulders and she holds a bunch of figs, symbol of fertility. Beneath her, cutting his way through the mountain so that he can rise at dawn is, is the sun God, Shamash. Standing with his right foot on them mountain, with streams of fish and water flowing from his shoulder is Ea, god of water and wisdom.
To the Mesopotamians, human society was merely part of a larger society of the universe governed by the Gods: Anu, father of the Gods, represents the authority, which the Mesopotamian ruler emulates as a lawmaker. Enlil, God of wind, earth, and fire, represents forced, which the ruler emulates in his role of military leader. Equally revealing are the God of agriculture, Belitili subject to Anu, while Ishtar is subject to Enlil (ruled by his breezes in case of love), and to storm (in case of war).
Epic of Gilgamesh: The Sumerians contributed to the world’s first forms of adventurous literature; epic poetry, a long and detailed poem that recounts the deeds, adventures and values of a hero that reflects the magnitude of a civilization. Perhaps, most important, the epic illuminates the development of a nation or a race. The scope of an epic is large. The supernatural world of Gods and Goddesses usually plays a role in the story, as do battles in which heroes demonstrate their strength and courage. Epics are often compilations of preexisting myths and tales handed down from one generation to the other, often orally, and finally unified as a whole by the epic poet.
Sculpted low relief of Gilgamesh
Specifically, the celebrated local hero of Gilgamesh and his marvelous exploits of this individual believed to be 1/3 human and 2/3 divine (formed by the God Shamash and Adad. Gilgamesh might have originally been the4th king of the city of Uruk (builder also of its massive walls), and according to myth, it was written by Gilgamesh himself and placed on the walls of the city for all to see. It’s written in Akkadian cuneiform, 2,900 lines, and ranks as the first epic in the world. In this epic, Gilgamesh is gifted with beauty and strength and in the beginning, it depicts him as a violent tyrant, oppressor of people, until the Gods create a rival, Enkidu, to challenge the king. Born in the wild forests, he represents nature, while Gilgamesh civilization: Enkidu is Gilgamesh’s opposite. Enkidu will lose his “animal innocence”, wrestled Gilgamesh, it ends in a draw. The two become inseparable friends.
Tragedy strikes when the Goddess Ishtar, in love with Gilgamesh, proposes to marry him. The hero, however, spurns her away, accusing her of treachery with other mortals, and she sends the Bull of Heaven to destroy him. Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay the bull, but they cannot avoid the wrath of the Gods. Enkidu is chosen to die, attended by his friend which remains terrified.
Dismayed at the prospect of his own mortality, Gilgamesh embarks in a journey to find the secret of immortality from the only mortal known to have attained it: it’s Utnapishtam which narrates to the hero how he had been chosen by the god Ea to save human kind after the gods led by Enlil send a devastating deluge on earth, to destroy their own creation, man, which had become rebellious and noisy. In fact, many similarities to the biblical accounts of Noah and the great ark can be found in this Epic. Ultimately, Utnapishtam reveals to Gilgamesh the place where he can find the elixir “the potion that turns old men young again”, under water, Gilgamesh retrieves it, but at the end of the epic, he falls asleep close to a well, where a snake snatches the potion – maybe symbolizing the demon – eats it and sheds its skin, a symbolic reference to rebirth and regeneration. The message is clear, kings, however mighty and heroic must recognize their own, very human limitations and their own powerlessness in the face of the ultimate known, death.
The epic of Gilgamesh exemplifies the human need for immortality ideology. It’s the first clear example about a mankind’s struggle against the fear of death, and remains one of the greatest masterpieces of world literature. Furthermore, in the course of his adventures, Gilgamesh becomes the first in using “modern technologies.” He digs an oasis in the desert, cuts the cedar trees of mount Lebanon, invents new techniques to kill an enormous bull, rides sailing crafts capable of navigating oceans, and dives for coral with special “scuba” equipment. Gilgamesh is also the most unconventional of Sumerian kings. In his misery he spurns and ignores the Gods instead of seeking for their advice; he praises his own achievements not those of the Gods, showing enormous vanity; doesn’t accept the proper duty of a man, that is, to live fully his life because he is mortal.
Why the Deluge? According to Sumerian myth man was created immortal, but the gods didn’t program the fact that men multiply rapidly, and became rebellious. It was Enlil that has the idea to get rid of them; he sends a plague, then famine, then draught, as well as imposing infertility to females, but nothing seems to work, not even the deluge! The God Ea, always saves a few specimens for the continuation of humanity. At the end a compromise is reached, Enlil takes immortality away from men.
Marduk, sun god of Babylon, with his thunderbolts pursues Anzu after Anzu stole the Tablets of Destiny.
The great harp of Ur (see picture below), dates back to 2600BC, might have been used to adorn the chanting of this epic. It’s decorated with a bull’s head and the harmonic case is fronted by a panel of narrative scenes. They are composed with lapis lazuli and gold leaf over a wood core. They are related to events from the Epic of Gilgamesh. On the bottom, a goat holding two cups attends the scorpion king. Above a donkey is playing a bull-headed harp held by a bear. On the third level, animals carry foods and drink for a feast. On the top,Gilgamesh himself, with long hair, naked, holds two human-headed bulls by the shoulders. Such magnificent musical instrument indicate that music was important in Mesopotamian society.
We can understand that neither the Sumerians nor their eventual conquerors envisioned an attractive afterlife.They believed that the spirits of the dead went to a shadowy, disagreeable place from where they might occasionally affect the living, usually for ill. Sumerians’ only hope for happiness lay in the present life, and that happiness hinged on capricious Gods who cared little for humans. Did they trust their Gods? No. Did they worship them? They were forced to.
Excerpt from the Epic of Gilgamesh: See Excerpts – Gilgamesh
Overview of Greek culture: Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey:
The civilization of Egypt and Babylon in Mesopotamia, sketch the role to a new civilization, that of the Aegean area, the great Greek world. This ancient civilization called itself Hellas, and its people were known asHellenics (the name Greece derives from the Latin Graecus, a common name given by the early Latin Romans to the first Hellenes that colonized southern Italy and Sicily, it means “grain growers”).
The title “Classical Legacy” seems appropriate for our studies regarding these people. The term Classic is still widely used today – deriving from the Latin “classis” (which actually means specific soldiers or marines!), to identify something that is perfect and long lasting, let’s say, enduring in time (i.e., a classic vehicle, like a 1969 Ferrari Daytona!). To the civilization of Greece – and later that of Rome – the West owes much of its cultural expressions, in almost every field: Literature (from drama to prose and poetry); philosophy and scientific knowledge; Civil Law and Politics; the Visual Arts in their entirety, including musical composition.
Erection, mount Acropolis, Athens, Greece.
Make no mistake, every civilization – not only the West – has experienced a Classical Era that determined the culture and particularities of a people, transmitted for centuries. Greece lived its Golden Classical Age between 500 to 323 BC, and when the Romans came in contact with the Greeks, this gave way to a ClassicalGreco-Roman Culture, since the Romans are to be considered in their arts and civil institutions Hellenistic, “Greek Like”. China as well lived its Classical Era during the Han Empire between 200 BC to 200 AD, and India flourished in Classical values under the Buddhist Gupta Monarchs between 330-550 AD. It is important in this part of our studies to familiarize with chapters 2 and 3 in the text, to understand the evolution of the Classical style and distinguish between the Hellenic Era, the Hellenistic Era, and the Roman Era.
The Greeks, in fact, are the first ancient civilization with which modern society feels an immediate affinity with. We recognize them as reflective people, questioning the human condition, producing their philosophical thought as well as their speculative interpretation of nature. They were interested in the new – Science – as well as very respectful for the old. Their literature, one of the richest the world has ever seen, shows a great interest for history and human creativity. Their religion – polytheism – although highly influence by the near eastern civilizations, was far less indoctrinated and lacking an ecclesiastical organization: in Greece, an institution like the Church (with its body of liturgy), never existed, and therefore there was no heresy. However, they believed in their Gods with such intensity, but also sarcasm and humor, and with such human features, that it made their deities partners of every day events.
Politically, we may look at the Greeks as the fathers of Democracy, that is, a government for and by the people (Demo/people; Cracy/Power), where people, not state representatives, rule and legislate. At times, they found it best to be rule by an Oligarchy, a government of the few, they were composed by several Aristocratic families linked together in strategic intermarriages. At other time, they accepted the rule of a single almighty individual, the Tyrant.
Can we relate to the Greeks? As the Romantic English poet Shelley says, “we are all Greek!” (see Handouts & Videos / A- Shelley and Athens). Not only did they influence the rise of the West, but today it is a question of possessing Greek culture, costume, Greek language, and the analytical way of thinking, that make us all part of Hellas. No other civilization in the world showed such a deep concern and interest for the beauty and high quality of life like the Greeks: they are truly the first Humanists. And by viewing Map 2.1 on pg. 32, we understand that the Greeks practiced colonization, from the Black Sea to Southern Italy, and that each new colony became an independent city state, spreading those cultural values throughout the Mediterranean.
This is evident in their arts: the arts of the western world are still dominated by the arts of the Greeks. They demonstrated a remarkable, phenomenal, artistic development. The Greeks are the first civilization to rapidly evolve from virtual, abstract, symbolic art, to realism. In the early sixth C BC Greek artists were creating exact replicas of human beings, with the same skill of poets and philosophers that were determining human virtue!The human body for the Greeks became a common mathematical point of reference for measuring the entire universe. With the Greeks, idealism gives way to realism, and realism is based on classical concepts such asproportion, harmony and balance, and they applied these principles in every field of human creativity; sculpture, architecture, decorative vessels, paintings, mosaics, city-planning and designing; as well as in the way they governed. Protagoras, leading figure of the Sophist movement in Athens.
Curiosity: The Greek philosopher, member of the Sophist movement, Protagoras (485-410 BC), coined the famous Greek Dictum: Man is the measure of all things.” Leonardo’s study on the proportion of the human body, known as Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, is based the Hellenic philosopher’s reasoning. By this, Protagoras meant that each individual human, not the Gods, not some divine or all-encompassing force, defines reality. All sensory appearances and all beliefs are true for the person whose appearance of belief they are. The Sophists (see pg. 101 in our text,. believed that there are two sides to every argument. Protagoras’s attitude about the gods is typical skepticism: “I do not know that they exist or that they do not exist.”
Mycenaeans and the heroic age:
It is also true that the Aegean people remained behind the artistic and economical advances of the people of the Levant throughout greater part of the Bronze Age, as the great German archeologist of the late 19th CHeinrich Schliemann says, following his discovery of Troy. Only in the second half of the second millennium did they come in contact with the cultures of the Middle East. Who were, hence, the early Greeks (or proto-Greeks)? Some say the Minoans, the inhabitants of the island of Crete 2000-1400BC. Others say theMycenaean, the inhabitants of southern Greece – 1600-1400BC – both were distinctively different civilizations, however, both will transmit cultural tracts that will produce the world of Hellas. Both are “proto-Greeks.”
The Mycenaean instead were a militant warlike people occupying the southern portion of Greece. They stored great wealth in the agricultural field, and they excelled in the arts; decorative vessels, metallurgy (weaponry and jewelry), and architecture. They constructed heavily fortified citadels with massive walls. The one’s of their capital, Mycenae (Fig2.5, pg. 32) are so big that is was believed that they had been built by mythical giants known as Cyclops. Mycenaean were master stone masons, those in the picture are composed by 6 ton stones perfectly cut rising to 25’; the key stone above the entrance shows two lions and central engaged column about 9.5’ tall. The ancient city of Mycenae, which gave its name to the larger Mycenaean culture, was discovered by the German archeologist Heinrich Schleimann in the late 19th C., before Evans discovered Knossos.
We also know that these early Greeks built warships to challenge other traders in the eastern Mediterranean and practiced international piracy. Above all, the Mycenaean led the ancient Greeks in a long, vicious, bloody war against the mightiest commercial stronghold in Asia Minor, Troy (Ilion) from 1250-1240. Latest archeological investigations in 1870 of Schleimann, found nine Troys, one on top the other, the sixth one coincides with these dates, and shows massive destruction. The Trojan Wars provided the historical matter and cultural values for the two great epic poems on Ancient Greece, the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as providing those heroic values so highly cherished by the future Greeks. Fig. 2.6, pg. 33, illustrates the Golden Mask of King Agamemnon, conqueror of Troy. This object of part of a series of pieces of artwork found in the king’s tomb in 1876 by Schliemann. His discovery was the richest archeological discovery until the finding of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. Schliemann demonstrates that the Mycenaean built beehive-like underground tombs that were fit for Pharaohs, inside there was a collection of weapons, armor, urns, vessels, and jewelry. The architectural form used by the Mycenaean to build their tombs is known as the “Tholos”: a round building often called a bee-hive shape. This tomb is known also as the Treasury of Atreus. An open air passage (115’ long, 20’ wide), leads to a 16’ high door. Over the door is a relieving triangle, designed to relieve some of the weight the lintel has to bear. All in all, the Tholos of this structure – with its 43’ in height, and its 47’ in diameter remained the largest uninterrupted space in Europe until the Pantheon was built in Rome.
Note: The dome of the tomb is an example of corbelled construction: As the roof’s squared stones curve inward toward the top, they were buttressed, or supported, on the outside by earth. Because of the conical shape of such burial chambers, they are known as beehive tombs.
See also ctrl + click, HYPERLINK "http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/864/20213145.JPG" Tomb of Agamemnon; and ctrl + click, HYPERLINK "http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Treasury_of_Atreus.html"Pictures of Tomb
The fall of the Mycenaean – by hands of the northern Dorian – Greek conquerors, opened an era known as the Dark Ages, between 1200-800 BC.
The Heroic Age (1200-750 BC):
The period after the fall of Mycenae is called the Dark Ages (which extended from 1100 BC to 800 BC), because with the loss of writing, we have no texts to illuminate the life during this time of chaos and civil strife. For three centuries life went on in the small villages, and people told tales that preserved their values. At the end of the Dark ages, a very eloquent, charismatic, blind poet, Homer, recorded some of these oral tales. Homer was most likely a bard, a singer of songs about the deeds of heroes and the ways of the Gods. His stories were part of a long-standing oral rendition that dated back to the time of the Trojan Wars, which we believe occurred between 1800-1300 BC. The details he included offered glimpses into life during the previous three centuries. For example, Homer’s descriptions of the cremation of the dead, which had not been practiced in Mycenaean civilization, suggest that cremation was developed after the fall of the early Greeks.
The earliest Greek literature preserved a series of values that define what scholars call a heroic society, in which individuals seek fame through great deeds and advocate values such as honor, reputation, and prowess. A hero is a legendary figure that is admired for his qualities.
The most influential Greek poet, Homer, valued this tradition. Homer’s two greatest epics were the Iliad, the tale that narrates the final days before the fall of Troy by hands of the Achaeans.
Achilles fighting Hector, Attic amphora, black figure type, 5th C. BC
The war lasted 10 years, which according to Homer, began when the early Greeks launched a large fleet of ships under Agamemnon’s command to bring back Helen, the wife of his brother King Menelaus of Sparta, who had eloped with Paris, son of King Priam of Troy. It is a tale of heroic gestures, values, achievements but also shortcomings; heroes like Antilochus, Automedon, Alcinus, Odysseus and Ajax for the Greeks, Hector, Serpidom and Aeneas for the Trojans: It’s actually a tale of the greatest of all, Achilles, and his heroic scalewrath and rage. And the Odyssey, the story of the Greek warrior Odysseus’s 10-year travels to return home from Troy. The Iliad became a seminal text for later ancient Greeks – schoolchildren and adults never tired of this tale of heroic deeds that captured details from Homer’s times and preserved many Mycenaean values. Both epics became national poetry, uniting the Greek speaking people.
Note: Homer might have been inspired in creating the protagonist of the Iliad, Achilles, from the Epics of Gilgamesh. Achilles like Gilgamesh is half God and half man (the child of Thetis – a sea nymph, and the king of Thessalia, Peleus: remember how his mother dips him in the Styx river up to his ankle? Achilles’ heel, doesn’t it remind us of something?). Both heroes are beautiful, warriors, and invincible. Both heroes lose an important friend that ignites the theme of both epics (Achilles loses Patroclus; Gilgamesh loses Enkidu). However, differently from the Mesopotamian epic, Homer gives voice to the quest of individual glory and honor, Gilgamesh’s main theme is the pursuit of eternal life. Furthermore, the quest for immortality is quite different between the two epics: in the Iliad Achilles makes it clear, after having defeated Hector that he knows that he will die, but his main objective is that of living for ever in poetic memory. As a protagonist he is certainly more human than Gilgamesh; Achilles is a complex character, he suffers and rejoices, and shows anger, love, rage and grief. In book 9 of the Iliad Achilles remarks; “My mother Thetis Silver foot says, that two different fates are carrying me on the road to death. If I stay here and fight before the city of Troy, there will be no homecoming for me but my fame shall never die. If I go home to my native land, there will be no great fame for me, but I shall live long and not die an early death.”
And finally, it’s clear, Achilles is searching for virtue over life’s temporary enjoyment. In fact, the highest virtue for Homer (and subsequent Greeks) was arête – manliness, courage, and excellence. Arete was best revealed in a contest, whether sporting, warfare, or activities extending into many other areas of life and recreation. In fact, the ancient Greeks believed that striving for individual supremacy enhanced one’s family honor, and the hero’s name would live in poetic memory.
Thetis, goddess of the Sea, dipping Achilles in the river Styx. Marble copy.
Such beliefs and values helped to fuel the greatness of ancient Greece. However, such striving for excellence – heroism – was not always beneficial. At times it created a self-centered competitiveness that caused much suffering – just as Achilles’ heroic scale rage was said to have caused his companion’s death (see excerpts Iliad, Book 18, lines 1-42). Harboring such intense competitive spirit, Greeks also held a deep disregard for all cultures other than their own. Greeks distinguished themselves from barbarians who spoke other languages.
Why is Achilles mad? And what lessons can we learn from Homer’s main hero?: Undoubtedly, the main subject of the Iliad is the anger of Achilles. Right after his first victorious battles, Achilles takes possession of a beautiful maiden of the temple of Apollo, Briseis. Agamemnon, maybe jealous, takes her from Achilles, at this moment, fuming over the king’s insult, Achilles sits out of the battle. Only after the death of Patroclus, by hands of Hector – the latter could not have known that under Achilles’ armor was Patroclus – Achilles redirects his rage against the Trojan warrior, which he meets in battle and kills, in front of Hector’s wife,Andromeda (a very catching moment of the epic!). He then ties the body to his chariot and drags it to his tent.The act is pure sacrilege, a violation of the dignity to the great Trojan warrior and an insult to his memory. Late that night – please note this in your reading – Prima, King of Troy, steals across enemy limes to Achilles’ tent and begs for the body of his son. It is now that those Heroic Greek values, are embodied by Achilles. Not only does he give the body back to Priam, cleaned, oiled and dressed, but in his encounter with the king of Troy, Achilles at last recognizes and accepts the tragic nature of life and the inevitability of death. The message of the Iliad is clear. We must be prepared to answer for the results of our actions and realize that when we act wrongly (as Achilles did in the beginning) we will cause suffering both for ourselves, and more important, for the ones we love.
Fact: Homer clearly recognizes the ability of these warriors to exceed their mere humanity, to raise themselves not only to a level of great military achievement, but to a state of compassion, nobility, and honor.It is this exploration of the “doubleness” of the human spirit, its cruelty and its humanity, its blindness and its insight, that perhaps best defines the power and vision of the Homeric epic.
Ajax, on the left, attacks Hector. Attic plate, black figure type.
The grammatical structure of the Iliad is innovative, giving way to a “Homeric” language. Homer uses similesto describe human emotion (anger “blinds like smoke”); epithets (nicknames – the bronze-armed Acheans – to identify the Greeks); and catalogs (detailed description of individuals or objects). And yes, if you read one of the two texts, you will find repetition to be almost absurd of these grammatical constructions (i.e. Athena “the gray-eyed Goddess”, is repeated 130 times in the Odyssey). Why? Maybe because he was blind, and therefore never wrote anything, it facilitated memory, the Iliad and the Odyssey are products of an oral tradition of transmission. Among the most renown epithets, “the swift-footed” (Achilles); “the cunning sailor” (Odysseus); “the tamer of horses” (Hector); “the cloud-gatherer (Zeus); “the earth shaker” (Poseidon). What about the Gods, since I just mentioned a few? Aren’t they involved in the Trojan war? Didn’t they start this war? Aren’t they divided into groups, one supporting the early Greeks, others the Trojans? For extra credit,make a list of which main gods are supporting the Greeks (and why!), and which gods are supporting the Trojans (and why?).
In the Iliad, the Gods are not at the center of the Homeric universe, rather, human beings are capable ofdetermining their own destiny through their own actions. For the Greeks, if humans are not able to know when they will die, they are at least free to choose the way they will live. The Gods are present in the two epics but they act as a kind of divine umpire: they observe the action of men, they comment and criticize human activity,they also intervene but to the extent that they will not change the course of history. This differs much from theJudeo-Christian principle of viewing every event as wanted by the divine will of the gods and not through human action. Zeus, in fact, in the Iliad, makes us understand through tis excerpt how Gods do not determine the course of destiny and how ignorant are humans to believe so.
Penelope meets Odysseus after 20 years. Attic Amphora
Out of the two epics, the most read is by far the Odyssey, whose protagonist, Odysseus (also known as Ulysses), is the true victor over Troy after the death of Achilles, and architect of the “famous horse” still today present in our language and metaphorical description of situations. Following Achilles’ death, the Gods chose Odysseus as the champion and honoring him with the weapons and armor of Achilles, not Ajax, the latter will commit suicide. Odysseus accepts, but refuses to join – under Poseidon’s invitation – the gods above, and longs to return home: punished by Poseidon, in his voyage to Ithaca, of which he was king, he is literally absorbed by the sea together with his men for more than 10 years. Many of the themes of Homer’s 24 books composing the Odyssey are embedded in our daily lives, adventures and protagonist that are quite common among many toady, and therefore classic. His encounters with monsters (Scylla and Caribi!), giants (the Cyclopes!), and seductive enchanters such as Maga Circe and a sojourn on a floating island for 7 years under the spell of the beautiful Calypso, without forgetting the Lotus Eaters and the mermaids…have all become indelible in Western tradition. The main subject, however, of Homer’s epic is Odysseus’s passionate desire to once more see his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachos after 20 years: most of all, to witness Penelope’s fidelity to him. Where anger and lust drive the Iliad – remember Achilles angry sulk and Helen’s fickleness – love and familial affection drive the Odyssey. Penelope is also gifted with arête!
In her own right, yes, since for 20 years of her husband’s absence she uses all the cunning in her power – weaving and undoing Laertes' shroud– to ward off the suitors who flock to marry her, convinced that Odysseus in never coming home. Finally, the Iliad and the Odyssey laid out the individual values and responsibilities that all Greeks understood to be their personal obligations and duties if the state were ever to realize its goal.
Excerpt from the Iliad: See Excerpts – The Iliad
Overview of Roman history: Vergil, the Aeneid; Ovid, Metamorphosis
Welcome to Rome, or better, Roma! I come from Rome, and lived there for 34 years. In this Lecture I will try to delineate the qualities, the virtues and organization of this civilization that embraced the civilized world. It made this world one, just imagine that by the 1 C. AD, the Latin were actually a minority, the world had gained roman citizenship! To cover the artistic and historical development of this people would be impossible in 10 to 20 pages, however, there as some legacies in the field of politics, architecture, literature, and more, that combined with the passed Hellenic world, have been transmitted to future generations, and are a landmark in the rise of the West: we call this a Greco-
The Roman Forum is a rectangular forum (plaza) surrounded by the ruins of several important ancient government buildings at the center of the city of Rome. Citizens of the ancient city referred to this space, originally a marketplace, as the Forum Magnum, or simply the Forum. It was for centuries the center of Roman public life.
Roman culture, hence, the Romans were by all means Hellenistic (Greek like). As the great English HistorianEdward Gibbon narrates in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “the laws and manners [of the Romans] had gradually cemented the union of the provinces”. What Alexander couldn’t do for the West, Rome did. (see map 3.1in text, pg. 67 )
The Periods of Rome:
1- Empire: Many of us think of Rome only as the Empire, that is, the Rome of the Emperors, which starts actually with Emperor Augustus in 27 BC and last for centuries there after;
2- Republic: Before the Empire, Rome was a Republic (Res Publica), which means “commonwealth” or “public business”: a government controlled by adult male citizens organized in public assemblies. The date of the foundation of the Republic is 509 BC;
3- Monarchy: Before the Republic comes the Regal period – the Monarchy – when Rome was governed by a kingship. The traditional date of the foundation of Rome is 753 BC, founded by Romulus, which is accepted as the first of seven kings of Rome.
Geography: See Map in text pg. . As we can see, Rome was located in a site uniquely adapted to the growth of the city, and a major factor for becoming the dominant power in Italy. The region of Rome is known asLatium. Rome is also characterized by seven hills
Traditional symbol of Rome, the “she wolf”, suckling the twins, Romulus & Remus (bronze cast)
ranging from 200’ to 700’ above the water level, rising on the eastern banks of the Tiber river. The most important is the Capitoline (from where our modern term capitol derives from). Eventually, Rome became Italy’s largest river port as Phoenician, Etruscan, and Greek merchants took advantage of its ideal location for trade. And finally, the proximity of the hills facilitated the fusion of several communities into a single state.
Who influenced the Roman – Latin?
Out of the many, there are three civilizations.
1- the Phoenicians, responsible for transmitting their trading and commercial capabilities to the Latin in Central Italy (Phoenicians had colonized parts of Sicily and Sardinia);
2- the Greeks, absolutely! Greek influence form Magna Grecia (Southern Italy), affected the Romans even before they conquered Greece itself? In the arts, architecture, philosophy, the Romans found much of their inspiration in Greek models. In the field of literature and drama, the Greeks supplied the form, the spirit, the character, and also the alphabet. The Greeks were present in southern Italy with city-states such as Naples and Cumae, in constant contact with the people of the seven hills. From Greece there came the entire collection of Olympic gods, some of them blended with existing Roman deities, others simply had their names changed (Zeus became Jupiter; Hera became Juno, etc.). as the Greeks, the Romans fought in ranks;
3- the Etruscans, among many, their impact was the most tangible on the early Latin people. A mysterious people, many coming from central Asia, they poured into Italy in 1000 BC, giving way to the Villa Nova Era. They established colonies throughout the peninsula, however, a greater part settled in Etruria (present day Tuscany). They all shared a common language, they spoke non-Indo-European language, and although their alphabet is that of the Greeks, the letters are placed in such a way that Etruscan writing cannot be deciphered. Most of, in a period when most peninsular people experience primitive village life, Etruscans were building large elaborate city states – with avenues, intersections and sumptuous monuments and building – at the peak of the process, Etruscans were confederated into a league of 12 city states.
Etruscan bronze cast officer helemt 7th C. BC.
To the Romans, therefore, they transmitted the knowledge of urban-city planning projects. Tuscany is renown not only for fertile arable lands, but also rich with mineral resources. In fact, the Etruscans were renown formanufacturing and exporting some of the most beautiful metal products in the Mediterranean – whether in Gold, iron, or bronze – from helmets to chariots, urns to jewelry, as well as house hold items and weapons. Below are examples of metallurgy.
Close to their cities, they built cities for the dead, the renown Etruscan Necropolis. Many are present today in Tuscany and Northern Latium, and they clearly give us an idea that their idea of death and the afterlife was similar to that of the Egyptians. An Etruscan necropolis is open to visitors, with avenues and intersections, and most of all, tombs that resemble temples or homes, with open doors and windows (see below);
Inside these tombs we find everything that is necessary for a pleasurable journey to the after life: frescoed walls, jewelry, pottery, furniture, weapons, and foods: most important, we find a remarkable and original piece of Etruscan artwork that will be adopted by the Romans and the Christians thereafter, the EtruscanSarcophagus.
Etruscan Necropolis – Cerveteri, Italy.
A Greek term meaning “flesh eating”, the sarcophagus is a stone or terra cotta coffin with carved representations of the deceased on top, usually showing affection and livelihood, relaxing on a comfortable piece of furniture (often husband and wife were placed in the same sarcophagus, lavishly dressed), see figure below. Below, I have included other models, meaning that there was a rich market of Sarcophagus manufacturers. Most important, Etruscans followed the Greek Archaic style in their sculpted representations and they were all brilliantly painted. Most remarkable of all, is that like the Egyptians, the Etruscans elegantly painted the walls of their burial chambers with sumptuous frescoes, indicating they joyful, cultured lives, and practicing symposiums as this picture demonstrates.
Etruscan Sarcophagus
And finally, the Etruscan contribution to future Roman architectural feats is noticeable, by introducing the Arch.An element that will permit the Romans to improve and bring their structures to striking dimensions and heights. Stronger than the post-lintel system, the arch simply distributes the weight towards the sides and into the ground through he piers. It does this thanks to the lock stone on top – the voussoirs - (see Handouts, Etruscan Arch). If the Romans adopted so much from the Etruscans, it is also because – and mainly – the last three kings of Rome were Etruscan.
Roman Literature:
Roman Literature: The contribution of the Romans in this field is immense, from philosophy, to lyrical poetry, from prose to satire. In their style and form yes, they were Hellenistic. Wars on Greek main land and in Hellenistic kingdoms exposed the Romans to these classical ideals. This blending of Romanism and Hellenism gave way to the Greco-Roman classical culture, that spreads throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. To speak, read, and intellectually reason like a Greek was paramount for a Roman man. Even Cato the Elder, a Roman senator that despised the Greeks, took the trouble of learning Greek! As the great Latin poet Horace said; “Greece, though conquered by the Romans took their fierce conquerors captive, and brought in the arts to the uncivilized Latin peoples”. In fact, many of the earliest and most impressive Latin writers were not Roman natives.
Ovid (43BC-17AD): Second of the three great Augustan poets (and my favorite!), he gave birth to a new genre; Narrative poetry, being an unrivaled master, and one of Augustus’s circle of humanists. His first compositions were erotic in context, including Amores (Love Affairs) and a sex or love manual known as Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love); a satire that offers glimpses of everyday life, but also showing how female lust is dangerous for republican values. Ovid married three times and was a master of seduction, this truly disturbed the moralizing values of the emperor. A couplet form Amores reads “Offered a sexless heaven, I’d say no thank you, women are such sweet hell.” These texts are so explicit that they may have been the reason Augustus exiled Ovid to what is now Romania.
It’s not a surprise that the more common reading of Ovid assigned to students today, and one of the greatest masterpieces in world literature, is “Metamorphosis.” This narrative poem portrays a vast collection of mythological tales from the creation of the world and the gods, how they intervene in human life, to the death of Caesar. It is written in 15 books and it remains a key source of information regarding Greek and Roman mythology, and some of the tales therein found their way into literature and drama throughout the ages. How about some of the great stories? Here’s a few. In book 10 we find the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor of Cyprus, who became enamored of a statue he has created, Venus taking pity on him brings the statue to life. Pygmalion has served as the inspiration for the musical My Fair Lady. The story of the Greek hunter-hero,Actaeon, a tale that warns people of the cruel power of gods. One day, as he is hunting with his associates in a forest, he gets lost, until night approaches. All at once he sees a shallow crystal blue pond upon whichdescend nymphs and the goddess Diana (goddess of hunting). She strips naked and takes a bath, then notices that she is being observed by a mortal. To prevent him from telling his story she transforms him into a stag. As Actaeon is experiencing this horrible faith, he hears the approaching of his dogs. He tries to call for them but he can’t speak anymore and his voice is simply an utterance coming from a snout. The dogs, ultimately, reach him and tear him to pieces. What about the story of Echo and Narcissus? Echo, a beautiful nymph who turned the heart of Zeus, elicits the hatred of Hera, which casts a spell on the nymph: every word she will say hereafter will be repeated “ad infinitum.”
Echo meets Narcissus and falls madly in love with him, he spurns her away. The gods react by forcing him to fall in love with his own image reflected in a pond. So consumed he is by his own beauty that he dies close to the pond and the gods turn him into a flower (the narcissus, from which we derive narcissist). Metamorphosis is essentially a collection of myths, not a complete epic. It is so complete in its survey of the most important Greco-Roman mythological tales that it became a standard reference text. But here’s a surprise. In Ovid’s story of young lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, we find direct references to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story. The rival Greek families of the ill-fated couple forbid them to marry. Pyramus (below)commits suicide and Thisbe, finding his body, kills herself as well; here’s a passage of the tale from Book 4 which describes the couple’s passion when their love is forbidden by their parents;
“What parents could not hinder, they forbad.
For with fierce flames young Pyramus still burn'd,
And grateful Thisbe flames as fierce return'd.
Aloud in words their thoughts they dare not break,
But silent stand; and silent looks can speak.
The fire of love the more it is supprest,
The more it glows, and rages in the breast.”
Before Thisbe joins Pyramus in death, she has a final request for their parents:
“Now, both our cruel parents, hear my pray'r;
My pray'r to offer for us both I dare;
Oh! see our ashes in one urn confin'd,
Whom love at first, and fate at last has join'd.
The bliss, you envy'd, is not our request;
Lovers, when dead, may sure together rest.”
One point is clear: Ovid denies that any form of human character is essential or permanent but everything is subject to change.
Titus Livy (59BC-17AD): Born in Parma, he remains celebrated as Rome greatest Latin prose historical writer,and yes, he worked under the propaganda machine of Augustus to produce a glorious account of Rome’s beginnings. In writing historical prose, Livy shows how Latin authors blend documentation with mythological events, surpassing the Greeks. Livy wrote a monumental opera divided into 142 Volumes “The Histories of Rome:, from the foundation to the might of the Empire. It is the most reliable form of information regarding Roman society and history, and many times he gives you two stories: one based on mythology, the other based on real notions. Livy shows how Romans used prose not only as a form of entertainment, but also as a form of record keeping, education, as well as transmitting virtuous values to the readers. (see next page)
I.E. Book I “At Urbe condita” (From the Foundation of Rome); According to Livy, and many others followed suit, it all started with the great Trojan hero Aeneas, who escaped conquered Troy and after many years of adventurous navigation, reached the western coast of Italy, Latium. There he laid down the ground works of the Roman State, 1240 BC (circa). Livy tells us that Aeneas’s descendents continued the tradition, and in the early 8th C. BC, his great-great granddaughter, Rhea Silvia, forced to become a vestal virgin by her wretched uncle, remained pregnant by the God Mars and gave birth to twin boys “Romulus and Remus”. Silvia uncle, Amulius, furious, orders his soldiers to kill the twins. The soldiers, instead, placed the twins in a basket afloat the Tiber river (remind of another story, right?), until they were saved from drowning by a she wolf that suckled them (the symbol of Rome!). One thing is sure, the twin founders of Rome are half god half human! Livy tells us also another story, that they might have been found by a shepherd named Faustulus and his wife Laurentia that raised them. Laurentia was renown for committing adultery and among the Romans – and still today – when a women “sleeps around”, we say that “she’s hungry like a wolf”! Nevertheless, Livy narrates that the twins each created a settlement where they had been found, and soon they disputed who should lead this new city, ushering into a dramatic struggle that resulted in Romulus killing his brother Remus, and therefore founding Rome (deriving from the feminine of Romulus, Roma). By god, the city was born through fratricide!?! Romulus began to populate the city with exiles and outcasts coming from all over Italy, lacking women, Romulus and his men carried off the woman of the nearby Sabine tribe. The war between both groups ended with a settlement and the amalgamation of both tribe, Latin and Sabin. Whatever the truth, Rome had a heterogeneous origin, opposed to the racism demonstrated by the Greeks, this allowed the Romans to assimilate others, grow, and create a powerful federation of Italian peoples.
Virgil (70-19BC): His full name was Publius Virgilius Maro, the most renowned of Roman poets. Poet, philosopher, historian, he more than any other humanist showed the glorification and admiration for Augustus. Immortalized for his epic masterpiece, the Aeneid, his earliest authentic works were known as pastoral prose. With it he praises the values and satisfaction of rural life; he glorifies Italy’s sturdy farmers, the country’s fertile soil, and Augustus for having brought back peace. Still today survive his ten short pastoral poems known as the Eclogues, which deal with the joys and sorrows of the country and the shepherds and herdsmen who live there. Virgil was the son of a farmer, born in Aquilea, north-eastern Italy, and of Gallic blood, his deep love for the land emerges also in his next work, the four books of the Georgics (29BC). Here he describes the beautiful colorful countryside landscapes of Italy and its rustic inhabitants.
Bust of Virgil in Naples, marble.
The most obvious purpose of this last opera is to serve as a practical guide to farming – they offer helpful advice on such subjects as cattle breeding and beekeeping - as well as the deep conviction that the strength of Italy lies in its agricultural richness. For Virgil, only life in the country brings true peace and contentment. It’s Virgil, thus, that helped Augustus get the people out of the cities and back to their farming duties.
However, it was the emperor that persuaded Virgil to write the Aeneid, the great national epic poem of Rome’s beginnings in which the poet could predict the great ruling future of Augustus. The Aeneid is one of history’s greatest and most influential poems. A succession of poets including Dante, Tasso, and Milton regarded him as their master. Probably no work of literature in the entire tradition of western culture has been more loved and revered than the Aeneid – described by T. S. Eliot as the classic of Western society – as the Homeric epics, the Aeneid was written in dactylic hexameter (the rhythmic scheme used in epic poetry by Homer and Virgil; each line consists of six dactylics, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables). His Aeneid would be to Roman literature what Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are to Greek literature.
The task was immense and it required ten years of constant work to complete. It unfolds the destiny of Rome, entrusted by the gods, for the civilianization of the world, from the landing of its Trojan hero, Aeneas (the Aeneid is named after him), to the rise of Rome as great empire of which Augustus is the culmination.Differently from Homer’s epics which are based on an oral tradition, Virgil’s Aeneid was born as a literary epic from the beginning. The Aeneid is not a perfect poem (Virgil, on his death bed, asked his friends to destroy it), but in some ways it surpasses even the highest expectations of Augustus. Not only does it provide the Romans with their national epic, but it created a moving study of the nature of human destiny and personal responsibility. The Aeneid is divided into twelve books. The first six books (reading 6.5) recount the escape of the Trojan hero Aeenas, son of Venus and the Trojan prince Anchises, from burning and conquered Troy and his landing on the western coast of Italy. In the middle of the journey towards Italy, with the intent of founding a new Troy, Rome to be exact, he is caught in a storm and lands in Carthage, North Africa, and begins a romantic relationship with its Queen Dido. She falls in love with him, and gives herself to the hero willingly, ultimately she is expecting a child from him. She now assumes to be married, but Aeneas, reminded by his father’s ghost of his duty to accomplish what the gods had in store for him, knows he must resume his journey. An angry and accusing Dido begs him to stay. When Aeneas rejects her pleas, Dido vows to haunt him after death, she will commit suicide, and to bring enmity between Carthage and his descendents for ever (a direct reference to Virgil’s part to the Punic Wars).
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1618-19. The Baroque master here reproduces an episode of the Aeneid. Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back, with his son, Ascanius close, fleeing from the city of Troy. Anchises, Aeneas’s father, clutches the household gods protectively. This scene from the Aeneid, marvelously depicted by Bernini, symbolizes the roman ideal of devotion to the gods, family, and duty. Aeneas, in Virgil‘s epic, and in Bernini’s sculpture, embodies all the roman virtues, from responsibility, dutifulness, sense of self-worth, to manliness and courage.
Virgil’s point is almost coldly hard-hearted: All personal feelings and desires must be sacrificed to one’s responsibilities to the state. Civic duty takes precedence over private life. With this, Virgil intention is that of proving the superior stoic values of the Romans, capable of overcoming passions and desires and accomplishing their missions. In the last 6 books the Trojans arrive at the Tiber river, and Aeaneas visits the future site of Rome while the Italian people, led by the Latin prepare to resist the Trojan invasion. In book 8, Aeneas’s mother, the goddess Venus, appears before him with gifts, including a shield forged by her husbandVulcan, that he will use in battle. On the shield is written the future of Rome:
Book 8, lines 29-32: “Vulcan had made the mother wolf, lying in Mars’ green grotto; Made the twin boys at play around her teats; Nursing the mother without fear…” Virgil continues to describe the helmet sporting“terrifying plumes and gushing flames”; then he describes the sword blade which was, “edged with fate.” The last four books describe the war between the Trojans and the Latin, in the course of which are losses on both sides. The Aeneid ends with the death of Turnus – the king of the Italic people allied with the Latin – and the final victory of Aeneas.
Finally, the Aeneid became a landmark work for the study of Latin in Italian Middle and High School, I studied in Italy, and can tell you that the most important translations and readings were done on this epic. It is tempting, however, to see Aeneas as the archetype of Augusts; certainly, Virgil must have intended for us to draw some parallels. Altogether, Virgil might be asking his readers, “If greatness can be acquired only by sacrificing individuals, was Aeaneas’s adventure worth the price?”
Extra Credit Question on the Aeneid: In your opinion, does the future glory of Rome excuse the cruel treatment of Dido? Bring examples from your readings as well as achievements or shortcomings in our contemporary world.
Excerpt from the Aeneid: See Excerpts – The Aeneid
Overview of Early Medieval History: Beowulf
The Medieval West: In the West, the Middle Ages lasted more than a millennium; roughly from the fall of Rome in the early 4th C. to the mid-fifteenth century, which witnessed the end of the 100 Years’ War between France and England. Scholars used to call the centuries between 500 to 1400 AD by the same term to describe the Greek centuries between 1100 and 800 BC: the “Dark Ages”, this suggests a gloomy, retrograde interruption between a brighter classical reality – the Greco Roman world – and a later brighter recovery, rebirth, the Renaissance. But today scholars prefer the more realistic term Middle Ages because they have come to believe that Dark is a misleading exaggeration. Our studies will confirm the opposite, since this long period is one of the most astonishing and productive in Western history, as a transition from classical to Christian culture took place. The Western Middle Ages, that witnessed three distinctly different cultures combine Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Germanic, is divided in three stages;
Early MA 4th C to 500AD; the invasion of the Germans and the establishment of Germanic Kingdoms. The Empire of Charlemagne and Carolingian culture. The feudal and manorial system that established the patterns of class and social status that shaped the economic and political history of Europe. (map 5.1 text, pg. 122)
High MA 1000-1300; saw the beginning of the Crusades, the revival of trade, the emergence of commercially oriented towns, and the rise of Universities.
Late Ma 1300-1450s; witnessed the foundation of modern states, and gradual shift from religious culture to one dominated by laymen secular issues, global exploration, and scientific inquiries.
Germanic tribes, often fought against each other.
The popular picture of Medieval Europe is colored by Knights in shining armor, monasteries, monks and popes, crusades and castles; in reality, this long era had a powerful impact in shaping contemporary western values. The geographic boundaries of modern European states and the basic political, religious and linguistic traditions of western Europe took shape during the Middle Ages. The prototype of nations, modern commercial cities, the Middleclass, and centers of higher studies known as universities materialize in the Medieval Era. The feudal epic, courtly romance, the morality play and vernacular languages as well. And finally, Medieval artists and artisans produced works of art and architecture that still dazzle modern beholders.For Western Middle Ages we also mean that one of the institutions that survived the collapse of Roman order was the Christian Church: it is the Catholic Church that throughout the Middle Ages reached its political peak of power and assumed a major role in shaping not only the belief system of Medieval Christians but led the western world in generating humanistic traditions through its clergymen and monasteries in the field of architecture, philosophy, sculpture, painting, church building, stained glass windows, music, poetry, and drama. And finally, it was its idea of the Christian savior that led great writers in producing an image of the afterlife, such as in the work of Dante.
Beowulf:
Germanic traditions of personal valor and heroism associated with a warring culture reflected the epic poems of the Early Middle Ages. Just as Homer had recorded the dramatic deeds of Achilles and Odysseus, anonymous Germanic poets composed works remembering the heroes of the North.
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was inspired by Beowulf.
The three most famous of these, 1) Beowulf; 2) The Songs of Nibelungen; 3) The Songs of Roland, were transmitted orally for hundreds of years before they were written down sometime between the 10th and 13th C. The most renowned Germanic early epic poem was Beowulf, which originated among the Anglo-Saxons around 700, was recorded in old English, the Germanic language spoken in the British Isles between the 5th and 11th C. Therefore this 3,000 line epic is the first monumental composition in European vernacular.
The tale of a daring Scandinavian prince, it brings to life the heroic world of the Germanic people. The poem survived in a unique tenth-century manuscript, copied form an earlier one and badly damaged by fire in the eighteenth-century. It owes its current reputation largely to J.R.R. Tolkiien, author of “The Lord of the Rings,”who in the 1930s argued for the poem’s literary value. The source of Tolkien’s attraction to the poem will be obvious to anyone who knows his own great trilogy. Beowulf is an English poem, but the events it describestake place in Scandinavia. Its verses are embellished with numerous two-term metaphors known as kennings("whale-path", for sea; "ring-giver", for king). See example below, from Old English to current English: Hwoet we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum So.
The Spear-Danes in days gone by.
Instead of saying “the past,” the poem says gear-dagum, which literally means “years-days.” Instead of “the Danes,” it says Spear-Danes, implying their warrior attributes. In a sense, then, these compounded phrases are metaphoric riddles that context helps to explain. The compound beado-leoma, which means “battle-light,” referring to a flashing sword. The poem opens with Beowulf arriving among the Danes to rid them of the monster Grendel. The monsters in the poem, it becomes clear, are metaphors for fate and the destructive forces of nature. Serving the Danish king Hrothgar, Beowulf kills Grendel, and, subsequently, Grendel’s mother attacks in an even more fearsome battle, which again Beowulf means.
Beowulf fighting the fire-breathing dragon.
But Hrothgar reminds him of life’s fragility. With these words in mind, Beowulf returns home to Sweden with his men and rules well, but 50 years later, he meets the dragon, or “hoard-guard,” who teaches him Hrothgar’s lesson. Resigned by the fact the he only can defeat the dragon he exhibits the courage and loyalty to his vassals that define a Medieval warrior (the Knight). There is some Christian allegory implicit in this poem, although it has nothing to do with Christianity. For example Hrothgar’s admonition to Beowulf to look for “eternal rewards” over earthly glory, is quite illuminating. And although the hero does bring thanks to “Almighty God,” and admits that without this God he couldn’t have killed Grendel, there is nothing in the poem that suggests that this could be the Christian God. At Beowulf’s tragic end (he dies), “he passes into the Lord’s keeping,” but “no man can tell…for certain” where death will carry him.
The poem teaches the audience that power, strength, fame, and life are fleeting – a theme consonant with Christian values, but by no means necessarily Christian. And although Beowulf, in his arguably foolhardy courage at the end of the poem, displays a Christ like willingness to sacrifice himself for the greater good, the honor and courage he exhibits are fully in keeping with the values of feudal warrior culture.
Excerpt from Beowulf: See Excerpts – Beowulf
Overview of Early Medieval History the Carolinigan Era: Song of Roland
CharlemagneCrown.jpg - 48393 BytesCarolingian Renaissance: Founder of this Frankish Empire wasCharlemagne (742-814 AD) It’s the most important name linked to medieval culture during the period immediately following the migrations. This powerful ruler tried to unify the warring factions of Europe under the aegis of Christianity, and modeling his campaigns on those of the Roman emperors. Charlemagne was a lusty, vigorous, intelligent man; a man that particularly loved hunting, arts, and war and he knew how to perform them well. A true German, his physical presence was striking, a big man for his time, however, his intellect was advanced: he spoke and read Latin, as well as Greek (could never get himself to learn to write), loved the arts, and was a very religious man. A great conqueror, in more than 30 years of warfare, he created a new political entity over the ruins of the Western Roman empire; he pursued in restoring the Roman empire under Christian leadership. He brought forth his “Christian Jihads”, conquered Italy, freeing the Popes from the Lombard menace; he defeated the Saxons in Denmark, and converted them to Christianity by the tip of the sword, and added also to his domains much of eastern Europe. Along these wild eastern frontiers he created defensive provinces known as marks (map on next page). On Christmas night of 800 AD, in Rome,Charlemagne was crowned by pope Leo III as Holy Roman emperor. He also was the first Christian prince to challenge Muslim power in Spain and setup a mark there in Catalonia. Much of the epic chivalry and heroic poetry was a product of Charlemagne’s and the Christian knights battles against the Muslims in Spain, which are considered a monumental contribution the early Medieval culture (written in early French). Charlemagne’s patronage of the arts and learning gave birth to an era known as the Carolingian Renaissance: a unique cultural synthesis between Germanic, Christian and near eastern humanistic values.
With the death of Charlemagne, which led to political and legal disorder, since he had left no legal, administrative centralized system, nor a standing army and a taxation, a new form of administrative government came to being in times of chaos. What were these new rules that enabled life to go on however harshly? The Feudal Era. The term feudal indicates “property” or land, deriving from the German practice of rewarding warriors with spoils of war. Feudal organizations were mutual arrangements that allowed certain people to work and produce food, and others to fight and guarantee law and order. Feudal institutions were those social and political arrangements that sprang up in the countryside in the 9th C. that made survival possible. Feudalism was not a movement against national unity – in a time when nations didn’t exist – but a system of citizenship security.
Feudal investiture
Feudalism is nothing less than commending (committing) oneself to someone’s service. The granting of land witnesses a Clientele Relationship (an “investiture”): a contract between a Duke (vassal) and a Lord/King Patron. When a Duke (Client) wanted to enter a contract and obtain land he would have to promise certain services such as military service in the king’s army (40 days an year); ransom money to free his patron; set up judicial courts.
The Literature of Medieval Chivalry: During many of the evening gatherings, people listened to Chanson de Geste (songs of good deeds), which remark the birth of European nobility and celebrated the ideals of Christian knighthood in the 11th and 12th C. The most famous of these literary works are the French Song of Roland and the Spanish Poem of the Cid. Both poems extol the virtues of feudal heroes – Roland, a perfect vassal of Charlemagne; Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known as El Cid (Arabic for Lord), hero of the Spanish Reconquista, and the perfect vassal of king Alfonso VI of Aragon. They were sung from court to court in simple syllabic melodies by jongleurs – professional entertainers – accompanied by a lyre.
El cid, popular spanish Knight of the XIth C. In the Songs of Roland – written in French verse - the knights embody the values of prowess and loyalty to a fault. Roland was too brave to call for help in the face of overwhelming forces as he commanded the rear column of Charlemagne’s army as it was retreating in 778 in the Spanish Mark; the story features specific details of battle and bloody victories designed to delight an audience of warriors: fighting Bishops, chain armor and new weapons such as the mace, and it clearly divides the world in two, the bad guys – the Muslim, the good guys identified as the Christians.
The Duke Roland
The descriptive language is vivid, clear and stark, and at times, grotesque with brains gushing out, bloody swords, and dying horses. These poems prized the performance of heroic deeds that brought honor to a warrior and they show also another side of the chivalric ideal – men’s strong emotional ties with one another. The loyalty and camaraderie formed on the battlefield pervaded many aspects of warriors’ lives.
The poem embodies the values of feudalism, celebrating courage and loyalty to one’s ruler above all else, in this case, Roland’s loyalty to Charlemagne. Although Olivier, his companion, counsels Roland that the Muslim army is so great that he ought to use his horn, Oliphant, to call Charlemagne to help him, but Roland’s pride prevails. The loyalty to the Franks – and of Roland and Olivier in particular – to Charlemagne is expressed in these words, uttered by Roland a moment later”
The death of Roland from a manuscript dated 1455.
“In his lord’s service, a man must suffer pain,
Bitterest cold and burning heat endure;
He must be willing to lose his flesh and blood…
And if he die, whoever takes the sword
Can say its master has nobly served his lord.”
Indeed, Roland ultimately sacrifices all for his king and his God. Mortally wounded in combat, he “knows that death is very near / His ears give way, he feels his brain gush out.” The two main characters are reduced to stereotypes; Roland is brave, Olivier is wise. But finally, in his slow and painful death – “Count Roland feels the very grip of death / Which from his head is reaching for his heart.” – he becomes a type for Jesus, sacrificing himself for Christendom.
Curiosity of the past: Did this battle really happen. Yes, although magnified by epic imagination. The battle that witnessed Duke Roland protagonist is the Battle of Roncevaux, and it happened in 778. Roncevaux is a high pass in the Pyrenees mountains, on the border between France and Spain. HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland" \o "Roland" Roland, prefect of the HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany" \o "Brittany" Breton HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marches" \o "Marches" March and commander of the rear guard of HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne" \o "Charlemagne" Charlemagne's army, was defeated by a Muslim army.
See Handouts & Videos: B- Charlemagne
Excerpt from the Song of Roland: See Excerpts – Song of Roland
Overview of the Late Middle Ages: Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy
Fifteen years after the death of Frederick II and the defeat of the Hohenstaufen Dynasty, the poet Dante Alighieri was born in the Italian city of Florence (1265-1321). As we know, the most famous opera in vernacular Italian was written by Dante Alighieri in the early 14th C. It was with his famous Commedia (re-titled The Divine Comedy in sixteenth century editions) that the vernacular Italian tongue – Tuscan to be precise - will strike its definite triumph over Latin. Among the writers of the West, Dante belongs to Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Von Goethe, but Dante is the supreme master of all! In fact, his career, his interests, and his values signaled the emergence of a new Europe.
Dante was a genius, a scientist a scholar, but unlike other scholars of the late Medieval Era – that were mainly products of monasteries and universities – he was a self-educated man, thanks to classical and scientific texts present in Florence as a young man.
Dante Alighieri 1265-1321
And differently from other scholars, he aspired in becoming a politician, not a clergyman; he was a layman through and through: he participated in civil service, served in the army, he married at 22 and had 4-5 children; and finally engaged in politics and won high office. Originally, poetry and scholarship were his pleasures, not his work. Nevertheless, it is believed that Dante, through his opera, heralded Europe into the Modern Era, although the Divine Comedy was a medieval opera. Dante is so innovative that it is difficult to fit him in a definite category of history; his morality and theology is medieval – that of Thomas Aquinas – while his poetry is romantic and thus modern.
Dante matured in a time of “intestinal conflict” among Italian communes that stimulated his literary creativity: the Guelf-Ghibelline feud. In the eternal struggle between Papacy and empire, in the course of the 13thcenturies the Guelf Communes became the party opposing the authority of the German emperors and supporting the power of the Pope. Among the most powerful Ghibelline communes were Arezzo, Verona andPisa; among the Guelf Milan, Bologna and above all Florence.
The Alighieri’s belonged to the victorious Guelf party that had driven its Ghibelline opponents out of Florence about the time of Dante’s birth. By 1300, however, a quarrel had split the Guelfs into virulently hostile factions: the Black & Whites – the latter Dante’s party. In 1302 the Blacks took control of the city and exiled the Whites.Dante, in his late thirties, suddenly found himself a “man without a country.”
DOMENICO DI MICHELINO. Dante and His Poem, 1465. Fresco, 10 ft. 6 in. × 9 ft. 7 in. Florence Cathedral, Italy
The feeling of anguish can be broadly interpreted by lines 1-6 of the Proemio Generale, the first introductory Canto of Dante’s Comedy:
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarrita.
Ah quanto a dir qual era e’ cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la Paura!”
(In the middle of our journey through life
I found myself in an obscure forest
that the right way had been lost.
Ah to tell you what it was and hard thing
this salvage forest and austere and strong
that in the mind renews the fear!)
The words are clear, Dante doesn’t even know how he entered this obscure and dense forest, therefore, Dante recognizes the “ugliness” of his physical and mental state of being, of having lived a sinful life.
To produce his operas, Dante depended on the hospitality of various wealthy patrons who valued his political counsel and his literary talent. A volume of poetry, Vita Nova (The New Life), had already established his reputation as an artist. It celebrated his love for a woman that was Dante’s ideal; the incarnation of virtue and beauty. The object of his devotion was not his wife, but a girl named Bice (Beatrice) Portinari. He became enamored of her when she was nine years old. She married into the prestigious Bardi family while Dante wedded a woman of the Donati clan; Beatrice dies in 1290.
Nevertheless, Dante’s greatest achievement – the Divine Comedy – was a huge poem whose popularity helped his Tuscan dialect become Italy’s national language. Dante’s Commedia was comedic in the formal sense of a tale that, unlike a tragedy, comes to a happy end.
Plan of Dante's Universe.
The Divine Comedy narrates the dream, or a journey of Dante - at the age of 35 –in the indefinable areas of hell, purgatory and paradise. In the first two zones he is accompanied by the great Roman poet and Augustan narrator, Virgil, which becomes Dante’s companion, guide and duce in the afterlife. The reasons that led Dante in choosing the author of the Aeneid as his primary guide and guardian, are central in understanding the Comedy’s objective: Dante’s admiration for the
Classics, and therefore, anticipating the Humanists. Virgil is symbol of Roman Imperial Authority, which major task – entrusted by the Gods (or the God) - is to civilianize the world and lead the human species to temporal felicity. It was also believed in the High Middle Ages that Virgil had predicted Jesus’ birth. Virgil, however, was and will remain a pagan.
Descending into Hell – divided into 9 hierarchical circles of punishment - the two poets meet and discourse with souls in eternal torment, some of great historical importance; Frederick II, Brutus, Judah, Attila, Achilles, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great and a number of Greco-Roman poets and scientists, among which Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. The scholars’ souls are trapped in the first circle – in Limbo, Canto IV – they are the innocent souls that couldn’t be saved not because of positive sins, but because they didn’t receive baptism and didn’t adhere to the belief of the real God. Their only punishment is the torment and continuous desire to reach the heavens above.
In the Purgatory, they meet with less sinful souls that are being temporarily punished before reaching heaven; some of the souls are of pagan faith. Mount Purgatory appears to Dante divided into 2 “Balzi” (Jumps), and 7 tiers of expiation, each one communicating with the other thanks to steps cut into the live rock, where repentant souls, as they march, receive stages of purification. Indicative is Dante’s choice for the custodian of the Purgatory; Cato the Elder; he was a Pagan and suicide, shouldn’t the ancient Roman senator be in the seventh circle of Hell? But Dante recognizes him as the inflexible defender of the Roman Republic during its final stage of existence. Cato preferred to take his life rather than submit to Caesar’s favors; Cato the Elder was known to be in the favor of many important clerics throughout the Middle Ages. Dante condemns him in Purgatory but at the same time absolves him.
When the poets come to the gates of Heaven, Virgil cannot continue to escort him (the Divine will of God is inflexible); his new escort will be Beatrice, a women that he never married but that he loved intensively throughout his life. In Paradise he finds all the Christian Saints (as well as Bernard of Clairvaux, the visionary mystical monk), and he will be crowned by the Holy Virgin. And at the climax of the poem he sees a vision of God himself. This voyage through the afterlife is designed to show a typical Christian concept: that peoples’ actions in this life determine their fate in the next.
Dante’s assignment of Christ-like roles to women would not have shocked Bernard, who was Mary’s ardent disciple (and in fact, the High Middle Ages witnesses a high-rise of “Marianism” – devotion for the Holy Virgin).But the ascetic abbot would have been disturbed by the poet’s suggestion that the love men felt for women wasn’t “sinful flesh”, but a revelation of God’s love. Therefore, Dante did not believe that human love was always opposed to divine love. He was not a naïve romantic, for he filled hell with people who were condemned for mishandling carnal passion and practicing adultery. But he believed that human nature was not defined solely by sin; it still reflected the nobility of its divine creation. Dante stresses the priority of salvation, but he viewed earth as existing for human benefit. He allowed humans free will to choose good and avoid evil
His justifying love as a transcendent experience – almost neo-platonic – is clear in the second circle of the Inferno, where the lascivious are placed; some among the most renown carnal sinners. First and foremost,Francesca da Rimini and her passionate affair with her husband’s brother, Paolo Malatesta. Francesca is the first damned soul to speak to Dante, she says:
(Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che,
come vedi, ancora non m’abbandona.)
“Love, that nothing has loved to love will pardon,
the pleasure for him took me so strongly,
as you see, still doesn’t abandon me.”
Dante’s pity for them is such that he falls “as dead on the ground”. Lines 103-105 – Fifth Canto, 2nd Circle - are clear in Dante’s intention to justify his spiritual passion for Beatrice, which he sees in Francesca; love doesn’t permit not to love others. Francesca, that is loved, felt herself irremediably dragged by an invincible
force to love again. The way that she expresses herself to Dante, seems to indicate that the irrationality of love is a general divine law, and therefore acceptable by God’s standards.
Virgil indicates to Dante the Greek philosophers. Canto 4, first circle of hell, Limbo.
Francesca and Paolo were placed in hell because they were both assassinated by her husband – Gianciotto –before performing the religious act of penitence to redeem their sins on earth. If God transcends nature, love does as well.
In his prophetic anomaly – and the examples are many - he pinned his hopes for a society not on the church and the clergy, but on politicians and ordinary men and women. He urged scholars and poets to work in vernacular tongues so that the masses might profit from their insights. This produced a portentous shift in Medieval civilization. For Europeans at least, life was beginning to seem less like an exile to a doomed and alien realm and more like an invitation to an adventure – an opportunity to share the creativity of their Creator.The great Renaissance that was soon to flare across Italy and bring the Middle Ages to a close shared Dante’s faith.
Symbolic Structure of the comedy:
Dante Structured the Commedia according to a strict moral hierarchy. The three parts of the poem might correspond to the Aristotelian divisions of human psyche: reason, will, and love;
They also represent the potential moral conditions of the Christian soul: perversity, repentance, and grace;
Sacred numerology colors the Commedia – especially the number 3, symbol of the Trinity. The poem is divided into three Canticles (books); and each canticle has 33 cantos, to which he added one introductory canto to reach the sublime figure of one hundred (plentitude);
Each canto consists of stanzas composed in terza rima – interlocking lines that rhyme at the last word of each third sentence – a/b/a/, b/c/b, c/d/c. There are three guides to escort Dante, three divisions of Hell and Purgatory, three main rivers in Hell. Three squared (9) are the regions of sinners in hell, the circles of penitents in Purgatory, and the spheres of heaven.
The commedia has unmatched symbolism that draws on theological, scientific and historical information in ancient and medieval sources. The inhabitants of Dante’s universe are real people, flesh-and-blood creatures, some drawn from history and legend, others from his own era – buzling Italian cities as Dante wandered around in exile for 19 years;
This original system brings to life the allegory (of Platonic memory): a system that tries to solve a dilemma through a mock-up representation, giving a figurative meaning from which a conclusion can be drawn.
The most revealing part is the “Inferno.” With grim logic the sinners are each assigned to one of the 9 rings in hell, where they are punished according to the nature of their sins: the violent are immersed for eternity in boiling blood, while the gluttons float like pigs in their own excrement. By the law of symbolic retribution, the sinners are punished not for but by their sins. Those condemned for sins of passion – the least grave, occupy the rings at the top of hell, while those who committed grave sins lie farther down.
BEGINNING OF THE NINTH CIRCLE:
Traitors; The Ninth Circle is a well, guarded by four giants, containing an enormous lake of ice known as Cocito, and it’s reserved for those that committed the worst of crimes: betrayal. Cocito is divided into four zones – areas – each, of course, presenting different punishments, according to the nature of the crime(Caina, Antenora, Ptolomaic, Judaic). Master of the Ninth Circle is Lucifer – Satan – standing suspended in the air at the center of the Universe. The giants guarding the entrance, all once deities, are punished for having betrayed Jupiter itself, hence their enormous sin is allegorically portrayed in their giant aspect.
Zone IV, Judaic: Traitors of the Benefactors. This is the zone of Lucifer – Dite for Dante – prince of evil, lord of the Inferno. Furthermore, this zone also collects the acidic waters of the three rivers, fulfilled with human corruption and sin. Accordingly, allegorically speaking, these waters (that corrode stone), return to their principle, in our case, Lucifer.
In the Judaic zone the damned are entirely enclosed in ice in different positions. As the two poets get closer, Virgil exclaims “here’s Dite”. Lucifer emerges from the ice up to his chest, his dimensions are so big, that the giants seem pigmalians by comparison.
Satan has three heads, maybe in juxtaposition to the Trinity.
His figure is monstrous: the large head has three faces of three different colors, and under each protrude two large wings, similar to those of a bat, and as they wave they generate the wind that consequently freezes Cocito. Lucifer cries with six eyes, and the tears trickle down the three faces, they mix with the bloody saliva that gushes from the three mouths. Each mouth is bighting and mingling one of the three sinners.
The three faces have been interpreted in many manners. First of all it emphasizes the triplication within unity,Lucifer is therefore juxtaposed to God’s oneness in the Trinity. Others suggest that the three faces representIgnorance, Hatred, and Impotence of the good and truth. It is therefore the antithesis of the divine Trinity which represents Prowess, Wisdom, and Love.
These sinners – Brutus, Cassius and Judah – are traitors of the two supreme authorities on earth, from which human truth and goodness derive from.
The finalization of Dante’s Inferno reinforces our thesis revealed in the beginning of our study; Dante is a Humanist and Classicist, but at the same time a devoted Medieval Christian; the blending is clear, by analyzing the following: Each one of
Plan of Dante's Inferno
Lucifer’s three mouths is mingling one of the three sinners. The one hanging from the mouth of Lucifer’s central head is Judah, that betrayed Christ, God-man, he whom the Lord had sent on earth to redeem humanity from sin, from whom the supreme papal authority derives. The other two sinners, with their legs inside Lucifer’s mouth, but their heads hanging out, are Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus, architects of Caesar’s assassination, hence traitors. There is a graded scale of difference in the punishment inflicted to them: Judah not only is being mingled (Tuscan “Maciullato”) but also deeply scratched by Lucifer, indicating that the traitor of the supreme divine authority is more severely punished than those that betrayed the supreme human authority. Nevertheless, Dante regards Caesar as “Primo principe sommo” (first supreme Prince). Therefore Caesar is not less than Christ, as God’s master plan implies. Christ and Caesar are necessary for the safeguard of human society. Both are the first and supreme Benefactors. We understand now why these traitors are suffering more painful punishments than the others. It is therefore clear to us that the mission to execute the supreme divine justice of God against this breed of traitors is entrusted to the supreme authority of the Inferno: Lucifer, who had been the supreme angel of the heavens and supreme chief of the rebels against God.
Excerpt from the Divine Comedy: See Excerpts – The Divine Comedy
Overview of the Romantic Era and Heroism: The Promethean Hero Napoleon Bonaparte (Diary) and Frankenstein (Mary Godwin Shelley), Lord Byron (Promethues)
The nineteenth-century – we will cover only its first decades – is dominated by three crucial social transformations: the emergence of industrial society, supplanting the predominantly agricultural way of life had defined the West, the rise of European imperialism over the native cultures of Africa, Asia and the Americas, and finally, the rise of nationalism and socialism through a series of revolutions that colored the years between 1848 and 1871.
The Romantic Protest:
By the late eighteenth-century intellectual Europe was reacting strongly against the Enlightenment, which had made the French Revolution possible. The reaction against the Enlightenment took the form of the Romantic Movement. Romantic writers, thinkers, and painters protested against the rationalism and classicism of the 18th C and championed nature, faith, emotion, tradition, and those values associated with the more distant past.
The Romantic Era is usually dated between 1780-1830. There a general revolt against what many viewed as the narrowness of the 18th C, that is, the emphasis on the purely logical.
The Haywain, Constable, 1821. One of the greatest landscaper was this British artist of the early nineteenth-century.
The Romantics accused the Enlightenment predecessors of being too optimistic about reaching the perfect human form through reason, and argued that pleasure and beauty could also be taken from the grotesque, the disorganized and the irrational. The revolutionary qualities of the romantics were present in their arts, where they rebelled against the cult for classical antiquity (Neoclassicism). They were attracted by Medieval culture, the Gothic, the colorful, the exotic, the visually undisciplined, the emotional and nature. The Romantics protested against the deism of the Philosophes and preached for a religion of the heart not of the head; God existed and was to be found in nature, the romantics argued, not in science.
Romantics embraced nature, especially rural nature, which provided them with a refuge from the steaming and smoggy industrialized cities, entrenched with poverty and crime. They looked at nature as a source of inspiration, very close to religion inspiration: where nature unites the human soul with God in best Pantheist tradition. These Romantic intellectuals are known as transcendentalists, because they sought to discover rgw “transcendent” order of nature. The natural world became a sacred space that pointed to the immanent presence of the divine.
Romanticism in fact, is best revealed through literature. We have a new Renaissance in poetry. In the 1770s and 1780s a new intensity appeared in the very
popular works of German Sturm and Drang movement. These German romantics detested neoclassicism, and praised the vigor and color of the bible, Homer and Shakespeare. The result was a great Renaissance of poetry, especially in England.
For romanticism we mean also return to the past. They had great enthusiasm for the Middle Ages in general and for the earlier history of their nations in particular. This increased the sentiment of nationalism, with the rising star of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the post Napoleonic Era that witnessed many nationalities revolt against foreign rule such as Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary and gain independence. Nationalism became an emotional almost a mystical force. Therefore, the pioneers of the Romantic Era tended to cherish what the philosophes detested, notably the Middle Ages, for the Philosophes, age of darkness and religious superstition and ignorance.
EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 6 in. × 10 ft. 7 in.
Romantic Nationalism and Heroes: As the Romantics embraced nature, so they cherished the accomplishments of individuals: they embraced heroism. Nationalism and heroism were all in one, and will develop after in the wake of the French Revolution, and thereafter, as a form of resistance against French Imperialism itself. One after another, European states, as well as African and South American, revolted against foreign occupation. Therefore, the love for nature, the nation, and the love for liberty, became all in one, and its best identified in the love for heroes, that became subjects for Romantic artwork and especially literature.
Napoleon Bonaparte: The first of the Modern Dictators, although a man of the Enlightenment and attached to neo-classicism – stamped on Paris - he also became the first Romantic Heroes. He was included in several poems and paintings, especially J. David’s paintings. He will also inspire musicians such as Beethoven and writers such as Mary Shelley, Byron, and Pushkin, giants of romanticism.
The Rise of Napoleon and the Napoleonic Era, 1799-1815;
France was to face a series of wars following the declaration of the Republican constitution in 1792, that would have seriously jeopardized the Revolution. Almost all the European powers eventually participated and the fighting would range far beyond Europe, embracing also the Euro-Colonies. Austria, Holland, Britain, Prussia, Russia and Turkey, would continuously form coalitions to debel revolutionary France, but by 1794 the French had definitely gained advantage; occupying by 1795, Holland, Belgium and the Rhineland. Themotives for success were certainly the introduction of the Levee en masse (military conscription, and logically,Napoleon Bonaparte, which was able to bring French military might and revolutionary ideology throughout the European areas and beyond.
JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID, Napoleon Crossing the Great Saint Bernard Pass, 1800.
The directory, in fact, to lead an attack in 1796 against the Austrians in Italy, had picked-out a youthful lieutenant of artillery Jacobin, a mathematician, historian political scientist and archeologist, all together, an enlightened genius. He was born on the island of Corsica, city of Ajaccio, on August 15, 1769. He will gain power in November of 1799, following a successful coup d’état (Brumaire), that permitted him to control the levers of government and reach the ambitioned title of emperor in 1804.
His exploits in the political field remain crucially important for the future of Europe. Napoleon wroteConstitutions and then made the Republican gesture of submitting the change to the electorate, and each time the results were favorable. The majority in France and beyond, supported and admired Napoleon, which, as many of them, came also from the Middle Class. His military triumphs – between 1805, battle of Austerlitz, to 1807, Battle of Jena and Friedland – brought all of Europe under his rule (see map 12.1 text pg. 326). Thisappealed to French national pride and his policy of stability and prosperity at home, guaranteed Frenchmen from further revolutionary changed or crisis. An Enlightened mind, he accepted men of every political, racial and religious background to staff his government, bureaucracy and high military ranks. Napoleon cared little whether his subordinates were aristocrats or Jacobins, whether they were Jewish or Christian, whether they were black or white, as long as they used their abilities and skills for the glory of the empire, they were accepted as equals. He rewarded outstanding soldiers with the high title of Fedelmarshall, for their skills regardless of class rank or birth status. And finally, Napoleon gave birth between 1800-1804, to his own code of laws, known as the Code Napoleon: recognized all men euqual before the law; abolished feudalism and serfdom; abolished privileged rights of the bnobiltiy and other classes; it imposed a strong patriarchal leadership within the family.
JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID, Coronation of Napoleon in Notre-Dame De Paris by Pope Pius VII.
So stunningly successful were so many of Napoleon’s military campaigns, so fierce his dedication to the principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality (abolishing serfdom throughout Europe), and so brilliant was his reorganization of government, the educational system (gave birth to public schools known as Lyceums), and civil law, that in the first years of the nineteenth century, he seemed to many a savior.
His diary (see excerpts), includes intimate reflections generating the cult for romantic heroes. Written during his last years prisoner on the island of St. Helen, it’s a record of his reflections and a favorite among Romantics. His dairy reveals the attributes of a Romantic hero. The first lines attest clearly to Hegel’s theory of “Great Men”; Napoleon shows his self-conscious, the esteem, the egotism, that individualism that rises among the masses. This glory among the people is imaginative, but an imagination produced by his personal powers and great accomplishments. Only imagination, claims Napoleon, leads to perfection, a true Romantic concept. Finally, lines 18-22 clearly attest to his having achieved the status of hero, a modern Achilles or Aeneas, becoming immortal: “Had I succeeded, I would have died with the reputation of the greatest man….although I failed, I shall be considered as an extraordinary man.”
Excerpt from Napoleon’s Diary: See Excerpts – Napoleon’s Diary
Mary Shelley: The Promethean Hero and Frankenstein:
Napoleon Bonaparte was the favorite real-life hero of 19th C. Europe, Prometheus was the 19th C’s favorite fictional hero. According to mythology, Prometheus was Greek deity – part of the family of Titans - that stole from Zeus the “sacred fire” from the sun (fount of all creation and wisdom) bestowing this gift on mankind, to whom Zeus, ruler of the Gods, had denied it. Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock, where an eagle will feed daily on his liver, which was restored every night. The Romantics adored the Prometheus as the lonely champion of humanity and a symbol of freedom, along with his bold and reckless ambition to achieve his goals by breaking the laws imposed by supreme authority.
It was Shelley’s second wife, Mary Godwin Shelley (1797-1851), that gave birth to a modern Prometheus in her novel Frankenstein. She began working on this novel in Italy, when she was 18, living with her husbandPercy Shelley, and meeting with the great Lord Byron. The novel is narrated by an English explorer in the Arctic, whose ice-bound ship takes on a man in terrible conditions, and reports the passenger’s story. The man is a scientist philosopher by the name of Dr. Victor Dr. Frankenstein subsequently gave birth to a monster of giant proportion and supernatural strength from assembled body parts taken from graveyards, slaughterhouses, and dissecting rooms. Dr. Frankenstein is a modern Prometheus, he also suffers the punishment of his ambitious project – as the Prometheus does with Zeus – when his creation, excluded from normal life, revolts against his creator and becomes a figure of evil.
The first illustration of the Frankenstein monster, frontispiece from the 1831 Standards Novel edition.
In fact, as soon as the creature opened his eyes, the scientist realized that he had not so much created a miracle as a horror, a creature doomed to a miserable existence of exile from normal society (see excerpt,lines 127-145). What follows is the story of the monster’s revenge – regardless of the fact that he had become highly cultivated through his autodidactic learning – leading to a series of murders that will adversely affect Dr. Frankenstein and his family.
Frankenstein belongs to a literary genre known as the Gothic Novel (horror and supernatural cast in a Medieval setting). It shows Romanticism’s love for the Medieval past, and it is actually a scientific horror that will become a modern classic. It questions human limits and modern scientific research, and it will inspire many movie and video makers of the modern era.
Excerpt from Shelley’s Frankenstein: See Excerpts – Frankenstein
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824): One of the most grandiose personalities of the early 19th C., that embodied all the values of the Romantic Era: pleasures of nature, of the senses, brotherhood, nationalism, extensive traveling – a man of the world – became a prototype of the romantic hero “Byronic Hero”. A man of action, traveling throughout Europe, engaging in panoramic sightseeing, and amorous affairs with numerous mistresses, he was – romantically speaking – an attractive man. Abandoning England he lived in Italy henceforth, until called by his urgent romantic passion for adventure, in 1824 he reached Greece to join the Hellenes in a desperate fight for emancipation from the Turks; there he palsy his last romantic nationalist role, dying of a strange fever.
His anti- conformism contributed to his reputable operas. In Italy he composed two of his best poems, unleashing his “violent passions”; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Don Juan. Both operas were autobiographic; Childe Harold, a wanderer, who alienated from society, seeks satisfaction in nature and traveling; Don Juan, the Libertine in search of new and exciting mistresses, who can’t control his sexual appetite. In all his operas he masterfully captures imagination in the art of writing.
Lord Byron in a portrait of Thomas Phillips' 1814
In his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he chooses the name Childe maybe because of its descent from the middle Ages, a word for a young noble awaiting knighthood setting out on a pilgrimage of journey of discovery. Harold is an outsider with a complex personality, loving nature, hating crowds, never contented but forever seeking new experiences. He is the archetypical Romantic hero. It essentially recounts Byron’s own grand tour, his own restless travels through Spain, Portugal, Greece, turkey, and Albania, including Italy. It’s in Albania that he purchased the costume in which he posed for Thomas Phillips. This opera was written in “Spenserian stanza”, a nine-line stanza with the rhyme scheme ababcbc.
Byron’s “Prometheus” was the embodiment of his emphatic spirit of individualism. Byron rehearses the myth as described by Aeschylus’ play “Prometheus Bound” and the addresses his mythical hero in Napoleon. In simpler terms, he compares Prometheus with the fallen Napoleon. In the first part of the poem he describes the traditional Promethean story, in the second part it’s the saga of napoleon.
Prometheus’s daring to oppose the Olympian gods was, for Byron, the same attempt of Napoleon to vanquish Europe’s established monarchs. The French emperor embodies the strength of the human spirit to overcome any and all troubles it encounters – even death. Napoleon like Prometheus becomes a symbol of human ambition, part divine but doomed to die. The Byronic hero must strive to define his destiny, only his actions will outlive us and himself.
Excerpt from Byron’s Prometheus: See Excerpts – Prometheus
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the Faust
It’s an irony to realize that one of the greatest Romantic operas in world, “The Faust”, was written by a writer (Von Goethe), whose style in the beginning was identified as classical. An avid collector of Greco-Roman artifacts, he visited many times Italy, especially Rome, between 1786-1788. However, many of his important writings seem to fall between an ill-defined border between “classical” and Romantic approaches.
The story of his most renown opera – the Faust, which he began writing in 1800 and completed just before his death in 1832 – is a 12,000 line verse play based on a 16th C. German legend of a historical figure, the Faust, which was a traveling physician and practitioner of black magic, which was known for having sold his soul to the devil in exchange for immense knowledge and personal joys.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust therefore, is a man of great learning and knowledge but bored with his station in life and longing for some greater experience. In Goethe’s hands, the Faust became a reflective mirror of man, a quest for knowledge, experience, and power.
The Faust is the maximum expression of romanticism, the will to break transcendent human limitations and master all knowledge. The Faustian hero, like Prometheus and Napoleon, sought power to control the world. The first 6 verses on pg. 250 indicate his dissatisfaction: “Here stand I, ach, Philosophy / Behind me, Law and Medicine too / And to my cost theology- / All these I have sweated through and through / And now you see me a poor fool / As wise as when I entered school!” In essence, Faust is profoundly bored! That challenge – satisfaction – appears, not long after, in the form of Mephistopheles – the devil – who arrives in Faust’s studio dressed like a dandy (see figure on next page).
The Faust is one of the most monumental literary works of its time, and although a drama it resembles more an epic poem, being written in lyric German. In theatrical performance the Faust ignores time and place, and therefore it is more adaptable to modern cinemas. Nevertheless, the opera shows tensions between heroic aspirations and human limitations. Goethe was a student of medicine, law, theology, theater, alchemy, etc. he himself seems to have modeled Faust.
The beginning – Prologue - of the Faust is set in Heaven where a bet is made between Mephistopheles (Satan) and God. Satan bets God that he can change Faust from the path that is true and fit. God contends that though man at times might sin along the right way, Faust will never give his soul to the devil. In the 1stpart of the play, Satan does a second pact with the Faust; if he can satisfy Faust’s deepest desires and ambitions then Mephistopheles wins his soul, “I will bind myself to your service in this world, To be at your beck and never rest nor slack; When we meet again on the other side, In the same coin you shall pay me back.”, says Mephistopheles. Faust responds, “A spell of pleasure that can hoax me – Then let that day be my last! That’s my wager!”, the Devil responds “Done!” Faust agrees, “Let’s shake!” Lines 601-618, Mephistopheles recognizes Faust as the ultimate Promethean hero, a man “always pressing onwards, beyond control,” whose insatiable ambition will inevitably lead him to “overleap” his limitations.
“Mephistopheles Offering His Help to Faust,” illustration to Goethe's Faust, lithograph by Eugène Delacroix.
Faust, liberated from his “dreary hole,” begins a tumultuous love affair with a young woman, Gretchen, but abandons her, which causes her to lose her mind and murder their illegitimate child. Although condemned to death, she wins salvation thanks to the purity of her love.
In the 2nd Part, The demon carries the Faust away from the life of the mind to a world of passion and satisfaction; the hero visits a nether world made out of sirens, fantastic creatures and heroes of the past, as well as the ravishing Helen of Troy, which whom he has a love affair, but he’s sstill not satisfied! But what begins to “quench his thirst”, as per God’s design, is to put his immense knowledge at the service of the community. Faust engages in a life devoted to the public good. He builds a new state guaranteeing life and joy to millions, and only now does he begin to find personal satisfaction: the Romantic objective, heroism. He dies however, before fully realizing his dream, hence he never actually vows his satisfaction to would damn his soul to Mephistopheles. A band of angels carry the Faust to heaven with the divine Gretchen at their head.
Judging the Faust: In the end, Goethe’s Faust is an extremely ambiguous figure, a man of enormous ambition and hence enormous possibility, yet, like Frankenstein, his will to power is self-destructive. We see these ambiguities in the poem’s high seriousness countered by flagrant comedy, and in Faust’s great goodness countered by deep depravity.
Excerpt from von Goethe’s Faust: See Excerpts – The Faust
Last Visited Jan 31, 2016 11:42 AM
Last sent to Binder on Jan 19, 2016 10:11 PM