Democracy
The Classical period is 500BCE to 400 BCE approximately and
while we speak about classical Greece, we are really talking mainly about the
art, writing and ideas of the city state of Athens.
Athens was the only city state in Greece to adopt a system
of democracy – rule by the demos or people. Voting citizens were men over a set
age (18, possibly 20) and while the rules change at various points, they
generally had to be the children of parents who were both citizens.
Democracy is instituted in about 593BCE through the reforms
of Solon. It is over-turned many times by individual tyrannts – the most
well-known being Pisistratus. The word tyrant in Greek does not have any of the
implications it has in modern English – it just means a one-man ruler, who
rules by force.
Democracy is important because the system impacts on the way
Athenians see themselves in relation to everyone else in Greece and certainly
how they view foreigners.
Wars
There are three separate conflicts which shape the fifth
century – but it is important to remember that war is an everyday part of Greek
life. Every Athenian citizen wealthy enough to buy armour would have been a
hoplite (a foot solider). Those too poor to buy armour would have rowed in the
huge Athenian navy. Every Athenian male would have experienced combat at some
stage in their lives.
In 490BCE the Persian King Darius invades Greece. He is
stopped on the plain of Marathon by a force led predominantly by Athens. The
fallen heroes of Marathon become an important part of Athenians’ understanding
of themselves – they see themselves as the state that saved Greece.
Ten years later his son Xerxes makes a second attempt. The
second Persian invasion is 480-479BCE. Xerxes brings a much larger force by
both sea and land. He famously bridges the Hellespont, thus yoking Europe to
Asia – an act of terrible hubris. He is held for a time by the brave
self-sacrifice of the Spartan King Leonidis and his Three Hundred Spartans at
the pass of Thermopylae. (of course there were lots of other Greeks there
too…). Having been warned, Athens was ready for the Persians – the city was
evacuated to the island of Salamis (visible from the Acropolis) and a clever
ploy to draw the Persian navy into the narrow straits was used. The naval
battle of Salamis was a decisive victory for Athens. The complete rout of the
Persians was then completed at Platea – a land battle where the Spartans gained
the victory.
All of this is covered in Herodotus’s Histories where he examines “why the two people’s fought”. The
conflict with Persia sets up not just the Athenians sense of themselves but
also the key geo-political conditions, particularly in Greece, for the next
nearly hundred years.
After the second Persian War, the Greek states of the mainland
(as opposed to the Peloponnese, dominated by Sparta), establish, under Athenian
leadership, a Treasury on the island of Delos and a military alliance called
the Delian League. The aim is to have funds to always have a navy ready to
defend Greece from Persia – but Athens, as the great naval power already,
dominate and the navy is under their control and leadership. Its not long
before the Treasury moves to Athens and the League becomes effectively, an
Athenian Empire with tribute-paying states.
This situation is key in the growing tensions that then lead
to the Peloponnesian War (if you believe Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War). This is a war predominantly
between Sparta and Athens which lasts from 429BCE to 404BCE when Athens is defeated
and the wall in the harbour of Piraeus is dismantled. There is a long peace,
called the Peace of Nicias in between and some scholars, including probably
most contemporary Athenians, see it as a series of separate wars. The war
overhangs much of what occurs in Athens in the latter part of the fifth century
– the comic playwright Aristophanes is particularly obsessed with it.
The period in Athens from the end of the second Persian War,
till the beginning of the Peloponnesian War is sometimes referred to as the
“Golden Age”. The important statesman Pericles, rises to prominence (he dies in
a terrible plague in 429BCE). It is he that is responsible for the huge
building works in Athens – including the constructions of the Parthenon on the
Acropolis.
The plasticity of myth and the position of Homer.
Greek myth is not a cannon and even Homer should not be
viewed as cannon. Hesiod, in the sixth century, writes the Theogyny – a long lyric poem about the birth of the gods and it is
from this that we have many of our ideas about the Olympian gods in particular.
But its just one story. Vase paintings often tell very different versions of
myths from the epic poems. The playwrights of the fifth century acted a lot
like fan-fiction writers today – they told their own versions of the myths,
changing endings, characters and character relationships to suit their own
thematic needs. Sometimes the same playwright would produce different versions
of the myth – depending on their specific intentions.
Homer and The Iliad
Homer is at the centre of Greek and particularly Athenian
life. Homer is credited with constructing the two key epic poems which contain
the myth of the Trojan war. The Iliad
– the story of Ilium – deals with a few months in the tenth year of the Trojan
War. It is an epic poem. It was probably first written down in something like
the form it would have had in classical Athens about 200 years previously, at
the end of the “Dark Ages” – around 700BCE. Until that point it was part of the
oral tradition and even in classical Athens would have been recited, in parts,
by rhapsodes rather than read. The same is true of The Odyssey –the story of Odysseus’ travels back to Ithacca from
Troy at the end of the war.
The Iliad begins
with the word “Rage” and ends with the line “So the Trojans buried Hector,
breaker of horses.” It is the story of how the rage of Achilles leads not just
to the deaths of many Greeks but also to the death of the noble Trojan prince
Hector and to his own. The poem ends though, not with the destruction of Troy,
but months earlier, with the return of Hector’s body, taken by Achilles, to his
father, King Priam of Troy. It is not a conventional narrative of war.
The Trojan myth and its prominence in Athens in particular
tells us a lot about how the Athenians viewed war. The story of Troy is a
genocide narrative. Early in Book 1 Agamemnon, leader of the Greek (Achaean)
forces says to his brother Menelaus (whose wife Helen has been “stolen” by the
Trojan prince Paris and is the cause of the conflict) that all the Trojans must
die, “even the babies in their mother’s bellies.” The destruction of the family
line and of the city is something that caused the Athenians great horror – the
Troy myth is a story of Greeks committing a series of terrible, genocidal
crimes. These crimes though are in response to an equally bad crime – Paris has
disrespected the idea of xenia – guest friendship – by running off with Helen
whilst a guest of her husband. It is the same crime the suitors commit in Ithaca
when they seek to marry Penelope whilst Odysseus is lost after the end of the
war. Guest friendship is Zeus’ special concern and thus disrespecting it is a
great offence to him.
Book 1 of the The
Iliad deals with why Achilles experiences rage in the first place. It is
central to understanding the key Greek ideal – the heroic ethos. The Book
begins with a terrible plague striking down the Greeks. They are told it is
punishment from Apollo because Agamemnon has taken the daughter of a priest of
Apollo as his war prize and refuses to return her. War prizes are material
expressions of a heroes bravery and battle prowess. They are the evidence that
the rest of the community holds them in high honour and they indicate that the
hero has won glory.
Achilles argues with Agamemnon and demands he return his war
prize – for the good of the rest of the army. A good leader should put the
community first. This angers Agamemnon – it would besmirch his honour. He
agrees, only if he is given another war prize and the one he wants belongs to
Achilles. When Achilles war prize is taken away; he refuses to fight anymore
and goes a step further – he asks his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, to plead
with Zeus to kill as many Greeks as possible as punishment for the offence they
have done him.
The heroic ethos is a set of ideas about what it means to be
a hero.
-
Bravery
-
Battle prowess (being very good at fighting, but
also being crafty or clever – heroes can have brain or brawn and often both)
-
Honour (having material evidence that other
heroes and the community respect you)
-
Glory (having one’s name live on forever)
-
Having the love and assistance of one or more
gods.
None of these criteria suggest that the person needs to be
“good” – Agamemnon, the “pig of Greek literature” to quote Australian Homer
scholar Chris Mackie, is still a hero. Paris and Hector, the Trojan princes,
are both heroes.
To be a “good” man though, a hero would also have to fight
to protect his family and put his city’s needs before his own. This is the
dilemma that Hector finds himself in in Book 6 of The Iliad – he can’t protect his family and also fight in the front
row of battle to defend his city. It’s the kind of paradox that the Greeks
loved. The Troy myth starts with a similar impossible choice between two
unbearable options – but for Agamemnon. When the Greek fleet is supposed to set
sail from Aulis the winds die. To raise the winds, Agamemnon must sacrifice his
daughter Iphigenia. He can’t protect his child and lead the army. He chooses to
sacrifice his daughter and that choice eventually leads to his own death at the
hands of his wife Clytemnestra (Helen’s sister!). It is a story dealt with in
Aeschylus’ cycle of plays The Oresteia.
Monsters in The Iliad
There are no monsters in The
Iliad. In the poem the acts of monstrosity are those committed by men. Old
heroes like Nestor look back on a better time when men fought monsters, not
each other. The only monster is in a story told within the narrative of Book 6
about the hero Bellerophon and his fight with the Chimera.
Greek Theatre
There are three tragedians and one comedic playwright that
we have extant works for. There were many more that we have as only names or
fragments. Even for the playwrights where we have many of their works, there
are many more missing or that we know of only from titles and fragments.
In chronological order they are :
Aeschylus – the most traditional, with significant use of
the Chorus and with only two voice actors. He wrote the only tragedy that is
not based in myth – The Persians,
about the battle of Salamis.
Sophocles – competed with Aeschylus. He was a prominent
politician himself and probably a close friend of Athenian leader Pericles. He
introduces a third voice actor.
Euripides – writes characters that are more psychologically “real”.
He is known for his particularly beautiful lyrics in the choral odes. He
competed with Sophocles. He went into self-imposed exile during the
Peloponnesian War.
Euripides is sometimes described as writing humans as they
are whereas Sophocles writes them as they should be!
Aristophanes, the one comic playwright we have extant
examples from, is roughly contemporary with Sophocles. He writes Lysistrata towards the end of the
Peloponnesian War. He is writing in a genre called Old Comedy. It is explicitly
political, usually highly satirical and contains a lot of physical, slapstick
and scatological humour. Actors in comedy would have been grotesquely masked
and had costumes with over-sized buttocks, breasts (if they were female) and
huge phalluses (if they were male). Much of the humour in the plays would have
been achieved by characters running about and tripping over their own
over-sized genitalia. Aristophanes comedy is supposed to be funny, but its also
often very bitter, and bitingly critical of political opponents.
Women
While the position of women in Athenian society feels deeply
foreign to 21st century eyes – it would be anachronistic to view it
as “sexist”. The Greeks in general and the Athenians in particular, had a deep
fear of the power of women. Most Greek mythological monsters are female – the
gorgons, the Scylla, the Harpies, the sirens, the Amazons. The exception is the
Minotaur – a male monster created by the monstrous pairing of a queen and a
bull.
Athens’ patron god is Athena Parthenos – the Parthenos is
the girl in the liminal state before she is married and becomes a woman. It is
the state in which women are considered most powerful and most dangerous.
That’s why so many young women die on their wedding days in Greek myth.
Women’s power and danger is linked to sexuality. The most
powerful god (at least in some senses), more powerful than Zeus because even
Zeus is under her power, is Aphrodite. She’s not the goddess of love – she’s
the goddess of women’s sexual appetite and power, especially outside of marriage.
She’s older than Zeus, born from the “sea foam” when the genitals of Uranus are
thrown into the sea by his son Chronus who seeks to overcome him. She is one of
the old, dark, chthonic gods whereas the rest of the Olympians are children of
Chronus, including Zeus, who overthrew him.
In practical terms, wealthy women were secluded from public
life, generally in the second storey of the house. They were responsible for
running the household and vitally for weaving. All cloth production was done
domestically. The ideal woman in Greek myth is “white-armed”. Hera – the god of
marriage is always described with this epithet. So is Hector’s wife Andromache,
and Odysseus’ wife Penelope. It implies that they stayed inside and did the
weaving! The Athenians in particular were afraid of women’s rampant sexuality.
Women without men to “protect” them were dangerous. Penelope is held up as such
an ideal because she waited for her husband to return and in fact found ways to
protect herself from the advances of the suitors. She uses the ruse of weaving
a shroud for her father in law – which she unpicks each night. This connection
between protecting her virtue and the art of weaving is no coincidence.
It would be wrong to see women as hated or even mistreated.
There were laws preventing domestic violence and even violence against
household slaves was frowned upon. Women were married young – probably about 14
– but there were protections including their dowries and they could ask for
divorce – though only via a male relative. If a woman’s husband died, it was
the responsibility of his family and hers to find her another husband or to
take her and her children back and protect them. Funerary monuments and the
inscriptions on them suggest great affection between husbands and wives, with
very moving scenes and verses.
Women in other Greek city states had varying statuses. In
Sparta women probably owned and certainly controlled property – a necessity of
a system where the men were segregated into barracks. We have statues showing
Spartan girls running and they certainly participated in athletic competition.
Homosexuality
There was no moral problem with either male or female
homosexuality. Both are shown in vase painting; though acts of male
homosexuality are more frequent. There was no separate homosexual identity.
People were not “homosexual” but most men would have engaged in homosexual
activity at some point in their lives.
There was probably a separation between the casual sexual
activity, both heterosexual and homosexual that adult males engaged in with
slaves, performers, dancing girls and boys and prostitutes of both genders and
the more formalised relationships of lover and beloved.
There appears to have been a short period in boys’ lives
from about the moment they enter puberty, when they were considered highly
attractive to slightly older male admirers. These admirers were unlikely to
have been much older than 18 to 20 – young men not yet of marriageable age, but
no longer boys. The older man would send his beloved gifts, hares are common in
vase painting, but also more expensive items – like the vases themselves which
often have kalos inscriptions. Kalos translates as beautiful but has erotic implications
and implies the admired is male. The boys were under no obligation to accept
these proposals. If they did, sex was generally intercrural (between the
thighs) – if the explicit images on vase paintings are accurate! Aristophanes
is particularly disparaging of anyone who engages in anal sex and of older men
(married men) who still pursue young lovers.
In Plato’s Symposium, a collection of stories about love
supposedly told one night at a drinking party (symposium) by prominent
Athenians; it is Aristophanes that tells the charming story of the time in the
distant past when humans were four-armed, four-legged creatures with two bodies
and two heads but joined. Some were male, some were female and some were
hermaphrodites. Because humans could satisfy all our emotional and physical
needs within ourselves in this form, the gods became jealous and divided us
from ourselves – making the two legged creatures we now are. That’s why humans
always seem to be searching for their other halves and why some people’s ideal
partner is of the same gender and some prefer the opposite! It’s a satire
certainly – but says a lot about how the Athenians viewed sexuality; and love.
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