Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [90]
With the victory over Persia by a united Greece, Athens emerged as Greek’s leading city and reached its pinnacle. Over the next century and a half, the great philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle walked the streets of Athens, the agora, or marketplace, and established their schools—the model for the university—in which the ideas that form the basis of Western philosophy were discussed and debated. This was also the time of voting-rights experiments and the flourishing of the great trio of playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—whose tragedies were performed in front of tens of thousands of Athenians in a dramatic competition that had its roots in a religious festival honoring the agricultural god, Dionysus, who was also credited with the invention of wine.
In all of these periods, myths played a central role in Greek life and society; they were at the core of religious observances and entertainment. Along with language and a common culture, myths provided a bond that no central Greek government ever could. But clearly, sometime around 800 BCE, as the so-called Dark Ages began to give way, something changed. A switch was thrown. And from then on, some Greeks began to abandon the notion that the gods controlled the universe. It was perhaps a singular moment in human history. Before this tipping point, most other ancient civilizations viewed life as the work of the gods, who needed to be served and worshipped, and their divine representatives on earth, kings and pharaohs—who also demanded to be served and worshipped.
Suddenly, in Greece, the fundamental understanding of the universe and man’s place in it was transformed through a revolution in thinking. A range of Greek thinkers began to search for natural explanations—a humanistic mind-quest to discover a rational system of creation in which order was not dependent on sacrificing animals to the gods and invoking magical oracles.
Of course, not everyone liked those notions, which challenged the status quo. That was one reason that the philosopher Socrates would eventually be placed on trial and sentenced to death in 399 BCE. His concepts were actually not so much antireligious as they were threatening the Athenian powers-that-be. But there was no turning back the sweeping tide of change. An unstoppable series of ideas had been set in motion, and history would never be the same.
MYTHIC VOICES
The continual buzz of conversation, the orotund sounds of the orators, the shrill shouts from the symposia—this steady drumbeat of opinion, controversy, and conflict could everywhere be heard. The agora (marketplace) was not just a daily display of fish and farm goods; it was an everyday market of ideas, the place citizens used as if it were their daily newspaper, complete with salacious headlines, breaking news, columns, and editorials.
—THOMAS CAHILL, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
Was Greece ever a theocracy?
Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece never produced a heavy-handed, monolithic central government ruled by divine kings. Even in Greece’s earliest times, there is no evidence that Minoan or, later, Greek kings ruled with the sort of divine sanction that Egyptian and Mesopotamian rulers claimed—and Rome’s emperors would later attempt to