The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Whoever wrote these abecedaries was pioneering a very different type of Ancient Greek script from Linear B. Greeks had become aware of the alphabet used by the people they knew as Phoenicians, seagoing folk based in the ports of the Levant, met with already. The abecedaries were found in Egypt, an indicator of a Greek world in later Geometric times that was increasingly connected once more with a larger Mediterranean world by seafarers and trade.

  By this date Greeks had managed without writing for the best part of five centuries. The Phoenician alphabet was not fully alphabetic in our sense, since it contained signs only for consonants. For some reason Greeks vastly extended the versatility of what they took over by borrowing Phoenician signs for Greek vowel sounds as well. The end result was a script of the ‘one letter, one sound’ type.

  The earliest examples of the new script do not suggest that dry accounting, Linear B-style, was the priority. The National Archaeological Museum in Athens displays in a special case a wine jug found in a grave in 1871. An Athenian potter made it around 740 BC, painting the surface in the Geometric style, now nearing the end of its popularity. On the shoulder someone scratched a rather unskilled run of letters in the new script: ‘He who of all the dancers now performs most daintily . . .’ A second line, hard to decipher, is often rendered as ‘the [jug] is his’ – a prize in other words. The first line is fitted to the same rhythmic pattern of beats as Homeric poetry. The early date of this scrap of verse makes it important. It shows that Greeks wasted no time in exploring the expressive potential of the new writing. Some authorities believe that the much greater undertaking of converting Homeric epics into written form belongs to this same period, the later 700s BC. Perhaps there was a poet who shaped and polished the great inheritance of oral material. He might even have been called Homer.

  The world conjured up in Homeric poetry was not one in which writing seems to have been a commonplace activity. This suggests that the new Greek alphabet and the new literacy among Greeks to which it gave rise could still have been novelties when the poems were written down. Whether the Homeric aspic captured other realities from the moment in time when the poems were set down in writing is a matter of learned debate.

  For instance, one vignette seems to hint at the Greek politics of the future. The Iliad’s King Agamemnon, the Greek commander-in-chief, has summoned the Greek army besieging Troy to an assembly. He has staff-wielding aristocrats steward the assembly, making sure that everyone is sitting quietly. He makes his speech. Then a common soldier, well known for his habit of criticizing his betters, dares to speak out. He reminds Agamemnon that it is thanks to the men that their leader’s royal tent is filled with Trojan booty.

  To be sure, this is a society in which the king and the aristocrats dominate the commoners, who normally know their place. Yet in this scene, Homer seems to imagine for his audience of aristocrats and their retainers the possibility of a more collective politics, in which the many, not just the one or the few, have their say. Cooperative communities, anchored geographically to a particular locality and valuing a communal life, were in fact the hallmark of a new political map of ancient Greece as it starts to come into focus from the 700s BC onwards.

  To this century belong the earliest reasonably reliable dates and events of their history recorded by the Greeks themselves. Because experts today can now start to draw on the historical traditions of the ancient Greeks themselves, the 700s BC mark a new phase in the way they conventionally divide up Greek history into periods. The Archaic Period is held to start in 776 BC, supposedly the first celebration of the athletic games at ancient Olympia to be officially recorded.

  Archaeologists have found some of the best evidence for the emergence of these collective communities in Archaic Greece at places of religious activity. A case in point is the large offshore island of Euboea, today’s Evvia. Fifteen miles or so south-east from the archaeological site of Lefkandi, the modern coast road reaches Eretria, a nineteenth-century town superposed on an ancient predecessor. Everywhere, ancient remains litter the modern streets and poke out of building plots. Through a wire fence the visitor can look at a particularly complicated jumble of foundations, a series of structures one on top of another. The topmost foundations belong to a Greek temple erected around 525 BC. Two sets of foundations below are remains of a building shaped like a hairpin with one end curved.

  People erected this some two centuries earlier, around 725 BC. Of flimsier materials, the walls being simple bricks of sundried mud, this earlier building even so must have been eye-catching, if only for its length, roughly the equivalent of, say, the forty-yard dash, a popular speed test for American footballers. It must have dominated its surroundings when it was built.

  Archaeologists see this hairpin building as serving the same essential purpose as the Doric-style temple built on top of it two centuries later. It was dedicated, that is, to a Greek divinity, Apollo. In its architectural ambition it served as an impressive expression of local religious feeling. On the practical level, it provided a shelter for an important focus of ancient Greek worship, a representation of the god. Like many sacred sites in many cultures, it would be rebuilt more than once on the same spot.

  In general plan this temple looks like a slightly smaller version of the hairpin building at nearby Lefkandi encountered earlier in this chapter. As we have seen, this predecessor from around 1000 BC obviously served the two notables buried inside. It could have been their former home.

  It is possible that the aristocrats of these earlier times also exercised priestly authority, guarding the sacred objects of the local divinity in their residences. Some archaeologists think that the Eretrian hairpin and other ‘first temples’ of the 700s BC point to a religious restructuring. A communal new building, mimicking the aristocratic architecture of the time, was now erected to protect the property of the god, offering access to a wider group. It was as if the protests of Homer’s curmudgeonly plebeian were inching, ever so slowly, towards greater political realization.

  The religious customs of the time offered the political communities emerging in Archaic Greece a potent form of social glue. When individuals came together as groups to worship at a shared sacred site, they were engaged in what modern sociologists call community building. It follows that Archaic Greek society as a whole must have been predisposed to believe in its gods, and that a – basically – uniform pattern of rituals and, indeed, pantheon of gods was developing. Another sacred site shows vividly how the levers of Greek religion operated at this time to bring people together to mix socially.

  Olympia was one of the chief Greek shrines of the god Zeus. In the 700s and 600s BC, the sacred site was a leafy, riverside spot where visitors passed the time in outdoor activities. The modern museum on site gives some clues to what these were. The display includes case after case of metalwork from this period, much of it in the form of bits of bronze cauldrons – bowls, that is, designed to stand on three legs so that a fire could burn underneath, while something cooked inside.

  On websites today, if you are so disposed, you can order a modern witches’ cauldron. It looks ordinary enough but becomes magical, apparently, if the owner applies a special paste to it, conveniently supplied by the manufacturer. Those ancient cauldrons from Olympia are not entirely remote in spirit. By this date such cauldrons had been around for a long time in Greece: ‘three legs’ or ti-ri-po-de, tripods in other words, turn up in the Linear B tablets of the Mycenaean Bronze Age. So here too an originally mundane form – a cooking utensil – has been turned into something special and sacred. On one particularly massive specimen at Olympia, its bowl over two feet wide, you can see ancient Greek lettering on the rim, in what at the time was the local dialect here. It reads simply, ‘Sacred to Zeus’.

  These ancient cauldrons communicated an air of manliness. Many have metal attachments, which are sometimes all that survives: a horned bull, or a male warrior with uplifted spear-arm. These extras raised the prestige of the object, transforming it into somet
hing finely wrought and therefore costly. Homer’s Iliad also talks about tripods. They feature in the Homeric description of preparations for athletic games to mark the funeral of the dead Greek hero Patroclus:

  The swarming populace the chief detains,

  And leads amidst a wide extent of plains;

  There placed ’em round: then from the ships proceeds

  A train of oxen, mules, and stately steeds,

  Vases and Tripods, for the fun’ral games . . .

  Some experts believe that all these dedications of cauldrons celebrated victorious contestants in the all-male running races of the earliest Olympics. This ancient athletic meet began life at Olympia as a gathering for Greece’s social stratum of ‘sceptre-wielding’ aristocrats. The objects never quit the sanctuary because the winners left them behind as ‘sacred to Zeus’: offerings to the god. As an attendant, in Homer’s words, ‘to his wrists the gloves of death bound’ for a bout of tooth-and-claw wrestling, a real-life Greek blue-blood could become for a moment ‘great Ajax’ and fancy himself competing in Homer’s games.

  Olympia lies a short distance inland from the west coast of the Peloponnese. Today the archaeological site has its own port for visiting cruise ships and seems far from remote. In the 700s and 600s BC the region was not exactly a Greek hub, but rather out of the way. This might have encouraged aristocrats from different parts of Greece to meet here at what became regular, fixed intervals. At Olympia they could socialize without being beholden to some overweening local power.

  As the inscribed cauldron shows, these aristocratic athletes competed in honour of Zeus, but also for honour among men. With its contests, its ritual feasting on the meat of sacrificed animals cooked in cauldrons, and its acts of offering, the four-yearly gathering at Olympia was a religious event. Competitive athletics is one of the best-known legacies of the ancient Greeks. The ancient Egyptians had also developed sporting activities such as running, throwing and wrestling out of the primitive need for men to fight and to hunt. The Archaic Greeks likewise fought and hunted and were as competitive as any neighbouring ancient people, if not more so. Where they were culturally distinctive was in conceiving athletic contests as a form of pious offering aimed at pleasing their deities.

  In turn they could think in this way only because, helped along by the art of the line of bards culminating in Homer, they had come to imagine their gods as resembling themselves not only in looks but also in passions. So Greeks took for granted that these human-like gods would welcome as a gift the human excellence brought out in competitive sport, as much as they would a finely wrought object made by the best of human craftsmen.

  At religious events like Olympia, Greek aristocrats of Archaic times who had come together from different communities perhaps dwelt more than they normally did on what far-flung Greek-speakers had in common. An aristocratic outlook is usually one that sets great store on superior lineage. Homer’s Greek paladins leave no doubt that pride of birth was a hallmark of their society. A good example is a warrior called Glaucus, who openly vaunted his five generations of male forebears, all of them kings and great warriors. When Archaic Greeks thought about a larger Greek identity, it was natural for them to imagine Greeks as different branches of a genealogical family.

  ‘And from Hellen the war-loving king sprang Dorus and Xuthus and Aeolus delighting in horses.’ This is an ancient quotation from a lost Greek poem composed in the Archaic Period, perhaps around 700 BC. In it the poet, who was called Hesiod, tidied up existing genealogies of gods and heroes. He livened up his material by emphasizing the alluring females thanks to whose fertility and childbearing labours these lineages were perpetuated.

  It turns out that Archaic Greeks thought of themselves as a modern plant family: a single race divided into subgroups, with a common ancestor. This was Hellen, as in the quotation, from whom had sprung Dorus, the ancestor of the Dorian Greeks. Another ancient quotation from this lost poem gives a son to Xuthus called Ion, the ancestor of the Ionian Greeks.

  Genealogies sprung from figures whom many people might be inclined to think of as mythical are far from being a uniquely Greek way of imagining ethnic identity – one only has to think of Adam and Eve. For ancient Greeks, or ‘Hellenes’, their legendary family trees likewise had sacred authority. The father of Hellen was Zeus himself.

  All those cauldrons at Olympia are one sign that in early Archaic times the Greek world was becoming richer. As well as undergoing economic developments, it was also becoming more complex politically. Although powerful aristocrats abounded, many Archaic Greeks lived in local communities in which pressure seems to have been building to enlarge the decision-making group. At the same time, many of these Greek settlements were forging identities as self-governing republics, passing laws, waging wars and behaving in other ways like mini-states.

  Geographically the heartland of this settlement pattern came to resemble a political patchwork spread across the valleys and uplands of mainland Greece, the Ionian and Aegean islands, and the shores of western Turkey. The ancient Greeks had a word for this type of settlement. The most common translations in English are ‘city-state’ or ‘citizen-state’. This is the Ancient Greek word which gives us our word ‘politics’. It is time to say more about the polis, the crucible of Greek civilization.

  CHAPTER 3

  NEW THINGS

  THE FIRST GREEK CITY-STATES

  In my twenties I was a volunteer on an archaeological dig near ancient Sparta. Every morning at the crack of dawn the director drove a jeep-load of postgraduates halfway up a rural hillside. This was as far as a vehicle could go. Then we walked up to the archaeological site through a riot of yellow euphorbias harbouring large caterpillars with stinging hairs.

  On arrival, I think none of us, not even the most bleary-eyed, ever tired of what we saw. The dig was perched on the summit of one of a range of foothills lining the side of a great valley. Immediately beneath us stretched a sea of silvery-green olive trees. Closing the far side of the valley reared a snow-capped range of majestic mountains. I was not the only digger who habitually daydreamed while contemplating all this natural splendour when I should have been bagging up the small finds.

  On the summit stands ancient masonry enclosing a pimple of natural rock, the object of our efforts. We were digging the ruins of a Spartan shrine. For six or so centuries from the 700s BC, ancient Spartans clambered up here to worship at what they believed to be the tombs of a famous married couple, leading players in Homer’s Trojan War. In the 600s BC a worshipper left an offering inscribed in the local alphabet for ‘Menelaus’ Helen’ – a dainty bronze flask suited to holding perfume. For the Spartans this was the tomb of beautiful Helen, wife of the king of Sparta, snatched by a Trojan prince, the act justifying Greek aggression in Homer’s Trojan War.

  For the Spartans, Helen and Menelaus were more than a pretty story. The finds of archaeologists suggest that locals across a wide swathe of Archaic Greece were making offerings at places that they believed marked the graves of figures from remote times. As well as their gods, the Greeks also believed in the existence of demi-gods – the glorious dead of ancient days, with the power to assist mortals from the grave if they were properly worshipped with gifts and sacrifices. So this activity had religious overtones. Their generic name for one of these male demi-gods was the Greek word we translate as ‘hero’. There were also ‘heroines’.

  Scholars see here a desire of fledgling Greek communities in Archaic times to claim kinship with earlier inhabitants of their land. These communities might have had one or more villages as their focal point. The villagers were mainly farmers. The surrounding land fed, clothed and housed the community by means of its crops, its livestock, its wildlife and its natural resources.

  Some experts think that the population had been rapidly rising in Greece in the 800s and 700s BC. One of the arguments is an apparent increase in the number of child burials found by archaeologists in some parts of Greece at this time, as if more infants and chi
ldren were dying as a proportion of a rising population. This is a complex debate that cannot be discussed here in detail.

  If population growth was putting pressure on the resources of the land, this would have given added impetus to a community to stake out its territory. Through acts of worship at supposed tombs of supposed ancestors, its members might ‘perform’ their traditions of alleged common descent from an older population once working the same land – land now also claimed by neighbours. The message would be: ‘We were here first.’

  Alternatively, a group of violent incomers might try to soften its domination of a region’s prior inhabitants by paying honours to the master of the place in former times. This scenario could fit the Spartans. They claimed to descend from the Dorian Greeks who, so the Greeks believed, migrated into the Peloponnese after the Trojan War. Later Greeks remembered these Dorians for using force against the existing inhabitants. By finding a spot visible for miles around at which to honour Menelaus and Helen, pre-Dorian rulers of the area in the days of the Trojan War, the incomers could also have tried to build bridges to this older population – a ‘carrot and stick’ approach, you could say.

  An inscription on stone in Ancient Greek dating from about 650 BC records for the first time a particular polis and the workings of local politics there. Typically of most of these hundreds of Greek city-states, ancient Dreros on the island of Crete was small and unimportant in the larger scheme of Greek history. It was more like a large village, controlling the nearby valley, now an olive grove.