The Classical World (7 page)

The life of an aristocrat involved prowess and display, but it also brought duties and responsibilities. It was the nobility who decided on all wars and treaties and led the fighting. Nowadays, we think of aristocrats as amateurs, but there was nothing amateurish about early Greek aristocrats in action. They were champion fighters in war and expected a due reward of the booty and prizes. Homer’s heroes fight on foot in memorable, stylized duels with swords and ‘long-shadowing’ spears. Real aristocrats might also fight such ‘battles of champions’, but, unlike Homer’s heroes, they also fought from their beloved horses. They rode them without stirrups or heavy leather saddles (at most, they sat on padded horse-blankets) and the horses were not even shod, although the dry climate helped to toughen their hoofs. Literary and artistic evidence for early Greek cavalry is so scarce that some modern historians have doubted its existence. But many hundreds of horses are attested in later literary texts for some of the early Greek city-states, and they were not kept solely for competitions or for use in farming: there was no efficient horse-collar which would allow horses to pull heavy loads. On horseback, a nobleman could scatter and pursue the ill-armoured groups of lower-class foot followers whom his noble opponents brought to war. Noblewomen, by contrast, never rode at all. They were priestesses, objects of competition (if they were rich and pretty) and mothers, without any political power.

In city-states beside the sea, nobles also had a close relationship with the bigger ships. They owned them, surely; perhaps in their youth they sometimes fought or went raiding with a crew of social dependants. It is a subject on which, as yet, we lack clear information. However, already in the eighth century, we see scenes of warships rowed by two levels of oarsmen on some of the fine pottery painted in Attica, fit for noble owners. Warships would probably be a nobleman’s responsibility, and were co-ordinated by magistrates even in early city-states (the
naukraroi
). In due course they developed into the supreme Greek warship, the trireme, propelled by three levels of oars and armoured with a metal ram on its prow. Phoenician warships probably showed the Greeks the way here, and in my view they had shown it by the late eighth century
BC
(the great historian Thucydides thought so too, although many modern scholars adjust his dating to refer to the late seventh century, or even the sixth). Triremes were not merchant-ships (no Greek state had a ‘merchant navy’). They could travel up to seven knots an hour and as we shall see, conditions aboard them were awesome. As crews constantly needed water, they tended to stay close to coastlines, but even so they could cover 130 (even 180) sea miles in a long day. Nobles have left us an image of themselves as horse-lovers, but in Corinth or Euboea or islands like Chios and Samos they were lords with an eye for the sea.

In peacetime a nobleman was expected to arbitrate disputes and pronounce justice. At the start of his poem the
Theogony
, Hesiod gives us an idea of such an aristocrat in action (
c.
710
BC
). He speaks ‘gentle words’; he persuades, and ‘mild words’ flow from his mouth. He gives ‘straight justice’ with ‘discrimination’ and can put an end to a ‘great dispute’ with ‘knowing skill’. In another poem, however, the
Works and Days
, Hesiod chides these same nobles for ‘devouring gifts’ as bribes.
¹
But the ideals are important too: persuasion, insight and a degree of gentleness, before disputants who have caused and suffered damage. Without written laws, even more depended on the nobleman’s own judgement, or lack of it: ‘gifts’ were a frequent means of influencing it.

These godlike judges were revered, but they did not receive godlike honours themselves: rather, they presided over the rites and offerings to their community’s gods. Their priesthoods did not require any
special religious knowledge. The priest would say a prayer in public when an animal was being sacrificed to a god, but another assistant would kill the beast on his behalf. There was no special training, and so noblemen’s wives and daughters might serve as priestesses too. A priest or priestess, often finely dressed, would then allot the all-important meat to people present at the sacrifice. Except for a kill during hunting, a religious sacrifice was the main occasion when a Greek ate meat. The priest also retained the animals’ hides and skins, a valuable privilege as they were the community’s main source of leather.

Aristocrats also monopolized the magistracies of their communities. In Corinth, the Bacchiads monopolized all these jobs; in rural Elis, Aristotle later recalled, ‘the citizen-body was small in number and very few of them ever became councillors, because there were only ninety of them, and the election was limited to a few dynasties’.
²
In Attica, the region we know best, magistracies were limited to members of the noble Eupatrid caste. There were nine such magistracies, and a nobleman could probably aspire to all but the top magistracy in sequence, holding each one for a year at a time. After holding office, an Athenian nobleman then became a lifelong member of the prestigious council, the Areopagus. Political life in their city-state’s council and its public meeting place was the lifeblood of most aristocrats’ existence: there is a fine tribute to it by the noble poet Alcaeus, who was missing it during a time of rustic exile
c.
600
BC
.

Rhetoric did not yet exist as a formal theory, but leaders certainly had to speak effectively in public. Already in Homer, the gift of speaking well was admired in a nobleman, in an Odysseus, for instance, from whom words would pour in public ‘thick and fast as snowflakes’. Some of the finest speeches in all Greek literature are in pre-rhetorical Homer.
³
Judging and speaking were not the limits of an aristocrat’s accomplishments. He was also brought up to dance, to sing and to play music, especially on the
aulos
, an instrument like the modern oboe. He learned to ride, still without stirrups, and to use his sword and spear, but he could also compose verses and cap a neighbour’s wit at a party. He was accomplished in ways in which his modern critics tend not to be. But even in peacetime most of the outlets for these accomplishments were combative and competitive.
Typically, an aristocrat would be a huntsman, adept at killing hares especially, and also foxes, deer and wild boar. Some of his hunting was conducted on horseback, but hare-hunting was often on foot as the hares were chased with hounds into carefully laid nets. Slaves assisted the netting, but young noblemen indulged in the chase personally. The pursuit was fun, and if wild boars were the prey, they could be dangerous, so prowess was highly respected.

The physically fit aristocrat also competed in athletics, aristocracy’s supreme legacy to Western civilization. The researches of later Greek scholars fixed the start of their Olympic Games in what we calculate as 776
BC
, and we can certainly think of them as blossoming during the eighth century, while being wary of too precise a starting-date. For a while, the Olympics were mostly contested by competitors from nearby states in southern Greece (the Peloponnese), but by
c.
600
BC
their scope had become ‘Pan-Greek’, a status they retained for nearly a thousand years. Women, however, were not allowed to watch the Olympics where men competed in the nude (they did have their own little ‘games’, separately conducted in honour of the goddess Hera). The basic male events were running, boxing, throwing and wrestling. Almost no holds were barred, and boxing was carried out with thongs around the wrist, although not with the spiked gloves which Roman cruelty later introduced. Victors would inflict severe wounds, especially in the ‘all-in-victory’ (
pankration
) where kicking was only one part of the violent repertoire. There was nothing effete about the contestants, noble or not. They smashed teeth, limbs, ears and bones, occasionally to the point of death. ‘Gentlemanly’ is entirely the wrong description.

These sports and games are an aristocratic legacy for three reasons. The athletic events were probably never confined to aristocratic entrants, but aristocrats (as in Homer’s description of games) certainly set the standards and were more likely to win in the early years: they had the most leisure in which to train and the greatest resources to pay for a healthy diet. More importantly, aristocrats patronized athletic contests at fellow aristocrats’ funerals, thereby supporting an infrastructure of local games on which the Olympics rested. Above all, nobles dominated the most spectacular Olympic events, those which they themselves had invented: horse racing and chariot racing. These
events spread the fame of the major games far and wide: Greek aristocrats are the founding heroes of the hippodrome and the racecourse, legacies as enduring as ‘democracy’ or ‘tragedy’. Noblemen owned the best horses, although they tended to hire skilled dependants to drive and ride them: one of the neglected heroes of Greek history is the horse Pherenicus who won at three major sets of games during an amazing twelve-year span (from the 480s into the 470s
BC
).

This culture of prowess and trophies had links, too, to the life of love. The most freely expressed love was for a youth of the same sex, not least because the exercise for athletics was naked and promoted admiration for, and close contact with, nude male bodies. For the nobly born were not just the ‘best’ or the ‘good’, they were the ‘fair’, the beautiful (
kaloi
), in an explicit monopoly of good looks. To ‘look good’ was to ‘be good’. In due course, male beauty contests became a feature of local games, at Athens or at Tanagra in Boeotia, where the winning boy was allowed to carry a living ram on his shoulders around the city’s walls in honour of the god Hermes the Ram-Bearer. Boys were most ‘pleasing’, as Homer noted, in early adolescence when the first soft hair appeared on their cheeks. On painted pottery this supreme beauty was often commemorated: an older bearded man would be shown courting a boy of this age, touching him up or having sex with him between his young thighs. Even in this culture of
ephebo-philia
(love for the adolescent male), the naked athletic ideal left its imprint. As sculptures would soon exemplify, particularly beautiful young men were those with an athletically fit figure: broad shoulders, tight narrow waists, prominent buttocks and firm thighs. There was no romantic cult of the girlish or the pale, frail intellectual: on painted pottery, girls’ anatomy was usually represented with boyish lines. Exceptionally muscly boxers or wrestlers would be too chunky to be very desirable, but the ideal was the fit pentathlete, skilled in all departments, including the throwing of the javelin.

The context for this sexual activity is that boys, in most city-states, were not being formally educated beyond the age of fourteen: rather, they exercised and competed, teeming with hormones, in the wrestling-rings for naked men or in due course in special ‘gyms’, the gymnasiums which archaic Greek aristocracies have also bequeathed to modern Western imitators. Older men watched and sighed at all this young
beauty in the dust-clouds. When they courted it, they were not engaging in a macho proof of their virility, in which ‘honour’ and ‘masculinity’ were to be shown by forcing and penetrating a lesser man, rather than being penetrated themselves. As usual, the practical details of lovemaking are concealed from us, but it is only a modern prejudice to link them with ‘Mediterranean’ values of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’. There were links, often tender ones, between sexual desire and the culture of gift-giving and physical prowess. On painted pottery, especially in the sixth century
BC
, we see scenes of an older man, a hunter, bringing hares, deer and other trophies from the field to his young loved one. Here, hunting and love-gifts go together. Typically the older man would court an adolescent: a competitive culture of pursuit and gift-giving pitted men, not against an ‘inferior’ lover, but against one another in rivalry for a lovely young boy’s favours. Not for nothing were so many political quarrels traced back by later anecdotes to quarrels over a boy-lover. Participants were not usually one-way ‘homosexuals’: the Greeks did not have a notion of a ‘homosexual nature’. Nor were they only a counter-culture. Most participants would marry and have sexual relations with a wife, or slave-girls and courtesans: they simply had them, at times, with males too. Courtship of a noble heiress might also set noble suitors against each other, as they competed for her father’s favour (and fortune). But homoerotic courtship was more fleeting and thus kept recurring in a man’s life: its changes and chances were publicly proclaimed, a favourite subject for poetry. At their parties, men did not sit and listen to poems in praise of their wives or married love.

Hunting, courtship and athletics are not arts which leave solid archaeological survivals. Instead, the main relics of aristocratic life are fragments of its painted pottery which was cast in many specialized shapes and styles. The setting for so much of this pottery was the stylized drinking-party, or
symposion
, held by male diners after dinner. Arguably, its origins go back into the mid-eighth century
BC
.
⁴
At the
symposion
, male aristocrats reclined in parties of a dozen or so on couches. They mixed water into their wine and drank from cups with short ‘stems’, allowing them to slip them between their fingers and swirl wine and water together. Civilized parties also included poetry and songs and games of riddles or the capping of one another’s
words. Free women were excluded, but there was music from the slave-girls who played the
kithara
, or lyre.

Despite being mixed with water, wine led to drunkenness and sex was always near the surface. One reason, indeed, for changing from sitting at tables to reclining on couches was said to be the greater ease for sex on a sofa during the evening. The height of a symposiast’s skill became the game of
kottabos
, most famous in Sicily, in which reclining male players would flick drops of wine at a cup hung on a stick or peg. They are even believed to have exclaimed, while flicking, that ‘so-and-so is beautiful’, naming their own or a widely admired male pin-up. During the party, male guests might touch up one another; female courtesans might join in, and on one view the winner in contests or at
kottabos
was given one of the musical slave-girls as a sexual prize.
⁵