Overall I’ve always been pleased with Bertrands’ attempt to show the chaotic spiritual mess that was early Greece. In chapter one he does a decent job of showing several very non-traditional views of early Greek spiritual beliefs. In my opinion the chapter is only too sparse in showing the breadth and amazing detail of all the tribal cults and practices of the area we now know as Greece. In particular the focus on the cult of Bacchus and it’s slow transformation through reformers into Orphism and the eventual move towards what became called the ‘philosophical life’ of Pythagoras is somewhat lacking in detail.

More importantly I find that Bertrand pointing out the key difference that Greeks saw between civilized men, who have prudence, and uncivilized men, who have only indulgence, to be the most important point made in the chapter. This development of perspective is very different from other conceptions of ‘civilized and uncivilized’ in the world at that time.

Being very familiar with the time period, I would like to point out that Bertrand didn’t have the precision of knowledge of the evolution of writing in the ancient world that we have today. It should be noted that the art of writing began in Summeria, with pictograms, around 8,000 B.C. long before the Egyptians started using pictograms. And that the alphabet was most likely first developed by foreign workers/mercenaries in Egypt as a development of Egyptian stone writing (2,000 B.C.), which was a technical writing form that had very little relation to the priestly scripts of higher Egyptian writing of the time. The Phoenicians are believed to have evolved this writing system into their formal alphabet somewhere between 2,000 and 1,000 B.C. The earliest Greek alphabets are currently traced to about 800B.C. (although the Minoan linear B script is arguably a Greek language).