Date:4/17/08
PHILANTHROPY IN THE GREEK WORLD*
Demetrios J. Constantelos, Ph.D., D.D.**
Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
First, let us define our terms. What is philanthropy? Philanthropy is composed of three words: Philein ton anthropon- to love the human being. In the course of centuries, the term philanthropia has become a synonym to agape (love), charity, benevolence, good will, unselfishness
What do we mean by the terms Greek world? Certainly not Greece proper. In ancient times Miletos and Ephesos in Asia Minor, Acragas and Syracuse in Sicily, Naples and Tarantas in Southern Italy, Massalia in Gaul and Cyrene in North Africa were as much Greek, or Hellenic, as Sparta in the Peloponessos, Athens in Attica, Thebes in Boeotia, Demetrias and Pagasai in Thessaly, Pella and Thessaloniki in Macedonia, Apollonia and Byzantion in Thrace.
It is well known that Asia Minor, present day Turkey was filled with Greek cities and by the sixth century of our era, as the synecdemos of Ieroklis indicates, and modern scholarship confirms, it was fully Hellenized. Millions of Greeks there survived down to the 20th century. Likewise, Greek cities in the West, and elsewhere, retained their linguistic and cultural identity. Southern Italy, Acragas in Sicily, Massalia and Lyon in Gaul, Cyrene in Libya, Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria are good illustrations. This is not to deny the fact that non-Greeks, perioikoi resided in many of those Greek cities. Whether in antiquity or during the Roman and the Byzantine centruries, the Greeks were spread out like frogs around the Mediterranean lake.
Under Roman rule and its successor state, the Byzantine Empire, the Greek world was a continuation of the Greek world as it had developed after the classical age, the age of Alexander the Great and his successors. Even though the triumph of Christianity deprived the Greeks of their Hellenic national name for several centuries, they still remained attached with uncompromising loyalty to their language, literature, cultural consciousness. As citizens of the old Roman Empire, they viewed themselves as Romans, Romaioi, Romioi, but they neither spoke Latin nor read Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius or other Latin authors.
Unlike the name Hellene, which was identified with paganism, the name Greek was used extensively during the Byzantine millennium. People of various races and nations, in both the East and the West, called them with their ancient names. Latins, Germanic tribes, Franks but also Russians, Khazarian Jews, called the Byzantines Greeks, and the Byzantine Empire Graecia. Near Eastern people, Armenians, Georgians, Semites of different backgrounds called them Yoyn, Yavani, or Yunani, that is Ionians and their Empire as Yunastan, Yavan that is Ionia. Arabic sources do not differentiate between the ancient and Byzantine Greeks. They emphasized the unity and the continuity of the Greek, or Hellenic, world. For practical purposes I prefer to speak, of non-Christian, and Christian Hellenism.
Unity in diversity was a major characteristic of the ancient Greeks – a unity through language, religious beliefs, ethnic consciousness and cultural traditions. Modern anthropologists concerned with physical life, remind us that the growth, development, and continuity of a culture does not necessarily change with the adoption of a new religion. A new religion may be the product of its founder but its propagation can not be understood outside of its milieu. Its ultimate growth depends on the thought world on which it is drafted. Old beliefs and moral principles reappear transformed, nevertheless essentially the same. Concepts such as philanthropia, philoxenia, dikaiosyne, isonomia that we find in ancient Greek theory and practice contributed to the formation of the ethos of Hellenism of the Christian era and beyond.
In the last seventy five years, if not earlier, we have gone far beyond the disputes, when Christian theologians claimed that the ancient world did not know any love, and classical scholars who maintained that Christianity was the cause for the decline of the classical world. Today we know that many of the leading ideas of Christianity were not alien and totally unfamiliar to later Hellenism. We now know that the cleavage between Hellenism and Christianity was not as great and disruptive between the two. We know what Hellenism received from Christianity and how much Christianity owes to Hellenism.
Even after the condemnation of Athens and what it represented by some early Christian theologians, such as Tertullian and Tatian, who sought to replace Athens with Jerusalem, Athens continued to influence the descendents of Jerusalem, both Jews and Christians. “The damned pagans,” Socrates and Plato, Aristotle and Zeno were perceived as instruments for God’s purposes. Faith and reason were not antithetical.
Furthermore we know that there are several other indications, literary and cultural, that confirm this continuity of Hellenism, including their understanding and practice of the communion of the human with the Divine. From as early as the Homeric times, sacramental communion is perceived as communion of the worshipper with the Divinity. The blood sacrifice evolved into ta apyra iera, sacred sacrifices offered with no fire used such as cereals and fruits, bread and wine, used by Clement of Alexandria to describe the sacrifice of Christ. The partaking of the blessed bread and the cup of wine used in Greek antiquity has entered into the Christian mystical and liturgical lexicon. Whether the theanthropic and anemaktos thysia that we find in ancient Greek religious practices, or the Eucharistic communion of Christian practice, both emphasize its necessity for the Communion of the believer with the Divinity.
But this is a different topic, not for discussion here. My purpose is to explain, how the idea and practice of Hellenic philanthropia, drafted into Christian agape, constitutes an indication of the continuity in the Hellenic heritage.
A
For the concept of philanthropy we have to go back to the classical age of ancient Hellenism. The Greek tragedian Aeschylus reminds us that Prometheus, the demigod, decided to bring to earth fire and empower humans with knowledge and skills because of his great philantrhopia for the future of humankind. He was bound to a crag and had his liver eaten daily, an image often identified with crucifixion, because of his love for humans. Centuries later, Paul of Tarsus wrote that the philanthropia of God for the salvation of humankind became manifest through the incarnation of God’s Logos (Titus 3:4). The practical application of philanthropy is related by Luke in the Book of Acts with reference to the attitude of the natives of Malta toward Paul and other prisoners on their way to Rome (Acts 27-28.11). In both cases, the torment of Prometheus and the crucifixion of Jesus the Christ were attributed to their philanthropia for humanity.
The Divinity’s love for humankind is expressed through other terms: agapao, agape, agapetos, and phileo, philios, philotes, from which we have the term philanthropia—philein ton anthropon, to love the human being. While agapao and agape are rarely used in the Homeric epics and the later Greek literature, phileo, philios, philotes appear four times as often as agapao, agape. It is in the post classical literature of both Greeks and Greek-speaking Jews—the Suptuagint, New Testament, papyri, Plutarch, and others—that agape and philanthropia appear as synonyms.
Even in the so-called Koine Greek, and the Christian patristic language, philanthropia as a theocentric concept appears more frequently than agape. Both terms were used to stress that humans must imitate the Divine and extend their love not only to kin and friends, but to all in need of love, whether in expression of word or in practical application. The word philanthropia became a standard term in the transition between pagan and Christian Hellenism—intentionally appealing to the past in Christianity’s self-presentation. In Homer’s Odyssey, “a stranger in need,” a xenos, a suppliant, was held to be equal to a brother. A stranger must be received with philanthropy because he or she was God’s agent.
Centuries later Plato emphasized that the virtue of philanthropia is manifest in various ways, humans must practice philanthropia to achieve inner satisfaction and to improve society. The doretes, the philanthropist, benefits twice—first, because of the inner satisfaction that comes with giving, and second, because he (or she) is helping fellow humans.
Plato’s emphasis on the need for philanthropia did not remain a philosophical yearning. He condemned the existence of poverty, which he considered an impediment to a happy society. “There must be no place for poverty in any section of the population, nor yet of opulence, as both breed either consequence.” In a democracy poverty is not disgraceful but as a source of illiberality and evil becomes an impediment to innovation and progress. In a genuine democracy “neither is a man rejected because of weakness, poverty or obscurity or origin, nor honored by reason of the opposite.
Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, stressed the importance of justice, condemned poverty, and stressed that extremes of wealth and poverty could undermine democracy. The only way to prevent social conflicts and civil wars is to establish just balance and fair distribution of goods and resources. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, outlines Aristotle’s views on philanthropy, social justice, and relative or proportionate equality under the law based on social status; Aristotle’s Politics 3.1-10 offers a similar discussion. Beliefs and teachings, those of Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, were inherited and sustained habitually and unreflectively. Few are the cases of people who change religious allegiance because of intellectual or spiritual questioning. Those Greeks who converted to Christianity came from a climate where the teachings and the practices of the ancient Greeks were familiar to them. Were Plato’s teachings on virtue, justice, and soul less Christian than the teachings of the Scriptures? “Asclepius is good for the body but Plato for the immortal soul,” writes Plato’s disciple Heraclides of Pontus. Was Aristotle’s emphasis on social justice, his views that material insufficiency hinders democracy and is a cause of social uprisings and the roots of civil wars, less Christian than the ethics of the Bible?
Whether for selfish or patriotic reasons there were many philanthropists in Athens and in other Greek city-states. Solon, Pisistratus, Themistocles, Callias, and Cimon were highly regarded for their philanthropies. For example, Plutarch writes that Solon’s father was a wealthy man but that he used much of his wealth for philanthropies and the common good, to the extent that Solon inherited little, and when impoverished, he was embarrassed to seek assistance and was forced to turn to trade and earn a living from an early age (Solon 2). Athenians, such as Cimon, Ephialtes, and Aristides, were not only outstanding civil servants but also popular because of their philanthropic policies.
Philanthropy was not practiced by Athenians only. For example, it was customary for Cretans to honor strangers by giving them first place at dinner. The xenos is still the unknown god in Crete, and elsewhere. The ethics on philoxenia is sacred to the present day in the Greek world. But giving in ancient Greece was not done without any discrimination. It was given to those who were regarded as deserving it. Idle beggars were turned away. Plutarch relates that when a beggar asked for charity from a Spartan, the Spartan answered: “If I were to give you, you would become poorer. Your present miserable condition was caused by the first person who gave you and made you lazy.” Concerning discrimination in giving, as we indicated before, Aristotle writes that to give away money is an easy matter and in any man’s power, but to decide to whom to give it, and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man’s power nor an easy matter (Nicomachean Ethics 7.3.14-4.6 and 8.9.5-14.4). Hence, to achieve such excellence is rare, praiseworthy, and noble.
Pisistratus, the Athenian archon, enjoyed the reputation of a man moderate in his way of life and generous toward his fellow citizens. He had no fences around his properties and had no guards around his gardens. Anyone who wanted to pick crops and fruits from his estates was free to do so. Cimon was also highly praised for his magnanimous and philanthropic attitude toward his fellow Athenians, the poor in particular. Cimon had stationed no guards in any of his fields and gardens, so that any citizen who wanted could go in and receive. Furthermore, he had an open house, preparing plain meals for many, inviting the poor people in particular to dinner. He would distribute money to the poor every day and provide for the burial of others. If he saw someone badly dressed, he would give them money to buy better clothes.
Two brief illustrations of benevolent cities outside of the Greek chersonese. Aristotle writes about the benevolent people of Tarentum and praised the city’s social system, which had measures to help the poor. He commended Tarentum as a city for imitation. The historian Deodoros Sikeliotes writes of the benevolent and altruistic character of Acragas and its citizens. The philosopher Empedocles (492-432) praised Acragas as “havens of mercy” and its citizens as “people unacquainted with evil.” In any case, Greek cities, which had experimented with various political systems, continued to be united linguistically and culturally. Social and ethical values remained bonds of unity and identity.
In brief, the needs of the suffering were a matter of both private and public, personal and collective responsibility, individual and community benevolence. If the standard of measuring the value of a culture is not the military power or the magnitude of scientific achievements but the extent of reverence, compassion, justice, and philanthropy, ancient Greek culture deserves high grades. Thus when Plutarch writes that Cimon’s philanthropia surpassed even the traditional philanthropia of Athens, he drew from the history of Athens and his own observations. The spirit of material generosity (euergetism) among the ancient Greeks was always related to religious faith and practice. Were the choregoi of the postclassical Hellenic era, the so called Hellenistic, less philanthropic than those of the Christian church? The choregoi, known also as euergetai, assumed the expenses for schools, athletic competitions, and public events, such as liturgies for the penetes, the poor, but also for the metoikoi (the resident aliens). Some choregoi were motivated by altruistic, humanitarian, or patriotic spirit. Others, however, made their philanthropies not for a gain in heaven or eternal salvation, but for self-display and vainglory. In a sense the choreoi can be designated as philanthropists.