The Greek writer Herodotus is widely considered the
father of history because he was the first person to
systematically construct accounts of significant events
and the lives of important figures. But some also call him
“the father of lies” because not all of his stories turn out to
match the facts we have come to know about the classical
world. Reconstructing the past can be tricky business.
Here are some accounts of the origins of practices and
technology that have been claimed to have been founded
in Greece. Their truth is a matter of historical controversy.
Which ones do you believe?
by Steven Gimbel, PhD, and
Brett Rogers, PhD
Made in Greece
The Marathon
The Greeks lived in fear of the Persians
whose great army was conquering the
region. When Persian warships landed at
the city of Marathon, the Athenians sent
their messenger Pheidippides to Sparta to
request their help in resisting the invaders.
Pheidippides ran 150 miles over rocky
mountains in two days, his speedy trek
allowing the Spartans to join the fight in
time to save Greece from being overrun. In
his honor, we still run long-distance races
called marathons.
Computers
It is hard to think of a computer before electricity, but the point of a computer is to take input and
transform the data into output that the user finds useful. While exploring a shipwreck in the 20th
century, divers brought to the surface parts of a geared machine that no one understood until fifty
years later when a physicist realized what the pieces could do. Sailors needed to look to the stars
to help determine where they were in comparison to where they came from and where they were
going. But the mathematics needed to convert the astronomical observations into useful results was
extremely intricate. The Antikythera mechanism, as it is now called, used a cranked series of meshed
gears to model the movements of the heavens and help the seafarers interpret their data. It may have
only had one program, but this artifact is the world’s earliest computer.
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Nov/Dec 2011
Gym Class
Public games like the Olympics were such
an important part of Greek life that they
created gymnasiums, special places for
athletes to learn the rules and techniques of
the events and to be able to train for them.
“Gymnasium” literally translates to “place
where people are naked,” for that was the way
that Greek athletes competed. Plato argued that gym
class was the only learning that should be required
of people under 40 years old; the minds of the
young, he said, were not yet strong enough to
acquire true wisdom, so we ought to focus
only on training their bodies and teaching them how to work hard.
or
Was
It?
…
Vending Machines
Because the barter system made trade and commerce difficult (if you made shoes and needed
bread, but the baker had shoes but needed
eggs…), the Lydians (people who lived in modern-day Turkey) invented coins, the first form of
money. But it was not that long after coins were
introduced that the Greek mathematician and
engineer Hero invented the vending machine.
Sellers of holy water for rituals let people pay
and take water on the honor system, but found
that people would take more than they paid for,
so Hero invented a machine. When you put a
coin in a slot, it would fall on a tray connected
to a lever. The weight of the coin pulled down
the lever which yanked on a string that opened
a plug, allowing the water to flow. The tilt of
the lever, however, would cause the coin to fall
off into a box, at which point the lever would
return to its original position and the water
flow was stopped. Until recently, coffee vending
machines worked on the same principle.
Democracy
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www.cty.jhu.edu/imagine
The wealthy of ancient Athens belonged to four different clans and for a great while, each
tried to have one of their own take over as tyrant of the city. This caused constant strife
between the clans and between the poor workers of the city and the wealthy
power brokers. Solon, one of the famous “Seven Sages” of Greece, was the
first to extend legal protections to all citizens. While the poor could not
become government officials, they could help appoint them and sit
on juries, making them a part of the political process for the first
time. The ideas of Solon did not immediately create democracy, but
set the foundation upon which it would grow. After a later period
of great strife, Kleisthenes found himself the ruler of Athens and
came up with a new idea. Instead of dividing people according to
clan membership, he split them up according to the neighborhoods
in which they lived and selected governmental representatives from
the mixed population of the areas. He set up the system so that all adult
male citizens were equal under the law.
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Zoology
The systematic study of animals
began with Aristotle, the great
Macedonian thinker who spent
twenty years studying at Plato’s
Academy, but left following Plato’s
death (at which point Plato’s lectures became extremely boring).
He then traveled widely, keeping
detailed notes about all the animals he
could find and grouped them according
to their anatomical features (animals with
blood, animals with feathers, animals with gills).
He was the first person to point out that dolphins and
whales are not fish.
Cynicism
As Greek life became structured around commerce, politics, and
religion, a group of philosophers saw the normal person being
led away from goodness and wisdom, replacing it with a desire
for material things, honor, and fame. Priests were big thieves and
politicians were little thieves. The love of money and the need to
be in fashion corrupted the soul. So they lived differently, rejecting
social conventions, letting their hair and beards grow long, wearing
old ripped up clothing, and sneering publicly at those who adopted
the acceptable ways of the culture. Their mangy appearance and the
way they hung around reminded people of stray dogs, so they came
to be known as kynikos, or dog-like, a word that was transliterated
into English as cynic. So the next time someone tells you that you
are being cynical, feel free to growl and bark at them.
Science Fiction
Americans may have put the first man on the moon in 1969, but
it was the second-century CE author Lucian who first dreamed
of making a trip to the moon and put it into writing. His
novel True Histories tells the tale of a man who sails to the
moon. There he meets the King of the Moon, and then
gets caught up in a hostile war between the kings of the
moon and the sun. (Later, he also gets stuck in the
belly of a whale and hangs out in the afterlife
with ghosts, where he sees Herodotus being
eternally punished for his lies.) But readers beware: Lucian tells us at the beginning
of his story that the only thing that’s true is
the fact that he is telling lies! Moreover, Lucian’s
story does not include anything we would
call science—for example, he does not know
about pesky things like gravity or escape velocity—but Lucian’s story of a fantastic voyage beyond
Earth is often seen as one small step for man, and one
giant leap for sci-fi.
Robots
Homer’s Iliad is the oldest surviving
poem (c. 750 BCE) in Western literature,
and it’s got it all: war, love, glorious
armor, political intrigue, and even talking horses. And yet we find perhaps
the most astonishing spectacle in the
poem in the home of the craftsman-god
Hephaestus, for working alongside him, Homer tells
us, were robots, “handmaidens wrought in gold, in the
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appearance of maidens, in whom there was thought in their
hearts, and speech and strength, and they knew the handiwork
of the immortal gods.” Of course, these automatons were not
known to the Greeks as “robots”; we’re not even sure what
ancient audiences made of these walking, talking maidenmachines. And it wouldn’t be until 1920 that people started
using the term “robot” to describe human-like machines. The
term “robot” derives from the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal
Robots) written by the Czech author Karel Capek.
Nov/Dec 2011
Alphabetic Writing
Writing is perhaps one of the most important
human technological achievements; it makes
possible our ability to keep records, immortalize a memory, and even pass information
to people we have never met. According to
Herodotus, it was a Bronze-Age Phoenician
hero named Cadmus who invented writing. Cadmus went looking for his lost sister,
Europa; although he never found her, he did
end up in Europe, founded the Greek city of
Thebes, and invented alphabetic writing. The
Greek alphabet does indeed seem to derive from a
Phoenician script, but archaeological evidence tells a different story about when Greek writing itself was invented.
Amongst the ruins of Minoan and Mycenaean palaces on
the island of Crete and throughout the Greek mainland,
we find clay tablets inscribed with writing quite different from the Greek alphabet (what we call syllabaries).
We refer to these particular syllabaries as “Linear A” and
“Linear B.” (Linear A has yet to be decoded!) But be careful whom you tell this story to; ancient Mesopotamians
and ancient Egyptians in the room might take offense,
since they were using cuneiform and hieroglyphics to
write centuries before Cadmus ever lived.
Plexiglas
Cartoon Word Bubbles
Although people tend to think about the Greeks when it comes to ancient
advances in science, the Romans were no slouches, either, and we even
have a story about a Roman who made one particularly dangerous engineering breakthrough: unbreakable glass. According to Pliny the Elder
(whose Natural History is our oldest surviving encyclopedia), an anonymous Roman glass-maker once approached the Roman emperor Tiberius
(14-37 CE) with a glass that would not break when it was dropped and
that could be hammered back into shape. Tiberius rewarded this technological breakthrough by having the man immediately beheaded, so
that this unbreakable glass would not become known to the public and
lead to a devaluation of precious metals (like gold) and a crash in the
Roman economy. The glass-blowing technique would die with this poor
glass-maker, and it would be almost 2,000 years before “acrylic glass,” the
unbreakable glass we use today, was discovered, patented (in 1933) and
made widely available. As of yet, no economist has ever blamed Plexiglas
for any economic depression or collapse.
Most people know the ancient
Greeks for their beautiful
poetry, their probing philosophy, and their meticulously
produced art and architecture, but few people give credit
to the ancient Greeks for their
important contribution to the cartoon
strip and comic book: the cartoon word
bubble. If you look carefully at some of
the Greek red-figure vases painted by the famed artist Euphronios
(c. 535-470 BCE), you can find depictions of people not only in
action, but talking, speaking directly to the person looking at the
vase. In these depictions, the words pour out of the speaker’s mouth.
And what do these vases have to say? Take a trip to the Museum of
Fine Arts in Boston or the Antikensammlungen in Munich and find
out for yourself!
Steven Gimbel is chair of the philosophy
department at Gettysburg College. He
is the author of several books, including
Profiles in Mathematics: René Descartes, a
biography for high school students, and many
articles, including one considering questions
of sportsmanship in the Deep Blue/Garry
Kasparov chess match. In his spare time, he is an amateur standup comic. His blog is available at http://philosophersplayground.
blogspot.com.
www.cty.jhu.edu/imagine
Brett Rogers is Assistant Professor of
Classics and Women, Gender, & Sexuality
Studies at Gettysburg College. He is the
author of several articles on such topics as
ancient drama, myth theory in superhero
comics, and, of course, Buffy the Vampire
Slayer. He is currently co-editing a book
on classical traditions in science fiction. Occasionally he can
also be found playing a gaggle of instruments in his band, the
Gettysburg Pirate Orchestra.
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