The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  During the next fifteen years the wisdom of the great historians was proved right. Herodotus' old belief in 'pride before a fall' was promptly confirmed by Sparta's eclipse, as was Thucydides' shrewd perception that in inter-state relations, 'justice' is the plea of the weak when they lack the power to enforce their own interest. Despite the King's Peace of 3 86, the Spartans condoned gratuitous raids on Thebes and Athens. They also went northwards, by request, on an expedition to restore the endangered king of the Macedonians. Each move would return to haunt them. In 379 the Thebans threw out the garrison which the Spartans had imposed on them and turned democratic and fiercely anti-Spartan instead. By spring 377 the weakened Athenians were pleading justice and inviting Greek allies to join a new anti-Spartan 'Confederacy' which would avoid the perceived grievances of the Athenians' years of 'Empire'. The 'Confederacy' was a great suc­cess, and within two years more than seventy allies had joined it. As for the Macedonian king, his rule was restored, thanks to Sparta, but forty years later, first King Philip of Macedon, then Alexander the Great would be explicitly anti-Spartan; their diplomacy and cam­paigning would isolate Sparta even more in Greece. With hindsight, the Spartans ought to have ignored the Macedonians' pleas.

  No city-state in Greece wanted war for war's sake, and the Spartans' dominance caused their own downfall. A raid on the Piraeus had outraged Athens in the 370s and Spartan troops continued, too, to challenge a hostile Thebes, who was expanding meanwhile within her own confederacy of neighbours. In 371 the turning point came. After trying to stop the Thebans' local expansion yet again, the Spartans lost a cardinal land battle at Leuctra against a deeply packed Theban line. Their king was caught with his cavalry in front of his infantry, condemning the Spartans to their worst ever defeat. People said later that the gods and omens had been against Sparta and that the battle had been fought near a site where Spartan soldiers had raped young virgin sisters in the legendary past.2 If so, the rape victims took a fine revenge.

  The consequences were pursued immediately by citizens in the southern Greek communities which Sparta had terrorized for cen­turies. In winter 370 the able Theban general Epaminondas was invited across the Isthmus and was able to realize the long-held dream of Sparta's enemies by invading the Spartan homeland itself. Two great goods came out of Sparta's defeat. The Messenians, their Greek neighbours, could at last regroup themselves as a free Greek com­munity, a status which they had been denied for some three hundred and fifty years. Their days of serfdom, or helotage, were over and to emphasize it they built stupendous defensive walls, assets which Spartans had always detested. The Arcadians, meanwhile, resolved on the building of a new 'Great City' (Megalopolis) into which the surrounding villages were forcibly merged. There were local pro­testers, but the 'Great City' became the centre of another long-held dream, an 'Arcadian League'. The Arcadians had been seeking one for at least a hundred and fifty years. The separate towns of Arcadia were all to join it, although local rivalries and factions beset its founda­tion. The League was to have a big Assembly (the 'Myriad', probably including all male Arcadian citizens); Arcadian oligarchs, so long supported by Sparta, were most unhappy with it. For six years the League was a democratic force, maintaining a big army (the 'Select') from its member-cities' funds. After 370 Spartan power was severely damaged by it, to the greater freedom and justice of most of her long-suffering Greek neighbours.

  Fittingly, Epaminondas was commemorated in the Arcadia which he had helped to free. It was there that his tomb was admired by the Emperor Hadrian on his tour through southern Greece. Near Mantinea, Hadrian saw a pillar engraved with a serpent and learned that it honoured Epaminondas' noble family: he was descended from the legendary sons of the dragon's teeth with which Thebes' mythical founder, Cadmus, was supposed to have sown the city's fields. No doubt the boy-loving Hadrian also appreciated the nearby tomb: it commemorated Epaminondas' boy-lover. Perhaps he also discovered that Epaminondas' victories had been helped by a famous homoerotic unit, the Thebans' 'Sacred Band' of 300 infantrymen who were bound together by homoerotic pairing. The merits of 'gays in the army' had been discussed by Greeks at least since the time of Socrates.3 They had also been exemplified individually in the Spartans' own ranks. But the Sacred Band made sex between males a necessity.

  What Hadrian did not understand was that the Thebans and Epami­nondas were not the ideal champions whom Greek freedom and justice might have hoped for. The Thebans were not allowed by other Greeks to forget that their ancestors had cravenly taken the Persian side in the invasion of 480 bc. On their own doorstep, they had recently destroyed one Greek city (Plataea, in 373) and then damaged three more, all within her Confederacy. They were hardly more palat­able to the Athenians than the old enemy, the Spartans, and they had the disadvantage of being much nearer to the Athenian frontier. After much hesitation, the Athenians set aside old prejudice, allied them­selves with Sparta in 369 bc and used this alliance as a counter-weight to the Thebans throughout the 360s. Their rivalry was played out in the north (including Macedon, a source of ship-timber), the Aegean (where a Theban fleet tried to support oligarchic opposition to Athens) and in southern Greece. In 362 a big battle at Mantinea saw Epami­nondas' death and no clear-cut winner, leaving 'confusion and inde­cision' in Greek affairs.4

  These decades may seem a melancholy failure, in which Greeks could not unite despite their awareness of their shared gods, their shared language and a common ethnicity. Yet there were valid obstacles to unity, and the urge for peace was not gone. Repeatedly, settlements of Greek affairs were attempted, at first with the backing of the Persian king. The king, Artaxerxes II, had his own reasons for wanting peace: he needed Greeks to be free to serve him as mercenaries in his attempts to reconquer rebellious Egypt. When the king's pro­posals became too partisan, there were attempts at forming a 'Common Peace' among Greeks without him. There was also a con­tinuing faith in arbitration as a solution to Greek communities' long-standing disputes. However, valuable territory was often at issue in these conflicts, as was the greater freedom (for male citizens) of a democratic life. For democracy shared financial burdens more equit­ably between citizens: it meant that all male citizens were consulted before being committed to a war. Under an oligarchy the laws might be said to be 'equal' for all citizens, but under a democracy, they were more likely to be equitably applied. When the Spartans' oligarchic stranglehold broke up in southern Greece, democracy was realized in Arcadia, offered in Achaea and feared once again in Corinth. There was no question of it being discredited or in retreat in the fourth century. Political theorists did discuss the merits of a 'mixed' consti­tution, as if elements of an aristocracy, an oligarchy and a democracy could somehow be blended into the best of all three. These theories were quite impractical (a state is either completely democratic, or not at all) and made no mark on real life. True democracy still aroused the strongest political passions among actual citizen-bodies. In Argos in the 370s, existing democrats indulged in a fearful act of 'Clubbing' during which they attacked the rich in the city and left 1,200 citizens dead in civil conflict. Nearly a hundred and fifty years after Cleisthenes had proposed democracy in order to avoid renewed faction-fighting, democracy was being propelled by open conflict between classes. For in this period there was a real class-struggle within the citizen-bodies. It was not a struggle between citizens and slaves. It was one between poor citizens and the rich. Poorer citizens used democracy against the rich, but a real desire for justice impelled these fights, not just greed or simple revenge.

  Among such mayhem, respect for the gods might seem to be on the wane. In the fourth century Greek sculptors took the bold step of representing goddesses as topless or naked females; oaths were broken bewilderingly on the inter-state stage. After so much theatre about the mythical past, were the myths really so believable? But in fact, the traditional gods were still assumed to be as active in the fray as ever. They received vows and sacrifices before battle, and afterwards they still took a share of the spoils. F
ar and wide they still gave oracles, even though the Delphic shrine of Apollo had been ruined by fire and earthquake in 373 bc. There was not a growing disbelief; there was flexibility, as ever, in manoeuvring human actions and decisions within their divine framework. As ever, omens from the gods were variously interpreted and although the festival-seasons were often a time of truce, it was nothing new when they were exploited by Greek generals. A temple's treasures were supposed to be sacrosanct, but nonetheless they could be 'borrowed' on loan to finance a war, just as Periclean Athens had 'borrowed' from the goddess Athena to finance the great war. None of this casuistry was a new godlessness: rather, it presupposed that the old divine framework was still valid. So far from becoming pretty legends, the myths and the distant heroes continued to be advanced as compelling diplomatic claims and as sound reasons for alliances between Greek states.

  To an outside eye, what changed most from the 370s on was the apparent eclipsing of a single polis, or community, as the focus of political life. For, on the surface, these decades appear to be an era of Leagues and Confederacies, something which Hadrian would have understood, as he later promoted Leagues again in Greece. Before and after Leuctra the Spartans relied on the support of their 'Peloponnesian alliance' whose members were mostly ruled by convenient oligarchies. From 377 onwards the Athenians led their large new Confederacy of allies against Sparta. In the 370s the Thebans managed to dominate the votes on the inner council of the long-proven Boeotian Confederacy; in the 360s they perhaps imitated the Athenians and began a new 'League' for their allies outside Boeotia. The Spartans' decline in the 360s led to the new League in Arcadia and also to other confederacies in Achaea and Aetolia; the longer-standing Leagues in Thessaly and even in Epirus in north-west Greece become visible or more prominent in our evidence. Together, these Leagues refute the temptation to see this era as a proof of the menace of little warring Greek city-states. As genuine confederacies, most of these alliances were made up of a central decision-making body and separate decision-making com­munities. In Arcadia, the Assembly of the 'Myriad' met in its special building (the 'Thersilion') and chose magistrates from the member-communities who, initially, paid the costs of the League's 'Select' military force. Athenians, by contrast, discussed or voted on proposals which were passed to their existing city-assembly by a separate 'parlia­ment', made up of delegates from their allies. The representative councils of these confederacies were all rather different from the democratic practice of one vote, one adult male in a single city-assembly.

  Nonetheless, they were not superstates which marked the end of the polis as a political unit. Like the Athenian assembly, the assemblies of the Arcadian or Boeotian member-cities continued to meet and take decisions too. They continued to fear internal faction or the attack of a fellow confederate member, not least one by the ever-aggressive Thebans. The same mainstays of Greek political life con­tinued vigorously: civic oaths and civic magistracies, debates about new citizens and debates about financial contributions to be paid by individuals. In 363, after only six years of existence, the unity of the Arcadian League fractured on the decision of some of its magistrates to pay the League army by 'borrowing' funds from Olympia, rather than by exacting payments from the member-states.

  Through the ancients' own narrative histories, we continue to know this era for the names of famous individuals, Epaminondas the Theban or Jason the Thessalian (active there until 370 bc) or Agesilaus the Spartan king. But it is quite wrong to see these men as signs of a new age of individualism. Each of them held office in their home communities and remained locally accountable to them. 'Community' was not breaking down before a drift into superstates or a new era of great men. The struggle, at bottom, was still about freedom and justice and their interpretation, without an Athens rich enough to support the majority view or a Sparta strong enough to suppress it in her own interest.

  17

  Women and Children

  When a woman's womb moves up towards her head and suffocation occurs there, her head becomes heavy . . . One symptom is that the woman says that the veins in her nose and beneath her eyes are hurting her and she becomes sleepy and when this condition is improved, she foams at the mouth.

  You should wash her all over with hot water and if she does not improve, with cold . . . Rub her head with the scent of roses and use sweet-scented fumigations beneath her vagina, but foully scented ones at her nose. She should eat cabbage and drink cabbage-juice.

  Hippocratic doctor, Diseases of Women 2.126 (fourth century bc)

  When a husband and wife are at odds with one another, they are much more likely to be reconciled for the sake of their children than to detest the children they have had together because of the wrongs they have done to one another.

  Demosthenes, speech against Boeotus, 39.23 (348 bc)

  Women and children were not exempted from the wars in the fourth-century Greek world. When their city was taken by siege, their fate was to be killed or sold into slavery. There was no mercy during an invasion for non-combatants, either. In 364 bc the Thebans simply enslaved and sold all the women and children whom they captured in little Orchomenus. We can well see why city-states would try to send off their women and children (and livestock) to a place of safety during war: in 431 bc, the Plataeans evacuated their women, children and non-combatants to Athens before the siege which is so vividly described by Thucydides.

  Spartans apart, a love of children and an affectionate family life were prominent, in my view, in Greek city-states. Extreme modern theories that parental calculation prevailed and that there was a reluc­tance to invest love in children who were so likely to die young are refuted by the images, texts and dramas of our best sources, those from fifth- and fourth-century Athens. Representations of a child and a parent are shown (admittedly, rarely) on painted Attic pottery from the late fifth century bc onwards. There is a loving poignancy to many of the Attic grave-reliefs and the inscriptions for children who have died young. It is hard to miss the force of the painting on a white-figured Athenian oil flask, to be set at the tomb, which shows pathos and parental love in its scene of a young child in the boat of the waiting ferryman of the underworld, the child holding out its hands to a fondly gazing mother on the far bank.1 There are images of a mother looking on at a young baby wriggling happily in its high chair or of a child crawling towards its mother, watched (in my view, with pleasure) by a man, surely its father, as it sets off on its course. These scenes, and others, imply a public who enjoyed children. They were not only mothers: fathers are represented too, never better than in the character-sketches of the wry philosopher Theophrastus of Athens, who describes how the 'obsequious man' is a man who plays excess­ively with other people's children, while the 'talkative man' is so endlessly talkative that his children, even, will call to him to come at bedtime and talk to them so that they will fall asleep. Of course individuals varied, as nowadays. When Aristophanes represents Dicaeopolis, his cussed rustic of an Athenian, taking a sexual interest in his own daughter, he is meaning that we should laugh at the man's ghastliness. Publicly, too, fathers were expected to be much more than unloving absentees. The orator Aeschines could attack the orator Demosthenes before an Athenian jury for his supposed callousness about his daughter's death: 'the man who hates children,' he goes on, 'the bad father, would never be a trustworthy leader of the people.'2 There were assumptions, here, which an orator could exploit.

  In Athenian citizen-households, the father decided if a new-born child was to live: he would run round the hearth carrying it on the fifth day of its life, in a ceremony called the Amphidromia. On the tenth day the child would usually be named. Aristotle remarks that parents waited for ten days because so many children died meanwhile. Modern estimates of the average losses tend to be high, as high as half of all babies born. Nonetheless, in some Greek states (but not all), exposure of unwanted children was freely practised. The exposed ones might sometimes be picked up by others and brought up as slaves, and so cast-offs tended to be
exposed in public places, as if hoping to be 'found': girls were more frequently exposed than boys.

  Like other social transitions, the stages of an Athenian child's life can be attached to Athenian festivals. In their third year, children attended a day of February's Anthesteria festival. They had their first taste of wine, and we still have some of the drinking-mugs, with children shown on them, which marked the occasion. For citizen-born boys, the focus then became the autumn festival of the phratries, or 'brother­hoods', which would enrol them in due course as citizens. Fathers would take them along to be introduced to members (and to show that they were legitimate, not sons by a slave-girl). There would be a sacrifice, called the 'lesser', when the boy was perhaps only five or six, and then one for the cutting of his hair, when the boy was eighteen and old enough to be a full citizen. Contacts with the phratry were therefore spread out across the boy's years of change in childhood.

  Bastards, obviously, were known to pose problems, of which chil­dren born to two citizens out of wedlock were the least. If the mother was married to somebody else, she would probably pass off such a child as her husband's; if not, she would abort it. In a slave-society, however, masters or their sons were also quite likely to father a child on a slave-girl; if the child was not aborted, it would be left to follow its mother's status and be a slave. The complications were greater if a citizen-male fathered a child on a metic or non-citizen foreigner. If the mother was a prostitute, she would be expected to abort it (it would ruin her future livelihood). Otherwise, the child would surely become a metic too. For bastards, with one citizen-parent, were not members of a phratry nor were they eligible for Athenian citizenship. They are said, however, to have had a particular 'gym' for their exercise, connected with the shrine of Heracles at Cynosarges outside the city-gate. Comic poets made fun of this site and have probably complicated our evidence for it. Heracles was a 'bastard', too, fathered by Zeus on a mortal mother.3