Over that winter the Macedonians made an early appearance in Greek affairs. At this time, Macedon, an ancient state located in what is now northern Greece, was a Persian dependency. Its hereditary ruler had paid homage in the time of Darius, then sealed his status as the king’s vassal by marrying a daughter to a prince of the Achaemenid blood. Mardonius now sent the son and successor of this Persian client ruler to negotiate terms with the Athenians, choosing him ‘partly because the Persians were akin to him’. The Athenians rejected the overture. This took courage. Needless to say they were reminded that Persia was the Goliath in this conflict and was bound to prevail in the end.
At this point the Greek alliance looked in danger of unravelling. The Peloponnesian Greeks wanted to barricade themselves behind a wall across the Isthmus. The Spartans seemed more interested in celebrating their annual festival for Apollo. Eventually, however, they did honour their alliance, sending five thousand of their young men to war, under the command of a Spartan royal, the vainglorious Pausanias, encountered at the start of this chapter. Hearing this, Mardonius pulled back from Athens, which the Persians had occupied for a second time, but not before once again setting the city alight
Today the drive from Athens to ancient Plataea takes about seventy-five minutes. After leaving the modern highway to the Isthmus, an old road meanders northwards through what once were the borderlands of ancient Athens, negotiates a mountain pass, then descends into rolling farmland. Plataea was the name of the ancient city-state of these parts, and it was here that Mardonius encamped, in terrain suited to his cavalry. Few tourists come here, but local Greeks well remember what happened here. I have seen their elaborate wreaths left by the ancient city-walls to commemorate the battle of 479 BC.
The Peloponnesians, led by the Spartans and joined by the Athenians, took the route I have just mentioned. As Herodotus describes the battle, it was chaotic, the Greeks disunited, harried by the Persian horsemen, praying, sacrificing, awaiting their soothsayers to declare the entrails propitious. Herodotus believed that the fact that the easterners did not wear heavy body armour, whereas the Greek infantrymen did, put them at a crucial disadvantage.
So did the success of the Spartan troops in making a beeline for Mardonius himself and killing him. This prompted the Persians to turn tail, some for the long road back to the Dardanelles, most taking shelter behind the palisade of their fortified camp. The Athenians ‘by courage and constant effort’ were the first to scale this. The camp then became an abattoir, the Greeks cutting down tens of thousands of the enemy.
The Spartans lost ninety-one men, the Athenians fifty-two. From the loot, the Greek allies set up the bronze pillar at Delphi supporting a gold tripod for Apollo bearing on the base that inscription of Pausanias with which this chapter started. When the Spartans back home got wind of this, it was they who had it erased.
For centuries the ancient Greeks could not stop talking about their astounding success against Persian arms in 490 BC and again against Xerxes. Until Marathon, Salamis and Plataea, Greeks saw the Persians as invincible. In numbers alone they were terrifying. Herodotus puts Xerxes’ invasion force in 480 BC at well over two and a half million men. Experts doubt this figure, with reason. But no one questions the overwhelming numerical superiority of his host.
Herodotus makes clear that the prospect of Xerxes’ attack divided the Greeks, as well it might have. As he says, some Greek states sided with the Persians from necessity. Others, he makes clear, were happy to do so. When he recounts what motivated the states minded to resist, he highlights the huge importance which they attached to a word which around now started to appear in the works of ancient Greek writers: ‘freedom’. This meant independence from foreign rule, for which the city-states seem to have had a particular passion. Xerxes found this startling: ‘that freedom of theirs’, Herodotus has him say with disdain.
Herodotus thought that the Spartans and Athenians played pivotal parts. As the main Greek powers on land and sea respectively, they arguably had the most ‘freedom’ to lose. Still, their defiance was remarkable. The force led by Leonidas knew the risk of death before it set out: Leonidas selected only men who already had sons. Everyone looked to the Spartans to set an example. In 479 BC, only after Pausanias had set out against Mardonius did the other Peloponnesian Greeks send forces of their own.
As for the Athenians, their warships – and the lower-class rowers who propelled them – were so crucial that the threat of their coming to terms with Persia worked as glue holding the Greek alliance together. When Herodotus wrote, many Greeks had since come to dislike Athens, as a later chapter will show. So Herodotus knew he was sticking his neck out when he gave as his opinion that, in the Persian Wars, it had been the Athenians with their fleet who had really won the day:
As it is, to say that the Athenians were the saviours of Greece is to hit the truth. It was the Athenians who held the balance; whichever side they joined was sure to prevail. Choosing that Greece should preserve her freedom, the Athenians roused to battle the other Greek states which had not yet gone over to the Persians and, after the gods, were responsible for driving the king off.
The Persian conquest had ended the cultural flowering of the eastern Greek cities in Archaic times. The victory over Persia now crowned mainland Greece as the centre of Greek political power. In Athens itself, defeat of the Persians would act as an electrifying catalyst both in its politics and in its culture. It is time to look more closely at the Athenians and Spartans, the chief protagonists on the Greek side, and their divergent destinies in the aftermath of victory.
CHAPTER 8
THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT
ATHENS AND SPARTA
In the centre of modern Athens American archaeologists in the 1950s rebuilt a ruined antiquity, the so-called Colonnade or Stoa of Attalus. Nowadays they use its basement to store and study the finds from their next-door excavations on the site of the agora, or civic centre, of ancient Athens. The ground floor, familiar to tourists from all over the world, houses a museum of the choicest discoveries.
This restored monument is the one that the British writer and humorist Nancy Mitford targeted for her derision in 1955: ‘in a ghastly graveyard marble, the Stoa, said to be “of Attalos”, but really of Mr Homer A. Thompson’. Homer Thompson, the Canadian specialist in ancient architecture who guided the precision-led restoration, was a scholar of huge learning. The marble in question, white with a honey tinge, was also used to build the Parthenon.
On an Athenian summer’s day in 2014 American friends, Ann and Richard, an archaeologist and her assisting husband, took me down into the Stoa basement, an oasis of cool air, to show me their current work. They were carefully measuring sherds of broken crockery dug up in association with what must have been one of the ancient agora’s most distinctive structures, its only perfectly circular building.
This Tholos, as the ancients called it, was somewhere between the crow’s nest and the ship’s bridge of the Athenian democratic style of government. It was where the fifty officials responsible for the routine business of the state ate their staff meals, which were funded by the public purse. A third of them at any one time slept here as well, on call in an emergency.
These fifty officials were selected according to rules with particular ends in mind. First, the hands that rested on the levers of power were many, not few. Nor did they rest for long. These officials only served for a month before a different set of fifty replaced them, and so on throughout the ten months of the ancient Athenian year. All of them came from the same body, a state council of five hundred citizens. In turn council members served for one year only. They too were then replaced with new faces, five hundred of them.
Second, the selecting of councillors was done by a citizen lottery. This is extraordinary in one way, given the political responsibilities of the councillors. The whole point of a lottery is its randomness – chance alone decides who is selected. Its widespread use by the Athenian democracy shows how seriously the Athenia
ns took the idea that all eligible citizens must have an equal chance to serve the city. Merit was all very well, but in practice this might favour citizens whose merit was, or seemed to others to be, the result of privilege – wealth, a private education, social connections and so on.
As to how this Athenian democracy had come about, its earliest stirrings were doubtless older than the first firm date pinpointed by ancient writers, 508/7 BC. At this time, against a background of political rivalry between Archaic Athenian aristocrats, one of them, called Cleisthenes, hit on the ploy of boosting his support by ‘taking the people into his hetaireia’. As used here by Herodotus, ‘faction’ and ‘party’ are among suggested translations of this word. It had some of the sense of the French word nébuleuse when applied to the concentric social circles surrounding great lords in pre-Revolutionary France: ‘people gathered around a leading personality in complicated relationships of dominance and dependence’.
For details of what Cleisthenes did next experts rely on an ancient Greek book preserved on a papyrus from Egypt describing the Athenian democracy of the 330s BC and its earlier history. According to this account, Cleisthenes introduced a wholesale reorganization of the way the Athenians did politics.
In outline, he now created a formal citizen body, based on registration of all Athenians in registration centres centred on localities – mainly pre-existing villages – in the 930 square miles of surrounding countryside controlled by Athens. As if to cut across the old landed interest and its local clienteles, he then mixed up these citizens geographically by grouping far-flung local registration centres into ten new citizen-tribes. Each of these tribes in turn sent 50 councillors to sit on a pre-existing government council, its membership now expanded to 500.
Another procedural innovation of Cleisthenes is worth mentioning, not least because the finds of archaeologists vividly illustrate its workings, in the form of hundreds of humble potsherds with names scratched on them. ‘Cimon, son of Miltiades, take Elpinice and go.’ This Athenian’s background was impeccably aristocratic. His father had led the Athenians to victory at Marathon. Cimon himself was a leading Athenian naval commander and politician in the quarter-century or so after the battle of Plataea. The journey wished on Cimon by this graffito, however, was one into exile from Athens.
He had fallen foul of the institution of ‘ostracism’, from the ancient Greek for a potsherd. Athenians would assemble to vote by means of a name scratched on an ostrakon for the banishment of a particular politician. He would have to go abroad for ten years if a minimum of six thousand votes had been cast and his name was in the majority. According to that papyrus, Cleisthenes saw ostracism in the first instance as a way of enabling Athenians to rid themselves of would-be tyrants. But soon ‘it was also used to remove any other person who seemed to be too great’. In other words, it had become a tool of rival politicians.
In Cimon’s case, the ‘graffitist’ had added a personal insult. Elpinice was Cimon’s devoted sister – too devoted. At any rate, there was talk, recorded centuries later by a writer of Roman times, that her relations with her brother were incestuous. This graffito, from the 460s BC, suggests that these rumours of sexual impropriety already circulated in Elpinice’s lifetime. In the best traditions of democratic cut-and-thrust, sexual innuendo provided ammunition for her brother’s political enemies.
The democracy put in place by Cleisthenes was a work in progress. The old aristocratic structures of power could not be dismantled overnight. Going back to the broken crocks that my friends were examining, detective work on this kind of evidence provides new insights into the very different kinds of Athenian holding office in the democratic system.
In the case of these particular pots, made in the years around 460 to 450 BC, their ancient users were Athenian citizens holding democratic office thanks to a lottery. They would have represented a mix of social backgrounds, including Athenians who had to work for a living. Piecing together as much as they could of at least twenty-two clay cups used for drinking, my friends discovered a striking common feature. Most if not all these cups were about the same size, with a likely capacity of around half a pint.
This was not the only egalitarian note. The officials who drank equal measures from these standard cups did so at meals which they took, not sprawled on cushioned couches like Greek aristocrats but, it is thought, sitting upright on a bench around the inside wall of the Tholos, facing each other in a big circle.
To grasp the import of this apparently deliberate symbolism, another style of official dining in the same vicinity is revealing. A few hundred yards to the north, American archaeologists have found crockery discarded as rubbish after being broken during, once more, shared meals. This locale, however, had distinctly upper-class associations, specifically with another group of annual officials who dined at public expense in democratic Athens, the ten archons.
The archons had been the senior officers of Archaic Athens. In those days elected aristocrats dominated the posts. Once it came to power, the Athenian democracy whittled away the powers of the archons. However, at the time that this crockery was made, around 460 to 450 BC, the position was still a preserve of the richest Athenians.
These diners literally speak to us, because they scratched graffiti on their earthenware. The graffiti are a revelation. They praise and insult individuals in the style of the homoerotic banter of – precisely – aristocrats reclining at a private symposium. ‘Alcaeus is beautiful’ runs one. Another, as if in reply, asserts to the contrary: ‘Alcaeus is a lewd fellow’. This Greek word for ‘lewd’ is related to the Greek word for ‘buttocks’. These might have been Athenian ‘toffs’ using the word, but it was not a polite one.
More than that, these graffiti are incised on the undersides and feet of vessels, and so most easily read if these vessels were already broken into pieces. It may well be that the upper-crust diners who scratched these graffiti amused themselves by making fun of the democratic procedure of ostracism. As seen, this too involved citizens scratching names on bits of broken pot.
The reason for dwelling on these fragments of ancient Athenian mealtimes is that they vividly suggest the social differences underlying the achievement of ancient Athenian democracy. The word for democracy in Ancient Greek, dēmokratia, means ‘people power’. Yet Athenian democrats had to take constant account of the continued existence of an Athenian upper crust with inherited wealth and aristocratic attitudes.
A walk through the sculpture galleries of the National Archaeological Museum in modern Athens is almost a stroll through the cemeteries of the landed families of Archaic Athens. Standing on their bases are expensive statues of strapping youths honed by hours of leisure spent in the gymnasium, and richly dressed maidens, destined for socially advantageous matches.
In Athens there had been no social revolution as in Russia in 1917. The descendants of these families lived on under the democracy, rich, entitled. Left to themselves, they took time to abandon the outward signs of their old status. These were the sort of noble Athenians who ‘not long ago, laid aside the fashion of wearing linen tunics and golden brooches shaped like cicadas, which they used to fasten their hair bun’, according to the Athenian historian Thucydides, writing around 400 BC.
These people were not just potential opponents of the democracy. They also needed to be on side for the positive reason that Athens needed their financial clout. With no system of direct income tax (unknown in antiquity), the Athenians looked to their richest citizens to ‘volunteer’ to pay for certain public services from their own pocket.
An elegant structure in the Plaka district of modern Athens gives an insight into how this system worked. A marble cylinder on a square podium, topped by a conical roof, the Lysicrates Monument was erected by a rich Athenian to commemorate, not to say flaunt, his role as the producer of successful plays performed for the benefit of the citizenry at the city’s annual festival of drama.
Relatively few tourists find their way to the barren hillside not f
ar from the Acropolis known as the Pnyx to the ancient Athenians. Thanks to erosion the site is now a puzzle. In front of a stepped platform cut into the natural rock the ground slopes downwards. In ancient times it sloped upwards instead, so as to form an auditorium. Here in the open air, citizens sat comfortably to hear fellow citizens addressing them from the platform. Then they voted with a show of hands. This was the bridge of the democracy: the citizens meeting as a sovereign assembly and voting directly on matters of state, not relying on representatives to do so on their behalf, as in today’s parliamentary systems.
This referendum-like mode of popular sovereignty was feasible thanks to the relatively small numbers of citizen-voters in ancient Athens. Their total number in the 400s and 300s BC probably fluctuated in the region of thirty to forty thousand. Many lived, not in Athens proper, but in the surrounding townships and villages. Some of these can still be visited. At Sunium, for instance, famous for its temple of Poseidon, tourists can also walk ancient streets, passing remnants of ancient houses belonging to the ‘men of Sunium’.
Up on the Pnyx, the auditorium could never have accommodated the full citizen body. Modern archaeologists put the seating capacity at around six thousand. This meant that the Athenian assembly habitually made its sovereign decisions on the basis of a maximum of perhaps around one-fifth of all eligible voters. As in the low turnouts in popular elections in western democracies, this paradoxical state of affairs does not seem to have been a cause of undue concern for the Athenians – who were, admittedly, a far smaller and more homogeneous body.
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