Introduction Who were the Ancient Greeks? questions intro.pdf · In the Iliad Homer describes the...

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IntroductionWho were the Ancient Greeks?

Our rst acquaintance with the ancient Greeks comes through the romance of myth rather than the researches of historians. For the rst stories we hear about the Greeks are the tales told by the poet Homer about the heroes of the Trojan War – heroes such as Achilles, Odysseus and Agamemnon. From Homer, too, we hear about the Greek gods and goddesses, the Olympians, and their extraordinary behaviour and life style.

The world of HomerHomer lived in the eighth century B.C, and is credited with giving nal shape to two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Versions of these poems had been recited over many centuries by bards who travelled throughout the Greek world, and the stories they told were well known to their listeners. Until Homer’s time, however, there had been no de n-itive written version.

In the Iliad Homer describes the nal stage of the legendary ten-year war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans, reputedly over the ownership of a beautiful woman, Helen. Helen is usually known as ‘Helen of Troy’, and therein lies the problem. Helen only became ‘of Troy’ when she was abducted from Sparta, her real home in Greece, by the Trojan prince, Paris.

A glance at the map on page 4 will show you that Sparta is on the southern Greek peninsula known as the Peloponnese, and Troy is across the Aegean Sea in a region called Asia Minor (modern Turkey).

Helen’s husband, Menelaus, was naturally enraged at the abduction of his wife. He appealed for help to his brother, Agamemnon, king of neighbouring Mycenae, and the most powerful warrior in Greece. Agamemnon led the Greek expedition to Troy, and after a ten-year siege, sacked the city and reclaimed Helen for his brother, Menelaus.

© 2007 The Lutterworth Press

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8 Eternal Questions

In the Iliad, the success of the Greeks in capturing Troy is attributed to a ruse devised by Odysseus, a Greek hero renowned for guile and inventiveness. Odysseus suggested that the Greeks build a huge wooden horse with a hollow interior. The horse would be left outside the gates of Troy with Greek soldiers concealed inside it. Odysseus predicted that the Trojans would be so intrigued by the horse that they would drag it inside the city to get a better look at it. This is in fact what happened – and once the horse was inside Troy’s walls, the Greek soldiers leapt out and opened the gates for their comrades to pour through. Troy’s fate was then sealed.

In Homer’s second great poem, the Odyssey, we read about Odysseus’ journey home from Troy to his native island, Ithaca – another ten-year marathon of endurance and adventure. This is the rst ‘journey story’ in western literature, and still serves today as a metaphor for the life journey we all undertake.

These then are the stories told by Homer. And for centuries it was thought that they were just stories – legends with no historical basis. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, a wealthy German busi ness man, Heinrich Schliemann, championed a different view. A passionate admirer of Homer, Schliemann was convinced that the world described in the Homeric epics was once a reality, and he set out to prove it. At the age of 46, he turned amateur archaeologist and began a series of excavations in northern Turkey and Greece. In Turkey he unearthed an ancient city at a spot where, according to legend, ancient Troy was located. In Greece, in the Peloponnese, he found the remains of grand palaces and tombs at a number of locations. The most impressive palace was at Mycenae, and so Schliemann named this civilisation ‘Mycenaean’. When he found a gold funeral mask in a tomb at Mycenae, he declared: ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.’

In fact the civilisation which Schliemann dug up at Mycenae dated from an earlier period than that of the Trojan War. If there was really a Trojan War it is likely that it took place around the thirteenth century B.C, whereas the Mycenaean palaces were ourishing three or four centuries earlier. It seems that Homer, and the bards who preceded him, took folk memories from different periods of history and wove them all together into a single narrative.

The Mycenaean rulers were powerful local warlords. They lived, and had themselves buried, in style. They were served by a palace bureaucracy which kept written records of economic transactions. These records appear to be mainly lists of goods and they are written in an early


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Who were the ancient Greeks? 9

form of Greek script, which we call Linear B. In this script (deciphered in 1952) each sign stands for a syllable rather than a letter, which makes it a cumbersome writing tool – suitable for record-keeping. but not for extended writing. Archaeological evidence tells us that the Mycenaean palaces were eventually attacked and destroyed around 1150 B.C, and so at this point the Mycenaeans and their script fade from history.

Dark ages The period which follows seems to have been one of turbulence. So little is known for certain about it that it is often termed the ‘Dark Ages’. There appear to have been large population movements and it may be that invaders entered Greece from the north. At all events, when the sit-uation began to stabilise, around the ninth century, Greece had become divided into a number of regions, each with its own distinct dialect. One racial group, the Dorians, were settled in the Peloponnese and the island of Crete. Another group, the Ionians, had spread out from Attica (the area around Athens) to the Aegean islands and Asia Minor. Although the exact sequence of events is not known, what is clear is that by the time Homer was composing his poems in the eighth century, the social and political organisation of Greece had altogether changed.

Life in the cityThe most notable change was the emergence of a number of large inde-pendent cities, such as Athens and Sparta. Because of their independence and powerful local in uence, these cities are often referred to as city states. They were organised communities ruled by kings or local aristo-cratic families. (The Greek word for ‘city’ is polis, from which we derive our word ‘politics’). So at this time, to give a modern analogy, it was as if Greece was a collection of town councils which were free of in uence from any sort of national government. Major cities each had their own coinage and calendar. There was little sense of nationhood: people were loyal to their family, their clan and their city.

To see how city states could be completely different in character, we need only look at Athens and Sparta. Sparta presents itself to our imagination as rigid, repressive, military, dour and philistine. Athens, by contrast, appears democratic, exible, imaginative, lively and artistic – open, as one ancient writer said, to ‘anything new’. The dourness of the Spartans was remarked upon in ancient times, and since the area ruled by Sparta was called Laconia, the word ‘laconic’ was used, as it is today, to mean ‘not saying much’. The following story illustrates this:


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10 Eternal Questions

A foreign ambassador came to Sparta to request military aid. He addressed the Spartan assembly at length, detailing numerous reasons why they should grant his request. But the Spartans complained that his speech was so long they had forgotten the rst half of it, and they could not understand the second half. After a moment’s pause, the ambassador addressed them again with just two words: Help needed. To which the Spartans replied: Why not just say Help?

More will be said about Sparta and Athens later in the book (Chapter 6), but for now we’ll turn to the second major change which took place in Greece from around the ninth or eighth centuries. This was the ‘colonisation’ by the Greeks of many neighbouring lands.

The colonistsThe Greeks were an energetic and enterprising people: if they were, for any reason, dissatis ed with life in their home city, they set out to seek their fortune elsewhere. Very often groups of people from a single city would travel together to found a daughter city in some far-off place. As shrewd traders, the Greek migrants favoured towns along the sea coast all around the Mediterranean. So they settled in Asia Minor, North Africa, Italy, Sicily and southern France. They also pushed north to the shores of the Black Sea. The map on page 6 shows the locations of some major Greek colonies, and, as you will see, they were, as one observer said, ‘like frogs around a pond’. They soon dominated trade in the regions where they settled.

The colonists’ motives for founding cities were mainly commercial: they wanted to nd somewhere to live, somewhere where they could own land and run a prosperous business. They were not colonists in the imperial sense: they had no interest in ruling the regions where they settled, and made no attempt to impose Greek political ideas or cultural values on the local population. Rather they adopted a ‘live and let live’ policy. The Greek city state was by tradition independent of its neighbours and was happy to leave them to their own devices as long as its own interests were not threatened.

Life of the mindBut the Greeks were more than just entrepreneurs. They were also thinkers, bold explorers not just of the physical world, but also the world of the mind, and of the world beyond the mind’s grasp. They speculated about everything: the nature of the world, of the soul, of men, of gods. They theorised about how the world was created and about its ultimate


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purpose. They debated the best way for men to behave, and for states to be organised. They discussed the meaning of art and the mysteries of death. They were much concerned with the ‘eternal questions’.

As far as we can tell from the evidence, this surge of intellectual activity began during the same period as the Greeks were exploring the physical world through their migrations around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Hence many of the rst Greek thinkers – who were part philosophers, part mystics, part natural scientists – were located not in Greece itself, but in one or other of the Greek colonies, notably in Asia Minor and southern Italy. Homer himself came from one of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor.

There was one crucial development during the 8th century that created the conditions in which thinkers who lived hundreds of miles apart were able to reliably communicate their thoughts to one another and to ‘thinking men’ among their fellow citizens. This was the introduction of an ef cient form of writing.

As noted earlier, the Mycenaean Greeks had developed a primitive form of writing, a syllabic script suitable only for record keeping. In the eighth century, however, the Greeks of the city states took over a more ef cient and exible script from their eastern neighbours, the Phoenicians, and adapted it to their own purposes. This new script was alphabetic, i.e. it had a sign for every letter, as in English.

The Greeks were not slow to put their new script to use. Not only were the Homeric poems written down, but so were the teachings of sages throughout the Greek world. These sages thought and taught about every subject that could be of interest to human beings. As we shall see in later chapters, they laid the foundations for many of the subjects we study today: history, philosophy, geology, biology, geography, zoology, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, physics, politics, ethics… I could go on. The names of these subjects are all in fact variations of Greek words transliterated into English (see Chapter 9).

Greeks versus PersiansAt this period the Greeks had little sense of nationhood in a geographical sense. They did, however, have a strong sense of ‘Greek-hood’ or ‘Greekness’ in a cultural sense. Wherever Greeks lived – whether in Athens, or Asia Minor, or southern Spain or the Black Sea region – they felt a strong Greek identity based on common language and customs. When writing came into use, this identity was further strengthened by the bond of a common literature and written communication.

At the beginning of the fth century, however, dramatic events


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occurred which caused the Greeks who lived on the Greek mainland to bind themselves together along national as well as cultural lines. What brought about this change was the threat of a foreign invader in the person of the Persian king, Darius.

The Greek colonies in Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor, had been part of the Persian Empire for half a century. Although they were allowed a degree of independence, these cities eventually became restive and, in 499 B.C, rose up in revolt against Darius. They asked help from their ‘mother city’ Athens, and Athens agreed to support them.

Darius swiftly quelled the revolt and had the chief Ionian city, Miletus, razed to the ground. He did not, however, stop there. He determined to punish Athens for her support for the rebels, and no doubt also relished the prospect of adding mainland Greece to his empire. He thus began preparations for an invasion of Greece. It is said that he permanently employed a servant to whisper ‘Remember Athens’ three times in his ear as he sat down to dinner.

The mainland Greeks were thrown into disarray at the prospect of a Persian invasion. Some cities proposed just giving in straight away, but the two leading cities, Athens and Sparta, determined to join together in opposing Darius’ forces. The matter came to a head in 490 B.C when a huge Persian army sailed across the Aegean Sea and landed at Marathon, a large plain on the north coast of Attica (the territory around Athens).

The Athenians promptly sent a runner – Phidippides – to Sparta to request immediate reinforcements. The distance between Athens and Sparta is 140 miles and Phidippides covered the distance in less than two days. His effort was, however, in vain. The Spartans sent back word that they were willing to send troops, but could not immediately do so as they were observing a religious festival .

So the Athenians had to face the Persians at Marathon with no more than a few local allies. The odds against them seemed overwhelming, but fortunately they had one trump card: a brilliant general in the person of an aristocratic adventurer called Miltiades.

Mitiades’ plan was to wrong-foot the Persians by using unorthodox military tactics. Instead of placing his elite heavy infantry, the hoplites, in the middle of the Greek line opposite the Persian elite troops, he stationed them instead on the two wings. He calculated that the Persians would easily break through in the middle and, imagining themselves vict-or ious, would relax their discipline. In the meantime the Greek hoplites would have routed the light Persian forces on the wings and could then turn and attack the rear of the Persians. The success of this plan can be


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seen in the nal casualty gures, which, reportedly, were: Persian dead 6,400, Athenian dead 192.

A runner was now despatched to Athens to report the good news. He had to run a distance of 26 miles, and by the time he reached Athens he was completely exhausted. He just managed to gasp out his report of victory before collapsing on the spot and dying.

The Spartans did eventually turn up to reinforce the Athenians, but were in time only to congratulate them on their victory. At a later date, however, they were able to make up for their absence at Marathon in a spectacular manner and to win eternal glory for themselves. It happened as follows:

After Darius’ generals had retreated back to Persia with their defeated army, Darius immediately began to plan a second invasion. The humili-ation of being defeated by the smaller Athenian forces was too great to bear. Before his plans came to fruition, however, he died, and the task of taking revenge on the Greeks fell to his son Xerxes.

A son sometimes likes to outdo his father, and the army which Xerxes now gathered together was so vast (probably around 100,000 strong) that it could not be transported to Greece by sea. Xerxes therefore detailed a task force of engineers to build two bridges across the Hellespont strait which divides Europe and Asia (see map 3 above) so that the army could march overland to Greece. When a storm destroyed the bridges, Xerxes was so furious that he ordered the waters of the Hellespont to be lashed and branded with hot iron as a punishment.

When the bridges had been rebuilt, and preparations for the expedition completed, Xerxes reviewed his troops. He had a white marble throne placed on a small hill overlooking the coastal plain, and remained seated

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Map 3 - Greece in the PersianWar Period: 5th Century B.C.


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at that spot for two days watching the army cross the strait. He then led his forces to Doriscus in Thrace where 1000 support ships joined them.

As word of this second Persian invasion spread through Greece, there was again panic and an attempt to collect together a Greek army. On this occasion no less than thirty-one Greek states banded together under the leadership of Sparta to repel the invaders. Xerxes was reported to be making swift progress down the east coast of Greece, and it was clear that he had Athens rmly in his sights.

There was only one spot on Xerxes’ route where the Greeks might hope to hold up his advance, and this was a place called Thermopylae, which means literally ‘hot gates’ (referring to the hot springs in the area). This was – and is – a narrow corridor of land formed where high mountains come down close to the sea. However many thousands of men Xerxes had with him, only a handful could move through this pass at any one time.

The Greeks forces, therefore, prepared to defend Thermopylae. The Spartan contingent was small – only 300 men – but these made up an elite force known as ‘The Equals’. They were led by the Spartan king, Leonidas. The Athenians’ main contribution was at sea: they sent a eet to prevent the Persians transferring to ships to bypass Thermopylae.

The Spartan 300 fought with unparalleled valour and held the pass against vastly superior numbers for two days. It seemed, in fact, that they would be able to hold out inde nitely and Xerxes was beginning to despair of his expedition. But then the Spartans were betrayed. A Greek, called Ephialtes, led an elite group of Persian ghters, known as ‘The Immortals’, along a lightly-guarded mountain track to the rear of the Spartan position. The Spartans were thus trapped in the pass. Every last man of ‘The Equals’ fought to the death against the Persian ‘Immortals’ and, at the place where they fell, a modern memorial plaque bears the message they left for their countrymen.

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

The heroism of the Spartans at Thermopylae has been cele brated through-out the ages. It is the theme of a short poem by a modern Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, who uses the story to re ect more generally on human life. Here is his poem (in which the Persians are called by their Greek name, the Medes):

THERMOPYLAE Honour to those who in the life they lead de ne and guard a Thermopylae.


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Never betraying what is right, consistent and just in all they do, but showing pity also, and compassion; generous when they’re rich, and when they’re poor, still generous in small ways, still helping as much as they can; always speaking the truth, yet without hating those who lie. And even more honour is due to them when they foresee (as many do foresee) that Ephialtes will turn up in the end, that the Medes will break through after all.

Although the Persians did break through at Thermopylae, they were later defeated by Athens and her allies, both at sea (at the Battles of Salamis and Mykale) and on land (at the Battle of Plataea). After these defeats the Persians never again attempted an invasion of Greece, though they continued for decades to ght an on-and-off sea war with Athens.

The victory of the Greeks over the Persians in these wars had a decisive in uence on the later history of Europe. Some historians say that the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C is more important for British history than the Battle of Hastings in A.D. 1066. Had the Persians been victorious over the Greeks at Marathon, then there might have been no Golden Age of Greece to look back on, no Roman Empire. Christianity might never have become a mainstream religion. Our language, our culture, everything about us might be very different. So perhaps we should talk about ‘490 B.C and all that’!

The Golden AgeThe Greeks themselves could hardly foresee how momentous their victory over the Persians would be for the history of the western world, but they were conscious of the fact that they had saved themselves from cultural annihilation by a ‘barbarian’ (a word used by the Greeks in a neutral sense to mean ‘foreigner’). In the decades that followed the defeat of the Persian invader, the Athenians in particular entered into a period of brilliant cultural achievement in which they offered a distinctively Greek ‘take’ on every aspect of life: political, intellectual, religious, social, artistic, athletic.

Active in this period were many outstanding men: the philosophers Socrates and Plato, the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides, the histor-


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ian Thucydides, and the sculptor, Pheidias. Every aspect of human life was discussed, written about and represented in art. It is this period that attracts the name: ‘the Glory that was Greece’. And this glory was re ected in ambitious public buildings erected at this time – notably the Parthenon, a huge temple to Athena which stands on the Acropolis, the hill in the centre of Athens.

The Athenians were not given to modesty about their achieve ments. The famous Athenian statesmen, Pericles, who came to prominence around 450 B.C, claimed that Athens, with its ne buildings, democratic institutions, and rich cultural life, was the showcase for the whole of Greece, a shining example of Greek achievement, of which Greeks, wherever they lived, could be proud. He called Athens ‘the school of Greece’.

Athens was now generally acknowledged to be the leading city in Greece, and she was not slow to exploit her prominent position. She became the leader of a new anti-Persian alliance, called the Delian League, which included Greek cities both on the mainland and in the Aegean islands. The league members paid a tax to Athens in the form of either money or ships. Initially the money, the so-called treasury, was held on the island of Delos, but in 454 B.C the Athenians transferred it to Athens and used a portion of it to nance Pericles’ ambitious building programme in the city.

The allies were, unsurprisingly, resentful of the fact that Athens was using their tax money to nance projects, such as the building of the Parthenon, from which they received no special bene t. As for Pericles’ claim that such buildings were ‘for all the Greeks, not just the Athenians’, the allies’ reaction was in effect: ‘Pull the other one’. Athens was increasingly viewed as a self-seeking imperial power rather than as an ally and protector, and there were a number of revolts against her leadership. These Athens put down ruthlessly, always claiming that, without her protection, the league of allies would again face a threat from Persia.

Athens v SpartaThe next threat to Athens, however, came from much nearer home, in fact from Sparta. The Spartans had been uneasily watching Athens’ empire building activities, and, from 464 B.C, engaged in various military actions to try to reduce Athens’ power. In 431 B.C a full-scale war broke out between the two cities. Sparta was supported by a number of cites in the Peloponnese, and so this war is known as the Peloponnesian War.

Prominent in Athens at this time was the statesman and general,


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Pericles. From the historian Thucydides, we learn that Pericles was a man of vision and integrity who was able to inspire his fellow-citizens to stand rm against Sparta and defend Athens’ democratic values. (You will nd one of his famous speeches on page 81) Thucydides also relates in graphic detail how the Athenians, as well as ghting the Spartans in annual summer campaigns, had to contend with an even deadlier enemy: a visitation of the plague. He gives a harrowing eyewitness account of the suffering this caused. Thucydides himself caught the plague but survived; Pericles was less lucky: he died of his infection.

Athens fought bravely on, but, weakened by the long years of war and the effects of the plague, eventually capitulated in 404. For a short period after this a pro-Spartan government ruled Athens, but later the Athenians achieved independence again.

The March of the Ten Thousand During the period of hostilities between Athens and Sparta, the Spartans adopted the principle of ‘your enemy is our friend’, and showed themselves ready to make alliances with the Persians. They had close relations in particular with the Persian governor of Asia Minor, Cyrus. This alliance led to a famous, and somewhat bizarre episode, known as ‘The March of the Ten Thousand’:

Cyrus wanted to seize the Persian throne from his elder brother, Artaxerxes, and needed to raise an army. He requested help from the Spartans who contributed over 10,000 men. These crossed to Asia Minor and joined Cyrus’ forces on the three-month march to Persia, see Map 4. When battle was eventually joined with Artaxerxes (at Cunaxa close to

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Babylon), the Greeks were victorious, but at the moment of victory, Cyrus was killed. This left the Greek mercenaries stranded in the heart of Persia with no-one to pay or feed them – and at the mercy of Artaxerxes.

But . . . ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’. An inspirational leader emerged in the person of a newly-appointed general, Xenophon. He refused to surrender to Artaxerxes and determined to get his troops back to Greece. He decided to take a different route home – northwards through Armenia to the coast of the Black Sea, where Greek colonies were established. The terrain along this route was wild and mountainous, and Xenophon’s men came under constant attack from both Persian forces and local tribes. Estimates for the duration of their homeward journey vary from eight months to over a year. Their ordeal nally ended when, breasting a mountain ridge one day, they saw below them a longed-for sight: the shimmering waters of the Black Sea. At once the joyful cry went up ‘The sea! The sea!’ – a cry that has echoed through history. A recent use of it was as the title of a prize-winning novel by Iris Murdoch.

Greece in declineIn the following decades, down to the middle of the fourth century B.C, the Greek states continued in their traditional pattern of bickering with each other, making and breaking alliances, and pursuing their own interests with little regard to the fate of Greece as a whole. The consequence of this was eventually fatal to their political independence. For whereas, in the previous century, they had successfully resisted being incorporated into the Persian Empire, they were now to be subjugated by a fellow Greek with imperial ambitions. This was Philip of Macedon.

From the map on page 17 you will see that Macedon was a large territory to the north of Greece. Although the Macedonians were Greek by descent, they were regarded by their southern neighbours in Greece proper as uncultivated rustics. These rustics, however, now revealed themselves as a force to be reckoned with. The Macedonian king, Philip, was ambitious to bring Greece under his own control, and to use the country as a stepping-stone for an attack on Persia – he saw this as long overdue revenge for Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in the previous century. He judged – rightly – that the Greeks were too disunited to put up much resistance to him. The effort that had earlier been made against the Persians would not be repeated. He began gradually to conquer territory in northern Greece.

In Athens there was one man who clearly perceived the danger


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presented by Philip. This was the prominent orator, Demosthenes. In a series of speeches, known as the Philippics, he alerted his fellow Athenians to the Macedonian threat, and begged them to organise some effective resistance. But he was unable to prevail. The Athenians hesitated, prevaricated, negotiated – but they did not ght. By 337 Philip had gained control of the Greek mainland and incorporated it into his Macedonian empire.

Philip never achieved his ambition to invade Persia: he was assassinated in 336 B.C. He was succeeded by his twenty-year-old son, Alexander, known to us as Alexander the Great. Alexander was an inspiring leader and a brilliant general. In the thirteen years up to his untimely death in 323 B.C he not only achieved his father’s ambition of conquering Persia, but extended his rule as far as India. Greece, once so gloriously powerful and independent, was now part of somebody else’s empire.

And this was the fate of Greece for many centuries. After the Macedonian conquerors came the Romans, then the Byzantines, then the Venetians, then the Turks. Greece did not regain political independence again until 1821.

Of all the conquerors of Greece the Romans were the most ‘respectful’. Although they ruled Greece, they could never feel themselves culturally superior to her. They were in awe of her intellectual and artistic achievements, and felt themselves to be ‘captivated’ by the small country which they had captured.

And many people since have been ‘captivated’ by ancient Greece. In every subsequent age, scholars and amateur students of life have returned to the ancient Greeks, in particular to the Greeks of the fth and fourth century B.C, to get help with answering life’s eternal questions. And this is what we shall do in the remainder of this book.


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