One of the major developments of the Archaic period was the erosion of the political power and status of the aristocrat. With cities now fighting with hoplite armies the aristocrat could no longer prove himself as a heroic warrior. The prestige coming from landed wealth was being challenged by the increase in trade. The aristocrat estate with its wasteful cattle economy had largely vanished by the seventh century. The poet Theognis, a Megaran aristocrat writing about 550 Bc, expressed the views of a class who felt themselves under siege.
Kyrnos, our city is as it always was; its people, though, are different: the ones who used to have no concept of our laws or rules, but wrapped their ribs around with goatskin cloaks, and lived like deer outside the city walls, have now become the masters, while those who once were noble behave as cowards now. What a humiliating sight.
Over a hundred years later, Aristophanes, with his sympathies towards aristocratic life, contrasts the older coinage of silver and gold with the new debased coins of bronze. ‘So with our citizens, those we know as noble, sensible, honest, decent men, reared in wrestling schools and choruses and culture, we reject, while for all purposes, we make use of those of base metal, aliens, redheads, scoundrels born of scoundrels, the latest arrivals, who formerly the city would not have easily used even as scapegoats.’
High birth is the defining factor of the agathoi, loosely translated as ‘the good ones’, but with connotations of physical excellence and skill in war. The rest are kakoi, ‘the unworthy ones’ The agathoi need wealth because it is the only way that their position can be sustained. For the kakoi, however, wealth is seen as potentially corrupting (the kakos has not been brought up to know how to handle it and certainly he can never use it to transform himself into an agathos). Intermarriage between classes, for Theognis, is anathema. The class of agathoi must be kept pure.
How can the agathoi maintain their status? One way is to mark their graves with the symbolic form of the nude hero, the kouros (see earlier p. 189). However a more
Immediate access to status was required while they were still alive. Now that the old Homeric warrior contest was no more, aristocrats became obsessed with proving themselves through other forms of contests, agones. The early sixth century was the period when games spread through the Greek world. The Olympic Games, held every four years, were by then officially 200 years old but probably much older still. They had originated as a festival to the god Zeus, and the great temple to the god stood in a sacred enclosure around which the stadium, the race track for chariot races, the gymnasium, and the wrestling ring were grouped. Close to it was an ancient altar at which, at the central point of the Games, a hundred oxen were sacrificed to Zeus. The ashes were never cleared away but mixed into a paste, with the result that every year the altar became more monumental.
By the sixth century the Games had taken their final form of nine events, among them running and chariot races, boxing, wrestling, and a pentathlon. The contestants would assemble at Elis, the city which managed the Games, a month before
Key: 1 River Kladeos 2 Xystos 3 Gateway 4 Palaistra 5 Heroon 6 Bath-buildings 7 Courtyard house 8 Residential house 9 'Workshop of Pheidias' 10 Leonidaion 11 Club-house 12 Processional entrance 13 Wall 14 Bouleuterion 15 Temple of Zeus 16 House of Nero 17 Roman baths 18 Doric colonnade 19 Honorific monument 20 Secret entrance 21 Stadium 22 Altar 23 Umpires' stand 24 Bases 25 Terrace 26 Treasuries 27 Metroon 28 Nymphaion 29 Temple of Hera 30 Precinct of Pelops 31 Philippeion 32 Prytaneion
Fig. 3 Plan of Olympia. The site of Olympia was primarily a sanctuary to Zeus, whose temple dominated the central enclosure. As a sanctuary open to all Greeks, cities also contributed their own buildings and kept their own treasuries on the site. The site became impossibly crowded during the games.
They were due to start, and then, two days before the first races, a procession would set out for the sanctuary with officials leading the athletes, horses, and chariots. The Games would last for five days and were attended by vast crowds. The custom of running naked was already well established, nudity being the ‘costume’ of heroic identity. The events were interwoven with contests for heralds and trumpeters, speeches by well-known orators, banquets, sacrifices, and finally, on the last day, a great procession of the victors to the Temple of Zeus where they were given their wreaths of wild olive and showered with leaves and flowers. (The last Games were held in ad 395 but the site had become forgotten after earthquakes changed the flow of the river Alphaeus and allowed it to be buried in silt. Much of the site of Olympia has been excavated since its discovery in 1766.)
In the sixth century the Olympic Games were joined by the Pythian Games at Delphi (in 582), in 581 by the Isthmian Games, and by the Nemean Games at Nemea in the Argolis in 573. Each year there were now one or two major festivals. However, they were, in effect, only open to those with the leisure to train for them. This preserved them for the aristocracy. The prizes were, as at Olympia, always modest—a pine crown at the Isthmian Games, a crown of wild celery at the Nemean. A victor might erect his statue at the games and hundreds of these statues still remained at Olympia when the site was visited by the Greek traveller Pausanias in the second century ad.
Among the poets of this world is Pindar (518-438 Bc), a Theban aristocrat whose complex but exquisite songs were commissioned by aristocratic victors from throughout the Greek world. Pindar believed the good breeding of the aristocrat made him naturally superior, while victory in the games elevated him further, close to the gods and heroes of the past. His achievements shone with the radiance and magic of gold: ‘Gold shines out like a blazing fire in the night beyond any proud wealth: and, if you wish to sing of prizes, seek no other bright star that is hotter in the day than the sun in the golden sky, nor shall we name a contest better than Olympia.’ (Olympian I; translation: Ewen Bowie.) In her The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca, NY, 1991), Leslie Kurke has shown how success in the games transferred itself into status in the city where victors would even be incorporated unarmed into the line of battle as if they had become talismans of their city’s invincibility. In 416 the Athenian aristocrat Alcibiades entered no less than seven chariot teams in the Olympics (this was the only event in which one could use others, here charioteers, as competitors) and then unscrupulously used his success to manipulate the city’s democratic assembly. ‘There was a time’, he told his credulous audience, ‘when the Greeks imagined that our city had been ruined by the war, but they came to consider it even greater than it really is because of the splendid show I made as its representative at the Olympic Games, when I entered seven chariots for the chariot race and took the first, second, and fourth places. . . It is customary for such things to bring honour, and the fact that they are done at all must give an impression of power.’
Just as victory brings its divinity so does defeat its shame. In a late ode to a wrestler, Pindar records the humiliation of those defeated:
And now four times you came down with bodies beneath you (You meant them harm)
To whom the Pythian feast has given No glad home-coming like yours.
They, when they meet their mothers,
Have no sweet laughter around them moving delight.
In back streets out of their enemies’ way They cower, disaster has bitten them.
(Translation: Maurice Bowra, the Oxford don famous for his love of Pindar)
Back home after the excitement of the games, the aristocracy retreated into the private world of the symposia, drinking parties conducted within a formal and ritualized setting. The symposium had its roots in the hall-feasts of the warrior chieftains, but now they were developed into occasions of dignity and ceremony. Men reclined on couches set around the walls of the dining-room. There were always odd numbers of couches, a minimum of seven, a maximum of fifteen, often with two men to a couch. One man would preside over the proceedings, mixing the wine and overseeing the transfer of the mixture to the drinking cups of the guests. The symposium was, in fact, the major influence on the design of pottery and its decoration. The water was fetched in a hydria, the wine stored in an amphora, from which it was transferred for mixing to a krater, and distributed to the participants via a drinking cup, a kylix. Although it has proved enormously difficult to generalize about the relationship between the symposium and the favourite scenes on pottery, there is certainly a link to scenes from the life of Dionysus, the god of wine, and to traditional mythical scenes in general.
The symposia provided for many pleasures—food and drink, good conversation, and sex. Here one finds a market for luxury goods, perfumes, honey, and eels as well as selected wines, notably from Mende or Thasos. There were the girls, the hetairai, who often had skills in dancing and music and who could provide more in companionship than the prostitute visited for immediate sexual relief. Then there were games such as kottabos which involved flicking the dregs of wine at a target or favoured lover. The symposia would normally end in music and song—the hetairai are often shown on pots naked playing the double pipe, the instrument associated with Dionysus and abandonment. (In contrast, the lyre was always the symbol of restraint and respectable women are often shown on pottery seated and playing one.) Finally the participants might rowdily take to the streets to complete an evening of drunken revelry.
In Greece music was interwoven with every aspect of life. Rosalind Thomas, an Oxford classicist specializing in performance culture, lists, among the many manifestations of music, ‘hymns to the gods at public festivals, paeans in honour of Apollo, victory odes at the games, processional songs (prosodia), songs praising individuals (encomia), songs at funerals and marriages (epithalamia), maiden songs (partheneia), and dirges’. Typically, also, music accompanied any public performance of poetry or drama. The composing of the words was thus only part of the
Poet’s task. Pindar stresses that ‘the garlands placed like a yoke on the hair exact payment of this sacred debt: to blend together properly the lyre with her intricate voice, and the shout of oboes, and the placing of words.’ The works of Pindar were choral lyrics, those of Sappho monodic lyrics, accompanied by the lyre. Music gave an emotional tone to the spoken word that is hard to re-create today. It was one that the philosopher Plato was well aware of, and when he put his case for the regulation of poetry (based on the emotions it aroused) he included dancing and choral singing as well.
Music also formed the core of a traditional education. In Athens education was originally a form of initiation into aristocratic culture. Mastery of the lyre had its place in the formation of character. ‘So also the lyre teacher’, records one source, ‘sees to his pupils’ restraint and good behaviour. Once they are able to play, he teaches them songs by suitable poets, stringing these into the lesson, and gets the rhythms and tunings into the boys’ minds to make them less wild and better in tune for effective discourse and action’ (translation: Peter Levi). Literature and physical training were taught alongside music and all three were related to physical and moral development. Physical training allowed the development of a perfect body. ‘What a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable,’ said Socrates. Once literacy had been acquired, pupils learned poetry, particularly that of Homer, by heart, as a means of absorbing moral values.
Attendance at a symposium appears to have been a part of the young boy’s initiation into the values of aristocratic society. As a sign of his status he was allowed to sit, but not recline, on a couch, and was expected to pour out the wine once it had been mixed. In the same period that games became an integral part of aristocratic life, another form of competition, that of older unmarried men for the sexual attentions of young boys, appears. It is recorded without inhibition or prurience on many vase paintings.
Anthropologists have found pederasty to be a feature of many traditional societies, and it is normally related to the initiation of the boy into the warrior community. In some cases semen is passed on from the older man to the boy as if the strength of the community depends on it being preserved from one generation to the next. Usually the boy is expected to be a passive partner. In Athens, however, the essence of these pederastic relationships is not easy to discern. They certainly took place within heavily circumscribed limits. The erastes, the suitor, approached the eromenos, the loved one, according to the closely defined rituals of a courtship. The boy was expected to behave chastely, to refuse any material reward, and not to submit easily to the attentions of his lover. (This is the ideal put forward in Plato’s Symposium.) The sexual element of the relationship appears to have been restrained, and may not have involved any actual penetration of the eromenos. In his essay ‘Law, Social Control, and Homosexuality’, which deals with the control of sexuality in Athens, David Cohen suggests that the boy, who was not yet fully a male member of the community, might be being used as a substitute for women by older men who had not yet reached the age of marriage. The courtship rituals for boys and for women were, he suggests, very similar. The boy had the right to be protected from
Unreasonable sexual demands and his family would be vigilant to ensure he was not being abused by his lover.
A distinction has to be made between pederasty, as described above, and homosexuality. For a Greek male to accept the submissive role in a homosexual relationship, or to be paid for this role, was considered so degrading that, in Athens at least, it resulted in the loss of citizen rights. As a surviving vase painting showing the victory of the Greeks over the Persians at the Battle of Eurymedon (early 460s) suggests, one of the rights of a victor was to inflict sexual humiliation (sodomy) on those he had defeated.
For the older man pederasty appears always to have ceased with marriage, and older lovers were simply seen as ridiculous. ‘What kind of life is there,’ wailed the sixth-century poet Mimnermos, conscious above all of his failing sexual powers, ‘without golden Aphrodite, the goddess of love. May I die when I no longer take any interest in secret love affairs, in sweet exchanges and in bed. These are the flowers of youth, pleasant alike for men and women. But when painful old age overtakes a man and makes him ugly outside and foul-minded within, then wretched cares eat away at his heart and no longer does he rejoice to gaze upon the sun, being hateful to young men and despicable to women.’ (Translation: Robert Garland.)
It was understandable that many aristocrats should hold conservative views and be reluctant to welcome the coming of democracy in a city such as Athens. Xenophon, the historian and friend of Socrates, wrote that ‘the demos [the people] has put down the athletes at Athens and the practitioners of mousike’ Aristocrats adapted to democracy in different ways. Some attempted to use enduring traditions of deference, or displays of victory in the games (as with Alcibiades above), to gain influence over the Assembly; in other words they accepted the reality of political change and tried to work with it. Others put up defences of oligarchy or, in the extreme case of Plato, highly sophisticated attacks on popular involvement in government. A tradition of reasoned objection to democracy was to be an important element in Greek political philosophy. (See further p. 285 below and Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton and London, 1998.)
The death rate in ancient Greece, through childhood illness, death in battle, shipwreck, or disease, must have been high. There was an intense recognition of the transition from youthfulness to old age. As Mimnermos of Colophon put it in the seventh century
The ripeness of youth’s fruit is short,
Short as the sunlight on the earth,
And once this season of perfection’s past,
It is better to be dead than stay alive.
(Translation: M. L. West)
Even so many Greeks survived into old age. Solon claimed that a man was at the peak of his intellect and power of speech between the ages of 42 and 56. Plato lived
Until he was 80 while the playwright Sophocles was still writing a year before he died aged 91. The rhetorician Gorgias, reputed to have lived to over 100, attributed his longevity to a meagre diet. (Certainly the normal Greek diet of oil, cereals, and fruit was a healthy one and modern Greeks have the highest male life expectancy in the European Community.) Some even found joy in being a grandparent. One fifth-century grave-marker commemorating a dead woman called Ampharete is inscribed, ‘I am holding the dear child of my daughter, which I did when we both looked on the rays of the sun, and now that we have both passed away, I hold her still upon my knees'
And so on towards death. For those who died young there was a desire to die nobly so that burial could take place publicly with all due honours. The Greeks cared most for their posthumous reputations, and the preservation of the body had no importance. The rituals of death were simple and moving. The body was washed and anointed in olive oil, then wrapped in two layers of cloth. A vigil was held at which songs of mourning would be sung and the body taken in procession to the cemetery. Here its final resting place was marked by a stone stele, or even a statue of the dead man for those who could afford one. (See further Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death, 2nd edition, Ithaca, NY, 2001.)
A funeral monument from the second century ad at the city of Aphrodisias honours the memory of Epicrates, son of Epicrates, and places him well within the aristocratic culture that was enduring centuries after the classical age.
This stone sings of Epicrates’ son.
Epicrates, who lies under the mound
Still a youth. Now the dust [of the gymnasium] is left behind
As well as the lyre he strummed and the Homeric songs
And the spears and the round shield of willow with its fine grip
And the horse bridles now covered with cobwebs
And the bows and the javelins. Outstanding in all these things
To Hades the fair-famed youth has gone.
(Translation: Angelos Chaniotis)
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