Who Were the Most Important People in Ancient Greece

Hey, this is Matt, and welcome to my channel, Nothing New, where we explore the ancient roots of modern culture. I've been studying ancient Greece for a few years now, and if one thing is clear, they love a good story. From poetry competitions and theater festivals to the myths that are represented across paintings, sculpture, even pots, we can see that storytelling was a central part of Greek society. It's a central part of every society, and understanding these stories is key to understanding the cultures that they come from. They reveal what the society valued, what it feared, what it believed in and prayed to, and what they thought a good and virtuous life consisted of. And when we take a step back and look at the historical context and the drama of politics, we see that that too tells us a very human story. We see how societies grow, what keeps them together, what splits them apart, how they stop working altogether. Even seemingly abstract subjects like philosophy tell very human stories when you understand it as a history of ideas and see the timeless debates and conflicts between different personalities and worldviews. So if we want to understand the story of ancient Greece, then we're going to need to get to know the cast of characters. That's what today's video will be covering. I'm going to give you a brief biography of the most important Greek personalities that we will be covering in more depth later on in this series of videos. So if you're interested in these historical figures and want to learn more about them, you can look forward to the upcoming full-length videos we'll be posting covering them and their historical context. The obvious starting place is the legendary author of the Iliad and Odyssey, two absolutely central works in Greek literature, the epic poet Homer. Of course, next to nothing is known about his life and there will always be debate whether he existed at all and if one person could have composed both works. Either way, the cultural significance of these two epic poems is comparable only to the Bible. Like the Bible, it was a near endless source for moral parables, stories of victory and defeat, and practical advice that absolutely everyone knew. Plato recognized his profound influence when he declared him above all to simply be the teacher of Greece, and many famous poets considered him to be the greatest poet of all. The Iliad and Odyssey continue to serve as an indispensable source for Greek culture between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. The only epic poet of comparable fame is Hesiod, who along with Homer is credited with laying the foundation of Greek religious belief. Unlike Homer, Hesiod actually tells us a little about himself. Like most Greeks, he was a farmer who was afraid of traveling by sea and cursed the harshness of his environment, calling it cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant. Also unlike Homer, the works attributed to Hesiod are likely to have been written down instead of being composed orally, which is also why we have more certainty about his personhood. His work on the origin of the gods, called the Theogony, gives us the Greek creation myth and contains the earliest versions of classic stories such as Pandora's Box, Prometheus, and The Myth of a Golden Age. There are also many scholars who point out possible connections with and inspiration from the creation stories of the Near East. His other major poem, Works and Days, is another indispensable source for the material culture of his time, including information on farming techniques, astronomy, and timekeeping. As Greece moved from the archaic age during which these poets lived into the classical period, the written record moves from the darkness of myth and into the light of history. The 5th century writer, Herodotus, is credited with being the father of history itself, coining the term when he opened his famous work on the Persian Wars by declaring it to be an Inquiry, or Historia, into the causes of the war. Born in the Greek city of Helicarnassus, then under the rule of Persia, he found opportunity to travel thanks to the international nature of the port city he called home. His travels cover the span of his histories from Egypt to Tyre in modern-day Lebanon, down the Euphrates to Babylon, around the Black Sea and across the Mediterranean to southern Italy. He shared his works through publicly reciting them to an audience, often at popular festivals as was the custom. He has been both praised and criticized for the many fantastical folk stories he includes in his works, even stories that he admits may be unlikely, for which other historians such as Thucydides call him a storyteller, and others call him simply the father of lies. To me, he is the father of ethnography, the study of cultures, because he covered not only the historical stories and myths of the places he visited, but also their geography, daily life, religious practices, and even wildlife. Without him, we would be without one of the richest sources on the daily life and customs of the ancient Mediterranean. He also provides the earliest accounts we have for legendary figures such as the Lydian king Croesus, famous for being one of the richest men in antiquity and minting the first coins, and Solon, whose law reform earned him his place among the seven sages of Greece. He covers the rise and fall of the Peisistratids, a family of three tyrants who ruled Greece after Solon and before the reforms of Cleisthenes, the father of democracy, along with the rise of Sparta and how famous kings like Cleomenes tried to intervene in the affairs of Athens. We'll hear about great leaders like the king Leonidas, famous for leading the 300 Spartans who died defending the pass at Thermopylae, and famous generals like Miltiades, Themistocles, and Aristides the Just, who led the tiny Greek city-states in their victory against Persia. The next major historian, who we'll also see pop up often as a source in these videos, is Thucydides, an Athenian general who would be inspired by Herodotus to write his own history on the main conflict of his lifetime, the Peloponnesian War. By being unjustly exiled early in the war, he was able to travel among the Spartan allies, giving him a unique and valuable perspective on events. His use of eyewitness accounts and reproduction of important speeches shows us the human side of the conflict, never resorting to explanations for events, unlike earlier writers. Without his work, we may not have had as clear a picture on the rise of Athenian naval supremacy under leaders like Cimon, and the development of probably its most famous piece of military technology, the trireme. We would not have the famous funeral oration of Pericles, a eulogy in praise of the brave soldiers, good laws, and liberal attitude of Athens, and we definitely wouldn't have the Mytilenean debate and Melian dialogue, classic examples of political realism that are still used as case studies in political and military science today. We also get incredible stories like the leadership struggle between Alcibiades and Nicaeus over the Sicilian expedition, and the complete catastrophe that it would result in. Xenophon is the last major historian in this period who we'll be covering, and he'll help us fill in some of the gaps after Thucydides, but by this period in Greek history, we are blessed with a wealth of literary sources. We'll cover all the famous playwrights from this period, including the tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, and the comic playwright Aristophanes, but all this history and culture will only serve as the background for the core subject of this video series, the philosophy of ancient Greece. By understanding thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and the subsequent cultural history, we will begin to understand their profound moral, spiritual, and intellectual influence on western culture. Socrates and his endless questioning is the classic embodiment of the Greek principle of knowing oneself, leaving him with a reputation as the first moral philosopher. Almost every school of Greek thought after him had to respond to the questions he posed if they weren't already directly influenced by the few answers he did seem to give. His most famous student, of course, was Plato, who may have been a playwright or a poet had he not fallen into the hard-to-resist orbit of Socrates. Without Plato, we would have a very slim, not nearly as rich record of the conversations and debates of Socrates, for his work consists almost entirely of what's called Socratic dialogues. If Plato had any doctrine at all, he often put it in the mouth of Socrates, and there's been an enormous amount of scholarship poured over the issue of defining where Socrates' philosophy ends and Plato's philosophy begins. But from the time of his academy and the later Neoplatonists, there has been a core of esoteric teaching that seems to be uniquely Plato's which has gone on to inform and influence much of western spirituality and mysticism. This intellectual flourishing in Athens would continue under Plato's student Aristotle, who gave philosophy its lexicon and clearly laid out the divisions between speculative, natural, and practical philosophy for the first time. These early categories of philosophical study would grow into the basis for modern disciplines like the study of logic, politics, ethics, physics, and the natural sciences at large, but we won't be able to truly understand them unless we understand the thinkers that came before them and how they were influenced by or disagreed with them. Traveling wise men, known as sophists, were famous for teaching rhetoric and relativistic attitudes about truth and virtue, and provide a foil to the idealistic realism seen in Plato. The proto-scientific philosophy of the early Greek thinkers known as the Presocratics would have a large influence on the metaphysics of both Plato and Aristotle. But I think we've introduced enough names for one video, so we're going to save the sophists and Presocratics for the next video, where we'll see how cities from Italy to Ionia began to give rise to thinkers who turned away from the mythical just-so stories of the past and towards rational explanations that relied on the logic of cause and effect instead of divine intervention. I know it's a lot, and you probably won't remember all these names, but that's perfectly okay. This video is just to plant the seeds of these names and ideas, so that when we cover them in depth later on, you'll have at least heard of them before. So, I hope you're excited.