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

by Edith Hall

Protagoras and he soon followed Democritus to Athens, where he became the most important political thinker in the democracy, as befits a workingman who rose to eminence on the strength of his intellectual prowess.

Protagoras’s complete works would be at the top of my personal list. Protagoras’s two most famous sayings were that “man is the measure of all things” and that the existence of gods is an unverifiable assumption. He developed a concept of civic “concord,” an early form of “social contract” theory. His ideas are relevant today. The problem is the difficulty of accessing them. They are discussed in the Protagoras and Theaetetus of Plato, who himself profoundly disagreed with the gifted Abderite—and took issue with the idea of democracy. Since Protagoras, who was born in about 490 BC, was much older than Socrates, Plato had a relatively free hand in the degree to which he could distort or even misrepresent Protagoras. On the other hand, he treats Protagoras with much more respect than he shows toward most of Socrates’ sophistic interlocutors.

The wise democratic theorist held the relativist view that there is no absolute right or wrong, but that each community needs to work out for itself what to deem right or wrong. This view of laws as contingently created during human progress, and therefore relative, was grounded in Protagoras’s historical vision of...

But in Prometheus’s speeches in this tragedy, the Protagorean vision of human progress receives its grandest articulation.

The repeated experience of setting up new communities accelerated the Greek development of political theory. Thousands of new groups of Greeks founded hundreds of new towns in the centuries when Ionians were pioneering the new ways of thought. As we have seen, several philosophers themselves moved to a newer city from an older one at least once in their lives, often because their cities were under pressure from barbarian kingdoms of the east. Some of the most brilliant Greeks who ever lived were

involved in the foundation of Thurii in 444 BC. It was an unusual colony, designed to be a Panhellenic project. It was an attempt to create a model democratic Greek polis in which migrants from several cities participated under the leadership of Athens. One of the unusual things about the foundation of Thurii was that Ionian and Doric Greeks were both involved. The impetus behind the project is not altogether clear, although the Athenians, led by the statesman Pericles, wanted to strengthen their foothold in the west. They were also attracted by the plentiful timber supplies in the area. But there was a serious intellectual idealism underlying the ...

The extraordinary experiment being conducted at the new model city of Thurii also attracted no less a figure than Herodotus, the father of a revolutionary form of inquiry—history. Indeed, the very word derives from the Greek word for “inquiry,” historie. The form of super-inquiry that Herodotus invented sought for the first time to explain how the entirety of the contemporary world resulted from past circumstances and real events, in his case the events of the Persian Wars, which he felt passionately deserved to be written down and remembered by future generations. We have to thank Herodotus for creating the idea that to understand the present we need to understand our past and that of all the other nations in the world as well. He set out his path-breaking manifesto in his opening sentence: He has conducted his inquiry (historie) “to prevent the deeds of mankind being forgotten over the course of time, and the great and marvellous works produced by both Greeks and barbarians losing their renown, especially the reason why they waged ...

Egyptians and the Balkan and Black Sea barbarians of Thrace a...

The work of Herodotus shows the extent to which the Greeks before and contemporary with him, especially those who, like him, were born and raised in Asia, ...

One important predecessor of Herodotus, Hecataeus of Miletus, had already engaged in the systematic study of the lifestyles of different peoples. Hecataeus had extended Anaximander’s map by adding the lands that comprised the Persian Empire by the end of the sixth century, especially Egypt. He also included detail about Scythia and the western Mediterranean, which colonization had opened up to the Greeks and which had stimulated the curiosity of their thinkers. Part of his achievement was cartographic, but what absorbed him was the study of the individual character of different ethnic groups—ethnology. To put it another way, Hecataeus pioneered comparative anthropology. To understand a people—say, the Libyans—it was of course necessary to know something about their past and their physical environment as well as their customs, and so both historical and geographical mate...

Herodotus never lets us forget that Greek writing about the Orient needs to be seen as just one component in a dynamic and unceasing exchange between the two, rather than as a view from one side of a conceptual wall;

Greek elites in

and around the northwest regions of the Persian Empire cultivated warm relationships with the courts of the king and his satraps. There were large numbers of individuals living in ethnically complicated civic communities, above all in the Black Sea region and Asia Minor. The diverse Aegean and Near Eastern spheres need to be visualized “as a mosaic of highly individual and distinctiv...

But Herodotus’s greatest poetic debt is undoubtedly to the Iliad, which is omnipresent in his Histories. It serves both as his model (since he sees it as a precedent in the endeavor to narrate a great war between Europe and Asia) and as an earlier

authority, the historical truth of which he often questions. He insists, for example, that Homer really knew what Herodotus regards as the historical truth about Helen of Troy—that she had never been to Troy but had spent the war years in Egypt. Herodotus thinks that Homer had simply ignored the truth because it did not suit his own goals, which were poetic.

Herodotus deserves his title, Father of History. His reputation suffered in the early modern period and in the eighteenth century, when he was compared by serious thinkers like David Hume with Thucydides, the father of “real” history, and judged inferior. The eventual rehabilitation of Herodotus as a serious thinker in the late nineteenth century was related to the rise of anthropology in tandem with imperial ethnography. In the twentieth century, the combined efforts of Arnaldo Momigliano and Isaiah Berlin illustrated the incomparable role played by Herodotus in the philosophy as well as the practice of history, while the reinstatement of oral sources at the heart of the historical discipline did much to revive interest in the way he wrote about the past.

Yet the arguments over Herodotus’s status as history writer have obscured his monumental literary achievement. His writing is a sheer joy: Although ancient writers routinely attacked him for his perceived tendency to confuse myth with reality and his tendency to say unpatriotically positive things about barbarians, he was universally admired for his literary qualities. Herodotus was the Father of European Prose. He almost

singlehandedly took writing, without the aid of meter, from plodding strings of simple phrases to high art; his genius at word order and variation in sentence length has never been surpassed. He was immersed in poetry and seems to have realized that prose was a medium of equivalent potential. There are sentences in Herodotus of heart-stopping beauty, created by surprising word order (hyperbaton), the mirroring of the content in the aural effect (as when the Nile rises), and the use of abstract nouns to denote the onset of an emotion, as in “fear falling” on someone. There are narratives so colorful that they have allowed the ancient Persians and Greeks to remain living presences in our culture—Xerxes ordering the waters of the Hellespont to be flogged, or the Spartans’ last stand at Thermopylae. Herodotus himself moved from Halicarnassus to Athens and also traveled in the Black Sea region and probably Egypt before joining the project at Thurii. His...

In democratic Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Greek civilization reached the apex of creativity.

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.

Yet it is also a story of almost incredible feats. 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). As if these intellects were not enough, Athens welcomed resident foreigners, to whom it gave the status of metic, and attracted from overseas such seminal figures as the historian Herodotus, the rhetorician Gorgias, the scientist Anaxagoras, the political theorist Protagoras, the mathematician Theodorus from Cyrene, and the orator Lysias (a permanent resident whose family came from Sicily). 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 first was with the Persians in 490 and 480, and the second with the Spartans, the Athenians’ rivals for domination of the Greek world, during the long Peloponnesian War of 431–404. The best witness to the earlier period is the dramatist Aeschylus, who fought the Persians himself and wrote the earliest surviving play, his Persians of 472, to celebrate the Greek victory. He died in the 450s, at the zenith of Athenian power, when the core political institutions of the democracy (the Assembly, Council, and law courts) were brought to full development.

the soldier Xenophon, the comic poet Aristophanes, and the philosopher Plato.

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

The magnificence of Aeschylus’s patriotic Persians is appropriate to the enormity of the events that took place during his lifetime. Such was the case with all his plays. He was a pioneering innovator who had effected a crucial transformation in the genre; his ancient biography records that he was the first tragedian “to make tragedy grander by means of nobler emotions. He decked out the stage and stunned his audience with brilliant visual effects, with paintings and machines, with stage props such as altars and tombs, with trumpets, ghosts, and Furies.”

Aeschylus’s language is also crammed with newly coined compound words, and experimental;

The scale of Aeschylus’s theatrical effects and poetry is reflected in the magnitude of his conception of history and of the universe. The underlying philosophy of all his plays is that the progress of civilization, although god-ordained, necessary, and magnificent, is bought at the cost of terrible suffering.

But it is always underpinned by a sense of inevitability, and a hope that the divine reason for the suffering will eventually be revealed:

When the Oresteia was performed in 458 BC, 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.

The reform of the Areopagus finally put the entire sovereign power (kratos) in the hands of the whole citizenry (demos). The nine city magistrates (archons)were selected annually by lot, from the citizen body, as a precaution against corruption; the ten generals were elected annually but could be repeatedly reelected. All officials were subjected to scrutiny at the end of their term of office. The generals had responsibility for more than just military affairs, although since all citizens and some metics were liable for military service, and the Athenians were almost always fighting somewhere in their empire, military matters featured large in all Athenians’ lives.

The democracy at its height gave even the least prosperous citizen an enviable set of rights and standard of living. Until 451, these privileges could be passed down by a citizen father to his legitimate sons, regardless of his wife’s provenance.

Pericles mounted a platform and delivered the most influential speech in Western history: Its praise of the democratic values and love of liberty for which that year’s crop of war dead had laid down their lives has informed countless significant orations since, including Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg.

“Our government,” said Pericles to the bereaved of all classes, “is called a democracy because it functions on behalf of the many and not on behalf of the few. Under our laws, everyone has the same entitlement as everyone else in private disputes. When it comes to social standing, we evaluate men according to their reputation, and their class background is less important than merit. Poverty is not a barrier, either, since a man who can do something to benefit the city is not prevented from doing so by coming from insignificant circumstances.”

Yet the Athenians’ pride in themselves, their city, and their empire was about to face its greatest challenge in history. By the next spring, when the Spartans began to invade...

fearsome plague that they caught from their water supplies, exacerbated by the close quarters in which they were confined behind the city walls. Neither doctors nor prayers to the gods could alleviate it. It was during this plague that Pericles and his legitimate sons died. Thucydides, who was one of the few to con...

People who were healthy were suddenly afflicted by powerful waves of heat in their heads, and their eyes became red and inflamed. The insides of their mouths, the throat and tongue, became instantly covered in blood, and their breath smelled unnatural and foul. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, and then the pain descended into the chest, with a hacking cough. When the disease settled in the gut, it caused a serious upset, with discharges of every type of bile to which doctors have given a name, and acute misery. Most victims retched unproductively, with violent spasms, some for a short period and some for much longer. The surface of the body was not particularly hot, nor pale, but very red and livid, with eruptions of small boils and ulcers. But internally the sense of burning meant that patients could not tolerate clothing or linen even of the very lightest description, but could only bear being stark naked. What they really wanted to do most was to hurl themselves into cold water, and some of those who were ill but not being looked a...

Aristophanes, more than twenty years Socrates’ junior, was fascinated by his ideas, writing an entire comedy about them, Clouds, first produced in 423 BC.

The swiftest way for a modern reader to grasp the contours of the Spartan myth as it circulated in antiquity, and informed the Renaissance, is to read Plutarch’s engaging Life of Lycurgus, the original Spartan lawgiver. But this exercise, alas, will not reveal how much of Plutarch’s colorful mirage is based on fact. Plutarch, who was not even from the Peloponnese, worked centuries after Sparta’s ascendancy, at a more peaceful time, when classical Sparta had become a nostalgic theme park for Roman tourists. Plutarch admits that nothing is actually known about Lycurgus. So how much did the Spartans themselves contribute to their own mirage, whether deliberately or unconsciously? And if we dissect the mirage carefully, can it bring us anywhere near the truth?

The name of the council at Sparta, gerousia,

The gerontes were the judges in capital offenses.

birth by the elders. Weaklings were immediately exposed. Xenophon’s Constitution of Sparta supplies further details: At seven years old, a Spartiate boy joined the public education system and lived with other boys. He was subjected to an austere lifestyle and arduous training, aimed at creating excellent soldiers with a developed sense of shame and obedience. They were in the control of a paidonomos, a Spartiate who could call on selected young men. They carried whips and administered the punishments he ordained. But any Spartiate could punish other men’s sons if he saw fit. The boys were also encouraged to steal food, since it was felt to make them resourceful and aggressive, but if they were caught they were punished. Between the ages of twenty and thirty the Spartiates were in an intermediate position. They could grow their hair long but still slept in a state dormitory, were not yet allowed to hold office and probably not to attend meetings of the Assembly. The three hundred best soldiers in each year at the end of this period were selected as the crack troops for the army. Spartiates over thirty were expected to fight until they were sixty and continue to exercise appropriately; gymnastics were compulsory. The penalty for refusing to go to war or for desertion was death. Some rules are so odd that they are likely to be true—for example, that Spartiates were not allowed to carry a light around in the dark, to ensure that they remained on high alert permanently.

perioikoi, “dwellers-around,” who were nominally free but, in ways not well understood, subject to the hereditary Spartiates. The third class were the slaves—helots. They were said originally to have been the free inhabitants of a place called Helos who had been conquered and enslaved. Later, the Spartans also conquered Messenia and added the Messenians to the helots. The helots did all the agricultural labor and had to hand over a sizable portion of the proceeds: Tyrtaeus compares them to donkeys, “oppressed with great burdens, grimly compelled to produce for their masters half of the

fruits of their field.” They belonged to the state rather than to any individual Spartiate; only the state could emancipate helots, and it occasionally did so, for example as a reward for loyal conduct during war.

The life of the helot was wretched. Each Spartiate warrior was responsible for disciplining the helots who worked the land belonging to him, and this arrangement resulted in humiliating and intimidating practices. Helots had to wear a rough uniform of a dogskin cap and leather tunic, and it was laid down that they “should be beaten a fixed number of strokes annually, besides any offence they committed, so that they would never forget that they were slaves.” Moreover, if they started to look too physically strong, they were executed and a fine imposed on their master. The Spartiates even had a ritual whereby the ephors annually reenacted the conquest of Laconia by declaring war on the helots, in order to remove a...

rectangular formation known as the phalanx, with the best fighters standing on the front and the back lines. The front line stared the enemy’s front line full in their frightening helmeted faces.

Alexander III, usually known as Alexander the Great.

They were the last in the long line of kings from the same family who had ruled Macedonia for centuries and were known as the Argeads because they said they had originally come from Argos.

But before their dynasty disappeared, they taught the Greeks to trade in big ideas. Macedonians went farther east than any Greeks before them. They gave the Greeks the idea of a world empire. They built the best cavalry that Greece had ever produced and developed the technology of siege warfare, p...

Alexander I’s descendant Philip II, over a century and a half later, had