Early Greece

by Oswyn Murray

  Kleomenes was asked by Aristagoras to intervene in the Ionian revolt, but unlike the Athenians he refused: his next victim was to be Argos. The campaign is dated by a unique double oracle from Delphi, which balances an ambiguous reply on the prospects of the war against Argos with an irrelevant but clear prophecy of the fate of Miletus (Herodotus 6.77 and 18): the date is therefore between 499 and 494. At the battle of Sepeia Kleomenes won a crushing victory, and managed to surround a large body of Argives in a sacred wood where they had taken sanctuary. On the pretext of ransom he called out a number of men by name and killed them; when the rest realized what was happening, he burned them alive in the wood. 6000 men were killed in all; the consequence of this defeat was a new regime at Argos: ‘slaves’ (presumably the helot-type serfs known as the gymnētes or ‘naked ones’) took control for several years, until they were expelled by the sons of the hoplites killed at Sepeia (Herodotus 5.76–83). According to the Argives the campaign was marked by a series of sacrilegious acts on the part of Kleomenes; contrarily his enemies at Sparta put him on trial for failing to go on to capture the city of Argos. The episode certainly reveals Kleomenes’ high-handedness and lack of concern for the conventions of war; but his very success and his absolute control of the hoplites were winning him enemies at home: for he had split the hoplite assembly from the ephors and aristocratic council, who seem to have rallied behind his rival king Demaratos. His campaign had one more general effect: it eliminated Argos from history for a generation, and so made the Peloponnese a stronghold for the Greek resistance against the Persians.

  Kleomenes was now at the height of his power. In 491 Persian envoys of king Darius arrived in Greece, seeking earth and water, the traditional symbols of submission. Athens was already hostile and implicated in the Ionian revolt: the Persians were thrown into ‘the pit’, the normal mode of execution of criminals. More surprisingly the Spartans reacted as strongly, and threw their envoys down a well, where earth and water were both in plenty; they later suffered from deep guilt about this treatment of men protected by the gods (Herodotus 7.133–4). Elsewhere the islands and many of the mainland cities gave the signs of submission; Aegina was one of these. Athens, pursuing her old enmity and afraid that Aegina might be used as a Persian base against her, complained to Sparta as head of the Peloponnesian League, to which Aegina belonged. Kleomenes attempted to take Aeginetan hostages, but was opposed by Demaratos; whereupon he persuaded Demaratos’ kinsman Leotychidas to claim that Demaratos was illegitimate, and bribed the Delphic oracle to support the claim. Demaratos was deposed in favour of Leotychidas and left for Persia; the ten richest men on Aegina were handed over to the Athenians as hostages. But Kleomenes’ plot became known, and he fled from Sparta to Thessaly and then to Arcadia, where he began organizing an attack on Sparta. The Spartans in alarm brought him home and reinstated him, but his relatives tied him up on the grounds he was mad; he acquired a knife from one of the guards and carved himself to pieces. There followed a war between Athens and Aegina over the Athenian refusal to return the hostages (Herodotus 6.48–75).

  The strange story of Kleomenes’ fall contains difficulties. Chronologically it is hard to believe that all this happened in the course of a year, before the Persian attack on Athens in 490, as Herodotus implies. The end of the story looks suspiciously like a disguised assassination; yet it is perhaps wrong to be too sceptical. The character of Kleomenes reveals a tension between religious belief and sacrilegious disregard of conventional norms, which may well be a symptom of mental instability, as contemporaries thought. Within Sparta itself there was an inherent danger of conflict between the demands of a successful royal general at the head of his troops, and a system which expected social conformity for the creation of those same troops. This conflict had been stirring since the power of the ephorate began to rival that of the kings: the first ephor whose exploits are recorded was Chilon about 556, who was perhaps architect of the ‘bones of Orestes’ policy, and was regarded as one of the Seven Wise Men. But it was Kleomenes who brought the conflict into the open. Sparta was left without a strong king; Leotychidas was in disfavour, and Leonidas the half-brother of Kleomenes lacked his stature. By his last throw Kleomenes had destroyed the prestige that he and the previous generation had won for the kingship; yet for whatever personal reasons his career had demonstrated Sparta’s firm commitment to an anti-Persian policy.

  Like Kleomenes of Sparta, the importance of Peisistratos of Athens is minimised in the historical sources: the family most responsible for the growth of the city of Athens, which for two generations presided over her artistic preeminence in the sixth century, and showed the way to the democratic patronage of the age of Perikles, ended in disgrace, exile and flight to the Persians; the oral tradition followed by Herodotus chose to forget the Peisistratid age as an age of tyranny, and to attribute the greatness of Athens to the subsequent generation of the foundation of democracy. The record of the tyranny at Athens has to be reconstructed from scattered anecdotes in Herodotus and elsewhere, and from the artistic evidence of vase-painting and temple building.

  Solon had freed the peasantry of Attica, provided a law-code; and offered a constitution which attempted to mediate between the demands of wealth and of birth. The tyranny arose from the failure of this constitutional compromise (p. 199): the emergence of feuding aristocrats, supported by the territorial factions of Shore, Plain and Highlands, shows that there was still in Attica an entrenched aristocracy supported by powerful client interests. The three attempts of Peisistratos, leader of the ‘party beyond the mountains’ which was based at least in part on his family control of the northern plain of Marathon, beginning in 561 BC, are typical episodes in the seizure of power by a Greek tyrant: driven out after the first attempt by his two rivals, he made a marriage alliance with Megakles head of the Alkmeonidai, and returned to power about 558; but his refusal to breed heirs to unite the two families (and so compromise the rights of his existing children) led to a second expulsion and a decade in exile. He finally gained power at the battle of Pallene in 546, which he won with massive foreign aid – Thessalian mercenaries, troops from Eretria, and assistance from Lygdamis, tyrant of Naxos. He ruled Athens from 546 to 528, and his sons succeeded him, until their expulsion in 510.

  The political history of Athens in this generation of tyranny is obscure: Herodotus says that the existing magistracies and laws were retained (1.59), and the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians emphasises the mildness and popularity of Peisistratos’ rule. But magistrates were presumably appointed by the tyrant, rather than elected, and there is considerable evidence both of use of the aristocracy by the tyrants, and of continuing troubles from them. The suppression of aristocratic feuds provided a period of stability in which power would inevitably begin to be concentrated on the city of Athens. One of Peisistratos’ innovations was the institution of travelling judges; another was a tax on agricultural produce used in part to provide loans to smaller peasant farmers. These suggest that he sought to substitute central provision for local aristocratic control, and to further the interests of the independent hoplite farmer. All these developments prepare the way for reforms after the fall of the tyranny.

  The most distinctive feature of the policy of the Peisistratidai is their conscious attempt to create in Athens a religious centre to rival those emerging in the international shrines of Greece, with temples, festivals and new artistic forms centred on the territory of a city-state. The main focus of Greek religion was the festival, rather than the god or his temple: from the original practices of consumption of the sacrificial meat in a communal feast, processions and competitions had evolved, in which the entertainment of worshippers was an essential part of the honour paid to the god. Even before his first tyranny in 566/5 Peisistratos seems to have been connected with the reorganization of the main festival for the city goddess Athena, the Panathenaia. An inscription records the construction of a dromos or racetrack in the Agora by ‘the first commissioners (?) of the c
ontest for the grey-eyed maiden’ (Dedications from the Athenian Akropolis no. 326), and it is at this time that the great series of Panathenaic prize vases begins (plate 2b): these were especially commissioned by the state as prizes. They were decorated with a painting of the statue of Athena Armed (Athena Promachos) on one side, and on the other with a representation of the contest in which the prize had been won; and they were filled with the traditional Athenian product of olive oil. Long after the Black Figure technique had been replaced by Red Figure, these vases continued to be made with the old technique.

  Buried in the foundations of the fifth century Acropolis is the debris left by the Persian sack of Athens—the best preserved and perhaps the greatest of all collections of ancient sculpture, now in the Acropolis Museum in Athens: many of the sculptures even retain traces of their original paint. The most important of these come from the decoration of two large temples, one of about 560, the other of the 520s; built into the fortification walls of the Acropolis are the unfinished column drums of a third temple, the so-called Old Parthenon, which was still under construction in 480 when the Persians arrived, and the foundations of which can be seen under the present Parthenon. One further set of foundations exists, located by the German archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld in 1885 north of the Parthenon. The problem of how to apportion three sets of remains between two foundations has exercised the ingenuity of successive generations of archaeologists, and almost every possible variant has been suggested. My personal preference is for the theory that suggests three successive temples on the Parthenon site, one in 560, demolished in order to be replaced by that interrupted in 480, whose ruins were finally replaced by the Parthenon in the mid fifth century; the Dörpfeld foundations will then belong to the temple of the 520s.

  The temple of 560 seems then to be the original temple of Athena Polias (Athena of the City); it was the first large-scale temple in Athens, and is surely connected with Peisistratos’ known interest in the cult and festival of Athena. His return from exile about 558 was the subject of a story which the rational Herodotus found incredible, but which shows the importance of his connection with the goddess: he was conducted back in a religious procession by a beautiful girl six foot tall successfully masquerading as Athena herself (1.60).

  It is not easy to distinguish the building activity of Peisistratos’ last period of power (546–528) from that of his sons (528–510). The father certainly purified the island of Delos by removing all graves from within sight of the sanctuary, and the presence of Athenian workmen on the temple of Apollo is another sign of his activity there. In Attica itself there were a number of minor temples, and public buildings in the agora. The erection of a new Hall of Mysteries at Eleusis shows the same concern as for the Panathenaia: both are attempts to give Athens the prestige of an international religious centre. In Greece temple building involves carved figures as decoration; and it is not therefore surprising to find the first great Attic sculptors emerging at this time. The sons of Peisistratos were responsible for extensive water-works, culminating in the monumental fountain-house of Enneakrounos (nine springs). They also seem to have created a second major temple to Athena on the Acropolis (that on the Dörpfeld foundations); and it was probably they who started the huge temple of Olympian Zeus, which was abandoned on their fall (above p. 242).

  The Peisistratean festival of the Panathenaia was associated with the recitation of the poetry of Homer:

  In the eyes of your ancestors Homer was a poet of such worth that they passed a law that every four years at the Panathenaia he alone of all the poets should have his works recited.

  (Lycurgus [fourth century orator], Against Leokrates 102)

  This assertion of the canonical importance of Homer is connected to the ancient claim that it was Peisistratos who established a fixed text of the poet; for competitions in recitation require rules about what should be recited.

  Another festival was destined to establish a new art form. The City Dionysia in honour of Dionysos were reorganised about a generation later than the festival of Athena, but still within the age of Peisistratos. A small temple of Dionysos was built on the southern slopes of the Acropolis. The festival involved an annual procession of the ancient statue of Dionysos from Eleutherai (a mountain settlement on the northern borders with Boeotia) to Athens. At the celebrations around 536–3, ‘Thespis the poet first acted, who produced a play in the city and the goat was awarded as prize’ (Parian Marble 43). The origins of tragedy are a controversial subject; but the great democratic art form began with performances at a tyrant’s festival on the bare hillside next to the temple of Dionysos.

  The unification of Attica, and the creation of a new form of public patronage capable of being taken over and directed by the polis, point forward to the political life and public culture of classical democratic Athens. But the Peisistratidai were also patrons of the old aristocratic arts. This was the greatest period of Attic Black and early Red Figure vase painting, of master potters and painters like Nearchos, the Amasis Painter, Exekias, the Andokides Painter, Euphronios, Euthymides: their vases show the new sophistication of the culture of pleasure at the court of tyrants. The Peisistratidai were patrons too of the great sympotic poets, Ibycus and Anacreon, and of the choral poet Simonides, creator of the victory ode for the games and the first poet to work for pay. The age of the Peisistratidai was remembered as a golden age of Athenian culture.

  Some have found a contradiction in the idea that the Athenian tyranny was responsible for the first great period of Athenian art and culture: surely this art is essentially an expression of the spirit of freedom. But that is to ignore the fundamental fact that the basis of all art is patronage, the willingness of individual or society to pay for the skills involved. Art has a use, a social function, which is mediated through the relationship between creator and patron. The art of the Peisistratid age stands at the watershed between the earlier conception of art formed by the patronage of an aristocratic elite, and the art of the polis as the expression of the will of the people, created to serve their public temples and their public festivals. The tyrants were both aristocrats and the representatives of their polis; their art therefore looks forward and back.

  In many ways the Peisistratid age did not differ from the aristocratic world that preceded it and continued afterwards. And yet the culture of Athens in the late sixth century lacked rigid class barriers: Nearchos the potter was rich enough to commission Antenor, Athens’ most famous sculptor, to carve the largest surviving kore (female sculpture) for dedication on the Acropolis in about 520 (plate 7a); and the mass of similar dedications found in the debris of the Persian sack, dating from both before and after the fall of the tyranny, shows a society unified by its appreciation of art and its sense of the importance of the achievements of individuals. Many have the pride to state their profession: after the aristocrats and victors in the games, the largest group is that of the potters (including Andokides and Euphronios) dedicating ‘a tithe from their earnings’, along with other workers and professionals – a fuller, a tanner, an architect, a shipbuilder, and eighteen women, including a washer-woman.

  In the age of the Peisistratidai, Athens was still politically an aristocratic state; for even after the final establishment of the tyranny other families had considerable power. The great wealth of the Philaidai is shown by the achievement of Kimon in winning on three successive occasions the chariot race at Olympia (p. 204); his half-brother Miltiades was invited by the tribe of the Dolonkoi in the Thracian Chersonese to be their ruler. He established a family principality there: on his death it passed on to Kimon’s sons, Stesagoras and his brother Miltiades (later general at Marathon), who ruled with the support of the Peisistratidai, and married a Thracian princess. His son was the Kimon who founded the Athenian empire, and a more distant relation was the historian Thucydides, who still possessed ancestral estates in Thrace in the late fifth century.