The Greeks (2016–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - The Good Strife - full transcript
Explore history as the ancient Greeks emerge from the first dark ages.
NARRATOR:
They brought us democracy,
epic poetry,
science...
and the Olympic spirit.
(horn honks)
And yet,
mention Greece these days
and you're more likely
to think ATM lines,
government bailouts,
and economic collapse.
HUGHES (off-screen): They are
in an impossible economic situation,
but I think the Greeks
draw inspiration
from their own past.
NARRATOR: 3,000 years ago,
Greece,
and much of the Mediterranean world
for that matter,
faced hardships unlike
anything humans had before.
War and famine...
economic and
environmental meltdowns,
mass migrations.
It was the worst
collapse in human history.
The sophisticated
Greek civilizations
of the Bronze Age,
first the Minoans,
then the Mycenaeans,
faded into memory.
HUGHES (off-screen): You
have these amazing civilizations
in the Greek Bronze Age,
incredible examples
of human achievement
and someone or something
brings that all crashing down.
NARRATOR: And yet, somehow,
the Greeks who emerged
from this Dark Age
would be the first
to write in verse,
posit a theory of nature,
and vote in an election.
OBER (off-screen): Imagine
that there was never a collapse,
it's very unlikely
that we would have
what we think of
as Greek civilization.
NARRATOR: Through one
of history's darkest chapters...
individuals
striving to be better,
would band together,
build a new society
and ultimately change the world.
CAMP: You are supposed
to try to be the best you can.
NARRATOR: From
strife rose the foundations
of Western civilization.
(man speaking Greek)
NARRATOR: In Greece these days,
the signs of strife
are inescapable.
(speaking Greek)
NARRATOR: Citizens are outraged
over the current
economic crisis.
(shouting in Greek)
(explosion)
NARRATOR: It's especially
demoralizing in a country where reminders
of civilization's former
glories are everywhere.
Many are finding creative
ways to express their concerns.
In Athens,
graffiti blankets practically
every wall in the city.
(speaking Greek)
DIMITRI (off-screen): It's a
kind of jungle at the moment.
All this confusion
taking place in Greece.
It's a way out,
a way for each person to show their anger.
Of course, through this,
beautiful things emerge.
NARRATOR: One Athenian
artist in particular seems
to be drawing on the
ancients for inspiration,
invoking their wisdom
to protest everything
from corruption to
austerity to greed.
His murals are widely
recognized not only in Greece,
but throughout the world,
even if the artist himself
prefers to remain anonymous.
He's known only as Ino.
Today, on a prominent building
in Athens' bustling
port of Piraeus,
he's starting on a new mural,
one that he hopes will
inspire fellow Greeks
and incite change
in his country.
INO (off-screen): Many people,
they want everything ready in the dish.
They want things,
but they don't try,
so to have a change,
you must try.
INO (off-screen): For me
that is what keeps you alive.
You're poor if you
have everything,
and if you don't
fight for something.
NARRATOR: It's a sentiment
Ino could have pulled
straight out of ancient Greece.
That strife can bring
out the best in people
is an age-old notion.
But for the Greeks,
it would form the
basis of their identity.
"Without strife,"
the ancient Greek poet Hesiod wrote
nearly 3,000 years ago,
"there could be no greatness."
So long as it's the
right kind of strife.
HESIOD (off-screen): Indeed on this Earth,
two kinds exist.
For one fosters evil,
war and battle,
her, no man loves;
the second,
set in the roots of the Earth,
she is far kinder to men.
She stirs up even
the lazy to toil;
for a man grows eager to work
when he considers his neighbor,
a rich man who hastens
to plough and plant.
Neighbor vies with neighbor
as he hurries after wealth.
This strife is
wholesome for man.
CAMP: The very earliest
lines of Greek literature
are Hesiod telling
you about bad strife,
which creates war and death,
and a good strife,
which makes men strive against each other
to be the best and it says,
"poet against poet,
potter against potter."
HALL: Or a painter
competes with a painter.
He even says a beggar can compete with a,
another beggar.
OBER (off-screen): Hesiod
sees the advantage of hard work.
He sees competition
as being valuable.
Potter contends against potter.
Doesn't mean that people
were cutting each other's throats.
It means that people were
trying to make better pots
in a world that saw
some market in good pots.
NARRATOR: It's a work
ethic that may have lifted
Ino's Greek ancestors out
of some very dark times.
A little more than
3,000 years ago,
hundreds of years before
Athens' glorious Golden Age,
Greece and societies
across the Mediterranean
faced struggles unlike
anything we've experienced
in modern times,
famine, mass migrations,
a global economic collapse.
The Mycenaean empire,
whose extravagant palaces
in Mycenae and Pylos
would inspire the likes
of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
was brought to its knees.
CLINE (off-screen): Over
a period over 200 years,
you go from the
height of civilization
to almost absolutely nothing.
CLINE (off-screen): Everything
that they've known in the Bronze Age
suddenly collapses.
NARRATOR:
Archaeologists call this period,
from 1200 down to 800 B.C.,
the Greek Dark Age...
since so few hallmarks of
civilization have been found.
And yet,
even if people may have been building
and writing less
during this time,
scholars are
beginning to recognize
that culture didn't
vanish completely.
HUGHES: There is
no time when the light
of civilization and society
is completely extinguished.
There are always
glimmers somewhere.
NARRATOR: Kings
and palaces were gone,
but the commoners were
still there to pick up the pieces.
NAGY: Think of it as a
pyramid where the entire society
is defined, let's say,
by the pinnacle,
so what happens is that
the top of the pyramid
is lopped off,
but everything underneath is there.
HALL (off-screen): We do know
that the basic Greek way of life,
these small craftsman,
these peasant farmers,
these seagoing traders,
stayed basically the same.
NARRATOR: Only now
for the first time in history
and in true Hesiodic fashion,
the fruits of their hard work,
skills and talents
didn't go to a select
few elite at the top.
The workers themselves would
have a shot at the good life.
♪ ♪
HALE (off-screen): Out of this
comes one of the most distinctive
Greek possessions that we
have still to define the West,
the cult of the individual.
It is the supreme opportunity
given to each of
us as individuals
to make our own identity,
make our own world,
make our own life.
♪ ♪
HUGHES (off-screen): I think
the Greeks keep hold of this idea
that they are somehow special,
that they have potential.
Then even if times was hard,
they have a kind of pluckiness
and a grit and really they
are creating the conditions
for change that allow
the glories of Greece
then to emerge
100 or so years later.
(singing in Greek)
♪ ♪
(applause)
NARRATOR: The
earliest evidence to suggest
this timeless Greek identity
endured through the Dark Age
comes from a small poem,
inscribed in a most
unlikely place...
the side of an ancient wine
pot called the cup of Nestor.
It's early in the
8th century B.C.
A group of Greek traders,
having sailed from Rhodes
off the western coast of Turkey,
where the pot originated,
to the island of Ischia
off of Italy where
it was discovered,
are kicking back.
HALL: Once they get
to their destination to sell
the pot, presumably, guess what.
They're Greeks; they decide
to have a drinking party.
HALL (off-screen): And there are
three men who are having a competition
in making a poem,
witty one-liners.
NARRATOR: They pass
the pot between them,
each one scribbling a verse
in their own handwriting.
HALL (off-screen): I am the cup of Nestor,
good for drinking from.
Whoever drinks from this cup,
on him straightaway
will come desire for
Aphrodite of the lovely crown.
NARRATOR: In other words...
HALL (off-screen): If you
drink wine out of this cup,
you will begin to feel
extremely sexy indeed
and want to find a
woman as beautiful
as the goddess of love,
Aphrodite.
NARRATOR: They are
just three lines of verse,
but they reveal a
lot about the Greeks
who lived during
this mysterious time.
The cup was found
on a remote island
hundreds of miles from Greece,
so we know that like their
Minoan and Mycenaean ancestors,
they continued to be seafaring.
The writing itself is new,
not the linear script of their
Mycenaean predecessors,
but innovative letters
adapted from the Phoenicians,
Greek,
the earliest example ever found.
HALE (off-screen): The very
first use of letters we have,
the oldest one that we've
discovered for Greece,
is an expression of personal feeling,
of personality.
HALE (off-screen): Well, that's not
what Phoenicians used letters for.
That's not what people
in the near East or Egypt
used writing for.
Writing in those worlds belonged
to the authority structure,
to kings, to priests.
NARRATOR: The suggestion of
a game implies competitiveness.
They're getting drunk
and cracking jokes,
so it seems they know
how to have a good time.
HALL (off-screen):
They're laughing at sex,
they're witty, they're verbal,
they're already completely Greek
just as they were 500
years before in Mycenae.
NARRATOR: They'd gone
through the worst collapse
in human history,
but within only a few hundred years,
absent the centralized power
of kings and bureaucracy,
Greeks were forging a new
social order for themselves,
rebuilding their civilization
from the bottom up.
HALE (off-screen): The idea that you
could go and parlay your wealth or skills
into a new social identity,
where you could pull
yourself up by your bootstraps,
where you could
elevate your rank,
this is anathema in
the autocratic kingdoms
of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia.
It's what Greece is all about.
NARRATOR: Of course,
there was no Greece just yet.
No Athens, no Sparta,
just disparate groups of people.
But there was something
binding them together,
a common language...
and some of the
greatest stories ever told.
MAN (off-screen): The Golden
Age of adventure surges to life again.
NARRATOR: We've all
heard the epic stories of
the Trojan War...
of Achilles and Agamemnon,
Helen and Odysseus
and of the gods, Zeus,
Poseidon, Athena,
and the many others who put
the heroes through their paces.
MAN (off-screen): When
men like us and gods like men
live and love violently.
NARRATOR: Well,
the post-Dark Age Greeks
would have been well-versed in them,
too.
In fact,
it may well have been these epic stories
that kept them going
when their civilization was
falling down around them.
MAN: Kill them all!
COSMOPOULOS (off-screen): When
you go through a period of difficulty,
when you go through a crisis,
your instinct is to
return to your roots.
CLINE: That's one of
the hallmarks of a systems
collapse is that the group
after the collapse looks back
and tells stories
about what it was like
back when men were men, that,
oh, that was back in the day.
NARRATOR: From the Bronze
Age collapse in about 1200 B.C.
and for hundreds of years
through the Dark Age,
people passed the
stories down orally,
from generation to generation,
town to town,
through wandering poets,
capable of memorizing and
reciting hundreds of
thousands of lines of verse.
Until finally, sometime in the
middle of the 8th century B.C.,
good old Hesiod and another guy,
the Greek poet Homer,
used their new high-tech
alphabet to write them down.
HALL: The Greeks were
extremely proud of three
very long poems,
which they all learned by heart
in childhood, The Iliad,
The Odyssey,
and Hesiod's Birth of the Gods.
These three poems
were the absolute linchpins
of Greek identity.
NARRATOR: Unfortunately for us,
there are no first-edition
Iliads or Odysseys
floating around.
Papyri scrolls weren't
written for posterity.
The closest we're able to
get are fragments rescued from
ancient trash heaps and
now in the care of researchers
in Oxford, England.
The collection,
owned and maintained by the
Egypt Exploration Society,
contains millions of pieces
of papyri from a former Greek
colony in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt.
OBBINK (off-screen): There were
rubbish dumps from the ancient
town ringing the village
on the desert edge,
but as soon as they
stuck their shovel into one
of these rubbish mounds,
the papyri just started to
fall out of them.
NARRATOR: 100 years later,
Dirk Obbink and his team
have the monumental
task of translating
and publishing each one.
OBBINK (off-screen):
It's not going to stop.
5,000 items out of a million
have been published so far.
It's the,
probably the largest incomplete
archaeological
project in the world.
NARRATOR: So far they've
pulled out works by Hesiod,
new poems by the
lyric poet Sappho,
a copy of Aristotle's
Athenian Constitution
and hundreds of
other ancient texts.
But by far,
the vast majority of fragments
stem from one source.
Homer.
OBBINK (off-screen): The ancient
authors are vastly outnumbered
by Homer just because
of his position in the
educational system.
Everyone read Homer first
and memorized
large swaths of it.
NARRATOR: The papyri
date to the 1st century B.C.
at the earliest,
hundreds of years after Homer.
But that his works were
being copied and read in Egypt,
hundreds of miles from Greece,
so many centuries later,
reveals how significant Homer's
epics were to the ancients.
Whether written or spoken,
his stories of bravery,
dignity,
love and war articulated
what it meant to be Greek.
CLINE (off-screen):
In telling these stories,
they're handing down knowledge.
They're handing down ideas.
They're handing down
concepts of identity.
Who are we? Where
did we come from?
HUGHES (off-screen): The
Greeks are very smart because they
recognize that although we
shouldn't ever live in the past,
we're fools if we don't
admit that we live with it,
and so they really nourish
this idea of the past,
of history, of memory.
NARRATOR: And in
their deepest of memories,
even more central
to the Greeks than the
heroes of Homer were
more powerful forces.
There would be no
Greece without its gods.
HUGHES (off-screen): You
can't underemphasize how central
religion was to the Greeks.
For them there were gods
and goddesses and demigods
and spirits around every corner.
GARDNER (off-screen):
The beauty of Greece,
the beauty of the mountains
and the Mediterranean
allowed people to
imbue natural phenomena
with personality.
GARDNER (off-screen): Everything in
nature is imbued with this divine essence.
NARRATOR: The 12
main gods lived here,
atop Greece's highest peak,
Mount Olympus.
Almighty Zeus
controlled the weather,
Poseidon the sea,
Hades the underworld.
There was Athena,
goddess of wisdom;
Aphrodite, beauty; Apollo,
god of the sun and music,
all jockeying for power
and for the affections of
the insignificant humans below.
It's quite a departure from
how formalized religions
view their gods today.
(singing in Greek)
GARDNER (off-screen):
There's not a big book that tells
you exactly how to
practice Greek religion.
Because there's no way to
write something down that
is constantly changing,
something that has different
incarnations depending
where you are in Greece
and what period
of time you live in.
NARRATOR: Even without
a rule book it seems their
religion played a significant
role in bringing disparate
groups of Greeks together,
much more so than many
archaeologists believed.
The textbook version of how
Greece came to be typically
doesn't begin with religion,
but with the
emergence of cities.
After the Mycenaean collapse,
the story goes,
pockets of people,
separated by a mountainous landscape
and rocky coast,
banded together into small,
isolated villages
throughout Greece.
Over time,
villages grew into towns,
towns grew into cities,
and by the end of the Dark Age,
right around Homer's
time in the 8th century B.C.,
cities grew into what
the Greeks call polis,
or city-states, Athens,
Sparta, Corinth,
and some 1,500 others.
According to the
traditional theory,
the big religious sanctuaries
cropped up only after the
city-states were established.
But new discoveries are
turning that on its head.
About two hours north of Athens,
at an ancient temple
site called Kalapodi,
archaeologist
Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier
and his team have
uncovered altars and artifacts
that indicate people were
worshipping their gods here
for hundreds of years
before the formation of cities,
all the way back to
the Mycenaean period.
NIEMEIER (off-screen): You
read in handbooks there were
no Greek temples before
the 8th century B.C.,
when the polis developed,
the Greek city-state.
But here we have three
Mycenaean temples,
and then we have a
temple of the 10th century.
We have a temple
of the 9th century.
We have a temple
of the 8th century.
And this is a time
when the polis arise.
NARRATOR: In all,
the team has uncovered ten different
temples here, built,
destroyed, and rebuilt over
millennia on this very spot,
right through the Dark Age.
NIEMEIER (off-screen): At
least in this area, we have no
Dark Age at all.
We have a continuity.
(speaking Greek)
NARRATOR: By offering refuge,
providing a forum for the
exchange of culture and ideas,
and bringing people together
around shared beliefs,
Niemeier believes the
temples here,
and others like them across Greece,
may have helped Greeks survive
those meager Dark Age years.
NIEMEIER (off-screen):
What brought them together,
what made them Greeks,
was their religion and their gods.
This was very important
for the Greek identity.
NIEMEIER (off-screen): The sanctuaries
had an important function in the
formation of the city-states, and,
and not the other way around.
NARRATOR: By the
late 8th century B.C.,
stunning centers of worship
have started cropping up all
over the Greek world,
with as many as 1,500 city-states
growing around them,
stretching east to the
Black Sea, west to Italy,
and south to North Africa.
But in ancient Greece,
one sanctuary in particular
stood out above all the others.
HALL (off-screen): Delphi is the ritual,
psychological,
and geographical
center of the Greek world.
When you make the
great ascent up the valley
past all the olive groves
and vineyards to this high,
high place, you know that
this is where the god of the sun,
Apollo, would have chosen to
have his seat of, of prophecy.
NARRATOR: A who's who of
Greek history made the trek up
this mountainside to Delphi,
entering through these
towering columns to seek
the wisdom of the oracles,
priestesses believed to be
the mouthpieces of Apollo.
Said to see years
into the future,
the Delphic oracles were
consulted on all kinds
of matters,
from forming alliances to going to war.
They warned Oedipus that
he would kill his father and
marry his mother...
and pronounced that no one was
wiser than Socrates,
for he was wise enough to know
that he indeed knew nothing.
For thousands of years,
the oracle's words were
gospel to the ancients.
But in keeping with the defiant,
individualistic,
some might say
hubristic Greek character,
they weren't exactly
humble before their gods.
They were among
the first to imagine their
deities in their own image.
STAMPOLIDIS (off-screen):
Their gods resemble them.
They created the Olympian
gods as human beings
with their thoughts,
with their ways of thinking.
STAMPOLIDIS (off-screen):
They are not resembling to dragons.
They are not resembling
to animal-headed gods.
They are humans.
NARRATOR: If the lowly Greek
humans earned the gods' favor,
they could even achieve
god-like status for themselves
and have their names
sung across all eternity.
HUGHES (off-screen): I think
this is one of the reasons that the
Greeks achieve so much is
that they have this notion that
the best way to become
immortal was to do something
in your life that made
you worthy of immortality.
NARRATOR: It was an idea
so ingrained in their culture,
they even conjured a place
where people from all rungs
of society could
prove their worth.
This... is Olympia.
It began like the
many other religious
sanctuaries across Greece.
But starting in 776 B.C.,
events would take place in
this very arena that would
give mortals a shot at immortality
and unite the
Greeks in the process.
Athletes at the peak of
performance flocked here from
hundreds of Greek city-states to run,
jump, wrestle, box,
throw,
and compete for the favor of Zeus.
The Olympics.
HALL (off-screen): People came
from all over the Greek-speaking world.
The best chariot racers
came from North Africa,
from Libya.
Some of the best sprinters
came from Southern Italy.
The boxers came
from the Greek islands,
and they would bring
their pack of fans with them.
NARRATOR: All that was
required was that you had
to be Greek,
which means they had a sense for what
that was by then,
you had to be male,
and you had to be naked,
preferably
slathered in olive oil.
HALL: The ancient Greeks
absolutely delighted in beauty
and they delighted in the
beauty of the physical form.
They saw men's bodies
as absolutely as beautiful
in a different way
as women's bodies.
NARRATOR: Nearly 3,000
years after the first Olympics,
modern competition
is a little different.
(cheering)
We have clothing, for starters.
(gunshot)
And women, finally.
And it seems we might
have grown a little soft.
Compared to the hundreds
of Olympic events today,
Greek competitions
were limited to skills
useful in combat, running,
wrestling, boxing.
And while today three
teams make it to the
podium for bronze, silver,
and gold, in ancient Greece...
CAMP: One guy is the winner
and everybody else is the loser.
There's no second place.
There's no third place.
So there's a whole
different ethos,
a competitive ethos which
runs right through all of
Greek life all the time,
where they're
striving to be the best.
NARRATOR: The Greeks
had a word for this competitive
ethos, agon, as in agony,
and it wasn't confined
to the Olympics.
COSTAS: Agon is really
just an ancient predecessor of
somebody telling you now that
nothing worthwhile comes easy.
COSTAS (off-screen): In lofty
pursuits like philosophy or government
or literature,
whatever it might be,
if we're forced to do our
very best in the pursuit
of the standard of excellence,
then that's going
to make us better.
NARRATOR: When it came
to putting agon on display,
the Olympics weren't
the only game in town.
So-called panhellenic
festivals were held
at four different religious
sanctuaries across Greece,
in Olympia, Delphi,
Nemea, and Isthmia,
alternating annually
between each one,
which is why the Olympics
are only held every four years.
But there was one place
that may predate them all,
just 22 miles away from Olympia,
in a small mountain
village called Lykaion.
(speaking Greek)
NARRATOR: And every four years,
residents here host the Lykaion Games
to keep their competitive
traditions alive.
♪ ♪
The myths tell us Zeus
wasn't just worshipped here,
he was born here.
And archaeologist,
and competitor, David Romano,
has found evidence that
the games to honor him were
likely held here
hundreds of years
before the torch at
Olympia was even lit.
ROMANO (off-screen): We
now believe that the whole idea
of Olympia was probably
modeled on Lykaion.
So for many centuries,
Zeus was being worshipped,
and was being celebrated here,
and only 22 miles
away at Olympia,
there was no cult of
Zeus until the 11th century.
NARRATOR: Romano's work
is revealing the archaeological
significance of Lykaion,
and today the proud Greeks
are hoping the finds,
and their games,
will put their town
back on the map.
(gunshot)
♪ ♪
They've got a ways to go.
But the path to excellence...
has never been easy.
This competitive pursuit
of excellence became
a core facet of Greek culture,
much like stories of heroes
and shared beliefs in the gods.
(cheering)
It's why 776 B.C.,
date of the first Olympic Games,
is widely considered
to be the unofficial
birth year of Greece.
Even if Greece would
remain a factious
collection of city-states.
Over the next few centuries,
new Greek city-states would
form around the
Mediterranean world.
HALL (off-screen): Whenever
there wasn't enough to eat,
whenever there was a bad tyrant,
Greeks just got up,
packed their ships,
and went off somewhere new.
COSMOPOULOS (off-screen): The
Greeks colonized the Mediterranean.
Marseille and Nice.
Napoli, Naples in Italy.
They go as far north as the Black Sea,
Ukraine.
The near east, Cyprus,
South Italy and Sicily.
NARRATOR: Like frogs around a pond,
to use Plato's words,
the Greeks sailed as far
and wide as their ships
would take them,
spreading their language
and traditions
wherever they went.
But one thing
distinguished these
Greek colonizers from others.
No matter how tied to
their roots they were or
how far afield they went,
they always seemed to embrace
new ideas from the
lands they settled.
HUGHES (off-screen):
Ideas are really the kind of
favorite currency of the Greeks,
so the Greeks make
ideas their business.
And "idea" is actually a pure Greek word,
adie.
It's come down to us
completely unchanged.
NARRATOR: And in
the 6th century B.C.,
on what is now the
west coast of Turkey,
inspired by their new
astronomically and
mathematically inclined
neighbors in Mesopotamia
and Egypt, Greek colonists
would conjure ideas so radical,
they'd reshape our
entire vision of the world.
This is Miletus.
You'd never know it nowadays,
but 2,500 years ago,
it was a coastal city.
The Greeks who lived
here would transform it into
one of the wealthiest
ports in the Mediterranean.
Today the sea is over
six miles to the west.
GOODMAN (off-screen): You
have to kind of imagine that instead
of having all of these fields,
that the water came all the
way up into this valley.
And this is the place where
they chose to establish Miletus.
NARRATOR: According
to geo-archaeologist
Beverly Goodman,
the reason for the landlocked valley
and for the revolution in
thought that took place here,
begins in central
Turkey far to the east.
The long,
wandering Maeander River,
which gave the word
"meander" its name.
GOODMAN (off-screen):
This is the river that, basically,
was one of the reasons that
they settled where they did.
But it's also the same
river that destroyed
the harbor eventually.
HALL (off-screen): The silt
from the river Maeander gradually
extended the land down
and down and down westward,
westward, and westward.
So you had these
men actually watching
their own beloved city,
they're seamen,
they're Greeks,
becoming landlocked.
NARRATOR: The harbor
was gone within a generation.
Typically, ancients from
Greece to Egypt to India would
have had a simple answer for
natural phenomena like these,
the gods caused them.
(thunder crashes)
TYSON (off-screen): People
have no idea what's going on
and so it's simpler to say Zeus did it,
Poseidon did it.
NARRATOR: But as the
worldly citizens of Miletus
watch their precious
harbor disappear practically
in front of their eyes,
they don't blame the gods.
They look at the stones
and silt being carried by the
Maeander into the sea and
for the first time in recorded
history attribute their
woes to natural causes.
They're considered to be
the world's first scientists,
and from that moment on,
life would never be the same.
TYSON (off-screen):
Once you hatch that egg,
once you crack that ice,
once you pry open that door,
all of nature is there
for you to explore.
TYSON (off-screen):
Take it and run with it.
NARRATOR: And these
Greeks on the west coast
of Turkey did just that.
First came Thales,
considered the world's first philosopher
by none other than Aristotle.
He used geometry to calculate
the distance of ships
from shore and the height
of Egypt's Great Pyramid,
was first to predict a solar
eclipse and posited a
cause for earthquakes.
He got the details wrong,
that the Earth floated on water
like a giant raft,
but his natural explanation was worlds
beyond the previous theory,
that Poseidon caused them.
Thales would inspire other Greeks,
like Pythagoras,
who founded a brotherhood
around the belief that numbers
and mathematics could
explain the universe,
everything from astronomy
to nature to music.
And Hippocrates,
a renowned ancient physician who
developed an ethical code
for practicing medicine.
Today,
doctors swear by an oath in his honor
to first do no harm.
Countless philosophers
and scientists would follow
in the footsteps of
these great thinkers,
and their ancient wisdom
continues to motivate one
artist in Athens'
Port of Piraeus today.
After four long days and nights,
Ino's mural is
finally taking shape.
It shows the face of Democritus,
another ancient Greek
philosopher who determined
that everything in the
universe was made up of tiny
building blocks called atoms,
Greek for indivisible.
TYSON (off-screen): For
me when I think of a first idea
that matter is made of atoms,
that tells you that they are
thinking that maybe
the universe is knowable,
nature is knowable.
That's profound because
that would become the very
foundation of science,
that we have methods and
tools that transcend
our five senses,
that probe the operations
of nature in ways that
your life experience
has no encounters with.
NARRATOR: Probing nature,
questioning the origins of
phenomena,
even our very existence.
They are profound ideas
that all had their start
in the Eastern Aegean.
But they wouldn't stay there.
By the 6th century B.C.,
a new power was emerging
in the East, the Persian empire.
And as it expanded,
many Greeks would head west,
back across the Aegean,
taking their radical new
ways of thinking with them.
Over the next century,
the flood of reason that
began in the Maeander
River valley would wash
over the Greek world,
and eventually culminate in
a small backwater of a
city-state called Athens.
HALL (off-screen): So
against this background of
intellectual turmoil,
of the beginnings of science,
of abstract reasoning,
and indeed ideas of a physical
universe that man can
intervene in and control,
that he's not entirely at
the whims of the gods,
comes Athenian democracy.
NARRATOR: For centuries,
Athens had been just one of
those 1,500 city-states,
climbing its way out of
the ashes of the Dark Age.
Teetering between the rule of rich,
aristocratic families,
who came to power by birth,
or power-grabbing
leaders called tyrants,
people were often subjected
to Draconian laws, literally.
They were written by a
tyrant named Draco in 621 B.C.
Farmers who couldn't
pay their debts were
forced into slavery.
Simple crimes like
"stealing a cabbage"
were punishable by death.
Athens was on the brink
of revolution until a wise
reformer named Solon
stepped in with a series
of reforms that would
make today's Greeks proud.
He freed all debtor slaves,
eliminated the death penalty
for all but extreme cases,
and wrestled political power
out of the hands of noble
bloodlines by establishing
a council of 400
citizens to run the city.
It was a big step,
untethering governance from inheritance.
But only Athens' wealthiest
citizens had the privilege of
serving on the council,
and in the decades
that followed,
factions of competing
aristocrats formed.
HALL (off-screen): You have a
lot of seesawing around about
who's actually in charge,
and this actually
gets worse and worse.
NARRATOR: In 508 B.C.,
the power struggle came to a boil
Between two rival aristocrats,
Isagoras and Cleisthenes.
Isagoras, with support from
military powerhouse Sparta,
took control of the city,
installed an
oligarchy of nobles,
and banished Cleisthenes.
With the Athenian elite
squarely in Isagoras' corner,
Cleisthenes was left
with only one place to turn.
HUGHES: We're told
that Cleisthenes took
into his faction, cha demos,
the common people.
NARRATOR: Ordinary citizens
had had just about enough of
aristocrats and nobles
running their city.
For their support,
Cleisthenes agreed to break
the hold of
aristocratic factions,
determine power by elections,
not wealth,
and institute trials by jury.
Neither leader could have
predicted what happened next.
An all-out revolt
swept over Athens.
Citizens stormed the
Acropolis and sent Isagoras
and the Spartans packing.
And Cleisthenes?
OBER (off-screen): The
way to think about Cleisthenes
is he's a surfer.
He is riding a really big
wave of an increasingly clear
identity of a common people that
they are the people of Athens.
They are Athens.
OBER (off-screen): He
gets ahead of the wave.
He rides it well. The
rest of it is history.
NARRATOR: Whether
he meant to or not,
Cleisthenes ushered in a
revolutionary new way of
running a society.
In 507 B.C., democracy was born.
(crowd cheering)
HUGHES: I cannot overemphasize
how stomach-churningly
mind-blowingly electrically
exciting this was in ancient Greece.
Because this is the first
time in the human experience
as far as we know when
"I" the people are allowed
to act as a political agent.
HUGHES (off-screen): Suddenly you
get perfume makers and cheese traders
and generals and aristocrats
standing next to one another
in the assembly deciding how
they should run their own lives.
NARRATOR: Athenian
democracy wasn't exactly of,
by, and for all the people.
You needed to be
a free male citizen.
Women, slaves,
and foreign born need not apply,
which means fewer than 50,000
in a city of more than 200,000,
less than 20%,
were actually eligible to vote.
Still,
the idea of democracy was wildly popular.
"Democritus,"
or judge of the people,
the star of Ino's mural,
became one of the most
prevalent names of the time.
HUGHES (off-screen): So
this is the most extraordinary
moments in the human story.
Democracy just
appears from that febrile,
fervent bubble that is Greece,
and it's been
delivered down to us
as one of the most extraordinary
legacies of the Greek world.
OBER (off-screen): The
democracy emerges in strife.
It was the will of
the ordinary people.
That is what made
democracy possible.
(shouting)
NARRATOR: Two and
a half millennia later,
it's ordinary people who
continue to fight for it.
(chanting in Greek)
NARRATOR: People like Ino,
who's putting the finishing touches
on his mural...
an infant looking
up at Democritus.
INO (off-screen): It's about the
knowledge and the power of knowledge.
The child is the people,
the younger people
after the ancients.
It's a connection,
from then to now.
The power is in every one of us,
and with collaboration,
we can work to
make this place better.
NARRATOR: Individuals
corralling their talents
to make life better.
It's what the Greeks
have always been about.
Through one of the
darkest chapters in history,
they built a civilization
from the bottom up,
delivering some of humanity's
greatest achievements,
literature, the Olympics,
scientific reasoning, democracy.
And they were
just getting started.
HUGHES (off-screen): What is
very interesting about democracy
in Greece is that very
quickly it becomes this idea
that catches like wildfire,
and there is no doubt that
that powers the kind of
engine of change and the
development of civilization
that still speaks to us today.
NARRATOR: With
power now squarely in the
hands of the people,
citizens would finally have
the chance to set
their own course,
not only for Athens, but for
all of Western civilization.
They brought us democracy,
epic poetry,
science...
and the Olympic spirit.
(horn honks)
And yet,
mention Greece these days
and you're more likely
to think ATM lines,
government bailouts,
and economic collapse.
HUGHES (off-screen): They are
in an impossible economic situation,
but I think the Greeks
draw inspiration
from their own past.
NARRATOR: 3,000 years ago,
Greece,
and much of the Mediterranean world
for that matter,
faced hardships unlike
anything humans had before.
War and famine...
economic and
environmental meltdowns,
mass migrations.
It was the worst
collapse in human history.
The sophisticated
Greek civilizations
of the Bronze Age,
first the Minoans,
then the Mycenaeans,
faded into memory.
HUGHES (off-screen): You
have these amazing civilizations
in the Greek Bronze Age,
incredible examples
of human achievement
and someone or something
brings that all crashing down.
NARRATOR: And yet, somehow,
the Greeks who emerged
from this Dark Age
would be the first
to write in verse,
posit a theory of nature,
and vote in an election.
OBER (off-screen): Imagine
that there was never a collapse,
it's very unlikely
that we would have
what we think of
as Greek civilization.
NARRATOR: Through one
of history's darkest chapters...
individuals
striving to be better,
would band together,
build a new society
and ultimately change the world.
CAMP: You are supposed
to try to be the best you can.
NARRATOR: From
strife rose the foundations
of Western civilization.
(man speaking Greek)
NARRATOR: In Greece these days,
the signs of strife
are inescapable.
(speaking Greek)
NARRATOR: Citizens are outraged
over the current
economic crisis.
(shouting in Greek)
(explosion)
NARRATOR: It's especially
demoralizing in a country where reminders
of civilization's former
glories are everywhere.
Many are finding creative
ways to express their concerns.
In Athens,
graffiti blankets practically
every wall in the city.
(speaking Greek)
DIMITRI (off-screen): It's a
kind of jungle at the moment.
All this confusion
taking place in Greece.
It's a way out,
a way for each person to show their anger.
Of course, through this,
beautiful things emerge.
NARRATOR: One Athenian
artist in particular seems
to be drawing on the
ancients for inspiration,
invoking their wisdom
to protest everything
from corruption to
austerity to greed.
His murals are widely
recognized not only in Greece,
but throughout the world,
even if the artist himself
prefers to remain anonymous.
He's known only as Ino.
Today, on a prominent building
in Athens' bustling
port of Piraeus,
he's starting on a new mural,
one that he hopes will
inspire fellow Greeks
and incite change
in his country.
INO (off-screen): Many people,
they want everything ready in the dish.
They want things,
but they don't try,
so to have a change,
you must try.
INO (off-screen): For me
that is what keeps you alive.
You're poor if you
have everything,
and if you don't
fight for something.
NARRATOR: It's a sentiment
Ino could have pulled
straight out of ancient Greece.
That strife can bring
out the best in people
is an age-old notion.
But for the Greeks,
it would form the
basis of their identity.
"Without strife,"
the ancient Greek poet Hesiod wrote
nearly 3,000 years ago,
"there could be no greatness."
So long as it's the
right kind of strife.
HESIOD (off-screen): Indeed on this Earth,
two kinds exist.
For one fosters evil,
war and battle,
her, no man loves;
the second,
set in the roots of the Earth,
she is far kinder to men.
She stirs up even
the lazy to toil;
for a man grows eager to work
when he considers his neighbor,
a rich man who hastens
to plough and plant.
Neighbor vies with neighbor
as he hurries after wealth.
This strife is
wholesome for man.
CAMP: The very earliest
lines of Greek literature
are Hesiod telling
you about bad strife,
which creates war and death,
and a good strife,
which makes men strive against each other
to be the best and it says,
"poet against poet,
potter against potter."
HALL: Or a painter
competes with a painter.
He even says a beggar can compete with a,
another beggar.
OBER (off-screen): Hesiod
sees the advantage of hard work.
He sees competition
as being valuable.
Potter contends against potter.
Doesn't mean that people
were cutting each other's throats.
It means that people were
trying to make better pots
in a world that saw
some market in good pots.
NARRATOR: It's a work
ethic that may have lifted
Ino's Greek ancestors out
of some very dark times.
A little more than
3,000 years ago,
hundreds of years before
Athens' glorious Golden Age,
Greece and societies
across the Mediterranean
faced struggles unlike
anything we've experienced
in modern times,
famine, mass migrations,
a global economic collapse.
The Mycenaean empire,
whose extravagant palaces
in Mycenae and Pylos
would inspire the likes
of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
was brought to its knees.
CLINE (off-screen): Over
a period over 200 years,
you go from the
height of civilization
to almost absolutely nothing.
CLINE (off-screen): Everything
that they've known in the Bronze Age
suddenly collapses.
NARRATOR:
Archaeologists call this period,
from 1200 down to 800 B.C.,
the Greek Dark Age...
since so few hallmarks of
civilization have been found.
And yet,
even if people may have been building
and writing less
during this time,
scholars are
beginning to recognize
that culture didn't
vanish completely.
HUGHES: There is
no time when the light
of civilization and society
is completely extinguished.
There are always
glimmers somewhere.
NARRATOR: Kings
and palaces were gone,
but the commoners were
still there to pick up the pieces.
NAGY: Think of it as a
pyramid where the entire society
is defined, let's say,
by the pinnacle,
so what happens is that
the top of the pyramid
is lopped off,
but everything underneath is there.
HALL (off-screen): We do know
that the basic Greek way of life,
these small craftsman,
these peasant farmers,
these seagoing traders,
stayed basically the same.
NARRATOR: Only now
for the first time in history
and in true Hesiodic fashion,
the fruits of their hard work,
skills and talents
didn't go to a select
few elite at the top.
The workers themselves would
have a shot at the good life.
♪ ♪
HALE (off-screen): Out of this
comes one of the most distinctive
Greek possessions that we
have still to define the West,
the cult of the individual.
It is the supreme opportunity
given to each of
us as individuals
to make our own identity,
make our own world,
make our own life.
♪ ♪
HUGHES (off-screen): I think
the Greeks keep hold of this idea
that they are somehow special,
that they have potential.
Then even if times was hard,
they have a kind of pluckiness
and a grit and really they
are creating the conditions
for change that allow
the glories of Greece
then to emerge
100 or so years later.
(singing in Greek)
♪ ♪
(applause)
NARRATOR: The
earliest evidence to suggest
this timeless Greek identity
endured through the Dark Age
comes from a small poem,
inscribed in a most
unlikely place...
the side of an ancient wine
pot called the cup of Nestor.
It's early in the
8th century B.C.
A group of Greek traders,
having sailed from Rhodes
off the western coast of Turkey,
where the pot originated,
to the island of Ischia
off of Italy where
it was discovered,
are kicking back.
HALL: Once they get
to their destination to sell
the pot, presumably, guess what.
They're Greeks; they decide
to have a drinking party.
HALL (off-screen): And there are
three men who are having a competition
in making a poem,
witty one-liners.
NARRATOR: They pass
the pot between them,
each one scribbling a verse
in their own handwriting.
HALL (off-screen): I am the cup of Nestor,
good for drinking from.
Whoever drinks from this cup,
on him straightaway
will come desire for
Aphrodite of the lovely crown.
NARRATOR: In other words...
HALL (off-screen): If you
drink wine out of this cup,
you will begin to feel
extremely sexy indeed
and want to find a
woman as beautiful
as the goddess of love,
Aphrodite.
NARRATOR: They are
just three lines of verse,
but they reveal a
lot about the Greeks
who lived during
this mysterious time.
The cup was found
on a remote island
hundreds of miles from Greece,
so we know that like their
Minoan and Mycenaean ancestors,
they continued to be seafaring.
The writing itself is new,
not the linear script of their
Mycenaean predecessors,
but innovative letters
adapted from the Phoenicians,
Greek,
the earliest example ever found.
HALE (off-screen): The very
first use of letters we have,
the oldest one that we've
discovered for Greece,
is an expression of personal feeling,
of personality.
HALE (off-screen): Well, that's not
what Phoenicians used letters for.
That's not what people
in the near East or Egypt
used writing for.
Writing in those worlds belonged
to the authority structure,
to kings, to priests.
NARRATOR: The suggestion of
a game implies competitiveness.
They're getting drunk
and cracking jokes,
so it seems they know
how to have a good time.
HALL (off-screen):
They're laughing at sex,
they're witty, they're verbal,
they're already completely Greek
just as they were 500
years before in Mycenae.
NARRATOR: They'd gone
through the worst collapse
in human history,
but within only a few hundred years,
absent the centralized power
of kings and bureaucracy,
Greeks were forging a new
social order for themselves,
rebuilding their civilization
from the bottom up.
HALE (off-screen): The idea that you
could go and parlay your wealth or skills
into a new social identity,
where you could pull
yourself up by your bootstraps,
where you could
elevate your rank,
this is anathema in
the autocratic kingdoms
of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia.
It's what Greece is all about.
NARRATOR: Of course,
there was no Greece just yet.
No Athens, no Sparta,
just disparate groups of people.
But there was something
binding them together,
a common language...
and some of the
greatest stories ever told.
MAN (off-screen): The Golden
Age of adventure surges to life again.
NARRATOR: We've all
heard the epic stories of
the Trojan War...
of Achilles and Agamemnon,
Helen and Odysseus
and of the gods, Zeus,
Poseidon, Athena,
and the many others who put
the heroes through their paces.
MAN (off-screen): When
men like us and gods like men
live and love violently.
NARRATOR: Well,
the post-Dark Age Greeks
would have been well-versed in them,
too.
In fact,
it may well have been these epic stories
that kept them going
when their civilization was
falling down around them.
MAN: Kill them all!
COSMOPOULOS (off-screen): When
you go through a period of difficulty,
when you go through a crisis,
your instinct is to
return to your roots.
CLINE: That's one of
the hallmarks of a systems
collapse is that the group
after the collapse looks back
and tells stories
about what it was like
back when men were men, that,
oh, that was back in the day.
NARRATOR: From the Bronze
Age collapse in about 1200 B.C.
and for hundreds of years
through the Dark Age,
people passed the
stories down orally,
from generation to generation,
town to town,
through wandering poets,
capable of memorizing and
reciting hundreds of
thousands of lines of verse.
Until finally, sometime in the
middle of the 8th century B.C.,
good old Hesiod and another guy,
the Greek poet Homer,
used their new high-tech
alphabet to write them down.
HALL: The Greeks were
extremely proud of three
very long poems,
which they all learned by heart
in childhood, The Iliad,
The Odyssey,
and Hesiod's Birth of the Gods.
These three poems
were the absolute linchpins
of Greek identity.
NARRATOR: Unfortunately for us,
there are no first-edition
Iliads or Odysseys
floating around.
Papyri scrolls weren't
written for posterity.
The closest we're able to
get are fragments rescued from
ancient trash heaps and
now in the care of researchers
in Oxford, England.
The collection,
owned and maintained by the
Egypt Exploration Society,
contains millions of pieces
of papyri from a former Greek
colony in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt.
OBBINK (off-screen): There were
rubbish dumps from the ancient
town ringing the village
on the desert edge,
but as soon as they
stuck their shovel into one
of these rubbish mounds,
the papyri just started to
fall out of them.
NARRATOR: 100 years later,
Dirk Obbink and his team
have the monumental
task of translating
and publishing each one.
OBBINK (off-screen):
It's not going to stop.
5,000 items out of a million
have been published so far.
It's the,
probably the largest incomplete
archaeological
project in the world.
NARRATOR: So far they've
pulled out works by Hesiod,
new poems by the
lyric poet Sappho,
a copy of Aristotle's
Athenian Constitution
and hundreds of
other ancient texts.
But by far,
the vast majority of fragments
stem from one source.
Homer.
OBBINK (off-screen): The ancient
authors are vastly outnumbered
by Homer just because
of his position in the
educational system.
Everyone read Homer first
and memorized
large swaths of it.
NARRATOR: The papyri
date to the 1st century B.C.
at the earliest,
hundreds of years after Homer.
But that his works were
being copied and read in Egypt,
hundreds of miles from Greece,
so many centuries later,
reveals how significant Homer's
epics were to the ancients.
Whether written or spoken,
his stories of bravery,
dignity,
love and war articulated
what it meant to be Greek.
CLINE (off-screen):
In telling these stories,
they're handing down knowledge.
They're handing down ideas.
They're handing down
concepts of identity.
Who are we? Where
did we come from?
HUGHES (off-screen): The
Greeks are very smart because they
recognize that although we
shouldn't ever live in the past,
we're fools if we don't
admit that we live with it,
and so they really nourish
this idea of the past,
of history, of memory.
NARRATOR: And in
their deepest of memories,
even more central
to the Greeks than the
heroes of Homer were
more powerful forces.
There would be no
Greece without its gods.
HUGHES (off-screen): You
can't underemphasize how central
religion was to the Greeks.
For them there were gods
and goddesses and demigods
and spirits around every corner.
GARDNER (off-screen):
The beauty of Greece,
the beauty of the mountains
and the Mediterranean
allowed people to
imbue natural phenomena
with personality.
GARDNER (off-screen): Everything in
nature is imbued with this divine essence.
NARRATOR: The 12
main gods lived here,
atop Greece's highest peak,
Mount Olympus.
Almighty Zeus
controlled the weather,
Poseidon the sea,
Hades the underworld.
There was Athena,
goddess of wisdom;
Aphrodite, beauty; Apollo,
god of the sun and music,
all jockeying for power
and for the affections of
the insignificant humans below.
It's quite a departure from
how formalized religions
view their gods today.
(singing in Greek)
GARDNER (off-screen):
There's not a big book that tells
you exactly how to
practice Greek religion.
Because there's no way to
write something down that
is constantly changing,
something that has different
incarnations depending
where you are in Greece
and what period
of time you live in.
NARRATOR: Even without
a rule book it seems their
religion played a significant
role in bringing disparate
groups of Greeks together,
much more so than many
archaeologists believed.
The textbook version of how
Greece came to be typically
doesn't begin with religion,
but with the
emergence of cities.
After the Mycenaean collapse,
the story goes,
pockets of people,
separated by a mountainous landscape
and rocky coast,
banded together into small,
isolated villages
throughout Greece.
Over time,
villages grew into towns,
towns grew into cities,
and by the end of the Dark Age,
right around Homer's
time in the 8th century B.C.,
cities grew into what
the Greeks call polis,
or city-states, Athens,
Sparta, Corinth,
and some 1,500 others.
According to the
traditional theory,
the big religious sanctuaries
cropped up only after the
city-states were established.
But new discoveries are
turning that on its head.
About two hours north of Athens,
at an ancient temple
site called Kalapodi,
archaeologist
Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier
and his team have
uncovered altars and artifacts
that indicate people were
worshipping their gods here
for hundreds of years
before the formation of cities,
all the way back to
the Mycenaean period.
NIEMEIER (off-screen): You
read in handbooks there were
no Greek temples before
the 8th century B.C.,
when the polis developed,
the Greek city-state.
But here we have three
Mycenaean temples,
and then we have a
temple of the 10th century.
We have a temple
of the 9th century.
We have a temple
of the 8th century.
And this is a time
when the polis arise.
NARRATOR: In all,
the team has uncovered ten different
temples here, built,
destroyed, and rebuilt over
millennia on this very spot,
right through the Dark Age.
NIEMEIER (off-screen): At
least in this area, we have no
Dark Age at all.
We have a continuity.
(speaking Greek)
NARRATOR: By offering refuge,
providing a forum for the
exchange of culture and ideas,
and bringing people together
around shared beliefs,
Niemeier believes the
temples here,
and others like them across Greece,
may have helped Greeks survive
those meager Dark Age years.
NIEMEIER (off-screen):
What brought them together,
what made them Greeks,
was their religion and their gods.
This was very important
for the Greek identity.
NIEMEIER (off-screen): The sanctuaries
had an important function in the
formation of the city-states, and,
and not the other way around.
NARRATOR: By the
late 8th century B.C.,
stunning centers of worship
have started cropping up all
over the Greek world,
with as many as 1,500 city-states
growing around them,
stretching east to the
Black Sea, west to Italy,
and south to North Africa.
But in ancient Greece,
one sanctuary in particular
stood out above all the others.
HALL (off-screen): Delphi is the ritual,
psychological,
and geographical
center of the Greek world.
When you make the
great ascent up the valley
past all the olive groves
and vineyards to this high,
high place, you know that
this is where the god of the sun,
Apollo, would have chosen to
have his seat of, of prophecy.
NARRATOR: A who's who of
Greek history made the trek up
this mountainside to Delphi,
entering through these
towering columns to seek
the wisdom of the oracles,
priestesses believed to be
the mouthpieces of Apollo.
Said to see years
into the future,
the Delphic oracles were
consulted on all kinds
of matters,
from forming alliances to going to war.
They warned Oedipus that
he would kill his father and
marry his mother...
and pronounced that no one was
wiser than Socrates,
for he was wise enough to know
that he indeed knew nothing.
For thousands of years,
the oracle's words were
gospel to the ancients.
But in keeping with the defiant,
individualistic,
some might say
hubristic Greek character,
they weren't exactly
humble before their gods.
They were among
the first to imagine their
deities in their own image.
STAMPOLIDIS (off-screen):
Their gods resemble them.
They created the Olympian
gods as human beings
with their thoughts,
with their ways of thinking.
STAMPOLIDIS (off-screen):
They are not resembling to dragons.
They are not resembling
to animal-headed gods.
They are humans.
NARRATOR: If the lowly Greek
humans earned the gods' favor,
they could even achieve
god-like status for themselves
and have their names
sung across all eternity.
HUGHES (off-screen): I think
this is one of the reasons that the
Greeks achieve so much is
that they have this notion that
the best way to become
immortal was to do something
in your life that made
you worthy of immortality.
NARRATOR: It was an idea
so ingrained in their culture,
they even conjured a place
where people from all rungs
of society could
prove their worth.
This... is Olympia.
It began like the
many other religious
sanctuaries across Greece.
But starting in 776 B.C.,
events would take place in
this very arena that would
give mortals a shot at immortality
and unite the
Greeks in the process.
Athletes at the peak of
performance flocked here from
hundreds of Greek city-states to run,
jump, wrestle, box,
throw,
and compete for the favor of Zeus.
The Olympics.
HALL (off-screen): People came
from all over the Greek-speaking world.
The best chariot racers
came from North Africa,
from Libya.
Some of the best sprinters
came from Southern Italy.
The boxers came
from the Greek islands,
and they would bring
their pack of fans with them.
NARRATOR: All that was
required was that you had
to be Greek,
which means they had a sense for what
that was by then,
you had to be male,
and you had to be naked,
preferably
slathered in olive oil.
HALL: The ancient Greeks
absolutely delighted in beauty
and they delighted in the
beauty of the physical form.
They saw men's bodies
as absolutely as beautiful
in a different way
as women's bodies.
NARRATOR: Nearly 3,000
years after the first Olympics,
modern competition
is a little different.
(cheering)
We have clothing, for starters.
(gunshot)
And women, finally.
And it seems we might
have grown a little soft.
Compared to the hundreds
of Olympic events today,
Greek competitions
were limited to skills
useful in combat, running,
wrestling, boxing.
And while today three
teams make it to the
podium for bronze, silver,
and gold, in ancient Greece...
CAMP: One guy is the winner
and everybody else is the loser.
There's no second place.
There's no third place.
So there's a whole
different ethos,
a competitive ethos which
runs right through all of
Greek life all the time,
where they're
striving to be the best.
NARRATOR: The Greeks
had a word for this competitive
ethos, agon, as in agony,
and it wasn't confined
to the Olympics.
COSTAS: Agon is really
just an ancient predecessor of
somebody telling you now that
nothing worthwhile comes easy.
COSTAS (off-screen): In lofty
pursuits like philosophy or government
or literature,
whatever it might be,
if we're forced to do our
very best in the pursuit
of the standard of excellence,
then that's going
to make us better.
NARRATOR: When it came
to putting agon on display,
the Olympics weren't
the only game in town.
So-called panhellenic
festivals were held
at four different religious
sanctuaries across Greece,
in Olympia, Delphi,
Nemea, and Isthmia,
alternating annually
between each one,
which is why the Olympics
are only held every four years.
But there was one place
that may predate them all,
just 22 miles away from Olympia,
in a small mountain
village called Lykaion.
(speaking Greek)
NARRATOR: And every four years,
residents here host the Lykaion Games
to keep their competitive
traditions alive.
♪ ♪
The myths tell us Zeus
wasn't just worshipped here,
he was born here.
And archaeologist,
and competitor, David Romano,
has found evidence that
the games to honor him were
likely held here
hundreds of years
before the torch at
Olympia was even lit.
ROMANO (off-screen): We
now believe that the whole idea
of Olympia was probably
modeled on Lykaion.
So for many centuries,
Zeus was being worshipped,
and was being celebrated here,
and only 22 miles
away at Olympia,
there was no cult of
Zeus until the 11th century.
NARRATOR: Romano's work
is revealing the archaeological
significance of Lykaion,
and today the proud Greeks
are hoping the finds,
and their games,
will put their town
back on the map.
(gunshot)
♪ ♪
They've got a ways to go.
But the path to excellence...
has never been easy.
This competitive pursuit
of excellence became
a core facet of Greek culture,
much like stories of heroes
and shared beliefs in the gods.
(cheering)
It's why 776 B.C.,
date of the first Olympic Games,
is widely considered
to be the unofficial
birth year of Greece.
Even if Greece would
remain a factious
collection of city-states.
Over the next few centuries,
new Greek city-states would
form around the
Mediterranean world.
HALL (off-screen): Whenever
there wasn't enough to eat,
whenever there was a bad tyrant,
Greeks just got up,
packed their ships,
and went off somewhere new.
COSMOPOULOS (off-screen): The
Greeks colonized the Mediterranean.
Marseille and Nice.
Napoli, Naples in Italy.
They go as far north as the Black Sea,
Ukraine.
The near east, Cyprus,
South Italy and Sicily.
NARRATOR: Like frogs around a pond,
to use Plato's words,
the Greeks sailed as far
and wide as their ships
would take them,
spreading their language
and traditions
wherever they went.
But one thing
distinguished these
Greek colonizers from others.
No matter how tied to
their roots they were or
how far afield they went,
they always seemed to embrace
new ideas from the
lands they settled.
HUGHES (off-screen):
Ideas are really the kind of
favorite currency of the Greeks,
so the Greeks make
ideas their business.
And "idea" is actually a pure Greek word,
adie.
It's come down to us
completely unchanged.
NARRATOR: And in
the 6th century B.C.,
on what is now the
west coast of Turkey,
inspired by their new
astronomically and
mathematically inclined
neighbors in Mesopotamia
and Egypt, Greek colonists
would conjure ideas so radical,
they'd reshape our
entire vision of the world.
This is Miletus.
You'd never know it nowadays,
but 2,500 years ago,
it was a coastal city.
The Greeks who lived
here would transform it into
one of the wealthiest
ports in the Mediterranean.
Today the sea is over
six miles to the west.
GOODMAN (off-screen): You
have to kind of imagine that instead
of having all of these fields,
that the water came all the
way up into this valley.
And this is the place where
they chose to establish Miletus.
NARRATOR: According
to geo-archaeologist
Beverly Goodman,
the reason for the landlocked valley
and for the revolution in
thought that took place here,
begins in central
Turkey far to the east.
The long,
wandering Maeander River,
which gave the word
"meander" its name.
GOODMAN (off-screen):
This is the river that, basically,
was one of the reasons that
they settled where they did.
But it's also the same
river that destroyed
the harbor eventually.
HALL (off-screen): The silt
from the river Maeander gradually
extended the land down
and down and down westward,
westward, and westward.
So you had these
men actually watching
their own beloved city,
they're seamen,
they're Greeks,
becoming landlocked.
NARRATOR: The harbor
was gone within a generation.
Typically, ancients from
Greece to Egypt to India would
have had a simple answer for
natural phenomena like these,
the gods caused them.
(thunder crashes)
TYSON (off-screen): People
have no idea what's going on
and so it's simpler to say Zeus did it,
Poseidon did it.
NARRATOR: But as the
worldly citizens of Miletus
watch their precious
harbor disappear practically
in front of their eyes,
they don't blame the gods.
They look at the stones
and silt being carried by the
Maeander into the sea and
for the first time in recorded
history attribute their
woes to natural causes.
They're considered to be
the world's first scientists,
and from that moment on,
life would never be the same.
TYSON (off-screen):
Once you hatch that egg,
once you crack that ice,
once you pry open that door,
all of nature is there
for you to explore.
TYSON (off-screen):
Take it and run with it.
NARRATOR: And these
Greeks on the west coast
of Turkey did just that.
First came Thales,
considered the world's first philosopher
by none other than Aristotle.
He used geometry to calculate
the distance of ships
from shore and the height
of Egypt's Great Pyramid,
was first to predict a solar
eclipse and posited a
cause for earthquakes.
He got the details wrong,
that the Earth floated on water
like a giant raft,
but his natural explanation was worlds
beyond the previous theory,
that Poseidon caused them.
Thales would inspire other Greeks,
like Pythagoras,
who founded a brotherhood
around the belief that numbers
and mathematics could
explain the universe,
everything from astronomy
to nature to music.
And Hippocrates,
a renowned ancient physician who
developed an ethical code
for practicing medicine.
Today,
doctors swear by an oath in his honor
to first do no harm.
Countless philosophers
and scientists would follow
in the footsteps of
these great thinkers,
and their ancient wisdom
continues to motivate one
artist in Athens'
Port of Piraeus today.
After four long days and nights,
Ino's mural is
finally taking shape.
It shows the face of Democritus,
another ancient Greek
philosopher who determined
that everything in the
universe was made up of tiny
building blocks called atoms,
Greek for indivisible.
TYSON (off-screen): For
me when I think of a first idea
that matter is made of atoms,
that tells you that they are
thinking that maybe
the universe is knowable,
nature is knowable.
That's profound because
that would become the very
foundation of science,
that we have methods and
tools that transcend
our five senses,
that probe the operations
of nature in ways that
your life experience
has no encounters with.
NARRATOR: Probing nature,
questioning the origins of
phenomena,
even our very existence.
They are profound ideas
that all had their start
in the Eastern Aegean.
But they wouldn't stay there.
By the 6th century B.C.,
a new power was emerging
in the East, the Persian empire.
And as it expanded,
many Greeks would head west,
back across the Aegean,
taking their radical new
ways of thinking with them.
Over the next century,
the flood of reason that
began in the Maeander
River valley would wash
over the Greek world,
and eventually culminate in
a small backwater of a
city-state called Athens.
HALL (off-screen): So
against this background of
intellectual turmoil,
of the beginnings of science,
of abstract reasoning,
and indeed ideas of a physical
universe that man can
intervene in and control,
that he's not entirely at
the whims of the gods,
comes Athenian democracy.
NARRATOR: For centuries,
Athens had been just one of
those 1,500 city-states,
climbing its way out of
the ashes of the Dark Age.
Teetering between the rule of rich,
aristocratic families,
who came to power by birth,
or power-grabbing
leaders called tyrants,
people were often subjected
to Draconian laws, literally.
They were written by a
tyrant named Draco in 621 B.C.
Farmers who couldn't
pay their debts were
forced into slavery.
Simple crimes like
"stealing a cabbage"
were punishable by death.
Athens was on the brink
of revolution until a wise
reformer named Solon
stepped in with a series
of reforms that would
make today's Greeks proud.
He freed all debtor slaves,
eliminated the death penalty
for all but extreme cases,
and wrestled political power
out of the hands of noble
bloodlines by establishing
a council of 400
citizens to run the city.
It was a big step,
untethering governance from inheritance.
But only Athens' wealthiest
citizens had the privilege of
serving on the council,
and in the decades
that followed,
factions of competing
aristocrats formed.
HALL (off-screen): You have a
lot of seesawing around about
who's actually in charge,
and this actually
gets worse and worse.
NARRATOR: In 508 B.C.,
the power struggle came to a boil
Between two rival aristocrats,
Isagoras and Cleisthenes.
Isagoras, with support from
military powerhouse Sparta,
took control of the city,
installed an
oligarchy of nobles,
and banished Cleisthenes.
With the Athenian elite
squarely in Isagoras' corner,
Cleisthenes was left
with only one place to turn.
HUGHES: We're told
that Cleisthenes took
into his faction, cha demos,
the common people.
NARRATOR: Ordinary citizens
had had just about enough of
aristocrats and nobles
running their city.
For their support,
Cleisthenes agreed to break
the hold of
aristocratic factions,
determine power by elections,
not wealth,
and institute trials by jury.
Neither leader could have
predicted what happened next.
An all-out revolt
swept over Athens.
Citizens stormed the
Acropolis and sent Isagoras
and the Spartans packing.
And Cleisthenes?
OBER (off-screen): The
way to think about Cleisthenes
is he's a surfer.
He is riding a really big
wave of an increasingly clear
identity of a common people that
they are the people of Athens.
They are Athens.
OBER (off-screen): He
gets ahead of the wave.
He rides it well. The
rest of it is history.
NARRATOR: Whether
he meant to or not,
Cleisthenes ushered in a
revolutionary new way of
running a society.
In 507 B.C., democracy was born.
(crowd cheering)
HUGHES: I cannot overemphasize
how stomach-churningly
mind-blowingly electrically
exciting this was in ancient Greece.
Because this is the first
time in the human experience
as far as we know when
"I" the people are allowed
to act as a political agent.
HUGHES (off-screen): Suddenly you
get perfume makers and cheese traders
and generals and aristocrats
standing next to one another
in the assembly deciding how
they should run their own lives.
NARRATOR: Athenian
democracy wasn't exactly of,
by, and for all the people.
You needed to be
a free male citizen.
Women, slaves,
and foreign born need not apply,
which means fewer than 50,000
in a city of more than 200,000,
less than 20%,
were actually eligible to vote.
Still,
the idea of democracy was wildly popular.
"Democritus,"
or judge of the people,
the star of Ino's mural,
became one of the most
prevalent names of the time.
HUGHES (off-screen): So
this is the most extraordinary
moments in the human story.
Democracy just
appears from that febrile,
fervent bubble that is Greece,
and it's been
delivered down to us
as one of the most extraordinary
legacies of the Greek world.
OBER (off-screen): The
democracy emerges in strife.
It was the will of
the ordinary people.
That is what made
democracy possible.
(shouting)
NARRATOR: Two and
a half millennia later,
it's ordinary people who
continue to fight for it.
(chanting in Greek)
NARRATOR: People like Ino,
who's putting the finishing touches
on his mural...
an infant looking
up at Democritus.
INO (off-screen): It's about the
knowledge and the power of knowledge.
The child is the people,
the younger people
after the ancients.
It's a connection,
from then to now.
The power is in every one of us,
and with collaboration,
we can work to
make this place better.
NARRATOR: Individuals
corralling their talents
to make life better.
It's what the Greeks
have always been about.
Through one of the
darkest chapters in history,
they built a civilization
from the bottom up,
delivering some of humanity's
greatest achievements,
literature, the Olympics,
scientific reasoning, democracy.
And they were
just getting started.
HUGHES (off-screen): What is
very interesting about democracy
in Greece is that very
quickly it becomes this idea
that catches like wildfire,
and there is no doubt that
that powers the kind of
engine of change and the
development of civilization
that still speaks to us today.
NARRATOR: With
power now squarely in the
hands of the people,
citizens would finally have
the chance to set
their own course,
not only for Athens, but for
all of Western civilization.