The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  An Athenian philosopher writing in the early to mid-300s BC, when Athens was still very much a democracy, claimed a remarkably egalitarian ethos for these meetings. When the assembled citizenry needed expert advice, Plato says, they summoned an architect, say, or a shipwright. However,

  if anyone else, whom the people do not regard as a technical specialist, attempts to advise them, no matter how handsome and rich and well-born he may be, not one of these things induces them to accept him; they merely laugh him to scorn and shout him down . . . Such is their procedure in matters which they consider professional. But when they have to deliberate on something connected with the administration of the state, anyone may stand up and offer advice, whether he be a carpenter, a blacksmith, a shoemaker, a merchant, a ship-captain, wealthy, poor, noble, or base-born.

  In practice, there was always a tendency for the assembled citizens to allow themselves to be led by speakers from the upper echelons of Athenian society who had the leisure to devote themselves to public life. Thucydides thought that the Athenians in effect submitted to ‘one-man rule’ under the greatest of these leaders, who dominated his city through the middle decades of the 400s BC.

  A Roman-period marble bust of this man on display in the British Museum copies a lost statue from his own time. It shows a mature, bearded, male. Greek letters spell out his name: ‘Perikles’. Contemplating the idealized features of this handsome yet authoritative personage, one might well believe, as Thucydides claimed, that Pericles owed his political influence not just to ‘ability’ but also to ‘personal repute’ – charisma, in other words.

  In a paradox familiar in modern democracies, Pericles, far from being a man of the people, was by background an aristocrat from a rich and distinguished Athenian family. The ancients looked back on him as one of the main architects of the great flowering of Athens in the fifth century BC. Under his ascendancy Athens became a dominant – not to say domineering – power in the Aegean, as the next chapter shows.

  Later writers also credited him with pursuing greatness for Athens through cultural excellence. One Roman-period writer went so far as to describe the architectural marvels erected on the Acropolis during his leadership – including the Parthenon – as ‘works of Pericles’. He had a cultured entourage which included the artist Pheidias, entrusted with oversight of the Parthenon; the philosopher Socrates; and a live-in partner called Aspasia, who was said to give political advice to Pericles while acting as the madam of a brothel – rather like King Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour in eighteenth-century France.

  Thucydides bestowed a kind of immortality on Pericles by putting into his mouth a speech to his fellow citizens presenting a solemn and elevated picture of Athens in 431/430 BC. It is known nowadays as the Funeral Oration because the occasion on which the historical Pericles pronounced something like this speech before an Athenian audience was a public funeral for fallen citizen-soldiers.

  The reader at this point can be told a bit more about Thucydides. Experts regard him as the greatest of the Greek and Roman history-writers who have come down to us. This is because he was not just highly intelligent. He also approached his task – the history of the great war of his lifetime between Athens and Sparta – with a concern for truth and with a rational and analytical approach. He saw humankind, not the hand of gods, as the driver of human fortunes. Unlike modern critics of the value of studying the past, he believed that history could teach lessons for the future. The same or similar events would happen again ‘in all human probability’.

  He was also explicit about his methods – unlike some history-writers even today, and a great novelty for a Greek writing two and a half millennia ago. He says that for the events of the war he interviewed eyewitnesses, but freely admits that accounts of the same events would vary, making it ‘hard work’ to establish the facts. He found it difficult, he wrote, to recall the actual words of speeches, even ones that he had heard himself.

  His method when it came to composing the speeches he puts into the mouths of his historical actors – generals haranguing troops, or debaters before political assemblies in various Greek cities – poses a problem for modern admirers of his stated commitment to accuracy. As well as his own memory, he drew on informants who reported on speeches which he had not himself heard. He then says that in general with speeches in his history, he composed them so as to convey both the truth of what was said, and also what was ‘appropriate’ in the circumstances.

  The last criterion hints that Thucydides might have made up parts of speeches despite what he knew, or thought he knew, had actually been said. This makes for an insoluble difficulty, not least when assessing the Funeral Oration as evidence for what the historical Pericles actually said and thought. I proceed on the assumption that Thucydides would have avoided flatly contradicting the memories of those Athenians who had been present at the actual event.

  In eulogizing the city for which the Athenian soldiers gave their lives, the Pericles of Thucydides praises its democratic features, including the city’s law courts which ‘treat everyone equally in the settlement of private disputes’. The Athenians went to great lengths to ensure that juries in their legal system were immune from tampering by the rich and influential. They paid citizens to serve as jurors and they developed an elaborate system for randomizing the assigning of jurors to particular courts by means of the jurors’ ‘tickets’ – bronze strips with an individual citizen’s name punched on it. There are numerous examples of these in museums today.

  Thucydides’ Pericles drew attention to the political opportunities for everyone in the democracy. ‘Poverty’ was not a bar to serving the city in public office – this was thanks to measures such as the lottery system, as stated earlier. On the other hand, the democracy enabled elitism of the right sort, since ‘excellence’ in a citizen conferred promotion in the state on merit.

  In all this, indeed throughout the speech, Thucydides’ Pericles had in mind citizen-males like himself. Athens in the 400s and 300s BC was the ancient society that probably came closest to having a general consideration for its (citizen) members. However, there were significant groups of disenfranchised residents, starting with the womenfolk of the citizenry. Thucydides’ Pericles mentions them only once, when addressing the mothers and widows of the fallen who were present in the audience: ‘Great is your glory if you fall not below the standard which nature has set for your sex, and great also is hers of whom there is least talk among men whether for good or bad.’ Exactly what is ‘Pericles’ saying here? A Roman-period writer, so a lot closer in time to the age of Pericles than us, glossed the passage as follows: ‘the name of the good woman, like her person, ought to be shut up indoors and never go out’. Even if it is not certain what ‘Pericles’ – let alone Pericles – thought on this point, it remains a fact that the Athenians, like other male-dominated Greek societies in this period, deemed their womenfolk unfit for political decision-making by virtue of their supposed inherent nature. This way of thinking was universal among ancient Greeks. At about this time Greek medical writers started to construct a cod physiology which seemed to justify it. Women’s bodies were wet and spongy. They were fundamentally different from and inferior to those of men, conceived as hard and dry.

  Naturally the slaves owned by many Athenian citizens, and as much their private property as their livestock, had no political rights. As in modern democracies, foreign residents in Athens were also excluded from political participation. The many registered migrants living in Athens at this time – Greeks called such people ‘metics’ – were often traders and artisans attracted by the economic opportunities of a flourishing city. Native-born Athenians tended to think of them as self-interested rather than civic-minded, although this was certainly not true of all of them. The Athenians jealously guarded the status of Athenian citizen, which Pericles had restricted to men born of two Athenian parents. It must be said that this meanness of the democracy with Athenian citizenship and its perks hardly encouraged mig
rants to place the public welfare above their private interests.

  Roughly 140 miles south-west of Athens, the motorway from the Isthmus, having smashed its way through the mountainous centre of the Peloponnese, starts to descend into a green valley edged by hills and mountains. This natural setting is so scenic that the stark contrast with the harsh way of life of the Greeks who once lived here is a historian’s commonplace. This was the home of the Spartans, in the fifth century BC first the rivals, and later the open foes, of Athens.

  The most spectacular of these mountains towers to the west: Mount Taygetus (pronounced ‘Ty-ee-getus’), a range of peaks retaining their snow cap most years until well into May. In antiquity bears roamed the heights. To understand the ancient Spartans, the mind’s eye must cross these redoubtable mountains into the region on the far side.

  This region is now centred on Kalamata. As the juicy olives named after this modern town suggest, the farmland of the south-western quarter of the Peloponnese is extremely productive. Some 24 miles to the north-west of the town, near today’s olive-growing village of Kopanaki, Greek archaeologists in the early 1980s discovered the remains of an ancient farmstead from the 500s and 400s BC. This had been a sizeable building, a rectangle 100 feet long, with an upper storey. The site has since disappeared, although the museum in Kalamata keeps some of the finds. These include parts of large clay storage jars for agricultural produce.

  If this all sounds rather unexciting, the identification by experts of the type of farm is anything but. They think that this could have been the centre of a large estate worked by slaves, rather like the plantations of the antebellum American South. In this case the ‘planter’ would have been a Spartan, the slaves the so-called Helots. Of the miserable lot of these Helots a Spartan poet of the 600s BC had this to say: ‘Like donkeys worn out with huge burdens, compelled by a terrible necessity, they bring to their masters a half of all the fruits of the earth.’

  Sparta was not the only Greek state to exploit an agricultural underclass who were forced to work the land. Where the Spartans do seem to have been unusual, and probably unique, is in the harshness of their treatment of these serf-like workers. Even in a slave-owning society like ancient Greece, Spartan cruelty was well known enough to attract the notice of fellow Greeks.

  Thucydides describes an exceptional episode in 424 BC when the Spartans ‘disappeared’ some two thousand Helot men, selected because ‘they were the most high-spirited and the most apt to revolt’. In the 300s BC, if not earlier, Greeks were aware of a Spartan custom whereby nocturnal bands of young Spartan warriors went around randomly killing Helots. Sometimes they did so in broad daylight too, when they could easily identify and pick off the physically fittest of the Helots labouring in the fields.

  The ancients themselves were not sure whether the Spartans had always treated the Helots like this. As with many aspects of ancient Sparta, scholars are uncertain too, although these debates cannot be gone into here. Thucydides records a revolt by the Helots on both sides of Taygetus in 464 BC. In ancient times such slave revolts were uncommon, if only because slaves were usually of mixed origin, arriving in their place of servitude thanks to the workings of the slave market and not necessarily even sharing a common language.

  However, Thucydides says that the rebellious Helots had a collective name, ‘Messenians’. They descended from the original inhabitants of the region beyond Taygetus, who, supposedly, had already been calling themselves ‘Messenians’ before the Spartans conquered them. If the Helots over the mountains had shared stories about a common ancestry and a violent subjugation in far-off times, and so come to build a common identity out of adversity, this could have motivated them to unite to throw off the Spartan yoke.

  The risk of revolt by Helots frightened their Spartan masters. Thucydides had personal knowledge of the Peloponnese, the region of southern Greece that Sparta dominated. He thought that policy at Sparta ‘was governed at all times by need to take precautions against the Helots’. The Spartans were constantly worried, not just because they depended on Helot labour to free them from working the land themselves, but also because the Helots outnumbered them.

  Greeks thought that Sparta was thinly populated by normal standards. They meant chiefly the fighting population of able-bodied Spartan males. This was small when compared to Sparta’s military clout in the larger world. It was also getting smaller. Herodotus has a Spartan informant in 480 BC describe Sparta to the Persians as ‘a city of about eight thousand men’. By the middle decades of the 300s BC, this number had dwindled to ‘not even a thousand’ according to the well-informed Aristotle.

  An ancient writer describes Spartan customs which would make sense if designed to encourage procreation:

  For among the Spartans it was a hereditary custom and quite usual for three or four men to have one wife or even more if they were brothers, the offspring being the common property of all, and when a man had begotten enough children, it was honourable and quite usual for him to give his wife to one of his friends.

  Such customs help to explain why fellow Greeks saw the Spartan way of life as more or less the opposite of that of most Greek states. Long after Spartan greatness was just a historical memory, the ancient Greeks and Romans remembered one thing above all.

  They called it the Spartan ‘discipline’. By this they meant the barracks lifestyle of all Spartan warriors. In the 400s BC this made Spartan soldiering seem far more rigorous when compared with the relatively amateur armies of citizen-farmers fielded by most other Greek states, Athens included. Thucydides has Pericles praise the Athenians for – in effect – the amateur quality of their soldiering. As fighting material, he says, Athenian men were blessed with their courage. This in turn was a by-product of the Athenian way of life, which was morally superior to that of their Greek opponents. When ‘Pericles’ refers to an unnamed enemy that ‘from early childhood pursues courage by a laborious training’, his Athenian audience would have known at once whom he had in mind. In ancient Greece, only one city trained children to fight.

  Other distinctive features of this way of life included the all-male dining clubs where Spartan men took their meals. As a condition of his citizenship, each clubman had to contribute to his own upkeep from the produce of his Helot-farmed land. But increasingly there were Spartans without enough land to maintain their contributions. As to why this was so, the philosopher Aristotle thought that the declining number of Spartan citizens arose from the way in which Spartan laws of inheritance had concentrated landed property in the hands of the few. ‘It has come about that some of the Spartans own too much property and some extremely little.’ When the wealth gap poses such problems in today’s world, perhaps the Spartans should not be unduly censured for failing to solve the economic disparities which caused their citizen numbers to decline. Meanwhile, with an eye on the Helots, the Spartan citizens kept up their ‘discipline’. The truly remarkable feature of this state regimen was the military-style training of youths, beginning at the age of seven, when boys were taken from home for this purpose.

  One archaeological site in particular is associated with this training. Today’s motorway from Athens into Sparti, the modern town overlying ancient Sparta, crosses the gravel banks of the River Eurotas and heads through the outskirts towards the central square. Doing so it passes one of Greece’s brown and yellow archaeological signs, which directs the visitor down a track to an old excavation on the river’s right bank.

  As with most remnants of ancient Sparta, the human imagination has to work here with poor materials. An ancient Greek inscription on a toppled block references ‘the customs of Lycurgus’. He was the lawgiver in the remote past to whose wise dispositions the Spartans attributed their way of life. For the rest, battered bits of ancient buildings do little to bring to life what was once a major centre for Spartan religion – except, that is, the substantial remains of an open-air altar.

  Here took place one of the more peculiar tests in the training of the Spartan
youth:

  He [Lycurgus] made it a point of honour to steal as many cheeses as possible from the altar of Orthia, but appointed others to scourge the thieves, meaning to show thereby that by enduring pain for a short time one may win lasting fame and felicity. It is shown herein that where there is need of swiftness, the slothful, as usual, gets little profit and many troubles.

  This description comes from a Greek author writing in the early 300s BC who knew Sparta well and was probably an eyewitness to this cheese-stealing from the altar of the goddess Orthia. In this trial the Spartan lads had to be nimble so as to snatch cheeses while avoiding the lash. Some of the aims of what passed for a Spartan education can be glimpsed here: the promotion of not just manly courage but also stealth and cunning – the sort of qualities one might expect from so-called special forces in the modern military. Since they were under orders, the boys also learnt obedience – not to mention, once it was all over, the sense of solidarity that comes from an ordeal shared and survived.

  Ancient writers disagreed about whether active homosexuality formed part of this education. An Athenian admirer of Sparta who knew the city first hand states that the Spartans considered touching the boys as ‘most shameful’. On the other hand, a prominent Roman of the first century BC thought that Spartan custom permitted ‘embraces and lying together’ with ‘cloaks [or covers] in between’, the equivalent of sex with your clothes on. Cicero, the Roman in question, was probably told this detail on one of his visits to the Sparta of his own day. It is odd enough perhaps to be true.

  Sparta was not just a boot camp – at least, not always. In the British Museum a showcase displays objects found by archaeologists who excavated Orthia’s shrine at the start of the twentieth century. They include examples from the thousands of parts of clay face masks which Spartans of the 500s and 400s BC had left as offerings to the goddess.