The Classical World Page 10

  Not that these eastern Greeks were soft. On the mainland, the broad plains of Asia were very well suited to cavalry and it was there, in the seventh and sixth centuries, that some of the finest Greek horsemen could be seen. On land, Ionian 'men of bronze', hoplites therefore, had already been helping in Egypt by c. 665: eastern Greeks were the first to adopt the new tactics and the 'hoplite revolution'.2 They were surely on the forefront of trireme-warfare too. The earliest surviving use of the word happens to be east Greek in the 540s bc, and although islanders kept on using the older 'fifty-oared' vessels, the numbers and skill of Ionian triremes (353 in all) which appear in 499 bc cannot have emerged from only a few decades' experience.

  Off the battlefield, eastern Greeks lived elegantly too, unless they were at the bottom of the social pyramid. Their luxury was famous and their scent and finely woven robes were so fine that they were said to have 'softened' their morals. In some of their cities (we know specifically about Colophon, on the Asian coast), a thousand or more male Ionians would go to their public meeting place, dressed in long, sumptuous purple robes. Men did their hair up into a topknot and used golden brooches on their dress; among women it is probably no accident that the most famous courtesans of the era were eastern Greeks. Even their food was more interesting. The climate, so hot to us, was envied, and after contact with the nearby kingdom of Lydia they had figs worth exporting, chestnuts worth boiling and a much whiter variety of onion. By c. 600 bc, they even had peach trees, as the find of a peach-stone at Hera's shrine on Samos has now proved: peaches had come west all the way from China, far earlier than was previously thought. Through Near Eastern contact they developed their own elegantly decorated 'Ionic' order of architecture with prettily rounded capitals. They also developed coinage, initially a Lydian invention. Previously, Greek city-states had been using measured quantities of metal as a standard of value. Coinage merely cut them down into more convenient shapes, and at first it was struck not as everyday small change but from a precious mixture of gold and silver (known as electrum). City-states had their own varying weight-standards which inhibited coinage's prompt adoption as an inter-state money supply. It developed into a convenience, but it did not single-handedly change Greek economic horizons.

  In the early sixth century bc the most remarkable east Greek voice was not a trireme-rower or a coin-striker: it was Sappho's. She is the one female in the archaic Greek world whom we can still read in her own words, unrivalled until the poetess Erinna in the fourth century bc, who is also known only through fragments. Sappho is the unique early Greek witness to love and desire between women, the namesake of modern lesbians (she lived on the island of Lesbos). Only fragments of her poetry survive, although another one, lamenting old age, was discovered and published from papyrus as recently as 2004. More may reappear, but what we have implies a fascinating context. Women come and go from Sappho's presence, while Sappho expresses love for them and intense regret at their departure, especially for Anactoria who has left Lesbos to 'shine' among the Lydians. What social context is Sappho assuming? Ancient sources, and many moderns, made her into a schoolmistress with female pupils. It is more likely that she was a poetess in a well-connected household (she is credited with a daughter) who shared songs, dances and poetry with other young ladies and female visitors to Lesbos. Some of her poetry might be for formal choral performance; some of it, certainly, was for weddings; the 'lesbian' part of it was surely performed for women, not necessarily at a religious festival. As the poems show, one or other lady would then leave Sappho's company, for marriage or perhaps to follow a husband. But Sappho is the great poetess of desire, of the 'fluttering heart' and its physical symptoms and the bitter-sweetness of love. There is more to this language than close friendship; she really desires these ladies, Anactoria or Gongyla or Atthis, and she expresses desire with fine analogies from the natural world. Sappho is the most sharp-eyed poetess of flowers: she describes a young bride as having 'a bosom like a violet', not a bruised purple violet but the milky-white violet which is native to her island, a 'Lesbian pansy' with petals the colour of fine female skin.3

  Sappho and her ladies' comings and goings are not so easily imagin­able in an Athens regulated by Solon or in a reformed Sparta where no Spartan lady 'married out'. But her brother, too, had travelled far (he loved a famous Greek prostitute in Egypt) and compared with most Athenians, let alone Boeotians, many eastern Greeks had seen much more of the world. Their main reason for travel was trade, and the supposed 'barrier' between trading and landowning in Greek city-states was paper-thin among the eastern Greeks' upper classes: they were particularly aware of the scope for gain overseas and the need for securing desirable imports from the varying landscapes and non-Greek societies around them. In the criss-crossing networks of their Aegean islands it is hard to believe that the day-to-day business of trade and exchange was eschewed on social grounds by all male members of the landowning class. From the mid-seventh century onwards (at the latest), the Milesians pioneered dozens of settlements along the southern and northern coasts of the Black Sea, going up into the Crimea for access (surely) to its abundant grain and resources. From c. 630 bc onwards, Milesians were prominent, too, in renewed Greek contact with grain-rich Egypt. By c. 600 bc, eastern Greeks from the promontory of Phocaea had settled in the western Mediter­ranean, establishing Massilia (Marseilles) near the mouth of the river Rhone. They also touched on southern Spain, so rich in silver, and skirted along the coast of north Africa. By c. 550-520 bc eastern Greeks were familiar with the non-Mediterranean societies of the Scythian nomads (beyond the Black Sea), Egypt along the Nile and the curious tribes of north Africa. These three points, Scythia, Egypt and Libya, would remain fixed points of contrast with the Greeks' own way of life for eastern Greek authors in the fifth century. But they had been discovered and made into a talking point by Ionian traders and settlers long before. One eastern Greek traveller, Aristeas, had even journeyed far off into the steppes of central Asia and described what he saw in a poem. He imagined how ships and the sea would have seemed to a Scythian nomad if he had sent a 'letter' home.4 It is not then surprising that the first Greek attempt to draw a map of the world was a Milesian's. Anaximander (c. 530 bc) showed the continents of Asia and Europe as equal in size and surrounded by an outer Ocean. Another Milesian, the learned aristocrat Hecataeus, improved it (c. 500 bc) and wrote a Circuit of the Earth which set out its known place-names: surviving quotations from his work allow us to follow information gained from Ionian sea-travellers along the coasts of north Africa and southern Spain. Travel was not their only contact with foreign barbarians. In the western Mediterranean, increasingly from the 540s onwards, Etruscans and Carthaginians fought hard to contain eastern Greeks' attempted settlements in their area. In Asia, meanwhile, the east Greek cities had been constantly threatened by foreign warriors, by nomads from the north (the Cim­merians, during the mid-seventh century), by the rich kings of Lydia, including Gyges (c. 685-645 bc) and Croesus (c. 560-546 bc), and finally by the Persians who emerged from further east in the mid-sixth century bc. In 546, the great Persian king, Cyrus, conquered Lydia and his generals took over the east Greek cities in Asia. They would control them for most of the next two hundred years.

  The simple tough life of the Persian tribesmen became contrasted with the luxury, the purple dress and softness of the eastern Greeks, and in due course the contrast was cited to explain the Greeks' defeat by these barbarians. One city, however, made treaties both with the Lydians and Persians and prospered from them: Miletus, whose nearby oracle of Apollo at Didyma was remembered for speaking the 'entire truth' to the conquering Persian King Cyrus. It is in Miletus, during the years of the city's special treaties with eastern kings (c. 580-500 bc), that we first hear of a new Greek innovation: philosophy. Some of it also qualifies as the world's first scientific thought.

  We hear of Thales the Milesian who predicted an eclipse of the sun correctly to 585 bc, of Anaximenes who traced all things to the simple element o
f air, and of Anaximander who proposed an amazing theory of human and animal origins. Life, he argued, began in a watery element and as the world began to dry up, land animals developed. As man needed prolonged nursing, the first men were born in prickly coatings from fish-like parents, and these coatings protected them for a long while. These thinkers did not conduct experiments or randomized trials. They did not reason from repeated observations. Their claim to be scientists rests on their attempts at a general expla­nation of aspects of the universe without appealing to gods and myths. No other thinkers had attempted such theories anywhere else, and for the first time we can apply tests of formal logic to the sequence of their arguments. Why did they occur then, and why there?

  Thales' predictions of the eclipse surely rested on existing astro­nomical records which had been kept for centuries by Babylonians. Thales himself travelled to Egypt; conquest then brought Iranians into western Asia. When the Ephesian thinker, Heraclitus (c. 500 bc), proposed an underlying 'strife' behind the apparent unity of the world, his ideas perhaps owed something to theories of cosmic 'strife' which would have been current among Persians in Ionia who followed the prophet Zoroaster's religious teaching. Contact with 'eastern' think­ing was a precious stimulus for these intelligent Greeks in Asia. But so also was travel and their own observation. It may seem absurd when Thales is reported to have said that 'all is water', but his own city, Miletus, lies beside the eddying river Maeander which has con­tinued to deposit so much silt there that the city is now several miles from the coast. In Egypt's Nile Delta, Thales could see and observe exactly the same process: water creating a land mass. Everyday analo­gies from cooking and the making of pottery may underlie other Greek thinkers' attempts at explaining the world.

  Travel alone was not enough to create 'science'. These thinkers also lived in communities which were held together by impersonal laws. As a result, they tended to explain the universe by underlying law too, and metaphors of 'justice' and 'requital' were sometimes important in their account of change. It is too vague, though, to ascribe the 'birth of scientific thought' to the existence among Greeks of the citizen-community, or polis. The first thinkers did not argue their theories before the common man in these communities. They did, however, react to each other's opinions as known through books. Crucially, such free reaction was possible because the Greek communities were not ruled by kings and the priesthoods in them had a restricted non-dogmatic role. They were sharply different from the kings and priests to be found in the older kingdoms of the Near East. These early Greek thinkers were not atheists (one of them, Xenophanes, even argued for 'one God', supreme, it seems, among many), but their theories of the universe were not religious theories, either. They were not the sort of thing which could arise in societies where priests propounded 'wis­dom' on such matters and kings had to be flattered and obeyed.

  It is probably in the eastern Greek world that we should locate the most widely cited and endorsed of all Greek prose texts: the so-called 'Hippocratic OathV Doctors still contest, or appeal to, its principles, but within Greek medicine it was only the 'oath' of a minority of practitioners. There is no reason to ascribe it to the great Hippocrates, the most famous early Greek teacher of medicine who is linked to the east Greek island of Cos. Like Hippocrates himself (probably an early to mid-fifth-century doctor), its date is unknown, but its morals and ideals have been upheld for centuries as a tribute to 'Greek science'. As a 'charter text', what it says is sometimes misrepresented by those who appeal to it. It is even cited in support by those who disapprove of euthanasia. What it actually requires is that doctors swear not to assist poisoners, rather than not to assist those who wish to be helped to die. Most modern doctors still admire the clause against the sexual harassment of patients, women as well as men, although the Greek oath also protected the persons of slaves; most doctors are less keen on the oath not to give a pessary to a woman 'to assist an abortion'. The clauses swearing to share one's livelihood with one's teacher in medicine and not to repeat gossip heard in the course of everyday life, outside professional hours, disqualify even the most admiring modern doctors from the halo of the Hippocratic Oath's observance.

  Nowadays the most vivid material survivals from the eastern Greek world happen to be from the Greek West. In a much later text, we happen to have a description of an amazing robe, dyed with purple and made for one Alcisthenes, a man of luxurious Sybaris, who lived in southern Italy.6 Some six yards long, it showed woven images of two palaces in the East, Susa and Persepolis, the ceremonial seat of the Persian king. It must have been made in the later sixth century (Alcisthenes' home city-state of Sybaris was destroyed in 510 bc), but it survived to have a long history, eventually selling for a vast sum to a Sicilian tyrant and then ending up in Carthage. As Greek gods were part of its design, its origin was certainly Greek. The answer must be that it was made in Miletus, the greatest of east Greek cities, and was commissioned by a man from Sybaris, the western city in Italy with which Miletus had a very special relationship. The text which describes it is a glimpse of the wide horizons spanned by its artist, a man of Miletus who knew about the Persians' great palaces so many miles to the east, who drew the first Greek sketch of Persepolis, quite soon after the palaces there were being built, and who then sold the result to a western Greek in Italy, miles from the Persian Empire but within the orbit of Miletus too.

  In the 540s, when Persian armies conquered western Asia, the Greek citizens of little Phocaea decided to escape. They put on board ship their women and children and the statues and all the dedications from their temples 'except', the historian Herodotus tells us, 'for bronze or stone or paintings'.7 Then they sailed west. It is in the West in the following decades that we can still catch a last echo of their east Greek style of painting. It survives at Tarquinia on the west coast of Italy about sixty miles north of Rome; here, Etruscan nobles were buried in impressive tombs like underground houses, their walls plastered and then painted with figured designs. In the late seventh century Tarquinia was the Etruscan place of origin of Tarquinius Priscus, who moved south to rule Rome as a king, as did his descendants. From c. 540 bc the style of the nobles' tomb paintings shows that Tarquinia had received able Greek artists from the east Greek world. Their style is evident in painted masterpieces which conform to the taste of their Etruscan patrons: these Greek migrants painted scenes of the hunting of ducks, banqueting and sports, exquisite echoes of their east Greek talent in a West which adapted and admired it.

  Towards Democracy

  Histiaeus of Miletus held the opposite view: 'as of now,' he said, 'it is because of King Darius that each one of us is the tyrant of his city-state. If Darius' power is destroyed, I will not be able to go on ruling the Milesians, nor will any of you anywhere else, for each of the city-states will prefer to be democracies rather than tyrannies.'

  Herodotus, 4.137, on events at a bridge across the Danube, c. 513 bc

  When the Persian King Cyrus and his commanders reached the western coast of Asia Minor as the new conquerors in 546 bc, the Spartans sent him a messenger by boat, carrying a 'proclamation' (another Spartan 'Great Rhetra'). They told him 'not to damage any city-state on Greek land because they would not allow it'.1 For Sparta, there was a clear line between Asia and Greece (surely including the Aegean), and the latter's freedom was their concern.

  In Greece, the years from 546 to c. 520 were to be the supreme years of Spartan power. Her warriors had already defeated their powerful neighbours in southern Greece, the men of Argos and Arcadia, and forced the defeated cities of Arcadia to swear an oath to 'follow wherever the Spartans lead'.2 In battle, the trained Spartan soldiers had been heartened by the presence among them of the great mythical hero Orestes, son of Agamemnon. In the 560s bc his enor­mous bones were believed to have been discovered in Arcadia by a very prestigious Spartan who transferred them to Sparta, bringing the hero's power with them. The hero's bones were probably the bones of a big prehistoric animal which the Spartans, like other Greeks, misu
nderstood as the remains of one of their race of superhuman heroes ('Orestesaurus Rex').

  It also helped the Spartans that during the sixth century bc tyrannies came to an end in most of Greece. In many city-states, the sons or grandsons of the first tyrants proved even harsher or more objection­able than their predecessors and were remembered in some spectacular anecdotes, the best of which concerned their sex life. Periander, tyrant of Corinth, was even said to have insulted a boy-lover by asking him if he was pregnant by him yet. The brittle, competitive culture of homoerotic love was indeed one source of insult and revenge, but it was not the only cause of turmoil. Tyrants had seized power at a time of faction in the noble ruling classes, after the military hoplite reform had changed the balance of power between nobles and non-nobles. Two or three generations later this military change had settled down and the former noble families could at least unite in wanting the tyrants out. Spartan soldiers were a convenient ally with whom to overturn a tyranny which had lost its point. Sparta was believed to have the most stable 'alternative to tyranny'5 in her social and political system, the nature of which, however, outsiders did not really under­stand. Spartans, therefore, were frequently invited in by discontented nobles to help put a tyranny down. Sparta 'the liberator' ranged far and wide in Greece. With one eye on Persian ambition in the Aegean and a close connection with her distant kin at Cyrene ('Black Sparta') in north Africa, from 550 to c. 510 Spartans did indeed have a wider interest in the Mediterranean. When one of their kings, Dorieus, was forced to leave Sparta (c. 514 bc), he set off first to Libya with supporting troops, then later to south Italy and Sicily where he died trying to conquer the north-western, Phoenician end of the island.