The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  'Undeserved' office in the community was also a source of grievance and disruption. There were not many jobs of any distinction in an archaic Greek community but as riches filtered downwards, there were more people who thought themselves competent to hold them. Disappointed candidates, as always, were one source of trouble and excluded but confident 'new men' were another. So tyrants opened up high offices in the community and the ruling council to more families, including rich and able non-nobles. They became the arbiters of much social honour and preferment and also, ultimately, of civil judgements. Meanwhile, political elections to magistracies could be quietly fudged into 'selections'. At home, troublesome rivals had to be killed or exiled, but abroad, tyrants were wary of gratuitous border-wars against other tyrants: they brought the risk of military failure.

  In short, tyrants helped to stop spiralling ambition and faction by an ultimate act of ambitious faction: their own coup. Usually, it involved bloodshed, and, as tyrants regarded their rule as the inherit­able asset of their family, their dominance passed on to a second generation. Inevitably, some of these heirs were much less discreet or able than their fathers. Amazing stories circulated about Periander, the second tyrant of Corinth (how he made love to his wife's corpse, how he threw brothel-keepers into the sea), or Phalaris in Sicily (how he roasted his enemies in a big bull of bronze: the story was probably inspired by one of the tyrant's surviving bronze sculptures). Tyranny had a basic illegitimacy, and observant citizens were well aware of its drawbacks. Within decades of the first tyrants some of the Greek communities were already trying to find an alternative way of resolv­ing tensions. Their preferred option was the use of law, prescribed by contemporary lawgivers.

  Among the aristocrats, there had already been individual lawgivers, but the social and political crisis of the mid-seventh to sixth centuries bc gave them a new scope. From Dreros, on Crete, we have our earliest inscribed Greek law (probably c. 650 bc). It limited unduly prolonged tenure of the main civic magistracy, just the sort of 'dis­order' which might result in a tyranny. In Athens, in the 620s, faction-fighting broke out after the foiled coup of a would-be tyrant acting with foreign backing. To restore social harmony, laws were set out and displayed in writing by the Athenian nobleman Draco, of harsh 'Draconian' fame. In 594 bc, again at Athens, a tyranny was within easy reach of Solon, another aristocrat. However, Solon preferred to 'call the people together',4 as the chief elected magistrate of that year, and then to write down wide-ranging laws which regulated anything from boundary disputes to excessive display at weddings and funerals, provocative insults of a man's dead ancestors and the due sacrifices in the year's religious calendar.

  Solon is the best-known and most admirable lawgiver in early Greece. He was also a poet and he defended his reforms in vigorous verse. To Solon, we owe the first surviving statement that the conflict leading to tyranny was 'slavery': freedom, therefore, was a value for citizens to prize and fight for, not just against foreign enemies, but also within their own community/' Tyranny sharpened men's sense of what they had lost. To avoid it, Solon installed a second council beside the nobles' monopoly of the Areopagus council, and opened magistracies to the rich in Attica as well as to the nobly born. Famously, he abolished the 'dues' which had been payable to noble overlords by lesser landowners throughout Attica. In return for a noble's 'protection', landowners had been paying one-sixth of their harvest; the non-nobles did own the land in question and could buy and sell it, but the 'charge' remained attached to the land, whoever bought it. Graphically, Solon describes in verse how he set the 'black

  earth' free by uprooting the markers on which this ancient 'due' was recorded.6 The earth, too, had been 'previously enslaved': now, thanks to Solon, it was free.

  These 'dues' had probably been exacted by the nobles in Attica since the turbulent years of the 'dark ages'. By 594 bc many who paid them were the new hoplite-soldiers and so they no longer depended on their nobles for their military safety. The payments had become unjust, and even the nobles acquiesced in their ending. For them, the crucial point was that Solon had not gone on to redistribute lands from the rich to the poor: the nobles' own properties were left intact. What he did do was to ban the bad practice of creditors who demanded their debtor's free person as security for his debts. Most of these debts would be small and short-term, but they brought the debtor the accompanying risk of default, real or alleged: there was no idea of 'collateral' and as the security (a person) was so much more valuable, it was tempting for a creditor to foreclose unjustly. Debts thus led to the unacceptable enslavement of one Athenian by another. Solon also enlarged the process of justice by extending the right to prosecute offenders to third parties outside the particular crime. Solon promoted 'active citizenship', while believing in abstract, impersonal justice which was sustained by written law, not by his personal tyranny.

  Earlier scholars of this period, who were familiar with the Old Testament prophets in Israel, ascribed this Greek concern with 'justice' and 'fair play' to Greece's prophetic centre, the Delphic oracle. Pro­phetic Delphi, it was believed, inspired this new 'rule of law' and the moral revulsion from tyranny. In fact, Solon probably joined a 'Sacred War' in order to rid Delphic Apollo of a priesthood which was declared to be unjust and too partisan. Lawgivers like Solon did not claim divine inspiration or the gift of prophecy from the gods. Rather, they addressed social crises in the belief that human laws would avert them and that by giving up some of their interests, the protagonists could cohere in a new, sustainable order.

  Solon's legislation had a scope and detail which certainly qualify it as a 'code'. We can compare it with our best-attested collection of laws for an early Greek community, those which were publicly inscribed in the Cretan city of Gortyn, c. 450 bc.7 Some of these laws were new or recent, but others were much older, contemporary with Solon's. They had not grown up year by year, as if each year's magistrates routinely added to the laws which they inherited: in Greek city-states, the annual magistrates did not publish their year's judgements as a body of laws when they left office. They had surely been collected up into a single text by a public decision. In Gortyn, special 'law commissioners' had, in my view, been appointed to collect up existing laws and publish whatever they could find.

  These Cretan laws address vexed questions of inheritance which also concerned Solon in Attica: bequests are a source of social inequality and potential tension, especially within an upper class. Throughout, the laws' penalties for offences vary hugely according to social class. If a free man raped a household slave, he had to pay a fine about a hundred times smaller than the fine for a slave who raped a free person. The laws at Gortyn accepted the existence of semi-free 'serfs' (called woikeis) and inferiors (apetairoi) who were excluded from the dining-groups of the free citizens.8 The codification of these laws did not bring freedom or equality for everyone who came within their scope.

  Solon, too, accepted and upheld the distinctions of social class. However, all Athenians were declared free by him, and the legitimate slaves in Attica would henceforward be foreigners only. What, though, of relations between the Athenian 'people' and the new 'upper class' of nobles and rich men which Solon had recognized? Solon denied the hopes of those Athenians who wanted 'equal shares' in the land of Attica and a redistribution of property. The 'people', or demos, he tells us, did have its 'leaders', but they were probably not drawn from the very poor, as if they were engaged in a straight class-conflict with the rich. They are more likely to have been lesser landowners, men from the newly armed hoplites, the sort of people who had supported a tyrant elsewhere. Traditionally, even before Solon the citizens of Attica had been categorized as those who owned a horse, those who owned a 'yoke' of two oxen and those (the thetes) who owned neither but worked for others. The Attic hoplites were the oxen-owners, people with lands from about 'seven acres and two cows' up to about twelve to fifteen acres.9 They were, by modern standards, very small freeholders. Solon freed such people from paying an outdated 'due' to
the nobles, but he did not redistribute land or assets to them or give the lowest classes (the thetes) a full share in political power. It was not appropriate, he considered, to their station.

  Like tyrants, therefore, lawgivers were not the active promoters of a unified lower class. They restored 'order' and 'justice', but the dominant culture in their communities remained the culture pursued by aristocrats. During the continuing age of tyrannies in Greece, the scope for noble, competitive glory actually increased. By 570 bc four further great festivals of athletic games existed to rival the Olympics. The Pythian Games at Delphi began in 590 as a gymnastic contest financed by war-booty, probably from the recent Sacred War; they then included a famous musical contest too. The Isthmian Games (in 582) probably celebrated the ending of tyranny in Corinth. The surviving tyrant in nearby Sicyon then rivalled them by founding local Pythian Games of his own (also in 582); his enemies in nearby Cleonae, helped by the men of Argos, then founded Nemean Games too (in 573). All across the Greek world, a culture of the 'celebrity' began, not a culture of great warriors but one of great sportsmen, poets and musicians. By contrast, there are no 'celebrities' in the world described in the Old Testament or in the Near Eastern monarchies. For their athletes, the Greeks invented the victory parade, our 'red carpet'. Cities welcomed and rewarded their returning victors, and fine stories were told about these celebrities' prowess and then their sad decline (from old age, not narcotics). The all-in wrestler, Tim-anthes, would prove himself daily by drawing a huge bow, but when he fell out of practice, he could no longer do it and there was nothing left but suicide. And yet he killed himself, it was said, on a bonfire, like the great hero of wrestling, Heracles.10

  Victors in these games were proclaimed in the names of their home cities. Audiences from all over the Greek world heard their moment of glory, and it was mortifying for a city's tyrant that he could not command such success for himself. It was a young man's business, and the aristocratic poets dwelt on the short-lived glories of youth. It was also beset with risks, but risks were something which no nobleman professed to fear. In politics or in war, at the games or on the seas, there was a constant flow of winners and losers in the archaic age. In a temple on his home island of Lesbos, the lawgiver Pittacus, a 'wise man', was said to have dedicated a ladder, symbol of life's inevitable ups and downs of fortune."

  The families of tyrants did have one advantage: they controlled much greater revenues than almost any other noble rival in their community. The same tyrants who legislated against disruptive luxury could afford to build grand temples in the newly devised styles of stone architecture, copied from Egypt. Not all of their temples were sound projects: one of the biggest, on Samos, was begun, but never finished, on very unstable ground. But at Corinth or Athens, the tyrants' temples and buildings are the earliest which still impress us. In suitably placed city-states, tyrants also developed that earlier invention, the trireme, and built bigger fleets. Naval service, in due course, would add to the morale and shared sense of identity of their citizenry. While regulating extravagant weddings, tyrants also held the most magnificent contests among suitors for their own daughters in marriage. Unlike some of the aristocrats, they were not known for writing poetry, but they did patronize poets and artists and their own cities' festivals. They kept striving to outdo each other in the style of the old aristocrats, whose motto was 'anything you can do, I can do better'. To be secure, tyrants needed to outshine the nobles among whom they still lived; this pre-eminence was more important to them than fostering 'civic identity' for non-noble members of their city-states. Before tyrants existed, aristocrats had already patronized poets, craftsmen and the naval adventures of trading and raiding. While lacking a popular programme, tyrants strove to achieve even more of the same. As a result, the first era of political revolution was not the era of a new 'people's culture': rather, the aristocrats' values outlived their political monopoly.

  Sparta

  He was capable, too, of convincing everyone with him that 'Clearchus must be obeyed'. He used to do it by being hard: he was gloomy in appearance, harsh in voice, and he used to punish severely, sometimes in anger so that there were times when even he was sorry afterwards. He used to punish on principle, for he used to think that there was no good in an unpunished army . . . In danger, the troops were willing to obey him wholeheartedly and they would choose no one else to command them, for his gloominess then seemed to be bright­ness and his hardness . . . to be a saving grace. But when they were out of danger. . . many of them would desert him . . . for he had no charm . . . and they regarded him as boys regard a schoolmaster.

  Xenophon, Anabasis 2.6.9-11, on Clearchus the Spartan

  In the seventh century bc freedom, justice and luxury were indeed active agents of political change. The pursuit of 'luxury' really did divide Greek communities' upper classes, and it was not an irrelevant moralizing which caused laws to be passed to limit it. The political exclusion of non-nobles and the biased settling of disputes led to a demand for impersonal justice which is best seen in Solon's reforms and their underlying values. Solon also stood for freedom, in the sense of freedom from the 'slavery' of a tyrant and the 'enslavement' of paying 'dues' as a citizen to a superior. After his reforms all Athenian citizens were assured legally of freedom from one another's harass­ment. They could bring lawsuits, even as a third party, against anyone who behaved violently and abusively (showing hubris) and they were forbidden to make a fellow citizen into a slave. By law, they were granted a crucial 'freedom from .. .' superiors as arrogant as the Iliad's Odysseus.

  It is, however, in Sparta of this period that freedom, justice and luxury brought about the greatest changes. For centuries, the Spartans' lives would be conditioned by the results. In winter 12.5 Hadrian himself visited Sparta and is said to have praised 'Spartan values'.1 Like other tourists, he witnessed the games and festivals of the Spartan young men and would have watched the brutal whipping of the young male runners who took part. It was still a most peculiar place with a famous past, but he and his contemporaries had no true idea of how and why 'Spartan values' had originated. Sparta's secrecy is notoriously hard to penetrate because legends about Sparta, a 'Spartan mirage', colour almost all of our surviving evidence, from the early fourth century bc onwards. An idealized Sparta has been the most influential of all Utopias in history, and has influenced generations of political thinkers, from Plato through Thomas More to Rousseau.

  Unlike most other Greek communities, ancient Sparta retained king­ship, but unlike all known ancient states (except the Khazars by the Black Sea in the eighth century ad) she had not one king but two at the same time. These kings had religious duties, duties which other Greek states parcelled out among priests: they led the army in war and when they died they were given a highly reverential burial. The villages from which Sparta was made up were odd too: throughout their history they were unwalled. Nobody in future times, the historian Thucydides remarked, would ever infer Sparta's power from her insig­nificant physical remains. Her political order spanned a wide range of unusual statuses. There were Spartiate 'Equals', 'Inferiors', people called mothakes, and the 'Dwellers Around' (perioikoi, who lived in outlying towns in Sparta, not the main villages). There were also the helots ('captives') who were owned by the community; they worked the land and gave half of their produce to the Spartiates, but could not be bought or sold like slaves elsewhere. Helots ranked for ancient theorists, too, as people 'between slave and free'. As for Spartan children, the boys of Spartiate (citizen-Spartan) families underwent a fearsome compulsory training from the age of seven. There were many oddities in Sparta which puzzled outsiders. Several Spartiate brothers might end up sharing one wife (in my view because she was an heiress); girls, too, would be trained in running, wrestling and other sports, some of which were undertaken naked (arguably to prepare them to be mothers of fit, healthy children). All male Spartiates dined in communal groups or messes and ate simple food including a notorious black broth. Respect for superiors and
fellow Spartans' opinions was integral to these messes' social values.

  Adult Spartiates prized brief utterances and vivid, verbal images. Even those who could write a few words saw no need to write at length or use books for self-enrichment. Their restricted code of speech went with a strongly conservative and ordered society. Above all else, the system was shaped to train soldiers, so much so that a Spartan's failure in battle was quite often followed by his suicide. It is under­standable that archaeology in archaic Sparta has recovered thousands of little lead figurines of hoplite warriors, bronze figurines of female dancers who are holding their skirts (or 'mini-chitons') above the knee, and large reliefs in limestone, showing small figures approaching big seated persons, evidently heroes who were worshipped. The male warriors and the female dancers point to Spartans' education, while the reliefs show Spartans' extreme reverence for the gods and heroes, which was famous even in antiquity. But some of the Greek gods were not prominent among them: Spartan men are not known to have had a cult of Dionysus. The god of drunk, disorderly release was the very opposite of masculine Spartan control.

  Spartan society was never static, and the ancients were wrong to ascribe its entire constitution to one single early lawgiver, Lycurgus. When they tried, many years later, to date people in the distant past with a formal chronology, they gave Lycurgus dates which equate to c. 800-770 bc. However, his very existence is now rightly doubted. Most of the laws which reformed Spartan society had occurred, I believe, by c. 640 bc and were intended to address the basic issues of freedom, justice and luxury which underlay the rise of tyrants and lawgivers elsewhere in the contemporary Greek world.