Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

the number of headlands, inlets, and islands makes the proportion of coastline to land area higher than in any other country in the world.

The second outstanding feature of the ancient Greek mind-set that we shall encounter repeatedly is their suspicion of authority, which found expression in their advanced political sensibility.

Even the Spartans, who were no democrats, suspected rulers who gave themselves airs and graces.

Thucydides tells us that during the revolution in Kerkyra (Corfu), the women of democratic families climbed the roofs of their houses, joining in the fight and hurling down tiles onto the heads of their oligarchic opponents below.

Because they loved to travel and habitually lived close to the sea, they consistently put themselves in positions that maximized their exposure to other cultures and took swift advantage of the chance to learn skills from other peoples and to experiment with completely new techniques and ideas themselves.

On the other hand, wit and mockery are used against the powerful—whether gods, kings, or commanding officers—in stunning displays of irreverence and moral courage that help to explain why the Greeks invented democracy as well as comic theater.

Dolphins, like humans, are intelligent mammals with strong social and kinship ties. They evince what appears, to human eyes, to be joy when they cavort in the water. They do not predate on humans. These are some of the reasons why many seagoing human societies have formed psychological and ritual bonds with the dolphin. None have been as intense as the Greeks’.

The Open Society of Athens In democratic Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Greek civilization reached the apex of creativity. Perhaps alone among the Greek communities studied in this book, the classical Athenians demonstrated their ample endowment with every one of the ten characteristics that defined the ancient Greek mind-set. They were superb sailors, insatiably curious, and unusually suspicious of individuals with any kind of power. They were deeply competitive, masters of the spoken word, enjoyed laughing so much that they institutionalized comic theater, and were addicted to pleasurable pastimes. Yet the feature of the Athenian character that underlies every aspect of their collective achievement is undoubtedly their openness—to innovation, to adopting ideas from outside, and to self-expression.

“The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their plans are characterized by speed both in their conception and execution,” said a Corinthian diplomat,

“we throw open our city to the world, and never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything.”

Athenians certainly welcomed non-Athenians in their city, and were consistently receptive to new ideas from outside. But they were also fearless about allowing others to scrutinize their way of life from within, and this social and psychological honesty was in turn intimately related to their genius for the honest examination of emotions and human behavior in the theater and in philosophy.

The Athenians positively welcomed immigrants.

The question raised by Athenian democracy, with its principle that every citizen had the right to express his opinion, was where to draw the limits to either membership of the citizen body or the subversive potential of opinions allowed to be expressed.

A population of perhaps thirty or forty thousand free citizen males could produce, within three generations, the pioneering tragedian Sophocles (born in 496 BC), the statesman Pericles (495), the tragedian Euripides and the sculptor Pheidias (both c. 480), the philosopher Socrates (c. 469), the historian Thucydides (c. 460), the comic dramatist Aristophanes (c. 448), the historian and moralist Xenophon (c. 430), and the philosopher Plato (c. 427).

Their conversations were among the most dynamic the world has witnessed. It is hardly surprising that the Theban poet Pindar called Athens “the noisy city,” a city of ceaseless talk.

the best source for these wars is Aeschylus’s tragedy Persians of 472 BC, the earliest surviving dramatic text in the world.

It was only with this overwhelming mandate, after such an intense struggle at the heart of the city, that Cleisthenes could introduce the reforms that created Athenian democracy. To denote it he perhaps used the term isonomia, or “equality for all citizens under the law.”

“Spartan stranger, go back! Do not enter the holy place. No Dorian is permitted to go in!”

Moreover, lottery, rather than bloodline, was now used to select the members of the legislative Council, and which was to have five hundred members at any one time, fifty from each of the new transregional tribes. The patrician Aeschylus was often represented in the Council by peasants and dockworkers. These measures must have been disorienting. But they constituted a masterstroke. They created a sense of Attic identity, shared by men of all classes and livelihoods, which offered them, for the first time, equality under the law.

Aeschylus’s Persians affirms is that it was a sea power whose well-being was dependent on its rowers. The oarsmen were from the lowest of the citizen classes (they were thetes) and thus had the most at stake in defending the democracy: Many of them lived in Piraeus,

The Athenians’ identity as democrats who had secured freedom with their hands on their oars was intertwined with their aspiration to be leaders of other Greeks and soon to become their imperial masters.

The defeat of the Persians at Marathon and Salamis became the foundational narrative of the classical Athenian imperial democracy.

Athens was recovering from devastating violence in a primal class struggle ultimately caused by the opening up of rights to the lowest class of citizens by Cleisthenes’ reforms.

While Athenian playwrights, historians, and philosophers address us candidly in their own writings, the Spartan voices that speak to us unmediated are few. The influence has been exerted less by the actual, historical Spartans than by the near-mythical image of Spartans as insuperable soldiers of brutal habits, few words, and pungent humor.

The Ptolemies’ unbounded intellectual ambitions, however, still reverberate. They began to be realized in the early third century BC, at the moment when Demetrius of Phalerum, the exiled Athenian statesman, docked in the Alexandrian harbor to advise Ptolemy on his library. Demetrius was a renowned student of Aristotle’s school and therefore brought the prestige the Ptolemies craved to their project, the wholesale relocation of world intellectual prowess to Alexandria.

Hellenism was so powerful precisely because it “was a medium not necessarily antithetical to local or indigenous traditions. On the contrary, it provided a new and more eloquent way of giving voice to them.”