欧洲文化入门---希腊文化

鸟鸣涧

[B]1. The Historical Context[/B]
In a remote period of Greek history, probably around 1200 B.C., a war was fought between Greece and Troy, a city on Asiatic side of the Aegean, ending in the destruction of Troy. This is the war thatHomer refers to in his epics.

Greek culture reached a high point of development in the 5th century B.C. This was marked by the duccessful repulse of the \persian invasion early in the century, the establishment of democracy and the flourishing of science, philosophy, literature, art and historical writing in Athens.

The century closed with civil war between Athens and Sparta.

In the second half of the 4th century B.C., all Greece was brought under the rule of Alexander, King of Macedon. His armies went out to conquer large areas of Europe, Asia and Africa, spreading Greek culture wherever they found themselves.

In146B.C.the Romans conquered Greece. By that time Greek culture had firmly established itself in much of eastern and western Europe and northern Africa, with flourishing centres of Greek learning, such as Alexandria with its famous library, around the  Mediterranean.

我是luna

抄课堂笔记啦————

鸟鸣涧

我是在抄书，不是笔记。
好喜欢这个网站，总觉得应该做点什么，能力有限，只有把自己觉得好的东西让大家分享。有无价值就由战友去评说了。

鸟鸣涧

2. Social and Political Structure
Athens was a democracy. Democracy means “exercise of power by the whole people”, but by “whole people ”the Greeks meant only the adult male citizens, and citizenship was a set of rights which a man inherited from his father. Women, children, foreigners and slaves were excluded. They had no rights.
The economy of Athens rested on an immense amount of slave labour. Slaves worked on farms and in workshops and mines owned by their masters. There was harsh exploitation in Greek society. The Greeks loved sports. Once every four years, they had a big festival on Olympic Games. Revived in 1896, the Games have become the world’s foremost amateur sports competition.

iwillwin2003

Thank you friend, it is interesting and useful.

鸟鸣涧

3. Homer
Ancient Greeks considered Homer to be the author of their epics. He probably lived around 700 B.C. Two such epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have survived. They are not about events of Homer’s own time, but about great men and wars of a remoter age, probably in period 1200-1100 B.C.
The Iliad deals with alliance of the states of the southern mainland of Greece, led by Agamemnon in their war against the city of Troy. The heroes are Hector on the Trojan side and Achilles and Odysseus on the Greek. In the final battle, Hector was killed by Achilles and Troy was sacked and burned by the Greeks.
The Odyssey deals with the return of Odysseus after the Trojan war to his home island of Ithaca. It describes many adventures he ran into on his long sea voyage and how finally he was reunited with his faithful wife Penelope.

我是luna

以下是引用鸟鸣涧在2004-1-22 20:49:21的发言：
我是在抄书，不是笔记。
好喜欢这个网站，总觉得应该做点什么，能力有限，只有把自己觉得好的东西让大家分享。有无价值就由战友去评说了。

嘿嘿 你误会了
偶觉得你这两篇都挺好的 所以来抄课堂笔记啊
再接再厉哦 [em19][em26]

鸟鸣涧

4. Lyric Poetry
Homer’s epics were not the only form of poetry the Greeks had written. There were other forms, such as lyrics. Of the many lyric poets of the time, two are still admired by readers today: Sappho and Pindar.
Sappho(about 612-580 B.C.), woman poet of Lesbos, is noted for her love poems of passionate intensity, some of which are addressed to women. She was considered the most important lyric poet of ancient Greece. Many Greek and Latin writers know nearly all her poems by heart. But in the 10th century the Christian church burned her works. Only fragments remain. Two samples:
(1)
I could not hope
To touch the sky
With my two arms
(2)
in gold sandals
dawn like a thief
fell upon me

Pindar(about 518-438 B.C.) is best known for his odes celebrating the victories at the athletic games, such as the 14 Olympian odes. These were chanted by a chorus in a procession. They are marked by an elevated tone and stirring sound effects. Pindar, too, had imitators, such as the 17th century English poet John Dryden.

鸟鸣涧

5. Drama
Early in their remote past, the Greeks started to perform plays at religious festivals. Out of these origins a powerful drama developed in the 5th century B.C.
Performances were given in open-air theatres, with the audience sitting on stone benches and looking down at the stage from three sides. Actors wore masks.
a.        Aeschylus(525 – 456 B.C.)
He wrote such plays as Prometheus Bound, Persians, and Agamemnon. In these plays there are only two actors and a chorus. Yet they manage to stir and move the audience deeply by showing heroes and heroines in complicated human situations, out of which there is no escape but death. The plays are written in verse. Aeschylus is noted for his vivid character portrayal and majestic poetry.

b.        Sophocles(496 – 406 B.B.)
Author of plays like Oedipus the King, Electra, and Antigone. Contributed greatly to tragic art. He added a third actor and decreased the size of the chorus.
Oedipus the king has a perfect plot. It is the story of a man who unknowingly committed terrible sin. An oracle said that the child Oedipus would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother,.So the parents asked a shepherd to leave him on a hillside, but he was rescued and brought up as the son of the king of Corinth. Hearing the oracle, Oedipus ran away from Corinth. While traveling, he met and killed Laius, king of Thebes, without recognizing that the man was really his father. After riddling Thebes of the Sphinx, he married the queen of the country, Jocasta, knowing not that she was his own mother. Thus, unwittingly, he fulfilled the oracle. Later, realizing the truth of his birth, he stabbed out his eyes, while Jocasta hanged herself.
Antigone is about what happened to a girl by that name, who was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta. She had defied the king’s order by performing funeral rites over her brother, executed by the state for treason, and was condemned to death on that account. It is thus a play with an important theme---about the difficult choice one has to make between public duty and private feeling.
Sophocles has had a strong impact on European literature. Some of his plots were taken over and adopted by later writers. The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud’s term”the Oedipus complex” was also derived form Sophocles’s play.

c.        Euripides(484-406 B.C.)
Euripides wrote mainly about women in such plays as Andromache, Medea, and Trojan Women. He was more of a realist than Aeschylus and Sophocles, concerned with conflicts. His characters are less heroic, more like ordinary people. He may be called the first writer of “problem plays”. He was a friend of Socrates and the intellectuals, but the people who flocked to the performances often found him disturbing. Aristotle said of his,”If a bad manager in all other points, Euripides is at least the most tragic of the poets.”. In the 19th century, the English poetess Elizabeth Browning called him “Euripides the human”.

d.        Comedy
Comedy also flourished in the 5th century B.C. Its best writer was Aristophanes(about 450 – 380 B.C.), who has left eleven plays, including: Frogs, Clouds, Wasps, and Birds. These plays are loose in plot and satirical in tone, full of clever parody and acute criticism. They treat of contemporary events and contain direct attacks on well-known people of the day, such as Socrates in Clouds and Euripides in Frogs. Coarse language is a striking feature of Aristophanes. Swift says of him: As for comic Aristophanes, The dog too witty and too profane is.