Ancient Greece

V

The Aristocratic Age

The early poleis were governed by small, hereditary councils. Membership of councils was confined to particular landowning families who also controlled the main cults in the calendar of their polis. These families had been increasingly recognized as a noble caste. In the poleis they monopolized power from c. 750 to c. 630 bc. Even thereafter, down to c. 450 bc, Greek culture and politics were predominantly aristocratic, and their contribution to Greek civilization is fundamental. Noblemen profited from overseas trade, but in their adult years were not traders themselves, unless a distant voyage offered chances of glory and plunder. Slaves or serfs did the heavy daily work. They preferred to govern, keep horses, meet in their smart dining-groups, or symposia, and compete in their famous athletic games. In most areas, the nobles’ cavalry and individual combat were the main forms of war. Excellence in war won honour, but the loss and pains of battle were not unduly courted. Most wars were still border-wars which sworn treaties attempted to regulate. Off the battlefield, nobles were admired for display and hospitality, for dispensing justice to their inferiors, for honouring the gods whose cults they led and for competing in games, contests, and the pursuit of love. At their symposia, wine was mixed with water and served according to fixed custom in many types of vessel of painted pottery or precious metal. The cheaper, pottery vessels were buried in their owners’ graves and thus survive in great quantity.

Symposia were for men only, but the food consumed was characteristic of the everyday Greek diet. Bread, vegetables (especially olives), and fish of varying rarity were the main items. Meat was rare and eaten only after sacrifice to the gods, unless it was the prize of a day’s hunting. Poetry, riddles, and polished talk were expected from guests, who reclined on their host’s couches in special symposion dining rooms. We still admire the lyric poetry that Alcaeus, Theognis, and many others composed for aristocrats in this setting.

Outdoors, noblemen loved to compete and to enjoy their fine dogs and horses. They organized games in which they or their skilled employees competed. The oldest and most famous were the Olympian Games, whose main origin was later dated to 776 bc. Many of our sports, including running-races, throwing the discus, and the all-important horse racing, come to us in imitation of the sports of Greek aristocrats. Men wrestled and ran naked almost everywhere and at the Olympian Games women were forbidden to watch. Poets celebrated their victories and the odes of Pindar have been widely imitated. Off the racecourse, the hunting of deer, hares, and wild boar was the main pursuit of noble males. Captured animals were given as love-gifts to young favourites, almost always males too. The homosexual courting of young men by older men was regarded with approval and widely practised. It was a romantic prelude or companion to men’s marriages, which they contracted with girls who were often in their early teens. Dowries were given to brides by their male kin, but were usually returned in case of divorce, which was itself not uncommon. Sexual relations with female slaves remained frequent.

Between c. 700 and 550 bc, foreign settlement and contact both enriched and undermined the aristocratic age of the polis. They brought new luxuries, better horses, and new finery for nobles to display. Display, however, embittered competition, as some aristocrats outdistanced others. It also increased the circulation and acquisition of riches, creating groups of non-noble rich citizens. Above all, the greater availability of metals and skills in working them led to a new style of warfare. Around 680-650 bc, armoured lines of infantry, or hoplites, emerged to counter the old duelling and cavalry of nobles’ style of battle. The hoplites’ style influenced Etruscans in Italy and many neighbouring peoples, and persisted until its defeat by Alexander the Great in the 4th century bc.

From the 730s bc onward, settlement beyond the Greek mainland had been a safety valve for discontented nobles or troublesome citizens in times of food shortage. From c. 680, the profits of expansion worked to divide aristocracies and undermine their claim to be their city’s sole warriors. In many poleis, a single aristocrat took over as a tyrant and dominated free politics. The great age of the tyrannies ran from c. 650 to 510 bc. Foreign contact, however, continued to encourage new thought and skills. From c. 620 bc, closer knowledge of Egypt and its crafts caused Greeks to develop their own stone sculptures of the human figure, their own architecture of stone pillared buildings, their own mathematical theories, their explanations of the stars and heavens, and their ideas of health, sickness, and treatment of the body. Individuals tried to explain what Near Eastern societies had only observed and compiled. They were not dominated by professional priests or religious orthodoxy. Their theories, therefore, did not involve the gods as protagonists of natural phenomena. The first philosophers, mathematicians, and natural scientists emerged in the poleis of the eastern Greek world during the 6th century bc. Thales, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus were among the first to open new fields of thought. Artists, simultaneously, gave a new rhythm and humanity to the sculpted figure.

Thinkers explained the universe by impersonal laws, just as laws and constitutions shaped many of their poleis. Increasingly, however, lawgivers published written laws which defined the duties of magistrates and priests and prescribed penalties for civil lawsuits. The most famous Greek lawgiver was Solon, whose basic laws forbade one Athenian to enslave another and gave a defined role in politics to the non-noble rich. His civil laws persisted as the law-code of Athens throughout the later democracy until 322 bc.

VI

Sparta

In Sparta, however, a deliberate alternative to this changing society emerged during the 7th century bc. Instead of sending out colonies overseas, Sparta subjugated its neighbours, the Messenians. Male citizens of Sparta became a trained, standing army in order to hold down Spartan conquests and defeat neighbouring states who might otherwise have freed Sparta’s Greek serfs. This military need was met by an austere way of life, lived apart from families and women. Boys ate, slept, and trained in companies which were denied all disruptive luxuries and were restricted to a basic coarse food. Women exercised naked, but were regarded mainly as the seedbed for new warrior citizens. The Spartan state avoided the tyrannies of other poleis and Spartan infantry remained invincible until the Battle of Leuctra in 371 bc. Its unwritten laws and apparent stability have been idealized by many philosophers since, from Plato to Rousseau, but the famous “equality” was often superficial and the training led to an intolerable brutishness of style and manner.

VII

The Triumph of Democracy

The new Spartan state conquered far and wide during the 6th century bc and often restored aristocracies to Greek states which had been under a tyranny. From 546 to 500 bc, however, two lasting rivals emerged. One was the Persian Empire which conquered the previous Asian kingdoms, including Egypt, and the eastern Greek cities on their coasts. The other, in 508 bc, was the invention of democracy at Athens, a new alternative to tyranny. The Athenian aristocrat Cleisthenes proposed reforms which gave each citizen one, and only one, vote in regular assemblies for all public business. A presiding council of 500 changed yearly and was drawn from citizens over 30, who could not serve more than twice in a lifetime. This alternative to tyranny included peasants, but not women, as equals and became the most imitated and successful of all political experiments. All male citizens were free to attend the assemblies, which debated and ratified all public business, usually four times a month. There were no organized political parties. Unlike democracy in the modern world, Greek democracy was not government by elected representatives. It was government by majority decisions on each major issue.

In 490 bc and 480 bc, the Persian kings tried to punish and subject mainland Greece, which had previously helped the eastern Greek cities. First, at Marathon and then at Salamis and Plataea, great Greek victories overcame the odds and beat off Persian enslavement. Greeks were nearly united in the effort and emerged with a new confidence and a heightened attachment to political freedom.

The alternative systems of Athens and Sparta now faced each other. Athens led the Greek reprisals against Persia and ended by consolidating an alliance of more than 230 poleis into an empire, paying yearly tribute. Many of these allies were democracies, following Athens’s example. Sparta, meanwhile, stood for oligarchy, or government by a few privileged citizens only.

In Athens, the older aristocratic culture broadened and developed into the new setting of democracy. There was a major beneficiary, peculiar to Athens: the theatre. Tragedies and comedies (see Drama and Dramatic Arts) were performed at the city’s festival of Dionysus each spring. The dramatists began to weave the great issues of human life into plays whose plots were based on the exploits of mythical heroes. Male citizens acted, sang, and danced in the productions and, in due course, the democracy gave free entry tickets to each member of the polis. In tragedies, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides explored great questions of human responsibility, the relations of gods and mortals and of men to women. Comedy, too, became political and free-spoken, crowned by the genius of Aristophanes. Citizens sat and watched groups of four plays by each tragedian at a time before turning to the lighter comedies. The plays by Athenian dramatists were performed throughout the Greek world in theatres built in imitation of those in Athens.

VIII

Athens at its Height

The imperial power of Athens was a magnet for foreign talent, while the city’s receipt of tribute also allowed the financing of fine buildings and public works of art. The temples on the city’s heights, or acropolis, were rebuilt from the tribute of the allies between 449 and c. 410 bc. The best-known, the Parthenon, honoured the virgin goddess Athena and was adorned with a frieze of Athenian civic myth and a large statue of the goddess by the supreme Greek sculptor, Phidias. Mathematical proportion, the two main orders of architecture (the fluted Doric column and ornate Ionic), and painted and carved decorations made these buildings the wonder of their age. Sculptors also worked on gravestones, tombs, and private commissions, where they expressed the same idealized vision of human form. Portraits, however, were not a feature of democratic life, where everyday dress had also become simpler and more uniform. The huge divine statues of Phidias led on to the gentler, more human works of Praxiteles and others who introduced children and animals into a soft, lifelike style. In the 4th century bc, sculptors began to show goddesses as beautiful, naked females. As individual patrons emerged in kingdoms on the edges of the Greek world, wall paintings, mosaics, fine jewellery, and highly decorated furniture were developed to meet the tastes of rich individuals. The great painters in 4th-century Greece, from Zeuxis to Apelles, had already attained subtleties of line, illusion, and colour which had to be rediscovered, nearly 2,000 years later in Renaissance Europe.

Like artists, philosophers and intellectuals were drawn to settle in the city where they advanced ideas of ethics, human society, and even town planning. They met Socrates, the native Athenian famous for his sceptical questioning of his prominent young pupils. The main discussions concerned ethics and political theory, the nature of knowledge and of the human personality: what is justice, what is the best type of government, how does reason relate to passion, what is true by nature or by convention? There was no compulsory schooling and education was for those who paid or learned from their slaves or families. Knowledge spread by word of mouth, although many people could read simple messages. Books were scarce and were best known by being read aloud. Most of the discussion was among men, although richer women could often read too and were well trained in music.

The sciences of astronomy and medicine were furthered outside Athens, but their development was impeded, the one by a lack of optical instruments, the other by a ban on the dissection of human bodies. Always, however, the best thinkers tried to frame general theories. Aristarchus of Samos even proposed that the Earth went round the Sun; Hippocrates‘ oath of ethical medical practice is still taken by doctors to this day. Medicine was better at observing and predicting rather than controlling and curing. The greatest advance, however, was in historical thought.

Greek victory in the Persian Wars led indirectly to the birth of history as a discipline concerned with recording and understanding past events. After 480, the eastern Greek aristocrat Herodotus devoted a lifetime of travel and questioning to the cause and course of the Greek conflict with Persia. When war broke out in the 430s between Athens and Sparta, its cause and course attracted another historical genius, the Athenian aristocrat Thucydides. Herodotus’ history dwelt on the dangers of excessive prosperity and fortune, the intervention of gods in the affairs of mortals, and the value of freedom against tyranny. Thucydides, by contrast, excluded the gods as an explanation for the turn of events and was explicit about human psychology and power politics between states. Their two approaches have had an enormous influence on subsequent historians, anthropologists, and theorists of international relations.

Despite the war, the years 446-403 bc were a golden age for Classical Athens in art, drama, prose-writing, and political life. The democratic leader Pericles was followed by the younger, dissipated Alcibiades, the beloved friend of Socrates who also fought and served his city. Aspects of the older, aristocratic culture persisted but in the newer public setting of a democracy. However, after several near-misses and over-ambitious plans, Athens lost the war to Sparta, who had cynically accepted Persian help in 404 bc.

Athens did not, however, lose its democracy. The 4th century bc revealed two truths: that democracy was still the natural choice of the poor, in and outside Athens, and that Sparta was too brutish and retrograde to be acceptable as an alternative leader of Greece. Without a settled empire, no one polis could finance a lasting alliance to defeat all rivals. Money had become centrally important to winning wars and, without the tribute of an empire, no one state could dominate. A brief phase of Spartan rule was followed by a revived alliance led by democratic Athens. Thebes and its neighbours then emerged in the 370s, defeated Sparta at the crucial Battle of Leuctra (371 bc) but were not strong enough to beat all comers in the next decade. The Battle of Mantinea (362 bc) left an uneasy balance of weakness between the main alliances.

Fourth-century politics turned on the unstable rivalry of the main powers and on a sharp struggle in cities outside Athens between the rich, who disliked democracy, and the poor, who saw it as their protection. This general conflict is the setting for the main achievements of the age, the philosophies of Plato (to 347 bc) and Aristotle (to 322 bc). In their political thinking, both took the polis as their ideal unit, although events had shown that leagues, alliances, and empires were now the main power block. Both Plato and Aristotle idealized non-democratic government, although the democracy of Athens was incomparably the most stable and successful system of the period. In their works on ethics and logic, both raised new and enduring questions: what is good, what is happiness, what is truth? Aristotle’s genius was particularly for classification and method. He discussed and advanced every branch of knowledge, from logic to natural history. By contrast, much less was written for the Athenian theatre in the 4th century bc, but we have many more of the speeches of Athenian orators in the assembly and the law courts, including the great Demosthenes. These speeches, rich in rhetoric, reveal the humanity, variety, and vigour of Athenian democratic life.

IX

The Rise of the Macedonian Empire

In the power vacuum that followed the Battle of Mantinea, Athens would perhaps have re-emerged as the leader of Greece. However, conquest came from an unexpected quarter. In the north the new king of Macedon, Philip II, united the manpower and resources of his kingdom and trained a new model army. Neighbouring peoples, whom the Greeks regarded as barbarians, and the Greeks of northern Thessaly then assisted him in the conquest of adjoining Europe by defeating the hostile Greek states of Athens, Sparta, and his former ally, Thebes. At Chaeronea (338 bc) Philip defeated a major allied Greek force in a close-run battle. He then joined his new subjects in a formal alliance, professing “freedom and autonomy”, but neither was offered at its former level.

After Philip’s murder in July 336, his young son Alexander (who had been tutored by Aristotle) inherited his plans for invading Asia and the Persian Empire. Many more Greeks, however, fought against Alexander in Persian service than in his own army. His three crushing victories at the Granicus (334 bc), Issus (333 bc), and Gaugamela (331 bc) made him master of an unparalleled fortune and kingdom at the age of only 25. A march into India followed before his men forced him to return. He died, probably of malaria, in Babylon on June 10, 323 bc. His conquests had been amazing, but he was no true friend of the Greek freedom which he professed to espouse. His hero and role model was Homer’s Achilles. The Greek world’s independence ended with an echo of the Homeric era, the age from which it had begun.