TWO

Greek Civilization:
Hellas and Hellenism

The Greeks may at first seem more familiar than the Egyptians or Mesopotamians because so many Western ideas trace back to them: ideas about
government and politics, art and architecture, literature and philosophy. The
concept of democracy, the nude figure in art, and the Western approach to
history as a discipline all trace back to the Greeks.
But while many aspects of Greek culture have been influential over time, it
is also part of the historian's job to recognize the ways in which the Greek
world was different from the modern one. Consider one famous Greek monument, the Parthenon of Athens. This building may look familiar for several
reasons: It has become the symbol of classical Greek civilization, which is perceived as part of the Western heritage. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Western architects admired classical Greek styles and periodically revived
them, so that many modern public buildings resemble the Parthenon in a
superficial way. The Greeks also developed aesthetic theories of correct proportions and compensation for optical illusions that were applied to the
Parthenon and seem modern today.
But it is also possible to view the Parthenon in another way. It was constructed entirely of marble blocks, some of them very large. Each piece had
to be transported several miles from Mount Pentelicus to the northeast of the
city, then precisely carved to fit into the spot where it would be located. In this
sense the Parthenon is a megalithic monument more similar to Stonehenge
than to modern buildings constructed in utilitarian fashion of brick, wood, or
concrete. It is familiar and foreign at the same time. Despite their cultural
influence, the Greeks were not necessarily more "like us" than other premodern societies. Their dazzling cultural sophistication impressed and influenced all who encountered them, but a modern observer transported back to
classical Athens might find it a strange, primitive environment.

54

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

55

The Parthenon of Athens was constructed between 447 and 432 B.C. Like the other buildings
on the acropolis, a hill that was the city's most important sacred precinct, it was didicated to
Athena. It is a sophisticated example of the Doric order of Greek architecture. (Photo by
Susan P. Mattern-Parkes)

The Dark Age

After the fall of Bronze Age civilization around 1200 B.c., many Mycenaean
sites were abandoned or declined dramatically in population. In contrast to
the tombs, palaces, and citadels of Greece's early kings-some of which
remain astounding sights even today-the architecture of the Dark Age that
followed is much simpler. The Greeks lost the art of writing; their memories
of the Bronze Age evolved over the centuries as oral traditions and continued
to evolve after writing was rediscovered in the eighth century B.C. It is no
wonder that, in their minds, the Bronze Age took shape as an era of myth.
Their Bronze Age heritage, and the mysterious and devastating destruction
of early Greek civilization, was the background for the later evolution of
Greek culture.

Population Decline and Dark Age Culture

After the collapse of Mycenaean civilization, the population of the Greek
peninsula declined steeply. The number of known Dark Age sites is very
small compared to Mycenaean sites, and the Dark Age settlements that have

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IMPORTANT DATES AND PERIODS IN GREEK HISTORY

ca. 2000-1200 B.C.
Mycenaean Age
*1184 B.C.

Fall of Troy

ca. 1200-800 B.C.

Dark Age

ca. 800-480 B.C.

Archaic Age

776

First Olympic games

B.C.

594/3 B.C.

Solon's archonship

508/7 B.C.

Reforms of Cleisthenes

480-323 B.C.

Classical Age

480

Battle of Salamis: Greeks defeat Persians

B.C.

447-432

B.C.

Construction of Parthenon

431-404 B.C.

Peloponnesian War

399 B.C.

Trial of Socrates

338 B.C.

Battle of Chaeronea: Victory of Philip II of Macedon

331

Foundation of Alexandria

B.C.

323 B.C.-31 B.C.

Hellenistic Age

323 B.C.

Death of Alexander the Great

31 B.C.

Battle of Actium: Octavian defeats M. Antonius and

C!eopa tra VII

An asterisk(*) indicates that the date is traditional.

been found are smaller in size-even the largest of them probably had populations of less than five hundred. Perhaps as a result of harsh conditions on
the mainland, many Greeks migrated across the Aegean Sea to the western
coast of Asia Minor, which the Greeks called Ionia.
The end of the Mycenaean period was also the beginning of the Iron Age
in Greece. Around 1050 B.c., iron began to replace bronze for weapons and
utensils. (Later, its duller, heavier, and harder character compared to bronze
inspired the poet Hesiod to use the term "Iron Age" to describe his own era
of decline from the glorious age of heroes.) The art of writing was lost in the
Dark Age, and Greeks no longer built structures in stone.

Lefkandi
The main exception to the overall impression of poverty and isolation in the
Dark Age is the cemetery complex at Lefkandi on the island of Euboea. Some
of the graves excavated there contained art objects and jewelry imported
from Cyprus and the Near East. Archaeologists also discovered a large build-

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

57

ing with a surrounding colonnade, in which the remains of an adult man and
woman were buried together with four horses and a variety of rich grave
goods, including some in gold and silver. Clearly, this couple had a great deal
of status in their community. The building itself was constructed of mud
brick and timber, the same materials used for other structures of the time, but
it is very large-measuring 164 feet long and 46 feet wide, it is by far the
largest known building from the Dark Age. But Lefkandi remains an exceptional Dark Age site. From the rest of the Greek world, material remains are
few, artifacts are simple, and evidence of trade with other areas of the
Mediterranean world is scanty.

Homer and Oral Poetry

Nevertheless, it is in the Dark Age that the exceptionally rich mythic culture
of the Greek world first developed. The oral traditions of this culture would
normally be lost to us forever; but in the early Archaic period (ca. 800 B.c.),
parts of this tradition crystallized in two great poems, the Iliad and the
Odyssey, attributed to a poet named Homer. The poems recount episodes in
the legendary ten-year war between the Greeks and Trojans. They are early
examples of the genre of poetry called epic. In antiquity this word merely
referred to the type of six-footed meter Homer used, but today it signifies a
poem that tells the great deeds of heroes or gods.
In the Iliad, the Greek hero Achilles withdraws from the war in anger when
king Agamemnon seizes his favorite concubine, the captive Briseis. But when
his best friend Patroclus attempts to take his place in the fighting and is
killed, Achilles turns his anger against his killer, the Trojan hero Hector. The
poem emphasizes the importance of honor, vengeance, and feud in the society Homer imagines-including blood feud, as Achilles seeks to avenge his
friend's death. But it also suggests a society in which conflicts could be
resolved peacefully through gift exchange and where assemblies, courts, and
other communal institutions existed side-by-side with an individualistic
code of honor.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, whose journey
home from Troy after the war becomes a ten-year ordeal after he angers the
sea-god Poseidon. Odysseus encounters monsters such as the primitive,
man-eating Cyclops and is seduced by an array of female characters, such as
the witch Circe, who turns his crew into pigs. At home, a horde of suitors
besieges his faithful wife Penelope; in the end Odysseus returns to slaughter
them all in a bloody climactic scene. But while the Iliad emphasizes the public feuds of warrior heroes, the Odyssey offers more insight into private and
domestic life. Odysseus' own household comprises his wife and son, female
domestic slaves and male agricultural workers, and "guests" to be entertained and showered with gifts. Good guests offered gifts in return, cementing friendships that could last generations.
The original composer of the poems was probably not literate (legend
related that Homer was blind, and thus could neither read nor write). While

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it is likely that the poems took shape around 800 B.c., it is not clear when they
were actually written down; this was perhaps not until much later. The written texts also continued to evolve and did not take their current form until the
second century B.c., when they were edited by the great scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria (seep. 113).
Certain features of the poems long puzzled scholars, especially Homer's
repetition of phrases and sometimes of whole passages-for example,
descriptions of sacrifices or scenes of arrival or departure. These kinds of repetition do not make sense in a composition that is intended to be read; they
are more characteristic of oral works, such as songs. In the 1930s a scholar
named Milman Parry changed the way we understand Homer when he
observed illiterate bards in Serbia who sang epic poetry. He found that they
composed their poems by drawing on a vast stock of standard phrases,
themes, and stories, which they wove into songs before the eyes and ears of
their audience. He realized that Homer must have been doing something
similar. Homer's poems crystallized a fraction of the mass of poetic material
that was available to him: the complex mythology that had grown around the
memory of the Bronze Age, each story with innumerable large or subtle variants; and an array of heroes, gods, monsters, and minor divinities. Homer
also drew on a host of specific words and turns of phrase suitable to the
poems' meter-in fact, an entire language that was specific to epic poetry.
The unwritten mass of epic tradition from which his poems were formed was
the most important legacy of the Dark Age. In a society without writing, culture was transmitted through bards like Homer.

The Archaic Age: Hellas and the City

Beginning around 900 B.C., grave goods from some sites in central Greece
show that trade with non-Greek peoples and especially with the Phoenicians
began to revive; economically and culturally, Greece became inextricably
entwined with the rest of the eastern Mediterranean world. The Greeks were
using a version of the Phoenician alphabet by about 740 B.c. Some of the
myths that the poet Hesiod records in his Theogony, or "birth of the gods" (ca.
700 B.c.), echo themes in Hittite and Akkadian texts. Egyptian monumental
architecture and stone sculpture probably influenced the development of the
Greek temple and of Greek sculptures of kouroi and korai (see later in this
chapter). But while the Greeks, like all civilizations, were profoundly transformed by their contacts with others, they in tum transformed the ideas and
techniques that they learned in distinctly Greek ways.
Demographic revival accompanied cultural revival. Around 800 B.c., the
population of the Greek peninsula began to increase: Not only does the number of known settlements rise, but the population of previously settled areas
like Attica increased dramatically as well. This trend continued throughout
the Archaic period until, in the Classical Age, Greece was populated more
densely than at any time afterward until the late nineteenth century.

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

59

Perhaps partly because of the strain that the rapidly expanding population
placed on land, the Greeks began to found "colonies" in new areas of the
Mediterranean world. Greek cities emerged in southern Italy, on Sicily, and
on the coast of the Black Sea. The Greeks even settled in places as distant as
the Crimean Peninsula in what is now Ukraine, Emporium in Spain, and
Cyrene in modern Libya.

Hell as
The Greek word for "Greece" was and is Hellas. The word and the concept
emerged in the archaic age, when Greek communities began to trace their
descent to a common mythical ancestor, Hellen. Later the historian Thucydides would observe, correctly, that Homer did not use "Hellas" in this sense.*
Who was a Greek, a "Hellene"? The question is a complicated one, like all
questions of ethnic identity. The Greek word ethnos meant "tribe" or "people"; the Romans used the Latin words gens and natio to express the same
concept. But what does it mean to belong to a "people" (or a "tribe" or
"nation")? In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars believed
that ethnicity was easy to define and identify. People who spoke the same
language, practiced the same religion, and produced similar art objects
shared an ethnicity and a presumed biological kinship. But in the midtwentieth century some scholars began to see problems with this approach.+
Peoples who were culturally very similar could perceive themselves-and be
perceived by others-as different; while others who were culturally diverse
perceived themselves as one people. Researchers began to see ethnicity less
as an objective reality and more as a way that people describe themselves. But
although ethnicity is a social construct rather than a natural and immutable
thing, it is nevertheless real. The ways in which people define themselves
and others shape their social interactions and can even lead to violence and
war.
The Greek definition of Hellas was not geographic. It did not mainly refer
to a specific area, such as the Greek peninsula or the Aegean basin; Hellas was
wherever Greeks could be found. In the archaic period, Greeks mainly
defined the Hellenic community in terms of a supposed kinship relationship,
descent from Hellen. Language was also important from an early stage, and
the word barbaros ("barbarian"), which eventually came to signify any nonGreek, imitated the nonsense sound of a foreign language to the Greek ear.
But the idea of Hellas was still nascent in the archaic period. For example,
although the Greeks partly appealed to a common language to define Hellenism, they also recognized that not all Hellenes spoke the same kind of
*The word translated as "Greeks" in the quotation that begins this book is Homer's
Danaoi, which is one of several terms he uses to indicate the Greek army.
+The work of Fredrik Barth, in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of
Cultural Difference, London: Allen & Unwin, 1969, has been especially influential.

I
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Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

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Greek. They identified four main dialects of their language; modern scholars
count four or five (not the same ones), and it is not clear that speakers of different dialects could understand one another well or at all. On an even more
local level, practically every city spoke its own variant of its dialect and had
its own alphabet, its own system of weights and measures, its own army, and
its own laws. The focus of one's identity might be a city, or a regional ethnic
group, not to mention one's family, clan, or even social class; archaic Greeks
may have only dimly perceived themselves as Greek.
But in the archaic period some cultural institutions evolved that were
common to Bellas as a whole. The great "Panhellenic" sanctuaries arose in
this era; they were religious sites visited by all Greeks, sponsoring festivals
and competitions in which all Greeks participated. They include Olympia in
the western Peloponnese, where the first athletic competitions were held
(according to tradition) in 776 B.c., and the famous sanctuary and oracle of
Apollo at Delphi, which was considered the "navel" or center of the Greek
world.
There were other distinctly Hellenic traditions of the archaic period.
Homer's epics were recited widely in the Greek world; they were not composed in any one dialect, but in a unique poetic language that combined elements of several dialects. The Trojan war came to be perceived as the first
Panhellenic venture, a glorious event in which all Greeks had participated.
Some traditions in architecture and in sculpture transcended the boundaries of city or region. The hop lite style of warfare and organization into communities called poleis also characterized the Greek way of life.

War and the City: The Rise of the Polis

The Greek word for "city" was polis. To the Greeks, the idea of the city did
not mainly suggest a geographic location, or monumental architecture
(although both of these played a part in how the polis was imagined), but a
community-a group of citizens. These were not only the people living
within the city's walls, but also those who farmed the surrounding land
within the city's territory. These citizens were the city.
The polis that developed by the end of the archaic period was strikingly
egalitarian in some ways. Citizens were ruled by other citizens, not by a king
or a hereditary aristocracy, according to the rules of what the Greeks called a
politeia. This word may be translated as "constitution," but it also meant
''body of citizens," reflecting the idea that all citizens had a share in the government of the city. Political institutions usually included a board of annually
elected officials, a council of some kind (often of elders or ex-magistrates),
and, most importantly, an assembly of the full citizen body. Citizenship
became the most important status distinction in the polis.
But who were the citizens? The Greeks made a strong connection between
citizenship and military service: Those who defended the city in war also had
full rights of participation in its constitution. Women could not be citizens in
this sense, nor could anyone below the warrior class. Every city had its own

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

63

army, and in a sense, the army was the city. In archaic Greece, this meant that
the heavy-armed infantryman, the hoplite (see below), was the typical citizen
of the polis.
The concept of the city as it eventually developed included the idea of the
equality of all citizens, but these egalitarian ideas evolved slowly. In the early
Archaic period, some cities were still ruled by narrow elites, and constitutions reserved many privileges (such as the right to hold certain offices) for
the highest economic classes. But eventually the Greeks' distinctive idea of
citizenship resulted in broader-based, more egalitarian governments as
lower-class citizens struggled for political equality, and eventually succeeded
in their aims.
Why did the Greeks develop this unique institution of the polis? Some
scholars have argued that new developments in weaponry resulting in the
h oplite style of infantry warfare led to the egalitarian structure of Greek
cities. However, it seems more likely that changes in technology followed
social and military changes instead of causing them. On the other hand, economic factors were probably important in the development of the polis. As in
early Israel, the Greek economy was decentralized and its basic unit was the
family farm. The landowning peasant who was the backbone of the Greek
economy became the warrior-citizen of the archaic polis.

Hoplite Warfare.

The characteristic style of warfare in archaic Greece was

infantry warfare. Infantrymen were called hoplites after the type of heavy
shield that they used (the hoplon). The design of the shield's grip was such
that it protected half of its owner's body and extended outward to protect
h alf of the body of the man standing to the owner 's right. It was designed for
use in a rigid formation called a phalanx.
The full panoply, which developed over centuries, included the shield, a
bronze helmet that covered the head and face, a heavy bronze corselet,
bronze greaves that protected the knees and shins, and an iron-tipped spear
used for thrusting at close quarters. Hoplites also carried a short sword as a
back-up weapon. This equipment was cumbersome, and useful only in
p itched battles on flat ground.
Hoplites were usually required to furnish their own armor. The normal
qualification for hoplite status was a property qualification-they were
landowners. But hop lite armor, while not cheap, was not exceptionally expensive either; most landowners in a given polis probably belonged to the hop lite
class. The hoplite style of warfare reflects the importance of the landowning
peasant in the Greek polis and the egalitarian ideas behind the polis-all
hop lites had similar equipment and fought side-by-side.
How Big Was a Typical City? In the Archaic period, the landowning,
hoplite class formed the citizen body of most poleis. Later, the Greeks would
call this type of constitution oligarchy, meaning "the rule of the few," but this
label is somewhat misleading as the "few" might be a large number (perhaps
even a majority) of the city's adult male residents. However, citizenship was

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This vase dates to about 630

B.C.

and is an early depiction of hop lite warfare. The two armies

face each other in phalanx formation; the unique grip of the hoplite shield is illustrated in the
foremost figure on the left.

(Scala/Art Resource, NY)

exclusive as well as inclusive: Those disqualified from citizenship included

slaves, the landless poor, and resident aliens or metics. (The population of
metics was probably small in most cities, but very large in Athens.) Women
were excluded from political participation, although they might share in the
social status and religious privileges of citizen birth.
Population statistics are very rare in ancient Greek sources. Athens, the city
that we know most about, may have had fifty thousand male citizens at its
height in the mid-fifth century B.c. The general population (including citizens and non-citizens) of Attica, the territory of Athens, may have been as
high as 300,000, but that is just a guess. And Athens was by far the largest
Greek city in the classical period. It is likely that the citizen population of the
average city numbered in the hundreds or low thousands.

The Spartan Politeia. The city of Sparta came to embody the ideal of the
hop lite polis, although it was unusual in several ways. The literary sources on
early Sparta are problematic because most of them date to the Classical
period or later and reflect the influence of Sparta's image as an ideal warrior
state preserving conservative values. Archaeological evidence for archaic
Sparta is scanty and difficult to interpret.

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

65

In the early Archaic period, the Spartans conquered the nearby territory of
Messenia and reduced its inhabitants to the status of helots. The helots were
owned collectively by the Spartan state; they farmed the land and provided
a quota of produce to their masters, the Spartan citizens. The helots greatly
outnumbered the citizens, and occasional violent revolts punctuated early
Spartan history. In response, the Spartans developed the political institutions
and way of life that made them renowned throughout the Greek world for
their eunomia, or "good laws." Although they attributed their politeia to a
mythical lawgiver named Lycurgus, it probably evolved gradually over the
course of the Archaic period.
Two kings served mainly as generals leading the army. The Spartans were
unusual in having a hereditary kingship (not to mention a double kingship);
in other Greek cities, such as Athens, the "king" was an elected official. The
rest of its political institutions resembled those of other poleis. The chief magistrates were five "ephors" elected annually in the assembly of Spartan citizens, by acclamation (shouting) . A council of elders over the age of sixty, who
were also elected and who held office for life, prepared business for the
assembly and had some judicial powers. All Spartans were in theory eligible
for election to the ephorate and also the council, although in fact the council
was an aristocratic body in which a few leading families predominated.
In theory, all Spartan citizens were not only equal but alike-they called
themselves homoioi, which means "similar." They were full-time warriors
who devoted themselves to military training, while the helots worked the
land and provided them with food. Private life and the family were subordinated to the warrior state. From the age of seven, boys were organized into
"packs" and subjected to harsh discipline and a state-run education in the
traditional subjects of music, gymnastics, and military exercises. From the
ages of twenty to thirty they lived in barracks, even if they were married. For
their entire adult lives, until the age of sixty, they continued to eat at the barracks, which were called syssitia-literally, mess-halls or eating clubs. Membership in one of these mess-halls required a monthly contribution of produce and was the main criterion of Spartan citizenship.
Spartan women were famous (or notorious) for having more freedom than
the women of other cities. Ancient sources record with amazement that girls
received an education similar to that of boys, emphasizing physical training
and dancing, and even exercised naked like boys. Spartan women of the
Archaic period were prominent among the victors in the special women's
footrace at the Olympics. Unlike women at Athens, many Spartan women
owned land.
This is the image of the Spartans that dominates the literary sources of the
Classical period and later. The reality did not necessarily conform to the
ideal. There is evidence, for example, that some Spartans were wealthier than
others (that is, not all Spartans were economically "similar") and that an aristocracy of noble families existed. But archaeology may corroborate the idea
that that an austere warrior society arose and choked what was previously a
rich and varied culture. In the early sixth century B.C., the poet Aleman wrote
graceful, imaginative lyrics for choruses of young girls. Figured pottery and

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fine bronze vessels were produced by skilled craftsmen, and Spartans were
prominent on the Olympic victor-lists. All of these aspects of culturepoetry, figured pottery, fine bronzework, and athletics-were in decline by
the end of the Archaic period. Nevertheless, the archaeological record is difficult to read, and scholars today debate whether changes in Sparta's material culture were related to a new, more austere regime.

Tyranny and Democracy in Archaic Athens. Our main source of information about the government of archaic Athens is a document called The Constitution of the Athenians, written some time in the fourth century B.c. and
attributed to the philosopher Aristotle (although he probably is not the real
author). Because few other sources for sixth-century Athens survive, it can be
difficult to reconstruct the details of what happened and the conditions that
led to change, but the basic outline of events is reasonably clear.
In 594 B.c., in a period of social crisis, a reformer named Solon held the chief
magistracy at Athens, called the archonship. In his poetry, Solon described his
reforms as a compromise between the demands of the rich and those of the
poor. He abolished enslavement for debt and liberated the hektemoroi, probably sharecroppers or serfs. Solon also made constitutional reforms, organizing the Athenian citizens into four property classes. He allowed even the lowest class of poor or landless thetes the right to vote in the assembly and the
law-court (although he restricted the right to hold high office to the richest
classes). From this time forward, Athens was unusual in having no property
requirement for citizenship; free birth from a citizen father was the only
requirement.
Solon's changes did not put an end to violent conflict at Athens. A few
decades later, in 560 B.c., a leader named Pisistratus emerged at the head of
one of three warring factions in Attica; he perhaps represented the interests
of the lower citizen classes. He briefly seized power, but was expelled, only
to return again in 546 B.C. In 525 he died, and his sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, ruled after him.
Greek sources label Pisistratus and his sons tyrants. This was a foreign
word signifying individuals who ruled over Greek cities, and in fact many
cities, not just Athens, went through a period of one-man rule in the late seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Whether they ruled well or badly, whether they
seized power or inherited it or were appointed by a higher authority (such as
the Persian emperor; see p. 75), the Greeks called these rulers tyrants, not
kings: The idea of a king ruling over a polis, which was generally governed
by its citizen body, was an anomaly. For this reason and because tyrants were
often associated with arbitrary and cruel behavior, the word had negative
connotations. Very little is known about most of the tyrants, and it is difficult
to generalize about the reasons they came to power; these were perhaps different in each city.
The Constitution of the Athenians describes Pisistratus' rule as mild and beneficial to the common farmer; he established traveling judges to bring justice
to the countryside and gave loans to impoverished peasants. The Athenian

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

67

economy boomed, as black-figure pottery from Attica came to dominate the

market, and coinage was first introduced to Attica at this time. The tyrants
were also responsible for great public building projects and the elaboration of
city festivals. Legend told that the first tragedies were performed under Pisistratus at the City Dionysia, a festival in honor of the god Dionysus. On the
hill called the Acropolis, he or his sons built a new temple to Athena Polias,
the goddess who presided over Athens' most important religious event, the
Panathenaic festival. The Pisistratids may have constructed another, larger
temple on the site later occupied by the Parthenon. Southeast of the Acropolis, they began an enormous temple to Olympian Zeus that was not completed until Roman times.
Pisistratus and his sons ruled until510 B.c. In 514 Hipparchus was assassinated in a conspiracy led by two lovers named Harmodius and Aristogiton,
and in 510 aristocrats of the exiled Alcmaeonid family expelled Hippias with
the help of the Spartans. Then in 508 B.c., another round of constitutional
changes took place under the leadership of a reformer named Cleisthenes,
himself a member of the Alcmaeonid clan.
Later, the Athenians would look back to Cleisthenes' reforms as the beginning of what they called democracy at Athens. "Democracy" means "rule of
the people"; the demos, like "the people," in English, was either the whole
citizen body or the poorer classes specifically. Athens' politeia had contained
some democratic elements since Solon-especially the participation of the
thetes on jury-courts and in the assembly. Under Cleisthenes the constitution
became more democratic, and in the Classical period, Athens was the largest,
most powerful, and probably most radical democracy in Hellas.
Cleisthenes changed the way citizens were organized; he retained Solon's
four economic classes, but he abolished the political organization of citizens
into four tribes. He replaced them with ten new tribes, each composed of a
number of "demes," small communities to which each citizen belonged. His
intention was perhaps to create more social equality by breaking up old kinship structures. Cleisthenes also replaced Solon's "Council of 400"-a body
which we know little about-with a "Council of 500" to which each deme
contributed one or more members (based on its population). The Council
prepared business for the assembly and handled the city's finances. Cleisthenes also may have invented the odd institution of ostracism: In a special
assembly, each citizen would write on an ostrakon (potsherd) the name of
someone to be expelled from the city; the "winner" had to leave Athens for
ten years. Many ostraka inscribed with the names of Athenian statesman survive; handwriting analysis shows that some of them were mass-produced by
a few people and distributed to the crowd.

Literature and Culture in Archaic Hellas

In the Archaic period as later, myth infused most of Greek literature. Around
700 B.C., the poet Hesiod composed his Theogony, which traces the genealogy
of the gods from primeval Chaos to Zeus, Hera and the other deities that

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ruled from Mount Olympus. His poem attempts to synthesize and rationalize what must have been a complicated mass of mythical traditions- to produce his fairly coherent account, he must have resolved contradictions and
rejected variants in the stories he used. Although Hesiod still relied on traditional, mythic explanations of the natural world, he applied critical methods
to the material.
Hesiod also wrote Works and Days, a didactic or "teaching" poem that sets
down rules for the small farmer. This work is an important source for the
social and economic history of the Archaic period, as it describes life on a typical family farm.
The fascinating genre of lyric poetry also flourished during the Archaic
period. Lyric poetry is difficult to define-like epic, it was performed to
music, but it used different types of meter and might be sung by an individual or danced by a chorus. Its subjects are widely varied and reflect the contexts in which it was performed (religious festivals, marriages, funerals, and
private parties) as well as aristocratic life and values. Themes range from war
and politics, to myth and the gods, love and sex, and athletics; the poet Pindar, who wrote in the early fifth century B.c., celebrated and idealized the athletes of the great Panhellenic competitions.
One of the most important themes in archaic poetry is love. While some
early archaic poets romanticized heterosexual love, later authors wrote of
homosexual love between mature men and youths-the passionate and
erotic* dimensions of love that they celebrated were to be found here, and not
in heterosexual love leading to marriage. The ideal love object was an adolescent, but still beardless, youth-as in the case of female parthenoi (discussed later in this section), sexual desirability is associated with a fleeting
time of life. The asymmetrical relationship between a mature, active pursuer
and a young, passive love object remained central to the Greek idea of erotic
love throughout the Classical, Hellenistic, and even Roman periods.
Although we know the names of several female poets of the Archaic age,
the only one whose works survive is Sappho, who wrote on the island of Lesbos toward the end of the seventh century B.c. Little is known about her
except what she reveals in her poetry- and even this is difficult to interpret,
because ancient (and modern) poets do not necessarily write about real experiences. Nevertheless, careful analysis of her work can illuminate its social
context. Her poems were composed for choruses of young girls- parthenoit,
girls of marriageable age but not yet married. They came from far and wide
to learn to sing and dance in Sappho's chorus before returning to their homelands to be married. Her aristocratic pupils hoped to emerge as graceful, talented, and cultivated women and desireable mates. But dancing in Sappho's
chorus was also an important rite of passage; living apart from men and
bonding with their peers, the dancers prepared to take their place as adult
*The word "erotic" derives from Eros, which in Greek signified either the young
god of sexual desire or sexual desire itself.
tparthenos is sometimes translated as "virgin."

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

69

The Written Record

THE YOUNG WOMEN OF SAPPHO'S CHORUS

A large body of Sappho's work circulated in antiquity, but little remains today.
This fragmentary poem survives on a parchment dating to the sixth century A.D.
A close reading offers insights about the members of Sappho's chorus-where
they came from, for what purpose, and how they felt about one another.
The elaborate simile comparing the poem's subject to the moon is typical of
Sappho's poetry, which takes its most powerful imagery from the natural world.

At Sardis
she often remembers us here
and how we lived
To her you were like a renowned goddess
and she enjoyed your dancing most of all.
Now in Lydia she is outstanding among women,
just as the rose-fingered moon when the sun has set
surpasses all the stars, and its light spreads
equally over the salty sea
and the many-flowered fields;
in loveliness the dew gathers,
and the rose blooms, and the delicate thyme
and the flowering honey-clover.
Though she wanders abroad, she often remembers
gentle Atthis, *and her tender heart
is consumed with longing. (Sappho, fragment 96)
*Another girl in Sappho's chorus, mentioned in several of her poems.

women in society. The poems suggest that emotional bonds among the girls,
and between the girls and Sappho, could be intense and even erotic in
nature-some of the poems have sexual overtones.
Sculpture. From several different parts of the Greek world, statues of young
men, naked and beautiful, life-sized or larger, attest to one of the most important developments in archaic art: the large-scale nude sculpture. From a narrower area and in smaller numbers, statues of clothed young women-sometimes life-sized but often smaller-also survive; these statues offer an
opportunity to compare artistic views of the male and female body.
Art historians call the male sculptures kouroi (sing.: kouros), which is simply a word for "young man." In antiquity, they would be found in cemeteries, as grave-markers, or near temples as dedications to the gods. The statues
are strangely anonymous. Their faces seem to be ideal types rather than portraits; they carry no items or "attributes" that would help identify them; they

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The Ancient Mediterranean World

The Anavyssos or "Kroisos " kouros, from Attica, dates to about 530 B.C. It was a grave
marker. The inscription on its base read, "Stop and mourn at the tomb of dead Kroisos,
whom clamorous Ares slew in the front line." (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

are always young, regardless of the age of the deceased. They always stand
in the same pose, arms at their sides, striding with the left foot forward, staring straight ahead, their hair arranged in long, straight braids, their facial
expression a mysterious "archaic smile." In a way, they capture the spirit of
the Archaic age-representing the idealized young warrior or athlete and the
standard of homoerotic beauty.
Freestanding sculptures that portray young girls-korai, "maidens" - survive in smaller numbers; most come from the Acropolis of Athens, where
they once stood among the religious dedications that crowded the sacred
precinct. Damaged in the Persian War (seep. 75) and deliberately buried,
they are very well-preserved; traces of paint even remain on some korai.
Like kouroi, korai are young and probably represent an ideal of beauty. But
they are less anonymous than kouroi; they vary slightly in pose, and some

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

71

This kore from the Athenian acropolis dates to about 520 B.C. She pulls her skirt tight
around her legs with one hand and raises her other hand to display an unknown object.
(Scala/Art Resource, NY)

korai hold objects that may identify them as individuals (for example, by
associating them with a goddess such as Athena or Persephone) or give a
sense of context to the sculpture. Korai are clothed, and much artistry is
devoted to the portrayal of the drapery that enfolds them. This emphasis on
clothing probably reflects the conventions of Greek society, which accepted
male nudity in public but jealously guarded the sexuality of respectable
women and girls. The way in which the bodies of some korai are outlined
under tightly drawn skirts suggests they had an erotic appeal-but one that
was more coy than that of the kouroi and depended on their costume rather
than their nudity. The sculptures offer us another image of the young, marriageable parthenos who is the subject of Sappho's poems.

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Architecture. The stone temple has its origins in the Archaic period. Temples were the earliest monumental buildings constructed in ancient Greek
cities; the temple gave the city a religious center, a focus for the festivals and
cults that helped give social cohesion to the city.
Greek temples were rectangular in shape, surrounded by columns and a
low flight of steps on all four sides, and had a pitched, tiled roof. By tradition
they faced east. Each temple housed its god's cult-statue- the image of the
god that occupied the main interior room (cella). Offerings to the god by
hopeful or grateful worshippers were displayed in and around the temple.
The festivals, sacrifices, processions, and contests with which the gods were
worshipped took place in the open air, in the religious space around the temples, not inside them.
The temple was the first, and remained one of the most important, distinctly Hellenic forms of architecture. But different styles of temple were built
in different regions. In the Archaic period two main styles or" orders" of temple evolved. Greeks on the mainland built temples in the Doric style-simpler than the Ionic style, which is named for the region (Ionia) in which it
arose. Ionic temples had more slender columns and elaborate decoration
than Doric temples. In the West, the Greeks of Sicily and southern Italy built
temples in the Doric style, but with variations particular to their region.
The temple was a focus for Greek art, especially sculpture. Votive offerings
placed in or near the temple could take the form of kouroi and korai, plaques
with relief sculpture, or statuettes (but the Greeks dedicated a huge variety of
items to the gods, from tools and weapons to clothes and baked goods). The
temple itself was often decorated with sculpture, especially the gable or
pediment.
Philosophy. In the sixth century B.c., a new way of thought arose in parts
of the Greek world-the beginning of what the Greeks later called philosophy, which means "love of wisdom." Philosophers began to investigate
nature in a new way, without invoking the traditions of myth and its vast,
complicated array of gods. Although they did not deny the gods' existence,
the philosophers thought about them in more abstract ways-rejecting the
gods of mythology, who looked and acted like humans. Some archaic
philosophers wrote down their arguments, in verse or in prose, but their
works survive only in the fragmentary quotations of later wtiters.
Philosophy especially flourished in the city of Miletus, in Ionia. It was perhaps the influence of Eastern civilizations- especially Mesopotamian civilization and its traditions in astronomy and mathematics-that inspired the
first Greek philosophers. Thales of Miletus is the earliest of the Ionian
philosophers, and one of the most mysterious, since he apparently did not
write down any of his ideas. Legend told that he predicted an eclipse (scholars date this event to 585 B.c.) and calculated the height of the Egyptian pyramids by measuring their shadows. He is said to have argued that the world
floats on water, and that water is the fundamental element from which the
universe was created.

Greek Civilization: He lias and Hellenism

73

The temple of Apollo at Corinth was constructed around 540 B.C. to replace an even older
building. The relatively flat, sharply angled column capitals are typical of early Doric temples. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

Perhaps the most influential philosopher of the Archaic period was

Pythagoras, who was born on Samos, on the Ionian coast, but moved to the
city of Croton in Italy around 530 B.c. Like Thales, he wrote nothing, and
because an especially vast body of legend later grew up around him, it is difficult to separate his ideas from those of his followers in later generations.
One of his genuine contributions was the idea of "metempsychosis," the
transfer of the soul to another body after death, an idea that may have
reached Greece from India; the Greeks themselves believed that he was
inspired, in this and in many other things, by Egyptian culture. Unlike the
other early philosophers, Pythagoras was a charismatic, religious figure. He
could work miracles, such as being in two places at once. He advocated a disciplined way of life, with restrictions on diet, clothing, and behavior, that dis-

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The Ancient Mediterranean World

tinguished his followers from ordinary Greeks, and he established a "school"

or tradition of learning that long outlasted his lifetime. The discoveries in
geometry, number theory, and music that later generations attributed to him
were probably made by his followers in the Classical period.

The Classical Age: The Empire and Culture

of Athens
In 480 B.C. an event occurred that had profound effects on ancient Greek history and culture: the naval defeat of Xerxes, king of Persia, who had invaded
Greece with a great force. As a result of this victory, the city of Athens, which
led the Greek resistance, built an empire; a new, broader form of citizenship-democracy-took shape; the idea of Hellas, and of the foreigner or barbarian, crystallized; and the story of the war was told in the first work to be
called "history"- the work of Herodotus.
In the eyes of later generations, the culture that flourished in fifth-century
Athens represented the height of Greek civilization. It could be argued that the
Archaic period was more important because institutions such as the polis, the
temple, and the tradition of epic poetry all evolved then, or that Hellenistic
developments in philosophy or medicine were ultimately more influential.
But since antiquity both Greeks and non-Greeks have seen in the literature,
art, and architecture of classical Athens the fullest expression of Greek culture.

The Persian Empire

In the fifth century B.C., the entire Near East from Asia Minor, Syria, and
Egypt all the way to modern Afghanistan and Pakistan was united under the
rule of the Persians. At the time, their empire was the largest in world history.
The Persians' homeland was in the southeastern Zagros Mountains, in
modern Iran. They spoke an Indo-European language, the ancestor of modem Persian, which they wrote using a cuneiform script. Only a few written
sources in Old Persian remain, however; these are mainly monumental
inscriptions. The administration used other Near Eastern languages, including Aramaic and Elamite, for its records and documents, and many of these
survive. Excavations of important Persian cities, such as Susa and Persepolis
near the Persian Gulf, also provide valuable information on the Persian
Empire. Sources in Greek and Hebrew, especially Herodotus, record some
details of its early political history, but it is not clear how accurate these writings of outsiders really are.
The Persians rose to power under the leadership of King Cyrus II ("the
Great"), who ruled from 559 to 530 B.c. Early in his reign, he conquered the
Medes, whose empire or hegemony reached from their capital, Ecbatana
(modem Hamadan in Iran) as far west as central Asia Minor. Cyrus went further and conquered the kingdom of Lydia, which controlled western Asia
Minor (including the Greek cities of Ionia). In 539, he conquered Babylonia;
it was he who allowed the Jewish exiles living there, as well as exiles of other

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

75

nationalities, to return home. His son and successor, Cambyses, conquered

Egypt, the last of the great Near Eastern kingdoms.
The next king, a usurper named Darius, expanded the empire westward,
to Thrace and some Aegean islands; he also campaigned unsuccessfully in
the Black Sea region against tribes that the Greeks called "Scythians."
The Persian Empire was organized into provinces ruled by governors, or
satraps. The Persians were flexible in the way that they administered their
empire. In general, they allowed local power structures, as well as native
laws and customs, to remain intact. As much as possible they worked with
these institutions, not against them, to control their subjects and extract taxes
from them. Local Greek aristocrats ruled over the Greek cities of Ionia as
"tyrants," with Persian support.

The Persian Wars

In 499 B.C., in the reign of Darius, the Greek cities of Ionia revolted from the
Persian Empire. The revolt was crushed after five years; the city of Miletus,
which had led the uprising, was punished especially harshly. In the course of
the revolt the lonians had sacked and burnt Sardis, the capital of the satrapy
of Lydia. In this, the city of Athens had played a small part-they had sent a
few ships to Ionia in support of the revolt.
Later, the Greeks believed that when Darius invaded Attica in 490 B.c., he
was seeking revenge for the destruction of Sardis. When his force landed at
Marathon in northern Attica, it was met and routed by an Athenian hoplite
army. Herodotus writes that while all ten Athenian generals were present at
~arathon, one of them- Militades- provided the strategy and the leadership that won the battle.
At Marathon, the Athenians opposed the Persians alone, aided only by the
tiny city of Plataea. They asked the Spartans for support, but the Spartans
were observing a religious holiday and refused to send help. As yet it seemed
impossible for the Greeks to combine in a military effort under a single
leader, but the response to the next Persian attack was somewhat different.
In 480 B.c., Darius' successor, Xerxes, launched an invasion of Greece by
land and sea. He bridged the strait of the Hellespont and marched his army
through Thrace to the Greek peninsula; the navy accompanied the army, sailing along the coast. The size of the invading force awed the GreeksHerodotus writes that it numbered over 2 million, an impossibly high figure.
~any Greek cities, especially those in the north that could not be defended,
surrendered without a struggle. But this time, a coalition of some Greek cities
ormed to oppose the Persians. The Spartans, because of their military reputation, commanded this unified army-but not without dissent and bickering from other cities. Even now, it was not easy for the Greeks to unite in a
Panhellenic effort. Not all Greeks joined the resistance to Persia, and the
alliance that did arise was an uneasy one.
The Greeks first attempted to stop the Persians at Thermopylae, a narrow
pass between the mountains and the sea. They were unsuccessful; legend

76

The Ancient Mediterranean World

later told of the band of three hundred Spartans who remained to fight and
die even after all was lost, a story that greatly contributed to Sparta's military
mystique.
The city of Athens played the starring role in the final act of the Persian
wars. After Thermopylae, central Greece could no longer be defended; rather
than surrender, the Athenians evacuated their city and left it for the Persians
to destroy. The Greek navy-to which the Athenians contributed more ships
than any other city-inflicted a crushing defeat on the Persians in the Strait
of Salamis, near Athens. Herodotus writes that it was an Athenian general,
Themistocles, who devised the winning strategy of fighting in the narrow
waters and who lured the Persians into the trap.

Herodotus: The First History

Herodotus finished his book about fifty years after the end of the war. In his
first sentence, he uses the word historiae to describe its contents; in Greek, this
word means "inquiries," and it is the origin of our word "history." Herodotus
traveled far and wide gathering information; in the process of tracing the origins of the war, he recounts over two hundred years of Greek and Persian history and describes the geography and peoples of the entire known world.
Herodotus wrote decades after the last events he describes, in a world
where oral tradition was by far the most usual way of preserving information. As a result, his stories sound like folktales to the modem reader. Most of
them have characteristics that are typical of folktales: For example, the history is imbued with a mysterious and tragic fatalism, in which disastrous
events balance ancient transgressions and ambiguous oracles come true in
unexpected ways. Herodotus himself accepted this way of understanding
history, and thus may strike modem readers as naive.
On the other hand, he did not simply repeat the stories he heard. He sometimes offers multiple versions of a story from different sources, implying that
one should consider their biases when deciding what to believe. Sometimes
he rejects a story as incredible or untrustworthy. He also gives thought to the
limits of knowledge: For example, although he begins his work by reviewing
mythical conflicts (such as the Trojan war) between Greeks and Asians, he
suggests that this period is not truly knowable in the same way that more
recent events are. Herodotus was the first to apply a method to the writing of
history- diligent research, combined with a critical attitude toward the information he gathered.

Greeks and Barbarians

Herodotus looked to Homer's Iliad as one of his models: Homer, too, had
written about a great war between a Greek force and an Eastern enemy.
Although Homer had not emphasized the differences between the Greek and
Trojan heroes in his poem (he portrays them worshipping the same gods and
speaking the same language), the Iliad had always been one of the works that
defined Greek identity. This is also one of the functions of Herodotus' work.

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

77

Its fascinating accounts of foreign peoples (including Egyptians, Persians,

and Scythians) reflect new ideas about the foreigner or barbarian and about
Hellenic identity.
The barbarian appears not only in Herodotus' history, but in other Greek literature of the Classical period: in the tragedies and comedies of fifth-century
Athens and in philosophical and medical treatises. In describing barbarians,
the Greeks indirectly described themselves-their image of foreign political
institutions, religious practices, gender roles, even diet and clothing, reflects
their ideas about the defining features of Greek culture. When describing the
Persians, the Greeks emphasized their subjection to a single ruler-the
despotic king Xerxes- and contrasted this with the "freedom" of the Greek
polis. They portrayed the Persians as cowardly and weakened by an effeminate, luxurious lifestyle, while they thought of themselves as warlike, brave,
and fortified by simple living. Greek ideas of "East" and "West," first formulated in the fifth century B.c., are still influential today.

Democracy and Empire: Athens at Its Height

The naval victory at Salamis demonstrated the power of a new kind of citystate: not the city of hoplite warriors and farmers, but a city that built and
maintained a navy from a central fund of resources and manned it with its
poorest citizens.
In the interval between the two Persian wars, the Athenians had made a
historic decision: They used the income from silver mines in Attica to build a
fleet of warships. By the time of the battle of Salamis, their fleet was larger
than that of any other Greek city.
The Greek warship of Salamis and of the Classical period was the trireme.
These were long, fast ships with bronze rams fitted to their prows; each was
rowed by 170 oarsmen, arranged in three banks, and carried a small number
of marines, archers, and sailors for a total crew of two hundred. Triremes
fought by ramming one another at high speeds.
Naval warfare required large numbers of citizen-rowers. A fleet of one
hundred ships needed a crew of twenty thousand to be fully manned. This is
why democracy, with its broader definition of citizenship, was associated
with naval warfare and vice-versa. Athenian oarsmen were drawn from the
lowest property class, the thetes-those who were too poor to be ranked as
hop lites.
The navy required money. Triremes were expensive to build, and their
large crews had to be paid. Until the dissolution of their empire at the end of
the Peloponnesian war, the Athenian fleet was financed mainly by the tribute
that Athens collected from its allies and subjects. After that, the Athenians
maintained a smaller fleet by means of taxes levied on the richest classes.
As the Athenians achieved dominance over the Aegean Sea with their
navy, their politeia became more democratic. We do not know when some of
the reforms took place, but by 400 B.C. Athens was a radical democracy. Any
citizen, regardless of class, could speak at the assembly. Most offices were

78

The Ancient Mediterranean World

The trireme Olympias is a modern reconstruction designed by naval architect fohn Coates
and built by the Greek navy in 1987. Triremes carried sails and used them to travel long dis-

tances, but in battle they were rowed by a large crew, as here.

(Photo by Alexandra Guest,

courtesy of the Trireme Trust)

probably open to all citizens. The city's nine chief magistrates- the archonswere appointed annually by lot; so were the members of the Council of 500
and the jurors who decided each year's innumerable court cases. Of the city's
important officials, only the ten strategoi were elected; the Athenians considered election an undemocratic process because the rich tended to win more
often than the poor. Citizens were paid for attending the assembly, for serving on the council, and for sitting on juries-measures designed to increase
the participation of the poorest classes. The city's most important decisions
were made in the assembly, by majority vote; the assembly met forty times a
year, and at least six thousand citizens attended each meeting.
But as the politeia became more egalitarian, it also became more exclusive.
In 451 B.c., the assembly passed a proposal that restricted citizenship to those
with two Athenian parents. The class of citizens was effectively closed, and
non-Athenians could only gain citizenship by special decree of the assembly.

From League to Empire. When the Persians retreated from Greece in 479 B.C.,
the Greeks pursued the war on Persian territory. At first the Spartans contin-

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

79

ued to lead the Greek forces, but in 478 the Athenians took over. In the alliance
they founded, each city was required to contribute either a quota of ships or a
sum of money. The headquarters of the alliance and its treasury were located
oh the sacred island of Delos; for this reason modern scholars call it the
"Delian League." Its members were mainly the Greek cities of the Aegean
Islands and Ionia.
Gradually, the Athenians exercised more control over their allies. Some
cities tried to leave the alliance and were subdued, sometimes brutally.
Stripped of their navies, they were forced to contribute money (tribute)
instead of ships. In 454 B.c., the alliance's treasury was moved to Athens. The
Athenians came to think of the allies as their subjects, and the league as their
empire.
In the early fifth century B.c., the Athenians ambitiously expanded their
military power. They built a fortification wall around their city, and "Long
Walls" that connected it to their port, Piraeus, four miles away. They won a
stunning victory over the Persians at Eurymedon in Asia Minor, sent a large
force to Egypt, and campaigned in Cyprus. In a conflict with Sparta and its
allies, they conquered the territory of Boeotia on the Greek mainland. But
they suffered setbacks too: The naval expedition to Egypt was destroyed in
453 B.C., and in 446 several allies revolted and the Spartans invaded at the
same time. The Athenians were forced to abandon their control of Boeotia
and sign a thirty-year truce with the Spartans.
One of the most prominent politicians in Athens at this time was Pericles.
From about 443 to 431, he was elected strategos every year. He led democratic
reforms to the Athenian politeia and socialized with some of Athens' leading
intellectuals. The Parthenon and other monuments that stand on the Athenian acropolis were constructed on his proposal.

Culture in Imperial Athens

In the early Classical period, as Athens became Greece's largest, most powerful polis, the idea of the city suffused its culture. Pericles' building program
celebrated the greatness of Athens, and the historian Thucydides cast the city
as the hero of his tragic story of the Peloponnesian war. The city was a central theme in comedies and tragedies, which were produced at great civic festivals. Philosophers speculated about the origins of the city and its laws and
taught their students the skills they needed to be political leaders.

The Acropolis and the Image of Athens. In antiquity as today, the most
famous monuments of classical Greece were the temples constructed on the
acropolis of Athens. All of these were dedicated to Athena, the city's patron
goddess. The first to be built (447-432 B.c.) was also the largest and most
famous: the Parthenon, or temple to Athena Parthenos (meaning "unmarried
maiden"; seep. 68). While the Parthenon was still under construction, a monumental entryway called the Propylaea (meaning" gateway") was begun, but
never finished. A small Ionic temple to Athena Nike (meaning "victory")

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Greek Civilization: He lias and Hellenism

81

The Parthenon dominates this view of the Athenian acropolis. In front of it are the remains of
the Propylaea-the monumental gateway to the acropolis-with the small Ionic temple to
Nike on the far right. On the far left, part of the Erechtheum is visible. (Scala/Art
Resource, NY)

projects from its foundation; relief sculpture on the temple depicts a battle
between Greeks (portrayed nude) and an enemy clad in the baggy trousers
Greeks associated with Eastern peoples. The subject is probably either the Trojan war or the battle of Marathon. Finally, a temple called the Erechtheum
(after the legendary king Erechtheus) replaced the temple of Athena Polias
that had been destroyed by the Persians and housed some of the city's oldest
and most important cults, including the statue of Athena Polias. Pericles is
supposed to have proposed the program that planned and paid for all of these
buildings. Constructed in a relatively short time-they were all complete
before 407 B. c.-they seemed to later generations to represent the ephemeral
greatness of the Athenian Empire.
The Parthenon is a Doric temple, but it also has some Ionic elements,
including a sculpted frieze around the walls. The sculpture that decorated it
was supervised by Phidias, one of classical antiquity's most famous artists.
His colossal cult-statue of gold and ivory for the interior depicted Athena in
her helmet and shield, holding a winged Victory in the palm of her hand.
The Parthenon and the whole of Pericles' building program are difficult to
interpret. It is possible to relate them to the military imperialism that preoccupied Athens at the time that they were constructed. Tradition held that Pericles proposed to pay for the buildings with the tribute that Athens collected
from its allies (but it is not clear that this is true). In fact, the acropolis com-

82

The Ancient Mediterranean World

plex is the only example of a planned, state-funded building program in classical Greece, and it reflects the uniqueness of Athens' achievement.
Military themes are prominent in the sculpture of the acropolis buildings:
They appear in the cult-statue of Athena in full battle dress and in the temple
to Victory with its battle frieze. Sculpture on the Parthenon's metopes also
portrayed mythic conflicts, such as the Trojan war and a battle between centaurs (a monstrous race that was half horse, half man) and La piths (Greeks of
Thessaly). The blending of Ionic and Doric forms on the Parthenon may
reflect Athens' solidarity with the Ionian subjects of its empire.
But in general the building program, like classical Greek architecture and
sculpture generally, lacks any obvious reference to its historical context.
Mythical battles are typical themes on all classical Greek temples; they may
reflect a growing sense of Greek identity (contrasting civilized heroes with
the barbarous or monstrous opponents they face), or they may reflect the
struggle between man and nature that is a fundamental theme of many religions. With the dubious exception of the frieze on the Temple of Nike, historical events are not depicted in classical sculpture at all. The close connection between art, history, and the needs of the state that characterizes much
of Hellenistic and Roman sculpture is absent.
Drama-both comedy and tragedy-developed and flourished in
the era of imperial conquest. All of the examples of classical drama that survive were produced in Athens by a small number of playwrights. The surviving tragedians, in chronological order (although their lives and works
overlapped), are Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The only classical
comic writer whose works are preserved intact is Aristophanes.
Nearly all surviving comic and tragic dramas were produced in the fifth
century B.c. Aeschylus' earliest extant play (The Persians) dates to 472 B.c. and
the last play of Euripides dates to 406; Aristophanes' surviving plays all date
between 425 and 388 B.c. But both types of drama arose much earlier, probably in the 500s B.c. Legend told how tragic drama was invented in the reign
of Pisistratus, when a poet named Thespis added speeches and an actor to the
tragic chorus. Comedy may be as old as tragedy, or older; comic choruses
(identifiable by their funny animal costumes) appear on vases from Attica as
early as the mid-SOOs B.C.
Drama had a central place in Athenian political life. Comedies and
tragedies were both performed in competition at Athens' great civic festivals
in honor of the god Dionysus; the contests were judged by citizens selected
by lot. To prepare for the competition, the city provided each playwright with
funding; the financing of comedies and tragedies was one of the duties
undertaken by rich citizens. Each play needed a chorus to sing and dance the
odes that were the foundation of the performance, as well as a few actors
(two or three for tragedies, as many as four for comedies) to recite the dialogue. The actors were professionals, paid directly by the city. The chorus was
composed of ordinary citizens (metics and slaves were not allowed to participate); one of the main jobs of the playwright, who also directed the play, was

Drama.

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The Theater of Dionysus in Athens, where comedies and tragedies were pe1jormed. Its stone
seats, orchestra, and stage date to the mid-300s B.C. or later. Before that, the theater was constructed of wood or simply carved into the hillside. (Photo by Susan P. Mattern-Parkes)

to train this amateur chorus in rehearsals. The city is often a key theme in
both comedies and tragedies; tragic choruses sometimes seem to speak for
the (citizen) audience and articulate its reactions, while comedies often
ridicule prominent statesmen and comment on political events.
Our understanding of classical theaters is imperfect, since surviving theaters generally date to the Hellenistic period. The stone seats and elaborate
stone set of the Theater of Dionysus, on the south slope of the Athenian
Acropolis, were constructed in the mid-fourth century or later. Like most theaters, it was originally just a hillside overlooking a flat area (called the orchestra, or "dancing-place") where the chorus performed; eventually the hill was
hollowed into a semicircle and provided with wooden seating and a wooden
backdrop.
The arrangement of the spectators in the theater reflected Athens' civic
structure. Special seats were reserved for priests and magistrates, the sons of
veterans killed in battle, and ambassadors from other cities. The Council of
500 sat together; the ephebes (youths undergoing military training) also sat
together; and metics had their own section. The rest of the audience was perhaps organized by tribe.
According to tradition, dramatic performances were free at first, but
because the crowds became unruly, the city began to issue tickets (some of
these small lead tablets survive). By the end of the Classical period, however,
a special fund called the theoric fund had been established to purchase tickets

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for poor citizens who otherwise could not afford them. This became a large,
widely used, and very popular fund, maintained even in times of war-so
integral did the Athenians consider the theater to civic life.

Sophists and Scientists. In Athens, skill at public speaking brought great

rewards. An eloquent speaker could win his case against an enemy in court
or persuade the assembly to vote for his proposal. Athenian democratic values allowed anyone, regardless of class, to seek honor in the assembly or in
the law-court, but the most successful men would be the best speakers.
A traditional education focused on gymnastics and music-students would
learn to sing and dance the poetry that was the foundation of Greek culture.
But beginning in the mid-fifth century B.C., it was possible to pay for a more
advanced education in persuasive speaking, a skill the Greeks called rhetoric.
Rhetoric was taught by experts known as sophists (from the Greek word
sophos, meaning "wise"). The sophists were usually not citizens; they came to
Athens from all over the Greek world, perhaps attracted by the demand for
training in rhetoric that the democracy created. The sophists were philosophers as well as teachers. They reasoned and speculated about a range of subjects that included language, mathematics, music, and sociology. They were
notorious for their intellectual and moral relativism-the idea that absolute
truth does not exist and that reality depends on the viewer's perspective. Thus
the most famous sophist, Protagoras, is credited with the saying "man is the
measure of all things." His ability to produce an argument for any situation
made many suspicious of him and other sophists; Protagoras was accused of
boasting that he could "make the weaker argument stronger."
The sophists were not the imperial period's only philosophers-philosophy flourished in the fifth century, and not just at Athens. In fact, most of the
era's most important thinkers were from other cities, such as Parmenides of
Elea, in Italy; his long poem On Being broke new ground by rejecting the evidence of the physical senses and arguing that true reality was single,
unchangeable, and eternal. Two influential theories of physics developed in
the Classical period: Empedocles of Acragas argued that everything in the
universe was made of four elements (earth, fire, air, and water), and this
became the dominant theory later; Democritus of Abdera proposed a theory
of atoms or tiny, indivisible particles from which all matter is composed.
Mathematicians tackled problems of geometry and number theory, and in the
early fifth century B.c. Zeno of Elea proposed the famous paradoxes that
remain problematic today (for example, he demonstrated if the "swiftfooted" hero Achilles were to race a tortoise, he could not possibly win as
long as the tortoise had a modest head start).
As far as their ideas can be reconstructed from fragmentary evidence, most
early classical philosophers argued in abstract and theoretical terms, even
when their subject was the natural world. In the later Classical period and
especially in the Hellenistic period, observation and experience played more
of a role, but theory and logical demonstration continued to dominate the
language of philosophy, and philosophers continued to argue about the

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

Art and Society

SCULPTING THE BODY IN CLASSICAL GREECE

Polyclitus's Doryphoros. (Roman copy)

Resource, NY)

(Scala/ Art

In the Classical period Greek sculptors abandoned the kouros and depicted
male subjects in poses that created graceful curves, explored how the body's
weight was distributed, and made the subjects seem more natural and involved
in their surroundings. At the same time, it is not quite accurate to say that the
Greeks arrived at a realistic image of the body. The men of classical sculpture are
still idealized; with few exceptions, they are young, beardless, and beautiful.
Greeks continued to theorize about the body and to depict it in ways that conformed to these theories. For example, in the mid-fifth century B.c. Polyclitus
published a work called Canon in which he described the best way to portray the

85

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male body-this was probably (at least in part) a theory of symmetry and proportion. His statue of the Doryphoros, or "club-bearer," may illustrate the canon
he invented.
Sculptors continued to portray women clothed, and drapery was depicted
with increasing virtuosity and naturalism. On the other hand, the female body
emerges in more detail from beneath increasingly diaphanous drapery. The
"Victory ,of Paeonius," dating to the 424 B.c., illustrates both of these trends.
Later, around 380 B.c., the sculptor Praxiteles shocked the Greek world by
depicting the goddess Aphrodite naked in a cult-statue for a temple at Cnidus.
lnterrrupted during a bath, she shields herself shyly with her hand. Her coy
response to the viewer, as well as the erotic response she provoked in those who

The Nike of Paeonius. (Scala/ Art Resource, NY)

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saw her (stories in ancient sources describe this), show that she was imagined
as the object of the observer's gaze and desire in a way that male nudes were
not.

Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Cnidus. (Roman copy)

(Scala/ Art Resource, NY)

reliability of the senses and the validity of phainomena (literally, "the things
that are apparent") as evidence.

The Peloponnesian War

From 431 to 404 B.c., the Athenians and the Spartans fought a war that devastated the population of both cities and involved much of the Greek world.
Scholars call this war the "Peloponnesian war" because most of Sparta's

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allies were located on the Peloponnese, the southern part of the Greek peninsula. This reflects the fact that the Athenian point of view is the only one that
survives (the Spartans would not have called the war "Peloponnesian").

Thucydides. The Peloponnesian war inspired the next great history in

Greek, the work of Thucydides. He was an Athenian who took part in the war
as a general, but was exiled in 424 B.C. when the mission he led was unsuccessful. One important way in which Thucydides' history differed from
Herodotus' is that he did not describe a war between Greeks and foreigners,
but one that that engulfed much of the Greek world. One of his themes is the
idea of Athens and especially the qualities and values that distinguished it
from Sparta. Thucydides' image of Athens emerges especially clearly in a
funeral oration that Pericles gave for those killed in the first year of the war
(book 2, chapters 34-46). This is the most famous passage from his work, but
modern readers should note that Thucydides had no written text of any of
the speeches he records and was working from memory (his or someone
else's); he writes that his speeches do not necessarily represent what was
actually said but what he thought the occasion called for (1.22). Pericles' real
funeral speech may have been very different from the one Thucydides
relates, and Thucydides' speech may represent the Athenians' views of themselves only imperfectly.
Thucydides is much more critical than Herodotus of certain themes that he
identifies with poetry and oral tradition. He states that he has relied on eyewitness testimony whenever possible (this was much easier for him than for
Herodotus, since he wrote of events that occurred in his lifetime and he
observed some of them himself). He used a dry writing style that he viewed
as practical rather than entertaining. He eliminated from his history all references to divine intervention as well as other material that he found suspicious (for example, his history-in sharp contrast to Herodotus'-<:'ontains
no substantive references to women). As a result, Thucydides' work seems
more scientific and objective than Herodotus'. However, a careful reading
reveals that it is just as full of ingenious symmetry, foreshadowing, and certain tragic themes as Herodotus' is. Although Thucydides viewed human
nature as the driving force behind history, rather than mysterious divine
forces or individual personalities, his work is no less artfully intricate and
compelling than his predecessor's.
Athens and Sparta at War. To Thucydides, in hindsight, it seemed inevitable
that Athenian imperial ambitions would eventually cause a reaction from the
conservative and anxious Spartans. But he also describes a series of specific
incidents that led the Spartans to declare war; one of these immediate causes
was the defection of Corcyra, a colony of Corinth with a strong navy, to the
Athenian alliance.
Part of the Athenian strategy in the first years of the war was to withdraw
Attica's population behind the city's walls. In the overcrowded conditions
that resulted, a devastating epidemic disease broke out; its victims included

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Pericles. Nevertheless, the Athenians were successful in the first part of the
war; they fortified Pylos in the southern Peloponnese and captured over four
hundred Spartan citizens alive. The Spartans offered peace, and a treaty was
concluded in 421 B.c. But in 415, the Athenians decided to invade Sicily with
a large force of one hundred ships. Thucydides writes that they hoped to add
the entire island to their empire. The Spartans supported the city of Syracuse
against the Athenians, and in a disastrous series of setbacks the entire Athenian force was lost.
The Athenians and Spartans were now at war again. In this second phase
of the conflict, the Athenians contended with internal political strife and the
revolt of its most important allies. The Spartans fortified Decelea in Attica,
which allowed them to pillage the Athenian countryside at will and became
a refuge for thousands of runaway slaves. Nevertheless, the Athenians persisted in the war and even achieved some successes until405 B.c., when the
Spartans defeated them in the naval battle of Aegospotami. The Athenians
were forced to surrender unconditionally. For a time it was uncertain
whether the Spartans would allow the city to survive or would execute the
male citizens and enslave the rest of the population, as Athens had done to
some of its own enemies; but the Spartans spared Athens. They forced the
Athenians to tear down their walls and join the Spartan alliance; they also
dissolved the democracy and installed a narrow oligarchy, called the "Thirty
Tyrants" in Athenian sources.

Stasis. After the Sicilian disaster, in the difficult second phase of the Peloponnesian war, civil conflict (called stasis in Greek) broke out in Athens-a
group of revolutionaries who hoped to win the military support of the Persians proposed replacing the democracy with an oligarchy of five thousand.
They persuaded or bullied the assembly into passing the proposal. At first a
small, extremist group of four hundred seized power for itself; in 410 B.c. the
oligarchy of five thousand was instituted, but it did not last long, and the full
democracy was restored after a brief interval.
Thucydides and other sources refer to many episodes of stasis in Greek
cities, and they tend to identify the same cause: conflict between the rich and
the poor (or "the few" and "the many") over issues of political power, oligarchy, and democracy. Whether class conflict of this kind was the real cause
of stasis in classical Greek cities, or whether this is simply the way that
observers chose to describe it, is not clear. But it is interesting that ancient
sources perceive economic class as an issue of major significance in Greek
p olitics.

Athens after the War

Athens suffered devastating loss of life in the years of the Peloponnesian war,
especially from disease and the Sicilian expedition. But in many ways it
recovered from the effects of the war quickly. The rule of the Thirty Tyrants
was brief; by 403 B.c., the democracy had been restored. In the first half of the

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fourth century B.c., the Athenians even attempted to revive their empire and
confronted Sparta and other cities in a series of conflicts. In 371 their ally, the
city of Thebes, defeated the Spartans in battle and became a major military
power in Greece.
Some of Athens' most famous writers and citizens-such as Plato the
philosopher and Demosthenes the statesman and orator-lived in this
period. But the literature that survives from the fourth century is mainly in
prose: Dramatic poetry was still produced, but in general it does not survive.

Philosophy. In 399 B.C. an Athenian jury found a fellow citizen named

Socrates guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth and condemned him to
death. Although he was one of the most influential thinkers of classical
Athens, he wrote no works of his own and we only know about him through
the writings of his students, especially Plato. It is hard to tell how accurately
Plato portrays his teacher, especially because his dialogues do not present a
consistent picture. Perhaps the most useful text for reconstructing the historical Socrates is the Apology, Plato's version of the speech Socrates gave at his
trial; but although Plato was present at the trial, the speech is his own creation and its relationship to Socrates' actual words is tenuous.
In the Apology Socrates describes his way of life and his role in Athenian
society. One activity he mentions here-and also demonstrates-is his habit
of exposing the ignorance of others who claim wisdom or expertise by subjecting them to probing questions; the Greek word dialectic sometimes refers
to his method of questioning and arguing toward truth. Socrates' favorite targets were sophists, but they also included craftsmen, poets, and politicians.
While Socrates insisted that he did not, like the sophists, teach for money,
he attracted an entourage of young men who admired his ideas and accompanied him in public. Most of them came from wealthy families, and some
were among the "Thirty Tyrants" who ruled Athens briefly after the Peloponnesian war. For this and other reasons, Socrates' politics seemed antidemocratic and one of his arguments in the Apology ridicules the idea that an
ordinary Athenian could be a good model and instructor for young men.
Suspicions of elitism partly lay behind his indictment and prosecution.
Plato was Socrates' most famous student. He founded the West's first university-the Academy, which offered instruction in many subjects from rhetoric and dialectic to music and mathematics-and became one of its most
influential thinkers. Almost all of his known works survive, and all of them
except the Apology are written as dialogues, like plays-they are not expositions of a single view, but examples of dialectic reasoning. Although many
readers have assumed that the words of Socrates, who usually plays a leading role, reflect Plato's own views, this interpretation does not explain why
Plato wrote in dialogue form in the first place. The problem is even more
complicated because, while Plato's dialogues involve real historical figures,
he never portrays himself as one of the speakers or (except in the Apology) as
a witness. The dialogues often begin with prologues suggesting that the
reader is hearing the story second- or third-hand, many years after the event.

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The result is to create doubt in the reader about what to believe-is Plato
endorsing the views he expresses, or not? Which views are Plato's, anyway?
One of Plato's most influential works is the Republic (in Greek, Politeia);
here, Socrates and his interlocutors attempt to describe an imaginary, ideal
city. The Republic explores many problems that recur throughout Plato's corpus, such as epistemology (the theory of knowledge), the city and government, and the soul. This work also contains a famous discussion of the social
role of poetry.
Plato's politeia is governed by an elite class of "Guardians," qualified by
their merits and virtues and including both men and women. This class
seems to be closed and hereditary. The rest of the citizens are also divided
into classes-for example, soldiers and artisans-according to their abilities.
Plato's view of a rigid hierarchy where all power is wielded by a narrow elite
seems oligarchic and even, to some readers, totalitarian.
The Republic contains some of Plato's best-known speculation about the
human soul, a subject explored in many of his dialogues. The sharp, dualistic contrast he often draws between the immortal, divine soul and the mortal, corrupt body is one of his most influential legacies. However, his thinking on this issue should not be oversimplified; some dialogues (such as
Timaeus, which explains the origin and function of the human body) suggest
a complicated interrelationship between soul and body. In the Republic, Plato
describes the ideal city as a mirror of the soul, which is divided into three
parts: the rational part (analogous to the Guardians); the emotional part
(analogous to the soldiers); and the appetites, associated with the lower
classes. In a well-governed individual the emotions and appetites are subjected to reason. At the end of the Republic, Plato relates a story about the
afterlife, the "myth of Er," which is designed to teach people the importance
of living virtuously. Here, souls are reincarnated in the bodies of animals and
people, and are thus rewarded or punished for their behavior in their previous life.
Like many philosophers before him, Plato was interested in problems of
reality and perception. He is skeptical about the idea that truth can be understood with the physical senses and sometimes suggests that observable
objects are not truly real, nor can true knowledge be achieved through the
senses. In the Republic, Plato argues that only ideal objects called "forms" are
truly real, and that they can only be perceived through abstract reasoning.
Plato was also critical of poetry and prophecy as ways of perceiving
truth- a theme that is especially important because of the foundational role
that poetry, mostly performed as songs and chants, played in Greek culture.
While he assumes that poetry is divinely inspired, he argues that it lacks
social value, for example, when it portrays the gods committing sins and
crimes. He criticizes the way in which poets imitate the voices, mannerisms,
and emotions of the characters they portray. All poetry is banned from his
ideal city.
Another prominent theme in Plato's dialogues is love; this is the subject of
one of his most renowned and entertaining treatises, the Symposium . A sym-

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posium was a drinking-party, a type of entertainment well attested in ancient

Greek sources for men of the leisure class. No respectable women were
allowed; prostitutes and flute-girls of slave status entertained the guests with
music and sex. Larger houses had an andron, or "men's room," that could
accommodate the couches on which the male guests reclined to eat, drink,
and have sex with the women or with one another. Plato's speakers decide to
dismiss the flute-girl and to drink moderately at this particular party, amusing themselves instead with speeches in praise of Eros, or sexual love-an
appropriate topic for a symposium.
For the most part the speakers assume that eros refers to homosexual love
between men. One speech, that of Pausanias, seeks to make sense of the value
system behind these relationships. Why is the lover encouraged to pursue his
beloved and applauded for his conquests, while the beloved is covered in
shame if he submits? This speech suggests that while Athenians did not stigmatize homosexual love as such (many, like Plato, valorized it), they did condemn and ridicule those who played a passive sexual role. Pausanias' speech
describes how parents guarded their sons as well as their daughters against
sexual predators; those who could afford it had slaves called "pedagogues"
(paidagogoi) to chaperon their sons in public.
Plato's speakers condemn love based mainly on sexual desire (although it
is less clear whether they condemn sex as such) and praise its moral, intellectual, and spiritual aspects. For example, it inspires courage; lovers are
brave soldiers, as they seek to prove themselves before each other or to rescue each other from danger. Several speakers portray the ideal lover as an
educator-a mentor providing moral instruction for the beloved. Socrates
himself expounds a mystical view of love that he attributes to a prophetess
named Diotima: Eros is not a god but a daimon, a creature intermediate
between gods and mortals; the desire that the beloved's beauty inspires is
really a longing for divine beauty and goodness. Through love, humans can
arrive at a vision and understanding of divinity.

Science and Medicine. The first Greek medical writing dates to the later
Classical period. Gradually, in the late fifth and fourth centuries B.c., a canon
of treatises evolved that was attributed to a great physician named Hippocrates, who lived on the island of Cos. Even in antiquity, commentators
argued that some of the treatises in the collection were not by Hippocrates,
and today scholars are not sure which, if any, are authentic. But the Hippocratic Corpus* remained one of the West's most influential medical texts
through the eighteenth century.
Some of the treatises speculate about the nature of the human body, proposing that it is composed of as many as four types of liquid or "humors" (the
theory of four humors eventually became widespread, but not all Hippocratic treatises recognize four humors). They also speculate about anatomy,
describing, for example, the body's network of blood vessels. But dissection
*Corpus means "body" in Latin; here, it refers to a body of work.

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

.------------li

Doing History

93

ir------------,

LITERATURE AND LITERACY

Written texts-literature, documents, and inscriptions on stone, for exampleare some of the most important sources of evidence for the ancient historian.
But a tendency to rely on texts can skew our understanding of ancient societies
in which writing was not as important as it is today. While it is tempting for the
historian to attribute great significance to the distinction between literate and
preliterate or "oral" societies, not all cultures with writing use it in the same
way or to the same extent. Studying literacy in the ancient world means not just
tracing the introduction of the alphabet or determining how many people could
read or write (a question we cannot answer accurately anyway), but trying to
define the role of writing in society.
Literary texts of many kinds survive from classical Greece-but what was
their purpose? Most were intended to be performed before an audience as
songs, plays, and speeches. In fact, only a restricted group of texts were written
to be read privately-these include Thucydides' history and many medical and
philosophical works (although some of the latter were probably written as lectures). Poetry was sung or chanted; comedies and tragedies were staged in theaters, where a chorus danced out the main musical themes. Some evidence suggests that Herodotus' histories were mostly experienced in public readings.
Careful readers of classical Athenian literature w ill find it full of surprising
evidence that culture was primarily oral. When Plato criticized the poetry that
was still the foundation of education in his time, he focused not on how it was
read, but on how it was performed. When Thucydides explained his new, more
critical and scientific approach to history, he emphasized that he relied on the
evidence of eyewitnesses-not documents-and he refers to few documents in
his work. The overwhelming bulk of Greek culture-its traditions about the
past, its songs and speeches- was never written down at all.

is not well attested in the Hippocratic corpus; Aristotle, who performed animal dissections himself, is responsible for many advances in anatomy in the
late Classical period.
Aristotle was a citizen of Stagira, in northern Greece. He studied with Plato
at the Academy but left Athens when Plato died in 348 B.c. A few years later
he moved to the Macedonian court as tutor to the young Alexander the Great;
he returned to Athens in 335 and founded a new school there, called the
Lycaeum.
Aristotle did not write with the same level of stylistic artistry as Plato; he
used plain expository prose, and his surviving works make no use of drama
or dialogue. Many of his writings read like lecture notes, and that may be
their origin. An enormous corpus of his work survives; his ideas on government (in the Politics) and on dramatic poetry (in Poetics) are especially well
known and influential today. His treatises on logic developed new, rigorous

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standards for demonstrative proof. But Aristotle's contributions to natural

science are perhaps his most important legacy.
Aristotle's ideas on physics-the first principles of nature-are complex
and highly abstract. He identifies four basic aspects of existence (form, substance, origin or cause, and purpose) and investigates questions of motion,
weight, and the fundamental constituents of matter. But his favorite subject
was biology, especially the study of animals-their classification, anatomy,
physiology, origins, development, and behavior. He describes an enormous
variety of animals from insects to mollusks to large mammals; his discussions
of marine animals are especially impressive. Aristotle's view of nature was
profoundly teleological-he believed that nature created every part of an animal for a purpose, to help the creature or its species survive. While many of
his conclusions are based on logical deduction, literary tradition, or secondhand accounts (from beekeepers and the like), he also used deliberate observation and dissection much more than other classical writers.

Society in Classical Athens

Compared to many other civilizations, classical Greece was less stratified
economically-that is, the rich were not that rich compared to ordinary
people. But while egalitarian and democratic ideas were important, powerful and complex class distinctions-between citizens and aliens, aristocrats
and commoners, men and women-still pervaded Athenian culture. The
courtroom orations of the fourth century offer some of the best information
on social issues in classical Athens; other sources, especially the comedies of
Aristophanes, also help us understand how Athenian society was organized.
Oratory and Honor. Rhetoric was important at Athens in the imperial
period, but most surviving speeches date to the fourth century B.C. Like dramatic performances, the orations were delivered in public settings before an
audience of ordinary citizens--either the citizens of the assembly or the jurors
in a courtroom. Either way, the citizens passed judgment on the speech by voting, but they also voiced their opinions by cheering and heckling. The speaker
risked his image and reputation-his honor-with every performance.
Oratory is a good source for the social values of classical Athens. This is
especially true of forensic (that is, legal) speeches because they describe conflicts among relatively ordinary people and because they were designed to
appeal to a citizen jury. Every year, a panel of six thousand jurors was chosen
by lot from among citizens who volunteered to serve for pay. Juries were
large, usually in the hundreds, and decisions were made by majority vote. A
large number of forensic orations survive, many written by professional
speechwriters but not delivered by them-the parties to a lawsuit in Athens
were required to speak for themselves.
The speeches reveal that Athenian society was intensely competitive. Men
tended to become involved in long-standing feuds with other men, along
with their friends and families. Thus many speeches begin by describing a

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complicated history of hostility between the two parties. For example, when
Demosthenes prosecutes Meidias for punching him at a festival, he tells a
story about his past relationship with the defendant that includes among
other events a slander suit, an allegation of murder, and an insult to Demosthenes' mother. Women are usually passive in these stories: Abusing a female
family member is construed as an insult to its men. Athenian orators tell the
stories as though they expect the jurors to agree that the courts are an appropriate forum for personal revenge.
The Greek word for "insult" or "outrage" was hybris. An act of hybris
embarrassed and humiliated its victim, who could only regain his image and
self-respect by retaliation. The courts provided one way of playing out this
type of drama and, especially, offered a non-violent way for Athenians to
insult one another and avenge themselves. The audience of jurors, representing public opinion, would determine which man was winning this perpetual
contest for honor-at least until the next round.
Citizens. The Athenian citizen body was divided into four official property
classes; but citizenship was itself a social class. It was defined by birth: After
451 B.c., two citizen parents were required for citizenship. This meant that all
Athenian citizens were conscious of inherited privilege. The right to hold
political office, to participate in the assembly, to serve as jurors in the lawcourts, and even to own land in Athens was exclusively theirs by birth. Thus
Athenian citizens proudly distinguished themselves from the slaves and resident aliens who lived among them.
Nevertheless, there were inequalities within the citizen class between rich
and poor, educated and uneducated, well-born and common. The speakers
who made proposals in the assembly tended to be rich and aristocratic,
although every citizen had the right to speak. Education in rhetoric, which
was important for success in the assembly and in the law-courts, was available to the leisure classes but not to the ordinary Athenian. Aristocrats considered themselves better than their social inferiors and called themselves the
kaloi k'agathoi, the "handsome and noble." Athenian values granted the highest social status to men who did not have to work for money and whose
wives and daughters stayed within the confines of the house. Wealth made a
statesman more credible and less corruptible in the eyes of the Athenian
demos . Through a kind of tax called liturgies, the wealthy financed ships for
the navy or the dramatic performances that all citizens enjoyed; the Athenians valued these contributions highly.
But while values privileging the rich and well-born emerge strongly from
some classical texts, others- or sometimes the same ones-show that ademocratic value system was also prominent. Orators often appeal to the jury's
suspicions of educated, clever speakers and to their hostility to the arrogance
and displays of luxury associated with the rich. Some speeches show that all
citizens might think of themselves as well-born and "noble" compared to
noncitizens.

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A Closer Look
THE AGORA

The agora, the marketplace, was the heart of the ancient Greek city. Essentially,
an agora was simply an open space for public use, and functions of all kinds
took place there. People might visit the agora to shop; to watch a contest, a
parade, or a lawsuit in progress; to hear the latest news; or to socialize. Vendors
hawked products of every possible kind, and livestock mixed with the human
crowds. Socrates met with his friends and followers and had some of his most
important conversations in the agora. Ostracisms took place at the agora, and
over a thousand ostraka inscribed with the names of politicians (including Pericles, Themistocles, and many others) have been found there.
Gradually the agora became the site of some of the city's most important
monumental buildings, including a permanent courthouse, a meeting-house
for the Council of 500 and an office for the ten generals, a number of altars dedicated to gods, the Temple of Hephaestus (which is well-preserved today), and

Ostraka from the agora at Athens inscribed with the names of prominent
statesmen. The round ostraka (made from the bottoms of cups) read "Themistocles son of Neocles," referring to the famous strategist of the battle of
Salamis, and were apparently mass-produced by a few individuals.
(Scala/ Art Resource, NY)

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

97

(possibly) a prison, as well as some private houses and a host of temporary

shops that do not survive. Several stoas-long, colonnaded buildings-provided shade and shelter for socializing or for vendors offering their wares.

Boundary stones like this one marked the

entrances to the agora. The inscription reads, "I am
the boundary of the agora." The stone dates to
about 500 B.C. (American School of Classical Studies
at Athens: Agora Excavations)

Slaves and Metics. Nobody knows exactly how many slaves there were in
classical Athens, or what percentage of the population they formed-only
that there were many, and the percentage was large. Even modest households
might own one or more slaves, but slaves played a much larger role in clas-

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sical Athens than just domestic service. They were a fundamental part of the
Athenian economy and society.
The role of slaves in Athens' economy was very diverse. Some were owned
by the state, including the corps of three hundred "Scythian archers" who
enforced order in the city. Private individuals often bought slaves as an
investment-some of these slaves lived and worked independently as craftsmen; others were hired out as agricultural laborers, workers in the state
mines (an especially miserable fate), or prostitutes. Other slaves worked
directly for their masters as domestic servants or field hands. Domestic slaves
were sometimes freed, and wage-earning slaves might buy their freedom.
But the boundary between slave and citizen was difficult to cross. Citizens
could not be enslaved for debt or as punishment for a crime, and freed slaves
became metics, not citizens.
Athens' population of metics, who could be "barbarians" or Greeks from
other cities, was very substantial. They were not allowed to own land, with
the result that they dominated other areas of the Athenian economy, such as
banking and craftsmanship. Some metics, including the logographer Lysias
(see later) and most of the sophists, made a living teaching rhetoric or selling
speeches. While citizens looked down on metics socially, they perceived their
economic contributions as necessary. Metics were excluded from all political
participation and had limited legal rights; they were required to have the
support of a citizen patron, and they paid a special tax. It was difficult and
rare for a metic to become a citizen; this could only be done by a special
decree of the assembly.
Women and Family. The status of women in classical Athens is one of the
most controversial problems in the study of this period. Some scholars
emphasize women's seclusion and lack of economic and political power,
while others point out the ways in which they were empowered-ways that
a modem Western audience, accustomed to a different role for women in
society, might easily overlook.
Athenian legal orations and some other classical documents suggest that
women's ability to own or control property was strictly limited in theory and
also in fact. Every woman was under the power of a kyrios, or" guardian," usually either her husband or father, and could perform no public transactions in
her own name. A man's property went to his legitimate sons on his death; if
he had only a daughter, she could be claimed in marriage by her father's closest male relative, often his brother, who then controlled the property. On the
other hand, some orations reveal that women could be knowledgeable about
family accounts and sometimes made or influenced decisions about property.
Marriages were arranged between the bridegroom and the bride's male relatives and her consent was not legally required. Literary sources suggest that
women in Athens were married in their early teens, to men who were about
thirty. Marriages between first cousins and between uncle and niece were not
unusual, probably for economic reasons-to keep property in the family.
In Athenian literature the ideal wife remains at home, appears in public
only on well-defined occasions such as religious festivals and funerals, and is

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

Art and Society

THE FAMILY ON ATHENIAN FUNERARY MONUMENTS

This gravestone from Attica dates to about 350 B.C. It is

inscribed with the individuals' names: The man is
Phainippos and both women are named Mnesarete.
(Reunion des Musees Nationaux/ Art Resource, NY)
The classical Greeks avoided portraiture-statues that represented the individual features of their subjects. Bodies and faces are idealized, and most subjects
are in the prime of life. This is mainly true even of tombstone reliefs, which are
supposed to depict the deceased and members of his or her family. But these
reliefs are unique in several ways. Many depict people of different ages, including mature men, aged parents, and infants. Women are dressed soberly as
matrons, in contrast to the coquettishly draped freestanding sculptures; strikingly, their names appear on their tombstones, making these the main source
for women's names in classical Athens. Family scenes are common, as the dead
say good-bye to their children and parents, spouses, slaves, and even pets.

99

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The Ancient Mediterranean World

never mentioned in public (this is why orators refer to respectable women as

"the wife of X" or "the daughter of Y"). Some sources suggest that even
within the house, women inhabited a separate gynaikonitis, or "women's
quarters," where they were less accessible to visitors and passers-by. The
honor of the family's men was deeply vested in the chastity of its women, and
stereotypes portrayed women as deceptive and unable to control their passions. A feeling of anxiety about the control of women, and even of hostility
toward women, thus pervades much of Athenian literature.
But the ideal of the secluded woman diverged from the reality. Even
respectable women left their homes to visit female friends. Not all households could afford servants to answer the door, fetch water, and perform
other chores that would otherwise bring the wife into contact with men or
into public view; nor could all households afford a lifestyle in which women
did no work outside the home. In the marketplace, women (often metics or
slaves rather than respectable citizens) could be found selling a wide variety
of goods; they also held jobs as bakers, innkeepers, nurses to the sick, midwives, wetnurses, dancers, and prostitutes. Woolworking was a trade that
could be practiced at home, and some women sold their wares for profit.
Rural women often worked in the fields, especially if their husbands were off
at war.
Athenian values granted women power in the domestic and religious
spheres. They supervised the household's servants, raised its children, and
managed its budget; they took charge of family rituals, such as weddings and
funerals, and participated in important civic festivals. Women traditionally
produced their family's clothes, blankets, and other textiles at home. They
could be powerful figures in the family and played a crucial role in the
economy.
Athens' numerous prostitutes came mainly from its metic and slave population. Some prostitutes who formed lasting relationships with citizen men
were called hetairai-" companions." Men could bring their hetairai, but not
their wives, to the symposia that were central to male social life. In this way
they might mingle with the city's poets and politicians and even become
famous (or notorious). Pericles' hetaira, Aspasia, was renowned for her
friendship with Socrates and other Athenian intellectuals and for her influence over Pericles. But we should not idealize the life of the hetaira. The story
of a hetaira named Neaera, told in a legal oration, reveals some of the harsh
realities of her background: She was sold to a madam as a small girl and practiced prostitution from childhood. When she tried to leave a lover who
treated her abusively, he sued for her return with partial success. Although
she counted famous cultural figures (a poet, an actor) among her lovers, she
was in many ways at the mercy of the men who supported her.
Women Outside Athens. The evidence for women outside of Athens is much
scarcer, but it suggests that their status was not the same everywhere in Hellas. The Athenians themselves contrasted the secluded, sedentary lives of
their women with the more active, public lives of Spartan women. Aristotle

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

101

The Written Record

AN ATHENIAN FAMILY
Lysias, a professional speechwriter, wrote this oration for a client named Euphiletus, who was charged with murder. Euphiletus' defense is that he caught the victim committing adultery with his wife and that the law allows him to kill the victim in these circumstances. This passage is full of fascinating details about
Euphiletus' household.

In the early days [of my marriage],Athenians, she was the best of wives; for she
was a clever and thrifty housekeeper, and she kept everything well-organized.
But when my mother died, this became the cause of all my problems. For when
my wife attended her funeral, she was seen by that man [Eratosthenes, the victim], and in time she was led astray. He kept watch for the female slave when
she went to the market, and sent messages through her, and corrupted my wife.
But first, gentlemen, it is necessary for me to explain that my house has two stories; the upper floor, the women's quarters, is equal [in size] to the men's quarters on the lower floor. But when our child was born, my wife breastfed him;
and so that she did not have to risk going down the stairs whenever he needed
to be washed, I lived above, and the women below. At this time it was quite
usual for my wife to go off and sleep below, so that she could give the baby the
breast and he would not cry. (Lysias 1.7-10)

writes that Spartan women owned two-fifths of the land there, contrasting this
ituation with the restricted economic rights of women at Athens. Evidence
from Gortyn on Crete, where a long inscription recording some of the city's
laws survives, indicates that women there also had more property rights than
,, omen in Athens.
The best evidence for classical Greek houses comes from Olynthus, in
:1orthem Greece; there, the distribution of artifacts throughout the houses
;;uggests that women used most rooms and no separate women's section
existed. Houses were built around a central courtyard, a plan that would
:mve made it difficult to segregate members of the household from one
another; however, this plan was well adapted for separating women from
isitors and outsiders, since access to all of the rooms was controlled from the
-ourtyard. Some wealthy families built houses with two courtyards-men
ed the larger, more accessible court for entertaining, while women used the
ther for domestic activities. These large, wealthier houses incorporated segregated women's quarters in a way that smaller houses did not.

he Hellenistic World
Alexander's conquest of Persia, which ultimately spread Greek culture
oughout the Near East, is among the most significant events in Western

102

The Ancient Mediterranean World

history. For centuries the educated, elite classes in Asia Minor, Syria, and
Egypt spoke Greek, and Greek traditions in art, architecture, and literature
dominated urban culture. This remained true even after the Romans conquered the Greco-Macedonian kingdoms that succeeded Alexander's
empire. Modern scholars use the word Hellenistic to describe Greek history
and culture after Alexander's conquests.

The Macedonian Conquerors

The kingdom of Macedonia lay north of Thessaly, between the Balkan Mountains and the Greek peninsula. Beginning in 359 B.c. its new king, Philip II,
reformed the army (equipping the infantry phalanx with a long pike called
the sarisa) and embarked on a program of imperialist expansion, conquering
neighboring peoples including some Athenian allies and colonies. While the
Athenian orator Demosthenes encouraged his fellow citizens to take a stand
against him, the Athenians were occupied with problems closer to home and
unable to convince other Greek cities to join in an alliance against Philip; they
mounted no resistance until341 B.C. In 338, Philip defeated the allied armies
of Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea and occupied Thebes and other important Greek cities. The next year, the Greek cities jointly agreed to an alliance
with Macedonia and appointed Philip their leader. At the same time, Philip
proclaimed his intention to lead them in a war of revenge against Persia. But
Philip was assassinated in 336 B.c.

Were the Macedonians Greeks? In Demosthenes' speeches encouraging the

Athenians to go to war with Philip, he portrays the Macedonian king as an
uncivilized barbarian. At the same time a rival Athenian statesman, Isocrates,
argued that all Greeks should unite under Philip's leadership and campaign
against a barbarian enemy- the Persians- instead of fighting one another.
Whether one viewed the Macedonians as invaders threatening the liberty of
Greek cities or as leaders of a great Panhellenic cause depended partly on
whether they and their kings seemed Greek or not.
Macedonian rulers had admired Greek culture and tried to present themselves as Greeks since the early fifth century B.C., when King Alexander I persuaded the Greeks to allow the Macedonian royal dynasty to compete in the
Olympic games by tracing his descent to the Greek hero Heracles. Philip II
was especially anxious to appear Greek, publicizing his victory in the
Olympic chariot race of 356 B.C. and leading the Greek league that managed
the sanctuary at Delphi in a "Sacred War." He even hired an Athenian
philosopher, Aristotle, to tutor his son Alexander.
Not much is known about Macedonian culture before Greek influence. We
are not sure whether the Macedonian language was a form of Greek. The
Macedonians worshipped Greek gods (such as Zeus), but it is hard to tell
whether these cults were native to them or imported from the Greek world.
But regardless of whether the Macedonians were truly "Greek" or not, the
culture that Philip's son Alexander and his successors spread around the

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

103

Near East was Hellenic: in its art and architecture, its literature and language,
its cults and festivals.

Alexander the Great. Alexander III ("The Great") was just twenty years old
when he became king. He began his reign by crushing a revolt of the city of
Thebes and enslaving its population. In 334 B.C. he began the Eastern campaign that his father had planned, crossing the Hellespont with an army of
about fifty thousand troops. Like his father, Alexander portrayed himself as
Greek: as a new Achilles leading a second Trojan war (he even slept with the
Iliad under his pillow) and as an avenger of Xerxes' invasion. He defeated the
Persian army at the Granicus river and again at Iss us, in southern Asia Minor,
a year later. In 332 he marched to Egypt, which surrendered without resistance. There he founded a city on the Nile Delta, which he named Alexandria
after himself. In the centuries that followed, it would become one of the
Mediterranean world's most populous cities and one of the main centers of
Greek culture (and Hellenized Jewish culture).
Later that year Alexander marched again against the Persians and defeated
them at Gaugamela in Mesopotamia. The Persian king escaped from the battle, but was murdered a year later. Alexander occupied the great cities of
Babylon and Susa and plundered and burnt Persepolis, the capital.
His conquests were still unstable and revolts continued until327 B.c. In the
meantime, Alexander kept marching east, through what is now Afghanistan,
to the frontier between Persia and India; he crossed the Indus river, defeated
the Indian king Porus, and was approaching the Ganges river when his
troops refused to march further. Reluctantly, Alexander turned back, retreating along the coast of the Indian Ocean. Ancient sources record that the journey westward was disastrous, as the army suffered heavy casualties from
heat, thirst, and hunger. But Alexander was planning more conquests when
he died at Babylon in 323 B.c.; he was thirty-three years old.
Alexander 's military achievement was extraordinary; with a relatively
small army he had conquered the world's largest empire and had marched
through lands virtually unknown to the Greeks. The ultimate aim of his
Indian campaign was probably to reach the limits of the world. He became
the subject of numerous histories and biographies, of romantic adventurestories in two dozen languages, and of a vast body of oral legend. But ancient
writers (as well as modem ones) found Alexander an ambiguous subjecthis military achievements were astonishing, but his character problematic.
They criticized his violent temper, his overpowering drive to conquer, and
his occasional arbitrary acts of despotis:tp..
The Hellenistic Kingdoms. Alexander's empire did not survive his death;
his generals divided it among themselves. After much initial conflict and
negotiation, three large kingdoms emerged that comprised most of the Greek
world in the Hellenistic period. Seleucus and his descendants ruled over Asia
).llinor, Syria, and the eastern part of the empire (this kingdom of "Syria" was
at first by far the largest of the Hellenistic kingdoms). The descendants of

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Antigonus ruled over Macedonia and northern Greece and dominated southem Greece (which they left nominally independent) with a combination of
military occupation and political manipulation; and Ptolemy and his descendants ruled over Egypt. Throughout the Hellenistic period, boundaries
shifted as the kings fought one another, and two important new powers
emerged. In the mid-200s B.c., under its leaders Eumenes and Attalus, the
city of Pergamum expanded its power until it controlled most of Asia Minor.
And in the later third century B.C. the Parthians, whose homeland was in the
north of modem Iran, began a long campaign of expansion that eventually
wrested much of its eastern territory from the Seleucid kingdom of Syria. By
100 B.C. Parthia ruled most of the former territory of the Persians and Seleucids as far as the Euphrates river.
One by one, in a long process that will be discussed in the next chapter, the
Roman Empire absorbed all of the Macedonian kingdoms. The last of the
Hellenistic monarchs was the famous Cleopatra VII of Egypt, who committed suicide after her defeat by the future emperor Augustus in 30 B.C.

Greeks and Natives

Alexander and his successors founded a large number of cities throughout
the former Persian Empire (Alexander was said to have founded seventy
cities himself). Some of the most important of these cities were Alexandria on
the Nile Delta, Seleucia on the Tigris river, and Antioch on the Orontes river
in Syria (now part of Turkey). Many of the earliest foundations were military
colonies, settled by soldiers from Alexander's army, but in the centuries that
followed the new cities attracted settlers from mainland Greece, Macedonia,
and the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Like the classical Greek poleis, they had
bodies of citizens organized into demes and tribes; they even had councils
and assemblies, although they did not have the same political independence
as classical cities but were subject to the Hellenistic monarchs. They were
equipped with the public buildings that defined the Greek way of life: theaters, Greek-style temples, and especially gymnasia. The gymnasia were
partly athletic facilities for the nude exercises and sports that were the
favorite pastime of the Greek leisure class, but they were also schools and
cultural centers.
Greeks also settled in older cities, such as Babylon, which acquired a theater, a gymnasium, and an agora in this period. The Hellenistic kings funded
large-scale buildings, such as the Stoa of Attalus in the Athenian marketplace,
or whole projects, such as the complex of buildings on the acropolis at Pergamum- with its library, theater, temples, and enormous, elaborately decorated altar of Zeus. The result is that many of the Greek world's most impressive architectural remains date to the Hellenistic period.
Today, scholars debate the effects of "Hellenization"- Greek influenceon the native populations of the Greco-Macedonian kingdoms. Some argue
that Greek and native populations were segregated from one another, with
little social or cultural mixing. In this view, the ruling class was composed
almost exclusively of Greco-Macedonians, and Greek cultural institutions

106

The Ancient Mediterranean World

(like the gymnasia or Hellenic religious festivals) appealed only to Greeks,

while indigenous traditions continued undisturbed among natives. Others
point out the substantial evidence for intermarriage between Greeks and
natives and argue that the participation of natives in government is well
attested at some levels. It is likely that the reality is complex and that the picture of a neat division between Greek and native cultures is too simplistic.
For example, it is often impossible to determine the biological or racial
background of individuals mentioned in Hellenistic documents. To obtain
positions in the administration, natives might acquire a Greek education and
take Greek names. Intermarriage between Greeks and natives is well
attested, and people with Greek and native names might belong to the same
family. Many people used two different names.
The problem of language in the Hellenistic world is equally complicated.
On the one hand, Greek became the dominant literary and administrative
language. In this period a standard form of Greek called koine (meaning
"common") gradually replaced the different dialects. However, the native
languages of the Near East continued in use, not only as spoken languages;
documents and some literary works were written in them. The two most
important native languages were Aramaic (a Semitic language widely spoken in the territories ruled by the Seleucids) and Egyptian (written in hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic script).
While a small number of the highest administrative posts were reserved
for Greeks and Macedonians, the lower-ranking officials who kept records
and collected taxes in the kingdoms' towns and villages could be either
Greeks or natives who had learned Greek. The administrative structures of
the kingdoms also reflected local traditions. For example, in Egypt, the nome
remained the basic division of the kingdom, as it had been under the
pharaohs; the Seleucids used a system of satraps and city governors similar
to the Persian system.
The Ptolemies were careful to portray themselves in ways that appealed to
Greco-Macedonians and also to native Egyptians: While their coins featured
Greek-style portraits and Greek legends, they also appear on the walls of
Egyptian temples in sculpted images like those of the pharaohs, with inscriptions in hieroglyphs. Egyptian law continued in use side-by-side with Greek
law. Both Ptolemies and Seleucids generously supported native cults and
temples. Respect for old traditions of government and the use of native elites
in administration helped maintain a stable and efficient rule.
Although it may not be easy to define who counted as Greek, there was
nevertheless a strong sense of Greek identity, especially among urban elites,
in the Hellenistic period. Overall, the Hellenic minority tended to be wealthier, more urban, and more educated than non-Greeks, and Greeks considered
themselves superior to the non-Greek population. On the other hand, nationalist feelings among native peoples are also attested and sometimes found
important expression-for example, in the revolts that centered on Thebes in
Egypt in the late third century B.c. or in the Jewish revolt under the Hasmonaeans, discussed later.

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

107

This relieffrom the temple of Hathor at Dendera, in Egypt, depicts Cleopatra VII and her
son Caesarian-her child with Julius Caesar-on the left. Cleopatra, who ruled until 30 B.C.,
was the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt. Here, she portrays herself in native Egyptian
style, on a temple to an Egr;ptian goddess. (Middle East Documentation Center, University of
Chicago)

Religion in the Hellenistic World. Throughout the Hellenistic world, Greekstyle temples were constructed to traditional Hellenic gods (such as Zeus)
and their priesthoods were prestigious civic offices. The great Hellenistic
cities all had their own Greek religious festivals, complete with competitions
in athletics, poetry, drama, and rhetoric, and inscriptions commemorating
the winners show that they usually had Greek names.
The Hellenistic rulers also established a cult of themselves. Alexander
believed he was divine, claiming to be the son of Zeus or of the Egyptian sungod Amen. The Seleucids and the Ptolemies found this tradition convenient;
they encouraged cities and towns to dedicate altars, shrines, priesthoods,
cult-statues, and festivals to them (or at least did not discourage this). The
ruler-cult was especially important in Egypt, where the pharaohs had also
been worshipped as gods.
At the same time, the worship of native Near Eastern gods continued in
much the same way as before. The Hellenistic kings paid for renovations to
the temples of the most important native gods, and these temples and their
priesthoods continued to function. On a different level, local deities such as
the Egyptian household god Bes (seep. 33) remained popular.

108

The Ancient Mediterranean World

But perhaps the most interesting feature of Hellenistic religion is the way in
which strange combinations of Greek and native ideas are attested at all levels of society (this promiscuous mixing of religious practices, like the wideranging mixture of cults in early Egypt, is sometimes called syncretism). For
example, in the second century A.D., the most important temple in the Egyptian village of Karanis was a shrine to the local crocodile-god Sobek, attached
to a large cemetery full of mummified crocodiles. Another temple was
devoted to the god Sarapis-Zeus-Amen-Helios: Here two ancient Egyptian
gods, Sarapis and Amen, have been associated with Greek equivalents, Zeus
and Helios ("Sun"). This god shared the temple with the Egyptian goddess Isis
and also with the popular crocodile god. Inscriptions and art objects recovered
from the village mention both Greek and native Egyptian gods.

Judaism in the Second Temple Period

Jewish history is organized around different events than Greek history. The
period from the return of the Babylonian exiles to Judah, when Solomon's
temple was rebuilt, to the temple's destruction by the Romans in A.D. 70 is
called the Second Temple Period of Judaism. The first part of the Second
Temple Period will be discussed here; the Jews' struggle with the Romans
will be described in the next chapter.

The Jewish State. After Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, Judah
was politically subject to either the Seleucids or the Ptolemies, depending on
who ruled over the area at the time. In 166 B.c., the Seleucids were in control
when Judah Maccabee and his brothers led a revolt. The story of the revolt is
told in the Biblical books I and II Maccabees,* and also by Josephus, a Jewish
historian of the Roman period. These sources identify the Seleucid king Antiochus IV's insults to Jewish religion as the cause of the revolt: He pillaged the
Temple of Jerusalem, occupied the city with troops, and issued edicts that forbade the practice of Jewish law (including circumcision, the observation of
the Sabbath, and dietary rules). His most outrageous act was to install images
of the Greek gods in the Temple of Jerusalem.
Eventually, after many vicissitudes, the revolt of the Maccabees resulted in
the establishment of an independent kingdom of Judah in 141 B.C. Jewish
independence lasted until 63 B.c., when the Roman general Pompey conquered Judah. During this time, the descendants of the Maccabees, who
called themselves the Hasmonaeans after one of their ancestors, ruled as a
dynasty of kings and high priests. In 166 B.c., Judah was a small territory centered on Jerusalem; but during the revolt and afterward, the Hasmoneans
conquered their neighbors until they ruled most of the peoples of the southwest Levant.
Judaism and Hellenism. The history of the Jewish people in the Second
Temple period is not only the history of the Hasmonaean kingdom. Ever
*These books are not part of the Tanakh, but Catholic Bibles include them.

Greek Civilization: Hellas and Hellenism

109

since the Babylonian exile, Jewish communities could be found in cities

throughout the eastern Mediterranean, a phenomenon often called the diaspora, which means "dispersal." The city of Alexandria in Egypt had an especially large Jewish population, and it was here that the Hebrew Bible was
translated into Greek. (Legend told that seventy-two Jewish scholars working in isolation produced an identical, divinely inspired translation; it was
called the Septuagint, from the Greek word for "seventy".) Like the peoples
of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Jews had a well-developed cultural tradition
of their own; they also had a strong sense of ethnic identity and retained this
sense even as they encountered and absorbed many aspects of Greek culture.
The especially rich and diverse Jewish literature of the Second Temple
Period reflects Jewish interactions with Greek culture. It was written in
Hebrew and Aramaic but also in Greek; Jews of the diaspora mostly wrote in
Greek, and the Septuagint was produced for an audience of Jews who could
read Greek but not Hebrew. Hellenistic Jewish literature includes works of
history and biblical commentary, romances, epics, and apocalypses about the
end of the world; a few became part of the canonical Bible, but a large body
of nonbiblical works also survives. These include the papyrus scrolls that
were discovered, beginning in 1947, in caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea;
often called the "Dead Sea Scrolls," they date from about 250 B.C. to A.D. 70.
While the mythology of the Bible remained the basic subject matter for most
Jewish literature (as Greek myth did for Greek literature), the stories were
reinterpreted and embellished in a wide variety of ways; Babylonian and
Greek influences often mingled with Jewish traditions.

Jewish Sects. Judaism was a diverse religion in the Second Temple Period.
As a result of the Babylonian exile, the diaspora, and the Maccabaean conquests, it was practiced in widely scattered communities with different histories, different geographic and cultural settings, and even different ethnic backgrounds (the Maccabees had converted some of the peoples they conquered).
At the same time, the observance of Jewish law had become a crucial test of
Jewish identity, and the interpretation of the Torah became an important intellectual discipline. Various sects arose that distinguished themselves largely by
their different ways of interpreting and observing the law. One of these was
the Samaritans, who trace their origins to the remnant of Israel's population
that remained in Palestine after the kingdom's destruction in 722 B.c., and
whose biblical canon includes only the Torah. Later sources describe another
group called the Pharisees, who accepted an expanded version of Jewish law
based on oral interpretations of the Torah. They were perceived as legal
experts and, later, as early rabbis (see Chapter 3, p. 162). The Sadducees, a
priestly and aristocratic class, rejected the Pharisees' tradition of interpreting
the Torah and construed its laws more literally. Finally, the Jewish community
at Qumran that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls believed that mainstream
Judaism was corrupt and destined to be destroyed soon. They lived in the
desert, in isolation and celibacy (no women were allowed in their community), according to a strict code that is described in one of the texts recovered
from the site.

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Greek Culture in the Hellenistic Period

Whereas Athens had been the geographic focus of Greek culture in the Classical period, the achievements of Hellenistic period are widely scattered.
They come from great cities like Alexandria or Antioch, but also from other
cities of the eastern and western Greek world.

Science and Technology. Greek science flourished, and even reached its
height, in Hellenistic times. Astronomy, for example, became a sophisticated
discipline in this period. In the third century B.C., Aristarchus of Samos developed a more accurate "heliocentric" (sun-centered) theory of the universe,
although his ideas were unproveable at the time and most Hellenistic
astronomers still accepted the geocentric ("earth-centered") theory that had
been adopted by Plato and Aristotle. In the second century B.c., Hipparchus
of Nicaea introduced mathematical calculation to the science of astronomy
(in the process, he invented the techniques of trigonometry), which allowed
him to predict celestial movements accurately. He also developed new instruments for making astronomical observations.
Geography was related to astronomy because it involved the idea of the
world as a sphere, divided into climate zones that could be measured by
astronomical observation. As early as the sixth century B.c., Ionian philosophers had speculated about the world's geography, and Herodotus had
described the three known continents-Europe, Africa, and Asia-as well as
he could in his history. When Alexander the Great set out to conquer the East,
part of his mission was to advance Greek geographic knowledge. He measured the distances of his march and sent explorers along the coast of the
Indian Ocean. Later, under the Seleucids, Greeks explored and wrote about
India, the Caspian Sea, and even the North Sea. In the mid-third century B.c.
Eratosthenes gathered together all of this information and published a geographic work that described the oikoumene-the "inhabited world," which he
imagined as an oval-shaped land mass. Eratosthenes also invented the notion
of longitude and latitude and calculated the circumference of the earth;
although his method was inaccurate, his answer was close to the correct one.*
Hellenistic scientists investigated theoretical problems but were also interested in applied science-mechanics or engineering-and the same individuals often made contributions in both areas. In mathematics, Euclid (about
whom little is known except the works that circulate under his name) published a sort of textbook called Elements that remained the basis for mathematical knowledge through the nineteenth century. The surviving works of
*Hipparchus disagreed with Eratosthenes' estimate and published his own calculation of the earth's circumference-about 20,500 miles, which is too small. In the second century A.D., Ptolemy used this estimate in his own work on geography, which
was rediscovered in Europe in the late fourteenth century. It was this calculation
that led Columbus to underestimate the westward distance from Europe to Asia and
to believe that he had landed at islands off the coast of China (instead of in the
Caribbean).

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Archimedes of Syracuse, who lived in the third century B.c., are also theoretical in nature; they investigate problems in geometry, number theory, and
hydrostatics. His most famous discovery was that the volume and density of
a body could be calculated by the amount of liquid it displaced when
immersed (an idea that occurred to him in the bath; he ran naked through the
streets shouting "Eureka!"). But he was also remembered for his inventions,
including the compound pulley and a screw used to lift water for irrigation
or drainage that was named after him and widely used. His contemporary
Ctesibius invented the forced-air pump, of which numerous examples have
been found. Thus it is not correct to say that the aristocratic mentality of Hellenistic scientists prevented them from inventing machines of great practical
utility. For example, in his treatise called Pneumatics, Hero of Alexandria's
description of several amusing, elaborate toys (which were probably never
built) reflects the leisured society in which he lived, but he also describes the
screw-press, an important advance over the lever-press used to make olive
oil. Military engineering also flourished in the Hellenistic period; especially,
improved ballistic weapons were invented, including a sort of automatic catapult. Archimedes is supposed to have helped defend the city of Syracuse,
besieged by the Romans, with weapons of his own design. It was the Hellenistic Greeks who invented some of the building techniques that were most
widely influential in Roman architecture- such as the arch and vault and the
underfloor heating system used in Roman baths.
The influence of Babylonian mathematics and astronomy on Greek
thought is especially obvious in the Hellenistic era. Aristarchus, Euclid, and
Hipparchus all developed ideas that seem to derive from a new familiarity
with Babylonian science. Although Greeks had always (with brief interruptions) been in contact with other civilizations, a new level of cultural interaction was reached in the Hellenistic period.

Medicine. Anatomy means "cutting open" in Greek. One of the most

important and influential developments in ancient Greek medicine was the
use of dissection to find out about the body's internal structure. The authors
of the Hippocratic Corpus had speculated about this, but they scarcely refer
to dissection at all. Aristotle dissected animals and was able to make many
accurate observations about their anatomy, although logical deduction is
usually more prominent than direct observation in his reasoning.
Most of the Greeks' most important anatomical discoveries date to the Hellenistic period. In the early third century B.c., two physicians working at
Alexandria-Herophilus and Erasistratus-dissected human beings and
perhaps vivisected them as well (that is, cut them open while they were still
alive). They described the organs of the female reproductive system, the ventricles of the brain, the nerves (especially the paired nerves in the cranium),
the membranes of the eye, and the valves of the heart much more accurately
than physicians of the Classical period.
While dissections and vivisections of animals were performed at other
times and places, the only solid evidence for the dissection of humans comes

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from early Alexandria. The patronage of a new dynasty-the Ptolemieswilling to break long-standing taboos might be part of the explanation; the
influence of Egyptian culture, with its tradition of mummifying dead bodies
(and removing and preserving their internal organs), might also have played
a role.

Philosophy. The story of philosophy in the Hellenistic period illustrates a

prominent trend in the intellectual history of this time: the development of
traditions called "schools" or "sects" today. The Greeks sometimes called this
type of intellectual allegience hairesis, which means "choosing"-in this
case, the choice of a particular set of ideas. Later, Christians used the same
word to label those theological beliefs that they disapproved of (this is the
origin of our word "heresy").
Athens remained the most prestigious place to study philosophy, and its
philosophical schools-such as Plato's Academy-continued to function. But
adopting the ideas of a sect did not necessarily mean attending (or teaching
at) a particular school. The sects were simply traditions about philosophical
truth, passed down from teacher to student.
The Epicurean sect was named after its founder, Epicurus, who established
a new school called "the garden" at Athens around 300 B.c. The Epicureans
adopted the atomic theory of physics and believed that the universe was the
result of a chance amalgamation of atoms rather than the work of a providential god. They believed that gods existed but took no interest in what happens on earth and that the human soul is mortal and dissipates at death. They
considered the pursuit of pleasure the best way to a happy life (a doctrine
that made them notorious when it was misunderstood by later philosophers
and Christians), but that most pleasures are outweighed by the pain associated with them. Therefore they advocated withdrawal from politics, love,
and the pursuit of wealth and advocated a simple, austere way of life. The
works of Epicurus himself survive only in fragments; the only complete Epicurean text that has come down to us is a work in Latin, by Lucretius, dating
to the first century B.c.
Zeno founded the Stoic sect at about the same time that Epicurus established his new school. His sect was named after the "Painted Stoa," a building in the Athenian agora where he lectured to anyone who wanted to listen.
Stoics believed in fate-that everything happens according to strict rules
governed by divine providence, upon which human effort can have little
effect. They believed that living a virtuous life was the best way to achieve
happiness. They associated the idea of virtue closely with reason; believing
that human nature was essentially rational, they argued that people should
suppress their emotions and accept what fate brings them with equanimity.
Perhaps the most interesting and mysterious of the philosophical sects was
the Cynic sect, which took its name from the Greek word for "dog." The first
Cynic was Diogenes, who lived in Athens in the mid-300s B.c. Extremely antisocial, he challenged and exposed the hypocrisy of virtually all civilized institutions (such as education, class distinctions, and marriage) with his acid wit,

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outrageous behavior, scruffy appearance, and voluntary poverty (he lived

outdoors and begged for food). Subsequent generations of Cynic philosophers were distinguished not so much by their belief in certain doctrines as
by their way of life-bearded, wandering, simply dressed, carrying only a
pouch and a staff, they were easy to spot wherever they appeared and were
prominent in Greek cities throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods. An
interesting feature of Cynicism was that some of its most extreme advocates
were able to stand up to Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors as no one else
could-criticizing them openly and surviving the experience. Many tales of
such encounters between Cynic philosophers and figures such as Alexander
the Great or the notorious emperor Caligula survive. They were cultural
heroes of a kind, and they may have represented the obligation of a ruler to
abide by the values that society imposed on him and that philosophy-with
its emphasis on ethics- expressed.

Literature and Literary Scholarship. Tragedy, philosophy, history, epic, and

other literary genres invented in the Archaic and Classical periods continued
in use in Hellenistic times. Hellenistic authors consciously strove to imitate
previous writers-such as Homer- while at the same time adapting the
models they used in distinctive ways. But some new and influential types of
literature also arose in this period. One of these was "New Comedy," which
in some ways resembled modem situation comedy (with its stock characters
and silly plot devices). Another was a type of poetry about herdsmen called
"pastoral" poetry, which idealized the rural life in ways still influential today.
The Greek romance novel was probably invented in the Hellenistic period
(but since all surviving examples date to Roman times, they will be discussed
in the next chapter).
Biography became a common literary form in the Hellenistic period. This
increasing interest in describing individual lives may be related to the new
place of portraiture in Hellenistic art: Not only the ruler-portraits described
later, but also portraits of past and contemporary intellectuals (such as
Homer, Socrates, or various Hellenistic philosophers) were produced in large
quantities. Like portraiture, biography's subjects were great statesmen and
generals, or intellectual figures such as philosophers and poets.
Biographies played a number of important roles in Greco-Roman culture.
They tended to focus on moral issues and questions of character; by praising
and blaming good and bad behavior, they reinforced social values. They could
also be a type of propaganda, defending a political or intellectual leader
against the accusations of rival sects. The focus on intellectual heroes reflects
the key role of culture in the Greeks' sense of their identity and superiority.
One of the most important intellectual developments in the Hellenistic
period was literary and textual scholarship. Scholars at Alexandria edited
classical texts, eliminated discrepancies to arrive at a single standard text
(Homer's works were now standardized in this way), attempted to determine which texts (or passages) were authentically written by their supposed
authors, added punctuation marks that made them easier to read, and inter-

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Art and Society

SCULPTURE AND THE CITY IN THE HELLENISTIC WORLD

It is almost impossible to generalize about sculpture in the Hellenistic period

because its features are very diverse. But one of the most interesting trends that
distinguishes it from classical sculpture is its political relevance: Much Hellenistic sculpture directly reflects its historical context and has a political
purpose.

Eutychides' Tyche of Antioch (Roman copy).

Resource, NY)

(Scala/ Art

This statue by Eutychides (ca. 300 B.c.) portrays the Tyche, or "Fortune," of
Antioch. The city is personified as a woman wearing a crown like a city wall,
grasping an ear of wheat to represent prosperity, with her foot resting on a
swimming, naked man-the personification of the river Orontes. The Tyche

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115

represented the city much more clearly and directly than classical statues of
patron gods and goddesses. By the end of the Hellenistic period at least fortyfour Greek cities had similar statues.

Portrait of Alexander from Pergamum, dating to

the early second century B.C. (Erich Lessing/ Art
Resource, NY)

Portraiture became important in the Hellenistic period-especially portraits

of rulers. Ancient tradition traced the origins of the ruler portrait to Alexander,
whose likeness was sculpted by the famous artist Lysippus. While few or no
sculpted portraits of Alexander dating to his lifetime survive, his very numerous portraits from later periods show features that reflect individual characteristics rather than an ideal of beauty-for example, his distinctive hairstyle with
a cowlick in the center of his forehead . Other aspects of this Alexander portraitsuch as the way he turns his head dramatically and looks upward-may project
a heroic image; thus the ruler portrait (or any portrait) combines features that
distinguish the subject as an individual with features that reflect the message
that the artist wants to convey. Hellenistic rulers published their portraits on
statues and coins so that all their subjects would become familiar with them.
Hellenistic sculpture sometimes portrayed historical events, especially a
ruler's glorious military victories. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this

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The "Dying Gaul," from Pergamum (Roman copy). The Gaul's right arm has
been restored. (Scala/ Art Resource, NY)
kind of sculpture was a group of statues that once stood on the acropolis of
Pergamum. This monument commemorated King Attalus I's victory over the
Galatians-Gauls (a Celtic people) who had migrated from Europe to Asia
Minor-around 233 B.c. Roman copies of some of these statues survive and
depict naked Gauls in the highly dramatic poses typical of some Hellenistic art.
Here, the subject sinks to the ground as blood gushes from a wound; his shaggy
hair and mustache identify him as a Celtic ''barbarian." The sculpture celebrates
and publicizes a real and recent (rather than a remote and mythical) victory.

preted them in commentaries. The Alexandrians' focus on literary works as

texts-as items to be read-may reflect the growing importance of writing in
the Hellenistic period. Their choice of texts for editing forever influenced the
future of Western culture, as this partly determined what would survive. The
canon they established reflected the prestige of classical Athens, already perceived as Greek civilization's "high water mark."

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SUMMARY

Around 1100 B.C., Greece sank into a" dark age" of poverty, isolation, and population decline. When it began to emerge slowly from this period beginning
in the 800s B.c., a different type of civilization arose. Although it included slavery, it was in some ways more egalitarian than other ancient societies-it was
organized around the polis (or "city"), whose citizens could claim a certain
amount of equality in rights and status.
In 480 B.C. the Greeks, under the leadership of the Athenians and Spartans,
defeated a massive invasion of the Persian army. Afterward, the city of
Athens established a type of imperial rule over the Greek cities under its control. It became the cultural center of the Greek world-most surviving literature of the fifth and fourth centuries B.c. was produced at Athens. While its
constitution became more democratic in this period, inequalities based on citizenship and gender became more prominent.
Athens and Sparta fought a long and enervating war, which Athens lost. In
the later 300s B.c., the kingdom of Macedonia gradually gained political control of the Greek world. In an extraordinary series of campaigns, its king
Alexander the Great conquered Persia; after his death, the territory he had
acquired was divided among his companions. The Hellenistic kingdoms
were ruled by descendants of these Macedonian generals until, one by one,
they were absorbed by the Roman Empire. As a result, Greek culture (including its language) became an influential force throughout the Near East.