The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  For I imagine it’s by contact with what is beautiful, and associating with it, that he brings to birth and procreates the things with which he was for so long pregnant, both when he is present with him and when he is away from him but remembering him; and he joins with the other person in nurturing what is born.

  The wise woman goes on to claim that this is the ‘correct kind of boy-loving’. Plato does not seem to allow for the possibility of this kind of chaste, educative relationship between a man and a woman. He himself never married.

  He then uses an anecdote to illustrate the self-control of his hero Socrates in these matters. The handsomest of the young male guests at the Athenian party where this conversation supposedly took place relates with an air of disbelief how Socrates had once resisted his advances. Socrates had fended him off with the philosophical retort that his fine admirer was ‘trying to get hold of truly beautiful things (Socrates’ mind) in return for only apparently beautiful ones (the young man’s body)’.

  Plato’s writings include the first surviving attempt to imagine an ideal society, a utopia. This was needed, the work explains, because existing types of Greek state, including democracy, were faulty. Plato’s ideal society practised eugenics to ensure the reproduction of the fittest, abolished the family, and separated mothers from their children. Governing was to be entrusted to a class of philosophers, the Guardians, rigorously trained for the purpose. How serious Plato was about the achievability of this totalitarian vision is a debate among experts which we cannot go into here.

  Unlike Socrates, Plato founded a private community of like-minded people, both students and other teachers, at a particular Athenian address, where it outlived its founder (who died in 347 BC) to become a long-lived institution of higher learning, one of the first of its kind in Athens.

  An ancient life of Plato records that he did his teaching ‘in the Academy, and that is a suburban place of exercise planted like a grove, so named from an ancient hero called Hecademus’. Greek archaeologists have located the site of this gymnasium, beneath the streets of the modern city to the north-west of the ancient agora.

  In this vicinity Plato carried on with his philosophizing inquiries. The chief format seems to have been the conversation, Socrates-style, although one lecture by Plato survives. A comic playwright of the time mocks these inquiries, but at the same time reveals how varied they were. Here they included what we would call sciences, zoology and botany, as well as practical researches:

  I saw a group of boys in the gymnasia of the Academy, and I heard strange talk that I can’t describe. They were defining and classifying the natural world: the way that animals live, the nature of trees, and the species of vegetables. And in the middle of this they had a pumpkin and were investigating the species that it belonged to.

  An ancient list survives of Plato’s pupils. It is interesting for including, as well as Athenians, Greeks from all over the Aegean, in addition to Sicily and the Black Sea. Like his reputation, his community was ‘international’. These young males must have had financial means to study away from home. So presumably did the two women on the list, both from the Peloponnese.

  According to an ancient story, one of these women sought out Plato after reading one of his political works. She joined the community, ‘disguising for some considerable time the fact that she was a woman’ by dressing as a man. So it was not impossible for a woman of independent character in mid-fourth-century Greece to pursue the life of the mind. If nothing else, the fact that Axiothea – her name – felt obliged to cross-dress suggests strong social disapproval for Greek females spending time in the company of unrelated men.

  Another of the ‘international’ pupils, hailing from northern Greece, was a young Aristotle. An ancient life labels him the most eminent of Plato’s pupils and adds some personal details which may or may not be true: ‘he had a lisping voice . . . He also had very thin legs, they say, and small eyes; but he used to indulge in fashionable dress, and rings, and used to shave.’

  In the mid-1990s archaeologists digging near the Athenian residence of Greece’s head of state found an ancient building. Its focus was a very large rectangular courtyard, some 25 yards across. The court was edged by colonnaded walkways, and behind these were various rooms. This is the classic layout for an ancient Greek exercise space or gymnasium.

  Given the location, the archaeologists were confident that they had discovered the Lyceum, an Athenian gymnasium like the Academy. After Plato’s death, this public place of exercise on the other side of town was where the mature Aristotle preferred to teach. It was here that he founded his own centre of higher studies. Like Plato’s, this private institution lived on long after its founder’s death.

  Aristotle owes his greatness in antiquity and ever since in part to the encyclopaedic breadth of his inquiries. According to his ancient biographer he wrote around 550 books, which the biographer lists. They cover topics that span today’s disciplinary divides between science, arts and humanities. Aristotle was equally at home inquiring about friendship, the workings of plants and animals, meteorology, deductive reasoning or logic, optics, Homer, astronomy, law, theatre – the list goes on. It makes the point that philosophers were the research-led academics of antiquity, although none repeated Aristotle’s extraordinary range.

  This taster comes from his factual survey of the animal kingdom and concerns the type of shellfish known today as molluscs:

  And generally, the molluscs are observed to be carrying their so-called eggs in spring and late autumn, except the edible sea-urchin, which, though it carries its so-called eggs most abundantly at these times, always has some, and most plentifully at the times of full moon and when the days are warm and sunny. This does not apply to the sea-urchins in the strait of Pyrrha, which are at their best in winter.

  This ‘strait of Pyrrha’ can still be visited today. It is Aristotle’s name for the funnel-like entrance from the open sea to the seawater lagoon of Kalloni on the Aegean island of Lesvos, ancient Lesbos, where Aristotle spent time in his forties. Altogether he makes five observations based on the waters of Kalloni. Presumably he used to make expeditions there during his time on the island, seeing the catch of the fishermen for himself. Practical research in the modern sense, as here in the form of personal observation, was certainly one, if not his only, method of study.

  Any supervisor of postgraduate students knows that pupils do not always agree with their teachers. Aristotle did not agree with Plato that skill in public speaking was merely a knack. Aristotle believed that there was a system to it. This made it a teachable skill, and as such worthy of a philosopher’s attention. Aristotle wrote down his system, or a version of it. It included wisdom on how to prepare a not very educated audience by means other than the actual merits of the case:

  Things do not appear the same to a friendly and to a hostile hearer, or to an angry and to a calm hearer . . . For if the juryman is friendly to the accused, he thinks the accused has done no injustice at all or only a slight injustice; but if he is hostile, quite the contrary is true . . . Feelings are all those conditions that cause us to change and alter our attitude to judgments, conditions that imply pain or pleasure – for instance, anger, pity, fear, and all other such things.

  Here Aristotle had in mind not least the need of a speaker to mould his audience in the law courts. In the ancient world this was one of the chief arenas for oratory. In fourth-century Athens there were speech-makers who specialized in producing expert speeches for the defence for a fee. In Athenian law the accused defended himself by delivering the bought speech in his own voice.

  Copenhagen’s superb museum of classical antiquities houses a full-length ancient statue of one of these speech-makers. A bearded man stands with his head bowed, his forehead creased in thought, his stage of life betokened by the sagging flesh of his arms and chest. This statue is a Roman copy. So are the many ancient busts which replicated the head alone of the same original figure. They all portray Demosthenes.

/>   An exact contemporary of Aristotle, Demosthenes was a citizen of Athens and an orator politician of a common type in fourth-century Athens. He also took work as a writer of legal speeches. As seen in a later chapter, the Romans admired Demosthenes first and foremost as an orator. We are told that his oratory did not come naturally to him. He burnt the midnight oil composing his speeches. In old age he told a fellow Athenian about his voice exercises. They included correcting his lisp by reciting with a mouth full of pebbles, and, as a breathing exercise, talking while running or climbing. He practised expression and gesture in front of a mirror.

  But Demosthenes owed his place in history to the political use to which he put his speaking skills. In speech after speech before the Athenian assembly, for years Demosthenes warned his city about a growing foreign threat. Two modern museums take up this story.

  There is nothing unusual about archaeological museums housing human remains from ancient burials. However, tucked away in a storeroom in the Athens archaeological museum are boxes containing human bones of a special sort. Once (but no longer) on public display, these bones show clear evidence of wound marks. One sign of trauma has a special interest for me. The collection of antiquities in the north-east of England which I looked after as part of my former university job has an example of the weapon that might have caused it.

  This particular wound is a small puncture to a skull, caused by a powerful blow to the head. It could have come from a weapon like the bronze butt of an ancient spear now displayed in Newcastle upon Tyne’s Great North Museum. This butt is tipped with a small spike which made the butt a weapon in its own right if the shaft broke in battle. Its diameter almost matches the hole in the skull – the difference is one of a millimetre.

  What makes this connection more than wild coincidence is, first, the Greek lettering embedded into this spike: ‘MAK’, in fourth-century BC forms. This must be an abbreviation of the word ‘Mac[edonian]’, as if the butt were government issue from the Macedonian state. Second, the skull belongs to one of the Greek victims of a battle in central Greece against the Macedonians – the threatening foreigners of many civic speeches by Demosthenes.

  This battle, at a place called Chaeronea, where the skull was found, could have been Demosthenes’ finest hour. In 338 BC a Macedonian army marched south. The news caused panic in Athens. Demosthenes gave a speech in the assembly which put courage into Athenian hearts. He then went as ambassador to the Thebans, in central Greece, and made them allies of Athens. His oratory roused them and their neighbours to armed resistance. Demosthenes himself fought on the allied Greek side in the ensuing battle.

  Unfortunately, the Macedonians defeated the Greeks decisively. Their commander was their king, Philip, aided by his son and heir, the eighteen-year-old Alexander, in charge of the cavalry. Continuing military success would go on to bring Macedon to the top of the hard-power table. Macedonian might would also facilitate a dramatic spread of the soft power of Greek civilization – as far east as what is now Afghanistan. It is time to look more closely at the northern superpower whose rapid rise to hegemony conventionally closes the Classical phase of Greek history.

  CHAPTER 11

  ‘A BRILLIANT FLASH OF LIGHTNING’

  ALEXANDER OF MACEDON

  Once I came face to face not quite with Alexander the Great, but with what may be his oldest ancient likeness. I had received permission to mount wooden scaffolding in front of Tomb II at Vergina in northern Greece, erected so that archaeologists could get to grips with an ancient painting decorating the tomb’s façade.

  Anyone who has visited this tomb will know that it is a site of great sanctity for the modern Greeks. Wardens hush noisy Greek schoolchildren as if they are misbehaving in church. Close up the painting had been damaged by burial under a man-made mound of earth for twenty-three centuries. I knew what I was looking for, there in the centre: a splodge of pink – the garb of a young man on foot. Somewhere to his right, too abraded for me to see him clearly, was a rider on a horse.

  For me this was a moment of great privilege: few people before or since have been this close to these two figures. Many experts believe that the tomb belonged to King Philip II of Macedon. This would make the two huntsmen featured in the centre of this painting, itself occupying such a prominent position above the tomb’s entrance, most likely Philip himself, the older man on the horse, alongside young Alexander, his son and heir, going in for a kill on foot.

  At that time I also saw, laid out in a showcase in the museum at nearby Thessaloniki, the cremated bones of the tomb’s occupant – since put away from respect for a man regarded as a national hero by many Greeks today. Specialists have argued that these are Philip’s bones.

  They belong to a mature male in the right age range, who had a nick in the bone above the right eye-socket. This fits with an ancient description of Philip’s war wounds: a lost eye, as well as a broken collar bone and a maimed hand and leg. If nothing else, this list shows what sort of monarchy based in northern Greece Philip headed for some twenty years (360/59 BC–336 BC): one where the king was first and foremost a war leader, a warrior who fought himself in the thick of the fray.

  Well, there are archaeologists and historians who believe with a quasi-religious fervour that this is indeed the tomb of Philip. Others are not so sure. Unlike, say, the grave goods from Tutankhamun’s burial place, those from Vergina, lavish and golden though many are, do not name the deceased. There are other troubling details – the dating of certain pots imported from Athens doesn’t quite fit. This is a debate likely to rumble on.

  On higher ground near the royal tomb archaeologists have found an ancient palace. It was organized Greek-style around two open courts. It once had an upper storey, commanding views over the Macedonian plain. The larger, monumental, court was framed by dining rooms for feasting. Some archaeologists now think that the builder of this palace was Philip II. Ancient writers show that Philip was a tremendous giver of parties. A famed diplomat as well as fighter, he knew all about the power of hospitality to soften up guests. His dinners dismayed some Greeks, being notorious for drunkenness, with the king himself leading the foolery.

  Below the palace is a theatre. Alongside hunts and parties, the royal court had its cultured side. Among other skills for which Macedon’s kings sought out Greek specialists, they had long liked Athenian-style theatricals. It may have been in this very theatre, two years after his victory at Chaeronea, that Philip, like a king in a Greek tragedy, met a sudden, violent and scandalous death, stabbed by a discarded male lover. Philip was an active bisexual, as we would say today; so, probably, was his son.

  At the time, Philip was celebrating a festival attended by envoys of many foreign states, Greek but also non-Greek, since Macedonia was geographically on the cusp of Balkan regions that some southern Greeks considered ‘barbarian’. Onlookers had just been treated to an extraordinary procession of statues – the twelve gods of Mount Olympus, to which Philip had added a thirteenth, of himself.

  A century or so earlier, the Athenians had depicted themselves in the company of the gods on the sculptured frieze that ran round the outside of the Parthenon. Experts normally see this presumption as the vainglory of Athens in its pomp under Pericles: even the gods waited on the city. If Philip in 336 BC was bursting with regal pride when he approved this theatrical gesture, he had reason.

  Philip’s was one of those reigns in which a kingdom is transformed – like the rule of China’s First Emperor, or Russia’s Peter the Great. Hereditary royalty allows this chance. Philip’s lineage claimed to be outsiders – Greeks of divine origin, in fact, since they alleged Heracles as their ancestor. Legend told of distant forebears who had gone north and won rule over non-Greek barbarians.

  The story may or may not have been true. In any case, this lofty genealogy probably aimed at enhancing royal prestige among the Macedonians – and the (other) Greeks. In more recent times the Russian tsars claimed a Roman imperial origin. This outlandish ancestry aimed at setti
ng them above the home-grown Russian noblesse, and to make the exotic Russian ruler more palatable to the more advanced states of the west – where early-modern Russians could be mocked as barbaric, as some Greeks mocked the Macedonians.

  As Thucydides tells the story, the early Macedonians were essentially a band of warriors who used force to take over the lands of others. They had been European vassals of King Xerxes and, as seen, a Macedonian princess had wed a Persian prince. When Philip came to power in 360/359 BC, the kingdom was enfeebled, overrun by Balkan enemies, the Macedonians themselves disunited. By a fluke of heredity, the ancient royal lineage produced a capable strongman to meet this crisis.

  Inside the kingdom, Philip was the architect of two policies that did more than any other to reposition Macedon as a major power. First, ancient writers link him to the creation of a new army. Its key components were novel weapons and battlefield tactics, as well as a cutting-edge siege-train. It was probably Philip too who introduced the pay structure which we first hear of under his son Alexander. This incentivized poor Macedonian agriculturalists to commit full-time to military service. There was more:

  Philip used to train the Macedonians before battles, making them take their arms and march for three hundred stades [about 30 miles], carrying their helmets, shields, greaves, pikes, plus – in addition to their arms – a stock of provisions and all the utensils necessary for daily life.

  Apart from Sparta, citizen armies in Greek states did not usually train in this sort of way, which sounds almost modern. Nor did they fight all year round. Down in Athens, Demosthenes warned his fellow citizens about Philip’s new way of fighting, that ‘he draws no distinction between summer and winter, and that he has no season set apart for suspending operations’. What Philip had done was to create a lethal new combination: not only a militarized society traditionally primed for wars, but now a revolutionary new capability to win them.