A History of Ancient Greece in Fifty Lives

David Stuttard

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780500772201
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The political leaders, writers, artists and philosophers of ancient Greece turned a few city states into a pan-Mediterranean civilization. But who were these people, what do we know of their lives and how did they interact with one another? This highly readable, original new approach to telling the history of Greece weaves together the lives of the movers and shakers of the Greek world into a continuous narrative up until the rise of Rome.
From mathematics to politics, from painting and sculpture to sport, the reader will meet both the famous and less well-known figures such as Milo, the Olympic wrestler; Aspasia, the brilliant female intellectual; Zeuxis, the painter who invented trompe l'oeil; and Epaminondas, who taught tactics to Philip of Macedon.
David Stuttard has written numerous books on the Classical world including 'The Parthenon: Power and Politics on the Acropolis'.

Chapter 1

Of Gods and Heroes

‘Goddess, sing…’: this marble figurine of a harp player from the Cyclades dates from around 2700, two millennia before the Homeric epics were first committed to writing. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1947.

At the battle of Marathon in 490, blood-spattered in the crush of shields and spears, Epizelus, an Athenian hoplite, experienced a miracle. He saw a towering figure, long-bearded, heavy-armoured, bearing down, about to strike. At the last moment the enemy’s blade swerved and Epizelus was spared. But he was struck profoundly blind. For the giant he had seen was a demigod (or so he later claimed), and no one can look with impunity on the divine.

This glimpse into an otherwise unremembered life was recorded by Herodotus, whose account of the wars between Greece and Persia are considered to be the first works of western historiography. Writing in the middle of the fifth century, Herodotus, originally from Halicarnassus on the west coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), travelled widely, interviewing everyone from Egyptian priests and Ionian explorers to Athenian war veterans like Epizelus, as he conducted research (historie) into the origins and outcomes of Persia’s invasions of mainland Greece in 490 and 480/79.

Herodotus’ world view was rooted firmly in the belief systems of his age. Like Epizelus, he believed in divine intervention. It was not until the end of the fifth century that the Athenian Thucydides, in his rationalizing account of the Peloponnesian War, wrote a history that tried to make sense of a past and present stripped of the supernatural and played out on a purely human level. In doing so Thucydides was aware of attempting something revolutionary; as he commented, ‘Most people accept traditions as they hear them, including those of their own country, without employing any critical evaluation.’

For the early, pre-literate societies of Greece two centuries before Epizelus’ birth, those traditions, even if unexamined, provided rare links with what we (but not they) would call their history. Except when the past impinged on the present (in cases such as inheritance or landownership), there was little reason why people should employ critical evaluation or be overly concerned about the accuracy of stories remembered from preceding generations, especially when embroidery or fantasy might make an oral narrative more entertaining. Yet lack of verifiable material did not stop the Greeks from forming traditions of their past which stretched surprisingly far back into time, and based on which they built their cultural identity.

Today it is generally agreed that most people’s sense of their own family history encompasses at most three (or possibly four) generations, based on stories heard from grandparents, whose details become more blurred the further they are in the past. For ancient Greeks, oral storytelling meant that these blurred memories extended for many centuries. So, by the time of Epizelus’ birth in the second half of the sixth century, people were familiar with stories set in societies six centuries earlier, evidence for which can now be discovered through archaeology. The earliest such stories, populated by characters such as Heracles, Theseus and Jason, may be imagined as occurring in around the thirteenth century, while the Trojan War, which both Herodotus and Thucydides regarded as historical, was traditionally dated to the early twelfth century. The third-century polymath Eratosthenes placed the sack of Troy in 1184.

Oral poetry told how aristocratic Greek societies, commanded by King Agamemnon of Mycenae, united to retrieve the flighty Helen, who had abandoned her Spartan home for the lure of life with Troy’s prince Paris. Today we recognize that much of the story belongs to mythology, but as recently as the 1870s AD the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was driven to excavate at Troy and Mycenae by his passion to prove the legends true and his belief that the characters of epic once existed. Famously he attributed ownership of a cache of jewelry found at Troy to Helen herself and, unearthing a rich burial at Mycenae, Schliemann telegrammed the Greek king to report: ‘I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon.’

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries AD, other excavations at Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1100) sites uncovered clay tablets containing records written in a proto-Greek language, in a script now called Linear B. Not deciphered until the 1950s AD, these tablets revealed a highly structured society obsessed with record-keeping and terrified of attacks by ‘peoples from the sea’. Physical evidence showed the sudden collapse of Mycenaean civilization in the twelfth century, when many palaces were destroyed by fire. The identity of the Sea Peoples, and whether they were responsible, is still hotly debated. While ancient Greeks wrote of the Dorian Invasions (influxes of migrant warriors, ancestors of the Spartans and their kin), archaeology offers no evidence for new cultures arriving on mainland Greece. Instead, the social disintegration of the so-called Dark Ages was gradually replaced by aristocratic and largely agricultural societies, which still predominated in the sixth century.

With the collapse of Mycenaean Greece, writing and record-keeping disappeared, but in the middle of the eighth century an alphabet, based on that of the Phoenicians, was adopted. Its impact was revolutionary. Now writing was used not just for record-keeping but to preserve and refine the oral poetry which enshrined the heightened memories of Greece’s past. Soon literature was helping to fill in spaces left by forgotten ancestors and to forge a Greek identity, as the first epic poetry – attributed to Homer and Hesiod – attests.

Hesiod and Homer: The Birth of the Gods and the Ages of Man

Like most peoples, the Greeks sought an explanation for the present in the past. One commonly held view of their most distant origins appears in Theogony (Birth of the Gods), a late eighth-century ‘didactic epic’, just over a thousand lines long, attributed to the poet Hesiod. Nothing is known about the author other than from the texts themselves, but in Works and Days, an exploration of the rituals of civilization through the medium of agriculture, which also bears his name, he adopts the role of a Boeotian peasant farmer. As we shall discover, ancient ‘biographers’ regularly took such internal literary evidence at face value, and thanks to them Hesiod’s lowly background is still commonly accepted. In fact, Hesiod was probably a highly sophisticated writer working in a near-eastern tradition of ‘wisdom poetry’ to produce in literary form verses recited by itinerant bards to educate, inform and entertain elite aristocratic audiences.

After describing the creation of the world from Chaos, Theogony traces the birth and generations of the gods, presenting mythical prehistory as a cycle of struggles, as sons succeed fathers in their lust for power, and first Ouranos, then Kronos and (lastly) Zeus seizes the Olympian throne. Later, Theogony describes how, when the earth was inhabited by outlandish beasts, barbaric giants tried to overthrow the civilized order of the gods. Ostensibly rooted more firmly in reality, Works and Days also imagines a perilous world, where gods and spirits lurk at every turn, and inadvertently leaving a ladle in a mixing bowl or wading across a river with unwashed hands can provoke divine punishment.

In a pre-scientific age (without the vocabulary or correlating conscious objectivity to express abstract thought) such stories provided ways of making sense of the world, but to what extent they were taken literally must have varied widely. Beginning Theogony with a warning not to believe everything he writes, Hesiod claims that, while shepherding his flocks on Mount Helicon, he met the Muses, who breathed into him ‘a sacred voice with which to celebrate the past and future’, and told him that they possess ‘knowledge to invent convincing lies, and the skill, when so desired, to tell the truth’. Readers should suspend their disbelief at their own peril.

A late third- or second-century marble stela, possibly Alexandrian, shows the ‘Apotheosis of Homer’: worshippers approach the deified poet, seated bottom left; above, Zeus reclines with his thunderbolt, surrounded by the Muses. British Museum, London.

Works and Days presents history as a sequence of ‘Ages’, tracing a downward progression from a Golden Age free from disease, when the earth produced crops with no need for farming, through a squabbling Silver Age, a brutal Age of Bronze, a fourth, Heroic Age, to the present Age of Iron, when ‘men work and weep continuously by day, while by night they wither and die’. Although for Hesiod the Heroic Age is distinct from his own, for many other writers stories that we consider myth, like those concerning the Trojan War, reflected real history, whose repercussions were still being felt in the fifth century and beyond. This was thanks in no small part to two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, thought by Greeks to be the work of one man, Homer.

More than any other literature, Homer’s epics defined what it was to be Greek. Originally composed orally, they were written soon after the invention of the alphabet at the dawn of a great diaspora, when many Greek cities founded colonies and trading posts as far away as Byzantium by the Black Sea (c. 657), Naucratis in Egypt (late seventh century), Cyrene in Libya (c. 630) and Massalia (Marseilles) in France (c. 600). As the real world fragmented, the epics preserved in imagination a time when Greeks were briefly united in one common enterprise.

Like the poems of Hesiod, Homer’s world is populated by both men and gods, and the Trojan War unfolds simultaneously in the human realm and the divine; sometimes the two overlap, as gods sabotage or aid mortal endeavour. Both epics show a deep concern for the lives of their central characters, and reveal much about how contemporary Greeks viewed their place within society and history and how they felt that stories (including their own) might be manipulated.

Homer and the Beginnings of Biography

The Iliad’s opening line (‘Goddess, sing of the anger of Peleus’ son, Achilles’) proclaims that, like Hesiod’s Theogony, this is a work of inspiration, not historical research. Yet, as the reader progresses, it becomes apparent that it is also a well-observed study in human psychology, a slice from the fictive biography of its hero, Achilles. Achilles, obsessed with how his life will be regarded both by contemporaries and by subsequent generations, views himself as part of a heroic continuum. Skulking with his companion Patroclus in his tent, nursing his wrath against the overbearing Agamemnon, Achilles consoles (or torments) himself by playing his lyre while singing, like an oral poet, about ‘the famous deeds of men’.

Scenes from the Trojan War appear on the late first-century BC–early first-century AD Capitoline Iliac Tablet: the Greek fleet lies before the walls of Troy (left), while warriors fight from chariots, on foot, and by the ships (right). I Musei Capitolini, Rome.

To Achilles, as to many Classical and later Greek aristocrats, reputation is everything. His mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, has informed him that he can choose between two fates: either to enjoy a long but unremembered life, or to die young and have ‘immortal fame’. Choosing the latter, Achilles becomes the inspiration for many an ambitious young man in centuries to come. As the Greek polymath Plutarch, writing in the late first or early second century AD, records, when Alexander III visited Troy, he was asked if he wanted to see the lyre belonging to Troy’s prince Paris (himself also known as Alexander). Declaring that all Paris had ever sung were ‘wanton ballads designed to seduce women’s hearts’, Alexander replied he would rather see Achilles’ lyre ‘to which he sang the famous deeds of men’.

The Odyssey’s hero, Odysseus, reveals another way in which a Greek might inhabit his own history. A man of ‘many wiles’, he is the antithesis of the early-dead Achilles. His greatest wish is to survive, return home and grow prosperously old with his family. Yet Odysseus too has an eye for his reputation. Already, on his protracted voyage, his fame is sufficiently widespread that, arriving on the far-off mythical island of Scherie, he can hear a bard sing of his exploits at Troy. But interestingly each time Odysseus himself is invited to recount the story of his travels, he weaves a different narrative, sometimes a variation on the truth, sometimes a complete fabrication (he once pretends to be a Cretan prince), always carefully calculated to enthral his immediate audience.

Gold funerary mask from c. 1500, found at Mycenae. When the archaeologist Schliemann lifted a similar mask, he claimed the face beneath remained briefly intact, prompting his famous telegram: ‘I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon’. National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

Although Odysseus is a fictional char...