Two Lots of Greeks

When you come to Athens by air in daylight, you look down on the ruins of one of the most famous buildings in the world: the Parthenon, standing on the Acropolis, the rocky hill in the heart of Athens. Next day, perhaps, you go to the National Museum in Athens, and the likelihood is that the very first things you look at there are golden necklaces, masks, jewellery and inlaid daggers excavated a century ago from the royal graves at Mycenae.If you imagined that the austere marble grandeur of the Parthenon and the intricate opulence of the gold from Mycenae are simply two different aspects of the same civilisation, the products of two different arts practised at the same time, you would be going wrong right at the start. They actually represent two different civilisations a thousand years apart. A thousand years is a long time, longer than from the Norman Conquest to our own day, and whatever is said about 'the ancient Greeks' in sweeping general terms is going to be no more secure, no more immune to criticism and qualification and reconsideration, than what the future will say about 'the English'.

The Greeks, the people who came to call themselves Hellenes, can be defined as the people who spoke the language we call 'Greek'. There were plenty of them in Greece soon after 2,000 BC. Where they came from is a controversial question, but there's nothing unusual, let alone mysterious, about that; after all, everyone comes from somewhere else, if you go back far enough.

About 1600 BC fortified palaces were built at a number of places in Greece. The most famous of these sites is at Mycenae; for that reason the Greeks who built and inhabited them are nowadays called 'Mycenaeans', and their time the 'Mycenaean period'. Their ruling class was rich; their artists and craftsmen were skilful; and their administrative organisation was elaborate. They developed a system of writing, but they seem to have used it only for inventories and other administrative records. There is a limit to what can be said about a past people to whose thoughts and feelings we have no direct access through literature, laws or private documents. From archaeological evidence we can discover what crops they grew or how they built houses, and we can draw plenty of inferences about their religious practices; but we cannot know what they were really like.

Mycenaean civilisation endured for the best part of four centuries. It faded out in the period 1200-1100 BC: not submerged under any cataclysmic invasion from outside, but shredded by turbulent movements of peoples within Greece, an endless series of wars, the destruction of the fortified palaces, and the replacement, in one locality after another, of rulers who valued the arts by rulers who did not. The Mycenaean writing-system survived in a modified form far away in Cyprus, but in Greece and the Aegean it was forgotten. Good building ceased; craftsmanship degenerated. In pottery, the history of which we can follow right through because it is abundant and its fabric does not decompose, decoration became crude and naïve.

Then, between 800 and 700 BC, the Greek world comes to life for us in a new form. We see it first, as we might expect, in decorated pottery, where design becomes sensitive, elegant and ambitious. The alphabet is invented by adaptation of the writing-system used in Syria, and from then on literature is transmitted in writing. The 'real' Greeks, who have been with us ever since, have come into view, the Greeks whose civilisation generated great sculpture, drama, democracy and philosophy.

ISo, two lots of Greeks, separated by a trough of four centuries; and the link between them is Homer.

Homer was regarded by the Greeks as the supreme composer of epics, long narrative poems. Two such poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, came to be treated as belonging in a class by themselves, and they are the only two (out of many) which have survived. Where and when Homer himself lived is a question about which the Greeks themselves disagreed so much that it is obvious they never had any good evidence; but for various reasons it is hard to push him back much beyond 700 BC, and his true date may be a bit later. His poetry was not about events of his own time, but about great men and wars of a remote age: above all, about the alliance of the states of the southern mainland of Greece, led by Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, against the city of Troy, on the Asiatic side of the Aegean.

Politically and geographically, the Greece of the Iliad is much more like Mycenaean Greece than anything that existed in Homer's own time. Many centres of power and wealth in Mycenaean Greece, such as Pylos and Mycenae itself, are important in Homer's poetry, but they had become negligible long before Homer. From about 1000 BC there were many Greek cities on the Asiatic coast of the Aegean, but in the world that Homer portrays that area is Greekless. In the Iliad Agamemnon's army and the Trojans fight with weapons of bronze, as the Mycenaeans did, but Homer's contemporaries fought with iron. In other words, the framework of the story which Homer tells is a very old one, and so are some of the details; but a great deal else in it belongs much later than the Mycenaeans.

When Schliemann excavated Mycenae a hundred years ago and found rich royal graves, he thought he was proving Homer's story true. Finding a gold mask in one grave, he was convinced he had 'looked upon the face of Agamemnon'. Unfortunately, the dates don't work out. Thanks to widespread systematic excavation of Mycenaean sites and the discovery of many links between Mycenaean artefacts and the cultures of the ancient Near East, we know immeasurably more about the Mycenaean period than Schliemann could know, and no one would now feel any confidence in putting a name to the man upon whose mask Schliemann gazed. It belongs to about 1550 BC. Now, the Greeks themselves made different estimates of the date of the Trojan War, but their most favoured pointed to the neighbourhood of 1200 BC. Excavation of Troy indicates that somebody burned it about that time, though of course the remains of a burned city don't tell us who burned it. The Greek estimates were based on the genealogies of noble families who claimed descent from Agamemnon or other heroes. We have some of these genealogies, and we can see for ourselves that (for what it is worth) they imply a date for the Trojan War in the period 1200-1100 BC, certainly not earlier.

Maybe there once lived eminent Greeks bearing the names of Homer's heroes--Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus and so on. Maybe they belonged to the time when Troy was destroyed. But in all human cultures tradition and legend so often run together famous names and famous events from quite different periods that Agamemnon or any other of Homer's heroes could as well belong to a time later than the Trojan War or much earlier. Homer links the first lot of Greeks to the second in the sense that he reveals to us the picture of the first lot which was entertained by the second. It was a picture of a rich, adventurous past, a heroic age, and down to the end of pagan Greek civilisation it furnished the staple material of serious poetry and drama.

The Barbarian Context

Greece in ancient times was never a nation; it never had a capital, a government or a single ruling element. The typical Greek-speaking sovereign state was a tribe cultivating an area of land separated from the next cultivable area by a range of rocky hills or mountains. Somewhere on its land it created or inherited a concentration of buildings, surrounded by a defensive wall and, if possible, clustered round a fortified hill. There were hundreds of communities of this kind in Greece, many of them no larger than Kirriemuir or Lambourne, but each one a sovereign state making its own laws and very commonly in a state of war with one of its neighbours.

Nothing brings this home to us more vividly than standing on the citadel of Mycenae, on a day that is not too hot and hazy, and looking southwards. Only seven miles away the rocky citadel of Argos soars up from the plain. Look a little to the left, and you see the flat top of the fortifications of Tiryns, only ten miles away. For centuries these three places were independent sovereign states; but they are closer together than, say, Aylesbury, Berkhamsted and Leighton Buzzard.

'City' and 'city-state' may seem misleading ways of translating the Greek term (polis) for the independent sovereign community, because so few of those communities had a concentration of population of a size that we would nowadays call a 'city', but it would be more troublesome to use one word for big sovereign communities, another for small ones, and argue over what we should call the middle-sized.

What the Greek cities had in common was their language and the community of culture which followed from community of language: interstate festivals of which religion, art and athletics were ingredients; temples and sanctuaries respected by all; free movement of artists and poets; the easy dissemination of ideas. People were thought of as Greeks if their native language was Greek, and not otherwise. Those whose native language was not Greek were called barbaroi, 'barbarians'. This became a derogatory word (and has remained so) when the Greeks acquired the firm conviction that their own culture and way of life were much better than anybody else's; but that conviction took a long time to grow.

It would be very surprising if it had not taken a long time; for whatever the achievements of the Greeks, they certainly did not create ancient civilisation, and as comparatively late arrivals on the ancient scene they did not lack respect for what they found already there. Karl Marx, a lifelong devotee of the Classics, once wrote about the Greeks: 'Why shouldn't the childhood of human society--the stage at which it attained its most attractive development--exercise an eternal charm, as an age that will never return ?' In 1857, when he wrote those words, good progress had been made for some time with the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions and papyri, and the decisive steps in the decipherment of Babylonian inscriptions had just been taken, but when people thought of 'the ancient world' they had in mind the Greeks, Romans and Hebrews, not the Egyptians and Babylonians. Nowadays it would seem odd to assign Socrates and the Parthenon to 'the childhood of human society'. Seen against a background of the whole history of human-like creatures living in groups and using tools, fire, colour and language, Socrates was around only yesterday; he is virtually our contemporary. Placed in the context of the history of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, he stands no nearer to the beginnings of civilisation than he does to us. Two and a half thousand years before Socrates was born the inhabitants of ancient Egypt and of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) had evolved systems of writing and the distinctive styles of art, work and life which generated ancient civilisation.

A summary description or tabulated chart of the history of the ancient world down to the time of the Greeks can be cast either in terms of culture and its diffusion or in terms of power and wealth. Part of the time, especially in the first thousand years, it makes little difference, but it makes quite a difference later. A table displaying rise, peak and decline in terms of virtue and wisdom is, I fear, impracticable.

Let's take the first thousand years for granted and begin at 2000 BC. At that time Egypt was one of the two great centres of power, wealth and culture; the other was Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is rather complicated: two quite different languages were spoken there, Sumerian and Akkadian, the latter a 'Semitic' language (related to Hebrew and Arabic) and destined gradually to replace Sumerian. Mesopotamia was, moreover, still a region of city-states; the unified kingdoms of 'Babylonia' and 'Assyria' had not yet taken shape. Greece and the Aegean are off the edge of the world dominated by Egypt and Mesopotamia, but not in cultural darkness: on the island of Crete the Minoans, builders of the great palaces at Knossos and elsewhere, were developing a sophisticated and quite distinctive culture of their own.

Now come down half a millennium, to the time of Mycenae at its richest. There is a third centre of power and wealth in Asia, the Hittite Empire in what is now Turkey. Mycenaean civilisation has flourished by assimilating the arts and techniques of the Minoans. Eventually it takes over Crete. At the same time as Mycenaean civilisation begins to fade out (and with it, necessarily, the Minoan component which it had taken over), the Hittite Empire dissolves and is succeeded by a number of smaller power-centres.

The period of four centuries which I have described as a 'trough' in the history of the Greek world, a 'dark age', was not that in the Near East. A great military power arose: the kingdom of Assyria, insatiable, ruthless, resilient, ruled by frightful men who were great builders and patrons of the arts and (a thing for which historians bless them) addicted to the compilation of archives and the publication of garrulous inscriptions. The Assyrians reached the Mediterranean, intimidated Egypt and inflicted great sufferings on (among many others) a small people in Palestine whose religion and literature were destined to matter much more in human history than anything the Assyrian kings had ever done (though no one knew that yet).

While the Assyrian lion rampaged in Asia, the Greek mice multiplied and spread. Early in the 'dark age' they migrated in force across the Aegean and established cities on the big offshore islands and in many coastal areas. In the 700s and 600s BC they planted cities in the northern Aegean, the Black Sea, Sicily and South Italy, and eastern Libya. These 'colonies', as they are usually called, were not such in the sense that they were administered by the cities that sent them out, but new and independent city-states. A mother-city often wished, and sometimes tried, to exercise control over its colonies, but usually failed; on occasion, mother-city and colony went to war against each other. The effect of the era of Greek colonisation, which slowed down after the middle of the 500s but never entirely stopped, was to make the Greek world a linguistic and cultural unity which was spatially discontinuous. The maps on pages xi and xii show how the Greek cities were distributed in 500 BC and the enormous extent of something that came into existence entirely between 600 and 500 BC: the Persian Empire.

One of the strangest things, at first sight, about the centuries of Assyrian domination is the frequency of rebellion against Assyria. The consequences of unsuccessful rebellion were often horrible; yet the resilience and tenacity of Assyria in the face of difficulties was matched by the irrepressible optimism of other peoples in combining against her (this time, they always thought, their gods would favour them). In the end they turned out to be right. Babylonia, in alliance with the Medes, a people who lived in the north-west quarter of what is now Iran, succeeded in capturing and destroying Nineveh, and suddenly Assyrian power vanished for ever. The Medes were one part of a complex of peoples speaking Indo-European languages closely related to the ancient languages of northern India. The other part of the complex was the Persians, and it was the Persian king who became not only ruler of the whole complex but also, within the space of a single generation, the heir to all the monarchies of the Near East. Babylonia, Egypt, all the cities and lands of Syria and Asia Minor, collapsed under Persian attack. By 520 BC the Persian Empire was the greatest centralised power the world had yet seen.

This was the point of imminent confrontation between Greek and 'barbarian'. Not, of course, the first conflict; wherever a Greek settlement was planted, intermittent warfare with the local peoples was an accepted risk, and there were Greek disasters. Moreover, some of the Greek cities in the eastern Aegean had become subjects of the king of Lydia in the early 600s, and when Lydia was brought into the Persian Empire so were they. Part of the population of one city, Phokaia, migrated westwards rather than surrender to the Persians, and settled in Corsica. They didn't last long there, because they encountered the hostility of two enemies much more formidable than local tribes: the Etruscans of central Italy, and Carthage (the modern Tunis). The Greek world, fragmentary and discontinuous as it was, had come up against a barrier, in east and west alike, which was not just a limitation on further spreading but carried an implicit threat of subjugation by 'barbarians'.

Prizes for Coming First

I mentioned in the last section a dozen ancient peoples, and a more detailed story would have mentioned a lot more: Elamites, Mitannians, Urartians, Phrygians.... So: why always the Greeks?

Not so long ago many teachers in western Europe told their pupils that Greek was a uniquely subtle and expressive language, Greek art a set of unsurpassable models and Greek philosophy the foundation of wisdom. Their acquaintance with other languages and other artistic and philosophical traditions was hardly sufficient to furnish them with good arguments in favour of these propositions, so they had to use bad arguments instead. With every day that passes there are more things apart from Greek to be interested in, and a wider variety of models available to the artist and writer; and even if the first step in philosophy was taken by the Greeks, a modern philosopher can still take the hundredth by starting from the ninety-ninth.

Most readers of Greek literature in translation discover that it has great merits. But more than English or French literature? So much more that we should read it instead? There cannot be many professional classicists today who would be so arrogant as to say, 'Yes, instead!' We are more likely to rest content with the observation that the ancient Greek world presents us with one interesting civilisation, one great literature, which will stand comparison with any others.

To many people 'ancient' is an off-putting word, because the world has changed so much in our time as to create an assumption that no ancient writer can ever be dealing with the same human experience. Make the contrary assumption before you read any Greek literature, and see how it works out. You may sometimes encounter observations which have been overlaid for a long time and needed to be made afresh. For example, I learn from the Science Journal of April 1968 that a series of experiments has demonstrated that the sight of a weapon can exacerbate aggressive feelings. This was expressed in a proverb, twice used by Homer: 'iron, of itself, draws a man after it'.

Different people have criticised classical education for different reasons. Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651 that 'there was never any thing so dearly bought, as these western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues'--because Greek and Roman notions of 'liberty' encourage people, he thought, in impudent attempts to control their sovereign rulers. Another eminent English philosopher, John Locke, writing in 1695, decried the teaching of Latin verse composition in school on the grounds that it might encourage in a boy a vein of poetry disastrously incompatible with hard-headed money-making. Locke still thought that Latin was essential in the education of a gentleman. Sentiments of that kind, coupled with the fact that it takes time and a lot of hard work to learn to read Greek and Latin fluently, have led to vilification of classical studies as 'élitist'. Well, I despise the use of thought-substitutes ending in -ism and -ist, but if Greek is élitist, that's one up to élitism.

A more serious hostility to classical studies is founded on the charge that Greek society is a bad model: slave-owning, contemptuous of women and addicted to war. A Black Power spokesman said:

We are told that Western Civilisation begins with the Greeks, and the epitome of that is Alexander the Great. The only thing that I can remember about Alexander the Great was that at age twenty-six he wept because there were no other people to kill, murder and plunder. And that is the epitome of Western Civilisation.

Greek society is certainly a bad model in some ways. So is every other known society, in some ways. I am more interested in the ways in which any given society is a good model.

A casual acquaintance with the ancient world suggests that there were a great many things which the Greeks did, said and thought for the very first time in human history. To sustain such a claim takes a lot more than casual acquaintance, because the assertion, for instance, that 'the Greeks were the first people to think that matter might be made of indestructible particles' implies 'No Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hittite, Israelite, Phoenician, etc., had ever thought that matter might be made of indestructible particles'. That proposition is one which, although it could be disproved by a single datum, could never conceivably be proved. By the time we had found it to be valid in respect of ancient oriental texts discovered so far, more texts would have been published; many more still, untranslated, even unread, would have piled up in museums; and new and controversial interpretations of some existing texts would have been put forward. In offering opinions on what the Greeks did for the first time, I can only do my best and hope that the reader will always understand phrases like 'So far as I know' and 'On the evidence up to date'. There is the further complication that many interesting things were done and said and thought in ancient times in China. I confess that I know nothing about ancient China. I know nothing about basketball or biochemistry, either, but that can't be helped; life is short, and even the joy of learning palls at times. Fortunately, since I am concerned with what happened down to 300 BC at the latest, and to a great extent with what happened before 500 BC, I risk very little by saying boldly that the Greeks and the Near East were part of our history, and ancient China was not; nor, for all practical purposes, was ancient India. So, when I say 'the first time' I shall mean 'the first time in our history'.

We have already seen that the Greeks did not exist in a vacuum. Their civilisation took shape at a certain time and place, in a long-established context. Anything we say about them may turn out to be true of their entire context as well, or it may be true of them alone; without looking to see, we cannot know in advance which will turn out to be the case.

Obviously, if we browse through the literature and the documents of the ancient Eastern civilisations, we shall constantly be struck by reminders of the Greeks. Many of the things we notice will turn out to be ideas and practices shared by the Greeks not simply with their forerunners but also with any number of other cultures, past and present, and curious to us only because our own technological culture is so different from everything, everywhere, that has gone before. For example, a Hittite inscription which gives the wording of a very elaborate oath of loyalty taken by soldiers includes many passages of the following kind:

Then he places wax and mutton fat in their hands. He throws these ona flame and says, 'Just as this wax melts, and just as the mutton fat dissolves--whoever breaks these oaths and shows disrespect to the king of the Hatti land, let him melt like wax, let him dissolve like mutton fat.' The men declare, 'So be it!'

Seven hundred years later Homer describes the making of a truce between the Greeks and the Trojans. A truce requires an oath, so they sacrifice two lambs and pour a libation of wine to the gods.

And men said among the Greeks and Trojans, 'Zeus, mightiest and most glorious, and all the immortal gods--whichever side first violates the oath, may their brains flow upon the ground just as this wine flows, their brains and their children's, and may their wives become the spoil of others!'

Not only religious practices but ingredients of myths and poetic motifs surface in two or more ancient civilisations, sometimes over long periods of time. What we are looking for is things which surface for the very first time in Greek civilisation; and preferably things of real importance or, if trivial, at least carrying important implications. We shall not, if we are prudent, spend too long seeking these things in mathematics and applied science; until comparatively recently, the achievements of the Greeks in those fields have been somewhat overrated and those of the older Eastern civilisations underrated. True, the Greeks did invent the alphabet, and this very simple system of twenty-four signs meant that far more people could read and write in the Greek world than in Egypt or Mesopotamia, which used writing-systems of subtle beauty but horrible complexity. But the Greek set of signs was taken from Syria, at some time well before 700 BC, and the inhabitants of Syria and Palestine had for a long time used a simple system whose only drawback was that it left out short vowels. The Greeks remedied that by using for vowels some of the signs they did not need for consonants, an essential step if the system was to be practicable for Greek, but by no means the most inventive step, which was the substitution of simplicity for complexity.

In the arts, it is open to us to prefer Greek epic poetry to Mesopotamian, or Greek lyric and dramatic poetry to Egyptian, and open to us to wonder whether Egyptian oratory, though an art-form developed for discriminating audiences, was really as subtle as Greek. These are matters of more and less, not of total Greek innovation. The speed and exuberance of Greek experiment in the visual arts come in a different category; I shall revert to them in chapters 3 and 4. Experiment is even more conspicuous in the organisation of society and the exercise of the intellect.

Democracy was certainly Greek. Shaky and partial, but still recognisably a major step towards equality under the law and the participation of people in the taking of decisions which affected their lives. Democracy was not, of course, designed by a committee round a table. It was a product of Greek behaviour, for the unruly Greek tribes did not bring with them into Greece the habit of throwing themselves on their faces before a ruler or addressing him in the formulae of adulation. The world portrayed by Homer is a world ruled by kings, but one of its remarkable features is the freedom with which lesser men speak their minds to greater men; they risk anger, abuse and violence, but the risk has more in common with prodding a bull than with ridiculing the sacraments. Democracy was a logical consequence of irreverence.

When the Greeks borrowed arts and techniques from their venerable Eastern neighbours, they showed no inclination to invest their big men with the frightening aura of divinity which belonged to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings. That servility was not in fact a universal characteristic of ancient man, but a special development, slow in growth, of centralised monarchies. It may well be that if we go further back in time, to the early cities of Mesopotamia, we find something more like the Greek city-states. Seventeen centuries before Homer, two thousand years before Plato, a Mesopotamian king, Urukagina of Lagash, boasted of how he had reformed age-old abuses, ended unjust oppression and 'restored freedom' to the people of his city. The Sumerian word translated 'freedom', amargi, is plainly a good thing, of which one boasts, and some five centuries later another Mesopotamian legislator is praised for 'procuring the amargi of the sons and daughters of Ur...., upon whom servitude had been imposed'. I understand that Urukagina's document is the earliest surviving text in the world containing a word which we can translate as 'freedom'.' But there are many different freedoms. Amargi, like the Akkadian word which translates it in bilingual documents, covers manumission of slaves, remission of debts and immunity from taxation. If we were to say that the Sumerians instituted the practice of free speech between free men, we would need to ask first, 'Did amargi include freedom to criticise the ruler who conferred amargi?'; and unless we could see reason to think that it did, we should go on regarding Greek civilisation as the first of the ancient civilisations in which it was common for people to insist on speaking their minds.

If the man in the street speaks his mind on issues of practical politics, the intellectual speaks his mind on history, tradition, religion and science. We shall find, I think, that the distinctive new feature of Greek civilisation is the readiness of the Greek to dissociate himself from established ideas, to speculate, to use his imagination, to say, 'This is what I think; and I this is why I think it...', and (what matters most) to say it without fear of monarch, noble, priest, gang or mob. Without too much fear, that is; these things are relative. And the reluctance of the ancient oriental to express sceptical reservations is not absolute either. Here are a few instances of what I would call Greek attitudes expressed long before the Greeks. First, from an ancient Egyptian story, King Cheops and the Magicians:

The king's son Hardedef rose to speak, and he said, 'You have heard examples of the skill of those who have passed away, but there one cannot know truth from falsehood. But there is with Your Majesty, in your own time, one who is not known to you....'

Secondly, from an Egyptian song:

Now, I have heard the sayings
of Iyemhotep and Hardedef,
which are quoted
in the proverbs so much.

What are their cult places?
Their walls are dismantled,
and their cult places exist no more,
as if they had never been.

There is no one who can return from there
to describe their nature, to describe their dissolution,
that he may still our desires,
until we reach the place where they have gone.

So may your desire be fulfilled:
allow the heart to forget
the performance of services for you.
Follow your desire while you live.

And an excerpt from regulations for a Hittite temple

If an ox or a sheep is driven up to the god as food, and you appropriate for yourselves either a fattened ox or a fattened sheep and substitute a lean one which you have slaughtered ... and speak as follows, 'Since he is a god, he will not say anything, and will not do anything to us'--just think how the man reacts who sees his morsel snatched away from before his eyes! The will of the god is strong. It does not make haste to seize, but when it seizes it does not let go again."

Not everyone, perhaps, will agree that Greek scepticism and independence of judgement are the most important strand in the history of the West, even if they are taken (and not everyone, in any case, would so take them) to be the moving force of Greek artistic and literary innovation. Some will give pride of place to the idea of a single righteous God, the distinctive contribution of the Jews. There is a point beyond which it is hard to argue about degrees of importance.

And suppose we decide that the most important things in the history of our civilisation were first done by the Greeks, what do we do about it? Give them a prize, pat them on the head, and send them off to have a nice tea? The value of what is done does not depend on who first did it, and a historian can fairly criticise the compilation of a list of 'firsts' as historically trivial, suitable only for inclusion in a Book of Records. But if all Greek innovations proceeded ultimately from one fundamental revolution in attitude, and if that revolution is one from which we can learn and profit directly, the case is altered. One argument of this book is that they did all proceed from one fundamental revolution, and that we can learn and profit directly from the Greek example.

A Persian Frontier Problem

Darius 'the Great King, King of Kings, King of the World' became ruler of the Persian Empire in 521 BC 'by the favour and gift of the Wise God'. He was not the son of his predecessor, but the choice of an aristocratic conspiracy which ended a turbulent episode, and the first year of his reign was passed in the suppression of revolts. He showed himself as quick and efficient a conqueror as the Assyrian kings before him, and he adopted their style too:

... Fravartish was seized and led to me. I cut off his nose and ears and tongue and put out one of his eyes. He was kept bound at the entrance to my palace; all the people saw him. Afterwards I impaled him at Ecbatana, and the men who were his chief followers, those at Ecbatana within the fortress, I hung out [i.e. flayed them and displayed their skins] ...

The water which separated Asia from Europe marked at that time the edge of Darius' world. The Greek cities on the Aegean coast of Asia were on that edge, and over the edge were the Aegean islands and the mainland of Greece. A ruler who has every reason to think he controls the only great power in the world does not like untidy bits of independence lying around, and Darius did not leave Europe undisturbed for long. Intervening in the big Greek islands which lay closest to the Asiatic shore, he brought them under his control. With their help, he invaded Europe, crossed the Danube, and campaigned deep into the plains of eastern Romania, towards the Ukraine. This was not a profitable adventure for him, but Persian power was more enduringly established along the north coast of the Aegean.

Whether--or how soon--Darius intended to invade Greece itself is not known, because some of his Greek subjects in Asia, the 'Ionian' cities, combined to rebel. It took the Persians five years to extinguish this rebellion completely, but its prospects had never been good. The rebellious Greeks had sought help from the Greek mainland, but had got little. Two cities, however, Athens and Eretria, sent contingents in time for the rebels' most showy achievement, a march inland to capture the city of Sardis. Herodotos, who wrote the history of the conflict between Greeks and Persians, tells a memorable anecdote about the consequences:

When King Darius heard the news that the city of Sardis had been taken and burnt by the Athenians and Ionians, it is said that he did not worry at all about the Ionians, for he well knew that they would pay dearly for their rebellion, but he asked, 'Who are the Athenians?' On being told, he demanded his bow; he took it up and put an arrow on the string and shot it up towards the sky, saying, as he let fly the shaft, 'Lord of the Gods, may it come to pass that I revenge myself on the Athenians!' Then he commanded one of his servants to say three times every day, at the hour of dinner, 'Master, remember the Athenians!"'

A few years passed, and in 490 BC Darius sent a punitive 'frontier' expedition by sea against Athens and Eretria. The Persians devastated Eretria, but when they landed at Marathon, on the east coast of Attica, the Athenians repelled them and drove them to re-embark. Marathon ever after was a proud name in Athenian tradition; the very first alien attempt on the mainland of Greece had been defeated by Athens virtually alone, helped only by the men of the little city of Plataea.

Darius died before he could prepare an expedition on a grander scale, and it fell to his son Xerxes to organise a great army and fleet designed to subjugate the whole of the Greek mainland for good. This army, led by Xerxes himself, entered the northern regions of Greece in the summer of 480 BC, the fleet keeping pace offshore. Army and fleet alike were on a scale quite outside Greek experience, and the tradition which Herodotos inherited and consolidated spoke of millions of men and thousands of ships. We don't have to believe that, but we do have to remember that the Persian king was, for all practical purposes, perceived as ruler of the world, and when his forces flooded on southwards the cities of northern and central Greece submitted without a fight. Further south, the temper was different. Most Peloponnesian cities, dominated by Sparta, were determined to resist; and outside the Peloponnese so was Athens.

When it was known that the Persian invasion was imminent, the Athenians sent emissaries to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, to ask the god, 'What shall we do?' It was normal for a city-state faced with a difficult decision to consult an oracle, and by this time Delphi had unique prestige as an oracle in mainland Greece. Of course, there was no compulsion on the god to answer a question, and when he did answer, it was possible to misinterpret his words disastrously. But oracles were not simply a piece of machinery; they were manifestations of the graciousness of the gods, and any hint about the future, no matter how fragmentary or ambiguous, was a precious gleam in the darkness of human ignorance. When the Athenian emissaries asked how they should act in face of the Persian threat, they were aghast at the answer: the god told them to 'flee to the ends of the earth'. Being Greeks, they were not all inclined to say 'Thy will be done'. They threatened instead that unless they were given a better answer they would starve themselves in the sanctuary and defile it by dying there. So the god had second thoughts, and offered an enigmatic hope by telling them to trust in their 'wooden walls'. This answer they took back to Athens.

In the years since Marathon the Athenians had built up a big fleet of warships and trained themselves to use it. Realising that these ships were their 'wooden walls', they abandoned their city and their land and moved their entire population across to the offshore island of Salamis - all except a foolish minority who entrenched themselves behind a wooden wall on the Acropolis, expecting divine aid, and were quickly disposed of by the invaders. At Salamis the Athenian fleet was united with the other Greek fleets. There was much bitter argument; they were not accustomed to co-operating. The Peloponnesians hankered after a fixed defence, a fortified line across the narrowest part of the isthmus that joins the Peloponnese to the rest of the mainland. The Athenians saw plainly that so long as the Persian fleet was undefeated, any fortification on land could be turned. It was therefore imperative to fight a sea-battle now. Themistokles, one of the Athenian commanders, saw to it that the Persian king got a message, which purported to be friendly, telling him that the Greek fleet was in disarray and on the point of dispersing. This was meant to tempt the king to send his fleet into the narrow waters between Salamis and the mainland for an easy 'dawn round-up'. This he did, and his fleet went in to meet disaster head-on.

Eight years after the battle the tragic poet Aeschylus produced his Persians, in which the scene is set at the Persian court and Xerxes' mother, the dowager queen, hears the terrible news of Salamis from a messenger. Here is part of the messenger's speech:

When the white horses of the day spread brightness
on all the earth, from the Greek side we heard
the ringing voice of [incredulously] music, fervent song!
The echo from the cliffs of Salamis
threw back a shrill reply.
And fear ran through us all, the host of Asia;
for now we knew we had deceived ourselves.
That solemn song was not the sound of fear,
but heart and courage moving into battle.
A trumpet-cry set land and sea afire.
Straightway their oars struck in the sea together,
rhythmic, steady, cleaving the salt foam.
Suddenly they were all before our eyes.
Their right wing led, ordered and sure and fast;
behind it, all their fleet raced to attack,
and we could hear the chorus of their cry:
'Go, sons of Greeks! Set free your fatherland,
your wives, your children, temples of your gods,
ancestral tombs! Now--all is at stake!'
On our side a roar of Persian tongue
replied; this was the moment for the fight.
At once the iron ram struck, ship into ship;
the first to ram was Greek, tearing away
the high stern of a warship from Phoenicia;
a second Greek drove at another victim.
At first the great stream of the Persian fleet
held out; but when the ships were massed together,
tightly in turmoil, none could help another--
ship tearing sister-ship with teeth of iron,
shearing away the oars--while all around
the Greek fleet circled, cool and sharp, and struck.
Ships were capsized; the waves could not be seen,
smothered in shattered wrecks and human flesh.
On shores and rocks dead men were crowded thick.
From end to end, in all the fleet of Asia,
the rowers turned to panic and retreat.
But they, with splintered oars and bits of plank,
were hacking, chopping.
We were a catch of tunny in their net.
So all the sea was filled with cries and groans
till the dark eyes of night were closed upon it."

Aeschylus had fought at Marathon, and he fought at Salamis too--probably not as a sailor on a warship, but as a soldier posted on the shore, waiting to kill enemy sailors who struggled out of the water. He was one of the pioneers of the theatre, perhaps the most important single figure in the history of European drama. There exists an epitaph on him, which he is said to have composed for himself, and it reflects the priorities of his time it tells us that he fought against the Persians, but does not mention that he wrote plays as well. The striking feature of his Persians is its dignity. He might have made the Persians ridiculous and contemptible, jabbering foreigners' Greek, wretched victims of innate Greek superiority. We know that he might have done, because two generations later another poet did. Aeschylus does not deny his Persians courage; he sees and expresses their suffering and despair as if he were a defeated Persian, not an exultant Greek; and he emphasises--through the ghost of Darius, who appears in answer to the invocations of the chorus and the queen--that the Greeks owed their victory not just to themselves, but to the good will of the gods. Xerxes had offended the gods by destroying sanctuaries in Greece, but above all he had provoked their malice by overreaching himself.

The idea that the gods slap down any mortal who becomes too powerful, rich and ambitious was widespread among the Greeks. Herodotos portrays a Persian noble as warning Xerxes, at the time when the invasion of Greece was first mooted:

It is always the biggest buildings and the tallest trees that are struck by lightning. The gods are accustomed to throw down whatever rises too high.

A bleak doctrine, perhaps, but easy to reconcile with what the Greeks saw happen. To the Athenian audience, seeing and hearing the homecoming of Xerxes in Aeschylus' Persians, the formalised co-ordination of despairing gestures and cries of lamentation portrayed human misfortune first and enemy misfortune second.

Xerxes in fact did not give up easily or all at once. When he returned to Asia, he left in central Greece an army of formidable size and quality, commanded by Mardonios. The Athenians and the Greeks of the Peloponnese had to reflect and decide afresh: surrender or--possibly, in the end, unsuccessful--resistance? In this context, 'resistance' meant destruction of Mardonios' army, if they could achieve that; nothing less would do. They decided that they must achieve it, and the last great battle of the Persian invasion was fought between some forty thousand heavy infantry of the allied Greek states (plus a very large number of light-armed soldiers) and a Persian army, including strong cavalry and contingents from northern and central Greece, which Greek tradition (perhaps mistakenly) believed to be four times as large. The battleground was the gently undulating ground by the city of Plataea, below Mount Kithairon--an archetypal battlefield, on which it is the easiest thing in the world to visualise glittering masses of troops advancing to the attack, and one of the hardest to work out, Herodotos' narrative in hand, which troops were where at what stage of the battle. The days that led up to the battle were full of uncertainties, frustrations and perils for the Greeks, but when it came to the hand-to-hand fighting the heavy armouring of the Greek infantryman was decisive. The Persian survivors retreated from Greece, and no Persian king ever tried to invade Greece again.

Few people, if any, outside Greece had believed that the Greeks could defeat Xerxes. Perhaps there were not many in Greece itself who believed it in those chill moments when reason insists on being heard. But now they had won after all; a conglomeration of little cities on the fringe of the world ruled by the King of Kings had humbled him. No wonder that from then on the Greeks thought themselves the best people in the world; as a rhetorical writer put it more than a century later, some felt that the Greeks were to the rest of the human race as human beings are to the rest of the animal kingdom (and the writer, being Athenian, added: as the Athenians are to other Greeks). It is interesting that they rarely thought of their superiority in terms of 'race' or genetic factors, and they attached no importance to differences of colour. Some of them theorised about the part played by climate, soil and water in determining apparent national differences of behaviour and temperament. What seemed to them most significant were laws, customs, way of life and language--all the alterable things about which a people can grow careless and put its own culture at risk.

The defeat of Xerxes marks the beginning of what we call the 'Classical 'period and the end of the 'Archaic' period. What is best known about the Greeks nowadays is Classical: drama, the Parthenon sculptures, Socrates, the greatest works of history, philosophy and oratory. It may be tempting to think that the sudden consciousness of superiority inspired by the defeat of Xerxes was a cause of these extraordinary achievements. But this temptation is quashed by the evidence, for all the distinctive features of Greek culture--artistic experiment, free-ranging speculation, drama, democratic assemblies--had plainly taken shape before the Persian invasion. Refusal to accept defeat before putting the need for acceptance to the test was itself a manifestation, an effect, of a way of life which evolved during the Archaic period, a way of life which had something new and remarkable to offer.

The Fate of the City

Collaboration was required for the defeat of the Persian invasion: above all, between Athens, which provided the bulk of the fleet at Salamis, and Sparta, which provided the supreme command and the hard core of the army at Plataea. This was a very unusual degree of collaboration, and it was not destined to last. Faced with a threat so close and terrible that it cannot be talked away, people get together. When the threat recedes, they revert to their traditional ways of doing things. The Greek tradition is acutely summed up by a speaker in Plato's Laws in the middle of the 300s BC:

What most people call 'peace' is only a name. In reality every city is always in a state of undeclared war against every other city.'

We have already had a look across at Argos and Tiryns from the citadel of Mycenae, and we have to remind ourselves that at the time of the Persian invasion these three places were independent sovereign states, and had been for centuries. Soon after the defeat, of the Persians, Argos turned upon Tiryns and Mycenae and swallowed them up, absorbing the population into her own and abandoning the sites. This nicely illustrates the most important of the restraints on Greek fragmentation: obliteration of the smallest and weakest by more powerful neighbours.

Much more commonly, the independence of a weak city-state was to some degree diminished--to a degree varying very greatly from time to time and place to place--by subordination to a stronger city. Subordination was usually called 'alliance'. A weak city allied to a strong might well have its own constitution, legal code and coinage, and it talked the language of sovereign independence; but it was unlikely to be a democracy if its stronger ally was not, it was often expected to contribute its forces to an expedition on demand, and it might be subject to a demand for regular tribute. In the years after the Persian war, Greece and the Aegean, ostensibly a vast swarm of city-states, were in fact largely polarised between two powerful cities, Athens and Sparta. 'The Athenians and their allies' was the formal designation of what we commonly call 'the Athenian Empire', comprising the islands and the northern and eastern coasts of the Aegean, paying annual tribute to Athens and subject, as the 400s went on, to an increasing degree of political and administrative control by Athens. 'The Spartans and their allies', or 'the Peloponnesians', or 'the Peloponnesian League', are more elusive entities, but the reality behind them is that Sparta was indisputably the strongest military power on land, dominated most of the Peloponnese, and had some allies outside the Peloponnese as well.

The greatest collision between Athens and Sparta, the 'Peloponnesian War' (we name it from an Athenian standpoint), lasted from 431 to 404 BC, with a few years of uneasy truce round about half-time. It ended with the total defeat and capitulation of Athens and the dissolution of her control over her 'empire'. It looked as if it had changed the balance of power in Greece for ever; and in a sense it did, but by substituting a complicated and shifting balance for a simple one.

Let us again try to translate the situation into visual terms by going on to another high place and looking at the view--this time Acrocorinth, the 1800-foot mountain which was the fortified citadel of ancient Corinth. From the top of Acrocorinth we can see south-westwards into the territory of Argos and the mountains of Arcadia, and to the east the Acropolis of Athens could once be seen (nowadays lurid industrial haze intervenes); north-westwards, we look far into central Greece and may glimpse mountain-tops seventy miles away. Corinth is literally in the middle of things, just where the Peloponnese hangs by a thread from the rest of the mainland. Politically, too, Corinth was in the middle of things. In the Peloponnesian War she was an ally of Sparta, and remained so to the end of the war despite a period of indignant estrangement in the middle. Yet within ten years we find a new alignment: victorious Sparta has aroused resentment, and Corinth and Thebes are in alliance with their former enemy Athens against her. The first part of the 300s is marked by the rise of Thebes as the chief military power on the mainland and the deposition of Sparta from that eminence. Xenophon, whose history of this period survives, ends his narrative on a sombre note after describing the battle of Mantinea (362 BC):

Each side said it had won; but neither was demonstrably any better off, in territory, city or power, than before the battle was fought. After the battle confusion was greater in Greece, and decisive outcome further away, than previously.

This is the point at which I propose to end. Someone else will perhaps concern himself with subsequent events.

At the time Xenophon wrote those words, a 'decisive outcome' was surprisingly near at hand, but it was not one achieved by the Greeks themselves. Far away beyond the northern horizon lay the kingdom of Macedon, the region where nowadays Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria meet. The kings of Macedon claimed Greek heroic ancestry, and from the 400s they sometimes offered lavish patronage to distinguished Greek poets (Euripides, for example). To judge from what little we know of the Macedonian language, it was very close to Greek, but not close enough for the people who spoke it to be welcomed as members of the Greek linguistic community. They were regarded as a primitive, ill-organised and unreliable people. When Philip II became king of Macedon in 359 BC, it was a little while before the Greeks realised that his intelligence, energy and ruthlessness were very quickly transforming Macedon into a military power quite unlike the Macedon to which they had long been accustomed. The Athenian politician Demosthenes, indignant at Athens' failure to defend her possessions and allies in the north Aegean against Philip's aggression, exclaims:

And he's so far from being a Greek or having the remotest connection with us Greeks that he doesn't even come from a country with a name that's respected. He's a lousy Macedonian--and not so long ago you couldn't even buy a decent slave from Macedon.

Less than twenty years after his accession to the throne of Macedon--a period in which he had established his power in Greece partly by his military speed and efficiency, partly by exploiting the mutual resentments of Greek city-states--Philip resoundingly defeated the last and biggest combination of states to stand against him. Then he summoned a congress at Corinth (in the middle of things, as usual) and constituted them a league of allies. Two hunks of stone in the Epigraphical Museum at Athens, looking rather like small boulders, are pieces of the official Athenian copy of the 'foundation-document' of this league. The lettering is small and badly worn, but we can read at the beginning some words of the oath which the delegates swore, and where words are lost our knowledge of the formulae of similar documents makes it possible to fill in the gaps:

I swear by Zeus, Earth, Sun, Poseidon, Athena, Ares and all gods and goddesses that I will abide by the peace and I will not break the treaty made with Philip the Macedonian. Nor will I bear arms by land or sea against any who abide by this oath.... And if anyone acts in contravention of the treaty, I will intervene as demanded by those who are wronged, and I will make war on violators of the General Peace in accordance with the decisions of the General Council and the demands of the head of the Alliance...

The head of the Alliance (literally 'Leader') was Philip, and the effect of the oath was to ensure that it should be Macedon, in the long run, which decided what was to happen in Greece and the Aegean.

Two years later Philip was murdered by one of his own men, at a time when he was planning an attack on the (by now rather ramshackle) Persian Empire. His youthful son Alexander, 'the Great', carried out this plan in spectacular fashion, conquering in a few years everything from Libya to Samarkand and Karachi. When he died in Babylon at the age of thirty-two his generals carved up the vast empire he had conquered. From then on the history of the distribution of power in the Greek world is a history of monarchies rather than city-states. But 'the Greek world' was much bigger than it had been, for Alexander's conquests had spread the Greek language and Greek culture all over the Near East, and the rulers everywhere were Macedonians and Greeks. Egypt, for example, was ruled by a Greek-speaking dynasty for the next three hundred years, and Greek settlement there was extensively superimposed on the native Egyptian population.

Just at the time of this explosive diffusion of Greek from the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the remoter future was taking shape in the central Mediterranean. The city of Rome was extending its control over Italy. A hundred years later the Romans were in Spain, Sicily and the Balkans. The history of Roman relations with Macedonian kings and Greek cities and leagues of cities is complicated. It ceased to be so in 146 BC, when the Romans burnt, sacked and obliterated the city of Corinth. This terrifying lesson was never forgotten; from then on Greece was a peaceful province of the Roman Empire. Greek was the official language of the eastern half of that Empire, Latin the official language of the western half.

The Greeks and the Romans had a good deal in common. Both peoples had traditions rooted in the idea of the citizen-assembly, hostile to monarchy and to servility. Their religions were alike enough for most of their deities to be readily identified--Greek Zeus with Roman Jupiter, Greek Hera with Roman Juno, and so on--and their myths to be fused. Their languages worked in similar ways, and were ultimately related, both being members of the Indo-European language-family which stretches from Bangladesh to Iceland. The Latin alphabet (that is, our own alphabet) was derived directly from a form of the Greek alphabet used by Greek colonies in part of southern Italy.

But there was one great difference between Greeks and Romans. Rome, one single city--just as Athens or Sparta was a single city--progressed relentlessly over the centuries to create the Roman Empire, embracing the entire Mediterranean basin, together with Britain and parts of central Europe. The Roman Empire was eventually able to experience a 'decline and fall' (having lasted twice as long as the British Empire) because it attained a position of supremacy from which decline was possible. The 'Greek Empire' could not decline, because no such thing as a Greek Empire ever existed, unless we count the brief moment for which Alexander of Macedon ruled over the vast area he had conquered. (When the Roman Empire in the western Mediterranean broke up, the eastern half, with its capital at Constantinople, lasted until it was destroyed by the Turks in the fifteenth century, but the Greek-speaking people of Constantinople called themselves 'Romans'.)

Rome did not doubt that she was an instrument of Providence, destined to rule for ever, and that the Greeks were among the many unfortunate peoples from whom Providence had turned away her face. Torn as they were by civil war for much of their history, the Romans none the less derived an extraordinary confidence from the systematic, meticulous organisation of their own military and administrative activities, and their confidence is reflected in the uniformity with which they put their system smoothly and quickly into effect, wherever in the world they went.

But every Roman knew that the Greeks enjoyed an artistic and intellectual inheritance much older and immeasurably richer than his own. With few exceptions, he respected this inheritance and assimilated it for the artistic enrichment of his own culture. 'Captive Greece', said the poet Horace, 'took her rude conqueror captive.' If a Roman asked himself what kind of plays his ancestors were writing when Aeschylus was alive at Athens, he knew that the answer was: none whatsoever. Writing good poetry is, of course, only one out of a very large range of possible human activities, and different civilisations have different priorities. The Roman's respect for Greek culture sometimes had a rather patronising colouring; it reminds us of the expression into which a self-made millionaire thinks it appropriate to compose his features when he has occasion to speak of the Church of England, medieval archaeology or a distinguished violinist.

Later ages too, in studying the past, can have various priorities. This must be at least the hundredth book about the Greeks published for the general reader in the English-speaking world during the last thirty years; how many have there been about the Romans?