Leveque, Pierre. the Greek Adventure (1968)

STUDIES IN WORLD HISTORY
THE GREEK ADVENTURE

i
Pierre Leveque
translated by Miriam Kochan
WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON

5 Winsley Street London Wi
© 1964) Librarie Armand Colin
English translation © 1968 by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd
First published in France under the title VAventure grecque
SBN 297 76176 5
Printed in England
by Ebenezer Baylis and Son, Limited
The Trinity Press, Worcester, and London
Contents
INTRODUCTION I
The Land of Greece i

Differences and Contrasts 2
A Double Adventure 4
BOOK ONE PREHELLENES AND HELLENES:

ENCOUNTERS AND SYNTHESES UP TO THE
END OF THE SECOND MILLENNIUM
1 THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP.TO 1580) 9
GREECE BEFORE THE GREEKS 9
The Neolithic Age in Greece 9

The Beginnings of the Bronze Age: Early Helladic Period 11
The Early Helladic Civilization 13
THE FIRST GREEKS IN GREECE: MIDDLE HELLADIC PERIOD
(igs0-^80) *5
The Indo-Europeans 16
The Occupation of Greece by the First Greeks 19
Material Civilization of the Middle Helladic Period 20
Society and Religion during the Middle Helladic Period 22
A Middle Helladic Site: Dorium-Malthi 23
MINOAN CRETE 24
The Power and Prosperity of Crete 26

Minoan Palaces 28
The Artistic Florescence 29
The Religion of the Cretans 32
2 THE FORMATION OF AN ACHAEAN WORLD (1580-

1200) 38
The Sources of Achaean History 38
THE ACHAEAN REALMS 39

CONTENTS
The Hegemony of Mycenae 4°

The Citadel of Mycenae 41
Achaean Sites in the Peloponnese 44
Manors in Attica and Boeotia 45
Achaean Royalty 46
THE MILITARY EXPANSION OF THE AGHAEANS 47
The Conquest of Crete 47

Achaean Principalities in the Eastern Mediterranean 49
The Trojan War 5°
A CIVILIZATION OF THE SCRIBE 53
The Achaean Syllabary and its Origin 54

The Lessons of the Tablets 54
The Diffusion and Disappearance of Writing 55
3 LIFE IN THE ACHAEAN KINGDOMS 57
THE VITALITY OF A STATE-CONTROLLED ECONOMY 57
Rural Life and the Organization of the Land 57

Industry and Commercial Expansion 58
A TRI-FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY 60
Kings, Dignitaries and Priests 60

The Damos and the Slaves 61
Daily Life 61
THE ARTISTIC WORLD OF THE PALACES 63
The Birth of the Epic 63

Painting and Sculpture 64
The Minor Arts 65
RELIGIOUS SYNCRETISM 67
The Gods 68
Worship of the Gods 7°
Funeral Customs and the Worship of Heroes 72
4 THE DORIAN INVASIONS 74
HERACLIDAE AND DORIANS I MYTH AND HISTORY 74
The Reality Underlying the Myth 76

ROUTES AND CHRONOLOGY OF THE DORIAN INVASIONS 77
The Routes of the Invasions 77

The Date of the Dorian Invasions 76
CONSEQUENCES OF THE DORIAN INVASIONS 80
The Final Ethnic Formation of Hellas and Anatolia 80
Dorian Civilization 83
CONTENTS
BOOK TWO THE CREATIONS OF THE

ARCHAIC AGE IN GREECE
5 TRANSITIONS AND RENEWALS-THE GEOMETRIC
PERIOD (i 100-750) 89
PROTO-GEOMETRIC (c. I IOO-gOO) 89

The Greeks in Asia (1100-800) 90
GEOMETRIC (APPROXIMATELY 9OO-750) 92
The Resumption of Art 92

The Ionian Epic: Homer 93
A Peasant-Poet: Hesiod 95
The New Religious Forms 96
The Invention of Writing 100
Birth of the City 1o1
6 THE EVOLUTION OF THE CITIES 105
FROM MONARCHY TO ARISTOCRACY 106
The Monarchy 106

The Aristocratic Regime 107
THE BIRTH OF A MERCANTILE ECONOMY IOg
The Introduction of Money 109

Development of large-scale Greek Commerce in the Mediterranean 114
THE CRISIS OF THE ARISTOCRATIC REGIME I 17
The Appearance of Heavy Infantry and the Navy 117

The Social Crisis 119
The First Legislators 121
THE TYRANTS 122
The Establishment of Tyranny 12 3

Political and Social Life under the Tyrants 124
Prestige Policies of the Tyrants 126
The Fall of Tyranny 12 7
7 THE ANCIENT WORLD: ANATOLIA AND GREECE

PROPER 130
THE ISLANDS OF THE AEGEAN AND ANATOLIA I31
Cyclades and Sporades x32

Cyprus, the Southern Coast of Anatolia and Northern Syria 135
Dorian Asia 13^
Aeolia *37
The Ionian Towns *3^
The Greeks of Asia face to face with Lydia and Persia 143
GREECE PROPER AND CRETE *44

Thessaly r45
CONTENTS
Central Greece 146

Boeotia 148
Euboea x^g
The Peloponnese 150
Aegina x6o
Crete x6i
SPARTA x62
The Equals and Social Inequality 162

Oligarchs and Kings 165
Spartan Imperialism 166
Discipline and Austerity 168
The Deliberate Death of a Civilization 169
A DEMOCRACY IN GESTATION: ATHENS 173

A Patriarchal Society 173
The Athenian State and the Nobles 175
Self-interest and Passions Unleashed 176
The Era of Reform: Draco and Solon 177
A Good-humoured Tyrant: Pisistratus 179
The Pisistratids and the Fall of the Tyranny 181
The Triumph of Decimal Democracy: Cleisthenes 181
8 THE NEW WORLD OF COLONIZATION 184
ADVENTURERS AND TRADERS 184
Factors Underlying the Great Adventure 185

Metropolises and Colonies 185
Two Stages in Colonization 186
the new Greece: italy and sicily 188

An Untidy Colonization 188
A Striking Prosperity x8g
Greek Civilization in the West igo
THE ELDORADO OF THE FAR WEST ig4
The First Temptations of the Far West 194

The Early Rise of Marseilles igg
TWO STRIPS OF AFRICAN SOIL ig^
Cyrenaica xg6
Egypt 197
THE ATTRACTIONS OF THE NORTH 198
From the Thermaic Gulf to the Bosporus 200

Pontus 201
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE GREAT ADVENTURE 206
The Greeks and Colonization 206

The Barbarians and Colonization 207
CONTENTS
9 SPIRITUAL INNOVATIONS 209
ARCHAIC LYRICISM, DRAMA AND RATIONALISM 20g

The Upsurge of the First Greek Lyricism 209
The Birth of Dramatic Forms 213
Ionian Positivism 215
Western Thought 216
THE RENAISSANCE OF LARGE-SCALE ART 2l8

Archaic Art and Society 218
Religious Architecture 220
The Birth of Large-Scale Plastic Art 223
The Appearance of Monumental Sculpture 224
Orientalizing Ceramics 228
Attic Ceramics in the Sixth Century 229
IN SEARCH OF RELIGIOUS EQUILIBRIUM 23O
Civic and Popular Religion 230

The Great Pan-Hellenic Sanctuaries 233
Religion and Spiritual Life 236
BOOK THREE THE BLOSSOMING OF

GREEK CLASSICISM
10 ATHENS, MISTRESS OF THE AEGEAN 241
GREEKS AND BARBARIANS: THE STRUGGLES FOR INDEPENDENCE
(499-478) 241
The Revolt of Ionia (499-493) 241
The First Persian War 242
The Second Persian War 244
The Salvation of the Greeks in Sicily 245
Triumph of the Greeks and Triumph of Athens 245
SELF-RULE AND IMPERIALISM 246
The League of Delos and the Role of Cimon 247

The First Trials of the Democracy (461-446) 248
The Athenian Empire from 454 to 431 248
DEMOCRACY TRIUMPHANT 252
Themistocles and ‘Athens’ Descent to the Sea’ 252

Cimon and the Oligarchs’ Revenge 254
The Final Consolidation of Democracy 254
Pericles 255
A Balanced Society 257
The Economy of Imperial Athens 259
THE INDOMITABLE GREEK WORLD 260

CONTENTS
Peloponnesian Conservatism 261
Mainland Greece 263

Tyrannies and Democracies in the West 263
Hellenism of the Borders 266
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR (431-404) 269

The Course of the War 269
Political and Social Upheaval 272
THE CENTURY OF PERICLES OR THE ADVENT OF

ENLIGHTENMENT 272
THE GENERATION OF MARATHON AND THE SEVERITY OF PRE-

CLASSICISM 274
A New Religious Fervour 276
The Anguish and Greatness of Aeschylus 277
The Last Flames of Aristocratic Lyricism: Pindar 279

The Severe Style in Art 280
THE GENERATION OF PERICLES AND THE EURHYTHMY OF

CLASSICISM ggg
Man at Peace with the Gods 284
Divine and Human in the Tragedy of Sophocles 287
‘The Father of History’: Herodotus 289
The Ambitions of the pre-Socratic Philosophers 290
The Acropolis of Pericles 293
The Figurative Arts: Towards the Triumph of Serenity 295
THE GENERATION OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR AND THE

CRISIS OF THE GREEK CONSCIENCE 297
A New Education: Sophistry 297
The Mystery of Socrates 200

Aristophanes or Regret for the Past 302
An Uneasy Sophist: Euripides 304
‘An Acquisition for all Time’: The History of Thucydides 306

The Crisis of the Religious Spirit 307
The New Spirit in Art 3IO
THE ERA OF THE HEGEMONIES (404-323) 314
FIFTY YEARS OF FRATRICIDAL FOLLY (404-355) 314
The Tyranny and Betrayal of Lacedaemon (407-378) 314

Athens’ Revenge (378-371) 3
The Nine Years of Theban Greatness (371-362) 318
The Disillusion of Athens (362-355) 319

PHILIP AND GREECE (356-336) 321
Philip and Macedonia 321

Philip and Greece up to the Peace of Philocrates (346) 322
A Patriot: Demosthenes 324
CONTENTS
From Peace to Defeat (346-338) 325

The League of Corinth (337) 326
THE CRISIS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY 328
Upheavals in Society and Economy 328

The Contraction of the Market 331
Two Opposing Units: Rich and Poor 332
THE EPIC OF A YOUNG GOD 333

A Providential Hero 334
The Vision of Universal Empire 336
Towards the Unification of the World 338
The Death of the Titan 34°
COLONIAL GREECE 341
The Vitality of Cyrene and Marseilles 341
Sicily and Magna Graecia 342
13 THE CENTURY OF PLATO OR THE ADVENT OF

MYSTICISM 348
LITERATURE AND ACTION 348

Middle Comedy 349
Hired Orators: the Logographoi 349
The Vicissitudes of an Aristocrat: Xenophon 350
Isocrates and Pan-Hellenism 352
The Eloquence of Passion: Demosthenes 354
Oratorical History 355
FROM THE ACADEMY TO THE LYCEUM 356
Cynics and Cyrenaics 356
Plato 357
Decisive Progress in Mathematics 3®1
Aristotle 362
THE QUIVERINGS OF ART 365
Religious Architecture 367
Buildings of Public Assembly and Houses 371
The New Sculpture 372
The Zenith of Greek Painting 375
The Decline of Red Figure Ceramics 376
The Refinement of the Minor Arts 378
THE ANGUISH OF THE CONSCIENCE 379
The New Gods 38°
A New Mysticism 383
BOOK FOUR THE HELLENISTIC REVIVAL
14 THE HELLENISTIC STATES 389

CONTENTS
THE DECLINE OF INDEPENDENT GREECE

39°
A Middle-Class Athens
390
The Economic and Social Crisis in Mainland Greece
391
The Prosperity of the Greek Islands
394
The Federal States
396
THE KINGDOMS OF THE NORTH
397
The Kingdom of Macedonia
397
The Kingdom of Epirus
399
THE RESIGNATION OF THE WEST
400
The Monarchy of Agathocles (319-289) 400
Pyrrhus in the West (280-275) 401
Sicily at the Time of Hieron 11 (270?-2i5) 402
THE EASTERN KINGDOMS
403
The Ptolemaic Kingdom
403
The Seleucid Realm 406
The Attalid Kingdom 409
The Jewish Problem 410
THE HELLENISTIC MONARCHY
412
The King and the Court 412
The Royal Administration
413
15 THE WORLD OF THE CONQUEST: THE

EXPLOITATION OF THE KINGDOMS
THE DEVELOPMENT OF TOWNS

416
The Seleucids’ Creations 416
Attalid Pergamum 420
Alexandria of Egypt
422
CAPITALIST MERCANTILISM AND STATE CONTROL
425
International Trade
425
Planning of Agriculture 428
The Case of Egypt
429
A COLONIAL SOCIETY
432
Ethnic and Economic Cleavage
433
The New Middle-Class
433
The Functionaries
435
The Native Priesthood 436
The Working World
437
The Inevitable Fusion 440
THE WORLD OF THE SOLDIERS
442
The Recruitment of Mercenaries
442
The Condition of the Mercenary
443
Tenure of Cleruchies
444
CONTENTS
16 THE ULTIMATE MUTATION OF SPIRITUAL

HELLENISM 446
FEELING AND INTELLECTUALISM IN LETTERS 446
The Man of Letters and his Public 447

The New Comedy 44g
An Escapist Lyricism 450
Philological Scholarship 453
A Rationalist Historian: Polybius 453
THE sage’s IMPASSIVENESS AND THE SCHOLAR’S APPETITE 455

The Philosophical Societies 455
The Traditional Schools 4.56
The Epicureanism of Epicurus 4.57
Ancient and Middle Stoicism 4,58
The Zenith of Greek Science 4.60
AN ART OF MAN 4.63
Dwellings of Gods and Men 4.63

A Premeditated Achievement: The Town 4,65
Pathos and Realism in Sculpture 4.67
The World of Colour: Paintings and Mosaics 472
The Minor Arts 474
THE RELIGIOUS FERMENT 477
Scepticism and Fervour 477
Gods Close at Hand: The Kings 478
The Transcendental Gods 479
Hermetism and Magic 483
New Fraternities 484
17 BEYOND POLITICAL FRONTIERS 487
BARBARIAN EUROPE 487
The Colonies of Northern Pontus 487

The Balkan-Danubian Region 490
The Celtic World 493
Hellenistic Marseilles 495
The Celto-Ligurians of Provence 496
Iberians and Celts in Languedoc - Roussillon 498
The Iberians of Spain 5°°
THE CENTRAL MEDITERRANEAN 502
Changes at Carthage 5°2
In the Carthaginian Empire 5°4
A Greek Rome 5°5
In Subject Italy 5°9
AFRICA AND ARABIA 510
Greek Scholars, Merchants and Soldiers in Nubia 510
CONTENTS
The Arab Cross-roads 513
THE BACTRIAN KINGDOMS, INDIA AND CHINA 514
Asoka and the Greeks 313

Greco-Bactrian and Greco-Indian Kingdoms 516
Greek Commerce with the Indies 520
Greco-Buddhist and Greco-Bactrian Art 522
Intellectual Contacts 324
The Greeks and China 323
conclusion 329
BIBLIOGRAPHY 333
GLOSSARY 339
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES 343
INDEX 575
Illustrations
(between pages 200 and 201)
1a Minoan criophoros kouros in bronze.

ib Minoan vase with vegetable decoration.
2a Mycenae: The lionesses of the gate and the circle of tombs.
2b Mycenaean ivory, thirteenth century bc, found at Delos in the foundation
deposits of the Artemisium.
3a Fragments of a Geometric vase originating from the necropolis of the
Dipylon (Athens), eighth century bc.
3b Female head in painted limestone, about 1200 bc (Acropolis of Mycenae).
4a Geometric art: the fall of Icarus, cut and chased bronze leaf, originating
from Crete, about 700 bc.
4b Attic Geometric vase, eighth century bc.
5a Corinthian dinos with superimposed bands with animals motifs.

5b Archaic animal art: Naxian lions guarding the sanctuary of Leto at Delos,
around 600 bc.
6a Flandle of the Francois vase, discovered at Chiusi (Italy).
6b Corinthian drinking vase, first quarter of the sixth centur y bc.
7 Terracotta plaquette from the sanctuary of Persephone at Epizephyrian

Locri.
8 Tetradrachma from Gela (Sicily), fifth century bc.
9 Fragment of the west fagade of the temple of Zeus at Olympia.

10 Architecture of the fourth century bc : the theatre of Epidaurus.
11 Delphi: the tholos of Marmaria (temple of Artemis?), first quarter of the
fourth century.
12a Head of Alexander, found at Pergamum.
12b Head of Pyrrhus.
12 c Head of Cleopatra. Museum of Cherchel, Algeria.
I2d Head of Antiochus m the Great. Paris, Louvre.
13a Anatolia: Pergamum, the Asclepeum.
13b Didyma: colonnade of the peristyle of the temple of Apollo
14 Detail of the mosaic of the Nile at Praeneste (Palestrina), Italy.
15 Detail of the gold bowl from the treasury of Panagurichte (Bulgaria), end
of fourth century. Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Archaeological Museum.
16 Buddha of Gandhara, first centuries ad. Museum of Delhi. Taken from
Linde, ses temples, ses sculptures, by Louis-Frederic, introduction by Jean
Naudou, Paris, Arts et Metiers graphiques, 1959.
‘
'
Illustrations in Text
1 Plan of Lema (from Caskey, Hesperia, 1956, p. 128) 14

2 Cretan hieroglyphics A and B (from J. Fevrier, Histoire de Vecriture,
p. 141) 26
3 Weight standard in porphyry with a sculptured octopus 27
4 Lid of a pyxis in steatite with a sculptured dog (from Ch. Zervos,
Uart de la Crete, Cahiers d’Art, Paris 1956, p. 146) 30
5 Slabs of faience representing the facades of houses (from Ch. Zervos,
op.cit.) 31
6 Terracotta vase designed for the food of the sacred serpents 34
7 The sarcophagus of Hagia Triada, Museum of Heraklion 34
8 Helmet with decoration of boars’ teeth 37
9 The citadel of Mycenae (from A. J. B. Wace) 40
Io Mycenae. Reconstruction of the upper circle of tombs, by Piet de J ong 43
II Palace of Pylos of Messenia 45
12 The Achaean syllabary (from M. Ventris and J. Chadwick) 53
13 Tablet in linear B found at Cnossos (from M. Ventris and J.
Chadwick) 62
14 Amphora found at Mycenae. (Reconstruction from A. J. B. Wace) 65
15 The ‘two goddesses’ and the divine child. Athens, National Museum 71
16 Weapons, pins and fibulae of the Dorians (from V. Milojcic,
Archaologischer Anzeiger, 1948-9, pp. 19-20) 84
17 Geometric pyxis from Athens. Berlin, Staatliche Museen 92
18 Geometric horse in bronze. Berlin, Staatliche Museen 93
19 The Great Mother, Mistress of the animals. Athens, National
Museum 97
20 The Mistress of the Animals, terracotta statuette. Louvre 98
21 The Phoenician alphabet and the Greek alphabets (from Ch.
Higounet) 99
22 Decoration of two Attic Geometric vases from the Dipylon (from
Pfuhl, Griechische Vasenmalerei, volume hi, figure 15) 103
23 Frieze from the temple of Prinias (Crete) (from Ch. Picard, Manuel
d’arche'ologie grecque: volume 1, Paris, A. and J. Picard, 1935, figure
104) 107
24 The striking of a Greek coin (from Ch. Seltman) 109
25 Iron spits and ingots discovered in the Heraeum of Argos (from
Ch. Seltman) 111
XV111 ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
26 Archaic Greek coins (from Ch. Seltman, Greek Coins) 111

27 Hoplites marching to battle to the sound of the flute. Rome, Villa
Giulia 117
28 Delos about 500 (from H. Gallet de Santerre) 133
29 Reconstruction of a warehouse of Al-Mina (from C. L. Wooley) 135
30 The sanctuary of Hera at Samos (from E. Buschor, A.M., 1930,
plate 13) 140
31 Moulded drinking vase in the shape of a lion. Berlin, Staatliche
Museen 142
32 Backplate of a cuirass found at Olympia (from Ch. Picard, op, cit.,
figure 157) 151
33 The sanctuary of Artemis Orthia (from R. M. Dawkins) 170
34 Archaic dancing mask. Museum of Sparta (from Ch. Picard, op. cit.,
figure 133) 171
35 Reconstruction of the ‘throne’ of Apollo at Amyclae (from E.
Buschor and W. von Massow, in Ch. Picard, op. cit., figure 4) 172
36 Handle of a bronze cauldron found at Metapontum. Berlin, Staat¬
liche Museen 189
37 Dancer. Metope of the temple of Hera at the mouth of the Sele,
about 500 igi
38 Aryballos of Glanon. Museum of Saint-Remy-de-Provence 194
39 Plan of Naucratis (from H. Prinz) 199
40 Cup with black figures, found at Olbia (from A. Mongait, Uarcheo-
logie en U.R.S.S., Moscow 1959, translated into French M. Raiski,
p. 190) 205
41 The‘virtues’of the numbers with the Pythagoreans 217
42 Stele from Chrysapha. Museum of Sparta (from Ch. Picard, op. cit.,
figure 132) 225
43 Boeotian figurines in terra cotta. Pastry cook (Louvre), and sawyer
at work (Copenhagen, National Museum) 226
44 Chased golden plate, centaur returning from the hunt. Berlin,
Staatliche Museen 226
45 Rhodian oenochoae. Louvre 228
46 Chariot race, fragment of an Attic crater. Athens, National
Museum (from M. Robertson, La Peinture grecque, Skira 1959) 230
47 The sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi (from P. de la Coste-Messeliere) 234
48 Tessera of ostracism, American excavations of the Agora of
Athens 253
4g The forge. Attic cup with red figures. Berlin, Staatliche Museen 259
50 Scyphos from Chiusi (Etruria). Museum of Chiusi 260
51 Corinthian dish, fifth century. Athens, National Museum 262
52 Perseus. Crater with a white base, from Agrigentum (from Leonard
von Matt, La Sidle antique, plate 123) 264
53 Terracotta pinax from Epizephyrian Locri (from Leonard von
Matt, La Grande Grece, plate 137) 265
54 Gorgon. Chalcedony, from a tomb near Kertsch (Crimea) 267
ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT XIX
55 Ombos from a state shield of a Scythian chief. Leningrad, Museum of

the Hermitage 268
56 Three young women bathing, Attic red-figured stamnos 273
57 Artemis and Actaeon, crater attributed to the ‘master of Pan’ (from
Pfuhl, op. cit., volume hi, p. 170) 277
58 Young man astride a cock. Attic red-figured cup, signed Epictetus
(Castle Ashby) 281
59 Hunting scene in the style of Epictetus (about 500). Rome, Museum
of the Vatican 281
60 Diomedes and Ulysses. Attic cup, signed Euphronius. Paris, Biblio-
theque Nationale 282
61 Satyrs discovering a sleeping Maenad, Attic vase with red figures 296
62 A lesson at school. Attic cup by Duris. Berlin, Staatliche Museen 297
63 Maenad dancing, on a vase by the potter Hieron and the painter
Macron. Berlin, Staatliche Museen 308
64 Relief from the family sanctuary of the Echelids at Phalerum.
Athens, National Museum 311
65 Dish showing fish, from southern Italy. Paris, Louvre 342
66 Ulysses and the Sirens, crater from Posidonia. Berlin, Staatliche
Museen 344
67 Comic actor and his wife, Apulian amphora. London, British
Museum 345
68 Offering in front of a heroon, Apulian hydria. London, British
Museum 377
69 The merchant of tunny fish, crater from Lipari 378
70 The sanctuary of Athena Pronaea at Delphi (from P. de la Coste-
Messeliere, Delphes, p. 332) 380
71 Machine for drawing lots discovered on the Agora of Athens, third
century (from S. Dow) 391
72 The Agora of Athens (from the plan of the American excavations) 392
73 A Lacedaemon scytale. From a reconstruction by the Musee postal,
Paris 395
74 Lead weight found at Sidon 4°6
75 The construction of the Pharos of Alexandria. Leningrad, Museum
of the Hermitage 423
76 Handles of wine amphorae originating from Thasos 42®
77 Notice from the dispensary of an enypniocriles. Museum of Cairo 439
78 Battle of Amazons against a Greek hoplite. From Bas-relief de Teos,
by Pierre Devambez, Introduction by Louis Robert (kindly
authorized by M. Louis Robert) 4^9
79 Dionysiac mule serving as decoration of fulcrum. Musee de Marie-
mont (Belgium) 475
80 Thorn puller, terra cotta statuette. Berlin, Staatliche Museen 476
81 Ex-voto to Zeus the Very-High. Berlin, Staatliche Museen 480
82 Women bathing, a hellenistic mosaic of the second century (from
A. Mongait, op. cit., p. 194) 488
XX ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
83 Coins of the Scythian king Pharzoios 490

84 Fragment of the large frieze of the tomb of Kazanlik (Bulgaria).
Exhibition ‘Treasures of the Bulgarian Museums’, Galerie Char-
pentier, Paris 1963
491
85 Golden bowl, end of fourth century. Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Archaeo¬
logical Museum. Exhibition ‘Treasures of the Bulgarian Museums’,
Galerie Charpentier, Paris 1963 492
86 Pillar decorated with two cut-off heads, discovered at Entremont,
near Aix-en-Provence
497
87 Coins of the Greek dynasts of Bactriana (from J. Vincent, Information
historique, 1962, p. 188)
517
88 Hellenistic golden cup, originating from Siberia. Leningrad,
Museum of the Hermitage 526
89 Different shapes of Greek vases (from La Grece, Les Guides bleus,
Librairie Hachette, Paris 1962, p. 357)
541
90 Diagram and model of the peplos (from Ch. Picard, op. cit., figure 87) 543
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The publishers are grateful to the following for providing illustrations for this
volume: Robert Descharnes, plates ia, 2a, 9 and 12; Jean-Abel Lavand,
plate ib; Rene Percheron, Plates 3a and 10a; Jutta Tietz-Glagow, plate 4a;
Hassia, plate 4b; Georges Viollon, Agence Rapho, plates 5a and 11; Alinari-
Giraudon, plates 5b and 6a; Leonard von Matt, La Grande Grece, NZN Buch-
verlag Zurich and Librairie Hachette, Paris, plate 7; Leonard von Matt, La
Sidle Antique, NZN Buchverlag Zurich and Librairie Hachette, Paris, plate 8;
Alinari-Viollet, plate 10b; Jean Charbonneaux, plate 10c; Giraudon, plate
iod; Roger-Viollet, plate 13a; Raymond Matton, plate 13b; Anderson-Viollet,
plate 14; Louis-Frederic, Agence Rapho, plate 16.
NOTE
The following translations were used in the preparation of the English edition
of this book: the Penguin editions of Herodotus, Homer and Thucydides;
Plutarch’s Lives, translated by Sir John North (passages on pp. 6, 168); Greek
Poetry for Everyman, F. L. Lucas, Dent (fragments of Archilochus); Benjamin
Jowett s translation of Thucydides, Oxford; all other passages are taken from
volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.
Tables
Synchronisms in the Eastern Mediterranean I0

Greece before the Dorian Invasions I2
Comparative History of the Peopling of Crete and Mainland Greece 2^
The Pelopidae ^
The Heraclidae ^
The Descendants of Hellen: Dorians, Aeolians, Achaeans and Ionians 76
Dialects in Greece before and after the Invasions of the End of the Second
Millennium g2
Pondera! and Monetary Systems of Greece Proper 112
Correspondence between the Euboic System and the Other Monetary
Systems
Commerce in the Archaic Period j^
Chronology of the Buildings at Delos
The Allies of Chalcis and Eretria in the Lelantine War 150
Date of the First Olympic Victory by a Greek Originating from Various
Towns and Regions x^2
Greek Colonization in Italy and Sicily ig2
Colonization in the Thracian Chersonesus and Propontis 202
Greek Colonization in Pontus 203
The Eight ‘Great Categories’ of the Animal Kingdom 263
' “
.
Maps
1 The Greeks on the move rg

2 The Greek world in the second millennium 24
3 Achaean expansion in the Mediterranean 48
4 The Dorian invasions y^
5 Greek dialects in the first millennium 81
6 Greek expansion in the archipelago and Anatolia go
7 Monetary systems in the Greek world at the end of the Archaic
period (according to Ch. Seltman) ug
8 Miletus and the Latmic Gulf !g8
9 A league that came to nothing; the amphictyony of Calauria 154
10 General plan of Corinth (according to G. Roux) 157
11 Intellectual life in the Archaic period: the circulation of men and
ideas 211
12 The Persian wars 243
13 The Athenian Empire in the fifth century 249
14 The Peloponnesian war 271
15 Athens’ powers of attraction in the fifth century 275
16 The epic of Alexander the Great 335
17 Urbanization of the Orient and dynastic creations 417
18 Hellenistic Pergamum 420
19 Hellenistic Alexandria 421
20 The rapid growth of gymnasiums in the Hellenistic period (accord¬
ing to J. Delorme) 441
Introduction
Greece is the poorest of the great Mediterranean peninsulas. Its soil is in¬
fertile and its climate capricious, both factors particularly unfavourable
for agriculture, the basis of the first human settlements. But this poverty it¬
self served as a wholesome stimulus to a courageous people: it was their
fundamental handicap which prevented their giving in to a life of ease.
They were bound to an unproductive soil, and therefore toiled to enhance
its value, clearing forests for cultivation and covering hillsides with terraces.
Later they had to devise other expedients in order to survive.
The Land of Greece
The predominance of mountains - they cover eighty per cent of the country
-is the most marked characteristic of this furthermost projection of the
Balkans into the Mediterranean.
The recent folding of the Dinarics, resulting in a powerful, mainly cal¬
careous sedimentary series, was moulded on to a body of old, fragmented,
crystalline rocks, partly buried in the east by the Aegean Sea. Violent folds
deposited westwards were carried down over the whole central portion and
accompanied by eruptive intrusions of green rock. The western edge, from
Epirus to Messenia, forms the external zone of the chain, with smoother
folds and synclines filled with detrital formations of sandstone and shales.
The whole picture has been modified by tectonic movements which con¬
tinued until the quaternary era. The fact that earthquakes periodically
devastate these regions would seem to imply that the soils were still poorly
consolidated.
Fractures affecting the ancient base in north and east formed regional
units of considerable dimensions: the thickset masses of the horsts of Olym¬
pus, Ossa and Pelion overlook the sunken plains of Macedonia and Thes¬
saly. Elsewhere, tectonic complications, the nature of the rock and vigorous
erosion all contributed to dividing the surface into small plains, overlooked
by steep heights and not easily linked with one another - a fact which has
been highly propitious to political fragmentation.
The sea is everywhere. It cuts deeply into the coast, and very frequently
forms a jagged coastline where good harbours abound. It was the basic
means of communication, first because the division of the land made over¬
land contact difficult (Greece did not in fact possess a proper road network
2 INTRODUCTION
until the Roman period); and also because Greece is surrounded by islands
whose summits are landmarks and whose harbours are ports of call for
navigators. In the west, the Ionian Islands rise like a gigantic breakwater
before the coast. In the east, three large arcs of a circle divide the Aegean
into basins: the Northern Sporades continue the mountains of Thessaly;
the Cyclades are the outcrop of a submerged primitive continent; Cythera,
Crete and the Southern Sporades prolong the Peloponnesian folds. Never¬
theless, it must be noted that this sea, to which the Greeks have given the
Indo-European name for a bridge (pontos), is alive with dangers. Churned
by turbulent waves in the bad season, swept by a north wind in summer, its
sudden anger is a continual surprise to sailors.
The climate is on the whole Mediterranean, but almost continental in
many sectors because of the magnitude of the mountainous backbone. It is
more varied than is sometimes imagined. Winters are severe and summers
hot. In Athens, the average spread is from 19 degrees to a maximum of 38
degrees Centigrade. In summer, Thessaly and Boeotia become burning
plains where the wind raises whirling clouds of dust. In Attica and the
islands, the heat is more tolerable because of the Etesian winds.
Rainfall decreases considerably from north to south and from west to east
(for example 1,300 mm. annually at Corfu compared with 390 mm. at
Athens). The Ionian side of continental Greece has beautiful forests with
ilex, yoke elm, chestnut and oaks up to a height of 1,200 metres; pines, firs
and beeches above. The Peloponnese has a plentiful rainfall, which ac¬
counts for the strength of its waterways. East of Pindus any considerable
degree of precipitation only falls on high mountains. Olympus is covered
with firs and chestnuts, and Parnassus has snowy summits until June - but
a long, cruel drought, with scarcely any rain between June and September,
prevails in lower regions.
Winds add to the severity of the climate. In summer, low pressure from
the Mediterranean draws in air from the Balkans producing northern
winds which ravage harvests, sweep the Aegean Sea and sometimes alter¬
nate with burning siroccos. In winter, violent gusts of wind abruptly chill
the atmosphere.
The narrow plains and climatic extremes are not favourable to agricul¬
ture. The least infertile land is sown with cereals (with more barley than
corn, notably in Attica), the stony soil with vines and olive trees. The
mountains, largely deforested since antiquity (Plato stated that even in his
day large beams like the ones in old houses were no longer to be found), do
nothing to complement these deficiencies; their gullied sides can scarcely
be used for anything but summer pasturage. The poor wastelands between
the two are covered with mastic trees, rock roses, myrtle, asphodel and
hyacinths, dotted with a few ilexes: a favourite domain of sheep and goats.
The country is also not rich in minerals. There are a few small deposits of
iron and copper; silver-bearing lead at Sunium, ‘the source of silver’
(Aeschylus); and beds of a very fine clay which make excellent ceramics.
INTRODUCTION
3
Differences and Contrasts

This general view must be qualified, because regional diversity is great.
Two clear contrasts stand out, the one north/south between Balkan and
Mediterranean Greece, the other west/east, between relative humidity and
drought. More precisely, geographical regions with marked individuality
can be distinguished, and these are later confirmed by historical evolution.
Mainland Greece is held together by a large backbone, Pindus, which
reaches its greatest height at Mount Boeus. Epirus and Macedonia, where
the population for a long time was not recognized as Greek, form two fron¬
tier marches in the north. Epirus is made up of broken mountains with
parallel folds where communications are particularly difficult. The Arach-
thus flows through it for its whole length before emptying into the Gulf of
Ambracia (Arta). Macedonia, watered by the Axius (which provides an
easy means of communication with the tributaries of the Danube) and the
Haliacmon, consists of a high mountainous region and a steppe-like plain,
quite suitable for stock-farming. Further south, Thessaly is a vast plain,
bounded on all sides by mountains, reaching their highest point at Olym-
Pus (9>754 ft-) - Rich in game and good pasture for horses, it is crossed by
the most beautiful of Greek rivers, the Peneus, which cuts a difficult path
through the limestone of Olympus by way of the delightful Vale of Tempe.
But winter transforms it into a muddy swamp, summer into a dusty desert.
It has no maritime outlet except into the deep Gulf of Pagasae (Gulf of
Volos).
Communications between the two northern slopes of Pindus are difficult:
the best pass, Metsovo, well deserves its present name of the ‘Accursed
Pass’. They are no better between northern and central Greece. This ac¬
counts for the historical importance of the only two passes which are rela¬
tively convenient: Thermopylae in the east, and the Limnaea pass, on the
edge of the Gulf of Ambracia, in the west. Central Greece presents striking
contrasts. The western part, crossed by a large river, the Achelous, which
the Greeks quite naturally made into a god, is a land of impenetrable and
occasionally high mountains (Parnassus reaches a height of 8,070 ft.): it can
be divided into the rugged districts of Acarnania, Aetolia, the two Locrides
and Phocis. In the east, Boeotia is a muddy plain: it is unhealthy because
in antiquity it was covered by swamps for part of the year (around the vast
lake Copais) and is badly drained by the Asopus. Mediterranean charac¬
teristics stand out in the Attic peninsula, where mountains give way only
to very small plains, really screes.
Joined by a narrow stem to mainland Greece, the Peloponnese, likened
to the leaf of a plane or mulberry tree, depending on the period, marks the
end of the Balkan peninsula by boldly throwing its four fingers into the sea.
It is divided into a few natural regions, between which overland communi¬
cations are difficult. Mountains predominate here, but there are also fertile
plains, notably the parallel valleys of the Eurotas (Laconia), the Pamisus
(Messenia), and the plain of Argos. The northern coast, on the Gulf of
4 INTRODUCTION
Corinth, calm as a lake, consists almost entirely of unproductive wasteland.

The western coast is generally flat, sandy and fringed with lagoons. The
only purely continental region, Arcadia, which because of its isolation has
always served as a refuge, is divided between mountains (Mount Lycaeon
is sufficiently noble to be considered the dwelling place of Zeus) and inter¬
ior lakes. Apart from Megalopolis which is drained by the Alpheus, water
here only flows away through gulfs (or katavothres) and these are often
congested, transforming the country into pestilential swamps.
Geographical variety is also a feature of insular Greece. In the west, the
largest of the Ionian Islands, Corcyra (Corfu), is a positive orchard. In the
south, Crete, with a climate which is African at times, offers striking con¬
trasts between desolate mountains riddled with heights and hollows, and
plains covered with vineyards and olive groves. The Aegean Sea is dotted
with islands which join Greece to Anatolia in three roughly parallel arcs.
Only Euboea has a land surface of any size. The others are rocky peaks,
almost devoid of trees, and cultivation is only possible in graduated ter¬
races. However, Thera (Santorin) with its volcanic soil is more fertile. Of
the two large islands in the Sea of Thrace, Thasos and Samothrace,
cultivation is only practicable on the former.
A Double Adventure
Despite this diversity, the general poverty and mainly unfavourable physi¬
cal conditions were very different from the conditions the first imperial
civilizations had found in the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, and Indus. Al¬
though Greece still only had a fairly low density of population in the Neo¬
lithic age, large migrations in the third and fourth millennia increased its
population to such an extent that expansion became an absolute necessity
for the Greeks and the fundamental law which henceforth governed their
destiny.
Expansion nearly always assumes a double character: military and com¬
mercial, with one or the other predominating, according to the period. In
the second millennium, the Achaeans imposed their power over part of the
eastern Mediterranean, but their products travelled much further afield,
into countries which remained totally independent. At the turn of the two
millenia, large-scale migrations enabled the Greeks to conquer the rich
coastal fringe of Anatolia. A powerful colonization movement developed in
the archaic period which resulted not only in the acquisition of new lands
but also opened outlets into the barbarian world. The classical period coin¬
cided with a pause in this advance from the political point of view, but
increased trade offered ever wider openings to Hellenism in some areas. At
a time when these vital exchanges diminished and Greece seemed threat¬
ened with suffocation, Alexander’s genius conquered the Achaemenid
east.
From its first advance, Greek history can be seen, not as a continuous
development, so strikingly the case with the progressive rise of Roman
INTRODUCTION
5
power, but as a succession of vibrations, with sometimes political and some¬
times commercial imperialism coming to the fore. One constant factor was
evident beneath the apparent improvisation: the harsh need for ingenuity
to make up for the poverty of natural resources, and to invent new means
of avoiding autarchy which would lead to death. The Greek adventure was
born of hunger.
Thus almost from the time of the first Greek settlements on the soil of
Hellas there are good grounds for distinguishing between the Greeks and
the Greek world - which never coincided even in their darkest hours. The
Greek world must be stretched to include realms where the Greeks im¬
posed themselves as conquerors, and their colonies (some near together,
others completely isolated in a barbarous land) as well as, in a wider sense,
those countries where Hellenism penetrated by a constant process - the in¬
direct avenue of commerce. Although it very obviously foreshadowed its
direct successor, the Roman Empire, which amply profited from the Medi¬
terranean unity created by hellenization, it differed radically from the
Roman, notably in the weakness of the political links which joined the
Empire to a Greece which was itself divided.
Thus to write the history of the Greek people very often requires enlarg¬
ing the horizon far beyond the fortress of Mycenae, the banks of the Euro-
tas or the sacred hill of Pallas, where ancient civilization in various forms
reached its zenith, to include a peripheral world which often consciously
and deliberately became impregnated with Hellenism. It is not surprising
that a powerful impression of diversity emerges. By their very nature the
Greeks detested uniformity: they never made two temples or two cups
exactly alike. The history of Athens differed greatly from that of Sparta or
Corinth, only a few dozen kilometres distant. It is all the more obvious that
the Hellenism which developed in Anatolia could not be the same as in
Egypt, Gaul or India. It will, therefore, be necessary to indicate regional
distinctions, which are considerably more than slight modifications, for
each period.
For such an expansion to be as vigorous as it was presupposed uncom¬
mon perseverance in seeking the most suitable means to palliate the sparsity
of the soil and the meagreness of resources in Greece proper. As full of re¬
sources as their favourite hero, Ulysses, the Greek people have only been
able to survive by drawing on a constant genius for invention. Conse¬
quently, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the adventure of the
conquerors and traders should have been rapidly reinforced by a spiritual
adventure.
The myths contain the only adequate answers to questions concerning a
long period lasting roughly throughout the second millennium. The Greek
myths form a most delicate and subtle collection and it is not sheer chance
that they still give food for thought to present-day dramatists and psycho¬
analysts. Rational thought then appeared, the source of politics, philosophy
and science, in a sudden awakening unprecedented amongst eastern
peoples. Thenceforth, a dazzling procession of unknown men created new,
6 INTRODUCTION
more equitable and less oppressive ways ofliving in society, to say nothing
of the ‘friends of wisdom’ (for this is the full meaning of the word ‘philoso¬
pher’) who determined the place of man in the cosmos and posed the rules
of ethics, or of those scholars who fell in love with the beauty of numbers or
of those exegetai of the harmony of the celestial spheres. Literature and the
arts, more closely concerned with reality than other pursuits, rejected all
unworthy frivolity, engaged in the same quest and produced the most pro¬
found and subtle picture of man. They sought beauty because reason so
ordered them, because, according to the teachings of Plato, it was the
supreme climax of the dialectic.
Everything in the Greek soul joined in the indissoluble unity which is the
mark of true greatness. According to tradition, Thales and Plato did not
disregard profits from trade. Sophocles was elected strategos because he pro¬
duced Antigone. Deeply in love with life, which was all the more precious
because it was ephemeral, the Greek neglected no means of making it
tolerable and beautiful. Placed at the crossing of two paths (as Heraclitus
places Heracles) he chose ponos, painful and creative effort. He took up his
human destiny, preferring to help himself rather than wait for help from
the Olympians, hating isolation and submission. This was the secret of a
unique success and of the youth which rapturously emerges from all its
creations. Plutarch discovered this in the monuments of the Acropolis when
he wrote [Pericles, 27):
For every one of those which were finished up at that time, seemed then to be
very ancient touching the beauty thereof: and yet for the grace and continuance
of the same, it looketh at this day as if it were but newly done and finished, there
is such a certain kind of flourishing freshness in it, which letteth that the injury
of time cannot impair the sight thereof. As if every of those foresaid works had
some living spirit in it, to make it seem young and fresh: and a soul that lived ever,
which kept them in their good continuing state.
Book One
ENCOUNTERS AND
SYNTHESES UP TO
THE END OF THE
SECOND MILLENNIUM
■
The Awakening of Greece
(up to 1580 bc)
Human societies developed, slowly and feebly on the soil of Hellas, com¬
pared with the striking successes of proto-history in Egypt or Mesopotamia.
However, excavations carried out since the beginning of the present cen¬
tury reveal the main outlines of a continuous evolution from the Paleolithic
age to the flowering, after about 1580,1 of a truly original and brilliant
civilization: the Mycenaean civilization.
GREECE BEFORE THE GREEKS
Paleolithic settlements in Greece were few in number and of moderate

importance. From the time of the Neolithic age however, a civilization
worthy of attention developed.
The Neolithic Age in Greece

A series of Neolithic settlements appeared between 4500 and 4000, scattered
over the whole Greek countryside, from the valley of the Axius as far as
Arcadia. The peoples who founded them seem to have been natives of the
Asiatic Near East. This was the first Neolithic period, followed, shortly
before 3000, by Neolithic 11. The transition from one phase to the next was
determined by the arrival of invaders, whose origin has given rise to a great
deal of controversy. One scholarly faction, impressed by the great differ¬
ence between Neolithic on the continent and on the islands, sought their
birth-place in the black earth country of southern Russia, Bessarabia and
Transylvania. More recently, similarities between the Late Neolithic in
Greece and the Chalcolithic cultures of the Halys plateau in Asia Minor, or
even those of the Fertile Crescent in Syria have been pointed out. In the
face of such uncertainty, it must be admitted that the question is not yet
ripe for solution. Furthermore, it must be noted that new contributions by
the invaders seem to have been quite slight and no great change occurred
1 The dates given in the present work always refer to bc, unless there is indication to the
contrary.
10 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
Syncronisms in the Eastern Mediterranean
Crete Greek Continent Troy
Neolithic Neolithic
2700 2700
EM I1 2600 I
2500 2400
Arcadia
EM II EH II
2200 2150
EM III
2000 III-V
1950
1850-1750
MM MH
1580 1580
LM LH VI
1200 1200 1200
1 For sigla, see pp. 12 and 28 (according to F. Schachermeyr).
For the chronology of Troy, F. Schachermeyr diverges considerably from

the chronology proposed by the American excavators, which is as follows:
Troy I 3200-2600
II 2600-2300
III-V 2300-1900
VI 1900-1275
Vila 1275-1225
Vllb 1225-1100
VIII Since 720
in the core of the population. The Neolithic age can therefore be studied as
a whole.
The best known site is Dimini (in Thessaly) which belongs to Neolithic
11. It was already a fortified town, a fairly rare phenomenon at this period,
and the fortifications were particularly notable: six lines of concentric
ramparts, without towers, crowned the summit of a hill, in a curious
arrangement undoubtedly designed to protect successive rows of archers or
THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO 1580 BC) II
slingers. The central keep was almost rectangular in shape, and enclosed a
megaron which suggests a monarchical organization. Without exaggeration,
the first important fact m the political history of Europe is visible here.
I he civilization which developed on Neolithic sites was essentially agri¬
cultural and pastoral. Tools were very primitive: stone hoes and silex or
ob^dian sicldes mounted on wooden handles. The plough was unknown:
the Neohthics were therefore horticulturists and not ploughmen; they did
not work the fields but cultivated small gardens where a few furrows were
reserved for cereals. Crops were barley, corn, millet (used to make gruel),
lentils and tare. Population was most numerous in the relatively rich re¬
gions of Boeotia and Thessaly but in any case only a small part of the plains
was cultivated. The forest came down very low into the valleys: pines,
chestnut and oak trees (acorns ground to flour also served as food)
predominated but fig and almond trees were already known.
Sheep, goats and pigs were the most common domestic animals. These
latter played a more important role than later in Greece because of the
extent of the forest. Oxen were still rare. Hunting, which in the Paleolithic
age represented the main activity of man, was no longer anything but a
subsidiary occupation.
Caution is necessary when dealing with the subject of the organization of
Neolithic society. The idea has been put forward that the men engaged in
stockbreeding, whereas agriculture which, in the absence of the plough, did
not demand great expenditure of strength, was left to the women. It was a
widespread belief amongst many primitive peoples that female fertility
exercised a benevolent influence on the fertility of plants. The religious
factor already seems preponderant. The Neolithic idols of the continent of
Greece, similar moreover to those of the Cretan world, represented god¬
desses either seated or standing with fertile bodies: these were the Earth-
Mothers, steatopygous and big breasted, who fertilized the soil in the same
way as they brought fertility to animals and men.
But the rest remains and will remain unknown: neither the language of
the Neolithics nor the toponymy they used is known, and the efforts of cer¬
tain scholars to discover their psychology (like W. Blegen who found they
had a superstitious mentality, rough humour and a fundamental vulgarity)
are doomed to failure.
The Beginnings of the Bronze Age: Early Helladic Period

A profound change occurred in the population of Hellas at a date on which
no agreement has been reached (between 3100 and 2400). It corresponded
to the arrival, apparently in quite substantial numbers, of new invaders
from Anatolia. The archaeological demarcation is generally very clear.
But the conquest of the country must have been progressive: mountainous
and inaccessible Arcadia was only affected about 2300. Some distant or
unimportant sites, such as Berbati in the Argolid, show no trace of the
arrival of the Anatolians.
Greece before the Dorian Invasions
I GREECE BEFORE THE GREEKS

A. Neolithic i 4500-3000
11 3000-2600
B. Early Bronze 4
(or Early Helladic) J 2 00_I95°
-> around 1950: first Greek invasions in Greece <
II GREECE WITH THE FIRST GREEKS

A. Middle Bronze 4
(or Middle Helladic)/
->around 1580: new Greek invasions: the Achaeans <

and (??) the Aeolians
B. Late Bronze
(or Late Helladic 1580-1100
or Mycenaean Peri
> as from 1100: Dorian invasions <
In this chart we have tried to reconcile the different chronological systems proposed by
specialists. The dates are given in round figures which must be interpreted with a margin of
considerable error, notably in the earliest periods.
The period in Greek history which then opened represented the begin¬
ning of the Bronze age which is conventionally called ‘Helladic’ in Greece.
It is divided into three phases: early, middle and late Helladic (for short
EH, MH, LH). Only the first corresponds to the Anatolian civilization of
the newcomers who in their turn were submerged by other invaders about
1950 .
It is essentially by the study of toponymy that the extent of the Anatolian
civilization in Greece can be determined. In fact, a certain number of place
names used continuously in the first millennium b c and, in many cases, until
the present day, comprised suffixes which are inexplicable in Greek and
must therefore represent an earlier linguistic stratum. Widespread on the
continent, in Crete and in the islands of the Aegean Sea, they are equally
numerous in Anatolia. They are, for example, the suffix nthus (in Corinth,
Tiryns, Erymanthus, Zacynthus) or ss or tt sometimes simplified to j or t
(Gnossos, Amnisos, Tylissus, Ialysus, Parnassus, Hymettus) which is again
found in Anatolian names (such as Labraunda, Halicarnassus, Assus).
The third millennium therefore represented the moment when mountains,
rivers and towns acquired the names they retained despite later invasions.
But these names, for a long time designated by the convenient term Pre-
hellenic or Aegean, are today recognized more specifically as Anatolian.
THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO I580 BCj
!3
They enable these vast migrations over the countryside to be followed as
they crossed the Aegean Sea and thus supplied a new population not only
to mainland Greece but also to the islands (notably the Cyclades) and
Crete. As a result of them, the Aegean Mediterranean took on a new
character in the third millennium: mainland Greece was no longer isolated,
as in the Neolithic period; it participated in a unique civilization which
originated in Asia Minor and ranged from Macedonia to Crete.
The form that this civilization assumed in Crete, where it underwent a
striking development, will merit individual study later. At present we will
limit ourselves to describing it in Greece, where it remained much more
modest.
The Early Helladic Civilization

Indisputable progress was made in comparison with the Neolithic age:
there is evidence of the beneficial influence of Anatolia which was very ad¬
vanced as compared with Greece, primarily because of its contacts with the
flourishing cultures of the Middle East. The introduction of bronze was the
main indication of this and quite rightly marks the beginning of a new era.
But the emergence of a more vigorous life in all spheres can be felt.
On the whole, civilization remained agricultural and pastoral and con¬
tinued so for many long centuries in Greece. The chief activity was still the
working of an increasingly large area of the soil, as a result of the demo¬
graphic increase arising from the invasions, and the breeding of animals,
domesticated since the preceding period. But progress was not only marked
by the extension of soil cultivation, both consequence and cause of the in¬
crease in population. With the introduction of the plough, a rather modest
swing plough, which scratched the earth rather than turned it over, but
which was ample for the light soils of Hellas, a virtual revolution took place.
The Neolithic horticulturist was replaced by the ploughman. Only men
were capable of leading the swing plough and therefore had to assume a
task which hitherto may have been reserved for women. In addition, crops
became more varied and olive trees and vines appeared and, together with
cereals, henceforth formed the very basis of the population’s food.
Human habitations became very different. Towns (it might possibly be
better to call them villages) multiplied. They were of modest dimensions
but numerous, and the origins of one of the most striking features of later
Greece can be found in this period. They were very rarely fortified, which
strongly indicated that peace generally prevailed. Grafts, notably ceramics,
developed there (this was the period of the beautifully varnished pottery
known by the German name of Urjiniss) and also metal work, linked with
the introduction of bronze in metallurgy. Trade was no longer non-exis¬
tent and the unity of the population of the eastern Mediterranean certainly
constituted an important factor from this point of view. This Greece, not
Greek but pre-Greek, already had many of the features of Greece after the
arrival of the Greeks.
Figure i PlanofLerna
One city seems to have shone with particular brilliance. This was
Lerna, situated at the bottom of the Gulf of Nauplia, in a region of swamps,
preserved for posterity by the legend of Heracles. There was a Neolithic
settlement there, with two successive phases clearly marked. An early Hel-
ladic settlement was founded on it which also comprised two phases. The
first town was fortified on two occasions, first with a simple fortification and
then a double one, massive and reinforced with towers: an imposing
building stood in the centre, which must have been the palace. The fortifi¬
cation was later demolished and a new town built, with a large palace
which American excavators found and called ‘House of the Tiles’ (figure
i). This was a beautiful and powerful construction, the most important
built by the Anatolian people in Greece. It is almost worthy of comparison
with the palaces that these same Anatolians built in Crete.
Lerna seemed to enjoy considerable prosperity at this period. This is
explained to a large extent by its geographical situation which made profi¬
table trade with the Mediterranean world possible: the Argolid therefore
already occupied the privileged position which it retained after the arrival
of the Greeks. This very wealth must have been the cause of the misfortunes
of Lerna: the town was suddenly destroyed and never really rose again.
The remains of the palaces were merely collected and buried beneath a
low, circular tumulus which served to indicate the sacred character of the
place.
THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO I580 Be) 15
The fall of Lerna cannot be explained by foreign invasion: invaders

would not have taken the trouble to preserve the remains of the past in this
way. On the other hand, the new buildings at Lerna, though much more
modest, do not indicate any important change in customs. Its fate can
therefore only be ascribed to sudden and successful attack by a rival city or
by a coalition of cities jealous of the most flourishing town in the Pelopon-
nese. But it must again be emphasized that Lerna, as much because of its
power as because of its misfortunes, seems very much an exception to the
generally modest and pacific early Helladic civilization.
Caution is still necessary when discussing the higher forms of the civiliza¬
tion. One point, however, is certain: the existence of palaces which were
sometimes already fortified (Lerna, Aegina) presupposes a strong monar¬
chical oiganization. Each of these realms must have been independent of
its neighbours: here again the political fragmentation of later Greece
already appears.
The language of the Anatolians is not completely unknown, as it would
be if it were not for the toponymy. Moreover, it must have been very closely
related to Cretan, which will be mentioned later.
Not a great deal is known about spiritual beliefs. Steatopygous feminine
idols remained numerous and those found in the Cyclades, sometimes in
the stylized shape resembling a violin, are justifiably famous. They prove
the continued existence of worship of a great matronal goddess, who dis¬
pensed fertility and fecundity. Funeral customs during this period are quite
well known, though those of the Neolithic age are almost entirely lost.
Necropolises were situated beyond the limits of human dwellings. Tombs
were hollowed in the rock or built in the form of a cist. Offerings were
numerous, which suggests that belief in the survival of the dead was well-
established. Finally, it is not impossible that a whole mythology was created
during this period. A number of the most important heroes of the Homeric
epic are princes whose names are foreign to Greek and include a pre-
Hellenic ending in eus (Odysseus - Ulysses, Achilleus - Achilles). Without
being over-arbitrary, it can be supposed that these names originated in
myths going back to the early Helladic period, which the Greeks adopted
and utilized for their own purposes.
At the end of the second millennium, at a date which specialists fix at
between 2000 and 1950, the Anatolian civilization of Hellas must have
collapsed beneath the blows of new invaders, the Greeks, who thus made
their first entry into the history of Greece (map 1).
THE FIRST GREEKS IN GREECE-MIDDLE HELLADIC PERIOD
(1950-1580)
The Greeks form a branch which broke away from the vast body of people
conventionally called Indo-Europeans.
i6 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
INDO-EUROPEANS
END OF 3rd.MILLENN!UM
Carpatho-Danubian South - Russian
Hypothesis Hypothesis
DORIANS
END OF 2nd.MILLENNIUM
IONIANS
Hypothesis of the detour
via Anatolia
ATTICAY?
PAM PH YU A
RHODES
SYRIA
CYPRUS
CRETE
lonians 2nd. lonians 1st.

-i— 1 ■ Aeolians millennium f'* Aeolians millennium
■ Achaeans (early -Achaeans (early
• •• Dorians movements) • • • Dorians movements) Miles
Map i The Greeks on the move
This map can only give a very general indication (for the Dorian migrations, see map 4)
A distinction has been made between the early movements which peopled Greece with
Greeks and the later movements, which marked a later expansion from Greece and which
generally took place in the first millennium (except in the case of the Achaeans, when it
dated from the Mycenaean period).
The Indo-Europeans
Earlier theories that the Indo-Europeans originally constituted a single
race, or even had a common material civilization, have been discarded. In
actual fact, archaeology has not succeeded in discovering their birth-place,
despite attempts in many different directions over the past century. The
Indo-Europeans were rather aggregates, crystallizations of populations,
undoubtedly already well blended. At a very distant date (fifth to fourth
THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO I580 BC) 17
millennium.) they introduced a fundamental linguistic innovation, possibly

analogous to a mutation in the vegetable world. This was the basic lan-
guage, still in very fluid form, of mesolithic Europe. It was an agglutinative
type of language which served as the substratum not only for the Indo-
European group but also for other groups which continued it more directly
(Finno-Ugrian group, Basque) and it was eventually transformed into an
inflected language: Indo-European.
This fundamental event took place in two regions, which were further¬
more relatively close together: in the steppes of southern Russia, on the
shores of the Black Sea and on the Carpatho-Danubian borders. The two
distinct linguistic groups from these areas, Pontico-Caucasian and Car¬
patho-Danubian, may possibly be the basis of the differentiation found in
Indo-European languages between two types, known by the word denoting
hundred in Sanskrit and in Latin: the satem group (or oriental group) and
the centum group (or western group, which in particular includes Greek).
However that may be, before 2000, the undoubtedly very fluid unity of
the Indo-Europeans was disrupted and a series of migrations began which
broke them up into several groups. These henceforth evolved separately
(‘Tokharians’, Indo-Iranians, Hittites, Armenians, Greeks, Italics, Celts,
Balto-Slavs, Teutons) and populated Europe and part of Asia during the
course of the following three millennia. They undoubtedly represented one
of the most important phenomena in world history.
The oldest method of reconstructing the Indo-European civilization be¬
fore its division, is by finding vocabulary common to the different languages
of the Indo-European realm. Words preserved in all linguistic groups are
extremely rare but specialists consider the agreement of three languages
and even, in certain privileged cases, of two, to be sufficient. A table can
thus be constructed containing the essentials of what is known of primitive
Indo-European civilization.
We have tried to do this with the assistance of the work of A. Meillet:
Terms of relationship
Father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter.
All degrees of relationship in a man’s family are designated in precise
terms; everything for a woman’s family is vague.
Social groups
House, Head of a household.
Village. Chief of a village.
Race, tribe, King.
Fortified place (this term in several languages takes on the meaning of a
town).
Human activities
to manufacture
to give a shape to the soil, hence, depending on the language, to manu¬
facture pottery or raise a rampart.
to spin, to weave, to sew,

to plough,
to go in a cart,
to buy (that is to say, to exchange),
to lead, hence to marry
to carry, hence to be pregnant.
Animals
Herd, ox and cow, sheep and ewe, billy goat and nanny goat, pig and
sow, horse and mare, goose, fox, bee, dog and bitch.
Milk, butter, cream, to milk. Wool, honey.
Stag, bear, mouse, crane, serpent, fly, hornet, wasp.
Plants
Beech, birch, willow, oak, acorn.
Cereals (although it is not possible to state precisely which), straw, grain,
to till, to grind, millstone.
Religious names
God (word related to the root meaning brilliant).
Priest.
Name of Objects
Axe.
Wheel, cart, to go in a cart, axle, yoke.
Boat, oar.
Copper, gold, silver (but obviously not iron).
Names of the principal parts of the body.
Names of Numbers
A decimal system comprising ten distinct names for the first ten num¬
bers, names of tens, the word hundred (but not thousand).
A picture emerges from the application of comparative philology, of a

highly organized, patriarchal society, obtaining its essential resources from
stockbreeding but not ignorant of the cultivation of cereals, and where a
certain number of crafts are already well in evidence.
In the religious sphere, linguistic analysis is of no great help. Names of
the same gods are very rarely found in several Indo-European areas and
only the following can be cited:
Greek Latin Sanskrit

Zeus Jupiter Dyauh
(genitive Jovis)
Ouranos Varuna
Centaurs Gandharvah
But the method of comparative mythology, notably as applied in the

excellent work of G. Dumezil, produces more substantial results. It reveals
THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO I580 Be) ig
that Indo-European divine society was founded on a tripartite and tri-

functional distinction, which was also found in human society. Three
divine types incarnating the concepts of sovereignty, force and fertility,
corresponded to the three classes formed by priests, warriors and peasants!
I his explains the existence of triads, found amongst various peoples of
Indo-European origin:
Peoples Sovereignty Force Fertility

Indo-Iranians Varuna and Mitra Indr a Nasatya
Scandinavians Odhinn and Tyr Thor Freyr
Romans Jupiter Mars Quirinus
These were the cultural resources which the Greeks, who were, with the
Hittites, amongst the first peoples to break away from the common Indo-
European trunk, took with them on the migration which led to their
occupation of Hellas.
The Occupation of Greece by the First Greeks
Whether or not the first Greeks came from the steppes which border the
northern coast of the Black Sea or from the Carpatho-Danubian area, it is
absolutely certain that they reached Greece across the Balkans. The classi¬
cal theory, which corresponds to the simplest possible conception of the
migration, shows them occupying Greece progressively in a north to south
movement.
However, certain indications appear to prove that the phenomenon was
more complex. From the time they arrived in Greece they possessed a re¬
fined ceramic technique, that of ‘Minyan’ ceramics, which will be con¬
sidered in detail later. The only other area where ‘Minyan’ vases are found
is Troy vi and they seem to be derived from Anatolian metallic prototypes.
On the other hand, certain funerary customs practised by the Greeks from
the time of their settlement, in particular burial of the dead within the vil¬
lage and not in necropolises outside the limits of human habitations, are
only found in Asia Minor.
Attention is thus concentrated on techniques and customs which the first
Greeks could only have learned in Asia. This has recently given rise to an
apparently paradoxical theory (Hencken), which suggests that, after cross¬
ing the Balkans, the Greeks crossed the straits and occupied the north of
Asia Minor, where they came into contact with and were influenced by
much more developed forms of civilization. They would then have reached
Greece (by crossing the straits again or by sea?) - perhaps under pressure
from other invaders, the ‘cuneiform Hittites’.
It must in fact be noted that the migration of the first Greeks is only
explicable in the light of a much greater movement of populations. It was
at the same time that the founders of a new town, Troy vi, settled in the
Troad, violently interrupting the continuous course of Trojan history. Still
at the same time, the Hittites occupied central Asia Minor where some
centuries later they founded a powerful empire. Thus, on both shores of the
Aegean, the arrival of the Indo-Europeans simultaneously threw Anatolia
and Greece into confusion. It is one of the great dates in the history of the
Mediterranean, one of the great dates in history.
For the sake of caution, we have used a vague term to designate the in¬
vaders of Hellas: ‘the first Greeks’. In fact, there is no certainty about their
exact name. Only one thing is sure: that they were not yet called ‘Hellenes’
as they were in the following millennium, and still less ‘Greeks’ as we now
know them following the Roman example. The word Minyans sometimes
used to designate them is purely conventional: according to Homer, the
Minyans were the first inhabitants of Boeotian Orchomenus where the
pottery then called ‘Minyan’ was first found (and quickly seen to be
common to all Greece at the beginning of the second millennium).
There remains the name ‘Achaeans’ which indisputably belonged to the
Greeks in the second half of that millennium on the evidence of both the
Homeric epics and Egyptian and Hittite texts. But were these Achaeans
the invaders of 1950 ? Some authorities think this to be the case, thus imply¬
ing that there was no new Greek invasion between 1950 and the arrival of
the last Greeks, the Dorians, at the end of the second millennium.
However, a more subtle explanation would appear necessary. The first
Greeks were Ionians who recognized a healer river god, Ion, as their epo¬
nymous ancestor, and retained his impetuous character (the word Ionian
meaning ardent). The social framework - division into four tribes - very
probably went back at least to the time of their settlement in Greece. They
occupied, though undoubtedly rather sparsely, the whole of mainland
Greece and the Peloponnese, possibly not imposing themselves too harshly
on the Pre-Hellenes they subjugated. Traces of their original occupation of
the Peloponnese, recently collected into a convincing body of evidence (M.
P. Nilsson), are definite. Myths in particular have retained the memory of
the establishment of Ion in Achaea, then called Aegaleos. He and his des¬
cendants reigned there until the arrival of the Dorians. Moreover, topo¬
nymy is equally instructive in this respect: the earliest name of the largest
river in the Peloponnese, the Alpheus, seems to have been the Ion. The
Ionians were eventually dislodged from part of their possessions by new¬
comers, the Achaeans (in about 1580) and the Aeolians (at a date which it
does not seem possible to fix).
Material Civilization of the Middle Helladic Period

The Ionian bands definitely occupied Greece by force. The Anatolian
population, which had settled there itself in this way, was overwhelmed and
undoubtedly reduced to slavery. The archaeological division is very clear-
cut almost everywhere and sites like Lerna, where there is continuity
before and after 1950, are very rare.
A new period then began, which corresponded to the first centuries of the
THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO 1580 BC) 21
settlement of Greeks on the land where they were to remain until the pre¬
sent day. This was the Middle Bronze age or Middle Helladic period which
lasted nearly four centuries until about 1580. Knowledge of it remains very
limited, in so far as it is based solely on archaeological data from excava¬
tions. It is still pre-history. History, in the strict sense of the word, only
begins in the following period, that of the Late Helladic, when writing was
introduced into Greece.
In agriculture, changes as compared with the preceding period must
have been very limited. The newcomers evidently needed to adapt them¬
selves to Mediterranean agriculture. They certainly knew of cereals but the
cultivation of shrubs, characteristic of Greece since that period (olive, vine,
fig tree) was new to them. It has been noticed that most of the Greek words
which go back to this period are inexplicable in Greek (that is to say, they
have no Indo-European homologues). The following are typical examples:
sit os, corn; pis os, the pea; erebinthos, chick-peas; seris, chicory; sisaron, ram-
pion; oine, vine; elaia, olive tree; olynthos, fresh fig; sycon, dry fig; botrys,
bunch of grapes; side, pomegranate; oinos, wine; elaion, oil; leirion, lily;
sisyrigchion, iris; rodon, rose; kyacinthos, hyacinth; narcissos, narcissus; samp-
sychon, marjoram (extract from G. Glotz, The Aegean Civilisation, p. 441).
In all probability, these words were borrowed from the Pelasgian lan¬
guage (from the name Pelasgians, which the Greeks gave the first inhabi¬
tants of their country), which the Anatolians of Greece and Crete must
have had in common. They give a very good indication of all the Greeks
learned from the population they had just subjected.
As far as stockbreeding was concerned, the only new fact - but a funda¬
mental one - seems to have been the introduction of the horse, long known
to the Indo-European nomads and which the Greeks then introduced into
Greece. Their cousins, the founders of Troy vi, introduced it into theTroad
at the same time.
In the realm of crafts, metallurgy in bronze continued to be practised as
in the Early Helladic period. The essential innovation occurred in cera¬
mics, with the appearance of a new type, ‘Minyan’ pottery. Very refined,
it presupposed the use of the wheel, which at last made its appearance in
Greece although it had long been known in Crete and even longer in the
Middle East. The pottery was manufactured from a fine and very purified
micaceous clay; it was matt in appearance and therefore in clear contrast
with the varnished work of the preceding period (the Urjiniss style). Vases
were generally grey (Minyan grey) but a Minyan yellow developed in the
Peloponnese and then in Boeotia.
Minyan pottery presents a difficult problem to the specialist. Some
think it was created in Macedonia or Greece after the invasion (F.
Schachermeyr). Others consider that the Ionians imported it into Greece
after learning or inventing it elsewhere, probably in Asia Minor (D. Page).
They support this theory by a convincing argument: the pottery appeared
on sites occupied by the invaders immediately after their settlement (except
in certain very limited cases, as at Tiryns or Aegina where it was slightly
later). However that may be, it was a remarkable innovation and the first
manifestation of Greek artistic genius.
Mediterranean trade, which characterized the Early Helladic period,
disappeared with the Greek invasions. The unity of the population of the
Aegean Sea no longer existed: in mainland Greece, the Greeks had super¬
imposed themselves on the Anatolian populations, while Crete had not yet
been touched by their invasions, and the islands continued to live within
the Cretan orbit. They were not, of course, totally ignorant of Mediter¬
ranean routes, which they may have used once already to reach Greece, if
it is true that they first passed through Anatolia. For example, they are
quite soon found in the Cyclades, at Melos, where they went in search of
obsidian and thus came into contact with the Cretans. This first initiation
of the Greeks, until then purely landsmen, into the world of the sea, is one
of the great events of the Middle Helladic period.
It is none the less true that, between the two periods (EH and LH) when
the Mediterranean was widely opened up, the first centuries of the second
millennium represented a time when Greece was turned in upon itself,
closed on the whole to fertilizing influences from overseas.
Society and Religion during the Middle Helladic Period

Scarcely anything but hypothesis is available on the social state of Greece
during this period, in contrast to other and better known primitive Indo-
European societies. The newcomers were warriors organized into a mili¬
tary-type society which has often been regarded, not without some exag¬
geration, as foreshadowing the feudal system. They recognized the
authority of chiefs who rapidly installed themselves in palaces possibly in
imitation of the kings of Early Helladic times. The people led an egalitarian
life and there are grounds for believing that the agrarian system found in
the Late Helladic period when a common land was divided into equal lots
amongst heads of families, dates back to the first Greek invasions.
Hypothesis plays an equally large part in the religious sphere. Feminine
idols representing the Mediterranean Earth-Mother certainly almost com¬
pletely disappeared. On the other hand, acropolis sanctuaries like the one
at Aegina made their appearance. There are strong indications that the
uranian religion of the Indo-Europeans had taken root in Greece and had
not as yet come under the strong influence of the Mediterranean chthonic
cults — as was soon the case. Funerary customs also show profound changes.
Distinct necropolises no longer existed; the dead were buried in cist-like
tombs in the village. Offerings were non-existent at the beginning and rare
later, a sign of an eclipse of the belief in survival.
Art was almost non-existent at this period. The first effect of the Greek
invasions, with all the violence they engendered, would therefore seem to
have been to plunge Hellas into barbarism. But although virtually nothing
is known of this period, it undoubtedly did not lapse without fundamentally
influencing the history of the second millennium. The Greeks had already
THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO 1580 Be)
23
learned a great deal from contact with the population they had just subju¬
gated : techniques of Mediterranean agriculture, perhaps those of naviga¬
tion, and certainly the whole basis of pre-Hellenic folk-lore and myths
already mentioned, which remained very much alive in later periods. On
the other hand, the basic features of the political and social life of Achaean
Greece were already outlined. The idea that the Ionians were barbarians
in the first centuries must therefore be qualified. Study of Middle Helladic
sites very clearly demonstrates this.
A Middle Helladic Site: Dorium-Malthi

Quite a large number of Middle Helladic sites have been excavated. Many,
such as Aegina, Mycenae and Tiryns, were fortified, which proves that
technique of fortification inherited from certain Early Helladic towns (not
Lerna where the castle-fortress had not been in existence long before the
arrival of the Greeks, but Aegina for example) was not lost. Nevertheless,
none of the small towns with their impressive walls which were character¬
istic of the following period (LH) had yet been built. The art of building
remained fairly rudimentary, especially in private houses where the apse
shape was often substituted for the rectangular shape of Early Helladic.
First-class Swedish excavations have made a description of a Middle
Helladic city possible: this is Malthi in Messenia, north-west of Ithome,
which is undoubtedly the ancient town of Dorium. It was an acropolis
which overlooked the road descending to the plain of the Pamisus, where
there had been human settlements since the Neolithic period. The EH
settlement was destroyed and burned by the Ionian invaders who first
reconstructed a town (Dorium hi), which was open like its predecessors.
Then, around the middle of MH, they felt it needed to be fortified. They
erected a powerful wall, pierced with narrow doors and reinforced with
towers. Three hundred and twenty houses have been found inside. How¬
ever, these did not occupy the whole area and empty spaces remained,
possibly designed as markets and parks in which cattle could be rounded-
up in case of danger. Special warehouses backed on to the wall on the
western side.
The summit of the hill was fortified by an internal enclosure. This keep
first contained the palace, constructed without display and without luxury,
scarcely larger than the private houses, not isolated and not built on a cen¬
tral plan: an altar can barely be distinguished in a room slightly larger
than the others. It was still a very far cry from the marvellous manors of the
Achaean period. It was bounded on all sides by booths and shops where
smiths, joiners and potters worked. This new town was Dorium iv.
Dorium clearly shows the evolution of Middle Helladic. After a confused
and troubled period, the Greeks erected a skilfully fortified town, where
workshops, warehouses and military installations which supported the
power of a king, were concentrated around a palace which revealed his
sovereign authority. While the splendid palaces of Crete displayed their
luxury unprotected by walls, the Greeks of the continent, using techniques

inherited from the most distant past (Neolithic and Early Helladic) forti¬
fied their towns. These may have been barbarous, since they lacked the re¬
finements of comfort and Cretan art, but they nevertheless bore witness to
indisputable economic prosperity. Dorium iv, like analogous contemporary
sites, was, in many respects, the precursor of Mycenae or Tiryns in the
following period.
For a long time, the first Greeks lacked the indefinable quality which in
about 1580 enabled them to rise above this rudimentary civilization and
reach the heights of the Mycenaean epoch.
Before following their ascent, it is more convenient to turn first to Crete.
The Greeks had not yet settled here and the Anatolian civilization, which
the Ionian invasions of 1950 had driven from mainland Greece (map 2),
survived with incomparable brilliance.
MINOAN CRETE
In Crete, evolution had been much more rapid than on the mainland. The
LEMNOS o J©TROY
Dodona
^-'Sescio'
CORCYRA 0, 7 2v. Dimini*
Choirospilia/1<-> ORCHOM^^
LEUCAStZto
■^Chaeronea*?
,ebeso°Eutresis\ Colophon,.
V f—jATHCA /
CEPHALLENIA CHIOS \anatoUA
.„. jmWsW^PATHENS'
WNemea. N 1 v lANDROS
SAMOS
ZACYNTHUS V5
mm*%•
sfflLpiN • I I
CaDCo°riui>fi|
^WfiTyns ow
\ Lerna 0 'NAXOS
PYL0S»St MELOS ©0 0
S ^T/akop' Camirus.
Cl THERA
|/4indus
Rhodes!
CRETE/ Carrier
Hagia-Triadai
(Palaikastro
Petsofa
Map 2 The Greek world in the second millennium

THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO I580 Be)
25
soil there was rich, especially in the plain of Messara, deposits of copper
provided an indispensable mineral and the island lay wide open to the
Mediterranean, Greece, the islands, the Near East and Egypt. The Neo¬
lithic period ended after 2700 and the Minoan period began with the in¬
vasion of the Anatolians. The island did not suffer from the migrations
which steeped Hellas in blood at the beginning of the second millennium
and it remained independent until 1400.
This long and continuous period of peace made possible the develop¬
ment of a prosperous and brilliant civilization, which is known either as
Minoan, Aegean, or Cretan. Specialists divide it into several successive
phases:
Early Minoan (EM) 2700-2000
Middle Minoan (MM) 2000-1580
Late Minoan (LM) 1580-1200
Comparative History of the Peopling of Crete and

Mainland Greece
The Power and Prosperity of Crete

In about 2000, the ‘first palaces’ appeared, sure sign of the advent of a
strong central power at least on three sites: Gnossos, Phaestos and Mallia.
Around 1700, these palaces were destroyed in a general disaster, sometimes
attributed to an earthquake but more probably resulting from invasion by
populations from the mainland come to pillage and raid. When they had
annihilated everything, the Greeks withdrew; they certainly did not settle,
as no noteworthy changes occurred in Cretan civilization. This scourge was
the occasion for rebuilding vaster and more beautiful palaces: this was the
period of the ‘second palaces’ (1700-1400) when Mallia, Phaestos and
above all, Cnossos, were reconstructed. The king of Cnossos soon took
precedence over his neighbours: he destroyed Mallia and forced the prince
of Phaestos to accept his suzerainty. This was the triumph of Cnossos which
took advantage of its central position, unified all Crete and constructed a
network of roads to strengthen and establish its hegemony.
PLOUGH GRAIN OF WHEAT

IN FLOWER
LYRE TREE
DOUBLE AXE MORNING STAR
VASE WITH SPOUT CRESCENT MOON
PALACE MOUNTAIN
A B
Figure 2 Cretan hieroglyphics A and B
The dimensions and refined luxury of the palace amply demonstrate the
existence of a strong royal power. The royal institution was so important
that the Greeks borrowed the word to designate a king (basileus) from the
Cretans, although Indo-European also possessed a word to describe this
concept. The king of Cnossos undoubtedly bore the title of minos, possibly
an ancient proper noun, which the Greeks later recalled in the Cretan
Minos, one of the three infernal judges.
THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO I580 Be)
27
This was a bureaucratic monarchy, in the style of the Orient. It was

acquainted with writing, and several successive stages in the history of
scripta Minoa can be determined: first a rough ideograph, which was then
simplified into two hieroglyphic systems with more and more conventional
signs;, a linear writing, called linear A, finally emerged from the hiero¬
glyphics, which is mainly known from an important group of tablets at
Hagia Triada, but which spread from Melos to Thera. None of this writing
has been deciphered and Cretan civilization all too often seems like a
magnificent picture book illustrating incomprehensible stories (figure 2).
The power of the minos was so great that it extended far beyond the
borders of Crete. A veritable Minoan thalassocracy existed: Thucydides
Figure 3 Weight standard in

porphyry with a sculptured octopus
(0-41 m. high). Palace of Cnossos;
late Minoan I
has preserved its memory (1, 4): ‘Minos is the first to whom tradition as¬
cribes the possession of a navy. He made himself master of a great part of
what is now termed the Hellenic Sea; he conquered the Cyclades, and was
the first colonizer of most of them.5 It was a maritime empire, based essen¬
tially on the islands and coasts of the Aegean, precursor of the Athenian
empire of the fifth century. The Minoans settled on several minor sites,
where they founded towns which continued to be called Minoa: small
stations, undoubtedly equipped with a garrison, where they traded and
imposed taxes. Veritable colonies grew up on the most favourable sites -
at Phylakopi (Melos), Ialysus (Rhodes), Samos, Miletus and Claros.
Sole possessors of a powerful fleet, the Cretans were thus able to exploit
the Aegean Sea where they monopolized trade and imposed tribute. The
myth of Theseus - if it does really concern Minoan Crete, which is disputed
- preserved the memory of some of their violence, notably the tribute of
young men and girls levied each year from Athens, and of which the young
hero freed his country.
Economic activity was highly developed in all spheres. Agriculture pros¬
pered: abundant corn, barley, dry vegetables (peas, tare, lentils, beans),
and gourds were produced, while olive trees, vines, fig trees, date palms and
wild quince trees were widespread. Stockbreeding was as important as
agriculture; it comprised horned and light cattle and bees; the horse re¬
mained practically unknown until Late Minoan hi. Hunting, and above all
fishing were also pursued; fish and sea-food were particularly valued and
often appeared on artistic representations.
Industry was carried on, both in palatial workshops and in towns: a
stroke of luck has brought to light a whole industrial village at Gournia
with oil-stores, forges and joiners’ shops. Food production and textile in¬
dustries flourished; but best known are, of course, the ceramics, some of
which have survived to the present day, and the various artistic products,
where the Minoans showed incomparable mastery.
Trade was active, not only with the Cyclades which were under the
direct manumission of the Cretans, but also with Egypt, Cyprus, Syria,
Asia Minor and Greece (figure 3). Minoan vases spread over the whole
eastern Mediterranean. Relations with Egypt are best known, through
objects found during excavations, and references to the Keftiou (Cretans)
in Egyptian texts - which sometimes represented them (with more
eloquence than truth) as vassals of the Pharaoh.
Minoan Palaces
The wealth of Crete encouraged the development of a brilliant art which
found its most beautiful expression in the palaces. These were vast unforti¬
fied buildings, constructed round a central courtyard. The terraced roofs
were supported by median colonnades, which necessitated the use of a
lateral door. Lighting was provided by numerous windows and small in¬
terior courtyards which were to all intents and purposes light wells. They
were perfectly familiar with the science of hydraulics: drains carried away
water from the torrential rains as well as used water. Water from springs
was brought into the palaces to supply the numerous bathrooms or water-
points. There was no fixed hearth and braziers were used when necessary.
Particularly striking was the perfect adaptation to the Mediterranean
climate, the attention paid to comfort and the profound sense of beauty,
which was equally gratified by small refinements and monumental en¬
trances, superimposed terraces and vistas opening on to vast landscapes -
everything, in fact, that Gustave Glotz calls ‘a sure taste for the theatrical
and the picturesque’.
Gnossos was undoubtedly the most marvellous achievement in this
respect. It was brought to light at the beginning of this century by Sir
Arthur Evans. The palace rose on a hill overlooking the valley of the
Kairatos. The architect utilized the slope of the land and arranged the
building on two levels: the east wing was at a lower level than the central
courtyard (195 x 94 ft. approximately) and the remainder of the building.
To the west of the vast courtyard were sanctuaries and reception rooms,
notably the throne room, preceded by a purification basin, then, separated
by a long north-south corridor, the magazines where the wealth of the
minos accumulated, in enormous pithoi. To the east, on both sides of an
east-west corridor, were workshops and private apartments (the large hall
of the Double Axes and the queen’s apartments). To the south, outbuild¬
ings ; to the north, store-rooms and theatre, which Homer still recalled in
two lines of the Iliad (18, 591-2): ‘a dancing floor like the one that
Daedalus designed in the spacious town of Cnossos for Ariadne of the lovely
locks’.
The building was extremely complex because of the multiplicity of
rooms, corridors, small courtyards and stairways leading to the various
floors. The word ‘labyrinth’, which may have belonged to this ‘palace of
the Double Axe’, and the name of Daedalus, its mythical architect, have
remained symbolic of this strange building. Greek legend relates that
Theseus was only able to find his way through it to the outside world
because of Ariadne’s love and cunning.
The Little Palace and the Royal Villa stood a short distance away from
the palace. Here a large room, supported by a double row of columns,
seems like a prototype of Greek and Roman basilicas.
At Phaestos, Italian excavations have revealed a palace built on an
acropolis on four levels to give a marvellous view over the olive-groves of
Messara. Numerous wide stairways led from one level to another. The
essential elements were the same as at Cnossos: reception rooms, private
apartments, magazines, workshops and store-rooms. A balcony at the very
top enabled the king to survey his whole manor and the stately countryside
beyond. Not far away, the villa of Hagia Triada, later transformed into a
virtual palace, was one of the most luxurious buildings Crete bequeathed
to the world.
Finally, the palace at Mallia, excavated by the French School, lies on
the plain not far from the sea. Here again, all the buildings were arranged
round a vast central courtyard. The western quarter was the largest: a wide
corridor ran right through it from north to south, separating the magazines
from the sanctuaries and the official apartments (where the most notable
room was paved, and supported by two pillars decorated with signs). The
eastern wing was occupied by magazines, narrow cells opening on to a
corridor. The northern quarter, grouped round a more modest courtyard,
comprised notably a beautiful pillared room and a bath.
The Artistic Florescence

A description of the architecture of these palaces alone is not enough be¬
cause it omits the extraordinary luxury of their interior decoration. The
walls were covered with wide frescoes, executed with distemper on a coat
of wet stucco, which produced the liveliness and mobility so remarkable in

all these works. It is possible to follow the evolution of pictorial art, notably
at Cnossos. At the outset, it was exuberantly naturalistic, leaving nothing,
neither plants, animals nor men, unaffected. The bunches of reeds on a
carpet of white lilies, the dolphins swimming amongst the fish in the queen’s
apartment, and the toreador leaping dangerously over a bull before an
enthusiastic and seething crowd date from this period.
True classicism then appeared, delighting almost exclusively in human
representation. The best example of this is the enchanting ‘Parisienne’ with
her fine face, enormous eyes, battered nose, saucy mouth, long neck and
loose, undisciplined hair.
Finally, painting became stylized. It was less true to life, but still pro¬
duced marvellous frescoes such as the hieratic procession of vase bearers,
and most particularly the astonishing composition of toreadors. Here a
man is portrayed leaping boldly over a furious bull in full flight, towards a
young girl holding out her arms to him, while another is seizing the long
horns of the animal and seems to be trying to restrain it.
Figure 4 Lid of a pyxis in steatite with a sculptured

dog. Mochlos, Early Minoan II
A mixed art then developed. The flat relief of painted stucco produced
genuine masterpieces: the king with the fleur-de-lis, or a bull’s head
animated with tremendous vigour.
Minoan painters certainly obeyed strict conventions, reminiscent of
those governing Egyptian painting: different colours to distinguish male
and female personages, front-view of the eye on a face in profile, absence
of shading and true perspective. But it is impossible not to admire their
THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO I580 BC) 31
sense of colour, their skill in depicting the most sudden movement and their
appreciation of the individual. More organized, more intellectual Greece
too often knew nothing of their qualities of airy grace, decorative richness,
spirit and joie de vivre.
Sculpture was much less developed than painting in Crete. Large-scale
plastic art was unknown: neither monumental sculpture nor religious
statues are found there, only statuettes (figure 4 and plate 1). Work was
mainly done in steatite, faience, ivory and bronze as well as clay. The
most famous piece is the goddess with serpents at Cnossos: clad in a
flounced skirt and apron, her forehead bound with a high tiara, her breasts
exposed to the world, her head and bust encircled by three reptiles, she is
the great Cretan Earth Goddess.
Relief was represented by slabs of faience which undoubtedly served as
decorative panels (figure 5). One of them shows a goat feeding her
young, another a crab, so perfect that excavators at Cnossos first thought it
was a fossil: a wonderful example of the Cretan talent for depicting ani¬
mals. Three beautiful steatite vases at Hagia Triada were decorated with
reliefs: homage to the king, gymnastic games, and rural procession. These
show the same naturalism as the paintings which, moreover, seem to have
had a great influence on the art of relief as well (at least in the case of the
last mentioned) as a humour and fantasy which speak volumes for the
Cretan temperament.
Figure 5 Slabs of faience representing the facades of houses. Cnossos, Middle Minoan II
The artistic genius of the Cretans was particularly apparent in the minor
arts. Crete, which the Greeks regarded as the homeland of the engineer
Daedalus, practised the art of working in metal and precious stones with
consummate perfection. The men and women of the frescoes always wore
jewels. Tombs have revealed many necklaces and pendants like the won¬
derful golden pendant found in the royal necropolis of Mallia, at
Chrysolaccos, on which two wasps face one another. The technique of
incrustation, possibly oriental in origin, was perfectly known. The work¬
shop of the lapidary, surprised by the arrival of the invaders, has been found
at Cnossos. Some of the objects produced by this workshop show just what
he was capable of achieving: a table incrusted with seventy-two marguer¬
ites, which must have been used for some sort of chess game, combined
ivory, rock crystal, gold, silver and a blue stone, the cyanos.
In the sphere of gem-engraving, there are innumerable seals which were
used extensively in administration and private transactions. They differed
greatly from each other in form, material and the representations they
bore. Their evolution can be studied from the phase of primitive ideo¬
grams to decorative hieroglyphics and then to a naturalism which delighted
in representing Cretan life in its most varied forms: landscapes, plants,
animals (notably marine animals and bulls), human scenes depicting all
man’s occupations (with the exception of war) and divine representations.
Ceramics, the most utilitarian minor art, experienced a real artistic
development (plate i). The wheel had been invented since Early Minoan
times and the potter had learned to construct a kiln with a sufficiently high
temperature to achieve successful vitrification. Decoration consisted en¬
tirely of geometric elements (straight lines, circles, spirals). Following the
invention of a slowly rotating wheel in the Middle Minoan period, vases
with egg-shell thin walls could be produced - a technical miracle. A rich
polychrome was introduced. Motifs sometimes remained linear but were
more often vegetable or animal. Lines and colours combined to achieve a
most successful stylized decorative effect. This style is known as Camares,
after the place where the first finds were made. Finally, Late Minoan first
abandoned stylization for naturalism: fearsome octopuses uncurled their
tentacles around the sides of vases. Later, it reverted to a decorative style,
the ‘Palace-Style’ which adapted the intertwined linear and vegetable
motifs it loved, to the curve of the pottery. There is no better illustration of
the decorative power of the Cretans than these simple terra cotta
receptacles.
The Religion of the Cretans

In the absence of decipherable written documents, little is known of the
religion of these Cretans with their acute sense of beauty. Nevertheless, it
can be sensed that their religion was optimistic, invited them to commune
with the intimate forces of life and offered its worshippers the prospect of
joy to come. A primitive form of fetishism has long been suggested in this
connection and, in fact, sacred stones, pillars, double axes (or labrys),
bi-lobed shields and sacred trees and animals are frequently found on
religious representations, evidence of a time when the elemental forms of
nature and the magical quality of arms were worshipped. But it is possible
that all these objects might later have been conceived only as symbols of
the gods.
Divinities were portrayed in a generally anthropomorphic form, but
hybrid beings, men with goats’ heads and women with birds’ heads, were
not uncommon. Goddesses played a greater role than gods. They were
shown beneath sacred trees, on mountain tops, on boats, or brandishing

shields, accompanied by large wild animals or birds (particularly doves).
They represented the different forms assumed by the original Earth-
Mother, who incarnated the life force and whose empire extended over
plants, animals and men. Gods appeared much less frequently: sons or
lovers, they served as paredroi to the goddess without ever being equal to her
either in stature on figured representations or in power - certainly a sur¬
vival of a primitive matriarchy and of the deep belief the first civilizations
held in the essential link between woman and the life forces.
Some sources are inclined to believe that a genuine monotheism pre¬
vailed and that one single female divinity endowed the universe with life
and received the homage of the Cretans. There are very good grounds for
not adhering to this theory and for substituting the view that the poly¬
theism of the Greeks had deep roots in the polytheism of the Cretans.
Certain groups of deities were already apparent, such as the one consisting
of the Great Mother with a child-god or another of two goddesses, mother
and daughter.
These gods did not have temples but small sanctuaries, which in the
early days were undoubtedly erected in the open: innumerable grottos,
recently methodically explored, were sacred places and several of them
have remained famous in Greek mythology (the grotto of Eileithyia at
Amnisos, the grotto of the child Zeus on Ida . . .). Similarly, an intaglio at
Gnossos shows a worshipper on the summit of a mountain paying homage
to a Potnia theron flanked by her two lions. Within the palace, small rooms
were reserved for worship; they generally included a bench at the back
where offerings were piled up. ‘Horns of consecration’ hallowed all these
places and marked their supranatural character.
Ceremonies were full of ritual and consisted more of processions than of
bloody sacrifice. Libations were made; the divinity was offered the fruits
of the earth to ensure its divine protection. This gave rise to the use of
tables or vases for offerings, with multiple compartments ikernoi) and
many examples of these have been unearthed. The serpent, the chthonic
animal par excellence, because it crawls over the earth and makes its dwelling
underground, was a particular favourite (figure 6). The bull was also a
sacred animal, hence the innumerable tauromachian representations on
large frescoes or in the minor arts, as well as the tauromorphous rhyta
which may have been used for libations of bull’s blood.
The world of the dead is in its very essence near the world of the gods.
But, in Crete, the dead were carefully buried and provided with offerings
which obviously presupposed belief in survival. What idea can we now
form of the hereafter they entered? A precise answer to this question can¬
not, in all prudence, be given. It is noteworthy, however, that the Greeks
depended on the judgement of two Cretans, Minos and Rhadamanthus,
for access to Elysium, the Isles of the Blest (where, moreover, a Cretan god¬
dess, Persephone, reigned). In another respect, the mystery cults of the
Greek world, which opened up happy perspectives of eternal life to the
Figure 6 Terracotta
vase designed for the
food of the sacred
serpents. Palace of
Cnossos, Late
Minoan I
initiated, seem to date back to the most distant Cretan past. The word
heros, which the Greeks used to designate their illustrious dead who were
honoured with special worship, is also Cretan in origin (figure 7).
A whole body of evidence therefore points to definite Cretan beliefs in a
benevolent hereafter, where some of the dead (rendered equal to the gods
by being elevated to the status of‘heroes’) enjoyed eternal bliss under the
protection of the compassionate Earth-Mother, which continued after
death.
It is impossible to over-emphasize the historical importance of Cretan
religion which, through the intermediary of Achaean religion, contributed
so much to Greek religion in the first millenium. Its contribution did not
consist solely of the survival of the names of certain gods: Britomartis (the
sweet maid), Dictynna, Eileithyia, Velchanos (the god with the cock whom
Figure 7 The sarcophagus of Hagia Triada

THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP TO I 580 BC)
35
the Greeks turned into a Zeus Velchanos), or of the names of certain

heroines: Ariadne, Europa. The whole atmosphere of Aegean worship
lived on in the chthonic and mystical cults of the Hellenic world. Their
spirituality, optimism and preoccupation with the world beyond the tomb
recur constantly in the study of Greek religion.
So cursory a description cannot hope to recreate the brilliant world of the
Minoans. Peace, prosperity, harmony of social organization, love of life
and passion for beauty, most particularly for the pleasing - these were its
most obvious characteristics. It represented, in fact, a great human achieve¬
ment by a small people, whose creations in our opinion are equal in weight
to those of the civilizations of Egypt or the East, which are in so many
respects inhuman.
This only makes the mystery of its origins more irritating for the his¬
torian who cannot find the repeated statement that ‘it came from Anatolia’
satisfactory, and would love to know more about its distant past. A close
examination of the feeble remains of its language, Cretan, also conven¬
tionally known as ‘Pelasgian’, has been attempted. Using the method of
distinguishing residual elements and by extracting words from the Greek
vocabulary which cannot be explained by Greek, a basic Cretan vocabul¬
ary has been constructed, in addition to numerous toponyms. Contrary to
the general opinion that the Cretans represented the Mediterranean
substratum before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, recent studies have
tried to show that ‘Pelasgian’ was not unrelated to Indo-European lan¬
guages (notably those of Asia Minor, Luvian and Hittite). The Cretans
would therefore be proto-Indo-Europeans, cousins as it were, of the
Greeks, who had been broken oflf from the common Indo-European trunk
before them.
In about 1400, Greeks from the Peloponnese pillaged the palaces and
destroyed Minoan power. Unlike their ancestors in 1700, they occupied
the country: Crete lost its independence and had faded away by the end of
Late Minoan, about 1200.
The time has now come therefore to return to mainland Greece, which
we abandoned at the beginning of Late Helladic. But Crete did not
disappear from history with the ruin of Cnossos. It had in effect ‘con¬
quered its wild conqueror’ well before its conquest. For nearly two cen¬
turies it had been the leaven which caused the hitherto amorphous loaf of
Hellenism to rise. Its influence recurs at every turn in the study of the
Achaean world.
The Formation of an
Achaean World (1580-1200)
Around the years 1600-1580, a profound transformation took place in
Greek civilization: in archaeological terminology, this was the transition
from Middle Helladic to Late Helladic. The latter period, which lasted up
to about 1100, is also called the Mycenaean period from the name of the
most important site in Argolis. Work by pottery experts has made it pos¬
sible to divide the Mycenaean period into a number of phases. The most
recent and most complete chronology runs as follows (A. Furumark):
Late Helladic 1 I550-I500

Late Helladic 11 A 1500-1450
B I45°~I425
Late Helladic in A 1425-1300
B 1300-1230
C 1230-1100
There is no deep archaeological break on the ground to mark the trans¬

formation, such as corresponded to the arrival of the Greeks at the begin¬
ning of the second millennium or the invasion of the Dorians at the end of
the same millennium. There was obviously no massive incursion of new
populations. What happened was more a rapid and even brutal evolution
which can rather be compared to the movement from the Archaic to the
Classical period in Greece about 500. The dull Middle Helladic world, with
no wide outlets on to the Mediterranean, was succeeded by the dazzling
Late Helladic world, wide open to Crete and the Orient. In all proba¬
bility, it was the influence of Minoan Crete which woke Greece from its
lethargy. Sir Arthur Evans thought that Crete conquered the mainland,
but today this theory has been completely discarded. As a result of dip¬
lomatic relations and commerce, with the help of some armed encounters
as well, Greece was initiated into the Mediterranean civilization of the
Cretans. It imported Minoan objects and imitated them, brought artists
from Crete and adopted the beliefs of a religion very different from
its own. It was seduced and the seduction transformed it in every field.
According to some scholars (M. Nilsson), the ‘Cretanization’ of Greece
THE FORMATION OF AN ACHAEAN WORLD 37
is not a sufficient explanation for this sudden flowering of a new civiliza¬

tion. Scandinavian influences must also have affected Greece, particularly
apparent in the passion for amber (a precious material coming from the
shores of the Baltic and almost totally scorned by the Cretans) or in their
noted taste for helmets decorated with boars’ teeth (figure 8). These two
fashions appeared at the beginning of the Late Helladic period and dis¬
appeared fairly rapidly. They corresponded to the arrival of new Greeks
from the Balkans, undoubtedly the Achaeans. They came from Thessaly
(Phthiotic Achaeans) but settled mainly in the Peloponnese. Here they
forced back the Ionians, who thereafter only retained certain points along
the coast: Cynuria where Herodotus stated that the autochthonous Ionians
subsequently became dorianized; Epidaurus where Pityreus the son of
Figure 8 Helmet with decoration of

boars’ teeth discovered at Mycenae in
a chamber tomb
Ion, reigned at the time of the Dorian invasion; and Pylos, whence the
Neleids embarked to colonize Ionia.
It must once again be emphasized that the Achaean invaders were
relatively few in number: there is no archaeological break in the Pelopon¬
nese at the beginning of the Late Helladic period. They consisted of
numerically weak but determined bands of men who landed, imposed
their rule by violence and undoubtedly won power, but did not change the
essence of the population. Moreover, most recent archaeological studies
seem to show that their dialect, Achaean (as known from the Linear B
tablets), was allied to Ionian in so far as it can be placed in the same group
(‘southern Greek’). This relationship suggests that at some not too distant
date (the end of the third millennium) both peoples shared a common
habitat (in the Balkans?) where the Achaeans lingered while the Ionians
invaded Hellas.
The question now arises whether other Greeks, the Aeolians, appeared
in Greece at the same time. They were settled there in Late Helladic times
and therefore well before the Dorian invasions, but it is impossible to be
more precise and particularly to date their invasion in relation to that of
the Achaeans. They solidly occupied future Thessaly and Boeotia
(Thucydides said that their lands extended as far as Corinth) driving out
the Ionians (who must have fallen back towards Attica and Euboea where
their concentration considerably increased). Their origins remain myster¬
ious : even their name Aeolians (motley) undoubtedly suggests that they
were a fairly mixed population. They brought their dialect with them:
Aeolian is clearly distinct from the dialects of the southern group (Ionian
and Achaean).
This influx of new populations had its advantages. It certainly explains
to a large extent the vitality of Greece during the Late Helladic period. It
must finally be added that some of the ethnic features of later Greece were
definitely marked out by that time: the forcing back of the Ionians to the
extreme south of mainland Greece (Attica, Euboea) and the Aeolian
settlement of Thessaly and Boeotia. With the occupation of the Pelopon-
nese by the Achaeans, Greece already showed a remarkable ethnic medley
well before the Dorian invasions increased it. Nonetheless the Achaeans
were so important that Homer used their name to describe all Greeks who
fought at Troy: we will follow his example when discussing the Greeks of
the Late Helladic period.
The Sources of Achaean History

Many more sources are available to trace the history of the Mycenaean
period than in the preceding epoch. First and foremost are the excavations
on Mycenaean sites. After 1874 an excavator of genius, the German
Schliemann who had already discovered Troy, gradually exhumed
‘Mycenae rich in gold’; this was followed by excavations leading to the
rediscovery of the Minyan civilization of Boeotia and then by the excava¬
tion of Tiryns. As a result, the idea slowly gained credence that the
Homeric poems were not the products of the imagination of a great poet
but depicted a world which had actually existed. The research movement
increased in the twentieth century and results were far from disappointing;
Korakou (near Corinth), Asine and Midea (in the Argolid), Malthi (in
Messenia), Amyclae (in Laconia), and Ithaca all yielded an ample harvest
of Mycenaean objects. Even more recently, Mycenae again attracted the
scholars’ attention by the discovery of the second circle of tombs at the foot
of the acropolis, while the site of ‘sandy Pylos’ yielded a new large palace,
to rival those of the Argolid, which must have belonged to wise old Nestor.
All things considered, a vast archaeological documentation exists, extend¬
ing far beyond Greece because Mycenaean objects have been discovered on
almost all Mediterranean shores.
Several of these sites yielded tablets inscribed in a curious writing, known
THE FORMATION OF AN ACHAEAN WORLD
39
as Linear B. For a long time these remained incomprehensible to the his¬

torian, until Ventris and Chadwick, in 1953, suggested a scheme of de¬
cipherment. Since then a great deal of work has been done on the tablets
and although the Achaean inscriptions still pose innumerable problems
in reading and interpretation, decisive progress has certainly been made.
The extent to which knowledge of the Achaean world is indebted to these
palace archives will be analysed later.
Finally, the two Homeric epics, which record events occurring at the
end of the Achaean period, can often be used as evidence, but require
caution because of their equivocal nature. They are texts which, in parts,
go back to the Achaean period; but a long deformation ensued by purely
oral tradition, innumerable alterations and additions and the final ‘com¬
position’ by ninth or eighth century poets. Certainly excavations have
furnished striking proof of the veracity of many details, but it remains
nonetheless true that no episode or reference can be given a precise date.
The Iliad and Odyssey are too composite for the historian to study without
great caution.
THE ACHAEAN REALMS
Nevertheless, we draw on a text from the Iliad for our description of

Achaean Greece, but this text is now thought to be very ancient and to date
originally from the Mycenaean period. The ‘Catalogue of Ships’, inserted
in Book 2, enumerates the ships which took part in the expedition against
Troy and also the names of the leaders. Greece here appears broken up
into a number of principalities. The enumeration begins with central
Greece, continues with Euboea, Athens, Salamis; then comes the
Peloponnese with the two Argive realms of Diomedes and Agamemnon,
Lacedaemon, Pylos, Arcadia, Elis; the Ionian islands and Aetolia; Crete
and the Aegean islands; finally northern Greece. Naval force generally
fluctuated between thirty and fifty ships; of the twenty-eight realms, only
seven fell below thirty ships; six exceeded fifty. The following were the
great states of Achaean Greece:
Mycenae 100
Argos and Tiryns 90
Pylos 90
Crete 80
Lacedaemon 60
Arcadia 60
It is characteristic that, apart from Crete, these should all be Pelopon¬

nesian states. Mycenae heads the list with a hundred ships, and further¬
more its king, Agamemnon, had lent sixty ships to the Arcadians, ‘as the
Arcadians knew nothing of seafaring’.
The Hegemony of Mycenae

This poses a particularly difficult problem: were these principalities in¬
dependent or did they form a unified empire, with its centre at the most
impressive and wealthiest Achaean citadel, Mycenae? The tablets at Pylos
and Gnossos bear a great resemblance to the archives of two sovereign
states; they never mention relations of vassalage with the king of Mycenae,
nor tribute which would have been his due. Similarly, Hittite documents
refer to a realm of Achaea (Akhkhijawa), which must be Rhodes or
Pamphylia. The king there obviously had no suzerain though he was
powerful enough to carry out an active and ambitious policy on the Asian
coast.
On the other hand, certain successful military ventures could not have
been possible without the co-operation of all the Achaean forces. This,
would apply to the conquest of Crete, for which no written documents are
available, and the Trojan war of which Homer presents clear evidence. All
the Achaean leaders acknowledged the hegemony of Agamemnon, king of
Mycenae, and his authority was recognized though it was often flouted by
SO m
Figure 9 The citadel of Mycenae
I First enclosure (seventeenth century bc?) ; II Cyclopean walls (middle of fourteenth

century).
A, Lion Gate; B, Prehistoric cemetery outside the walls; C, granary; D, Schliemann’s
circle of tombs; E, Slope; F, Mycenaean houses; G, Palace (i, great stairway; 2, throne
room; 3, central courtyard; 4, Prothyron; 5, Prodomos; 6, Megaron; 7, Domestic quarter);
H, Archaic Doric temple; J, Posterns; K, cistern
the violence of other heroes, such as Achilles. In the same way, the con¬
struction of a wall to bar the isthmus of Corinth against possible invaders
from the north at the end of the Mycenaean period must have been the
joint work of all the Peloponnesians.
A compromise between the two theses is not impossible. Obviously it
cannot be called an empire in the strict sense of the term. The different
Achaean realms were to a large extent independent of each other. All the
same, in times of need, united by common interests and possessing the
same appetite for power (which presupposed their coalition), they acknow¬
ledged a single authority whether they liked it or not in the person of the
king of Mycenae, who filled the role of a primus inter pares very well. Thus
the germ of the political division of Greece in the first millennium and also
of the league which united several states in the face of a common enemy
already existed in Achaean Greece.
The Citadel of Mycenae

The most concrete remains of the Achaean realms are the fortified castles
where the power of the leaders was concentrated. None is more impressive
than that of Mycenae: it is a positive eyrie on a roughly triangular acro¬
polis and reaches a height of 904 feet. It is surrounded by abrupt ravines
on all but one side. Arid and rugged peaks tower over this spur, girdled by
savage gorges, hidden, inaccessible and invisible from the sea, only ten
miles away. It is a sinister site, in perfect harmony with the sinister legends
that the Greeks located there (figure 9 and plate 2).
These began with the Perseidae who, according to legend, reigned over
the Argolid in general and Mycenae in particular: Mycenae was founded
by Perseus and afterwards governed by his son Sthenelos and his grandson
Eurystheus. Power then passed to the Pelopidae (also known as the
Atridae). Pelops’ sons, Atreus and Thyestes, were driven out by their
father’s curse and took refuge in Mycenae. When King Eurystheus died
childless, the Mycenaeans entrusted them with the throne on the advice of
The Pelopidae
Pelops m. Hippodamia
Atreus Thyestes
m. Aerope
Agamemnon Menelaus Pelopia

m. Clytemnestra m. Helen m. her father Thyestes
Electra Iphigenia Orestes Hermione Aegisthus

an oracle. They chose Atreus and thus gave rise to an inexpiable hatred
and malediction which recurred from generation to generation. The
Atridae were undoubtedly the bloodiest of all the accursed families of
Greek mythology, and the one offering the most striking examples of
debauchery, adultery, incest and assassination. The genealogical table of
Pelops’ descendants is enough to show all that they represented in the way
of passion, violence and drama.
Today the fortified castle of the Atridae is quite different from the vision
of gold and blood that lives on in the Greek consciousness, and which
Aeschylus conveyed in Oresteia. Excavations since Schliemann have re¬
vealed the ruins of the acropolis of Mycenae, where buildings followed
closely on one another throughout the whole second millennium, but prim¬
arily in the Late Helladic period. In its final state, it was an enclosure
2,925 feet in circumference, powerfully fortified by gigantic walls pierced
in the west by a gate (the Lion Gate) framed by a solid bastion, and
in the north by a concealed postern.
The interior included magazines, a few houses and, most important, the
palace which stood at the highest point. Built on uneven ground, it com¬
prised a throne room, a sanctuary and above all, a megaron (or great hall)
consisting of three elements: an exterior vestibule (aithousa), paved with
slabs of gypsum, an interior vestibule (prodomos) and the principal room
(the megaron proper) with a central hearth surrounded by four columns
supporting a skylight through which the smoke escaped.
The basic plan of this palace was repeated at Tiryns and Pylos. It repre¬
sented a very different architectural type from the Cretan: as opposed to
the Minoan labyrinth, this was a clearly arranged entity; while the first
had a flat roof, this had a roof with a double slope; the central colonnade
which resulted in a bipartite division of the facade was replaced by a
double colonnade with a tripartite division; the Cretan palace was a broad
residence without depth, open to air and sun, the Mycenaean was a
deep rather than a wide dwelling with a single entrance on the smaller side;
the Cretans used a mobile brazier, the Mycenaeans a central fixed hearth.
Several of these features of the Mycenaean palace (the roof with the
double slope, the closed design of the dwelling, the fixed hearth) are
reminiscent of the cold damp Nordic countries where its birth undoubtedly
took place although it might also have had Anatolian origins. It was fun¬
damentally opposed to the specifically Mediterranean palaces that the
Cretans built.
The Lower Town and the Tombs of Mycenae

The acropolis was solely the residence of the king and possibly a few lords
of his suite. The real built-up area was a lower town, south-west of the
fortress. Interesting houses have been discovered there: ‘the house of the
wine merchant’ (really the cellar of a house whose upper part was des¬
troyed) with eight large jars and fifty or so stirrup vases; ‘the house of the
oil merchant’ where a series of pithoi, which had contained oil, and tablets
Figure io Mycenae. Attempt at reconstruction of the upper circle of tombs, by Piet de

Jong
which possibly constituted a merchant’s account books have been dug up.
The dead were not forgotten. The tombs of the kings and the great are
amongst the most noble remains of Achaean Mycenae. Three main types
seem to have followed in succession. There were, first, the shaft graves, in
two circles, one on the plain, recently discovered beside the ‘tomb of
Clytemnestra’ (circle b), and one on the acropolis, the jewel of Schliemann’s
excavations (circle a), slightly later than the first (figure io). Several cen¬
turies after the tombs had been made, the second circle was surrounded by
a wall of raised slabs clearly to separate within the citadel the land of the
living from the land of the dead; on the other hand the enclosure in the
first circle is contemporary with the tombs. The dead were accompanied
by funeral furnishings (masks, arms of state, vases and jewels) which have
yielded some of the most dazzling objects of Mycenaean art.
Chamber-tombs then replaced shaft graves: a corridor (dromos) gave
access to a chamber cut in the rock which, at least in princely tombs, was
built with very careful bonding.
Finally, the most refined type consisted of a tomb with a cupola (or
tholos), where the dromos led to a circular chamber with cantilever arches.
There are nine tholoi at Mycenae, which were given conventional names at
the time of their discovery: ‘tomb of Clytemnestra or of Aegisthus . . .’.
The most famous is the so-called ‘Treasury of Atreus’, the most beautiful
vaulted chamber without internal support to be built in antiquity before
Hadrian’s Pantheon; one peculiar feature is the inclusion of a small out¬
lying room, possibly an ossuary.
Achaean Sites in the Peloponnese

Even in ruins, Mycenae still makes a deep impression, with its citadel,
palace and the richness of its tombs. But it is anything but unique. Other
Achaean sites show the power of other kings, owners of imposing manors
and lords of wealthy cities. A few examples are enough to show the general
characteristics.
The Peloponnese is richest in Achaean remains, which corresponds to
the importance the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ attributed to its princes. Eleven
archaeological layers discovered at Korakou on the Isthmus of Corinth
have made possible the establishment of a strict stratigraphy for the
Helladic period. In the Argolid mention must be made of Berbati with its
houses, Dendra-Midea where a particularly rich necropolis has been ex¬
cavated at the foot of the gigantic walls of the citadel, and the port of Asine
with its fortified acropolis, dwellings and tombs. In Laconia, Amyclae was
built around the sanctuary of Hyacinthus, a young god of vegetation, and
numerous Mycenaean idols of him have been excavated; at Vaphio, the
tombs have produced excellent chased vases. But two sites merit special
mention: Tiryns and Pylos.
Tiryns, a neighbour of Mycenae, belonged to Diomedes in the Iliad
whereas Mycenae was part of Agamemnon’s realm. Its site was nearer the
sea and much less impressive: the palace rose on a long, low mound, only
eighty-five feet high. The surrounding walls were therefore constructed
all the more carefully: nineteen feet thick, they also included galleries and
casemates hollowed in the wall and covered by corbelling which did not
exist at Mycenae. In its final form, there was a triple fortification: the
upper part enclosed the palace, the middle the outbuildings, the lower may
have been used as an entrenched camp to gather men and flocks.
The palace is better preserved than at Mycenae. With its reserves, work¬
shops, and magazines it forms a striking complex, arranged around a series
of courtyards: the large courtyard entered by the large propylaea, then a
smaller courtyard penetrated via a small propylaea. The seigniorial habita¬
tion proper, the megaron, opens on to this courtyard, constructed on the
same tripartite plan as at Mycenae. A final courtyard gives access to a
second megaron, which is traditionally and conventionally known as the
‘megaron of the women’, but must really be an older room preserved despite
the construction of a larger and more luxurious room. Mention must be
made of a bathroom with the remains of a terra cotta bath next to the
principal megaron: this bathroom does not appear to have had an equiva¬
lent at Mycenae and was undoubtedly designed for the ablutions of guests,
which was still practised at the time of the Homeric poems.
45
Figure i i Palace of Pylos of Messenia. The palace of Pylos consists of two blocks:
I New palace (Late Helladic IIIB): i, propylon; 2, archive repository; 3, courtyard;
4, megaron (a, prothyron; b, prodomos; c, megaron proper with throne); 5, queen’s
apartment: great room; 6, boudoir; 7, dressing-room; 8, queen’s courtyard; 9, guest
rooms; 1 o, magazines.
II Old Palace (Late Helladic IIIA): 11, State room; 12, Throne room
Pylos in Messenia, recently unearthed by Greco-American excavations,

possessed a palace of the same type: a propylaea gave access to a courtyard
on to which the megaron with its three successive rooms opened. The last of
these rooms was supported by four columns surrounding a hearth and con¬
tained the throne. In its final form, the palace of Pylos, unlike those of
Mycenae and Tiryns, was not fortified. The original element here was the
archive room, to the left of the propylaea, which has supplied over a
thousand tablets in Linear B. More than eight thousand vases have been
discovered in the small rooms adjoining the royal apartment, suggesting
the probable existence of a royal workshop. There are a series of chamber
and cupola tombs around Pylos as there are at Mycenae. Despite numer¬
ous controversies, it is reasonable to regard this site as the Pylos of Homer,
Neleus and Nestor (figure 11).
Manors in Attica and Boeotia

Some Mycenaean sites outside the Peloponnese must also be mentioned.
At Athens, the acropolis was fortified by a formidable enclosure and re¬
mains of it are still in existence (the so-called Pelasgian wall). It enclosed
a palace which was undoubtedly built on the site of the future Erechtheum,
and where Athena was already honoured - or at least so Homer thought
when he evoked in the Iliad (2, 546): ‘the splendid citadel in the realm of
the magnanimous Erechtheus, child of the fruitful Earth, who was brought
up by Athene daughter of Zeus and established by her at Athens in her
own rich shrine’. American excavations elsewhere led to the discovery of a
rich Mycenaean necropolis to the west of the Acropolis. The unity of the
Greek world was so great that, at least as far as appearances are concerned,
nothing seems to distinguish the Ionian realm of Athens from the Achaean
realms of the Peloponnese.
The Boeotian sites also merit mention. Orchomenus, whose treasuries
the Iliad proclaimed, was the capital of the Minyans. A whole town has
been discovered there, with houses and tombs, including a superb cupola-
tomb which Pausanias described as the ‘Treasury of Minyas’, the legendary
ancestor of the Minyans. Thebes, said to have been founded by the
Phoenician Cadmus, possesses some fairly vague remains of a Mycenaean
palace where a number of vases have been discovered. Finally, the island
of Gla, in the middle of Lake Gopais, was surmounted by a fortified palace,
as impressive as those of the Argolid. The enclosure, three kilometres in
circumference, followed the curve of the rock; transverse walls divided the
interior into four keeps; one of these held the palace which was composed
of two wings at right angles opening on to a courtyard. Each of the wings
comprised a megaron and a suite of small rooms, which undoubtedly served
as private apartments, connected by a long corridor.
Achaean Royalty
All these citadels resemble each other. They convey the idea of a strong
monarchical power which concentrated its wealth within the shelter of
enormous walls (the Greeks could not believe they were the work of human
hands and attributed them to the Cyclops), on acropolises already de¬
fended by nature. They were generally not fortified towns but fortified
palaces. The military aspect of this civilization is immediately obvious par¬
ticularly when these powerful and menacing small towns are compared
with the peaceful dwellings of the Cretan princes. Merely by reading
Homer it is easy to imagine the rough life of raids, looting and distant
expeditions led by the princes who had their residence and their treasuries
there. But the tablets in Linear B add more precise and detailed informa¬
tion about royal power in the Achaean monarchies to what can be deduced
from the palaces and the Homeric epics. The prince there bore the name
of wanax (not basileus as in Homer). He was assisted by a functionary of
very high rank, the lawagetas, not mentioned in the epic. The meaning of
this word is not at all clear; some sources interpret it as ‘leader of the
people’, others as ‘leader of the army’. It is still not possible to decide
whether a grand vizier or a commander-in-chief was implied. The wanax
and lawagetas were the two most important personages in the state, and
47
were granted great properties or temene, still remembered in Homer’s
period. They commanded a numerous and efficient bureaucracy whose
mechanism will be dealt with later.
Achaean Greece thus emerges as divided into a number of autonomous
realms, each grouped around a fortified manor. But it is impossible to
restrict attention to Greece proper. The Achaeans showed a devouring
appetite for power. They very rapidly carried their ambitions towards
other lands, where they founded kingdoms basically similar to those in the
Peloponnese or Boeotia. One of the fundamental characteristics of later
Hellenism would seem to have already established itself at the outset - it
had never been able and had never wanted to confine itself within the
geographical boundaries of Greece.
THE MILITARY EXPANSION OF THE ACHAEANS
The phenomena of the peninsula invasions found its application in

Achaean Greece. When the Achaeans had conquered all Greece they still
felt cramped within their conquest and moved towards the sea in search of
new lands (map 3).
The Conquest of Crete

One of their first conquests is well known from the ruins it left behind: that
of Crete. The Achaeans were already in contact with the Cretans, whose
thalassocracy extended over part of the Aegean Mediterranean, and whose
culture strongly attracted them and was distributed over part of the
Peloponnese. Tired of paying tribute and envying Cretan wealth, they
landed at Cnossos one April day in about 1400, according to archaeologi¬
cal evidence. Their victory was rapid and total: the Cretans were unprac¬
tised in warfare and one battle must have been enough for the civilized to
break down the resistance of the civilizers, in the same way as Philip over¬
came the Greeks at Chaeronea. The palace of Cnossos was pillaged (which
explains why English excavators found few objects of value there) and then
burnt.
This victory had far-reaching consequences. In the first place it des¬
troyed the Minoan world which had created an original civilization,
developed a vast maritime empire and succeeded, with very slight means
as compared with those of the great monarchies of the Orient, in establish¬
ing itself as one of the most powerful nations of the eastern Mediterranean.
It also created an Achaean state in Crete, well known through the palace
archives of the Greek wanax at Cnossos in about 1200, a state which appears
to have been totally independent of the mainland realms. Again, it added
to the wealth of the Peloponnesian kings who had planned and successfully
led the expedition, probably under the guidance of the king of Mycenae:
the affluence of Mycenae in the fourteenth century can be explained by the
Map 3 Achaean expansion in the Mediterranean
49
considerable plunder which must have been brought back from Crete.
But for all that, the ruin of the Minoan world could not put an end to its
influence over the Achaeans: the invention of Achaean writing is a good
example of the perpetuation of the civilizing role of Crete.
Achaean Principalities in the Eastern Mediterranean

The Achaean settlement in the eastern Mediterranean world is no less
certain but less firmly datable than their conquest of Crete. Furthermore,
it is not always easy to distinguish between the occupation of new lands
which foreshadowed the colonization of the Archaic period and the estab¬
lishment of simple trading stations which will be studied in the next
chapter. However, the following points can be considered certain.
At Rhodes, the three sites of Camirus, Lindus and particularly lalysus
have yielded an impressive quantity of Mycenaean pottery as well as very
beautiful weapons in cupola-tombs. There is barely any possible explana¬
tion except a permanent occupation of the island by the Achaeans. On the
other hand, Hittite tablets at Boghaz-Keui make some twenty references
to a realm of Achaea (Akhkhijawa), a maritime realm which maintained
close relations with such Hittite kings as Mursilis n and Tuthakijas iv.
This realm was important enough for Tuthakijas to compare it to Egypt,
Babylon and Assyria in a first draft of one of his texts - though this was soon
deleted by the scribe. The location of this Achaean realm has been the sub¬
ject of a great deal of discussion, some authorities seeking it on the coast of
Asia Minor (notably in Pamphylia), others in the Peloponnese. According
to the geographic context of the tablets, it might possibly be located at
Rhodes. Thus the epigraphical evidence of the tablets would corroborate
the findings of archaeology and make it possible to estimate the importance
of the Achaean principality of Rhodes.
The Achaeans were also firmly settled at Cyprus, the turntable of the
eastern Mediterranean. Hittite or Egyptian texts often mention the large
island under the name of Alashia, evidence of the importance of diplomatic
and commercial relations between the three countries. One of the principal
settlements appears to have been Enkomi, where a formidable surrounding
wall (fourteenth to twelfth century) is very reminiscent of the fortified
castles of the Argolid: Mycenaean vases are numerous there. A syllabary
was formulated there, derived, like the Linear B of the Achaeans of Greece,
from the Linear A of the Cretans; this was the Cypriot Linear script also
called Cypro-Minoan, which remained in use until the destruction of
Enkomi in 1050. Although it has not yet been deciphered, the theory that
it was used to write the Achaean language of the island can be propounded
with certainty. This language was able to continue well into the first mil¬
lennium because Cyprus was not touched by the Dorian invasions; it can
be seen in a series of inscriptions written in a new writing derived from the
preceding one: the classical Cypriot syllabary which undoubtedly appeared
in the ninth century.
Another example of the same phenomena - the survival of the Achaean

dialect well into the first millennium - is found in the south of Asia Minor,
in Pamphylia, and the same explanation must hold good for Pamphylian
as for Cypriot: there again the Achaeans were firmly settled, as they were
in the neighbouring province of Cilicia where very numerous discoveries
of Mycenaean objects have been made. The Achaeans had difficulty in
settling on the western coastal fringe of Anatolia, which provided Hellen¬
ism with one of its most marvellous fields of expansion several centuries
later. Nevertheless Miletus and Colophon were certainly founded as long
ago as the fourteenth century.
The Trojan War

Troy is situated in the north of Anatolia, near the straits. For nearly three
thousand years, in fact since Homer sang of its ruin beneath their blows, its
destiny has been indissolubly linked in the mind with the Achaeans.
Excavations on the site of Hissarlik have led to the discovery of eight suc¬
cessive towns. Troy vi was erected in about 1900 by a newly arrived popu¬
lation, producing ‘Minyan’ ceramics and probably fairly closely related to
the first Greeks. This city was fortified with an excellent rampart and seems
to have been exceptionally affluent. Its prosperity was founded on the cul¬
tivation of its rich soil and on stock-farming, particularly of sheep and
horses (Homer always calls the Trojans ‘tamers of horses’); it maintained
close commercial relations with the Achaean world (these will be studied
later). It was destroyed by an earth tremor in about 1275, but was im¬
mediately reconstructed, although slightly less glamorously: this was
Troy Vila, which in all probability was the town of Priam.
The Iliad recounts the most famous episode in the struggle which raised
the entire Achaean world, under Agamemnon’s leadership, against Troy:
Achilles’ anger, his withdrawal from the combat after quarrelling with
Agamemnon over the captive Briseis, his return to it crazed with grief
when his friend, Patroclus, fell in battle, and his revenge on Hector for
Patroclus’ death. The Odyssey tells of the perilous and interminable
‘return’ of the heroes after a ten-year siege, which ended in the fall and
sacking of the town. We can no longer regard these accounts as pure im¬
agination on the part of a poet of genius, which is how they were consid¬
ered before the discovery of the ruins of Troy and Mycenae. Historic
reality underlies the myth, certainly magnified by the Achaean epic, and
profoundly altered by the centuries of oral tradition which preceded its
final ‘composition’ by Homer (ninth to eighth centuries) and the writing
down of the Homeric texts (sixth century).
The Origins of the Conflict

An element of risk is undoubtedly involved when trying to distinguish the
historic kernel in these famous texts. This emerges from the first question
which occurs: what were the origins of the conflict? The reader of Homer
would have absolutely no doubt as to the answer: the war broke out
because of the abduction of Helen, wife of Menelaus and therefore sister-
in-law of the powerful Agamemnon, by one of old Priam’s sons, the hand¬
some Paris. But even the authenticity of the character of Helen is disputed.
Some scholars think that the abduction fits very nicely into the atmosphere
of violence and kidnappings of the Achaean second millennium and the
chances therefore are that it is historic. Others think that it is purely a
theme in folklore (that of the beautiful and fickle princess who unleashes a
war to provide an opportunity for miraculous exploits) - a theme too
widespread not to give rise to the suspicion that it was introduced later into
a primitive history which seemed to lack the romantic element.
In actual fact, certain suspicions do occur because several indications
point to the fact that Helen was an ancient chthonic goddess and, as such,
a victim predestined to abduction (while still a child, Helen was already
abducted by Theseus and retrieved with great difficulty by her brothers,
the Dioscuri). This would therefore seem to be another instance of the well-
known case of a goddess who had fallen into oblivion and been gradually
reduced to the rank of a heroine. Too much trust should not be placed in
the adventure with which the old poet credited her.
Whether Helen’s abduction be historic or mythical, it could only have
been a pretext, seized by the Achaeans to legitimatize a military expedi¬
tion. What were their true motives? A brilliant theory which was for a long
time accepted stressed the proximity of Troy to the straits. The town, it was
said, was a port for loading and unloading merchandise in overland transit
between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, in order to avoid the diffi¬
cult crossing of the Hellespont, and its wealth was explained by the charges
levied for carriage. This thesis can no longer be maintained: it is obvious
that relations with the interior were almost impossible, as the town was
isolated by a mountainous barrier, and there never was a route between
Troy and the Black Sea. The picture of Priam, as some sort of King of
Denmark watching over the banks of the Sound and drawing incalculable
profits therefrom must therefore be abandoned.
Very recently, D. Page has tried to find the secret of the causes of the war
in Hittite documents. In fact, in a text dating from King Tuthalijas iv
(1250-20) Troy and Ilium may possibly appear as members of a vast coali¬
tion. This union of twenty-two towns was grouped around the Prince of
Assuwa, whose realm almost corresponded to the future Ionia, and seemed
to have totally escaped Achaean commerce. Other documents describe the
restiveness of the princes of Akhkhijawa, seeking to strengthen their hold
on the continent through the disintegration of the Hittite empire. From
this followed the idea that the Trojan war was born of the ambitions of the
Achaeans, desirous of extending their commerce to the north of the
Anatolian coast by destroying the resistance of the powerful ruler of Assuwa
and his allies.
This theory also does not stand up to close examination. The realm of
Akhkhijawa of Hittite texts undoubtedly represented Rhodes; but it was
primarily the mainland Achaeans who rose against Troy. Moreover, to

destroy the only town on the north coast of Anatolia which traded regu¬
larly with the Greek world would have been a curious way of developing
Achaean commerce.
A much simpler explanation is required. The immense wealth Troy had
accumulated in the palace of its kings during centuries of prosperity and
peace aroused the envy of the Achaeans. Legitimatized or not by the desire
to restore Helen to her empty hearth, an expedition was determined which
would set in motion all the living forces of the Achaean world. It succeeded:
the town was taken and methodically pillaged, then the Greeks retired to
their respective homes, taking back incalculable wealth. Homer never
states that the Achaeans settled in the conquered city, and archaeology
confirms that the site was not occupied by the Greeks. The taking of Troy
was therefore basically only the final episode in a gigantic pillaging opera¬
tion which throws quite a harsh light on military customs of the time and
only owes its survival in history to the scale of the means deployed and the
genius of the bards who immortalized it.
The Date of the Capture of Troy

Even in antiquity, there was no agreement on the date of the capture of
Troy. The most generally accepted date of 1183 was advanced by
Eratosthenes; but this creates difficulties, notably because the Achaean
world at that time was already unsettled by the first Dorian invasions and
would scarcely have been able to unite for so distant and so dangerous an
undertaking. J. Berard, in a theory which is challenging but possibly too
systematic, suggests placing the fall of Troy two centuries earlier, in 1380.
It seems more reasonable to locate the conflict in the thirteenth century,
possibly around 1230—25 (the date that the American excavators give for
the destruction of Troy vna); other scholars prefer 1280, which is the date
Herodotus suggests.
The capture of Troy would thus be the swan song of Achaean power, the
last expedition when those bold and valiant raiders joined forces to impose
their power and gather riches in the eastern Mediterranean. It was un¬
doubtedly only one exploit amongst many, but the epic has magnified it to
a point where it has become the symbol of the world of violence and cour¬
age which was the world of the Achaean lords. Nothing is now known of the
men who left for Crete, Rhodes or Cyprus except from archaeological dis¬
coveries, but the wrath of Achilles, the bravery of Patroclus, the beauty of
Helen, and the wisdom of Nestor have not ceased to feed imagination
throughout antiquity down to modern times because of the magic of the
Homeric epics.
One precise example shows the danger of using the epic as the sole source
of knowledge of the Achaean world: this is the case of writing, which seems
unknown in the civilization Homer depicts but which played a dominant
role in the Achaean realm in reality.
53
A CIVILIZATION OF THE SCRIBE
Clay tablets are known at several Achaean sites, principally Pylos and
Cnossos, where considerable portions of the palace archives were dis¬
covered, but also to a lesser extent at Mycenae. These were covered with
signs, obviously derived from Cretan Linear A, and which were designated
by the conventional name of Linear B (over half the signs were common to
both writings). Innumerable attempts to decipher them were made but
were foiled by the double difficulty that both the language and the method
of writing were unknown. In 1953, two English scholars, Ventris and
Chadwick, scored the triumph of interpreting most of the Mycenaean
signs. They applied processes of cryptography in use in military intelligence
and began from a working hypothesis which proved productive, namely
that the Mycenaean tablets were used to write Greek. Their discovery was
one of the most wonderful in the field of Mycenaean studies since the
palaces of the Argolid were unearthed (figure 12).
a V e A i Y 0 ft it P
da b de r di
m1 do f- du u
jo je Y — jo T JO
ka ® he t ki V ho ? ku
ma ¥ me ? mi mo =1 mu? r
va T ne Y m Y no vu 1=1
pa t pe D Pi ft po pu &
-u-
— qe © Qi T qo T —
ra 1° rc T n * ro i ru r
sa Y se r si zh so 1 su e
ta E le + ti A to T tu
wa we 2 wi d. wo A' —
za f ze t zi zo f 2 U?
Figure i 2 The Achaean syllabary, called Linear B

The Achaean Syllabary and its Origin

The writing thus deciphered was not an alphabet but a syllabary of 84-87
signs. It was not very well adapted to Greek: of the stops, the unvoiced was
not distinguished from the voiced except for the dental series; the two liquid
consonants (l and r) were confused; neither the aspiration nor the quality
of the vowels was noted, any more than the diphthongs (except the diph¬
thongs in a); final consonants and the groups of consonants disappeared
almost completely. Finally, there were inexplicable doublet's. But all these
problems which make Mycenaean texts so difficult to read for modern
scholars, equally existed for Achaean scribes. Why therefore was such an
inconvenient system used? Because for good or ill the Achaeans had adap¬
ted the Cretan’s system of writing (Linear A), conceived to write a
language which was phonetically different from Greek.
There is no exact answer to two questions which naturally occur: where
and when was the Mycenaean language invented? Linear A could only
have been adapted by the Mycenaean scribes themselves, either in Crete
(and this is the most probable hypothesis) or possibly at Mycenae. As for
the date, it is now known that the texts preserved in the archives from Pylos
and Cnossos, which constitute the main part of our documentation, only
date from the end of the thirteenth century, which provides a terminus ante
quem. A terminus post quem is represented by the conquest of Crete and the
end of the fifteenth century. The date therefore wavers between the four¬
teenth and thirteenth centuries. The most distant date is slightly preferable
because the Achaeans must soon have realized the advantages to be gained
from writing in the process of administration; at the same time, the sylla¬
bary in known texts seems to be perfectly fixed as though it already had a
long history behind it.
The Lessons of the Tablets

The first and not the least important lesson of the tablets is to stretch our
knowledge of Greek or rather of a Greek dialect, Achaean, to as far back as
the end of the thirteenth century. Until decipherment, the earliest Greek
texts consisted of the Homeric epics which could only date from the ninth
to eighth centuries. But historians have gained as much as philologists
from reading the Achaean documents.
Before decipherment, many dreams were woven around the contents of
the tablets: they were thought to contain religious and literary texts, pos¬
sibly a primitive Iliad or Odyssey. These hopes proved idle. The tablets
were solely administrative documents, lists and inventories. Their attention
to detail was particularly remarkable; they contained a record of the
weight of bronze distributed to manufacture 500,000 arrow heads or 2,300
swords, as well as the number of smiths active in every village, the number
of pigs a district must provide, the quantity of corn destined to sow the dif¬
ferent categories of soil, the number of wheels stored in the magazines at
55
the palace of Cnossos, the ration of corn and figs allotted to the thirty-seven
serving women at the baths at Pylos. The most personal details did not
escape the curiosity of the administration: a certain Pesero had a wife and
two children; another man had two slaves, a man and a woman; in one
place there were two chariots, one of which was out of use. . . .
It makes one dizzy to see the extraordinary efforts to draw up an inven¬
tory of men and goods within the realm. And yet these are probably only
part of the tablets from both Pylos and Cnossos, for one single year, the
year the palace was burned, baking the raw clay of the tablets and ensuring
their survival.
The Achaean monarchies thus appear to have been supported by a
powerful and omniscient bureaucracy, like the ones in the Middle East, at
Ugarit or Alalakh, for example. And this is one of the most important dis¬
coveries arising from the decipherment of the tablets. None of this appears
in Homer, where the kings were solely war chiefs, only notable for their
wealth and warlike exploits. In actual fact, they headed a complex and
pettifogging administration, which found its fundamental tool in the inven¬
tion of writing. The Achaean civilization was a civilization of the scribe,
quite as much as that of Egypt, Babylon or Phoenicia. Finally, by their
detail, the tablets give untold information on institutions, economic and
social life and onomastics - which will be utilized in the following chapter.
Nevertheless, it is pointless to ask more from them than they can give: they
leave whole fields of study uncovered; apart from this, there is no question
of following any form of development through them as all they preserved
belonged to the same period.
The Diffusion and Disappearance of Writing

In Greece itself, the syllabary was common to all the Achaean kingdoms:
tablets have not only been found in Crete and the Peloponnese but also in
Athens and Boeotia. They are always composed of the same signs, evidence
of the existence of a koine in writing as in language and civilization.
The writing was also widespread in the world of Achaean expansion.
Cyprus was a rather special case: a syllabary was formulated there, as al¬
ready stated (called Cypro-Minoan) which derived from Linear A and was
not dissimilar to the Linear B of the Mycenaeans. But in the west, the real
Linear B spread: Linear B letters have been found on vases from the
Lipari islands. And this confirms a mythical tradition relating to the ap¬
pearance of writing in Italy: the Arcadian Evander was said to have
brought it there well before a Corinthian introduced the alphabetical
writing of the Greeks (in the seventh century).
It is not known when Mycenaean writing disappeared. However, it can
be noted that no late tablets (sub-Mycenaean or proto-geometric) appear
to exist. Writing, which was a tool of administration and not of civilization,
must have disappeared with the palaces which sheltered the scribes, under
the blows of the Dorians. Several centuries passed before the Greeks
5^ THE GREEK ADVENTURE
re-learned how to write and before they invented a new writing, imitated
from Phoenician script and much more polished in that it not only noted
syllables but also consonants and vowels, thus showing considerable
progress in the analysis of sounds.
It is easy to understand how much the decipherment of the tablets has
added to our knowledge of Achaean civilization over and above the evi¬
dence furnished by the ruined palaces and the glimpses given by Homer.
The picture of this civilization we will proceed to sketch is much more
precise than it could have been ten years ago.
3
Life m the Achaean Kingdoms

The glittering expansion of the Achaean kingdoms was accompanied by
exceptional vitality in the economy, society and spiritual life. This, notably
in the Argolid and even in Boeotia, was the first apogee of the Greek world,
as striking as that which occurred in Athens in the fifth century.
THE VITALITY OF A STATE-CONTROLLED ECONOMY
Mycenaean power was based on a flourishing economy which produced

enough food and prime necessities for local needs, and permitted profitable
trade with the most distant countries.
Rural Life and the Organization of the Land

It has been suggested that favourable climatic conditions as a result of an
improvement in climate during the Bronze age would have allowed the
development of agriculture, but such hypotheses are perhaps not worthy of
complete credence.
However that may be, agriculture based essentially on cereals and the
cultivation of shrubs was prosperous. Certain regions, such as ‘hollow
Lacedaemon’ (that is to say Laconia), seem to have been particularly ex¬
ploited. Telemachus in the Odyssey (4, 602 ff.) admired the richness of the
Eurotas valley, when he visited Menelaus, comparing it with the aridity of
the soil in Ithaca: ‘As for the gift you offer me, please make it a keepsake I
can carry. Horses I will not take to Ithaca. I’d rather leave them here to
grace your own stables. For your kingdom is a broad plain, where clover
grows in plenty and garlingale is found, with wheat and rye and the
broad-eared white barley.’
Stockraising was also a very prosperous occupation. The lords of the
manor owned immense herds of light and heavy beasts. The Homeric
poems are full of pastoral evocations. Ulysses possessed a herd of several
thousand beasts, both on the mainland and at Ithaca, perfectly tended by
a competent personnel of herdsmen, shepherds and swineherds. The charac¬
ter of his chief swineherd, Eumaeus, is unforgettable by anyone familiar
with the Odyssey.
The tablets from Pylos and Cnossos have shed an entirely new light on
the organization of the land, which appears to have been extremely com¬
plex. The king and the lawagetas possessed vast domains or temene. The great
officers and functionaries held tenures of a smaller area in exchange for
services rendered the king or for duties which devolved on them: this was
the kitimena kotona (or acquired land). Considerable properties also appear
to have been reserved on behalf of the gods (the etonija) which occasionally
seem to have caused disputes with the people. A tablet at Pylos describes
one of these: ‘Erita, the priestess has and proclaims that she has an etonijo
for the god, but the people declare that she has an onato of common land.’
The remainder of the land belonged to the damos (the people). This is a
souvenir of the conquest, however much it seemed part of the distant past
by the end of the thirteenth century, the date of the tablets. When the first
Greeks arrived in Greece they displaced the previous occupants and appro¬
priated all the cultivable soil, which henceforth formed the common lands,
or kekemena kotona. The egalitarian principles of Indo-European societies are
perceptible here. The head of each family was allotted a portion of land
which was granted to him but of which he was not given full ownership
and which he cultivated in accordance with the open field system. This
confirmation of common ownership of the land in the Achaean period is
certainly one of the most important discoveries to emerge from the recent
decipherment of the tablets though some perspicacious scholars had
already inferred it from an allusion in Homer to the ‘common land’.
Evolution subsequently modified the original system. The tablets there¬
fore (in about 1200) mention lands taken from the kekemena kotona and dis¬
tributed to private persons, subject to certain liabilities, either in return for
rental (onata), or even free of charge (anona). Anona were only given to very
great personages and were undoubtedly recompense for distinguished ser¬
vice. The final transfers resulted in a serious strain on the common owner¬
ship of the land; to some slight extent they prepared the way for individual
ownership which only developed in the following millennium. But the onata
sometimes involved only very modest areas and could be given to ordinary
citizens. Their increase in number has been related, not without good rea¬
son, to the cultivation of shrubs (vine, olive, fig) which presupposed
investment and was difficult to reconcile with a system of common land
ownership.
Industry and Commercial Expansion

The advanced evolution of Mycenaean society can be seen from the
specialization of craftsmanship mentioned in the tablets. All industries are
represented: textiles, ceramics, metallurgy, the manufacture of weapons,
work in precious metals, ivory and horn. .. . The most important seems to
have been ceramics which produced enormous quantities of exports and
not only supplied utilitarian objects such as bathtubs, but also the beautiful
Mycenaean vases, found on almost all Mediterranean coasts. These vases
changed according to the prevalent fashion and have thus made it possible
LIFE IN THE ACHAEAN KINGDOMS
59
to establish a strict chronology of the period. Furthermore, ceramic pro¬
duction had a surprising unity on every site: the same shapes, such as the
stirrup vase, and the same decorative motifs, such as the octopus, inherited
from Cretan art, are found everywhere. Metal also played a leading part:
the Mycenaean period corresponds to the late Bronze age; the only known
and widely used metal was bronze, employed notably to make weapons,
fundamental to the war-like civilization of the Achaeans. From this point
of view, Greece was clearly behind Anatolia, where the Hittites had prac¬
tised metallurgy in iron for centuries and jealously preserved their
monopoly.
The large number of Mycenaean objects which excavations have brought
to light on the shores of the Mediterranean illuminates one fundamental
aspect: the commercial expansion of a world which was bursting with
vitality. The Mycenaean settlements on the eastern Mediterranean which
had resulted from the conquest must certainly have made it easier for trade
to develop, but Achaean businessmen were also frequent visitors to regions
remaining completely outside the Achaean political orbit. Moreover, they
most often followed the routes opened up by the Cretan sailors. Thus rela¬
tions between Egypt and the ‘inhabitants of the islands’ (the name the
Egyptians used to designate the Achaeans) have been confirmed by many
discoveries: in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries there were Egyptian
objects all over Greece, for example a scroll of Amenophis iii at Mycenae;
above all, Mycenaean vases were manifold in Egypt, notably at Tel-el-
Amarna, the ephemeral capital of the heretic sovereign Amenophis iv.
Achaean products also worked their way into Syro-Phoenicia, which was
divided between Hittite and Egyptian influences and where a mixed civi¬
lization was then taking shape at a point where Achaean Greece and the
Orient met. Mycenaean vases and ivories found at Ugarit (Ras Shamra)
actually show the activity of Achaean merchants in the great Levantine
port and a similar conclusion applies to other sites, such as Al-Mina, at the
mouths of the Orontes, or Byblus. What is even more remarkable - because
in this respect they were very different from the Cretans who preceded them
in these regions - the Achaeans sold their products far into the interior:
they followed the valley of the Orontes as far as Hamah, Qatna and Kadesh
at the bend of the river. Alalakh, an important Achaean centre, was for
them the gate to the Euphrates and Mesopotamia; further south, they
followed the Jordan as far as Jericho. Furthermore, Egypt and Syria (not¬
ably Ugarit) were the two routes for the transit of gold coming from Nubia
and which the Mycenaeans badly needed for their artistic work.
On the other hand, the Hittite empire and the vassal realm of Assuwa
scarcely allowed the Achaeans to enter Asia Minor. Nevertheless, they
settled at two points (Miletus and Colophon) and also possessed an impor¬
tant customer in Troy. The Trojans bought weapons (bronze daggers,
arrow heads), marble, ivory, ostrich eggs (brought from afar by Achaean
boats), and particularly vases. These vases were cups and therefore drink¬
ing vases, imported for their aesthetic value and not as receptacles. It is
6o THE GREEK ADVENTURE
rather more difficult to decide what the Achaeans took in exchange:

undoubtedly cloth and horses.
The Achaeans were thus not satisfied merely with occupying the large
islands (Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus); they established commercial settlements,
similar to the future emporia of the Archaic period, on all eastern Mediter¬
ranean coasts from the Troad to Egypt, with one single gap (and this only
partial) in Anatolia. But their ambitions extended over an even wider field.
Mycenaean boats undoubtedly made frequent landings in the west: tombs
in the neighbourhood of Syracuse and Tarentum have yielded Mycenaean
vases; recent excavations at Panarea, one of the Lipari islands, have re¬
vealed numerous Mycenaean potsherds, some bearing signs derived from
Linear B. A suggestion has been made that they even reached distant
Iberia: Strabo tells of Achaean heroes, contemporary with Agamemnon,
who might have settled there, but the total absence of Mycenaean objects
in Spain makes this hypothesis doubtful.
The primary condition of such an expansion was obviously the existence
of a powerful navy. Mycenaean ships are well known from representations
on intaglios and from a few small-scale models found in tombs (notably the
one at Mycenae). The most common type was a boat with oars (generally
five pairs, but much larger ships had fifteen pairs of oars: Theseus under¬
took his voyage to Crete in this type of triaconter); but it also carried a mast
and could thus combine power from the wind with the oarsmen’s exertions.
Some boats, however, had a deck which stretched over the whole hull thus
eliminating the use of oars. These large sailing boats were rigged for distant
expeditions. They are the only ones of their type to remain from the
prehistoric or protohistoric civilizations in the Aegean Sea.
This powerful surge of all forms of economic life can basically be ex¬
plained only by the very secure social framework in the Achaean kingdoms.
A TRI-FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY
The Linear B tablets have added a great deal to the equivocal evidence of
Homer. Achaean society was based on a very hierarchical system.
,
Kings Dignitaries and Priests
At its head was the king (wanax) assisted by a commander-in-chief or grand
vizier (lawagetas). Under them were a series of high functionaries, whose
names are known better than the actual functions they fulfilled: the telestai,
custodians of tenures on land given in fief, the hequetai, basileis, koretere ... A
brilliant theory which may perhaps be built on a somewhat unsound basis
(L. Palmer) tries to prove that all the elements of an Indo-European type
of feudal society were present here — as was the case with the Hittites and
Teutons. The lawagetas would be the duke; the telestai (which the author
translates as ‘the men of the feudal system’), the barons; and the hequetai
(literally: the followers, the companions), the counts. But justifiable doubts
LIFE IN THE ACHAEAN KINGDOMS 6l
on this theory have been expressed, as it is not certain that the lawagetas was
a military chief. As for the telestai, etymology only identifies them as men
invested with a telos, that is to say, a duty, an office, and the texts some¬
times show them fulfilling religious functions. It would not therefore be
reasonable to try to find medieval feudalism in the Achaeans at all costs, at
least in the present state of the evidence.
Just as many uncertainties surround the other dignitaries, such as the
koretere, whose name can be translated equally well as ‘foster-father’,
‘herald’ or ‘military leader’. The latter solution seems the most probable.
At Pylos, where they are relatively well known, there would seem to have
been nine of them, each in command of troops in one of the nine districts
into which the realm was divided: viee-koretere (porokoretere) assisted them.
The basileis (kings) probably played quite a secondary role, although their
name was applied to much loftier realities in the following millennium. It
is not impossible that they represented civil power in the provincial dis¬
tricts. Finally, it must be noted that the tablets frequently mention priests
and priestesses corresponding to their important status in society.
The Damos and the Slaves

Below these privileged classes were the damos (people) and here there was
already a systematic division of labour. Inscriptions refer to men engaged
in the liberal professions, such as doctors, heralds and bureaucrats (there
was a whole series of scribes and it is not at all easy to differentiate between
them). But in particular they mention many artisans: bakers, blacksmiths,
carpenters, naval construction workmen, potters, weavers. ... At times,
specialization was developed even further, for example, manufacturers of
bows, distillers of ointment and servants at the baths are mentioned. All
these artisans could be in the service of the king or of the lawagetas or es¬
tablished on their own account, sometimes grouped into guilds. The peas¬
ant class obviously appears slightly less often in the palace archives, though
not infrequent mention is nevertheless made of the various types of
landowners.
Finally, at the very bottom of the social scale, were the slaves who could
belong to gods, to the king, to important personages or even to ordinary
private individuals (for example there is a reference to the slave of a black¬
smith). Many female slaves were ‘booty’ and their ethnic descriptions
(Milesian, Cnidian, Lemnian) indicate the place where they were
captured.
In sum, the framework of the tri-functional Indo-European society was
still quite well preserved in this society: the two privileged classes, nobles
and priests, directed and exploited the productive class of the damos.
Daily Life
The evidence contained in the tablets and in Homer and the information
yielded by excavations give a relatively precise idea of the tastes and occu¬
pations of this society, at least so far as the upper classes are concerned.
Thus ‘the princes of the islands in the middle of the Great Green (the
Mediterranean)’ are to be seen on the frescoes of the tomb of Rekhmire,
vizier to Toutmosis hi, and on numerous Achaean representations, in par¬
ticular the famous golden masks of Mycenae which preserve the strong
features of the bearded kings. Male dress sometimes consisted of trunks,
taken over from Crete, and at other times of the short blouse and cloak,
which can be assumed to be the traditional costume of the first Greeks. The
women generally adopted Cretan fashion: full skirt and very decollete
bodice, or straight gown with sleeves. Rich, even flashy, jewels were held in
high esteem and this taste for adornment recurs in the arms of state which
the leaders often had buried with them.
Figure 13 Tablet in Linear B found at Cnossos
Translation: ‘Three chariots without wheels, incrusted with ivory, fitted with all their
parts, provided with bridles with cheekstraps, decorated with ivory, and with bits made
of horn. Feudal offering of Calchidas’
In fact, the use of armour was also well known. Helmets were made of
leather and decorated with wild boars’ tusks or covered with sheets of
metal; breast plates, also made of leather, were composed of two parts
solidly bound together; legs were protected by greaves, which Homer refer¬
red to when he described ‘Achaeans with splendid greaves’; shields assumed
several successive forms, from the enormous buckler shaped like a tower or
figure ‘8’ (plate 2), which covered the whole body, to round shields which
left the right hand free for attack. Offensive weapons included bows used
by the Cretans for hunting only, which now also served for war, javelins,
spears and swords, an improved version of the Cretan sword because it
could thrust as well as cut. The importance of weapons emerges clearly
from the wealth of vocabulary used to designate them in the Linear B
tablets. The same applies to chariots which played a major role in hunting
as well as in war: there are rich inventories of chariots or of wheels with
four spokes at Cnossos, from which it can be deduced that the king of
Cnossos had over four hundred chariots at his disposal (figure 13).
The powerful manor where the wanax lived, surrounded by his family
and his dignitaries, has already been described. A large part of his time
must have been spent in the administration of a centralized and bureau¬
cratic state, but his favourite occupations remained hunting and war. The
LIFE IN THE ACHAEAN KINGDOMS 63
predominance of hunting and warlike themes in Mycenaean art is

characteristic of the attitude of the civilization.
THE ARTISTIC WORLD OF THE PALACES
But hunts, raids and distant expeditions formed only one side of the Achaean
lords’ existence. Their inimitable life was set against a backcloth of the
treasures of an art which owed a great deal to Crete, and lavish festivities
when the bards sang epic verses; it was sustained by a body of religious
beliefs and protected by gods and heroes. The extremely refined spiritual
life led within the fortified castles of the Argolid is in significant contrast to
the military brutality of prevailing customs.
The Birth of the Epic

It is hazardous to talk about Achaean literature because no actual text has
been passed down to us, and it is known for certain that writing was solely
a means of administration and was never used to produce a written
literature.
But the idea inescapably emerges from an analysis of Homer’s works that
epics existed in the Achaean period, were transmitted orally up to the
middle of the dark ages and formed the first kernel around which Ionian
poets developed the monumental creations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
This would account for the numerous Arcadian and Aeolian forms, not re¬
placeable by Ionian forms, as residues of primitive forms in the epic of the
first millennium. It would also explain the mention of specifically Myce¬
naean objects, such as the helmet with boars’ teeth described in Book 10 of
the Iliad, whereas this type of helmet, which had a great vogue in the six¬
teenth and fifteenth centuries, totally disappeared later. This poetry was
solely oral and made the greatest use of ready-made formulae (particularly
the famous ‘Homeric epithets’) which facilitated the task of the poet in
both composition and recitation. Favourite subjects were primarily warlike
exploits but certainly dangerous adventures on the ‘wine-dark’ sea as well.
Contemporary art illustrated the same taste: three silver rhyta at Mycenae
represent respectively the siege of a town, a battle scene and castaways
swimming for their lives. The themes of the Iliad and the Odyssey are already
here in advance.
The most clearly defined Mycenaean relics are to be found in the Iliad.
The theme of the Trojan war seems to have been exploited very shortly
after its event. The ‘Catalogue of Ships’ in Book 2 is now thought to be one
of the oldest fragments and the one least altered by later poets: it gives a
picture of Achaean Greece at the time of the conflict which subsequently
unified it under the dubious authority of the king of Mycenae. In this early
form, the epic must have been created in central Greece, and woven around
a local hero, Achilles, who makes the principal Peloponnesian hero, Age-
memnon, seem pretty feeble. But even this primitive Iliad may well have
been preceded by many other compositions and recent research shows that
the first epic attempts could go back at least as far as the fifteenth century.
In this field, as in so many others, Cretan influence may have been deci¬
sive. A. Meillet has pointed out that there is nothing corresponding to the
Homeric line, the dactylic hexameter, in the Indo-European realm, and
that it is furthermore poorly adapted to the structure of the Greek lan¬
guage. It might therefore be supposed that the Achaeans took over a metre
from Crete. The epic would then be a characteristic creation of the
Mycenaean period: Minoan in form, Achaean in its warlike inspiration.
The bards certainly exploited other themes besides Ilium. Later cyclic
epics the Argonautica and Thebaid may also have utilized early attempts
from the Mycenaean period. The Argonautica tells of the deeds of the bold
Minyan navigators, who embarked at Iolcus in search of the magic talis¬
man, the Golden Fleece; the Thebaid sings of the battles between the
Argives and the Thebans before Thebes of the seven gates, possibly a
souvenir of the civil wars between the princes of the Argolid and Boeotia.
Boeotia could thus have been of fundamental importance in the birth of the
epic.
Painting and Sculpture

We are on much firmer ground in the sphere of art because of the large
quantity of material preserved. Cretan influence appears in its full force
here. In fact it was from Cretan techniques and Cretan taste that very
early on the Achaeans borrowed the decoration for their manors and the
adornment of their daily lives.
Large-scale painting registered a development as important as that in
Crete. The walls of the palaces were covered with frescoes which continued
the Minoan tradition though with a certain simplification of design and a
certain contempt for naturalism in the use of colours which have suggested
a decadent style. Some subjects unmistakably recall Cretan themes; thus
one of the masterpieces of pictorial art, the fresco of the procession from the
palace at Tiryns, shows two lines of women in brilliant ceremonial costume
moving towards each other on the walls of the megaron. Other subjects, also
treated according to Minoan technique, correspond more closely to con¬
tinental tastes: at Mycenae, warriors and horses crowd a fresco: at Tiryns,
two lords, a pair of javelins over their shoulders, leave for the hunt.
The Mycenaeans practised sculpture in the round to a very limited ex¬
tent, perhaps because this difficult art disappeared in Crete more quickly
than the rest. Only a few attempts can be noted, some very successful, such
as a beautiful limestone head, bearing curious tattooings, found at Mycenae
(plate 3 a). On the other hand, large relief in stone experienced a develop¬
ment that it never achieved in Crete, heralding the decorative sculpture of
Greece in the first millennium. At the entrance to the acropolis at Mycenae,
above the lintel of the cloor, the space of the relieving triangle was masked
by a relief showing two heraldic lionesses confronting one another, their
forepaws raised on two small altars in Cretan style and surmounted by a
column somewhat akin to the ones at the ‘Treasury of Atreus’. This is the
oldest monumental sculpture of Greece and one of the most expressive: wild
beasts were the animals proper to the Potnia theron, who watched over the
palace and was charged with safeguarding its security as well as the stabi¬
lity of its construction. They were rendered with astonishing fidelity, evi¬
dence that oriental models were imitated. There is no useless detail, but a
strong and noble simplicity well in keeping with the severe character of the
fortified bastion which precedes the entrance.
The Minor Arts

Amongst minor arts, mention has already been made of ceramics, where
quantity tended to replace quality. Technically, the vases remained first
class (figure 14), with a whole range of different shapes, the most popular
being the ‘stirrup vase’, the ‘pilgrim’s bottle’ and the ‘champagne glass’.
But decoration, originally directly inspired by Cretan ceramics, was exag¬
geratedly stylized and, by the end of the Mycenaean period, reduced to
horizontal bands and monotonous rosettes. It was the death agony of an
art which had been industrialized to excess.
In complete contrast work in gold, toreutics, and damascening fully
Figure 14 Amphora found at

Mycenae in the ‘tomb of
Aegisthus’ (palace style of Late
Helladic II)
showed what the Mycenaean genius was really capable of doing and pro¬
duced incomparable masterpieces where it is often very hard to discern the
Cretan works which served as models. They contain all the splendour of
‘Mycenae rich in gold’ which still sparkles in the large Mycenaean rooms
in the national museum at Athens where the most beautiful pieces are con¬
centrated. The curious golden masks from the tombs of the upper circle
(circle A) were thought for a long time to be rough embossings executed by
the Achaeans following ancestral customs. Their models can certainly not
be found in Cretan sources, but now that Egyptian influence on the funeral
customs of the Achaean world is better known, their origin may rather be
sought in the Nile valley. The most remarkable specimens of Creto-Myce¬
naean art (where it is rarely easy to state whether they were imported from
Crete or fashioned locally by artists trained in the school of Crete) originate
from the upper circle at Mycenae, notably from the fourth tomb, and from
Midea and Vaphio.
From Mycenae comes the silver rhyta already mentioned, which illus¬
trate the Homeric epics in advance, and the golden cup with doves perched
on its handles dipping their beaks inside. This could easily be the depas of
old Nestor which the Iliad (i i, 633) evokes: ‘a magnificent beaker adorned
with golden studs, which the old man had brought from home. It had four
handles. Each was supported by two legs; and on top of each, facing one
another, a pair of golden doves were feeding.’ At Midea, a golden cup
shows a rich submarine landscape of the most typical Minoan type, while
the quadrilobate medallions of a goblet depict ducks flying away.
But the two goblets from Vaphio probably represent the zenith of Myce¬
naean toreutics. They have a very sure sense of composition and a logical
clarity far removed from the aesthetic principles of the Cretans. They are
one of the first manifestations of the Greek spirit. One of them illustrates
the life of the wild bull against a background of mountains: a splendid ani¬
mal is caught in a net and two other bulls are charging furiously. The other
goblet depicts a scene taking place on a plain where one tame bull is being
led by a halter, while another makes up to a cow.
The arms of state which accompanied the Achaean princes in death
were no less remarkable. Here again, forging, chiselling and methods of
setting precious substances had been taught by Cretan artists. One of the
most beautiful pieces is the bronze dagger at Mycenae, its guard encrusted
with gold and silver, representing both a lion hunt and a lion hunting,
scenes of oriental inspiration.
Finally, many small masterpieces were produced in glyptics, also directly
inspired by Cretan art. There are numerous scenes from daily life which
again show the Achaeans’ very lively taste, for hunting and war (duels,
departures in chariots, raids on women or animals). But the fact that lion
hunts were so abundant shows that conventional motifs were often used,
inherited from the east through the intermediary of Crete. In many cases,
subjects are religious and can no longer be distinguished from correspond¬
ing Cretan subjects: the different seasonal stages in the cult of vegetation
have been noted here. In actual fact, there are numerous representations
of the Great Goddess, either alone or accompanied by various paredroi. A
very beautiful golden ring, originating from a tomb at Tiryns, shows a
couple sailing on a ship of state towards a palace, symbolized by propylaea,
where two other couples are waiting for them. This may represent the
annual voyage of the Earth-Mother and the young god of vegetation to the
underworld, or an abduction scene, such as is contained in the stories of
Ariadne or Helen in Greek mythology, or a princely couple delivered from
the miseries of life sailing to Elysium and the immortality of the blessed. It
is difficult to say which alternative is correct but a representation such as
this very probably had a religious meaning and in any case the artist’s skill
in concentrating this broad composition on to a bezel is worthy of ceaseless
admiration.
Taking into account the great achievements of palatial and funeral
architecture studied in the preceding chapter, it is impossible not to be
struck by the variety of this art. It created the sturdy walls of the Argolid,
the bare relief of the Lion Gate and so many decorative masterpieces —
vases, swords and Mycenaean seals. It was responsible for the eyrie at
Mycenae, still full of the horror of the crimes perpetrated there, and also for
the charming birds on the sides of goblets. This variety is partly explained
by the hybrid character of an art which borrowed its technique and its
fundamental inspiration from Crete, and yet did not repudiate certain
Nordic traditions, most particularly a state of mind which clarified and
arranged the Minoan heritage.
These lessons were not lost, despite the long disaster of the Dorian inva¬
sions which swallowed up all the works of one of the most vital arts that
Greece has ever known. *
RELIGIOUS SYNCRETISM
The study of religion, which must be approached with extreme caution,

leads to similar conclusions. In fact, information is only rarely found in the
tablets. Homer’s evidence is particularly dangerous in this field, because of
all the later additions. Monuments decorated with figures are fairly few in
number, and always susceptible to divergent interpretations. Furthermore,
Cretan religion and Mycenaean religion have too long been confused and
only recently has excellent work by M. P. Nilsson and G. Picard made it
possible to distinguish between them.
The fundamental characteristic of this religion is the synthesis it brought
about between Nordic and Mediterranean elements. The Indo-Europeans
brought their religion based on the worship of uranian and pastoral gods
to Greece but, once there, they came into contact with the Anatolian popu¬
lation of Crete which worshipped chthonic and agricultural gods. There
was therefore a fundamentally male pantheon on one side, and on the
other a pantheon where goddesses considerably outnumbered gods, and
where an essentially matronal divinity, an Earth-Mother analogous to the

one found in the Orient, dispensed life in all its forms - fertility, fecundity
and eternity. Mycenaean religion was born of a narrow syncretism between
two types of religiosity, between ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ and
‘Our Lady from under the earth’ as it has been nicely put in a related field.
Other influences were grafted on to these two principal factors, notably
from Egypt (not a negligible contribution as far as funeral customs were
concerned) and possibly from the east - but these are less easily discernible
in the present state of research.
The Gods
One possibility that cannot be excluded is that the ancestors of the
Achaeans may, like the primitive Romans, have worshipped the diffuse and
disembodied powers customarily called by the Polynesian name of mana,
rather than personal divinities. There are said to be traces of this early
state in the Mycenaean tablets and even in Hesiod’s work where obscure
cults appeal to gods or groups of gods without any individuality and often
without name or legend. However, it would be dangerous to stress this
feature which rapidly faded out. The divine world of the Achaean period
was arranged around divine figures, blessed with names, personalities and
a complex mythology. It resembled the human world in that the leaders
played the predominant part.
The tablets from Pylos and Cnossos mention a certain number of gods:
Zeus, with a feminine counterpart, Diwia; Poseidon, associated with a god¬
dess Posidaeia; Hermes, Hera (already coupled with Zeus), Athena
(named Potnia, Mistress, as in Homer), Artemis, Eileithyia, Erinys, and
possibly Demeter. Neither Ares nor Apollo appear, but Enyalios and
Paieon, two gods with whom they were later identified, are present.
Hephaestus and Dionysus certainly do not seem to be there and neither does
Aphrodite. There were also cults to a dove goddess (Peleia), another to the
winds, and yet another to ‘all the gods’ - as is found in Vedic India and
only seen again in Greece in the Hellenistic period.
A few examples show the distinctly composite character of these divine
figures which blended Greek and Cretan elements to make an invariably
original synthesis. Zeus, who had homologues in the Dyauh of the Vedic
Indians as well as in Roman Jupiter, was the great divinity brought in by
the Hellenic populations. He was the god of the luminous vault of heaven,
of atmospheric precipitation and of thunder, but he was also a god-king,
whose empire extended over Olympia as well as over men. However, very
distinct Cretan elements were grafted on to this fundamentally Indo-
European god and later mythology retained unequivocal traces of them.
He was said to have been born in Crete on Mount Ida where his mother,
Rhea, presented her insatiable husband, Cronos, with a stone wrapped in
swaddling clothes (which he swallowed). The infant Zeus was brought up
by a goat or a nymph, Amalthea, undoubtedly a hypostasis of the Minoan
69
Great Mother, while the Curetes danced their war dance round him. The
rationalist Greeks thought that this dance was designed to cover the sound
of the baby’s wails; in reality, it was a mimicry of the spirits of fertility and
fecundity in order to awaken the underground powers of the earth. Zeus in
this form appears as one of the ‘divine children’ so dear to Cretan hearts.
Until the middle of the Archaic period, he was represented as a beardless
adolescent, far removed from the bearded, majestic man in the prime of
life, which was his essential representation. A later hymn, discovered in
Palaikastro (in Crete), conjured up the image of a leaping young man —
‘the greatest of the Curetes’. The lord of Olympia and the young god of the
mysteries of Ida were totally distinct and yet blended into a single
personality.
Hermes presents a similar case where the part played by Cretan elements
is even clearer. His name itself was derived from a Cretan word, un¬
doubtedly describing the ritual pile of stones which bordered the roads.
His connection with stone remained a fundamental feature of his person¬
ality: he was the god of tombstones, thresholds and Hermes-statues. It is
relevant in this connection to refer back to the Minoan monuments where
libations were offered on heaps of stones and also to recall the importance
of the raised stone (baitylos) in the religions of the East. He was also the
lord of wild beasts, the ravisher of flocks (as he still was in the charming
Homeric Hymn which tells how he stole Apollo’s heifers) and the killer of
dogs (Argeiphontes). His familiar attribute, the caduceus, was a magic
wand, consisting of a wooden rod with two serpents coiled round it.
Finally, he was the Psychopomp, on whom souls depended for their acces¬
sion to the eternal happiness the Cretan religion promised the initiated.
These Minoan features existed side by side with features of Indo-European
origin: a pastoral god, the protector of flocks, born on Cyllene in Arcadia,
he was the god par excellence of Achaean pastoral society. Furthermore, his
legend was connected with the story of the ram with the golden fleece, the
talisman of Achaean royalties and the pledge of fecundity.
Not surprisingly the goddesses show even clearer Minoan features. All
the Achaean goddesses were the heiresses of pre-Hellenic goddesses. Thus
Hera, who bears a Cretan name (Hera is the feminine of heros, i.e. the
Lady), was mistress of the wild animals and her cult at Delos retained an
obviously sexual symbolism; but she was also the goddess who protected
marriage - a fundamental institution in Achaean society. Athena, whose
name was also Cretan, was directly associated with serpents and trees,
which are found so often in Minoan imagery. She was a warlike virgin,
represented with weapons; an example of this can be seen on the painted
stucco plaque found at Mycenae, which shows her completely covered by
an enormous shield in the shape of a figure ‘8’, and flanked by two wor¬
shippers. Both goddesses were natural protectors of the acropolises contain¬
ing the Mycenaean palaces. Thus the Odyssey depicted Athena returning to
‘the broad streets of Athens where she entered the great palace of Erech-
theus’ (Odyssey 7, 80 f.). At both Athens and Tiryns, her sanctuary was
erected on the remains of the Mycenaean palace. In relation to Zeus, the

husband and father, the matronal Hera represented the wife, the virginal
Athena the daughter.
Demeter and Kore presented the usual Cretan association of a goddess
mother and a goddess daughter. The principal episode in their myth, the
abduction of Kore by the god of the underworld, and Demeter’s anguished
quest for her daughter, are reminiscent of the abduction scenes which occur
so frequently in Aegean vegetation cults. The mysteries which continued to
be associated with them at Eleusis and in Arcadia originated in the most
distant Cretan past. Their names, however, were Greek: Demeter was the
Earth-Mother or the mother of corn; Kore the virgin. But Kore had
another name, Persephone, which is inexplicable in Greek and must there¬
fore be Cretan. A perfect union was never achieved between the benevo¬
lent Kore, goddess of grain, and the lugubrious Persephone, who reigned
over the underworld, and yet they formed the same divine character.
It is unnecessary to give further examples. All the Achaean gods had this
sort of dual personality, half Greek, half Aegean. Whether under a Greek
name (Zeus, Demeter), or under a Minoan (Hermes, Hera, Athena) or
even under a double name (Kore and Persephone, Pallas and Athena) they
had complex and hybrid characters which blended heterogeneous and
sometimes contradictory elements. There was no juxtaposition of two series
of gods in a single pantheon but strange syntheses created divinities who
were no longer either Indo-European or Minoan but Achaean.
Study of the Achaean pantheon therefore involves research into its
Nordic and Mediterranean constituents. Greek religion as from that period
was very different from the other Indo-European religions - Indian,
Roman or Teuton. Although our knowledge of these latter is of a later
date, they appear to have retained the original heritage of the Indo-
European community in a better state of preservation, particularly the tri¬
partite and tri-functional organization of the divine hierarchy. The reason
for Greek originality is obvious: it was the result of fundamental loans from
a profoundly different religious environment: the Aegean environment.
However, Achaean and Cretan pantheons remained distinct: in Greece,
the gods were of real importance and almost equal to the goddesses, while
in Crete, goddesses had precedence by far, over and above the gods. Apart
from which, Greek divinities seemed to be organized into a hierarchical
and feudal society conceived in imitation of human society, where the role
of Zeus amongst gods was analogous to that of Agamemnon amongst men
in the Iliad.
Worship of the Gods

Crete had already exercised considerable influence on the formulation of
divine figures; it seems to have played a still greater part in the field of wor¬
ship itself. Priests are often mentioned in the tablets. Their fundamental
role was to consecrate the offerings, which consisted of the first fruits of the
harvests as well as bloody sacrifices. A text from Pylos lists corn, wine, a
bull, cheeses, honey, four goats, fats, flour, and two sheepskins as offerings
to the gods. These skins undoubtedly formed the liturgical vestments of a
priest of lowly rank known from several tablets as the dipteraporo (that is to
say, the ‘wearer of a skin vestment’). He is also seen on several Cretan
intaglios and on the sarcophagus at Hagia Triada in Crete (which dates
from Late Minoan hi) .
As in Crete, places of worship were closely linked with human habita¬
tion. The palace sanctuaries at Mycenae and Asine are well known. At
Figure i 5 The ‘two goddesses’ and the divine child, ivory group originating from the
palace sanctuary of Mycenae
Mycenae, an ivory has been found representing two goddesses closely

wrapped in the same shawl, a child at their feet, foreshadowing Demeter
and Kore with the ‘divine child’ Triptolemus (figure 15). At Asine, a
rectangular room 23 feet by 16 feet with a bench in one corner in
accordance with Cretan custom, was the scene of rich discoveries, notably
terra cotta idols. The most famous of these is the ‘Lord of Asine’, long inter¬
preted as a Zeus or Poseidon but looking much more like a goddess. A place
was also set aside for worship in private houses, as was proved by
excavation of the potters’ district at Berbati (in the Argolid). Furthermore,
it has been established that a domestic cult of the hearth existed in the
palaces, installed in the centre of the megaron at both Mycenae and Tiryns.
Finally, an altar which was generally sunk into the ground (and therefore
a forerunner of the Greek bothros) was placed in the courtyards, notably at
Tiryns.
Large numbers of idols, generally made of terracotta, have been found
on all Mycenaean sites. They are essentially female, dressed in the Cretan
style, and most often standing - though sometimes seated. Some very rare
male idols depict a young god naked. All these statuettes, which are so
similar to Cretan statuettes, very probably portrayed divinities. They must
be interpreted as consecrations offered to the god concerned and not as
statues made for worship, which only appeared in the following period.
Funeral Customs and the Worship of Heroes
Funeral customs are relatively well known as a result of the discovery of-
numerous tombs. They seem to have varied during the second millennium,
but remained unchanged in one essential point: the dead were buried and
not cremated. In the Middle Helladic period, there were no distinct ceme¬
teries and the dead were buried amongst human habitations; tombs were
shaped like cists; offerings were not generally provided. In the Late Hella¬
dic period, necropolises were separated from habitation and most fre¬
quently situated to the west of the agglomeration, according to a custom
which may possibly have been copied from Egypt where the west was
thought to be the field of the dead. The first tombs were graves, descended
from the cist tombs; chamber tombs then appeared and finally the tholos
which was derived from them. Contrary to a long-held belief, bodies were
placed in coffins and grooves have been found in the corridors which gave
access to the tholoi (dromoi) to slide them in — again according to Egyptian
custom. They were accompanied by very rich funeral furniture, composed,
in princely tombs, of weapons, jewels and vases. A tomb at Midea merits
particular mention: it did not contain a skeleton and was therefore a ceno¬
taph tomb, probably designed to enclose the spirits of men who had died in
far-off lands: their place was taken by two blocks of stone with cavities cut
into them. Certain offerings were burned in a hollow on the tomb, which
partially foreshadowed the custom of cremating the body; the Achaean
period offers only one example of this practice but it became more wide¬
spread with the Dorian invasion. Funeral customs clearly developed con¬
siderably in the Late Helladic period under the combined influence of
Crete and Egypt, and in all cases showed a firmly established belief in
survival.
A cult undoubtedly thus existed around all the dead but some of them
enjoyed a different fate in the other world: these were the former lords of
the palaces, designated by the Cretan name of heros (that is to say, prob¬
ably, lords). Their worship was marked by particular brilliance: it lasted
to the very end of the Mycenaean period in the upper circle at Mycenae. It
consisted of ancestor worship performed by the ruling family, with which
the whole community had to associate itself. Belief in heroes (that is to say
73
in the great dead deified, who thus became supernatural powers inter¬
mediate between men and gods) was certainly Minoan in origin. It con¬
tinued until the first millennium, past the break caused by the Dorian
invasions; the importance of its origin in the aristocratic milieu of the
Mycenaean palaces can not be over-emphasized.
Heroic mythology also appeared in the Mycenaean period and must also
have outlived the civilization which gave it birth. M. P. Nilsson has dem¬
onstrated that the map of sites to which the heroic legends of Greece are
attached - notably in the Peloponnese and Boeotia - coincides with the
map of Achaean sites, which obviously does not mean that everything in
that mythology was Achaean. Here again, different elements must have
come into play, including Egyptian elements, which are very apparent in
the myth of Io, whose son Epaphus was born in Egypt. However, these are
primarily pre-Hellenic legends which have been blended with Greek
legends: Theseus, Achilles, Ulysses are all names ending in eus (Theseus,
Achilleus, Odysseus) which are not Greek at all, in contrast to their sons,
Demophon, Neoptolemus and Telemachus.
Bold and arbitrary syntheses thus took place in the case of the heroes, as
in the case of the gods, and from them stemmed a whole sector - and the
most important sector - of later mythology.
Religion is one of the spheres which best reveals the richness of Achaean
Greece. It was able to admit Mediterranean influences without giving up
Indo-European traditions. The fundamental features of the religion of later
Greece in respect of both gods and heroes were already laid down. They
were certainly considerably modified by the arrival of the Dorians and then
by new influences from the East, but the fundamental personalities of
Zeus, Hermes, Hera and Athena were already fixed, and Agamemnon,
Ulysses and Helen did not cease to feed Hellenic imagination.
This was the brilliant world which collapsed in the space of a century
beneath the blows of the Dorians.
4
The Dorian Invasions
Towards the end of the second millennium, a new wave of Greek invaders
flooded Achaean Hellas. They are generally known by the partly con¬
ventional name of Dorians (map 4).
HERACLIDAE AND DORIANS! MYTH AND HISTORY
The myth of the return of the Heraclidae, that is to say of the children and
descendants of Heracles, preserves a very vivid memory of this vast move¬
ment of peoples. The story goes that, after the deplorable and triumphant
death of the hero, his children had to flee the Peloponnese for fear of his
cousin, the cruel Eurystheus, who had imposed the twelve labours on
Heracles. They took refuge in Attica, where the king gave them a most
courteous welcome. Eurystheus attacked the Athenians, who were allied
with the Heraclidae, but was conquered, lost all his sons and was himself
killed in his hiding place. The Heraclidae were therefore able to seize the
Peloponnese without a blow being struck but, at the end of a year, a plague
broke out and they withdrew to escape divine wrath. Their leader, Hyllus,
consulted the oracle of Delphi who advised them to try their luck ‘at the
third harvest’. Three years later, they attacked the Peloponnesians and by
common agreement it was decided to settle the fate of the armies by single
combat between the two leaders. Hyllus was killed by the king of Tegea
Echemus.
The Heraclidae
I
Heracles
I
Hyllus
I
Cleodaeus
I
Aristomachus
I
Temenus
Two generations later, Aristomachus, grandson of Hyllus, again con¬

sulted the oracle and this time was advised to invade the Peloponnese ‘by
THE DORIAN INVASIONS
75
the narrow way’. He therefore attacked by the Isthmus of Corinth and was
repulsed and killed. His son, Temenus, resumed the venture: he built a
fleet at Naupactus in order to cross the Gulf of Corinth at its narrowest
point. As the oracle had advised him to be guided by a being with three
eyes, he joined forces with a king of Elis, the Aetolian Oxylus, exiled for an
involuntary murder. Oxylus possessed only one eye and had come to him
mounted on a horse. This time, the victory of the Heraclidae was total.
They divided the three realms of the Argolid, Laconia and Messenia
amongst themselves, giving Elis back to Oxylus and only handing over
Arcadia to the former inhabitants of the country. The Heraclidae therefore
recovered the Peloponnese almost a century after the death of Heracles.
Their interpretation of the oracles, which were by their very nature am¬
biguous, had long been faulty: ‘the third harvest’ meant the third genera¬
tion and not the third year; the ‘narrow way’ the place where the Gulf of
Corinth narrowed and not the Isthmus. Nevertheless, they had been
constantly helped by the god Apollo.
Tradition regarded the Heraclidae as the leaders of the Nordic invaders,
the Dorians (at a later period it sometimes even identified the two).
GREEKS FROM 'Servia

THE NORTH-WEST
.THESSALY-: f
Ambracief VwHiofiSjft
Limnaea;
Naupactus** DORIANS
ANRfcnS Proper
:haea
Olympia’Ar"
Mantinea-y DORIC ASIA ^
Tegear
PELOPONNESE!
MESSENIA'
RHODES
■ t* Probable routes of the invasions. 0 100 200 j
- p> Routes according to Miltner's theory. Miles
Map 4 The Dorian Invasions

The Descendants of Hellen: Dorians, Aeolians, Achaeans and Ionians
Prometheus
I
Deucalion m. Pyrrha
I
Hellen m. Orseis
Dorus Aeolus Xuthus

I
Aegimius
Achaeus Ion
Dymas Pamphylus
A later myth (end of the eighth century) traced Dorian descent to an

eponymous ancestor, Dorus, whose son, Aegimius, divided his realm be¬
tween his two children (Dymas and Pamphylus) and Hyllus the son of
Heracles. This latter was included in gratitude to the hero for erstwhile
help: an aition to the Greek mind for the names of the three ethnic tribes
into which the Dorians were divided, Dymanes, Pamphyli and Hylleis • but
it was also a souvenir of the confused period of the invasions when the
newcomers found guides and leaders in an Achaean clan in exile the
Heraclidae. 5
The Reality Underlying the Myth

At one point, there were even doubts as to whether any reality at all under¬
lay this myth and whether the return of the Heraclidae was not merely a
symbol of the conquest of the Peloponnese by new invaders. Beloch himself
denied the historicity of the Dorian invasions. No room for such critical
doubt remains today. On one hand, linguistics prove that a new linguistic
mhow the Dorian dialects, was superimposed on Achaean dialects. On the
other hand, archaeology shows that all the Achaean settlements in the
Peloponnese were violently destroyed within the space of a century (be¬
tween 1200 and i xoo) - only explicable by the arrival of large numbers of
new troops, trained in warfare.
Furthermore, as the history of the eastern Mediterranean becomes better
known, it can be established that the Dorian invasion took place within a
wide context. Asia Minor at that time was the scene of violent upheavals
following the arrival of peoples from the region of the Danube or Illyria’
rygians Teucnans, Dardanians, Philistines. The Hittite empire was
threatened and fell. Egypt itself was attacked by ‘the peoples from the sea’
a strange coahtion of Nordic invaders and Asiatic populations fleeing before
them. Mineptah, and then Rameses m, repulsed them but only with great
difficulty and not without considerable impairment of pharaonic power.
THE DORIAN INVASIONS 77
This ‘Aegean migration’ (Schachermeyr) was far from affecting Greece
alone; insecurity reigned on all eastern Mediterranean shores and swept
over the Hittite Empire as well as the Achaean realms. Furthermore, this
vast movement is reminiscent (with obvious differences) of the events of
almost a millennium earlier. In about 2000, the Indo-European popula¬
tions came down from the Carpatho-Danubian regions, divided into two
branches, and occupied Greece (the first Greeks) and Asia Minor (founders
of Troy vi, Hittites . . .); in the thirteenth to twelfth centuries, other
bands, originating from the same regions, spread terror and destruction in
Hellas and Anatolia, before settling there and building a new civilization
(map 4).
ROUTES AND CHRONOLOGY OF THE DORIAN INVASIONS
It is certain that over a long period the Dorians came from the valley of the
Danube and followed the Morava and Axius (Vardar) valleys, which are
marked out by their cemeteries.
The Routes of the Invasions

The route they took across mainland Greece to reach the Peloponnese is
less certain. It is probable that their troops split up into two groups.
The first group (known as Greeks of the north-west) crossed Pindus at
the level of the bend in the Haliacmon and came down across Epirus. The
Boeotians (from Epirus where Mount Boeus, the northern part of Pindus,
which gave them their eponym, is situated) crossed the mountains again,
settled in Thessaly in the region of Arne, and reached Boeotia where, ac¬
cording to Thucydides, some of them could already be found at the time of
the Trojan war - those who participated in the expedition.
But the Thessalians, leaving Epirus and following roughly the same
route, drove the Boeotians out of Arne and they then had no alternative
but to push further south as far as Boeotia, to which they gave its final
name. The Thessalians occupied Thessaliotis, then all Thessaly from which
they took their name.
Other clans followed their route on the western front and occupied
Acarnania, Aetolia, Locris, Phocis, adopting the names of the regions
where they settled — while the more adventurous crossed the Gulf of Corinth
around Naupactus and settled in Elis and to some extent in Achaea.
The unity of origin of these diverse peoples is proved by the fact that in
the following millennium they all spoke related dialects — dialects conven¬
tionally known as the north-west languages — with the exception of the
Thessalians and Boeotians. These latter slowly adopted the language of the
Aeolians, the Greeks who had preceded them and whom they had con¬
quered ; Thessalian and Boeotian are two dialect forms of Aeolian, but
specialists can discern certain features which denote the influence of the
north-west languages (particularly in Thessaliotis).
The second group of invaders (the Dorians proper), who all spoke closely
related Dorian dialects, stayed east of Pindus and cut across Thessaly,
going up the valley of the Enipeus to the Spercheius and the Malia Gulf
There they in their turn separated. One party plunged overland into
central Greece where they gave their name to Doris. They also crossed the
Gulf around Naupactus, but more to the east than their predecessors,
reached Laconia and Messenia by way of Achaea and the central depression
of Arcadia, and solidly occupied them.
The others were tempted by the idea of maritime adventure; they set
sail from the far end of the gulf of Malia, followed the channel of Euboea,
skirted Attica, and landed around Nauplia. They then conquered the
Argolid, settling particularly at Argos, whence they proceeded to swarm
towards Epidaurus and Aegina or Corinth and Megara, the final points in
their migration.
A theory which appears paradoxical but which seems to be supported by
various myths (Miltner) suggests that the occupation of the Argolid did not
take place until fairly late, after the Dorians who had been attracted to¬
wards the sea had conquered the Doric lands of Asia and the islands
(especially Crete).
This outline can only be general. Several important details are uncer¬
tain. It is possible that all the Dorians crossed Pindus and stayed quite a
long time at Epirus, which (apart from Dodona) had been little touched
by Achaean civilization. Pindar (Pythians i, 61 ff) tells that the Dorians ‘got
them Amyclae and prospered, sallying forth from Pindus . . and
Herodotus also preserves the memory of their passage, which archaeology
confirms. 7
Whatever may have been the case, some features are clear. The Dorians
could not have been as terrified of the sea as was formerly believed. Some
of them embarked on long sea voyages before reaching the shores of the
Argolid. All the others must have crossed the Gulf of Corinth (ordinary
rafts would have been sufficient for this) because it has been established
that the Isthmus was not used as a route for a north-south invasion and was
only utilized in a south-north direction by Dorians flowing back from the
Argolid to Megaris.
The Date of the Dorian Invasions

It is important not to be misled by Thucydides who placed the return of
the Herachdae eighty years after the war with Troy, which would make it
1150, assuming Troy was taken in 1230. In actual fact, it is impossible to
date a movement, which developed slowly over several centuries, so pre¬
cisely. Like preceding invasions, the Dorian invasion took the form of suc¬
cessive onslaughts. One can imagine them, like the Vlachs in the Middle
Ages, driving their herds before them and stopping for the length of a
season to sow and harvest. It is essential to mark the different stages in
their migrations, and literary tradition and archaeology do give a certain
number of not unimportant indications.
The Dorian invasions (in the wide sense of the term) began in northern
and central Greece even before the war with Troy. The text from
Thucydides (i, 12), pointing to the fact that Boeotians were already settled
in Boeotia and participated in the expedition, has already been mentioned.
The invasions continued regularly over the following decades. When the
Boeotians were driven from Arne and went to swell the population of
Boeotia sixty years after the capture of Troy, again according to Thucydides
(possibly about 1170), they cut the Locrians in two - which proves that the
latter were already settled there.
The assaults took place somewhat later in the Peloponnese and Attica.
Unequivocal signs of a latent menace can be noted there at the end of the
thirteenth century: this could only have been represented by the Dorians
who thenceforth devastated and occupied mainland Greece. In the
Peloponnese, fortifications were repaired or improved: a low surrounding
wall was built at Tiryns so that the countrymen could shelter there with
their herds in case of alarm; the fortification of the entrance was restored
at Mycenae, a bastion was added to the east, a vast granary built and
direct access made to a water supply from the Perseia spring. The various
Achaean kingdoms of the Peloponnese even seem to have co-operated,
because the gigantic wall which barred the Isthmus (remains of which have
recently been discovered) dates from this period. The same phenomena can
be noticed at Athens, where fortifications were extended and strengthened
and where direct access to water supply was established.
The first attempts on the Achaean towns of the Peloponnese may well
have taken place at the end of the century. Pylos was destroyed in about
1200. Traces of defence measures taken in the months immediately pre¬
ceding the attack may possibly remain in the tablets from the palace. But
nothing was effective more especially as the palace was no longer fortified.
Pylos thus brutally disappeared from history. The citadels of the Argolid
were not spared the attacks of the first bands of Dorians but their ramparts
enabled them to resist. However, the houses outside the surrounding wall
at Mycenae were obviously destroyed at the same time as Pylos.
Dorian assaults became increasingly harsh and their bands increasingly
numerous. One by one, in the course of the twelfth century, all the citadels
fell. Mycenae probably offered more resistance than the others and was not
annihilated until about 1150 or even 1100. Only a few regions in the
Peloponnese escaped the invasion and only Arcadia remained in the hands
of its former owners, but Attica was left undamaged, and it is impossible
to tell whether Athens was not attacked or whether it resisted successfully.
New invaders must have joined the first Dorians quite early and the tidal
wave which had submerged the whole Peloponnese had barely passed by
the eleventh or even possibly the tenth century.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE DORIAN INVASIONS
The most visible result of the invasions was the almost complete destruction
of Mycenaean civilization. Within a century, the proud creations of the
Achaean architects - their palaces and citadels - were nothing but ruins.
The bureaucratic royalty, the art of writing (scarcely anything but an
administrative technique) and all the artistic creations made possible by
the patronage of the princes simultaneously disappeared. A large portion
of Greece, racked by fire and blood, fell back into a state of barbarism. The
history of Hellas records no more total or more evil disaster.
Some elements of civilization undoubtedly survived: Archaic art remem¬
bered the Mycenaean column, and even the megaron; above all the religion
of the first millennium remained imbued with the atmosphere of Creto-
Mycenaean cults. But all in all an unforgettable and horrible murder of a
brilliant world had occurred.
The Final Ethnic Formation of Hellas and Anatolia
One of the very few positive contributions the migrations at the end of the
second millennium made was the influx of new populations. The ethnic
population of Greece was considerably strengthened and assumed its final
shape at that time. The three large ethnic groups, Ionians, Aeolians and
Dorians, formed an extraordinary medley, evidence of the intense confusion
of the period of the invasions (map 5).
The fundamental part of the population of mainland Greece consisted
of Ionians, driven back to Attica and Euboea, and of the long stream of
peoples from the north-west (Epirots, Acarnanians, Aetolians, Locrians,
Phocians). The Thessalians and the Boeotians belonged to this last group,
but were thoroughly mixed with earlier Aeolian elements, from whom they
took theii dialects. A further qualification of this already complex picture
must be made: Achaeans remained in Achaea Phthiotis and the small
canton of Doris was peopled by Dorians.
The Dorians imposed their power almost everywhere in the Peloponnese,
but study of the dialects makes it possible clearly to distinguish two groups,
which corresponded to the two principal waves of invasion. Elis, the only
place to be reached by the first wave, spoke a dialect (Elean) which was
directly related to the dialects of north-west Greece: there was certainly a
single stream of peoples there who had come down the western side of
Pindus; Elis (and partly Achaea) marked the farthermost point of their
advance beyond the Gulf of Corinth. The second wave, that of the Dorians
proper, occupied the Argolid, Laconia and, undoubtedly to a more limited
extent, Messenia, where very similar Doric dialects were spoken.
Arcadia, the mountainous and isolated centre of the peninsula, had been
spared by the Dorians, and remained inhabited by Achaeans who con¬
tinued to speak Arcadian well into the first millennium. Arcadian, together
4!
Map 5 Greek dialects in the first millennium
Dialects in Greece before and after the Invasions of the

end of the Second Millennium.
I II III
Southern Greek
Second Aeolian •
millennium 1 Ionian 2 Achaean
Southern Greek Aeolian Western Greek
First 1 Ionian 2 Arcado- 1 Thessalian 1 North-west

millennium a Ionian Cypriot 2 Boeotian dialects
b Attic a Arcadian 3 Asian a Dialects of
b Cypriot Aeolian Epirus,
c Pamphylian Acarnania,
Aetolia,
Locris,
Phocis
b Elean
2 Doric
with Cypriot and Pamphylian, was one of the three miserable remains of
Achaean, which spread so widely in the second millennium. Achaea, on the
edge of the gulf, was populated by Achaeans from Achaea Phthiotis and
undoubtedly also from the Achaean realms of the Peloponnese, but heavy
infiltrations of Greeks from the north-west must have occurred there
because the language belongs to the latter group.
Finally, amongst the Ionian islands, Corcyra and Leucas were Dorian
while Cephallenia and Zacynthus were linked with the north-western
peoples, like neighbouring Elis.
It is not easy to understand what became of the former populations of
the Peloponnese. Some would have perished amidst the violence unleashed
by the invasion; others would have been enslaved - this was probably the
principal source of the helots of Laconia. Others, particularly in less
donamzed regions, attempted to settle elsewhere: Pylians from Pylos in
Messema undoubtedly founded Triphylian Pylos further north after 1200.
Some took refuge outside the sphere of Dorian power, in Arcadia or pos¬
sibly Achaea. Others finally felt that the only means of salvation lay in
flight and swept over Attica (where a very large influx of population at this
time has been noted), before yielding to the temptation of more distant
emigration to Anatolian shores.
THE DORIAN INVASIONS
83
In fact, over-population as a result of the Dorian invasions gave rise to

migration to Asia Minor, which forms one of the most important factors in
Greek history. Moreover, in certain places, the movement clearly pre¬
ceded the end of the millennium (thus Greeks are seen to have settled in
Miletus and Colophon from the first decades of the fourteenth century)
and seems to have lasted until about 800. Details of the migration appear
extremely complex, as might be expected at a time of great upheaval, but
the overall plan remains simple. There were three principal zones of col¬
onization : in the north, Aeolis, with the island of Lesbos; in the centre,
Ionia, with Chios and Samos; and in the south, Doris with Rhodes. Each
of these zones corresponds to a large dialectal group (see p. 91). Naturally
enough, the old populations of Greece formed the main body of immi¬
grants, but the newcomers also showed no hesitation in completing by sea
the long overland route they had followed across the Balkans.
Dorian Civilization
Judging by the fundamental evidence of their dialects, the Greeks from the
north-west and the Dorians indisputably represented clans which were
closely related in their origins. However, their later evolution was quite
different. The Dorians showed extraordinary vitality particularly in the
field of colonization, whereas the Greeks from the north-west remained
very retarded — except for the Thessalians and Boeotians, who were so
greatly mixed with Aeolian elements. Apart from this we know so little
about north-western civilization that it would be hazardous to discuss it.
It is therefore safer to deal with the Dorians by themselves, pointing out in
passing, should the occasion arise, where the customs of the two groups may
have differed.
Undeniable upheavals occurred in Greece at the same time as the ap¬
pearance of the Dorians and we may have been over-hasty in attributing
one to the other. Following K. O. Muller’s great work (1844) there was for
a long time a prejudice in favour of the Dorians and numerous and im¬
portant contributions to Hellenism were attributed to them. Objective
examination of the facts in almost all spheres leads to a contrary conclusion.
In the field of material things, it was taught for a long time that they
introduced fundamental innovations - iron metallurgy and geometric
ceramics. In particular, their conquest of the Peloponnese was explained
by the superiority of their iron weapons over Achaean bronze weapons.
But today it would seem to be established that work in iron was first known
in Anatolia, where the Hittites had long held the monopoly. After the
break-up of the Hittite Empire in about 1200, iron spread to Palestine and
Crete and then undoubtedly to Greece. The Dorians must have gained
familiarity with the new metal there (figure 16).
A similar development can be traced in respect of geometric ceramics
which prevailed in Greece from 1100 to 750. This new art can no longer
be considered barbarous; it was actually born of Mycenaean art,
influenced by eastern elements. Furthermore, its most brilliant expression is

to be found in regions which had not been touched by the Dorian invasion
- Cyprus and particularly Athens. Here again, the Dorians were disciples
and not masters. With great adaptability they adopted the new technical
and artistic forms which were coming to the fore in Greece at that time,
most frequently under the influence of the Orient. They did not create
these forms. The Dorians’ material contribution was therefore nil - or at
least limited to insignificant innovations, such as the introduction of a new
type of buckle, the ‘spectacle fibula’.
Dorian contributions occurred rather in the sphere of society. Their
bands were closely organized around military leaders as in primitive Indo-
European societies. Men enjoyed incontestable superiority over women,
as a result of their primordial role as warriors. This denoted a spectacular
reversal of the situation in the Achaean kingdoms which had been strongly
influenced by Cretan matriarchy.
Some of the basic customs of Hellenism, such as athletic nudity and
paederasty, may date from this period. In fact, the men lived together
united in warlike camaraderie which carried the camaraderie of the battlefield
into daily life and might easily have degenerated into sexual relations.
Strabo (10, 483) evoked Cretan customs which certainly perpetuated

Doric customs: when an adolescent reached the stage of entering adult¬
hood, he was taken away by an older man with whom he spent two months
in the country; on his return, he was given armour by his ‘lover’, became
his squire and was finally admitted into the ‘club of men’ (andreion). The
same mentality has been identified here as develops in all warlike associa¬
tions of men - in the Templars just as much as in the Hitlerjugend and
Fascist Youth.
But this is not the main point. More significant was the chivalrous ideal
which lay behind such a society, exalting the virile virtues of strength,
valour and loyalty. Many of these features can be found in less evolved
Dorian societies, such as Sparta.
Dorian society was profoundly egalitarian. Land seems to have been
divided into almost equal lots (this system continued to exist, particularly
in Sparta). The contrary may have been the case in north-west Greece.
Harsh laws were enforced on conquered populations everywhere; serfdom
was adopted in the Peloponnese and Crete, as well as in several of the
colonies they founded. An odd detail which must be mentioned in passing
is that the Thessalians also had serfs, though this does not appear to have
been the case with the north-westerners. Attempts have been made to ex¬
plain this fact by pointing out that the Thessalians, like the Dorians, were
led by the Heraclidae. In several regions, however, the Dorians met strong
resistance from pre-Dorians and admitted them into the community by
creating a fourth tribe reserved for them by the side of the three traditional
tribes (another specifically Dorian custom, foreign to Greece of the north¬
west) .
Changes in the religious sphere were equally profound. To the Achaeans,
gods and goddesses were almost equally important; henceforth, the gods
far outdistanced the goddesses and a patriarchal type of divine society was
adopted, conceived in the image of human society. It was at this period
that two male divinities, Zeus and Apollo, asserted their hegemony almost
everywhere, at the expense of the Earth-Mothers or the young adolescent
gods. Dodona and Olympia, which mark the Dorian advance on Greek
soil, became the realm of Zeus, instead of the goddesses who seem to have
been worshipped there before the Dorians arrived. Apollo was installed at
Delphi, where he also dispossessed a matronal divinity - her animal was
the serpent Python whom Apollo had to kill after a fierce struggle; at
Amyclae near Sparta, he supplanted Hyacinthus, a young pre-Hellenic
hero of vegetation.
A profound change in funeral customs appeared with the Dorians, which
it is natural to assume they originated. Burial which existed everywhere in
the preceding period, gave way to cremation which slowly spread over all
Greece and even Ionian Attica.
The Dorian contribution must therefore not be over-estimated. Most
striking are the ruins they left wherever they passed, and the total destruc¬
tion of the Achaean world which they accomplished. Nevertheless, Greece
and Greek Asia received their final population following their invasions. A
fundamental antithesis, which henceforth dominated Greek history, was
already perceptible at the turning point of the two millennia: that of the
Dorians and the Ionians. Not that these two factions of the Greek people
must be considered as two totally different racial entities, but there un¬
doubtedly is an austere and rigid Dorian civilization as opposed to a
pleasant and gracious Ionian civilization. The ancients compared the con¬
trast between the two to that between man and woman. The future
strength of Hellenism lay in the double wealth of Dorian gravity and the
Ionian smile.
\
Book Two
THE CREATIONS OF
THE ARCHAIC AGE
IN GREECE
5
Transitions and Renewals-
The Geometric Period (1100-750)
‘Thus many years passed by and many difficulties were encountered before
Hellas could enjoy any peace or stability, and before the period of shifting
populations ended’ (Thucydides i, 12). In fact, for centuries the greater
part of Greece, put to fire and slaughter by the Dorian invaders, was only
ruin and confusion. Using various comparisons this period is known as the
Dark Ages or the Greek Middle Ages.
PROTO-GEOMETRIC (c. IIOO-9O0)
However, certain new elements had already appeared in regions which

had been spared by the invasions. Attica in particular advanced remark¬
ably as a result of the inflow of peoples who had been driven out of the
Peloponnese. Excavations at the Kerameikos show that in about 1075,
Sub-Mycenaean (Late Mycenaean, which already used iron) was replaced
by Proto-Geometric, which was characterized by a new style of pottery.
The approximate chronology is as follows:
Sub-Mycenaean 1125-1075
Proto-Geometric I075_95°
Geometric 950-710
Proto-Geometric also developed brilliantly in Cyprus. The influence of

oriental geometric art, notably northern Syrian, is evident in both regions,
though it must always be remembered that the Mycenaean heritage played
a large part in the creation of Proto-Geometric ceramics. There was not
really a new style but a simple evolution of Mycenaean, when all shapes
became geometrical. Simultaneous changes occurred in funeral customs:
cremation succeeded burial.
From the beginning of the tenth century, the Ionian colonists from
Athens spread Proto-Geometric ceramics over the whole Aegean Sea,
notably to the Cyclades, the Dodecanese and along the coasts of Caria and
Ionia. They reached Crete - not remote districts such as Vrocastro where
Sub-Mycenaean continued to exist, slumbering in the immobility of past
forms, but large centres such as Cnossos. Vases were covered with dull
varnish and principally decorated with a central band. Ornamentation

was always geometric and remained very simple: concentric circles and
semi-circles, hachured triangles. In turn, Boeotia, Thessaly, central Greece,
the Peloponnese and the Ionian islands all adopted the new pottery. But the
Athenian models were by far the most beautiful and showed the important
role Attica would henceforth play in the Greek world.
The Greeks in Asia (i 100—800)
The extensive spread of Attic Proto-Geometric can only be understood in

the light of the vast migrations which led the Greeks to colonize the coastal
fringe of Asia Minor, previously occupied by various peoples such as the
Leleges, Carians, Mysians and Lydians. This movement, which began in
the fourteenth century with the foundation of Miletus and Colophon, in¬
tensified at the end of the second millennium (the colonization of Samos,
Chios, then Smyrna and Ephesus) and even more at the beginning of the
first. It lasted until about 800, when the whole Anatolian coast was Greek
(map 6).
The most important of the three large regions of Greek settlement was
the central region, Ionia. Immigrants came principally from Boeotia, the
Argolid and Corinth, and to a lesser extent from Attica, Euboea, Thessaly
and Arcadia. Their projects were encouraged by the Athenians, who were
«AE0US ) AEOLIANS
THESSALY^ ... Assostsâ,
. Mytilene^.*2 Cyme
BOEOTIA: ^SfeSCr'ROS
V9EUB0EA CHIOS& AtjPS?nrIONIA
ig'%9 E;ythraeam&hu°sn >
IONIANS
7 \ rwclades 11 ♦‘jfBHalicarnass
PELOPONNESE
c "icJus
DORIANS
RHODES
Map 6 Greek expansion in the archipelago and Anatolia

TRANSITIONS AND RENEWALS
91
already equipped with a powerful navy, and this explains later Athenian
claims to patronage of the Ionians. One family which particularly stood
out amongst the leaders were the Neleids, natives of Messenia and descen¬
dants of Nestor. From the end of the tenth century, the Ionians were firmly
settled m the twelve towns which later formed the Ionian ‘dodecapolis’ ■
hm on the continent (Miletus, Myus, Priene, Ephesus, Colophon, Lebedus,
Teos, Clazomenae, Erythrae, Phocaea) and two on the large neighbouring
islands (Chios and Samos). & &
The Pîde of these colonists, who had forcibly planted themselves on the
shores of Asia, still resounds in a poem by Mimnermus: ‘When from the
lofty city of Neleian Pylos, we came on shipboard to the pleasant land of
Asia and in overwhelming might destroying grievous pride sat down at
lovely Colophon, thence went we forth from beside the wooded river and
by Heaven s counsel took Aeolian Smyrna’ (fragment 9).
. Although the origins of the immigrants were very varied, the civiliza¬
tions they developed were more or less the same. They had a number of
religious customs in common, notably the feast of the Apaturia when most
Ionian cities as well as Athens celebrated the admission of young people
into the phratry. ^
The northern Anatolian coast and the neighbouring islands of Tenedos
and Lesbos together formed Aeolis, colonized by Aeolians from Thessaly
and Boeotia. According to Herodotus, it was composed of three groups
of cities: in the south, the twelve towns of the ‘Old Aeolians’, the most im¬
portant being Cyme; the insular cities of Tenedos and Lesbos (the princi¬
pal town of Lesbos was Mytilene); and the towns of the Troad, which were
founded later and of which only Assos merits mention.
In the south of Ionia, Doric Asia was basically composed of an ‘hexa-
polis’: the three towns of Rhodes (Lindus, Ialysus, Camirus), the island of
Cos and the two towns of Cnidos and Halicarnassus on the mainland.
These large-scale migrations similarly ensured the settlement of the
islands of the Aegean Sea. The Ionians colonized the northern Cyclades
facing Euboea and Attica: Ceos, Cythnos, Seriphos, Siphnos, Andros,
Tenos, Naxos, Paros, Amorgos. . . . These islands form a sort of circle
(hence their name) around Delos, where Apollo was installed as master in
about 1000 and which acted as a common sanctuary. The Dorians occu¬
pied the southern Cyclades and southern Sporades (Melos, Thera,
Anaphe, Astypalaea, Calymna, Cos, Nisyros, Telos, Rhodes, Carpathos,
Casos), then Cythera and Crete.
Three broad, roughly parallel bands running from Greece proper across
the island world to Anatolia were thus formed, corresponding to the three
ethnic groups: Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian. This settlement, which turned
the Aegean into a Greek sea, explains a large part of the later history of
Greece. In particular, the very clear renaissance of Hellenism, which
began after the ninth century, will be seen to be primarily the result of
oriental influence, facilitated by the settlement of Greeks in Asia Minor.
GEOMETRIC (APPROXIMATELY 9OO-750)
The resumption of art

Around 900, an internal evolution transformed ceramic art in the move¬
ment from the Proto-Geometric to the Geometric style. The most beauti¬
ful specimens have again been found at Athens, in the Kerameikos next to
the Dipylon Gate (figure 17 and plate 3). Decoration was more varied:
maeanders and gammadions were added to the geometric motifs already
in use, and animals and men then appeared (but not vegetation). Figures
were always represented nude and in a very stylized form: heads were
circles, busts triangles, and legs lines. The larger vases, placed on tombs by
way of steles, showed complex scenes: funereal and funeral compositions,
rows of chariots or warriors, dancing choruses, boats and naval battles.
These vast constructions mingled a taste for narrative with a very intel¬
lectual and schematic sense of beauty. They are evidence of the wealth of
Athens and the existence of a large aristocracy whose life they depicted.
Figure 17 Geometric
pyxis from Athens, eighth
century bc
The Geometric style also developed in the other regions of the Greek
world. Boeotia had a fairly primitive - it could almost be called rustic —
local style but this was rapidly influenced by Attic art. In the Cyclades, at
Thera, decoration remained very strictly linear (circles, maeanders and
triangles) and was devoid of human representation. The large amphorae
were models of sober decoration, which only aimed at emphasizing the
shape and contours of the vase.
The first temples also appeared between 850 and 750. These architec¬
tural attempts still remained very rough. At Perachora near Corinth, the
93
temple of Hera Acraea was built on a ‘hairpin’ plan and the same form was
found in a terracotta model unearthed at the same sanctuary. However,
there can already be seen early developments of the type which would
eventually prevail: the plan of a rectangular building with a double sloping
roof, with a porch in front. It appeared notably in an ex voto from the
Heraeum of Argos which represented a quadrangular temple, with a
double sloping roof, preceded by a portico with a flat roof, not yet satis¬
factorily incorporated into the whole building. The ex voto dated from the
end of the Geometric period. On several other sites, sanctuaries still did not
include temples: thus at Sparta, Artemis Orthia was worshipped in an
open enclosure which contained only an altar.
The revival in sculpture began no less humbly. A series of ‘shields’
(really ritual dulcimers from a cult relating to the Curetes) have been dis¬
covered in the cave at Ida in Crete, native land of Daedalus and the
Daedalids, to whom the Greeks attributed the first creations of plastic art.
They cover a period from the ninth to the seventh centuries and reveal clear
Mycenaean memories or oriental, particularly Assyrian, influences. Work
in ivory appeared later, not before the seventh century, at the Artemisia of
Sparta and Ephesus. Mention must finally be made of a few geometric
bronzes from the eighth century (figure 18 and plate 4): animals, men
(principally warriors) and very few women. On the whole, therefore, there
was very little. Except in the realm of ceramics, art in the Geometric period
was still inarticulate, while literature was already producing masterpieces.
The Ionian Epic: Homer

The Achaean epic never ceased to be sung despite the invasions. It was
enriched by new episodes according to the imagination of the bards -
bards who were also called rhapsodes (that is to say, ‘stitchers’) because
they amalgamated various previously independent morsels, according to
the whim of their recitation. The end of the ‘Dark Ages’ saw a flowering
of poetic genius: the old epic poems were taken up again and developed in
a new spirit and a new idiom. The name of Homer alone remains from all
the poets who gave a new form to traditional material at that time. The
ancient peoples were unanimous in attributing the Iliad, and the Odyssey
to him.
Scholars have been divided on the ‘Homeric question’ si'nce the eigh¬
teenth century. Were the two epics really the work of the same poet? Do
they each have an internal unity or are they made up of bits and pieces of
different inspiration and different periods? Today, we are moving towards
a model ate solution of these two problems. It can no longer be maintained
that the two epics were composed by a single man. They differ in vocabu¬
lary, in style and in the realities they depict. To take one example from
many, the poet of the Iliad knew very little about iron, which the poet of
the Odyssey mentioned frequently. All the disparities cannot be explained
simply by the difference in subject and inspiration; historical poetry on the
one hand, folk lore and fairy tale on the other. They are generally thought
to imply a difference in date, the Iliad being earlier than the Odyssey. But
any attempt to substitute absolute chronology for this relative chronology
runs up against such difficulties that specialists can reach no agreement
whatever. We would be inclined to allow a time-spread of fifty or so years
between the two texts, putting the composition of the Iliad at the end of the
ninth century, the Odyssey towards the middle of the eighth.
What sort of impression can be gained from individual study of the
poems? Their internal unity is obvious. The Iliad is a wonderful produc¬
tion built around the theme of Achilles’ wrath: his grief when Agamemnon
robbed him of his captive slave, Briseis, caused him to withdraw to his tent;
the Achaeans then suffered defeat after defeat, until Achilles returned to
battle, after the death of his beloved Patroclus, and the fate of the armies
was reversed. The Odyssey is certainly more complex, but three large, skil¬
fully linked centres of interest can easily be distinguished; the voyage of
Telemachus, the wanderings of Ulysses and the slaying of the suitors. The
mastery of a poet of genius blazes through both poems. In perfect control
of the rich epic material inherited from the past, he arranges it into a whole
which, despite the many contradictions inevitable in oral poetry, is fully
satisfying to the mind. If the concept of ‘composition’ can be applied to
such a fluid text, he has achieved this goal by telling a story which has a
beginning, reversals of fortune, and an end.
Innumerable rhapsodes helped to compose the Iliad and the Odyssey by
drawing widely on songs about the war with Troy and the return, created
over a period of at least four centuries. The name Homer can be given to
the two poets from amongst their ranks who transformed the iridescent
clothing of Harlequin into a dazzling cloak, and changed the gaudy mosaic
into a work of art.
95
The language of the ‘Homeric’ epics is a unique combination of dialectal
forms mainly borrowed from Ionian though also from Aeolian and
Arcadian. They were certainly ‘composed’ in the Ionian world where so
many immigrants, who had been driven from their native lands by the
Dorian invasions, loved to hear songs about the achievements of the
glorious Achaean past. It would appear to be possible to risk an attempt at
even greater precision: the Iliad may have been the work of a poet from
the Anatolian coast, the Odyssey of an insular poet. This would explain why
the Odyssey, though later than the Iliad, made no allusion to it, and, in fact,
appeared totally ignorant of it. But the forms which are foreign and
irreducible to Ionian preserve the memory of the primitive epics (Aeolian
and Ai cadian are directly descended from the dialects spoken in northern
and southern Greece respectively in the second millennium).
The long history of the Homeric epics continued after ‘Homer’. They
wei e transmitted orally until the sixth century when they were finally
written down, notably at Athens under the Pisistratids. Numerous inter¬
polations have obviously prolonged the Homeric text, which was often only
a mixture of earlier fragments itself. The historian who tries to distinguish
successive strata has not at all an easy task.
The Greeks themselves were unaware of all the heteroclite elements
which modern erudition has revealed in the Iliad and Odyssey. For them
they were the fundamental texts with which their children were taught to
read and their adolescents to think. They have remained an inexhaustible
reservoir of myths, an unfailing source of beauty. No other book, apart
from the Bible, has had so great an influence on moulding minds and
souls.
A Peasant-Poet: Hesiod
Shortly after the ‘composition’ of the Homeric epics, possibly towards the
middle of the eighth century, a great poet, Hesiod was, born at Ascra in
Boeotia. Herodotus even thought he was a contemporary of Homer. He
was a peasant who laboriously cultivated a small plot of land on the
southern slope of Mount Helicon, not far from the sanctuary of the Muses.
Hesiod attributed the inspiration which transformed the rough peasant
into a poet to the Muses of Helicon: ‘they taught Hesiod glorious song
while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon (Theogony
22-23).
The Theogony and Works and Days are all that essentially remain of his
poems today. The Theogony is a copious composition describing the genera¬
tions of gods starting with ‘wide-bosomed Earth’, and at times drawing on
oriental cosmogonies for inspiration. It could be represented in a diagram-
form as an immense tree, showing the genealogical relationships between
the Immortals, and thus showed evidence of an effort to rationalize the
divine world by organizing the multiple divinities inherited from a distant
past into a hierarchical system. From the point of view of the history of
THE GREEK ADVENTURE
96
religions, this effort is absurd. To take one example from a thousand:

Hesiod gives Hera three children, Hebe, an abstraction, Ares, a Thracian
introduced later into the Greek pantheon, and Eileithyia, an old pre-
Hellenic goddess of child-birth. But this was of small account to Hesiod’s
contemporaries, who felt an intense need to see their innumerable gods
synthesized into a rational-seeming body. Hesiod’s influence was certainly
decisive - not because he was the first to tread this path, but because the
coherence and beauty of the Theogony made it a sure and respected basis for
everyone interested in divine myths.
The Works and Days returned to the human world. It consists of a long
admonition which Hesiod addressed to his brother Perses, exhorting him
to practice justice and to work. As agriculture still remained the primordial
activity, the greater part of the poem is devoted to the tasks of the peasant,
enumerated according to the seasonal cycle, from sowing to vintaging.
However, navigation, another source of profit, is not neglected. The work
ends with some moral advice and a calendar of lucky and unlucky days.
Hesiod was not an agronomist writing an agricultural textbook; he was a
peasant speaking to other peasants, trying to interest them in his quarrel
with his brother, discussing subjects which they knew as well as he. His
information is therefore rarely accurate except on problems relating to
agricultural implements.
But Works and Days contains fundamental evidence about life in the
country: it shows the large landowners - the ‘princes’ as Hesiod calls them
- whose hearts were filled with greed and who fed on the humble people
like the hawk on the nightingale. It also gives glimpses of the life of agricul¬
tural workers and slaves. However, Hesiod was principally interested in the
small landowner. His existence was rough and he was condemned to a life
of unremitting labour; he made his own plough, clothes from goatskin and
his own footwear; he was haunted by perpetual fear of death from hunger
during the winter (the harshness of which is strikingly portrayed); if he
were to make such infertile soil yield enough to meet his needs, he had to
think of nothing but work; all distraction was denied him, even a single
visit to a neighbouring town which involved the risk of wasting time. There
is no greater invocation of the world of the humble people - people who
barely appear in the Homeric epics.
The New Religious Forms

The literary texts of the Geometric period show the importance of religious
factors. Homer depicts two parallel societies: that of the gods and that of
men - and there was constant interplay between the two. TheTheogony
gives a methodical account of divine genealogy, Works and Days a picture
of the religion of a superstitious Boeotian peasant who would not sow until
he had invoked ‘Zeus of the Earth and pure Demeter’ (line 465) and who
would make sure he married on the fourth day of the month after choosing
‘the omens which are best for this business’ (line 801).
97
Figure i 9 The Great Mother, Mistress of the animals, on a Boeotian vase
Religious life had altered profoundly since the Mycenaean period. First¬
ly, the Dorians had increased the importance of gods in relation to god¬
desses (see page 85). In the second place, nascent rationalism was trying
to create order in a confused pantheon, not only by linking the divinities
with one another but also by reducing the number of gods. The most im¬
portant gods embodied secondary gods and heroes in their extending per¬
sonalities, and these then became simple divine epiclese: this occurred in
the case of Zeus Agamemnon and Amphiaraus, of Artemis Iphigenia and
Poseidon Erechtheus. Finally, and most important, new divinities, origi¬
nating in the Orient, had been introduced into the Greek world - and this
all the more easily because the Greek occupation of the coastal fringe of
Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean islands, notably Cyprus, had
thrown a bridge between Asia and European Greece.
The triad of the Letoids is undoubtedly the most typical example. Leto
was a Lycian (her name has been related to the Lycian lada, the lady);
Artemis had an exact counterpart in Artimus found in Lydian inscriptions;
Apollo, who was always armed with the bow so dear to the Asiatics, and
who fought on the Trojan side against the Greeks in the Iliad, was also an
Asiatic - a Lycian to be precise (the epithet of Lykeios, Lycian, continued
to be attached to him). The Greeks adopted all three of them and turned
them into a family composed of a mother and her twin children. But these
acquisitions could not have been simultaneous: Artemis already appears
on Mycenaean tablets, which do not mention Leto and Apollo. Apollo
would have reached Delos, which the Greeks made his birth-place, and
where female divinities previously reigned, in about 1000. He was already
one of the most important gods of the Hellenic pantheon in Homer’s day.
His striking success in the Greek world may possibly be explained by the
arbitrary connection which seems to have grown up between this Asiatic
god, widely known amongst Lycians, Hittites and future Etruscans, and a
pastoral Dorian god, Apello the god of the apella, that is to say the cattle-
pen.
Aphrodite also played a leading part in the epic and provides another
Figure 20 The Mistress of the animals. Terra¬

cotta statuette of Boeotian origin, from the
eighth century. Animals facing one another,
palms and solar wheels decorate her gown
example of a divinity from the Orient: but she was a Semite. Leaving the
Phoenician coast, her migration from east to west passed through Cyprus,
where legend placed her birth, and Cythera, where, according to Pausanias,
her first temple on Greek soil was built. Her example also shows the com¬
plexity of this phenomenon of divine importing. Although she precisely
resembled the Phoenician, Astarte, even the Greeks were already puzzled
by her name which was not derived from Astarte. They vainly tried to ex¬
plain it by a play of words: she who is born of the foam, aphros. It might
possibly be a synthesis of the names of two pre-Hellenic sea divinities. In
fact, oriental influences often only reinforced the Aegean influences which
had been so important in the preceding millennium.
The Dispossession of the Goddesses by the Gods

Female divinities were first worshipped at Delphi, Olympia and Delos:
the Earth-Mother, the oracular power at Delphi, Hera at Olympia,
Artemis and Leto at Delos. In about the year 1000 the centre of gravity in
Greek religion was reversed and the ancient chthonic powers were evicted
transitions and renewals
99
Phoenician Greek Alphabets

Alphabet
ARCHAIC MILETUS BCEOTIA CLASSICAL
| GREEK GREEK
9 < A A tX A a
b R B £ B b
g 'N r r r r g
d A A t> A d
h /£■ a E E e
w Y f F
z I Z z
h
•
0 e H B H e
t © 0 ® © © th
•
t s 1 1 1 1
y
k ■i- K K K K k
1 f' Is A U A 1
m s 1 r* M r M 01
n b A' N N M n
s 2 $ i X
9 0 O O 0 O 0
P ?. r r r n P
s 4 M
k
• 9 9 ?
r 9 P K p r
s w t I t z s
t + T T T r t
Y Y X u
0 -t" d> ph
X
0 X kh
£ r nU ps
1 XL XL 0
Figure 21 The Phoenician alphabet and the Greek alphabets
IOO THE GREEK ADVENTURE
by the gods - Apollo in the first and third cases, Zeus in the second. But
this eviction was never complete and one part of the sanctuaries remained
consecrated to their former divine mistresses (figures 19 and 20). At Delphi,
the Earth-Mother and the Muses preserved a temenos next to the rock of the
Sybil, possibly the first seat of the prophetess. At Olympia, the whole north
‘Aids’ was devoted to goddesses: principally Hera, whose temple had stood
there since the eighth century, two and a half centuries before Zeus;
Demeter Chamyne, worshipped in the neighbouring stadium; and later
Cybele. At Delos, Artemis retained her own hieron within her brother’s
hieron, while their mother was worshipped in the nearby Letoon.
The Invention of Writing

The Achaean syllabary disappeared in the ruins of the Dorian invasions. A
few centuries later, a new writing appeared in the Greek world. This con¬
sisted of an alphabet of twenty-four signs, derived from Phoenician writing.
The derivation is beyond doubt both because of the shape of the letters and
of the order in which they occur, which is identical in both systems. The
Greeks realized this themselves: Herodotus (5, 58) confirms that ‘The
Phoenicians who came with Cadmus ... introduced into Greece, after their
settlement in the country a number of accomplishments, of which the most
important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks.’
They made them known under the name of phoiniceia (Phoenician signs).
But subtle adaptations of the borrowed writing then had to be made: the
Phoenician alphabet only noted consonants. Although it is possible to write
a Semitic language without vowels because of the large part played by
consonants in the roots, it is unthinkable in the case of an Indo-European
language such as Greek. Because of the great freedom of construction, a
phrase is only comprehensible if the vocalic termination is legible. The
Greeks therefore took advantage of the fact that Phoenician was rich in
consonants (notably gutturals and sibilants) unknown to Greek: they uti¬
lized the useless signs gained in this way to denote the aspirates (which
inversely, Phoenician did not possess), and above all, the vowels (figure 21).
This was considerable progress: for the first time sounds were completely
broken down into consonants and vowels. This had far-reaching conse¬
quences; the Latin alphabet and almost all the modern alphabets of
Europe derive from the Greek alphabet. This concrete example epitomizes
the method by which the creations of Hellenism were achieved: it was able
to borrow from its former great commercial rivals, the Phoenicians, the
incomparable tool which writing could become, give it its fullest value and
develop it to its utmost.
As far as detail is concerned, the Greek alphabet appears in a number of
quite different forms, characterized by the absence or presence of the signs
<I>, X, and T and by the value attributed to them. The distribution of the
alphabets took no account of dialects and was purely topographical. Three
groups can be distinguished:
TRANSITIONS AND RENEWALS IOI
(1) Archaic alphabets (Thera and Melos);

(2) Oriental alphabets
(a) Alphabets from Asia Minor, the eastern islands of the Aegean Sea
and from the north-east Peloponnese (Argos, Corinth and Megara);
(b) Alphabets from the islands in the north-east Aegean and Attica;
(3) Western alphabets: Laconia and Arcadia; Boeotia and Phocis; Euboea;
Western colonies.
Sounds
Groups
ph kh ps ks
1 nH KH nz KZ
2, a 0 X or + T ,IH,
2, b 0 X or + 01 xz
3 O T TTZ or OZ X
No agreement whatsoever has been reached on the date of the invention

of the alphabet. Some geometric fragments from Corinth and Attic geo¬
metric vases originating from Hymettus dating from about 750, already
contain highly developed letters. Allowing for inevitable approximation,
the first attempts may have been made in about the year 900.
Birth of the City

The Greek world during the Geometric period possessed an indisputable
unity aa far as art, religion, literature and writing were concerned, despite
its geographic diversity. Nevertheless, politically speaking, a definite split¬
ting up into small units occurred. The relatively extensive realms of the
Mycenaean period disappeared during the Dorian turmoil. A much more
limited form of human grouping was appearing, the city {polls), which
remained characteristic of Greek civilization until the conquests by the
kings of Macedonia.
As would be expected of these far-olf troubled times, the actual origins of
this political form are shrouded in the greatest mystery. Geographical
determinism has been suggested: Greece, which comprises few large plains,
was split up into small districts, relatively isolated from one another. It has
been maintained moreover that, before the Achaean realms, ‘the indivi¬
dualism of the small cities of Greece may be thought to have taken root in
neolithic times’ (Wace-Blegen, Klio, 1939).
However, the real explanation is supplied by factors from the beginning
of the first millennium. The various groups of Dorian invaders were inde¬
pendent of each other and formed communities wherever they stopped.
This also applied to the Greek immigrants who populated the Asiatic coast.
The military element must have played a leading part at first: the word
polls itself originally described a citadel, before it assumed its later meaning
of city-state. Particularly amongst the Dorians, the first rulers were leaders
of armed bands. Other factors gradually came to the fore: the first settle¬
ments were obviously villages. Then, in many privileged cases, such as
Sparta and Athens, neighbouring villages formed one town, by a phenome¬
non which the Greeks called synoecism (common habitation). The town
engendered the city, that is to say a common political organization.
It is easy to imagine the important part spiritual elements played in
creations of this type - the feeling of a common origin, of belonging to the
same racial grouping and above all the existence of common cults which
were able to provide a solid religious basis for the first embryonic states.
But proximity itself also created ties: the inhabitants met in a single market
[agora] to make their still rudimentary dealings, and professional groupings
appeared; the Ionian tribes in particular are said to have retained some
memory of these.
All these reasons simultaneously must have favoured larger groupings
than those of family and village, which, according to Aristotle’s famous
theory in his Politics, gave birth to the cities. The historical importance of
this phenomenon can not be over-emphasized. The groupings formed in
this manner remained on the whole unchanged until Greece lost its inde¬
pendence. They linked a limited number of citizens who could all normally
participate in the conduct of public affairs. But there were too many cities
and clashes inevitably occurred between them. The whole history of
Archaic and Classical Greece, which is a history of brothers at war, was
germinating during this period.
The same difficulty recurs in dating the appearance of the polis. It must
be noted that the Iliad showed no trace of such political organization while
the Odyssey was already aware of it. In another respect, the colonial ex¬
pansion, which began in about 775 and which aimed at creating newpoleis,
obviously presupposed the fact that the metropolises themselves were poli¬
tically organized earlier. Finally, a basic text like the Great Rhetra of
Sparta (see page 165) which seems to belong to the first half of the eighth
century, demonstrated the whole mechanism of an already formed city,
with its kings, council and assembly of the people. There can hardly be any
error therefore, in placing the creation of the city system at about 800.
The birth of the city diminished the importance of the clans (genos) into
which the tribes were subdivided. A concommitant phenomenon worked in
the same direction: the evolution of landed property, which was the only
source of wealth at that time. Wherever the effects of the invasions had
been felt, that is to say in almost all Greece, they had led to the permanent
appropriation of the soil by the genos. But a counter movement rapidly set
in. On the one hand, individual property was introduced first for personal
possessions and houses, then for marginal lands (Homer’s eschatie) exploited
by hardy and energetic men. On the other hand, the genos tended to split
TRANSITIONS AND RENEWALS 103
up into individual families (in the narrow sense of the term) and the
domain was divided up amongst them. By Hesiod’s time, the collective
property of the gems had disappeared, and had been replaced by family
property, divided equally between the sons at each testamentary transfer.
A famous text from Works and Days already proves that it was transferable.
Thus great inequality of fortune existed by the end of the Geometric
period. It no longer resulted only from the disparity in the shares which
the leaders of the clans had originally appropriated and which had varied
according to their power and pugnacity. It was also the result of individual
initiative and new socio-economic forces.
Figure 22 Decoration of two Attic Geometric vases from the Dipylon: above: boat;
below: horsemen and chariots. Two complementary aspects offioleis of the Geometric
period: the beginnings of maritime trade; a powerful aristocracy, which was, in the true
sense, a knighthood
The Dark Ages had been left far behind when the Geometric period
came to an end in the 750s. An art and a literature had appeared which did
not completely cast away the Mycenaean past. Religion was finally consti¬
tuted and rationalized. Writing had provided an incomparable tool for
both trade and spiritual life. The disorder which followed the invasions and
migrations had been replaced by the constitutional organization of the
polls (figure 22). Much of this progress would have been impossible with¬
out the resumption of commerce across the Aegean Sea. In this respect, the
Phoenicians seem to have played a considerable role. They appear in the
Odyssey as particularly active intermediaries. After 850, Phoenician and
Syrian objets d’art appeared at Crete, Sparta and Athens, and Anatolian
ivories at Corinth. A rich treasury of oriental jewellery, discovered at
Aegina, provides a good example of the importance of Phoenician trade
with Greece around 800 in a privileged centre.
And this was only the beginning of a movement which continued to

expand in the following period. Increased trade and the development of a
really Hellenic commerce resulted in more prolonged contacts with the
East. This led to a new advance which began in the 750s with the Archaic
period proper.
The Evolution of the Cities
So great a confusion had reigned during the ‘Dark Ages’ that the Greeks
had even lost the name they used to designate themselves. In the seventh
century, a new word appeared which applied to all Greeks, irrespective of
identifiable races: Hellenes. It can first be found in Archilochus, who
speaks of the Panhellenes (all the Greeks), and in an interpolation in the
Iliad, which must be contemporary; in addition the Hellanodikai (judges
of the Greeks) were mentioned at Olympia at the end of the seventh
century.
The name itself was of long standing: it already appeared in a primitive
part of the Iliad to designate the inhabitants of a small canton in Thessaly,
next to Achaea Phthiotis and part of the domain of Achilles.
In a fairly late text of the story of Telemachus {Odyssey 15, 9-42), Hellas
probably designated the northern Peloponnese, later Achaea; the transi¬
tion from one meaning to the other could be explained by the Achaean
migrations from Achaea Phthiotis to the northern Peloponnese.
The name of Hellas is then found in the curious expression ‘Great Hellas’
(the Magna Graecia of the Romans), that is to say, the southern part of
Italy where so many prosperous Greek colonies were established, notably
the Achaean colonies (for the possible double meaning of the word, see
page 188). The neighbouring native populations did not distinguish be¬
tween the different races and would have called all the Greeks in Italy
Hellenes - not only the Achaean colonists. And the Greeks themselves
would have accepted this designation, applying it to both Greeks in Greece
and in Anatolia. This may be the complicated history of the name, which
the sheer chance of the migrations extended from very limited origins to
include all we now, after the Roman fashion, know as Greeks.
Another symptom of the consciousness of Hellenic unity appeared in
Greece from the beginning of the Archaic period: the creation of a genea¬
logical tree (see page 76) at the end of the eighth century, which gave
Hellen three sons, Dorus, Aeolus and Xuthus (who was the father of
Achaeus and Ion). Dorians, Aeolians, Achaeans and Ionians felt they were
brothers and translated this reality into the fiction of a common ancestry.
In fact, the unity of Archaic Hellenism was very much a reality and,
without being arbitrary, we can try to distinguish its essential features from
the dual viewpoints of the evolution of the cities and its intellectual activi¬
ties. It did, however, conceal a fundamental diversity resulting both from
io6 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
the diversity of the population and from the geographic spread of the
conquests. It is therefore also necessary to study the different local forms it
assumed.
FROM MONARCHY TO ARISTOCRACY
The Monarchy
Monarchy seems to have been the first form of government everywhere.
The king (basileus) controlled the city, led the army, judged civil matters
(criminal justice remained subject to the vendettas of the clans) and offered
public sacrifices. His authority was based both on his noble origins, always
considered divine, and on the wealth he derived from farming his own
property and from the temenos received from the community by way of en¬
dowment. However, his power was far from absolute: he was surrounded
by a council, made up of the heads of noble families, with whom he had to
come to terms. While the king in the Iliad closely resembled the wanax of the
Mycenaean period, the royalty of the Odyssey already seems to be a new
institution: the royalty of the cities limited by the presence of a powerful
aristocracy.
These nobles were essentially large landowners, who had cornered the
most fertile land. Their social and moral position was so close to the king’s
that Hesiod did actually call them kings. He denounced the insolent pride
and rapacity of these ‘princes who devour bribes’ (Works and Days, 264),
and who proclaimed that they were the best (aristoi).
Below them came the common people, mostly engaged in agriculture.
They were either small landowners, making a difficult living cultivating
the soil, or agricultural workers (thetes) in the service of the king or large
landowners. The demiurgoi (literally, those who work for the people), were
of very secondary importance compared with the peasant. Apart from
heralds, soothsayers, bards and doctors, who on the evidence of the Odyssey
commanded a certain amount of respect, they were primarily artisans,
whose existence was all the more wretched in that each family tried to
produce all the manufactured goods it needed itself.
The economy therefore remained elementary, confined almost exclus¬
ively to agriculture (cultivation of shrubs, but fundamentally cereals) and
the raising of small and large livestock. Trade was even more limited,
necessarily based on barter because money did not exist. At first, it consis¬
ted of local commerce which enabled consumer goods to be exchanged in
the market of the town. However, large-scale Mediterranean commerce
revived at the end of the ‘Dark Ages’, despite very strong Phoenician com¬
petition, and was often barely distinguishable from plain piracy. Hesiod
advised the small peasant who could not earn a living from the land to
turn to the sea.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE CITIES IO7
The Aristocratic Regime

A progressive evolution in most of the cities then put an end to the mon¬
arc y in favour of the aristocracy. The movement seems to have begun in
oma at the beginning of the eighth century. The oligarchy seized power,
generally without resort to violence; the kings had to yield to pressure from
the aristocrats, sometimes after a transition period when monarchy became
elective or was limited m its duration. Moreover, the title of king often con¬
tinued to exist to denote a magistrature (Argos, Athens, Corinth) or a
pnesthood (Ephesus, Miletus). Henceforth, royalty no longer existed except
on the borders of Hellenism, in regions where the city-system had not de¬
veloped (Macedonia, Epirus) or in very traditionalist cities (Sparta and
ihera and their colonies, notably Tarentum and Cyrene).
The essential organ of aristocratic government was the council (Boule or
Gerousia) which continued the king’s council of the preceding period. Its
members were generally appointed for life, according to systems which
varied with the cities: elected councillors at Sparta, heads of a great family
at Corinth, former magistrates who had relinquished office at Athens. It
was the council which really controlled the city, supervising and often
nominating the magistrates and dispensing justice. The magistrates, a
direct creation of the council, held different titles: Archontes (Athens,
Boeotia), Ephors (Sparta), Prytaneis (Miletus).... But almost everywhere
they formed a corporate body and changed every year, which removed the
risk of personal power being exercised by a prominent individual.
The assembly of the people played a very unobtrusive role. Its member¬
ship was often very limited as the active citizens never constituted the whole
population. In certain cities, it had the right to elect the magistrates. Im¬
portant decisions were submitted for its approval everywhere but it ratified
every proposal put before it as its interests were not separate from those of
the ruling class. This was notably the case in the Dorian cities where a
Figure 23 Frieze from the temple of Prinias (Crete): procession of

spear-bearing horsemen. About 625 bc
io8 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
unified front was required to oppress the previous populations who had
been reduced to servitude.
Oligarchy in this context therefore has a double meaning: first, because
the demos only included a limited number of privileged people; in the sec¬
ond place, because all real power was concentrated in the hands of an even
narrower elite.
The power of this aristocracy was primarily based on the prestige of a
reputedly divine origin, but also on considerable wealth which remained
essentially embodied in landholding. The nobles were large landowners
and large stockbreeders, particularly of horses. The titles which designated
them in some cities were highly characteristic of this state of affairs: gamoroi
(those who share the land amongst themselves) at Syracuse, hippobotai
(horse-breeders) in Euboea. Their own names very often derived from
hippos (a horse). In fact, they alone had large enough property and suffi¬
cient resources to pursue this type of stock-raising (which enabled them to
serve as horsemen as well as to compete at Olympia), which according to
Aristotle was intimately bound up with aristocratic government (figure 23).
As the horizon of the Greek world opened, the aristocrats were able to
adapt themselves to the new conditions. Many of them played an impor¬
tant part in colonization, such as the Corinthians, Archias and Chersi-
crates, the founders of Syracuse and Corcyra, both members of the ruling
family of Bacchiadae. Many also took an interest in commerce and made
considerable personal fortunes. Thus Charaxus, the brother of the poetess
Sappho, traded in Egypt, collected enough money to set the beautiful cour¬
tesan Rhodopis free, and was rewarded on his return with bitter satire from
his sister.
Their whole life took place in an atmosphere of affluence. They were the
only people who could eat as much as they wanted every day and Hesiod
was already referring to them as ‘the fat ones’. They loved the festivities at
which the bards always sang Homer’s aristocratic epics and where wine
flowed by the bucket. Alcaeus, who belonged to a great family from
Mytilene, always found an excuse for filling his glass: ‘it is ill yielding the
heart to mischance; for we shall make no advance if we weary of thee oh
Bacchus, and the best medicine is to call for wine and drink deep’ (frag¬
ment 35). They were also intoxicated with glory and liked nothing better
than a victory for their teams or steeds in the hippodrome at Olympia.
A whole moral ideal underlay their conception of existence and no better
expression of it can be found than in the Elegies that Theognis of Megara
addressed to his young friend Cyrnus. They show the ardent love of justice
and the role played by friendship between men of the same caste: ‘Take
care not to be in the company of evil persons, always attach yourself to the
good, please them whose power is great because it is from good men that
you will learn virtue’ (lines 30 ff.). This description naturally has to be
qualified: in Dorian territory, the accent was placed on physical well-being,
a warlike ethos and virile camaraderie; in Ionia, luxury, pleasure and even
a certain effeminacy characterized the powerful: Xenophanes of Colophon
THE EVOLUTION OF THE CITIES IO9
describes ‘them when they went into the market place, clad in all-purple
robes, went not less than a thousand in all, proudly rejoicing in gold-
adorned hair and bedewing their odour with studied anointings;’ (frag¬
ment 20). But they were separated from other citizens by the same arro¬
gance everywhere - an arrogance which even extended to their funeral
processions, such as those shown on the sides of vases.
THE BIRTH OF A MERCANTILE ECONOMY
A crisis disturbed the harmonious equilibrium of the aristocratic regime

during the seventh century. It was not local in character but affected most
of the cities of the Greek world. It originated in an economic revolution
which entailed important social changes.
The Introduction of Money

Until the seventh century, exchanges were solely based on barter in Greece
as in all the Orient. It seems that the Greeks, like the other Indo-European
peoples (cf. Latin pecunia, Germanic feo - beasts, and then money), used
cattle as the first instruments of barter. Religious considerations as well as
economic needs would have contributed to the formulation of the early
stages of exchange - there would have been a transition from the idea of the
Figure 24 The striking of a Greek coin

I IO THE GREEK ADVENTURE
bull of sacrifice to the idea of bull-money. But metal, because it was rela¬
tively unalterable and weighed little in relation to its value, was already
used in the form of stamped ingots in the East notably in Assyria and the
Hittite Empire, from the second millennium.
As far as the origins of money proper are concerned, that is to say of a
much more easily handled symbol than the ingot and of a standardized
weight, the traditions which the Greeks recorded are confused and contra¬
dictory. They generally agreed in attributing the invention of money to
Gyges (687-52?) king of Lydia, where abundant electrum, the natural
alloy of gold and silver, was found, and where the Pactolus flows - its name
is still synonymous with wealth. His successors, Alyattes (610-561) and
above all Croesus (561-46), who issued pure gold and silver staters, con¬
tinued to mint money in abundance (the creseides which accumulated in the
coffers of Croesus). This invention, which can be dated at 680, was imme¬
diately adopted (about 670) by the merchant aristocracies of the coastal
towns: Miletus, Ephesus, Phocaea, then Chios and Samos coined electrum
and shortly afterwards, in the case of the last two, pure silver (figure 24).
The coins of the various cities can be divided into two groups, depending
on whether they followed the standard of Miletus, that is to say of Lydia,
or the standard of Phocaea, adopted by Chios after a slight reduction. They
originally carried a hollowed sign (whence their name of incused coins),
then a sign in relief, generally the coat of arms of the city: the lion at
Miletus, stag or bee at Ephesus, seal at Phocaea, sphinx at Chios, bull at
Samos. The relative value of the metals was as follows:
Gold/silver 13-J-: 1
Gold / electrum 1^:1
Electrum/silver 10 :i
In Greece proper, where there was neither gold nor electrum, the situa¬
tion was different. Iron in the form of roasting spits (obeloi) was first used as
standard, six spits grouped into one handful forming one drachma. The
introduction of money was generally attributed to the king of Argos,
Pheidon, but this tradition is no longer fully accredited. Pheidon’s name
can be linked rather with a devaluation of the ponderal system which
would have taken place after 6%o(?). A bundle of iron spits and a standard
have been found in the Heraeum at Argos and these could be the new
measures consecrated to the protecting goddess of the city (figure 25).
Other excavations, notably those recently made at the tombs at Argos,
have revealed almost intact obeloi, which are heavier and must have
belonged to the pre-Pheidonian system.
It has been established that the first money in Greece proper was minted
at Aegina, the large commercial centre under the thumb of Argos, where
money could easily have been imported from Siphnos. These were the
famous silver tortoises, and the first issue could scarcely have been made
before the last decades of the seventh century (other scholars suggest an
earlier date: Seltman, 665). The names of the coins were borrowed from
THE EVOLUTION OF THE CITIES 111
Figure 26 Archaic Greek coins
A Coin from Aegina: starred stamp. Obverse/tortoise. B Coin from Corinth (under
Periander): Pegasus. Obverse/swastika. C Coin from Athens (under Pisistratus):
Athena. Obverse/owl, olive branch. Inscription: Athe (na).
the ancient system of roasting spits : obols (doublet of obeloi) and drachmae.
Gradually, the new invention reached all the commercial cities. It had
only one common feature: silver monometallism. But the multiplicity of
local economies was highly characteristic of the political fragmentation of
the Greek world. Broadly, two large monetary standards can be recog¬
nized : the Aeginetan and the Euboic.
The first system was in use at Aegina, in the Peloponnese (except at

Corinth), Megara, Athens until Solon, in Boeotia and northern Greece, in
the islands of the southern Aegean and on the south coast of Anatolia. The
second system included, apart from the towns of Euboea (Chalcis, Eretria),
Corinth, Athens after Solon, Samos and Cyrene. Whereas the first system
was irreducible to the Lydian standard, which, with several variations, was
used in Lydia, Miletus, Ephesus, and Phocaea, the second permitted
relatively easy conversion into the eastern and Aeginetan systems.
Ponderal and Monetary Systems of Greece Proper
Equivalents Aeginetan system Euboic system
1 talent = 60 minae 377 kg- 26-2 kg.
1 mina = 50 staters or 628 gm. 436 gm.

100 drachmae
1 stater or didrachma 12-57 gm- 8-73 gm.
1 drachma = 6 obols 6-28 gm. 4-36 gm.
1 obol 1 -04 gm. 0-73 gm.
The Greek ponderal systems were inspired by the East. In Mesopotamia a sexagesimal system
existed (i talent = 60 minae = 3,600 shekels) and this was widespread throughout the Middle
East. The Greeks devised a compromise, such as existed in Egypt, between the sexagesimal and
the decimal system, because the mina, the sixtieth part of a talent, only comprised 50 shekels or
staters, that is to say, 100 drachmae.
Money spread rapidly in the new world of the West, particularly as

silver could easily be procured from Spain. Several special standards co¬
existed there - that of Corcyra (anxious to keep its distance in relation to its
metropolis Corinth) and that of Himera, Selinus, Zancle and Naxos - with
the Euboic standard of Corinth, widespread through the considerable
Corinthian trade with the West (for example with Tarentum, Sybaris and
Rhegium) (map 7).
This movement gradually reached all the Greek cities in the fifth cen¬
tury, so much so that independence and minting became intimately con¬
nected in the Hellenic mind. For the moment, it remained limited to the
commercial cities and their offshoots. Some towns deliberately rejected it,
such as the towns of Crete and Sparta, which remained faithful to the old,
inconvenient iron money. The fact was that minting was scarcely of inter¬
est except in the context of trans-Mediterranean commerce: it was born in
Asia, a region of very active exchanges, and reached Aegina, Corinth,
Euboea and the West, that is to say all the regions with an intense commer¬
cial life. The case of Athens, which did not mint money until the beginning
Map 7 Monetary systems in the Greek world at the end of the Archaic period (according to Ch. Seltman)
of the sixth century when its commerce began to develop, is very character¬
istic (figure 26). Small scale retail trade was little concerned with money,
as is proved by the rarity of small coinage.
Thus money was born (vonia|jia) (the word, which appeared late,
possibly designated the value of the coin, its currency, before designating
the coin itself). The appearance of a monetary economy was one of the
most clearcut divisions in the history of the ancient world. Some texts
already called this economy ‘capitalist’ - not without a play on words: it
was the financial ability of the Greeks which Plato later defined as ‘the art
that relieves us from poverty’ (Gorgias, 477e).
Correspondence between the Euboic System and the Other Monetary Systems
100 Euboic drachmae of 4-25 gm. = 425 gm.

70 Aeginetan drachmae of 6-07 gm. = 425 gm.
60 Lydo-Milesian drachmae of 7-08 gm. = 425 gm.
26 Phocaean tetradrachmae of 16-35 §m- = 425 gm-
54 didrachmae from Chios of 7-87 gm. = 425 gm.
(from Ch. Seltman, Greek Coins II, p. 41)
It is not surprising that the figures indicated for the coins are not exactly the same as those
given earlier (page 112). There is a margin of uncertainty in establishing values when dealing
with a money whose weight was not strictly constant.
This very diversity of monetary standards, another example of the fun¬

damental diversity of the Greek world, certainly made operations in foreign
exchange difficult and formed a serious obstacle to freedom of exchange.
Nevertheless, the Greeks, by perfecting the invention of the kings of Lydia,
provided themselves with a valuable tool, indispensable to the develop¬
ment of large-scale Mediterranean commerce. Thanks to money, venture¬
some traders were able to amass large fortunes and for the first time these
were personal fortunes and no longer only represented by land. Some
were nobles but many others were ordinary commoners, and their
new prosperity presented difficult problems at the political and social
level.
Development of large-scale Greek Commerce in the

Mediterranean
The birth of money was only one factor in the extraordinary economic
development which occurred in the Greek world in the Archaic period. At
this point, it is a good idea to recall the conditions imposed by the natural
resources of Greece. The soil there was poor, and often unsuited to cereals;
forests, originally considerable, had diminished with the clearing of new
lands for agriculture and stock-raising; finally, minerals were scarce. On
the other hand, cultivation of shrubs which grew well there was constantly
expanding and yielded surpluses of wine and oil; and the skill of the
THE EVOLUTION OF THE CITIES
115
artisans, combined with the refined tastes of the Greeks, enabled them to
create masterpieces, particularly in the fields of ceramics and armour.
Commerce in the Archaic Period
Imports
Food resources of prime necessity Raw materials

Cereals Precious metals, ivory, amber
Salted fish Tin, copper
Wood
Wool, skins
I
Processing industries
I
Exports
Semi-luxury agricultural products Manufactured goods

Wine Gold and silver work
Oil Jewellery
Tools and weapons
Boats
Cloth
Ceramics
Perfumes and ointments
Greek colonization of part of the west and the shores of the Black Sea
profoundly altered economic life. It was a fundamental phenomenon which
will be studied later in its evolution. On one hand, it was easy to procure
corn and salted fish in Magna Graecia, Sicily or Pontus; the forests of
Thrace provided ample timber for woodwork and naval yards; and min¬
erals were plentiful in the west. On another score, the new cities, and above
all the barbarous peoples with whom they maintained close relations, were
an ideal clientele for wine and oil, at that time considered semi-luxury
goods, and for manufactured objects where the traditional Greek world
(Greece proper and Anatolia) had gained a decisive lead.
All the elements required for large-scale inter-Mediterranean trade were
then present, and Greece, completely incapable of leading anything but a
wretched life as an autarchy, opened wide its doors on all fronts. The
movement contained the strength of indefinite expansion: thus, the more
corn was imported the less it was necessary to produce, and the more
cultivation could be concentrated on vines and olive trees, the more wine
I 16 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
and olives could be exported (as well as vases in which to transport them).
Imported wood made it possible to build more and more boats, the neces¬
sary vehicles of a purely maritime trade. The minerals which flowed in
from the west supplied indispensable raw materials for utilitarian as well as
art industries - which again resulted in increased exports to the new world.
Industry and agriculture were simultaneously stimulated and commerce
became the basis of a continually developing economic life. Greece and
Anatolia grew rich from the continuous movement of ships sailing
far afield to exchange refined agricultural and industrial products
for foodstuffs and metals.
Moreover, these ships had been improved by fundamental technical
progress. The ships of the period are well known from numerous represen¬
tations on vases. They were more elongated than in the Geometric period
and rigged with considerable sail and, as from the seventh century, fitted
with anchors. Sailors grew bolder: they travelled at night, were less afraid
of bearing away from the coast and no longer beached their boats during
the four months of the bad season. The science of planning ports developed
at the same time as the science of seamanship. Herodotus (3, 60) called the
sea wall at Samos, two stades long, a technical masterpiece; the channel at
Leucas was dredged when it silted up; and Periander even envisaged
cutting through the Isthmus of Corinth.
New political conditions also favoured the development of Greek com¬
merce. In 677, Sidon was taken by the Assyrians and in 573 Tyre by the
Babylonians. The Greeks took advantage of the misfortunes of the Phoe¬
nicians, until then their principal rivals. But not all the regions of the Greek
world were opened to Mediterranean trade at the same time. At first, the
advantage lay with the Dorian states, notably Crete, Thera and Rhodes,
which marked out the great central Mediterranean route; Sicyon, Corinth
and Megara owed their importance to their position next to the Isthmus;
Aegina held the routes from the Saronic Gulf. Amongst the Ionian cities,
Miletus very rapidly monopolized trade with Propontis and the Black Sea;
the Cyclades and Chalcis in Euboea participated in commercial relations
equally quickly.
However, the centre of gravity shifted at the end of the seventh century.
New outlets opened up in Anatolia, Egypt and the west and Ionian mer¬
chants, particularly those from Miletus, took advantage of them. They
now took over the role of intermediaries between Asia and the Mediter¬
ranean, which the Phoenicians had filled. Ionia grew rich and became the
most prosperous region of the Greek world. This prosperity resulted not
only from a fortunate geographical position: it was the fruit of the initiative
and spirit of adventure of a small nation of bold sailors.
Looking back over the Geometric period, Greece had become almost un¬
recognizable. It was no longer a collection of essentially agricultural and
pastoral cities. There had been a renaissance of large-scale Mediterranean
trade as in the days of the Achaeans. Scarcely exaggerating, it can be said
that the modern world was born with the mercantile economy. Such a
THE EVOLUTION OF THE CITIES I!7
transformation could not occur without the accompaniment of a social

evolution which was at times very brutal.
THE CRISIS OF THE ARISTOCRATIC REGIME
Several concomitant but independent factors led in fact to a clear decrease

in the power of the aristocracy. Mention must first be made of a change in
military technique.
The Appearance of Heavy Infantry and the Navy

A battle in the eighth century was still a cavalry battle. Around 700 and
principally in the Peloponnese the preponderant importance of heavy in¬
fantry came to the fore. Henceforth, the 'man at arms’ par excellence was the
hoplite (this is actually the meaning of the word), often represented on
vases after 675, notably on the Chigi vase (figure 27). He wore a suit of
armour which covered his chest and stomach, and carried a shield and a
spear. Battle was henceforth only possible in close formation. For the
warrior, it was no longer a question of displaying his personal valour in
feats of great prowess but in keeping his place between his two neighbours,
brandishing his spear in his right hand and protecting himself with the
Figure 27 Hoplites marching to battle to the sound of the flute. Chigi vase.
Proto-Corinthian, 650-640 bc
shield held in his left. Battle consisted of the impact between two phalanxes
when the more solid and the more coherent forced the other to yield.
A new ideal replaced the chivalrous ideal of the preceding period: the
soldier’s fundamental virtue no longer lay in reckless bravery, which gave
rise to individual exploits, but rather in a respect for discipline and a
staunch determination to stay in his appointed place in the ranks beside his
comrades whom he supported and who supported him. It developed par¬
ticularly in the gymnasium which appeared at about the same time and
where the common spirit of the combatants was forged.
This tactical change involved important social changes. Aristotle was
already commenting on them in his Politics (1297, b) when he observed that
the replacement of cavalry by infantry presupposed a new preponderance
of the middle class over the aristocracy. Only the wealthy were able to own
and maintain horses; although the cost of the hoplite’s suit of armour was
certainly not negligible, it was nevertheless accessible to a wider range of
citizens.
A comparable evolution took place at sea. Warships appeared towards
the end of the ninth century, differing from merchant ships in their more
slender shape which made greater speed possible. Progress was rapid: the
invention of the ram, which transformed the technique of naval combat; the
superimposition of several rows of oarsmen, which also increased the speed
of the boat and therefore its offensive potential. From the seventh century,
two principal models are distinguishable by the number of oarsmen they
required: penteconters (fifty oarsmen) and triaconters (thirty oarsmen). At
first, boats both with and without bridges were in use, but the second type
later tended to predominate. Between 550 and 525, the trireme appeared,
a long narrow boat, without a bridge, propelled by three rows of superim¬
posed oarsmen (in all, 150 oarsmen). It was an elegant and very rapid
cruiser, possibly the first utilized widely by Polycrates; the Greeks owed
their incontestable mastery of the seas in the following century to the
trireme.
According to Thucydides (1, 13), the new types of vessels were born at
Corinth. The shipyards there enjoyed a particularly good reputation and,
at the end of the seventh century, the Samians placed an order for four
boats with them.
The thetes, that is to say, the least prosperous citizens, had to be called
on to provide the increasingly large numbers of crew and armed foot-
soldiers who were taken aboard. The creation of a navy in the principal
cities of the Greek world therefore had important social consequences.
In this way, hoplites and sailors became the strongest ramparts of the
cities: the middle class and the poor took precedence over the aristocratic
horsemen. But defence of the homeland and participation in political life
were closely linked in the Greek mind. The unavoidable consequence was
the emergence of demands from those classes which had hitherto in prac¬
tice been excluded from power. This occurred at precisely the time when
the social problem was at its most acute.
JI9
The Social Crisis
In the course of the seventh century, the rich grew richer and the poor
poorer. These two correlative phenomena were of extreme gravity in an
aristocratic society, already based on inequality of fortunes. The process
was the same everywhere and seems to have taken the following course:
when harvests were bad, small landowners were obliged to borrow at
usurious rates from their noble neighbours; they were unable to repay and
had to yield their land to cancel their debts; they were therefore reduced
to the status of tenants and cultivated the land, which had been theirs, for
others, unless in the final stage of the cycle they were sold as slaves.
The phenomenon was well-known at Athens where it will be met again
later, the only alternative for many humble folk was to except the condi¬
tion of hektemoroi, that is of‘sixth-parters’ (they gave up five-sixths of the
harvest and only retained one sixth for themselves). But it affected the
whole Greek world and led to the creation of a wretched agricultural prole¬
tariat everywhere. Their principal escape was migration to the towns,
which was very hazardous and where an increasing number of slaves
presented severe competition.
Distant adventure obviously remained another possibility, but this
would not appeal to everyone. Some participated in founding colonies,
others found employment as mercenaries with the rulers of Asia and Egypt,
where those ‘men of bronze’, entirely covered in heavy armour, who fought
so valiantly, were held in high esteem.
The genius of a poet has left us an atrocious picture of a man who pos¬
sessed nothing, driven from pillar to post by poverty: Pindar (Pythians 2,
99) says of Archilochus that he ‘battened on bitter abuse of his foes’.
Archilochus’ origins were certainly not proletarian; he even seems to have
belonged to a great family from Paros. But after their downfall as a result
of unknown causes, his existence must have been much the same as that of
a number of his contemporaries. He left Paros for Thasos and found only
disappointment on the island, where he amusingly says ‘the misery of all
Greece gathered’ (fragment 52). This eternal wanderer also seems to have
tried his luck at Siris (in Magna Graecia) and in Euboea. The only course
open to him was to hire himself out as a mercenary. His spear henceforth
remained his sole source of livelihood. ‘For me my spear is kneaded bread;
wine from the Thracian land my spear is; and to drink it, I lie with spear in
hand’ (fragment 2). He died in battle, in an obscure encounter between
Parians and Naxians.
There is no more conspicuous phenomenon than the social crisis in the
seventh century and none which is more difficult to explain. An attempt
has been made to explain it by the agrarian revolution when the cultiva¬
tion of shrubs replaced that of cereals almost everywhere. Only the wealthy
could afford to make this profitable conversion and wait the ten or so years
necessary before the plantations of olive trees and vines began to yield. The
poor needed an annual harvest and were therefore limited to sowing corn
or barley, which generally did not thrive. Solely in terms of yield, inde¬
pendently of all question of area and fertility - which must act in favour of
the wealthy - large landowners thus received a good yield and small
landowners a poor one.
Other sources refer to the heavy competition that colonial grain offered
to the grain hard-won from the scant soil of Greece: the small peasant,
doomed to cultivate cereals, drew even less profit, as corn from Pontus or
the west was thrown on the market at low prices.
However, although these factors are in no way negligible, they do not
really explain the ruin of the small landowner, which was already coming
to pass before they could have come into play. They consecrated his ruin,
they did not provoke it. Hesiod, in Works and Days (394 ff.) already men¬
tions the debts of the peasant (at a time when a monetary economy did not
exist, loans were of course made in kind). The same example from Hesiod
clearly shows that the new inheritance law which divided the land amongst
the sons was at the bottom of the whole process. The property decreased in
area with every generation. The time came - and it can be fairly exactly
dated at the beginning of the seventh century - when the process reached
a critical point: successive divisions reduced the portions to such an extent
that they were not sufficient to feed a family.
This was the time when the small landowners had recourse to loans. The
practice had certainly been pursued since time immemorial but it now be¬
came general as the sole solution in case of hardship. It was a deplorable
solution which ineluctably resulted in the dispossession of the debtor, fol¬
lowed by his reduction to the status of agricultural labourer if not of
slave. The appearance of coinage towards the end of the century aggra¬
vated the situation still further by making the problem of debts more
acute, but it was not, whatever has been said, the root of a much earlier
evil.
Land was thus concentrated in the hands of an oligarchy which became
wealthier and wealthier, and therefore more and more powerful. On the
other side, the demos were growing poorer just at the time when the new
part they were taking in the defence of the city brought them to a state of
political awareness. This gave rise to a crisis of exacerbated violence which
took the form of the most violent hatred and the appearance of an extremist
programme almost everywhere. The poor claimed the abolition of debts
and the division of the land; these would be the double demands of the
poor provoked beyond endurance by poverty until well into the Hellenistic
period in Greece.
One of the most striking phenomena of the period was the birth of a
middle class, enriched by commerce and industry, placed between the
humble folk and the aristocracy. The nobility and the new bourgeoisie cer¬
tainly established close relations in several cities. Many nobles showed no
hesitation about regilding their coats of arms, and Theognis indignantly
proclaimed: ‘But in marriage, not our noblest now refuses, if gold enough
goes with her, the base child of the base. Now an ignoble lover by never a
girl is dreaded, so he be rich — the wealthy, and not the good, must speed.
Money it is, men worship. The honourable have wedded the mean, and the
mean the noble. Wealth has confounded breed’ (185 ff.). Above all the
aristocracy in the great commercial cities of Ionia was often intelligent
enough to allow the bourgeoisie to participate in the exercise of power. But
this was not always the case and furthermore, the development of industry
and commerce had given birth not only to a wealthy bourgeoisie but also
to a middle class of artisans and shopkeepers whose status and interests
were fairly similar to the peasants’. In the face of an egoistic and en¬
croaching oligarchy, they claimed participation in government and in
the promulgation of laws.
The First Legislators

Laws were transmitted orally in the great families, and their heads ren¬
dered justice arbitrarily and corruptly. Hesiod had already complained of
‘crooked judgements’ (Works and Days, 221), and this state of affairs could
only deteriorate with the development of the social crisis. One of the most
forceful claims the discontented made was for the promulgation of laws
which would be valid for everyone without distinction. Several cities em¬
barked on this path of reform, appointing legislators to draw up codes. The
names by which these legislators were known varied from town to town:
thesmothetai at Athens, aisymnetai in Asia. They were chosen with the agree¬
ment of the different social classes, sometimes for life, generally for a deter¬
mined period, and possessed absolute power which enabled Aristotle to call
their office ‘an elective tyranny’ (Politics, 3, 14, 5).
The first legislators appeared in the colonial cities of the west where the
strength of tradition was obviously least: Zaleucus at Epizephyrian Locri
(about 660) and Charondas at Catana (a generation later). Neither their
laws nor those of Pheidon at Argos and Draco at Athens slightly later, are
well known. There is more information available on their successors at the
beginning of the sixth century: Solon - whom we will meet again when we
consider Athens - and Pittacus of Mytilene. This latter was elected for ten
years to put an end to the civil disorder which followed the death of the
tyrant Melanchros. He acted very firmly and did not hesitate to exile a
whole coterie, including the poet Alcaeus who pursued him with vengeful
and unjust verse: ‘With one voice they have set up the base-born Pittacus
to be tyrant of their spiritless and ill-starred country, shouting his praise by
their thousands’ (fragment 160).
It is therefore difficult to reduce the work of the legislators to a single
unity; it was spread over a century, and their task was carried out in cities
at very different stages of evolution. Nevertheless, it is possible to distin¬
guish certain general characteristics which clearly illuminate the crucial
problems of the period. The fundamental point concerned the administra¬
tion of justice. It was henceforth administered according to written laws
and withdrawn from the arbitrary control of the aristocrats. Veritable
juries were sometimes set up: Charondas imposed a fine, varying with for¬
tune, on the citizens who refused to judge; Solon created the popular tri¬
bunal of Heliaea. Zaleucus provided for an appeal before the assembly of
the Thousand: magistrate and plaintiff appeared with ropes round their
necks and the loser was hung at once - and all this was done to ensure
respect for justice.
Particular attention was paid to legislation concerning cases of murder.
This marks a turning point in the history of law; hitherto, only the private
vendetta of families had been in force, and this often brought with it a
chain reaction in a series of new murders. Henceforth the state intervened,
with the twofold motive of avoiding useless bloodshed and the spread of the
contamination to the whole city. As a result, extremely severe punishments
were imposed to suppress murder and violence: Zaleucus promulgated the
lex talionis, an eye for an eye; Draco is known in history for the sternness of
his legislation.
The problem of property seems to have been high on the agenda in the
evolution of civil law. But there was a perceptible contrast between the
legislators of the seventh and sixth centuries. Zaleucus prohibited the alie¬
nation of the plot of land (cleros), possession of which ensured the title of
citizen. He did away with all intermediaries between producer and con¬
sumer; Charondas permitted no legal action for sale on credit. In fact,
society had still barely broken away from a state of inalienable family
property, and commerce had not yet really developed. Solon, on the other
hand, permitted the alienation of the cleros in certain specified cases, and
encouraged citizens to turn to trade. His contemporary, Pittacus, regulated
contracts. Thus, shortly after the birth of large-scale commerce, the state
intervened and imposed its authority in this new field.
The authority of the state was in fact being confirmed in all fields simul¬
taneously - administration of justice, criminal law, civil law - to the detri¬
ment of the interests of the aristocracy and traditional prejudices. The
work of the great legislators marked a significant date in the history of law
and ensured the first triumph of the demos over the nobles. The task still
remained of fixing the rights of the individual in relation to the state. Al¬
though Draco was not entirely ignorant of this concept it was generally
necessary to wait until the fifth century to see it translated into fact.
THE TYRANTS
The reforms which the legislators attempted most frequently represented a

compromise between the conservative desires of the aristocrats and the
claims of the people. But they were powerless to put an end to the social
crisis and this was sometimes provisionally solved by the violent establish¬
ment of the power of a single person, a regime which the Greeks called
tyranny.
The Establishment of Tyranny

The man who seized power and retained it by force was distinguished from
the king, whose authority was legitimate because it was hereditary, and
from the legislator who ruled with the consent of the majority of citizens.
In all cities where this political regime was adopted in the seventh and
sixth centuries, its leader was designated by a new name, 'tyrant’.
The origins of the word are debatable. It is not Greek, that much is cer¬
tain. It seems to have been borrowed from Lydian, as Euphorion suggested:
it is first found in Archilochus in reference to the king of Lydia, Gyges, who
was a usurper like the tyrants. Its relationship to the Etruscan turan (lord
or lady) as well as to proper names of Etruscan origin (King Turnus, the
goddess Juturna) has also been stressed. But the Etruscans were Anato¬
lians. Although it has recently been denied (Mazzarino), both the word
and the reality it described originated in Asia Minor. It must be noted that
for a long time it did not have the pejorative meaning now given it, and
which it has retained since the fourth century in the texts of political
thinkers influenced by the new and much more violent and unrestrained
form of tyranny, appearing at the beginning of that century.
This political phenomenon was established in three very distinct regions
of the Greek world. The first of these was Anatolia and the islands. Tyranny
appeared in the seventh century, undoubtedly encouraged by the example
of nearby Lydia, and then by the support and matrimonial alliances of the
Lydian kings, the Mermnadae. The names of many tyrants are known but
not a great deal is known about them. Three, however, deserve to be
mentioned. Thrasybulus, who assumed power at Miletus at the end of the
seventh century after having held office as prytanis, maintained good rela¬
tions with Periander of Corinth and the sovereign of Lydia, Alyattes.
Lygdamis practised tyranny at Naxos for some twenty years (545 to 524
approximately). The most famous was Polycrates of Samos, the hero of
manifold anecdotes, who was able to make his homeland a leading power
in his ten years or so of government (532-22).
The second area was in the vicinity of the Isthmus of Corinth. At Sicyon,
Orthagoras seized power in 655 and his dynasty lasted a century. At
Corinth, Cypselus and his descendants established a particularly note¬
worthy tyranny which survived for a slightly shorter period (c. 657-584).
Procles of Epidaurus and Theagenes of Megara both belonged to the end
of the seventh century. Finally, the infection of tyranny reached Athens,
but more slowly, with Pisistratus and the Pisistratids (561-10).
The regime reached the Greek west later. The first tyrants were Panaitios
of Leontini (at the end of the seventh century) and Phalaris of Agrigentum
(565-49?) who appears in legend as a monster of cruelty, roasting his
enemies alive in a bronze bull. A new wave of tyrants took power at the
very end of the sixth century, but the most famous names only appeared in
the first decades of the fifth: Deinomenes of Syracuse, Gelon and Hieron.
One definite fact therefore emerges: the tyrannical regime only occurred
in cities which were highly evolved socially, economically and politically.

Thucydides (i, 13) emphasized the influence of this factor: ‘As Hellas
grew more powerful and the acquisition of wealth became more and more
rapid, the revenues of her cities increased, and in most of them tyrannies
were established.5 Tyranny supplanted aristocracy which was dominant
everywhere. The ambitious man - much more often an aristocrat than an
adventurer - who aspired to personal power, had to be able to depend on a
rich and discontented middle class. Even more, he had to be able to count
on the support of a demos which had been provoked beyond endurance by
the new insolence of the aristocrats, grown fat on the poverty of the poor.
All in all, the existence of a serious social crisis was the fundamental cause
of the emergence of tyranny.
Other forces which varied greatly according to place came into play: at
Argos, the new importance of the hoplites would have made it possible for
Pheidon, a king whom Herodotus and Aristotle regarded as a tyrant, to
assume absolute power; in the northern Peloponnese, tyranny took advan¬
tage of the antagonism between the Dorian aristocracy and the enslaved
pre-Dorian populations; in the west, the menacing presence of the bar¬
barians at the gates of the Greek cities must have impressed the need for a
strong government; in the east, after the Persian conquest, the tyrants were
often only governors under the king’s command.
However, it is no less true that tyranny was fundamentally produced by
the claims of the new middle class, the poverty of the people and the
effrontery of individuals thirsting for power and determined to succeed at
all costs.
Political and Social Life under the Tyrants

A general picture of Archaic tyranny would involve a great many arbitrary
judgements. However, certain features stand out, independent of people,
places or time.
The tyrant did not change the established constitution. The old magis-
tratures continued to be served, primarily by men devoted to him. The
council and the assembly (where it existed) ratified the new policy. But
this was only a facade: all power was in the hands of the tyrant, who gener¬
ally lived in the citadel and was accompanied by a bodyguard — to the
thinkers of the fourth century, this seemed the most striking external mani¬
festation of tyranny. Numerous anecdotes stress the arbitrariness and
violence of the tyrants: for example, Periander, who involuntarily caused
the death of his wife and was at odds with his mother and his sons, provided
moralists with a good illustration of the misfortunes engendered by excess.
A critical approach to all this material is necessary. Most of these tyrants
were too mindful of their own interests to indulge in useless excesses which
would have made their positions even more dangerous.
The different factions which had rent the cities before the tyrant’s acces¬
sion to power were affected in very different ways by the new regime. The
!25
aristocracy as a whole was persecuted. The parable of the ears of corn as
Thrasybulus taught it to Periander is significant in this context: ‘it is
necessary to cut the corn which grows too high’ - that is to say, get rid of all
the aristocrats who were dangerous because of their personalities. At
Megara, Theagenes gained the people’s sympathy by a symbolic action:
he massacred the rich flocks of the oligarchs when they were gathered at a
watering place. At Corinth, Cypselus confiscated the nobles’ lands for
distribution to the people. There were of course cases of individual sup¬
porters, such as the Alcmaeonids or the Cimonids temporarily at Athens
at the time of the Pisistratids. But the majority of oligarchs were ruined and
many had to go into exile.
There is no better evidence of the wild hatred the aristocrats felt towards
the tyranny than the Elegies of Theognis of Megara: *... but when it pleases
the bad to do the works of pride and corrupt the common folk and give
judgement for the unrighteous for the sake of private gain and power,
then expect not that city to be long quiet, for all she be now in great tran¬
quillity, ay, then when these things become dear to the bad - to wit, gains
that bring with them public ill. For of such come discords and internecine
slaughter, and of such come tyrants; . . .’ (line 43 ff.).
The poverty of the people was to some extent alleviated. Theognis fran¬
tically exclaimed (line 54 ff.): men ‘who of old knew neither judgements
nor laws but wore goatskins to pieces about their sides and had their pasture
like deer without this city: and now they be good men . . . and they that
were high be now of low estate. Who can bear this sight ?’ Large building
works were undertaken in the towns and these provided employment; the
resumption of colonial expansion, notably at Corinth with the Cypselids,
often made it possible for the most poverty-stricken members of the
proletariat to seek their fortune elsewhere.
The new leaders showed even more solicitude towards the peasants:
confiscated lands were redistributed amongst them at Corinth; at Athens,
Pisistratus made loans to small landowners so that they could convert their
lands to vineyard or olive groves. However, the country folk could still not
have too great pretensions. The tyrants did not like to see them in the
towns: Periander forbade them to go there; Pisistratus established itinerant
judges so that litigants should not have to appear at Athens.
In spite of everything, tyranny often made the poverty of the simple
people more tolerable, notably by making the existence of the small
landowner less precarious and less dependent on the nobility.
Is it possible to advance a step further and present tyranny on Dorian
soil as the revenge of the enslaved pre-Dorians? Certain signs seem to point
to this possibility. For example, Cleisthenes deprived the Argive hero
Adrastus of his cult in favour of the Theban Melanippus and the god
Dionysus, whose agrarian liturgies were dear to the hearts of the people.
He substituted humorous soubriquets (Pig-men, Swine-men, Ass-men) for
the traditional names of the Dorian tribes (Hylleis, Dymanes, Pamphyli)
and baptised his own tribe, the non-Dorians, Rulers of the People.
Actually, there do not seem to have been any measures taken to upset the
social order based on the pre-eminence of the Dorian holders of plots of
land (cleroi): at Corinth, the tyrants did not emancipate the Perioikoi; at
Megara, Theagenes certainly did not reverse the established order or there
would have been some direct allusion to it in Theognis; at Sicyon, one type
of serf, the catonacophoroi (wearers of smocks), were actually driven from the
town.
Prestige Policies of the Tyrants

The tyrants, subject to the latent hostility of the fallen aristocrats, all tried
to strengthen their authority by a policy of prestige. At first this was marked
in the cities by numerous brilliant building works, which had the added
advantage of providing employment for the working classes. W orks of public
utility figured largely here: Periander had a road (the diolkos) laid out
across the Isthmus of Corinth to facilitate the overland transport of boats
from one sea to the other; Theagenes and Pisistratus built aqueducts; they
were imitated by Polycrates, whose engineers constructed a tunnel-like
system of canals which was a technical marvel. Pisistratus also devised a
monumental fountain with nine mouths, the Enneakrounos, which rivalled
the fountains at Corinth.
But they principally devoted their attention to religious buildings. They
built large temples in their own countries to display their ostentatious
piety: Polycrates built the Heraeum and Pisistratus began the Olympieum.
They populated the pan-Hellenic sanctuaries (where they enjoyed racing -
especially Cleisthenes) with their ex-votos. At Olympia, Cypselus offered a
casket sculptured in cedar wood, incrusted with ivory and gold - pilgrims
were still admiring it in Pausanias’ time; at Delphi and Olympia, the trea¬
suries of Sicyon, Corinth and Megara were certainly their work (as is
proved by the inscription on the treasury of Sicyon at Olympia, dedicated
by the Orthagorid, Myron I: ‘Myron and the people of Sicyon’).
In fact, religion took first place in their considerations, or more exactly
in their propaganda. Periander and Pisistratus were enthusiastic adherents
of the popular cult of Dionysus and enthroned him at Corinth and Athens.
They established brilliant festivals, with the dual effect of providing an
occasion for foreigners to admire the luxury of their cities and of lulling the
common people with pious distractions. Periander reorganized the Isth¬
mian Games with ceremony; Cleisthenes founded the games at Sicyon in
honour of Pythian Apollo; Pisistratus enhanced the brilliance of the
Panathenaea and created the Great Dionysia. More than anything else,
they were anxious for the respect which support from the oracle of Delphi
would give them: the usurper Cypselus had himself recognized as king
(basileus) by the Pythia; Cleisthenes actively defended the Amphictyonies
in the holy war. This did not prevent Apollo from disowning them with
contemptuous oracles after their fall, even during their lifetime.
They also liked to gather artists and poets around them. Cleisthenes
summoned two famous sculptors, Dipoenus and Scyllis, from Crete. The
link between the ultimate development of lyricism and tyranny is not for¬
tuitous. Their courts readily became coteries where poets were welcome —
provided they sung of their glory; Arion was Periander’s protege; the
Pisistratids snatched Anacreon away from Polycrates; they attracted
Simonides and established the first compilation of the Homeric poems.
However much it may have been in their own interests, the impetus that
the tyrants gave to spiritual life must not be forgotten.
There was another means of assuring their prestige in the complex world
of the city-states, active diplomacy. In general, the tyrants were certainly
not belligerent, with the exception of Polycrates of Samos and the Sicilian
tyrants. They could not make too heavy demands on their citizens who
already had to make considerable contributions (Cypselus taxed his sub¬
jects to the extent of one-tenth of their income; Pisistratus one-fifth) and it
would have been dangerous to arm them. But, in various ways, they en¬
couraged colonial expansion — the Cypselids on a large scale, Pisistratus
more modestly - along the route to the straits, which was of vital
importance for supplies to Athens.
Above all, they tried to secure ties by marriages with the most famous
Greek or foreign families; Periander was the son-in-law of Procles,
tyrant of Epidaurus, whose own father-in-law was king of Orchomenus;
Theagenes married his daughter to the Athenian, Cylon; Cleisthenes in¬
vited the most noble suitors in all Greece to court his daughter Agariste,
who married Megacles, from the glorious Athenian family of Alcmaeonids;
the last of the Cypselids, Psammetichus, was born - as his name confirms -
of an Egyptian princess; Melas of Ephesus took for wife a daughter of
Alyattes of Lydia. The tyrants were also adept at forming useful friend¬
ships, witness for example Periander, who was allied with Thrasybulus and
was the friend of Athens, Lydia and Egypt. Above all, they supported one
another, conscious that tyranny formed a bloc which would yield every¬
where if it were breached in one place; Theagenes supported his son-in-law
Cylon in his unsuccessful attempt to seize Athens; Pisistratus encouraged
Lygdamis’ aspirations to tyranny, and he, in his turn, aided Polycrates to
take power. There was undoubtedly solidarity amongst tyrants in the
divided world of Greece.
The Fall of Tyranny

In the very nature of things, tyranny tried to become hereditary and in
several cities succeeded. But the qualities of vigour and audacity which
made the good tyrant were not correspondingly hereditary. Thus tyranny
was a phenomenon fairly limited in its duration. The Orthagorids, who
remained in power for a century, were an exception. Tyranny had disap¬
peared from the towns of the Isthmus by 550. At Athens and in Asia, it
lasted slightly longer. Practically in the west alone - and then because of
the special conditions represented by the presence of the Carthaginian
enemy - it continued to exist well into the Classical period - until about
465-
The tyrant was most frequently overthrown without violence: he was
rarely assassinated. In most cases he had to go into exile, under pressure of
an insurrection which was never caused by the demos. Thucydides empha¬
sized the role of Sparta in the eviction of tyranny. It is true that this great
aristocratic city had very little love for the tyrants and sometimes led expe¬
ditions to dislodge them - at Sicyon, Naxos and Athens, for example. But
Sparta’s influence must not be exaggerated in explaining a movement
which reached all the cities governed by tyrants. In actual fact, the hatreds
stirred up by the regime often played a determining part.
At a more general level, tyranny contained the essence of its own down¬
fall to the extent that its reforms contributed to solving the social crisis
which had given it birth. All citizens therefore wanted to return to regular
government where the exercise of power was not limited to a single man.
It would be satisfying to know precisely what regimes followed the evic¬
tion of the tyrants, but the diversity of solutions debars, as is so frequently
the case in the Greek world, any general conclusion. In most cases, the
aristocracy regained hegemony, all the more easily as the tyrants had not
tried to break down the system of landed property. This was the case in
Sicily, after the fall of the first tyrants (end of seventh or beginning of sixth
centuries) and at Epidaurus, where the magistrates (artynoi - directors)
were chosen from a council limited to 160 members.
At Corinth, on the other hand, the aristocracy seems to have learned its
lesson from the crisis: the Bacchiadae did not return to power and a moder¬
ate oligarchy was established, where wealth counted equally with birth -
one might call it a timocracy. At Megara, tyranny was followed by aristo¬
cracy and then in turn by a democracy which decreed at least a partial
remittance of debts. At Miletus, the fall of the first tyrants was followed by
a period of civil dissension between two factions, rich and poor: the
Ploutis and the Cheiromacha (literally: the man who has only his hands
for weapons). Finally, at Athens - a special case because of all its previous
evolution - the oligarchy which Sparta re-established was unable to retain
power and Cleisthenes forced the state to take decisive steps towards
democracy.
It is a delicate and risky undertaking to pronounce any judgement on
this tyranny. The ancient authors were often blinded by the misleading
experiences of later tyrannies and always emphasized the tyrant’s excesses
and moral failings. Their sole guiding principle politically was certainly
egoism and desire for power; but forced to struggle against the ancestral
privileges of the aristocracy, they contributed to loosening the suffocating
pressure it exercised on the state as well as on the lower classes. In the strong
words of J. Burckhardt, tyranny was often ‘an anticipated democracy’. The
very active impetus that the tyrants gave to arts and letters must also not
be forgotten. Although they, like the nobles, were solely motivated by
personal interest, they played a fortunate and fundamental part in the
evolution of the cities; and the judgement of posterity, which only remem¬
bered the tyrannicides, contains some elements of injustice.
According to Aristotle, the normal evolution of the city constituted a
transition from monarchy to aristocracy, then to tyranny and finally to
democracy. This scheme, which is on the whole valid, does not take enough
account of the diversity of special cases — and the super-abundance of these
latter was a characteristic of the Greek Archaic period. In fact, several
cities and not the least important ones (Sparta and Aegina, for example,
even within the limited sphere of Greece proper) did not experience
tyranny. Very few, at the end of the sixth century, gave the demos its share
in public affairs: Chios and Athens are almost alone in this respect. An
assembly existed at Chios, in the second quarter of the sixth century, which
elected a council of fifty members per tribe, and magistrates (demarchoi):
justice was administered in accordance with democratic principles. At
Athens, democracy was imposed more slowly in the course of the century,
from Solon to Cleisthenes. Everywhere else, intransigent or moderate
aristocracy remained in power.
An external event, outside the realm of thepoleis, was needed to complete
the liberation of the Greek world from the aristocratic structures of the
Archaic period. The Persian wars broughts Athens, the most advanced
state, politically and socially to the fore.
The Ancient World:
Anatolia and Greece Proper
The greatest diversity existed everywhere in the Archaic Greek world.

Regional study is absolutely essential to avoid easy and excessive general¬
izations. A distinction must first be made between lands which the Greeks
had occupied for a long time and those which they conquered after the
eighth century. The first group consisted of two large geographic land-
masses : Greece proper, where hellenization began around 1950, and, facing
it, the coastal fringe of Anatolia, which was finally occupied by the
migrations in the latter part of the second millennium.
In both Asian and European Greece, the political unit was very gener¬
ally the city. Only the backward states of northern Greece were slow to
move away from the idea of people (ethnos) towards that of city (polis).
Moreover, these cities only rarely covered very extensive territory, although
this was the case with Sparta (which included Laconia and Messenia) and
Athens, which corresponded to the whole of Attica. Most frequently, one
region, such as Boeotia or Achaea, comprised several cities, limited in size,
and competitive by their very nature.
This political fragmentation involved serious disadvantages to the extent
that it engendered an endemic state of war and, notably in Asia, weakened
the Greeks in respect of the barbarians, who were organized in strong and
centralized kingdoms. Attempts at unification which followed two different
lines were made during the Archaic period and these must therefore not be
neglected.
Religion could be the first unifying factor. Amphictyonies were orga¬
nized around some of the sanctuaries. The name itself (literally: dwellers
round about) suggests a geographical grouping, but ethnic considerations
and even commercial interests also came into play.
The Ionian dodecapolis formed an amphictyony which appears to have
been based on both ethnic and regional factors. The Pylaio-Delphic
amphictyony was originally the assembly of the neighbouring peoples of
Thermopylae who jointly administered the sanctuary of Anthela; its an¬
nexation of Delphi opened vaster horizons and it admitted peoples from
further afield, Ionians from Athens or Dorians from the Peloponnese. This
was the only amphictyony to display - with obvious limitations which will
THE ANCIENT WORLD
131
be mentioned later - a pan-Hellenic inclination. The amphictyony of
Calauria grouped cities of varied populations and in remote areas but
which wei e united by identical economic interests. Their history is not well
known, but it was always one of defeat: they failed in the task of unification
which should, it appears, have been theirs.
A second unifying factor was the population. Greece was divided into a
number of regions — this vague word has to be used, since the term ‘pro¬
vince is excluded — which had an ethnic unity and comprised a multi¬
plicity of cities: thus Thebans, Tanagraeans, and Orchomeneans felt that
they weie Boeotians before they were Greeks. In the Archaic period, con-
fedei ations (koina) appeared in most of these regions. Their federal orga¬
nization is most frequently unknown, except in Thessaly where the broad
outline can be discerned. In any case, it remained loose and lacked internal
cohesion, as the cities were fundamentally reluctant to renounce their
autonomy and to alienate their rights, even in favour of wider groupings
which would have made them better able to defend themselves on the
international plane. One has only to look at the mistrust aroused in
Boeotia by the Boeotian koinon, where Thebes clearly enjoyed hegemony.
These two types of supra-state organization were free, at least in prin¬
ciple. They must be carefully distinguished from attempts by powerful and
unified states to secure an empire by force. The clearest example of this
was Sparta which, in the sixth century, gathered most of the states of the
Peloponnese around itself in a symmachia (alliance). This was certainly a
voluntary alliance, because it was sanctioned by a treaty between Sparta
and each participant, but it allowed the dominant city to direct foreign
policy and to conduct military operations without restraint. At the end of
the sixth century, Athens, as a result of its imperialist ambitions, provided
another example of this phenomenon: the settlement of military colonies
(cleruchies) in certain privileged points heralded its empire of the following
century.
THE ISLANDS OF THE AEGEAN AND ANATOLIA
Up to about 550, the world of the Aegean archipelago and Anatolia ex¬
perienced a rapid and brilliant development which made it able to com¬
pete successfully with Greece proper. Two historical factors explain its
material prosperity and spiritual brilliance: the Dorian invasions had
scarcely touched it except with their final waves; the proximity of the
oriental states which were heirs to an ancient civilization, made valuable
contacts possible. Although the islands had a relatively homogeneous Greek
population, pre-Hellenes, Asians, Orientals and Greeks mingled in Asia
Minor. Herodotus (1, 146) points out that considerable contingents of
Abantes, Minyans, Cadmeians, Dryopes, Phocians, Molossians, Pelasgians
and Dorians had entered the ranks of the Ionians and that many had
married Carians.
Geographic conditions also played a determining role. In Asia, the

Greeks occupied the coast which often had excellent ports at the mouths of
river valleys, so that it was possible to penetrate very deeply into the inter¬
ior (Maeander, Cayster, Hermus, Caicus). Together with the Phoenicians
further south, they therefore set up as natural and indispensable inter¬
mediaries between the prosperous world of ancient Asia and the Mediter¬
ranean world which had just been considerably extended westwards by
colonization. The islands were in an equally favourable geographic posi¬
tion : Cyprus points towards Syro-Phoenicia in two places, notably nearby
Ugarit, and at one point towards Crete and Greece; the Cyclades and
Sporades, remnants of a lost continent, were like stepping stones linking the
two shores inhabited by Greeks.
Cyclades and Sporades

Although the population of the small Aegean islands varied (Ionian in the
north, Dorian in the south) they possessed similar thin soil which was
primarily suitable for vines and olive trees. Only Thera was prosperous
agriculturally, because its soil was fertile as a result of volcanic decomposi¬
tion. Richer than the others, its civilization developed precociously. This is
shown by the introduction of Phoenician writing at an early date, the crea¬
tion of original ceramics, and its participation in the founding of Cyrene.
Some islands possessed natural resources: silver at Siphnos, marble at
Paros and Naxos. All of them engaged in fishing and commerce. Life there
was poor - as is proved by the example of Archilochus - but they were not
particularly attracted by the idea of colonization.
In the absence of documents it would be very difficult to write a history
of the Cyclades and Sporades. Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades and one
of the nearest to the coast, is the only one where the broad outlines can be
described. Marble abounded, much coarser in grain than that of its neigh¬
bour Paros. Vines prospered and Dionysus was particularly worshipped:
his marriage to Ariadne, one of the most ancient episodes in his mythology,
is located there. From 700 to 550, the island exercised a positive hegemony
over the Cyclades, which the marvellous ex votos at Delos illustrate. It
might even have participated in the founding of Naxos in Sicily by the
Chalcidians. The proud sphinxes on their high column - undoubtedly the
coat of arms of the town - that it offered to Apollo, both at Delos and
Delphi, point to the fact that its influence was considerable. It made a late
experiment with tyranny, with the adventurous Lygdamis; his overthrow
by the Spartans was followed by bitter civil wars when the ‘fat ones’ of the
aristocracy and the democrats were each victorious in turn. On the eve of
the Median wars, it was, according to Herodotus (5, 31) ‘a fine and fertile
island, rich both in treasures and slaves’.
Tiny, rocky Delos in the centre of the archipelago was in a unique position
in that it was the cradle of the Letoids. After Apollo had been finally in¬
stalled in about 1000, the hieron experienced a continuous development
Figure 28 Delos about 500 bc (for the chronology of the buildings see table on p. 134-135)
and from the beginnings of the Archaic period welcomed an unending flow
of new offerings (figure 28). At first, Naxos was incontestably pre-eminent,
but after the sixth century, Athens was only too happy to remember its
Ionian origins to suit the needs of its policy and take an interest in the holy
island. Pisistratus established a sort of protectorate over it and had the
island purified by transporting to neighbouring Rheneia the bones from
all the tombs that could be found. In fact during the Archaic period, Delos
was the common sanctuary of insular Ionians. They gathered there for
brilliant panegyries which are already described in the Homeric Hymn to
Apollo (lines 145 ff.) in about 700:
. . . yet in Delos, Phoebus, do you most delight your heart; for there the long
robed Ionians gather in your honour with their children and shy wives: mindful,
they delight you with boxing and dancing and song, so often as they hold their
gathering. A man would say that they were deathless and unaging if he should
then come upon the Ionians so met together. For he would see the graces of
them all, and would be pleased in heart gazing at the men and well-girded
women with their swift ships and great wealth.
The position of the Cyclades explains their role in the renaissance of

Hellenism. Their schools of sculptors, encouraged by the presence of
marble quarries, rapidly became among the most famous in the Greek
world. Ex votos from all the islands flowed to Delos, an open-air museum,
and specialists have no difficulty in distinguishing them from one another.
The Siphnians, rich from working their mines, even offered the god of
Delphi a treasury in a fussy over-heavy style. As a general rule, however,
Ionian art, happily tempered by the island spirit, exercised a strong
influence there.
Lyric poetry was also not neglected. Paros gave birth to the bitter
Archilochus, Ceos to amiable Simonides and his nephew Bacchylides. And
Pherecydes, author of an Orphic Theogony in prose, was born on Syros.
Chronology of the Buildings at Delos

(see figure 28)
Mycenaean period First Artemisium; temple T (plin-

thinos oikos); tombs (theke and sema)
of the Hyperborean Virgins
About 700 New Artemisium; temple G
7°°-55° Naxian preponderance in the sanc¬
tuary
550-500 Athenian preponderance. Letoon;
completion of the first temple of
Apollo (porinos naos); treasuries; civic
buildings (Bouleuterion and Ecclesi-
asterium)
THE ANCIENT WORLD
*35
Mainly between 700 and 550 Naxos played a leading role as can be seen
from Naxian consecrations discovered during French excavations:
Geometric period Pre-oikos on the site of the future oikos

of the Naxians, perhaps already a
Naxian consecration
650 Artemis of Nicandra, one of the old¬
est Greek statues
End of the seventh century Kouros dedicated by Euthycartides
End of seventh, and sixth Several Kouroi and Korai
centuries Colossos of the Naxians; construc¬
tion of the terrace of lions, leading to
the sanctuary of Leto; oikos of the
Naxians, building lopsided in design
570 Addition of a porch to the oikos
550-40 Temple of Apollo begun (porinos
naos) which would be completed by
Pisistratus; portico of the Naxians
540-35 Sphinx
Cyprus, the Southern Coast of Anatolia and Northern Syria

The Greeks had been settled in Cyprus since the Achaean period, but they
had not been able to prevent the Phoenicians from conquering the whole
Figure 29
Reconstruction of a
warehouse of Al-Mina
south coast. Their cities continued to be governed by kings and some or

these dynasties are known: the Teucrids at Salamis, the Cinyrads at
Paphos. The kings had to submit to Assyria (Assurbanipal made them pay
tribute and undertake forced labour in his capital). Then, after the fall of
Nineveh (612), they fell victim to Egypt.
The memory of the Mycenaean period remained alive on the island
which the Dorians had spared. In about the ninth century, a new writing
appeared, the classical Cypriot syllabary, derived from the old Cypriot
linear of the second millennium. It remained in use until the third century
bc. However, Phoenician influence (it was very close both on the island
and on the Asiatic coast) was considerable in the religious sphere: the birth
of Aphrodite (the Hellenic version of the Phoenician Astarte) was located
on Paphos.
On the southern coast of Anatolia (Lycia, Pamphylia, Cilicia), the -
Greeks had fallen back somewhat since the Mycenaean period. Despite
the arrival of numerous immigrants, they no longer held more than a few
isolated cities, enclaves in a barbarian land, which were generally subject
to the Assyrian yoke: Phaselis (one of the strongest and with a place in the
Hellenium of Naucratis), Perga, Side, Aspendus and Celenderis.
Further south, the Greeks possessed a settlement at Al-Mina, at the
mouth of the Orontes, which gave access to the Fertile Crescent by Aleppo
and Apamea. The Achaeans had already settled there at the end of the
Late Hellenic period; about 800, Greeks from the Cyclades founded the
city of Posideium there. Excavations have revealed considerable ware¬
houses for ceramics which throw light on the importance of trade and its
development (figure 29):
800-700 Ceramics from the Cyclades (and some from Rhodes)

700-580 Cypriot and Rhodian ceramics. From 650, clear pre¬
dominance of Rhodian ceramics. A few proto-
Corinthian and Corinthian vases until 600.
580-520 Break (accidental?)
520-430 Attic ceramics
Thus Greeks - not always the same ones - did not stop coming to Al-
Mina during the whole of the Archaic period to exchange their vases for
oriental products, without using Cypriot or Phoenician intermediaries.
This was their most southerly emporion; no Hellenic objects have been
discovered in Phoenicia.
Dorian Asia
Both continental and insular, Dorian Asia essentially comprised the
hexapolis (see page 91) which celebrated the cults of Apollo, Poseidon and
the Muses on Cape Triopium. The principal products, wine (Cos) and
THE ANCIENT WORLD
J37
ceramics (Rhodes, Cos, Cnidos) combined with products from the east,
formed a basis for considerable trade. Rhodes, which actively participated
in colonization, traded with Crete, Cyrene and the west — as is shown by the
Chronicles of the temple of Lindus — and was already preparing for the role
of intermediary it would play in the Hellenistic period. Rhodes, Cnidos
and Halicarnassus were represented on the Hellenium of Naucratis. In
short, this was a prosperous region but one which made little contribution
to Hellenism.
It is difficult to cite any names in the world of letters except perhaps
Timocreon of Rhodes - though his fame is due as much to his athletic
prowess as to his skill as a lyric poet. In art, only ceramic production was
original. The beautiful treasury Cnidos offered at Delphi was inspired by
Ionian art and was more symbolic of the strength of Ionian influences.
These were particularly marked in Halicarnassus, which adopted the
Ionian dialect and was thereafter excluded from the hexapolis - thus
reducing it to a pentapolis.
Aeolia
Aeolia in the far north of Anatolia was even more overshadowed by the
brilliance of Ionia. However, it was a fertile area, more fertile than Ionia,
according to Herodotus (i, 149), but with a less favourable climate. Since
the Ionians had annexed Smyrna, the only remaining important town on
the continent was Cyme. Some sources regarded this as the homeland of
Homer and it was also the point from which Hesiod’s father set sail for
Boeotia. But Cyme did not take advantage of the benefits to be gained from
maritime life and until Aristotle’s time obstinately retained ‘the laws of
ancient times which were too simple and uncivilised’ (.Politics 2, 5, 12).
The large island of Lesbos, rich in wonderful vineyards, held six towns
including Mytilene which was the only Aeolian city able to compete with
Ionian agglomerations both in wealth and the brilliance of its civilization.
Political struggles were violent: when Pittacus retired after completing his
duties as legislator charged with restoring order to the strife-ridden city,
he had really earned his place in the ranks of the Seven Sages. The wine
and fine cloth produced by local weavers sold well, both in Egypt, where
Mytilene participated in the foundation of the Hellenium of Naucratis, and
in the Troad and Thrace, where Mytilene established colonies - and, in
the process, running up against Athenian claims to Sigeum.
Poetry blossomed in the refinement engendered by prosperity: Ter-
pander and Arion, natives of Lesbos, charmed Spartans and Corinthians.
But the true poets of Mytilene were Alcaeus and Sappho; their songs,
passionate and gracious in their every element, represented the first true
expression of personal lyricism in Greek literature. Nothing left them un¬
touched: ‘I desire and I burn’, wrote Sappho (fragment 35). Their sensi¬
tive souls were entranced by nature, revelled in wine or their expert Loves,
gave way within a moment to a melancholy which only coloured their
essential joy in life. And all this in simple and perfect metres which left
their imprint for all time on the lyricism of the ancient world. Both de¬
served to make their homeland the symbol of a world where abandonment
to the most voluptuous sensuality did not exclude the quest for knowledge.
The Ionian Towns

Between the Dorian and Aeolian lands, the twelve towns of Ionia (see page
91) practised a common cult to Poseidon Heliconios in the sanctuary of
all the Ionians (Panionium) on Mount Mycale, in the region of Priene.
Their amphictyony, which must go back to the beginning of the seventh
century, was of the greatest importance from the religious point of view: in
particular it appears to have formulated the idea of the twelve gods of
Olympus which spread throughout Greece, and later to Rome. But it did
not succeed in preventing political and commercial rivalry.
Mnf.Ftictyes Magnesia ad Maeandrum

Tralles (Adin)
^SSAMOS
Panioniui
island of Asteriurns
Island of Lade [•Miletus
) vC/H
Heraclea thf SEA
cs;n At the present time
Hrf At end of the 2nd. century AD

-^Didyma r'"!V
•Temple of ApolK 3T3-' In the 1st. century AD
HH In the 5th. century BC

In the early period
Map 8 Miletus and the Latmic Gulf
However, Ionia could count on powerful unifying factors: ‘a better

climate than any other we know of,’ according to Herodotus (1, 142), a
fertile soil, an incentive to commercial life in its position on a coast where
oriental products abounded, the same dialect spoken everywhere - with
some slight differences which Herodotus mentions - and insututions
which were generally closely related by a common origin (all, except
Colophon and Ephesus where the population was more mixed, celebrated
THE ANCIENT WORLD
139
the Ionian festival of the Apaturia). But despite all this and despite the dis¬
turbing nearness of the barbarians, nothing could prevent them from
indulging most of the time in self-destruction.
The most important city was the most southerly: Miletus at the entrance
to the Latmic Gulf, not as yet sanded up by the Maeander. Miletus culti¬
vated a rich soil, wove wool from the sheep of the hinterland - its woollen
goods and cloth with multi-coloured designs were famous - and manufac¬
tured beautiful vases. Its four ports did a flourishing trade: it bought
perfumes, ivory and ebony from Egypt; it procured corn, fish, salt, amber
and slaves from Pontus, where it did not acknowledge a first defeat, but
founded a new chain of prosperous colonies; Sybaris in the west served as a
warehouse for its merchandise which then reached the whole of Italy (the
destruction of Sybaris by Croton in 511 was mourned as a national disaster
in Miletus); finally it redistributed the products of the Orient and the
Black Sea (map 8) in Greece.
Its prosperity was only equalled by the prestige it gained through its
scholars, thinkers and writers: it produced the first historian in the Greek
world (Cadmus), the first geographer (Hecataeus) and the first philosopher
(Thales). Excavations have discovered few remains of the Archaic town;
even its exact site is not definitely established. But we do know the great
sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma, one of the most famous in Asian Greece,
situated some nine miles from Miletus and administered by the powerful
sacerdotal family of the Branchidae.
In the words of Herodotus (5, 28), Miletus was ‘the glory of Ionia’. But
several cities vied with it in prosperity and brilliance. Ephesus, in the
lower valley of the Cayster, controlled the outlet of the route from Lydia
and Mesopotamia, and this is the sole explanation for its wealth. The sanc¬
tuary of the ‘Ephesian’, a female divinity inherited from Anatolia and the
Semitic Orient and identified with the Greek Artemis, constituted a veri¬
table theocratic state. It was under the direction of eunuch high priests, the
Megabyzi, assisted by a vast clergy, notably priestesses called Melissai
(bees).
Luxurious and noble Colophon — which succeeded in annexing Aeolian
Smyrna by a surprise attack - was proud of its port, Notium, and the
neighbouring oracle, Apollo Clarios. Phocaea had interests both in the
Hellespont and in the west, where it founded Marseilles.
The two insular cities, both famous for their metal work (at Chios par¬
ticularly, it is said that Glaucus invented iron welding), were no less
brilliant. Samos, great rival of Miletus, took part in the colonization of the
straits and of the west: a Samian, Colaeus, was the first to pass through the
pillars of Heracles. Together with the Artemisium of Ephesus, its temple to
Hera was the largest in the Greek world. Archaeological material dis¬
covered there shows continuous influence from Syria, Cyprus, Anatolia
and the Cyclades (see figure 30). Finally Chios, which held land on the
mainland, exported famous wines, such as those from Maronea, its
Thracian colony, already mentioned in the Odyssey, to the whole world.
Figure 30 The sanctuary of Hera at Samos around the middle of the sixth century
THE ANCIENT WORLD 141
The Brilliance of Ionian Civilization

Right from, the beginning, the development of urban life in Ionia was strik-
ing. At a time when many Greek cities were still straggling villages, those
of Ionia were already large towns. By about 500, the whole Greek popula¬
tion of Ionia had risen to approximately 320,000 men, 65,000 of whom
lived in Miletus, 80,000 in Chios.
Experiments with all forms of political life were made there simultan¬
eously or successively. Miletus was governed by tyrants on several occasions
before it was torn by dissension. The oligarchy was powerful at Colophon
(the Thousand) and Erythrae (where it intermingled with the royal
family of the Basilides). Samos was governed by noble geomoroi (those who
share the soil), before it abandoned itself to the tyranny of Polycrates.
Finally, Chios was undoubtedly the first Greek city to venture to tread the
path of democracy (see page 129).
However, political forms were of little account. The genuine unity of
Ionia, its wealth and the liveliness of its cities, was based on commerce.
This was purely local until about 7°°? when it extended progressively;
great external expansion northwards, westwards and southwards began
after 625. Relations with Egypt were extremely close: Miletus and Samos
had a special sanctuary at Naucratis; Chios, Teos, Phocaea and
Clazomenae held places at the Hellenium there. But products from the
Hellespont, the Black Sea, the west and even from the far west were also
piled up in warehouses at their ports.
This wealth appeared in their costumes and adornments: the Ionians
loved beautiful materials woven in gold, long skilfully arranged hair-styles
- for men as well as women — jewellery and perfumes. They languished
over interminable banquets which Xenophanes evokes with customary
grace: ‘For now the floor is clean, and the hands of every guest, and the
cups; one lad puts woven wreaths about our heads, another brings round
a jug of fragrant perfume; the mixing bowl stands full of good cheer. . . .
1 The Archaic town of Samos is not well known. It was undoubtedly first established on the
promontory where the Byzantine fortified castle was built in the Middle Ages, then it stretched
out over the slopes of a fortified acropolis and over the crest which Eupalinus later pierced for
Polycrates with his famous tunnel. Thanks to the German excavations, more is known about the
Heraeum established four miles from the town on one of the arms of the Imbrasus, where
tradition records that a rudimentary statue of Hera was discovered by peasants. The chronology
of the buildings which followed one another there could be as follows:
Geometric period: Hecatompedon on an oblong plan with a central wooden colonnade. Seventh
century bc : Enlargement of the Hecatompedon (the axial colonnade disappeared, replaced by
pilasters imbedded in the lateral walls). The construction of a portico with two naves at the south
of the sanctuary. Middle of the sixth century bc : the course of the river shifted 220 yards to the west
and the old buildings were destroyed to make way for a general reorganization of the sanctuary.
The architects Rhoecus and Theodorus erected a dipteral temple in poros preceded by an altar.
At the north, a tripartite portico with a single nave was built and, in the south, a periptery with
two naves (which was undoubtedly the Odeon mentioned in later texts). The peribola was
framed, at least in the west, by an enclosure with pilasters. The temple of Rhoecus and Theodorus,
destroyed by fire, was reconstructed by Polycrates on the same plan but with a slight shift to the
west and south. It always remained unfinished although work was continued in the Hellenistic
period.
Frankincense gives forth its sacred odour. . . . Before us lie yellow loaves
and a noble trayful of cheese and honey. . . . The house is filled with song
and feasting’ (fragment 21).
They loved to stroll in the agora and to converse with courtesans, who
were more famous there than anywhere else. At Colophon, flautists and
zither players gave concerts at the state’s expense all day long. Greeks from
poor Greece could justifiably reproach them with the indolence of a life too
devoted to pleasure, this tryphe they had inherited from the orientals with
their long trailing robes and their thirst for sensual delights.
However, intellectual life continued to be fundamental in these bril¬
liantly prosperous cities, which have often been compared with the free
towns of Italy of the Quattrocento. After the Homeric revival of the epic,
lyricism was born in the cities, encouraged by the adoption of oriental
musical instruments: Mimnermus of Colophon wrote of his love for the
beautiful Nanno; the gnomic poet Phocylides of Miletus was a master of
apt and well-rounded phrases; Anacreon of Teos, who left his country in
turn for Abdera, Samos and Athens, sang of a playful Eros, who already
heralded that of Alexandria. Prose was no less striking. Aesop adapted
oriental fables to Greek. The logographers were the ancestors of both
history and geography; the most famous were Cadmus and Hecataeus,
both Milesians.
A new form of architecture, Ionic architecture, was born. The most
beautiful works were the gigantic temples of the Artemisium at Ephesus
and the Heraeum at Samos, absolute forests of columns after the fashion
of the hypostyle halls of the Orient. Sculpture made decisive progress, by
imitating oriental techniques: work in ivory (chryselephantine statues) and
bronze (the ‘inventors’ of the casting mould were two Samians, Rhoecus
and Theodorus). The ceramics, with their taste for colour and their
magnificent decoration, were evidence of a joyful world (figure 31).
In the realm of thought, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes in turn
Figure 31 Moulded
drinking vase in the
shape of a lion. Ionian
work of the seventh
century
THE ANCIENT WORLD
143
brought fame to the ‘school of Miletus’; Pythagoras, whose teachings later

ound so many echoes in the west, where he went into exile, was a native of
Samos.
The whole atmosphere was effervescent. Poetry was joyous, slightly
tinged with an ineluctable melancholy. Prose and philosophy posed the
problems of man and the universe with indefatigable curiosity. Finally, art
was unceasingly creative, with an exuberance, a prolixity, a colossal sump¬
tuousness — irrefutable signs of vitality. Ionia was incontestably the new
cradle of Hellenism, after the Geometric revival. In its large ports — par¬
ticularly Miletus, at that time the most flourishing and the most impressive
city of the Greek world — contacts were easily made with an age-old Orient,
so much so that it is difficult to distinguish orientalized Hellenes from
hellenized orientals. This explains the blossoming and rapid development
within two centuries of a Levantine civilization: lux ex Oriente.
Hellenic influence penetrated to Phrygia, Lydia and Lycia. Alphabets
appeared there, obviously derived from Greek writing, either directly
(Phrygian alphabet) or with the addition of new signs (Lydian and Lycian
alphabets). In the eighth century, geometric vases were belatedly manu¬
factured there. In the sixth century, a sculpture developed in Phrygia
which mixed Greek and Hittite motifs, both on religious steles (Cybele at
Ankara and Gordium) and rupestral tombs, decorated with reliefs from
Greek models (lions, warriors wearing Corinthian helmets). Lydia sup¬
plied terra cotta statuary and friezes which betrayed clear Ionian or
Aeolian contributions. Lycia anticipated its remarkable funeral architec¬
ture of the following century with the astonishing tower of Xanthus, known
as the monument of the Harpies. It was decorated with scenes of infernal
offerings which reveal Ionian taste in the heaviness of the forms, the
luxuriousness of the draperies and its coquettish picturesqueness.
The Greeks of Asia face to face with Lydia and Persia

But the Orient would later bring subjection to the Greeks of Asia, the
prelude to their long effacement. However, for a long time, relations be¬
tween the Greeks of the coast and the barbarians were not strained, as long
as the realm of Lydia continued to exist, extending over the plateaux of the
interior, with its capital at Sardes.
A remarkably intelligent dynasty, the Mermnadae (the falcons), actually
increased Lydia’s power and prosperity (c. 685-546), always knowing
when to recognize the suzerainty of Assyria when the need arose. There
was a succession of great sovereigns: Gyges, succeeded by two little-known
kings, and then Alyattes and Croesus. They were interested in the rich
coastal cities but wise enough to allow them the autonomy they held so
dear. They imposed tribute on them, had no hesitation in leading military
expeditions against them - readily supporting Ephesus against Miletus -
and at times encouraged the setting up of loyal tyrants. But they did not
maintain garrisons there, often took Greek wives (Alyattes married an
T44 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
Ionian and chose as son-in-law the Ephesian, Melas the Younger), had
recourse to Ionian banks (Gyges and Croesus raised capital at Ephesus),
filled the sanctuaries with offerings and showered the Greeks with atten¬
tions. Croesus, notably, gave the Spartans the wherewithal to cover Apollo
at Amyclae with gold; the Artemisium at Ephesus and the temple of
Apolla at Didyma overflowed with his consecrations; Herodotus (i, 50)
gives a striking list of his golden offerings at Delphi. All of them professed
phil-Hellenism, voluntarily consulted the oracles at Delphi and Claros and
surrounded themselves with Greek artists. It was a selfish policy, certainly,
but a supremely skilful one and it gradually won the interior of Anatolia
over to Hellenism.
Conversely, it is equally certain that Lydia influenced Ionia: both
tyranny and money were Lydian inventions of which the Greeks took ad¬
vantage. Herodotus mentions (1, 94) that the Greeks also borrowed their
games from the Lydians, with the sole exception of draughts - and this is
confirmed by linguists, who note the presence of the group ‘nd’ considered
Asiatic, in the names of several of them.
But this harmonious entente, from which both barbarian kings and Greek
cities amply profited, disappeared with the misfortunes of Croesus, victim
of the irresistible Persian advance. The victory of the Persian Cyrus (546)
came as a total surprise to the Greeks of Asia, who, with the exception of the
Milesians, had scorned his advances and supplied contingents to the king
of Lydia. After Croesus had been captured, they attempted to resist, but
the cities fell one by one. Only the Phocaeans preferred to leave their home¬
land: they embarked en masse and first went to settle in Corsica. All the
others, except the Samians, had to accept the suzerainty of the Great King
after 540. Samos then had a striking interlude under the tyranny of
Polycrates before it was taken in its turn by Darius.
Gyrus and his successor, Cambyses, treated the Greeks no differently
from the kings of Lydia. But Darius had another conception of the state.
He increased his hold on the cities, imposed garrisons on them, increased
the tribute and supported tyrants in his pay. The wealth of Ionia was cer¬
tainly not impaired: whatever may have been said, Darius did not favour
the Phoenicians to the detriment of Ionia. The conquest stimulated activity
in Ephesus and Miletus by making their relations with the interior much
closer and by turning them more towards the west and Thrace. In the
same way, intellectual life continued to flourish: this was the period when
Anaximander and Hecataeus won fame at Miletus. But every day, servi¬
tude weighed more heavily on the Ionian cities. The storm soon broke: it
came with the revolt of Ionia, the direct cause of the Median Wars.
GREECE PROPER AND CRETE
As a whole, Greece proper cuts a poor figure beside Greece of Asia. Except
for certain centres situated opposite Ionia or on the route to the Isthmus,
THE ANCIENT WORLD
145
it remained rural and its contribution to Hellenism was small. Its northern
boundaries were hazy: two frontiers, Macedonia on the east, Epirus on the
west, were inhabited by people who today are almost indisputably con¬
sidered Greek, but who were then regarded as barbarians. Macedonia was
unified in the sixth century by the dynasty of the Argeadae who conquered
the whole country and tried to unify it around their capital, Aegae, built
around a powerful acropolis. Epirus was divided between three rival tribes.
In both cases patriarchal monarchy survived, fairly close to Homeric
royalty, and relying on a feudal system of large landowners.
Thessaly
The plains of Thessaly, further south, also remained purely rural. The sole
port, Pagasae, which succeeded Iolcus of Achaean times, scene of the
Argonauts’ embarkation, was on the most modest scale. The Thessalian
invaders, after driving back the Boeotians who had settled in the country
before them, reduced the earliest inhabitants to serfdom. These were the
penestai, serfs, in a roughly similar position to the helots of Laconia, although
they belonged to nobles and not to the state. They also subdued their im¬
mediate neighbours, the Perrhaebi in the north, Magnetes in the east and
Phthiotic Achaeans in the south, as well as the inhabitants of the Spercheius
valley: Aenianes, Oiteans and Malians. These peoples preserved a sem¬
blance of independence but in time of war they had to serve as ‘allies of
the Thessalians’ and, after a reform by one of the Scopadae, pay
a contribution. Like their counterparts in Laconia, they were called
perioikoi.
Large-scale property existed everywhere, favoured by the vast expanse
of plain, unique in Greece in this respect. The basic wealth consisted of
cereals and horse-breeding. The nobles formed a feudal hierarchy around
the dynasts, who sometimes adopted the title of king in the most important
centres: the Aleuadae of Larissa, the Scopadae of Crannon, the descen¬
dants of the Echecratidae at Pharsalus. They were small squires, fond of
good cheer and rich living, tamers of bulls like Thessalus, the mythical
eponym of the country. However, they did not scorn the praises of poets
such as Simonides and Anacreon. The social question scarcely raised its
head, although a democratic movement appeared at Pherae towards the
end of the Archaic period. In the cities, the mass of free men - small land-
owners and artisans - did not participate in public life, excluded as they
were from the ‘open market place’ where the magistrates sat and the
Assembly met.
The country had gained a certain political unity from Aleuas the Red,
the partly legendary founder of the Thessalian koinon (confederation). A
general assembly of the Thessalians undoubtedly existed and chose a
supreme magistrate, the tagos (he who gives the battle order). The terri¬
tory was divided into four tetrads (Thessaliotis, Hestiaeotis, Pelasgiotis,
Phthiotis) headed by a tetrarch, probably appointed by the tagos. But the
6*
precarious nature of this unity gave rise to internal instability and the dis¬
loyalty in external relations for which the Thessalians were often criticized.
The army played a large part in this system, which remained so ob¬
viously feudal. Here again, Aleuas the Red seems to have organized it on a
permanent basis. Each realm provided forty horsemen and eighty peltasts
(foot soldier armed with the pelte: light shield). Contrary to the general
development in the Greek world, where the infantry was playing an in¬
creasingly marked role, cavalry retained its primordial influence here as
the peltasts were barely able to stand up successfully to the phalanxes of
the hoplites. This explains the rebuffs which the Thessalians suffered in
distant expeditions, notably against the Phocians.
All the same, Thessaly s prestige remained high in central Greece up to
the end of the Archaic period. It held the majority of votes at the Delphic
Amphictyony and led the first holy war in the name of the god. But this
region, one of the richest in Greece and one of the most powerful demo-
graphically, played a disproportionate role in relation to its potentialities.
Its history is one of defeat. The state lay under the menace of the bitter
hostility of the servile penestai and the subdued perioikoi, and was shaken by
the rivalries of the dynasts. Its defeat was that of a ruling class which had
failed in its mission. Despite its prosperity, and the ostentatious brilliance
of some of its aristocrats, it shut itself away within an obsolete structure. It
is not too surprising therefore that when the Persian danger threatened, it
deliberately sided with the barbarians.
Central Greece
From west to east, rugged central Greece - apart from tiny Doris, metro¬
polis of the Dorians - was occupied by peoples speaking related dialects:
Acarnanians, Aetolians, Ozolian Locrians, Phocians and Opuntian
Locrians, for the most part hardly removed from a state of primitive
barbarism.
Notably in the west, far from favourable Aegean influences, civilization
remained rural and patriarchal and towns were unknown. Thucydides
(ij 5) declared that Acarnanians, Aetolians and Ozolian Locrians ‘still
followed the old way of life’, permanently carrying arms and following the
old custom of pillage. Nothing is known of their history, except that the
Acarnanians were strictly dominated by Corinth and that the Aetolians
formed a confederation around the federal sanctuary of Thermum.
The Phocians, also federal, were fiercely jealous of their independence,
as the Thessalians discovered to their cost. The Opuntian Locrians owned
good land and a remarkable position at the southern outlet of the pass of
Thermopylae. They had only one city: Opus, ruled by the aristocracy of
the Thousand. Possibly in conjunction with their brothers in the west,
from whom they were separated by the Phocians, they founded
Epizephyrian Locri in Italy.
Central Greece would be of scarcely any account were it not for the
presence of one of the high places of Hellenism, Delphi, on Phocian terri¬

tory. A cult was rendered in the ‘bitter valley’, from the fourteenth century,
to a feminine divinity, Ge (Earth); numerous idols of her have been found
m the deep strata of later sanctuaries to Apollo and Athena. At the end of
the second millennium, a god, Apollo, was substituted for the goddess.
According to legend, he had to kill the dragon Python, the incarnation of
underground forces, before he took possession of Ge’s mantic. In the
Geometric period, male statuettes replaced female.
Influence from daedalian Crete undoubtedly appeared in the eighth
century, and was symbolized by a myth recounted with gusto in the
Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo at the end of the seventh century: the young
god, more enterprising that he was honest, disguised himself as a dolphin
(delphis) and leapt on a boat from Cnossos. He forced it to moor at Grisa
and compelled the sailors to become his priests.
In the eighth and seventh centuries, Delphi took shape as a great religious
centre: people flocked there from all quarters to consult the son of Zeus,
who thus played a leading part in Hellenic expansion and was also able to
act as a bold initiator in the sphere of morals. Ex votos accumulated around
an early temple (which was burned in 548 and reconstructed with the help
of the Alcmaeonidae at the end of the century, thanks to an international
subscription) and also in the sanctuary of Athena Pronaia in the suburb of
Marmaria. These ex votos communicated the grateful piety of the worship¬
pers and the ostentatious pride of the cities. Dorians and Ionians competed
in generosity in this hieron which had become pan-Hellenic in the full sense
of the term. A barbarian like Croesus made dazzling gifts of fabulous
weights of precious metals; not long afterwards, Etruscans from Agylla and
the most distant Greek cities such as Marseilles and Cyrene, erected
treasuries there. From the end of the sixth century, Delphi represented the
‘common hearth of Hellas’, of which Pindar later sang.
At first the hieron seems to have been under the domination of the little
port of Cirrha (or Crisa) which offered fairly easy access to Delphi, despite
the stiff climb involved. But in the course of the seventh century, control
passed to an amphictyony worshipping Demeter at Anthela, near
Thermopylae. Before the cities had been finally established, it grouped
peoples (ethne) belonging essentially to northern and central Greece and
not poleis. Membership at the time when it had reached its final number of
twelve was as follows:
1 Thessalians 4 Dolopians 7 Malians-Oiteans 10 Boeotians
2 Magnetes 5 Phthiotic Achaeans 8 Phocians 11 Ionians
3 Perrhaebians 6 Aenianes 9 Locrians 12 Dorians
This amphictyony set in motion the first sacred war at the demand of the
priests of Delphi, weary of seeing the Phocians of Cirrha grow rich at the
expense of pilgrims crossing their territory. The Thessalians forcibly inter¬
vened, only too happy to strike a blow at their Phocian enemies. Cleisthenes
of Sicyon did likewise. After ten years’ struggle, Cirrha was annihilated in
590. Delphi annexed the conquered territory and became an autonomous

state under the authority of the Pylaio-Delphic amphictyony which then
received its final structure. Each of its member-peoples sent two delegates
or hieromnemones (the Dorians divided their two votes between Dorians from
Doris and Dorians from the Peloponnese, and the Ionians between
Athenians and Euboeans) to the amphictyonic council which met twice a
year at Thermopylae and Delphi to administer the sanctuary and its riches
and celebrate the Pythian games.
This apparently happy attempt at collaboration between states was
much more apparent than real. In the first place, the amphictyony could
scarcely pass as representative of the Hellenic world because the least
evolved peoples, the Thessalians and their ‘allies’, possessed overwhelming
superiority. Apart from this, although it may possibly have favoured the
humanization of war, it often gave examples of discord, violence and the
crushing of the weak by the powerful within its own ranks. Its history is one
of long and tragic failure, and for this the Thessalians, egoists and retro¬
grades as they were, were to a large extent responsible. Their defeat was
all the more noticeable in contrast with the striking triumph of the god
Apollo at Delphi.
Boeotia
In many respects Boeotia resembled Thessaly: its soil was almost as fertile
and large landowners therefore played the same role. However, the nobility
had no serfs to draw on, was less powerful and did not turn into a body of
ostentatious knights. A class of small landowners existed by its side, par¬
ticularly in mountainous regions; Hesiod was already one example. Com¬
merce developed, favoured by roads from central Greece, which reached
the Isthmus or Attica. Once again it must be noted that merchants and
artisans were deprived of political rights.
The country was more urbanized than Thessaly. Thebes was now the
strongest city in place of Orchomenus, which had been partly submerged
by the waters of Lake Copai's. The cities formed a league which was sym¬
bolized by the shield on the reverse of its coins (the front being reserved for
the symbol of the issuing town) and celebrated in common the cult of
Poseidon at Onchestus and the festival of the Panboeotia at the sanctuary
of Athena Itonia near Coronea. But the internal cohesion of the koinon was
weak. All the cities were jealous of one another, and particularly of Thebes,
which had pretensions to hegemony; those of the south, Thespiae and
Plataea for example, turned voluntarily towards Athens. Consequently
Boeotia remained of small importance in the Archaic Greek world, despite
the fame won by its horsemen and hoplites.
Religious life was intense, supported by the lively superstition of the
Boeotian peasant. Naturally, as this was a rural country, chthonic powers
were mainly worshipped. There were numerous oracles, which were con¬
veyed by heroes assimilated to a greater or lesser degree with Apollo: the
THE ANCIENT WORLD
H9
Amphiareum at Oi'opus, where Amphiaraus appeared to pilgrims in their
dreams, was so famous that Croesus asked for a consultation; at Ptoion,
Ptoios spoke from the depths of a grotto; at Lebadea a reply from
Trophonius could only be procured by descending into a well in a crevasse;
at the Hismenion of Thebes, it was a case of pyromancy. The sanctuaries
were very modest, often only simple sacred woods around an altar: both
the one at Ptoion and the hieron of the Muses at Helicon are examples of
this.
Civilization in Boeotia advanced despite the pejorative meaning
attached to the word Boeotian since times of antiquity (not without a
certain measure of Athenian malice). Sculpture developed rapidly: a small
bronze, the Tyskiewicz Apollo, which bears the dedication of the Boeotian
Manticlos (beginning of the seventh century) on its thigh, was one of the
first divine effigies discovered in Greece; kouroi are more numerous there
than in Attica: those at Ptoion form one of the most important groups of
the Archaic period. The workshops of Thebes and Tanagra produced re¬
markably pleasant figurines, and the large vases, recognizable by their
maroon colour, are often very beautiful.
Poetry inherited a tradition extending from Mycenaean times to
Hesiod; the anonymous author of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, a master¬
piece of humour and lightness, was a Boeotian; the greatest Greek lyric
poet, Pindar, was born at Thebes at the end of the sixth century. In the
other arts, the Boeotians attached particular value to music, notably the
flute; they considered that it had been invented by Athena on the shores of
Lake Copais. Boeotia was also the birthplace of one of the first logo-
graphers, Acusilaus, whose Genealogies began at Chaos, Earth and Love, in
the tradition of Hesiod.
Although this civilization was certainly a far cry from the refinement of
Ionia, it was still full of a rustic vigour and strong vitality. It corresponded
to the character of a race which Heraclides, travelling there in
approximately 200, described as ‘astonishing for the hope it puts in life’.
Euboea
Euboea possessed an extremely fertile plain, the Lelantine plain in the
middle of its west coast. The two principal cities, Chalcis and Eretria, were
established at its two extremities, and here a landed aristocracy of hippo-
botai ruled. But the presence of mines (copper and iron) and a good clay
soil permitted the development of industry. Chalcis — which owed its name
to copper — specialized in the art of bronze, notably the manufacture of
arms, and Eretria in ceramics. Above all, the geographical position of the
island, stretching from Thessaly to Attica, opposite the Ionian coast, and
the opportunities which the channel of Euboea (which narrowed to some
210 feet at Euripus opposite Chalcis) offered boats going back towards
the Malia Gulf and the Gulf of Pagasae, turned the nobility towards
trade. The two cities participated jointly in the colonization of the
Chalcidice and the west, thereby acquiring mastery of the Straits of

Messina, and they formulated a metrological system which was adopted at
Athens and Corinth. They had attained an unparalleled level of develop¬
ment by the end of the seventh ceutury, when they tore each other to
pieces in a war which lasted nearly a hundred years and in which a
number of Greek cities participated — the Lelantine war.
Little is known about the Lelantine war, but it seems to have been the
occasion for a regrouping of the Greek cities into two rival camps: ‘the
conflict, in which the rest of Hellas was most divided, allying itself with one
side or the other, was the ancient war between the Ghalcidians and
Eretrians (Thucydides, i, 15). Local conflicts came into play, but com¬
mercial rivalries were primary factors (between Samos and Aegina and
Megara for example). The chart below (several of its features have
been contested) attempts to show the constitution of the two leagues;
Samos and Miletus seem to have been the two principal protagonists next
to Chalcis and Eretria.
Chalcis finally triumphed but in a weakened and hazardous condition.
It was conquered by Athens in 506 and had to abandon to the Athenian
cleruchies part of the plain so ardently disputed with Eretria.
The Allies of Chalcis and Eretria in the Lelantine War
Chalcis Eretria
Its colonies (Cumae, Naxos) Its dependencies (Ceos, Tenos)

Miletus (and its colonies)
Samos Teos, Clazomenae, Chios
Erythrae, Cyme, Phocaea Mytilene
Boeotians
Paros, Andros, Melos, Thera Megara
Thasos Aegina
Thessalians Argos
Corinth Cretans
Lyctos (in Crete)
Cyrene
(After A. R. Burn, JHS, 1929, p. 14 ff)
The Peloponnese
The population in the Peloponnese was even more mixed than in conti¬
nental Greece. After the Archaic period six large regions can be distin¬
guished corresponding to six ethnic groupings: Achaea, Elis, Arcadia,
Messenia, Laconia and the Argolid. But the real line of cleavage was not
represented by the populations but by the degree of economic and social
THE ANCIENT WORLD
151
evolution. Some regions remained rural and remote from the currents dis¬
turbing the Greek world. Others, on the contrary, principally those near
the Isthmus, underwent rapid change and possessed prosperous and
dynamic towns. There was one common feature: everywhere (except in
Arcadia, spared the Dorian invasion) there were two antagonistic social
classes, conquerors and conquered or often masters and serfs. This study
will for the moment leave aside Laconia, which deserves special treatment,
and Messenia, which was soon subjected and whose history was therefore
intermingled with Sparta until it regained its independence (fourth
century).
Achaea, Elis, Arcadia
Achaea was rural and poor; it nevertheless played a part in the coloniza¬
tion of Magna Graecia. It had approximately a dozen cities which ren¬
dered a common cult to Zeus Hamarios near Helice. The Eleans only
founded their town, Elis, at the beginning of the fifth century. They
devoted themselves to agriculture in the rich plain of the Peneus.
A rhetra, which it is difficult to date (beginning of the sixth century?) put
an end to the collective responsibility of the gene, source of interminable
vendettas. Meanwhile, since the fall of the Oxylid kings (descendants of
the mythical Oxylus), government had remained in the control of a close
aristocracy with power in the hands of a council of ninety gerontes, heads of
great families. The Eleans were ardent warriors and seized Acroreia in the
Figure 32 Backplate of a cuirass found at Olympia, seventh century. Above: animals:

below: homage of Hermes to Apollo
J52 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
north and Triphylia in the south from the Arcadians. In the course of a
long struggle, they also annexed Pisatis, a district formed around a hypo¬
thetical town of Pisa by the lower valley of the Peneus, and where Olympia
was situated. They took over the administration of the sanctuary from the
Pisatans in 580, with help from the Spartans, and designated two Hellano-
dikai (judges of the Greeks) to preside at the games. So began an era of
great prosperity for them.
The analogy between Olympia and Delphi is obvious. They were both
sanctuaries which became pan-Hellenic because they were remote from
all large cities. A matronal divinity first ruled here too and also had to
yield to a god, Zeus, who was henceforth appointed owner of the sacred
enclosure of Olympia, the Altis (sacred wood). But Hera continued to be
worshipped and, at the end of the Archaic period, hers was paradoxically
the only temple there. Very ancient heroic legends are connected with the-
site: of Pelops, an oriental who beat the King of Pisa, the Aetolian
Oenomaus, in a chariot race; and of Heracles, a Cretan daimon who be¬
came the national hero of the Dorians and was generally regarded as the
founder of the Olympic Games (or as their restorer, according to another
version which attributes their creation to Pelops). These legends express
the full complexity of the influences which mingled at Olympia in the plan¬
ning of the competitions and it would be very wrong to regard them solely
as Dorian institutions.
The history of the games, in the first half of the first millennium, is one
of continual expansion. Tradition attached primordial importance to the
year 776, the starting point of the Olympiads, which the Greeks used to
measure time: they regarded it as the date when they were founded where¬
as it was undoubtedly that of their permanent regulation. Originally, the
foot-race was the only contest but boxing soon appeared as well as the
pankration, chariot race, and the race between mounted horses. Gradually
also, the victors (or Olympionikai) came from further and further afield as
the fame of Olympia spread. At first, only Eleans, Achaeans and Messenians
competed but from the second half of the seventh century, the entire
Greek world was represented.
Date of the First Olympic Victory by a Greek

Originating from the Following Towns or Regions
Sparta 720
Athens 696
Anatolia 688
Magna Graecia 672
Sicily 648
As the games developed, the sanctuary filled with consecrated offerings

(figure 32) in which, as at Delphi, the most diverse and often the most far-
off cities displayed their sumptuous piety. This can be seen from the list of
treasuries which rose on a terrace north of Altis:
THE ANCIENT WORLD
r53
Greece proper Megara, Sicyon, Epidamnus

Straits Byzantium
Africa Cyrene
Magna Graecia Sybaris, Metapontum
Sicily Selinus, Gela, Syracuse
All these treasuries were from the Archaic period, except those from
Sicyon and Syracuse which dated from the beginning of the fifth century.
The list is doubly instructive since it shows the pan-Hellenism of the
sanctuary as well as its specifically Dorian character (all these towns were
Dorian except Sybaris and Metapontum, founded by the Achaeans of the
Peloponnese).
Arcadia was the only purely continental region of the Peloponnese and
also the only one which was never dorianized. Life there remained
patriarchal, pastoral in the mountains where dwellings were still very
scattered, agricultural in the rich lowlands where synoecism — often tardy —
turned several villages into one town: the synoecism of Tegea, the most im¬
portant and southernmost Arcadian agglomeration, was said to have been
accomplished by King Aleos who joined nine straggling villages and
created the common cult of Athena Alea by the syncretism of a local
goddess with the Greek Athena.
Unifying factors counted for little in the face of the geographical frag¬
mentation and the wild hatreds which one city often felt for another. The
price of these dissensions was heavy: neighbouring peoples, Eleans to the
west, Spartans to the south, seized part of their territory. A common
Arcadian currency belatedly appeared (sixth century), but remained of
very moderate use in such an economically backward country. Only
religion formed a powerful bond. The most important sanctuary was that
of Zeus Lycaeus on Mount Lycaeon, where leagues of lycanthropes (wer¬
wolves) venerated a wolf god with strange customs, particularly human
sacrifices. These cults, directly inherited from the second millennium, show
what an admirable conservatory of Mycenaean tradition Arcadia was.
The Argolid
The Dorians had founded a certain number of cities in the Argolid. The
most important, Argos, subjugated the smaller, Mycenae, Tiryns, Nauplia
and Asine, which had fallen from their glory of the second millennium: it
is not definitely known whether they allied with Argos or became its
perioikoi. It also subjected the adjacent districts of Cynuria and Thyreatis,
as well as Cythera, later gained by Sparta.
Even before Argos completed its annexations, the small coastal towns of
Prasiae, Nauplia, Epidaurus and Hermione, had from the eighth century
formed an amphictyony around the sanctuary of Poseidon, situated on the
island of Galauria. Their intentions were not solely religious because the
amphictyony also included cities outside the Argolid, such as Aegina,
Athens and even Orchomenus in Boeotia, which were also interested in
*54 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
keeping an eye on trade in the Saronic Gulf and the Gulf of Argolis, to
prevent it from concentrating in the ports of the Isthmus. However, the
bonds between members slackened fairly rapidly. Aegina and Athens pur¬
sued their own policy, Orchomenus had its own troubles with Thebes, and
Argos and Sparta replaced Nauplia and Prasiae. The amphictyony, which
could have become a powerful trading league, finally declined and
disappeared from history. There was no longer any city in the Argolid able
to counterbalance the attractions of Argos — not even Epidaurus, where the
cult of Asclepius the hero of medical care had been brought from Tricca
in Thessaly and established in confused circumstances (map 9).
Map 9 A league that came to nothing: the amphictyony of Calauria

The seven cities of the amphictyony were roughly marked out along a north-south axis,
Their interests were opposed to those of the three cities of the Isthmus which aimed at
directing trade along an east-west axis.
THE ANCIENT WORLD
X55
rgos stretched out at the foot of its two acropolises, Aspis and Larissa,
m the Argive plain, where fertility was assured by irrigation (myth dates
this back to Danaus and his daughters the Danaids). Although there was a
ceramic industry, Argos remained essentially rural, and did not develop
commerce to any great extent or participate in colonization. The Argives
exploited a class of serfs, the Gymnetai (those who go around nude or rather
those who have been stripped of their arms), but they had made room for
non-Dorians by creating a fourth tribe (the Hyrnathians) in addition to
the three Dorian tribes.
They mainly worshipped Pythian Apollo and Athena Oxyderces on
Aspis and a matronal Hera in the plain, forty-five stades from the town •
she was endowed with one of the first temples of the Peloponnese, possibly
in the eighth century. Herodotus tells of an exploit which two youths from
Argos, Cleobis and Biton, accomplished on her behalf; they dragged her
heavy statue to the sanctuary and were rewarded by the goddess with the
immediate favour of a happy death.
Argos, together with the cities of the Isthmus, played a large part in the
creation of the Doric temple and in the revival of plastic art. It was possibly
the only town in the Greek world, apart from Syracuse, to possess a very
archaic stone theatre as from the sixth century. The art of its sculptors can
still be judged from the statues of Cleobis and Biton (beginning of sixth
century) discovered at Delphi: these famous carriers have the thick-set
bodies and solid anatomy common to all Argive artists, found particularly
at the very end of the Archaic period, with Ageladas, Polycletus’ master.
There is only one outstanding name in the history of Archaic Argolid,
but it is of capital importance. Pheidon, a king who was regarded as a
tyrant, undoubtedly because he had no right to the throne. He led his
armies far afield, possibly because he was the first to see the advantages of
the new tactics of the hoplites. He defeated Sparta at Hysiae (669), flew
to the help of the Pisatans against the Eleans and arrogated the privilege
of presiding at the Olympic Games, and took forcible action against
Corinth and Sicyon. Important economic measures are also ascribed to
him: he was said to have introduced money into Greece by striking the
first Aeginetan coins - but it is not at all certain that he possessed Aegina
and he was probably content to establish a new system of weights and
measures by devaluing the foot (from 0-33 to 0-29 metres) and the
drachma (see page no).
His successors were unable either to continue or even to consolidate his
work and, in the sixth century, Argos was already leading a withdrawn
life, snarlingly mistrustful of Sparta which had deprived it of its borderland
districts. It refused to participate in the Persian Wars.
The Cities of the Isthmus

The three cities of the Isthmus, Corinth, Sicyon and Megara, must be
studied together, although Megara lay outside the Peloponnese. They
evolved on parallel lines. All three were Dorian, and included strong
pre-Dorian elements, and they were all in the hands of a powerful, land¬
owning aristocracy, which had to yield power to the tyrants. Economically,
they remained rural for a long time, before taking advantage of their
excellent positions at the intersection of the maritime route from Ionia in
the west (scarcely interrupted by the portages of the Isthmus) and the
overland route which joined continental Greece to the Peloponnese. But
however late it was - and it was certainly not before the middle of the
eighth century for Corinth, the most evolved of the three - their com¬
mercial advance was striking, and resulted in a prosperity in strong
contrast with the mediocrity of the other Peloponnesian cities.
In the west, Sicyon was a Dorian foundation on a fertile plateau, three
kilometres from the sea. Its land, rich in corn fields, olive groves, and vine¬
yards, was at the outset its basic source of wealth. But industry rapidly
developed: ceramics and bronze work, facilitated by a refractory soil
which made it possible to manufacture moulds to cast the metal. Its only
port was inadequate and artificial, although it was situated opposite
Cirrha, the port of Delphi. But the valley of the Asopos in which it lay
gave access to the heart of the Peloponnese and this explains the develop¬
ment of its commerce. It experienced a century of splendour under the
tyranny of the Orthagorids. The most famous, Cleisthenes, may have re¬
lied on support from non-Dorian elements (who already formed a fourth
tribe in the city) against the rich Dorian landowners. In any case,
Cleisthenes fought savagely against Argos, took an active part in the first
holy war and made the small city incomparably brilliant. Its Olympic
victory in 572, the fact that the famous Cretan artists, Dipoenus and
Scyllis, stayed at its court, the gathering of the most noble suitors in the
Greek world at Sicyon to solicit the hand of his daughter Agariste, were all
symbolical of this.
Apart from this, excavations at Delphi have revealed the sumptuous
sacred offerings that Cleisthenes made to Apollo: two buildings, a tholos
and a monoptera, decorated by Sicyonian artists with metopes illustrating
local legends. After the fall of the Orthagorids, the town relapsed into
oblivion and is barely known except for a poetess, Praxilla, and a fine school
of bronze-founders (the only important name is that of Canachus at the end
of the sixth century) which continued to produce up to the fourth century.
Corinth possessed two ports, Cenchreae and Lechaeum, on two seas, but
lRemains which precede the methodical destruction of Corinth by the Romans (146 bc) are
extremely rare. Only a few stones (none of them in place) of the famous temple of Aphrodite
(beginning of sixth century; reconstructed in the classical period) have been found on the
Acrocorinth which overlooked the plain from its height of 1,833 feet. In the lower town, the
temple of Apollo and the first installations of the Pirene and Glauce fountains, all in the region of
the agora, can be attributed to the Cypselids. The vast enclosure (12J miles, including the ram¬
parts of the lower town, those of the Acropolis and the long walls which joined Corinth to its port
of Lechaeum) date from the middle of the fifth century. The great portico of the agora (one of the
largest in Greece: 536 X 81 feet), the Greek theatre (15,000 spectators), and the Asclepeum
belong to the fourth century. The potters’ quarter is located quite near by, to the west of the city,
and that of the smiths next to Pirene.
Map io General plan of Corinth1 (according to G. Roux)
its incomparable position only played a late part in its history; at first, this
followed similar lines to all the Peloponnesian cities. Conquered, though
belatedly, by Dorians from the Argolid, it was part of the realm of the
Heraclidae. In the eighth century a great aristocratic family, the
Banchiadae, seized power. It was then administered by three magistrates
(king, prytanis, polemarch) - quite similar to the three original magi¬
strates of Athens - elected by a council of 200 members; the demos of small
peasants played only a very unobtrusive role. Contrary to a long-held
belief, the Bacchiadae represented a landed and not in the least a com¬
mercial aristocracy. They undoubtedly acquired wealth by raising tolls at
the ports but did not participate in commerce themselves: to regard them
as merchant aristocrats, in the Dutch or Venetian style, would be a serious
anachronism (map 10).
In the middle of the eighth century, a modest advance in commerce
began, and above all a first colonizing movement (Corcyra, Syracuse)
arising out of a thirst for territory as a result of the division of land into
small properties, and not out of mercantilist aims. But the social crisis
loomed larger, increased by difficulties with Corcyra - in 664 Corinth had
to wage the first naval combat in Greek history against it — and tyranny
took root. The family of the Cypselidae held power over a period of
seventy-three years. The dates of the period involved are the subject of
dispute: the difference lies between a traditional early chronology (657-
584) and a late chronology (E. Will: c. 620-550), both of which create
difficulties.
The founder of the dynasty, Cypselus, confiscated and redistributed the
nobles’ land, imposed a tithe on revenues, and minted the first Corinthian
money, according to the Euboic standard but with a division of staters into
three drachmae instead of two, which permitted easy exchange with the
Aeginetan standard used in the rest of the Peloponnese. His son, Periander,
is sometimes depicted as a fanatic, and sometimes as a sage (inscribed under
this heading in the ranks of the Seven Sages). He seems to have increased
tyranny by limiting the individual liberty of the citizens and by passing
sumptuary measures. He encouraged a second advance in colonization, in
the Ionian and Adriatic Seas (Leucas, Ambracia, Epidamnus, Apollonia)
and in the Chalcidice (Potidaea). A positive empire developed, because
the colonies remained close dependencies of the metropolis and furthered
its commercial ambitions, particularly towards the west, as well as possibly
forming a relay point on the route to central Europe where Corinth was
trying to procure silver. Periander’s nephew, Psammetichus, was over¬
thrown, with some intervention from Sparta which was always hostile to
tyrants.
A moderate aristocracy then succeeded tyranny. Government was
strengthened by eight probouloi (councillors) and a boule (council) of eighty
members, no longer recruited solely from the traditional aristocracy but
from the wealthy class. This was the beginning of the rule of Eunomia
(good constitution) sung by Pindar (Olympians, 13, 6).
THE ANCIENT WORLD
I59
Although its political evolution was not particularly original, Corinth

held a place apart in Greece proper because of its economic prosperity,
scarcely equalled except by the towns of Ionia. It manufactured cloth and
covers, artistic bronzes, perfumes and, above all, ceramics. Its naval work-
yards were famous. Trade was primarily turned towards the west, which
it flooded with its vases. In exchange, it bought corn and became the great
depository of this product in Greece. Rhodes seems to have been the prin¬
cipal centre for its eastern trade, which reached both Naucratis in Egypt
and Al-Mina in Syria. The town at this time became a great cosmopolitan
agglomeration, loving luxury and pleasure; the hierodouloi (sacred court¬
esans) of its temple of Aphrodite were famous from the Archaic period.
However, after about 550 (in conjunction with the fall of tyranny, if the
late chronology is accepted), an economic crisis developed. Exports de¬
creased as a result of the sudden and triumphant advance of Athenian
commerce which competed with it even in the most remote markets.
In Corinth, as in Ionia, culture benefited from the general prosperity.
Religious life was active around the two Heraea (that of the town and that
of Perachora), the Aphrodisium of the Acrocorinth and the sanctuary of
Poseidon at the Isthmus (about seven miles from the town) where pan-
Hellenic games, the Isthmian Games, reputedly founded by Theseus, were
celebrated. Corinth played a large part in the early stages of Doric archi¬
tecture: Pindar attributed the invention of pediments to Corinth; it also
established the final success of terracotta frontings. In addition, it probably
played a leading role in the transition from small figurines to large-scale
plastic art and monumental sculpture, although very few of its productions
remain. The masterpieces of ornamental art at which its artisans excelled
have fortunately been better preserved: large vases, mirrors, bronze tri¬
pods, and above all, ceramics. It is possible to follow the evolution of these
vases from Proto-Corinthian to Corinthian. They were made from a
beautiful yellow clay and the way in which their decoration was adapted
to the surface decorated was particularly remarkable.
Literature appeared at the end of the eighth century with Eumelus,
a Bacchiad who sang of the origins and myths of his native land in a
Corinthian History. It naturally developed at the court of the tyrants: Arion,
a Lesbian who created the dithyramb on Dorian soil, was Periander’s
guest.
Megara was situated at the furthermost point of the Dorian advance. It
retained intact the system of three tribes without the addition of a tribe of
non-Dorians. Its evolution resembled that of Sicyon and Corinth. The
monarchy had to withdraw before an aristocracy of great stock-raisers who
seized the land, and the only course left to the poor was to take part in
colonization. Colonization in this case involved Sicily and the Bosporus
where, as the metropolis of Byzantium, Megara reigned supreme. Then
came the tyranny of Theagenes, followed by the return to power of the
oligarchy and the troubles unleashed by the democrats. A moderate regime
was finally established. The violence of the political struggles can be
i6o THE GREEK ADVENTURE
explained by economic conditions: the plain of Megara was rich but narrow;
the rest of its territory was mountainous and only suitable for raising small
cattle - hence the exacerbated hatred of the starving poor for the rich.
Colonization and commerce provided fortunate outlets. Megara also
possessed two ports, of which Nisaea on the Saronic Gulf was the most
important. It manufactured fairly ordinary vases and wove wool from its
sheep to make exomides (rough tunics) which sold well to the barbarians of
the north. In the sixth century, its prosperity tended to diminish. It suffered
from its position between two important cities, Corinth and Athens, each
of which divided it off from some part of its territory.
It made little contribution to Hellenism except for one great poet,
Theognis (second quarter of the sixth century), who voiced the resentment
of the dispossessed aristocracy, and one great architect, Eupalinos, who
worked at Samos for Polycrates. The triumph of democracy allowed the
development of a form of coarse farce, Megarian farce; the Athenians used
many of its features in their comedy, despite their profound contempt for
the city itself.
Aegina
Aegina, another Dorian land, is a case apart. It was a barren, waterless
island unable to live from its almost non-existent agriculture. Paradoxic¬
ally, no social crisis seems to have arisen, possibly because there was no
large property, and it escaped tyranny. Nevertheless, it acquired wealth by
acting as an intermediary, a function for which it seemed to be predestined
by its insular position in the middle of the Saronic Gulf, halfway between
Attica and the Argolid, and which explains its great advance from Early
Helladic times. Ancient myths recall this early glory, notably that of
Aeacus, a national hero, father of Peleus and grandfather of Achilles and
Ajax, who earned the right to be one of the three infernal judges. In the
Archaic period, it created two artificial ports and a navy and merchant
marine. It was the first town in Greece to mint money.
It lacked all the raw materials necessary to industry, even good model¬
ling clay: the pots it produced were therefore crude, objects of mirth to
Athenian comedians; it imported bronze to manufacture knick-knacks, as
well as works of art. Its sculptors are famous: Smilis worked at Samos,
Gallon at Trezene and Amyclae and both of them at Olympia. Not far
from the north-eastern tip of the island stood a sanctuary dedicated to a
local divinity, Aphaea, who would later be identified with Athena. The
remains of a peribolos have been found here and a seventh century altar.
In the sixth century, the hieron was reorganized with propylaea and an early
temple which sheltered the ivory idol of the goddess.
The distributive trade formed its real wealth. Its sailors furrowed the
Mediterranean from the Black Sea to Naucratis, where Aegina was the
only town in Greece proper to own a concession. Only one small black
cloud heralded the storm: very lively competition from the cities disturbed
by its success - Corinth, Samos, Chalcis and then Athens. The time was
no longer very far away when it would have to submit to the law of
Athens.
Crete
A large group of Eteocretans (true Cretans), faithful to their traditions and
even — as can be seen from certain inscriptions - to their language remained
on the large island of Crete which had been dorianized very early. Its
social institutions roughly resembled those of Sparta. A warrior class can
be distinguished first, descendants of the conquering Dorians, brought up
by the state according to the system of age groups, eating together and liv¬
ing together in men’s clubs. They were normally the only participants in
political life, although, in certain cities, one or two tribes existed in addition
to the three Dorian tribes. Below the warriors came an intermediate cate¬
gory undoubtedly analogous to the Lacedaemonian perioikoi. Lastly were
the serfs, cultivating the citizens’ land and deprived of all political rights.
Corresponding to the helots, they were different in that they generally be¬
longed to individual owners and not to the state. Above all, their position
was less difficult - so much so that there is no mention of any revolt amongst
them.
Politically, Crete was divided into a large number of cities (Homer
counted ioo), governed by the oligarchy of citizens. In contrast to Sparta,
kings had disappeared there and had been replaced by annual magistrates,
the kosmoi (directors), who disposed of large powers and who, on retiring
from office, formed the council. The assembly of the people voted on
measures proposed, without debate. The evolution of law is partly known
from a fundamental text engraved on a wall at Gortyn. This code dates
from the beginning of the fifth century, although its essential decrees go
back to the seventh and sixth centuries. It was mainly concerned with
family affairs, but also with questions raised by serfdom and slavery,
attacks on morals and damage caused by animals.
It is now known that economic activity was lively. Crete was a relay
point on the great east-west route. Taking advantage of its central position
in the Mediterranean, it traded with Rhodes, Cyprus, and Syria, with
Sicily, Aegina and the Argolid, and with Egypt. It participated in the
foundation of Cyrene, Gela and possibly Agrigentum.
A positive Cretan renaissance occurred throughout the early Archaic
period, and was particularly apparent in the realm of art. Excavations in
the small city of Dreros have brought to light an Archaic (or possibly
Geometric) temple and the first known examples of sphyrelata; Gortyn and
Prinias have yielded sculpture which decorated seventh century temples
(figure 23). The Cretan sculptors or Daedalids (presumed descendants of
the mythical Daedalus) were instrumental in originating the revival of
large-scale plastic art and their teachings gave inspiration to the artistic
rebirth, principally in the Peloponnese. Cretan ceramics influenced both
the decoration and the polychrome technique of the pottery of the

Cyclades. A scholarly lyricism appeared: the Gortynian Thaletas went to
Sparta to sing his paeans and hyporchemata. A new religion also made its
appearance, though it still contained more remnants of Minoan tradition
than anywhere else: Zeus was identified with the adolescent god of Ida as
well as with the cock god Velchanos; the Great Mother continued to be
worshipped everywhere; Curetes and Corybantes pursued their ritual
saltations; and Cretan priests even assisted in the final installation of
Apollo at Delphi - if the most plausible interpretation of the Homeric Hymn
to Apollo is to be believed.
This renaissance was brutally and abruptly halted before the beginning
of the sixth century and for several centuries no further mention is made of
Crete. Better-armed competitors seized the markets. Art disappeared and
the Cretans, who had utilized both Minoan recollections and oriental in¬
fluences to fashion the first Hellenic works, proved incapable of adapting
themselves to the new conditions of a perpetually changing world. They
give the impression that ‘the noble but impoverished Eteocretan blood,
prevented them from taking certain actions’ (P. Demargne).
SPARTA
One branch of the Dorians had settled in the rich valley of the Eurotas,
Homer’s ‘hollow Lacedaemon’. After bitter struggles, they subdued the
Achaeans, notably those from Therapne, but had to compromise with
Amyclae which put up a desperate resistance. Villages were founded in the
ninth century on a neighbouring and still virgin site, and these were later
joined by synoecism to form Sparta, the only city of Laconia (and this was
the first symptom of originality on the part of the Dorians of Laconia, in
contrast to their brothers of Messenia and the Argolid). The new town may
have taken its name from the genista broom which grew in profusion in the
plain or from the fertility of the soil of the land under seed. Both meanings
have been debated. The term Lacedaemon continued to be used to denote
the city in external contacts.
The Equals and Social Inequality
No other city was like Sparta, primarily because of the rigidity of its social
system which comprised three clearly specialized and strongly hierarchical
classes. Only the citizens or Equals (Homoioi) possessed political rights. To
belong to this body, it was necessary to be born of parents who were citi¬
zens and to have received the education provided by the state. They were
forbidden to undertake artisan or commercial activity or to cultivate the
soil: they lived from rent from a plot of land (cleros), granted by hereditary
title in the valley of the Eurotas (political land). Their sole purpose in life
was military service, and to this they devoted their whole existence, after
the hard training in childhood and adolescence.
The perioikoi (those that dwell round about) were also freemen who
developed the perioikis (less fertile borders of the valley), cultivated the
land, raised sheep and pigs, and practised trade and handicrafts. They
were grouped in rough market towns (in all about a hundred of these towns
existed) and enjoyed a large degree of autonomy but no rights with regard
to city policy.
Finally, an oppressed class, the helots, serfs of the state, were placed at
the disposal of the citizens for cultivating the cleroi. The helots may have
been men of the marshes’, ‘inhabitants of Helos’, a small straggling
Laconian village, or ‘captives’. In any case, etymologies suggested by the
ancients make it certain that they represented aborigines conquered by the
invaders. Their material position was tolerable: they inhabited isolated
farms, and had no obligations other than the rent (apophora) due to their
master (seventy medimnoi of barley for the master, twelve for his wife, and
a proportionate quantity of fruit, wine and oil) and army service in case of
need, generally as light infantry-men or as camp-followers.
But they received no protection from the law and their moral condition
was one of the most evil in the whole ancient world: they were made drunk
deliberately in order to inspire sobriety in the children, beaten during the
mysterious expeditions made by the adolescents, and lived in a state of
abjection, methodical degradation and organized terror intentionally
brought about by the Equals.
The ancients unhesitatingly attributed this frightful system to the con¬
quest. The contrast between helots and citizens, according to them, per¬
petuated the contrast between Dorian conqueror and conquered Achaean.
However, some modern sources do not concede that the explanation of
Spartan society might be found in the law of the spear: they say that the
enslavement of the small landowner to the landlord was the result of
economic evolution in a conservative state which did not experience the
equivalent of the Athenian seisachtheia (Kahrstedt). But this thesis is not
strictly in accordance with the facts: if the reduction to slavery had been
the consequence of indebtedness, the helots would have belonged to
private individuals and not to the collectivity.
With Sparta therefore, as with Thessaly and Crete, it is necessary to go
back to the ethnic theory of antiquity, though in a strongly qualified form.
There must have been considerable mixing of populations because helots
and citizens spoke the same Dorian dialect. Dorians with little natural
talent could very easily become helots and, inversely, Achaeans (such as
the Amyclaeans) could succeed in penetrating the community of the con¬
querors. As for the perioikoi, they represented a composite body where
Dorian late-comers mingled with pre-Dorians who had been strong
enough to escape becoming helots.
It is tempting to regard the clearly marked severity of this framework as
a specifically Dorian contribution. The conquerors deliberately tried to
immobilize the social structure that had emerged from their victory and to
perpetuate an egalitarian and communal society of a Dorian type, where
the free man, identified with the combatant, lived by roughly exploiting
the serfs tied to the soil. But it must be noted that this view of the social
problem, which would appear to be the most reasonable, is far from being
generally accepted.
Some suggest that Sparta possessed an aristocracy of large landowners
from the outset. The equality which came later (and which must be clearly
acknowledged, if only because of the name of Equals) would have resulted
from an enlargement of the community, following the claims of the small
landowners against the creditors. It would, therefore, have been the out¬
come of a type of democratic movement producing an enlarged privileged
class - not at all a rare phenomenon in antiquity (in the ninth century or
even in the seventh and sixth?). New distributions of cleroi were made,
particularly after the wars with Messenia, in response to aspirations which
one hesitates to describe as democratic and they certainly increased the
number of citizens. However, in our opinion egalitarianism was funda¬
mental in Sparta: moreover Plato recalls that the land had been shared
among the Dorians without any disputes.
But the example of Sparta proves that no society can escape the law of
evolution. Its apparently perfect social organization concealed the faults
which gradually undermined it. In the first place, equality goes against
nature and, from the end of the Archaic period, inequality did in fact ap¬
pear behind the egalitarian facade. On the one hand, a citizen was not
forbidden to own property in the perioikis, which nullified the strictly equal
division of plots. On the other hand, an epicleros girl (that is to say the sole
heir of a man without male child) could marry a citizen who already had
his own cleros, and who would thus henceforth possess two cleroi: a strange
concession to the system of family property in the country of political land¬
owning.
Certainly, the end of the Archaic period, when this state of affairs pre¬
vailed, was still far away from the scandalous disparities of fortune which
ruined Sparta in the fourth century. On the whole, the Equals remained
poor and lived in parsimonious austerity. But Sparta had only to succumb
to the attractions of mercantilist societies for the whole ancient order to
collapse.
Besides - and even independent of all moral considerations - helotage
was a monstrous institution. Helots were numerous, possibly ten to every
citizen (at Plataea, the Spartan army, which obviously did not mobilize all
of them, included seven to every citizen). On the other hand, they lived in
such a state of moral poverty that their only action against oppression and
contempt was revolt. A heavy menace therefore hung over the city and
gave rise to the paradoxical situation of a state which possessed the strongest
army in the Greek world and yet was unable to use it for distant expeditions
for fear of the helots at home.
Oligarchs and Kings

The ancients attributed Spartan institutions to the patronage of Lycurgus.
But the character of this legislator is full of inconsistencies; a recent study
even attempts to portray him as the hero of one of the confraternities of
werwolves, which must have been important in primitive Sparta (H.
Jeanmaire).
The constitution as a whole was not created by Lycurgus (despite K.
Chrimes — who also gives a much too early date for its creation, 809). On
the contrary the city was organized step by step. The first document that
can be cited is the Great Rhetra (law) in the first half of the eighth century,
which undoubtedly represents the organic law of the polls born from the
synoecism of five villages. It mentions the two kings, the council, and the
assembly which appeared to be supreme. Towards the middle of the eighth
century, kings and council received the right to dissolve the meeting ‘if the
people decide against it’, and, possibly in 754, magistrates made their
appearance, the ephors, who limited the hitherto discretionary authority
of the kings.
The scholars who do not believe in the original equality of the citizens
interpret these measures as a double victory for the aristocracy: over the
people and over the kings. However, we prefer to believe that the tradition¬
alist legislators who inspired this reform wanted both to reinforce the
powers of the egalitarian community and to institute guardians to protect
it from all deviation.
In the seventh and sixth centuries, the constitution was finally put into
working order and its essential mechanism appeared much more clearly;
kings, ephors, council, assembly. Sparta was the only important city in the
Greek world to retain a monarchy. It had two kings, chosen from the Agid
and Eurypontid dynasties, the first undoubtedly Achaean, the second
Dorian. The double monarchy, which has posed so many problems to
modern scholars, would thus have been the result of an agreement con¬
cluded between the two communities at the time of the conquest: in parti¬
cular this would explain the constant and traditional discord between the
two families and the strict ban on their members marrying amongst each
other.
The kings were endowed with great riches and many honours and re¬
tained absolute power over the army which they could lead where and how
they pleased. They practised the priesthood of Lacedaemonian Zeus and
Uranian Zeus, as well as possessing other extensive religious powers.
Otherwise, they were closely supervised by the ephors, and had to take
an oath before them every month that they would reign ‘according to the
existing laws’. At the end of the sixth century, the ephors’ ascendancy
increased still further as a result of the machinations of King Cleomenes.
The five ephors were elected for one year by the gerousia by the strange
system of the vote by acclamation, which lent itself to many intrigues.
They were originally simply observers of heavenly bodies (the name of one
of them derives from this: Asteropus - the Star Gazer, a partly mythical
figure and a declared enemy of royal power). They became (after 754?)
magistrates who saw that respect for the law was maintained, supervised
children’s education, controlled the public life of the citizens and the con¬
duct of the kings, and at the same time judged in civil law. Even beyond
these functions, they were in possession of a mysterious power, which was
all the more terrifying because they were only answerable to their
successors when they retired from office.
The council (gerousia — senate, but the members of the Spartan aristo¬
cracy preferred the name gerochia = assembly of the privileged) comprised
28 gerontes, elected for life by acclamation from amongst men over sixty
years old, and the two kings. It met at regular dates ‘between Babyce and
Cnacion’ both as a high court forjudging important cases and as council to
prepare the decisions of the assembly. Above all, it played a leading part in
the conduct of foreign policy.
Finally, the assembly of the people (apella) included all the Equals. It
elected ephors and gerontes and debated all affairs. But its debates were
summary and voting most often took place by acclamation: the citizens
were therefore consulted but scarcely did anything but ratify the measures
placed before them.
The constitution was thus to a large degree oligarchical because only a
very small minority, the homoioi, participated in affairs. But within this
oligarchy, all citizens enjoyed equal rights. Developments at the end of the
sixth century even tended to increase this egalitarianism by limiting the
power of the kings to the advantage of the ephors, who were the represen¬
tatives of the community.
Scholars have sometimes imagined that there were hidden springs mov¬
ing the whole political machine for the benefit of a nucleus of energetic citi¬
zens unflinchingly leading Sparta along an undeviating path, under the
changing government of the ephors (P. Roussel). However, there is a
simpler explanation of the really very remarkable permanence of Spartan
policy. In Sparta, education broke down individualism and stifled innovat¬
ing tendencies, while the gerontocracy inherent in the system imposed con¬
servative government. Thus those aspiring to power - and it is known that
candidates were numerous and intrigues often lively - only aimed at
maintaining a past that had long passed away in other cities.
Sparta appears to have been very much a quasi-unique sociological phe¬
nomenon, a living anachronism, with its fierce decision to remain faithful
to its ancestral pattern and its egalitarian society, inherited from the most
distant ages. But it would be sheer romanticism to try to find an enigma
there.
Spartan Imperialism
The internal cohesion of the state was one of the causes of the constant de¬
velopment of Spartan power. As soon as the conquest of Laconia was
complete, it tried to expand westwards (to the detriment of the Argives)

and northwards (at the expense of the Arcadians). Between 736 and 72o(?),
it waged a very harsh war against the Messenians and, despite their heroic
resistance on Mount Ithome, subdued them. This first war with Messenia
marked an important date in Spartan expansion: the conquered Messe¬
nians were reduced to the status of helots; the rich lands of the Pamisus
valley were distributed in the form of cleroi to new citizens, while the moun¬
tainous periphery was joined to the perioikis. Thus the numbers of the
Equals increased and consequently Spartan military power.
This great success was followed by severe difficulties in the seventh cen¬
tury. Sparta was conquered at Hysiae by Pheidon of Argos - undoubtedly
its only defeat in the whole Archaic period. About 650, the Messenians,
who had not become resigned to servitude, revolted and the second war
with Messenia began, even harder and fiercer than the first. Their leader,
the valiant Aristomenes, was only beaten by a betrayal, after a struggle
which lasted thirty years and in which Sparta had to strain every sinew, as
the Elegies of Tyrtaeus confirm. Reduced once more to servitude, there was
only one thought in their minds: to massacre their masters, just like the
helots of Laconia (known as ancient helots). However, Sparta continued
strong enough to hold them in submission until the fourth century.
In the sixth century, Sparta helped the Eleans to crush Pisa, and then
made a vain attempt to conquer Arcadia. It then abruptly changed its tra¬
ditional policy, abandoned direct territorial expansion and tried to gather
as many cities round it as possible by treaties of alliance. In this way it
formed what is now called the Peloponnesian League (ancient texts only
speak of ‘the Lacedaemonians and their allies’) which soon extended its
ascendancy over the whole Peloponnese, with the exception of the indomi¬
table Argos and Achaea. No tributes were paid and the towns only
provided contingents which Sparta reserved the right to command, when
called upon.
This very flexible system, said to have been initiated by the mysterious
ephor Chilon, rapidly proved its efficiency. At the end of the century,
Sparta embarked on more distant and more daring ventures in the Greek
Orient though primarily in central Greece and Athens. A coalition of
Boeotians and Chalcidians led by Cleomenes against Athens certainly
proved that his ambitions had been excessive and ended in a positive rout
in 506. But Lacedaemon prestige emerged scarcely diminished and at the
time of the Median wars no one disputed its hegemony over all Greece.
This prestige was due not only to the allies which surrounded it, but also
to the valour of its army, the only one in the Greek world to be composed
of professional soldiers. It had no cavalry, and its navy, furnished by the
perioecic cities of the coast, was merely ridiculous, but its citizen-soldiers
formed an irresistible phalanx which was supported by perioecic hoplites
and lightly armed helots. Tyrtaeus (fragment 11) presents them in forceful
lines: ‘So let each man bite his lip and abide firm-set astride upon the
ground, covering with the belly of his broad buckler thighs and legs below
and breast and shoulders above; let him brandish the massy spear in his
right hand, let him wave the dire crest upon his head.’ Using rudimentary
tactics - advancing without breaking ranks until the enemy was forced to
yield and abandon the battlefield - the soldiers of Sparta remained
unconquered until Leuctra (371).
Discipline and Austerity

Spartan austerity has been a byword since antiquity. The- citizen learned
this austerity to his cost from infancy. At birth, the new-born boy was pre¬
sented to the old men of his tribe. If he seemed to be malformed, they
ordered that he be cast into a ravine of Taygetus. If he deserved to live, he
received an education, more appropriately called a training (agoge), which
was entirely organized by the state. The children were regimented from
the age of eight in formations (agelai - herds) with hierarchically organized
categories according to age. These were more reminiscent ofthe Hitlerjugend
than of the Boy Scouts. He had to follow the following cycle:
8th to nth year 1 robidas (sense unknown)

small boy 2 pre-small boy
3 small boy
4 pre-boy
12th to 15th year 1 first year boy
Boy 2 second year boy
3 first year future eiren
4 second year future eiren
16th to 20th year 1 first year eiren
Eiren 2 second year eiren
3 third year eiren
4 fourth year eiren
5 head-eiren
He was taught the minimum of reading and writing - music was already
more highly thought of because it ennobled the spirit and accompanied the
soldier in battle. But the main part of this training consisted of gymnastics
and the handling of arms, in short, a direct apprenticeship to the military
profession. Though unbounded admiration for this has sometimes been
expressed, in actual fact it only instilled the ‘ideal of the regular non-com¬
missioned officer’ in the child (H. I. Marrou). The training also tried to
develop discipline and communal sense. Plutarch’s Life o/Lycurgus, 25, has
the horrible sentence: ‘he did accustom his citizens so that they neither
would nor could live alone, but were in manner as men incorporated one
with another, and were always in company together, as the bees be about
their master bee: still in a continual love to serve their country, to win
honour, and to advance the common-weal’.
Strange rites dating from earliest antiquity were aimed at hardening the
future citizen, even further to the hardships of war. He spent a year in seclu¬
sion near the sanctuary of Orthia when passing from childhood to adoles¬
cence. Very fierce battles between two classes of the same age group —
where no holds were barred - were organized at the Platanistas (on an islet
of the Eurotas); in front of the altar of Artemis, one team tried to seize
cheeses which were defended by another team armed with clubs. The con¬
clusion of the initiation was marked by the Gymnopaedia, when the boys
endured an exhausting ordeal standing nude in the height of the sun,
amongst the dancing choirs. Other practices at the end of the ‘eirenate’
were limited to an elite who had to live as werwolves, not let anyone see
them, and kill helots: this was the krypteia (secret life) which qualified the
boy for entry into the corps of hippeis (foot soldiers, despite their name, who
served as the king’s bodyguard and the ephors’ secret police).
As far as girls were concerned, the Spartans only wanted to turn them
into productive mothers, capable of giving birth to vigorous children. They
had to practice gymnastics and get used to appearing in the nude at festi¬
vals. The Athenians were never weary of pulling these phaenomerides
(displayers of thighs) to pieces behind their backs.
Even the grown man did not escape the state’s clutches. Until his thir¬
tieth year, he slept in a dormitory with companions of the same age, just as
he had since he was twelve. He could if he wished rejoin his wife, provided he
did so secretly. Later he could have his own house, but he had to continue to
participate once a day in the common meals (syssitiai) (an inheritance of the
original warlike camaraderie) and also bring his share to them, or pay the
penalty of being struck off the roll of citizens. The famous or infamous black
broth was eaten at these meals, without the accompaniment of any of the
intellectual or artistic distraction current in the symposia of the other cities.
The women were very free, particularly as family life was greatly limited
in extent. Aristotle criticized their misconduct and authoritarianism, and
sexual customs were in fact fairly loose: one example shows three brothers
possessing the same wife, and Plutarch also reports on strange practices.
Much to the disgust of the other Greeks, the wives had to carry heavy res¬
ponsibilities because of their husbands’ frequent absences on campaigns or
manoeuvres. Many of them were very good at administering the family
fortune and increasing the household’s resources as they were legally
permitted to engage in commerce.
The Deliberate Death of a Civilization

There was no economic activity at Sparta comparable to that of the other
great cities. Notably, it refused to adopt money and remained faithful to
the ancient system of iron bars. Nonetheless, agriculture and stock-raising
prospered and the products of its luxury craft industries (ex voto, ceramics)
were easily exported. Furthermore, the importance of ivory work shows
that there was a regular trade with the Orient.
It is therefore not surprising that a brilliant civilization should have
7
Yards
Figure 33 The sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta

developed in Sparta until the middle of the sixth century, able to compete
with the most dazzling cities in Greece proper. They loved poetry, music
and dancing. The most famous poets visited Sparta and some of them made
their homes there: the nome was represented by Terpander of Lesbos and
Polymnestus of Colophon, choral lyricism by Thaletas of Gortyn and
Aleman of Sardes, the elegy by Tyrtaeus of Athens. Two of these foreigners
expressed two contrasting but complementary aspects of the Spartan spirit:
Aleman in his Maiden-Songs sang with gallant and gracious delicacy of the
strong young girls for whom he composed them; Tyrtaeus with masculine
simplicity exalted the heroism of the warrior whose only ideal was his
native land.
The town was covered with beautiful religious buildings: the temple of
Athena Chalkioikos, on a terrace north of the acropolis, owed its name to
the bronze reliefs with which Gitiadas decorated it at the beginning of the
sixth century. The Limnaium rose in the swamps on the banks of the
Eurotas (figure 33); it was the hieron of Orthia, a divinity of fertility identi¬
fied with Artemis, the object of a very fervent cult to judge by the multitude
Surrounding walls: A primitive, eighth century; B Archaic, about 600. Temples:

(1) primitive, seventh century (temple with median colonnade); (2) Archaic, about
600 (without colonnade) (reconstructed in the second century bc).
Altars: I Primitive (eighth century); II Archaic (seventh century); III Roman (third
century ad) . (The altar belonging to the reconstruction of 600 had not been discovered.)
Orthia, identified with Artemis, was a Spartan divinity, and therefore recent, because
Sparta was only founded in the ninth century, but she bears obvious traces of the heritage
of a Creto-Mycenaean goddess: on Archaic ex-votos, dressed as a goddess of the second
millennium, she is carrying a bow and wild beasts surround her. Her attributes are those
of a Great Mother: fertility and fecundity, protection against miasma of swamps, war
and hunting, education of children.
The English excavations carried out in her sanctuary have made it possible to establish
a fairly precise stratigraphy of the site: Tenth to ninth centuries: Geometric tessera.
Eighth century: first peribolos and first altar. Seventh century: second altar, first temple
(in wood on a stone pedestal, with rows of median columns). Destruction of the sanctuary
by a flooding of the Eurotas, which gave rise in about 600 to a general reconstruction,
after a raising of the level by a bank of sand. Second century ad : reconstruction of the
temple. Third century ad : Roman altar; Roman theatre (shown as dotted line on plan).
of ex voto which have been discovered there (figure 34). In nearby suburbs,
Menelaus and Helen, the Achaean heroes of Laconia, were worshipped
at the Menelaium and the handsome Hyacinthus and Apollo at the
Amyclaeum. The Spartans had no hesitation in summoning a famous
decorative artist, Bathycles, to decorate the god’s ‘throne’. He covered the
whole building with reliefs stamped with the slightly fussy charm of Ionia
(figure 35). Small ivory and lead consecrations were plentiful in all the
sanctuaries, notably at the one to Orthia (goddesses taming wild beasts and
warriors); furthermore, these were exported as far afield as-Asia or Cyrene.
Figure 35 Reconstruction
of the ‘throne’ of Apollo at
Amyclae
Finally, potters produced wonderful deep bowls, often decorated with

birds, and these also sold very well. Experts have difficulty in deciding
whether the most beautiful Laconian bowl, the Arcesilas Gup (in the
Cabinet des Medailles) came from a Spartan workshop or from a branch in
Gyrenaica.
In short, Sparta had thrown its doors wide open to the outside world
when, about the middle of the sixth century, it suddenly retired within and
closed them to external influences. Spartans were no longer authorized to
travel nor foreigners to stay. Life slowly dried up. Songs continued to be
sung in honour of the gods but these were only the old poems; no further
buildings were erected; ceramics declined after 550 and disappeared about
500. A city where oriental influence had been remarkably strong, and
which had known how to ally its virility to an often gracious charm, shut
itself up in permanent austerity.
The causes for this ruthless and sudden reversal are not really known:
the leaders were undoubtedly frightened that Spartan strength would flag
and the change which they dreaded more than anything else would in the
long run be unleashed. The Spartans never did things by halves: they
hacked into the living flesh and cut out everything that might soften their
ruggedness. Henceforth, Sparta smiled no more.
It is difficult to speak objectively about Sparta which has always - in
THE ANCIENT WORLD
*73
ancient times and still today - been the subject of fierce admiration and
fierce disparagement. The historian must recognize the rare qualities which
enabled it to assert itself as the strongest city of Greece: courage, discipline,
tenacity, everything that later Lacedaemonian apopthegms changed into
platitudes but which were actually alive during the Archaic period.
Thucydides (i, 84) put a wonderful evocation of Spartan ‘reflective wis¬
dom’ into the mouth of King Archidamus which defined one constant
factor in their character and their policy:
Because of our well-ordered life we are both brave in war and wise in council.
Brave, because self-control is based upon a sense of honour, and honour is based
on courage. And we are wise because we are not so highly educated as to look
down upon our laws and customs, and are too vigorously trained in self-control
to be able to disobey them.
But neither this courage nor this wisdom can conceal the elements of
fundamental egoism in their oligarchical constitution, of senility in their
immobility, and of contempt for spiritual values in their rupture with
civilization.
A DEMOCRACY IN GESTATION: ATHENS
Attica, populated by Ionians since the beginning of the second millennium,

was already very prosperous in the Achaean period, as is seen from the
extent of the Mycenaean remains of the Acropolis and its surroundings.
Sheltered behind its belt of mountains, it was spared the Dorian invasions
and even offered refuge to many Ionians driven from the Peloponnese.
Active development in the Proto-Geometric and Geometric periods, as a
result of this influx, made it the most civilized region of Greece proper at
that time. Unlike the Peloponnese and Thessaly, part of its population was
not therefore reduced to slavery by the conquerors and it can be said with¬
out exaggeration that this fact was at the origin of the relatively flexible
social system it always retained.
A confused memory of these facts, which secured it a place apart
in Hellas, caused fifth century Athenians to like to call themselves
‘autochthons’, that is to say, those sprung from the soil.
A Patriarchal Society
The social framework of Archaic Athens can be found again, with slight
variations in detail, in many Ionian cities. There are, therefore, good
grounds for believing that it represented the primitive organization of
Ionian societies and went back to a very early period. There were four
tribes with the enigmatic names of Geleontes, Aigikoreis, Argadeis,
Hopletes. The division was not made on a territorial principle because it
preceded the settlement of the Ionians in Attica. Nor does it appear to have
been professional, though it is tempting to interpret the names designating
the tribes as Brilliants (which would imply Nobles), Goatherds, Workers,

Men-at-Arms. They may therefore have an ethnic origin, as was possibly
the case with the three Dorian tribes, or they may have referred to groups
of men sharing the same cults (for example, a Zeus Geleon existed in
Attica). No one has ventured to make a decision. At a later date, every
tribe had its own king (phylobasileus), but it is not known whether this
institution originally existed.
The tribe was divided into three phratriai (fraternities) whose members
looked upon each other as brothers, i.e. as descendants of the same ancestor.
Furthermore, virtually with only one exception, their names, ending in idai
or adai (sons of) [Thyrgonidai, Achniadai], recalled this common origin.
They celebrated the festival of the Apaturia which, according to etymology,
is the festival of men who have the same father. On the third day of the
festival, the fathers presented sons born during the year to the phratry:
after a vote, the child was admitted into the community which secured him
the right both to citizenship and to succession. At the same time, they wor¬
shipped two gods, protectors of the phratry, Zeus Phratrios and Athena
Phratria.
The phratry in its turn was subdivided into clans (gene), composed of
families. Aristotle states that there were thirty gene per phratry and thirty
families per genos, which would make 10,800 families — an impossible popu¬
lation for early Athens. In fact, less than a hundred gene are known and
possibly not very many more existed. Most of them bore the name of their
common ancestor (Alcmaeonids, Cimonids ...), some the name of a sacred
function (Eumolpids = good singers, Ceryces = heralds) or of a place
(Gephisians, from the river Cephissus). Their members thought of them¬
selves as homogalactics (those who have sucked the same milk). They had
common cults, notably those of Apollo Patroos and of their eponymous
ancestor, and a common burial place. Collective ownership by the gene no
longer existed but possession of land remained closely linked with the clan,
to such an extent that until Solon’s time a childless citizen could not be¬
queath his possessions outside the genos. Solidarity was also very strong in
the realm of criminal law, since the entire genos was affected by an offence
committed against one of its members, and this gave rise to an interminable
series of vendettas.
From the very beginning, an aristocracy can undoubtedly be identified
amongst the members of the clans (the gennetai) - all proud of their origins -
which consisted of families which had grown rich because they owned the
best lands: the Eupatridae (those who have good fathers); families who
cultivated less fertile plots formed the labourers (georgoi).
But a plebian class developed on the margin of this closed society, that
was not integrated into the gene, and consisted more of their cast-offs and of
new immigrants than of descendants or pre-Hellenic populations. They
pursued crafts or trade or sometimes worked poor estates, reclaimed late for
cultivation after the gennetai had taken their share. Its members were demi-
urgoi (literally: artisans). Although they were deprived of the right of the
THE ANCIENT WORLD
175
city, they were naturally not complete strangers to the life of the commu¬
nity. They were grouped in cultic associations or orgeones (the word seems
pre-Hellenic, which is worthy of note), which tried to enter, if not into the
clans, which were fiercely impermeable to all external influences, at least
into the phratriai which formed the framework of civil society. According to
Philochorus, the phratriai as well as the gene were ordered by law to welcome
the orgeones, but it is impossible to give a precise date or to state under what
pressure this measure was taken — possibly Athens’ first hesitant step on the
road to democracy (end of the seventh century or under Solon?).
The Athenian State and the Nobles

At first Attica was broken up into several independent principalities which
its landscape of small plains separated by mountainous barriers favoured.
Tradition tells of often bitter struggles between the kings of the various
straggling villages, especially Eumolpus of Eleusis and Erechtheus of
Athens. It gives primordial importance to Theseus, a native of rocky
Aphidna north of Marathon, who imposed a unity, which became perma¬
nent, on the whole country. But the date of this synoecism is almost totally
impervious to historical research because of the mythical character of its
originator. However, Theseus also appears in the cycle of events involving
the Minotaur, and this to all appearances would locate him in the fifteenth
century though some sources suggest a later date in the eighth century. In
any case, taking into account the fact that already Athens appeared in the
‘Catalogue of Ships’ as a unified state: ‘a splendid citadel in the realm of
the magnanimous Erechtheus’ (Iliad 2, 546 ff.) - there are sound reasons
for placing the unification in at least the thirteenth century.
All the local particularisms certainly did not disappear overnight; even
the name of the town remained in the plural; some local formations con¬
tinued to exist, such as the tetrapolis of Marathon; and Salamis and Eleusis
successfully defended their independence. However, one important step
had been made: all Attica henceforth constituted a single realm - before
becoming a single city - where the inhabitants, villagers or townsmen, were
subject to the same laws. The Athenians who celebrated the festival of
the Synoicia (of the common habitat) every year as a prelude to the
Panathenaea were very aware of this.
Athens retained its monarchy long after the synoecism. At least two
dynasties are mentioned in mythology, the Erechtheids and the Medon-
tidae, but their list of kings includes an equal number of mythical heroes
and characters who may actually have existed. After that, here as else¬
where, the aristocrats succeeded in ousting the kings. The transition from
one regime to the next was imperceptible if Aristotle is to be believed: the
king, originally chosen for life, became decennial and then annual; at the
same time, whereas he had formerly been chosen solely from the Medontidae,
the choice was henceforth extended to all Eupatridae families.
In any case, three annual magistrates certainly appeared on the scene:
the archons. The archon, called eponymous because the year was known
by his name, directed the executive. The king (basileus) retained the title
and the religious functions of the original king; assisted by four phylobasileis,
he judged cases connected with religion. The polemarch (war-chief) led
the army and conducted trials concerning foreigners. The list of epony¬
mous archons from 683 to 682 still exists and shows that the evolution was
completed after the beginning of the seventh century.
Archons who had retired from office formed the council (boule) which
was later known as the ‘Council of the Areopagus’ - undoubtedly to dis¬
tinguish it from the new boule created by Solon - after the hill next to the
Acropolis, where it sat as a high court of justice. It had very extensive
powers: ‘In all’, according to Aristotle (Constitution of Athens, 3), ‘it took the
most important part in the administration of the city’. Notably, it super¬
vised the magistrates; it examined them before they took on office (doki-
masia) and examined their accounts when they retired, before joining their
elders amongst its ranks. Its composition and the functions it fulfilled
strongly resembled those of the senate of early Rome: it ensured the
permanence of aristocratic ascendency over the state.
In comparison, the assembly of the people (ecclesia) had only very limited
power: it undoubtedly nominated the magistrates, but Aristotle (ibid.) very
clearly states that they were chosen ‘according to nobility and wealth’.
The rudiments of a fairly simple administration emerge. The kolakretai
were the ‘amputators of limbs’ of sacrificial victims, originally a principal
source of state income. Thus they easily became financial officials who were
replaced at an unknown date by the tamiai (also amputators).
Local admistration was based on the system of naucraries: the tribe was
divided into four naucraries, each of which provided the state with a ship
ready to be used. Their leaders, the naukraroi (shipmasters), formed an
association under the direction of prytaneis. The naucraries also served
as a framework for army levies and tax collection.
Self-interest and Passions Unleashed

The crisis which shook all the developed cities of the Greek world at the
end of the seventh century also affected Athens. However, several factors
there operated to preserve the privileges of an aristocracy which monopo¬
lized political life. No class of serfs had been inherited from the conquest;
economic progress had been less rapid than elsewhere, and Athens did not
participate in colonization, and thus avoided competition from colonial
agricultural products; until Solon’s time, it did not mint money and was
content to use coins from neighbouring cities, which excluded it from the
ranks of the great commercial towns.
However, it gradually emerged from its slow and purely rural life. In the
Kerameikos district, craftsmen who worked with fire, potters and black¬
smiths, increased production under the dual patronage of Hephaestus and
Athena. Trade developed, as can be seen from its participation in the
THE ANCIENT WORLD
T77
amphictyony of Calauria and its export of vases of wine and oil, notably to
the Peloponnese. In this way, citizens, many of whom did not belong to the
closed world of the gennetai, became wealthy. This gave rise to political
aspirations on the part of men who had come into possession of worldly
wealth but were excluded from all participation in public affairs.
On the other hand, the state remained tribal and much less centralized
than, for example, the Dorian cities of the Peloponnese. Rivalries — often
bloody — between clans not only appeared as legal phenomena but ended
by dividing the aristocracy against itself.
Finally and most important, a crisis severely shook the rural world. The
basic reasons for this can be glimpsed in the fierce egoism of the large land-
owners who built up their possessions by gradually eliminating the small
free peasants. The latter were forced to borrow if the harvest was bad,
were unable to repay and were reduced to selling their land to the Eupatrid
creditor. One of two things could then happen: either they were employed
on the aristocrats vast domains and became hektemoroi (‘sixth-parters’),
obliged to be content with a sixth of the harvest they collected; or worse
still, they and their families were sold as slaves. The condition of the humble
folk in the country became untenable: this wretched proletariat which
Solon (in Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, 12) depicts ‘trembling before their
masters’ humours’ was ready for any revolt and it raised the eternal claim of
the dissatisfied in Greece: the abolition of debts and the division of the land.
The time had come for the aristocracy to make sacrifices.
The Era of Reform: Draco and Solon

The most urgent problem was to draft written laws, to avoid the arbitrary
judgements of the gene. There was a first unsuccessful effort at reform, which
entrusted six thesmothetai with this task. An attempt by Cylon to seize the
Acropolis and install a tyranny at Athens was successfully resisted by the
archon Megacles, of the family of the Alcmaeonids. But tension remained
great in the divided town and Draco was given the responsibility of putting
the laws into writing (621). Only his legislation on murder is familiar:
henceforth a genuine trial took place before the Areopagus, presided over
by the king, or before tribunals of ephetai. In this way the murderer was
removed from the vendetta of the clans, and the state intervened as an
all-powerful arbiter between them. Despite the severity of the punishments
specified (which have made ‘draconian’ synonymous with implacable), the
principles of a more humane law emerged from the introduction of
differentiation between various types of murders.
What fundamentally provoked social tension, however, was the in¬
equality of the division of landed property. Only Solon, entrusted by unani¬
mous consent with restoring order to the city (594-3?) dared attack this
problem directly. By the seisachtheia (remittance of burden), a revolution¬
ary measure, details of which are very little known, he abolished the im¬
prisonment for debt for which so many humble people had been victimized
7*
and reduced to slavery by the possessing class. He liberated the subjected

and removed mortgage boundary marks from the ‘rich land of the country’.
This was the first time that such a bold measure had been taken in the
Greek world, deliberately putting the interests of the state before those of
individuals - in this case the large landowners who were stripped of their
iniquitous acquisitions of recent decades. The hektemoroi disappeared,
undoubtedly restored to possession of their land.
Furthermore, Solon supported the peasant by less important measures:
he offered rewards for the capture of wolves, encouraged-the sinking of
wells, aided the development of shrub cultivation, the sole source of a satis¬
factory harvest on the poor soil of Attica, and in particular prohibited the
destruction of olive groves. His warm concern for the peasants established a
new social equilibrium, based on the solidarity of a middle class of small
and middling landowners which continued to exist until well into the
fifth century.
He also encouraged developments which were taking shape in industry
and commerce. He finally fixed measures of capacity, medimnoi for grains,
metretai for liquids. Athens had not yet minted money and had fallen
considerably behind in this field. Henceforth, forsaking the Aeginetan
standard which had made it closely dependent on its opulent neighbours,
Aegina and Megara, Athens struck silver coins according to the Euboic
standard, which was lighter, and therefore possibly effected a devaluation
of about twenty-seven per cent at the same time. They were of an excellent
alloy thanks to the rich mineral deposits of the veins at Laurium.
I would like to think that Solon also extended the body of citizens by
ordering thephratriai to welcome the orgeones, that is to say to integrate those
who were excluded from the closed society of the gemetai - essentially
the demiurgoi. But this measure may have occurred slightly before this
period.
At the same time, Solon transformed political institutions. He used an
earlier division into four classes, according to income derived from land:
pentacosiomedimnoi (annual income above 500 medimnoi or metretai), hip-
peis (between 500 and 300), geugitai (between 300 and 200), thetes (below
200). This served as a guide for dividing honours and duties according to
what was then considered fair, that is to say, according to wealth, and more
precisely, landed wealth. Magistrates were drawn from the first three cate¬
gories, archons and treasurers from the first; but all citizens, thetes in¬
cluded, participated in the assembly. The first two classes served in the
cavalry, the third in the heavy infantry of the hoplites, the fourth in excep¬
tional cases in the light infantry or navy. The most important magistrates
continued to be the archons who henceforth formed a college of nine
members including the six thesmothetai, the archon, the king and the
polemarch.
But Solon’s real innovations lay in his creation, first of a new council of
400 members, the boule, entrusted with preparing the sessions of the ecclesia
and which gradually nibbled away the prerogatives of the Areopagus; and
THE ANCIENT WORLD
179
secondly of a really popular tribunal the Heliaea — its members were taken
from the four classes — which gradually became the only court of appeal
beside the ancient blood tribunals.
Solon undoubtedly tried to establish equilibrium between the nobles and
the demos. He himself, in his Elegies, emphasized his role as impartial and
disinterested arbiter: ‘For to the people gave I grace enough, nor from
their honour took, nor proffered more; while those possessing power and
graced with wealth, these too I made to suffer nought unseemly’ (cited in
Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, 12). He was not at all a democrat in the
later meaning of the word, but the germ of the essential outline of future
democracy can be found in the reforms to which his name is attached.
A Good-humoured Tyrant: Pisistratus

Solon’s moderation dissatisfied all the extremists. He therefore preferred to
go into exile instead of trying to carry his work still further. Anarchy pre¬
vailed spasmodically at Athens with the archonship either usurped or lying
vacant. It is not impossible that a capital reform took place during the
period of political troubles which followed Solon’s departure: the drachma
was given equal value to the medimnos in the assessment of the property
qualification for voting. Other scholars, in the absence of all further proof,
attribute this measure to Solon or Cleisthenes. This equivalence marked
the complete assimilation of personal wealth to landed wealth in Athens,
then at the height of a period of commercial expansion.
This expansion also partly explains the formation of three interest
groups, corresponding to three social groups. In a city which still remained
completely rural, they were known by the names of the regions they culti¬
vated : Paraloi (people from the coast, concerned with the development of
commerce) under the leadership of Megacles, the Alcmaeonid; Pediakoi
(large landowners from the plain) around Lycurgus; and Diakrioi (small
landed proprietors from the hills), under the influence of a restless charac¬
ter, Pisistratus, a man ‘who was thought to be an extreme advocate of the
people’ (Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, 14).
For Pisistratus devotion to democracy consisted primarily in relying on
support from the demos, that is to say, from the humble folk and the dis¬
contented, against the Eupatridae. Cunning and crafty Pisistratus was
expert at spinning pathetic or miraculous yarns; he even utilized Megacles
on one occasion and promised to marry his daughter - though he did not
consent to consummate the marriage properly. He succeeded in imposing
himself as tyrant (561-60), was twice exiled, and twice returned to power.
On the whole, he was a good-humoured tyrant. He lived on the Acropolis,
surrounded by bodyguards, and closely limited the privileges of the nobles,
some of whom (the Alcmaeonids for example) preferred to leave Athens,
while others (such as the Cimonids) reached at least a provisional under¬
standing with him. No changes were made in institutions but magistratures
were monopolized by his devotees.
i8o THE GREEK ADVENTURE
All his attention was turned to the peasantry, which benefited both from
the redistribution of land confiscated from the aristocracy and from loans
granted by the tyrant which allowed it to convert poor fields with small
yields of corn into rich olive groves or vineyards. Judges of the demes (rural
market towns) were established, thus freeing the peasant from the need to
come to town - and also keeping him away from the temptations of politi¬
cal activity. It is a strange paradox that Pisistratus gave future democracy
a more solid social foundation by strengthening the freedom and
independence of the middle class.
Pisistratus was rich - his income consisted not only of personal revenue
from his mines at Thrace but also of the five per cent tax he instituted on
agricultural products. He loved the display of wealth. Under his impetus,
Athens underwent its first architectural development: the Acropolis was
covered with treasuries with gaudy frontons; a new temple to Athena, the
Hecatompedon, was constructed alongside the old and venerated sanctuary
of the Erechtheum; a gigantic temple to Olympian Zeus was begun at the
foot of the hill. The development of religious life gave Pisistratus an oppor¬
tunity to indulge this same ostentation while following a clever and popular
policy. He gave additional brilliance to the recently instituted Grand
Panathenaea; he organized superb festivals, the Great Dionysia for
Dionysus (a rustic god, foreign by his very nature to gentilic cults) and
these incorporated dramatic competitions between tragedies (534); he
built a new telesterion in the sacred enclosure of the two goddesses of
Eleusis, thus giving definite official sanction of the mysteries.
He showed the same skill in exploiting religious fervour for political ends
when he claimed hegemony over the Ionians of the Cyclades and over the
sanctuary at Delos. Old myths which had taken two Attic heroes, Erysich-
thon and Theseus, as far as Delos were given a new lease of life, and on this
basis, Pisistratus claimed authority to establish his protectorate there and
to decree a general purification of the sacred isle. Henceforth it was for¬
bidden to give birth or to die there. Other expansionist ambitions were less
hypocritical: Pisistratus occupied Sigeum in Anatolia near the Hellespont;
with his consent, a Philaid, Miltiades the elder, was established as tyrant in
the Thracian Chersonese. These were personal enterprises by bold men,
quick to secure key positions on the route from the Straits, but they already
foreshadowed the cleruchies of the Athenian state.
Pisistratus certainly took advantage of a favourable combination of cir¬
cumstances. Athens was beginning to play its part in the concert of eco¬
nomic powers. The minting of coins increased and the owl, the eloquent
symbol of the city, replaced the coats of arms of the Eupatridae families on
coins. The Kerameikos district went feverishly to work. The vases, first
with black figures, then — following a revolutionary invention which may
possibly have taken place around 530 - with red figures, had driven out
Corinthian pottery since 550 and flooded foreign markets. Athens also
profited from the exodus of Ionians who preferred to go into exile rather
than submit to the Great King: the smile on the faces of the korai on the
Acropolis and their luxurious adornments are evidence of the presence of

Ionian masters in Attica. But the tyrant’s own personal influence must not
be underestimated. He was clever enough to take advantage of every
occasion, and he strengthened the greatness of Athens which was as much
his own greatness. Increasing social harmony, providing assistance and em¬
ployment for the less well off citizens by a policy of large-scale public
works, encouraging the arts, expanding overseas and amalgamating the
chthonic cults with those of Athena Polias — this was the programme
Pisistratus executed in full. Minus the ideology, it was not so different from
Pericles.
The Pisistratids and the Fall of the Tyranny

On the death of Pisistratus (528-7), his two sons, Hippias and Hipparchus,
inherited the tyranny as though it were a family heirloom. Following their
father’s policy, they continued to embellish Athens, adding a peripteral
portico to the Hecatompedon (which cut a poor figure now that the town
had become more sumptuous) and erecting hermae at the crossroads.
They gathered a group of poets around them, amongst whom Anacreon
and Simonides were outstanding; they ordered an edition of Homeric epics
to be drawn up; they put their faith in Onomacritus, an ardent Orphic
soothsayer, and made him Minister of Cults until their resounding quarrel
took place.
However, the opponents of tyranny gained new partisans daily. In the
first place, tyranny was a positive anachronism at Athens at the end of the
sixth century. Secondly, the sons did not have their father’s breadth of
vision and tried in vain to re-establish a compromised situation by the use
of excessive severity: they had already had Cimon the Lout, head of the
powerful house of Cimonids, assassinated because his popularity displeased
them. After the murder of Hipparchus - killed by two young aristocrats,
Harmodius and Aristogiton, in 514, for purely personal reasons - Hippias
redoubled this severity (in particular, the Alcmaeonidae again walked the
road of exile). However, all this was unsuccessful: intervention by the king
of Sparta, Cleomenes, forced him to capitulate and go into exile (510).
The long and often brilliant episode of Athenian tyranny was over.
The Triumph of Decimal Democracy: Cleisthenes

The aristocratic regime, which Sparta re-established, could not withstand
the pressure of the democrats and they found a first-class leader in the
Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes, the grandson of the homonymous tyrant of
Sicyon. Cleisthenes’ work, undoubtedly accomplished in 508-7, was par¬
ticularly daring. It was all based on a new division of citizens which elimi¬
nated the ancient system of naucraries: Attica was divided into a hundred
or so demes, grouped into thirty trittyes; themselves joined into ten tribes in
the ratio of one trittys per tribe from the town, one from the coast and one
from the interior. The four ancient gentilic tribes, the phratriai and the gene
did not disappear and continued to play their part in family and religious
life, but in political life only the ten tribes (Cleisthenes furthermore skilfully
evoked the patronage of the Apollo at Delphi on their behalf), the trittyes
and the demes henceforth counted.
The new grouping of citizens was territorial as far as demes and trittyes
were concerned, but it was arbitrary at the level of the tribes. It thus oper¬
ated as a mixing process for the civil community, breaking it away from the
local influences of the Eupatridae. Every Athenian was now called by his
own name followed by the name of his deme (demotic name) and no longer
by his father’s name (patronym), and this contributed to diminishing the
importance of the nobility. Cleisthenes proceeded to reorganize the organs
of government in terms of this framework. The Solonian boule of the 400
became the Cleisthenian boule of the 500; the fifty bouleutai from each tribe
dealt with urgent matters for a tenth part of the year; a completely
secularized political calendar was introduced based on this division of the
year into ten prytaneiai. A secretary was attached to the college of the nine
archons, thus raising membership to ten, one for each tribe.
This method of basing democracy on a pyramid of civic groups and on a
decimal arithmetic was very characteristic of the Greek mind. Despite
the obvious rationalism which actuated the system, it was also not far
removed from the ‘virtues’ of the numbers so dear to the hearts of the
Pythagoreans. But the breadth, the severity and the scope of this reform -
to some extent comparable to that of the French Constituent Assembly of
1789-91 — is a^so apparent. Cleisthenes was certainly not a revolutionary:
he retained the framework of the aristocratic and religious state, with its
aura of immense prestige inherited from ancient times. But his innovations
and additions virtually established a new state, secularized and un¬
hampered by the intolerable privileges of birth. This Eupatrid was the
real creator of Athenian democracy.
The institution of ostracism is also traditionally attributed to Cleisthenes.
This was the system whereby every year the ecclesia could remove citizens
reputed to be harmful to public order for a period of ten years, perhaps on
condition that 6,000 votes carried his name. This measure is indubitable
evidence of a humanization of political life. The penalty did not involve
the loss of civil rights; the ostracised person kept his possessions, and his
family did not have to follow him into exile. However, its arbitrary charac¬
ter is astonishing and it is difficult to decide if it was conceived as a means
of protection against an aspirant to tyranny or as a safety measure in case
of over-heated struggles in the ecclesia. In any case the Athenians waited
until 488-7 before they used this democratic weapon.
Cleisthenes’ work was completed in 501-500 by the creation of strategoi,
elected on a ratio of one per tribe. They were originally officers placed at
the head of the ten taxeis (battalions of hoplites) levied from the ten tribes.
They were at first under the polemarch, who remained the leader of the
army, but they rapidly freed themselves from his authority. They then left
command of the taxeis to the taxiarchoi and became the supreme magistrates
in fifth century Athens.
Athens had now definitely established its position as a democratic city,
and was also strong enough to resist a coalition of Spartans, Boeotians and
Chalcidians in 506. However, fears ran high, and the possibility of accept¬
ing offers from Persia and thereby recognizing its suzerainty was even en¬
visaged. Cleisthenes disappeared brutally from political life; his career may
possibly have been shattered because he had been one of the ambassadors
at the court of the Great King. Athens victorious erected a beautiful Ionic
portico at Delphi in front of the polygonal wall. But it also made practical
use of its victory: it cut plots (4000?) out of the rich lands of Chalcis and
distributed them to poor citizens: this was the first appearance of the
cleruchs who were both soldiers and peasants combined and who played
such an important part in Athenian expansion in the fifth century. It
established others around the same time, at Lemnos and Imbros, on the
route from the Straits vital for corn and salted fish.
The vitality behind this expansion also showed on the economic plane in
the rocketing rise in exports (above all ceramics and undoubtedly, there¬
fore, also wine and oil). On the other hand, the young Athenian democracy
did not want to lag behind the tyranny. It abandoned the construction of
the Olympieum as too reminiscent of an abhorrent period and began to
build a new temple on the Acropolis, south of the Hecatompedon on the
site of the future Parthenon: this was the Cleisthenian pre-Parthenon, still
incomplete when the Persians destroyed it in 480. Athens was now strong
enough, and mature enough as a result of the trials which had not spared it
since 510, better to understand its own personality. Ionian influences
diminished notably at the end of the century. The korai lost their smile:
they were the mothers or sisters of those who later fought at Marathon or
Salamis to defend that heritage of liberty and democracy patiently
accumulated over a century.
In that battle, now so near, Athens was far from holding all the trumps:
it was torn by factions, it possessed neither a real navy nor a proper port;
it still practised democracy in principle; for example, it always reserved
the essential magistracies to the pentacosiomedimnoi. But it had at its disposal
the formidable phalanxes of its hoplites, accustomed to war by recent con¬
flicts, who knew that they were fighting not only for their life and their
unproductive land but also for an ideal of social harmony and autonomy
slowly forged from Solon to Cleisthenes.
8
The New World of Colonization
One vitally important phenomenon dominated the whole Archaic period:

Greeks from long-occupied countries (Greece proper and Anatolia)
founded colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
This type of movement was certainly nothing new: the myths told of sailors
setting off for the mysterious lands of the west and north from the Achaean
period onwards, and recent excavations at several sites have shown a very
striking continuity in Hellenic occupation from the fourteenth century,
notably at Tarentum. Minos pursued Daedalus to Sicily, where he was
assassinated; Ulysses, the man of many resources, boldly opened new paths
in the western seas; Jason travelled as far as Colchis in search of the marvel¬
lous golden fleece. However, a perceptible revival in these far-flung enter¬
prises occurred from 775 onwards and continued until the 550s, or even 500
in certain points. Slightly more than two centuries were sufficient to turn
the Mediterranean into a Greek lake.
ADVENTURERS AND TRADERS
It should be possible to identify the causes of such a widespread phenome¬

non and one so well defined in time. The whole movement was based on
the new vitality of Hellenism. The Geometric period (when Greece led an
enclosed life, completely absorbed in obscure origins) had barely ended
when the Greek world threw its doors open wide to outside influences. It
resumed contact with Asia, conceived a passion for orientalism, and at the
same time launched upon the conquest of the west and north. The dangers
involved in these enterprises were of little account - especially as the pro¬
gress in nautical science already mentioned had made them less hazardous.
The unknown lands captured the imagination, and the temptations of ad¬
venture attracted many brave hearts, in a young nation, impatient to have
the chance to show what it could do at last. In the same spirit the curved
Viking boats later ploughed the Baltic, that other Mediterranean, and the
North Sea, before they too embarked on still more far-off routes. In any
case, the period seemed auspicious for expansion: although the Phoenicians
were not interested in the Black Sea, they had outstripped the Greeks in
the western Mediterranean basin (tradition fixed the date of the foundation
of Carthage at 814 — though this has been disputed recently, possibly
THE NEW WORLD OF COLONIZATION 185
without much reason - and both Gades and Utica had preceded Carthage
as from the end of the second millennium) and they remained their rivals
throughout the Archaic period — one episode amongst many in the long
struggle between Indo-Europeans and Semites.
Factors Underlying the Great Adventure

But Hellenic vitality was far from the only factor in Archaic expansion.
The acute shortages in the Greek world played an equally important part.
Greece suffered greatly from the sparseness of its soil (stenochoria), but the
resulting scarcity was much more a social than a geographical phenome¬
non. This irremediable misfortune was aggravated by the unfortunate
division of the land, which deteriorated as bequeathals reduced the already
paltry portions, and the rich built up their domains at the expense of the
poor. The peasants might well be fascinated by the vision of vast lands
seized from native populations, and of heavy cereal harvests produced by
fertile soils. They set sail primarily to escape from famine.
There was another equally serious deficiency: the Greek world was in¬
capable of leading an economically self-sufficient life. It possessed neither
the corn, the minerals nor the wood that it required. On the other hand, it
produced a surplus of wine, oil and luxury articles. To found a colony was
to establish a trading post where trade with the barbarians might increase.
It facilitated trade and without trade life in Greece was bound to decline.
These considerations were certainly not taken into account originally but
certain cities, clever at turning an apparently unfavourable combination of
circumstances to good purpose, recognized them quickly enough.
More temporary reasons at times came into play in addition to the per¬
manent ones. The losers in the factional struggles which tore the cities
sought their fortunes elsewhere, like bees hiving off: in this way, Messe-
nians, driven out by their compatriots, participated in the foundation of
Rhegium. Sometimes it was the embittered or even the criminals who went
into exile: Spartan bastards, born during the first Messenian war, found
their social disrepute intolerable and colonized Tarentum; Archias left
Corinth following a murder to become oikistes of Syracuse. For many
people, colonization was the only escape from the discontent, resentment,
abuse and punishment which they would suffer if they remained in their
native land.
Metropolises and Colonies

The same variety existed in methods of colonization. There was a world of
difference between enterprises which resembled the clandestine departure
of pirates outlawed by their city and regular colonization carried out under
the authority of a founder, the oikistes, who possessed the widest powers and
was often honoured with heroic canonization on his death. The total
strength of the colonists rarely exceeded a few hundred at a time. They first
provided for the most immediate needs; they chose a site in fertile territory
around a good defensive position reminiscent of the Greek acropolises, and
providing as far as possible adequate mooring facilities. They then imposed
their power on the natives, most frequently by force, sometimes by negotia¬
tion (Marseilles, for example). The geometers and land surveyors included
in the party then carved the land out into equal lots which the oikistes dis¬
tributed by ballot. The regular squares thus obtained foreshadowed the
‘centuriation’ of the Roman military colonies, and even those of the
‘agrarian reform’ which divides present-day southern Italy much as it
undoubtedly was in Archaic times. The town was arranged around a
hearth containing fire religiously brought from the altars of the metropolis,
and a clod of earth from the soil of the home country was buried close by.
At first it only consisted of a miserable collection of clay huts surrounded by
a rough rampart, but within a few decades a real agglomeration developed
around religious buildings quickly built in stone. From the very start, the
colonists formed a new city often closely copying its institutions from those
of the motherland (thus Tarentum possessed an apella as did Sparta) but
enjoying absolute political independence. Nothing, at least at the begin-
ning, heralded European colonization of the modern or contemporary
period. These were as much totally autonomous Greek states as colonies.
However, not all connections with the metropolises (the word had not yet
lost part of its meaning and still had all the resonance of ‘mother city’)
were broken. The colonists retained the dialect of their town of origin, and
this gave rise to the strangely paradoxical situation whereby the dialectal
medley of Greece was extended to the limits of the Mediterranean, by the
sheer chance of expansion. They also brought their gods and installed them
on the acropolises, though they continued to worship them by sending
religious embassies to the great festivals. If a colony in turn emigrated, it
generally claimed an oikistes from its metropolis as a token of respect: thus
the founder of Rhegium originated from Chalcis, not Zancle. Archaic
expansion was a highly original creation, but it showed both the passion
for liberty and the strength of religious bonds characteristic of the Greek
spirit.
Two Stages in Colonization

The constant factors defined above did not prevent colonization from
evolving, at the same time as Greece and Anatolia themselves evolved.
Following accepted practice, two periods can be distinguished, though
their characteristics are far from clearly distinct.
The first period (c. 775-675) corresponded to spontaneous colonization
of an agrarian type. The colonists were isolated individuals united by sheer
hunger and a yearning for land. They were looking for rich plains and they
seized them from the autochthons, often reducing them to slavery or forc¬
ing them to pay tribute. They therefore settled by force in a naturally
hostile native environment and their contacts with the metropolis were
limited. Two large, widely separated regions were affected: the three
points of the Ghalcidice; and southern Italy and Sicily. The common
characteristic of these areas was their ability to provide good land for
colonies of population: small plains in the Chalcidice where vines grew
well, vaster plains yielding fine harvests in the west. All the metropolises
were in Greece (the only exceptions were Gela founded by Rhodians and
Cretans, and Siris founded by Colophon), as Anatolia did not have the
agonizing problem of stenochoria to the same degree. Chalcis and Eretria
were to the fore, followed by Megara and the Peloponnesian cities. But
after this first wave, other considerations appeared. The choice of certain
sites, like the Strait of Messina by the Chalcidians, can only be explained
by ambition, already commercial. Colonists most frequently came from
the most economically evolved Greek towns, not only because they were
more aware of the acuteness of the land problem there, but also because
outlets were needed for a craft industry at the height of its development,
situated in agglomerations which could only be fed on imported corn.
The second period (around 675-550) was characterized by the increased
emphasis on the commercial considerations already underlying the first.
Colonization certainly remained agrarian in essence; good land continued
to be sought after, but became more and more rare. However, the need for
foodstuffs was more urgently felt in Greece, at the same time as possibilities
for exports developed. Thus colonies appeared which were only trading
stations, the emporia, forerunners of the foreign trading stations of our
classical period. They had scarcely any hinterland as the colonists were no
longer exclusively peasants. They maintained good relations with the
natives who were quite content to be able to acquire the excellent products
of Hellenic craftsmanship as well as wine and oil, which they liked. Their
links with their metropolises were much closer and the metropolises now
took a clearer and more deliberate part in expansion and sought to estab¬
lish a positive chain of commercial settlements to serve as relay points for
trade. The area of expansion was enlarged: Magna Graecia and Sicily
certainly retained their high reputation in the eyes of emigrants, but
colonization turned the Black Sea and its outlying territories (Propontis,
Maiotis) into a Milesian lake and reached Egypt, and even the distant
shores of Gaul and Iberia. The most active metropolises were no longer
only in Greece but also in Anatolia. Ionia had grown rich and experienced
a striking commercial development which made the search for markets
vital. Colonization now consisted much less of the ‘beautiful adventure’ in
which the desires of bold pioneers were the primary factors: colonists were
more serious-minded and more conscientious; they liked to seek advice
from the oracle at Delphi. This may not have been the agency for colonial
information that is sometimes depicted (not without some exaggeration),
but it nevertheless rendered great services disciplining the energies of the
colonizers. Pindar (Pythians 4) recalls that the Pythia compelled Battus to
leave for Cyrenaica, and small tripods found on many colonial coins pay
well deserved homage to Apollo.
THE NEW GREECE: ITALY AND SICILY
The crossing from Greece to Italy was not difficult, facilitated by the long
chain of Ionian islands. Sailors had ventured there since Achaean times
and memories of their wanderings and trading stations survive in both the
Odyssean narratives and the modest settlements where Mycenaean vases
have been found. One tradition attributes the introduction of writing into
Italy in the middle of the Heroic period to Evander. Signs obviously de¬
rived from Linear B have in fact been found on pottery in the Lipari
Islands. The first colonies where Greeks had been settled, possibly from the
fourteenth century, did not disappear at the end of the Dark Ages but all
contact between the two Mediterranean basins was broken. It was left to
the bold pioneers of the beginning of the eighth century to re-open the
Italian world to Hellenism.
An Untidy Colonization
The extreme disorder of the enterprises was the most marked characteristic
of the settlement of the Greeks in the west. In the beginning, they were only
based on individual and disconnected efforts by colonists who wanted,
above all else, to escape from the oppression of the metropolises.
The Euboeans were the originators (after the Lelantine war, those from
Ghalcis eliminated those from Eretria with whom they had at first colla¬
borated) in two vitally important zones. From 775, they got a foot-hold in
the islets of Pithecusae (Ischia and Procida) before they moved on to terra
ferma at Cumae which remained the most advanced point of Hellenism in
Italy, and then to Parthenope (Naples). In 757, they founded Naxos, which
was not a great success because of its narrow hinterland and from there
they immediately emigrated to the rich plain of the Simaethus at Leontini
and Catana. At the same time, they settled on the straits at Zancle
(Messana) which quickly spread out on two sides to form Rhegium and
Mylae. The settlement of Megarians at Megara Hyblaea (750) and of
Corinthians at Gorcyra (driving out the Eretrians who had settled there
earlier) and Syracuse (733) were almost contemporary.
In about 720, colonization on the coast of the Gulf of Tarentum was
begun by Achaeans from the Peloponnese (however, some scholars now
suggest that the name ‘Achaean’ given to these settlements refers to the
arrival of the Achaeans in the second millennium). They founded Sybaris
and Croton, which emigrated in their turn, one to Metapontum and
Posidonia (this latter in Lucania), and the other to Caulonia. Spartans
created Tarentum (708) on the most beautiful site on the shore and
Locrians Epizephyrian Locri (680). Colophon, the only Asiatic city at that
time interested in expansion, sent colonists to Siris. By about 675, Greek
agglomerations hemmed the whole gulf.
The movement then reached the hitherto forgotten southern coast of
Sicily. Rhodians and Cretans settled at Gela (680); Syracuse founded three
small cities in the south-eastern corner (Acrae, Casmenae and Camarina);
and Megara Hyblaea colonized Selinus (650). At the same time, Zancle
drove deeply into the northern coast as far as Himera (648).
After 125 years of effort, the main territory had been acquired. Only
sporadic settlements were made thereafter. In about 580, Geloans emi¬
grated to Agrigentum while Cnidians combined with Rhodians to colonize
the Lipari Islands. Between 540 and 530 the threat of the Persian advance
led Phocaeans to Elea on the Tyrrhenian coast and the harsh tyranny of
Polycrates brought Samians to Dicaearchia (Puteoli).
Comparable attempts were made to establish some foundations on the
shores of the Adriatic to drain more distant wealth towards Greece:
Epidamnus and Apollonia in Illyria (foundations of Corinth and Corcyra)
and Adria north of the Po, which maintained close relations with Athens
as from the sixth century.
A Striking Prosperity
Agriculture provided a firm basis for prosperity. The colonists marvelled
at the extent and above all the fertility of the plains and their fine harvests.
In the richest of these plains, Campania, Cumae cultivated the Phlegrean
fields where the soil was the result of volcanic decomposition. Sybaris,
which had only a very mediocre harbour, was nonetheless one of the richest
Figure 36 Handle of a bronze

cauldron found at
Metapontum, middle of the
sixth century
igO THE GREEK ADVENTURE
cities because of its proverbially fertile territory, only equalled by its neigh¬
bour Siris. The plain of the Simaethus was rich from lava from Etna.
Syracuse cultivated the basin of the Anapus and Thucydides still des¬
cribed it as an essentially agricultural city at the end of the fifth century.
Development was facilitated by the system of serfdom, practised notably in
southern Italy with the Pelasgians and in the region of Syracuse with the
Gyllyrians, whose status was similar to the helots’ or penestai. A nobility of
knights, brave in war and owning immense domains, naturally tended to
grow up - at Leontini or Syracuse for example, where they were known by
the characteristic name of gamoroi (dividers of land).
Craft industries were equally prosperous (figure 36). Ordinary vases
were made everywhere. Tarentum wove and dyed in purple. Syracuse did
more work in metal, but its woollen fabrics were also excellent. Commer¬
cial activity developed rapidly. There was no shortage of good harbours.
From the outset Tarentum settled on the peninsula separating the open sea
from the calm haven of the Mare Piccolo; Croton had two harbour in¬
stallations at its disposal; Zancle owed its name (Sicel - the sickle) to the
shape of the beautiful natural breakwater protecting it; Syracuse was es¬
tablished on the island of Ortygia between a small well-sheltered port and
an immense roadstead. Elsewhere, the Strait of Messina, guarded on two
sides by Chalcidian colonies, controlled all trade entering the Tyrrhenian
Sea. However, the towns of the Gulf of Tarentum were jealous of this
privileged position and they organized overland transport which came out
on the Tyrrhenian coast at Terina, Pyxus, Laus and Posidonia.
Intense commercial activity developed, facilitated by these natural con¬
ditions. In the beginning, it was difficult to distinguish commerce from
piracy: Cumaean pirates, for example, first occupied Zancle. But trade
was soon organized and made more regular. It was based on barter until
the sixth century when money was used. Contacts were established with the
Greek world, principally between metropolis and colony. Corinth secured
an incontestable advantage from at least the first decades of the seventh
century: it flooded the market with its products (vases and perfumes) and
took considerable quantities of cereals in exchange. After all, the real role
of the colonies was to increase the transactions with the natives which
colonization had begun: the first Greek vases in Opic or Sicel necropolises
were contemporary with the foundation of settlements. The products of
Greek craftsmanship, luxury items imported from Greece or less expensive
objects manufactured locally were in great demand by the barbarians and
spread widely over the whole peninsula, especially in Etruria which was
then in its full glory.
Greek Civilization in the West

Many features of the Greek Occident, notably its prosperity, are reminis¬
cent of Ionia. There were richer lands on both sides of poor Greece and
commerce made then even wealthier. The cities grew rapidly larger and
THE NEW WORLD OF COLONIZATION
191
were at the same time covered with monuments. In this way Syracuse,
which had first been closely confined to the island of Ortygia beside the
pleasant fountain of Arethusa, reached the continent. The colonists liked
showing off the wealth they had acquired without too much trouble and
they were not above the pleasures of voluptuous existence - the Sybarites
remain the symbol of this. This rich civilization was not lacking in charms;
Archilochus already sang of Siris as grace and beauty incarnated. But
parvenu and nouveau riche taste was also pointed out in this Archaic America,
where the mushroom towns were a little too fond of the colossal and the
ostentatious.
Some very beautiful achievements can be noted, particularly in archi¬
tecture, which developed freely at first, because these new cities put no
obstacles in the way of builders’ plans and then because the surrounding
prosperity made it possible to envisage large-scale development. Excava¬
tions have revealed wonderful constructions: the two most important were
undoubtedly Selinus and Posidonia. Both these cities had to be consider¬
ably extended in the following century but they already had monuments
which put the most evolved cities of Greece proper into the shade.
Figure 37 Dancer. Metope of the temple

of Hera at the mouth of the Sele, about
500
There was a no less powerful upsurge in the other arts. Monumental

plastic art was brilliantly represented. At Selinus, it is possible to follow
development from its clumsiest attempts to the metopes at ‘Temple C’,
which already revealed a very theatrical taste for dramatic movement.
Recent excavations of the treasure enclosed in the sanctuary of Hera
Argaea at the mouth of the Sele (first half of the sixth century) have re¬
vealed a wonderful series of metopes which represent mythological subjects
in a style often inspired by Ionia, and undoubtedly form the most impor¬
tant Archaic collection in our possession. Clay modelling showed a striking
development in the west because of the scarcity of marble; it borrowed
its motifs from large-scale sculpture: all the sanctuaries have yielded
numerous terra cotta ex votos which embody the same poignant religious
sentiment as characterizes the works of large-scale art.
The same spiritual exaltation reappears in the hymns of Stesichorus of
Himera (640-550), the greatest poet in choral lyricism before Pindar. He
revived the myths of the epics but gave them a moral depth and a religious
background all too often lacking. He was said to have lost his sight after
writing ungraciously about Helen and to have recovered it when he had
sung a palinode. His sharp style, full of brilliant images, made him one of
the most notable verbal creators of the Archaic period.
Spiritual problems assumed a predictable importance in such a civiliza¬
tion. There was a constant preoccupation with life beyond the grave, and
the influence of the Etruscan world, haunted by the destiny of the soul
after death, has been noted in this connection. Mystically inspired philo¬
sophies, such as Pythagoreanism, found choice ground there. Hellenic
religion itself took on special forms: Greek gods were assimilated to local
divinities, generally the Great Mothers, dispensers of fertility and fecun¬
dity. As far as details were concerned there was a great deal of diversity.
Hera was particularly worshipped in Italy, notably on Cape Lacinion near
Croton and at Posidonia (in the vast sacred enclosure of the town, as well
as in the sanctuary at the mouths of the Sele, where the metopes [figure 37]
represented dancing choirs certainly linked with ancient agrarian liturgies).
Demeter was the principal goddess of Sicily and local traditions even
located the kidnapping of her daughter, Kore, at Enna, in the heart of the
island. Athena Ilias had a famous temple at Siris, and Persephone at
Epizephyrian Locri. At Eryx, Aphrodite was identified with an ancient
native divinity, undoubtedly already altered by Phoenician influences.
In the west, where Hellenism had such brilliant achievements to its
credit, it remained on the whole true to itself, even in its worst aberrations.
The total destruction of Sybaris by Groton in 511 comes to mind in this
context, showing the horrible results of the struggles to the death between
neighbouring cities. However, it was sometimes modified by contact with
native civilizations. A ‘colonial art5 has sometimes been mentioned (in the
sense that there is Iberian colonial art in South America). Above all, it is
possible to talk of a ‘colonial religion’ because in this field an atmosphere
clearly different from contemporary Greece or Anatolia can be sensed.
Greek Colonization in Italy and Sicily
Campania
"775 Pithecusae
Euboeans . . . -< 755 Cumae
675 Parthenope
Samians 531 Dicaearchia
:93
Greek Colonization in Italy and Sicily - continued
Eastern Sicily
f 757 Naxos
1750 Leontini and Catana
"750 Z ancle-
Euboeans 4 .
< 743 Rhegium Expansion in Italy
717 Mylae Expansion on the
648 Himera j north coast of
Sicily
Megara 750 Megara Hyblaea ■
Corinth 733 Syracuse —
Southern Italy
720 Sybaris
680 Metapontum
Achaeans 675 Posidonia
720 Croton
1
675 Caulonia
Spartans 708 Tarentum
Locrians 680 Epizephyrian Locri
Colophon 675 Siris
Cnidians and Rhodians 580 Lipari Islands
Phocaea 540 Elea
Southern Sicily
680 Gel a
Rhodians and Cretans 1
58° Agrigentum
663 Acrai
Syracuse • •
643 Casmenae ><-
598 Camarina
650 Selinus*-
Megara Hyblaea
? Heracleia Minoa
This chart gives a very simplified view of western colonization. In many cases, there were two
oikistai per colony: for example Zancle, where the Chalcidians combined with the Cumaeans
who had slightly preceded them.
The dates given here, following the latest work by J. Berard, L'expansion et la colonisation grecques,
are obviously the object of innumerable controversies.
The arrows indicate secondary colonies made from an already colonial metropolis.
THE ELDORADO OF THE FAR WEST
The western basin of the Mediterranean was perhaps already exerting its
attractions from the second millennium onwards. But the absence of any
archaeological discovery in Spain or Gaul makes this hypothesis doubtful.
It is easier to believe that the indisputably ancient legends which make
Heracles travel to Africa in search of the golden apples of the Hesperides,
to Spain where he seized the oxen of the triple-bodied Geryon in the mys¬
terious Erytheia, to Gaul where the pebbles of the Crau represented the
rain of stones from which his father Zeus defended him against the
Ligurians, only date from the beginning of Archaic colonization.
The First Temptations of the Far West

The Mediterranean Occident - with the exception of Libyan Africa which
the Semites jealously retained - was at that time peopled by Iberians
(Spain and Languedoc-Roussillon) and Ligurians (Provence and present-
day Liguria). To the Greeks, it was primarily the fabulous land of metals.
Spain and even southern Gaul supplied silver, copper and lead. Above all,
tin, so cruelly lacking in the eastern Mediterranean and consumed in large
quantities by the bronze industry, arrived there from the mysterious
Cassiterides (Cornwall?). Three great routes brought it to ports accessible
to Mediterranean navigators: the river route Seine-Saone-Rhone, the
shorter route Garonne-Aude by the threshold of Naurouze, and an Atlantic
journey to the land of Tartessus (the region of Cadiz, the Tarshish of the
Bible).
Figure 38 Aryballos of
Glanon. Vase of Corinthian
origin, sixth century
This globular vase, which
was used for unctions of oil,
is decorated in brown with a
cheetah (tame cheetahs at
that time played the same
role as our hounds)
X95
The first Greek ventures here were made more often by adventurers
than by colonists. In about 640, a tempest carried a Samian, Colaeus,
beyond the pillars of Heracles (the straits of Gibraltar) and he landed at
Tartessus, the land of good King Arganthonius, a semi-fabulous character
whose very name recalls the prodigious wealth of silver. The Rhodians
ploughed the western Mediterranean and, without possessing permanent
settlements, sold their vases in both Spain and Gaul (notably at Saint
Blaise). Finally, the Phocaeans after trying their luck in the heart of the
Adriatic, settled down on the site of Marseilles in 600 by agreement with
the natives and then possibly founded three trading stations in Spain: the
Palaipolis of Emporiae (Ampurias) on an islet quite close to the Catalanian
coast, Hemeroscopeion (the Watchman of the Day, undoubtedly on Cape
Denia), Maenace (near Malaga) and a warehouse in Corsica, Alalia
(Aleria).
The Early Rise of Marseilles

Marseilles developed immediately. It became the great commercial centre
distributing Greek products to southern Gaul (figure 38) and Iberia. The
town grew up around the Lacydon (Vieux-Port, but more deeply em¬
bedded in the land than today). It remained faithful to its Anatolian
origins: gods worshipped on its acropolis were Apollo and Artemis of
Ephesus; ex votos consecrated to a matronal goddess of Asiatic type have
also been found. Vases manufactured there imitated the grey ceramics of
Ionia. Although Marseilles was often the victim of attacks by belligerent
neighbours, it gradually increased its trade. It founded the small relay
point of Theline not far from future Arles, at the place where the Her-
culaean way, which had linked Spain with Italy since the pre-historic
period and which Heracles was said to have opened, crossed the Rhone.
But Marseilles’ northern ventures should not be exaggerated; it would
appear that traders made little use of the Rhone route at this period and it
is quite certain that the hellenization of eastern Gaul and the region of the
Rhine cannot be attributed to Marseilles.
Its incontestable commercial success in the Mediterranean aroused the
jealousy of Carthaginians and Etruscans who combined forces and fought
a successful naval battle in the open sea off Alalia (about 540). The Greeks
had to withdraw: they had to abandon Corsica (at least temporarily) and
southern Spain. But Marseilles survived, ready to resume its expansion in
the following century. Until it was incorporated in the Roman Empire
under Julius Caesar, it remained the vigilant champion of Hellenism in the
far west.
TWO STRIPS OF AFRICAN SOIL
The Maghreb was the only region on the Mediterranean coast to escape
the Greeks in favour of the Semites of Phoenicia and Carthage. But Greek
settlements, though of a profoundly different type, grew up in Cyrenaica
and Egypt.
Cyrenaica
The beginnings of Greek colonization in Cyrenaica remain obscure, des¬
pite the continuous account Herodotus has left. It appears that after a
first attempt on the sterile island of Platea, Theraeans and Cretans settled
in about 631 at some distance from the sea, on the second step of the vast
Libyan plateau near the spring of the asphodels, Cyra. They were under
the leadership of Aristoteles, who later took the name of Battus. In about
575 the new city, Cyrene, was strengthened by Dorian colonists from the
Peloponnese, Crete, and the Dodecanese. But its expansion worried the
natives and they appealed to the pharoah Apries who was severely beaten
in 570 at Irasa by Battus 11. Even the Libyan revenge under Arcesilas 11,
who lost 7000 men at Leucon, did not inhibit the expansion of the Dorian
colony. It even founded two new cities, Barca and Euhesperides. About
515-10, the Persians annexed Cyrenaica in the form of a satrapy but they
retained the dynasty which was loyal to them.
The development of Cyrene did not take place without internal set¬
backs. It was a monarchy, governed by the family of Battiadae (the kings
alternately bore the name of Battus and Arcesilas) which stayed in power
until about 440. But its character evolved from the patriarchal royalty,
practised by the original kings, into a tyrannical regime, instituted by
Arcesilas hi to resist the claims of a great aristocracy hostile to royal
prerogatives. Often very lively civil conflicts did not impede economic
development. Cyrene took full advantage of the economic possibilities of
the pleateau where land sown with corn yielded fine harvests. It made
large profits from silphium, a mysterious plant with tubers which was used
as a symbol on its coins, and which appears in the process of being weighed
under the vigilant eye of Arcesilas 11 on a famous cup. Its horses were
famous and Pindar sang of their victories in Panhellenic competitions. Its
port of Apollonia marked the terminus of caravan routes from Egypt — via
the oasis of Siwah - and from the Sudan and Carthage. From 550, its trade
brought it into particularly close contact with Athens and this gave rise to
very perceptible Attic influences in its art.
Civilization did in fact develop brilliantly there in a purely Hellenic
direction, borrowing scarcely anything from Egypt (so near and yet so far)
except the god Ammon who had come there from Siwah and who was
identified with Zeus but kept his ram’s horns. Apollo (who had aroused the
colonizing impetus of Thera with his Delphic oracles) remained the city’s
divinity, in close association with his sister Artemis. Excavations have re¬
vealed the stirring remains of their temples together with the kouroi and
korai who were in no way inferior to those in Greece proper. On the whole,
‘Greek colonization made this secluded corner of the African continent,
THE NEW WORLD OF COLONIZATION igy
lost on the edge of inhuman solitude, into a laughing province, a morsel

of Europe, the greatest, richest and most southerly of the Greek cities’
(F. Chamoux).
Egypt
Egypt was an entirely different case. It was not possible for the Greeks to
found settlements in this realm with its ancient culture and dense and often
xenophobic population.
Mercenaries and Traders

However, immense possibilities opened up for Hellenic mercenaries and
traders after Psammetichus i (664-10), founder of the 26th dynasty, had
freed Egypt from the Assyrian yoke and re-established the unity of the
country. He then appeared as the shrewd originator of the Saite renaissance
which continued under his successors until the conquest of Cambyses in
525-
This monarchy, with its aspirations to influence, needed mercenaries.
Psammetichus recruited them from the Garian and Ionian pirates who in¬
fested the delta. For more than a hundred years, the Greeks of Asia wil¬
lingly hired out their services to the pharoahs. They were settled in camps
at Daphne and at Stratopeda in the delta and even, under Amasis, at
Memphis. Documents show them fearless beneath their heavy armour and
they have left many traces of their passing, even in the extreme south at
Abu Simbel where graffiti drawn on a colossus by soldiers originating from
Ialysus, Teos and Colophon, and taken by Psammetichus 11 on his
expedition against Nubia, make emotional reading.
The incentive of profitable trade also turned Milesian merchants to¬
wards Egypt where they settled by force at the Milesians’ Fort (Milesion
Teichos) on the Bolbitine branch of the Nile, and then at Naucratis on the
Canopic branch near Sais, the capital. Other merchants soon flocked there
from Greek Asia, the adjacent islands and also Aegina. Amasis granted
them privileged status at Naucratis, with the obligation not to embark or
disembark at any other port: a good means of forestalling often lively
nationalist reactions, without depriving himself of the incomparable
ferment of economic activity which the Greek merchants represented.
The Concession of Naucratis

The date of the creation of Naucratis is disputed (under Psammetichus 1
or perhaps not until Psammetichus 11). In any case, excavations have re¬
vealed a prosperous town in the sixth century until the time of Cambyses
who withdrew its privileges in favour of Memphis (figure 39). Exports were
considerable: corn from the Nile Valley, salt, alum, papyrus, flax, and
hemp, products of Arabia. In exchange, the Greeks imported cloths and
fabrics, vases, wine and, above all, silver. They manufactured rough
ceramics of Ionian inspiration and smelted iron and copper locally. Life
I98 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
there was easy, and the courtesans numerous and refined, such as Rhodopis
beloved by Sappho’s brother.
Details of the institutions the Greeks of Naucratis possessed are not well
known. The Milesians had a sanctuary to Apollo in their own right, the
Aeginetans one to Zeus, the Samians to Hera. Colonists of nine other towns
(Chios, Teos, Phocaea, Clazomenae, Rhodes, Cnidos, Halicarnassus,
Phaselis, Mytilene) who came later, shared the sacred enclosure of the
Hellenium. These twelve metropolises, amongst whom Greek Asia almost
had a monopoly, administered the free port jointly through prefects. The
city had its own magistrates (prostatai). Naucratis, therefore, was an excep¬
tion to the general run of Archaic expansion: for once the Greeks had to
unite because of the difficulties encountered from an organized state and it
provides the sole example of inter-Hellenic institutions.
Through this concession (in the sense that the concessions of Shanghai
and Canton were once spoken of), contacts were established with the nat¬
ives: here again Naucratis was an exception, because it was the only place
where the Greeks came into contact with a civilization as developed as
their own. Alcaeus and Aesop crossed the Delta. Thales is said to have
derived his speculations on the primordial principle of water from this
source, and Egyptian land-surveying to have been the basis of his geo¬
metric demonstrations. Solon culled the Atlantis myth there. Pythagoras
also stayed in Egypt and the influence of Egyptian religions on Pythagor-
eanism, orphism and even (but with much exaggeration) on the mysteries
of Eleusis has been suggested. From the Archaic period onwards, the
Greeks were fired with enthusiasm for this mysterious country; Herodotus
and Plato both visited it and thought they had found the source of a wisdom
much earlier than that of their own people.
It is difficult to assess Egypt’s debt to these contacts. However, the
pharaohs came to be familiar with Hellenism. Psammetichus 1 created a
body of interpreters. His son Nechao 11 consecrated his war costume in the
Didymeium at Miletus. Amasis, who first appeared as the champion of a
national reaction against the Greeks, rapidly learned to value them: he
married a Cyrenean woman, sent offerings to Delphi, Samos and Lindus
and proved the most phil-Hellenic of princes.
Up to the time of the Persian conquest, which notably diminished its
prosperity, Naucratis was one of the most lively cities of the Greek world;
excavations there have unearthed temples and the network of streets. With
the contact between two antithetical worlds which would have had every
reason to know nothing of each other, it seems to herald hellenistic
Alexandria.
THE ATTRACTIONS OF THE NORTH
Northwards, colonization developed in the Ghalcidice and Thrace, in the

Propontis and Pontus.
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From the Thermaic Gulf to the Bosporus

The Chalcidice and Thrace
The cities of Euboea gave proof of their vitality by colonizing the Chalcidice
from the eighth century, that is to say at the same time as they were emi¬
grating to Italy and Sicily. Eretrians settled in Pallene (notably at Mende
and Scione) and then at Methone on the other side of the Thermaic Gulf.
The Chalcidians - who later gave their name to the triple peninsula -
colonized Sithonia (Torone). Acte undoubtedly received a mixed popula¬
tion of Eretrians and Chalcidians. Andros created four colonies between
Athos and the Strymon (including Acanthus and Stagirus), about 650.
Later (about 600) Corinthians founded Potidaea on the isthmus of Pallene.
These settlements remained small straggling villages and lived essentially
from agriculture, more particularly from cultivating vines. Civil war was
not a rare occurrence, particularly when the Lelantine war brought the
two Euboean metropolises into mutual conflict.
As from 682, two successive groups of Parians settled in the fertile island
of Thasos which, according to a legend which Archilochus has made
famous, was conquered by Heracles Callinicos. Archilochus also tells of
their harsh wars against the Thracian natives. However, they soon moved
to the continent where, in the sixth century, Thasian Peraea extended from
the Strymon to the Nestus including the region of the gold mines of
Pangaeus which secured an enviable prosperity for Thrace. Discoveries by
French excavations show the brilliance of the Archaic city. The wonderful
rampart, nearly two and a half miles in circumference, can still be traced,
its doors decorated with monumental reliefs of prophylactic value. A colos¬
sal moschophorus kouros rises on the height overlooking the town. Recent
discoveries of the sanctuary of Athena, near the acropolis, and the sanc¬
tuary of Artemis, near the agora which adjoined the port, show the wealth
of the colony in the seventh century: terracotta figurines, Cycladic and
Ionian vases and oriental ivories such as are found in the whole eastern
Aegean.
Between the Nestus and the Straits lay Abdera (where the first colonists,
Clazomenaeans, were thrown back to the sea by the Thracians in about
650 and replaced by Teians in 545), Maronea, with its vintages famous
since the time of Homer (seized by Chians in 650) and, in the vast fertile
plain of the Hebrus, Aenos colonized by the Aeolians. Samians finally
settled in the large island which became Thracian Samos (Samothrace).
Propontis
The two straits which connect the Propontis (Sea of Marmara) with the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea have names which recall the very
ancient Greek myths of the Golden Fleece and Io: the Hellespont
(Dardanelles) and the Bosporus. However, it was not their incomparable
position which first attracted the Greeks. They were more interested in
i a Minoan criophoros kouros in bronze,
Clad in a loin-cloth, he is wearing a
horn on his head, a sign of strength.
Collection of S. Yamanakis,
Heraklion, Crete.
i b Minoan vase with vegetable

decoration, in Camares style.
Cnossos, Middle Minoan II-III
Museum of Heraklion.
,*v
2a Mycenae: the lionesses of the gate and the
circle of shaft-graves.
fm flv | • 1 1; y
2b Mycenaean ivory, thirteenth century bc,
rm ~ •*?PJyoU Sr < W p from Delos, showing a warrior with a spear,
w
¥ f figure of eight shield and a helmet decorated
with boars’ teeth. Museum of Delos.
#**»»**
wmmm
******
3a Fragments of a
Geometric vase from
the necropolis of the
Dipylon, Athens,
eighth century bc. It
shows a procession of
warriors and a naval
battle (the dead are
curiously represented
above the boat).
Paris, Louvre.
3b Female head in
painted limestone,
about 1200 bc, from
the Acropolis of
Mycenae. Athens,
National Museum.
4a Geometric art: the fall of
Icarus, cut and chased bronze
leaf, about 700 bc, from Crete,
Museum of Heraklion.
5a (opposite) Corinthian dinos with

superimposed bands showing
animal motifs. First half of sixth
century bc. Above, the boar hunt
of Calydon. Rome, Vatican
Museum.
5b (opposite) Archaic animal art:

Naxian lions guarding the
sanctuary of Leto at Delos, about
600 BC.
4b Attic Geometric vase, eighth

century bc. Upper band, a man
between two horses; lower band,
winged creature with a horse and
men. The vase is decorated with
swastikas. Berlin, Staatliche
Museen.
6 a Handle of the Francois vase, discovered at Chiusi in Italy, the
work of the potter Ergotimus and the painter Clitias, second quarter
of thesixth century eg. Above, the Mistress of the Animals: below,
Ajax carrying the body of Achilles. Florence, Archaeological
Museum.
6b Corinthian black-figured drinking vase, first quarter of the sixth

century bc, showing drinkers dancing. Berlin, Staatliche Museen.
7 Persephone and Hades seated on a throne, holding offerings. In front of
them is an altar with incense {thymiaterion). Terracotta plaquette from the
sanctuary of Persephone at Epizephyrian Locri (Magna Graecia),
beginning of the fifth century bc. Museum of Reggio.
8 Bull with human head, representing the river god Gelas, a tetradrachma
from Gela in Sicily, fifth century bc.
9 (opposite) Lapith woman, fragment of the west fa$ade of the temple

of Zeus at Olympia, second quarter of the fifth century bc. Museum of
Olympia.
io Fourth century bc architecture: the theatre of Epidaurus.
11 Delphi, the tholos of Marmaria (temple of Artemis ?), first quarter of the
fourth century bc.
12a Head of Alexander, found at Pergamum. 12b Head of Pyrrhus. Naples, National
Istanbul, Archaeological Museum. Museum.
12c Head of Cleopatra. Museum of 12d Head of Antiochus III, the Great. Paris,
Cherchel, Algeria. Louvre.
13a Anatolia: the Asclepeum at Pergamum.
13b Didyma : colonnade of the peristyle of the temple of Apollo

14 Detail of the mosaic of the Nile at Praeneste (Palestrina), in Italy. This
mosaic, the date of which is very much disputed (between Sulla and the
Severan period), reproduces an Alexandrian original.
< Su/>
iSdYrfi, 1 r rFtvmPJAv
3 'A,***
15 Detail of the golden bowl from the treasure of Panagurichte, Bulgaria,

end of the fourth century bc (for a sketch of the complete bowl, see page 492).
The detail shows a circle of small rosettes, with three circles of heads of a
negroid character, separated by lotus flowers and palmettes. Plovdiv,
Bulgaria, Archaeological Museum.
16 A surprising
derivation from the
Greek Apollo: the
Buddha of
Gandhara, first
century ad.
Museum of Delhi.
supplies of foodstuffs (corn, wine, fish) and the first settlements were prim¬
arily agricultural. Already a Persian was surprised that the wonderful site
of Byzantium, destined for such an illustrious future, was occupied so
belatedly. But Chalcedon and Byzantium (which guarded the Bosporus),
Abydos and Lampsacus (on the Hellespont) and Cyzicus (on an island of
the Propontis which was at this time only connected to the shore by two
bridges) rapidly became flourishing emporia for Greek commerce in the
Black Sea. Apart from Megara, which secured profitable mastery of the
Propontis, only the cities of Asia and the large neighbouring islands
emigrated there, in a disordered and anarchic movement. But in the sixth
century, personal ventures by Athenian Eupatridae (the elder Miltiades,
Hippias) revealed the new interest which the route from Pontus was
arousing in Athens.
Pontus
Achaean boats had sailed the Black Sea from the second millennium: objects
originating in the Aegean area have been found on the lower course of the
Dniester and Dnieper, as well as in the Crimea; myths tell of the Argo¬
nauts sailing on the Don, and of time spent by Achilles on the White
Island, Iphigenia at Tauris, and Ulysses in the dark land of the Cimmerians
and the mysterious Amazons on the river Thermodon.
During the period of colonization, contact was resumed between the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In the seventh century, Greeks re¬
learned the route via the straits giving access to this sea, which they feared
because it was inhospitable, misty and without islands or gulfs.
Using a native word, they called it the Euxine Sea (hospitable sea) in
order to exorcise its dangers. At that time, large population movements
were disturbing the whole northern coast: Scythian newcomers of Iranian
race flowed across the steppes, seizing them from the Cimmerians, the
earlier occupants, who were undoubtedly related to the Thracians.
Henceforth, until the end of the Hellenistic period, Scythia played a
leading part in the economic life of the Greek world.
The Black Sea, a Milesian Lake

From the beginning of the seventh century, modest trading stations were
established on the north coast, notably on the islet of Berezan, off the
liman of the Dnieper and the Bug, and at Panticapaeum on the Cim¬
merian Bosporus (Kertch straits). Contacts with the natives proved
profitable and real cities were quickly founded.
On the west and north-west coasts, south of the Danube delta, there
were Milesian colonies (Apollonia, Odessus, Tomi) or Megaran sub¬
colonies (Callatis, Mesembria). Further north, the Milesians were
attracted by the facilities the mouths of the great rivers offered for inland
penetration (the word liman still used to describe them today preserves the
Greek name of the port: limen). Istrus prudently remained some distance
8
Colonization in the Thracian Chersonese and Propontis
Thracian Chersonese
Lesbos . . . <
f 2nd quarter 7th century Sestos
2nd quarter 7th century Alopeconnesus
Miletus . 6th Cardia
The elder Miltiades 560 Conquest of all
the Chersonesus
Propontis and the Straits

700 Astacus
687 Chalcedon
Megara «<
670 Selymbria
660 Byzantium
Miletus and Paros

and Erythrae 700 Parion
" 676 Cyzicus
670 Proconnesus
670 Abydos
Miletus . . . <
end of 7th Small settlements on the
and 6th Asiatic coast, includ¬
centuries ing Cios
Phocaea . 654 Lampsacus
Colophon. ? Myrlea
600 Perinthus
Samos . . . -< end 6th Bisanthe and Heraion
century Teichos
Hippias . 533 Sigeum
away from the swampy mouths of the Danube which gave it its name;
Tyras was on the Dniester, and Olbia (also known as Borysthenes) on the
Bug, in an excellent triangular position defended by the liman and by two
ravines.
The Greeks found the Crimea no less attractive, perhaps because of its
pleasant climate which reminded them of the Mediterranean. Two im¬
portant cities guarded the entrance to the strait of Kertch, Panticapaeum
in the west, and Phanagoria in the east, but there were numerous secon¬
dary towns, such as Myrmecion, Tiritica, Nymphaion, Cimmerion and
Theodosia in the Crimea, Hermonassa and Gorgippia in the Kuban.
Right in the north, an early Tanais was established on the lower course of
the Don, protected by two concentric enclosures. Except for Phanagoria
(a foundation of Teos) and Hermonassa (founded by Trapezus), all the
cities were Milesian.
In Colchis, three small Milesian colonies clung to the rocks of the

Caucasus: Phasis, Dioscurias and Pityus.
On the southern front, the first Milesian foundation was Sinope, a city
which was destroyed by the barbarians and courageously rebuilt. It
emigrated in turn to Trapezus, and then to Amisus. Megarians combined
with Boeotians finally settled at Heraclea Pontica.
Greek Colonization in Pontus
West and North-West Coasts
657 Istrus
646 Olbia
? Tyras
Miletus . . x
610 Apollonia
575 Odessus
? Tomi
s.
Heraclea Pontica 540 Callatis
Byzantium and
Chalcedon . 510 Mesembria
Tauric Chersonese and Cimmerian Bosporus

1 st half 6th century Panticapaeum
1 st half 6th century Theodosia
Miletus . . x
6th century Numerous small cities
^ end 6th century Early Tanais
Trapezus. ? Hermonassa
Teos 1st half 6th century Phanagori
Heraclea Pontica 422 Chersonese
East Coast
6th century Phasis
Miletus . . x 6th century Dioscurias
6th century Pityus
South Coast
' middle 7th century
new foundation 630 Sinope
Miletus . . x
6th century Trapezus
6th century Series of small posts
. 564 Amisus
Megara and
Tanagra 560 Heraclea Pontica
The only metropolises which played a part, and even then a very modest
one, alongside Miletus, were Teos and, above all, Megara. Directly, or
through the intermediary of its colonies, the latter completed its expansion
in the region of the straits. The brilliant Ionian city of Miletus founded
ninety colonies on the Black Sea during the Archaic period and could thus
drain their wealth entirely for its own benefit. It never tried to impose its
hegemony on them, but it gained the rewards of a bold and persevering
policy. This explains why, until the end of the sixth century, the coastal
towns of the Black Sea were essentially linked with Anatolia far more than
with Greece proper.
The Pontic Colonies of the South, East and West Coasts

Many of these colonies hardly appear in the texts and have not been
systematically excavated. We must therefore be content with summary
indications.
The south coast first lived from agriculture (corn and olive groves) and
stock-raising. Heraclea Pontica seems to have been essentially rural, its
natives reduced to serfdom by the colonists, the Mariandyni. The tunny
fish caught at Sinope were famous. The fine forests of northern Anatolia
provided timber, notably for naval shipyards at Sinope. There were valu¬
able mineral resources, particularly iron and copper in the Caucasus (one
of the principal sources of supply of the Greek world) which poured into
Trapezus as well as into the small trading stations of Colchis. There was a
flourishing trade with the interior of Asia Minor; the whole peninsula from
Sinope or Amisus to Cilicia could be crossed in six or seven days.
The resources of the west coast were not very different: corn, fish, and
timber in particular, and minerals from the Thracian mountains (iron,
lead, copper).
The Greeks in Scythia

Fortunately, we are much better informed on the colonies of the north
coast and the Crimea, as a result of the recent excellent excavations in the
Soviet Republics. In the sixth century, these consisted of small cities living
in symbiosis with a powerful autochthonous element. The necropolises
often show Hellenic sepulchres (shaft tombs or caves with dromoi) side by
side with native sepulchres where the dead were buried with their legs
folded. Close by the Greek town, the numerous villages in the open
countryside were almost exclusively inhabited by Scythians, Tauri, Maiotai
and Sindi.
Agriculture was prosperous; the heavy ground which bordered the sea
yielded abundant grain; on the other hand, vines which developed so
greatly in the Crimea in the Hellenistic period do not seem to have ap¬
peared yet. Heavy cattle were reared, from which excellent hide was ob¬
tained, and also bees. Fish - tunny and sturgeon - haunted the limans and
the Kertch strait in large quantities and supplied a prosperous salting
industry.
Craft industry gradually developed, at least for crudely manufactured

products (everyday vases, cloths and ordinary fabrics), but the beautiful
pieces came from the Greek world, especially Ionia. Thus a profitable
trade developed which exchanged local production (corn, fish, meat, wool,
skins, furs, salt), slaves and even goods which reached the Black Sea after a
long journey (amber from the Baltic, gold from the Altai) for jewellery,
objects of worked metal and luxury-class pottery (figure 40).
Figure 40 Cup with black

figures, found at Olbia
(USSR), sixth century
Greek products were barely of interest to anyone but the Scythian aris¬
tocracy, which had imbibed Hellenic influences from an early date.
Mixed marriages were not rare: a king at the end of the sixth century,
Ariapeithes, proved his eclecticism by taking three wives: a Greek woman
from Istrus, a Scythian and a Thracian. Herodotus is rich in anecdotes
about princes who aroused their subjects’ suspicions by their inordinate
taste for Greek customs: Anacharsis was assassinated on his return from a
long voyage into the Mediterranean world, because he wanted to intro¬
duce the cult of the Great Mother (Cybele) from Cyzicus; Ariapeithes’
son liked to visit Olbia and stay in the palace he had built there and decor¬
ated with sphinx and griffons; he was massacred by his guard when leaving
the mysteries of Dionysus.
It is scarcely probable that influences in the reverse direction came into
play (whatever may have been said), except in the field of religion. The
colonists adopted the cult of a mother goddess and this continued to exist
until well into the Hellenistic period, sometimes with strange character¬
istics : thus there are representations of a native goddess surrounded by a
halo, her arms crossed, and one of them replaced by the branch of a tree.
Demeter often seems to have taken the place of this vegetation goddess
in colonial cities, all the more easily as she was supposed to extend her
patronage to the harvest: she was the principal divinity of Olbia and
appeared on its coins in the following century. An Archaic temple at

Nymphaion was dedicated to her and abundant statuettes of the goddess,
sacred dancers and priestess water-carriers have been found there. As for
the Artemis Tauropole of the Greeks, she was linked, at least by a play on
words, with the Crimea (Tauric Chersonese). Furthermore, the Greeks
regarded the Nordic barbarians as wise, temperate and virtuous men:
from antiquity onwards, Anacharsis’ voyage to Athens provided material
for many moralizing fables.
None of these Pontic cities had yet experienced any major development
at the end of the Archaic period. It is possible to show that Olbia was in¬
terested in town planning as from the beginning of the sixth century (a
chequered plan with streets intersecting at right-angles). This only ap¬
peared at Miletus after 479, and thus might suggest that colonial architec¬
ture paved the way for metropolitan architecture. But the rare buildings
which still exist from this period are most modest. Economic techniques
remained rudimentary, because only Panticapaeum coined money before
the fifth century. There was nothing comparable here to the large-scale
creations of western Hellenism. But the Greeks had got a foothold on a
vast coastal region which had emerged from barbarism and they had laid
the foundations of a prosperous trade. Their influence even extended quite
far inland into the wooded steppes where the first ancestors of the Slavs
may already have been leading a nomadic life. A potsherd from the end
of the seventh century, bearing in Greek the words ‘You will draw me by
lots’, has been found at Nemirov, 200 miles from the mouth of the Bug;
vases with black figures penetrated as far as Kursk in the very heart of the
Black Earth country. The later development and prosperity of the Pontic
colonies would be unaccountable without the boldness of the Milesians who
girded the Black Sea with their settlements.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE GREAT ADVENTURE
Isocrates rightly said (.Panegyricus, 36) that the colonists ‘saved both those
who followed them and those who remained behind’.
The Greeks and Colonization
The metropolises restricted by civil wars, and more generally by the limita¬
tions of their territories, felt the pressure relax, although competition from
colonial products sometimes temporarily aggravated social malaise. In any
case, the economy was enormously stimulated by the superabundance of
raw materials and the increase in foreign markets.
The colonial cities developed a very lively form of Hellenism. It had a
striking originality, which resulted to a small extent from contacts estab¬
lished with the natives - that gave the cults of Sicily and Magna Graecia,
for example, their very special colour. But it was above all the result of new
conditions in the new world. In cities where, by definition, no tradition

existed, people could think and act unhampered by the old systems. The
first legislators appeared in the west; there too vast architectural ensembles
were conceived to honour the gods better than in the cramped and often
already congested sanctuaries of Greece. But the colonists were too proud
of being Greek and despised the barbarian too much not to aim at remain¬
ing true to the past history of their race above all else. This is proved by the
very name of Magna Graecia which they gave to the region where, with
Sicily, their achievements were most brilliant: southern Italy.
The Barbarians and Colonization

The principal effect of colonial enterprise was to spread Hellenism very far
from its first bases. Contacts were particularly close in Sicily where small
Sicanian communities in the neighbourhood of Gela, for example, pro¬
gressively abandoned their earlier way of life and adopted those of a polls.
Etruria, where all the tombs were overflowing with Greek vases (to such
an extent that in the nineteenth century they were known as Etruscan),
was profoundly changed. Even in countries where the density of colonists
was small, such as Pontus, Gaul and Iberia, the local aristocracy at least
yielded to the attractions of a superior culture.
The diffusion of writing in Italy is the best evidence of this vast move¬
ment. Political fragmentation explains the numerous attempts which were
all based on western Greek alphabets. The Etruscan alphabet appeared
for the first time on an ivory tablet at Marsiliana about 700 and originated
from the Chalcidians of Cumae. The ‘North-Etruscan’ alphabets of the
north of the peninsula and the Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan and Latin
alphabets were all derived in turn from it. The most ancient document in
the Latin alphabet is the black stone from the forum (end of seventh cen¬
tury?). This alphabet progressively eliminated all the others. In view of its
role in the formulation and spread of European civilization, the rapid ex¬
pansion of the western Greek alphabet can be regarded as a fundamental
phenomenon which directly or through the mediation of the Etruscans
gradually reached all Italy, eager to write.
It is more paradoxical to record that, notably in the west, Hellenism
advanced well beyond the regions where the colonists traded. The
Etruscans must have played a considerable part in the redistribution of
Greek products: it was undoubtedly through their intermediary that
Greek vases crossed the Alps in large numbers up to the Swiss plateau,
quite as frequently as by the long journey along the Danubian route. They
spread from there in the Rhineland and into eastern France (Alsace,
Franche-Comte, Burgundy, Champagne) where sepulchres contained
bronze oenochoae - at Keppel-am-Rhein (Baden) and Vilsingen (Wurttem-
berg) for example - and pottery with black figures, found in large numbers
on the oppidum of Mount Lassois (near Chatillon-sur-Seine), at Camp de
Chateau (Jura) and at Heuneburg (Wiirttemberg). The most beautiful
archaic bronze crater was found in the tomb of a Gallic princess at Vix
(Cote d’Or) together with a wonderful golden headband. Although mys¬
tery still surrounds the route it followed to arrive there, it does at the very
least show the incomparable prestige Greek art enjoyed in the Celtic world
which thus drank at the purest source of Mediterranean civilization.
Native artists adapted imported forms and motifs to Celtic taste. Build¬
ing techniques were modified: at Heuneburg, walls and bastions of
unbaked brick on stone pedestals are evidence of incontestable Hellenic
influence.
In Spain, the diffusion of Hellenism was particularly rapid in the region
of Tartessus and over the whole eastern coast. Three systems of writing
appeared, halfway between syllabary and alphabet and combining Semitic
and Greek influences. The same syncretism can be found in the first
attempts at Iberian art around Cadiz (seventh century): ivories, silver
goblets, golden jewellery, bronze candelabra - here however, the oriental
influence introduced by the Phoenicians seems to have been the strongest.
But the beginnings of large-scale plastic art, which soon depicted a rich
bestiary, drew attention more to the Hellenic world, in particular to
Magna Graecia where the model of the androcephalous bulls, dear to
Iberian hearts, is to be found. From the sixth century, ceramics copied
Greek geometric motifs.
Archaic expansion between the Achaean empire and the conquest of
Alexander gives the best evidence of the real vocation of Hellenism: to
extend its economic and spiritual conquests ever further afield.
9
Spiritual Innovations
A deep-seated unity remained in this world of endless variety where all
regions had not evolved in the same rhythm: its spiritual civilization. This
was constantly revived by incessant journeys between cities by poets,
thinkers and artists (map n). However, Greek Asia, because of its
economic organization and its prosperity, still retained its primacy.
The dominant impression is of intense creative power, somewhat exuber¬
ant and disordered: a young nation was formulating its style of thinking
and feeling, inventing its literary and artistic vocabulary, and defining its
relationships to the world of the gods. The direct and powerful emotion an
Archaic poem or statue inevitably evokes arises from the freshness of this
civilization. Although it had not yet achieved the purified serenity of
classicism, it was slowly seeking and slowly discovering itself.
ARCHAIC LYRICISM, DRAMA AND RATIONALISM
New forms appeared in every sphere: a variegated and flexible lyricism

succeeded the more serious and more severe poetry of Homer and Hesiod.
Then came drama, while thinkers for the first time tried to account for
the universe rationally and created science and philosophy, which were
still scarcely distinct.
The Upsurge of the First Greek Lyricism

Lyricism, in the Greek sense of the term, was poetry accompanied by
music. Its birth was directly connected with the contacts Ionians had made
with Orientals, who had considerably extended research in the world of
music and, above all, greatly improved the instruments indispensable to
the accompaniment. The Greeks adopted a cithara with multiple strings
(which took the place of the poor Homeric tetrachord), and above all the
large Phrygian flute with its stirring wail, and the small Lydian flute with
high notes which imitated young girls’ voices. The elegy even borrowed its
name from the Asiatic word for the reed from which the flute was cut.
The epic had extolled the warlike virtues of the Achaeans, and then ex¬
pressed passionate regret for the world which had disappeared with the
8*
Dorian invasions. Didactic poetry gave voice to the confusion in Greece

rising from its ruins and trying to organize its material life and bring order
to its spiritual universe. Lyricism was the expression of a society in full
gestation. It had a dual social function: in its choral form, it intervened
directly in the festivals, where the unity of the city was consolidated; in the
form of monody (soli), it was the only means of expression for turbulent
souls torn by life. With the growth of tyranny, it developed in small coteries
around the tyrants and readily became the poetry of the court. Periander,
Polycrates and the Pisistratids patronized the poets generously. It was an
amusing sight to see the men of power vying with each other to obtain the
services of a famous poet.
Lyricism also reflected Greek society through its diversity. Without en¬
tering into the technical distinction between the three styles (Dorian,
Phrygian, Lydian), it is possible to distinguish several spheres which
corresponded to the large ethnic groups. Ionia invented the elegy, a
threnos accompanied by a flute (for which Mimnermus of Colophon won
fame - he was perhaps the first to sing of the sufferings of love) and iambic
poetry with a jerky rhythm which lent itself to personal satire (Archilochus
of Paros) or general satire (Simonides of Amorgos). Aeolis primarily pro¬
duced kitharoidoi, Terpander and Arion who carried its glory far afield, and
Alcaeus and Sappho who immortalized their poetic and amorous rivalries
in light odes with subtle rhythms. Sparta attracted Aleman of Sardes, who
perfected choral lyricism, and Tyrtaeus who, although Athenian, discov¬
ered the masculine strains of a truly Dorian poetry. Megara gave birth to
Theognis, a powerful poet of the aristocratic ideal. On the distant shores of
Sicily, Stesichorus of Himera revived the old themes of the epic in abrupt
lines with the introduction of new moral values. Finally, Asian volup¬
tuousness and Dorian severity harmonized at Athens in the impassioned
elegies of a sage, Solon.
Lyricism and the Class Struggle

The bitterness of the social struggles cast its dark reflection over Archaic
lyricism. Hate generating insult seemed the poets’ best inspiration.
Archilochus turned iambic poetry into a formidable weapon which he
Commentary on Map 11: The names in large print are those of writers or philosophers and their
journeys are indicated by arrows.
A brilliant and general vitality characterized the Greek world from Thessaly to Crete and
Rhodes, from Sicily to Propontis. The participation of all areas in intellectual life emphasized
still further the existence of preferential directions and centres. Throughout the Archaic period,
the Asiatic coast and the Aegean islands remained consistently brilliant intellectual centres and
were regular points of departure. But after that, changes occurred. Sparta seems to have been the
principal pole of attraction in the eighth and seventh centuries. It was supplanted in the fifth
by Athens which by then had become the most important literary centre in Greece proper.
Thessaly was perhaps in reality only an excursion for Anacreon as it was for Simonides - at a time
when Sicily and Magna Graecia were exercising an irresistible attraction on the orientals. The
density of spiritual exchanges grew. The journeys lengthened, crossed and inter-crossed but all -
except for that of Ibycus — went from east to west, notably towards the far west, where new
doctrines were formulated (Pythagoreanism, Orphism).
LESBOS PHRYGIA
Alcaeus Anthippus, Crates
Cepion Hierax, Olympus
Pericleitus
Pittacus Ithasos
Sappho
Arion
Terpander /SAMOS \
I Asius \
BOEOTIA Simonides^
CROTON Hesiod PHESUS
Orpheus Clonas iallinus
ipponax
CORINTH [SARDES
[ LOCRI Eumelus
Aleman
Xenocritus
^2 ARGOS ATHENS
Sacadas iMILETUS
[vrtaeus \ Cadmus
1 SPARTA
CYTHERA LEROS
Xenodamus Demodocus
RHODES
CRETE Pisander
Epimenides PAMPHYLIA
8th.to7th Centuries B.C.| Thaletas Damophilus
Journey INTELLECTUAL LIFE Centre of Attraction
PERINTHUS
PROCONNESUS
Herodicus
Aristeas
ATHENS
Solon, Lamprpcles
METAPONTUM Onomacritus, Hipi
Brontinus
THESSALY
Aesop
CROTON CHALCIS TEOS

Tynnichus, Anacreon
BOEOTIA
Acusilaus 'COLOPHON
Xenophanes
MEGARAI
>'SAMOS'vr-y EPHESUS
PY*U1H Iririrlitii
SICYON
VPraxilla ' ARGOS
Telesilla/
HERMIONE
iSsrsii!!
L, Lasus
RHODES
' /Timocreon
6th Century B C
Map i i Intellectual life in the Archaic period: the circulation of men and ideas
wielded equally violently against an unfaithful fiancee, driven to suicide,

and the fate which had made him homeless, an unfortunate colonist at
Thasos and finally a mercenary.
Political conflicts engendered equally ferocious tones. Alcaeus, an in¬
transigent aristocrat, defended the interests of the propertied classes in
battle against the tyrant Myrsilus and then sang of his death with savage
joy: "Tis time for wine and time for women, now that Myrsilus is dead’
(fragment 20). He was scarcely more kindly disposed to ‘the miserable
Pittacus’ whom the people designated as arbiter and whom he considered
a tyrant.
Another aspect of the civil wars of the cities appeared in Theognis:
hatred of the triumphant demos which had eliminated the ‘good’ and must
be treated in the harshest manner: ‘Kick thou the empty-headed com¬
mons, prick them with a sharp goad and put a galling yoke upon their
neck’ (847 ff.). He detested the wealthy who gained as much power by
their riches as birth had formerly given the nobles, and he wondered sadly
before Zeus that ‘... the wicked enjoy untroubled prosperity, whereas such
as keep their hearts from base deeds, nevertheless, for all they may love
what is righteous, receive Penury, the mother of perplexity’ (383 ff.).
Political passions were equally lively at Athens. They blaze through the
works of Solon, already famous for having persuaded the Athenians to
reconquer Salamis. He tried to subdue these passions by re-establishing
harmony between the classes: ‘I stood protecting both with a strong shield,
and suffered neither to prevail unjustly’ (fragment 7). He liked glorifying
the task he had accomplished, bringing about a balance amidst the clash
of interests. ‘... Mingling myself strength from all quarters I turned at bay
like a wolf among many hounds . . .’ and ‘ordinances I wrote that made
straight justice for each man, good and bad alike’ (fragment 36).
Lyricism and the Individual

The echoes of the political conflict therefore reverberated through all the
work of these lyric poets, either when they sided violently with one or other
of the contending parties or - a unique example - when Solon tried to
mediate between them. But there was a great deal more to this poetry.
The Archaic period, time of the development of the poleis, was also the time
of the first conflicts between the individual and society. It was a period of
great enterprise when strong personalities - pioneers of colonization or
tyrants - asserted themselves and triumphed. The development of personal
poetry, of lyricism in the modern sense of the term, reflected the same
aspirations of the individual.
Not surprisingly, the impulse towards a life of refined pleasures was best
expressed in the opulent cities of Ionia and Aeolia, lovers of tryphe (luxur¬
ious indolence). First came the pleasures of society. Banquets, followed by
long drinking bouts and enhanced by the presence of flautists, often served
as framework to the lyricists’ songs. ‘Bring water, lad, bring wine,
bring me garlands of flowers, ... for I would try a bout with love’, cried
SPIRITUAL INNOVATIONS 213
Anacreon (fragment 62). And Sappho would not have been the same with¬
out the charming chorus of young girls who hovered around her, so like the
roses of their delicate garlands. In this environment, the soul quivered with
excitement. Wine played its part in this, and Alcaeus again and again
ordered the cup-bearer to pour great draughts of it. Love was equally
prominent - the naively sensual love of the great Lesbians, the elegant,
playful love of Anacreon, love which analyzed its passions and its chains
possibly for the first time, pondered over its vicissitudes and tried to under¬
stand itself by expressing itself. Lastly, melancholy was closely related to
pleasure, haunted by the spectre of old age and death; ‘the harvest of
youth is as quickly come as the rising sun spreadeth his light abroad’, said
Mimnermus, ‘And when the end of maturity be past then to be dead is
better than to live’ (fragment 2).
In fact, Archaic lyricism went far beyond the banal carpe diem. The
constant evocation of springtime, flowers, light and love meet the eye at
first glance, and these certainly formed the wonderful and radiant back¬
cloth to early Greek lyricism. But, gnomic or not, this poetry was entirely
devoted to a quest for wisdom, the only thing which could secure the full
development of the individual. This wisdom consisted of moderation and it
exalted a new virtue, justice - which had already appeared in Hesiod and
which attained its full bloom in the last of the Archaic lyric poets, Pindar.
Product of a troubled period, Archaic lyricism was a living lyricism. It
expressed two contradictory aspects of society with equal passion: political
involvement and the pursuit of personal fulfilment. This was not Alexan¬
drian lyricism, made up partly of science, imitation and rejection of life.
Lyricism here was born of a confrontation, or more appropriately, of an
opposition between the mind and a life torn by class conflict and by the
attraction of sensual pleasures.
The Birth of Dramatic Forms

The first dramatic attempts take us to a very different environment.
Literary forms of drama sprang fairly belatedly from purely religious
forms by way of a slow evolution, on which specialists are not in agreement.
Aristotle (Poetics, 1449a) taught that tragedy was born of the dithyramb,
but the dithyramb itself had developed from very primitive forms. It was
originally a liturgy in honour of Dionysus, celebrated by cyclical choruses
of men dancing around the altar, in the grip of collective possession: they
were cut off from the public by their own circle, and quickly achieved the
ecstasy which characterized adepts of the god of mania. The leader of the
chorus intoned a tune which he improvised according to his fancy, possibly
stimulated by alcohol. Gradually, however, this pre-literary dithyramb
which was only a cultic practice changed into the literary dithyramb,
written by a poet and learned by the chorus. This marked a decisive step,
for the elements of a possible dialogue between chorus leader and chorus
had appeared which was probably the seed of tragedy.
Satyrical drama was also linked to the cult of Dionysus. Originally, it

was undoubtedly nothing more than an unrestrained liturgy: satyrs who
formed the chorus indulged in dances in honour of the god, fairly similar
to the dance of the possessed. It then assumed a more literary form, notably
in the Peloponnese (the word drama itself is Dorian). Pratinas of Phlius
(in the Argolid) was said to have written the first satyrical drama and to
have introduced the form at Athens.
The beginnings of tragedy are enveloped in the greatest obscurity. The
word first appeared in the Peloponnese, at Sicyon where, according to a
famous text by Herodotus (5, 67), ‘tragic choruses’ (goats’ choruses), sung
in honour of the hero Adrastus, were transferred to Dionysus by the tyrant
Cleisthenes. From this, it is undoubtedly possible to conclude that the link
between tragedy and the cult of Dionysus which was clearly established in
the fifth century did not originally exist. Theories which attempt to trace
the derivations of tragedy to a ritual scenario in honour of Dionysus, god
of vegetation, whose death followed by rebirth was said to have been
celebrated every year, are therefore without foundation.
In its earliest form, tragedy was linked rather to funeral honours paid to
dead heroes in an aristocratic environment. But, even taking the influence
of the dithyramb into account, it is not easy to explain the transition from
this pre-literary tragedy, born in the Peloponnese, to literary tragedy which
appeared with Thespis in Athens shortly before 530. Thespis introduced
the first actor (hypocrites, literally: respondent) who replied to the choir in
speech and thus represented a rational element of analysis in contrast to the
lyrical lamentation of the original chorus. This was the first step in a long
evolution which ended by increasing the number of actors and diminishing
the part played by the chorus, and resulted in the new importance attached
to action as opposed to pure pathetic effusion.
In the presence of so many difficulties, it may be preferable to abandon
traditional explanations and agree with H. Jeanmaire in regarding the
birth of tragedy as one of those ‘sudden mutations’ biologists talk about,
the fruit of Athenian vitality in the maturity of the Archaic period.
The very name of tragedy itself (song of the goat) is equally impossible
to explain. A theory recently expounded by F. Robert suggests that it
originated in very primitive expiatory rites when a goat, analogous to the
Semite scapegoat, was sacrificed in order to purify the community. The
idea of purification, inherent in the old practices, certainly never totally
disappeared from tragedy; Aristotle still regarded it as a purge (■catharsis)
of the passions.
The origins of comedy are also deeply imbedded in very ancient rites.
Even its name recalls the comos, the Bacchic procession the peasants cele¬
brated at the end of the harvest, when pointed lazzis and filthy jokes were
exchanged with lookers-on. This was a time of relaxation when social
taboos were temporarily put aside; it is found in almost all societies (cf. the
Saturnalia at Rome or the carnival in modern civilizations). At Sicyon, for
example, which appears to have played a leading role in the development
SPIRITUAL INNOVATIONS
215
of dramatic forms, phallophoroi covered with serpula danced through the

streets of the town, indulging in high jinks by the thousands. However,
a more literary form appeared at Megara with the crude and naive
Megarian farce which Aristotle connected with the triumph of democracy,
undoubtedly because the people found it a means of expressing their griev¬
ances, as they did at Athens a century later. But the time-lag before
comedy assumed a clearly literary form in Sicily and Attica was much
longer than in the case of tragedy.
The creation of dramatic forms remains one of the most outstanding
achievements of Hellenism in the Archaic period, all the more so as no
external influence can be discerned (only Egypt under the new Empire
seems to have known religious drama before the Greeks). Its role at the
end of the sixth century was certainly slight but it advanced in leaps and
bounds at Athens in the following century and became the principal
expression of the triumphant democracy.
Ionian Positivism
Another, almost contemporary, phenomenon marked a decisive advance
in the formation of the Hellenic mind: the birth of reflection in Ionia in
the dual form of what are now known as philosophy and science. It was
facilitated by the easy contacts established (notably at Miletus) with the
oriental thought of Babylon and Egypt. But it was also a ‘child of the city’
(J. P. Vernant) because it was born in a totally different spiritual world
from the palatial world of the Orient, with its submission to royal power.
It was born in the world of the polis, a secular and rational world which
provided for reciprocity between similar citizens and was based on a law
(:nomos) which was equal for all. This gave rise to systems of the universe
based on the balance and opposition of natural forces, in the same way as
the nomos, etymologically, was an ‘apportionment’ between groups or
individuals who opposed and balanced each other.
The traditional cosmological explanation, which brought in the gods
and was, in sum, based on genealogies, was no longer considered satisfac¬
tory. For the first time, the human mind decided to use no powers but its
own to account for the universe, by seeking the first unique principle
[physis) which explained it. The first philosophical systems were formulated
by the courageous ‘physicists’ (those who seek the nature of things) of the
school of Miletus.
Thales (end of seventh century, beginning of sixth) was the originator.
He was possibly a hellenized Garian and he taught that water was the
original principle of all life. This explanation was certainly reminiscent of
certain Egyptian and Babylonian myths, but the essential difference lay in
the fact that the myth in this case was completely secularized. His succes¬
sor, Anaximander (middle of the sixth century), abandoned the idea of
finding the primordial physis in water and sought it instead in the Infinite
(.Apeiron). He explained at length how all things had emerged from the
2l6 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
Infinite, first by the separation within it of two contrary principles, the hot
and the cold. Finally, Anaximenes (second half of the sixth century) again
discovered the principle of things in an observable reality, in his case, air.
According to him, everything was born from either its condensation or its
rarefaction.
The founder of the school of Miletus, the first in date of the philosophic
schools, can also be regarded as the creator of Greek science. Thales was
certainly initiated into Chaldaean astronomy, and gained fame by pre¬
dicting a total eclipse of the sun - a feat of which Babylonian astrologers
had long been capable. His mathematical work is more interesting. Here
again he was largely inspired by the arithmetical and geometrical know¬
ledge of the orientals, but the spirit of his research was fundamentally
original: he substituted a science which was a real science because it was
purely logical for the empirical and semi-logical Egyptian and Babylonian
science. Plato quite rightly contrasted (Republic, 435c) the Egyptian and
Phoenician ‘love of riches’ with the Greek ‘love of knowledge’. The great
achievement of the first Ionian thinkers was to discard all pragmatism in
their exclusive search for rational explanations, in short, to found the
sciences by replacing the astrologer by the astronomer and the land-
surveyor by the geometrician.
At the same time, and again at Miletus, another field was opened to
rational reflection: that of the past. Logographers (literally: prose-writers)
pondered over the mythical traditions relating to the origins of the cities.
Their work was most frequently only a naive chronicle, as a prelude to
history proper, but nevertheless the most famous of them, Hecataeus of
Miletus, did adopt a critical attitude: ‘I write the things as they seem true
to me because the speeches of the Greeks are many and, in my opinion,
absurd.’ He composed the Genealogies and also a Description of the World,
partly based on his own travels. He was the true founder of history and
geography, and the greatest precursor of Herodotus, who borrowed a great
deal from him. Together with Anaximander, he also produced the first
Greek maps.
Western Thought
Other thinkers moved away from Ionian positivism. They generally came
from the west, which formed a sort of secondary centre of Greek philosophy
at that time.
Xenophanes was a native of Colophon who travelled a good deal and
possibly settled at Elea in Italy. He was not interested in the bold systems
within which the Ionians attempted to confine reality. He had a caustic
mind, was the giant-killer of traditional mythology, and had a passion for
precise observation; he recognized the imprint of leaves in the latomies of
Syracuse and deduced that the sea had previously covered the whole sur¬
face of the earth. However, it was as the founder of ontology, and thus as
the precursor of the Eleatic school, that he exercised the greatest influence.
According to Aristotle (Metaphysics, 986b) he surveyed the material uni¬

verse and ‘said that “the One is the only God” Henceforth, the problem
of being and the problem of the One haunted Hellenic thought.
Pythagoras’ achievements were far from being the work of genius of an
isolated individual. Men searching for purity and truth gathered round
him at Croton where he fled after his exile from Samos. They formed a
community, which was soon driven out by a rival faction but later spread
over the whole Mediterranean, particularly in the west. In the magnificent
flowering of Pythagoreanism it is hard to discern what belongs to the
master and what to the disciples, what is ancient, late or even very late.
Pythagoreanism seems to have contained two different, even antinomic,
elements: a scientific search for numerical relationships in the universe,
and an intense aspiration towards moral perfection, which gave rise to
austere observances. These two tendencies divided, possibly towards the
end of the fifth century and ‘mathematicians’ turned towards scientific
research were differentiated within the sect from ‘acousmatics’ more in¬
clined to asceticism and mysticism. In fact, both can be explained by the
concrete character of Pythagoreanism, a philosophy involved in the politi¬
cal struggle and aiming at a complete reform of man, conceived as a being
living in society. Pythagoras aimed at restoring order in a weakened Croton
and the different sciences which revealed the harmony of the universe and
the purifications which enabled the soul to gain mastery over itself were of
equal importance to further this end. It was not pure chance that the same
word (cosmos) designated both moral and social cosmic order.
On the purely intellectual level, Pythagoreanism was the sum of four
disciplines: music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy, with the ideas of
proportion and harmony inserted right in the heart of them. Music was
based on acoustics, that is to say, on the recognition of intervals between
sounds, able to produce calculated effects on the mind. Geometry dis¬
covered the relationship between figures and space. The theorem which
still bears Pythagoras’ name identified an ineluctable equality in the unequal
Figure 41 The ‘virtues of the numbers with the

Pythagoreans; tetractys and decade
The tetractys is the series of the first four numbers,
unity, the first even number, the first odd number,
and the first even square. Their sum is ten
(1 + 2+ 3+ 4=10), a preferential number for
the Pythagoreans, which can also be obtained by
the sum of unity and the first odd square
(1 + 9 = 10) or as the third term of an arithmetic
progression of 3 starting from unity
(1 + 3+ 3+ 3 = 10). ‘The decade’,
Philolaus later said, ‘is great; it perfects
and realizes everything’
In the arithmo-geometry of the Pythagoreans,
where the numbers were represented by geometric
figures composed of points, the tectractys was
represented by the decadic triangle.
2l8 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
elements forming the sides and hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle.

This symbolized the justice which established equality in a necessarily
disproportionate society.
Arithmetic played an even larger part, because for Pythagoras ‘things
were numbers’ - a fundamental principle which can without exaggeration
be said to be the basis of all modern science. It also produced social har¬
mony in so much as calculations enabled contracts to be correctly adjusted.
But there was also a lot more to it because reflections on numbers (reflec¬
tions on three, the first perfect number, on five, the representation of jus¬
tice, on seven, the symbol of Athena) based on their ‘virtues’ (dynameis)
already verged on religion (figure 41). Finally, although astronomy was
still rudimentary, it at least tried to distinguish the movements of the stars,
fixed stars, planets, the sun and the moon, from which the doctrine of the
harmony of the spheres was soon derived.
On the mystical plane, the Pythagoreans professed the doctrine of
metampsychosis, which may be evidence of early Indian influence, through
the intermediary of the east. The soul, to escape from the cycle of rebirth
and reincarnation, must purify itself by a series of ritual observances (the
ban on eating beans, boiling meat, sacrificing white cocks . . .) and harden
itself by travail (ponos) which alone could ensure the salvation of the
individual as well as of the city.
The influence of Pythagoreanism was considerable and extended well
beyond the Archaic period. In the west, which was passionately interested
in the problem of destiny, it attempted to provide a rational solution to it
and one which was different therefore from those offered by the religions.
Nevertheless it resembled these religions both in its fundamental mysticism
and in the atmosphere of fraternal piety which existed among its members.
THE RENAISSANCE OF LARGE-SCALE ART
The ideas of proportion and symmetry, fundamental in Pythagoreanism,

were equally important in art, which now mastered its means of expression
after the groping efforts of the Geometric period.
Archaic Art and Society

The new circumstances of the Archaic world explained this development.
The cities were no longer the humble, straggling rural villages they had
originally been; they had become towns which were jealous of each other
and competed as much in the glory of their monuments as in the efficacy
of their weapons. Prosperity spread everywhere, especially from the seventh
century, and public and private commissions increased. Aristocrats as well
as pdTvenus from craft industries and commerce liked to gather luxurious
objects round them. The minor arts experienced a striking renaissance and
so too did large-scale art, architecture and sculpture, which benefited from
the strength of religious feeling in a world where the expansion of the cities
could only have a favourable effect on civic religion.
The new contacts the Greeks made in the Orient were just as important.
Memories of the Achaean period were certainly not completely forgotten:
the plan of the temple and the Doric column remained firm evidence that
the Mycenaean heritage was still alive. But from the Orient which was
joined to Greece by ever-closer economic ties, the Greeks acquired the
knowledge of a living art based on secure age-old techniques: Ionian sanc¬
tuaries with innumerable columns revived the hypostyle halls; the male
statue with its rigid posture, arms close to its side, left foot forward, was
manifestly reminiscent of Egyptian models. The Greeks were even more
attracted by the decorative profusion of oriental art: they were profoundly
influenced by the tiny magnificently decorated ivory, bronze or ceramic
objects, often embellished with incrustations or brilliantly polychrome.
This was already the same sort of admiration that the Crusaders felt for the
products of Levantine technique. A new style not only entered the rich
Ionian cities, in permanent contact with the interior, but even Greece,
notably Corinth. The aesthetic vocabulary was enriched by themes bor¬
rowed from the Orient: arabesques and real or fantastic animals. The
rigidity of the Geometric era became more supple and imagination found
its way into vase painting.
The mania for orientalism certainly only lasted for a limited time and the
‘orientalizing’ period (roughly, the seventh century) gave way to a reaction
in favour of sobriety and even severity in the sixth century. But temporarily
at least, this new spirit blown in from the eastern Mediterranean gave fresh
life to all Hellenism, on the morrow of its over-severe experiments with
Geometrism, giving it back a taste for life and a feeling for decoration.
Finally, the colonial cities offered artists the widest of perspectives. Most
of the new towns had been established in barbarian countries where there
was no local artistic tradition to influence the Greeks. But their prosperity
(unequalled except in Ionia), the possibility of working on a large scale,
the feeling of having everything to create and perfect freedom to create it,
and the influence of the Orient also excited their enthusiasm and accounted
for the achievements of colonial art.
The art which emerged from these eminently favourable conditions was
a good reflection of the civilization which had given it birth. In particular,
it showed the same fundamental diversity that has been noted in almost
every sphere. There were at least two outstanding major trends: the Dorian
trend developed in the Peloponnese which was the most lively region in
Greece proper at first; it commanded attention with its powerfulness,
sobriety and severity. The Ionian trend, in Ionia and the Archipelago was
characterized by grace, elaboration and imagination. The Attic art which
appeared when Athens had won its place amongst the great cities (there¬
fore hardly before the sixth century) tried to established a difficult synthesis
between the two in which Ionian flexibility tempered Dorian severity.
Nevertheless despite such divergent tendencies, Archaic art possessed a
unity: it was the strong and living art of a young nation, adept at finding
wealth where it could, but which deliberately turned its attention to
humanism. None of its creations yet showed classic perfection made up of
harmony and eurhythmy, but it was enthusiastically seeking new paths in
every direction. The large pre-Hellenic sanctuaries, Olympia, Delphi,
Delos, undoubtedly played a large part in the creation of this artistic unity
- so evident despite the diversity of schools.
Religious Architecture
The most obvious manifestation of the new art was the birth of religious
architecture. Temples had been appearing diffidently since the Geometric
period, generally replacing more simple sanctuaries where the altar was the
only construction. Henceforth they increased, providing solid dwellings
worthy of the gods. For the temple, though it was less private than the
chapel of the Mycenaean palace, continued to be the house of the god and
not of the worshippers. They were content to observe the god incarnated in
his statue from a distance, through the open door, and to offer him their
sacrifices on the altar normally placed in front of the entrance.
The temple originally only comprised one room, the naos, where the god
dwelt. It rapidly became more complicated and, in its canonical form,
which was determined from the Archaic period onwards, it numbered
three rooms: the vestibule (pronaos), the sanctuary proper (naos) and the
rear vestibule (opisthodomos), symmetrical with the pronaos but not commu¬
nicating with the naos. There is scarcely any doubt that this plan to a large
extent derived from the Mycenaean megaron, although this relationship
creates difficulties and would now be less generally accepted than formerly.
In practice, the temples often deviated from this schema: notably, in the
secret cults, there was a fourth room, the abaton, a sort of ‘holy of holies’
situated to the rear of the naos (for example, in the oracular temple of
Apollo at Delphi). The building was normally aligned towards the east,
according to oriental custom, but here too the circumstances of the terrain
or the particular nature of the cult might require departures from the rule.
The most prominent element in the temple was the column. It was very
rarely absent. Even in the most simple types, the porch was supported by
two columns between the antae. A continuous colonnade soon appeared
on the principal facade or on the two facades (prostyle or amphiprostyle
type) and even more often a colonnade which surrounded the four sides
of the temple with a portico (peripteral type).
On some sites, where the presence of the divine was particularly marked,
the sanctuary included other constructions as well as the temple and its
altar: these were the treasuries (thesauroi) which retained, at least in name,
the memory of the pre-Hellenic period. They were offered to the god by a
city or a tyrant and served as protection for the most valuable offerings
which could not remain in the open air. They consisted of a single quad¬
rangular room, fairly soon preceded by a porch supported by two columns.
The Creation of Architectural Orders

These buildings were only composed of plat bands and piedroits, that is of
rectangular elements. But these elements, and particularly the entablature
and the colonnade, were not left to the imagination of the architect; they
followed strict canons which regulated their shape, proportions and decora¬
tion and are designated by the traditional name of‘orders’. There were two
orders, the Doric and the Ionic which developed on parallel lines from the
early Archaic period and henceforth formed an unchanging framework, as
far as essentials were concerned, for Greek, Roman and Renaissance archi¬
tecture. The fact that these orders, of such an obviously conventional
character, survived for such a long time makes the question of their origins
even more interesting.
One preliminary remark is essential: the first temples were made of
wood and this explains the most notable and, apparently, the most
illogical characteristics of the architecture in stone which very soon
replaced it.
The elements of the Doric order are well known: column springing
directly from the stylobate and fluted with twenty grooves with sharp
edges, geometric capital composed of an echinus surmounted by a square
abacus, smooth architraves, frieze presenting a regular alternation of trig¬
lyphs and blank or illuminated metopes, cornice where the dripstone was
decorated with mutules or guttae.
The special shape of the entablature is easily explained by architecture
in wood: the triglyphs were the extremities of the beams, sculptured with
fluting or glyphs and separated by a space filled by protecting plates, the
metopes. The guttae represented a means of enabling the rain to flow away
without reaching the columns or the walls and to prevent them rotting.
This architecture was born in the Peloponnese, the cradle of Achaean art,
and the column certainly owed its inspiration much more to Mycenaean
prototypes (for example, to the columns of the ‘Treasury of Atreus’) than to
the Egyptian proto-Doric column, as was previously taught.
In the Ionic order, the column was slimmer and slenderer, fluted with
twenty-four grooves with flat edges, and rested on a base which ensured its
stability. The capital was gracefully decorated with volutes, a double
string-course which coiled round and seemed like a ‘spring transmitting
the weight of the architrave to the shaft’ (Choisy). Above the epistyle,
formed of three plat bands or fascias, the frieze was continuous. Decoration,
almost non-existent in the Doric order, was profuse here: palmettes, beads
and twirls, ovolo and raie de coeur. In the Aeolic order, an ephemeral variety
of Ionic, they even invaded the capital, which was formed in Egyptian
style of a bouquet of water flowers surmounted by volutes.
Here again, we must suppose that architecture was originally in wood
and that, in the absence of beams of large scantling, a less heavy frame¬
work was adopted, in imitation of those of Lydia and Lycia and the apadana
of Susiana. The airy lightness of the Ionic compared with the Doric can be
explained by the fact that the sturdy oaks of Greece proper, which made
possible the strong constructions of Peloponnesian architecture, were rare
in Asia.
Oriental influence went even deeper: the Ionians did not invent the
capital with volutes but borrowed it from Hittite or Iranian prototypes. The
frieze itself — which was moreover rare in large Archaic buildings and only
became a canonical element as from the fifth century at Athens — took its
models from Egypt and Mesopotamia where it protected the most fragile
parts of the building at both crowning and sub-foundation;
The Achievements of Archaic Architecture

The Greek orders were therefore born of elements borrowed from Myce¬
naean and Oriental traditions. However, in every building architects
succeeded in introducing thousands of variations to temper the severity of
these strictures ineluctably imposed on them, and without these variations
Hellenism would not be Hellenism.
The Doric order ruled essentially in the Peloponnese, and from there colo¬
nization spread it widely over the entire west. One of the most valuable
incunabula is still partially erect in the Altis of Olympia: this is the
Heraeum which replaced an early end-of-seventh-century temple in about
600. It is as moving as a child’s first drawings, with its wooden columns
which were only replaced by stone shafts as and when necessity decreed, its
internal walls joining the columns to the partition walls as if the foreman
was doubtful of his capacity to secure the stability of the building without
this device, and with the clumsiness of its lopsided design.
From the sixth century onwards, large-scale buildings increased: the
temple of Artemis at Gorcyra (before 575), the temple to Apollo at Corinth
(shortly after 550) with its powerful monolithic shafts, the treasuries soberly
ranged on the terrace which overlooked the Altis at Olympia, and, in the
west, the Apollinium at Syracuse (about 550) and the ‘Basilica’ at
Posidonia (around 53°) > which furthermore shows Ionian influence in the
capitals decorated with chasing. Athens still cut a poor figure, with
Pisistratus Hecatompedon, even after his sons had provided it with a
peripteral colonnade.
In the Ionian world, the temples often had a colossal appearance which
vividly pointed to oriental influence. The most famous were the Artemisium
at Ephesus and the Heraeum at Samos rebuilt on a larger scale in the sixth
century on earlier buildings. They were both dipteral and were supported
by positive forests of columns (127 at Ephesus, 133 at Samos). The Arte¬
misium in particular, which was erected through the generosity of the
phil-Hellene Croesus, was sumptuously decorated down to the smallest
detail, even the bases of the columns were sculptured. It remained one of
the glories of Ionia until the fatal night when it was burned down by the
madness of Erostratus (356).
These gigantic buildings fired Athens under the tyrants with ardent
jealousy and it tried to match them with the Olympieum but this had to
wait until Hadrian to be finished. At the same time, Ionian genius created
the treasuries of Gnidos (about 545) and Siphnos (about 525) at Delphi -
small magnificent jewels where a positive frenzy of decoration seems to
have been unleashed. Their greatest originality lay in the use of human
supports, caryatids in imitation of certain Egyptian prototypes.
The Birth of Large-Scale Plastic Art

The caryatids were not the only example of the close connections between
sculpture and architecture in the Archaic period: sculpture at that time
only existed in order to populate sanctuaries and necropolises.
The practice of representing men and animals had been resumed as from
the Geometric period, but works remained small in scale and very sche¬
matic. This attempt continued during the early Archaic period with the
double difference that statues were henceforth of large dimensions and
that a constant evolution towards realism was evident. The appearance of
a life-size statue is linked with the development of the temple. The statue
was the god and it was fitting therefore that it give an impression of
majesty and power and also that it be adorned with all the attractions of
life. Furthermore, the Orient exercised a determining influence on this
birth; there, the Greeks, long accustomed to anthropomorphism, had been
able to see large idols for the first time.
Archaic art was not ignorant of animals: lions guarded the tombs or, as
at Delos, formed a wonderful alignment leading, in oriental style, to the
sanctuary of Leto (plate 5). But man was predominant everywhere because
gods with human faces prevailed everywhere. The real creation of the
Archaic period in that sphere were the two types - the young man (kouros)
and the young girl (kore) - which were used to represent both mortals
(dedicators, priests, the dead who were always represented in the prime of
life) and Immortals. The kouros was nude, his arms held close to his body
and his left leg forward. The female body, on the other hand, was only
shown draped in a fine fluted tunic, its light folds contrasting with the
heavy folds of a woollen cloak. The kore often held something, a flower or a
bird, in her outstretched right hand, while the left lifted her clothing on her
thigh.
But kouroi and korai have the same conventional faces - almond-shaped
eyes, thick lips formed in the famous ‘Archaic smile’ which increased their
enigmatic expression. There was also the same search for ornamentation:
it could scarcely find any outlet in the men except in luxuriant heads
of hair; the girls had very beautiful hair styles, often arranged in
‘snails’ shells’ on their foreheads or falling in heavy plaits decorated with
ornaments of bronze or precious stones (which have disappeared today).
Clothing was also rich, and polychrome painting sometimes repro¬
duced the added refinement of embroidery, as in the examples on the
Acropolis.
At first glance, all these statues seem alike, and not long ago ‘Archaic
Apollos’ were still studied en bloc. Since then, it has had to be acknow¬
ledged that all the kouroi were not Apollos. Likewise stylistic development
was well defined if not rapid. The early works, made of wood, have been
lost though texts mention these xoana, held in the greatest reverence every¬
where. The first attempts in stone were rudimentary. The Nicandra at
Delos is hardly anything more than a badly squared beam where the
female body fails to emerge from the heavy talaric drapery. But progress
can be sensed almost every decade, in the proportions of face and body
and, in the case of the kouros, in anatomy. The exercises on the palaestra
made it possible for the sculptor better to observe musculation, particularly
that of the thorax and abdomen, the pubic hair, and the knees, and
the modern expert can set an approximate date to the works from this
development.
The statue, originally little more than a plank, gradually took on the
three dimensions of space. It came to life because the artist was not content
to join the parts together by sharp transitions but tried to reproduce the
supple unity of a human being. Even the expression on the faces was
modified at about the end of the sixth century and the frozen smile was
discarded (though it can be still found somewhat later on the faces of the
dead at Aegina). Serious, even sulky, faces appeared.
The Appearance of Monumental Sculpture

It would be arbitrary to try to separate sculpture in the round from monu¬
mental sculpture which appeared at the same time and was even more
closely linked to the development of the temple. It was a crucial moment
when the Greeks learned to decorate the upper parts of buildings, friezes
or frontons, with figures, generally enhanced with contrasting polychrome.
The possibilities offered by the frieze varied greatly according to whether
it was Doric or Ionic. The metopes of the Doric frieze formed separate
tableaux which required a composition concentrated into successive epi¬
sodes: the exploits of Heracles or the combats of the Gigantomachy,
Centauromachy, or Amazonomachy lent themselves to this form. The
Ionic frieze, at that time found mainly on small buildings, allowed a freer
and more supple development. Thus the judgement of Paris, the rape of
Hippodamia, a battle before Troy, and a Gigantomachy, with a subtle
arrangement of figures, unfolded around the Treasury of Siphnos at Delphi.
However, the Ionians were not always capable of avoiding a narrative
loquacity (not so unlike that of the Orient) in these bands.
The fronton seemed to demand sculptured decoration and at the same
time reject it, because its triangular shape made glaring differences in the
stature of the various figures necessary. This difficult problem was solved in
several ways. At the temple of Artemis at Corcyra small figures were
placed around the central motif, the Gorgon flanked by panthers. On the
tufa treasuries of the early Acropolis, monsters, particularly anguipeds,
were used to decorate the corners. Finally, at the Treasury of Siphnos at
Delphi, the corners were filled by men in a crouching or out-stretched posi¬

tion. This latter solution was generally adopted later, notably at the
Pisistratids’ Hecatompedon on the Acropolis. This example shows how the
tentative experiments of the Archaic period bore fruit in the emergence of
the outlines wherein Greek art thenceforth inscribed its most beautiful
discoveries.
Schools of Sculpture
There was even more variety in sculpture than in architecture. Attempts
have been made to identify schools even inside the Doric and Ionic groups
corresponding to the large cities, but there is now sometimes a tendency
to regard these efforts as mere intellectual pastimes.
Figure 42 Stele from Chrysapha: adoration

of divine infernal couple (Dionysus and
Kore ?). Museum of Sparta
In any case, each group had a well marked individuality. In Dorian

country, the statue rose manifestly solid and precisely defined, even severe.
Elements of heavy stability were even brought out in the female body. It
was clad in a severe peplos with a smooth top which barely showed a breath
of life in the region of the breasts. The lower part was fluted with wide
folds and resembled a Doric column.
But this picture must immediately be qualified. Sparta showed a great
deal of vigour in its small bronzes, cultic reliefs (figure 42) and grimacing
masks. An Argive sculptured the powerfully built twins, Cleobis and Biton,
for Delphi. The east had left its mark on Corinth and bodies there were
thinner and more elongated, as in the Apollo at Tenea. The small city of
Sicyon offered a treasury to Delphi on which a razzia of Castor and Pollux,
the Argonauts, Europa and the hunt of Calydon were represented. The
artist could have flaunted all the picturesqueness of Ionian narratives here
but he preferred to compress these episodes, and the metopes, like the one
occupied solely by an enormous wild boar, are incomparably powerful. At
the Artemisium at Corcyra, the murder of Medusa also concentrates
attention on the expressively brutal monster in the centre of the fronton.
Boeotia was affected by Peloponnesian influence, and showed a marked

taste for domestic scenes (figure 43). A similar trend can be seen in the
west with the metopes of the early buildings at Selinus and of the sanctuary
of Sele (near Posidonia) but with somewhat more picturesqueness, as a
result of Ionian influence, and a sense of theatre particularly evident in
composition, which remained a characteristic of the colonial art of Sicily
and Magna Graecia.
Figure 43 Boeotian figurines in terracotta, end of sixth century: on the left, pastry cook
in front of his oven; on the right, sawyer at work
Ionian sculpture was the reflection of a more pleasant world, happy to

lead a life of ease. It loved animals (Naxian lions of Delos - plate 5) or
fantastic figures (figure 44). Its kouroi were no robust athletes in the Dorian
style but ‘servants at the tyrants’ palaces’ (Langlotz). It treated muscula¬
ture conventionally, using it as an excuse for decorative fantasy: thus
stomachs were often shaped like inverted lyres. It also represented men in
Figure 44 Chased golden plate: centaur returning

from the hunt. Rhodes, end of seventh century
draped clothing - a realm which belonged to Ionian sculpture in its own

right (such as the male statue of Tigani at Samos depicting an adipose
person who seems more devoted to the pleasures of the banqueting table
than gymnastics) and men seated (the path leading to the Didymeium at
Miletus was lined with statue-portraits of the Branchidae, an astonishing
gallery of priest-kings, apathetic bon viveurs with Levantine faces).
Above all, it showed special preference for the female body, its rotundi¬
ties and undulant grace; it was clothed in magnificent linen draperies with
fine folds, daintily set off. Even the Hera of Cheramyes, originating from
Samos, which is an early piece (about 570) and very stiff, has fluid con¬
tours. The korai at Delos are more recent and form a delicate collection of
young, buxom and refined beauty which has scarcely any equal save on the
Acropolis. Sometimes, and particularly at Chios, artists tried to obtain
more animation: Archermus of Chios sculptured a Victory for Delos
(about 550) ‘kneeling for the race’ (a Greek adaptation of an oriental
motif) pulsating with life and movement.
But art was the same everywhere. Though regional differences made it
more languid on the Asian coast, more rigid at Naxos, more attractive at
Paros, and more lively at Chios, it was the same in that it preferred above
all, suppleness of movement, morbidezza of face and profusion of decoration.
The friezes of the treasury of Siphnos at Delphi are possibly its most
harmonious epitome.
At Athens, where sculpture began later, the first attempts were modest.
The tufa frontons of the small chapels of the Acropolis or even of the first
Hecatompedon (first half of the sixth century) naively illustrated fashion¬
able subjects without giving much attention to matters of composition
(fights with animals, struggles of Heracles against the Hydra or against
Triton). However, the marble fronton of the Pisistratids’ peristyle Heca¬
tompedon already presented a loftier theme, a Gigantomachy, with the
figures pleasingly arranged. It can be regarded as the forerunner of the
great ensembles of the following century. Sculpture in the round produced
masterpieces with the Moschophorus, the Rampin knight, and above all,
the korai which formed the most delicate of retinues for Athena on the
Acropolis. Both the charm of their smile and the daintiness of their poly¬
chrome attire certainly owed a good deal to Ionian influence. But they
seem more highly strung, more alive and more modest than their Ionian
sisters and, at the end of the century, the ‘sulky girl’ and her brother the
‘blond ephebe’ indicate that Attic art had finally found a style of its own,
repudiated the external influence which had encouraged its flowering, and
discovered the difficult equilibrium which would henceforth characterize
it.
The only great name known from these last decades at Athens is Antenor,
sculptor of a powerfully built kore on the Acropolis and of the frontons of the
temple of the Alcmaeonids at Delphi. Here for the first time a sculptor
juxtaposed a static and a dynamic fronton, a practice which was often
repeated afterwards, notably at Olympia. The two ensembles are alike in
their very pronounced geometric equilibrium - not dissimilar to the

equilibrium which characterized the reforms of Cleisthenes and the Ionian
maps of Anaximander and Hecataeus at the same period. In all spheres,
the mind tried to impose a mathematical law on reality with geometrical
precision which was at times somewhat ponderous.
Orientalizing Ceramics
The same liberating movement transformed the minor arts as they emerged
from the Geometric period - especially ceramics which were then experi¬
encing a prodigious expansion in conjunction with the growth of luxury
trade (perfumes, wines, oil). At first, orientalizing ceramics took the lead:
gay with colour, their visual attractions consisted of their lively polychrome
and themes borrowed from the east, arranged in horizontal bands, one
above the other. Motifs were most often taken from the vegetable and
animal worlds; a delicately curling stalk, a bird taking flight, a stag lean¬
ing over the water, the dignified movements of a feline, sometimes even a
monster emerged. They always revealed a passionate pleasure in life, and a
precise understanding of line and of the touch of colour which highlights
a vase.
Figure 45 Rhodian oenochoae.

Orientalizing vase decorated with
superimposed bands (animals,
vegetable decoration)
The first works appeared in Asia and the adjacent islands. The most
important group consisted of the vases known as ‘Rhodian’ but actually
manufactured in several other coastal centres as well. The vase was cov¬
ered with a white slip, painted over in black with white or red touches
(figure 45). Many other studios produced fairly similar pottery, at Samos,
Larissa, Glazomenae and even Naucratis in Egypt. The human figure
appeared on Ionian hydriai found at Caere in Etruria, which show mytho¬

logical scenes treated with much more life and humour than sense of com¬
position. Terracotta was also used in Anatolia for other objects besides
vases: the large, gaily-coloured architectonic friezes of Larissa-on-Hermus
or the sarcophagi at Clazomenae.
The main centre of orientalizing ceramics in Greece proper was at
Corinth. The pottery produced here can be recognized by the pale yellow
colour of its clay with a design standing out in black glaze. Proto-
Corinthian (from 750) principally comprised small vases decorated with
animal friezes. In the Corinthian period proper (from 625), alabasters and
arybalios were numerous. They usually bore a single large motif, very
often a wild animal or a monocephalous monster with two bodies. Human
figures appeared at the same time as animal decoration and developed
considerably in the sixth century under Attic influence. The black-figure
technique was used with incised lines and coloured touches (plate 5).
Finally ceramics at Athens did not degenerate after the brilliant
Geometric period. There was firstly Proto-Attic which was completely
imbued with orientalism, but Athenian genius had already found a style
of its own in the narrative decor: large subjects, taken from the Homeric
myths, were encircled by a vegetable decoration of tendrils, flowers and
palmettes. The technique was the same at Corinth, but the silhouettes of
excellent black glaze which created Attica’s reputation were brought out
against a beautiful red clay.
Attic Ceramics in the Sixth Century

While the orientalizing influence remained great in Ionia and Corinth,
an original development occurred at Athens (plate 6). Vegetable decora¬
tion was reduced to the minimum and all attention concentrated on human
representation. Intellectual enjoyment was substituted or rather added to
visual enjoyment, increased by inscriptions which often accompanied the
figures (figure 46). Subjects were generally borrowed from mythology
(notably the cycle of Heracles which provided some fine picturesque
Figure 46 Chariot race. Fragment of an Attic crater originating from Pharsalus

(Thessaly) (first quarter of the sixth century)
The inscriptions read as follows: ‘Sophilus painted me. Funeral games in honour of
Patrocles’. The name of a spectator, Achilles, is also indicated
elements), but scenes depicting the joyful associates of Dionysus multiplied

and came near to representing everyday life. Some vases were real master¬
pieces and the artist, conscious that he was producing something more than
industrial art, sometimes signed his work. The masterpiece was undoubt¬
edly the Francois vase (second quarter of the sixth century) which carried
the double signature of Glitias and Ergotimos (plate 6). With its 250 per¬
sonages and 128 inscriptions, ‘it is a sort of illustrated Greek Bible’ (E.
Pottier). From 550, the most important names are those of the ‘Amasis
painter’, and above all, Exekias who was skilful at concentrating attention
on the essentials in his wonderful mythological compositions and dominated
all production of the period - which had in any case been intensified by
the decline of competing studios at Corinth.
Suddenly, at the very apogee of black-figure pottery, a technical revolu¬
tion occurred in ceramic production. Subjects had hitherto been painted in
black on a red base where detail could only be rendered by incised lines made
with a burin. Henceforth they were retained in red and the whole vase was
covered with black glaze. The artist could now draw faces, musculature and
draperies with exquisitely fine strokes made by using a hair. The black
figure vase was the art of the silhouette: a simple reversal of the respective
roles of black glaze and red base created ceramic painting, which was soon
able to compete with large-scale painting in its delicacy of execution. This
invention, often attributed to Nicosthenus, did not result in the total
disappearance of the old technique, which survived until about 475. But
from the end of the sixth century, it appeared to promise a brilliant future.
IN SEARCH OF RELIGIOUS EQUILIBRIUM
When we discuss Archaic literature, art, and even philosophy we are

already discussing religion, because the most conspicuous characteristic of
religion at that time was that it informed the whole of life. However, the
principal innovations go back to the Geometric period: new gods were
introduced, equilibrium was established between male and female divini¬
ties, and the nascent city created city cults and built temples to shelter the
idols. No religious revolution therefore took place in the Archaic period
but the general renaissance of Hellenism and the growing prosperity made
the harmonious development of spiritual life possible.
Civic and Popular Religion

The Greek pantheon at this time was composed of uranian and chthonic
powers formed by ancient syntheses, reinforced by more recent oriental
elements. This distinction was, broadly speaking at least, that between
civic and popular religion.
Civic religion, which was apparently the most active, aroused a wonder¬
ful creative impulse and established a close spiritual bond between the
members of the community. In this case, the group of worshippers was
identified with the social group (city, tribe, phratry . . .). In actual fact, it
was represented in liturgical acts, by officiants, the priests, who very closely
resembled magistrates in their social origin, the method of their recruit¬
ment, and the fact that they usually held office for a year. The god was now
represented by a large idol and had greater need than ever to be fed, and
this gave rise to the importance of sacrifice which was by far the most im¬
portant rite. The sacrificed animal was divided between the god (who most
often had to be content with the fat and bones) and the worshippers who
gathered for a communion feast.
Processions, inherited from Creto-Mycenaean civilization, came back
into favour, with the correlative development of prosperity and artistic
sense. They were no longer merely supplications designed to elicit favour¬
able treatment by the gods, particularly abundant harvests. They became
great festivals where the city took a pride in showing off its ostentatious and
magnificent clothing, its plump sacrifices and beautiful adolescents. The
Panathenaea of Athens was no longer as much an occasion for offering the
goddess the peplos embroidered by the young Athenian girls, as an oppor¬
tunity to dazzle all Greece invited to the panegyric, and at the same time
to form a feeling of membership of a powerful community amongst the
citizens.
Popular religion continued to turn, in Creto-Mycenaean tradition, to
the mysterious presences which motivated natural life. Its ceremonies
voluntarily remained secret - the Greeks called them mysteries from the
verb which meant ‘keep your mouth shut’. This was not, as it was long
thought, because they represented Achaean cults forbidden by the Dorian
conquerors, but because it was in their very nature to reserve salvation for
the initiates alone.
In the forefront, Demeter retained the incomparable privilege of dis¬
pensing rich harvests and watching over the hereafter. In Arcadia she was
worshipped with strange agrarian liturgies including zoomorphic disguises
and rustic dances. Figurines with animal heads found at the sanctuary of
Lycosura confirm this fact. Demeter’s paredros here was the daughter she
conceived from Poseidon in horse-shape - when she herself was changed
into a mare. This was the mysterious Despoina (Mistress) whose name it
was forbidden to utter. These primitive and simple rites still survived at the
time when Pausanias visited Greece.
The principal centre of the cult of Demeter in Attica was Eleusis. With
a different environment, however, the cult was also different. The Homeric
Hymn consecrated to her was drawn up in an Eleusian atmosphere at the
end of the seventh century, and sang of the misfortunes of the mater dolorosa,
her sad quest for her daughter (in this case Kore, born of Zeus), their
reunion in the holy city where Demeter herself founded her sanctuary and
instituted ‘awful mysteries which no-one may in any way transgress, or
pry into or utter’ (line 477). The moving lines of this wonderfully fervent
text tell the old naturist myth born of the tormenting agony of man face to
face with the cyclical changes of season, upon which the mysteries were
based. But unfortunately it does not say what these mysteries were nor on
what basis the initiate could legitimately hope for a different fate after death
from the uninitiated. There are good reasons to suppose that the rites of the
later mysteries, which culminated in the solemn showing of an ear of corn,
were inherited from the Archaic period at least. More caution is necessary
however on the exact nature of the happiness promised the mystai; it is
quite possible that this may yet have been conceived in terms of personal
salvation.
Demeter was descended from the ancient divinities of cereal growth -
undoubtedly worshipped from the Neolithic period. Dionysus was quite a
different case. Although his name may possibly be found on Pylian tablets,
he was a late-comer at Olympus and his role in the Homeric poems re¬
mained very limited. He was introduced from Asia Minor where he had
deep-seated ties with Phrygia and where he had already merged with a
Lydian god, Bacchus. His cult may possibly have spread to Thrace in the
first place and then to Greece, favoured by the vigorous development of
vine-growing during the Archaic period.
There was a vacant place in the Greek pantheon for a god of vine-
growers, wine and drinkers. Dionysus filled it, though his original character
as the divinity of vegetation in general, of ganos (vivifying humidity) which
motivated the whole vegetable universe, was modified in the process. He
remained god of large trees, particularly pines (and their cones continued
to be his accustomed symbol) and ivy which was also an evergreen. But he
became essentially the god of the vine and of wine. Wine was both liquid
and fire; it was like the ganos of the vine and it produced terrifying effects
on the spirit: it was torn from itself as if possessed by the god.
This gave rise to the ecstatic violence of the cults of Dionysus which have
parallels in the most primitive religions. The god himself was surrounded
by an unbridled retinue of satyrs, half animal, half human demons with
primitive instincts, and their companions the Maenads (literally, crazy
women) were often the victims of these. Worshippers imitated the sara¬
bands of this Bacchic thiasos (retinue): the Bacchants indulged in dances of
possession, of which the dithyramb was but a pale transposition; the
Bacchantes (also called Maenads) were even more uninhibited, wandering
through the solitude of the wooded mountains brandishing thyrsi (sticks
often terminating in branches or pine cones, a heritage of the old tree cult),
tearing apart the living flesh of the animals they encountered and eating it.
It was a terrifying religion in many respects, transporting the orgia of
Anatolia to Greece, inflaming the subterranean powers of the soul. But it
was also a liberating religion. Whatever the original meaning of the epithet
may have been, Dionysus was very much the ‘Eleuthereus’, that is to say,
the Liberator, not only because he released his devotees from all the re¬
pressions and taboos which overwhelmed them, but also because he gave
incomparable inspiration to the festivals where gaiety established harmony
between citizens and where purer and purer dramatic forms gradually
flowered.
Dionysus’ novelty and complexity exercised a strange attraction which
grew stronger every day. This was the Archaic prelude to a long triumph
which lasted well into the Hellenistic period.
For a long time, the cities were worried about the interest in chthonic
cults, the great rivals of the city cults. However, it appears that an equilib¬
rium was established between the two in the sixth century, notably at
Athens. Pisistratus understood that it was not possible to interfere with the
age-old success of the liturgies in honour of Demeter or Dionysus. He there¬
fore decided to integrate them into official religion. In other words, as he
was unable to eliminate them, he assimilated them. He built a temple for
the patron saint of Athens, Athena, and developed the Panathenaea, but
he also organized the Dionysia and enlarged the telesterion at Eleusis. Thus
equilibrium between uranian and chthonic powers was established and
gave spiritual strength and vitality to Hellenism for over a century.
The Great Pan-Hellenic Sanctuaries

Despite Archaic particularism, so perceptible even in religion, certain
sanctuaries, generally far from any important city, tended to extend their
reputation beyond the limits of any one city or region. This had already
happened in the case of Delos, which had become a meeting place for all
insular Ionians, in the heart of the archipelago. Above all, it was true of
Delphi and Olympia; their pan-Hellenic vocation was outstanding, and
fairly individual cultic forms developed there, both mantic and
competitive.
Delphi was primarily famous for the oracle which Apollo (heir to the
ancient mantics of the Earth) expressed through the mouth of the Pythia:
the inspiration of the oracle assumed that the prophetess was possessed
(‘enthusiasm’, as the Greeks said) by her god - though at that time she does
not show the slightest trace of the hysterical delirium that later texts
attribute to her. Strictly speaking, Apollo never revealed the future, but he
answered precise questions by advising on the best course to take. Private
individuals thronged to consult him about a journey, a marriage or an
undertaking; the cities also sent theoroi (sacred ambassadors) to question
the god about declaring war or founding a colony; even a king of Lydia,
such as Croesus, was sensitive to the utterances of the god, which in his case
turned out to be dangerously ambiguous. The spiritual and, unfortunately,
temporal influence of the god, or rather of his priests, was profound. It was
never greater than on the eve of the Persian wars, when their thoughtless
Medism temporarily dealt a palpable blow to its immense prestige (figure
47 on page 234).
The competitions represented another typically Greek religious form.
Apart from those celebrated in local sanctuaries, there were four centres,
privileged by their pan-Hellenic character: Delphi itself (Pythian Games
in memory of the Python), the Isthmus, Nemea and, above all, Olympia.
When the Olympic Games are analyzed, it can be found that they were
9
Figure 47 The sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi
235
made up of elements of very varied origin, because they fell heir to the
legacy of the festivals given in Minoan theatres and the trials of strength
of Dorian warriors. They commemorated the hero Pelops, said by one
form of the myth to be their founder, but memories of very primitive
agrarian liturgies are also present: the foot race evoked the powers of the
Earth by shaking it, the chariot race recalled the annual abduction of the
goddess of vegetation by the infernal Lord - so much so that the victor, a
genuine god of the May’ crowned with olives and covered with branches,
understood that the entire world of subterranean powers shared in his
victory.
However, they were also an opportunity for the competitors to show
what was deepest within themselves, their own value (arete), and this
List of references in figure 47 :

1, Base of Marathon; 2, The Seven against Thebes and the chariot of Amphiaraus; 3,
The horse of Troy; 4, The Epigoni; 5, the Navarchs; 6, The kings of Argos; 7, Base of
the Tarentines; 8, Treasury of the Sicyonians; 9, Treasury of the Siphnians; 1 o, Treasury
of the Thebans; 11, Treasury of the Syracusans; 12, Treasury of the Cnidians; 13,
Treasury of the Potidaeates; 14, Etruscan treasury; 15, Treasury of the Corinthians;
16, Bouleuterion; 17, Treasury of the Corinthians; 18, Treasury of the Cyreneans; 19,
Prytaneum; 20, Temenos of the Earth and the Muses; 21, Rock of the Sybil; 22, Naxian
Sphinx; 23, Portico of the Athenians; 24, Polygonal wall; 25, Pillar of Aemilius Paulus;
26, Tripod of Plataea; 27> Altar of Apollo; 28, Temple of Apollo: a, pronaos ; b, naos ;
c, adyton; d, opisthodomos; 29, Tripod of the Deinomenides; 30, Ex-voto of Daochus; 31,
Hunt of Alexander; 32, Theatre; 33, Sanctuary of Dionysus; 34, Lesche of the Cnidians.
Commentary on Figure 47
1 The long architectural history of the Delphic sanctuaries begins in the seventh century with
very simple buildings. The burning of the temple of Apollo in 548 gave rise to a brilliant period
of constructions (second half of the sixth century) which saw the reconstruction of the temple
and the erection of numerous treasuries. In the classical period, the new ex votos primarily served
to display the pride of the cities in their conflicts with the barbarian (Persian or Carthaginian)
or with other Greek cities. The disaster of 373 (earth tremor? and landslide) led to the recon¬
struction of the temples and the hieron then took on its quasi-final appearance (the asterisk below
indicates the buildings of the hieron of Athena at Marmaria).
Seventh century, first temple of Apollo and first temple of Athena*; second half seventh century.
Treasury of Corinth (which housed, as from 548, the Lydian offerings); 580-570, tholos and
monoptera of Cleisthenes of Sicyon; 575, Naxian Sphinx; sixth century, gymnasium; 550-545,
Treasury of the Cnidians; 548, temple of Apollo destroyed by fire, resulting in a general
restoration of the sanctuary; 540-510, polygonal wall; peribolus of the sanctuary; new temple of
Apollo (called temple of the Alcmaeonids); 525, Treasury of the Siphnians; 510-480, Treasury
of the Sicyonians (the stones of the two buildings of Cleisthenes were re-used in the foundations);
506, portico of the Athenians; 500, altar of Apollo, constructed by the Chiotes; tufa temple of
Athena *; 450-460, south wall of the sanctuary (called the Hellenic wall); 450-485, Treasury of the
Athenians; 480-470, offerings of the Deinomenides; 475, tripod of Plataea', fifth century, base of the
Tarentines; stadium; 456, the Epigoni, the Seven against Thebes and the chariot of Amphiaraus
(offering of the Argives); 450, lesche of the Cnidians; 414, the horse of Troy (offering of the Argives);
405, the Navarchs (offering of the Spartans); fourth century, reconstruction of the gymnasium;
beginning of fourth century, Treasury of the Cyreneans; 373, destruction of the temples of Apollo and
Athena*; 370-360, Treasury of the Marseillais*; 363, the Kings (offering of the Argives); 365-360,
reconstruction of the temple of Athena*; 365-330, reconstruction of the temple of Apollo; 336,
Thessalian ex voto of Daochus; 320, hunt of Alexander {ex voto of Craterus); third century: theatre
(rebuilt in 160 and under Nero); 161, pillar of Aemilius Paulus
furthermore was only the reflection of the value of their race and their
homeland. Their aristocratic ideology, undoubtedly of Dorian origin, gave
first place to the best and praised the individual, on condition that he
integrated himself firmly into the social groups of genos and state.
Religion and Spiritual Life

Concurrently, a powerful spiritual movement gave new life to religion,
withdrew it from ritual formalism and responded to the new aspirations of
a less primitive society. A tendency to raise the moral standards of the gods
can already be noted in Hesiod and this increased during the Archaic
period. Zeus in particular became the guarantor of moral life and the
protector par excellence of Justice (who was regarded as his daughter). This
fundamental virtue progressively compelled recognition in that age of
rough upheavals, still ignorant of the refinements of philanthropy; both
Aeschylus and Pindar, heirs in that respect to Archaic tradition, later
defined it in admirable formulae. Apollo at Delphi fostered even greater
progress: it was in his sanctuary that personal responsibility emerged from
the collective responsibility of the genos and the idea of ritual and moral
purity developed. It was a period of fundamental importance, when
phylonomism yielded to ontonomism, when the old curses clinging to a
race were no longer considered permanently immutable, and when re¬
morse could engender pardon for the soul stained by crime. Apollo and his
half-brother Heracles had set an example by purifying themselves, the
first for the murder of the Python, the second for the murder of his
children.
Acquisitions such as these were certainly slow, but even if Aeschylus still
had to fight for their acceptance, the development since the dark ages of
the Geometric period had already been immense.
Meanwhile, other hopes were attracting spirits anxious to make sure of a
blissful eternity. The mysteries of Eleusis were more than old agrarian
liturgies and the cult of Dionysus was more than the capers of satyrs. They
were motivated by the hope of salvation and this also lay behind a doctrine
which seems to have had a considerable audience at the end of the Archaic
period: orphism. It was linked with the marvellous name of the singer,
Orpheus, and taught that there were two elements in every man: the
celestial soul and the titanic body. The soul was delivered from the body,
which was its tomb, by death. However, after the gods had judged the acts
committed during life, it experienced a new incarnation and this continued
in succession until, completely purified, it achieved the felicity of the
blessed. It was an inspiring doctrine based on a cosmogony which did not
lack oriental features and it encouraged an intense quest for purity in the
whole Greek world. Despite the classification of the Orphic texts which
Onomacritus, too original a thinker to submit to this work of collation,
undertook for the Pisistratids, orphism is as difficult to know as
Pythagoreanism - from which it is not easily distinguished. However, the
237
depth of this mystical current can be sensed in the influence it exerted on

such minds as Pindar and even Plato.
At the end of the Archaic period, the Greek world was broken up into a
mosaic of small independent states, morbidly jealous of each other and very
different both in geographical position and degree of development. But
the unity of Hellenism was just as evident as its diversity. This already lay
in a unity of culture, as Isocrates later defined it in a famous passage in the
Panegyricus, 50: The name “Hellenes” suggests no longer a race but an
intelligence . The Greeks had been steeped in the same poetry of Homer
and inspired by the same literary and artistic quests. They had met at the
common hearths formed by the great sanctuaries. In this way, they had
grown aware of their individuality and of everything that differentiated
them from the barbarians, whose heavy menace had begun to hover over
them.
In this world, which had been propelled by ardent and creative vitality
for two centuries, evolution gathered pace in the course of the last decades
of the sixth century and the forms it assumed became more varied. Tragedy
took on a specific shape, black figure pottery yielded to red figure, the smile
forsook the stone faces, democracy conquered Athens. . . . The Persian
wars, too late, could not account for such a profound transformation: they
appeared rather as a hallowing.
Conscious henceforth of its power and its greatness, borne along by an
irresistible impetus, Hellenism drew the strength for a brilliant revival
from within itself. The danger which lay ahead, and which would be both
the harshest of tests and the hardest of victories, would only provide it with
other means of asserting itself and other reasons for imposing its authority.
’
'
.
Book Three
THE BLOSSOMING OF
GREEK
10
Athens, Mistress of the Aegean
The dawn and the twilight of the fifth century were stained with blood.
It opened with the prodigious but short confrontation between Greek and
barbarian and ended in the interminable conflict of a civil war, in which
the Greeks wasted their energies. Between the two, the ‘fifty years’ (the
pentecontaetia) as the Athenians called it, was a period of incomparable
triumph for Athens.
GREEKS AND BARBARIANS:
THE STRUGGLES FOR INDEPENDENCE (499—478)
The Persian wars directly derived from the antagonism between two
worlds, both in the midst of expansion. Since the conquest of the Middle
East by Cyrus, the Persian empire had not stopped growing with Cambyses
and becoming organized with Darius. The first encounter between Persians
and Greeks took place in Asia itself, where Cyrus annexed the whole coast
which had been Greek for some centuries, after his victory over Croesus.
The Revolt of Ionia {499—493)

For a long time, relations between the Ionians and their new masters were
no worse than under the Mermnadae. Darius himself respected their
customs and their beliefs: an inscription at Magnesia shows him protecting
the priests of Apollo against abuses by his officials. But his attitude was
harsher: he brought in garrisons, levied tribute in place of apparently
voluntary contributions, and imposed tyrannical governments, which were
easier for him to control but which seemed anachronistic at a time when
cities everywhere were liberating themselves from tyranny.
It has been suggested that economic restrictions were enforced and that
Darius supported the Phoenicians against the Ionians. But this theory
must be rejected: Ionia remained incontestably prosperous despite the
great blow to Miletus, totally independent of the Persian advance, in the
destruction of Sybaris, its relay point in the west. The unity which Darius
imposed on the whole Orient and soon afterwards even on the region of the
9*
Straits, the development of the fine golden coins, the darics, and the exten¬
sion of the road network could only have been advantageous to Ionian
commerce. However, the Greeks in Asia felt persecuted, wounded at the
deepest level of their political consciousness, because Darius treated them
as subjects while the Mermnadae and even the first Achaemenids had
respected the fiction of their autonomy.
A deep love of liberty, fundamental even to the Levantines debased by
luxury, was therefore the real cause of the revolt which blazed up in Ionia
from 499, but obscure intrigues by the tyrants of Miletus, Histiaeus and his
son-in-law Aristagorus, also played a part. The insurgents made vain
appeals to the towns of Greece: only Athens and Eretria sent a very modest
expedition which was content to thrust as far as Sardes, burn the town and
the great temple of Cybele there (498) and hastily re-embark. Left alone
and, moreover, incapable of agreeing amongst themselves, the Ionians were
defeated at Lade; Miletus was taken by direct attack and razed to the
ground, including the luxurious Didymeium. The Persians soon regained
mastery of all Greek Asia, and established a reign of terror there.
The First Persian War

Darius did not forget this warning. According to an anecdote, he reminded
himself ‘to remember the Athenians’ every day. He certainly thought it
dangerous to leave one part of the Greek world free when he had just
restored the other to harsh servitude. It seemed to him that the annexation
would be all the easier because he was well-informed on Greece and knew
that its forces were minute compared with his own. Theories of the Great
King’s ambitions for a universal empire have been propounded, based on
the grandiloquent titles he utilized in his inscriptions - titles in reality
inherited from Sumerian and Babylonian monarchies. His ambitions were
more modest and more realistic: to add the new satrapy of Greece to the
conquests he and his predecessors had made (map 12).
From 492, his son-in-law Mardonius was sent to retake Thrace and
Macedonia, but he was wounded, and had to give up the idea of moving
on to Athens. The following year, a fleet sailed to Greece: it won the
frightened support of numerous cities, spared Delos but completely crushed
Naxos and Eretria, then landed on the eastern coast of Attica at Marathon.
Athens could expect no mercy from the Persians, nor help from other
Greeks: Sparta hid behind religious excuses in order not to intervene, and
only the faithful Plataeans were brave enough to send a few hoplites. The
Athenians were drawn up in battle by the younger Miltiades, the former
tyrant of Chersonesus who had been driven from his land by the Persian
advance: he was a skilful strategist and, undoubtedly taking advantage of
the fact that one group of Persians had departed and of the desperate
valour of his men, attacked and drove the enemy into the sea (490).
Unknown traitors (aristocrats? partisans of the tyrant? Alcmaeonids?)
vainly hoisted a shield on to Mount Pentelicon to call the barbarian fleet
Map 12 The Persian Wars
to Athens, which was left without defenders: the Athenian army made a
prompt return. For the first time, the Athenians had saved both themselves
and Greece, and it was with hearts filled with legitimate pride that they
could honour their dead with a high tumulus and offer a treasury to the
god at Delphi.
The Second Persian War

Death overtook Darius, embittered by defeat, in the midst of new prepara¬
tions. His son Xerxes succeeded him (486) and methodically set a new
expedition in motion. Greece was in the grip of terror and only thirty-one
cities dared to unite at a congress gathered at Corinth to form a pan-
Hellenic league with the firm resolve to resist the barbarians; Thessalians
and Boeotians turned traitor and the oracle at Delphi Medised.
Xerxes, leading an enormous force, crossed the Hellespont on a bridge
of boats and came down towards Greece, while his fleet hugged the coasts:
‘It was a great flight of birds dressed in dark blue’ (Aeschylus, Persians,
559). The Greeks could only have halted him at the narrow pass of
Thermopylae, which guarded the entrance to central Greece, but the
Spartans had only sent weak contingents, 6,000 men at most (a third of
which were of doubtful loyalty), and were keeping their best troops for the
defence of the Isthmus. This colossal egoism detracted nothing from the
glory of the three hundred Lacedaemonians and the few Thespians who,
after combing their beautiful hair, ‘died to the last man in obedience to the
laws’. But Xerxes had got through and the dubious naval victory at
Artemisium, at the northern tip of Euboea, was nullified by the surrender
of Thermopylae, Nothing could any longer hinder ‘the irresistible en¬
thusiasm of Ares mounted on the Syrian chariot’ - as the Pythia plainly
told the Athenians when they came in terror to consult her.
However, one man did not give up hope either for Athens or for Greece:
this was Themistocles, who had acted boldly between the two wars to
ensure that Athens built up a considerable fleet. He forced a more reassur¬
ing oracle out of the Pythia, put new life into his men, and with some
difficulty persuaded his fellow citizens to take refuge in the ‘wooden ram¬
parts’ of their boats, while the town was abandoned and women and children
were evacuated. Xerxes continued his inexorable march and took and razed
a deserted Athens, thus avenging the ruins of Sardes. The disunited Greeks
hesitated and quaked, but, brilliant rogue that he was, Themistocles was
able to force them into battle in the roadstead of Salamis. When, at dawn
on 29 September 480, they intoned the paean ‘Go, sons of Greece, deliver
your children and your wives, the sanctuaries of the gods of your fathers
and the tombs of your ancestors: this is the supreme battle’, they well knew
that they were risking all for all. Their adversaries, Phoenicians and
Ionians, who had been forced into allegiance to the Persians, fought well,
but Greek sailors and soldiers, amongst whom Aegientans and Athenians
distinguished themselves, deserved the prize for bravery. Soon, as
ATHENS, MISTRESS OF THE AEGEAN
245
Themistocles had hoped, disorder broke out in the Persian fleet - which was
also too large for the narrow bay. In the evening ‘groans and shrieks to¬
gether filled the open sea, until the face of sable night hid the scene’
(Aeschylus, Persians, 426).
Xerxes slowly withdrew towards Asia. He recrossed the Hellespont, the
first and last Persian sovereign to tread the soil of Greece. He left crack
troops in Thessaly under the command of Mardonius, seized Athens again
in 479 and ruined its ruins, but was completely defeated at Plataea where
Spartans under Pausanias and Athenians under Aristides accomplished
miracles of bravery. This land battle, when Thebans fought with hateful
passion alongside the Persians, completed the naval victory of Salamis and
secured the final withdrawal of the barbarians.
There was no longer anything to restrain the enthusiasm of the Greeks.
They in their turn took the offensive, crossed to Asia, and defeated the
frightened troops of the Great King at Mycale (August 479). In 478 at
Sestos the Athenians eliminated the last Persian garrison on European soil.
The Persian wars were over but thirty years elapsed before a peace treaty
was signed.
The Salvation of the Greeks in Sicily

At the same time, the Greeks in Sicily were facing no less dangerous bar¬
barians, the Carthaginians. The coincidence was undoubtedly not the
result of chance but of a treaty concluded between Susa and Carthage.
Here again, the Hellenes were disunited: Selinus and Rhegium were fight¬
ing on the side of the Semites. Here again, they triumphed brilliantly: on
the banks of the River Himera, Gelon of Syracuse won a harsh but decisive
victory over Hamilcar (480). They seized an immense amount of booty and
numerous captives who made gigantic works possible. Shortly afterwards
(474), the Syracusans also defeated the Etruscans at Cumae. These two
successes may be regarded as revenge for Alalia. They enabled western
Hellenism, temporarily freed from its rivals, to make brilliant progress.
Triumph of the Greeks and Triumph of Athens

For the first time, Greek cities - which were far from constituting all the
strength of little Greece and still less of Hellenism - had suppressed their
eternal and recent discords in order to defend what to them represented
the supreme good, liberty. Their astonishing victory is not explicable in
any other terms. They had been faced by only one free man, the Great
King, commanding a nation of slaves - soldiers who marched to battle under
the threat of the whip, Ionian sailors rendered passive by the appalling
repression of their revolt (but who would not forget for a long time that
they had fought against their brothers). Marathon, Salamis and Plataea
had no real significance for Persia but they were fundamental dates in the
history of Greece: a nation that had not wanted to die or to surrender had
found its salvation in courage, self-sacrifice and union. It was a unique

symphony in the perpetual dissonance of a world interminably divided
against itself.
Athens had struggled, toiled and suffered above and beyond all the other
cities. It had proved less egoistic than others, notably Sparta. Above all,
it was Athens that had been victorious at Salamis where it had supplied
two-thirds of the Greek fleet. It therefore reaped the principal fruits of the
victory. Its maritime vocation was confirmed and there was something
symbolic in Gimon’s gesture when he hung up his horse’s bit in the temple
of Athena. But the humble oarsmen had really decided the issue; they were
not prepared to be passed over for too long. All the later evolution of a
democratic seafaring Athens was germinating from 480 onwards. In the
interval, the city rose up in a unanimous outburst: ‘Moreover, the vastness
of the Persian armament that threatened us both by sea and land, by the
desperate fear it inspired, bound us still more closely in the bonds of
slavery to our rulers and our laws; and because of all this, our mutual
friendliness and patriotism was greatly intensified’, as Plato rightly
remarked {Laws, 698c).
Athens also gained incomparable prestige. As a result of this, the cities
of the Aegean immediately formed a group around it and the most forceful
or most intelligent of the other Greeks were attracted towards it. The form¬
ation of the Delian League and the influx of metics were thus also direct
consequences of the Persian wars. After 472, Aeschylus in the Persians sang
a heartrending and triumphant hymn to the glory of his land; in the follow¬
ing generation, Herodotus showed more lucidity but no less enthusiasm
for the exploits of the Athenians. Art also collaborated in this glorification:
Phidias sculptured a heroon at Delos to commemorate Marathon, and on
the Parthenon even the Iliou Persis or the Amazonomachy subtly recall the
first confrontations of Greeks and Asiatics.
Greece emerged transformed from the terrible ordeal. Even its equilib¬
rium was disturbed because a city that had previously been mediocre had
moved into the foreground. It acted as a stimulus which helped the
Athenians to repudiate so many Archaic forces which still prevailed.
Furthermore, they were forced to think and build anew because their
whole town, twice dishonoured by the Persian, was only a pile of rubble.
Without ever excusing it, it is possible to understand the superiority
complex which henceforth actuated them.
SELF-RULE AND IMPERIALISM
On the morrow of the victory, the towns of the Aegean lived in terror of a
return offensive by Persia. They would gladly have turned for support to
Sparta, which exercised hegemony in the Hellenic League created in 481
against the barbarians. But the great Dorian city had grown tired of the
tyrannical intrigues of its king, Pausanias, and his quarrels with the allies.
ATHENS, MISTRESS OF THE AEGEAN 247
It also feared the consequences, deadly in the long run, of distant expedi¬
tions which would destroy the political and social stability to which it was
pledged. It, therefore, voluntarily withdrew from the struggle, leaving the
field clear for Athens. This retreat implicitly acknowledged a division
between the land that it reserved for itself and the sea which it surrendered
to youthful Athenian vitality.
The League of Delos and the Role of Cimon

The towns of the archipelago and Asiatic coast turned towards Athens and
formed a symmachia (alliance) with it with its centre at Delos, the federal
sanctuary of the Ionians. For this reason it was called the Attico-Delian
confederation or the Delian League.
All the cities had a vote in the council (synedrion) which met once a year
at Delos and where Athens already enjoyed indisputable supremacy be¬
cause of the number of small cities which regarded it as their sole hope of
salvation. States which did not wish or were not able to contribute soldiers
and ships to common expenditure were authorised to pay a tribute
(.phoros) instead. This was levied by ten Athenians, the hellenotamiai
(treasurers of the Greeks), who were also charged with balancing expenses.
Many states chose this solution, thereby initiating a weak and submissive
policy of which they themselves would soon be the victims. Moreover,
Athens showed great impartiality under the leadership of Aristides the
Just, whom the allies considered ‘the finest man of all that hail from holy
Athens’ (Timocreon of Rhodes).
This permanent confederation - the oaths taken would be valid until the
masses of iron thrown into the sea were washed up - conferred hegemony
on Athens, in the ancient sense of the term, that is to say, executive power
and direction of operations, but formally recognized the autonomy of the
allies. The League was very rapidly expanded and altered under the
energetic leadership of Cimon, son of Miltiades. As a result of its victory
over Persia at Eurymedon (468), the League definitely acquired mastery
of the Aegean and gained new adherents (the towns of Caria and Lycia,
new towns of Ionia): Greek Asia flew to aid the Athenian victory. But
revolts broke out at Naxos in 470 and at Thasos in 465, and these were
harshly subdued by Cimon. Here and then, it became obvious that no city
could withdraw from the League against the wish of Athens and it hence¬
forth comprised cities which had been subdued by force, as well as ap¬
parently autonomous cities. Cleruchies, positive Athenian military posts,
were established, especially in Thrace to supervise Thasos - which had also
to dismantle its wonderful rampart, surrender its fleet and pay a heavy
indemnity.
After Aristides’ death and Themistocles’ ostracism, the aristocrat Cimon
was left undisputed master of Athens and enforced his policy - the continu¬
ation of the war against the barbarians and friendship with Sparta. When
the panic-stricken Lacedaemonians appealed for help against the revolt of
the helots in Messenia, he obtained authorization to intervene from the

reluctant Ecclesia, but shortly afterwards he was humiliated by a brusque
dismissal at Spartan hands. The democratic leaders Ephialtes and Pericles,
his bitter enemies, were only too happy to take skilful advantage of this
pretext to have him ostracized (461).
The First Trials of the Democracy [461—446)

The question now arose as to whether the democracy which was estab¬
lished in power - and for a long time - would abandon imperialist expan¬
sion. Quite the contrary: it believed that henceforth it had the resources to
fight on two fronts: against the Great King and against Sparta which found
allies at Megara, Corinth and Boeotia. The two series of enterprises are
confused and involved.
Athens led a distant expedition to Egypt against Artaxerxes, who had
assumed power in Persia when his father, Xerxes, was assassinated. Its
object was to assist Inaros, a vassal who had revolted against the Great
King, and to secure new commercial centres for itself. It only resulted in a
lamentable defeat which might have been a disaster but which paradoxi¬
cally enabled it to extend the empire still further by fresh adherents
(Miletus, Erythrae, Halicarnassus).
The struggle against the Peloponnesians and their allies was indecisive,
and reverses and victories followed one another closely: Athens certainly
brought Aegina, ‘eyesore of the Piraeus’ according to Pericles, harshly to
heel, so that with garrisons solidly based on Naxos, Thasos and Aegina it
could dominate the entire Aegean (457). However, defeated at Tanagra,
victorious at Oenophyta, defeated afresh at Corone, it finally had to ask
Sparta for peace (446). The two cities were both equally weary of this in¬
terminable conflict, and concluded a thirty years’ peace. This ‘first
Peloponnesian war’, as it is often not unreasonably called, clearly shows
the obstacles that Athenian imperialism was encountering at a time when
its strength was growing by leaps and bounds.
The Athenian Empire from 454 to 431

The confederation had been only a fiction for a long time. Athens was now
strong enough to drop this double game. In 454, it took a symbolic decision
and transferred the federal treasury from Delos to the Acropolis. The
symmachia became an Empire (arche). In 449 the peace of Callias put an end
to the Persian wars by a compromise between Athens and the Great King.
The most important clause was the recognition of the autonomy of the
Greek cities of Asia. The confederation seemed to lose its raison d’etre
which had been the struggle against the barbarians. In fact, it is possible
that tribute was no longer levied in 449, at least on certain cities. However,
it was reimposed the following year and Athens strengthened the organiza¬
tion of the empire by unilateral measures taken by the Ecclesia. At a much
249
disputed date (undoubtedly 449—8) the decree of Clearchus forbade money

to be minted throughout the arche and imposed Athenian money, weights
and measures. In 448-7, the decree of Cleinias established a strict system,
with tablets and seals for levying tribute. Finally, the empire was divided
into five districts to facilitate the raising of contributions. As from at least
444, the federal treasury was used not only to maintain the army and navy
which assured peace in the general interest, but also to subsidize the build¬
ings on the Acropolis. Pericles proudly proclaimed, in answer to the claims
of the allies, which were supported by the aristocrat Thucydides, that cities
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The five
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Map 13 The Athenian empire in the fifth century
which contributed nothing to common defence had no right to protest at

the utilization of the funds of the phoros as decided by the Ecclesia (map 13).
The internal transformation of the empire continued without notable
alteration. New revolts were recorded but always at scattered points:
Euboea in 446, and Samos in 441. The fleet was powerful enough to bring
the insurgents to their senses. New cleruchies were established: in the
islands along the fundamental route from the Straits; at Chalcis and
Eretria after their uprising; in Asia Minor where they succeeded the
Athenian garrisons placed there before the peace of Callias; and finally and
above all, in Thrace (Brea, and then Amphipolis, were created). From the
economic viewpoint this was a vital region for Athens, and Athenian in¬
fluence moved further and further inland, even reaching the Odrysian
tribes of the Bulgar plains.
The Organization of the Empire

Athens had considerable means of action at its disposal. Inspectors elected
by the Ecclesia travelled over the empire, supervising the levy of tribute and
watching over the strict administration of Athenian decisions. More and
more cleruchies were established at strategic points. Above all, a con¬
siderable fleet which grew to between three hundred and four hundred
triremes cruised the Aegean, always ready to intervene wherever there was
danger of revolt breaking out. It was essentially fear which 'held the cities
in obedience.
The synedrion no longer met after 454 and all decisions were taken at
Athens. Tribute was fixed by the Ecclesia and apportioned by the Boule
according to evaluations by assessors (taktai). Delegates from the cities
brought it to Athens at the Great Dionysia and handed it over to the
hellenotamiai. One sixtieth was paid to Athena, and part of the accounts of
these early transactions have been preserved. Until 431, thephoros scarcely
increased (it varied between 450 and 500 talents), despite the expansion of
the empire, which reduced the contribution of each town.
All important lawsuits tried in the empire could come to the popular
tribunals at Athens for appeal and this involved the plaintiffs in consider¬
able travel and expensive visits. The allies complained freely about the
partiality of Athenian tribunals. It is difficult to know how much truth
there actually was in this reproach, but judiciary infringements at Athens
certainly became more and more numerous: at first, only offences against
the federal pact came up for trial at Athens, but shortly afterwards cases
liable for capital punishment and even private affairs of some consequence
appeared.
It used to be positively stated that Athens imposed its political regime
everywhere. Actually Erythrae was able to retain its tyranny until 453, and
Potidaea its oligarchy until 433. But revolts often provided the opportunity
to establish democratic governments, and these must also have spread by
simple contagion from the Athenian example.
Bearing in mind the fact that the privilege of minting money - linked
fundamentally to autonomy in the eyes of the Greeks - had been with¬
drawn from all cities of the arche, it appears that the Athenians on the
whole behaved with the most extreme lack of deference and sometimes the
most pitiless tyranny towards their ‘allies’ who had in reality become their
subjects.
Athenian Imperialism
One question quite naturally occurs at this juncture: how did the Athenians
reconcile democracy with imperialism - and still claim that they only
allowed themselves to be guided by reason, as it appeared in the speeches
that Thucydides attributed to Pericles? It must first be noted that the
Greek conception of liberty was very different from the one the ideology of
the French Revolution has imposed today. They had no Kantian idea of
251
the reciprocity of duties and limits imposed on the autonomy of some, out
of respect for the autonomy of others: liberty only appeared in action and,
more precisely, in enslaving others. Larsen has demonstrated that the most
insignificant cities acted like Sparta and Athens in this respect, and wasted
their energy for centuries in sterile struggles for derisory frontier adjust¬
ments. And in any case the more idealistic Athenians could draw comfort
from the idea that to expand the empire was also to extend democracy,
forgetting that the democracy permitted to the cities of the arche was
superficial and irremediably curtailed.
But there was more to it than this. Athenian democracy was not im¬
perialist by accident, but in its very essence. Its prime aim was to secure a
decent life for even the most depressed citizens. This diffusion of well¬
being was only possible by a policy of large-scale works, subsidized by the
tribute, by the search for new markets for foodstuffs, closely linked to the
extension of the arche, and by the increase in cleruchies which could only
be established by confiscating the richest lands of the ‘allies’. Payment of
magistrates, the most reliable basis for political democracy, presupposed
that Athens disposed of considerable revenues and these only its empire
could provide.
The genuine political cynicism shamelessly displayed in the speeches of
Pericles in Thucydides may sometimes cause surprise. The Athenians cer¬
tainly exploited their brothers in the islands or in Asia to their own advan¬
tage, with clear consciences. Thucydides, with his customary lucidity, has
made explicit the foundations of this imperialism, which was unleashed
even more forcibly during the Peloponnesian war: the Athenians had
strength on their side, they therefore owed it to themselves to use it; they
inspired violent fear in their subjects, so it was up to them to maintain their
subjects in that state of psychological dependence. Well before the thought
of certain sophists had developed a Nietzschean amorality, the democrats
of Pericles’ time, heirs to the aristocrats of Cimon’s time, were cheerfully
practising it.
The Results of Athenian Imperialism

Athens in the fifth century owed the best of its power and prestige to the
empire it had conquered and which it exploited for its own exclusive
benefit. But the rancours, resentments and hatred that its harshness
aroused finally led to its downfall. It perished because it had carried its
claims to maritime hegemony - which had long assured its greatness and
prosperity — to excess; because it had proved incapable of developing
amongst its allies a feeling of belonging to a community from which they
themselves would also benefit; and because it had conceived a political
system where democracy engendered imperialism as its necessary con¬
dition. Its final rout came from the fact that it was not able indefinitely to
continue strong enough to impose itself by force, and even the clear-sighted
Pericles was blind to the ineluctable denouement.
The allies grumbled, reluctant to admit the indisputable benefits they
also owed to Athens. Peace reigned in the Aegean, the barbarian re¬
mained on the defensive, food was plentiful, trade was not solely to
Athenian advantage because Athens did not establish a monopoly, and the
unity of the monetary system put an end to age-old disorder and facili¬
tated commerce. Even more important, Athens provided a great example
of a town where the entire demos participated in public affairs, where law
was becoming humanized, where the most magnificent processions and the
most beautiful sanctuaries sang the glory of its gods and where all who
thought or created met together. To quote Pericles it became (scarcely
without exaggeration) ‘the school of Hellas’ (Thucydides, 2, 41).
A strange antagonism thus developed between Athens, which refused to
admit its basic injustice, and its allies, who would not agree to recognize
the services which, despite everything, they owed to it. But they had to
wait until the end of the Peloponnesian war before they could shake off the
abhorrent yoke, when they very rapidly realized that other hegemonies
were no more tolerable.
DEMOCRACY TRIUMPHANT
Political life at Athens in the fifth century was organized around two
antagonistic political parties, the aristocrats and the democrats. Initially
at least they represented tendencies, coalitions of interests formed around
leading men, rather than parties (in the modern sense of the term)
equipped with a genuine political programme. Until the Peloponnesian
war, their leaders came almost exclusively from the great families of
Eupatridae.
The beginning of the century marked a turning point. Strong characters
who would have aspired to tyranny a few decades earlier, found it difficult
to conform to the new order which claimed to impose a rough egalitarian
discipline on everybody. Miltiades and Themistocles, the two victors of
the Persian wars, died, one in prison, the other in exile. It was only in the
following generation that the greatest men accepted the fact that they were
only the best qualified servants of the community: Cimon’s loyalism was
exemplary and Pericles himself was only the first among the citizens. A
dialogue between Aristides and an illiterate citizen who asked him to write
his name on a potsherd of ostracism because he was tired of hearing him
called ‘just’ reflects a widespread state of mind. Aristides, Cimon and
Pericles all in turn came under pressure from the people who continued to
be careful and suspicious well after all reason for being so had passed
(figure 48).
Themistocles and Athens' Descent to the Sea

‘ ’
Athens had already taken positive steps in the direction of democracy with
Solon and above all, Cleisthenes, but from 498 to 490 the aristocratic party
253
regained power. After Marathon, the city was torn by fruitless struggles
when first Xanthippus, one of the Bouzygai, favourable to the people, and
then Aristides, a moderate who had supporters amongst the oligarchs,
were ostracized. A democrat, Themistocles, took advantage of this to
assume the leading position in political life. Almost everything about his
origins and even the beginnings of his career are unknown. The date of his
archonship is disputed (either before or after Marathon). In any case he
appeared to be an ambitious man, uninhibited by scruples but gifted with
a clear-sighted intelligence and a keen sense of the new possibilities open
to Athens if it agreed to turn decisively seawards. It is possible that he
began construction and fortification of the port of Piraeus, which was in¬
tended to replace the mediocre roadstead of Phaleron, and equipping a
considerable navy before the first Persian war. With remarkable oppor¬
tunism, he succeeded in persuading the Athenians to use the new vein dis¬
covered in 483-2 at the mines of Laurium in order to increase their naval
Figure 48 Tessera of ostracism: The names of Cimon,

Themistocles, Aristides, and Pericles can be recognized
on these fragments of pottery, used in voting for
ostracism. American excavations of the Agora of Athens
power. Henceforth this assured the city of a hundred or so talents a year:

one talent was handed over to the hundred richest citizens on condition
that they each equipped a trireme. The victory of Salamis was a direct
result of this ingenious improvisation. Themistocles also proved the most
genuine propagator of democracy by the new importance accorded to the
thetes in the defence of the national heritage.
However, Themistocles’ role diminished after Salamis: Athens was not
very tolerant of any superiority and moreover, by his pride, excess and
greed, Themistocles had made himself unpopular as much with one
faction of the democrats, who ranged themselves behind the Alcmaeonids,
as with the aristocrats whose interests he directly opposed. He was struck
with ostracism in 472-1, and wandered about Greece for a long time before
offering his services to the Great King, when he was only too happy to be
entrusted with the government of Magnesia and a few other cities. The
victor of Salamis, the glorious organizer of a hopeless victory, ended life a
vassal of Artaxerxes - a wonderful theme for the moralists! But the real
culprit in this scandalous palinody was Athens, rapidly oblivious of the
merits of a man who ‘had persuaded the entire town to go down to the sea’
(Plutarch) and had thus assured its salvation for the present and its
prosperity for the future.
Cimon and the Oligarchs' Revenge

Paradoxically, the oligarchical party regained power shortly after the
victories of the second Persian war. It found a powerful leader in Cimon,
son of Miltiades: a valiant leader of men, who loved life, wine and women,
and over and above that, was also generous and at ease with everyone. His
real achievement was to rush off wherever he could strengthen the power
of Athens with little care for his life or the trouble he took, but methodically
extending the empire and enriching the citizens with the spoils of his
profitable expeditions. He had no internal policy to speak of. However, the
old aristocratic council of the Areopagus had taken advantage of the
Persian wars and of the atmosphere of panic they had engendered to re¬
cover part of its ancient prerogatives, which Cleisthenes had transferred to
the machinery of the populace. For nearly twenty years Athens surrendered
to the unaccustomed attractions of traditional policy under the aegis of the
oligarchs.
But the popular thrust born of the Persian wars could not be held back
indefinitely, all the more so as Cimon’s external policy itself encouraged
the power of the middle class and the thetes. Undoubtedly gifted with low
political intelligence, Miltiades’ son skipped cheerfully to his downfall:
he was brought to justice by Pericles and acquitted, but he was ostracized
after the humiliating defeat of his expedition to Messenia (461).
The Final Consolidation of Democracy

Honest Ephialtes, who led the democrats in their struggle, had taken
advantage of the expedition to pass one fundamental reform. The
Areopagus was already discredited by actions for misappropriation brought
against several of its members. It was now stripped of all ‘supplementary
functions’ and in fact reduced to jurisdiction of religious crimes. The
oligarchs had Ephialtes assassinated - but in vain. Pericles had fought by
his side and now completed his work: from 457-6, zeugitai were admitted
to the archonship. Shortly afterwards he instituted misthophoria, that is to
say, remuneration for public offices, which alone could enable all citizens
irrespective of their financial position really to participate in the manage¬
ment of public affairs. For the rest, he showed great moderation even in the
fundamental reforms which finally consolidated democracy: the thetes
remained excluded, in principle if not in fact, from the most honorific of
the magistratures; the generals did not receive any misthos and therefore
this office remained reserved to the upper classes; participation in the
255
assembly which constituted the essential duty of the citizen and which in¬
volved only a limited loss of time was naturally not remunerated; finally, a
law of 451—5° limited citizenship to men born of fathers and mothers who
were citizens. However, the intention clearly was to interest all members
of the civic body in the administration of the state. In the same way, pay¬
ment of an allowance to sailors, horsemen and hoplites on active service
was introduced. With Pericles, the exercise of political rights became a
profession.
The democratic mechanism henceforth functioned unrestrained. ‘The
assembly of the people was sovereign in all questions’, as Aristotle declared
in the following century, but in principle it could only deliberate on a
probouleuma (preliminary deliberation) of the Boule, the council of Five
Hundred whose members were drawn by lot every year from citizens over
thirty years of age. The fifty bouleutai from each tribe or prytanis sat in turn
as a sort of permanent commission of the council, in order to deal with
current business. Magistracies were annual and on a collegiate basis, so that
all citizens could effectively take part in affairs. The archons remained
surrounded by great honours but were deprived of almost all their former
privileges, except their religious functions and the preliminary investiga¬
tion of lawsuits. The strategoi, on the other hand, enjoyed considerable
powers and formed the real executive of the city. There were numerous
secondary judiciary offices (the Eleven, the astynomoi), financial positions
(treasurers of Athena, apodektai, poletai, praktores) and economic authorities
(<agoranomoi, metronomoi, sitophylakes).
The most outstanding characteristic of this direct democracy was the
importance of the assembly of the people. The Boule, the representative
council, was strictly subordinated to it. The magistrates were closely super¬
vised, subjected every prytany to the control of the Ecclesia, which could
suspend them, and were obliged to render account when they relinquished
office. The dangers of the system are patently obvious. The executive was
extraordinarily weak. The assembly was more powerful than any modern
assembly: it was a large, impassioned and changing body, composed by
definition of non-specialists who were sometimes capable of discussing de¬
tail at interminable length and passing quickly over important business.
The oligarchs had already expressed these obvious criticisms in the fifth
century. We could easily add that a regime in which the civic body was so
restricted, excluding women, metics and slaves, does not appear truly
democratic. But it would be unfair to forget that this was the first time an
entire nation had so deliberately taken its destiny into its own hands.
Moreover, the demos was lucky enough to find a guide to persuade and
enlighten it for a period of thirty years: Pericles.
Pericles
Pericles was born into the noble families of the Bouzygai and Alcmaeonids.
He followed the teachings of Damon of Oa, who implanted the idea of
misthophoria into his mind, and of Anaxagoras, the prophet of Nous (reason
which gave order to the original chaos). His strong and lofty character
emerges from the wonderful bust by Cresilas which represents him as a
strategos with high forehead, serious expression and fine, possibly slightly
haughty, features. Democrat though he was, he was not fond of people en
masse’, he rarely spoke in the Ecclesia, except on important occasions, in
order to shake up or reassure the nation; he preferred the company of the
scholarly Milesian woman Aspasia, and an elite of friends, all of whom
were important in letters, art or thought: Protagoras, • Hippodamus,
Phidias, Herodotus, Sophocles.
In perfect control of himself, Pericles never smiled, and only wept twice
during his lifetime; but he was not incapable of soft and even tender feel¬
ings : to him, the city deprived of its young soldiers killed in warfare was
like ‘the year that has lost its spring’, and he loved Aspasia with a deep love
which amazed and scandalized a world which licensed other attachments.
He possessed a lucid intelligence: he conceived a vast political system
which he tried to realize in practice, instead of being content, like so many
other later demagogues, with improvisations of the moment. He thus
merited Aristotle’s description of him as a sage (phronimos). He was not
lacking in perseverance - very necessary to impose a consistent policy on a
nation as unreliable as the Athenians. The demos was aware of the strength
which he evinced both when he led a military expedition and at the
tribune, of the incomparable magic of his intelligence, of his strong voice
which may possibly have been the origin of his nickname of ‘Olympian’,
and of his eloquence. Pericles’ greatest glory was to have ruled Athens for
nearly thirty years, constantly re-elected strategos for fifteen consecutive
years (443/2-429/8), and wielding powers as extensive as those formerly
wielded by the tyrant Pisistratus, but without ever exceeding legality.
The democratic ideal was at the heart of his internal policy. Democracy
to him meant the equality of everyone before the law, but over and above
that, it meant the possibility for everyone to lead a decent life. His foreign
ventures, which brought in valuable profits, and the misthophoria, which
enabled the most humble to exercise public responsibilities, are both ex¬
amples of this. Moreover, the state developed welfare institutions and paid
admission fees at the theatre for the poor (the theorikon). Even better,
Pericles conceived a vast programme of public works aimed both at
providing work and at fortifying and beautifying the town.
As Plutarch says, ‘he boldly suggested to the people projects for great
constructions, and designs for works which would call many arts into play
and involve long periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes, no whit
less than the sailors and sentinels and soldiers, might have a pretext for
getting a beneficial share of the public wealth’ (Pericles, 12). First two, then
three, long walls joined Athens to Piraeus and formed a veritable island,
able to depend on the sea alone; Piraeus was equipped with a remarkable
corn market (Alphitopolis); the ruins of the sanctuaries of Eleusis and
Sunium and, above all, the Acropolis were repaired.
257
This programme, which exceeded in breadth anything which had pre¬
viously been conceived or realized, quickly turned Athens into the most
beautiful of the cities. The magnificence of its buildings and the increased
brilliance of its festivals attracted a growing number of visitors, all the more
so as the Athenians were ‘lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in their tastes’
(Pericles, in. Thucydides, 2, 40). It became a vast and sumptuous theatre
with Pericles as producer, where the actors learned not to separate the two
words ‘power’ and ‘beauty’.
In vain, comedians mocked Pericles’ ‘onion-shaped’ skull or harried
Aspasia, ‘the most immodest concubine with the eyes of a bitch’. In vain
his enemies tried to attack him indirectly by bringing proceedings against
his friends, Anaxagoras, Phidias, and Aspasia, before they dared to bring
Pericles himself to justice. He towered over a century which rightly bears
his name. Admittedly his ideas were of necessity far removed from those of
the present day. We have already stressed the egoism of this democracy
which based its liberty and its wealth on the enslavement and exploitation
of others. We must also add that in many respects Pericles’ regime did not
differ greatly from a tyranny. The words of Cratinus, who called him ‘the
greatest of the tyrants’, are echoed in Thucydides’ conclusion (2, 65):
‘Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest
citizen’. But this first experiment in ‘state socialism’ (G. Glotz) also
deserves to be welcomed; it was inspired by the idea that the people could
be spoken to freely and attracted by appeal to their intelligence, and it
recognized Anaxagoras’ Nous - human reason - as the sole means of organ¬
izing public life as well. Gods and heroes, guiding the cosmos against the
barbarism of the giants, centaurs and Amazons, appear again and again
on the Parthenon, together with the rising of the stars which flood the
world with their light. These symbols borrowed from the mythical or
natural universe are doubly expressive of the great hope which for the first
time illuminated Greece.
A Balanced Society
Periclean society was founded, like all societies in antiquity, on the dis¬
tinction between the free man and the slave. In law the slave was only a
body, a living tool, but in fact in Athens he was treated with a great deal
of humanity. He had freedom of speech, participated in a number of cultic
celebrations and, in particular, could be initiated into the Eleusian
mysteries. He had certain legal resources at his disposal against the arbi¬
trariness of his master - who, moreover, did not have right of life and death
over him. In the country, his life scarcely seemed much different from that
of the small peasant who employed him. Only those who worked in the
smoky galleries at Laurium were in a wretched position. The sole servile
revolt of the century took place among slaves at the mines at the time of the
war of Decelea (425): twenty thousand of them took advantage of the
Lacedaemonian invasion of Attica and left their jobs; the works had to be
closed down. But there were no large landowners, no industrial concentra¬
tion, none of the economic conditions which were to create a fundamental
antagonism between free men and slaves in the Hellenistic kingdoms, and
even more so at Rome, producing serious social crises.
The free men were either metics or citizens. The metics were domiciled
foreigners who possessed special rights at Athens. They were excluded from
political rights and from the right to landed property; they payed a special
tax (the metoikion), were subject to liturgies and the eisphoraj and served as
hoplites and particularly as sailors. They were perfectly unhampered in
their relationships with the citizens, allowed to participate in religious and
civic ceremonies (as is seen by their presence on the frieze of the
Panathenaea), and they played a prominent role in the life of the nation.
Forceful and ready for any type of trade, they often made their mark in
big business: the richest of them were shipowners, bottomry lenders, and
soon bankers. The greater part of liquid property was under their control.
They played an equally prominent part in art, medicine and, above all,
philosophy where everybody who counted was a foreigner. Welcomed with
a generosity unmatched by any other city at that time, the metics of
Athens worked well for its prosperity and its glory. They were courageous
in battle and enriched the city by their energy and their talents, passionate
defenders of a democracy which did not despise them.
The citizens reserved political activity and landed property for them¬
selves. They formed a community which was primarily based on self-
interest. In fact, the classical city has been described, more amusingly than
erroneously, as a ‘joint-stock company’ in which the citizens were the
shareholders. The most violent antagonisms had long since disappeared
and the remaining one between rich and poor had assumed a very moder¬
ate character. In the first place the rich were often exploited by the poor,
not only at an individual level by blackmailers - sycophants, whom it was
not always a good thing to fight even when one was in the right - but also
at the institutional level, because the liturgies (public duties, of which the
heaviest were choregia and trierarchy) and eisphora (extraordinary tax on in¬
come) only fell heavily on the rich minority. Then Periclean socialism
aimed at eliminating pauperism and it succeeded perfectly, taking into
account the general reasonable level of needs. Finally, it was the metics
and not the citizens who owned the largest personal property. As the least
well-to-do citizen had a superiority complex in respect of the most affluent
metic, this made his lack of fortune easier to bear.
It was a strange society, this Athenian world, where slavery did not
degenerate too far into the shameful exploitation of man by man, where
the most important economic functions were left in the hands of foreigners
- who moreover possessed preponderant intellectual influence - and where
social tension tended to diminish within the civic class.
259
The Economy of Imperial Athens

No profound change took place in agriculture. The land remained very
broken up and produced poor crops of barley and corn, and greater abun¬
dance of wine and oil. Industry also continued along traditional lines: it
was a craft industry, technically rudimentary but often inspired by a deep
and original aesthetic sense. The main role was played by workers who
used fire, still grouped in the Kerameikos, although there was no concen¬
tration there, and under the patronage of Hephaestus and Athena Ergane
(the work-woman) (figure 49).
Figure 49 The forge: furnace and bellows. Attic cup with red
figures
Only commerce seemed to take on a new appearance under the influence

of imperialist expansion. The essential problem was to feed an increasingly
important agglomeration, swollen by numerous metics. The principal
sources for supplies of corn remained Egypt, Sicily, Pontus and the plain
of the Po. But political circumstances made the first of these unreliable and
Athens fed increasingly on corn bought in Sicily and, above all, at Spina
and Pontus. In exchange, it could offer wine, oil and manufactured pro¬
ducts. Piraeus became a great port for imports and redistribution, analo¬
gous to the ports of Ionia in the preceding period. ‘Because of the greatness
of our city,’ Pericles declared in Thucydides (2, 38), ‘the fruits of the whole
earth flow in upon us.’ The Athenian fleet secured entire freedom of com¬
munications, and the existence of a stable currency fostered commercial
exchanges. Many metics promoted large-scale trade by bottomry lending,
a hazardous undertaking but yielding enormous profits if successful, or they
fitted out ships themselves.
All the conditions of intense development were therefore combined. In
fact, Greek products spread widely in the east, not of course in Ionia which
had remained lifeless since its revolt, but in Syro-Phoenicia and Egypt
where Al-Mina and Naucratis were overflowing with Athenian vases.
Athens also took over from Miletus in Pontus and from Euboea in
Chalcidice. In the west, it was in close relations with Sicily and the
Adriatic. On the other hand, Attic pottery was very rare in the whole
western basin of the Mediterranean, although these regions had been
widely reached as from 550: Etruria, Gaul, Iberia, and Africa (figure 50).
The reasons for this rupture are not clearly apparent and such a general
phenomenon cannot be explained solely by the particular reasons some¬
times suggested, for example by the puritanism which appeared at
Carthage after Himera, when it felt threatened by Hellenism (G. Picard).
It has recently been suggested (G. Vallet) that the new conditions intro¬
duced by imperialism should be considered. It was no longer so much a
question of producing and selling, as in the period 550-480 when a policy
Figure 50 Penelope talks with the suitor Antinous in front of her loom. Scyphos from
Chiusi (Etruria)
of profits and investments had developed. Henceforth, the Athenian in¬

come from the empire and the mines at Laurium was so large that they did
not need to try to extend trade at all costs: they voluntarily abandoned the
western markets where they had only to exploit an already-held position,
in order to expand their efforts in the heart of the Adriatic and Pontus,
which yielded abundant supplies of cereals at low prices. Imperialism was
therefore not a stimulus to commercial life, as has long been taught. It
tended rather to restrain pure mercantilism, which had hitherto been the
only force regulating the development of commerce, by causing certain
markets to be abandoned and others preferred.
THE INDOMITABLE GREEK WORLD
The Greek world no longer had the rich variety of the Archaic period. The
triumph of Athens pushed formerly prosperous cities such as Chalcis,
ATHENS, MISTRESS OF THE AEGEAN 26l
Megara, Aegina, and even Corinth into the shade. A more rapid resume
is enough to describe the cities which remained alive and escaped the
hold of Athens.
Asia Minor was first destroyed by the repression of the Ionian revolt
and then fell under the close domination of Athens. Except for the
Propontis and the extreme south at Phaselis, it was no longer economically
active. Miletus, previously so brilliant, paid the same tribute as more
modest cities. It was only mentioned because of its beautiful reconstruction
in checker-board design, the work of Hippodamus, and because it gave
birth to Aspasia. It was not until the fourth century that Ionia slowly
emerged from a lethargy which had lasted nearly a hundred years.
Nevertheless it must be noted that Hellenism advanced in Anatolia, and
especially in Lycia. At Xanthus the dynasts erected strange funerary
monuments where the contribution of Greek (and more specifically Ionian)
art was obvious, but where the part played by local elements remained
large. A sarcophagus of about 450 showed an oriental-type lion and
sphinx but also a ‘heroization’ banquet. During the Peloponnesian war,
a funerary pillar - a typically indigenous monument - bore a king on a
throne of lions, but the decoration was so free that it unquestionably con¬
veyed the influence of the masters of the Parthenon. The famous monu¬
ment of the Nereids dating from about 400 provided the first example of a
temple tomb with super-abundant decoration sculptured in Ionian style:
the intercolumniations contained the Nereids, gracefully escorting the soul
towards its destinies in the hereafter, and four friezes (‘Amazons’, battles,
parades of tributaries and funeral banquet) which glorified the early life
of the monarch and his celestial apotheosis, with a very ‘fin de sudd tech¬
nical virtuosity. About the same time, and again in Lycia, the walls of a
funerary enclosure at Trysa were decorated with friezes over one hundred
yards long and comprising nearly six hundred personages on two bands.
They show the same syncretism between the flexibility of Ionian art and
native inspiration, undoubtedly linked with very ancient cults.
Peloponnesian Conservatism
Sparta retained its hegemony in the Peloponnese by means of the
Peloponnesian League, which had proved its efficiency and which had
been strengthened by placing allied contingents under Spartan officers.
But it also had to contend with democratic movements. Under the in¬
fluence of Themistocles, they not only transformed Argos, its traditional
enemy, which adopted a constitution modelled on that of Athens (with
tribes, assembly of the people, boule, strategoi and popular tribunal) but also
states subjected to its authority, such as Elis and Mantinea in Arcadia.
Outside the peninsula, it had deliberately renounced leadership of the
Greeks, for fear lest distant expeditions should disturb the delicate
equilibrium of its ‘Lycurgan’ constitution.
This constitution still existed unchanged - all the more unusual in
Greece where evolution was so rapid. The ephors had definitely established
their authority in their clash with king Pausanias. But the helots remained
a threat and gave an example of this at the time of an earthquake in 464
which claimed 20,000 lives and left only five houses standing. They formed
bands and were prepared to free themselves of their masters, but King
Archidamus acted forcefully and immediately sounded the trumpet, call¬
ing the citizens to arms. However, they succeeded in arousing the perioecic
towns of Messenia: beaten in open country, the insurgents withdrew to
Ithome, and Sparta had to appeal to the Athenians before the revolt was
quelled.
Spartan civilization also remained poor. The ‘fifty years’ which saw the
greatness of Athens also saw the effacement of Sparta. The Corinthian
envoys said as much to the Spartans in no uncertain terms on the eve of the
conflict, which brought the renewal of Spartan power (Thucydides 1, 70).
‘The Athenians are utterly different from you. They are given to innova¬
tion and quick to form plans and to put their decisions into execution,
whereas you are disposed merely to keep what you have, to devise nothing
new, and, when you do take action, not to carry to completion even what
is indispensable.’
Outside Sparta things were scarcely more alive and the Peloponnese en
bloc resisted all intellectual life. However, Elis awoke from rural inactivity
and the town of Elis was founded in 472; the sanctuary of Olympia re¬
mained one of the purest hearths of Dorian Hellenism. Mantinea carried
out a synoecism of its straggling villages. Argos struggled hard to escape
Spartan ascendancy and, like Sicyon, retained an excellent school of
bronze-founders. Corinth, which remained essentially mercantile and
which had hardly participated in the Persian wars, lost all its markets to
Athens. Its pottery works were in a bad way and American excavations
have shown that the city was generally impoverished during the fifth
century (figure 51).
Figure 51 Demeter seated

before an altar, holds her usual
attributes (torch, poppies, ears
of corn). Corinthian dish, fifth
century
Mainland Greece
Mainland Greece was not much more brilliant and was for a long time
tainted by the opprobium of its equivocal policy of alliance with Persia.
However, the fifth century marked a fundamental period in Macedonian
history when it formed a strong state under the authority of powerful
kings: Alexander 1, Perdiccas 11 and Archelaus. They took the lead over
their great vassals and restricted local minting. They employed a skilful if
not a scrupulous policy of equilibrium between the rival ambitions of
Sparta and Athens. Archelaus in particular proved a great organizer: he
moved the capital from Aegae to Pella and ‘in various ways improved the
country’ (Thucydides, 2, 100). At the same time, these monarchs wanted
to be recognized definitely as Greeks. Alexander succeeded in gaining
admittance to the Olympic Games. Men of letters thronged to their court-
Pindar, Herodotus, Timotheus, Choirilos, Agathon and Euripides - where
they received a most cordial welcome.
Thessaly’s prestige declined as the authority of its central power weak¬
ened: there were long periods without a tagos, the cities developed and
broke free, and the tetrarchs nominated by the tagos were replaced by
polemarchs elected by the federal assembly. It has even been suggested
that there was some heavy blow to the traditional social system which
could have been reflected in the emancipation of thepenestai in 457.
The Boeotian confederation had been dissolved in 479 to punish Thebes
for fighting on the Persian side. It was reconstituted in 447 under the
influence of an oligarchical legislator who created a constitution based on a
wise numerical balance, an aristocratic counterpart to Cleisthenes’
democratic constitution. In every ten cities, four councils (boulai) were made
up of the only active citizens, that is to say those with the rating of hoplite.
These cities formed eleven units (Thebes controlled four but the small
towns grouped themselves in threes to constitute one unit) which each
elected one boeotarch and sixty bouleutai. The central government was thus
composed of eleven boeotarchs who possessed extensive powers of initiative
and one boule of 660 members, itself divided into four sections each sitting
for one quarter of the year. It formed a strong framework, in which Thebes
enjoyed undisputed authority; it was undeniably aristocratic in its in¬
spiration since there were passive citizens who only possessed civil rights.
But compared with Sparta, it was a moderate aristocracy which was
further weakened by the existence of a strong democratic party which
claimed the enlargement of the civic body and often intrigued with Athens.
Tyrannies and Democracies in the West

As opposed to Greece which, apart from Athens, showed scarcely any signs
of revival, the west was making rapid strides. The beginning of the century
saw a new crop of tyrants in most of the cities. Gelon was a descendant of
the great family of Deinomenidae who held office as hierophantes of Deme¬

ter and Kore at Gela, and had won fame in his own right as commander of
cavalry. He asserted his authority in his native land and then in Syracuse,
with the support of the aristocracy - a fact which gave his tyranny a very
different character from the tyrannies of the Archaic period. His brother
Hieron succeeded him. They were both bolstered up by great victories
over the barbarians (at Himera over the Carthaginians, at Cumae over the
Etruscans). They relied on large numbers of mercenaries, stationed near
Syracuse, and were surrounded by friends who were often of noble birth.
Their authority weighed heavily on the city, and did not spare the people.
Strengthened by matrimonial alliances with Theron of Agrigentum and
Anaxilas of Rhegium, they gradually brought all eastern Sicily under their
hegemony.
Figure 52 Perseus. Crater

with a white base, from the
necropolis of Agrigentum
(440-430)
They were clever at raising their prestige, not only by the now tradi¬
tional policy of public works, but by sending runners to the pan-Hellenic
games, by entrusting the greatest poets (Pindar, Bacchylides) with the task
of singing their glory, covering the sanctuaries of Greece with their ex votos,
and by luring to their court Epicharmus the father of comedy, and
Aeschylus, who presented the Persae at Syracuse and was buried at Gela.
In about 465, the tyrants were expelled from most of the cities, undoubt¬
edly because pressure from the Carthaginians had notably diminished
since Himera and the need for strong men was less. The last of the Deino¬
menidae, Thrasybulus, had to go into exile (466). For a long time the situa¬
tion was confused, all the more so as the problem of the mercenaries,
former mainstays of the tyrants, had to be resolved and this remained one
of the black spots of the Sicilian world. Finally, a moderate democracy was
established at Syracuse which adopted a new constitution in which the
council (Boula) and the magistrates balanced the assembly of the people
more successfully than at Athens. To avoid candidates being tempted to
seek tyranny, petalismos was instituted, on the model of Athenian ostracism.

Dissension between the cities remained lively. Syracuse, which had tem¬
porarily lost its empire on the fall of the tyrants, again subjected Agrigen-
tum and became by far the most important city. On two occasions (427 and
416), it attacked Athens’ allies, Leontini and Segesta, and this unleashed
disastrous intervention from Athens. The Carthaginians took advantage of
these discords to resume their offensive, under the leadership of Hannibal,
grandson of the defeated leader at Himera, and of Himilco. Selinus,
Himera and Agrigentum were taken and destroyed (409-6). Once again
it proved necessary to resort to a tyrant: from 405, the elder Dionysius
was undisputed master of Syracuse.
The Apogee of the Greek West

The towns expanded considerably. Syracuse must have numbered 200,000
inhabitants and Agrigentum 100,000. The checker-board plan, which was
only introduced into Sicily in the Hellenistic period, spread in Magna
Graecia from the fifth century (Posidonia, Thurii and Parthenope, which
expanded so much that it took the new name Neapolis). Very beautiful
Figure 53 The gathering of quinces

and pomegranates for the nuptial
couple. Terracotta pinax from
Epizephyrian Locri, beginning of
fifth century
IO
temples were constructed, with a keen sense of the value of monumental

masses in the urban landscape. Selinus added four temples to its two ad¬
joining acropolises, including the colossal ‘temple G’. Agrigen turn spread
its temples out on a magnificent terrace, dominated by the gigantic
Olympieum, still unfinished in 406 despite nearly eighty years of effort.
Posidonia embellished its sacred enclosure with the wonderful ‘temple of
Neptune’ (really a Heraeum), the most advanced sanctuary of the west.
The Deinomenidae equipped Syracuse with a rich Athenaeum, at the
highest point of the hill of Ortygia. Even the Elymi constructed a Greek
style temple at their capital Egesta, which testified to Hellenic influence on
the barbarians of the west. The Doric style triumphed brilliantly every¬
where though it was often qualified by elements borrowed from Ionic.
All the arts were flourishing. Sculptors’ studios produced pure master¬
pieces, notably at Rhegium (with Pythagoras), Locris and Selinus. Clay-
modelling vulgarized their creations at low prices: all the sanctuaries
overflowed with terracotta ex votos. After 510, under the influence of Ionian
immigrants, Epizephyrian Locri produced abundant polychrome tablets of
a marvellous refinement, which it consecrated in its temple of Persephone
(figure 53 and plate 7). Ceramics with red figures appeared in Italy with
the foundation of Thurii, and from the end of the century were linked with
humorous and parodying representations, in harmony with western real¬
ism. No Greek city produced coins as beautiful as those of Sicily (plate 8)
and particularly Syracuse - notably the Demareteia, which showed the
nymph Arethusa with the features of Gelon’s wife. Comedy developed with
Epicharmus and the people developed a passion for theatrical perfor¬
mances. Another example of the Sicilian delight in words was the birth of
judiciary rhetoric, with Corax and Tisias, and of sophistry with Gorgias of
Leontini.
Despite an undeniable passion for life, revealed in the pleasure they took
in words and laughter, the Greeks of the west were gripped with a poignant
sense of human destiny. Chthonic cults triumphed everywhere, often
borrowed from the natives and hellenized by assimilating their goddesses
with Demeter, Hera, Persephone and even Aphrodite. The diffusion of
Pythagoreanism was dazzling, especially in Magna Graecia.
Hellenism of the Borders

The other colonial creations of classical Hellenism were very poor
compared with those of Italy and Sicily.
Marseilles declined and its trade was considerably reduced, possibly
because of changes in the Celtic world passing from the Hallstatt to the La
Tene civilizations and because of the resulting alterations in the traditional
routes of the tin trade. But in Spain, Emporiae remained very active.
Under Greek influence, Iberic sculpture at last showed genuine develop¬
ment, though it often lagged behind, imitating Archaic motifs, both
animal themes, which remained the most important (griffons, lions,
and rocephalous bulls and does), and human figures (korai, crested warriors
and seated goddesses).
Cyrene continued under the leadership of the Battiadae, kings who were
really tyrants and put up with Persian suzerainty until 480. Pindar sang of
Arcesilas IV, the last of the line, in two Pythian odes. The monarchy col¬
lapsed about 440, after two hundred years of existence, and was followed
by a democracy often thwarted by civil war.
The colonies founded on the Black Sea during the Archaic period
showed great development in the fifth and fourth centuries. Some of them
emigrated: Heraclea Pontica became one of the most prosperous towns of
the Crimea; small agglomerations multiplied on the two shores of the
Kertch straits. But the most important achievement was the creation in 480
Figure 54 Gorgon. Chalcedony from

the first decades of the fifth century,
found in a tomb from the end of the
fifth century, near Kertch (Crimea)
of the kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus linking several cities with

Panticapaeum, its capital, with a view to securing a stronger defence
against the barbarians. It was continually enlarged by annexing new
Greek towns, such as Theodosia, and the native territories of the Sindi and
the Tauri, and was protected against possible incursions by a strong en¬
trenchment lined with a ditch, which crossed the whole Maeotic peninsula
from one side to the other.
A close symbiosis appeared between the Greek cities and the barbarous
chora, and this, from the classical period onwards, foreshadowed later
events which took place in the east with the conquest of Alexander.
The towns were surrounded by powerful ramparts in the fifth and fourth
centuries; they were expanded considerably (Tanais covered 40 hectares,
Chersonesus 38, Olbia 33) and their appearance was improved. Minting
of money commenced almost everywhere. Corn, stocked in vast silos and
large pithoi, and salted fish, preserved in pits of pickling brine, remained the
basis of commerce.
The only change was that Athens had taken over from Miletus and was
more and more concerned with trade with Pontus.
The barbarians in the interior continued to become hellenized; this is
shown, for example, by the numerous discoveries of Greek pottery made
during excavations of the small agricultural agglomerations in the low
valleys of the Kuban and the Don. But the Crimea and its surroundings
remained inhabited by very rough populations (Maiotai, Sindi, Tauri),
undoubtedly related to the ancient Cimmerians, who were satisfied with
standard Greek objects, mainly vases, imported or manufactured locally.
The Scythians of the steppes of the northern coast were more refined. The
Figure 55 Stag in chased gold, ombos from a state shield. Greek work of the fifth century
found in a tomb of a Scythian chief, at Kul Oba (Crimea)
tumuli of their leaders (kurgans) protected corbelled tombs, probably con¬

structed by Greek masons and not only containing bows, arrows, and
horses sacrificed on their master’s death, but also masterpieces of Hellenic
toreutics: large vases, mirrors, bracelets, intaglios, torques, plaques designed
to decorate clothing or harness, and sheaths for quivers. These are the
famous ‘antiquities of the Cimmerian Bosporus’ which were discovered in
the last century and have justifiably aroused the admiration of all Europe
(figures 54 and 55).
The scenes represented are most frequently unreservedly Greek: for
example a tomb of Kul Oba held a wonderful judgement of Paris on an
ivory, and Thetis and Peleus on a golden bracelet; a quiver from Chertom-
lyk showed Achilles at Scyros, in typically Ionian style. But there were also
representations vividly depicting the nomad Scythians with their clothing,
weapons, equine or warlike pursuits, and their own way of life.
In this way, from the sixth century onwards, but even more in the classi¬
cal period, Greek artists produced works made to order for native clients in
the Pontic colonies. These contacts increased social evolution in Scythia:
the power of the tribal chiefs, who had acquired some polish from
Hellenism and wealth from trade with the Greeks, was considerably
strengthened.
All things considered, nothing could compare with the new Greece of
the west. Herodotus, who included some interesting Scythian tales in Book
4, developed a passionate interest in still barbarous Pontus where he found
material to satisfy his yearning for exoticism. In actual fact, the civilization
remained poor. Although the toreutics which sold so well to the natives
produced masterpieces, there was practically no sculpture - a fact which
distinguished Pontus from all the rest of the Greek world. Traditional
styles were retained there (particularly apparent in the long survival of
ceramics with black figures) as often happens in colonial societies. But the
importance of these colonies must not be underestimated. Clinging cour¬
ageously to the coast in a climate the Greeks found severe, they continued
to send the corn and the wealth of Scythia to Greece, and they made possible
at least a partial hellenization of the steppes of southern Russia.
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR (43I-404)
In 431, conflict again broke out between Athens and the Peloponnesians.
In appearance, it was only a continuation of the struggle which ended with
a botched-up peace in 446. In fact, the atmosphere had entirely changed:
the success and the pride of the Athenians were provoked beyond measure
by the cities which had remained independent. A fight to the death began,
an interminable struggle lasting nearly thirty years, in which each side
desperately strained all its energies: it has been calculated that Athens
mobilized 29 per cent of its population (revolutionary wars in modern
times: three per cent; 1914-18 war: ten per cent). It is not surprising that
Athens emerged broken for ever.
Furthermore, Athens was sure of itself and Pericles, far from exercising
the most elementary prudence, seems to have decided to provoke the trial
of strength in order to add to the indisputable successes he had achieved in
the past decades. The first two incidents (affairs of Corcyra and Potidaea)
found him directly confronting Corinth, the city most offended by its
rival’s economic triumph. Then he provoked Megara by an intolerable
decree which forbade it the markets of the empire and thus condemned it
to economic suffocation. A congress of the Peloponnesian League met at
Sparta and virtually decided on war at the forceful entreaty of the Corin¬
thians. But Thucydides truly remarked that the ‘real cause’ of the conflict
lay in the clash between the intransigent imperialism of Athens and the
desire for independence and the commercial interests of a few large cities
which had remained autonomous.
The Course of the War

The first years of the war were marked by Peloponnesian successes in
Attica - where their incursions ruined agriculture and caused a mass exo¬
dus of peasants who sought refuge within the long walls - and by victorious
Athenian expeditions on the Peloponnesian coasts, notably at Sphacteria
where the Spartans capitulated in 425. A plague from Egypt ravaged
Athens and carried off Pericles (429), and no worthy successor was found,
neither in the extremist demagogue Cleon nor in the wealthy moderate
Nicias. The revolt of Mytilene was severely punished, but the campaigns of
the Spartan Brasidas, in Thrace, threatened the fall of the empire in the
north. An immense lassitude seized the belligerents - as ‘was shown in
Athens, for example, by Aristophanes’ comedies. Facilitated by the death
of both Cleon and Brasidas at Amphipolis, negotiations slowly resulted in
the Peace of Nicias (421), when it was decided to return to the status quo
ante (map 14).
After six years, during which time Greece continued very restless, the
Athenians were called in to help Segesta against Syracuse (415). It was an
unexpected opportunity to extend the empire in the west. Drunk with im¬
perialism, the Athenians in a fit of madness decided to send an expedition
to Sicily. They preferred the attractions of Alcibiades - a young aristocrat
born with a silver spoon in his mouth, in whom they thought to rediscover
the virtues of his tutor, Pericles - to Nicias’ moderation. The affair augured
ill from the very beginning: heinous sacrileges were committed; the hermae
at the crossroads were defaced and the mysteries of Eleusis parodied.
Alcibiades was involved and summoned to Athens to be tried. He preferred
to flee and thus betray himself, inaugurating a lamentable egoistic policy
which had the most formidable consequences for his country. For two years,
the Athenians suffered irreparable disasters at the gates of besieged Syra¬
cuse, which fearlessly defended itself with assistance from the Spartans.
The dismal defeat of Assinarus (413) resulted in the loss of all the soldiers
of the expedition, killed or destined to die in captivity in the evil latomies of
Syracuse. The Athenian generals, including Nicias, were executed and
12,000 citizens disappeared, representing a definite weakening of Athenian
manpower.
Athens was lost but braced itself for another nine years, propped up by
Alcibiades, who had returned to favour with his co-citizens. It had to
struggle against the defection of part of the empire (notably Ionia), against
internal quarrels (the aristocrats temporarily took the lead in 411), and
against Sparta which was strengthened by a shameful alliance with the
Great King, selling him the Greeks of Asia in return for monetary support.
Furthermore, Sparta had finally found a real military leader in the admiral
Lysander. Victorious again in the Arginusae islands in 406, Athens was de¬
feated at the Stream of the Goat (Aegospotami) in 405. The whole empire
yielded at one blow, except Samos, and in 404 Lysander entered Piraeus.
Athens experienced the worst humiliation of its history: it was only too
glad to escape the total destruction desired by the Thebans, who wanted to
raze it to the ground and reduce it to pasturage. It had to surrender its
ships, demolish its fortifications and give up the empire.
14 The Peloponnesian war
A century of effort and success was annihilated, and for ever. Athens
would never more re-discover its enthusiasm, which had given birth to its
power.
Political and Social Upheaval

This total warfare threw the whole machinery into confusion. Agriculture
was ruined for a long time by the first incursions of the Peloponnesians,
who had shown no hesitation in cutting down the olive groves and tearing
out the vines. The peasants, uprooted by their exodus to the town, had dif¬
ficulty in readjusting themselves when they returned to their devastated
lands. Degraded and living most poorly, they no longer made any great
effort to participate in the sittings of the Ecclesia. It therefore assumed a
more and more urban character, in which the balancing factor represented
by rural elements was sadly lacking. All the Periclean equilibrium, based
on this harmony between the interests of country demos and urban demos,
collapsed.
In the town, the situation appeared less dramatic. Athens remained for a
long time undisputed mistress of the seas and its trade continued to flourish.
The anonymous aristocrat, author of the Constitution of the Athenians (c 420),
asserted that ‘all that was good in Sicily and Italy, at Cyprus, in Egypt, in
Lydia and in the Black Sea, in the Peloponnese, in no matter what country,
all this flowed to one point thanks to the control of the sea: only the
Athenians were able to procure the wealth of the Greeks and the barbar¬
ians, (2, 7 and 11). Tribute continued to be levied and was moreover, con¬
siderably increased. But the war was expensive and year after year citizens
were mobilized for campaigns, often in remote areas. All traditional life
disappeared: the processions and many religious ceremonies were sus¬
pended; corn had to be shared out and the misthoi increased (the heliastes
received three oboloi instead of two after 425), not only because the dema¬
gogues were obliged to humour the people battered by so much hardship
and affliction, but because life itself had become harder. Furthermore, good
citizenship diminished alarmingly: the development of individualism was
the consequence of public and private misfortune, and also of the preach¬
ings of the sophists who found excellent material in an Athens undermined
by war.
In fact, the interminable conflict was far from being the sole cause of the
crisis which critically shook Athens to its very foundations. The equilibrium
of the preceding period was made up of the blind submission of the interests
of the citizens to the interests of the city. The new individualism resulted
partly from a deepening of the needs of human self-awareness and it will be
seen that it produced great works in the literary and artistic fields, for
example. Moreover, the social disturbance had some favourable results:
women, hitherto kept strictly on the fringes of society, were emancipated by
the harsh necessity of war which often took their fathers and husbands away
on distant campaigns, and forced them to assume heavy responsibilities;
a sense of family developed. This is proved by the vases which preferred

scenes with women and children, often in a sentimental vein (departure
of the warrior, for example) (figure 56), to the male and bluntly pederast
themes which were in favour between 530 and 450.
Figure 56 Gynaeceum
scene: three young
women bathing. Attic
stamnos with red figures,
Periclean period
But this new respect for the rights of the individual was not compatible
with the conduct of an imperialist war. Pericles had enforced Athenian
hegemony because the whole city was strongly united behind him. The
politicians who followed him - and it is impossible not to think of Alcibiades
- were the first to set examples of indiscipline and egoism. The city col¬
lapsed in 404 because it failed to choose between the relatively austere road
to power which presupposed the sacrifice of everyone to the common
cause, and the road to the harmonious development of every citizen.
10*
11
The Century of Pericles or the
Advent of Enlightenment
The political history of the fifth century shows that Athens never succeeded
in ridding itself of its rivals and finally fell beneath their blows. However,
despite the harshness and inconsistencies of an imperialism which is not
only reprehensible because it failed, Athens was at the very heart of a
civilization which remains one of the most beautiful achievements of the
human mind. Athens was the meeting place for all Greeks who felt they
had some creative power in the various spheres of intellectual activity; at
Athens, history and dramatic forms acquired their final shape; the art
formulated there has never ceased to inspire admiration and imitation with
its tranquil nobility (map 15). The Acropolis (which one day Athena
would desert and which would become the place of worship of Jesus and
Allah successively) remained the high place of prayer for all who did not
despair of man. There was in effect a subtle but obvious relationship be¬
tween the town set out around the holy hill, the very human fresco
Herodotus depicted, the calm revolt of Sophoclean tragedy, Aristophanes’
unbridled mirth, Phidias’ Olympian gods, the sharp strokes of the potters
of the ceramic quarter, and the ‘demoniac’ Socrates. There was a huma¬
nism at the heart of it all, summed up but not exhausted by Protagoras’
famous maxim: ‘Man is the measure of all things, of the being of those that
are, of the non-being of those that are not’.
The symphony unfolded in three movements, corresponding to three
generations. In the period of the warriors of Marathon and Salamis, a new
Greece suddenly emerged from the ruins the Persians wars had piled up,
still bruised but already able to bring one form of classicism to fruition. The
Periclean apogee expressed the eurhythmy of a world which had found an
ephemeral balance. The Peloponnesian war reintroduced all the sources of
disquiet but the crisis actually favoured the richest creations. Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides seem to epitomize this evolution.
THE GENERATION OF MARATHON

AND THE SEVERITY OF PRE-CLASSICISM
The clearest characteristic of the first generation was severity. The ‘severe
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style’ is freely mentioned to describe the creations of plastic art and cera¬
mics in the first quarter of the century, but it can be no less aptly applied to
contemporary literature. Hellenism only emerged slowly from the terrible
ordeal when it had had to deepen the roots of its convictions and seek new
reasons for belief in its destiny and its gods in order to survive. The speed
with which the transition was made varied according to the artistic form
and care must be taken not to assume that the Persian wars explained a
whole movement which really preceded them and partially accounted for
them. Aeschylus and Pindar wrote before 490 and the development of
severe red figure ceramics was imperceptible after their first appearance.
Sculpture possibly showed a clearer break: despite transitional works, the
fairly sudden appearance of a pre-classicism which broke with the devel¬
oped conditions of the Archaic period, can be discerned. In any case, a new
effort was made everywhere to seize the timeless absolute rather than the
anecdote, in order to give man his dignity, and an unknown aspiration
towards order and harmony.
A New Religious Fervour

The Greeks had only been victorious in battle because the gods fought with
them. At Marathon and Salamis, the heroes of Attica fought beside the
Athenians. The religious fervour which was so characteristic of the begin¬
ning of the century can be explained by the close relationship between the
city and religion: success for Athens was the triumph of Athena and the
Olympians. Furthermore, it was pointed out that the sacred olive tree on
the Acropolis, pledge of the alliance between the goddess and her people,
had immediately grown again after the Persians had cut it down. But al¬
though the ordeal had demonstrated the help of the gods, it also bore wit¬
ness to the formidable character of the supernatural powers. However
fervent, piety remained a matter of anguish. Pindar (,Nemeans 6, 1) forcibly
noted the transcendence of the divine: ‘One is the race of men; one is the
race of gods’. Aeschylus lived in a world of anguish overshadowed by a
destiny more powerful than the divinities themselves.
Nevertheless, the dominant feeling was of optimism. The gods were no
longer powers indifferent to good and evil. Zeus, whose noble figure in¬
creasingly dominated the pantheon, was the guarantor of justice for both
Pindar and Aeschylus. Man could trust in him provided he accepted his
destiny and renounced hybris - excess tinged with violence which was the
very negation of the human condition (figure 57). Aeschylus’ plays expan¬
ded an idea which is quite foreign to present-day thought: the gods them¬
selves had developed. Zeus began with the detestable bravado of a tyrant
but he was reconciled with Prometheus in the last play of the Aeschylean
trilogy which is lost. Prometheus was no longer the trickster that Hesiod de¬
picted, whose schemes finally turned against humanity, but a supremely
philanthropic god who was willing to die for those he protected. He has,
without exaggeration, been described as a forerunner of Christ. The divine
THE CENTURY OF PERICLES 277
Figure 57 Artemis and Actaeon. Attic crater with red figures, in severe style, attributed
to the ‘master of Pan’
world was certainly prey to antagonisms which resembled those of the city,
but they were harmoniously resolved. The Oresteia contained a wonderful
lesson: the old goddesses of vengeance, the fearful Erinyes, haggard bitches
who quenched their thirst on blood, became the Eumenides (Kindly
Ones), while a new generation of Olympians, the generation of Apollo and
Athena, enforced a morality based on purification, contrition and pardon
of the repentant guilty. The theomachies ended with the triumph of har¬
mony and a message of hope not only for the initiates of Eleusis but also for
the citizen in respect of city deities.
The Anguish and Greatness of Aeschylus

Tragedy was obviously the best means of expression for a world where the
tragic had become an everyday occurrence. Personal lyricism disappeared
because individual problems were no longer in the forefront. Tragedy ap¬
pealed to the entire demos, in an Athens painfully obsessed with aspirations
towards democracy. It provided a tribune where even current events were
debated: the Taking of Miletus by Phrynichus made the people weep so
much that it had to be banned; the Persae sang of the triumph of Athens;
the Oresteia posed the problem of the Areopagus and gave Aeschylus an
opportunity to preach moderation to the two parties. But its real domain
was the myths where human dramas were decanted and purified. Its
heroes, apart from Prometheus, which depicted gods, were the heroes of the
fables, princes of former times, whose moving stories foreshadowed on a
higher plane the everyday heartbreak of man.
From the very beginning, Aeschylus brought this art form to perfection.
He made it into the equivalent of the decoration of present-day cathedrals:
a fresco wherein man sought and found himself. Born at Eleusis in the
peaceful shadow of the sanctuary, his thoughts could only ‘be of the most
noble. His real problem was destiny: fatality laid down its decrees both on
gods and on men. The gods were the instruments: they were jealous of all
greatness; they pursued men motivated by excess - the senseless desire to
grasp the ungraspable - Prometheus, Agamemnon and Xerxes; the gods
blinded men by inspiring them with the destructive frenzy (Ate) which
made them work towards their own downfall. No one has expressed the
glaring weakness of the human being crushed by infinitely superior forces
as forcibly as Aeschylus - except perhaps the Biblical prophets, to whom
Victor Hugo rightly compared him. His work still contained some very old
ideas, which humane j ustice was already rej ecting: that crime was hereditary,
that a curse clung to accursed families, such as the Atridae and the Labda-
cids; Eteocles went into battle driven ‘by the fatal wind of the hatred that
Apollo vowed to the race of Laius’. But he was also possessed by hopes of
progress which would make order and justice triumph over fearful up¬
heavals. His dramatic work was pervaded by anguish pushed to its culmi¬
nating point, by the interminable anticipation of a catastrophe felt to be
close at hand. But it was also imbued with appeasement if not peace. The
Prometheus trilogy ended in reconciliation between Prometheus and Zeus
after their inexpiable confrontation in Prometheus Bound, the Oresteia in the
submission of the sanguinary deities of former times to new gods, bearing a
message of hope.
The abrupt magnificence of his style matched the loftiness of his thought.
Brilliant images, prodigious colour - predominantly gold and blood - and
a bold vocabulary which denied itself no creation: there could be no better
expression of the heart-rending confrontation between man and the Moirai.
Tragedy later became more human and paid more attention to rendering
subtle psychological nuances, but it never regained the desperate, yet con¬
fident heights of Aeschylean drama, more able than any other to arouse
‘terror and pity’, which to Aristotle were the two essential springs of tragic
action.
While Aeschylus was bringing such brilliant fame to tragedy, comedy
was still taking its first steps. It was only introduced in 486 at the competi¬
tions of the Dionysia of the city. Born of the comos and Megarian farce, it
took definite form in Sicily with Epicharmus who, according to Aristotle,
‘gave it a plot’ in imitation of tragedy and could then create characters (an
amusing picture of a parasite has been preserved) and introduce a moral or
philosophical idea (a discussion on the gods already seemed to herald a
THE CENTURY OF PERICLES
279
Socratic dialogue). Athens made this curious mixture of buffoonery and

gravity its own.
The Last Flames of Aristocratic Lyricism: Pindar

Barely younger than Aeschylus, Pindar represented a different geographi¬
cal and political environment with no less greatness. He was a Boeotian of
a noble family which could trace its exploits back to the Dorian invasions.
He was the poet of the competitions between the flower of Hellenic youth.
Of his varied lyrical work, essentially the Epinicians remain, triumphal
odes devoted to commemorating the victors of the pan-Hellenic games.
The most beautiful were addressed to the great men of this world: Theron
of Agrigentum, Hieron of Syracuse, and Arcesilas of Cyrene, whose friend
and commensal he was and whom he praised not as a salaried poet but as
an equal.
The key terms of his work were virtue and glory. The competitions were
tests where the individual superiority of one man, who surpassed himself to
win, was best revealed. And furthermore this superiority merely reflected
the excellence of one race and one city. Strictly speaking the ideal which
emerged from these odes was aristocratic, possibly Dorian in origin, inheri¬
ted from the Archaic period but still very much alive at a time when Athens
was formulating a contrary ideal of man.
But the miracle of Pindar was that he rose far above a bare recital of fact
that an athletic victory basically constituted. One man ran faster than
another in the stadium or one prince had enough wealth to breed splendid
horses which won at the hippodrome. It was already important at the hu¬
man level that these triumphs be earned by painful exertion, glorious
heredity, and the nobility of the city. But there was infinitely more to it
than that: a banal sports report was turned into a meditation on destiny.
The gods ruled over all human affairs. They were clearly transcendent gods
of whom it would be odious to repeat some of the hare-brained nonsense of
vulgar myth; these gods were paragons of virtue and justice. They even
seemed to blend into a single, all-powerful god who embraced the universe,
when the poet cried: ‘What is divinity? It is everything’ (fragment 23).
The Epinicians were therefore wholly actuated by a myth which
strangely transfigured humble human reality: thus Olympian Odes 2 first
recalled the alternations of prosperity and misfortune inherent in human
destiny. Pindar then, in a sudden flight of poetry, evoked, undoubtedly in an
Orphico-Pythagorean sense, the supreme happiness which the souls of the
elite, who were reincarnated three times without contracting any blemish,
enjoyed in the isles of the blessed.
The links which bound such poetry to the past are obvious. Pindar was
the last glorious representative of choral lyricism which was running dry.
At first glance he remains the incomparable singer of happiness, youth,
power and glory - perhaps only more tinged with melancholy and feelings
of human tenderness than his predecessors. Furthermore, his odes, like
theirs, unfolded within the triple discipline of strophes, antistrophes and

epodes, scarcely marked by an apparent disorder. But he was also very
much a contemporary of Aeschylus, not only in the boldness of his verbal
creations, but also in his conception of an all-powerful destiny and an ideal
divine world. They were both worthy, often anguished, witnesses at the
birth of a new civilization.
The Severe Style in Art

Art was equally severe. The Ionian world played only an unobtrusive role
at this time, partly because of the ill fortune of Ionia, but above all because
its love of sprightly grace seemed over-done. The great centres of produc¬
tion were Athens, the Peloponnese and the west. At least in the latter two,
Dorianism was expressed with an austere and sombre power which fitted
the severity of the political situation.
It is possible to follow the formulation of pre-classicism in several stages
marked by large building works. Immediately after Marathon, Athens
erected a modest treasury at Delphi where metopes represented the exploits
of Heracles and Theseus. Although the excessive musculature (Heracles on
the doe) was reminiscent of the past, other scenes were charged with a new
spiritual meaning - an example of this is the scene which has been inter¬
preted as depicting Athena proceeding to the sacred investiture of Aegeus’
son. Undoubtedly between the two Persian wars the Aeginetans rebuilt a
temple for their Aphaea, identified with Athena. The frontons represented
the two wars with Troy, around an Athena watching over the fray, im¬
mobile in one, more archaic and showing her aegis in the other. The com¬
batants were quite skilfully arranged and the whole triangle was filled with
characters in different postures, but it showed more symmetry and severity
than unity, more juxtaposition than composition. The execution was very
careful but remained thin and dry and possessed remnants of a somewhat
out-moded coquetry - such as the famous ‘Aeginetan smile’ which even
played on the lips of the dying.
The metopes of‘Temple E’ at Selinus (480-60) already showed greater
strength. The temple was a solid building with powerful columns, possibly
consecrated to Dionysus. The metopes consisted of isolated episodes, most
frequently distinguished by their violence, such as Actaeon being devoured
by his hounds under the impassive eye of Artemis, or Heracles seizing
Antiope by the crest of her helmet and holding her immobile beneath the
powerful talons of his foot before sacrificing her. This brutality was not sur¬
prising in the Greek west which remained more unpolished and primitive.
It did not impair the deep spirituality of another scene in which an infernal
Zeus grasped his wife in a gesture of mingled tenderness and desire - a
prelude to the hierogamy which later fertilized the world. In about 470,
Theron of Agrigentum erected a gigantic Olympieum (about 360 X 180
feet) with some strange characteristics (half-columns engaged in the wall in
place of a peristyle; colossal statues of men alternately clean-shaven and
THE CENTURY OF PERICLES 28l
Figure 58 Young man astride a cock. Attic

cup with red figures, signed Epictetus
bearded, supporting the architrave). It has been suggested that it was as

much a meeting place for mystical cults as a temple.
We draw back from Aegina because of its frigidity, from Selinus because
of its over-lively pathos, from Agrigentum because of its strangeness.
Olympia, on the other hand, holds the attention with its fundamental har¬
mony. In 468, the Eleans who had just founded a capital, Elis, decided to
provide the Altis with a temple to Zeus. They called on a local architect,
Libon, who erected a sturdy structure in limestone, enhanced by marble
frontons and roof. The sculptured decoration must have been the focus of
all eyes. The frontons depicted the chariot race between Pelops and
Oenomaus, most Olympic of themes, and the Centauromachy, arranged
around two divine figures in glory, Zeus and Apollo. An impression of
strength emerged which excluded neither subtleties of composition (much
more flexible than at Aegina) nor even an attempt at psychological expres¬
sion (plate 9). The twelve metopes consecrated to the labours of Heracles, a
typically Dorian hero, were equally noteworthy. Some of them showed
him in vigorous action, conveyed by long oblique lines, but more often he
was depicted after victory - for example, the melancholy Heracles who
seems to be meditating over the lion’s corpse. He was a close relation of
Pindar’s victors, who knew the high price of success and the fragility of all
Figure 59 Hunting scene (Theseus and the sow of Crommyon?), fragment of an Attic
hydria with red figures, in the style of Epictetus (about 500)
things human. The Heracles handing, in a gesture conveying pious confi¬

dence and masculine strength, the loathsome birds from Lake Stymphalus
to his divine protectress, Athena, epitomizes this: she is portrayed turned
towards him with a certain fraternal tenderness. In any case he was always
the hero of endurance, as well as the manager of a universe disorganized by
the violence of monsters — almost a saviour who found his salvation in ponos
(travail) and the acceptance of a cruel destiny.
Apart from the decorative creations of the temples, sculpture was also
very quick to free itself from Archaic conventions. Musculature was ren¬
dered with accuracy but moderation, by large masses; facial expressions
were serious; and the statue in the round was inscribed in the three dimen¬
sions of space. The finest creations still in existence are two bronzes: the
Poseidon discovered in the sea at Cape Artemisium, brandishing his trident
with noble dignity; and the Charioteer of Delphi, the only remains — or
almost - of a quadriga offered by the Deinomenide, Polyzalos, after a vic¬
tory in the Pythian games. The latter is attributed to Pythagoras of
Rhegium or, with more probability, to the Athenian Critius. To all intents
and purposes, practically nothing but the names of the artists of the period
are known: at Athens there was Critius and, above all, Calamis, the great¬
est creator of gods before Phidias (Apollo Alexicacos of the Agora, repre¬
sented by the Apollo at the omphalos of the theatre of Dionysus). He was
also the author of the smiling Sosandra where Elpinice, the sister whom
Cimon loved too dearly, may possibly be concealed beneath the features of
Aphrodite. In Magna Graecia, Pythagoras carried his desire for realism so
far that he had a slave tortured so that he could render suffering better. His
pathos-laden creations were conceived a century before Scopas.
Figure 60 Diomedes and Ulysses seize the Trojan Dolon in the presence of Athena and
Hermes. Fragment of an Attic cup, in severe style, signed Euphronius
8The laige schools can be more easily distinguished: Ionian art survived
in the gracious nobility of the reliefs of the ‘Prytanaeum’ of Thasos. Attic
art retained its qualities of equilibrium and expressiveness, in the Ephebus
crowning himself at Sunium or in the Athena known as the melancholy
Athena. Dorian art in the Peloponnese produced vigorouspeplophoroi or the
powerful warrior of Sparta, perhaps a portrait of Leonidas. In Magna
Graecia, the Ludovisi triptych, which undoubtedly formed the decoration
from the thione of a cultic statue, contained unodos of Aphrodite being born
from the sea, of profound spirituality. She is shown between two represen¬
tations of a nude courtesan and a woman chastely clad - sacred and profane
love, it has been said.
The development of large-scale painting was determined by the genius
of a painter from Thasos, Polygnotus, who worked primarily at Athens
under Cimon and received the title of citizen. He painted vast lofty histori¬
cal or mythological compositions in bands one over another on the walls of
the Stoa Poikile at Athens or the Cnidian Leschc at Delphi. His colouring
was restrained, even poor, but he knew how to indicate different planes by
simple artifices (folds of land concealing part of a figure) and how to render
psychological expression.
Ceramics with red figures did not immediately come under the influence
of this incomparable master. Epictetus reacted against the taste for mytho¬
logical subjects and specialized in domestic, notably drinking, scenes.
Euphronios returned to mythology, with a marked predilection for the
labours of Heracles. He liked depicting the human body with minute pre¬
cision (crater with Antaeus and Heracles) and had a sure sense of compo¬
sition. Duris put a great deal of inventive imagination and humour into his
sketches of school and gymnasium. Brygus was the greatest artist of the
severe style, and his masterpiece was the cup of the Sack of Troy (in the
Louvre). He was interested in the play of light and shade and gave the epic
themes he loved a dramatic character which brought him close to his
contemporary, Aeschylus (figures 58, 59 and 60).
THE GENERATION OF PERICLES
AND THE EURHYTHMY OF CLASSICISM
Gradually, by an imperceptible transition, classicism emerged from pre¬

classicism. The anguish abated, the gods became as Olympian as Pericles,
and the Attic spirit of Athens triumphed everywhere. This was undoubted¬
ly a reflection of the political and social equilibrium which prevailed for
several decades. Like the equilibrium itself, the new harmony, which
sjpread in all realms was the result of travail. Even conquered, the powers of
evil remained present on the Doric friezes of the Parthenon, and the theme
of revolt lay at the very heart of Sophocles’ work. Discord could already be
heard and the commotion provoked by the Peloponnesian war was all that
was needed to transform all Hellenism.
Man at Peace with the Gods

The equilibrium between city and popular cults, which had been worked
out at Athens from Pisistratus onwards, was completed. Athena and Posei¬
don, the most ancient divinities of Attica, were worshipped in conjunction
on the Acropolis and on Gape Sunium, and were exalted together in a
famous chorus in Oedipus Coloneus. Above all, Athena benefited from the
new power of Athens. The wonder of wonders, the Parthenon, was dedi¬
cated to her and Phidias sculptured two statues for her on the sacred hill:
the Promachos and the Lemnia - apart from the great chryselephantine
statue of the sanctuary. The great Panathenaea became the most beautiful
festival of the Greek world and its momentary brilliance was eternalized on
the frieze of the secos. Artisans came in crowds to bring offerings to Ergane,
whose sacred enclosure was beside the courtyard of the great temple. In
fact, this ancient Creto-Mycenaean divinity, dispenser of the olive-branch,
mistress of the serpents, and protectress of the palace of Erechtheus, had chan¬
ged profoundly together with the city of which she was the living symbol. The
humble people, workmen and women adept at spinning and weaving, now
recognized her as their divine inspiration. Soldiers and sailors worshipped
the Promachos, the brave woman who fought in the front ranks. The whole
city honoured the goddess of Nous, whose glorious birth was celebrated on
the principal fronton of the Parthenon, above the frieze which showed her
victory over the confusion of the giants.
Dionysus and the ‘two goddesses’ were the objects of equally assiduous
attention. Dionysus was not yet primarily the mystical god he soon became,
but was honoured as god of wine in traditional festivals throughout the
year and the democracy gave these a new brilliance. They included the
rustic Dionysia, when the joyous procession of the phallos passed amidst ob¬
scene cries, the Lenaea around the wine-press, with its procession and sacri¬
fice, and the Anthesteria when the joy of drinking contests and the solemn
entry of Dionysus coming to marry the wife of the archon king in ritual
hierogamy was followed by a day of mourning when the dead were fed
with a propitiatory meal. Above all, there was the great Dionysia (or city
Dionysia) with its magnificent ceremony and dramatic competitions (which
also on a more modest scale formed part of the other festivities) where
the communal spirit of the demos was formed and its enthusiasm kindled.
The goddesses of Eleusis enjoyed an equally great success, so much so
that Pericles had to double the area of Cimon’s telesterion, already twice the
size of Pisistratus’. The mysteries celebrated in their honour were arranged
around very old Creto-Mycenaean themes: the theme of the two goddesses,
mother and daughter, united in deep affection, the theme of the abduction
of the young girl by the infernal lord and the joy of reunion, and the theme
of the ‘divine child’. This was no longer so much Plutus as Triptolemus, to
whom Demeter sent the first ear of corn which enabled man to develop
both agriculture and civilization, according to a view dear to the Greeks.
This theology, made up of successive deposits, was not perhaps very
coherent: thus Hades-Pluton gradually inherited the name of Plutus, the

original divine child, born of the love of Demeter and Iasion - whose role
became very slight.
An immense conspiracy of silence grew up around the rites themselves,
and this has only been broken by later Christian authors, who were ill-
informed and obviously dishonest. However, it is known that the lesser
mysteries celebrated in the suburb of Agrai should be distinguished from
the Great Mysteries which themselves comprised two stages, ordinary ini¬
tiation and epoptaea (or vision). The initial ceremonies took place at Athens
and the sacred objects (hiera) were solemnly brought there from Eleusis.
The assembly and proclamation, from which sacrilegious persons and
stutterers were excluded, were followed by a bathe at Phalerum, to the cry
of cto the sea with the mystai’. Then the procession moved off along the
sacred way and reached Eleusis under the leadership of Iacchus, a young
demon with a sacred cry who had become a sort of Eleusian incarnation of
Dionysus. The procession halted several times, notably at the bridge over
the Cephissus where the participants were assailed with jeers. At Eleusis
itself, after a torchlight tattoo in honour of Iacchus, sacred ceremonies took
place, beginning with the recitation of the sacramental formula: T have
fasted, I have drunk the Mixture, I have taken from the cist and after hav¬
ing felt (or tasted) I have replaced in the winnowing basket, I have taken
from the basket again and placed in the cist’. The objects alluded to were
undoubtedly representations of the sexual organs (or cakes depicting them),
and to handle them was a pledge of fertility. Then the hierophantes solemnly
showed the sacred objects, pronouncing the ‘unutterable formulae’ which
secured immortality. Finally, the first sacred play was performed, telling
the moving adventure of Kore, which first plunged the soul into the dark¬
ness of mourning and then made it burst forth into a wondrous light - put
into concrete form by opening the shutters of the lantern. The second stage
of initiation, which could only be undergone a year after the first, was
celebrated on the following night. This was the second sacred play, the
hierogamy of Demeter and Zeus, during which the hierophantes drew
the priestess of Demeter into the secret of the anactoron, followed by the
fundamental action, the silent showing of an ear of corn.
Scholars are divided over the interpretation of these strange rites. M. P.
Nilsson considers it necessary to emphasize the agrarian aspect envinced in
the ‘showing of the ear’. Gh. Picard finds the sexual elements more impor¬
tant, and, in fact, it is impossible to ignore the handling of the images of the
reproductive organs and, above all, the hierogamy. This latter was followed
by the recitation of the formula proclaiming the birth of the divine child,
the pledge of super-abundant life for all the holy people: ‘the venerable
Brimo has brought forth Brimos, the holy child, that is to say the Strong
Woman has brought forth the Strong’. In fact, very ancient liturgies were
involved here which in the Creto-Mycenaean fashion did not separate
fertility from fecundity; they had continued to be celebrated on the same
site where a Late Helladic megaron was erected.
But there was much more to it than that, and participation in the mys¬
teries undoubtedly opened the door to eternity from the very beginning.
The effects of the exaltation of the most intimate forces of vegetable, ani¬
mal and human life were not confined to existence on earth. The seed of
corn died in the earth to be re-born in manifold ears: the same was true of
man, and here we already find the evangelical parable, which corresponds
to one of the most ancient beliefs of humanity. In the same way, the union
of the gods had life-giving effects, far exceeding the perpetuation of the
species. Some sources even assume that the birth of Brimos the Strong
implied that the mystes became the child of the gods and as such was called
to a never-ending life.
In any case, the texts are categorical, from Pindar and Sophocles to
Isocrates and Plato * the dead initiate would live blissfully in the bosom of
the gods, while the non-initiate, although not strictly speaking punished,
would continue his miserable existence as in this world in damp darkness or
mire. Oh thrice happy those mortals who, after contemplating these mys¬
teries, will go to the realm of Hades; because they alone possess life there;
for the others there will be nothing but suffering’ (Sophocles, fragment
753); Surprise is sometimes expressed that the sole achievement of the
magic rites should be to assure salvation, but, after all, baptism adminis¬
tered before death procures the same effect according to the worshippers of
an even more spiritualized religion. In fact, when the initiate had been
duly purified, he became another man and indeed he could not remain un¬
moved by participation in the imposing ceremonies which drew him away
from the petty preoccupations of daily life and brought him to the level of
the divine world, beside the goddesses whose past sufferings had made them
compassionate. Though Aristophanes elsewhere mocked this salvation pur¬
chased at the minimal price of the young pig that had to be sacrificed, he
joined together in one formula ‘those who have been initiated and lead a
pious life towards foreigners and citizens’ {The Frogs, 320).
The influence of the mysteries was considerable. They introduced the
idea of personal salvation into a religion made up of ceremony and solemn
sacrifice observed by the state. Besides this, they took place in a soothing
atmosphere of human fraternity, because everyone — citizens and foreig¬
ners, free men and slaves, men and women — was admitted indiscrimi¬
nately. In a democracy so sparing of its terrestrial favours, the freedom of
the city in the hereafter was grudged to no one.
The pan-Hellenic sanctuaries envinced a similar vitality throughout the
century. Delos’ prestige certainly diminished because the island had fallen
completely under the authority of Athens, and in 426, after a new ‘purifica¬
tion which completed that of Pisistratus, Athens began to construct a great
temple to Apollo there, ‘the temple of the Athenians’. But Delphi and
Olympia benefited from the religious fervour and the affluence which were
becoming general in the Greek world. Delphi’s equivocal attitude in the
Persian wars was rapidly forgotten and paradoxically the offerings made by
Greeks victorious over the barbarians collected there (the palm-tree of
Eurymedon or the tumulus of Marathon, consecrated by the Athenians;

the twenty statues of Apollo offered by the Liparians, conquerors of the
Etruscans). Unfortunately they were soon joined by trophies of civil wars
between Hellenes (thus in 456 the Argives erected the monument of the
Epigoni after their victory over the Spartans at Oinoa). Its moral influence
was possibly less than during the Archaic period, particularly as the
Delphic priests were often accused - and not without good reason - of
speaking laconically. But the fame of the hieron of Apollo is well proven by
the number of ex votos, such as the quadrigas of the Deinomenids or the bull
of the Gorcyrians after the god had granted them a miraculous fishing haul.
Olympia remained more specifically Dorian but building activity was
equally great. The Eleans were finally able to build their lord the great
temple he lacked, with the spoils they captured from the Pisatans in 468.
Zeus’ supremacy over the goddesses he had supplanted was thus definitely
established, in much the same way as Aeschylus and Pindar had confirmed
his moral hegemony over a restored divine world. Phidias’ studio, the
south wing of the Bouleuterion, the treasuries of Sicyon and Syracuse, and
undoubtedly the stadium and the hippodrome as well, completed the work
of the preceding centuries.
The distractions which very rapidly overthrew this harmonious religion
were already making themselves felt. If the cult of Adonis was so wide¬
spread in 415, it was because the young Semitic lord had come to rejoin his
Aphrodite several decades previously and she had preceded him in Greece
by five centuries. Furthermore, the progress of thought developed a ration¬
alism which was to prove dangerous to the old beliefs. In actual fact,
triumphant democracy was sufficiently strong not to show too great severity
in respect of either new gods or strong minds. All Greece still lived in
communion, with one single impulse in an ordered piety, organized by the
cities; it was a little cold certainly, but it also generated beauty. A yearning
for salvation was satisfied by the liturgies of Eleusis, impregnated with a
collective, moderated mysticism, and men’s souls were content with the
promises they dispensed. The gods remained remote in their impassive
serenity, but they could show their benevolence to men and towns who did
not neglect them. This was the definite fulfilment of Greek religion, com¬
pletely freed from elementary forms of animism and animal or vegetable
fetishism and not yet shaken by confused disquiet. The Parthenos or the
Zeus of Olympia, as they emerged from the chisel of Phidias, were the most
noble creations erected by Hellenic theology. Olympus, their dwelling, was
very far removed from the terrestrial cities but it served as their ideal
model. Man knew his limitations and the respect mingled with fear that he
owed to the superior powers, but he had sufficient confidence in them not
to trouble them with inopportune prayers or himself with useless anguish.
Divine and Human in the Tragedy of Sophocles

Dramatic forms, addressed directly to the demos, constituted the essence of
literature. Comedy, which had reached its final technical form, was already
experiencing a succes de scandale as a result of its unbridled allusions to
political actuality and from 440 it had to be banned from representing liv¬
ing personages - though it continued to avail itself of this right. Unfortu¬
nately, all that is now available are a few fragments and a few names,
amongst whom Cratinus with his comic zest appears to have been the best
precursor of Aristophanes.
Tragedy lived on another plane: it continued to be passionately inter¬
ested in the relationships between man and the gods. Sophocles personifies
it for us, although Euripides had begun to produce from 455. Sophocles
was considered the model of the happy man: always triumphant in compe¬
titions, admired by his fellow-citizens - so much so that they conferred the
office of strategus on him after the performance of Antigone - and a zealous
worshipper of the gods and, as such, considered most worthy to welcome
Asclepius to his home when the god was brought from Epidaurus. In the
foreground of his tragedy was the man who took his destiny into his own
hands and was no longer the plaything of blind fatality. His theme par
excellence was the powerful will of the protagonists. A contemporary of the
apogde of Athens - before his exceptional longevity made him a witness of
its decline - he showed the new confidence which actuated the citizen,
confident that his actions could influence events, and also the deepening of
moral thought, when he extolled ‘the unwritten laws’ of conscience in
Antigone.
But underneath this undeniable equilibrium, a deeper tremor could be
felt. Human will engendered drama, and at the very moment when it
seemed to triumph, the jealous gods reappeared. Creon imposed his will on
everyone but perished beneath the weight of misfortunes he himself pro¬
voked; in proud anger Oedipus sought those responsible for the defilement
of Thebes, to discover that he alone was guilty. Moreover, Sophocles, good
citizen though he was, loved rebels and non-conformists. The theme of
righteous revolt which raised an ardent and uncompromising individual
against raison d’etat, lay at the heart of his work: pure and proud Antigone,
though ‘born for love and not for hate’, was justified in her disobedience
because Creon’s order had tyrannically violated the fundamental laws;
she had good reason loudly to proclaim the honour of her crime when she
reached her final dwelling.
It is not easy to account for this conflict. Recent theories (V. Ehrenberg)
show Sophocles as the defender of religious traditions. He would therefore
have been opposed to Pericles, disciple of the rationalist Anaxagoras, and
he is said to have represented him in the ungodly features of Creon and
Oedipus. It is possibly unnecessary to go so far. His heart was certainly
filled with sincere piety as well as a deep awareness of the omnipotence of
the gods, who affected the destinies of man less directly but just as decisively
as in the case of Aeschylus. But the divine was not everything for Sophocles
and it was not without reason that he exclaimed: ‘What a wonderful thing
is man!’ The man overwhelmed by the gods, the strong man who suffered
immoderately, remained great and noble and particularly worthy of our

pity, even if the root of his suffering lay in excess, as was often the case with
the most gifted temperaments, and all the more so if he suffered in order to
comply with the desire for justice, to defend the indefeasible rights of the
human being.
The same constant awareness of the gods, the decisive importance attri¬
buted to action, and the loftily acknowledged consciousness of the dignity
of man reappeared in a contemporary, though completely different work,
the History of Herodotus.
‘ The Father of History9: Herodotus

The study of history, which had been initiated in the sixth century by the
Ionian logographers, grew to its full height in the fifth, with the deepening
of political awareness as a result of the democracy. The citizen who felt his
liberty in political life and the possibility that he himself could make his
own history, also wanted to know the history that his ancestors had made.
An Asian Greek was responsible for the transition between the chronicles
of the logographers and the rational history of Thucydides. Herodotus of
Halicarnassus travelled for a long time in Persia, Scythia and Egypt, before
he settled at Athens, where he was the friend of Pericles and Sophocles, only
leaving the city to participate briefly in the colonization of Thurii. His
Enquiries (such was the first meaning of the word History) told of the gigan¬
tic conflict between the Greek and barbarian worlds in the Persian wars, as
well as its remote previous history. The narrative is overcrowded with di¬
gressions (Book 2 for example is a long report on Egypt) but bears no
animosity towards the Persians - so much so that Plutarch, who had no
great love for Herodotus, described him as the ‘friend of the barbarians’.
However, he was filled with profound sympathy for the Greek cause and
for the Athenians who did so much for it.
In many respects, Herodotus retained the indefatigable curiosity of an
Ionian who delighted in the varied spectacle the world offered: moreover,
he wrote in Ionian dialect. He enquired into the sources of the Nile and its
floods and described the hippopotamus and the crocodile. Costumes which
were different from those worn in Greece roused his enthusiasm and, like a
true ethnographer, he analysed the sexual customs of the African tribes.
He loved animated and picturesque tableaux, such as the adjudication of
the women of Babylon. His narrative teemed with colourful anecdotes,
notably about the Great Kings: he tended to reduce the beginning of the
second Persian war to a series of tableaux showing the magnificent journey
of an oriental despot. He was attracted by anything strange and he is
incomparable when he evokes natural or human thomata (marvels).
These narratives themselves are a valuable acquisition, full of colour and
life, but the historian was already appearing beneath the chronicler. His
documentation was extensive, first acquired from books (and he has been
accused of stealing from his predecessors, notably Hecataeus), but more
often drawn from his investigations and voyages. He cannot reasonably be

reproached for neither having understood nor read any oriental language
and thus being at the mercy of local informers and guides. Undeniably
credulous, he nonetheless made a great effort to use the evidence of one
party to criticize that of another. His impartiality was acknowledged,
although he occasionally showed some contempt for the Ionians and
Thebans, and some preference for the Athenians, particularly the family of
the Alcmaeonids. Although he was primarily interested in secondary
causes and saw the fundamental motive power of history in the qualities
and intrigues of great men, he did not despise primary causes and clearly
indicated that the real cause of the Persian wars lay in the ineluctable im¬
pact of two imperialisms. He well deserved the glory Cicero ascribed to him
when he called him ‘the father of history’.
The Ambitions of the pre-Socratic Philosophers

In the same way as Herodotus remained to a large extent the heir of the
logographers, classical philosophy followed the track of Archaic thought. It
was a continuous and seething movement, for the most part located outside
Athens, and its chronology is so difficult to establish that it is advisable to
include all the pre-Socratics before the appearance of the Sophists within
a single study. Like their predecessors of the sixth century they were bold
inventors of vast cosmological systems. The two metaphysical poles of the
Greek world remained Ionia and the west.
In Ionia, thought remained loyal to an abstract positivism, the enemy of
mythological constructs and mystical sects, more taken up with cosmology
than with human destiny and as such, reserved to a tiny elite. Three great
names personify it for us: Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and Leucippus, who can
scarcely be separated from his disciple Democritus.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, who was nicknamed the Melancholy because of
his gloomy temperament, was apparently in quest of the primary principle,
like the ‘physicists’ of the preceding century, and he found it in fire. The
universe for him was an eternal becoming, and the maxims in which he
expressed this painful discovery are famous: ‘Everything passes’; ‘You can¬
not enter the same river twice, because new water always flows over you’.
But the Logos was immutable in this mobility, and survived as the law of
becoming, symbolized by fire. Conflict (Polemos) actuated the universe,
‘father of all things, king of all things’, and paradoxically engendered the
supreme harmony, because conflict was the inner tension which maintained
contraries in order - life and death, youth and age, waking and sleeping,
night and day - because it was the force which caused one term to be born
from another in a continuous cycle. Thus the fundamental unity was re¬
established; ‘at the word not of myself but of the Logos, it is wise to recog¬
nize that everything is one’ - so much so that the prophet of universal
movement and incessant conflict returned at the end of his meditations to
the fundamental identity of man and the order of the cosmos. Nietzsche
forcibly declared: ‘What Heraclitus contemplated, the presence of law in

becoming, will henceforth be contemplated eternally: it is he who raised
the curtain on this sublime spectacle’. But one can understand why his
contemporaries, irritated by his deliberately sibylline remarks, frightened
by the abysses of the Other and the One which he opened beneath their
feet, called him the Obscure.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae found the world equally varied. It was made
up of the combination of irresolvable qualities. Everything contained,
mingled within itself, the seeds of everything else, the seeds which Aristotle
later called the homoeomeries (homogeneous parts). An incessant move¬
ment aimed at their dissociation, but it was endless because everything
concealed an infinity of qualities. Thus little by little, the different parts of
the world were isolated in the bosom of the infinite, the moist and the cold
in the centre, the dry and the hot on the exterior. All these movements
animating matter were only possible because an essential thinking quality,
Nous, existed outside matter. Nous, or Intelligence, was the organizing of
the Cosmos and its intervention had given order to the original chaos.
Anaxagoras conceived it as a circular movement gradually creating a
whirlwind which reached infinite space, separating the stars for example,
and igniting them. It was an exciting system which showed the unifying
and directing power of the mind amidst the infinite disorder of matter. Its
influence on Pericles’ policies is well known. In fact, it is easy to understand
the friendship between the two men, whose idealism was based on a firm
positivism. Anaxagoras dissected a ram born with one horn to one of
Pericles’ flocks. He was on the point of being brought to justice for teaching
that the sun was only an incandescent mass: even Athens was not ripe for
the boldness of his thought.
Leucippus of Miletus also inherited the Ionian tradition which he en¬
riched with the teaching of Zeno of Elea. At the end of the century, his
disciple, Democritus of Abdera, accepted his cosmogony, but extended his
reflections to cover the most diverse disciplines and proved himself the true
precursor of Aristotle in the multitude of his precise observations and his
encyclopaedic ambitions. Their own particular originality was to admit
that matter was composed of indivisible particles, unfathomable, solid and
infinite, to which they gave the name of ideas, and which did not differ
except in size, configuration and position. Amidst the perfect void in which
they moved, the whirling movement created aggregates, according to the
double play of density, which pushed the lightest towards the exterior, and
of shape, which allowed complementary particles to reunite. The soul itself
did not escape the pressure of this mechanism: it was made up of light and
spherical atoms, similar to the dust which hovers in a sunbeam, and con¬
stantly renewed by respiration. The modern aspect of this doctrine is
striking, not only because its creators were the distant precursors of modern
atomist doctrines, but also because for the first time it made no appeal to
an external motive force such as Logos or Nous to explain the universe.
Ionian positivism was confronted by a western rationalism, more
sensitive to mathematics than physics, freely expressing itself in mythical

form, taken up with the problem of destiny and as such sometimes able to
spread further afield. Pythagoreanism retained its creative impulse and its
success, but Empedocles and the Eleatic School were no less important.
Pythagoreanism spread widely both in Magna Graecia and Greece after
the expulsion of the sect from Croton, but a split took place between the
two tendencies which co-existed in the thought of the founder: ‘the acous-
matics’, faithful to the strict observances, formed positively religious confra¬
ternities; the ‘mathematicians’ were much more secular, seeking to
encourage progress in the sciences, notably arithmetic, geometry and
astronomy, in order better to discover the numerical harmony immanent
in the universe. Some names emerge, particularly at the end of the century
and at the beginning of the next, although it is not always possible to know
which works correspond to them: Philolaus, an inspired heretic who con¬
trasted the idea of relativity to the over-strict categories of the Pythagorean
tradition; Archytas and Theaetetus (beginning of fourth century) who
brought about decisive progress in geometry and organized it into a
rational outline, ‘increasing the number of theorems and forming them into
a more scientific whole’ (Proclos).
Empedocles of Agrigentum resembled Pythagoras in his strong person¬
ality of high-coloured magus, around whom a legend quickly grew up.
Clad in purple, he wandered over the Greek world like a king or, better
still, like a god, scattering miracles beneath his feet. He broke up the
monism of the Ionians by stating that there were four elements or rather
‘four roots of all things,’ iron, water, air and earth, a doctrine which
gathered support during the centuries. Two motive forces animated the
universe and explained the constant exchanges between these elements:
Strife and Friendship, which triumphed in turn in an indefinite series of
cycles. This idea of cycle was no less important for the human soul: guilty
souls had to wander three times ten thousand years in order to regenerate
themselves through suffering. In fact, mysticism was at the basis of the doc¬
trine: just like Pythagoras, Empedocles stated the need for abstinence and
purification, to which he consecrated a treatise. This philosopher was also
an engineer, an astronomer, a physician, a biologist and a thaumaturge.
This strange mixture of rationalism and mysticism was slightly out of
place at the height of the fifth century: it was more reminiscent of the
thinkers of the Archaic period, of the ‘philosopher kings’ dear to Nietzsche,
especially as the dualism of the two motive principles, the theory of cycles,
and the ritual observances, evoked the oriental influences which were so
important at the dawn of Greek thought.
Empedocles ended his romantic existence as a prophet by throwing
himself into the purifying fire of Etna: his disciples only found the soles of
his sandals; his soul had fled into the universal fire.
A real school developed at Elea after Xenophanes. Its incontestable
leader was Parmenides (beginning of fifth century). A few brilliant frag¬
ments of his work remain, including the introduction to the poem where he
293
describes how he was carried off by the chariot of the daughters of the Sun
towards Justice who revealed to him the supreme truth. This truth is that
the being is and the non-being is not. ‘I am going to tell you,’ the goddess
informed him, ‘which are the only two paths of research to conceive: the
first, how being is and that it is not possible that it should not be the only
path to trust to; the second, that it is not and that non-being is necessary,
that path is only a track where absolutely nothing on which to rely is to
be found’ (fragment 2). Being was identified with a perfect sphere,
indestructible, immobile and complete.
Towards the middle of the century, Zeno of Elea again took up the thesis
of the one and immobile being by demonstrating the absurdities of the
contrary thesis in his famous apories (Achilles and the tortoise, the unmov¬
ing arrow in full flight). He was thus, as Aristotle said, the real founder of
dialectic, the method of research by discussion which gained support in the
following generation.
Melissus of Samos, on the contrary, bent the doctrine in the direction of
Ionian thought by attributing eternity and infinity to being.
A common characteristic of such different doctrines can be found in their
concurrent cosmological and ontological aspirations; they aimed to explain
the birth and evolution of the cosmos, they were preoccupied with reconcil¬
ing the diversity and the unity of the real. Direct heirs of the Archaic
philosophers, they seemed in a sense to be survivals in the midst of the fifth
century. However, from 450 onwards, a new trend appeared in Greece:
critical thought replaced Ionian and western dogmatism; man took the
place of the universe and the being at the heart of speculative thought. This
was the sophist revolution which will be studied at the time of its conclusive
triumph.
The Acropolis of Pericles

The same desire to make reason prevail was evident in the building of the
towns. Town-planning, which had undoubtedly appeared from 480 on¬
wards, developed further. Tradition links it with the name of Hippodamus
of Miletus, a philosopher possibly with Pythagorean tendencies, who
would in fact seem to have synthesized converging investigations. Two new
principles emerged: the roads intersected at right angles (giving a
chequered arrangement which had already been adopted in certain colo¬
nial agglomerations), moreover without the two principal axes later found
in Roman designs; the plan was intended to be functional; for example, it
set aside certain districts for the port, for public buildings and for private
dwellings. Most noteworthy was the fact that a preliminary outline was
drawn up, ready for execution as the need arose. This was the case with the
two designs which can be attributed with most certainty to Hippodamus:
Miletus at the time of its construction in 479, and Piraeus where he worked
for Themistocles. He probably also collaborated in the pan-Hellenic
colony of Thurii for Pericles. At the end of the century, Rhodes was built
according to the same rules, and they enjoyed a long success during the
Hellenistic period.
A great deal of building work continued to be undertaken, notably in
the west, where Doric always reigned supreme. Agrigentum, thriving on
the booty it had taken from the Carthaginians at Himera, erected a series
of temples of rare beauty throughout the century, including those of‘Juno
Lucina’ and the ‘Concord’. The sacred enclosure at Posidonia was en¬
hanced in about 450 by the ‘temple of Neptune’, really consecrated to
Hera Argeia, which gave such an astonishing impression of stability with¬
out heaviness that it could be considered the most beautiful Greek temple
in Italy: it was slightly earlier than the Parthenon and already included
technical refinements (notably the sweep of the horizontal lines) which
Ictinus was erroneously thought to have invented.
But Pericles’ building programme far exceeded anything realized else¬
where : the telesterion at Eleusis, the temples of Poseidon at Sunium and of
Nemesis at Rhamnus, and, at Athens itself, the Odeon and the temples of
Hephaestus and Dionysus, not to mention a new arrangement of the
Acropolis. Pericles had the good fortune to find an indispensable associate
in Phidias, whom he made, so to speak, his superintendent of fine arts.
Phidias gathered a pleiad of artists around him and formed a general plan
to make the sacred hill an incomparable bridge between men and the gods.
There was no strict arrangement of the buildings in relation to each other,
but a scholarly mingling of Doric and Ionic so that severity and grace
might combine in a rich harmony. It has been suggested (W. Lawrence)
that the great decorative artist wanted to make the Acropolis a rival to the
Persian acropolises, where the palaces of the Great Kings were built, as
though better to emphasize the differences between a free and an enslaved
civilization. Deliberate or not, the comparison compels attention: on one
hand, the residence of an oriental despot ruling with heavy hand over a
world of conquered slaves, on the other, the dwelling of tutelary gods to
whom Athens found it all the easier to submit as they represented mind in
its purest form.
The plan Pericles and Phidias conceived was too vast to be achieved
within a single generation: neither of them saw its full completion which
only came about towards the end of the century. At least two buildings were
finished, one completely, the other partially, by 431: the Parthenon and
the Propylaea. ‘The great temple’, as the Parthenon is called, was built on
the site where Cleisthenian democracy had begun a temple to Athena. It
was built between 447 and 438 and was first remarkable for its considerable
dimensions (though these did not in any way attempt to compete with the
colossal sanctuaries of Asia and the west) and its octastyle facades. Equally
noteworthy was its unusual attempt to combine an exterior Doric frieze,
in harmony with the Doric order of the colonnade, with an Ionic frieze
below the peristyle. Finally, it was distinguished by the successful subtleties
which its architects, Ictinus and Callicrates, utilized in order to rectify the
optical illusions (course laid in slightly convex lines, the curve of which
295
reflected right back to the architrave; columns leaning towards the in¬
terior; more massive corner columns). Within, the plan was fairly complex:
in the east, the pronaos and the naos, holding the dazzling chryselephantine
Athena by Phidias; in the west, the opisthodomus and a supplementary
room, the Parthenon in the strict sense of the word, intended to protect the
treasury of Athena and that of the state.
The sculptured decoration of this majestic building added its own
message to the message of beauty. The frontons depicted the birth of
Athena and the dispute for Attica, which were almost domestic scenes for
the Athenians. The Doric frieze held four combats but these did nothing
whatever to detract from the harmony because the powers of disorder and
barbarism were shown yielding to the powers of the mind four times.
Finally - a unique characteristic which, it has been suggested, might have
been modelled on the realistic friezes of Susa or Persepolis - the
Panathenaea was depicted round the secos, a human scene, the merry
procession of an entire nation united in reverence to its gods. The gods
themselves were represented on the principal facade in a venerable and
peaceful assembly.
When the Parthenon was completed, Mnesicles undertook to provide
the Acropolis with a monumental entrance, the Propylaea, which replaced
the small propylaeum of Pisistratus. It was only a vestibule between two
wings which were unequal because of religious considerations and where
the Doric was still wedded to the Ionic. But there was great nobility in this
broad building, the only one on the plateau not to be consecrated to the
gods, a gate of blue and white marble leading to their domain on the
Acropolis.
The Figurative Arts: Towards the Triumph of Serenity

Three names made statuary famous in mid-century. Myron and Polycletus
brought athletic sculpture to perfection. Myron of Eleutherae excelled in
rendering the instantaneous, as in the wonderful Discobolus where he
seems to have caught a fugitive moment of time and imbued it with en¬
during quality, but he was also a powerful sculptor of animals. Polycletus
of Argos was more abstract and sought the ‘canon’ of the human body, that
is to say, a system of mathematical proportions between its various parts:
an old dream dear to the Greek mind, which Lysippus took up again in the
following century. An excellent maker of bronzes in the Argive tradition,
his two masterpieces, the Doryphorus and the Diadumenos, immortalized
young men in repose, with slightly bulky musculature and expressionless
faces; both the rhythmic harmony and the scholarly design of the ideal
beauty of the immobile, self-absorbed ephebi arouse admiration.
Phidias was a creator of gods, whether for the friezes and frontons of the
Parthenon, the bas-relief of the telesterion, or of statues (Athena Promachos
and Athena Lemnia and, above all, his two colossal chryselephantine
figures, the Parthenos and the Zeus of Olympia). If he sculptured men, in
the procession of the Panathenaea for example, it was to raise them to the
divine plane. Fault could be found with his new technique of drapery, his
bodies which were more supple than those of Polycletus, or the diffuse
sweetness of his faces. But to do so would be to avoid the fundamental
issues because with him everything was spiritual. The harmony of the
bodies and the tranquillity of the faces blazed forth the supreme virtue of
the Immortals: self-mastery. These Olympians were certainly impassive
and would not give way to pity; but they were not inaccessible, because
they held up the pure image of their perfection to man and it behoved
everyone to strive with might and main to emulate it. This art, which has
naively been described as cold and even academic, was profoundly human.
Although it did not give ready sympathy and refused to depreciate the
divinity, it ennobled man by tearing him from his weaknesses. Nothing was
more committed nor more inciting to action.
Figure 61 Satyrs discovering a sleeping Maenad.

Attic vase with red figures, Periclean period
The marbles of the Parthenon illustrated the painful victory of mind and
the rising of the stars, symbol of the advent of the enlightenment. Demeter
and Kore were loving bounteousness. The various Athenas, pacific or war¬
like, had the youth, strength, and wisdom which Pericles dreamt of for
Athens. And the Zeus of Olympia, halfway between the unctuous sweetness
of the Buddha of Amaravati and the unapproachable severity of the
Pantocrator of Daphni, was the most balanced and invigorating image of
the master of the world: that of supreme strategus of the cosmos, powerful
and magnanimous.
The minor arts could not fail to respond to lessons such as these.
Ceramics, in particular, became much more free in about 460 and came
under a double influence (figure 61). They adapted the discoveries of
Polygnotus on the sides of vases, displaying figures on several planes and
attempting to render psychological expression: a wonderful cup at
Munich, for example, shows Achilles falling in love with the Amazon
Penthesilea just as he is sacrificing her; a crater from Orvieto treated the
massacre of the Niobids with fresh pathos. But the great sculpture of
Phidias communicated some small portion of its harmony, strength and
serenity: nothing is more noble, more simple in line and more restrained
in feeling than the warrior’s farewell painted on a stamnos at Munich.
297
THE GENERATION OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR
AND THE CRISIS OF THE GREEK CONSCIENCE
After 4.30 — if it is possible to fix a date for such a subtle change — a crisis
shook Hellenism, equally perceptible in the alterations in daily life, the
development of the theatre, sculpture and ceramics, and the changes in
religious beliefs. Spiritual creations were no less brilliant than in the pre¬
ceding generation, but serenity was replaced by restlessness, certainty by
doubt and equilibrium by investigation.
Two independent causes explain so general an evolution. The most
apparent was the Peloponnesian war, when the power of Athens wavered
for a long time before collapsing, and which destroyed its political, social
and economic balance well before the disaster of 404. But there was more
to it than that, more especially as in several spheres the changes preceded
the conflict. Thinkers, breaking with a tradition which was nearly two
centuries old, turned away from cosmological and ontological problems
and brought their reflection to bear on man: their dissolving criticism
contributed to breaking up an established framework.
A New Education: Sophistry

The Sophists — and the word, which meant ‘skilled in wisdom’, was at first
very far from having its present pejorative meaning - were teachers rather
than philosophers. They went from town to town, holding public lectures
(called displays because the teachers displayed their knowledge and above
all their ability) and conversing with young people for high fees which
accordingly limited their clientele to well-to-do and therefore often aristo¬
cratic circles. They aroused a great deal of animosity from people who were
opposed to change: for example, Aristophanes in the Clouds paradoxically
portrayed Socrates as a dangerous Sophist, in the most unfortunate and
ridiculous manner - as boastful, self-seeking and devoid of all moral sense.
Figure 62 A lesson at
school. Attic cup with
red figures by Duris,
about 480
iz
But they received a most eager and enthusiastic welcome from their young
audience.
This was because their teaching answered a profound need: no new type
of education had come to replace the ancient aristocratic education, based
on the reading and commentary of the old poets (figure 62). The Sophists
used a method, borrowed from Eleatism - dialectics - that is to say step-
by-step discussion with the interlocutor, who led the pupil to acknowledge
that his postulates were false. Their varied, if not profound, knowledge
borrowed from all the human disciplines made them formidable in argu¬
ment. Furthermore, their pupils were also attracted by the practical and
even pragmatic aspect of their teaching: the man who had learned how to
speak, think and discuss with them, in his turn became a formidable
opponent, capable of asserting himself in daily life, before the tribunals, at
the assembly. These teachers were foreigners to Athens, but they had all
stayed there. They brought appropriate techniques for mastering the
demos to the city: they taught the art of words in a town where the word
ruled supreme but where no rhetoric had yet flowered in the schools. The
iridescent subtleties of their minds were understandably not their sole
attraction: the young men who spent liberally in order to associate with
them felt that they were wasting neither time nor money. The paradox of
sophistry was that it gave to Athens the education of mind and verbal
facility necessary to a democratic state, but that its clientele was restricted
to the most well-off young people. It thus contributed to increasing the
social imbalance, because it put a dangerous weapon into the hands of
those most favoured by fortune: the art of persuasion.
Was there some common element in such a variety of minds? Some
scholars think it lay in their humanism (W. Jaeger): they all believed in the
possibility of an indefinite development for man as a result of an education
which touched on all the disciplines, even virtue. A common factor can also
be seen in their need to question traditional opinions and no longer to base
thought and life (which they did not wish to separate) on anything but
human reason, which they made the touchstone of all their belief and
action. They were forced to make one fundamental distinction: that be¬
tween nature (physis) and law (nomos). Law was artificial because it often
reflected contingent historical factors and was therefore no longer sacred.
The revolutionary nature of such a concept in Hellenism, which had
hitherto found its fundamental basis in respect for nomos, can well be
imagined.
But there were still striking differences in the thought of these pro¬
fessional doubters. The question was certainly one of more or less radical
temperament; it was also a question of period, the first generation vindi¬
cating Periclean ideology, the second that of the Thirty. Protagoras of
Abdera (with whom Pericles was not afraid to spend a whole day in dis¬
cussion) made the strongest affirmation of humanism when he said that
man was ‘the measure of all things’. As far as the gods were concerned, he
could not know ‘neither that they are nor that they are not’ (fragment 4).
299
But this methodical doubt did not prevent him from attributing to Zeus
the most beautiful gifts given man: justice and modesty. And he believed
in the quality of the laws to the extent of accepting an appointment as
legislator to the pan-Hellenic colony of Thurii.
Gorgias of Leontini, who came to Athens in 427 as ambassador and
counted Thucydides and Isocrates amongst his disciples, pushed scepticism
much further: there was no being; if there were, it would be unknowable;
if it were knowable, the knowledge would be incommunicable. Thus he
specialized in the art of the word, which had been born at Syracuse with
Corax and Tisias, authors of technical treatises on rhetoric, intended to
teach the litigant the art of persuasion. It triumphed throughout Greece,
at Athens and Olympia, and determined the rules of public speech which
was made up of incisive phrases and striking antitheses, enhanced by skilful
artifices, especially the repetition of the same sounds.
Prodicus of Geos studied language in the dual form of semantics and
etymology. Hippias of Elis was a fine speaker himself as well as a geomet¬
rician and historian. Antiphon the Sophist — who need not perhaps be
distinguished from his homonym, the inspirer of oligarchical hetaireiai —
emphasized the conventional character of the laws. The young Callicles
of the Gorgias, whether fictional or a real personage, gave the strongest
expression to a moral nihilism which only admitted of the triumph
(acknowledged as supremely just) of the strong man over the weak.
It is difficult to form a balanced judgement on a movement such as this.
For the first time in the history of man, an effort was made to submit all
belief to the light of reason and nothing could have been more noble than
this. It is impossible not to remember that maxim of Hippias - and there
are many others like it — which, denying the antagonism on which Greek
society was based, considered all men ‘as kinsmen and intimates, and
fellow-citizens by nature not by law’ (in Plato, Protagoras, 337c). But
sophistry equally had its weaknesses. Beneath humanist appearances it
showed a great contempt for man in its indifference to all moral criteria
and in its affirmation that ‘wrong reasoning’ was as valid as ‘right reason¬
ing’. Even outside these extremes, it remained dissolvent, because it
attacked basic beliefs, which had been formulated at length during earlier
centuries and which formed the foundations of city, ethics and religion for
example. Born of the doubts which preceded it, the movement consolidated
them and drew from them their ultimate consequences. Well before the
upheavals of the following century, the idea of the polls, based on respect
for the law, on the blind submission of the individual to the collectivity,
and on arbitrary distinctions between citizen and foreigner, between free
man and slave, between Greek and barbarian, had collapsed beneath its
subtle arguments. Basically, this was a triumph for the individual, of man
armed only with reason, over the imperatives of the state and tradition.
The same movement can be found at the same period, in the teachings of
the sophists of India and China. This was already the Aufkldrung, with its
destructive power and undeniable greatness.
The magnificent development of medicine in the second half of the cen¬

tury can be explained partly by the same causes as sophistry. In the schools
- and the two most important were at Cnidos and Cos — medical thought,
heir to an ancient tradition, was gradually freed from magical beliefs and
laid the first foundations of modern therapeutics, based both on empirical
observation and reasoning. The doctors knew nothing of anatomy and even
less of physiology, but they did not neglect the influence of environment,
temperament, or the patient’s psychology, and brought about some very
fine cures. The richness of their observations can be assessed in the treatises
in the Hippocratic Collection. Although this was a collective work, the
advance in one of the most remarkable human techniques can also be
explained by the genius of one man: Hippocrates of Cos (born in about
460), a great scholar and practitioner, founder of professional ethics by the
famous oath that he imposed on his disciples. Almost everything about him
is unknown, except that he dominated his period by his breadth of thought
and the demands of his conscience.
The Mystery of Socrates

Socrates applied himself to counteracting the excesses of the sophists’
though in the Clouds, in 423, Aristophanes pretended to mistake him for
one. He was an Athenian of good stock, a good citizen who fought bravely
at Potidaea and Delium. He did not run a school in the proper sense of the
term, because he did not ask for payment, but he was surrounded by a
coterie of enthusiastic young people. He wrote nothing. Whether he was
speaking to the ordinary man in the street or at the shoemaker’s, or holding
dialogues with professional thinkers or with his disciples, he made use of
irony in the Greek sense of the word - that is to say a series of apparently
naive questions which made the adversary gradually retreat, disclosed the
contradictions in his thought and the inconsistencies of his action, and left
him bound hand and foot. In his own opinion, his real profession was mid¬
wifery: his mother, who was a midwife, delivered babies; he delivered
minds, revealing to them the hidden truths that they bore unwittingly
within themselves.
After the disaster, all the sins of humiliated Athens were heaped on
Socrates’ shoulders. In 399, three accusers brought him before the magis¬
trates, charging him with corrupting young people and stating that, not
content with disbelieving in the gods of the city, he had introduced new
gods. Was there any truth in this? Some modern scholars assert that all
Plato’s thought was impregnated with Orphico-Pythagoreanism and they
believe that they have found its origin in Socrates. But this is not at all
certain and, moreover, would it have been cause for a capital accusation?
In reality, the case brought against him was political. His disciples prim¬
arily belonged to aristocratic circles and included two formidable enemies
of the people, Alcibiades and Critias. No more was needed to make him
suspect to the democracy, cautious after the defeat. Recent authors
(Chroust) have been even more misled by appearances, and regard

Socrates as the secret inspirer of the oligarchical hetaireiai. His most promi¬
nent disciples, Plato and Xenophon, undoubtedly bitterly abused the
democracy but, after all, their master’s death gave them an additional and
decisive reason to despise it. There are no grounds for considering Socrates
as anything but a sensible man who was not blind to the defects of the
demos, without wanting to remove its power. His criticism of democracy
seems more constructive than destructive. It would be more intelligent to
ask whether Socrates’ individualistic preaching was not contrary to the
traditional idea of the city. If Socrates seemed dangerous, it was because he
preferred personal improvement to everything else. In any case, the city
was looking for a scapegoat and no one seemed more apt to fill the role than
the eccentric old man with a face like Silenus, who was disliked by many
citizens because he had disturbed their placid indifference and who had
already been depicted in a very unfavourable light twenty years earlier by
Aristophanes.
Whatever the case, Socrates put up a noble defence but when he was
proclaimed guilty he mocked the judges by proposing that, as punishment,
he be fed at the state’s expense at Prytaneum. He was condemned to death,
but he could still have fled, as his disciples had bribed his warders. Socrates
refused. The old man did not want to disobey the laws, even unjust laws, of
his native land. This would seem to show up conclusively the weakness of
the thesis which makes him a doctrinaire of the hetaireiai. After asking his
friends to sacrifice the cock he had promised to Asclepius, he raised the
cup filled with hemlock to his lips. It is impossible to read the account of
his last moments in Phaedo without being moved to tears: voluntarily,
without any boasting, with no megalomania to sustain him like other
prophets, he faced death and a hereafter which was his only hope and,
while the poison gradually froze his body, amidst the grief of his friends,
he continued to talk serenely.
Socrates’ message is as mysterious as the motives for his conviction. It is
only known indirectly from the writings of two of his disciples, one of
whom was too simple, and the other too great a genius. The evidence which
Xenophon and Plato give has only their admiration in common and it is
therefore not surprising that modern scholars have given such profoundly
different presentations of Socrates. His doctrine, if doctrine there was -
and it can be doubted, when it is noted that both the hedonism of the
Cyrenaics and the ascetic mysticism of Plato claimed kinship with him -
was confined to very few things. He admitted the primacy of man, ‘making
philosophy descend from heaven to the earth’, in the words of Cicero. He
took up again for his own purposes the dictum of Delphi, ‘know thyself’,
and, moreover, he diverted it from its purely moral sense to affirm the
necessity of action based on thought and introspection. He proclaimed that
‘no one is voluntarily bad’, giving the purest expression of moral intellec-
tualism. He affirmed the rights of the irrational, falling into an ecstasy for a
whole day during the siege of Potidaea and following that mysterious
‘daemon’ - voice of conscience or more a distinct supernatural power? —

which held him back from the brink of evil actions.
It is already much more difficult to distinguish what can be attributed
to him in Plato’s loftier speculations. The founder of the Academy clearly
credited him with the theory of ideas — those intelligible forms (the first
meaning of idea being form) which explained concrete reality. But it is
equally certain that Plato applied the theory to other fields, notably
knowledge, which were quite immaterial to Socrates. Socratic dialogue
must have been less metaphysical than Platonic dialogue.
At the heart of the strange and powerful verbal excitement which
belonged to Socrates, there was essentially ‘an incitement to the fife of the
mind’ (G. Bastide), an art of button-holing the listener in order to force
him to reflect, to set himself problems. He compared himself to a gad-fly
or cramp-fish preventing the Athenians from remaining somnolent. He was
a good-natured prophet, who practised what he preached and sowed the
seeds of the restlessness which is the basis of moral and philosophical
reflection. Heir to Anaxagoras, he made mind the sole living reality and,
although his thought was limited in object and although he did not found
either cosmology or ontology, he deserved more than all the pre-Socratics
and, despite the sarcastic maledictions of Nietzsche, to be considered the
father of western thought.
Aristophanes or Regret for the Past

All branches of literature showed the deep influence of sophistry, except
perhaps comedy which remained traditional and too fond of plain com¬
mon sense to worry about the subtleties of the new sages. Its structure was
well determined: it comprised a prologue, followed by the entrance of the
chorus, the ‘verbal combat’ which permitted the exposition of two con¬
flicting theses, the parabasis when the chorus temporarily detached itself
from the action and recounted grievances to the audiences, and finally the
exodus in the form of a saraband. But it remained very free in its subject
matter, always closely connected with the reality of a town seething with
excitement. This ‘ancient comedy’ bore a greater relationship to present-
day revues and sketches than to a real comedy of plot, character and
manners.
One single name stands out from the general body of comic writers of
whom some lines remain: Aristophanes. He was an Athenian and his first
play was produced in 427. The confused years of the Peloponnesian war
provided plenty of material to fan the flames of anger of a troubled mind
which missed the good old days. It was not that this moderate man sym¬
pathized with the aristocrats, but his thoughts readily turned towards an
already remote past (he gives the impression that he thought more about
those who fought at Marathon than about Pericles’ contemporaries) when
life was easy and harmonious, without the apparent refinements which
were only precursors of debauchery.
In fact, when he looked around, nothing was the same. Politicians, such
as Cleon (with whom he picked many a bone), were figures of fun, greedy
and unscrupulous: in The Knights it is very difficult to find a sausage-seller
more wretched or more vile than the Paphlagonian, who could supplant
him in the favours of Demos. The administration of justice was even worse
since Cleon had instituted the triobolus. The Wasps gives a dreadful picture
of legal life: the people have a passion for sitting in judgement so that they
can earn more; sycophants multiply scandalous accusations against the
rich whom the demos envy; Athens has become Chicanopolis and the
former fighters of Marathon, who Aristophanes with deliberate improba¬
bility made into the chorus of his comedy, have exchanged their pikes for
the stylets the heliastes used to pen their judgements. This play, which
Racine later made into a charming picture of manners, was a powerful
political pamphlet against a democratic institution which demagogues had
turned into a formidable weapon.
And yet it could open up a wonderful field of action for enlightened
politicians. The people, particularly the peasants, were suffering from the
horrors of war; the first objective therefore was to re-establish peace. In a
fragment of a lost play, Aristophanes extols Georgia (Agriculture) as ‘nurse,
servant, help, guardian, sister and daughter of Peace’; in The Acharnians a
worthy peasant, Dicaeopolis, is forced to make an individual peace with
Sparta and this fills him with joy; in The Peace. Tyrgaeus has to mount a
dung-beetle to go to the heavens and fetch the inaccessible goddess - for
whom the poet, voicing the hopes of many humble people, yearned with
all his might; in the dark days of 411, Lysistrata sees no other solution than
to ask the Athenian women to leave their men’s passions unsatisfied in order
to negotiate.
Nor was the picture of daily customs more reassuring. The peasants
were demoralized by the town where they had to seek refuge. Strepsiades
in The Clouds compares his own healthy country smell with the luxurious
smell of the townswoman he married: ‘This wife I married and we came
together, I rank with wine-lees, fig boards, greasy wool packs; she all with
scents, and saffron, and tongue-kissings, feasting, expense, and lordly
modes of loving’ (50 ffi). Sons no longer respected their fathers because the
Sophists had substituted soft and depraved education for the virile, virtuous
education of former times. The Clouds is a violent pamphlet against sophis¬
try, which taught the way to success by making ‘weak reasoning’ triumph:
the ‘Thinkery’ of Socrates (curiously chosen to represent the new edu¬
cators) was a school of immorality. Religion itself was corrupted by the
influx of foreign cults, which found all too many adepts amongst the
women, naturally greedy for sensation and enthusiasts for sophisticated
mysticism.
Art degenerated daily. Music had deteriorated since the abominable
innovations by Phrynis of Mytilene and Timotheus of Miletus had dimin¬
ished the share of the male element of rhythm to the advantage of the
female element of melody; their tunes were nothing but the ‘trampings of
ants’. Even the music of the tragedies was disintegrating under this per¬
nicious influence. Their inspiration was not much better. Aristophanes
combined the maturing Euripides and his young rival, the too-delicate
Agathon, in the same hatred. In The Thesmophoriagusae, some strapping
women decide to settle the future of Euripides who indefatigably insults
them. In The Frogs, in 405, at a time of mounting danger, Dionysus arbi¬
trates in the underworld between Aeschylus and Euripides and gives the
palm to the glorious veteran of Marathon, symbol of past greatness, against
the wretched destroyer of public mind.
The comic exaggeration and violent personal attacks dear to ‘Old
Comedy’ must certainly be taken into consideration - or else it would seem
as if Athens was inhabited only by ignoble layabouts. But the fresco is so
alive and the evidence so precise that V. Ehrenberg was able to utilize this
work for a sociological study of Athens at the end of the century. The
impression which emerged was of a world cracking on all sides under the
compelling pressure of innovating forces. The laudator temporis acti, which
Aristophanes was, grieved for it, and the paradox lay in the fact that he
could make the demos laugh at its defects and its need for change.
He could do so because he had a huge gift for comic laughter. There is
nothing refined about the comedies, which cheerfully stir up excrement
when they are not falling into libidinous jesting. All prejudice must be laid
aside in order to understand Aristophanes and the healthy natural atmos¬
phere of ancient societies. Furthermore, the power of his genius hallows
his dirt and his broad jokes. No one has re-discovered the secret of his
fantasy, which disguised heliasts as wasps and too-subtle thoughts as
clouds or which imagined the side-splitting city of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
No one knew as he did the art of introducing such rhythmic and flowing
poetry on to the stage and evoking in such delicate terms the winged tribe
or the croaking people of the swamps. His own personal ideal may not have
been very lofty and he would willingly have identified himself with
Dicaeopolis of The Acharnians (270 ff.), whose happiness consisted of seizing
the pretty woodcutter’s wife Thratta round the waist or having a good
carousal. But he fired his public - and that public it must be repeated was
not the bourgeois elite of present-day theatres, but the entire nation - with
the most elevated themes of politics, ethics and literature. His work was the
finest homage to the intelligence of the demos - in which he himself was
perhaps over-inclined to see only degradation.
An Uneasy Sophist: Euripides

Aristophanes was always a man of the people, although he despised the
innovations which the people enjoyed. Euripides was a lofty thinker who,
although completely permeated with the new spirit, only won first place
five times with the seventy-eight plays he presented and even at the end of
his life preferred to leave ungrateful Athens for the court of Pella.
More than anyone else he bore the stamp of his period, not only because
305
his work was filled with precise allusions (the joy of modern commentators)
but because he expressed all its misgivings.
He had no doctrine, no system comparable to those of his predecessors.
More than that, he seemed to enjoy destroying in one play what he had put
forward in another. He was interested in research and analysis, and not in
the formulation of a metaphysic or an ethic; he preferred to analyse their
different aspects in turn. This approach was determined both by his own
personality — his excessively subtle and fluid intelligence which was quite
incapable of maintaining a firm opinion — and by his sophistic education
which had taught him to see in everything arguments for and against.
His views fluctuated particularly in regard to the gods. He seems to have
begun with a simple, diffuse attitude of irreverence, but this was shortly
followed by positive professions of scepticism and even atheism, which
even Athens in the last decades of the great century found shocking. This
was a far cry from the world of Aeschylus, where men plunged into the
supernatural, or even the world of Sophocles, where man only asserted
himself by resisting his fate. With Euripides, it was a case of doubt or even
pure disbelief - which furthermore left the soul a-quiver and abandoned.
This makes it all the more surprising to find his last play, The Bacchae, the
most directly mystical work of the whole century of Pericles.
Euripides’ doctrine of man was not much firmer than his doctrine of the
gods. What was most striking was the bitterness of his concept. This dis¬
illusioned man, this misanthropist, this misogynist had very great under¬
standing of human misery. He was the first great painter of the passions
which devoured the soul, of love and its storms, and his portrayal, at times
psycho-pathological, seems strangely modern. Man’s misfortunes, there¬
fore, did not arise from his unfair struggle against Moira, but from his
inner weaknesses and inconsistencies and from the strength of the passions
which disturbed him without appeasing him. The characters he portrayed
of women in torment, such as Phaedra or Electra, have compelled recog¬
nition as admirable models of psychology, hopeless because strictly
human. A heart-rending pathos bursts forth from all his work and,
although Aristophanes was incensed by the rags in which he clothed even
his kings, Aristotle, by way of contrast, was fond of Euripides and declared
him ‘the most tragic of poets’.
But Euripides was a personality too many-sided to see only the section
of humanity which gave itself up to passion and consumed itself in the pro¬
cess. He also lovingly depicted young and noble creatures, still barely
touched by life: Iphigenia, for example, whom he was the first tragic
dramatist to show walking to her death not as to a torture but as a volun¬
tary sacrifice to the Greek cause; or even characters who could keep their
compassion and their integrity despite the trials of experience - such as the
labourer in Electra, a working man sensitive enough to respect the princess
who had been forced to marry him against her wishes.
Euripides therefore exercised a lasting influence after his death because
although he neither wished nor was able to be a metaphysician or moralist,
11*
3°6 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
he was a peculiarly sensitive and percipient psychologist, even a psycho¬

analyst. He threw a garish, and often sinister light on the condition of man
and his inconsistencies and on his loneliness in a world peopled by too
many gods. He also profoundly changed tragedy; admittedly, he did not
venture to abandon the traditional heroes of the repertory but he related
them so closely to work-a-day men that the audience could easily recognize
themselves in them — so much so that he may rightly be considered the
precursor of Menander and of bourgeois drama. His technical innovations
were also important: the songs of the chorus were less and less connected
with the action and tended to become simple lyrical interludes, which pre¬
pared the way for the division of a continuous theme into acts - as Horace’s
Ars Poetica later described it; the lyrical parts were freed from the more
rigid restrictions of symmetry; and the music endeavoured to give a better
rendering of the subtleties of the mind with the variety and caprice of its
melodies.
These innovations are found again in an even more complicated form,
in his young imitator, Agathon, the brilliant host of The Symposium who was
also a disciple of the Sophists. He was the first writer who dared abandon
the old myths and introduce a play on the stage, The Flower, with an
entirely fabricated theme. But tragedy had been born of worship and had
lived in the atmosphere of the divine; it wore itself out in its efforts to
approximate to everyday life. It declined in the fourth century and the
Poetics was a desperate attempt by Aristotle to try as philosopher to eluci¬
date its nature, based on imitation, its springs, terror and pity, and its
justification, catharsis (purification), by emphasizing action much more
than characters. He was going against the trend and for centuries to come
there was no one able to utilize these rules and write a new drama.
‘An Acquisition for all Time’: The History of Thucydides

A generation after Herodotus, an Athenian, Thucydides, marked a decisive
advance in historical research. He was related to the family of Gimonids
and a brilliant pupil of the Sophists, and his career was shattered in 424
when, as strategus, he was defeated at Amphipolis. Thereafter, history was
the brilliant ransom he paid for his political defeat. The subject he chose,
the Peloponnesian war, was purely contemporary, although in his Introduc¬
tion (beginning of Book 1) he went back to the most distant origins of
Greece. To deal with this subject, he amassed a considerable and precise
documentation and his exile enabled him to obtain information on the two
belligerents.
His work reveals a mind trained by sophistry in all the subtleties. It was
based on an austerely rigid chronology proceeding year by year or even
season by season because of the impossibility of conveniently harmonizing
the calendars of the different cities. His criticism of documents was im¬
placable. Moreover, the whole work was actuated by concern for a rational
approach: the wondrous, so dear to the heart of Herodotus, was eliminated;
307
in Thucydides’ view everything had to be explained by the general laws of

human nature. Admittedly, he hardly realized the importance of economic
structure in the development of history, but he cannot be reasonably re¬
proached on this score. He was absolutely determined not to be deceived
by appearances and he took events to pieces in order to make the inner
mechanism understood. The ruthlessly lucid analysis he has left of Athenian
imperialism, for example, could not be bettered.
His mode of exposition varied: he interspersed judgement and above all
speeches with narrative, remarkable for its density and vigour (his account
of the plague of Athens remains one of the models of its type). The speeches
were certainly fictitious and are evidence of his own extraordinary oratori¬
cal power rather than of anything else, but he made them into an incom¬
parable means to depict a man, a political programme, or a situation.
Pericles appears as a complete personality from the three harangues
Thucydides makes him utter, and it would be impossible to imagine a
better exposition of the antagonisms on the eve of the conflict than the
speeches of the ambassadors gathered at Sparta. His abrupt, constantly
antithetic style, which contained more ideas than words, corresponded
admirably to his constant concern for unravelling events and holding the
attention.
His accuracy, lucidity and genius can be all the more appreciated if his
work is compared with that of Xenophon (who resumed the narrative in
411 in the Hellenics at the point when death interrupted Thucydides). His
method and style compelled recognition from Polybius, Sallust and Tacitus
- from everyone who, to quote Thucydides’ own formula, sought to make
of history ‘an acquisition for all time’.
The Crisis of the Religious Spirit

The change in religion was parallel with the development of sophistry and
was partly engendered by it. Protagoras, although a moderate at heart,
could not commit himself on the existence of the gods; Gorgias went further
and made a clean sweep of all beliefs. Even a philosopher who thought on
traditional lines, such as Anaxagoras, roused the Athenians to indignation
by asserting that the sun was only an incandescent mass. Actions for impiety
multiplied but the scandals grew worse, as is seen by the dual and terrible
sacrilege of 415: the defacement of the hermae and the parody of the mys¬
teries of Eleusis of which Alcibiades, a pupil of the Sophists, was accused.
Euripides, another disciple, gave vent to aggressive and sarcastic criticism
of the gods; he expressed doubts about the traditional legends and rebelled
against the impostures of the divinities. The evil went still deeper, because
even comedy, which respected old customs and freely attacked the Sophists
and Euripides, was no kinder to the gods. Hermes in The Peace and Dionysus
in The Frogs are depraved and despicable figures of fun. The revolt of the
gods when they were deprived of their food by the birds, who had built
Cloud-Cuckoo-Land between heaven and earth, and intercepted the
smoke from the sacrifices on which they fed, was depicted in a burlesque
spirit which reduced the gods to the level of the most basic human appe¬
tites. This rich jesting was even more pernicious than the Sophists’ attacks,
because it made more impact on the masses.
Figure 63 Maenad dancing, on a

vase by the potter Hieron and the
painter Macron, about 480
Traditional religion, with its too-human myths and its gods who were
involved in sordid adventures, unscrupulous, and a prey to desire much
more than love, undeniably no longer corresponded to an increasingly
refined society which could be easily amused by the same Immortals to
whom the state made ceremonial sacrifices. Moreover, it was inevitable
that faith in the city divinities who had helped Athens for so long and who
now showed themselves such poor protectors should diminish.
It is characteristic of all troubled periods, however, that while scepticism
develops, religious spirit also increases. Paradoxically, Euripides the nega¬
tor, who was a much more devout spirit than has previously been asserted,
also evinced new religious needs. His work began to show a piety in which
the god became the familiar intimate of man, in a sort of companionship
or friendship. Hippolytus addressed himself to Artemis in these terms: ‘For
to me sole of men this grace is given, That I be with thee, converse hold
with thee, Hearing thy voice, yet seeing not thy face’ (.Hippolytus, 84 ff.). He
pronounced a prayer to his beloved goddess, which has been famous from
antiquity and which, in a strange atmosphere of purity, exudes feelings of
confidence and friendship for a divinity who was more than a friend, a
confidant.
Certain gods seemed to benefit particularly from the renewal of fervour,
resulting from the misfortunes which overwhelmed the Athenians and the
new need for closer contact with the divine. Asclepius’ reputation grew as
309
his miraculous cures increased. He was the heir of a very ancient demon
with healing power in the form of a mole and also of a doctor-hero origin¬
ating from Thessaly, already mentioned by Homer. He was gradually
transformed from a hero into a god and integrated into the myth of
Apollo, whose son he was reputed to be. Buildings in his honour multiplied
at Epidaurus, the principal centre of his cult, notably a curious tholos from
the Archaic period, discovered under the fourth-century building - a
labyrinth which must undoubtedly be regarded as a mole hill, the normal
dwelling place of the ancient demon-mole. In 420, the Athenians brought
him along to deal with the plague and, after giving him temporary accom¬
modation in Sophocles’ house, erected an Asclepeum for him at the foot of
the Acropolis. He was a benevolent god, who sympathized with the physi¬
cal miseries of humanity and he had an immediate success. His entry into
the official cult was all the more rapid because the goddesses of Eleusis made
place for festivals in his honour, the Epidauria, during the first days of the
Mysteries.
Dionysus furnishes an even more striking example. This pan-Hellenic
god had enjoyed an outstanding success throughout the Archaic period and
was honoured at dramatic contests with lofty tragedies and wild comedies.
His orgies now extended. Attic vases representing Dionysiac scenes and
particularly the delirium of the Maenads (figure 63), multiplied. The last
play by Euripides to have been preserved, the Bacchae, provides evidence
on this subject which is all the clearer because its author had (despite
anything that may be said) expressed misgivings regarding the divine. It
depicted the victory of Dionysus, the god of ecstasy and possession, who
filled the souls of his worshippers with a sacred enthusiasm and triumphed
over everything, even reason and its doubts. It brought to the stage the
women of Thebes who were inspired to ecstatic frenzy in the copses of
Githaeron during the god’s festivals, and indulged in strange and bar¬
barous rites, tearing to pieces the living victims whom they seized in their
transports [diasparagmos) and consuming their flesh raw (omophagy).
It is not absolutely certain that the Bacchae showed a true conversion on
Euripides’ part as Esther or Athaliah did in the case of Racine. Doubtless
it was only death that froze that infinitely mobile mind in an attitude of
mystic faith, most astonishing in a writer who had hitherto proved a loyal
disciple of the Sophists. Furthermore, it must also be noted that this tragedy
was not composed for performance at Athens but at the court of Macedonia,
in an atmosphere where the Dionysiac cults took on a zeal all their own.
But too little value has previously been given to the state of mind that it
depicted with astonishing veracity: the maenadism or collective ecstasy
of the Bacchae, drunk with the presence of their god in their hearts, break¬
ing all bounds and triumphing in savage exaltation. It was a state of mind,
which corresponded to a need for the total abandon of the soul to the
divinity, that no official cult satisfied.
It is not surprising that efforts were also made to satisfy it by calling on
foreign gods from Thrace or Asia. The slaves of Laurium, often of Thracian
origin, continued to worship Nordic goddesses: Bendis, a huntress who

easily became indentified with Artemis; and Cottyto, honoured in obscene
mysteries. These goddesses spread to the Athenians by contagion. The
Great Mother of the gods, Gybele, had made her way into Greece from
Phrygia before the Persian wars, and Pindar had poetically chanted her
nocturnal liturgies and choruses of young girls who worshipped her with
Pan. A temple was consecrated to her on the Agora where the public
archives were assembled and Agoracritus sculptured her accompanied by
her attendant lions. Her priest, the Metragyrtes, was a mendicant monk
who passed through the town on fixed days accompanied by the foal of an
ass laden with the gifts that he received, and who introduced an element
of oriental picturesqueness. Aristophanes poked fun at the disciples of
Sabazius, an Asiatic hypostasis of Dionysus, and at the Cabiri, gods of
Samothrace who protected sailors.
But above all, he attacked the worshippers of Adonis, Aphrodite’s
Phoenician companion, whose violently emotional cult attracted women.
In 415, when the expedition to Sicily was being settled, the Athenian
women were celebrating the passion of their god in noisy ritual on the
house-tops in the expectation of his resurrection - a sinister omen indeed:
‘Has then the women’s wantonness blazed out, their constant timbrels and
Sabaziuses, and that Adonis-dirge upon the roof which once I heard in full
Assembly-time? ’Twas when Demostratus (beshrew him) moved to sail to
Sicily: and from the roof a woman, dancing, shrieked Woe, woe Adonis !’
(.Lysistrata, 388 ff.).
Ceramics also showed the success of this cult with multiple portrayals of
‘gardens of Adonis’ - vegetable offerings of seeds made to sprout in a hurry
so that they might be offered at the foot of a statue of Aphrodite.
In vain, comedy made fun of the mystic appetites of the women,
attracted by moving liturgies in honour of a god whose death followed by
resurrection opened up happy vistas in the hereafter. In vain it even identi¬
fied them with intoxication. Mysticism was very much the common feature
of the new forms of religion which blossomed at Athens at the end of the
century: from both Dionysus and Adonis, the people sought direct contact
with a sympathetic god, a saviour god. The attraction of novelty, Nordic or
oriental picturesqueness, must have played a part in this movement which
led minds away from the traditional and too moderate mysticism of
Eleusis. But the movement contained the first manifestations of a phen¬
omenon which later extended further and further afield, both in Greece
and in Rome. If Juvenal could complain bitterly that henceforth the
Orontes and not the Tiber flowed at Rome, this was because as early as
400 it had mingled some small portion of its waters with those of the Ilissus
and Cephisus.
The New Spirit in Art

The revival was no less perceptible in art, first because it remained
311
essentially religious and therefore reflected the deepening of piety, and then
because it displayed the new needs of the Attic mind which was no longer
content with the perfections of Phidias’ classicism and sought more human
warmth and grace.
Work continued on the Acropolis according to Phidias’ plan. Only the
Parthenon was finished; the Propylaea, uncompleted at the beginning of
the war, were not continued. The Ionic style brilliantly reappeared in the
Figure 64 Abduction of Basil by Echelos on a chariot led by Hermes. Relief from the
family sanctuary of the Echelids at Phalerum, near the pan-Athenaean hippodrome, fifth
century. Height: 2 feet.
new constructions which completed the work of the preceding generation

and gave to the sacred hill virtually its final aspect. The temple of Athena
Nike was erected after the peace of 421 on the bastion which overlooked
the entrance: this small amphiprostyle chapel was a jewel with delicate
and engaging charm.
The Erechtheum posed much more complex problems - so much so that
it was only consecrated in 407, although it may have been begun by
Mnesicles. It had to do honour to both Athena and Poseidon, the two gods
3J2 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
who had quarrelled over the possession of Attica. It had to replace the
temporary buildings which had followed the Archaic hieron and the
Mycenaean palace of Erechtheus after 479, and it had to retain the most
moving souvenirs of Athens’ distant religious past - the sacred olive tree,
the salty spring and the tomb of Gecrops. The architect showed extreme
skill in extricating himself from these difficulties of religious arrangements.
This single building was really double because it comprised two secoi, for
Athena in the east and Poseidon in the west. The western part was both
a temple-altar (with the very rare presence of three altars inside and
benches around the walls, which made it into a hall of initiation where the
most national cults of Athens were celebrated before initiates from the most
ancient families) and a temple-tomb (the tomb of Cecrops was placed
under the delightful tribune of the Caryatids). This unusual plan showed
that, at the height of the century of enlightenment, it was not possible to
neglect such venerable relics and rites, which had not found a place in the
Parthenon where Athena was worshipped as goddess of the state renovated
by Periclean thought. There were also purely technical problems to be
worked out, arising particularly from the very steep slope which necessi¬
tated a much higher facade in the west than in the east. So many limita¬
tions could have resulted in a monstrosity. In fact, the Erechtheum was
the lightest and most ravishing of Ionic temples, with the proud young
girls supporting its southern portico, the frame of its gate decorated with
the most delicate motifs, and its panelled ceiling pierced with bronze
stars. It compelled recognition as model par excellence of the classical Ionic
style.
There are fewer examples of Doric architecture at the end of the century,
except for the unfinished temple at Segesta in Sicily, the ‘temple of the
Athenians’ at Delos, in purely Attic style, and the temple of Apollo
Epicurius at Phigaleia where Ictinus (in about 420) ventured on some bold
innovations: Doric peripteral on the exterior, it was divided into three
naves supported by Ionic columns; an isolated column, undoubtedly the
first architectural example of the Corinthian order which had already
appeared in decorative art, separated the sanctuary from the adytum.
Sculpture also moved in new directions though it remained strongly
marked by the teachings of Phidias (figure 64). Alcamenes, most famous
for his Aphrodite in the Gardens, sculptured a Hermes Propylaios in which
he amused himself by reverting to archaic conventions. The sensitive
Cresilas, who competed with Phidias and Polycletus for the right to depict
the wounded Amazon of Ephesus, has left an admirable bust of Pericles.
It is a unique mixture of stylization and individual characteristics, which
at least proves that classicism had fewer objections to the portrait than has
been stated. Callimachus, who was regarded as the inventor of the
Corinthian capital, also invented ‘clinging drapery’, moulding figures
which clothing had hitherto concealed; Paeonius of Mende sculptured a
Victory in full flight for the Messenians at Olympia, her body quivering
beneath her transparent peplos. Decorative sculpture at the temple of
3*3
Athena Nike, at the Erechtheum and at Phigaleia, remained worthy of its

earlier creations, with a movement towards prettiness, very perceptible
also in the graceful Victories on the balustrade of the bastion of the
Acropolis.
Only the names of a few artists are known in the field of large-scale
painting, and these moreover are difficult to place chronologically.
Apollodorus was called the ‘Sciagrapher’ because he tried to indicate
shadow. Zeuxis painted a female centaur with great delicacy. Parrhasius
conversed with Socrates who asked him why he did not try to render the
soul: ‘because it has neither dimensions nor colour’, he replied. This
voluptuous Ionian painted Dionysiac wars of religion and the loves of the
god and Ariadne on the new Donysium but he also tried to express pathos,
notably in his wounded Philoctetes.
The graceful vases produced at that time by the studios of the ceramic
quarter, notably that of Meidias, are better known. They are in the
‘flowered style’ with palmettes and foliage invading the whole background,
elongated dancing figures, and iridescent colours. Family scenes, par¬
ticularly pictures of the gynaeceum, were increasingly numerous. How¬
ever, the most beautiful example is a hydria, signed Meidias, which
represents the kidnapping of the Leucippides by the Dioscuri on its
shoulder and the garden of the Hesperides on the bulge. The design could
not be more detailed or more refined, the figures more delicate or the
drapery more supple. But it was not far removed from affectation and
already heralded the decadence of ceramics in the fourth century.
In fact, Athens had produced so much that it cannot be reproached for
having to some extent run dry - all the more so as, in its role of generous
leader of the school, it had spread its blessings widely over the whole Greek
and barbarian world. For thirty years, until the inexorable hour of its
decline in 404, it had liberated the mind from atavistic prejudices, created
new more human and more gracious forms of art and literature, and opened
the way to a more emotional and more mystic piety. Socrates would soon
testify in favour of the mind against stupidity and bad faith. All the features
of another classicism, less rigid and more moving, were already in place.
The Era of the Hegemonies
(404-323)
The fifth century had a profound unity, which Athens had imposed;
the fourth (which, for convenience, will be taken to end with the death of
Alexander in 323) was a chequered period. Three large cities first appeared
strong enough to attempt hegemony and then proved too weak to retain
it. In fact, a serious crisis shook Greece, which seemed paralyzed - in¬
capable of reforming its institutions, of giving a new impetus to its econ¬
omy, or of resolving its social problems. As a realist, Philip of Macedon
demonstrated a principle, dear to Greek philosophy: the superiority of the
one over the many. Alexander could then carry along a Greece which his
father had unified and subjugated, in a prodigious epic which spread
Hellenism to the limits of the known world. Within a few years, the same
Greeks who had sought subsidies from the Great King and his satraps had
become the masters of the Orient.
FIFTY YEARS OF FRATRICIDAL FOLLY (404-355)
Few periods are as discouraging as the fifty years separating the fall of
Athens from the entry of Philip of Macedon on to the historical stage.
Hellas was split by the rival intrigues of Sparta, Thebes and Athens. The
only aim of these cities was to impose their own authority, and the first two
at least showed no hesitation in humiliating themselves before the Great
King to subdue Greece more successfully, despite the strong current of
pan-Hellenism apparent from contemporary literature. The hegemonies
they established were only pathetic card castles. As a result of these sad and
ridiculous quarrels, a broken Greece could raise nothing but a collection of
stray impulses against the determined will of Philip.
The Tyranny and Betrayal of Lacedaemon (407—378)

The year 404 represents a genuine break in Greek history. Athens, con¬
quered and humiliated, was under the frightful tyranny of the Thirty,
established with the complicity of Lacedaemon. The civic body was
reduced to 3,000 citizens. However, as from 403, democracy was restored;

a general reconciliation took place and under the archonship of Eucleides
(403-2) considerable work towards re-establishing the constitution was
accomplished.
At Sparta, the man mainly responsible for victory, Lysander, was in
disgrace and King Agesilaus in had moved to the fore. Xenophon has left
a most flattering portrait of him: intrepid, indefatigable, magnanimous,
respectful of the law of his country, and devoid of all personal ambition.
In fact, he really was the best incarnation of Sparta as it then was: it still
retained its brilliant capacity for vigour but was dying because it did not
know how to reform or how to acknowledge any principle of action other
than force, any motive but the most egoistic self-interest. A few of his say¬
ings have survived, for example his exclamation before the ten thousand
enemy dead at Corinth: ‘Unhappy Greece, which has just lost men who
might have brought it success in the struggle against the barbarians!’ But
this pan-Hellenism could not withstand the test of action.
Sparta had raised the allies against Athens in the name of autonomy. In
fact, after its victory it imposed the harshest yoke on Greece: garrisons
replaced cleruchies, and harmosts the Athenian phrourarchs; aristocratic
regimes succeeded democracies; tribute continued to be levied but to
Spartan advantage. In the words of Plutarch (Lysander, 13). ‘The
Lacedaemonians . . . gave the Greeks a very pleasant sip of freedom and
then dashed the wine with vinegar.’
Spartan ambitions swelled accordingly. An army of ten thousand Greek
mercenaries, raised by Cyrus the Younger to dethrone his brother
Artaxerxes 11, succeeded, after the death of the prince, in crossing all
Persia and reaching the Black Sea. It was a small thing, despite the en¬
thusiastic account by Xenophon who was one of the leaders; but at least
the adventure showed the relative weakness of the Achaemenid empire.
Sparta then thought it was strong enough to drop its alliance with the Great
King: it sent several expeditions to Asia, including one under Agesilaus
which scored some very fine triumphs.
However, hostile groups were again forming against Sparta: at Athens,
where discontent was lively, because of the ruin of the economy after the
disaster, and where great hopes were beginning to be placed on Conon,
who had been beaten at Aegospotami and had become an admiral with
the Great King; at Thebes, which had not received the expected rewards
from the common victory. War united almost all of Greece in a coalition
against Sparta (war of Corinth: 395—4)* Agesilaus was recalled from Asia
and gained victories, but these were profitless because the Peloponnesians
remained jammed in the peninsula. Persia’s entry on the scene made the
Spartan situation still more difficult: Conon destroyed the Spartan fleet
at Cnidos (394) - thus causing Asian Greece to fall into Artaxerxes’ hands.
He then returned to Athens where, another Themistocles, he encouraged
the Athenians to resume maritime expansion and at the same time urged
the reconstruction of the long walls.
3i6 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
The war dragged on in obscure encounters. Several attempts were made

to bring it to an end, either at Sardes under the auspices of the satrap, or at
Sparta amongst the Greeks. Finally, the Spartan Antalcidas got the better
of the Athenian squadron and all the Greeks gathered afresh at Sardes to
hear conditions laid down by the Great King, once again converted to the
Spartan side. He proclaimed his indefeasible rights over all Asia Minor and
ordered the dissolution of confederations in Greece. This ‘King’s peace’
(386), a shameful antithesis to the peace of Callias, represented the second
Spartan betrayal of the cause of Hellenism: incapable of fighting on two
fronts, it preferred an alliance with the barbarian as the most successful
means of subduing Greece.
The two accomplices thus shared out the eastern Mediterranean be¬
tween them. The Greek cities of Asia experienced half a century of servi¬
tude. They were distributed amongst the satrapies, paid tribute and often
accommodated a garrison. Evagoras of Cyprus in his turn had to bow
down and swear obedience to the Great King ‘like a slave to his master’.
Meanwhile, all Greece was under Spartan command: the Peloponnese was
entirely subject to the Peloponnesian symmachia which continued to exist
on the fallacious pretext that it was not a confederation; Thebes was
restricted to its own territory after the dissolution of the Boeotian League;
the islands had to pay tribute. A positive empire was formed, liable to the
obligation to serve in war or pay tribute, and organized in ten circles, an
obvious copy of the Athenian empire of the preceding century.
This incomparable greatness whereby Sparta regained the power it had
possessed in the Archaic period collapsed at one blow. The Great King had
gained little by his alliance with Sparta; he once more pursued a see-saw
policy to weaken the Greeks. In Greece itself, the pan-Hellenic idea was
gaining ground, especially after Isocrates’ Panegyricus. Thebes rid itself of
its Lacedaemonian garrison and established a democratic government;
and an unsuccessful coup de force by the harmost, Sphodrias, against Attica
revealed the true face of Lacedaemon to the world — its monstrous egoism
and its recourse to violence alone.
However, the real cause of the Spartan defeat lay elsewhere: in its
archaic constitution and social immobility. Tension between oppressor and
oppressed remained lively, as was proved by a conspiracy (397) when
Cinadon succeeded in raising helots, perioikoi and elder citizens, driven by
hardship into the lower classes, against the Equals: leader and accomplices
perished amidst atrocious tortures. In fact, the citizen class, in whom the
whole strength of the system lay, was undermined internally by the in¬
equality which had increased throughout the fifth century and was further
aggravated in the fourth. The ephor, Epitadeus, sanctioned an already
existing situation by passing a law which, although not daring to permit
the sale of the cleros, at least authorized its mortgage. While some people
added to their land holdings, others did not have enough to pay their
reckoning at the communal meals and were struck off the civic body.
Another factor, the decrease in the number of children, combined to
produce the same result: Sparta, which aligned five thousand hoplites at
Plataea, had no more than three to four thousand during the Peloponnesian
war and one thousand at the time of Aristotle. The impoverishment of the
military potential which thus ensued seemed sensational in a city which
depended for all its power on those professional soldiers, the Equals.
Considerable moral decay was taking place beneath the fagade of
egalitarian sobriety, now no more than a deceptive appearance. With
the favourable opportunities for pillaging and the enforcement of tribute,
precious metals were plentiful in a city which persisted in acknowledging
only iron money. Charges of corruption against kings and magistrates
multiplied. Because of the exigencies of the Empire, it was necessary to
abandon the old principle which forbade Spartans to leave the town: lead-
ing figures in the city grabbed positions as harmosts where they could give
free play to unrestrained greed. Contacts with the external world were
ineluctable now the town had given up the policy of shutting itself up in
the Peloponnese, and they were equally disastrous because they showed the
citizens the absurdity of their archaic way of life. Corruption and the
desire for pleasure reigned supreme in the city of Lycurgus. At Leuctra,
under the Theban blows, it was not only an army which yielded, but a
rotten world which paid - in all justice - for the inconsistencies between
reality and appearance it concealed.
Athens Revenge (378—371)

’
The islands, which had been autonomous since the peace, but strongly
threatened by Persia, turned afresh towards Athens. At first, it was
merely a question of simple alliances, but a real confederation was later
formed, officially directed against Sparta so as not to disturb the Great
King. Its principles were solemnly laid down in the decree of Aristoteles
(377)-
Autonomy in the cities was formally recognized: neither garrisons, nor
phrourarchs, nor tribute. Two organs took decisions conjointly: the
Ecclesia for the Athenians; a synedrion for the allies, where all the cities had
one vote at their disposal and which sat permanently at Athens. Tribute
was replaced by a voluntary contribution (syntaxis), and this was, more¬
over, fairly low. Considerable effort was made to prevent the confederation
degenerating into an empire, as had been the case a century earlier.
Genuine international institutions appeared, with the application of a
representative system.
Naval victories over the Spartans won by the Athenians Chabrias and
Timotheus, brought new adherents en masse: in Euboea, the Cyclades,
Thrace and the Ghalcidice, and even in the Ionian Sea.
Meanwhile, in central Greece, two other powers were consolidating
their position. The Boeotian confederation was reconstructed around
Thebes. In Thessaly, Jason of Pherae subdued all the cities and had himself
appointed tagus.
Sparta, more and more isolated, was forced to negotiate. On two occas¬
ions a new peace was concluded at Sparta (374 and 371), with the media¬
tion of the Great King: Lacedaemon was granted the Peloponnese;
Athens its maritime empire. This was a magnificent revenge for Athens,
which forced its conqueror of 404 to recognize it as an equal. Cephisodotus
the Elder was entrusted with the task of sculpturing an allegorical group
of Peace carrying the child Wealth — clear evidence of the hopes of
prosperity which then filled the Athenians.
The Nine Tears of Thehan Greatness [371-362)

This precarious equilibrium was sharply broken by the rise of Thebes, a
second-rate city which later assumed hegemony. The basis on which the
Boeotian League was reconstructed was both more democratic and more
centralized than during the period 447-386. The federal council was re¬
placed by the assembly of the people (damos) which in principle grouped
citizens from all cities, but met at Thebes. This in itself was enough to give
Thebes predominance, further strengthened by a new distribution of
political units which secured it four out of the seven. The army was
reorganized by Gorgidas and Pelopidas who created a hand-picked body
of men well able to resist the formidable Spartan hoplites. This was the
sacred band, whose law it was to conquer or die together. Above all,
Thebes had the advantage of a man of genius who was able to harness all
its forces: Epaminondas, Pythagorean philosopher as well as strategus.
A numerically superior Spartan army, entrusted with dissolving the new
Boeotian confederation, was beaten by the Thebans in the plain of
Leuctra (371). Epaminondas employed much more subtle tactics than the
usual frontal impact of two armies, for the first time there: oblique order
with attack on the left wing.
His victory astounded Hellas: Sparta, unconquered for centuries, lost a
quarter of its citizens and its immense prestige. All central Greece grouped
around Thebes, more especially as the assassination of Jason had rid it of a
powerful and ambitious neighbour. For the Peloponnese, it spelt the ruin
of the Peloponnesian symmachia: in Argos, revolution massacred the wealthy
and left 1,200 dead; in Arcadia, Tegea and Mantinea, hereditary rivals,
united in a confederation to tease Sparta.
A period of extreme confusion followed. Thebes henceforth dominated
Greece, and this led to spectacular reversals of alliance: Athens and Sparta
were reconciled in the face of danger; the Great King abandoned the
Lacedaemonians for the Thebans. Epaminondas took vigorous action
during several campaigns in the Peloponnese, which principally resulted
in isolating Sparta. He liberated Messenia, in bondage for centuries, and
gave it a new capital, Messene, on the slopes of Mount Ithome which he
surrounded with wonderful ramparts: Sparta thus lost a third of its terri¬
tory. He helped the Arcadian confederation to create definite institutions
for itself; this was a moderate democracy with an assembly of Ten
Thousand (undoubtedly composed of citizens who possessed the status of

hoplite), a council, fifty demiurgoi and astrategus. A new town, Megalopolis,
was built as a political centre, and populated by skimming off citizens from
all Arcadia. It was divided into two parts by the river Helisson, which
separated the municipal from the federal district. The new capital
developed harmoniously and, with its temples, its theatres and the
Thersilion where the assembly of the Ten-Thousand met, became one of
the most beautiful cities of the Peloponnese. Sparta was thus encircled by
the strongholds of Messene, Megalopolis and Mantinea. The situation had
altered indeed.
However, Thebes had to fight on several fronts: in Thessaly, it took sides
against Alexander of Pherae who, like his uncle Jason, was trying to
enslave the other cities — Pelopidas died winning a fine victory at
Cynoscephalae (364); even in Boeotia, where it committed the horrible
and heinous crime of massacring all the citizens of Orchomenus who re¬
sisted its ascendancy; and above all in the Peloponnese where its hegemony
finally collapsed at Mantinea. Epaminondas did not falter even before the
prospect of fighting at sea, and equipped Thebes, the land lubber, with a
fleet of 100 triremes, constructed under the instructions of the Carthaginian
Annobal. But the struggle was interrupted by various attempts at peace;
both the congress of Delphi and congress of Thebes (368 and 366) proved
incapable of reaching a conclusion. Between the two, the rescript of Susa
(367) showed the new pro-Theban orientation of Persia, when it declared
Messenia independent of Sparta and ordered Athens to withdraw its ships
from the high seas.
In the end, general war broke out. All Greece took sides in an obscure
quarrel between Eleans and Arcadians. In the plain of Mantinea, Greece
was divided into two camps, with Sparta, Athens, the Eleans, Achaeans
and northern Arcadia on one side; Thebes, Argos, Messene and southern
Arcadia on the other. Epaminondas seemed to be carrying the day when
he perished in the height of battle, his breast pierced (362). It was an
absurd free-for-all which was followed, in general lassitude, by a
reconciliation on the basis of the status quo.
But it was the end of Theban power. Epaminondas could not be easily
replaced and in reality the city’s strength was too weak to continue such a
desperate struggle much longer. Furthermore the hero to whom Thebes
owed its momentary greatness had much the same ambitions for his native
land as Agesilaus: military hegemony, based exclusively on the dis¬
play of strength. All that his genius, his courage and his untiring activity
had been able to give Thebes was nine years of harsh hegemony over
Greece.
The Disillusion of Athens (362-355)
With Sparta and Thebes successively humiliated, only Athens at the head
of its confederation seemed to retain some power. Within a few years, all
its hopes collapsed.
Difficulties had already begun in the north, where the Chalcidice had
deserted the alliance in order to unite with Amphipolis and where Athens
was coming up against the ambitions of Macedonia. They continued in the
Hellespont, as a result of the intrigues of the king of the Odrysae, Cotys,
and his agent, the infamous Charidemus. Corcyra defected. Euboea lis¬
tened to Theban advice and turned traitor in its turn; great efforts were
required to make it return to the league.
But the real reasons for the weakening of Athenian power did not lie in
the ambitions of the northern kings, Theban intrigues and the oligarchs of
Corcyra. On one hand, Athens no longer had the strength to compel res¬
pect everywhere. It was becoming increasingly expensive to pay foot-
soldiers and oarsmen for unending expeditions which were repeated year
after year. The rich were overburdened with the trierarchies and the
eisphora. It was easier to look for scapegoats and to bring strategi, who had
failed, before tribunals than to solve the real problem, the shortage of
finance.
On the other hand, although Athens was discreet enough not to relapse
into its imperialist excesses of the preceding century, circumstances often
forced it to act alone. The synedrion, the newest organ of the second con¬
federation, gradually lost its powers and was reduced to a consultative role.
A few cleruchies were re-established. The judicial autonomy of some cities
was again questioned. The syntaxis remained low (never more than three
hundred talents, that is to say, clearly less than the fifth century phoros) but
the strategi were entrusted with levying it.
The outbreak of the revolt of the allies in 357, which established the ruin
of the confederation, actually followed Chios’ refusal to pay the syntaxis.
Even in Asia, the situation had profoundly altered. Whereas Artaxerxes 11
had lived under the threat of rebellion from satraps who were almost inde¬
pendent, a new forceful and ambitious ruler ascended the throne in 358:
Artaxerxes hi Ochus. The satrap of Caria, Mausolus, jealous of Athenian
preponderance in the Aegean Sea, founded a league grouping Chios,
Rhodes and Byzantium, which proved strong enough to beat the Athenian
fleet at Embata (356). Athens still had the courage to send Chares to Asia
where he won a fine victory over a satrap (he not unpompously described
it as ‘the sister of Marathon’). But it lacked the resilience to refuse an ulti¬
matum from Ochus. Athens had to renew the King’s peace and recognize
the independence of the rebellious cities (355). Within a few months, only
fragments remained of what had once been a great empire.
In 355^ Athens was still the largest, richest Greek town but it had just
lost its master trump: the towns, which had voluntarily allied with it once
again, had now, in disillusion, broken away by force. But neither Athens
nor its two rivals, Sparta and Thebes, was powerful enough to unite an
impoverished and demoralized Hellas against the danger which lay in
wait and which not even the most perspicacious seemed to realize. In fact,
the most serious threat to the autonomy of Greece proper was not build-
ing up in the orient, but in Macedonia where a young sovereign had
conclusively taken power the preceding year.
PHILIP AND GREECE (356-336)
Macedonia had been the scene of many upheavals since the assassination
of Archilaus by his favourite (400-399). Amyntas in, who ascended the
throne after a troubled period including a terrible series of murders, had
continued the struggle to restrict the vassals of the upper country and had
skilfully followed a see-saw policy between the Greek cities. After his death
(370), his two elder sons reigned in turn: Alexander 11 who was killed at
the command of the lover of his mother Eurydice, a princess entirely at
the mercy of her senses and ambitions; and then Perdiccas hi, who perished
in a great battle against the Illyrians, unruly neighbours who created a
state of insecurity on the northern frontier.
By 359, the situation was therefore serious, Perdiccas’ son, Amyntas,
was too young to reign and the throne was disputed amongst several rivals.
The youngest son of Amyntas hi, Philip, was appointed guardian to his
nephew, and he took the lead so authoritatively that, three years later, he
could without argument oust his ward and proclaim himself king (356).
Philip and Macedonia

Philip was only twenty-three years old when he became regent, but he
already had great experience behind him: as a hostage at Thebes, he had
consorted with Epaminondas and formed a most lively admiration for him;
he had then governed a province of Macedonia. His private life was fairly
dissolute and his adversaries had every ground for taxing him with an
immoderate love of wine and women. But everyone had to recognize his
political gifts: completely unscrupulous, he made use of force as well as
diplomacy. He also possessed the contradictory virtues of vigour in action
and prevarication in negotiations.
His activity within his kingdom was considerable, as he had first to be
able to count on a strong Macedonia, before indulging his real ambition -
no less than the subjugation of a disunited Greece. He expanded at the
expense of all his neighbours, conquered two provinces from Epirus, seized
Amphipolis and Pydna by tricking the Athenians in cunning negotiations,
annexed the gold-bearing district of Mount Pangaeum from Thrace, and
drove back the Paeonian and Illyrian barbarians from the north. Real in¬
ternal colonization was pursued in recently conquered territories and this
resulted in the exploitation and hellenization of regions which had on the
whole remained very barbarous. The most famous of these creations,
Philippi, kept a wary guard on the mines of Pangaeum.
He held many trumps in his hand. First, a strong social organization in a
still primitive country where the nobles, who had finally been subdued,
provided him with incomparable officers: these were the hetairoi (com¬
panions), who occupied all the higher positions in the administration and
army. Then, the financial position was healthy: the customs were reorga¬
nized by the Athenian Callistratus, while the mines of Pangaeum secured
him the enormous revenue of one thousand talents a year. He used this to
mint superb golden staters, the philipps, which henceforth competed with
Persian darics and Athenian owls. He used this money skilfully to acquire
the services of Greek poets and artists who frequented his-court in large
numbers. Undeniably Greek in character as well as race (whatever
Demosthenes may have said), he continued the hellenization of Macedonia
that had begun long since. He adorned his capital Pella with beautiful
buildings.
But his principal strength lay in his army and he took great pains with it,
aided by an incomparable chief of staff, the loyal Parmenion. Compulsory
conscription made it possible to raise large contingents in a country with a
population of perhaps 800,000. Macedonia was divided into military areas,
each of which provided three units, one cavalry, one heavy infantry, one
light infantry. In battle, the existence of these different elements secured
great flexibility in manoeuvre, but the most important was unquestionably
the phalanx, groups of units of heavy foot-soldiers, armed with sarissas
(pikes), varying between 16 and 23 feet in length, according to rank.
Though the phalanx had not yet acquired the massive and compact
character it assumed in the Hellenistic period, it was very well adapted
to holding back the enemy and breaking up his ranks by confronting
him with the veritable wall of iron formed by the sarissas held low down.
With this weapon, Philip conquered Greece, and Alexander subjugated
Asia.
Philip and Greece up to the Peace of Philocrates [346)

Philip’s advance in a period of ten years was all the greater as the only
town able to oppose him had withdrawn into itself and was more
interested in its own material advantage than in the struggle for hegemony.
Athens no longer had faith in its destiny. It put itself in the hands of
Eubulus, a very honest man, primarily a financier, who, as president of the
officials of the theoric treasury, exercised considerable influence. His prime
concern was to put finances (very much in debt since the disappearance of
the confederation syntaxis) on a sound basis, by avoiding waste and without
introducing new taxes. He obtained substantial compensations for the
nation for the loss of imperialism; he paid available funds more readily to
the theoric treasury than into military coffers and he intensified the work¬
ing of Laurium. Externally, he observed strict neutrality, successively
avoiding conflicts with the Great King, Mausolus, and Sparta. He was
welcome both to the rich (freed from the crushing weight of war contribu¬
tions) and to the people (who basked in prosperity with no risks attached)
and he finally secured peace and affluence for his country. But it is surpris¬
ing that a town with a past like that of Athens should have accepted
Philip’s seizure of Methone (354), the only place that Athens still occupied
on the Macedonian coast, without reaction.
Philip was only looking for a pretext for more direct intervention in
Greece. He found one beyond his wildest dreams in the third sacred war
waged against the sacrilegious Phocians. The Phocians were led by strong
dynasts, Philomelus and Onomarchus, who, as strategi autokratores, fortified
Delphi and did not hesitate to use Apollo’s possessions as a war treasury.
They secured the friendship of Sparta and Athens, but came up against a
formidable coalition of Thessalians and Locrians grouped around Thebes.
Philip’s intervention, facilitated by the civil dissensions once again ravag¬
ing Thessaly, gave a new direction to the conflict which had at first been
limited, but which now threw the whole Greek world into turmoil. The
Macedonian did not have an unbroken record of successes. He was beaten
by Onomarchus and a surprise march on Thermopylae caused repercus¬
sions from all the allies of the Phocians. He had at least added one decisive
trump to his hand by annexing Thessaly, which retained its autonomy but
recognized his hegemony: shortly afterwards he was named life archon of
the Thessalian confederation.
Although the war dragged on in Phocis, it was clear that henceforth the
problem of Delphi was secondary and all that counted was the confronta¬
tion between Philip and Athens. Philip found a worthy adversary at Athens
in the person of Demosthenes. But there was not a great deal that the
ardent patriot could do in face of the pacificism of Eubulus (who was
acting in all good faith) and the intrigues of orators, such as Aeschines, in
Philip’s pay. The demos was not capable of much more than sporadic
action.
Meanwhile Philip was methodically pursuing the execution of his plans
in northern Greece. Without neglecting his unruly barbarian neighbours,
he turned his full attention on the Greek cities on the coast. In 348 he seized
Olynthus, undermined internally by his gold. Prevarication at Athens
prevented any effective help being sent from that source. Olynthus was
destroyed from top to bottom.
There was no course open to a despondent Athens except to negotiate to
secure at least the status quo. Demosthenes, seeing his country completely
isolated, brought himself to conclude a sacred union with the pacifists of
Eubulus’ party. Philip, with the macchiavelianism of which he was a
past-master, entertained the ambassadors, trying to obtain even more
advantageous positions. Finally, the peace of Philocrates was concluded
(346): both parties retained what they possessed, which left the Ghalcidice
to Athens. Philip could then punish the blasphemous Phocians with the
utmost severity, and the two votes at the amphictyony confiscated from the
sacrilegious offenders were assigned to him. In 346 he came in person to
celebrate the Pythian Games at Delphi like a triumphant Te deum.
A Patriot: Demosthenes
Demosthenes had already stood up to Philip; later, he assumed a still more
important role. He did not act on a hand-to-mouth basis but chose to be
‘the nation’s adviser’ and offered it a programme.
Although he was a firm defender of democracy, he had no love for those
who tried to indulge the demos. He doggedly demanded a personal commit¬
ment on the part of every citizen who owed his country military service and
honest payment of taxes. These were the fundamental. themes of the
Philippics and Olynthiacs. In foreign affairs, democracy must also be
made to triumph over monarchy, the usual fate of the barbarian. He
understood that the time for Athenian hegemony was past and he seemed
to favour a policy freely agreed to by the Greeks; hence the satisfactions of
prestige that he granted to the allies on several occasions, to the Euboeans,
to Byzantium and to Thebes.
It would be unfair not to recognize the unity of this policy which was
conducted with an equal degree of realism and sense of honour during a
career lasting over thirty years. His sincerity and his disinterestedness
were equally obvious. He has been accused of receiving money from the
Great King or of being in league with importers of grain from the Cim¬
merian Bosporus. If he did in fact accept subsidies from abroad, this was an
established custom amongst the orators. We have no grounds for doubting
Plutarch’s statement that ‘he was far superior in respect of honesty, to all
the men of his time’.
But were his choices reasonable? Was the policy, which he pursued dis¬
interestedly, in the interests of Athens and Greece? The subject has been
heatedly discussed. Some sources accuse him of looking only towards the
past and of not realizing that Greece had a great yearning for unity after
so much self-laceration. But to say this is perhaps to forget too easily that
the adversary he faced was a political intriguer who founded his power on
the destruction of cities, banishment, spoliation and carnage, and who was
not aiming to carry pan-Hellenic plans into effect but to satisfy his own
libido dominandi.
It is above all to forget that Demosthenes’ views were not as narrow as
they are sometimes depicted. He sought the salvation of all Greeks, even if
he did not believe this possible under the leadership of Athens. In the
third Philippic, he exhorted the Ecclesia ‘to deliberate on the interests of all
the Greeks’ and praised the Athenians of the past for securing the common
welfare of the Hellenes. In the evening of his life, summarizing his action in
On the Crown, he could cry: ‘As I was for our town, so I was for all Greece’.
He therefore desired, no less keenly than did Philips’ partisans, an end
to the unprofitable dissensions which tore the Greek world. But he believed
that the unity of Hellas could only be founded on respect for tradition,
respect for liberty, and respect for the polis. Basically, he was more pan-
Hellenic than the Macedonian, for whom the unity of Greece was but the
condition of its subjection, its enslavement.
All the same, it may possibly be fair to add that this action came late, in
a world which was losing courage. Demosthenes had great difficulty in
rousing the Greeks from their lassitude and apathy. He never succeeded in
grouping all the Greeks against Macedonia: given that the fate of the
armies hung for a long time in the balance, he might possibly have suc¬
ceeded with the help of Sparta, which preferred to isolate itself in excessive
pride. The city regime in itself undoubtedly did not offer effective means to
fight against an autocratic sovereign. ‘Philip was’, he cried in one of the
strongest passages in On the Crown (235), ‘the despotic commander of his
adherents . . . then he was well-provided with money, he did whatever he
chose without giving notice by publishing decrees, or deliberating in
public, without fear of prosecution by informers or indictment for illegal
measures. He was responsible to nobody, he was the absolute autocrat,
commander and master of everybody and everything. And I, his chosen
adversary, of what was I master? Of nothing at all. Public speaking was
my only privilege: and that you permitted to Philip’s hired servants on the
same terms as to me.’
It is all too easy to make a case against the beaten. We will therefore not
accuse the man who was above Aeschines’ base slander; the patriot, who
devoted himself to his task without respite, unreservedly giving of his per¬
son and his possessions for the victory of his ideas; the politician who was
neither blind nor retrograde, but a clear-sighted orator, who saw through
Philip’s purely egoistic ambitions and judged his intrigues, in which resort
to violence was only replaced by resort to cunning, at their true value.
Even if he aimed too high and over-estimated the possibilities open to
Athens, his courage was high and he deserved to remain known as the
champion of the liberty of Hellas. ‘If thy strength, Demosthenes, had only
been equal to thy purposes, Greece would never have been ruled by a
Macedonian Ares’, justly proclaimed the inscription on the statue that the
Athenians dedicated to him on the Agora in 280.
From Peace to Defeat [346-338)

The six years which separated the peace of Philocrates from the new decla¬
ration of war (346-40) were particularly confused. Athens came even more
strongly under the ascendancy of Demosthenes, who reorganized the navy
and secured heavy financial sacrifices from the people and the rich: army
coffers encroached more and more on the theoric fund, and the eisphora
became a permanent tax. Great political trials in connection with the un¬
fortunate embassies preliminary to the peace showed Demosthenes’
authority: Philocrates was convicted and Aeschines was only absolved by a
majority of thirty. But the people did not know how to take advantage of a
wonderful opportunity: they thoughtlessly dismissed ambassadors from
Ochus, who had come to offer the friendship of the Great King, disturbed
by the new advance of Macedonia. Philip was more cunning, and it was he
who concluded a treaty of alliance with Persia. At least, Demosthenes suc¬

ceeded in breaking the isolation of Athens: he was wise enough to negotiate
with the Euboean confederation on an equal footing. The confederation
had just been created and solicited an alliance with Athens. With the aid
of Callias of Chalcis, Demosthenes convened a pan-Hellenic congress at
Athens grouping all the cities anxious to resist Philip: Euboea, Megara,
Corinth, Achaea, Corcyra, Leucas, Acarnania and Ambracia. The nation
considered that the orator had deserved well of his country and voted him
a crown of gold.
On his side, Philip also no longer regarded the peace as anything but a
truce. He attacked the king of Odrysae, Cersobleptes (whom Athens had
honoured with the freedom of the city), and annexed Thrace, where he
established new military colonies, including Philippopolis. Then he ven¬
tured to cross the Chersonese and laid siege to Perinthus. Finally, by a
remarkable stroke of force, he carried off a food convoy of 180 Athenian
vessels at Hieron, at the entrance to the Black Sea. This was more than the
nation could stand: Athens, ready to risk everything in the face of so
dishonest an adversary, declared war (340).
It began favourably for Athens. Demosthenes reorganized finances and
the navy: the syntrierarchy made it possible to obtain more funds from the
rich and to give a new impetus to naval construction. Philip was obliged
to raise the siege of Byzantium, which had been sustained by the Athenian
fleet; his interventionist intrigues in a new sacred war against Amphissa
failed. But the news suddenly broke that he had outwitted his former ene¬
mies the Phocians, moved round Thermopylae as a result, and was already
occupying Elatea. This information threw Athens into a panic. Only
Demosthenes acted: he succeeded in forcing the nation to decide on an
alliance with Thebes despite recent memories of so many conflicts and
clashes: he rushed to Thebes where he used his eloquence to prove that
an alliance of the two cities was the only thing that could save both them
and Greece. He did not hesitate to make large concessions to the Thebans.
The decisive battle was fought in Boeotia, at Chaeronea (338) where the
Hellenic league and Philip each drew up 30,000 foot-soldiers and 2,000
horsemen. The coalition did not lack courage: one thousand Athenian
citizens were left dead on the field and the whole sacred band, faithful to its
promise, was massacred. But their wretched generals were faced with
Philip, an excellent tactician, and Alexander, a young prince, whose
furious charges carried the day.
Demosthenes and Athens were defeated. Greek liberty died in the
valleys of Chaeronea.
The League of Corinth [337)

At first, Philip was so carried away by his success that he insulted the dead.
He showed more sense in acting generously towards Athens. He sent there
one of his prisoners, Demades, who described the city as nothing but ‘an
old woman dragging her sandals and swallowing soothing drinks’. Peace
was concluded: Athens had to give up its confederation and the Hellenic
league: it retained its autonomy, its fleet and its cleruchies. Thebes, on the
other hand, was treated with the utmost severity: an oligarchical regime
was established there, under the protection of a Macedonian garrison, and
the Boeotian league was dissolved.
Meanwhile, Philip, victorious, was cherishing some very vast schemes.
While Athens was recruiting its strength under the leadership of the honest
Lycurgus, retaining sufficient dignity to entrust the task of pronouncing the
funeral oration over the dead of Chaeronea to Demosthenes, he subjugated
the rest of Greece without difficulty — except Sparta, which he humiliated
by destroying all its flat countryside and by restricting it to Laconia. He
then summoned representatives of all the cities to Corinth and established
a pan-Hellenic league, from which only Lacedaemon was excluded.
The members of the League of Corinth were linked by a general peace.
The cities retained their frontiers and their governments. They did not pay
taxation but had to provide contingents in proportion to their strength.
The deliberative organ was the synedrion of the Hellenes in which the
number of votes every city possessed was in proportion to its military
importance. Macedonia remained outside but its king was the hege¬
mon, the military head of the league, and in case of war, its strategus
autokrator.
Such a conception did not lack breadth. Almost the whole of Greece
experienced genuine supra-state institutions for the first time: the synedrion
was a perfectly constituted assembly with proportional representation of
states, delegates who only voted according to their conscience, without
having to send in an account, and a board of directors of five proedroi who
could summon it in case of need, beyond the ordinary meetings scheduled
for the pan-Hellenic Games. This was a federal state with very extensive
powers that went far beyond the Peloponnesian symmachia and the two
Athenian confederations, and might have been able to become a consti¬
tutional monarchy with Philip at its head. Such a creation would ob¬
viously not have been possible without the slow but sure development of
pan-Hellenic ideas in the course of the century.
It is equally obvious that this fine construction was built in the interests
of Philip and not of the Hellenes. Philip was too astute a sovereign and
knew the Greeks too well to think them capable of giving up their tradi¬
tional forms of government, particularly the polls. He therefore superim¬
posed on the polls a federal state of which he himself was undisputed leader
and which he supervised from garrisons maintained at four strategic
points: Thebes, Chalcis, Corinth and Ambracia.
Philip now wanted to lead the Hellenes on a great common expedition
to cement their unity, as Bismarck did with the Germans. There again,
pan-Hellenism opened the door for him, with the idea of a crusade against
the barbarians. He planned to take revenge on the Persians for the insults
of Xerxes. He could do this all the more easily as the throne had been filled
by a prince of disputed authority, Darius hi Godoman, after the assassina¬

tion of Ochus.
But Philip was struck down with a blow from a knife by a hetairos,
Pausanias, at the wedding celebrations of his daughter Cleopatra. This
may have been personal revenge or Pausanias may have been armed by
the king’s wife Olympias, grown tired of his contempt, or even by the
Persians. In any case, what would now become of the immense work of a
man struck down at the height of his strength, the height of his glory?
THE CRISIS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY
Philip’s victory was not solely explicable by the unfortunate dissensions

amongst the Greeks. The numerical balance of forces did not ineluctably
condemn the poleis to bow down before Macedonia. But they would have
had to find within themselves the necessary resources to resist. However,
politically, socially and economically, the city was shaken to its traditional
foundations. The crisis of the poleis was just as much the cause as the
consequence of Philip’s triumph.
Upheavals in Society and Economy

Athens will be used as the principal example as it is the only case that is
well known through the large number of literary and philosophical docu¬
ments. But there are the best grounds for believing that the development
was the same in regions which traditionally practised oligarchy (Sparta,
Thessaly) or moderate democracy (Boeotia). There were two fundamental
causes of upheaval: a new relationship appeared between town and
country; and Greece, incapable of leading an autarchic existence, lost part
of its external clientele.
In the Fields
The Oeconomicus by Xenophon provides a first-class document on rural life

at the beginning of the fourth century. In the form of a dialogue between
Ischomachus (a rich landowner) and Socrates, it gives an idyllic picture of
agriculture, nurse and mother of all arts, and school of civics and endur-
rance for the soldier-citizen. It preaches return to the land in its most
pleasing form. Who could help but envy the life led by Ischomachus, in the
midst of his slaves (treated with paternalism but humanity), by the side of
a sweet companion, gently trained to be submissive and to fulfil the duties
of mistress of the house? Furthermore, a rationally exploited estate - and
there is no need for any special talents (Ischomachus in his turn uses
eugenics, and makes Socrates, who thinks he does not know them, redis¬
cover all the fundamental principles of husbandry) — secures a comfortable
profit. Did not Ischomachus’ father indulge in positive land-speculation,
buying domains that were in a bad way, putting them to rights and selling
them at large profits?
This document idealizes life in the fields excessively and only gives one
side of the problem. A deep-seated crisis had been shaking the countryside
since the Peloponnesian war. The Spartan destruction of Attica, the un¬
avoidable exodus to Athens when the country people had grown unaccus¬
tomed to their traditional way of life, and the long-drawn-out conflict
which brought perpetual mobilization of agriculturists in its wake, had
ruined agriculture and, worse still, destroyed the social class of small and
medium landowners. Recreated by Solon and developed by Pisistratus,
this class had made up the strength of Periclean Athens, giving it political
stability and supplying it with excellent hoplites, hardened by work in the
fields and completely devoted to their native land. When the war had
ended and woefully so, many of them did not have the heart to rehabilitate
their ravaged fields. The last comedies of Aristophanes depict the sorry
state of the peasant, obliged to gnaw roots to cheat hunger, and without
even a corner of earth to dig his grave. This was the sempiternal movement
of the flight to the town by the broken peasant, selling up his possessions in the
hope of a less wretched life. Mortgage posts multiplied in the Attic count¬
ryside and, as in pre-Solonian times, the communist ideal (in the ancient
meaning of the term) of a general land re-distribution appeared afresh.
Aristocrats or more often nouveaux riches built up vast estates, glad to
invest part of their fortune in landed property, all the more so as rational
farming often proved very lucrative. The considerable rise in prices was
advantageous to the large landowner, who produced in order to sell, but
not to the small one who produced to feed himself and had to buy manu¬
factured objects which had also become more expensive. The rich worked
their lands by means of day-labourers, often the former dispossessed owners
of the soil, and above all the slaves, whose numbers swelled considerably.
This phenomenon was far from being limited to Athens: large-scale land-
ownership increased in Thessaly where it was in any case already wide¬
spread ; land in Sparta, as previously mentioned, was also concentrated in
a few hands.
Admittedly, this development did not go to the ultimate limits. In
Attica and Boeotia land remained broken up. Even the large estates re¬
mained moderate in size: Plato, in Alcibiades, regarded a domain of sixty-
five acres as considerable. Moreover, the machinery of successive purchases
generally prevented the accumulation of property in the hands of a single
tenant: there were large landowners, but no latifundia.
Furthermore, rural capitalism did have advantages and it would be
wrong to talk of a recession in agricultural production. Undeniable though
limited technical progress was made: the nature of soils was studied and a
step taken in the direction of triennial rotation of leguminous plants;
manure was used on a larger scale; there was draining and irrigation; and
marling and liming came increasingly into use. However, the large estates
were naturally orientated towards profit-making production, such as
12
market-gardening products which sold well in an overlarge city, wine and

oil - though these involved the risk of selling at a loss because of the new
difficulties trade was experiencing.
In the Town
The peace of 404 had equally harmful consequences in the town. For the
poor, the downfall of the state meant the disappearance of profits from the
Empire and the war (pay and pillage), and the recession in the economy,
based on large-scale trade. However, Athens recovered in the course of the
following decades and particularly after the revival of a maritime con¬
federation. New sources of profit then appeared, both for the urban
proletariat and for the self-sufficient country people.
First of all there was demand for mercenaries a normal affliction in
periods of endemic wars. Many of the poor and of the social outcasts were
attracted by the high pay which rewarded military valour. The expedition
of the Ten Thousand proves how easy it was for a prince to collect con¬
siderable forces. Disorders in the Persian empire, the revolt of Egypt, and
intrigues by the satraps forced the Great King, Pharaoh, and the satraps
themselves to resort to Greek mercenaries. The same social crisis as in the
Archaic period therefore produced the same effects: the citizen who could
no longer integrate himself into the city put his arms and his courage at the
service of the highest bidder. Moreover, the poleis themselves were no
longer satisfied with conscription, and the decrease in civic spirit meant
that they too had to resort to hired soldiers. It must nevertheless be noted
that recruitment was greatest in the poorest regions, such as Achaea or
Arcadia, where urban life offered no means of support. The poor of Athens
had other means of earning a livelihood.
These means were traditional. In the first place, there was the welfare
state. The constant repetition of wars, the creation of several cleruchies,
the reconstruction of the walls, municipal or temple works, and the ship¬
yards provided the less well-to-do with means of survival. Syntaxeis
partially replaced the phoros.
After 400, a demagogue, Agyrrhius, instituted the misthos ecclesiasticos
whereby citizens received a salary (one, then two, and then three oboles)
for fulfilling their major duty and attending the sessions of the Ecclesia.
The decline in public morality can be gauged by this detail. He also re¬
established the theoric fund, which had had to be suppressed and which
now became increasingly important because all surpluses were paid into it.
This fund, which Pericles had intended to be a bank to help the needy,
served more and more for the minor pleasures of the demos. The difficulties
Demosthenes experienced in persuading the demos to prefer the military
treasury are known. The other misthoi continued to exist, notably at the
Heliaea, where verdicts became increasingly biased and where confisca¬
tions multiplied, often contrary to all justice, because the people looked on
the state treasury as their own property.
In the second place, Athens had resumed its economic upsurge. The
ceramic quarter hummed anew with artisan activity. There was still little
concentration (Demosthenes’ father had thirty-three workmen in his arm¬
oury and twenty in his furniture factory) and small workshops predomi¬
nated. Trade was equally prosperous, favoured by the development of
bottomry and banking loans. Foreigners were increasingly numerous and
Egyptian, Phoenician and Cypriot merchants frequented the Piraeus.
Together with me tics, former slaves, such as Pasion and Phormion,
gathered enormous fortunes and became so indispensable to the state that
they were granted the freedom of the city. The production and distribution
of luxury goods remained the very basis of economic life.
The Contraction of the Market

But the pernicious effects of recession were already to be felt. On the one
hand, the Piraeus no longer held the unchallenged monopoly that it had
enjoyed in the fifth century. The ports of Anatolia, under the Persian
empire, had regained their archaic prosperity, particularly Ephesus which
had conclusively prevailed over Miletus. Rhodes, Cyzicus and Byzantium
became rich entrepot ports.
Other factors were even more serious. The external market tended to
decline as a result of industrial development in hitherto underdeveloped
countries which had obtained all their luxury goods from Athens.
Italiot studios manufactured very presentable vases with themes better
adapted to local tastes than those of Athenian ceramics. Even Etruria fired
vases with red figures, though these were quite mediocre. Coins from
Syracuse were henceforth at a premium on the western market to the
detriment of those of Athens.
The same phenomenon can be noted in the north, formerly Athens’ prin¬
cipal market. Scythia, also much taken with Hellenic products, preferred
to buy from the colonies rather than from Athens. Wine amphorae were
manufactured in several towns in the Chersonese - which shows the de¬
velopment of local viticulture, hitherto non-existent. Panticapaeum even
plucked up enough courage to fire vases with figured decoration modelled
on the Kertsch style of Athenian vases. Gold and silver objects, always
numerous in native tombs, were more and more frequently manufactured
locally, and bear traces of Iranian influence quite as profound as Greek.
The same conclusions can be drawn at Thrace, where the nobles bought
products manufactured in the Greek colonies on the Mediterranean and
Pontic coasts, more readily than from Athens. They also imported objects,
notably harnessing for horses, originating from Scythia, on whom they
depended politically to an ever greater extent. A characteristic Thracian
art even developed, fairly similar to Celtic art in its stylization.
Finally, in the provinces of the Persian empire which had traditionally
gone in for trade with Athens, a similar contraction of the market occurred,
but slightly later (middle of the century). Smaller quantities of Attic pot¬
tery were found in the tombs, and local imitations (often clumsy) replaced
Athenian coins. Al-Mina, which was destroyed by fire in 375, broke free
from Athenian influence after its reconstruction; the same development
occurred at Naucratis, though without a catastrophe to fix the rupture.
The gravity of the situation must not be exaggerated. Athens still ex¬
ported a great deal, as the large number of Kertsch vases found on the
whole circumference of the Mediterranean and Black Sea showed. But the
trade balance registered a deficit. In fact, although it was no longer as easy
to sell wine, oil and finished craft products in the same quantities as before,
cereal requirements remained the same, or even greater. Corn certainly
came in much larger quantity from Egypt, Cyprus and Phoenicia, but
western imports had almost ceased. Athens had to resort to the worst
flatteries in respect of Scythian and Thracian dynasts (they were often
granted the freedom of the city): without their custom and good offices,
Athens would have died of starvation.
The deep-seated reasons for this change lie both in the disappearance of
imperialism - its influence on the economy of Periclean Athens has already
been mentioned — and the maturity of former colonial countries which now
preferred to produce what they previously imported. Athens no longer
dominated Greece politically; in the fourth century it could no longer
dictate to the Mediterranean and Pontic worlds, which had emancipated
themselves from its protection.
Two Opposing Units: Rich and Poor

The middle stratum of agriculturists who had owned a patch of land
sufficient to live off, had disintegrated. Life for those who had succeeded in
holding on was so hard that they barely participated in the Ecclesia any
longer and thereby excluded themselves from political life. This left two
opposing parties.
The poor formed a wretched proletariat, either of day-labourers in the
country or craftsmen and shopkeepers at Athens and Piraeus. The unques¬
tionable decline in economic life harshly affected those who lived on the
commercial expansion of Athens. It was difficult to find employment be¬
cause of competition from slaves, and work was poorly paid, particularly in
non-specialized trades where salaries had not risen. But the cost of living
had increased in disastrous proportions, following the wave of precious
metals which the Great King or Philip continued to pour into Greece and
which only entered the pockets of the powerful. All that was left to the out¬
casts of fortune was to queue up at the doors of the tribunals, rush for
tokens for attendance at the Ecclesia, and await the help or generosity of the
theoric fund.
The wealthy held concessions in mines or were large shipowners or
bankers, but apart from this they were cornering more and more of the
land. Although they possessed everything to make life attractive, they com¬
plained bitterly and they were, in fact, severely treated. They were victims
of the unfair bias of the heliasts the moment any question of a law suit
THE ERA OF THE HEGEMONIES (404-323)
333
came up. They were crushed by liturgies (notably trierarchy) and by the
eisphora. Changes were continually necessary in these two spheres in order
to obtain greater justice and prevent the powerful from avoiding their
obligations. The eisphora in particular, formerly a distribution tax on in¬
come, had become a proportional tax on capital which fell almost entirely
on the rich. In order to levy it, it had been necessary to introduce a com¬
plicated system of a hundred symmoriae, each representing a tenth of
taxable capital, and this gave rise to inextricable disputes. It is easy to
understand the ardent longing the whole possessing class felt for that happy
day when the Athenians ‘will be relieved of paying war-taxes, of fitting out
triremes and of discharging the other burdens which are imposed by war’
(Isocrates, On the peace, 20).
In the ultimate resort, the city, torn between these two parties, disinte¬
grated. The weakening of civic spirit is often mentioned and must not be
under-estimated, but it was as much the consequence as the cause of the
disappearance of the city. Well before its political collapse beneath the
blows of the Macedonians, the city no longer existed as a fact. It had been
a unitary body in which each person was ready to make the supreme sacri¬
fice because he felt he belonged wholly to a community with rights and
duties. But who could still dare to talk about equality of rights in a society
where one side had everything and the other nothing? Paradoxically, each
of the two classes thought it was persecuted by the other: the poor because
they could not make do with charity from the misthoi and theoric fund; the
rich because they could not enjoy their possessions in peace, always
threatened or curtailed as they were. Ill will on both sides replaced the
common will which had formed the very essence of the polls.
It was not only Athens that suffered this consuming evil. The massacre
of the rich in Argos set the tone in class hatred. Sparta under the Equals
had become a colossal inequality. At times, tyrants took the lead, promis¬
ing the people the division of the land or remission of debts and daring to
appeal to the slaves to establish their power. This threat, which was in fact
still only latent, nonetheless determined Philip to exact a promise from the
Greeks not to proceed to any liberation of the slaves with a view to
revolution.
Faced with the downfall of the city as a result of an economic and social
rupture whose importance they did not realize, Greek thinkers were gener¬
ally only able to devise partial solutions, without giving up the principle of
the city itself. Alexander later struck a decisive blow at the poleis but the
conquest of the Orient solved (at least provisionally) the economic
suffocation and class antagonisms.
THE EPIC OF A YOUNG GOD
Alexander was twenty years old when his father died in 336. At the age of
thirteen, his father had placed him under Aristotle’s instruction and the
child had listened passionately to a teacher who knew everything. He read

Pindar, Herodotus, and Euripides and thus acquired a profoundly Hellenic
culture, and a love of the things of the mind which he never lost. At sixteen,
he was entrusted with the regency during one of Philip’s expeditions and he
began to initiate himself into public affairs. After a temporary misunder¬
standing with his father, they became reconciled and he was, as the eldest
son, proclaimed king by the army in due course, when Philip was struck
down by Pausanias. A reign of twelve and a half years then began which
was to change the face of Hellas and the oriental world.
A Providential Hero
Alexander combined prudence and inspiration, reflection and intuition in
a unique compound. His exceptional character has often been explained
by heredity: from Philip the realist and Olympias the mystic. His mother,
of violent personality and unrestrained temperament, abandoned herself to
the frenzy of the Dionysiac rites. She belonged to the royal family of
Molossi, the Aeacidae, who claimed kinship with Pyrrhus, the son of
Achilles and possessed the impetuosity and anger of the ‘lion-hearted’
hero. Alexander, like other Aeacidae such as Pyrrhus and Philip v, had
uncontrollable attacks of anger and enthusiasm (plate io).
It was no mean heritage for a noble adolescent to believe he was des¬
cended from Heracles on his father’s side and from Achilles and Priam on
his mother’s. Passionately interested in mythical traditions, he felt the
blood of the heroes who were his ancestors bubbling in his veins. But it was
still not enough for him to know that he was a distant descendant of Zeus,
father of Heracles. In a century obsessed with the supernatural, he quickly
crossed the line from a human being to a god. His inner conviction was
corroborated by a visit to the oracle of Ammon at Siwah. In the holy of
holies, the god gave him the double answer that he had hoped for: Ammon
proclaimed him his son and promised him universal empire. It mattered
little that Alexander interpreted too literally the expression ‘son of Ammon’
which was current in pharaonic titulature. What counted was the exalting
certainty, henceforth his, that he was not only a king in line of succession,
but also the beloved son of the divinity and therefore a god himself.
Because he thought he was a superman, Alexander behaved like one. In
this respect most false to the teachings of Aristotle, who proclaimed that
moderation was the only security for monarchy, he was inhabited by a
daemon of excess. Radet has depicted a mystical Alexander, excited at the
thought of imitating the noble valour of Achilles. Schachermeyr presented
him more romantically and more demoniacally: an apocalyptic Titan in
whom light and shade, philanthropist and assassin, human benefactor and
sanguinary tyrant, lived side by side. Both pictures were true: deep down
inside, he was aware of the disparities which separated him from the
greatest mortals. One can understand without excusing the murderous mad¬
ness which gripped him at the end of a banquet when his foster-brother
Map i 6 The epic of Alexander the Great
Gleitus jokingly quoted some lines by Euripides: ‘Those who think them¬
selves superior to the people and who are nothing . . As he was not
part of human nature, nothing could hold him back — not the restraint
which the Greeks called wisdom and which he considered mediocrity, nor
traditional morality. Nothing was forbidden him, because everything was
required of him. But the undeniable blots which darkened his life were of
little account compared with the fire and the creative impetus, which were
so violent and so impulsive that even without the selfish exhortations of the
priests of Siwah, Delphi and Gordion, he could in all good faith think they
were divine.
The Vision of Universal Empire

Alexander acted promptly and vigorously right from the beginning of his
reign. He liquidated the pretenders to the throne and waged war in the
Balkans. Greece was disturbed and Demosthenes laughed at the ‘small
young man’ who reigned at Pella. But a lightning campaign dried up all
hopes raised by Philip’s death. To show his implacable resolution, he
razed Thebes (which resisted him) to the ground except for the temples
and Pindar’s house. However, like his father, he was generous to Athens.
Then, less than two years after his accession to the throne, he mobilized
the Macedonian army and the Hellenic league contingents and departed
for Asia (map 16).
This first action - the departure for Asia - on which everything depended,
has been insufficiently emphasized. Everything afterwards was linked to it
by fairly simple logic: the easy initial success, the collapse of the Persian
monarchy (definitely as rotten as pamphleteers had for half a century
averred), the need to consolidate what had been acquired and the exciting
temptations of an ever more distant Orient, accounted for the methodical
expansion of unrestrained conquest. But if ‘the slippery path of victory’
(mentioned in reference to another conquering genius) explained quite
satisfactorily the long triumphal march which made him master of the
world, the rival of Dionysus, and the founder of the greatest empire the
world had ever known, why did he set foot on the soil of Asia?
Historians have offered many explanations for Alexander’s departure.
Some say he wanted to protect the Greeks of Anatolia from the barbarians
and to avenge the wrongs suffered during the Persian wars; others, that he
wanted to propagate Hellenic civilization in the Orient. Others again,
more realistically, think that what he had at heart was the wish to pursue
his father’s work - by not abandoning the army of ten thousand men
Philip had sent to Asia under Parmenion’s orders and which was on
the point of being thrown into the sea, and also by cementing the pre¬
carious union between the kingdom of Macedonia and the League of
Corinth.
Undoubtedly none of these reasons was unimportant. But equally signi¬
ficant was the desire to revive memories of the Iliad by a coalition of Europe
against Asia. He was also haunted by the thought of Xerxes; like Xerxes,
he made sacrifices to Athena and the heroes at Troy; again, like him, he
threw a golden cup for Poseidon into the sea from his ship. Darius’ son had
prayed to Helios that no obstacle should prevent him from reaching the
frontiers of Europe. Alexander wanted to be the anti-Xerxes and his
initial programme had equal breadth. His first act on Asian soil was to
plant his spear, to make it a ‘country conquered at the point of the spear’.
It would therefore appear that he was actuated by the dream or rather the
scheme of universal monarchy right from the beginning of his expedition.
The Orient would fall beneath his blows because he carried the irresistible
impulse of a god within himself.
The Asiatic and African Epic

The satraps’ army awaited him in the lower valley of the Granicus, backed
up by the Greek mercenaries of Memnon of Rhodes. He defeated it, lead¬
ing a furious charge of Macedonian cavalry himself. At the end of a few
months, almost all Asia Minor was his: he seized Sardes, then Ephesus,
which rebelled against the Great King at Alexander’s approach, and took
Miletus by storm. At Gordion he sliced the inextricable knot of the chariot
of Gordias with his sword, portent of the total conquest of Asia.
With Anatolia conquered, he entered Syria, where he completely de¬
feated the Great King in person at Issus (333). Darius himself gave the
signal for retreat, leaving his mother, wife and baggage in the hands of the
victor. The King wanted to negotiate and offered a ransom for his family:
Alexander arrogantly replied that he must first surrender.
The Macedonian then wanted to break Persia’s maritime power. The
Phoenician towns were divided. Only Tyre dared to resist him: he took it
after a siege of seven months and treated it extremely harshly, razing it to
the ground and selling all its inhabitants. He seized Gaza and moved into
Egypt where he was welcomed as a liberator. He donned the double crown
at Memphis, went to request divine investiture from the oracle at Siwah
and founded Alexandria.
He left Egypt in the spring of 331 for the decisive encounter with the
Great King. Darius was waiting for him near Arbela, at Gaugamela where
the terrain was favourable for his war chariots, and where he also had
numerical superiority. But again he was defeated. One capital fell after
another: Babylon, where Alexander offered the royal sacrifice to Marduk
in order to be recognized as ‘king of the four quarters of the world’, Susa,
where he retrieved the group of Tyrannicides stolen by Xerxes and sent it
back to the Athenians; Persepolis, where he so far forgot himself as to
abandon it to the wrath of the soldiery and to conflagration; and Ecbatana.
Master of Iran, he pursued Darius, who was massacred by the satrap of
Bactria, Bessus. Alexander gave him a solemn and elaborate funeral,
thereby showing his intention to proclaim himself heir to the Achaemenids.
This he was — to the point of not agreeing to stop his triumphal march
before he had conquered the eastern satrapies, which had formerly been
12*
under the authority of the Great King. With prodigious flexibility, he

adapted himself to the new conditions in these mysterious countries where
popular opposition was lively and where pitched battles could not be deci¬
sive. Hyrcania, Parthia, Aria and Arachosia in turn fell into his hands.
Hindu Kush did not halt his progress and he moved on to Bactria and
Sogdiana, fixing the frontier of his empire at Iaxartes. After these hard
conquests, he wintered at Bactria, where he executed Bessus as punishment
for his regicide.
But a new dream now filled his mind. India had not resisted Dionysus;
why should it resist him? He entered into an alliance with the rajah of
Taxila, who wanted to subdue his old enemy Porus. Alexander defeated
Porus on the banks of the Hydaspes (nowadays Jhelum) and in one bound
reached Hyphasis (Beas). But here his soldiers, weary after such a pro¬
digious expedition, refused to follow him further. Before retracing his steps,
he erected twelve altars for the Olympians, around a bronze column that
bore the inscription: ‘Here Alexander stopped’.
Descending along the Hydaspes and the Indus, he divided his troops
into three groups for the return: Graterus left for Arachosia; Alexander
kept the most difficult task for himself - crossing the horrible desert of
Gedrosia; Nearchus returned by sea, following the coastline. They were
reunited in Garmania, whence Alexander proceeded to the old capitals,
Susa, Ecbatana and Babylon.
Alexander had added as much and possibly more to the possessions
inherited from his father (the realm of Macedonia and the hegemony of the
Hellenic league) than the Achaemenid empire in its period of maximum
expansion under Darius i. No conqueror had gathered so many provinces
under one yoke, or carried his weapons so far from his native land. The
military strength of youthful Macedonia, the bravery of the Greek soldiers,
the decomposition of the Achaemenid monarchy, and the weakness and
cowardice of Darius Codoman are not enough to explain his success. The
moderate size of the contingents with which Alexander conquered the
world is astounding: possibly 40,000 men when he landed, 120,000 in India,
80,000 at the time of his death. But Alexander was everywhere, indefati¬
gable, charging at the head of his cavalry (as he is represented on the
mosaic of the battle of Arbela), and inspiring his army with his own ardour
while he steered it with infallible strategic insight. Furthermore, he was not
only an intrepid horseman, a formidable manipulator of men and a great
captain, he also proved to be an organizer of genius.
Towards the Unification of the World

The empire rested on one man, gifted with a prodigious capacity for work
and supported by a few intimates, such as the chancellor Eumenes and
the chiliarch Hephaestion. Authoritarianism, traditional to the Mace¬
donian monarchy, was strengthened by contact with the Orient, because
Alexander intended to be considered the successor to the Achaemenids.
Royal ceremonial was introduced into the court, where Greek and bar¬
barian made strange bed-fellows, the harem alongside the philosophers
and artists.
The principal mainstay of the empire was the army, which changed
considerably as the expedition progressed, causing the initial Macedonian
and Greek elements to amalgamate and more and more orientals to be
enrolled. Military expenses in addition to functionaries’ salaries, the cost of
large-scale public works and the ostentation of the court, presupposed vast
resources. Alexander drew little from his kingdom of Macedonia and noth¬
ing from Greece. He preserved an incoherent financial system in Asia:
almost every satrapy had its own system of landed or personal taxation,
corvees and customs. Above all, he made ample use of the treasuries
accumulated in the Achaemenid palaces.
His regional administration showed the same flexibility. The adminis¬
trative unit remained the satrapy, except in the Far East where he created
large military commands. Initially the satraps were orientals, except those
in Asia Minor and Syria, but Alexander rapidly replaced them by Mace¬
donians or Greeks. They no longer had anything but civil power, and mili¬
tary authority was entrusted to a strategus who was answerable only to the
king. He left natives in middle-rank and minor posts, as they alone were
conversant with local language and tradition. In this way, he was wise
enough not to try to unify a polymorphous empire but to retain the
administration to which each region was accustomed.
This policy of collaboration was rounded off by a much more ambitious
policy, radically new in its conception. Alexander did not espouse the pan-
Hellenic ideal: he did not want to subdue and humiliate the barbarian
but to amalgamate him with the Greek in a harmonious whole, in which
each would have his share. What better way of bringing about this fusion
than by mixed marriage? The king practised what he preached: he married
Roxane, the daughter of a noble from Sogdiana, and then three Persian
princesses. On a single day, on the return from India, most of his generals
and ten thousand soldiers were married to natives in a splendid ceremony.
At the same time, he had thirty thousand Iranian children educated in the
Grecian manner.
But he seemed aware of the dangers of degeneration that such a policy
concealed. Hung with the royal embellishments of the east, the disciple of
Aristotle still remained loyal to Hellenism. In his opinion, the surest
method of securing the hellenization of the Orient lay in founding new
cities which proudly bore his name from one end of the empire to the other:
these Alexandrias, thirty-four at the most, also supplied military, adminis¬
trative and economic needs. Although they were apparently equipped with
institutions borrowed from the Greek polis, they were in actual fact subject
to the authority of a governor. They have had considerable influence down
the centuries, although not all of them knew the glory of Alexandria in
Egypt, destined to become one of the most beautiful cities of the world.
Although urbanization and hellenization quite naturally went hand in
hand, Alexander had other ways of spreading the incomparable culture of

the Greeks. He had the Greek language taught as widely as possible. He
summoned Greek artists such as Lysippus and Appelles to sing his glory. He
readily established musical and gymnastic competitions in the Greek
manner in front of the barbarians. He did not stop worshipping divinities,
but he was liberal and generous enough to allow every man his own beliefs.
He brought an old brahmin, Calanos, from India and allowed him to free
himself from life at the stake. He tolerated the religious customs of every
region - true to Achaemenid tradition in that respect - and spent large
sums restoring the temple of Marduk at Babylon and of Ammon at Carnak.
But Alexander, though justifiably praised for his passionate interest in
things of the mind, was too great a realist not to understand that inter¬
change was the most certain guarantee of the progressive unification of the
empire; the interchange of species of animals and vegetables between dis¬
tant regions, heralding the selections of the Hellenistic period; above all,
human interchange, made possible by the roads, canals, ports, lakes and
boats that he built or reconstructed. Moreover, by a stroke of genius, he
imposed a single coinage on the empire: Macedonian coins, of Attic
standard, replaced the heavier darics in Asia.
The Death of the Titan

After a few days of agony when about to leave Babylon, Alexander sud¬
denly died (323). Scandalous rumours circulated about several of his
intimates, but it would appear natural that malaria should quickly carry
off a body such as his, worn out by orgies, expeditions and nights passed in
study, and seamed with scars.
He had reigned for twelve and a half years. It is easy to draw up a nega¬
tive balance sheet: futile violence, all the excesses of a king given up to the
pleasures of hybris, lack of understanding of the Greek concern at pros-
kynesis (genuflection) and, even more, at the mixing of the races to which
they would have preferred the harsh enslavement of the conquered, and
the geographical vastness of an empire which could not survive its creator.
But what are these undeniable defects beside all the innovations he intro¬
duced: the conception of an autocratic monarchy, Greek domination of
Egypt and Asia, the urbanization of distant satrapies, and the inter-pene¬
tration of hellenic and oriental civilizations. Alexander conquered the
world, with a copy of the Iliad annotated by his master Aristotle in his
hand. But this epic hero was also an inspired innovator who repudiated
the distinction between Greek and barbarian, the basis of classical Hellen¬
ism, in favour of the noble ideal of the unity of humanity. There is no
more dazzling proof that Plutarch was right when he said that at certain
times great men control history. It is easy to understand the admiration
Pyrrhus or Caesar felt for the hero who had created a new world before he
died in his thirty-third year.
COLONIAL GREECE
Despite the important events in Greece and Asia, it would be wrong not to
cast at least a glance at the colonial world, without which Hellas would
have been even more stifled than it actually was.
Because of gaps in documentation, little can be added to the picture of
Pontis in the fifth century. The most notable feature was the economic
emancipation of the region which had learned to be self-sufficient and only
resorted to Athens for items of great luxury. The towns expanded, notably
Panticapaeum, which was henceforth spread out in tiers of terraces around
the acropolis of Mount Mithridate, while the lower districts hummed with
the activity of the harbour.
The Vitality of Cyrene and Marseilles

Information is more plentiful on two great cities in full bloom, Cyrene and
Marseilles.
Cyrene was rich, as is proved by the abundant minting of money and the
numerous marble bases on the agora. It dedicated a remarkable treasury at
Delphi and enlarged its old temple of Apollo. Its vast necropolises held many
strange statues of women cut off at the waist, with aniconic faces, offerings
to some infernal divinity. Large numbers of Kertsch vases were imported
and its considerable surpluses of corn were exported in return: a stele from
about 330 reveals that, when famine struck, it could send over a million
bushels of cereals to forty or so Greek cities, including Athens. Its mathema¬
tical school was famous, and also its school of pleasure-loving philosophers
- it was a Cyrenian, Anniceris, who bought back Plato when he was sold as
a slave.
At first, Marseilles was severely affected by the consequences of the
Gallic invasions which reached Provence in the fourth century. According
to tradition the town was attacked by the neighbouring peoples united
under the leadership of Catumandus. The siege was finally raised . . .
following the appearance of Athena. One would have thought that the
people of Marseilles would have preferred to buy peace. In any case, the
confusion of the period was expressed both in devaluation (heavy drach¬
mae were replaced by light drachmae) and the construction of a fortified
outpost on a site already occupied previously - at St Blaise, on a peak
which closed the ring of the pond of Berre. The fortress which has been
discovered there, with its curtains, counterscarps, ditches and posterns,
revealed considerable military skill and there are the best grounds for
believing that Sicilian engineers worked there, for the general effect bore a
close resemblance to the Euryalus at Syracuse.
Prosperity seems to have returned, particularly in the second half of the
century, after its long absence during the fifth century. Trade with Greece
proper and Sicily flourished and provided an opportunity for the large
Marseillais shipbuilders to make money without too many qualms: one
Zenothemis accepted freight between Syracuse and Piraeus and engaged

in an abominable barratry business. Gaul, now totally occupied by Celts
prepared to absorb Hellenism, was once again opened to trade.
The small Proven£al colonies were undoubtedly founded at this period
(unless they went back to the fifth century). They were ‘ramparts erected
against the Salyi and Ligurians of the Alps’, Strabo said, but above all,
they supplied entry points for Greek products: Tauroentium (Sanary?),
Olbia (Hyeres), Antipolis (Antibes) and Nicaea (Nice). Trade flowed
even more easily in the Iberian area: in Languedoc and Roussillon, where
native oppida of the Heraclean road bought widely, undoubtedly through
Figure 65 Dish with fish from

southern Italy. Dishes with
fishes, decorated with marine
fauna and including a hollow in
the centre for sauce, were one
of the specialities of the studios
of southern Italy in the fourth
century
the intermediary of the Marseillais warehouse at Agatha (Agde); and in

Spain, where the most important colony was still Emporiae (Ampurias).
These modest cities, fortified against barbarian covetousness, remained
closely dependent on their metropolis (in particular, except for Emporiae,
they did not mint money). They formed a positive empire, which enabled
Marseilles to make good use of the populations living on the shores of the
Mediterranean.
This was also the period when bold pioneers discovered new routes
across the ocean. Euthymenes and Pytheas passed the pillars of Heracles.
One sailed down the length of the western coast of Africa, possibly as far
as Senegal. The other struck north, visited the British isles (which made
their first appearance under this name), Scandinavia, foggy Thule (Ice¬
land) and returned to Marseilles where he wrote memoires which met with
general incredulity. These explorers prepared the way for a better know¬
ledge of the oicoumene, which only became general in the Hellenistic period.
Sicily and Magna Graecia

Although the Greeks were settled in Sicily and Magna Graecia in more
compact groups, they were just as disturbed by the threat of the barbarians
as the isolated colonies in the far west. Their pressure became more pro¬
nounced both in Sicily, where the Phoenicians were showing renewed
boldness after almost a century of timidity, and in Italy where the Italics,
often organized in powerful and warlike confederations (Lucanians, then
Bruttians), proved more dangerous than the Etruscans, now in full
decadence. However, dissensions between the cities, as harrowing there as
in Greece, remained the endemic evil. Nonetheless, a forceful tyrant suc¬
ceeded in grouping a large part of the Greek west under his leadership,
and it then revived and reached new heights. After his death, in 367,
cracks appeared in this erstwhile brilliant world, leading to its approaching
collapse and conquest by Rome in the following century.
The Elder Dionysius, Master of the Two Sicilies {405-367)

After their brilliant successes of 409-6, the Carthaginians threatened
Syracuse. The lead was then taken by a man of very humble origins, the
son of an ass-driver, but ambitious, worthy, intelligent and not hampered
by any scruples, who was appointed strategus autokrator. The elder Dionysius
rapidly procured a bodyguard of a thousand soldiers and henceforth
reigned undisputed over the city. He was not able to win a decisive victory
over the Phoenicians and had to be satisfied with a treaty maintaining the
status quo (405).
This tyrant was reminiscent of Pisistratus: he respected the appearance
of the traditional magistracies; he harshly persecuted the aristocrats,
massacring them and confiscating their possessions, and he freed the
Gyllyrians and slaves. The army was his principal mainstay: he brought it
up to a strength of fifty thousand foot-soldiers and ten thousand horsemen.
He fortified Syracuse, made Ortygia an impregnable citadel in which he
lived, and surrounded the town with a defence system whose key structure
was the wonderful fortified castle of Euryalus, the most beautiful achieve¬
ment of military architecture of the century. His engineers were past-
masters in the art of siege-craft: their catapults struck at 975 feet with
an extraordinary impact. He used the normal methods of tyrants to finance
these needs: he made the land tax heavier, debased the coinage and
pillaged sacred treasuries. He went so far as to replace the golden cloak of
Zeus of Syracuse by a woollen one.
After that, he was able to resume the struggle against the natives in
Sicily, against the Greek cities, and against the Carthaginians. He brought
the Sicels around Enna to their senses. He subdued Gatana and Naxos,
razing the latter to the ground when it dared offer resistance. Leontini
preferred to open its doors to him. Henceforth he declared himself‘archon
of Sicily’. In order to mix the various races, he displaced populations or
settled new colonies: this form of internal colonization heralded that of
Philip in Macedonia or of the Hellenistic sovereigns in the east. He led
three wars against the Carthaginians, with uneven success, possibly with¬
out driving home his advantage, because the barbarian threat made his
presence at Syracuse indispensable.
Figure 66 Ulysses and the Sirens.

Crater from Posidonia, about 330
His sights were fixed further afield than Sicily, where the eastern half
was subject to him. He wanted to form an empire in Italy and, with Locri
as base, he seized Rhegium, Caulonia and Croton. He made an alliance
with Tarentum, where Archytas was trying to establish a Pythagorean con¬
stitution based on the balance of social classes. He annexed the Lipari
islands, sent colonists to Corsica, maintained excellent relations with
Naples (which enabled him to levy rough Campanian mercenaries) and
ventured to plunder as far afield as Etruria. He also secured mastery of the
Otranto canal, established himself at Ancona and Hadria, and obtained a
foothold in Illyria on the island of Issa.
He was the true master of the west but he did not forget his intrinsic
Hellenic quality and voluntarily put phil-Hellenism to the fore when it
was to his advantage to do so. He intervened actively in the affairs of
Greece, generally on the Spartan side, although at the end of his life he
turned towards Athens.
Dionysius had risen from nothing and accomplished a great deal, by
breathing new life into the Greece of Sicily and Italy. Supercilious, cruel,
ungodly, he had sold Plato as a slave, and yet he still had literary preten¬
sions. His ambitions led him to go beyond the boundaries of the city, to
envisage the amalgamation of the races, to spread Hellenism and to give
a brilliant impetus to the economy. He was both the Philip and the
Alexander of the west.
The Apogee of Greek Civilization in the West

Hellenism in the west remained very much alive. Economic life flourished.
Cereals were produced in large quantities, olive trees and vines made
headway in southern Italy and fishing showed a lively development
THE ERA OF THE HEGEMONIES (4.O4-323) 345
Figure 67 Comic actor and his
wife. Apulian amphora with

red figures, fourth century
(figure 65; see also figure 6g). Industry broke away from the metropolis
and in its turn began to export. Trade expanded as a result of the opening
of the Straits of Messina and the Otranto canal. Supplies of precious
metals were plentiful. Great capitalists appeared, such as the Sicilian
banker who cornered all metallurgical production.
The urban population increased and Syracuse in particular became the
most populous and wealthy town of the Greek world. Dionysius, who was
passionately interested in drama, had a theatre cut in the rock there. The
minor arts attained a hitherto unknown refinement, notably gold and silver
work and toreutics - the ‘Treasury of Tarentum’ has preserved some
wonderful examples of this - and even ceramics (figure 66). The dithy¬
ramb flowered with Telestes of Selinus and Philoxenus of Gythera -
Dionysius had summoned this latter to his court and then had him thrown
in the latomies (quarries), hurt because he did not admire his own verses.
The historian Philistus, a disciple of Thucydides, gave an impartial account
of the details of the reigns of the two Dionysius. Italy revelled in burlesque
comedies, th e p fry lakes (figure 67).
Orphico-Pythagoreanism gave moral unity to this civilization. The
Orphic lamellae in the tombs of Thurii and Petilia will be analysed later.
Archytas solved the ‘Delian problem’ by inventing a new curve, he made
mathematical terminology more precise and introduced the hypothesis of
the sphericity of the earth: he well deserved Horace’s eulogy (Odes, 1, 28)
as one who ‘had explored the gods’ ethereal homes and traversed in thought
the circling vault of heaven.’
The prestige that Hellenism in the west enjoyed in native eyes can be
understood. An Iapygite chief from Brindisi was buried with an orphic
lamella. Roman religion strengthened Hellenistic acquisitions that were
already ancient: Heracles became increasingly popular both at Porta
Trigemina, where merchants worshipped the god of travellers, very

similar to Heracles of Posidonia, and at the Ara Maxima. Here, in 312,
Appiiis Claudius had the state adopt a hitherto secret gentile cult whereby
a chthonic Heracles from Locri or Croton, completely imbued with
Pythagoreanism, was worshipped. The Carthaginians in Sicily themselves
imitated Greek coins as well as figurines from Tanagra. Rays from the
west began to reach Greece itself: Plato dreamed of turning the tyrants of
Syracuse into philosophers and was deeply influenced by Archytas.
Isocrates wished for the time when the elder Dionysius .would lead a
pan-Hellenic crusade.
The Decline of the Greek West

However, after 367, the irremediable decline of the west set in. At first it
was due to internal crises in the cities. The elder Dionysius was succeeded
by his son, the younger Dionysius, a profligate who preferred to follow
hedonist advice from Aristippus of Cyrene rather than to found a philo¬
sophic state with Plato. After a period of anarchy when all the cities regained
their independence, Syracuse appealed to its metropolis, Corinth, which
entrusted an honest man, Timoleon, with putting an end to tyrannical
encroachments.
According to Plutarch, he was a heroic and generous warrior, chosen by
the gods to punish the tyrants for their egoism and cruelty. According to
modern scholars, he was a skilful man, who used duplicity and treachery,
in his opinion justified by the purity of his intentions. In any case, he was
sincere, disinterested and actuated by faith in the ancient ideal of the city;
and he acted with the utmost vigour, refusing to be crushed by defeat. He
dismantled the citadel of Ortygia and established a democratic constitu¬
tion at Syracuse with a council of Six Hundred and an assembly of the
people. He also proved an excellent general and imposed peace on
Carthage. The liberated cities adopted institutions similar to those of
Syracuse. Finally, he recalled the exiles and brought in sixty thousand
colonists who gave new life to Sicily, depopulated by so many trials. After
seven years of effort (344-37), he abdicated the powers entrusted to him.
It is difficult to estimate an achievement which has been interpreted in
so many contradictory ways. In fact, Timoleon himself developed, under
the influence of the Academy which, after Plato’s death and under
Speusippus’ guidance, tended to a more strict conservatism. He moved
from a position of advanced democracy to a deliberately oligarchical atti¬
tude. Apart from this, his Hellenism remained narrow: he subordinated
everything to the interests of the Greeks and looked on the barbarian
countries as free field for expansion. He nevertheless succeeded in slowing
down Sicilian decadence, without being able to halt it: less than twenty
years after his withdrawal, a new tyrant came to power in Syracuse,
Agathocles.
Southern Italy was still more disturbed, because it suffered from re¬
newed barbarian attacks. Tarentum, in the grips of an internal crisis since
THE ERA OF THE HEGEMONIES (404-323)
347
the death of Archytas, and threatened by Lucanians and Messapians,
tinned to the K-ing of Sparta, Archidamus, and then to a prince from
Epirus, Alexander of Molossia, who first won some fine victories and was
then assassinated at Pandosia (331). The death of this forceful warrior,
who might have been able to establish a kingdom of Magna Graecia in
order to resist Italic pressure, turned out to be disastrous.
The entire west remained very prosperous but the disunity of the cities
bore more bitter fruit than in Greece proper, because of the proximity of
the barbarians. The time was not far off when Plato’s sinister prophecy
would be realized (Letters, 8): ‘Hardly a trace of the Greek tongue will
remain in all Sicily, since it will have been transformed into a province or
dependency of Phoenicians or Opicians. Against this all the Greeks must
with all zeal provide a remedy.’
To sum up: the most striking feature in the history of the fourth century
was the strength of traditional elements, and particularly the attachment
to the city, despite all the defects that its development had brought to
light. Only individual efforts had been able to open this tight world en¬
closed in its bitterness and conflicts: the ocean revealed the secret of its
tides and its distant lands to Euthymenes and Pytheas; Asia yielded up its
treasures and abandoned itself to Alexander. Explorers and conquerors
were, from the second half of the century, the pioneers of a less enclosed
universe, that of the Hellenistic period.
13
The Century of Plato or the
Advent of Mysticism
It is difficult to analyse the fourth century because it was predominantly

a restless period. The institutional framework apparently remained stable
and man, in Aristotle’s famous words, remained ca political animal’, but
traditional conditions were unsettled. The cities had been rotting internally
well before they yielded to the irresistible impetus of the Macedonians and
economic life was gradually being strangled.
Then man took stock of himself. With a characteristically Hellenic
approach, he did not give up hope of finding a rational solution to the
political problems - economics remaining, qua economics, outside the
scope of his thought. Philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, developed
a political thought proper, which there is every reason to believe they con¬
sidered as important as their metaphysical speculations. Moreover, speci¬
fically political literature - which had appeared after the Peloponnesian
war with the Republic of the Athenians by the Pseudo-Xenophon - developed
considerably with Xenophon and Isocrates.
But the efforts to construct an imaginary city prove all too well that the
actual city was no longer a tolerable framework: these utopias were one of
the first manifestations of the flight from reality. An ideal world was super¬
imposed on the real world. The philosopher rediscovered the pattern of
perceptible realities; the artist tried to reach it by going beyond illusory
appearances; even the ordinary man directed all his conscious yearnings
towards its attainment. A new mysticism stirred Greece, partly inherited
from the last troubled decades of the fifth century and the preachings of
Socrates but with new dimensions added by the genius of Plato.
LITERATURE AND ACTION
Literature gives the most eloquent evidence of these new tendencies.

Tragedy was running dry, indefatigably treating the same subjects before a
less and less responsive public. Comedy was better able to withstand the
wear and tear that threatened those dramatic forms born with democracy
and which declined with democracy, but it did not really find its vocation
THE CENTURY OF PLATO
349
until the end of the century. The only living literature was represented by
prose works which had a pragmatic orientation towards action in common
and, very generally, took the form of oratory.
Middle Comedy
Aristophanes’ last two comedies already showed that ancient comedy had
disappeared. There was no more political satire and scarcely any political
allusions; ravaged Athens no longer had the heart to laugh at its defects
and the poet who had been such a strong advocate of peace could not find
the humiliating treaty of 404 satisfactory. He took refuge in utopias where
the comedy ill-conceals bitterness - the community of women and property
in Women in the Assembly (Ecclesiazusae) where the women take the place of
men at the Ecclesia, the triumph of the honest poor over the wealthy rogues
in Plutus
A new dramatic form took shape, Middle Comedy. It abandoned
traditional subjects, avoiding the old quarrels in favour of political ap¬
peasement. Moreover, the coarseness of yesteryear was no longer found
pleasing and delicate, and elegant analysis of situations closer to reality was
preferred to obscene gestures and equivocal subjects. At the beginning of
the century, amusing situations were created depicting gods and heroes as
members of the respectable Athenian bourgeoisie. For example, Antiphanes
and Eubulus created comedy by the contrast between the greatness of the
characters and the commonplace gallant adventures in which they were
involved. But this parody of mythology could not go on arousing mirth for
very long and comedy found its real vocation in the portrayal of everyday
manners in a deliberate spirit of realistic observation. Plot, completely
neglected in the preceding century, became of primordial interest. Alexis, a
native of Thurii who had become an Athenian citizen, is believed to have
created the standard models of the parasite and the boastful cook who
quickly became traditional comic figures.
Hired Orators: the Logographoi

Comedy therefore moved towards realism and respectability and provides
good evidence of the development of customs in an organized society,
which was no longer interested in large-scale problems and no longer will¬
ing to yield to Aristophanes’ uproarious laughter. But it was only a
superficial distraction and living literature was to be found elsewhere.
First, it was to be found at the tribunals where the logographoi displayed
their eloquence through intermediaries. They were ‘speech-makers’ who
manufactured speeches for their clients to recite before the judges as custom
forbade the plaintiff direct assistance from advocates.
The master of this skill was Lysias, a Syracusan, who made an enormous
fortune by his talent. No one could more skilfully put himself in his client’s
place, state the facts vividly and simply and win the favour of the court
35° THE GREEK ADVENTURE
with his good humour. He did not need either refined dialectic, which he
lacked completely, or lofty eloquence, which would have been out of place
in often trivial affairs. His style was sober and distinguished and his phrases
short. His moderation, the deliberate poverty of resources he brought into
play, his gracious elegance and his discretion deservedly made him the
symbol par excellence of Atticism and a model, until well into the Roman
period, to all who shied away from eloquent pomposity.
Another metic, Isaeus, was a better dialectician and tried to convince
the judges by strictly organized argument. His language already had more
breadth and vigour. Isocrates worked for twelve years as a logographos and
although he despised the profession, managed to acquire remarkable
affluence, by its pursuit.
The following generation produced the most wonderful political orators
amongst its logographoi. Demosthenes was clever enough to drop the
subtleties of his dialectic and his linguistic verve in humble cases. He could
have been imitating Lysias when he depicted banking circles with their
scandalous fortunes earned by parvenus who were former slaves (for
Phormio), or the bohemia of Athens and the persecution military service
involved (against Conor!).
His rival Hyperides was also a logographos who could skilfully adjust his
eloquence to his client s level. His Against Athenogenes was a delicious
comedy depicting the pranks of a young man head over heels in love with a
pretty slave perfumer, whom he bought with the stocks of the perfumery
from a rogue who exploited his simplicity. His work was so lively and so
fresh that Cicero proclaimed him one of the most perfect orators of Greece.
The logographos had a vast clientele in an Athens which had not lost its
taste for chicanery: metics, who were precluded as such from the tribune,
but also great orators found that this humble career (one of the first liberal
professions in antiquity) could earn them an ample living. The tribunals
were an excellent school for observation, analysis, elegance and simplicity:
all moderate qualities, characteristic of the new fourth century Atticism
and very similar to those found in the best contemporary comedies.
The Vicissitudes of an Aristocrat: Xenophon

The elegance of Atticism is found again in Xenophon and Isocrates, but in
a very different context, political propaganda. These two Athenians were
not only alike in their common mistrust of the democratic ideal of their
city, but because both of them remained outside active politics while
endeavouring by their writings to direct the current of opinion in the
direction of their ideas. Furthermore, both of them by their changing
viewpoints showed the difficulties that clear-thinking people were experi¬
encing in the confused situation in Greece. In other respects however,
Xenophon, the man of action, who spent the main part of his life outside
Athens, was wholly different from the logographos and teacher Isocrates
who spent his whole working life in his native land.
351
Xenophon was of aristocratic birth. It was Socrates who first awoke him
to spiritual life but he very quickly adopted an active career as an officer,
despite his master’s advice. He participated in the expedition of the Ten
Thousand and left an unforgettable account of it in the Anabasis: the idea
that the weakness of the Persian empire put it at the mercy of a bold attack
was already gaining ground in his mind.
Sick to death of Athenian democracy because of its death sentence on
Socrates, he was banished for fighting in the Spartan ranks at Goronea.
He then settled down on a vast estate at Scillus (Elis) offered him by the
Spartans, where he led the life of a gentleman farmer. Most of his intellec¬
tual activity was devoted to the defence and exposition of Lacedaemonian
policy. In the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, a sometimes clumsy and
often dishonest pamphlet, he praised unreservedly the virtues of Spartan
education and constitution. However, the last chapter of this work, un¬
doubtedly written later and possibly posthumous, sharply criticized the
decadence of a town which his discernment prevented him from admiring
wholeheartedly. In the Hellenica he recounted the history of Greece from
411 to 362 with a philo-Laconian bias which nullified his claim to continue
Thucydides’ work. The Agesilaus was filled with unmitigated praise for a
king who had been his friend.
But Xenophon had seen the real Sparta at too close quarters - brutal,
cynical and unworthy of a past which was no longer anything but a facade.
He realized that it was a far cry from the dreams which haunted Athenian
aristocrats and quite incapable of taking the lead in a crusade against the
barbarian. The Cyropaedia, the longest and most important of his works,
was a historical novel in which he eulogized monarchy, on the pretext of
depicting the education and reign of Gyrus the Great, founder of the
Persian empire. The inference suggested to the reader was that only a king
could organize a state strong enough to conquer Persia, whose weaknesses
were complacently displayed.
Driven from Scillus by the Eleans and reconciled with Athens (tem¬
porarily allied with Sparta), Xenophon henceforth thought about reform¬
ing his native land. The Hipparchicus and On Horsemanship were technical
treatises designed to promote the reorganization of the cavalry. The
Oeconomicus sought remedies for the ills suffered by the Attic economy.
Ways and Means presented a financial programme, conservative certainly
but from which all fundamental hostility to the democracy was absent.
As a polygraph Xenophon undoubtedly suffered from a certain poverty
of intellect and as a man he all too frequently left himself open to accusa¬
tions of opportunism. The most interesting thing about him was not the
Spartan mirage of his youth nor his later rallying to Athens; it was the
development, largely due to events, which detached him from the Spartan
aristocracy and made him choose a strong monarchy as his ideal. It was
also the idea, which dominated all his work from the Anabasis to the
Cyropaedia, that the Persian empire was only waiting for a daring conqueror
to overthrow it. Historical work, pamphlet or biographical novel, his books
prepared opinion by opening wide horizons and vast hopes in the east. It
may reasonably be asked whether they did not contribute to the birth of
the great idea of the conquest of Asia in the minds of the sovereigns of
Macedonia.
Isocrates and Pan-Hellenism

Isocrates had followed the teachings of the greatest Sophists, Prodicus and
Gorgias, as well as Socrates. When he found himself ruined by the
Peloponnesian war he quite naturally turned towards eloquence. But the
weakness of his voice or his shyness turned him away from the tribunal
with its harangues, and for twelve years he practised the profession of
logographos. When he had made his fortune and reputation, he abandoned
it (not without contempt) and opened a school of rhetoric, at the same time
devoting himself to set eloquence (known as epideictic). He gained an
immense reputation both as teacher and publicist.
Pupils flocked to his school from the whole Greek world: Lycurgus,
Hyperides, Ephorus and Theopompus were his disciples; Timotheus
carried his admiration for his master to such lengths that he erected a
statue to him at Eleusis. What so many well-informed minds gained from
him was a method that reconciled the advantages of rhetoric and dialectic,
without falling into the emptiness of the one and the subtleties of the other.
Isocrates prided himself on training the adolescent in ‘philosophy’, that is
to say, giving him a culture firmly based on general ideas and on reflection
on great moral and historical examples, and perfected by everyday prac¬
tice in the art of oratory. He was halfway between the masters of rhetoric,
who mocked at truth and were only concerned with form, and the dialec¬
ticians, who bewildered the mind with their hair-splitting. It can easily
be seen what a novelty this education - which ill-deserved the ambitious
name of philosophy Isocrates himself gave it - represented. Basically, what
Isocrates had invented were the humanities. The rhetorical civilization of
Greece and Rome lived on his heritage for many centuries.
His influence in the specific realm of the art of oratory was no less clear.
Before his time, sentences had stayed short, more suitable for current
affairs than for great ideas. He created a new mode of expression: the
spacious phrase organized around the balance of two expressions and often
ending in a crescendo. It was an excellent instrument for analysis, well
adapted to philosophical or political thought and pleasant also to listen to
as a result of the balance of rhythm which this prose musician introduced.
Isocrates, the creator of the period, was undoubtedly one of the most
typical geniuses of the whole ancient world: apart from a few fastidious
souls who preferred to remain loyal to Thucydidean abruptness, all those
voices, which echoed and swelled in vast, well-constructed and harmon¬
ious phrases for a thousand years until the final triumph of the barbarians,
were his spiritual sons. Demosthenes himself could not have stirred the
Athenians without the wonderful periods of Isocrates at his command.
353
Isocrates made Greece adopt his rhetoric but he also had lofty political
aims and gave a new brilliance to the pan-Hellenic ideal. The Greeks
had certainly been able to show a united front against the barbarians
during the trial of the second Persian war, but since then they had
presented a harrowing spectacle of internal dissension. At the beginning
of the fourth century, however, two orators in their Olympiacs insisted
on the need to form a joint block against the Persians. Gorgias (in 392)
preached harmony; Lysias (in 386) emphasized the lamentable state of
Greece reduced to soliciting subsidies from the Great King, and recalled
that the Greeks had two enemies, barbarians and tyrants. On a still more
solemn and urgent note, Isocrates, a disciple of Gorgias, devoted his whole
work to pleading the cause of Hellenism, which to him was a civilization
(paideia) and a way of thought (dianoia), and not a race. He constantly
cited the mythical heroes who in his eyes remained the great models:
Theseus, Heracles and Agamemnon. He indefatigably glorified the vic¬
torious battles of the expedition against Troy or the Persian wars. He cease¬
lessly proclaimed the necessity for peace between the cities and protested
against the imperialism which, despite appearances, was weakening
Greece. He continually stated that only war against Persia could unify a
divided world, free the Greeks of Asia and yield incalculable advantages;
moreover, Persia was weak, undermined by luxury and servility.
However, Isocrates was not at all the dreamer he was all too frequently
depicted, and he thought that a crusade of this type would only be possible
if Greece acknowledged firm leadership. He never gave up the essentials of
his programme, but during his long career as publicist he often changed
his mind considerably on the powers this hegemony must assume. In the
Panegyricus (380), which was one of his most perfect discourses, and took
fifteen years to compose, he still believed that only Athens, which had
deserved well of the Greek cause and was rich in its glorious mythical and
historical past, could fill this role. Sparta had stolen its empire and proved
unworthy of the task, subjugating the Greeks with its harmosts and aban¬
doning the Greeks of Asia to the Persians. He advocated a forward move¬
ment to conquer fertile lands from the barbarian, who would not be able
to resist the noble onslaught of the Hellenes led by Athens and Sparta
reconciled.
Events between 380 and 370 proved these hopes vain. In view of the
persistent disunity as well as the rise of Thebes (which he detested),
Isocrates modified his plans and tried to find in one man the leader he
could not find in the cities. But he went from one disappointment to
another. His disciple Timotheus died before he had emerged as the
Pericles Isocrates had imagined. Jason of Pherae and Dionysius also
disappeared before they were able to take the lead. The king of Sparta,
Archidamus, proved unworthy of the confidence Isocrates placed in him.
For several years Isocrates seemed to give up the very idea of the
crusade against Persia, and then quite naturally he turned towards Philip 11.
In his Philippus after the peace of 346, he invited the king to set himself up
as an impartial arbiter between the Greeks, and reconcile them to each

other. He would then be able to plunge into the conquest of weak and
corrupt Asia and establish colonies of mercenaries there, acquiring the
triple glory of ‘the benefactor of the Hellenes, king of the Macedonians,
master of the barbarians’. Letters referred to the same programme, which
had obvious points in common with the Panegyricus. On the very morrow of
Chaeronea, he again wrote to Philip rejoicing on his victory. He rose above
the disappointment felt at the humiliation of his native land and showed
that he was more Greek than Athenian. He begged the king to set off for
Persia now that he had subdued Greece. He died at the age of ninety-eight
having devoted the best of his strength to the pan-Hellenic concept.
Isocrates’ work was certainly not limited to preaching the crusade
against the Great King. He was not uninvolved in the internal develop¬
ment of his country. Notably in the Areopagiticus, he pleaded for a reform of
morals, more important in his opinion than political reform proper.
Democracy was given over to excess; it persecuted the rich with no real
benefit to the poor. Isocrates believed that it was neither possible nor
desirable for Athens to change to a monarchy or an aristocracy but he
wanted a moderate, one might say ‘Theramenian’, democracy, fairly
similar to the type favoured by Aristotle, where the Areopagus would
regain its predominant role in the state.
But this was not the main point: in his opinion the problem of Greece
was more crucial than the problem of Athens. The Greeks were degrading
themselves by discord; because the traditional cities could no longer act
effectively, a king of Macedonia must hold the torch aloft. Isocrates showed
a new line of thought which people, tired of the inextricable situation born
of rival antagonisms, were following; he aspired to a union which the
Macedonians would achieve - by force. The exact extent of the influence
that Isocrates exercised on Philip is as impossible to estimate as
Xenophon’s, but it must have been considerable. But for the first time, a
thinker, halfway between the utopias of Plato and the direct action of
Demosthenes, made his mark on the destiny of Hellenism.
The Eloquence of Passion: Demosthenes

Greek thought was so unsettled that Demosthenes, with no less conviction
and no less sincerity, could make a stand against pan-Hellenism and devote
all his strength to fighting Philip - the same Philip whom Isocrates saw as
the natural arbiter between the Greeks. His political actions have already
been described, but it would be unjust not to add that they were only pos¬
sible because Demosthenes possessed the most wonderful oratorical talent
which enabled him to stir the enthusiasm of the Athenian demos, and, better
still, to infuse it with new energy.
Demosthenes obviously revealed himself more in his Harangues and his
Political Speeches than in his Civil Speeches (where he performed the task of
logographos). He was strongly influenced by Thucydides, from whom he
355
borrowed his contempt for rules of style, his surprise effects and his liking
for abrupt and jarring constructions. But, without paradox, however much
he put his personal mark on all that he borrowed, he was also aware of the
great conquest that Isocrates’ periods represented, with their symmetry
and their heavy balance which so effectively broke up the process of
thought.
In fact, words and phrases were but tools in his hands. He used them
with the greatest freedom, not flinching from violent expressions or the
boldest combinations, departing from habitual word order, and resorting
to the most strongly expressive images. His constructions, often harmonious
and regular, would suddenly blaze up into the worst anacolutha. This was
because he spoke, not just to display his eloquence, but to drag support
from the audience. He was entirely absorbed in his speeches, with his rages,
enthusiasms and consuming passion for liberty. He therefore broke
through the static framework in which Isocrates had all too often enclosed
his thought. His governing quality was action, as his adversary Aeschines
acknowledged in a famous anecdote, and for him oratorical action was only
a form of political action. Always passionate, he was infinitely varied, at
times pathetic, and at others ironic; he apostrophied, threatened and
pleaded. His vehemence carries one away and even today a certain amount
of detachment is needed from the charm of his fiery periods to make it
possible to examine the value of his proofs. He was not an eloquent orator,
but eloquence personified, and if the advisability of his policy could
legitimately be questioned, it is impossible to begrudge this great loser
the fame of having carried the art of oratory to its most heart-rending
heights.
Oratorical History
Apart from Xenophon, whose poor ability in this respect has been men¬
tioned, history was represented by authors of secondary importance and
only small fragments of their work have been preserved. However, a
favourable tendency towards a wider outlook on the world does seem to
have appeared. But eloquence, which reigned supreme in that sphere too,
took precedence over the quest for truth.
Ctesias of Cnidos, a doctor at the court of Susa, consulted the archives
of the Great King there, and contributed a book on Persia and another on
India. His work was still written in Ionian, and in the tradition of the
logographoi remained entirely coloured with the miraculous.
Two disciples of Isocrates were much more serious. Ephorus of Cyme
wrote a General History of the World from the return of the Heraclidae until
340: it was the first attempt at a universal history, and was moreover
carried out with a real attempt at critical treatment. Theopompus of
Chios, who also achieved fame with his set speeches, first carried on with
Thucydides’ work and then gave an account of events in Greece during
Philip’s reign in his Philippica. These two authors had a common defect:
they both regarded history as a branch of eloquence rather than a discipline

with a dignity of its own.
FROM THE ACADEMY TO THE LYCEUM
Socrates’ influence entirely overshadows the history of philosophy in the

fourth century and moreover it was his method, more than his doctrine,
which commanded attention. There was scarcely a philosopher who did
not claim kinship with him and it is surprising to find that Cynics,
Cyrenaics and Academicians all claim heritage from him. On the other
hand, the Sophists had made thought more flexible and new forms of dis¬
cussion familiar, which did not always leave Plato untouched. Finally,
Pythagoreanism remained very much alive, both in the purely scientific
field, where it made decisive conquests, and in moral speculation and
eschatology: Aristotle could even state that Platonism was Pythagoreanism
modified by Socratism (Metaphysics i, 6).
Cynics and Cyrenaics
Amongst the divergent streams, we will deal first with the Cynic school
founded at the gymnasium of Cynosarges by the Athenian Antisthenes.
He thought that the best life was that of the animal or the savage, easily
obtaining the strict necessities, scorning the opinion of others and tramp¬
ling on prejudices concerning patriotism and religion. There was a certain
greatness in this contempt for transient possessions and social convention,
but there was also an affectation in it and Socrates once reproached
Antisthenes on this score. The sect, which called itself Cynic because its
members claimed to lead the life of a dog, quickly achieved a great success
because it satisfied undeniable moral aspirations towards a life untram¬
melled by contingencies and also because of its very direct methods of
preaching. Crates of Thebes walked through the streets clad in rags.
Diogenes of Sinope, the hero of repercussive anecdotes, was a picturesque
character, a peevish Socrates, who lived in slightly ostentatious penury and
scorned humanity to the extent of ‘searching for a man’ in the centre of
Athens at mid-day, a lantern in his hand.
Aristippus of Cyrene thought that there was a single wisdom: to cull the
sensual pleasure of the moment. But the shattering statements of his
absolute hedonism may be misleading. In fact, he also taught that the wise
man must dominate his passions; ‘take and not be taken’, as he said of his
amorous relations with Lais. The moral life lay therefore in a balance be¬
tween pleasure and detachment from pleasure, and Aristippus, who shame¬
lessly flattered the tyrants of Syracuse, seemed to be past-master in the art
of apportionment. His influence was profound throughout the century,
and some of the most distinguished minds, such as Theodorus the Atheist,
357
Hegesias, who was nicknamed ‘Councillor of Death’ because of his
pessimism, and Anniceris, claimed kinship with the Cyrenaic school.
Plato
There was no absolute difference between Plato’s thought and that of
Antisthenes or Aristippus: all three were moulded by the same master,
Socrates, and were seeking before all else how man might become man.
But the sublime genius of the founder of the Academy enabled him to
formulate a doctrine which embraced all speculative problems, while re¬
taining an extreme flexibility and without ever falling into scholasticism.
His influence was so profound, so enduring and so varied that, according
to an apposite formula, all the philosophers of the western world have only
been able to add footnotes to his work.
Plato belonged to a famous aristocratic family of Athens and was one of
the enthusiastic youths who found in Socrates’ teachings the revelation of
themselves. The death of his master and also the excesses of some members
of his family at the time of the tyranny of the Thirty, turned him away from
the political life he would normally have followed, This was heart-breaking
for him and some sources have seen this suppression as the origin of the
obsession which haunted him throughout his life, not only in his theoretical
search for an ideal city but also in his unfortunate experiences in Sicily.
On his return from a long journey during which he visited Egypt, Cyrene
and the west and was influenced by the Pythagorean Archytas, he opened
a school at Athens on an estate adjoining the gardens of the hero Academus.
The Academy was both a centre for research and an institute of moral and
political studies. Henceforth, his whole life was spent in speculation, train¬
ing young people and composing his dialogues - the three inseparable
fields of his activity - apart from two further journeys to Sicily at the re¬
quest 01 Dionysius n whom Plato thought he could make into a philosopher
prince but who proved a wretched and unworthy character. He died at
Athens at the age of eighty, without ever ceasing to push his thought
further.
The heart of his doctrine was the theory of ideas. He took up afresh the
word ideas (that is to say, forms) which Democritus had used to designate
atoms, but with quite a different meaning. Ideas were the model, the
structure, the formula of the world of the senses. They alone represented
verifiable absolute and eternal reality, of which visible objects were only
reflections. Various categories of thought seem to have favoured the form¬
ulation of this theory: Socrates had taught him that the virtues existed in
themselves, independently of the virtuous man who practised them; the
Pythagoreans had shown him that the universe obeyed a rational and
abstract order, based on numbers; his own aesthetic experiences taught
him that it was possible to rise from the contemplation of a beautiful body
to that of beautiful bodies, then to that of souls, activities and knowledge,
finally to attain the pure essence of the Beautiful in itself, which burst forth
in the soul like a vision of the ultimate mystery to the initiated, at the end
of that prodigious ascent which is the dialectic of love properly speaking.
Thus the world of being was organized at four levels as the myth of the
cave teaches: shadows, perceptible objects, mathematical objects, ideas. In
the same way, the world of knowledge had four parallel steps: illusion,
belief, mathematical knowledge, the dialectic - which alone gave access to
the supreme world of ideas.
The theory of ideas in itself revealed one of the most striking aspects of
Platonism: that dynamism which tore the mind away from.the impoverish¬
ing vision of appearances to lead it, by way of an ineluctable progress under
the guidance of love, to the radiant domain of the Beautiful. The same
dynamism is again found in relation to the problem of the soul. The soul
was an independent substance which did not have an organic relationship
to the body; it could reflect and conceive ideas. But the body with the con¬
fused effervescence of its instincts was a permanent obstacle to the soul.
All moral life consisted therefore in self-preservation from contact with the
perishable and physical as from something impure and degrading. ‘While
we live, we shall be nearest to knowledge when we avoid, so far as possible,
intercourse and communion with the body ... but keep ourselves pure from
it’ (Phaedo, 67a). Only a violent purge restored the soul to its natural state
and enabled it to unite with God. This has been described as a philosophy
of escape, but it must be noted that the escape aimed at freeing the soul
from the deception of the senses and the impurity of appetites and passions,
so that it might emerge into its divine home, the realm of being. ‘It is
necessary to strive to flee from here as quickly as possible; but this flight
was the imitation of God’, proclaimed the Theaetetus.
Plato was undeniably inconsistent about the survival of the soul. In
the Apology it was only a hypothesis. Phaedo, an account of the last moments
of Socrates, solemnly stated that death made what was mortal disappear,
but that the soul remained incorruptible because of its participation in the
ideas. In the wonderful myth of Phaedrus, the soul was shown drawn in a
chariot by two horses, the horse of noble passions and the horse of base
passions, driven by reason which succeeded in casting a few glances at the
world of ideas beyond the celestial vault; reincarnated in a body, accord¬
ing to the Pythagorean theory, the soul recognized some ray of the ideal
world and was stirred and this was the quiver of the scholar, the lover or
the poet.
Dialectics and eschatology did not make Plato forget the actual cities.
In The Republic, he rejected the four impure forms of government (timoc¬
racy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny) and in their stead imagined an
ideal city where the first concern was to form a governmental personnel of
‘guardians’ over the state. Women and children were held in common.
A strict system of education gave the best people the opportunity to study
gymnastics (from the age of seventeen to twenty), then the theory of
numbers (twenty to thirty years), and then the theory of ideas (thirty to
thirty-five years): the man thus fashioned would be able to follow active
359
offices between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, before returning to his
studies until his death. This, in advance of Comte and Renan, was the
restoration of power to the princes of the mind, who would govern by
modelling their conduct on the world of ideas.
Although the chronology of the Platonic dialogues is disputed, it would
appear that, in his maturity, Plato encountered certain objections:
Antisthenes in particular attacked the ideas themselves and claimed ‘to see
the horses but not the horseness’. If the main point, the theory of ideas,
withstood all trials, the master of the Academy weakened on certain other
aspects of his thought. This has sometimes been attributed to the influence
of one of his friends and disciples, Eudoxus of Cnidos, a mathematician,
philosopher, geographer and astronomer, and the inventor of a machine
with twenty-seven wheels to calculate the movements of the stars. Plato
was more than willing to turn his eyes to the heavens and, sensitive to the
regular beauty of its movements, tended to form a less impersonal concept
of the divine.
On another count, he allowed Eudoxus and Aristippus, both convinced
hedonists, to persuade him to admit certain pure pleasures, such as those
born of the contemplation of geometric forms or of listening to sweet, clear
sounds, and henceforth he defined beatitude as a mingled condition of
knowledge and pleasure.
With the crisis surmounted, Plato extended his thought still further in
the works of his old age. The Timaeus outlined a vast cosmology. The
creative act of the divine artisan (or demiurgos) emanated from two realities,
disturbed and chaotic matter and the harmoniously ordered world of ideas,
and he sought to model the first on the second. He endowed the world with
a soul made up of a mixture of Self and Other born in a crater and broken
up in accordance with two geometric proportions which formed the inter¬
vals of the scale. He also created the gods, divinities of mythology and the
stars, charged in their turn with creating the three types of living things,
by utilizing what might be left of the soul in the crater in order to join it
to perishable bodies. It would then fall to the soul to purify itself by an
appropriate process of asceticism.
The Laws are the sum of Plato’s final political thought. Retaining the
bitter memory of his experiences in Syracuse and despairing of reforming
the city, he imagined an ideal city which, whether it liked it or not, must
model itself on the soul of the world. An integral communism of possessions,
women and children was established. Everything was subject to the most
severe regulation, so as to withdraw the individual from the tumultuous
attractions of his instincts. Education, with a strictly mathematical basis,
was the concern of the state. Liberty was almost non-existent: women-
inspectors watched over young households: pederasty was proscribed (a
great innovation this), journeys abroad forbidden under the age of fifty;
worse still, religion was obligatory, as indispensable to the profane as
dialectics to the elite. The unbeliever was shut up in a house of correction
for five years, unless he were judged incorrigible and put to death. This
dreadful system has been attacked and compared either to the Inquisition
or to totalitarian regimes according to the taste of the critic. In fact,
Plato’s political thought had hardened flagrantly since The Republic and
the philosopher’s last pages give an impression of the bitter pessimism of
an old man whose last hopes had died at Syracuse.
His work was striking because of its immeasurable breadth, because it
embraced all spheres, from ontology and eschatology to ethics and politics.
Despite its contradictions and retractions, it forms a whole, because it was
wholly moved by enthusiasm for the ideal world on which it behoved
individuals and cities to model themselves. Based on mathematical know¬
ledge but also on both mystical and realistic inspiration, it was so vast and
so rich that the most divergent doctrines have been able to find their roots
in it. This was the case, from antiquity onwards, with Aristotelianism which
moved forward from Platonism in order to reform and deform it, with the
New Academy in whose probabilist arguments Plato would certainly have
had difficulty in recognizing himself, and finally with neo-Platonism, that
marvellous belated blaze of Hellenism which mainly retained from Plato’s
teachings the ascetic and mystic impulse towards the One who was God.
Still more striking was the fact that the great spiritualistic religions of the
ancient world appropriated him to their own advantage: in the first
century ad, the Jew, Philo of Alexandria, attempted to synthesize the
Academy and the Old Testament; the Fathers of the Church tried to find
in his work the first step of a wisdom which the Christian message brought
to completion; the greatest of them, Augustine, would not have been the
same had he not first embraced neo-Platonism as a faith. Arab, Jew or
Christian, the Middle Ages were nourished on Plato and it is no paradox
also that the spiritual liberation of the Renaissances of the twelfth and
fifteenth centuries took place beneath his banner.
Plato’s message did not cease to fertilize western thought, partly because
he was able to state it in a wonderfully vivid form. Plato abandoned treat¬
ises in prose or poems which had hitherto served as the means of expression
for philosophers, except Socrates, and he invented the philosophic dia¬
logue. This was a real dialogue between real characters: the ineffable
Socrates - undoubtedly less and less Socrates and more and more Plato;
his adversaries, the great Sophists; and those aesthetic, naive and attentive
youths who, minus their languor, had the eurhythmy of Praxiteles’ ephebi.
He presented a complete world that, with Diotima, did not even lack the
inspiring presence of a woman. It was a world where Athenian, Spartan and
Cretan rubbed shoulders with foreigners, where the little slave, charged
with solving the problem of the duplication of the square, conversed with
free men enjoying philosophical leisure. The hand of the producer himself
did not appear and yet truth was never given ready-made but gradually
emerged from eristic discussion. In the best Socratic style, the adversary
was suddenly pushed back to his last defences unless, at the most stirring
moment, Plato turned to myth, which alone was capable of enabling the
soul, trammelled by the body, to cast a bold glance at transcendental
THE CENTURY OF PLATO 361
realities. Every extreme is there, from a dip in the Ilissus to the stars whirl¬
ing round in harmony, from a circle of carousing friends to the most diffi¬
cult problems of the city, from tender evocations of the radiant beauty of
youth to the austerity of asceticism. The master of the Academy has not
ceased to captivate his readers well after the end of his long life, because he
put into his work the delicacy of his conscience, the anguish of his problems,
the strength of his aspirations — a whole universe which is without any
doubt the richest that antiquity has bequeathed.
Decisive Progress in Mathematics

It is not even necessary to recall the famous formula engraved on the door
of Plato’s school: ‘Let no one enter here, if he be not geometer’. One has
only to scan the Platonic dialogues to understand the decisive importance
of mathematical speculation at the Academy, as was perhaps already the
case in Socrates’ circle. This was because the different branches of mathe¬
matics had made decisive progress since the end of the fifth century and
throughout the fourth, although it is not possible to delimit the precise
stages of the advance. This was primarily the doing of the Pythagoreans, of
whom the most notable were Philolaus, Theaetetus and Archytas, but
many other scholars, notably Theodorus of Cyrene and Eudoxus of Cnidos,
made capital contributions to this structure which, after many attempts,
found its expression in Euclid’s Elements.
Speculations on numbers developed by the extension of the specifically
Pythagorean idea of means (mesotes), that is to say of progression amongst
three numbers (a, b and c) which constituted ratios equal to two of their
differences. Three primordial types were recognized: arithmetic mean
(a—b a\ x . (a—b a\ , , . (a—b a\
-- - , geometric mean --—- and harmonic mean -=-
Vo— c a) \b—c b) \b—c ch
Geometry advanced at two levels. First, elements, that is to say a series
of logically linked propositions, were constituted from Hippocrates the
Mathematician up to Euclid, These still represented the essentials of math¬
ematical construction to Descartes. In the second place, attention was
focused on new questions, necessitating the formulation, notably in rela¬
tion to of the idea of irrational size (arreton or alogon) in absolute con¬
tradiction to the first Pythagorean speculations. Thinkers then grew bolder
and applied themselves principally to three problems, the squaring of the
circle, the duplication of the circle and the trisection of the angle: they did
not grasp the insoluble character of the first but Eudoxus and Archytas
solved the second (set as a competition by the priests of Delian Apollo) and
the third received a mechanical solution thanks to the curve of Hippias.
Two geometricians of the fourth century, Menaechmus and Aristaeus, even
embarked on the study of conic sections.
Astronomy also strengthened its advance, although it tended to concen¬
trate on geocentricism. But Heraclides of Pontus was already asserting that
the world rotated on itself and, although he continued to believe that the
13
sun and most of the planets revolved around it, he granted the sun two
satellites, Mercury and Venus. His contemporary, Eudoxus of Cnidos,
started from the immobility of the earth and imagined twenty-seven con¬
centric spheres with the centre of the earth as their common centre to
account for the apparent movement of the stars: a brilliantly absurd
conception which despite endless correction remained the basis of all
astronomical knowledge until the discovery of heliocentricism.
Finally, the scale was definitely constituted as a series of eight notes
spaced out from Do to Do, obtained by a succession of quints; at the same
time the theory of sharpened and flattened notes was formulated. Imagina¬
tion was so carried away that it recognized musical intervals in the
distances of the planets from the earth.
Aristotle
Plato’s most famous disciple entirely neglected mathematics, which had
played such a part in his master’s thought. Aristotle was born into a family
of doctors and was passionately interested in concrete observation above
all else; his favourite sphere was the sciences of life. However, he followed
the lessons of the Academy for twenty years and Plato proclaimed him ‘the
understanding of the school’. After a sojourn at the court of the tyrant
Hermeias, he was summoned by Philip who entrusted him with the educa¬
tion of his son, Alexander. Then he returned to Athens where he founded
the Lyceum. Dividing his time between teaching before a limited public in
the morning and a wider one in the afternoon, he was able to associate his
disciples with his research and utilize their work in his vast syntheses.
About to be brought to justice at the time of the reaction which followed
Alexander’s death, he took refuge in Chalcis where he died. He left con¬
siderable work behind him but only the esoteric works destined for his
pupils now remain. They are often simple lecture notes or collections of
memorandum slips; all his exoteric books are lost.
An anecdote tells how Aristotle stayed up one night with a bronze ball
in his hands above a pond so as not to give way to sleep. In fact, one cannot
help admiring the amount of effort that his work represented. An impor¬
tant part of it was devoted to the science of reasoning, which had gradually
been formulated by the Sophists and rhetors but had never been worked
into a coherent system. The standard model of reasoning was the syllogism
and Aristotle carefully established its theory, for example separating the
nineteen conclusive from the sixty-four possible modes. In another con¬
nection, he stressed primary principles, without which no deduction was
possible: the principle of identity common to all the sciences, particular
principles in every discipline, such as the odd and the even, or the square
and the cube in mathematics. The most striking characteristic of this
Aristotelian logic was that it was formal, undertaking to study the very
structure of reasoning, determined to denounce the sophisms which cor¬
rupted thought, indifferent to the truth of the proposition. Its influence in
antiquity is known — especially in the Middle Ages as a form of mental

gymnastics - although it did not escape a certain hardening.
Taking a firm doctrine of reasoning as his basis and with a firm belief
in the possibility of attaining truth, Aristotle endeavoured to provide an
encyclopaedia of all the sciences, except mathematics. He elaborated the
representation that Plato and Eudoxus had developed of the movement of
the stars; he replaced the eight motive spheres of Plato and the twenty-
seven spheres of Eudoxus by fifty-five spheres: this resolutely geocentric
system was only aiming at ‘keeping up appearances’ better. But Aristotle
is much more interesting in his role as biologist. Aided by his disciples, he
carried out an investigation of exceptional scope to classify the different
living species and he described over four hundred of them. Here, for
example, is his classification of animals:
The Eight ‘Great Categories'1 of the Animal Kingdom according to Aristotle
I Animals with red blood

1 Viviparous (mammalians and cetaceans)
Two species: bipeds and quadrupeds.
2-4 Oviparous: 2 Birds: eight species
3 Reptiles
4 Fish.
II Animals with white blood

5 with soft bodies (cephalopoda)
6 with soft bodies covered by scales (crustaceans)
7 with soft bodies covered with a shell (gasteropoda)
8 Insects (nine species) and worms.
He described the organs and their functions precisely and in minute

detail. Despite minor errors (he counted six cranial bones instead of eight
and eight ribs instead of twelve), he accumulated an astounding mass of
precise and exact observations. It was an immense fresco he produced,
alive with the feeling that life was a unity: he showed no hesitation in
comparing man to animals (for example, art to instinct) and the animals to
one another or to plants (the mouth was analogous to the root). The whole
picture was dominated by a supreme finality, each organ having the good
of the whole animal as its end and being particularly adapted to its own
form of life.
For all that he was the creator of formal logic and a first-class naturalist,
Aristotle did not ignore early philosophy. In this sphere, he totally rejected
the theory of ideas. ‘The argument of the third man’ is famous: Socrates
and Callias resembled one another because they participated in the idea of
man in himself; but the resemblance between Socrates and man in himself
could only be explained by a third man, and so on. For Aristotle therefore,
there was no being but the individual. Being was determined according to
categories, prior to the operation of the intelligence and amounting to
ten in all (substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, pos¬
session, action, passion). Ontology then advanced in a series of fundamental
distinctions. Substance was a self-sufficient being; accidents only existed when
received by a substance. Being in a state of becoming comprised three
principles: ‘form which is the future of movement, privation which is its
past, matter which is its indefinitely present present’ (P. Aubenque). Thus
the sculptor’s art turned the unformed bronze of metal into a statue.
Substance appeared under two aspects: in action when its form was realized,
in potential when that realization was not yet completed: thus the adult is
potential in the child, the square or the cube of a number in that number.
The heart of substance, or substratum, underwent changes which were the
transition from the potential to the action and these could be of four types:
qualitative, quantitative, local or substantial (this latter, the most radical,
being generation or death).
Did this philosophy, centred on being and its modalities, exclude God?
In his explanation of the changes, Aristotle proclaimed that ‘it was neces¬
sary to come to a halt’. Movement presupposed an unmoved mover which
was God. This was no demiurgos\ he did not even undergo creation. But
the whole universe, particularly the stars, was motivated by an immense
aspiration towards his beauty and sought to model itself on it. God was
pure thought, pure action, without matter, accident or development. Pure
intelligence, he was totally absorbed in his thought: he was therefore the
thought of thought. Absolutely transcendental, limited to the contempla¬
tion of himself, ‘he moved, in so far as he was an object of love’, the whole
cosmos by the desire born of his immutable perfection. Astronomy and
metaphysics thus found their final explanation in this primum movens: all
substances concurred to universal harmony by raising themselves towards
a radically abstract divinity, loved but not loving, which, despite its purely
intellectual character, was not without analogies to Plato’s god.
In the realm of action on the other hand, Aristotle clearly diverged from
his master. He seems to have been the first thinker to devote special
treatises to ethics. They stated a doctrine which had no resemblance to
Plato’s asceticism, but was based on the quest for equilibrium and the
happy medium, and was profoundly human. In actuality, it influenced the
most diverse thought for long to come: stoicism, Christianity and Kant.
V. Brochard said that the ‘JVichomachean Ethics was to eternal morality
what Euclid’s Elements was to geometry’.
Happiness was the supreme good but it did not reside in pleasure, wealth
and respect, as the common people understood it. It lay in an activity con¬
sistent with the nature of man, that is to say in reason. The philosopher
would find it in the contemplative life, and everyone in the practice of
virtue. Aristotle’s definition of virtue is justifiably famous: ‘This is a perma¬
nent state, a possession presupposing choice. It consists of a mean, peculiar
to each person, defined by reason and such as a man of good sense would
determine.’ Although everyone thus had his own virtue, in conformity with
his condition, age, sex and profession, virtue always lay in mastery over the
passions and tended to establish a mean position, midway between oppos¬

ing excesses, in the great tradition of Hellenic wisdom. It was therefore not
opposed to the normal enjoyment of moderate possessions: if the appetites
were controlled and dominated, pleasure was added to action, as an extra,
‘like the bloom of an adolescent’.
Aristotle also diverged from Plato as a political theorist. His realistic
mind did not take refuge in the utopia of the ideal cities, except perhaps at
the beginning of his career. He first studied the existing constitutions, and
produced the enormous total of 158 treatises on the Greek cities, in colla¬
boration with his assistants; only the Athenaion Politeia now remains. He
then classified the various possible regimes, each with its own virtues and
vices, ever ready to degenerate through the egoism of its leaders: monarchy
easily became tyranny, aristocracy an unscrupulous oligarchy, democracy
a vicious demagogy. With a great deal of realism, he recognized that no
constitution was good in itself and that everything depended on climate,
geographical conditions and historical precedents. Nevertheless, he gives
the impression that, like Isocrates, he considered the best government a
moderate democracy, reserving the work of government to the best in¬
structed, but respecting political equality. The analysis is so acute, there
are so many penetrating remarks in this treatise and it is often so modern
that it sometimes reads like Macchiavelli or Montesquieu. Nevertheless, it
is difficult not to be surprised that this contemporary, subject and friend of
Philip and Alexander, should never have thought of any political frame¬
work other than the classical polls. Compared with Isocrates, his political
thought remains timid.
Aristotle also wrote on rhetoric and poetics and possessed an encyclo¬
paedic mind, rare in antiquity. It is sufficient for his reputation to have
built logic and ethics into a system and given a precise and hierarchical
picture of the living world. No one has ever made a greater effort at under¬
standing and one almost wishes that the anecdote were true about him
throwing himself into the waves of the Euripus, because he was unable to
extract the secret of their movements. However, criticism of his ‘dryness’
has not been infrequent, simply because he did not have Plato’s enthusiasm
and preferred to stay closer to the real and actual. Worse still, he has been
accused of sterilizing medieval thought for centuries. But it was hardly his
fault if‘the master’ triumphed with Albertus Magnus or Thomas Aquinas
and if theologians, more bold than honest, borrowed and hardened his
doctrine in order forcibly to introduce into it the message of Christianity.
THE QUIVERINGS OF ART
The future course of art could have been predicted as from the last decades
of the fifth century. But the development already begun, continued rapidly
and incessantly, throughout the fourth century, linked with the changes in
political life and, above all, in philosophy and religion.
The spiritual father of the century was indisputably Socrates, progress¬

ively glorified as a martyr sage. Platonic mysticism had a direct influence
on artists, despite the contempt the master of the Academy displayed in
respect of art, which he considered even more illusory than reality in rela¬
tion to the essential verity of the ideas. This tendency was not without its
dangers, because the perceptible world was no longer of any interest except
in so far as it granted access to the ideal and abstract world which infinitely
transcended it. This gave rise to the use and soon the abuse of allegories
and symbols: Scopas planted Pothos (Desire) and Himeros (Charm) at
Aphrodite’s side; the Hermes Dionysophorus of Praxiteles evoked the salva¬
tion of the soul by Dionysus; Lysippus mounted a winged Kairos (Oppor¬
tunity), holding scales on a sharp blade. Certain traditional myths returned
with significant emphasis, such as that of Psyche which best illustrated the
Platonic doctrine of the soul as the prisoner of the body, freed from its
prison by love. In the same way, abduction scenes multiplied and it is
necessary to beware of seeing in them the voluptuous attraction of sensual
representations, because they sang of the omnipotence of Eros, god of
deliverance.
But the complexity of the period was partly the result of the constant
conflict between rationalist and mystical trends. On the artistic plane, the
former was expressed in a desire to look for beauty in the sensible world,
conceived as having its own value inherent within itself. It ended in a
realism which was at times extremist. This had come much before the
Hellenistic period, because it had appeared from the beginning of the
century with the ‘Pugilist’ with the powerfully detailed back by Naucydes
(in the Louvre). The two tendencies constantly intermingled. Nevertheless,
at the time of the triumph of mysticism and visible passion, it is possible to
discern a development in the very different styles of Praxiteles and Scopas,
which would lead towards the eurhythmic realism of Lysippus.
Besides, whether mystical or realistic, art went in for psychological
analysis. This is not implying that Phideas’ creations were devoid of emo¬
tion, but that all his faces expressed the same serenity. In the fourth cen-
tury, troubled or passionate feelings conveyed their changing truth. Heroes
earned salvation through suffering. On one side of the frontons at Tegea,
Scopas showed Meleager ennobled by his trials; on the other, Peleus and
Heracles, sorrowful fathers, watch the battle between their sons, Achilles
and Telephus, on the plain of the Caicus: anguish was the predominant
motif of these compositions, which might merely have been banal hunting
or battle scenes. Even the divinities were no longer impassive models of
heart-rent humanity. Aphrodite often had the voluptuous charm of a
beautiful mortal; the Dionysus Taurus’ of the Vatican has the charming
pout of a young adolescent; the ‘Asclepius’ of Epidaurus with his finger
raised resembles a doctor giving a consultation. It went still further; the
gods showed sympathy with the sorrows they shared; the ‘Demeter’ of
Gnidos has the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks of a mother who has lost her
daughter; the Zeus by Bryaxis is a god of mercy and pity. This art may be
less pure, less exalting, but it is moving because nothing human is alien to
it.
Athens remained the centre where emotions and sensations were at their
strongest; again it must be added that this was the Athens of the gardens of
Academus, not of the Acropolis. But people everywhere were seeking and
producing. A small city like Sicyon continued worthy of its glorious artistic
past. Boeotia showed new life: the nonchalant, skilfully natural grace of its
‘tanagras’ in themselves would be enough to clear it of the charge of bar¬
barism, which still clings to its name. The greatest change was the revival
of Ionia which regained its creative vitality with its economic prosperity.
Moreover, the notion of school lost even more of its meaning. The great
artists were in demand everywhere and they made positive tours in the
company of innumerable collaborators. This resulted in a mingling of
influences, an artistic syncretism which corresponded to the religious
syncretism. Praxiteles crossed Asia with Phryne. The barbarous but phil-
Hellenic princes of Caria summoned the greatest artists of the time to their
court.
Religious Architecture
The indefatigable activity of the builders continued to be directed essen¬
tially towards religious architecture. Although Doric was not abandoned, a
clear renaissance of the Ionic style occurred in conjunction with the eco¬
nomic revival of Greek Anatolia. On the other hand, Corinthian, which
had appeared in the form of a single decorative capital in the temple of
Apollo at Phigalia, showed a tendency to become a distinct order. For a
long time, it was only used in internal colonnades (tholos of Delphi, temple
of Tegea, tholos of Epidaurus, Phillipeum at Olympia). It only won a
diffident place on the exterior with the Choragic monument of Lysicrates
at Athens - a gem-like monument. In the course of the century, an ortho¬
dox Corinthian type gradually took definite shape and this spread in the
Hellenistic and Roman periods.
There were few innovations in the shape of buildings. Temples obeyed the
same canons, all the more so as many fourth-century constructions were
only reconstructions of sanctuaries destroyed by the disasters, and the origi¬
nal design was retained. Nevertheless, the development of round monu¬
ments (which had always been known to Greek art) can be noted. The
proper significance of these tholoi remains mysterious, although it can be
guessed that they were linked with the cult of chthonic powers (tholoi of
Delphi and Epidaurus) or heroic powers (tholos of Olympia). In any case,
aesthetically, they corresponded perfectly to the new taste for refined ele¬
gance. On the other hand, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus provides a
wonderful model of a temple-tomb. A partial example of this type of build¬
ing had already been provided by the Erechtheum, but it spread following
contacts with the barbarian world and the development of belief in the
heroization of the great dead.
Architects seemed more concerned with proportions than in the preced¬

ing period. At the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, at the temple of Athena at
Priene, and at Philon’s arsenal at Piraeus, they tried to achieve simple
relationships between the different parts of the building, as if the ‘mathe-
matization’ of the design would necessarily involve a greater harmony.
Such exercises were sometimes carried very far: at the propylaea of
Labraunda (in Caria), the height of the steps of the sub-foundation was
taken as the module for the elevation and their width for the plane, in such
a way that all vertical surfaces were reduced to rectangles of j ’5 by 2 -5, and
all horizontal surfaces to squares of 2-5.
But these theoretical concerns were nothing compared with the preten¬
tions of the anonymous architect of the Treasury of Cyrene at Delphi. He
was undoubtedly a disciple of his compatriot, the great mathematician
Theodorus, who had constructed the irrational roots of numbers from two
to seventeen. In his project, he multiplied irrational relationships, 2 and
V 3 in the lower and upper diameters of the columns, and 7r in the jamb of
the door of the naos. This modest building thus became the expression in
precious marble of the truths discovered by the mathematical school of
Cyrene. Its beauty could be analysed in intellectual terms; it is what
Socrates in the Philebus defined as the only true beauty, that of the ‘straight
line and the circle and the plane and solid figures formed from these by
turning-lathes and rulers and patterns of angles’ (51c).
Sanctuaries of Anatolia and Greece
The Ionian renaissance was marked by the number of its new buildings,
more than by the boldness of its innovations. Ionian art in the fourth
century, like that of the Archaic period, was characterized by decorative
profusion and a tendency to the colossal.
At Ephesus, the temple of Croesus, burnt down in 356, was reconstructed
on the same plan, but with the addition of a large stairway right round the
platform: the most original element was supplied by the bases of the col¬
umns, sculptured in oriental style. The temple of Artemis at Sardes, burnt
in 499, was only reconstructed late in the fourth century, on a very similar
model to the one at Ephesus. However, a new arrangement of the colon¬
nade, the first example of its kind, may be noted: there were two rows of
columns on the facades, and a single row on the long sides (pseudo¬
dipteral). The columns of the peristyle were colossal, the largest in Asia
Minor. At Halicarnassus, the temple of Ares showed Attic influence and
the columns copied those of the Erechtheum.
There were greater changes at Priene, where Pythius made the temple
of Athena Polias the very incarnation of a canon of proportions (to which
he had devoted a book). With 6x11 columns, he reached twice the num¬
ber of inter-columniations on the long sides as on the facade; on the other
hand, the bases of the columns were equal to the inter-columniations,
which produced a regular division of the stylobate into squares of six feet,
alternately free and covered by a plinth; finally simple relationships

existed between the dimensions of the different parts.
All these temples of Ionia, with their imposing proportions, forests of
columns, and luxurious decoration, were unquestionably magnificent,
though this magnificence may possibly have been purchased at the cost of
freshness. But it must at least be pointed out that they showed neither the
ostentation nor the vulgarity which were all too often characteristic of
Hellenistic Ionic.
The Peloponnese showed equal vitality but, true to its traditions, pre¬
ferred the Doric and often resorted to simple limestone, less luxurious than
marble. However, Doric proportions were fined down and the temples
were now less thick-set and did not scorn Corinthian refinements, at least in
the interior. Olympia was somewhat neglected but Epidaurus at last offered
a temple to Asclepius. The work of Theodorus (about 375), it was on a
very simple plan (comprising only a vestibule and a naos), but of rare ele¬
gance. The healer god was enjoying so great a success that the Epidaurian
dependency of Gortys, in the very heart of Arcadia, appealed to Scopas for
help with its temple of Asclepius. Political events also influenced the de¬
velopment of architecture: the success of the Arcadian league made it
possible to entrust Scopas with the reconstruction (about 340) of the con¬
federal temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, destroyed at the beginning of the
century. The Parian made it one of the most beautiful in Greece, har¬
moniously wedding Doric columns on the exterior to Corinthian columns
within. A temple for Zeus very similar to that at Tegea was built at the
agonistic sanctuary at Nemea.
The delightful tholos at Epidaurus must be added to these temples. It
was possibly modelled on the one at Delphi and was known in inscriptions
by the name of thymele (chthonic altar). This building, undoubtedly the
scene of old ceremonies in honour of the mole-god, was one of the best
incarnations of the elegance of the century. The younger Polyclitus (about
360) united Doric and Corinthian here and utilized polychrome marbles.
The panels of the ceiling were delicately sculptured, and Pausias painted
allegorical pictures. Philip began another rotunda at Olympia, the
Philippeum, which his son completed. It was even more graceful, because
the external peripteron was Ionic, and sang the glory of the Macedonian
sovereigns, heralding the royal hero a of the Hellenistic period.
Athens, in decay, nevertheless continued to work for the gods. A new
Asclepeum stood beside the old one on the southern flank of the Acropolis.
The temple of Apollo Patroos was reconstructed on the agora and a chapel
for Zeus Phratrius and Athena Phratria was erected. The fa$ade of the
telesterion of Eleusis was embellished with a large portico (the portico of
Philon). However, nothing really recalled the wonderful constructional
impetus of the preceding century - still less as the builders were often satis¬
fied with using poor quality walls of cemented gravel as though the
knowledge of beautiful bonded constructions had been lost.
Delphi remained the astonishing centre of Hellas, where its conflicting
13*
tendencies asserted themselves. The tholos of Marmaria (plate 11), possibly

consecrated to Artemis (first quarter of the century), provided the leading
example of the rotunda of perfect grace and lightness: its architect,
Theodorus, devoted a book to it, and had undoubtedly carried out subtle
research into mathematical proportions. The sanctuary, devastated by the
disaster of 373, was covered with new buildings where all Greece combined
in a magnificent burst of pan-Hellenic piety. The temple of Apollo, pro¬
tected by a large retaining wall (the Ischegaon), was rebuilt very similarly
to the temple of the Alcmaeonids. Athena Pronaia was worshipped at
Marmaria in a temple, in a slightly different position to its predecessor,
where all the beauty was obtained by the pure severity of line.
But also prominent is the uneasy enthusiasm of cities wishing to com¬
memorate the fratricidal wars between Greek and Greek. The ex votos alone
tell the history of the battles for hegemony: the Spartan Navarchs after
404, the base of the Arcadians after their incursion into Laconia in 369,
the kings of Argos after the foundation of Messene. The treasury of
Thebes, a rectangular room without column or sculpture, and a valuable
example of sober work in limestone, celebrated the victory of Leuctra.
Only the Treasury of Cyrene (third quarter of the century) rose above the
shabby disputes between cities and offered the god an intellectual tribute
of mathematical rhythm.
A Wonder of the World: The Mausoleum

The most important building of the century was a tomb and the tomb of a
barbarian prince at that; this was a far cry from the radiant temple of the
acropolis which incarnated the glory of the fifth century. The Mausoleum
was conceived by Mausolus and completed after his death by his widow
Artemisia. It was the work of two architects, Satyrus and Pythius, and four
sculptors, Scopas, Timotheus, Bryaxis and Leochares. The brilliance of
these artists fully showed that nothing was spared to sing the glory of the
ostentatious dynast of Halicarnassus, who reposed with his wife beneath a
colossal weight of marble in the capital that he had founded.
Unfortunately destroyed by the Crusaders, the Mausoleum is scarcely
known except by Pliny’s description. Rising on an artificial platform on the
side of the hill, it comprised a quadrangular sub-foundation, which un¬
doubtedly enclosed the sepulchral chamber, decorated with painted friezes.
Above, an Ionic temple with thirty-six columns was surmounted by a rec¬
tangular pyramid with twenty-four steps of equal height. A quadriga
attributed to Pythius stood on the summit. The completed work gave an
impression of vertiginous ascent, from the massive base, solidly attached to
the ground, to the upward flight of the pyramid and the chariot, heavily
seated on the slender Ionic colonnade, symbolizing the flight of the soul
towards its super-terrestrial destiny.
The Mausoleum was linked to a thousand-year-old oriental tradition of
colossal tombs and was also reminiscent of the temple-tombs of Lycian
dynasts (the heroon of Xanthus, for example). Oriental love of display may
also be seen in the sculpture, profusely scattered over the whole building
and emphasizing its spiritual message. The dilapidated state in which the
pieces have emerged from excavation precludes any question of reconsti¬
tuting this sculptured decoration with any certainty or of discovering the
part played by each of the four artists, two acknowledged masters and two
young men - one side was attributed to each of them. Unending discussions
have taken place about replacing (on the sub-foundation and on the
temple) existing fragments of three of the friezes: chariot race, symbol of
the final victory of Mausolus and of his apotheosis, Amazonomachy and
Gentauromachy. Only the Amazonomachy is fairly well preserved. It may
possibly hold indirect references to Carian cults but it resumed an old
Greek theme with remarkable virtuosity, variety in the episodes, unex¬
pected details and an exquisitely musical rhythm. Two colossal statues of
the couple, in the naos rather than on the chariot or in the vault, completed
this unique work.
The Mausoleum was the meeting point of the oldest beliefs of the Orient
and what was newest in Greek art - which sculptured dramatic scenes,
symbols of the vicissitudes of the human soul, and depicted faces with
moving expressions. This striking synthesis of Hellenic and barbaric heral¬
ded the Hellenistic era all the more in that it was wholly directed to the
apotheosis of an individual raised after his death to the heights of the
sublime.
Buildings of Public Assembly and Houses

One of the most characteristic features of the fourth century was the
development of buildings for public gatherings, particularly stone theatres,
which retained a religious character, but above all also testified to the taste
for spectacle, widespread throughout Greece. At Epidaurus, the younger
Polyclitus was able to make a theatre which overlooked the sanctuary from
the slope of the hill, a work not only of art but also of science. It was a
complete intellectual achievement where mathematical knowledge was the
very condition of the pursuit of beauty (plate 12). At Athens, permanent
constructions succeeded earth embankments and wooden stages. Prepara¬
tions were begun from the end of the fifth century. Undoubtedly under the
administration of Lycurgus, a stone stage and auditorium were constructed.
Megalopolis and Delphi also erected theatres.
Political assemblies likewise posed problems which received new solu¬
tions. Athens, to be sure, was content with a new adaptation of the Pnyx
(under Lycurgus), but Megalopolis, the mushroom capital of the Arcadian
confederation, erected a very skilful, hypostyle bouleuterion (the Thersihon)
for the assembly of the Ten Thousand. Columns ranged in five rectangles
did not conceal the orators, placed in the centre, from the participants.
The building was strongly influenced by the theatre, right up to its sloping
tiers, and served as the model for all places of assembly in the Hellenistic
period. It can to some extent be compared with the Arsenal at Piraeus, a
vast hypostyle construction 426 x 58 feet, made by Philon of Eleusis into

a technical masterpiece.
Private architecture is not well known, except at Athens and in two
towns destroyed by Philip and Alexander: Olynthus and Thebes. Houses
generally remained poor, though there was a movement towards greater
comfort (because citizens tended to stay at home more) and greater refine¬
ment, corresponding to the new state of mind. The house was closed on the
outside and arranged around a central courtyard, sometimes decorated
with porticos on at least one side. The material used was brick over a layer
of stone, which made it possible for thieves to enter easily by piercing the
walls. The most beautiful specimens comprised two principal rooms, the
andron (banqueting hall for men) and the oicos (family room with hearth).
Luxury made its appearance: Demosthenes contrasted the humble dwell¬
ing of Themistocles with the palaces which surpassed other buildings in
munificence . Olynthus had magnificent houses, decorated with painted
stucco and mosaics, such as the ‘villa of Good Fortune’, which heralded the
Hellenistic period.
The New Sculpture

Although no rupture with the preceding period took place, sculpture also
developed rapidly. A period of transition up to about 370 was marked by
experiments in the most conflicting directions — exaggerated realism or
graceful imagination. The masterpiece of the elder Cephisodotus was an
allegorical group of ‘Irene’ (Peace) carrying the infant Plutus (Wealth),
which bore witness to a new taste for childhood. The elegant Timotheus’
charged with the decoration of the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus,
sculptured a ‘Capture of Troy’ on the eastern fronton. It is more pleasant
than powerful but nevertheless does contain some beautiful pieces, such as
a pathetic-looking Priam. Its acroteria - delicate feminine figures in full
flight - are justifiably famous.
Scopas, Sculptor of Pathos
In about 370, a new classicism emerged which found its first most beautiful
expression in the work of Scopas and Praxiteles.
Scopas, a Parian, worked on the Artemisium of Ephesus and partici¬
pated in the decoration of the Mausoleum, before he was entrusted with the
reconstruction of the temple of Alea at Tegea. The ‘Meleager’ in the Villa
Medici and the Maenad’ at Dresden can in all likelihood be attributed to
him.
He still retained many fifth century features in his proportions as well as
in the general harmony of his compositions. But passionate sculptor that
he was, he also expressed the disquiet of his century. His heads always had
a massive and square construction with the faces showing strong expression,
obtained by very simple and invariably the same means: half-open mouth’
eyes sunk beneath a heavy prominent arch, glance raised. In fact, he
liked dramatic subjects: he sculptured the ‘Hunt of Meleager’ and the

‘Battle of Caicus’ at Tegea. The very bodies quiver; his Maenad, carried
away by Dionysiac passion, vibrates with her whole being, possessed by the
god’s delirium. She is as taut as a bow beneath her fine tunic. Undisputed
master of pathos and movement, he had a profound influence on fourth
century funeral steles (which often show the same wild-eyed intensity) and
also on Pergamene sculpture. But his genius was not confined within the
conventions of an anguished art. The ‘Ares Ludovisi’ represents the god of
war in repose, as if weary of battle: Gouraud not unreasonably called him
‘the divine deserter’. His ‘Hypnos’ (Sleep), with bent head, depicts a serene
demon, small wings at his temples, seeming to invite man to flee from
reality.
Sensuality and Mysticism: Praxiteles

The works of the Athenian Praxiteles, son of the elder Cephisodotus, show
less power and more grace. His early works embodied Polycletian rhythm,
but with greater flexibility and sinuosity of line, such as the ‘Leaning Satyr’
or ‘Aphrodite of Thespiae’, whose youthful beauty was reproduced in the
Venus of Arles. Then he devised figures with pliant forms, languidly lean¬
ing on supports. His ‘Satyr in Repose’, with sensual animal head, empha¬
sized the apathy of his early works. The ‘Aphrodite of Cnidos’, the most
beautiful female statue of antiquity, shows the goddess bathing in dazzling
nudity: an old Asiatic theme whose religious value must also be appre¬
ciated. Its supple rhythm represented the outcome of all preceding re¬
search, without languor having yet degenerated into morbidity. The later
works show even greater mastery, for example the ‘Hermes Dionysophorus’
of Olympia. The adolescent god had stopped to play with the child en¬
trusted to him: a moment of relaxation and abandon, saved from mawkish¬
ness by the spiritual intensity of the mission that Hermes had assumed in
snatching the child, that bore the hopes of humanity, from its fate.
Praxiteles to all appearances sang of the ineffable grace of adolescence
and the divine unconcern of beautiful bodies, made divine by leisure. No
one better portrayed their soft sinuosity nor sketched with more supple art
the projections and depressions alternating there in imperceptible transi¬
tions. Constantly copied in the Hellenistic period, the Praxitelian model
remained inimitably graceful. The heads with their refined hair styles are
delicately bent; the features of the faces blend in an indescribable sfumato;
eyes and lips smile. At the opposite extreme from athletic sculpture, his
ephebi languish in equivocal poses as if they found the burden of life too
heavy. His goddesses invoke voluptuousness, like Phryne who so often in¬
spired him. This was a world which gave itself up to all the attractions of
beauty, although it was not always spared disenchantment.
But all this langorous charm may be misleading. Praxiteles created gods
even though he portrayed them beneath the features of uncertain adoles¬
cents or quivering young women. These are gods whom Plato might not
have disowned, for the beauty of their bodies is only the reflection of a
transcendental reality. The satyrs, for whom he displayed a particular

preference, do not belong to our ephemeral world. There is a passionate,
wildly sensual mysticism in the ‘Aphrodite of Cnidos’, the most complete
representation of the majestic deity, without whom the world could not go
on existing. And the full depth of the affection that so many souls then
cherished for Dionysus shines through the divine bearing of the infant
savour.
Lysippus or the Return to Realism

With the work of Lysippus, we seem to return to better-known schemata.
He was the last master of the school of Sicyon; he neglected representation
of the female body and resumed the tradition of athletic sculpture. His
most beautiful creations, the ‘Agias of Delphi’ (which formed part of a
group of Thessalian dynasts and conquerors) and the ‘Apoxyomenos’
(athlete with a strigil), nevertheless give an altogether new impression of
life, with their freer proportions, their art of seizing momentary movement,
and the realism of their detail. A meeting with Alexander turned Lysippus
into a court artist, the official sculptor of the prince, whom he loved show¬
ing with leonine face, neck slightly leaning to the left shoulder, eyes raised
and moist, hair in a mane. It was a skilful mixture of realism and idealiza¬
tion which anticipated all royal sculpture of the Hellenistic period. After
the death of the king, he seems to have devoted himself to the sculpture of
gods and heroes in natural attitudes, which nonetheless did not detract
from their dignity: ‘Poseidon’ leaning forward, one foot raised, a careful,
anxious pilot; ‘Hermes’, also with raised foot, fastening his sandal before
carrying a message from Zeus.
All Lysippus’ art arose from meditation on the human body. He aban¬
doned Polycletus’ over-stumpy proportions and lengthened them (the head
to be contained seven times in the body, instead of six) and obtained more
slender and more life-like figures. He aimed at representing life at its
richest, bringing to fulfilment the long efforts of Greek sculpture to inscribe
statues in the three dimensions of space, bathing them in air, shadow and
light, fixing the truth of a fugitive moment in bronze, not faltering in face
of picturesque detail, and borrowing his own means of expression from
painting. Although he was an innovator, it was not because of any yearn-
ing towards pathos or mysticism, but because of his desperate eagerness to
create the beautiful where it was most perceptible: in the representation of
the human body. His influence was all the greater because he would seem
to have lived until the end of the century and formed a natural transition
between classicism and Hellenistic art, which steadfastly continued his
efforts to disengage the beautiful from its ephemeral physical covering,
even to the point of caricature.
These three incomparable masters do not exhaust the history of sculpture
in the century when it attained its maximum evocative power and its most
vibrant humanity. Two Athenians, Bryaxis and Leochares, together
with Timotheus, collaborated with Scopas on the Mausoleum. Bryaxis
sculptured an ‘Asclepius’ with ardent compassion shining forth from a face

charged with goodness and tenderness. Leochares, author of the ‘Apollo
Belvedere’ and the ‘Diana of Versailles’, loved theatrical attitudes.
Silanion, creator of a morose Plato, was the most famous of a series of
portrait artists who bore witness to a new interest in the individual, des¬
tined to be perpetuated over the centuries. Generally, this art, which
formed an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists of the Hellenistic
and Roman periods, while imitators vulgarized its masterpieces, is striking
in its vitality.
The Zenith of Greek Painting

The undeniable pre-eminence of sculpture in the fifth century did not con¬
tinue in the following century, when a remarkable revival of large-scale
painting took place and this, in turn, did not fail to influence sculpture.
Lysippus had, in fact, declared that his true master was a painter,
Eupompus of Sicyon.
From the beginning of the century, three great schools emerged. The
Ionian school recognized as master of the great Parrhasius who continued
to produce until about 370. Timanthes of Cythnus produced his master¬
piece in the ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’, in which he competed with another
Ionian, Colotes of Teos. This moving theme gave him the opportunity to
render all the subtleties of sadness but, despairing of giving worthy expres¬
sion to the grief of the father, he preferred to represent Agamemnon with
his head veiled.
It was Eupompus who gave the school of Sicyon its exceptional brilliance
but nothing is known of him except that his pictures were thought particu¬
larly highly of in the Hellenistic period, and that he trained the two great
painters of the school, Pamphilus and Pausias. Pamphilus of Amphipolis
employed difficult techniques and is sometimes wrongly represented as
their inventor: painting on boxwood and encaustic painting. His family
groups are of particular note and are undoubtedly related to those shown
in large numbers on contemporary funeral steles. Pausias of Sicyon painted
‘Glycera’, a pretty flower-girl, rendering her flowers with exquisite subtle¬
ty; but he could also rise to the level of great religious art on the ceilings of
the tholos of Epidaurus, where he painted ‘Methe’ (Drunkenness) and
‘Eros’ (Love), the two mystical rewards of worshippers of Asclepius.
Apelles in Greek eyes remained the greatest painter of all time. He was
an Ionian who studied at Sicyon and was able to combine the light grace
and superabundance, inherited from his origins, with the gravity of the
Sicyonian school. He worked for the sanctuaries of Asia and painted an
‘Aphrodite Anadyomene’ for Cos (the lower part of her body, still sub¬
merged, must have appeared through the transparent water) and the
‘Procession of the Megabyzos’ for Ephesus. ‘Calumny’, only known from the
description left by Lucian, was a powerfully allegorical picture. But Apelles
was primarily the portrait-artist appointed to the court of Macedonia, and
something of the glory of his models, Philip, Archelaus and Alexander,

reflected on him. Among the works most highly praised by antiquity,
Alexander on his Triumphal Chariot’ and ‘Alexander accompanied by
Victory and the Dioscuri’ were the most famous.
The Attic school applied itself to painting the emotions of the soul. The
elder Aristides showed a slightly morbid taste for pathetic compositions: a
dying mother pushing the suckling child from her breast, or a young girl
dying of love for her brother. Nicias, the appointed painter of Praxiteles’
statues, was above all an aesthete, preoccupied with beauty in itself and
passionately interested in rendering light and shade. He took pleasure in
representing persecuted innocence in the romantic adventures of ‘Io and
Argos or of Perseus and Andromeda’. Philoxenus of Eretria painted the
‘Battle of Alexander and Darius’ for Cassander; the famous mosaic in the
House of the Faun at Pompeii was undoubtedly a copy of this. It is difficult
to know which is more worthy of admiration in this vast composition: the
realistic precision of the weapons and horses or the intensity of the unique
moment when the two kings confront one another, the young conquering
god and the conquered Asiatic, from whom the death of his kith and kin
tears a gesture of vain pity.
The Decline of Red Figure Ceramics

At the same time as painting attained its full dignity, abandoned the
simple coloured designs which had long been its lot, conquered the irides¬
cent realm of shadows, reflections and transparency, and also tried to
render all the emotions of the soul, ceramics was bogged down in self-
satisfaction.
The great centre of production remained Athens. In conformity with the
flowered style of Meidias, ceramists took to a rich polychrome, white and
even blue high-lights, and also gilding. They sometimes amused themselves
by mixing painted figures and figures in relief, as on the aryballos of
Xenophantus which represented a royal hunt against a background of a
Persian ‘paradise’. Gynaeceum scenes remained numerous but religious
themes with mystical resonance also increased, corresponding to the en¬
thusiasms of the time. Execution was rapid and the meticulous care which
accompanied beautiful fifth century pieces never reappeared. However, in
about 370 a renaissance took shape in conjunction with the revival of
Athenian power: it took the form of the vases generally known as ‘Kertsch’
which were widely spread out over the whole area of the Mediterranean
and the Black Sea. It was an ephemeral revival of an art which had sym¬
bolized the vitality of Athenian craftsmanship. In the last decades, vases
became more and more mediocre and finally ceramics with red figures
totally disappeared.
An interesting innovation was the expansion of the factories which had
appeared in Italy in the fifth century. They produced large vases which had
no practical use but were intended to decorate tombs or apartments and
377
often showed great technical skill. Taste was even less refined than in con¬
temporary Attic compositions: polychrome became a motley and decora¬
tion was super-abundant, already displaying a use of garlands which
heralded the Hellenistic period. Subjects were often borrowed from the
theatre; the ceramist tried to reproduce its decor, costumes and accessories
whether he were depicting tragic scenes or parodies, coarse or farcical
representations taken from the phlyakes. The hereafter was also frequently
Figure 68 Offering in front of a heroon: five women are grouped around a tomb; in the
heroon, the dead woman is seated, looking at herself in a mirror, with a servant standing
opening a casket. Apulian hydria from Ruvo (Italy)
portrayed, including the denizens of the underworld, damned notorieties,

such as Sisyphus or Tantalus, and occasional visitors such as Orpheus or
Heracles (figure 68).
Three large centres of this rich Italiot production - which moreover
often imitated Kertsch vases - may be distinguished: Campania, very sus¬
ceptible to influence from nearby Etruria and its funereal imagery;
Lucania, which had a marked preference for subjects of violent pathos and
scenes of offerings and libation; and above all Apulia, which fired vases
with exuberant vegetable decoration, often realistic painting (plates of
fish: see figure 65) or burlesques (scenes of mythological parody or every¬
day life, all remarkable for the bestiality of the faces). These studios
Figure 69 The merchant of

tunny fish. Crater from Lipari,
beginning of the 'Hellenistic
period
continued in production after the Attic studios, until well into the third
century (figure 69).
The Refinement of the Minor Arts

Nowhere was the progress of elegance and refinement more perceptible
than in the minor arts.
The studios of Athens continued to produce beautiful terracotta figur¬
ines, but Boeotia again became a great centre of production, undoubtedly
under the influence of the new vitality associated with the success of
Theban imperialism. This was the great period for Tanagra ware, whose
name has - not without some abuse — become a common noun in the
present day. Themes were less frequently religious than in the preceding
period: there were certainly numerous representations of ‘mystical’ gods,
notably Aphrodite and Dionysus, but familiar subjects were preferred,
children, young men or girls. There could be no more pleasant or more
light-hearted representations of everyday life than these statuettes of
schoolchildren, of young girls dancing, cither and knuckle-bone players or
women walking with parasols. The paradox lay in the fact that in the best
specimens, the artist succeeded in making these trivial knick-knacks into
masterpieces of psychology and in rendering all the expressions of laughter,
melancholy, joie de vivre and spontaneous coquetry. The positions of the
body were carefully noted and reproduced, though the bold or languorous
poses of Praxitelian sculpture also exercised a strong influence. And there
was great variety in the drapery, which suggested the harmonious shape of
the body beneath the outer clothing with discreet sensuality.
This instantaneously-captured grace was found again, tempered with
more gravity, in toreutic productions. Work in precious metals was carried

on in all parts of the Greek world, especially in Ionia, Athens, Corinth and
Tarentum, and the studios of the Greco-Pontic world competed with those
of the Mediterranean. New forms appeared, the box mirror possibly cre¬
ated at Corinth, and the funeral cados (urn). A cup with emblema, one of the
oldest pieces from the Treasury of Tarentum, shows Cephalus and Procris,
their faces and gestures radiating love - respectful, zealous, almost repen¬
tant in the case of the hero, timid and reserved in the daughter of Erech-
theus. The beautiful cinerary urns in the Museum of Chantilly bear
mystical scenes, ‘Eros and Psyche’ or ‘Dionysus and Ariadne’, which
brilliantly illustrate Platonic belief in the liberation of the soul by love.
Coins were also affected by the evolution in large-scale art; not perhaps
at Athens, where tetradrachmas with unchanging representations were
more indicative of degeneration, but in the Greek west, which remained
the favourite home of monetary art - especially Agrigentum, Syracuse,
Tarentum and even Marseilles - and in the confederations (Arcadian or
Achaean league) which found currency the most direct expression of their
political unity. The golden staters and silver tetradrachmas of the sover¬
eigns of Macedonia are interesting not only because of their very extensive
diffusion but because they were widely copied in all issues - Greek and
barbarian - in the Hellenistic period.
Although this second period of artistic classicism did not possess the
beautiful purity and eurhythmic serenity of the first, it presented the most
complete expression of a world whose living springs had not run dry.
Literature was too much directed towards action and politics - that is to
say, towards contingency. Philosophy was led astray by constructions where
boldness verged on utopia. Art was more subtle; though it generally gave
an impression of elegance which avoided compassionate nobility and
though in this respect it closely corresponded to the Atticism of a Lysias or
the sunny good-humour of many Platonic dialogues, it showed sentiment
without facile emotionalism, while still retaining the cult of formal beauty
which sprang from the number and the harmony of shapes, lines and
colours.
THE ANGUISH OF THE CONSCIENCE
In appearance, no change took place in the official cult, which continued

to worship the gods of the city, uranian gods and certain chthonic gods
long integrated into city religion, such as the ‘two goddesses’ of Eleusis.
The best evidence of the prestige Apollo still enjoyed is provided by the
reconstruction of the sanctuary of Delphi, destroyed in the disaster of 373
(figure 70). Apart from the contributions made by the cities, as determined
at the pan-Hellenic Congress of Sparta, many voluntary gifts flowed in.
The enormous sum required to rebuild the temple of the Alcmaeonids
(500 to 700 talents) was collected without overmuch difficulty.
However, in a civilization where worship was a state affair, every politi¬

cal change involved religious evolution. In the fourth century the city was
tottering on its foundations. It was therefore not surprising that discontent
with the city divinities increased to the benefit of gods who corresponded
better to the aspirations of the individual. The crisis that had set in at least
as early as 430 grew larger and assumed disquieting proportions.
The New Gods

The old core of Hellenism harboured divinities who answered to mystical
needs or who could, at the very least, accommodate themselves to these
needs. Dionysus was a case in point - the Bacchae of Euripides had just
demonstrated his marvellous triumph and he continued to make more and
more conquests. Dionysus was primarily worshipped as the ‘divine child’,
cherished by the Nymphs of Nysa, or as the saviour lover of Ariadne. The
master of the dishevelled thiasus was even introduced into the well-ordered
liturgies of Eleusis, notably in the form of Iacchus, a hero who personified
the ritual cry of the procession and whose name evoked Bacchus. He also
conquered Heracles, often represented in death by an apotheosis which
allowed him to enter into Dionysiac felicity.
Aphrodite was another divinity of love or rather of salvation through
love and she was more and more frequently accompanied by a rosy-
cheeked Eros, fore-runner of Hellenistic cupids. She was intimately linked
with Adonis, whose cult gained in extent and fervour, and, as a troubled
deity, she was omnipotent over people’s minds. She combined the forces of
procreation and erotic impulses.
0 ■ ■ ■ ■ 5.Qro
Figure 70 The sanctuary of Athena Pronaea at Delphi: 1, Dwellings of the priests;

2, Limestone temple of Athena; 3, Tholos; 4, Treasury of the Marseillais; 5, Doric
treasury; 6, Tufa temple of Athena; 7, Altars; 8, Treasuries
Asclepius continued to be the giver of health and his sanctuaries were

increasingly popular. It was in the fourth century that Epidaurus was
covered with monuments which made its hieron a worthy rival of the great
pan-Hellenic enclosures. Athens built a new Asclepeum; a small curative
centre such as Gortys in Arcadia set up as a branch of Epidaurus. But this
evidence of prosperity is not as moving as the increasing number of modest

ex-votos, which most frequently represent parts of the body saved by the
god’s miraculous actions. At Epidaurus, steles engraved in the fourth cen¬
tury related the cures of Asclepius with a faith sometimes tempered by
humour. Apparently, these were real miracles, because his intervention was
most often instantaneous and did not involve actual treatment as in later
periods. The thaumaturge shown on reliefs and in the round, often ac¬
companied by his daughter Hygieia (Health) and his pet serpent, is like
the very incarnation of divine philanthropy. He had come a long way
from the demon whom Pindar still portrayed, disturbing the order of the
world by his untimely resurrections and struck down as such by Zeus.
But minds were too troubled and too unrestrained to be content with
these traditional divinities. The backwash of Nordic or oriental mysticism
now more than ever ravaged Greece, despite the sarcasms of Middle
Comedy (in this respect worthily continuing Aristophanes’ tradition) and
Plato’s maledictions in The Laws. A glance at this exotic pantheon shows
that many other gods joined the already known ones.
There was a considerable group of Thraco-Phrygian gods. Cybele was
hardly a foreigner any more but her high priest, the Metragyrtes, still
served as a target for comedians. Bendis was as much at home in Taren-
tum as at Athens and Piraeus. Sabazius, already denounced by Aristo¬
phanes, was served by unworthy priestesses: Nino condemned to death as a
poisoner, and Glaucothea, mother of Aeschines (Demosthenes gave a
pungent account of her ridiculous practices). Isodaites, a newcomer, must
have resembled him closely; he was a demon of passion whose disappear¬
ance was celebrated with tears and his resurrection with joy. He was wor¬
shipped in excessively licentious rites and Phryne only escaped a serious
charge of participating in his cult because of her beauty and Hyperides’
talent. The ‘Great Gods’ of Samothrace continued their brilliant career.
The gods of the Near East encroached to a like extent. Egyptian mer¬
chants at Piraeus obtained authorization to erect a temple for Isis. Hence¬
forth, the good goddess increased her popularity from century to century.
Traders from Cittion soon received the same rights for their Astarte.
These new gods were not essentially different from traditional gods.
More original was the development of astrolatry, a direct inheritance from
the east, particularly from the Maguseans, the magi of Anatolia who had
established a syncretism between Babylonian Zoroastrianism and astrology.
It was entirely based on belief in the divinity of the stars. It burst forth
most forcibly and with most conviction in Epinomis, the last of Plato’s
works (at least, unless it is to be attributed to an immediate disciple). The
stars had a soul, as was proved by the regularity of their movements, and
this soul was divine. They were therefore visible gods and to contemplate
them could be enough to bring man wisdom and happiness.
But although this theory delighted the mind of the old philosopher, the
people drew more direct consequences from the divinity of the stars. On
one hand, belief developed in the celestial immortality of the soul, which
Pythagoreanism had borrowed from the Iranian system and which

Aristophanes had already evoked in the Peace when he made Tyrgaeus say
that ‘when someone dies he becomes a star in the sky’. On the other hand,
the idea that man’s destiny was inscribed in the heavens spread very
rapidly. The reign of the astrologers began and they did not cease to extend
their hold over men’s minds for centuries to come.
The Cult of the Sovereigns

The cult of the sovereigns brings us back to earth. The people were eager
for closer and more directly helpful divinities, and some princes were
clever enough to exploit the people’s latent beliefs for political ends.
Royalty still preserved something of the sacredness of its origins and tradi¬
tional cults dedicated to heroes, especially the founders of cities, existed in
Greece. Moreover, no period showed more forcibly the role of providential
individuals in the development of history, a role glorified by some political
theoreticians such as Xenophon or Isocrates. Lastly, for several millennia
the east had shown an example of theocratic monarchies, where the king
was considered as god himself (Egypt) or as a deputy for a god (Mesopo¬
tamia) .
The first attempts to strengthen the power of one man by the immense
strength of the supernatural preceded Alexander. Clearchus established a
Greco-barbarian tyranny at Heraclea Pontica. He proclaimed himself son
of Zeus, surrounded himself with liturgical ceremonial, and demanded
proskynesis (genuflexion) from his subjects. Philip went further: he had his
statue carried in procession following those of the twelve gods; he ordered
a chryselephantine group from Leochares representing himself with his
family, which he intended to present for worship in the rotunda of
Olympia, a veritable monument of a heroic cult.
But it was left to Alexander to give the royal cult its final development.
He was by nature a mystical spirit, impregnated with his divine mission,
and he won from the oracle at Siwah the certainty of being the son of
Ammon. Thenceforth, everything strengthened his inner conviction: his
brilliant successes, his deeds of mad bravery on the battlefield, and his epic
march to the banks of the Indus which was reminiscent of the conquest of
India by Dionysus. How could he fail to think himself a god, he who had
extended the limits of possibility, and exhausted all triumphs? But he was
also a realist and saw the advantages to be gained from his divinity: the
cult of the sovereign, a living and epiphanous god, alone was capable of
giving indispensable unity to an excessive empire, over and beyond the
diversity of countries, peoples and religions.
He therefore adopted the quasi-divine ceremonial of the Achaemenids.
And even then the Greeks showed resistance to the deification of a living
man and were indignant at the imposition of proskynesis; they misunder¬
stood its true nature at the court of the Great King: it was much more an
act of allegiance than of worship. Alexander then lost his temper and let
fly: Cleitus was put to death, Callisthenes, natural nephew of his master
Aristotle, was thrown into prison. Gradually, the opposition died away.
Athens worshipped him as the ‘new Dionysus’. In 324, the Greek cities
delegated theoroi - ambassadors sent to the gods - to Babylon to crown him
with gold. The royal cult was founded, the surest basis for autocracy, in¬
herited both from the conjectures of Greek thought and the monarchic
traditions of the Orient. And the tremendous genius who gave new life to
the Greek world for centuries to come was also responsible for this mon¬
strous stupidity, which less worthy rulers — Hellenistic basileis and Roman
imperatores - would use to their own political advantage. His only excuse
was that he himself undoubtedly believed — and not without apparent
grounds - in his divinity.
A New Mysticism
An intense yearning for the divine filled the century. It was marked by very
active enthusiasm for the mysteries. The Gabiri of Samothrace and the
‘two goddesses’ of Eleusis, reinforced by the exciting presence of Dionysus,
retained their worshippers. Bacchants continued to haunt the copses,
shouting Evoke. Old Archaic rites blossomed anew, notably at Andania
(Messenia) where orgies, related to the liturgies of Eleusis, worshipped the
‘Great Gods’ associated with Demeter, Kore, Apollo Karneios and
Hermes.
There also seems to have been a revival in Orphism, most notably in
Boeotia: a vase from the Cabirion of Thebes shows a Dionysus Gabirius
surrounded by Orphic figures. There is no doubt, despite interminable
controversies, that Plato was strongly influenced by Orphism, notably in
respect of the divine origin of the soul, its superiority in relation to the
body, and its happy or unfortunate survival. However, it has also always
been difficult to distinguish from Pythagoreanism and it is wiser to speak of
Orphico-Pythagoreanism, especially with regard to the famous tablets dis¬
covered in tombs, particularly in Magna Graecia. The examples from
Petilia and Thurii (fourth or third century) were extracts from a ‘book of
the dead’ designed to facilitate the journey into the hereafter. The first
provided the elements of infernal topography necessary to reach the Lake
of Memory, where the soul quenched its thirst while it proclaimed its divine
descent in the purest Orphic style: ‘I am of the Titans, son of the Earth
and the starry Heavens, but my race is celestial.’ The second, in an atmo¬
sphere which also borrowed elements from Eleusinism, showed the soul
‘flown outside the mourning cycle of grief’, descending next to Despoina
(Mistress), the queen of the underworld, from whom it obtained admission
to the ‘dwelling of the saints’. ‘Happy and blissful, you will be a god instead
of a mortal’, they stated with firm conviction and pious confidence far
removed from the ‘beautiful risk’ that eternal life signified to Plato.
Some people wanted to experience stronger emotions while still on earth.
They threw themselves into other mysteries, made more piquant by exoti¬
cism, those of Sabazius, Adonis and Attis. Demosthenes’ On the Crown gives
3^4 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
an unforgettable picture of the liturgies (more ridiculous than unseemly)

which Aeschines celebrated with his mother, though it is not always pos¬
sible to distinguish the various syncretic elements blended in them: ‘You
assisted your mother in her initiations, reading the service-book while she
performed the ritual, and helping generally with the paraphernalia. At
night it was your duty to mix the libations, to clothe the catechumens in
fawn-skins, to wash their bodies, to scour them with the loam and the bran,
and when their lustration was duly performed, to set them on their legs
and give out the hymn. “Here I leave my sins behind, Here.the better way
I find”, and it was your pride that no-one ever emitted that holy ululation
so powerfully as yourself. ... In daytime you marshalled your gallant
throng of bacchanals through the public streets, their heads garlanded with
fennel and white poplar; and as you went you squeezed the fat-cheeked
snakes or brandished them above your head, now shouting your Evohe!
Sabohe! now footing it’ (259-60).
The social aspects of this mysticism were also very new. It developed in
associations (or thiasi) that grouped worshippers of the same god. They
appeared from the end of the fifth century and Lysias gives a very piquant
description of the misfortunes of a member of a thiasi exploited by his con¬
freres. Their numbers increased in the course of the fourth century, notably
in circles frequented by foreigners, metics and slaves, who continued to
worship their national gods, but soon attracted Athenians anxious for reli¬
gious novelties. As generally happens, women and humble folk seemed to
form the essential clientele of these communities, and the outlines of the
innumerable religious confraternities of the Hellenistic period can, without
difficulty, be discerned in them.
It was in these closed surroundings, totally withdrawn from the influence
of civic cults, that the taste for complicated ceremonies developed. They
appealed to all the senses in order the better to inflame the soul and were
orchestrated by the inspiring music of Asia. Positive liturgies appeared,
often resorting to facile symbolism: thus round cakes were distributed
under the name of ambrosia or the bread of the Blissful and chewing them
was supposed to bring salvation.
Sacred personnel multiplied, profiting from the public passion for the
supernatural. Priests, exegetai, purificators, orpheotelestai arbitrarily exploited
the appetite for the divine and developed a taste for parable, allegory and
obscurity. A new psychological type appeared: the superstitious man to
whom Theophrastus dedicated one of his ‘Characters’: he ran to the sooth¬
sayer if a mouse nibbled at one of his sacks of flour, and if he met muddy
people he returned home, soaked himself from head to toe, called the
priestesses and asked them to purify him with a sea onion or with the
corpse of a young dog, carried in a circle around him.
In sum, it was a restless, ardent religion, that has been compared to
Catholicism at the time of Bernini. All half-heartedness was banished and
lawsuits for impropriety followed hard one upon another. Some spirits
were so frenzied that they even had to look elsewhere for sensations that
the most orgiastic cults did not satisfy. Demons who ravished children and
phantoms haunted popular imagination. Magic and sorcery developed to
such a point that Plato provided for the most severe sanctions against them.
Formulae of malediction multiplied from the beginning of the century on
tablets of dejixion asking Hermes or Hecate to bind the tongue or the limbs
of execrated enemies.
It is necessary to return to the fundamental contradiction mentioned at
the beginning: this century, which was the century of Aristotle, also saw
the aspiration towards the divine resound for the first time with so much
violence. The irrational triumphed everywhere and everywhere people
joyously abandoned themselves to it. Slogans appeared, which people never
came near to renouncing: salvation, love, purification, redemption. Each
man responded to this appeal in his own way; Plato and Praxiteles erected
radiant worlds above the real but poor people and women had to be
content with tasting cut-price mysticism in the thiasi.
.
' *
-——_
■
Book Four
THE HELLENISTIC REVIVAL

The Hellenistic States
The period conventionally known as Hellenistic (in German Hellenismus)

opened with the death of Alexander and ended, at dates which vary greatly
according to region, with the Roman conquest. It was characterized by the
expansion of the territory occupied by the Greeks and by the shifting of the
centre of gravity of Hellenism — the part played by Greece proper was
henceforth very small compared with that of the great oriental kingdoms.
Its history was particularly complex: it consisted of a long series of desper¬
ate and murderous wars and usurpations which ceaselessly modified state
frontiers. On the other hand, documents are much more plentiful than in
preceding periods. Papyri in particular must be mentioned, for they were
preserved in very large quantities above all in Egypt, and have retained the
most varied testimony: royal letters, administrative texts, notarial archives,
private correspondence, students’ exercise books. The description of the
political fortunes of the Greek world at such a troubled period will perforce
be brief.
In particular, there can be no question of relating the interminable wars
in which Alexander’s generals quarrelled over his empire. After the assas¬
sination of the regent Perdiccas in 321 a first partition was affected at
Triparadisus: Macedonia went to Antipater, Egypt to Ptolemy, Thrace to
Lysimachus, Asia Minor to Antigonus, Babylonia to Seleucus. From 306-5
they took the title of king (Antipater having been replaced by his son,
Cassander). The struggles still continued for over twenty years, marked by
bloody episodes such as the defeat and death of Antigonus the One-Eyed
at Ipsus (301), of Lysimachus at Corupedium (281), and the assassination
of Seleucus by Ptolemy Keraunos (280).
By that date, Alexander’s direct successors (Diadochi) had all disap¬
peared after forty years of effort, intrigue and battle in which they en¬
deavoured to seize part of the immense empire, as they were not able to
rule it as a whole. The situation was then stabilized by the formation of
three large realms: Egypt with Ptolemy 11, the son of Ptolemy; Asia with
Antiochus, the son of Seleucus; and Macedonia, which quickly returned
to Antigonus Gonatas, grandson of the One-Eyed. No period saw such
bitter personal struggles, such fearless condottieri, and such changing al¬
liances. They form a wonderful portrait gallery - the invincible One-Eyed,
his son Demetrius Poliorcetes (the Taker of Towns), as passionate in battle
as in debauchery, the implacable Seleucus, wily Ptolemy, and the brutal
Cassander! The following generation, the Epigoni, saw less great am¬
bitions - because no one prince any longer aimed at re-establishing the
universal empire which had long been the hope of the Diadochi, but at a
general consolidation of the kingdoms created amidst so many ordeals.
Nor is it within our province to describe the successive campaigns with
which the Romans put an end to the independence of the Greek world, to
analyse the motives and pretexts for their intervention or to lay bare the
arcana of the circuitous policy of the Senate and the greed of the knights.
In fact, all this belongs to Roman history. These events will only be
mentioned from the Greek point of view.
THE DECLINE OF INDEPENDENT GREECE
A few cities in Greece proper, notably Athens, retained the facade of in¬
dependence and the appearance of their traditional institutions. But
decline became more pronounced with impoverishment and social prob¬
lems. Only some insular towns took advantage of the shifting of political
and economic power towards the east.
A Middle-Class Athens
If Athens scarcely counted any longer, it was not so much because of the
activities of the sovereigns of Macedonia (the garrison was even expelled
from the Piraeus in 228 so that Athens regained full autonomy, at least in
appearance) as because the democratic spirit was dead. Institutions had
scarcely changed, despite the addition of two tribes to the Cleisthenian
tribes, but the people no longer ruled supreme (figure 71). The theoric
fund and most of the misthoi had been suppressed. Power was in the hands
of the Areopagus and the most important of the strategi, that of the hop-
lites. Military service had disappeared and the state entrusted its defence
to mercenaries. The ephebi were no longer anything but students grouped
together to pursue their studies. Economic activity had diminished con¬
spicuously since the disappearance of the cleruchies and the decline of the
Piraeus, which was no longer on the great trading routes. It revived slightly
after the ‘liberation’ of Greece, particularly when the Romans returned a
few cleruchies to Athens in 166 and gave the latter Delos to spite the
Rhodians. It lasted until the sacking by Sulla in 86.
Meanwhile, the rich continued to monopolize power. They followed a
prudent policy because they considered nothing important except main¬
taining their privileges and the undisturbed possession of their wealth.
They only tried to counter-balance Macedonian influence by keeping up
good relations with the Attalids and Ptolemies, who showered Athens with
favours and erected beautiful buildings there. But the substitution of the
middle class for the demos aptly signified the end of Athenian greatness.
THE HELLENISTIC STATES 391
Figure 71 Machine for drawing lots discovered on the Agora of Athena, third century.
It was used to allot the various commissions amongst the bouleutes.
However, the city retained considerable intellectual prestige. Its festi¬

vals continued to be cloaked in exceptional brilliance, especially the mys¬
teries of Eleusis and the Dionysia, where not only classics were performed
but also the ‘New Comedies’, a discerning portrayal of contemporary
society. A Seleucid, an Egyptian and a Numidian prince all considered it
worth their while to compete at the Panathenaea. Its philosophical schools
were the most brilliant in the Greek world and their conjectures attracted a
blase public, which had not lost its taste for the things of the mind. Its
sculpture studios supplied the entire world with fine copies of the master¬
pieces of the classical period. The outlines of its role in the Roman period
were already appearing, that of a university town, a repository of the
abolished past within the monumental, still intact, framework of the
Periclean city (figure 72).
The Economic and Social Crisis in Mainland Greece

The situation was critical everywhere in Greece. Agriculture certainly
advanced as a result of the use of manure which made better harvests
possible, and stockbreeding profited from the increase in grassland. But
this was to the advantage of the few, because large-scale landownership
was becoming more and more extensive following a tendency already
apparent in the fourth century. Industry and large-scale trade were in a
bad way, after a brief revival in the years following Alexander’s conquest;
in fact, eastern kingdoms very quickly began to manufacture their own
Figure 72 The Agora of Athens (from the plan of the American excavations
THE HELLENISTIC STATES
393
indispensable products. But Greece retained the same need for cereals and
this need was all the more costly as the price of corn rose considerably in
the second century after falling at the beginning of the third. But Greece
could barely export anything, except wine and oil (the prices of which
unfortunately remained stable) and luxury products which ensured a
modest survival of craft activity, notably at Corinth and Athens. Further¬
more, the most dynamic elements had left the country. The rich no longer
invested in anything but land, which resulted in the disappearance of the
vital ferment of economic activity in the classical period.
The social repercussions were serious. Society was increasingly divided
into a tiny wealthy class and a wretched proletariat. It was certainly still
rare to find large fortunes: Polybius talks about an Aetolian Alexander, the
richest of the Greeks, who owned two hundred talents, that is to say, not
more than Cimon’s brother-in-law the Athenian Callias. But there was a
well-to-do, cultivated middle-class which tended to increase. Henceforth
it was this class alone which exercised power everywhere, thus gratifying
its taste for honours and sometimes forcing it to make heavy financial
sacrifices.
The pauperization of the rest of the population was alarming. Wages
had undeniably decreased during the Hellenistic period, as the documents
at Delos prove. Work was difficult to find, all the more so as slaves were
competing with free men. For many, there was only one solution: service
as mercenaries.
It is not known if the class of slaves increased. Numerous emancipation
stelai have certainly been found in the sanctuaries, particularly at Delphi.
This only proves that the repurchase of the slave in return for payment was
now easily accepted, undoubtedly under the influence of humanitarian
philosophies. The improvement in the position of the slaves possibly ex¬
plains the astonishing fact that conspiracies between slaves and proletariat
never occurred at the time of the social troubles.
This social crisis had ominous consequences. Greece was depopulated
and oliganthropy, denounced by Polybius, became a scourge. The rich
through a love of ease, the poor because they were reduced to the most
extreme poverty, no longer wanted children and, if they had them, left
them to die of exposure. Philip v vainly tried to breathe strength into a
lifeless Greece by advocating a birth policy and immigration.
Poverty also engendered revolt. Brigandage and piracy reappeared. The
old social claims of the Archaic period blossomed anew: the abolition of
debts and a general redivision of the land. In one place at least they met
the first steps towards satisfaction: at Sparta, where social disparities were
even greater than elsewhere. Two kings led the movement: Agis, who failed
because he was too moderate, and Cleomenes, who adopted a truly
revolutionary programme, abolishing debts, creating new citizens from
amongst the inferiors or helots, and distributing portions of land to them.
By these actions, he gave the country a new military power and won great
victories in the Peloponnese, supported moreover by popular elements,
14
until he was beaten by the coalition of the Achaean League and Macedonia
(battle of Sellasia, 222). His work was undoubtedly influenced by egali¬
tarian philosophies (there have been attempts to suggest he was a Stoic)
and therefore failed because of a conspiracy amongst champions of the
established social order. Meanwhile, revolution was again incubating and
King Nab is, considered a tyrant by his adversaries, expanded Cleomenes’
revolutionary programme. This time he unleashed the intervention of
Rome itself.
The Prosperity of the Greek Islands

The situation was less serious in the Aegean polynesia, which took more
advantage of strong trading relations between Asia, Egypt and the west.
These were disturbed, however, by pirates based on Illyria, Crete and
Cilicia.
The prosperity of Cos, based on wine, ceramics and a type of local silk
is fairly well known. The Mimes of Herondas or the Idylls of Theocritus
vividly depict the environment of rich merchants and esoteric poets. The
Asclepeum, adorned with new constructions and endowed with a veritable
school of medicine, attracted an increasing number of the sick.
Rhodes eclipsed all its neighbours. Formed in 408 by the synoecism of
three cities, it skilfully manoeuvred in the fourth century and then resisted
attack by Poliorcetes. After that, it experienced a climactic century, re¬
taining its independence amidst the intrigues of kings and brilliantly
exemplifying the survival of government by polls at the height of the
Hellenistic period. Its constitution was moderate: it was a republic of
merchants, careful of their rights but generously welcoming and protecting
all the foreigners who increased its wealth.
Basically, Rhodes owed this prosperity to its privileged position, very
near the Asiatic coast and facing Alexandria. It had three ports, equipped
with remarkable docks and arsenals: one for trade, one for war, and one as
a port of call. Stocks of wine and oil, produced on the spot or imported,
corn from Pontus and Egypt, vases and exotic commodities accumulated
in its gigantic warehouses and were then distributed throughout the whole
Mediterranean. Amphorae stamped with its seals infiltrated everywhere,
to the steppes of Pontis as well as to Gaul and Spain. In short, it had suc¬
ceeded the Piraeus of the classical period. Its banks were particularly
active. Its wartime navy - fifty wonderfully maintained vessels - kept the
peace in the Aegean by fighting piracy. Its maritime legislation, the Lex
Rhodia, was so famous that Marcus Aurelius retained some of its principles,
later to be inherited by Byzantium and Venice. Rhodes was so rich and so
generally useful that, when it was destroyed by an earth tremor in 227,
the whole Greek world immediately assisted its recovery.
This striking brilliance collapsed almost at one blow. Rhodes had for a
long time been a faithful ally of Rome and had acquired fairly extensive
possessions on the continent, in Lycia and in southern Caria by the Peace
of Apamea. But it embarked on a battle of wits and Rome, wearying of its

intrigues, created a free port at Delos in 166 which endangered Rhodian
trade by its competition. In two years, its customs yield (ad valorem taxes
of two per cent) fell from the colossal figure of one million drachmae to
150,000. It was reduced to signing a treaty with Rome, and in fact, lost its
independence.
Figure 73 A Spartan scytale (cf. Plutarch, Lysander, 19): the sender and the addressee
possessed two identical sticks: the sender wound round his a band of papyrus on which
he had written his letter; once unwound, the band was no longer legible; but the words
could be reconstructed when the addressee wound it round his own stick
It remained a town of art and science, a university centre where young

Roman aristocrats came to complete their studies. Its school of rhetors,
famous since Aeschines, strove after a bare Attic style. Posidonius of
Apamea taught Stoicism brilliantly there. Its sculptors experimented in the
most varied directions, with a preference for Pergamene pathos.
Delos slowly developed a new role which turned the cradle of Apollo
into one of the greatest trading centres. Here again, the position of the
island was a predominant factor, but the enormous wealth accumulated in
the temples (inventories engraved on marble still give some idea of it) also
acted in its favour. The priests became bankers and private individuals
soon followed their example.
Delos was at first a member of the League of Islanders subject to the
Ptolemies, and then independent from 250; it was the principal beneficiary
of the quarrel between Rhodes and Rome. It then became the common
Greek and Italian entrepot centre for corn, oil, wine, wood, ceramics and
above all slaves (though he did exaggerate somewhat, Strabo stated that
ten thousand might be sold in one day). Its population was increasingly
mixedeven if all the Delians had been expelled to Achaea, Athenians,
Italians and orientals rubbed shoulders there, each remaining loyal to his
own customs and gods, and building his own warehouses and sanctuaries.
A Greco-Latin bi-lingualism appeared on inscriptions. The houses, en¬
hanced by frescoes and mosaics, show the wealth and love of luxury of a
commercial middle class. The sanctuaries denote a veritable cosmopoli¬
tanism as well as the intrusion of oriental cults.
Prosperity was still further increased by the decline of Corinth and the
formation of the Roman province of Asia, and continued to exist until the
first century. But in 88, the island, which had stayed loyal to Rome at the
time of Mithridates’ revolt was pillaged by the king and 20,000 inhabitants
were massacred. It was the beginning of an irremediable downfall.
The Federal States

Although the world of the cities was now not much more than a caricature
of classical institutions, the republican spirit survived in the koina or
federal states (often, but not very aptly, called leagues or confederations).
These koina had developed primarily in backward areas where towns were
small or non-existent and where organization in ethne (peoples), prior to the
system of the polls, survived. Two of them expanded considerably in the
Hellenistic period, undoubtedly because the Greeks had gradually grown
accustomed to federations since the League of Corinth and, above all,
because they were beginning to realise that unity was the only means of
presenting efficient resistance to the encroachments of the King of
Macedonia.
An Aetolian koinon had for a long time existed around the federal
sanctuary of Thermum (where excavations have already revealed the site
of a Mycenaean cult), but it had never played a historical role. Aetolia was
regarded as a rough country where the inhabitants were excellent soldiers
and always carried weapons for fear of brigandage. They turned their
courageous attitude to good account when Delphi was attacked by Gallic
bands (279~8), made sure of their hold over the sanctuary, exercised
hegemony at the amphictyony and considerably increased their prestige.
At the same time, they made great territorial progress westwards in
Acarnania and, above all, eastwards in Phocis, western Locris and
Thessaly, thus forming the most extensive Greek state that had ever
existed.
The assembly of the people grouped all citizens, without property quali¬
fications, from all cities belonging to the confederation. It held two annual
sessions, including one at Thermum. There were two councils, one of a
thousand members (boule or synedrion), the other more limited (council of
the apokletoi). The assembly elected magistrates, the most important being
the strategus, who was in fact, the head of the executive for one year. The
number of delegates to the council from each town, as well as the con¬
tingents it provided and the taxes it paid, were in proportion to its size.
The constant hostility that the Aetolian koinon felt towards Macedonia
made it espouse the Roman cause, but this did not prevent it in 189 from
paying with its independence for a luckless defection against its ally.
A rival of the Aetolian confederation, the Achaean League in 281-80
revived an ancient Archaic koinon which had been dissolved at the begin¬
ning of the century. But it quickly overflowed the boundaries of poor
Achaea, won over Sicyon and seized Corinth, as a result of forceful action
by Aratus, and gradually annexed the whole Peloponnese.
We know less about its institutions. The federal assembly, which was
undoubtedly open to all citizens of the member cities, met four times a
year at the sanctuary of Zeus Hamarios in the territory of Aegeum, but
there were also extraordinary assemblies. The main role was played by the
council, the college of the ten demiurgoi and the strategus who was elected
annually. Some leading personalities endowed this magistrature with great
brilliance, notably Aratus of Sicyon and Philopoemen, who well deserved
to be called ‘the last of the Greeks’ for his ill-fated courage against the
Romans.
In this case too, the decline of the koinon in fact resulted from the ad¬
vance of Roman power, but also from the intrigues of cities, such as Sparta,
which had entered the confederation against their will. At first, the
Achaeans were allied with Rome but they ended by arousing its suspicions
to such an extent that after the third war with Macedonia, Rome deported
a thousand citizens, including Polybius, son of the strategus Lycortas. They
took up arms against Rome in 146 but Corinth was razed to the ground
and the League dissolved.
It is customary to compare these two koina and it is certain that the
Aetolian was more democratic than the Achaean. In fact, both were led
by the most prosperous citizens, because there were no misthoi for magis¬
trates. They represented the supreme effort of the Greek spirit to organize
states strong enough to oppose the cupidity of the Antigonids.
THE KINGDOMS OF THE NORTH
Macedonia represented real power, and in fact even extended its hege¬
mony over cities apparently independent of Greece proper. Only the
Aetolian and Achaean Leagues could stand up to it. By comparison, Epirus
cut a poor figure, except during the brilliant reign of Pyrrhus.
The Kingdom of Macedonia

In 276, Antigonus Gonatas finally reconquered the kingdom of Macedonia
which had already belonged to his father Demetrius Poliorcetes. He
founded a dynasty there which reigned over the country until the Roman
conquest. His authority extended not only over Macedonia but over the
part of Greece which was not in the hands of Aetolians or Achaeans: it was
maintained by garrisons commanded by strategi.
This very great king (276-39), the friend of philosophers, surrounded by
a court of men of letters, including the historian Hieronymus of Gardia
and the poet Aratus of Soli, manoeuvred forcefully and cunningly. He had
a high conception of his profession as king: ‘Do you understand,’ he asked
his son, ‘that our royalty is only noble servitude?’ Although Athens was to
some extent his ‘intellectual capital’, he settled anew at Pella, despite the
fact that his father had built a new capital, Demetrias, on the Gulf of
Pagasae. He successfully defended Macedonia against encroachments by
the kings of Epirus, Pyrrhus and his son Alexander. He defeated an

Athenian uprising led by Chremonides in the name of liberty. But he could
not prevent Aratus from winning Sicyon over to the Achaean League and
taking Corinth from him. Internally, he established royal absolutism and
pursued a policy of urbanization by founding three Antigoneas, in Chalcis,
on the Axius and on the Aous.
His son Demetrius 11 had to fight against a general coalition of central
Greece and the Peloponnese. When he died, his cousin, Antigonus Doson,
inherited a serious situation. By a masterly stroke, he restored Macedonian
influence in the Peloponnese, summoned thither by the Achaeans who,
though ancient adversaries of the Macedonians, were disturbed by the
revolutionary reforms of the Lacedaemonian Cleomenes. He recovered
Corinth, occupied by the king of Sparta, organized a powerful symmachia
grouping half Greece (including the Achaean League) with himself as
hegemon, defeated Cleomenes at Sellasia (222) and entered Sparta, which
was thus profaned by a victorious enemy for the first time. But, by a con¬
cession (its importance was misjudged) he may have agreed to the for¬
mation of a Macedonian koinon, which must to some extent have limited his
absolutism.
The reigns of the last two kings, Philip v (son of Demetrius 11) and his
son Perseus, were entirely dominated by the fight against Rome. Philip v
was a prince who carried force to a point where it became violence. He let
the Achaeans involve him in war against the Aetolians, ‘the war of the
allies’, which ended in 217 with the peace of Naupactus on the basis of uti
possidetis. The first Macedonian war, when the Aetolians and Pergamum
fought with the Romans, and Philip allied with Hannibal, ended at
Phoenice (205) with the division of Illyria between Rome and Philip. The
second war, when the Aetolians and even the Achaeans were allied with
Rome, saw the rout of the Macedonian phalanx at Cynoscephalae (197).
The following year, the peace forced Philip to give up Thessaly and Greece
and to surrender his fleet. Flamininus proclaimed the liberty of the Greeks
at Corinth.
Perseus resumed the struggle, but, irresolute and miserly, he was far from
possessing his father’s qualities. The third Macedonian war ended in rout:
defeated at Pydna (168), he was dragged to Rome to the triumph of
Aemilius Paulus. Macedonia was divided into four districts, before being
reduced to a province (148). In 146, following a revolt, Corinth was taken
and razed by Mummius: a horrible and heinous crime which caused the
disappearance of one of the most beautiful towns of Greece. Except for
Sparta, Athens and Delphi, which secured the title of federates, all Greek
cities had to pay tribute. Greece was subject to the proconsul of Macedonia
until 27, when Augustus made it a special province, Achaea. It was true to
itself in its collapse - hating all restraint, preferring an alliance with the
Roman barbarian to the Macedonian yoke: it could not forget that the
wild Aetolian attack at Cynoscephalae had partly determined Roman
victory.
Macedonia was undoubtedly the least brilliant of the Hellenistic realms,

but it occupied a distinctive position. Its military power was certainly
considerable for a long time because of the valour of the phalanx it re¬
cruited locally - to which Galatian, then Illyrian, Cretan and even Syrian
mercenaries, had soon to be added. However, its fleet, except under
Gonatas, never reached the heights of the land army. Its financial resources
were limited. On the other hand, its proximity to Greece involved it in a
series of intrigues, for the Greeks had a tendency to confuse their bloody
games with the defence of liberty. Tradition there was so strong that
neither the monarchic cult nor the hierarchical administration of the orien¬
tal courts existed (only one high functionary was known: the king’s secre¬
tary). However, Macedonia’s role was considerable: its kings protected
Hellenism from turbulent neighbours to the north, and from Celtic incur¬
sions ; they alone engaged all their forces against the cupidity of Rome. If
the venture was in vain, it was no less worthy of the true past of Hellas.
The Kingdom of Epirus

Mountainous Epirus was inhabited by three peoples; Molossi, Thesproti
and Chaones. In the fourth century, the Molossi incorporated the other
tribes in a federal state which was successively called the koinon of the
Molossi and the symmachia of the Epirotes: inscriptions mention its
assembly (ecclesia) and its principal magistrate (the prostates). At its head
was a king belonging to the Molossian dynasty of the Aeacidae which
claimed descent from Neoptolemus, son of Achilles. The most important
members of this line included Alcetas i, a powerful prince, allied with
Dionysius the Elder and undoubtedly the true founder of Epirote federal¬
ism, and Alexander I, brother-in-law of Philip n of Macedonia, a wonderful
monarch who minted money for the first time in his own name.
In fact, only one prince really counted in the line of the Aeacidae; this
was Pyrrhus, whose passionate greed disturbed Greece and the west for
twenty years. He gave his kingdom new frontiers, annexing Epirote prov¬
inces which had been subject to Macedonia since Philip 11 (Parauaea,
Tymphaea, Atintania, Athamania, Amphilochia), part of Illyria, Ambracia
and Acarnania. His real ambition was to conquer Macedonia. In this he
succeeded, both by his skill in manoeuvring amidst royal intrigues and
on the battlefield by his courage and brilliant gifts as strategus. However,
he was driven back by Lysimachus, and realized that the resources of his
realm, though considerably increased by a tenacious policy, were
insufficient to enable him to act (plate io).
His chance came again in 281 when the Tarentines appealed to him for
aid against the Romans. He set sail for Italy, sustained by the example of
his cousin, Alexander the Great, who had shown what could be accom¬
plished by a passionate spirit entirely devoted to the achievement of a
superhuman goal, and also by the consciousness of his descent from the
impetuous Achilles. He won the most brilliant victories there and then
moved on to Sicily to defend the Greeks against Carthage. Champion of

Hellenism, he created a vast realm in the west but was abandoned by his
own allies, and returned to Epirus to gain new resources. However, he did
not give up his great project of a unified state of the two Sicilies, and
furthermore left his son at Tarentum with considerable forces.
Once again it was child’s play for him to conquer the throne of
Macedonia and he threw himself into an assault on the Peloponnese. Only
his death at Argos made a western defeat final though he himself had never
regarded it as anything but provisional.
Pyrrhus was one of the most wonderful military geniuses of antiquity,
the only one, according to Appian, worthy of comparison with Alexander
and, like him, Pyrrhus was also an organizer. His policy in the west will be
studied later. His actions in Epirus itself were equally important. His
kingdom gradually emerged from barbarism; his new capital, Ambracia,
became a beautiful city, dominated by the royal palace, and profusely
decorated with works of art; the sanctuary of Dodona was covered with
new buildings; economic relations with Italy increased.
His son Alexander did not possess the same genius. There was nothing
praiseworthy about his attempt to pit his strength against Gonatas and he
had to restrict his ambitions to Epirus. After this his kingdom underwent
a constitutional crisis: the monarchy was overthrown and Pyrrhus’ ashes
were scattered to the winds. A republic was established, with a college of
three strategi at its head. Moreover Illyrian pirates were becoming bolder
and bolder. Amidst these troubles, Epirus was dismembered. It was de¬
prived of the neighbouring Epirote provinces which Pyrrhus had con¬
quered, and was reduced to its three original tribes. The time was ap¬
proaching when it would be annexed by Rome to form part of the province
of Macedonia (148).
THE RESIGNATION OF THE WEST
The colonial world had lost some of its earlier vitality. The part the towns
of Pontis and Marseilles played in the diffusion of Hellenism will be studied
later. But Cyrene was currently under Egyptian suzerainty and, not long
after, the Greece of Italy and Sicily was annexed by Rome. The attempts
by Agathocles, Pyrrhus and Hieron 11 could only slow down the decline.
The Monarchy of Agathocles (gig-28g)

The situation was serious in the whole Greek west. From the end of the
fourth century, Rome had subjected Campania and was growing more and
more interested in Magna Graecia. The Italic peoples, descending south¬
wards, strengthened their pressure on the Hellenic colonies. Tarentum
appealed for help against them in turn to the king of Sparta, Archidamus,
Alexander of the Molossi (who carved an ephemeral kingdom for himself
from Posidonia to Rhegium), and then to the Lacedaemonian Cleonymus.
Sicily lived under the threat of the Carthaginians. At Syracuse, which

was still the most prosperous town, a democrat, Agathocles, seized power
by massacring the oligarchs, subjected eastern Sicily and arrogated the
title of king which he used on his coins. He resumed the struggle against
the hereditary enemy and, unable to subjugate them on the island, moved
into Libya by a stroke of unprecedented boldness which proved him a
worthy precursor of Scipio. The venture ended in defeat but he succeeded
in imposing a status quo peace on the Carthaginians.
His reputation was so great that the Tarentines, weary of the services of
liberators from Greece, appealed to him. He waged war in Italy against
the Bruttians and subjected Croton. He even succeeded in seizing Corcyra,
which he yielded with his daughter to Pyrrhus.
This new Dionysius realized that only a powerful Greek kingdom of the
two Sicilies could save the west, but he encountered too much resistance.
On his death (289), the Syracusans regained their liberty, in accordance
with his wishes, but lost it through dissension. The Carthaginian threat
remained just as great and the Mamertines, Campanian mercenaries who
had settled by force at Messina, terrorized Sicily.
Pyrrhus in the West [280—2 J5)

At one time it might have looked as though the west had found its saviour
in Pyrrhus, who was also summoned by Tarentum and who tried to establish
a Greek kingdom on the two shores of the strait of Messina.
Tarentum, for the first time, was not complaining about her Italic
neighbours but about the Romans. In 303, Rome had concluded a treaty
with Tarentum which forbade Roman ships to pass beyond Cape
Lacinium.
This was violated in 282 and in a stormy session the people of Tarentum,
under the impetus of the democrats, decided on war. They needed a leader
and appealed to Pyrrhus who had already given wonderful proof of his
military genius and who was bored to death with inaction.
At first Pyrrhus was enthusiastically received and rallied not only the
cities of Magna Graecia to his cause but also Italic barbarians (Lucanians
and Bruttians). But he rapidly put himself into the bad books of the
Tarentines by trying to impose a severe discipline. Nevertheless, he scored
brilliant successes; he was victorious twice: at Heraclea and at Asculum
(280 and 279); on a daring march, he pitched his camp as near as
Praeneste where he could watch the smoke rising from Rome. On two
occasions also he offered the Romans peace, possibly because he recognized
their valour in war and their courageous obstinacy in defeat, and above all,
because he had no intention of destroying their power; it would be much
more advantageous to reach an understanding with them, so that he might
devote himself to building the great Greek empire of the west, which his
uncle, Alexander of the Molossi, and his father-in-law, Agathocles, before
him, had only partly been able to achieve.
14*
With some hesitation, he then left Italy to answer a new appeal, this
time from the Sicilians, who were equally threatened by the barbarians.
It was not that he forsook the task he had undertaken. Quite the contrary,
he would find new resources in the large island to enable him to pursue it
successfully. There again, everything went well at first: he was proclaimed
king of Sicily and gained brilliant victories over the Carthaginians, con¬
quering their whole province except Lilybaeum, which he was powerless
to take by direct assault. He then planned to follow in the footsteps of
Agathocles and attack Carthage in Africa itself. But he came up against
the lassitude of his Sicilian subjects, who accused him of tyranny.
Faced with Sicilian ingratitude, he moved back to Italy, again con¬
fronted the Romans in an uncertain battle (Beneventum), and preferred
to return to his own Epirote kingdom to collect the forces necessary for his
venture. Only death forced him to abandon it.
Thus his great dream collapsed, his dream of a realm which would
collect Greeks and hellenized barbarians from southern Italy and Sicily
under his rule and was the only means of halting the ambitions Rome was
now turning southwards. The breadth of his plan was admirably proved
by the monetary policy he inaugurated. He coined gold and silver pieces
with his effigy, according to the Attic standard, in order to unify the west
as Alexander had unified the east. However he was versatile and also an
opportunist and he issued bronze coins in accordance with the Sicilian
standard - which had the advantage of presenting close analogies to the
Roman libral system. Pyrrhus emerges from this, not as the fickle con¬
queror of Greek historiography nor as the chivalrous king of the Roman
annals, but as an intelligent and strict organizer who, between two cam¬
paigns, conceived vast projects and patiently achieved them. He was the
Alexander of the west, but an Alexander who did not have the good fortune
to be carried off by malaria in the flower of his thirty-two years.
Pyrrhus’ attempt represented the last effort of Hellenism in the west.
If he failed, it was not because he was inferior to his task but because,
despite short spurts, neither Tarentines nor Syracusans were really deter¬
mined on a fierce battle, which would have required them to forgo their
pleasures and comforts. Like an over-ripe fruit, the Greek west submitted
to Roman force.
In Magna Graecia, the loss of independence was quasi-immediate.
Tarentum capitulated (272) when it was no longer supported by Epirote
troops. ‘With Tarentum conquered, who could still be brave?’ (Florus).
The cities in turn all yielded and Epizephyrian Locri stooped so low as to
celebrate the Pistis (good faith) of Rome on its coins.
Sicily at the Time of Hieron II [2^5?—2 if)

Syracuse, on the other hand, still had several decades of independence
left, and it made the best use of them under the impetus of Hieron 11.
Hieron commanded recognition by undeniable personal qualities. He
was a scholar who composed books on agronomy, and also a courageous

soldier who still fought at the age of ninety. Above all, he was a diplomat,
skilful at manoeuvring between the powers which coveted Sicily.
He established his authority at Syracuse by overthrowing the Mamertines
and he received the title of king. His kingdom was not large but he admin¬
istered it in the manner of the Hellenistic sovereigns. The principal clauses
of the famous lex Hieronica, which arranged the raising of land tax on royal
peasants and restricted profits of tax farmers, were borrowed from
Ptolemaic Egypt. Rome adopted it, though in a profoundly altered form.
The art industry and trade remained flourishing. Goins bearing the head
of Queen Philistis were pure masterpieces. Hieron’s reputation was even
high enough for him to intervene in the east, by helping starving Egypt or
Rhodes when it was destroyed by an earthquake. He surrounded himself
with artists and men of letters and, although Theocritus preferred
Philadelphus to Hieron, Archimedes alone was sufficient to make Syracuse
famous.
When Sicily became the arena of the fight between Carthaginians and
Romans, Hieron acted carefully. In 263, he made an alliance with Rome,
his former enemy, acknowledging his status as a tributary, and in 248 he won
release from the obligation to pay tribute. The services he rendered contri¬
buted to Roman victory. Sicily was annexed but Hieron retained his king¬
dom until his death in 215, at the height of the second Punic war. Syracuse
then thought it could break the alliance with Rome and declared for
Hannibal. In 212, Marcellus took it by assault (despite the siege machines
of Archimedes who fell victim to the soldiery), and gave it over to pillage.
Greek Sicily had lived its last.
THE EASTERN KINGDOMS
The monarchic form inherited from Alexander reached its fullest develop¬
ment in the east, in two vast blocks formed at the time of the division of the
empire: the kingdoms of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. At least one of
the kingdoms created by the fragmentation of this latter merits special
mention: the kingdom of Pergamum.
The Ptolemaic Kingdom

Ptolemy, son of a Macedonian baron, and a loyal friend of Alexander, had
succeeded in winning possession of Egypt which was the richest if not the
most extensive Hellenistic kingdom. For a century, it was fortunate in
having forceful sovereigns, able to develop it and build a positive empire
around it. During this zenith, it regained as much power and brilliance as
under the greatest of the pharaohs, but a long period of decadence then
ensued.
Ptolemy, a discreet and tenacious prince, proved an initiator in all
fields. He began to annexe the lands around Egypt as if to gain greater

access to the Mediterranean for his kingdom. He introduced money,
attracted Greeks and tried to retain his mercenaries by endowing them
with estates. He inaugurated a policy of collaboration between Greeks
and natives by offering a new god, Serapis, for their worship. He was a
writer himself, and a friend of the philosopher-tyrant, Demetrius of
Phalerum, and he did not neglect the things of the mind, founding the
museum and library.
His son, Ptolemy 11 (283-46), whose marriage to his sister Arsinoe ac¬
cording to native custom brought him the name Philadelphus, extended
his father’s work. He pursued an active foreign policy, based both on royal
marriages and on war, notably against the Seleucids (first and second
Syrian wars). At the height of his power, he possessed Cyrene, Cyprus,
Pamphylia, Lycia and Coele Syria (southern Syria) and exercised
hegemony over the League of the Nesiotai (Islanders). He had sufficient
intellectual curiosity to send embassies to Rome and India. Internally, he
equipped Egypt with an administrative framework which enabled him to
exploit it to the full by means of monopolies and a strict financial system.
He reformed the coinage, repaired the canal of Necao and the immense
oasis of Fayum, and continued to attract Greek mercenaries and capital¬
ists. Through his ministrations, the museum and library reached their full
development. His court was the rendezvous for the most famous poets,
scholars and doctors.
His son, Ptolemy hi Euergetes (246-21), first led campaigns in Asia
which seemed to be reviving the achievements of the great pharaohs of the
New Empire. He then spent the second part of his reign resting on his
laurels, as if gorged with booty. The court was no less brilliant than under
his father. He enlarged the library, sent explorers to the Persian Gulf and
encouraged the works of Eratosthenes.
But social troubles were already beginning to appear, as well as a de¬
basement of the currency which continued at an increasing rate under his
two successors. Their reigns marked the turning point for Ptolemaic Egypt.
Ptolemy iv Philopator, threatened by the ambitions of Antiochus hi, still
gained a brilliant victory at Raphia (217), but had to incorporate
Egyptians in his army. They turned against him and he was forced to make
concessions to the natives. Under Ptolemy v Epiphanes, Egypt lost Coele
Syria: of its whole empire, only Cyprus and Cyrene remained. Although
the king had begun his reign by granting an amnesty and privileges, as is
seen from the famous Rosetta stone, rebellions multiplied, both in the
capital and the Thebaid. Manipulation of the coinage was so serious that
gold and silver pieces practically disappeared from circulation from the
beginning of the second century, and this increasingly cut Egypt off from
large-scale Mediterranean trade.
A long period of decadence and decline then set in and lasted during
the second and first centuries. Two brothers disputed the throne, Ptolemy
vi Philometor and Ptolemy vn Euergetes, known as ‘Puffy’ (Physcon)
though his subjects preferred to call him the Cacergetes (Evil-doer); one
was supported by Antiochus iv, the other by Rome. The populace of
Alexandria now intervened in the choice of sovereign, and imposed
Ptolemy viii. They drove him out, and then recalled him, and massacred
Ptolemy x. A bastard of Ptolemy viii, Ptolemy xi Neos Dionysus, known
as the Auletes (the Flute-player), usurped the thone with the connivance
of Rome, and kept himself in power by buying imperatores, including
Caesar. He was thrown out by the people, indignant at the Roman annex¬
ation of Cyprus, and was brought back in the baggage of the proconsul of
Syria (35). Roman troops remained stationed at Alexandria and the
tax-collector Rabirius became dioecetes.
The baseness and debauchery of the court, the inconsistency and cruelty
of the populace of Alexandria, the constant threat of intervention by Rome
(to whom Egypt appeared the finest of prizes), and the bare-faced servility
of its leaders explained the growing weakness of the monarchy, ruined by
the loss of the empire, by lack of maintenance of hydraulic installations, by
the flight of the peasants, and by the concessions made to priests and
cleruchs. The great functionaries made themselves independent of the
government while the priests were richer than the king and set up as
protectors of the fellahs. Anarchy, neglect and desertion formed the general
picture everywhere.
The quarrels resumed worse than ever on the death of Auletes. A great
sovereign then appeared in the person of his daughter, Cleopatra. The
queen with the wide, gold-studded eyes was no adventuress or sorceress
(plate 10); she knew how to utilize her charm for vast schemes. She capti¬
vated Caesar. She captivated Antony and with him dreamed of an empire
of the east which would give Egypt back the boundaries it possessed during
the reign of Philadelphus and counterbalance Roman power. But she
fled from Actium when the battle between Octavian and Antony
was still undecided, and she could not captivate Octavian. The last of the
Ptolemies preferred the bite of the asp to the triumphal chariot (3°)* The
only Greek land which was still independent was annexed to the Roman
empire.
Cyrenaica
Cyrene, annexed by Alexander, returned to Ptolemy after Alexander s
death. But its distance from the Nile valley made it easy game for adven¬
turers: Thibron and Ophelias who perished tragically, Magas who had a
long and prosperous reign. His daughter Berenice married Euergetes, after
killing her first fiance in his mother’s bed, and thus joined Cyrene to Egypt
for a lengthy period. Ptolemy Physcon, however, restored its independence
for the benefit of one of his bastards, Apion, who bequeathed it to the Roman
nation. In 74, the province of Cyrenaica was created.
Cyrenaica experienced stable prosperity throughout the Hellenistic
period. Buildings were numerous, not only at Cyrene but also at Ptolemais,
a town on the coast which expanded considerably, and at Euhesperides
which took the name of Berenice. Most famous of the sons of Cyrene was
Callimachus, an aesthetic singer of his native land, who mainly lived at the
court of Alexandria. The Venus of Cyrene shows the brilliance of the
sculptors’ workshops.
The Seleucid Realm

Seleucus i left an uncommonly vast empire to his son Antiochus i, stretch¬
ing from Afghanistan to the Straits, from Pontus to Syria. It was equally
varied. All languages were spoken there, Greek, Persian, Aramaic, Asian
Figure 74 Lead weight found

at Sidon (net weight: 1-143
gm.). The inscription runs:
‘Weight of Seleucus. Year 123
(of the Seleucid era, that is to
say 189 bc, under Seleucus V).
Two minae. Under Delphion
(name of agoranomos) ’
dialects. All religions lived side by side: Greek polytheism, Zoroastrianism,

Judaism, native cults of Anatolia. Commercial life was particularly well-
developed (figure 74).
Progressive Dismemberment
Centrifugal forces were so powerful that the history of the realm consisted
of progressive dismemberment. It is only surprising that disintegration was
not more rapid. Its real centre was Syria, where Seleucus established his
capital, Antioch on the Orontes, in 300. Disintegration therefore occurred
fundamentally in regions furthest from Syria: northern Anatolia and the
oriental satrapies. The Seleucids were undoubtedly the victims of a decision
made by the founder of the dynasty; the Great Kings who had preceded
him had shown more intelligence in administering their empire from
capitals situated at its geographical centre, Iran. But Seleucus was a
Greek and he wanted to make his conquest a Greek and therefore a
Mediterranean state.
Northern and central Asia Minor were untouched from the reign of
Antiochus 1 onwards. Independent kingdoms were established there, under

the authority of native dynasts: Bithynia (which even Alexander was un¬
able to conquer), Paphlagonia, Cappadocian Pontus (also called the realm
of Pontus) and southern Cappadocia (or Greater Cappadocia). The
Galatians (invasion by whom terrorized Anatolia) formed a state on the
high Phrygian plateau, a region thenceforth known as Galatia. The king¬
dom of Pergamum was created at the same time; it was very modest at
first but later conquered almost all southern Anatolia at the expense of the
Seleucids.
Further east, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, Armenia re¬
mained under the authority of native princes. Alexander had not con¬
quered it but Seleucus 1 had imposed tribute on it. In the northern part of
Media, the satrap Atropates proclaimed himself independent of Seleucus 1
and founded a principality which no longer had any but very tenuous links
with the Seleucids: Media Atropatene.
The Punjab had regained its independence after Alexander’s death. We
will have more to say later about how the satrap of Bactria rid himself of
Seleucid suzerainty shortly before 250, and how a Greco-Bactrian realm
was created on the eastern borders of the empire. Hellenism still remained
firmly rooted there under Greek kings. But the region between Ochus and
the Caspian was conquered in 249 by the Parthians, barbarians from the
Turanian steppes. Whether they were Scythians or Iranians who had
turned back in face of the Greek invasion is not known. Under the leader¬
ship of Arsaces and his brother Tiridates, founders of the dynasty of
Arsacids who claimed to be related to the Achaemenids, they founded a
new independent state, Parthia. Their ambitions increased as the Seleucids
grew weaker: in 130 they conquered Babylonia up to the Euphrates and
thus deprived the monarchs of Antioch of one of their richest provinces.
The Romans inherited the threat that they had already constituted to the
Seleucid kings. Thenceforth, barely anything but Syria remained of what
had once been an immense empire, almost as extensive as that of the
Achaemenids.
A Line of Mediocrities
This pitiful dismemberment had been possible because of the striking
weakness of the Seleucid princes. Their power was undermined by the
intrigues of the court, where murder and usurpations followed one another,
often instigated by unauthorized queens. Their most important function¬
aries were not always reliable — take for example, Molon, strategus of Media,
who revolted against Antiochus hi. Their neighbours in Egypt, who were
linked to them by so many dynastic bonds, waged an interminable war
against them for possession of Coele Syria.
But perhaps the greatest weakness of the realm lay in the mediocre
quality of most of its sovereigns. They had a great example to follow in the
person of the founder of the dynasty, a formidable combatant who well
merited his name of Nicator (Victorious). Following the reign of his
grandson, Antiochus 11 Theos, obscure palace intrigues (in which

Queen Laodice played a deplorable part) led to the division of the realm
between two brothers, Seleucus 11 Callinicus and Antiochus Hierax:
by the time they died, the Seleucids had lost all possessions north of the
Taurus.
A single prince marked a pause in the decline: Antiochus hi (223-187)
restored authority, which had been weakened by so many intrigues, re¬
conquered a large part of Asia Minor, crossed the east as far as India in a
dazzling anabasis reminiscent of Alexander, and finally seized Coele Syria
from Egypt. At the height of his power, he well deserved the title of the
‘Great’. But his ambitions aroused the jealousy of Pergamum and Rhodes
and they appealed to Rome, which was already disturbed by the fact that
Antiochus had sheltered Hannibal as his adviser. He was conquered by the
Scipios at Magnesia ad Sipylum (189), and by the treaty of Apamea
deprived of all Anatolia beyond the Taurus. The bold and ambitious
prince, who had seemed like a new Alexander, died in a wretched skirmish
with the rebellious subjects of Susiana, an example for moralists of the
tricks fortune can play with the destiny of a mortal (plate 10).
Thenceforth it was irremediable decadence, primarily due to the errors
and turpitude of his successors. However, one of his sons stands out from
their ranks: Antiochus iv Epiphanes (175-168) piled up follies and outrages
but sincerely sought to spread Hellenism and ventured to embark on the
conquest of Egypt. He was dissuaded by the insolence of the Roman am¬
bassador, C. Popillius Laenas, who drew a circle around him in the sand
and forbade him to step outside it before he had replied to the Roman
ultimatum. The dynasty survived for a century in the midst of the
basest intrigues, until Pompey’s triumphs in the east. He annexed Syria
in 64.
This was a crucial date: it marked the end of independence in all Greek
and hellenized Asia. The following year, the last of the sovereigns of
Pontus, Mithridates vi Eupator, was finally conquered by Rome and chose
to offer his throat to a Galatian sword. His dynasty was of course not Greek
by origin; it went back to Mithridates, prince of Gios on the Black Sea,
who had won his independence from Seleucus 1. But it was so deeply
hellenized that Eupator can be regarded as the last of the great Hellenistic
monarchs. Rome had trembled before this subtle, cruel, forceful and lucid
barbarian. He had combined with all its enemies - Sertorius, the pirates
and Armenia - and, in a horrible Sicilian vespers, had massacred 80,000
men in Asia, all those who spoke Latin. He had raised Greece against
Rome in the name of democratic principles which one might have thought
were long out-dated. He had linked the shores of the Black Sea under his
sceptre, intervening in the Crimea at an appeal from Chersonesus and
annexing the kingdom of the Bosporus (107). But successive campaigns by
Sulla, Lucullus and Pompey removed all chance of his success. One king,
however great a genius, could no longer resist the lust of the imperatores and
publicans.
Pompey was then able to determine the new status of what had once
been Greek Asia. Three provinces already existed: Asia from 129; Cilicia
from 101; and Bithynia, bequeathed by Nicomedes iv from 74. He en¬
larged Cilicia, to which Cyprus was added in 58, and joined the western
part of the kingdom of Pontus, seized from Eupator, to Bithynia. He
created the province of Syria. The most remote regions such as eastern
Pontus, Paphlagonia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Armenia and Commagene
were left to vassal kinglets.
The Attalid Kingdom

The Attalid kingdom was born of a betrayal. Lysimachus had entrusted
the protection of the citadel of Pergamum, with considerable treasure, to
Philetaerus, an officer of Greek paternity who had a Paphlagonian mother.
Philetaerus deserted to Seleucus 1 (282) who left him in control of
Pergamum although he had to acknowledge himself a vassal of Seleucus.
His nephew Eumenes 1 broke with Antiochus 1 and declared his indepen¬
dence. The decisive step was taken by his nephew and successor Attalus 1,
who gained some excellent victories over the Galatians and arrogated the
title of king (240). Above all, he concluded an alliance with Rome, and
proved a loyal friend in the first two wars with Macedonia. This alliance
henceforth dominated the whole history of Pergamum. As a result, its
kings were much more than the rulers of a small Anatolian kingdom and
could play a large part in the history of the Greek world in the second
century.
His son, Eumenes 11 (197-159), who combined forcefulness with diplo¬
matic subtlety, contributed to precipitating war between Rome and
Antiochus in. He fought valiantly on the Roman side at Magnesia ad
Sipylum and gained considerably from the victory, because all the lands
seized from the Seleucids in Anatolia (except for southern Caria and Lycia,
given to Rhodes) were in actual fact bestowed on him. Henceforth, his
kingdom was the most powerful in Asia Minor but he had a great deal of
difficulty in retaining it in the face of the hatred of all his neighbours and
the disgrace he incurred, for no very obvious reason, in the eyes of Rome,
which was strong enough to indulge its whims.
This greatness was ephemeral. The second successor of Eumenes 11, his
son Attalus in, died childless (133) and bequeathed his realm to the
Romans, only granting liberty to Pergamum and the Greek cities. One can
only censure this strange decision by a prince who carried misanthropy to
the point where it became the most sanguinary tyranny and spent his
leisure cultivating poisonous plants. Did it mark the recognition of estab¬
lished fact or fear of social troubles, particularly servile revolts, which only
Rome could avert? Rome accepted the legacy and established a province
of Asia (129) with Ionia and the territory of Pergamum, leaving the out¬
lying regions to the neighbouring kings who were its vassals. It was a
momentous occasion when Rome first set foot on Asian soil, whence in the
words of Justinian, it would later borrow ‘both its resources and its
vices’ (cum opibus suis vitia quoque).
The kingdom of Pergamum was born of a usurpation and only attained
power by allying with the Romans against Greek monarchs. Its sovereigns
could not claim Macedonian ancestry nor base their kingship on the law of
the spear. They make a poor showing in comparison with the Ptolemies
and Seleucids. But these middle-class, affable and accessible kings created
a personal style of their own and although they were only too clever at
exploiting their subjects by imposing heavy tributes on.the cities and
temples and in over-taxing the royal peasants of the chora, it stands to their
credit that they halted the Galatians and created a living centre of
Hellenism at Pergamum.
The Jewish Problem

The Jews had lost their independence since the Assyrian conquest, but they
retained very strong national traditions and drew great strength from the
alliance which, according to one of their fundamental beliefs, linked them
with Jehovah. They formed two groups which developed very differently:
in Judaea and in the Diaspora.
In Judaea
Judaea formed part of Coele Syria and as such belonged to Egypt for a
long time. When it was recaptured by Antiochus hi, it formed a com¬
munity administered by the high priest and a council (the Synedrion or
Sanhedrin), which had the considerable treasures of the temple at their
disposal. Spiritually, it was deeply divided: one part, primarily drawn from
the aristocracy, became hellenized and voluntarily gave up certain prac¬
tices of the law; others, the Pious (Chassidim), remained strictly austere and
rejected all foreign contamination.
Antiochus hi did not hesitate to grant the Jews the same autonomy as
they had enjoyed under the Ptolemies. His successors were less tolerant and
precipitated a nationalist reaction which became open revolt. Seleucus iv
sent his vizier Heliodorus to Jerusalem to allow himself to be corrupted by
the Jews: legend has it that angels fustigated him and prevented him from
fulfilling his mission. The situation worsened under Antiochus iv, a deter¬
mined partisan of hellenization. The high priest Jason agreed to establish
a gymnasium at the foot of the hill of Zion. Trouble broke out and the king
profaned the temple by bloody sacrifice and installed the statue of Zeus
there. He forbade circumcision and the sabbath. Then followed the holy
war, led by Judas Maccabaeus. He retook Jerusalem and purified the
temple (165).
The struggle continued with varied fortune but always a great deal of
passion. The Jews intrigued skilfully and took advantage of the dynastic
quarrels at Antioch and also of Roman support. The high priest Simon was
THE HELLENISTIC STATES 41 I
finally recognized as ethnarch (leader of the people), though he still ad¬

mitted vassalage to the king. His grandson Aristobulus (the name itself
indicates hellenization) restored the Jewish kingdom, proclaimed himself
king (104) and founded the dynasty of the Hasmoneans which retained
power until Herod’s time. None of the Seleucids could end this schism.
There was then and thenceforth a Jewish question which the Romans
inherited.
In the Diaspora
Jewish emigration from Judaea was an old story, going back at least to the
great disaster of 586: the taking of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, followed
by the Exile. This was the Diaspora (Dispersion), which became more
pronounced when Palestine was joined to the Greek world as a result of
Alexander’s conquest, and even more so by the Jewish troubles in the
second century.
The area of dispersion was considerable. The world Jewish population
in the Hellenistic period has been estimated at eight million. It was mainly
grouped in four zones: Babylonia, Syria, Anatolia and Egypt, each of
which contained over a million Jews. But they were equally numerous in
Cyrenaica, the Aegean islands, Greece and even Africa, Italy and Spain.
Conversions were recorded everywhere, particularly amongst the women,
because many men found circumcision repugnant, and a class of semi¬
converts, the sebomenoi (those who fear God) came into existence. Although
there was only one Temple, synagogues (meeting places for prayer)
multiplied.
The Jews of the Diaspora are best known in Egypt. They formed small
communities there as from the sixth century; they were joined by a large
number of others with the annexation of Coele Syria, and then with the
Maccabaean revolt. There were over a million there, including 100,000
at Alexandria where they inhabited two of the five districts. Moreover,
wherever they were, they had a tendency to collect in certain districts.
They practised all the professions: they were soldiers, agriculturists,
artisans, functionaries and more rarely merchants or money-lenders, which
clearly differentiated them from medieval Jews. There was no anti-
Semitism properly speaking, but they incontestably aroused the mistrust of
the Greeks, to whom they represented great competition. Their particu¬
larism appeared offensive, as a Jewish Sibylline oracle (3, 272) of the second
century acknowledged: ‘Your customs provoke the wrath of all men.
Poorly organized, except at Alexandria, where their community was
administered by a council of Elders (gerousia), and living in contact with
the Goyim, the Jews of Egypt became hellenized. Most of those mentioned
in the papyri have Greek names. They abandoned Aramaic for Greek from
the beginning of the second century. The holy texts were translated into
Greek from Philadelphus onwards: this was the famous Septuagint which
exercised so great an influence in spreading knowledge of the Old Testa¬
ment amongst non-Jews. Hebrew, therefore, was no longer necessary to the
synagogue and disappeared from use. The last of the sapiental books,
Ecclesiasticus, written towards the end of the third century, shows some
influence of Stoic and Cynic thought.
Schools of exegetae were formed, applying Stoic methods of interpreta¬
tion to the Bible. Jews composed works of philosophy, tragedies and sibyl¬
line oracles in Greek. Philo (born a short time before the present era) was
both a rabbi nourished on the Hebraic tradition and an eclectic philoso¬
pher. In any case, he was one of the finest contemplative geniuses of
antiquity, whose synthesis between two such different ways-of thought pre¬
figured Helleno-Christian syncretism. If he no longer belonged to the
Hellenistic period, he was in the line of those open-minded Jews who, over
a period of three centuries, had become deeply instilled with Greek
education.
A considerable difference still remained between the Jews of Judaea,
where hellenization was at best superficial, and those of the Diaspora. The
latter, notably in Anatolia, Syria and Egypt, showed deeper assimilation of
Greek culture and, while they continued to be faithful to the best that their
faith offered - that is to say, to monotheism - they did not hesitate to give
up certain of the more absurd practices of their religion which would have
made life difficult for them in a hellenized world.
THE HELLENISTIC MONARCHY
The dismemberment of Alexander’s empire, and then of the Seleucid

kingdom, only confirmed the great political innovation represented by the
institution of monarchy: large or small, monarchies were established
everywhere.
The King and the Court

As in the time of Alexander, very different factors were combined in the
monarchic ideology then formed. Philosophers, notably Pythagoreans and
Stoics, developed the concept of the strong and providential man, which
had appeared in the fourth century. To them, the king was the living and
incarnate law (nomos empsychos), which was justified by his divine char¬
acter. The common people were primarily sensitive to the prestige which
victory conferred: military success appeared to them the most tangible
mark of the favour of the gods. Thus an absolute monarchy was defined,
which furthermore ascribed moral obligations to the king, and the texts
vie with each other in emphasizing these obligations: the monarch must
be zealous, benevolent to all, particularly the humble, philanthropic and
pious.
But oriental factors were equally evident. As heirs to the eastern theoc¬
racies, the Hellenistic sovereigns disposed of absolute power, because they
THE HELLENISTIC STATES 4:3
were the sons of the divinity and themselves gods. Thus the Ptolemies
agreed to be pharaohs. Soter did not undergo the rite of coronation, un¬
doubtedly considering it adequate to reign by right of conquest, but all his
successors allowed the priests to anoint them, that is to say, provide them
with magic fluid belonging to the living Horus. Henceforth they bore the
five names characteristic of pharaonic power: ‘valiant adolescent, great in
glory, enthroned by his father, powerful ka of Ra loved by Ammon, Ptolemy’
- such was Ptolemy n to an Egyptian. An inscription on the temple of
Edfou relates that Horus yielded the land of Egypt to the monarch with
its title deeds drafted by the divine clerk, Thot.
The monarchy was hereditary. The eldest son succeeded the father.
Exceptions were rare and due to court intrigues: thus Ptolemy i imposed
a legitimized bastard, who became Ptolemy n, as his successor, to the
prejudice of his eldest son Ptolemy Keraunos. The father sometimes ruled
in conjunction with the son as co-regent. This occurred particularly with
the Seleucids, where the young prince could serve as viceroy in the oriental
provinces.
The queen played an important role. Despite the contrary examples of
Philip and Alexander, the kings practised monogamy, tempered however
by concubinage. With very rare exceptions, they chose their wives from
ruling families. However, the custom of consanguine marriages was intro¬
duced in Egypt. This was intended to preserve the total purity of the race,
and was adopted by certain Seleucids.
The king was surrounded by a court (aule) where customs recalled both
the Macedonian and Persian monarchies. He wore the chlamys and the
causia of Macedonian sovereigns but also the diadem of the Great Kings.
His palace was comfortable and luxurious but not inspired by the gigantic
constructions of the princes of the Orient. An etiquette which tended to
differentiate the king and his family from the common run of mortals
gradually crept in. Aulic titles appeared, creating a sort of nobility, which
was moreover personal and not hereditary. Those generally singled out for
distinction (although there were variations from one dynasty to another)
were ‘friends of the king’ and ‘relatives of the king’ (for example ‘foster-
father’ or ‘foster-brother’, purely honorific titles, enabling them to dress in
royal purple but not implying real bonds of kinship). Add to this the royal
cult (which will be studied later) and the presence of the royal effigy on
coins (only the Attalids abandoned the practice of depicting living sover¬
eigns there), and the importance of the period becomes apparent. This was
the time when many customs were instituted that the emperors of Rome
and Byzantium as well as modern sovereigns would adopt.
The Royal Administration

The king was the living law. He therefore legislated without needing coun¬
cil or assembly to approve his decisions. This was very much the essential
difference from the classical period, when the law was the expression of the
community. Texts expressing the all-powerful will of the king vary in

detail: laws (nomoi), rulings (diagrammata), ordinances (prostagmata) which
often took the form of letters.
Naturally, the king, though omnipotent in all spheres, could not know
and decide everything by himself. He called his ‘friends’ to sit in council
to enlighten him. He entrusted certain of them with responsibilities which
roughly corresponded to ministries, but always kept the command of the
army and the supreme pontificates for himself as two specifically royal
functions. There was generally a sort of vizier, who bore, a modest title
(official in charge of affairs), a grand chancellor (particularly important
in Egypt, where the bureaucracy was overwhelming), a minister of justice
(in Egypt, the archidicast) and a general controller of finance (under the
Ptolemies, the dioecetes; under the Seleucids, the official in charge of
revenues).
Local administration was directly copied from the kingdoms before
Alexander’s conquest and as such was based on the idea of territory admin¬
istered by an officer who directly represented the sovereign. But there was
a tendency to substitute a military governor for the traditional district chief
(nomarch or satrap) under both the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. He
gradually concentrated all authority in his own hands and held the title
everywhere of strategus, inherited from classical Athens (where, in the
fourth century, the strategus had gradually assumed the permanence of an
established post, which may explain the apparently quite paradoxical use
of the word in the Hellenistic period). The institution of strategus was
fundamental and was largely responsible for the fact that these kingdoms
could continue to exist despite the enormous disproportion between
Greeks and natives.
Egypt remained divided into nomoi (some thirty or so), administered by
a nomarch aided by a royal secretary (basilicogrammateus). In principle, each
nomos was in turn divided into two toparchies, with a toparch and a
topogrammateus. The toparchies were composed of villages (comai) with a
comarch and a comogrammateus. Soter introduced a strategus, who concen¬
trated all civil and military powers, into each nome, possibly as early as
Ptolemy hi, and limited the nomarch to management of the royal domain.
In Upper Egypt, where nationalist revolts had been violent, there was a
military governor, the strategus of Thebaid, who had the strategi of the
different nomoi under his authority, and in certain texts even bore the title
of epistrategus.
The Seleucids retained the Persian division into satrapies, though they
slightly increased their numbers. Apparently a military governor, the
strategus, and a prefect, the satrap, whose functions were fairly unobtrusive,
also co-existed there.
These institutions were pregnant with the future, both at factual and
idealogical level. Trajan, whom the younger Pliny presents in his
Panegyricus, was the direct heir of a Hellenistic monarchy and all the
evidence shows that the strategus served as model for the proconsul. But
THE HELLENISTIC STATES
415
study of the economy and society which were born of the conquest in the
Greek kingdoms of the east poses equally fascinating problems: the bold¬
ness is the same, the solution as modern and the vitality of a Hellenism that
refused to petrify bursts forth anew.
15
The World of the Conquest:
The Exploitation of the Kingdoms
Alexander’s successors faced the same problem as he himself had already-

had : the organization of economic and social life in realms where it had
traditionally been regulated by royal authority. In their treatment of it
they were consistently careful not to disturb previous arrangements over¬
much - the most elementary of wisdoms. But new conditions - the develop¬
ment of a capitalist middle class of Greek origin and, in Egypt, the intro¬
duction of money - brought about deep-seated changes, particularly visible
in the towns. The imposition of a class of conquerors on conquered native
masses (but who were for the most part accustomed from an early date to
foreign domination) gave the Hellenistic world its own very individual
aspect and very often made it the prefiguration of the Roman Empire.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF TOWNS
Archaic and classical civilization had coincided with the rise of the polis,
and it had been in great urban centres such as Miletus, Corinth, Athens
and Syracuse that Greek civilization had developed. Alexander had proved
heir to this tradition by scattering numerous Alexandrias over the empire
he had just conquered, designed to hellenize the Orient and to achieve the
fusion of races which he considered necessary (map 17).
His successors followed his policy unevenly: the Seleucids endowed their
states with numerous new cities: the Attalids founded Pergamum in Asia
Minor, which had long been urbanized, in order to have a capital which
could compete with the great metropolises of the east; Egypt under the
Ptolemies remained purely rural, but Alexandria, Alexander’s creation,
developed prodigiously and became the most important town in the
Hellenistic world.
The Seleucids Creations

’
The first Seleucus alone founded some sixty towns, including sixteen
Antiochs (named after his father) and nine Seleuceias. Creations multiplied
Map i 7 Urbanization of the orient and dynastic creations
4.18 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
under Antiochus 1, but became rarer under his successors until the reign
of Antiochus iv Epiphanes, when they were brilliantly resumed. More¬
over, the word ‘foundation’ may be misleading; it does not necessarily
imply a creation ex nihilo but sometimes refers to a synoecism of villages, or
the elevation of a small native town to the dignity of a city, or even a
simple change in name.
These cities were genuine poleis in the Greek sense of the term, with their
own territory, municipal autonomy, notably in judicial and financial
matters, and magistrates. Granted, they no longer represented independent
states as in the classical period: they were most frequently subject to the
close supervision of a governor (epistates) and sometimes had to accept a
garrison. Furthermore, the king made numerous philanthropic gestures in
their direction, sharing in the construction costs of public buildings from
his treasury, helping them in cases of catastrophe and granting them
privileges which increased their independence, such as the right of asylia
and inviolability.
The aims behind this urbanization were fairly varied. The cities en¬
couraged economic development, which accordingly increased the king’s
wealth. They made it possible to garrison troops to guard the great traffic
axes and strategic centres. The motive is clear in the case of Asia Minor,
which was the subject of desperate disputes with the Attalids, and where
numerous cleruchies were established in the form of small urban groupings
(politeumata). They reduced native resistance, by dividing up the former
satrapies between the cities. It has even been suggested that the sovereigns
found this a cunning means of satisfying the traditional tastes of their
Greek subjects, and also of sparing themselves the weight of an adminis¬
tration such as the one the Ptolemies had to employ in their purely rural
kingdom. Finally, they did not completely forget Alexander’s idea: if they
were no longer concerned with fusing the races, at least they dreamed of
hellenizing the Orient, with the double object of bringing the natives more
under control by assimilating them, and of spreading Greek civilization,
considered superior and alone worthy of man.
The results of this policy were uneven. The Seleucids created difficulties
for themselves, because the towns were restless in the Greek tradition, and
several revolts were recorded, for example in Antioch. It is true that the
Persian system of satrapies had not been much more favourable to a strong
central power. On another score, the kings limited their incomes by en¬
dowing the cities with territories drawn from the royal lands, and the yield
of the direct and indirect taxes from these brought in less than the exploita¬
tion of the soil by royal peasants. But apart from its military and economic
advantages, the development of towns was a skilful measure politically,
because it incontestably favoured the fairly rapid hellenization of the
native elite. Whereas the Ptolemies too often behaved like capitalists, only
concerned with increasing their incomes, the Seleucids acted like kings,
not neglecting the higher interests of their kingdom.
THE WORLD OF THE CONQUEST 419
Dura and Antioch

The Seleucid cities were all built on the same model and according to the
same strict rules of Hippodamian town-planning. They were hasty con¬
structions and only rarely give an impression of monumentality and beauty.
An early zone of town-development was former Mesopotamia, with
Antioch-Edessa, Antioch-Nisibis, Dura-Europus, Seleuceia-on-Tigris, and
Babylon. Dura-Europus, created by Seleucus 1, on the right bank of the
Euphrates, is the best known of these towns as a result of fine excavations.
A citadel guarding the crossing of the river, and a first class commercial
centre, the town was built to a checker-board design around a vast agora.
Its institutions were Greek, with boule, strategus, treasurers and sitonai
charged with provisioning corn, but the king exercised supervision through
an epistates. The citizens had cleroi, worked by natives. However, numerous
sanctuaries to local divinities existed beside temples dedicated to Greek
gods (Zeus Aegistos, Apollo and Artemis), and art gives good evidence of
the rapid predominance of oriental elements. In any case, economic pros¬
perity was great and Dura developed continuously beyond the Parthian
occupation and during the Roman period.
However, the most beautiful Seleucid creations were situated in Syria,
which became the kernel of the realm after its successive contractions.
Four towns were of primary importance: two ports; Seleuceia in Pieria and
Laodicea (Latakia); and two cities on the Orontes, Antioch and Apamea.
Antioch was situated on the left bank of the Orontes, nearly 14 miles
from its mouth. It lay in a rich valley which was some 25 miles wide at
that point; it was a vast garden, with fertile soil and plentiful rainfall. The
Orontes, navigable right down to the sea, was doubled by a road which
made it accessible to caravans from the Asian hinterland in the other
direction.
The city was founded by Seleucus 1 in 300 for ten thousand colonists, and
it developed considerably. At the end of the Hellenistic period it housed at
least 300,000 inhabitants (without counting the big native suburbs),
divided into four districts: two near the river, dating from the foundation;
a third, Neapolis, added by Antiochus in the Great on an island of the
Orontes; and a fourth on the lower slopes of Mount Silpios, the work of
Antiochus iv Epiphanes who also surrounded the town with ramparts. The
plan followed the ordinary standards of Hellenistic town-planning: a large
thoroughfare ran parallel to the river and roads were built at right angles
to it.
Antioch’s institutions were those of a polls, with boule and archons. Many
Greeks had joined the Macedonian colonists of Seleucus 1 and the native
element was also considerable: Syrians, naturally numerous and who be¬
came hellenized fairly quickly, and Jews, grouped in a ghetto. Antioch was
one of the most prosperous and lively cities of the Hellenistic Orient. It was
a cosmopolitan metropolis, its roads seething with life, a flourishing textile
industry and the capital of the Seleucid realm. But it could not compete
with either Alexandria or Pergamum as a literary and artistic centre, des¬

pite the efforts of some of its kings (Antiochus hi and Antiochus ix both
tried to establish a museum and a library) and although work in precious
metals was done. Its fate was to be a Levantine city whose incomparable
wealth and propensity for luxury and pleasure would stand out in the
Roman period.
Attalid Pergamum
Pergamum’s destiny was quite different. The Attalid’s capital rose about
twenty miles from the coast, on a spur formed by two tributaries of the
Map i 8 Hellenistic Pergamum
Caicus, the Selinus and the Cetios: this volcanic outcrop, about 1,100 feet
high, provided a wonderful site but was difficult to arrange by very reason
of its height. The architects solved this problem by superimposing three
towns, connected by stairways, with belvederes and terraces which bear
witness to a new taste for the picturesque and were perfectly adapted to the
countryside (map 18).
The highest town was the most important and comprised a double agora,
bordered by a temple of Dionysus. On the upper plateau stood the great
altar to Zeus (one of the most noteworthy buildings both because of its
colossal dimensions and the romantic beauty of its sculptured decoration),
the sanctuary of Athena Polias, bounded by two porticos and arrogantly
Map 19 Hellenistic Alexandria
overlooking the valley of the Selinus (with its soberly decorated Doric
temple), the library and, right on top, the palace and a vast arsenal.
Slightly lower was the theatre, which itself overhung a long terrace with
the small Ionic temple of Dionysus at the end.
In the middle town, a magnificent gymnasium, possibly the most beauti¬
ful in the Hellenistic world, was set out on several superimposed levels,
joined by flights of steps and underground passages, as well as the temples
of Demeter and Hera Basileia separated by the Prytaneum. The lower town
formed the commercial centre, around a spacious agora bordered by a
two-storeyed colonnade. In sum, the town was a wonderful success, erected
to rival Athens and birth-place of so many new inspirations. ‘How can one
compare the trophies with which Rome staked out the world with the
passion with which the Hellenistics made the vast site of Pergamum into
an architectural composition unfolding from the horizons up to the gods?’
(A. Malraux).
This success can be explained by the multiple activities which, by Attalid
design, were centred around Pergamum. Commerce did not account for
its development, because it was too far from the great routes to Upper Asia.
But it was the centre of rich agricultural land (corn, olives, vines), and
scientific stockbreeding, including the selection of species, was practised.
Diversified industry was established there: perfumes, fine cloths and parch¬
ment (its very name recalls the town). Apart from this, it was the capital of
one of the best administered and richest states, even though it did not have
the dimensions of the great Hellenistic realms.
The Attalids’ ambition was also to make Pergamum the Athens of the
Hellenistic world. Its library rivalled that of Alexandria: the royal palace
housed a veritable museum of sculpture, where undoubtedly art criticism
was born. Its school of rhetors and the studios of its sculptors, lovers of
pathos and effect, were rightly famous, as were its Dionysiac artists. The
latter were also protected by the sovereigns and as a result it became the
principal centre of dramatic art. The most beautiful homage to Pergamum
came perhaps from the elder Pliny (33, 149): ‘After the death of Attalus
(the sovereign who bequeathed his state to the Romans), the Romans learnt
not merely to admire but also to covet foreign opulence.’ Pergamum, the
school of Rome, was the counterpart of Athens, school of Greece.
Alexandria of Egypt
‘Everything which can exist or be produced on earth can be found in
Egypt: fortune, sport, power, blue skies, glory, spectacles, philosophy, fine
gold, pretty boys, temple of Adelphic gods, the king who is so good,
Museum, wine, all the good things one could possible want, and women,
so many women . . .’ So runs a confused but truthful speech by an old
bawd in Herondas’ Mime I. In fact, the town which Alexander founded
from nothing on the site of a fishing village, Rhacotis, summed up all the
splendours of the Orient.
The Town and the Port
It was established to the west of the delta, on the isthmus between the sea
and Lake Mareotis, near the Canopic branch of the Nile; a salubrious site
even in summer, because of the Etesian winds. The port was protected by
the island of Pharos and was relatively sheltered from rough storms (map
:9)- . . .
The ancient town is not well known, because subsidence has buried it
beneath the water. However, it is known to have been elongated in shape
(like a chlamys according to Strabo) with a perimeter of over nine miles.
Its plan, designed by the Rhodian Deinocrates, was Hippodamian. Two
very wide main thoroughfares (99 feet) intersected at right angles. It
was divided into five districts, which were named after the first five letters
of the alphabet. The most important monuments included the gymnasium
with magnificent colonnades, the dicasterion and the Serna or tomb of
Alexander, isolated from the town by a great wall. The palace itself
covered a quarter of Alexandria, but in no way resembled the monumental
masses of the pharaonic dwellings. With its light buildings, gardens,
museum, library and theatre, it formed Neapolis, the New Town.
The port was divided in two by the jetty or Heptastadium which joined
the island of Pharos to the mainland. On the east was the great port, which
received most of the trade; part of this port was set aside for the royal port.
On the west was Eunostus (Safe Return) with the war port, an artificial
basin communicating with Lake Mareotis. The Pharos lighthouse in the
middle of the island was the work of Sostratus of Cnidos, with its three
storeys, surmounted by a lantern, where the play of convex mirrors
reflected light from a fire of resinous wood (figure 75).
Streets were narrower in the Egyptian quarter of Rhacotis, where the
Sarapeum was erected. Besides, the town quickly expanded beyond its
Figure 75 The construction of

the Pharos of Alexandria. Silver
plate from Perm. Two cupids
build with all possible speed the
tower of the Pharos in the
landscape of the delta (fish,
birds, lotus). Around the
emblema, evocation of the
valley of the Nile (ducks,
serpents, duck bills, water-lilies)
boundaries: in the east, this took the form of the suburb of Eleusis, with
stadium, hippodrome and cemetery; to the west lay the principal necropo¬
lis and, along the canal joining Alexandria to Canopus, beautiful gardens
and luxurious dwellings, where, according to Strabo, a gay life was led.
A great deal of attention was paid to comfort and cleanliness: water was
distributed by a close network of pipes running off the canal bringing water
from the Nile.
A Cosmopolitan Whirlpool
The town presented one of the most cosmopolitan sights of the whole Greek
Orient. According to Strabo (under Augustus), it had over a million in¬
habitants. All nations rubbed shoulders there: Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians,
and, after a certain date, Italians. The Jews alone occupied two-fifths of the
town: their violent disputes with the Greeks often led to serious troubles
which continued well into the Roman period.
The town administered itself, at least in appearance. Two assemblies are
known from inscriptions: the boule created by Alexander and fairly quickly
suppressed, and the ecclesia organized according to the Athenian system
with tribes, phratries and demos. The most important magistrate seems to
have been the gymnasiarchos, who appears to have been the representative
of the citizens and the defender of republican liberties. In fact, autonomy
was more a facade than a reality, in a city which was not only the capital of
a strongly centralized kingdom, but also contained the royal residence.
Royal functionaries interfered in municipal affairs — notably the ‘head of
the night guard’, holder of an office about which little is known but which
was undoubtedly similar to the one the Praefectus Vigilum occupied in
Rome.
Life there was lively, noisy and frenzied. The troubles of Alexandria,
sung by the poets, later served as a model to satirists, evoking those of
Rome and then of Paris. All pleasures were practised there, even the less
innocent. ‘Aphrodite was at home there’, Herondas said. It was not diffi¬
cult to hide there and many peasants fleeing the burdens of rural life took
refuge in the city. The people were unruly: their quarrelsome tempera¬
ment had frequent opportunity to appear during the dynastic quarrels of
the second century, as well as at the time of Julius Caesar’s intervention.
The Functions of Alexandria
In practice, Alexandria was the only city of Egypt; the two towns which
also had the status ofpolis, old Naucratis and Ptolemais, founded by Soter,
can be regarded as of no account.
Three factors explain its unique development in the history of the Greek
world. First, it was the political centre of the Ptolemaic world: it housed
the enormous bureaucracy which administered Egypt.
In the second place, it was Egypt’s only real port on the Mediterranean,
and therefore its only link with the other Hellenistic realms and later with
Rome. It was an importing port for wood, minerals and marble, all pro¬
ducts which were lacking, and for olive oil and fine wines. It was an export¬
ing port primarily for corn, papyrus, linen cloths or muslins, perfumes
and fancy goods generally. Finally, it was a transit port which re-shipped
commodities originating from deepest Africa (ivory, gold, ostrich feathers,
negro slaves, wild animals) and from Arabia and India (spices, aromatics,
perfumes, silks) to the whole Mediterranean. This merchandise most fre¬
quently reached Alexandria by the canal of Necao and the Nile. The im¬
portance of maritime and fluvial trade - with division of load at Alexandria
- explains the development of the naval workyards.
Finally, as we will show later, Alexandria was one of the most active
cultural centres of the Greek world. Its brilliance was such that, for a long
time, everything Hellenistic was called - wrongly - Alexandrian. As a
result of the patronage of enlightened princes and the great institutions
with which they endowed the town, Alexandria took the lead for more than
a century in the new Hellenism born of the epic of its founder. Its poets,
scholars, scientists, sculptors and toreutists made the third century famous.
Afterwards came decline and even this was not devoid of charm.
But this success took place on the margin of Egypt. The Latin formula
Alexandria ad Aegyptum (Alexandria near Egypt) illustrated a reality which
was also valid in the Ptolemaic period. The great city which resembled
other Hellenistic towns — only it was better — was the capital of a kingdom
where life in the chora continued to follow the immemorial and immutable
pattern. This was basically the real weakness of Alexandria and of those
who directed its creation: influenced by the specifically Greek forms of the
state, they succeeded in creating a great, beautiful and prosperous polis,
but without integrating it into the life of the kingdom, to which it remained
external.
CAPITALIST MERCANTILISM AND STATE CONTROL
Radical changes occurred in economic life. Greece no longer played the

central and dominating part it had held for centuries and which it had
begun to lose from the fourth century onwards. Only two insular places
(Rhodes and then Delos) and Corinth were of international importance.
All activity tended to be concentrated in Asia Minor, in Syria and Egypt.
International Trade
This meant that the colonial type of economy which had prevailed for so
long disappeared. Except in the far west and Pontus, trade was no longer
concerned with marketing Greek products in the underdeveloped regions.
Conversely, two new types of trade appeared.
On one hand, commerce between Hellenistic realms or between
Hellenistic realms and Greece was active. It involved, first, foodstuffs.
15
Egypt in particular was a great exporter of grain: inversely, the Greeks of

the Orient remained fond of good wines which always came from Greece
or Anatolia (figure 76), and olive oil. The papyri even tell of some more
specialized transactions, including such items as hazel-nuts from Pontus.
In the second place, good quality manufactured products changed hands:
the ceramics known as Megarian, metallic vases, bronze works of art, ex-
votos and jewellery, luxury cloths and carpets (everything which was in
current production was henceforth manufactured everywhere with the
development of basic industries). Finally, there was considerable trade in
slaves.
3 4
Figure 76 Handles of wine amphorae originating from
Thasos: 1, Oenochoae and bowl; 2, Crab; 3, Hand;
4, Ivy leaf
On the other hand, as a result of the conquest of the east, products

originating from deepest Africa, Arabia, and the Indies arrived in the
Mediterranean: ivory, spices, incense and perfume, beads and precious
stones, valuable timber. The importance of the Syrian ports and Alexandria
is largely explained by the fact that the overland and maritime routes along
which these products were carried, ended there. Purchase of these luxury
goods brought a deficit in the commercial balance and hence a haemor¬
rhage of gold and silver which lasted to the end of the Roman empire. This
far-flung trade was both the cause and the consequence of the opening of
the Hellenistic world to regions of which classical Greece had only caught
an ephemeral glimpse. There will be occasion to mention it again later in
the book.
Not all conditions were favourable to the development of trade. Wars
ravaged the Hellenistic realms; piracy, particularly in the first century,
was an evil which was difficult to control. The Greeks had to share their
profits with competitors. Trade with the Indies presupposed intermed¬
iaries : the Arabs, on the maritime route; the Parthians after the formation
of an independent Parthia, on the overland route. The Greeks even met
bold and enterprising competition in the Mediterranean: Carthage was

experiencing a new upsurge, after its withdrawal in the classical period;
Rome was taking an increasing interest in the Orient. If the crude demands
born in Italy of the new appetite of the nobilitas and the equestrian order
for luxury products encouraged trade, this primarily benefited the Italian
negotiatores, who became increasingly arrogant and self-confident as Rome
made its weight felt.
However, the striking economic development which characterized the
period is explicable by a collection of convergent factors. Navigational
techniques improved. Excellent mercantile ports were fitted up or en¬
larged. Rulers gave thought to roads and canals. An intelligent effort, in
the tradition of the Great Kings and Alexander, to equip Egypt and Asia
with the economic substructure necessary to large-scale trade, can be noted
everywhere.
Demand was considerable. It went beyond the constant factors, which
continued to exist: the necessity for Greece to procure provisions and for
Egypt to obtain wood and iron. These vital requirements were swollen
by other needs, born of the refinement of a civilization which did not want
to be deprived of any pleasure or luxury. Kings spent, without counting
the cost, on the upkeep of their courts and on the festivals which were an
almost obligatory means of assuring their prestige. A rich and enlightened
middle class loved display and would no longer content itself with the
austere life led by fifth century Greeks. They could not dispense with ob¬
jects considered enviable and luxurious elsewhere. Even the Mediterranean
could not satisfy their greed: they needed blackest Africa or India to supply
adornments for their palaces and dwellings, ornaments for their person,
and the means of bringing the spice of exoticism into daily life.
Money, Banks and Capitalists

Moreover, trade was facilitated by economic technique: the extension of
the monetary economy and the development of banking. The use of money
became general, even amongst barbarian peoples: Arabs, Parthians,
Thracians, Celts, Iberians and Romans. The most interesting case was
Egypt, which had hitherto lived outside the monetary economy, although
Greek coins (primarily Athenian) were in circulation there as well as darics
and even coins struck by the last national dynasties to pay off their mer¬
cenaries. Following Alexander, Soter issued the first royal Ptolemaic coins
in 305, and these bore his effigy: golden staters, silver tetradrachmas and
copper obols, an example which was followed by all his successors. Al¬
though a natural economy remained alive in certain sectors, as will be
noted later, Egypt finally emerged from the age of barter.
A considerable quantity of precious metal was used for minting, so much
so that a certain drain appeared at the end of the period, just at a time,
moreover, when pillage, fines and trade were drawing a large part of the
coinage of the Greek kingdoms towards Italy. Silver mono-metallism re¬
mained the rule, but Alexander’s successors did not maintain the monetary
unity he had instituted. While Seleucids, Antigonids and Attalids retained

the Attic standard, Rhodes and the Ptolemies adopted a lighter standard
which was the same as the Phoenician standard of Carthage.
The various coins circulated freely, except in Egypt where Philadelphus
forbade the use of foreign coins. Exchange was one of the first functions of
the banks, which developed incredibly at that time. They also made loans,
generally at a rate of ten per cent (at Rhodes and Delos for example, which
were the first banking centres) but as high as twenty-four per cent in
Egypt. They kept their clients’ accounts, and bills of exchange, cheques
and possibly transfers came into current use.
City banks, such as the one at Miletus, existed as well as private banks,
which were often in the hands of expatriated Athenians (in fact Athens had
made a great advance in this field from the end of the fifth century).
Banking institutions also developed in the temples, according to a very old
tradition: the priests of the great sanctuaries had been the first to conceive
the idea of making the silver of the sacred repositories bear fruit. The most
famous were in Anatolia (at Ephesus or Sardes) and at Delos, but when the
priests of Egypt regained their autonomy in respect of the king, they too
embarked on this profitable path.
The Ptolomies also created state banks, and leased out their monopoly.
These banks played a dual role: on one hand, they carried out the same
operations as private banks for private individuals; on the other, they
regularly received the taxation returns of the public treasury (on condition
that the tax farmer invested the king’s money to advantage), and handled
public payments. Papyri show how deeply banks were rooted in Ptolemaic
Egypt; Greek or Egyptian, the artisan and trader used their services to
effect all his transactions.
The most deep-seated reason for the development of vast international
commerce lay in the definite advent of a large capitalist middle class, to
which bankers and tax farmers belonged but which also included ship¬
owners and merchants. Traders often formed associations - particularly
evident at Delos. They were sometimes powerful enough to act alone, like
Apollonius, dioecetes of Philadelphus. Zenon’s archives show not only his in¬
terests in his immense property in the Fayum but also his commercial rela¬
tions with Syria. In this way, the most energetic expatriated Greeks made
extraordinary fortunes in the Orient; their example was very quickly
followed by Syrians and even Egyptians, and then by the Italian negotia-
tores who took increasing advantage of the political predominance of Rome
to assert their authority as masters of trade.
Planning of Agriculture
Large-scale commerce was thus the realm of private initiative, which seems
to have obtained greater success the more adventurous it was. Rural life
offered the contrasting picture of a world which developed little and where
positive state control existed.
THE WORLD OF THE CON QUEST 429
Royal Land, Concessions, Private Lands

Without prejudice to other fundamental factors that will be analysed later,
the rulers were induced to pay very close attention to the land because the
conquest had given them the superior right which the Achaemenids and
pharaohs had possessed before them. The largest part of the land therefore
belonged to the king: this was the ‘royal land’ (basilice ge), leased by con¬
tract to ‘royal peasants’. They cultivated it for a rent which with taxes
could amount to half the harvest.
However, not all the land in the kingdom was royal. On one hand, the
king yielded part of it to associations or individuals. The first group in¬
cluded cities (this did not apply to the Ptolemies who did not found any
cities to speak of) and temples, whose previous possessions were ratified
or who were even endowed with new domains. In Asia Minor, positive
sacerdotal states existed around great sanctuaries, such as those of Pessinus
or Comana, custodians of great landed wealth; the same phenomenon
could be observed in Egypt where the last Ptolemies considerably increased
the priesthood’s possessions in order to try to guarantee its support. The
second group was composed of soldiers, whom the kind tried to attach to
his service by establishing cleruchies, or of great functionaries, who re¬
ceived endowments or doreai as evidence of royal favour; the best known of
these is Apollonius in the Fayum.
On the other hand, private property did exist and texts from Upper
Egypt show that it clearly preceded the settlement of the Greeks. It
developed in two ways: the king sold part of the royal land in order to
obtain money, an expedient which the Seleucids utilized all too often and
thus appreciably reduced their domain; or else the king granted long
leases which were in practice equivalent to a sale, involving very unproduc¬
tive lands reclaimed from the desert or domains developed as vineyards or
orchards, which obviously did not lend themselves to the annual contract
of royal land.
Even with these reservations, the Greek kings of the eastern realms had
inherited a land system which put them in possession of a considerable part
of the soil. How they cultivated it, the example of Egypt, well known from
a number of papyri, will show.
The Case of Egypt: Old and New Factors

In Egypt, the fundamental wealth came from the land. But, here more
than elsewhere, work had to be organized because of the annual flood.
Apart from this, the soil now had to feed newcomers — administrators,
soldiers or merchants — who did not produce their own sustenance. Some
control over the peasants’ efforts was therefore necessary, in order to force
them to produce more.
The problem was even more complex. Egypt had hitherto lived as an
autarchy, economically self-sufficient. Henceforth it bought commodities
necessary for the lives of the Greeks who lived there, and in particular foi
the king and his court, from abroad. Hitherto, it had lived outside the
monetary economy. Henceforth, the kings needed money to pay for the
services of all their employees - mercenaries, technicians and adminis¬
trators. Exports therefore had necessarily to be far in excess of imports.
But these exports, apart from certain merchandise originating in deepest
Africa or the Far East and conveyed across Egypt, primarily consisted of
agricultural products: either directly (corn more than anything else, which
was produced in large quantities in Egypt and which was so lacking in the
Greek world), or indirectly, involving products manufactured from
agricultural raw material (papyrus, linen cloth).
It was therefore necessary for the ruler to organize agricultural produc¬
tion: to make the land of Egypt produce to the maximum was his only
means of making money, that is to say, of being able to pay for imports and
meet the wages and salaries of those who served him.
This necessity was immediately understood. To increase production, the
Ptolemies were able to take advantage of the experience of thousands of
years of pharaonic Egypt. The Nile Valley had been accustomed to an
economy strictly controlled by the pharaoh from time immemorial: a
whole system of censuses of men and land, and of statistics, absolutely in¬
dispensable for authoritarian planning, was already in existence. The
Ptolemies therefore had only to utilize pre-established frameworks and
retain the administrative sub-structure of the countryside.
Monopolies and the Financial System

However, the system was inflected (though it is difficult to determine the
extent of this inflection) by the great innovation represented by the definite
introduction of money. The purely natural economy of Egypt was pro¬
foundly altered by the two corollaries resulting from the use of money:
banking and the leasing of revenues.
It is worth the effort to enter into some slight degree of detail in order to
establish the flexible and varied solutions the royal power adopted to
control agricultural life.
In the case of corn, the basic crop, the king himself fixed the area to be
sown in each nomos by an ordinance (diagraphe). In other respects, the pre¬
cise nature of this ordinance is disputed amongst scholars: one side con¬
siders that the order applied to all who cultivated their land, no matter by
what title they held it, and was therefore an instrument of the economy of
an absolute state; others think it was a programme of administration for
the royal estates.
The king loaned seeds to the peasants, and this represented an excellent
investment on his part, as well as a possibility of introducing new species
which might give better yields. The fields were then closely supervised by
royal functionaries until the harvest. The harvest was entirely seques¬
trated : this was the king’s guarantee for the rents and taxes which were due
to him in corn (the most important tax, land tax, was proportional to the
surface cultivated). Interest on the loan of seeds, rent and taxation easily
consumed half the yield of the land.
The king’s profits were enormous. Custodian of prodigious quantities of

corn which accumulated in the royal granaries, he was master of the
countryside. Apart from this, he possessed a precious export commodity.
This absolute power over the market in cereals was obtained with minimum
recourse to absolutism.
Oil was quite a different matter. It was essentially obtained from
oleaginous seeds (castor oil, sesame, cnicus) and to a small extent, after the
Greek conquest, from olives. The product of the oil plants was closely
supervised from sowing to harvest; it was then entirely absorbed by the
royal services and leased out after valuation. The aim was to establish an
absolute monopoly over manufacture and trade. Oil could then be sold at
a very high price, far in excess of the cost price, which entailed, as a
corollary, high duties on all imports.
Oil therefore provides an example of a fully state-controlled and closed
economy. It was a good choice on the king’s part for a monopoly, because
of its role as food and source of illumination. With a large body of func¬
tionaries at his disposal, aided by the big money-lenders, the tax farmers,
he met no resistance, except ill-will from the peasants and schemes for
evasion.
An ordinance also determined the surface to be sown under flax every
year and the harvest was similarly supervised and leased. The flax was then
woven in workshops, subject to strict control so that all clandestine manu¬
facture should be prevented. A monopoly did therefore exist here, but a
more flexible one than in the case of oil: the weaver could in fact produce
cloth in addition to the quantity that he owed to the king. On the other
hand, some workshops escaped the king’s grasp: those of the temple which
wove byssus, a ritual fabric for mummies and gods, which was also
considered a highly luxurious material, in great demand outside Egypt.
Vineyards and orchards increased, helped by long leases. The king’s
intervention was of necessity more restrained in this realm and taxation
took the place of rent and requisitions in the case of annual harvests. The
same applied to the papyrus, a hardy plant from the swamps of the delta
or Fayum, which was also the object of fiscal and not economic control.
Stockbreeding was highly developed and Egypt seems to have had much
more pasturage than in the present day. Cattle were primarily utilized for
work in the fields but light beasts were exploited as capital assets:
Apollonius’ endowment at Fayum shows enormous flocks of sheep, includ¬
ing one of 6,381 beasts. Cattle belonged to the monarch or else to private
individuals, cleruchies or temples. In the first case, the king hired them out
and drew both income and taxes in return. In the second, the owners were
subject to a special tax, the ennomion, which affected all animals, even camels.
This tax, which was farmed out, presupposed a general census of livestock.
This was taken at the height of the flood when the flocks were sheltered
on rising ground, in order to verify the declarations made by owners.
This strikingly flexible system was not inspired by any preconceived
plan. The control the king exercised over agricultural production varied
from one commodity to another, even in the case of two related types of
cultivation practised on the same lands, such as corn and oleaginous plants.
This was because it can quite truthfully be said that the Ptolemies were
actuated by one single desire: that of filling their coffers. As we have said,
they were great capitalists essentially concerned with self-enrichment.
They regarded Egypt as a vast estate which belonged to them in their own
right and which they had to exploit in their own best interests. The pattern
they worked out appears clumsy and not particularly coherent: at times it
was a genuine planned economy with oppressive monopolies; at others,
the state was content to deduct its share from the wealth produced by
private individuals on land which belonged to them with cattle which were
their own property. The unity of the system lay in the unity of the objec¬
tive: to encourage intensive production and to keep the largest possible
part of this production (through rent or taxation, or both together) for the
sovereign.
Progress in Rural Egypt

That those in power should take an interest in rural life was something
completely new in the history of the Greek world, and not without some
very favourable consequences. The area cultivated was increased by drain¬
ing swamps and irrigating the fringes of the desert. The immense oasis of
the Fayum, the most beautiful creation of the New Empire, came back to
life after long neglect during the Late Period. Improved irrigation tech¬
niques were introduced: a machine with cogged wheels or the Archimedean
screw tended to replace the primitive shadoufs.
Stronger tools appeared with the import of large quantities of iron.
Ploughs, spades, hoes, scythes and axes, which had been made of wood
under the pharaohs, were now made of iron. A plough which sowed was
used and possibly also a spiral wine-press for grapes and olives.
Great efforts were made to acclimatize new species. Vines and olive
trees, which already existed sporadically in Egypt, were extended con¬
siderably in order to satisfy the needs of Greek immigrants. Fig, pomegran¬
ate, apple and walnut trees were introduced. Plantations of trees were
encouraged in the rare places where this was feasible, in order to alleviate
the scarcity of structural material. By using a real selective process it was
possible to improve seed-corn and to introduce sheep with long wool.
The economic results of this policy therefore seem to have been favour¬
able: production from the land and from stockbreeding was intensified.
But socially nothing was done to improve the condition of the peasant, who
was exploited even more harshly than under the pharaohs; his only resort
in periods of crisis was anachoresis, flight from oppression and injustice.
A COLONIAL SOCIETY
The society born of the conquest was a colonial society, where Macedonian
or Greek invaders ruled over the natives. The latter remained much more
numerous: in Egypt possibly eight million as compared with barely one
million conquerors. This disproportion had the inevitable results: a defen¬
sive reaction on the part of the Greco-Macedonians to preserve the purity
of their civilization, but also progressive orientalization, particularly
striking in the religious sphere; nationalist reactions on the part of the
natives to preserve their customs and beliefs, but also the appearance of an
elite which became hellenized in its own interests.
Ethnic and Economic Cleavage

As in all colonial society, the cleavage first followed ethnic criteria; the
conquerors also had power and wealth. But the disproportion between
the two elements, the natural ability of some of the natives, with a
thousand-year-old civilization behind them, and the personal achievement
of gifted and forceful individuals led fairly rapidly (and in any case from
the second century) to another differentiation, based no longer on race,
but on fortune. Without even mentioning the priests, who retained or
recovered their hold, many natives grew rich in administration, on the
farms, in agriculture or trade: they occupied a higher place in the social
hierarchy than ‘small Greeks’ who had failed and who vegetated in
subordinate positions. There were also innumerable examples of cross¬
breeding, all the more frequent as there were clearly very many more men
than women amongst the Greek immigrants.
Contempt — furthermore reciprocal — often existed between the two
ethnic elements but generally no segregation, either by law or in fact,
occurred. Greek and Egyptian farmers lived together and also with
Syrians, Arabs and Jews on Apollonius’ endowment, and it was the same at
all levels of administration as well as on the royal farms. It is therefore more
valuable to study the different social types irrespective of race, though it
must be noted that natives become more numerous the lower one descends
on the social ladder.
The New Middle-Class

The birth of a numerous and well-to-do middle class was the most notable
feature of the period. Its income came from industry, particularly from
commerce, though it never neglected the purchase of landed estates. Its
material resources as well as its intellectual level were higher than in the
preceding period, and this resulted in profound changes in daily life. It
liked the pleasures of life, good cheer, courtesans and comfortable houses,
but did not neglect the more refined satisfactions to be obtained from
poetry, art and philosophy.
The man of finance became a widespread phenomenon. Bankers accum¬
ulated enormous fortunes in the great public squares. The tax farmers were
equally powerful. In Egypt notably, they took advantage of the king s
15*
desire to reduce his risks. Most of the revenues were leased as a supplemen¬
tary guarantee in a country which had known a monetary economy for
only a short time. Admittedly the ruler took extraordinary precautions:
the farmer had to pay a deposit; the steward checked his accounts every
month; he was accountable to the extent of his property. The papyri show
the enormous number of disputes between the different farms. But men of
every race, primarily Greeks but also Egyptians and Jews, would not be
quarrelling over adjudications if the system had not normally been most
lucrative for the tax-gatherer.
Even more than in fourth century Athens, the development of a capital¬
ist economy made it possible for more forceful or more fortunate men to
make enormous fortunes. Apollonius is a case in point: he was the friend
and dioecetes of Philadelphus, but his onerous official functions did not
prevent him managing extraordinarily complex personal affairs: trade with
Asia Minor, Palestine, Syria, and Arabia; cultivating the dorea of ten
thousand arourai (6,700 acres) at Philadelphia on the border of the basin
of the Fayum which the monarch had granted him. His energy and activity
worked miracles in this pilot-domain, where the first priority was to pro¬
duce, not only to please a king whose economic policy could be compared
with that of Colbert or of Frederick the Great, but also for his own benefit,
because the surplus of wine, oil, cloth and papyrus could be sold.
Zenon’s wonderful document shows the sumptuous life that Apollonius
led, his table loaded with silver plate and rare flowers, covered with the
most refined dishes, fish, caviare, fine wines. Above all, it shows his organ¬
izational gifts - his offices divided into two sections (secretariat and
accountancy department), including even native scribes to draft contracts
with Egyptian peasants. Finally, it shows a man who could make quick
decisions, whose speech was clear and imperious and who had gained
confidence from his own brilliant achievements: ‘Superlatives abound from
his calamus like the English spoken by Americans’ (Cl. Preaux). This is
possibly the first time in history that the figure of a great capitalist appears
with such clarity. Money, the primum mobile of his actions, was not enough
for him: he also cared about his prestige, his glory. Surrounded by a posi¬
tive court of clients and servants, he lived like a great eclectic, philanthropic
seigneur, generous to the gods whether Greek or Egyptian, generous to
men who appealed to his omnipotence.
The same papyrus document also reveals the figure of Zenon, a Greek
from Caria, who was the confidential agent of the great dioecetes and succes¬
sively his commercial agent for eastern affairs, his secretary, and his steward
at Philadelphia. He was an educated man, capable of scribbling a few notes
of music or a line from Euripides on a scrap of paper. He wrote in excellent,
terse Greek but his mind seems to have been less lucid, his will less firm
than his patron’s. However, he appears to have been quite at ease in the
administration of that immense estate where everything had to be created,
very proud after all of his role as founder of the town, and of his mission of
bringing life and prosperity to the desert. Though not on the princely level
of Apollonius, he lived comfortably, ate delicate dishes on feast days, and

owned beautiful hunting dogs. He could also play the philanthropist and
received letters of disinterested amity from friends who had remained in
Caria, which reveal in him a man not unworthy of his social success.
The Functionaries
The functionary represented a completely new type in the Greek world.
The Seleucid realm may have suffered from obvious under-administration;
the reverse was true of the Attalids and above all the Ptolemies who had a
solid hierarchy of employees at their disposal.
The functionary was the king’s man — bound to him by an oath —
charged with imparting his wishes and seeing that they were executed, and
above all, in these capitalist monarchies, with assuring maximum produc¬
tion and with levying taxes. In fact, the system was doubly corrupt. On one
hand, although the functionary was theoretically appointed by the king,
he was in fact designated by his superior and, in the course of time, became
his liegeman: the papyri disclose the gifts he had to shower on his boss in
order to keep his position. Thus, a new feudality tended to build up as the
monarchy weakened; the highest placed members of the hierarchy became
real despots, subject to very little control by the central authority and
treating their subordinates with all the more arrogance, haughtiness and
contempt in that the latter were entirely dependent on them — even at the
judicial level, because the functionaries were subject to special
administrative jurisdiction.
On the other hand, the ruler thought that the financial responsibility of
the functionaries gave him an additional guarantee. By a chain reaction,
each one tried to recover from his immediate subordinate the sums for
which he was personally beholden; the most lowly were left to squeeze
those under their administration so that the money might be forthcoming
at any cost: any means would do — seizures, requisitions, even corporal
punishment. Moreover, violence called forth violence: the complaints of
villagers against the contemptuous arrogance and excesses of the function¬
aries are balanced on the papyri by tales of woe from inspectors or
tax-collectors received with blows.
Nevertheless, one must not be misled by the large quantity of evidence
of the administration’s misdeeds. By definition, the papyri have only pre¬
served traces of the imperfections of the system and, furthermore, these are
obvious. The picture of the good functionary also emerges - scrupulous,
deferential towards his superiors and generous to those under his adminis¬
tration : the heir of a type of respectable and honest scribe traditional in
Egypt, and also of a Greek model of the philanthropic magistrate. The good
rulers ceaselessly reminded the administrators of their duties: In your
tours of inspection,’ wrote one of them, ‘try to encourage the peop e
and inspire them with the best frame of mind, not only in words, but if
the peasants complain of the comogrammateis and the comarchs on the
subject of the work of the land, investigate and put an end to malicious
practices.’ The Romans and then the Byzantines found the model for their
institutions and the sound basis of an efficient administration in ptolemaic
officialdom.
Greek and native rubbed shoulders in the administration because the
Ptolemies were wise enough not to deprive themselves of a pre-existing
structure. To be sure, the higher ranks were occupied strictly by Greeks,
at least until Euergetes 11, who entrusted the office ofstrategus to Egyptians.
But the middle and lower rungs were mainly recruited from amongst the
natives, and Egyptian nomarchs can be found from the earliest days. In
another traditional class, the priesthood, the old native elite continued to
rule alone.
The Native Priesthood

Alexander’s successors everywhere retained his policy of tolerance towards
national gods. For reasons of policy - because they felt their hold on the
people - they endeavoured to win over the native priesthood. They re¬
paired the old sanctuaries, built new ones and showered gods and priests
with presents and privileges, in the hope that in return this generosity
would enable them to control the masses more easily. Documentation on
the subject is most plentiful in Egypt and the picture there less indistinct-
though quite a lot is known about some of the great temples in Asia,
particularly the Artemisium at Ephesus, a genuine sacerdotal state with
immense wealth and an innumerable personnel of eunuch priests and sacred
courtesans under the authority of the Megabyzi; or the Esagil at Babylon
and the temple of Nabou at Borsippa, both restored by the Seleucids.
If the functionary was the king’s man, the priest was the man of god. He
possessed alarming power: he alone was capable of establishing relations
with the supernatural world and procuring stability for the universe
through daily or solemn liturgies which, by offering the god everything he
needed for his life in the temple - food, drink, clothing, distraction - at the
same time ensured the god’s benevolence towards mortals. He was heir of a
thousand-year-old science, and the trustee of traditions and of sacred
writing. He still possessed the immense prestige which had always sur¬
rounded him in the Nile valley, although in the ptolemaic period priestly
circles tended to withdraw within themselves and suffer from a certain
paralysis (for example Strabo points out that all the schools which had
existed at the sanctuaries in Herodotus’ and Plato’s time had disappeared).
This was a prelude to the irremediable decadence which was very visible
after Antoninus in the wretched inscriptions of the temple of Esna.
But there is an ambiguity here, because the Ptolemies set up as legitimate
successors of the pharaohs, and the priests - through lassitude or oppor¬
tunism - accepted this view. Now the pharaoh was the only real priest and
all the priests held their office from him. The king himself made appoint¬
ments to the most important posts and in any case levied a special tax on
every investiture or on every promotion in the hierarchy, because the

priests had to buy their offices as well as the prebends which were attached
to them. Every birthday he was solemnly hailed by the council of five
elected members which administered each temple. In this way a close
relationship between sovereign and priesthood was established, based on
mutual need: the monarch to establish his legitimacy in the eyes of his
native subjects and to strengthen the royal cult in its traditional form; the
priests so that they could continue to enjoy their immemorial privileges.
While the Ptolemies were strong, they kept the priesthood in strict obedi¬
ence. The sacred land, which had not been confiscated and which still
comprised immense landed domains, with workshops (particularly for
weaving), was directly administered by the king who, being god, quite
naturally collected the revenue from it. There was no question of spoliation
here, because this had already been the case in independent Egypt, when
pharaonic power was strong. In exchange, the king ensured that the priests
had everything necessary to subsist and to render liturgical homage to the
gods.
But when the Ptolemies grew weaker and native revolts made the
priesthood’s support more necessary, they granted immunity to the temples
(decree of 118) - thus sacrificing considerable revenue - and showered the
priests with gifts. Fleeing royal peasants more and more frequently took
refuge in the asylum of the sanctuaries: to them the priests thus became
protectors (in the sense the word was used in the Late Empire) and their
influence increased accordingly. They were so rich that henceforth they
made loans to the monarch. In this manner they regained the immense
temporal prestige they had had under the sixth and nineteenth dynasties,
but without retaining the spiritual authority and dignity which justified,
at least partially, their power in the state at that time.
The picture must be qualified as far as details are concerned, because
the priesthood was innumerable. In contrast to the purified, who alone had
the right to penetrate into the holy of holies (high priest, prophet, dressers
of the gods) and the scribes of the divine books, were the low clergy whose
job it was to prepare the ceremonies or look after the administration of the
holy places. A papyrological document from Thebes sheds a good deal of
light on the small world of the choachytai, funerary priests entrusted with
the cult of the dead: they were foolish, greedy and prepared to fight for
their own interests. But the same traditionalist, conservative, and oppor¬
tunist world was to be found everywhere. Over the centuries it had got too
much into the habit of foreign domination to be affected by anything except
its own interests.
The Working World

King middle classes, functionaries and priests lived off the hard labour of
the humble people. The division of society into two antithetic classes, rich
and poor, and the exploitation of one by the other, which had appeared in
43 8 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
the fourth century in Greece, was only accentuated in the world of the
conquest.
No agreement has been reached as to the number of slaves, but in our
opinion it must have been considerable, both because of wars and because
of the large-scale trade of which they were the object. They consisted of
domestic slaves, who were very numerous as a result of the development of
a middle class avidly pursuing its own comfort, as well as slaves employed
as industrial labour in the factories at Pergamum, Antioch and above all
Alexandria where a considerable servile concentration seems to have
appeared for the first time.
The mass of workers, artisans and peasants were free, although some
days a year were claimed for royal forced labour. Agriculture remained
the basic activity and life in the chora (countryside) had scarcely changed
despite some technical improvements. In Egypt, particularly, the fellah
led his traditional existence, in wretched villages concentrated on artificial
raised ground beyond the reach of the floods - where the effects of the
requisition of dwellings for royal agents or soldiers were harshly felt. In
answer to complaints — which papyri show were innumerable - the
sovereign often had to recall that not more than half a house could be
requisitioned. Life was hard for the worker whoever he worked for, with
rent, taxes, forced labour and all sorts of requisitions (legal or increasingly
frequently illegal) which the functionaries multiplied. It was harder than
before the conquest, because greater production was required of him.
However, a development can be perceived from the texts. In the third
century, the condition of the Egyptian peasant was not too bad. He sold
his labour to the king (because the majority of the land was royal) but also
to temples or private individuals. The contract which bound him to his
master was freely discussed and agreed. But the situation worsened after
the beginning of the second century; civil wars ruined the countryside;
the king, impoverished by the loss of the empire, wanted to make the land
produce more - and the land itself was contracting because regions won
from the desert by irrigation works were gradually being abandoned for
want of maintenance of hydraulic installations. Functionaries were less
closely supervised and often acted as despots. It was more and more diffi¬
cult to find peasants to cultivate the land and papyri show that in order to
get them to sign contracts to work, all arguments, ranging from an appeal
to devotion to torture, had to be used.
The administration tried to remedy this serious crisis by measures which
were only palliatives and sometimes aggravated the evil. There were, to
be sure, detailed adjustments in rents which are evidence of a real concern
for justice, but there were also compulsory measures. Additional leaseholds
were imposed on the least poor of the peasants: this was the dreadful
epibole which made its appearance in 164 and its pernicious effects devel¬
oped well into the Roman period. From the end of the second century, the
collective responsibility of the village was established: the community of
royal farmers in a village was responsible for all rents. The peasant was
Figure 77 Sign from the dispensary of an enypniocrites (interpreter of

dreams) from the Serapeium of Memphis, astonishing evidence of
Greco-Egyptian syncretism. The stele has the shape of a Greek naiscos
with fronton and acroteria, but the lateral pillars and the goddesses
which they support are Egyptian.
The painting represents the bull Apis in front of an altar. The
inscription means ‘I interpret dreams on the order of the god. Good
luck! The interpreter is Cretan.’
forced to swear to ‘remain in view of the royal functionaries’ because it

was very obvious that the simple signature of a contract was not sufficient.
Crushed by an oppressive system and by unfair and pernicious leases,
the peasant fled: this was the anachoresis which was one of the most serious
phenomena of the late Hellenistic period before it became one of the
scourges of Roman Egypt, and was tinged with religious values with the
first Christian anchorites. Whatever may have been said, the desert could
only have provided possible retreat for a tiny minority, because the life it
offered was impossible for anyone unaccustomed to nomadism. But
Alexandria, with its swarming uncontrollable population, exercised an
attraction which was all the stronger because there was work to be had
there and the temples were quite ready to offer their right of asylum to the
fleeing peasant. Still others formed bands of brigands which devastated the
countryside. The papyri show the anguish and bitter complaint of those
who stayed and were forced by the solidarity of the village to pay for those
who fled: indignant denunciations multiplied against the royal agents.
The papyri clearly show the deep discontent which pervaded the
countryside. The peasants there appear to have been quite violent and in¬
capable of tolerating coercion: their claims were presented in tones of
revolt, in contrast to the platitudinous adulation adopted by the ‘little
Greeks’ in the same circumstances. This discouragement and this turbu¬
lence explain why the revolts found such an echo in the Egyptian chora.
Thus the rift between the urban world of exploiters and the rural world
of the exploited grew deeper and deeper, and Rostovtzeff not unreasonably
regards it as the deepest defect in ancient society after the fourth century;
it would finally be one of the clearest causes of its collapse.
The Inevitable Fusion

Alexander’s dream of a fusion of races gradually became a reality in this
colonial society where the laws ignored racial discrimination between
conquerors and conquered, fundamental in the Roman empire.
‘The Macedonians have become Egyptians’, declared Polybius and Livy.
Despite the obvious exaggeration of this statement, all Greeks in Egypt as
well as in Asia felt drawn towards the Orient, principally in the religious
sphere (figure 77). In Egypt, Greeks were mummified and buried with the
books of the dead: the pharaonic system of weights and measures and their
calendar were adopted by Ptolemaic administration. Infection remained
weak in the cities where the Greeks retained their traditional framework
and where they were relatively numerous. However, colonists and
cleruchs, who lived a much more isolated life and could only group them¬
selves in politeumata (recognized but not institutionalized associations, at
the most only a caricature of a city), gradually adopted native customs -
all the more so as these customs corresponded to a very different climate
from that of Greece and Anatolia; also mixed marriages were numerous
after 250. A Theban papyrus of 113 records a loan made to a choachytes by a
Greek named Psen-Mont son of Pa-Thot: except for his judicial status
nothing Greek remains. The same phenomenon can be found in Syria and
Babylon, notably at Dura Europus, where onomastics show the fusion
between Greek and native elements.
The reverse phenomenon is still clearer, because it was in the natives’
interest to imitate the conquerors and they may also have felt their super¬
iority and vitality. To be sure, the countryside was not at all affected by
this movement, and local languages, Aramaic, Persian and Egyptian,
successfully resisted Greek. Sacerdotal circles also remained fairly imper¬
vious : cuneiform writing, Sumerian, survived as a liturgical language for a
long time, and hieroglyphics even longer.
But in Attalid or Seleucid cities, in the metropolises of the Egyptian
nomes, hellenization was irresistible. It resulted in the formation of a
native elite, speaking Greek, dressing in Greek style and adopting Greek
Map 20 The rapid growth of gymnasia in the Hellenistic period (according to J. Delorme)
customs and practices. Even at Thebes, in a sacerdotal and traditionalist

environment, there was increasing recourse to agoranomoi (notaries of
Greek language, who spread Hellenic law widely and discredited Egyptian
notaries who drafted their documents in demotic writing). There are
numerous graffiti written in Greek in the old religious metropolis, and some
of their authors, who described themselves as priests, magicians or em-
balmers, could only have been Egyptians. The numerous scholarly texts on
the papyri show that Homer, the tragic poets, Demosthenes and Menander
were read everywhere. The gymnasium - where it was accessible to natives,
that is to say primarily in Asia - provided an ideal environment for forming
men in the style of Hellenic life (map 20): those who frequented it were
very proud of the fact and formed associations of apo ton gymnasiou (those
who came from the gymnasium).
Socially, the development of this hellenized middle-class was a success.
However, it must be added that, apart from Berosus, Manetho and Zeno,
the founder of stoicism, none of those who shone in letters, the arts, sciences
or philosophy belonged to it. Its members could speak or read Greek, they
lived in the Greek manner in Greek houses; but they never formed part of
the thinking elite. Paradoxically, they had to wait until the empire for a
Philo, a Plotinus and an Athanasius to emerge.
THE WORLD OF THE SOLDIERS
The presence of soldiers in the cities or the metropolises of the nomoi was
one of the basic factors of this hellenization. Moreover, the army played
such a part in the Hellenistic world, born of the conquest and torn by
incessant conflict, that it deserves special study.
The Recruitment of Mercenaries

Just when men were so urgently needed, civic recruitment, linked to the
system of the polls, dried up. As a result, the rulers had to resort to mer¬
cenaries, following a development which had begun in the fourth century.
Recruitment operated in several ways: the dispatch of recruiting ser¬
geants, the engagement of condottieri who brought their own troops, even
diplomatic agreements between cities providing for the supply of con¬
tingents in case of need. Once the mercenary was engaged, it was a good
idea to keep him for as long as possible. An attempt was therefore made to
turn him into a military colonist (or cleruch), by providing him with land,
which he could hold on condition that various obligations were fulfilled:
financial obligations and the obligation to hold himself ready for immediate
mobilization at all times.
Where were these mercenaries recruited from? Up to the end of the third
century, the Greek element played a fundamental part. Originating from
the poorest regions of Hellas (certain districts of the Peloponnese, central

and northern Greece, the islands of the archipelago), large numbers of
Greeks joined the service of the new monarchies. The proportion of Greeks
diminished considerably in the second century, on one hand because the
mercenary’s position worsened, on the other, because many found it hard
to adapt to the climate, notably in Egypt where it was noted that the
families of the cleruchs degenerated. The Macedonians were a slightly
different case: they were numerous from the beginning and remained so.
It has been thought that, as they belonged to a young race, they were more
adaptable and continued to proliferate.
The barbarians were also willing to enlist. Their ranks included
Galatians, Celts who had invaded Greece, ravaged Anatolia and even
ventured as far as Egypt. The rulers, notably the Antigonids and Attalids,
appreciated their valour and their complete devotion and incorporated the
remains of their bands.
The rulers had to make increasing use of native elements to compensate
for the numerical deficiency of Greek soldiers. Semites were very highly
valued, even in Egypt where they tended to replace Greeks in the army.
The Ptolemies even decided to incorporate Egyptians after the battle of
Raphia (217).
The Condition of the Mercenary

The mercenary, often exiled for life, became a sort of stateless person de¬
prived of all political rights. Military and civic life, so closely linked in
classical Greece, were now definitely separated. To be sure, garrisons, units
or even associations of soldiers can be found voting honorary decrees and
electing magistrates, but this activity had no authentic reality and was
undoubtedly only an expression of the nostalgia that many of them
retained for the ancient institutions.
Their social condition is difficult to define, all the more so as it changed
considerably. In the third century, the mercenary was well paid, in kind
and cash, without prejudice to the many additional privileges involved,
and the military profession was popular because it was lucrative. The
soldier at that time appeared a well-fed, well-dressed, well-heeled person¬
age, happy with his lot in life. In the second century, however, when the
economic crisis raged in the Hellenistic monarchies, the profession lost
many of its attractions: badly paid and impecunious, there was barely any
difference between the soldier and the peasant; he was obliged to cultivate
the land and therefore shared the same humble tasks.
This development explains the new relationship between the soldier and
the population of the town or village where he was billeted. In the third
century, numerous complaints were directed against mercenaries: under
Euergetes, householders are seen tearing the roofs from their houses and
blocking their doors with altars rather than submit to requisition. In the
second century, a modus vivendi seems to have been established, to the extent
that the army consisted much more of natives and the soldier was far from
the privileged person he formerly was. Much closer to the peasant, he no
longer inspired the wild hatred to which so many third century papyri
bear witness.
Torn from their native surroundings, Greek and Macedonian mercen¬
aries remained deeply attached to Hellenism, although they were strongly
influenced by local cults. It would appear that the foundation of gymnasia,
which multiplied in the Hellenistic realms, should largely be attributed to
them. Again a distinction is necessary: in the Syro-Anatolian world,
gymnasia were open to natives, avid to acquire Greek culture. In Egypt,
on the contrary, they were clubs jealously reserved for the conquerors: at
the time when the army there was was invaded by Semites, they formed the
nucleus of a sort of Hellenic freemasonry anxious to avoid contamination
by the barbarians.
Tenure ofCleruchies
One of the most original institutions of the Hellenistic period was the
cleruchy intended to tie mercenaries to one place by granting them an
allotment of land (its area varied considerably, between one and 618
acres). Although the word is Greek and recalls the cleruchies of classical
Athens, this method of recompense for military service was traditional in
the Orient, and notably in pharaonic Egypt. The Greek sovereigns found
it greatly to their advantage to retain it: they wanted to use it to constitute
a hereditary army and free themselves from the tricky problem of recruiting
new mercenaries; at the same time, they hoped, by settling Greek colonists
as far as the countryside, to control the natives better and encourage their
hellenization. But the system was fundamentally vitiated when natives
were introduced into the royal army and cleruchical lands also conceded
to them.
Originally, on his death, the cleruch’s land reverted to the king, unless
he had a son old enough to bear arms. But the relationship between the
sovereign and the cleruch changed. In the third century, the first opera¬
tions of appropriation, land-clearing and reclamation were effected by the
royal services. The cleruch, kept away by external campaigns, also did not
know a great deal about work on the land, especially in the very individual
conditions of Egyptian agriculture. But from the second century, the
cleruchs were no longer foreigners: they were the sons of cleruchs or natives.
They were given uncultivated land which they had to develop. They were
no longer beholden to the king for it, but were rather doing him a favour
by' cultivating this undeveloped land, and paying a rent for it.
In these conditions it was natural that the king’s demands in respect of
the cleruchs diminished. Tenure tended to be hereditary and was even
allotted to women. It also became almost alienable: the cleruch could not
sell it but he could transfer it for cash, together with the duties it carried -
which came to the same thing. Heredity and the quasi-alienability of the
cleros, which gradually became assimilated to an ordinary private property,

was an important victory for the individual over royal prerogative.
This specific example is particularly typical of the development of the
relationship between the king and his subjects in the late Hellenistic
period. The concession of a cleruchy was originally a favour, carrying with
it important obligations. But the progressive impoverishment of Egypt led
the rulers to consider it vitally necessary to ensure the cultivation of the
land, as their basic resources came from the soil. They then gave up some
of their rights in order to obtain wider cultivation. But this was a vicious
circle: the change from cleruchies to private properties correspondingly
diminished the royal domain and therefore the monarch’s landed wealth,
already conspicuously reduced by concessions and gifts made to the priests.
The Hellenistic kingdoms leave a confused impression of success and
failure. On one hand, they produced the great cosmopolitan cities with
their broad thoroughfares and noble monuments, their undeniable pros¬
perity, their dynamic middle class in the midst of expansion and the
hellenization of a middle class in native environments. On the other, they
produced the stagnation of the countryside, harshly exploited and drawing
no benefit from the new order. The king and the great capitalists who led
the game were only interested in their profits. Consciously or not, they
favoured this division between the urban and rural worlds; this only
superficially appeared to be in the tradition of Hellenism because,
although classical civilization was defined by the city, the latter included
both town and country. Even before the conquest, it clearly foreshadowed
the Roman Empire with its greatnesses and weaknesses inscribed in the
same antagonistic framework.
What was more serious was that the situation deteriorated, notably in
Egypt where priests, soldiers and functionaries gained more and more
privileges at the expense of the sovereign and where the countryside,
ravaged by anachoresis, was less and less cultivated. It has rightly been
called a ‘rejection of the masses’, abandoned to their fate. Nothing was
done to raise their standard of living (which could nevertheless have been
a means, from the capitalist point of view, of rehabilitating the economy)
and no one could offer them an ideal capable of giving meaning to their
work.
Again it must be added, to avoid injustice, that the rulers did their best,
taking into account the small number of Greek and Macedonian immi¬
grants, unable to overthrow the much more numerous native masses. To
use a famous expression applied to the Early Empire, it can be said, with
all the qualifications the formula involves, that the Hellenistic world was
at that time the best of all possible worlds. A dioecetes expressed the same
sentiment when he wrote: ‘No one has the right to do what he wants, but
everything is ordered for the best.’ Furthermore, study of the civilization
which developed within this framework will show other often brilliant
achievements.
16
The Ultimate Mutation of
Spiritual Hellenism
The somewhat unruly wealth of the creations of the Hellenistic period is
acutely striking. They show life in profusion but it is difficult to bring it
down to a unity. This was because individualism finally triumphed after
its great progress since the end of the fifth century. It was expressed in such
differing forms as the success of lyricism, the philosopher’s yearning for
personal wisdom and the mystical needs of souls concerned with ensuring
their own salvation.
Paradoxically, however, man only seemed able to expand his person¬
ality within the community. The poets were grouped into societies, studio
traditions played a predominant role in the development of art, and
philosophy and science evolved in strictly organized schools. Even the
mystics only found their god in brotherhoods.
Corresponding to this need, libraries and institutes where human
knowledge accumulated and increased expanded with assistance from
enlightened sovereigns. The first two Ptolemies, influenced by Demetrius
of Phalerum, a disciple of Theophrastus, and by the poet Philetas, en¬
dowed their capital with the museum and the library. The museum
(literally, the sanctuary of the Muses) was founded by Soter and became,
after Philadelphus, an academic centre for advanced research. Scholars
were maintained there by the prince’s munificence and they were supplied
with the instruments, collections and zoological and botanical gardens
necessary to their work. The library, an annexe of the museum, was con¬
stantly growing: 200,000 volumes at the death of Soter, 400,000 at the
death of Philadelphus who bought important deposits, notably those of
Aristotle, and 700,000 in Caesar’s day. Apart from this, Philadelphus
established a second library at the Serapeum, with 50,000 works. The
Attalids competed with the Ptolemies by founding a library at Pergamum
with 400,000 volumes, specializing more in scholarship than in literature.
FEELING AND INTELLECTUALISM IN LETTERS
Literature proved extraordinarily lively. Certainly the traditional forms of

the classical centuries had almost completely disappeared: tragedy and
ULTIMATE MUTATION OF SPIRITUAL HELLENISM 447
eloquence had been intended to instruct and convince the demos', hence¬
forth they no longer found the social framework they needed. But lyrical
poetry was reborn, philological scholarship appeared, and comedy and
history survived.
The Man of Letters and his Public

The new conditions of the Hellenistic world explain both the brilliance of
its literature and the radical changes that occurred in it. The joint appear¬
ance of an instrument of expression and also of literary centres (which is
so typical of the mixture of unity and diversity which characterized
contemporary Hellenism) were amongst the most important.
During the classical period, the Attic dialect had taken undeniable
primacy because of the intellectual brilliance of Athens. This dialect
formed the essential basis of the koine or common language, which spread
as from Alexander’s time, first for pragmatic purposes, in chancellery,
commercial relations, and current use. But the koine enriched Attic by
various loans, notably from Ionian, and simplified it from both the
morphological and the syntactic point of view, removing its subtleties and
refinements, but enabling it to become the language of a widespread
culture. However, as in the preceding period, literature remained a freak
case. It made ample use of the koine in prose, but in poetry it liked to vary
phrases by resorting to dialects traditionally attached to a particular form:
Homeric language (itself a very bastard composition) for epics, Aeolian for
amorous lyricism, Dorian for bucolic songs.
Although it was from Athens that the dialect had to a large extent been
drawn, it did not remain the literary centre of Hellas, except as far as
comedy was concerned. Alexandria tended to replace it in this sphere,
though it did not take over the role of capital city in philosophy and the
sciences. But other centres such as Syracuse, Tarentum, Cos and Perga-
mum were not unimportant.
An equally striking change occurred in the relationship between creative
artists and those in power and the public. An entirely new human type
appeared: the man of letters. But as the concept of author’s rights was
unknown to antiquity, the literary man could only live on subsidies from
princes, unless he had private means. Patronage became the normal basis
of all literary life. The first Ptolemies particularly practised it, as literature
was as dear to their hearts as the arts or sciences. The danger, which even
the best did not escape, was the development of court poetry with its
ineluctable flattery. Theocritus, after vainly trying to attract the attention
of Hieron of Syracuse, and after a stay at Cos where he may possibly have
had family ties, settled at Alexandria and managed to get in favour with
the Adelphi kings. This gave him the chance to write one of his most
mediocre idylls, the Eulogy of Ptolemy, which seems like a schoolboy’s
exercise, with the pedantic precision of its plan, borrowed from the
panegyrics of the Sophists and rhetors. It successively praises Philadelphus’
parents, birth and virtues. But the example of the Syracusans, one of his
most perfect poems, proves that court poetry did not necessarily sterilize
the mind. Here he skilfully showed the brilliance of the palace festivals and
entered shrewdly into the game of deifying monarchs.
Nor was the public the same as in the preceding period. It was still
purely Hellenic, and native letters do not appear to have exercised the
slightest influence despite a certain interest in local traditions seen in two
works, for the most part lost, those of Berosus and Manetho who wrote in
Greek on the history of Babylon and Egypt. But literature’was no longer
in contact with the demos and was addressed exclusively to the middle class.
Again, it must be noted that this class had a natural tendency to spread,
to become increasingly enlightened because of the incontestable diffusion
of culture resulting from a more intensive and more rational education, and
that women, imitating the queens who were often very well-instructed,
were no longer held apart from things of the mind. Although the audience
was no longer as popular as it had previously been at theatre, tribunal and
Ecclesia, it remained quite vast and it is surprising how much pleasure it
was able to derive from the subtleties of refined poetry for example,
apparently reserved for the happy few. Familiarity with the Muses was
indisputably regarded as a virtue and almost as a means of attaining
heroization, and the success of the sort of festival Philopator gave to
celebrate the apotheosis of Homer, would have been incomprehensible
previously.
The man of letters quite naturally had to take the tastes and interests of
this public into account - and he generally shared them himself. Thus
certain tendencies developed which can be seen to be common to all
literary forms. The most obvious is the feverish search for the new. If,
except for comedy and history, the classical forms had disappeared, it was
not only because they were not in harmony with the new society. It was
primarily because the public did not like walking in its immediate pre¬
decessor’s footsteps. It preferred to turn to the most ancient past of Hellas,
the Heroic, or at least the Archaic period, to find literary forms which had
disappeared for centuries - epic, didactic poetry, personal lyricism: a
useful framework in which to insert radically new thoughts and feelings.
However, the Archaist interest, also found in art, must not be misunder¬
stood ; Apollonius of Rhodes could not and above all did not want to be a
Homer, nor Theocritus an Alcaeus.
Another equally striking tendency was the taste for highly intellectual
literature. The Greek more than ever wanted to understand, and some
lively developments took place in history as events crowded on top of one
another in that chaotic period. Furthermore, scholarship, more than
science, was at a premium and profited from this unflagging curiosity.
Commentators tried to fathom the secrets of the great classical texts, while
the poets created several enigmas for future exegetai with their veiled
allusions and deliberate obscurity.
The New Comedy

Tragedy was dead but comedy continued to shine brightly and brilliantly
at Athens for some time and spread to Macedonia (Philip gave perform¬
ances after the capture of Olynthus, and Alexander after that of Thebes)
and to the Hellenistic Orient. Chorus and parabasis disappeared: inter¬
ludes tended to break up the subject matter (hitherto continuous) into acts,
and a prologue, copied from tragedy, enabled the poet to tie up the action
and present his personal opinions - somewhat as he had previously done in
the parabasis.
Even more than Middle Comedy, the form of comedy which appeared at
that time (called New Comedy) took to the qualified depiction of con¬
temporary life. Love became the basic subject, a love which was thwarted
until the final ‘recognition’ made a happy ending possible. The plot be¬
came more complicated though it remained faithful to an almost uniform
schema. The characters were shrewdly studied. Pollux has counted forty-
four comic masks in use, nine of which were of old and mature men,
seventeen of women, eleven of young people and seven of slaves. General
human types were therefore no longer considered sufficient.
This comedy often skimmed the surface of pathos but remained never¬
theless gay. It still used the methods of Middle Comedy as far as ‘gags’ were
concerned: parodies, chit-chat between cooks, swaggering soldiers, tales of
parasites, plots about slaves fooling old fogies - slaves who are the ancestors
of Scapin.
The plays are known from the ‘contaminations’ of Latin comedy and
from fragments. Two authors were particularly distinguished: Philemon
(possibly Syracusan by birth) excelled in multiplying comic incidents; and
the Athenian Menander, ‘star of New Comedy’, who divided his time be¬
tween the delights of his villa at Piraeus, the company of the courtesan
Glycera and the composition of almost 11 o comedies. The discovery of his
Dyscolos (Misanthrope) on a papyrus has given a more exact idea of his
genius, described without exaggeration as inferior only to that of Moliere.
Menander deliberately philosophized, or rather moralized, without
much originality. His Misanthrope has been called a ‘patronage play . His
real talent lay in drawing characters who were so true to life that
Aristophanes of Byzantium could ask whether Menander imitated human
life or human life Menander. In his Heauton Timoroumenos, which Terence
almost translated, he contrasted two types of old men, Ghremes, a solemn
speechifier, and Menedemus, the ‘self-tormentor’, a soul entirely smitten
with the absolute, and he evoked the conflict between the generations by
showing their relationships with their sons. The Arbitration depicts two
young married people madly in love but separated by a serious misunder¬
standing : the young man, a passionate character, a veritable Scopas-like
hero, throws himself whole-heartedly into debauchery, before returning to
his wife who has remained worthy of his love despite all appearances to the
contrary.
Love and family feelings therefore formed the main substance of

Menander’s comedies, as was natural in a period when man, torn from his
position as a citizen, clutched at passion and affection. But he was too much
a product of his own time not to give a glimpse of other problems as well,
and these are fascinating for the historian: the relationship between rich
and poor, slavery, superstition and religion. In the great comic tradition,
he abominated foreign cults. The Apparition throws an astonishing light on
the practices of sorceresses. The Maiden Possessed depicts a young girl vowed
to Cybele, who bemoans the loss of her gifts as prophetess since she fell in
love: the goddess wanted exclusive love.
In short, these are plays which hold the attention by the delicate touch
of their psychological analysis, and at the same time stir the emotions by
their deeply human qualities. They were the last fires of Attic genius, still
sufficiently aglow for both Euripides and Plato to be mentioned in connec¬
tion with Menander.
An Escapist Lyricism
The poetry is mainly entitled to its traditional name of Alexandrian poetry,
because it was at the Ptolemies’ court that the greatest poets lived - at
least some of the time.
Some of its characteristics, particularly its courtly quality, have already
been noted. Praise - often unrestrained - of the sovereign, took the place
formerly filled by love of country. Eulogy was sometimes direct, enhanced
by pious lies, sometimes indirect by the use of cunning mythological com¬
parisons. The style of these court poems was at the same level as their
inspiration: stiff, cold, full of studied periphrases and useless apostrophe.
Whatever the theme, the poetry was scholarly. Again, it must be noted
that real science (which was experiencing exciting developments at that
time) was not introduced into its verses, but rather erudition, principally
in the fields of archaeology, history, geography and mythology. Certain
passages from Callimachus and above all Lycophron are totally unreadable
today without an annotated edition utilizing the work of the ancient or
Byzantine glossators, themselves often very much at a loss faced with some
obscure allusion.
But the greatness of the Alexandrians did not lie in their flattery or
scholarship. A new sensibility appeared, delicate or profound, but always
subtle and varied. Family feelings were gladly shown and even affection
for domestic animals, visible in so many epitaphs to family pets. Above all,
love reigned supreme in this new lyricism. It penetrated everywhere: the
rough Homeric warriors became gallants of good fortune; the Cyclops
himself, Homer’s terrible Cyclops, was transformed in one of Theocritus’
most charming elegies into a bashful lover, piteous in his misfortunes and
the contempt his beloved heaps on him. It is rare to find a detailed picture
of a passion such as Apollonius’ Argonautica contains. Most frequently the
pieces were short, moving expressions of amorous situations. It is customary
ULTIMATE MUTATION OF SPIRITUAL HELLENISM 45I
to emphasize all the affectation and false sentiment this poetry contains
and it is true that cupids and images of fires, arrows and chains occur a little
too frequently. But it must not be forgotten that these images, which have
become so painfully commonplace since, were then in their first youth.
Moreover, stronger tones can be heard in Theocritus’ most beautiful
elegies or in those of his best imitators: at times sensuality bursts forth in all
its frenzy; at others, it is associated with remorse, regret, despair arising
from betrayal. The Alexandrian elegiacs not only invented love poetry,
they also practised the most sincere and moving amatory lyricism.
There was a keen taste for the countryside at that period, when towns
were expanding to the point where they became enormous inhuman
agglomerations. Bucolic poetry took pleasure in depicting nature as a
framework for human emotions. It preferred pleasant and attractive
scenery, suitable to provide an agreeable resting place for the weary. This
countryside is still called ‘idyllic’ in memory of Alexandria: essential con¬
stituents were springs, gullies, mossy rocks and carpets of soft grass. It was
peopled by peasants, particularly shepherds, but not at all the shepherds of
Arcadia. These shepherds led a free and solitary life in the bosom of the
valleys, knew their animals by name, tended them and loved them; their
animals were not yet wearing ribbons. But the shepherds were raised far
above their circumstances by an ardent yearning for beauty, the beauty of
the desirable bodies of adolescents or young girls, and above all the beauty
of poetry and music. This gave rise to the poetic challenges, musical
contests, amoebaean songs which so often formed the background of
Theocritus’ eclogues and which transposed competitions, which seem to
have been very active at that time, to the pastoral surroundings of Sicily.
The Alexandrians did not neglect other possible avenues of escape. They
were aware of the poetry of travel and showed a special preference for
picturesque incident and wondrous countries: thus Apollonius adapted the
old Odyssean dreams to the tastes and knowledge of his time. They were
captivated by the metamorphoses of which mythology supplied so many
examples. However, without paradox, they also knew how to make the best
use of concrete and realistic detail. They described still-life and even works
of art at length, and with a great profusion of precise epithets; these are the
ecphraseis which have such a large place amongst the epigrams of the
Anthology.
New means of expression corresponded to this total change in inspiration.
The Alexandrians did not avoid long poems - as can be seen from the
Alexandra, Argonautica and the Phaenomena. But they preferred short pieces,
where the search for words could be carried to its most extreme limits: the
idyll, still called the eclogue, or the epigram. They exercised a genuine cult
of form, choosing the rare, archaic or technical word, piling up powerfully
sonorous proper names. At the same time, in a positive revolution, poetry
freed itself from musical accompaniment. The poets paid all the more
attention to prosody, with which they were particularly concerned,
because it alone would henceforth give music to verse.
The Masters of Art for Art's Sake
The greatest names belong to third century Alexandria, although several

of Theocritus’ poems brilliantly recall the pleasing society of poets
grouped around Philetas at Cos - who was himself called to the Ptolemies’
court as preceptor to the royal children.
Theocritus took pastoral poetry to its summit right from the start. Even at
Alexandria, this Syracusan never forgot the charm of the Sicilian country¬
side, nor the shepherds’ erotic or musical games. His exquisite, slightly
feminine, sensibility worked wonders in exalting the ephemeral joys and
lasting pains of love. He gave Cyclops the most hopeless lines of all
antiquity: ‘Unfortunate they who love’. He conjured up the dishonoured
and abandoned maiden with her philtres and refrains. But his Syracusans
was a full-flavoured and brutal mime - and still a discerning picture of
court ritual. For a long time afterwards, Moschus, Bion and innumerable
anonymous authors imitated his bucolic zest in fairly mediocre products,
with a few exceptions, such as the delicious Oaristys, which remains the
most sensual amatory conversation that ancient poetry produced. A subtle
and sensitive man, Theocritus was the undisputed creator of a form which
quickly went into decline; he does not deserve the discredit which his
clumsy emulators have brought upon his name.
Callimachus, librarian at Alexandria under Philadelphus and Euergetes,
was the very scholarly author of the Origins, the Elegies and the Hymns.
Keenly aware of the dignity of poetry, he detested the critics, ‘the scourge
of poets, who plunge the minds of children into obscurity, bugs who devour
beautiful verse’. It is unfortunate that he had such a lively taste for the
unusual and for indirect references and that he indulged in such a harsh
style of writing.
His uncompromising enemy, Apollonius of Rhodes, conceived his
Argonautica as a pendant to the Odyssey: this plagiarism would be intoler¬
able were it not a wonderful picture of Medea’s passion. Aratus, favourite
of Antigonus Gonatas, was even bolder: his Phaenomena translated the
astronomical system of Eudoxus of Cnidos into beautiful verse and proved
that the inspiration of highest philosophy was not incompatible with
poetry. Lycophron, an obscure poet and Philadelphus’ librarian, set the
prophetic lament of ill-fated Cassandra into a long monody, the Alexandra.
He had a bold turn of phrase - he referred to Clytemnestra as a ‘respect¬
ful prostitute’ - but strayed too often into the incomprehensible subtleties
of a hermetic poetry. Herondas used mime, a crude and picturesque form
not scorned by the great men of the period. His brothel-owner trying to
recover, by way of the tribunal, one of his inmates who has been abducted,
has the lewd and savoury language of his profession. The Anthology, a
miscellaneous collection made in a later period, which also includes
Roman and Byzantine pieces, contains innumerable epigrams showing in
a minor key the subtle and affected tastes of the period.
This poetry does not deserve the disrepute which often surrounds it.
There is much more to it than tricks by performing dogs - to which some

scholars have wished to reduce it. It expressed new emotions and sensations
in a modern tone, which is striking right from the first. It was actuated by
an intense need for formal perfection which made it the natural model
over the centuries for everyone seeking art for art’s sake.
Philological Scholarship
Despite the contempt of bitter Callimachus, grammarians accomplished a
useful task in the Hellenistic period by creating a new branch of knowledge,
textual criticism, which had become increasingly necessary as vast libraries
were formed.
Their names deserve to be remembered because it is through them that
we possess correct texts of the great Greek authors. Zenodotus of Ephesus
was Philadelphus’ preceptor before he became librarian at Alexandria. He
produced an edition of the Homeric poems and opened the door to the
diorthotai (correctors). Aristophanes of Byzantium, librarian under
Euergetes, edited Homer, Hesiod and the lyricists with a remarkably
critical mind. His most notable disciple and his successor at the library,
Aristarchus, primarily famous for his Homer, was so well known that his
name became a common noun to designate a hard judge. Together with
his master, he began to establish the canon (that is to say, the list) of the
classics, and this rapidly won acceptance. Finally, his great rival, Crates of
Mallos, librarian at Pergamum, provided commentaries on Homer and
Hesiod, as well as an important work of Stoic philosophy.
A Rationalist Historian: Polybius

History was almost the only great classical form to survive but it was com¬
pletely transformed in the process. In the wake of Ephorus, it tended to
become universal, and its curiosity now extended beyond Greece to em¬
brace both the east (which was opened up with the epic of Alexander) and
the west (to which the advance of the Roman conquest was gradually
attracting attention). But the mass of events was now so considerable, the
research necessary so vast, that the historian became an arm-chair scholar,
with the single exception of Polybius who owed his incontestable super¬
iority over his predecessors and imitators to his direct knowledge of his
subject matter. On the other hand, history was becoming increasingly
established as a scientific pursuit and sometimes abandoned all literary
pretensions.
The greatest historian of the third century was Timaeus of Tauromemum,
notably the author of a great History of Sicily, and a wonderful scholar who
undertook an immense amount of preparatory work in order to collect
original documents. There is too great a tendency to judge him by Polybius’
sharp and unrelenting criticism of his too bookish knowledge and above all
his excessive taste for rhetoric. In actual fact, his passion for knowledge led
him to take an interest in hitherto neglected spheres, such as the barbarous
west, particularly Rome - he was the first to draw attention in that
direction.
However, his glory was eclipsed by that of Polybius (c. 210-125) who
introduced a real revolution into history and was certainly one of the
richest and most profound minds of the whole Hellenistic period. He
belonged to a great family of Megalopolis and, as a young man, was one
of the hostages the Achaean League surrendered after Pydna'. He thus spent
forty years at Rome, where he forged bonds with all the most noble minds
of the city, in particular with the sons of Scipio Aemilianus. For him, as for
Thucydides, history was therefore the exile’s ransom. Like the great
Athenian, he brought to history a real knowledge of war and politics. His
main work, the History, told how Rome conquered the world. His real
narrative ran from 221 to 146, but he gave a summary of events since 246
in the guise of an introduction. The whole work, which was in chronologi¬
cal order, was divided into forty books. Only the first five are fully
preserved.
Right at the beginning of his work, Polybius assigned a dual objective
to history: didactic and moral - to draw lessons for the statesman and to
teach endurance under the blows of fortune. He therefore rejected every¬
thing which aimed solely at giving pleasure, particularly rhetoric.
To attain his aim, he had to proceed to a search for causes, in which he
showed himself a faithful disciple of Thucydides. Like him, he claimed that
a distinction should be made between the pretexts and the real causes of
wars. Amongst the latter, he attached prime importance to the effect of
strong personalities such as Hannibal or Scipio, to institutions and customs
(he considered the rivalry between Rome and Carthage inevitable because
of a sort of determinism), to economic factors (his exposition of the part
played in Roman policy by the movement of capital, the stock market, and
the negotiatores was excellent), and to social factors (he emphasized the
importance of the oliganthropy in the decline of Greece). Thus history to
him was not an account of individual facts, but a work of intelligence
directed towards practical life.
Despite his constant concern for rational explanations, he often invoked
Tyche (Fortune). But he does not seem to admit chance any more than
providence into history. Tyche therefore represented a sort of residue and
he tried as far as he was able to find human causes for human events: thus
the Roman conquest in his opinion was mainly the result of a concerted
plan and the exceptional qualities of a race.
Beginning from such principles, he produced a work of undeniable
accuracy. His documentation was first class; he had participated in many
of the events and learned of many others, notably at Rome in the circle of
his friends, the Scipios. His principal source of information, and the one he
valued most was, therefore, his own personal experience. Apart from this,
he had travelled a great deal and thus had direct experience of the places
where his narrative was located. But he had also read widely among his
predecessors and contemporaries. Finally, he had access to documents in
the archives, particularly to the tabula of the Great Pontiff and Perseus’
archives, brought to Rome after Pydna.
He was constantly concerned with objectivity. The ‘truth’, he wrote, ‘is
to history what its eyes are to an animal: when torn out, they become
useless’. In pursuit of this end, he went so far as to omit almost all the
prepared discourses traditional to Greek historiography.
However, he was never absent from his text, which was frequently
broken up by prefaces, explanatory digressions, and also polemics when he
lost his equanimity. Constantly judge and critic, at times moved by a
strange asperity, he was very far from the contemptuous impassiveness of
the great Thucydides. One particularly important question arises: that of
his relations with the Romans. Scholars have gone so far as to upbraid
him for his policy of collaboration and it is obvious that he was impressed
by what he himself saw at Rome, and made no secret of his admiration for
that wise, patient, serious and forceful people. But later on his enthusiasm
was somewhat tempered: he had witnessed the violence whereby the
Romans settled their conflicts; he had also perceived the crisis that
threatened Rome and had foreseen its decadence.
The style was the weakest part of his work. He had neither imagination
nor sensibility. His descriptive passages were poor and showed an un¬
forgivable preference for abstract words. His prose was even worse, and a
modern critic could say, without exaggeration, that he was readable in
every language but his own. In this respect he was an isolated case in the
midst of so many fine minds concerned above all else with giving pleasure.
His primary desire was to understand, to explain, to convince, and he did
so with so much profundity and so much enthusiasm that he remains one
of the soundest historians of all Antiquity.
THE SAGE’S IMPASSIVENESS
AND THE SCHOLAR’S APPETITE
The Philosophical Societies

Philosophy had shone so brilliantly with Plato and Aristotle that it seemed
condemned to stagnation. However, during the whole Hellenistic period,
it remained one of the most active branches of Greek thought. Not only did
the traditional doctrines survive and develop along interesting lines, but
new ones appeared which made a deep impression on the elite.
The common characteristic was the discipline imposed on the philoso¬
pher. There were no isolated individuals, but strongly organized schools,
with their own traditions, premises, leader (or scholarch) and, naturally,
their own heretics. Paradoxically, even the Cynics conformed to this rule.
In these seminaries, the master continued to educate his disciples not so
much by theoretical lessons as by daily conversation and communal life.

The philosopher became a well-defined human type, a specialist
increasingly cut off from the common herd.
Although every important city had its philosophers who, with the
rhetors, dispensed what might be called higher education, Athens re¬
mained the major centre of thought. Its schools were more famous than all
the others and it was there that the new doctrines were formulated.
The Traditional Schools
Most of the fourth century schools still existed. The Cynics were the most
picturesque, with their integral materialism, their rejection of all deference
to public opinion and their deliberate association with the most dubious
social elements, dockers and prostitutes.
The school of Aristotle developed well with Theophrastus, a direct
disciple of the master, who neglected metaphysics in favour of an in¬
creasingly precise observation of facts, notably in botany and meteorology.
The main survival of his mutilated work is the Characters which appears to
be fragments of a Poetics - models offered to the poets for imitation.
The Academy received a new impetus with Arcesilas of Pitane (schol-
arch from 268 to 241), the founder of the New Academy. He taught
probabalism, a doctrine which was repugnant to Stoic dogmatism and only
aimed at the discovery of the most likely, the most probable. Carneades
built it into a system in the second century. He is known primarily for the
embassy he led to Rome on behalf of the Athenians, with two other
philosophers, the Stoic Diogenes, and the peripatetic Critolaus, and by the
success mingled with scandal that his discussions aroused there. Although
he wrote nothing, he seems to have been one of the most profound thinkers
of the period. He claimed that there was no way of distinguishing truth
from error; it was necessary to steer a difficult course between the absolute
doubt of the Sceptics and the grand hypotheses of the Stoics.
The Sceptics (literally, the interrogators) claimed kinship with Pyrrhon
(end of fourth century), a thinker of very high character who is only known
from the evidence of his disciples, particularly Timon. They taught that
everything was indifferent, neither true nor false. Man must therefore be
without opinion and inclination, and abandon all belief so that the causes
of disturbance within himself should disappear. One of Pyrrhon’s disciples
proclaimed the master’s teachings in the following epitaph: ‘This is I
Menecles the Pyrrhonian, who always finds everything said of equal value
and who has established the path of ataraxia amongst the mortals.’ Such a
doctrine is not unreminiscent of Hindu wisdom and it is reported that
Pyrrhon had met sages from India whom the Greeks called gymnosophists
(nude sophists).
The Sceptical school enjoyed a very lively success during the whole
Hellenistic period and it is easy to understand that the misfortunes of the
time should have drawn minds towards this doctrine of despair. Above all,
it made a stand against Stoic dogmatism: this was the attitude of Ariston
of Chios, a dissentient from Stoicism, whose criticisms often coincided with
those of the pure Sceptics. The school remained very active, even beyond
the Roman conquest, because its two most eminent masters date from the
imperial period: Aenesidemus and Sextus Empiricus.
The Epicureanism of Epicurus

Moral concerns were already important in the traditional schools. They
were still stronger in two doctrines which appeared at the end of the fourth
century, Epicureanism and Stoicism. Hardly exaggerating, it may be said
that philosophy now appeared as a refuge from the ruin of the man who no
longer found a purpose in life in his position as citizen. It aimed first at
solving the problem of happiness and in the two cases, despite obvious
differences, the answer was the same: happiness lay in the self-mastery of
a soul which had escaped from the world, shaken itself free from the con¬
tingent, and achieved a state of indifference (ataraxy for one school,
apathy for the other) where nothing could any longer affect it. The funda¬
mental asceticism at the basis of these doctrines was certainly nothing new
at the end of the fourth century, but it was, for the first time, based on
science, particularly physics: this gave rise to their scientific dogmatism
which did in fact far remove them from the humanist philosophies of the
great classical tradition.
Epicurus was born at Athens and spent his youth at Samos. Then he
returned to settle at Athens where he lived, secluded in his famous garden,
surrounded by disciples who sought moral peace with him. The kindness
with which he treated them, the friendship he bore them, and the sweet¬
ness of his character, all the more creditable in that he was victim to a cruel
illness which caused his death in 270 after years of suffering, make him
more than a saint, a sage.
Not much is known about his teaching because we have only three
letter-programmes of his, addressed to friends, and a series of thoughts.
He adopted the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, though physics in
his opinion was not of interest in itself, but the calm of the soul could only
be obtained by a general explanation of the universe. The mechanicalness
of the system, scarcely attenuated by the theory of clinamen which made it
possible to safeguard human liberty, helped him to dominate the super¬
stitions which terrorized the common herd: fear of the gods and fear of
death. The gods existed, but they were supremely indifferent to man, and
undoubtedly inhabited the spaces which separated the worlds. As for
death, it was an unreal ghost because the soul was composed of particu¬
larly fine physical atoms, and disintegrated at the moment of death.
Therefore, it could not be punished with the infernal chastisements which
terrified non-philosophical souls.
His morality was subtle and greatly misunderstood, because his detrac¬
tors very rapidly gave the word ‘Epicurean’ a meaning which would have
l6
brought a blush to Epicurus’ cheeks. All beings were certainly in search of

pleasure and in flight from pain, but wisdom did not lie in the unbridled
pursuit of vulgar satisfactions which enslaved the soul ever further. It lay
in the absence of disturbance (this is the meaning of the word ataraxy)
which was obtained by removing the restlessness of desire.
The sage defined in this way obviously did not participate in political
life. He fled from social involvement and withdrew into his ivory tower.
This was undoubtedly the reason why Epicureanism was often accused of
egoism. It was easy to make play with the equivocalness of this search for
pleasure which described Epicurus’ morality. This incomprehension was
not slow to appear as is seen by the chaffing which Cineas, ambassador
of King Pyrrhus and Epicurean philosopher, sustained at the hands of
Fabricius. However, Epicureanism made a great advance at Rome, even
amongst the people. It was at Rome that it found its most famous ad¬
herent : the poet Lucretius, who in his de Rerum JVatura gave the most
complete account of the doctrine. There is no clearer description of the
liberation that the spirit found in the Atomic doctrine and no more
enthusiastic hymn to the desire for knowledge, confidence in philosophy,
and wonderment at the wisdom of Epicurus - invoked as the prophet of
salvation. It was a brilliant echo of the preaching of the sage, whose lofty
intellectual doctrine never caused him to forget the most brotherly and
human virtues.
Ancient and Middle Stoicism

Stoicism, so called after the Portico at Athens (in Greek Stoa) where Zeno’s
disciples met, was born of the same need for peace and certainty, for peace
through certainty, in one of the most troubled periods in Greek history.
Its founder, Zeno, was a Semite from Citium in Cyprus, a merchant who
turned to philosophy. He achieved such a great success at Athens that the
demos honoured him with a crown of gold and Antigonus tried in vain to
attract him to the court of Macedonia. The school he founded and ran
from 322 to 264 was afterwards led by Cleanthes (from 264 to 232) and
Chrysippus (from 232 to 204), who systematized his thought. These three
created what is customarily called Ancient Stoicism.
It rested on a wide view of the universe and offered a whole body of
doctrine to the soul thirsting for truth: logic, physics and ethics. The
wonderful order of the universe proved that it was controlled by an
intelligence. This intelligence, which was God, was not external to the
world, but immanent in it; it was reason distributed throughout matter.
The most active principle was fire, intelligent and artistic fire which, in a
general conflagration (ecpyrosis) at the end of a great year lasting ten
thousand years, entirely consumed and renewed the world.
In a world totally determined by physical laws, there was only one rule
for man to follow: to live in conformity with his own nature, to comply
with the universal order, to want whatever the divinity wanted and thus
to identify himself with it. But this acceptance, far from being distressing,
must be joyful: complaisance with the world. In practice, it was fundamen¬
tal to distinguish ‘what depended on us’ from ‘what did not depend on us’.
The second group included everything related to the passions, which it
was necessary to learn to abandon by a long asceticism, ending in perfect
self-mastery, apathy (absence of passion). What depended on us was
precisely the will which made the sage the equal of God. It was a hard
morality but an exciting one which rendered man independent of circum¬
stances, particularly of rank and position, and preached a sort of egalitarian
socialism.
It has been called the ‘philosophy of metics’ and in actual fact many
members of the school were orientals and particularly Semites (including
even Chaldeans). The influence of Asiatic thought is obvious, particularly
in the concept of a single and omnipotent god who administered the
universe with wisdom and governed men by his providence. But Stoicism
would not have succeeded in Greece if its roots had not also been plunged
deeply into fourth century Hellenic thought, notably that of the Cynics
and also of Plato, the first of the masters of moral asceticism.
In the second and first centuries, the school began a new development,
with two very talented and very different men, Panaetius of Rhodes and
Posidonius of Apamea, the two masters of Middle Stoicism.
Panaetius (scholarch from 129 to 110) made numerous disciples at Rome
during a long stay in the town, where he was the friend of Scipio
Aemilianus. He was a humanist who to some slight extent abandoned the
orientalizing theory of early Stoicism and reintroduced human liberty and
the primacy of action.
Posidonius ran the Stoic school of Rhodes, where he was Cicero’s
master. Some scholars have thought to find a synthesis of Stoicism and
Pythagoreanism in his work. It is more profitable to look for the deep
meaning contained in it in the universal sympathy which enabled him to
admit the influence of the stars on the tides and to accord exceptional
weight to divination.
This development in itself is the best indication of the vitality of the
doctrine, and its ethics undoubtedly represent the finest creation of the
human mind in antiquity. It is not at all surprising to find that it fired so
many great minds, Cleomenes of Sparta and Tiberius Gracchus. It already
exercised a profound influence at Rome under the Republic because it was
an incentive to action and social involvement. In the imperial period, New
Stoicism gave to the elite their moral strength: it helped the victims of
tyrants such as Seneca to die. In the second century, with the slave
Epictetus and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, it became a sort of state
philosophy, inspiring the philanthropic decisions of the wisest princes and
providing an ideal for the minds of the elite, disgusted with the corruption
around them and not wishing to abandon themselves to the sophisticated
facilities of the various types of oriental mysticism
The Sage
It is undoubtedly characteristic of this troubled period that the greatest

philosophers launched out in search of happiness. But this happiness was
only possible in the indifference of the soul, which tore itself from the
troubles of the world by the violence of asceticism. The same phenomenon
occurred in the crises of the third and fourth centuries ad when the
mystical impetus of neo-Platonism promised the initiated the beatitude of
escape.
A new moral idea thus emerged: the hero of early times and the citizen
of the classical ages, were followed by the sage. There was a certain resig¬
nation in this conception, a flight from reality which had to be dominated
for want of being able to assimilate it. But there was also a greatness and
nobility in this ascent which gave all power to the soul. Salvation, which
religion was also pursuing at that time, was earned by conflict. Hellenism
finally tended towards individualism, because conscience was alone in face
of its destiny, but it did not give up hope of reforming public affairs (not¬
ably the Stoics who were great advisers of princes) and above all, in a
magnificent philanthropic impulse in the full sense of the term, it did not
forget that all men were brothers.
The historian cannot fail to be struck by the ultimate similarity between
ataraxy and apathy, reached at the end of paths which had started out
from radically dissimilar beginnings. The resemblance between these states
of serene calm and the nirvana of Indian speculations has also been pointed
out. The connection is undoubtedly more than fortuitous and there must
have been some reason why the same wisdom blossomed in the eastern
Mediterranean and the Indo-Gangetic plain when so many productive
contacts between the two areas had begun to be established.
The Zenith of Greek Science
The sciences were now totally independent of philosophy. They tended to

form autonomous disciplines, as no one mind could any longer embrace_
as did Aristotle — the quasi-totality of human knowledge.
The favourable conditions which explained their considerable develop¬
ment included patronage, which created genuine research institutes, such
as the Museum of Alexandria with its dissection rooms, observatories, and
zoological and botanical gardens. But the extension of the known world
also played a part, not only, as would be expected, in the knowledge of the
oicoumene, but also in mathematical geography: it was only the length of
Egypt which enabled the terrestrial meridian to be measured. Finally,
contacts with oriental, Egyptian and Chaldean science increased.
Mathematical Investigation
Mathematics remained pre-eminent and, besides making incontestable
progress, was more and more widely used to account for the universe.
Euclid, called to Alexandria by Ptolemy Soter, drew up the thirteen

books of his Elements there in about 300. He arranged all earlier research
and employed an entirely systematic method, proceeding from the simple
to the complex by a long series of demonstrations beginning from first
principles. The historical importance of his work must not be under¬
estimated, since it has provided the firm basis of all human knowledge of
the subject up to the recent invention of the new mathematics. Apollonius
of Perga taught at Alexandria and Pergamum in about 200 and deserved
the name of the ‘great geometer’. His work was primarily concentrated on
the value of pi (tc) and on conic sections and he was the first to give a
rational definition of this latter.
Archimedes of Syracuse (287-12) was also interested in mathematics,
notably pi (71) (and fixed its value at 3.1416), spheres, cylinders and conic
sections and he founded rational mechanics and hydrostatics. But apart
from this brilliant theoretical work, he displayed extraordinary genius in
the field of practical mechanics, inventing levers, mechanical toys, and
siege machines, and leaving his name attached to ‘Archimedes’ screw’,
invented to meet irrigation needs in Egypt. In this, he was an example of a
new trend towards improving technique, which also existed at Alexandria
in a pleiad of excellent engineers, including Sostratus of Cnidos, architect of
the Pharos lighthouse.
Astronomy also took advantage of progress in mathematics. The exten¬
sion of the known world had also stirred up a new interest in the earth, its
shape, its place in the universe and its movements. Eratosthenes of
Cyrene, librarian at Alexandria under Euergetes, created mathematical
geography. He used a fairly simple method to measure the length of the
terrestrial meridian: Syene and Alexandria were approximately on the
same meridian; on the day of the summer solstice, the rays of the sun
struck Syene, situated under the tropic, perpendicularly; on the same day,
the rays at Alexandria formed an angle with the vertical which he meas¬
ured with a gnomon: seven degrees. From the knowledge of the distance
separating the two towns, he deduced the length of the meridian: 252,000
stades (22,800 miles); the precision of this result fills one with admiration.
On another score, he established a map of the terrestrial surface by longi¬
tudes and latitudes: taking Rhodes as the centre of his co-ordinates, he
calculated the longitudes by the differences in time and the latitudes by
the inclination of the sun at the solstice in relation to the vertical of place.
Aristarchus of Samos (third century) determined the size of the sun and
the moon and their distance from the earth. But his real triumph was to
maintain that the sun was immobile and that the earth gravitated around
it. Although he still only envisaged circular movements for the earth, the
moon and the planets, he can be considered the first precursor of
Copernicus.
Moreover, this hypothesis caused a scandal and his greatest successor,
Hipparchus of Nicea, strained his ingenuity to ‘keep up appearances’
and improve the geocentric system by the theory of eccentric circles
and epicycles. This was an extremely ingenious theory which did not con¬
sist of making the stars turn directly around the earth but around a point
which itself gravitated around the earth, and this made it possible to
account for the apparent irregularities of the planets, their positions and
their rearward movements. He possessed a wonderful gift for observation
and drew up a map of the sky in his observatory at Rhodes, where he
catalogued over eight hundred fixed stars. Comparing his results with
those of the Chaldeans, he discovered the precession of the. equinoxes. He
calculated with notable precision the length of the solar year: 365 days,
five hours, fifty-five minutes (true figure: forty-eight minutes). At the same
time, he laid the foundations of trigonometry, notably by establishing the
division of the circle into 360 degrees, divided into minutes and seconds.
Posidonius of Apamea, the great Stoic, was also versed in the sciences.
He was passionately interested in measurement (length of the meridian,
height of the atmosphere, distance from the stars) and put forward the
hypothesis that the tides could be explained by lunar attraction.
Biology and Medicine

The sciences of life were equally flourishing, primarily linked to the ad¬
vance in medicine. The most famous school was possibly at Alexandria:
it was there that dissection began, undoubtedly because mummification
practices had paradoxically rendered respect due to mortal remains less
absolute than in Greece. But Cos, homeland of Hippocrates and long
famous for its Asclepeum, also preserved its ancient repute, as did Gnidos.
In a general way, cures by medical treatment took precedence over
miracles in all the sanctuaries of Asclepius (notably at Epidaurus and at
Pergamum).
The greatest names are those of two contemporaries, born at the end of
the fourth century. Herophilus of Chalcedon was one of the pioneers of
anatomy. He discovered the nervous system and explained its general
functioning, showing the role of the spinal cord and brain. He studied the
eye and the optic nerve. Erasistratus really founded physiology. He
specialized in the study of the circulation and had an inkling of the role of
the capillary vessels. Although he taught that the arteries contained air and
only the veins carried blood, his discoveries in this field were not surpassed
until Harvey.
The doctor remained one of the most noble social types in the Greek
world. He was scarcely susceptible to oriental influence and continued to
practice a secular and scientific medicine which claimed kinship with the
great Hellenic philosophies. He was much more than a healing technician;
he was also a moral authority expected to provide psychological comfort.
At the court of the kings, notably the Ptolemies, much attention was paid
to him and he enjoyed incomparable prestige.
We cannot pretend that Hellenistic science did not have its limitations.
Although mathematics entered into new fields, there was no real system of
notation, and algebraic notation was not outlined until Diophantus in the
third century ad - and moreover it was then still rudimentary. On another

score, the absence of instruments of observation was sorely felt in the
natural sciences. Nevertheless, the progress achieved is staggering. ‘The
man who understands Archimedes and Apollonius’, said Leibniz, ‘has less
admiration for the moderns’. This blossoming was all the more remarkable
in that it actually constituted the end of ancient science: the Romans
hardly followed up the Greek speculative efforts in this realm and human¬
ity lived on intellectual capital amassed at Alexandria, Rhodes and
Pergamum until the great discoveries of the Renaissance.
AN ART OF MAN
Our discussions of philosophy and science have taken us into ‘serene

temples’, where access was reserved to a few specialists; with art, we return
to the mundane. In fact, no period has made so many demands on artists
to embellish the framework of daily life. Quantitatively, production was
prodigious: building proceeded at a feverish rate and the great excavation
sites have revealed thousands of statues and statuettes intended to decorate
buildings. There have never been so many architects, sculptors and
painters. First, the Hellenistic world was prosperous and the kings con¬
sidered it their duty to gather round them men capable of bringing fame
to their capitals or their dwellings. But there was also a rich and numerous
middle class, who loved art as well as letters, and patronage began to
develop there as much as at the courts.
Art became secularized because its large clients were now the kings and
the middle class. Religious architecture and sculpture certainly continued
to exist in so far as every Greek city had a sanctuary and urbanization was
one of the most characteristic; phenomena of the period. But, with a few
exceptions, the impetus of faith was no longer there: scarcely any innova¬
tions were made in the construction of the temples and proven formulae
were most frequently used; sculptors liked to depict very human divinities
and family scenes often replaced religious reliefs. On the other hand, civic
buildings increased in the beautiful towns, arranged according to rational
town-planning; palaces and private dwellings competed in comfort and
luxury.
There was barely any influence from the Orient, whereas native arts
tended to imitate Greek models, and anyway were in a bad way and no
longer truly creative. Hellenism triumphed everywhere and a sort of
artistic koine was created, despite clear differences between schools.
Dwellings of Gods and Men

Few innovations occurred in religious architecture, a favourite field of
classical art. Work on the Olympieum at Athens, abandoned since the fall
of the Pisistratids, was resumed as a result of subsidies from Antiochus iv.
One important change was introduced there: the Corinthian order was
adopted and thus made its first appearance in a great temple. But work
was interrupted again and the colossal building was not completed until
Hadrian. Many new temples were built but according to traditional rules.
The Ionic order was in particular favour, notably in Asia Minor where the
most remarkable achievement was the temple of Artemis Leucophryene at
Magnesia ad Maeandrum. The Doric order moved towards a greater
lightness, under the influence of Ionic: columns became slenderer and
triglyphs increased. The best examples are at Pergamum.
Only one building departed from the general run: the Didymeium of
Miletus, finally reconstructed after the fire at the beginning of the fifth
century (plate 13). This gigantic building (377 x 169 feet) was sur¬
rounded by a peristasis with two rows on the long sides, three rows on the
facades, in all making 120 columns, a veritable forest of marble like the
great creations of the Archaic period in Anatolia. The plan was most
curious: a pronaos was followed by an antichamber which served as the
oracle room, but communication between the two rooms was only by a
balcony, possibly from which the oracles were promulgated. A vast central
courtyard was entered on one side by a large monumental stairway from
the antichamber, on the other by two tunnels from the pronaos passing on
either side of the stairway. This open-air courtyard corresponded to the
naos in a canonical temple, but either its dimensions or possibly religious
motives prevented it being covered. At the rear of the courtyard, a small
prostyle-tetrastyle Ionic temple enclosed the statue of Apollo by Canachus,
removed by Xerxes and brought back from Ecbatana by Seleucus. It is
difficult to imagine the reasons underlying such an original construction:
requirements of the cult or need for complete change?
Much clearer architectural progress was made in houses, which in¬
creased in size and gained still more in comfort and luxury. The develop¬
ment which had begun in the fourth century was accentuated now that
man, from being a citizen, had become a simple private individual. He
no longer had a place in the external world, in the open-air discussions at
the agora and assembly and was taking an increasing interest in his home.
Naturally, there were still many wretched dwellings: at Alexandria, the
poor huddled together in blocks of flats several storeys high (at least four)
which prefigured the insulae of imperial Rome. But the advent of a well-to-
do middle class encouraged building, as excavations at Priene and above
all Delos show.
Excavations on the island of Apollo, now one of the privileged centres
of large-scale Mediterranean trade, have brought to light just as many
mediocre houses, squeezed together between four streets, as luxurious
dwellings, occupying a whole small block to themselves. These latter were
particularly numerous in the theatre district. They had a single door open¬
ing on to a vestibule, and were built around a central courtyard, generally
bordered by a peristyle, with the reception (notably the oicos) and living
rooms opening off it; there was a cistern in the centre, covered by a mosaic,
to collect the water - indispensable on that island, with its absence of

springs, more than anywhere else. There was nothing original about the
plan, it was merely a development of earlier schemas. But the abundance
and luxury of the decoration were new: the pavement in the principal
rooms was made up of extremely fine mosaics (‘Bacchus and the panther’)
in brilliant colours reminiscent of Syrian style; the walls were covered with
stucco painted in vivid colours, framing bands of scenes with figures;
statues and statuettes brightened rooms and courtyards, as in the recently
discovered ‘house of the Hermes’, a magnificent dwelling with two
superimposed peristyles; marble tables and armchairs provided agreeable
furniture in the interiors. It is easy to understand why the Italian mer¬
chants who settled at Delos liked these beautiful, intimate, airy and
spacious houses and soon imitated them, first at Campania, then at Rome,
where the peristyle tended to line the early atrium.
A Premeditated Achievement: the Town

Progress was equally clear in the urban ensemble. The town was rarely
allowed to develop haphazardly, as seems to have been the case with
Delos. Town-planning became the general rule, whether filling in an old
framework - as at Miletus or Piraeus - or creating something entirely new
— as in the new agglomerations. The cities which grew up in the whole
Orient at that time most frequently obeyed Hippodamian rules: orthogonal
roads and a functional plan. Alexandria and Antioch were excellent ex¬
amples of these achievements, which were as much in accordance with
laws of aesthetics as with those of convenience. But Pergamum, with its
very high acropolis, provided the Attalids’ architects with an opportunity
for an entirely different creation. This took the form of three super¬
imposed towns, each with its temples, clinging to terraces, and joined
by a winding path and gigantic stairways: it was an extraordinary
theatrical backcloth suspended on the flank of an abrupt spur over the
plain.
In fact, Hippodamian or not, the plans of the Hellenistic towns evince
more subtleties and ideas than would appear at first glance. Adaptation to
the landscape, from which Pergamum derived its powerful beauty, was an
equally compelling law in a town on a plain, such as Alexandria, where
everything was arranged around the ports: the painters and mosaicists of
the future drew unflagging inspiration from this intimate combination of
water and buildings.
Nor is there the monotony one might fear from towns which had been
over-planned. Even though they no longer had the chaotic freedom of
former times, unusual buildings intended to surprise or impress were still
erected. Alexandria was dominated by its Pharos, one of the seven wonders
of the world - a superposition of a parallelepiped, an octagon and a
cylinder - and it also possessed Philadelphus’ tent-pavilion and Philopator s
thalamegos (house-boat). Pergamum had the great altar of Zeus, an offering
16*
place unique both in stature and beauty, and worthy of the king of the
gods.
Although the town-planners who conceived these organized stone worlds
never gave up the idea of embodying both mathematical order and
theatrical fantasy in them, they also thought of more practical needs.
Several regulations by local administrations are known mainly from in¬
scriptions, dealing with the width of roads or the distance between houses.
Water was brought by aqueducts and widely distributed, though its role
was not as important as in later Roman towns. Services for removing
rubbish were organized.
The Great Communal Buildings

Although their plans were very different, buildings designed for communal
life developed considerably everywhere. There were assembly rooms for
the council or assembly, which generally returned to the lay-out of the
Thersilion at Megalopolis - the best example of this is the bouleuterion of
Priene, from the beginning of the second century.
But the weakening of political life explains why the most beautiful
creations were only devoted to the pleasure and convenience of the in¬
habitants. A very lively fashion for porticos appeared: they made the urban
ensemble more monumental, offered a refuge from both the heat of the
sun and from rain, and provided shelter for the stroller or the philosopher.
The Romans very soon borrowed this architectural type, though not with¬
out some alterations: this was the basilica which preserved the name of
the ‘royal porticos’ of Athens and the Hellenistic cities throughout the
ages.
The portico was often used by itself, to provide a more grandiose frame
for a sanctuary (porticos of Antigonus and Philip v at Delos) or to empha¬
size a pre-existing urban landscape (portico of Eumenes at the southern
foot of the Acropolis of Athens, leading towards the temples of Asclepius
and Dionysus). More often, it was erected as a border to an agora and thus
helped to set the limits of the market and regularize it. The agora, hitherto
a fairly simple, quite inorganic market-place, henceforth clearly followed
the Milesian type, a rectangular area surrounded by porticos. Delos had
several agoras near the port where the principal activity of the trading
island was now concentrated. Corinth and Thasos had spacious and
agreeable agoras. The one at Athens was even more striking, with its three
new porticos: in the middle, on the south and on the east (the latter offered
by Attalus 11).
Buildings designed for collective pleasure increased in a civilization
which was becoming more sociable. Stone theatres backed on to hillsides
everywhere. An important change in design made it possible for a really
permanent stage to be developed: the actors previously performed on a
wooden platform in front of the proskenion which served as a backcloth;
henceforth they climbed up on this proskenion. The change was particularly
clear in the theatre at Priene, where it can be dated at about 150.
Gymnasia, palaestra and stadia even in the most modest cities bear
witness to the traditional love of physical exercise, the basis of all liberal
education. The gymnasium, regular meeting place for all youth, also
became the university centre of the city, where teachers attached to the
establishment dispensed literary, scientific, philosophical and musical
instruction and where visiting lecturers spoke. Inscriptions only testify to
this function from the third century, but it was already the custom at
Athens a century earlier for grammarians, rhetors and sophists to meet at
the gymnasium. New rooms answered these new needs: lecture-rooms
(,acroateria) and libraries, while at the same time gardens were arranged all
around for philosophers to walk in. Adults did not consider it beneath their
dignity to frequent these sanctuaries of the body and mind, to indulge in
the pleasures of conversation. Henceforth the gymnasia were placed under
the special patronage of a typically Greek god and hero, Hermes and
Heracles, and they became increasingly integrated into the city. Previously,
they had been situated outside the agglomeration; now they were often
next to the agora.
The development of large-scale trade gave rise to other creations, on
which we are particularly well informed as a result of excavations at Delos.
A vast hypostyle room was erected there as from the third century (its
design must show oriental influences) which can only be compared with a
commercial stock-market. Fraternities of foreign merchants established
vast warehouses there, also equipped with magnificent state rooms and
small chapels: they have rightly been called genuine fondouks. The
Poseidoniastai of Berytus (Beyrut) had a particularly luxurious establish¬
ment beside the sacred lake there, where remarkable statues have been
discovered (the group of‘Aphrodite and Pan’). The Italian negotiatores had
their own agora, bordered by shops and offices, foreshadowing the Piazzale
delle Corporazioni of imperial Ostia.
There is no better evidence of the prosperity of the Greek world and the
leisure its inhabitants enjoyed than these harmonious towns, where all was
order and beauty - on the agora, at the theatre and palaestra, and even in
the most utilitarian buildings. Again it must be added that they were
decorated with a profusion of works of art which surpass imagination,
when Philip v took Thermum, the centre of the Aetolian confederation but
still a very modest city, Polybius counted two thousand statues. Then, as
in the preceding periods, the Greek could not conceive of architecture
which could dispense with the magic of sculpture.
Pathos and Realism in Sculpture

Few periods have had a greater love for statues and bas-reliefs. Obviously
not everything was of the highest quality and the public did not expand
without a certain deterioration in art. However, sculpture remained very
much alive: it was not content to continue to run with the stream nor
untiringly to copy the masterpieces of the Classical period; it created anew
in new centres, which replaced the traditional centres (particularly Athens,

which had fallen far behind in this field as in so many others).
Two tendencies, both inherited from the second classical period, seem to
have asserted themselves. On one hand, pathos triumphed and sculpture
appears to have taken over the role of tragedy in inspiring terror and pity
in the soul. It loved bloody scenes, borrowed as much from the terrible
chastisements of mythology as from the most up-to-date history. Bodies
were convulsed and faces, distorted by suffering, expressed the curse of the
human condition: a wild and frenzied romanticism appeared, notably at
Pergamum but also at Rhodes, on the same lines as Scopas’ art but further
exacerbating its excesses.
On the other hand, the realistic vein was also exacerbated. A symptom
of this was the triumph of the portrait, corresponding to the development
of individualism and the advent of royal cults. It was also obvious in a
liking, which might better be described as naturalistic rather than realistic,
for the coarsest aspects of life: an example of this is the horrible ‘Drunk Old
Woman’, the masterpiece by Myron of Thebes. It shows a decrepit
drunkard with pitiable withered breasts still holding her drinking vase in
her hand. Another example is the wretched ‘Fisherman’ with piteous face,
and every rib projecting. Sculpture was no longer looking down at these
aspects of life - childhood, old age, physical deformities and poverty —
which classical art, smitten with an ideal beauty, most often neglected.
An almost baroque style appeared, notably in small statuary for apart¬
ments and in ‘picturesque’ reliefs which were too quickly termed
Alexandrian and which seem to have been equally valued in Asia.
The Sculptural Tradition in Greece

Scarcely any new ground was broken in Greece proper, and sculptors were
content to exploit sculptural traditions which were already several cen¬
turies old and rich in numerous masterpieces. Although certain Archaist
tendencies have been noted there, as in Alexandrian poetry, the break with
the fourth century was nonetheless much less sharp than in literature.
Sculptors basically copied the great masters of the second classical
period, though without always properly understanding their message or
their harmony. They deliberately adopted the themes which had been dear
to Praxiteles’ heart: adolescents with over-attractive bodies, indolently
leaning against supports, satyrs with flutes, (there were innumerable
replicas of these), familiar Erotes, young women with laughing flesh. More¬
over, the master’s most striking characteristics were exaggerated: the
softness of the relief with its imperceptible transitions, the morbidezza of
faces, and the specific attention paid to the hair. More than chance must
account for Praxiteles’ continued success: although the spiritual value of
this delightful art was increasingly unappreciated, it corresponded to a
love of the gracious, which was widespread throughout the Hellenistic
world. There have been good grounds for pointing out that the satyrs were
similar to some of the creations of Theocritus’ idylls.
Scopas, master of mournful realism, was widely copied in Greece before

he found his most direct heirs in the sculptors of Pergamum. There is
evidence of this in those ‘dying’ Alexanders with their intensely pathetic
expression, eyes lifted as if in ecstasy, reminiscent of the heads on the
frontons of Tegea. The anonymous author of the ‘Victory of Samothrace’
was also one of the Parian’s disciples, though with more freedom and
eclecticism: the goddess with her arched torso and projecting hips throbs
with profound life, and the drapery bubbling in the sea-breeze supports
the illusion, though not without some romanticism. This makes it all the
more regrettable that specialists are uncertain as to which battle this
masterpiece commemorated: the victory of Demetrius Poliorcetes over
Ptolemy at Salamis in Cyprus or the victory of Antigonus Gonatas at Cos?
Lysippus also had his followers. The anonymous sculptor of the ‘Farnese
Heracles’ retained some part of his style: but the hero seems crushed by his
monstrous musculature as ‘itinerant Heracles’ and weary of his own vic¬
tories. The Sicyonian’s most famous disciple was Chares of Lindos, author
of the famous Colossos of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the world.
It was a statue of Helios, a city god, which rose at the entrance to the port
of Rhodes and was soon destroyed by an earth tremor.
As time went on, academicism appeared. After 150, the neo-Attic school
deliberately chose models from the past and avoided direct observation of
life. This cold and formal art was obsessed with the too-brilliant achieve¬
ments of classical times, and produced the most impersonal works of the
whole period, indefatiguably copying the Parthenos or the Korai of the
Erechtheum. This phase was prolonged at Rome where its most famous
representative was Pasiteles (first century), a curious soul who devoted five
books to the history of sculpture.
Passion in the Asiatic Schools

Hellenistic sculpture was not restricted to this traditional art, which
quickly froze into immobility. Great creations, really actuated by a new
spirit, appeared in Asia and Alexandria.
Figure 78 Battle of Amazons against a Greek hoplite. Very flat bas-relief, originating
from Teos: decoration of a funerary building, about 300
Once again Asia was in ferment. The most brilliant of all the many
creative studios (figure 78) was at Pergamum. The Attalids formed a
museum in their palace where they even collected Archaic pieces by
Bupalos and Onatas and they gathered excellent masters around them. A
new form, art criticism, was born in this environment. Some of the most
notable masterpieces of the period were achieved on their behalf.
On the summit of the citadel, near the sanctuary of Athena, Attalus 1
erected a great ex-voto to celebrate his victory over the Galatians, those
wandering bands of Gauls who laid waste to Asia. Although it is difficult
to reconstruct the complete work, famous pieces can at least be attributed
to it - the ‘Dying Gladiator’ of the Capitol and the group of ‘Arria and
Paetus’ from the Ludovisi collection (they actually represent one dying
Galatian and another cutting his own throat after killing his wife). It gave
the anonymous artist a wonderful opportunity to sing the glory of the
sovereign, by flaunting the anguish of the conquered, whose faces express
the horror of death and defeat, and whose bodies sink beneath terrible
wounds.
Eumenes 11 erected a great altar to Zeus and Athena Nicephoros with a
long and continuous frieze (423 feet in extent). It is in oriental style and
depicts a Gigantomachy. On one side, the giants are often shown in
horribly realistic forms (monsters with lions’ heads or winged anguipeds);
on the other, the Olympians appear more restrained in their movements.
There is tremendous power and passion in this dishevelled melee, wholly
stirred by a romanticism reminiscent of the tormented art of Rude. There
is great excess in the poignant faces of the monsters. Realism is carried into
the minutest detail, the monsters’ fur, serpents’ scales, the accessories
which occupy even the smallest free space on the band as though the artist
had a horror of leaving anything empty. One remembers somewhat nos¬
talgically the Gigantomachy of the Parthenon less than three centuries
earlier. Here a delirious Scopas carried disorder, the exacerbated whirl¬
pool ol passions, to its final point, the better to express the bitter cruelty
of the conflict which had shaken the universe before the triumph of the
gods.
The emotional power of these works arises from all that they were at
last daring to express: horror and despair in the face of death or barbarity.
The taste for the macabre, the morbid or the deformed, for whatever
denied man’s reason and sense of proportion, is displayed there with a
complacence which corresponds to psychoanalysis. Their lesson was un¬
doubtedly no different from that of classical art, but the upheavals of an
anguished period had freed the artist from his reserve and scruples; the
victory of the spirit stained by blood and impurity was hard. A world which
had known terror and phantasms betrayed itself on the high acropolis of
Pergamum as much as it expressed itself.
Rhodes also possessed a brilliant school of sculptors, which can better be
linked with the Asiatic studios. Production was very varied there — from a
triple Hecate in Archaist style to a Nymph which was based on one of the
most modernistic sculptures, the Aphrodite of Doidalsas, though with a

great deal of freedom. The masterpiece was the Laocoon group (about 50),
which showed a taste for pathos very reminiscent of Pergamum, though
possibly with more emotion because of the children about to be stifled by
the fearful serpents.
This same ‘anatomy of suffering’ (C. Picard) is found again at Tralles,
in the enormous group of the ‘Farnese Bull’ (about 100). The artists have
complaisantly retrieved a very rare myth - Dirce’s punishment at the
hands of Antiope’s two sons - in the same way as the poets followed up
little-known themes. At the summit of a rockery, the young men prepare
for Dirce’s torture; her quivering body is attached to a wild bull, later to
be thrown into a spring. It is an enormous pyramidal mass and a paroxysm
of emotion.
Two great masters worked in the north of Anatolia: Doidalsas of
Bithynia sculptured a ‘Crouching Aphrodite’, bathing, the water stream¬
ing down her plump body: a domestic scene where the goddess is only the
pretext for a display of daring virtuosity. Boethus of Chalcedon produced a
charming ‘Boy with Goose’ which shows a new fashion for childhood.
The Syrian school possibly remained more classical. It delighted in
depicting the full female relief of generous bodies. The most characteristic
work is the group of ‘Aphrodite, Pan and Eros’ found at Delos in the
establishment of the Poseidoniastai of Berytus: the goddess closely resembles
a plump mortal with heavy charms - she has been described as a Levantine
beauty.
The Pleasant Realism of Alexandria

The sculpture of Ptolemaic Egypt can easily bear comparison with the
Asiatic schools, despite their wealth and diversity. Moreover, it is at times
difficult to distinguish between the two: a ‘Galatian’ from Fayum is very
similar to the Pergamene ‘Galatians’, and a buxom Aphrodite at
Alexandria closely resembles her Syrian sisters.
Praxiteles’ influence was felt more strongly at Alexandria than anywhere
else. It was primarily apparent in innumerable female representations
which bore no connection with goddesses except in name: ‘Aphrodite at
her toilet’ or bathing, unknotting her hair or fastening her sandal, ‘Modest
Aphrodite’ coquettishly concealing the charms of her plump body. One of
the most moving derivations of these Praxitelian models originated from a
neighbouring centre: the‘Venus of Cyrene’.
There was passionate interest in the keen observation of reality, and
there are good grounds for thinking that this realism was a combination of
a Greek trend, which had appeared after the classical period, and of an
Egyptian trend; native art had always taken a delight in minute and often
amused analysis of the real. There was an increasing fondness for anecdote
for anecdote’s sake and family scenes replaced religiously inspired scenes.
Cupids happily frolicked there - graceful putti with fat cheeks and sly faces
- and also domestic animals, just as in the epigrams of the Anthology. The
sculptor took pleasure in distinguishing the different social types, and all
the life of the humble people, sailors, peasants, fishermen and buffoons,
appeared, providing most instructive evidence for the historian of daily
life. He did not neglect the exotic types to be found in cosmopolitan
Alexandria: Nubians, Libyans, piccaninnies. The picturesque relief,
which was one of the most original creations of Alexandrianism, gave him
the opportunity to evoke a whole landscape within a modest framework:
rural scenes, related to those of the contemporary idyll, urban scenes,
harbour scenes and Nilotic landscapes.
These domestic subjects and picturesque reliefs convey an intense love
of life in its most varied forms. It is found again in portraits, particularly
royal portraits, and the most beautiful of these show a sharp sense of
psychological analysis. There are astonishing busts of the first Ptolemies
and the last of the queens; the great Cleopatra with her imperial profile and
aquiline nose is now recognizable in a noble veiled head of Cherchel
(plate io).
Greco-Egyptian Syncretisms
While Greek art at Alexandria was passionately interested in seizing the
unseizable in life, traditional Egyptian art was dying. Sculpture continued
to follow pharaonic canons, as is seen in the relief of the ‘Crowning of
Ptolemy iv Philopator’ where the ptolemaic ruler is shown as a pharaoh,
surrounded by the two goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt. But it was a
moribund sculpture where convention had replaced sincerity.
More interesting was a mixed art which had already appeared in the
funerary monument of Pet-Osiris (end of fourth century), an Egyptian
priest elevated to a hero in the Greek manner. The bas-reliefs here show
a curious mixture of native motifs and Hellenic types. But sculpture in the
round produced even more noteworthy works. A great head in green schist
at Copenhagen represents Ptolemy Euergetes, full face, with Apollonian
features, but the smooth, even surfaces, meeting in solid angles, could not
possibly have been conceived outside Egypt, and the same is true of the
charm of the dorsal column. Another green schist head (in the British
Museum) is the portrait of an African of markedly Hamitic type, with very
prominent bone-structure, hair in small curls and an indefinable expression
of irony, cruelty and mystery: a wonderful creation where two techniques
and, one might also say, two wisdoms mingle.
The World of Colour: Paintings and Mosaics

This was a period when the painter, no less than the sculptor, was expected
to be able to stir the emotions as well as to charm. More is known about
painting since the discovery of some very rare originals (decorations from
houses of Delos or stelai from Volos) and particularly of frescoes and
mosaics from the villas of Herculaneum and notably Pompeii which
deliberately copied the great creations of Hellenistic painting (plate 14).
ULTIMATE MUTATION OF SPIRITUAL HELLENISM 4.73
Here again, the creative impulse must be sought outside Greece. The
schools of Asia and the Propontis were remarkable for their pathos. Two
examples are characteristic: Timomachus of Byzantium painted ‘Medea’,
in the throes of acute mental distress, looking at her children whom she is
about to murder: their pedagogue watches as they peacefully play with
knuckle-bones on the altar where their throats will be slit. The Pergamene
artist who represented Telephus with the nymph Arcadia and Heracles
also played on the sensibility of the spectator but in a more subtle way:
while the nymph stares into the distance, as if contemplating the future of
the Attalid dynasty, born of that small child (according to a version for
which they tried to win credence), Heracles looks at Telephus; beside
them is a large basket of fruit, a satyr and the young Parthenos symbolizing
the Arcadian countryside.
A characteristic of the school of Alexandria was the importance of love
scenes in bucolic landscapes. The cycle of Aphrodite and Adonis held
primordial place here. Little cupids, mischievous and cruel, with their
wicked little schemes which caused so much suffering to mortals and to the
gods themselves, appeared in pretty scenes, like the ‘Discovery of a Love-
Nest’ or the ‘Merchant of Love’. Most frequently these paintings were
marked by a light charm, although, like contemporary poetry, they
sometimes descended into the coarsest debauchery.
The undeniable progress in painting was not only the result of improve¬
ment in technique (the appearance of new tones: blue, violet, purple), but
also the deepening of sensibility. Idyllic scenes were undoubtedly most
numerous. They most frequently represented famous couples from myth¬
ology, a useful pretext for tender pastoral scenes: a nymph pouring a
drink for a thirsty satyr; Aphrodite flirting with Ares; Artemis lovingly
holding Hippolytus’ chin while he looks at her with large astonished eyes;
Dionysus contemplating a sleeping Ariadne; Adonis dying on Aphrodite’s
knees.
The countryside provided an indispensable backcloth to these idylls, but
it was also often represented in its own right. Gardens were particularly
popular, ‘paradises’ full of rare species, which seem to exude an odorous
freshness, and harbour scenes which seem to sing an invitation to the sea.
Painters also enjoyed representing animals - wild beasts, fantastic monsters
- and equally often fish or fowl as well, with baskets of fruit beside them,
very natural decoration for dining rooms. This was the first appearance of
still-life in Greek art.
The main function of these paintings was to charm the eye. But a place
must be set apart for the vast frescoes containing numerous figures, where
the humane and often religious inspiration makes vivid appeal to the mind.
The ‘Noces Aldobrandines’ at the Vatican shows the young bride sur¬
rounded by her mother and servants and encouraged by Aphrodite and
Peitho (Persuasion): their faces are filled with the gentlest emotions; the
colours used could not be clearer.
The frescoes from the Villa Item at Pompeii (also called the Villa of
Mysteries) are even more noteworthy. This vast collection which un¬
doubtedly formed the decoration of an initiation room, poses many prob¬
lems of interpretation: Dionysus is leaning towards Ariadne, a satyr plays
the syrinx, a Maenad is in a trance, while one young girl receives a ritual
fustigation, another flees in fear to a companion’s arms and a choir boy
reads a sacred book. The general meaning at least is clear: the salvation
through love of the god, promised to the faithful by the mysteries. The work
is valuable for the intense religious fervour which animates it, quite as
much as for its beauty and technical perfection.
Mosaic often borrowed its ideas from painting. It emerged from its first
attempts (pavements of natural pebbles, called pebble-mosaics) in the
fourth century and immediately made enormous progress towards self-
expression, using specially cut coloured stones. The question of whether
this progress was achieved in Sicily or Alexandria is still being discussed,
but it is certain that right from the beginning this minor art was of prime
importance in the decoration of houses.
The wonderful ‘Battle of Arbela’ in the museum at Naples was
undoubtedly a reproduction of a picture by Philoxenus ofEretria. The artist
here was trying his hand at some complicated effects of perspective: his
sky scored with spears and his foreshortened horses are reminiscent of a
picture by Uccello. The countryside is symbolized by a withered tree.
However, the very dense composition was centred on the vain and moving
gesture of Darius.
The mosaics of Delos have the exceptional quality of being real
Hellenistic works and not Roman copies. The pavements of the rich abodes
present geometric decoration, still-lifes, animals (most often marine:
dolphins) or mythological scenes according to the room concerned: the
most famous is the astonishing ‘Dionysus brandishing the thyrsus’, his
melancholy face and dreamy eyes in sharp contrast to the fiery panther he
bestrides.
The Minor Arts

A civilization must be judged by the small works of the minor arts as much
as by the great creations of the plastic arts. But the Hellenistic period shone
particularly brilliantly in this sphere.
However, ceramics were on the decline. Decoration rarely depicted the
human figure and was most often formed of vegetable and floral subjects,
sometimes shown against a bright base (like the funeral hydria of
Alexandria) and sometimes against a dark one (imitating metallic models).
In fact, painted vases no longer held the place of honour in daily life which
had been theirs during the classical period. First of all they had met com¬
petition from pottery in relief, hitherto rare, but which had extended con¬
siderably : the bowls, formerly called Megarian (it is known today that they
were produced in the whole eastern Mediterranean), reproduced the
beautiful creations of toreutics at low prices.
In fact, metallic vases had never been so popular. Toreutists worked

gold, silver and bronze at both Alexandria and Pergamum. Most of the
pieces from the famous treasury of Berthouville-Bernay (in Normandy)
are from the Hellenistic and not the Roman period: the most beautiful
represent Achilles grief and death and the tragic fate of Hector whose
body was dragged around the ramparts and then weighed: pathetic and
moralizing scenes which have rightly been linked with Pergamene art.
The bronze state-couches can be related to these vases. They are decor¬
ated with incised uprights often representing Dionysiac scenes (a mule
crowned with vine leaves or Dionysus himself). They are indiscriminately
called ‘couches of Delos’, from the largest centre of production, or ‘couches
of Boethus’, after one of the most famous creators, the master of Chalcedon
(figure 79).
There were innumerable monetary issues, as each sovereign wanted his
own coinage marked with his own effigy. This custom had already been
adopted by some dynasts or satraps in the Persian Empire and was now
initiated not only in both large and small eastern Hellenistic realms, but
also in Sicily with Hieron 11, even in Sparta with Cleomenes and Nabis,
and in the Bactrian and Indian kingdoms. Their primary value lies in the
wonderful iconographic gallery they provide. Some wonderful heads
emerge, such as the fat eunuch Philetaerus or the classical profile and
heavily laden tiara of Tigranes of Armenia, or the princes of Pontus, parti¬
cularly Mithridates 11 and Mithridates vi, rendered with powerful realism.
Cities which had remained independent, naturally continued to mint their
own money: coins from Athens, always numerous, were the work of in¬
different and conventional engravers, lacking in all sense of composition.
Figure 79 Dionysiac mule

serving as decoration of fulcrum.
Hellenistic period
Terracotta figurines give the most delicate evocation of a world of grace

and harmony. The clay modellers of Alexandria touched them up with a
light colouring in pastel shades. The most famous centre was in the Attalid
realm, at Myrina: the figurines it produced were possibly less refined than
the fourth century ‘tanagras’ but of an almost infinite variety (figure 80).
There remains a collection of odds and ends of art, glass-ware, bronze
and plaster medallions, cameos, gold, crystal or porphyry jewellery, fancy
goods in general. It would seem that Alexandria was the centre of produc¬
tion for these small masterpieces stamped with delicate grace and where
Figure 8o Thorn puller. Terracotta statuette

found at Priene, second century
life was exalted in delicate realism — sometimes caricatural, often com¬

passionate - amidst the arabesques of a consuming mania for garlanding.
Excavations at Begram have shown that they were highly valued very
far from the Mediterranean world, where they have been found in
profusion, even as far as central Afghanistan.
Whatever may have been said, Greek art was not reborn in the Hellenistic
period - because it had not died; nor did it merely survive - because it
changed and broke new ground in the most varied directions. Its most
deep-seated characteristic was that it expressed man, with his anguish but
also with his yearning for happiness. There are few emotions it did not
render, from the excesses of passion to the refinements of the idyll. There
is scarcely a subject it did not essay: Greeks and barbarians, old men and
children, ideal beauty and deformity and, although it was addressed to the
rich elite it often found inspiration in the world of the humble people.
There are no paths it did not attempt to follow, from Pergamene
romanticism to the baroque of some of the Alexandrian reliefs. It remained

very Greek in that, more than ever, nothing human was alien to it.
THE RELIGIOUS FERMENT
Traditional religion did not disappear, any more than it had done in the
fourth century. The Panathenaea continued to climb the Acropolis, the
athletes to pit their strength at Olympic matches, Delphi to render its
ambiguous oracles, and the pilgrims to flood the parvis of Eleusis. Further¬
more, all these sanctuaries were still visited well after the Hellenistic period,
until the end of the ancient world. But the impulse behind the faith no
longer existed and public sacrifices were now not much more than an
opportunity for a good meal amidst general jollification.
Scepticism and Fervour

Already moribund as a result of the internal disintegration of the cities,
state religion disappeared with their political collapse. Man’s yearnings
for the hereafter could no longer be satisfied within the framework of the
poleis: his best form of piety could no longer be to accomplish his duty as a
citizen to the best of his ability. Collective religion became individual
religion, as was natural at a time when individualism was triumphing
everywhere.
This deep-seated crisis engendered two opposing attitudes. Many people
gave way to scepticism, which not only developed in some philosophical
schools, but also, it would appear, in the common herd: it was inevitable
that the Athenian should doubt Athena after seeing Poliorcetes proclaim
himself the goddess’s brother and install his harem in the Parthenon.
Euhemerus (end of fourth century) taught that the gods were only great
men of former times, deified for the services they had rendered humanity -
a theory which was to find favour amongst many audiences in Greece itself
and above all in republican Rome.
The new cult of Tyche (Fortune) was a disguised form of scepticism. In
actual fact, this goddess was only the negation of divine providence and the
personification of confusion and chance which amidst the vicissitudes of
chaotic events henceforth seemed the sole guiding factor in human affairs.
A hero of one of Menander’s comedies taunts his questioner with credulity:
‘Do you think that the gods are interested in damning or saving millions of
men one by one? What an occupation!’ The importance of the idea of
Fortune in Polybius’ history - where moreover it was poorly reconciled
with his claims to rationalist explanation — has already been mentioned.
More curious was the appearance of a genuine divinity worshipped as such
and capable of wide diffusion (the ‘Fortuna Primigenia’ of the Italic
sanctuary of Praeneste was not without strong Hellenistic influences).
Even the metropolises had their Tyche and we still have the representation
of the ‘Tyche of Antioch’ which took shape under the chisel of Eutychides,
a disciple of Lysippus. The goddess is portrayed with supple and majestic
body, her foot placed on the domesticated Orontes, her head bound by a
crown of towers, and on her face a gravity which is serene, even benevolent,
but impenetrable.
But on the whole, religious fervour was much stronger than scepticism.
It bursts through certain philosophies such as stoicism, as the wonderful
Hymn to geus by Gleanthes shows. This should be quoted in full, but the
final invocation anyway runs as follows: ‘Zeus, dispenser of all good, god
of the dark clouds, of the bursting thunder, rescue men from their dismal
ignorance, remove it, oh father, from their souls, make them find the
wisdom which you obey and which makes you rule everything with
justice.’
It was even stronger in the masses, crushed by the social crisis, bruised by
the vicissitudes of a stormy history, torn from their traditional beliefs and
unable to find consolation by ascending the heights of wisdom. The thirst
for salvation became a torture. It could only be assuaged by emotional,
even ecstatic cults, which gave the worshipper direct and personal contact
with the god of his choice.
Gods Close at Hand: The Kings

At first glance, the cult of kings, inherited from Alexander, seems a poor
answer to these new yearnings and looks like the result of skilful machina¬
tion on the part of the kings who had an obvious interest in proclaiming
themselves gods. However, faced with the failure of the cities, hope turned
naturally and spontaneously towards those all-powerful masters whose
favour was infinitely precious. Hermocles’ paean in honour of Demetrius
Poliorcetes is an exact expression of sentiments which many must have
owned: ‘The other gods are far away or they have not got ears or they do
not exist, or they pay no attention to our needs; you, Demetrius, we see
you here, not in wood or in stone, but really present.’ The monarchs
exploited this state of mind, only too happy to find a guarantee of power
and stability in the royal cult and often also a means of imposing a spiritual
unity on the mosaic of populations which made up their realms.
The composite origins of this cult, which include Hellenic and oriental
elements, have already been stressed. The Greek cities were as zealous in
their worship as any of the others: for example from 305 onwards, Ptolemy
1 received divine honours at Rhodes. But the theocratic traditions of the
Orient accentuated the development and made it possible for cults, which
were isolated and anarchical at first, to become regularized and universal.
Many qualifications need to be introduced as far as detail is concerned, all
the more so as the governmental cult was distinct from the municipal cult.
Egypt is a good example of the implantation of the royal cult. Of course,
a thousand-year-old tradition made the pharaoh a god there, but the
problem now was to impose this belief on the Greeks, who formed the most
ULTIMATE MUTATION OF SPIRITUAL HELLENISM
forceful element in the kingdom. Ptolemy n took up the challenge.

Alexander was worshipped at Alexandria both as a god and as a hero, the
founder of the city. Philadelphus added the cult of his father Soter
(Saviour) and even of his relations under the name of Saviours. The
apotheosis of Arsinoe 11, his sister-bride, marked a further step in that dir¬
ection. During her lifetime, she set herself up as Aphrodite by receiving
Adonis into her palace and installing him on her own couch, and she was
honoured by Callicrates with a temple near Alexandria, consecrated to
Aphrodite Zephyritis. After her death, her husband deified her under the
name of Philadelphus. Her cult spread rapidly in the small lowland towns,
notably in the Arsinoite nome (Fayum) which bore her name. Its principal
seat was at Crocodilopolis, where Adonis the young god of vegetation was
her paredros and where the flowers dear to his heart were grown in a
‘paradise’. At the same time, Ptolemy actively associated himself with the
dead queen and created a cult of the Adelphi gods (Brothers). In this way
he overcame all difficulties and obtained divine honours during his lifetime,
an example which all his successors followed.
The sovereigns’ surnames are characteristic of the new attitude: Soter
(Saviour), Euergetes (Benefactor), Epiphanes (he who appears, in the
same way as a god appears in an epiphany), Theos (God). The minds of
the people had grown so used to this strange confusion between the divine
and the royal that an extraordinary attempt by Antony and Cleopatra to
form a vast theocratic empire occurred at the end of the Hellenistic period.
Though it was Cleopatra who found Antony at Tarsus, it was Aphrodite
who went carousing with Dionysus. The triumvir officially took the appel¬
lation of the New Dionysus and entered Alexandria crowned with ivy,
holding a thyrsus and shod in cothurni, like Bacchus himself. On the eve of
the defeat, some even thought they heard the divine thiasus abandoning
the imperator as if to leave him to his merely human proportions - he who
for years had been inhabited by the god.
The Transcendental Gods

Royal cults were not enough to appease religious yearnings, even though
they corresponded to the popular mentality which made the strong man
into a god and even though they served the sovereigns’ political interests.
Transcendental gods were required.
Some of the gods of the traditional pantheon had kept their thriving
clientele. These were the same gods who had enjoyed an outstanding suc¬
cess in the fourth century. The sick still turned to Asclepius: in his funda¬
mental benevolence, which is evident from so many statues and reliefs of
the period, he sympathized with suffering and promised recovery. Exten¬
sions of Epidaurus, notably Cos and Pergamum, were covered with
sumptuous buildings which prove their wealth. Moreover, these sanctuaries
became genuine medical schools, all the more so as miracles became
rare and the god most frequently effected his cure through treatments
prescribed by his priest-doctors. A sort of rationalization therefore took

place in this cult and there was a gradual movement towards the Roman
Epidaurus, which was as much a watering place as a hieron for cures.
Similarly, Dionysus continued to increase his hold over men’s minds. Both
literature and art bear witness to the profundity of the Dionysiac move¬
ment, which made conquests in Etruria and even Rome. Ecstasy remained
the reward of the worshipper who gave himself up entirely to the madness
the god inspired, but a Dionysiac soteriology which preached salvation
through love became increasingly widespread. Admittedly, all worshippers
did not understand the depth of the doctrine, and many of them doubtless
abandoned themselves to the facilities of a mysticism which found its
primary source in drunkenness. But one look at the frescoes of the Villa
Figure 81 Ex-voto to Zeus the

Very-High, originating from Athens.
The inscription of the votive breast
runs: ‘Eutychia to the Very-High in
execution of a vow.’ First century bc
Item is enough to understand what the god’s mysteries conferred upon the
best of his devotees - the god who carried off the soul as he carried off
Ariadne, abandoned on his breast in ineffable happiness.
The Triumph of the Orient

The gods of the Orient had a charm of their own, partly consisting of
exoticism and mystery, and Greece had been all too aware of this since
420. Their success during the Hellenistic period was all the greater since
the Greeks themselves now occupied the centres of their cult. Influence
from hither Asia remained considerable, while Thracian influence dimin¬
ished and Egyptian increased. Buddhism and Brahmanism will be left
aside provisionally, though there will be occasion later to mention that
they too exercised an attraction on Greeks in the most easterly diaspora.
The Phrygian Cybele, long since hellenized, won new adepts every day,
especially in the kingdom of Pergamum. It was there that the Romans in
a difficult period came to find the black stone and solemnly enthroned it at
Rome in a temple of the Palatine (204). Alexandria itself was won over and
a strange document in the Museum of Cairo reveals the queer syncretisms
whereby the former goddess of Asia was linked with a Cretan divinity
attended by demon warriors, the Curetes. There are also some curious
references to astrolatry because the planets are represented as well. The
newest element in the cult was the increasingly frequent appearance of
Attis by his lover’s side, served by eunuchs, enthusiastic imitators of a god
who in his folly caused himself to be castrated. The barriers of decency and
reason which Hellenism had erected against the cult of the Great Mother
over the centuries collapsed, and Cybele henceforth appeared as she really
was in Phrygia and Crete, a great orgiastic mother, mistress of all the
frenzies. The same can be said of the Syrian deities, particularly the
‘Syrian goddess’, who was worshipped in obscene mysteries which exalted
her resolutely naturalist character.
Egyptian prestige stood even higher. The Greeks there were sensible of
the colossal size of the temples and tombs, the coherence of a spirituality in
which cults, rites and beliefs formed an organic whole, and the message of
immortality offered by an open and optimistic religion. Native cults were
still fully alive, as is seen in one of the most beautiful temples of the
Ptolemaic period: Edfu. Here, in miles of inscriptions, the priests system¬
atically collected the sum of all sacred knowledge - geography, astronomy,
mythology — and also ritual, because celebrations were still magnificent
both at daily services and on great solemn occasions, like the crowning of
the pharaoh or the ‘good reunion’ (hierogamy of Horus and Hathor).
Even at Thebes, which had now lost all its political role, the great sanc¬
tuaries on the right bank were active and well maintained, although
Ammon’s influence had declined in favour of another sun god, Montu-Re,
encouraged by endowments from the rulers.
Almost all the Egyptian gods could claim Greek worshippers, and they
indulged in some strange identifications: Hathor the cow-goddess became
Aphrodite, and Epet, the hippopotamus-goddess, Demeter! Ammon,
Anubis and Horus played an important part. But it was Isis, often
associated with her husband Osiris, who primarily appealed to their hearts.
A moderate mysticism developed, which sought communion with the
goddess in the daily conversation of the liturgy and a quest for moral im¬
provement, and not in the violence of orgy. There are several Roman
copies of a Hymn to Isis which certainly goes back to the Hellenistic period
and seems to have been written by a Greek from Memphis, instructed in
Egyptian religion. It is a very pleasant litany, a barely hellenized trans¬
lation of some native religious text, where the worshipper pours out his
gratitude and adoration to the goddess to whom humanity owed so much.
Very much more elementary forms of Egyptian piety such as zoolatry
even enjoyed a great success with the Greeks. Leaving aside the Apis
of Memphis, the Greco-Roman sanctuary of Hermopolis is well known,
organized specially to breed sacred animals, with fountains for the ibises,
palm groves for the baboons, and galleries for the sepulchres of ibises and
baboons duly mummified. Numerous pilgrims paid homage to these

animals, conceived as ‘the great soul of the god on earth’.
These cults penetrated the whole Mediterranean, but Delos is quite the
most typical example. One would not have thought that the sacred island
where Leto had given birth to Apollo and Artemis would have room for
gods from elsewhere. However, in the Hellenistic period, a terrace almost
entirely reserved for foreign gods was created halfway up Mount Cynthus,
Syrian on one side, Egyptian on the other. The northern part was conse¬
crated to the gods of Hieropolis in Syria: Hadad and hisparedros Atargatis,
worshipped as Aphrodite the Holy. It consisted of a sacred theatre,
isolated by a portico designed to protect the licentious mysteries which
were celebrated in honour of the ‘Syrian goddess’ from all profane inspec¬
tion. The southern part comprised manifold constructions, including
several temples dedicated to Isis, Osiris, Serapis and Anubis, It is note¬
worthy that even the Romans introduced certain of their religious customs
at Delos, particularly the cult of the Lares.
The Birth and Amalgamations of Gods

The Greeks were sometimes not content to adopt the divinities with their
powerful mystical potential without changing them, and strange syn¬
cretisms were formed. In one privileged case, the act of creation of a mixed
divine type can actually be seen taking place - in the fullest sense of the
term. Ptolemy, anxious to provide a god whom both his Greek and
Egyptian subjects could respect, entrusted a commission of theologians
(in which Manetho played a large part) with the task of formulating this
new deity. The result was Serapis, the heir of both Osiris-Apis, Egyptian
funerary god of Memphis, and of philanthropic Greek divinities such as
Zeus or Asclepius, or mystical gods like Dionysus, whom Herodotus had
already identified with Osiris. He is represented with the features of a man
of mature age, a long beard, his head bound with a modius, and his face
stamped with infinite benevolence.
The cult was born at Memphis and spread to Alexandria, where
Ptolemy hi replaced the little Serapeium, built by the founder of the
dynasty, by a vast sanctuary. The syncretism which Soter had deliberately
brought about can be seen there. The sculptured decoration is Greek,
made up of Dionysiac motifs. The foundation plates extol ‘King Ptolemy
son of the Adelphi gods’ in Greek and ‘the king of the South and the North,
chosen by Ammon, son of Ra, Ptolemy eternally alive, loved by Ptah’ in
Egyptian. Serapis gradually spread to the whole Mediterranean basin:
Delos, for one, possessed three Serapeia; two of them were very modest,
which showed his success with the humblest classes. Serapis had been born
by the will of the first of the Ptolemies and the subtleties of his theologians.
They succeeded in making him an object of worship first for the Egyptians,
and then for the whole world.
Other syntheses were more spontaneous. Zeus Hypsistos (The Very
High), sometimes worshipped simply as Hypsistos, combined Greek and
Asiatic characteristics as the god of summits, with obvious Hebraic

features: the double meaning of his description was sufficient to validate
the union. There was a tendency at the beginning of the Christian era to
substitute this Zeus for all the male gods of the Hellenic pantheon and for
him to become a single god, under the joint influence of Jewish mono¬
theism and a monotheism towards which the Greek conscience was turning
(figure 81).
The Semitic couple, Aphrodite and Adonis, are an even more curious
case. They had long been enthroned in the Greek pantheon and were intro¬
duced into Egypt by assimilation with Isis and Osiris. Dedications to
Aphrodite-Isis appeared at Alexandria from the beginning of the third
century, and wherever Aphrodite, benefiting from the immense popularity
of Isis, was installed, her lover Adonis joined her. He was identified with
Osiris, the benevolent god of visits to the underworld and supernatural
life. The Syracusans by Theocritus shows the people of Alexandria throng¬
ing to the palace to contemplate its young god in his radiant beauty,
rendered even more pathetic by the certainty of near death. This was
‘Adonis, the thrice-loved’, for whom woman particularly had a passionate
and impassioned admiration. The Adonis festivals celebrated in the
countryside by a small Greek can be indirectly reconstructed from a much
more modest document, the account book of one of Adonis’ disciples: after
the purification bath and ritual tonsure, borrowed from the Isiac liturgy,
came the day of rejoicing in the hierogamy, feted by abundant love feasts,
then the day of mourning and abstinence in commemoration of the god’s
funeral, and then the day of the mysteries when the sacred pantomime of
the resurrection was performed.
The same sycretisms can be seen everywhere. The Hymn to Isis, already
cited, identified the goddess with Demeter. A dedication was made at
Delos to an Isis Soteira (Saviour) Astarte Aphrodite, therefore a goddess of
salvation who was Greek, Semitic and Egyptian at the same time. A con¬
fused yearning for monotheism tended to unite all the female deities of the
eastern Mediterranean in the person of Isis. The time was no longer so far
away when Apuleius, in the wonderful invocation of Book 11 of the
Metamorphoses, would present her as a universal power, worshipped under
the most varied titles.
Hermetism and Magic

New forms of religious thought appeared. The most important of these was
Hermetism, which took its name from Hermes. He was the Hellenic
equivalent of the Egyptian Thot, a benevolent god, the inventor of
hieroglyphic writing and dispenser of all the sacred sciences, who measured
time and inscribed the words of destiny, was able to pronounce invocations
in the requisite tone and, in the opinion of the theologians of Hermopolis,
had even created the world with his demiurgic utterances. Specialists do
not always agree on what is Egyptian, Greek or even Iranian in the
Hermetic treatises - and these furthermore date from the Roman period
although they were derived from Hellenistic texts. In any case the part
played by ancient native thought is considerable: ‘The Greeks’, declared
Asclepius in one of these books (Corpus Hermeticum, 16, 2), ‘only had empty
discourses, good for producing demonstrations, and this is in fact all that
Greek philosophy is, a jumble of words. As for us Egyptians, we do not use
simple words, but sounds abounding in power.’
In fact, Hermetic thought proceeded by revelations and not by dis¬
cursive steps. It was a total effort to bring into play the divine forces des¬
tined to preserve the strength and stability of the universe. Intelligence was
not separated from action because the regularity of the phenomena could
only be secured by ritual; for example the regular return of the moon was
ensured by the sacrifice of the antelope, the moon’s enemy. The task of the
king was to execute the ritual which stabilized the cosmos: he was ‘the
master of the word which made peace’.
Hermetism therefore contained considerable Egyptian influences, but
it is equally certain that Egyptian thought was re-thought in Greek terms.
For example the trinitarian theory of the sun god Atoum, the creator of
the two gods who remained one with him who was the Whole, was a
transcription of old native beliefs into philosophical language.
The extensive development of magic was another manifestation of
oriental influences: it became an autonomous discipline in the Greek world
at that time as it had already been for several millennia in the Orient. The
Magicians by Theocritus throws light on strange practices designed to
recover a fickle lover. Amulets multiplied in the tombs. Magic papyri
show that magic culminated in the magician being possessed by a god or
demon who came and established residence in him: it went beyond ritual,
formulae, invocations and hoodoos and became a form of mysticism.
The following text provides sound evidence of the powers which the
magician who was inhabited by the demon felt he possessed - and it is by
no means an isolated example: ‘May your name and your fluid bring me
good things! Enter into my intelligence and my thoughts for all the days of
my life and achieve all the desires of my soul for me. Because you are I and
I am you. Everything I command must come to pass. Because I possess your
name in the form of a phylactery over my heart and no body acting against
me can dominate me, no mind resist me, because of your name that I
possess in my heart and which I invoke. Bind the eyes of those who resist me,
everyone of them, and for me, give me success in everything I undertake.’
New Fraternities
The adepts of the new gods grouped themselves in cultic communities.
Whereas the cult of city divinities had, by definition, taken place within
the framework of the city, in the case of the new gods private associations
were formed, genuine confraternities where worshippers met together
because they had freely chosen to worship the same god.
Greeks and barbarians, citizens and foreigners, rubbed shoulders here.

Although slaves sometimes formed their own groups (such as the Com-
petaliasts at Delos), most confraternities received both free men and slaves.
Men and women were equal and even children were admitted as choir
boys. The powerful ferment of social unification that they represented can
well be imagined. The classical world where the distinction between
Greek and barbarian or between citizen and slave was absolute, and
where women were pretty well despised, was replaced by a new world
where these antagonisms no longer existed, where all men felt they were
brothers because they loved the same god and expected the same salvation
from him.
There were different sorts of confraternities. Orgeones, which were
several centuries old, worshipped protecting heroes, but they disappeared
fairly quickly. They were supplanted by thiasi, groupings which ensured
the cult of a saviour god - we have already mentioned their creation at the
end of the fifth century. Eranoi were societies by subscription which ap¬
peared in the third century, and were more complex and less religious in
their organization than the thiasotai. Quite a lot is known about the exis¬
tence of these associations, which played an increasingly important role in
daily life, from numerous inscriptions. For example, the thiasotai of
Dionysiac Technitai (artists) were companies of actors, whom the ruler
often charged with the organization of festivals and processions. The most
famous was ‘the artists under the invocation of Dionysus in Ionia and the
Hellespont’ which functioned throughout Anatolia and enjoyed the
patronage of the Attalids.
But the distinctions are of little importance. The spirit was the same
everywhere: the participants were brothers who met together for prayer,
to perform liturgies or to banquet and who were not separated by death
because the association often had its own cemetery. They were united
because they had freely chosen the same god. The unity of their hearts was
strengthened by participation at the same ceremonies, at the same initia¬
tion (which was often baptism by water or blood), at the same fasts, in the
same ritual which, like the catabasis (descent into the earth), symbolized
the hope of another life after death, and above all, in the same gospel of
salvation. As Father Festugiere excellently puts it, it is only necessary to
change the name of the god in the famous phrase from the Epistle to the
Galatians (3, 28) to define all these communities: ‘Henceforth there is no
longer either Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free man. There
is no longer either man or woman. You are all one in Jesus Christ.’
The best minds had found relief from the fundamental disquiet of the
period in philosophical reason. The humble discovered their remedy in
the hopes the doctrines of salvation opened up. This was the religion, so
fervent and so alive, which Rome later borrowed. It was a religion where
the share of the Orient beside the Hellenic element must not be minimized.
Another oriental religion was also born into this world. It was also a
religion of mysteries, likewise a religion of salvation, which slowly gathered
devotees: Christianity. Its Judaic roots are obvious but Hellenistic religion
provided the psychological preparation. The trinity, the possibility of a
link between divine and human nature, the mother of the Saviour, the
cult of the Saints - the direct equivalent of all these dogmas can be found
in the hellenized kingdoms of the Orient, whereas they are profoundly
foreign to Judaism. However, the fundamental point may possibly be that,
like the mystical doctrines of Egypt or Asia, it teaches love and not fear of
the Lord.
In the confrontation of Greece and the Orient which resulted from
Alexander’s conquest, it is difficult to estimate the Oriental contribution
to Hellenistic civilization: nothing to speak of to literature, slightly more to
art and philosophy, and practically everything to religion.
In a general way, everything which entered the mould of language was
impervious to oriental influence, but the yearnings of the heart were often
satisfied by adherence to the attractive and mysterious beliefs and ritual of
the Orient. If he were ill, the Greek in Egypt first consulted a Greek doctor,
who would use an almost exclusively Hellenic diagnostic method, treat¬
ment and pharmacopoeia. But if he despaired of recovering his health in
this way, he would gladly climb beyond Thebes into the mountain with
the tombs to seek a cure from Amenhotep, son of Hapou, a very good god
in the words of the graffiti, which were almost all written in Greek.
17
Beyond Political Frontiers
Possibly the most striking phenomenon of the period was the extension of
the oicoumene. It was marked in both west and east and was therefore not
solely bound up with Alexander’s conquest. It affected lands where
civilization was already ancient, such as Carthage or India, as well as
countries which were still barbarous such as Scythia, Gaul or Iberia.
Hellenism penetrated everywhere. Through trading relations, art,
thought, religion, the Greek way of life spread far afield, raising up the
most varied civilizations like yeast in the dough.
Roughly this general transformation followed two different lines. Some¬
times it went according to a pattern (well-known since the Archaic period)
of hellenization through colonies implanted in barbarous lands: for ex¬
ample, without Marseilles, the Gallic and Iberian west would not have
been the same. At other times, long distance commercial contacts (several
thousand miles in the case of relations between the Mediterranean and
India or China) brought together mutually unknown worlds.
BARBARIAN EUROPE
From the Urals to the Straits of Gibraltar, beyond the Mediterranean

fringe, Europe, whence the Indo-Europeans had almost everywhere
eliminated previous populations, continued to lead a patriarchal life,
despite incontestable material progress, particularly the general spread of
ferrous metallurgy. The ancient colonial system was in force almost every¬
where and this enabled the Greeks to market their products, procure food¬
stuffs or raw materials, and consequently spread Hellenism, at least in
regions nearest the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
The Colonies of Northern Pontis

Hellenism remained firmly rooted in Pontus, despite the migration of new
Iranian tribes, the Sarmatae, who came from the region between the Don
and the Ural river, and in the third and second centuries replaced the
Scythians over the whole northern coast. The Scythians then found them¬
selves restricted to the Crimea, around their new capital of Neapolis, and
to the lower courses of the Dnieper and the Bug.
Figure 82 Women bathing. Hellenistic mosaic discovered at Chersonesus (Crimea),

second century
At least one city suffered seriously from the repercussions of these vast
movements. Olbia was besieged on several occasions, had to pay heavy
tribute and, in the third century, fell under Scythian control before it was
destroyed by the Getae in about 50. At first, the situation in the Crimea
was less disturbed. A new Tanais was set up in the second century on the
steep right bank of the mouth of the Don. All the towns were enriched
with magnificent dwellings, much more spacious than those of the past:
a Hellenistic house at Chersonesus included a bath decorated with a
mosaic, undoubtedly the work of a local artist, and representing two young
nude beauties on either side of a basin in which a bird was reflected
(figure 82). However, the barbarian threat gradually grew stronger.
Mithridates Eupator, who united the kingdoms of Pontus and the
Bosporus under his authority (see p. 408), quelled a serious revolt of
Scythian slaves. He flew to the help of Chersonesus when it was attacked
by the Scythians; it had soon to give up its independence and become
integrated into the kingdom. His suicide in 63 marked the beginning of
irremediable decadence.
General prosperity remained based on the export of grain (though it was
meeting increasing competition from Egyptian corn) and salted fish. Large
agricultural establishments are known from the period, such as a third
century estate at Chersonesus, surrounded by powerful quadrangular walls.
Fisheries were organized on an industrial scale. Ceramic and tile works
were also genuine factories and continued to produce on a large scale. An
BEYOND POLITICAL FRONTIERS 489
interesting development was the extension of viticulture — apparently

paradoxical in these northern territories — in the outskirts of Panticapaeum:
a large estate has been found at Myrmecion with presses and vats for un¬
fermented wine around the owners’ magnificently decorated house; at
Tiritaca, there were cisterns with a capacity of 1,100 gallons of grape juice.
Trade, always active, once again changed its direction: with the decline
of Athens, it tended to be concentrated on Asia Minor, Alexandria and
Rhodes. It continued on the same principle as the colonial commerce of
the previous centuries: the exchange primarily of food products for luxury
objects and wine. However, the ever-wider growth of the oicoumene made
the northern Pontis the terminus for very distant routes. A long trail from
China, by way of Mongolia, emerged at Olbia. Elsewhere, easy connec¬
tions with the far north via the Russian plain were developed. Discoveries
of bones and reindeer horn at Olbia are characteristic of this expansion of
trade. A polar bear is mentioned at Alexandria. A plaster refief showing a
woman, dressed in a long pelisse, milking a female reindeer, has been found
in the workshop of a toreutist at Memphis: a reindeer standing and two
seated dogs appear by her side. It is a picturesque evocation of fife in the
far north, very much in Alexandrian style.
Hellenism in the Pontis was certainly pretty shadowy compared with
that of the Mediterranean and it is difficult to name anyone it produced
except perhaps the Cynic, Bion of Borysthenes, and the Stoic, Sphaerus,
adviser to Cleomenes. At times it even allowed itself to be contaminated by
the natives who came in greater and greater number to settle in the Greek
cities: a third-century inscription in the small town of Citaea mentions a
temple dedicated to an anonymous divinity, the ‘thundering god’.
The Hellenization of the Scythians

Urbanization was far and away the most important of the deep-seated
changes in the Scythian world which came about as the result of long contact
with Hellenism. The Scythians showed a tendency to give up nomad fife and
settle in agglomerations. In the second century, they build a new capital,
Neapolis (near Simferopol), on the Greek model. A Hellenistic-type Doric
portico with isodomous bonding has been found inside its ramparts -
which remained in Scythian tradition - as well as houses decorated with
frescoes, sculptures and Greek inscriptions. The mausoleum of a great
aristocratic family (second century) rose not far from the enclosure; it is
fairly roughly built, but surface tombs had until then been unknown in
Scythia. At the same time, royal power made its existence felt, as is seen in
the appearance of coinage minted from the middle of the fourth century by
the powerful monarch Ateas (figure 83).
In fact, Hellenism penetrated deeply into the interior of the country.
Greek discoveries are increasingly numerous: coins (above all at
Panticapaeum) and vases, principally amphorae for wine, bearing the
stamps of Sinope, but also of Thasos and Rhodes. Art, in an irreversible
evolution, moved away from vegetable and animal stylization and towards
17
Figure 83 Coins of the Scythian king Pharzoios struck at

Olbia (Crimea), first century (?)
human representation. The pommels of the tombs were no longer crowned

with birds or griffons, but with the image of the Great Goddess, as in the
tumulus of Alexandropol (beginning of the third century). Numerous
golden plates placed in the sepulchres bear the figure of the goddess seated,
a mirror in her hand, in front of a man with a rhyton, or the anguiped
ancestress of the Scythians. Animals gave way to genuine scenes taken from
the life of Achilles on arms of state, particularly quivers, with the addi¬
tion of some curious local characteristics (the education of the hero learn¬
ing to draw the bow must have been a concession to native habits). It is
impossible not to regard this artistic transformation as on a par with a
religious development towards anthropomorphism.
On the other hand, Greco-Scythian art took increasing pleasure in
depicting typically local scenes: battles, horse-breeding, a hero drawing a
bow, fighting or drinking from a rhyton, a horseman chasing a hare. These
must not solely be considered as picturesque reliefs, trying to render the
fierce life of the steppes with local colour, although the Greek artists who
conceived the first sketches incontestably worked in this spirit, character¬
istic of the Hellenistic period. There are serious grounds for thinking that
to the Scythians they illustrated old sagas singing of the ancient high deeds
of the race.
The Balkan-Danubian Region

The Balkan-Danubian region was inhabited by Thracians in the east,
Illyrians in the west, and Getae and Dacians in the north. Its proximity to
Greece had long facilitated the commercial and cultural expansion of
Hellenism and it expanded still further in the Hellenistic period, despite
BEYOND POLITICAL FRONTIERS
491
Figure 84 Fragment of the large frieze from the death chamber of the tomb of Kazanlik
(Bulgaria), fourth to third century, frieze representing the funeral banquet of
heroization. Servant carrying jewels and slave holding back the horses of a quadriga
the upheaval caused by the Celtic invasions. Again careful distinction must
be made between the western and the eastern facade.
Illyria remained more or less unaffected. The Greek colonies of the coast,
Epidamnus and Apollonia, did, to be sure, continue to expand but they
were separated from the hinterland by mountainous barriers. Italic and
Celtic influences were strongly felt, and it is true that the Hellenism they
diffused was, as it were, already assimilated. Greek objects, except possibly
Apulian vases, were rare there.
The situation in the eastern part was quite different. The Greek colonies
on the two Thracian coasts had a powerful influence all around. The
Hebrus and the Vardar and Morava valleys made possible an easy
diffusion of objets d’art and ways of life. Apart from this, the Thracians were
much more civilized than the Illyrians and even than the Geto-Dacians,
and so were more able to appreciate Hellenism, and the continuing
Scythian influence helped its spread still further.
The most noteworthy Greek records are therefore to be found in
Thracian country. The most remarkable is possibly the cupola-tomb of
Kazanlik (Bulgaria) dating from the end of the fourth or beginning of the
third century (figure 84). The vestibule and the burial chamber are
decorated with frescoes of exceptional freshness. The main one represents
a funeral banquet: the deceased, undoubtedly an Odrysian chief, crowned
with gold, is seated at a table holding his wife’s hand, while servants bustle
about, carrying fruit or jewels and trying to hold back prancing horses.
There is no doubt that this vigorously realistic work can be attributed to

Greek, and, more probably, Anatolian artists, but several details, par¬
ticularly in the construction of the cupola, show that they were able to
adapt themselves to local traditions. The treasure of Panagurichte (near
the old Philippopolis) dates from this period (end of fourth century) and is
composed of nine vases, together weighing over thirteen pounds of fine
gold: a magnificent service which could only have been executed by
Greeks for the lavish drinking sessions of a prince (figure 85 and plate
J5)-
Figure 85 Golden bowl, end of fourth century. This bowl (diameter

9 inches; weight: 1 -87 lb.) is decorated with chased ornamentation in
concentric circles around a central umbo: rosettes, acorns, three rows
of negroid heads. Between the motifs, lotus flowers and palmettes. It
must have been used as a tray for serving drink. Treasure of
Panagurichte (Bulgaria). Cf. detail, plate 15
The Greco-Thracian art which then developed is even more notable

than these imported objects. Seuthes hi built a new capital, Seuthopolis,
with ramparts encircling twelve and a half acres on the left bank of the
Tonzos (today Toundja) at the end of the fourth century. The royal palace,
surrounded by a special enclosure, was a vast building with a 130-feet
facade and a large room decorated with polychrome incrustations. The
houses were arranged round a courtyard and often included terraces
supported by wooden columns. The general plan was Hippodamian and
every dwelling was connected to a water supply system. Large numbers of
local and Greek vases have been found there: the latter include numerous
493
amphorae for wine from Thasos. Furthermore, the town was destroyed at
the end of the third century. The great Dacian fortresses, which are being
discovered in increasing number in Transylvania, came later.
The minor arts of the Thracians and Geto-Dacians showed equal
Hellenic influence: metallic vases, silver-ware, jewels, arms of state,
luxury ceramics. Money was minted everywhere, first modelled on Philip
and Alexander’s staters, and then on the tetradrachmas of Thasos.
Finally, the Thracians borrowed an anthropomorphic representation of
their principal divinity, the Hero depicted in the form of a horseman, from
the Greeks. Although most of the innumerable examples only date from the
Roman period, it is certain that the origin of the type went back to the
Hellenistic period. Moreover, religion became hellenized and curious
syntheses can be noted between the Hero and Apollo or Asclepius, and
between Bendis the huntress and Artemis or Hecate.
The Celtic World

As from the fifth century, the west was almost entirely celticized but the
restless vitality of the Celts immediately carried them onwards to other
conquests. At the beginning of the fourth century they occupied Padan
Italy, where they created a new Gaul. Southern Gaul received new
immigrants in the fourth century, the British Isles and Spain in the third.
Others settled in the Danubian valley and as far as Illyria and Thrace.
Bands of Galatians sacked Greece in the third century, before turning off
towards Asia Minor, where many finally settled in Galatia. After 250 came
the turn of the Belgians to conquer all northern France and part of Great
Britain. By the end of this expansion, the Celtic world comprised Germany
up to the Elbe, all central Europe on both sides of the Danube, Great
Britain, France, northern Italy, Spain and Portugal. Even Scandinavia
was completely imbued with Celtic influences, particularly as a result of
imports of works of art. It was the most powerful race in independent
Europe.
As from the first Iron Age (the Hallstatt period), Celtic civilization was
deeply impregnated with Hellenism, as a result of contacts with Greece by
way of the Danube, with Italy by the Alpine passes and with Marseilles
by the Rhone valley. The movement continued in the second Iron Age
(the La Tene period), particularly during the first two periods (La Tene
1: 450-250, and La Tene 11: 250-100), when the Celtic world reached its
zenith. A certain decline marked La Tene 111 (first century). The paths
this penetration followed remained the same, but Gallic expansion south¬
wards and eastwards made contacts easier and more productive. More¬
over, the western Celtic world was turning more and more towards the
Mediterranean, and the Rhone valley, the great tin route, played anew an
increasingly important part.
Greek objects, which remained numerous in the Celtic world, provide
important evidence of this trade. The people of Marseilles also imported
abundant supplies of red coral, originating from the Hyeres islands, which
Gallic art used in large quantities. Greek money, above all coins from
Marseilles, can be found everywhere in Gaul, except west of a line running
from western Normandy to the mouth of the Gironde. This does not mean,
however, that Marseilles traded directly with all Gaul, as Marseilles issues
were often used for trade between the Gauls themselves. Some curious
traditions, showing the distant diffusion of Hellenism, must go back to this
period: for example Tacitus attributed to Ulysses the foundation of
Asciburgium (Eschenburg, at the confluence of the Ruhr and the Rhine,
an important centre on the amber and tin route).
Art was more affected than any other sphere. Certainly, Celtic repre¬
sentations of the human figure were still infrequent and the few works of
sculpture in the round which have survived are scarcely marked by
Hellenism. But decorative art produced excellent pieces: arms of state,
golden, coral, enamel and bronze jewellery, bronze vases and earthenware
vessels. Greek motifs were utilized, notably leaves, palmettes and foliage,
and these were gradually transformed and enriched by fairly extravagant
curvilinear designs. Twirls replaced the leaves of the palmettes; foliage
became double spirals; vegetable decoration was changed by the play of a
lively imagination, which loved curves, assymetry and abstract geometrical
styles.
Monetary economy (also borrowed from Greece in the Balkan-
Danubian region) expanded with trade. It spread widely throughout the
Celtic world, from Hungary to Great Britain. From the third century, the
Celts copied Philip’s and, above all, Alexander’s coins; then Marseillais
and Spanish pieces served in turn as models. Each tribe tried to have its
own issues, most frequently in silver, although a few gold mintings were
made. Brief inscriptions, the names of nations or of kings in Greek or Latin
characters, appeared in the second century. But with time and diffusion
in space, Greek types became simplified in accordance with the Celtic
temperament, which disliked naturalism. Elements were decomposed: for
example, the body and legs of a horse were shown separately. They were
also adapted to native beliefs, as is seen by the presence of numerous
mythological symbols. Strange deformations occurred, notably in
Armorica where fantastic motifs undoubtedly corresponded to Celtic
myths, which are also found in Irish epics of the Middle Ages. None of the
innumerable barbarian nations who copied Hellenic coins did so with so
great a freedom, imagination and contempt for classical beauty.
In actual fact, it is necessary to take good note of the limitations of
Hellenism in the Celtic world. The Gauls were attracted by Greek master¬
pieces and copied them, but their adaptation was very free and always
followed the lines of their own genius, inherited from the abstract geo¬
metric style of primitive Europe. Furthermore, their very flexible minds
were sensitive to many other influences at the same time and at times these
came from very far afield: the stylized motifs of the Scythians, the heraldic
animals of Iran. Etruscan contributions were equally important: as a
495
result of contact with them, the Gauls in the Cisalpine and then in Gaul
began to construct oppida. It is true, at least in the artistic sphere, that
Etruria transmitted an already assimilated Greek message. The Celts were
only deeply imbued with Hellenism in regions nearest the Mediterranean
under the close influence of Marseilles and its colonies — in regions where
Celticism, debased by contact with earlier populations such as the
Ligurians or the Iberians, was less pure.
Hellenistic Marseilles
Marseilles remained powerful. It was Rome’s most loyal ally during the
second Punic War, and had in fact maintained excellent relations with
Rome for a very long time. In the second century, Rome gave it its reward
by sending troops to defend it against the Celto-Ligurians. It also endowed
Marseilles with a vast territory, taken from its enemies along the coast,
where previously Marseilles had only had very narrow outskirts under its
control. Marseilles’ faulty choice in the conflict between Caesar and
Pompey caused the loss of its liberty in 49 and its annexation to the
Empire.
Its constitution was aristocratic, with a council of six hundred timouchs
and two more limited delegations of fifteen and three members. A striking
feature was the absence of an assembly of the people. But there was no
social crisis, because the rich were not great landed proprietors. With the
town always on the alert because of the barbarian threat and with a strict
military organization, customs remained old-fashioned. Miming spectacles
were forbidden, as well as oriental cults and dowries in excess of a hundred
gold pieces. Old customs had been retained by a frantic attachment to a
Hellenism which had often been endangered: long trailing clothing in the
Ionian style remained the fashion and gave rise to highly unjust charges
against the morals of Marseilles. In reality, an austere gravity, quite
surprising in so great a port, prevailed.
The basic cults were still those of Apollo, Artemis of Ephesus, and
Athena, but a statuette of Hecate has also been found there, and an
abundance of small vases in a neighbouring grotto were undoubtedly
offered to a Nymph of the mountains. The people there loved stories; the
Toxaris of Lucian may possibly be a survival of one of these. Dramatic
productions were in high esteem because a theatre was built. Technology
flourished, notably the construction of ships and war machines: Caesar’s
lieutenants later had great cause to complain about the Marseillais cata¬
pults ! The medical school was famous until well into the Roman period.
But the arts remained the weak point: Strabo did not admire any building
except the ramparts; Vitruvius declared that the houses were covered
with daub; the ex votos were very rough and the vases, vulgar dishes.
Economic life flourished. Coinage was plentiful and of good alloy since
the devaluation of the fourth century: silver or bronze coins were produced
with models of Apollo, Artemis or Athena, showing recognizable traces of
the skill of Sicilian engravers. Contacts with Rome increased, but Marseilles
was not cut off from the traditional Greek world. Several Marseillais
appear in the lists of proxenoi or theorodokoi of Delphi. The people of Delos
voted an honorary decree for a citizen, Leon. Lampsacus, a sister-city
because also a Phocaean foundation, sent an embassy to solicit Marseilles’
diplomatic support when it wanted to obtain help from Rome against
Antiochus hi. But Marseilles’ real achievement was to drain off all the
commerce of southern Gaul and Mediterranean Iberia with the powerful
aid of the network of colonies it had established along the coast.
The Celto-Ligurians of Provence

From time immemorial, the coast from the mouths of the Rhone up to the
Arno had been occupied by primitive peoples who were not Indo-
Europeans: the wild Ligurians. In Provence, they mingled with the new
wave of Celtic invaders (fourth century), and in this way created a mixed
civilization. A powerful Celto-Ligurian confederation was formed, that of
the Salyi, with Arles and Entremont (in the neighbourhood of Aix-en-
Provence) as its principal centres. Although relations with Marseilles were
often strained, commercial bonds were rapidly established, more especially
as the Celts proved more susceptible to Hellenism than the Ligurians.
Moreover, Marseilles was powerfully fortified and it always possessed an
excellent advance post at Saint-Blaise which was only destroyed by
Caesar’s lieutenants. Its merchants were well protected. They were gen¬
erally favourably received, in accordance with agreements made with the
natives of the interior. A bronze hand (beginning of the first century)
found in Haute-Provence was a tessera of hospitality with the Velauni, a
tribe of the Maritime Alps.
The emporia of the coast of Provence continued to act as staging points
for Marseillais trade, in a fairly rough country where the protection of
solid walls was advisable. In the third century, the Marseillais settled at
Glanum (Saint-Remy-de-Provence) at the outlet of the valleys crossing the
small mountain chain of the Alpilles, on a native site concentrated around
a water sanctuary. A beautiful Hellenistic city grew up there, which was
not only a centre for trade, but also an urban resort. It reached its zenith
in the second century: the houses were similar in design to the Delian
dwellings, built in Hellenic style and very well finished. Dating from this
period are a temple, a monumental Nymphaeum erected around the
miraculous fountain (near which a dedication to a healing Apollo has been
discovered) and a marble relief representing a dancing Season, strong and
sober in its workmanship (Museum of Munich). But the first century
already brought the Romanization of Glanum, after the occupation of the
country by Marius: irregular stone walls replaced the isodomous facing and
Italian influence appeared in the design of the houses.
The establishment of a colony in the interior, such as Glanum repre¬
sented, seems to be unique. But trade by itself offers sufficient explanation
497
for the rapid hellenization of the Celto-Ligurians. The cultivation of olive
trees and vines was introduced, though on a fairly narrowly limited scale.
The oppida were fortified, using Greek techniques, with well-constructed
walls in contrast to those of the enclosures of Gallia Comata. The cult of
Dionysus spread, together with the taste for wine. The Celts began to write
their language in the Greek alphabet: some forty or so fairly enigmatic
Celto-Greek inscriptions still exist in Provence, including the famous
dedications to the Mothers (Gallic goddesses of fertility) of Glanum.
Above all, a Celto-Greek art took shape, known basically from dis¬
coveries at Entremont and Roquepertuse. The themes are Celtic but the
technique was obviously borrowed from the Greeks. This sculpture cer¬
tainly remained fairly barbarous, and, surprisingly enough since it was
born in the third century, it is often reminiscent of the Greek Archaic style,
as if the inexperienced sculptors had met the same problems and resorted
to the same conventions to solve them. But a comparison between these
Greco-Celtic pieces and such purely Celtic sculpture as the head found at
Msecke-Zebrovice (Bohemia) with its strange stylization or even the
god with the wild boar of Euffigneix (Haute-Marne) shows the decisive
progress achieved under Mediterranean influence.
Hellenic influence is particularly apparent at the principal oppidum of
the Salyi, Entremont, which was destroyed by the Romans in 122. A vast
city grew up on a triangular plateau, barred by enclosing walls. It was
divided into an upper and a lower town, the first containing the dwellings
of the chiefs and the sanctuaries; the second, private residences and work¬
shops where metal, leather and clay were worked. The plan was character¬
istically Hellenistic, with square design and broad roads, but the houses,
built of loose stones or unbaked bricks with a covering of branches, com¬
pared unfavourably with those of Glanum. There were numerous Hellenic
objects there (‘Megarian’ bowls), all imported from Marseilles. Coins have
Figure 86 Pillar decorated

with two cut-off heads,
Celto-Ligurian art of the
Hellenistic period. Note the
closed or half-closed eyes,
symbolizing death. Discovered
at Entremont, near
Aix-en- Provence
been discovered in large numbers, mainly coming from Marseilles (one

treasury contained nearly 1,500) although there were also a few Allobroges
pieces and some Republican denarii.
A paved path led to the ‘sanctuary of the spirits’, in the upper part of the
town. Astonishing discoveries have been made there: pillars hollowed with
alveoli in the shape of a skull, alternating with engravings of cut-off heads,
and statues of chiefs in war garb, shown seated, squatting cross-legged or
on horse-back, resting their left hand on a mask depicting a cut-off head
and holding an iron thunderbolt in their right hand. It was‘a place of wor¬
ship of great dead chiefs, heroized in the form of Taranis, the god of
thunder - the Romans later identified him with their Jupiter. As for the
cut-off heads, they did not necessarily belong to decapitated enemies, be¬
cause we know that the Gauls embalmed the heads of their dead kings and
treasured them: Posidonius, who visited Gaul at the beginning of the first
century, has told the horrifying story of this. The deepest belief the Celtic
world perpetuated at Entremont was of a cult of heroes, who had become
protecting daemons, and whose mana it was salutary to preserve in the
oppidum, a cult of cut-off heads. But they borrowed from the Greeks the
means of plastic expression to perpetuate them. Inspiration remained pro¬
foundly native, with a poignant emotion in the face of death, terrible and
fraternal at the same time because it gave access to apotheosis, but the
technique remained Hellenic (figure 86).
The ancients were aware of this vast hellenization movement which con¬
quered all southern Gaul in the space of three centuries. Caesar declared
that there was a civilization (cultus) and a humanism (humanitas) in
Narbonese Gaul which did not exist in Gallia Comata. According to
Strabo (4, 1, 5) the Marseillais had made their town ‘a training-school for
the barbarians and was schooling the Galatae to be fond enough of the
Greeks to write even their contracts in Greek’. Justin, abridger of Pompeius
Trogus, was even clearer, although a certain rhetorical turgidity spoils the
famous passage where he cries: ‘Under the influence of the Phocaeans, the
Gauls softened and abandoned their barbarism and learned to lead a softer
life, to cultivate the soil and surround the towns with ramparts, to live
under the dominion of laws rather than under that of weapons. Progress
was so brilliant that it seemed, not that Greece had emigrated to Gaul, but
that Gaul had passed into Greece.’ (43, 4).
Iberians and Celts in Languedoc—Roussillon

This evidence is also valid for the region situated between the Rhone and
the Pyrenees, which was equally influenced by Marseilles but differed from
the ethnic point of view. A Celtic people, the Volcae had imposed them¬
selves on the Iberians (a non Indo-European population fairly similar to
the Ligurians), and a syncretic civilization had developed in which a Celtic
aristocracy controlled natives who were still very attached to their tradi¬
tions. The low pond-strewn plain of Languedoc-Roussillon was densely
499
populated. Oppida were established at the edges of the small mountain,

often at the outlets of valleys which made it possible to bring minerals from
the sea (copper from the Corbieres and the Black Mountain by the
Herault and the Orb, tin from the far-off Cassiterides, arriving by way of
the Aude at the end of a long trail). Population was also concentrated in
the neighbouring region of the Pyrenees, terminal point of an overland
route bringing the products of the rich Cantabrian mines.
The Marseillais had always traded in the region between Herault and the
Pyrenees because of its grain resources and, above all, minerals. Their only
colony in Gaul west of the Rhone, Agatha (Agde), was established at the
mouth of the Herault. Excavations on the knoll, where the upper town can
still be found, have revealed a small Hellenic agglomeration with many
Marseillais and Campanian potsherds, and two Greek inscriptions (a
dedication and a private letter). But from the fourth century, with Celtic
settlement, the zone between the Rhone and the Herault was reached in its
turn. A magnificent field of expansion was henceforth opened up to Greek
commerce between the Rhone and the Pyrenees and it has left
innumerable traces in the form of vases and coins in the oppida.
These contacts explain the cultural borrowings made by the natives.
Architecture improved: fortifications were well-finished; houses were still
rudimentary and consisted of only one room, but they were supported by
a column with a capital which clumsily tried to copy the Ionic or Doric
style. A Celto-Greek sculpture, very closely related to that of Provence
developed, at least in the region of Nimes. The most remarkable character
it produced was the warrior of Grezan.
Local coins appeared, bearing the name of the city in Iberian characters
(Narbonne) and even Greek (Beziers) or the name of the Celtic tribe
(Longostaleti) or of its king who called himself in Greek by the title of
basileus. Iberians and Celts got used to writing their language in Greek
characters, particularly surprising in the case of the Iberians who had an
alphabet of their own. There is an Ibero-Greek inscription on a lead
lamina of Elne (eastern Pyrenees) and some twenty Celto-Greek. These
latter, mainly found in the region of Nimes, were placed on clearly Gallic
type monuments: capital or shaft of votive column (capital of Montagnac
in the Herault) and high funeral stelai crowned with a pyramid (monument
of Escingoreix at Nimes).
The religion itself seems to have been changed. Strabo states that they
sacrificed ‘by the Greek ritual’ (4, i). The ossuary was henceforth normally
formed of a crater. Cups were broken on the funeral stake and shut up in
the tomb. This was Greek funeral ritual which consecrated the dead to the
infernal Dionysus to ensure their eternal salvation. Thus trade in wine and
drinking vessels also conveyed Dionysiac beliefs. Altar-hearths for domestic
worship have been discovered in houses on the oppidum of La Roque, near
Fabregues (Herault). They are accompanied by curious vases pierced at
the bottom before firing - a custom which does not appear to have been
local and which must have been imported. Furthermore, certain local
5°o THE GREEK ADVENTURE
divinities were given Hellenic names: the cult of Heracles was of long
standing along the road which bore his name and a nymph Pyrene is also
mentioned, whom the hero seduced on his way, as well as an Aphrodite
Pyrenaea.
Some fine excavations at Enserune, an oppidum situated between
Narbonne and Beziers, have yielded the best proof of these contributions.
In about 250 an Ibero-Celtic town replaced the Iberian town there. It
spread out widely in a checker-board design, until its destruction by the
Cimbri in about 100. It continued to exist in a reconstructed form up to the
time of Tiberius, when the inhabitants finally abandoned the heights for
the plain. Marseilles trade brought in Mediterranean products, particu¬
larly wine (amphorae stamped by Rhodes have been discovered there).
Coins were numerous and more than a quarter of them originated from
Marseilles (the others were minted by native cities of the region or by the
Volcae, money from Spanish colonies and Republican denarrii). Large
pithoi carried emblems of ears of corn, clusters of grapes, and Ionic
columns.
Thus southern Gaul from the Alps to the Pyrenees really was a ‘Greek
Gaul, to quote Justin again. This was not because Marseilles exercised
political supremacy; it was because its trade spread new tastes and a new
way of life. This world remained fundamentally different from the purely
Celtic world of the interior where civilization remained rough and more
strictly Gallic, despite undeniable Greek contributions. From 125, Rome
occupied the country in order to strengthen communications with its
Spanish provinces, and soon created the Transalpine province with Narbo
Martius as capital which was called Narbonensis from the time of
Augustus. The conquest rapidly altered the balance of power, although
until 49 Marseilles remained independent and even in possession of a vast
territory. But the oppida in Provence which had resisted were savagely des¬
troyed and even in Languedoc, where they had preferred to yield and
therefore had continued to exist, trade deliberately turned towards Italy
as is seen from the abundance of Roman coins. Marseilles was already de¬
clining, even before its political collapse, and the Via Domitia, the great
road the Romans built, was intentionally built a fair distance from Agde,
which had been the principal centre of its trade. Rome had replaced the
Phocaean city and in the Roman period it was nothing but a dead town, a
university town, still jealous of the Hellenism it had preserved for so many
centuries. But it had left its stamp on the south of France and this did not
disappear: if Narbonensis enjoyed an incomparable civilization, it was
because it had been ploughed by Greek merchants and impregnated with
their civilization since the earliest Archaic period.
The Iberians of Spain

The Iberian population had continued to exist on the Mediterranean coast
of Spain and in the land of Tartessus, whilst the Celts had occupied all of
BEYOND POLITICAL FRONTIERS 5°!
Meseta and mixed closely with the autochthons in the upper valley of the
Ebro under the name of Geltiberians. Their hellenization, like that of their
celticized brothers of Languedoc-Roussillon, was of ancient date.
The principal colony of Marseilles, Emporiae, developed brilliantly. The
town was situated in the rich grain country of Ampurdan, between the
mouths of the Fluvia and the Ter which made possible easy relations with
the hinterland. The new town (Neapolis) was established, perhaps at the
end of the sixth century, on the continent opposite the island of Palaeopolis,
and spread so much that its enclosure had to be enlarged. Most of the
monuments there date from the Hellenistic period: an agora edged by a
portico beside a large cistern; a temple of Asclepius where a wonderful cult
statue in the style of Phidias has been discovered; some fairly ordinary
houses with three or four rooms, sometimes decorated with mosaics, one
bearing a dedication to the Good Daemon. The native agglomeration of
Indica was right next to it.
Commercial relations with the natives were still based on the exchange
of mining products and grain for wine, oil, vases, and objets d’art. There
again, they led to rapid hellenization, primarily evident in Iberian art.
Buildings were well bonded and utilized Greek columns when the occasion
offered. Veritable temples in antis were built at Cerro de los Santos and at
Llano de la Consolacion. Sculpture reached its zenith as from the fourth
century but mainly in the third and continued to produce interesting
works until the beginnings of the Empire. Sanctuaries have yielded a great
abundance of very original statuary representing a rich bestiary as well as
human figures. At Cerro de los Santos alone, a remarkable collection of
two hundred statues of draped or praying women has been found.
The masterpiece, the ‘Woman of Elche’, well deserves its reputation. It
is difficult to know what most to admire here - the troubled face with its
hard and haughty majesty or the heavy weight of decoration: a compli¬
cated hair-style surmounted by a mitre, a flat band with a large wheel with
a central umbo hanging on either side of the head, and a rich three-tiered
necklace. This enigmatic woman, queen or priestess, is unmistakably a
local type and her adornment recalls certain Carthaginian works. But the
technique is indisputably Greek, particularly the relief of the face and the
draping of the close-fitting bodice and the cloak with its wide folds. It is
difficult to believe that an artist who could achieve such an expressive
portrait could have been taught anywhere but in a Hellenic studio. It
was first thought that this work could be compared with Attic art of the
fifth century, but it was obviously later and can date back only to the be¬
ginning of the Hellenistic period (according to certain sources, to the
middle of the fourth), as do the great statues of Cerro de los Santos.
Minor art was equally hellenized. The bronzes of the sanctuary of
Despenaperros and of Castellar de Satiesteban, which are also very ornate
in the oriental style, evince strong Greek influence. Terra cotta figurines,
particularly those of Ibiza (Balearics), show both Punic and Greek contri¬
butions. But large-scale painting and ceramics were really Hellenic in their
inspiration. A rich decoration of animals and human figures replaced

geometric motifs on vases from the fourth century. The pottery of San
Miguel de Liria depicted hunting and fishing scenes or ritual ceremonies,
with slightly barbarous expressiveness.
It is necessary to recognize the limitations of this hellenization, which
rapidly diminished the higher one climbed up the Meseta and which did
not inhibit other influences, notably Carthaginian. But, as in southern
Gaul, the resulting changes were no less profound; it was characteristic
of both zones that statuary, one of the most brilliant creations of Greek
civilization, so fascinated the natives that they copied it to express their
own ideas. There also, when the Romans conquered Spain to snatch it
from the Carthaginians (Roman intervention began in 219, with the first
landing of troops at Emporiae, therefore much earlier than in Transalpine
Gaul), they found a country which was no longer really barbarous - and
this they owed to the Greeks.
THE CENTRAL MEDITERRANEAN
At the beginning of the Hellenistic period, the central Mediterranean was

divided between two aristocratic republics, which were first allies and very
shortly afterwards rivals. They were Carthage and Rome, where the in¬
fluence of Hellenism was even stronger than in the barbarous nations of
Europe.
Changes at Carthage
The old Phoenician colony no longer shut itself up in the isolation of the
preceding centuries. But its openness made its social troubles more severe.
The people resented the power of the aristocracy and claimed their rights
after the defeats of the first Punic war and the mercenaries’ revolt. A great
family, the Barcidae, took advantage of the situation to place itself at the
head of the people and invade Spain in private ventures, reminiscent of
those of Alexander and his Diadochi. In turn, Hamilcar (who landed there
in 237), his son-in-law Hasdrubal and his son Hannibal extended their
power. The state they created in Spain was based on an army of mercen¬
aries and had many of the characteristics of a Hellenistic monarchy.They
followed a policy of assimilation, married Iberian princesses, founded New
Carthage (Cartagena) as their capital, and minted money on which they
appeared as kings, their heads crowned by a diadem.
Carthage again traded with the Greek world, after an interruption of
almost two centuries. It maintained particularly close relations with
Ptolemaic Egypt, Rhodes and Campania. Coins appeared in the fourth
century (in Punic Sicily, even from the end of the fifth for the payment of
mercenaries): the Phoenician standard was the same as that of the
Ptolemies. There were Carthaginian merchants at Athens and Delos.
503
Thebes had a proxenos at Carthage. Plautus was drawing his inspiration
from a Greek comedy when he made a Punic merchant be put ashore
at Calydon where he was given hospitality. Commerce was based on
barter offoodstuffs from the Maghreb and minerals imported from blackest
Africa (gold from the placers of Gambia) or from the British Isles (tin)
in return for Greek manufactured products. There were numerous
Hellenic objects at Carthage itself or in the necropolises of Cape Bon:
pottery, bronzes and ivories. There is a beautiful figured vase, originating
from Alexandria, with the head of a man on its lid, and a frog underneath:
the Egyptian symbol of the resurrection.
Changes occurred in art as a result. Doubtless not large-scale art: the
temples were still Phoenician in type and their sculptured ornamentation
was only later inspired by Greek models. But religious and funeral sculp¬
ture became hellenized. The stelai of the tophet assumed the form of small
temples with frontons, acroteria, entablatures and Ionic columns. Relig¬
ious symbols or decorative elements originating from Greece appeared
(hermae, satyrs, craters, foliage). The sarcophagi discovered in the ‘necro¬
polis of the Rabs’ at Saint Monica were decorated with statues of divinities
on their covers: the best of them shows a Tanit identified with Isis and clad
in a costume representing the skin of a bird. Clay modellers copied
Sicilian terracottas and the makers of bronzes Italiot oenochoae. These in¬
fluences can partially be explained by the settlement at Carthage of Greek
artists, the most famous of whom was the sculptor Boethus.
The minds of men were also sensitive to the prestige of Greek cults. The
gods invoked in the Carthaginian oath at the time of the treaty concluded
between Hannibal and Philip v on the morrow of Cannae had Hellenic
names, as though the Carthaginian wanted to show that the two pantheons
were close together. Demeter and Kore had been solemnly introduced in
396, in expiation of a sacrilege Hamilcar committed during the siege of
Syracuse. A temple was consecrated to them on the hill of Bordj Djedid
and a cult in Greek style rendered to them by Greek women settled at
Carthage. Excavations have revealed numerous vases for multiple libations
(1cernoi) and, in tombs, statuettes of the two goddesses, one carrying the
other, of Greek workmanship. In the fourth century, Dionysus was
identified with an infant god of Cana, Shadrapa. Dionysiac signs can be
seen on the funeral stelai of the tophet: crater, ivy, vine and ithyphallic
satyr. Bunches of grapes and phalloi have been discovered in the sepulchres.
A new eschatology appeared, in response to the same anguish experi¬
enced in the Hellenistic world.The practice of incineration, borrowed from
the Greeks, was evidence of belief in a subtle soul which could be liberated
by fire. Motifs symbolizing this soul, sphinx and sirens, were numerous on
the tombs: for example, on the mausoleum of a Numidian prince at
Dougga (second century). People turned to Demeter and Dionysus to
solicit eternal salvation, because the old beliefs in the dark cavern of
scheol no longer sufficed.
All these contributions certainly remained superficial. Punic art lazily
5«4 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
continued to manufacture its traditional trumpery. The vital gods were

still Baal Hammon and Tanit and the horrible cult rendered to them at
the tophet was hardly humanized by the substitution of animals for children
at the sacrifice. Even with its doors wide open to the Mediterranean -
that is to say to the Greek world - Carthage stayed loyal to its Semitic
past.
In the Carthaginian Empire

Greek influence seems to have spread partially to the vast empire that
Carthage gradually created.
The case of Spain, where Punic and Greek colonies co-existed, has
already been mentioned. Corsica and Sardinia, where the indigenous
element remained predominant (Ligurian in the first case, Iberian in the
second) had to accept the hegemony of Carthage until their annexation by
Rome in 238. But Hellenic influence is perceptible there. Recent excava¬
tions in Corsica have shown that Alalia remained partially Greek. In
Sardinia, where a few Greek inscriptions have been discovered, Olbia
had commercial contacts with Marseilles.
The Maghreb was first partly controlled by the Punics, and remained
imbued with Carthaginian traditions even after the fall of the metropolis,
but Hellenism in its turn made progress there. Towns expanded. Berber
kingdoms (Moorish and Numidian one should rather say, at that time)
appeared in northern Morocco and in the Algero-Tunisian Tell in the
fourth century. Their kings subsequently adopted an oriental court
protocol, instituted a royal cult and coined money. They copied the
Barcid state of Spain, as appears from the study of monetary types.
Thus Greek influence at second hand turned them into tiny Hellenistic
principalities.
Recent excavations in Morocco have revealed several towns which were
susceptible to Greek influence, though they still retained the Punic way of
life, particularly their rudimentary dwellings. Tamuda, nine miles from
the sea in the region of Tetouan, was familiar with Hippodamian town-
planning with an agora and a checker-board plan. Lixus, an ancient
Phoenician trading post at the mouth of the Louquos (opposite modern
Larache), had two Hellenistic temples undoubtedly dedicated to Heracles-
Melqart and constructed with fine masonry - as was the enclosure built
round the town in about 100. Sala, at the estuary of the Bou Regreg, had a
building in Hellenistic bonding. Volubilis, in the interior, was also
equipped with a carefully built rampart; it had three pre-Roman temples,
one of Punic type and the other two Greek. The coins of Tingi (Tangiers)
bore a head of Ceres. A Hadad shown as Oceanus has been found at Lixus.
It is a moot point whether the wonderful Greek bronzes of Volubilis or
Lixus were introduced by trade in the Hellenistic period or merely col¬
lected by Juba 11. In any case, it can certainly be established that Hellenism
penetrated everywhere - despite the resistance of the Punico-Mauretanian
BEYOND POLITICAL LRONTIERS 5°5
civilization - and that this penetration can be almost entirely attributed to

the deliberate will of the Moorish kings who were hellenized well before
Juba ii.
A Greek Rome
At Rome, hellenization was an old story. Two dates are vitally important
in its development: 343, when an agreement signed with Capua turned
eyes and minds towards a deeply hellenized area, and 272, with the
capture of Tarentum which completed the conquest of Magna Graecia.
Thenceforth, political and military contacts with the Hellenistic world, the
progressive conquest of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, and the
influx of oriental slaves all accelerated the movement. Troubled spirits
tried in vain to stop it: Cato the elder introduced sumptuary laws, but
himself learned Greek in his old age: in 186, the Senate harshly repressed
the Bacchanalia, but did not succeed in expelling Bacchus or in con¬
quering mysticism. If it was irresistible, it was because social conditions had
changed profoundly. The city was divided between the aristocracy and the
plebs, both equally bent on pleasure. The aristocratic power wielded by
oriental kings fascinated the minds of the most noble and the time was not
far off when unscrupulous imperatores would impose their law on the state.
The people themselves were sensitive to the radical preaching of some
Greek political thinkers.
Large-scale trade developed, based quite naturally on the Greek model.
After 326, Rome minted its first silver coins in Campania, the ‘Romano-
Campanian didrachmae’. Its initiation into a monetary economy was so
rapid that it abandoned the Greek standard in 289 in favour of the libral
system and in 269 moved its workshops into the town itself. In 179, it built
a large Hellenistic-type port in Ostia. Thenceforth, negotiatores and Italian
bankers no longer differed in any way from their oriental competitors -
except that they were even greedier.
The most obvious changes took place in daily life. The traditional house
with its atrium was doubled at the back by a peristyle. Floors were covered
with mosaics and walls with paintings - beautiful specimens were preserved
at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Marble tables and bronze beds replaced the
old wooden furniture. The rich acquired a taste for luxurious clothing and
for highly refined dishes at their meals. The urban surroundings were im¬
proved, not only by buildings but also by the accumulation of pillaged
oriental masterpieces. Sulla brought back a capital from the Olympiem,
and the boat loaded with works of art discovered in the open sea at Madhia
(Tunisia) may perhaps have been bringing back his booty. Verres was far
from an isolated example.
The effect on the public mind was fatal. The old patriarchal society col¬
lapsed. The authority of the paterfamilias was challenged. Marriages for
money and divorces multiplied. An unrestrained quest for pleasure
succeeded the austerity of former times.
5°6 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
The Scipionic Circle

But Hellenism was like ‘Pandora’s Box’. A new refinement appeared in
some aristocratic circles, notably in the Scipionic circle. Scipio Africanus
caused a scandal by shaving every day and walking around in Greek cos¬
tume; he could already count Ennius as one of his friends. Scipio
Aemilianus had been taught by Greek masters and had the use of King
Perseus’ library, brought back by Aemilius Paulus. He collected close
friends of high calibre around him - Greeks or men who had been won
over to Hellenism: Polybius, Laelius called the Wise, Terence, Panaetius
of Rhodes.
Some bold thinking went on within the circle. Government by the
people was considered the worst of all systems and the seizure of power by
enlightened aristocrats was justified. Scepticism increased, although re¬
ligion was regarded as a wonderful instrument in the hands of a skilful
politician. Stoicism exercised a great attraction. The vulgar forms of
Hellenism were scorned as subversive of morality. Aemilianus’ censure was
like Cato’s: Scipio told the people ‘that he wanted to be of use to it as a
collar of nails is to a dog’ and he expressed his violent disapproval on a
visit to a dancing school. Simplicity and purity were preached and prac¬
tised: the meal Tubero offered at Scipio’s funeral was so frugal that the
people complained. In short, the most intelligent representatives of the
aristocracy were delighted to welcome the purified forms of Hellenism,
while scorning its most lowly aspects.
The Awakening of Literature and Art

It is appropriate to consider these purified forms which gave to Rome such
a brilliant future.
Literature, hitherto rudimentary, was really born in the second half of
the third century. Drama and the epic appeared first. Tragedy and comedy
replaced the primitive dramatic forms - native or originating from the
Etruscans and Oscans - and borrowed their subjects from Greece. This was
particularly clear in the comedy of Greek manners, the palliata (from the
name of the pallium, Greek cloak). The epic quite naturally found its in¬
spiration in the great conflicts between Rome and Carthage, but all the
methods it used were Greek. The old Latin verse, the Saturnian, quickly
disappeared in favour of Greek measures. History developed at the same
time, but the first annalists, Q. Fabius Pictor and L. Cincius Alimentus,
only thought it possible to write in Greek.
The peoples of hellenized Italy, particularly southern Italy, played a
considerable role in this creation, which was primarily an imitation. Livius
Andronicus, a Tarentine slave who was later freed, translated the Odyssey
and wrote comedies and tragedies on the Trojan cycle (particularly dear to
Rome, where the myth of the arrival of Aeneas in Latium had long been
widespread). He founded a college of poets on the model of the associations
of Greece. Naevius, a citizen of Campanian origin, sang of the first Punic
507
war in his Bellum Poenicum and wrote comedies and tragedies. Plautus, an
Umbrian, composed comedies, all drawn from Middle or New Comedy,
with a farcical zest tempered by the most delicate of poetry. Ennius, a
Messapian who received Roman citizenship, extolled the greatness of
Rome in his Annals and imitated Euripides in psychological tragedies.
Hellenic influence was equally strong in the next generation. Accius, the
greatest of the tragic writers, also imitated Euripides. Comic writers mixed
the plots of several Greek comedies together by the method of ‘contamina¬
tion’. The best of them, Terence, a former African slave, was completely
imbued with all that was most human in Hellenism. This Berber who
translated Greek plays into Latin is one of the best examples of the unity of
the Mediterranean world.
In the first century, Lucretius gave wonderful lyrical expression to the
philosophy of Epicurus. Cicero handled Isocrates’ periods with incom¬
parable authority. Sallust took Thucydides as his ideal. Catullus was as
much an Alexandrian in his intimate confidences as in his mythological
and gallant Epithalamiumfor Thetis and Peleus. The poets of the Augustan age
rapturously adopted Hellenic forms. Horace borrowed the metres of
Alcaeus and Sappho and exclaimed (Ars Poetica, 323): ‘To the Greeks, the
Muse gave native wit, to the Greeks she gave speech in well-rounded phrase;
they craved naught but glory.’ Virgil successively wrote bucolics, a didactic
poem and an epic, like the masters of Alexandria. Hellenistic influence was
even more apparent in the fiery and conventional carmina of the elegiacs.
All Roman literature of the Republican or Augustan periods is only
distinguishable from contemporary Hellenistic literature by the language
in which it was written. This is not to say that it did not have its own
characteristics, as did those of Alexandria, Cos or Athens. Virgil is the most
typical example. His Bucolics and Georgies revive themes untiringly treated
by the Alexandrians, but in the new spirit of a return to the land advocated
by Augustus. The Aeneid tried to be both an Iliad and an Odyssey, but it was
completely imbued with Roman patriotism and devotion to the emperor
and his race.
Hellenization was an old story in art: the temple of the Aventine triad
had been decorated by Greek artists, Damophilus and Gorgasus, at the
beginning of the fifth century. But Rome remained a modest town where
roofs, so it was said, were still made of shingle at the time of Pyrrhus. Its
appearance improved and gradually took on a monumental character.
Marble was used on an increasing scale. Basilicas were built on the Forum:
the Basilica Porcia (184) and the Basilica Aemilia (179) 5 but Rome did not
have its stone theatre, built by Pompey, until 52. Greek architects came to
Rome: Hermodorus ofSalamis (Cyprus) was brought there by Q_. Caecilius
Metellus Macedonicus and built the temples of Jupiter Stator and Juno
on the Campus Martius in the middle of a vast portico (146) for him, before
he erected a temple of Mars for Junius Brutus, consul in 138. These were
the first marble temples in Rome. In actual fact, Greek marble peripteral
temples gradually replaced the Etrusco-Italic brick temples rising on a high
podium. Greek orders replaced the Tuscan order. The sanctuaries of Largo
Argentina illustrate this development: Temple C from the end of the fourth
century and temple A from the third are Etrusco-Italic, but a Corinthian
peristasis was added to the latter in the first century; the round temple B
(beginning of second century) is in Hellenic style. The first of the neigh¬
bouring temples of the Forum Olitorium (second and first centuries) is
Doric peripteral, the second Ionic peripteral, but the third has columns on
three sides only. Outside Rome, the imposing sanctuary of Fortuna
Primigenia on the acropolis of Praeneste at least deserves mention, with its
harmonious effect of terraces and superimposed porticos, culminating in a
hemicycle and a tholos, possibly built in the second century or at the least in
Sulla’s time.
Hellenization was equally apparent in sculpture. The cult of familial
imagines and the glorification of heroes quickly developed portrait art,
which further emphasized Hellenistic realism. The historic bas-relief was a
parallel development. After Pydna, Aemilius Paulus consecrated a pillar at
Delphi, decorated with battle scenes to celebrate his victory: a Greek
artist glorified the Greek defeat for the victorious imperator. At Rome itself
the first example appears to be the ‘altar’, said to be of Domitius
Ahenobarbus in about 40 bc. Neo-Attic sculptors copied the great classical
works more and more frequently: the most famous of these was Pasiteles
who received Roman citizenship in 89.
Painting appeared in 300 with Fabius Pictor who, despite his high
nobility, painted episodes from the second Samnite war in the temple of
Salus on the Quirinal. The earliest preserved record seems to be a fresco
of the Esquiline depicting warlike scenes (about 140).
Thought and Mysticism

The most solid-minded of peoples acquired a taste for philosophy. In 155
Athens sent the scholarchs of its most famous schools (Lyceum, Academy,
Porch) as ambassadors to Rome. Carneades caused a scandal there by two
contradictory lectures on the same theme. The Scipionic circle was a
powerful centre of thought and it was not by chance that Cicero chose it
for the framework of his philosophical dialogues. Philosophers soon
flocked to Rome and their influence was no less lasting, despite the jeers
they often encountered.
The pragmatic character of Euhemerism had great appeal. The harsh
school of Stoicism attracted great minds. Panaetius of Rhodes was the
favourite of the Scipios. Tiberius Gracchus was the fervent disciple of the
Stoic Blossius of Cumae. Posidonius of Apamea was the friend of Pompey
and took some part in politics. Neo-Pythagoreanism, which had already
attracted Appius Claudius and Ennius, triumphed in the first century; it
was often linked with Stoicism, as in the case of Diodotus who was a
guest at Cicero’s house. Pythagorean chapels multiplied, under the in¬
fluence of P. Nigidius Figulus, a mystagogue and thinker, and also a
friend of Cicero. The great orator, with customary instability, embraced
509
each system in turn: the epicureanism of Lucretius (he was his first
publisher), Stoicism in the Tusculans, Pythagoreanism in the wonderful
Dream of Scipio, and the doctrine of the New Academy in his last dialogues.
Law took on a less formal and more humane appearance, as a result of
Greek influence. Arbitration became current procedure. The magistrates
took a hitherto unknown principle into consideration, bona fides.
If the old Roman religion, with its fundamental animism and its bizarre
ritual continued to exist, a process of hellenization which had begun in the
Archaic period continued. The great gods of the Roman pantheon had
long since been identified with Greek gods. With the development of
Greek ritual, Apollo, who was so Greek that he was the only god to keep
his own name, promoted the rise of an open and fraternal religion, in com¬
plete contrast with traditional cold ritualism. He successively fostered the
renaissance of Pythagoreanism and the renewal of Sullan sibyllism. Ceres
assumed the sad and mystical face of Demeter, mother of Persephone, and
was worshipped in the Greek manner in the sacrum Cereris when matrons
observed nine days of fast and sexual abstinence. Venus, an ancient daemon
of female fertility, became the protecting god of great ambitious men, like
Sulla, Pompey and Caesar.
But the traditional Greek gods were not enough for the Romans - any
more than they were for the Greeks themselves. Oriental mysticism in¬
vaded Rome, notably during the terrible crisis of the second Punic war.
After Cannae, they consulted Delphi, and in 212 offered Apollo new games
in the Greek manner. As these means proved ineffective, they brought the
Great Mother of Pessinus from Pergamum and solemnly enthroned her on
the Palatine in 204. The mysteries of Bacchus appealed to all those people
unable to distinguish between mysticism and the most naturist cults. In
186, the Senate had to deal severely with the scandalous orgies of the
Bacchanalia. A horrible repression ensued, during which seven thousand
arrests were made, most of them followed by execution.
Beneath all these layers of hellenization, the old Roman base certainly
continued to exist, with its materialist and pragmatic character and its
mistrust of hypotheses and quests for a more beautiful life. It has been
nicely put that in Latin the names of the vegetables are Latin, those of the
flowers Greek. But the wave of Hellenism was irresistible, because the same
needs and aspirations were felt both in Italy and in the eastern Mediter¬
ranean basin. From the third century, Rome was a Hellenistic citv. Its
best citizens did not forget their debt. Cicero wrote to his brother: ‘Re¬
member that you are commanding Greeks, who have civilized all the
nations by teaching them sweetness and humanity.’
In Subject Italy
In Italy, now politically entirely subject to Rome, Greek influences re¬
mained strong, especially in two regions they had entered since the Archaic
period.
5io THE GREEK ADVENTURE
In Etruria, the arts were enjoying one last revival and showed Hellenistic
influence everywhere. This applied as much to statuary, which produced
high class pieces such as the ‘Minerva’ of Arezzo or the ‘Arringatore’ of
Florence, as to the funerary arts, which produced a varied selection of
objects: urns decorated with bas-reliefs, their lids often bearing portraits
which carried realism to the point of caricature: hypogea decorated with
large frescoes (the Francois tomb or the tomb of Typhon, which may date
from the first century). Terracotta statues (‘seated Apollo’ of Falerii, the
fronton of ‘Dionysus and Ariadne’ and the Galatian frieze of Civita Alba)
show a perfect knowledge of Greek technique and often reveal a
pronounced taste for the moving baroque style of Pergamum.
Ceramics appeared in Campania which took the place of Italiot pottery
(this disappeared at the beginning of the third century) and flooded the
western market for over two centuries. They were mainly manufactured at
Gales and Teanum Sidicinum and imitated floral Hellenistic decoration,
white on a black base, or bowls with reliefs — a cheap substitute for metallic
vases. Large-scale art was equally hellenized, notably the frescoes of
Oscan hypogea at Paestum or the idols of the sanctuary of Fondo Paturelli
at Capua, with their powerful archaizing pungency. Love of spectacle was
keen here - Pompeii had a theatre from the beginning of the second
century.
AFRICA AND ARABIA
Even the deserts of Africa and Arabia were not insuperable obstacles to
the penetration of Hellenism, but, not surprisingly, it was much more
superficial there.
,
Greek Scholars Merchants and Soldiers in Nubia
Long-standing relations had existed between Egypt and deepest Africa by
way of the middle valley of the Nile: Homer knew of the Pygmies and
evoked their battles with the cranes; Herodotus described the journey
between the first and fourth cataracts as far as a Meroe, which can only be
Napata. But relations were later interrupted because of the very great
weakness of Egypt. They were brilliantly resumed when the Ptolemies
re-established a strong authority.
Two factors contributed to this revival - first, intellectual curiosity. The
problem of the flooding of the Nile continued to arouse passionate interest.
In the fourth century two theories divided scholars: Ephorus took the
effect to be the cause and thought that the flood was due to the accumula¬
tion of water in crevasses from which it re-emerged in summer like a sweat;
according to others (possibly Eudoxus of Gnidos), the Nile had its source in
the temperate southern zone where summer rains (similar to our winter
rains), swelled the river. The scholars of the Hellenistic period, perhaps
51 1
following Aristotle, who is said to have asked Alexander to make the

appropriate tests, thought that summer rains in Ethiopia were the cause of
the inundation - a partial but truthful explanation.
Cartographers also instituted an exploration in depth. Eratosthenes,
utilizing earlier works by Philon, knew the latitude of Meroe and he made
the latitude of this town the southern side of his map of the world. He knew
that the Nile described a large loop in the form of an inverted ‘N’ between
the second and the sixth cataracts and he was ignorant of neither the
Atbara nor the Blue Nile.
This progress was only possible because economic contacts had resumed,
undoubtedly encouraged by military operations. The Nile, broken up by
cataracts and encircled by a totally inhospitable desert, was not a practic¬
able means of penetration. Trade followed caravan trails: in the west, by a
route which was independent of the river, known as the Forty-Day Road;
in the east, primarily by a route which cut and re-cut the Nile at Kerma,
Napata and Meroe and which presupposed an Egypt strong enough to
guard the desolate passage between the second and fourth cataracts.
Philadelphus sent an expedition there which was also the occasion for ex¬
tensive scientific research. But the elder Pliny stated that the cities down¬
stream from Meroe had all disappeared, which fully confirms that, apart
from the passage of a few embassies or explorers, the no-man’s-land in the
late Hellenistic period was only crossed by rare nomads coming to sell or
rather to barter their products with the last Egyptian outposts.
Only the Dodecaschoenus remained firmly in the Ptolemies’ hands. This
was the region twelve schoeni long to the south of Aswan, where there were
small stations: Philae, the religious metropolis where the Ptolomies still
continued to make their offerings; Ajuala, where trade was done with the
nomad Blemyes around the temple of a native god, Mandoulis; Pselchis
right in the south, a frontier post clinging to a strip of arable land and
guarding the entrance to the Wadi Allaki where gold was extracted
from the auriferous quartz. It was also an important market because
as many demotic and Greek ostraca as Meroitic graffiti have been found
there.
As they were not able to make any real use of the Nile or the desert, the
Ptolemies attempted to explore the Red Sea, which had already been
frequented by the great pharaohs. Philadelphus founded a series of out¬
posts there - Myos Hormos, Philotera, Berenice and Ptolemais ‘of the
Hunts’. Merchandise followed a track marked out with wells between
Meroe and Ptolemais, which was on the sea at almost the same latitude. It
was loaded on to ships for the journey up to Berenice or Myos Hormos and
reached the Nile Valley again at Coptus by trails which took twelve days in
the first case, and six in the second, and which were marked out with wells
or cisterns. Philadelphus also had the Necao canal finished or put into
working order, a sort of forerunner of the Suez Canal, joining the bottom
of the Gulf of Suez to the Nile and not to the Mediterranean. Despite so
much effort, little trade followed this route because of navigation difficulties
5J2 THE GREEK ADVENTURE
on the Red Sea where a constant north wind blew, making the return
journey difficult, and where the western coast was a real mineral desert,
peopled with savage nomads, Troglodytes or Ichthyophagi. However,
navigators grew bolder in the late Hellenistic period and went beyond
Bab-el-Mandeb: they even reached the coast of Somaliland (the old
country of Pount).
Defying geography, as it were, real trade between Africa and the Medi¬
terranean world took place by making a diversion via Arabia. The goods
travelled across the desert to the sea, crossed it on barques' made of skins,
travelled on the caravan trail along the western coast of Arabia and
reached Gaza, often by way of Petra.
If the Ptolemies took so much trouble to secure possible routes to tap the
wealth of Africa, it was because there was a keener and keener demand for
it. Elephants had a military potential which was all the more important
because their rivals, the Seleucids, could easily obtain them from India:
their role in Hellenistic tactics was somewhat similar to that of tanks in
modern armies. They continued to come by the maritime route on
specially designed ships. But above all else, there was the gold of the Upper
Nile and the Ethiopian rivers, the topazes, emeralds, ebony, ivory, ostrich
eggs and feathers, the great wild beasts (alive, or in the form of skins),
negro slaves and even iron ore.
Hellenism in Ethiopia and Blackest Africa

It is not surprising that Hellenic civilization penetrated so deeply into
Africa, as had pharaonic civilization in former times - and for the same
reasons. This is particularly clear at Meroe, where a powerful kingdom of
Ethiopia (in the old meaning of the term) was formed. The climate was
tolerable: in summer, rains accompanied the rising of the sun to its zenith
so that a thorny vegetation was able to grow and this gave rise to flourish¬
ing stock-raising. There were trees, which facilitated the smelting of iron
ore, plentiful throughout the region: the lai'ge number of slag heaps from
the Hellenistic period, brought to light by excavations, prove that the
nickname of the ‘African Birmingham’ given to Meroe is no exaggeration.
Its position at a genuine crossroads of land and river routes explains its
commercial role: the valleys of the White Nile, the Blue Nile and the
Atbara, a network of tracks leading towards central Africa by Kordofan
and Darfur, towards the high plateaux of Ethiopia, towards Egypt by
Napata and Kerma and towards the Red Sea.
Although the Meroitic civilization had an undeniable originality of its
own — most obvious in the abandonment of Egyptian writing and the
appearance in about 200 of a new writing — the influence of Hellenism was
great. Moreover, it owed as much to Syrian as to Egyptian influences
(which is easily explained by the close relations with Arabia and Petra).
The bath at the royal palace at Meroe is in pure Hellenistic style and the
tombs of the kings and the great men concealed abundant Greek objects
(bronze lamps and tripods, gems, intaglios).
BEYOND POLITICAL FRONTIERS 5*3
Furthermore, Greek influence went beyond this, but is difficult to

measure for want of methodical excavations. Four small metal bowls have
been discovered in central Abyssinia, not far from Maqalle, which certainly
came from Hellenistic Egypt. But the question still remains whether they
reached this high plateau by a trail leading from Meroe to Axum (where a
cippus of Horus on the crocodiles has been noted) or whether they landed
at Thio, on the Red Sea (where Alexandrian amphorae have been
discovered), and then crossed the Dankali desert.
Even outside these settled environments, where it was intense, Greek
influence undoubtedly also reached blackest Africa. A copper mumiform
statuette of Osiris of a late period has been found in Katanga, but the
possibility that it was brought there much later by Arab traders cannot be
excluded. In any case, despite hazardous theories as to its local origin, it is
certain that metallurgy in iron spread to the whole of blackest Africa from
Meroe. As Meroe owed its ability to work the metal to Ptolemaic Egypt,
the African continent was indirectly indebted to Hellenism for this
technique which completely revolutionized daily life.
The Arab Crossroads

Arabia formed an enormous corner between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic
kingdoms. Its cruel climate had protected it from Alexander’s encroach¬
ments, as it had previously from those of the Persians. However, it played
an important role in the economic life of the Hellenistic world, and this in
two ways.
On one hand, its southern portion (Arabia Felix), was relatively fertile
and abundant spices (notably frankincense, myrrh and cinnamon) grew
there. Four small Semitic kingdoms developed, Minaea, Sabaea,
Katabania and Hadramaut. They lived mainly from trade in spices, which
the Greek world used in considerable quantity for liturgical purposes and
for perfume and cooking.
On the other hand, Arabia formed a sort of hinge between Africa, Asia
and the Mediterranean world. Washed by the Red Sea and the Persian
Gulf, products came by sea from the African continent and the Indies. Its
nomad population — especially the Gerrhaeans who bordered the Persian
Gulf — were primarily caravaneers. Through their medium, the wealth of
east and west converged on Petra, as well as that of Arabia proper,
primarily spices, but also gold and wild animals (lions, tigers, leopards and
ostriches). The wonderful site of the town, an impregnable lair amidst its
amphitheatre of mountains, was described by Diodorus (2, 48) as ‘a rock,
which is exceedingly strong since it has but one approach, and using this
ascent they mount it a few at a time and thus store their possessions in
safety. And a large lake is also there, which produces asphalt in abundance,
and from it they derive not a little revenue.’ The Nabataeans, who had
their capital at Petra, then conveyed the treasures which collected there to
Gaza, the redistribution centre both for the Syrian ports and Alexandria.
This could be reached by sea or by a difficult route to Pelusium, un¬

doubtedly established during the period of Persian domination and passing
across a country of lagoons and dunes, without drinking water. From the
second century, Greek pottery and coins (many more Seleucid than
Ptolemaic pieces) show the increase in commercial relations with the
Mediterranean world.
The economic importance of Arabia explains the interest which both
scholars and the most powerful kings showed in it. In 312, Seleucus
attacked Petra; Philadelphus led a campaign in Arabia Felix which was as
disappointing as that of Augustus later. Theophrastus in his History of
Plants utilized information brought back by Anaxicrates in a periplus
undertaken on Alexander’s order. Eratosthenes described the four south
Arabian tribes. Agatharchides of Cnidos evoked - with excessive local
colour - a fabulous land completely suffused with the sweet scent of spices.
Hellenism in Arabia
However, Hellenic influence (which was in fact much more Syrian than
Egyptian) only penetrated slowly to the barbarous tribes and they re¬
mained fiercely attached to their traditions. At Petra, it only really appeared
with Aretas 111, called the Phil-Hellene (87-62), who inaugurated a policy
of expansion in Syria and had coins minted copying Seleucid types
(Aretas 11 had already minted coins but with no inscription). Buildings
were made more carefully; vases with floral decoration, imitating the
Hellenistic pottery of Palestine and Syria, began to be fired. But the won¬
derful tombs in Greco-Roman style with classical facades, for which Petra
is renowned, were certainly not erected until the Roman period.
Hellenism did not reach South Arabian kingdoms much before the first
century ad. It made a forceful impact, notably in sculpture - for example,
the wonderful statue of Timna known as ‘Lady Bar’at’, which shows
undeniable Parthian influence.
The weakness of the Hellenistic world, born of the rivalries between
monarchies, is the only reason why it remained dependent for its most
coveted luxury products on the barbarians of Arabia - who in their turn
exploited the refined tastes of the Greeks to the full: ‘. . . From all times’,
wrote Strabo (16, 4, 22) ‘these regions were considered very wealthy, and
that they sold aromatics and the most valuable stones for silver and gold,
but never expended with outsiders any part of what they received in
exchange.’
THE BACTRIAN KINGDOMS, INDIA AND CHINA
Alexander’s expedition to India opened unlimited eastward perspectives

to Hellenistic expansion. The conqueror had not, of course, been able to
penetrate as far as the Ganges basin because of the mutiny of his veterans,
and under his heirs, the Seleucids, his eastern satrapies were diminished
5*5
by the loss of a vastly elongated kingdom. But the contacts, once estab¬
lished, were not suspended and this was shown at the beginning of the third
century in the history of Asoka, the greatest India emperor of the Hellenis¬
tic period. Greek princes continued to reign over the immense region which
today is divided between the southern republics of the USSR, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and even part of the Indian Union. Better still, commercial
and cultural relations between India and the Mediterranean world grew
closer.
Asoka and the Greeks

Asoka (261-24?), the most powerful sovereign of the Mauryas, was one of
the most brilliant examples of these new contacts. The dynasty had been
founded in 313 by Chandragupta (the Sandracottus of the Greeks) and
had driven off Alexander’s prefects; it extended its authority widely, from
Arachosia to Bengal and from Afghanistan to Mysore. Asoka is well known
from the inscriptions which he scattered over his empire. This magnificent
epigraphic collection was composed of orders of Buddhist inspiration,
which were both confession and sermon: the sovereign had recently been
converted and took as his guide the Dharma (the Good Order, the Law)
which determined the essential virtues. The real message lay in the gift of
the Dharma, a charitable gift inspired by love of humanity, demanding a
difficult and dogged effort.
The inscriptions express an ideal of royalty comparable to that of the
Hellenistic ruler. There are resemblances between the titles; the oft re¬
peated formula, ‘the king friend of the gods, with the kindly face’ recalls
Ptolemaic and Seleucid formulae. Asoka loved men, in the same way
as the Greek monarchs declared they were philanthropists (friends of
humanity). In both cases, the essence of good government lay injustice,
which inspired in the ruler the desire to have all cases of litigation brought
before him. There was no mutual influence but the same conception
emerged in two worlds, which were no longer separate.
One essential difference remained: the Greek king was guided by
reason alone; Asoka was led by a faith, which he spread ceaselessly by
propagating the Law. This spirit of proselytism was clearly foreign to the
Hellenistic sovereign. On another score, Asoka was inspired by an ideal
which passed beyond earthly things: ‘What is more important that to gain
the heavens?’ he exclaimed. Elsewhere he can be seen a prey to remorse,
after a campaign which had entailed great slaughter: an unimaginable
sentiment in the Mediterranean of this period.
The inscriptions mention diplomatic relations with Greek sovereigns,
Antiochus 11, Ptolemy 11, Magas of Cyrene and Alexander (of Epirus?).
Furthermore the elder Pliny speaks of an embassy sent by Philadelphus to
an Indian prince, who must have been Asoka’s father. The texts show
evidence of a certain knowledge of the western world, which was called
iona (Ionian) — a word which designated both Iranians and Hellenes: he
knew that there were no Brahmans there. He noted the development of

the faith amongst the Greeks, undoubtedly colonists on the eastern
borders.
The discovery of a wonderful bilingual document (in Greek and
Aramaic) in southern Afghanistan, near Kandahar, on the site of
Alexandria of Arachosia, has shed light on this fairly enigmatic informa¬
tion.1 It confirms the king’s passionate proselytism in his anxiety to propa¬
gate the faith to Greeks and Iranians (amongst whom Aramaic was in wide
use as a language of culture) to the margins of his empire. ‘The king’,
according to one notable statement, ‘abstains from living beings just as
other men and all the king’s hunters and fishermen have ceased to fish.
And all those who were intemperate have ceased to be intemperate to the
extent of their ability. And they have become obedient to their father and
mother and to old people, contrary to what was formerly the custom.’
Furthermore, the two versions are slightly different, because there was a
clear intention to adapt the revelation to each nation in order to make the
Dharma more accessible: for example, Greeks could recognize a Pythagorean
prescription in the formula which recalled abstention from animal flesh,
a fundamental principle of Buddhism. This text opened up a new and
passionately interesting chapter in the history of the influence of oriental
cults on the Greeks of the Diaspora.
Greco-Bactrian and Greco-Indian Kingdoms

Contemporary with the reign of Asoka, events of great consequence dis¬
turbed the most easterly satrapies of the Seleucid empire, Bactria and
Sogdiana. Bactria was the plain situated between the Hindu Kush and the
Oxus (today Amou-Darya), with its capital at Bactria. Sogdiana, with the
beautiful oasis of Maracanda (Samarkand), lay between the Oxus and the
Jaxartes (today Syr-Dayra); Alexander had established one last Alexandria
on its banks. These two provinces of the steppes were wonderfully fertile
when irrigated. Apart from this, Bactria was one of the great communica¬
tion centres of Asia: routes coming from India and China met there and
continued across further Asia as far as the Mediterranean coast.
These regions were too far away from Antioch to stay under Seleucid
suzerainty for any length of time. Shortly before 250, the satrap governing
them proclaimed his independence, even allying with Parthia against his
former sovereign, and took the royal title under the name of Diodotus 1.
He inaugurated a line of thirty-nine kings, who are primarily known from
their coins, but also from a few western, Indian and Chinese texts, and who
reigned over the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms and then over Greco-Indian
ones for two hundred years. Their history is particularly obscure. The
monarchs, whose effigy always appeared on their coins (figure 87),
belonged to several families who might have constituted a sort of Hellenic
1 A second Buddhic inscription of Asoka’s, written in Greek, was discovered at Kandahar in
1964. It deals with sects.
military aristocracy. The boundaries of their states are uncertain. Several

princes often reigned simultaneously, either because rivals had divided
power or because viceroys were assisting kings in the administration of
their over-extensive conquests.
During the first period, the Bactrian kingdom extended its initial area.
Under Euthydemus 1, who seized power by assassinating Diodotus 11, and
under his son Demetrius 1, it comprised Arachosia (around Kandahar)
and Drangiana in the south, Aria and Margiana in the west, and part of
Ferghana in the east, apart from Bactria and Sogdiana. Euthydemus had
3 4
Figure 87 Coins of the Greek dynasts of Bactriana, which show a
powerful realism. Each prince appears there with his own specific
characteristics: 1, Antimachus I (190-180), wearing the Macedonian
causia, has ‘an intelligent head which evokes that of an Italian
condottiere’; 2, Heliocles I (155-140) seems almost a caricature; 3,
Eucratides I (171—155) wearing a helmet and with fleshy face,
protruding chin and thick neck, looks like a resolute adventurer; 4,
Euthydemus I (235-200) wears a diadem like Heliocles, has thick
features and a contemptuous look
to fight an attempt at reconquest, led by Antiochus n, who was finally wise

enough to bury the hatchet.
A new increase in territory was achieved by fearless princes who
dared to venture beyond the high barrier of the Hindu Kush, one of
the most impregnable in the world. They went towards India, which
was in a state of confusion when Maurya power collapsed after Asoka s
death. Their first object was to conquer the Kabul valley, a tributary
of the right bank of the Indus, and a natural route for all invasions:
they settled at Kapica (upper valley of the river, around Kapici) and
Gandhara (lower valley around Peshawar, tributary valley of the Kounar
and undoubtedly part of the Punjab with the important centre of Taxila).
Antimachus Theos and his son Demetrius 11 led successful expeditions
and numismatics prove that the kingdom, hitherto purely Iranian, was
extended towards India. Antimachus minted square coins on the Indian
model; with Demetrius (wearing a helmet trimmed with elephant hide),
bilingual inscriptions appeared, translating the Greek title into Prakrit
dialect. In about 170, Eucratides took power by a coup deforce when he
assassinated Demetrius 11. He largely occupied the Kabul valley, suffi¬
ciently to proclaim himself Megas (Great), but was killed by his son on his
return from his campaign.
The years following the death of Eucratides were particularly troubled.
They undoubtedly saw the final schism between the two kingdoms on
either side of the Hindu Kush: the Greco-Bactrian and Greco-Indian
states. Then began the glorious reign (155-130) of Menander (in Indian
Milanda), a Greek originating from Alexandria of the Caucasus - possibly
a simple villager by birth. Master of Kapica and Gandhara, he extended
his power by waging war in the Punjab up to the course of the Ravi, if not
even further. Allied with Indian princes, he led a victorious expedition to
Pataliputra (Patna). He then ruled over a kingdom extending at least
from Kabul to the Ravi and from Udyana to Arachosia and well deserved
the titles he boasted on his coins: Basileus basileon (king of kings) in Greek,
and maharajah, (great king) in Prakrit. He died while on a campaign,
possibly while trying to annexe Bactria.
He was greatly interested in Buddhism. A shrine in his name has been
discovered near Peshawar and his coins bore the Buddhist emblem - the
Wheel of the Law (Dharmatchakra). A text in Pali, the Milandapanha
(Questions of Milanda), shows him engaged in subtle philosophic dialogues
with a Buddhist. ‘He was an astonishing figure, this intelligent and
eloquent Greek, already so well adapted to the colonial environment that
he left behind in the Church of Buddha the reputation of a neophyte full of
deference, almost a saint’ (R. Grousset). It is difficult to decide if he were
genuinely converted. Some scholars think that the change in epithet on his
coins at the end of his reign marked the point when he became a Buddhist:
in actual fact, Soter (Saviour) was replaced by Dicaios (Just), translated
as Dhramika in the Indian inscription, possibly meaning ‘he who has the
Dharma as his ideal’.
Menander’s reign marked the zenith of oriental Hellenism. It was later
weakened by quarrels between dynasties or between kings. Above all, vast
population movements in the steppes of central Asia overwhelmed the
Greek states. The barbarian nomads beyond the Jaxartes and as far as the
Chinese frontiers were in a state of upheaval; they were Partho-Scythians
and Scythians of Iranian race. Further afield, stationary Indo-Europeans
(but not Iranians), the Yueh-chi (undoubtedly the Tochari of the Latin
texts) were settled in the oases of the Tarim basin. Towards the middle of
the second century, the Yueh-chi were violently driven back by the Hiong-
nou (probably ancestors of the Huns). They then exerted tremendous
pressure on the Scythians and Partho-Scythians, and soon followed them

in their onslaught towards Afghanistan and India.
In 130, the barbarians seized Sogdiana: the Hellas of Uzbekistan was
no more. In about 100, they conquered Bactria, and the Greeks could only
hold on in the north of the Hindu Kush in the small cantons of Badakshan.
The Greco-Indian realms continued to exist, but unity had been replaced
by fragmentation (five states can without doubt be distinguished) and there
was great political instability. Power passed from hand to hand and the
figure of one powerful sovereign, Antialcidas, can only be discerned with
difficulty. The Greek states disappeared from the Punjab in about 75, from
Gandhara in about 70, and from the upper valley of the Kabul which
formed the last stronghold of Hellenism in about 50.
A Eurasian Civilization
The most astonishing thing is that these Greco-Bactrian and then Greco-
Indian kingdoms were able to hold out for two centuries. Their passion¬
ately interesting history was only possible because of the forceful and skilful
condottieri; we can see their powerful or cunning profiles on the coins. Some
of them dared carry their weapons much further afield than Alexander, as
far as the central Ganges valley. Boasting the title of king and described by
the same epithets as Seleucid or Ptolemaic monarchs (sometimes even
before them: Antimachus Theos, Plato Epiphanes), they appear to have
administered their states in the Greek fashion, with the aid of strategi who
governed the satrapies and had meridarchs, group commanders, under
their command. The policy of urbanization seems to have been pursued
and we know of at least one Demetrias in Arachosia, founded by a
Demetrius, and one Dionysopolis in Gandhara.
It is impossible to obtain any idea of the numbers of Greeks settled in
these distant lands. Some may have been the grand-nephews of Hellenes
settled from very ancient times, but most of them must have been descen¬
dants of colonists established by Alexander or the first Seleucids. Natives
seem to have played a considerable role in administration and commerce.
Some appear to have received citizenship of the Greek poleis: dedicatory
inscriptions in grottoes near Bombay have preserved the names of Indians
who describe themselves as Tavanas, that is to say, Greeks.
The numerical disproportion and the lure of ancient and brilliant civiliza¬
tions explain why Greeks here came under native influence much more
than anywhere else. Much cross-breeding must have occurred: a Bactrian
prince such as Antimachus Theos had a typically Eurasian face. The in¬
fluence of local cults in the Greco-Indian realms was strong. The Greek
kings showed obvious sympathy for Buddhism, which was very widespread
at that time. Besides the attraction of such a humane doctrine of universal
compassion, it was natural that foreigners should turn towards the new
religion which was accessible to all, rather than towards traditional
brahminism, where the system of ‘colours’ (classes) was in its very essence
barely accessible to non-Aryans. The example of kings such as Menander
was widely followed. Nearly ten inscriptions in Prakrit, written in local

alphabets (it is characteristic that nothing in the way of Greek texts has
been found in that region), are Buddhist dedications made by Greeks - one
of them was a meridarch, Theodorus, who offered a casket for relics - and
obvious copies of Indian ritual formulae.
But traditional brahminism also had attractions. Some Indian texts
even seem to admit that the Hellenic element belonged to the second
‘colour’, that of the kshatriyas (warriors). A pillar offered in about ioo to
Vasudeva, avatar of Vishnu, by an ambassador of Antialcidas has been
found at Vidica. It bears this curious inscription: ‘The pillar-Garouda
(bird-god, hypostasis of Vishnu) of Vasudeva, the god of gods, has been
erected by Heliodorus, a Bhagavata (disciple of the Lord), son of Dion,
inhabitant of Taxila, who came as Greek legate from the great king
Antialcidas to king Kosiputra. . . .’ It is no less astonishing to see one
pattern — Zeus on an elephant — endlessly repeated with multiple varia¬
tions on Antialcidas’ coins. The important Greek god was represented with
a symbol borrowed from Indian mythology, because the elephant was the
vahana (conveyance) of Indra, who was also king of the gods.
These kingdoms possessed considerable wealth as a result of their fertile
soil and active commercial relations. They were crossed by a great axis of
communications coming from Bactria via the passes of the Hindu Kush,
and reaching Begram, Taxila, then Mathura in independent India, whence
one route continued to Pataliputra on the Ganges and another to Barygaza
on the Indian Ocean. It was lined all along by towns, immense caravan¬
serai, like Bactria, at the crossroads of the route from India to the Mediter¬
ranean via Peshawar and the routes from China via the oases of Turkestan
or Mongolia; the Chinese ambassador Tchang K’ien has left a striking
description of the latter. Recent excavations have also revealed some cities
on the other side of the Hindu Kush, designed according to the
Hippodamian checker-board: Begram (ancient Kapici, capital of Kapica)
near Kabul, fortified by a rampart with a double facing of bricks on a
stone footing, and Taxila where city walls, three-quarters of a mile in
circumference, encircled an acropolis and a lower town.
The abundant and remarkable coins minted by the Greek sovereigns
circulated everywhere, far beyond the area of their political power. If only
three of them (Euthydemus i, Eucratides and Menander) minted gold
(and sometimes astonishingly heavy pieces), many silver and copper series
also existed. Nevertheless, the real wealth of these kingdoms came from
their incomparable position on the great trading routes which joined India
and even Mongolia and China to the Mediterranean world.
Greek Commerce with the Indies

Part of the Indo-Gangetic plain was temporarily opened up to the bold
exploits of these dynasts. But another epic feat was accomplished during
the whole Hellenistic age by the merchants who took luxury products
from India and Afghanistan to the Mediterranean: ivory, precious stones,

pearls, perfumes, spices, muslins, precious woods, not forgetting the
animals (above all elephants, but also parrots, dogs and Indian livestock
which is mentioned at Alexandria) and possibly even courtesans.
The great trade arteries with India in the Roman period consisted of
three routes but it is well established that they already existed in the
Hellenistic period. The simplest was the sea route which ended in Arabia.
It presupposed the utilization of the monsoon which made it possible to go
and then to return rapidly at regular dates. The Greeks only seem to have
known about the monsoon fairly late, thanks to a certain Hippalus: in
about 80 bc for some, about 40 ad for others. But Arab sailors on the one
hand and Indian and Singhalese on the other, had noticed the phenomenon
long before and the main part of the trade was in their hands.
The goods were generally landed on the Persian Gulf, either at Gerrha
or at Alexandria-Charax (later, Antioch) at the mouths of the Tigris. In
the first case, Gerrhaean caravans brought them to Petra, whence they
reached Gaza and the ports of Syria or Alexandria. In the second case,
they went back to Seleuceia-on-Tigris where they regained the second route.
A variation, which was very important in the future, was introduced in
the very late Hellenistic period. Strabo reports that every year 120 ships
left Myos Hormos on the Red Sea for India: he adds that merchants from
Alexandria had recently taken this step, whereas few people had dared to
undertake the crossing at the time of the Ptolemies. The route was entirely
by sea from the coast of Egypt and was therefore a means of evading the
need for Gerrhaeans and Nabataeans. It apparently presupposed a know¬
ledge of the monsoon because a considerable and regular fleet was
involved (hence the date we would like to put forward for this ‘invention’
of the Greeks: second half of the first century). But Strabo distinctly states
that the route had been opened up before, at least by isolated individuals.
The second route, which was entirely overland, left the Indus valley or
ports south of its delta, and used the passes of Peshawar. It crossed the
states of the Greco-Bactrian monarchs, then Parthia (when it had become
independent) and the Seleucid kingdom via Alexandria (Merv), the
Caspian Gates, Rhagai (near Teheran), Ecbatana, Seleuceia-on-Tigris
(where it was joined by the route originating from Alexandria-Charax),
and Dura-Europus, whence it branched off by either Damascus or
Palmyra to the Phoenician ports, or to Antioch and, by the Taurus, to
Ephesus. A more northerly variation reached the Anatolian coast directly
by way of Nisibis, Edessa and Sardes.
Using complementary information in Strabo and the elder Pliny, it is
undoubtedly possible to reconstruct a third route which was identical with
the preceding one as far as Bactria. It followed the Oxus, where navigation
is said to have been very easy, the Caspian Sea (though Strabo declared it
was non-navigable), went up the Cyrus and down the Phasis as far as the
Black Sea, whence it easily reached the Mediterranean. However, certain
points remain obscure, notably the passage as far as the Caspian (some
18
scholars have gone so far as to suppose - wrongly - that the Oxus at that
time flowed into the Caspian and not into the sea of Aral); it may possibly
have been facilitated by the Ochus, whose name the ancients often
confused with the Oxus.
Intermediaries played a considerable role on all three of these routes; it
must not be imagined that Greek merchants conveyed the merchandise
from beginning to end of its long journey. The sea route up to the point
where the caravaneers of Arabia took over was essentially in the hands of
Arab or Indian sailors. The great overland route also presupposed a series
of transmissions. In a Hippocratic treatise dating from the end of the fourth
century the name for pepper (piperi) - which is Indian - is given as Persian,
because the product reached the Greeks via Persia. Moreover, the latter
two routes became increasingly difficult with the successive shrinking of
the Seleucid states; fairly soon it was necessary to cross independent
Parthia and, after ioo, even the Scythian principalities which had been
established on the ruins of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom.
The balance in this trade was clearly unfavourable to the Greek world
which bought much more than it sold, and this partly explains its pro¬
gressive impoverishment in precious metals. However, very luxurious
objects came eastwards on these same routes, as is evident from highly
illuminating excavations at Begram.
In the first centuries ad Begram became the summer capital of the
Indo-Scythian emperors, including the great Kanishka. An extraordinary
treasury has been discovered in the ruins of the royal palace destroyed
when the town was seized by Sapor i in 241 ad. It represented a collection
made over a period of time and consisted of Hellenistic pieces, followed by
Iranian objects, Indian ivories, and Chinese lacquers: a strange conjunc¬
tion of the most beautiful objects that four civilizations had produced. The
Greek remains vary greatly as far as material is concerned (bronze, col¬
oured glass, crystal, porphyry, and even plaster) and come mainly from
Egypt, although some may be attributed to Seleucid Syria. The subjects
are also very diverse: the Pharos of Alexandria, a port scene, Sophocles
and the Muses. There are numerous religious representations: Tyche,
Serapis-Heracles wearing a modius and carrying a club, a chubby Eros
with a butterfly representing the soul, Dionysus assisting at the ritual cook¬
ing of a pig, the child Bacchus. One cannot help pondering on the aston¬
ishing attraction that Hellenic art held for the Indian kings nor on the
lengthy route that these highly valuable pieces had taken to reach Begram.
And yet Begram itself was only one stage on the route which, in the course
of the following centuries, slowly transmitted Greek influence as far as
China.
Greco-Buddhist and Greco-Bactrian Art

The discoveries at Begram, as well as those of Ionian remains and enig¬
matic Alexandrian polyhedrons at Taxila, show that high quality pieces
523
originating from the Mediterranean reached the Indian world in the
Hellenistic period, and therefore well before Roman commerce brought
Greco-Roman objects in abundance. This explains the profound influence
that Greek art exerted on contemporary Buddhist art. Again it is advisable
rather to speak of ‘western influence’, because the Hellenic contribution
was often accompanied by Iranian and even Mesopotamian associations.
The fundamental innovation which characterized Maurya art was the
replacement of wood by stone, generally sandstone, and there have been
attempts to interpret this as an imitation of Greco-Iranian art. The
monuments of Asoka particularly seem to denote Persian contributions:
the great hypostyle room at the palace of Pataliputra recalls Darius’ throne
room at Persepolis and the wonderful columns with campaniform capitals,
surmounted by extraordinarily elegant animals, which he scattered over
his empire, had obvious connections with Achaemenid works. But tech¬
nique was already showing Greek influences which tempered the dryness
of the Achaemenid relief, to such an extent that it is thought that Seleucid
artists may have worked at the court of Pataliputra.
Under the Sunga dynasty (176-64), Greek influence increased, at the
same time as the iconography of Buddha’s former lives was finally estab¬
lished. The masterpiece is the great stupa of Santchi (hemispherical dome
surrounded by a balustrade and adorned with porticos or torana at the four
cardinal points). Although the work really owes its whole inspiration to
Buddhism and although it more profoundly denotes a specifically Indian
passion for vegetable and animal life - a sort of sturdy paganism activated
by the belief in the unity of all forms of life - certain bold foreshortenings
can only be explained by a new knowledge of Hellenic techniques. Greek
motifs emerge even more clearly in an almost contemporary work, the
enclosure of Bodh Gaya, where the rearing quadriga of Surya, the solar
god, and the centaur on a medallion even more, were imported themes.
Sunga art, which prevailed essentially in central India, strictly forbade
the representation of Buddha on reliefs and, with even greater reason, on
sculpture in the round, and he was only evoked through transparent
symbols. On this score too Hellenism remained subdued and modest.
Sculpture where the great compassionate one was himself portrayed and
where Greek influences were given free reign only developed in the follow¬
ing period, the Kuchana era, in Gandhara. Buddha appeal's with the
youthful features of Apollo, his nose a prolongation of his forehead, his
mouth clearly outlined. Only the heavy eyelids and the fleshiness of the
face betray the oriental type. He has his own distinguishing features: a coil
of hair, a wisdom spot between his eyes, the lobes of his ears elongated. His
monastic cloak is a genuine himation with skilfully concentric folds. In the
same way, Zeus was used as the model for the spirit of thunder, or the
Maenads for the Nagi, while other pieces show an Athena or the Trojan
horse with Cassandra.
The most beautiful examples of this Gandhara art (plate 16) - which
quickly formed a school at both Mathura and Amaravati - are the reliefs
and statues in blue schist of Gandhara and the stucco figurines of Hadda
(Afghanistan) or Taxila. They date from the Roman period (second to
fifth centuries), and must be related to the enlightened protection granted
to Buddhism by the greatest of Kuchana sovereigns, Kanishka, to the in¬
comparable prosperity of his empire, and to the development of Buddhism
of the ‘Great Vehicle’. But, although this may be challenged, we think that
it appeared much earlier and dates back to about the year ioo: Hellenic
influences from Alexandria and Syria were strong enough in the Greco-
Indian kingdom to break the taboos of aniconism. The creation of
Gandharian sculpture would therefore be contemporary with the enclosures
of Sanchi or Bodh Gaya.
In this way the divinities and heroes of Greek religion supplied Buddhism
with its iconography as they did Christianity somewhat later. But, para¬
doxically, the Hellenic tradition remained stronger in Asia than in the
west. Gradually, in the course of something like a millennium, Buddha-
Apollo conquered the Indies, central Asia, Indo-China, China, Korea and
Japan, although he changed in the process and imperceptibly became
distorted. There are few such unexpected consequences of Hellenism. The
most beautiful of the Greek gods travelled slowly with the stream of
Buddhist evangelization. Their progress can be compared to the widening
circle of ripples formed when a pebble is thrown into water.
As a result of very recent excavations, it is possible to examine a
phenomenon which was related to the creation of a Greco-Indian art: the
birth of Greco-Bactrian art. A collection of sculptures has been discovered
at Khalchayan, in the ruins of a town situated on the shores of a tributary
of the Amu-Darya. They were obviously inspired by Hellenistic models,
profoundly changed to coincide with Iranian tastes or customs. An Athena
wears a Bactrian helmet and a clinging robe with sleeves. Her face is
devoid of the virile serenity fitting for the daughter of Zeus, and her expres¬
sion is of such a feminine and private sweetness that one can assume that
the artist wanted to give her the features of a Scythian queen. Nike
appears on several representations, but in religious or political surround¬
ings that are clearly local: on a bas-relief, she hovers over a bust of Mithras;
on a terracotta medallion, she crowns a king seated on a zoomorphic
throne, wearing a pointed hat and with his vizier by his side. It is interest¬
ing to note that these astonishing creations date from the period which
followed the fall of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and that this did not
prevent the spread of Hellenism, at least in the most formal art - because
the extremely varied collection of terracotta statuettes from the same site
are still in native style.
Intellectual Contacts
Indian relations with the west were not limited to the exchange of luxury
products nor to lessons in Greek art. A better knowledge of the two worlds
was established. These contacts were certainly not new; certain oriental
elements in Pythagoreanism may be Indian. In any case, the ‘great year’

10,800 years long which, according to Heraclitus, enabled the stars to
regain their positions was probably of Indian origin. Aristoxenus of
Tarentum, a disciple of Aristotle, describes a visit paid to Socrates by an
Indian sage, who taught him that it was not possible to understand human
things without understanding divine things: whether true or false, the
anecdote does not seem in the least absurd. The history of the sciences
(above all, astronomy and medicine) also provides examples of the same
east-on-west influence. The Hippocratic treatises were familiar with
Indian medical treatments. Of the Winds accounted for illness by the circu¬
lation of wind in the body, in accordance with brahminist hypotheses.
Plato in the Timaeus explained bodily equilibrium by three essential sub¬
stances - air, phlegm and bile - a classical doctrine in Indian physiology.
But embassies and trade brought increased knowledge of the distant
Orient to the Mediterranean kingdoms. Great admiration was felt for the
exemplary life and the wisdom of the gymnosophists. Cineas’ famous con¬
versation with his master Pyrrhus is curiously reminiscent of a dialogue
between King Koravyo and the Buddha Ratthapalo.
In many cases, however, it is not really possible to talk of influence, for
example, in the development of a genuine sophistry in India and China,
contemporary with that of Greece; similarly, if the Chinese Hui Tzu did
maintain a century after Zeno that a stick, which was shortened by half
every day, had no end, he obviously could not have known about his
Hellenic predecessor. But an osmosis, which is difficult to define, was
established between zones of high civilization, henceforth to be linked by
so many bonds. It has already been stated that their conceptions of royalty
were related and that indifference or ataraxy was not all that far removed
from nirvana. Megasthenes, legate of Seleucus Nicanor at Pataliputra, had
already noted similarities in custom and ideas and left an account of his
voyage which seems to have been one of the principal Hellenistic sources
of information on India.
There was certainly still a great deal to be done. Strabo was still deplor¬
ing the scarcity of information about India. Intellectual exchanges only
really developed in the Roman period and then as a result of increased
trade. India was then initiated into Greek astronomy, astrology and
medicine and may have copied Greek theatre. Conversely, it may be sup¬
posed that India influenced Hellenic romanticism or the thought of the
Gnostics and Plotinus. The monsoon brought together two worlds which
for centuries already had been far from ignorant of one another.
The Greeks and China

It is difficult to believe that relations existed even further afield - with the
Mongol or Chinese world. Nevertheless, they are undeniable although
sporadic and only half-glimpsed from some chance archaeological
discovery.
Figure 88 Golden cup originating from Siberia. This Hellenistic cup,

ornamented with a rich vegetable decoration, must have been
produced in the oriental Greek world before being brought into
Siberia by Bactrian trade
There again, Bactria played a basic role. Interminable trails had long
joined it to the Chinese world, leading the traveller across difficult passes
while suffering agonies of thirst. Two of these trails are particularly signi¬
ficant. The first reached Kashgar by the valleys of the Pamir and skirted
the desert basin of the Tarim either to the north (via Aksu, Turfan,
Kan-Chow) or to the south (via Khotan, Tuen-Huang, Kan-Chow). After
that, the road to China was not too arduous. The second headed north
towards Samarkand, whence the traveller could either rejoin the northern
section of the first at Aksu, or continue north-eastwards to reach the Yellow
River via Mongolia. Chinese texts were familiar with Ta-yuan (Ferghana)
(at least partly annexed by Bactrian dynasts) and Ta-hia (Bactria). They
give precise information on the conquest of the Bactrian kingdom by the
Yueh-chi. The Emperor Wu-ti sent a fact-finding mission to Bactria, led
by Tchang K’ien (about 138-125), and the account it gave was utilized
and partially reproduced in about 100 by Ssuma Ch’ien: it makes par¬
ticular mention of numerous fortified towns which could only have been
the work of Greeks.
This text specifies the difficulties experienced by the merchants of
Ferghana who were anxious to enter into direct relations with China. They
only seem to have achieved these direct contacts in 106, when the first
Chinese caravan travelled towards Parthia via Bactria. But exchanges
were being made before then by a chain of successive intermediaries, carry¬
ing silks, furs, high grade iron ore and precious metals. There is evidence
of this in the cupro-nickel pieces minted in about 170 by Bactrian kings -
Euthydemus in, Agathocles and Pantaleon; at this period they could only
have resulted from a natural alloy in view of the high fusion point of nickel.
527
If it were certain that such an alloy were only to be found in Yunnan (and
this has recently been questioned) there would be evidence of Chinese-
Bactrian trade from the beginning of the second century. On another
score, the word for silk was well known in the Mediterranean before the
Christian era.
Western objects have also been found on both routes: Coins from the
Bosporus (fourth century) in the valley of the Ili (a tributary of Lake
Balkhash); Bactrian and Syrian clothing of the end of the second century
discovered by the Koslov mission in the middle of Mongolia at Urga; a
vase of Alexandrian glass with a head of Athena (second century) at
Ho-nan, i.e. in the middle valley of the Yellow River. A suggestion has
been made that Hellenism exerted an artistic influence in southern Siberia
in the second and first centuries - the route from the north would also have
diverted Siberian gold towards Bactria (figure 88), and even on the art of
the Han kingdom (this latter undoubtedly later). Greek words have been
found in texts from Khotan (Chinese Turkestan) of the third century ad,
meaning stater, drachmae and military camp, and some scholars have
assumed that they went back to the time of the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms.
The Chinese word for the vine (Pou T’ao) may be a transcription of the
Greek botrys (cluster), the vine having perhaps been introduced into
China following Sino-Bactrian contacts.
Nevertheless, Bactria was not the only centre for relations between the
Greek and Chinese worlds. China and India were linked by overland and
maritime routes. The Indo-Greek kingdoms undoubtedly obtained their
gold from Yunnan. There were Chinese jades in Hellenistic Taxila as well
as a Japanese shell and also a statuette representing a gorilla, which is
apparently Greek, the only evidence of possible contact with the Indo-
Chinese peninsula. Even after the nomad occupation of Bactria and the
consequent slowing down of overland trade, sea links existed between
India and the Mediterranean to carry Chinese objects, notably silk.
Finally, it would seem to be well established that the northern trail, which
came from China via Mongolia, skirting the enormous central mountain
mass of Asia to the far north, did not necessarily end at Samarkand and
Bactria, but that a diversion established direct contact with Olbia on the
Black Sea.
However, it must be acknowledged that all this did not amount to much
and was still far away from the embassy which Marcus Aurelius sent to the
emperor of China in 166.
From the Bou Regreg to the Ganges, from the Elbe to the Blue Nile, the
spread of Hellenism was the only factor capable of giving some small
degree of unity to such a sparklingly varied world. But the mode of thought
and way of life of the Greeks were unevenly assimilable, and depended
on distance, ethnic character and, above all, degree of civilization. If Rome
emerged totally transformed from its contact with the Hellenistic king¬
doms, and Celts, Iberians and Nubians were raised to a more humane
level of existence, the Indians on the other hand barely owed the Greeks
anything but a new sense of beauty.
Furthermore, Hellenism everywhere was imposed without force, but
solely by its indefinable attractions. It reached not only subject nations but
also the Romans who had been politically victorious over the Greeks and
Parthians and Scythians, freed from their guardianship. Horace’s famous
words about ‘Conquered Greece which had conquered its wild conqueror’
would apply to many other nations besides republican Rome.
For a nation to yield to the attractions of Hellenism' never implied
repudiating its own personality; it was a means towards self-fulfilment,
better self-expression and a more humane life. This gave rise to the im¬
portance of an art which spread harmonious forms, a language where mind
and matter seemed to communicate, and a syntax which concealed the
most knowledgeable expression of appearances and essential reality. For
the best, Hellenism meant liberation, access to the serene, and deliverance
from superstition and ritualism. For all, it was a revelation, the sharp dis¬
covery of their own potentialities, a means of deepening their most
intimate beliefs. In this sense, the austere faces of the heroes of Entremont
or the disillusioned smile of the Buddhas of Gandhara may equally be born
of Greece.
Conclusion
Another adventure began with the progressive annexation of the Hellenistic
kingdoms by Rome. But it was not completely different. On the one hand,
the whole eastern part of the empire remained Greek in language and
culture. In the second century ad a renaissance occurred in Greece itself,
marked by such different men as Plutarch, Lucian and Pausanias. On the
other, the most vital provinces in the west were for a long time those which
had been imbued with Hellenism: Baetica, Tarraconensis, Narbonensis,
Africa. Rome itself was entirely hellenized: it disseminated a rhetorical
education which it had inherited from the Greeks everywhere, as well as
an art which followed the lines of Hellenistic art, until the breach in the
third century, a literature based on Greek models, a religion which was the
result of a Greco-oriental syncretism, and Stoic thought which became
something of a state philosophy under the Antonines. Autocratic monarchy
and the machinery of provincial administration were both legacies of the
Hellenistic kingdoms.
During the crisis which shook the foundations of the Roman world in
the third century, Plotinus and his disciples found new ferments of spiritual
life in a revival of Platonism. An oriental religion which, from the second
century, had not scorned to assimilate the best of earlier thought gradually
gained ground. The apologist Justin dared to write: Socrates had been an
incarnation of the Logos; Christ was the same only more complete, because
he was the absolute truth.’
After the final partition of the empire into two halves, the west owed less
and less to Hellenism, although Greek studies were still pursued there for
some time. But in the east, where the pressure of the barbarians was not so
strong, the Byzantine basileus could still pose as a direct heir of the Roman
emperors and the Hellenistic monarchs until I453- The rays of Platonism
enlightened Constantinople in the eleventh century with Psellus, and
Mistra in the fifteenth with Georgius Gemistus. Even in the west, Hellenism
was a powerful ferment of revival in both the Carolingian renaissance and
the Rebirth of Learning when scholars and poets ‘day and night leafed over
the pages of Greek copy-books’.
Even without venturing into more modern times, one has to recognize
that Byzantine or even ancient Hellenism was not content merely to survive
in the civilization of Rome. Rome’s historical role, independent of its
brilliant political success in the unification of the Mediterranean world, was
essentially to serve as a transmitter of Greek culture. Hellenism was also a
source of light in the darkness of medievalism and stirred up the revival
which opened the modern era.
The historian cannot remain insensible to an influence of such scope and

permanence. We no longer consider the ‘Greek Miracle’ as an absolute
creation, a Fiat Lux as did Renan, and we are well aware of everything that
the Greeks in their adaptability borrowed from the orientals and pre-
Hellenes. They themselves also served as a staging point between the first
achievements of historical humanity in the empires of the Orient, and
Rome which transmitted them to the Middle Ages and to ourselves. On
another score, we no longer conceal the blemishes on a civilization which
can in no way be regarded as a golden age: think only of slavery, the
horrible exposure of children, pederasty (which Plato thought quite as
much characteristic of Greek as compared with barbarian as gymnastics or
philosophy) or of the constant disunion which made Greek history, from
Mycenae to the Hellenistic period, a quasi-incessant series of bloody
conflicts. ‘Athens was only the elementary image of paradise’ (J. L. Borges).
However, the fundamental vitality remained a permanent element in
the course of two millennia, which even survived the political defeat of the
Greek world. Its first and most obvious explanation lies in the energy,
perseverance and persistence of a small nation, no less noteworthy in the
case of Greece than in the continuous development of Roman history. This
tenacity was as visible in their efforts to create political forms and to open
economic outlets as in the ardent and joyous restlessness of the mind in the
conquest of truth. Socrates in the Phaedrus did not want his companions to
sleep during the siesta: dialogue was more worthwhile so that the mes¬
senger cicadas might go and tell the Muses that they were practising
philosophy and music, two sister disciplines as were their divine patrons.
One dogged aim persisted through the centuries, symbolized at a later
period by the old Homeric image of the golden chain which became the
allegory of the powerful bond linking all generations in the quest for truth.
Hence came the youthfulness which attracts and carries one along in
Hellenism: ‘You Greeks, are always children: there is not such a thing as
an old Greek. . . . You are young in soul, every one of you’, the Egyptian
priest in Plato’s Timaeus (22b) was already saying to Solon, though not
without some condescension.
To find the means whereby man could be fully man can be seen as a
constant at the heart of this quest. A man amongst other men, whence
came that essential preoccupation with politics and the ardent yearning
for forms of society which did not crush the individual. These varied from
period to period: Achaean or Hellenistic kingdoms, Archaic or classical
cities. Man in a cosmos which infinitely surpassed him, but where he could
make himself master by establishing harmonious relations with the super¬
natural powers, and above all, by formulating a cosmology and a science
which invaded its mysteries. Lastly, man face to face with himself and
needing to provide himself with the means to master his instincts and
dominate his destiny.
From this arose the two characteristics which, in a summary analysis,
best define Hellenism: order and proportion. Order was the triumph of the
CONCLUSION 531
mind, as taught by Anaxagoras: it was the reasonable subordination of the

lower elements to the higher elements, obtained by a harsh victory, where
man first had to conquer or, better still, go beyond himself. Proportion was
equally difficult to achieve, born of a reasoned appreciation of the powers
and limits of man and tearing him both from the excesses of oriental
imperialism and from the violence of the passions.
It is not at all surprising therefore that the Greeks obstinately refused to
mutilate man, to subjugate one of the components which gave him his
unity. The body had a place, and a large one at that, in education. Sensi¬
bility must be mastered only in order to give it its full value. In fact, there
are scarcely any human sentiments that they did not experience and to
which they did not give definite expression, from the troubled concern of
Hector bidding farewell to Andromachus to the amorous sighs of the
bucolic poets, from the pride of the citizen sacrificing himself for his
country to the most mystical devotion.
The mind was given a primordial role, and possibly Hellenism’s finest
claim to glory is that it founded rational science and philosophy. But the
creators of rationalism also gave a place to the most obscure powers of the
soul. The temple of Reason, personified in the features of Athena, and the
sanctuary of an ancient bear-goddess, Artemis of Brauron, stand side by
side on the Acropolis. The Hellenistic period saw both the triumph of
mysticism and the zenith of ancient science.
There could be no harmony without deliberate equilibrium between the
powers which made up man. And this harmony was essential because, of
all values, the Greeks prized none more than beauty. ‘Beauty alone has this
privilege’, said Plato (Phaedrus 25od), ‘and therefore it is most clearly seen
and loveliest.’ It was the essential quality which the gods esteemed in the
sacred offerings made to them. It was not distinct from virtue, because the
human ideal was the Kalos Kagathos, the man who was both beautiful and
good. To Plato the whole dialectic of love was a drive towards beauty,
which was God, and the Stoics made an artist of the supreme fire which
animated the world. Moreover, it was not distinct from intelligence, be¬
cause it was born of subtle mathematical proportions, rules whereby the
mind imposed its law on matter. It was both the conqueror and the con¬
quered at the end of a violent process of uprooting. It was the lot of the
immortal gods, but also of mortal man who found in it the surest means of
reaching the same level as the divinity.
The ultimate symbol of Hellenism was Hypatia the geometrician,
daughter of the last of the philosophers of the Museum of Alexandria, a
Platonist emeritus. She crossed the town followed by her disciples,
captivated as much by her beauty as by her discovery of the projection of
the sphere. She died in 415 ad, stoned by the Christians, who were un¬
grateful enough to persecute in her the Hellenism to which they owed one
of the best parts of their faith.
*
'
'
Bibliography
GENERAL WORKS
Historical Studies
Aymard, A. and Auboyer, J., VOrient et la Grece antique, 4th ed., Paris 1961
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1950
Beloch, K. J., Griechische Geschichte, I—IV (in 8 vols ), 2nd ed., Berlin-Leipzig
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Bengtson, H., Griechische Geschichte, 3rd ed., Munich i960
Bonnard, Greek Civilisation, London, 1957
Busolt, G. and Swoboda, H., Griechische Staatskunde, 3rd ed., I, 1920 and II,
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Chamoux, F., La civilisation grecque a Vepoque archaique et classique, Paris 1963
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Croiset, M., La civilisation de la Grece antique, Paris 1932
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Francotte, H., Lapolis grecque, Paderborn, 1907
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Hatzfeld, J., Histoire de la Grece ancienne, 3rd ed. revised by A. Aymard, Pans
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Larsen, J. A. O., Representative Government in Greek and Roman History, University
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Martin, V., La vie internationale dans la Grece des cites, Paris 194°
Petit, P., Precis d’histoire ancienne, 2nd ed., Paris 1965
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Dictionaries
Daremberg, C.,
Saglio, E. and Pottier, E., Dictionnaire des antiquitesgrecques
et romaines,l—V(in 9 vols), Paris 1877 i9x9

Pauly, Wissowa and Kroll, Real-Encyclopadie der klassischen Altertumswissen-
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Atlas and Guides

Bengtson, H. and Milojcic, V., Grosser historischer Weltatlas, I: Vorgeschichte und
Altertum, 1954
2nd ed., Munich .
Kirsten, E. and Kraiker, W., Griechenlandkunde, 4th ed., Heidelberg 1962
Leveque, P., Nouspartonspour . . . la Grece, 3rd ed., Paris, 1966
534 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Leveque, P., J\'ous partons pour ... la Sidle, Paris, 1966

Van Der Heyden, A., and Laved an, P., Atlas de VAntiquite classique, Paris—
Brussels 1961
Chronology
Delorme, J., Chronologie des dvilisations, 2nd ed., Paris 1956

Delorme, J., Les grandes dates de VAntiquite, Paris 1962
Economy and Society

Cavaignac, E., Ueconomie grecque, Paris 1951
Cloche, P., Les classes, les metiers, le trafic, Paris 1931
Couissin, P., Les institutions militaires et navales de la Grece, Paris 1932
Flaceliere R,. Eamour en Grece, Paris i960
Glotz, G,. La solidarite de lafamille dans le droit criminel en Grece, Paris 1904
Glotz, G., Ancient Greece at Work, London
Jaeger, W.,Paideia, I—III, Oxford 1936-45
Jarde, A., Les cereales dans VAntiquite grecque, Paris 1925
Marrou, H. I., Histoire de Veducation dans l’Antiquite, 6th ed., Paris 1965
Westermann, W. L., The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Philadel¬
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Religion
Amandry, P., La mantique apollinienne a Delphes, Paris 1950
Defradas, J., Les themes de la propagande delphique, Paris 1954
Defradas, J., Religions du monde, La Grece, Paris 1963
Delcourt, M., Les grands sanctuaires de la Grece, Paris 1947.
Delcourt, M., Toracle de Delphes, Paris 1955
Festugiere, A. J., and Nilsson, M. P., in Gorce, M. and Mortier, R.,
Histoire generale des religions, II, Paris 1944
Flaceliere, R., Greek Oracles, London, 1965
Gernet, L., and Boulanger, A., Le genie grec dans la religion, Paris 1932
Grimal, P., La Mythologie grecque, Paris 1953
Grimal, P., Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et romaine, 3rd ed., Paris 1963
Jeanmaire, H., Dionysos, Histoire du culte de Bacchus, Paris 1951
Meautis, G., Les dieux de la Grece et les mysteres d’Eleusis, Paris 1959
Meautis, G., Mythologie grecque, Paris 1959
Nilsson, M. P., Greek Popular Religion, New York, 1940
Nilsson,M. P., Geschichte der griechischen Religion, I—II, 2nd ed., Munich 1955-61
Pettazzoni, R., La religion dans la Grece antique, des origines a Alexandre le Grand,
French translation, Paris 1953
Des Places, E., in Brillant, M. and Aigrin, R., Histoire des religions, III, Paris
1955
Rohde, E., Psyche, London 1925
Intellectual Life
Brehier, E., Histoire de la philosophie, I (2 vols), 3rd ed. Paris 1934-5
Gomperz, Th., Greek Thinkers, London 1912
Imbert, J., Le droit antique, Paris 1961
Rivaud, A., Les grands corn ants de la pensee grecque, Paris 1929
Rivaud, A., Histoire de la philosophie, I, 2nd ed., revised by G. Varet, Paris 1948
Robin, L., Greek Thought and the Origins of the Scientific Spirit, London
BIBLIOGRAPHY 535
Robin,L., La morale antique, Paris 1957

Schaerer, R., L'homme antique et la structure du monde interieur, Paris 1958
Sinclair, T. A., A History of Greek Political Thought, London, 1951
Taton, R., and collaborators, La science antique et medievale, 2nd ed., Paris 1966
Literature
Croiset, A. and M., Histoire de la litterature grecque, I-V, 2nd-4th ed., Paris
1928-51
Defradas, J., La litterature grecque, Paris i960
Flaceliere, R., A Literary History of Greece, London 1964
Lesky, A., Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, Bern, 1958. English translation,
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Meillet, A., Apergu d’une histoire de la langue grecque, 5th ed., Paris 1938
Robert, F., La litterature grecque, 5th ed., Paris 1963
Art
Babelon, J., La numismatique antique, Paris 1949
Charbonneaux, J., Les vases grecs, Paris 1958
Charbonneaux, J., Hartgrec, Paris 1959
Coche de la Ferte, E., Les bijoux antiques, Paris 1956
Devambez, P., Sculptures grecques, Paris i960
Devambez, P., Histoire de Fart, I: Le monde non-chretien, Paris 1961
Dinsmoor, W. B., The Architecture of Ancient Greece, London 1950
Dugas, Ch., Greek Pottery, London 1926
Lawrence, A. W., Greek Architecture, London 1957
Martin, R., L'urbanisme dans la Grece antique, Paris 1956
Meautis, G., Les chefs-d'oeuvre de la peinture grecque, Paris 1930
Metzger, H., La ceramique grecque, Paris 1953
Picard, Ch., La sculpture antique, I—II, Paris 1923-6
Picard, Ch., Manuel d'architecture grecque, La sculpture, I-IV (in 7 vols) Paris
1935-63
Richter, G. M. A., The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks 3rd ed., Yale 1950
Ridder, A. de, and Deonna, W., Art in Greece, London 1927
Robertson, D. S., A Handbook of Greek and Roman Architecture, 2nd ed., Cam¬
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Robertson, M., La peinture grecque, Geneva 1959
Sechan, L., La danse grecque, Paris 1930
Seltman, Ch., Greek Coins, 2nd ed., London 1955
Villard, F., Les vases grecs, Paris 1956
Wycherley, R. E., How the Greeks built Cities, 2nd ed., London 1962
Zervos, Ch., Hart en Grece, Paris 1934
Regional Monographs
Cloche, P., Thebes de Beotie, des origines a la conquete romaine, Louvain 1938
Cloche, P., Histoire de la Macedoine jusqu’d Favenement d’ Alexandre le Grand, Paris
i960
Effenterre, H. van, La Crete et le monde grec, de Platon a Polybe, Paris 1948
Guillon, P., La Beotie antique, Paris 1948
La Coste-Messeliere, P. de and Mire, G. de, Delphes, 2nd ed., Paris 1957
Laidlaw, W. A., A History of Delos, Oxford 1933
536 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lerat, LLes Locriens de I’Ouest, I—II, Paris 1952

Pouilloux, J., Recherches sur Vhistoire et les cultes de Thasos, I, 1954; II (with
Ch. Dunant), 1958 Paris
Robert, L., Villes d’Asie Mineure, 2nd ed., Paris 1962
Roussel, P., Delos, Paris 1925
BIBLIOGRAPHY BY PERIOD
The Age of the Invasions

Blegen, W. and Rawson, M., A Guide to the Palace of Nestor, Cincinnati 1962
Bosch-Gimpera, P., Les Indo-Europeens, Problemes archeologiques, French transla¬
tion, Paris 1961
Evans, A., The Palace of Minos, I-IV (in 6 vols), London 1921-35
Glotz, G., The Aegean Civilisation, London
Karo, G.,Fiihrer durch Tiryns, Athens 1934
Lorimer, H. L., Homer and the Monuments, London 1950
Matz, F., Le monde egeen (Troie, Crete, Mycenes), French translation, Paris 1956
Matz, F., Crete and Early Greece, London 1963
Mylonas, G. E., Ancient Mycenae, London 1957
Page, D., History and the Homeric Iliad, Berkeley i960
Palmer, L. R., Mycenaeans and Minoans, London 1961
Picard, Ch., Les religionsprehelleniques (Crete et Mycenes), Paris 1948
Schachermeyr, F., Die altesten Kulturen Griechenlands, Stuttgart 1955
Severyns, A., Grece et Proche-Orient avant Homere, Brussels i960
Ventris, M., and Chadwick, J., Documents in Mycenaean Greek, Cambridge
1956
Wace,A. J. B., and Stubbings, F. J., A Companion to Homer, London 1963
Wace, A. J. B., Mycenae, Princeton 1949
Webster, T. B. L., From Mycenae to Homer, London 1964
Geometric and Archaic Periods

Andrewes, A., The Greek Tyrants, London 1956
Bayet, J., La Sidle grecque, Paris 1930
Berard, J., La colonisation grecque de ITtalie meridionale et de la Sidle dans VAnti-
quite, 2nd ed. Paris 1957
Berard, J., Hexpansion et la colonisation grecques jusqu’aux guerres mediques, Paris
i960
Carriere, J., Theognis de Megare, Paris, 1948
Chamoux, F., Cyrene sous la monarchic des Battiades, Paris 1953
Charbonneaux, J., La sculpture grecque archaique, Paris, 1938
Chrimes, K. M. T., Ancient Sparta, Manchester 1949
Clerc, M., Massalia, Histoire de Marseille dans VAntiquite, I—II, Marseille 1927
Demargne, P., La Crete dedalique, Paris 1947
Dunbabin, T. J., The Western Greeks, Oxford 1948
Gallet de Santerre, H., Delos primitive et archaique, Paris 1958
Jarde, A., The Formation of the Greek People, London 1926
Jeanmaire, H., Couroi et Couretes, Lille 1939
LLveque, P., and Vidal-Naquet, P., Clisthene VAthenien, Paris 1964
Mallet, D., Les premiers etablissements des Grecs en Egypte, Cairo, 1893
BIBLIOGRAPHY 537
Michell, H., Sparta, Cambridge 1952

Robert, F., Homere, Paris 1950
Roussel, P., Sparte, 2nd ed., Paris i960
Sartori, F., Le eterie nella vitapolitica ateniese del VI e Vsecolo, Rome 1957
Schuhl, P. M., Essai sur la formation de lapensee grecque, 2nd ed. Paris 1949
Ure, P. N., The Origin of Tyranny, Cambridge 1922
Vallet, G., Rhegion et Jâncle, Paris 1958
Vernant, J. P., Les origines de la pensee grecque, Paris 1962
Wuilleumier, P., Tarente, des origines a la conquete romaine, I—II, Paris 1939
Classicism
G., Le moment historique de Socrate, Paris 1939
Bastide,
Battistini,V., Trois contemporains: Heraclite, Parmenide, Empedocle, Paris 1955
Bousquet, J., Le tresor de Cyrene a Delphes, Paris 1952
Brun,J., Socrate, Paris i960
Brun,J., Aristote et le Lycee, Paris 1961
Carcopino, J., Histoire de Vostracisme athenien, 2nd ed., Paris 1934
Charbonneaux, J., La sculpture grecque classique, I—II, Paris 1943-5
Chatelet, F., La naissance de V histoire. La formation de lapensee historienne en Grece,
Paris 1962
Cloche, P.,La democratic athenienne, Paris 1951
Cloche, P., La civilisation athenienne, 5th ed., Paris 1955
Cloche, P., Demosthenes et la fin de la democratic athenienne, 2nd ed., Paris 1957
Cloche, P., Le monde grec aux temps classiques, Paris 1958
Cloche, P., Le siecle de Pericles, 3rd ed., Paris i960
Cloche, P., Alexandre le Grand, 2nd ed., Paris 1961
Cloche, P., Isocrate et son temps, Paris 1963
Delcourt, M., Pericles, Paris 1939
Delebecque, E., Essai sur la vie de Xenophon, Paris 1957
Delebecque, E., Euripide et la guerre du Peloponnese, Paris 1951
Devambez, P., L’art au siecle de Pericles, Lausanne 1956
Dugas, Ch., Aison et la peinture ciramique a Athenes a Vepoque de Pericles, Paris 1930
Ehrenberg, V., The People of Aristophanes, Oxford 1951
Flaceliere, R., Daily Life in Greece at the Time of Pericles, London 1965
Goossens, R., Euripide et Athenes, Brussels 1962
Hatzfeld,J., Alcibiade, Paris 1951
Hege, W., and Rodenwald, G., The Acropolis, Oxford 1932
Homo, L., Pericles, me experience de democratic dirigee, Paris 1954
Leveque, P., Agathon, Paris 1955

Meautis, G., Le crepuscule d’Athenes et Menandre, Paris 1954
Meautis, G., Pindare le Dorien, Paris 1962
Metzger, H., Les representations dans la ceramique attique au IVe siecle, Paris 1962
Mosse, Cl., La fin de la democratie athenienne, Paris 1962
Picard, Ch., La vie privee dans la Grece classique, Paris 1930
Radet, G., Alexandre le Grand, reissued Paris 1950
Robin, L.,Platon, Paris 1938
L., Aristote, Paris 1944
Robin,
Romilly, J. de, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism, Oxford 1963
Schuhl, P. M., L’oeuvre de Platon, Paris 1954

Wilcken, U., Alexandre le Grand, French translation, Paris 1952
538 BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Hellenistic Period

Aymard, A., Les assemblies de la confederation achaienne, Bordeaux 1938
Bikerman, E., Institutions des Seleucides, Paris 1938
Brehier, E., Chrysippe et Vancien stoicisme, Paris 1951
Brun, J.,Les Stoiciens, Paris 1957
Brun, J., Epicure et les Epicuriens, Paris i960
Cloche, P., La dislocation d'un empire, Les premiers successeurs d'Alexandre le Grand,
Paris 1959
Delorme, J., Gymnasion. Etude sur les monuments consacres a Veducation en Grece (des
origines a VEmpire romairi), Paris i960
Festugiere, A. J., Epicure et ses dieux, Paris 1946
Filliozat, J., India, the country and its traditions, London 1962
Grousset, R., LTnde, Paris 1949
Holleaux, M., Rome, la Grece et les monarchies hellenistiques, Paris 1921
Jannoray, J., Enserune, I—II, Paris 1955
Jouguet, P., Macedonian Imperialism and the Hellenization of the East, London 1928
Launey, M., Recherches sur les armies hellenistiques, I—II, Paris 1949-50
Leveque, P., Pyrrhos, Paris,1957
Petit, P., La civilisation hellenistique, Paris 1962
Preaux, Cl., Eeconomic royale des Lagides, Brussels 1939
Preaux, Cl., Les Grecs en Egypte d’apres les archives de fenon, Brussels 1947
Rostovtzeff, M., A Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic world, I—III,
Oxford 1941
Tarn, W. W. and Griffiths, G. T., Hellenistic Civilisation, London 1952
Glossary
The reader can refer to the index to find the definition given in the text for terms
which are not explained here.
Adyton holy of holies of a temple

Agonistic relating to athletic contests
Agoranomoi Magistrates charged with inspecting the markets
Aition literally, reason. Explanation of a myth, ritual, name, etc.
Alabastron and Aryballos perfume vases with narrow necks and wide lips, in
order to spread the unguent on the skin. The alabastron is cylindrical, the
aryballos globular or pear-shaped
Amphora large, big-bellied vase with two handles, used for storing liquids or
solids (figure 89)
Anactoron ‘holy of holies’ of the telesterion of Eleusis
Anodos literally, ascent. Appearance of a divinity (for example, anodos of Kore
returning from the underworld to earth)
Apadana hypostyle room enclosing the throne of the Great King in a Persian
palace
Apodektai general finance collectors
Aramaic Semitic dialect which spread throughout the Orient in the Hellenistic
period
Archaeology literally, knowledge of the past. The beginning of Book 1 of
Thucydides, devoted to the ancient history of Greece, is traditionally called
Archaeology
Aryballos see Alabastron (figure 89)
Astynomoi Magistrates charged with keeping an eye on the cleanliness and
regulation of the streets
Autokrator equipped with full powers (particularly used to refer to a strategus)
Bomos see Bothros

Bothros round altar hollowed into the ground for chthonic divinities (as op¬
posed to the bomos, a quadrangular offering table for uranian gods)
Bouleutes a member of the boule
Causia felt hat with wide brim of Macedonian origin, worn by some Hellenistic
kings
Chiliarch commander of 1,000 men
Chlamys loose cloak worn by soldiers and adopted, in imitation of Alexander,
by Hellenistic kings
Cyclical Chorus chorus revolving in a circle, as in the dithyramb (in tragedy, the
chorus revolved in a rectangle)
54« GLOSSARY
Chora the open country (as opposed to the cities)

Choregia liturgy involving meeting the expenses of the instruction and equip¬
ment of the chorus
Chryselephantine (statue) plated with gold and ivory
Chthonic from the depths of the earth (chthon, ground). The chthonic gods:
the gods from below, from the underworld (in contrast to uranian divinities)
Cist basket
Cleros allotment of land conferred by ballot
Clinamen In Epicurian theory, the deviation of atoms in respect .of the vertical,
notably used to explain free will
Cnemides greaves
Pillars of Heracles Straits of Gibraltar
Cosmos universe; literally, good order. For the various meanings of the word,
see p. 217
Crater large vase in which wine and water were mixed (figure 89)
Demos people
Depas cup. For the depas of old Nestor, see p. 66
Dicasterion tribunal
Didrachma coin of two drachmas
Dinos cauldron placed on a moulded foot (figure 89)
Diptera with two rows of columns
Doryphorus spear-bearer
Emblema central motif of a toreutic vase, a mosaic

Emporion market, trading post
Epiclese epithet of a divinity
Eponymous he who gives his name. An eponymous hero gives his name to a
nation, country or town (e.g. Dorus, Thessalus, Corinthus, eponyms of the
Dorians, Thessaly and Corinth). An eponymous priest or magistrate (at
Athens the eponymous archon) served to date the year in which he held office
Euergetes Benefactor
Fibula Buckle used to fasten clothing, double pin
Genos clan, large patriarchal family, subdivision of the phratry

Gerontes member of the gerousia
Gnomic comprising maxims, judgements
Gnomon instrument the Greeks borrowed from the Chaldeans composed of an
upright rod fixed vertically, the shadow of which was observed. It was used
to measure angles
Harmost head of a Facedaemonian garrison

Hellenium common sanctuary of the Greeks at Naucratis
Herm bust of Hermes (later of any other god) imbedded in a stone terminal.
Hermae were installed at the crossroads. For their relationship to the cult of
Hermes, see p. 69
Heroon funerary monument of a hero
Hierogamy literally sacred union. Marriage of gods, reputedly the source of
fertility and fecundity
AMPHOR/E HYDRIA CRATERS
ASCOS
LEKYTHOS KALPIS CANTHARUS KELEBE ENOCH OAE
LOUTROPHOROS RHYTON PITHOS DINOS(onfoot) GAMICOS
Figure 8g Different shapes of Greek vases

542 GLOSSARY
Hieron sanctuary
Himation cloak
Hypostyle supported by columns
Iliou Persis taking of Troy

In antis (building) having, as a facade, two columns between the antae (that is
to say between the extensions of the walls)
Isodomous (wall) with uniform blocks
Koine (language) common. By extension, common civilization
Latomy quarry. The latomies of Syracuse were used as prisons (the Athenian
prisoners were shut up there after the disaster of Sicily)
Lesche building for meeting and conversation, for example, the lesche of the
Cnidians at Delphi
Linear writing with diagrammatic signs (in hieroglyphic writing, on the
contrary, the signs represent proper designs)
Mantic relating to divination

Medimnos measure of capacity for solids. At Athens after the reform of Solon,
the medimnos was equal to 11J gallons
Metretes measure of capacity for liquids. At Athens after the reform of Solon,
the metretes was equal to 8\ gallons.
Metronomoi magistrates charged with controlling weights and measures
Misthos salary
Monoptera building composed of a single row of columns
Moschophorus he who carries a calf. A fairly common type amongst Archaic
kouroi
Mystai participant at a cult with mysteries
Nome (i) liturgical hymn executed by a soloist in honour of a god. (2) In the
Hellenistic period, a province of the Ptolemaic kingdom
Nymphaeum ornamental lake consecrated to the Nymphs, generally decorated
with fountains and statues
Obsidian a very hard stone, a sort of natural glass, dark in colour

Oicoumene inhabited land
Oenochoae small vase used to pour wine into a crater or stamnos (figure 89)
Omphalos literally, navel. Delphi was considered to be the omphalos of the world
Ontonomism ethics which allows that the individual is only responsible for his
own actions (as opposed to phylonomism according to which wrong-doings
are transmitted from generation to generation)
Orpheotelestes priest giving an Orphic initiation
Paradise word of Persian origin, describing a park with luxuriant vegetation

Parthenaea lyrical poem executed by a chorus of young girls
Peplos feminine garment composed of a large piece of material (figure 90)
Perea a possession held by an insular city on the continent, e.g. Thasian Perea,
Rhodian Perea
GLOSSARY
543
Figure90 Diagram
and model of the peplos
Perioikoi inhabitants with an inferior status to that of the citizens

Peristasis colonnade surrounding a temple
Phallophoroi bearer of a phallos (male sexual organ), in the processions in honour
of Dionysus
Phratry literally, brotherhood. Subdivision of the tribe
Phrourarch head of an Athenian garrison
Phylactery talisman
Phyle tribe
Phylonomism see ontonomism
Pinax panel
Pithos large ovoid jar, used for holding provisions (figure 89)
Poletes magistrates charged with effecting sales and adjudications on behalf of
the state
Polls (plural, poleis) city
Poros tufa
Potnia theron Mistress of the animals (title of the Great Mother, dispenser of
fecundity)
Prakrit Indian dialect derived from Sanskrit
Praktores magistrates charged with bringing in fines
Proscynesis genuflection before the king
Proxene citizen charged with receiving ambassadors or travellers from another
city
Pyromancy divination by fire
Pyxis a round box, used for holding unguents, cosmetics, medicaments
Rhetra law
Rhyton vase for libations in the shape of a horn, Cretan in origin
544 GLOSSARY
Schoeni measure of distance used by the Egyptians. Its value varied furthermore
according to authors from the simple to the double (between 4 and 8 miles)
Scholarch head of a philosophical school
Seven Sages group of seven sages from the Archaic period. Their names vary in
different lists (however, they all contain the names of Thales, Bius, Pittacus
and Solon)
Sitophylachs magistrates charged with controlling trade in corn
Soteriology doctrine of salvation
Sphyrelaton metallic statue worked with a hammer (as opposed to a moulded
statue)
Stamnos vase with small horizontal handles and a narrow opening, used to keep
wine (figure 89)
Sycophants professional blackmailers who lived at Athens by denouncing rich
citizens. Etymology obscure: possibly those who inform on figs (?)
Telesterion initiation (telete) room for the celebration of the mysteries

Temenos (plural, temene) for the meaning of the word in the Mycenaean period,
see p. 47. Later, sacred enclosure
Tessera tablet, token. The tessera of hospitality served as a sign of recognition
between two individuals or communities who had contracted bonds of
hospitality
Tetradrachma coin of four drachmas
Theomachy battle of the gods
Theorodochae one who meets the expenses of a reception of a theoroi (sacred
ambassador)
Theramenian partisan of a moderate democracy (like Theramenes in the last
decade of the fifth century)
Thesmothetai literally, legislators (for the first meaning, see p. 121). Later at
Athens, magistrates, members of the college of arehons (see p. 178)
Thiasote member of a thiasos (religious association)
Toreutics art of chasing metal
Trierarchy liturgy consisting of the upkeep of a trireme
Uranian celestial (from ouranos, the sky). The uranian gods: gods from above
(as opposed to chthonic divinities)
Chronological Tables
by Monique Clavel
i. The Period of
Population Movements Internal Development in Greece
4500 4500. Arrival of Neolithic populations

4500-2600
3000-2600 3000-2600. Citadel of Dimini with

monarchical power
2700 2700. Anatolian migrations to Crete
2600 2600. Anatolian migrations to Greece
2600-1950 2600-1950. Fortified palaces of Aegina
and Lerna
2000 .'1
1950 1950. First Greek invasion of Greece

(Ionians)
1900 1900. Foundation of Troy vi
1700
17 th century 17 th century. First enclosure of Mycenae

Apogee of Dorium
1610-1500
1580 1580. Second Greek invasion of Greece
(Achaeans and possibly Aeolians)
1510
- 15th century
1400
15th-13th I5th-i3th centuries. Synoecism of Athen

centuries
14th century
14th-13 th 14th-13th centuries. Apogee of Mycenae

centuries
1350 1350. Second enclosure of Mycenae

1230-1225
After 1230
End of 13 th End of 13th century. Strengthening of
century fortifications in the Peloponnese and a
Athens
1200 1200. Third Greek invasion (Dorians) 1200. Destruction of Pylos
12 th century 12th century. Destruction of Mycenae.
Downfall of Achaean monarchies
1100-900
1100-800 1100-800. Greek migrations to Anatolia
546
fie Invasions
Outside Greece Civilization
4500
4500-2600. Agricultural civilization; 4500-2600
chthonic religion
3000-2600
2700
2600. Beginning of the Bronze Age 2600
2600-1950. Agricultural and maritime 2600-1950
civilization. Appearance of vines and
olive trees. Chthonic religion.
Urjiniss ceramics
ooo. First Cretan palaces 2000
1950. Appearance of Minyan ceramics. 1950
Introduction of Indo-European gods
1900
700. First Greek incursions into Crete; 1700
destruction of the first palaces;
beginning of the second palaces
17th century
1610-1500. Circle of tombs of Mycenae 1610-1500

1580. Appearance of Nordic fashions 1580
(amber, helmets with boars’ teeth)
1510. First tholoi 1510
5th century. Apogee of Cnossos 15th century. Appearance of the first 15th century
epics
3.00. Destruction of Cnossos and founda¬ 1400
tion of an Achaean kingdom in Crete
15 th-13 th
centuries
4th century. Commercial and military 14th century
expansion of the Achaeans to Cyprus,
Rhodes and the West. Foundation of
Miletus and Colophon. Development
of the navy. Trade with Egypt
14th-13th centuries. Apogee of 14th-13 th
Mycenaean art: Cretan decoration of centuries
palaces; appearance of monumental
sculpture; wide diffusion of ceramics.
Creto-Mycenaean religious syncretism.
Invention of Linear B
1350
230-1225. Fall of Troy 1230-1225
After 1230. New epic blossoming After 1230
End of 13th century. Tablets of Pylos End of 13 th
and Cnossos century
1200
12th century. Destruction of the palace 12 th century
civilization and disappearance of
writing
1100-900. Beginning of Iron Age. Proto- 1100-900
Geometric ceramics
1100-800
547
2. Geometric and
Relations between the Internal Development of

The Colonial World
Cities the Cities
1000
900 (?)
900-750
9th century 9th century. Foundation
of Sparta
End of 9th
century
gth-beginning
of 8th centuries
800 800. Appearance of the
poleis
776
1st half of 8th 1 st half of 8th century.
century Great Rhetra of Sparta
8th century (?) 8th century (?). Transi-
tion from monarchy to
aristocracy
Middle 8th
century
757. Foundation of Nax<
757
in Sicily
755. Foundation of Cum;
755
754. Institution of ephors
754
at Sparta
8th century
747-647 747-647. The Bacchiadae
in power at Corinth
736-720 736-720. First war with
Messenia
708 708. Foundation of
Tarentum
End of 8th
century
700
Beginning of Beginning of 7 th century.
7 th century Beginning of Ionian
amphictyony
Chalcedon
683-682 683-682. Beginning of the
list of eponymous archons
at Athens
682 682. Foundation at Thas
680
670
669 669. Victory of Pheidon
over Sparta at Hysiae
664 664. First naval battle
660 660. Zaleucus legislator
Locris. Foundation of
Byzantium
7 th century 7 th century. Foundatio:
of Naucratis
548
Archaic Periods
'conomy and Society Spiritual Creations
1000. Installation of Apollo at Delos and 1000

Delphi
900 (?). Beginning of writing 900 (?)
900-750. Geometric ceramics 900-750
9th century. Homer: The Iliad gth century
nd of 9th century. Appearance of End of gth

warships century
:h-beginning of 8th centuries. Break up gth-beginning
of the gene of 8th centuries
800
776. Beginning of the Olympiads 776

1 st half of 8th
century
8th century (?)
Middle of 8th century. Homer: The Middle of 8th

Odyssey; Hesiod century
757
755
754
8th century. First Heraeum at Argos 8th century

747-647
736-720
708
End of 8th century. Eumelus of Corinth End of 8th

century
do. Appearance of hoplites 700
Beginning of 7 th century. Terpander Beginning of
7th century
687
683-682
682
80. First Lydian coins 680
70. First Ionian coins 670
669
664
660
th century. Appearance of large merchant 7th century. Orientalizing ceramics 7 th century

ships. Agrarian crisis and concentration
of property. Birth of a mercantile econ-
omy: appearance of personal fortunes
549
2. Geometric and Archaic

The Colonial World
Cities the Cities
2nd quarter of
7th century
657-584 657-584. Cypselids
tyrants at Corinth
650 650. Foundation of Selinu
650-620 650-620. Second war with
Messenia
646 646. Foundation of Olbia
640 64O. Colaeus at Tartessus
640-550
632-631 632-631. Conspiracy of
Cylon
631 631. Foundation of Cyren
630 630. Charondas legislator
at Catana
621 621. Draco’s laws
612 612. Taking of Salamis by
Athens
End of 7th
century
End of 7th
century-be¬
ginning of 6th
601-570 601-570. Cleisthenes
tyrant at Sicyon
Marseilles
Beginning of Beginning of 6th century.
6th century Foundation of
Panticapaeum
6th century 6th century. Formation of
the Peloponnesian
League
594-593 594-593. Solon’s reforms
590 590. End of the first holy 590. Autonomy of

war Delphi
580 580. The Eleans seize 580. Foundation of
Olympia Agrigen turn
580-485
577
57o
566
561-528 561-528. Pisistratus
tyrant at Athens
55°
Periods (continued)
t---—
tommies and Societies Spiritual Creations
2nd quarter of 7th century. Archilochus 2nd quarter of

and Aleman 7 th century
657-584
650
650-620
646
640
640-550. Stesichorus ofHimera 640-550
632-631
631
630
621
612
id of 7th century. First coins of Aegina. End of 7th century. Homeric Hymn to End of 7th
Beginning of large-scale Ionian trade. Demeter. Mimnermus century
Increase in hektemoroi at Athens
End of 7th century-beginning of 6th. End of 7 th
Alcaeus and Sappho. Thales century-be¬
ginning of 6th
601-570
600. New Heraeum at Olympia 600
Beginning of 6th century. Decoration of Beginning of

the temple of Athena Chalkioikos at 6th century
Sparta
a century. Development of vineyards 6th century. Ceramics with black figures 6th century
and olive-groves in Attica
4-593. Athens adopts the Euboic 594-593

standard
590
580
580-485. Xenophanes of Colophon 580-485

577. Artemisium of Corcyra 577
570. Hera of Cheramyes at Samos 57o
566. Institution of the Great Panathenaea 566
561-528
551
2. Geometric and Archaic

The Colonial World
Cities the Cities
2nd quarter of
6th century
Middle of Middle of 6th century.
Sparta’s withdrawal
6th century
into itself
548
545 •
545-524. Lygdamis
545-524
tyrant at Naxos
540. Battle of Alalia
540
532-522. Polycrates
532-522
tyrant at Samos
530 -
2nd half of
6th century
528-510. Tyranny of the
528-510
Pisistratids at Athens
525
514. Assassination of
5H
Hipparchus and exile of
the Alcmaeonids
r. 11. Destruction of
511 Sybaris by Croton
508-507 508-507. Reforms of

Cleisthenes
506 506. Victory of Athens

over the allies
501-500. Institution of
5OI-5°°
the strategoi at Athens
End of 6th
century
End of 6th
century¬
beginning of
5th
552
Periods (continued)
Economies and Societies Spiritual Creations
2nd quarter of 6th century. First 2nd quarter of

Hecatompedon. Theognis of Megara 6th century
liddle of 6th century. Appearance of the Middle of 6th century. Anaximander. Middle of 6th
trireme Artemisium of Ephesus, Apollinia of century
Syracuse and Corinth. Victory of
Archermus at Delos. Exekias
548. Burning of the temple of Delphi 548
545. Treasury of Cnidos at Delphi 545
545-524
540. Temple G at Selinus 540

532-522
530. Tragedy by Thespis. ‘Basilica’ of 530

Posidonia; second Hecatompedon of
Athens. Departure of Pythagoras for
Italy. Beginning of ceramics with red
figures
2nd half of 6th century. Anacreon 2nd half of
6th century
528-510
525. Treasury of Siphnos at Delphi 525

514. Temple of the Alcmaeonids at Delphi 5i4
5”
08—507. Beginning of democracy at 508-507

Athens
06. Foundation of the first Athenian 506
cleruchy
501-500
End of 6th century. Anaximenes End of 6th

century
End of 6th century-beginning of 5th. End of 6th
Hecataeus of Miletus century-
beginning
of 5th
553
19
j. The Fifth
Athens The Athenian Empire The Other Greek Cities
Beginning of
5th century
499-493
498
490
488-487 488-487. First use of

ostracism •
486
485-478
483-482 483-482. Discovery of a -

new vein at Laurium.
Aristides ostracised
482
481
480
480-460
479 479. Dissolution of the

Boeotian confederation
478
477 477. Creation of the

League of Delos
474
472 472. Foundation of Elis
472-471 472-471. Themistocles

ostracised
470 470. Revolt of Naxos
468 468. Extension of the

Empire after the victory
of Eurymedon
465 465. Revolt of Thasos
464 464. Earth tremor at

Sparta. Revolt of the
helots
462 462. Democratic reforms
of Ephialtes
461 461. Cimon ostracised
554
Century
he Colonial World International Relations Civilization
Beginning of 5th century. Beginning of

Heraclitus. Parmenides. 5th century
Beginning of Pindar
499—493. Revolt of Ionia 499-493
498. Destruction of Sardes 498
490. First Persian offen- 490
sive. Marathon
488-487
486. Accession of Xerxes 486. Introduction of 486

comedy at the urban
Dionysia
5-478. Gelon tyrant at 485-478
Gela
483-482
n. Gelon at Syracuse 482

481. Foundation of the 481
Hellenic Feague
0. Himera. Creation of 480. Second Persian 480
Ithe kingdom of the offensive. Thermopylae.
i Cimmerian Bosporus Salamis
480-460. Temple E at 480-460
Selinus
479. Plataea. Mycale 479
■8. Accession of 478

I Hieron 1
477
474. Auriga at Delphi 474

r 2. Victory of Cumae 472. Aeschylus: the 472
Persians
472-471
470. Beginning of work on 470

the Olympieum at
Agrigentum. Birth of
Socrates. Beginning of
Polygnotus and Myron
468. Eurymedon 468. Beginning of work on 468
the Olympieum at
Olympia
>5. End of the tyranny 465
in Sicily
464
462
461
555
j. The Fifth
458-456. Siege of Aegina

457-456. Zeugitai ad¬
mitted to archonship
454. Transfer of the

treasury from Delos
to the Acropolis
451-450. Restrictive law
on the right of the city
449-448. Decree of
Clearchus
448-447. Decree of
Cleinias
447. Reconstitution of th
446. Revolt of Euboea
443. Thucydides ostra¬

cised. Apogee of Pericles
441. Revolt of Samos
436. Foundation of
Amphipolis
Century (continued)
he Colonial World International Relations Civilization
460. Beginning of 460

Polycleitus. Zeno of Elea
End of ‘severe’ ceramics
and beginning of ‘free¬
style’ ceramics
459-454. Athenian 459-454
expedition to Egypt
458. Aeschylus: Oresteia 458
458-456
457-456
456. Anaxagoras at Athens 456

454
451-450
450. Beginning of soph- 450

istry (Protagoras).
‘Temple of Neptune’
at Posidonia
449-448. Peace of Callias 449-448
448-447
447
447-438. The Parthenon. 447-438

Apogee of Phidias
446. Thirty years peace 446. Herodotus at Athens 446
between Athens and
Sparta
43. Foundation of Thurii 443
442. Sophocles: Antigone 442

441
(40. Fall of the Battiadae 440. Apogee of 440
at Cyrene Empedocles
437-432. The Propylaea 437-432
436
433. Reform of the calen- 433

dar at Athens
432. Athenian decree 432
against Megara.
431-404. Peloponnesian 431-404
war
557
j. The Fifth
430 430. Plague at Athens.

Pericles convicted
429 429. Death of Pericles
428 428. Revolt of My tilene
427
426
425 425. Revolt of the slaves •
at Laurium
424
423
422
421
420
416 416. Taking of Melos

415 415. Mutilation of the
hermae and profaning
of the Mysteries
415-413
414 414. Alcibiades at Sparta

411 411. Oligarchy at Athens
409-406
408 408. Synoecism of Rhod<

407
406
405
404 404. Collapse of the

Empire
400
558
Century (continued)
ZThe Colonial World International Relations Civilization
430. Birth of Hippocrates 430
429
428
427. First comedy by 427
Aristophanes. Gorgias
at Athens
426. Purification of Delos 426
425. Spartan capitulation 425
at Sphacteria
424. Exile of Thucydides 424
423. Aristophanes: 423
The Clouds
t-22. Foundation of 422
Chersonesus
421. Peace of Nicias 421. Temple of Athena 421
Nike
420. Asclepius at Athens. 420
Temple of Phigalia.
Beginning of flowered
ceramics
416
415. First evidence of the 4i5
festivals of Adonis at
Athens
415-413. Expedition to 4i5-4i3
Sicily
411. Aristophanes: 411

Lysistrata
409-406. Carthaginian 409-406
offensive on Sicily
408. Euripides: Oresteia 408
407. Consecration of the 407
Erechtheum
406. Arginusae islands 406
405. Aigospotami 405. Aristophanes: 405
The Frogs
404. Fall of Athens 4°4
400. Monument of the 400

Nereids and heroon of
Trysa
559
4. The Fourth
The Greek Cities International Relations Macedonian Enterprises
405-367
404 404. Accession of
Artaxerxes n
404-403 404-403. Tyranny of the
Thirty
403 403. Democracy re-
established at Athens
401 401. Expedition of the
Ten Thousand
400 400. Institution of the
mist ho s ecclesiasticos at
Athens
400-399 400-399. Assassination of
Archelaus
Beginning of Beginning of 4th century.
4th century Law of Epitadeus at
Sparta
399
397 397. Conspiracy of
Cinadon at Sparta
395-394 395-394. War of Corinth
394 394. Victory of Conon at
Cnidos
392-388
392
390
388
387
386 386. Dissolution of the 386. King’s peace
After 385
380
377 377. Decree of Aristoteles
377-353 377-353. Mausolus satrap
of Caria
376 376. Reorganization of the
375
After 375 After 375. Economic
suffocation of Greece
374 374. King’s peace renewed
373
37i 371. King’s peace re-
newed. Leuctra
370 370. Death of Amyntas m
After 370

Messene
Megalopolis
367 367. Rescript of Susa
366
56°
Century
~he Colonial World Civilization
95-367. Reign of the elder Dionysius 405-367

404
404-403
403
401
400
400-399
Beginning of 4th century. Lysias Beginning of

logographos 4th century
399. Death of Socrates 399

397
395-394
394
392-388. Last comedies of Aristophanes 392-388

392. Olympic Discourses by Gorgias 392
390. Xenophon: Anabasis 390
388. Olympic Discourses by Lysias 388
387. Foundation of the Academy 387
386
After 385. Scopas’ career After 385

380. Isocrates: Panegyricus 380
377
377-353
376
375. Temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus 375

After 375
374
373. Disaster of Delphi 373
37i
370. Revival of Athenian ceramics: 370

Kertsch vases
After 370. Careers of Praxiteles and After 370
Lysippus
369
368
367
The younger Dionysius exiles Plato 366
561
19*
4. The Fourth
The Greek Cities International Relations Macedonian Enterprises
364. Battle of
Cynoscephalae. Death
of Pelopidas
362. Battle of Mantinea.
Death of Epaminondas
359. Philip regent

358. Accession of
Artaxerxes hi
357. Philip takes

Amphipolis
356. Athenian defeat at 356. Philip 11 king
Embata
355. End of the second
Athenian confederation
354. Philip takes Methon
348. Philip takes

Olynthus
346. Peace of Philocrates
340. Athens declares war

on Philip
338. Beginning of govern¬ 338. Battle of Chaeronea
ment of Lycurgus at
Athens
337. Foundation of the
League of Corinth
336. Accession of 336. Assassination of
Darius hi Philip. Accession of
Alexander
334. Battle of Granicus
333. Issus
332. Siege of Tyre
331. Arbela. Foundation
of Alexandria
329—327. Conquest of the

eastern satrapies
326-325. Alexander in
India
324. Alexander crowned
with gold by the Greek
cities. Marriages of Sus
323. Death of Alexander
322. Death of Demosthenes
-----■—
Century (continued)
—
The Colonial World Civilization

1
364
362
360. Tholos of Epidaurus 360

359
358
358-330. Theatre of Epidaurus 358-330

357
356. Burning of the temple of Ephesus 356
355
354. Isocrates: Areopagiticus 354

351. Demosthenes: First Philippic 35i
350. Career of Apelles 350
348
347. Death of Plato 347

346. Isocrates: Philippas 346
{44-337. Timoleon at Syracuse 344-337
{41. Victory of Timoleon over the 34i
Carthaginians at Crimisus
340. Temple of Alea at Tegea 340
338. Arrangement of the Pnyx. Death 338

of Isocrates
337
336
334
333
332
J31. Assassination of Alexander of the 33i
Molossi
530. Stele of corn-suppliers at Cyrene 330. Demosthenes: On the Crown 330
329-327
326-325
324
323
322
322-321. Death of Aristotle 322-321
|.th century. Marseilles: devaluation; 4th century
foundation of colonies, expeditions of
Euthymenes and Pytheas
End of 4th century. End of red-figure End of 4th
ceramics century
563
j. The Hellenistic
Greece and Macedonia The West The Eastern Kingdoms
34I-27°
2nd half of
4th century
End of 4th
century
•
326-325
323 323. Death of Alexander 323. Ptolemy satrap of

Egypt
322-264
321
319-289 319-289. Agathocles

3*6 316. Cassander master of
Greece
313. Seleucus satrap at
3i3
Babylon
312-176
306-305 306-305. The Diadochi

take the title of king
305 305. First royal Ptolemaic
coins. Divine honours
bestowed on Ptolemy
at Rhodes
305-304
303 303. Tarentum-Rome
treaty
3° 1
3°° 300. Foundation of

Antioch
Beginning of Beginning of 3rd century.

3rd century Seleucus 1 founds 60
towns
3rd century 3rd century. Appearance 3rd century. Spead of iro

of Celtic coinage in Egypt
297 297. Death of Cassander.

Intervention of Pyrrhus
294 294. Demetrius Poliorcetes
seizes Macedonia
289 289. Taking of Messina
by the Mamertines
287-211
564
Period
International Relations The Hellenized Borders Civilization
341-270. Epicurus 341-270

2nd half of 4th century. 2nd half of
Appearance of figured 4th century
mosaics
End of 4th century. End of 4th century. End of 4th
Foundation of Pyrrhon. Euhemerus. century
Teuthopolis. Tomb of Herophilus and
Kazanlik. Treasure of Erasistratus
Panagurichte
326-325. Alexander in 326-325
India
323
322-264. Zeno scholarch 322-264

321. Division of 321. First comedy by 321
Triparadisus Menander
319-289
3l6
3J3
312-176. Dynasty of the 312-176

Maurya in India
306-305
305
305-304. Siege of Rhodes 305-304

3°3
301. Battle of Ipsus. 3QI

Death of Antigonus the
One-Eyed
300. Embassy of 300. Euclid: Elements. 3°°
Megasthenes to Tomb of Pet-Osiris
Pataliputra
Beginning of 3rd century. Beginning of
Creation of Serapis 3rd century
Assimilation of
Aphrodite and Isis.
Foundation of the
Museum and Library at
Alexandria
3rd century. Development 3rd century
of viticulture in the
Crimea
297
294
289
287-211. Archimedes 287-211
565
5. The Hellenistic
283-246. Ptolemy 11
Philadelphia. Archives
of Zeno. Institution of
the Ptolemaic mon¬
opolies
282. Betrayal of
Philetaerus
281-280. Reconstitution
of the Achaean koinon
281. Couropedium. Death
of Lysimachus
280. Assassination of
Seleucus 1 Nicanor
280-261. Antiochus 1
Soter
280-275. Pyrrhus in the
west
279-278. Galatians 279-278. The Galatians
attack Delphi invade Anatolia
276-239. Antigonus
Gonatas
275~2I5- Hieron 11
272. Death of Pyrrhus 272. Capitulation of

Tarentum
270. Antiochus crushes
the Galatians
267-261. War of
Chremonides
264-241. First Punic War
263-241. Eumenes 1
246-221. Ptolemy hi
Euergetes
245. Aratus strategos

240. Attalus 1 takes the
title of king
239-229. Demetrius 11
Period (continued)
International Relations The Hellenized Borders Civilization

1
1
283-246. Divinization of 283-246
the Ptolemaic sovereigns.
Beginning of the
Septuagint
282
281-280
281
280. Berosus. Aratus. 280

Pharos of Alexandria
280-261
280-275
279-278
276-239
276-272. First war with 276-272

Syria
275-215
2 75-194. Eratosthenes 275-194
272
270. Theocritus. 270

Callimachus. Herondas
268-241. Arcesilas of 268-241
Pitane scholarch
267-261
264-241
264-232. Cleanthes 264-232
scholarch
263-241
261-224. Asoka. Greco- 261-224
Buddhic inscriptions
<260-255. Second war 260-255
with Syria
250. Bactriana and 250. Aristarchus of Samos 250
Sogdiana independent and Hipparchus.
Timaeus
249. Foundation of the 249. Apollonius of Rhodes. 249
kingdom of Parthia Manetho
*. " " ’ 246-221
246-241. Third war with 246-241
Syria
245
240
239-229
567
j. The Hellenistic
232-204
229-221 229-221. Antigonus

Doson
228 228. Athens drives the
Macedonian garrison
from Piraeus
227 227. Reforms of Cleomenes
at Sparta .
223-187 223-187. Antiochus 111
the Great
222 222. Battle of Sellasia
221-204 221-204. Ptolemy rv
Philopator
221-179 221—179. Philip v
219 219. Roman intervention
in Spain (beginning of
the second Punic war)
217 217. Mobilization of
native soldiers in Egypt
212-205
212 212. Sacking of Syracuse

210
210-125
207-I92 207-192. Nabis at Sparta
205
204 204. Introduction of
Cybele at Rome
203-181 203-181. Ptolemy v
Epiphanes
202 202. Zama
3rd-2nd 3rd-2nd centuries. Apogee
centuries of the oppida of Provence-
Languedoc
200-196
Beginning of
2nd century
2nd century 2nd century. Revolts in

Egypt
197-159 I97_I59- Eumenes n
197
196 196. Flamininus proclaims
the liberty of the Greeks
189
188
568
Period (continued)
nternational Relations The Hellenized Borders Civilization
232-204. Chrysippus 232-204

scholarch
229-221
228
227
223-187
222
221-204
221-179
219
17. Raphia 217
12-205. First war with 212-205

Macedonia
212
210. Hypostyle room of 210
Delos
210-125. Polybius 210-125
207-192
05. Peace of Phoinice 205
204
203-181
202
3rd-2nd
centuries
00-196. Second war with 200-196

Macedonia
Beginning of 2nd century. Beginning of
Crates of Mallos. 2nd century
Bouleuterion of Priene
2nd century. Foundation 2nd century
of Neapolis of Scythia
I97_I59- Great altar of 197-159
Pergamum
97. Cynoscephalae 197
196
189
R89. Defeat of Antiochus
hi at Magnesia
188
88. Treaty of Apamea
569
5. The Hellenistic
186. Scandal of the

Bacchanalia at Rome
184. Elder Cato censor.
Basilica Porcia at Rome
179-168. Perseus
175-168. Antiochus rv
Epiphanes
166. Athens receives

Delos. Decadence of
Rhodes
165. Purification of the
temple of Judas
Maccabeus
161. Philosophers expelled
from Rome
155. Embassy of
Carneades at Rome
148. Macedonia reduced

to a province
146. Sacking of Corinth 146. Taking of Carthage.
First marble temple at
Rome
145-116. Ptolemy vn.
Euergetes 11. Egyptian-
ization of the monarchy
133. Death of Attalus in

Period (continued)
iternational Relations The Hellenized Borders Civilization
186
184
179-168
176-164. Dynasty of the 176-164
Sounga in India.
Enclosures of Santchi
and Bodh Gaya
175-168
72-168. Third war with 172-168

Macedonia
170. Cupro-nickel coins 170. Resumption of work 170
at Bactriana on the Olympeium at
Athens
70-168. Sixth war with 170-168
Syria
58. Pydna. Popilius 168
Laenas at Alexandria
166
165
161
Around 160. Library of Around 160

Pergamum
155
155—I3°- Menander 155-13°

150. Alteration of the 150
theatre at Priene.
Beginning of Neo-
Atticism
148
146
145-H6
138-125
138-125. Tchang K’ien
mission
133
130
130. Extension of the
Parthian kingdom to the
Euphrates. Conquest of
Sogdiana by the Yue-
tche
571
5. The Hellenistic
129 129. Asia reduced to a

province
129-110
125 125. Beginning of the

conquest of Trans¬
alpine
118 118. Foundation of 118. Immunity for
Narbonne .Egyptian temples
II2-63 112-63. Mithridates rv
Eupator
107
104 104. Aristobulus takes th<

title of king
IOI 101. Cilicia reduced to a
province
100
Beginning of
1st century
88 88. Sacking of Delos
87-85
86 86. Sacking of Athens by
Sulla
80-51 80—51. Ptolemy xi Aulett
75-70
74 74. Cyrenaica and

Bithynia reduced to
provinces
66-62
64 64. Annexation of Syria

by Pompey
63 63. Suicide of Mithridate
rv. Taking of temple ol
Jerusalem by Pompey
50
49 49. Annexation of
Marseilles
48 48. Caesar at Alexandria
3i
30 30. Suicide of Cleopatra.
Annexation of Egypt b
Rome
27 27. Creation of the
province of Achaea
2nd half of
1st century
572
573
■
.
Index
Index
Abantes, 131 Aenianes, 145, 147

Abdera, 142, 200, 291, 298 Aenesidemus, 457
Abu Simbel, 197 Aeneid, The, 507
Abydos, 201, 202 Aeolia, 137, 212
Acarnania, 3, 77, 82, 146, 326 Aeolians, The, 20, 38, 63, 80, 82, 105, 200, 447
Achaea, 40, 43, 44, 77, 78, 105, 116, 150-1, Aeolis, 76, 83, 105, 210
330, 395 Aeschines, 325, 355, 381, 384, 395
Achaemenids, The, 242, 382, 407, 429 Aeschylus, 2, 42, 236, 244-5, 246, 264, 276-9,
Achaemenid Empire, The, 315, 337, 338 280, 283, 297, 288, 304-5
Achaeans, The, 4, 12, 16, 20, 34-35, 37, 47, 49, Aesop, 142, 198
50-52, 55-64, 66, 69-70, 73, 76, 79-80, Aetolia, 3, 39, 77, 82, 146, 398
82,85, 93,95, 105, 136, 145, 152, 162-3, Afghanistan, 406, 476, 515, 524, 526
172, 188, 193, 208, 209, 231, 379, 397, 398 Africa, 153, 194, 260, 342, 411, 425-7, 431,
Achaean Greece, 39, 41, 47, 49, 59, 63, 73, 84 472, 510, 5!2-i3, 529
Achaea Phthiotis, 80, 82, 105 Against Athenogenes, 350
Achaeus, 105 Agamemnon, 39-41, 44, 50, 51, 60, 64, 70, 73,
Acharnians, The, 303-4 94, 278, 353, 375
Achelous, 3 Agariste, 127, 156
Achilles, 15, 41, 52, 64, 73, 94, 105, 160, 201, Agatha, 342
268, 293, 296, 334, 366, 399, 490 Agathocles, 346, 400, 407
Achniadai, 174 Agathon, 263, 306
Acrae, 189, 193 Ageladas, 155
Acrocorinth, 159 Agesilaus, 315, 319
Acropolis, The, 6, 46, 156, 173, 176-7, 180, Agesilaus, The, 351
183, 224, 227, 248-9, 256, 276, 284, 294, Agid, 165
295, 309, 3”, 3r3, 366-7 Agis, 393
Actaeon, 281 Agora, 310
Acte, 200 Agoracritus, 310
Actium, 405 Agrai, 285
Acusilaus, 149 Agrigentum, 161, 189, 193, 264, 265-6, 279-
Adonis, 287, 310, 380, 383, 473, 474, 479, 483 281, 294-5, 379
Adrastus, 125 Agylla, 147
Adria, 189 Agyrrhius, 330
Adriatic Sea, The, 158, 260 Aigikoreis, 173
Aeacus, 160 Ajax, 160
Aegae, 145, 263 Akhkhijawa, 49, 51
Aegean, Civilization, The, 25, 70, 135 Alalakh, 53, 59
Aegean Migration, 77 Alalia, 195, 245
Aegean Sea, The, 1, 12-13, 20, 27, 39, 60, 70, Alashia, 49
89, 91, 103, 112, 131, 200, 201, 210, 241, Alcaeus, 108, 121, 137, 198, 210, 212-13
246, 247-8, 250, 252, 394 Alcamenes, 312
Aegeum, 397 Alcibiades, 270, 273, 300, 307, 329
Aegeus, 280 Alcmaeonids, 125, 127, 147, 174, 179, 181,
Aegimus, 76 227, 242, 253, 290, 370, 379
Aegina, 15, 21, 23, 103, no, 112, 116, 129, Aleman, 171, 210
150, 154, 160-1, 178, 197, 201, 224, 248, Alea, 372
261, 281 Aleos, 153
Aeginetans, The, in, 244, 280 Aleppo, 136
Aegisthus, 41, 43, 65 Aleuadae, 145
Aegospotami, 315 Aleuas, The Red, 145
Aemilianus, 459 Alexander, 263, 267, 315, 318-19, 320, 322,
Aemilius, Paulus, 398 327, 333-4, 336-40, 344, 347, 362, 365,
578 INDEX
Alexander, contd. Andros, 91, 150, 200

372, 374) 376, 382, 3^9) 398-9, 402-3, Ankara, 143
405, 407-8, 411-14, 4^, 422-3, 425, 427, Anniceris, 341, 357
440, 449, 453, 469, 478-9, 487, 493-4, Annobal, The Carthaginian, 319
502, 514, 519 Antaeus, 283
Alexander the Molossian, 347, 400-1 Antalcidas, 316
,
Alexandra 451-2 An tenor, 227
Alexandria, 142, 198. 337, 339, 395, 405-6, Anthela, 130, 147
411, 420, 422-7, 438-9, 447, 450-2, 46°- Anthesteria, 284
463, 465, 468, 470-7, 479, 482-3, 489, ,
Anthology The, 451, 472
503, 51®, 5l8, 522, 524, 527, 531 ,
Antigone 6, 288
Alexandropol, 490 Antigonus, 389, 397, 458, 466
Alexis, 349 Antigonus Doson, 398
Allah, 274 Antigonus Gonatas, 389, 397, 398, 400
Al-Mina, 59, 135, 136, 159, 259, 332 Antimachus, 517-18
Alphabet, Phrygian, 143 Antioch, 406, 410, 418-19, 438, 465, 496
Alpheus, 3, 20 Antiochus, 389, 404, 406-10, 416, 418-20, 463
Alphitopolis, 256 Antiope, 280, 471
Alps, The, 207, 342 Antiphanes, 349
Alsace, 207 Antipater, 389
Altai, 205 Antiphon, 299
Altis, 152, 222, 281 Antipolis, 342
Alyattes, no, 123, 127, 143 Antisthenes, 356-7, 359
Amalthea, 68 Antony, 479
Amaravati, The Buddha of, 296 Apamea, 136, 395
Amasis, 197, 198, 230 Apaturia, 91, 139
Amazonomachy, 224, 246, 371 Apeiron, 215
Amazons, The, 201, 257, 261 Apelles, 340, 375
Ambracia, The Gulf of, 3, 158, 326, 327, 399 Aphaea, 160
Amenhotep, 486 Aphidna, 175
Amenophis, 59 Aphrodite, 68, 98, 136, 156, 266, 282, 287, 310,
Amphipolis, 270, 306, 321 312, 366, 373, 374, 378, 380, 424, 467,
Amisus, 203-4 47i, 473-4, 479, 481, 482-3
Amon, 196, 334, 340, 382, 4x3, 481 Apollo, 68-69, 75, 85, 91, 97, 100, 126, 132,
Amnisos, 12, 33 136, 139, 144, 147-8, 172, 182, 187, 195,
Amphiaraus, 97, 149 233, 236, 241, 278, 281, 282, 287, 309,
Amphiareum, 149 341, 367, 369, 370, 374, 375, 379, 383,
Amphictyonies, 126, 130, 146 419, 464, 472, 491, 493, 495-6, 523-4
Amphipolis, 375 Apollodorus, 313
Amphissa, 326 Apollonia, 158
Amphora, 65 Apollonius, 428, 429, 431, 433, 434, 448, 450,
Amyclae, 38, 44, 78, 85, 144, 160, 163, 172 451, 452, 461, 463
Amyntas, 321 ,
Apology The, 358
,
Anabasis The, 351 Apollo Patroos, 174
Anacharsis, 205-6 ,
Apparition The, 450
Anacreon, 127, 142, 145, 181, 213 Appius, 346
Anaphe, 91 Apries, 196
Anapus, 190 Apulia, 377
Anatolia, 4, 11-15, 19, 21, 24-25, 50, 60, 67, Aquinas, Thomas, 365
77, 80, 83, 91, 95-103, 115-16, !23, *30, Ara Maxima, The, 346
131, 135-6, 139, >52, 180, 184, 186-7, Arabia, 512, 514, 520, 522
192, 195, 204, 229, 232, 261, 331, 336, Arachthus, 3
337, 367, 406-9, 4”, 412, 426, 428, 440, Arachosia, 338
443, 464, 47i, 485, 492 Aratus, 397, 398, 452
,
Anaxagoras, The Prophet of Nous 256-7, 288, Arbela, 337-8
290-91, 302, 307 ,
Arbitration The 449 ,
Anaxilas, 264 Arcadia, 3, 10, 39, 63, 69, 80, 82, 95, 150-1,
Anaximander, 142, 144, 215, 228 152-5, 167, 231, 261, 318-19, 330, 369,
Anaximenes, 142, 216 370-x, 379, 451, 473
Ancona, 344 Arcesilas, 196, 267, 279, 456
Andromachus, 531 Arcesilas, Cup, The, 172
INDEX 579
Archaic, Colonization, 194 Artaxerxes, 248, 254, 315, 320
Archaic Period, The, 60, 69, 102, 104, 114-15, Artemis, 68, 97-98, 100, 135, 169, 171, 195,
129, 130-1, 134, 145-6, 149-50, 152-61, 196, 222, 280, 308, 368, 419, 473, 495,530
164, 167, 173, 184-5, !92, 198, 204, 206, Artemis Orthia, 93
212, 215, 218-22, 225, 230, 232-3, 236-7, Artemis Tauropole, 206
246, 260, 264, 266-7, 276, 282, 297, 290, Artemisia, 370
292, 3°9> 3!2, 3!6, 330, 368, 393, 448, Artemisium, 134, 144, 222, 244, 282
464, 468, 470, 471, 487, 500 Aryballos of Glanon, 194
Archelaus, 263 Asclepeum, 369
Archermus, 227 Asclepius, 154, 288, 301, 308, 366, 369, 372,
Archias, 108, 185 375, 380-1, 426, 466, 482, 501
Archidamus, 173, 262, 347, 353, 400 Asia, 82, 91, 97, 112, 116, 119, 121, 127, 131,
Archilaus, 320 132, 144, 172, 184, 201, 222, 228, 242,
Archilochus, 105, 119, 123, 132, 134, 191, 204, 245, 295, 309, 315, 316, 320, 322, 336,
210 337-8, 339-40, 341, 347, 352-4, 367, 375,
Archimedes, 403, 432, 463 384, 389, 394-5, 408-9, 422, 427, 436,
Archipelago, 219 440, 468, 470, 473
Architecture, 142 Asia Minor, 9, 13, 19-21, 28, 35, 49, 59, 76,
Archontes, 107 83, 90, 101, 204, 232, 261, 337, 339, 368,
Archytas, 292, 344, 345, 346, 361 389, 406, 408-9, 416, 425, 429, 434, 464,
Areopagus, Council of the, 176, 177-8, 354 493
Ares, 68, 244, 474 Asoka, 515-17, 523
Arethusa, 191, 266 Asopus, 3, 156
Argadeis, 173 Aspasia, 256-7, 261
Arganthonius, 195 Aspenduss, 136
Argeiphontes, 69 Aspis, 155
Argive, the Plain of, 155 Assinarus, 270
Argive Tradition, The, 295 Asine, 38, 71, 153
Argives, The, 167, 225, 287 Assos, 91
Argolid, 11, 14, 38, 41, 44, 46, 49, 53, 57, Assurbanipal, 136
63-4. 67, 71, 78-9, 150, 153-4, 155-8, Assuwa, Prince of, 51
160, 162, 214 Assyria, no, 136, 143, 197
Argolis, The gulf of, 154 Assyrian, 93, 116
,
Argonautica 64, 450, 452 Astarte, 98, 136
Argonauts, The, 145, 201, 225 Asteropus, 166
Argos, 78, 101, 107, no, 121, 150, 153-6, 167, Astypalaea, 91
261, 262, 295, 319, 333, 371 ,
Athaliah 309
Aria, 338 Athanasius, 442
Ariadne, 29, 35, 67, 132, 313, 473, 480, 510 Athena, 46, 68, 69, 70, 149, 160, 176, 180, 200,
Ariapeithes, 205 233, 250, 274, 277, 280, 282, 283, 284,
Arion, 127, 137, 210 294, 295, 3”. 312, 337, 340, 34i, 3g8,
Aristagorus, 242 477, 495, 524, 527, 530
Aristaeus, 361 Athena, Alea, 153, 369
Aristarchus, 453, 461 Athena Chalkioikos, 171
Aristides, 245, 247, 252 Athena Ergane, 259
Aristippus, 347, 356-7, 359 Athena Ilias, 192
Aristobulus, 411 Athena Lemnia, 295
Aristogiton, 181 Athena Nicephoros, 470
Aristomachus, 74 Athena Nike, 311, 313
Aristomenes, 167 Athena Oxyderces, 155
Aristophanes, 270, 274, 286, 288, 297, 300-5, Athena Phratria, 174, 369
310, 329, 349, 381-2, 449, 453 Athena Polias, 181, 368, 420
Aristotle, 102, 118, 121, 124, 129, 137, 169, Athena Promachos, 295
174, 175-6, 177, 179, 196, 210, 255-6, Athena Pronaia, 147, 370
278, 291, 293, 305, 317, 333, 334, 339, Athenaeum, 266
340, 348, 354, 356, 362, 363, 364, 365, Athenaion Politeia 365,
Athens, 2, 5, 28, 39, 45-46, 66, 69, 79, 84, 89,
383, 385, 446, 455, 456
Armenia, 17, 407-9, 476 91, 92, 95, ^02, 103, 107, 112, 119, 121,
,
Ars Poetica 306 125, 127, 129, 131, 134, 142, 150, 152,
Arsaces, 407 154, 158, 160, 161, 167, 173, 174, 175,
Arsinoe, 479 176, 177-81, 183, 189, 201, 206, 210,

58° INDEX
Athens, contd . Battus, 187, 196

214-15, 222, 227, 229, 231, 233, 237, Bellum Poenicum 507 ,
241-2, 244-5, 246-54, 256-61, 262-72, Beloch, K. J., 76
274, 276, 277, 279-80, 284-86, 288-90, Bendis, 310, 381
294, 296-300, 303-5, 307-8, 310, 312, Bdrard, J., 52, 193
3I3, 3:4, 317-20, 323-33, 336, 34i, 344, Berbati, 11, 44, 71
349- 50, 353, 356, 357, 362, 366, 367, Berenice, 406
369, 37J-2, 376-9, 380, 383, 390, 414, Berezan, Isle of, 201
416, 422, 434, 444, 447, 449, 456-7, 463, Berosus, 448
466-7, 476 Berre, 341
,
Athens Constitution of 177, 179, Bessarabia, 9
Athenians, The, 169, 182, 183, 229, 231, 241, Bessus, 337, 338
242, 244-52, 256, 258-60, 262, 265, 269- Bible, ,
The 95, 194, 412
270, 272-3, 276, 287, 289, 295, 302-3, Bisanthe, 202
306-10, 312, 315-18, 320-1, 323, 324-7, Bismarck, 327
350- 1, 354, 356, 373, 374, 376-7, 393, Biton, 155, 225
395, 424, 427, 428, 449 Bithynia, 407, 409
Athos, 200 Black Sea, The, 17, 19, 51, 115, 139, 141, 160,
Atlantis Myth, 198 184, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 267, 272,
Atoum, 484 315, 326, 376, 407, 408, 487
Atreus, 41-42, 44 Blaise, St., 341
Atreus, Treasury of, 65, 221 Blegen, W., 11, 101
Atridae, 41, 42, 278 Boeotia, 3, 11, 21, 38, 45, 47, 55, 64, 73, 77,
Atropates, 407 79,83, 90-9D 92, 95, IDI, I07, I3T 137,
Attalid Kingdom, The, 409, 416, 473 147, 149, 153, 167, 183, 203, 226, 244,
Attalus, 409, 420 248, 279, 319, 326, 328-9, 367, 378
Attica, 2, 16, 38, 45, 74, 78, 80, 82, 89, 90, Boeotian League, The, 263, 316, 317, 318, 327
91, t30, 148, 149, 160, 173, 175, 178, 181, Boethus, 475
215, 231, 242, 258, 270, 276, 295, 312, Boeus, Mount, 3, 77
316, 329 Boghaz-Keui, 49
Attic Culture, 227, 229, 260, 283, 309-10, 331, Borges, J. L., 530
340, 350, 376, 377, 379, 395, 447, 469 Bosporus, The, 159, 200, 324, 408, 488
Attis, 383, 481 ,
Boule 250, 255, 264
Aubenque, P., 364 Bouleutherion, The, 287
,
Aufklarung The, 299 Bouzygai, 253, 255
Augustine, 360 Branchidae, The, 139, 227
Augustus, 424, 500, 514 Brasidas, 270
Aurelius, Marcus, 394, 459, 527 Brimo, 285
Auletes, 405 Brimos, 285-6
Axius, 3, 77, 398 Brindisi, 345
Briseis, 50, 94
British Museum, The, 472
Babyce, 166 Britomartis, 34
Babylon, 53, 215, 289, 338, 346, 383, 407, 411, Brochard, V., 364
4r9, 436, 44°, 448 Bronze Age, The, 11, 12, 21, 57, 59
, ,
Bacchae The 309, 380 Bruttians, The, 343
Bacchants, The, 232 Bryaxis, 366, 370, 374, 482
Bacchiadae, 108, 128, 158 Brygus, 283
Bacchus, 108, 232, 479, 505, 509 Bug, The, 201, 202, 206, 487
Baccylides, 134, 264 Burckhardt, J., 128
Bactria, 337, 338, 407, 526 Burgundy, 207
Baden, 207 Burn, A. R., 150
Balkans, 1, 3, 19, 23, 83, 336 Byzantium, 153, 159, 200, 203, 320, 324, 326,
Baltic, 184, 205 33L 394, 449, 450, 452, 473, 529
Balto-Slavs, 17
Barbarians, The, 266, 272, 354
Barca, 196 Cabinet des Medailles, 172
Basilides, 141 Cabiri, The, 310, 383
Bastide, G., 302 Cadmeians, 131
Bathycles, 172 Cadmus, 46, 100, 139, 142
Battiadae, 267 Caere, 229
INDEX 58!
Caesar, Julius, 195, 340, 405, 424, 466, 495, Cephisians, 174
496 Cephisodotus, 318, 373
Caicus, 132, 366, 420 Cephissus, 174, 285, 310
Calamis, 282 Cersobleptes, 326
Calanos, 340 Ceryces, 174
Calauria, 131, 153, 154, 177 Chabrias, 317
Calchidas, 62 Chadwick, J., 39, 53
Callatis, 203 Chaeronea, 47, 326-7, 354
Callias, 249, 316, 326, 363 Chalcedon, 201-2
Callicles, 299 Chalcidice, 150, 158, 187, 198, 260, 317
Callicrates, 294 Chalcidians, 132, 150, 167, 183, 198
Callimachus, 312, 406, 450, 452-3 Chalcis, 116, 149, 150, 161, 183, 186-8, 249,
Callinicus, 408 260, 327, 362
Callisthenes, 382 Chalcolithic Culture, 9
Callistratus, 322 Chamoux, F., 197
Callon, 160 Champagne, 207
Calydon, 225 Chaones, 399
Calymna, 91 Chaos, 149
Camares, 32 Characters, The, 456
Camarina, 189, 193 Charaxus, 108
Cambyses, 144, 197, 241 Chares, 320, 469
Camirus, 49, 91 Charidemus, 320
Campania, 189, 192, 377 Charondas, 121-2
Camp de Chateau, 207 Cheiromacha, 128
Canachus, 156 Chersicrates, 108
Cape Denis, 195 Chersonesus, 242, 267, 408, 488
Cappadocia, 407, 409 Chertomlyk, 268
Cardia, 202 Chicanopolis, 303
Caria, 89-90, 247, 320, 367, 369, 371, 394, 409, Chigi Vase, The, 117
434 Chilon, 167
Carians, 131 China, 299, 489, 526-7
Carnak, 340 Chios, 91, no, 129, 139, 141, 150, 198, 227,
Carneades, 456 320
Carpathos, 91 Choirilos, 263
Carpatho-Danubian, 17, 19 Chremes, 449
Carthage, 184-5, I96> 245, 260, 346, 402, Chrimes, K., 165
427-8, 487 Christ, 276, 486
Carthaginians, The, 195, 245, 264-5, 343, 403 Christianity, 364-5
Caryatids, The, 312 Chroust, 301
Casmenae, 189, 193 Chthonic Cult, The, 266
Casos, 91 Chrysippus, 458
Caspian Sea, The, 407 Cicero, 290, 301, 459
Cassander, 389, 390 Cilicia, 50, 136, 204, 394
Cassandra, 452 Cimmerians, The, 201-2, 268
Cassiterides, 194 Cimmerian Bosporus, The, 267-8
Castor, 225 Cimon the Lout, 181, 246-7, 251-4, 282, 284
Catalogue of Ships, The, 39, 44, 63, 175 Cimonids, 125, 174, 179, 181, 306
Catana, 121, 188, 193, 343 Cinadon, 316
Catumandus, 341 Cinyrads, 136
Caulonia, 193, 344 Cirrha, 147
Cayster, 132, 139 Cithaeron, 309
Cecrops, 312, Cittion, 381
Celenderis, 136 Claros, 27, 144
Celtic World, The, 266 Classical Period, The, 128
Celts, The, 17, 33 L 34* Clazomenae, 91, 141, 150, 198, 200, 228, 229,
Cenchreae, 156 291
Centaurs, The, 18 Clearchus, 249, 382
Centauromachy, 224, 281, 371 Cleanthes, 458
Ceos, 91, 134, 150, 299 Cleinias, 249
Cephallenia, 82 Cleisthenes, 125-8, 147, 156, 179, 181-3, 214,
Cephalus, 379 228, 252, 263, 294
582 INDEX
Cleitus, 336, 382 Crimea, The, 201-2, 204, 206, 267, 268, 488
Cleobis, 155, 225 Critias, 300
Cleodaeus. 74 Critius, The Athenian, 282,
Cleomenes, 165, 167, 181, 393, 394, 398, 459 Critolaus, 456
Cleon, 270, 303 Croesus, no, 143, 149, 233, 241, 368
Cleopatra, 328, 405, 472, 479 Croiset, A., 353
Cleruchies, 247 Cronos, 68
Clitias, 230 Croton, 139, 188, 190, 192-3, 292, 344
Clouds, The, 297, 300, 303 Crusaders, The, 219, 370
Clytemnestra, 43, 452 Ctesias, of Cnidos, 355
Cnacion, 165 Cumae, 150, 187, 189, 192,-245, 264
Cnidian, 61, 189 Curetes, 69, 93, 162
Cnidos, 137, 198, 223, 300, 315 Cybele, too, 143, 205, 242, 310, 381, 450, 481
Cnossus, 26-32, 34, 47, 54-55, 57, 62, 68, 89, Cyclades, 1, 13, 15, 22, 27, 28, 89, 91, 92, 116,
9i, 147 i32, 136, !39, 162, 180
Colaeus, 195 Cyclops, The, 46, 450, 452
Colchis, 184, 203-4 Cyllene, 69
Colossus, 135 Cyllyrians, The, 190, 343
Colophon, 50, 59, 83, 91, 108, 138-9, 141-2, Cylon, 127, 177
187, 193, 197, 202 Cyme, 91, 137, 150, 355
Commagene, 409 Cynis, The, 356
Concord, The, 294 Cynosarges, 356
Conon, 315 Cynoscephalae, 319, 398
Constitution of the Athenians, The, 272 Cynuria, 37, 153
Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, The, 351 Cypriot, 82, 136
Copais, Lake, 3, 46, 148-9 Cypro-Minoan, 49
Copenhagen, 472 Cyprus, 28, 49, 52, 55, 60, 97, 135, 139, 144,
Copernicus, 461 241, 272, 332, 404, 405, 409
Corax, 266, 299 Cypselids, 127
Corcyra, 82, 112, 158, 188-9, 222, 224, 320, Cypselus, 123, 125, 126, 127, 158
326 Cyra, 196
Corfu, 24 Cyrenaics, 301
Corinth, 12, 38, 41, 44, 75, 80, 92, 101, 112, Cyrenaica, 172, 187, 196, 405
116, 118, 123, 125, 126, 128, 150, 155-6, Cyrene, 137, 147, 150, 153, 161, 172, 196, 267,
158-61, 189-90, 193, 229-30, 244, 248, 279, 34L 346, 356-7, 367, 370, 405, 406,
261-2, 269, 315, 327, 336, 346, 379, 396- 461
398, 416, 425, 466 Cyrnus, 108
Corinthians, The, 108, 136-7, 159, 188, 194, Cyropaedia, The, 351
200 Cyrus, The Great, 351
Corinthian History, 159 Cyrus, The Younger, 315
Corone, 248 Cythera, i, 9L 98, I53> 345
Coronea, 351 Cythnos, 91
Corcyra, 401 Cyzicus, 201-2, 205, 331
Corsica, 144, 195, 344
Corybantes, 162
Cos, 91, 136-7, 300, 394, 447, 452, 462, 480 Daedalids, 93, 163
Cottyto, 31 o Daedalus, 28, 31, 93, 161, 184
Cotys, 320 Damon, of Oa, 255
Craterus, 338 Danaus, 155
Crates, 356 Danube, The, 77, 202
Cratinus, 257, 288 Daphne, 197
Creon, 288 Dardanians, The, 77
Cresilas, 256, 312 Darius, 144, 241-2, 244, 328, 337-8. 376, 474
Cretan Civilization, 25, 161 Dark Ages, The, 89, 94, 103, 105, 106, 188
Cretan, 69, 84-85 Decelea, The War of, 257
Cretans, The, 24, 26-28, 31-35, 42, 47, 59, 62, Deinocrates, 423
187, 189, 193, 196 Deinomenes, 123
Crete, 2, 12-14, 16, 21-27, 33, 36, 39, 40, 47, Deinomenidae, 264, 266, 282, 287
49. 52, 54-55. 60, 63-64, 66, 70_7I> 85, Delian League, The, 246-7
89, 91, 93, 103, 112, 116, 127, 147, 161-3 Delium, 300
Creto-Mycenaean Civilization, The, 231 Delos, 91, 98, 132, 134, 180, 220, 223-5, 227»
INDEX 583
Delos, contd. Don, The, 268, 488
233. 242, 246, 247-8, 286, 312, 345, 390, Dorians, The, 16, 20, 65, 73, 75, 77-78, 80, 83,
393. 395. 425> 428, 464, 465, 466, 471, 84, 85, 91, 97, 101, 105, 107, 108, 116,
473) 475, 482, 483, 495 125, 130, 136, 146-8, 153, 155, 156, 161,
Delphi, 74, 98, 100, 126, 130, 132, 137, 144, 162-5, 174, 177, 196, 225, 236, 280, 287,
147-8, 152, 155, 156, 162, 182, 183, 187, 447
196, 220, 227, 233, 236, 244, 280, 282, Dorian Invasion, The, 12, 67, 72, 79, 83, 84,
283, 286, 301, 323, 336, 341, 367, 368, 89, 95, IO°, 101, 131, 151, 173, 210, 231,
369, 379, 393, 396, 399, 496 235, 279
Demades, 326 Doric Architecture, 159, 266, 294, 295, 312,
Demareteia, The, 266 367, 369
Demargne, P., 162 Doric Order, The, 221, 222, 225
Demeter, 68, 70, 147, 192, 231-3, 266, 284-5, Doris, 80, 83, 146, 148
295, 365, 383, 422, 503, 509 Dorium, 23-24

Demetrius of Phalerum, 404, 446, 518 Dorus, 76, 105
Demetrius Poliorcetes, 389, 398, 478 Doryphorus, 295
Democritus, 290, 291, 357, 457 Draco, 121, 122, 177
Demos, 303 Dryopes, 131
Demosthenes, 322-7, 330-1, 336, 350, 352, Dumezil, G., 18
354, 375, 381, 383, 442 Duris, 283

Demostratus, 310 Dyauh of Vedic Indians, 68
Dendra-Midea, 44 Dyscolos, 449
Descartes, 361 Dymanes, 125
Description of the World, 216
Despoina, 231, 383
Deucalion, 76 Ecbatana, 337-8, 464
Diadumenos, 295 Ecclesia, The, 248-50, 255, 256, 272, 317, 324,
Diaspora, 410-11, 412 332, 349, 448
Dicaearchia (Puteoli), 189, 192 Ecclesiasticus, 412
Dicaeopolis, 303-4 Echecratidae, 145
Dictynna, 34 Echemus, 74
Didyma, 139, 144 Edfou, The Temple of, 413

Didymeium, The, 198, 227, 242 Egypt, 5, 20, 28, 49, 55, 59, 60, 68, 72, 73, 76,
Dimini, 10 108, 116, 119, 137, 139, 141, 159, 187,
Dinarics, 1 196-7, 215, 259, 270, 289, 330-2, 337,
Diodotus, 517 339, 34°, 382, 389, 394, 403, 404, 405,
Diogenes, 356 408, 410, 411-14, 416, 422, 424, 425,
Diomedes, 39, 44 427, 428-38, 439-40, 443, 444, 448, 461,

Dionysia, The Great, 126, 180, 233, 250, 278, 472, 479, 481-4, 502, 512-14, 530
Ehrenberg, V., 288, 304
284, 334, 375, 465
Dionysius, 265, 343, 344, 345, 346, 353, 357 Eileithyia, 33, 34, 68
Dionysus, 68, 125, 132, 180, 205,213,214,230, Elatea, 326
232, 233, 236, 280, 282, 284, 285, 304, Elea, 189, 193, 216, 291-2
307, 309, 310, 313, 336, 338, 366, 374, Eleans, The, 152, 155, 167, 281, 287
379, 380, 382, 383, 391, 420, 422, 466, Eleatic School, The, 292
Eleatism, 298
473-5, 480, 482, 485, 499, 5°3, 5!°, 5=2
Dioscurias, 203 Electra, The, 305
Dioscuri, 51, 313 Electra, 41
Diotima, 360 Elegies, The, 108, 452

Dipoenus, 127, 156 Elements, 361, 364, 461
Dipylon Gate, 92 Eleusis, 198, 231, 236, 256, 270, 278, 284, 287,
Dirce, 471 288, 294, 307, 310, 352, 369, 380, 383,
Discobolus, 295 39i, 477

Diwia, 68 Eleuthereus, 232
Dnieper, The, 201, 487 Elis, 39, 80, 150-1, 261, 262, 281, 299, 351
Dniester, The, 201-2 Elpinice, 282
Dodecanese, The, 89, 196 Elymi, 266
Dodecapolis, Ionian, 91 Elysium, 33
Dodona, 85, 400 Embata, 320
Doidalsas, 471 Empedocles, 292
Dolopians, 147 Emporiae, 342

584 INDEX
Enipeus, 78 Eulogy of Ptolemy, The, 447

Enkomi, 49 Eumaeus, 57
Enneakrounos, 126 Eumelus, 159
Enyalios, 68 Eumenes, 338
Epaminondas, 318-19, 321 Eumenides, The, 277
Epaphus, 73 Eumolpus, 175
Ephesus, 91, 93, no, 112, 138, 139, 143, 312, Eunomia, 158
337) 368, 375, 428, 436 Eupalinus, 141-60

Ephialtes, 248, 254 Eupatridae, 174-5, J79> 180, 182, 252
Ephors, 107 Euphorion, 123
Ephorus, 353, 355 Euphrates, 4, 59, 407
Epicharmus, 264, 266, 278 Euphronios, 283
Epictetus, 283 Euripides, 263, 274, 304, 305, 308, 309, 334,
Epicurus, 457-8 336, 380, 450
Epidamnus, 158, 189, 491 Eupompus, 375
Epidaurus, 37, 128, 153, 288, 309, 366-7, 369, Euripus, 149, 365
371 > 374) 380, 381, 462 Europe, 336, 337

Epigoni, The, 287 European Civilization, 207
Epinomis, 381 Eurotas, 3, 162, 169
Epiphanes, 453, 479 Euryalus, 341, 343
Epirote, 400, 402, 403 Eurydice, 320
Epirus, 1, 3, 77-78, 82, 145, 397, 398, 400 Eurymedon, 247, 287
Epistle to the Galatians, The, 485 Eurypontid, 165
Epitadeus, 316 Eurystheus, 41, 74
Epithalamium for Thetis and Peleus, 507 Euthycartides, 135
Epizephyrian Locri, 121, 146, 188, 192, 193, Euthydemus, 517, 520
266, 402 Euthymenes, 343, 347
Equals, The, 162-4, 166-7, 316, 317, 333 Euxine Sea, The, 201
Erasistratus, 462 Evagoras, 316
Eratosthenes, 52, 404, 461, 511, 514 Evans, Sir Arthur, 28, 36
Erechtheids, 175 Evander, 55, 188
Erechtheum, 46, 180, 311, 313, 367, 368 Excavations, American, 262
Erechtheus, 46, 69, 175, 284 Exekias, 230
Eretria, 149, 150, 187, 188, 242, 249
Eretrians, 150, 200
Ergotimos, 230 Fabricus, 458
Erinys, 68, 277 Faliscan Alphabet, The, 207
Eros, 142, 366, 380, 471 Fascist Youth, 85
Erostratus, 222 Fayum, 404
Erymanthus, 12 Fertile Crescent in Syria, g, 136
Erysichthon, 180 Festugiere, Father, 485
Erythrae, 141, 150, 248, 250 Flamininus, 398
Eryx, 192 Flower, The, 306
Esther, 309 Francois Vase, The, 230
Eteocles, 278 Frederick, The Great, 434
Eteocretans, 161-2 French Constituent Assembly, 182
Etna, 190, 292 French Revolution, The, 250
Etruria, 190, 229, 260, 331, 344, 377, 480, Frogs, The, 304, 307
516
Etruscans, 147, 192, 195, 207, 245, 287, 343
Euboea, 4, 38-39, 78, 80, 91, 101, 108, 112, Gades, 185
116, 148, 188, 192, 193, 198, 244, 249, Galatia, 407
260, 320, 324 Ganges, The, 527
Euboic, III, 158 Gaugamela, 337
Eubulus, 322, 323 Gaul, 5, 187, 194, 207, 260, 342, 487
Eucleides, 315 Gaza, 337
Euclid, 361, 461 Ge, 147
Eudoxus, 359, 361, 363, 452 Gela, 161, 187, 193, 264
Euergetes, 472, 461, 479 Geloans, 189
Euhemerus, 477 Geloontes, 173
Euhesperides, 196, 405 Gelon, 123, 245, 263, 266
INDEX
585
Genealogies, 216 Hellanodikai, 105, 152
General History of the World, 355 Hellas, 5, 11, 13, 15, 19-20, 25, 37, 77, 89, 105,
Geometric, Period, The, 116, 135, 141, 147, 124, 147, 150, 173, 252, 318, 320, 325,
173> 184, 220, 223, 228, 230, 256 334, 34i, 369, 399, 447
Geryon, 194 Hellenica, The, 351
Gibraltar, Straits of, 487 Hellenes, 105, 131, 245, 287, 324, 353, 354
Gigantomachy, 224, 227 Hellenic, 96, 98, 104, 112, 126, 143, 148,
Gitiadas, 171 !74-5, 184-5, !92, 196, 197, 204, 205,
Gla, Island of, 46 208, 217, 233, 268, 279, 287, 324, 326,
Glaucus, 139 33!> 344, 348, 365, 37l, 448
Glotz, G., 21, 28 Hellenic Games, The, 159
Goat, Stream of the, 270 Hellenic League, The, 246, 326, 336, 338
Golden Fleece, The, 64, 184, 200 Hellenics, The, 307
Gordion, 336, 337 Hellenism, 4, 5, 83, 84, 86, 91, 100, 105, 134,
Gordium, 143 I44“5> 147, 152, 160, 162, 184, 188, 192,
Gorgias of Leontini, 266, 299, 307, 352, 353 195, J98, 206-7, 209, 215, 230, 237, 245,
Gortyn, 161 258, 260, 261, 262, 266, 269, 276, 283,
Gortys, 369, 380 297, 298, 314, 316, 339, 340, 342, 344,
Gouraud, 373 345, 353, 354, 360, 367, 380, 383, 389,
Great King, The, 242, 245, 248, 253, 270, 399, 400, 402, 407-8, 410, 416
314-18, 322, 324-5, 332, 337, 338, 353, Hellenistic Period, The, 136, 137, 201, 205,
382, 413, 427 220, 233, 265, 294, 340, 342, 366, 369,
Greece, Occupation of, 19 37i, 372, 377, 396, 411, 4*2, 414, 415,
Grousset, R., 518 422, 424, 426, 439, 442-7, 449, 452, 455,
Gyges, no, 123, 143, 144 456, 460, 463, 465, 466, 469, 470, 471,
Gymnopaedia, 169 473, 476, 477-482, 484, 486, 487-91,
494-99, 500-14, 516, 518, 520, 521, 524,
525, 527, 529, 530-1
Hades, 286 Hellenium ofNaucrates, 136-7, 141, 198
Hadria, 344 Hellespont, 51,139, 141,180,200,244,245 320,
Hadrian, 223 Helos, 163
Hadrian’s Pantheon, 45 Helots, 164, 167
Hagia Triada, 27, 29, 31, 34, 71 Heliodorus, 410
Haliacmon, 3, 77 Hemeroscopeion, 195
Halicarnassus, 12, 91, 137, 198, 248, 289, Hencken, 19
367-8, 370 Hephaestion, 338
Hallstatt, 266 Hephaestus, 68, 176, 259, 294
Hamah, 59 Hera, 68-70, 73, 96, 98, 100, 139, 152, 155,
Hamilcar, 245 198, 227, 266
Hannibal, 398, 408, 454, 502 Heraea, 159
Hapou, 486 Hera Acraea, g3
Harangues, 354 Hera Argaea, 191, 294
Harlequin, 94 Heracles, 14, 74, 139, 194, 195, 227, 229, 236,
Harmodius, 181 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 334, 342, 345,
Harpies, 143 346, 353, 366, 377, 380, 467, 473, 500
Harvey, 462 Heracles Callinicos, 200
Heauton Timoroumenos, 449 Heracleia Minoa, 193
Hebe, 96 Heracleia Pontica, 203-4, 267, 382
Hebrus, 200 Heraclidae, 74-76, 78, 85, 158, 355, 401
Hecataeus, 139, 142, 216, 228, 289 Heraclides, 149, 361
Hecate, 385, 471, 493 Heraclitus, 290
Hecatompedon, 141, 180, 181, 183, 225, 227 Heraeum, 126, 141, 222, 266
Hector, 50 Heraeum of Argos, 93, no, in
Hegesias, 357 Heraeum at Samos, 142
Helen, 51, 52, 67, 73, 105, 172, 192 Hermeias, 362
Heliaea, 178, 330 Hermes, 68-69, 70, 73, 151, 373, 383, 467,
Helice, 151 484
Helicon, Mount, 95, 149 Hermes Dionysophorus, 366
Helios, 469 Hermione, 41, 153
Helladic Period, The, 11-15, 21-23, 35-36, 44, Hermocles, 478
65, 72, 160, 285 Hermonassa, 202
20
586 INDEX
Hermus, 132 Iacchus, 285

Herodotus, 37, 52, 78, 91, 95, 100, 116, 124, Ialysus, 12, 91, 197
131, 132, 137, 138, 139, 144, 155, 196, Iasion, 285
198, 205, 216, 246, 256, 263, 269, 274, Iaxartes, 338
289, 306, 334, 436 Iberia, 187, 194, 207, 208, 487
Herodotus, Enquiries, 289 Iberic Sculpture, 266
Herodotus, History of, 289 Ictinus, 294
Heroic Period, The, 188 Ida, Mount, 68, 69, 93, 162
Herondas, 394, 424, 452 Iliad, The, 39, 46, 54, 63, 64, 70, 94, 95, 97,
Herophilus, 462 102, 105, 106, 336, 340, 507
Hesiaeotis, 145 Illyria, 76, 189, 321, 394, 398, 399, 400
Hesiod, 68, 95. 96, 103, 106, 108, 121, 137, Imbrasus, 141
148, 149, 213, 236, 276, 453 Imbros, 183
Hesperides, 194 Inaros, 248
Heuneburg, 208 India, 427
Hieron, 123, 264, 279, 326, 400, 402, 403 Indian, 5, 70
Hieronymus, 397 Indo-European, 2, 15-21, 35, 58, 60-61, 64,
Himera, 112, 192, 193, 245, 260, 264, 265 67, 68-70, 73, 77, 109
Himilco, 265 Indo-Iranians, 17, 19
Hindu Kush, 338 Io, 73, 200
Hipparchicus, The, 351 Iolcos, 64, 145
Hipparchus, 181, 461 Ion, 37, 76, 105
Hippias, 181, 201, 202, 299, 361 Ionia, 83, 89, 90, 91, 108, 116, 121, 131, 137,
Hippocrates, 301, 462 138, i39> I41. J43, !44> !59. i87, 190,
Hippocratic Collection, The, 300 191, 210, 212, 215, 219, 222, 225, 247,
Hippodamia, 224, 419, 423 259) 367, 379, 485
Hippodamus, 256, 293 Ionians, The, 16, 20-21, 23, 37, 76, 80, 82, 86,
Hippolytus, 305, 473 89, 91, 95, 102, 105, 130, 134, 138, 141,
Hismenion, 149 147, 158, 173, !8o, 181, 183, 197, 200,
Hissarlik, 50 222, 226, 227, 228, 233, 241, 242, 244,
Histiaeus, 242 245, 261, 280, 282, 289, 290, 292, 317,
History of Plants, 514 353, 368, 369
History of Sicily, 453, 454 Ionian Islands, The, 1, 4, 39, 188
Hittites, The, 17, 19, 20, 35, 49, 51, 59, 60, 77, Iphigenia, 41, 201, 305
83, no, 143, 222 Isaeus, 350
Homer, 20, 45-46, 50, 52, 55, 58, 61, 94, 95- Ischia, 188
96, 102, 108, 137, 161-2, 181, 200, 232, Ischomachus, 328
237, 309, 442, 447-8, 450, 453, 530 Isocrates, 206, 237, 286, 299, 316, 333, 346,
Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo, 134, 147, 348, 350, 352, 353, 354, 355, 365, 382
162 Isodaites, 381
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, The, 231 Issus, 337
Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 149 Isthmus, 151, 154, 155, 159, 233, 244
Horace, 306, 345, 507 Istrus, 201, 203, 205
Horus, 413 Italics, 17
Hugo, Victor, 278 Italy, 55, 105, 142, 186, 187, 188, 192, 193,
Hyacinthus, 44, 172 198, 207, 272, 294, 344, 402
Hydaspes, The, 338 Ithaca, 38, 57
Hydra, The, 227 Ithome, 23, 167, 262, 318
Hydriai (Ionian), 229
Hygieia, 381
Ilylleis, 125 Jaeger, W., 296
Hyllus, 75-76 Jason, 184, 317, 319, 353
Hymettus, 12, 101 Jeanmaire, H., 165, 214
Hymns, The, 452 Jericho, 59
Hymn to Isis, 481, 483 Jerusalem, 410—11
Hymn to feus, 478 Jesus, 274
Hypathia, 531 Jordan, 59
Hyperides, 350 Juno Lucina, 294
Hyphasis, 338 Jupiter, 68, 498
Hyrnathians, 155 Justinian, 410
Hysiae, 155, 167 Juturna, 123
INDEX 587
Kadesh, 59 Lex Rhodia, 394
Kahrstedt, 163 Libon, 281
Kairatos, Valley of, 28 Ligurians, 194, 342
Kalos Kagathos, 531 Lilybaeum, 402
Kanishka, 522 Limnaea, 3
Kant, 364 Limnaium, 171
Kazanlik, 491 Lindus, 49, 91, 137
Kerameikos, 8g, 92, 176, 180, 259 Linear, A., 27, 49, 53-54, 55
Keppel-am-Rhein, 207 Linear B., 39, 45-46, 53, 56, 60, 62, 188
Kertsch, 202, 204. 267, 331, 332, 341, 376, 377 Lion Gate, 40, 42, 67
Knights, The, 303 Lipari Islands, The, 55, 188, 189, 193, 344
Korai, The, 227 Liparians, The, 287
Korakou, 38, 44 Locri, 344, 346
Kore, 70-71, 192, 231, 264, 285, 383 Locrians, 79, 147, 323
Kul Oba, 268 Locris, 77, 266
Kursk, 206 Louvre, The, 283
Lucania, 188, 347, 377
Lucretius, 458
Labdacids, 278 Lucullus, 408
Labraunda, 12, 368 Luvian, 35
Lacedaemon, 39, 162, 167, 173, 244, 247, 258, Lycaeon, Mount, 3, 153
3H, 3I5> 3i6> 3i8 Lyceum, The, 362
Laconia, 44, 57, 75, 80, 130, 145, 150, 162, Lycia, 136, 143, 221, 247, 261, 394, 404, 409
166, 167, 172, 327 Lycophron, 450
Lacinion, Cape, 192 Lycosura, 231
Lacydon, 195 Lycurgus, 165, 179, 317, 327, 352, 371
Lai, 356 Lycurgus, Life of, 168
Laius, 278 Lydia, no, 112, 114, 123, 139, 143, 144, 221,
Lampsacus, 201 233, 272
Langlotz, 226 Lydians, 90, 144
Languedoc, 342 Lygdamis, 123, 127, 132
Laodice, Queen, 408 Lysander, 270, 315
Larissa, 228 Lysias, 349, 353, 379, 384
Larsen, 251 Lysimachus, 399
Latin Alphabet, The, 207 Lysippus, 298, 340, 366, 374, 469, 478
Latmic Gulf, The, 139 Lysistrata, 303
Laurium, 178, 253, 257, 260, 309, 322 Lysistrata, 310
Laus, 190
Laws, The, 381
Lebadea, 149 Maccabaeus, Judas, 410
Lebedus, 91 Macchiavelli, 365
Lechaeum, 156 Macedonia, 1, 3, 21, 101, 145, 242, 263, 309,
Lelantine Plain, The, 149-50 320, 321, 322, 324, 325, 327, 328, 336,
Lelantines, The, 188, 242 337. 338, 339. 348, 352. 354. 369. 389.
Lemnia, The, 284 390. 397. 398, 399. 400, 409, 413, 432,
Lemnian, 61 433. 440, 443. 444. 445. 449, 458
Lemnos, 183 Maenace, 195
Lenaea, The, 284 Maenads, The, 232, 309, 375
Leochares, 370, 374, 382 Maeander, 132, 139
Leonidas, 283 Maeotic peninsula, The, 267
Leontini, 188, 190, 193, 265, 343 Magas, 405, 515
Lerna, 14-15, 20 Maghreb, 195
Lesbians, 213 Magicians, The, 484
Lesbos, 91, 137, 202 Magna Graecia, 105, 115, 119, 151, 152, 153,
187, 206, 207, 209, 210, 225, 265, 266,
Leto, 97-98. I35> 223
Letoids, 132 282, 283, 292, 342, 347, 383, 400, 401,
Leucas, 82, 116, 158, 326 402, 505
Leuctra, 168, 317, 318, 370 Magnesia, 241, 253, 408, 409
Leucippides, The, 313 Magnetes, 147
Leucippus, 290, 291, 457 Magnus, Albertus, 365
Lex Hieronica, 403 Maiden Possessed, The, 450

588 INDEX
Maiotai, 204, 268 Mesembria, 203

Maiotis, 187 Messara, 25
Malia, gulf of, 78, 149 Messene, 319, 370
Malians, The, 145 Messenia, 1, 3, 38, 45, 80, 130, 150, 152, 162,
Malians-Oiteans, The, 147 164, 167, 248, 254, 262, 312, 318, 383
Mallia, 27, 29, 31 Messina, Straits of, The, 150-87, 190, 345
Malraux, A., 422 Metamorphoses, 483
Malthi, 23, 38 Metaphysics, 356
Manetho, 448 Metapontum, 153, 183, 189, 193
Manticlos, 149 Methone, 323
Mantinea, 261, 262, 318 Metragyrtes, The, 310, 381
Marathon, 183, 242, 245, 246, 253, 274, 276, Metsovo, 3
280, 286, 303, 304, 320 Middle East, The, 241
Marcellus, 403 Midea, 38, 66, 72
Marduk, 337, 340 Milandapanha, 518
Mare Piccolo, 190 Milesian, 61, 144, 197, 201, 203, 206
Mardonius, 242, 245 Miletus, 27, 50, 59, 83, 90, 91, 107, no, 112,
Mariandyni, 204 123, 128, 139, 141, 143, 150, 198, 202,
Marmaria, 149, 370 204, 206, 213, 216, 227, 241, 259, 261,
Maronea, 139, 200 268, 293, 331, 337, 416, 428, 464-6
Marrou, H. I., 168 Miltiades, 180, 201, 242, 247, 252, 254
Marseilles, 139, 147, 180, 195, 266, 341, 342, Mimnermus, 142, 210, 213
400j 493-8 Mineptah, 76
Mausolus, 320, 322, 370 Minoan, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73, 162, 235
Mazzarino, 123 Minoan Civilization, 25, 28, 30, 32, 35, 47, 49,
Medea, 452 64
Median Wars, The, 132, 144, 155, 167, 241 Minos, 26, 27, 184
Mediterranean, The, 1, 2, 4, 22, 36, 57, 58, 62, Minotaur, 175
70, 97, 106, 112, 114, 115, 132, 160, 161, Minyan Ceramics, 19, 20, 21, 50
184, 186, 194, 195, 201, 202, 208, 217, Minyans, 131
260, 332, 342, 376, 404, 425, 487 Minyas, Treasury of, 46
Mediterranean, The Eastern, 47, 49, 52, 59, Misanthrope, 449
76, 77 Mithridate, Mt., 341
Mediterranean, Occident, 194 Mithridates, 396, 408, 488
Medontidae, 175 Mnesicles, 295, 311
Medusa, 225 Mochlos, 30
Megabyzi, 139 Moira, 305
Megacles, 127, 177, 179 Moliere, 449
Megalopolis, 3, 319, 371 Molon, 407
Megara, 79, 101, 112, 116, 123, 125, 126, 128, Molossi, 399
15°! l55> !59> l6°. O8, 187, 193, 201, Molossians, 131
202, 203, 204, 215, 248, 261, 269, 278, Montesquieu, 365
326, 426, Morava, 77
Megara Hyblaea, 188, 189, 193 Morbidezza, 227
Meidias, 313, 376 Moschophorus, The, 227
Meillet, A., 17, 64 Mount Lassois, 207
Melanchros, 121 Muller, K. O., 83
Melas, 127, 144 Munich, 296
Meleager, 366 Mursilis, 49
Melos, 22, 27, 33, 91, 100, 150 Mycale, 138, 245
Memnon of Rhodes, 337 Mycenae, 23-24, 37, 38, 40-41, 44, 47, 50, 54,
Memphis, 197, 337 59, 60, 62-64, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 79, 153,
Menaechmus, 361 187
Menander, 306, 449, 450, 518, 520 Mycenaean Civilization, 9, 16, 49, 55, 58, 59,
Mende, 200 63, 67, 80, 83, 89, 93, 103, 149, 153, 222,
Menecles, 456 396
Menelaium, 172 Mycenaean Period, The, 12, 24, 36, 38, 39,
Menelaus, 41, 51, 57, 172 42, 53. 59, 60, 65, 66, 97, 101, 134, 136
Mercury, 362 Mycenaean Tablets, 68, 97
Mermnadae, The, 123, 143, 241, 242 Mylae, 188, 193
Mesopotamia, 59, 139, 222, 419 Myrlea, 202
INDEX
589
Myron, 295 Octavian, 405
Myrmecion, 202, 489 Odeon, the, 294
Myrsilos, 212 Odrysae, 320, 326
Mytilene, 108, 121, 137, 150, 198, 270 Odrysian Tribes, The, 249
Myus, 91 Odysseus, 15, 73
Odyssey, The, 39, 50, 54, 57, 63, 94, 95, 102,
106, 139, 451, 507
Nabis, 394, 475 Oeconomicus, The, 328, 351
Nanno, 142 Oedipus, 288
Narouze, ig4 Oedipus Coloneus, 284
Naucratis, 141, 160, 197, 198, 228, 259, 232 Oenomaus, 152, 281
Naucydes, 366 Oenophyta, 248
Naupactus, 77, 78, 398 Of the Winds, 525
Nauplia, 14, 153, 154 Oinoa, 287
Navarchus, 370 Oiteans, 145
Naxos, 91, 112, 123, 128, 132, 134, 135, 188, Olbia, 203, 205, 206, 267, 342, 488
193, 227, 242, 247, 248, 343 Old Testament, The, 411
Naxians, The, 119, 135 Olympia, 1, 68-69, 85. 98, 105, 108, 126, 151,
Naxian Lions, The (of Delos), 226 152, 220, 227, 233, 262, 280, 286, 287,
Neapolis, 265 299, 369
Nearchus, 338 Olympian Odes, The, 279
Nebuchadnezzar, 411 Olympias, 328
Nechao, 198, 404, 425 Olympic Games, The, 152, 155, 233, 263
Neleids, 91 Olympieum, 126
Neleus, 45 Olympus, 2, 3, 138, 232
Nemea, 233, 369 Olynthiacs, 324
Nemesis, 294 Olynthus, 323, 372
Nemirov, 206 On Horsemanship, 351
Neolithic Age, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 25 Onacritus, 181, 236
Neolithic Period, The, 232 Onchestus, 148
Neoptolemus, 73, 399 Onomarchus, 323
Neptune, Temple of, 266, 294 Ophelias, 405
Nereids, The, 261 On the Crown, 324, 325, 383
Nestor, 45, 52 Opuntian Locrians, 146
Nestus, 200 Orchomeneans, 131
Nicaea, 342 Orchomenus, 20, 46, 127, 148, 153, 154, 319
Nicandra, 224 Oresteia, The, 42, 277, 278
Nicator, 407 Orestes, 41
Nichomachean Ethics, 365 Orient, The, 336, 337, 338, 339, 371, 383, 413,
Nicias, 270 416, 418, 422, 424, 425, 436, 437, 438,
Nicias, The Peace of, 270 440, 449. 463, 478,479, 484, 486, 525, 530
Nicomedes, 409 The Origins, 452
Nicosthenus, 230 Orontes, 59, 136, 310, 406
Nietzschean, 251, 290, 292, 302 Oropus, 149
Nile, River, 4, 197, 289, 405, 423-5, 430, 436, Orpheus, 236
5IO> 5”. 527 Orphic, 181
Nilsson, M. P., 20, 37, 67, 73, 285 Orphic Texts, The, 236
Nineveh, 136 Orseis, 76
Nino, 381 Orthagoras, 123
Niobids, The, 296 Orthagorid, 126, 127, 156
Nisaea, 160 Orthia, 169, 171, 172
Nisyros, 91 Ortygia, 190, 191, 266, 343, 346
Nordic, 70 Oscan Alphabet, The, 207
Notium, 139 Osiris, 482, 483
Nubia, 197 Ossa, 1
Nymphaion, 202, 206 Ouranos, 18
Numphs of Nysa, 380 Oxylus, 75, 151
Ozolian Locrians, 146
Oaristys, 452
Ochus, 320, 328, 407 Paeonius of Mende, 312
INDEX
59°
Pagasae, 145 348, 352, 393, 396, 400, 443
Pagasae, Gulf of, 149 Peloponnesian League, The, 1 67, 261, 269
Page, D., 51 Pelopidae, 41
Paieon, 68 Pelops, 41, 52, 235, 281
Palaikastro, 69 Peneus, 3, 151, 152
Palaipolis, 195 Pentelicon, Mount, 242
Paleolithic Age, 9, 11 Penthesilea, 296
Palestine, 434 Perachora, 92, 159
Pallas, 5, 70 Perdiccas, 263
Pallene, 200 Perga, 135
Palmer, L., 60 Pergamum, 398, 403, 408-10, 420, 422, 438,
Pamisus, 23, 167 446-7, 461, 463, 465, 468, 469, 470-1,
Pamphylia, 16, 40, 49, 50, 82, 125, 136, 404 480-1
Pamphylus, 76, 375 Periander, 116, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 158,
Pan, 471 159, 210
Panaetius, 459, 508 Pericles, 181, 248-52, 254-9, 269, 270, 273,
Panagurichte, 492 274, 283-4, 288-9, 291, 293-4, 296, 298,
Panaitios of Leontini, 123 303, 307, 3*2, 330, 353
Panathenaea, 175, 180, 231, 233, 258, 284, Perinthus, 202, 326
295= 296, 391 Perioikoi, 126
Pandosia, 347 Perrhaebi, 145, 147
Panegyrics, The, 206, 237, 316, 352, 354, 414 Persae, The, 264, 277
Pangaeus, 200 Perseidae, 41
Pangaeum, Mount, 321, 322 Persephone, 33, 70, 266
Panticapaeum, 201, 202, 206, 267, 331, 341, Persepolis, 295, 337
489 Perseus, 41, 398, 455, 506
Pantocrator, 296 Persia, 143, 246, 247, 263, 289, 315, 3*6, 317,
Paphlagonia, 203, 407, 409 337
Paphos, 136 Persians, The, 244, 245, 246
Paraloi, 179 Persians, The, 124, 129, 183, 233, 237, 241,
Parians, 119 242, 244, 248, 252, 254, 262, 263, 266,
Parion, 202 274, 276, 280, 286, 289, 290, 310, 327,
Paris, 424 328, 35*, 353
Parmenides, 292 Pesero, 55
Parmenion, 322, 336 Pessinus, 439
Parnassus, 2, 3, 12 Petilia, 345, 383
Paros, 91, 119, 132, 134, 150, 202, 227 Phaedra, 301
Parrhasius, 313 Phaedra, 305
Parthenon, The, 183, 246, 261, 283, 284, 294, Phaedrus, 358
295. 196, 3”= 3i2, 469-70, 473 Phaenomena, 451, 452
Parthenope, 188-92, 265 Phaestos, 26, 29
Parthia, 338, 407, 426, 427, 521 Phalaris, 123
Pasion, 331 Phalerum, 285
Patroclus, 50, 52, no Phanagoria, 202
Pausanias, 46, 231, 245, 246, 262, 328, 334 Pharoah, 330
Pausias, 369, 375 Pharos, 423
Peace, The, 307, 382 Phaselis, 136, 198, 261
Pediakoi, 179 Phasis, 203
Peitho, 474 Pheidon, no, 121, 124, 155, 167
Pelasgians, 21, 35, 131, 19° Pherae, 145
Pelasgiotis, 145 Pherecydes, 134
Peleus, 160, 268, 366 Phidias, 246, 256, 257, 274, 282, 284, 287, 295,
Pelion, 1 310, 312, 366
Pella, 263, 304, 322, 336 Phigaleia, 312, 313, 367
Pelopidas, 318-19 Philadelphus, 403, 404, 405, 428, 434, 446-7,
Peloponnese, 2, 16, 20, 21, 35, 37, 39, 41, 44, 466, 479
45, 57, 73-77, 79, 89, 90, 100, 105, 112, Philaid, 180
117, 124, 130, 131, 148, 150, 155-8, 161, Philetaerus, 409
167, 173, 177> j96, 214, 223, 248, 251, Phil-Hellenism, 144
252, 260, 262, 269, 272, 274, 280, 283, Philebus, The, 368
297, 302, 306, 315, 316, 317, 318, 327, Philetas, 446, 457
INDEX
591
Philip, 5, 314, 321, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 358, 359, 360, 362, 363, 364, 365, 373,
332, 333, 336, 343, 344, 353, 354, 355, 381, 383, 385, 438, 45°, 455, 459, 46<b
365, 369, 372, 376, 393, 398, 399, 4i3, 530, 53i
466, 467, 503 Plautus, 507
Philippi, 321 Pliny, 414, 422
Philippics, 324 Ploutis, 128
Philippica, 355 Plutarch, 6, 168, 169, 254, 256, 289, 324, 340,
Philippus, 353 346
Philippopolis, 326 Plutus, 284, 285, 372
Philistines, 76 Plutus, 349
Philistis, 403 Po, The, 259
Philo, 360, 412 Poetics, The, 306, 456
Philochorus, 175 Pious, The, 410
Philocrates, 323, 325 Poliorcetes, 394
Philoctetes, 313 Political Speeches, 354
Philolaus, 217, 292, 361 Pollux, 225, 449
Philomelus, 323 Polybius, 307, 393, 453, 454, 478
Philomen, 449 Polycletus, 153, 285, 296, 369, 371, 374
Philon, 511 Polycrates, 118, 123, 126, 127, 141, 144, 160,
Philopator, 448 189, 210
Philopoemen, 397 Polygnotus, 283
Philoxenus, 345 Polymnestus, 171
Phlegrean, 189 Polyzalos, 282
Phocaea, 91, no, 112, 139, 141, 150, 189, 193, Pompeii, 376, 472
195, t98, 202, 323 Pompey, 408-9, 495, 509
Phocis, 3, 77, 101, 323 Pontico-Caucasian Group, The, 17
Phocylides, 142 Pontus, 115, 139, 198, 201, 203, 207, 259, 260,
Phoebus, 134 268, 269, 341, 384, 400, 406, 407, 408,
Phoenicians, The, 55, 56, 59, 80, 98, 100, no, 409, 476, 487-8
I31, !32, 135, !36, r44, 196, 208, 241, Porus, 338
244, 310, 326, 332, 337, 343 Poseidon, 68, 71, 97, 136, 153, 159, 282, 284,
Phormion, 331 294, 312, 337, 374
Phrygia, 143, 232, 310 Poseidoniastai, 471
Phrygians, The, 76 Posidonia, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 222, 265,
Phrynis, 303 266, 294, 400
Phrynichus, 277 Posideium, 136
Phthiotic Achaeans, 37, 145, 147 Posidonius, 395, 459, 462, 498, 508
Phthiotis, 145 Pothos, 366
Picard, G., 67, 260, 285, 471 Potidaea, 158, 200, 250, 300, 301
Pindar, 119, 147, 149, 158, 159, 187, 192, 236, Pottier, E., 230
237, 263, 265, 266, 276, 279, 281, 286, Prasiae, 153
287, 334, 336, 382 Pratinas, 214
Pindus, 2, 3, 77, 78, 80 Praxilla, 156
Piraeus, 248, 256, 259, 270, 293, 331, 332, Praxiteles, 360, 366, 367, 372, 373, 385
342, 368, 371, 381, 390, 394, 449 Priam, 50, 372
Pirene, 156 Priene, 91, 138, 368
Pisa, 152, 167 Prinias, 161
Pisatans, 155, 287 Procida, 188
Pisatis, 152 Procles, 123, 127
Pisistratids, 85, 123, 125, 127, 210, 225, 227, Proclos, 292
236 Proconnesus, 202
Pisistratus, 123, 125, 126, 127, 134, 135, 179, Prodicus, 299, 352
180, 181, 233, 256, 284, 286, 295, 296, 343 Promachos, The, 284
Pithecusae, 188, 192 Prometheus, 76, 276, 278
Pittacus, 121, 122, 137, 212 Prometheus, 278
Pityreus, 37 Prometheus Bound, 278
Pityus, 203 Propontis, The, 116, 187, 198, 200, 201, 210,
Plataea, 148, 164, 196, 242, 245, 317 261
Platanistas, 169 Propylaios, 312
Plato, 2, 6, 114, 164, 198, 216, 237, 246, 286, Protagoras, 256, 274, 298, 307
299, 301, 302, 329, 344, 346, 347, 354, Prytanaeum, The, 283, 301
592 INDEX
Prytaneis, 107 Roman Empire, 5, 195

Psammetichus, 127, 158, 197, 198 Romans, 19, 68, 70, 399, 401, 402
Psyche, 366 Rome, 138, 258, 310, 342, 395, 398, 401, 505
Psychopomp, 69 Roussel, P., 166
Ptoion, 149 Roussillon, 342
Ptoios, 149 Roxane, 339
Ptolemy, 389, 403-4, 405, 410, 413-14, 416, Russia, 9, 17, 269
418, 424, 428-30, 432, 435, 436, 437, 446,
447) 450, 463, 469, 47i, 472, 479) 481,
482, 483, 502, 511, 513, 515, 519 Sabazius, 310, 381
Punic War, 403 Saint Blaise, 195
Punjab, The, 407 Saite Renaissance, 197
Pydna, 321 Salamis, 39, 136, 175, 211, 183, 244, 245, 246,
Pylaio-Delphic, 130, 148 274, 276
Pylian Tablets, 232 Sallust, 307
Pylos, 37-40, 42, 44, 45, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, Salyi, The, 342
68, 79 Samians, 189, 192, 198, 200
Pyrrha, 76 Samos, 27, no, 112, 116, 123, 127, 139, 141,
Pyrrhon, 456 142, 143, 144, 150, 160, 202, 217, 227,
,
Pyrrhus, 344, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402,
458 525
Pythagoras, 143, 198, 217, 218, 266, 282, 292
228, 249, 270, 461
Samothrace, 4, 200, 310, 383
Sanhedrin, The, 410
Pythagoreanism, 192, 198, 218, 236, 266, 292, Sappho, 108, 137, 198, 210, 213
345. 346, 356, 382 Sardes, 142, 242, 244, 337, 368, 428
Pythagoreans, 182, 344, 357, 358, 361, 412 Saronic Gulf, 116, 154, 160
Pytheas, 342, 347 Saturnalia, 214
Pythia, 126, 187, 223, 244 Satyrus, 370
Pythian Apollo, 155 Scandinavians, The, 19, 343
Pythian Games, 148, 233, 282, 383 Sceptics, The, 456
Python, The, 147, 233, 236 Schachermeyr, F., 10, 21, 334
Pyxus, 190 Schliemann, 38, 42-43
Scipio, 454
Scopadae, 145
Qatna, 59 Scopas, 282, 366, 369, 370, 372, 469
Quattrocento, 142 Scyllis, 127, 156
Scyros, 268
Scythia, 201 204, 205, 268, 289, 331, 407, 433,
Ra, 413, 483 489
Rabirius, 405 Segesta, 265, 266, 270, 312
Racine, 303, 309 Sele, 192, 226
Radet, 334 Seleucids, 403, 404, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410,
Rameses, 76
Rampin Knight, The, 227
Raphia, 404
,
411, 412, 413-19, 428-9, 435, 440, 464,
512 5*4
Selinus, 112, 153, 189, 191, 226, 245, 265, 281,
Rekhmire, 62 301, 422
Renaissance, The, 463 Sellasia, 394, 398
Republic of the Athenians, The, 348, 358, 360 Seltman, C., 114
Rhadamanthus, 33 Selymbria, 202
Rhamnus, 294 Semites, The, 245
Rhea, 68 Semitic Orient, 139
Rhegium, 112, 185, 186, 193, 245, 264, 266, Semonides, 210
282, 344, 400 Seneca, 459
Rhenia, 134 Senegal, 342
Rhetra, Great, 102, 165 Serapis, 404
Rhodes, 27, 40, 49, 51, 60, 83, 137, 159, 161, Seriphos, 91
187, 189, 195, 210, 226, 228, 247, 293, Sertorius, 408
320, 331, 394. 403. 408, 409, 425, 428, Sestos, 245
448, 463. 489 Seuthes, 492
Rhodopis, 109, 198 Seuthopolis, 492
Rhoecus, 141, 142 Seven Sages, The, 158
Roberts, F., 214 Sextus, Empiricus, 457
INDEX 593
Sicily, 115, 128, 152, 161, 184, 187, 189, 193, Sulla, 408
198, 206, 226, 259, 260, 264, 266, 272, Sunium, 2, 256, 284, 294
278, 3!°. 328, 340, 342, 343, 344, 400, Susa, 245, 295, 338, 355
401, 403, 447, 474 Susiana, 221
Sicyon, 116, 123, 126, 128, 147, 153, 155, 156, Sybaris, 112, 139, 152, 188, 189, 192, 193, 241
159, 181, 214, 225, 262, 287, 374, 375 Sybil, 100
Side, 136 Symposium, The, 306
Sigeum, 137, 180, 202 Synoicia, 175
Simaethus, 188, 190 Syracusans, 245, 448, 452, 483
Simon, 410-11 Syracuse, 60, 108, 158, 185, 188, 190, 191,
Simonides, 127, 181 193, 264, 265, 266, 270, 287, 331, 340,
Sindi, 204, 267-8 343. 345. 346, 357, 379, 402, 403
Sinope, 203, 204, 489 Syria, 9, 16, 28, 59, 135, 139, 159, 161, 339,
Siphnians, 134 404, 405, 406, 407,408,409,411,412,425
Siphnos, 91, no, 132, 227
Siphnos, Treasury of, 224
Siris, 119, 187, 188, 190, 193 Tacitus, 494
Sithonia, 200 Taking of Miletus, The, 277
Siwah, 196, 336, 337, 382 Tanagra, 149, 203, 248, 346, 378
Smilis, 160 Tanagraeans, 131
Smyrna, 91, 137, 139 Tanais, 202, 267
Socrates, 274, 300-2, 305, 313, 328, 351, Tantalus, 377
356-7> 360, 363, 367, 530 Tarentum, 60, 112, 185, 186, 188, 190, 193,
Sogdiana, 338, 339 344, 345, 346, 379, 381, 400, 401, 402, 447
Solon, 121-2, 129, 174-9. 183, 210, 212, 252, Tartessus, 194, 195, 209
329 Tauri, 204, 267, 268
Sophocles, 6, 256, 274, 283, 286, 288, 289, Tauroentium, 342
297. 309 Taxila, 338
Sophists, The, 297, 298, 299, 303, 306, 308, Taygetus, 168
352, 356, 362 Tegea, 153, 318, 319, 366, 367, 369, 372, 373
Sosandra, 282 Tempe, 3
Sostratus, 461 Telemachus, 57, 73, 94, 105
Soter, 413-14, 424, 446, 461, 479, 482 Telephus, 366
South America, 192 Telestes, 345
Soviet Republic, The, 204 Tell-el-Amarna, 59
Spain, 112, 194, 195, 209, 266, 342 Temenus, 74, 75
Sparta, 93, 102, 103, 107, 112, 128-9, 131, Tene, La, Civilization, 266
152, 153. 154-5> 162, 163-7, i69, i7i, Tenedos, 91
172, 181, 186, 210, 242, 246-8, 251, 262, Tenos, 91, 150
263, 269, 282, 303, 314, 315, 316, 318, Teos, 91, 141, 150, 197, 198, 202, 203, 204
319. 320, 323, 325, 329, 333, 351, 398, Terence, 449
400, 476 Terina, 190
Sparta, The Congress of, 379 Terpander, 137, 171, 210
Spartans, 144, 169, 172, 183, 188, 244, 245, Teucrids, 136
261, 262, 270, 287, 328, 344 Teutons, 17, 60, 70
Spercheius, 78, 145 Thales, 6, 139, 142, 198, 215, 216
Speusippus, 346 Thaletas, 162, 171
Sphinx, 135 Thasos, 4, 119, 150, 200, 212, 247, 248, 282,
Sphodrias, 316 489, 493
Spina, 259 Theaetetus, 358
Sporades, 1, 2, 91, 132 Theagenes ofMegara, 123, 125, 126, 127, 159
Stagirus, 200 Theaetetus, 292, 361
Stesichorus, 192, 210 Thebaid, 64, 404, 414
Sthenelos, 41 Thebans, 125, 131, 245, 270, 290, 320, 326,
Stoa Poikile, The, 283 378
Stoics, The, 412 Thebes, 46, 131, 148, 149, 154, 263,288,309,
Strabo, 60, 424, 436 314, 315, 316, 318, 319, 320, 321, 324,
Strathopeda, 197 326, 327, 352, 370, 372, 442, 481
Strepsiades, 303 Theline, 195
Strymon, 200 Themistocles, 244, 245, 247, 252. 253, 261,
Stymphalus, Lake, 282 292, 315
594 INDEX
Theocritus, 394, 403, 447-8 Trajan, 414

Theodorus, 141, 142, 356, 361, 369, 370 Trezene, 160
Theodosia, 202, 267 Tribes, African, 289
Theognis, of Megara, 108, 125, 126, 210, 212 Tricca, 154
Theogony, 95, 96, 134 Trigemina, 346
Theophrastus, 456 Triopium, Cape, 136
Theopompus, 352, 355 Triparadisus, 389
Theos, 408 Triphylia, 152
Thera, 4, 27, 91, 101, 132, 150, 196 Triptolemus, 71, 284
Theraeans, 196 Triton, 227
Therapne, 162 Troad, 60, 137
Thermaic Gulf, 200 Trojan War, 63, 77
Thermodon, 201 Troy, 10, 19, 21, 38, 39, 50, 52, 59, 77, 78, 79,
Thermopylae, 3, 130, 147, 255 94, 280, 283, 337, 353
Thermum, 146, 396 Trysa, 261
Theron, 280 Turnus, 123
Theseus, 27, 51, 73, 175, 280, 353 Tuthalijas, 49, 51
Thespiae, 148 Tyche, 454
Thespians, 244 Tylissus, 12
Thespis, 214 Tyrannicides, 337
Thesmophoriazusae, The, 304 Tyras, 202, 203
Thesproti, 399 Tyre, 337
Thessalians, 77, 83, 85, 145, 148, 150, 244, 323 Tyrgaeus, 303
Thessaly, 1,10, 38, 78, 90, 146, 149, 154, 163, Tyrrhenian Coast, 189, 190
!73, 210, 245, 328, 396 Tyrtaeus, 167, 171, 210
Thetis, 268 Tyskiewicz Apollo, 149
Thibron, 405
Thot, 413, 484
Thrace, 4, 137, 144, 180, 198, 205, 232, 242, Ugarit, 53, 59
247,309,317,326,331,359 Ulysses, 185, 201
Thracian Chersonese, 180, 202, 326, 331 Utica, 185
Thrasybulus, 123, 127, 264
Thratta, 304
Thucydides, 27, 38, 77, 78, 79, 89, 118, 150, Vallet, G., 260
173, 190, 249, 250, 251, 252, 257, 259, Vaphio, 44, 66
262, 263, 269, 289, 299, 306, 307, 345, Velchanos, 34, 162
35 G 354, 454, 455 Ventris, M., 39, 53
Thurii, 265, 266, 289, 293, 299, 345, 349, 382 Venus, 362, 375
Thyestes, 41 Venus of Cyrene, The, 406
Thyrgonidai, 174 Vernant, J. P., 215
Thyreatis, 153 Vilsingen, 207
Tiberius Gracchus, 459 Virgil, 459
Tiber, The, 319 Vix, 208
Tigani, 227 Vlachs, 78
Tigris, The, 4
Timaetis, 359
Timaeus 453 Wasps, The, 303
Timon, 456 Ways and Means, 351
Tiridates, 407 Will, E., 158
Timocreon, 137, 247, 346 Women in the Assembly, 349
Timotheus, 263, 303, 352, 353, 370, 372, 374 Work and Days, 103, 120-1
Tiritica, 202 Wiirttemberg, 207
Tiryns, 12, 21, 24, 38, 42, 44, 45, 64, 69, 71, 72,
79, 153
Tisias, 266, 299 Xanthus, 143, 261, 370
Tokharians, 17 Xanthippus, 253
Tomi, 203 Xenophanes, 108, 141, 216, 292
Toutmosis, 62 Xenophantus, 376
Toxaris, The, 495 Xenophon, 301, 307, 315, 328, 348, 350, 351,
Transylvania, 9 352, 354, 382
Trapezus, 202, 203, 204 Xerxes, 244, 245, 248, 278, 327, 337, 464
INDEX
595
Xuthus, 76, 105 281,285, 287,295,296,299,334,343,
366,369,381,382,419,466,524
Zeus Geleon, 174
Zacynthus, 12, 82 Zeus Hamarios, 151, 397
Zaleucus, 121, 122 Zeus Hypsistos, 483
Zancle, 112, 186, 189, 190, 193 Zeus, Lacedaemonian, 165
Zeno, 291, 293, 458 Zeus Lycaeus, 153
Zenon, 428, 434, 442 Zeus Phratrius, 174, 369
Zenothemis, 342 Zeus Uranian, 165
Zeus, 3, 18, 33, 46, 68-71, 73, 85, 96, 100, 152, Zeuxis, 313
162, 194, 196, 212, 231, 236, 276, 280, Zion, 410
I

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STUDIES IN WORLD HISTORY

THE GREEK ADVENTURE

translated by Miriam Kochan

WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON

SBN 297 76176 5

The Land of Greece i

BOOK ONE PREHELLENES AND HELLENES:

1 THE AWAKENING OF GREECE (UP.TO 1580) 9

GREECE BEFORE THE GREEKS 9

The Neolithic Age in Greece 9

The Power and Prosperity of Crete 26

2 THE FORMATION OF AN ACHAEAN WORLD (1580-

The Sources of Achaean History 38

THE ACHAEAN REALMS 39

The Hegemony of Mycenae 4°

The Conquest of Crete 47

The Achaean Syllabary and its Origin 54

3 LIFE IN THE ACHAEAN KINGDOMS 57

THE VITALITY OF A STATE-CONTROLLED ECONOMY 57

Rural Life and the Organization of the Land 57

Kings, Dignitaries and Priests 60

The Birth of the Epic 63

4 THE DORIAN INVASIONS 74

HERACLIDAE AND DORIANS I MYTH AND HISTORY 74

The Reality Underlying the Myth 76

The Routes of the Invasions 77

BOOK TWO THE CREATIONS OF THE

PROTO-GEOMETRIC (c. I IOO-gOO) 89

GEOMETRIC (APPROXIMATELY 9OO-750) 92

The Resumption of Art 92

6 THE EVOLUTION OF THE CITIES 105

FROM MONARCHY TO ARISTOCRACY 106

The Monarchy 106

The Introduction of Money 109

THE CRISIS OF THE ARISTOCRATIC REGIME I 17

The Appearance of Heavy Infantry and the Navy 117

The Establishment of Tyranny 12 3

7 THE ANCIENT WORLD: ANATOLIA AND GREECE

THE ISLANDS OF THE AEGEAN AND ANATOLIA I31

Cyclades and Sporades x32

GREECE PROPER AND CRETE *44

Central Greece 146

The Equals and Social Inequality 162

A DEMOCRACY IN GESTATION: ATHENS 173

8 THE NEW WORLD OF COLONIZATION 184

ADVENTURERS AND TRADERS 184

Factors Underlying the Great Adventure 185

the new Greece: italy and sicily 188

THE ELDORADO OF THE FAR WEST ig4

The First Temptations of the Far West 194

THE ATTRACTIONS OF THE NORTH 198

From the Thermaic Gulf to the Bosporus 200

THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE GREAT ADVENTURE 206

The Greeks and Colonization 206

9 SPIRITUAL INNOVATIONS 209

ARCHAIC LYRICISM, DRAMA AND RATIONALISM 20g

THE RENAISSANCE OF LARGE-SCALE ART 2l8

IN SEARCH OF RELIGIOUS EQUILIBRIUM 23O

Civic and Popular Religion 230

BOOK THREE THE BLOSSOMING OF

10 ATHENS, MISTRESS OF THE AEGEAN 241

GREEKS AND BARBARIANS: THE STRUGGLES FOR INDEPENDENCE

SELF-RULE AND IMPERIALISM 246

The League of Delos and the Role of Cimon 247