Man, State and Deity

Essays in Ancient History

Victor Ehrenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136576522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

First published in 1974, this book is a collection of nine essays written by Victor Ehrenberg between 1925 and 1967, five of which had not been published before. They deal with a number of aspects of Greek and Roman history, and with the nature of ancient history in the East and West. The first essay is a broad survey of interactions between opposing forces and ideas in the world as seen from the most ancient Near Eastern civilizations to the beginning of the western Middle Ages and the era of Byzantium; this is followed by discussions of topics from Classical and Hellenistic Greece and Republican and Imperial Rome, with the accent on the history of ideas and institutions –freedom, the Greek city-state, and Roman concepts of state and empire. The final chapter consists of personal reflections on the meaning of history from the writer's own characteristic viewpoint, and is, as he admits, more in the way of a confession than pure scholarship.

1

East and West in Antiquity¹

There may have been times when the tremendous importance of the relationship between East and West – in Europe or on the whole earth – was not realized. In the lifetime of the last two or three generations everyone will have felt the impact of the contrasts and conflicts between East and West. I believe it was more or less the same in antiquity, and there will be few people who might prefer a theory recently fashionable: that the invasion of Northern, i.e. Indo-European, intruders into the Mediterranean was of greater impact than continuous relations – friendly or hostile – between East and West.

It is a vast subject, and to press it into one lecture means that much can only be hinted at, and much has to be left out. Moreover, even when restricted to ancient times, it is by no means a clearly defined subject. It can mean mainly the contrast between Europe and Asia, or between the western and the eastern Mediterranean. It will also be more than a question of geography; the contrast of two different spiritual aspects, two ways of the working of the human mind. If we are prepared to see it in its most sweeping (and therefore inaccurate) generalization, we can speak of the god-centred East and the man-centred West.

It goes without saying that those relations and conflicts could be political, economic, social, religious, or of any other sphere of man’s life and mind. But we need not try to paint such a multicoloured picture in order to see the whole instead of its parts. There is a clear unity behind the many aspects: history has been shaped by the relations and decisions between East and West to such an extent that behind the various historical forces lies a certain unity, though not uniformity. The facts of history were decisively determined by the moves and happenings between East and West; they were, as it were, the bed of a river which was formed by very different forces. We may have certain concepts of East and West, but they resist all clear definition; that simply does not exist. What I am going to do is to discuss facts of ancient history in the light of the general concept, however nebulous, of the East-West contrast. There can be little doubt that the foundations laid in those centuries are, even if unconsciously, the foundations of all succeeding times.

The history of the ancient world, as seen in its widest aspects, is a unity the centre of which is the Mediterranean. Without denying that a really universal history might be possible, I am speaking of the European history to which Mesopotamia and Egypt belong, to some extent India but not China. History moved from Babylon and the Near East to Greece, and from Greece to Rome, but also directly from Jerusalem to Rome and in the opposite direction from Rome to Constantinople, always East to West or West to East. Very different peoples and civilizations adapted themselves to the new surroundings, essentially because of the climate and rich soil of most of the Mediterranean world. They came from the North like the Persians, Greeks and Italians, or from the South like the Semites to Mesopotamia and Syria; later followed the Celts, Germans, Slavs, Arabs. They all, as far as they became part of the Mediterranean area, shaped its history, accepted the demands of, and were shaped by, their new homes: they ‘became Mediterranean’.

The first era of our history took place in the Near East (now usually called the Middle East), in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Here for the first time in our world, prehistory grew into history. Excavations during the last century or so have revealed the cultural greatness of these countries, and the evidence is still growing. There are many other important differences, partly determined by the different race groups, partly by local conditions; but there are also decisive common features. Just as further east, in the Punjab and in China, civilizations grew up in the river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt where annual flooding brought to the lowlands the fertile soil which gave these countries their great chance. It was ‘the river’s gift’, as Herodotus calls Egypt, but only because man set to work on what nature offered him. Dikes and dams and canals had to be built, even artificial flooding added during the dry seasons. The population grew, and the technical achievement led to political consolidation and organized administration. Briefly, the states of the Ancient East were all, though in different ways and in different mixtures, theocratic, autocratic and bureaucratic: divine or god-given kings, a caste of priests, a hierarchy of bureaucrats. May I give you an amusing example of the bureaucratic spirit? An Egyptian book contains a father’s letter to his son, who may have had a low I.Q. He is advised to do better in order to become a scribe (an official), not a peasant or a soldier or metal-worker ‘who has fingers like a crocodile’ (a suitable comparison if we think of its thick skin). ‘Be a scribe who is free from compulsory work, even protected against all labour … When a man works with his hands he does not dare sleep, for hard labour lies in front of him. No servant brings him water, no woman bakes bread for him, while his former school-fellows have become scribes, live according to their own desires and have servants working for them.’ This description sounds, of course, idealized to an almost ironical degree. Even high officials (they perhaps more than the lower grades) were dependent, living in fear of the king. But the praise of an official’s comfortable life sounds genuine. Perhaps the highest achievement of such a bureaucracy, apart from an efficient system of administration, was the use of writing and the creation of a written code of laws, as it is especially connected with the name of Hammurabi. It was most important for the development of mankind that these early autocratic states proclaimed the principle of justice. The laws of the East, partly by influencing the Greeks and largely by way of the legislation in the decalogue of the Old Testament, which had a good deal in common with Hammurabi’s laws, had, as we all know, a decisive influence on European civilization.

Those empires of the Ancient East with their urban civilization, their peasant serfs, their astonishing achievements in art, architecture, literature, and in particular in science, were above all strong political powers, and the threatening imperialism of Babylon, Assur and Persia was knocking at the doors of the West. Yet the driving force was religion, primitive in many aspects, ‘barbarian’, full of fear of daemonic powers, reaching a remarkable height in the worship of the sun as the embodiment of truth by the heretic Pharaoh Ikhnaton, and eventually its most spiritual shape in the ethical dualism of Zoroaster and the ethical monotheism of Israel.

When in the second half of the second millennium B.C. the East began to get in nearer touch with the West, they were unequal opposites, the East a vast, consolidated system of states, the heir of high civilizations, the West weak, primitive, still in the era of prehistoric migrations. The only exception was the Minoan civilization of Crete, which had strong connections with Asia Minor and Egypt, but displayed an amazing originality; it belonged neither to the East nor to the West. It was this rich, peaceful and refined civilization which the first Greeks met after they had come from the Balkans and invaded their future home country. The Mycenaean civilization as well as similar centres in Asia Minor, e.g. at Troy, resulted from a mixture of civilizations. Primitive warrior tribes accepted much of that higher Minoan culture, yet without abandoning their own way of life. What emerged was not Greek civilization, though Greeks for a time ruled in Crete, and there was an imported syllabic script (Linear B), used by skilled scribes to put down records in Greek. There also began a tradition of myth and legend which shaped the world of Homer. The Trojan war may have been one of the piratical onslaughts by the Mycenaeans to counter the East beyond the Aegean, even in Syria and Egypt. The warriors who did not settle anywhere outside Greece were followed by colonists. Later, towards the end of the second millennium when new Greek nomads came from the North, a movement culminating in the ‘Dorian Migration’, there began the Greek colonization of the Aegean and the west coast of Asia Minor, an area that was to be the outpost of the West against the East, and at the same time a fortress and a market. This movement led to what is called the ‘Ionian Migration’. The Greeks became heirs to the Eastern world and at the same time its enemies and conquerors, and that is true of the cultural aspects no less than of the military and political ones. Asia Minor, though hellenized only centuries later, had begun on its historical task of being a bridge between East and West.

However, the Greeks had to start again, almost from scratch. After the end of the Minoan and Mycenaean world, long dark centuries followed, the era of Hesiod’s Iron Age in the true sense of the word, for it was then that in the Mediterranean the Bronze Age ended. We know very little of the Greeks of the eleventh to ninth centuries. The decisive fact is the emergence of the Greek people and its world of political units, having one language, one religion, one civilization. Politically as well as in its various forms of dialects, cults and cultural developments, it was divided into numberless independent units. The Greeks had closed behind them the gateway from the North through which they had passed themselves, and became Mediterranean. Mixing with earlier Greeks and non-Greeks they were the creators of the first European civilization. It is significant that inside the extending area of Greek settlement the tension between East and West was soon apparent. Furthest to the East, the Ionians and Aeolians were most progressive, living in an urban civilization of prosperity and even luxury, though they had to learn from the ‘motherland’ the finer crafts, e.g. vase-painting. In general, however, it remains true that the further to the West, the slower were cultural progress and political stabilization.

The world in which the Greeks grew up during the dark centuries had also changed. New powers arose and opened new ways of political expansion. The Phoenicians, a Semitic people, founded cities along the Syrian coast, and their ships sailed the Mediterranean as far as the Pillars of Heracles and beyond. Carthage, founded by Phoenicians in the ninth or eighth century, was the leading Eastern colony in the West. The mysterious people of the Tyrrhenians probably emigrated from the eastern Mediterranean and invaded Italy, creating the great Etruscan civilization which brought at the same time a great deal of Greek culture to Italy and later – directly and indirectly – to Rome. In the East the cruel military power of Assur advanced to the shores of the Mediterranean and, among other things, forcibly repulsed a landing of Greek colonists in the south of Asia Minor. The relations between East and West grew closer, though hardly less hostile. Symbolic for this process is the creation of the alphabet. Containing earlier imperfect attempts of the East, the Phoenicians created the signs for consonants which the Greeks in the ninth or eighth century accepted and adapted to their own different dialects. Europe owes its most important cultural tool to the East, though it was finally shaped by the creative inventiveness of the Greeks.

About the time when the Phoenician cities began to flourish, the country behind the Phoenician coast, Palestine (or Canaan), was invaded by tribes from the southern desert who became the people of ‘Israel’, which means ‘God fights’. It was a time of war and murder, as it is described at the end of The Book of Judges: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’ But the external enemy, the Philistines, believed by some scholars to be Indo-Europeans, forced Israel into defence and to a monarchical consolidation. This move was accompanied by religious intensity when the Jewish god Jahve was raised to a position of national monotheism which later opened the way to universal monotheism. The decalogue pronounced clear ethical laws, and gradually over many centuries those books were written, mythological, pious or historical, which all preached the greatness of Israel’s god, and not that of its people or its leaders. Thus the religion of Israel was enabled to become the source from which Christianity and Islam originated.

The creation of what we now call the Old Testament is roughly contemporary with the creation of Homer’s epics. We shall not deal here with biblical criticism or the Homeric question. The decisive fact is that the two most miraculous literary expressions of the human mind came into the world at about the same time, and could not be more different. On the Eastern side the miracle of divine revelation was predominant, on the Western were the deeds of heroic men. Yet there were also heroic men under the guidance of God, and on the other side is the myth, however anthropomorphic, of the Olympians. From the stories and images of Homer and the Old Testament sprang two never-ending rivers which fertilized the history of the European mind and largely prevented it from becoming a dry desert. The Bible and Homer (often called the Bible of the Greeks) are opposites, bearing witness to the Eastern and the Western minds. However, even in this contrast is something they have in common. Man, whether created by God or a godlike hero, has to face the task of shaping his own fate and put into harmony his own will and the laws of divine world order. Here we touch on the deepest foundations of Europe. We shall have to speak of both sides, but first of the Greeks.

Greek literature started with its greatest revelation, and Homer remained the lasting companion of most Greeks from schooldays to the grave. In the great epics are reflected not only prehistory, myth and fairytale but also a completely new vision of world order. Instead of the Eastern view that the world is created and ruled by external divine forces, for the Greek the world itself is full of gods. Πάντα πλήρη θε

ν. It is in this world that man lives and in himself combines the great general rule, the unity of freedom and order. Apart from a few passing movements, Greek religion never fettered mind or reason, and that is why the Greeks were the first philosophers, the first who tried to understand both the kosmos and their own minds. Greek philosophy and science learned from discoveries and researches of the East, but they alone recognized the true principle of it all, rational definition. The word philosophy, the ‘love for wisdom’, speaks for itself, expressing the heroic fight of the European mind for that truth which the East received in divine revelation, that heroic and tragic fight which all the time led to the mountain tops and again into the depths of the abyss, but did not forget the final goal: to try to understand the macrocosm of the world and the microcosm of the human mind.

This, of course, does not mean that all Greeks were philosophers. It is always dangerous to speak of the Greeks. We know what most of them thought of those thinkers who, as with other peoples, were generally regarded as useless dreamers. There always was (and is)a gap between the beliefs of the masses and the theories of the intellectuals. Philosophy was only one of the ways to human perfection. Most Greeks were well aware of the dangers of human greatness; but though they might condemn hubris, they knew nothing of the humility of the East. We might say that the Greeks saw the legitimate end of human endeavours in the satanic word of the serpent: ‘eritis sicut Deus scientes bonum et malum’.

The autonomy of man was achieved within the framework of the state. By the founding of Greek colonies, the Greek form of state, the polis, was brought to all the shores of the Mediterranean and even the Black Sea. Land-hungry peasants, impoverished townsfolk, traders, adventurers, they all went out to sail largely unknown seas; to settle in unknown lands; and to found new autonomous Greek city-states. Thus, the kind of state which for the first time in human history represented a community of free citizens became the basis of Western civilization. That remains true even though the society of the polis could only exist with the help of slavery. The West found in Aristotle’s ‘political animal’, the citizen bound to the polis, the counterpart to Eastern politics which were in the hands of the king or the god whom he served. The people, apart from the king’s officials, knew nothing of politics, and the only form of patriotism was religious nationalism. In the polis everything was political, even religion, and it is political freedom, though rarely fully accomplished, that Greek culture was built upon. There is no need to idealize reality. With all its faults and insufficiencies, the Greek state was an expression of the will of the people and the foundation of culture. It faced its crucial test in the victories over Persia and Carthage, and experienced its highest flowering in the Periclean Age. It also influenced the East. The Greek features of the Persian court in Aeschylus’ Persae do not prove that either way, but the famous coin of Tissaphemes with his own head on the front, and the Athenian owl on its back, does.

The Periclean Age saw at the same time the first signs of the break-up of the polis community. The autonomous state gradually disintegrated because of the increasing autonomy of the individual. The Sophists and Socrates marked the beginning of the end for the old Greek civilization, though it still took a long time till the end came. Socrates had tried to combine the new principle of individual responsibility with the traditional idea of citizenship. His death sealed the fate of his attempt but, more than through all his teaching and questioning, it was his martyrdom that made him for all time the great witness of truth.

The fourth century prepared the Greeks for their new oecumenical task, although the two great philosophers of that century, Plato and Aristotle, as far as their political philosophy went, looked backwards and did not understand the signs of the time. It was Alexander who by his conquests and his empire, not least by the latter’s breakup, created a new world to which both East and West belonged. Now the Greeks were the main support of a civilization which we call Hellenistic, but which owed a great deal to the East, especially in public administration and economic organization. A feature prevalent in most of the Hellenistic monarchies, also the result of both Eastern and Western influences, was the cult of the deified ruler. Meeting and mixing of East and West occurred everywhere and in all ways of life. Indian art created the picture of a Greek-looking Buddha, and at least one book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, is full of Greek wisdom and Greek scepticism; the mysteries of Eastern gods, on the other hand, with their ecstatic rites, entered the life of Greek cities, and educated Greeks began to study Babylonian astrology. There are many other examples of the mating between East and West, some of them rather absurd. May I quote from the correspondence between one of the purely Indian, but hellenized, Mauryan kings and one of the Seleucids? The Indian asked for three items and was prepared to pay for them: a certain sweet drink, dried figs from Asia Minor and a Greek sophist. The answer was: ‘I shall send you the figs and the wine, but a sophist, according to Greek views, is not an article of sale’ (.Fr. Hist. Gr. IV, 421). There were, however, Greek sophists and artists who went as far as India, and though the rule of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. East and West in antiquity
• 2. Freedom – ideal and reality
• 3. Prometheus
• 4. Dike and Eros
• 5. Some aspects of the transition from the Classical to the Hellenistic Age
• 6. The Hellenistic Age
• 7. Some Roman concepts of state and empire
• 8. Caesar’s final aims
• 9. Remarks on the meaning of history
• Index