by Oswyn Murray
(Greek Historical Inscriptions no. 12 = 35F).
The Persian interest in agriculture is well known; the word ‘paradise’ entered the Greek language from Persian, where it described their great cultivated pleasure parks. In institutional terms, with his shrines at Branchidae, Delos and Delphi, Apollo was the greatest god of the Greeks; but he did not wield the power of Marduk, Bel or Jehovah. It may be that the Persian attitude helped to persuade Delphi that Apollo stood to gain much from a Persian conquest; but there was no simple connection between his priesthood and the political elite in any city. As elsewhere the Persians installed or encouraged single native rulers in the Greek cities, whom the Greeks called tyrants: tyranny was fast becoming an outmoded institution, which was now identified with oriental despotism. Enlightened though the Persian style of imperialism was, it failed to fit the Ionian situation.
At the end of Cambyses’ reign there was a usurpation by a Median pretender claiming to be a son of Cyrus; but Darius with the help of Persian nobles seized power, and was faced with widespread rebellions. ‘The Lie waxed great in the country, both in Persia and in Media and in the other provinces’. ‘Saith Darius the King: This is what I did by the favour of Ahuramazda in one and the same year after that I became king. Nineteen battles I fought; by the favour of Ahuramazda I smote them and took prisoner nine kings.’ He recorded his ascent to power in the great trilingual inscription cut into the cliff face at Behistun 225 feet above the main caravan route from Baghdad to Teheran, where only the god could read it and only time deface it; it is even probable that it was on this occasion that Darius caused to be invented the script for writing Persian, which was only used in imperial inscriptions and could probably only be read by Ahuramazda.
By 520 Darius had reunited the empire, and embarked on a reorganization so extensive that it amounted to the creation of a new imperial system. The boundaries of the various satrapies or provinces were established and regular tribute was imposed for the first time (Herodotus 3.89–117 gives a remarkably accurate list, drawn undoubtedly from official Persian sources). The Persians began attacking the Aegean islands, destroying by treachery and invasion the tyranny of Polykrates of Samos, who had built up an important naval power since the fall of Sardis. Darius then invaded Europe, marching through Thrace, and calling on his Ionian vassals to support him with their navies in an attack on Scythia (about 514). According to Herodotus the campaign was not a success, and the king was only saved by the untimely loyalty of his Ionian navy, who were holding the bridge across the Danube which was his line of retreat.
It is true that in some respects the Persian empire opened up new possibilities for Greeks. The unification of Asia from the Persian desert to the Mediterranean made overland travel and trade far easier, and this may have been helped by the establishment of the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis, though it was primarily intended to serve the Persian imperial messenger service. But Ionian trade was essentially sea-borne. Skilled Greeks found their way to Susa, for instance the court doctor Demokedes of Croton, whose life story illustrates dramatically the opportunities and costs for such men. He had been physician to Polykrates of Samos, then served as public physician on Aegina for a state salary of a talent for the year; this was increased by Athens next year by a half, and the year after he returned to Polykrates for two talents. He arrived in Susa as a captive slave, and became physician to Darius, who sent him as a spy on a Phoenician ship to Greece and south Italy; here with local help, he jumped ship and escaped home to Croton, where to demonstrate his wealth he married the daughter of Milon, the Olympic wrestler and general (p. 204: Herodotus 3.129–38).
Ionians were also employed in numbers on the imperial buildings works at Pasargadae, Susa and Persepolis, as acknowledged experts in stonework. Ionian techniques in such details of Persian sculpture as drapery show that it is an amalgam of Greek craftsmanship with oriental style; rough paintings, graffiti and masons’ marks in Greek letters reveal Ionians at work. A trilingual building inscription of Darius at Susa demonstrates the international character of the work force:
The stone-cutters who wrought the stone, those were Ionians and Sardians. The goldsmiths who wrought the gold, those were Medes and Egyptians. The men who wrought the wood, those were Sardians and Egyptians. The men who wrought the baked brick, those were Babylonians. The men who adorned the wall, those were Medes and Egyptians.
(Darius Susa F. 45–55 in Kent Old Persian p. 144)
At Persepolis the treasury tablets of the early fifth century record the terms of service of these workmen; two mention Greeks. The workmen are in receipt of subsistence rations or silver in lieu, not true wages; the implication is that they are engaged on compulsory not voluntary labour.
The opportunities offered by the Persian empire had little economic relevance to the Ionian cities. They had lost their outlets for mercenary service; trade must have been seriously disrupted, first by the Persian conquest of Egypt, and then by their advance into the Thracian and Black Sea area. The Ionians had not joined the great national rebellions of Darius’ accession; but in 499, on the occasion of an expedition against Naxos, under the instigation of Aristagoras tyrant of Miletus, they deposed their tyrants and revolted.
The course of the Ionian revolt is described in detail by Herodotus in books 5 and 6; the general tendency of his narrative is to trivialize and devalue the resistance of the Ionians, which he sees as doomed from the start. This is not the product of conscious bias; it is rather due to the difficulties of writing the history of a defeat on the basis of oral tradition. Victory has its own unity; the story is organized and improved by constant telling: society accepts gladly the duty to make coherent sense of the past. Defeat is an occasion for forgetting, for blame, for self-justification, and in the last resort for changing the values of society to make a virtue out of failure – the Ionians admit to being naturally weak, and most of them are ashamed of being Ionian (Herodotus 1.143); the emphasis on their lack of military spirit and their luxury is a self-created myth resulting from defeat. The problems for the oral historian of defeat were of course increased by the Greek belief in the importance of the agon: the loser loses not only the contest, but also all claim to respect in the eyes of himself and of others:
In back streets out of their enemies’ way, they cower.
(Pindar, p. 206)
In fact the Ionian revolt was remarkably successful. They raised most of the cities of the coast from the Hellespont to the south of Asia Minor; the Greek cities in Cyprus and much of Caria joined. From Greece itself they won Athenian and Eretrian help (‘the beginning of evils for Greeks and barbarians’: Herodotus 5.97), and together with them burned Sardis in a commando raid. But once mobilized the Persians were invincible on land; with Phoenician help they reconquered Cyprus: the siege mound at Paphos has produced a great quantity of arrowheads and of archaic sculpture scavenged from local monuments outside the city walls. Caria was subdued with rather more difficulty, and the Phoenician fleet was brought up. The sea was the only element where the Ionians might hope for success; in the fifth year of the revolt (494) on the island of Ladē off Miletus they mustered for the defence of the city – 353 triremes, manned by upwards of seventy thousand men; the largest contingents were 80 ships from Miletus, 100 from Chios and 60 from Samos. The Phoenicians were estimated at 600; the battle was lost amid excuses and recriminations. Miletus fell: the inhabitants were killed or enslaved, and though the city later revived, the harbour area was never rebuilt. The Sack of Miletus was the title of a famous tragedy by the Athenian playwright Phrynichos performed in 493/2: the author was fined for reminding the Athenians of the disaster.
The remaining operations were easy; but both Greeks and Persians learned from the revolt. The Persians ceased to rely on tyrants to control the cities; according to Herodotus they instituted ‘democracies’, but that is perhaps an exaggeration (6.42–3). They also recognized the danger of a free Greek world on the borders of their empire. Ionians had attempted to creat
e a unified command based on the religious league which met at the Panionion, and they had shown considerable ability in organizing and conducting inter-city operations; but after the disappearance of the unsatisfactory Aristagoras, they were unable to solve the problem of leadership effectively. These lessons were not lost on the mainland Greeks, who in the next few years became increasingly aware of the danger they were in.
One long term consequence of the pressure of the Persians from 546 onwards was the increased emigration westwards of Ionian communities and individuals. The second stage in Milesian thought is bound up with its transfer to the west; Herakleitos remained in Ephesus, but Xenophanes of Colophon and Pythagoras of Samos both went west, and it is significant that the first western philosopher, Parmenides, came from the Phocaean town of Elea. The further development of Ionian thought was marked by divergence. Xenophanes continued the rationalist tradition; and Herakleitos, despite his deliberately hieratic and opaque mode of expression, was still concerned with problems of physical change, especially in relation to the properties of fire and the conflict which he saw as basic to physical flux. He also attacked the methods of other thinkers and their inability to perceive a deeper level of reality: ‘much learning does not teach sense, or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras and Xenophanes and Hekataios’ (Frag. 40). Pythagoras himself was the founder of a mystical sect at Croton, which was also politically active and controlled a number of south Italian cities in the late archaic period, until its adherents were driven underground about 450. The sect was interested in mathematics and the mathematical proportions inherent in musical harmony; it practised asceticism and ritual silence, and possessed a complex hierarchy of initiations and various dietary tabus; many of these were related to the need to free the soul from the body, and purify it for the cycle of reincarnations which it must undergo. Some of Pythagoras’ ideas suggest the influence of the shamanistic culture of the Scythians in south Russia.
Parmenides is the first Greek philosopher whose thought survives intact, in a coherent series of quotations from his hexameter poem on the two Ways, the Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming. In the first he sought to destroy belief in the evidence of the senses and the reality of the world they perceive; in the Way of Seeming he postulated a revised cosmology which he claimed possessed the virtue of coherence, while denying it any higher status than a hypothesis. His speculations raised many fundamental questions related to the problem of knowledge, in a form which points forward both to the tradition of philosophical scepticism and to the transcendental idealism of Plato.
In social terms it is Xenophanes who sums up the experience of Ionia in the sixth century. Looking back from the relative calm of the west and the familiar context of the symposion, he asks the old Homeric questions, with one poignant addition:
So should you speak by the fire in the season of winter,
lying on a soft couch, full of food,
drinking sweet wine, chewing chick peas:
‘who are you, from where among men, how many years do you have, sir?
How old were you when the Mede arrived?
(Fragment 22 Diels-Kranz)
That was the event which changed the world.
XV
The Leadership of Greece: Sparta and Athens
THE SIXTH CENTURY was the age of the hoplite state; numerous cities passed through the stage of tyranny, to emerge with a constitution dominated by the hoplite class. Sparta was at the centre of this process, with her army of ‘equals’ proud of the virtues of the constitution which they called eunomia. Aristotle described the Spartan kingship as ‘a hereditary generalship for life’ (p. 162), and it is certainly true that the power of the kings was enhanced by war: the alliance of kings and hoplites produced an aggressive city intent on expansion.
By 600 the Messenians were subdued, and Sparta sought to move northwards into Arcadia; the aim was yet more land. Under kings Leon and Agesikles (about 580–560) she consulted Delphi and was told:
You ask for Arcadia? You ask too much, I shall not give it to you; there are many acorn-eating men in Arcadia who will keep you out. But I do not grudge you: I will give you Tegea to dance with stamping feet, and her fair plain to measure out with the line.
(Herodotus 1.66)
The Spartans marched out carrying the chains to enslave the men of Tegea, but were defeated and found themselves enslaved, dancing the land with different step; Herodotus saw the chains from this Battle of the Fetters, hanging in a temple at Tegea.
Under the next kings, Anaxandrides and Ariston (about 560–520) a different policy emerged. Again on advice from Delphi, Sparta acquired by stealth from Tegea the alleged bones of the hero Orestes, son of Agamemnon, and gave them public burial in Sparta; thereafter she was successful against Tegea (Herodotus 1.67–8). The story describes more than a mere ceremony of the ‘evocation’ or calling away of an enemy’s divine protection. Like the attempt of Kleisthenes of Sicyon to discredit the Argive hero Adrastos, it was a conscious expression of foreign policy (p. 154): the Spartans were claiming the leadership of the Peloponnese which had once belonged to Agamemnon, thereby asserting a right to Achaean leadership and subordinating their Dorian claims. It was part of a general appropriation of Agamemnon, who was moved to Sparta from Mycenae by the poet Stesichoros: his work clearly reflects contemporary Spartan interest in the pre-Dorian world of Menelaus, Helen and her two divine brothers, Kastor and Polydeukes (Pollux), protectors of Sparta. In the next generation King Kleomenes, ordered by the priestess to leave the temple of Athene on the Athenian Acropolis on the grounds that ‘Dorians are not permitted to enter here’, replied ‘Woman, I am no Dorian, but an Achaean’ (Herodotus 5.72).
This claim seems to mark the beginning of Sparta’s shift from conquest and enslavement to alliance. One detail from the treaty with Tegea may survive; for according to Aristotle an old inscription stood on the banks of the river Alpheus, in which the Tegeans agreed to drive Messenians out of the country and ‘not to make them good’ (Plutarch Greek Questions 292b). Aristotle thought this phrase was a euphemism for killing, but it must rather mean ‘not to admit them to political rights’.
The Achaean charter myth was only one aspect of the new policy, for it is in this period that Sparta began to acquire her reputation for expelling tyrants: the eunomia of which the hoplites were so proud was being exported. The lists of deposed tyrants given by ancient sources (Plutarch Moralia 859, and an anonymous semi-literate papyrus of unknown character about 150 BC: F.G.H. 105 Frag. 1) ignore chronology and are little more than attempts to fill out the tradition which they reflect; but the fact remains that during the sixth century tyranny disappeared in the Peloponnese, and was replaced by a group of states banded together apparently to defend their hoplite constitutions. Argos was the only major city to hold aloof from this alliance; her traditional emnity with Sparta was continued in intermittent fighting for the eastern coast of the Peloponnese. By the mid sixth century Sparta had annexed the island of Cythera and was moving up through the borderland of Kynouria into the territory of Thyrea: in 546 there was a battle for this plain in which each side put forward 300 picked men; the Battle of the Champions ended with two Argives and one Spartan alive. Since the Argives had left the Spartan in control of the field, both sides claimed victory, and the Spartans won the succeeding battle.
By now Sparta was recognized as the strongest state in Greece, exchanging diplomatic presents such as her famous bronze cauldrons with eastern kings, and consulted by the old powers of the Mediterranean, who were threatened from Persia and anxious for Greek troops. She had relations with Croesus of Lydia and Amasis of Egypt; and Scythian ambassadors arrived in Sparta to teach Kleomenes to drink his wine neat (p. 207). Sparta failed to help Croesus, but had the temerity to send a ship to Ionia to warn Cyrus to leave the Greek cities alone (Herodotus 1.153). Shortly after 525 she was even willing to mount a major overseas expedition with Corinth, to expel the tyrant Polykrates of Samos. Herodotus gives various reasons for
this expedition (3.45ff); but it is likely to be connected both with Sparta’s anti-tyrant policy, and with the fact that Polykrates had recently changed sides at the time of Cambyses’ expedition against Egypt, to ally himself with Persia. The expedition failed, though Lygdamis of Naxos may have been deposed about this time. Such adventures were based on an inflated idea of the power of Sparta in relation to that of the great kings of the east, an illusion fostered by their advances to her as an equal.
The limits of Sparta’s power and the tensions inherent in Spartan society were demonstrated in the reign of her greatest king, Kleomenes (about 520–490). Spartan oral tradition sought to minimize his importance, claiming that he was ‘somewhat mad’ (Herodotus 5.42) and ‘did not rule for very long’ (5.48 – at least 28 years!); he was best forgotten because he infringed too much the principle of equality, came close to achieving personal tyranny, and even ended by trying to raise a helot revolt. The beginning of his reign was marked by a dispute over the succession, after which his half-brother Dorieus (‘the Dorian’ – his name perhaps signifying opposition to the Achaean policy) led a major expedition to establish a new city in Africa between Cyrene and Carthage; the expedition was attended with great publicity and attracted men from all Greece (though it lacked Delphic sanction); but it failed, and the settlers moved to south Italy and Sicily, where they were finally destroyed by rival Phoenician colonists: there was no longer room for new foundations.
Three episodes demonstrate the development of Kleomenes’ power in Sparta. The first is the overthrow of the tyranny of the Peisistratidai at Athens in 510. Herodotus gives a version of the events based on Alkmeonid family tradition, in which the Alkmeonidai, by their generosity (or bribery) at Delphi, won over the oracle, who persuaded the Spartans to attack their former ally (5.62–96); this story certainly plays down the importance of other aristocratic families in the fall of the tyranny (p. 274), and it also fails to account adequately for the Spartan action. Since the war of Alkaios the Athenians had possessions in the Bosporus area, at Sigeum in the Troad, and later in the Thracian Chersonese; the Peisistratidai through these possessions had connections with the Persian advance, which were strengthened when Hippias married his daughter to the son of the tyrant of Lampsacus about 513 (Thucydides 6.59); he also had hereditary ties with Sparta’s enemy Argos. But essentially for the Spartans the expedition was the next step in a process which had already led to the leadership of the Peloponnese: the league was to be extended beyond the Isthmus by the old means of overthrowing a tyranny and installing eunomia. A sea-borne expedition failed, and Kleomenes invaded with a large army. The Peisistratidai were prepared for a long siege, but their children were captured in the countryside, and they withdrew under a truce to Sigeum. The new government was however the reverse of ‘good order’: the revolution of Kleisthenes (p. 274) provoked a second invasion of Kleomenes at the head of a small force, which was defeated. This intervention may well have been a private affair; he next summoned the combined forces of the Peloponnese and Boeotia, apparently without telling his allies the aims of the expedition – the Peloponnesian army was still Sparta’s army. Just before battle at Eleusis the Corinthians withdrew, unwilling to fight their Athenian friends, and Kleomenes’ fellow king, Demaratos, declared himself against the expedition, which broke up. Two results followed: a rule was made that only one king could go out on an expedition; and the right of league members to be consulted on the use of their forces seems to have been recognized. For Kleomenes’ next move was to call a congress at which he presented the allies with the exiled tyrant Hippias, and proposed his restoration. Once again the Corinthians opposed intervention, and this direct reversal of traditional policy was rejected by the allies. This is the first episode in which any form of league organization can be discovered. The history of Spartan intervention in Athens demonstrates the dominance of Kleomenes over Spartan policy, and its limitations in the beginning of his conflict with his fellow king; it marks the failure of Sparta to extend her league beyond the Isthmus; finally the political troubles at Athens showed for the first time that eunomia was not a universal ideal.