The Classical World (13 page)

In my view, Ionia and the eastern Greeks in the eighth to sixth centuries would have made mainland Greece seem decidedly drab and unsophisticated. Their use of language was far superior. In poetry, they had produced some of Homer’s oral forerunners (or so his traditional dialect suggests) and almost certainly Homer himself. They had exported the poetic genre of elegy back to Greece and invented many of the metres and genres of lyric poetry too. The metres used by two island geniuses, the noble Alcaeus and the lady-poet Sappho, gave a new rhythm and polish to lyrics, as the poets of Rome and, later, England tried to imitate in their ‘Sapphic’ and ‘Alcaic’ stanzas. When texts began to be written down in prose (
c.
520
BC
), it was the Ionian Greek dialect which showed the way. Ionians also have their own fine tribute in Greek poetry, by the unknown author of the Hymn to Apollo on Delos (arguably,
c.
670–650
BC
), who was probably an Ionian himself. In their long, trailing robes, he tells us, Ionians would come with their ‘children and modest wives’ and commemorate Apollo, with their ‘boxing and dancing and song’ at one of their competitions on Delos.
¹
‘Anyone who met them, then, when they were gathered together, would say they were immortal and would never grow old,’ and ‘he would delight his heart while gazing at their men and fair-girdled women, at their swift ships and many possessions’. At that time, the Athenians would have been a much less impressive sight, let alone the Spartans. It is the most beautiful tribute; the Ionian visits to Delos are a poetic picture which still delights our mind’s eye.

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

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

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

Sappho and her ladies’ comings and goings are not so easily imaginable in an Athens regulated by Solon or in a reformed Sparta where no Spartan lady ‘married out’. But her brother, too, had travelled far (he loved a famous Greek prostitute in Egypt) and compared with most Athenians, let alone Boeotians, many eastern Greeks had seen much more of the world. Their main reason for travel was trade, and the supposed ‘barrier’ between trading and landowning in Greek city-states was paper-thin among the eastern Greeks’ upper classes: they were particularly aware of the scope for gain overseas and the need for securing desirable imports from the varying landscapes and non-Greek societies around them. In the criss-crossing networks of
their Aegean islands it is hard to believe that the day-to-day business of trade and exchange was eschewed on social grounds by all male members of the landowning class. From the mid-seventh century onwards (at the latest), the Milesians pioneered dozens of settlements along the southern and northern coasts of the Black Sea, going up into the Crimea for access (surely) to its abundant grain and resources. From
c.
630
BC
onwards, Milesians were prominent, too, in renewed Greek contact with grain-rich Egypt. By
c.
600
BC
, eastern Greeks from the promontory of Phocaea had settled in the western Mediterranean, establishing Massilia (Marseilles) near the mouth of the river Rhône. They also touched on southern Spain, so rich in silver, and skirted along the coast of north Africa. By
c.
550–520
BC
eastern Greeks were familiar with the non-Mediterranean societies of the Scythian nomads (beyond the Black Sea), Egypt along the Nile and the curious tribes of north Africa. These three points, Scythia, Egypt and Libya, would remain fixed points of contrast with the Greeks’ own way of life for eastern Greek authors in the fifth century. But they had been discovered and made into a talking point by Ionian traders and settlers long before. One eastern Greek traveller, Aristeas, had even journeyed far off into the steppes of central Asia and described what he saw in a poem. He imagined how ships and the sea would have seemed to a Scythian nomad if he had sent a ‘letter’ home.
⁴

It is not then surprising that the first Greek attempt to draw a map of the world was a Milesian’s. Anaximander (
c.
530
BC
) showed the continents of Asia and Europe as equal in size and surrounded by an outer Ocean. Another Milesian, the learned aristocrat Hecataeus, improved it (
c.
500
BC
) and wrote a
Circuit of the Earth
which set out its known place-names: surviving quotations from his work allow us to follow information gained from Ionian sea-travellers along the coasts of north Africa and southern Spain. Travel was not their only contact with foreign barbarians. In the western Mediterranean, increasingly from the 540s onwards, Etruscans and Carthaginians fought hard to contain eastern Greeks’ attempted settlements in their area. In Asia, meanwhile, the east Greek cities had been constantly threatened by foreign warriors, by nomads from the north (the Cimmerians, during the mid-seventh century), by the rich kings of Lydia, including Gyges (
c.
685–645
BC
) and Croesus (
c.
560–546
BC
), and
finally by the Persians who emerged from further east in the mid-sixth century
BC
. In 546, the great Persian king, Cyrus, conquered Lydia and his generals took over the east Greek cities in Asia. They would control them for most of the next two hundred years.

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

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

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

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

It is probably in the eastern Greek world that we should locate the most widely cited and endorsed of all Greek prose texts: the so-called ‘Hippocratic Oath’.
⁵
Doctors still contest, or appeal to, its principles, but within Greek medicine it was only the ‘oath’ of a minority of practitioners. There is no reason to ascribe it to the great Hippocrates, the most famous early Greek teacher of medicine who is linked to the east Greek island of Cos. Like Hippocrates himself (probably an early to mid-fifth-century doctor), its date is unknown, but its morals and ideals have been upheld for centuries as a tribute to ‘Greek science’. As a ‘charter text’, what it says is sometimes misrepresented by those who appeal to it. It is even cited in support by those who disapprove
of euthanasia. What it actually requires is that doctors swear not to assist poisoners, rather than not to assist those who wish to be helped to die. Most modern doctors still admire the clause against the sexual harassment of patients, women as well as men, although the Greek oath also protected the persons of slaves; most doctors are less keen on the oath not to give a pessary to a woman ‘to assist an abortion’. The clauses swearing to share one’s livelihood with one’s teacher in medicine and not to repeat gossip heard in the course of everyday life, outside professional hours, disqualify even the most admiring modern doctors from the halo of the Hippocratic Oath’s observance.