The World

After the chaos of 1200, when the Mycenaean kingdoms were overthrown, the Greeks gathered in villages that coalesced into small cities (poleis) – the process known as synoecism – where they developed a concept of communal self-government. Their Greekness centred on their language, developed from the Phoenicians whom they encountered around the Mediterranean: Phoenicians only used consonants; the Greeks added vowels to develop the first alphabetic system of writing. Then came their stories. Around 850, writing and reading started to spread.^* Rhapsodes – song-stitchers – recited poems at festivals. Drama, developing out of religious festivals, became popular. It was not so much that Greeks placed humanity at the centre of their world; all people did that. What was new was their consciousness of this self-focus.^* Their sculptors developed the skill to fashion human likeness out of marble. Their religion was a set of rituals rather than a system of beliefs, concerned with living rather than afterlife. They worshipped a pantheon of flawed, greedy gods, led by Zeus, and treasured stories of half-divine supermen, like Hercules, and god-blessed travellers, like Odysseus, whose global exploits reflected the voyages of Greek sailors.^* ‘Are you here on business,’ asks a character in The Odyssey, ‘or traversing the seas as reckless raiders?’ The Greeks, like their rivals the Phoenicians, were seafarers, traders and pirates, colonizing the Mediterranean they called the Great Sea in ships powered by rows of oars.

Yet not all their cites were naval: Sparta was a land-based monarchy, more precisely a diarchy ruled by two kings from rival dynasties, descended from Hercules, elected to rule with a twenty-eight-man council of Elders, assuming command in times of war. The Peloponnesian city was organized around a small citizenry of Spartiates who did not trade but served as soldiers in order to overawe a conquered subject population of serfs – the helots, benighted inhabitants of Helos. Spartiates were trained by living in a barracks, not with their families; they dined with their soldier messmates and maintained their martial ferocity and the obedience of the underclass by sending squads of adolescent Spartiates annually into the countryside to kill a certain number of serfs; they were also spurred by wargames such as missions to steal cheeses, and by having ephebophilic relationships with twenty-something men.^* They married in their twenties, but did not live with their families until they were thirty and only ceased military service at sixty. Deformed children were exposed – that is, abandoned to the elements. They prided themselves on manners and control, and were so curt that the word laconic comes from Laconia, the Spartan homeland. Yet Spartiate women, famed for fitness, blondeness and morality, trained in tiny tunics, nicknamed ‘thigh-flashers’ by prudish Athenians.

Dominated by a martial nobility, Greek society was macho, social and competitive: men exercised naked at gymnasia; at symposia dinners, they drank mixed wine and water out of a shared bowl, symposiasts told stories and had sex with pipe-playing hetairai – courtesans – or cupbearer boys. Their peasant farmers served as infantrymen, hoplites, wearing iron cuirasses, greaves, plumed helmets, and they fought together in a phalanx, guarded by their interlinked shields; nobles fought on horseback – all of them much in demand as mercenaries. In distant Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar employed Greek auxiliaries.

The Greeks prided themselves on their involvement in governing the polis – politics based on good governance, eunomia, and freedom, eleutheria. Yet their poleis were dominated by aristocracies and often ruled by tyrants, sometimes by benign autocrats, who were supported by middle and lower classes against overweening nobles.

Alcmaeon and his Athenian family were typical of these aristocrats. Athens had developed as an aristocracy in which an elected council of nine archons ruled, presenting their ideas to an assembly of male citizens. A mythical Alcmaeonid was said to have been the first archon in the eighth century BC, and in the 630s the clan leader Megacles and his son Alcmaeon ruled as archons. In 621, a nobleman Drakon drafted the first laws in his own blood, but his draconian code scarcely restrained the aristocratic faction fights that often led to massacres: eighty skeletons with bound wrists were found in one mass grave. Around 593, Solon, an archon, established a constitution that turned the poor into full citizens, but its system still favoured the Alcmaeonids and other clans. When another Megacles murdered his opponents, the entire family were expelled from Athens, even down to the bones of their ancestors. Yet they rose again.