Ancient Greece

From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History

"Most things in the history of Greece have become a subjectof dispute" is how Pausanias, the second-century A.D. authorof a famous guide to sites throughout Greece, summed upthe challenge and the fascination of thinking about the significanceof ancient Greek history (Guide to Greece 4.2.3). Thesubject was disputed then because Pausanias, a Greek, livedand wrote under the Roman Empire, when Greeks as subjectsof the emperor in Rome no longer enjoyed the independenceon which they once had prided themselves and had foughtfiercely to protect. One dispute he focused on was why Greekshad lost their liberty and what it meant to live as the descendantsof more-glorious ancestors. Today, the study of ancientGreek history still remains filled with disputes over how toevaluate the accomplishments and the failures that its story sodramatically presents. On the one hand, the accomplishmentsof the Greeks in innovative political organization, includingdemocracy, history writing, literature, drama, philosophy, art,and architecture, deserve the description that the fifth-centuryB.C. historian Herodotus used to explain why he included theevents and people that he did in his groundbreaking work:They were "wonders." On the other hand, the shortcomingsof the ancient Greeks, including their perpetuation of slavery,the exclusion of women from politics, and their failureto unite to preserve their independence, seem equally strikingand strongly disturbing. For me, after nearly forty yearsof studying, teaching, and writing about ancient Greece, thesubject in all its diversity remains fascinating—and often perplexing—becauseit is awe inspiring. Awe, a word in English derived from the ancientGreek noun achos, meaning "mental or physical pain," can, of course, havetwo opposite meanings: "wonder and approval" or "dread and rejection."I have both those reactions when thinking about ancient Greece and thedisputes that its history continues to stimulate.

Ancient Greece is a vast subject, and this overview, written to be aconcise introduction, necessarily compresses and even omits topics thatothers would emphasize. Whenever possible it tries to signal to readerswhen interesting disputes lie behind the presentation and interpretationof events or persons, but it cannot offer anything like a full treatment andstill achieve the goal of brevity. My hope is that readers will be inspired,or at least provoked, to investigate the evidence for themselves, startingwith the ancient sources. For this reason, those sources will be cited in thetext from time to time to give a glimpse of the knowledge and delight tobe gained from studying them. An extensive list of English translations ofthose sources is provided in the Suggested Readings, along with modernscholarly works that present fuller accounts and sometimes dueling interpretationsof important topics, especially those that give rise to dispute.

The narrative of the overview covers the period from prehistory (socalled because no written records exist to document those times) to theHellenistic Age (the modern term for the centuries following the deathof Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.). Geographically, it covers, as muchas space allows in a book meant to be very brief, the locations in andaround the Mediterranean Sea where Greeks lived. The majority of thenarrative concerns the Archaic and Classical Ages (the modern terms forthe spans of time from 750 to 500 and 500 to 323 B.C., respectively)and the settlements in the territory of mainland Greece, especially Athens.This coverage admittedly reflects a traditional emphasis on what remainthe most famous events, personalities, writings, art, and architecture ofancient Greece. It also reflects the inescapable fact that the surviving ancientsources for this four-hundred-year span are more copious and havebeen studied in greater depth by scholars than the sources for the earlierand later spans of Greek history, although that imbalance is being reducedby discoveries and modern scholarly work. Finally, that this book focusesabove all on the Classical Age reflects my interest in the awe-inspiring(in both positive and negative senses) deeds and thoughts of Greeks overthose few centuries.

Relatively small in population, endowed with only a limited amountof flat and fertile agricultural land, and never united as a single nation,ancient Greece eagerly adopted and adapted many ideas and technologiesfrom its more-numerous, prosperous, and less-factional neighbors in theNear East (the southwestern edge of Asia at the eastern end of the MediterraneanSea). Building on these inspirations from others, Greeks incubatedtheir own ideas and practices, some of which still resonate today, thousandsof years later. It is also true that ancient Greeks, like other ancientpeoples, believed and did things that many people today would regard as"awesome" in the sense of morally repugnant. In this context, I agree withthose who regard the past as a conceptual "foreign country" largely populatedby people who can seem strikingly "other" from what most peopletoday believe, or at least proclaim that they believe, about what sort ofpersons they are and what moral standards they live by. I also think that admirersof modernity sometimes express a supercilious moral superiorityin their judgments regarding antiquity, which recent history scarcely merits.In any case, writing history inevitably involves rendering judgments, ifonly in what the historian chooses to include and exclude, and I hope thatmy skepticism about the assertion that the present is far "better" than thepast will not seem inconsistent or hypocritical when I occasionally offercritical evaluations in this history. These judgments are made with a deepsense of humility and a keen awareness of how they certainly may missthe mark. Those are the sentiments, along with awe, that studying ancienthistory constantly renews in me.

The Greek achievements that strike me as the most impressive, and thefailures that seem the saddest, took place beginning in the eighth centuryB.C., when Greece gradually began to recover from its Dark Age—the centuriesof economic devastation, population decline, and political vacuumfrom about 1000 to 750 B.C. Earlier, in the Bronze Age of the secondmillennium B.C., life had been stable and, relatively speaking, prosperousthroughout Greece in tightly organized, independent communities ruledby powerful families through "top-down" political, social, and economicinstitutions. Spurred by growing trade and cultural interaction with especiallythe peoples in the lands bordering the eastern end of the MediterraneanSea, Greeks slowly rebuilt their civilization, but in doing so theydiverged both from their previous ways of life and also from those ofeveryone else in their world: Organizing themselves into city-states, theyalmost universally rejected the rule of royalty as the "default value" forstructuring human society and politics. For them, the new normal becamewidespread participation in decision making by male citizens who earnedthat privilege by helping to defend the community. Most astonishing ofall, some Greeks implemented this principle by establishing democracies,the first the world had ever seen (some scholars see roots of democracy inearlier communities in the eastern Mediterranean, but the evidence is unconvincingbecause, for one thing, it shows no concept of citizenship). AtAthens, the guiding principle of democratic government became "equalitybefore the law" and "equality of speech," regardless of a male citizen'swealth, birth, or social status. These concepts of equality represented aradical departure from the usual expectations and norms of politics in theancient world.

It is necessary to emphasize that Greeks stopped short of fully puttingthe principle of participation into practice: They did not extend it to femalecitizens or slaves. As their literature dramatically reveals, they wereclearly aware of logical arguments refuting the assertions that women andthe enslaved of both genders were by nature characterized by cognitiveinferiority and ethical deficiencies, rendering them incapable of participatingin the community alongside men. This failure to accept and live bythe full implications of their reasoning about politics and law seems to mean inescapable demerit to ancient Greek society. As the nineteenth-centuryEnglish historian known as Lord Acton remarked in commenting on theruthless actions of popes and kings, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolutepower corrupts absolutely" (Historical Essays and Studies, p. 504). Men heldthe majority of power in ancient Greece, and it corrupted them, as it eventuallydoes everyone in every era who exercises it.

That ancient Greeks recognized the existence of ideas contradictingtheir practices is not as surprising as it might seem, because their philosophers,scientists, and literary authors displayed relentless insight inconducting what we might call "thought experiments" on the nature ofthe world and of human beings. The Greeks' expressions of their ideas inpoetry, prose, and drama are deservedly famous for their brilliance—andtheir sometimes troubling implications. Other ancient civilizations, fromthe Near East to India to China, also developed impressively insightfulscientific and philosophic theories, and the Greeks certainly belong to thefirst rank of this distinguished company. The same evaluation is justifiedfor Greek literature, drama, history writing, art, and architecture. It is moredifficult to evaluate ancient Greek values and practices concerning thosetwo most controversial areas of human experience and belief— religionand sex. As will become clear from the discussions of those topics laterin this book, significant differences exist between ancient Greek religiousand sexual traditions and what the majority of people today believe and do.

For all these reasons, and more that form part of the narrative to follow,the history of ancient Greece offers fascinating insights into the possibilitiesand limitations of human existence and presents numerous opportunitiesfor discovery and reflection about the past and the present; not only is itintrinsically interesting (it seems to me), it is also good to think with, asthe renowned French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said in interpretingwhy human beings have identified animal species as totems, meaninglegendary ancestors whose characteristics their descendants were thoughtto have inherited and needed to keep in mind in defining their lives (Totemism,p. 89).

SOURCES AND EVIDENCE

The best way to learn about ancient Greek history and form one's ownjudgments is to study the ancient evidence first and then follow up on particulartopics by consulting specialized works of modern scholarship. It isconventional to refer to ancient literature, inscriptions, documents writtenon papyrus, coins, and archaeological remains as "primary" sources, evenwhen they were not contemporary with the history to which they refer.In fact, sources that scholars treat as primary can be considerably later indate than the events or persons for which they provide evidence, such asthe inscription from Cyrene cited in the discussion of the founding ofcolonies in chapter 4. Other primary sources, such as fifth-century B.C.inscriptions about the finances of the so-called Athenian Empire (fig. 1.1),provide direct evidence about history at the time when they were produced.In any case, the surviving ancient sources are the first place towhich we should turn to try to understand the past, and in that sense theyare always primary. They can be hard to understand. Ancient documents werewritten for people who knew the full context to which they applied, notfor us, who do not. Authors of literary works, including historians, werenot aiming to present neutral, objective accounts of events and persons.Rather, they wanted to support a particular view of things and persuadetheir audiences to accept their interpretations of events and people's motives.Of course, modern writers often take this same approach, too, butthose of us studying ancient Greece today must always stay on the lookoutnot only for what the ancient source was saying but why it was saying that.

The works of modern scholars are usually referred to as "secondary"sources, even when they prove essential in understanding, or even in correcting,the evidence derived from the primary sources. To try to helpreaders in consulting ancient sources, the citations to them in this overviewwill use, whenever possible, the internal reference systems that allowa passage to be located regardless of the translation being used (if thattranslation includes the reference system, which not all do, unfortunately).So, for example, a citation of Herodotus, The Histories 7.205, cited as evidencefor the three hundred Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae in 480B.C., means the passage is in book 7, section 205. (For poems, citationsare to line numbers, preceded, if needed, by book number.) For secondarysources, the citations are to page numbers or catalogue item numbers.

The majority of the literary and documentary texts from Greek antiquityhave not survived, but those that have are significant and provocative.The epics of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, represent the most primaryof the surviving primary sources from literature for the history of ancientGreece, for the Greeks then and for us today. Scholars debate how theselong poems reached the form in which they have survived to this day.Some argue that they emerged from centuries and centuries of fluid andflexible oral performances by many bards, finally put down in a writtenversion in the Archaic Age. Others believe that a single poet created thepoems using the technology of writing in the eighth century B.C. Howeverthey came into existence, the stories in The Iliad and The Odyssey lookedback to the Bronze Age while also reflecting the history of the Dark Age.Every ancient Greek valued these works for their artistic beauty and theirlife lessons. Above all, the Homeric epics encoded enduring values and traditionsabout the nature of the gods and human courage, self-control, loyalty,love, and sorrow. A thousand years later, people were still memorizingHomeric poetry. The (much-shorter) epic poems of Hesiod, The Theogony(Birth of the Gods) and Works and Days, composed arguably in the eighth centuryB.C., were meant to teach lessons about the role of the gods in humanlife, the nature of justice, and the problems created by the inequalities ofpower that arose as the Greeks slowly developed new forms of politicaland social life in their city-states. Seventh-century lyric and elegiac poets,such as Alcaeus, Alcman, Archilochus, Sappho, and Tyrtaeus, composedshorter works for choruses and for single voices that introduced communaland individual themes relevant to an era of social and political change.Bacchylides, Pindar, and Simonides in the late sixth century and the fifthcentury became famous for their elaborately artful poems intertwiningmythology with current events, often composed in praise of victors inathletic competitions or battles and powerful rulers. The so-called "firstphilosophers"—who could just as well be called "scientific thinkers"—inthe sixth century also wrote poems describing the underlying and invisiblenature of reality as they reasoned it must be.

Soon after, Greeks began to write in prose, focusing on ethnography,geography, and myth (a Greek word, mythos, that means stories about thedistant past that offered competing versions of the consequences of theoften-difficult relationship between gods and human beings). The earliestof these works have not survived except in quotations and paraphrases bylater authors. From the later fifth century B.C., however, we do have TheHistories of Herodotus. Telling the complex story of the background andevents of the extended war between a coalition of Greek city-states andthe powerful Persian Empire in the opening decades of the fifth century,Herodotus's unprecedented history generates a sense of wonder throughits enormous length (50 percent longer than The Iliad), diverse reportingon a dizzying array of Greeks and non-Greeks alike, and its thematic complexityon human motivation. Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, composed(though not finished) during that long conflict (431–404 B.C.), createdthe genre of contemporary history written by an eyewitness participant.His biting observations about the human desire for power and the unintendedconsequences of the violence of war also point to the beginningsof what today is called political science. In the next generation, Xenophoncontinued Thucydides' history by narrating events in Greece but also madea reputation by producing works about his exciting service as a mercenarysoldier in a Persian civil war, the unique characteristics of society at Sparta,the idiosyncratic ideas and behavior of the famous philosopher Socrates(469–399 B.C.), and many other topics.

The fifth century also saw the creation of the primary sources that areperhaps best known today: the plays of the Athenian dramatists Aeschylus,Sophocles, and Euripides. These tragedies sometimes dealt with recenthistory, but mostly they based their plots on imaginative retellingsof myths whose themes connected to life in contemporary Greek society.The characters and emotional conflicts portrayed in these dramas have auniversality that keeps them fresh even for performance today. The comicplays of Aristophanes provide another fascinating, if sometimes perplexing,primary source for fifth-century B.C. Athenian society. Skewering hiscontemporaries with fantastic plots, merciless mockery, and vivid profanity,Aristophanes offers a revealing glimpse of what Greeks said about oneanother when they were unconcerned with being polite.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Ancient Greece by Thomas R. Martin. Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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