The Classical World (21 page)

A Changing Greek Cultural World

Then, there is something which some people find amazing: in every area, the Athenians assign more to the wicked and the poor and the populists than to the Good. In this way, they are actually preserving the democracy. In every land on earth, the Best are opposed to democracy
…

The ‘Old Oligarch’, 1.4 (probably in 425
BC
)

The years from the 450stothe 420s are cardinal years in the cultural history of ancient Greece. Tragedy flowered in the theatre at Athens, as we can follow in the dramas of the three great surviving tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides). Athenian comedy followed suit, combining music and dance with jokes on political subjects. The Athenian art of this period is the supreme example of ‘classical art’. In sculpture and vase painting, the human form has an idealized realism; the proportions are finer, the poses more confident. The art in this period does not stand still, but the best of it has a contemplative naturalism which exists only in antiquity in Greek culture, and only elsewhere because of it. ‘Classical art’ is not always ‘severe’ or ‘austere’, labels which are suited only to a fraction of the art of the ‘classical’ era and are mostly applied because the surviving sculptures have lost their painted colour.

Since the Persian Wars there was also remarkable intellectual progress in a Greek world free of barbarian invaders. It was not even predominantly at Athens or from Athenian-born thinkers. In the Greek West, philosophy’s ‘way of truth’, with implications for language and reality, was explored by Parmenides in a poem of obscure, but profound,
imagery. He raised sceptical problems about reality which were then addressed by two thinkers, Democritus and Leucippus, who postulated indivisible particles (‘atoms’, the origin of our word); they even argued that these atoms moved in empty spaces and by their collisions came together to form bigger objects. More mundanely, the symptoms and progress of diseases were described with careful observation in a book of medical
Epidemics
, composed between
c
. 475 and 466
BC
.
¹
It contains an exact description of mumps, including its familiar effect on young males, as observed on the island of Thasos (females were not so readily infected, a fact which says much for the absence of close contact between the sexes there at a young age). Mathematics also found their first theoretical exponent, Hippocrates of Chios. In Athens, the architectural plan of the Parthenon temple combined exact ratios between its parts and its whole with subtle adjustments for the visual effects of regularity. In the 440s, perhaps first in ‘east Greece’, unknown thinkers invented political theory and pursued the abstract avenues which it opened. Above all, a new type of prose-writing began, ‘enquiry’ (
histori
ē
) into the past, what we now know as history.

Unlike writers about the past in Near Eastern societies (including the writers of Hebrew scriptures), the first surviving exponent of ‘history’ wrote overtly in the first person, weighing evidence and expressing his own opinions. Herodotus was born in the 490s and was busy with his great enquiry into the conflicts of Greeks and Persians at least until the early 420s
BC
. He was born not in Athens but in south-west Asia, at Halicarnassus, where Greek and non-Greek cultures coexisted under the wavering control of the Persian Empire. He was well born, with literary relations in his family. He is credited with political action against a tyrant in his home city, followed by exile abroad. Eventually he settled in Thurii in south Italy, a city whose foundation in the late 440s was organized on the former site of luxurious Sybaris by the Athenians. In the Greek world, historians were so often to be exiles, cut off from the daily exercise of politics and power which was so much more interesting than writing a book.

Herodotus set out to explain and to celebrate the great events of the Persian Wars against the Greeks. The enterprise led him on long digressions, both literary and personal. He travelled widely to ‘enquire’ and, if possible, find the truth. He went to Libya, Egypt,
northern and southern Greece and even east into Babylon. He did not know any foreign languages and of course he had no convenient reference books with numbered dates which would place events in different countries side by side. He noted quite a variety of inscribed objects and monuments during his travels, but he did not always describe every detail of them correctly and he did not engage in searches for locally preserved documents. Nonetheless, he came across several written sources, including what he took to be a ‘list’ of Xerxes’ great invading army in 480. His main evidence was oral, what people in different places told him when he questioned them. Out of it he devised a story, but he was not simply another raconteur. Here and there, he used existing written sources, particularly the work (now lost to us) of his great predecessor, Hecataeus of Miletus, who was more inclined to ‘geographic’ detail than to political ‘history’. He also seems to have used the poem of Aristeas, the Greek who had travelled into Central Asia
c.
600
BC
. Herodotus was explicitly critical of many of the oral stories which he himself reported from his oral sources but could not endorse.

Herodotus brought strong, personal interpretations to the complex sources he interrelated. The great themes of freedom, justice and luxury are very prominent in his ‘enquiry’: he shared the Greek view of the battles of 480/79 between Greeks and Persians as battles for freedom and for a life under the impersonal, just rule of law, and it is his history, above all, which has immortalized them in that light. The final speech in his ‘enquiry’ dwells on the contrasts between the hardy, impoverished Persians who had embarked on an age of conquest and the ‘soft’ luxury of peoples who live in the ‘soft’ plains and become others’ subjects. Particular themes were evident to him in human life: that ‘pride goes before a fall’ and that extreme good fortune leads to a debacle, that truly outrageous behaviour often gets its deserts, or retribution, that human affairs are very unstable, that the customs of different societies differ and that some, but not all, of our cherished behaviour is therefore relative to the society in which we happen to live. These beliefs are still valid in our own world.

However, Herodotus also accepted that the gods are active in human affairs and that, through oracles, they speak truly to men. Dreams and visions are very important for individuals in his history:
he knows that some of his contemporaries refuse to accept the truth of oracles, but he is most indignant at their refusal. He accepts, as oracles did too, that the gods may punish a descendant for the deeds of an ancestor. This belief in ‘hereditary guilt’ is most centrally associated with the idea of an ‘archaic age’ (‘archaic’ otherwise being an art-historical term for the sculptures and paintings before the more ‘human’ classical style of the 490s onwards). ‘Retribution’, therefore, and ‘inevitability’ are still independent forces in Herodotus’ way of writing and thinking. But they coexist with a dense range of human motives, including spite and covetousness of which he is a connoisseur. Herodotus can also relate a community’s development to its physical setting, its laws and customs and its rising population. But he thinks more readily in individual, human terms.

The results are amazing in their range and human variety. Like eastern Greek settlers and travellers in the previous century, Herodotus accepts that Libya, Egypt and the world of the Scythian nomads are the extreme points of contrast with the world of the Greeks. He digresses on all three, while returning, justly, to his main theme of the Persian expansion which touched on these peoples too. He is interested in so much in other cultures, in their marriage-practices, in questions of health and diet, religious rites and styles of burial. In Egypt, especially, he reasons with cogency from his evidence, though he tends to see the Egyptian world as a polar opposite to Greece and thus misunderstands it. As we have lost so much other east Greek debating and writing conducted
c.
480–460, we have to compare him with later writers, thereby making him seem more ‘modern’ than he probably seemed to his contemporaries. His religious outlook and language would suggest otherwise. So, too, would his politics, for Herodotus sympathized with the passing ‘Panhellenic’ world of an international Greek upper class, Cimon and his like. To them, the enemies were treachery, spontaneous violence and the lower classes: the wars between Greek states since the 460s were a profoundly regrettable outcome. Admiring liberty, Herodotus was not an uncritical democrat: the Spartans are frequently seen in a favourable light in his ‘enquiries’.

Naturally, Herodotus visited Athens, probably in or just before 438/7 (to judge from a comment about the entrance-way to their
Acropolis). He is even said to have received an enormous cash prize for his
Histories
, as voted by the Assembly. He talked with important Athenians, but he was already in his mid-fifties. By the early 430s abstract theorizing about power and inter-state relations was current in the city among members of the younger generation, but it was not Herodotus’ way of looking on the world. Nor was the new subject of political theory, although Herodotus had picked up one example of it, a clever ‘debate’ among Persians about the merits of alternative constitutions, including democracy, set in 522
BC
; it was a witty fake, but old Herodotus believed it.
²
This new, hard cleverness underlies an accelerating change in the intellectual and cultural outlook of the big names in Athens.

The victories over the Persians, then the years of expanding empire had helped to root Athenians’ self-confidence and trust in their democracy. How far, then, was the culture of the Athens which Herodotus visited a democratic culture, shaped by the equalities of a political system based on equal popular voting? It was certainly not a level, egalitarian society. Culturally, it was still a place where the upper class enjoyed their hunting and cultivated their sexual advances with gifts and protestations to the ever-fickle young boys. Hunting scenes and hunters’ ‘love gifts’ happen to disappear from Athenian painted pottery after
c.
470, but this change is only a fact about a taste in pottery decoration; it is not evidence for a new caution and a lack of openness about these old aristocratic pursuits. In the evenings socially select groups of males still dined and drank luxuriously in their ‘men’s rooms’ and sang the aristocratic anti-populist songs of the past. Were these old-style
symposia
, though, on the defensive in the new age of ‘mob-rule’? A much-discussed group of Attic drinking-cups, dated to the early fifth century, shows paintings of men wearing effeminate dress, apparently as cross-dressers. They have been interpreted as a reflection of an upper-class social life which had adopted this transvestite style as a symptom of ‘anxiety’, now that its own supremacy was under stress. But ‘anxiety’ was not obviously the mood of Athenian aristocrats at the time. Taking the long view, they believed they needed only to wait until their political hour dawned again. Militarily, meanwhile, they were indispensable members of the cavalry which even the most committed democrats were about to increase
sixfold and honour with provisions for a public ‘insurance-repayment’ on any registered horse which an upper-class warrior lost in battle. Probably, the cross-dressing simply portrays revels in honour of Dionysus.

On other cups, we see the young differently, as owners of exotic cheetahs and hunting leopards. These superior young shockers were not ‘anxious’: even in the democratic age, the cultural life of the theatre and the festivals still depended on the spending of their male upper class. In Attica’s social infrastructure, too, not so much had changed since the aristocrats of the sixth century
BC
. If Herodotus had asked a male Athenian who he was, he would have named his father and his deme, as Cleisthenes’ reforms had emphasized. But he would also have named his ‘phratry’, or ‘brotherhood’, as in the older times, and only then, if at all, his membership of one of the democracy’s new ten tribes. Even under the democracy, aristocratic families retained a significant power of veto on candidates for inclusion in ‘brotherhoods’.

In the early 430s Herodotus would have talked to young Athenians of noble birth, people who still styled themselves the ‘good’ as opposed to the vulgar ‘bad’. Not so very far below the surface, these people hoped that one day democracy would simply go away, but from the 470s to the 430s conquest abroad and the huge increase in the numbers and tribute of Athens’ allies helped meanwhile to compensate for their discontent. The gains of Empire blurred class-tension for both the rich and the poor. Empire brought new land-holdings and revenues abroad for both classes of Athenian, and, as the rich well knew, it was on the poor and their hard days as oarsmen that this Empire’s safety rested meanwhile. Vital though the cavalry might be against the Theban ‘pigs’ and their horsemen or scattered Spartan ravagers of the land, horses, as Homer’s
Odyssey
remarked, were no use on islands overseas. For the ‘island empire’, what mattered was the trireme. Fleets of a hundred ships or more were now a commonplace in most years. Although some of the rowers were hired foreigners, the bulk were lower-class Athenians who had amassed years of practice beyond any possible enemy’s. On midsummer expeditions these rowers were far tougher than anyone nowadays. Their modern re-creators had to drink about two pints of water for each hour of rowing (the
modern oarsmen of a trireme would thus need nearly two tons of water in a ten-hour day, and yet an ancient trireme could not carry a big water supply). ‘Almost all the water consumed’, writes the modern trireme’s mastermind, ‘was sweated off, with the rowers feeling relatively little need to urinate. Much of this sweat dripped onto the lowest row, making life particularly unpleasant for them. The smell in the hold became so unpleasant that it had to be washed out with sea water at least once every four days (but ancient Athenians may have been more tolerant).’ The body must evaporate fluid to stay cool and so ‘ventilation is an absolute necessity, but it is barely adequate for the lower of the three rows’.
³
None of the noble ‘fine and fair’ would have lasted in this heat for long. Those who did were the Empire’s ultimate sanction, and it was no use calling them a ‘naval mob’ and expecting them not to vote when they came home.