The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  These masks often have strong facial expressions – heavy wrinkles, for instance – and fall into a number of types, such as old women, youths and warriors. Since they are mostly too small to have ever been worn, scholars think that their donors left them to Orthia as permanent mementoes of performance masks made of a perishable material such as linen. Experts debate the nature of the Spartan performances that these masks commemorated.

  Their most recent student thinks that the Spartans used the hypothetical originals in a form of comic theatre akin to farce: masked performers who enacted slapstick, exaggerated characters and improbable plots. In this way the Spartan worship of Orthia might even have played its part in the hazy evolution of the masked performances in sanctuaries in Archaic Greece into fully fledged theatre. But this final transformation took place in fifth-century BC Athens, as we shall see, and certainly not in Sparta.

  There are other traces of an early atmosphere of artistry and creativity at Sparta. A papyrus in the Louvre preserves the comparison by a Spartan poet living in the 600s BC of two beautiful maidens of Sparta:

  Don’t you see? One is a racehorse

  from Paphlagonia. But the mane

  of the other one, my kinswoman

  Hagesichora, blossoms on her head

  like imperishable gold.

  And the silver look of her face –

  what can I tell you openly?

  She is Hagesichora.

  The ancient evidence does not tell exactly when and how – perhaps under pressure from Helot revolts – the Spartans turned towards the harsh and rigid life of military routines which their name evokes today. It seems to have happened by the time of their great war with the Athenians, which broke out in 431 BC.

  The cultural similarities between Athenians and Spartans arising from their shared Greekness can be overlooked. The Spartans also had an acropolis, if not a lofty one like that of Athens, and they erected on theirs a temple to the same divine protectress, whom they called in their dialect ‘Athana’. But it was as a clash of opposites that the ancients preferred to look back on the disastrous conflict between the two powers, which we examine next.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘UNPRECEDENTED SUFFERING’?

  THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

  Most visitors to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens are unaware of another museum next door. Little visited except by specialists, the Epigraphical Museum houses a sensational collection of inscriptions from ancient Greece.

  Among experts, the acknowledged queen of this collection is a monolithic block some 18 feet high. It almost reaches the ceiling, and a ladder is needed to read the letters at the top. When you look closer, you see that the material is modern plaster. Into this are set many fragments of a single ancient inscription.

  American experts created this wonder of modern scholarship in 1927 by fitting together over 180 fragments, all originally from the same giant block of marble, perhaps a leftover from an abandoned building project. The Athenians of the age of Pericles had set up the original on the Acropolis. The document records annual payments to Athena, the goddess of the Acropolis. Each year an ancient mason climbed up a ladder to add a new record of these payments.

  What makes this shattered monument so important is the identity of the payers. As seen, the Greek allies inflicted a decisive defeat on the remnants of Xerxes’ Persian army of invasion at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC. After this victory, the allies looked to Sparta, the senior power on the Greek mainland, to spearhead the continuing struggle against the Persians, still a formidable threat to Greek settlements east of the mainland, thanks to their warships.

  But the allied Greeks felt that the Spartan regent Pausanias, the Spartan general at Plataea, had started to behave more like a tyrant than a commander-in-chief. As seen already, it was he who placed a self-promoting inscription on the victory monument at Delphi, later removed. The allies asked the Athenians to take over the leadership instead, seeing how well they and their navy had performed in the struggle against the Persians.

  Sensing their opportunity, the Athenians obliged. To fund the war-effort, they organized a system whereby the Greek allies contributed either money based on an assessment of their resources or, at the beginning, ships. Twenty-five years later, in 454 BC, the Athenians moved the allied treasury from the relatively neutral location of the Cycladic island of Delos to the sanctuary of Athena on their Acropolis. To appease the new protectress of the fund, the allies agreed to set aside a portion of their annual payments – a sixtieth – as an offering to the goddess.

  It was for the inscription and advertisement of these annual amounts that the Athenians now erected the freestanding slab of stone somewhere on the Acropolis and put the masons to work. These lines from the first record of the payments to be inscribed on the block, 454/3 BC, show the format of the inscription:

  Mecypernians

  Stolians,

  Polichnitans: 231 drachmae 2 obols.

  Singians: 2[?]2 drachmae 2 obols.

  Thasians: 300 drachmae.

  Mysians: 33 drachmae 2 obols.

  Picres the Syangelian: [50 drachmae] etc.

  The location of the paying communities tracks the growing scope of the Greek alliance. Picres was a local ruler based to the east of Bodrum in south-west Turkey; he was not even an ethnic Greek, but a Carian. In the quarter-century since the Athenians had taken over, and under the leadership of their generals, the forces of the Greek allies had effectively turned the Aegean Sea and the littoral of western Asia Minor into a no-go zone for the Persian Empire – a feat of arms scarcely less remarkable than the earlier victories over Persia on the Greek mainland.

  The greatest victory belonged to the mid-460s BC, when an Athenian general led a fleet of two hundred war galleys along the south coast of Turkey in search of a rumoured Persian force. This he located not far from modern Antalya, at the mouth of a river which the Greeks called the Eurymedon, a fast-moving torrent in its upper reaches, nowadays popular with white-water rafters. Here the Greeks landed their infantry and inflicted a crushing defeat on the enemy, who had abandoned their ships in the hope of finding safety on land.

  The strategic aim of the Greek allies by this stage was to keep Persian sea-power well away from Greek lands by bringing the king to agree to a frontier, beyond which his warships were no longer to sail. Not far west of the River Eurymedon the coast of Turkey’s southern mainland turns an abrupt corner at a promontory marked by a chain of five offshore islets. The ancient Greeks knew them as ‘Swallow Islands’. I have cruised past this picturesque spot more than once in recent years, but probably at the wrong time of year for migrating swallows, although I did see dolphins. The Greeks are said to have chosen these islands as the boundary markers. There is a knotty problem for historians of whether they negotiated a formal peace with the Persians on these terms. But both sides stopped fighting each other at about this time.

  Even so, the Athenians did not dissolve the Greek alliance against Persia. When they raised that great monolith on the Acropolis in 454 or 453 BC, sight of the expanse of blank stone beneath the first record to be inscribed might have caused a Greek from an allied state disquiet about future Athenian intentions. He will have known, too, that leaving the alliance was no easy matter, as the Thasians had found out.

  In the quoted extract above, the ‘Thasians’ of line 5 are the citizens of Thasos, a rich Greek island in the northern Aegean. Thucydides describes how they tried to leave the alliance in 465 BC or thereabouts, despite, like the other allies, having sworn to remain in it ‘for ever’, meaning as long as the Persian Empire should exist. The Athenians promptly sent warships, landed on the island and determinedly besieged the Thasians behind their walls for three years. When the besieged eventually surrendered, the Athenians forced them back into the alliance on humiliating terms, including – salt in the wound – payment of recent arrears in their annual contributions.

  There were other signs that the Athenians were starting to trea
t their allies more like subjects of an empire of which they alone were the masters. A century later, an Athenian writer recalled how the Athenians used to parade the allied payments ‘on the stage, when the theatre was full, at the festival of Dionysus’. He was referring to the contributions in precious metal which allied representatives brought to Athens every spring. To some onlookers, this annual parade before the Athenian citizenry might have resembled more a show of Athenian power.

  To those Greeks who had knowledge of the internal workings of the Persian Empire, this kind of Athenian behaviour smacked of the imperialistic ways of the very empire that the alliance was set up to resist. The Persians too went in for parades of contributions. As seen, the great palace of the Persian kings at Persepolis in south-west Iran was adorned with sculptured images of great processions. These gift bearers were the subjects of the king, organized by ethnicity and bearing the produce of their lands to lay before ‘the Great King, King of Kings’.

  Later writers record traditions that the Athenians started to divert the allied payments from the war chest – their raison d’être – to purely Athenian ends. In effect they treated them as part of the revenues of the city of Athens. It was in the mid-400s BC, under the leadership of Pericles, that the Athenians started to beautify their city in earnest. This striving for ‘soft power’ through cultural works has a modern ring. Pericles was creative, a builder as well as an imperialist.

  The outcomes – notably the beautiful buildings of the Periclean Acropolis – occupy a central place in modern judgements about the brilliance of Greek civilization. The economic enterprise of individual Athenian citizens, as farmers, traders or anything else, was by no means the sole, or even the main, source of the wealth that made this achievement possible.

  The policy of Pericles divided the Athenians. An ancient writer records that voices were raised in the citizen assembly opposing, on grounds that today would be called ‘ethical’, the misuse of allied funds for these purposes:

  And surely Greece is insulted with a dire insult and manifestly subjected to tyranny when she sees that, with her own enforced contributions for the war, we are gilding and bedizening our city, which, for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her wardrobe costly marbles and sacred statues and temples worth their millions.

  These later traditions were more than the echoes of smears against Pericles by rival politicians inside the hothouse of the Athenian democracy. The Athenians began building the Parthenon in 447 BC. Athenian inscriptions recording the annual accounts of the work indicate that the bulk of the funds for the new temple were transfers of monies by the Athenian officials who received the annual payments of the allies.

  Apparently done without consultation of the allies, this misspending of allied treasure was supposedly defended by Pericles himself in forthright terms:

  For his part, Pericles would instruct the people that it owed no account of their moneys to the allies provided it carried on the war for them and kept off the barbarians; ‘not a horse do they furnish,’ said he, ‘not a ship, not a heavily-armed infantryman, but money simply; and this belongs, not to those who give it, but to those who take it, if only they furnish that for which they take it in pay.’

  This policy of spending on public works enlarged further the pool of Athenian stakeholders in maintaining Athenian domination of the Greek alliance. These included military personnel, notably the lower-class rowers – not always citizens admittedly – who received pay for their uncomfortable exertions at the oars of the Athenian war galleys, known today by their Latin name of trireme.

  A trireme was a one-masted wooden vessel, its prow tipped by a bronze ram, propelled by three banks of oars per side. Like many others I once clambered aboard the modern reconstruction of a trireme, at the time in dry dock down at Piraeus, also the war harbour of the ancient Athenians. Despite the best effort of its young crew of rowers, in sea trials during the 1980s this minutely researched replica failed to keep up the fastest speeds recorded for the ancient Athenian originals – 10 or so miles an hour – for more than a few minutes.

  This suggests that, like all naval powers, ancient and more recent, the Athenian fleet relied on the fine honing of skills through continuous service at sea, season after season, year after year. This enabled the crews not just to perform routine actions such as embarking and beaching, going ahead and going astern, using the sail and so on, but also a demanding manoeuvre like the – a literal translation of the Ancient Greek – ‘sailing through and out’, in which a line of galleys would attempt to sail through a line of enemy vessels and then to ram them with their bronze-sheathed tips from their exposed sides.

  Poorer Athenians were stakeholders in the democracy more broadly. Pericles introduced pay for citizens who served on the juries in Athenian courts. These juries were large – 501 members was typical – in part to ensure a fairer trial by obstructing the use of bribes by the accused. In doing this, Pericles may thereby have deepened the Athenian sense at the time of a link between their democracy and their rule of the allies, given the increasing confusion of the city’s different strands of revenue and the lack of accountability to the allies of how their payments were spent.

  By launching into public works, Pericles expanded local stakeholders in the sea empire yet further. An inscription on display in the British Museum records wages to workmen on one of the new temples on the fifth-century-BC Acropolis – architects, masons, sculptors, carpenters and so on. As seen, all were potential beneficiaries of the Athenian diversion of allied funds for public works. These workers included citizen-artisans, foreign residents or metics, and Athenian slave-owners, who probably received the wages paid to the slaves working on these building sites.

  As for the rest of Greece, the Athenians seem to have turned a blind eye to Athens’s growing unpopularity abroad. Down in the Peloponnese, the Spartans and their friends looked on at Athenian ambitions with mounting unease. They too had a military alliance, a much older one. In the course of the 500s BC Sparta had created a permanent agreement between the Greek communities of the Peloponnese to fight together under Spartan leadership against a common enemy.

  The historian Thucydides offers his version of how one Peloponnesian city presented the Athenians as a threat to a meeting of Sparta’s citizen assembly in 432 BC. Envoys from the Corinthians, who had various grievances against Athens, contrasted the temperament of the Spartans to their face with that of the Athenians:

  And you have never considered what manner of men are these Athenians with whom you will have to fight, and how utterly unlike yourselves. They are revolutionary, equally quick in the conception and in the execution of every new plan; while you are conservative – careful only to keep what you have, originating nothing, and not acting even when action is most urgent. They are bold beyond their strength; they run risks which prudence would condemn; and in the midst of misfortune they are full of hope . . . They are impetuous, and you are slow to act; they are always abroad, and you are always at home.

  This reluctance of the Spartans to venture outside their frontiers was probably driven by fear of a Helot revolt behind their backs. In the end the Spartans decided to go to war. Thucydides says that it was less the speeches of their allies that persuaded them and more their real fear of the Athenians ‘and their increasing power’. So began a struggle that dragged on for a generation, and involved most of the Greek states on one side or the other. The ancients came to call this the Peloponnesian War.

  Like the Trojan War, this was a war that owes its modern renown to works of ancient Greek literature. In Homer and Thucydides respectively, later centuries have found true greatness, both of artistry and of the human spirit, and additionally, especially in the case of Thucydides, of insight into the verities of statecraft and military command. To describe the Peloponnesian War is – more or less – to paraphrase Thucydides, by far the most important ancient source.

  Thucydides relates how, for the first ten years, the Spartans and their allies stag
ed an annual invasion of the farmlands surrounding the walled city of Athens so as to disrupt Athenian agriculture. A character in an Athenian comedy of this time voices the feelings of Athenian farmers about this enemy strategy: ‘I detest the Spartans with all my heart, and may Poseidon . . . cause an earthquake and overturn their dwellings! My vines also have been cut.’ The Athenians in response crowded behind their city walls. They had prudently extended these a generation earlier so as to unite both the city proper and its harbour of Piraeus in a single fortification. The link between the two was a pair of parallel walls of sundried mud bricks some 4 miles long and 200 yards apart. Access to their harbour secured, the Athenians could rely if need be on their navy to provide supplies of imported food.

  Given the rudimentary state of Greek ideas about disease at this time, no one, including Pericles, who had led Athens into what he considered a survivable war, foresaw the health risks posed by the concentration of all Athenians inside the walls. Here the country Athenians had to camp in shanty dwellings, stiflingly hot in the Athenian summer. Thucydides describes in detail a lethal epidemic which spread from the harbour to the whole city in the second year of the war. This caused, he wrote, ‘men to die like sheep’. He carefully described the symptoms, which years of debate have failed to match conclusively to any modern disease.

  He noted that animals could contract the disease from humans and humans from each other – by contagion, in other words. This observation contradicted what passed for Greek medical theorizing of the time, which blamed bad air for spreading illness – an explanation erroneously linked to geography. Thucydides used his historian’s eye to observe a medical truth about the transmission of infectious diseases that western medicine did not fully accept before the nineteenth century. By the time the plague had spent itself, most inhabitants of the city must have been either dead or become immune – Thucydides says that the disease could revisit a victim, but far less severely. Pericles was struck down in 429 BC.