The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Here we might briefly return to the competitive temperament of the Greeks, already touched on in connection with their love of athletics. The temple-building Samians had rivals a short distance across the water. As described just now, their first great temple to Hera foundered. They promptly started to rebuild it on an even larger scale. Assuredly not by chance, this rebuilt temple, of which a solitary column still stands, fractionally outdid in size a recent super-temple raised by the city-state of Ephesus across the water on the nearby Ionian shore.

  The Samians and Ephesians were part of a frenzy of temple building in Archaic Greece. In 2014 a Republican senator from Illinois complained that Chicago was no longer a world-class city, since not one of its skyscrapers was in the top ten tallest in the world. Fanning the frenetic spread of the first wave of major Greek temples seems to have been an ancient version of today’s skyscraper envy.

  On the face of things, each Archaic state was culturally similar to its neighbours – broadly the same ethnicity, language and so on. For one community’s collective identity to stand out, to assert that ‘we are Samians, not Ephesians’, the same things had to be done differently and – obviously – better. What is indeed striking about these communities when looked at more closely is the diversity of their local identities. For example, the Archaic Corinthians used their own version of the Greek alphabet, they worshipped their own local version of the Greek pantheon of gods, evolved their own laws and so on. The political fragmentation of Archaic Greece into a mosaic of small states was itself a force for creativity and innovation.

  The British Museum devotes a large room to the rich material culture of Archaic Greece. By grouping objects geographically the display brings out this character of diversity in sameness. It also shows off a very visual expression of this same spirit of inquiry which was a trait of Archaic Greeks. If one material dominates the room it is clay, mainly in the form of products from local potteries all over the Archaic Greek world.

  Each production centre seems to have developed a distinct style, within a broad framework of similar techniques, shapes and decorative subject matter. Centuries later, a Roman writer opined that ‘Choræbus, the Athenian, was the first who made earthen vessels’. The display does indeed bring out the undoubted superiority in this ancient Greek industry of one particular cluster of potteries, those of Athens.

  In the 1980s a furore fired up the tight-knit world of experts in ancient Greek pottery studies. Two British academics claimed that the Athenian potteries producing these fine pieces were merely imitating the lost gold and silver vessels made by metalworkers for a ‘high end’ stratum of aristocratic Greeks. Feelings ran high over what for some was an assault on the artistic originality of the makers and decorators of Athenian crocks. I remember a tense London seminar at which an academic from one side of the argument arrived with a conspicuous tape recorder to record what the speaker from the other side was about to say, rather like a police interview.

  Even so, visitors to any of the world’s great collections of Athenian pots confront a strange and exuberant aesthetic distinctly of its time and place: black figures on a red background, or the other way round; painted stories covering bellies, shoulders, lips and feet. The subjects can be gods and legends, or illustrations of the societal norms of those times – men arming, women weaving textiles and so on.

  Perusing this material, the spectator may well be struck by the evident fascination of the pot painters with the human body and, more specifically, the young male body, often shown scantily clad or naked. As a trait of ancient Greek culture, this open admiration for male looks seems less exceptional today than a generation ago. We ourselves live in a world of male beauty contests, of advertising that exploits the male body beautiful and, increasingly, of male body-image anxiety.

  The display in the British Museum shows how – for commercial reasons – the pot painters of Archaic Athens were keen to improve their technique. One side of a water jar dated around 510 BC depicts a group of near naked males in black silhouette, the other, four males shown more naturalistically to a modern eye as reddish-brown figures with black hair. This ‘red-figure’ technique was a new invention.

  Another interesting thing is how much better the pot painters became over time at depicting the human body. In the 500s BC some painters, somewhere, must have been curious enough to start observing bodies from life, and naked ones at that. These red-figure males are shown filling up water jars at one of the public fountain houses that Pisistratus provided for the Athenians. Three of them are young males, nude. The painter uses their manhandling of the jars, hoisted on a shoulder, or being filled, to show off his treatment of musculature in different action poses.

  It is possible to see in this little scene a small expression of a larger trait of ancient Greek culture. Sometimes this is called ‘humanism’. By this is meant the great interest the Greeks took in exploring and expressing human experience. Caution is needed here. A positive generalization about a whole people amounts to idealization, a negative one to stereotyping. It would be absurd to claim that the ancient Greeks were collectively more ‘humane’ than, say, the ancient Egyptians or Babylonians. What it seems safe to say is that Greek culture was more human-centred or ‘anthropocentric’: more inclined, that is, to see human beings as the most significant entity in the cosmos.

  The Greeks could behave in ways that many people in today’s world of human rights would class as barbarous. Slavery was a universal fact of ancient Greek society. For their time and place the ancient Greeks were perhaps unusual in developing a cultural mindset facilitating in its thinkers, writers and artists an intense engagement with human nature and culture, not just the world of divinity. It was to the latter that the cultural efforts of neighbours like the ancient Egyptians were so much more orientated.

  The chapter is not quite finished with these pottery products. Captions label them as cups, bowls, jugs, storage jars and so on. In other words, this is ancient crockery, and it gives clues about Archaic Greek social life. The shapes just named were made to contain potables for guests at a particular type of Greek social gathering, the drinking party, or ‘symposium’. By the 500s BC the Athenian potters were turning out forms for what had evolved into a social ritual with a central place in the aristocratic circles of Archaic Greece.

  There were conventions regarding how strong the drink was (the bowls were for diluting wine with water), and a lord of revels who ensured they were observed. Passing round the drinking cup was important, and it had to go from left to right, unlike the port decanter, which people in London’s gentlemen’s clubs consider good form to pass to the left. These drinking sessions could last well into the night. Wives and daughters were excluded. Female courtesans and comely boys were welcomed.

  Many images painted on this drinking equipment focus on raucous group misrule ranging from drunkenness to orgies (museums do not always put these latter images on display). Here the society of Archaic Greece looks very much a man’s world. Media headlines over today’s sagas of the ‘lads’ night out’ might almost caption some of these vivid ancient images: ‘boozed-up youngsters fight in the streets’, ‘rowdy students mob house’, ‘graphic sex act’.

  And yet there were differences: the symposium was by no means all about male hopes of debauchery with girls, or boys. Talk was important, although this seems to have been both structured and competitive, perhaps not so unlike the verbal performances which made conversation in the salons of eighteenth-century Paris so dazzling and, for the new arrival, so formidable. For young nobles, the symposium, like the salon, was also formative, an education. A poet called Xenophanes composed edifying verses especially for performance at these events:

  Now is the floor clean, and the hands and cups of all . . .

  The mixing bowl stands ready, full of gladness,

  and there is more wine at hand . . .

  But first it is meet that men should hymn the god with joy,

  with holy tales and pure words.
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  Then after libation and prayer made that we may have strength to do

  right – for that is in truth the first thing to do –

  no sin is it to drink as much as allows any but an aged man

  to get home without an attendant.

  And of all men is he to be praised who after drinking brings noble

  deeds to light,

  as memory and strength will serve him.

  Let him not sing of Titans and Giants – those fictions of the men

  of old –

  nor of turbulent civil broils in which is no good thing at all;

  but to give heedful reverence to the gods is ever good.

  This poem from the 500s BC offers rules for proper behaviour at a drinking party. Guests should drink moderately, respect the gods and recite poetry about noble deeds and not about monstrous gods like the Titan Cronus, who ate his children. For green young men listening in this way to their elders and betters, partying might have been not only pleasurable but also improving.

  To the east of Archaic Greece lay a much older, non-Greek, world. Hearsay about its banqueting practices probably gave the Greeks ideas about how to organize a drinking party. They may have taken over the Near Eastern custom of reclining to eat and drink. More broadly, the innovative world of the Archaic Greeks makes no sense unless they are pictured as a people who had fallen under the spell of foreign travel and alien cultures, just like the Minoans and Mycenaeans before them. It is time to explore this interconnected Archaic world of neighbours more fully.

  CHAPTER 4

  AS RICH AS CROESUS

  EARLY GREEKS AND THE EAST

  All ancient Greeks knew the poet who authored these lines:

  You yourself wait until the season for sailing is come, and then haul your swift ship down to the sea and stow a convenient cargo in it, so that you may bring home profit, even as your father and mine, foolish Perses, used to sail on shipboard because he lacked sufficient livelihood. And one day he came to this very place, crossing over a great stretch of sea . . . and he settled near Helicon in a miserable hamlet, Ascra, which is bad in winter, sultry in summer, and good at no time.

  Hesiod is usually thought to have been active around 700 BC. Here the poet portrays himself as the son of a migrant from a Greek state on what is now the coast of north-western Turkey. Poverty drove the father to start a risky journey that ended with him settling with his sons as a farmer in the backwoods of the Greek mainland.

  Nowadays the site of the ancient village of Ascra can be reached from Athens by car in under two hours. Once the furthest outskirts of the capital have been shaken off, travellers find themselves in a different Greece, deeply rural. As you start to drive through Boeotia, the region to the north of Athens, the soil changes to a rich brown, fertile enough to grow cotton in modern times.

  Boeotian Ascra today is a landlocked hill in a near-empty valley over which towers Helicon, a real mountain. From here the brother to whom Hesiod addresses himself would not have had an easy job transporting a cargo of farm produce on stony tracks down to the nearest port. This haven was itself little more than the seaside mouth of a torrent bed.

  As to the trade which Hesiod imagines his brother conducting, questions come more easily than answers. Was it short-haul, to a neighbouring community, or long-distance, venturing further out into the Mediterranean? Did he take his goods as a part-load on someone else’s boat, Phoenician-owned for instance, or did he have his own vessel? Was he a market-oriented farmer producing an annual surplus, or was he a self-sufficient peasant who made just the occasional foray in order to trade some grain for, say, a new metal tool?

  Despite these unknowns, the poem does depict rustic Ascrans going down to the sea in ships. One or more vessels had brought the young migrant father from Asia Minor to Ascra in the first place. No part of Greece is more than 60 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. Except in the direst of times, its ancient inhabitants always had this chance to make connections with the outside world, to meet foreigners, to travel, to see and touch alien artefacts.

  As well as complete vases, the British Museum curates heaps of sherds from broken Greek pots. On one such sherd, just over 3 inches long, a row of birds in flight is painted. This attractive fragment comes from one of the most debated archaeological sites in the eastern Mediterranean. In the 1930s the museum sponsored a dig near the mouth of the River Orontes in what is now south-east Turkey, close to the Syrian border. There is not much to see at the site today, just a low mound in a sea of orange trees.

  The excavators dubbed this man-made feature ‘Al-Mina’ in Arabic, ‘the Port’. They found ancient warehouses. To their surprise, they also recovered large amounts of ancient Greek pottery. Much of it turns out to have been made in the late 800s and the 700s BC on a Greek island already familiar to the reader, Euboea. The hand of a Euboean potter probably painted that flight of geese-like fowl.

  All these Greek pots arrived by sea. So Al-Mina and the ancient Greeks of the time of the Geometric style formed part of a long-distance network. Vessels must have plied routes that linked the Aegean with the coasts of southern Turkey, Cyprus and the Levant. By this time, parts of Greece were once more embedded in a linked world of long-distance trade.

  2. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.

  Archaeologists nowadays see Al-Mina as a trading station with a population of varied ethnic backgrounds: an emporion in Ancient Greek. It seems likely that there were Greeks residing there, using their own potter. The non-Greek pottery points to the presence of other groups, including traders from a major seafaring people a short way south along the same coast.

  We have already met more than once with the Phoenicians, as the Greeks called them, the Canaanites of the Old Testament. To build their ships they enjoyed the huge advantage of the strong, straight timbers of the local cedar forests in what is now Lebanon. Phoenicians were an enterprising society of experienced seafarers prepared to risk sailing far from home. The reach of their voyages extended the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, leaving tangible traces.

  At the ancient site now known by its modern name of Kommos, on the south coast of Crete, archaeologists have found a religious shrine of Near Eastern type, and much Phoenician pottery. With its sandy coastline, now favoured by nudists and well suited to beaching ancient ships, Kommos was once a stopping place welcomed by Phoenician seafarers plying the high seas. They planted friendly settlements at key points further afield, such as Carthage in modern Tunisia and Gadir (Cadiz) in southern Spain. They specialized in long-distance trade in costly commodities like silver, with a high value compensating for the risks involved.

  It has been seen that the Phoenicians were the ultimate source of the new alphabetical script which Greeks created at just the same time as their pottery started to travel to Al-Mina. This trading station is one possible locality for cultural exchanges between Greeks and easterners. These went way beyond the Greek adaptation of Phoenician script. Scholars have learnt to use the term ‘orientalizing’ to describe the way in which Greek craftsmen encountered eastern styles of art decorating imported objects – metalwork for instance. From the later 700s BC fascination with some of these motifs prompted Greek artisans to adopt and adapt them for their own craft products.

  The British Museum displays a miniature clay perfume container with the spout moulded in the form of the bared teeth of a lion, with a shaggy mane achieved in painted lines. A Corinthian made this little pot around 640 BC. The idea for the unusual form of the spout ultimately came from the animal heads attached to metal bowls imported from the Near East. These were a sought-after display item for Greek aristocrats in early Archaic times. Following an immutable law of consumption, local manufacturers of cheaper ceramics imitated the decoration of these exotic bowls for a less exalted Greek market.

  There is no doubt that the goods and ideas of the ancient Near East had a deep impact on the developing cultural life of Archaic Greece and that they had already done so in earli
er centuries of Greek prehistory. Because the hard evidence is very patchy, with new finds and new insights always around the corner, scholars have learnt to take a provisional line on just how profound these influences were. The Greek rite of animal sacrifice is one example of these difficulties.

  ‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat ye the flesh.’ Taken from the Book of Jeremiah, this quotation from the Old Testament is one of many passages in the Hebrew Bible showing the central place of animal sacrifice in ancient Jewish worship. The following is a translation from an inscription in ancient Greek found on the Cycladic island of Kea, ancient Ceos:

  The chief magistrates who are in office are to pay the person who has undertaken the duties, 150 drachmas for sacrificial victims. Whoever takes on the duty is to provide a surety acceptable to the magistrates that he will give the feast as prescribed by law. He must sacrifice one mature ox and one mature sheep. If he sacrifices a pig it must not be older than 18 months. A feast is to be provided for the citizens, for those invited by the city-state, for resident foreigners and freedmen and for all that pay taxes to the city-state of the Coressians. Supper, wine, fruit and nuts, and all the rest are to be well provided along with an amount of meat not less than 2 minas in raw weight, and a part of the entrails which the sacrificial beasts have. The chief magistrates and the financial officer must examine the beasts and weigh the meat and preside at the sacrifice [etc.].

  In ancient times this Greek island of roughly 50 square miles was divided between no fewer than four tiny city-states, of which Coressia was one. The Coressians like all Greek city-states organized sacred killings of animals on a regular annual basis. As here, a public feast might follow, when meat from the butchered carcasses could be shared out equably among citizens and other invitees.