Generally known for its advanced, often radical suggestions of reform in politics, religion, morality, and human behavior, the Greek Enlightenment has long been studied in terms of its doctrines and ...theories. To understand the environment in which the new ideas flourished and their impact, Friedrich Solmsen explores the novel intellectual methods that developed during the period.
A variety of new modes of thought was introduced at this time or, if known before, was applied with delight in experimentation. Among those that Friedrich Solmsen examines are new methods of argumentation: persuasion aimed at the control of man's emotions; Utopian speculation; experiments with language; and the emergence of a secular psychology and its use in the reconstruction of human motives and historical events.
Concentrating on the work of nonphilosophical authors such as the historian Thucydides and the tragedian Euripides, the author presents a portrait of a restless and spirited age engaged in an adventure of reason.
Originally published in 1975.
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Friedrich Solmsen provides a new approach to Hesiod's personality in this book by distinguishing Hesiod's own contributions to Greek mythology and theology from the traditional aspects of his poetry. ...Hesiod's vision of a better world, expressed in religious language and imagery, pictures the savagery and brutality of the earlier days of Greece giving way to an order of justice. In this new order, however, the good aspects of the past would be preserved, giving an inner continuity and strength to the changing world. Solmsen traces the influence of Hesiod's ideas on other Athenian poets, Aeschylus in particular. From personal political experience Aeschylus could give a deeper meaning to Hesiod's dream of an organic historical evolution and of a synthesis of old and new powers. For Aeschylus, justice became the crucial problem of the political community as well as of the divine order. Through close readings of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days and of Aeschylus' Prometheia and Eumenides, Solmsen reinterprets the political ideas of the Greek city state and the relation between divine and human justice as seen by early Greek poets. First published in 1949, this book has long been recognized as the standard work on Hesiod's influence. For the 1995 paperback edition, G. M. Kirkwood has written a new foreword that addresses the book's reception and discusses more recent scholarship on the works Solmsen examines, including the disputed authorship of Prometheia.
Hesiod and Aeschylus Solmsen, Friedrich; Kirkwood, G. M
01/1949, Letnik:
30
eBook
Friedrich Solmsen provides a new approach to Hesiod's personality in this book by distinguishing Hesiod's own contributions to Greek mythology and theology from the traditional aspects of his poetry. ...Hesiod's vision of a better world, expressed in religious language and imagery, pictures the savagery and brutality of the earlier days of Greece giving way to an order of justice. In this new order, however, the good aspects of the past would be preserved, giving an inner continuity and strength to the changing world.
Solmsen traces the influence of Hesiod's ideas on other Athenian poets, Aeschylus in particular. From personal political experience Aeschylus could give a deeper meaning to Hesiod's dream of an organic historical evolution and of a synthesis of old and new powers. For Aeschylus, justice became the crucial problem of the political community as well as of the divine order. Through close readings of Hesiod'sTheogonyandWorks and Daysand of Aeschylus'PrometheiaandEumenides, Solmsen reinterprets the political ideas of the Greek city state and the relation between divine and human justice as seen by early Greek poets.
First published in 1949, this book has long been recognized as the standard work on Hesiod's influence. For the 1995 paperback edition, G. M. Kirkwood has written a new foreword that addresses the book's reception and discusses more recent scholarship on the works Solmsen examines, including the disputed authorship ofPrometheia.
During the earlier centuries of Greek thought and literature, hardly any concept holds so dominating a position in moral issues ashybris.¹ How far literature reflects “life” in this aspect is ...difficult to know, but some corresponding, even if far less articulate, beliefs and superstitions must have formed the substratum of what we meet in the written documents. Were one to say nothing here ofhybrisprior to the fifth century and, in this century itself nothing about its central importance in Aeschylus and about its somewhat reduced place in Sophocles, Herodotus alone would suffice to prove its continuing vitality.
As we have stated in the Introduction, we do not propose to deal with the content of radical and reformatory theories put forward in this period. Our concern is with forms rather than with subject ...matter. Sometimes the protest against tradition takes the form of a Utopian wish or thought; in fact when criticism goes to extremes, it is apt to demand impossible changes, and the most radical ideas of the time are known to us only in the medium of Utopian speculations. Speculations and wishes are free and can travel in any direction. To begin with a well-known instance,
ARGUMENTATION Solmsen, Friedrich
Intellectual Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment,
03/2015
Book Chapter
Central in importance as is argumentation for the vigorous new use oflogos,an exhaustive account of its varieties seems impossible, and, even were it possible, would disturb the proportions of our ...study. On the following pages, we shall examine briefly one and, somewhat more fully, another type of argumentation. Instances of these types might be found in earlier days; but in the period of the Enlightenment they became appreciated and an object of conscious manipulation.
It seems expedient to start at a point where arguments run riot. Gorgias in his treatiseOn NatureorNot-Beinguses arguments that are
RATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION Solmsen, Friedrich
Intellectual Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment,
03/2015
Book Chapter
In Chapter V we became acquainted with a new approach to the problems of human motivation. In the generation of Thucydides, realistic analysis took possession of a subject in which formerly divine ...operation had been allotted a large share. Antiphon the Orator uses the realistic psychology in the interest of his clients. Euripides and perhaps other tragedians of the time show men and women “as they (really) are” in their acting and suffering; and Thucydides thinks in terms of the new psychology to explain the conduct of individuals or communities directing the course of historical events. The events themselves are
The principal instrument of reason is language, and if reason enjoyed new freedom and used it for experimentation, language was bound to be drawn into these experiments. In itself, a conscious ...attitude to language was nothing new. Even the early poets are likely to have known why they preferred one manner of phrasing to another. In theTheogonywe observe the “invention” of names for deities and understand what the poet wishes to express through them. Aeschylus speaks of names given “truly” and names given “falsely.”¹ Much more could be said about this subject, but our concern is with the
This paper makes no attempt to compete with the brilliant studies through which in the last thirty years several scholars have advanced our understanding of the evidence for Zeno of Elea and in ...particular of the verbatim preserved fragments. In fact my intention is not to replace theories by other theories but to create doubt about matters that for some time have been taken for granted and to change confident assumptions into hypotheses that would tolerate others besides them.
Accounts of Zeno’s philosophy generally take as their starting point some well known statements at the beginning of Plato’sParmenides.¹ Given
