Introduction

The narrative returns to Dikaiopolis, who continues on his way through the city with the rhapsode. They meet Euelpides and Peisetairos, two friends who plan to escape from Athens and its troubles and found a new city, Cloudcuckooland (Νεφελοκοκνγία), a Utopia in the sky with the birds (Section 8). ‘Utopia’ (a word confected in 1516 by Sir Thomas More to describe an ideal society) = οὐ τόπος ‘no place’ – or should that be εὖ τοπος (Eutopia)?

We have already seen some of the troubles they want to escape – the war, the plague, increasing lawlessness and disrespect for the gods and human institutions, the collapse of morality and the challenge of the sophists – but Euelpides mentions another, the Athenian obsession with law-suits, a theme which is comically explored in scenes from Aristophanes' Wasps (Section 9).

Peisetairos and Euelpides have already decided on their plan of escape, but Aristophanes provides two other possible comic solutions: in Lysistrata (Section 10) the women of Athens stage a sex-strike to end the war, and in Akharnians (Section 11) Dikaiopolis finally finds his own solution to the problems of Athens at war.

There is one criterion, and one only, by which a course for the learners of a language no longer spoken should be judged: the efficiency and speed with which it brings them to the stage of reading texts in the original language with precision, understanding and enjoyment. The setting-up of the Greek Project by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers was the product of a conviction that it was possible to compose an Ancient Greek course which would satisfy that criterion substantially better than any course already existing.

There would have been little point in such a project if the current decline of Greek in schools had clearly reflected a general, growing and irreversible failure on the part of modern society to respond aesthetically and intellectually to Greek culture; but there has been no such failure of response, for the popularity of Greek literature in translation and of courses in Greek art and history has continued to increase. It seemed to the Joint Association that there was a gap waiting for a bridge. Bridges cost money, and when an appeal for £40,000 was launched at the beginning of 1974 by Dr Michael Ramsey and others it was legitimate to wonder how the cause of Greek would fare in competition with louder claims. But the optimists were justified: by November £63,000 had been contributed, a sum which more than compensated for the effect of inflation after the original costing of the project, and in 1976 an appeal for the money required for a fourth and final year of work brought in more than £15,000.

Introduction

Odysseus has left Troy for home with his contingent of ships, but is swept off course and, in a series of adventures with such mythical creatures as the Cyclopes, the Lotus Eaters, Kirke, the Sirens and Skylla and Kharybdis, loses all his ships and men. He himself is washed up on the island of the demi-goddess Kalypso, where he is kept against his will for a number of years. Eventually, the gods order his release and Odysseus builds himself a boat and sets sail for his home, Ithaka. But Poseidon the sea-god, still enraged at Odysseus for blinding his son the Cyclops, wrecks the boat. Odysseus swims to land and arrives at Scheria, where he hauls himself ashore and collapses joyfully under a bush to sleep. Meanwhile his patron goddess, Athene, is working on his behalf to arrange a welcome for him amongst the Phaiakians, who inhabit the island.

The interleaved translation is by Richmond Lattimore.

In World of Athens: Homer 1.10–11, 17, 8.1; dreams 3.8, 12, 14–16; display and reputation 4.5–8.

There is a good edition by Janet Watson, Homer: Odyssey VI and VII (Bristol 2005); and for more advanced students by AF Garvie, Homer: Odyssey VI–VIII (Cambridge 1994).

While Odysseus sleeps, Athene visits Nausikaa, the daughter of Alkinoös (king of the Phaiakians), in a dream and suggests that she should go to the river next day to wash the royal linen.

Introduction

Whether Aristarkhos was telling the truth or not (and it was probably six of one and half a dozen of the other), the fact was that the actual working of justice could be a slow, messy and unsatisfactory business – slow because of the variety of claims and counter-claims that could be lodged, messy because it was always up to individuals to bring cases, gather evidence, present the case and enforce the verdict, and unsatisfactory because the scanty rules of legal process made dikasts liable to be swayed by purely emotional or personal appeals. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the law was an intensely personal concern for a Greek (far more, perhaps, than it is for us with our batteries of solicitors, policemen, barristers and judges) and that the Greeks regarded the laws, by means of which justice was upheld, as the absolute heart and soul of the πόλις. Indeed, Greek citizens actually made the laws by their vote in the ἐκκλησία; and, as we have seen, thousands of citizens could be daily involved in the process of law as dikasts. The word νόμος also had much deeper associations for a Greek than ‘law’ does for us, because it meant much more than statutory law: it meant also ‘custom’, ‘convention’, the collected wisdom of the past, the ‘accepted inheritance which formed the permanent background of [a Greek's] life’ (Dodds).

The following passage is taken from Plato's dialogue Protagoras. Socrates has asked Protagoras, the great sophist and thinker, whether it is possible to teach people to be good citizens, a skill that Protagoras himself claimed to teach.

Introduction

Section Twenty, the final section of the first half of the Course, introduces Homer through the story of Odysseus and Nausikaa. The shift of emphasis apparent in Section Nineteen, which took you away from the secular society of Neaira and Aristarkhos to an interpretation of history which depended on the intervention of the gods in man's affairs, is continued here. Homer's world is one in which the gods move easily amongst the (mortal) heroes of the Greeks (whom the gods are made, in many ways, to resemble), and heroes are quite often, as a result, called ‘godlike’. Yet there is a deeper sense of the value of mere humanity in Homer than perhaps in any other Greek writer.

Homer and his poems

The Iliad and Odyssey are the very first works of literature of Western civilisation, and some would say they are rivalled only by Shakespeare. In reading them, you will be placing yourself in a mainstream of human experience which stretches back for some 2,700 years, and will stretch forward for as long as books are read. No other works have made, directly or indirectly, such a profound impact upon Western literature, or exercised such a compelling grip upon the human imagination over so long a period.

The two poems had probably reached the form in which we now have them by about 700. Tradition tells us that their composer was Homer and that he was blind.

The Joint Association of Classical Teachers' Greek Course Reading Greek has been written for beginners in the upper school, at university and in adult education. Its aim is to enable students to read fifth- and fourth-century Attic Greek, Homer and Herodotus, with some fluency and intelligence in one to two years. It consists of a continuous, graded Greek text, adapted from original sources (contained in Reading Greek [Text, with vocabularies]), coupled with a grammar book (Reading Greek [Grammar and Exercises]) which runs in phase with the text.

Method

The two books are to be used in conjunction.

Stage One (using the Text and running vocabularies) With the help of the teacher and accompanying vocabularies, read and translate the Greek in the Text up to the point in the Grammar book where grammatical explanations for those sections begin. The text has been written to encourage beginners to read with increasing fluency and confidence. The running vocabularies are so written as to enable students to read ahead out of class once the main grammatical principles have been established. It is vital to encourage students to do this.

Aristarkhos had been appointed in succession to Theophemos as a trierarch, whose duty it was to equip and man, at his own expense, a trireme of the Athenian navy. It was Theophemos' duty to hand over the state-provided ship's gear to his successor, but this he refused to do. In his attempts to recover the gear Aristarkhos got into a fight with Theophemos: Theophemos then brought a charge of assault and battery which he won, thanks to false evidence and the suppression of the testimony of a slave woman. Aristarkhos sought an extension of time in which to pay the fine, but at this Theophemos and a bunch of friends descended on Aristarkhos' farm, grabbing all they could lay their hands on and mauling an old servant so badly that she subsequently died.

Aristarkhos is uncertain what action he can take against Theophemos, and consults the Exegetai, state officials who advised on what to do in cases of murder. He is returning home when he meets Apollodoros, and tells him the whole story.

The speech is datable to the time of the Social War in 357.

Note

Aristarkhos' monologue is almost entirely unadapted.

In World of Athens: liturgies 6.62; trierachies 7.43–6; exegetai 3.33; blood-guilt 3.26; revenge 4.8ff.; Social War 1.100.

Introduction

Institutionally, Athenian society was male-dominated; and nearly all Greek literature was written by men. How then can we assess the impact and importance of women in Athenian society, especially when we cannot help but see them through twentieth-century eyes? A straight, short and true answer is ‘With much difficulty’. But the question is an important one for many reasons, particularly because women play such a dominant role in much Greek literature (e.g. Homer, tragedy and, as we have seen, comedy).

One of the best sources we have for the attitudes and prejudices of the ordinary people in Athenian society is the speeches from the law courts, and much information about women's lives emerges almost incidentally from these to balance the silence of some literary sources and the ‘tragic’ stature of the great dramatic heroines.

In the Prosecution of Neaira the prosecutor, Apollodoros, charges the woman Neaira with being an alien (i.e. non-Athenian) and living with an Athenian Stephanos as if she were his wife, so falsely claiming the privileges of Athenian citizenship. Apollodoros describes her early life in Corinth as a slave and prostitute, and how her subsequent career took her all over Greece and brought her into contact with men in the first rank of Athenian society, before she eventually settled down with Stephanos. Apollodoros' condemnation of her behaviour, which he denounces as a threat and affront to the status and security of native Athenian women, indicates by contrast his attitude to citizen women.