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

by Edith Hall

The Macedonians took competitiveness (the seventh of the characteristics I believe defined the ancient Greeks) to literally cutthroat levels. This started at home in the family. The Macedonian elite consisted of dominating individuals who understood intuitively how to acquire, maintain, and increase their power. Philip and Alexander, like all Macedonian rulers, never hesitated to use ruthless violence, even against family and associates. The general acceptance of polygamy, with several wives or concubines producing rival claimants to be heirs, heightened the competitive ethos. Macedonian history is a complex saga of internal struggle within dominant clans. Different factions, often supporting half-brothers born to the king, attempted to outmaneuver one another; rival wives and children were regarded as disposable. Alexander’s mother, Olympias, may have conspired to kill Philip’s “other woman,” Eurydice, along with her child or children, after Philip was killed by his own bodyguard. She may even have conspired in her husband’s assassination. The internal competition for power in Macedon was deeply entrenched. There was a general consensus that this system ensured the continuing strength of the kingdom on the principle of survival of the fittest.

Raised on rivalry between wives, between siblings and half-siblings, between dynastic families and warlords, it is hardly surprising that Philip and Alexander III competed in power first with the ancient city-states of Greece and then with the Persian king himself. The problem inherent in the Macedonians’ love of competition was that—at least from the moment that Philip became king in 359 BC—they were never satisfied with what they had already conquered. With their eyes always on the next rung of the ladder, they often forgot to look after the rungs they had already occupied. This hazard is most clearly seen in the enigmatic figure of Alexander, whose extraordinary conquests and permanent absence destabilized and impoverished both his home district of Macedonia and the rest of mainland Greece. His death left all the Greeks and all the peoples formerly under the Persian Empire in a state of anarchy, vulnerable to the mass destruction caused by the Wars of the Successors. Their descendants continued to murder each other, as well as intermarry, for several centuries, until the Romans annexed each one of their kingdoms in succession in the second and first centuries BC.

Both Philip and Alexander were able to compete and win hands-down on the world stage because they had the money to fund military campaigns and to import world-class brainpower—not only leading engineers and admirals but the philosopher Aristotle, mentor to Alexander.

Philip always led from the front in battle, and he incurred many injuries, including the loss of his right eye at the siege of Methone in 354 BC. But the Macedonian legend begins in 338 BC, at the battle of Chaeronea. On a plain beneath Mount Parnassus, Philip defeated the venerable city-states of Athens and Thebes, breaking the heart of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, who had spent years warning his compatriots that the Macedonians were coming. Philip’s son Alexander, at the age of only eighteen, displayed courage and skill in combat.

capital city of Pella.

satrap

The seminal ancient account of Alexander’s death occurs in the work of the Sicilian Greek historian Diodorus. Diodorus relates that, although soothsayers were instructing Alexander to perform grand sacrifices, he was distracted by his retinue of official “Friends,” an inner circle of trusted lieutenants, and joined a carousal in honor of his ancestor Heracles. Although the Greeks normally diluted their wine with water, that night Alexander drank it undiluted, and (as often) in far too great a quantity.

Alexander did no favors to his homeland in fighting far away for so long. He disastrously depleted Macedonian manpower. His regent Antipater and his indomitable mother, Olympias, conducted an exhausting power struggle that dominated court life. Macedonian rule did not benefit the Greeks of the Corinthian League much, if at all. They simply installed garrisons in most of the city-states they ruled in the Peloponnese, or at least near

enough to keep the local inhabitants sufficiently intimidated not to rebel. On many occasions Alexander was wiping out other Greeks, employed by the Persians as mercenaries. The lack of interest in Greece and the Greeks themselves is a factor in questions concerning Alexander’s character and motivations, one of the great conundrums of history.

crucial factor in his achievements was money. Under Philip, the disposable income of the Macedonian monarchy had increased massively. He developed and kept under his family’s control a new mining program, exploiting the natural resources of gold and silver around his domain. He received as much pure annual profit from the mines as a thousand talents.

Yet of all the brilliant men who helped Macedonia conquer the world, the most important was Aristotle, tutor and inspiration to both Alexander and his confidant, Hephaestion. Aristotle raised the bar on intellectual inquiry in a way that still profoundly affects science, literature, philosophy, and political theory. It is difficult to imagine a more formidable and cosmopolitan source of support available to Alexander. Aristotle came from Stagira, in northern Greece, originally a colony established by Ionian Greeks from the island of Andros in the seventh century. Stagira had been strategically more important than its size might suggest, and had seen a variety of conquerors. Xerxes occupied it during his invasion of Greece. It was a member of the Delian League and thus allied with Athens, but it withdrew from the league in 424 and had then sided with Sparta. Aristotle’s birth occurred during the reign of Philip’s father, Amyntas III. Stagira was dominated by its increasingly mighty neighbor to its north and east and was indeed destroyed by Philip in 348, when he and Aristotle were both in their thirties. Aristotle was an almost exact contemporary of Philip, who was born just two years after him, in 382. Since Aristotle’s father was physician to Philip’s father, King Amyntas, it is inevitable that the two boys, Philip and Aristotle, knew each other well from an early age.

As a youth Aristotle traveled to Athens to study with Plato at the Academy. He stayed for twenty years. Much of his work can be read as a response to Plato’s ideas, although the differences are significant. Aristotle left Athens in about 348, at the same time Philip destroyed Stagira. He traveled in Lesbos and Asia Minor but in 343 took up the appointment of tutor to the young Alexander. It was not until eight years later, in 335, when Alexander had succeeded Philip and already taken control of Athens, that Aristotle returned there to found his Lyceum and, it is thought, write most of his numerous treatises. For eight of Alexander’s most important years, therefore, he was in constant and intimate dialogue with the famous thinker. Aristotle’s contribution to intellectual history, not only to Western philosophy, is incalculable. His Metaphysics, in particular, was instrumental in founding Arabic philosophy (falsafa) in the ninth century AD. It elicited a massive commentary by the Spanish Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), himself studied keenly in the West. There was no constituent of the universe in which Aristotle was not interested, whether it was empirically discernible to the senses or beyond the perceptible surface of things. All Aristotle’s writings are unified by the methods of reasoning he developed, expressed in a group of works on logic that later ancient philosophers assembled and named his Organon (Instrument). The contents of these works monopolized the ent...

In the case of a kitchen table, its material cause is the matter out of which it is made (wood), its formal cause is the shape that makes it a table and not something else made of wood, its efficient cause is the agent who shaped the wood (the carpenter), and its final cause is the purpose, end, or goal (telos) for which it was made: providing something for people to put their ...

Aristotle was as interested in culture as he was in nature. His handbooks on rhetoric and tragic poetry analyze their constituents but have an ethical component and are prescriptive as well as descriptive. They can improve the output of the trainee public speaker or tragedian partly because they do not let him forget the goal at which his art is aiming: persuasion in the case of rhetoric, but in the case of tragic theater, guiding the audience to understand painful matters better.

But it was probably Aristotle’s works on ethics and political theory that Alexander found most helpful. In his two books on ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle posits happiness (eudaimonia) or “living well” as the fundamental goal in human life. Eudaimonia is an activity rather than an abstract state, and the function of human life is to perform this activity. Living well is equivalent to living rationally, in an examined and carefully considered way, in accordance with virtue (arete). Aristotle’s political theory was an extension of this ethical position to the whole community or city-state (polis), since happiness is the goal of the city-state and the reason for its existence. In his Politics, he notoriously argued for the superiority of Greeks and their natural right to rule other peoples and to enslave them through warfare, a political philosophy that matched Alexander’s aspirations perfectly.

When Alexander died, Perdiccas became regent for the whole empire, with Antipater in control of Greece. Antipater became guardian of Alexander’s infant son by Roxana. After machinations, Antipater’s son Cassander replaced him. Cassander disposed of Olympias and had the boy heir and Roxana murdered. Yet amazingly, Cassander’s twenty years on the throne of Macedonia (316–297 BC) were relatively peaceful and prosperous. We must thank Cassander for one of the most famous ancient visual images, since he commissioned from the painter Philoxenos the picture of Alexander in battle against Darius III of Persia that almost certainly was imitated in the exquisite “Alexander mosaic” from Pompeii: Alexander, with determined jaw and staring eyes, charges on his chestnut warhorse toward the terrified Darius, gesturing helplessly in his chariot.

Alexander’s most trusted general, Ptolemy, concentrated on making himself king of Egypt and founded the long-standing Ptolemaic dynasty there

Perdiccas was assassinated by his own officers within two years. One of the assassins was Seleucus, who became Seleucus I Nicator, or Seleucus the Victor. Although originally given the satrapy of Babylon, which was wealthy but unimportant in military terms, Seleucus took years to achieve dominance there. But by 302 he had taken control of the eastern conquests of Alexander as far as the Indus Valley. He founded ten cities in what are now Turkey and Syria. They included Seleucia Pieria on the coast as a basis for naval operations, and Antioch as the center of power. Although he failed to extend this empire westward or to recover Macedon and Greece themselves, he founded a dynasty and an empire boasting a high level of Greek sophistication and culture that was to last until 63 BC.

Yet the most colorful descendant of Macedonian imperialists was Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus (134–63 BC), who made a concerted stand against the might of Rome. With the exception of Hannibal, Mithridates was the most intimidating foe the Romans ever faced. He was also a star of the eighteenth-century stage, the protagonist in operas by both Scarlatti and Mozart. The trajectory of his life was inherently dramatic. He came to power only after his father was poisoned and his mother plotted against him in favor of her other son. Mithridates expanded the Pontic empire to an unprecedented size, to encompass coastal regions adjoining the northern, eastern, and southern Black Sea and some of Anatolia. He was as formidable at sea as on land, maintaining a potent navy. At one point, during the first of the three Mithridatic wars in which he challenged the expanding Roman Empire (88–84 BC), he occupied Cappadocia as well as Asia Minor and had even established his authority as far west as Athens, which he ruled through a vassal magistrate.

Of mixed Persian and Macedonian descent, Mithridates exploited his hybridity to bolster his claim to be a new Greco-Persian unification hero. His name means “gift of Mithras,” and on his father’s side he claimed the Zoroastrian Darius I as ancestor; when it was strategically advisable, as in relation to some eastern tribes, he presented himself as Persian. On the other side, he claimed direct descent from Alexander the Great and took care to present himself as the heir to Alexander’s imperial mission as well. Like Alexander, he encouraged artists and coin designers to identify him with Dionysus, Heracles, and Perseus, along with his winged horse Pegasus; although Perseus was Greek as could be (he was held to have founded Mycenae), his name had led Xerxes to identify him as ancestor of the Persians hundreds of years before.

Menander

The surviving texts of Menander’s comedies were not discovered until the twentieth century, too late to exert a direct influence on Western culture equivalent to the other great names in ancient Greek literature. But the papyrus finds, especially the Dyskolos (Ill-tempered Man), have furnished substantiation of Menander’s claim to have founded the European “comedy of manners.”

the Hellenistic Greeks needed to conform to an autocratic monarchy, and in the process their rebellious streak was suppressed, along with at least some of their psychological candor. Fortunately, the Ptolemies fostered inquisitive and analytically minded individuals, provided their questions were not overtly political, and furnished them at the library with an ideal place to push at the limits of knowledge.

An earthquake and tsunami on July 21, AD 365, obliterated almost all Alexandria’s architecture. The earthquake began underwater near Crete. But soon afterward, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote,

“fearful dangers suddenly overspread the whole world, such as are related in no ancient fables or histories.” In Alexandria, the tremors and ensuing winds were so violent that large ships were spewed out by the sea and landed on rooftops. Most of the last visual remains of the Ptolemaic Greco-Egyptian dream city, home to the best minds and the greatest collection of books the world had ever seen, sank out of sight forever.

The inhabitants of the mainland Greek peninsula were forced to accept Roman dominion in the mid-second century BC. Under its last monarch, Perseus, the once glorious kingdom of Macedonia fell to Rome at the battle of Pydna in 168.

The events were narrated by the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, in his Library of World History. Diodorus accepted the inevitable rise of the Roman regime but had reservations about Roman culture and behavior. The ambivalence of his Greek contemporaries was crystallized in his work. His Library is peppered with formulaic praise of Roman virtues, yet between the lines it reveals another story. Consider his account of the punishment of Perseus, the last king of Macedonia, in Italy after his defeat. While the victorious Roman general Aemilius Paullus celebrates a triumph, The adversities faced by Perseus were so grave that his tribulations seem like the inventions in a novel. But despite them all, he still did not want to die. Before the Senate had made a decision as to how to punish him, one of the city magistrates had imprisoned him and his children at Alba. This prison is deep underground, smaller than a dining room, dark and foul-smelling from the large numbers of men it accommodated. They were men condemned for capital offenses, for at this time Alba was the jail where most who fell into this category

were imprisoned. Since so many of them were confined in such a small space, the miserable wretches began to look like animals, and since their food and everything else related to their bodily functions was disgustingly combined, t...

Two decades later, the Romans completed their conquest of Greece by annexing the Peloponnese.

In 146 BC the rebellious Achaean League, which had earlier striven for Greek autonomy under the magnificent “last of the Greeks,” the Arcadian military tactician Philopoemen, was overwhelmed by the Roman republican army at the battle of Corinth. The Romans obliterated the beautiful ancient port city, a long-standing symbol of Greek commerce, sea power, and alluring temple cults. Polybius, a historian from Arcadia who witnessed the aftermath of the destruction of Corinth, describes boorish Roman soldiers with such contempt for high culture that they threw masterpieces of Greek painting on the ground, including two world-famous pictures of Dionysus and Heracles, and used them as checkerboards. The career of Polybius, born in the late third century BC but surviving until he was over eighty, typifies the Greek attitude to Rome. He had nostalgia for the glory days of Greek freedom and a conviction that Greek culture was superior to all else. But any sentimental patriotism was leavened by an admiration for the Romans’ efficiency, a fascination with Roman history reflected in his brilliant account of the Punic Wars, by ties of affection with individual Roman friends, and by a desire for peace at almost any cost. Although his father was loyal to the Achaean League, Polybius was a soldier and a realist who appreciated the quality of the Roman army. During the conquest of Greece he had supported a policy of cooperation with (although not acquiescence to) Rome against Macedon. But in...

historical record. This soldier and administrator was also a wordsmith. His discussion of political constitutions helped shape the modern world by influencing the ideas of a series of seminal thinkers from Charles de Montesquieu to the Founding Fathers of the United States, especially John Adams. For of all the defining characteristics of the Greeks, in the Roman imperial centuries it was their prowess in both the spoken and the written word that came to full fruition.

Diodorus and Polybius were just two of an extraordinary group of intellectuals writing in Greek under Roman rule, including the biographer Plutarch and the Stoic Epictetus.

There is more than one kind of colonization, and cultural hegemony has more lasting effects than political dominance. As Diodorus put it, “it is by means of discourse alone that a man can gain ascendancy over many.”

koine Greek was thus the official language. Anyone who wanted to build a business or a career in civic administration needed to speak it competently.

The most stellar was Galen (AD 129 to around AD 200), the ancient physician whose reputation is second only to that of Hippocrates. Galen’s career offers a vivid route into Roman imperial culture. He was born into a well-to-do Greek family in Pergamum, always one of the Greek cities of Asia most accommodating to Rome.

Aelius Aristides,

Pausanias invented travel writing.

What Pausanias did for Greece was done for the geography of the entire Roman Empire by Strabo, born farther east in the city of Amasia (in modern central north Turkey). The year Strabo was born, 63 BC, Amasia became part of the Roman Empire on the death of the defiant Pontic monarch Mithridates. Strabo supported the burgeoning project of Roman imperialism. But he never doubted that the giants on whose intellectual shoulders he stood were products of Greek, rather than Roman, culture. Strabo thought hard about the intellectual discipline of geography. He maintained that measuring the earth and ignoring the human population upon it was to overlook the wood for the trees. He insisted that geographers, while taking their departure from measurements of the world in its entirety, have a distinctive role. This is to explain our “inhabited world,” the oikoumene (from which we derive our word “ecumenical”). Strabo’s seventeen-book Geography thus conceived the discipline ahead of his time, moving through the whole world the Greeks and Romans knew, beginning at the Pillars of Heracles in the Straits of Gibraltar and advancing clockwise around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It explains the nature of peoples in the context of places they inhabited, from Ireland to India, Libya to the Caucasus.

Napoleon Bonaparte was sufficiently inspired by Strabo’s account of Egypt to invade it in 1798.

The last of this group of brilliant men from near the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor was the prodigious Greek philosopher Epictetus, originally a slave from Hierapolis in Phrygia. Epictetus brought to culmination the ethical program of Stoicism, perhaps the most beneficial contribution to human ethics made by classical antiquity.

The figure of the tyrant, the antitype of the Stoic wise man, dominates Epictetus’s writing, and the tyrant of whom he was thinking was Domitian.

He argued that because God (whom he calls “Zeus” or occasionally “the gods”) is benevolent and rational, he created human beings to be rational, too, and capable of rational actions if they use their impressions of the world reflectively. In fact, our minds are small parts of Zeus’s mind, and so our mental power is part of the power that runs the universe. We are accountable for our choices because we are free to make them and are capable of so doing. We seek through our choices to act to our own advantage, but since our own interests are part of a much larger system, we are able to see that, for example, choosing our own death can sometimes be the best decision. Stoics were famously prone to dignified suicide. For Epictetus, objects external to ourselves are neither unconditionally good nor unconditionally bad. The inner self is paramount, and externals are to be evaluated only in relation to the self. Epictetus understands that happiness is achievable only if humans are not dependent for their happiness on wealth or possessions or any other external phenomena. The emotions that make us miserable (fear, envy) are responses to the false idea that externals can make you happy. Equally false is the idea that the actions of another need

affect us detrimentally. However, this does not mean we should not make efforts on behalf of other people, especially family and close associates. Epictetus’s thought was so attractive in antiquity because he gave practical advice on how to cultivate the peace of mind that Stoic theory described in the abstract. His thought is compatible with taking part in public life and taking an active role in any community. It can help people without control over the external circumstances of their lives (slaves, the poor, persecuted critics of the emperor) to find maximum contentment within those circumstances. But it takes a long-term commitment to self-improvement, and reflection about perceptions and choices.

The most important thing is to slow down, absorb information carefully, and take time...

Epictetus has always been in tune with the American character and was recommended by both William Penn and Benjamin Franklin.

A more esoteric alternative to Stoicism was Epicureanism, a philosophy grounded in a materialist conception of the universe. Epicureans believed that we are all made of atoms, and come into creation and pass away as part of a universal cycle of agglomeration and dispersal. Epicureanism aimed to free people from fear, especially fear of death, by showing that all religion was superstition. Knowledge of the world and the self could facilitate a freedom from desire, anxiety, and pain and thus true tranquillity (hedone, from which we derive our word hedonism, although with a debased signification). Epicureanism was voguish among Roman literati, who sought out experts from the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire

Plutarch (AD 46–120).

Plutarch’s Lives

Our ideas of Pericles, Alexander the Great, Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesar, of the Gracchi and Spartacus, of Coriolanus and Cato, owe more to Plutarch than to any other author.

Plutarch wrote about prominent Romans from history in the same way as he wrote about prominent Greeks. He used the method of writing “parallel lives,” comparing the lives of two figures, one of each ethnicity, who had experienced what struck him as similar careers. He compared, for example, the Greek orator Demosthenes and Cicero, the Roman lawyer and philosopher.