In this episode, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Reinman describes the early origins of Greek culture, its eventual arrival at atheism and the development of Greece as a powerful imperial force.
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Who were the Greeks? The Greeks call themselves Hellenes after a mythological figure named Hellen from who they believe they are descended. The Romans called all of them Greeks after the Graikos, a small tribe who lived in southern Italy, and that name stuck with them. According to Jewish tradition, they are called Yevanim, descendants of Yavan, one of Noach's grandsons. The Ionians, one of the major Greek tribes, still carry that name, Yavan being expressed as Ion in the vowel-rich Greek language.
The Greeks were late to join the civilized societies of the Imperial Quadrant. After they emigrated from Mesopotamia in very deep antiquity, they established settlements on the numerous Cycladic islands of the Aegean Sea, on the Greek mainland and along the western coast of Asia Minor on the fringes of the Hittite Empire. The settlements grew into independent city-states governed by minor kings. The city-states sometimes fought each other and sometimes joined forces against common enemies ...
The seminal event of Greek civilization and culture was the Trojan War, which loomed large in the Greek collective memory. For a long time, modern scholars believed there was no place called Troy, that there had never been a Trojan War. Archaeologists in the nineteenth century, however, discovered the incinerated ruins of the city of Troy dating back to about 1200 b.c.e. Apparently, there had been a city called Troy, and apparently, there had been a war that devastated it. But without contemporaneous written records, the memory was preserved only by oral repetition, and as it was told and retold over the centuries, it acquired many layers of myth.
In about 800 b.c.e., at about the time Shlomo was ascending the throne of the Kingdom of Israel, a Greek teller of folk tales named Homer appeared on the stage of history. The Greeks had recently adapted the Phoenician alphabet to their own language, and Homer used it to write an epic poem describing the conquest and destruction of Troy. The book was called The Iliad, and it turned out to be one of the most influential books in history.
According to the Homeric story, a Trojan prince named Paris carried off Helen, wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta. In outrage, a group of minor Greek kings, headed by Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and brother of Menelaus, organized an expedition to rescue Helen and take vengeance upon the Trojans.
The climactic events described in The Iliad are set in the tenth and final year of the siege of Troy. The cast of characters is almost equally divided between members of the human race and members of the god race; some characters are offspring of cohabitation between humans and gods, further blurring the line of demarcation between the human race and the god race. All these characters maneuver and fight against each other on and off the battlefields, and the result is a sweeping tale of bravery, prowess, courage, cowardice, loyalty, passion, treachery, adultery, pride, greed, honor and disgrace.
Homer's story was a work of genius, a literary masterpiece remarkable for its style, poetic forms, imagination, characterization and close examination of the human experience in the realm of the gods. It was such a rich mother lode of literary material that it formed the basis for much of future Greek and Roman literature. Most notably, Aeschylus and Euripides drew on it for their tragedians in later periods, and Virgil, the leading Roman dramatist, wrote a sequel in Latin called The Aenid ...