• Nathan G wants to know why the Greeks were able to originate so many new ways of thinking about the world.
• I have asked that many times.
• I do think it has to do with the facts that they got the alphabet, coinage, colonization all at the same time. All three of those were revolutionary in terms of forcing new ways of doing things.
• But also, they always thought of themselves as little siblings: the really wise people were in Egypt and Babylon (our evidence shows that that was not quite true: Egypt and Babylon had great empires, power, huge buildings, etc., but they had little, less, or no History, Philosophy, Science, etc.).
  
• So maybe the Greeks built up their neighbors so much that when they tried to outdo them, they rose higher.
• Or maybe the Greeks just got an intellectual infection: the question "why" and the will to answer.
  
• Logan L wants to know if the Greeks used their first money to trade with other cultures or was it localized.
• I don't know for a fact how they used it.
• I do know that within a couple hundred years, there were money changers in markets (to deal with the fact that a whole lot of cities were minting money of different weights and metal content).
• Also, it's still a vulnerable way to keep wealth: easily lost and untraceable.
• Alex R wants to know how someone just invents philosophy.
• Here's what I know:
  
• A 6th century BC Milesian man named Thales had this thought that all material things are made out of one single material (he thought it was water) that simply changes various qualities, such as density, temperature, maybe other things he thought of (that  might be radically wrong).
  
• Another, Heraclitus, thought it was fire, but things cycle through 4 elements (water, earth, air, and fire).
  
• Another, Anaximander, thought that every thing has the seeds of every other thing in it, and the seeds can somehow grow or shrink so that one thing becomes another thing.
• Another, Parmenides, thought that time is an illusion: nothing really ever changes but just is what it is, everchanging, everlasting. Well, I've caricaturized his thought.
• It's not as amazing that someone thought these things, but rather that they wrote it down and tried to teach it to others! And others debated it. ANd it became philosophy and science.
• THen later thinkers debate and argue and come up with their own ideas.
• Before you know it, you've got Plato and Democritus, who have a full blown ethics, physics, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, etc.
  
• History? We'll read the beginning few pages of Herodotus and Thucydides soon. That will show you what it means to "invent history." Basically, it's a person not just thinking hard about what he has been told about the past and coming up with his own theories, but also then writing it down and making copies available to others. The purpose originally seems to be to educate people about the past, to make moral/ethical points.
  
• Connor O wants to know if we are sure the epics disappeared for a time.
• I must have said something to make you ask that, Connor.
  
• I didn't mean that they disappeared.
• What I know is that they appeared in the 8th/9th century BCE, but they cannot have appeared from nowhere. It must have taken a long span of time for the language and techniques of a bard network to evolve and enable them to sing such complex and long songs as the Homeric epics.
• Will Jones wants to know if there is a deeper meaning in the epics. E.g. Achilles' anger is meant to be generalized to all humans and to show how we are all flawed.
• Great question.
• Does Homer ever say that? No.
• DOes a homeric character ever say that? Maybe, but not so straightforwardly. Look at Achilles' discussion with his mother Thetis, or look at what is cast in Agamemnon's teeth by Thersites. Those seem somewhat generalizable.
• But maybe, just maybe, these stories have stood the test of time because people are able to find aspects relevant to themselves. Perhaps not always the same elements, in which case it's not "human nature" so much as "cultural echoes of significance."
• It's hard to characterize it, but clearly the epics have spoken to many people over many ages, most of whom lived in worlds in many ways unlike the one depicted in Homer.
• Natalie L wants to know if the Homeric bards could have invented their own "dialect" by borrowing from various dialects.
• Absolutely: this sort of thing is called a kunstsprache from the German word Kunstsprache: it's a "language" that is only used in some literature, but never really exists as a language people speak and teach their babies. Honestly, it is very close to a language that people teach their babies (i.e. it's not like Esperanto), but it has lots of borrowings and a mix of words from different ages, etc.
  
• Homeric Greek has often been called a kunstsprache.
• What we don't know is how it grew. Is West right that an originally Aeolic epic was thoroughly adapted by Ionic bards, but they didn't make everything in it Ionic, because it was hard finding words to fit the meter, and certain characters were too important to just change? Or did a group of Ionic bards simply borrow a few Aeolic forms? and as for the characters, sure, a few are Aeolic in origin, but not all: maybe that's just a geographical accident rather than an indication of origin. We can only speculate. West is among the most intelligent of speculators and has a lot of good evidence.
  
• Diana B asks whether the origin of epic was more Ionian or Aeolian and how did it change so much.
• The best evidence we have for these questions is the epics themselves, their language and their characters and their places, etc.
• What does it mean to be "more Ionic"? It means that the language has Ionic words and forms in it and also that ties to places and heroes from the geographical area that spoke Ionic Greek are featured highly in the Epics in a way that leads us to think the bard was purposely highlighting them or influenced by his surroundings (folk tales, shrines, traditions) to include them.
• we also have a bit of evidence external to the poems, from archaeology and other literature.
• Cole F wants to know what made me interested in Greece, since I'm not Greek.
• Part of the point of my pointing out that I'm not Greek was to say that I think this material is of universal human interest and of incredible historical import, and I'm not saying that because of any sense of nationalism, heritage, or other motive that might be considered biased. If I have become biased, it is because of the culture I find in Ancient Greece and how important it seems to me, and that is the reason I stay biased.
• Autobiographically, what made me interested in Greece was 1) a book about Greek myths, and 2) English etymology that was taught to me in 5th grade, and 3) a larger-than-life Irish nun who taught me some Latin in high school, and 4) the pre-socratic philosophers, who continue to absolutely blow my mind with how inventive and intellectually daring they were.
• Ethan H wants to know when the 4 page Homeric paper is due.
• It's on the schedule. I'd have to look it up just like you. I believe it is due after we finish reading the Odyssey.
• Nataly H want to know if just any passage would work for the Homeric paper.
• Just about.
• But some might be "easier" than others, because the parallels to them are more obvious.
  
• For example, Hera only seduces Zeus once, and Hephaestus only catches Ares and Aphrodite once: maybe those passages don't have so many obvious parallels.
• Ruby R-J wants to know why Greek didn't stay present in Europe?
• It did, in the eastern half of the ROman Empire. THen when the Ottoman empire took over there, many Greeks fled west and Greek was revived in the west of Europe. It's a longer story with lots of chapters, but basically Greek culture has been spreading and present in Europe ever since Homer. The language has had times when it was known by fewer people and times when it was known by more.
• Eggy G wants to know whether the Achaeans are celebrated for lasting so long outside of Troy.
• In a way.
• In the epics you get occasional hints of how they might have survived: they went viking against various surrounding towns and islands. We met one pair whom Agamemnon killed, but who had been hostages of Achilles before, and Achilles ransomed them back to their family. But then they came back to fight more and Agamemnon killed them. We also hear Achilles complain about how the spoils are divided: what spoils? they haven't taken Troy yet! well, it's the spoils from their other raids against Troy's allies.
• Tim B noticed that I said that the Homeric Epics contain little/no magic, and he begs to differ. The gods seem to be magical.
• You are right, completely.
• What is missing in the Homeric Epics are things like potions, spells, curses, herbs, etc. I suppose that is just one part of magic. Thanks for pointing that out.
• Also, the line between heroes and gods is pretty solid in Iliad and Odyssey: in the epic cycle, however, heroes can be deified, as happened in generations previous to those of Iliad and Odyssey (like Dawn's consort, Tithonos)
  
• It's basically a matter of degree too: the story of Medea has magic in it, front and center, but the Iliad and Odyssey don't have that kind of magic.
• Raphael wants to know the connection of Aeolus to the Aeolian islands.
• Aeolus is the keeper of the winds (well, there may be 3 mythical men named Aeolus, and they get confused with each other and may actually not be completely separate). One tradition says the Aeolus who is the keeper of the winds had a cave on the Aeolian islands (hence the name). Traditions that link heroes and gods to particular places are very very very common, and sometimes there are multiple ones that cannot all be true (you can't be born in more than one place, for instance).
• We'll run into Aeolus again in the Aeneid when Juno goes to ask him to wreck Aeneas' ships.
• Miona F wants to know what allows this literature to be perpetuated even to this day.
  
• Well, being the very first literature in any tradition gives it a privileged place that people will always return to.
  
• Basically, the earlier a text, the more time it has to influence more other texts: as long as people read it, that is.
• These epics seem to have a lot more going for them than merely being the first, but that is a big factor. They are also the first in the Greek tradition, and that tradition is what led to a lot of European traditions. It could have been otherwise, but it isn't.
• Enola M wants to know if dactylic hexameter existed in oral traditions as well as written.
• It must have: the system is well developed and in full flower in Homeric epics: that sort of thing does not just come from nowhere. It must have existed in the previous generations of the epics that lead up to the form we have that was written down.
• Alyson D wants to know how many languages were there.
• Many many.
• The Greek language has multiple dialects: Ionic, Attic, Doric, Aeolic, Arcadian, etc.
• Neighbors of the Greeks spoke many different language such as Luwian (Troy!) and Hittite (further east in Asia Minor), Thracians to the north, phoenician and Egyptian and Akkadian, etc.
  
• Hundreds. Evidence for some is scanty, for others plentiful.
• Alyson D also wants to know about the night scene: it seems random, maybe added after the fact?
• It's not really random: this is the first time, apparently, that the Trojans made camp outside of their city, and so it's the first time the Argives can send out a night expedition like that (not the first time for the Trojans, however!).
  
• It does seem like a neatly packaged episode that could be added in or left out depending on time constraints or whether the audience wanted it or a patron paid for it. There are lots of episodes like that (think of Hector's return to the city to ask that a garment be dedicated and the meeting with his wife Andromache).
  
• Henry D wants to know about these characters who "don't move the story forward": why are they there?
• It all depends on how far you zoom in or zoom out.
• If you are talking about the story of what happened when Achilles got mad at Agamemnon, then all of these characters move the story.
• But if you are talking about the story of the whole war, then the rage of Achilles is just kind of a small episode. It doesn't really change the overall story of the war, does it?
• The Iliad is the story of Achilles' anger, and it was wildly successful as an epic poem: we know that because the number of scraps of papyrus with Iliad bits on them that we find is larger than the number of other scraps with literature on them. A sort of "vote from the trash heaps of Egypt." So that is why these characters are remembered.
• The other characters, the ones who don't get an epic, are often remembered because they play some key role in the larger story.
• Henry D also wants to know why Philoctetes' bow was so important.
• So, the version I know is that a son of Priam whow as a seer was captured and tortured by the Greeks until he revealed that Troy would not be captured until the bow of Heracles was used against Troy. How did he know that? he's a seer. He saw it.
  
• Who had that bow? Philoctetes. Why? Because Heracles gave it to him after Heracles died. It was recompense for Philoctetes' lighting Heracles' funeral pyre. Why do you give a guy who lights your corpse on fire a bow? I don't know. But he did. We could go on a lot with the "why's" of it all, but it's mythology, and I can't pretend it all makes lucid logical sense. It does usually make its own kind of sense.
  
• Paige V asks if many languages of the Mediterranean originated from Greek?
• No. Only Greek as far as I know.
• But Greek is one member of a large family of European languages, called "indo-european." Latin, Celtic, Slavic, Germanic (including English!!!), Hittite, and many others are members of this family. Look up "indo-european family tree": it's amazing!
• Caroline D wants to know if Homer was worshipped.
• Not that I know of.
• But many of the heroes in Homer's stories were worshipped.
• Look up "Greek hero cults": there were many of them all over the Greek landscape.
• Oops, I take that back: apparently Homer was worshipped at Alexandria by one of the Ptolemies: but that is about 500 years after HOmeric times. Most hero cults arose during or soon after Homeric times, as far as we can tell. That is when offerings start appearing in the archaeological record, for example, at older Mycenaean palaces that were in ruins by the time the hero cult started there.
• Julia H wants to know how the dark ages would have influenced Homeric epic's style.
• I think it might have led the bards to magnify the past: those huge Mycenaean ruins of buildings of a size that were no longer being built, the tradition that humans of yore were bigger, better, closer to gods, etc. may have led to a public and performer more willing to glorify and pay attention to the remote past.
• Cassia HS wants to know what would have caused Homer to write in Ionian.
• Most obviously, if he himself were a bard in the Ionian tradition: if he knew how to sing songs in Ionian, then he would have written them down.
• We don't have extensive knowledge of other epic traditons, because we have no surviving epics from that time parallel to Homer, but we do have reports and references to other traditions, mostly via variants in stories, but some from later poets whose language is in a different dialect who offer different versions that seem influenced not just by lagnuage but also by the place that language exists in.
• Brian A asks if the Greeks were proud of their accents.
• We know of some stereotypes that are based on accents. We also know that each Greek city was quite broadly in rivalry with other Greek cities, and there were definitely prejudices (see Pericles' funeral oration in Thucydides: Sparta and Athens had perhaps the most famous rivalry). Some rivalries broke out into war at times. Others were played out in the games or trade, etc.
  
• Morgan D wants to know why the Iliad focuses on Achilles, given that he pulls out of the fighting.
• All I can say is that the whole Iliad is the story of Achilles' rage, its causes, consequences, and all of that.
  
• I can't ask Homer why.
• But it makes a great story to read, to think about.
• Autumn A asks how long the story of the Trojan War was around before being written down.
• Start with the obvious: it can't have been around before Troy was destroyed.
  
• Beyond that, I am just not sure. I don't know for a fact that there was an expedition by a broad coalition of Greeks to conquer Troy. I'm willing to believe it, but I don't know it, and I don't have any great evidence for it other than the epics themselves.
• In a way, I don't mind either way: it's great literature, interesting culturally, etc. and that's enough.
• But I can't avoid the question of how it links to history.