The Classical World (8 page)

The male
symposion
was one part of the accomplished web of a nobleman’s life: it was not the key to it all. Like the giving of justice, it is a reminder that not all aristocratic life was ruthlessly competitive (or ‘agonal’, from
agon
, the Greek word for a contest), as if the only aim was to defeat and humiliate rivals. Good counsel, good manners and companionship were every bit as valued as the more ‘combative’ virtues: the aristocratic ideal was rounded, and many-sided. In our more generous moments, we think of aristocrats nowadays as above competition and too naturally grand to worry about petty titles or sordid gain. We think of them as unworldly, and perhaps best at planning a model estate. Landscape gardening, or any gardening at all, is not the recorded interest of early Greek aristocrats. In Attica, the ‘estates’ of the nobles were ranked in the highest class if they were no more than about fifty acres.
⁶
Elsewhere, in spacious Thessaly perhaps, a nobleman might own rather more, farming it with lowly serfs, but estates of a thousand acres or more, like a modern duke’s, were most unlikely even there. Nonetheless, noblemen’s riches existed to be spent and displayed, especially on the widely seen splendour of their marriage-feasts and funerals. Aristocrats also used finely made objects to mark out their graves: at first they used big, decorated pottery vessels and then, from the later seventh century
BC
, sculpted statues and reliefs. By then Greek craftsmen had learned from renewed contact with Egypt the art of making big sculptures in stone of the
human form: for their aristocratic patrons, they began to innovate in representing the balance and proportion of human figures. Sculptures thus became another noble mark of status. They were put up for the ‘special dead’, for athletic victors or for womenfolk who had served in the cults of one of the divinities. Inscriptions helped to personalize these statues and to attach names to them even if they were statues of women. However, the statues of athletes were statues of famed individuals and so they were sometimes personalized directly as quasi-portraits. ‘Portraiture,’ the great cultural historian of ancient Greece, Jacob Burckhardt, observed, ‘in this case, begins by and large with the whole, necessarily naked figure and it never again had such an origin anywhere in the world. The athlete forms an artistic genre before there is any such thing as a statuary of statesmen or warriors, to say nothing of poets.’
⁷

This increasing luxury was not a cause of decadence among the upper class. Rather, it encouraged emulation and it certainly did not exclude the pursuit of gain. No aristocrat, it is true, would ever wish to be a full-time ‘businessman’. Daily traders, like craftsmen, were lucidly despised as vulgar by Greek authors with an upper-class bias: for one thing, they realized, they tell lies. In later Greek history, the known traders are almost all non-citizens of their communities, and the upper classes are certainly not among them. However, the chance of riches was too good to miss. Even the aristocrats had young sons who were fit and able to lead a temporary raiding (or ‘trading’) party in a ship abroad: seen from the other side, these bold ventures were as much about piracy as boring commerce. Although no nobleman was ‘in’ trade, he could always profit ‘from’ trade by using slave-agents and social dependants to deploy his ships, exchange his farms’ surplus and barter overseas for metals and fine materials.
⁸
On these commodities yet more of the nobles’ display at home was based. For display, not canny giving, was a noble’s primary use of riches: in their upper class, gifts were not calculated solely to prompt gifts in return. At funerals or weddings, within families or before a grateful community, noblemen gave grandly, without always thinking of the ‘reciprocity’ which Hesiod, at a lower social level, urged on shrewd small farmers. Even in Homer’s poems, one noble’s gift is promptly ‘exchanged’ with another’s only once. Rather, the nobles’ display of riches and gifts
intensified competition, as the ‘best’ had to keep up with the ‘best’ of them. Those who simply lived on rents and agricultural dues were not likely to be the ‘best’ for very long in many parts of the Greek world.

The Immortal Gods

There is the virgin Justice, too, daughter of Zeus
,

respected and revered among the gods who hold Olympus.

And when anyone scorns her by his crooked speech and harms her, at

once she sits by her father Zeus the son of Cronos

And tells him the unjust purposes of men so that the people pay for

the follies of the noble princes
…

Hesiod,
Works and Days
256–61

Anaxippus asks Zeus Naos and Dione about male offspring from his wife Philista… by praying to which of the gods might I fare best and most well?

Oracular question, inscribed on lead at Dodona

In Homer’s poems, the dominant image is that there is no life beyond the grave. In the world below, the ‘souls’ of the heroes live a shadowy life, fluttering like bats, but in the main lines of the epics they have no power to influence events on earth and none, certainly, to rise from the dead. This superb view of man’s condition heightens the poignancy of a hero’s life. We are what we do; fame, won in life, is our immortality. Until Achilles cremates his dear Patroclus, the dead man cannot cross over finally into the house of Hades. So Patroclus’ spirit appears to Achilles by night, asking for the last rites: ‘give me your hand, I beg you in sadness: for I will never come back again from Hades once you have given me my due of fire’.
¹
Achilles reaches out with his hands, but Patroclus is gone ‘like smoke’: Achilles never sees him again.

Few, if any, aristocrats shared this poetic view of death which so
greatly enhanced the pathos of the epics and their legendary choices. All over Greece, they honoured rather different local heroes, in the belief that their anger and favour still worked locally in the world: this cult was logically inconsistent with the predominant view in Homer’s poetry which, therefore, did not inspire it. For themselves, many of the nobles may have expected rather more than a bat-like afterlife of shadows, a life, perhaps, in the ‘Elysian fields’ at the far ends of the earth with some of the games and contests which they had known in life or, if not, perhaps some punishment (at least for their enemies) for wrongs done here on earth. Homeric life was ‘this-worldly’, but in one corner of their minds few Greeks in the seventh and sixth centuries
BC
would have been quite as certain as a Homeric hero that it was all there was.

In the early sixth century
BC
a post-Homeric hymn imagines for us how the gods enjoy the ‘lyre and song’ up on Mount Olympus. All the Muses, we learn, ‘sing antiphonally with their fair voices of the immortal gifts of the gods and the sufferings of mortal men, all those which men have from the immortal gods as they live witlessly and helplessly and cannot find a cure for death or a defence against old age’.
²
So much for ‘justice’ or ‘love’ in heaven: life is as it is, and the gods simply like to hear it contrasted with their own immortal ease, much as aristocrats on earth might listen to songs of the toils of the lower classes.

It is, again, a magnificently hard image, but one, also, which Greeks would not quite so readily sustain throughout their own ‘witless’ lives. Greeks were polytheists, accepting that many gods existed. Homer’s poems had said most about twelve gods (Dionysus and Demeter having the least mention), but the ‘twelve’ on Olympus were a poetic convention, and in real life there were hundreds more. Titles and adjectives linked gods with a particular place or function (Zeus Eleutherios, of freedom, or Apollo Delios, from the island of Delos) and brought them especially close to local worshippers: in Attica, at least ten ‘varieties’ of Athena are attested. Outside the Homeric circle, there were gods who were even closer, the sort of gods we find in the local cult-calendars of Attic villages or the gods of crops and farms for the ordinary man. In grave-mounds and special places, there were also the un-Homeric heroes, the semi-divine figures whose potential anger was so unpredictable: hundreds of these heroes existed in Attica alone,
and Athenians maintained due relations with them. For, at all levels of a community, all Greek social groups looked to particular gods or heroes, whether the hunting-groups in Macedonia who looked to ‘Heracles the hunter’ or the phratries in Attica who looked to a local god or hero, to ‘Zeus Phratrios’ or Ajax or simply the ‘hero by the salt-deposits’. Gods and heroes were bound up with the social infrastructure as well as with the land and citadels of each city-state. On the streets and outside the houses of many Greek cities (Athens is the best known) there were stone pillars, or ‘herms’, with a god’s head on top and erect male private parts lower down. They were probably a warning, to keep off bad things (‘watch out, or you will be penetrated’).
³
As time passed, educated minds regarded them as rather ridiculous, and so groups of clever young things smashed off the herms’ parts on one famous night in 415
BC
, probably so as to scare the simpler classes into feeling that the gods would oppose their forthcoming naval campaign to Sicily. In fact, the simpler classes turned on the arrogant ‘herm-smashers’ and put them on trial.

The gods, on the whole, were imagined as more kindly than cruel, though their cruelty could be spectacular. Their justice was most divine when it was most random, sending a punishment many years later for the misdeed of a previous family member. For the gods did have their values too: they expected oaths to be observed, strangers to be respected and their shrines not to be polluted. When a spectacular misfortune occurred, Greeks tended to look back to the gods and the past for an explanation, a way of making sense of the world which never died out among most of them in the course of their later ‘classical’ history. In the poetry and oracles of the archaic age, this belief in divine punishment is particularly prominent, but even then people were not oppressed by holy dread. For most of the time their religiousness was passive, ticking over with a few of the usual offerings and no undue anxiety. Only in a crisis, whether personal or collective, did it become active, and then belief in divine justice across the years or generations was one way of making sense of grave misfortune. Until such a crisis, ‘act first, explain later’ was one way of keeping it all in perspective; another was to try to win a god over before risking an adventure. If it failed, the god might have been the wrong one, or unwilling, this time, to ‘get involved’.

These gods and heroes were not simply up in heaven, enjoying the Muses’ gloating over human suffering. Greek life was lived with a sense of their potential presence, in the clamour of storms or the stresses of sickness, in the dust-clouds of battle or on distant hillsides, especially in the midday sun. ‘Not to everyone’, Homer had said, ‘do the gods appear’, but they were most freely accessible at night, in dreams. For, as the painted sculptures multiplied, Greeks saw around them the representations of gods crowding their public spaces: at night, the images, fixed by their craftsmen, then seemed to ‘stand beside’ them as ‘manifest helpers’. The choral hymns, the poems, the stories of childhood, the talk at festivals all helped this nightly converse. They referred so often to the gods and their earthly appearances and their doings in the flexible stories, or
muthoi
, which we rather grandly call ‘myth’. Like the nobles, most of the gods of these statues and stories stood for shining beauty and grace: ‘they were marvellous figures; their deeds and their loves were as fascinating as those of film stars.’
⁴
Like superstars, gods and goddesses were said to have made love occasionally to mere mortals, never better than Poseidon, who swept his girl away in the folds of a purple wave.
⁵
Like film stars, gods might love a boy (as Zeus loved Ganymede, or Apollo the hapless Hyacinthus) and their female lovers were not always virgins. Unlike film stars, gods always made their lady pregnant. If a god made love to her twice in succession, she had twins. But she was also commanded not to ‘kiss and tell’.
⁶

The potential presence of these gods was keenly felt on festival days when their statues came out from the temples which were built to be their houses. On other days visitors might find a temple unlocked and go in to contemplate a god’s statue. What visitors did not do was sit inside and participate with a priest in a service. There was no polytheist Church, no special training or theological essentials for being a ‘priest’ or a ‘priestess’. There were no sacred scriptures in the main cults: religious texts were a distinguishing mark of the minority, ‘secret’ cults. The core of polytheism was the paying of honours to the gods in the hope of favours or of appeasing and averting divine anger. The honours might be cakes or first-fruits or libations of wine or honey. Above all, they were offerings of animals, killed for the occasion on altars, whether birds, sheep, piglets (costing about 3 drachmas) or the
most expensive, cattle (costing ‘90 drachmas’).
⁷
There were ‘gods below the earth’, for whom blood and libations would be poured out onto the ground and the animal totally burned (the origin of our word ‘holocaust’). Or there were the Olympians and the gods ‘above’ with whom the animal’s meat would be shared. The gods enjoyed the smoke and mostly received the fat and bones (although Aphrodite did not like pigs, except in semi-Greek Aspendus). The mortals cannily ate the meat themselves.

These ‘sacrifices’ emphasized the line between mortals and immortals and although anyone might offer a victim, they were most frequent in cults paid by social groups, especially by the city-state or community. Each city-state had a calendar of yearly festivals which varied from place to place, but everywhere the dead, the crops and human fertility were the unpredictables whose well-being underlay much of this cultic activity. Citizens did not have to attend the rites, but a priest or priestess did, and there would often be meat or little gifts for the crowds on the day. Particular festivals were focused on women, too. In the Attic calendar, the Thesmophoria (widespread in the Greek world) was celebrated by respectable married women only, in honour of Demeter and the Maiden (Persephone). They spent three days with their priestesses which ranged from a sacrifice of piglets to a day, at least, of fasting while sitting on mats on the hard ground and a day of celebration on which the women offered sacrifice in honour of ‘fair Birth’. Sexual abstinence was required before and after the festival. At the Haloa, by contrast, Attic women carried models of male and female private parts, while cakes of a similar shape were set before them and priestesses (it was said) whispered to them to commit adultery. Outside the civic calendar, women also sometimes celebrated an exotic festival for young Adonis, the gorgeous beloved of Aphrodite. The rites involved some hasty gardening in flowerpots, bare-breasted lamentation and a sense, it seems, that divine Adonis was the ideal lover whom these ‘desperate housewives’ failed to find in their typical Greek husband.