The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Safe inside their long walls, the Athenians even so showed resilience. In 415 BC, during a short-lived cessation of hostilities that gave both sides some recovery time, they revealed just how far they were from mending their imperialistic ways. Out in the central Aegean lay the small Cycladic island of Melos, inhabited by Greeks of the Dorian branch who looked on the Spartans as their cousins. These men of Melos had never joined the Athenian alliance and still held out, despite harassment by the allied fleet. The Athenians now sent a naval force in the name of the alliance. In a pow-wow the Athenian envoys sat down with the magistrates and oligarchs who ran the island and tried to persuade them to join the alliance – or else.

  Thucydides gives his version of this debate, with the Athenians encouraging the Melians to interrupt and ask questions as they spoke. The envoys explained that the Athenians could not tolerate Melian neutrality, since this made them look weak in the eyes of their allies (an admission of allied malcontent with Athenian dominance), especially as Melos was just one small island. They made this argument as well: ‘You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ This ancient doctrine that might just ‘is’ – power rules OK, as it were – is liable to disturb liberal thinkers today on any number of levels. Still, it heedlessly continues its long run in the world’s history where the behaviour of states is concerned. In the telling of Thucydides, the Athenians assumed that self-preservation would make the Melians submit. If so, they cannot have been pleased when the Melian oligarchs replied that they would feel shame in giving in without a fight. They would rather hope for the best, put their trust in the gods, and defend their freedom.

  Thucydides, who probably saw in this Melian attitude a baleful lesson for his readers in the triumph of emotion over reason, describes what happened next. The Athenians and their allies laid siege to the town of Melos, forcing the islanders to surrender, and then ‘put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred settlers and inhabited the place themselves.’

  Elsewhere Thucydides presents the Athenians too as victims of faulty reasoning in war and suggests how the utterances of politicians could delude them. The most spectacular man-made cavern in modern Syracuse is a good place to introduce the Athenian expedition to Sicily. This cavern beguiles tourists with a feature prompting some of them to break into song: an echo. This so-called Ear of Dionysius is a lofty cave created by years of ancient masons quarrying down from the top for building stone.

  In one of their local quarries the Syracusans corralled at least seven thousand soldiers, captives from an Athenian armada that had gone spectacularly wrong. This was in 413 BC. Thucydides emphasizes what he seems to have considered the unusual cruelty of this incarceration – the heat of the sun, lack of air, thin rations doled out by the Syracusans, leading to hunger and thirst, and the stink from the bodies of dead comrades. This episode closes his account of what he calls ‘the most important action’ of the whole war. He meant the military expedition from Athens which had set out for Sicily two years earlier.

  Thucydides had the highest opinion of Pericles as a statesman. His own view was that the lesser quality of the Athenian leaders who succeeded him was to blame for what he called this ‘blunder’. His analysis is hard to prove or disprove in the absence of alternative accounts. On its own terms, what turned out to be a disaster for Athens offered another lesson, this time about the unintended consequences of public speeches by politicians.

  What seems to have attracted the Athenians to attack the rich island of Sicily in the first place was the hope of material gain. They dressed this up as the need to answer a call for help from their allies in Sicily, the non-Greek people of Egesta, against an enemy neighbour. Thucydides adds that, alongside the profit motive, the young Athenian men felt ‘a longing for foreign sights and travel abroad’. Similar reasons are given by men and women who enlist today.

  In the version of Thucydides the Athenians sit in assembly and listen to prominent Athenians giving speeches for or against this bold plan. There is the young Alcibiades, a glamorous member of the Athenian social elite whom Thucydides wants his readers to view with suspicion: someone ‘exceedingly ambitious of a command by which he hoped to reduce Sicily and Carthage, and to gain in wealth and celebrity by means of his successes’. Whether or not the judgement was fair, this is arguably a recognizable type in western politics today.

  Before Alcibiades spoke, an older politician called Nicias had attempted to dissuade the Athenians from the idea because he feared that his countrymen harboured the overambitious aim of conquering the whole island. He saw the plan as a distraction from the real enemy, the Spartans, and attacked without naming him the plan’s advocate, a young man ‘who seeks to be admired for his stud of horses’, and ‘to maintain his private opulence at his country’s risk’.

  Alcibiades then got up to rebut these criticisms and to speak in favour of the expedition, so eloquently that he left the Athenians keener than ever to go ahead. Nicias felt obliged to rise for a second time at the same meeting. Thucydides says that he now aimed to dissuade the Athenians by using a rhetorical trick. He talked up the military risks and argued that if the expedition were to go ahead it needed to be much bigger and more expensive. He hoped that the Athenians would give up the whole idea when they weighed these greater costs against an uncertain outcome.

  In fact, his rhetoric achieved the opposite effect. He persuaded the Athenians that a much bigger force would make success a certainty. So the expedition went ahead, thanks to ‘the enthusiasm of the majority’, while ‘the few who liked it not, feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands (and voting) against it, and so kept quiet’. Here Thucydides shows his grasp of group psychology.

  The Athenians arrived in Sicily and laid siege to the city of the Syracusans, who were fellow Greeks but – like the men of Melos – of Dorian ethnicity. With help from their kinsmen, the Spartans, the Syracusans proved a more formidable foe than the Athenians had reckoned with. As things went from bad to worse militarily, the Athenian general, none other than the same Nicias, missed a crucial last chance to sail home – he and the men alike were deterred by what Greeks generally at this date saw as a bad omen, an eclipse of the moon. When the force finally retreated by land, demoralized and short of water, order broke down when they reached a river. The Syracusans slaughtered the desperately thirsty men as they tried to drink, and enslaved the survivors.

  The Athenian disaster in Sicily made a great impression on the Greeks. Every state was reconsidering its position in the face of a weakened Athens. The Spartans scented a decisive victory in the offing. They changed strategy. Instead of the old annual raids on Athenian territory, they fortified a stronghold a mere 11 miles north-east of Athens and kept it permanently garrisoned. The Athenians took heavy losses in the countryside, including, Thucydides says, all their farm animals.

  There was more. Under cover of the Spartan occupation, ‘more than twenty thousand slaves, the greater part of them skilled workers, deserted’ their Athenian masters. At this time skilled slaves in the territory of Athens were mainly concentrated in the south. Here visitors venturing into the peaceful, pine-scented hill country near the modern town of Lavrion encounter a side of ancient Athens contrasting starkly with the aesthetic ruins on the Acropolis.

  There are fenced-off entrances to ancient tunnels; slag heaps; great cisterns for collecting industrial quantities of rainwater; and ruined installations where workers once washed lumps of mined ore before heating them in a furnace to separate the noble metal from the base. In the nearby archaeological museum, teachers show throngs of Athenian schoolchildren a display of crude inscriptions found locally: the Ancient Greek word for ‘boundary’ features prominently. These stones once marked mining concessions granted by Athens to private individuals.

  An Athenian writer calle
d Xenophon, who as a boy might have seen Nicias in person, records how this hapless commander of the Sicilian expedition once owned a thousand slaves ‘in the mines’. He made his profit by hiring out this workforce and its know-how to fellow citizens operating concessions. So, going back to the Spartans, their garrison now disrupted not just agriculture but another major source of Athenian wealth, the city’s silver mines.

  The Spartans had a more astonishing card up their sleeve. In its early years the Athenian alliance had successfully liberated and then recruited the Greek settlements of western Turkey previously under Persian rule. This constituted a loss of face to a hereditary monarchy that based its legitimacy on claims to rule over multiple ‘lands’ and ‘peoples’. The current Persian king, Darius II, a grandson of Xerxes, felt the time was now right to put pressure on his chief governor in the region to have these Greeks resume their tribute payments – bring them back, in other words, under Persian rule.

  The upshot was that the Spartans, in order to defeat Athens, made a treaty with the non-Greek foe against whom Spartans and Athenians had once fought side by side. In this deal, Sparta agreed to hand back the Ionian Greeks to Persia once Athens was defeated. In return, Persia gave military aid and enough treasure for Sparta to build and maintain a fleet to take on that of Athens.

  The final blow to the dwindling resources of the Athenians came in 405 BC, when a Spartan admiral, Lysander, captured an Athenian fleet beached on the European side of the Dardanelles. After this disaster, the Spartans were able to prevent supplies of grain being shipped to Piraeus from what is now the Crimea and Ukraine. Most of what was left of the Athenian alliance now melted away. Lysander sailed for Athens. Inside their walls, the starving Athenians, mindful not least of the fate at Athenian hands of the people of Melos, braced for the worst.

  To the sound of women playing flutes, the Spartans and their allies demolished the fortifications of Athens and imposed victors’ terms. But they did not destroy Athens. Somewhat ironically in the circumstances, they said that they could not forget the city’s great services in the Greek cause during the Persian Wars. Shorn of their imperial power, the Athenians survived.

  For a generation, with ups and downs, including another major inter-Greek war, the victorious Spartans with Persian support dominated mainland Greece politically and militarily. This period seems to have seen, or hastened, social change at Sparta. During the Peloponnesian War the previously insular Spartans had become accustomed to serving abroad. They had seen wealthy Syracuse, the great rivers of northern Greece, and the opulent entourages of Persian officials. The leadership now had more connections and experience of the world.

  In the view of our best source of information about Sparta in the decades following the defeat of Athens, the Athenian writer Xenophon, power now went to the head of the Spartans. Leading Spartans were no longer content to live modestly at home, but sought out trips abroad on state business. Some started to flaunt their riches. In positions of authority they let themselves be ‘corrupted by flattery’ while serving overseas – a roundabout reference, probably, to bribery.

  This moralizing indictment is not necessarily way off the mark. Xenophon had Spartan friends in high places and knew Sparta well. He disapproved of the changes he records and saw a decline in Spartan values. That said, a moralizing judgement about a whole society is always difficult to evaluate objectively. Xenophon might have echoed the disapproving conservatism of some Spartan friends. A modern historian might ask whether competition for status among richer Spartans had taken new forms as they became more ‘worldly’.

  An achievement by a Spartan woman at around this time highlights the ostentation of rich Spartans and also – maybe – a conservative reaction to this phenomenon. Various ancient writings record that a daughter and sister of Spartan kings called Cynisca twice won the prestigious four-horse chariot race at Olympia in the 390s BC.

  She went on to boast in a victory monument there that she was ‘the only woman in all Greece who won this crown’. Owning and racing chariot teams, like the equestrianism of Queen Elizabeth II in modern times, was a sport for the rich, and Cynisca had serious wealth at her disposal.

  Her inscription at Olympia makes Cynisca sound almost like a proto-feminist. It plays on an ancient Greek view that Spartan females enjoyed more social freedoms than their counterparts in other Greek cities. But a later Greek tradition claimed that Cynisca was put up to this venture by her royal brother, King Agesilaus II:

  Seeing that some of the citizens thought themselves to be somebody and gave themselves great airs because they kept a racing stud, he persuaded his sister Cynisca to enter a chariot in the races at Olympia, for he wished to demonstrate to the Greeks that this sort of thing was no sign of manly excellence, but only of having money and being willing to spend it.

  This tradition cannot just be dismissed. If correct, Cynisca merely did her brother’s bidding. The aim of the conservative Agesilaus was to try to check the costly appetite for horse-racing among his rich fellow Spartans by using Cynisca to show that a victory – achieved at second hand by a driver – did not make you any more of a man.

  Spartan society was not just divided at the top. Thanks to Xenophon, who drew on his insider’s knowledge, history records a failed plot among members of Sparta’s – numerically far superior – underclass to take up arms against the diminishing elite of Spartan citizens with full rights. Xenophon reels off a list of categories of disadvantaged groups in Spartan society who were united in the view that they ‘would be glad to eat the full citizens even raw’.

  As seen in the last chapter, these full citizens, those who went through the military training and who were now benefiting economically from the Spartan hegemony, had no appetite to reform the unequal distribution of wealth which kept them on top. Yet the inheritance laws that seem to have helped a few families to become very rich were shrinking the patrimony of other Spartans.

  Unable to pay their mess dues, these Spartans were being forced out of the citizen body altogether into a simmering state of social exclusion. It seems that the grip of the authorities was fierce enough to avoid civil conflict. Another danger was that Sparta’s citizen army would shrink in numbers to the point where recovery from a decisive defeat in battle would no longer be possible.

  This is exactly what happened in 371 BC. A Spartan army had marched out of the Peloponnese to assert Sparta’s hegemony against the Greeks of Boeotia, the region to the north of Athens. This army was now decisively beaten. It was rare enough for Greeks to defeat Spartans on the battlefield. Greek onlookers were even more amazed by the disintegration that followed. Sparta was unable militarily to recover from the blow. She failed to prevent the Helots of Messenia or the cities of her Peloponnesian alliance from now seizing the chance to throw off Spartan domination.

  The future philosopher Aristotle, aged thirteen at the time, later gave this analysis: ‘The impact of one single battle was too much for Sparta; she succumbed owing to the shortage of manpower.’ The insuperable rigidities of Spartan society may help to explain why the Spartan victory in the Peloponnesian War and the Spartan dominion in Greece that followed did not prompt a second flowering of Spartan culture. Both before and after her defeat, the cultural atmosphere of Athens was very different. In the next chapter I consider examples of the achievements of the Athenians and those other Greeks drawn to reside there at this time, and the local conditions encouraging individual geniuses to shine.

  CHAPTER 10

  EXAMINED LIVES AND GOLDEN MOUTHS

  After the brilliance of Homer, modern critics traditionally identify a creative peak in Greek culture in the period from the first Greek victory over Persia (490 BC) to the rise of the Macedonian overlords (from 336 BC). A list of famous, even household, names living in these times (such as Sophocles and Socrates) would make the point about the widespread perception today of the high achievements of those two centuries.

  The period is sometimes called ‘Classical’ with a capital
‘c’. The denomination ‘Classical’ is more than a modern way of dividing up time. It conveys today’s standard judgement about the near perfection of aspects of Greek culture in this period, compared with what went before and what came after.

  This subjective rating owes some of its authority to the opinions of the ancients in the post-Classical centuries, and some to classical enthusiasts since the Renaissance. These last include all the creative people who have consciously taken inspiration for writing literature, for philosophizing, carving statues, designing buildings and so on from ancient models. The modest aim of this chapter is to sample some of what it is about ‘Classical’ Greece that (traditionally) has justified its high rating in the culture stakes.

  Classical Greece by and large means Classical Athens. From the late fifth century BC, the signs start to mount showing how ancient neighbours of the Athenians, Greek and non-Greek, were embracing the innovations hosted, and occasionally promoted, in the ‘revolutionary’ cultural atmosphere of the fifth-century BC Athenian democracy. The British Museum offers one small example which visitors today can easily appreciate.

  I was once told a true story about a visit to this museum by a distinguished advocate for the return to Greece of the Elgin Marbles. Arriving in a cavernous gallery before the Parthenon display, but also full of Greek sculpture, the personage mistook these statues for the more famous ones next door. An entertaining story maybe, but the mistake is almost understandable when you look at the clinging drapery of a row of freestanding female figures in this ante-gallery: they could almost have stepped off the Parthenon.

  This specific idea for carving female drapery had occurred to the sculptors of the Parthenon half a century before. The visitor who turns left on entering the Duveen Gallery where the Parthenon sculptures are displayed will see at the far end the battered torso of a female figure. Close up she too has been carved as if the folds of her dress were stuck to her.