II

HELLAS

Ancient Greece

THERE is a quality of excellence about Ancient Greece that brooks few comparisons. In the same way that the quality of Greek light enables painters to see form and colour with exceptional precision and intensity, so the conditions for human development in Greece seem to have favoured both the external environment and the inner life of mankind. Indeed, high-intensity sunlight may well have been one of the many ingredients which produced such spectacular results—in which case Homer, Plato, and Archimedes may be seen as the product of native genius plus photochemistry.

Certainly, in trying to explain the Greek phenomenon, one would have to weigh a very particular combination of factors. One factor would have to be that sun-drenched but seasonal climate which provided optimal encouragement for a vigorous outdoor life. A second factor would be the Aegean, whose islands and straits provided an ideal nursery in the skills of seafaring, commerce, and colonization. A third factor would be the proximity of older, established civilizations whose achievements were waiting to be imported and developed. There were other parts of the world, such as present-day California or southern Australia, which possessed the same favourable climate. There were other enclosed seas, such as the Baltic or the Great Lakes of North America, which were suited to primitive navigation. There were numerous regions adjacent to the great River Valley civilizations that were perfectly habitable. But nowhere—with the possible exception of the Sea of Japan—did all three factors coincide as they did in the eastern Mediterranean. The rise of Ancient Greece often strikes its many awestruck admirers as miraculous; but it may not have been entirely fortuitous.

No doubt a touch of caution should be added to prevailing comment on ‘the most amazing period of human history’. Modern opinion has been so saturated by the special pleading both of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism that it is often difficult to see ancient Greece for what it was. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), ‘The Discoverer’, sometime Prefect of Antiquities at Rome, invented an aesthetic scheme which has deeply affected European attitudes to Greece ever since. In his Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works… (1755) and his History of Art Among the Ancients (1764), he wrote of ‘the noble simplicity and serene greatness’ and ‘the perfect law of art’ which supposedly infused everything Greek.1 The motto was taken to be ‘Nothing in excess’ or ‘Moderation in all things’. One can now suspect that many classical scholars have imposed interpretations which owed more than they knew to the rationalism and restraint of Winckelmann’s era. It was not the fashion to give emphasis either to the irrational element in Greek life or to its sheer joie de vivre. The philhellenic Romantics of the nineteenth century held priorities of their own. First there came John Keats with his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:

Map 6. Prehistoric Europe

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede

of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed:

Thou silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As does eternity. Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Then there is Shelley enthusing on ‘Hellas’:

The world’s great age begins anew,

The golden years return,

The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn.

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam

Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

Above all, there was the young Lord Byron dreaming about ‘The Isles of Greece’:

Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep

Where nothing save the waves and I

May hear our mutual murmurs sweep.

There, swan-like, let me sing and die.

The Romantics wrote on Greece with beguiling genius; and it is not surprising that they can ‘tease us out of thought’. Even the most distinguished critics can lose their critical faculties. One of them can be found writing on Greek literature about ‘results so satisfactory in form and so compelling in substance that their work has often been held up as a type of perfection’. Another can be found waxing on the joys of digging ‘at any classical or sub-classical site in the Greek world … where practically every object you find will be beautiful’. Yet another claimed that ‘the spirit of Ancient Greece … hath so animated universal nature that the very rocks and woods, the very torrents and wilds burst forth with it’. It may be that moderns are fired by nostalgia for a time when the world was young, or moved by a misplaced desire to prove the uniqueness of ancient Greece. Or perhaps, in marvelling at the surviving masterpieces, they forget the dross which has not survived. It was ‘a liberal education even to walk in the streets of that wonderful city’, wrote a popular historian of Athens, ‘to worship in her splendid shrines, to sail the Mediterranean in her fleets’.3

Negative aspects can undoubtedly be found by those who seek them. Those noble Greeks, who are so admired, were none the less surrounded by ‘degrading superstitions, unnatural vices, human sacrifice, and slavery’.4 Many commentators compare the high-minded vigour of the early period with the violence and decadence of later centuries. Still, the facts remain. When the civilization of Ancient Greece first came into focus, its links to the older worlds of Egypt and Mesopotamia were tenuous, [BLACK ATHENA] [CADMUS] [EPIC] Yet in the space of three or four hundred years it had created breathtaking achievements in almost every field of human endeavour. European history knows no such burst of vital energy until the era of the Renaissance. For Greece, apparently, did not develop slowly and methodically. It blazed.

The political history of Ancient Greece spanned more than a thousand years, and passed through several distinct ages. The initial prehistoric age, which looked to the twin centres of Minoan and Mycenean civilization, came to an end in the twelfth century BC. In its later stages it coincided to a large extent with the so-called ‘Heroic Age’ which culminated in the Trojan War, and which later Greek literature peopled with the legendary names of Hercules, Ajax, Achilles, and Agamemnon. Troy was built on the Asian side of the Aegean which, especially in Ionia, supported the major centres of Greek settlement for centuries. The traditional date for Troy’s fall is 1184 BC. Excavations have shown that the historical basis of the legends is stronger than was once supposed.

After that, an extended ‘Dark Age’ ensued, where the historical and even the archaeological record is meagre.

The ‘Golden Age’ of the Greek city-states lasted from the eighth to the fourth centuries, and itself passed through several distinct periods. The Archaic period reached the historical record with the first Olympiad whose traditional date of 776 BC was to be adopted as the arbitrary starting-point of the Greek chronology. The central period of Greece’s greatest glory began in the fifth century and ended in 338 BC, when the Greeks were forced to surrender to the Macedonians. Thereafter, in the period of dependence, the Greek cities laboured under foreign rule, first Macedonian, then Roman,[ECO] [NOMISMA]

The principal conflicts of this Golden Age were provided by the wars against the empire of Persia, which under Cyrus the Great (558–529) absorbed the eastern half of the Greek world, and later by the Peloponnesian War (431–404), where the Greek cities fought in fratricidal strife. The battles where the invading Persians were held and repulsed, at the Plain of Marathon (490 BC), or at the Pass of Thermopylae and the Bay of Salamis (480 BC) have inspired endless panegyrics. In contrast, Sparta’s inglorious victory over Athens in 404 BC, which was accomplished with Persian support, or the merciless suppression of Sparta by Thebes, have received less attention.

ECO

ECOLOGICAL devastation had already caught the attention of Greek rulers in the early sixth century BC. Solon the Law-giver proposed that the cultivation of steep slopes should be banned to prevent soil erosion; and Pisistratus introduced a bounty for farmers who planted olive trees to counteract deforestation and over-grazing. Two hundred years later Plato noted the damage inflicted on the land in Attica:

What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away…. There are some mountains which now have nothing but food for bees, but they had trees not long ago … and boundless pasturage. Moreover, it was enriched by the yearly rains from Zeus, which were not lost to it, as now … [providing]… abundant supplies of springwaters and streams, whereof the shrines still remain even now, at the spots where the fountains formerly existed.1

From the ecological point of view, ‘the adoption of agriculture was the most fundamental change in human history’. It is known as the ‘First Transition’, since it created the first form of artificial habitat—the cultivated countryside. Europe, in this process, served as a latter-day appendage to the main developments in south-west Asia, moving in parallel with China and Mesoamerica. But it shared all the consequences—a permanent food surplus and hence the potential for demographic growth; an ordered, hierarchical society; an increase in social coercion, both in labour and in warfare; the emergence of cities, organized trade, and literary culture—and ecological disasters.

Above all, particular ways of thinking about mankind’s relationship to Nature were engendered. The Judaeo-Christian tradition, which was destined to triumph in Europe, derived from the era of the ‘First Transition’. It stressed Man’s supremacy over the rest of Creation:

Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, upon every fowl of the air, upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.
Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb, have I given you all things. (Gen. 9)

For Thou hast made him [Man,] a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet… (Ps. 8)

The heavens are the Lord’s, but the earth he has given to the sons of man. (Ps. 115)

Dissident thinkers, such as Maimonides or St Francis, who rejected these exploitative nostrums must be counted a distinct minority.

Nor did attitudes change with the emergence of secular thought during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution (see Chapter VII). ‘Man, if we look to the final causes,’ wrote Francis Bacon, ‘must be regarded as the centre of the world.’ Progress, including open-ended material progress, was one of the ideals of the Enlightenment. Mankind was judged perfectible, among other things through the application of the new science of economics. Yet in the eyes of the true ecologist, ‘economics has enthroned some of our most unattractive predispositions: material acquisitiveness, competition, gluttony, pride, selfishness, shortsightedness, and just plain greed’.3 [MARKET]

Of course, by the time of the Enlightenment, the world was moving into the era of the ‘Second Transition’. The logic of exploitation was advancing from ‘the rape of nature’, i.e. of renewable botanical and zoological resources, to the unbridled consumption of non-renewable resources, especially of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. At this stage, Europe definitely took the lead. The Industrial Revolution vastly increased the sheer weight of human numbers, the urban sprawl, the expectation of affluence, and the rate of consumption, pollution, and exhaustion. Above all, it magnified mankind’s capacity for causing ecological trauma on a scale which Solon and Plato could never have imagined.

It has taken a long time for people to take the effects of a damaged environment seriously. When the ex-Emperor Napoleon lay dying at Longwood House on St Helena in 1821, his terminal illness aroused much disquiet. A post-mortem stated the cause of death to have been abdominal cancer. But tests conducted in 1840, when the body was returned to France for reburial, revealed traces of arsenic in the hair roots. Earlier suspicions of murder seemed confirmed. Various persons in his entourage were named as the poisoner. Over a hundred years later, however, a fresh suspicion emerged. In the early nineteenth century, arsenic compounds were sometimes used to fix the colours of fabrics; and close examinations at Longwood House showed that a strong constituent of arsenic was present in the wallpaper of the ex-Emperor’s specially redecorated rooms. The subject still arouses controversy. But it is not beyond possibility that Napoleon’s death was a case not of murder but of environmental pollution.4 (See p. 762.)

The Persian Wars gave a permanent sense of identity to the Greeks who escaped Persian domination. Free Hellas was seen as the ‘Glorious West’, ‘the Land of Liberty’, the home of Beauty and Wisdom. The East was the seat of slavery, brutality, ignorance. Aeschylus put these sentiments into the mouth of the Queen of Persia. The scene is the royal palace at Susa, where news has arrived of her son’s defeat at Salamis:

NOMISMA

NOMISMA, meaning ‘coin’, was used by both Greeks and Romans. Our own word ‘money’ derives, via the French monnaie, from the Latin moneta, meaning the mint, where coins are struck. (In early Rome the mint was situated on the Capitoline Hill in the temple of Juno Moneta.)

Money, in the sense of coinage, began to circulate in the Aegean in the early seventh century BC. According to Herodotus it was the Kingdom of Lydia which minted the first coins. A stater or two-drachma piece of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver, struck either in Lydia or in Ionia, is often described as the world’s oldest coin.1 Certainly the kings of Phrygia, from the legendary Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold, to Croesus (r. 561–546 BC), whose name was synonymous with fabulous wealth, were closely connected with the origins of money. They owned the ‘golden sands’ of the River Pactolus, near the Lydian capital, Sardis.

The island of Aegina also participated in the early days of coinage. Aegina’s silver coins, introduced in 670 BC, were certainly the first in Europe. Stamped with the emblem of a sea tortoise, they mark the beginning both of the widespread ‘aeginetic’ system of weights and measures and of numismatic art.2 Each of the subsequent mints adopted a similar emblem—the owl or the olive-branch for Athens, the pegasus for Corinth, the Arethusan nymph for Syracuse. From an early date, heads of divinities and inscriptions identifying the mint or the ruling authority were also common. Coins bearing the head of the ruler did not come into fashion until Hellenistic times, but were the norm under the Roman Empire.

Numismatics, the study of coins, is one of history’s auxiliary sciences. It deals with some of the most durable evidence of ancient times, and is particularly valuable for dating the layers of archaeological sites. Coins struck in hard metal speak with great precision about time and space. They bear witness not only to material conditions but also to the ramifications of international trade and cultural contacts.

From the seventh century Aegean coins have spread throughout the world. They form the basis of most monetary systems and of most commercial exchange. The right to mint coins has become one of the hallmarks of political sovereignty. 1,500 mints are known from ancient Greece alone. The Lydian stater has its descendants in the coinage of Rome, of Christian Europe, and now of all countries. Like the silver drachma of Aegina, some coins have gained currency far beyond the times and the territories for which they were intended. Indeed, the charisma of nomisma became so powerful that many came to fear it. ‘The love of money’, wrote St Paul from Macedonia in AD 65, ‘is the root of all evil.’ [DOLLAR]

QUEEN. My friends, where is this Athens said to be?
CHORUS. Far toward the dying flames of the sun.
QUEEN. Yet my son lusts to track it down.
CHORUS. Then all of Hellas would be subject to the King.
QUEEN. So rich in numbers are they?
CHORUS. So great a host as dealt to the Persians many woes.
QUEEN. Who commands them? Who is shepherd to their host?
CHORUS. They are slaves to none, neither are they subject.

The notion that Greece was all liberty, and Persia all tyranny, was an extremely subjective one. But it provided the foundation of a tradition which has persistently linked ‘civilization’ with ‘Europa’ and ‘the West’ (see Introduction, p. 22). [BARBAROS]

The rise of Macedonia, a hellenized country to the north of Greece, reached its peak in the reigns of Philip of Macedon (r. 359–336 BC) and of Philip’s son, Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 BC). In a series of campaigns of unparalleled brilliance, which ended only with Alexander’s death from fever in Babylon, the whole of Persia’s vast domains were overrun and the Greek world was extended to the banks of the Indus. According to one admiring opinion, Alexander was the first man to view the whole known world, the oikoumene, as one country. But for the senior English historian of Greece, at the end of his twelfth volume and his 96th chapter, the passing of ‘Free Hellas’ was to be lamented even more than Alexander was to be praised. ‘The historian feels that the life has departed from his subject,’ he wrote, ‘and with sadness and humiliation brings his narrative to a close.’ In the political sense, this Hellenistic Age, which began with the Macedonian supremacy, lasted until the systematic elimination of Alexander’s successors by the growing power of Rome, [MAKEDON]

The geographical expansion of the Greek world was impressive. The miniature island- and city-states which ringed the stony shore of the Aegean often lacked the resources to support a growing population. Arable land was at a premium. Commercial outlets grew, even without a modern sense of enterprise. Friendly trading-posts were needed for effective contacts with the continental interior. For all these reasons, the foundation of clone colonies offered many attractions. From the eighth century onwards, therefore, several of the most ancient cities of the Greek mainland and of Asia Minor—Chalcis, Eretria, Corinth, Megara, Phocaea, and, above all, Miletus—were engaged in active colonization. The most frequent locations were found in Sicily and southern Italy, in Thrace, and on the coasts of the Euxine or ‘Hospitable’ Sea—so named, like the Pacific, in the hope that its name might offset its nature, [CHERSONESOS]

In time, as the early colonies themselves gave birth to further colonies of their own, whole chains or families of cities were established, each with its lasting devotion to the parent foundation. Miletus constructed the largest of such families, with up to eighty members of various generations. In the west, in Sicily, the first Chalcidian colonies, Naxos and Messana (Messina), dated from 735 BC. Emporia (Ampurias) in Iberia, Massilia (Marseille), Neapolis (Naples), Syracusae (Syracuse), Byzantium on the Bosporus, Cyrene in North Africa, and Sinope on the southern Euxine shore all date from the same early centuries. At a later date, following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek cities arose in the depths of Asia. Foundations which bore the name of the Macedonian conqueror included Alexandria-at-World’s-End (Khojent, in Turkestan), Alexandria in Areia (Herat), Alexandria in Arachosia (Kandahar), Alexandria in Syria, and, above all, Alexandria in Egypt (332 BC). From Saguntum (Sagunto near Valencia) in the far west to Bucephala (Jhelum) in the Punjab at the eastern extremity, named after Alexander’s faithful charger, the interlinked chains of Greek cities stretched for almost 4,500 miles, that is, for almost twice the distance across North America. [MASSILIA] (See Appendix III, p. 1222.)

BARBAROS

EVERY textbook stresses the formative influence of the Persian Wars in uniting the people of ‘Free Hellas’ and in fixing their sense of Greek identity. Less obvious is the fact that those same wars set in motion a process whereby the Greeks would define their view of the outside, ‘barbarian’ world. Yet ‘inventing the Hellene’ went hand in hand with ‘inventing the barbarian’; and Athenian drama of the 5th century provided the medium through which the effect was achieved.1

Prior to Marathon and Salamis, the Greeks do not appear to have harboured strong feelings about their neighbours as enemies. Archaic poetry had often made heroes out of supernatural outsiders, including Titans and Amazons. Homer treated Greeks and Trojans as equals. Greek colonies on the Black Sea Coast lived from fruitful co-operation and interchange with the Scythians of the steppe, [CHERSONESOS]

In the 5th century, however, the Greeks became much more self-congratulatory and xenophobic. One finds the ethnic factor raised by Herodotus (b. 484), who, whilst appreciating the older civilizations, especially Egypt, laid great store by the ‘shared blood’ and common language of the Hellenes.

But the most effective catalysts of changing attitudes were the tragedians, especially Aeschylus (b. 525), who had himself fought at Marathon. In his Persae, Aeschylus creates a lasting stereotype whereby the civilized Persians are reduced to cringing, ostentatious, arrogant, cruel, effeminate, and lawless aliens.

Henceforth, all outsiders stood to be denigrated as barbarous. No one could compare to the wise, courageous, judicious, and freedom-loving Greeks. The Thracians were boorish and mendacious. The Macedonians were not echte hellenisch. By Plato’s time, a permanent barrier had been raised between Greeks and all foreigners. It is assumed that the Greeks alone had the right and the natural disposition to rule. In Athens, it was simply not done to liken the conduct of foreign tyrants to the ways that Athenians could themselves behave towards subject peoples.

The ‘superiority complex’ of the ancient Greeks inevitably raises questions about similar ethnocentric and xenophobic ideas which surface in Europe at later dates. It was certainly adopted by the Romans, and must be held in the reckoning when one considers the various purveyors of ‘Western Civilization’ who, like the Romans, have felt such an affinity for ancient Greece. Nor can it be irrelevant to the resentments which combine attacks on ‘Western Civilization’ with a particular brand of Classical revisionism. [BLACK ATHENA] Some commentators hold that the conclusions which the ancient Greeks drew from their encounter with the otherness of neighbouring peoples have passed into the body of European tradition:

In this particular encounter began the idea of ‘Europe’ with all its arrogance, all its implications of superiority, all its assumptions of priority and antiquity, all its pretensions to a natural right to dominate.2

Sicily and southern Italy (then known as Magna Graecia or ‘Greater Greece’) had a special role to play. They developed the same relationship with the Greek mainland that the Americas would develop with Europe. Until the Persian conquest of Asia Minor in the sixth century, the focus had remained very firmly in the Aegean. Miletus had been an even larger and more prosperous city than Athens. But once ‘Europa’ came under threat, first from Persia and then from Macedonia and Rome, the cities of Magna Graecia assumed a new importance. Sicily, full of luxury and tyrants, thrived on its special symbiosis with the surrounding Phoenician world. Syracuse was for Athens what New York was to be for London. On Greek Sicily and its internecine wars, Michelet waxed specially eloquent:

It grew in gigantic proportions. Its volcano, Etna, put Vesuvius to shame … and the surrounding towns responded to its grandeur. The herculean hand of the Dorians can be seen in the remains of Acragas (Agrigentum), in the columns of Posidonia (Paestum), in the white phantom that is Selinonte… Yet the colossal power of these cities, their prodigious riches, their naval forces … did nothing to retard their ruin. In the history of Magna Graecia, one defeat spelt disaster. Thus Sybaris and Agrigentum passed from the world, the Tyre and the Babylon of the West…7

Magna Graecia commanded a region of great strategic importance, where the Greek world came into direct contact with the rival spheres first of the Phoenicians and then of Rome.

Phoenicia, homeland of Europa, flourished in parallel to Greece and in similar style. Indeed, Phoenicia’s city-states were considerably senior to their Greek counterparts, as were the Phoenician colonies. Sidon and Tyre had risen to prominence at the time when Crete was in terminal decline.Kart-hadshat, or ‘New City’ (Kartigon, Carthago, Carthage) had been founded in North Africa in 810 BC, reputedly by Phoenician colonists led by Pygmalion and his sister Dido. Neighbouring Atiq (Utica) was still older. When old Phoenicia was overrun, like Asia Minor, by the Persians, Carthage and Utica were left, like the cities of the Greek mainland, to thrive on their own.

Carthage built a huge empire through naval power, trade, and colonization. Its daughter colonies stretched from beyond the Pillars of Hercules at Gades (Cadiz)

and Tingis (Tangier) to Panormus (Palermo) on Sicily. In its heyday it was probably the most prosperous of all city-states, dominating all the islands and coasts of the western Mediterranean. From the fifth century onwards, it fought and destroyed many of the Greek cities of Sicily, where its ambitions were cut short only by the arrival of Roman power.

CHERSONESOS

CHERSONESOS, ‘Peninsular City’, was founded in 422–421 BC by Dorian colonists from Heraclea Pontica. It stood on a headland on the western coast of the peninsula of Táurica,* 3 km beyond modern Sevastopol. It was one of a score of Greek cities on the northern shore of the Euxine Sea, most of them colonies of Miletus—Olbia (‘Prosperity’), Panticapaeum on the Cimmerian Bosphorus (The Straits of Kerch), Tanais on the Don, Phanagoria, and others. Its foundation coincided very closely with the visit to neighbouring Olbia of the historian, Herodotus, who recorded the first description of the Scythian and Tauric peoples inhabiting the Pontic steppes. Like its neighbours, it lived from commerce with the inland tribes, and from the resulting seaborne trade in wheat, wine, hides, and salted fish. Its population of perhaps 20,000 inhabited a typical grid of straight stone streets, replete with the usual agora, acropolis, theatre, and port.1

Exceptionally, Chersonesos survived all the turbulence of the next 1,700 years, passing through successive Greek, Sarmatian, Roman, and Byzantine phases. After its initial period as a solitary Greek outpost, it was absorbed in the 2nd century BC by the growing ‘Kingdom of the Bosphorus’, based at nearby Panticapaeum. The Kingdom, whose huge wealth grew from the grain trade, especially with Athens, was dominated by the latest wave of immigrants from the steppe, the Iranic Sarmatians, whose ability to assimilate into preceding Greek civilization created a brilliant new synthesis. Its goldsmiths, who worked to order for the Scythian chiefs of the interior, produced some of the most magnificent artistic jewellery of the ancient world. Its Spartocid dynasty, which was not Greek, eventually sought the protection of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus—the subject of Mozart’s early opera, Mitridate, Re di Ponto—who died in Panticapaeum in 63 BC (the acropolis at Kerch is still called Mount Mithridates). The Roman garrison, installed at that time, did not impose full imperial rule for nearly two centuries.

Despite repeated invasions, particularly by the Goths, Huns, and Khazars, the late Roman/early Byzantine period saw some fifty Christian churches built at Chersonesos. In one of them, in 988 or 991, the latest barbarian visitor, Prince Wolodymyr (or Vladimir) of Kiev, stepped into the marble pool of the baptistery to be christened before his marriage to the Byzantine Emperor’s sister. By that time, Khazar overlordship had waned, and the Byzantines were able to re-establish Chersonesos as capital of the Theme of Klimata.2 The final destruction of the ‘Peninsular City’ came in 1299 at the hands of the Mongol Tartars, who were busy turning Crimea into their homeland. It lived to see neither the arrival of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century nor the Russian conquest of 1783.

Excavations at Chersonesos began in 1829. They were intensified before the First World War, and resumed in the 1920s by a Soviet Archaeological Commission. The Tsarists were mainly looking for evidence of St Vladimir’s baptism. In 1891 they erected a vast domed basilica, now shattered, on the wrong spot. The Soviets were looking for remains of the material culture of a slave-owning society.3

Possession of the classical Black Sea sites gave their modern owners a strong sense of historical pride. The naval port of Sevastopol was founded beside the ruins of Chersonesos with an appropriate Greek name meaning ‘City of Glory’. The Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, built for the conqueror of Crimea, Prince Potemkin, started Russia’s ‘native classical style’. After the attack of the British and French in 1854–6, and the heroic Russian defence, the Crimean coast became a favourite resort for the summer palaces of tsarist courtiers and Soviet Party bosses. They all justified their presence through the dubious Russian Version of History that starts with St Vladimir. In 1941–2, after a second heroic siege of Sevastopol, the Crimea was briefly occupied by the Nazis, whose ‘Gotland Project’ would have returned the peninsula into the hands of German colonists. In 1954, on the tercentenary of another dubious event, the Soviet Government in Moscow presented Crimea to Ukraine. The gift was intended to symbolize the indissoluble links of Crimea and Ukraine with Russia. Instead, on the collapse of the USSR, it had exactly the opposite effect. In August 1991, the last Soviet General Secretary was caught holidaying in his villa at Foros, along the coast from Sevastopol, when the abortive coup in Moscow brought the Soviet era to an end.4 (See p. 1126.)

In recent times, the great variety of Crimea’s native population has all but disappeared. The ancient Tauri and Tauro-Scythians were long since over-run. The Crimean Goths defended their inland stronghold of Mangup until 1475. The Tartars were deported en masse by Stalin in 1942.5The Pontic Greeks survived until their deportation in 1949. A handful of Jews, who had escaped the Nazis, left for Israel in the 1980s. Russians and Ukrainians were left in an absolute majority.

In 1992, as families of the ex-Soviet military from Sevastopol shared the pebbly beach with the tourists, seeking their suntans beneath the ruined clifftop columns of Chersonesos, they looked on anxiously at the returning Tartars, at Ukrainian claims to the Black Sea Fleet, and at Russian demands for an autonomous Crimean republic. No location could have reminded them more of the impermanence of glory.

MASSILIA

MASSILIA (Marseille) was founded c.600 BC by Greeks from Phocaean Asia Minor. According to legend Photis, their leader, sailed his galley into the harbour just as the chieftain of the local Ligurian tribe was holding a betrothal ceremony for his favourite daughter. When the girl was invited to hand the cup of betrothal to one of the assembled warriors, she handed it instead to the handsome Greek. Thus began one of the richest and most dynamic of all Greek colonies.

Surrounded by high white-stone crags and guarded by an offshore island, the magnificent harbour of ancient Massilia has served as a major centre of commercial and cultural life for more than 2,500 years. The government was a merchant oligarchy. A Great Council of 600 citizens, elected for life, appointed a smaller Council of Fifteen, which formed the executive. The trade and exploration of the Massiliots spread far and wide. They dominated the sea from Luna in Tuscany to the south of Iberia, and they set up trading-posts at Nicaea (Nice), Antipolis (Antibes), Rhoda (Arles), and distant Emporia, all dedicated to their own patron goddess, the Ephesian Artemis. Their sailors did not fear the ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and were reputed to have reached Iceland in the north, and what is now Senegal in the south. One daring fourth-century Massiliot, Pytheas, navigated the northern coasts of Europe including the ‘Tin Islands’ (as Herodotus called Britain). His lost ‘Survey of the Earth’ was known to Strabo and Polybius.

Faced with the jealous rivalry of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Massilia had often appealed to Rome for support. But they did so once too often. In 125 BC when they called for military aid against the Gauls, the Roman legions overran the entire country, thereby creating the Province of Transalpine Gaul (Provence). From this a trilingual community grew up, speaking Greek, Latin, and Celtic. Thereafter, the city’s life mirrored all the changes of Mediterranean politics—Arabs, Byzantines, Genoans, and, from 1481, the French. The greatest days of Marseilles’s prosperity started in the nineteenth century, with the opening of French interests in the Levant. Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, and the building of the Suez Canal by de Lesseps, were key episodes.

Modern Marseilles, like ancient Massilia, is still ruled by the sea. Le Vieux Port, immortalized by the dramatic trilogy of Marcel Pagnol, has been superseded by the vast Port Autonome beyond the digue. But the turbulent emotions of Fanny, Marius, and César, hopelessly torn by the tearful departures and arrivals of the ships, are constantly repeated:

FANNY. Et toi, Marius, tu ne m’aimes pas? [// se tait]…

MARIUS. Je te l’ai déjà dit, Fanny. Je ne peux pas me marier.

FANNY. Alors, c’est quelque vilaine femme des vieux quartiers.… Dis-le moi. Marius …

MARIUS. J’ai confiance en toi. Je vais te le dire. Je veux partir.1

(Marius, don’t you love me? / I’ve told you already, Fanny, I can’t marry you. / Oh, I see: it’s one of those nasty women from the old town … Go on, say it. / No. I trust no-one but you, Fanny. I’m about to tell you. I want to leave./)

From the terrace of Notre Dame de la Garde, perched high on the site of a Greek temple, one can still gaze down on the ships slipping into the harbour like the galleys of Photis. Or, like the Count of Monte Cristo in the Château d’lf, or like Marius, one can dream of escape across the sea.2

The Phoenicians and Carthaginians, like Jews and Arabs, were Semites. As the ultimate losers in the struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean, they did not enjoy the sympathy either of the Greeks or of the Romans. As idolaters of Baal, the ultimate graven image, they have always been singled out for derision by followers of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which the Graeco-Roman world eventually adopted. Though Europa’s Phoenician kinsfolk held sway for a millennium and more, their civilization is very little known or studied. Their story may have suffered from yet another variant of antisemitism.

Greek religion progressed from early animism and fetishism to a view of the world seen as ‘one great City of gods and men’. The Olympian pantheon was already extant in the late prehistoric age. Zeus, Father of the Gods, and Hera, his consort, ruled over the headstrong family of Olympians—Apollo, Artemis, Pallas Athene, Ares, Poseidon, Hermes, Dionysus, Demeter, Pluto, and Persephone. Their home on the summit of Mount Olympus was generally taken to stand on the northern frontier of the Greek homeland. They were joined by a rich gallery of local deities, satyrs, shades, nymphs, furies, sibyls, and muses, to whom the Greeks paid their oblations. The ritual sacrifice of animals remained the normal practice. Though it was the prerogative of the gods to be capricious, and though some, such as Ares, God of War, or Poseidon, God of the Sea, could be vengeful, there was no Devil, no power of darkness or sin to prey on people’s deeper fears. Man’s supreme fault was hubris or overweening pride, commonly punished by nemesis, the wrath of the gods, [SPICE-OX]

A thousand myths, and a dazzling choice of cults and oracles, proliferated. They fostered an outlook where courage and enterprise, tempered by respect, were thought to be rewarded by health and fortune. The cult of Zeus, centred at Olympia, which hosted the Olympic Games, was universal, as was the combination of piety and competitive endeavour. The widespread cult of Apollo, God of Light, was centred at his birthplace on the island of Delos, and at Delphi. The Mysteries of Demeter, Goddess of the Earth, at Eleusis, and the still more ecstatic Mysteries of Dionysus, God of Wine, developed from ancient fertility rites. The cult of Orpheus the Singer, who had pursued his dead love, Eurydice, through the underworld, turned on a belief in the existence and purification of souls. Orphism, which lasted from the seventh century until late Roman times, inspired endless poetic comment, from Plato and Virgil onwards:

SPICE-OX

PYTHAGORAS (fl. c.530 BC) gave voice to two well-known maxims: ‘Everything is numbers’ and ‘Eating beans is a crime equal to eating the heads of one’s parents’. Scholars concerned with the origins of modern science study his mathematics. Those concerned with the working of the Greek mind study his ideas on gastronomy. (See Appendix III, p. 1221.)

Like the Pilgrim Fathers of a later age, Pythagoras was a religious dissenter, and sailed away from his native Samos to found a sectarian colony in Magna Graecia. There he found the freedom to apply his religious theories, among other things to food and diet. His central contention sprang from the concept of metempsychosis, ‘the transmigration of souls’, which could pass after death from person to person, or from persons to animals. As a result, he was opposed in principle to the custom of animal sacrifices, and held that the perfume of heated herbs and spices was a more fitting offering to the gods than the stench of roasted fat.

But if spices formed the link with Heaven, beans were the link with Hades. Broad beans, whose nodeless shoots relentlessly push their way to the sunlight, were thought to act as ‘ladders for the souls of men’ migrating from the underworld. Beans propagated in a closed pot produced a seething mess of obscene shapes reminiscent of sexual organs and aborted foetuses. Similar taboos were placed on the consumption of the noble meats, especially of beef. Some creatures like the pig and the goat, which root around and damage nature, were judged harmful, and hence edible. Others, like the sheep, which gives wool, and the ‘working ox’, man’s most faithful companion, were judged useful, and hence inedible. Joints of ignoble meat could be eaten, if necessary, but the vital organs such as the heart or the brain could not. According to Aristoxenos of Tarentum, the resultant diet consisted of maza (barley meal), wine, fruit, wild mallow and asphodel, artos (wheatbread), raw and cooked vegetables, opson seasoning, and, on special occasions, suckling pig and kid. Once, an ox rescued by Pythagoras from a beanfield was given a lifelong pension of barley meal in the local Temple of Hera.

More famously, when Pythagoras’ disciple, Empedocles of Acragas, won the chariot race at Olympia in 496 BC, he refused to offer up the customary sacrifice of a roasted ox. Instead, he burned the image of an ox made from oil and spices, saluting the gods amidst a billowing cloud of frankincense and myrrh. The Pythagoreans believed that diet was an essential branch of ethics. ‘So long as men slaughter animals,’ the master said, ‘they won’t stop killing each other.’ [KONOPIPJTE]

Nur wer die Leier schon hob
auch unter Schatten,
darf das unendliche Lob
ahnend erstatten.

Nur wer mit Toten vom Mohn
aß, von dem ihren
wird nicht den leisesten Ton
wieder verlieren.

Mag auch die Spieglung im Teich
oft uns verschwimmen:
Wisse das Bild.

Erst in dem Doppelbereich
werden die Stimmen
ewig und mild.

(Only he who has raised the lyre even among the shades can dispense the infinite praise. Only he who ate of their poppy with the Dead will never lose even the softest note. Though the reflection in the pond may often dissolve before us—Know the image! Only in the double realm will the voices be lasting and gentle.)

All these cults, as well as the Hellenistic cults of Mithras and Isis, were still in full circulation when Christianity arrived in the period after the 200th Olympiad (see Chapter III), [OMPHALOS]

Greek philosophy, or ‘love of wisdom’, grew up in opposition to conventional religious attitudes. Socrates (469–399 BC), son of a stonemason, was sentenced in Athens to drink hemlock for ‘introducing strange gods’ and ‘corrupting youth’. Yet the Socratic method of asking penetrating questions in order to test the assumptions which underlie knowledge provided the basis of all subsequent rational thought. It was used by Socrates to challenge what he regarded as the specious arguments of the earlier Sophists or ‘sages’. His motto was ‘Life unexamined is not worth living’. According to his disciple Plato, Socrates said: ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ It was the perfect start for epistemology.

Plato (c.429–347 BC) and Plato’s own disciple Aristotle (384–322 BC) together laid the foundations of most branches of speculative and natural philosophy. Plato’s Academy or ‘Grove’ and Aristotle’s Lyceum, otherwise known as the Peripatetic School, were the Oxford and Cambridge (or Harvard and Yale) of the ancient world. With them in mind, it has been said: ‘the legacy of the Greeks to Western Philosophy was Western Philosophy’.9 Of the two Plato was the idealist, creating the first imaginary utopias, fundamental theories of forms and of immortality, an influential cosmogony, a far-ranging critique of knowledge, and a famous analysis of love. Nothing in intellectual history is more powerful than Plato’s metaphor of the cave, which suggests that we can only perceive the world indirectly, seeing reality only by means of its firelit shadows on the wall. Aristotle, in contrast, was ‘the practitioner of inspired common sense’, the systematizer. His encyclopedic works range from metaphysics and ethics to politics, literary criticism, logic, physics, biology, and astronomy.

Greek literature, initially in the form of epic poetry, was one of those wonders which apparently came into being in a mature state. Homer, who probably lived and wrote in the middle of the eighth century BC, was exploiting a much older oral tradition. He may or may not have been the sole author of the works attributed to him. But the first poet of European literature is widely considered to have been the most influential. The Iliad and the Odyssey have few peers, and no superiors. Homer’s language, which classicists call ‘sublime’, proved to be infinitely flexible and expressive.[EPIC]

Written literature depends on literacy, whose origins go back to the importation of an alphabet in the eighth century. The art of letters was greatly encouraged by the urban character of Greek life, but the extent of its penetration into the various social strata is a matter of some controversy.[CADMUS]

Homer’s successors—his fellow epicists from Hesiod (fl. c.700 BC) to the unknown author(s) of the so-called ‘Homeric Hymns’; the elegists from Callinus of Ephesus (fl. from 690 BC) to Xenophanes of Colophon (c.570–480 BC); the lyricists from Sappho (b. 612 BC) to Pindar (518–438BC),from Anacreon (fl. c.530 BC) to Simonides of Ceos (556–468 BC)—have attracted countless imitators and translators. Theocritus the Syracusan (c.300–260 BC) wrote idylls of nymphs and goatherds which became the model for a pastoral tradition stretching from Virgil’s eclogues to As You Like It. But none sang so sweet as the ‘tenth muse’ of Lesbos:

Some say that the most beautiful thing on this dark earth
Is a squadron of cavalry; others say
A troop of infantry, others a fleet of ships;
But I say that it is the one you love.10

Poetry-reading was closely allied to music; and the melody of a seven-stringed lyre served as a common accompaniment to the declaimed hexameters. The Greek word musike encompassed all melodious sounds, whether words or notes. Poetry was to be found in the simplest inscriptions, in the widespread art of epigrams:

OMPHALOS

Delphi, in the view of the Greeks, lay at the exact centre of the world. Its omphalos or ‘navel stone’ marked the meeting-place of two of Zeus’s eagles, one sent from the east and one from the west. Here, too, in a deep valley ringed by the dark pines and rose-tinted cliffs of Mt Parnassus, Apollo had slain the snake-god Python and, in a steam-filled cave above a gaseous chasm, had established the most prestigious of oracles. In historic times, the Temple of Apollo was built alongside a theatre, a stadium for the Pythian Games, and the numerous treasuries of patron cities. In 331 BC Aristotle and his nephew drew up a list of all the victors of the Pythian Games to date. Their findings were inscribed on four stone tablets, which survived to be found by modern archaeologists.1

The procedures of the oracle followed a timeless ritual. On the seventh day of each month the high priestess, Pythia, freshly purified in the Castalian Spring, would seat herself on the sacred tripod above the chasm and, locked in an ecstatic trance among the vapours, would await her petitioners’ enquiries. The petitioners, having watched the customary sacrifice of a goat, would await her notoriously ambiguous responses, delivered in hexameters.2

Theseus, the legendary slayer of the Minotaur and founder of Athens, was given this comfort:

THESEUS, SON OF AEGEUS … DO NOT BE DISTRESSED. FOR AS A LEATHERN BOTTLE YOU WILL RIDE THE WAVES EVEN IN A SWELLING SURGE.

The citizens of Thera, worried by their failing colony on the African coast, were told to reconsider its location:

IF YOU KNOW LIBYA, THE NURSE OF FLOCKS, BETTER THAN I DO, WHEN YOU HAVE NOT BEEN THERE … I ADMIRE YOUR WISDOM.

Moved to the mainland from its offshore island, Cyrene prospered.

King Croesus of Lydia wanted to know whether to make war or to keep the peace. The Oracle said: ‘go to war and destroy a great empire.’ He went to war, and his empire was destroyed.

Before Salamis in 480 BC, an Athenian delegation implored the aid of Apollo against the Persian invaders:

PALLAS IS NOT ABLE TO APPEASE ZEUS … BUT WHEN ALL ELSE HAS BEEN CAPTURED … YET ZEUS OF THE BROAD HEAVEN GIVES TO THE TRITON-BORN A WOODEN WALL … TO BLESS YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN.

Themistocles, the Athenian admiral, rightly deduced that the key to victory lay with his wooden ships.

Lysander, the Spartan general who had entered Athens in triumph at the end of the Peloponnesian War, was warned:

I BID YOU GUARD AGAINST A ROARING HOPLITE AND A SNAKE, CUNNING SON OF THE EARTH, WHICH ATTACKS BEHIND THE BACK.

He was killed by a soldier with the emblem of a snake on his shield.

Philip of Macedon, notorious for his bribery, was reputedly told ‘TO FIGHT WITH SILVER SPEARS’. More authentically, on preparing to fight the Persians, he received this prophecy: ‘THE BULL IS GARLANDED, THE END IS COME, THE SACRIFICER IS NIGH.’ Shortly afterwards he was murdered.

The Roman, Lucius Junius Brutus, consulted the Oracle with two companions, and asked about their future:

YOUNG MEN, HE AMONG YOU WHO FIRST SHALL KISS HIS MOTHER WILL HOLD THE HIGHEST POWER IN ROME.

Brutus’ companions took the hint literally, whilst Brutus bent down to kiss the earth. In 509 BC Brutus became Rome’s first Consul.

Four centuries later, Cicero asked the Oracle how one achieved the highest fame. He was told:

MAKE YOUR OWN NATURE, NOT THE OPINION OF THE MULTITUDE, THE GUIDE OF YOUR LIFE.

The Emperor Nero, fearing death, was told: ‘EXPECT EVIL FROM 73’. Encouraged, he thought that he might live to be 73. In the event he was overthrown and forced to kill himself at the age of 31. Seventy-three turned out to be the age of his successor, Galba.

Most famously, perhaps, when Alexander the Great consulted the Oracle, it remained silent.3

Belief in the omniscience of the Delphic Oracle is almost as great among enthusiastic moderns as it was among the superstitious Greeks of old. For scholars, however, the problem lies in distinguishing the Oracle’s real achievements from its limitless reputation. Sceptics point out that none of the alleged predictions was ever recorded in advance of the events to which they referred. The amazing powers of the Oracle could never be tested. A powerful cult, an efficient publicity machine, and a gullible public were all essential elements of the operation.

Many of the oracle’s most famous sayings were inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Apollo. These included ‘Nothing in Excess’ and ‘Know Thyself’.4 They became the watchwords of Greek civilization.

EPIC

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were traditionally regarded in Europe not merely as the oldest examples of European literature but as the earliest form of high literature anywhere. In 1872, however, following excavations of clay tablets from the palace library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, the capital of ancient Assyria, the world was introduced to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh was already venerable by the time that Homer’s poems were composed. Indeed, it can be traced back through a Mesopotamian literary tradition into the third millennium BC. It begins:

[Of him who] found out all things, I shall tell the land,

[Of him who] experienced everything, [I shall teach] the whole.

He searched [?] lands [?] everywhere.

He who experienced the whole gained complete wisdom.

He found out what was secret, and uncovered what was hidden.

He brought back a tale of times before the flood.

He had journeyed far and wide, weary and at last resigned,

He engraved all his toils on memorial tablets of stone.1

Initial interest in the Babylonian epic centred on its biblical connections, notably on its narration of the Flood and the Ark and the story of Creation. But it was not long before scholars noticed echoes of Homer. After all, the chronological coincidence was close enough. Assurbanipal was building his library at Nineveh in the last quarter of the seventh century BC; Nineveh was destroyed in 612, in much the same era that the Homeric poems must have found their final form. (See Appendix III, p. 1216.)

Many textual similarities can be explained by the oral conventions practised by all pre-literate epic poets. But many things cannot be so easily explained. The opening invocation of Gilgamesh resembles the opening lines of the Odyssey both in tone and sentiment:

Goddess of song, teach me the story of a hero. This was the man of wide-ranging spirit who had sacked the sacred city of Troy and who had wandered afterwards long and far. Many were those whose cities he viewed and whose minds he came to know, many the trouble that vexed his heart… Goddess, daughter of Zeus, impart to me in turn some knowledge of all these things, beginning where you will.2

Stronger still is the case that can be made for the influence of Gilgamesh on the Iliad. Both epics turn on a dramatic twist of the plot which occurs with the death of one of two inseparable friends. Gilgamesh mourns for Enkidu as Achilles mourns for Patroclus. Other episodes, such as that where the gods draw lots for the division of the earth, sea, and sky, are strikingly similar. What was once rated as ‘a possible Greek debt to Assyria’ must now be upgraded to a probability.3 If this supposition is correct, the Homeric epics not only supply a link between Classical Letters and the countless generations of aoidoi, the unlettered bards of the immemorial tradition. They also span the gap between the conventional western literary canon and the far more ancient writings of non-European literature.

(Everything’s laughter, everything dust, everything nothing. I Out of unreason comes everything that exists.)

and of epitaphs:

(Tell them in Lakedaemon, passer-by. | That we kept the rules, resolved to die.)

Greek drama evolved out of the ceremonies of religious festivals. The concept of tragodia, literally ‘goat-song’, was originally connected with ritual sacrifice. The first Athenian dramas were performed at the festival of Dionysus. Like the Games, they were staged in the spirit of competition. The stylized dialogue between the players and the chorus provided a vehicle for exploring the most terrible psychological and spiritual conflicts. Between them the triad of tragedians, Aeschylus (525–456), Sophocles (c.496–406), and Euripides (c.480–406), turned tribal myth and legend into the foundation-stones of world literature. Seven Against Thebes, the Oresteia, and Prometheus Bound; Oedipus the King, Electro, and Antigone; Iphigenia among the Taurians, Medea, and Hippolytus, represent the remnants of a much larger repertoire. [OEDIPUS]

Only thirty-two tragedies have survived; but they continue to be performed the world over. They are specially needed by the horror-struck twentieth century. ‘Tragedy enables us to live through the unbearable.’ ‘The greatest Greek tragedies are a constant education in [the] nightmare possibility… that we will all end in darkness and despair and suicide.’ ‘Having boldly looked right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called World History, as well as the cruelty of nature, the Greek comforts himself…. Art saves him, and through art—life.’

The comedians, led by Aristophanes (c.450–385), felt free to poke fun at everyone from philosophers to politicians. The Knights, The Birds, The Clouds, The Wasps, The Frogs, whose fantastic plots are laced with lavatorial and sexual humour, still raise roars of laughter from audiences the world over. Aristophanes had a matchless talent for coining unforgettable phrases. He is the inventor of Nephelokokkugia, ‘Cloudcuckooland’. [scholastikos]

It is no exaggeration to say that Greek letters form the launch-pad of the humanist tradition. ‘Wonders are many,’ wrote Sophocles; ‘but nothing more wonderful than man’:

CADMUS

CADMUS, son of Agenor, King of Phoenicia, and brother of Europa, features in numerous Greek myths. He was honoured as founder of Boeotian Thebes, and as importer of the alphabet. Wandering the earth in search of his abducted sister, Cadmus consulted the oracle at Delphi. He was told to build a city ‘wherever a cow would rest’. So he followed a likely bovine from Phocis into the plain of Boeotia. He marked the spot where it finally lay down beside a hillock, and started to build the Cadmea, the oval acropolis of Thebes. The city’s inhabitants were born from the teeth of a dragon which Cadmus had slain on the advice of Athena. Athena made him their governor, and Zeus gave him a wife, Harmonia.

Birthplace of Dionysus and Hercules, of the seer, Tiresias, and of the magical musician, Amphion, Thebes was also the scene of the tragedy of Oedipus and of the Seven Against Thebes. It was the neighbour and hereditary rival of Athens; it was the ally and then the destroyer of Sparta; and it was destroyed itself by Alexander. [OEDIPUS]

The Phoenician alphabet, which Cadmus reputedly brought to Greece, was phonetic but purely consonantal. It is known in its basic form from before 1200 BC, having, like its partner, Hebrew, supplanted the earlier hieroglyphs. A simple system, easily learned by children, it broke the monopoly in arcane writing which had been exercised for millennia by the priestly castes of previous Middle Eastern civilizations. The names of the letters passed almost unchanged into Greek: aleph (alpha) = ‘ox’, beth (beta) = ‘house’; gimel (gamma) = ‘camel’; daleth (delta) = ‘tent door’. The old Greek alphabet was produced by adding five vowels to the original sixteen Phoenician consonants. It also doubled for use as numerals. In due course, it became the ancestor of the main branches of European writing—modern Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Glagolitic, and Cyrillic.1 (See Appendix III, p. 1218)

The earliest manifestations of the Latin alphabet date from the sixth century BC. It was based on a script found in the Chalcidian colonies, such as Cumae, in Magna Graecia. It was subsequently adopted and adapted by all the languages of western Christendom, from Irish to Finnish, and in recent times for many non-European languages, including Turkish.

The Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets were developed from the Greek in Byzantine times for the purpose of writing certain Slavonic languages. In Orthodox Serbia, ‘Serbo-Croat’ is written in Cyrillic; in Croatia the same language is written in the Latin alphabet. [ILLYRIA]

The angular style of Phoenician, Greek, and Roman scripts was dictated by the art of the stone-chisel. The gradual evolution of cursive styles was made possible by use of the stylus on wax and of quill on parchment.

Latin minuscules, which are the basis of modern ‘small letters’, emerged around AD 600, although the Roman majuscules, or ‘capitals’, have also been retained. [PALAEO]

Letters and literature are one of the glories of European civilization. The story of Cadmus hints that their roots lay in Asia.

CHORUS. Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these

    Is man, who rides the ocean …

    He is master of the ageless earth, to his own will bending

    The immortal mother of gods…

    He is lord of all living things…

    The use of language, the wind-swift motion of brain

    He learnt; found out the laws of living together

    In cities…

    There is nothing beyond his power…14

Greek oratory was an art fostered both by the theatre and by the tradition of open-air law-courts and political assemblies. Rhetoric, first expounded in The Art of Words by Corax of Syracuse (fl. c.465 BC), was studied as a formal subject. Of the ‘Ten Attic Orators’ from Antiphon to Dinarchus of Corinth, none matched the skill of Demosthenes (384–322). In his youth an orphan and a stammerer, he overcame all difficulties, drove his arch-rival Aeschines (389–314) into exile, and became the acknowledged master both of public speaking and of prose style. His series of Philippicsargued eloquently and passionately for resistance to Philip of Macedon. His oration On the Crown, delivered in his defence at a trial in 330 BC, was modestly described by Macaulay as ‘the ne plus ultra of human art’.

Greek art, too, experienced its great awakening—what one leading scholar has dared to call ‘the greatest and most astonishing revolution in the whole history of Art’.15 Modern appreciation is influenced no doubt by those forms which have best survived, notably sculpture in stone, architecture, and figure-painting on ceramic vases. Even so, the sudden leap from the stiff and gloomy styles of older antiquity, the explosive flowering which took place in the sixth and fifth centuries, is remarkable. Strongly inspired by spiritual and religious motives, Greek artists paid special attention to the human body, seeking, as Socrates urged, ‘to represent the workings of the soul’ by observing the effect of people’s inner feelings on the body in action. The two most celebrated statues of Phidias (c.490–415 BC) are only known from later copies; but the Parthenon friezes, dubiously salvaged by Lord Elgin, speak for themselves. [LOOT] A century later Praxiteles (fl. c.350 BC), a sculptor of almost ethereal ease and grace, was no more fortunate than Pheidias in the survival of his masterworks, though the Hermes of Olympia and the Aphrodite of Arles attest to his talent. These, together with figures of the later period such as the bronze Apollo Belvedere, or the Aphrodite of Melos, better known as the ‘Venus de Milo’, have often been taken as ideal models for male and female beauty. By the era of Alexander the Great, the Greeks had created ‘the pictorial language of half the world’.16

MOUSIKE

The Greek term mousike embraced both poetry and the art of contrived sound. Both have a long history.

Ancient Greek music was built on ‘modes’. A musical mode, like a scale, is a fixed sequence of notes whose intervals provide the basis for melodic invention. The Greeks were familiar with six of them; and Pythagorean mathematicians correctly calculated the frequencies which underlie their component tones, semitones and quarter-tones. The modal system, however, does not operate in quite the same manner as the later system of keys and scales. A change of mode alters the configuration of the intervals in a melodic line, whilst a change of key only alters the pitch.

In the fourth century St Ambrose selected four so-called ‘authentic modes’ for ecclesiastical use, to which Gregory the Great added four more so-called ‘plagal modes’, making eight ‘church modes’ in all. These formed the basis of plainsong [CANTUS]. In the sixteenth century the Swiss monk Henry of Glarus (Glareanus) set out a full table of twelve modes, giving them a confusing series of names which, with one exception, did not coincide with the ancient originals:

No.	Glareanus	Greek name	Range	Final	Dominant
I	Dorian	Phrygian	D–D	D	A
II	Hypodonian	—	A–A	D	F
III	Phrygian	Dorian	E–E	E	C
IV	Hypophrygian	—	B–B	E	A
V	Lydian	Syntonolydian	F–F	F	C
VI	Hypolydian	—	C–C	F	A
VII	Mixolydian	Ionian	G–G	G	D
VIII	Hypomixolydian	—	D–D	G	C
IX	Aeolian	Aeolian	A–A	A	E
X	Hypoaeolian	—	E–E	A	G
XI	Ionian	Lydian	C–C	C	C
XII	Hypoionian	—	G–G	C	E1

The development of modern harmony rendered most of the ancient modes redundant. But two of them, XI and IX, the Lydian and the Aeolian, survived. Known from the seventeenth century onwards as the major and the minor variants of the twelve key scales, they supply the twin aspects, the ‘joyful’ and the ‘mournful’, of the melodic system on which most European ‘classical music’ is based. Together with time and harmony, they constitute one of three basic grammatical elements in the musical language which marks Europe off from its Asian and African neighbours.

Given that Europe has never acquired a universal spoken language, i.e. a common verbal musike, Europe’s musical idiom, its non-verbal musike, must be reckoned the longest and strongest thread of its common culture. Indeed, since it extends from Spain to Russia but not to India or to the Islamic world, one is tempted to suggest that it is the only universal medium of pan-European communication.

Greek architecture succeeded in harnessing immense technical skill to exquisite sensibility. The art of building, which in Mesopotamia and in Egypt had largely sought to impress by means of its colossal scale, now aimed to exhibit more spiritual values. The finely proportioned harmonies of the Doric temples, with their subtly tapered colonnades and sculptured plinths and pediments, could convey either heavyweight muscular power, as at the Temple of Poseidon at Posidonia (Paestum), or effortless elegance, as in the white Pentelic marble of the Athenian Parthenon. The tone and the mood of the temple could be tuned to the special characteristics of whatever deity inhabited the enclosed cella or ‘sanctuary’ behind the soaring columns. Of the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’, as listed in the second century BC by Antipater of Sidon for the first generation of classical tourists, five were masterpieces of Greek architecture. After the Pyramids of Egypt and the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis at Babylon, these were: the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the (third) Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos or Lighthouse of Alexandria. [ZEUS]

Greek science was simply a branch of general philosophy. Most philosophers were concerned with both the physical and the abstract sciences. Thales of Miletus (c.636–546), who held that everything derived from water, died fittingly by falling down a well. He measured the flood levels of the Nile, the distances between ships, and the height of mountains, and he was credited with predicting solar eclipses. Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. c.500), in contrast, considered fire to be the primary form of all matter, which was constantly in flux. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c.500–428), the teacher of Pericles, argued for the existence of a supreme Mind or nous which animated all living things and which, by exerting its force on infinitely divisible ‘seeds’, enabled them to combine into all forms of matter. He claimed that the planets were stones torn from the earth, and that the sun was red-hot through motion.

Empedocles of Acragas (c.493–433) proposed that the earth is made of four ‘elements’: fire, earth, air, and water, and that these elements are constantly merging and separating under the contrary stresses of love and strife. He reputedly leapt into the crater of Mount Etna in order to test his capacity for reincarnation. But the volcano obliged by returning only one sandal. Democritus of Abdera (c.460–361) refined the atomic theory of Leucippus, holding that all physical matter could be explained in terms of the random collisions of tiny particles which he called atoma or ‘unbreakables’. He was popularly known as the laughing philosopher, because of his amusement at human folly.

OEDIPUS

OEDIPUS ‘the Swollen-Foot’, King of Thebes, is one of the most ubiquitous characters of ancient Greek myth and literature. He also furnishes a prime illustration of the Classical Tradition which derives from them.

The story of Oedipus is that of a Theban outcast who, being rejected by his royal parents, is doomed to take the most terrible, though involuntary, revenge. Exposed to die as an infant because his father, King Laius, feared a bad omen about him, he is saved by a shepherd and is fostered in nearby Corinth by people unaware of his origins. Consulting the oracle at Delphi, he is told that he will kill his father and marry his mother. For which reason he flees Corinth and comes again to Thebes. He kills Laius during a chance meeting; solves the riddle of the Sphinx; rids the city of its terror, and as a reward, is given the King’s widow, Jocasta, his own mother, to wife. After fathering four children through this unwittingly incestuous union, he discovers the truth, and sees Jocasta hang herself in despair. Thereon he blinds himself, and is led into exile by his daughter, Antigone. His end comes, at Colonus in Attica, where the tragic wanderer disappears into a sacred grove.

Homer mentions Oedipus in both Iliad and Odyssey. But it is the lost epic, Thebais, which was probably the main source of the later story. It then becomes the centrepiece of the Theban trilogy of Sophocles, and the background to Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes and to Euripides’Suppliants and Phoenician Women.

Oedipus recurs throughout subsequent European literature. The Roman poet Statius wrote an epic Thebaid which in turn was the model for Racine’s first play La Thébaide (1665). The Roman tragedian Seneca composed a variation on Sophocles’ Oedipus, inspiring further versions by Corneille (1659) and by André Gide (1950) and a loose adaptation by the contemporary poet, Ted Hughes. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonnus provides the basis both for T. S. Eliot’s verse drama The Elder Statesman (1952) and Jean Cocteau’s Infernal Machine (1934). His Antigone has been followed by dramas of the same name and subject by Cocteau, Jean Anouilh (1944), and Brecht (1947). Anthony Burgess wrote an Oedipus novel entitled MF (1971). There are two paintings of Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808) by Ingres. There is an opera-oratorio Oedipus-Rex (1927) by Stravinsky set to Cocteau’s Latin libretto, and a film, Oedipus-Rex (1967) by Pasolini.1

By far the best known use of the legend, however, was made by Sigmund Freud who gave the label of ‘Oedipus Complex’ to the repressed hostility of boys to their fathers. Deriving from the rivalry of father and son for the mother’s affection, the syndrome can lead in later life to a pathological mother-fixation.

The Classical Tradition, which may be defined as the creative reworking of ancient themes for contemporary purposes, draws on thousands of such examples. Nourished since the Renaissance by five centuries of education in Greek and Latin, it has supplied a body of knowledge with which all educated Europeans have been familiar. Together with Christianity, it has provided a stream within ‘the bloodstream of European Culture’ and ‘a code of instant recognition’. Its decline in the late 20th century has been precipitated by changing social and educational priorities. Its advocates argue that its survival is essential if European civilization is not to wither from alienation.

SCHOLASTIKOS

The Philogelos or ‘Love of Laughter’, once attributed to Philagrius of Alexandria and the fifth century AD, is a collection of much older Greek witticisms. It features the original scholastikos or ‘absent-minded professor’, together with the men of Abdera and Cumae, butts of early forms of the Irish (or Polish) joke.

• A scholastikos who wanted to see what he looked like when asleep stood in front of a mirror with his eyes shut.

• A scholastikos met a friend and said, ‘I heard you’d died.’ ‘But you see I’m alive.’ ‘Yes, but the man who told me was much more reliable than you.’

• A Cumaean went to the embalmer’s to collect the body of his dead father. The embalmer, looking for the right corpse, asked if it had any distinctive features. ‘A bad cough.’

• A Cumaean was selling honey. A passer-by tasted it, and found it excellent. ‘Yes,’ said the Cumaean, ‘I wouldn’t be selling it at all if a mouse hadn’t fallen into it.’

• A Scottish scholastikos decided to economize by training his donkey not to eat, so he gave it no food. When the animal had starved to death, the owner complained, ‘And just when it was learning to live without eating.’

Collectors of folk-tales have recorded versions of the last story in Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Swedish, English, Spanish, Catalan, Walloon, German, Italian, Slovene, Serbo-Croat, Russian, and Greek. Malcolm Bradbury uses it in Rates of Exchange, as part of the heritage of his imaginary East European country, ‘Slaka’.2

Hippocrates of Cos (c.460–357) took medicine out of the realm of religion and magic. Numerous treatises on public health, hygiene, patient care, and surgery were attributed to him. The Hippocratic Oath, whereby doctors dedicated their lives to the welfare of their patients, remained the corner-stone of medical practice until quite recently. His book of aphorisms begins with the line: ‘Life is short, Art is long.’ [HYSTERIA]

Eudoxus of Cnidus (fl. c.350) taught the motions of the planets round the sun, whilst inventing the sundial. Aristotle wrote systematic works in both physics and biology. His classification of animal species forms the basis of all subsequent zoology. His Politics begins with the inimitable remark: ‘Man is above all a political animal.’ Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus of Lesbos (c.370–288), applied the same methods of classification to botany. His treatise on Characters can be seen as the founding text of analytical psychology.

From the historian’s point of view, Heraclitus was probably the most important of these pioneers. Heraclitus reasoned that everything in the world is subject to perpetual change and decay: also that change is caused by the inevitable clash of opposites—in other words, by dialectics. In so doing he unwrapped the two basic ideas of the historian’s trade: change over time, and causation. His favourite aphorism was: ‘You cannot step into the same river twicé.’ [ELEKTRON]

Greek mathematics developed under the influence both of speculative thought and of religious mysticism. Thales had supposedly learned the rudiments of arithmetic and geometry in Egypt. But it was Pythagoras of Samos (c.572–497) who, in addition to compiling the results of his predecessors, made a number of original advances. He launched the Theory of Numbers, formulated the theorem about the square of the hypotenuse of the right-angle triangle, and, most interestingly, worked out the mathematical basis of musical harmony. He may be the author of the beautiful but mistaken theory of ‘the music of the spheres’. Eudoxus discovered the Theory of Proportions, and the method of exhaustion for measuring curvilinear surfaces. His disciple, Menaechmus, discovered conic sections.

All these researches prepared the way for Euclides of Alexandria (fl. c.300), whose Elements is said to have reigned supreme for longer than any book save the Bible. Euclid was the great mathematical systematizer, who set out to provide lasting proofs for all existing knowledge. When asked by the ruler of Egypt whether geometry could not be made more simple, he replied that there was ‘no royal road’. The next generation was dominated by Archimedes and by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276–196), who, in calculating the earth’s diameter at 252,000 stades or 7,850 miles, erred by less than 1 per cent. Lastly there was Apollonius of Perge (fl. c.220 BC), who wrote a vast eight-volume study of Conies and found an approximation for pi that was even closer than that of Archimedes. [ARCHIMEDES]

Greek moral philosophy, divided in the later centuries into several rival schools, greatly modified the teachings of traditional religion. The Sceptics, founded by Pyrrho of Elis, whose dates are not known, asserted that it is not possible to attain certain knowledge about anything, and hence that man’s sole object should be the pursuit of virtue. He was an anti-speculative speculator, who exerted an important influence on the Athenian Academy after Plato’s death.

HYSTERIA

ACCORDING to various Hippocratic treatises on medicine, hysteria was exclusively a woman’s disease associated with uterine disorders. Hystera in Greek meant ‘womb’; and the state of nervous agitation was caused when menstrual blood was unable to escape:

Whenever the menses are suppressed or cannot find a way out, illness results. This happens if the mouth of the womb is closed or if some part of [the] vagina is prolapsed … Whenever two months’ menses are accumulated in the womb, they move off into the lungs where they are prevented from exiting.1

In another variant, the womb itself was thought to become displaced and to wander round the body cavity. By pressing on the heart or brain, it provoked anxiety and eventually uncontrollable panic. Religious taboos forbade human dissection; and the internal workings of women’s (and of men’s) bodies were not understood until modern times. In the view of one analyst, however, ancient attitudes to women survived even when ancient anatomical theories had been discounted. ‘The notion persisted that women’s minds could be adversely affected by their reproductive tracts.’

The history of women’s bodies is a complicated subject. Over the ages, their size, weight, shape, muscular development, menstruation, child-bearing capacity, maturing, ageing, and disease patterns have varied considerably, as have their symbolism, their religious connotation, their aesthetic appreciation, their decoration, clothing, and display. Women’s awareness of their physical potential has been particularly constrained. So much so that a standard textbook on the subject can seriously ask: ‘Could any woman enjoy sex before 1900?’ Histories of the male body do not ask such things.

As for the wonderful workings of the womb, modern research suggests that the interdependence of the female nervous and reproductive systems is extremely sophisticated. A survey of women’s health conducted during the prolonged Siege of Budapest in 1944–5, for example, revealed unusually high levels of amenorrhea. Menstruation was suspended through well-grounded anxieties, not through hysteria. The womb does not need to be told that a minimal birthrate makes very good sense in times of maximum danger.

ELEKTRON

ELEKTRON, ‘bright stone’, was the ancient Greek name for amber. The Greeks knew that, when rubbed, it generated a force which attracted other objects, such as feathers. Thales of Miletus said it had ‘psyche’. Electra, ‘the Bright One’, was the name given to two women prominent in Greek myth. One, the daughter of Atlas, was a favourite paramour of Zeus. The other, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and sister to Orestes, figures in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

The invisible physical force which repels and attracts had no name until William Gilbert, the ‘father of magnetism’, called it ‘electric’ in his treatise De Magnete (1600). ‘Earth’, he wrote, ‘is nothing but a large magnet.’

Advances in the study of electricity and magnetism were made by A. M. Ampère, H. C. Oersted, and Michael Faraday, until J. C. Maxwell (1831–79) combined the two into the theory of electromagnetic force. H. R. Hertz (1857–94) demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic waves filling a spectrum of different frequencies. Application of electricity had moved on from the dynamo and the electric motor to radio and X-rays. Finally, in 1891, the British physicist J. D. Stoney needed a label for the negatively charged particles which constitute the smallest component of matter and which, in the company of positively charged protons and non-charged neutrons, orbit round the nucleus of an atom on the scale of a pinhead in St Peter’s dome. He called them electrons.1 (See Appendix III, p. 1272.)

The Cynics were founded by Diogenes of Sinope (c.412–323), who held a Tolstoyan sort of belief in the value of freeing oneself from desire. Their name meant literally ‘the dogs’. Diogenes was a noted eccentric, who lived in a barrel as a gesture of renouncing the world’s comforts, and walked the streets of daytime Athens with a lantern, ‘looking for honest men’. In a meeting with Alexander the Great in Corinth, he is said to have told the King to ‘stop blocking my sunshine’.

The Epicureans, named after Epicurus of Samos (342–270), taught that people should devote themselves to the pursuit of happiness, fearing neither death nor the gods. (It is a thought which found its way into the constitution of the USA.) They gained an undeserved reputation for mere pleasure-seeking; in reality, they held that the road to happiness lay through self-control, calm, and self-denial.

The Stoics, founded by Zenon of Cyprus (335–263), took their name from the Athenian Stoa poikile or ‘painted porch’, where the group first gathered. They followed the conviction that human passions should be governed by reason and (like the Sceptics) that the pursuit of virtue was all. Their vision of a universal brotherhood of mankind, their sense of duty, and their disciplined training, designed to insure them against pain and suffering, proved specially attractive to the Romans. [ATHLETES]

ARCHIMEDES

ARCHIMEDES of Syracuse (287–212 BC) was the mathematicians’ mathematician. He possessed a childlike delight in solving problems for their own sake. Not that he was averse to practical matters. After studying in Alexandria, he returned to Sicily as adviser to King Hiero II. There he invented the ‘Screw’ for raising water; he built a planetarium, later carried off to Rome; and he designed the catapults and grapnels which held off the final Roman siege of Syracuse (see pp. 143–4). He launched the science of hydrostatics, and is best known for running naked into the street, shouting Heureka, heureka (‘I’ve found it’), after supposedly working out the ‘Archimedes Principle’ in his bath. The Principle states that an object immersed in water apparently loses weight equal to the weight of the water displaced. The volume of the object can then be easily calculated. On the subject of levers, he said: ‘Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth.’

His greatest enthusiasm, however, was reserved for purely speculative problems:

1. The Sand-reckoner. Archimedes set himself the task of calculating how many grains of sand would be needed to fill the universe. To deal with the vast numbers involved, and since decimals were not yet in existence, he came up with the original concept of ‘a myriad myriad’, i.e. 10,000 × 10,000 or 10,0002. Given that he assumed the universe to be equivalent to the galaxy of the sun, his answer of 10,00037 was entirely respectable.

2. Measuring the Circle. Archimedes worked out the ratio of the circumference to the diameter by starting from the upper and lower limits of the perimeter of a 96-sided polygon. He took certain known approximations, and went on to find approximations for the square roots of the necessary seven-digit numbers. He had to work, of course, in the clumsy alphabetic system of numeration. But his answer for what is now called pi (π) lay between the limits of 3 1/7(= 3.1428571) and 3 10/71 (3.140845). (The accepted modern value is 3.14159265.)

3. Problema Bovinum. Archimedes thought up a seemingly straightforward teaser about the God Apollo having a herd of cattle, bulls and cows together, some black, some brown, some white, some spotted. Among the bulls, the number of white ones was half plus one-third of the number of the black ones, greater than the brown … etc., etc. Among the cows, the number of white ones was one-third plus one-quarter the number of the total black cattle … etc., etc. What was the composition of the herd? The answer comes to a total of more than 79 billion, which is far in excess of the number of beasts that could possibly find standing-room on the island of Sicily. (Sicily’s 25,000 km2 can only accommodate 12.75 billion cattle at 2 m2 per head, not excepting those which would have to stand in the boiling crater of Mount Etna.)

Greek sexuality is a subject for which fashionable scholarship would prefer monographs to paragraphs. What for scholars of an older vintage was ‘unnatural vice’ has now been upgraded to personal ‘orientation’ or ‘preference’; and homosexuality is widely considered to occupy a central position in an ancient code of social manners which, as now presented, has very modern overtones. ‘The Greek vice’ did not generate guilt: for a man to pursue young boys was no more reprehensible than to pursue young girls. Young Greek males, like English public schoolboys, had presumably to take sodomy in their stride. Parents sought to protect their sons in the same ways that they protected their daughters. Female homosexuality was in evidence alongside its male counterpart, though the island of Lesbos, home of the poetess Sappho and her circle, did not lend its name to the phenomenon in ancient times. Incest, too, was clearly an issue. The tragic fate of the legendary Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother by mistake, was proof of divine wrath. Generally speaking, the Greeks do not appear either licentious or puritanical so much as practical and open-minded. Their world was full of explicit erotica, about which they were sublimely unembarrassed.17

One must not imagine, however, that Greek assumptions about sexuality resembled those of contemporary California. A slave-owning society, for example, assumed that the bodies of the unfree were available for the uses and abuses of the free. Sexual activity thus became a function of social status. Mutuality in sexual relations did not have to be taken into account, still less shared feelings. Satisfaction was mainly associated with the phallic pleasure of the active male who imposed himself and his organ on its passive recipients. Despite legal constraints men of superior status often took it for granted that they could penetrate their inferiors at will; and inferiors included women, boys, servants, and foreigners. This assumption, if correctly identified, would render the modern distinction between homo- and heterosexuality largely irrelevant. Similarly, the distinction between pederastand philerast was less dependent on personal proclivities than on the age at which the growing male could assert himself.18

The classic text for the study of such matters—Aristophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium—mentions a number of sexual practices that appear to foreshadow familiar modern categories. Yet closer inspection suggests that the Greeks may have followed a system of values that are very alien to our own. According to the myth, human beings were originally eight-limbed, two-faced creatures, each with two sets of genitals front and back. They came in three varieties—male, female, and androgynous. Zeus later cut them in half, and invented sexual intercourse for the benefit of the separated halves. People possessed assorted sexual desires in line with the type of ancestor from whom they were descended. Hence the binary opposition of male and female would seem to have been lacking; and pluralist sexuality, present to different degrees in all individuals, may have been considered the basic condition. Unfortunately, modern scholarly opinion presents no less pluralism than the subject in hand.19

ATHLETES

ATHLETIC games were an essential part of Greek life. Every self-respecting city had its stadium. The pan-hellenic games at Olympia were but the most prestigious of more than a hundred such festivals.1 The common devotion to athletics, and to the gods, whose patronage the games celebrated, gave a strong sense of cultural unity to a politically divided country. The athletes, all male, competed in ten well-established disciplines. From the seventh century onwards, when one competitor accidentally lost his shorts, they customarily performed naked. They were not amateurs, being accustomed to arduous training and expecting handsome rewards. The tariff of prizes (in denarii) awarded at a minor festival at Aphrodisias in the first century indicates the status of particular events:

long-distance race: 750; pentathlon: 500; race in armour: 500; sprint (1 stade): 1,250; pankration: 3,000; wrestling: 2,000; foot race (2 stades): 1,000; boxing: 2,000.

The standard stade, or stadium length, was about 212 metres. Runners turned round a post at the end opposite the start. The pentathlon consisted of five events: long jump, discus, javelin, foot race, wrestling. In the pankration, a form of all-in combat, one aimed as in judo to force one’s opponent into submission. Quoit-throwing and chariot-racing were also important.2

Athletes and their home cities gained great renown from their triumphs at the Olympiads. Sparta was prominent. Athens during its golden age gained only four victories out of a possible 183. But the most successful district was Elis in the Peloponnese, home of the first recorded victor, Coroebus, in 776 BC, and site of Olympia itself.

The all-time champion athlete was Milo of Croton, who won the prize for wrestling in five successive Olympiads between 536 and 520 BC. On the last occasion he carried the sacrificial ox round the stadium on his shoulders, before sitting down to eat it. [SPICE-OX]

Most of Pindar’s surviving odes are devoted to the games:

Single is the race, single
Of men and of gods;
From a single mother we both draw breath.
But a difference of power in everything
Keeps us apart.
For the one thing is Nothing, but the brazen sky
Stays a fixed habitation for ever.
Yet we can in greatness of mind
Or of body be like the Immortals,
Though we know not to what goal
By day or in the nights
Fate has written that we shall run.3

The ethos of the games lasted well into Christian times. St Paul was surely a fan, if not a competitor. ‘I have fought a good fight,’ he wrote. ‘I have run the course. I have kept the faith.’ The sentiment was quintessentially Greek.

The last ancient games at Olympia took place either in AD 389 or 393. The last known victor ludorum, in 385, was an Armenian. There is no evidence that the Emperor Theodosius I formally banned the festival. More probably, since Christian opinion had turned against pagan cults of all sorts, it was impossible to revive it after the Visigoths’ invasion of Greece in 395. Substitute games continued at Antioch in Asia until 530.5

The Olympics were revived at Athens on 6–12 April 1896, after an interval of more than 1,500 years. The initiator and founding president of the International Olympic Committee was the French sportsman Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937). With the exception of wartime, the games have been held at four-year intervals and at various venues throughout the twentieth century. Women were permitted to compete from 1912. The Winter Olympics were organized as from the 1924 meeting in Chamonix. Appropriately enough, the winner of the first marathon race of the modern series in 1896, Louis Spyridon, was a Greek.

Greek social structures do not present a simple picture. There were fundamental differences between the societies of the city-states and those of the remoter mountain areas, such as Arcadia in the Peloponnese, where pastoral, pre-Greek tribes survived into Roman times. Slavery was a general feature, though it did not necessarily form the foundation of all social and economic institutions, as some historians would like to believe. (In the ‘five-stage scheme’ of Marxism-Leninism, classical slave-holding is taken as the necessary starting-point of all social history.) In Athens, the population was divided between slaves, metics or ‘resident foreigners’, and citizens. The slaves, who were called andrapoda, literally ‘human feet’, were treated as chattels, and could be killed with impunity. They were not allowed to serve in the army. Freed slaves automatically rose to the status of metics, who could be both taxed and conscripted. The citizens (who alone could call themselves ‘Athenians’) had the right to landed property and the duty of military service. They were divided into ten phylai or tribes, and the tribes into smaller groupings called trittyes (thirds) anddemes or parishes. Each of these bodies had its own corporate life, with a role in both civil and military organization.

Greek political organization was characterized by variety and experimentation. Since every polis or city-state governed itself, at least in theory, a wide range of political traditions developed, each with its variants, derivatives, and imitations. There were monarchies, like Samos under the pirate-king Polycrates. There were despotisms, especially among the cities of Asia Minor influenced by the Persian example. There were oligarchies of various types like Corinth, Sparta, or Massilia. There were democracies, like Athens in its prime. Yet incessant wars, leagues, and confederations caused constant interaction; and each of the different polities was subject to drastic evolutions.

The Athenian system itself underwent many changes, from its earliest known manifestations in the seventh century under Draco, author of the first ‘draconian’ law-code, and the sixth-century reforms of Solon and the benevolent despotism of Pisistratus. Two hundred years after Draco, Athens’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War ushered in the episode of the ‘Thirty Tyrants’ and the rule of the radical Cleon, Pericles’s chief critic. Even in the central decades of Athenian democracy in the fifth century, modern scholarship is far from unanimous about the true extent of participation by the citizens. Elaborate controversies take place over the size of the slave population, the role of the city mob, the degree of land-holding among the citizens, the place of the citizen-peasant, and, above all, the operations of various city assemblies—the Boule or ‘Council of 500’, the Ecclesia, which was the main legislative assembly, and the jury courts. It turns out that the demos or ‘people’, which is thought to have consisted of up to 50,000 exclusively male freemen, is no easier to define than the democracy. Nor is it easy to reconcile the fact that Pericles or Demosthenes, the great Athenian democrats, were (like Washington and Jefferson) slave-owners, or that the democratic Athens exercised a tyrannical hold over the city’s lesser dependencies, [DEMOS]

Not surprisingly, the extreme complications of Greek political practice offered fertile ground for the growth of political theory. Plato’s Republic, which advocates the rule of the Guardians—a somewhat totalitarian breed of so-called philosopher-kings—and Aristotle’s Politics, with its categoric statement about man being zoon politikon, offer two opposing approaches to the subject. The basic political vocabulary of the modern world, from ‘anarchy’ to ‘politics’ itself, is largely a Greek invention.

Greek history-writing, like the theatre, had its triad of giants. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484–420) is commonly known as the ‘Father of History’, but his keen interest in foreign lands earned from his more chauvinistic compatriots the label of ‘Father of Lies’. He wrote from eyewitness reports and from personal observation on his far-flung travels. He saw the past in terms of the titanic contest between Europe and Asia, and his nine books culminate in the Graeco-Persian wars. Thucydides (455–c.401 BC) the Athenian, in the opinion of Thomas Hobbes and many others, was quite simply ‘the most Politick Historiographer that ever writ’. He introduced the systematic analysis of causation and consequence; he quoted documents and treatises at length; and in the set-piece orations of his principal protagonists he found a marvellous method for injecting his strictly impartial narrative with subjective opinion. His eight books on the Peloponnesian War were ‘not designed’, he wrote, ‘to meet the taste of an immediate public, but to last for ever’. Xenophon (c.428–354), another Athenian, was author of the Hellenica and of Anabasis. The Hellenica continues the narrative of Greek history from the point where Thucydides had broken off (in 411), just as Thucydides had to some extent carried on from Herodotus. The Anabasis, translated as ‘The Persian Expedition’, describes the long march of 10,000 Greek mercenaries, including Xenophon himself, who went to Mesopotamia and back in the service of a Persian pretender. The shout of Thalassa! Thalassa!—’The sea! The sea!’—when, after months of marching, Xenophon’s companions caught sight of the coast from the hills behind Trebizond, provides one of the most enthusiastic moments of military chronicles.

DEMOS

SOME people believe that in 507 BC a lasting tradition of popular sovereignty was launched by Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid. In AD 1993 they were moved to celebrate ‘the 2,500th anniversary of the birth of democracy’. To this end, a lavish banquet in London’s Guildhall was addressed by the President of the Classical Society.1 In fact, the seeds of Athenian democracy had been sown some time before Cleisthenes. The Assembly of Citizens, the Ecclesia, which met in the meeting-ground of the Pnyx alongside the Acropolis, was established by Solon. But it was easily manipulated by aristocratic leaders such as Pisistratus and his sons, who used it to bolster their fifty-year tyranny from 560 to 510 BC.

Cleisthenes belonged to a rich family which tried to share power with Pisistratus, then chose exile. He was probably responsible for refacing the Temple of Zeus at Delphi with Parian marble to atone for a massacre committed by his kin. He led an abortive invasion of Attica in 513, possibly seeking Persian aid. But it was the Spartans not Cleisthenes who drove out the last of the Pisistratids three years later.

Cleisthenes is said to have invoked the power of the people in order to undermine the old tribal organizations on which his predecessors had relied. By proposing sovereign power for the Ecclesia, he gained the authority to instigate still wider reforms. He replaced the four old tribes with ten new ones, each with its own shrine and hero-cult. He greatly strengthened the demes or ‘parishes’ into which the tribes were divided, and extended the franchise to all freemen resident on Athenian territory. Above all, he instituted the Boule, which functioned as a steering committee for the Assembly’s agenda. He also initiated legal ostracism. He has been called ‘the founder of the art of organizing public opinion’.

Athenian democracy, which lasted for 185 years, was far from perfect. The sovereignty of the people was limited by the machinations of the Boule, by the waywardness of the deme, and by the continuing influence of wealthy patrons and demagogues. To ensure a quorum of 6,000 at meetings of the Ecclesia, the citizens were literally ‘roped in’ from the streets, with a rope dipped in red paint. The extent of participation, both in the central and the district bodies, is a matter of intense scholarly debate.2 And yet the citizens really did rule. They enjoyed equality before the law. They elected the ten top officials, including the Strategos or military commander. They drew lots for distributing hundreds of annual administrative posts among themselves. Most importantly, they held public servants to account. Dishonest or bungling officials could be dismissed, or even executed.

Not everyone was impressed. Plato thought that democracy meant the rule of the incompetent. Aristophanes made fun of ‘that angry, waspish, intractable old man, Demos of Pnyx’. At one point he asked, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and replied, ‘Women’.

Unfortunately, the link between the democracy of ancient Athens and that of contemporary Europe is tenuous. Democracy did not prevail in its birthplace. It was not admired by Roman thinkers; and it was all but forgotten for more than a millennium. The democratic practices of today’s Europe trace their origins as much to popular assemblies of the Viking type [DING], to the diets convened by feudal monarchs, and to medieval city republics. The Athenian notion of a sovereign assembly consisting of all qualified citizens found its counterparts in medieval Novgorod, Hungary, and Poland—in political systems which spawned no heirs. The theorists of the Enlightenment blended classical knowledge with an interest in constitutional reform; and a romanticized vision of ancient Athens played a part in this among classically educated liberals. But liberals could themselves be critical. De Tocqueville inveighed against ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Edmund Burke called democracy on the French model ‘the most shameless thing in the world’. Democracy has rarely been the norm.

Nowadays there is little consensus about the essence of democracy. In theory, it promotes all the virtues, from freedom, justice, and equality to the rule of law, the respect for human rights, and the promotion of political pluralism and of civil society. In practice, ‘rule by the people’ is impossible. There is much to divide the Continental brand of popular sovereignty from the British brand of parliamentary sovereignty (see p. 631). And all brands have their faults. Winston Churchill once said that ‘democracy is the worst of political systems, except for all the others’. What does exist, as always, is almost universal abhorrence of tyranny. And this is what propels all newly liberated nations in the direction of democracy, irrespective of previous realities. ‘Our whole history inclines us towards the democratic Powers’, declared the President of newborn Czechoslovakia in 1918.3 In 1989–91, similar sentiments were echoed by leaders of all the countries of the ex-Soviet bloc.

This is not to deny that democracy, like any other movement, needs its founding myth. It needs an ancient pedigree and worthy heroes. And who could be more ancient or more worthy than Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid?

By common assent, the zenith of Greek civilization was reached during the Age of Pericles in Athens. In the interval between the city’s salvation from the Persian invasion in 480 BC and the onset of the ruinous war with Sparta in 431, the political, intellectual, and cultural energies of Athens peaked. Pericles (c.495–429), general and statesman, was leader of the moderate democratic faction. He had organized the reconstruction of the pillaged Acropolis, and was the friend of artists and philosophers. His funeral oration for the dead of the first year of the Peloponnesian War pulses with pride at the freedom and high culture of his native city:

Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about….Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs, but in the affairs of the state as well…. We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all….Others are brave out of ignorance, and, when they begin to think, they begin to fear. But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.20

The Athenian contemporaries of Pericles gave him good reason to be proud. Anaxagoras and Socrates, Euripides and Aeschylus, Pindar and Pheidias, Antiphon and Aristophanes, Democritus and Hippocrates, Herodotus and Thucydides, all walked the same streets, all watched the Parthenon taking shape for its inauguration in 438. Athens, ‘the eye of Greece, Mother of arts and eloquence’, had fulfilled the prediction of the Oracle: ‘You will become an eagle among the clouds for all time’. Most appropriate perhaps are the words from a fragment of Pindar:

(Shining and violet-crowned and celebrated in song, bulwark of Greece, famous Athens, divine city.)

Sparta, otherwise known as Lacedaemon, was Athens’s foil and rival. To modern sensibilities it was as ugly as Athens is attractive. Exceptionally, it was a landlocked city, built on the plain of Laconia in the middle of the Peleponnese. It possessed no native navy, and was entirely devoted to the militarism which had enabled it to confront all its immediate neighbours—the Messenians, the Argives, and the Arcadians. Its system of government, bestowed in remote times by the divine Lycurgus, was variously described as a despotic form of oligarchy or an oligarchic form of despotism. A council of ephors or magistrates wielded dictatorial powers. They gave orders to the two hereditary ‘kings’ of Sparta, who acted as high priests and military commanders. Sparta had few colonies, and solved its problems of overpopulation by culling its male infants. Weaklings were ceremonially left to die in the open. All surviving boys were taken by the state at the age of seven to be trained in physical prowess and military discipline. At twenty, they started their forty-year service as citizen-soldiers. They were forbidden to undertake trade or crafts, and were supported by the toil of an underclass of helots or slaves. The result was a culture which had little time for the arts and graces, and little sense of solidarity with the rest of Hellas. According to Aristotle, it was also a society in which the number of men began to fall alarmingly, and a large part of the land was held by women. To be ‘laconic’ was to spurn fine words. When Philip of Macedon sent a threatening letter to Sparta: ‘if I enter Lacedaemon, I shall raze it’, the ephors sent him a one-word reply, an, ‘if’, [MAKEDON]

The era of hellenism—that is, the era when the world of the Greek city-states was merged into the wider but essentially non-Greek world created by Alexander and his successors—is frequently despised for its decadence. Certainly, in the political sphere, the internecine strife of the dynasties that latched onto Alexander’s dismembered empire does not make an edifying story. On the other hand, Greek culture had stamina, and the beneficial effects of a common tradition, through several centuries and in diverse lands, should not be casually dismissed. Greek rulers in the Indus Valley, where the veneer of hellenism was thinnest, held on into the middle of the first century BC. In Macedonia the Antigonid dynasty, founded by Alexander’s one-eyed general, Antigonus (382–301), reigned until their defeat by the Romans in 168. In Syria, and for a time in Persia and in Asia Minor, the Seleucid dynasty, founded by Seleucus I Nicator (ruled 280–261), controlled vast if ever-diminishing Asiatic territories. They were active hellenizers, consciously executing Alexander’s plans for a network of new Greek colonies in Asia. They surrendered to Rome in 69. The eastern half of the Seleucid realm was seized in 250 BC by Arsaces, the Parthian (d. 248), whose Arsacid dynasty ruled in Persia for nearly 500 years, until the rebirth of a native Persian empire in AD 226. In Egypt the Ptolemaic dynasty launched by Alexander’s bastard half-brother, Ptolemaeus Soter, ‘the Preserver’ (d. 285), reigned until 31 BC.

MAKEDON

TO ask whether Macedonia is Greek is rather like asking whether Prussia was German. If one talks of distant origins, the answer in both cases must be ‘No’. Ancient Macedonia started its career in the orbit of Illyrian or Thracian civilization. But, as shown by excavation of the royal tombs, it was subject to a high degree of hellenization before Philip of Macedon conquered Greece.1 [PAPYRUS]

The Roman province of Macedonia stretched to the Adriatic [EGNATIA], and from the sixth century onwards was heavily settled by migrant Slavs. According to one theory, the Slavs mingled with the residue of the pre-Greek population to form a new, non-Greek Macedonian nation. The Byzantine empire was sometimes dubbed ‘Macedonia’ because of its Greek connections. But the former province of Macedonia, and much of the Peloponnese, was submerged in ‘Sclavonia’.

In medieval times Macedonia was incorporated for a time into the Bulgarian empire, and remained permanently within the exarchate of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. This strengthened later Bulgarian claims. In the fourteenth century it passed under Serbian rule. In 1346 Stefan Dusan was crowned in Skopje ‘Tsar of the Serbs, Greeks, Bulgars and Albanians’. This was to strengthen Serbian claims. Then came the Ottomans.

In the late nineteenth century, Ottoman Macedonia was a typical Balkan province of mixed religious and ethnic composition. Orthodox Christians lived alongside Muslims, and Greeks and Slavs alongside Albanians and Turks. By custom, all Orthodox Christians were counted as ‘Greeks’ because of their allegiance to the Patriarch of Constantinople.

Throughout the Balkan wars (see p. 874) Macedonia was fought over by Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. It was divided into three parts. (See Appendix III, p. 1309.) Southern Macedonia, centred on Thessaloniki, was taken over by Greece. After the Graeco-Turkish population exchange of 1922, and the Slav exodus due to the Civil War in 1949, it came to be dominated by a strong majority of highly patriotic Greeks, ‘Alexander’s successors’, many of them immigrants from Turkey. Eastern Macedonia found itself in Bulgaria, which treated it as synonymous with ‘Western Bulgaria’. Northern Macedonia, centred on Skopje and the upper Vardar valley, possessed a mixed Albanian and Slav population living within Serbia.

When this northern section was reconstituted in 1945 as the autonomous republic of ‘Makedonija’ within Yugoslavia, a determined campaign was launched to simplify history and to transmute the identity of the entire population. The Yugoslav leadership was intent on reversing the effects of wartime Bulgarian occupation, and on resisting the cultural charms of ancient Greece. The Slav dialect of the political élite was declared to be a separate language; Old Church Slavonic was equated with ‘Old Macedonian’; and a whole generation was educated according to the ‘Great Idea’ of a Slav Macedonia stretching back for centuries.2

Not surprisingly, when the government of Skopje declared independence in 1992, no one could agree what their republic should be called. A Greek scholar was reported to have received death threats for revealing the existence of a Slavic-speaking minority on the Greek side of Greece’s closed northern frontier.3 Neutral commentators abroad adopted the evocative acronym of FYROM—‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.’ Equally useful was the curious mnemonic of FOPITGROBBSOSY—‘Former Province of Illyria, Thrace, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia, and Yugoslavia.’

The Ptolemies were noted for their love and patronage of the arts and learning, even when, occasionally, as with Ptolemy VII Physcon (‘The Paunch’), they were also noted for the most disgusting perversions. Through a series of matrimonial contortions, Physcon contrived to marry his sister, who was also his brother’s widow (and who thereby became simultaneously sister, wife, and sister-in-law); to divorce her in favour of her daughter by a previous marriage (who thereby became simultaneously his second wife, niece and stepdaughter); and to murder his son (who was also a nephew). Incest, to protect the purity of royal blood, was a tradition of the Pharaohs which other cultures have called decadence.

Yet Therme (Thessalonika), Antioch, Pergamum, Palmyra, and above all Alexandria of Egypt became major cultural, economic, and political centres. The blending of Greek and oriental influences, which fermented alongside the decadent dynasties, created that inimitable hellenistic culture which eventually triumphed over its Western, Latin masters. After all, the ‘Romans’ of Byzantium, who upheld the Roman Empire for a thousand years beyond the fall of Rome, were heirs to the hellenistic Greeks, and in a very real sense the last successors of Alexander. In the words of Horace,Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, ‘Captured Greece captured its fierce conqueror’.

Hellenistic culture, therefore, acquired a much broader base than did its hellenic progenitor. According to Isocrates (436–338), the last of the Attic Orators, ‘Athens has brought it to pass that the name of Greek should no longer be thought of as a matter of race, but a matter of intelligence’. As a result, the quantity of Greek writers actually increased. There was a gang of geographers, from Strabo (c.63 BC to AD 21) to Pausanias (fl. c. AD 150). There was a profusion of poets: Apollonius, Aratus, and Bion, author of The Lament for Adonis; Hermesaniax; Moschus, Meleager, and Musaeus; Oppian, Timon, and Theocritus. There was a host of historians: Manetho of Egypt, inventor of the chronological system of kingdoms and dynasties, and Berosus (Bar-Osea) of Babylon; Polybius of Megalopolis (204–122 BC), the Greek apologist for Rome, and Josephus (b. AD 36), Governor of Judaea and author of The Jewish War, Appian, Arrian, Herodian, Eusebius. Galenus (129–99) wrote a shelf of medical textbooks, Hermogenes (fl c AD 170) the standard treatise on rhetoric. Among philosophers the Neostoics, such as Epictetus of Hierapolis (AD 55–135), vied with the Neoplatonists: Plotinus (205–70), Porphyry (232–305), Proclus (412–88). The Enchiridion or ‘Manual’ of Stoicism, written by Epictetus, has been called the guidebook to the morality of the later classical world. Plutarch (c.46–126), the biographer and essayist, Lucian of Samosata (c.120–80), the satirist and the novelists Longus (late 2nd century) and Heliodorus (3rd century) exemplify the continuing diversity of the Greek prose tradition under Roman rule. [PAPYRUS]

Among the writers of the hellenistic period, many wrote Greek as their second language. Josephus, Lucian, and Marcus Aurelius fit into this category, as do the Christian evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and above all St Paul.

Within the Hellenistic world, Alexandria in Egypt soon gained the preeminence that Athens had enjoyed in Greece. Under the rule of the Ptolemies, it grew into the largest and most cultured city of the East, second only to Rome in wealth and splendour. Its multinational and multilingual population consisted of ‘Macedonians’, Jews, and Egyptians. The decree inscribed on the Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, provided the trilingual text which permitted Champollion to decipher its hieroglyphics. The fabulous Museum or ‘College of the Muses’, with its library of 700,000 volumes, was dedicated to the collection, preservation, and study of ancient Greek culture. It was a beacon of learning, illuminating the intellectual life of the later classical world as surely as the great Pharos illuminated the sea lanes of the harbour. Aristophanes of Byzantium (c.257–180 BC), one of the early librarians at Alexandria, was responsible both for the first annotated editions of Greek literature and for the first systematic analysis of Greek grammar and orthography. Aristarchus of Samothrace (fl. c.150 BC) established the text of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Philon or Philo Judaeus (30BC–AD 45), a leader of Alexandria’s thriving Jewish community, attempted to reconcile Greek philosophy with traditional Judaic theology. Heron, an Alexandrian engineer of uncertain date, is reputed to have invented, among other things, the steam-engine, the syphon, and a drachma-in-the-slot machine.

Specially important in the history of cultural transmission were the so-called Hermetic Writings. Long attributed to an otherwise unknown author, Hermes Trismegistus (the ‘thrice greatest Hermes’, scribe of the Gods), this huge collection of Greek texts from Alexandria purports in effect to be an encyclopedia of ancient Egypt. Forty-two sacred books summarize the laws of the Pharaohs, their deities, rituals, beliefs, cosmography, astrology, medicine. Other books dating from the third century contain a strange mixture of Neoplatonic and cabbalistic texts apparently directed against the rise of Christianity, [BLACK ATHENA]

In the long run, however, it is not surprising that Greece’s ‘shoreline civilization’ proved unequal to the massed battalions of the neighbouring land-based powers.

PAPYRUS

In 1963 a carbonized papyrus from the fourth century BC was unearthed at Derveni near Thessaloniki in Macedonia. It had either been burned as part of a funeral rite or had possibly been used as a firelighter. But it was still readable. Deciphered by Dr Faekelmann of Vienna, who separated the layers of the reheated roll with static electricity, it was shown to carry a commentary on the Orphic poems. It replaced the papyrus of Timotheus’ Persae (P. Berol. 9875), unearthed at Abusir in Egypt, as the oldest Greek papyrological discovery.1 In 1964 a similar papyrus roll was found in the hand of a man buried in the fourth century BC at Callatis on the Black Sea coast of Romania. But it crumbled to dust on discovery.

The Cyperus papyrus plant had been used for writing in Egypt since 3,000 BC. It was laid out in horizontal and vertical strips, which were then pressed flat to form a long volumen or scroll. A thick black ink made from soot was applied either by the tip of a sliced reed or by a quill. Papyrus continued to be used in Greek and Roman times, especially in lands close to the source of supply in the Nile delta. The largest find of classical papyri, some 800 in number, was extracted from the lava-sealed ruins of Herculaneum.

Papyrology—the science of papyri—has made an immense contribution to classical studies. Since very few other forms of writing have survived over two millennia, it has greatly advanced knowledge of ancient Palaeography; and it has helped bridge the philological chasm between ancient and medieval Greek. It has supplied many texts from the lost repertoire of classical literature, including Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, Sophocles’ Trackers, and Menander’s The Discontented Man. It has also played a key role in Biblical studies. Some 7,000 early Greek MSS of various fragments of the Bible are now extant. The Dead Sea Scrolls contained a few Christian as well as Jewish texts. There are two pre-Christian papyrus rolls containing segments of Deuteronomy. A papyrus from AD 125 carrying the Gospel of St John is significantly older than any version on parchment. Some of the oldest papal bulls to survive have done so on papyrus.2

As papyrus gave way to parchment, to vellum, and eventually to paper, so too did the roll give way, to the folded pages of the codex. The passing of papyrus, and the advent of the codex, combined to launch the birth of the book. [BIBLIA] [XATIVAH]

BLACK ATHENA

NO thesis has divided the world of classics more profoundly than that associated with the title of Black Athena. The traditionalists regard it as freakish; others maintain that it deserves close attention.1 The thesis has two separate aspects—one critical, the other propositional. The critical part argues with some force that classical studies were moulded by the self-centred assumptions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans, and that the cultural debt of Greece and Rome to the older civilizations of the Near East was systematically ignored. The critic’s purpose, ‘to lessen European cultural arrogance’, would seem to be fruitful, though talk of ‘the Aryan model of Greek civilization’ is provocative.

The main propositions of the thesis centre on the twin notions of Greek civilization being specifically rooted in Egypt and of ancient Egyptian civilization being ‘fundamentally African’ and created by ‘blacks’. This line stands on shakier ground. The Coptic contribution to Greek vocabulary is at best marginal. The skin-colour of the Pharaohs, as portrayed on tomb-paintings, is usually much fairer than that of their frequently negroid servants. Egyptian men were tanned, the women pale. A Nubian dynasty of the seventh century BC is the only one out of thirty-one that can realistically be categorized as ‘black’. Sceptics might suspect that scholarship has been hijacked by the racial politics of the USA.

In which case, it is perhaps necessary to re-state the obvious. If one cares to go back far enough, there is no doubt that the origins both of Europeans and of European civilization lie far beyond Europe. The point is: how far back, and to what starting-point, do prehistorians have to go? [CADMUS] [CAUCASIA] [DASA] [EPIC]

Aristotle’s simile of mankind living ‘like ants milling on the shore’ underlines the strategic problem of concentrating Greek manpower and resources. The thin, extended lines of communication were effective for purposes of economic and cultural expansion, but vulnerable to military attack. In the fifth century BC the Persian challenge had been repulsed with the greatest difficulty. In the fourth century the Macedonians overran the whole of Greece and Persia in the space of thirty years. From the third century onwards, the advance of the Roman legions was unstoppable. At no time could the Greeks ever put more than 50,000 hoplites into the field; yet once the Roman Republic was able to conscript the manpower of the populous Italian peninsula, it had more than half a million soldiers at its disposal. The military contest between Greece and Rome was heavily weighted from the start. The Roman conquest of Magna Graecia was completed at the end of the Pyrrhic Wars in 266 BC. Sicily was annexed following the spirited defence of Syracuse in 212. Macedonia was defeated at the Battle of Pydna in 168. Mainland Greece, which under the Achaean League had reasserted its independence from Macedonian rule, was subdued by the Consul L. Mummius in 146, and turned into the Roman province of Achaia.

Thereafter, Rome successively reduced all the Greek successor states of the former Macedonian empire. The dramatic end occurred in 30 BC, when Cleopatra, daughter of Ptolemy XII Auletes and the last Queen of Egypt, terminated both a political tradition and her own life by ‘pressing the asp to her snow-white breast’. As the lover of both Caesar and Antony, she had done her utmost to control the relentless advance, and advances, of the Romans. But Pascal’s bon mot that ‘the face of the earth would have been different if Cleopatra’s nose had been a little shorter’ was hardly to the point. The political and military strength of the Greek world was exhausted; the absolute supremacy of Rome was already an established fact.

The resultant fusion of the hellenistic and the Roman world, and the emergence of the hybrid Graeco-Roman civilization, makes it impossible to put a precise date on the death of ancient Greece. But hellenic and hellenistic traditions persisted much longer than is usually supposed. The Delphic Oracle continued to operate until destroyed by marauding barbarians in AD 267. The Olympic Games continued to be held every four years until the 292nd Olympiad in AD 392. The Academy continued to teach its pupils in Athens until closed by the Christian Emperor Justinian in AD529. The library of Alexandria, though badly burned during Caesar’s siege, was not finally closed until the arrival of the Muslim Caliphate in AD 641. By then twenty centuries, or two whole millennia, had passed since the twilight of Crete and the dawn at Mycenae.

Much of Greek civilization was lost. Much was absorbed by the Romans, to be passed by them into the Christian and the Byzantine traditions. Much had to await rediscovery during the Renaissance and after. Yet, one way or another, enough has survived for that one small East European country to be regularly acclaimed as ‘the Mother of Europe’, the ‘Source of the West’, a vital ingredient if not the sole fountain-head of Europe.

Syracuse, Sicily, Year 1 of the 141st Olympiad. In the late summer of the sixth year of the Second Punic War, the epic struggle between the Italian city of Rome and the African city of Carthage was balanced on the knife-edge of fate. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, having annihilated a number of Roman armies sent to halt him, had marched the length of Italy and was campaigning strongly in the south. He had just seized the port and fortress of Tarentum (see Chapter III, p. 155). The Romans, unable to tame him directly, were straining to hold off his allies—the Celts of northern Italy, Philip V of Macedon, who had invaded Illyria, and the Greek city of Syracuse. They were specially eager to subdue Syracuse, since Syracuse held the key both to Hannibal’s supply lines from Africa and to their own intentions of re-conquering Sicily. As a result, Syracuse was enduring the second season of a determined siege from a Roman force under M. Claudius Marcellus.

Syrakousai, queen of Greater Greece, was the largest, the most prosperous, and reputedly the most beautiful of all the Greek colonies in the West. Proudly independent in a hellenic age which had seen the subjugation of most city-states, it had asserted its supremacy over Athens long since, and had escaped the attentions of Alexander the Great. It had overhauled its sometime rival, the glorious Acragas, razed by the Carthaginians and never fully restored. In this third century BC it had upheld its profitable role astride the overlapping spheres of Rome and Carthage. It was the last major representative of unconquered Greek civilization.

Situated on the east coast of Sicily, half-way between the snowy slopes of Mt Etna and the island’s most southerly point at Cape Pachynum, Syracuse commanded a site of unequalled splendour, security, and convenience. It was the natural entrepôt for trade between the eastern and the western parts of the Mediterranean, and the most usual staging-post between Italy and Africa. Originally founded on a rocky offshore islet, the Ortygia, it had spread upwards onto the neighbouring seaside plateau, which was protected by an almost unbroken ring of cliffs and crags. The grand harbour, which curved southwards for almost five miles in a perfect bay, was screened by lofty mountains. On the other side of the Ortygia, a second harbour could also accommodate the largest fleet of ships. [See Map 7, opposite.]

The island of Ortygia, which served as the city’s acropolis, had been joined to the mainland by a fortified causeway in the sixth century. Watered by the marvellous freshwater spring of Arethusa, it was dominated by a huge Temple of Apollo which looked out across the harbour to the matching Temple of Zeus on the opposite headland at Olympieum. In the fifth century the entire plateau had been enclosed within a mighty length of stone walls which ran atop all the natural features. These walls, which stretched for over fifteen miles, were anchored to the castle of Euryalos at the foot of the mountains. They surrounded half a million citizens living in five distinct suburbs. The Achradina or ‘Upper City’, which possessed its own internal walls, contained the main Agora or Forum. Beyond that lay the residential suburbs of Tyche and Epipolae and, above them, the monumental buildings of Neapolis, the ‘New Town’, containing a hillside theatre, a nest of temples, and, in Hieron’s Altar, the largest sacrificial structure of the ancient world. In all this magnificent site there was only one blemish. An area of marshland astride the River Anapus, which flowed into the Grand Harbour, was a notorious source of summer pestilence. With that one proviso, Syracuse basked in unrivalled favours. According to Cicero, who was to govern there somewhat later, there was never a day when the sun failed to shine. The elevated plateau caught every breeze that blew across the wine-dark waves. Flowers bloomed on the cliffs, and still do, even in winter.

Prior to the arrival of the Roman army, Syracuse could boast more than 500 years of history. Founded by Corinthian colonists in 734 BC, it was only twenty years younger than Rome, and had spread its influence through a network of daughter colonies. In 474, only six years after Salamis, it had been responsible for the destruction of the naval power of the Etruscans, thereby removing one of the early obstacles to Roman fortunes. Like many city-states, it passed through phases of oligarchic, democratic, and monarchical government. It survived its supreme test in the successive sieges of 415–413 and 405–404, the former laid by the Athenians, the latter by the Carthaginians.

Map 7. Rome—Sicily—Carthage, 212 BC

For want of better information, the political history of ancient Sicily has to be written in terms of successive Syracusan tyrants, who ruled through a bloody succession of coups and tumults.22 Dionysius the Elder (r. 405–367) was cited by Aristotle as an example of the type of tyrant ‘who gains power by demagogic appeals to the poorer classes’. His relative, Dion (r. 357–354), who had been personally tutored in the ways of a philosopher-king by Plato and the Academy, seized control of Syracuse after sailing from Greece in a pre-run of Garibaldi’s Thousand. Timoleon (r. 344–36), the Corinthian ‘son of liberty’, was another who triumphed with the aid of mercenaries; but he seems to have introduced democratic constitutions in many of the cities, and succeeded in fixing a boundary on the River Halycus between the Greek and the Carthaginian spheres. The cruel Agathocles (r. 317–289) was a plebeian potter who rose by marrying a wealthy widow. In 310 BC he resolved the second Carthaginian siege of Syracuse by carrying the war into Africa. This self-styled ‘King of Sicily’ was said to have been paralysed by a poisoned toothpick and laid out on his funeral pyre alive. In the next generation Syracuse was saved from Rome’s expanding power by Pyrrhus, the adventurer-King of Epirus, who left the field clear for the long reign of his Syracusan supporter, King Hieron II (r. 269–215). Hieron II, patron of Archimedes, preserved the peace through an unbroken treaty with Rome and gave Syracuse its last spell of independent affluence. Hieron’s death, however, at a crucial moment in the Punic Wars, precipitated a struggle between pro-Roman and pro-Carthaginian factions. His grandson and successor, Hieronymus, abandoned the Roman alliance, only to be overthrown by a popular revolt that overwhelmed first the royal family and then the Roman party.

In 215 the election of two Carthaginians as ruling magistrates in Syracuse greatly aroused Roman anxieties. Shortly afterwards four Roman legions were transported to Sicily, and a casus belli was found in a border skirmish. Marcellus laid siege to Syracuse, by land and by sea, late in 214 or possibly in early 213. For the besiegers, the year was 538 AUC. Their rivalry with Carthage was the central political feature of the era. It was a natural extension of Rome’s earlier conquest of southern Italy. Carthage was the established power, Rome the challenger. The First Punic War (267–241) had been provoked by Roman intervention in a local quarrel between Hieron of Syracuse and the city of Messana; and it had ended with Rome’s annexation of all Carthaginian possessions in Sicily. Carthage made up for its loss by the creation of a new colony in eastern Iberia, where in 227 Carthagonova (Cartagena) was founded. Rome watched these developments with intense suspicion; and the Second Punic War was provoked by Roman intervention at Saguntum in Iberia, despite a treaty recognizing Carthaginian rule up to the Ebro. Hannibal had then carried the war to the gates of Rome, causing a general conflagration in which the strategic control of the central Mediterranean was at stake. Syracuse was the pivot.

M. Claudius Marcellus (d. 208), five times consul, was a pious hero-warrior of the old Roman school. In his first consulship in 222 he had slain the King of the Insubrian Gauls in single combat on the plain near Milan, and had dedicated the whole of his Gallic spoils to the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. He was due to die in battle, ambushed by Hannibal. He earned himself a Life by Plutarch. By all accounts, which include those of Livy and Polybius as well as Plutarch, the Roman siege of Syracuse was laid with high hopes of quick success. Marcellus was opposed by the unbreached walls and by confident defenders. Yet, in addition to three legions of perhaps 25,000 men, he was armed with 100 warships, a huge train of siege engines, and by the knowledge that Syracusan counsels were divided. He had reckoned on everything, writes Livy, except on one man.

That man was Archimedes, unicus spectator caeli siderumque, ‘that unrivalled observer of the heaven and the stars, even more remarkable as the inventor and engineer of artillery and engines of war’.23 Throughout the reign of Hieron II, Archimedes had been building an arsenal of ingenious anti-siege machines of every range and calibre.

Livy’s account of the scene when the Roman troops approached the sea-walls makes good reading:

The wall of Achradina… which is washed by the sea, was attacked by Marcellus with sixty-five quinquiremes. From most of the ships, archers and slingers… allowed hardly anyone to stand on the wall without being wounded.

Other five-bankers, paired and lashed together … and propelled by the outer banks of oars like a single ship, brought up siege-towers several storeys high, together with engines for battering the wall.

Against this naval equipment, Archimedes had lined the walls with artillery of various sizes. Ships lying offshore were bombarded with a regular discharge of stones of great weight. The nearer vessels were attacked with lighter but much more frequent missiles.

Finally, to let his men discharge their bolts without exposure to wounds, he opened up the wall from top to bottom with numerous loopholes about a cubit wide. Through these, without being seen, some shot at the enemy with arrows, others from small protected ‘scorpions’.24

Polybius relates that the floating siege-towers were called sambucae, since their shape resembled that of a musical instrument of that name, no doubt an ancestor of the modern Greek bouzouki.

Most disconcerting were Archimedes’ devices for lifting the attackers clean out of the water:

Huge beams were suddenly projected from the walls, right over the ships, which could then be sunk by great weights released from on high. Other ships were grabbed at the prow by iron claws, or beaks, like those of cranes, winched up into the air, then dropped stern first into the depths. Others again were spun round and round by means of machinery inside the city, and dashed on the steep cliffs … with great destruction of the fighting men on board … Frequently, a ship would be lifted into mid-air, and whirled hither and thither… until its crew had been thrown out in all directions…25

Marcellus recognized a superior adversary. ‘Let us stop fighting this geometrical giant,’ he exclaimed, ‘who uses our ships to ladle water from the sea.’ Or again, ‘Our sambuca band has been whipped out of the banquet.’ Plutarch commented, ‘The Romans seemed to be fighting against the Gods.’

With the assault abandoned, the siege turned into a blockade that lasted for two years. The Syracusans remained buoyant for many months. A Carthaginian relief force set up camp in the valley of the Anapus, requiring Marcellus to bring a fourth legion from Panormus. A naval sortie left the harbour successfully, and returned with a fleet of reinforcements. In the interior of the island a Roman massacre of the citizens of Henna, a city sacred to Proserpina, turned the Sicilians against them. In the spring of 212 Marcellus mounted a night raid on the Galeagra Tower during the Festival of Artemis, and broke through the Hexapyloi Gate into the suburb of Epipolae. But the main fortresses held firm. In the summer the Carthaginian admiral, Bomilcar, gathered a vast fleet of 700 transports, protected by 130 warships. With clear superiority, he lay in wait for the Roman fleet off Cape Pachynum. At the last moment, for reasons unknown, he declined Marceilus’ offer of battle, stood out to sea, and sailed on to Tarentum.

In the end, the outcome of the siege was decided by plague and by treachery. The Carthaginians, who had been struck by the plague when attacking Syracuse two centuries earlier, were now decimated by the same disease when trying to defend it. Then, with parleys in progress, an Iberian captain called Moeriscus, one of three prefects of Achradina, decided to save his skin by letting the Romans in near the Fountain of Arethusa. On the agreed signal, during a diversionary attack, he opened the gate. After setting guards on the houses of the pro-Roman faction, Marcellus gave Syracuse to plunder.

Archimedes was counted among the many victims. Later tradition held that he was killed by a Roman soldier whilst working on a mathematical problem traced in the sand. Plutarch reviewed the various versions in circulation:

As it happened, Archimedes was on his own, working out some problem with the aid of a diagram. Having fixed his mind on his study, he was not aware of the Romans’ incursion.

Suddenly, a soldier came upon him with drawn sword, and ordered him to Marcellus. Archimedes refused until he had finished his problem… Whereupon the soldier flew into a rage, and despatched him.

Others say that the Roman… had threatened to kill him at once, and that Archimedes, when he saw him, had earnestly begged him to wait so that the result would not be left without demonstration. But the soldier paid no attention, and made an end of him there and then.

There is a third story, that some soldiers fell in with Archimedes as he was taking some of his scientific instruments to Marcellus, such as sun-dials, spheres, and quadrants. They slew him, thinking that he was carrying gold.

It is generally agreed, however, that Marcellus was greatly troubled by the death, and shunned the killer, seeking out the relatives of Archimedes and paying them his respects.26

Such was the impact when Greek civilization met Roman power.

At his own expressed wish, Archimedes was buried in a tomb designed as a sphere inside a cylinder. He once said that the ratio of 2 : 3, as expressed in a sphere and cylinder of similar length and diameter, offered the most pleasing of proportions.

The fall of Syracuse had immediate consequences. On the cultural front, it underlined Rome’s obsession with everything Greek. The artistic loot, wrote Livy, was no less than if Carthage itself had been sacked. It created the fashion for Greek artefacts and Greek ideas which henceforth became the norm for all educated Romans. It was probably the single most powerful stimulus in the growth of a shared Graeco-Roman culture. On the strategic front, it completed the Roman hold on Sicily. It cut off Carthage from a major source of trade and food, and deprived Hannibal of his principal source of logistical support. Before Syracuse, Rome was an equal player in the three-sided Greek–Carthaginian–Roman power game. After Syracuse, Rome held the initiative in all directions.

In the longer term, the Romans’ success in Sicily encouraged their further embroilment in Greek affairs. During the siege of Syracuse, Rome had just opened an alliance with the Aetolian League in central Greece, in order to outflank Carthage’s other ally, Macedonia. From then on, Rome had Greek clients to be satisfied and interests to be protected. Three Macedonian Wars (215–205, 200–197, and 171–168), and the struggle against Macedonia’s chief associate, Antiochus III of Syria, brought the Romans into Greece with a vengeance. In the end, as in Sicily, Rome decided to terminate the complications by turning the whole of Macedonia and the Peloponnese into Roman provinces.

At the time, the fall of Syracuse must have been soon forgotten, even by the Syracusans. They were lucky to escape the fate of other defeated cities, where the whole of the surviving population was habitually sold into slavery. After all, it was just one event in the endless series of campaigns and battles that accompanied the rise of Rome and the demise of Greece. On consideration, however, it may be seen to be symptomatic of shifts and changes that were to affect a much wider constituency than that of central Mediterranean politics.

Historians who look back at Rome’s triumphant expansion are locked into the knowledge of subsequent developments. They are fully aware that the resultant Graeco-Roman culture was destined to dominate the whole of the classical world, and to exert a lasting influence as one of the pillars of ‘Western civilization’. Their antennae are less sensitive to other trends and prospects which existed alongside it. Equally, fully equipped with a knowledge of Greek and Latin, the standard vehicles of higher education in modern Europe, they have sometimes been slow to relate the growth of the Graeco-Roman sphere to the full panorama of contemporary events. No one could fairly deny that the fusion of the Greek and Roman worlds, in which the fall of Syracuse was a signal moment, was a process of capital importance. The difficulty is to see what other perspectives were in the offing.

No record has survived of Syracusan reflections at the time of the siege. But many of the citizens of a merchant city must have travelled widely. They lived on an island which had long been contested between Greeks and Carthaginians and only recently invaded by Romans. As a result, whatever side they favoured in the Punic Wars, they must surely have seen the Carthaginians, like themselves, as members of an ancient order challenged by Roman upstarts. Indeed, as a seagoing commercial nation they would probably have felt a deeper affinity with Carthage than with Rome. Certainly, living more than a century after Alexander put the Greeks into intimate contact with Persia and India, they must surely have felt themselves to be part of that Graeco-oriental world of Hellenism than of a Graeco-Roman world which had not yet been delivered. For them, the centre of the world was undoubtedly neither Carthage nor Rome, but Alexandria.

Modern perspectives have often placed Syracuse as a Greek and therefore a European city whose new bond with European Rome was a natural, if not an inevitable, development. They instinctively avoid the suggestion that the Greeks were more Asiatic than European at this juncture, or that they might well have maintained their oriental connections indefinitely. Few courses on Western civilization which honour Archimedes would point out that the great mathematical genius gave his life opposing the union of his Greek city with Rome.

Four years after the battle of Cannae (see p. 155) Rome’s position was still extremely precarious. It would have been entirely reasonable for the Carthaginian party to calculate that Marcellus lacked the strength to take Syracuse by assault; that Roman failure at Syracuse would give heart to Carthage’s other allies; that the reassertion of Carthaginian power in Sicily would guarantee proper logistical support for Hannibal; that Hannibal, effectively supplied, would break the stalemate in Italy, that Rome, in other words, had every chance of being defeated. There was no Cato in Syracuse; but the razing of troublesome cities was an established practice. In the long watches on the Syracusan walls, it was entirely possible that some of Archimedes’ men, if not Archimedes himself, could have realistically mused: Roma delenda est—that is, until the plague struck and Moeriscus opened the gate.

The Syracusans’ knowledge of the world would have been largely confined to the Great Sea, and to the countries of the East. The science of geography had made great advances in classical Greece, although the frontiers of the world directly known to the ancients had not radically changed. A contemporary of Archimedes, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276–196), librarian at Alexandria, had concluded that the world was a sphere; and his work was known to Ptolemy and Strabo. But, apart from the Phoenician route to the Tin Islands, little progress was made in practical exploration. No known contact was ever made with West Africa, with the Americas, or with the more distant parts of northern Europe. The rigid division between the ‘civilized’ world of the Mediterranean shoreline and the ‘barbarian’ wilderness beyond was not overcome.

In the late third century Mediterranean civilization was still made up of three major spheres of influence: Carthaginian in the West, Romano-Italic in the centre, Greek-Hellenic in the East. Thanks to Alexander’s conquests, it was more closely tied than previously to the oriental empires from Egypt to India. Along the fragile tracks of Central Asia, it had some slight link with the Empire of China which at that very moment had begun to construct its Great Wall against nomadic incursions.

Over the previous centuries, the barbarian wilderness of northern and central Europe had begun the slow transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age. It had been strongly marked by the dominant influence of the Celts, whose culture had taken hold, whether by migration or osmosis, at most points from the middle Vistula to Iberia, Gaul, and Britain. The Celts had stormed Rome in 387, and had moved in force into northern Italy. Celtic hill-forts had created a permanent network of urban stations, and their commercial activities formed an important intermediary for the Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic tribes further afield. In the late third century one branch of the Celts, the Galatians, who were established in their kingdom of Tyle in Thrace (on the territory of modern Bulgaria), were facing revolt by their Thracian subjects and preparing the move to neighbouring Asia Minor, where they lingered until medieval times. Their sojourn in Thrace has been confirmed by the recent discovery of inscriptions at Seuthopolis and Messembria (Nesebar).27

In the third century BC, however, many historians would consider that the European Peninsula was at least 1,000 years away from anything recognizable as European civilization. In particular, the Europeanness of ancient Greece is being questioned as an anachronistic, intellectual construction of latter-day Europeans. Which is all very proper.

Yet the two most striking processes of that age—the fusion of Graeco-Roman civilization in the Mediterranean and the supremacy of the Celts across much of the interior—put two essential building-blocks into place for the developments of the future. There was little trace of a common culture or common ideology, though both Graeco-Romans and Celts were Indo-Europeans (see Chapter IV). There was absolutely no inkling of a common identity. None the less, one has to concede that these were the peoples whose descendants and traditions were to find themselves at the core of later European history. It is one thing to correct the excessively Eurocentric interpretations of the ancient world, which have prevailed for too long. It is quite another to go to the other extreme, and to maintain that Greeks and Romans hold little or no relevance to the later European story.

There are certain events which happened, and whose consequences are still with us. One cannot pretend otherwise. If Moeriscus had not opened the gate; if Syracuse had resisted the Romans as it once resisted the Athenians; if Hannibal had destroyed Rome as Rome would soon destroy Carthage; if, as a result, the Greek world had eventually fused with Semitic Carthage, then history would have been rather different. The point is: Moeriscus did open the gate.

Map 8. The Roman Empire, 1st Century AD

* The Tauric Peninsula’s modern name, Krym or Crimea, derives from the Turkish word kerim meaning ‘fortress’, and dates only from the 15th century.