Greece

Greece produced several hundred constitutions, and then the habit of comparing them, which may be the more consequential achievement. The polis was small enough that its arrangements were visible to the people living under them, and numerous enough that alternatives were always in view across the next range of hills.

Athens arrived at radical democracy by increments and crises. Solon’s reforms early in the sixth century cancelled debt-bondage and tied political rights to property rather than birth. Cleisthenes, in 508/7, did something stranger. He redrew the citizen body itself, distributing Athenians into artificial units, demes grouped into tribes, that deliberately cut across the old regional loyalties, and he built a Council of 500 on that base. Ephialtes stripped the aristocratic Areopagus of its remaining powers in 462.

The result was more radical and less familiar than representative government. Most offices were filled by lot rather than election, on the reasoning that election favours the well-known and the wealthy. Juries ran into the hundreds. Pay for public service meant poorer citizens could afford to take part. Ostracism let the assembly exile a man for ten years without charging him with anything, and the surviving ostraka, thousands of inscribed potsherds, include batches written in the same hand, which suggests organised campaigning.

Sparta answered the same questions differently and was studied obsessively by Athenians for that reason: two hereditary kings, a council of elders, five annually elected ephors with real supervisory power over the kings, and an assembly with limited initiative. The Greeks argued about which arrangement was better, and in arguing invented political theory.

The limit sits underneath all of it. The Athenian citizen body was a minority of the population of Attica. Democracy among citizens coexisted with the exclusion of women, metics and a very large enslaved population, and the two facts are not separable.

Greek warfare and Greek politics were the same question asked in different rooms. The hoplite fought in a phalanx, shoulder to shoulder, each man’s shield protecting the neighbour on his left, a formation that rewards cohesion over individual prowess and requires men who can afford their own armour. A state whose defence rests on middling farmers standing in line together will find it difficult to deny those farmers a political voice.

The trireme extended the logic downwards. A warship needed around 170 rowers, and rowers did not need equipment they could not afford. Athens’ naval power was therefore built on its poorest citizens, the thetes, and the link between the fleet and the democracy was obvious to contemporaries. The oligarchic pamphleteer known as the Old Oligarch complains about it directly. Sea power and radical democracy arrived together and were understood to be linked.

The Persian Wars set the terms in which Greeks talked about themselves for centuries. A coalition of small states had defeated the largest empire on earth, and it was remembered as freedom against despotism, in exactly the form that suited the victors. The Peloponnesian War that followed was a much less flattering conflict, and in Thucydides it produced the first sustained attempt to explain a war by power and interest rather than blame.

The end of the classical system came from the north. The Macedonian phalanx, with its longer pike and combined-arms doctrine, made the hoplite formation obsolete, and no polis could match the resources Philip and Alexander commanded. The system that had made Greek warfare distinctive was destroyed by a state that had learned from it.

Greece is a poor country for farming and a superb one for shipping. Mountains divide it into small pockets of workable land, and nowhere is far from the sea. The consequences run through everything: cities that could not feed themselves from their own territory, dependence on imported grain, and colonies founded around the Mediterranean and Black Sea from the eighth century onwards to relieve land shortage rather than to build an empire.

Athens ran on three things it did not grow. Grain came from the Black Sea and Egypt, which made the sea route through the Hellespont a strategic obsession and explains a good deal of Athenian foreign policy. Silver came from the mines at Laurion, worked by enslaved labour in conditions the skeletal evidence still records, and paid for the fleet. And the labour itself was largely imported. The enslaved population of Attica has been estimated at 80,000 to 100,000 against a total of perhaps 300,000 to 400,000.

Coinage was a Greek adaptation of a Lydian invention, and the Greeks made it more than a medium of exchange. A city’s coin carried its badge, the Athenian owl or the Aeginetan turtle, and circulated as a statement of identity and creditworthiness. The monetary conventions established here persisted through the Hellenistic kingdoms and into Roman practice.

Metics, the resident foreigners, did a disproportionate share of the commercial work. They paid a specific tax, served in the fleet, could not own land, and could not bring a case without a citizen sponsor. Athenian banking was largely in their hands.

Every literary source we have for classical Greece was written by a free adult male citizen, and most were written by slave-owners. That fact determines what the record can tell us, and it cannot be noted once and set aside.

Subtract from the population of Attica the enslaved, a quarter to a third, then the metics, then women of every status, then children and the very poor, and what remains is the group that produced the writing. The ancient evidence is plentiful, and it is a conversation among the enfranchised about everybody else.

For women, the absence was deliberate. In the funeral oration Thucydides gives Pericles, the advice to Athens’ widows is that the greatest reputation belongs to the woman least spoken of among men, in praise or in blame. Public documents did not name respectable Athenian women. They were identified by their relationship to a man. A woman’s legal existence ran through her kyrios, first her father, then her husband, then her adult son. Their absence from the record is itself the evidence, the ideal achieved.

Sparta is the instructive exception, and instructive partly in how we know. Spartan women inherited and owned land in their own right, were educated physically, married later, and spoke publicly with a freedom other Greeks found alarming. We know this largely because Aristotle was alarmed. He reports that women held about two-fifths of the land in Sparta and treats it as a structural defect. Where a Greek woman is visible in the record, it is often because a man found her a problem.

The symposium, the male drinking party with its couches, its rules and its hired entertainers, was where much of Athenian elite social and political life took place. Plato’s dialogues should be read with that in mind.

Greek religion had no scripture, no creed, no church and no professional priesthood in the sense later religions would recognise. Priesthoods were often annual civic appointments, sometimes allotted. There was no body of doctrine to believe and no institution empowered to decide what counted as belief. What there was instead was practice, and the practice was overwhelmingly sacrifice.

Animal sacrifice was the central religious act and also the main occasion on which most Greeks ate meat. The god received the smoke and the inedible portions, and the community divided the rest. A religion whose principal ritual is a shared meal distributed according to civic status is telling you something about what it is for.

Religion was local and civic. Each polis had its own gods, festivals and calendar, and only a few institutions reached beyond the city. The Panhellenic sanctuaries at Olympia and Delphi drew participants from across the Greek world under sacred truce, and the Olympic Games and the Delphic oracle were the closest thing to a Greek international system.

Alongside the civic cults ran things the civic cults did not provide. The Eleusinian Mysteries offered initiates something about death that participants were forbidden to disclose, and most of them never did. Hero cults attached to local tombs. And beneath all of it lies the evidence people left when they wanted something badly and privately. Roughly 1,500 lead curse tablets survive, folded and buried in graves and wells, naming real people, traders, litigants and rivals, who appear nowhere else in the record.

Greek art is unusually legible in its development, and the reason is pottery. Fired clay survives when almost nothing else does, Athenian vases were exported across the Mediterranean, and their painted scenes make up the largest body of images from the ancient Greek world. The shift from black-figure to red-figure around 530 BC changed more than technique. Red-figure allowed interior detail and foreshortening, and with them a new interest in the body as something occupying space.

Sculpture shows the same trajectory more dramatically. The archaic kouros stands rigid and frontal, one foot forward, arms at the sides, in a scheme borrowed from Egypt. Within roughly a century the classical figure has weight on one leg, a turned torso and a plausible interior structure. By the Hellenistic period sculpture is chasing extremes of pain, age, movement and ecstasy, with a technical confidence that later periods spent centuries trying to recover.

Temple architecture worked in the opposite way, refining a narrow set of solutions rather than expanding them. The Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders are systems of proportion, and the interest lies in the adjustments: the Parthenon has almost no straight lines, its columns swelling slightly and leaning inward, its platform curving, so that it appears regular to an eye that would otherwise perceive distortion.

The Parthenon also raises the question the whole subject eventually reaches. It was built with funds from an alliance that had become an empire, decorated with a sculptural programme asserting Athenian primacy, and a substantial portion of that programme is now in London. What the building argues, and who gets to hold the argument, have not stopped being live questions.

The Greek innovation was demonstration. Babylonian astronomers had accurate predictive methods centuries before any Greek, and Egyptian surveyors had reliable geometrical procedures. The Greeks added the demand that a claim be derived from stated premises by steps a reader could check, and the willingness to treat an argument as something that could be wrong.

It begins with the Presocratics, who did something strange for their time. They proposed explanations of the natural world that did not involve the gods. Heraclitus argued for flux, Parmenides and Zeno for the impossibility of change, the atomists for matter and void, and each defended the position by argument against its rivals.

Mathematics is where the method shows most clearly. Euclid’s Elements organises geometry into a chain of proofs from explicit axioms and became the most durable textbook ever written. Aristarchus proposed a sun-centred cosmos eighteen centuries before Copernicus and lost the argument to better-supported objections. Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth from shadow lengths and came very close.

Medicine took the same turn. The Hippocratic writers insisted that diseases have natural causes, and the treatise on epilepsy, the so-called sacred disease, argues explicitly that calling an illness divine is an admission of ignorance. Greek historical writing came out of the same intellectual climate, with Herodotus enquiring into causes and Thucydides refusing supernatural explanation and stating his method.

The characteristic Greek failure is the mirror of the strength. A tradition that prizes argument will sometimes prefer the elegant demonstration to the inconvenient observation, and Greek science was often at its weakest where it declined to measure.

Greek history begins with a man inventing the activity. Herodotus called his work historiē, meaning enquiry, and the word has been in use ever since. He travelled, asked, recorded competing versions, and often reported what he had been told while declining to vouch for it, which is a more sophisticated procedure than he is usually credited with.

Thucydides did something different and harder. He restricted himself to a war he had lived through, refused divine explanation entirely, stated his method for reconstructing speeches, and produced in the plague of Athens a clinical description explicitly intended to let the disease be recognised if it returned. He is also a participant with judgements to defend, and his authority is so considerable that his interpretations tend to be absorbed as facts.

Then the transmission problem, which shapes everything. Texts survive because someone kept copying them, not because they were important. The Athenian state archived official texts of the three great tragedians, and the Library of Alexandria produced the editions from which nearly all our manuscripts descend. The shift from papyrus roll to parchment codex selected the corpus again, and whatever nobody thought worth transcribing was lost. Egyptian papyri preserve fragments of works the medieval tradition dropped entirely.

Against the literary record stands the material one, and it is differently biased. Inscriptions record decrees, accounts and dedications. The Delphi manumission inscriptions name roughly 1,200 enslaved people and the prices they paid for their freedom. Ostraka, curse tablets and grave markers preserve people the literature never mentions. Where the two disagree, the documents were not composed to persuade anyone.