The Classical World (9 page)

A recurrent feature of these festivals was a suspension of ‘normal time’ and social rules, either by briefly inverting the usual reality (the ‘world turned upside down’) or by enforcing an exceptional routine. Inversion and exceptionalism were most visible in the cults of the
rampaging Dionysus, the god of wine, growth and life-giving forces. Dionysus was often represented in feminine dress himself, as an asexual being among his female maenads and the half-bestial satyrs who were so very over-sexed. We should not deny the revelry and ‘altered states’ in Dionysus’ real-life cult or limit the women participants merely to dancing, as if only the men drank the wine. Drinking, ecstatic dancing and (in Macedonia) snake-handling were indeed practised by women: sometimes they worshipped Dionysus in ‘wild’ nature, even up on the mountains. Nonetheless, worshippers of either sex probably never ripped up living animals (let alone a slave) in real life as opposed to myths or drama. Dionysus was included among the civic cults of city-states, even though his worship was especially conducted by women: their ‘wild’ worship projected the image that women were ‘wild’ and ‘irrational’ (their laments at funerals, women’s business, gave a similar impression). Then, as the cult ended, the brief festival-time of release was over, and so the controlled norms of sound everyday behaviour (guided by men) were reasserted: as the festival showed, these ‘irrational’ women really needed a sober-minded man. But Dionysus, though long known in Greece, remained potentially exotic. Myths therefore characterized him as a foreign invader from barbarian, ‘irrational’ lands, from Thrace or Lydia or even India (where Alexander the Great and his soldiers later believed that they had discovered real traces of him). In fact, Dionysus was not an intruder at all, or somehow ‘younger’ than the sober, rational Olympians. He was an old member of the total Greek pantheon, but his wildness was accommodated by these myths and imagery of ‘eastern’ luxury.

Rituals with these sorts of contrasting references ran through each city-state’s calendar and, in that sense, ‘religion’ was intertwined with ‘politics’: increasingly, citizens voted funds for the cults, or chose their priests by lot or election or passed decrees to keep the sanctuaries orderly. It was not, conversely, that ‘politics’ were somehow always ‘religious’ or that laws were really ‘sacred’. For the
polis
was not a religious community organized simply for cult or the worship of the dead: it was a community of citizens whose political meetings were prefaced by prayers or religious honours but whose debates, decisions and conflicts were quite independently political, about contested
human ends and means. The gods were appealed to, rather, as ‘helpers’. Throughout this book, the Greek city-states and armies must be thought of as carrying out repeated honours for these ‘helpers’, occasions which brought crowds together, suspended public business and even delayed soldiers on the march: there were almost no known atheists. Citizens had to accept that the civic gods existed (only a very few philosophers seemed not to), but otherwise the main limit was only that they must not worship some weird god who denied that the other gods were gods needing worship too. Until the Greeks met Jews or Christians, this exclusive sort of god was not an issue. ‘Freedom of worship’, therefore, was not a freedom for which Greeks fought and died amongst themselves. Nor was religious ‘tolerance’ an issue in their struggles. As polytheists, the Greeks accepted many gods, and the gods which they met abroad were usually worshipped and understood as their own gods in yet another local form. The only major attempts to ban ‘private’ cults were in the pages of that political revisionist, the philosopher Plato. Like the rest of his horrible ideal city, they were ignored by every other Greek in real life.

Nor was Greek religion simply ‘
polis
-religion’. Beside the calendar of public cults, families observed their domestic cults on their own properties (especially to Zeus ‘of property’) and in their households (in Alexandria in Egypt, the ‘good
daemon
’ or snake was to prove very popular). Families would also worship together, led by their father, as we can see on sculpted votive-reliefs which show them paying their vows. For beside the public cults there was a flourishing culture of personal vows to the gods by individuals, whether in hope of, or thanks for, a favour. Individuals ‘vowed’ sacrifices, statues or even temples, let alone the little clay and terracotta statues that turn up by the thousand in excavations of sanctuaries, especially in some of the shrines of the western Greeks. These vows were made for worldly ends, for conception, childbirth or success in love, for victory or profit and especially for recovery from sickness: gods were widely represented as healers, even by educated doctors. The god who received a vow did not have to be a god of a civic cult. Hesiod’s poetry contains a lavish tribute to the powers and functions of the goddess Hecate whom his family had perhaps met on their travels:
⁸
a cult of Hecate is not known then or later in the region of his Boeotian
polis
.
The idea of a ‘vow’ paid for a favour could quite easily slip over into a ‘curse’ made for the favour of doing harm to somebody else, a rival in love or at the games or even in democratic politics. Curses also followed precise rituals, but although they were sinister, they too were trying to bring the gods to bear on a personal interest much as a vow or a conventional prayer did.

Prayers do often stress the hope of reciprocity which underlay so much of the giving between Greeks, except (in my view) between aristocrats. The pattern was taken for granted in earthly social relations and so it was projected onto heaven: ‘If I ever gave you a pleasing sacrifice, Zeus, please give me…’ The aim was not bribery but the continuance of relations with a divine superior who, like a social superior, might sometimes (not always) intervene. Worshippers never knew when he would, and when not.

But they did have a chance of discovering what the gods’ commands and wishes were. Experts would watch the flight of birds and interpret any unusual omens or the tangled entrails of an animal when sacrificed. In such contexts, the will of the gods might be discoverable. Again, many of the decisions of individuals throughout the classical world would have been preceded by prayers or divination. The gods were not only spectators or ‘listening’ gods: they also communicated, albeit very obliquely.

Outside one’s dreams, these communications were most accessible at particular sanctuaries, above all at the oracular shrines where prophets and prophetesses ‘spoke’ for the gods. In the eighth century the reputation of the most famous, at Delphi, became established: its priesthood were later described as immigrant Cretans, a tradition which I accept, at least until a Sacred War there,
c.
590
BC
, may have expelled them.
⁹
On a few favourable days a priestess would respond at Delphi on the gods’ behalf to the questions put by visitors. She usually became inspired, perhaps after drinking toxic fresh honey and chewing ‘daphne’ (it may be wrong to translate this plant as non-toxic ‘laurel’).
¹⁰
The responses were then given as prose or hexameter verse (with the help of priests), but, Apollo being the god he was, they were very often ambiguous or perplexing. So, human intelligence was needed, and frequently, the god only said ‘it would be better if…’. However bad it proved, the alternatives would then be known to be even worse.

In the aristocratic age, oracular sites flourished in the Greek world, not just Delphi but Dodona in north-western Greece or Didyma and Claros on the western coast of Asia, among many others. Much of the business might be the everyday anxieties of individuals: whom to marry, whom to blame, how to have children. But these sanctuaries also offered an external sanction for major civic decisions, a stamp of divine approval which would reassure and exculpate the small, fractious ruling class of a community who submitted a question. In due course, democracy would tend to provide its own fully authoritative stamp anyway. Then, too, oracles would be a community’s resort when coping with questions of innovation in a cult or fears of unusual divine anger: they allowed a god to speak out on matters which were the gods’ own affairs. In the age of aristocracy they were also a support for proposed new settlements abroad or major changes in the political order. In turn, the outcomes of these ventures enhanced their reputation: ‘at the beginning it is surely true that colonization was far more responsible for the success of Delphi than Delphi for the success of colonization.’
¹¹

Tyrants and Lawgivers

What I said I would do, I did with the help of the gods and I did not do anything else heedlessly – nor did it please me [to do] by force anything which a tyranny would do, nor that the ‘good men and true’ should have equal shares with the ‘bad’ in their rich land
…

Solon, F 34 (West)

Among their splendour, aristocrats did have an idea of a ‘just city’. Already, Hesiod’s poetry had imagined one for them, not a theoretical and utopian sort of place, but a city of ‘straight judgements’
¹
where peace rules and famine is absent. In it, the nobles would naturally rule, taking their freedom for granted. They did not write about this freedom in the few poems and inscriptions which survive because within their living memory they had not set themselves free and asserted it by taking power away from a previous king. Nor was a politically active lower class threatening to limit their freedom or subject them. The one slavery they feared was enslavement by an enemy in war, a danger to them as individuals and also to their communities as a whole.

Nonetheless, in the 650s
BC
the political monopoly of the aristocratic cliques began to be broken. The world’s first ‘age of revolution’ began in Greece at Corinth and spread to Corinth’s nearby communities.
²
Aristocrats could be described as ‘monarchs’ (
mounarchoi
), but from the 650s a single ruler sometimes replaced them, a true ‘monarch’ in our sense of the word. Greek contemporaries called the new monarch a
turannos
, or ‘tyrant’, and for more than a century, these ‘tyrannies’ flourished in many Greek communities. They have left us some
spectacular stories about their behaviour, the first surviving Greek gossip, and some significant relics of Greek architecture, bits of their huge stone temples. One of the biggest, to Olympian Zeus in Athens, was so huge that it was only completed by Hadrian, six and a half centuries after its beginnings
c.
515
BC
.

What Hadrian did not know was that
turannos
was a word which Greeks had adapted from the foreign Lydians in western Asia. There, in the 680s, a usurper, Gyges, had dared to kill the long-established line of Lydian kings. The gods did not punish him, and Gyges even consulted the Greek oracle at Delphi for advice. Within thirty years Greeks were applying a word of Lydian origin to similar usurping rulers who had taken power in states on their own Greek mainland.

Why, though, did the aristocrats’ monopoly ever break up? It has to be relevant that in the early seventh century, certainly by
c.
670
BC
, we have evidence of a famous change in Greek military tactics, to the long-lasting ‘hoplite’ style. ‘Hoplite’ infantrymen adopted a large shield, about three feet across, which was held by a double grip inside its rim and could protect the warrior’s left side from his chin down to his knees. In a massed line, the overlapping shield of each warrior’s neighbour helped to protect his right side and thus freed his right hand to use a thrusting-spear or a short sword at close range. Metal helmets and a metal or padded linen breastplate gave body-protection, as did metal greaves on the legs, at first an optional extra; they allowed a close-packed line to stand firm against enemy arrows and missiles. New styles of warfare developed against the previous style of warfare and, crucially, the prevailing Greek style of cavalry could not charge down this heavy-armoured line of infantry so long as the ranks stood firm. Noble horsemen became peripheral and henceforward were most useful in giving pursuit when the heavy infantry broke before their hoplite opponents. So too, noble champions and their individual duels diminished: they were no longer the main focus of most of the battles fought on foot.

In this change of infantry tactics, the crucial item was a double grip, positioned inside the shield, which allowed a warrior to hold such a big item of protection on one arm. Sufficient evidence links its introduction on the Greek mainland with Argos, where the new-style fighters were admired as the champion Greek ‘stings of war’.
³
However,
the new shield-grip and several items of armour may have begun earlier in western Asia as the equipment of non-Greek Carians and the neighbouring Ionian Greeks who served the Lydian rulers as infantry. Gyges may even have been the military leader of such soldiers. Among the Argives, too, the adoption of ‘hoplite’ tactics is convincingly ascribed to an individual, the former King Pheidon. An individual was needed for the innovation, because no aristocracy would have voluntarily introduced a new style of fighting which so obviously undermined its own aristocratic power. Pheidon of Argos,
c.
670
BC
, was a near-contemporary of Gyges and probably copied the eastern example. Once the Argives fought as hoplites, neighbours in Greece had no choice but to follow suit; similar constraints would later force the use of firearms on the reluctant military class of the Ottoman Turks.

The new hoplite tactics had social consequences which we can compare with the adoption of the thrusting-spear and massed line by the mighty Shaka Zulu in southern Africa only 150 years ago. They did not create a separate social order, ‘the army’: the new hoplites were the citizenry who mustered on call to take up arms. But now the smaller landowners among them could club together with weapons and a formation of their own so as to defend their property or ravage others’ without depending on aristocratic champions. They were not a new class, but an old class made newly class-conscious. For the new tactics were certainly a change to ‘safety in numbers’. The solid metal helmet greatly restricts a warrior’s view from side to side. The big shield, with its double grip, is also a very clumsy object to manoeuvre in single combat outside a formation. Reconstructions of this weaponry do persuade me that the new tactics required quite a big, solid formation for the armour to be effective. The first vase paintings which show hoplites do sometimes show them with one or two throwing-spears too: perhaps, at first, the front ranks used such missiles, but in my view they are only shown as an artistic convention. For the next three centuries, however, the massed hoplite line would be the dominant Greek form of battle by land. Its participants, the citizens, would exercise in their athletic gyms and wrestling-grounds, but, except in Sparta, their military training on parade grounds would be very limited. For the front ranks, nonetheless, a battle was a fearsome
experience, culminating in ‘pushing and shoving’ (
ō
thismos
) against the enemy’s opposed hoplite line (the details of a hoplite battle are nowhere fully described and so its usual course remains disputed).