Download The Principal Gods of Greek mythology

The Principal Gods of Greek mythology
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Note: Hephaestus is often said to be only Hera's son, and Aphrodite is usually said to be born of sea foam.
Source:
Edith Hamilton. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes.
New York: Mentor, 1940. ISBN: 0451628039.
© Copyright MCMXCV - MMI Encyclopedia Mythica.
All rights reserved.
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Greek Names vs. Roman Names
Greek Mythological Beings are often confused with the Romans. They are, for the most part, completely different and the names should not be used interchangeably.
Greek Name
Roman Name
Aphrodite
Ares
Artemis
Athene
Demeter
Erinyes
Eris
Eros
Fates
Graces
Hades
Hephaistos
Hera
Herakles
Venus
Mars
Diana
Minerva
Ceres
Furiae
Discordia
Cupid
Morae
Charities
Pluto
Vulcan
Juno
Hercules
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Hermes
Hestia
Hours
Kronos
Odysseus
Pan
Persephone
Poseidon
Zeus
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Mercury
Vesta
Horae
Saturn
Ulysses
Faunus
Proserpina
Neptune
Jupiter
Masterpieces of the Ancient World
Introduction
The area is the Mediterranean basin, and the period the twelve hundred years from, roughly
800 B.C. to A.D. 400.
The literature of that world was written in three languages -Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The
peoples who spoke these languages created their civilizations independently in place and
time, but the development of the Mediterranean area into one economic and political unit
brought them into contact with one another and produced a fusion of their typical attitudes
that is the basis of all subsequent Western thought.
the three separate lines converge, and they finally meet in the figure of St. Augustine, who
had the intellectual honesty and curiosity of the Greek at his best, the social seriousness and
sense of order of the Roman, and the Hebrew's feeling of man's inadequacy and God's
omnipotent justice.
THE ANCIENT WORLD
Though Rome at the height of her power was to extend her rule northward through France as
far as Britain and eastward to the Euphrates, the ancient world was centered on the
Mediterranean Sea—"We live around the sea," said the Greek philosopher Socrates, "like
frogs around a pond." Climate and basic crops were (and still are) similar over most of the
area: a dry hot summer and a comparatively mild winter, more favorable to sheep and goats
than cattle, to vine and olive rather than cereal crops. Though metal was mined and worked,
what we know as heavy industry did not exist, coal and oil were not exploited for energy, and
the war galleys were propelled by sail and human oarsmen, the armies moved on foot. All the
advanced civilizations of the ancient world
depended for their existence on a slave class
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to do their heavy work, on the land, in the
mines, and in the house; this institution,
widely varied in its forms—peasants tied to the land as in Egypt, bought slaves as in Greece
and Rome, or men enslaved for debt as in Greece and Israel— lasted until the end of the
ancient world, to be gradually replaced in Europe by the feudal system with a peasantry
technically free but in practice working the land for the benefit of an overlord.
Civilization began in Babylon and Egypt. Ancient civilization was based on agriculture:in the
valley of the Nile, in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers which flowed through the
"Fertile Crescent," the land now known as Iraq and Iran.
Civilization begins with cities-from a Latin word which means "citizen."
As far back as 3000 b.c. the pharaohs of Egypt began to build their splendid temples and
gigantic pyramids, as well as to record their political acts and religious beliefs in
hieroglyphic script.
Babylon, Nineveh, and Egypt as the centuries went by were all but lost to memory, as
Gilgamesh exemplifies. The pyramids and the Sphinx remained but it was not until the
nineteenth century A.D. that the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians and the cuneiform
records of Babvlon and Nineveh were deciphered
The cultural history of the ancient world came to medieval Europe in the languages not of
Babylon and Egypt but in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
THE HEBREWS
The Hebrews, in fact, early in their history, spent some years as government slaves in Egypt
before their Exodus, their migration, under the leadership of Moses, through the Sinai desert
to Palestine.
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Their later history was a bitter and unsuccessful struggle for freedom against a series of
foreign masters- Babylonian, Greek, and Roman.
After the period of expansion and prosperity under the great kings, David and Solomon
(1005-925 B.C.), the kingdom fell apart.
the deportation of the population to Babylon (586 B.C. ). This period of exile (it ended in 539
when Cyrus, the Persian conqueror of Babylon, released the Hebrews from bondage) was a
formatis e period for Hebrew religious thought, which was enriched and refined by the
teachings of the prophet Ezekiel and the unknown prophet known as the Second Isaiah (pp.
48, 89). 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 hse books of the Old
Testament. The religious legacy of the Hebrew people was nou codified for future
generations.
Henceforward, they were the people of the diaspora, the "scattering": religious communities
in the great cities of the ancient world maintaining local cohesion and universal religious
solidarity but stateless,
The political history of the ancient Hebrews ended in a series of disasters. In the field of the
arts they left behind them no painting or sculpture and little or no secular literature -no drama,
for example, no epic poetry. What they did leave us is a religious literature, written down
probably between the eighth and second Centuries B.C., which is informed by an attitude
different from that of any other nation of the ancient world. It is founded on the idea of one
God, the creator of all things, all-powerful and just -a conception of the divine essence and
the government of the universe so simple that to those of us who have inherited it it seems
obvious.
THE GREEKS
The Greeks of historic times were presumably 4a blend of the native tribes and the
Indo-European invaders, en route from the
European landmass.
The second millennium B.C. saw a brilliant culture, called Minoan after the mythical king
Minos, flourishing on the large island of Crete, and the citadel of Mycenae and the palace at
Pylos show that mainland Greece, in that same period, had centers of wealth and power
unsuspected before the excavators discovered the gold masks of the buried kings and the clay
tablets covered with strange signs. The decipherment of these signs (published in 1953)
revealed that the language of these Myceneans was an early form of Greek. It must have been
the memory of these rich kingdoms that inspired Homer's vision of "Mycenae rich in gold"
and the splendid armed hosts that assembled for the attack on Troy.
the great palaces were destroyed by fire. With them disappeared not only the arts and skills
that had Created Mycenean wealth but even the system of writing. For the next few hundred
Poverty-stricken years the Greeks were illiterate and so no written evidence survives or what,
in view of our ignorance about so many aspects of it, we call the Dark Age of Greece.
One thing we do know about it: it produced a body of oral epic poetry which was the raw
material Homer shaped into the two great poems, the Iliad and Odyssey These Homeric
poems seem from internal evidence to date from the eighth B.C. - which is incidentally, or
perhaps not incidentally, the century in which the Greeks learned how to write again.
they became the basis of an education and therefore of a whole culture. Not only did the great
characters of the epic serve as models of conduct for later generations of Greeks, but the
figures of the Olympian gods retained, in the prayers, poems, and sculpture of the succeeding
centuries, the shapes and attributes set down by Homer. The difference between the Greek
and the Hebrew hero, between Achilles and Joseph, for example, is remarkable, but the
difference between "the God of Abraham and of Isaac" and the Olympians who interfere
capriciously in the lives of Hector and Achilles is an unbridgeable chasm. The two
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conceptions of the power that governs the universe are irreconcilable; and in fact the struggle
between them ended, not in synthesis, but in the complete victory of the one and the
disappearance of the other. The Greek conception of the nature of the gods and of their
relation to humanity is so alien to us that it is difficult for the modern reader to take it
seriously. The Hebrew basis of European religious thought has made it almost impossible for
us to imagine a god who can be feared and laughed at, blamed and admired, and still
sincerely worshiped. Yet all these are proper attitudes toward the gods on Olympus; they are
all implicit in Homer's poems.
The Hebrew conception of God emphasizes those aspects of the universe that imply a
harmonious order. The elements of disorder in the universe are, in the story of Creation,
blamed on man, and in all Hebrew literature the evidences of disorder are something the
writer tries to reconcile with an a priori assumption of an all-powerful, just God, he never
tampers with the fundamental datum. Just as clearly, the Greeks conceived their gods as an
expression of the disorder of the world in which they lived.
The Olympian gods, like the natural forces of sea and sky, follow their own will even to the
extreme of conflict with each other, and always with a sublime disregard for the human
beings who may be affected by the results of their actions. It is true that they are all subjects
of a single more powerful god, Zeus. But his authority over them is based only on superior
strength; though he cannot be openly resisted, he can be temporarily deceived by his fellow
Olympians. And Zeus, although by virtue of his superior power his will is finally
accomplished in the matter of Achilles' wrath, knows limits to his power too. He cannot save
the life of his son the Lycian hero Sarpedon. Behind Zeus stands the mysterious power of
Fate, to which even he must bow.
Such gods as these, representing as they do the blind forces of the universe which man cannot
control, are not thought of as connected with morality. Morality is a human creation, and
though the gods may approve of it, they are 5not bound by it. And violent as they are, they
cannot feel the ultimate consequence of
violence: death is a human fear, just as the
courage to face it is a human quality. There is a double standard, one for gods, one for men,
and the inevitable consequence is that our real admiration and sympathy is directed not
toward the gods but toward the men. With Hector, and even with Achilles at his worst, we
can sympathize; but the gods, though they may excite terror or laughter, can never have our
sympathy. We could as easily sympathize with a blizzard or the force of gravity. Homer
imposed on Greek literature the anthropocentric emphasis which is its distinguishing mark
and its great contribution to the Western mind. Though the gods are ever-present characters
in the incidents of his poem, his true concern, first and last, is with men and women.
THE CITY-STATES OF GREECE
The stories told in the Homeric poems are set in the age of the Trojan War- the twelfth
century B.C. Though the poems do perhaps preserve some faded memories of the Mycenaean
age, there is no doubt that the poems as we have them are the creation Of later centuries, the
tenth to the eighth B.C., the so-called Dark Age which succeeded the collapse (or destruction)
of Mycenaean civilization.
This was the time of the final settlement of the Greek peoples, an age of invasion and
migration which saw the foundation and growth of many small independent cities. The
geography of Greece - a land of mountain barriers and scattered islands -encouraged this
fragmentation. The Greek cities never lost sight of their common Hellenic heritage, but it was
not enough to unite them except in the face of unmistakable and overwhelming danger, and
even then only partially and for a short time. They differed from each other in custom,
political constitution, and even dialect: their relations with each other were those of rivals
and fierce competitors.
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In these cities, constantly at war in the pursuit of more productive land for growing
populations, the kings of Homeric society gave way to aristocratic oligarchies, which
maintained a stranglehold on the land and the economy of which it was the base. An
important safety valve was colonization. In the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. landless
men founded new cities (always near the sea and generally owmg little or no allegiance to the
home base) all over the Mediterranean coast— in Spain, southern Franeeil Marseilles, Nice,
and Antibes were all Greek cities), in South Italy (Naples), Sicily (Syracuse), North Africa
(Cyrene), all along the coast of Asia Minor (Smyrna, Miletus), and even on the Black Sea as
far as Russian Cnmea. Many of these new outposts of Greek civilization experienced a faster
economic and cultural development than the older cities of the mainland.
It was the cities founded on the Asian coast that the Greeks adapted to their own language the
Phoenician system of writing, adding signs for the vowels to create the first efficient alphabet.
Its first use was probably for commercial records and transactions, but as literacy became a
general condition all over the Greek world. In the course of the seventh century B.C., treaties
and political decrees were inscribed on stone and literary works written on rolls of paper
made from the Egyptian papyrus plant.
ATHENS AND SPARTA
By the beginning of the fifth century B.C. the two most prominent city-states were Athens
and Sparta. These two cities led the combined Greek resistance to the Persian invasion of
Europe in the years 490 to 479 B.C. The defeat of the solid Persian power by the divided and
insignificant Greek cities surprised the world and inspired in Greece, and particularly in
Athens, a confidence that knew no bounds.
Athens was at this time a democracy, the first in Western history. It was a direct not a
representative, democracy, for the number of free citizens was small enough to permit the
exercise of power by a meeting of the citizens 6as a body in assembly. Athens' power lay in
the fleet with which she had played her
decisive part in the struggle against Persia,
and with this fleet she rapidly became the leader of a naval alhance which included most of
the islands of the Aegean Sea and many Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor.
Sparta, on the other hand, was a totalitarian state, rigidly conservative in government and
policy, in which the individual citizen was reared and trained by the state for the state's
business, war. The Spartan land army was consequently superior to any other in Greece, and
the Spartans controlled, by direct rule or by alliance, a majority of the city-states of the
Peloponnese. These two cities, allies for the war of liberation against Persia, became enemies
when the external danger was eliminated. As the years went by, this war came to be accepted
as "inevitable" by both sides, and in 431 B.C. it began. It was to end in 404 B.C. with the
total defeat of Athens.
Before the beginning of this disastrous war Athenian democracy provided its citizens with a
cultural and political environment that was without precedent in the ancient world. The
institutions of Athens encouraged the maximum development of the individual's capacities
and at the same time inspired the maximum devotion to the interests of the community. It was
a moment in history of delicate and precarious balance between the freedom of the individual
and the demands of the state. Its uniqueness was emphasized by the complete lack of balance
in Sparta, where the necessities of the state annihilated the individual as a creative and
independent being. It was the proud boast of the Athenians that without sacrificing the
cultural amenities of civilized life they could yet when called upon surpass m policy and war
their adversary, whose citizen body was an army in constant training. The Athenians were, in
this respect as in others, a nation of amateurs. "The individual Athenian," said Pericles,
Athens' great statesman at this time, "in his own person seems to have the power of adapting
himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace." But the
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freedom of the individual did not, in Athens' great days, produce anarchy. "While we are . . .
unconstrained in our private intercourse," Pericles had observed earlier in his speech, "a spirit
of reverence pervades our public acts."
This balance of individual freedom and communal unity was not destined to outlast the
century. It went down, with Athens, in the war. Under the mounting pressure of the long
conflict, the Athenians lost the "spirit of reverence" that Pericles saw as the stabilizing factor
in Athenian democracy. They subordinated all considerations to the immediate interest of the
city and surpassed their enemy in the logical ferocity of their actions. They finally fell victim
to leaders who carried the process one step further and subordinated all considerations to
their own private interest. The war years saw the decay of that freedom in unity which is
celebrated in Pericles' speech. By the end of the fifth century Athens was divided internally
as well as defeated externally. The individual citizen no longer thought of himself and Athens
as one and the same; the balance was gone forever.
One of the solvents of traditional values was an intellectual revolution which was taking
place in the advanced Athenian democracy of the last half of the fifth century, a critical
re-evaluation of accepted ideas in every sphere of thought and action. It stemmed from
innovations in education. Democratic institutions had created a demand for an education that
would prepare men for public life, especially by training them in the art of public speaking.
The demand was met by the appearance of the professional teacher, the Sophist, as he was
called, who taught, for a handsome fee, not only the techniques of public speaking but also
the subjects that gave a man something to talk about - government, ethics, literary criticism,
even astronomy. The curriculum of the Sophists, in fact, marks the first appearance in
European civilization of the liberal education, just as they themselves were the first
professors.
The Sophists were great teachers, but like most teachers they had little or no control over the
results of their teaching. Their methods
7placed an inevitable emphasis on effective
presentation of a point of view, to the
detriment, and if necessary the exclusion, of
anything which might make it less convincing. They produced a generation that had been
trained to see both sides of any question and to argue the weaker side as effectively as the
stronger, the false as effectively as the true. They
taught how to argue inferentially from probability in the absence of concrete evidence; to
appeal to the audience's sense of its own advantage rather than to accepted moral standards;
and to justify individual defiance of general prejudice and even of law by making a
distinction between "nature" and "convention." These methods dominated the thinking of the
Athenians of the last half of the century. Emphasis on the technique of effective presentation
of both sides of any case encouraged a relativistic point of view and finally produced a
cynical mood which denied the existence of any absolute standards. The canon of probability
(which implies an appeal to human reason as the supreme authority) became a critical
weapon for an attack on myth and on traditional conceptions of the gods; though it had its
constructive side, too, for it was the base for historical reconstruction of the unrecorded past
and of the stages of human progress from savagery to civilization. The rhetorical appeal to
the self-interest of the audience, to expediency, became the method of the political leaders of
the wartime democracy and the fundamental doctrine of new theories of power-politics.
These theories served as cynical justification for the increasmg seventy of the measures
Athens took to terrorize her rebellious subjects Their distinction between "nature" and
"convention" is the source of the doctrine of the superman, who breaks free of the
conventional restraints of society and acts according to the law of his own "nature. " The new
spirit in Athens has magnificent achievements to Its credit,, but it undermined old solid moral
convictions. At its roots was a supreme confidence in the human intelligence and a secular
view of man's position in the universe that is best expressed in the statement of Protagoras
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the most famous of the Sophists: "Man is the measure of all things. "
THE DECLINE OF THE CITY-STATE
In the last half of the fifth century the whole traditional basis of individual conduct which had
been concern for the unity and cohesion of the city-state, was undermined - gradually at first
by the critical approach of the Sophists and their pupils and then rapidly, as the war
accelerated the process of moral disintegration "In peace and prosperity," says Thucydides,
"both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives . . . but war, which takes away the
comfortable provision of daily life, is a hard master, and tends to assimilate men's characters
to their conditions. " The war brought to Athens the rule of new politicians who were
schooled in the doctrine of the new power-politics and initiated savage reprisals against
Athens rebellious subject-allies, launching the city on an expansionist course which ended in
disaster in Sicily (411 B.C.). Seven years later Athens, her last fleet gone surrendered to the
Spartans. A pro-Spartan antidemocratic regime, the Thirty Tyrants was installed, but soon
overthrown. Athens became a democracy again but the confidence and unity of its great age
were gone forever. Community and individual were no longer one, and the individual, cast on
his own resources for guidance, found only conflicting attitudes which he could not refer to
any absolute standards The mood of postwar Athens oscillated between a fanatic, unthinking
reassertion of traditional values and a weary cynicism which wanted only to be left alone.
The only thing common to the two extremes was a distrust of intelligence.
In the disillusioned gloom of defeat, Athenians began to feel more and more exasperation
with a voice they had been listening to for many years. This was the voice of Socrates, a
stonemason who for most of his adult life had made it his business to discuss with his fellow
citizens the great issues of which the Athenians were now so weary - the nature of justice, of
truth, of piety. Unlike the Sophists he did not lecture nor did he charge a fee: his method was
dialectic, a search for truth through questions 8and answers, and his dedication to his mission
had kept him poor. But the initial results of
his discussions were often infuriatingly like
the
results of sophistic teaching. By questions and answers he exposed the illogicality of his
opponent's position, but did not often provide a substitute for the belief he had destroyed. Yet
it is clear that he did believe in absolute standards, and what is more, believed they could be
discovered by a process of logical inquiry and supported by logical proof. His ethics rested
on an intellectual basis. The resentment against him, which came to a head in 399 B.C., is
partly explained by the fact that he satisfied neither extreme of the postwar mood. He
questioned the old standards in order to establish new, and he refused to let the Athenians
live in peace, for he preached that it was every man's duty to think his way through to the
truth. In this last respect he was the prophet of the new age. For him, the city and the
accepted code were no substitute for the task of self-examination which each individual must
set himself and carry through to a conclusion. The characteristic statement of the old Athens
was public, in the assembly or the theater; Socrates proclaimed the right and duty of each
individual to work out his own salvation and made clear his distrust of public life: "he who
will fight for the right . . . must have a private station and not a public one."
The Athenians sentenced him to death on a charge of impiety. They hoped, no doubt, that he
would go into exile to escape execution but he remained, as he put it himself, at his post, and
they were forced to have the sentence carried out. If they thought they were finished with him,
they were sadly mistaken. In the next century Athens became the center for a large group of
philosophical schools, all of them claiming to develop and interpret the ideas of Socrates.
The century that followed his death saw the exhaustion of the Greek city-states in constant
internecine warfare. Politically and economically bankrupt, they fell under the power of
Macedon in the north, whose king, Philip, combined a ferocious energy with a cynicism that
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enabled him to take full advantage of the corrupt governments of the city-states. Greek
liberty ended at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., and Philip's son Alexander inherited a
powerful army and the political control of all Greece. He led his Macedonian and Greek
armies against Persia, and in a few brilliant campaigns became master of an empire that
extended into Egypt in the south and to the borders of India in the east. He died at Babylon in
323 B.C., and his empire broke up into a number of independent kingdoms ruled by his
generals, but the results of his fantastic achievements were more durable than might have
been expected. Into the newly conquered territories came thousands of Greeks who wished to
escape from the political futility and economic crisis of the homeland. Wherever they went
they took with them their language, their culture, and their typical buildings, the gymnasium
and the theater. At Alexandria in Egypt, for example, a Greek library was formed to preserve
the texts of Greek literature for the scholars who edited them, a school of Greek poetry
flourished, Greek mathematicians and geographers made new advances in science. The
Middle East became, as far as the cities were concerned, a Greek-speaking area; and when,
some two or three centuries later, the first accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus of
Nazareth were written down, they were written in Greek, the language on which the cultural
homogeneity of the whole area was based.
ROME
When Alexander died at Babylon in 323 B.C., the Italian city of Rome, situated on the Tiber
in the western coastal plain, was engaged in a struggle for the control of central Italy. Less
than a hundred years later (269 B.C.) Rome, in control of the whole Italian peninsula, was
drawn into a hundred-year war against the Phoenician city of Carthage, on the North African
coast, from which it emerged master of the western Mediterranean. At the end of the first
century B.C., in spite of a series of civil wars 9fought with savage vindictiveness and on a
continental scale, Rome was the capital of an empire that stretched from the Straits of
Gibraltar to the frontiers of Palestine This empire gave peace and orderly government to the
Mediterranean area for the next two centuries, and for two centuries after that maintained a
desperate but losing battle against the invading savage tribes moving in from the north and
east. When it finally went down, it left behind it the ideal of the world-state, an ideal that was
to be reconstituted as a reality by the medieval church, which ruled from the same center,
Rome, and with a spiritual authority as great as the secular authority it replaced.
The achievements of the Romans, not only their conquests but also their success in
consolidating the conquests and organizing the conquered, are best understood in the light of
the Roman character. Unlike the Greeks, Romans were above all a practical people. They
might have no aptitude for pure mathematics, but they could build an aqueduct to last two
thousand years. Though they were not notable as political theorists, they organized a
complicated yet stable federation that held Italy loyal to them in the presence of invading
armies. Romans were conservative to the core; their strongest authority was mos maiorum,
the custom of predecessors. A monument of this conservatism, the great body of Roman law,
is one of their greatest contributions to Western civilization. The quality Romans most
admired was gravitas, seriousness of attitude and purpose, and their highest words of
commendation were "manliness," "industry," "discipline." Pericles, in his funeral speech
praised the Athenian for his adaptability, versatility, and grace. This would have seemed
strange praise to a Roman, whose idea of personal and civic virtue was different. "By her
ancient customs and her men the Roman state stands," says Ennius the Roman poet, in a line
that by its metrical heaviness emphasizes the stability implied in the key word "stands":
moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque.
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Greek history begins, not with a king, a battle, or the founding of a city, but with an epic
poem; the literary achievement preceded the political by many centuries. The Romans, on the
other hand, had conquered half the world before they began to write. The stimulus to the
creation of Latin literature was the Greek literature that the Romans discovered when, in the
second century B.C., they assumed political responsibility for Greece and the Near East.
Latin literature began with a translation of the Odyssey, made by a Greek prisoner of war,
and with the exception of satire, until Latin literature became Christian, the model was
always Greek. The Latin writer (especially the poet) borrowed wholesale from his Greek
original not furtively, but openly and proudly, as a tribute to the master from whom he had
learned. But this frank acknowledgment of indebtedness should not blind us to the fact that
Latin literature is original, and sometimes profoundly so. This is true above all of Virgil, who
chose as his theme the coming of the Troian prince Aeneas to Italy, where he was to found a
city from which, in the fullness of time, would come "the Latin race, . . . and the walls of
lofty Rome."
When Virgil was born in 70 B.C. the Roman republic, which had conquered and now
governed the Mediterranean world, had barely recovered from one civil war and was drifting
inexorably toward another. The institutions of the city-state proved inadequate for world
government. The civil conflict which had disrupted the republic for more than a hundred
years ended finally in the establishment of a powerful executive. Although the Senate, which
had been the controlling body of the republic, retained an impressive share of the power, the
new arrangement developed inevitably toward autocracy, the rule of the executive, the
emperor, as
he was called once the system was stabilized. The first of the long line of Roman emperors
who gave stable government to the Roman world during the first two centuries A.D.
wasOctavius, known generally by his title, Augustus. He had made his way cautiously
through the intrigues and bloodshed that
10followed the murder of his uncle Julius
Caesar in 44 B.C. until by 31 B.C. he
controlled the western half of the empire. In
that year he fought a decisive battle with the ruler of the eastern half of the empire, Mark
Antony, who was supported by Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. Octavius's victory at Actium
united the empire under one authority and ushered in an age of peace and reconstruction.
For the next two hundred years the successors of Augustus, the Roman emperors, ruled the
ancient world with only occasional disturbances, most of them confined to Rome, where
emperors who flagrantly abused their immense power - Nero, for example - were overthrown
by force. The second half of this period was described by Gibbon, the great historian of
imperial Rome, as the period "in the history of the world during which the condition of the
human race was most happy and prosperous." The years A.D. 96-180, those of the "five good
emperors," were in fact remarkable: this was the longest period of peace that has ever been
enjoyed by the inhabitants of an area that included Britain, France, all southern Europe, the
Middle East, and the whole of North Africa. Trade and agriculture flourished, and the cities
with their public baths, theaters, and libraries offered all the amenities of civilized life. Yet
there was apparent, especially in the literature of the second century, a spiritual emptiness.
Petronius's Satyricon paints a sardonic portrait of the vulgar display and intellectual poverty
of the newly rich who can think only in terms of money and possessions. The old religion
offered no comfort to those who looked beyond mere material ends; it had been too closely
knit into the fabric ofthe independent city-state and was inadequate for a time in which men
were citizens of the world. New religions arose or were imported from the East, universal
religions that made their appeal to all nations and classes: the worship of the Egyptian
goddess Isis, of the Persian god Mithras, who offered bliss in the life to come, and of the
Hebrew prophet Jesus, crucified in Jerusalem and believed risen from the dead. This was the
religion that, working underground and open suppressed (there was a persecution of the
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Christians under Nero in the first century, another under the last of the "good emperors"
Marcus Aurelius in the second), finally triumphed and became the official and later the
exclusive religion of the Roman world. As the empire in the third and fourth centuries
disintegrated under the never-ending invasions by barbarian tribes 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, later, the Renaissance, as a model and a basis for their own great
achievements in the arts and letters.
FURTHER READING
H. M. Orlinsky, Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. ( 1960) is a short but clearly written outline of the
history of Israel up to the return from Babylonian exile. John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and
Oswyn Murray, eds., The Oxford History of the Classical World (1986) is a superb survey,
by many different specialists, of the whole sweep of classical culture - social, political,
literary, artistic, and religious. It is also handsomely and lavishly illustrated. For the political
history of Greece to the death of Alexander, see J. B. Bury, A History of Greece, 4th ed.,
revised by Russell Merggs (1975). Michael Grant, History of Rome (1978), presents a
well-illustrated, eminently readable survey.
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