by Kevin Reilly
Neither Hindus nor Buddhists sought political identities. People identified themselves by lineage, varna, jati, or religious community but not city, state, or territory. Religious communities could function isolated in the forest or in a monastery within the city, but these were separate communities. Buddhist holy sites attracted pilgrims or worshippers but rarely settlers, and they did not become reasons for building a city. Indian cities lacked public squares and neighborhood meeting places. In these respects, Indian culture was different from that of Greek culture, with its public market (or agora), acropolis with religious temples, and public theaters, walks, and monuments.
Greece
The Hellenes . Whether the Bronze Age Mycenean palaces were overrun by starving peasants, northern invaders, or the Sea People who destroyed Ugarit around 1200 BCE, there followed a century of cooler temperatures and a longer period of population decline sometimes called “the dark ages.” From 1100 BCE to about 700 BCE, even writing may have been lost. The tribes that revived or reinvigorated writing in the seventh century did so with the aid of a borrowed alphabet and in one of the earliest examples of their new self-identity called themselves “Hellenes.”
The settlement of Iron Age Greece was probably much like that of India. People settled into villages; towns became cities. But in Greece, lineage identities did not hold as strongly as they did in India. The impact of strangers and foreigners took a greater toll. Eventually, territorial sovereignty, the authority of the state, or the law of the land replaced the authority of the tribe or lineage group.
Clans into Citizens . In some sense, all of world history may be summarized as the process of turning clans into citizens, families into friends, and relatives into residents. And urbanization—the need to share an environment with strangers—is a long-term cause of that transformation. But it did not happen everywhere or at the same pace; indeed, it has still not happened fully even today. India today is a territorial state in which everyone must obey the laws of the land. But in India throughout the classical age, territorial sovereignty was constrained. The growth of cities weakened lineage attachments, but because people also thought of themselves in terms of varna, jati, guild, and religious affiliation, Indian cities did not create new identities as anonymous subjects, neighbors, or public-spirited citizens.
Greek cities created citizens. Sumerian cities had begun the process but were then conquered by Akkadian and Babylonian empires. Later Babylonians under Assyrian rule developed a particular civic identity in the seventh century. But for the first time, at least since the Sumerians, an entire nation of people—the speakers of Greek—developed a system in which civic identity was the core identity. In The Constitution of Athens, Aristotle tells us how the Athenians accomplished this about 500 BCE. He tells us that the tribal leader Cleisthenes ended a system of alternating rule by the heads of the leading tribes by creating artificial tribes that were groups of neighbors rather than relatives and by making these artificial tribes the basic political units of Athens. Further, each of the 10 new tribes was composed of city, country, and coastal people so that each tribe would have an identity not only with its particular neighborhood but also with the larger Athenian city-state. Finally, all were to take on these new affiliations as their new names, to be passed on to their children and descendants. Aristotle’s description was probably more ideal than reality, but it underscores how complete the transition from kinship to citizenship was to become.
The Polis and Greek Religion . The Greek system of territorial sovereignty was based on the polis, which we translate as “city-state.” But the polis was much more than a city surrounded by enough farm and pasture to constitute a self-governing state. The polis meant raising politics above all else: not above the people but above the tribes, above kings, and even above the gods.
The Greeks were not irreligious. They worshipped the gods. But Greek cities paid homage to their particular patron deities, whose statue was placed high above the city on the hill of the Acropolis and adorned on special feast days for all to see. The temple of Aphrodite looked over Corinth, Zeus and Athena over Argos, and Athena over Athens. Many cities also had sanctuaries to the nurturing of Demeter or sanatoriums to the healing of Asclepius, and Greeks from all cities came together to listen to the Oracle at Delphi, honor Apollo at Delos, or pay homage to Zeus at Olympia.
Public Spaces and Public Dramas . Each city crowded around a large public meeting place, the agora, part market, part public square, and part promenade, where one came as much for gossip and amusement as for buying and selling. Around the agora were temples, covered markets, a gymnasium, shrines, public buildings, and perhaps a law court or theater. Every city of any size had a theater, a large concave, rock-inlaid tier of seats carved out of a hillside, facing a stage. There they saw the great dramas of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles and the comedies of Aristophanes. There they recalled the patriotism of their fathers in the war with Persia in 480 BCE as depicted in Aeschylus’s The Persians:
Come, O ye sons of Greeks,
Make free your country; make your
children free,
Your wives, and fanes of your ancestral
gods,
And your sires’ tombs! For all we now
contend!4
On other occasions, they gathered in these or similar assemblies to discuss the business of their polis or debate matters as weighty as war.
Freedom and Law . Freedom for these Greeks meant self-government and the rule of law, not individual liberty. The historian Herodotus imagined a dialogue between the Spartan Demaratus and Xerxes, the king of Persia, on the eve of the battle memorialized by Aeschylus above. The circumstances were extraordinary. Demaratus, a former king of the Spartans spurned by his people, had gone over to the Persian enemy, becoming a trusted confidant of Xerxes. When the Persian king asked if the Greeks, outnumbered a thousand to one, would surrender, Demaratus said they would fight until the last man because “they will not under any circumstances accept terms from you that will mean slavery for Greece; . . . They are free—yes—but not entirely free; for they have a master, and that master is Law, which they fear much more than your subjects fear you.”5
Greeks defined themselves as free men under the rule of law. Their self-government, they believed, separated themselves from all the empires around them. Herodotus also tells us that one of Xerxes’ most trusted and fearless allies, Artemisia, advised the Persian king that all his vast armies from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and the Mediterranean were inferior to the Greeks because the Greeks were their own masters. “Good masters have poor servants,”6 Artemisia told Xerxes. And since Xerxes was “the best master in the world,” he had a “miserable lot” of allies.
Greek success against the Persians, the largest empire in the world at the end of the sixth century BCE, lay with the organization of the polis and the citizen militias that trained continually and enlisted every citizen in time of war. The classical Greek military formation, the phalanx, in which each soldier moved in unison, protected each neighbor with a large shield, and taught discipline, coordination, and mutual responsibility. Citizens who could not afford the expense of arms for the phalanx learned to fight in unison as rowers on the naval battering rams called triremes, where 170 oars touched the sea simultaneously to the beat of a shrill pipe.
Law and War between States . In the decades after the Greek defeat of the Persians in 480 BCE, the Athenians created a navy of hundreds of such ships that they allied with the smaller navies of other Greek city-states in the Delian League. At first, each city-state had a vote in the league council that met in neutral territory at the temple of Apollo on the island of Delos. After the Persian threat seemed to wane, some Athenian allies sought to withdraw from the league. But the alliance was too important to Athens as the dominant power. Gradually, Athens turned the league into an instrument of the Athenian Empire, building the membership to more than 100 while preventing withdrawals, moving the treasury and council to Athens, and dire
cting the league into the coming struggle with Sparta and its allies in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE).
Sparta was a very different city-state from Athens. While Athens was a commercial and maritime democracy, Sparta was a land-based, aristocratic, militarized city-state. The Spartan ruling class consisted of full-time soldiers, enlisted until the age of 60, living a hard, physical “Spartan” life made affordable by a class of conquered “helots” who grew their daily bread. When the Spartan Demaratus told the Persian Xerxes that Greeks would die for freedom and the law, he did not mean personal freedom but the freedom of the Greek state, and he did not mean the rights of citizens but the rule of law. In that regard, the Spartans were not that different from most Athenians.
The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta was provoked by Sparta, but the longer-term cause, according to Thucydides, the Athenian participant and historian, was “the power of Athens” and the fear that such power engendered among the Spartans. The long war raged not only in the Peloponnese Peninsula, the home of Sparta, and throughout the rest of Greece but also in the waters of the Mediterranean and the Bosporus and in the cities of Sicily, North Africa, and what is today eastern Turkey. Both Athenians and Spartans had numerous opportunities to accept a peace, but the democratic forces of Athens and the proud ruling fathers of Sparta would have none of it. Finally, the end came for Athens in 404 BCE, when its navy was annihilated by Persian ships sailing for Sparta.
Laws of Nature . The idea of the rule of law may have guided the development of Greek science as much as politics. Greek philosophers looked for laws of nature that regulated the natural world in the same way that human laws regulated the social world. This idea of nature as a separate realm that could be understood by human reason was probably new in history. Earlier civilizations had solved particular scientific problems. The Mesopotamians recorded enough information about the positions of the sun, moon, and stars that they were able to predict new moons and possibly eclipses. The Egyptians recorded the daily movements of the star Sirius, which seemed to predict the rise of the Nile River. But this was pattern recognition from endless lists, a systematic activity undertaken by priests or scribes on behalf of the king.
The Greeks were the first to pose and attempt to answer questions about nature and the universe. Without regard to a particular problem and without the prodding of political authority, individuals like Thales as early as the sixth century tried to answer such questions as the basic ingredients of all matter. Some, like Thales, thought that it was water; others believed that everything was made of tiny particles, which they called atoms. The earliest such thinkers were Ionian Greeks. In the sixth century, Ionians had long lived on the Asian mainland in what is today eastern Turkey but was then part of the Persian Empire, and some had already migrated to Athens. As the richest city-state in the fifth century, Athens drew the best minds of the Mediterranean, but Athens did not always provide the best environment for speculative thought.
In some respects, the Persians were more supportive of free inquiry. The Persian Empire may have been the first in world history to accept the different religions and cultures of its many subject peoples. Consequently, the empire did not repress the speculative thought of Thales and the Ionian natural philosophers. By contrast, when Anaxagoras, an Ionian mathematician and astronomer, brought Ionian scientific ideas to Athens about 480 BCE, he was imprisoned for declaring that the sun and moon were not gods but only rocks like the earth. Even the great Athenian philosophers, Socrates and Plato, preferred to think of the basic ingredient of things in ethical rather than material terms. Eventually, however, the work of the Ionians prevailed in Athens. They developed logical formulas, laws of geometry, trigonometry, and higher mathematics. Astronomers understood that the earth and moon revolved around the sun, computed accurate sizes and distances for these bodies, and not only predicted eclipses but also understood why they occurred.7 Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine, speculated about arteries and veins, practiced dissections, diagnosed illnesses, and bequeathed the “Hippocratic oath” of physicians to do no harm. A modern historian of science suggests that the Greek struggle to discover truths of nature was a by-product of the intense debates in the law courts and assembly. In the competitive give-and-take of Greek public life, “it was dissatisfaction with merely persuasive arguments used there that led some philosophers and mathematicians to develop their alternative, to capture the high ground,” with incontrovertible truths “that would silence the opposition once and for all.”8
Athenian Democracy . Most of the Greek city-states were self-governing territorial states ruled by law, though some were ruled by kings, aristocrats, or even tyrants periodically. Few, however, were democracies, and Athens was the most democratic of all: in some ways more democratic than modern democracies. Some Greeks feared that democracy might lead to mob rule. Socrates and his student Plato, whose dialogues are our only written record of the thoughts of Socrates, believed that only philosophers should rule. In a famous passage in Plato’s Republic, the Philosopher suggests that most people are like denizens in a cave who take the reflected light on the wall for the only reality. Most Athenians, however, prided themselves on their democracy.
The level of participation of citizens in government decision making was far higher than it is today. Citizens participated in a number of ways. First they came together in the Assembly to discuss public issues, debate proposals, and pass laws. The Assembly was therefore the equivalent of our Congress, and all citizens were legislators. Second, as members of one of the 10 tribes, citizens were chosen by lot to serve on the Athenian Council of 500, 50 members of which were again chosen by lot each month to administer the departments of government. From those 50, one citizen was chosen by lot each day to be Athenian president and chair of the Assembly. The turnover—and the resulting level of participation—was staggering by modern standards. One wonders how they got anything done and where they found so many able people. Since they accomplished a great deal and kept a relatively constant course, the answer must be that citizenship was a constant preparation. The prospect of being suddenly selected by lot to lead the country ensured their readiness, and the knowledge that they would be “president” for only a day ensured their commitment to the continuing interests of the larger community.
In addition to choosing their governors by lot, the Athenians also had elective offices. As the statesman Pericles put it,
It is true that we are called a democracy, because the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition.
We might find it strange, however, that one of the most prestigious offices that Athenians chose to elect was that of general. Each tribe elected a general each year, and the group formed a College of Generals who were responsible for military strategy in time of war. Perhaps in a world of citizen soldiers, military leadership was considered a widely available civic talent rather than a specialized skill. Pericles, the most famous statesman of Athens in the mid-fifth century, was able to exert enormous influence by virtue of his election as general 15 years in a row, including the early years of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta.
Athens City Limits . Citizenship in the ancient world was severely limited by modern standards. Even in Athens, women, foreigners, slaves, and former slaves were excluded from citizenship. Although estimates vary, slavery may have been pervasive, especially within the city. Many poorer Athenians were also sent to the numerous city-state colonies that Athenians settled throughout the Mediterranean. The resulting Athenian Empire put Athenians on an almost constant war footing. In a famous funeral oration marking the death of Athenian young men early in the Peloponnesian Wa
r, Pericles urged his listeners to be proud of their sacrifice:
I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them, and who, if ever they failed in an enterprise, would not allow their virtues to be lost to their country, but freely gave their lives to her as the fairest offering which they could present at her feast.
The rhetoric of patriotic sacrifice, familiar to the modern ear if generally limited to wartime and Memorial Day, was first voiced in classical Greece. One of its roots was, oddly, democracy—at least a democracy that required slaves and colonies. But another root may have been the city-state itself: so numerous in the ancient Mediterranean that they were bound to rub up against each other, even if there were no Persian Empire to settle disputes. And on a deeper level, patriotic sacrifice may have been the logical conclusion of territorial sovereignty. What greater power could the state command over the tribal patriarch or the mother of a family than the power to take away their sons forever? What greater defeat over the lineage system than to not only gain the acceptance of the grieving parents but also win their pride?
No society has existed very long without a means for turning some people into soldiers. The Persian Empire raised armies from the provincial governors, satraps, who received crown lands in return for troops. Classical India designated a hereditary population for military service and governance. The classical Hinduism of the Bhagavad Gita justified the sacrifice and killing by those whose varna was fighting. All ancient (and modern) societies purchased allies and used mercenaries. But the territorial state, especially as epitomized by fifth-century Athens, made the citizen army a source of new life as well as a new source of death.