The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

1000 to 197 B.C.

	What Made Classical Greece So Special?
	The Archaic Period
	Colonization
	Aristocracy, Oligarchy, and Tyranny
	Militant Sparta
	The Athenian Road to Democracy
	The Persian Wars
	Why the Greeks Won
	Athenian Democracy
	Greek Medicine
	Hellenic Poetry and Drama
	Hellenic Architecture, Sculpture and Pottery
	Athenian Society
	Athenian Imperialism
	Athenian-Spartan Rivalry
	The Peloponnesian War
	Spartan and Theban Ascendancy
	Philip of Macedon
	Alexander's Empire Up For Grabs
	Hellenistic Devolution
	Pre-Classical Greek Religion
	The Early Philosophers
	The Sophists and Socrates
	Plato and Aristotle
	Other Developments in Greek Philosophy
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Who was this Tellus? Croesus had never heard of him, so Solon explained. Tellus was a well-to-do gentleman, though not a millionaire, who prospered because his city prospered. He had sons anyone would be proud of, all of them lived to grow up, and he got to see his grandchildren. One day Athens went to war against neighboring Eleusis, and Tellus went with the army, instead of excusing himself because of his age. He died in battle, was given a public funeral right on the spot where he fell, and is now remembered as a hero.

What Solon was trying to say was that nobody knows for sure if a person's life is happy until it is over. Croesus found this out the hard way several years later, when he lost his fortune and his kingdom to the Persians. Solon's story, though he did not say it, also reflected the Athenian attitude; he thought that being an ordinary citizen of Athens was better than being the world's richest king.⁽¹⁾

The ancient Greek civilization was the most influential the world has ever known. Many aspects of it--its art, its philosophy, its drama, its educational system, and its values--are prominent in our culture, visible to anyone who cares to look. Many books have been written on just one part of Greek civilization, and the typical public library will have at least a whole shelf devoted to these books. So much emphasis has been placed on the Greeks in college courses that one could believe world history started with Greece. The Greek statesman Pericles had it right when he declared that, "Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now."⁽²⁾ We credit the Greeks with so much that it seems western civilization had an overachiever for a father!

Why all the emphasis on the Greeks? It is because the Greeks were the first people in ancient times who thought and acted much like us. True sons of Japheth, they displayed a keen intellectual curiosity, which led to speculation on almost every subject. They also had a strong individualistic spirit, and would not accept any law, rule or fact just because somebody "said so." Those two characteristics paved the way for the Greeks to depart from the patterns of all those that preceded them. Finally, they were the first people on record who saw humanity in a positive light. Whereas the Bible teaches us that man has fallen and can only recover with God's grace, and most of the world's mythologies claimed that man was created to serve the gods, the Greeks thought that man left on his own was generally good, and that under the right circumstances he could rise to challenge the gods. Recently, when it covered an exhibition of Greek art from the time of Alexander the Great, the New York Times Book Review explained it this way:

"For thousands of years older civilizations--Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian--thought of man as a despised figure who groveled before deities and despots. Then the Greeks picked man up and set him on his feet. They taught him to be proud. 'The world is full of wonders,' sang Sophocles, 'but nothing is more wonderful than man.'
They persuaded him, as Pericles put it, that he was 'the rightful lord and owner of his person,' and formulated laws to safeguard this personal freedom. They encouraged man's curiosity about himself and his world, holding with Socrates that 'a life without inquiry is not worth living.' They believed in excellence in all things and left a legacy of beauty that ranged from the Parthenon and the Hellenic sculptures . . . the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides . . . the poetry of Hesiod and Homer . . . to the painted pottery of the simplest household.
Without the ancient Greeks, we might never even have conceived of self-government. But still more important than our language, our laws, our logic . . . our standards of truth and beauty . . . we owe to them a deep sense of the dignity of man. From them, we learned to aspire without limit, to be, as Aristotle suggested, 'immortal as far as we can.'"

The Archaic Period

Unlike the Near Eastern monarchies, a god-king did not govern the polis, nor were the thoughts and activities of its citizens limited by powerful priesthoods. Many Greeks, especially the Athenians, were fond of good talk and relished debate and argument. As late as the first century A.D., the Apostle Paul was welcomed by the Athenians because they "liked to spend all their time telling and listening to the latest new thing." (Acts 17:21)

Although the Greeks were unusually independent, several factors kept them united culturally. The writings of Homer established a common list of gods for all Greece. They had a common language. The intense trading from community to community reduced isolation and so contributed to a more homogenous society. Finally, threats from foreign empires forced the Greeks to act together.

As noted in Chapter 1, a dark age followed the destruction of the Mycenaean cities, although the precise cause of Mycenaean decline is unknown. The Dorians, themselves a Greek people, migrated from somewhere in the north (Macedonia?), took possession of much of the Peloponnesus, and though some Mycenaean sites lingered on for a considerable period (i.e., Athens), civilization as a whole was swept away and population decreased. Writing disappeared, perhaps because it was mainly used by governments which no longer existed. Many Mycenaeans fled from Greece to the coast of Anatolia, which they called Ionia. These refugees took with them a recollection of their traditions, which crystallized into epic poetry like that of Homer.

A new aristocratic social structure, less rigid than the Mycenaean, began to take root--in both Ionia and Greece itself. The Dorians lived in tribal communities, led by a hereditary king who commanded in war and served as chief priest. The king heeded the advice of a council of elders, who came from the warrior class; hunting and war were the main business of life. Non-Dorian Greeks lived a similar existence.⁽⁵⁾

Curiously, technology can advance without civilization or literacy. At the time of the Dorian invasion, iron was known, but the iron tools and weapons produced were not very good. During the next few centuries, though, the first blacksmiths appeared, and through commerce with Asia, or simple trial & error, they perfected the techniques of ironmongery. Iron spears and swords replaced bronze ones, though bronze armor remained the norm for the rest of ancient Greece's history. The largest source of iron in Greece was in the southeastern corner of the Peloponnesus, near the city of Sparta, which may give us the economic reason behind Sparta's rise to supremacy over southern Greece in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.

While working with iron, the Dorians also abandoned their cavalry in favor of a new tactical formation, the phalanx. Members of the phalanx, known as hoplites, wore the heaviest armor available (up to seventy pounds!), and assembled to form a rectangle, eight ranks deep and as much as two hundred men wide; they trained themselves to keep their spears and shields facing forward while they ran and charged in unison. A skillful charge by such a mass of men had an awesome impact, which swept just about any other military force off the field. Apparently the Spartans were the first to try it, but it took them a while to perfect their moves without tripping, knocking over or stabbing each other; they fought a twenty-year war with a rival to the west, Messenia, before conquering it (735-715 B.C.).

Once the Spartans got their phalanx working right, every other city-state in Greece had to have one too. This had a revolutionary impact on Greek society, as William McNeil explained:

"The introduction of the phalanx had still another pervasive and profound influence. Every young man who could afford to buy the necessary armor and weapons spent long hours with his fellow youths practicing the rhythms and skills needed to fight effectively in the phalanx. Speed, strength and courage were only part of what was required. In addition every man had to learn to keep time to the beat set up by the war chant, so that the wall of shields would not break when the phalanx charged across the field of battle. Every man's safety depended on his neighbor keeping his place in the ranks, for each man's shield helped to cover the right side of the man next to him. Conspicuous personal feats of arms were as much out of place in such a situation as cowardice or inability to keep pace with the rhythm of the charge, for anything that broke the line threatened immediate disaster."⁽⁶⁾

As in other armies, training and fighting together produced a strong sense of camaraderie; call it male bonding if you wish. Within the phalanx, everyone was equal, and everybody had to do his share to make the whole thing work. The mentality and solidarity required by the phalanx carried over into politics, promoting both a sense of civic responsibility and the equality of men.

The Ionian refugees from Greece remained on the coast and organized themselves into cities before the Dorians did, probably to defend themselves from the adjacent Near Eastern empires (Hittites, Phrygians and Lydians), though there was considerable cultural interchange between Greek and Asian. These walled cities evolved into new city-states. The whole city, with its citadel, central shrine, hearth and sacred fire, and marketplace (agora), replaced the palace as the center of government for both town and country. One's city, rather than one's language or race, determined one's political identity. A similar process occurred in Greece itself, though in some areas, such as Arcadia in the center of the Peloponnesus, village life continued; in other areas the most successful cities annexed the surrounding land. Thus Athens and Sparta absorbed Attica and Laconia (Lacedaemonia), respectively.

From an early date Greeks on both sides of the Aegean patronized common shrines. They worshiped Apollo at Delphi, Zeus at Olympia (where the first Olympic games were held in his honor in 776 B.C.), Apollo and Artemis at Delos. The Greeks celebrated festivals at these shrines with dance, song, and athletic contests. These meetings reminded Greeks that they were one people, despite their political divisions, and prompted them to form some basic rules of interstate behavior concerning warfare, religious truces, and the sanctity of messengers. The Oracle at Delphi grew to become the most highly regarded oracle in the ancient world, visited by "barbarians" as well as Greeks. Whenever somebody came to Delphi with a question for the gods, they took it to a priestess called a pythia; before giving an answer, she inhaled fumes from burning bay leaves, and whatever she said under the influence of those fumes, no matter how garbled, was accepted as divine wisdom.⁽⁷⁾ In the archaic period Delphi was very influential, fixing the site of prospective colonies and helping to formulate major policies for cities and individuals.

Colonization

From Ionia's eastern neighbor, Lydia, came two very important inventions, money and capitalism. Today, living in a nation that has been capitalist from the very beginning, it is difficult to imagine a society where people do not regard the regulation of price by supply and demand as a natural law, but that is the case in primitive communities. There the main rule is that status determines wealth, not the other way around; they allow you three strings of beads if you are important enough to wear them. Consumption is expected and done to express rank. Twentieth-century communist nations went back to this system because they protested the destructive social effects of laissez-faire economics, and people lost their liberty in the process. Conversely the introduction of the agora to the cities around the Aegean Sea dramatically affected the Greeks. In contrast to the towns of the Fertile Crescent, where there was no single place to go shopping (buying and selling was usually done either next to temples or in the workshop of one's house), the agora became the main center of activity in any Greek city. With a fistful of coins and an eye for an opportunity, the ordinary person entered history.

A great wave of colonization went out between 750 and 500 BC. Greek culture spread all around the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Besides the usual reasons for colonies (population pressure at home, the desire for outposts close to the sources of valuable products, etc.), there was politics; defeated political factions and disgruntled individuals would get together, charter a ship, and look for a new place to live. Whereas Phoenician shipping only accidentally created a new nation (Carthage), Greek colonization was a deliberate enlargement of the existing Greek world. Markets were opened so that Greece could export olive oil, wine, and pottery in return for precious metals, timber, grain, and other goods. Greek colonies were always self-governing from the start, though they kept commercial and religious ties with the mother city.

Cyprus was the first area settled outside the Aegean; by 1000 B.C. two-thirds of the island had Greek colonists. Since the remaining third of Cyprus was Phoenician, the original Cypriot population was absorbed into the communities of the newcomers. A more important center of colonization was Sicily and southern Italy, the Roman Magna Graecia; here Corinth founded Syracuse, the greatest Greek city in the west. The coast of the Black Sea was settled by Ionia; grain and commerce with the Scythians lured colonists here. The island of Thera founded Cyrene in northeast Libya, while Egypt's XXVI dynasty (663-525 B.C.) invited the Greeks to establish a commercial emporium, Naucratis, in the Nile delta. Likewise, the establishment of outposts on the Syrian and Cilician coasts connected the Greeks with the Assyrian Empire and other Middle Eastern nations. Further expansion in Africa and Spain was blocked by the Phoenicians; the westernmost Greek colonies were on the French Riviera, led by Massilia. Neither Sparta nor Athens were colonial powers, though. Sparta founded Tarentum in Italy as a place to dump rebels (see footnote #7), while Athens had no colonies until after the Persian Wars, when overpopulation forced it to send out a few colonists.

Commanding a single ship, Pytheas began his journey by sailing around the coast of Spain. In those days, the Phoenician city of Carthage dominated the western Mediterranean, and the Carthaginians blockaded the Strait of Gibraltar to keep trading rivals, especially the Greeks, out of the Atlantic. However, Carthage was involved in a war at the time, so the ships that normally guarded the strait were needed elsewhere, allowing Pytheas to slip through. Then he followed the coasts of Portugal, Spain, and France northward, until he reached the English Channel. Across the Channel he dropped anchor at Land's End, Cornwall, and discovered what the Carthaginians were hiding; Cornwall's mining and smelting industry was the best source of tin in the known world. Continuing up the west coast of Britain, he landed at many places to meet the natives; the main discovery he made here was that the Britons made fermented drinks out of grains (beer) and honey (mead).⁽⁹⁾

In northern Britain Pytheas learned of an island called Ultima Thule, six days sailing to the north. Ultima Thule was "the outermost of all countries," supposedly the most northerly inhabited land, where daylight lasted for 24 hours at midsummer. Historians do not agree on where this island was; some believe it was Iceland, while others assert it was Norway, because Iceland probably did not have anybody living on it this early. A few conservatives think Pytheas meant the Shetland Islands, and overestimated their size. The record does not even tell us if Pytheas went to Thule, but at least he tried; he got far enough north to write an accurate description of ice floating in the Arctic, something a Mediterranean sailor would never see. After that adventure, Pytheas completed his circumnavigation of Britain. Apparently he also sailed along the German and Danish coasts, and may have entered the Baltic Sea, before returning home. Back in Massilia he didn't receive a hero's welcome; instead, like Marco Polo centuries later, he found his stories received with disbelief.

Aristocracy, Oligarchy, and Tyranny

In the late 7th century BC, ambitious or sympathetic individuals capitalized on the general discontent, especially in prosperous cities, kicked out the aristocracies and oligarchies, and established one-man dictatorships, called tyrannies. Cypselus (657-625) seized control of Corinth and built a colonial empire, founding cities on the west coast of Greece and modern Albania. Tyrants also arose in Athens, Megara, Epidaurus, and Sicyon, just northwest of Corinth. In the Aegean, Polycrates (530-522), tyrant of Samos, made his island a major naval power.

Back then tyranny did not have the negative connotation it does today. Most tyrants tried to be beneficial rulers to their subjects, like the political "bosses" of big American cities. Though the tyrant seized power illegally and ruled without a constitution, his power ultimately derived from popular support. The first tyrants centralized the city-state, repressed the aristocracy, fostered commerce and the arts, built temples and other impressive public works, and brought civic pride to the masses. Their heirs, however, ruled despotically and caused their own destruction. Most tyrants were removed from power by the end of the 6th century, except in Sicily and other areas on the periphery of Greece, where they became monarchs rather than true tyrants.

After the tyrants, the next step in Greece's political evolution was democracy, "government or rule by the people." However, few city-states besides Athens produced a fully developed democracy. Most of the others stopped at an earlier political stage (e.g., Sparta never progressed past oligarchy). Ironically, the Greek state which conquered the others in the mid-fourth century, Macedonia, still had a king, which may be the reason why it prevailed in the end (King Philip never agreed with the opinion that city-states are better than kingdoms).

Militant Sparta

To start with, they evenly divided the land among all "true Spartans." It was worked by serfs from Messenia and other conquered states called helots, who had to give half their harvest to the Spartan lords. Spartans were ordered to live simply; silver, gold, and home decorations like fancy ceiling beams were banned. They also abolished eating at home; all Spartans joined "mess clubs" where they took meals for the rest of their lives.

The monarchy was devalued; two kings took the place of one, and power went to a council of the city's thirty best men, which was presided over by an ephor, or head man. They did not write down the law code, so to make sure everyone knew it, musicians sang it during festivals.

The women of Sparta enjoyed more independence and rights than Greek women elsewhere. They received military training, owned property, and ran Sparta while the men were off fighting wars. We credit a Spartan woman with saying that it is better for a warrior to be carried back (dead) on his shield than to come home without it.

Because he had taken out all silver and gold of circulation, Lykurgos introduced a currency made of iron, which he may have seen as an appropriate symbol of strength. The iron money had to be cast in sizeable ingots to be worth much, which produced several advantages from the non-merchant's point of view. It was too bulky to steal, not worth the trouble to counterfeit, rusted if hoarded, and wasn't even easy to spend. It also discouraged commerce with others, according to Plutarch: "No rhetoric-master, fortune-teller, harlot-monger, jeweler or engraver would set foot in a country which had no money." This meant that Spartans knew little about either foreign vices or marketing skills.⁽¹⁰⁾

After Lykurgos, Sparta began to form a series of alliances with other city-states and localities, which it turned into the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League. Sparta's policy after this was to oppose and overthrow the tyrannies. This policy was generally successful; by 550 B.C. Arcadia, Elis, Corinth and Megara were members of the League, and Boeotia (Thebes) joined it when the Peloponnesian War broke out.

Turning a boy into a hoplite required strength, speed and discipline, and the Spartans worked overtime to achieve this. They did not pamper children; sickly babies were left outdoors to die, and at the age of seven, the typical Spartan boy had to leave home and enter a dormitory. He had his head shaved, was only allowed two baths a year, and had to go to a swamp and pull--not cut--reeds for his sleeping mats. At the age of twelve, he was issued a cloak, which served as his only clothing and blanket. When he turned sixteen, they sent him out to live off the land for several weeks. Stealing and murdering helots was encouraged, but if caught, he would be severely punished, not because of what he did, but because somebody caught him! Often they also ritually whipped Spartan youths, to make them tougher and to teach them that dying was better than crying out for mercy.

The Spartan youth's military training started when he was eighteen, and he was permitted to marry at nineteen. At twenty he left his wife, except for conjugal visits, because his military training was complete, and spent the next ten years in the barracks, always ready for battle. At the age of thirty, he left active duty (but stayed in the reserves), and faced a critical test. To join a mess club, earn the right to vote and become a full citizen, he had to be elected unanimously; one negative vote made him an "inferior" (perioikoi), a non-citizen hardly better off than the helots. If elected, he sat in the assembly and campaigned and dined with his club; if he lived to sixty he could become an oligarch.

The Lykurgan reforms achieved their goal; Sparta was always in a state of full military readiness, and one Spartan soldier was considered as good as a dozen men from anywhere else. That is why today we still call a life which emphasizes military virtues "Spartan." The cost, however, was so expensive that no other city-state dared to try it. Because engaging in economic activity had been so sharply curtailed, the Spartans depended on an underclass they held in contempt--the helots and "inferiors"--to meet all their needs. They also were obsessed with fears of corruption from contact with the outside world, and worried about revolts all the time, because they treated the helots even rougher than they treated themselves. Those undergoing military training served in a police force called the krypteria, whose purpose was to spy on and terrorize the helots. Sparta had created a society that was introverted, yet fiercely aggressive toward anything which might endanger it.

The Athenian Road to Democracy

To resolve problems like these, a tyrant named Draco produced a new law code in 621. It didn't work, though, and the punishments it inflicted were so harsh that we have called brutal governments "Draconian" ever since. In 594, Athenians turned to Solon, and gave him dictatorial powers as diallaktes, or mediator; he canceled debts, abolished debt-slavery, wrote a more humane law code and made ownership of land the main criterion of public office.⁽¹¹⁾ Yet his reforms were only temporarily successful; neither rich nor poor were satisfied, civil strife soon broke out again, and Solon decided to leave town, rather than keep absolute power.

Peisistratus bequeathed a peaceful and prosperous Athens to his sons Hippias and Hipparchus. They ruled as co-tyrants until 514, when two aristocratic rivals murdered Hipparchus. This made Hippias paranoid, and he became the kind of tyrant we are familiar with; he hired foreign mercenaries, raised taxes to pay for them, and turned Athens into a police state. An anti-tyrannical faction named the Alcmaeonids plotted against Hippias, and they agreed that to beat the mercenaries, they would need to call in somebody tougher. That somebody could only be the Spartans. Since the Spartans were also the most religious Greeks, the Alcmaeonids knew how to persuade them to help--bribe a priest! To do this they financed construction on a magnificent white marble temple at Delphi, and had a few words with the priestesses. After that, whenever a Spartan petitioner went to the Oracle, he was given the same answer to whatever question he had: "Liberate Athens!" The Spartans got the message, liberated Athens, and then went home again.⁽¹²⁾

However, there no peace just yet. Now that the Peisistratids were gone, the upper class tried to make Athens an aristocracy, while the lower class wanted a democracy. The aristocratic leader, Isagoras, called back the Spartans and exiled the leader of the democrats, Cleisthenes. However, in 507 Cleisthenes returned with an army and blockaded both the Spartans and the aristocrats on the highest hill of Athens, the Acropolis. When the siege ended the Spartans were allowed to leave, but every enemy of democracy was slaughtered. This event, which we now call the Athenian Revolution, established the famous democracy of Athens. We will describe how the Athenian democracy worked after the next section.

The Persian Wars

The Persians first moved into the area in 546 B.C.; Cyrus II's conquest of Lydia brought Ionia into the empire. In 516 B.C. Darius I marched against the Scythians, only to come back from the Ukraine empty-handed. The Ionian Greeks saw this as a sign of Persian weakness and revolted, with Athenian assistance. Darius put down the rebellion, and decided that he would have to conquer Athens, to keep Ionia pacified. In 492 he sent an army, under the command of a general named Mardonius, into Thrace and Macedonia. The campaign came to a premature end, though, when a storm wrecked the supporting fleet near Mt. Athos. The Persians tried again in 490; this time they sent their fleet directly across the Aegean, only making stops to attack Naxos and Eretria on the way, before they landed 20,000 men on a beach near Marathon, about 26 miles northeast of Athens. The Athenians immediately sent a runner named Pheidippides to Sparta, with a message requesting aid against the Persians. Unfortunately a religious festival was going on in Sparta, and the Spartans didn't want to offend the gods, so they declined; maybe after the festival they would come and help. Except for 2,000 men from Plataea, the Athenians would have to win the war by themselves.

Besides the Plataeans, the Athenians could only muster 5,000 hoplites, so they assembled on a hill above the plain of Marathon, and waited. The reason for the wait is that the Athenians had the most democratic army around; ten generals led it, five of them voted to attack now, and the other five voted to wait for the Spartans. The gridlock ended on the tenth day, when the Persian fleet and cavalry went off to attack a nearby town, and the Athenian "general of the day," Miltiades, gave the order to attack. Though outnumbered by nearly 3 to 1, their phalanx split into three units, charged down the slope, and hit the Persians from both the front and the sides. The final score: Persia lost 6,400 men, and Athens lost only 192 (they did not count Plataeans and slaves, though). The surviving Persians sailed around the peninsula of Attica, hoping to capture Piraeus, the port of Athens, only to find the Athenians ready for them, so they went home instead. A few days later 2,000 Spartans arrived, checked out the battlefield at Marathon, and congratulated the Athenians on a job well done.⁽¹³⁾

The battle of Marathon was one of the most important in history; it destroyed the belief in Persian invincibility and showed, as Herodotus explained, that "free men fight better than slaves." Nevertheless, the Persians began preparing more thoroughly for a second invasion. It took ten years; in the middle of that period Darius died and his son Xerxes took the throne. Back in Athens, Miltiades was accused of misusing public funds, and he died in prison; this made Athenians wonder at the fickleness of fate (and others wondered at the fickleness of Athens). In his place Themistocles, an illegitimate son of a vegetable vendor, became the leading man in Athens. Between 487 and 483 he succeeded in ostracizing all his rivals: Hipparchus, Megacles, Xanthippus and Aristides.⁽¹⁴⁾ Then the Athenian silver mines made an especially rich discovery, which Themistocles used to finance his warship-building program. By the time the Persians came back, Athens had 200 triremes (battleships driven by three banks of oars), the largest fleet in Greece, while Sparta took the lead in forging an alliance of thirty-one states.

The Persian army--reckoned by Herodotus at 2,500,000 but more likely 180,000--marched along the Aegean coast accompanied by a great fleet carrying provisions. The states of northern Greece submitted; they knew resistance was hopeless and just wanted to get that huge army out of their territory before it ate and drank everything in sight. The Greek alliance sent an advance force to Thermopylae, where they planned a holding action. In those days (erosion has made it much wider since then), Thermopylae was an extremely narrow pass between some cliffs and the sea, scarcely wide enough for a chariot to pass through; here a few men could hold back a thousand indefinitely, canceling the Persians' numerical advantage. The first three attacks failed utterly, with the Persians suffering appalling losses, until a Greek traitor showed them how to get around Thermopylae and the Greeks. As the Persians advanced this way, Greek scouts reported their movement to the Greek commander, a Spartan king named Leonidas. Realizing that they would soon be trapped, Leonidas decided to make a last stand, buying more time for the rest of Greece. He ordered most of the soldiers to leave, and kept only those he could count on to fight to the death--300 Spartans and 1,100 others. As the Persians darkened the sky with their arrows, the Spartans fought magnificently; when they lost their weapons, they used their fists and feet, not stopping until the last of them was dead. This act of bravery raised the reputation of the Greeks even higher than the victory at Marathon had done. Afterwards the Spartan dead were immortalized on a monument built at the pass: "Go tell the Lacedaemonians, you who pass us by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie."⁽¹⁵⁾

On the same day both fleets met at nearby Artemision, where they fought an inconclusive battle. Now the Greeks were forced to retreat; the fleet went around Attica to the island of Salamis, near Athens. Thebes submitted to the advancing Persians, and Xerxes pushed on to Athens. However, his army was too big to move fast, which gave the Athenians time to evacuate their women and children to Salamis. When the Persians arrived they stormed the Acropolis, killed a few diehards who wouldn't leave the city, and put every building to the torch. Xerxes had avenged his father's defeat at last.

The Athenian refugees stayed with the navy because the Oracle at Delphi had predicted that Athens could only defend itself with "wooden walls." By now they had figured out that "wooden walls" meant their fleet. However, they couldn't agree on how to use it; although nearly half the ships were Athenian, the non-Athenians refused to take orders from an Athenian admiral. Themistocles gave in to their wishes and stepped down in favor of a Spartan commander, Eurybiades, but secretly gave him some money to keep him friendly. The other issue was where to make their stand; the southern Greeks, including the Spartans, wanted to draw a new defensive line at the isthmus of Corinth, abandoning everything but the Peloponnesus to the enemy. To keep the southerners from having their way, Themistocles pulled a neat trick; he sent a letter to the Persians, telling them exactly where the Greek fleet was, so they could attack before the Greeks could get away.

As the Persians entered the narrow strait between Salamis and the mainland, the Greek ships backed up, allowing the Persians to have their way--to a point. When they had their backs to the beach, the Greeks suddenly charged forward and began ramming or shearing the oars off the Persian ships, spurred on by the shout: "On, sons of the Greeks! Set free your country, set your children free, your wives, the temples of your country's gods, your fathers' tombs; now they are all at stake."⁽¹⁶⁾ Soon the Persians were suffering from the same problem that would afflict the Spanish Armada, 2,000 years later; they didn't have enough room to maneuver effectively, but the smaller Greek fleet did. The result was total confusion on the Persian side, as new ships rushed through the bottleneck to impress the Great King, only to find their way blocked by other ships trying to get out.

Xerxes parked his throne on a nearby hill, where he could get a panoramic view of the whole battle. He didn't like what he saw. In the water he could see the heads of Greeks swimming to land, but "of the Barbarians the greater number perished in the sea, not knowing how to swim." Herodotus told of a particular scene, where an Ionian queen named Artemisia, an ally of the Persians, was chased by an Athenian trireme, and accidentally rammed another Persian vessel while trying to escape. In the resulting confusion, the Athenians thought Artemisia must be on their side, and broke off their pursuit. Xerxes mistakenly thought the ship Artemisia had sunk was a Greek one, and exclaimed, "My men fight like women, and my women fight like men!"⁽¹⁷⁾

With 200 of his 350 ships destroyed and his lines of communication cut, Xerxes had no alternative but to retreat. Themistocles sent him another letter, in which he apologized that things didn't go as planned, but at least he had restrained his comrades so they wouldn't pursue the Persians all the way back to Asia. Xerxes took the hint and went home, though he left a force of 80,000 men in Greece, under the command of Mardonius. As the Persians withdrew, Themistocles visited several minor members of the alliance and bullied them to cough up more gold, to pay for the war effort. The only one he didn't get anything from was the island of Andros. When he told the Andrians that the Athenians were rich and powerful because of two great gods, Persuasion and Compulsion, they replied that they had two useless gods who wouldn't leave their island, Poverty and Inability!

The following summer (479 B.C.) the Greek army, with the Spartan contingent in the vanguard, routed the Persian force at Plataea, killing Mardonius and most of his men. There was a memorable episode afterwards, when the Spartan commander, Pausanias, visited the tent used by both Xerxes and Mardonius as a command post, and couldn't believe the luxury he saw; he called the other Greek generals, and said, "Gentlemen, I asked you here in order to show you the folly of the Persians, who, living in this style, came to Greece to rob us of our poverty."⁽¹⁸⁾ On the same day as the battle of Plataea, the Greek navy caught and destroyed the surviving Persian ships at Cape Mycale, near Miletus in Ionia. For the time being, Greece was safe from invasions.

Why the Greeks Won

Consequently, if you had been an observer at Marathon or Salamis, nobody would have been surprised to see you bet on a Persian victory. Instead, Greece (or the city-state of Athens, to be exact) triumphed. Nor was that all; after Salamis, Persian monarchs hired Greek hoplites as mercenaries, but no Greek commander hired Persians; around 400 B.C., Greek adventurers like Xenophon and Agesilaus found that they could meddle in the Persian Empire's western satrapies without much concern for retaliation from the Great King; finally Alexander the Great turned the tables and conquered the Persians. The military balance had shifted from east to west, and in most east-west confrontations since that time, the West has been the winner. What happened?

The Greeks themselves thought it was because they were free men. They were fighting for their homes, and for what we would call their right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Moreover, they could debate each decision, and those who disagreed with their commanders were allowed to propose a better plan if they had one. This made for a more flexible army than what their opponents had. Contrast this with the typical Persian soldier. Even if he wasn't technically a slave, he might as well have been one; the Persian's morale couldn't have been very high if he never expected to see his homeland again, and Xerxes had a reputation for getting nasty with those who didn't do what he wanted.

Another factor was that although the Greeks had their differences, as we have noted previously, they were not as heterogeneous a group as their enemies; they all spoke the same language, even if their dialects were different. The Persians, on the other hand, had an army composed of troops from all 127 provinces of their empire, "from India to Ethiopia," as the writer of the Old Testament Book of Esther put it. Their navy was also polyglot, combining Phoenician, Cypriot, Egyptian and Ionian ships. In ancient times, communications tended to break down easily in a unit where the members spoke more than one language; the Egyptians, for example, did not even take part in the battle of Salamis, but sailed on to Megara because they heard a rumor that the Greeks had escaped to there.

The most important factor was that the Greeks brought a new attitude to warfare. Asia has plenty of wide-open spaces, so during the first millennium B.C., Asian armies began using archers on horseback, and have done so for most of the time since. In Greece, however, a shortage of pastureland made horses an expensive luxury; only Macedonia and Thessaly had enough pastures to raise many of them. Thus, for the Greek city-states, heavy infantry became the most cost-effective military units. We already saw how they developed the phalanx formation to make the most of a frontal charge by infantry; now they would use their intellect to apply a scientific approach to the task of killing people and breaking things. A battle involving an exchange of thrown spears or volleys of arrows can decimate or demoralize an opponent, but it doesn't kill as many enemies as hand-to-hand combat. The Greeks expected heavy casualties whenever two phalanxes slammed into one another, as Herodotus explained by putting words into the mouth of the Persian general Mardonius:

"Yet, from what I hear, the Greeks are pugnacious enough, and start fights on the spur of the moment without sense or judgment to justify them. When they declare war on each other, they go off together to the smoothest and levellest bit of ground they can find, and have their battle on it -- with the result that even the victors never get off without heavy losses, and as for the losers -- well, they're wiped out."⁽¹⁹⁾

These pictures of Persian and Spartan warriors have appeared elsewhere on this website, but are worth putting together to compare differences. The Persians, even the elite guard (the "Immortals"), didn't wear much armor; in fact, the Persian king Cyrus relied on tricks to conquer Lydia and Babylon, rather than brute force. By contrast, a Greek hoplite would go into battle carrying as much as seventy pounds of weapons and armor, and in the case of the Spartans, would spend the active years of his life training and keeping in shape under that load. In a one-on-one fight, the Greek would undoubtedly win. To offset their disadvantage the Persians first hired Greeks, and when they could no longer get them, brought in elephants and scythed chariots, but they proved to be no substitute for a solid heavy infantry.

The next important European civilization, that of the Romans, learned the military lessons of the Greeks well. We will see in the next chapter how they fought with more determination than their Italian, Celtic and Carthaginian opponents, and often this was enough to decide the winner. They also made their own military units, the legions, more flexible than the phalanx, and thus deadlier. After the Romans, there was a step back to warfare being a contest between champions, as was the case in pre-classical Europe, but even then they used the heavy cavalry of an armored knight wielding a lance, a phalanx of sorts on horseback, rather than the mounted archers of Asia and North Africa. Then in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, a military revolution brought the infantryman back to his key place in European armies (see Chapter 11). Westerners haven't forgotten that lesson since then; cavalry and missile weapons--from arrows and catapults to today's howitzers and jet fighters--are always helpful, but you still need the lowly foot soldier to take a piece of ground and hold it.

Non-European cultures have produced their share of brave warriors; the difference was that they took warfare personally, regarding it as a matter of honor. Such warriors count their success in battle by acts of courage, and by how many trophies they brought back; the latter might include live captives to torture and sacrifice. None of them were likely to win recognition for rescuing a comrade; they also found it difficult to fight in any sort of formation, and total destruction of the enemy was not on their minds. By contrast, most of the battles that went down in history as meat grinders, destroying men as fast as they could arrive, involved two European armies; brave as they were, no Maori, Zulu or samurai would have stayed at Alesia, Verdun or Stalingrad to see how it turned out. It's safe to say that the greatest danger to a Western army is another Western army, and when non-Europeans beat the Europeans--like Hannibal against the Romans or the Japanese against the Russians--it was usually because the non-Europeans learned how to use the weapons and tactics of their opponents.

Athenian Democracy

The first years were easy ones from a political standpoint, because Sparta was weak and friendly.⁽²¹⁾ In 470 Themistocles was ostracized because many Athenians thought he was letting success go to his head; he found a comfortable home among the Persians in the town of Magnesia, where he spent the rest of his days. Cimon, the son of Miltiades, became the new head man of Athens.

In 464 a severe earthquake devastated Sparta, and the oppressed helots seized the opportunity to revolt. The Spartans suppressed most of them quickly enough, but one group entrenched itself at Mt. Ithome in Messenia and resisted the clumsy Spartan efforts to dislodge it. Sparta's allies came to her aid, and Sparta even asked Athens for assistance. Cimon compared Athens and Sparta to a pair of oxen when he said in a speech, "Will you stand by and see Greece hobbled, and Athens without her yokemate?" They voted to help, and 4,000 Athenian hoplites marched to Sparta. However, these hoplites were men full of radical democratic ideas, and once the Spartans learned that they favored human rights, they feared the Athenians would switch sides. Sparta sent the Athenians home before they took part in any fighting, and put down the rebellion on its own.⁽²²⁾

Cimon fell out of favor because of this fiasco. Leading conservatives were put on trial for corruption, and in 461 Cimon was ostracized. As he left, the democrats reduced the power of the Areopagus (the assembly of the rich from aristocratic days), so that all it could do was advise, and perform minor judicial and religious functions. Then they reduced the property requirements formerly imposed on all public officials to a mere token sum, allowing any freeborn male in Athens to fully participate in the government. The radicals now dominated Athens, and their leader was a nephew of Cleisthenes--Pericles. For the next thirty-two years (461-429 B.C.), Pericles was Athens' greatest statesman, dominating the city with nothing but his ability to persuade others. Because of him, the Golden Age of Athens is also called the Periclean Age.⁽²³⁾

Under Pericles the Athenian democracy achieved its fully developed form. The main body was the popular assembly, which gathered on a hill called the Pnyx; the amphitheater where they met had 18,000 seats, and any citizen could participate. From the assembly came the jurors, and the Council of Five Hundred; members of both were chosen by lot, so that the most popular or the richest wouldn't serve every time. They allowed no lawyers on lawsuits or criminal cases, while anywhere from 251 to 2,500 jurors took part in a typical case. Jurors were placed in groups of ten, and a magistrate randomly gave out white and black marbles to each group; those who received a white marble went to work that day. The Council of Five Hundred set the Assembly's agenda, and each month fifty of its members were on duty, 24 hours a day (the Athenian calendar had ten months of 36 days each). Eight of the archons (judges) were elected, while the ninth, the Archon Polemarchos, came from what was left of the Athenian royal family. Nobody served a term lasting more than a year, and the only appointed positions were those which required special skills, like state architect and finance minister.

This total democracy did not have a chief executive; not even a president or prime minister. Instead, military matters and executive functions were run by a board of ten elected generals. These generals urged the Popular Assembly to adopt specific measures, and both their success and popularity determined whether they would be reelected at the end of their annual term. Pericles distinguished himself by leading a squadron of ships against both Sparta and Thebes in 457 B.C., and afterwards became a lifelong advocate of a strong navy. His prestige reached such heights that he won every election for thirty years in a row, and so great was his influence on the Athenians that, in the words of the contemporary historian Thucydides, "what was in name a democracy was virtually a government by its greatest citizen."⁽²⁴⁾

For the first time, they made payment to citizens for performing public duties, allowing even the poorest to become jurors and members of the Council of Five Hundred. Attendance at civic meetings became a subsidy for the lower class. Only the army remained in the hands of the well-to-do, because each soldier was still expected to pay for his equipment; by contrast, the navy was overwhelmingly democratic, because most of its sailors were poor. Conservatives called the payments for political participation a form of bribery, but Pericles insisted that it was essential to the success of democracy:

"Our constitution is named a democracy, because it is in the hands not of the few but of the many. But our laws secure equal justice for all in their private disputes, and our public opinion welcomes and honors talent in every branch of achievement, not as a matter of privilege but on grounds of excellence alone . . . [Athenians] do not allow absorption in their own various affairs to interfere with their knowledge of the city's. We differ from other states in regarding the man who holds aloof from public life not as "quiet" but as useless; we decide or debate, carefully and in person, all matters of policy, holding, not that words and deeds go ill together, but that acts are foredoomed to failure when undertaken undiscussed."⁽²⁵⁾

Greek Medicine

"It seems to me that this disease is no more divine than any other. It has a natural cause just as other diseases have. Men think it supernatural because they do not understand it. But if they called everything supernatural which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of such thing!"⁽²⁶⁾

The Hippocratic school also gave doctors a sense of service to humanity which they have never lost. All members took the famous Hippocratic Oath, still in use today, which says things like: "I will adopt the regimen which in my best judgment is beneficial to my patients, and not for their injury or for any wrongful purpose. I will not give poison to anyone, though I be asked . . . nor will I procure abortion."⁽²⁷⁾

Despite their empirical approach, the Hippocratic school adopted the theory that the body contained four liquids or humors--blood, phlegm, black bile, and white bile--whose proper balance was the basis of health. This doctrine impeded medical progress until modern times.

Hellenic Poetry and Drama

As Greek society became more sophisticated, a new type of poetry, written to sing with a lyre, arose among the Ionian Greeks. Unlike Homer, authors of this lyric poetry sang not of legendary events but of present delights and sorrows. This new note, personal and passionate, can be seen in the following examples, in which the contrast between the new values and those of Homer's heroic age is sharply clear. Whereas Homer saw Arete (excellence) as the greatest virtue, Archilochus of Paros (seventh century B.C.) unashamedly throws away his shield so he can run from the battlefield:

"My trusty shield adorns some Thracian foe; I
left it in a bush - not as I would! But I have
saved my life; so let it go. Soon I will get
another just as good."⁽²⁸⁾

While Homer imagined an unromantic, purely physical attraction between Paris and the abducted Helen, Sappho of Lesbos (sixth century B.C.), the first female poet on record, saw Helen as the helpless, unresisting victim of romantic love:

"She, who the beauty of mankind
Excelled, fair Helen, all for love
The noblest husband left behind;
Afar, to Troy she sailed away,
Her child, her parents, clean forgot;
The Cyprian [Aphrodite] led her far astray
Out of the way, resisting not."⁽²⁹⁾

Greek drama began with the religious rites of the Dionysian mystery cult, in which a large chorus and its leader taught moral lessons through singing and dancing. Thespis, a contemporary of Solon, added an actor called the "answerer" to converse with the chorus and its leader. This made dramatic talk possible. By the fifth century B.C. in Athens, two distinct forms--tragedy and comedy--had evolved. Borrowing from the old familiar legends of gods and heroes for their plots, the tragedians reinterpreted them in the light of the values and problems of their own times.

In reworking the old legends of the heroic age, Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) sought to spread the new religious values of his age, by showing how the old beliefs cause suffering. In his trilogy, the Oresteia, for example, he concerned himself with the murder of Agamemnon by his queen following his return from the Trojan War, and then went on to work out the consequences--murder piled on murder until people through suffering learn to substitute the moral law of Zeus for the primitive law of the blood feud. Like the prophets of Israel, Aeschylus taught that while "sin brings misery," misery in turn leads to wisdom:

"Zeus the Guide, who made man turn
Thought-ward, Zeus, who did ordain
Man by Suffering shall Learn.
So the heart of him, again
Aching with remembered pain,
Bleeds and sleepeth not, until
Wisdom comes against his will."⁽³⁰⁾

A generation later, Sophocles (c. 496-406 B.C.) largely abandoned Aeschylus' concern for working out divine justice and concentrated upon human character. To Sophocles, a certain amount of suffering was inevitable in life. No one is perfect; even in the best people a tragic flaw causes them to make mistakes. Sophocles dwelled mainly on the way in which human beings react to suffering. Like the sculptors of his day, Sophocles viewed humans as potentially ideal creatures, and he displayed human greatness by depicting people experiencing great tragedy without whimpering--and sometimes triumphing over it in the end.

Euripides (c. 480-406 B.C.), the last of the great Athenian tragedians, reflects the rational and critical spirit of the late fifth century B.C. Instead of idealizing humanity, as Sophocles did, Euripides viewed human life as pathetic, the ways of the gods ridiculous. His recurrent theme was "Since life began, hath there in God's eye stood one happy man?" For this he has been called "the poet of the world's grief." Euripides has also been called the first psychologist, for he looked deep into the human soul and described what he saw with intense realism. Even Sophocles admired this; he once compared Euripides with himself by saying, "He paints men as they are, I paint men as they ought to be." Far more than the other playwrights, Euripides strikes home to us today. His Medea, for example, is a startling and moving account of a woman's exploitation and her retaliatory rage. When Medea's ambitious husband discards her for a young heiress, she kills her children out of a bitter hatred that is the dark side of her once passionate love:

"He, even he,
Whom to know well was all the world to me,
The man I loved, hath proved most evil. Oh,
Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow,
A herb most bruised is woman.
. . . but once spoil her of her right
In man's love, and there moves, I warn thee well,
No bloodier spirit between heaven and hell."⁽³¹⁾

Comedies were bawdy and spirited. There were no laws against libel or obscenity in Athens, so political satire became a favorite subject of the comedians. Aristophanes (c. 445-385 B.C.), the most famous comic-dramatist, brilliantly satirized Athenian democracy as a mob led by demagogues, saw the Sophists (among whom he included Socrates) as subversive, Euripides as an underminer of civic spirit and traditional faith, and the youth of Athens as irresponsible youngsters more interested in the latest fashions than in politics. Yet he also put intelligent messages between his jokes. For example, in his play Lysistrata, the women of Greece stop the Peloponnesian War with a sex boycott, refusing to sleep with their husbands until they agree to end the fighting; thus, he could advocate peace and women's rights in the same story. By allowing such ribald humor even in difficult times, the Athenians may have shown us why Athens remained a cultural center after its best years ended; they were never afraid of the truth, and could always laugh at themselves.

Hellenic Architecture

For a generation after the Persian Wars, the Athenian Acropolis was left bare, to remind citizens of what the Persians did to their city. However, in 449 B.C. Athens finally signed a peace treaty with Persia, so Pericles launched a great building program, because he felt that the glory of the city should be expressed in some visible form.

The Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and the other temples on the Acropolis exhibit the highly developed features that make Greek architecture so pleasing to the eye. All relationships, such as column spacing and height and the curvature of floor and roof lines, were calculated and executed with remarkable precision to achieve a perfect balance, both structurally and visually; for example, they gave the columns a delicate curve so that they appear straight from a distance. The three styles of columns were the simple Doric, which was used in the Parthenon; the Ionic, seen in the Erechtheum; and the later and more ornate Corinthian. Unlike the temples of older civilizations, which were enclosed and mysterious places, the Greek temple was open, with a colonnade porch and a single room for a statue of the god. Sacrifice and ritual took place outside the temple, where the altar was placed.

Other types of buildings, notably the theaters, stadiums, and gymnasiums, also express the Greek spirit and way of life. With the open-air theaters, the circular shape of the spectators' sections and the plan of the orchestra section set a style that has survived to this day. In his Life of Pericles, Plutarch explained why classical Greek architecture is still appealing to us, even in its ruined state:

"And this is the more cause to marvel at the buildings of Pericles, that they were made in so little time to last for so long . . . Such a bloom of newness is there upon them, keeping them, to the eye, untouched by time, as though the works had blended into them, an evergreen spirit and a soul of unfading youth."

Hellenic Sculpture and Pottery

The mastery of technique around 480 B.C. ushered in the classical period of Greek sculpture whose "classic" principles of harmony, proportion and realism have shaped the course of Western art. Sculpture from this period displays an idealization of the human form, always a favorite subject of Greek art afterwards. The most famous sculptor from this time was Phidias, who carved both the relief sculptures on the outside of the Parthenon and the colossal ivory and gold statue of Athena on the inside.

The more relaxed character of fourth-century B.C. Hellenic sculpture, while still considered classical, lacks some of the grandeur and dignity that mark fifth-century art. Charm, grace, and individuality characterizes the work of Praxiteles, the most famous sculptor of this century. We can see these qualities in his supple statues of the god Hermes holding the young Dionysus and of Aphrodite stepping into her bath.⁽³²⁾

Pottery, the oldest Greek art, followed crude imitations of Mycenaean forms at the beginning of the Greek Dark Age. Soon abstract geometric designs, sometimes with stick figures, replaced the Mycenaean motifs. With the arrival of the archaic period came paintings of scenes from mythology and daily life. From surviving Greek pottery and mosaics, we can get an idea of what Greek painting, now lost, was like.⁽³³⁾

Athenian Society

Most of the inhabitants of Athens were not even recognized as citizens. Women, slaves, and resident aliens were denied citizenship, could not vote, and had no voice in the government. Legally, women were first the property of their fathers, then of their husbands; they could not, as the law expressly stated, "make a contract about anything worth more than a bushel of barley."

Athens was definitely a man's world. Greece had plenty of goddesses, and celebrated the female form nearly as often as the male form in art, but the real status of women was low. Aristotle even argued that women provided only an abode for a child developing before birth, as male seed alone contained the full germ of the child. A wife's function was to bear children, make clothes and manage the home; she had to stay in the women's quarters when her husband entertained his friends.⁽³⁴⁾ Men did not marry until they were about thirty, and they usually married girls half their age. Marriages were normally arranged by the families, and prospective brides and bridegrooms seldom met before their betrothal. Daughters could not inherit their parents' property, so if there were no sons, a daughter could be forced to marry the closest male relative, to keep the fortune in the family. Families were often small, and infanticide, usually by exposure, of unwanted infants (especially girls), was practiced as a primitive form of birth control.

Most Greek families didn't want daughters because they were a financial burden on the family, especially when they got married. Every woman needed a dowry in the form of money, cloth, and weaving equipment. Plutarch tells us that Elpinice, the daughter of Miltiades, was the most desirable woman in Athens, but she married quite late, because Miltiades owed the state a large fine at the time of his death. The family was rich in land but didn't have enough money for a dowry. Her brother Cimon ended up auctioning her off; he gave her to the richest man in Athens when he agreed to pay off the family debt, making him the only groom in Athenian history who provided the dowry.

Greek society sanctioned double standards where sex was concerned, and the philandering of a husband did not cause unfavorable public comment. The raping of a free woman, though a crime, was a lesser offense than seducing her, since seduction meant winning her affections away from her husband. A peculiar institution, catering to the needs and desires of upper-class Athenian males, was that of high-class prostitutes called "companions" (hetaerae). These females were normally resident aliens and therefore not subject to the social restrictions imposed on Athenian women. A few of the hetaerae, such as Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, were cultivated women who entertained at salons frequented by Athenian celebrities. However, champions of the social emancipation of Athenian women were rare, and the women themselves accepted their status. Apart from a few cases in which wives murdered their husbands (usually by poison), married life seems to have been stable and peaceful. Athenian gravestones in particular attest to the love spouses felt for one another. The tie to their children was strong, and the community expected sons and daughters to honor their parents.

Male homosexuality is frequently pictured in Greek art and mentioned in literature. The most common form was "boy love," a homosexual relationship between a mature man and a boy who was about twelve years old. The man became the boy's role-model and counselor, and might even help him choose a wife when he grew up. They viewed this relationship as a rite of initiation into adult society, and like other initiation rites, it contained a strong element of humiliation. Sparta strongly encouraged this pedophilia; other Greeks indulged to a lesser extent, because Greek men thought women were not intelligent enough to carry on a stimulating conversation.⁽³⁵⁾ Homosexuality between adult males, however, was only socially acceptable in the Theban army, where they reasoned that lovers would fight to the death to defend each other; elsewhere it was often outlawed, because it was "contrary to nature."

No ancient society did without slaves. In fifth-century Athens we estimate that between one fourth and one third of the people were slaves.⁽³⁶⁾ Some were war captives, others were children of slaves, but most came from outside Greece through slave dealers. No large slave gangs worked on plantations, as they did in Roman times and in the American South before the Civil War. Small landowners owned just a few slaves, who worked in the fields alongside their masters. Those who owned many slaves--one rich Athenian owned a thousand--hired them out to private individuals or to the state, where they worked beside Athenian citizens and received the same wages.⁽³⁷⁾

Other slaves were taught a trade and set up in business. They were allowed to keep one sixth of their wages, and many of them could purchase their freedom. Although a few voices argued that slavery was an unnatural institution and that all people were equal (Euripides, for instance), the Greek world as a whole agreed with Aristotle that some people--especially non-Greeks--were incapable of full human reason; thus they were by nature slaves who needed the guidance of a master.

Slavery also helps explain why Greece was never interested in developing machinery. Abundant slave labor probably discouraged concern for more efficient production of food or manufactured goods. So did a sense that the true goals of humankind were artistic and political ones. One Greek scholar, for example, refused to write a handbook on engineering because "the work of an engineer and everything that ministers to the needs of life is ignoble and vulgar." An even more graphic example comes from Hero, a resident of Alexandria in the second century B.C. Hero invented a working steam turbine, but he couldn't think of a practical use for it! To him it was just a toy, and he ended up using it as an automatic door-opener for a temple, fooling superstitious pilgrims into thinking that the gods opened and closed the doors.⁽³⁸⁾

Because of this outlook, classical Mediterranean civilization produced fewer inventions than contemporary societies like India and China. Population growth, also, was less substantial; it topped out when the Romans took over, and population actually shrank during the late Roman Empire period. A host of features of Greek life, including even its democracy, thus hinged on the slave system and its requirements.

Athenian Imperialism

From the beginning, Athens dominated the League. To maintain the navy that would police the seas, each city-state had to make a yearly contribution of either ships or money. Most of the 173 member states found it easier to give money, but Athens always gave ships. Because of that, the League's navy was almost entirely Athenian, and Athenian garrisons became a common sight around the Aegean.

By 468 B.C., the Ionian cities had been liberated and the Persian fleet destroyed, preventing Xerxes from coming back for a rematch. In 465 Cimon won the League's greatest victory; he liberated the provinces of Lycia and Caria in southwest Asia Minor and enrolled them in the League. Because of these successes, some League members thought the alliance was no longer necessary. One member, Naxos, refused to contribute anything for the League in 468, and the Athenian navy attacked and looted that island. In 465 Thasos tried to drop out, and Athens again sent its ships; they took the island by storm and forced Thasos to tear down its walls, surrender its fleet, and become an Athenian vassal. These actions showed that the Athenians wouldn't let anyone quit the League, because of their fear of the Persians and because they needed to maintain and protect the large free-trade area so necessary for Greek (and especially Athenian) trade and industry. They also felt that any state which benefitted from the League ought to belong to it; when the city of Carystus, on the island of Euboea, refused to join, Athens attacked and forced it into the League.

Gradually, Athenian domination of the League became Athenian rulership over all the states in it. Soon members were ranked in three categories, which were, from top to bottom: Athens, other members who contributed ships (Chios, Lesbos and Samos), and everybody else. Minor members might be forced to donate soldiers as well as money, and Athenian officials might come to manage their affairs. Athens insisted on the right to try criminals accused of conspiracy or treason, since these crimes threatened the safety of the League, and eventually it extended its jurisdiction to all legal cases between League members. In 454, Pericles was concerned that the League treasury was not safe from thieves, so he moved it from Delos to Athens. Not long after that, the Athenian coinage and system of weights and measures was made the official one among all league members. Now Athens regarded the other League members as satellites, so the League quietly turned into an Athenian empire, with a population of two million. By suppressing local aristocratic factions within its subject states, and by clearing the Aegean of pirates, Athens both eased the task of controlling its empire and emerged as the leader of a union of democratic states.

To many Greeks, Athens was now a "tyrant city" and an "enslaver of Greek liberties." Pericles, on the other hand, justified Athenian imperialism on the ground that it brought "freedom" from fear and want to the Greek world:

"We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by doing them . . . We are alone among mankind in doing men benefits, not on calculations of self-interest, but in the fearless confidence of freedom. In a word I claim that our city as a whole is an education to Hellas."⁽³⁹⁾

Athenian-Spartan Rivalry

These activities alarmed Sparta and Corinth, who would have let Athens do its own thing had it been willing to let them do theirs. The result was the First Peloponnesian War. Sparta moved its army into Boeotia in 457, and won a victory at Tanagra, but in the same year the Athenians defeated the Thebans at Oenophyta; this brought all of Boeotia except Thebes under Athenian control. Both sides agreed to a five-year truce in 451, but when it ended, Boeotia revolted; this encouraged Euboea and Megara to revolt and tipped the balance in favor of Sparta and its allies. A Spartan king marched on Athens, but withdrew inexplicably before he encountered Pericles' forces (the king went into self-imposed exile afterwards). Then Athens recovered Euboea, but her land empire was now gone, so she signed a new truce in 445 and wisely abandoned the ambitions which had started the fight.

The truce allowed Athens to keep a sea empire and Sparta a land empire, and was supposed to last for thirty years. It only lasted for fourteen, though. Athens looked overseas, to the rich trade routes of Sicily and southern Italy, and her moves to take over this commerce antagonized the city that dominated this area, Corinth. In 433 Athens formed an alliance with Corcyra (modern Corfu), an island colonized by Corinth but now at odds with the mother city. Meanwhile Potidaea, a Corinthian settlement in northern Greece which had passed into the Athenian Empire, revolted, and Athens sent ships to put down the rebellion. Corinth objected to both these actions and warned Athens to stop. Feeling that war was inevitable, Pericles retaliated by putting a total embargo on trade with Megara, the nearest city-state not under Athenian control.

The Peloponnesian War

"The real but unavowed cause I consider to have been the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which it inspired in Lacedaemon [Sparta]; this made war inevitable."

The first year of the war went well for Athens. Sparta could march right up to the walls of Athens, but it had no siege equipment, so it could not take the city. Pericles decided to let the Spartans ravage the farms of Attica, counting on the empire's navy and money to bring in food and harass the enemy's coastlines. This may have been a prudent strategy, but it was also an unpopular one, because the owners of the destroyed farms, vineyards and olive groves lost their income. Perhaps in response to complaints about this, he decided to speed up the war by leading a naval expedition against Epidaurus, a pro-Spartan city on the eastern Peloponnesus. He failed to capture Epidaurus, and when he returned he found Athens had been besieged for forty days and was anxious for peace. The Athenians voted him out of office--the only time he lost an election--and tried and fined him for misusing public funds. One year later, though, they reelected him, because even his opponents realized he was the best leader they had.

Then fate took a hand in the conflict. To escape the Spartans, refugees crowded into Athens, raising the population to 300,000 and providing a wonderful opportunity for infectious diseases to spread. In 429 a plague carried off a third of the Athenian population, including Pericles. His death was a great blow to Athens, for leadership of the government passed to far less capable men. In the words of Thucydides:

"Pericles, by his rank, ability, and known integrity, was able to exercise an independent control over the masses--to lead them instead of being led by them . . . With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude. This, as might have been expected in a great imperial state, produced a host of blunders."⁽⁴⁰⁾

Since the ancient Greeks did not know anything about germs, the plague came as a complete surprise. Back then diseases were often seen as evidence of some god's wrath, and morale plummeted. Again we quote from the eyewitness account of Thucydides:

"Seeing how quick and abrupt were the changes of fortune which came to the rich who suddenly died and to those who had previously been penniless but now inherited their wealth, people now began openly to venture on acts of self-indulgence which before then they used to keep in the dark. Thus they resolved to spend their money quickly and to spend it on pleasure, since money and life seemed equally ephemeral. As for what is called honor, no one showed himself willing to abide by its laws, so doubtful was it whether one would survive to enjoy the name for it. It was generally agreed that what was both honorable and valuable was the pleasure of the moment and everything that might conceivably contribute to that pleasure. No fear of God or man had any restraining influence . . ."⁽⁴¹⁾

Two factions now competed to fill the vacancy left by Pericles. One group, led by the honest but timid Nicias, wanted peace with Sparta; the other was led by the fiery demagogue Cleon, who wanted to continue the war. Between them they kept Athens in a constant state of turmoil, where any debate could cause a sudden reversal in government policy. For example, in 428-427 the city of Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, tried to secede from the Athenian Empire. Cleon put down the rebellion, and called for the execution of all adult males and the enslavement of all women and children. A ship was sent to the fleet surrounding Lesbos with orders to carry this out, but on the next day, the Popular Assembly had second thoughts, ignored Cleon's angry protests, and sent another trireme to countermand the first decree. Thanks to a prodigious effort from the oarsmen (they were promised free wine if they got there in time), the second ship arrived ahead of the first one. Still, the whole episode shows the self-proclaimed champion of democracy practicing the worst kind of imperialism.

In 425 B.C. Athenian forces, led by Nicias, occupied Pylos on the western Peloponnesus, and blockaded 120 Spartans on the offshore island of Sphacteria. The siege dragged on for months until Cleon declared to the Assembly that if he had been in command, he would have taken the island long ago. Nicias called the bluff, turned the command over to him, and told him to make good on his claim. Cleon didn't really want to go, but he had no choice, so he left with a promise to do the job in 20 days; to everyone's surprise, he did. The Spartans on Sphacteria surrendered, almost the only time they did in Greek history.

Next Athens captured Methone (near Pylos) and the island of Cythera, and won a victory against Megara (all in 424). At this point the pro-peace faction called for quitting the war while Athens was ahead, but Cleon thought he could do even better by continuing it. Instead, Athens began losing almost immediately. It lost the battles of Delium (in Boeotia) in 424, and of Amphipolis (in Thrace) in 422. Amphipolis was a battleground because both Athens and Sparta wanted control over the gold and timber of Macedonia. Cleon was among the six hundred Athenians killed at Amphipolis, and though the Spartans lost only seven men, one of them was their general, Brasidas. Thucydides told us that Brasidas was so likeable that even his enemies admired him, and his intelligence and manners convinced many in the Athenian camp that the Spartans might not be such bad folks after all.⁽⁴²⁾

Now that both sides had lost their most belligerent leaders, they agreed to peace. The peace imposed by the treaty of Nicias (421) was supposed to last for fifty years, but it only lasted for two. Sparta's allies felt that the treaty had deprived them of their legitimate gains, while in Athens a younger, bolder generation took charge. Chief among them was Alcibiades, a nephew of Pericles. Athenians found him extremely charismatic; he had good looks, intelligence and wealth, and even talked with a fashionable lisp. However, he was also cruel, ambitious, insolent and extravagant. He was a student of Socrates, who tried hard to set him straight, but the only principle he followed was the pleasure principle. His main interests in life were boys, women, racehorses and wine; he wore a purple robe in public, and his shield was adorned with a picture of Cupid (Eros in Greek) holding a thunderbolt. As long as he felt he could achieve his ambitions by promoting those of Athens, he was loved and admired as a patriot, but those who knew him feared him as well.

Alcibiades resumed the war in 419, on a charge that Sparta had not honored its obligations in the peace treaty. Sparta won the first round, though; at Mantinea it defeated Argos (the main ally of Athens) so handily that everybody on the Athenian side avoided facing the Spartans in a land battle for the rest of the war. Then in 417 the neutral island of Melos refused to join the Athenian Empire, and when the Athenians captured it, they carried out the genocide they had earlier promised against Mytilene. They killed every man of military age, sold the women and children into slavery, and settled 500 Athenians on Melos in place of the natives. Thucydides gave us the Athenian argument used to justify their naked aggression; not until Machiavelli wrote The Prince (1513 A.D.) would power politics again be so ruthlessly and candidly presented:

"We believe that Heaven, and we know that men, by a natural law, always rule where they are stronger. We did not make that law nor were we the first to act on it; we found it existing, and it will exist forever, after we are gone; and we know that you and anyone else as strong as we are would do as we do."⁽⁴³⁾

Since these activities were not grinding down Sparta to submission, Alcibiades proposed a new strategy. His idea was to ignore Sparta for the time being and conquer the Greek colonies in the west, especially Sicily. If this could be done, Sicily's rich supply of crops, cattle and men would flow to Athens, and Corinth could no longer bankroll the Peloponnesian League; Athens might even become powerful enough "to rule the whole of the Greek world."⁽⁴⁴⁾ An expeditionary force of 134 triremes and 30,000 men was prepared to attack the main city of Sicily, Syracuse; Athens claimed it was doing this to protect a Sicilian ally from a Syracusan invasion. However, the antiwar party tried to stop the expedition with a gross act of sacrilege. Athens had hundreds of images called "herms" beside its houses and streets; these were short pillars (4-5 ft. tall), decorated with the face and genitals of the god Hermes, and regarded as good-luck charms. One morning Athenians woke up to find nearly every herm in the city "defaced." This graphically showed that Athens had become impotent, unfaithful to its gods, and vulnerable to conspirators working at night.

People knew Alcibiades was irreverent, so somebody accused him of doing it. In response he demanded an immediate trial, but the Assembly didn't want to sabotage the expedition, so it told Alcibiades to go on to Sicily, while authorities investigated the matter at home. Athenians didn't fully trust Alcibiades, though, so they divided leadership of the expedition between him, Nicias, and a general named Lamachus. As the fleet left in 415, Thucydides wrote that "almost the entire population of Athens, citizens and foreigners, went down to Piraeus . . . and they came full of hope and full of lamentation at the same time, thinking of the conquests that might be made and thinking, too, of those whom they might never see again, considering the long voyage on which they were going from their own country."⁽⁴⁵⁾

Alcibiades may have been innocent of mutilating the herms, but he was guilty of many other things. As soon as he arrived at Sicily, he was called back to Athens, to stand trial for a crime Greeks rarely charged anybody with--blasphemy (they accused him of profaning the Eleusinian mysteries, a religious rite of the goddess Demeter). Instead of giving them the chance to uncover any "skeletons in the closet," Alcibiades defected to Sparta, and the advice he gave to the Spartans did severe harm to Athens. Some of his ideas which the Spartans carried out included sending Sparta's best general, Gylippus, to Sicily, and building a fort at Decelea in northeast Attica; the latter put a Spartan army within striking distance of Athens and cut off access to the Athenian silver mines.

With hindsight, Alcibiades may have been the only Athenian with enough courage to lead the Sicilian expedition to victory. Without him, the Athenians got off to a slow start; Nicias cruised along the east coast of Sicily for much of the summer and fall before dropping anchor at the port of Catana. The following summer (414) saw the Athenians build a wall two-thirds of the way around Syracuse, hoping to blockade the city by land as well as by sea. Meanwhile, Lamachus was killed and Gylippus arrived; the Spartans cleverly built a two-kilometer counter-wall straight across the path where the Athenians planned to put the last stretch of their wall, preventing them from surrounding Syracuse completely. These events left Nicias so discouraged that he wrote back to Athens: "The time . . . has come for you to decide whether to recall us, or else to send out another force, as big as the first, with large sums of money, and also someone to relieve me of the command, as a disease of the kidneys has made me unfit for service."

After that the situation steadily deteriorated for the Athenians. Since it couldn't either surround Syracuse or break through its defenses, most of the Athenian army sat in its camp. The campsite was next to a marsh, so many men got sick. In August of 413, the reinforcements requested by Nicias finally arrived, led by Demosthenes. However, the entrance to the harbor of Syracuse was still in Syracusan hands, allowing them to trap both the original fleet and the reinforcements. Nicias should have withdrawn immediately when he realized the trap was closing, but instead he delayed for a month because he saw a lunar eclipse and was superstitious about moving at such a time. By the time they tried to move, it was too late. The Syracusans demolished the triremes, and in a confused night battle, the Athenians killed more of their own men than they did of the enemy. Nicias and Demosthenes surrendered and were executed; most of the surviving Athenians were worked to death in Sicilian stone quarries. Altogether Athens lost 45,000 men; it was the turning point of the war.

After this debacle it is remarkable that Athens continued the war for nine more years. New ships and men replaced those lost at Sicily, and they won some battles necessary to keep the vital Black Sea grain ships coming in. At home Athenians wondered if something might be wrong with their democracy, and in 411 they experimented with an oligarchy, putting a council of 400 in charge of the city. It didn't inspire much confidence, though, and three months later the traitorous Alcibiades returned to Athens. He fled Sparta when he was caught fooling around with a Spartan queen, and incredibly, the Athenian navy, which was still full of democrats, welcomed him back. Together they restored democracy in Athens, and Alcibiades became a general, but when he lost a battle, the fickle Athenians turned against him, so he wasn't reelected. After this disgrace he fled again, this time to the Persians.

Next came three events which made sure that Athens would lose the war. The first was a political shift in Sparta's favor following the Sicilian expedition; in 412 and 411 several previously neutral states joined the Spartans, and many Athenian allies (Chios, Miletus, Mytilene, Rhodes and Abydos) switched sides. The second was Sparta's decision to break tradition and normalize relations with Persia. Since Athens was still anti-Persian, the Persian kings generously gave gold to Sparta. The third critical event was what Sparta did with the gold; it built a fleet to challenge Athens at sea, ending the fish-and-fox game which had marked the war to this point.

For Athens, the end came suddenly. In the summer of 405 B.C., 180 Athenian ships were anchored at Aegospotami, in the Hellespont (Dardanelles), while the crews were ashore eating a meal. A Spartan fleet, commanded by an admiral named Lysander, caught the Athenians off guard and destroyed or captured 171 of those ships. This battle not only eliminated the last Athenian fleet, but cut off access to the Black Sea. Faced with starvation, Athens surrendered in April of 404 B.C.. In the peace treaty that followed, Athens gave up her empire and all but twelve triremes, agreed to tear down the "Long Walls" between Athens and Piraeus, and to become an ally of Sparta.

Spartan and Theban Ascendancy

Elsewhere the Spartans proved themselves unable to take advantage of their newly-won dominance. Their generals, trained only for war, were easily corrupted by the wealth in the areas where they now commanded garrisons (see footnote #10). The governments they set up were brutal, bloodthirsty, and incompetent. When Sparta invaded the Persian Empire, the Persians switched sides and paid Athens to build a new fleet. Then Thebes and Corinth, which had been on Sparta's side in the Peloponnesian War, formed a coalition with Argos to wage war against Sparta (the Corinthian War, 395-387). Sparta had to bargain with Persia, and the Persians dictated the so-called King's Peace, which restored Persian rule over Ionia in exchange for acknowledgment of Spartan supremacy in Greece.

In 382 the northern city-state of Olynthos got in a territorial dispute with three neighbors: Akanthos, Apollonia and Macedonia. Thebes and Athens announced they would aid Olynthos, while the king of Macedonia called on Sparta for help. All Greece could have been drawn into a war by proxy at this point, but the Spartans got there first and won the conflict quickly. On his way north the Spartan general, Phoibidas, helped a pro-Spartan faction seize power in Thebes, and left some troops to garrison the citadel of Thebes, the Cadmeia. This success was short-lived, though; only a year later a Theban named Pelopidas liberated the Cadmeia and slew the tyrants (379). Since Athens had aided the Thebans in this venture, Athens and Thebes made an alliance against Sparta, and the Athenians formed the Second Athenian Confederacy, a naval alliance of 60 independent members, in 377. The confederacy was too decentralized to permit Athens to become an empire again, though; twenty years later it disintegrated. The restored Athens would become a spiritual and intellectual center, the "school of Hellas," but not a political center.

Sparta invaded Boeotia three times between 379 and 377, but the Thebans repulsed each invasion. Following that, the Theban leader, Epaminondas, felt confident enough to end the alliance with Athens, and declare war on Sparta by himself. Another Spartan army came to Boeotia in 371, and Thebes slaughtered it in the battle of Leuctra. Epaminondas followed this up by driving into the Peloponnesus and liberating Messenia from Sparta in 369--a devastating blow to the Spartans.

The next nine years (371-362) saw Thebes reign as the dominant city-state in Greece. Sparta never recovered from its defeats, because its dominant caste of warrior-citizens had been steadily decreasing in recent years. Leuctra emphasized the problem--out of 700 Spartiates who took part in that battle, 400 were killed. The home city refused to enlist new blood and Sparta shrank to insignificance after that. In its place, the Thebans enrolled most of Greece (but not Sparta or members of the Athenian Confederacy) into a Theban-led Boeotian League. The 300 men of the Theban Sacred Band became the toughest military unit in Greece, until Philip of Macedon destroyed them in 338 B.C., at the battle of Chaeronea.

Theban supremacy collapsed with the deaths of the two leaders who established it. Pelopidas spent most of his time in the north, meddling in the affairs of Thessaly and Macedonia; in 364 he was killed at Cynoscephalae, but the Thebans won the battle and forced Macedonia into their League. Epaminondas fell in another battle, at Mantinea, against Athens and Sparta (362), and Theban power was broken. This time neither Athens nor Sparta was strong enough to replace Thebes. While most Greeks worried about the Persians, intellectuals--including Plato and Aristotle--lost faith in democracy and joined with the wealthy in looking for "a champion powerful in action" who would bring order and security to Greece. They soon found him in the person of the king of Macedonia.

Philip of Macedon

The kings of Macedonia claimed descent from Hercules, and often gained the throne by dagger or spear--a real-life version of the tragedies told by Athenian playwrights. Such a case occurred in 359 B.C. when King Perdiccas III died in battle, and his brother Philip II was put in charge of the dead king's son. Shortly after that, Philip bought off or eliminated three half brothers who wanted his job, and defeated more invasions from the Illyrians and Thracians. In the middle of all that scuffling, the royal infant conveniently vanished, so Philip persuaded the army to declare him king.

The discovery of gold deposits allowed Philip to build his army into the largest in Greece; a childhood spent as a hostage in Thebes, coupled with a lifetime of military experience, showed him how to make it an efficient force as well. For example, he introduced the sarissa, a 15 to 18-foot-long spear that outreached any pike the other Greeks had.⁽⁴⁹⁾ His hoplites needed both hands to hold spears this heavy, so Philip gave them smaller shields that were slung around their necks; this allowed him to create a phalanx with twice as many men in it as an older formation the same size. He also wasn't afraid to go into battle; the archaeologists who found his bones in an intact tomb in 1977 noted that he lost an eye in one battle, had his shoulder smashed in another, and had his thigh so badly wounded by a lance that he walked with a limp afterward. Yet he was always willing to use nonviolent methods, like bribery or diplomacy, as a first resort. "The credit for a military victory," he once said, "I share with my soldiers; for a diplomatic victory, it is all mine." Another time he was told that the walls of a city were so impregnable that he could never get past them, and he responded: "So impregnable that even gold can't scale them?"

Philip's first conquests were in the north: the Paionians (an Illyrian tribe) in 358, and Amphipolis in 357. In central Greece, Athens, Thessaly, and Thebes were fighting over the temple of Apollo and its Oracle at Delphi (the so-called Sacred War, 355-346). Philip used this opportunity to move south and annex Thessaly in 352, but an Athenian force kept him from passing through Thermopylae to get at Thebes and Athens. He then turned around and grabbed the Chalkide district, the three peninsulas on Macedonia's eastern frontier. When he returned in 348, Phocis, an ally of Athens, overran Boeotia, but confusion in the Athenian ranks allowed Philip to get through the Thermopylae pass. This meant southern Greece was wide open to his force; he conquered Phocis, scooped up the Athenian outposts in his way, and imposed a treaty that gave Delphi to him.

This ruler of a "hillbilly" state was now the most powerful man in Greece. The established powers of Greece got their warning, but they put off forming an anti-Macedonian coalition until the last possible moment. That came while Philip was busy conquering Thrace (340). When he moved toward Byzantium, Athens prepared for war, seeing a threat to the Athenian grain supply at its most vulnerable point--the Bosporus. Too late, Philip was now unstoppable. At the battle of Chaeronea, he and his eighteen-year-old son Alexander III vanquished a combined Athenian-Theban force (338). Then Philip bypassed Athens, marched south to the Peloponnesus, subdued it without a struggle, and called all Greek cities to send representatives to an assembly at Corinth. There he announced the rules by which Greece would now be governed. No Greek could make war on another Greek; cities would be allowed to manage their local affairs, and no taxes or tribute would be sent to Philip, except whatever men and ships he might need in wartime. However, all Greek city-states would now be enrolled in an alliance, called the Hellenic League, with Philip in charge of it.

Now that Greece was his, Philip declared war on Persia, prepared for an invasion of Asia, and sent an advance force across the Hellespont. He never joined it, though, due to one thing he could not control--his family life. Philip met his chief wife, Olympias, shortly after becoming king; she was the sister of Alexander I, the king of Epirus. Plutarch tells us that both love and politics persuaded them to get married, but it wasn't a happy marriage for long. Philip married five more foreign princesses (something ancient kings often did when they signed treaties), and had a habit of coming home drunk at night. Olympias was interested in a mystery religion which had a thing for snakes, so she kept the reptiles at home, even in her bed. This was a major turn-off for Philip; he had bedtime companions of his own, but at least they were warm-blooded! As their son Alexander grew up, she persuaded Alexander to love her and hate his father; her main goal in life was now making sure that Alexander would inherit the throne.

Plutarch tells us a sad story of what happened in 337 B.C., when Philip took yet another wife, a Macedonian lady named Cleopatra. At the wedding banquet, everyone was drinking, until Attalus, the father of the bride, declared that he hoped this marriage would give King Philip a truly Macedonian heir. This was a slap at Olympias and Alexander, so the enraged Alexander shouted, "What then am I?" and threw his cup at Attalus. Philip stood up and drew his sword to stop the brawl he expected, but his bad leg and the effects of the wine caused him to stumble and fall. Alexander then taunted his father by saying, "Macedonians, see here the general who would go from Europe to Asia! Why, he cannot get from one table to another!" After that, the queen and prince moved to Epirus; Philip eventually persuaded Alexander to return, but Olympias stayed away for the rest of his life.

A year later Philip arranged a marriage which should have ended his domestic problems: a match between his daughter and Olympias' brother, the king of Epirus. Instead, when Philip entered the theater where the ceremony was to take place, a bodyguard named Pausanias stabbed him. Pausanias then tried to make a getaway on horseback, but the horse tripped on a vine and threw him, allowing the pursuers to catch up and kill him. Nobody could prove whether the assassin worked alone or was part of a conspiracy; some suspected Olympias was behind it because she insisted that the killer receive a funeral as honorable as Philip's. Then she did away with the woman who had stolen her husband's affection, Cleopatra, along with her newborn baby. Alexander was shocked by this, but when he went off to become "Alexander the Great," he still exchanged letters with her regularly, and sent her a sizeable share of the loot he captured from the Persians.

If there was ever a man supremely confident of his destiny, it was Alexander. He had a magnetic personality, and made himself even more popular among his soldiers by treating them as equals. Still, he had an ego to match his generosity; Olympias told him that his real father was Zeus, not Philip, so he started believing that he was a god before long. He also knew how to act when he saw an opportunity. This showed when he was about twelve years old, and a fine stallion was brought for Philip to buy. The horse was so wild that nobody could control it, so Alexander asked if he could try to tame it. The adults chuckled, but they failed to notice something that Alexander spotted; the horse was afraid of its own shadow. Alexander calmed the horse by turning its head to the sun; then he mounted and started riding around. Philip broke down and exclaimed, "My boy, you must find a kingdom big enough for your ambitions. Macedonia is too small for you." The steed became Bucephalus, Alexander's favorite horse and companion in many battles.

Despite all that he had in his favor, Alexander looked vulnerable, because he was only twenty when Philip's crown passed to him. First Thrace revolted, so he moved north to reconquer it. While he was there, he also successfully attacked the Illyrians, expanding the borders of Macedonia to the Danube River and the Adriatic Sea. Finally he established friendly relations with the Gauls, a group of Celtic tribes that had moved into the middle Danube valley recently; these brave warriors boasted to Alexander that they only had one fear. When Alexander asked what that fear was, expecting them to say his name, they said they only feared that the sky might fall on their heads!

Back in Greece, a rumor spread that Alexander had died in battle, so several city-states, led by Thebes, rose in rebellion. Alexander rushed from Illyria to Thebes in just twelve days; his troops sacked the city, killed 6,000 and sold 20,000 into slavery. This seems to have been the only time Alexander expressed regret for anything; the destruction so troubled him that he made a pilgrimage to Delphi. Then he continued on to Corinth and revived his father's pan-Greek league.

Philip had done extensive recruiting for the upcoming war with Persia, so Alexander found himself with an army so big that only an empire the size of the Persian one could pay for it. Accordingly, once he had peace in Europe he was ready to march into Asia. The story of his campaign against the Persian Empire (334-323 B.C.) is one of the great epics of history. Because most of the activity took place in Asia, I have posted it in Chapter 6 of my Middle Eastern history.

Alexander's Empire Up For Grabs

Trouble started before the year was over. In 323 B.C. the Athenians revolted, thinking that Alexander's death would free them of Macedonian decrees. Antipater found himself besieged by the Athenians at Lamia (giving this conflict its name, the Lamian War), until Macedonian reinforcements arrived to rescue him. Then the Greek allies of the Athenians deserted them, causing Athens to lose a sea battle and a land battle. One year after the rebellion started, it was over; Athens surrendered unconditionally, became an oligarchy, paid a huge indemnity, and saw Macedonian troops occupy the port of Piraeus.

Despite the best of intentions, the arrangement between the generals could not last. In 321 Ptolemy, the general in charge of Egypt and Libya, captured Alexander's body and took it to Alexandria, for burial there instead of in Macedonia. This started a war which soon killed Craterus and Perdiccas. As for Antipater, he lasted until 319, but his colleague and successor, Polyperchon, was run out of Macedonia and Greece by Antipater's son, Cassander. The royal family did no better; in 317 Olympias returned from Epirus and murdered Philip Arrhidaeus, leaving her grandson Alexander as the only ruler on the throne. This prompted Cassander to besiege Olympias, Roxane and Alexander IV in Pydna. When he captured the royal family, Cassander executed Olympias, gave Philip III a proper funeral, and married Alexander the Great's half-sister, Thessalonica. Now hailed as the liberator of Macedonia, Cassander looked like the most legitimate heir. In response, Antigonus I, the general who controlled Asia Minor, declared himself Alexander IV's guardian, leading to several fierce battles between Antigonus and Cassander.

Alexander IV and Roxane died in 310, putting an end to the royal dynasty. Some thought Cassander killed them; whether or not he did, he kept the deaths secret until 306. Meanwhile he founded Cassandraeia as his capital, on the site of Potidaea, and built another city named Thessalonica, in honor of his wife (modern Salonika, the largest city of present-day Macedonia). By now the Greek-speaking world was in a state of perpetual warfare, so he formed an alliance with Ptolemy and Lysimachus, the governor of Thrace, to keep Antigonus I from conquering them all. Antigonus won the first round; he persuaded the Hellenic League to switch sides, enrolled most of the Aegean islands in a second league (Rhodes was strong enough to ignore it, though), and drove Cassander from the Macedonian throne in 306 B.C. Nevertheless, the alliance defeated and killed Antigonus at the battle of Ipsus, in 301 B.C.

The fall of Antigonus ended all efforts to reunite the empire. The remaining generals expanded the frontiers of Greek civilization slightly (Cassander went around Epirus to reach the Adriatic, while Lysimachus advanced until the Danube became his northern frontier), but most conquests were made at some rival's expense. Though Macedonia was poorer than Egypt and the Asian provinces, the fact that it was the heart of Alexander's empire gave its owner more prestige than any other territory. Moreover, the Antigonid family was down but not out. Demetrius, the son of Antigonus, still had the most powerful Greek fleet; he had used it as early as 307 to restore the Athenian democracy. Now he used it to capture Greece, and when Cassander died, he conquered Macedonia too, removing Cassander's three sons and the regent who ruled in their name (297-294). Nevertheless, that was as far as he could go; before he could invade Asia his best admiral and the fleet deserted to Ptolemy, taking the Island League with them. Then Lysimachus and Pyrrhus, the new king of Epirus (297-272), teamed up against him. In 288 they attacked Macedonia from opposite directions, forcing Demetrius to flee to Asia Minor. Eventually he gave himself up to Seleucus, the general who had conquered Asia in the meantime, and died of drinking in 283. Ptolemy died in the same year, (remarkably) of natural causes.

At this point the remaining contenders were Lysimachus, Pyrrhus, and Seleucus. The aged Lysimachus held Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly and northwestern Asia Minor, so he was the man to beat. Seleucus succeeded in toppling him, at the battle of Corupedium (281). Now it looked like Seleucus would reunite the European and Asian parts of the empire, but when he crossed the Hellespont to claim Europe, he was stabbed to death by Ptolemy Keraunos, the eldest son of Ptolemy I. The Ptolemies, however, couldn't have Europe either; they were immediately challenged by a son of Lysimachus, also named Ptolemy, and Antigonus II Gonatas, the son of Demetrius. Then the Gauls chose this moment to migrate from the Danube into the lower Balkans. Invaded and leaderless, the kingdom of Thrace disintegrated, becoming the scene of a free-for-all until 277, when Antigonus defeated the Gauls in the battle of Lysimacheia. The Gauls moved on into Asia Minor, while Antigonus became the undisputed ruler of Macedonia (277-239); the throne remained in his house thereafter.

A balance of power now emerged, allowing some stability to come to the Greek-speaking world; the "Wars of the Diadochi" (successors) were finally over. The Ptolemies controlled the sea, and in wartime they could raise Greece against the Antigonids or Ionia against the Seleucids, but none of the three kingdoms had the power to destroy its rivals. Other Greek states worth remembering were Epirus, the Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus in the Crimea, Tarentum in southern Italy, and Syracuse, which under a tyrant named Agathocles (317-289) ruled most of Sicily and successfully attacked the Carthaginian empire. In Asia Minor several Greek-speaking states (Bithynia, Pontus, Cappadocia and Pergamun) broke away from Seleucid rule, and these were very successful at spreading Greek culture to the east.

Hellenistic Devolution

Antigonus II was a very different man from his father. He had a snub nose, and his nickname, Gonatas, meant "knotted knees"; by contrast, the flashy Demetrius I would have won the "sexiest man alive" contest if there had been such a thing in ancient times. Furthermore, Demetrius was interested in little besides fighting, while Antigonus had a fondness for philosophy, poetry and history.

At first the greatest danger to Antigonus was Pyrrhus of Epirus. A huge, red-haired man with a deformed mouth, Pyrrhus saw himself as a great conqueror, like his ancestor Alexander the Great. He was a talented military leader and succeeded in taking away Macedonia's western territories, but he had a bad habit of not finishing what he started. In 281 he went to Italy to fight the Romans, giving Antigonus the relief he needed. First he marched on Rome, then decided that he liked Sicily better, and went after the Carthaginians instead. Failing to conquer Sicily, he returned to Italy, and this time the Romans managed to defeat him. That persuaded him to go home and teach Antigonus another lesson, so he overran Macedonia in 274. Finally Pyrrhus decided to try his luck in southern Greece, having been invited by Cleonymus, a Spartan king looking to regain his throne. When he tried to sneak into Argos at night, his war elephants got stuck in the city gate, raising the alarm. An old woman on a roof stunned him by throwing a tile at his head, and a Macedonian soldier beheaded him (272). Only then were Antigonus and the bewildered Romans sure they had won.⁽⁵⁰⁾

The Macedonian kings had never ruled central & southern Greece directly, finding it easier to let the city-states run their own affairs, so long as they supported Macedonia in wartime. Macedonian garrisons were set up in a few well-placed forts, the main one located at Corinth, to keep the Greeks of Attica, Boeotia, and the Peloponnesus on their side. However, their chief political tool, the Hellenic League, had disappeared during the wars between Alexander's successors, so around 280, two new leagues arose, the Aetolian and Achaean, that were less friendly to the Antigonids. The Aetolian League was based in a part of central Greece that didn't even have city-states, just mountain villages and primitive towns. It had an ingenious federal government, with a flexible constitution, a bicameral legislature, and an annually elected president. They gained much prestige when they singlehandedly defended Delphi against the Gauls (279), and in 245 they subdued Boeotia, making them the second most powerful organization in Greece. The Aetolians opposed the Macedonians constantly, and initially supported the Romans when they got involved in Greek politics. Rome did not act grateful for the Aetolians' help, though, so in 192 they invited the Seleucid king Antiochus III to invade Greece. Once the Romans drove out Antiochus, they stripped the League of its members outside Aetolia, and forced it to accept a treaty that ended its independence.

The Achaean League was a confederation of 10-12 city-states in the northern Peloponnesus. Like the Aetolian League, it had a mixed constitution run by delegates from the member communities, and held elections every year. However, it had no headquarters--each session met in a different place. Otherwise it was more centralized; the president was the League's commander in chief, though he could not serve for two consecutive terms. In fact, around 190 the League members gave up their separate laws and coinages, making them a single state without a capital.⁽⁵¹⁾

The Achaean League's most important leader was Aratus of Sicyon, who was president nearly every other year from 245 until his death in 213. Under Aratus the League saw its greatest successes, taking Corinth from Macedonia in 243, adding Megalopolis (in Arcadia) eight years later, and acquiring Argos in 229. Like Pericles, he was a persuasive speaker who devoted his life to opposing autocracy, particularly those of Macedonia and Sparta. He successfully oversaw the reduction of Sparta, so the successors of Aratus alternated between resisting Macedonia and resisting Rome. The most important of the latter presidents, Philopoemon, incorporated Sparta into the League in 192, followed by Elis and Messenia. This gave the League control over nearly all of the Peloponnesus. When the Romans finished their conquest of Greece in 146, they disbanded the Achaean League, but gave its name to the new province they created there (Achaia).

In the past the Persians had paid Greeks to fight Greeks; now Egypt's King Ptolemy did. Ptolemy II used both money and grain to form an anti-Macedonian coalition in Greece. Besides Egypt, the main members of the alliance were Athens, Sparta and Epirus. The Athenian leader, Chremonides, felt ready enough to declare war on Macedonia in 267, but Antigonus II was up to dealing with this challenge; he struck first, before the allies could all attack him at once. For most of the Chremonidean War (267-262) Antigonus had his way on the battlefield. When the conflict ended, the opposing alliance was broken and Macedonia was dominant in Greece again. After that Antigonus retaliated by supporting the Syrian-based Seleucids in the wars between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies for control of the Middle East. He defeated the fleets of Ptolemy in both the Second (260-255) and Third (246-241) Syrian Wars, but he could not dislodge them from the Aegean.

The next Macedonian king, Demetrius II (239-229), spent his whole reign fighting the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues. Though he did better than his opponents, the slow progress on Demetrius' part showed that Macedonia was beginning to come apart. His successor, Antigonus III Doson (229-221), faced a reviving Sparta. By the time of Alexander the Great, Sparta looked little like the Sparta of earlier times. The old austerity of Lykurgos had disappeared: the ancient rigorous training and the mess clubs were abandoned, and the Spartans switched from speaking Doric to the common Greek dialect (Koine). The first king of the Hellenistic era, Areus (309-265), encouraged trade by replacing the iron bar currency (which had been used to discourage trade, remember) with silver coins. One hundred men and women were very rich and owned all the land, meaning that everyone else was in debt to them. Sparta's King Agis IV (244-241) wanted to solve this crisis by bringing back as many of the old ways as possible. To do this, he proposed cancelling the mortgages, promoting some of the second-class perioikoi to full-citizen status, and dividing the land into 4,500 equal parts, to redistribute the wealth. To the ephors and the other king, Leonidas II, this sounded like a communist revolution, so they had Agis killed before he could put his program into action. The son of Leonidas, Cleomenes III (235-219), married the widow of Agis, and that made him an admirer of Agis.

Cleomenes found that the reform program had much support from lower-class Greeks beyond Sparta's frontier. Accordingly, in 229 he moved north and occupied much of the Arcadia district, which had been disputed territory between Sparta and the two leagues in recent years. The Achaean League's Aratus declared war; the Spartans won the first two battles, and then Cleomenes abruptly returned home. He did this because he felt the need to recruit the largest army he could get. To get such a force he executed four ephors and abolished their office; then he carried out Agis' ideas for debt cancellation, land reform, and citizenship for non-Spartiates. Finally he gave the helots the right to buy their freedom, a move which alarmed slave owners all over Greece. When Cleomenes returned to fight the Achaeans, he won another big victory, this time at Hecatombaeum. Aratus was so concerned that he ended his lifelong anti-Macedonian policy, calling on Antigonus III for help. Together they inflicted a decisive defeat on the Spartans at Sellasia (222). The Spartan force was almost completely destroyed, Sparta fell to the invaders, and Cleomenes fled to Egypt, where he later committed suicide.

One more Spartan attempted to save the city through reform. This was Nabis (207-192), who seized the crown for himself after the death of Pelops, the youthful king he had acted as guardian for. Like Cleomenes, he formed a new army (this time from mercenaries, Cretan pirates, and ex-slaves), ruthlessly worked to clean house in Sparta, and used his popularity among the poor to spread these ideas abroad. At first he clashed with the Achaean League, now led by Philopoemon, but changed sides to support the Romans when they attacked Macedonia. The Romans, however, considered Nabis an unreliable ally, and did not object when an Aetolian officer struck him down. After his death, Sparta was bundled into the Achaean League, and its last effort to become a major power ended.

The main opponent of the next Macedonian king, Philip V (221-179), was not a Greek rival but the Roman Republic, which began to get involved in the Balkans during his reign. Philip opposed Roman expansion at every opportunity; when the Romans moved into Illyria he tried to occupy it too (219); during the Second Punic War he supported Carthage. However, he could not get the Greeks to cooperate with him, and present a united front against the Romans when it was needed the most. His attack against the Aetolians (214-205, commonly called the First Macedonian War) resulted in the League calling for Roman intervention to save it. Not long after this Philip formed an anti-Egyptian alliance with the Seleucid king, Antiochus III. Together they cleared the Ptolemies out of the Aegean and the Levant (Philip took Samos and Miletus, Antiochus took Israel, Lebanon and southern Syria), but they also made enemies of Pergamun and Rhodes, the two remaining independent states in the war zone. The Pergamenes and Rhodians joined the Aetolians in petitioning the Roman Senate for action. The Senate felt it couldn't act while it was fighting Hannibal in Italy, but shortly after the Second Punic War ended, Rome declared a new war against Macedonia (200).

Philip marshaled his phalanx for the Second Macedonian War, but the legions he faced were far more sophisticated than the ones Pyrrhus had defeated in the previous century. The decisive battle was fought at Cynoscephalae, in 197; here the Roman commander realized that the big pikes and heavy armor of the Macedonians kept them from turning around very fast, so he attacked them on both the flank and the rear. Rome's triumph marked both the end of the hoplite, and the end of Macedonian supremacy in Greece. The Romans took nothing but a bit of land bordering their Illyrian province, and they announced they had no intention of becoming the new rulers of Macedonia and Greece. However, they insisted that from now on all Greeks must respect the interests and wishes of the Roman Senate; if they do not know what those wishes are, they must ask.

From a political standpoint, the Roman Republic had more in common with classical-era city-states like Athens, than did the Macedonian kings who took over most of the Greek-speaking world in the fourth century. The Romans had gotten started as a city-state, had a representative government with checks and balances, and in progress toward equal rights, the Republic began to resemble a democracy during its best years, the late fourth and third centuries B.C. Some of this came from their own experience, but it is no coincidence that the Greeks who taught them the latest cultural developments came from southern Italy, Sicily and Massilia, places that maintained the city-state system of government after Alexander conquered everything to the east. Consequently, one could argue that Rome, and not the Hellenistic kingdoms, was the true heir of Greek civilization in its purest form.

Despite the pleasant words exchanged by the Greeks and Romans at this point, Cynoscephalae was the end of Greek independence. From that time on Greece came increasing under Roman domination. When we hear about Greece in the next chapter, it will be part of the Roman Republic, and later the Roman Empire. Thus, here is a good place to end the political discussion of Greek history. The rest of this chapter will focus on the most important cultural development of classical Greece, philosophy.

Pre-Classical Greek Religion

Beginning with Hesiod (an eighth-century B.C. poet), the Greeks stressed the virtue of sophrosyn (moderation, self-control) as the key to happiness and right living. Its opposite was hubris, meaning pride, arrogance, and unbridled ambition; hubris invariably provoked nemesis, or retribution. According to the Greeks, the laws of nature would cause the downfall or disgrace of anyone guilty of hubris. Athenian playwrights often employed this theme in their tragedies, and Herodotus attributed the Persian defeat by the Greeks to Xerxes' overweening pride, for "Zeus tolerates pride in none but himself."⁽⁵²⁾

A century after Hesiod, the Orphic and Eleusinian mystery cults emerged as a new type of Greek religion. Initiates (mystae) were promised an afterlife of bliss in a paradise called Elysium, formally a reward only given to a few heroes. The basis of the Orphic cult was an old myth about how Dionysus was slain and eaten by evil giants called Titans, before Zeus arrived on the scene and burned them to ashes with his lightning bolts; then Zeus created man from the Titans' ashes. Human nature, therefore, is composed of two disparate elements: the evil titanic element (the body), and the divine Dionysian element (the soul). Death, which frees the divine soul from the evil body, is therefore to be welcomed. "Happy and blessed one!" reads a typical Orphic tomb inscription, "Thou shalt be god instead of mortal."⁽⁵⁴⁾ These emotional practices, which they may have imported from the Middle East, were most popular among the peasants, because they provided more color than the official ceremonies of the Greek pantheon and spiced the demanding routines of work.

The Early Philosophers

Thales and a few of his immediate successors, like Pythagoras, probably took the real creative steps which opened the doors for those who followed. Because no writing from Thales survives, it is difficult to separate fact from legend on what he did. For example, he is said to have predicted the eclipse of the Sun in 585 B.C. Other stories claim that he traveled to Egypt and Babylonia (doubtful), figured the height of the Great Pyramid by measuring its shadow, proposed a central government to rule all Ionia (rejected, of course), and made a fortune in the olive oil market by renting every olive press in Miletus, just before harvest time. Although he probably knew some practical techniques of angle measurement, stories that he proved geometrical theorems have no basis in fact.

We best know Thales for teaching that the Earth floats on water; all things came from water initially; and that all things are somehow made of water. Explanations for his choice of water as the main element of the universe point to its importance in the growth and nutrition of living things and its central role in daily Greek life, and perhaps because he reportedly fell into a well while stargazing! Thales is traditionally considered the teacher of Anaximander and the founder of Milesian school of natural philosophers.

The next philosophers did not think that Thales had the last word on anything, and speculated in new directions. The one thing all of them had in common was that they left no place for the gods in their theories; unlike other Greeks, they did not see the need for a hairy thunderer on Mt. Olympus to explain where the world came from. Anaximander (611-546) thought that all land animals had once been fishes in the sea, meaning that he came up with a theory of evolution 2,400 years before Charles Darwin did!⁽⁵⁵⁾ Anaximenes (586-525) felt that both Thales and Anaximander had been wrong, and that air, not water, was the most important element! Still another philosopher asserted that fire was the "most mobile, most transformable, most active, most life-giving" element. This search for a material substance as the first principle or cause of all things culminated two centuries after Thales in the atomic theory of Democritus (c. 460-370 B.C.) To Democritus, everything contained indivisible atoms, which differed in shape, size, position, and arrangement but not in quality. Thus the physical world became more important than the spiritual one. Meanwhile, Xenophanes (570-480) made fun of the Greek myths, and said that the gods only resemble people because people made up the stories. If horses had gods and could make statues of them, Xenophanes said, their gods would look like horses!⁽⁵⁶⁾

Pythagoras of Samos (c.560-c.480 B.C.) was probably the most important of the pre-Socratic philosophers; he was responsible for important developments in mathematics, astronomy, and music. Early in life he traveled to Egypt and Babylon, and may have gotten some of his ideas there. After his return to Samos, he was expelled by the local tyrant, Polycrates, so he moved to Croton, Italy, and founded a secret brotherhood of mystics preoccupied with mathematics, the Pythagoreans. Because no reliable contemporary records survive, and because the school initially placed a death threat on any member who revealed its discoveries to the outside world, we cannot distinguish the contributions of Pythagoras from those of his followers.⁽⁵⁷⁾

Pythagoreans believed in strict vegetarianism, reincarnation, and that all relations in the universe can be reduced to a set of numbers ("all things are numbers"). This generalization stemmed from certain observations in music, mathematics, and astronomy. For example, they noted that a string on a harp or lyre produces a note exactly one octave higher than a string twice as long. They also gave us the Pythagorean theorem, a highly useful tool for measuring right triangles: the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides (A² + B² = C²). The Egyptians and Babylonians had been practicing geometry like this for millennia, but we usually credit the Pythagoreans with the first proof of this theorem.

Pythagoras didn't stop there; he looked at a right triangle where both of the shorter sides have a length of 1, and came up with an interesting problem. Since the square of 1 is also 1, then according to his theorem the length of the hypotenuse should be the square root of two (1² + 1² = C², with C² equaling 2). When he tried to calculate the value of C, he got a decimal than ran on forever; he had to accept an approximate value of 1.414. Could any fraction or ratio of two whole numbers produce this? The answer he came up with was no; some numbers, like the value of pi and the square root of two, could not be correctly expressed as either whole numbers or fractions. Pythagoras had proved the existence of irrational numbers.⁽⁵⁸⁾

The Sophists and Socrates

The eroding of traditional views in the fifth century B.C. caused Greek inquiry to turn away from the physical world to consider human values and institutions. The Sophists submitted all conventional beliefs to the test of rational criticism, concluded that truth was relative, and denied the existence of universal standards to guide human actions. They loved to use ingenious words to turn around an argument, making despicable actions look excellent. Under their influence, the old admiration for knowledge became respect for a form of craftiness, the ability to advance a cause by any means possible. Today we call such a belief "situational ethics" or "ethical relativism," which some have defined as: "If you can get away with it, it's okay."

The most noteworthy of the Sophists was Protagoras, who speculated more about the gods than any philosopher before him. Protagoras did not believe that intimacy with God was possible, and concluded that "I cannot know that they exist, nor yet that they do not exist." From that he produced the idea that became the classic humanist statement, "Man is the measure of all things." This turned humanity's view of the universe upside down--man now became more important than God. This was too radical for most Athenians, and they forced Protagoras to flee because of this "impiety." However, after the Peloponnesian War ended, they no longer felt that Athens needed all the moral strength it could get, and embraced the ideas they had previously rejected. During this time Socrates would dismiss all myths as irrelevant by simply saying, "Of the gods we know nothing."

The Peloponnesian War brought all kinds of doubt to Athens: doubt about whether the war could be won, doubt about whether Athens was really more righteous than Sparta, and doubt about the mediocre leaders who followed Pericles. Appropriately, this was the time that produced the most famous doubter of all time, Socrates (c. 470-399 B.C.). We don't know much about his personal life, because he wrote nothing; all of our accounts of him come from those who knew him first-hand, especially Plato.

Socrates invented the debating tactic we call the Socratic method; instead of answering questions directly, he would ask more questions instead, like a modern attorney, until he led others to think in strange ways and make astounding admissions. Plato wrote down a collection of these debates in his Dialogues, which probably didn't really take place, but give us a clear view of Socrates' method of reasoning. Such a discussion would have gone like this:

"He would go right up to the most prominent citizen, a great orator or anybody, and ask him if he really knew what he was talking about. A distinguished statesman, for instance, would have wound up a patriotic speech with a preroration about the glory of dying for one's country. Socrates would step up to him and say, 'Pardon my intrusion, but just what do you mean by courage?'
'Courage is sticking to your post in danger!' would be the curt reply.
'But suppose good strategy demands that you retire?' Socrates would ask.
'Oh well, then, that's different. You wouldn't stay there in that case, of course.'
'Then courage isn't either sticking to your post or retiring, is it? What would you say courage is?'
The orator would knit his brow. 'You've got me--I'm afraid I don't really know.'
'I don't either,' Socrates would say. 'But I wonder if it is anything different from just using your brains. That is, doing the reasonable thing regardless of danger.'
'That sounds more like it,' someone in the crowd would say, and Socrates would turn toward the new voice.
'Shall we agree then--tentatively, of course, for it's a difficult question--that courage is steadfast good judgment? Courage is presence of mind. And the opposite thing, in this case, would be the presence of emotion in such force that the mind is blotted out?'"⁽⁶¹⁾

Because Socrates could get anyone to contradict himself by asking enough questions, he concluded that no one really knew anything. However, because Socrates knew that he knew nothing, he reasoned that he knew more than anyone! (Are you following this?) His fame spread all over Greece, until one of his friends visited Delphi and asked the Oracle, "Is any man wiser than Socrates?" Instead of getting the usual cryptic poem, he got a one-word answer anyone could understand: "No." The celebrities he embarrassed thought him a pest, while the young people of Athens flocked to listen to him on street corners. Soon the Socratic method of questioning all cherished assumptions became a favorite tactic in political discussions among the up-and-coming generation.

In time Socrates' quest for truth led to his undoing, for the Athenians, unnerved by their defeat in the Peloponnesian War, arrested him and put him on trial for his life. They really wanted to charge him with inventing the philosophy which produced Critias and Alcibiades, but because the amnesty following the expulsion of "the thirty tyrants" prevented this, they instead accused him of introducing strange gods and corrupting the youth (As if he could do any worse than the Sophists had already done!). Instead of saving himself by recanting, Socrates defended himself with a speech the judges thought was arrogant:

"Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake . . . but for yours, that you might not sin against God by condemning me, who am his gift to you. For if you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me, and therefore I would advise you to spare me."⁽⁶²⁾

By a vote of 280-220 a jury of citizens condemned Socrates to die. He had a chance to run away, but instead he accepted the sentence and calmly drank the hemlock, talking with his friends until the poison took effect. Socrates said he did this to avoid giving future philosophers a bad name, while Xenophon tells us that he was looking forward to escaping the pains of old age, which may explain why he gave a weak defense during the trial.

Plato and Aristotle

Like Socrates, Plato believed that truth exists, but only in the realm of thought, the spiritual world of Ideas or Forms. Such universals as Beauty, Good, and Justice exist apart from the material world, and the beauty, good, and justice encountered in the world of the senses are only imperfect reflections of eternal and changeless ideas. The task for humans is to come to know the True Reality--the eternal Ideas--behind these imperfect reflections. Only the soul and the "soul's pilot"--reason--can accomplish this, for the human soul is spiritual and immortal, and in its prenatal state it existed "beyond the heavens" where "true Being dwells."⁽⁶³⁾

Disillusioned with the democracy that led Athens to ruin in the Peloponnesian War and condemned Socrates to death, Plato expounded his concept of an ideal state in The Republic, the first major book on political science. The state's basic function, founded on the Idea of Justice, was the satisfaction of the common good. Plato imagined the perfect state as a "spiritualized Sparta," where the state regulated every aspect of life, including thought. Thus those poets and forms of music considered unworthy were banished from the state. Private property was abolished because it bred selfishness. Plato believed there was no essential difference between men and women; therefore, women received the same education and held the same occupations as men, including "the art of war, which they must practice like men."⁽⁶⁴⁾ Individuals belonged to one of three classes and found happiness only through their contribution to the community: workers by producing the necessities of life, warriors by guarding the state, and philosophers by ruling in the best interests of all the people.

Plato's greatest pupil was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Reacting against the otherworldly tendencies of Plato's thought, Aristotle insisted that Ideas have no separate existence apart from the material world; knowledge of universal ideas is the result of the painstaking collection and organization of particular facts. Because he disagreed with Plato on these key points, Aristotle was not allowed to become headmaster of the Academy after Plato's death. Accordingly, he moved to Macedonia in 343 B.C., where King Philip hired him as a personal tutor for his son, Alexander the Great.⁽⁶⁵⁾ Eight years later he returned to Athens and founded his own school, the Lyceum. As one might expect from Aristotle's approach to research, the Lyceum became a center for the analysis of data from many branches of learning. He had a habit of delivering his lectures while walking, so his disciples received the name of Peripatetics, or walking philosophers.

To us today, Aristotle's most significant treatises are the Ethics and the Politics. They deal with what he called the "philosophy of human affairs," whose object is the acquisition and maintenance of human happiness. Two kinds of virtue, intellectual and moral, are described in the Ethics. Intellectual virtue is the product of reason, and only people like philosophers and scientists ever attain it. Much more important for the good of society is moral virtue. Virtues of character, such as justice, bravery, and temperance--are produced not by reason but by habit and thus can be acquired by all. In this connection Aristotle introduced his Doctrine of the Mean as a guide for good conduct. He considered all moral virtues to be means between extremes; courage, for example, is the mean between cowardice and rashness.

In the Politics Aristotle viewed the state as necessary "for the sake of the good life," because its laws and educational system provide the most effective training needed for the attainment of moral virtue and hence happiness. Thus to Aristotle, the popular viewpoint that the state stands against the individual would be unthinkable.

Aristotle's writings on formal logic, collectively known as the Organon ("Instrument"), describe two ways in which new truths can be found. The first, induction, moves from particular facts to general truths. Deductive logic, on the other hand, moves from the general to the particular. To simplify deductive reasoning from general truths, Aristotle devised the syllogism, a logical structure requiring a trio of propositions. The first two propositions (the major and minor premises) must be plainly valid and logically related so that the third proposition, the conclusion, inevitably follows. For example, (1) all Greeks are human; (2) Socrates is a Greek; (3) therefore Socrates is human.

Other Developments in Greek Philosophy

The Skeptics and Cynics reflected most clearly the doubts and misgivings of the times. Skeptics avoided anxiety by denying the possibility of finding truth. The wise, they argued, will suspend judgment and not dogmatize because they have learned that sensory experience, the only source of knowledge, is deceptive. The Skeptics were like modern pragmatists in substituting probability for certainty and insisting that even the probable must be tested by experience and exposed to the possibility of contradiction. To drive the point home they were famous for arguing both sides of the same question.

The Cynics carried negativism further; they believed in shunning the values and conventions of society. Their founder was a student of Socrates named Antisthenes (455-365 B.C.). Antisthenes, like Socrates, taught that happiness depends solely on one's own moral virtue, and that virtue is the highest value in life. However, whereas Socrates advocated temperance and self-control, Antisthenes urged harsh and ascetic self-denial. His followers behaved like Hindu mystics; they grew their hair long, lived under trees or bridges, and owned almost nothing. People gave them the name "cynic" (doglike) because of their vicious attacks on the lifestyle of the rich.

The most famous Cynic was Diogenes of Sinope, who reportedly lived in a large tub, and went about Athens with a lantern in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man--but never finding one. To those who looked down on his behavior, he shouted back, "Look at me, I am without house or city, property or slave. I sleep on the ground. I have no wife, no children. What do I lack? Am I not without distress or fear? Am I not free?"⁽⁶⁷⁾ In one celebrated episode, Alexander the Great met Diogenes, and was so impressed by his determination that he said, "If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes."

More practical and popular were Stoicism and Epicureanism. Stoicism's founder, Zeno (336?-261?), spent the early part of his life in the vocation of his father, a merchant, but one day a fortunate shipwreck made him lose his goods during a voyage to Athens, and he turned to philosophy for consolation. Though he had previously known something about the doctrines of Socrates, he first became a disciple of the Cynics, and then studied Platonism. After twenty years of preparation, he opened a school in the stoa or porch in Athens, from which his doctrine and disciples have received their name. He presided over this school for many years, until he chanced to fall and break his finger; he took this as a sign that his time was up, and strangled himself.

Zeno did not indulge in any fantasies on what kind of society his ideas might produce. His only interest was morality; making men virtuous was his aim. To do this, he taught the two great Stoical maxims: "Live according to Reason" and "Live in harmony with Nature." Because reason controls nature, it ought to control man. Our existence should be intellectual, and all bodily pains and pleasures should be despised. Humans become good by cultivating a reasonable outlook and not giving way to emotion. A Stoic does not regret happenings that are outside his control, but concentrates his efforts on what he can control--his attitude and response to what happens. The human soul is simple and solely rational. The expression "he took it philosophically" reflects the idea that the Stoic sage is the typical philosopher.

Stoicism flourished during the Roman era, because it emphasized civic duty, social responsibility, the importance of good law, and the basic rights of all human beings; Roman citizens valued most of these things already. Important Roman Stoics included Epictetus, a slave who became a leading philosopher; Emperor Marcus Aurelius; and Seneca, the tragedian, author and prime minister to Nero; Cicero and the Apostle Paul were also influenced to some degree. For a thousand years after the fall of Rome, Stoicism continued to find admirers; even John Calvin may have taken some ideas from it ("the Protestant work ethic").

A diametrically opposite view was taken by Epicurus (341-270). Epicurus studied with followers of Plato and Democritus before opening his school in Athens. The school, later called the Garden, accepted women and slaves; that and the Epicurean philosophy led to public criticism of the school as a haven of debauchery. In reality, life at the school was fairly austere. Most of the writings of Epicurus have been lost, save some fragments from his most important work, Peri Physeos (On Nature), which were recovered from charred papyri buried at Herculaneum.

Epicurus taught that happiness could be achieved simply by freeing the body from pain and the mind from fear, especially the fear of death. To do this, people must avoid bodily excesses, including sensual pleasures, and accept the scientific teaching of Democritus that both body and soul are composed of atoms that fall apart at death. Thus, there is nothing immortal or incorporeal about us; beyond death is no existence and nothing to fear.

In ethics, the main thesis of Epicureanism is that the senses are the best guidance of our actions. Consequently, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain are the supreme good and the principal goals of life. People should therefore forget their fears of gods and of punishment after death (both of which have no logical basis) and live for pleasure. As for the gods, if they exist, they do not concern themselves with humans but spend their time pursuing true pleasure like good Epicureans. Nowadays we summarize this attitude with the saying "If it feels good, do it." This has become the predominant philosophy of Western civilization today, whether or not today's practitioners know it.

It appears that nations are founded by individuals of a hardworking, Stoic bent, and when they become successful, the Epicurean philosophy gradually takes over. This is definitely the case with the United States; the pioneers and homesteaders had a different set of values from most of today's "Baby Boomers" and "Generation X-ers." Historians disagree on when such a transition from Stoicism to Epicureanism took place; this author marks the beginning of it in the 1920s, when actors, musicians, and professional athletes--in short, entertainers--became the most highly esteemed people in America.⁽⁶⁸⁾ The transition went on for a generation, finally finishing in the 1950s, when the self-sacrificing values which got our parents and grandparents through the Great Depression and World War II were no longer seen as necessary. Since then, moralists have feared that America has become too fat and happy for its own good, and will decline and fall as surely as Rome did, unless we return to the morality of a less decadent era. We saw the clash between the old and new values most recently in the 1992 and 1996 elections, when World War II veterans ran against the first Baby Boomer president, Bill Clinton.

1. Herodotus, The Histories, I, 30.

2. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II, 41.

3. Nowadays a canal cuts through the isthmus, making the crossing easier.

4. From polis we get our word politics.

5. Greek warriors at this stage were literally bottomless. If Homer and the renditions of pre-classical artists can be trusted, the typical warrior already had the breastplate and helmet we are familiar with, greaves for his shins, and carried a figure-eight shield, but he wore nothing between his waist and knees!

6. McNeil, William H., A World History, New York, Oxford University Press, 1967, pg. 94.

7. Several oracular messages had to do with finding a good spot for a new city. Accordingly, in 706 B.C. Phalanthos checked with the Oracle of Delphi before leading a group of colonists from Sparta, and was told, "Don't stop until you feel rain from a clear sky." They went as far as southern Italy, but all the good locations were already taken. Finally, near the city of Tarentum (modern Taranto), Phalanthos collapsed in despair, and his wife, Aithra, put his head on her knees and started grooming his hair. Spartans wore their hair longer than other Greeks, so the grooming job, combined with their situation, got Aithra depressed very quickly. She started crying, and when Phalanthos felt her tears land on his face, he figured out the Oracle's message, for Aithra's name meant "clear sky." Deciding that this must be the place, he and the other Spartans sacked Tarentum and settled there. Tarentum's original inhabitants were an Italian tribe, mere barbarians from the Greek point of view, so taking their land worked just as well as building a new city from scratch.

8. During the dark age Ionian fashions also caught on in Athens. According to one story, this happened when some Athenian soldiers went off to war and only one survived. When he brought back the bad news, the hysterical widows pulled the pins from their gowns and pricked him to death. After this the men of Athens introduced longer, fancier gowns from Ionia, which were also pinless!

9. I'll bet Pytheas thoroughly enjoyed the British part of the expedition. If you went to present-day Britain and practiced the same fact-finding tour that Pytheas did, it would be called a pub crawl!

10. The Spartans may have been incorruptible at home, but away from Sparta they succumbed to the temptations of wealth quite easily. Non-Spartan Greeks coined the phrase "a Spartan abroad" to describe such a person, and made jokes about those who acted that way.

11. Solon divided Athenian citizens into four social classes, based on their income. At the bottom of the heap were the thetes (rowers), who grew less than 200 bushels of grain a year or earned the equivalent in wages; they usually did not own the land they worked on, and in wartime, they served as oarsmen in the navy. The next ones up were the zeugitae, meaning teamsters, because they could afford oxen; these folks produced 200-300 bushels, served in the infantry, and paid for their arms and armor. Those who produced or earned 300-500 bushels could afford a horse, and were thus called hippeis, meaning equestrians. The biggest earners of all were the pentakosiomedimnoi, or "500-bushel men."
However, in one way Athenian society was more equal than ours. You may have noticed that the poorest "500-bushel man" earned only two and a half times as much as the richest thete. In fact, the elite of Athens were not expected to flaunt their wealth; one considered himself "well off" if his only luxuries were a horse, a purple robe, and a few gold plates. Contrast this to today's corporations, where a CEO can make hundreds, even thousands of times as much as his lowest paid employee!

12. Hippias fled to the Persians, and came back with them in 490, hoping they would reinstate him in Athens. The battle of Marathon ended that dream in a hurry!

13. Yes, there is a connection between the battle of Marathon and today's marathon races. After his fruitless jog to and from Sparta (150 miles each way), Pheidippides went to take part in the battle. When it ended he ran back to Athens to report that they had won, and as soon as he entered the city, he said, "Victory is ours!" and dropped dead of exhaustion. The marathon race was invented in memory of him.

14. Every year the Athenians voted to ostracize (exile) the most odious among them, banishing him for ten years. He didn't have to do anything wrong; anyone could be ostracized if enough folks didn't want him around. The term comes from ostrakon (ostraka in plural), the potsherds on which citizens wrote the name of the person they wanted banished.
Anyway, Themistocles and Aristides tried to get each other ostracized for years. Plutarch tells us of a funny incident during one of these bouts of name-calling. Aristides was an "army man," while Themistocles argued for a strong navy, and the two agreed to let ostracism decide the issue. On election day, Aristides was walking through the streets when a stranger came up to him; the man didn't recognize Aristides, and told him that he couldn't read because he was a farmer; would he be so kind as to write the name of Aristides on a potsherd? "But why?" he asked. "Has Aristides ever injured you?" And the citizen answered, "No. No. Never have I set eyes on him. But oh! I am so bored by hearing him called Aristides the Just." Whereupon Aristides, still a democrat at heart, took the potsherd and signed his name on it.

15. Two Spartans survived because they were away at the time, sick with ophthalmia; both felt great shame because they did not die with their comrades. One had his helot guide him to the site of the battle, and struck blindly until he killed himself. The other was taken back to Sparta, where he got the nickname of Tresas, "the man who retreated." To clear his name, he performed feats of reckless courage, until he was killed at Plataea a year later.

16. A. R. Burn, The Pelican History of Greece (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 186.

17. Herodotus, VIII, 87.

18. Ibid, IX, 82.

19. Ibid, VII, 9.

20. C. E. Robinson, Hellas: A Short History of Ancient Greece (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 68.

21. All the Spartans could do was protest when Themistocles rebuilt the walls of Athens, something they didn't want. In 470 Elis and Arcadia left the Peloponnesian League, and Elis established an Athenian-style democracy. They came back when the helot revolt threatened them all.

22. It took until 455, though, and the Athenians ended up finding a new home for the helots in the city-state of Aetolia.

23. Admirers called Pericles "the Olympian" because his wisdom and eloquence reminded them of the gods. However, an accident at birth left him with a pointed head, so opponents gave him names like "onion-head." That is why artists always portrayed him wearing a helmet.

24. Thucydides, II, 65.

25. Ibid, II, 37 and 40.

26. M. Cary and T. J. Haarhoff, Life and Thought in the Greek and Roman World, p.192.

27. A. R. Burn, The Pelican History of Greece, p. 272.

28. A. R. Burn, The Lyric Age of Greece (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1960), p. 166.

29. Ibid, p. 236.

30. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, from Ten Greek Plays, trans. Gilbert Murray and ed. Lane Cooper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929), p. 96.

31. Medea, trans. Gilbert Murray, Ten Greek Plays, pgs. 320, 321.

32. His sculpture of Aphrodite was so attractive that Greeks claimed the goddess saw it and exclaimed, "Alas, when did Praxiteles see me naked?"

33. Like their modern-day counterparts, Greek artists often signed their works. One Athenian potter added a jab at a rival by writing on his pots, "As Euphronios never, ever could."

34. Socrates spent most of his time away from home, teaching in public places, because it got him away from his wife Xantippe's sharp tongue.

35. When Spartan soldiers came to town you didn't hide the women, you hid the boys!

36. Sparta had a higher percentage of slaves; helots outnumbered "Spartiates" (full citizens) by about 10 to 1 at this stage.

37. Even the Athenian police were slaves, because it was considered unseemly for free citizens to lay hands on each other. Among these slaves were 1,000 Scythian archers, and on days when they didn't have a quorum attending the civic meetings, the Scythians would lasso and bring in more citizens, using ropes dipped in red paint. To show up for jury duty or some other function with a "vermillion stripe" on your toga was embarrassing, to say the least.

38. Hero also built the first vending machine, an urn that dispensed a cup of water when a coin was dropped in the slot on top of it; this went into the temple, too. It may be just as well that Hero's inventions didn't catch on; if they had, the industrial revolution might have begun 2,000 years earlier than it actually did, and a nuclear war might have destroyed the Roman Empire.

39. Thucydides, II, 40-41.

40. Ibid, II, 65. George Grote tells us that when Pericles was on his deathbed, his friends were there discussing his great accomplishments. They thought he was unconscious and insensible, until he interrupted them by remarking: "What you praise in my life belongs partly to good fortune--and is, at best, common to me with many other generals. But the peculiarity of which I am most proud, you have not noticed--no Athenian has ever put on mourning through any action of mine."

41. Ibid, II, 53.

42. Thucydides commanded the relief force sent to Amphipolis, but it failed to arrive in time. This provoked Athens to banish one of the world's greatest military historians for the rest of the war.

43. Thucydides, V, 105.

44. Ibid, VI, 90.

45. Ibid, VI, 30.

46. Athenians were so concerned about a person's freedom of choice that they made condemned criminals commit suicide, by drinking a cup of hemlock.

47. Both the Illyrians and Thracians had fearsome reputations: the Illyrians as pirates, the Thracians as warriors. The Illyrians were united under a queen named Teuta in the third century B.C., until the Romans conquered them. The Thracians apparently were never united at all; only recently have archaeologists come to appreciate the fine craftsmanship that went into their gold and silver work.

48. Athenians claimed they could not understand the Greek dialect spoken by the Macedonians, and modern Greek historians have taken that to mean the Macedonians weren't really Greeks. George Grote, for example, snobbishly remarked that the Persians had more Greeks in their army than Alexander did! This is unfair, because in the early fifth century King Alexander I (495?-452 B.C.) was recognized as a Greek by the president of the Olympic games, allowing a Macedonian prince to compete. Also remember that both Philip and his son Alexander promoted Greek culture--not Macedonian--wherever they went, to bring peace and unity.

49. After the Peloponnesian War, many Greek states, starting with Athens, introduced a light infantry of peltasts (javelin throwers) and slingers, to make their armies more flexible than one made up solely of hoplites.

50. Ambitious kings tried the resources of the Epirotes too far and in 231 their kingdom broke up. The ruling dynasty, the Molossians, lasted until 167, when it made the fatal error of supporting Macedonia's last king, Perseus, against the Romans.

51. Two thousand years later, the founding fathers of the United States would study the constitutions of both leagues for ideas on how federalism should work.

52. Herodotus, VII, 10.

53. Homer gave us a good example of this behavior in Chapter 5 of the Iliad. He portrayed Ares, the god of war, as a bully, rather than a true hero. When Ares got involved in the war on the side of the Trojans, he had his way at first, terrifying everyone on the battlefield, until he was wounded by a spear from a Greek soldier named Diomedes; then he went crying to Mt. Olympus, and didn't show his face again!
Nobody knows for sure when Homer lived; most historians put him in the ninth century B.C. and accept the traditional dates of 1184-1174 B.C. for the Trojan War he told about in the Iliad. The author believes that the Trojan War also took place in the ninth century B.C.; this would go a long way toward explaing the similarities between Homer's Achaeans and the classical Greeks. This would also make Homer an eyewitness of the war, or a witness at least, since everybody claims he was blind.

54. This myth about Dionysus reminds us of the Egyptian story about the death and resurrection of Osiris. In fact, when Greeks starting visiting Egypt, they figured that Osiris and Dionysus were two names for the same god. Respectable Greeks, however, were ashamed of Dionysus for a long time, and wouldn't mention his name if they could help it. This is because Dionysus was also the god of parties, and his worshipers got drunk at orgies, leading to all manner of unspeakable acts.

55. "There is nothing new under the sun . . ."--Ecclesiastes 1:9.

56. We give this idea the long name of anthropomorphism. It means that man will tend to invent gods which fit his own view of the universe. To give some examples: the Greeks were intellectuals, and so were their gods; the Norse gods were as warlike as the Vikings who worshiped them; the Chinese had a bureaucratic government for more than 2,000 years, so they imagined Heaven full of bureaucrats, rather than angels!

57. According to Herodotus (Book IV: 94-95), Pythagoras had a Thracian slave named Salmoxis. Salmoxis eventually bought his freedom and earned himself a fortune, before returning to Thrace. He taught the philosophy he learned from the Greeks by inviting the Thracians to banquets, where he talked about his beliefs while the guests feasted. Most of all he taught his students that they would not really die, but go with him to a blessed paradise. To prove this doctrine he faked his own death, and hid in a mausoleum for three years; his emergence in the fourth year convinced many that his teachings were true. Thus Salmoxis had followers as late as the first century A.D.; when the Romans conquered nearby Dacia they ran into a group of fearless warriors who worshiped a god named Zamolxe (Salmoxis) and believed they were immortal.

58. He thought this was such a great discovery that he sacrificed a hundred bulls to thank the gods. Now that's irrational!

59. Likewise, "philosopher" meant "lover of wisdom." Today we often think of philosophers as wimpy little intellectuals, but this is not entirely correct. Socrates came from a family of stonecutters, and was a veteran of the first battles in the Peloponnesian War; at Potidaea he showed off by going barefoot when his unit marched across some ice. And Plato's name is really a nickname; it comes from platon, meaning broad-shouldered, because he was once a wrestler. Remember the Greek ideal--physical and mental development are equally important--so they might have expected their philosophers to look more like Hulk Hogan than Woody Allen!

60. M. Cary and T. J. Haarhoff, Life and Thought in the Greek and Roman World, 5th ed. (London: Methuen & Co., 1959), p. 200.

61. Max Eastman, Secrets of the Past, New York, Berkley Books, 1980, pg. 171-172.

62. Plato, Apology, 56.

63. Plato, Phaedrus, 247.

64. Plato, The Republic, 451.

65. Aristotle kept in correspondence with Alexander after his student went off to conquer the world. Alexander sent him back plants, animals, and other interesting scientific specimens, and when he got to Egypt, Aristotle encouraged him to find out what causes the Nile to flood every summer. Instead of sailing upstream, Alexander wrote that the annual flood was caused by rain; this pleased the old philosopher very much.

66. "The more one peruses this author, the more one realizes the wide range, the almost universal scope of his misinformation. I cannot help thinking this is why his pupil, Alexander the Great, was so simple in some respects."--Will Cuppy

67. The Cambridge Ancient History (1936 edition), vol. 11, p. 696.

68. One wag joked that Babe Ruth was the first baseball player to earn more than the president of the United States, and Calvin Coolidge was the first president to deserve that happening to him!

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball