by Andrew Marr
Democracy as a system survived in Athens for nearly two hundred years, on and off, though it never caught on widely in the ancient world. To work, it demanded an educated citizenry, though only perhaps a tenth of them could actually read, as well as people who had learned how to speak publicly, to reason and to follow complicated arguments. This development of what we might call civil society was as important as the results of the voting.
Athenian ‘democracy’ did not include women, younger men or slaves, however. As Athens developed her gorgeous architecture and sculpture, her theatre and music and philosophy, she relied on slaves just as much as unsmiling Sparta did. And as Athens came to depend ever more on her silver mines to buy the corn she could not grow herself, huge numbers of slave miners were imported: one account suggests 150,000 at one time.13 But slaves were used heavily on farms as well – the historian Xenophon refers to twenty thousand absconding from Athenian farms during a Spartan invasion – and as paid craftsmen, including for the great public buildings. It has been estimated that for every free male Athenian citizen there were two slaves. Without the slaves, captured in wars, the Greek farmers could not possibly have spared the time to learn to speak and vote, or to serve as active citizens; nor could the Greek aristocrats have enjoyed the wealth and leisure to study philosophy. Again, it was war that underpinned the ‘Greek miracle’ – and rather more substantially than many of its admirers like to admit.
The fighting against the armies of the Persians went on by land and sea. It had begun with the Ionian revolt of 499 BC, a rebellion by Greeks in Asia against their masters, which ended in Persian victory. But then Cyrus’s successor Darius, taking over after an interlude dominated by less-than-great Kings of Kings, determined to punish Athens for supporting the rebels. The campaign began well for the Persians, who mopped up small Greek island states and destroyed the rebel polis of Eretria before landing on Attica to make for Athens. There, at Marathon in 490 BC, the Athenians won a surprising and remarkable victory. They were heavily outnumbered. Even modern historians accept that the Persian army was anything from twice to ten times as large, and had both cavalry and archers, which the Athenians lacked. But these citizen soldiers did a most surprising thing: they charged the Persian enemy at the run, with a deliberately weak centre but strong wings, and rolled them up, producing a great slaughter.
The robustly partisan Herodotus says the Greeks
closed with the enemy all along the line, and fought in a way not to be forgotten. They were the first Greeks, so far as I know, to charge at a run, and the first who dared to look without flinching at Persian dress and the men who wore it; for until that day came no Greek could hear even the word Persian without terror.
The Persians got back to their ships and tried to sail round to Athens for another attack; but the Athenian army had beaten them to it. The story of this extraordinary run in armour back to the city is believed to have produced the 26-mile marathon race of modern times. Another legend has it that the Athenian courier Pheidippides ran the twenty-six miles back to his city to tell them of the victory and stiffen their determination to resist, dying after he delivered the message. Unfortunately there seems no historical evidence for this.
After Darius’s death and a ten-year hiatus, his son Xerxes mounted a much larger invasion, intended to finish the Greeks off. By now the federation led by Athens and Sparta embraced more than seventy other Greek states, though even more were standing on the sidelines or supporting the enemy. Herodotus calculated the Persian army at 5.2 million men, a ludicrous figure; but it was certainly a huge force, brought across the Hellespont by rope bridge and barges, including special horse-barges. Herodotus gives a vividly exciting account of the famous fight at the narrow pass of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas and three hundred Spartans whom he had selected himself – ‘all men in middle life and all fathers of living sons’ – held back the Persians for days, until they were betrayed and all died.
Xerxes’ army then poured down towards Attica and the Athenians had to evacuate their city, which was burned behind them. Eventually, in the narrow straits of Salamis, the combined Greek fleet won a crucial victory over the Persians. Two further major battles, at Plataea on land and Mycale by sea, were also Greek victories, ending the invasion. Historians have argued since that these fights were crucial to Western civilization because it relied so heavily for its development on the thought, art and politics of the Greeks, which would otherwise have been snuffed out by Persian despotism. Like other historic military turning-points, the imbalance of forces was probably exaggerated, but these Greek victories were the prototype of ‘the war to save civilization’, a trope used by the Russians before Borodino, by the British in 1940, and by scores of other forces.
The Greek victory did lead to a golden age for Athens, since rather oddly Sparta did not seize the leadership of Greece that her achievement in battle suggested she deserved. The eighty years from around 450 BC embrace the rise of the great statesman Pericles, the writing of the first historians – including, of course, Herodotus – and the rebuilding of the Athenian Parthenon under the sculptor Phidias. Athenian drama had emerged, exuberantly, from its origins in the performance of sacred song. And alongside the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides flourished a riotous and very rude tradition of comedies, most of them now lost, which acted as a constant criticism and heckle of Athenian life.
These performances became ever more showy and expensive, as rich Athenians competed to fund them (rather like later Roman emperors competed to show the best games). They were originally staged with full musical accompaniment for the chorus, the main players in exotic masks and intoning in rhythmic speech – bright, open-air celebrations of urban life at festivals attended by tens of thousands of people, enjoying the food stalls, the wine and the gossip. Having just the words of some of the dramas is a little like knowing the operas of Handel or Verdi only from their librettos. In a similar way, seeing the superbly crafted statues of Athenian heroes and gods in galleries, in cool white stone, hardly reflects the vividly painted public presences they would originally have been. And above all, of course, towered the philosophers, arguing about the nature of reality, what might constitute the good life, and how best to organize human societies.
This wealth and confidence came from the great conflict. It originated in decisive military victory over the Asian superpower of the day. The crackle of criticism and laughter came from democratic winners, sure enough of themselves to laugh at themselves. The intense search to understand – to understand the constitutions of the 158 Greek states studied by Aristotle, and the differences between Asian and Greek societies, as Herodotus sought to do; to understand the causes of civil war as Thucydides tried to, or the nature of the good society, as Socrates and Plato attempted – all this curiosity was not idle, and certainly not simple: it was the rich fruit of war.
Aborigines and Aryans
Among the forces in the Persian army marching under Xerxes towards the Spartans, Herodotus tells us, were a group dressed in cotton, armed with iron-tipped cane bows, and in chariots pulled by horses or wild asses. These were from India. The early history of that vast triangular protrusion from Eurasia is one of the most lively, still-developing subjects of study. As described earlier, it is now thought that the world-changing migration out of Africa brought people to India much earlier than to the Mediterranean, Europe or China. The indigenous forest-dwellers of southern India still look more like the aboriginal Australians and East Asian islanders who were part of humanity’s first southern march than like northern Aryan Indians, who came much later.
For almost as soon as the early history of India was opened up by British scholar-explorers in the nineteenth century, it was assumed that India’s great civilizations came from outside, rather than being cooked and shaped at home. And it is true that waves of migrants and conquerors, from tribal Asian herders to Greeks, Persians and Mongols, pushed their way into India through the north-west gap between the Himalayas
and the sea. Each of them radically changed the subcontinent. The British were different only in that they, like the Portuguese and French, arrived by sea. Yet it may well be that India’s earliest-known civilization, the mysterious urban centre of the Indus valley, or Mohenjo-Daro, was indeed home-grown. At the start of the new Indian republic in 1947, one leading politician, Jaipal Singh, a representative of the tribal (or forest) people, claimed to speak for the ancient Indus valley tradition, labelling other Indians newcomers: ‘The whole history of my people is one of continuous exploitation by the non-aboriginals of India.’14
So what was this, perhaps aboriginal, civilization? The baked-brick cities of the Indus River plain had excellent water systems and plumbing, writing that has not been decoded, and some interesting art. This includes a small figure who could be practising yoga, and another which could be a very early version of the later Hindu deity Siva. There are many finely cut seals showing the bulls, elephants and tigers so important to later Indian religion and art. And there is a very sexy nude dancing-girl, whose challenging pose and bangles prefigure the erotic sculpture of much younger Hindu temples but whose face is that of an aborigine. So it is possible – no more than that – that the very first human migrants from the Horn of Africa who had stayed in India created the essentials of Indian religion and art long before invaders arrived from the north.
By the time these Indians were marshalled under Persian banners against the Greeks, however, they were ethnic cousins of the people they were fighting. Connected by the tips of their empires, the Indians of the fifth and fourth centuries BC certainly knew of the Greeks, calling them ‘Yona’, a word derived via the Persian for ‘Ionians’. These northern Indians, like the Persians, spoke a language that had the same origins as Greek, Latin and every major European language of today. This is old news, thanks to a discovery made in 1785 by a brilliant English lover of India, who had been sent to Calcutta as a High Court judge, Sir William Jones.15
Jones, a superb linguist, had become one of the first Europeans to learn Sanskrit, the academic language of Hindu scholarship. Spotting clues in key words and in the grammatical structure, he saw that it was part of what would be called the ‘Indo-European’ family of languages. This was originally the language of the Aryans, ancestors of so many later noisy tribes. They had been pastoral people, depending on cattle and horses, who had migrated in waves from their original homeland, which was probably around the Caspian Sea or the Ukraine. ‘Aryan’ is a word whose implication of racial superiority, after the Europe of the Nazis, can make modern ears twitch. But it is just a useful label. We could as well say that Indians, Mediterranean people and Europeans are ‘all Caspians’ or ‘all Ukrainians’ (though we don’t).
Because ancient peoples can be tracked by words as well as by stones, it is generally accepted that the Aryans moved to the west, driving into Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, as well as into what is now Iran, and into India too. They had probably crossed into today’s Pakistan at around the time of the Trojan war, and were reaching the great Ganges plain a couple of hundred years after that. It is possible that the Dorians were another branch of the Aryan migration, displacing the Mycenaean Greeks at roughly the same time – in which case, at the battle of Marathon distant cousins had confronted one another on the battlefield without knowing it.
The ancient hymns, or ‘vedas’, of the Indian Aryans, orally transmitted with great care, show them to be warlike and horse-obsessed. On the other hand, they had no words for ‘plough’, ‘writing’ or ‘elephant’,16 so they may indeed have had to learn from the indigenous people they merged with, defeated or displaced. We do not know what happened, though these Aryan incomers had a culture of animal sacrifice and cattle-stealing, which fits with herders turning into raiders. They had clearly been part of the wider Near Eastern family. Stories such as those included in the Puranas show similarities with the tales of Mesopotamia and the Bible, including a great flood in which a god, Vishnu, warns the lawgiver Manu to build a boat, then takes him to a mountain peak to save him.
The Aryans had followed a familiar historical path. They had moved from roaming with animals to settling. The Rig Vedas, the oldest Sanskrit stories, paint a picture of a tribal culture with chieftains, priests, orgiastic sacrifice parties, and cattle as the common currency. The historian John Keay has memorably compared it to the clan system of the Scottish highlands before the arrival of sheep cleared the glens: ‘All . . . whether Indian or Scots, shared a language (Gaelic/Sanskrit), a social system in which precedence was dictated by birth, and a way of life in which both wealth and prestige were computed in cattle. In Scotland as in India, the rustling of other clans’ herds constituted both pastime and ritual.’17
But in India as in Scotland, farming eventually won. By the time of the Scottish clans, Scotland’s original forests had long gone, cleared for fuel and farmland and leaving behind a thin ecology that could sustain few people. The Indian Aryans were luckier. Northern India then was very different from the heavily populated and intensively farmed khaki plains of today. As the ancient texts make clear, once the invaders left the Punjab and migrated eastwards, they found a lushly forested terrain, rich in wildlife and game, spreading slowly to the waterlogged Ganges delta itself. The land was inhabited by forest people, hunter-gatherers whose way of life was comparable to that of the people of the Amazon or the highlands of New Guinea. Even in twentieth-century India there were forest-dwellers excluded by, and suspicious of, the urban and farming culture all around them.
The Iron Age was the age of the iron plough as much as of the iron sword. Mile by mile, the forests were burned for farmland, the soil broken by ploughing, and crops of barley were sown. The game retreated, and villages became small towns. The Aryans settled. Eventually rice paddies would be carved out of the watery land where the forests ended. This was a long-lasting and stable change. Parts of today’s India, for instance in Bihar towards the border with Nepal, contain villages built of wood and woven reeds, whose farmers plough with oxen and tend rice and vegetable fields, burning cow-dung for fuel, as they have done ever since the Iron Age. Yet soon the great Indian rivers were being used for trade and transport, and a network of roads began to link the north. Thus, under the great white ridges and the blue arms of the Himalayas, in the valleys and plains, a northern Indian civilization was evolving.
As with ancient Greek, Semitic, Nordic and Mesopotamian cultures, the Vedic-age Indians had a family of gods and goddesses who required endless and complicated sacrifices. These gods were the responsibility of the Brahmin priests, who occupied the top rung of a developing caste system.
Caste is a complicated and much argued-about issue. To begin with it was no more than a rough and ready division of people by their role, such as happened in Europe and Russia too. In the Indian formulation, after the priest-teachers, the Brahmins, came the warriors and administrators (kshatriyas); then the farmers and traders (vaisyas), and finally the workers and servants (shudras). This is not, of itself, surprising. Agricultural societies and early urban ones maintained skills and knowledge by passing it down within families. Before mass education, know-how was too precious to squander by allowing everyone choice. It was hoarded. Potters shaped potters and charioteers gave their sons the reins.
Evidence from early scriptures suggests that, nevertheless, some people could move between these groups. On the other hand, some DNA evidence (much contested) suggests that today’s higher-caste Indians have closer genetic links to Europeans than lower-caste people have. In which case, the Brahmins, kshatriyas and vaisyas may be the children of Indo-European invaders, while the lower castes, doing the rougher, dirtier and more routine work, are more likely to be descended from the earlier people of India. If true, this would be a remarkable example of cultural persistence. But we also have to remember that, in terms of biology, ‘ancient history’ is hardly even yesterday; if we think of modern lifespans, say seventy years, then the Greeks of Marathon and the ancient Aryans of India are onl
y around forty spans away.
What is unarguable is that this early Vedic system of caste became steadily more rule-bound and hard to evade. As the towns and trade grew, there was more specialization, so that functions were defined and slotted into a more complex structure, like drawers added to a giant chest. As in other cultures, the growth of towns and states led to more complicated and overbearing hierarchies of power and wealth, and made what we would call social mobility harder, too. At the bottom of the scale, the worker-families with the nastiest duties were turned into a subclass of exploited helots, the ‘untouchables’. But then, after all, the Greeks had their slaves.
The Rebel at the Tree-root
There were other parallels between northern India and the Greek world. As the clans settled down, many of them came under the rule of kings, some hereditary and others elected. Other clans developed a system that has been translated as ‘clan organization’ or ‘government-by-discussion’. More simply, it was a form of republic in which most men had a say, at regular meetings. The term rajah could mean something close to ‘elector-citizen’ as well as ‘ruler’. Thus a political map of northern India at around the time of the birth of classical Greece shows a patchwork of rival states not so very different from the states of the Greek world, which also had government-by-discussion, contending with tyrannies.
By 600 BC in northern India there were sixteen mahajanapadas, or ‘great states’, from the Indus in the west to the Ganges and its tributaries. Magadha, Licchavi, Kosala, Kura and Panchala were names possessing something of the resonance there of Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Thebes in south-eastern Europe. Kingdoms challenged republics. How best to rule, how best to live, were issues as live in India as in Athens. Here too there were leagues and alliances, wars and fallings-out; and great interest in the best balance of power and in the duties of citizens. There were cruder quarrels too. One particularly long war was fought between King Bimbisara of the powerful Magadha state and the republican ‘knights’ of Licchavi. A courtesan at the Licchavi capital of Vaishali, called Amrapali, who was seduced by Bimbisara and bore him a child, was at the centre of the affair – a Helen of the Ganges. Such are the old stories, still told in modern India. This same woman, Amrapali, later became a follower of an individual who was certainly more than a legend.