Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Griechisches Bewusstsein von Geschichte; Neugeburt im 9. Jahrhundert in Kleinasien (Homer)

Kurzinhalt: the history of Greek society extended over approximately the same period as the parallel history of Israel with its memory of Abraham's exodus from Ur of the Chaldaeans

Textausschnitt: 2. The Hellenic Consciousness of History
11/1 The historical consciousness of Hellenic society will be, first, described with regard to its extension in time, its geographical location and civilizational diversification, and the nature of its sources. The brief account of general characteristics will, then, be followed by three sections on the specific forms that the historical consciousness assumed in Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato. These sections intend to characterize the actual range of knowledge and the principal motives of recollection; and they will furthermore adumbrate some problems of the Hellenic symbolic form. A last section will, finally, summarize the conclusions. (99f; Fs)
1. General Characteristics

12/1 With regard to depth in time, the classic memory of continuous history went back for more than a thousand years beyond the Hellenic civilization proper. Hesiod was aware of a dark Iron Age, extending from the migration storms of the twelfth century B.C. into his own time, as well as of a preceding Bronze Age. The classic memory knew, furthermore, about the invasions, and especially the Doric one, and about the emigration of mainland and island Greeks to Ionia, as the events that marked the end of Hesiod's Heroic Age with its expedition against Troy. It included the Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations. And it was even aware of the ancient populations on the mainland, the Archipelago, and in Anatolia, which had been replaced or conquered by migratory movements, back to the Achaean immigration of c. 1950B.C. Hence, if memory be accepted as a guide, the history of Greek society extended over approximately the same period as the parallel history of Israel with its memory of Abraham's exodus from Ur of the Chaldaeans. (100; Fs)

13/1 The memory of a society is not an indifferent collection of knowledge, but the experience of certain events as factors that constitute the society as it exists in history at the time of the remembering historian and philosopher. Nevertheless, not every item of knowledge, even though it has a bearing on the civilizational order, will indiscriminately extend the limits of Greek society. When, for instance, Herodotus remembers that practically all the names of the gods came to Hellas from Egypt (2.50), or that the alphabet came to Hellas from the Phoenicians (5.58), neither Egypt nor Phoenicia are thereby included in the history of Greece. The observation may sound trivial, but its methodological importance is considerable in view of the fact that the rough criteria for the identification of a society, which in other instances are provided by the power organization, are not given in the Greek case. In the absence of a permanent political organization with dominion over a definite, though perhaps expanding or contracting, territory, Greek society is indeed constituted through a consciousness of civilizational unity with fluid boundaries and varying intensity of participation. The content of the Hellenic memory is, therefore, inseparable from the historical process of its growth. A brief recollection of the dynamics of this process will be in place. (100f; Fs)

14/1 In the wake of the invasion of the twelfth century something like a cultural vacuum formed on the Greek mainland, when the carriers of Mycenaean civilization were forced in large groups, presumably including the socially and culturally ruling stratum, to emigrate to the islands and the Anatolian coastal area. In the ninth century B.C. a new Greece began to rise. The rebirth started in the poleis of Asia Minor where the "Sons of Yavan" had become the neighbors of the "Sons of Ashkenaz" (Gen. 10). In this border area of the emigration originated the Homeric epics, and from here they began to diffuse their influence over the islands and the mainland, furnishing the recovering Greeks with the consciousness of a common past. The pan-Achaean federative enterprise against Troy became the living symbol of a pan-Hellenic cultural and precariously even political bond. Moreover, since the war of men was at the same time a war of the gods, the epics furnished a common mythology wherever they spread, thus creating a counterweight to the diversification of local divinities and their cults. The function of the Homeric gods-although not the gods themselves-may be compared in this respect with the Egyptian summodeism, with its interpretation of the various sun gods of Egypt as aspects of the one god who had become politically supreme. And, finally, the language of the epics was a unifying factor inasmuch as it balanced the dialectic diversification. (101; Fs) (notabene)

15/1 From the eastern Aegean area, then, the Greek recovery expanded over the Hellenic world and, through the expansion, created it. Homer was an Anatolian or island Greek, the first of a brilliant line. The Ionian coastal cities and the neighboring islands were the meeting place of the surviving pre-Hellenic culture with Asiatic culture,- and from this focal region, the vital mixture spread over the southern semicircle of isles to the west of the Greek mainland and further to Sicily and southern Italy. From the outside this vast semicircle was hemmed in by the Lydians, Persians, and Phoenicians to the east, by the Egyptians in the south, and by the Carthaginians and Etruscans in the southwest and west. In this border circle appeared, besides Homer, the travelers and historians Hecataeus and Herodotus; the poets Alcaeus, Sappho, Callinus, and Alcman; the philosophers Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Anaxagoras. Here was the frontier of contacts and conflicts with Asiatic forces that dominated Hellenic pragmatic history,- and here also must the Iliad have received the pointed interpretation, which was taken for granted by Herodotus, as the epic of the great struggle between Europe and Asia. The mainland Greeks were the last to enter this growing consciousness of the common Hellenic society in articulate form, although they were destined to have the most important role in mastering the Asiatic threat-Lacedaemon through its military strength, Athens through the outburst of intellectual and spiritual vitality that made it the Hellas in Hellas. On the margin, in time and space, moved the northern Greeks who, through Macedonia, became the hegemonic power in the conquest of Asia and the carriers of imperial Hellenism. (101f; Fs)

16/1 No strand of pragmatic history would ever have been pulled from the fabric of traditions unless there had been men who conceived the project and were able to execute it. From the problems of content we are, thus, referred back to the growth of the Hellenic consciousness of history. The consciousness was not a body of knowledge mysteriously diffused among the members of Hellenic society, but a symbolism by which historians and philosophers representatively articulated their experience of Hellenic society and the meaning of its order. Hence, before we can explore this creation of a Greek history in Hellenic retrospect any further, we must survey some of the forms that the phenomenon assumed. Our brief survey will properly begin with the Histories of Herodotus, the first Hellenic thinker who made the deliberate attempt to preserve the living traditions before time had erased them from the memory of the living. (103; Fs)