The Rise of Athens

Copyright © 2016 by Anthony Everitt

Maps copyright © 2016 by David Lindroth, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Illustration Credits: “Athens Acropolis/Reconstruction”: akg-images/Peter Connolly; “Achilles and Patroclus,” “Plato,” “Hetairas”: Bibi Saint Pol; “Parthenon,” “Athena Relief”: Harrieta 171; “Athena Parthenos”: Dean Dixon; “Themistocles,” “Foundry”: Sailko; “Pericles,” “Athenian Hoplite,” “Discus Thrower”: Marie-Lan Nguyen; “Demosthenes”: Gunnar Bach Pedersen; “Greek and Persian Soldiers”: Alexikoua; “Helmet of Miltiades”: William Neuheisel; “Lion of Chaeronea”: Philipp Pilhofer; “Socrates”: Yair Haklkai; “Aristotle,” “Sacrificed Boar,” “Symposium”: Jastrow; “Baby and Mother”: Marsyas.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Everitt, Anthony, author.

Title: The rise of Athens: the story of the world’s greatest civilization / Anthony Everitt.

Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016014843| ISBN 9780812994582 | ISBN 9780812994599 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Athens (Greece)—History.

Classification: LCC DF285 .E94 2016 | DDC 938/.5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016014843

Ebook ISBN 9780812994599

randomhousebooks.com

Cover design: Anna Bauer Carr

Cover painting: Leo von Klenze, Ideal View of the Acropolis and the Areopagus in Athens, 1846 (Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich/bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, N.Y.)

v4.1

ep

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

List of Maps

Introduction

Three’s Company

Chapter 1: National Hero

Chapter 2: A State of War

Chapter 3: The Persian Mule

The Invention of Democracy

Chapter 4: The Shaking-Off

Chapter 5: Friend of the Poor

Chapter 6: Charioteers of the Soul

Chapter 7: Inventing Democracy

The Persian Threat

Chapter 8: Eastern Raiders

Chapter 9: Fox as Hedgehog

Chapter 10: Invasion

Chapter 11: “The Acts of Idiots”

Chapter 12: “O Divine Salamis”

The Empire Builders

Chapter 13: League of Nations

Chapter 14: The Falling-Out

Chapter 15: The Kindly Ones

Chapter 16: “Crowned with Violets”

The Great War

Chapter 17: The Prisoners on the Island

Chapter 18: The Man Who Knew Nothing

Chapter 19: Downfall

Chapter 20: The End of Democracy?

A Long Farewell

Chapter 21: Sparta’s Turn

Chapter 22: Chaeronea—“Fatal to Liberty”

Chapter 23: Afterword—“A God-Forsaken Hole”

Photo Insert

Glossary

Time Line

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Sources

Bibliography

Notes

By Anthony Everitt

About the Author

PREFACE

As a small child I devoured a Victorian storybook that told tales of Greek and Roman mythology. I read every word, except for the sickly sweet poems that were scattered across its pages.

My paternal grandmother noticed my interest in the ancient world and bought me three Penguin Classics, then a new publishing enterprise. She chose E. V. Rieu’s versions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and a translation of Plato’s Symposium. A farmer’s wife, she was no classicist, and the last of these books came a little early for a prepubertal child, who was mystified by the references to Hellenic homosexuality. But I could not have been given a better sense, smell, flavor, of Greek civilization. Homer and Plato introduced me to a world that was new and ravishing, which, for all the tragedy and the bloodshed, radiated the sunlight and luminous skies of free thought.

For a span of two hundred years in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the ancient Athenians pioneered astonishing advances in almost every field of human endeavor. They invented the only real or complete democracy (the word itself is Greek) that has ever existed outside the classical age. Whereas we merely elect representatives to act on our behalf, citizens then met in assembly and took every important decision themselves. (I need to enter a reservation here: the franchise was limited to adult males and so excluded two large social groups—women and slaves.)

The Athenians believed in reason, and its power to solve the mysteries of the human condition and of nature. They established the concepts and language of philosophy, and raised issues with which today’s thinkers still wrestle. They pioneered the arts of tragedy and comedy, architecture and sculpture. They invented history as the accurate narration and interpretation of past events. With their fellow-Greeks they developed mathematics and the natural sciences.

We must beware of exaggeration. The Athenians were part of a general Hellenic advance and borrowed ideas and technologies from their non-Greek neighbors—for example, the Egyptians and the Persians—in spite of their vaunted scorn for “barbarians.” If only we knew as much about other societies in and around the Eastern Mediterranean in classical times as we do about them, they might not look to be quite so exceptional. We would probably have to make a lesser claim.

Nevertheless, even if the Athenians were not unique, that takes nothing away from the fact of what they did achieve. The greatness of Socrates will not be compromised by the discovery of a mute, inglorious counterpart.

Although Athenians were indeed rationalists, they were also deeply religious. Worship of the Olympian gods was integrated into every corner of daily life. Most of them believed these anthropomorphic divinities to be players in the great game of history quite as much as human beings.

We in the West complacently note that a fully independent Athenian democracy lasted only two hundred years or so. It is well to remember that our own democracies, in their complete form, have yet to last that long.

The mechanics of the Athenian democratic system are relevant to today’s electronic world: the arrival of the computer means that should we so wish we could move back from representative to direct democracy. As in the heyday of classical Athens the people would genuinely be able to take all important decisions. Each citizen would, in effect, be a member of the government. Are we brave enough to take such a rational step?

For all the wonders of ancient Athens, or rather because of them, I faced a fundamental question. How was it that this tiny community of 200,000 souls or so (in other words, no more populous than, say, York in England or Little Rock in Arkansas) managed to give birth to towering geniuses across the range of human endeavor and to create one of the greatest civilizations in history? Indeed, it laid the foundations of our own contemporary intellectual universe.

In my account of the city’s rise and fall I seek to answer this question—or at least to point towards an answer.

—

If we were able to travel back more than two millennia and walk the streets and alleys of ancient Athens, we might very well come across the master playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the sculptor Pheidias; the comedian Aristophanes; and the bad boy of Athenian politics, Alcibiades. Perhaps we overhear a class in ethics that Socrates is giving in a shoe shop on the edge of the agora and meet two of his students, Plato and Xenophon. At a citizens’ assembly we listen to a speech by that greatest of statesmen, Pericles.

This is the Athens I evoke, beginning with its early centuries of kings, tyrants, and aristocrats, moving on to the invention of democracy and the city’s political and cultural heyday, and concluding with its decline into a pleasant “university town.”

The story is much less well known than that of Rome, but it had just as great an influence on posterity, on today’s Western civilization, in a word, on us. The Athenians laid the foundations of the house in which we live today. We ought to remember and celebrate what they built. And what a story it is—crammed with adventure and astounding reversals of fortune.

—

On the game board of Eastern Mediterranean politics from the sixth to the fourth century B.C., there were three main players.

The first of these was Athens. It was a maritime rather than a land power and encouraged trade throughout the known world. Its fleets came to dominate the Aegean Sea. Its citizens bought and sold goods and services, were devoted to culture and the arts, and were inquisitive and open-minded.

Sparta was different in every way, one of the strangest societies in the history of the world. A city-state in the Peloponnese, the peninsula that makes up southern Greece, it was highly disciplined and dedicated to warfare. It was widely recognized as the leading Greek power. Male citizens lived collectively and spent much of their lives in communal messes. Called Spartiates or (to deny them their individuality) Equals, they were forbidden to farm or trade, and were brought up to be professional soldiers. They conquered much of the Peloponnese and enslaved its population as serfs, or helots. These helots served their masters by working their estates for them; they were regularly humiliated and could be put to death at will.

Young Spartiates were trained brutally to be brutal. The aim was to turn them into pitiless fighters, to abjure personal wealth, and to be silent, modest, and polite. Theirs was a self-sufficient community—closed, dour, and totalitarian—with little interest in the outside world.

The third player was the vast Persian Empire on the far side of the Aegean Sea. In the mid-sixth century an Iranian nobleman, Cyrus the Great, conquered and annexed all the great kingdoms of the Middle East. Ultimately Cyrus’s domains stretched from the Balkans to the Indus, from Central Asia to Egypt. He was an absolute monarch.

The prosperous Greek cities along the littoral of Asia Minor fell under his sway. This was a standing insult to the entire Greek world, which saw foreigners as barbarians—that is, barbaroi or people who make noises sounding like “bar bar” instead of speaking proper Greek. Here the tectonic rock layers of two cultures met and ground against each other.

Conflict was inevitable. As in a complicated ballet, these dancers would entwine their bodies, exchanging friends and enemies, moving in turn from war to peace and to war again.

The three great powers enjoyed golden zeniths, but all three ended up facing defeat and disaster. Their progress conveys all the thrills of a historical roller-coaster ride.

—

I write narrative history. I never reveal future outcomes or endings during the telling, for I want readers to have no better idea of what is to happen next than those who lived through the events I describe. If they are unfamiliar with ancient history, they are in for a lively time.

Some of the stories in the ancient sources have a suspiciously fictional ring, or so picky scholars claim. Solon’s encounter with King Croesus of Lydia (see this page) is a good example. We cannot always say at this distance of time whether they are true or false. But, like the myths and legends, they are good stories and even if some of them have been embellished they cast a bright light on how Greeks saw themselves. So I happily retell them.

I do my best to sketch the Athenian record in the fields of philosophy and the arts, but a sketch is all I have space for. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are represented by masterpieces, including The Oresteia, Antigone, and The Trojan Women, and the ideas of Plato and Aristotle are only adumbrated. Lysistrata speaks up for Aristophanes. But I hope to have done enough to illustrate their greatness.

Ancient historians are very variable in quality, with part of the fifth century being much more fully covered than the fourth. The work of many writers has been wholly or partly lost thanks to the corrosive passage of time. Thucydides is the greatest writer of history in history. In fact, he is so good that we are trapped inside his version of events. Lesser authors give themselves away, offer some purchase for the modern scholar, and allow corrections and new interpretations. What Thucydides does not write about is an empty space that usually we cannot fill, and what he does write about is usually irrefutable.

There are topics that even the finest chroniclers, such as Thucydides, do not touch except tangentially—for example, economics and social life. Also we know far more about Athens than any other of the many city-states and their Mediterranean colonies that made up ancient Greece. One way or another, we have less to say than we would like about wider developments.

There are many matters on which today’s experts disagree. In general, I touch on their debates only in the Endnotes and leave the main narrative clean of scholarly controversy.

How should I spell the names of people and places? In Western Europe we were first introduced to the literature and history of ancient Greece via the Romans and their language, Latin. The convention was established of using Latinate spelling for Hellenic proper nouns. It was only in the Renaissance that most Europeans came into direct contact with Greek as a language, and by then the practice was too ingrained to change.

So most of us speak of Achilles and not Achilleus, Alcibiades and not Alkibiades, Plato and not Platon. I have decided to keep to these Roman forms because of their familiarity; readers would be puzzled and daunted by a strictly accurate transliteration from the Greek to the European alphabet. A few esoteric technical terms are exempted from this rule.

Also some very famous names have anglicized versions that most people use and I prefer—for example, Athens to Athenai (Greek) or Athenae (Latin), Corinth (English) to Korinthos (Greek) or Corinthus (Latin), and Sparta (Latin) to Sparte (Greek). I borrow the Greco-Latin versions of foreign and mostly Persian names: so I refer to Astyages, the Median king, rather than Ishtumegu. Lesser-known places in the Greek world take their original form. In sum, every rule has an exception and I have followed my taste.

In proper names ending with “e,” the “e” is pronounced in the English way as “ee” (in Greek it would be “ay” as in hay); and in those ending with “es” as “ees.”

It is hard to be precise about the value of money, because the relative worth of different products varies from time to time and from economy to economy. The principal units of the Athenian currency were

6 obols = 1 drachma

100 drachmas = 1 mina

60 minas = 1 talent

One drachma was a day’s pay for a foot soldier or a skilled worker in the fifth and fourth centuries. From 425 B.C. a juror received from the state a daily allowance of half a drachma or three obols, just enough to maintain a family of three at a basic level of subsistence. So the payment was adequate rather than extravagant. A talent was a unit of weight and equaled twenty-six kilograms; it also signified the monetary value of twenty-six kilograms of silver. The two hundred rowers who crewed a trireme during the Peloponnesian War were paid a talent for one month’s worth of work.

An obol was a small silver coin. It was placed in a dead man’s mouth so that he had the wherewithal to pay the ferryman Charon for passage across the river Acheron to the underworld.

I omit the term B.C. (or A.D.) with dates except in the rare cases where there might otherwise be a misunderstanding.

—

In many respects we can recognize the people of Athens; this is no great surprise, for they pioneered so many of the fields of knowledge that are current and alive today. But in so many ways they inhabited a different moral and technological universe. Their motto was “know yourself”; they simply would not have understood the Christian command to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

If I have helped to bridge the gap between ourselves and our Hellenic forebears and conveyed a little of my enthusiasm for the founders of our civilization, I shall be well pleased.

Detail left

Detail right

LIST OF MAPS

The Aegean Basin

Ancient Athens

The Plain of Marathon

The Battle of Salamis

Athens, Piraeus, and the Long Walls

The Battle of Chaeronea

INTRODUCTION

The young king from foreign and uncivilized Macedon forced the great city of Athens into submission and enslaved the whole of Hellas, together with its quarrelsome horde of city-states. This was not because he seriously disliked the Greeks. Far from it. He was deeply impressed by their military and cultural achievements. In fact, he longed to be accepted as a full and complete member of the Hellenic club.

He was Alexander the Great, son of Philip, and it was the year 334.

But what was the nature of Greekness and how did one get hold of it? The simplest way of answering the question was to study and digest the epic poem the Iliad. Set in a remote past, it concerned the ten-year siege of Troy, a city in Phrygia, by a Greek army.

Every Athenian, indeed every Greek, boy learned of heroes such as Achilles and Agamemnon, Hector and Odysseus, who fought in the war, and did his best to emulate them. Their deeds embodied Greekness. Alexander cast himself as the new Achilles, as the bravest Hellene of them all.

He first encountered the Iliad as a child and it guided his life. He took a copy with him on his travels and when a finely made casket was presented to him that had previously belonged to the Persian Great King he asked his friends what precious object he should keep inside it. All kinds of suggestions were made, but Alexander said firmly that he would deposit his Iliad there for safekeeping and for splendor.

Hellenes at home will have laughed at the royal upstart’s pretensions, but they were just as deeply indebted as Alexander was to the world that Homer conjured to life. It was here that they found their moral, personal, social, and political attitudes.

—

In fact, it was a lost world, even when the Iliad was composed sometime towards the end of the eighth century. The poem was a long written text, but inspired by compositions learned by heart and spoken or sung at important social occasions. Homer may or may not have existed, we simply don’t know. He could have been one man, a collective, or even a woman. But anyone reading the poem will feel that he has been in the presence of a controlling mind, whatever its name and nature. (Its companion piece, the Odyssey, which describes the adventures of Odysseus, king of a small island off western Greece, and his ten-year journey home from Troy, may have been another author’s work.)

Did the Trojan War take place? We do not know. But if it or something like it was a historical event, it can be dated towards the end of the second millennium B.C. This marked the high point of a Bronze Age civilization that dominated Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. We call it Mycenaean after its main city Mycenae in the northeastern Peloponnese. It was its kings and warriors who sailed across the Aegean Sea and sacked Troy.

Not many years after this victory mysterious invaders put a violent end to the Mycenean civilization. It is uncertain who they were, but they ushered in a poorly understood period that modern scholars have called a Dark Age. Centuries of economic and social collapse followed. This meant that Homer was evoking a way of life only dimly remembered. The Iliad and the Odyssey are fictions, but in one crucial sense they embody an essential historical truth, in that they showed many generations of Greeks who they were and what values to live by.

Homer exercised an almost biblical authority. Here, in brief, is the story that he tells.

—

The siege of Troy lasted for a decade, but the events in the Iliad cover only a period of fifty-four days in the ninth year and most of the action takes place within four full days. But this close shot captures the glory and the tragedy of slaughter that seems to have no end.

Warfare in Homer is, in essence, a succession of duels between princes and kings; they ride in chariots and throw spears at their opponents. The common people mill about in the background. Achilles, a handsome, lordly, and invincible fighter, occupies the heart of the story. He is by far the best soldier among the Greeks, but he has a terrible temper. He falls out with his commander-in-chief, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, over two pretty girls. The first is Chryseis, the daughter of a local priest dedicated to the archer god Apollo, in appearance a handsome youth eternally in his late teens. Captured by the Greeks on a raid, she is donated as human booty to Agamemnon. Her father complains to the god and pleads for redress.

Then a plague strikes the expeditionary force. The soldiers are crowded into huts on a beach not far from the city of Troy a few miles inland. Their ships are drawn up on the sand beside them. Many die. A soothsayer announces that the epidemic is the god’s punishment for Chryseis’s capture and advises that she be returned to her father at once.

The Hellenic universe was very different from our own. Homer’s men and women live simultaneously in what could be called parallel universes. In one of them things are as they seem. A plague is a plague. But in the second the gods are in charge. On this occasion Apollo comes down in fury on the camp. His arrows clanged in their quiver.

“His descent was like nightfall,” says the poet. “He sat down opposite the ships and shot an arrow, with a dreadful twang from his silver bow. He attacked the mules and the nimble dogs. Then he aimed sharp arrows at the men, and struck again and again. Day and night innumerable fires consumed the dead.”

So through one door of perception an event has a rational explanation, through another, supernatural. The Greeks believed that both are true at one and the same time.

—

The chief deities in the Hellenic pantheon are a squabbling family of anthropomorphic immortals. They live in a palace on the peak of Mount Olympus in northern Greece. They enjoy tricks and practical jokes and their “unquenchable laughter” echoes around the mountaintops. Their loves and hates make an entertaining soap opera, but, as we have seen, they are not funny at all when they turn their attention to human beings.

Head of the family is Zeus, the Thunderer and Cloud Compeller—and a henpecked husband. His wife, Hera, is always plotting to obstruct his plans. Then there is the warrior Athena, protectress of Athens. She is the goddess of wisdom and patron of the arts and crafts. She calls her father “an obstinate old sinner, always interfering with my plans.” Both goddesses loathe the Trojans and work tirelessly for their downfall.

This is because they and the goddess of love, Aphrodite, competed long ago for a golden apple, which was to be awarded to the most beautiful of the three. A young Trojan prince, Paris, was the judge and he gave the prize to Aphrodite. If he chose her, she promised him the most beautiful woman in the world for his paramour.

Her name is Helen and, inconveniently, she is already spoken for. She is the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta in southern Greece. Paris pays her a visit and they elope to Troy. It is this offense that sets off the war.

These gods are not models of virtue and do not expect invariable virtue from their worshippers; rather, each of them stands for emotions or principles or skills that reflect and magnify those of human beings.

The Greeks were deeply religious, not so much to learn the rules of morality as to keep on the good side of the gods and to find out what their intentions were. They achieved this by sacrificing animals in their honor and reading their entrails, and by consulting soothsayers, prophecy books, and oracles before any important decision was taken. They held festivals and conducted ceremonies in their honor. They peppered the countryside with temples, shrines, groves, and sacred caves in honor of one deity or another. They did not trouble themselves over theological dogma. Religion was about ritual rather than belief.

—

Agamemnon calls a general assembly of the army and his fellow-kings and princes. He agrees to return Chryseis to her father and Apollo stops shooting. The plague ends. The king then makes a bad mistake. To make up his loss, he confiscates Briseis, another attractive female captive, who has been allocated to Achilles. Enraged, the warrior withdraws from the war and sulks in his hut.

He broods over his fate. At his birth destiny gave him the alternatives of a short but glorious life on the field of battle or a long but undistinguished one at home. It is no choice. Since his birth, his mother, a sea goddess called Thetis, has tried every trick to save him from an early death. When he was a boy, she dressed him in girl’s clothes and had him brought up among girls. But the unexpected pregnancy of a fellow-pupil revealed his true gender.

Like most Greeks, the adult Achilles recognizes the brevity of life and, while he believes that death is not the end, has few hopes of happiness in the underworld where the spirits of human beings pass a dim and futile eternity.

On his long return journey home after the war is over, the crafty Odysseus is given the rare privilege of visiting the underworld while still alive. He encounters the ghost of Achilles, who is as angry as he used to be in the light of the sun. He complains about the afterlife:

Put me on earth again, and I would rather be a serf in the house of some landless man, with little enough for himself to live on, than king of all these dead men that have done with life. But enough.

A few years earlier, as the still-living Achilles sits idly on the beach in front of Troy, he is aware of what lies in store for him. He is supremely competitive, a characteristic he shares with future generations of Greeks who will be as contentious as he is. Homer expresses the general attitude concisely, when he puts these words in the mouth of a warrior: “Let your motto be, I lead. Strive to be best.” However, for the time being Achilles is letting his aggression rust.

The Trojans, led by Prince Hector, the king of Troy’s eldest son and their match for Achilles, begin to gain the upper hand in battles on the plain that lies between the city and the sea. The Greeks (or Achaeans, as they were called in the poem) build a great defensive wall to protect their ships and the encampment on the beach. Homer describes the fighting in great, gory detail. He achieves two simultaneous and contradictory effects. War is glorious and, at the same time, a great evil.

A ferocious Greek warrior called Aias runs amok. Homer, who has a wonderful talent for comparing the high deeds of kings and princes to the low experiences of ordinary life, compares Aias to a “donkey who gets the better of the boys in charge of him; he turns into a field they are passing and helps himself to the standing crop.” He adds that the animal pays no attention to the sticks that are broken on his back until he has eaten his fill.

In another telling image, the goddess Athena implants in the breast of King Menelaus “the daring of a fly, which is so fond of human blood that it returns to the attack however often a man may brush it from his face.”

But for every winner in war there is a loser. The poet gives each of the unnumbered fallen a touching epitaph. To select one killing from many, an archer fires an arrow into the chest of a young Trojan. In a moving, pitch-perfect simile, Homer writes: “Weighed down by his helmet, Gorgythion’s head dropped to one side, like the lolling head of a garden poppy, weighed down by its seed and the showers of spring.”

Zeus sits on a nearby mountaintop, thundering balefully and sending down flashes of lightning, as he surveys the scene. He never shifts his “bright eyes” from the fighting.

—

Things are looking so bad for the Greeks that Patroclus, who is Achilles’ best friend (and, according to some, older lover), begs him to let him join the fighting and save the day. Achilles reluctantly agrees and lends Patroclus his famous armor.

There is something almost psychopathic in the nature of Achilles. Talking with his friend, he imagines them alone, alive and triumphant over all the world. “How happy I should be if not a single Trojan got away alive, not one, and not a Greek either; and if we two survived the massacre how happy I would be to pull down Troy’s holy diadem of towers single-handed!”

When Patroclus enters the battle everyone mistakes him for Achilles, because of the armor he is wearing. He dispatches many of the enemy, but he does not know when to stop. He comes up against Hector, a better fighter, who kills him and strips him of Achilles’ armor. After a fierce struggle, the Greeks rescue his corpse.

Achilles is devastated. Heroes in Homer express their feelings, and he cannot stop crying. One night he dreams of Patroclus and holds out his arms to embrace him. In vain. The vision

vanished like a wisp of smoke and went gibbering underground. Achilles leapt up in amazement. He beat his hands together and in his desolation cried: “Ah then, it is true that something of us does survive…but with no intellect at all, only the ghost and semblance of a man.”

Determined on revenge, Achilles makes up his quarrel with Agamemnon and goes out once more to fight the Trojans. He chases after Hector, who loses his nerve and runs away. Eventually the breathless Trojan halts and faces his unforgiving foe.

The gods watch in silence. Zeus confesses to a fondness for Hector and asks the others to agree to spare his life. “What are you saying?” Athena bursts out, adding that his doom has long been settled. “But do as you please. Only don’t expect the rest of us to applaud.” Zeus yields the point.

Achilles dispatches Hector. He then maltreats his body, which he intends to throw to his dogs. But a proper burial is an essential passport to the underworld and after military defeats Greeks invariably negotiate burial rights for their fallen.

Zeus insists on dignity for the dead man. He has a message sent to the brutal victor: Hector is to be given his full funeral rites. The old king of Troy, Priam, secretly travels across the windy plain and presents himself to Achilles, to whom he offers rich presents. For once the Greek warrior behaves nobly. He recognizes Priam’s grief for his son as being of the same depth and character as his own father’s love and misery for himself, seeing that he will not return home for burial.

The two mourners share supper. This is important, for it signifies that Achilles has recognized Priam as his guest, a sacrosanct relationship sealed with gifts. In return for those he brought, the king has received Hector’s body. They weep together in shared grief. Achilles says: “We men are wretched things, and the gods, who have no cares themselves, have woven sorrow into the very pattern of our lives.” Alongside their ruthless rivalries, their sociopathically sunny egoism, Greeks understand very well the tragedy of the human condition. Life is ephemeral and filled with pain.

Homer writes elsewhere, in justly famous lines:

Men in their generations are like the leaves of the trees. The wind blows and one year’s leaves are scattered on the ground, but the trees burst into bud and put on fresh ones when the spring comes round. In the same way one generation flourishes and another nears its end.

After a night’s sleep, Priam and Achilles part and go their ways. Both know what destiny has in store for them. The king buries his son. Here the Iliad comes to an end, but what has been predicted comes to pass. Soon Achilles is shot dead by an arrow from Paris’s bow. He does not live to take part in the fall of Troy, which is brought about by cunning rather than courage.

The Greeks pretend to abandon the siege and sail away. They leave behind a huge wooden horse, as an offering to the gods. The foolish Trojans drag it inside the city and celebrate the end of the war. But, of course, the horse contains a body of armed men. In the middle of the night they emerge and let the Greek army into the city. Troy falls and is destroyed. Priam is slaughtered by the son of Achilles.

Helen goes back to Sparta.

—

Homer hints broadly that the Trojan War achieved little. Too many brave men have died. And the argumentative family on Olympus moves on to other topics. Deities who took different sides of the argument, the sea god Poseidon and Apollo, decide to destroy the great defensive wall the Greeks erected around their ships. It had been built without the mandate of heaven.

Now that Troy has gone and “all the best of the Trojans were dead, and many of the Greeks too, though some were left,” all that remains is this massive fortification. The gods turn against it the united waters of all the rivers in the area. Zeus the sky god lends a hand by raining continuously. After nine days the wall and its foundations have been washed out to sea. Poseidon then covers the wide beach again with sand and turns the rivers back to their old courses.

It is as if nothing had ever happened on that bloodstained shore. Had Helen been worth it? What had Hector, Achilles, and all the others really died for? To most Greeks the answer was obvious. Whatever their pointless ostensible purpose, brave deeds conferred glory in and for themselves. No other rationale was needed. From a vantage point in the underworld valor brought no practical benefits.

Virtue was its own regard, one might say.

—

So now through the fog of time we discern the shape of Greekness. The very fact of an expedition journeying a long distance by water is evidence of the importance of seafaring to a people inhabiting a rocky landscape with few roads. Hellenes shared a language, with mutually intelligible dialects, and gods. They believed profoundly in honor or personal status (timē). They were committed to fairness and the rule of law. They saw the cruelty and waste of war, but celebrated bravery. They recognized the harm done by rashness, but felt at the same time that there was something splendid about it.

We cannot call a society headed by impulsive rulers such as Agamemnon or Achilles democratic, but these were no despots. They had to consult public opinion and called regular mass meetings to advise on matters of importance, a tradition maintained in later centuries.

They were religious without doctrine; their family of unpredictable deities felt the same “human” passions as they did. What we see as myths and legends were real to the Greeks; their gods truly existed and heroes from the remote past were historical figures.

There was no sacred code handed down for mortals to follow. They could only hope to control the Olympians through prayer and sacrifice. There was a limit, though, to what could be done, for the course of men’s and women’s lives was foredoomed by the Fates, three old crones who spun the future from the threads of human lives.

The competitive pursuit of excellence was an essential attribute of a fine man. But, as Homer shows, this disputatious rivalry had its dark side and in later centuries was reflected in poisonous quarrels that disfigured the many independent city-states that made up Hellas. The Greeks made a point of disagreeing with their neighbors, a habit that led ultimately to their downfall.

Despite the flow of blood that is shed in the pages of the Iliad, the underlying atmosphere is optimistic. This is partly due to Homer’s sense of humor; as we shall see, comedy and laughter are to infuse Athenian, if not Greek, culture. Also, in the Iliad, man-made objects—ships or tools or furniture—are always found to be well made. When mentioning by name one of his characters, Homer likes to add a descriptive phrase or adjective. So Paris is “godlike” even when he is being cowardly. These epithets describe a man’s true character, especially when he is not living up to it.

If Hellenes were united on anything it was the abiding enmity between them and the successors of Troy. From about the middle of the sixth century these were the Great Kings who founded and maintained the Persian Empire, stretching at its greatest extent from Egypt and Anatolia to the frontier of India. These decadent orientals, as they regarded them, were the bogeymen of the Hellenic world.

In a word, Greece was not a place, as today’s nation-state in the Balkans is, but an idea. And wherever he lived a Greek was someone who spoke the same tongue—and knew his Homer.

—

Although the great philosopher Aristotle tutored him in the latest thinking about the world, Alexander the Great felt himself to be a throwback. He was a Homeric warrior, a latter-day Achilles, a man of action rather than of intellect. It is ironic that this lover of all things Greek brought to a violent end the liberties of the civilization he so admired and halted the great democratic experiment that the city of Athens had pioneered.

It is the extraordinary story of that experiment which the following pages tell. First of all, we must meet the three leading powers in the Eastern Mediterranean, Athens itself, Sparta, and the empire of Persia, for it was their interwoven rivalries and opposing values that led, one after another, to their triumphs—and to their ruin.

1

National Hero

The geography of their homeland helped mold the collective character of the ancient Athenians and of all the other sporadic communities that shared the Greek peninsula. Rocky, bare mountains are interspersed with numerous, small, fertile plains. But much of the soil is dry and stony, and more suitable for olive trees than fields of wheat. Travel by land between the meager centers of habitation was laborious.

Athens was the chief city of Attica, a triangular tract of level ground about nine hundred square miles in extent. This plain is punctuated by hills and surrounded by mountains on two sides and on a third by the sea. Mount Hymettus was famous for its honey, and still is, and Pentelicon for its honey-colored marble, from which it built its temples to the gods. Rich lead and silver deposits at Laurium in the southeast were found and mined. Summers are hot and dry and heavy outbursts of rain mark the fall.

The poverty of the land of Greece brought with it three consequences. It bred a fierce individualism, a cantankerous refusal to agree with those living on the other side of mountains; states were many and tiny and Athens was one of the largest. Unable to feed their growing numbers, the Athenians became seafarers, although sailing was dangerous in the windy winters. Around the eighth century they joined other Greek statelets in exporting surplus citizens to new settlements around the Mediterranean littoral and importing grain from the Black Sea and elsewhere in growing quantities.

The citadel of Athens was the Acropolis, or “high city,” an almost impregnable outcrop that rises one hundred and fifty meters above sea level. There is evidence of human occupation as early as 5,000 B.C., but we hear little of the place during the age of the Mycenaean monarchs.

The Athenians held that they belonged to an ethnic group called the Ionians, who had always lived in Greece (the word derives from Ion, a legendary king of Athens). Not long after the traditional date of the fall of Troy towards the end of the second millennium, another group called the Dorians, Greek speakers but with their own cultural customs and dialect, came down from the north and settled in Greece. Under pressure from these newcomers, some Ionians emigrated to Asia Minor where they settled and prospered. Athens argued that she was “the eldest land of Ionia” and felt some ongoing responsibility for her cousins overseas.

How many of these beliefs are true cannot now be told and we have no choice but to open our narrative with instructive fiction rather than irretrievable fact.

—

The future of Athens was determined by a goddess, Pallas Athena, and by a king called Theseus, whose legendary character traits express, for good or ill, Athenian identity.

It was as well not to cross Athena’s path. From the moment of her birth she emanated power. Her father, Zeus, had sex with Metis, the divine personification of Wisdom, but then had second thoughts. Fearing that their child would grow up to be more intelligent than he was himself, he opened his mouth wide and swallowed Metis up. Nine months later he experienced a raging—literally, it would turn out, a splitting—migraine. He ordered his son Hephaestus, god of metalwork, to strike his head with an ax, hoping that this would relieve the pain. The divine blacksmith obeyed and out jumped Athena from the crack in his skull, adult and fully armed.

She was a perpetual virgin and tomboy. As goddess of war, she could vanquish in combat her half brother Ares (the Roman Mars), lord of battles who delighted in the slaughter of men and the sack of towns. However, Athena took no pleasure in fighting and preferred to settle disputes by discussion and mediation. She patronized crafts and the making of clothes.

She is unique among the Olympians in having a city named after her. She regarded Athens as hers following a quarrel with the sea god and brother of Zeus, Poseidon. As a mark of possession, he thrust his trident into the Acropolis and a spring of seawater sprang out from the rock (it still flows today). Later, Athena laid her own claim in a more peaceful manner, by planting the first olive tree alongside the spring. A furious Poseidon challenged her to a duel, but Zeus insisted on peaceful arbitration. A court of Olympian gods awarded the prize to Athena. Poseidon resentfully sent a tsunami to flood Attica, so she took up residence in the city and kept it under watchful guard.

From early times the Athenians welcomed the goddess with open arms. She was foster mother to one of the first kings, the semi-divine Erechtheus. From his vantage point in the eighth century, Homer celebrated

the Athenians from their splendid citadel in the realm of the magnanimous Erechtheus, a child of the fruitful Earth who was brought up by Athena Daughter of Zeus and established by her in her own rich shrine, where bulls and rams are offered to him yearly in due season by Athenian youths.

The Athenians learned from their tutelary goddess that military force was an invaluable arm of policy, but that it should be tempered by metis, wisdom or, in its less complete sense, ingenuity and craftiness.

—

Aegeus, legendary king of Athens during the Mycenaean age, was childless, but on his travels he enjoyed a one-night stand with an attractive princess. He suspected, or perhaps just hoped, that he had made her pregnant, so he hid a sword and a pair of sandals under a rock. Before leaving, he told the woman that if she gave birth to a son she should show him where they were when he grew up, and tell him to take them with him to Athens.

A baby duly arrived, whom she named Theseus. When a young adult he learned about the tokens from his mother, who gave him Aegeus’s message. He did as he was told and lifted up the rock with ease. He refused to take ship to Athens, although it was the safest method of travel. Instead, looking for adventure, he set off by land to Athens. En route he sought out and destroyed a number of dangerous opponents. The first of them wielded a large club, which Theseus carried about with him ever afterwards, rather as Heracles, whom he greatly admired, invariably wore the skin of a lion he had killed. Next came Sinis the Pine-bender, who tied travelers to two pines he had bent down to the ground; he then let them go, tearing the victims apart.

Feeling randy, Theseus chased after Sinis’s pretty little daughter, who had very sensibly run away. Plutarch reports that he

looked for her high and low, but she had disappeared into a place which was overgrown with shrubs and rushes and wild asparagus. The girl in her childish innocence was imploring the plants to hide her; and promising that if they saved her, she would never trample them down or burn them. Theseus called her and gave her his word that he would not harm her but treat her with respect—and she came out.

Once he had caught her, he took her to his bed. After she had borne him a son, he married her off to some nonentity. Throughout his life Theseus was a sexual predator.

After this diversion he resumed his Heraclean labors. Next on his list was the terrifying Crommyonian sow; some said she was not a pig but a depraved murderess who was “nicknamed the Sow because of her life and habits.” Either way, Theseus killed her. He then dispatched the robber Sciron. His modus operandi had been to stick out his feet to passersby on a narrow cliff path and to insist they wash them. While they were doing so he tipped them into the sea. Of other challengers the most alarming was Procrustes, who forced travelers to fit onto his iron bed; if they were too tall he cut off their legs and if too short stretched them as on a rack until they were the right size.

—

At long last Theseus made it to Athens. He was unknown to anyone there. His tunic was unusually long and touched his feet. His hair was plaited and, according to an ancient commentator, “nice-looking.” He passed a temple construction site and the builders jeered at him. What, they bantered, was a marriageable girl doing wandering about on her own? Theseus said nothing, but took the oxen from the men’s cart and flung them over the temple’s half-built roof. He was not a man to suffer fools gladly.

Strangers in ancient Greece were routinely given a hospitable welcome and the king offered Theseus a meal in his palace on the Acropolis. His wife, the celebrated witch Medea—back from the Black Sea with the Argonauts—knew who Theseus was. Fearful that her position would be threatened by the arrival of a son, she persuaded the aged and infirm Aegeus to have this potentially troublesome foreign guest poisoned at dinner.

For his part the young man thought it best to reveal his identity to his father tactfully; when the meat was served he drew his sword as if to cut off a piece, hoping that the king would recognize it. Aegeus saw the weapon and immediately acknowledged his son’s identity. We may assume that the food was removed. After beating off some competitors for the succession to the throne, Theseus became heir apparent. Medea left town.

—

Not long afterwards collectors of human tribute arrived from Crete. Largest of the Greek islands, it was the center of a great maritime civilization that flourished from about 2,700 to the fifteenth century. Modern archaeologists have called it Minoan after the mythical king of Crete, Minos.

His son died a mysterious but violent death while on a visit to Athens, possibly at the hands of Aegeus. Minos was enraged with grief. He fought and won a war of revenge against Athens and in compensation for his loss demanded the handover every nine years of seven young men and seven young women, chosen by lot. They were sent to Crete and imprisoned in a labyrinth where a monster half man and half bull lived, called the Minotaur. He was the product of an extramarital liaison between Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, and a white bull with whom she had become infatuated. He killed all the captives.

Athenian public opinion was highly critical of Theseus. Here was the heir to the throne, a bastard and a foreigner, coming off scot-free, while ordinary people’s legitimate children were being sent to a dreadful fate. Theseus took the point and volunteered to be a member of the tribute group and destroy the Minotaur.

Being of a tricky frame of mind, he swapped two of the girls for a couple of pretty (but manly) boys; he softened their skins by warm baths, kept them out of the sun, got them to use makeup, gave them frocks, and trained them to walk in a feminine manner (we shall see later that this was not the only time a Greek used drag as a deadly ruse).

On previous occasions the ship carrying the captives had shown a black sail, as a sign of mourning. But Theseus promised that he would give the captain another sail, a white one, for him to hoist on the return voyage as a sign that he had killed the Minotaur.

Minos’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and showed him how to master the intricacies of the labyrinth. She gave him a ball of string, which he unwound as he walked along, thus enabling him to find his way back. As he had vowed, he put the Minotaur to death and cut off its head.

Theseus and the other boys and girls escaped from Crete. The now pregnant Ariadne and her sister came along with them, but they were dumped on the island of Naxos. Ariadne hanged herself in despair (or, according to another account, married on the rebound the wine god Dionysus, who was passing by).

As they approached Attica, Theseus and the ship’s captain forgot to change the sails. When Aegeus saw the boat come into harbor sporting its black flag, he committed suicide by flinging himself off the Acropolis.

As we have seen, Theseus had a cheating, sometimes violent way with women. He and his best friend, a Thessalian called Pirithous, kidnapped Helen, later to be “of Troy.” He was fifty years old and she a prepubescent girl; he said he meant to keep her until she was old enough to marry and have sex with. But she was rescued and the plan failed.

Theseus joined in a war with the Amazons, a race of aggressive women who forswore men. Their queen, Hippolyta, was tricked into boarding Theseus’s ship; he took her back to Athens where he married her. However, he soon put her away in favor of Ariadne’s little sister, Phaedra.

Pirithous had the not-so-clever idea of going down into the underworld and kidnapping the Queen of the Dead, Persephone. He took Theseus along with him and the pair wandered around the outskirts of Tartarus, a deep abyss where the wicked are endlessly tortured. They were caught and led away to eternal punishment by the Furies, ancient goddesses of vengeance, who had snakes in their hair and whips in their hands. Both men were placed on the Chair of Amnesia; they grew into it and were held fast by coiled serpents. Here they were to live or partly live forever.

By a stroke of luck Heracles happened to be visiting. He was engaged on the last of his Labors, the capture of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to the underworld. He persuaded Persephone to let bygones be bygones and Theseus was restored to the upper air. His comrade remained unforgiven and, for all we know, is still suffering.

On his return to Athens, the family atmosphere in the palace on the Acropolis became strained when Phaedra fell incestuously in love with Hippolytus, Theseus’s son by Hippolyta. He rejected her advances. False evidence from Phaedra led the angry king to cause his son’s death at the hands of the sea god Poseidon. She then killed herself out of guilt.

—

The Athenians were sure that Theseus was a historical figure. A thirty-oared galley, said to be the ship on which he had sailed to and from Crete, was preserved and was still on public display in the fourth century. Its old timbers were replaced with new wood as they rotted away. This gave philosophers a handy conundrum for their pupils. When all the timbers had been exchanged, was the ship the same ship or a different one?

In fact, of course, Theseus was fictional and probably originated as a local divinity in northern Attica. However, there was one aspect of his achievement that did actually take place, even if the date is unknown and the personal credit must go to some other leader (or leaders) whose names have been lost. It was the first step that Athens took towards greatness.

Athens with its near-impregnable citadel was the largest of numerous independent small towns and villages in Attica. Plutarch reports that Theseus

conceived a wonderful and far-reaching plan, which was nothing less than to concentrate the inhabitants of Attica into a single urban area. In this way he transformed them into one community belonging to one city; until then they had been scattered about, so that it was difficult to bring them together in the common interest.

He campaigned vigorously village by village and won the support of the poor. To the more influential classes, he proposed that a limited form of democracy should be established. All citizens were to be on an equal footing, although the government and the conduct of religious rites would be placed (or remain) in the hands of the landed aristocracy. Many went to live in Athens, leaving it every day to work in the fields.

This process was called synoecism, or a “bringing together into one home.” Attica was now a unitary polity with central control exercised by Athens. In other words, it became a city-state, or (to use the Greek word) a polis. Its national hero, Theseus, stood as the symbol of this groundbreaking development.

Similar reforms unfolded elsewhere in Greece, not always with complete success. In Boeotia, for instance, the lands lying to the north of Attica, the largest city, Thebes, never managed to secure more than a fractious federation. Throughout its history it was always having to use force to maintain its authority over its constituent parts.

Theseus was regarded as the first people’s ruler of Athens. He laid aside his royal power, reserving to himself only the supreme command in war and guardianship of the law. In practice, of course, this meant that he was still in charge, a benevolent autocrat. Plutarch’s overall verdict is that he “founded a commonwealth, so to speak, of all sorts and conditions of citizen. However, he did not let his democracy become confused and disordered by multitudes of immigrants.”

—

These stories about Theseus reflect the attitudes of those who made them up—namely, Athenians in search of a founding myth. Banditry and violence were common in the classical world and here we have a hero ready and able to put down criminal behavior wherever he found it. What is more, his deeds are clearly constructed on the model of the celebrated Labors of Heracles, seemingly impossible tasks that the strongman completed with ease. Athens wanted its own personalized Heracles-alternative.

A believer in the rule of law, this fictional Theseus was only too happy to break it when it suited him. Careless, sexist, and a little sociopathic, intelligent and attractive, willing to thumb his nose at the gods and capable of taking punishment for his impertinence, Theseus was the kind of man Athenians liked to be like. We will meet his type time and again as we proceed through the city’s history.

The “Dark Age” that followed the mysterious collapse of the Mycenean civilization lasted for about three centuries. Monarchs like Theseus became a rarity and some time before 800, when the Greeks emerged into the light, Athens became a republic governed by a group of noble families, an aristocracy. Combative and unruly, they were a collective of Theseuses.

By contrast, the Spartans, who are our second protagonist, were conservative and kept their kings. In fact, they could not have been more different from the Athenians in almost every way. The two states got on together very badly. A candid friend from the city of Corinth told the Spartans how little they had in common with the Athenians. “They are innovators, quick thinkers and swift at putting their plans into action, while you like to hold on to what you have, come up with no new ideas and when you do take action never achieve as much as you should have done.”

Where the Athenians were open-minded and excited by change, Sparta feared and resisted it, as we shall now see.

2

A State of War

The Spartan boy was terrified, but absolutely determined. He must not let himself down, or his comrades. They were under strict instructions by their official trainers to steal wherever and whatever they could. Their only crime was to be found out.

The others with him in his age group had stolen a tame young fox and given it to him to look after. When its owners came in search of it, the teenager was holding the fox under his cloak. The frightened animal struggled to escape; it began biting through his side and lacerated his intestines. The teenager did not move or make a noise, to avoid being found out.

The owners left and the boy’s friends realized what had happened. They told him off for his stupidity. Far better to let the animal be found than lose his life. “No!” he replied, though mortally wounded. “Better to die without giving in to the pain than to save a life and live ever after in disgrace.”

This famous parable was an object lesson for young Spartans.

The origins of Sparta, or Lacedaemon, its official name, are obscured by ancient myth. Its citizens numbered themselves among the Dorian “invaders” of Greece in opposition to the “native” Ionians. By the end of the eighth century, it had become one of the great city-states of Greece. You would not think it, though, if you were to judge by appearances.

Sparta, the Lacedaemonian capital, lay in a fertile river valley in the southern Peloponnese. The land was called Laconia and the river the Eurotas. The Peloponnese was, like the rest of mainland Greece, rocky and barren with only a few pockets of farmland. The mountains were still wooded, but the process of deforestation was proceeding apace. To the west, but cut off from Sparta by the high barrier of the Taygetos range, lay the rich, flat, alluvial, and tempting plain of Messenia.

As for Sparta itself, it could scarcely be called a town, let alone a city. It looked very much like what it was—a haphazard collection of four villages. There were some visually unimpressive shrines, altars, and temples, and soldiers’ barracks. It had a sort of a citadel, which, as one visitor described it, was “not so high as to be a landmark.” Thucydides, the Athenian historian, was struck by the contrast between Sparta’s position as a major power and the dismal appearance of its chief city. He noted politely: “There would be an impression of inadequacy.”

Also, unusually for an urban settlement in an age of endless wars, Sparta had no defensive walls, a fact of which the Spartans were counterintuitively proud. When someone asked a Spartan king why there were no fortifications, he simply pointed at some Spartan soldiers. “These are our walls!” There was truth in this, but Sparta was also protected by near-impassable mountains.

—

This then was where a young Spartan was brought up. Children were held to be the property of the state, not of their parents. On their birth a committee of elders examined the infant to decide whether or not he or she should be allowed to live. The life of the epileptic, the sickly, and the disabled infant was “of no advantage to itself or to the state,” so it was taken to a ravine called Apothetae, which translates as a “place reserved for special occasions.” The euphemistical special occasion was the baby’s exposure to the elements (not to mention wild animals) and death.

Those allowed to live were reared without traditional swaddling clothes, leaving their limbs and physiques to develop naturally. Their nurses taught them to be happy and contented, to eat up their food and not be afraid of the dark or of being left alone. Tantrums and tears were discouraged.

At the age of seven, boys were taken on by the state and divided up into companies or troops. From this early age they were trained in the art of war. Their education—or, as it was called, agogē—was designed to make them “obey orders, cope with stress and win battles.” They were taught to read and write—but “no more than was necessary.” They lived together, rather as in a Victorian boarding school. They went about barefoot, had their hair cropped, and usually played naked. They never wore a tunic, and were given only one cloak a year. They slept together in dormitories on rush-filled pallet beds. Older men came to watch their competitions and disputes, and identified the most aggressive and fearless.

When little Spartans reached the age of twelve they were allocated “lovers” from among young men of good character. The purpose was not meant to be sexual (at least in theory), but to provide role models.

A state official, the Inspector of Boys, employed a team of men with whips to administer punishments. He supervised the companies and appointed commanders for each of them from men in their early twenties. They ordered the bigger boys to fetch and carry, to find firewood and food. The idea was that, like the boy with the fox, they stole all these things from gardens and the messes for adult Spartans, and became adept at pouncing on sleepers or catching people off their guard. According to Plutarch,

any boy who is caught is beaten and has to go hungry. For their meals are meager, so they have to take into their own hands the fight against hunger. In this way, they are forced into daring and villainy.

Adolescents took part in a fearsome rite of passage in honor of Artemis Orthia (Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo, goddess of the hunt and childbirth; she was identified with Orthia, a local Peloponnesian divinity), held at the goddess’s sanctuary on the bank of the Eurotas. Cheeses were piled on an altar and guarded by men with whips. Competitors had to snatch as many cheeses as they could while running a gauntlet of flagellators. Blood stained the altar.

The Athenian writer and soldier Xenophon, who lived through Sparta’s heyday in the fifth and fourth centuries, was an admirer of the system. He observed: “All this education was planned in order to make the boys more resourceful at feeding themselves, and better fighting men.”

—

That is true as far as it goes, but is not completely right. A good Spartan was expected to embody apparently contradictory qualities. Criminal guile, aggression, and tolerance of pain cohabited with obedience, deference, and modesty. A boy was taught to keep his hands inside his cloak, to walk in silence, and to fix his eyes firmly on the ground.

There were a few acceptable pleasures. Food at the Spartan dinner table may have been terrible, as can be guessed from its most famous delicacy, “black broth,” which was made from pig’s blood and vinegar; but alcohol was permitted, although not to excess. An admiring Athenian poet noted:

The Spartan youths drink just enough

To bring each mind to pleasant thoughts

…and moderate laughter.

Festivals allowed an opportunity for dancing and singing. The Gymnopaideia, the Festival of Naked Boys, was one of the state’s most solemn celebrations during which young Spartans danced in the nude in the main square (also referred to as the Dancing Floor). Three choirs would perform. Old men would begin, singing “We once were valiant young men”; then men in their prime would respond: “That is what we are now: look and learn”; and, finally, teenagers chanted: “One day we will be better men than all of you.”

The poems of a patriotic general called Tyrtaeus were learned by heart and used as marching songs. They called for valor in the field, as these typical lines make clear.

For a good man to die in the vanguard is a fine thing

Doing battle on behalf of his native land.

But to leave his city and rich fields,

To go begging is the most miserable of fates.

Spartans did not enjoy gossip and could not stand having to listen to long speeches. They were men of few words—hence our “laconic.” Fellow-Greeks loved collecting specimens of their down-to-earth brevity, as when a Spartan king was asked what type of training was most practiced at Sparta. He replied: “Knowing how to take orders. And how to give orders.”

—

Adult male citizens—the Spartiates or “Equals”—joined a military mess, a syssitia (literally, a “common meal”). It had about fifteen members, who spent most of their time together and shared everything in common.

Around the age of eighteen a trainee entered the army reserve and two years later was eligible for election to a syssitiai by its members. He had finished the agogē, but went on living with his comrades. At the age of thirty he became a full citizen, but only if he was a member of a syssitia—not necessarily a simple matter, for one vote was enough to blackball a candidate.

An Equal owned farming land, which was tilled by helots, or serfs. Its produce enabled him to make a contribution to the costs of the syssitia. Apparently, this would include for every month seventy-four liters of barley, thirty-six liters of wine (not too bad a ration), about two kilograms of cheese, one of figs, and a small sum of money for cheap “relishes” (namely, flesh or fowl). In this way he was freed from working for his own living and enabled to spend his active life as a soldier, in training or on campaign. If he could not afford the contribution, he was dismissed from the mess.

All contributions were equal and the same standard of living was intended for all. Young Spartans were not to be tempted to make money. They were forbidden to engage in business or to own silver or gold. Gold and silver coins were not struck, and instead only iron bars were used. These were given a very low financial value, so that a substantial sum of money was inconveniently heavy and large to transport easily or to store. There was little point in receiving cash in this form as a gift or a bribe or in stealing it.

Cowardice was punished by social ostracism. Mothers and wives would tell their menfolk to return home victorious or dead: “Come back with your shield or on it.” In fact, on the rare occasions that an army lost a battle the Spartan soldier was better advised to give his life than save it. If he was injured, it was essential that his wounds were on the front of his body. Cowards could not hold public office, were expelled from their mess, had to wear a cloak with colored patches, and were not allowed to marry.

—

Women in ancient Greece spent much of their lives in discreet seclusion, and above all were banned from taking part in public sports, riding, or hunting. In Sparta it was quite the opposite. Girls were brought up like their brothers to excel physically.

They were made to harden their bodies through exercise. They ran, wrestled, threw the discus, and hurled the javelin, just as the boys did. Motherhood was to be their main purpose in life and the theory was that in this way they would be able to manage the pangs of childbirth and give birth to healthy and strong sons.

Although this was shocking to other Greeks, who expected the opposite sex to be modestly clothed, Spartan girls wore only a scanty tunic or even went about naked. Makeup, long hair, or gold ornaments were barred. Women were not shy at coming forward and enjoyed engaging in hostile banter with men, but, if there was no prudery in Sparta, flirtatious and conventionally feminine behavior was discouraged.

Marriage was handled in a typically unappealing manner. Men were fined if they failed to marry. The would-be husband, who had to be at least thirty years old, carried off his intended by force. A bridesmaid shaved her head and dressed her in a man’s cloak and sandals. She was then made to lie down on a rush mattress, alone and in the dark. After dining with his comrades in the mess, the groom slipped away surreptitiously and carried his bride to the marriage bed. He spent a little time with her and then went back to his barracks as if nothing of any consequence had taken place.

And this was how he continued to act. He spent his days with his comrades, and slept with them at night, visiting his wife briefly, secretly and after dark, full of dread that they would be found out. Plutarch writes:

and they did not carry on like this for a short time only, but long enough for some of them to become fathers before they had seen their own wives in the light of day.

Married couples were to be neither jealous nor unduly amorous.

Brothers were allowed to share their wives. The techniques of animal breeding were applied; husbands could give another man permission to sleep with his wife, if he believed he “would fill her with noble sperm.” He would happily adopt the consequential offspring and bring them up as if they were his own. Once they had their own families, women were expected to manage their households when their husbands were away at war, as they often were.

The name of one independent-minded great lady has come down to us. This was Cynisca, sister of a Spartan king (for more on the monarchy see below on this page). Born about 440, she was an expert horsewoman and, being royal, had plenty of money. She was the first woman to score a victory at the ancient Olympic Games. The games were almost entirely a men-only affair and women were only allowed to compete in equestrian events—not directly but by owning, breeding, and training horses.

Cynisca won the four-horse chariot race, but she would not have witnessed her victory for only men were allowed to be spectators. She was very proud of her achievement and commissioned a statue of herself, which stood in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. The inscription on its stone base reads:

I, Cynisca, victorious with a chariot of swift-footed horses,

Have erected this statue. I declare myself the only woman

In all Hellas to have won this crown.

—

A grove sacred to Zeus stood in a pleasant, grassy, and wooded plain in the northwest of the Peloponnese. Here at Olympia in the summer of the year 756 an international athletic competition was held for the first time in honor of the god. These were the Olympic Games and they were staged every four years through the next millennium. They were soon joined by others, which were also quadrennial, and filled in the empty years—the Pythian Games at Delphi, the Isthmian Games at Corinth, and the Games at Nemea between Argos and Corinth. These were genuinely Panhellenic events and attracted crowds of visitors from across the Greek world.

So that competitors and audiences could reach Olympia safely a sacred truce was declared for one month (later extended to two and then three months). Heralds called spondophoroi or truce-bearers, wearing olive wreaths and carrying staffs, were sent out to every Greek state to announce the date of the festival and proclaim the truce. States taking part in the Games were forbidden to wage war, to enter into legal disputes, or to put anyone to death.

Women were allowed to participate neither as athletes nor as spectators (although apparently virgins were not refused admission to the games, perhaps because of their ritual purity). They had their own four-yearly Games of Hera, at which competitors took part in three foot races for different age groups.

The Olympic Games lasted for five days. There were various foot races, including one in armor. Other sports featured were throwing the discus and the javelin, the long jump, wrestling, and boxing. The most extreme event was the pancration. This was a combination of boxing and wrestling, with almost no rules except that gouging and biting were banned (although in practice contestants sometimes tried to get away with both). It was not unknown for competitors to lose their lives. The pentathlon challenged all-around athletes with five tests—discus, jumping, javelin, running, and wrestling. Only those with the deepest pockets, such as Cynisca, could afford to enter teams for the chariot races.

To win at the Games was to be favored by the gods. The prizes at Olympia were only crowns of olives, but a victor was a celebrity for life. His polis showered him with honors, among them free board and lodging at the city hall and best seats at the theater. A poet such as Pindar wrote odes in his honor and sometimes he was commemorated by a life-size statue of him in bronze or marble.

—

In sum, then, a Spartan’s life was spartan. It was much admired by contemporaries for its purity, its elective poverty, its military efficiency, and, in a wider culture where personal willfulness had a certain allure (remember Theseus), its self-control. It was not for nothing that a leading Greek poet called Sparta “man-taming,” for it broke its boys in as if they were colts.

Citizens lived austere lives and were formidable on the battlefield. Like bees in a hive everyone worked obediently and efficiently for the common good; there were no drones.

But it is hard not to detect a sense of strain. From today’s perspective the Spartan system is extremely odd—even, perhaps, a little deranged. Moral standardization and the suppression of ordinary, more generous, patterns of human behavior required a fierce act of will. This could only be achieved by isolating Spartans from other Greek city-states. Would their right little, tight little world survive exposure to other, more relaxed and individualistic communities?

To understand their mindset we need to find out why the Spartans decided to create their enclosed, eccentric, militaristic society in the first place.

—

In the 700s many Greek communities felt the need to acquire more fertile land, probably because of a rise in their populations. There were too many wildernesses and too few productive acres. Most of them exported surplus citizens by sending them out to found “colonies” here and there on the coast of the Mediterranean. There they sat, wrote the famous Athenian philosopher Plato, “like frogs around a pond” (for more on this diaspora see this page).

Sparta in those days was (so far as we know) a city-state like any other, but it decided on a different solution to the challenge. It would expand its borders locally in the Peloponnese. It began a process of conquest and assimilation of its neighbors. First, it created up to thirty dependent settlements in the Laconian plain, whose inhabitants were called perioeci, “people who live round about.” They were responsible for all the manufacturing and other services that Sparta needed. They were also liable to be called up into the army, but they did not have the prestige of the full Spartan citizen-in-arms.

The next step was to move south along the river Eurotas, through marshes and down to the sea. Here a second group of dependents was formed, the helots (probably so-called after the village of Helos, or “Marsh”). These were members of a vanquished population and as such the property of the Spartan state. They were instructed where to live and given specific duties. However, they were not owned by individual Spartans. Helots worked in the fields and could be conscripted (although their loyalty was suspect and they were deployed with caution).

The great prize lay over the mountains to the west, the wide and productive plain of Messenia. If only that could be annexed, Sparta’s economic problems would be over; there would be sufficient food for hungry mouths, and a rise in the standard of living. In fact, on the restricted Greek stage it would gain the stature of a great power.

Few details have survived, but between about 730 and 710 Sparta fought and won a long, hard war against the Messenians. Tyrtaeus crowed:

…we captured Messene of the broad plain

Messene good to plow, good to plant.

They fought for it for nineteen full years

Relentlessly unceasing and always stout of heart.

In the twentieth year, the story was told, the enemy abandoned its last redoubt, a near-impregnable stronghold on Mount Ithome, the highest of twin peaks that rise from the plain to about eight hundred meters. Many Messenians fled their homeland for good to the safety of Arcadia in the northern Peloponnese.

It was a decisive victory, but the Spartans realized that they had consumed more than they could easily digest. How could they keep their prize in the face of bitter opposition from the remaining Messenians? The question was given a sharp relevance when fifty years or so later the Messenians took advantage of a Spartan defeat at the hands of Argos, a north Peloponnesian power, and domestic discontent in Laconia. They rose in revolt, but once again they were defeated.

—

The Spartans decided that they would have to transform themselves into a fully militarized society if they were to have a chance of keeping their subject peoples under their permanent control. A series of radical reforms were introduced. The credit is traditionally given to a leader called Lycurgus, but he is probably a legendary figure.

We are told that the reforms were based on a consultation with the famous oracle at Delphi in central Greece. “The Lord of the Silver Bow, Far-shooting Apollo, the Golden-haired spoke from his rich shrine,” wrote Tyrtaeus. On this occasion, the god did not initiate a plague as he had among the Greeks in front of Troy. He gave helpful advice and a proclamation, the Great Rhetra, which reflected his ideas, was issued.

The basic proposition was to give full citizenship to several thousand (perhaps nine thousand at the outset) Spartan males and, as we have seen, to free them from the business of earning a living from farming or manufacturing. They would be trained to be the best soldiers in Greece. The Messenians were all “helotized,” or turned into public serfs. Their task was to farm the allotments allocated to Spartan male citizens. According to Tyrtaeus, they were

Just like donkeys weighed down with heavy burdens

Bringing to their masters from cruel necessity

Half of all the produce their land bears.

The state’s political institutions were reorganized. At its base was a citizen assembly, or ecclesia, which passed laws, elected officials, and decided policy. But in practice its powers were limited; it could not initiate or amend legislation. Votes at elections were measured in a most peculiar way (presumably it was designed to counter vote rigging). Some specially selected judges were shut up in a nearby building; candidates for office were silently presented to the assembly, which shouted its endorsements. The judges assessed the volume of the shouts, without knowing which candidates they were for. Those who attracted the loudest applause were declared elected.

The assembly was guided by a council of elders or gerousia and Sparta’s two kings. These elders were all more than sixty years old and were members for life. They were “ballast for the ship of state,” as Plutarch put it, and a force for conservatism, although they could fall under the influence from time to time of a particularly able king. The gerousia’s main power was to prepare the agenda for the assembly and it was empowered to set aside any popular decision of which it disapproved.

Executive authority lay in the hands of five ephors. Appointed by the assembly, they held office for one year and could not be reelected. They wielded great (and somewhat sinister) powers, and played a role not altogether unlike that of the political commissars who accompanied officers in the Red Army. They had a judicial function, and could levy instant fines. They could depose, imprison, and bring to trial any official, including a king (in which latter case they sat in judgment alongside the other king and the council of elders). They also negotiated with foreign embassies and expelled unwelcome foreigners. They chaired the assembly and implemented its decisions. When a king led an army abroad, two ephors accompanied him to oversee his behavior. Once a year they formally declared war on the helots, so that killing them would not be illegal and a religious pollution.

The Spartans were terrified that their helots would rise again against them and believed that the most efficacious means of preventing this was through wholesale oppression. A secret police called the crypteia (literally “hidden things”) was tasked with ensuring peace and quiet in Messenia. Its members were recruited from the brightest and best of the younger generation, and only those willing to serve were likely to obtain senior public posts in later life. According to Plutarch, the ephors from time to time sent out into the countryside young Spartiates in the crypteia, equipped only with daggers and basic rations. “In the daytime they scattered into obscure and out of the way places, where they lay low and rested. At night they came down into the roads and murdered every helot they came across.” Often they even went into the fields where helots were working and cut down the strongest and best of them.

On one occasion in the fifth century it is reported that the helots were invited to volunteer names of those who had shown bravery on the battlefield and deserved to be given their freedom. Two thousand helots were singled out, crowned with wreaths, and ushered in procession around the sanctuaries of the gods. But then a little while later they all disappeared and were secretly liquidated. No one ever found out how they had met their ends.

—

At the head of Spartan society stood two kings from separate royal families, the Agiad and the Eurypontid, who reigned simultaneously. This was a unique arrangement in Greece and its purpose is unclear, although the existence of an alternative may have constrained an autocratically minded monarch from stepping out of line. Over time the kings saw their powers diminish. As a rule they could not initiate policy, although a man with a talent for politics could win over the gerousia and the assembly to his way of thinking. As noted, executive authority became the prerogative of the ephors.

In military affairs, however, the kings remained supreme. One or other of them led the Spartan army and wielded absolute power on the battlefield. They were accompanied by a bodyguard of one hundred horsemen and could summarily execute any soldier for cowardice or treason. However, they were liable to prosecution for mishandling campaigns and a number of kings were convicted of bribery.

A king had another equally weighty and demanding duty. As religious leaders, he and his colleague were responsible for relations with the gods. They often consulted the oracle at Delphi and conducted frequent ceremonies on behalf of the state. Before setting out on a military campaign a king sacrificed to the gods to make sure that the enterprise had their approval. He did so again when crossing Sparta’s frontier, and sacrificed daily while on campaign and before a battle.

These matters were taken very seriously. A commander would not advance against an enemy if the omens were unfavorable—for example, unusual signs on an animal’s liver. The king might have to sacrifice again and again before getting the right result; in the meantime his men were forced to stand idly by. An earthquake or an eclipse was enough to send a Spartan army marching home.

In peacetime kings had comparatively little to do—except for enjoying their wealth. They owned large estates and were the only Spartans who were permitted to be rich; they were the first to be served at public banquets and were given double portions. They were entitled to decide whom heiresses should marry—a profitable occupation, we may surmise—and adoption ceremonies had to take place in their presence.

—

The takeover of Messenia made Sparta the most powerful of the Greek city-states and its opponents thought twice before meeting their army in the field. But it was not naturally predatory or expansionist. Its primary concern was to control the Peloponnese and, above all, to ensure that the helots were broken in and docile. So far as the wider Hellenic world was concerned it had no particular ambitions, except that it expected—and received—a general acknowledgment of its superiority. Its formidable army could repel all comers and its constitution seemed to many outside observers to be a fine example of eunomia, or “good order and stability under just laws.”

Sparta would have liked nothing better than to be left alone, but its interests were to be challenged in future years by its polar opposite and rival, the changeable and creative city of Athens.

3

The Persian Mule

Even today Delphi is an astounding place. The town is a series of headlong terraces perched dangerously on the limestone slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece. In classical times, it was almost inaccessible. Pausanias, the author of a guidebook to ancient Greece, who wrote in the second century A.D., walked along the craggy path that was the only way into the town. He found it hard going. He observed: “The highroad to Delphi gets more precipitous and becomes difficult even for an active man.”

It was here that the classical world’s leading oracle was located. Oracles were shrines where mortals could consult the immortals who warned, guided, and rewarded their worshippers. There were at least eight on the Greek mainland and many more around the Eastern Mediterranean. They were popular with foreigners, or “barbarians,” as well as true Hellenes.

Once the visitor was inside the town he found himself on the Holy Way, a street that wound its course uphill towards the great temple of Apollo. He passed numerous Treasuries: these were stone buildings, looking like tiny temples, with columns and pediments, where grateful states stored votive gifts to the god, often one tenth of the spoils of a military victory—gold or silver artifacts, tripods, and bullion. They were decorated with brightly painted sculpture and with metal ornaments, as was typical of Greek architecture. Everywhere stood statues of prizewinning athletes in their hundreds. Paintings celebrated antique myths and great historical events.

The temple itself was a fine marble structure, partly resting on bedrock and partly on a specially built platform. On its walls three inscriptions were carved, which summed up basic principles of the good and fulfilled life. They were “know yourself,” “nothing in excess,” and, somewhat cynical advice to steer clear of rash pledges, “make a promise and ruin follows.”

We are told that beneath the cella or inner room was a small secret chamber, the adyton (Greek for “inaccessible”), where the omphalos stood, a stone object that represented the center or “navel” of the earth. Its surface was covered with the carving of a knotted net and it had a hollow center widening towards the bottom.

The temple was managed by a priest who was recruited from Delphi’s ruling elite. He served for life. The position was one of high prestige, but the incumbent was not expected to live a particularly virtuous life. He was assisted by five hosioi (or holy ones), and one or more prophetae, who may have had some role in interpreting or explaining the god’s messages.

The key figure in the oracular process was the Pythia, the priestess or prophetess. She was an ordinary local woman, not of high birth, and she too served for life. She was past childbearing age when appointed, but on duty she wore the costume of an unmarried girl—a sacred sheep dressed as lamb. She was expected to be chaste.

Apollo was supposed to live at Delphi for nine months of the year, and the oracle appears to have been available for consultation only for one day in each of these months. It is not clear whether the god was willing to open up shop in cases of emergency; when a city-state like Athens needed advice we do not hear of them having to wait for Apollo’s convenience. As to inquirers, priority was given to the city of Delphi and its citizens, to states with “most favored nation” status, and to specially honored individuals. In general, states took preference over individuals.

In front of the temple stood a large altar. Here a preliminary sacrifice was conducted on behalf of all the day’s inquirers. If this went well—that is, the animal reacted to a sprinkling of water by appearing to nod in acceptance of its fate—it was duly slaughtered.

An inquirer was led inside the temple and performed a second sacrifice, depositing the victim or parts of it on a table at the door to the adyton, the sunken room where the omphalos stood and where the Pythia was awaiting him. He was shown into a place from which he could hear but not see her.

The priestess had prepared for the consultation by purifying herself at the Castalian Spring in a ravine (two fountains fed by the spring still flow). At an altar inside the temple she burned laurel leaves and barley meal. Crowned with laurel she sat on a tripod and became possessed by the god. She then delivered her prophecy.

While we know broadly how consultations were managed, there are important aspects of the Delphi process about which we are in the dark. First of all, how was the Pythia’s prophetic trance induced? We can be sure that she did not chew some kind of hallucinogenic leaf. No ancient source mentions this, and if she did do so, she would probably have chosen leaves of bay or laurel, both plants sacred to Apollo. The former would have produced no effect at all, and the latter are poisonous.

The author Plutarch, a local man and a priest of Apollo who knew the oracle from the inside, writes in the first century A.D. of a sweet smell emanating from the Pythia’s consulting room. Was there a vent from which subterranean fumes rose? No trace of it could be found when archaeologists excavated the temple of Apollo in the twentieth century.

However, recent geological research suggests that the temple was built over the confluence of two fault lines and that gases including ethylene, which is both explosive and anesthetic, did come up from them. But the oracle functioned for a thousand years and it is hard to believe that the production of gas did not fluctuate. Even if the gases, when flowing, were of assistance to the Pythia it seems very probable that mostly her trances were self-induced.

The second problem concerns the presentation of the prophecies. Ancient historians such as Herodotus quote well-turned verses, rich in meaning and often carefully ambiguous. It is hardly plausible that the Pythia would have been able to improvise them, so one possibility is that her “ravings” were not altogether articulate and were later translated into poetry by the prophetae or some other persons.

We do not know whether the oracle was notified in advance of questions to be put. If it was, both officials and the Pythia would have had time to consider her response; even if not, the content of inquiries submitted by governments could often be guessed. Thoughtfulness does not necessarily mean that fraud was involved. That said, Apollo could be bribed; on one known occasion, for example, the Athenians paid money to have the Pythia influence the Spartans. But we do not know if the oracle was easily corrupted or if this was a frequent occurrence.

In this context, how “political” was the oracle? States frequently consulted Delphi and it is hard to believe that the officials at the oracle did not take care to monitor contemporary events and perhaps develop views or even policies that colored the prophecies. But we have no hard evidence.

—

Croesus, the king of Lydia in western Asia Minor, was wealthy, famous, and counted himself the luckiest of men. But in 547 he was also a worried man. Obscure and frightening changes were upsetting the balance of power in the Middle East. Although Croesus was not a Greek, he made himself into an honorary one. His donations to the god at Delphi were extraordinarily generous. They included the statue of a lion made from refined gold, two huge bowls, one of silver and the other of gold, and a large quantity of gold ingots. He urgently needed guidance from the oracle about his enemies and their prospects of success.

Lydia was a fertile territory. The nearby coastline was occupied by a multiplicity of noisy Ionian Greek city-states. They were the interface between the Hellenic world and the kingdoms of the east. Croesus had uneasy relations with them. He had brought most of them under his control and although they resented this, they recognized that he was a lover of all things Hellenic and provided protection from other potential threats in the region.

The Ionian settlements were originally founded by colonists sent out from mainland Greece. As we have seen, tradition had it that they were refugees from an invasion by newcomers, called Dorians, who arrived towards the end of the second millennium and made their home mainly in the Peloponnese. For many of them their departure point was Athens, which in later centuries claimed to be their mother-city. Ionians such as the Athenians spoke their own dialect of Greek, the other main ones being Dorian, spoken by the Spartans among others, and Aeolian, spoken mainly in Thessaly, Boeotia, and Lesbos.

The Ionians were the forerunners of an extraordinary, mostly peaceful diaspora throughout the Mediterranean between 734 and about 580 B.C. Nowhere in Greece is far from the sea, and mainland states sent out teams of citizens interested in sailing away and starting a new life. They founded city-states on the coasts of Spain and southern France. They even reached Tartessus, the Tarshish of the Bible, a port beyond the Pillars of Hercules (today’s Gibraltar), which became a source for rare metals such as tin, and silver from northwest Spain. They peppered Sicily and southern Italy with new foundations; so substantial was the Hellenic presence that the region was nicknamed Greater Greece.

Athens was unable to produce enough food for its population and depended on Greek settlers in the Black Sea for importing grain from their hinterland (in today’s Ukraine and the Crimea) and sending it on by ship.

Links between the mother-city (the original meaning of “metropolis”) and her colonies were usually warm, but once they had established themselves the offspring were completely independent. Occasionally bad blood flowed: Corinth and its colony, Corcyra (today’s island of Corfu), were on famously unfriendly terms.

Colonies facilitated the development of trade throughout the Mediterranean. They imported goods, such as bronze, silver and gold vessels, olive oil, wine, and textiles, from mainland Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean or manufactured them themselves, and then exchanged them with local communities—from the west, grain and slaves, from Thrace, silver, hides, timber, and slaves, and from the Black Sea, corn, dried fish, and (once more) slaves.

Greeks also set up trading posts, or emporia, which had no civic sponsor and attracted citizens from all kinds of different states: an important example was Naucratis on the Nile Delta.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that by 580 practically every suitable spare spot for colonization on the Mediterranean coastline had been taken up. There were, of course, non-Greek colonizers, most especially the Phoenicians, who founded the great trading city of Carthage in North Africa. But the Hellenic achievement was remarkable all the same.

Not only did it create a far-flung Greek “world,” but it also threw light on the early development of a corporate Hellenic “personality”—flexible, international, inquiring, and opportunistic.

—

Croesus’s neighbors to the east were the kingdoms of Babylon and of Media, which had joined forces to destroy the old Assyrian Empire and sack its capital, Nineveh, in 612. Babylon was one of the great cities of the world. Once free of the Assyrians, its king built high, impregnable walls enclosing about one thousand acres and with eight gates. The most spectacular of these was the Ishtar Gate, faced with glazed blue bricks on which were bas reliefs of various animals, including lions and aurochs. The gate opened onto a grand processional way that led into the heart of the city.

To the northwest of Babylon and south of the Caspian Sea lay Media, a vigorous and newly centralized state. In the first half of the seventh century a founding king, Deiokes, built a great capital on a hill, Ecbatana. If the Greek historian Herodotus is to be trusted, its fortifications were as remarkable as those of Babylon. Looking very much like a ziggurat, they consisted of a series of massive concentric walls, each out-topped by the one within it. Inside the innermost and tallest wall stood the royal palace and the treasury.

The parapets of the first circle are white, of the next black, of the third scarlet, of the fourth blue, of the fifth orange; all these colors being painted. The last two have their battlements coated respectively with silver and gold.

—

The rulers of the three states were on reasonably good terms, and had intermarried.

Eastwards in the southwestern part of Iran, roughly coextensive with the modern region of Fārs, there was the small dependent kingdom of Persis. Its new king was the youthful, hook-nosed Cyrus (in Old Persian, Kūruš), an ambitious and energetic ruler. He assembled the Persian tribes in 550 and persuaded them to approve his plan to revolt from his Median overlord. The campaign met with total success, as a Babylonian priest recorded.

King Ishtumegu (Astyages) [of Media] called up his troops and marched against Cyrus, king of Anshan (a city under Persian rule), in order to me[et him in battle]. The army of Ishtumegu revolted against him and they de[livered] him in fetters to Cyrus. Cyrus [marched] against the country Agamtanu (Ecbatana); the royal residence [he seized]; he took as booty silver, gold, (other) valuables…of the country Agamtanu and brought [them] to Anshan.

It was this disaster that captured Croesus’s full attention. He decided that he needed to act rather than wait, like a tethered goat, for Cyrus’s next step, which would very probably be an invasion of Lydia.

However, before making any definite move, he consulted Apollo’s oracle at Delphi.

Croesus wanted to be sure that Delphi and other well-known oracles were all they were cracked up to be, or so writes Herodotus. As a first step he sent delegates to the oracle, instructing them to consult the Pythia on the hundredth day after they had left Sardis, the Lydian capital. They were to ask what the king was doing at that very moment. This they did, and in the versified response the prophetess claimed that she could smell

hard-shelled tortoise

Boiling in bronze with the meat of lamb,

Laid upon bronze below, covered with bronze on top

Croesus was most impressed, for at the relevant time he had chopped up a tortoise and a lamb, and boiled them together in a bronze cauldron with a bronze lid. It was now that the king began to deluge the shrine at Delphi with generous gifts. The god looked after patrons like Croesus, generous and trusting. The king was given priority consultation rights, exemption from fees, and the best seats at Delphi’s festivals.

In due course a second delegation raised a more substantive issue. This was the king’s question: “Croesus, king of the Lydians and other peoples, in the belief that yours is the only true oracle in the whole world, gives you gifts worthy of your prophetic insight, and asks whether he should wage war against the Persians and whether he should seek to add any military force to his own as an ally.”

The god replied that if Croesus were to cross the Halys River, the boundary of his empire, and wage war on the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire. So victory was guaranteed. The Lydian envoys asked a third question. Would his reign be a long one?

The Pythia answered in cryptic verse:

Wait till a mule becomes king of the Medes,

Then, tender-footed Lydian, run away to the pebbly River Hermus.

And hurry, hurry, don’t feel ashamed of being a coward.

More good news, thought Croesus. He had never heard of a mule ruling a kingdom and he could safely look forward to many years on the throne.

He mobilized his army and led it northeastwards. He found Cyrus in Paphlagonia and an indecisive battle ensued. He attributed his lack of success to his army being much smaller than that of Cyrus. He decided to return to the safety of Sardis and disband his troops, who were all mercenaries. Winter was approaching, when wars were not usually fought, and he would spend the interval before spring seeking allies and reinforcements. He concluded a military alliance with the Bab;ylonians, who could imagine themselves being next on Cyrus’s imperial shopping list if Lydia fell. Apparently he also sent embassies to Egypt, which might regard the emergence of a new and aggressive power in the Middle East with alarm, and to the Spartans, who had no obvious locus in the conflict and were not interested.

Cyrus liked to fight a war of movement, and saw the Lydian withdrawal and demobilization as an opportunity. He followed hot on Croesus’s heels and, much to the king’s dismay, soon appeared outside Sardis. A new army was swiftly raised and Croesus led it out against the Persians. Cyrus unexpectedly used camels as cavalry. They frightened the Lydian horses, which turned around and fled as soon as they caught the camels’ scent. The Lydian infantry fought on bravely, but the day belonged to Cyrus, who now placed Sardis under siege.

Nothing happened for a time. Then one day a Lydian guard on the city’s citadel accidentally dropped his helmet down a cliffside, so precipitous that it had not been fortified. The man scrambled down the slope, retrieved his helmet, and climbed back up without difficulty. A Persian happened to be watching and realized he had witnessed a way into the city. He passed the word to Cyrus.

In this period siege machines and artillery were incapable of destroying strongly built walls, but once a few men had managed by trickery, treachery, or clever observation to bypass the defenses, a city’s fate was usually sealed. Cyrus made good use of the intelligence he had received and Sardis fell.

A legend grew that Cyrus intended to burn Croesus alive, but that a timely rainstorm doused the flames. Perhaps it was the doing of Apollo, feeling a little guilty at having so comprehensively hoodwinked a loyal admirer. What happened to him in truth is unknown. He may have become an adviser at the Persian court. But the Babylonians told a different story.

Cyrus, king of Persia, called up his army and crossed the Tigris….In the month of Aiaru (May/June) he marched against the country of Lydia…killed its king, took his possessions, put there a garrison of his own.

But of one thing there could be no doubt. Croesus had allowed himself to be misled by Apollo’s crooked words. A mule is a cross between a horse and a donkey; in the oracle this signified Cyrus himself, also a mongrel, for his mother was a Mede and his father a Persian. And the empire Croesus had destroyed was his own.

What was to be the fate of the Ionian city-states now? Cyrus had invited them to join him in the conquest of Lydia, but they had declined. Instead, they sided with their ruler, Croesus, for they could not believe that he would be totally overthrown and feared his vengeance once the Persians had gone away. After the debacle they put out feelers to Cyrus, but he was still irritated at having been snubbed and did not respond (although he agreed to a treaty with the great mercantile city of Miletus, which had been neutral).

At this point the Ionians would have been wise to unite and plan a common resistance to the Persians, who would surely launch an invasion. The greatest philosopher of the age, Thales of Miletus, intervened. He rejected religious and mythological explanations of the universe and applied reason to the question.

Turning to political matters, Thales argued that the Ionians should unite into a single political entity and set up a governing council on the island of Teos. As a more extreme variation on this idea it was further suggested that all the Ionians should emigrate to Sardinia and found an integrated state there, far beyond the Great King’s reach.

The Ionians met together at their general assembly, the Pan-Ionium, but agreed on little except to make a general appeal for assistance to the international Hellenic community. The Spartans sent a herald to Cyrus, telling him not to attack the Ionians, “for the Spartans will not tolerate it.” A bemused Cyrus asked his officials: “Who are the Spartans? And how many of them are there?” Having received an answer, the Great King dismissed the herald with the comment that he was not afraid of anyone who had a marketplace in the center of his city where people swore false oaths and cheated each other.

Having failed to hang together, the Ionians were, of course, hanged separately. Cyrus took on each polis one by one and reduced them all. They now had a new master.

—

A clay cylinder has been found, inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform (one of the earliest known systems of writing, consisting of wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets), which gives Cyrus’s own account of his next victory, now that he had disposed of the Lydians. This was nothing less than the conquest of the ancient city of Babylon in 539. It took some years to accomplish, but the king presented his victory as a walkover, almost as if his invasion had not simply been peaceable but the result of an invitation by the people. He entered the city “without fighting or battle” and the ruling elite welcomed him. “Their faces shone.”

Cyrus saw himself as the inheritor of the “perpetual seed of kingship,” as if it were in his genes, and did not allow himself to be knowingly undersold:

I am Cyrus, king of the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad (ancient territories under Babylonian rule), king of the four quarters of the world, son of Cambyses, the great king, king of the city of Anshan, grandson of Cyrus, the great king, ki[ng of the ci]ty of Anshan, descendant of Teispes, the great king, king of the city of Anshan.

The Persians under Cyrus now controlled a large empire stretching from the Ionian Greek city-states on the western seaboard of Asia Minor to Persia. At some stage (we do not know exactly when) Cyrus also conquered Central Asia. It was an extraordinary rise. At its fullest extent and for the first time in the history of the Middle East, countries from the river Indus to the Balkans, from Central Asia to Upper Egypt were incorporated into a single political system.

Cyrus the Great, as he came to be known, did not have many years to enjoy his achievements. He continued aggressively campaigning in the east of his domains. In 539 he fought with an Iranian nomadic confederation, the Massagetae, who probably roamed lands south of the Caspian Sea and who were then ruled by a queen. The Persians captured her son, who felt so shamed that he killed himself at the first opportunity.

His enraged mother assembled all her forces and defeated the Persians in a great battle during which Cyrus lost his life. She found his corpse on the battlefield and stuffed its head into a wineskin filled with blood. “I said I would make you have your fill of blood.”

His tomb, set in a park, was a modest stone building with a gabled roof and two small stone doors, standing on a stepped platform. The monument survives, although the body and grave goods are long gone. Apparently it once contained a golden bed, a table with drinking cups on it, a golden coffin, and various ornaments studded with jewels. There was also an inscription on the tomb. According to the first-century B.C. geographer Strabo, this read:

O man, I am Cyrus. I won an empire for the Persians, and was king of Asia.

So do not grudge me this monument.

—

How was this enormous empire run? It is a hard question to answer, for the Persians left behind them no books of political theory, nor descriptions of their system of government, nor even a history of their times. However, there is no question but that the Achaemenid dynasty (so-called after its founder, Achaemenes, an early king of Persia) that Cyrus founded was autocratic. The Great King, as he was called, lived in splendid and solemn state. He was divinely appointed and divinely accountable.

Distances from the imperial capitals of Susa and Persepolis to the farthest provinces were so great that it was essential to make communications as speedy as possible. A highway, called the Royal Road, was created that ran from Sardis, Croesus’s old base, to Susa. At intervals all along the way, more than one hundred posthouses were established where royal messengers and public officials could obtain a change of horses, food, and rooms for the night. Sometimes this express service operated around the clock; night messengers succeeded day messengers in relays. “Nothing prevents these couriers,” comments Herodotus, “from completing their allotted course in the quickest possible time—neither snow, rain, heat or darkness.” Even so travel was painfully slow, for nothing could go faster than a horse. According to the indefatigably curious historian, “the distance from Sardis to what is called the Palace of Memnon [at Susa] will be 13,500 furlongs. Thus those travelling at a rate of 150 furlongs a day, will take just ninety days to make the journey.”

Clay tablets have been unearthed at Persepolis that record officials’ traveling expenses. As this typical example shows, the Persians ran an efficient bureaucracy: “1:5 [?] quarts of flour supplied by Bakadusda. Muska received, as a fast messenger. He went from the King to Zissawis. He carried a sealed document of the King. In the tenth month.”

However hard he might try, the Great King was not able to respond quickly enough to events as they arose in the more remote corners of his dominions. He established a network of provincial governors, called satraps, whose main duty was to collect taxes and remit them to the central authority in Persia (in some places local kings were employed rather than satraps). The precise details are unclear, but, according to Xenophon, there was also a network of military garrisons and commanders who looked after security but were not to meddle with anything else. This division of powers was obviously intended to guard against plots and insurrections. However, it seems that on occasion one man controlled both the army and civilian affairs. Such satraps ran small wars and were known to fight with one another and even to rise up against the Great King himself.

Until now this had been a world without coinage. It is said that Croesus invented coins and the Persian government picked up on the idea, less as a means of day-to-day exchange than of making bulk payments with gold and silver currency. Most of the Great King’s subjects did not use coins and restricted themselves to barter: they would have been hard put to recognize them or know what they were for. Satraps minted their own coinages, but they only did so in extraordinary military circumstances when armies needed to be paid. The golden daric of the Persians and the silver siglos did not merely have practical uses, they were symbols of the wealth, grandeur, and stability of the empire.

The Great King seldom went on progresses throughout his realms and spent most of his time in his palaces in Persia, but he needed to check on the performance of his satraps and generals. Every year (again according to Xenophon) a government inspector at the head of an army went out on a provincial tour. An advance announcement would be made: “the King’s son is coming down,” or “the King’s brother,” or, more anonymous and sinister, “the King’s eye,” but one never knew whether he would actually turn up, for at any moment the Great King might recall him. It was an economical way of keeping people alert to their duties.

—

The Persian system of government was hardly ideal. As we shall see, satraps often misbehaved and acted in their own rather than their employer’s interest. Palace politics could be lethal and the transition from one ruler to his successor fraught and murderous. But the Great King understood that the majority of his subjects were at their most productive and governable if they were left alone to live their own lives. It was a sound and civilized imperial principle.

Cyrus wanted to be regarded as a just ruler and sought the moral approval of his subjects; in the Cyrus Cylinder he speaks of the blessings of his kingship and boasts: “I have enabled all the lands to live in peace.” Political and economic stability was indeed the chief benefit that the empire could confer. It also promoted religious and linguistic diversity. Communities were expected to speak in their own tongues and to practice their own faiths. The empire tried not to intrude.

It was annoying to have to pay tribute, but there was a return on the investment. In his book The Education of Cyrus, Xenophon has the Great King say of tribute: “It is no more than fair, for if any danger comes it is we who have to fend it off.” And peace fostered the main source of most people’s solvency—mainly agricultural production, but also, especially in cities, manufacturing (pottery, tools, weapons, and luxury goods).

—

We are not sure of the religious faith of Cyrus the Great, for there is no direct reference to it in his surviving inscriptions, and the same applies to his son Cambyses. But he is polite about other peoples’ gods. He even gave financial assistance for the building or rebuilding of temples dedicated to foreign faiths. It was forbidden to disturb the cult of Ahura Mazda or any other religion. In the Cyrus Cylinder the Great King pays his respects to the Babylonian deity, Marduk, and in the Bible receives the honorific title of Messiah. According to Isaiah, he was the anointed of Jehovah (this was a thank-you for repatriating the Jews exiled to Babylon).

Thereafter the Achaemenid kings speak of themselves as worshippers of Ahura Mazda (literally Being and Mind). He was a perfectly good, benevolent uncreated spirit who created the universe. His worship often took place in the open air in walled gardens (in Greek, paradeisos, whence our word “paradise”) or even mountaintops. Except for Cyrus. Great Kings were buried in tombs built into a high cliff-face not far from the imperial city of Persepolis.

Against Ahura Mazda stood a destructive spirit, Ahri-man. As in Zoroastrianism (a religion, to which that of the Achaemenids seems to be related, founded by the prophet Zarathustra or, as the Greeks called him, Zoroaster, who may have lived around the year 1000), the essential struggle in the universe was that between the “Truth” and the “Lie.” So far as the Achaemenid kings were concerned, the Lie referred to the ever-present dangers that threatened Persia and its empire. By contrast, they believed that “the man who has respect for that law which Ahura Mazda has established and worships Ahura Mazda and Arta [one of the other gods in the divine pantheon] reverently, he becomes happy while living, and blessed when dead.”

—

The Achaemenids were expansionist. Cyrus’s son Cambyses succeeded him and in 525 launched an attack on the Egypt of the pharaohs, a civilization that had already lasted for millennia. He defeated the Egyptians at the Battle of Pelusium, the fortress town that is the gateway into the kingdom from the east. He made himself pharaoh, assuming the ruler’s official titles, regalia, and uniform.

Then in 522 something happened that made him rush back to Persia. His long absences in Egypt and his despotic style of government had led to unrest back home. Cambyses had a younger brother or half brother, Bardiya (the Greeks called him Smerdis), who revolted and set himself up as Great King. He was extremely popular in Persia and Media, the heartland of the empire. The challenge had to be addressed, but en route from Egypt, Cambyses died childless in disputed circumstances.

There are different versions of what happened. Herodotus says that in March 522, the scabbard of Cambyses’ sword fell off and he accidentally stabbed himself. The wound went gangrenous and in eleven days he was dead. Another account by his lance-bearer, a nobleman called Darius, has it that the Great King “died his own death”—a gnomic phrase that some have taken to mean that he committed suicide.

Whatever precisely happened, this death left Bardiya still on the imperial throne, but only for seven months. Darius, who was a member of the imperial family and the son of a satrap, joined six other nobles in a successful conspiracy to assassinate the pretender. Darius was then appointed his successor.

He himself promoted a different version of events, according to a large inscription carved on a mountainside in Persia. He claimed that Cambyses had his brother Bardiya killed, before he himself died. Darius wrote: “When Cambyses slew Bardiya, it was not known unto the people that Bardiya was slain.” Then a magus, or priest from Media, called Gaumata, seeing the unpopularity of the government, impersonated Bardiya and hijacked the throne.

Darius continued: “The people feared him exceedingly, for he slew many who had known the real Bardiya. For this reason did he slay them, ‘that they may not know that I am not Bardiya, the son of Cyrus.’ There was none who dared to act against Gaumata, the Magian, until I came.”

Darius put Gaumata to death, but had a hard time maintaining his authority. In his first year in office he claims to have fought nineteen battles and captured nine kings. He punished them with horrifying severity; he writes of one rebel, proudly:

Phraortes, seized, was led to me. I cut off his nose and ears and tongue, and put out one eye; he was kept bound at my palace entrance, all the people saw him. Afterward I impaled him at Ecbatana; and the men who were his foremost followers, those at Ecbatana within the fortress, I flayed and hung out [that is, their hides, stuffed with straw].

—

So what are we to believe? There was not much passing trade to read Darius’s mountaintop inscription, although copies were distributed through the empire. He intended his narrative to last forever and to be read by posterity. However, there are inherent improbabilities in his account.

How likely is it that a senior member of the imperial family could be put to death on the order of Cambyses without anyone noticing? And surely many people knew Prince Bardiya by sight and would not have been taken in by a Median magus. And they could hardly all have been put to death. Nothing can be proved, but it is probable that it was Darius who was the usurper, who, Cambyses having died, murdered a real Great King and with barefaced effrontery replaced him. This could never be acknowledged, but the cover story he concocted is so thin as to insult the intelligence. One wonders what Ahura Mazda was supposed to make of this Great Lie.

Darius turned out to be a strong and effective ruler who earned his sobriquet “the Great,” as he came to be called, but the method of his accession exposed the chief weakness of the Persian state. At the center of affairs lay not so much a government as a palace. Intrigues were de rigueur, and maneuvers for the succession frequently fraught and bloody.

—

Compared with statelets like Athens and Sparta, the empire of Persia suffered from elephantiasis and good Hellenes thoroughly disapproved. For them, whether on the mainland, or in the many Greek colonies in Italy, Sicily, or Ionia, the best constitutional arrangement was the polis—that is to say, a small self-governing city that had all the competences of an independent state. Its citizens were potent stakeholders. They felt themselves to be superior to other peoples governed by despots. So far as Greeks were concerned, the man who was not politically active did not deserve to be a citizen, a politēs.

The philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist Aristotle, writing in the fourth century, claimed that “man is by nature a creature of the polis.” Anyone who “by nature and not by chance” is without a polis is either a bad man or a supernatural being. He is like the “outlaw, without a tribe or a hearth,” whom Homer condemns in the Iliad. Such a person is necessarily by nature a lover of war.

A city should not be too small to be incapable of being self-sufficient or too large to govern effectively. In Aristotle’s opinion, it should be possible to see all its citizens when gathered together in one place in assembly. (It must be remembered that women, slaves, and foreign residents—metics—were excluded from the franchise.) The philosopher Plato was even more specific. He proposed a citizen body of about five thousand men.

The issue of population size was important for one very good reason. The Greeks had no notion of representative democracy. When rule by the people was introduced in Athens in the sixth century (see chapter 7), decisions were taken directly by citizens meeting in public. In the middle of the sixth century, a poet called Phocylides wrote:

…a little

polis

living in good order

In a high place is greater than block-headed Nineveh

Not all poleis (the plural of polis) were democracies. Among the Ionians the Great King liked to insist on one-man rule or oligarchies. But they maintained citizen assemblies, even if their powers were limited or only a few citizens were allowed to vote.

Despite the recommendations of Plato and Aristotle, the city-state was prone to fierce, sometimes murderous quarreling between two factions, democrats and oligarchs. Civil war was common. Oppositions were invariably disloyal and, if not liquidated, were driven into exile, where they plotted their return and the expulsion or execution of those presently in power.

Nevertheless, unless a Hellene was free and lived in a polis, his condition was felt to be shameful. He was the next best thing to a barbarian—not simply foreign, but the shadow of a man, cowardly, effete, slavish, murderous, susceptible to luxury and comfort.

—

The Persian Empire had not finished expanding. To secure its northwestern edge, Darius led a campaign in 513 to conquer Macedonia and Thrace, home of untamed tribal groups (today, southeastern Bulgaria, northeastern Greece, and the European part of Turkey). There was a lesson here for mainland Greeks who could foresee a day when the Great King might cast a greedy eye in their direction.

Persia already controlled the myriad city-states along the Asian seaboard, having taken them over with Lydia from Croesus. Like all Hellenes, the Ionians were passionate for their liberties and resented foreign control. They were tired of Persian rule. The seeds of revolt against the Great King were sown in the port of Miletus near the mouth of the Maeander River in the satrapy of Caria.

Its leader, a certain Aristagoras, who was deputy governor for the Persians, turned coat, and persuaded the city-states as well as Caria and Cyprus to form an anti-Persian alliance. He crossed over into Greece to win more support. He told the Spartan king Cleomenes: “It is a disgrace that the Ionians are slaves rather than free men.” But he failed to win him over, for in his view the Persian Empire was much too far away to be of concern.

Aristagoras did better at Athens where he won over the assembly by promising that the war would be a walkover. Twenty warships were voted to help the Ionians. It was not the most generous of commitments, but it infuriated Darius when he came to hear of it. Herodotus famously commented: “These ships turned out to be the beginning of evils for both Hellenes and barbarians.”

In 499 the rebels, Athenians among them, marched north from Miletus and then Ephesus. They turned inland and arrived at Sardis, which put up no resistance. But although they had taken the city, they were unable to plunder it. Many of its houses were made of reeds and after a soldier had set fire to one of them flames swept through Sardis. A sanctuary dedicated to the greatly respected mother goddess, Cybele, was burned to the ground. This was sacrilege, and the Persians were shocked, for, as we have seen, their policy was to privilege and protect all religions. Another ground for dismay was that the Lydian kingdom was technologically very advanced and Sardis was its industrial center. Its products included the making and dyeing of fine woolen cloth and carpets. The river Pactolus flowed through the city’s marketplace carrying gold dust in its mud. It was during Croesus’s reign that the secret of separating gold from silver was discovered, thereby producing both metals of a purity never before known.

At this point the Athenians withdrew from the war and sailed back to Athens. We are not told why, but it is possible that they came to a view that the revolt was bound to fail. This was because it would be won and lost at sea. Most of the states taking part were maritime powers, but the Persian fleet bristled with state-of-the-art Phoenician warships and employed well-trained crews. In any battle at sea the odds were against the rebels.

As time passed, the Ionian confederation began to fall apart. Its members may have been allies, but they simply could not bear to act in unison for any length of time. In 494 an Ionian commander, Dionysius of Phocaea, a Greek city-state on the Asian coast, was dismayed by the state of the fleet that had gathered at the little island of Lade not far from beleaguered Miletus. In theory it was a powerful force with more than 350 warships, but it was ill disciplined and morale was low. Dionysius attempted but failed to introduce rigorous training to prepare the fleet for battle with the Persians.

The result was predictable. Some contingents from the Aegean islands sailed away and the Persians won a decisive victory. Seeing that all was lost, the Greek admiral made good his escape. He did not return to Phocaea, his homeland, guessing at the vengeance the victorious Persians would wreak against his fellow-citizens. He sailed south and attacked the Phoenician merchant fleet. Having captured valuable booty, he set a course for Sicily where he made a living as a pirate who preyed on Carthaginian and Etruscan shipping. He had done his best for the Ionians, but he knew when he was beaten. Beaten, that is, not by the enemy but by his fractious Ionian allies.

Miletus fell and was sacked. Most of its men were killed and the women and children were sold into slavery. It was a bitter blow to Ionian pride. Modern archaeologists have found evidence of the destruction and abandonment of parts of the city.

There was a lesson in the failure of the uprising for all Greeks. Until they learned to cooperate with one another, they would never beat the Persians with their vast reserves of wealth and human capital.

The Athenians were dismayed. It was scandalous that civilized communities had lost their liberty to a barbarian monarchy. A popular dramatist, Phrynichus, staged a play on the subject of the fall of Miletus. It was a hit and spectators wept at the moving reenactment. This did not do Phrynichus any good. He had laid bare their emotions and people were furious. They made him pay a heavy fine for reminding them of a real-life tragedy with which they were only too painfully familiar. They decreed that no drama on this subject should ever be presented again.

—

Darius brooded over the fiery fate of Sardis. He had a justifiable reputation for religious toleration. A letter of his to an official survives, whose discouraging opening sentence reads: “I understand that you are not completely obedient to my commands.” We can imagine the panic with which the recipient of this missive read on. The Great King explains his anger. “You have levied tribute on the sacred gardeners of Apollo and you have ordered them to till profane land, disregarding the will of my ancestors towards the god.” He added that through his oracle at Delphi Apollo had always spoken truth to the Persians.

History does not record the official’s reply, nor what happened to him. But we have other evidence that Darius was not a merciful man. Ionia had passed back under his yoke, but so far the Athenians had gotten off scot-free despite their part in the firing of the Lydian capital and the destruction of the Great Mother’s sanctuary. In his eyes they were not in the least civilized, as they liked to claim; they were no better than the pirates or sea raiders who until the peace of the Great King had infested the Eastern Mediterranean. One day, he promised himself, flames would consume their gods.

He began to lay plans for the invasion of Greece.

4

The Shaking-Off

It was the greatest moment of his life.

The young Athenian nobleman had won the diaulos at the Olympic Games of 640. He was Cylon and the diaulos, literally a “double flute” in Greek, was the name given to a foot race of about 400 meters. The competitors, stripped to the buff, ran the length of the stadium, which in those days was not much more than a dirt track (later it was remodeled with raised banks for spectators), and back again.

Cylon was crowned with a wreath of olive leaves, an inexpensive honor, but, as we have seen, the real prize was glory. The great poet Pindar, writing more than a century later, was a specialist in composing praise hymns for winners, and in one of them he summed up what was important about victory at the games. Life was filled with pain and ended in the defeat of death, but the triumph of an athlete in bloom offered a kind of immortality.

Man’s life is a day! What is he?

What is he not? A dream of a shadow

Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men

A gleam of splendour given by heaven,

Shining life is on earth

And life is sweet as honey.

Cylon intended to add to his glory another great deed. In 632 he led a plot to overthrow the constitution and set himself up as tyrant, or sole ruler, of Athens. He knew something about tyranny as a form of government, for he was married to a daughter of the tyrant of Megara, Theagenes. This was a small city-state just north of the Isthmus of Corinth with a claim on the strategic island of Salamis, which Athens fiercely contested. Theagenes’ approach to the business of power was simple and direct. He won and kept the approval of the poor by slaughtering the cattle of the rich, which were grazing on other people’s well-watered land. He understood that he needed the confidence of the people and, as the clear-eyed philosopher Aristotle put it, the “confidence of the people [depended] on hostility to the rich.”

At this time Athens was ruled by an aristocracy, the so-called Eupatridae (literally, “men with good fathers”). Although an aristocrat himself, Cylon knew his peers had no interest in supporting him. He would need popular backing, and he must have had some evidence that this was forthcoming.

He took sensible precautions. He consulted the oracle at Delphi, which advised him to seize the Acropolis, the city’s citadel, during the “greatest festival of Zeus,” so he made his attempt during that year’s Olympic Games. This surely was Greece’s “greatest” celebration. His father-in-law supplied him with troops.

When he presented himself to the people, his careful preparations went for nothing. He seized the Acropolis, but not the city. Ordinary Athenians failed to cheer him along. In fact, when they realized what was going on they came in from the countryside where they were working in their fields and placed Cylon under siege.

It turned out he had gotten the oracle wrong too. Apollo had not meant the Olympic Games, but the Diasia, a great Athenian festival that was held outside the city walls and was attended by all citizens. With the city itself deserted, Cylon and his men would have met with little or no opposition.

—

The only remaining business to be decided was what to do with the failed revolutionaries. Cylon himself and his brother managed to slip away unseen, but the remainder sought sanctuary in the old temple of Athena on the Acropolis. The protection of the goddess was absolute for so long as the suppliants chose to remain.

However, the ruling aristocrats wanted to teach the traitors a lesson, while sticking to the letter of the law. The chief official of that year, or Eponymous Archon (for more on Archons see this page), was Megacles, a very grand man indeed, who was a leading member of the Alcmeonidae, a fabulously wealthy clan with influential international connections.

He persuaded Cylon’s men, who were short of food, to come down and stand trial. They would technically remain in sanctuary because they would all have their hands on a long thread tied to the cult statue of the goddess inside the temple. Megacles solemnly promised they would not be harmed.

They walked past the Areopagus hill and the shrine of the Erinyes. These were the Furies, unforgiving and ferocious punishers of the forsworn oath. Ancient deities older than Zeus and the Olympians, they were usually imagined as disgusting hags; they were variously described as having coal black bodies, bat’s wings, snakes in place of hair, and dog’s heads. They wielded cruel brass-studded scourges. By a malign coincidence, it was just at this point that the thread broke—and so did the oath of Megacles.

He and his fellow-Archons were delighted by the convenient accident. The goddess had clearly withdrawn her gift of sanctuary. This was justification, he claimed, for his next move. Those outside sacred precincts were stoned to death and even those who sat down at the altars of the “august goddesses” (as the Furies were politely called) in a vain attempt to save their lives were butchered. Some who begged for mercy from the wives of the Archons were spared.

If Cylon had miscalculated, it was as nothing to Megacles’ hasty error of judgment. He had soiled himself by his own trickery. Nothing was more important than a man’s purity when he entered into relation with the divine. Homer writes: “In no way can [he] pray to Zeus spattered with blood and filth.” Hands had to be washed and clean, sometimes white clothes were worn at sacrifices. When entering a sanctuary a suppliant would sprinkle himself with water in a font. Sexual intercourse, birth, death, and, especially, murder defiled all those involved.

Athens had been preserved from a despot, but in the process had incurred the gravest of pollutions. The murder of anyone under the guardianship of the gods was an insult to the gods themselves. The Olympians were not mocked.

So how could the city purify itself?

Cylon, his brother, and their descendants were condemned to perpetual banishment. But Megacles and the entire clan of the Alcmaeonids were tried and found guilty of sacrilege. They too were all exiled in perpetuity and even those who died between the date of the offense and the passing of the sentence were exhumed and their remains thrown out. The point was not so much to punish those convicted as to remove the threat of divine displeasure.

A curious shaman-like figure, Epimedes, who was a Cretan seer, philosopher, and poet, was brought in to purify the city itself. He was said to have fallen asleep for fifty-seven years in a cave sacred to Zeus and died at an extreme old age. Tattoos were found on his corpse and his skin was preserved in the ephors’ court at Sparta, for whom he had prophesied on military matters.

The seer accepted the Athenian commission and conducted the necessary rituals. He only charged for his services an olive branch and an alliance of friendship between the now cleansed city and Knossos, the capital of his homeland.

—

In the seventh century we at last enter an era of something looking like history. In the Mycenaean world, as we have seen, most states were monarchies, but by the time the “Dark Age” was over and light again suffused the scene, hereditary rulers like Theseus had mostly vanished.

In the place of kings, there was almost continuous civic strife between dominant aristocracies and impoverished peasants. Cylon’s story is evidence of something unsettled in the Athenian polity, and much the same was the case in other Greek city-states, or poleis. There was a shift from animal husbandry to arable farming and migration from the country to the city. Between 1000 and 800 the Hellenic population seems to have remained more or less constant, but then, alongside a general economic and social revival, came rapid population growth, a major destabilizing factor. To have too many citizens was a problem that could only be partially alleviated by sending out citizen colonies. It inevitably contributed to unrest at home over land ownership and food production.

The nobility hijacked the Greek word for good, agathos, which came to mean of high birth. In Athens, these Eupatridae were connected with each other by intermarriage and ties of kinship. They forged international links, often traveling around Greece and the Mediterranean and giving each other generous hospitality and gifts. They were fiercely proud of their genealogies and fiercely competitive with one another. They looked back with regret to the obsolete heroes of old.

Unsurprisingly, men of this cast of mind strongly objected to new money and resisted upwards social mobility on the part of wealthy parvenus. The worst thing was to marry rich girls with no background. A poet, Theognis, a Greek from Megara who flourished in the middle of the sixth century, noted sourly: “Wealth has mixed up the race.”

The lords and ladies of Homer’s epics were the model for later aristocratic lifestyles. Theognis put the conservative case against social change in tones that have been repeated through the ages by defenders of privilege:

This city is still a city, but the people are not the same.

Once they knew nothing of justice nor laws,

But wore old goatskins

And lived outside the city like deer.

And now they are “noble”…while those

Who used to be noble are worthless.

The Eupatridae were satisfied with the way things were. The peasantry took a different view. For them the status quo had become unacceptable. Aristotle summed up their situation:

The poor were enslaved to the rich—themselves and their children and their wives. The poor were called dependents and “sixth-parters,” since it was for the payment of a sixth of what they produced that they worked the fields of the rich. All the land was in the hands of a few, and if the poor failed to pay their rents both they and their children were liable to seizure. All loans were made on the security of the person.

Many of the common people were in debt. They pledged their persons and could be seized by their creditors. Some of them became slaves at home, and others were sold into foreign countries.

Just as important as the problem of indebtedness, perhaps even more important, was the rising anger of ordinary Athenians at their subordinate relationship to the rich, their dependence on them as clients. They simply wanted to be free of their masters.

—

During the seventh and sixth centuries two ways were found of resolving this conflict between the classes. The first was to install one-man rule—in other words, a tyranny. The second was to invite an experienced politician to recommend radical constitutional reform—in other words to hand over the problem to a wise, all-knowing lawgiver.

A tyrant, or turannos, was a despot who depended on the backing of the people. Aristotle writes:

The tyrant is set up from among the people and the mob against the notables, so that the people may suffer no wrong from them. This is clear from the facts of history.

Charismatic and ruthless, he was usually a dissident nobleman, who seized power by coup d’état. Tyrannies tended to last for two or three generations, but seldom for longer. Of the main Greek states only Sparta and the island of Aegina appear to have escaped periods of tyranny. The word “tyrant” did not acquire a pejorative connotation before the fifth century. Many of these rulers were no worse than the aristocrats who had preceded them, and some were a distinct improvement. Above all, what they did was to quash the class war by the use of force.

The Cylon affair only exacerbated social and political tensions in Athens. It was clear that tyranny would not attract support, so a trusted lawgiver called Dracon was appointed in 622 or 621 to prepare a legal code and for the first time in the history of Athens to put it in writing. Perhaps it was meant to address, among other things, the fallout from the Alcmaeonid prosecutions. Little of the code survives, but it reflected the world of the blood feud and the rituals of purification. The legislator won a reputation for harshness. Apparently, the death penalty was applied to people convicted of idleness, and indeed for almost every offense. According to Demades, an Athenian orator and politician in the fourth century, Dracon “wrote his laws in blood, not ink.”

The criticism seems to be unfair, for the only laws of his to come down to us are sensible and humane rulings on manslaughter. Involuntary homicide was punished by exile, and relatives of the dead man were entitled to give the offender a pardon. If a person defended himself against “someone unjustly plundering him by force” (that is, a burglar) and killed him, “that man shall die without a penalty being enforced.”

Whatever the truth about Dracon’s work, a review of Athenian legislation did little to calm the atmosphere of political rancor.

—

Solon was born into a good family in about 638, although it had fallen on hard times. It claimed descent from Codrus, last of the semimythical kings of Athens who flourished towards the end of the second millennium.

Those were the distant days of the Dorian invasions of mainland Greece. The Athenians were determined to resist the newcomers. They boasted proudly that they were autochthonous. They had not come from anywhere and they were going nowhere.

The oracle at Delphi prognosticated that a Dorian attack on Attica would only succeed if its king was unharmed. So Codrus decided to give his life for his country. He disguised himself as a peasant and made his way to the Dorian encampment, where he provoked a quarrel with some soldiers and led them on to killing him. Once the Dorians realized what had happened, they piously withdrew from Attica and left the Athenians in peace.

Some time after Codrus’s death, the monarchy was abolished and replaced by three annually elected officials. The Basileus (or king) retained the old title, but was restricted to important religious duties. The Eponymous Archon (so-called because he gave his name to the year in which he held office) was, as we have seen, the civilian head of state and government; and the polemarch (or “war-ruler”) was the army’s commander-in-chief. These officials with executive powers were later supported by six others, making a total of nine Archons. Archons were appointed on the basis of birth and wealth. According to Aristotle, at first they held office for life, although this was apparently reduced later to ten years and by the seventh century to one year.

Solon’s father, one Execestides, maintained a long-standing tradition of public service and, if we are to believe Plutarch, got himself into financial difficulties by excessive charitable giving. After his death, his son was too proud to approach his friends for loans; his family was accustomed to giving help, he told himself, not receiving it.

Short of funds and despite the fact that aristocrats did not approve of going into trade, Solon entered on a commercial career. It required a great deal of travel and the young merchant was able to see many different kinds of Greek governance. Once he had made his fortune, he gave himself over to a life of pleasure. However, he insisted: “I am not prepared to become rich unjustly, for retribution is certain.”

Solon was a copious poet. Unlike his great contemporary Sappho from the island of Lesbos, who wrote the most passionate love lyrics, he wrote verse chiefly because there was no prose literature at that time and he had no other option. It was not for a century or so that authors such as the “father of history,” Herodotus, took to prose as a matter of course.

A good deal of Solon’s work survives. To begin with, he wrote with no particular end in view, but over time he used verse to communicate his political views. Paradoxically, as he rebuilt his family’s fortune, he grew increasingly sympathetic to the poor. He once compared the differing fortunes of two men. One of them “owns much silver/And gold, and wide fields” and another has only enough to feed and clothe his family. But the latter also has a “child and a blooming wife…wealth enough for mortals.”

While Solon was setting himself up in his writing as a defender of the poor, the political situation at Athens deteriorated. It appears that law and order broke down. Aristotle quotes from an important poem about Athens, the original Ionian territory, which Solon wrote at this time.

I know, and the pain lies in my heart,

When I look on the eldest land of Ionia

Tottering.

Solon built a reputation as a reconciler and at the request of all the city’s political factions he was elected Eponymous Archon in 594/93. He was given sweeping powers to reform the state. It was agreed that whatever he recommended would be implemented. Solon claims to have accepted the commission reluctantly, but behind the scenes he gave assurances in advance to the parties.

This got him into a lot of trouble. He incautiously confided in some unreliable friends that he would not be confiscating land, but had made up his mind to cancel debts. Anticipating his decree, they immediately borrowed large sums of money and bought up estates; after Solon announced the cancellation, as he had assured them, they declined to pay their creditors. His embarrassment was only alleviated when, according to the terms of his legislation, he forgave large debts he himself was owed.

—

The new lawgiver moved fast. An Archon usually opened his term with a routine proclamation that he would protect property rights; but Solon evidently recognized that his reforms would attract strong opposition. He needed to build momentum from the outset if he was to stay the course and hustle the public into acquiescence.

He declared that all mortgages and debts which pledged the debtor’s person in the event of default were annulled. Everyone who had become a slave because he could not repay what he owed was now a free man again. Those who had been sold abroad would be bought back at the state’s expense and returned to Athens with their citizenship restored. This seismic event was nicknamed the seisachtheia, or the “shaking off of burdens.”

Solon passed a law forbidding debt bondage in the future and fixed a maximum amount of land that an individual could own. However, as already mentioned, he refused to confiscate and redistribute the large estates. As a result he pleased nobody and there was widespread grumbling. Rich creditors were annoyed to lose what they were owed. The poor had been looking forward to owning the freehold of their allotments, but were disappointed to find that they still had to pay rent. Criticized on all sides, he was a wolf at bay encircled by attack dogs.

Solon’s underlying sympathies lay with the poor, as he made clear in his poetry. In fact, he presented himself, unembarrassedly if inaccurately, as one of them. He wrote:

Many evil men are rich, and many good men poor;

But we will not exchange our virtue

for their wealth, since virtue lasts forever.

Whereas wealth belongs now to one man, now to another

However, the role of the lawgiver was to be an arbiter between conflicting interests and Solon convinced his fellow-citizens that he would be evenhanded, as indeed he was. Although he had started out as a radical, he ended as a moderate.

Solon was no democrat; he simply wanted all classes to be of good standing in the state. This was how he put it:

I have given the masses as much privilege as is enough

neither taking away nor adding to their honor.

As for those who had power and were envied for their wealth,

for them I took care they should suffer no slight.

I stood holding my valiant shield over both sides,

and I did not allow either of them to triumph unjustly.

However, his political reforms took a giant step from aristocratic government in the direction of democracy, even if Solon did not perceive it at the time.

—

His first priority was to create a new kind of aristocracy—an aristocracy of wealth rather than the existing one of birth. He divided the population of Attica into four economic groups, measured according to the annual yield of landed property in the form of grain, wine, or oil.

The richest were the pentacosiomedimni; these were landowners whose income reached five hundred medimni, or bushels of grain, either grain alone or in combination with equivalent measures of oil and wine. Only these men were eligible for the Archonship and the important financial post of Treasurer of Athena. Of course, many noblemen were rich enough to be pentacosiomedimni, but the point was that now it was to be only their money that qualified them for high office, not their parentage. There were wealthy “commoners” more than ready to compete with them.

Next came the hippeis, whose property produced less than five hundred and more than three hundred bushels. Their name means “horsemen,” for they were judged rich enough to afford the upkeep of a horse and so could act as cavalry in time of war. The third class were the zeugitai (able to keep a team or zeugos of oxen), who needed to produce two hundred medimni. Various official jobs were open to both these classes.

Finally, at the bottom of the heap were the thetes (serfs), who were manual laborers with property worth less than 150 medimni. They could not hold any public office and in wartime served as light-armed infantry or oarsmen in the fleet.

Citizens in a polis like Athens attended meetings of a general assembly or ecclesia. Its authority and its membership varied according to the kind of regime in power at the time. At a minimum it decided on war and peace and formally elected magistrates. The poor were often excluded or at best not expected to play an active part in proceedings. In any case, they had little free time to attend meetings. In a groundbreaking move, Solon opened the assembly to the thetes as full participants.

He also created a new council, or boulē, of four hundred members drawn from the four tribes, which met regularly and prepared business for the assembly. A preexisting all-purpose body, the council of the Areopagus (a hill near the Acropolis named after Ares, god of war, where it met), had been dominated by the nobility and its powers were now limited to guardianship of the constitution and to criminal trials.

—

Solon was still not convinced that he had prized the fingers of the aristocracy from the levers of power. So he introduced a remarkable innovation into the election of the nine Archons. This was the principle of randomness. Each of Athens’s four tribes (or subdivisions of the citizen body) elected ten men for the Archonship, forty in total. The successful nine were then chosen from the forty by lot.

The use of lot (the technical term is sortition) was a typically imaginative Greek device. It had two purposes—one religious and the other political. First, it was a respectful invitation to the gods to play their part in an election and, so to speak, leave them with the last word. Then, it ensured equality of opportunity and prevented the corruption that can mar elections. So far as Solon was concerned, it was a mechanism for weakening the influence of over-mighty factions. The nobility would find it harder to monopolize the Archonship.

To the modern mind, random selection is absurd. But sortition took the sting out of electoral contests. Perhaps most significantly, it encouraged citizens (at least, the better-off ones) to keep up-to-date with the issues of the day, for there was a reasonable chance that at some point they might have to play an active part in public life. Vetting and the preliminary long list went some way to preventing totally unsuitable or incapable appointees.

—

One of Solon’s most curious measures underlines the seriousness with which he meant Athenians to take politics. He ruled that in times of faction and great policy debates a citizen who held back and did not involve himself or take sides should lose his civic rights and have no share in the city’s governance.

Solon had not finished. As a successful businessman, he understood the value of economic growth to social harmony and the alleviation of poverty. Too much was being exported for higher prices than in the domestic market. So the Archon forbade the export of agricultural products, except for olive oil, of which there was probably a surplus. To encourage manufacturing, citizenship was granted to craftsmen (for example, in metalwork and ceramics) who settled in Athens with their families. Fathers were obliged to teach their sons a trade, if they were to enjoy support in their old age. The rapid rise in the production and dissemination of decorated Attic pottery at about this time is probably no coincidence.

Domestic ceramics were popular throughout Hellas. Corinthian ware was widely exported and featured black figures in silhouette on a red ground. The style was copied in Athens where it achieved very high levels of artistry from about 570. By about 530 Athenian potters developed a new, more realistic technique, with black backgrounds and human figures drawn by brush in red. Modern scholars have identified, on stylistic principles, more than one thousand ceramic artists.

Vases, cups, and plates depict a wide range of social activity—athletes training in the gymnasium, wining and dining at drinking parties or symposia, battle scenes, ships at sea, religious ceremonies, attractive young men (often accompanied by a fond toast—“Here’s to the lovely Alexias” or whomever), mythological scenes (sometimes ghoulish, as when Medea is shown killing her children), people having sex, a reveler with a prostitute, women making music at home, and many, many more. Small vases (called lecythoi) show figures on a white ground; they held olive oil used for anointing the corpses of young unmarried men. Athenian pottery is not only aesthetically pleasing, but it also goes a long way to making up for the lack of literary accounts of everyday life.

For the first time Athens began minting its own coinage. Until then it had used the money of its nearby commercial rival, the island of Aegina. The object of the exercise was to assert the city’s arrival as a serious economic force.

As well as his social and economic policies and his constitutional changes, Solon tackled the legal system of Athens and repealed Dracon’s legal code except for his homicide laws.

He brought in two radical legal measures. In Athens there was no police or prosecution service. When a crime was committed it was for the victim in person to prosecute the alleged offender; but few poor men had the education or the audacity to take a nobleman to court. Solon ruled that any citizen, not simply the person affected, could bring a prosecution. An experienced orator was now able to speak for the injured party, thus improving the odds on a conviction.

The most far-reaching of all Solon’s measures was the creation of a jury court of appeal against decisions taken by elected officials, particularly the Archons. This was the heliaea. Anyone could qualify to be a juror, even the impoverished thetes. This supreme court may indeed have been the ecclesia itself, in legal session.

In later times the annual jury list consisted of six thousand citizens over thirty years of age, chosen by lot. These sometimes met in full session and, as required, could be subdivided (also by lot) into panels some hundreds strong and served in various different courts. Cases were heard in the open air in a marked-off area of the agora. The large number of jurors not only encouraged citizens’ participation in public affairs, but made bribery less likely. As we shall see, the judicial powers of the Archons were eventually taken over by the heliaea, and they merely prepared cases to be heard by it.

Whether or not Solon understood the full consequences of what he was doing, the establishment of his jury courts was the foundation of Athenian democracy, because they gave the citizens control over the executive arm of government.

Solon’s settlement was inscribed on four sides of wooden tablets that were set in rotating frames, so they could be consulted easily. These tablets were still in existence in the third century and fragments survived to the lifetime of Plutarch in the first century A.D. They were in an antiquated and more or less incomprehensible script and were written “as the ox plows”—that is, in alternating lines from left to right and then right to left. But they were a treasure from Athens’s time-honored past.

—

Once Solon had finished his work, what was he to do? And, despite all the assurances, how could he be certain that his reforms were properly carried out? The city appears to have been in turmoil; there is little detail but, in the light of the fact that the lawgiver lost an eye, we may suppose a forceful reaction, even riots. Also he faced endless advice on improvements to what he had written and inquiries about the exact meaning of one law or another.

Solon could have established himself as a tyrant and governed by decree. But this would have gone against everything he stood for—the rule of law, constitutional government, and social reconciliation. He would never be a Cylon. He wrote:

And if I spared my homeland,

And refused to set my hand to tyranny

And brute force, staining and disgracing my good name,

I am not ashamed. For I think in this way I will outdo

All other men.

Tyranny, he once remarked, was a delightful place, but there was no way out of it.

So, instead, he recalled his days as a trader and set off on his travels again. He obtained a leave of absence for ten years and advised his fellow-citizens simply to do what he had written and make no changes. He himself had no regrets, confessing contentedly: “I grow old, forever learning many things.”

Apparently he visited Egypt, where he met the pharaoh, Amasis II, a man of lowly origins who seized the throne during an army revolt. He spent time studying with priests. From them he heard the story of the lost island of Atlantis (later taken up by Plato), which offended the gods and was swallowed up by the Atlantic Ocean. Solon is then said to have sailed to Cyprus, an island of numerous small kingdoms, where one of its mini-monarchs was a friend of his and was said to have named a new town in his honor, Soli.

At some point many years later, Solon, who had become an international celebrity as a wise man, went to Lydia, or so legend has it. There, at the capital, Sardis, he met King Croesus, then at the height of his power. Plutarch, who was the lawgiver’s biographer, doubts the tale; the dates are difficult (albeit just about feasible), for Solon’s Archonship was in 594 and Croesus only acceded to his throne in 560. But Plutarch can never resist a good story. He observed: “It so accurately fits Solon’s character that I do not propose to reject it for reasons of chronology.”

Solon was dismayed by the vulgarity of the Lydian court, but tried to keep his feelings to himself. Croesus asked him who he judged to be the happiest of men, confidently expecting the sage to name him. Solon was not prepared to flatter the king and nominated an Athenian who had died gloriously in battle.

Then who was the second most happy man? said the king, crossly. The unforgiving Solon said that Cleobis and Biton were his next choice. These two young men collapsed and died after hauling a wagon with their mother in it for five miles so that she could attend a religious festival. The sage’s point was that life was uncertain and no one should be counted happy till the day of his death.

After Croesus’s defeat by the Persians, the story that Cyrus the Great had intended to burn the Lydian king to death until a timely tempest doused the pyre was further enriched. As the flames licked upwards to him, Croesus groaned the word “Solon” three times. When asked to explain whom he was talking about, he replied: “A man to whom I would pay a fortune if only he could talk to all tyrants.”

He then spoke of his encounter with Solon. Herodotus writes:

Cyrus learned through interpreters what Croesus had said. He reflected that he, too, was human, and changed his mind about committing a living man to the fire, a fellow human being who had been blessed with happiness no less than he. Moreover, he began to fear retribution, and to contemplate the fact that nothing is really secure and certain for human beings.

Cyrus pardoned Croesus for opposing him, spared his life, and appointed him as an adviser on high policy.

The anecdote is an elaborate fiction, but all the same it expresses a profound truth about the Hellenic mind. It embodies Apollo’s maxims at Delphi—“nothing in excess” and “know yourself”—and was a bleak reminder that the fate of human beings lay not in themselves, but (as Homer put it) “on the knees of the gods.” The Lydian king had offended them by his presumption. So he paid the price.

—

Was Solon a success or a failure? He himself knew that what he had achieved was imperfect. Someone once asked him: “Have you enacted the best possible laws for the Athenians?” “The best they would accept,” came his undeceived reply.

His social, legal, and economic reforms brought undoubted benefits. Thanks to him Athens became an increasingly prosperous, progressive, and well-administered state with an emphasis on social justice. But the attempt to lower the political temperature failed. The Eupatridae were furious that they had lost so much wealth, prestige, and power. They were going to fight with all their might for a return to the old world of aristocratic privilege.

Within five years of Solon’s Archonship, law and order broke down. In one year no Archons at all were elected, and in 582 an Eponymous Archon called Damasias tried to make his post permanent and in effect founded a tyranny: he lasted two years before being expelled.

Party strife broke out and three mutually hostile factions emerged. The party of the Coast was led by the Alcmaeonid Megacles (Solon had organized an amnesty for the exiled clan) and promoted moderate policies, while the men of the Plain advocated a return of the dismantled aristocratic system. The men “beyond the Hills” promoted the cause of the unprivileged. For the unpalatable fact remained that, in spite of the “shaking off of burdens” the poor were still poor, and angry. There were many more of them than noblemen. They were led by an ambitious young politician called Pisistratus, who could see an opportunity when it presented itself.

He was eager for power, and was determined to avoid Cylon’s mistakes.

5

Friend of the Poor

The island of Salamis, hilly and dry, lies less than two miles off the coast of Attica. With nine thousand hectares of land, it is a rocky, inlet-rich crescent with few fertile acres. Unproductive though it was, its dark, rugged outline could be seen from the Acropolis and stood as a threat to freedom of passage for the merchant ships of Athens.

The export trade in olive oil, with Solon’s encouragement, was thriving and the city was undoubtedly prospering. But until the Athenians controlled the island they faced the ever-present threat of a blockade. In the sixth century, Salamis was owned by Megara, the small but energetic and not always friendly polis on the mainland just west of the island.

In the days of the tyranny of Theagenes, Cylon’s father-in-law, Megara was too troublesome a problem to solve. The Athenian assembly passed a law forbidding anyone to lay before it a proposal to annex the island by force on pain of death. At some point in the 560s the aged Solon decided to circumvent this prohibition.

He chose a bizarre means of doing so, if we are to believe Plutarch. His family let it be known that he had become demented. In the privacy of his home, he secretly wrote a poem of a hundred lines about Salamis. When he had learned it by heart, he ran out of doors into the marketplace and recited it. He began:

I have come as a herald from lovely Salamis

With a beautifully written song, not a political speech.

Solon’s point, a technical one to put it mildly, was that his verses did not qualify as a formal proposition. But his message could hardly have been plainer.

Let us go to Salamis to fight for a beautiful island

And clear away bitter disgrace.

In what must have been a preplanned move, Solon’s friends, and in particular the leader of the peasant faction, Pisistratus, praised the poem to the skies and advised the people to act on his words. The law was repealed and war was declared against Megara. Solon took command of an expeditionary force and set off with Pisistratus on his staff to conquer the island.

They sailed past a headland on the southern coast of Attica and saw a large number of Athenian women sacrificing to the harvest goddess Demeter. A man who made himself out to be a deserter was dispatched to the Megarians. He told them that if they hurried they would be able to capture the wives and daughters of many leading Athenian families. The Megarians fell into the trap and sent a party of men to kidnap them. Meanwhile the women were sent away and replaced by attractive young men in dresses who did not yet need to shave. They caught the Megarians completely by surprise and killed them all.

Greeks much admired tricks of this sort. Guile was seen as a virtue and its “patron saint” was Odysseus, who devised the wooden horse at Troy and whose foxiness got him out of trouble more than once on his way home after the city’s fall.

The ambush did not win the war, which carried on bloodily for some time. The two parties were so exhausted by the fighting that they agreed to submit the quarrel to the Spartans, who were the acknowledged if informal leaders of the Greek world. Apparently Solon thought of yet another device to help their cause. In the sixth century there was no agreed text of the Homeric epics. The revered lawgiver slipped two lines into the famous catalogue of the ships that the Greeks sent across the Aegean Sea to Troy. They referred to the flotilla of Ajax, king of Salamis.

Ajax brought twelve warships from Salamis

And beached them close to the Athenian army.

The couplet helpfully emphasized the close relationship between the islanders and Athens. And so it was to Athens that, after careful consideration, the Spartans awarded Salamis.

—

Solon and Pisistratus were very fond of one another. We are told they entered into a love affair when Pisistratus was a good-looking lad in his teens. Despite a wide gap of thirty years between them, this is not implausible. Solon was highly sexed, if we may judge from his poetry, where he writes of the delights of falling in love “with a boy in the lovely flower of youth,/Desiring his thighs and sweet mouth.”

However, it would be wrong to believe that either man was necessarily, in our modern sense, gay. This is because from the eighth century onwards the Greek upper classes established and maintained a system of pederasty as a form of higher education. A fully grown adult male, usually in his twenties, would look out for a boy in his mid-teens and become his protector and guide. His task was to see him through from adolescence into adulthood and to act as a kind of moral tutor.

Sex was not compulsory, but it was under certain strictly defined conditions allowed. The older man was the active lover/partner or erastes and the teenager was the loved one, or eromenos. Buggery was absolutely out of bounds and brought shame on any boy who allowed it to be done to him. It could have the most serious consequences, as the fate of Periander showed. This famous tyrant of Corinth in the seventh century unwisely teased his eromenos in the presence of other people with the question: “Aren’t you pregnant yet?” The boy was so upset by the insult that he killed Periander.

A popular and acceptable technique for achieving orgasm was intercrural sex: both participants stood up and the erastes inserted his erect penis between the thighs of the eromenos and rubbed it to and fro. The youth was not meant to enjoy his lover’s attentions or show signs of arousal; rather, he was making a disinterested gift of himself to someone he admired.

The great Athenian writer of tragic dramas, Aeschylus, wrote a play about the love between the two Greek heroes, Achilles and Patroclus. It was called The Myrmidons, after the warriors whom Achilles commanded during the Trojan War. Achilles is presented as the erastes, and reproaches his lover, in rather roundabout terms, for declining an intercrural proposition.

And you rejected my holy reverence for your thighs,

Spurned our many kisses.

These same-sex unions were perfectly respectable provided that the conventions were observed, and that the teenager developed into a good man without disgracing his erastes, and so had been worth the trouble. Fathers would give couples their blessing. Just to the north of Attica in neighboring Boeotia, man and boy lived together as if they were married. In time of war lovers might fight alongside each other. A memorial stone found in the countryside outside Athens survives, in which an eromenos sadly records his lover’s death.

Here a man solemnly swore for love of a boy

To take part in strife and tearful war.

I [i.e., the memorial stone] am sacred to Gnathios, who lost his life in battle.

The romantic phase of a pederastic relationship did not last long, and once an eromenos had started to shave, sexual relations were felt to be improper.

—

The gods gave pederasty their blessing. They routinely had affairs with attractive young human beings and quite often their eyes lighted on pretty boys. Theognis, a lyric poet from Megara who flourished in the sixth century, argued that the king of the gods set his seal of approval on same-sex love by having numerous affairs with handsome youths.

In fact, he was not averse to committing rape, as the case of Ganymede goes to show. He was a Trojan shepherd whom Zeus fell for. Turning himself into an eagle, the god swooped down, grabbed him, and flew him off to his palace on Mount Olympus, where he appointed him his cup-bearer—in effect, chief sommelier.

There is a certain pleasure in loving a boy, for even Zeus,

The son of Cronus, king of the immortals, fell in love with Ganymede,

And snatching him up took him to Olympus, and made him

A god, keeping forever the lovely bloom of youth.

Couples were expected to graduate to marriage and children, those without a gay orientation doubtless heaving a sigh of relief. In fact, most of them will have been heterosexual and not much wanted sex with one another. These pederastic relationships were essentially adopted for cultural reasons. They often evolved into a lifelong friendship and, like marriages, were a useful means by which families could form connections and alliances.

There was, of course, a routine spread of homosexuals throughout the population, and evidence has survived of energetic sexual activity that seems to have had little association with the erastes/eromenos ideology.

High up a rocky promontory on the volcanic island of Thera in the southern Aegean Sea some curious inscriptions have survived, probably dating to the early or mid-seventh century. They were carved into the mountainside in large, deeply scored letters. The spot appears to have been a rendezvous for archaic sex. The messages evoke a distant erotic past with touching immediacy. One of them reads: “I swear by Apollo of Delphi, right here Krimon fucked [So-and-So…the name is missing], the son of Bathykles.” Another boy praises his partner: “Barbax dances well and he gave me pleasure.”

Greeks would not understand the language of modern psychology. So far as sex was concerned they thought in terms of a man’s acts not of his essence, of what he did rather than what he was. He might have sex with another man, but that did not make him a homosexual, for neither the concept nor the word had been invented. However, to have sex only with someone of the same gender aroused stern comment. One was expected to spread one’s favors.

Particular disapproval was reserved for effeminacy, and there was a name for it. A cinaedus was a man-woman, soft, degenerate, and depraved. He allowed himself to be penetrated and, worse, enjoyed it. He was regarded as not far off from being a male prostitute.

—

Solon and Pisistratus cherished the memory of their love, long after the passion had died. This was fortunate, for they came to disagree sharply on political issues. It was evident that Solon’s reforms had not quelled the regular disruptions of daily life in Athens, and intelligent minds turned to the desirability of a tyranny. Pisistratus, with his successes in the war with Megara behind him and as leader of a major political movement, believed he was the man for the job.

He presented himself as a “great friend of the poor” and the thetes, the lowest and most numerous of Solon’s four classes, saw in him a savior. One day he drove into the agora in a chariot, apparently wounded as if he had just escaped an assassination attempt and complaining of a plot against him because of his policies to help the underprivileged. However, the aged Solon arrived on the scene and claimed that the whole affair was a trick. He accused the people of being empty-headed: “You listen to the words of a crafty man, but not to what he does.”

The matter was raised at the ecclesia.

The meeting was packed with supporters of the Hills faction. They paid no attention to Solon’s objections and decided that Pisistratus should be allowed a bodyguard of fifty men armed with clubs. With their assistance the would-be tyrant then seized the Acropolis and made himself master of the city.

He took no steps to silence the ever-vociferous Solon; their common, loving past presumably protected the old man. The lawgiver had kept his integrity, but if he looked back he must have considered himself and his reforms to have failed. But he did not repine. He devoted himself to the joys of sex, wine, and the arts. He wrote up the story he had heard in Egypt about lost Atlantis. A year or so into the tyranny he died.

Megacles and his fellow-clansmen saw that the game was lost and immediately went back again into the safety of exile. Five years passed and the other two factions of the Plain and of the Coast put their differences on one side and joined forces to overpower and eject Pisistratus. The tyrant was driven from Attica. But the victors soon fell out.

The Alcmaeonids were not fools. They must have noticed that they and the other great clans lacked popular support. Without it, they would find it hard to hold on to their old monopoly of power. Their best option was to restore Pisistratus and govern through him, be his collective éminence grise. So despite the family’s hostility to tyranny, another Megacles, grandson of the man who massacred the followers of Cylon, did a deal. He would help Pisistratus return to power on condition that he marry his daughter. The aspirant despot agreed, although he already had a perfectly good wife and two healthy sons, Hippias and Hipparchus.

Pisistratus understood the value of publicity and of symbolism. He staged a grand entrance into Athens. He found an unusually tall young woman from a country district. Pisistratus dressed her up in a suit of armor, taught her how to present herself convincingly as a goddess, and drove her in procession into the city. Town criers went ahead shouting: “Men of Athens, give Pisistratus a warm welcome, for Athena herself is bringing him home to her own citadel. She honours him more than all men.” What better way of demonstrating that Pisistratus enjoyed divine approval and had a legitimate claim to rule?

Herodotus calls the stunt “the silliest idea I have ever heard of,” and claims that some people were taken in by the impersonation. Maybe so, but in an age that saw the birth of drama, most Athenians will have recognized a theatrical spectacular when they saw one, were entertained by it—and accepted the political point that Pisistratus was making.

—

It was not long before Pisistratus fell from grace again. The problem was the arrangement with Megacles. He did not want to imperil the succession of his legitimate sons by new rivals, so, to avert the risks of pregnancy, he avoided ordinary sexual intercourse with his new wife and penetrated her up the anus. This was a grave insult and Megacles was furious when he found out about it. He withdrew his backing for Pisistratus and began assembling a grand alliance against him. The tyrant conceded without a fight and fled the country.

The second exile lasted ten tedious years. Pisistratus and his sons talked the matter over and agreed that they would work to regain power at Athens, however long it took. They went to Thrace, a large territory lying between Greece and the Hellespont, which was inhabited rather than governed by rough, semi-barbaric peoples. Evidently he was neither short of money or international contacts—nor sheer organizational energy.

First, he settled in the northeastern shoulder of Greece off the Thermaic Gulf. The king of the notoriously wild Macedonians may have made him a grant of land. In any event he established some kind of fortified outpost or town there. This was no mean achievement, for, although full of economic promise, the area was dangerous; a quarter of a century previously an Athenian colony had been wiped out by locals. Sometime later Pisistratus moved along the coast to the mountain range of Pangaeum north of the island of Thasos, where he exploited abundant silver and gold mines.

Pisistratus became very rich and in 546/5 recruited a small mercenary army. He won support for his cause from the important city-states of Argos in the Peloponnese and of Attica’s neighbor Thebes, as well as from the friendly tyrant of Naxos, the largest island of the Cyclades. Sensing that his moment had finally arrived, he moved to the town of Eretria on the island of Euboea. Attica lay just across the water. It was fairly obvious what was going to happen next and public sentiment in Athens rallied to the former tyrant. Once he was sure he would receive a warm reception, Pisistratus made his move. He sailed across the narrow strait and landed on the beach of Marathon.

Men from town and countryside flocked to meet and greet him. Herodotus commented sardonically: “These were people who found tyranny more welcome than freedom.” Little is known of the government of Athens during the decade of Pisistratus’s absence, but we will not go far wrong if we presume aristocratic misrule. An army of the self-defined better class of persons assembled to halt the invader.

The vicissitudes of his life had taught Pisistratus a lesson. He knew that his tyranny would not succeed by trickery, women dressed up as goddesses, the use of force, or ingenious alliances with former enemies. If he was to avoid going on his travels again he would have to rule by consent. During the coming battle he kept this very much in mind. He wanted as little blood to flow as possible.

The two sides met at a sanctuary of Athena near bee-loud Mount Hymettus. A seer gave Pisistratus a prophecy, which said:

The net has been cast, and the trap opened;

The tuna will swarm through the moonlit night.

Although obscure, the tone of the message was positive, and Pisistratus welcomed it.

He noticed that a shoal of optimistic Athenians had eaten their lunch and were either asleep or playing dice. He led his soldiers in a surprise attack, broke in on their siesta, and routed them. He sent his sons on horseback to chase after the fleeing enemy and when they had caught up with them to promise there would be no reprisals. They told them not to worry and go home.

Tyrant for the third and last time, Pisistratus wanted to show from the outset that he intended to run a tolerant and forgiving regime. Nobody need fear punishment or persecution—except perhaps for the Alcmaeonids.

6

Charioteers of the Soul

Pisistratus had a debt to pay.

Leader of the thetes, the unpropertied poor, he knew they had great expectations of his government. If he wanted to hold on to power, he would have to make a real difference to their lives. Fortunately, the means of doing so was to hand.

Most aristocrats had fled the country on the restoration of the tyranny and abandoned their estates. Solon had not dared, nor wished, to threaten their titles of ownership, but now the time had come for turning the screw.

If there was one group of people whom Pisistratus could not pardon it was the absent Alcmaeonids and their like. So he confiscated the vacant farming land, divided it into lots, and distributed it among those in greatest need—landless laborers in the fields and unemployed men in the city. He offered start-up loans to enable the new owners to make the most of their opportunity. Pisistratus’s aim was not only to develop agriculture, but also to encourage citizens to engage in private enterprise (rather than political activism).

The state did not lose by the arrangements, for smallholders were liable to a land tax amounting to one tenth of what they produced. This tax, which may have been introduced by Pisistratus, applied to all kinds of estate and formed a substantial part of the public revenue. To this may be added the income from the silver mines at Laurium in Attica, which were more effectively worked now than they had been in the past. The silver was mainly used for coinage, and so added to the liquidity of Athenian wealth and eased trade.

Land reform was not enough by itself to heal the woes of the countryside. The regime sought to improve the efficiency of farming and, building on Solon’s encouragement of olive oil exports, it planted olive trees more widely.

The creation of a class of peasant proprietors was a substantial achievement and removed in part at least the grievances of the poor that still plagued the body politic. Many Athenians found the loss of civic liberties a fair price for social reconciliation and economic development. And nobody much missed Megacles and his friends.

—

The heart of a polis was the agora. This was where people could shop, idle, do business deals, find out the latest news, and, above all, talk politics. A busy market square was evidence of a politically engaged citizenry, so it is more than a little surprising that Pisistratus laid out the famous agora of Athens.

Of course, the tyrant took all the necessary precautions to protect the regime, and employed a permanent force of mercenaries, which included Scythian archers, fierce nomad peoples from the northeast of Europe. But once he had looked after his personal security and warded off any risk of a coup d’état, he relaxed and trusted the people.

The space Pisistratus chose for the agora was roughly triangular. It was skirted by the main road into the city, the Panathenaic Way. Private houses were demolished, an old burial ground cleared, and wells closed. A fountain house was built and opened to the public, into which water was fed by a terra-cotta pipeline. A vestibule was entered through a colonnade and gave access to basins and running water spouts (hence the fountain house’s name “The Nine Spouts”).

In the southwest corner of the marketplace a substantial building rose from the ground, much larger than other Athenian homes of the period. A collection of rooms surrounded a courtyard. Modern archaeologists have found evidence of cooking, and it has been sensibly suggested that this was the residence of Pisistratus and the headquarters of the tyranny.

Establishing the agora could have meant no more than paying lip service to the people’s rights. But in fact, as the author of The Athenian Constitution put it, Pisistratus was “humane, mild and forgiving to criminals” and governed “more like a citizen than like a tyrant.” He left the constitution and institutions of Solon in place. Archons took office every year as usual, although the name of a family member or a reliable ally regularly appeared on the list. We are not certain that they were elected or appointed by him, but one way or another his wishes prevailed. Gradually political unrest subsided.

At some point Pisistratus or his successor, his son Hippias, was reconciled with the aristocracy. Leading noblemen returned to Athens and took part in the government. A fragment of an inscription recording annual Eponymous Archons throws light on how the tyranny organized power, making it effective without being blatant.

Onetorides

Hippias

Cleisthenes

Miltiades

Calliades

Pisistratus

Pisistratus died in 528/7 at about the age of seventy-five. Onetorides, of whom we know nothing (except he was probably the handsome youth whose name appears on painted vases in the middle of the century), was appointed while the old man was still alive. We may assume that the Hippias here was the ruler’s son. The Alcmaeonids liked to claim that they lived in exile throughout the tyranny; we can see that this was not true, for Cleisthenes was a member of the clan. Miltiades belonged to the powerful and extremely rich Philaid clan. Calliades was a common name and is unidentified, but Pisistratus must have been the tyrant’s grandson.

—

Despite officially being the tyrant’s political enemy, the step-uncle of the Miltiades on the inscription, also named Miltiades, collaborated with Pisistratus on an important foreign project.

He was sitting one day on the porch of his country house beside the road from Athens to Eleusis when a group of men passed by. Their clothes looked foreign and they were carrying spears. Inquisitive, he asked them over and gave them lodging, and food and drink—a gesture no one had made until then. He learned that they were Thracian tribesmen from the Chersonese (today’s Gallipoli) who were returning from Delphi. They had consulted the oracle about a war with an aggressive neighbor they were fighting and losing. The Pythia told them to appoint as their leader the first man who offered them hospitality. So Miltiades was invited to take charge of their affairs. He checked with Delphi to be sure he should accept the commission, and on receiving clearance from the oracle set off for the Chersonese.

It is a nice story; but the simple truth of the matter is that the tribe appealed to Athens to found a settlement or colony in their territory. This would strengthen their ability to defend themselves from their enemies. Always keen to support Athenian trade, Pisistratus was delighted to gain a strategic foothold on the trade route from the Black Sea. The arrangement had the secondary benefit of removing from the scene a potentially dangerous competitor for power.

Although Miltiades disapproved of the tyranny at home (while collaborating with it), he had no qualms about making himself absolute ruler of the Chersonese, which in effect became a family possession of the Philaids.

—

Pisistratus represented much more than a style of governing—he governed with a purpose. He wanted to turn Athens into an international religious and cultural center, and to promote the city as the motherland and moral leader of the Ionian Greeks.

The regime built and built and built. At Eleusis, a town twelve miles from Athens near the border with Megara, an annual festival was held in honor of the goddesses Demeter, patron of agriculture, and her daughter Persephone, queen of the underworld. Pisistratus had a great hall erected where initiates conducted visually spectacular but secret rites, giving them hope of a happy afterlife.

Back in Athens a new temple of Athena duly appeared on the rugged terrain of the Acropolis. Not far away in the south of the city, work started on a vast temple to Olympian Zeus. In this case, Pisistratus had overreached himself and it was many centuries before the building was completed.

The small island of Delos in the Cyclades was a center of pilgrimage for loyal Ionians. It was here that the god Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis, were born to Leto; she was one of the Titans, the generation of divinities that preceded Zeus and the Olympians. A hymn to Apollo reports that “the long-robed Ionians assemble with their wives and children” on Delos for a great annual festival with songs, dancing, and athletic games. It has Leto address the island as if it were a sentient being. She calls on it to build a temple of “far-shooting” Apollo. If they did this, she promised, “all men will bring you hecatombs and gather here, and incessant smells of rich sacrifices will always fill the air.” To be sure that Delos got the point, she predicted that tourists would grow the economy, “for you have to admit that your own soil is not rich.” The islanders obeyed. A temple rose from the ground and a twenty-six-foot-high marble statue of the god was erected.

Pisistratus staked his claim to the hegemony of Ionia by conducting a purification of the island. He did this by digging up all graves that were within sight of the temple and reburying the polluting dead elsewhere. Evidence of the presence of Athenian workmen suggests that he also improved in some way the shrine itself.

Pisistratus wanted Athens to become a lively tourist destination. He revamped, or perhaps founded, two great festivals. The Panathenaea was, in essence, a grand procession in which much of the population went up to the Acropolis and presented Athena with a robe woven by the hands of young virgins. Every fourth year this was accompanied by athletic and musical competitions.

—

The Great or City Dionysia was the consequence of a new temple which Pisistratus built on the southern slopes of the Acropolis in honor of Dionysus, god of wine and of out-of-body experiences. Here every spring festivities were held in his honor.

Choirs sang of legendary events and the leader of the performers, who was also the composer of the music and lyrics, took on the role of the protagonist in the story and exchanged dialogue with them. Sometime between 536 and 533, a man called Thespis is reputed to have added a prologue and speech to what had been a choral performance. Here were the first stirrings of Greek drama.

An able propagandist, Pisistratus called for support from the legendary king of Athens, Theseus. During the years of the tyranny his image is found on Attic pottery, often showing him as the slayer of the Cretan Minotaur. He was made to stand for the rights of the ordinary Athenian and for the permanence of the regime. As we have seen, the king had brought the villages of Attica into a single state. He was credited with founding the Panathenaea festival and opening the city to foreigners. He was well qualified to become the symbolic face of the new well-ordered Athens.