(116) Zeus, Prometheus, and Greek Ethics

Much as the literature and art of Greece before the time of Plato have been admired, the notion that the ethics of that period might have much to teach us would have seemed bizarre to most people even as late as the nineteenth century. While the aesthetic appeal of the early Greek religion has been uncontested, it has been looked down on as a superstition which no thinking person could take seriously, and early Greek thinking has been esteemed only so far as it could be regarded as a preparation for the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, which helped the fathers of the Church to construct a religious philosophy. Even atheists looked back to Epicurean philosophy rather than to the ethics of the early Greeks, sharing the general assumption that progress had been made since that time. Early Greek ethics were very poorly esteemed in the days when the theory invented by Hermann Fränkel11 and propagated by Bruno Snell2 was fashionable. It was believed that since certain words did not occur in the Homeric poems, their author or authors lacked various concepts indispensable to modern ways of thinking. In particular, it was believed that Homer had no coherent, articulated concept of the self, and was therefore incapable of showing how a character made a decision. The doubts about this expressed by some people as early as the sixties3 were thought highly scandalous; but I do not think we need to worry about that now, although quite lately an American scholar || referred to Merit and Responsibility (1962), by A. W. H. Adkins, an author who accepts Snell’s theory and goes on to argue that Homer has a wholly inadequate conception of justice and morality, as ‘a classic work’.4

Aesthetics · Appeal · Art · Character (mathematics) · Epicureanism · Epistemology · Greeks · Literature · Period (music) · Stoicism · Superstition · Theology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Classics · Law · Philosophy