Introduction #1.

Facts about the Heroes course (a five-minute sketch):

A. What kinds of media were used to convey such concepts as the heroic and the antiheroic? Here are seven that we will study in this course: a) epic and lyric poetry, b) wisdom poetry, c) drama, d) history, e) various other forms of prose, f) ancient art, g) religious practices (worship of heroes and gods. In the first two dialogues I concentrate on (a) and briefly mention (g). Most of you have never studied most of these media before. Even those of you may have already read the Iliad or the Odyssey in translation will nevertheless find that this course will give you perspectives that are different and even new. In any case, there are no prerequisites for this course. There is no language requirement, and there are no previous readings required or assumed. B. This course gives you a major part of the core of Classical Greek literary masterpieces (for a more detailed list, see the syllabus): #a) all of Homer for epic; highlights from lyric, #b) Hesiod, #c) 7 Greek tragedies, from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; #d) highlights from the History of Herodotus; #e) two works by Plato about the last days of Socrates; the Gospel according to Mark; highlights from the Heroikos of Philostratus; #f) a slide dialogue on heroes as represented in Black Figure painting. I will also provide for you, in the dialogues and in the notes to the dialogues, #g) documentation of ancient Greek religious practices involving the worship of heroes. So, your readings give you a very full knowledge of Classical Greek culture (especially the literature), which is an important aspect of becoming an educated person. But your goal, I hope, is not only to achieve a solid foundation in Classical civilization. An education in the Classics is not merely a commodity, something that can be evaluated and even rated by a Consumers Report mentality. C. Work-load. While we are on the subject of consumerist thoughts....

People tell me that the reading load for this course is light. Well, there is less in volume than in other courses. But here is the essential thing: the reading experience in this course is very different - more challenging in many ways than what you read in other courses that focus more on our own cultural values. Reading in ancient Greek culture was a very different experience from reading in our culture. D. The readings in this course will expand your ways of thinking. I will encourage you to produce your own ideas on the basis of the facts you will learn and, even more important, on the basis of the new reading skills you will develop. The best advice I can give at this point: keep thinking while you listen to the dialogues and keep thinking while you read the assignments. And take

notes about what you are thinking: these will be very useful for you later, when the time comes for your work to be evaluated. E. I hope you and I will have a chance to talk, at the very least via e-mail. I enjoy talking with students about ideas, about facts, about anything at all (though I dont enjoy quarreling about grades!). F. In short, this course is about how to think about literature - a very different kind of literature. G. A word about the history of the course. What makes this course similar to other courses taught in other colleges and universities about Greek literature in translation? The answer is that this course has a "Great Books" dimension, since we will be reading so many of the major works of the Classical Greek canon. And what makes this course different. The answer has to do with the perspective on ancient Greek religious practices and thinking as reflected in the literature. This perspective is tied in with one of my own major research projects, as reflected in the 1979 book that is recommended for the course, The Best of the Achaeans . Around the time when I finished writing the book, I started teaching an earlier version of the course you are now taking, and I have been teaching the course ever since, almost without interruption. Why? Because I wanted to find a way to communicate my research with those who are not experts in the Classics. Two models for this kind of communication have been the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde on Greek concepts of heroic psukh, death, and immortality. As for the research that forms the basis of the course, it draws from a variety of different disciplines, such as comparative literature, study of religion, history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics. I have also applied the perspectives of the study of oral traditions, as pioneered at Harvard by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. The main point of interest for me is the study of literature: how to read it in new ways, how to communicate about it in new ways - as well as in old ways. H. A word about Classics as a field of study. In the history of European civilization, the study of Greek and Roman Classics has been the core of humanities - and of humanism. In the past, it was availalbe only by and for the lite. More recently, however, Classics has become democratized in places like the United States, much as the ideals and the life-styles of aristocracy were democratized in 5th-century Athens. But it has not always been a smooth journey. Even in the history of the U.S., Classics has in the past tended toward social litism. This tendency, which can have a variety of negative consequences for the field, has been for the most part transcended in recent times. Another negative tendency, one that the field has in many ways also transcended, is an attitude of intellectual superiority leading to the slighting or even exclusion of other fields. The resulting dangers are obvious: (1) any exclusiveness in the field of Classics impoverishes its own humanism and (2) other disciplines will try to bypass the Classics, thus cutting themselves off from the historical core of humanism. The study of Classics at Harvard reflects the ideals of the field: intellectual inclusiveness and vigorous concentration on learning and thinking about central facts and values of civilization.

Introduction #2.
A brief overview of ancient Greek history (a five-minute sketch):
A. Time. The time-span covered in this course extends from the eighth through fourth centuries before our era (unless otherwise noted, all dates are BC or BCE = Before Common Era). Some of the sources we are using date from later periods, however: for example, Pausanias is dated to the second century CE (= Common Era) and Philostratus, to the early third century CE.) The term ancient Greece will include Archaic (up to roughly the middle of the fifth century), Classical (roughly, the second half of the fifth century), and post-Classical (fourth century and beyond). A convenient point for dividing Classical and post-Classical is the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. A convenient stopping-point for this course is the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. B. Place. In the ancient world of the classical period, Greece was not really a country or a nation, as we ordinarily think of these terms. Rather, it was a cultural constellation of competing city states that had a single language in common, Greek. Among the most prominent of the ancient Greek city states were Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Argos, and Thebes, all of them located in the Mediterranean region that we know today as modern Greece or Hellas. There were also other prominent ancient Greek city states in other Mediterranean regions. To the East, on the coast of Asia Minor, which is now part of the modern state of Turkey, were Greek cities like Miletus and Smyrna (now Izmir); facing the coast of Asia Minor were Greek island states like Samos and Chios. Further to the North was a federation of Greek cities on the island of Lesbos and on the facing mainland of Asia Minor. Still further to the North, guarding the entrance to the Black Sea, was the Greek city of Byzantium, later to be called Constantinople (now Istanbul). To the South, in African Lybia, was the Greek city of Cyrene. Further to the East in Northern Africa, in Egypt, was the arguably greatest of all Greek cities in the ancient world, Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE. To the West were other great Greek cities like Syracuse on the island of Sicily as well as Tarentum and Naples in what is now the modern state of Italy. Still further to the West, in what is now the modern state of France, was the Greek city of Massalia (now Marseille). The ancient Greeks would agree that they shared the same language, despite the staggering variety of local dialects. They would even agree that they shared a civilization, though they would be intensely contentious about what exactly their shared civilization would be. Each citystate had its own institutions, that is, its own government, constitution, laws, calendars, religious practices, and so on. Both the sharing and the contentiousness lie at the root of the very essence of the city-state. What I am translating here as city-state is the Greek word polis. This is the word from which our words political and politics are derived.

C. A most basic observation about ancient Greek society: The human being is an organism of the polis - Aristotle, Politics I 1253a23. (Often mistranslated as Man is a political animal.) Here we see the basis for the concept of civilization. In other words, human beings achieve their ultimate potential within a society that is the polis. From this point of view, the ultimate humanism is achieved politically. D. The most basic aspects of Greek civilization that most ancient Greeks could agree about: 1. interpolitical festivals; primary examples: the Olympic festival (= Olympics) at Olympia, the Pythian festival at Delphi 2. interpolitical repositories of shared knowledge; primary example: Delphi 3. interpolitical poetry; primary examples: the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer,

the Theogony and Works and Days of Hesiod. E. I use interpolitical instead of international because I do not want to imply that each polis is a nation. In my own writings, I use a cover-term for interpolitical: Panhellenic. Panhellenism is the least common denominator of ancient Greek civilization. F. The impulse of Panhellenism is already at work in Homeric and Hesiodic poetry. In the Iliad, the names Achaeans and Danaans and Argives are used synonymously in the sense of Panhellenes = all Hellenes = all Greeks. G. We will start with Homer. Homer represents an interpolitical or Panhellenic perspective on the Greeks. Homeric poetry is not tied down to any one polis. It presents the least common denominator in the cultural education of the elite of all city-states. How can a narrative or story like the Iliad be an instrument of education? We will get to that later. H. In the Classical period, an authoritative source is on record as saying that Homer and Hesiod are the foundation for all civilization. That source is the 5th-century historian Herodotus (2.116 117). Note that Herodotus defines civilization primarily in terms of religion (the forms and functions of gods). I. Finally, an essential point about ancient Greek religion: not only were the gods worshipped. Heroes too were worshipped. The worship of heroes was very much like ancestor worship. (Compare similar customs in other traditional societies, including the Japanese.) Besides the word worship, we may use the word cult. As in hero cult. {Other relevant concepts: cultivate and culture. More on these concepts later.} That is one of the main topics of my book Best of the Achaeans. Another useful word:ritual. I will have more to say later on the concepts of worship, cult. {It is enough for now to give two main examples of ritual: sacrifice and war. A related ritual is the killing of animals to eat their meat, which is correlated in myth with the moral problem of killing other humans. A classic discussion is Walter Burkert's Homo necans. This book is not required for the course.