The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Broad similarities between the ancient Jewish and Greek rites include the role of an outside altar on which a fire could be lit, victims mainly selected from domesticated species, burning of some parts of the carcass as an offering to the divinity, and human consumption of the meaty parts. In Greek sanctuaries, the importance of the rite is shown by the standard practice of aligning the main doors of a temple with an open-air altar. This allowed the statue of the divinity inside to become a spectator at the fate of the victim offered on the altar outside.

  Animal sacrifice already had a long human history. Archaeologists find it hard to distinguish between slaughter and sacrifice as the cause of death of the animals whose bones they find in excavations. Still, there is a growing consensus that the deposits of animal bones providing evidence for human feasting from Neolithic settlements in what is now eastern Turkey and Syria probably derived from a rite of sacrifice. The practice could then have spread. The Mycenaean Greeks certainly engaged in animal sacrifice. Linear B inscriptions include lists of animals intended for sacrifice and, probably, feasts.

  The burning of parts of the carcass for the god is a distinctive part of the later Greek ritual. Archaeologists are still debating whether this was a feature inherited from Mycenaean religion or a more recent development. A tradition found in an ancient Cypriot Greek writer of uncertain date, perhaps the first century BC, records how a burnt sacrifice accidentally introduced a taste for cooked flesh among his compatriots in the time of Pygmalion, a legendary king of Cyprus:

  . . . afterwards, when the victim was burnt, a portion of the flesh fell on the earth, which was taken by the priest, who, in so doing, having burnt his fingers, involuntarily moved them to his mouth, as a remedy for the pain which the burning produced. Having, therefore, thus tasted of the roasted flesh, he also desired to eat abundantly of it.

  This ancient Greek tradition describes an event set in mythical times and tells a tale that sounds too good to be true. It would not be sound historical method to rely on it as a source of historical fact, even if the story fits with the modern idea of animal sacrifice as a Near Eastern practice rippling westwards in prehistoric times.

  That said, if burnt offerings were indeed a later addition to prehistoric Greece’s sacrificial repertoire, the island of Cyprus, some 62 miles from the Syrian coast, was certainly in the right place. Many archaeologists working on Cyprus infer from their finds that migrant Greeks from the Aegean as well as people from the Levant settled on the island in the times following the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces. This would have made the island a classic zone of contact between cultures.

  East of Al-Mina lay the peoples of Mesopotamia, a fertile country watered by its two great rivers and the seat of ancient civilizations including the Sumerians and then the Babylonians, centred on the great city of Babylon, 50 miles south of modern Baghdad. A Greek poet from the Aegean island of Lesbos, some 3 miles from the Turkish shore, shows that Archaic Greeks were visiting the Middle East in the 600s BC. This poet hymns the warlike exploits of his brother in Mesopotamia, where he killed a warrior of great height ‘while fighting as an ally of the Babylonians’. What the poet shies away from saying is ‘as a mercenary’.

  This scrap of evidence offers a glimpse of a largely lost horizon of culturally momentous contact between Greeks and Mesopotamians. Thales of Miletus has already been encountered as an inventive Greek engineer at the start of the 500s BC. According to the historian Herodotus, Thales also foretold when ‘the day was suddenly turned to night . . . fixing it within the year in which it did indeed happen’. The historical and astronomical data point to the eclipse of 28 May 585 BC.

  Whatever the truth behind this story, many experts see the ultimate source of the observations, techniques and mathematics enabling Greeks to predict astronomical phenomena to be the Babylonians. Babylonian interest in the motion of the heavenly bodies was deep and ancient. By this date, their scholars had developed skills of analysis and reasoning. Archaic Greek encounters with these ways of thinking might have contributed more broadly to the rise of the first Greek philosophers.

  Some experts believe that, long before, it was Babylonian storytelling that influenced the earliest Greek poetry to be written down, that of Homer. The great epic of ancient Mesopotamia was a poem about a male hero called Gilgamesh. At one point this hero, who is mourning the death of his friend Enkidu, is said to behave like a distressed lioness who has lost her cubs:

  Like a lioness who has been deprived of [her c]ubs,

  he kept pacing about, hence [and forth].

  With the difference that the lioness has become a lion, Homer applies a similar comparison to the hero Achilles, grieving for his friend Patroclus:

  The lion thus, with dreadful anger stung,

  Roars through the desert, and demands his young . . .

  So grieves Achilles . . .

  The coincidence between the Mesopotamian and the Greek poems is striking, and experts see others – too many to set out here. Is it far-fetched to imagine a fireside encounter at Al-Mina, or on Cyprus, when polyglot merchants exchanged stories, some of them drinking from Euboean cups? In such ways in the 800s or 700s BC, an ancient tale from the Middle East might have entered the food chain of Greek storytelling.

  Once in the era of Archaic Greece proper, the evidence for cultural exchange between Greeks and easterners improves. The conservation miracle that is Abu Simbel is famous throughout the world. In 1968, workers dismantled this ancient Egyptian temple and rebuilt it further upstream on the River Nile, on a site safe from the floodwaters of the new Aswan dam. On the shin of a giant statue of Ramesses II, builder of the temple seven centuries earlier, someone around 593 BC incised this graffito in five wavy lines of Ancient Greek:

  When King Psammetichus came to Elephantine, those who sailed with Psammetichus the son of Theocles wrote this; and they came above Kerkis as far as the river allowed; and Potasimto led those of foreign speech and Amasis the Egyptians etc.

  The graffito commemorates Greeks serving as mercenaries in an army commanded by a much later pharaoh called Psammetichus. The Greek leader of this band sounds like an expatriate living in Egypt, since his parents gave him an Egyptian name, the same as that of the pharaoh he later served. At this time Egypt remained a powerful state as well as an ancient one – the pharaoh Psammetichus belonged to the twenty-sixth dynasty of native rulers.

  The Nile valley was also wealthy, and it was these riches that attracted Archaic Greece’s long-distance traders. The British Museum’s display on Archaic Greece includes a clay storage jar which a restorer has deftly pieced together from fragments. The style is obviously Greek – a meander-pattern here, an Ionic capital there.

  So it is a surprise to see, on the neck, Egyptian hieroglyphics spelling out the name of a second pharaoh of Egypt’s twenty-sixth dynasty, Apries, who ruled from 589 to 570 BC. British archaeologists found this Egyptianizing product of a Greek pottery over a century ago on the site of an ancient settlement of Greek merchants some 50 miles inland from the Mediterranean mouth of the Nile.

  The Greek name for this place, Naucratis, meant ‘ship power’. This maritime prowess belonged to a twelve-strong group of Archaic Greek states allowed by the pharaoh to set up a trading concession here – Egyptian goods in exchange for Greek ones. Prominent among the Greek imports welcomed by the Egyptians, so the Greek historian Herodotus writes, was wine.

  In turn this suggests a sophisticated winemaking business in some parts of Archaic Greece. Two likely sources of this wine were the eastern Greek islands of Samos and Chios. These islanders, who had helped to found Naucratis, made their own long-distance storage jars, each capable of transporting several gallons’ worth of liquid in a vessel’s hold.

  The family of the ancient world’s most famous female poet was involved in this long-distance trade. Sappho, a native of the Greek island of Lesbos, lived at this time. In 2014 an Oxford scholar published an enigmatic fragment of a new poem by Sappho found on an Egyptian
papyrus, where she references her brother’s trading:

  But you keep babbling that Charaxus is coming [or has come],

  His ship full of cargo . . .

  This Charaxus crops up in a piquant story of Herodotus shedding a sidelight on how money was both made and spent in Naucratis during the trading station’s sixth-century BC heyday. According to the Greek historian, a smitten Charaxus once spent heavily to buy the freedom of a ‘sexually irresistible’ slave whose sex-trafficking master had brought her to Naucratis to work – so the historian’s euphemistic Greek puts it – as a ‘woman companion’. Once freed, Rhodopis, as Herodotus names her, stayed on in the emporium, achieving renown in her calling and financial success.

  Sex workers and sex trafficking were as embedded in ancient society as they are in ours, as were the same double standards. Cocking a snook at Greek prejudices against working women, Rhodopis decided to spend a tenth of her fortune on ‘preserving her memory’ by making an offering to the god Apollo at Delphi. The historian later claimed to have seen this gift – a great heap of iron roasting spits – with his own eyes.

  Plying the Mediterranean, ships like those of Charaxus also spread ideas. At much the same time as the establishment of Naucratis, the Archaic Greeks started to produce monumental sculpture in stone. These statues were a symptom of how Archaic Greeks were becoming richer and also more confident in the permanence of their world, since the chief quality of stone is its durability.

  The Metropolitan Museum in New York displays one of the first Archaic Greek statues on a new, much larger, scale. This marble figure of a naked youth is over 6 feet high. He has long beaded hair falling over the shoulders. To create this stone giant, its unknown sculptor might well have been indebted to Egyptian know-how. The ancient Greeks believed that the Egyptians invented the technique of releasing such figures from a block of stone, by laying out a grid on the surface with which to plan out the intended figure before carving began. Later Greeks thought that their own sculptors then borrowed this technique.

  Many experts think that Archaic Greeks could not have made the transition from wooden to stone architecture without Egyptian technology, or the inspiration provided by the sight of Egypt’s great architectural monuments lining the banks of the Nile. In the centre of modern Syracuse’s old town the visitor can see behind modern railings what is left of the earliest known example of this new type of Greek building.

  Each column in this Sicilian Greek temple of Apollo is carved from a single block of stone weighing some 35 tons. It is as if the architect worried that only monoliths on this scale could hold the stone superstructure aloft. In a Greek inscription still visible on the riser of one of the steps, as if amazed at what he had achieved, one of the construction team boasted of how he had ‘executed columns – fine works’. It is likely enough that Archaic temple-builders ultimately drew on Egyptian techniques for cutting, lifting and fitting large stone blocks.

  It has been seen that the Greeks began to make coins somewhere around 600 BC. The historian Herodotus linked this invention with a neighbouring people from inland Asia Minor, known to Greeks as the Lydians: ‘The Lydians . . . were the first men whom we know who coined and used gold and silver currency; and they were the first to sell by retail.’

  There are indeed early coins inscribed in the Lydian script with the name ‘Walwet’. The bearer of this name is usually identified as the Lydian king whom the Greeks called Alyattes. He reigned from about 610 to 560 BC. Although Herodotus implies that Lydian coins were used in small retail transactions, the value of the only known denominations seems too high. Possibly Alyattes and other Lydian kings minted their coins to pay for the armies with which they aggressively conquered a large land empire of tribute-paying subjects in western Turkey. These subjects came to include the Greeks of Ionia.

  From this empire building, the Lydian kings grew hugely rich. In the British Museum’s display on Archaic Greece, a case of finds from the Ionian Greek city of Ephesus on Turkey’s west coast includes a fragment from a temple column inscribed with two Greek letters. These are a kappa (‘k’) followed by a rho (‘r’), the first two letters of a proper name, ΚΡΟΙΣΟΣ. Croesus, as he is best known today, was the last Lydian king, coming to the throne in the late 580s BC. Here he used his imperial funds to sponsor the cost of individual columns in the great temple of the goddess Artemis that the Ephesians built in the 550s BC.

  From this distance in time it is no longer possible to say exactly how the Lydians and the Greeks each contributed to the invention of coinage. In other ways too, Lydian riches made a deep mark on the way of life of their nearest Greek neighbours. A Greek poet of Late Archaic times portrays a Greek musician from Sappho’s island, Lesbos, as cutting a figure in the high society of the Lydians on the nearby mainland of Asia Minor. As a result, this musician is said to have invented a type of lyre on an Asian model, ‘after hearing at Lydian feasts the plucked strings that answer to it from the lofty harp’.

  Aristocratic Greeks of Archaic times copied the luxurious customs of the Lydians rather as the nobility of eighteenth-century Europe aped the manners of France. Another Archaic Greek poet describes the ‘dainty ways learnt from the Lydians’ of the rich citizens of another Ionian city, his home town, also on the west coast of Turkey. ‘They went to the central plaza with cloaks of purple dye, not less than a thousand of them all told, vainglorious and proud of their comely tresses, reeking of perfume . . .’

  Berlin’s Altes Museum provides a clue to the appearance of these dainty gentlemen. On display is a headless marble statue of a young man which German archaeologists found near the great Ionian centre of Miletus. It has been seen that Archaic Greek sculptors often represented young men as nude. This particular Archaic youth of about 530 BC is emphatically not naked, nor is he lean and well-muscled. On the contrary, he is plump and fussily dressed in a sleeved outfit reaching to the feet. This ample drapery bears traces of dark red paint meant to signify the expensive dye that the Greeks and Phoenicians extracted from certain kinds of Mediterranean shellfish. Greeks called this dye porphyra, or ‘purple’. In this figure, rich clothing combined with corpulence as a sign of wealth and status, of a superior being with access to the ‘Lydian’ pleasures making life worth living.

  Greeks also made Lydian customs scapegoats for the commodification of sex. Several centuries later a Greek author preserved the following story about an Archaic Greek tyrant ruling the island of Samos:

  Clearchus says that Polycrates, the tyrant of dainty Samos, was ruined by his reckless personal behaviour, because he aspired to Lydian softness. He accordingly constructed the alley in the city of Samos that imitates the area in Sardis [the Lydian capital] known as Sweet Embrace, and wove the notorious ‘Samian flowers’ to match the ‘Lydian flowers’ . . . the Samian alley was a narrow street filled with working women, and it literally filled Greece with everything that promotes hedonism and excess, while the ‘Samian flowers’ were exceptionally beautiful women and men.

  This chapter ends as it began by pondering the extent and the importance of trade in the economic life of the Archaic Greeks. I once found myself one of a fortunate party permitted by the kindness of the Greek army to enter the pine-scented grounds of a military school built right next to the modern Isthmus canal cutting through the neck of land linking the Peloponnese to central Greece.

  After a colonel had ordered the reluctant guards to open the gate for us, Greek conscript soldiers escorted us to an open-air classroom. A young officer gave us a military-style briefing, standing at a lectern, barking commands to an even younger subordinate wielding a pointer. In passable English the yellow lettering on a huge noticeboard next to him had this to say:

  Technical work of paved road, which was used to avoid circumnavigation of Peloponnese. The boats were transferred with the use of the slide from the Saronikos Gulf into the Corinthian Gulf. Manufactured in 600 BC from the tyrant of Corinthus and ancient wise man, Periandros.

  Over the officer�
��s shoulder we could see, curving out of sight, the well-preserved stretch of ancient paved road that was the object of our visit. While the officer expounded his subject with a military certainty, I heard murmured doubts from our group. Could the Archaic Corinthians really have devised a means, on a regular basis, of lifting a whole ship out of the water and dragging it a distance of just under 4 miles over an isthmus rising some 260 feet above sea level? Put into some kind of wheeled cradle, each wooden ship would have risked major stress in transit even if it avoided actual mishap, quite apart from the huge cost in animals and men of each operation.

  Even so, the Archaic Corinthians must have had pressing reasons for investing in the technical challenge of building the sweeping gradients of this stone roadway. Nowadays experts think that it was meant chiefly to serve as a porterage. Men would unload a cargo on one side of the Isthmus and use oxen to drag it on wheeled carts for reloading onto another vessel on the other side. The Corinthians probably built this grooved roadway because they hoped to attract merchants who could afford to pay the toll moving high-value, low-bulk commodities.

  Today’s sailors still respect the strong and contrary winds around the capes of the southern Peloponnese. ‘Stay ten miles off Cape Malea, and off Cape Grosso ten and another ten’, as one Greek proverb goes. As seen with Cape Uluburun, promontories posed problems for ancient navigators in the Bronze Age. In Archaic Greece vessels usually hugged the shore still. The painstaking building of the Corinthian haulage suggests how much was at stake for vessels with valuable cargoes in avoiding such lethal headlands.

  The haulage also highlights the economic importance of long-distance trade at this time. The ancient Greeks believed that the riches of the Corinthians derived in large part from seaborne commerce. Astride the Isthmus, this city-state faced in two directions. As an ancient writer put it, ‘The one leads straight to Asia, and the other to Italy.’ It is time to turn to the activities of Archaic Greeks in the west. Here migrants from the Greek homelands created their own versions of the Greek way of life, amid close encounters, sometimes peaceful, but often not, with their non-Greek neighbours.