Name: HISTORY OF IDEAS - Ancient Greece
Uploaded: 2018-09-22T17:32:42.000Z
Duration: 10 min 56 s
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Adverbs of degree

The modern world is deeply attracted to ancient Greece.

Every year around one million people visit the Parthenon and wander around the ruins.

Transition words & phrases

Because they're sure the place and the
culture of which its supreme embodiment

There are perhaps five big ideas we can
take away from ancient Greece.

The Greeks thought it was extremely important for everyone regularly to witness a certain

Festivals existed to honor these tragedies and

governments close civic buildings businesses and law courts to enable citizens to go and see them.

Some festivals such as the festival
of Dionysus in Athens which began in 508 BC

would last a week and involve up to
17 plays.

Famous plays included Aeschylus' The Oresteia

Sophocles' Ajax, Oedipus' The king and Electra and Eurípedes' Medeia.

In these tragedies
people were seen to break a minor law or

make a hasty decision or sleep with the
wrong person and the result was ignominy and death.

Yet what happened was shown to
be to a large extent in the hands of

It was the Greeks poetic way of saying
the things often work out in random ways

according to dynamics that simply don't
reflect the merits of the individuals concerned.

In the Poetics, the philosopher
Aristotle defined the key ingredients of tragedy:

The hero of the tragedy should be a
decent person, better than average often

highborn but prone to making small
mistakes as we all do.

At the start it may not be obvious that it is an error they are making

but by an unfortunate chain of events for which they are not wholly to blame

this small mistake leads to a catastrophe.

Tragedy is the sympathetic morally complex account of

how good people can end up in
disaster situations.

It's the very opposite of today's
tabloid newspaper or social media sphere

with a mob rushes to make judgments on
those who slipped up.

Aristotle thought it was extremely
important that people see tragic works

on a regular basis to counter their
otherwise strong inclinations to judge and moralize.

Tragedy is meant to be a
corrective too easy judgment.

Without the idea of tragedy we can make existence for everyone far crueler and far more

We should look back to the Greeks to recover an extremely important idea.

What unites the Greek philosophers is a search for what they termed eudaimonia.

Which translates happiness or fulfillment.

They saw philosophy as a hugely
practical subject that could help people

find their way through the dilemmas of
life.

The approach was already contained in
the word philosophy itself:

in Greek, Philo means love or devotion and Sophia
means wisdom.

Philosophers were people devoted to wisdom.

That would be abstract the concept of wisdom isn't mysterious.

Being wise means attempting
to live and die well,

leading as good a life as possible within the troubled conditions of existence.

What we call the history of Greek
philosophy is made up of repeated

attempts over the centuries to address
ways in which we are unwise.

So for example Socrates paid special
attention to the problem of how people get confused in their minds.

He was struck that people didn't quite
know what they meant by key ideas like

even though these were the main ideas they used when talking about their own lives.

Socrates developed a method which still
bears his name by which you can learn to

get clearer about what you mean by
playing devil's advocate with any idea.

The aim isn't necessarily to change
your mind

it's to test whether the ideas guiding
your life are sound.

A few decades later, the philosopher Aristotle tried to make us more confident around big questions.

He thought the best questions with those that ask what something is for.

He did this a lot and over many books asking

Today he might be encouraging us
to ask questions like:

Also active in ancient Greece was the stoic philosophers who were interested in panic.

The Stoics noticed the really central
feature of panic:

We panic not just when something bad occurs but when it does so
unexpectedly,

when we are assuming that everything was going to go rather well.

So they suggested that we should arm
ourselves against panic by getting used to the idea that

danger, trouble and
difficulty are very likely to occur at every turn.

The overall task of studying Greek philosophy is to absorb

these and many other lessons and put
them to work in the world today.

The point isn't just to know what this
all that philosopher happened to say but

to aim to exercise wisdom at an
individual and societal level starting now.

Athens is known as the home of democracy.

Democracy was developed in the fifth century BC first under Solon then
Cleisthenes and Ephialtes.

However, democracy came under threat in the later stages of the fifth century BC,

When Athene was in the midst of fighting a lengthy war with its nemesis Sparta,

So to remind Athenians of their importance within a democracy, the great general Pericles

delivered a rousing speech at the annual Funeral Oration to mark the
dead of the war in 430 BC.

What makes Pericles's famous speech so striking is that

he isn't defending democracy just as a way of running the state.

He's defending what we might call the
democratic spirit,

a spirit of equality, community and comradeship

that can develop in societies where members more or less feel themselves to be equal to one another.

The voting system is a root to something
much deeper that we might term "fellow feeling".

An emotion the Greeks
discovered for Humanity.

Pericles declared: the administration of Athens favors the many instead of the few;

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HISTORY OF IDEAS - Ancient Greece

approach

extremely

physical

panic