The Greeks

Lost Civilizations

Philip Matyszak

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781780239002
• eBook ISBN: 9781780239439
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

This book is a portrait of Ancient Greece—but not as we know it. Few people today appreciate that Greek civilization was spread across the Middle East, or that there were Greek cities in the foothills of the Himalayas. Philip Matyszak tells the lost stories of the Greeks outside Greece, compatriots of luminaries like Sappho, the poet from Lesbos; Archimedes, a native of Syracuse; and Herodotus, who was born in Asia Minor as a subject of the Persian Empire. Stretching from the earliest prehistoric Greek colonies around the Black Sea to Greek settlements in Spain and Italy, through the conquests of Alexander and the glories of the Hellenistic era, to the fall of Byzantium, The Greeks illuminates the lives of the Greek soldiers, statesmen, scientists, and philosophers who laid the foundations of what we call "Greek culture" today—though they seldom, if ever, set foot on the Greek mainland. Instead of following the well-worn path of examining the rise of Athenian democracy and Spartan militarism, this book offers a fresh look at what it meant to be Greek by instead telling the story of the Greeks abroad, from modern-day India to Spain.

ONE THE GREEKS BEFORE ALEXANDER

In 1200 BC ancient Greece was part of a developing and integrated civilization that stretched from India to the western Mediterranean. This was the peak of the Bronze Age, when trade routes reached from Britain deep into Asia, and an Egyptian pharaoh might be entombed along with vases from Mesopotamia, olive oil from Cypress, cedar from the Lebanon and bronze artefacts made with tin from Welsh mines. This was the age of the Hittites, the bull-leaping Minoans of Crete and the palace civilization of Mycenaean Greece, a world later remembered in the legends of Hercules and Helen of Troy. It was advanced, sophisticated, prosperous – and doomed.

When disaster struck, the magnitude was as vast as the cause is incomprehensible. In the fifty years between 1050 and 1000 BC almost every city of note in the ancient world was sacked and destroyed. Even mighty Egypt, protected by her natural barriers of sea and desert, came under major assault by the Hyskos, the Sea People, and under that attack the state almost collapsed into anarchy. Lacking the natural defences of Egypt, the Hittite and Minoan civilizations were wiped out. Trade collapsed, populations went into catastrophic decline and civilization in the western Mediterranean fell into a ‘Dark Age’ that lasted for over 250 years.

What caused the collapse has been the cause of much academic debate in the modern era. Volcanic eruptions have been suggested, especially the vast explosion of the volcano at Thera (modern Santorini), and the climate changes brought about by such eruptions. Thera threw an estimated 60 cubic kilometres of debris into the atmosphere, causing severe weather effects that were recorded in contemporary ancient China. Barbarian invasions, severe plagues and systemic economic collapse have also been suggested triggers for the Dark Age, and even if these disasters did not cause the collapse, they certainly contributed to it.

Archaic era vase showing one of the ‘black ships’ described by Homer in the Iliad, book II, ‘The Catalogue of Ships’, ll. 484–580.

Greece was not spared, nor was its Mycenaean civilization. Every ancient city unearthed by archaeologists in Greece reveals a destruction layer dated to this period. Whatever happened to these cities in the last decades of the eleventh century BC included burning, looting and corpses left unburied in the streets. The survivors of the catastrophe huddled in isolated valleys and hilltop forts. Over the following decades the art of writing was lost, and trade became a matter of barter between local villages.

The population of Greece also changed. In later Greek tradition a people known as the Dorians, who called themselves ‘the sons of Hercules’, swept south from the Balkans and occupied most of the Peloponnese. Thereafter the Greeks identified themselves as either the original Ionian and Arcadian peoples or the invading Dorians (the Spartans in particular identified with the latter group).

The Dorian invasion displaced the original inhabitants of the Peloponnese, who fled abroad, laying the foundation of the Greek empire in the centuries to come. Or so the ancient Greeks believed. Modern research has shown that the picture was considerably more complex than that. For a start, it is uncertain whether the Dorians replaced the population of the Peloponnese, assimilated with it or were the original population to begin with. Nor were the Dorians alone the cause of the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. However, in this study we are less concerned with causes than with results, and the result of the Dark Age collapse was to spread Greek civilization around the Mediterranean and beyond.

‘I see men bearing shields and spears, together with horses and curve-fronted chariots.’ The playwright Aeschylus (525–456 BC) describes a scene such as that depicted on this vase in his play The Supplicants.

Limestone statue of Hercules from Archaic-era Cyprus. Egyptian influence can be seen in the stance of and the kilt worn by the figure.

When the mists of the Dark Age began to clear into the world of Archaic Greece, not only were there Greeks living far beyond Greece, but these ‘foreign’ cities were among the torch-bearers leading Greek culture and thought into the new era. To the ancients, ‘Greece’ included parts of Asia Minor, the islands of the Aegean Sea, Sicily and much of southern Italy. The main divisions of the Greek world were ‘Hellas’, comprising Greece itself, Ionia, which was the Greek cities of the Aegean Islands and those on the coast of Asia Minor, and Magna Graecia, which included Sicily and South Italy. In total there were hundreds of such colonies (the city of Miletus alone established thirty). From Mainace in southern Iberia to Phasis on the Black Sea coast of modern Georgia, Greek colonies were woven along the coastline like ‘a Greek fringe on a barbarian cloak’ (as Cicero put it in De republica, 2.9).

As well as sharing in a unified Greek culture, these cities had much else in common. For a start, almost all were on or near the coast. As the philosopher Plato famously remarked, the Greek cities sat around the Mediterranean ‘like frogs around a pond’ (Phaedo, 109b). From Halicarnassus in Asia Minor to Syracuse in Sicily, the pattern of colonization seems to have been for the Greeks to find and fortify an island base just off the coast. Then, once trade and familiarity had softened up the locals, the Greeks moved to the mainland opposite and set up their colony, with the island serving as a fortress of last refuge.

As an example of how important this settlement technique was to the early colonists, the city of Chalcedon came to be known to later Greeks as ‘the City of the Blind’. This was because the founding fathers apparently missed the obvious attractions of the site that later became Constantinople just over the Bosporus strait. However, Chalcedon had the Kadikoy Peninsula, which served as the ‘offshore base’, and this was lacking on the prospective settlement site on the European side.

Most cities retained a sentimental attachment to their founding city (Chalcedon was founded by Greeks from Megara). These links, as well as the more material links of trade and commerce, brought prosperity to the new colonies as goods from their diverse hinterlands were swapped around by fleets of traders who plied the seas. The Athenians exported vases to Phoenicia in return for that land’s famed purple dye, while the Phoenicians often re-exported the vases to Egypt in exchange for grain and papyrus. Chinese silk and Persian slippers imported by the cities of Anatolia might be exchanged in Rhegium for Italian wax, cheese and slaves. Between feuding with the Sicilian Greeks, the Carthaginians traded ivory for Cypriot tin or Etrurian bronzes.

Through trade, cities such as Corinth prospered. In fact Corinth benefited so greatly from its position on the narrowest part of the Peloponnesian isthmus that the city was often called ‘wealthy Corinth’, just as the lifestyle of Sybaris in Italy was so luxurious that even today the word ‘sybaritic’ describes self-indulgent decadence.

With the movement of goods from the diverse hinterlands of the Greek world came exposure to different cultures, ideas, religions and philosophies. The stimulus that resulted from this exchange brought about the fifth-century intellectual revolution, and the thought processes that have shaped our modern world.

Empires of the mind

When we look at the explosion of intellectual energy in early Classical Greece, we can see that much of what the Greeks developed was not original. There are clear traces of Semitic (Phoenician and Jewish) influence, and the Greeks also built on the earlier work of the Babylonians. The controversial ‘Black Athena’ hypothesis has alleged that much of Greek philosophy was adopted from African thought and imported via Egypt. While this idea has come under academic attack, it is at least increasingly probable that the Greek alphabet was developed in Egypt from Semitic roots. Linguists note that the word ‘alphabet’ itself comes from the Semitic words aelph (bull) and beth (house). (‘Beth lehem’ literally means ‘house of bread’.)

Greek myths reflect the international fusion that created later Greek culture. Here we see Titian’s portrayal of Dionysus (a god with origins in Asia Minor) meeting Ariadne of Crete on the island of Naxos.

However, while earlier forms of writing such as Egyptian hieroglyphics relied on pictographs, the Greeks went further by using symbols to reproduce the sounds of their spoken language. Where the Egyptians used a picture to show (for example) a cat, Greek used symbols to represent the sounds of the spoken word for ‘cat’. The example of the alphabet shows that the Greeks did not blindly adopt foreign ideas; they analysed, adapted and improved them by incorporating ideas and concepts from the many other cultures with which they were in contact. The result was a synthesis (synthesis being a Greek word and concept) that was uniquely Greek.

Likewise, we can trace the arrival of the Classical Greek gods from their origin stories. Zeus came from Crete, Aphrodite from Cyprus, Dionysus and the witch-goddess Hecate from Anatolia. The earliest legends of Hercules come not from Greece, but from Egypt. However, once adopted by the Greeks, these gods changed in fundamental ways that adapted them to the Greek view of religion.

Marble grave marker from Archaic Athens. The inscription on the base reads ‘To dear Me[gakles], on his death, his father with his dear mother set [me] up as a monument.’

In Greek mythology the Olympian gods came to rule the world after overthrowing the previous generation of gods in a literally titanic battle (both Zeus and his predecessors were of a gigantic race known as the Titans). This battle may reflect the struggle by which the new pantheon of gods imported from abroad replaced their native predecessors in the minds of worshippers.

With the replacement of the gods came new ways of thinking about religion. In previous belief systems, the world operated in the way it did through the direct agency of the gods. The corn, for example, grew because the goddess Demeter willed it. And that was that, because the workings of the gods were basically unknowable. However, Greek thought in the Archaic and Classical eras came to see the gods as forces. Zeus was the force of order, Aphrodite represented the power of love and Demeter the impulse that caused the fields to be fruitful, and so on. Once the world was seen as being run by a pattern of interlocking forces it became possible to view the cosmos as a machine. It helped that the Greeks had no religious dogma – defining dogma as religious beliefs that the clergy regard as indisputable and unchallengeable – and no concept of heresy. The Greeks were wary of blasphemy and sacrilege, but only because they believed that their gods cared little about collateral damage while they were avenging personal affronts.

Therefore, if it did not interfere with the community’s worship of the gods, the average Greek was free to believe what he liked. Once Greek philosophers came to believe that the world was a machine, it was natural for them to take up the challenge of figuring out how that machine worked, and Greek religious thought had no ideological objection to such a line of enquiry.

From there the Greeks developed the concept of empiricism – the process of observing through personal experience and then rationalizing the knowledge gained through that experience. This is the basis of the modern scientific process. While the concept seems obvious to the modern mind, in the ancient world this represented a huge intellectual breakthrough that led directly to the modern disciplines of biology, mathematics, physics and chemistry.

While modern philosophy is mostly concerned with the self, its ethics and morality, the first ‘lovers of wisdom’ (which is what ‘philosophers’ actually means) gave themselves a far broader scope, addressing questions that were once left for priests to answer. ‘Where do things come from?’ ‘What are they made from?’ ‘Can nature be described by processes?’

Some of the answers were wildly wrong. Greek astronomers understood that the Earth was round by observing its shadow on the moon, and from there they quickly realized that the moon circled the Earth. They then jumped to the erroneous conclusion that the rest of the universe circled the Earth as well, and drew up an elaborate – and totally false – cosmology that nevertheless explained all observed phenomena. This included some stars that moved about the constellations when all others were fixed. These stars were the planets, from the Greek planetes or ‘wanderers’.

Greek thought thus removed the superstition surrounding events such as eclipses, which became understood and predictable. For example, the Greek statesman Pericles once explained matters to a sailor by holding his cloak between the sailor and the sun and patiently explaining that eclipses were just like that, but bigger and further away.

On Gaia – the Earth – the first table of the elements included only earth, air, water and fire, since the early Greeks reckoned that everything was made of a greater or lesser amount of these. In the fifth century the philosophers Democritus and Leucippus concluded that all matter had a single building block. This could be found by cutting something into halves until the final remaining part was that basic uncuttable unit. This was called ‘the uncuttable’ or in Greek, atomus. Leucippus argued that the material world was made from these ‘atoms’ arranged in almost infinite combinations to make up the objects with which we interact every day.

The investigative process described here went on through the next five hundred years with steady advances in all the sciences. By the end of the Hellenistic era, philosophy had established with remarkable accuracy things like the size of the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• CHRONOLOGY
• PROLOGUE
• 1 THE GREEKS BEFORE ALEXANDER
• 2 ALEXANDER AND THE EAST
• 3 THE GREEK EMPIRE
• 4 THE HELLENISTIC WORLD FROM EAST TO WEST
• 5 MACEDON AND EGYPT
• 6 ROME AND THE HELLENISTIC KINGDOMS
• 7 GREECE IN ROME
• 8 BYZANTIUM AND THE END OF THE GREEK EAST
• EPILOGUE: THE GREEK LEGACY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX