|
|
|
|
Ostra-Size Me!
Associated to Place:
AncientWorlds >
Rome >
Achaea >
articles
-- by
A light-hearted look at Fate, Death and Exile in Ancient Greece.
It’s not easy being Greek (ancient, that is). We know that Greece was the birthplace of Western art, philosophy, music and that untidy form of government we call democracy.
These epic accomplishments arose from the talent of giants like Socrates and Pericles. But the treatment these great men received from their peers was sometimes not so great. And Fortune herself could be less than kind to the noblest Hellene, Socrates being the prime example. But there were others b*tch-slapped by Fate. Consider: Aesop, the author of those celebrated fables, apparently had no tolerance for the tales perpetrated by the priests of Apollo at Delphi. He denounced them publicly as fakes and was promptly murdered. The moral to this story? Never stand on principle if you’re on the edge of a cliff. The great mathematician, Archimedes of Syracuse, gained fame by discovering the principle of displacement. To celebrate he invented streaking. During the conquest of the city he was working on a geometry problem when an impatient Roman soldier killed him with a sword. This proves what I’ve always suspected-math homework is hazardous to your health ! Another luminary who ended his days in Syracuse was Aeschylus, the father of drama. Like the hero of his play Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus was charged with revealing the secrets of the gods to the unwashed. (Allegedly he took notes during the Eleusinian Mysteries and incorporated them into one of his plays.) He was acquitted, but the gods got even by having an eagle drop a turtle on his head. The bird apparently mistook his bald noggin for a rock. Poor Euripides couldn’t buy a break. The man who penned Medea and the Trojan Women had a wife who cheated on him. Aristophanes picked on him. His friends were arrested and exiled. When the Man finally came for him, Euripides was living alone in a cave on Salamis. Banished to the court of Macedonia, he was accidentally ripped to pieces by the king’s hunting dogs. Modern playwrights have it a little easier-today it’s theater critics instead of Rottweilers. Nearly two millennia before Galileo, the Ionian philosopher Anaxagoras got in trouble by insisting that the sun was not a god pulled across the sky in a chariot, but a great ball of fire. His belief that the heavenly bodies were not divine but natural objects was deemed impious by the Athenians and he was condemned to death. With his friend Pericles influence he was exiled instead to Asia Minor. Since he was a homeboy there it all worked out fairly well. ( Hey they can’t all be tragedies) The Ephesian philosopher Heraclitus was so deep even Socrates had trouble understanding his works. He believed that the world was in a constant state of flux and that fire was the source of all matter. Disgusted by the immorality of city life he went to dwell as a hermit, living on wild plants like Euell Gibbons. Unfortunately the lifestyle didn’t agree with him or his gastrointestinal tract. The concept of flux took on a whole new meaning. Organic to the end, he tried to cure himself by sitting in a pile of manure. It didn’t help. Thucydides failed to defend the city of Amphipolis from the Spartans, so the Athenians gave the erstwhile general a 20 year leave of absence to work on his book, the History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides eventually returned to Athens, but left soon after to finish his great work. Sadly, he died before he could complete it. There is no record that he ever got an advance from his publisher. A Sicilian, Empedocles was a poet and philosopher and a student of Pythagoras. He’s the one who came up with the idea of the four elements –earth, water, fire and air. A successful statesman as well as a thinker, he must have let his achievements go to his head, for he believed that he could become a god if he cast himself into the fires of Mt Etna. He jumped into the crater, and the volcano promptly spit back one of his sandals. Guess he didn’t make the cut. So it was with many of Greece’s best and brightest. There’s more but you get the jist. Not that this sort of bad mojo was confined to the Hellenes, of course. Did I mention the Romans ? You think the Greeks had it bad ? Let me tell ya. .. Ah, but that’s a story for another day. historically yours, Anticus Cornelius |
Library
|
