The Classical World (17 page)

If the Persians had won in Greece, Greek freedom would have been curbed and with it, the political, artistic, dramatic and philosophical progress which has been a beacon to Western civilization. Satraps would have ruled Greece and dispensed personal justice; a few Greek traitors and collaborators would have flourished, and, at most, Persians might have dined on sofas and encouraged and watched the
Greeks’ athletic games, although their kings would never have risked competing in them for fear of losing, and, for good Persians, naked exercise (though titillating) was shameful and out of the question. In 480 brave Greeks and their families died for freedom not slavery. Posterity has remembered several of them, Pytheas from the island of Aegina who died in a sea-battle from so many wounds that even the enemy kept his corpse on board their ship to honour it, or Aristodemus of Sparta who survived alone from the glorious Spartan band of 300 ‘Knights’ at Thermopylae and then, out of shame, fought way beyond the line with frenzied bravery so as to acquit himself, next year, at Plataea. To commemorate the victories, a column of three entwined serpents, made of bronze, was set up at Delphi to the god Apollo and was inscribed with the names of thirty-one grateful Greek states. Among them, the Spartans at Plataea and the Athenians deserved a particular praise. In 490 the Athenians had won the first round of battle against the Persian invasion at Marathon. In Winter 481/0 they acted on their dire decision to evacuate their city and left it, with their dogs swimming beside them. In their absence they saw a great Persian sacrilege, the burning and ruin of the temples on their Acropolis. For two consecutive harvests they were out of their own territory, but nonetheless they ignored offers of terms from the Persian king and continued to fight heartily at Salamis, Plataea and Mycale. The Delphic oracle, by contrast, took the Persian side, and then had to invent stories of its ‘divine’ protection in order to explain why the Persian invaders, its friends, had not sacked it.

The battle was for Greek freedom, but the contrasts of justice and luxury were woven into memories of it. Persians were capable of a terrible ruthlessness, decapitating and impaling corpses, having young boys castrated and, in Xerxes’ case, ordering an attempted ‘draft dodger’ of a father to be flayed. The father’s skin was then stretched as a covering on the very seat from which he had once given justice. Greek values of restraint, modesty and justice were affronted by these anecdotes. The invaders’ finery made an equally profound impression and was remembered in some vivid episodes. One Persian cavalryman had armour entirely made of gold; Persian cavalry-horses ate from mangers made of solid bronze, too; the Greek concubine of a Persian nobleman dressed herself and all her maids in gold jewellery in order
to win pardon from the Greek commander after the defeat at Plataea. An astounding quantity of gold and silver objects, including wonderful clothing, was taken as spoils in the battle. Some of it was stolen by the Spartans’ helot-serfs, but some was still being found in the nearby fields many years later. Just once, in 479, the young Spartan commander Pausanias ordered the captive cooks of King Xerxes to prepare a magnificent Oriental dinner and set it out for his guests in the former royal tent. He then ordered a Spartan meal to be prepared too and served in all its sparseness beside the Persian one. Among the king’s lavish silver and gold furniture, Pausanias is then said to have told his Greek guests how silly the king had been to come so far, when he had so much, in order to invade a Greece which had almost nothing.

The costumes, the jewellery, the gold which the Greeks observed were classed as soft and ‘effeminate’. In subsequent Athenian art, in vase painting and in the theatre, barbarian Orientals were indeed represented in these ‘Oriental’ terms. But this representation was not a new Greek ‘invention’ of the barbarian, in the wake of victory. Greeks abroad in the West and East had already anticipated it, beginning with Homer’s description of a ‘barbarian-speaking’ Carian who was dressed in gold ‘like a girl’ (
barbaros
referred to the alien ‘bar-bar’ sound of non-Greek speech).
⁷
Rather, old stereotypes were reinforced by the Greeks’ amazing triumph. The barbarian losers were presented as ‘slaves’ to one master, their king (Persian kings did indeed refer to their subjects as their ‘inferiors’, a word which Greeks translated as ‘slaves’). By contrast, the free Greeks were hardened by their poor land. The Spartans, Xerxes was said to have been told, were free men who knew only one master, their law.

The ultimate victors were the Greek gods and semi-divine heroes. They seemed to be present in the awful tumult of battle; their very multiplicity kept up morale. If prayers and sacrifices to one of the gods proved ineffective, there was always another one to try hopefully instead. Persians, by contrast, included Zoroastrians who believed in two warring powers, one good, one evil, and when things went badly, the evil one, Ahriman, would seem unstoppable. Victory monuments to the Greek gods were built at the great Greek athletic centres, Olympia, Delphi and the Isthmus. In a fine celebration after the victory of 479, the Spartan king Pausanias, a warrior in his early thirties,
sacrificed to Zeus Eleutherios, ‘Zeus of Freedom’, in the main
agora
of brave little Plataea. It is the most touching victory-celebration in all ancient history.

Evidence of the wars continues to reappear, with more, no doubt, to be found. In 1959 a reinscribed text of what appears to be Themistocles’ proposal for the evacuation of Athens in 481/0 was found on a stone at the ancient site of Troezen: it was itself a later copy, evidence of the event’s continuing fame.
⁸
In 1971 another inscribed text was found at Plataea whose citizens had helped the Athenians at Marathon in 490 and had witnessed Pausanias’ great sacrifice after the nearby battle in 479. This text testified to a cult some two centuries later of ‘Zeus the Liberator and the Concord of the Greeks’ and to an athletic contest which the Greeks were still celebrating ‘for the brave men who fought against the barbarians for the liberty of the Greeks’.
⁹
‘Freedom’ games remained popular, and for us the ‘tombs’ and the ‘heroes’ have acquired more meaning. In 1992 parts of a celebratory poem by the great poet Simonides were recovered from a piece of papyrus: they compare Pausanias, the Spartan commander at Plataea, with the hero Achilles, the star of Homer’s Trojan War against barbarians.
¹⁰
In Athens, during the 1990s, yet more fragments of an inscribed text which was set up to honour the valiant dead at Marathon were recovered during building work. A further inscription now shows that they belonged to a special cenotaph in the heart of Athens which was set up like the one at Marathon to honour the Athenian dead.
¹¹
For centuries, Athenians continued to honour both monuments; their famous Funeral Speeches began to be recited by a picked orator at the city cenotaph.

Six centuries after the event, Greeks who presided over the cults at Plataea were also priests of the cult of the Emperor Hadrian ‘the Panhellene’. Greek freedom had changed, but the fame of the great days of 480 lived on under the Roman Empire. They owed their preservation, above all, to the
Histories
of Herodotus, the author who preserves for us the stories, values and turning points in the Greek triumph. At dawn on the awesome September day of Salamis it was Themistocles, he tells us, who made the best speech. ‘Throughout, he contrasted what is noble with what is ignoble, and told them, in everything which concerns man’s nature and predicament, to choose
the nobler part.’
¹²
King Xerxes was remembered for no such speech, and freedom, we may be sure, was at the heart of the choice Themistocles offered. It was a crucial reason why the Greeks won.

The Western Greeks

Grant O son of Cronos, that the battle-cry of the Carthaginians and the Etruscans may stay quietly at home… Such were their losses when they were vanquished by the ruler of the Syracusans, who threw their young men into the sea from their ships, drawing Greece from heavy slavery
…

Pindar,
Pythian
1.71–5 (470
BC
)

A (Roman) citizen is not to bury a dead man in the city. He is not to do more than this: he is not to smooth the funeral pyre with a trowel. Women are not to lacerate their cheeks or to hold a wake for a funeral… Nor is a Roman citizen to add gold. But, for anyone whose teeth have been joined with gold, if he buries or burns it with the dead man, it shall be done without his being liable.

Table X, of the Twelve Tables at Rome (451/0
BC
)

The Persian threat to Greek freedom was matched by another in the western Mediterranean. Greek settlements here had multiplied since their beginnings in east Sicily in the later eighth century
BC
, but in 480, the year of Salamis, the Greek sector of Sicily was invaded by a vast barbarian army, led by Carthaginians. The impulse for it came partly from a Greek initiative. A recently ousted Greek ruler on the island, together with his brother-in-law, had appealed for help to Carthaginian friends. The Carthaginians needed little encouragement. Not long before, the Greek ruler of Syracuse, Gelon, had been trying to persuade the Greeks in Greece to join him in attacking the
Carthaginian sector of Sicily. He had even promised them renewed trading opportunities, a clear call to a Greek war with a commercial motive. But there was also a Persian dimension. In 480 the Persians were said to be urging Carthage to attack Sicily and to keep its Greeks from helping Greece itself. Carthage had a connection with the Persian campaign because she was the colony of Tyre in the Levant, and Tyrian sailors were serving loyally in the Persian fleet against Greece.

In reply, an army of 300,000 barbarians are said to have swarmed into the island, but the Greeks in Sicily won a tremendous victory on their north coast, at Himera. Gelon of Syracuse was credited with an ingenious stratagem, Themistocles’ equal, which deceived the Carthaginian commanders by intercepting a letter of help to them. In defeat, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar died, possibly by throwing himself onto the fire during a religious sacrifice, and Greek freedom was saved. Justly, the poet Pindar described the victory as ‘drawing Greece from heavy slavery’: it imposed slavery on the barbarian participants instead.
¹
Hordes of them were distributed as captives to Greek cities on Sicily. At Acragas (Agrigento), it was said that many of the citizens acquired up to 500 prisoners each as their personal slaves. The slaves were used to quarry stone and to work on new temples to the gods: Acragas acquired a gigantic temple of Zeus (whose debris is still visible). As so often in ancient history, the acquisition of quantities of captives or fugitives in war was the most effective transformation of a local economy. In the West, barbarian slavery assisted new levels of Greek splendour and luxury.

Twice in his life the Emperor Hadrian visited Sicily, on the first occasion climbing volcanic Mount Etna to see the sunrise which was ‘said to be like a rainbow’.
²
By then many Greeks had been there before him, not least the poet Pindar who had composed a wonderfully sonorous ode for Hieron the Greek tyrant, founder of a new city of Etna in the 470s. The poem reveals a first-hand awareness, surely Pindar’s own, of Etna and its slopes during an eruption. By Hadrian’s day Sicily had had more than three centuries of Roman rule, and he would have had no clear idea of the island’s turbulent past.

The western Greeks’ dynamics were complex. Phoenician-Carthaginians had settled in western Sicily at least since the early eighth century
BC
. Earlier migrants to the island continued to occupy

parts of it, especially the Sicels in the interior; since the eighth century Greeks had also settled in the east and south, especially near the coastline. The two sectors were not segregated; Carthaginians lived in Sicilian Greek cities, just as Sicilian Greeks lived across the sea in Carthage. The Greek islanders’ main networks lay not with Africa, but with yet more Greek cities, those which had been settled on the nearby Aeolian islands and in southern Italy. In due course this region became known as ‘Great Greece’, Magna Graecia.

It certainly had a ‘New World’ grandeur and extravagance: the great modern Sicilian novelist Lampedusa called Sicily the America of antiquity. Already in the mid-sixth century
BC
Greek cities had ostentatious temples to the Greek gods, as we can see at Selinus in south-west Sicily: half-cut columns still lie in the big stone-quarries, several miles from the acropolis to which they were pulled on huge wooden rollers. In Sicily, as a pupil of Plato later observed, the Greeks even ate two major meals a day.
³
Pindar’s fine poems for Sicilian patrons celebrate the rich farmland on the island, the crops and flocks, as well as the recent grand buildings. Pindar evokes the blossoming townscape of Camarina, in 456
BC
, where ‘a soaring forest of solid dwellings’ was helping to bring ‘the people of the city from helplessness into daylight’.
⁴
There was also very lucrative trade, not least from the Sicilian coast to barbarian Carthage. By land and sea, many Sicilian landowners had the best of both worlds.