Introduction to Western

Literature

The Ancient World of Western

Literature

• Time: roughly from 1000 B.C.E. to 400 B.C.E.

• Place: The Mediterranean Basin • The literature of this period was written in

three languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. • The Roman Conquest brought the

civilizations of these three languages into contact with one another and produced a fusion of their typical attitudes that formed the basis of later European thought.

The Ancient World of Western Literature

• Mediterranean civilization began not on the coasts but east and south of the sea: Babylon and Egypt (in the valleys of Euphrates and Tigris rivers and in the valley of the Nile).

• However, the cultural history of the ancient world (in the west)came to medieval and Renaissance Europe not in the languages of Babylon and Egypt but in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

The Ancient World of Western Literature

• When we consider how these groups

influenced our world and society, we see

the following:

• the intellectual honesty and curiosity

(philosophy) of the Greeks,

• the social seriousness and sense of order (law

and government) of the Romans, and

• The Hebrews’ feeling of human inadequacy

and God’s omnipotent justice.

The Ancient World of Western

Literature

• The cultures of the ancient world passed

down to later ages were dominated by two

major traditions:

• the Greco-Roman (Pantheistic) tradition and

• the Judeo-Christian (Monotheistic) tradition.

The Hebrews

• The Hebrews progressed from their

beginnings as a pastoral tribe to their high

point as a kingdom with a splendid capital

in Jerusalem.

• Their later history was a bitter and

unsuccessful struggle for freedom against

foreign masters—Babylon, Greek, and

Roman.

The Hebrews

• After the period of the great kings David

and Solomon (1005-925 B.C.E.), the

kingdom fell apart again into warring

factions.

• The period of exile (the deportation of the

population to Babylon, 586-539 B.C.E.)

was formative for Hebrew religious thought.

The Hebrews

• The return to Palestine was crowned by the rebuilding of the Temple and the creation of the canonical version of the Pentateuch or Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.

• Around 300 B.C.E. Palestine became part of a Hellenistic, Greek-speaking kingdom, and was absorbed into the Roman Empire in 63 B.C.E.

The Hebrews

• A second revolt against the Roman Empire resulted in the diaspora, the “scattering” of the Hebrew people.

• The Hebrew people remained stateless until the creation of the state of Israel in1948.

• It is founded on the idea of one God, the creator of all things, all-powerful and just.

• With the Hebrews’ concept of one God for all of us, one God for each of us, concepts of good and sin originated, as well as a feeling of guilt.

The Greeks

• The Hebrew conception of God emphasizes those aspects of the universe that imply a harmonious order; the Greeks conceived their gods as an expression of the disorder of the world in which they lived.

• The Olympian gods in Homer’s epics represented the blind forces of the universe.

• Morality is a human creation to the Greeks. They had a strong sense of what would be a crime or unjust, but no sense of error/sin.

The Greeks

• There is a double standard: one code of behavior for gods and another one for mortals.

• Homer imposed on Greek literature the anthropocentric emphasis that is its distinguishing mark and its great contribution to the Western mind.

• The stories told in Homer’s poems are set in the 12th century B.C.E.

• They were probably written between the 10th and the 8th B.C.E (the so-called “Dark Age”).

The Greeks

• For the next few hundred years the Greeks were illiterate; this period is called the “Dark Age” of Greece.

• It produced a body of oral epic poetry that was the raw material Homer shaped into two great poems, the Iliad and Odyssey.

• These works became the basis of an education and of a whole culture.

• The great characters of these epics serve as models of conduct for later generations of Greeks.

The Greeks

• The 5th century B.C.E., especially in Athens, was the cultural apex of the Greek civilization.

• By the end of the 5th century B.C.E. Athens was divided internally as well as defeated externally.

• An intellectual revolution occurred; it was a critical reevaluation of accepted ideas in every sphere of thought and action.

The Greeks

• The Greeks led quite an integrated existence

that sought to find harmony of mind, body,

and spirit.

• These markers of the Greek civilization are

pretty much for the men only.

• Women had few rights, and for such free-

thinking, individualistic people, it is ironic

that they upheld and accepted slavery.

Rome

• When Alexander died, the city of Rome was engaged in a struggle for the control of the surrounding areas. Rome was founded out of war and long periods of fighting.

• There were three Carthaginian (or Punic) Wars between Rome and Carthage.

• Rome emerged from the second Punic War (218-201 B.C.E.) not merely victorious but a world power.

• By the end of the first century B.C.E., Rome was the capital of a great empire.

Rome

• This empire gave peace and orderly government to the Mediterranean area for the next two centuries.

• When it finally went down, the empire left behind it the ideal of the world-state, an ideal that was to be taken over by the medieval church, which ruled from the same center, Rome, and which claimed a spiritual authority as great as the secular authority it replaced.

Rome

• The great body of Roman law is one of the Romans’ greatest contributions to Western civilization.

• The quality Romans most admired was gravitas, seriousness of attitude and purpose.

• Latin literature began with a translation of the Odyssey, made by a Greek prisoner of war.

• The Roman people appreciated discipline, control, and obedience most. Very patriarchal, very ordered and strict.

Rome

• While the Roman empire flourished in the 2nd century C.E., the old religion offered no comfort to those who looked beyond mere material ends.

• New religions arose or were imported from the East.

• The worship of the Hebrew prophet Jesus finally triumphed and became the official and later the exclusive religion of the Roman world.

Rome

• Under the never-ending invasions by peoples from the north, the church, with its center and spiritual head in Rome, converted the new inhabitants and so made possible the preservation of much of that Latin and Greek literature that was to serve the European Middle Ages and Renaissance as a model and a basis for their own great achievements in the arts and letters.

Source

• The above points are abstracted from the

chapter “The Ancient World” in Literature

of the Western World: Vol. 1, The Ancient

World through the Renaissance. 4th ed.

Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1997.