The Classical World (11 page)

Like tyrants, therefore, lawgivers were not the active promoters of a unified lower class. They restored ‘order’ and ‘justice’, but the dominant culture in their communities remained the culture pursued by aristocrats. During the continuing age of tyrannies in Greece, the scope for noble, competitive glory actually increased. By 570
BC
four further great festivals of athletic games existed to rival the Olympics. The Pythian Games at Delphi began in 590 as a gymnastic contest financed by war-booty, probably from the recent Sacred War; they then included a famous musical contest too. The Isthmian Games (in 582) probably celebrated the ending of tyranny in Corinth. The surviving tyrant in nearby Sicyon then rivalled them by founding local Pythian Games of his own (also in 582); his enemies in nearby Cleonae, helped by the men of Argos, then founded Nemean Games too (in 573). All across the Greek world, a culture of the ‘celebrity’ began, not a culture of great warriors but one of great sportsmen, poets and musicians. By contrast, there are no ‘celebrities’ in the world described in the Old Testament or in the Near Eastern monarchies. For their athletes, the Greeks invented the victory parade, our ‘red carpet’. Cities welcomed and rewarded their returning victors, and fine stories were told about these celebrities’ prowess and then their sad decline (from old age, not narcotics). The all-in wrestler, Timanthes, would prove himself daily by drawing a huge bow, but when he fell out of practice, he could no longer do it and there was nothing left but suicide. And yet he killed himself, it was said, on a bonfire, like the great hero of wrestling, Heracles.
¹⁰

Victors in these games were proclaimed in the names of their home cities. Audiences from all over the Greek world heard their moment of glory, and it was mortifying for a city’s tyrant that he could not command such success for himself. It was a young man’s business, and the aristocratic poets dwelt on the short-lived glories of youth. It was also beset with risks, but risks were something which no nobleman professed to fear. In politics or in war, at the games or on the seas, there was a constant flow of winners and losers in the archaic age. In a temple on his home island of Lesbos, the lawgiver Pittacus, a ‘wise
man’, was said to have dedicated a ladder, symbol of life’s inevitable ups and downs of fortune.
¹¹

The families of tyrants did have one advantage: they controlled much greater revenues than almost any other noble rival in their community. The same tyrants who legislated against disruptive luxury could afford to build grand temples in the newly devised styles of stone architecture, copied from Egypt. Not all of their temples were sound projects: one of the biggest, on Samos, was begun, but never finished, on very unstable ground. But at Corinth or Athens, the tyrants’ temples and buildings are the earliest which still impress us. In suitably placed city-states, tyrants also developed that earlier invention, the trireme, and built bigger fleets. Naval service, in due course, would add to the morale and shared sense of identity of their citizenry. While regulating extravagant weddings, tyrants also held the most magnificent contests among suitors for their own daughters in marriage. Unlike some of the aristocrats, they were not known for writing poetry, but they did patronize poets and artists and their own cities’ festivals. They kept striving to outdo each other in the style of the old aristocrats, whose motto was ‘anything you can do, I can do better’. To be secure, tyrants needed to outshine the nobles among whom they still lived; this pre-eminence was more important to them than fostering ‘civic identity’ for non-noble members of their city-states. Before tyrants existed, aristocrats had already patronized poets, craftsmen and the naval adventures of trading and raiding. While lacking a popular programme, tyrants strove to achieve even more of the same. As a result, the first era of political revolution was not the era of a new ‘people’s culture’: rather, the aristocrats’ values outlived their political monopoly.

Sparta

He was capable, too, of convincing everyone with him that ‘Clearchus must be obeyed’. He used to do it by being hard: he was gloomy in appearance, harsh in voice, and he used to punish severely, sometimes in anger so that there were times when even he was sorry afterwards. He used to punish on principle, for he used to think that there was no good in an unpunished army… In danger, the troops were willing to obey him wholeheartedly and they would choose no one else to command them, for his gloominess then seemed to be brightness and his hardness… to be a saving grace. But when they were out of danger… many of them would desert him… for he had no charm… and they regarded him as boys regard a schoolmaster.

Xenophon,
Anabasis
2.6.9–11, on Clearchus the Spartan

In the seventh century
BC
freedom, justice and luxury were indeed active agents of political change. The pursuit of ‘luxury’ really did divide Greek communities’ upper classes, and it was not an irrelevant moralizing which caused laws to be passed to limit it. The political exclusion of non-nobles and the biased settling of disputes led to a demand for impersonal justice which is best seen in Solon’s reforms and their underlying values. Solon also stood for freedom, in the sense of freedom from the ‘slavery’ of a tyrant and the ‘enslavement’ of paying ‘dues’ as a citizen to a superior. After his reforms all Athenian citizens were assured legally of freedom from one another’s harassment. They could bring lawsuits, even as a third party, against anyone
who behaved violently and abusively (showing
hubris
) and they were forbidden to make a fellow citizen into a slave. By law, they were granted a crucial ‘freedom from…’ superiors as arrogant as the
Iliad
’s Odysseus.

It is, however, in Sparta of this period that freedom, justice and luxury brought about the greatest changes. For centuries, the Spartans’ lives would be conditioned by the results. In winter 125 Hadrian himself visited Sparta and is said to have praised ‘Spartan values’.
¹
Like other tourists, he witnessed the games and festivals of the Spartan young men and would have watched the brutal whipping of the young male runners who took part. It was still a most peculiar place with a famous past, but he and his contemporaries had no true idea of how and why ‘Spartan values’ had originated. Sparta’s secrecy is notoriously hard to penetrate because legends about Sparta, a ‘Spartan mirage’, colour almost all of our surviving evidence, from the early fourth century
BC
onwards. An idealized Sparta has been the most influential of all utopias in history, and has influenced generations of political thinkers, from Plato through Thomas More to Rousseau.

Unlike most other Greek communities, ancient Sparta retained kingship, but unlike all known ancient states (except the Khazars by the Black Sea in the eighth century ad) she had not one king but two at the same time. These kings had religious duties, duties which other Greek states parcelled out among priests: they led the army in war and when they died they were given a highly reverential burial. The villages from which Sparta was made up were odd too: throughout their history they were unwalled. Nobody in future times, the historian Thucydides remarked, would ever infer Sparta’s power from her insignificant physical remains. Her political order spanned a wide range of unusual statuses. There were Spartiate ‘Equals’, ‘Inferiors’, people called
mothakes
, and the ‘Dwellers Around’ (
perioikoi
, who lived in outlying towns in Sparta, not the main villages). There were also the helots (‘captives’) who were owned by the community; they worked the land and gave half of their produce to the Spartiates, but could not be bought or sold like slaves elsewhere. Helots ranked for ancient theorists, too, as people ‘between slave and free’. As for Spartan children, the boys of Spartiate (citizen-Spartan) families underwent a fearsome compulsory training from the age of seven. There were many
oddities in Sparta which puzzled outsiders. Several Spartiate brothers might end up sharing one wife (in my view because she was an heiress); girls, too, would be trained in running, wrestling and other sports, some of which were undertaken naked (arguably to prepare them to be mothers of fit, healthy children). All male Spartiates dined in communal groups or messes and ate simple food including a notorious black broth. Respect for superiors and fellow Spartans’ opinions was integral to these messes’ social values.

Adult Spartiates prized brief utterances and vivid, verbal images. Even those who could write a few words saw no need to write at length or use books for self-enrichment. Their restricted code of speech went with a strongly conservative and ordered society. Above all else, the system was shaped to train soldiers, so much so that a Spartan’s failure in battle was quite often followed by his suicide. It is understandable that archaeology in archaic Sparta has recovered thousands of little lead figurines of hoplite warriors, bronze figurines of female dancers who are holding their skirts (or ‘mini-chitons’) above the knee, and large reliefs in limestone, showing small figures approaching big seated persons, evidently heroes who were worshipped. The male warriors and the female dancers point to Spartans’ education, while the reliefs show Spartans’ extreme reverence for the gods and heroes, which was famous even in antiquity. But some of the Greek gods were not prominent among them: Spartan men are not known to have had a cult of Dionysus. The god of drunk, disorderly release was the very opposite of masculine Spartan control.

Spartan society was never static, and the ancients were wrong to ascribe its entire constitution to one single early lawgiver, Lycurgus. When they tried, many years later, to date people in the distant past with a formal chronology, they gave Lycurgus dates which equate to
c.
800–770
BC
. However, his very existence is now rightly doubted. Most of the laws which reformed Spartan society had occurred, I believe, by
c.
640
BC
and were intended to address the basic issues of freedom, justice and luxury which underlay the rise of tyrants and lawgivers elsewhere in the contemporary Greek world.

In the late eighth century the Spartans, under their two kings, did not follow other Greeks and embark on a series of overseas settlements. Instead, they incorporated a fifth village, Amyclae, into their
existing four, the
obai
. They also took in exiles from the coastal settlement, Asine, of their great rival and near-neighbour Argos. They then conquered lands of Messenia, their independent Greek neighbour, which was separated from western Sparta by a high intervening range of mountains. The Spartan kings then allotted these conquered lands to their own warrior-citizens. This allotment was selective and unequal and it was probably the unrest which it caused that led to the Spartans’ one overseas settlement, Tarentum in southern Italy (modern Taranto), supposedly in 706
BC
. Later legend ascribed it, wrongly, to the promiscuity of women in Sparta during their husbands’ absence in war: when the men returned, it was said, they had to expel the resulting bastard children.

These moves outside their home villages were varied and, no doubt, therefore controversial; arguably, it was in the wake of them that the Spartan kings sought the approval of the Delphic oracle for a constitutional reform. Its thirty-eight words (preserved later by Aristotle) are known as the ‘Great Rhetra’ (or ‘pronouncement’) but they are highly obscure, and their interpretation is disputed. Certainly they recognize the formal existence of a council of older men who are later known as the Gerousia. This council, made up of men over sixty, was given the formal role of preparing business to be put to ‘the people’: this formal role of preparatory committee work has rightly been described as a major contribution to the techniques of government.
²
Proposals were then to be put to the ‘people’, and, on the likeliest interpretation of the text, the ‘people’s’ sovereign right was defined as the right to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to them. If members of the ‘people’ spoke on anything other than the proposal before them, the elders’ council had the right to ‘set aside’ and simply submit their original motion for decision (even in antiquity, the translation of these Greek words was hard to understand, but in my view ‘setting aside’ in this archaic Greek meant ‘asking opinions’).
³

The ‘people’, or
demos
, were the Spartan citizens, male only. As a body they appear to have been given final power or
kratos
, a first anticipation of what we later encounter as the single word
demo-kratia
(‘democracy’). However, this popular power depended on the prior decisions of a council of elders and two kings, and it was exercised only in the deferential context of a soldiers’ assembly. Was this political
freedom a concession to a Spartan people who had just changed over to the new massed hoplite army tactics and were newly able to defend themselves in war? In my view, the political change in Sparta came before the military change to a hoplite style. It is better ascribed to the results of Sparta’s major oddity, the existence of two kings. In the disputes of the previous decades, from
c.
730 to 705, the kings and their supporters might well divide on contentious decisions and fail to agree. In Homer’s
Iliad
, such a dispute between two great kingly heroes, Agamemnon and Achilles, is irreconcilable and is played out before the Greeks’ army: it comes before the soldiers only because King Agamemnon lets it spill over into their presence. In Sparta, however, the political reforms required decisions to be put to the citizenry by right, in regular public meetings held at formally defined intervals. This political reform encouraged
eunomia
, the orderly conduct of citizens under the law.
Eunomia
was not a new Spartan word or an abstract word for a new constitution.
⁴
It was already used by Homer: the reformed Spartan state allowed an old ideal to flourish.