by Peter Watson
Religious transformations were not the only changes in the Axial Age, however. As we shall now see, other changes accompanied the religious ones, a series of steps that was never taken in the New World.
• 19 •
THE INVENTION OF DEMOCRACY, THE ALPHABET, MONEY AND THE GREEK CONCEPT OF NATURE
The fighting that characterised the end of the Bronze Age in the Old World, while it had profound effects on the development of religion and self-consciousness, even on the very idea of what it means to be human, also stimulated a raft of other changes that were equally transformative and never occurred in the New World. Together they helped push the trajectories of the two hemispheres even further apart.
We have just seen that one of the achievements of pastoral nomads was the evolution of horse-back riding. This had a crucial effect on the transmission of power away from the chariot to the cavalry. In the new cavalry, the horses were ridden in pairs. This was because, before the invention of the stirrup (800–500 BC), it was difficult to fire a bow and arrow and manipulate a horse with one’s legs only. Horses were therefore ridden in pairs, with one rider holding the reins of both horses, while the second man loosed off his arrows. This was an advantage in that horses were cheaper than chariots, and if a horse was shot, the two men could escape on the second, much less difficult than transferring from a broken chariot. With the invention of the stirrup, the replacement of the chariot by cavalry was swift.
Even so, in the Iron Age the cavalry was always secondary to the infantry. This came about partly because the limitations of the chariot began to matter (they were not as manoeuvrable as horses, or infantry, and expensive), and with greater urban complexes, with larger overall populations, greater numbers of infantrymen (less expensive and easier to train) were available. For example, one Assyrian army of the period had 1,351 chariots but 50,000 men, thirty-seven men to each chariot: one cannot imagine a chariot, however skilled its rider, being able to account for thirty-seven men. Many of the twelfth-century BC papyri from Egypt refer to great numbers of barbarians, especially Libyans and Meshwesh, who were creating trouble at Thebes.1 These were almost certainly professional infantrymen. It is known too that Assyria relied on infantry in the early Iron Age, combating tribesmen with at least 20,000 infantry. In Greece, burials and the accounts of Homer both suggest that Dark Age Greeks (1200–800 BC) fought on foot (arrow heads appear almost nowhere among Dark Age grave goods). Recent evidence even suggests that Greek ‘knights’ rode to battle on horseback, but once there dismounted and fought on foot. And in fact the recent recreations of Greek warfare techniques in the Dark Age, between rival poleis, featured massive infantries drawn up in a line, or phalanx, of spearmen. ‘Dueling nobles are essential for the poet’s story, but in reality the promachoi [prominent warriors] were much less important than the anonymous multitude in whose front rank they stood.’2
Greek infantries of the Dark Age were not impressive by later standards but the crucial point is that an infantry was a community’s principal – and usually its only – line of defence. By the end of the eighth century BC, the manufacture of weapons had advanced considerably, and in Greece the poleis were increasingly able to equip large infantries in place of much smaller aristocratic squadrons of charioteers. As a result, between 700 and 650 BC, the old-fashioned Homeric-style warriors, who had fought in single combat, were phased out.3 This was a crucial social as well as military transformation because it meant that warfare was no longer the privilege of nobility. Anyone who could afford up-to-date weapons (hopla) could join this prestigious troop, regardless of rank or birth. And so, with the hoplite army, a new equality was born. The hoplite army was now a people’s army, drawn from a wider cross-section of the male population than ever before.
This was a major break with the past. ‘Hesiod had suggested that it was time to abandon the traditional heroic ideal; the hoplite army effected this severance.’ The individual (and invariably aristocratic) warrior, seeking personal glory, was now an anachronism. Instead, the hoplite soldier was essentially one of a team. Hoplite phalanxes were or were not defeated together, en masse. ‘Excellence was redefined: it now consisted of patriotism and devotion to the common good. Instead of aggressively seeking his own fame and glory, the hoplite submerged his own needs for the good of the entire phalanx. It promoted an ethic of selflessness and devotion to others.’4
This reform changed Greece momentously, if inadvertently; and it laid the foundations of democracy. ‘A farmer who fought next to a nobleman in the phalanx could never see the aristocracy in the same way again.’ The deference which commoners had for aristocrats dissolved. And it didn’t take long for the lower classes to make claims that their organisation – the people’s assembly – should take a major role in city government. The self-image of the polis was radically overhauled by the hoplite reform.5
The overhaul had wide-ranging effects. For example, free speech, originally the privilege of the noble hero, was now extended to all members of the phalanx. However, the phalanx used a different language. Logos (dialogue speech), direct and practical, was totally different from the allusive poetry of Homer and the Heroic Age. Aristocrats, who were traditionally meant to excel in battle, thought that war gave meaning to life.6 But logos was driven by practical need. Men wanted to know ‘What happened?’, ‘What shall we do?’ and it was vital that any soldier felt comfortable in challenging a battle plan that would affect everybody. The logos of the hoplites did not replace the mythos of the poets – the two coexisted. As more citizens became hoplites, however, logos took over as the distinctive modus operandi of government. By the seventh century, Sparta, more than Athens, embodied the new ideal. By 650 BC, all male citizens were hoplites, and the demos, the people, were sovereign.7
The hoplites played a further, albeit indirect, role at the beginning of the sixth century, when the farmers in rural areas of Attica complained of exploitation by the aristocrats and banded together against them. Civil war seemed inevitable and by now the aristocrats no longer had the inbuilt advantage of military superiority which they had traditionally enjoyed. The exploitation of the farmers had deepened at that time owing to the invention, in nearby Lydia, of coins. Their use spread quickly among the Greeks and enabled wealth to grow and more men to acquire land. This land needed defending and, in conjunction with new weapons, played a role in the development of the hoplite phalanx. At the same time, however, the invention of money opened up a much bigger gap between rich and poor.
This gap opened up because land in Attica – desirable though it was in theory – was poor, certainly so far as growing grain was concerned. Therefore, in bad years the poorer farmers had to borrow from their richer neighbours. With the invention of coins, however, instead of borrowing a sack of corn in the old way, to be repaid by a sack, the farmer now borrowed the price of a sack. But this sack was bought when corn was scarce – and therefore relatively expensive – and was generally repaid in times of plenty, in other words when corn was cheap. This caused debt to grow and in Attica the law allowed for creditors to seize an insolvent debtor and take him and his family into slavery. This ‘rich man’s law’ was bad enough, but the spread of writing, when the laws were set down, under the supervision of Drakon, made it worse, encouraging people to enforce their written rights. ‘Draconian law,’ it was said, was written in blood.8
Dissatisfaction spread, so much so that the Athenians took what for us would be an unthinkable step. They appointed a tyrant to mediate. Originally, when it was first used in the Near East, tyrant was not the pejorative word that it is now. It was an informal title, equivalent to ‘boss’ or ‘chief’ and tyrants usually arose after a war, when their most important function was the equitable distribution of the enemy’s lands among the victorious troops. In Athens, however, Solon was chosen as tyrant because of his wide experience. A distant descendant of the kings, he had also written poems attacking the rich for their greed. He was given a mandate to reform the constitution.9
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p; Solon was a wise man and he was not content to pass a few laws. Rather he thought it more important to make farmers and aristocrats alike aware of their responsibilities, that everyone had a share in the blame for the current state of dysnomia (‘disorder’) as he called it. His real breakthrough, however, was his insistence that the gods did not intervene in human affairs and would not reveal any divine law to help Athenians sort out their problems. At a stroke, therefore, Solon secularised politics, what Karen Armstrong calls an ‘axial moment’. In the previous vision of antiquity, justice was part of a cosmic order but Solon would have none of it. For him the city must work in the same way as the hoplite phalanx, in which all warriors acted in concert for the good of the whole. In order to even up the balance between the two main sectors of society – the farmers and the aristocrats – he cancelled the farmers’ debts and defined status in a new way: by wealth rather than by birth. Anyone who could produce over 200 bushels of grain, wine or oil each year was eligible for public office.
The hoplites played a still further role – and again indirect – somewhat later, at the beginning of the fifth century, when war with Persia threatened. Persia was a world power then and Athens had unwisely sent help to Miletus, on the western coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey) which had rebelled against Persian rule. Darius (550–486 BC), king of the Achaemenids/Persians, had quashed the rebellion and transferred his attention to the mainland. Faced with a major threat, Themistocles, a general from one of the less prominent Athenian families, was elected magistrate and he persuaded the Areopagus Council (see below) to build a fleet.10
The Athenians had no real experience of naval warfare – the hoplites were their pride and joy – so this move was a risk. Nonetheless, they went ahead and built 200 triremes and trained a navy of 40,000 men. This too was controversial, and in two ways. The size of the threat meant now that all able-bodied men were conscripted: aristocrats, farmers, and thetes, men of the lower classes, who all sat on the same rowing benches in the triremes. Previously only men who could afford their own equipment had been allowed to join the hoplites; now everyone was part of the military, further widening the democratic ideal. On top of all that the hoplites, used to fighting hand-to-hand and face-to-face, found it dishonourable and demeaning to sit in a trireme, because it meant having their backs to the enemy.
The hoplites must have resented Themistocles’ plan, the more so when, in 490 BC, the Persian fleet entered Greek waters, conquered Naxos and landed on the plain of Marathon, twenty-five miles north of Athens. The hoplites set out to meet them and, though they were outnumbered by about two-to-one, they managed through discipline and good leadership to inflict a stunning defeat on the Persians. ‘Marathon became the new Troy; its hoplites were revered as a modern race of heroes.’11
But Themistocles had cleverly anticipated what would happen next. In 480 BC, Xerxes, the new Persian king, advanced towards Athens with twelve hundred triremes and roughly 100,000 men. In other words, he had six times the number of Greek ships and more than twice the number of men. Even with the aid of other Greek cities – if aid were offered – the Greeks were badly outnumbered.
Themistocles understood these odds and before the Persians arrived he made his move: he evacuated Athens completely, transferring the entire population, including children and slaves, to the island of Salamis. And so, when the Persians reached Athens they found it empty. They enjoyed themselves, looting what they could and setting fire to the Acropolis. Then they moved on to Salamis.
But Salamis was not just another island city. It had one crucial feature, which is why Themistocles chose it. The city could be approached only by a narrow gulf into which not all of the Persian ships could squeeze. In fact, the triremes became gridlocked in the gulf, the great size of the fleet – as Themistocles had anticipated – acting against it, as the ships were jammed together and unable to move. In these circumstances the Athenians picked off the Persian ships, one by one, until by evening the triremes that were still afloat retreated and fled back home.
Salamis was another axial moment and so here we see the hoplites being involved in four important changes that occurred in Greece at that time: the development of democracy; the secularisation of politics; the development of the disciplined exercise of reason and logic in which rational thought is abstracted from emotion; and – to an extent – the experimental approach to life, knowing when to dispense with tradition and use new thought patterns generated by new conditions.12
In view of what was to follow, it is worth taking time to remind ourselves what other aspects of democracy the Athenians introduced. From the point of view of the argument of this book, the most important element was the Council of Five Hundred, initiated by Cleisthenes in 508–507 BC, which included not only aristocrats but men of modest means.13 Then there was the fact that Athenians established the idea, and practice, that democracies require public spaces, not as religious theatres but open to all, where matters of common concern can be defined and lived. ‘For many, the agora – the main public space in Athens – served as a second home.’ Life in Athens was anchored in a polytheistic universe of gods and goddesses though in the early 440s Protagoras of Abdera told Athenians that man was the measure of all things, including the deities, who perhaps did not exist, except in men’s minds. John Keane, in his celebrated history of democracy, also makes the point that the Greek system of gods – many individuals behaving (and misbehaving) in all sorts of ways, human and superhuman – themselves inhabited a form of democracy, where negotiations took place, where they were open to persuasion, where their minds could be changed. This is why many Athenians thought of their democracy as a system for establishing and enforcing the will of the deities, ‘who in turn authorized the exercise of human powers’. The assembly regarded itself as sovereign but also as divinely mandated.14
No conflict was seen between the exercise of democracy and the existence of slavery. Business in Athens was seen as quite separate from (and, status-wise, below) politics: the two were kept physically separate. Slaves were used to round up citizens who should have been in the assembly but weren’t. Seating in the Council of Five Hundred was egalitarian, all business was carried on face-to-face, speakers stood on a small platform, the better to be heard, decrees were written down and deposited in the city archive. Heralds and archers were on hand to prevent disagreements leading to violence, because people were expected to trade in what the Athenians called frank speech (parrhēsia), which was seen to be a great discharger of friction. The chief executive officers of the administration of the Council of Five Hundred were chosen by lot. Citizens had to serve on juries and everyone was equal before the law. Ballots were in secret.15
Above all, perhaps, democracy highlighted the contingency of things, of events and of peoples. ‘The originality of democracy lay in its direct challenge to habitual ways of seeing the world, to living life as if everything was inevitable, or “natural”.’ Open-ended government produced nail-biting cliff-hangers and stimulated a sense of scepticism about power and authority; life was open-ended. Athenian democracy managed to trigger radical questioning of who gets what, and pulled the rug from under the high-and-mighty. Monarchy, tyranny and oligarchy were rejected and could not be defended as ‘natural’. Men were not the same and it was recognised that being born well was a fluke. Athenian theatre showed this. Plays depict individual qualities, even in slaves. The ubiquity of perplexity was shown in all characters. Scripts could be rewritten, with endings that were unknown.16
Many, of course, were against democracy, including Plato and, formally, it didn’t last. In 260 BC the Macedonians captured the city and democracy disappeared for centuries. But the form by which men and women govern themselves was not the only legacy of Athens’ democratic age: the contingency and open-endedness revealed by democracy, the role of persuasion, of equality, of secularisation and radical questioning of convention had stimulated other activities that could not be so easily crushed.
And in fact there were
two other principal aspects to the legacy of democracy. One was that the Greeks were the first to truly understand that the world may be known, that knowledge can be acquired by systematic observation, without aid from the gods, that there is an order to the world and the universe which goes beyond the myths of our ancestors. And second, that there is a difference between nature – which operates according to invariable laws – and the affairs of men, which have no such order, but where order is imposed or agreed and can take various forms and is mutable. Compared with the idea that the world could be known only through or in relation to God, or even could be known not at all, this was a massive transformation.17
FROM DANCING TO METAPHYSICS
The question of order is interesting. One of the innovations of that time that generated new thought patterns had nothing directly to do with politics or military affairs. It was an intellectual invention all by itself and which, historians tell us, separated the Mediterranean/ European world not only from the New World but from the East – China in particular – as well. This was the introduction of the alphabet.
Big claims have been made for the ‘alphabet effect’ and some of these are no doubt overblown. Still, the alphabet was important – revolutionary – for two reasons, one socio-political, the other religious. What made it so transformative was the ease with which people could learn to use it. In other cultures it was (as we shall see) in the interest of the scribes to keep the rest of the population ignorant of the secret of writing: those who were literate had a great advantage over those who were not, who often looked upon scribes as possessing what were, in effect, divine powers. But the development of the alphabet ended the dominance of the literate elite.18 In place of a complex syllabary of some 6,000 characters (and a complex grammar that had to account for these characters), an alphabet consisted of between twenty and thirty signs, signs that children and the less intelligent members of a society could – and did – master with ease. Possibly the alphabet can be traced back to Egyptian hieroglyphics, which included a complete set of twenty-four signs for the twenty-four Egyptian consonants (which in turn may have begun life as clicks in click languages).19 But the Egyptians never took the next step, to a proper alphabet which, as we have seen, was itself a democratising device.
