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increasing wealth went increasing isolation of respectable women, who in later times had little part in the civilized aspects of Greek life except in Sparta. There was a very general development, first from monarchy to aristocracy, then to an alternation of tyranny and democracy. The kings were not absolute, like those of Egypt and Babylonia; they were advised by a Council of Elders, and could not transgress custom with impunity. “Tyranny” did not mean necessarily bad government, but only the rule of a man whose claim to power was not mbt stockists hereditary. “Democracy” meant government by all the citizens, among whom slaves and women were not included. The early tyrants, like the Medici, acquired their power through being the richest members of their respective plutocracies. Often the source of their wealth was the ownership of mbt shoes uk gold and silver mines, made the more profitable by the new institution of coinage, which came from the kingdom of Lydia, adjacent to Ionia. * Coinage seems to have been invented shortly before 700 B.C. One of the most important results, Cheap mbt shoes to the Greeks, of commerce or piracy–at first the two are scarcely distinct–was the acquisition of the art of writing. Although writing had existed for thousands of years in Egypt and Babylonia, and the Minoan Cretans had a script (which has not been deciphered), there is no conclusive evidence that the Greeks knew how to write until about the tenth century B.C. They learnt the art from the Phoenicians, who, like the other inhabitants of Syria, were exposed to both Egyptian and Babylonian influences, and who held the supremacy in maritime commerce until the rise of the Greek cities of Ionia, Italy, and Sicily. In the fourteenth century, writing to Ikhnaton (the heretic king of Egypt), Syrians still used the Babylonian cuneiform; but Hiram of Tyre ( 969-936) used the Phoenician alphabet, which probably developed out of the Egyptian script. The Egyptians mbt clearance used, at first, a pure picture writing; gradually the pictures, much conventionalized, came to represent ____________________ * See P. N. Ure, The Origin of Tyranny. syllables (the first syllables of the names of the things pictured), and at last single letters, on the principle of “A was an Archer who shot at a frog.” * This last step, which was not taken with any completeness by the Egyptians themselves, but by the Phoenicians, gave the alphabet with all <a href="http://www.pumabig.com/"><strong>puma shoes</strong></a> its advantages. The Greeks, borrowing from the Phoenicians, altered the alphabet to suit their language, and made the important innovation of adding vowels instead of having only consonants. There can be no doubt that the acquisition of this convenient method of writing greatly hastened the rise of Greek civilization. The first notable product of the Hellenic civilization was Homer. Everything about Homer is conjectural, but the best opinion seems to be that he was a series of poets rather than an individual. Probably the Iliad and the Odyssey between them took about two hundred years to complete, some say from 750 to cheap mbt shoes 550 B.C., 閳�while others hold that “Homer” was nearly complete at the end of the eighth century. 閳�The Homeric poems, in their present form, were brought to Athens by Peisistratus, who reigned (with intermissions) from 560 to 527 mbt uk B.C. From his time onward, the Athenian youth learnt Homer by heart, and this was the most important part of their education. In some parts of Greece, notably in Sparta, Homer had not the same prestige until a later date. The Homeric poems, like the courtly romances of the later Middle Ages, represent the point of view of a civilized aristocracy, which ignores as plebeian various superstitions that are still rampant among the populace. In much later times, many of these superstitions rose again to the light of day. Guided by anthropology, modern writers have come to the conclusion that Homer, so far from being primitive, was an expurgator, a kind of eighteenth-century rationalizer of ancient myths, holding up an upper-class ideal of urbane enlightenment. The Olympian gods, who represent religion in Homer, were not the only objects of worship among the Greeks, either in his time or later. There were other darker and more savage elements in popular religion, which were kept at bay by the Greek intellect at its best, but lay in wait to pounce in moments of weakness or terror. In the time of decadence, mbt shoes australia ____________________ * For instance, “Gimel,” the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, means “camel,” and the sign for it is a conventionalized picture of a camel. ? 鈧�Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, Chap. XII. ? 鈧� ? Rostovtseff, History of the Ancient World, Vol. I, p. 399. beliefs which Homer had discarded proved to have persisted, half buried, throughout the classical period. This fact explains many things that would otherwise seem inconsistent and surprising. Primitive religion, everywhere, was tribal rather than personal. Certain rites were performed, which were intended, by sympathetic magic, to further the interests of the tribe, especially in respect of fertility, vegetable, animal, and human. The winter solstice was a time when the sun had to be encouraged not to go on diminishing in strength; spring and harvest also called for appropriate ceremonies. These were often such as to generate a great collective excitement, in which in mbt shoes sale dividuals lost their sense of separateness and felt themselves at one with the whole tribe. All over, the world, at a certain stage of religious e mbt shoes online volution, sacred animals and <a href="http://www.pumabig.com/puma-speed-cat-c-0075.html"><strong>puma speed cat </strong></a> human beings were ceremonially killed and eaten. In different regions, this stage occurred at very different dates. Human sacrifice usually lasted longer than the sacrificial eating of human victims; in Greece it was not yet extinct at the beginning of historical times. mbt shoes review Fertility rites without such cruel aspects were common throughout Greece; the Eleusinian mysteries, in particular, were essentially agricultural in their symbolism. It must be admitted that religion, in Homer, is not very religious. The gods are completely human, differing from men only in being immortal and possessed of superhuman powers. Morally, there is nothing to be said for them, and it is difficult to see how they can have inspired much awe. In some passages, supposed to be late, they are treated with Voltairean irreverence. Such genuine religious feeling as is to be found in Homer is less concerned with the gods of Olympus than with more shadowy beings such as Fate or Necessity or Destiny, to whom even Zeus is subject. Fate exercised a great influence on all Greek thought, and perhaps was one of the sources from which science derived the belief in natural law. The Homeric gods were the gods of a conquering aristocracy, not the useful fertility gods of those who actually tilled the soil. As Gilbert Murray says: * “The gods of most nations claim to have created the world. The Olympians make no such claim. The m mbt discount ost they ever did was to conquer it. . . . And when they have conquered their kingdoms, what do they do? Do they attend to the government? Do they promote ____________________ * Five Stages of Greek Religion, p. 67. agriculture? Do they practise trades and industries? Not a bit of it. Why should they do any honest work? They find it easier to live on the revenues and blast with thunderbolts the people who do not pay. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. They fight, and feast, and play, and make music; they drink deep, and roar with laughter at the lame smith who waits on them. They are never afraid, except of their own king. They never tell lies, except in love and war.” Homer’s human heroes, equally, are not very well behaved. The leading family i discount mbt trainers s the House of Pelops, but it did not succeed in setting a pattern of happy family life. “Tantalos, the Asiatic founder of the dynasty, <a href="http://www.pumabig.com/"><strong>puma 2010</strong></a> began its career by a direct offence against the gods; some said, by trying to cheat them into eating human flesh, that of his own son Pelops. Pelops, having been miraculously restored to life, offended in his turn. He won his famous chariot-race against Oinomaos, king of Pisa, by the connivance of the latter’s charioteer, Myrtilos, a buy mbt shoes nd then got rid of his confederate, whom he had promised to reward, by flinging him in mbt chapa to the sea. The curse descended to his sons, Atreus and Thyestes, in the form of what the Greeks called ate, a strong if not actually irresistible impulse to crime. Thyestes corrupted his brother’s wife and thereby managed to steal the ‘luck’ of the family, the famous golden-fleeced ram. Atreus in turn secured his brother’s banishment, and recalling him under pretext of a reconciliation, feasted him on the flesh of his own children. The curse was now inherited by Atreus’ son Agamemnon, who offended Artemis by killing a sacred stag, sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia to appease the goddess and obtain a safe passage to Troy for his fleet, and was in his turn murdered by his faithless wife Klytaimnestra and her paramour Aigisthos, a surviving son of Thyestes. Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, in turn avenged his father by killing his mother and Aigisthos.” * Homer as a finished achievement was a product of Ionia, i.e. mbt shoes sale of a part of Hellenic Asia Minor and the adjacent islands. Some time during the sixth ce mbt shoes clearance ntury at latest, the Homeric poems became fixed in their present form. It was also during this century that Greek science and philosophy and mathematics began. At the same time events of fundamental importance were happening in other parts of the world. Confucius, Buddha, and Zoroaster, if they existed, probably belong to ____________________ * Primitive Culture in Greece, H. J. Rose, 1925, p. 193. -12- the same century. * In the middle of the century the Persian Empire was established by Cyrus; towards its close the Greek cities of Ionia, to which the Persians had allowed a limited autonomy, made a fruitless rebellion, which was put down by Darius, and their best men became exiles. Several of the philosophers of this period were refugees, who wandered from city to city in the still unenslaved parts of the Hellenic world, spreading the civilization that, until then, had been mainly confined to Ionia. They were kindly treated in their wanderings. Xenophanes, who flourished in the later part of the sixth century, and who was one of the refugees, says: “This is the sort of thing we should say by the fireside in the winter-time, as we lie on soft couches, after a good meal, drinking sweet wine and crunching chickpeas: <a href="http://demonandangels.fb5.ru/displayimage.php?pos=-7"><strong>Formentor Ship Black-jack shoe Class | bdotnet</strong></a> ‘Of what country are you, and how old are you, good Si mbt clearance r? And how old were you when the Mede appeared?’” The rest of Greece succeeded in preserving its independence at the battles of Salamis and Plataea, after which Ionia was liberated for a time. 閳� Greece was divided into a large number of small independent states, each consisting of a city with some agricultural territory surrounding it. The level of civilization was very different in different parts of the Greek world, and only a minority of cities contributed to the total of Hellenic achievement. Sparta, of which I shall have much to say later, was important in a military sense, but not culturally. Co