Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

The ultimate, of course, was for an entire region to claim never to have been conquered, but always to have preserved its customs, and its liberty, from invaders. 'The same ethnic stock, generation after generation, the same people, they have always lived in this, our native land — and it is they, by virtue of their merits, who have bequeathed it to us, a country eternally free.'1 The Athenians, throughout their history, never tired of this kind of talk. No folk-tales of migration, of the melting-pot, for them. Instead, with a smugness that other Greeks found wearisome in the extreme, they pointed to the sacrosanct quality of their borders, of how no Heraclid or Dorian had ever succeeded in forcing them, and of how, like 'the wheat and the barley' that grew in the Attic fields, 'the vines, the olives and the figs',2 they were earth-born, soil-sprung — 'autochthonous'.

  This was no metaphor, no laboured conceit. To the Athenians, it was the simple, literal truth. When they trod their native land, the dusty paths that wound over the hills of Attica, her plains and rocky valleys, they knew they were as much a part of the landscape as the clumps of marjoram and heady-smelling thyme, or the meadows of spectral asphodels, beloved of the gods, or the marble that might sometimes be glimpsed through the scrub of a mountain slope. Here was a mystery profounder by far than those claimed by other Greeks when they traced fabulous bloodlines for themselves and boasted of divine descent. Indeed, it would have been blasphemy for an Athenian to pretend to any such thing. After all, the goddess whom they worshipped as their protector and from whom they took their name was Athena: the grey-eyed warrior, mistress of the arts, daughter of Wisdom - and a virgin. Not for her, sublime and enigmatic, the indignities of childbirth. No man would ever possess her. The nearest anyone had come to achieving that was when her brother Hephaestus, the crippled blacksmith of the gods, whose talents of craftsmanship were as limitless as his bandy legs were weak, had been so overcome with desire for his sister that he had hobbled after her, sweaty and soot-stained, and sought to take her in his arms. Athena, with icy contempt, had brushed him aside — but not before Hephaestus, shuddering with excitement, had ejaculated all over her thigh. Wiping the mess off with a tangle of wool, the goddess had then dropped it, still sodden, down onto Attica — where the semen, like heavy dew, had moistened the womb of Mother Earth. From this fertilising of 'the grain-giving fields' had been born a child with the coiled tail of a snake. Athena, adopting him, had named him Erechtheus.3 She had settled him on the Acropolis, 'in her own wealthy temple', and there, 'to this day, with each revolving of the year, the sons of Athens offer him bulls and rams'.4

  Hardly the kind of story that a Heraclid would promote. That the Athenians were content to ascribe the origins of their city to a discarded toss-rag speaks eloquently of the significance that the myth possessed for them. Over the centuries it would be increasingly elaborated, but its roots were ancient, and reflected an equally ancient truth. The Athenians were indeed, just as they insisted, a people distinct. Whether their borders had really remained as sacrosanct as they would later claim seems improbable, but Attica, of all the regions of Greece, had certainly best weathered the storm that brought the palace of Menelaus and many other proud capitals blazing into ruin. Throughout the turmoil and obscurity of the centuries that followed, the various communities of Attica had preserved a sense of themselves as a discrete nation, united by shared customs, dialect and race. Emerging from their dark age, they were still able to recollect that they, at any rate, had never been homeless migrants, but were 'the oldest people of Greece'.3

  True, Athens, right until the seventh century bc, was, like Sparta, little more than a shabby village, huddled ingloriously around the rock of its acropolis. Nor did the people of other settlements yet think of themselves as Athenians, or even, it may be, as citizens of a single state.6 Yet the Acropolis itself, sheer and immense, served all the communities of Attica as a natural focus of veneration, since every valley led to it; nor was there any other Attic sanctuary that could rival its aura of mystery. Rectangles of masonry so heavy that it was evident only giants could have raised them ringed its summit in an immense wall. Ruins incalculably ancient testified to its use in former times by heroes and kings.* Sanctified by the presence of Athena, whose dwelling-place it was, its rock served also as the tomb of Erechtheus, the earth-born one. So it was that all the people of Attica, not just the Athenians, could look upon the Acropolis and be reminded of the soil from which they had sprung, of the inheritance which they shared, and of the loyalty to their homeland which they owed.

  The result was a regional identity unlike any other in Greece. That Athens stood dominant as the only city in the whole of Attica was, in the eyes of other Greeks, both startling and aberrant. Boeotia, an area of similar size to its neighbour, was carved up between no fewer than ten squabbling states. Argos, the most populous city in the Peloponnese, ruled a plain that was barely half the size of Attica. Only-Sparta, of the Greek powers, controlled a broader swath of territory than Athens did — but hers had been won, and was held, at the point of a sword. The Athenians themselves had never attempted anything remotely as energetic. In the seventh century bc, while the Spartans were completing their pacification of Messenia and cities throughout Greece were swirling with violent currents, a visitor to Attica from Argos or Corinth would have found it a somnolent backwater. The Athenians positively shrank from dipping their toes into the flood tides

  *Fragments of a Bronze Age palace would still have been visible on the summit of the Acropolis in the seventh century bc.

  of the modern. Not for them the military and political revolutions that were affecting the rest of Greece, and were transforming Sparta, in particular, into something perilous and new. Rather than submit to a similar experiment, the Athenians preferred the security of parochialism and nostalgia. In comparison to those on even the smallest Aegean islands, their temples were poky and unimpressive; their funeral practices self-consciously archaic; even their pottery, which provided employment for a full quarter of the city, and had once been the most innovative in Greece, increasingly harked back to the past. Just as the rest of the Greek world was fixing its gaze on dazzling new horizons, the Athenians seemed to be set on returning to the age of the Trojan War.7 And indeed, in the structure of their society, it was as though they had never really left it. Out in the fields and groves of Attica, a whole day's journey from Athens, perhaps, or maybe more, a man might easily live less as a citizen than as a serf, as a share-cropper, paying a sixth of all he earned to a distant landlord. The landlords themselves, in the traditional manner of heroes, lived well apart from the common run, marrying into one another's houses, parcelling out magistracies to one another, and sneering at everyone else with a roistering contempt. Such was the desire for exclusivity of some aristocratic clans that they even turned their noses up at what was commonly an Athenian's proudest boast, and would trace exotic foreign lineages for themselves from the assorted stars of the Trojan War. One family, the Pisistratids, claimed descent from a Messenian king; another, the Philaids, from Ajax, the tallest warrior to have fought on either side at Troy, and a king of Salamis, an island just off the Attic coast. Well might the Athenian nobility have awarded themselves the title 'Eupatrids', or 'Well-bred'. There was no other aristocracy in Greece quite so snobbishly stuck in the past.

  But the forces for change in the world beyond Athens were not easily kept at bay, and by 600 bc even the Eupatrids were starting to embrace them. Cosmopolitanism, for those with sufficient fashion sense, had long promised ready entry to an international fast-set. Its members felt their truest sense of identity not with compatriots from the grubbing lower classes but with fellow sophisticates from across the entire Greek world. 'I simply adore the good things of life':8 a statement unimaginable upon the lips of a stern and shaggy hero, but raising no eyebrows whatsoever among those who believed that luxury held up a mirror to the gods. Even a woman, if her tastes were sufficiently elegant, her jewellery golden, her robes soft and richly dyed, might hope to glimpse and converse with
the divine: 'Come, rainbow-throned and immortal goddess of love, if ever in the past you heard my far-off cries and heeded them, leaving your father's halls, travelling in your chariot of gold, your pretty sparrows bearing you swiftly upon the fluttering of their wings, down from heaven through the sky to the dark earth.'9 A prayer well worth raising — for pleasures, properly enjoyed, might indeed lift scales from mortal eyes, and a dinner-party provide a better-ordered realm than any state. The seductions of high society, delicate and perfumed as they were, exerted on those who could afford them an almost spiritual allure. Taste as well as breeding had become the mark of the elite.

  Yet what defined it also served to threaten it. The passion for luxuries, most of which had to be shipped from glamorous locations overseas, inevitably boosted the fortunes of those with their fingers in the import—export trade. Capital, which had previously been tied up almost exclusively in the estates of the nobility, grew increasingly liquid. By 600 bc, a momentous innovation was being introduced to the cities of Ionia: coinage. Over the following decades, it would cross the Aegean and begin to circulate in Greece. The aristocracy, unsurprisingly, reacted with disgust and mounting alarm. They bristled at the prospect of a businessman having the same spending power as a Eupatrid, and responded with increasingly frantic insults. 'Kakoi', they called the nouveaux riches: the 'low-born', the 'unpleasant', the 'cheats'. The Kakoi themselves, however, as they could afford to do, merely shrugged their shoulders and continued to rake in the cash. After all, as a Spartan had once pointed out, back in the days of his own city's social upheavals, 'A man is nothing but the sum of what he owns.' Fitting slogan for a new and perplexing age. 'Gold is the only thing that makes for breeding now.' So, with a curling of the lip, might the declasse nobleman complain. There is no other basis of esteem.'10

  The Spartans themselves, of course, once so convulsed by precisely such complaints, had long since evolved their own remedy. To many, in the Attica of the 590s bc, it must have seemed as though history were repeating itself. Once again, just as in Lacedaemon a century previously, a whole region of Greece was crippled by an agrarian crisis. Never before had the property market been so fluid. As impoverished noblemen, threatened with the loss of their patrimony, tightened the screws on their tenants, so misery was passed down the food-chain to the very poorest, from the mansions of great families to the barest, rockiest plots. Creditors, mapping the limits of mortgaged olive groves and fields, filled the countryside with ominous lines of stones. They might just as well have been marking out the graves of ruined peasants.

  As it worsened, the land famine drew an inevitable recourse. Just over the straits from southern Attica, temptingly, indeed irresistibly, close, lay the island of Salamis. Athenian scholars, adducing complex arguments from ancient epics, were able to demonstrate, at least to their own satisfaction, that Ajax's old kingdom belonged to them. News, certainly, to the citizens of Megara, a small city midway between Athens and Corinth, which also laid claim to Salamis, and indeed had planted it with settlers. The two cities duly went to war. Athens was defeated and forced to sue for peace. All the more galling for the vanquished was the fact that Megara, tiny as she was, ranked only as a third-rate power. The Athenians plunged into a gloomy introspection. Racked by crisis at home, humiliated abroad, they could no longer deny that they were punching woefully below their weight. Something was rotten in the state of Athens.

  Spectral figures began to be glimpsed on the streets of the city, seeming portents of imminent ruin. So desperate did the situation appear that the Athenians, with that Greek enthusiasm for one-man think-tanks best exemplified by the tales told of Lycurgus, began to cast around for a sage. Fortunately for them, a ready candidate was at hand. In 594 bc, Solon, universally held to be the wisest man in Athens (not to mention one of the seven wisest Greeks who had ever lived), was given the archonship, the city's supreme magistracy, and entrusted with the task of saving the state. His appointment, remarkably in a society as class-riven as Athens', met with universal applause. The blue-blooded descendant of an ancient Attic king, Solon had also dabbled in trade, while simultaneously letting slip to the poor his sense of outrage at their plight. Here was a man who could appeal to all his constituencies.

  Skilled though he was at tailoring his pitch to his audience, however, Solon was no mere idle trimmer. His brand of wisdom was of a peculiarly muscular variety. It was he, only a year before becoming archon, who had rallied Greek opinion to the defence of Delphi when the impious city of Crisa had sought to annex the oracle. His own city's defeat by Megara had inspired him to even greater heights of outrage. 'Let's head for Salamis,' he had urged in impassioned verse, 'fight for that beautiful island, wipe ourselves clean of the disgrace.'12 Now, as head of state, he was in a position to do more than sloganeer. It was evident to Solon that the two great crises facing Athens, agrarian and military, both sprang from the same root: rural impoverishment was enfeebling the reserves of Attic manpower; farmers were sinking ever deeper into serfdom. The poor, if truly desperate, might even stake their freedom against their debts, perhaps ending up chained and shackled as slaves in their own fields. Solon, had he displayed the calculating mercilessness of a Lycurgus, could easily have sponsored this trend, and condemned his city's poor to a permanent helotage. Instead, he chose to redeem them. Even those who had been sold abroad, even those 'who had forgotten how to speak the Attic dialect', were liberated, while in Attica itself, wherever property had been mortgaged, Solon ordered a general pardoning of debts. Out in the fields, men were set to work 'digging up the boundary-stones where they had been set in the dark earth'.13

  Most landlords, naturally enough, were outraged; but Solon, playing the selfless sage to the hilt, argued sternly that his reforms were in their interests, too. After all, without the bedrock provided by a free peasantry, what hope was there of capturing Salamis, or of preserving Athens from social meltdown, or of winning for the city a rank commensurate with her size? Yes, Solon had sought to ease the sufferings of the poor — but he had also laboured hard to keep the rich in power. The Eupatrids, holding their noses, had duly been persuaded into an alliance with the Kakoi; wealth rather than birth made the prerequisite for office; the poor, although granted membership of a citizens' assembly, denied the privilege of speaking in it. It was a triumph not for revolution but for a hard-fought middle way. 'Envied for their wealth though they were,' Solon pointed out, 'I sought to preserve the powerful from the hatred of the oppressed. Taking my stand, I used my strong shield to protect both sides of the class divide, allowing neither to gain an advantage over the other that would be unjust.'14

  The boast, in short, of an instinctive centrist. Solon's watchword was the traditional one of eunoinia: that familiar Greek dream of a just and natural order, one in which all would know their place, and 'rough edges would be smoothed out, appetites tamed, and presumption curbed'.15 What was such an ideal, after all, if not the birthright of the earth-sprung Athenian people? Far from launching a novel political experiment, Solon saw himself as engaged in an act of restoration and repair. With a talent for reinventing history that would have done credit to a Spartan, he persuaded his city that the constitution he had drafted was in fact the very one she had possessed in her distant past. Copies of his laws, inscribed in public on revolving wooden tablets, served to spell this out to every class of citizen. To the poor, they guaranteed freedom and legal recourse against the abuses of the powerful; to the rich, they gave exclusive right to magistracies and the running of the city. What could be fairer, more natural, more traditional, than that?

  Before relinquishing power and departing Athens for a ten-year Mediterranean cruise,

  [2] Solon decreed that his laws should remain in force for a minimum of a century. No sooner had he set sail, however, than familiar problems began to raise their ugly heads. Eunomia was not as easily maintained in Athens as the departed Solon had cared to hope. Their powers left untrammelled, the nobility swaggered and feuded just as they had always done
. Beyond Athens herself, Attica remained a patchwork of rival loyalties and clans. The war for Salamis, although it scored some successes, continued to drag on. Despite all Solon's efforts, Athens remained very much the sick man of Greece.

  Even so, his reforms had set in train something momentous. Moved by the legends of his city, and by her claims to antiquity and to the favour of the gods, Solon had taken for granted that here was a heritage upon which every Athenian had a claim. Scandalised at the sight of his countrymen labouring in bondage amid the dust from which their ancestors had sprung, he had ordered their chains struck off. There could be no doubting, from that moment on, who was an Athenian and who was not. Nothing, of course, like the spectacle of another's servitude to boost one's self-esteem: thanks to Solon, even the poorest peasant could now look down upon a slave, and know himself to be as free as the haughtiest Eupatrid. Admittedly, he was not as much of a citizen; how could he be when he was barred from standing for office or making his voice heard in debate? Yet the rich, even though they still hugged political power to themselves, could not entirely afford to ignore him and his fellows. The poor may have been silent in the Assembly — but not without a vote. 'For in their hands lay the power to elect officials, and to review their performances — and indeed, had the people been denied even this privilege, then they would still have ranked as little more than slaves.'16

  Clearly, a new and intriguing cross-current had been added to the endless swirl of aristocratic rivalries. How best to negotiate it was a challenge that every ambitious nobleman would henceforward have to meet. There was certainly no call for him to kowtow to the poor — the very idea would have been ludicrous! — but success or failure, even for a Eupatrid, might now depend on a show of hands. Tanners, carpenters, farmhands, potters, blacksmiths: any or all of these might come to the Assembly to use their votes. Even as they continued to make policy in the closed rooms of their mansions, the elite could not afford entirely to forget where sovereignty now resided. As befitted a city with earth-sprung origins, it lay not only with the Eupatrids, nor even with the rich alone, but with the Assembly of all the Athenians, with the people —with the 'demos'.