The oikoumene of the ancient Middle East embraced the regions from Iran to Egypt and from Anatolia and the Aegean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula through the years 3000 to 330 BC. The word means the inhabited world and signifies a distinct historical and cultural continuum. From the dawn of civilisation the area constituted a far-flung house (oikos, house) until Alexander's empire replaced the intimacy of the ecumene. Architectural, ceramic, metallurgical and other products radiated from the first civilisations to their younger contemporaries. Just as the secular crafts were monopolised by professional guilds, so were other-worldly services concentrated in priest-guilds. The mobility of guilds disseminated ceramic as well as religious forms: sacrifice in Mycenaean (Late Bronze Age) Greece mimicked the Hebrews, its memory preserved to this day in ritual Jewish slaughter.1 Merchants and priests were equally to be found rubbing shoulders in ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria as in Israel or hobnobbing at the Mesopotamian gateway at Alalakh in what is now modern Turkey. The Greek world, in the late Bronze Age, thereby, drew on the inventory of the Middle East, material, cultural and spiritual, to stock its corresponding warehouses rendered virtually native, by such exchange, to the Levant.
Thus, the consecutive occupation of the divine throne by Uranus, Cronos and Zeus, in Hesiod's Theogony, appears to be the reflex of the successive theocracies of Anu, Kumarbi and the storm god in a Hittite version of a Hurrian myth. The court of Hattusa was the royal school of chariotry for Achaean princes, and the empire, no doubt, proved equally dexterous in the art of diplomacy.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, inferring from the number of copies discovered in the Levant, enjoyed the status of a bestseller.2 And it would not be stretching a commercial analogy overmuch to suggest a parallel between the piracy on the Mediterranean and the influence of the epic on Homer. In both the odyssey of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, the representation of the joys of this-worldliness in an attempt to suspend the hero's journey to the netherworld devolves, respectively, on the divine bargirl, Siduri, lodged as inn-keeper amidst the garden of the sun-god near the ocean, and Circe and Calypso on their mythical isles. Both in the Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad, friends die their surrogate deaths for the heroes, Patroclus for Achilles, Enkidu for Gilgamesh, both to return and report on the nothingness of death.
The analogies, however, dramatise the disanalogies. Gilgamesh's monomaniacal quest for immortality cursorily dismisses the sanity of Siduri's advice, while Odysseus' uncompromising humanity spurns a goddess's gift of eternal life. The death of Patroclus has the opposite effect on Achilles as that of Enkidu on Gilgamesh: the one shuns, the other chooses, his friend's fate, to avenge it.
Without doubt, such difference in outlook, subsisting with so much similarity in execution, gives pause to thought, and occasion for reflection. Prima facie, the ineluctable conclusion stares the querying mind —the West is essentially secular, the East quintessentially other-worldly. The phenomenon thus compartmentalised, the tired mind rests from further labour. Henceforth, all subsequent surprises cease to be so, going into one of two boxes: the Greek, heroic and the Mesopotamian, pathetic view of life.
Thus, even minds belonging to such as Thorkild Jacobsen asseverate: "The Epic of Gilgamesh does not come to an harmonious end; the emotions which rage in it are not assuaged; nor is there, as in tragedy, any sense of catharsis, any fundamental acceptance of the inevitable."3 (Italics not original.)4
And H.D.F. Kitto's acquires greater catholicity by moving further east: "There can be no romantic protest — for how can we protest against the first law of our being? — nor resigned acceptance — such as we find, for example, among the Chinese, to whom the individual is only an ancestor in the making, one crop of leaves on one tree in the forest. There is instead this passionate tension which is a spirit of tragedy." (Italics supplied.)5
These observations are condensed into modern aphorisms by Edith Hamilton. "A tomb in Egypt and a theatre in Greece. The one comes to the mind as naturally as the other." And, so as not to overlook a large chunk of the orient, she stuffs India into the Grecian urn with: "As in Egypt, the priests saw their opportunity".6 One recognizes here the intellectual luggage of our latter-day psyche.
And last but not least, the Encyclopaedia Britannica pontificates: "The Mesopotamian mind never tires of expressing man's deep regret at not being immortal through stories about ancient heroes who, despite their superhuman strength and wisdom, and their intimacy with gods, failed to escape from death. A decisively different idea, however, is fundamental to the Greek heroic view of life".7 (Emphasis added.)
And politics provides the theory explaining the secular-religious split between East and West. Tyranny and hierocracy contrast with democracy, freedom from both kings and priests.
Subject they are not unto any man:
They say "slave" sorts not with "Athenian".8
Lydia's glebe, where gold abounds, and Phrygia have I [Dionysus] left behind; o'er Persia's sun-baked plains, by Bactria's walled towns and Media's wintry clime have I advanced through Arabia, land of promise; and Asia's length and breadth, outstretched along the brackish sea, with many a fair walled town, peopled with mingling race of Hellenes and barbarians; and this is the first city in Hellas I have reached.9
The average barbarian, therefore, is a religious sycophant.
The political development of Hellas and that of the 'barbarians', indeed, diverged sufficiently to constitute two schools. Their distinguishing characteristic was a 'break of study' in the former case, and an uninterrupted curriculum in the latter. From 3000 BC, Egypt experienced uninterrupted government down to the present day, and Mesopotamia for more than 3000 years until its terminal illness - the combined canker of the absence of national, and presence of alien, government (and peoples). Their slightly younger contemporary, the Minoan, and its mainland successor, the Mycenaean, civilisations of Greece were as monarchical as their eastern sisters.10 Thus, around 1400 BC, the ecumene exhibited a sorority of monarchical states, urban or unified. The barbarian Greeks (an adjective that cannot be qualified with the use of inverted commas) descended in several waves; the first arrived in the north around 2,000 BC, descended south over hundreds of years and, inspired by Crete, engendered, in conjunction with their predecessors, the Mycenean civilisation; but the second wave - the Dorian invaders - inundated the reservoir and began the Dark Age of Greece from 1100 BC to 750 BC11 — a period of absolute anarchy unfamiliar to the East, constituting antithetical syllabi for the two schools. (The Cretan capital at Knossos was sacked and destroyed in 1400 BC for unknown reasons, though the Cretan civilisation survived, albeit as an outpost of the Mycenaean Greeks).12
How did the Greek pupil learn to look at life during this lacuna of government? The effect of government or non-government on the world-view of a people may strike modern readers, ensconced in the safety of the state, as fancied or absurd causality. We'll let the Greek, with his greater experience of anarchy, support or discredit the association, if any. He learned to value freedom above everything, setting a premium on it as a rational response to the absence of security. But he went one step further: vigilance became a habit. Eternal vigilance, it has been said, wrongly, is the price of liberty; on the contrary, liberty is the price of vigilance. And a high premium on freedom meant an equally high discount on kingship. Where every man, must, perforce, 'pack a rod', so to speak, he would be loath to relinquish the gun to another. Homer belongs to this period.
The shield of Achilles is apt symbolism for the Dark Age. Hephaestus, the 'thin-lipped armourer', saves us a thousand words by fashioning one scene (which we focus on among several, as our theory directs our gaze).
A crowd was in the market-place, where a dispute was going on. Two men disputed over the blood-price of a man who had been killed: the other refused to accept anything; but both were willing to appeal to an umpire for decision.13
Throughout later (post-Mycenaean) Greek history, the umpire was never a king. The Greek, gradually, reluctantly, out of a sense of anangke (necessity), surrendered a sufficient moiety of his sovereignty to render Hephaestus' handiwork passé; but until Alexander wrested the remainder with brute force, he preserved a limpet hold on his individuality, making him, according to Thucydides, well-nigh ungovernable.
Pericles, indeed, by his rank, ability and known integrity was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude —in short, to lead them instead of being led by them;...what was nominally a democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen. With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude.14
Unlike the Mycenaean rulers, the power of the Homeric kings was girt by the council of nobles and the assembly of commoners. The council could debate in parliamentary fashion, but the assembly could only listen and consent or dissent by acclamation, as in a modern referendum. Unlike their predecessors and contemporaries, the Greeks practiced some form of limited constitutional government.15 Indeed, they recognized degrees of kingship, and while Achilles addresses Agamemnon as 'most kingly', he does not restrain his tongue from the liberal use of expletives: "You drunkard, with eyes like a bitch and heart like a fawn!" Rude language, admittedly, but not subversive!
The Greeks, then, at least in Homer, hold kingship and death in contempt. The Mesopotamians, on the other hand, are in awe of both king and death. They value life and government. What does the Greek value? Freedom, as we have seen. And what does he dread? The opposite of freedom, slavery, for Homer tells us that
Zeus takes away from a man half of his manhood if the day of enslavement lays hold of him.
And of womanhood? We're not told what percentage accrues to Zeus, but from Hector's speech to Andromache we can infer, darkly, that the ratio was quite considerable.
But my grief is not so much for the Trojans, nor for Hecuba herself, nor for Priam the king, nor for my many noble brothers, who will be slain by the foe and will lie in the dust, as for you, when one of the bronze-clad Achaeans will carry you away in tears, and end your days of freedom.
And yet Homer, unlike another, later, blind poet who juxtaposes servitude in heaven with dominion in hell (a preference eloquent of an acquired, elder penchant for old-fashioned oriental dominus), affirms that
It is better to be a slave on earth than a king of Hades.
Notes:
1 Cyrus H. Gordon, Ancient Middle Eastern Religions, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition, pp. 60-61
2 Angus Stewart Fletcher, The Art of Literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 107
3 H. & H.A.Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 227
4 Disagreement with Jacobsen over interpretation originates, in part, from his dating of the epic (page 223), which he places in the second millenium, when the state waxed mightier and juster than before; hence, Gilgamesh rebels against the ultimate injustice, death! While admitting the epic to be based on older material, he disappoints by not explaining the basis of the original. Gerard Roux places the epic fragments in the 'Heroic Age of Mesopotamia', the Early Dynastic Period (c.2700 – 2400 BC). Furthermore, the former author betrays a greater fondness for his own cultural roots by discerning a Primitive Democracy in Mesopotamia, a view rejected by the latter - as well as by S.E.Finer , The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 111-112.
5 H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, (Edinburgh: Penguin Books, 1952), p. 61
6 Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way to Western Civilisation, (New York: Mentor, 1960), pp. 17, 21
7 Angus Stewart Fletcher, The Art of Literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 108
8 Aeschylus, The Persians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, trans. G.M.Cookson, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 239-240
9 Euripides, The Bacchantes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, trans. G.M.Cookson, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 1-41
10 Herman Aubin, Europe, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 692
11 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 176-178
12 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, pp. 319 - 320
13 Homer, The Iliad, trans. W.H.D.Rouse, (New York: Mentor), passim
14 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), II-65
15 J.B.Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980), pp. 51-53
