The Classical World (6 page)

Even in the 730s these overseas settlements were official ventures. The names of the Greek founders were remembered, not least because they continued to be celebrated in ‘founders’ festivals’. Religious rituals also accompanied the settlers’ departures and arrivals. Before setting out, advice was sought from the Greek gods at one of their oracle-shrines, usually by asking if it was better and preferable to go or not: even if the venture went badly, participants would then know that the alternatives would have been worse. The most important source of advice was the god Apollo at Delphi, although the oracle there was a relatively recent cult in central Greece (no older than
c.
800
BC
). In Asia Minor, founding cities like Miletus turned to a nearer oracle, Apollo’s shrine at Didyma, for similar encouragement.

Founding
poleis
left a stamp on their foundations which is often very evident to us. Founders and settlers sometimes retained reciprocal citizenship in their original communities, but even when they did not, we can often infer the origins of the main founding citizenry without any founding-legend to help us. For the personal names chosen by the settlers, the particular calendar which they adopted in their settlement, their social customs, their religious cults all reflected their place of origin. They were not the random travellers and traders of the ‘pre-colonial’ age, and the reasons for formally sending them off abroad were seldom commercial. On arrival, Greek settlers sometimes drove out the nearby local residents, which was hardly the action of
would-be traders. We sometimes hear, too, of the formal conscription of settlers in their home city and a ban (inappropriate for traders) on their returning home for several years. In one case, ‘slingers out’ were appointed to wait on the shore back in the founding
polis
: they had the memorable task of slinging stones at any settlers who tried to return home.
⁴

Essentially, settlement overseas headed off potential trouble at home which might lead to a demand to adjust the unequal distribution of land. In the home
polis
, a small class of nobles owned much of the available land and received ‘dues’ from owners of the rest of it. In a new colony, some of the humbler Greek settlers could perhaps enjoy a greater measure of freedom and a sense of a juster existence than they ever knew at home. Around a settlement, there were often some poorly defended foreigners who could be subjected and used as forced labour: these locally available slaves may have eased the demands on some of the lower-class Greeks. A new settlement also offered the chance to plan and lay out a site: some of the Greek settlements in south Italy and Sicily are our earliest evidence of Greek town planning. Temples, a regular ‘gathering place’ (
agora
), a shrine to the goddess Hearth and, in due course, spaces for exercise and athletics were among the hallmarks of a Greek settlement. In most of Sicily, south Italy and Libya, land for farming was definitely the settlers’ aim and attraction. But by the later seventh century ever more Greeks had left to settle outposts on the Black Sea, especially on its hostile northern coast. Here, in un-Greek weather and conditions, they probably had an eye on access to local resources, including the readily exportable grain of the Crimea. Access by rivers to the interior was surely important, too, not least for the Greek settlements on the southern coast of France (
c.
600–550
BC
), including Massilia (modern Marseilles) which was not far from the mouth of the river Rhône. Further west on the coast of Spain, one new Greek settlement was openly called ‘Trading Place’ (Emporion, whence the modern name Ampurias). In Egypt, some of the visiting Greeks chose to settle in the Nile Delta, in a
polis
called Naucratis given to them by the reigning Pharaoh,
c.
570
BC
, who did not want them dispersed through his land. There were other Greeks who went to and fro, exchanging goods for Egypt’s assets, including its grain and the soda used for washing clothes.

Some ‘mother-cities’ like Corinth or Miletus were prolific founders, and it surely did not escape their ruling class that selected areas were best settled with their own people or potential allies, not least so as to ensure local trade-routes and access to the sources of valuable local assets. What is impressive everywhere is the adaptability of the Greek settlers. Unlike the impractical British ‘gentlemen’ who settled at Jamestown on the American coast or the bickering Spaniards left by Columbus on Hispaniola, all Greeks buckled down and made a practical success, commoners and aristocrats together, like Homer’s hero Odysseus and his crew. No settlement is known to have failed through incompetence.

One obvious consequence of these settlements was the spread of the Greek language and Greek literacy. The Greek alphabet actually owed its origin to Greek travel overseas: it was derived from a Greek’s close study of the neighbouring Phoenicians’ script in the Near East, probably
c.
800–780
BC
. Its inventor was one of the Euboean travellers to Cyprus, Crete or north Syria. This alphabet was then adapted by the non-Greek Phrygians in Asia and by Etruscans in Italy and used to write their own languages. As Greeks travelled with it, the result was a vastly increased spread of reading, writing and speaking Greek around the Mediterranean. Many centuries later, Hadrian was to be its beneficiary on his travels.

There was also a marked increase in known luxuries. The new Greek settlements covered many new landscapes and micro-climates which had special natural assets, richer than those in Greece. Northern Italy’s plains and the steppe lands beyond the Black Sea were found to produce excellent breeds of horse. Beside the Bay of Naples, the wet land around Cumae grew superb flax which could be woven into linen and made into fine hunting-nets.
⁵
In Libya, at Cyrene, the settlers found an exceptionally good site for growing the saffron crocus, a most precious asset of their home island, Santorini, and one which was highly prized for dyes, scents and uses in cooking.
⁶
They also found a valuable plant called silphion which they traded heavily overseas. Silphion was surely related to the forms of fennel, but its exact identity continues to be disputed.
⁷
Conversely, there were local absentees, no silver-mines in Sicily, no olive trees in the northern Black Sea, no salt, either, in the water of the southern Black Sea’s coastline. Local
specialities and local deficiencies encouraged trade-links between settlements, not just with their mother-city but also in important networks between one another.

Where there was a rich soil, watered with good rivers, several of the new settlements flourished famously. The luxury of Acragas (modern Agrigento) in south-eastern Sicily became famous and at its height (
c.
420
BC
) was said to be supported by nearly 200,000 immigrant non-citizens.
⁸
Its Greek residents became celebrated for their ‘luxurious’ fishponds, swans and pet songbirds. Most famous of all was the Greek settlement at Sybaris in southern Italy, founded
c.
720
BC
and increasingly prosperous until its destruction
c.
510
BC
. The word ‘Sybarite’ is still proverbial for a lover of luxury. Up to 500,000 people have been suggested as a possible population for Sybaris’ fertile site at its peak (
c.
550
BC
): if so, the place dwarfed Sparta or Attica on which most historians of archaic Greece now concentrate.
⁹
Wonderful stories were later told of its Greek citizens’ refinement, so as to explain their destruction. The Sybarites are said to have banned cockerels because they disturbed their sleep; they invented chamber pots and took them along to their drinking-parties; they gave prizes for cookery; they taught cavalry-horses to dance to the flute (a possible circus-trick); the Greek Sybarites are the people who invented what we call the Turkish bath.

Seen from the locals’ side, the first Greeks had rather less that was novel and desirable to bring to their settlements, except for poetry, painted pottery, athletics and their convenient alphabet. Inevitably, they wanted olives for their diet and so very often they brought olive oil to a region for the first time. They also wanted wine, but quite often it had preceded them. Through the Etruscans’ earlier contact with France’s south coast, the first wine to be drunk in France was ‘Italian’. In the mid-fifth century, however, a Greek at the Cap d’Antibes inscribed two verses on a black stone shaped like a penis: ‘I am Mister Pleaser, the servant of the holy goddess Aphrodite.’
¹⁰
The first person in France to record himself as a great lover is therefore a Greek.

Meetings with so many non-Greeks, from Spain to the Crimea, can only have helped to sharpen the settlers’ existing sense of their Greekness. They also had a strong sense of kinship with the distant
Greek
poleis
which had founded them. By
c.
650
BC
we first encounter the word ‘Panhellenes’, ‘all Greeks together’; by
c.
570 Greek visitors to Naucratis in the Nile Delta had a special temple, a Greek ‘Hellenion’. Across the Mediterranean, settlement had helped to reinforce the settlers’ underlying Greek identity. Within it, of course, local Greek pride remained very strong. When Hadrian visited the Greek settlement of Cyrene in north Africa, he flattered the citizens by referring to their connection with ancient Sparta and to the oracles from the god Apollo which had guided the first settlers.
¹¹
The oracles by then were seven and a half centuries old, and the Spartan connection was supposedly very much older still. But the citizens still prized them: the widened Greek world was patterned with these tales of kinship and affinity, within the sense of Greekness which the settlers and their parent
poleis
shared.

Aristocrats

Happy is the man who has dear children and sound horses and hunting hounds and a friend abroad
…

Solon, F23 (West)

In rams and donkeys and horses, Cyrnus, we look for noble thoroughbreds, and anyone wants to breed from noble parents. But a noble man is not concerned if he marries the ignoble daughter of an ignoble father so long as he gives plenty of money with her.
Theognis (
c.
600–570
BC
), lines 183–6

At home in what we call Greece, the mother-cities of these settlements were not ‘state-less’ societies. Already in the eighth century these home-grown
poleis
had magistrates and ruling councils who could enforce and co-ordinate a foreign settlement. They could also impose fines and tithes, agree treaties and declare wars. But the men who ruled them were drawn from a very small class: their cliques had aristocratic names, like the Eupatrids, the noble caste of the Athenians, or the Bacchiads, the dominant family at Corinth. Their social attitudes and style of life were the dominant image of power in their world: they even shaped Greeks’ ideas of their gods. On Mount Olympus, Homer’s gods regard mortal men much as aristocrats, in Homer’s world, regard their social inferiors. As Greeks’ moral thinking changed, so did their ideas of their gods, but the cultural pursuits of the first aristocrats persisted for centuries. In many aspects of his life, even the Emperor Hadrian was still the heir to them, a thousand years later.

The word ‘aristocracy’ is of Greek origin, but does not occur in our surviving Greek texts until the fifth century
BC
: perhaps it was coined then, as an answer to common ‘democracy’. But, as often in Greek history, the absence of a general word for something is certainly not evidence that the thing did not exist. In Homer’s poems, particular Greek leaders are already ‘the best’ (
aristoi
) by family and breeding. In many Greek city-states, the ruling families had the names of exclusive kin (‘Neleids’ or ‘Penthelids’) and in Attica, the name of the ruling caste, the ‘Eupatrids’, meant ‘of good fathers’. Aristocrats differ from others, including the merely rich, by their noble descent from other aristocrats. In the eighth and seventh centuries these clans and castes were certainly aristocratic, even before the word ‘aristocracy’ was in use.

In any society, particularly a pre-scientific one, noble families are at risk from infertility. In the Greek city-states, adoption was permissible, a crucial social fiction, and, as riches spread into non-noble hands, marriage to a non-noble rich bride could re-establish the fortunes of a noble line. So a nobility could maintain itself sufficiently across the generations. But so far, nothing found in the archaeology of archaic Greece confirms the existence of whole families in Greece with a long record of persisting noble splendour. The existence, therefore, of true aristocrats in eighth-century Greece has been questioned by some modern historians who rely on ‘material evidence’: were the Greek communities, perhaps, more egalitarian between
c.
850 and
c.
720
BC
, led by only temporary ‘big men’ or local ‘chiefs’? However, archaeology is not the best guide to this sort of question, and the aristocrat’s splendour lay in goods which would not survive for posterity, in textiles, in metals which might be melted down and reused and, above all, in horses.

The older, more persuasive view among historians is that in the aftermath of the age of ‘Mycenaean’ kings or during the disorders of what we call the early ‘dark age’ (
c.
1100–900
BC
) particular families in mainland Greece established themselves with greater holdings of land in the former territories of their kings and princes. These families may have been powerful under the previous kingship, or even the descendants of its royal line. Those who maintained their power pointed back to their ancestry and sometimes traced it to a god or hero. They also controlled particular cults of the gods in their
community’s territory and passed the priesthoods of these gods down their direct family line. They were not a ‘sacred caste’: landowning was their basic distinction and the priesthoods were only another one. As and where
poleis
or city-states formed, these superior families dominated them. By
c.
750
BC
those who owned the most land and held such priesthoods were described as the ‘best’ or the ‘good’ or the well-born (hence the ‘Eupatrids’). In most Greek communities, the aristocratic families, or
gen
ē
, stood at the head of groups of social inferiors, pyramids of dependence of which the best known are ‘brotherhoods’, or ‘phratries’. These phratries were not a new eighth-century invention, but into them the male members (in my view, all members) of the early Greek citizen-bodies were grouped. Those who were not noble or ‘good’ were simply ‘bad’ or ‘wicked’. From an early date, Greek aristocrats invented a frank vocabulary of social incorrectness.