Europe: A History (28 page)
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
A
RCHIMEDES
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 10,000
2
. Given that he assumed the universe to be equivalent to the galaxy of the sun, his answer of 10,000
37
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 km
2
can only accommodate 12.75 billion cattle at 2 m
2
per head, not excepting those which would have to stand in the boiling crater of Mount Etna.)
1
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
pederast
and
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
A
THLETIC
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.’
4
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) and
demes
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]
