ASIA MINOR IN THE TIME OF THE SEVEN WISE MEN 



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the time of Greek history, and there are 

 few records from which to reproduce it. 

 In trying to describe the culture of an 

 age wholly different from anything which 

 we have ever known, the chief authority 

 is from internal evidence of writings of 

 the time, largely poetry, which now exist 

 for the most part in fragments, quoted 

 by later writers, and also from pictures 

 or vases belonging to that period. 



The pictorial representations on the 

 vases of the stories of the gods reproduce 

 the ordinarv customs of daily life in re- 

 gard to religious worship, dress, use of 

 chariots and horses, weapons of war, 

 varieties of musical instruments, habits 

 of sitting and standing, wedding and 

 funeral ceremonies, and many other 

 things. 



Are we justified in calling the period a 

 cultured one? 



It seems to me that we are justified in 

 attributing culture to people who could 

 produce and enjoy the best lyric poetry 

 which the world has ever known, and 

 who could originate lines of thinking that 

 have had a permanent significance in the 

 development of the intellectual life of 

 later times. 



Emerson says that the flower of civili- 

 zation is the finished man, the man of 

 sense, of grace, of accomplishment and 

 social power, and of such there were 

 many in that age. 



We find in the late seventh and sixth 

 centuries B. C. the beginning of modern 

 systematic knowledge, and a careful study 

 of the thought of the time will give us an 

 insight into the origin of modern science 

 and philosophy, for our present use of 

 language and our ideas of the world are 

 permeated with the results of that ancient 

 thinking. 



Even the emancipation from traditions 

 and the desire for independent individual 

 thought, which characterize modern 

 ideals, find their counterparts in the age 

 of the Wise Men. 



ANCIENT CULTURE WAS ADDRESSED TO 

 THE EARS 



The culture that arose in Ionia was 

 very different in its form, however, from 

 any development of later times, and most 

 difficult for us to understand. 



It was, first of all, addressed to the ears 

 and not to the eyes. We are now essen- 

 tially an eye-minded people, and measure 

 our learning by the books that we read 

 and write and collect in libraries and by 

 other things that we can see with our 

 eyes, but the sixth century B. C. was an 

 age without any free distribution of writ- 

 ten records and only the beginnings of 

 libraries, which were mostly collections 

 of wooden tablets. Some of the great 

 men of the latter part of the period each 

 wrote a book, but it was a laborious 

 process. 



Heraclitus of Ephesus was one of 

 those who wrote a book which was kept 

 for safety in the Temple of Diana at 

 Ephesus ; for a book was not a thing to 

 be lightly regarded, and the process of 

 writing was so difficult that it was far 

 easier to remember what one had written 

 than to decipher it from the book. 



Solon and Pittakos wrote their laws on 

 wooden tablets. However, they did not 

 write them for general circulation among 

 their friends, but rather to preserve the 

 laws that they had promulgated. 



LABORIOUS TO WRITE, WRITING DlEElCULT 

 TO READ 



Greek writing at the time of the Wise 

 Men was not easy to read, for neither the 

 words nor the sentences were divided 

 from each other, and the lines ran both 

 from right to left and from left to right. 



The length of time which archeologists. 

 even when they are good Greek scholars, 

 give to puzzling out inscriptions which 

 belong to that period would not lead us 

 to suppose that any writing of the time 

 would form easy reading for an evening 

 by the fireside or an afternoon siesta. 



During the period of the Wise Men, 

 however, writing was becoming more 

 common, as it was in that age that we 

 had the beginning of Greek prose; and 

 while it is easy to conceive of poetry be- 

 ing communicated from one generation 

 to another by constant repetition, it would 

 not be the same with prose, at least in the 

 case of prose that followed any consecu- 

 tive train of thought. 



There were certain forms of prose, 

 however, in the age of the Wise Men that 

 could be easily remembered, such as the 

 so-called gnomic sayings, which were 



