The worst conflict was soon to be that between the city as a collective unit and the aristocracy. For the new kind of city to emerge, it would have to liberate the peasantry, and abolish the religious, legal and political privileges of the ‘top people’. This took a long time and required many compromises, especially in the religious sphere. For the city did not simply represent a new political and geographical order; it was also a meeting of cults and gods, a religious world order which was now to be governed by the collective will rather than by the secret and arbitrary activity of the gene. But the latter were not abruptly destituted, as the striking and rather late example of Eleusis demonstrates. Even in Athens, which might seem to us the most revolutionary of cities, to take one example from a hundred, the Eteobutadae retained the privilege of providing the priestess of Athena Polias and the priest of Poseidon Erechtheus. In this way the past and the prestige of the great patrician families were partially maintained under the new dispensation. Athens indeed drew on the lordly culture of the eupatridae and assimilated their pride of identity. ‘The morality of the Greeks was an aristocratic morality’, as Louis Gernet put it. Athens was a kind of prefiguration of the aristocratic Polish republic.
Troubled centuries
The greater involvement of the citizens in the government of their own affairs was nevertheless a major revolution, and one which developed in a climate of tension and anxiety, but also of enthusiasm.
This enthusiasm gave rise to a kind of violent city-centred patriotism. With its manageable compass, its central focus on the prytaneion, its agora, its universally recognized laws, and its repeated proclamation of the equality of all citizens, the city was no longer an abstraction. Julien Benda once wrote a book entitled Histoire des Français dans leur volonte de former une nation {History of the French and their Desire to Form a Nation). Who will give us a history of the ancient Greeks and their desire to create a set of limited political units, of human dimensions? The passionate love they bore their little homelands verged on the pathological, going well beyond the reasonable. They used a term meaning sexual desire, himeros, to refer to it: cities might be known as ‘Salaminos the well-beloved’ or Athens ‘crowned with violets’ which all its ‘lovers’ will come to defend at Pericles’ call. Nowhere else in world history has this love for the native soil been taken to such extremes, with the result that love could yield only to hatred. A Greek city-state, like an Italian city of the Renaissance, had its fuorisciti, the banished, or perhaps one should even say the excommunicated. Exiles were driven by desperation to treason, murder, lies and even, horror of horrors, entering the service of Persia!
The turmoil was not confined to politics. The tumultous return of Dionysiac cults gave rise to a sort of medieval outbreak of flagellation, first of all in the countryside, then overwhelming the cities. Another obsession was that of collective guilt, of the sacrilege which could defile an entire city as the crime of one individual rebounded on all. The Alcmaeonidae, a great patrician family of Athens to which Cleisthenes and Pericles both belonged, were on three occasions banished for having a hand in the assassination of the allies of the usurper Cylon when they had taken refuge by the altars on the Acropolis. The city became quieter only in about 590, when the Cretan Epimenides appeared there as a purifying prophet, able to assuage the gods: he sacrificed black and white ewes to them, as well as ‘two human victims who apparently volunteered’. Sicknesses required healers, thaumaturgi, prophets, tyrants and wise men, who would become social arbitrators (such as Lycurgus, Solon and Cleisthenes) or charlatans who exploited popular credulity. Empedocles of Agrigento, a philosopher born in about 490, ‘proclaimed himself a god and appeared before the crowd draped in purple and crowned with flowers’, practising various kinds of sorcery and resurrecting the dead. In Athens, acording to Herodotus, Pisistratus returned to power for the second time thanks to a certain amount of stage management. A chariot went before him, and in it rode a woman, tall, beautiful and armed from head to foot: Athena in person. That this miracle was believed is a sort of litmus test.
It was also in this period, the so-called pre-Socratic age, that the Philosopher appeared as a figure. The age of the Heroes was followed by the age of the Sages. According to tradition there were seven Sages: Thales of Miletus; Solon of Athens; Periander, the tyrant of Corinth; Cleobulus of Lindos; Bias of Priene; Pittacus of Mytilene and Chilon of Sparta, who embodied the ‘laconic speech of the Lacedaemonians’. But there are plenty of other names on the list of Sages: one Hellenist has counted twenty-two, including Myson of Chen, the obscure or ‘unknown sage’, chosen for his virtuous modesty. All this period is somewhat opaque to us now, but these individuals did exist before being absorbed into a moral legend where they are supposed above all to incarnate the persuasive wisdom of popular sayings: know thyself; nothing in excess; and so on – in other words common-sense mottoes for anxious men in troubled times.
Hoplites and oarsmen
Warfare in the archaic age meant the Athenian eupatridae riding out on horseback, or better still in chariots. By the seventh century, the hoplite began to be the regular soldier. The hoplite was a heavy-duty infantryman, equipped with a bronze breastplate, a shield, greaves (cnemides) and a long lance which he held in his right hand. He advanced towards the enemy alongside his companions in a solid phalanx: several rows of men shoulder to shoulder, presenting a protective line of shields, like the plates of body armour. The whole troop marched as one man. On the Chigi vase (c. 640) we see alongside thehoplites a musician playing a double flute: he is beating time and making the whole phalanx march in step. This discipline was the result of training in the gymnasium. Accordingly, the prime military virtue was not the bravery required to engage in single combat but technical proficiency and self-discipline. War was a kind of game, with its rules and its ‘ludic aspects’. The adversaries would sometimes agree on a pitch for the battle. Such was the conflict in the seventh century BC on the island of Euboea between Chalcis and Eretria, and it was from this experience of warfare that the tactics of the hoplites seem to have spread to other Greek cities towards the middle of the century. In Sparta, the young men were divided into two teams to train in one of the Eurotas Islands: the losing side found itself pushed into the sea.
After an age when war was dominated by aristocrats on horseback, the hoplite ushered in the age of the foot-soldier – a revolutionary development, here as everywhere, whether in ancient Greece, in China in the sixth century BC, or in the Swiss cantons in the sixteenth century ad in the days of Charles the Bold. The hoplites, who supplied their own armour and became full citizens, were recruited from the peasants in the countryside surrounding the city. A political and social revolution followed on from this, with only formal divergences from one city-state to another. In Sparta for instance the hoplites made up a professional army known as the Equals. It was in the logic of such development that military society would be integrated in some form into political society, imposing on the latter its own requirements. The Athenian peasant, owner of his own plot of land, his klerosy expected the city to respect his rights: it had to protect him, and deliver him from the bonds of debt which attached him to great landowners. The resolution of this difficult problem brought about some new forms of government. Solon’s greatest success was the seisachtheia, the operation whereby he enabled the peasant literally to ‘shake off’ his burden of debt.
The soldier-citizen had been born. Herodotus and Thucydides compared the Greek soldier, fighting for freedom, to the Persian soldier driven into battle by lashes of the whip. But the peasant-soldier also brought to a city like Athens a certain number of rural prejudices, for instance that toil on the land (and the accompanying leisure, whether that of the great landowner or that of everyone in wintertime) was the only activity really worthy of a man. Any other kind of labour reduced one’s status: the artisan, the miner, the merchant or the sailor were social inferiors. Yet trade and industry were expanding: foreigners, slaves and landless peasants had to take o
n the menial tasks of the city and the port of Piraeus. Some of them made fortunes, others, remaining eternally poor, became the fourth estate of Solon’s classification, the thetes. But they too would benefit from wars, eventually obtaining basic political rights (that of attending the People’s Assembly) in the fifth century.
Their importance was confirmed when Athens, on the eve of the second Persian war, became a maritime power. The silver of the mines of Laurion, only recently discovered, helped build two hundred triremes. They wintered in the naval port of Cantaros in Piraeus; but every spring an army of oarsmen was required to launch them on the sea once more. The trireme was a floating battering ram, designed to strike the flank of the enemy vessel. ‘As a sailing ship, it had faults; unable to tack, it could only sail with a following wind. So the sail was only an extra form of power and in a naval battle the sail (akataeion) was hoisted only in order to escape.’ The trireme was able to play its role as a warship only when propelled by a mass of human brawn.
Crammed into their vessels, able to stretch out to sleep only when the boat was drawn up on land, the oarsmen had a tough job, so tough that it was later done only by forced labour. Yet in the sixteenth century ad, in the days of Andrea Doria and Don John of Austria, there were enough poor wretches to provide voluntary labour for the galleys, the buonavoglie as they were called in Italy. Poverty must have had the same baleful influence in the days of Pericles, since the oarsmen were free men and were paid wages. And when the Peloponnesian fleet later beat the Athenian navy, it was with crews whom they had been able to levy thanks to Persian gold. But these oarsmen received their share of any booty, so they had the chance to make their fortune, to buy a piece of land and a slave, and aspire eventually to that leisure which in Athens conferred dignity on the individual.
In a word, the phalanx had introduced the peasant to political society, and the oar had brought in the thetes, previously more or less untouchables. If Athens adopted these new methods it was perhaps a sign that they were irresistible. Corinth did however oppose this massphenomenon, and found a different solution to its internal tensions: its agreement with Sparta provided it with a policeman at the gate. At the first sign of trouble, the policeman reported for duty. Athens had chosen democracy instead.
Democracy and slavery
But we should clarify what was meant by this term in antiquity. The reforms of Solon (595) and Cleisthenes (509) had limited the rights of the oligarchs and given pride of place to the powers of the ekklesia, the Assembly of citizens meeting on the Pnyx. In the lawcourts of the heliaia, citizens were also judges during trials. Except for the strategoi, or generals, who were in effective command of the army and were elected, all magistrates were appointed by the drawing of lots. And all citizens, whether they were magistrates, attended the Assembly (from the fourth century), sat in the lawcourts, or went to the amphitheatre, were entitled to draw an allowance. This was the system of citizen-wages. Every citizen was, as we would put it, a state employee and theoretically all-powerful.
But there were limits on this power. The ekklesia was obliged to take the advice of the boule, a sort of intermediary committee of 500 magistrates of whom fifty (replacing each other by rota every thirty-five days) sat in permanent session. And the prestige of patrician families weighed heavily here. Pericles belonged to the aristocratic dynasty of the Alcmaeonidae. Only after his death did Athenian democracy find its own leaders, of whom the first was Cleon.
Even so, this ‘democracy’ was far from complete. Yes, the citizens had the right, real or imaginary, to be held as absolute equals. But only a few of the men of Attica had the right to the title of citizen. In about 431, there was a citizen class of i7z,ooo, including members of their families, or in other words 40,000 men who were actually citizens out of a total population of 315,000. Democracy was the privilege of this group who stood in authority over a mass of foreigners (metics) and slaves [not to mention women, SRj. The number of slaves went on growing in later centuries. Moreover Athens was able, because of its strength, to exploit its Aegean allies in the Delian League, making them subjects and tributaries. The city also exploited distant markets, by exporting ceramics, fabrics and oil in exchange for the grain it needed to survive.
In short, Athens was a privileged city which oppressed others. Enough at any rate to make us disagree entirely with J.-L. Borges when he writes that ‘Athens was only a rudimentary version of Paradise’. Earthly paradises are always rudimentary, but their gates are not open to all comers.
The city as official structure
The universe created by the city controlled the life of its citizens, shaping their thoughts, their actions and their art. This role of matrix operated even in the sphere of philosophy and religion: the way the natural universe, its origins and its equilibrium were understood by philosophers reflected the city and its own particular order.
The decline of the sacrosanct patrician families, allied, as the priest-kings of the past had been, to the dark forces of the supernatural, had returned official religion to the authority of the city, making it an aspect of public affairs. The sacred and the mysterious had been expelled to the margins of society. In the same way, cremation, which had come with the Dorian invasion, had separated the dead from previous forms of ancestor-worship. With the establishment of the earthly city, centred on the agora, and no longer on the sacred Acropolis (to which Plato wished to return it), religion had become a less constricting garment. Moreover there was no clergy here as there was in Egypt or Babylon: any Greek could officiate as priest and no one was normally appointed permanently to the priesthood. The cities found that this made their tasks considerably easier. They were free to organize festivals, to effect a surface reconciliation between cults which were apparently incompatible, rather as we now organize towns for the safety of pedestrians. Thus Eleusis became the point of departure for the procession of the Panathenians to the Parthenon on the Acropolis, in honour of the official cult of Athena, using the sacred way, with the grooves for the chariots laid down in advance. Being thus linked to the daughter of Zeus, the tutelary goddess of the city, the Eleusinian mysteries became more official, and lost something of their autonomy. The Dionysiac rites became an occasion for theatricalperformances, a meeting point between religion and urban life, thus defusing a potentially explosive conflict. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides portrayed in their plays the great figures of Homeric epic, giving the public exactly what it wanted from them – such was the condition of any success.
It was, however, only to be expected that people of sensibility should look beyond these over-consensual cults and their routine rituals for a more authentic religious life. The mysteries, with their purification rituals, the marvellous promise of salvation, and the soul’s journey towards a new eternal life exerted a strong attraction. The origins of the Pythagorean revolt are only too comprehensible. Taking refuge in 525 in Croton (a sort of Geneva avant la lettre) Pythagoras introduced there a reign of justice in which the essential aim was the salvation of souls, not that of the earthly city. This attitude was regarded as scandalous: the ascetic life and fasting of the Pythagoreans, their attempts to adapt Orphic cults, led all cities to condemn their stance as a kind of dereliction of civic duty, comparable with a little exaggeration to that of a conscientious objector today. There was no one at the time – the sixth century BC – capable of seeing the Pythagoreans’ embryonic ‘science’, their pursuit of golden numbers and mathematical ratios, as a positive counterweight to the civic ethos. In Athens after the defeat of 404, Socrates was accused of every crime against his fatherland. What did the Athenians wish to punish him for – his friendship with Alcibiades and Critias, opponents of democracy, his pursuit of Orphic and Pythagorean ideas, or even (and this might explain the ‘Socrates mystery’) his position as defender of individual perfection, of an effort which was intrinsically a sin against the collective world of the city-state?
Greek art was gradually locked into the same straitjacket. The art whose origin
al flowering one so admires, freed from imitation of foreigners or from the patronage of the rich, an art which had acquired its own self-confidence, finally entered bag and baggage into the service of the state. The age of Pericles was an age of official art: the workshops, sculptors, stone-masons and foremen were all working for Athens. One cannot complain about this since it bequeathed us the Parthenon. But all official art is already secretly contaminated: it prefers to define its rules and canons and to stick to them, soon degenerating into repetition and pale imitation. By the law which makes classical and romantic movements alternate in turn, Greek art ended up lapsing into the baroque excesses of the Hellenistic style, with a mannerism that was by turns both charming and tragically grandiloquent.
A logical outcome, or should we blame Pericles?
The destiny of Greece was decided by war: first the Persian wars (from 499, the date of the Ionian uprising, to the peace of 450) then the Peloponnesian war (431-404.) Things might have turned out differently in both cases. The handful of Athenian and Plataean hoplites might have been defeated at Marathon (490); the Greek fleet might not have triumphed in 480 in the narrow channel between the island of Salamis and the mainland. Later on, Athens might not have yielded to the sudden passion which drove it to launch the insane Sicilian expedition of 415; and while we are rewriting history, why not imagine that the Athenians might even have won the battle of Syracuse?
But, as we know, Greece was fragmented into a patchwork of independent city-states, all of which were liable to fall prey to their often extreme passions. And these passions were in the end fatal. Was it conceivable that this constellation of autonomous worlds could live in harmony and mutual respect? Aubrey de Selincourt thought so, as he wrote the last pages of his moving and almost always convincing book. But surely this is to ask the impossible. De Selincourt is shocked that one Greek city could set about destroying another, that Croton should destroy Sybaris, or Athens subdue Aegina or Megara. Worse still, Athens first concluded an alliance with the free cities of the Aegean, then in 454 transported to its own city the League’s treasure, which had previously been held on Delos, the island of Apollo. Already before this date, Athens had been throwing its weight about. But in 454 any illusions vanished: the allies (summachoi) had become subjects {hupekooi). It was a betrayal.
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