The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  Chapter 4

  Two ancient cities follow diverse paths.

  ABOUT 2,500 YEARS ago two city-states of Greece flared like stars exploding. In different ways they both excelled. For a century and a half they gave mankind an opportunity to see how wide is the range of things that we can do.

  Three peninsulas hang like udders from Europe’s underbelly. On the west is Iberia (home of modern Spain and Portugal), which almost reaches Africa. In the middle is Italy, looking like a boot that’s poised to kick. And on the east is the Balkan Peninsula, full of rocky hills and quarrelsome peoples.

  Greece is at the bottom of “the Balkans,” where they dwindle to an end. It is formed of juts of land and 1,400 islands strewn with low but rugged mountains. Before our story starts, Greeks who needed wood for fuel or lumber to construct their ships had largely stripped the hills of trees. Erosion followed. Plato, the Greek philosopher, once wrote of his homeland that “what remains…is like the bony body of a sick man, with all the rich and fertile earth fallen away, and what is left is only the scraggy skeleton of the land.”

  The World of the Greeks

  City-states (too many to show here) crowded the Balkan Peninsula (left), the west coast of Asia Minor, and islands in between.

  Because the villages and towns were by the sea or walled by mountains, they lived in partial isolation. Many towns developed therefore into small and independent city-states, about 200 of them. Some were tiny. On the island of Amorgos, which covered fifty miles, three city-states existed side by side, each one running its affairs. The Greeks believed in little states; they were certain people ought to organize themselves this way. Aristotle (another thinker) held that the ideal city-state was small enough so that everyone knew everyone else by sight.

  An historian once imagined a conversation between an ancient Greek and a modern Briton who belonged to a London club. It went about like this.

  BRITON: What’s so good about a tiny state?

  GREEK: Can’t you see? Life is vivid. You can stand by our fortress on the hill, and see everything: our town, our temples, our theatre, our law court, our farms, our seashore, our ships, our mountains. A city-state like this holds all of life’s possibilities.

  BRITON: But why not join with all the other city-states?

  GREEK: Hmmm. How many clubs does London have?

  BRITON: About five hundred.

  GREEK: Well, then, if they all joined together, they could have a clubhouse as big as Buckingham Palace.

  BRITON: Yes, but that would no longer be a club.

  GREEK: Right, and a city-state as big as yours would no longer be a city-state.1

  1Freely adapted from H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (1951), p. 79.

  Not all the city-states were tiny. Sparta, one of the two places this chapter will focus on, was no mere flyspeck on the map. It filled two-thirds of the Peloponnesian peninsula at the southern end of Greece, and was a little smaller than modern Israel and half as big as Belgium. What was more important for our story, Sparta was three times as big as Athens, Sparta’s rival.

  In most places, governments develop slowly, with trials and errors and the shedding of some blood. But if the legend is correct, Sparta missed all that. Instead, a Spartan named Lycurgus, in the 600s B.C., devised quite quickly the system that the Spartans used for centuries. Lycurgus saw that Sparta needed basic rules to run the government and for the Spartan way of life. He wrote them single-handed and won approval of them from the god Apollo, whose cave was in the mountains of central Greece. The Spartans agreed to use his rules, but Lycurgus feared they might later change their minds. So he prepared to leave Sparta, and just before departing he made the Spartans swear to leave the constitution unaltered until he returned. Then he went away and starved himself to death.

  The government Lycurgus is supposed to have designed was run entirely by the Spartan upper class of warriors and landowners. At the top were not one but two kings, who, in time of war, served as generals. (This arrangement sometimes worked as badly as one might guess.) Sparta also had a council of twenty-eight men aged sixty or more; and a board of five overseers with very broad powers; and an assembly of all the warriors in the heavy-armed infantry. More unusual than their form of government was the way the Spartans lived. According to the legend, Lycurgus also planned this, but no doubt it simply evolved. For the Spartans, these were the facts of life: they numbered only about 25,000, while the conquered people whom they ruled were perhaps twenty times as many. They had to somehow manage all these people. The Spartans decided to leave some of them free, but with no political rights. The rest they made into publicly owned farm laborers — in a word, serfs. As badges of their lowly status, the serfs were made to wear dog-skin caps, and each year (the philosopher Aristotle tells us) the Spartans formally declared war on them. They may have done this so that their secret police could legally murder any troublemakers.

  It was their determination to oppress these others who outnumbered them that shaped the ruling class’s way of life, the customs that we have in mind when we use the word Spartan. They had to make themselves a weapon that could crush revolts, so they invented a social system designed to make every Spartan male a keen and loyal soldier. A committee of elders inspected newborn baby boys and approved only babies who were fit. They threw the others into a mountain ravine.

  After the age of twelve a boy lived in a camp with other boys. He ate wretched food and slept on a bed of reeds that he gathered by a river. He was taught to read and was trained in marching and gymnastics and in the kind of music that was played in drills and battles. The older boys were whipped once a year to see who could stand it longest. They also went through a “time of hiding,” in which they had to live alone in the wild and emerge at night and kill any serfs they found.

  At the age of twenty a young man joined an army squad of fifteen men, and he trained and ate with them. The food was so dreary that a visitor who ate in a Spartan mess is said to have exclaimed, “Now I understand why the Spartans have no fear of death!” So that he could pay for his food, each man was allotted income from one of the state farms worked by serfs. And in this way most Spartan men passed their lives, training and fighting, living off the labor of an underclass, and always under supervision of the state.

  The Spartans were known to all as warriors. Among the Greeks, not just the Spartans, it was disgraceful to run from battle and to throw away your shield. Nevertheless, a lighthearted poet (not a Spartan) wrote:

  Some lucky Thracian has my noble shield:

  I had to run; I dropped it in a wood.

  But I got clear away, thank God! So hang

  The shield! I’ll get another, just as good.2

  2Kitto, Greeks, p. 88.

  Compare that with the story of the Spartan mother who is said to have told her son, as he was going out to battle, either to triumph or be killed. “Come back with your shield — or on it.”

  Women’s lives in Sparta were not much easier than men’s. Girl babies were less likely to be thrown in a ravine, but girls shared some of the same training as the boys. Their main duty was to produce more warriors for the state, but Sparta made even sex a challenge. In the first years of marriage their husbands could visit them only at night and by stealth; this was intended to be a test of the men’s cunning and drive. Spartan couples, it was said, had children before they ever saw each other’s faces by daylight.

  To outsiders, it seemed that Spartans had sold their souls. Not only did they oppress their serfs, but they had surrendered much of their freedom to their war machine. Culturally their lives were barren. Long before, the Spartans had been known for their poets, their music, and their bowls and weapons cast in bronze. Poets from all over Greece had competed every autumn at a Spartan festival. But in its heyday Sparta was a cultural wasteland. Their capital city was a mere collection of villages, with hardly any handsome temples. Music, for the Spartans, was only war songs and the piping of the flutes as they marched to battle.

 
Grim as their lives were, the Spartans took pride in giving them to their state. According to a Spartan custom, when one of their kings went to war he always had beside him a Spartan who had been crowned as victor in the all-Greece Olympic games. One year a Spartan at the games was offered a bribe to lose a wrestling match, but he refused it. After he had thrown his opponent, someone asked him whether it would not have been even better to take the bribe. “No,” he answered with Spartan brevity, “I shall fight the enemy by the side of my king.”

  ATHENS, SPARTA’S RIVAL, lay to Sparta’s northeast, on a peninsula nearly girdled by the sea. It contained only a city and about a thousand square miles of hills, villages and little seaports, olive groves, and tiny fields of grain. But so small were the other city-states that Athens was second in size only to Sparta.

  Before the fifth century B.C., Athens’ history was like that of many other city-states. It was ruled first by a line of kings, then by landlords who had made their fortunes raising grapes and olives, then by ordinary people (a limited democracy), and then by three dictators in succession. When the second of these tyrants was murdered, his brother succeeded him. But he proved to be harsh and vengeful, so a clique of wealthy men overthrew him. For the next two years, these men struggled for power.

  This competition led to a basic change in the way Athens was ruled. Among the struggling politicians was the able Cleisthenes. When he found he needed help, this politician took a fateful step: he turned to the common people. He promised the ordinary Athenians that in return for their help he would bring about reforms.

  When he had won, in 508 B.C., Cleisthenes actually did what he had promised. All free men living in the Athenian state at that time became citizens with full rights. Those over thirty years old were eligible to take part in the ruling council, whose members would be picked by lot. Without having planned to do so when he started, Cleisthenes had taken Athens a long way toward democracy.

  Later, however, the Athenians went farther. They paid their government officials for their service, which at least in theory meant that even the poor could afford to serve. And they set up law courts in which juries of hundreds of citizens, without any management by judges, decided cases by majority votes. Every citizen might hope to sit on the council at some time, or hold an office, or serve on a jury. Athenians were certain of the wisdom of the common man.

  True, Athenian democracy was far from pure. For one thing, only men took part, and, of the men, only those who were citizens. The rest were excluded because they were slaves or had been born somewhere else. And although officeholders were paid, the pay was low, so that most men could not afford to serve again and again. In the posts that dealt with crucial matters such as taxes, the navy, and foreign affairs, a handful of rich men served time after time.

  Meanwhile, as we saw, Sparta, the other leading city-state, was ruled autocratically by a military caste. Here, then, were two sharply different systems. And now both systems would be tested in war.

  This is the background. To the east, across the Aegean Sea, was Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Centuries earlier, many Greeks had crossed the Aegean and settled here along the coast. These Ionians, as they were called, stayed in touch by sea with the motherland Greeks; they were all one civilization. Politically, however, the Ionian Greeks were subjects of the Persian Empire, whose capital was far away in what is now Iran. The Ionian city-states had a grievance against their overlord. Persia often interfered with them in order to ensure that they were ruled not by Athenian-style democrats but by tyrants obedient to Persia.

  In 499 B.C. the Ionians rebelled. Athens helped them by sending twenty ships, and another Greek city-state (Eretria) sent five, but Persia nevertheless stifled the revolt. The Persian emperor Darius was furious with the impudent Greeks for helping the Ionians. He vowed to punish them and is said to have ordered a slave to repeat three times at dinner every day, “Master, remember the Athenians.” Darius did remember, and seven years after the revolt he sent an army to punish Athens and Eretria. The campaign, however, was a disaster. His fleet of 300 ships, bearing 20,000 men, was wrecked in a storm off northern Greece, and the surviving Persians went home.

  Despite this failure, Persia now sent envoys to many Greek city-states demanding tokens of submission: earth and water. The Spartans threw the envoys down a well, telling them that there they would find plenty of both. In 490 B.C. the Persians struck again. This time they sailed straight across the Aegean and captured Eretria and sacked it. Then they sailed on to the bay of Marathon, about twenty-five miles north of Athens, and landed an army on the coast. The Athenians debated what to do, and they considered using a very cautious strategy: simply to stay at home and defend their city when the attack came. While they were debating, they sent a messenger to Sparta asking for help.

  Soon, however, the Athenians decided to get in the first blow at the Persians. (This daring was typical of them.) Along with a small force from the nearby town of Plataia, they marched to the plain of Marathon. There they boldly attacked the much larger Persian army and drove the Persians back to their ships. Then, just as the Spartans finally arrived, the Athenians rushed back to their own city before the Persians could sail around the coast and attack it. The frustrated Persians once again gave up and returned to Asia.

  As a mighty power, the Persians could not put up with such humiliation. Ten years later, a huge Persian army marched along the northern shore of the Aegean and down into Greece. On the sea, not far away, the Persian fleet sailed with it. Athens, Sparta, and other Greek cities joined forces to oppose the Persians. Their ships fought them well, off Greece’s eastern coast, but then they had to retreat to the waters near Athens. Meanwhile the allied Greek army tried to block the Persian one on the eastern coast of Greece at Thermopylae, where a narrow pass ran between the cliffs and the sea. Here, the allies hoped, their small force could hold off the Persians’ large army.

  On the first and second days the Greeks, fighting in shifts on the narrow shoreline, blocked the enemy. But on the night before the third day, a Greek traitor showed the Persians a mountain path that led to the far end of the pass. When the Greek army learned of this betrayal, they retreated, leaving a rearguard of only three hundred Spartans and some others to delay the Persians. These men fought hard, and all were killed. The epitaph on their mass grave reads, “Passerby, tell them in Sparta that here in obedience to their laws we lie.”

  The Persians soon won most of Greece — all the way down to the slender isthmus that links the main body of Greece to the Peloponnese. The Athenians had abandoned their city, and the Persians sacked it. But the Athenians still had their fleet. They lured the Persian navy into a bay near Athens that was so narrow that the lightweight Persian ships could not outmaneuver the heavier Greek ones. While the Persian ruler Xerxes, Darius’s son, watched in horror from a throne on a hill overlooking the bay, the Athenians sank most of his ships.

  With no navy, Xerxes had no supply line, so he withdrew the bulk of his army from Greece. In a later battle, a force of Spartans and other Peloponnesians beat the remnant he had left behind. On that very same day, it is said, on the faraway coast of Asia Minor, Greeks stormed a beach and destroyed what was left of the Persian fleet. At a sacred shrine on Mount Parnassus the Greeks erected a bronze column simply inscribed: “These fought in the war.” Below are the names of thirty-one city-states, beginning with Sparta and Athens.

  No one could be sure that Persia would not attack yet again. So the Athenians organized a league of the Greek towns that lay on the coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea. They swore oaths of allegiance that were to last, they pledged, until lumps of iron, which they threw into the sea, should rise again. Each of them contributed a sum of money or an agreed-on number of ships and men. While many of the members were assessed at only one ship, Athens supplied its fleet of two hundred.

  Naturally, Athens dominated the league. After a while, Athenians began to shape the foreign policies of the league without consulting the other members.
And then, when the island of Naxos tried to secede from the league, Athens crushed this “revolt” and forced the Naxians to pay the league what it demanded. Other protests had the same result, and so what had begun as a defensive league turned into an Athenian empire. Many Greeks now viewed Athens with fear.

  IN THESE EXCITING decades the Athenians were not only fighting a great empire, along with other Greeks, and building a small empire of their own. They, and other Greeks as well, also had an adventure of the mind. They probed the nature and the meaning of life itself, and told what they had learned in buildings, statues, and above all words that still can move us.

  This chapter has already shown the Athenian mind at work in one arena. Our narration of the Persian wars drew on the writings of Herodotus, who is sometimes called the “father of history.” Herodotus was born in a Greek town in Asia Minor, but he later lived in Athens. About a generation after the Persian wars, Herodotus set out to write the history of that struggle between the empire and the city-states. This was not an easy task, for he had scarcely any public documents or memoirs to work with. He had to rely largely on the memories of aged army veterans, and what their sons and daughters still recalled of tales their fathers told them.