The Classical World (14 page)

Nowadays the most vivid material survivals from the eastern Greek world happen to be from the Greek West. In a much later text, we happen to have a description of an amazing robe, dyed with purple and made for one Alcisthenes, a man of luxurious Sybaris, who lived in southern Italy.
⁶
Some six yards long, it showed woven images of two palaces in the East, Susa and Persepolis, the ceremonial seat of the Persian king. It must have been made in the later sixth century (Alcisthenes’ home city-state of Sybaris was destroyed in 510
BC
), but it survived to have a long history, eventually selling for a vast sum to a Sicilian tyrant and then ending up in Carthage. As Greek gods were part of its design, its origin was certainly Greek. The answer must be that it was made in Miletus, the greatest of east Greek cities, and was commissioned by a man from Sybaris, the western city in Italy with which Miletus had a very special relationship. The text which describes it is a glimpse of the wide horizons spanned by its artist, a man of Miletus who knew about the Persians’ great palaces so many miles to the east, who drew the first Greek sketch of Persepolis, quite soon after the palaces there were being built, and who then sold the result to a western Greek in Italy, miles from the Persian Empire but within the orbit of Miletus too.

In the 540s, when Persian armies conquered western Asia, the Greek citizens of little Phocaea decided to escape. They put on board ship their women and children and the statues and all the dedications from their temples ‘except’, the historian Herodotus tells us, ‘for bronze or stone or paintings’.
⁷
Then they sailed west. It is in the West in the following decades that we can still catch a last echo of their east Greek style of painting. It survives at Tarquinia on the west coast of Italy
about sixty miles north of Rome; here, Etruscan nobles were buried in impressive tombs like underground houses, their walls plastered and then painted with figured designs. In the late seventh century Tarquinia was the Etruscan place of origin of Tarquinius Priscus, who moved south to rule Rome as a king, as did his descendants. From
c.
540
BC
the style of the nobles’ tomb paintings shows that Tarquinia had received able Greek artists from the east Greek world. Their style is evident in painted masterpieces which conform to the taste of their Etruscan patrons: these Greek migrants painted scenes of the hunting of ducks, banqueting and sports, exquisite echoes of their east Greek talent in a West which adapted and admired it.

Towards Democracy

Histiaeus of Miletus held the opposite view: ‘as of now,’ he said, ‘it is because of King Darius that each one of us is the tyrant of his city-state. If Darius’ power is destroyed, I will not be able to go on ruling the Milesians, nor will any of you anywhere else, for each of the city-states will prefer to be democracies rather than tyrannies.’

Herodotus, 4.137, on events at a bridge
across the Danube,
c.
513
BC

When the Persian King Cyrus and his commanders reached the western coast of Asia Minor as the new conquerors in 546
BC
, the Spartans sent him a messenger by boat, carrying a ‘proclamation’ (another Spartan ‘Great Rhetra’). They told him ‘not to damage any city-state on Greek land because they would not allow it’.
¹
For Sparta, there was a clear line between Asia and Greece (surely including the Aegean), and the latter’s freedom was their concern.

In Greece, the years from 546 to
c.
520 were to be the supreme years of Spartan power. Her warriors had already defeated their powerful neighbours in southern Greece, the men of Argos and Arcadia, and forced the defeated cities of Arcadia to swear an oath to ‘follow wherever the Spartans lead’.
²
In battle, the trained Spartan soldiers had been heartened by the presence among them of the great mythical hero Orestes, son of Agamemnon. In the 560s
BC
his enormous bones were believed to have been discovered in Arcadia by a very prestigious Spartan who transferred them to Sparta, bringing the hero’s power with them. The hero’s bones were probably the bones
of a big prehistoric animal which the Spartans, like other Greeks, misunderstood as the remains of one of their race of superhuman heroes (‘Orestesaurus Rex’).

It also helped the Spartans that during the sixth century
BC
tyrannies came to an end in most of Greece. In many city-states, the sons or grandsons of the first tyrants proved even harsher or more objectionable than their predecessors and were remembered in some spectacular anecdotes, the best of which concerned their sex life. Periander, tyrant of Corinth, was even said to have insulted a boy-lover by asking him if he was pregnant by him yet. The brittle, competitive culture of homoerotic love was indeed one source of insult and revenge, but it was not the only cause of turmoil. Tyrants had seized power at a time of faction in the noble ruling classes, after the military hoplite reform had changed the balance of power between nobles and non-nobles. Two or three generations later this military change had settled down and the former noble families could at least unite in wanting the tyrants out. Spartan soldiers were a convenient ally with whom to overturn a tyranny which had lost its point. Sparta was believed to have the most stable ‘alternative to tyranny’
³
in her social and political system, the nature of which, however, outsiders did not really under-stand. Spartans, therefore, were frequently invited in by discontented nobles to help put a tyranny down. Sparta ‘the liberator’ ranged far and wide in Greece. With one eye on Persian ambition in the Aegean and a close connection with her distant kin at Cyrene (‘Black Sparta’) in north Africa, from 550 to
c.
510 Spartans did indeed have a wider interest in the Mediterranean. When one of their kings, Dorieus, was forced to leave Sparta (
c.
514
BC
), he set off first to Libya with supporting troops, then later to south Italy and Sicily where he died trying to conquer the north-western, Phoenician end of the island.

Tyrannies had been resented as ‘slavery’ by their discontented citizens and their removal was therefore celebrated as ‘freedom’. When tyranny ended on the island of Samos (
c.
522) a cult of ‘Zeus of Freedom’ was instituted, a type of cult which was to have a long history. Freedom, here, meant freedom of the citizenry from arbitrary misrule. For, within a
polis
, the value of freedom had not been forced to the male citizens’ attention by unfree slaves or women, protesting at what they did not have. It had become prominent thanks to the
experience of the political ‘
polis
-males’ under ‘enslaving’ tyrannies which had overstayed their welcome. Nonetheless, even under a tyranny, the magistrates and procedures of a city-state were not suspended. Important principles of subsequent free Greek, even democratic, political life went back, by origin, to the aristocratic-tyrannical age of the seventh and sixth centuries
BC
. Tenure of a civil magistracy was limited in duration by law: retiring magistrates were to be scrutinized, albeit rather cursorily, when their office ended. Legal procedures also developed and there was already a public use of the ‘lot’, in some states, to select office-holders. The names which entered the ballot for office were pre-selected, no doubt with a tyrant’s approval. Between
c.
650 and
c.
520
BC
there was a continuing growth of ‘the state’. Under the subsequent democracies, these procedures were to be extended and applied by the male citizenry as a whole. But they were not introduced into a void, as if tyrants and nobles had ruled autocratically.

Nor were tyrannies the only form of government outside Sparta. Throughout the sixth century
BC
they continued to be replaced or avoided; and it was still a period of active Greek political experiment in the male citizen-bodies. Some of the Greek communities (such as Corinth or Cyrene) changed the number and names of their ‘tribes’; there and elsewhere, more broadly based constitutions replaced tyrants. In Cyrene,
c.
560
BC
, the powers of the ruling kings were curbed by a lawgiver, invited in from Greece; the reform did not cause bloodshed. In the 520s, after a time of internal turmoil in Miletus, foreign arbitrators even gave political power to those of the citizens who had the tidiest farms. By the end of the century new political terms had begun to be coined. City-states started to insist on
autonomia
, or self-government, a degree of political freedom which left them to run their own internal affairs, their courts, elections and local decisions. Quite where this degree of freedom began and ended would be constantly contested and redefined during subsequent centuries. By origin, the demand had arisen only because there were now outside powers strong enough to infringe it. In absolute terms, it was a city-state’s second best to total freedom, which included freedom in foreign policy.
Autonomia
is first cited in surviving sources as the concern of eastern Greek communities when confronted with the much greater
power of the Persian kings. The context would well suit the idea’s invention.

Besides
autonomia
, citizens within a community would also claim
isonomia
, perhaps best rendered as ‘legal equality’, leaving open whether it was equality under the law, or equality in administering the law. This term is first ascribed to political proposals which followed the ending of tyranny on the island of Samos,
c.
522
BC
. Again, this context fits the idea well, suggesting that
isonomia
was a word for freedom after the resented ‘slavery’ of tyranny. The main force of the word was probably equal justice for all citizens after the favouritism and personal whim of tyrants; it was not necessarily democratic, but could become so. For, the years of tyrannies had often weakened the power of local noblemen. In several city-states, some of the nobles had been exiled and in their absence, or their curtailment, the ‘people’ (
d
ē
mos
) had had good reason to learn to manage local disputes on their own behalf. By the mid-sixth century there had been signs, too, of an obstinate solidarity in some city-states among people who were not noble or rich. In Megara,
c.
560
BC
, the ‘people’ were even said to have forced creditors to repay all interest-payments to their debtors. But who, exactly, were the ‘people’? Those farmers with small (perhaps tidy) properties? Those who fought as hoplites? The word did not necessarily refer to the entire male citizenry, including the lower classes.

In 510 one of the last major tyrannies in Greece was ended, the rule of the Peisistratids in Athens. During the previous six years attacks by noble Athenian families had weakened the second generation of this tyrant family’s control. By bribing the priestess at Delphi, exiled Athenian nobles then obtained oracles from ‘Apollo’ which urged the Spartans to intervene and finish the tyranny off. In 510
BC
they succeeded, at the second attempt. The Athenians now had to run themselves very differently.

For two years their noble families continued to compete within the surviving shell of Solon’s constitution: in an anti-tyrannical mood, they seem to have agreed to a law that in future, no Athenian citizen could be tortured. It was symptomatic of a new sense of ‘freedom’. The aristocratic Alcmeonid clan had been noble pioneers in the expulsion of the Athenians’ tyrants, but in spring 508
BC
they failed to win
the supreme magistracy for one of their own number. Something drastic was needed if they were to regain favour, and so it was probably in July or August, when their rival came into office, that their most experienced elder statesman, Cleisthenes, proposed from the floor of a public meeting that the constitution should be changed and that, in all things, the sovereign power should rest with the entire adult male citizenry. It was a spectacular moment, the first known proposal of democracy, the lasting example of the Athenians to the world.

Like St Paul, Cleisthenes knew from inside the system which he so cleverly subverted: he himself had been the Athenians’ chief magistrate under the tyrants, seventeen years before. What he proposed was a new role and composition for some very familiar Athenian entities. In his speech, he probably referred to a council and an assembly (both of which had functioned, at times together, since Solon), to tribes and ‘demes’ (Attica’s small villages and townships, already totalling some 140) and to ‘thirds’ or so-called
trittyes
(entities which had long been familiar in Attica’s organization). At a local level, he proposed something new; locally elected officials to be called ‘demarchs’ (‘deme governors’) would preside over local meetings in the village-demes and replace the time-honoured roles of the local noblemen. Cleisthenes’ proposal was that the male citizens should go off and register themselves in a ‘deme’ locally, and then they would find themselves allotted deme by deme to one of thirty new ‘thirds’ which, in turn, would connect them to one of ten newly named tribes. The numbers of tribes and ‘thirds’ were to be increased (to a ‘decimal system’) but the core of it all seemed wonderfully clear and straightforward. Until this moment, the highest clique in Attica had been the ex-magistrates who made up the revered Areopagus council and served on it for the rest of their lives. They could only look on and listen helplessly to Cleisthenes’ populist speech. In 508
BC
almost all of them were politically discredited men, former magistrates who had been ‘selected’ in previous decades by the hated tyrants. Their main concern was to avoid being exiled for their past.

Cleisthenes’ proposals were excitingly new. Since Solon’s reforms, a second public council (other than the Areopagus) had helped to run the Athenians’ business and had sometimes brought items after
discussion to a wider assembly of citizens. We know nothing about this council’s powers or membership, but it is most unlikely that almost everything which it discussed went on to the assembly as a matter of course. Henceforward, Cleisthenes’ idea was that every major public decision must go to a popular assembly by rights. A very few inscribed decrees of the Athenians which survive within decades of 508
BC
begin bluntly: ‘it seemed good to the people’. In future, too, the council was to be chosen from all male citizens over the age of thirty and no restrictions of class or property are attested as limiting membership of it. In the later Athenian democracy, a man could serve on the council only twice in his lifetime, and in my view this rule, too, was enacted in 508
BC
. In an adult citizenry with perhaps 25,000 men over the age of thirty, almost everyone could now expect a year on the council in his own lifetime. The implications were obvious, and like his audience Cleisthenes could see them.