The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  The reign of Hadrian belonged to a period of eighty-odd years (AD 98–180), which an eighteenth-century historian of the Roman Empire, the Englishman Edward Gibbon, considered the era in the history of the world when the human race was ‘most happy and prosperous’. Nowadays many academics would want to sound more cautious. They might point to the near-absence in the Roman Empire of what today we would call ‘social justice’, not to mention the extensive presence of slavery. Gibbon’s ‘prosperity’ was mainly the preserve of a small imperial elite. Even so, the Roman Empire lasted, from century to century.

  What is more precarious than the evils now surrounding the inhabited world? To see a barbarous, desert people overrunning another’s land as their own, and our civilized way of life consumed by wild and untameable beasts, who have the mere appearance of human shape alone.

  The author of this lament, written in Greek, was a Christian monk called Maximus. He was born in Roman territory, in what is now the Golan Heights, and wrote these words around AD 640: five centuries after Hadrian gave the name ‘Palestine’ to this part of the Roman Empire. Maximus alludes to a new power in the east, aggressive and militant, the Muslim caliphate, bent on conquering what was now left of the Roman Empire. When Arab armies captured Jerusalem in AD 637, Palestine, the homeland of Maximus, ceased to be Roman territory.

  By this date the Roman Empire was no longer a pan-Mediterranean state. Its emperors now ruled from Constantinople, a new imperial capital founded on the Bosporus in AD 324. The Romans had been unable to preserve imperial rule in western Europe. Here large-scale migration from the AD 370s onwards was helping to lay the foundations of a new, ‘mediaeval’ world.

  The focus of this book is the ancient world. It offers my personal story, unfolded in roughly chronological order, about the beginnings and the development of the two ancient and overlapping societies, Greek and Roman, which gave us ‘classical civilization’. It is aimed at readers who are interested enough in the topic to start reading this book, but who have little or no background in the disciplines of Classics or Ancient History.

  The story offered has to be selective since the subject is so vast. The book focuses on providing an up-to-date historical background to the cultural creations of classical antiquity which still matter to some of us today, from artworks, theatre and the so-called first computer (discussed in Chapter 16) on the Greek side, to the villas and towns of the Roman Empire, their remains suggesting a quality of daily life at which we can still marvel.

  It also emphasizes the scale of the creative interaction with neighbours that, as often as not, stimulated cultural innovation. This included the eastern influences behind much of the cultural flowering of the first Greek city-states (seventh–sixth centuries BC) and the adoption, already touched on, of many aspects of Greek civilization by the Romans on a scale that invites comparison with, say, the Meiji ‘westernization’ of Japan (1868–1912).

  It is hard to think of any great civilization in world history that does not offer the uneasy contradiction of high achievement in the field of culture married to state-condoned oppression of fellow humanity in some form or other. In these matters the societies of ancient Greece and Rome often behaved in ways that can seem harsh to us today. In addition they fought endless wars. This book avoids the rose-tinted lens through which, say, the Victorians liked to contemplate the ‘glories’ and ‘grandeur’ of ancient Greece and Rome. They were the heirs of a long-running tendency among Europeans, stretching back to the Renaissance, to accord the civilization of Greece and Rome an exaggerated respect and authority – to see it as ‘classical’, in other words.

  In the end, though, writers (I believe) should nail their colours to the mast. This book is firmly on the side of wondering at the achievements of ancient Greece and Rome as it recounts the extraordinary story of these intermingled civilizations.

  PART I

  THE GREEKS

  CHAPTER 1

  THE DAWN OF GREEK CIVILIZATION

  During the Stone Age, some human groups in different parts of the world learnt how to grow edible plants instead of foraging in the wild. They also began to tame and manage some of the wild animals that they hunted for food. As a result, they were no longer bound to the migrations of their prey, and could remain in one place. The first settled communities emerged. Because farming feeds more mouths than hunter-gathering, these groups of first farmers were more numerous. They needed to organize themselves in more complex ways.

  This change in human behaviour was momentous: hence its modern name, the Neolithic Revolution. Traditionally historians see here a welcome change: a stage in a progress to a more civilized state. It was not a straightforward advance. On the facts, archaeologists now think that the diet of the first farmers would have been less healthy. It turns out that a cereal-based diet is less diverse than the food of most hunter-gatherers and more likely to be deficient in some nutrients.

  In truth, not everyone today embraces the idea of a ‘progression’ from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilization’ as humankind’s obvious destiny. Stone Age societies survive in the modern world. Some people are squeamish about judging indigenous Amazonians or Australians as worse off or inferior because they have not ‘advanced’ to what others in the world are used to calling the civilized state. Others see moral merit in lifestyles seemingly less shaped by western values.

  1. Greece and the Aegean World.

  By and large the ancient Greeks saw matters more simply. Their view of agriculture as a great human blessing is clear from their tradition that a benevolent divinity had intervened in primal times to teach them its techniques. This was Demeter, the grain goddess. Athena did the same for the olive, Dionysus for the vine. As for what life was like before farming, one Greek writer in the second century AD described it as ‘harsh, rustic, and little different from living on a mountain’.

  In 1968, in a cave, not exactly on a mountain but on a seaside headland in southern Greece, American archaeologists found a caveman from the Stone Age. A male in his late twenties, he had apparently died from blows to his head. His group buried him in a simple grave in the cave floor. The archaeologists matched ash from burnt wood with information from tree rings – the technique known as carbon-14 dating – to produce a time for his death and burial in the late 7000s BC.

  Nowadays, a visit to the Franchthi Cave is a civilized business. Inside there is a wooden walkway. Panels give information about the excavation. The finds indicate that the Stone Age band that camped here lived by hunting deer. They gathered wild plants such as pistachio nuts, oats and lentils. Personal possessions would have been few: a necklace of pierced seashells, say.

  Among the finds, archaeologists discovered basic tools shaped from obsidian, a flint-like rock formed from volcanic glass. The best quality, with the fewest impurities such as flecks of trapped pumice, comes from the Aegean island of Melos, one of the Cyclades. What can be done with obsidian is the stuff of a modern flint-knapping course. On these courses, enthusiasts for ancient outdoors knowledge learn the correct technique for banging lumps of flint together. At the cost of cuts, bruises and significant fatigue, they aim, by chipping and flaking the stone, to shape it into, say, a primitive blade.

  With obsidian, the fresh surface produced by such laborious methods attracts water trapped inside the stone. This forms a ‘rind’. By measuring the thickness of the ‘rind’, archaeologists can date the tool-making moment that triggered its formation. By such means, archaeologists know that the hunter-gatherers of the Franchthi Cave were already using obsidian in around 8500 BC.

  By implication, then, these cavemen were also mariners, or in touch with others who were braving the Aegean Sea in simple paddle boats. This rudimentary seafaring was encouraged by the way in which the Aegean islands cluster together, one in sight of another. On a calm day, they invite the adventurous to risk taking to the water. The cultural connectivity that the Mediterranean Sea enabled, with all its momentous consequences for the building of ancient Greek civ
ilization, turns out to have had truly ancient beginnings.

  Our Greek writer described human life before the invention of agriculture as ‘life before Triptolemus’. Ancient Greek myth recounts how this legendary prince, son of a local king ruling what now is a satellite town of Athens, embarked on a kind of apostolic mission to spread knowledge of farming. His teacher was the goddess Demeter. The opulent Getty Museum in Malibu, California, possesses a clay vase from Athens which a craftsman decorated (about 470 BC) with a painting of this popular ancient story. The young Triptolemus sits in a winged chariot clutching grain stalks in both hands. Demeter and her daughter are standing by to bless his mission and watch him fly off.

  Archaeologists are uncovering the real facts about how sowing and ploughs originated in Greece. Underlying them, some archaeologists think, was a basic human drive to seek an advance in the material conditions of life. Sesklo is a modern village in a large and fertile plain in the region of Thessaly, on the Aegean side of central Greece, north of Delphi. Today’s visitor sees open countryside all around, well watered and not especially level. This means that the soil is well drained. So it was less difficult for the first farmers to cultivate. This was just as well: they had to work with implements of the basic variety, made from stone and bone.

  On a man-made mound at Sesklo, archaeologists have found the remains of a long-lived settlement of these first farmers. They started by building themselves simple houses of wood and sundried mud. They grew wheat and barley on nearby hillsides. They kept sheep and goats. They knew how to shape clay. This community grew up in the 6000s BC. At its height it spread over some 32 acres of land – the size of the main campus of Columbia University in New York. But this was a low-density settlement, not a city. At most it is now thought to have numbered perhaps five hundred or so souls at any one time.

  It is a mystery how these first farmers in Greece learnt the new technology. They husbanded sheep and goats from genetic lines that were not native to Greece. The same is true of the cereals that they planted. There is DNA evidence to suggest that both livestock and crops could have come from what is now Turkey. Farmers from there, migrating westwards, might have arrived with animals and seeds in their baggage.

  Working with these finds, archaeologists try to probe the minds of the first farmers in Greece. Psychological impacts on humans from the huge change in human lifestyle – from wandering hunter-gatherers to settled agriculturalists – might be predicted. Finds from Sesklo are on display in the archaeological museum of Athens. They show that life was still simple. There is early pottery. It looks rather crude to a modern eye, since the potter’s wheel had yet to be invented.

  There are also clay figurines. They, and many others like them, show that Greece’s first farmers attached importance to representing the female form. These are naked, fleshy females. Hips, thighs and upper arms bulge unrealistically; so do bellies. Art historians would say that these ‘Venus’ figures served as symbols of a specific ideal of the feminine. Some academics use these enigmatic figures to claim that the ‘Neolithic mind’ honoured the feminine qualities in nature to an unusual degree. People might have worshipped great goddesses. Real women in these societies, they suggest, were accorded an unusual social prominence.

  The social role of Neolithic males is not fully grasped. The community at Sesklo built stone walls around the top of its mound. Some archaeologists think that their purpose was defensive. On this view, Sesklo men could have been fighters and killers, using their tools for more than just hunting wild animals or butchering dead meat. Archaeologists have identified hundreds of other Neolithic communities sharing the same agricultural plain as Sesklo in this part of Greece. Perhaps they co-existed peacefully. Perhaps from time to time they fought with each other over what was a finite supply of local farmland.

  Another find from Sesklo is a small clay model of a house. It is roughly square. It has crude rectangular openings on all four sides. They apparently stand for doors and windows. It has a slightly pitched roof with a central opening, as if to emit the smoke from a hearth. Many clay house models have been found in the Neolithic settlements of Greece. Their makers were not aiming at faithful depictions. It was the idea of a house that fascinated them.

  Archaeologists see the Neolithic period in Greece as lasting for four millennia, from around 7000 BC to 3000 BC. The house models appear about halfway through this vast span of time. They show that the organization of human society at Sesklo evolved over time. Experts think that the pioneers who founded these communities saw themselves as working for a collective, not so unlike the original ethos of the Israeli kibbutz. The house models seem to mark a later turning away from this idea of working in the name of the community. Instead they emphasize the importance of the individual household.

  The most impressive building at Sesklo has stone foundations, walls of sundried brick and (originally) a timber roof. The builders erected it in a central place on the highest point of the mound towards the end of the Neolithic, in the 3000s BC. People entered through a porch into a more or less square chamber with a rectangular clay hearth. There were holes in the clay floor for three poles once supporting the roof.

  Archaeologists have revealed similar buildings from this period elsewhere in the plain. They could be communal meeting places. Another idea is that they might be residences of a top stratum in a society that had become more hierarchical. This would then be a pivotal moment in Greek prehistory. It would mark the emergence on a small scale of a society in which some people ranked higher than others. Some households might have achieved greater success as farmers, or had a bigger say in trade.

  The finds from Sesklo include at least two axe-heads made from copper. They too date from the 3000s BC. By then Greece’s early farmers knew that rock could contain metal and that metal had advantages over stone. There were craftsmen who knew how to melt such rock, or ore, in a furnace in order to extract the metal. They could make an axe-head – as here – by pouring the molten copper into a mould. The people of prehistoric Greece were entering the metal age.

  How Greece’s Neolithic farmers gained their first knowledge of metalworking is another prehistoric mystery. They went on to discover how to mix other elements with copper, notably tin. In this way they could make the much harder alloy that we call bronze. People could now make much stronger tools for key activities like farming, construction or warring. From around 3000 BC, bronze objects start to be found in Greece alongside copper ones.

  As with obsidian, so with metals, prehistoric Aegean people must have risked paddling boats across the sea to connect with human groups who controlled metal resources. When I lived and worked in Athens in my late twenties, I sometimes used to have a day off on the Greek island of Andros, easily reachable by bus and ferry. Andros is a westerly outlier of the Cyclades, an archipelago in the central Aegean Sea. Here, on a coastal cape, archaeologists have discovered the earliest rock art in the Aegean area.

  Alongside wolves, jackals and an octopus is a depiction – crude to modern eyes – of a longboat, essentially a large canoe, with a schematized row of oars. This kind of craft could carry a modest cargo. At the end of the Neolithic era – the date of this rock art – the pace of trading was picking up. A hierarchy of settlements was also emerging. Because these longboats needed manpower, only larger communities could have owned them.

  At this time the islands of the Cyclades were home to some of the earliest sources of copper ore. Today’s visitor to the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art in central Athens is led back in time to this dawning age of Greek metalworking. On the first floor, a space resembling a jeweller’s shop showcases the world’s leading collection of so-called Cycladic figurines. A fairly typical specimen stands about 10 inches high. It is carved from the white marble so plentiful in the Cyclades. The figure depicts a naked female with an oval-shaped head who ‘stands’ with slanting feet, slightly bent knees, her arms crossed on the belly below pronounced breasts. The visitor can best appreciate the high level
of technological accomplishment from the smoothness and polish of the hard marble surface.

  These stark figurines nowadays enjoy a second life as prized icons of early Bronze Age Aegean ‘art’. In today’s museum showcases they mostly give an impression of pure white form. This appealed to Modernist artists like Brancusi or Giacometti. However, archaeologists have noticed traces of original paintwork on some figurines. Once they were decorated with tattoos and jewellery. For this, Cycladic craftsmen would have used natural pigments such as ochre, extracted from the rich mineral deposits of their islands.

  The Goulandris Museum displays a Cycladic chisel made of the newfangled bronze. The tattooed people who fashioned these figurines were island farmers of Greece’s early Bronze Age. The heyday of their way of life lasted for five or so centuries, from roughly 2800 to 2300 BC. Mostly the figurines depict the naked female form in the same pose. Their uniform style shows that the islanders had developed a shared sense of cultural community. Braving winds and currents, they used their crude paddle boats to visit each other.

  These dangerous voyages were a matter of basic survival. Archaeologists systematically walk the island landscapes to examine surface finds – mainly pottery sherds – for signs of past settlement. The results suggest that the islands might have been too thinly inhabited in the early Bronze Age for local people to have reproduced themselves demographically. They could have taken to the water from the need to find mates. The original meaning of the figurines remains enigmatic today. One tempting suggestion is that the naked marble females symbolize, among other things, the high value that these islanders placed on women’s fertility.