/lit/ - Literature

I was taught that Athenian education was the best in Greece and by the 5th century largely democratised, so most citizens knew rhetoric, mathematics, art, music, literature and politics.

You have to remember at the time books were for the rich and their purpose was to be memorised and/or read aloud to an audience so the academic relevance of reading was pretty limited. Your education as a.kid would be dialogues and debates with your teachers so by your adult life you would be well used to rhetorical nuances of the language, even if you didn't read.


That is what enabled communal life and engagement with the democracy. Most citizens would need to follow high discourse of the theatre or politicians or he would be an outcast. The philosophers would have been just as much part of this communal life, speaking publicly, not cloistered academics like you imagine today.

>>7764827
I had a professor of classics out of UCLA that thought initial Greek intellectual development: writing, theater, philosophy etc was extremely simplistic: they wanted to record, transmit, and analyze Homeric Saga. In doing so they created an educated and well traveled elite, that after the Persian wars began being influenced by long-standing eastern ideas, at which point you had people like Socrates and Democritus creating brand new shit in the really excellent learning environment that was created.

The theater isn't highly challenging if you live in and are fully immersed in the culture. The reason it is so difficult for us to understand is that we not only have to deal with the subject matter itself, but come to grips with such alien methods of thought, axioms and idioms etc.

>>7764984
This.

The Greeks were not like us. We can conceive how they thought (object based sexuality vs individual based sexuality) but we cannot really grasp how they internally processed their world view (Did you hear of Alexios? He has received his beard and is being honored into the fratry! We were deep in the cups with Eutropios last night, he mourns the loss of Alexios' youth and the love they shared, and we all wept that Alexios was to take a wife in a fortnight!)

>>7765002
>>7764984
That is no answer. Lots of cultures are not like ours, but only the Greeks produced Sophocles.

It's not challenging because it's different, it's challenging because it deals with inherently challenging ideas.

>>7765026
>only the Greeks produced Sophocles
The English produced shakespeare and the prussians produces Kant

>>7765027
Of course, but that's the crux of the problem. Those societies had education that covered more than the Iliad, the Gods, and rhetoric. They were post-Gutenberg societies, whose thinkers had long intellectual traditions to be taught by and interact with.

>>7764932
>ywn live in this time period

400 B.C. Is right around the time Shakespeare set Timon of Athens.

What does that tell you? Hmmm?

>The story the book presents is that education in general was very low-quality,
Most rich Athenians had private tutors for their kids. All those sophists wandering around were teachers for pay. Many were very well-educated and fond of showing it off - that's why so many Plato's dialogues are about bright little whippersnappers admiring the sexiest one with the best handle on Protagoras' latest horseshit ideas.

>Then we have the Sophists who are set against that style of learning,
The sophists are not monolithic, and the ones we get are stereotyped and used for very specific didactic, ironic, or moral purposes by Plato. Remember that sophist essentially means "wise man." They weren't a fixed school. There were different intellectual strains. The kind of eristic "sophistry" that Plato and Socrates seem to have hated might have been a minority position they exaggerated, or just a common side gig of otherwise pretty ordinary teachers of political acumen.

>But Socrates/Plato (and later Aristotle) are against both of those strains. Where the hell did these guys come from?
Socrates/Plato are in the sophistic tradition. Socrates moreso. Probably both represent new or at least minority strains aimed at replacing relativistic eristic with constructive dialectic, but they're still discursive talky talky philosophers who came out of the sophist milieu fundamentally. Both had background in the natural philosophers and other strains as well, like the Eleatics and Milesians, and depending who you talk to, probably lots of other shit (Diotima + crazy-ass esoterica/gymnosophistry maybe).

Socrates was new in an intellectual sense, at least from our distilled perspective, but he probably seemed like Yet Another Sophist to the Athenians. And a really annoying one.

>On the other hand they seem to have been very close to the most powerful citizens (Pericles, Alcibiades).
In a way, this is a big part of Plato's setting. The figures in his dialogues, especially early ones, are chosen carefully. They tend to be set at past moments which foreshadow the participants' later membership in the Thirty Tyrants (e.g.), stuff like that.

But yeah, Athenian upper society was close-knit. They would have enjoyed the company of those powerful men, the kinds of men who WOULD be involved in the Thirty Tyrants and such if it ever became a thing. They were in the aristocratic milieu. Plato and Aristotle in particular had bustling schools; in later life Plato was involved in some kind of philosophical experiment (or at least political fuckery) in Syracuse, one of the single most powerful states in the Greek diaspora, and while Aristotle was in and out of Athens because he feared persecution, he was also famous for his school and appointed tutor of Alexander.

>>7766368
That was great, thanks.

>>7766368
>And a really annoying one.
How annoying was Socrates? He seems to be viewed as the model philosopher but he comes across as a bit of a cunt from what I've read.

>>7764947
Who?

>>7766709
He was basically the philosopher version of Andy Kaufman.

>>7764827
ive wattched all the house md and house of cards shows and i have no idea what theyre talking about half the time and im a dumbass but i applaud at the end and am mesmerized by it. i think thats' the same way with the ancient greeks. somebody was putting on a show and it was better than looking at a big rock so they went to the show and sat down and watched it. they didnt do lit crit analysis of it, they just watched some cool shit happen because there was no tv. same with the elizabethans.

>How did these illiterate, barely-educated, backward, traditionalists watch highly intellectually challenging theater all the time?

The pool of extant plays probably skew our perception of the average quality. Keep in mind, between the period of their creation to the invention of the printing press and revival of interest in Western Europe of Classical Greek literature, the survival and transmissions of manuscripts of said plays relied entirely on their popularity throughout the ages and just chance of surviving through such length of time by the interest of a very small amount of scholars who were interested in getting and inscribing these works down for centuries.

Most of the playwrights wrote as up to 100 plays in their lifetime. Every year, the city of Athens would furnish 3 tragedians and 3 comedians to compete and write plays for the Dionysos festival, and they probably were preformed outside of it as-well. Reason why a lot of the plays have not survived is probably because they weren't interesting or of high quality worthy to preserve.

There was also likely variety in complexity and content of the playwrights. In Aristophanes's "Frogs" and "The Women and the Poet", Aristophanes lampoons Euripides' plays of ones being appealing in content to most of the knaves and low-class scum in the city. In the "Frogs" particular, it's stated that his plays were written in a much more simplistic diction, that he was banal in his poetic phrases, and that the themes of his plays were impious and damaging to the society of the polis; compare to Aischylos. Where in the play, Aristophanes' character of Euripides rebuts and states that Aischylos was verbose in his writing and his diction was too polysyllabic and complex to a point where it wasn't necessary and didn't convey the message of the play as-well, and wasn't accessible to watching audience.

There's also snippets in Aristophanes that brings up how there's a lot of people who attended the theater just to watch the comedies and satyr plays, but would be forced to sit through the tragedies first (which implies they didn't want to watch them and considered them boring, and possibly too complex).

>>7766709
Imagine you were at a party with all your greek buddies, sitting on couches, being served watered down wine, just having a good time. You're talking about events and maybe people start talking about a crime that happened recently. You chime in about how whatever the criminal did was impious or unjust. Then you see Socrates stand up. No one really likes this guy, he's loud, obnoxious, talks over people and has this "posse" that follows him around, one of which who you've heard twists every story to make it seem like Socrates is some rhetoric god. The only reason Socrates is there is because people think he's smart because his little posse runs around claiming he's won so many arguments. Socrates then proceeds to walk over to where you are sitting having a lighthearted conversation, you can see his cheeks are flushed from drinking too much and the whole time he's been pawing at the slave server with no decorum. He proceeds to ask, "Tell me what's the nature of piety?"
You start to respond, "Well you see Socrates the nature of piety is rooted in---"
"HUH HUH? WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? HUH? YOU HAVE TO SPEAK UP!" Meanwhile his posse has followed him over and they proceed to echo his "huhs" and "whats". Then the host of the house kicks the whole group out for their impropriety why Socrates shouts, "TELL ME WHAT IS THE NATURE OF PROPRIETY AND HOW DO OUR ACTION FULFILL THE FORM OF IMPROPRIETY? HUH?" The next day you hear you son tell you about how Socrates and his posse are going through Athens talking about how they "won" another argument against the "sophists".

bump.