Tag: Greeks

Among the ancient Greeks, nothing of any importance could occur, no decisions could be made, without the accompanying flow of sacrificial blood. Funerals required sacrifices, as did celebrations and homecomings, vows and agreements. Risky ventures, such as journeys and wars, could not be undertaken without sacrifices both to reveal the likely outcome and to win the support of the gods. During campaigns, the military leader served also in the priestly role of sacrificer. As historian John Keegan reports of Alexander the Great:

Bizarre though it seems to us…his day began with his plunging of a blade into the living body of an animal and his uttering of prayer as the blood flowed.

— Blood Rites, p. 27

The miraculously lifelike statues for which Greece is famous emerged from the Mystery schools. Their original function was…to help bring the gods to earth, to materialize. We know from the earlier use of statues in Egypt and Sumeria that it was intended that the gods occupy them, live in them as their physical bodies and make them come alive. If you stood in front of the statue of Artemis in Ephesus, the Mother Earth loomed over you like a great tree. You had a sensation of being absorbed into the vegetable matrix of the cosmos, the great ocean of weaving waves of light, and of being at one with it.

The statues would breathe, seem to move. It was said that sometimes they would speak to you.

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 14

…Amber is a golden-colored gemstone made from fossilized tree resin, and its beauty has attracted the attention of rock collectors and jewelry makers since the Neolithic period (10,000 to 2,000 [BCE]).

It was apparently associated with Sun worship and spirituality in some societies, and Professor Czebreszuk believes the Mycenaeans must have valued amber primarily as a symbol of the Earth’s solar companion. He states:

"Already in the Neolithic in Central Europe, we have disc-shaped artifacts with radial decorations that clearly point to the Sun. Amber probably also comes to the south as a solar material. And the Sun is power, it is the most important celestial body, so it is also a heavenly body, it is also heaven. And all these symbols together gather into one beam, which made it such an important raw material."

Wearing an amber necklace or other type of jewelry would have signified that a person was blessed by the Sun, which would have acted as a justification for their aristocratic status in the class-conscious Mycenaean society.

In Bronze Age societies in general, the elites thought of themselves as a separate and distinct group that had more in common with elites in other societies than they did with average citizens in their own. Consequently, Professor Czebreszuk explains, they remained in contact with each other and traded with each other over long distances. Amber would have been exchanged across this trade network, ensuring that elites would have exclusive access to this coveted gemstone.

— Ancient Mycenaeans Wore Amber Jewelry to Symbolize Their Elite Status – Ancient Origins

The Athenian general and author Xenophon (427-355 [B.C.E.]), was so particular about the quality of his equipment that his shield came from Argos, his breastplate from Attica, his helmet from Boeotia, and his horse from Epidaurus.

— Al Nofi’s CIC #187 – Strategy Page

The rise of phalanx-style warfare in Greece in the period c. 850-c. 600 [B.C.E.], characterized by the heavily armed and armored hoplite warrior, resulted in armor and swords becoming too valuable to inter with deceased warriors, contrary to the custom in previous ages.

— Al Nofi’s CIC #455 – Strategy Page

As I read more classics I find that different mythologies seem to present entirely different worlds. The world of the Iliad, for example, is so different in certain ways from that of the Irish Fiona, that the systems which run these mythologies would have to be in some ways intrinsically different. For example, the handling of magic. In the Irish World of the Fiona, magic is imbued into the very living substance of the universe, and the question is how easily one can migrate between our world and the Otherworld (tir na nog). In the Iliad, however, there is no sense of humans transporting between worlds, but rather it is the Gods who step down from on high and invade ours. Rare is the hero who enters the Otherworld in Greek Myth. Common is he who does so in the Celtic Mythos.

Were I to create a world for running an “Iliad” game, that world would have Gods of non-infinite powers, who act directly in the game, who can be wounded by mortals (such as Diomedes, who causes Aphrodite to bleed the famous Ichor of the Gods), and who scheme and connive their way throughout the entire fabric of the story. In fact it is a story about the competitions and victories of the Gods, and almost incidentally about the Heroes. This world would require strong rules for handling God-like Powers, and for it to be reasonably sporting, the Player Characters would pretty much need to be Heroes and the children of the Gods. Conversely, you could play it low level, in the same world, where the Player Characters come within approximate range of the Heroes, get occasionally swept up (dangerously so, I should think) in their Quests, and perhaps return to the village either a richer or wiser or stronger somehow. Either way, it would be an interesting world, but the rules would have to support it.

On the other hand, when we look at such fairy tales as Kil Arthur, the son of the King of Erin, I think we’d find that a different set of rules would be required. Or if not the rules themselves, at least the parameters of those rules in which our game would operate. It could certainly be played at almost any level, as what influence the Gods may have in these stories, there is little obvious to tell. An impulse to go here, a ship perhaps sent on the wind to a magical island, or the appearance of a giant over the edge of a hill…none of which seem named to occur by the dictate of any particular deity as in the Greek mythos. No, rather it is the Character who has chanced to enter, perhaps, the Otherworld, and knowingly or otherwise, has entered upon some quest. The mood is mysterious and vague and clouded, unlike the Greeks, whose tales were starkly brilliant in their divine clarity. We know each of the Gods and all of their motives, arguments, stratagems, and follies with the Greeks.

I wonder if anyone here has attempted to put these kinds of worlds to the test in their RPGs, and how did you go about GMing for it, and how did it work out?

— The Iliad as Source Material – Literary RPG Society of Westchester

Alas, that forum is gone, and the Internet Archive does not have a copy of this post. I have copied the entire text here for posterity.

Today our armies are parallel societies or total institutions. They take in individual recruits, separate them from their prior friends and relations, and teach them everything they will need while they are isolated from their civilian associates. They re-organize these recruits into a new hierarchy of units for both everyday and tactical purposes (people in the same platoon both live and fight together, at least in the field). Armies like the army of Classical Athens were nothing like this and yet they fought….

Soldiers in Classical Greece were expected to teach themselves or seek out whatever training would be useful. Cities which wanted to be skilled at war encouraged pastimes such as archery or choral dancing to prepare their men for war. The closest thing to this in our societies are the Scouting movement…, physical education and free lunches in schools, all of which were meant to create a population of healthy and skilled recruits. Except in Sparta, there is no clear evidence for mandatory peacetime training of infantry before 338 BCE (although armies could train together once they were assembled with their arms). We have a number of examples in Thucydides and Herodotus of armies and navies which refused training or work which their commander wished them to perform.

Greek cities were small and recruited their troops by subdivisions such as the tribes of Athens or messes of Sparta. Soldiers in one of these groups knew each other before they joined the army. It would have been impossible for most cities to break up these ties, since they had only a few hundred or a few thousand adult male citizens. In the Iliad, enemies like Glaucus and Diomedes sometimes know each other, and since many Greek wars were between great families not great cities, this may not have been unknown in real warfare.

We [today] have elaborate systems of professional military education modelled after universities and public schools with examinations and grades and certifications. Commanders of ancient armies learned in their families or through apprenticeship with more experienced commanders. They sought out idiosyncratic personal training and education from all kinds of sources. Among other things, this let groups which were good at war like the Spartans keep their practical wisdom for themselves and only share it with people who took time to befriend them. Anyone [today] can go to a leadership course for senior NCOs or a staff college by meeting meritocratic criteria, but someone like Iphicrates had to like you or decide you were useful before he took you under his wing. If you were in the position to decide who had access to secret knowledge, you had social power.

…Classical Greek armies grew out of Classical Greek societies, rather than creating a new parallel society with new rules, social ties, and systems of reward. Good generals worked with this rather than trying to turn these armies into something more like the Roman army of Augustus or whining that their solders were self-governing citizens not mute pawns from a board game….

— Ancient Greek Armies Were Part of Ancient Greek Society – Book and Sword

Imagine a Highland Napoleon. Imagine a Bonny Prince Charlie with European ambitions who, having won back Scotland from King George II, sets off at the head of his clans not just to conquer England—a mere preliminary—but to cross the Channel, to meet and beat the French army on the River Somme, then journey south into Spain to besiege and subdue its principal fortresses, return north to challenge the Holy Roman Emperor, twice confront and defeat him at the head of his forces, seize his Crown, burn his capital, bury his corpse and finally depart eastward to cross swords with the Tsar of Russia or the Sultan of Turkey. Imagine all this compressed into, say, the years 1745-56 [C.E.], between the princeling’s twenty-second and thirty-third birthdays. Imagine on his death, at the age of thirty-two, the crowns of Europe shared between his followers—Lord George Murray ruling in Madrid, the Duke of Perth in Paris, Lord Elcho in Vienna, John Roy Stewart in Berlin, Cameron of Lochiel in Warsaw, a gaggle of tartaned chieftains braying for whisky in the small courts of south Germany and London garrisoned by a crew of bare-kneed highlanders. Finally, imagine most of the Jacobite empire enduring into the nineteenth century, parts of it into the twentieth, and its last fragment into the twenty-first.

Or imagine, if you prefer, a George Washington Bolivar, a Founding Father who determines also to be the Liberator of Latin America; who, having endured the long winter of Valley Forge and the setbacks of the middle years of the War of Independence, to exult at last in the capitulation of Yorktown, conceives the ambition of ridding all the Americas of foreign governments. Imagine him embarking the Continental Army in the ships of the new-born United States Navy to voyage south, clear Mexico of Spanish troops, garrison the West Indies with Virginians or New Englanders and make a landing on the shores of South America. Then, victorious in Peru, he crosses the Andes, defeats the Spanish army of the east, and expires on the approaches to the empire of Brazil.

Thus is it just possible to grasp how extraordinary was the career of Alexander the Great. The distances and obstacles of either enterprise defeat the imagination—and they have, indeed, no parallel in any reality except that of Alexander’s own life. The world has, of course, known conquerors of extraordinary ambition in its time: Attila the Hun whose horsemen rode from Central Asia to the gates of Rome in the fifth century; the Arab successors of Mahomet turned back into Spain by defeat on the banks of the Loire in the eighth century; and the sons of Genghis Khan, whose Mongols menaced Venice and Vienna in the thirteenth. Napoleon, a devotee of the Alexander epic, came close to re-enacting it in the years between Rivoli, 1797, and Moscow, 1812, as again did Hitler, in whom some gobbet of classical learning also nourished an admiration for Alexander. His orgy of victory was, of course, even more telescoped in time than Napoleon’s, who in turn gave battle oftener than Alexander ever did. Yet the achievements of none of these earthshakers quite match those of the original. Napoleon and Hitler scarcely ventured beyond their own continent. Attila, the Arabs and the Mongols broke the boundaries of Asia but only scratched the heartland of Europe. Alexander, by contrast, first made himself master of the Greek world, then translated himself to another, the Persian Empire, and finally ventured into a third in India. At his death in June 323 BC, he had subdued the largest tract of the earth’s surface ever to be conquered by a single individual—Genghis Khan’s short-lived empire excepted—and ruled as overlord, emperor or king from Mount Olympus to the [Himalayas]….

— Mask of Command, Chapter 1

Emphases mine.

Homer has little time for comment on his characters. They reveal themselves in word and action, not in the poet’s commentary. But we feel from the outset that the human characters are caught like strong swimmers in an undertow that is much stronger than their most strenuous strivings, an undertow that will take them where it will, despite their efforts. At the same time, this undertow is not entirely a substance apart: it is rather the sum of all the characters, both gods and men, for both gods and men are driven by their need for honor. Hera and Athena’s dishonor at the hands of Aphrodite and Menelaus’s subsequent dishonor at the hands of Paris have made the war inevitable; Apollo is dishonored by the dishonor shown his suppliant, Chryses; Agamemnon’s need to appear as supreme commander clashes with Achilles’s need to be honored as supreme warrior.

Somehow, we feel, these motivations—and others’ yet to be revealed—are propelling the action of the poem toward its inevitable conclusion. As the seer Calchas says in his fear of Agamemnon’s rage:

A mighty king,
raging against an inferior, is too strong.
Even if he can swallow down his wrath today,
still he will nurse the burning in his chest
until, sooner or later, he sends it bursting forth.

That’s just the way of mighty kings; there’s nothing to be done about it. But it’s not as if Agamemnon can in his rage own the field. His rage must contend with the rage and will of others. When he taunts Achilles that he will come personally to take away Achilles’s concubine—”so you can learn just how much greater I am than you”—Homer shows us Achilles’s heart pounding “in his rugged chest,” torn between alternatives:

Should he draw the long sharp sword slung at his hip, thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now?—or check his rage and beat his fury down?

Only the intervention of Hera “of the white arms,” who “loved both men and cared for both alike,” prevents Achilles’s wrath from finding its target. She speeds down to earth the battle goddess Athena, who, unseen by all but Achilles, constrains him, seizing his “fiery hair”; and Achilles submits, though, as he says, “his heart breaks with fury,” so dearly would he love to see Agamemnon’s “black blood gush and spurt around my spear!” But “if a man obeys the gods, they’re quick to hear his prayer.”

— Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, pp. 23-25

The Athena of The Odyssey, patroness of heroes and innovators, of those who live life to its fullest and live life at the edge, is herself at a transition point. She is evolving from the archaic and militant Mycenean deity of citadels, reflected in the raging war goddess of The Iliad, into the goddess of wisdom, of culture, and of civilization. This evolution of an archetype is an important informing motif of The Odyssey and is, I believe, the reason the entire poem is under the dominion of Athena. At a depth level it tells us as much about the growth of a god as about the growth of a hero. It is as much about the evolution of spiritual powers as it is about the growth of human consciousness. Studied from this perspective, The Odyssey becomes a sacred text and a drama of the highest mysteries.

— The Hero and the Goddess, p. 42

Human nature is so formed that any power I may have to resist my animal desires—indeed what stops me from becoming a mere animal—derives from my capacity for thought and reflection. Venus was traditionally depicted holding a mirror, but not out of vanity as is nowadays supposed. The mirror was a symbol of the power of reflection to modify desire.

The god of reflection was the god of the great reflector in the sky—the moon. In all ancient cultures the moon regulated not only fertility but thought.

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 4

Author’s emphasis.

Heroes always emerge in a time of dying—of self, of social sanctions, of society’s forms, of standard-brand religions, governments, economics, psychologies, and relationships. In answering the call of the eternal, they discover the courage to perform the first great task of the hero or heroine—to undergo all the gestations, growth, and trauma required for a new birth. This occurs so that they can then serve as midwife in the larger society for the continuum of births necessary to redeem both the time and the society in which they live and bring them to a higher level of functioning.

Thus, the second great task of the hero or heroine—as The Odyssey and many other myths show us—is to return to the world. Plato tells us that, after receiving illumination in the vast world of eternal realities, philosophers must go back into the cave of ordinary society. In just such a fashion, Jesus comes back from the desert. The Buddha returns from his ascetic meditations. And Odysseus returns, at last, from his voyage into the depth world. All are deeply changed; some are transformed. And they immediately begin teaching the lessons they have learned of palingenesia, of life renewed and deepened.

— The Hero and the Goddess, p. 73

Author’s emphasis.

The Greeks were the Vikings of the Bronze Age. They built some of history’s first warships. Whether on large expeditions or smaller sorties, whether in the king’s call-up or on freebooting forays, whether as formal soldiers and sailors or as traders who turned into raiders at a moment’s notice, whether as mercenaries, ambassadors, or hereditary guest-friends, the Greeks fanned out across the Aegean and into the eastern and central Mediterranean, with one hand on the rudder and the other on the hilt of a sword. What the sight of a dragon’s head on the stem post of a Viking ship was to an Anglo-Saxon, the sight of a bird’s beak on the stem post of a Greek galley was to a Mediterranean islander or Anatolian mainlander. In the 1400s [B.C.E.], the Greeks conquered Crete, the southwestern Aegean islands, and the city of Miletus on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, before driving eastward into Lycia and across the sea to Cyprus. In the 1300s they stirred up rebels against the Hittite overlords of western Anatolia. In the 1200s they began muscling their way into the islands of the northeastern Aegean, which presented a big threat to Troy….

— The Trojan War, pp. 2-3

Emphasis mine.

In the Minoan days of Crete an unprecedented flowering of learning and the arts was cultivated by Athena. Dynamic architecture rose to four stories, pillared and finely detailed, yet always infused with the serenity of the Goddess. Patiently Her mortals charted the heavens, devised a calendar, kept written archives. In the palaces they painted striking frescoes of Her Priestesses and sculpted Her owl and ever-renewing serpent in the shrine rooms. Goddess figures and their rituals were deftly engraved on seals and amulets. Graceful scenes were cast in relief for gold vessels and jewelry. Athena nurtured all the arts, but Her favorites were weaving and pottery.

Long before there were palaces, the Goddess had appeared to a group of women gathering plants in a field. She broke open the stems of blue-flowered flax and showed them how the threadlike fibers could be spun and then woven. The woof and warp danced in Her fingers until a length of cloth was bom before them. She told them which plants and roots would color the cloth, and then She led the mortals from the field to a pit of clay. There they watched Athena form a long serpent and coil it, much like the serpents coiled around Her arms. She formed a vessel and smoothed the sides, then deftly applied a paste made from another clay and water. When it was baked in a hollow in the earth, a spiral pattern emerged clearly. The image of circles that repeat and repeat yet move forward was kept by the women for centuries.

As the mortals moved forward, Athena guided the impulse of the arts. She knew they would never flourish in an air of strife, so She protected households from divisive forces and guarded towns against aggression. So invincible was the aura of Her protection that the Minoans lived in unfortified coastal towns. Their shipping trade prospered and they enjoyed a peace that spanned a thousand years. To Athena each family held the olive bough sacred, each worshipped Her in their home. Then quite suddenly the flowering of the Minoans was slashed. Northern barbarians, more fierce than the Aegean Goddess had ever known, invaded the island and carried Athena away to Attica. There they made her a soldier.

— Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, pp. 99-101

Perseus’s subsequent trials and triumphs, like those of his great-grandson Herakles, are too epic in scope, covering most of the known world, Hell included, and too teeming with exploits to go into in any detail here. Most significant, however, was the way in which the deeds of both heroes were reflections of their father’s battles against Gaia—which is to say, of the Greeks’ ongoing struggle to subsume the Pelasgians’ old, earthbound, chthonic cults into the brave new world of patriarchal Olympian dominance. Thus, Perseus’s most renowned exploit would be his beheading of that superbly demonized version of the Great Mother, Medusa, the terrible, snake-haired Gorgon who dwelled with her equally hideous sisters in a seaside cave near the opening to the Underworld.

— Zeus, p. 123

Demeter’s hair was yellow as the ripe corn of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain. The threshing floor was her sacred space. Women, the world’s first farmers (while men still ran off to the bloody howling of hunt and battle), were her natural worshipers, praying: “May it be our part to separate wheat from chaff in a rush of wind, digging the great winnowing fan through Demeter’s heaped-up mounds of corn while she stands among us, smiling, her brown arms heavy with sheaves, her ample breasts adorned in flowers of the field.”

Demeter had but one daughter, and she needed no other, for Persephone was the Spirit of Spring. The Lord of Shadows and Death, Hades himself, the Unseen One, carried her off in his jet-black chariot, driven by coal-black steeds, through a crevice in the surface of Earth, down to the realms of the dead. For nine days, Demeter wandered sorrowing over land, sea, and sky in search of her daughter, but no one dared tell her what had happened till she reached the Sun, who had seen it all. With Zeus’s help, the mother retrieved her daughter, but Persephone had already eaten a pomegranate seed, food of the dead, at Hades’s insistence, which meant she must come back to him. In the end, a sort of truce was arranged. Persephone could return to her sorrowing mother but must spend a third of each year with her dark Lord. Thus, by the four-month death each year of the goddess of springtime in her descent to the underworld, did winter enter the world. And when she returns from the dark realms she always strikes earthly beings with awe and smells somewhat of the grave.

— Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, p. 3

To modern sensibility the fact of a story’s being allegorical makes it less likely to be an accurate depiction of real events. Modern writers try to drain their texts of meaning, to flatten them out in order to make them more naturalistic.

To the ancients, who believed that every single thing that happens on earth is guided by the motions of the stars and planets, the more a narrative brought out these ‘poetic’ patterns, the truer and more realistic the text.

So, it may be tempting to view the journeys into the Underworld made by Hercules, Theseus, and Orpheus as mere metaphor. It is true that on one level their adventures represent the beginning of humanity’s coming to terms with the reality of death. But, as we try to imagine the adventures underground of Hercules, Theseus, and the others, we must not conceive of them as to be purely internal or mental journeys, such as we might contemplate today. When they battled with monsters and demons, they were confronting forces that infested their own beings, the corrupted human flesh, the dark labyrinth of the human brain. But they were also fighting real monsters of flesh and blood.

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 7

Entropy is the engine that drives the Universe, which exists in a constant balancing act of Cause and Effect. Once you cause something to be set in motion, it inevitably slides down the slope of entropy, into the unavoidable effect of that action. Magic works more directly with Entropy and begins with the desired effect and then alters the fabric of the Universe so the proper cause sets it in motion.

— fragment from unknown ancient text found in the Vault of Alexandria

Thetis:

What a dangerous precedent! What if one day there were other heroes like him?

Hera:

What if courage and imagination were to become everyday mortal qualities? What would become of us?

Zeus:

We would no longer be needed. But for the moment there is sufficient cowardice, sloth, and mendacity down there on Earth to last forever.

— “Clash of the Titans” (1981)

Magic was accepted without exception by all strata of society, but its practice required considerable specialist magical knowledge; amateur dabbling with such powers was generally disastrous. In the official rhetoric of these times magic is a powerful but ambiguous quality, sometimes practised by specialists or charismatic individuals, and also by priests and rabbis drawing on religious lore. Magic is intimately bound up with religion for the Greeks and Romans, somewhat more removed for Jews. It is by turns valued, contested, debated and deemed dangerous; it is a variable quality but still central to social and cultural forces, as well as being a good diagnostic of them. Magic is as important for the historian in the present as it was for contemporary people millennia ago, and in order to understand it we must briefly sketch out broader cultural traditions and histories, many of which also provide the foundations of the world in which we live today.

— Magic: A History, p. 240