Early Greece

by Oswyn Murray

  Now clean is the floor, and clean the hands of all and the vessels: one person places on our heads the woven garlands, another offers sweet-scented myrrh in a flask. The mixing bowl stands full with delight (euphrosynē); more wine is ready, and claims it will never give out, sweet in its jars, flower-scented. In the midst the holy perfume of incense arises; cool is the water, fresh and pure. White loaves are there, and a table groaning with cheese, burdened with rich honey. The altar in the midst is covered in flowers; song and joy fills the house around. First men of goodwill must sing the praise of the god with reverent tongue and pure words, pouring the libation and praying to be able to do right; for this is the duty at hand, not deeds of pride. Then we may drink as much as a man can carry home needing no attendant (unless he is very old). Praise the man who reveals his worth while drinking, and has memory and a song for virtue; do not recite the battles of Titans and Giants or Centaurs, the quarrels of old, or their violent factions: there is no good in these, but it is always right to have respect for the gods.

  (Fragment 1)

  The two stands of sport and feasting are woven together in the story of the marriage contest for the hand of Agariste, daughter of Kleisthenes tyrant of Sicyon. After winning the chariot race at the Olympic Games (of 572?) Kleisthenes caused it to be announced that anyone who thought himself worthy of the hand of his daughter should present himself within sixty days at Sicyon. He had a running track and wrestling ground built, and received there the most eligible suitors of Greece and south Italy, thirteen men of wealth and sporting fame. They were kept for a year while they were inspected by Kleisthenes: ‘the younger men he would take out to the gymnasion, but especially he tested them at the banquet’. Two Athenians led the field, and the chief contender was Hippokleides son of Teisandros, who was especially favoured because of his ancestral relationship to the Kypselid dynasty at Corinth. On the day of choice there was a magnificent banquet, ‘and the suitors competed publicly in music and in conversation’. Hippokleides was an easy winner, until after much drinking he called for a dance tune from the flautist. ‘He may have danced to his own satisfaction, but Kleisthenes who was watching began to have serious doubts about the affair. After a short pause Hippokleides ordered a table to be brought in; and when it arrived he climbed on it, and danced first some Laconian dances, and then some Attic ones; and finally standing on his head on the table he began beating time with his legs. Kleisthenes disapproved enough while he was dancing the first and second dances, at the thought that a man who could dance and act so shamelessly might become his son-in-law; but he held his peace, not wishing to denounce him. But when he saw him beating time with his legs, he could no longer restrain himself, and broke out, “Son of Teisandros, you have danced away your marriage.” To which the reply was “Hippokleides doesn’t care”. Hence the famous proverb.’

  Kleisthenes then announced a prize of a talent of silver to all the unsuccessful contestants, and betrothed his daughter to Megakles the son of Alkmeon, founder of the fortunes of the Athenian family of the Alkmeonidai through his friendship with the king of Lydia. The offspring of this match was the Athenian reformer Kleisthenes (p. 274), whose brother was the great-grandfather of Perikles. So Herodotus tells the story (6.126–30); it is fascinating, not only because it is one of the few examples of a Greek oral tradition directly related to a proverb, but also because everything that is known of the life style of the aristocracy suggests that it is true. For the episode reveals a class self-consciously aware of Homeric precedent, but combining this with the changed attitudes of an aristocracy of leisure.

  One aspect of archaic culture has been touched on in passing, but needs further exploration – its attitude to sexuality. The period from about 570 to 470 is not only one of the most productive periods of love poetry; it has also been described as ‘the great age of erotic vase-painting’; indeed it is its attitude to sex which perhaps defines most clearly the chronological limits of the archaic period. The higher manifestations of sexuality, the sublimation of the sex drive that is the experience of love, and the sophisticated arousal of sexual response through art or literature that is eroticism, are both in general culturally determined: in the archaic age, as in our own, social class and fashion played a major part in affecting the sexual responses of the individual.

  Archaic attitudes to sex were closely related to the social institutions of the aristocracy. Marriage was for the upper classes an occasion for creating political and social ties between different families and so enhancing the status of the genos within the individual city-state, or among the wider circle of the international aristocracy. So much is clear from the betrothal of Agariste: Kleisthenes was looking primarily for an alliance of wealth and power and for a bridegroom who would not shame him, not for his daughter’s happiness. Again in Pindar’s portrayal of the wedding feast (p. 205), the bride is unimportant; the primary relation is that between father-in-law and bridegroom, and it is not at all clear whether the ‘hearts that are one’ are those of the wedding couple, or of the two men and their families. For marriage in all classes was an institution concerned with social standing, property and inheritance, or with the practicalities of peasant existence, not an occasion for emotion: when Semonides grudgingly portrays the improbability of a happy marriage, it is in terms of the woman as a busy domestic bee ‘bearing a goodly and respected brood’ (Frag. 7.83–93). The women who appear for love in the symposiac poetry of Anakreon are anonymous – ‘Lesbian girl’, ‘Thracian filly’; they are slaves or professional entertainers at the feast, and the attitude to them is that of direct sexual desire, easily satisfied and without significance. Any deeper love of woman was a sign of degrading effeminacy.

  The Greek conception of romantic love was homosexual; all those attitudes to love which the courtly poets of the high Middle Ages and the age of Romanticism have taught us to experience for women were in Greece particularly associated with homosexuality, male or (by extension) female: the concept of love as permanent, destructive, irresistible, the basis of all human actions; idealization, unattainability and the idea of purity in the loved one; the importance of pursuit and conquest over satisfaction; the torture of jealousy – these are all expressed primarily in relation to members of the same sex. Such attitudes were established by the archaic aristocracy, and remained especially characteristic of aristocratic circles later. There is little enough evidence to trace the transition from the heterosexual society reflected in Homer (p. 41), and in Archilochos; but the cult of nakedness and athletic prowess in the gymnasion and palaistra, the sexual exclusiveness of the symposion and the emphasis on male courage in a society still largely organized for war, must surely be connected with the rise of homosexual love among an aristocracy who invented a new compound word to describe themselves, ‘the beautiful and the good’ (kaloikagathoi – ‘good’ of course in the sense of well-born). The accepted relationship was between an older man, the erastēs (lover) and a young adolescent, the erōmenos (loved one). The erastēs beseeches and importunes the erōmenos with gifts, and acts in general ‘as if he were mad’; the response of the boy’s family is the typical ambivalence, of pride that his charms are recognized coupled with anxiety lest he be corrupted. To the erōmenos are attributed unawareness, purity, coldness, disdain; he is Anakreon’s

  Boy with the virginal eyes,

  I seek you but you do not hear,

  for you know not that you are

  the charioteer of my soul.

  (Fragment 304)

  In art the erōmenos is portrayed similarly, with small genitals; even in the more explicit sexual scenes he is seldom aroused, and often rejects advances. The same attitudes emerge from the fact that prostitution is the worst accusation that can be made against a man, actual enjoyment of the passive role the next worst. In contrast to the girls, the boys Anakreon addresses are usually named: they are real people to be taken seriously: ‘I love Kleoboulos, I am mad for Kleoboulos, I run after Kleoboulos’ (Frag. 303). Such boys belong to
the same social class as their lovers and to the real world of sport and drink. Even the homosexual love poetry collected in ‘book 2’ of ‘Theognis’, though it addresses no particular boy, concerns serious relationships.

  Art reflects these preoccupations. The great series of naked male youths known as kouroi dominates the history of archaic sculpture; their precise functions and significance are usually unclear, though they often stood as idealized memorials of the dead on graves, or dedicated at religious shrines. Yet as a series they can only be understood in terms of a preoccupation with the beauty of the youthful male nude. Another product of this concern is the large group of Attic Black Figure and Red Figure cups primarily from the archaic period, inscribed (with or without a portrait) ‘So-and-so is beautiful’. The majority of these inscriptions refer to men, often to men whose names are known or are obviously aristocratic: so the Miltiades Kalos of plate 6b. It is not necessary to suppose that all examples were either painted on commission for particular erastai, or more generally reflect the attractions of particular boys; but they provide strong evidence for the tastes and interests of the Athenian aristocracy who used them at symposia.

  A more tentative conclusion may perhaps be drawn from the actual portrayal of the male form in archaic art. The emphasis initially is on the musculature of the male athlete, and even women are portrayed with generally masculine characteristics, narrow hips, small breasts, and pronounced musculature. At the end of the archaic period there is a marked tendency towards greater effeminacy in the portrayal of young men, and a correspondingly greater accuracy in the portrayal of women. At the same time the kalos inscriptions begin to disappear, and other indications suggest that the great age of homosexuality was passing. Aristophanes in the Clouds of 423 contrasts the new sophistic education with the old education of the ‘men who fought at Marathon’: in general the audience is meant to approve of the old, or at least to recognize with sympathy the parody of older attitudes. These attitudes are markedly homosexual, and portray the behaviour of the old-style erōmenos, aware of his attractiveness, but with the appropriate modesty of one whose function is to be the object of desire, not to invite it: the consequence of this education is ‘a powerful chest, a healthy skin, broad shoulders, a weak tongue, a big arse and a small cock’ (Clouds 101 off). This mock nostalgia neatly characterizes the older generation, and shows a significant shift in values, related perhaps to two phenomena. The first is that by the mid fifth century the attitudes of the aristocracy no longer shaped culture, which under state patronage had become democratic and therefore more heterosexual in its attitudes and assumptions; homosexuality retreated into the closed world of the intellectual right and the philosophical circles of Socrates and Plato. The second factor is the resurgence of the themes of the Homeric and heroic ages both in art and in such public literary forms as tragedy – for this too involved a return to a heterosexual age.

  The importance of homosexual attitudes can be seen in the story of the overthrow of the Athenian tyranny, as told by Thucydides (6.54–9). In the year 514 Hipparchos, brother of the tyrant Hippias, was murdered by two aristocratic lovers, Harmodios and Aristogeiton: Hipparchos had made advances to Harmodios, and on being rejected took revenge by arranging a public insult to his sister. The two lovers joined a conspiracy against the tyranny, and when that looked like failing, publicly assassinated Hipparchos and were themselves killed. Thucydides insists that this episode took place four years before the fall of the tyranny, and had no effect other than to increase its harshness. But for political reasons (p. 280) the Athenian people chose to believe that it was Harmodios and Aristogeiton who had overthrown the tyranny: statues of the ‘tyrannicides’ were placed on the Akropolis, they were given a public tomb in the Kerameikos, and their genos received public honours in perpetuity; when the statues were removed by the Persians in 480 (to be discovered at Persepolis by Alexander the Great and ceremonially returned to Athens), they were at once replaced, and as late as 440 the honours of their descendants were renewed and redefined. Thucydides clearly regards the episode in an unfavourable light, as the result of a sordid love quarrel; but originally it had been seen differently, as marking the creation of two culture heroes and the apotheosis of male love. As late as 346, speaking in a public court, the orator Aischines could say:

  Those whose courage has remained unsurpassed, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, were educated by their chaste and law-abiding erōs (or however we should call it) to be men of such a kind that anyone who praises their deeds is felt never to do justice in his praise to what they accomplished.

  (Against Timorchos 140)

  Like most forms of sexual behaviour, archaic homosexuality was culturally determined, and bears little relation to modern customs. It was a rite of transition, confined to an elite group, and involving young adults and adolescents in a social bonding whose aim was educational, the introduction of the young male into the adult group of warriors and the symposion. On Crete the lover presented his beloved with three gifts to symbolise his new status – a cloak, an ox (for sacrifice) and a cup (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 11.782c); at Athens (to judge from vase-painting) the gifts were often hares or fighting cocks. Such relationships ceased to be important at the age of marriage, and were marked by clear rules of appropriate conduct; in the language of the historian of sexuality, Michel Foucault, they were ‘problem-atised’, or made socially significant. They were distanced from the sex drive itself; it was women not men who were regarded as sexually insatiable and uncontrollable: as a result the accusation of ‘effeminacy’ against men refers not to weakness or passivity, but to excessive sexual activity.

  By the early fifth century the aristocratic world was no longer secure; a constant preoccupation in the odes of Pindar is the theme of envy. Part of the hoplite reaction to the Homeric ethic was expressed in the view that success or prominence in anything was dangerous, for it brought on a man the envy of the gods; this view was conventional by the classical period, and could even outlive the belief in direct divine intervention in man’s affairs: it still lies behind the historical world view of Herodotus. But Pindar’s conception of envy is more urgent; it is not the envy of the gods which worries him, but the envy of men; and this envy is directed not only against the monarchic power of the tyrant, but against the aristocracy in general. It is the envy of the new democratic world against the social order for which he speaks. The theme is most prominent in his poems for the aristocrats of Aegina, who were first threatened and finally enslaved by the democratic navy of Athens after the Persian Wars; but it is no preoccupation of the latest days of the archaic age. Pindar had already expressed it for the Alkmeonid Megakles, victor in the Delphic chariot race of 486:

  There call to me also

  five victories at the Isthmos

  and one paramount at God’s Olympia

  and two by Krisa,

  Megakles, yours and your father’s!

  And in this last happy fortune

  some pleasure I have; but sorrow as well

  at envy requiting your fine deeds.

  – Thus always, they say,

  happiness, flowering and constant,

  brings after it

  one thing with another.

  (Pythian 7.1 off. trans. Bowra)

  Megakles had been exiled by the Athenian assembly, voting in the democratic procedure known as ‘ostracism’ (p. 285) earlier in the same year.

  XIII

  Life Styles: the Economy

  THE DISTINCTION between aristocracy and the rest of the community was in many ways an uncertain one, lacking a clear institutional or economic basis. The diffusion of aristocratic attitudes was helped by a military system which encouraged a third or more of the citizen body to regard themselves as equal to the original military elite, and therefore to adopt aristocratic customs, so that many of these became widely accepted in the hoplite class, and were transmitted especially to the colonial areas where they influenced decisively the development of an aristocratic menta
lity among the original settlers.

  Equally important were the new sources of wealth, which produced an upwards social mobility much disapproved of by the hereditary aristocracy. In the elegiac poetry attributed to Theognis of Megara in the mid sixth century, the identification of virtue and birth is complete, while wealth is primarily seen as an undesirable disturbance of the established order; ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have the same connotations as the English ‘noble’ and ‘base’, being both social and moral:

  Wealth (ploutos), men do not honour you without reason, for you put up with their evil so easily; it would be right if only the good had wealth, and poverty were the companion of base men.

  (523–6)

  The result is the corruption of the aristocracy as the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ intermarry:

  We seek well-born goats or asses or horses, Kyrnos, and want them to come from good stock; but a good man does not hesitate to marry a base woman from a base father, provided he gives much money; nor is a woman ashamed to be the wife of a base man if he is rich, preferring wealth to birth. They honour money, and good marries base, and base good: wealth has mixed the race.

  (183–90)

  So congenial were these sentiments to the aristocracy that the personal character of Theognis’ poetry merged into a collection of elegiac couplets attributed to him, and sung at symposia throughout the classical period – the poet of a class who became a class of poetry. Theognis represents the unacceptable face of aristocracy.

  The economic basis of the distinction drawn by Theognis is primarily that between wealth based on land and that based on other activities: land was in all classes the most socially acceptable form of wealth, because it was the most permanent, the safest, and the one most subject to the constraints of the genos, and so least at the disposal of the individual. But few Greeks of any class allowed these considerations to dictate their economic behaviour entirely. Much modern work on the economic history of early Greece attempts to establish rigid distinctions relating social class to types of economic activity. The justification for such theoretical constructions is the evidence from Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries, where craftsmanship was of low status and trade was in the hands of resident foreigners: a priori it is claimed early Greece must have been less ‘economically advanced’ and more prone to despise craftsmen and traders as peripheral groups. The conception of a linear and one-directional movement in economic history is typical of the economist’s desire to construct models or theoretical patterns of behaviour; but it ignores the extent to which other factors influence economic development. In many respects Greece and the trading area of the Mediterranean were economically more advanced in the archaic period than later, when political tensions between competing groups of trading powers had developed and the home society had become more stratified.