Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

I

ATHENS

479

BC

: T

HE

H

ELLESPONT

At one of the narrowest points on the Hellespont, the thin channel of water that snakes from the Aegean up towards the Black Sea, and separates Europe from Asia, a promontory known as the Dog’s Tail extended from the European shore. Here, 480 years before the birth of Christ, a feat so astonishing as to seem the work of a god had been completed. Twin pontoon bridges, stretching from the Asian shore to the tip of the Dog’s Tail, had yoked the two continents together. That none but a monarch of infinite resources could possibly have tamed the currents of the sea in so imperious a manner went without saying. Xerxes, the King of Persia, ruled the largest empire that the world had ever seen. From the Aegean to the Hindu Kush, all the teeming hordes of Asia marched at his command. Going to war, he could summon forces that were said to drink entire rivers dry. Few had doubted, watching Xerxes cross the Hellespont, that the whole continent beyond would soon be his.

One year on, the bridges were gone. So too were Xerxes’ hopes of conquering Europe. Invading Greece, he had captured Athens; but the torching of the city was to prove the high point of his campaign. Defeat by sea and land had forced a Persian retreat. Xerxes himself had returned to Asia. On the Hellespont, where command of the strait had been entrusted to a governor named Artaÿctes, there was particular alarm. He knew himself, in the wake of the debacle in Greece, ominously exposed. Sure enough, late in the summer of 479, a squadron of Athenian ships came gliding up the Hellespont. When they moored beside the Dog’s Tail, Artaÿctes first barricaded himself inside the nearest stronghold; and then, after a lengthy siege, made a break for safety, accompanied by his son. Despite a successful escape in the dead of night, they did not get far. Hunted down, father and son were soon being hauled back in chains to the Dog’s Tail. There, on the furthermost tip of the promontory, Artaÿctes was fixed by his Athenian captors to a wooden board, and hung from it. ‘Then, before his very eyes, they stoned his son to death.’¹ Artaÿctes himself was left to a much more lingering end.

How had his executioners succeeded in keeping him attached to the upright plank? In Athens, criminals convicted of particularly heinous crimes might be fastened to an instrument of torture called the apotumpanismos, a board furnished with shackles for securing the neck, wrists and ankles. There is no suggestion, however, that this particular device was employed by the killers of Artaÿctes. Instead, in the one account of his death we have, we are told that he was fastened to the board with passaloi: ‘pins’.* The executioners, forcing their victim onto his back, had evidently driven spikes through his living flesh, hammering them deep into the wood. Bone would have rubbed and scraped against iron as the board was then levered erect. Artaÿctes, watching as his son was left a pulped and broken mess, would also have been able to look up to the skies, and see the birds there wheeling, impatient to settle on him, to feast on his eyes. Death, when it finally claimed him, would have come as a release.

His captors, in making such a protracted spectacle of Artaÿctes’ suffering, were also making a statement. To execute him on the very spot where Xerxes had first stepped onto European soil broadcast an unmistakable message. To humiliate the Great King’s servant was to humiliate the Great King himself. The Greeks, who had long lived in the shadow of Persia, had good reason to regard it as the home of ingenious tortures. It was the Persians, they believed, who had first initiated the practice of exposing criminals on stakes or crosses, so that humiliation compounded the agonies of death. Certainly, the punishments inflicted on those who defied the royal dignity were as excruciating as they were minatory. Some forty years before Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, his father, Darius, had dealt with those who disputed his right to the throne by torturing them in the most public manner possible. Entire forests of stakes had been erected, on which his rivals, writhing and screaming as they felt the wood start to penetrate their innards, had been impaled. ‘I cut off both his nose and his ears, and put out one of his eyes, and kept him bound at my palace entrance, where all could see him.’ So Darius had boasted, detailing his treatment of one particularly noxious rebel. ‘Then I had him impaled.’²

Not every victim of the Great King’s anger, though, was necessarily suspended and exposed as he died. The Greeks reported in hushed tones of disgust one particularly revolting torture: the scaphe, or ‘trough’. The executioner, after placing his victim inside a boat or hollowed-out tree trunk, would then attach a second one over the top of it, so that only the wretched man’s head, hands and feet were left sticking out. Fed continuously with rich food, the criminal would have no choice but to lie in his own excrement; smeared all over with honey, he would find himself powerless to brush away the buzzing flies. ‘Worms and swarms of maggots were bred of the rottenness and the putrefaction of the excrement; and these, eating away at his body, bored into his intestines.’³ The victim would finally expire only once his flesh and organs had been almost entirely consumed. One man, so it was reliably reported, had endured the scaphe for seventeen days before finally breathing his last.

Yet cruel though such a torture might be, it was not wantonly so. The Greeks, when they charged the Great King with heedless displays of despotism, mistook for barbarous savagery the sense of responsibility that characterised his concern for justice. In truth, from the perspective of the Persian court, it was the Greeks who were the barbarians. Although the Great King was content to allow his subject peoples to uphold their own laws – provided, of course, that they were dutifully submissive – he never doubted the cosmic character of his own prerogatives and responsibilities. ‘By the favour of Ahura Mazda am I king,’ declared Darius. ‘Ahura Mazda bestowed kingship upon me.’ ⁴ Greatest of the gods, the Wise Lord, who had created both the heavens and the earth, and clad himself in the crystalline beauty of the skies above the snows and sands of Iran, he was the only patron whom Darius acknowledged. The justice the Great King gave to his subjects was not of mortal origin, but derived directly from the Lord of Light. ‘The man who is loyal, I reward; the man who is faithless, I punish. It is by the favour of Ahura Mazda that people respect the order I uphold.’⁵

This conviction, that the rule of a king might be as beneficent as a god’s, was not original to Darius. It reached back to the very beginning of things. To the west of Iran, watered by two mighty rivers, stretched the mudflats of the region known to the Greeks as Mesopotamia: ‘the land between the rivers’. Here, in cities older by far than the Persians, monarchs had long been in the habit of thanking the gods for their assistance in administering justice. A thousand years and more before Darius, a king named Hammurabi had declared himself charged with a divine mandate: ‘to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, and to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers, so that the strong should not harm the weak’.⁶ The influence of this claim, that a king best served his people by providing them with equity, was to prove an enduring one. Babylon, the city ruled by Hammurabi, regarded itself as the capital of the world. This was not mere wishful thinking. As wealthy as it was sophisticated, the metropolis had long attracted superlatives. Although its greatness had ebbed and flowed over the course of the centuries, the grandeur and antiquity of its traditions were grudgingly acknowledged across Mesopotamia. Even in Assyria, a land to the north of Babylon, and which, until the collapse of its ferociously militarist regime in 612 BC, had repeatedly launched punitive expeditions against the great city, its kings echoed the pretensions of Hammurabi. They too claimed a dazzling and intimidating status for their rulings. ‘The word of the King,’ so one of them ringingly declared, ‘is as perfect as that of the gods.’⁷

In 539 BC, when Babylon was conquered by the Persians, just as Assyria seven decades previously had been conquered by the Babylonians, the gods of the vanquished metropolis had not hesitated to hail its new master as their favourite. Cyrus, the founder of his people’s greatness, and whose capture of the world’s largest city had set the seal on a lifetime of astonishing victories, had graciously accepted their patronage. The Persian king boasted of having entered Babylon at their explicit invitation; of having restored their temples; of having cared daily for their worship. Cyrus, as deft a propagandist as he was effective a military commander, knew full well what he was doing. Starting his reign as the king of an obscure and upstart people, he ended it as lord of the largest agglomeration of territories that the world had ever seen – and on a scale, certainly, that far exceeded the wildest fantasies of any Assyrian or Babylonian monarch. Yet Cyrus, when he looked to promote himself as a global ruler, had little option but to look to the heritage of Mesopotamia. Nowhere else in his dominions had offered him a model of kingship so rooted in antiquity, so burnished by self-satisfaction. ‘King of the universe, mighty king, king of Babylon’:⁸ here were titles that the Persian conqueror had been eager to make his own.

Nevertheless, Mesopotamian tradition had in the long run proven inadequate to the needs of his heirs. The Babylonians, despite all Cyrus’ flattering of their pretensions, had only reluctantly accepted their loss of independence. Among the rebels who rose against Darius when, seventeen years after the fall of Babylon, he seized the Persian throne, there was one who claimed to be the son of the city’s last native king. Defeated in battle, the wretched man and his lieutenants – as was only to be expected, of course – were all briskly impaled. Darius also made sure, though, to skewer his defeated rival’s reputation. Inscriptions broadcast to the world the full scale of the pretender’s deceptions. Far from having been a prince of the blood, it was announced, he had not even been a Babylonian, but an Armenian by the name of Arakha. ‘He was a liar.’⁹ This, of all the many accusations that a Persian might level against an adversary, was easily the most damning. The falsehood of which Arakha had been convicted was an offence, not just against Darius, but against the very stability of the universe. All good and all wise though the Lord Mazda was, his creation, so the Persians believed, was menaced by a darkness to which they gave the name of Drauga: ‘the Lie’. In fighting Arakha and his fellow rebels, Darius had not merely been defending his own interests. Infinitely more had been at stake. The spreading filth of the Lie, had it not been purged by Darius, would have ended up splashing the radiance of all that was good with the poison of its sewage. Rebels against his authority as king were also rebels against that of the Wise Lord. ‘Ignorant of the worship of Ahura Mazda,’¹⁰ they had assailed a cosmic order that was synonymous with Truth itself. Not for nothing did the Persians use the same word, Arta, for them both. Darius, in committing himself to the defence of Truth, was setting an example for all who would follow him onto the throne. ‘You, who shall be king hereafter, be firmly on your guard against the Lie. The man who shall be a follower of the Lie – punish him well.’

And his heirs had done so. Like Darius, they knew themselves engaged in a conflict as old as time, and as wide as the universe. Between the light and the darkness, all had to choose their side. There was nothing so tiny, no creeping or coiling thing so insignificant, that it might not rank as a minion of the Lie. The worms and maggots that fed on a man sentenced to the scaphe, bred of his filth, confirmed by consuming his flesh that both were agents of falsehood and darkness. In a similar manner, those barbarians who lurked beyond the limits of Persian order, where the writ of the Great King did not run, were the servants not of gods, but of demons. Naturally, this did not mean blaming foreigners merely because, unlucky not to have been born Persian, they were ignorant of Ahura Mazda. Such a policy would have been grotesque: an offence against all accepted custom. Cyrus, by lavishing patronage on the temples of Babylon, had blazed a path that his heirs made sure to follow. Who was any mortal, even the Great King, to mock the gods of other peoples? Nevertheless, as the man charged by Ahura Mazda with the defence of the world against the Lie, it was his responsibility to purge strife-torn lands of demons no less than of rebels. Just as Arakha had seduced Babylon into revolt by taking on the appearance of their dead king’s son, so did demons similarly practise deception by aping the appearance of gods. Faced with such a danger, what recourse did a Great King have save to take punitive action?

So it was that Darius, looking to the lands beyond his northern frontiers, and alerted to the fractious character of a people named the Scythians, had recognised in their savagery something ominous: a susceptibility to the seductions of demons. ‘They were vulnerable, these Scythians, to the Lie’¹¹ – and so Darius, ever the dutiful servant of Ahura Mazda, had made sure to pacify them. In similar manner, after capturing Athens, Xerxes had ordered the temples on the Acropolis be scoured clean with fire; and only then, once he could be certain that they were purged of demons, had he permitted the gods of the city to be offered sacrifice once again. Power such as the Great King wielded was something unprecedented. More than any other ruler before him, he was able, by virtue of the sheer immensity of his territorial possessions, to believe himself charged with a universal mission. The word he gave to his empire, bumi, was synonymous with the world. The Athenians, when they thought to defy Xerxes’ claim to Europe by crucifying one of his servants beside the Hellespont, only confirmed themselves as adherents of the Lie.

Beyond the physical apparatus of the Great King’s vast empire, then, beyond the palaces, and the barrack rooms, and the way-posts on dusty roads, there shimmered a sublime and momentous conceit. The dominion forged by Cyrus and secured by Darius served as a mirror to the heavens. To resist it or to subvert it was to defy Truth itself. Never before had a monarchy with ambitions to rule the world endowed its sway with quite so potent an ethical character. The reach of the Great King’s power, which extended to the limits of east and west, even cast its light into the grave. ‘These are the words of Darius, the King: that whosoever worships Ahura Mazda will be blessed with divine favour, both living and dead.’¹² Perhaps, as he endured his death-agonies, Artaÿctes was able to find comfort in such a reflection.

Certainly, the news of his execution would only have confirmed the Great King in his disdain for the Athenians as terrorists. Truth or falsehood; light or darkness; order or chaos: these were the choices that humans everywhere had to make.

It was a way of comprehending the world that was destined to have an enduring afterlife.

Tell me Lies

In Athens, of course, they saw things rather differently. In 425 BC, a dramatist by the name of Aristophanes made comic play of just how differently. Fifty-four years had passed since Xerxes put the Acropolis to the torch, and the summit of the rock, cleaned of rubble and adorned with ‘marks and monuments of empire’,¹³ bore dazzling witness to the scale of the city’s revival. Below the Parthenon, largest and most beautiful of the temples that now adorned the Athenian skyline, citizens would gather every winter within the natural curve of the hillside, there to take their seats in a theatre for an annual display of drama.* In a year marked by the rhythm of festivals, the Lenaia was a particular celebration of comedy – and Aristophanes, although only at the start of his career, had already proven himself a master of the medium. In 425, he made his debut in the Lenaia with a play, The Acharnians, that ridiculed everything it touched – and among its targets were the vaunts of the Persian king.

‘He has many eyes.’¹⁴ To the Greeks, the claim of their traditional enemy to a universal rule could hardly help but seem sinister in the extreme. Within the limits of his empire, spies were believed to enforce a perpetual surveillance. ‘Everyone feels himself under watch by a king who is omnipresent.’¹⁵ Such a target, for Aristophanes, was too tempting to resist. When the actor given the part of a Persian ambassador in The Acharnians walked onto the stage, he did so wearing an enormous eye on his head. Invited to deliver the Great King’s message, he solemnly declaimed a line of gibberish. Even his name, Pseudartabas, was a pointed joke: for just as arta in Persian meant ‘truth’, so did pseudes in Greek mean ‘lying’.¹⁶ Aristophanes could recognise a deserving target when he saw it. Insolently, indomitably, he exposed the profoundest convictions of Darius and his heirs to the laughter of the Athenian crowd.

That truth might deceive was a paradox with which the Greeks were well acquainted. In the mountains north-west of Athens, at Delphi, there stood an oracle; and so teasing were its revelations, so ambiguous and riddling its pronouncements, that Apollo, the god who inspired them, was hailed as Loxias – ‘the Oblique One’. A deity less like Ahura Mazda it would have been hard to imagine. Greek travellers marvelled at peoples in distant lands who obeyed oracles to the letter: for those delivered by Apollo were invariably equivocal. In Delphi, ambivalence was the prerogative of the divine. Apollo, most golden of the gods, who in time would come to be identified with the charioteer of the sun, dazzled those he raped. Famed though he was for his powers of healing, and for the magical potency of his musicianship, he was dreaded too as the lord of the silver bow, whose arrows were tipped with plague. Light, which the Persians saw as the animating principle of the universe, wholly good and wholly true, was also the supreme quality of Apollo; but there was a darkness to the Greek god as well. He and his twin sister Artemis, a virgin huntress no less deadly with the bow, were famed for their sensitivity to insult. When a king’s daughter named Niobe boasted of how many more children she had than Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, who had only ever had the two, the twin gods exacted a terrible vengeance. A firestorm of golden arrows felled her sons and daughters. For nine days their corpses lay unburied in their mother’s hall, caked with blood. The princess herself, worn to the bone with weeping, took to the hills. ‘There, stuck into stone, Niobe still broods on the spate of griefs the gods poured out to her.’¹⁷

How were mortals to avoid offending these capricious and ever status-conscious deities? It was not enough merely to refrain from insulting an immortal’s mother. There were dues of sacrifice to be paid, as well as of respect. The bones of animals slaughtered before white-chalked altars, glistening with fat and burned in fires perfumed with incense, were the portion owed the gods. While offerings certainly never guaranteed their favour, failure to make sacrifice was bound to provoke the gods’ rage. The risk was one shared by all. No wonder, then, that it should have been the rituals of sacrifice which tended to bring a community most closely together. Men and women, boys and girls, free and slaves: all had their part to play. Festivals, hallowed by time, were hallowed as well by mystery. There were some altars built entirely out of blood; others where no flies ever swarmed around the shambles. The whim of a god was a variable thing, and differed from place to place. In her shrine at Patrae, in southern Greece, Artemis demanded a holocaust of living creatures, birds, and boars, and bears; at Brauron, east of Athens, the robes of women who had died in childbirth; at Sparta, the blood of young men lashed to ribbons. Naturally, with so many different ways of paying the gods what was owed them, and with so many different gods to honour, there was always a nagging anxiety that some might be overlooked. A citizen set the task of collating and inscribing the traditions of Athens discovered, to his horror, a long list of sacrifices that everyone had forgotten. The expense of restoring them, so he calculated, would bankrupt the city.

The grim truth was that the immortals, with the passage of time, had withdrawn from the company of men, and a golden age become an age of iron. Once, back in the distant past, even Zeus, the king of the gods, who ruled from the heights of Mount Olympus, had delighted in joining the banquets of mortals. Increasingly, though, he had chosen to disguise himself, and to descend from his palace not to share in a feast, but to rape. Whether as a shower of gold, or as a white bull, or as a swan with beating wings, he had forced himself on a whole succession of women; and thereby bred a race of heroes. Warriors of incomparable prowess, these men had cleansed mountains and swamps of monsters, ventured to the limits of the world, and fathered entire peoples, ‘the noblest and most righteous of generations’.¹⁸ The doom of the heroes, when it finally arrived, had proven fully worthy of their peerless stature; for they had been culled in the most renowned and terrible of wars. Ten years it had lasted; and at the end of it, when Troy, the greatest city in Asia, had been left a pile of smoking ruins, few were the victors who had not themselves then succumbed to shipwreck, or to murder, or to a battalion of sorrows. Justly could it be said of Zeus, ‘No one is more destructive than you.’¹⁹

The fate of Troy never ceased to haunt the Greeks. Even Xerxes, arriving at the Hellespont, had demanded to be shown its site. The Iliad, the poem that enshrined the memory of those who had fought amid the dust of the Trojan plain, also provided the Greeks with their most popular window onto the workings of the gods, and of their relationship to mortals. Its author, a man whose dates and place of birth were endlessly debated, was himself a figure touched by a certain quality of the divine. Some went so far as to claim that Homer’s father had been a river and his mother a sea-nymph; but even those who accepted that his origins had been more mundanely human stood in awe of his achievements. ‘Best and most godlike of all poets’:²⁰ so he was hailed. Never had there been a poem as vivid with a sense of brightness as the Iliad. The play of light was everywhere in its verses. No woman in it was so insignificant that she could not be described as ‘white-armed’; no man so fleetingly mentioned that he might not be cast as ‘bronze-armoured’. The queen who dressed herself did so by putting on robes that dazzled the eye. The warrior preparing for battle sheathed himself in refulgence, ‘brighter than gleaming fire’.²¹ Beauty was everywhere – and invariably it hinted at violence.

To blaze like a golden flame, and to attain a godlike pitch of strength and valour: this it was, in the Iliad, to be most fully a man. Physical perfection and moral superiority were indissoluble: this was the assumption. On the battlefield at Troy, only the base were ugly. Such men might on occasion merit being mocked and beaten, but they were hardly fitting opponents of a hero. The surest measure of greatness was in a contest worthy of the name: an agon. This was why, in the fighting between Greek and Trojan, the gods themselves would sometimes descend onto the battlefield; not merely to watch the serried lines of men, their shields and armour glinting, as they moved in for the kill, but to fight in the cause of their favourites – and whenever they alighted, they would quiver with anticipation ‘like nervous doves’.²² It was why, as well, sitting in their golden halls, the gods might not hesitate to sacrifice whole cities and peoples to their enmities. When Hera, the queen of the gods, demanded of her husband that he surrender Troy, which he loved above all other cities, to her quenchless hatred, and Zeus demurred, she refused to cede the field.

The three cities that I love best of all

are Argos and Sparta, Mycenae with streets as broad as Troy’s.

Raze them – whenever they stir the hatred in your heart.²³

What mattered was victory, not the cost.

This spirit, this ferocious commitment to being the best, was one in which all aspired to share. In Homer’s poetry, the word for ‘pray’, euchomai, was also a word for ‘boast’. The gods invariably looked with favour upon an agon. Rare was the sanctuary that did not serve as the venue for some competition, be it for dancers, poets or weavers. From athletics to beauty contests, all had their divine sponsors. When Aristophanes wrote The Acharnians he did so as a contender in an agon. The Lenaia was held in honour of Dionysus, a god whose fondness for drunken revelry and female company rendered him a more than appropriate patron for Aristophanes’ brand of comedy. Kings and princes, of the kind who on the plain of Troy had dared to fight even with gods, no longer reigned in Athens. Less than a century before the time of Aristophanes, revolution had come to the city and a radically new form of government, one in which power was entrusted to the people, been enshrined there. In a democracy, the right to contend with one’s peers was no longer the prerogative of aristocrats alone. Indeed, the ethos of gods and heroes might come to seem, when viewed through the prism of a more egalitarian age, more than a little comic. Aristophanes, who was nothing if not competitive himself, did not hesitate to portray them as oafs, or cowards, or liars. In one of his comedies, he even dared to show Dionysus, disguised as a slave, shitting himself as he was threatened with torture, and then being scourged with a whip. The play, like The Acharnians, was awarded first prize.

The tension, though, between ancient song and the values of those who were not heroes, was never simply a matter for laughter. ‘Are there no guidelines set by heaven for mortal men, no path to follow that will please the gods?’²⁴ This question, which the sick, the bereaved or the oppressed could hardly help but ask, had no ready answer. The gods, inscrutable and whimsical as they were, rarely deigned to explain themselves. They certainly never thought to regulate morals. The oracle at Delphi might offer advice, but not ethical instruction. ‘The god does not rule by issuing commands.’²⁵ Such guidelines as mortal men had set for them derived from tradition, not revelation. Law was so dependent on custom as to be indistinguishable from it. With the coming of democracy, though, that assumption was challenged. The right of the people to determine legislation emerged as something fundamental to their authority. ‘For everyone would agree that it is the city’s laws which are chiefly responsible for its prosperity, its democracy and its freedom.’²⁶ Only in the assemblies, where citizens met as equals to deliberate and vote, was there to be found a source of legitimacy appropriate to the rule of Athens by the people. What value liberty otherwise?

Nevertheless, the Athenians could not help but be nagged at by a certain anxiety. To submit themselves to laws of human origin was to run the risk of tyranny: for what was to stop an over-ambitious citizen from framing legislation designed to subvert the democracy? Unsurprisingly, then, the laws most reassuring to the Athenians were those that seemed to sprout from the very soil of their homeland, like the olive trees in the fields beyond Athens, their roots clinging fast to stone. This was why, in an attempt to give legislation a comforting patina of age, it became the habit to attribute its authorship to sages from the city’s distant past. There were many, though, who believed in something infinitely more venerable: indeed, a law so transcendent that it had no origin at all. Some four or five years before the first performance of The Acharnians, another play staged in the theatre of Dionysus gave potent voice to this conviction.* Sophocles, its author, was not, like Aristophanes, a writer of comedies. There were no jokes in Oedipus the King. Tragedy, the genre of which Sophocles was a prize-winning master, took the ancient stories told of gods and heroes, and made play with them to often disorienting effect; but not for laughs. The downfall of Oedipus had been dramatised many times before, but never to such bleak effect as in the version presented by Sophocles. King of Thebes, a city to the north-west of Athens much detested by the Athenians, Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother. That he had committed these crimes unwittingly, having been exposed as a baby, and brought up by foster parents, did not serve to extenuate his offence. His crime was against laws that were timeless, eternal, sacred. ‘Begotten in the clear aether of heaven, fathered by Olympus alone, nothing touched by the mortal is their parent, nor shall oblivion ever lull them to sleep.’²⁷

These laws, unlike those of mortal origin, were not written down: it was precisely their lack of an author which distinguished them as divine. ‘Neither today or yesterday were they born; they are eternal, and no one knows when they first appeared.’²⁸ Quite how, if lacking a written form, they were to be recognised, still more to be distinguished from human legislation, was an issue that did not much concern the average citizen; most Greeks – whose capacity to hold two dissonant points of view at the same time was considerable – were not greatly perturbed by the resulting tensions. But some were; and among them was Sophocles. Oedipus the King was not the only play he wrote about the curse brought down on Thebes by the crimes of his hero. In an earlier tragedy, Antigone, he had portrayed the ultimate doom of Oedipus’ house. The play opened amid the aftermath of civil war. Oedipus’ two sons, fighting over the kingdom, both lay dead before the walls of Thebes. Only one, though, Eteocles, was to be afforded proper burial: for their uncle, Creon, succeeding to the throne, had decreed the second brother, Polynices, to blame for the war, and that as punishment his corpse be left as food for dogs and birds. Even to mourn the traitor, so the new king had pronounced, would mean death. Yet this edict, for all that it had the force of law, did not satisfy everyone that it was legal. Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter, dared to defy her uncle, and give Polynices a symbolic burial by scattering dust on his corpse. Brought before Creon, she scorned his edict. ‘I do not believe your laws, you being only a man, sufficient to overrule divine ordinances – unwritten and unfailing as they are.’²⁹ Sentenced to be walled up alive in a tomb, Antigone hanged herself. Creon’s son, who had been betrothed to her, likewise committed suicide; so too his queen. The ruin was total. The chorus, witness to the tragedy, drew the seeming lesson. ‘The chiefest part of happiness is wisdom – that, and not to insult the gods.’³⁰

Such a resolution, in light of the ruin visited upon the house of Oedipus, seemed barely adequate to the terrifying nature of the divine order that had sanctioned it. Yet it seems unlikely, as the stage was cleared and the spectators rose to leave the theatre, that many were brought to question the glaring contradictions that lay at the heart of how they conceived the gods. That the immortals were held to be simultaneously whimsical and purposeful, amoral and sternly moral, arbitrary and wholly just, did not perturb most Athenians. Leaving the theatre of Dionysus, they would have been able to look up at the brilliant array of monuments on the rock above them, where Athena, the divine virgin whose name their city bore, had her greatest temple. No god better exemplified the paradoxes that characterised how most Greeks comprehended the divine. To enter the Parthenon and to look upon its colossal statue of Athena, fashioned out of gold and ivory, magnificent, imperious and sublime, was to behold a deity who offered up a mirror to the Athenian people themselves. Like them, she was famed both for her wisdom and for her quicksilver moods; like her city, she was mistress both of handicrafts and of ‘the clamorous cry of war’.³¹ Although, in the theatre below her temple, the Athenians were content every year to watch new drafts of the stories told of the gods, and be brought by the spectacle either to laugh or to weep, it did not prompt most of them to smooth out the inconsistencies in their attitudes to the divine. Most preferred not to worry. Most barely paused to reflect that their beliefs might perhaps be a bit inconsistent.

Most – but not all.

Lovers of Wisdom

A century and more after Aristophanes had mocked the pretensions of the Persian king in The Acharnians, a great array of bronze statues began to appear across Athens. By 307 BC, the city had come to be dotted with over three hundred of them, some equestrian, some complete with chariot, but all portraying the same man. Demetrius of Phaleron was a native of the old port of Athens, and from a resolutely working-class background – indeed, according to his enemies, he had once been a slave.* Nevertheless, while still only in his early thirties he had secured a more absolute authority over the city than anyone had wielded since the founding of the democracy. Blessed as a youth with the kind of long-lashed beauty that was liable to make Athenian statesmen go weak at the knees, Demetrius had not hesitated to capitalise on the head-start this advantage gave him. Even as he continued to dye his hair blond and make liberal use of mascara, he had also proven himself, over the course of the decade that he had ruled as the master of Athens, an effective legislator. Not merely a statesman, he was also bred of the city’s intellectual marrow: a philosophos.

‘Lover of wisdom’, the word literally meant. Although it had become a recognisable job only a few decades previously, the origins of philosophy were venerable.† For two centuries and more, while most Greeks had been perfectly content to rely upon Homer for their understanding of the gods, and upon local tradition, and upon what custom defined as the dues of sacrifice, there had been some who were not. To these thinkers, the contradictions between the timeless laws that were presumed to prescribe correct behaviour, and the readiness of the immortals in the Iliad to ignore them, were a scandal. Homer and his fellow poets, so the philosopher Xenophanes complained, ‘have attributed to the gods all kinds of things that among humans are shameful and matters of reproach: theft, adultery, deceit’.³² Were cattle only capable of drawing, he scoffed, they would portray their deities as bulls and cows. Yet this bracing scepticism – although in time it would tempt some thinkers to atheism – did not in the main result in a godless materialism. Quite the opposite. If philosophers disdained to believe in the quarrelsome and intemperate immortals of song, then it was generally so that they might better contemplate what was truly divine about both the universe and themselves. To fathom what underlay matter was also to fathom how humans should properly behave. ‘For all the various laws of men are nourished by the single law – which is divine.’³³

Beyond the buzzing of flies above a sticky altar, beyond the statues of gods smiling or frowning in shadow-cooled temples, beyond all the manifold variety and flux of human custom, there existed a pattern to things. Eternal and perfect, it needed only to be identified. It was not in the lies of poets but in the workings of the cosmos that it was to be located. Nowhere was this conviction more fruitfully explored than in Athens. By the time that Demetrius of Phaleron was born, some time around 350 BC, it had come to be accepted by the city’s most celebrated philosophers that the seemingly irregular motions of the stars in truth obeyed unchanging geometric laws. The universe itself stood revealed as rational – and hence divine. Xenophanes, a century and a half before, had proclaimed the existence of a single ungenerated and morally perfect deity, who guided everything through the sheer power of his consciousness – his nous. Demetrius, studying as a young man, could trace in the movements of the stars the evidence for a subtler, and yet no less chilly conception of the divine. ‘There is something which moves without being moved – something eternal.’³⁴ So wrote Aristotle, a philosopher from the north of Greece who, settling in Athens, had established a school so influential that it continued to flourish even after his death in 322. In the heavens, so Aristotle had taught, beyond the sublunar world to which mortals were confined, bodies were eternal and obedient to unchanging circular orbits; and yet these movements, perfect though they were, depended in turn upon a mover which itself never moved. ‘This, then, is the god – the principle on which heaven and nature depend.’³⁵ Such a deity – off-puttingly metaphysical though it might appear to those without a schooling in philosophy – was properly the object of every mortal’s love. Whether that love was reciprocated, however, appeared exceedingly improbable. Aristotle certainly disdained to say that it might be. The sublunar world, lacking as it did the inerrant order of the stars, and far distant from them, could hardly be expected to concern the unmoving mover.

Nevertheless, the earth as well as the heavens bore witness to its controlling nous. Aristotle, to a degree unprecedented among philosophers, sought to fathom its workings by anatomising whatever he could. Sometimes, whether dissecting a cuttlefish or examining the stomach of an elephant, he would do so literally: for even amid the slipperiness of a dead creature’s intestines there was proof to be found of the eternal structure of the cosmos. To love wisdom, so Aristotle taught, was to train the mind in the skills required to trace its laws. This was why, not content with studying as many different organisms as he could, he also investigated the numerous ways that humanity sought to organise itself: ‘for man alone of animals is capable of deliberation’.³⁶ The goal, as ever with Aristotle, was not merely to compile a catalogue, but to distinguish the lineaments of a cosmic order. The need to achieve this was evident. Only the law that pervaded the universe, and was equivalent to the divine nous, could truly provide a city with proper governance, ‘for to be ruled by men, whose appetites will be something feral, and whose passions – no matter how upstanding they may be – are bound to warp them, is to be ruled by wild beasts’.³⁷

Yet there lurked in this conviction, for any philosopher anxious to act upon it, a familiar puzzle. How, when the affairs of the world so signally failed to mimic the smooth and regular movement of the heavens, was a city best to be ordered? Naturally, there were certain fundamentals upon which everyone could agree. It hardly required an anatomist of Aristotle’s genius to observe the most obvious ways in which society should obey the laws of nature. ‘He used to say, it is reported, that he thanked Fortune for three things: “first, that I am a human and not a beast; second, that I am a man and not a woman; third, that I am a Greek and not a barbarian”.’³⁸ This anecdote, so widely repeated that it was told of several philosophers, was certainly nothing with which Aristotle disagreed. Satisfied as he was that humans were superior to all the other 494 species he had identified over the course of his researches, that man was the master of woman, and that barbarians were fitted by nature to be the slaves of Greeks, he drew the logical – indeed, the only possible – conclusion. ‘That one should command and another obey is not just necessary but expedient.’³⁹

And now, less than a decade after the death of Aristotle, a philosopher ruled over Athens. Demetrius, following the prescriptions of his master, had little patience with the masses. Aristotle, anxious that the reins of state be held only by those with the time and money to be educated in the true nature of things, had wrinkled his nose at the thought of sailors – men more habituated to the rowing bench than to the philosopher’s salon – wielding influence over public affairs. ‘Such a mob should never rank as citizens.’⁴⁰ Demetrius, despite his own upbringing in a port, had enthusiastically followed this prescription. Under his rule, the poor were disenfranchised. Property was defined as the qualification for having a vote. Assemblies were abolished, laws revised, spending cuts imposed. The machinery of government, no longer subject to the chaotic whims of the people, was set on a new and regular course. His labour of reform completed, Demetrius then settled back and devoted his attention to prostitutes and young boys. What else was there for him to do? Athens’ new constitution had not been crafted by a philosopher for nothing. Like the stars in their orbits, revolving with smooth precision around the earth, it was designed to be obedient to the eternal and unchanging laws that governed the cosmos.

A reflection certainly fit to delight philosophers – but not, perhaps, the vast mass of those who had little time for abstract speculation. To them, the deity enshrined by Aristotle at the heart of the universe, heedless as it was of humanity’s cares, remained as impersonal and colourless as it had ever been. A people with the rhythms of the Iliad in their minds still wanted glamour when they looked to the heavens. Sure enough, far beyond the walls of Athens, deeds were being achieved of what seemed to many a god-like order. In 334 BC, Alexander, the king of Macedon, on the northern periphery of Greece, and himself a one-time student of Aristotle, had crossed the Hellespont at the head of an army. By the time he died eleven years later, he had humbled the pride of the Persian monarchy and conquered an empire that stretched all the way to the Indus. The proud claims of Darius a century and a half earlier stood revealed as vain. The greatness of his dynasty’s dominion was not, after all, eternal. Carved up in the wake of Alexander’s death by predatory Macedonian generals, its provinces now funded the ambitions of men who cared nothing for Ahura Mazda. ‘The strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak must suck it up.’⁴¹ This grim parody of the law discerned by philosophers in the workings of the universe – formulated by an Athenian a century previously – was one which Demetrius too, in his heart of hearts, had little choice but to acknowledge. His regime was ultimately dependent, not on the approbation of his fellow citizens but on foreign spears. The true master of Athens was not Demetrius at all, but his sponsor, a Macedonian nobleman named Cassander who, in the wake of Alexander’s death, had seized control of Macedon – and with it the rule of Greece. Philosophers too, no less than women or slaves, might be dependents. Any weakening of Cassander’s position was liable to leave Demetrius as collateral damage.

And so it turned out. In the spring of 307, a large fleet appeared in the waters off Athens. A second Macedonian warlord was making a pitch for Greece. Demetrius, rather than stand and fight, promptly fled to Thebes. The Athenian people, in an ecstasy of delight, celebrated by felling his statues, melting them down, and converting them into chamberpots. Even so, they had hardly been liberated. One man named Demetrius had merely been exchanged for another. Unlike the Athenians’ previous ruler, though, the second Demetrius was at least an authentic hero. Young, dashing and handsome, he had palpable shades of Alexander. Far too restless to linger in Athens, he had no sooner captured the city than he was off again, fighting a series of epic engagements and winning for himself a splendid honorific: ‘the Besieger’. Time would see him outlive Cassander, murder his rival’s son, and make himself king of Macedon. Returning to Athens in 295, the Besieger assembled the people in the theatre of Dionysus, and then appeared to them on the stage, as though he were the hero of a drama – or a god. Five years later, when Demetrius made a further visit to the city, his claim to divinity could hardly have been rendered any more flamboyant. Stars embroidered on his cloak identified him with the sun. Dancers adorned with giant phalluses greeted him as though he were Dionysus. Choirs sang a hymn that proclaimed him a god and saviour. ‘For the other gods are far distant, or have no ears, or do not exist, or ignore us – but you we can see before us. You are not made of stone or wood. No, you are real.’⁴²

Disappointment followed soon after. An unseasonal frost blasted the Athenian harvest; an altar raised to Demetrius was overgrown by hemlock; the Besieger himself, having been chased off the Macedonian throne, died in 283 the prisoner of a rival warlord. Nevertheless, the yearning of the Greeks for what they termed a parousia, the physical presence of a deity, did not fade away. The gods who had manifested themselves on the battlefield at Troy had been absent too long for kings of the order of Demetrius not to impress many as enticing substitutes. The Athenians were far from alone in feeling their smallness before the immensity of the world revealed by Alexander’s conquests. The descendants of his generals ruled from capitals so vast and multi-cultural that Athens, by comparison, could only seem diminished. The largest of them all, a city founded by Alexander on the coast of Egypt and named by him – with his customary modesty – Alexandria, was consciously promoted as the new heartbeat of Greek civilisation. When Demetrius of Phaleron, licking his wounds, looked around for alternative employment, it was to Alexandria that he duly headed. There, sponsored by a Macedonian general who had made himself pharaoh, he helped to establish what would endure for centuries as the greatest repository of learning in the world. For all the scope and scale of its research facilities, though, Alexandria was not solely a monument to the philosophy of Aristotle. Beyond its incomparable library, and the cloisters and gardens where scholars enjoyed a richly subsidised opportunity to catalogue the wisdom of the ages, the city served as a microcosm, not of the chilly perfection of the stars, but of the teeming diversity of the sublunar world. Planted where previously there had been nothing but sand and wheeling sea birds, Alexandria rested on shallow foundations. Its gods as well as its citizens were immigrants. Statues of Apollo and Athena stood in the streets alongside those of strange deities with the heads of crocodiles or rams. It did not take long, though, for new gods, distinctively Alexandrian, to emerge. One in particular, who combined the luxuriant facial hair of Zeus with echoes of Osiris, the Egyptian judge of the dead, had soon become the face of the megalopolis. Serapis – whose vast temple, the Serapeum, would come to rank as the greatest in Alexandria – provided its ruling dynasty with a patron that they avidly promoted as their own. Philosophers, alert to the source of their funding, proved happy to do their bit as well. When Demetrius of Phaleron, miraculously cured after going blind, wrote a hymn of thanks to Serapis, no mention was made of the motionless mover at the heart of the cosmos. Even a disciple of Aristotle might sometimes prefer a god with the personal touch.

Not only that, but he might doubt the very value of his role as a philosopher. ‘It is not intelligence which guides the affairs of mortals, but Fortune.’⁴³ This claim, when made by Demetrius’ teacher back in Athens, had generated much outrage among his peers; but Demetrius himself, over the course of his turbulent life, had been brought to acknowledge its force. Fortune – Tyche, as the Greeks knew her – had revealed herself the most terrible and powerful of deities. ‘Her influence on our lives,’ wrote Demetrius, ‘is as beyond computation as the manifestations of her power are unpredictable.’⁴⁴ Small wonder, in an age that had seen great empires dismembered and kings rise from nothing to rank as gods, that she should have come to be worshipped as the truest mistress of things. Even as philosophers continued their search for the patterns that governed the cosmos, the dread of what might be wrought by Tyche could not help but shadow their efforts. The affairs of the world did not stand still. Demetrius, wondering at the downfall of Persian greatness, had foretold that the Macedonians would in their turn be brought low – and so it came to pass. A new people emerged to claim the rule of the world. In 167 BC, the king of Macedon – a descendant of Demetrius the Besieger, no less – was dragged in chains through the streets of a barbarous capital. Famous cities were put to the torch. Multitudes were sold on the auctioneer’s block. The fate of the Trojans was visited on countless Greeks. Nevertheless, the gods who on the battlefield of Troy had given such free rein to their murderous whims appeared inadequate to explain the sheer jaw-dropping scale of change. ‘For the affairs of Italy and Africa, interwoven with those of Asia and Greece, now tended towards a single end.’⁴⁵ Surely only a deity as great as Tyche could explain the rise to world empire of the Roman republic?

Yet even Tyche, perhaps, could be tamed. In 67 BC, the most celebrated Roman general of his day arrived on Rhodes. Pompey the Great was, as his soubriquet implied, a man whose conceit had never found it much of a challenge to keep pace with his own achievements. Accustomed since a young man to being idolised, he was always delighted to burnish his reputation with a well-devised publicity stunt. So it was, prior to embarking on a campaign to clear the Mediterranean of pirates, that he dropped in on the world’s most famous philosopher. Posidonius, like his guest, had an international reputation. He was a noted athlete; he had dined with barbarian head-hunters; he had calculated the size of the moon. Among the Roman elite, however, he was famed for one particular accomplishment: the equation of their city’s conquests with the order of the cosmos. Five hundred years after Darius had promoted a very similar vision of empire, Posidonius was able to reassure his Roman patrons that their triumph was born of more than chance. Tyche, who had repeatedly granted victory to their legions, and rewarded them with slaves harvested from across the Mediterranean, and brought them riches beyond the avarice of kings, had not bestowed her blessings merely on a whim. Rather, she had done so because of what one of Posidonius’ students, the great Roman orator Cicero, described as ‘the highest reason, ingrafted in nature’.⁴⁶ Rome had become a superpower in obedience of ‘natural law’.

This phrase had not originated with Posidonius. Like so many other eminent philosophers, he had been educated in Athens and his thought bore the stamp of the school that he had attended there. Zeno, its founder, had himself arrived in Athens from Cyprus back in 312, when Demetrius of Phaleron was still in power. He and his followers had come to be known – from Zeno’s habit of teaching students in a painted stoa, or colonnade – as ‘Stoics’. Just as Aristotle had done, they wrestled with the tension between the perfection of a heavenly order governed by mathematical laws and a sublunar realm governed by chance. Their solution was as radical as it was neat: to deny that any such tension existed. Nature, the Stoics argued, was itself divine. Animating the entire universe, God was active reason: the Logos. ‘He is mixed with matter, pervading all of it and so shaping it, structuring it, and making it into the world.’⁴⁷ To live in accordance with nature, therefore, was to live in accordance with God. Male or female, Greek or barbarian, free or slave, all were equally endowed with the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Syneidesis, the Stoics termed this spark of the divine within every mortal: ‘conscience’. ‘Alone of all creatures alive and treading the earth, it is we who bear a likeness to a god.’⁴⁸

It was not merely in the conscience common to humanity, however, that natural law was manifest. If the entire fabric of the cosmos was divine, then it followed that everything was bound to be for the best. To those who lacked this understanding, it might indeed seem that Tyche was a motiveless thing of caprice; but to Stoics, who could recognise in the universe a living thing, in which the explanations for everything that ever happens are bound together like the mesh of an infinite net, cast out deep into the future, none of her works were motiveless. ‘If there only existed a mortal with the capacity to discern the links that join causes together, nothing would ever deceive him. For the man who grasps the causes of future events necessarily grasps what lies in the future.’⁴⁹ So wrote Cicero – whose admiration for Posidonius was such that at one point he even vainly begged the philosopher to write a treatise on his feats as a statesman. The appeal of Stoic teaching to Roman statesmen was hardly difficult to fathom. Their conquests and their rule of the world; the wealth that they had won, and the teeming populations of slaves, uprooted and transported to Italy; the rank that was theirs, and the dignity, and the renown: all had been fated to happen.

It was unsurprising, perhaps, that Rome’s leaders should have come to see their city’s empire as an order destined as universal. Not for the first time, sway of a global scope served to foster a matching conceit. Pompey did not, however, cast himself as an agent of truth and light. The notion of the world as a battleground between good and evil was foreign to him. Iron courage, unbending discipline, mastery of body and soul: these were the qualities that had won the Roman people their rule of the world. The role of Greek philosophers was merely to gild this self-image. ‘Always fight bravely, and be superior to others.’⁵⁰ Such was the admonition with which Posidonius sent Pompey on his way. The tag, though, was not his own. It came from the Iliad. As on the battlefield of Troy, so in the new world order forged by Rome – it was only by putting others in the shade that a man most fully became a man. Setting sail at the head of his war fleet, Pompey could reflect with satisfaction upon the perfect elision of his own ambitions and a beneficent providence. All was for the best. The whole world was there to be set in order. The future belonged to the strong.