athens

Athens

The legend of Theseus and the Minotaur suggests that Athens had dealings with Crete during the Minoan and Mycenaean Ages. We have no written history of that time, though the discoveries of archaeologists show that the Acropolis, a rocky mass 512 feet high, already had fortifications like those found at Tiryns and Mycenae. At the time of the first Olympiad (776 B.C.) there may still have been a King upon the throne, but at Athens, as in many other Greek states, government by Kings gave way about that time to government by the nobles. Monarchy, that is to say, gave way to aristocracy. Sparta with her two Kings was an exception. Whoever ruled Athens also ruled Attica. This was not a district of great natural riches. As can be seen from the map, much of it was mountainous and the corn grown on the plains was not enough when the population increased. However, olives and vines were plentiful and the mountains, as well as providing a home for goats and beet, contained silver mines, lead mines and marble quarries. In the river beds lay a reddish clay suitable for pottery. Finally, there were good harbours. Attica, therefore, though not rich, had considerable natural advantages and we shall see how well she used them — how the red clay was turned into pots and the marble into temples, while the harbours were crowded with merchantmen and ships of war. The most famous product of Attica was neither animal, vegetable nor mineral. It was the form of government known as democracy. We have now to see how democracy grew out of the aristocracy, or rule of nobles, which succeeded the period of the Kings. The Spartans had tried to prevent one man becoming much richer than another by using iron bars as …

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A Spartan grows Up

A Spartan child was examined at birth. A healthy infant was allowed to live. Weaklings were not wanted. They were left in the mountains to die. (Exposure of unwanted children was not peculiar to Sparta. Even civilized 5th-century Athenians practised it.) At the age of seven a Spartan boy left home. His period of family life was finished. Thereafter he would be a member of a community. In modern terms, he would always be either at a boarding school or on military service. In the “pack”, as it was called, the seven-year-old newcomer quickly learned obedience. He had to act as a kind of servant to one of the older boys. He learned to be hardy, since even in winter he had to go barefoot and was only allowed a single garment. He learned to use initiative and was even encouraged to steal in order to increase his rations, which were purposely kept small. It was one of these thieving raids which gave rise to the story of the Spartan boy and the fox. The boy had stolen a fox and hid it under his cloak. It began to gnaw at his stomach, but to set it free would have meant discovery. The boy therefore let it go on gnawing and at last fell down dead, but with his honour preserved. The incidentals of this story are puzzling. If the fox was stolen, it must presumably have belonged to someone. Was it a pet? It seems an odd animal to steal if you are hungry. However, there is no doubt about the moral. Death to a Spartan, even in boyhood, was preferable to the taint of cowardice. The education of girls was milder; but compared with the education of Athenian girls it was tough and unrestricted. At Athens athletics were …

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sparta

Sparta

This striking difference in the way Athens and Sparta treated their victorious athletes reflects a striking difference between the states themselves. Neither was important as a coloniser. But during the 6th and 5th centuries they occupy the centre of the stage. At Sparta living was hard; hence the adjective “Spartan”. In the Mycenaean Age, when, according to legend, Menelaus was King of Sparta and Helen was his queen, the place had not yet gained this reputation for hardness, which was a result of the Dorian invasion. The invaders found the valley of Lacedaemon attractive. They settled there and made the district round Sparta the centre from which they governed. They did not mix with the previous inhabitants of the country. They enslaved them. These slaves, called Helots, were much more numerous than the Spartans themselves. As a result of two wars (c. 736 and 650 B.C.) against the pre-Dorian inhabitants of Messenia, the Spartans reduced them also to Helot status. In spite of their military strength the Spartans were at this time still a cultured people, honoured for their poets and musicians and it was to one of their wise men, Chilon, that the celebrated Greek maxims “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess” were ascribed. Their craftsmen produced fine pottery and ivory carvings. It was probably not till after the second Messenian war that the Spartans, in order to keep control of their greatly increased Helot population, began that system of cheerless, iron discipline which made them famous. Tradition attributed its introduction to a certain Lycurgus. How much Lycurgus had to do with the moulding of the Spartan system, or whether he ever existed at all, we do not know. It is the system itself which is important, because it did not change very much throughout the next three centuries …

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olympic games

The Olympic Games

At Olympia every four years Olympic games were held in which any Greek was entitled to take part. It is not known when the first Olympic games were held, but they were said to have been revived in the year 776 B.C. and the Greeks used that year from which to reckon dates. The period of four years between each celebration of the olympic games was called an Olympiad. When therefore a Greek writer says something happened in the year of the . . . Olympiad we can calculate the year according to our system and put it down as . . . B.C. From now onwards Greek history becomes more exact. Like Delphi, Olympia became a place where men from any part of the Greek world might meet. For a month every four years the incessant quarrels of the city-states were stopped and during five days of this truce period the olympic games were held. There was running, long jump, boxing. wrestling, throwing the discus or javelin, chariot racing and horse racing (all individual events — no team games) and no Marathon. The only prize at Olympia was a crown of wild olive, but when victorious, competitors reached home they were given a variety of honours and rewards. At Athens they received a large sum of money and the right to free dinners for life (cf. p. 60). At Sparta they were assigned the post of honour in battle.

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delphic oracle

The Delphic Oracle

The Delphic oracle, the priestess of Apollo, was supposed to have the gift of prophecy. The Delphic Oracle was consulted before a colony was founded, before war was declared and on all sorts of other questions. When a request for advice was put to her through her priests she proceeded to put herself into a trance. She is said to have done this by chewing laurel leaves, drinking water from an underground stream and inhaling an evil-smelling gas which arose through a cleft in the rocks within her shrine (but no traces of this cleft have been found). Finally, seated on a tripod, she spoke. The priests claimed to be able to make sense of her utterances. After listening, they presented a reply, in verse, to the questioner. The priests acquired great power, but if they had abused it grossly, Delphi would not have maintained its importance for centuries, as it did. Replies to political questions obviously had to be ambiguous, but when consulted on private affairs the oracle tended to be on the side of what we would now consider right (e.g. in favour of mercy and against fraud). It was not, however, the formal reply alone which made a visit to Delphi worth while. As at international conferences nowadays, all sorts of informal meetings and conversations must have taken place. Nowhere else could one find out so much about the scattered communities of the Greek world.

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city-states

City-States and Colonies

The two hundred years after 800 B.C. saw a great expansion of the Greeks by colonisation. Colonisation is a more orderly kind of migration. The Greeks now lived in numerous small communities, often no more than towns with surrounding farmlands. They are therefore called “city-states”. Some of these city-states now sent out colonies to southern Italy, Sicily and also to the Black Sea. These colonies became independent but they kept in touch with their mother-city. Miletus in Ionia sent out many of the Black Sea colonies. Byzantium, now Istanbul, was founded by Megara a city near Athens. The most important of the western colonies, Syracuse, was founded by Corinth. Sparta founded Taras (Taranto) in Italy. Marseilles in the south of France was first colonised by Greeks from Asia Minor. One of the Aegean islands founded Cyrene in North Africa. A map of the Greek world about 600 B.C., when the period of colonisation was over, has therefore to cover most of the Mediterranean. When a people expands in this way it is usual to speak of their “empire” and a map of it shows somewhere a city in extra large print, which is the capital — Babylon, for example, or Egyptian Thebes, or Rome. At this time (c. 600 B.C.) the Greek city-states and their colonies, being independent of each other, did not constitute an empire and acknowledged no capital. There were however two places which all Greeks regarded with reverence. One was Delphi and the other was Olympia.

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migration

The Migration

The “Dark Age” of Greece (c. 1100 – 800) was a time of migration and settlement. Whole peoples were in migration mode. People on the move do not have time to write records for us to read later nor do they build palaces which we can dig up. So there is no continuous history of this period, though during it Homer (c. 900) and Hesiod (c. 800) wrote their poems. (Hesiod’s contained two very different ingredients — stories of the gods and practical advice about country life.) The Achaeans were overcome by invaders from the north called Dorians, who occupied the Peloponnese. Some of them also occupied part of the coast of Asia Minor and Crete. The Dorians did not invade the peninsula on which Athens stood, but Achaeans and kindred peoples called Ionians, who had been forced out of other parts of Greece, took refuge there. In time some of these migrated to Asia Minor. The coastal area which they occupied was called Ionia. The distinction between Dorian and non-Dorian parts of Greece gradually ceased to be important. The point to remember about the Dorian invasion is that it left Greeks settled in Ionia as well as on the Aegean islands and the mainland. They were destined, however, to go further afield than that.

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Trojan

Was there a Trojan War?

Parts of the story of the Trojan War are told in two poems the Iliad (Ilium = Troy) and the Odyssey (Odysseus was one of the Greek Generals) by Homer, the earliest Greek poet. A hundred years ago the war was regarded as a legend, but a German-American, Heinrich Schliemann, who had learned to love Homer as a boy and became immensely rich, determined to try and find Troy by digging. He succeeded, in 1871 and later proceeded to excavate Mycenae. He made many mistakes, but his work and the work of those who followed him have made it possible to answer ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Was there a Trojan War?’ We now know that from about 2500 B.C. a number of great cities existed on the site of Troy, each one built on top of the ruins of its predecessor. The sixth city was built about 1500 B.C. and its destruction by the Greeks is now thought to have taken place about 1180 B.C., that is, about the time when the great days of Mycenae were coming to an end. We know nothing at all about the course of the war, but its cause may well have been a quarrel over Black Sea trade. Troy’s position naturally tempted her to try and exact tribute from ships passing through the Hellespont. Homer and the archaeologists thus give us some sort of picture of the Greeks in about 1200 B.C., but after the end of the Trojan War we enter a period of several centuries about which neither legends nor written accounts nor archaeologists can tell us very much.

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hector

The Wooden Horse

In the tenth year of the war the Greek hero Achilles slew Hector, the Trojan, in single combat. (Paris, the cause of all the trouble, never distinguished himself very much in the fighting.) The death of Hector was a cruel blow to the Trojans, particularly to Hector’s old father Priam; but they still did not surrender. In the end they were beaten by a trick. The Greeks built a huge wooden horse, big enough to hold a number of fully armed men. They put the pick of their warriors inside the horse and left it on the shore. All the rest of the Greek army sailed away. Hector were supposed to think that the Greeks had given up hope and gone home; but in fact they had only withdrawn to an island nearby. The Trojans streamed out of their city and strolled delightedly through the deserted Greek camp and along the shore where the Greek ships had been drawn up. The wooden horse started them arguing. Should they destroy it? Or should they drag it into their city and keep it there as a memorial of their victory? One Trojan, Laocoon, had no doubts. “I fear the Greeks, even when they bring us gifts”, he said and threw his spear at the horse’s great wooden belly. There was a hollow sound and perhaps Laocoon would have persuaded the Trojans to open up the horse straight away if their attention had not at that moment been distracted by something even more interesting — the discovery of a live Greek. This Greek was a young spy named Sinon. His hands were bound and he had a plausible story to tell. The Greeks, he said, had been going to make a human sacrifice of him in order to ensure that the gods would …

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troy

Helen of Troy

Helen “of Troy“ was in fact Helen of Sparta where she was the wife of King Menelaus. She only spent part of her life in Troy, but it was those years which made her famous. The cause of her going there was the following. The three goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite (goddess of love) were attending a wedding, when a golden apple was thrown among the guests. It was inscribed “to the fairest”. Naturally, each of the three goddesses claimed it. Zeus ordered Hermes to take them to Mount Ida, near Troy, where Paris would settle their dispute. Paris was the son of King Priam, but it had been prophesied that he would cause trouble; so he had left the court and was working on Mount Ida as a shepherd. Instead of letting Paris decide simply by looking at them, the three goddesses all offered him bribes. Hera said she would make him a powerful ruler if he chose her. Athena offered him fame as a warrior. However, Aphrodite promised Paris that if he would award her the golden apple she would give him the most beautiful woman in the world for his wife. Paris gave the golden apple to Aphrodite. Aphrodite kept her promise, but not in the way one might have expected. Instead of finding a beautiful unmarried girl for Paris, she caused him to fall in love with Helen of Sparta and he eloped with her to Troy. This was an outrageous thing to do. It is not surprising that the poets who told the story made Helen of Troy the cause of a ten year war.

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Yes! I would like to send the editor, the price of a jar of coffee.

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