Selected Books
Turkey in Europe & Europe in Turkey
Turgut Özal

The Helenistic Period

"The sun lends its brightness to the moon."
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae

As I remarked earlier, the Ionians had neither the militaristic inclinations of the Spartans, nor the political energy of the Athenians. Pan-Ionian coalition also proved to be ineffective. After they had succumbed to Athenian imperialism, another danger came from the East. The Lydian, Croesus, invaded Ionia, but he did not institute any significant changes because Lydia was a Hellenized and civilized country. However, after the Persian invasion of 547-6 BC, Ionia gradually lost its creative spirit, even though Persian rule was mild by the standards of the time. The Persians remained in Anatolia for two centuries until the arrival of Alexander the Great in 333-30 BC.

The repeated suicidal wars in mainland Greece culminated in the Peloponnesian Wars of 431-404 BC, which marked the beginning of an end which was very near.

Philip II of Macedon, and subsequently Alexander the Great, then conquered a weakened and divided Greece. Macedonia at this time was not a fully Hellenized country, and the Greek language and culture were attributes only of an elite. Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, although sworn enemies, had united against the Macedonians, but too late to save their liberty. Alexander the Great divided them still further when, after taking possession of Greece, he took up the Hellenic cause.

Alexander's conquest was the primary cause of the breakdown of Greek civilization. It resulted in an interminable struggle which amounted virtually to a civil war in mainland Greece. The historical law noted by Toynbee, namely that geographical expansion generally coincides with the deterioration of a civilization, is certainly true in this case. A second cause behind Alexander's drive towards the East was the historic response to the Persian stimulus.

Anatolia, having created a Neolithic civilization in the seventh millennium BC, came under the influence of the river basin civilization of Mesopotamia until the first millennium BC. The Ionian civilization then came peacefully into being, with Anatolia Hellenizing Caria, Lycia, Lydia, and other areas, before radiating its influence eastward, equally peacefully. Persian force of arms put an abrupt end to this pacific civilizing process in the East in the sixth century BC. In the fourth century BC Alexander the Great turned the tide militarily once again.

The conquests of Alexander do not form part of our subject. He wanted to achieve political union of the civilized world, which at that time extended eastwards from Greece, and that is the world that Alexander conquered. However, this `united world' found itself torn apart again through rivalries among Alexander's generals immediately after his untimely death. Anatolia once again became a battlefield.

During this war of the Macedonian generals, the only one to die in his own bed was Ptolemy. Nicodemus of Bithynia appealed for help against the Seleucids to the savage tribes of Gaul, who crushed and destroyed the Anatolian towns.

It was Pergamum that finally succeeded in subduing them, and the Gaul's who, like ourselves, had made Ankara (Ancyra) their capital, withdrew first into central Anatolia, then into the region which became known as Galatia.

The bloody conquests of Alexander, and the division of his empire among his warring generals, are seen in the West as beneficial events: the propagation of Hellenism `civilized' all the territories between the Adriatic and the Indus. Indeed, ever since that time Hellenism has been considered a contribution made by `the West' towards the civilization of `the East'! When one looks at it from the Anatolian point of view, one is tempted to think that it might perhaps have been of more value to export this civilization to Europe in the north-west rather than to the east.

One has to admit that Alexander was a great military leader, but he was not a great statesman. He doubtless did not have enough time to become one. Is it conceivable that a man, even a genius, could achieve fraternal union of the Hellenes and the Orientals by setting them at war with one another? Like every conqueror, rather then civilizing the conquered land, he became more influenced by the people he had subjugated. He started dressing like a Persian, he adopted eastern traditions, and became the son of the god Ammon in Egypt, an emperor of a universal state rather than a Hellene.

To what extent were Iran and the neighboring regions Hellenized, and for how long? What was the contribution of Alexander and his successors to the Hellenization of Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt, who had for a very long time had cultural contacts with Greece? In reality, if there had been no Alexander Hellenism could have been spread pacifically and easily, without the resistance provoked by his invasions.

While acknowledging that Greek had become the common language of the whole region, it must not be forgotten that Akkadian, Aramaic, and Sogdian had each been used as a lingua franca for very much longer, and without having been imposed by war.

Under the thin layer of Hellenism, a syncretic cultural development took place between the East and the West which prepared the ground, first for the dissemination of Christianity, and later for the spread of Islam. In Anatolia the destruction of great stretches of forest by fire during the wars between the Macedonian generals profoundly disturbed the ecology. The altered climate brought drought and inadequate harvests, and periods of famine were suffered throughout the Byzantine and Ottoman eras. In the Ionian, Carian, and Aeolian valleys, on the other hand, swamps appeared which gave rise to epidemics of malaria.

Pergamum

When Alexander died, the Aegean coasts of Anatolia were nothing but silent ruins, and Pergamum was still a small village. Philetaerus, to whom one of Alexander's generals had left his fortune, founded there the dynasty of the Attalids.

Attalus I made Pergamum a powerful state by subduing the Gauls, and for a time the city-state of Pergamum appeared to be the new sovereign power in Anatolia. However, to the west, Rome had destroyed Carthage, thereby establishing an empire which extended outside Italy. Later Rome would invade Greece and, just as Alexander had done, attempt to perpetuate Hellenism by sword and by fire.

The functional town planning of Hippodamus was applied for the first time at Pergamum. The less aesthetic aspects of this urbanism have disappeared, but the town planning concept remains. Public hygiene naturally improved as the town developed, and Pergamum overtook Athens. In Pergamum, for the first time anywhere, girls were allowed to attend school, an innovation arising from the traditional respect for women in Anatolia.

The art of sculpture progressed from representing idealized types to portrayals of real individuals. The Dying Gaul is the best example.

The greatest gift of Pergamum to humanity, however, was the book. When Egypt, jealous of the library at Pergamum, ceased all exports of papyrus to Anatolia, parchment was invented-pergamina (leather) of Pergamum.

Galen created at Pergamum, the place of his birth, a modern school of medicine, based on observation and dissections. Pergamum's Asclepeium - a combination of hospital and university - was the most advanced in the world. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius went there for treatment.

Politically Pergamum was linked to Rome. However, for nearly one hundred and fifty years (third and second century BC) it enabled Anatolia to find some of its old dynamism once more.

The Attalid kings took possession not only of the whole of western Anatolia but, having been allies of the Romans, were rewarded with part of the territory under the sovereignty of Antioch. Attalus II founded the town of Attaleia (the present-day Antalya) on the Mediterranean coast, after the battle of Magnesia against Antiochus the Great.

After the Persians and the Macedonians, Anatolia passed under the domination of Rome. Like Toynbee, I tend to consider the Roman Empire as the continuation of the Hellenic universal State, founded on the breakdown of Greek civilization, hence its raison d'être was the prevention of its disintegration rather than the further promotion of its creative drive.

Trajan and Hadrian considered Anatolia to be the richest and most civilized province of the Roman Empire. Anatolia had regained some of its prosperity during the `golden age' inaugurated by Augustus, but reached the high point of its time under the Romans during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, who visited the four corners of the province. He founded several towns. Of these, Hadriano-polis (the present-day Edirne) in Thrace later became the capital of the Ottomans prior to the conquest of Istanbul.

The excavations undertaken at Ephesus are currently bringing to light superb works of art from Rome at its zenith. It is known that Anthony came to Ephesus accompanied by Cleopatra. They passed through the Akkadian avenue riding in a sumptuously decorated chariot. Anthony was dressed as Bacchus; among the crowd were children disguised as fauns or satyrs, and women as Bacchantes. There was a great celebration, in acknowledgement of which Anthony exempted the town from taxation.

A fundamental difference, however, distinguished this Ephesus, still grand on the outside, from the Ionian Ephesus. No longer did any one devote himself to rational research on the nature of man and the cosmos. The flame kindled by Heraclitus, which ignited the first lights of science, already belonged to History. The golden age of science had come to an end before the monotheistic religions penetrated Anatolia.

Conclusion

Levi-Strauss, in his contribution to a UNESCO publication, 3 points out the decisive importance of the Neolithic `revolution', which worked out almost all the essential institutions necessary to a human society, and almost all the technical inventions needed to sustain it.

The Mesopotamian civilization, which naturally followed it, elaborated these institutions to a level of high sophistication. It took the peoples of Europe about two thousand years to catch up with the Sumerians.4 For him race is of no importance, even irrelevant, to the creation of civilizations. `The only fatality, the unique defect, which besets a human society and prevents it from fulfilling its potential, is being alone.' s For civilization is an acquisitive, cumulative, and progressive process, to which the contributions of diverse groups are essential. Therefore, civilization is based on a fortunate combination of numerous cultural elements which create, and in turn are created by a deep and time-consuming synthesizing process.

In this light, one can easily understand why the Neolithic revolution began and developed in Anatolia. The climatic conditions were suitable, but, more important, Anatolia was a natural geographical bridge between East and West, and between North and South. The cultural products of the Neolithic revolution came to full fruition in Mesopotamia which, as a fertile river basin, provided a better environment for a more advanced civilization. Later, the developed forms of the Mesopotamian civilization spread back through the civilized societies of Anatolia as far as the Aegean shores of Ionia.

Anatolia was always at the centre of this civilizing process. In order to show the irrelevance of race in this context, I have already emphasized that those who were involved in this process were mostly not Indo-Europeans. They were the indigenous peoples of the land. I hope that my remarks in the first three chapters of this book will not be construed as a romantic glorification of the history of the Anatolian civilizations. My aim has simply been to rectify a pervasive wrong which has long been committed against Anatolia on ethnocentric grounds.

If I stress this point, it is because this immense Anatolian contribution to world civilization, and to the Aegean civilization in particular, is too often neglected, sometimes, though not always, intentionally. The fact that the Western historians of the nineteenth century tended, perhaps unconsciously, to perceive Anatolia as if it were originally · the native land of the Ottomans or Turks, and Greece as a `liberated' country, obscured the vital contribution of Anatolia to the Greek civilization. In the blinkers eyes of these historians only the influence which Egypt and Phoenicia exerted on the Greeks was noteworthy, and then only to a negligible degree. The Anatolian dimension remained in oblivion. Even the radiation of the Mesopotamian civilization apparently had to bypass this blank point, and reach mainland Greece via the sea route from Syria.

I will have occasion later to discuss the image that western Europe formed of its Ottoman enemy during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the consequences of this view. However, let us here and now remedy the historic injustice which Anatolia has suffered from this misplaced antagonism.

The era of scientific thought, begun by Anatolia, was interrupted by the imperialism of Sparta, Athens, Persia, Macedonia, and Rome. Fifteen centuries had to pass before another similar period could begin in western Europe. What happened in Anatolia in the meantime?

I should first like to consider whether the Anatolian civilizations, which succeeded one another before the birth of Christ, bequeathed a cultural heritage to the Turkey of today.

As I said earlier, the survival of a wide variety of cultural elements was made possible by the unity of the Anatolian peninsula as a whole, and the geographical diversity within it. Tradition has it that there have been no fewer than seventy oral languages in use up to the present time. On the other hand, both the (East) Roman and Ottoman Empires, being universal states, respected, preserved, and built upon existing cultures. The Seljuks, like the Romans before them, constructed roads, bridges, and caravansaries, and renovated and extended towns. They thus helped to create a unity of both space and culture. Most of these legacies have been inherited by the Turks.

I have already mentioned the political and moral unity of Anatolia forged by the Hittites. From their language, as well as from Luvian, we have retained some basic words.

Among the Hittites, as well as among the peoples of the Aegean civilization of the Anatolian coast, the woman was the equal partner of the man, not only within the family but also in the social context. Perhaps the reason goes back to Cybele and the Hittite queens. I should like to make two comments regarding this equality of status. Firstly, in today's Anatolia women also work to earn their living and thus share family responsibilities. However, contrary to appearances, it is the woman who, in her capacity as mother, predominates in family affairs. Thus she enjoys a discreet but natural respect on the part of the other members of the family. Secondly, it was this traditional respect for women which enabled Ataturk to introduce reforms concerning the rights of women and have them adopted by society without any resistance.

The Mother-Goddess survived in Turkish folklore as goddess of abundance. It is claimed that the Hittites took Cybele from the Sumerians. Her lover, called Attis (or Atys) among the Phrygians, and Adonis by the Greeks, was known as Tammouz among the Sumerians, whence our Temmuz, the Turkish name for the month of July. The most interesting folk dances of western Anatolia originated from the worship of Bacchus, god of the vine and of wine in the ancient Anatolian civilization. His name is not Indo-European, and his origin goes back to the Maeonians or to the Lydians, as is mentioned by Euripides in The Bacchantes.

In the region of Smyrna (Izmir), the Zeybeks dress in costumes of a very old design and perform a dance which imitates the gestures of the grape picker. The Zeybek makes a show of picking the grapes, putting them in the vat, treading them underfoot, and so forth. Similarly, several other folk dances in the Turkey of today have the cycle of the seasons as their central theme, and the god of fertility, called Atys, Adonis, or Dionysus, as their central figure. From Malatya's Dance of the Middle of Winter to the dance of the Zeybeks of Bitlis, all evoke the deadening of nature in winter and her re-awakening in the first signs of spring.

From the Cretan Minoans we adopted trousers baggy to the knee (our salvar), and from the Hittites the shoes with raised pointed toes (our çarzk) and the short-sleeved tunics which Anatolian peasants wear to this day.

Another very old tradition-already old at the time of Homer - is that of the bards who traveled throughout Anatolia singing their poems. After some centuries of eclipse, they reappeared in the Middle Ages, at the same time as in Europe. But whereas bards, troubadours, and minstrels disappeared in the West after the fifteenth century, Turkey still has them to this day.

The weaving of carpets is a very old tradition in Anatolia, as it is among the Turks of central Asia. The carpets woven in western Turkey, around Izmir and especially at Pergamum, are adorned with geometrical rather than floral motifs. This might well be due to the influence of the physiology who originated geometry in this region.

The modes of Turkish musique savante have also been influenced by the music of the regions which contributed to the Aegean civilization. In fact, the styles called rast and çargâh in Turkish are based on the Ionian prototype, ussak and buselik on the Aeolian prototype, neva and hüseyni on the Dorian prototype, and kürdi on the Phrygian prototype. Rhythm patterns (usul), including asymmetric types, were developed by the Turks based on Anatolian prototypes, firstly Aegean, then Byzantine.

Another tradition of Greek origin which has survived among us is the efe. The word comes from the Greek ephebos and denotes young people who, like the Zeybeks, practiced the handling and use of weapons in the mountains. After having undergone this training, they came down into the towns to take part in martial games in the temple of Dionysus, which served as a theatre. There are similarities between the organization and way of life of the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire and those of the efe. They were very active during our war of independence (1919-22). As to their games, they still have their place in present-day Turkish folklore. In the same way, the organizations called ahis during the Ottoman Empire- types of craft guilds which played an important role in bringing together Muslims and Christians, forming the corps of Janissaries and establishing colonies in conquered territories-functioned in the manner of brotherhoods of Anatolian bacchantes, or other societies such as the Hymnodoi and the Theologoi.

But what is perhaps more interesting is that the Janissary institution conceived by the Ottomans was the closest approximation to Plato's Republic. This system was based on the teaching of the guards, who later became either soldiers or the ruling élite.

Finally, as Arnold Toynbee noted, during the Byzantine period and up until the beginning of the westernization reforms undertaken by the Ottoman Empire towards the end of the eighteenth century, the cultural heritage of Anatolia continued to be predominantly Hittite, taking the form of a feudal empire which maintained the consensus and loyalty of its various subjects by respecting their customs and assuring them equality.

To sum up then, the language, music, folklore, legends, popular humour (Diogenes, Aesop, Hoca Nasreddin, and Bektasis), philosophy and mysticism (as will be seen later), social, political and military organization, architecture, dress, and the art of weaving, bore or still bear recognizable imprints of this earliest period. These elements live on within the cultural texture of the Anatolian, shaping his customs and his view of life.

The question to be answered here is not whether the Turks, after living for nearly a thousand years in this land, can claim the legacy of the ancient Anatolian civilizations, but rather to what extent they have inherited the Ionian/ Greek civilization, through which they can associate themselves with the Western world.

Until now I have dwelt extensively on the influence of Anatolia and Mespotamia on the culture of ancient Greece. Every important step in the progress of civilization entails the enlargement of the sphere of reason at the expense of magic, myth, absolutism, and superstition. In this respect, both the Neolithic revolution and the civilization of Mesopotamia represented great leaps forward for mankind. Nevertheless, in these two instances progress in technology and in the creation of institutions was achieved through practical reasoning. Only in Ionia first, and then in mainland Greece later, did rational inquiry force the limits of the sacred to the extreme. The theoretical knowledge thus generated was in turn put to use in further inquiry, and the findings of deductive reasoning were systematized. Only in those places was absolutism eliminated and the true individual was born, conscious both of himself and of his social and natural environment. Only there was the universe understood to behave according to laws, and was considered to be intelligible in terms of natural causes. In Mesopotamia, by contrast, divination, astrology, dream interpretation, and demonology were all built up into elaborate systems.

In this respect, present-day Turkey cannot lay claim to Greek rationalism. Indeed, no people, no country or continent can do so, because it is not a cultural legacy to be inherited, but a faculty which emerges under particular conditions. In the field of science even mainland Greece was not sufficiently Ionianized, and in philosophy Ionia was not fully Athenian.

Just as the oriental monarchy, typified by Persia, was the antithesis of the free mind and spirit of the Greeks, so the universal states of Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire (including the Eastern) were both distant from the attitudes of the Greek city-states. Despite the fact that the Christian religion was a Hellenized form of Semitic monotheism, it remained alien to Ionian reason until the Renaissance, even though, like Islam, it was fully acquainted with Greek philosophy and metaphysics. As we shall see later, Islam, by contrast, was very much at home with the Ionian scientific approach which gave birth to algebra and astronomy during the Islamic renaissance from the ninth to the twelfth centuries AD, so proving that the theoretical scientific mind and monotheism are not mutually exclusive.

It was only after the Italian Renaissance that the West fully assimilated Greek civilization. This was achieved through a classicist movement which occupied itself with the translation and study of ancient Greek masterpieces and used them as the intellectual stimulus for further creative activity. This fruitful process, which was made possible by abandoning certain religious premises, entailed to some degree a return to pre-Christian Hellenic intellectual attitudes. Thus Western civilization was not only considered to be based on that of the Greeks, but also regarded as being the continuation of it after an interval of fifteen centuries.

Personally, I doubt whether classicism of any kind could entitle anyone to make so wholesale a claim. Admittedly, in order to benefit from classicism a civilization needs to have some cultural common ground with its exemplar. Although Greek works have always been available to the Christian world, both Eastern and Western, unsuitable socio-cultural conditions kept the Christians from making use of them until the end of the twelfth century, when Arabic versions of Aristotle by Avicenna and Averroes became known in Latin translation. Not until a century later were these superseded by direct translations from the Greek. Muslims, however, while they had long had access to Arabic translations of Greek texts, never claimed a Greek ancestry for their civilization.

As I w ill discuss later, the classicist movement in Turkey was delayed for some while, though it was virtually completed before World War II, following the foundation of the secular Republic. The great works of antiquity, as well as those of the West, were translated and incorporated into the Republic's education system. While for the West classicism meant going back to a different time and place, for us it had only the temporal dimension. The place in question was our own country which, as I have explained, still has various aspects of this cultural heritage in its living tissues.

It is strange how this concept has been, and indeed still seems to be, inconsistent with the general perception of the categories East and West. How can we Turks, an Asiatic Muslim people living in Asia Minor, talk about the heritage of Ionia, and make a classicist attempt at Greek rationalism ?

The division between East and West started with Herodotus who, according to Muller:s presented the Persian war as a struggle between Europe and Asia. Ever since, the valid ideological distinction between East and West has been confused by a wholly artificial geographical distinction...

. . . the mainlanders (Greeks) were not less pleased to obscure the natural unity of the eastern Mediterranean world by flaunting the fiction of `Europe'. The Athenians in particular looked down on the Greeks in `Asia', and branded the superior sophistication of the Ionians as mere decadence.

But in the beginning, as I have said, Asia was only the name of the north-eastern province of Anatolia, which meant `east' in old and modern Greek, and Europe `west' was a corruption of the Phoenician word `ereb', meaning the dark quarter where the sun sets,9 although the Greeks, as they always did, made a mythology out of it. These were purely geographical locations, which nonetheless had the effect of leaving mainland Greece and the Greek coast of the Aegean as the centre of the universe, for they were neither East nor West by this definition. East, however, gradually acquired all the negative connotations representing irrational forces, hence the `enduring and eternal East', `undistinguished masses of peasants', absolutist kings, sinister barbarism, out of time and history, and out of progress.

If the main criterion in defining East and West is the prevalence of a reasoning free mind, free from irrational shackles, we should recognize that it corresponds neither to reality nor to the geographical division of Europe and Asia. Especially in medieval times, the Middle East was much more enlightened than Europe in this respect. Furthermore, no society, neither the Greek nor the Western, is free of irrational forces. The history of the twentieth century fully testifies to this fact. In any case, the question is one of degree, not nature, and even then only to a minimal extent. The `individual', who was very recently born into human civilization, is still in a very precarious situation. He can easily, as in the past, fall back into the abyss of the irrational.

The heroes of Troy are relatively much freer individuals than those of other and older civilizations. They are like gods, themselves subject to the impersonal necessity which governs the universe. Yet they seem dissociated from the vicious circle of sacrificial ritual to the Mother-Goddess and her consort. The religion of sky or mountain gods is a step forward in the birth of the individual. Later Greek civilization, in the period of its decline, relapsed into the earth religion.

Although Paris of Troy broke the cardinal rule of respect for the host by abducting his wife, the Achaean leader Agamemnon, who was there to take revenge for his brother, broke a similar rule right at the beginning of the epic by taking Achilles's slave-girl. Hence the struggle between the two parties at once lost its meaning, and because of its repetitive nature (endless assaults and retreats on both sides, resulting in the death of heroes) acquired the appearance of sterile dialectic. Later we see this pattern of dialectical hostile relations in the Greek city-state and the European nation-state systems; or, in the words of Toynbee, in the `pre-Christian Hellenic' and `post- Christian Western' eras. It seems that the same sterile dialectical relationship, that is to say the interaction between two sides (thesis and anti-thesis) without producing a synthesis or conclusion, has become characteristic of relations not only between states but also between different political, philosophical, and religious movements. This is what Edgar Morin calls `dialogical' (in the sense of endless dialectical struggles by more than two players) in order to identify the main feature of Western civilization.

Apparently, the birth of the individual in Homer's Iliad coincided with the replacement of the vicious circle of the sacrificial ritual of the earth religion with that of a sterile dialectical struggle. It remains to be seen whether the European Community will be able to change this fate of the West and consequently of mankind, or continue to play the same game on a greater scale. This is of the utmost importance, for in history the faithful repetition of the Trojan prototype has consumed the energies of civilizations and caused them to regress to fascist and communist ideologies reminiscent, in essence, of the earth religion. In the present state of humanity, humility rather than arrogance is called for. The technological advances of our time should not dazzle our vision, lest they become instrumental in fulfilling irrational desires or distract us from searching for our true souls.

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