65 pages • 2 hours read
A Little History of the World
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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Heroes and Their Weapons”
Gombrich introduces the history of Ancient Greece by discussing one of our best sources on the subject: their poetry. The famous poems of Ancient Greece were first told in chanted hexameter, shared over many years. Some were eventually written down and remain very important literary works, like The Iliad, which is attributed to a Greek poet named Homer. Stories like The Iliad tell of epic battles and love stories from ancient times, but none of it could be proven to be more than mere fiction until a 19th-century German businessman named Schliemann set out to prove otherwise. He raised money to travel to Greece and seek out Troy, the city described in The Iliad. He uncovered palaces and royal tombs of Mycenae and found Troy, dated to around 1400 B.C.
In comparing them to the Egyptians, Gombrich says that the seafaring people of Greece were not as interested in preserving their traditional styles and often incorporated ideas and techniques that they discovered at home or abroad. The artifacts discovered by Schliemann are believed to have been made on the nearby island of Crete. By 1200 B.C, new tribes came from the North and ruled over these Greek cities. Crete was destroyed, but its traditions and stories lived on in the culture of the invading tribes. They were not a unified people, but separate tribes with different rulers and dialects. One tribe, the Dorians, settled in the southernmost tip of Greece, known as the Peloponnese, and founded a city called Sparta. Another tribe, the Ionians, settled largely north of the Peloponnese on a peninsula called Attica and founded the city of Athens. Ionians were also great seafarers, and they also took possession of a series of islands that we know as the Ionian islands. They even founded cities on the coast of Asia Minor, which put them into contact through trade with the Phoenicians, who shared with the Greeks their way of writing (26).
Chapter 8 Summary: “Unequal Struggle”
Gombrich begins this chapter by admitting that the events between 550 and 500 B.C. are quite strange, and he himself doesn’t quite understand them, which makes them all the more interesting (37). He then describes the home of the Persians, a mountain tribe from north of Mesopotamia that was ruled over for hundreds of years by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Around 550 B.C, their ruler, Cyrus, led them to an unlikely victory over the Babylonians. He freed the captive people of Babylon, which included the Jews of Jerusalem, in 538 B.C. Cyrus died on the way to conquer Egypt. His son, Cambyses, succeeded him and deposed the pharaoh, ending an almost 3,000-year empire. With this, Persians had conquered much of the known world.
When a man named Darius became king, he looked to extend his empire, at that time extending from Egypt to the frontiers of India to the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Greeks in these colonies were rich merchants, uninterested in being ruled by a Persian king and paying tribute. They rebelled, and the Athenians supported them by sending ships to help. Still, the port cities were defeated, and the meddling of Athens provoked King Darius to send a fleet to defeat them as well. They conquered and destroyed many cities along the way before they disembarked at Marathon, near Athens. They outnumbered Athenian soldiers seven-to-one, but the Athenian general Miltiades had lived among the Persians and could fight against them. Athenian soldiers, too, were empowered by the knowledge that their families and their homes were at stake. Against all odds, they defeated the Persian invaders.
The surviving Persians fled, but Miltiades noticed that they had sailed towards Athens, which now lay unprotected and vulnerable. He sent a messenger by foot to warn Athens. The messenger ran so far and fast that he fell dead after delivering his message, but Miltiades and his army followed close behind. When the Persians saw the Athenians at the harbor, they turned back, and Greece was saved in 490 B.C.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Two Small Cities in One Small Land”
Greece, Gombrich now reiterates, was a small, rocky peninsula that housed neighboring tribes, like the Ionians, Aeolians, and Dorians. Though their dialects and cultures differed only slightly, they did not get along and maintained separate, unfriendly kingdoms. The exceptions were their religion and sports. Every four years, the Greeks celebrated the god Zeus at his sanctuary in Olympia with a series of sporting competitions. Athens and Sparta were two of the most important cities in Greece. Sparta, founded by the Dorians, had a culture of constant vigilance and strict laws. The Athenians did not live by this same militaristic code, and instead, the power of the state was given to the citizens themselves. They assembled in the marketplace and voted on state issues. The majority would determine the result and would elect a council to execute the decision. This was the invention of democracy, which translates to “rule of the people” in Greek.
Despite their interest in shared power, the politician Pericles was so popular that he eventually became the sole ruler of Athens in 444 B.C. Pericles ensured that Athens maintained its seapower and built strong alliances with other Ionian cities. Athens grew rich, but its greatest value, Gombrich suggests, was in its other accomplishments. In their assemblies, the Athenians learned to argue and consider not only matters of the state, but also questions of existence. In this way, the Athenians invented philosophy. They reflected on the meaning of humanity and nature and how one should live morally. Athenians also created beautiful, naturalistic depictions of people and Gods, sculpted from stone or painted on their walls and pottery. Though we no longer have much of their masterful art, many temples of Athens still stand. The forms that the Greeks used to make these beautiful buildings, such as their columns, are still employed in architecture around the world.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
In these chapters, Gombrich describes ancient Greek society, as well as the society of their contemporaries and enemies, the Persians. He introduces ancient Greek society by discussing the history of its discovery in the 19th century. Using examples of archeological artifacts, Gombrich details what we know about the Greeks and how they lived. Because historical records of antiquity are rare, it is the relics of these times that provide us with the stories of ancient lives. Gombrich also chooses to focus on the life of Schliemann, the man who discovered the ruins of the city of Troy. Schliemann, driven by his fascination with Homeric tales of the ancient world, is a powerful symbol of Gombrich’s belief that stories and the truth often have more in common than they appear.
Gombrich begins his chapter on Persia by stating that he does not understand it (37). This is an unusual choice for Gombrich, who, throughout the book, offers theories and possibilities for why events unfolded the way that they did. Something about the Persians’ reversal of their subjugation presents a puzzle to Gombrich, and more importantly, he presents this puzzle to the reader.
In describing Spartan and Athenian society, Gombrich pays significantly more attention to the Athenians than he does to the Spartans. He describes Spartan society as a militant, strict culture, whose contributions to history were largely in military manpower. Athens, conversely, he attributes with the invention of many foundational ideas of Western thought and art. Though he expresses gratitude for the innovations of all societies throughout history, there is no culture that he admires so readily as the Athenians: “I can hear you asking: ‘But what exactly did they do that was so great?’ And I can only say ‘everything’” (48).
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