A History of the World (14 page)

Alongside this ‘balance of powers’ constitution, which allowed the city-state to avoid tyranny while giving its fighters an equal say, the Spartans shunned modernizations such as money, or walling their villages, and relied on their terrifyingly well organized semi-permanent army. The result was a dominant military state, which made other Greek states nervous but which could be engaged by them to topple tyrants or confront enemies.

Sparta rose to its greatest fame when it led the federated Greeks against the Persians. When Cyrus defeated Croesus in 546
BC
it was the Spartans who sent a message ordering him to back off, and who forty-seven years later would rally the western Greeks against Persia in the Ionian revolt. And in the twenty-five years that followed, it was the Spartans above all who kept the epic fight going. Yet other Greeks, particularly the Athenians, laughed at the Spartans for their uncouth ways, seeing them as long-haired, unwashed, uncultured killers.

Athens, Sparta’s great rival, was also a slave state, which gave extensive voting and other rights to its male citizens. Its original tyranny had been toppled with Spartan help in 510
BC
. Two years later, Athens’s ruler Cleisthenes proposed a radical new system of voting and representation, based on local parish- or village-level elections and on larger ‘demes’. The deme was a territorial division, which could be
as large as a small town and which would now replace the family name as the main badge of belonging. This was an important shift. Himself the grandson of an Athenian tyrant, Cleisthenes believed that the rivalry and power struggles between families had led inexorably to breakdown and tyranny. Only by ending the obsession with family or ‘gene’ could order be restored.

Crucially, his complex plan led to a single assembly of citizens, all men aged over thirty, who would take the biggest decisions. This was too large to be practical, since there were around twenty-five thousand such people, but these elected a council of five hundred who ruled Athens day by day. The full assembly would meet too, generally around six thousand Athenians traipsing into the city most weeks to listen and vote. This was ‘democracy’ in action, the one thing almost everyone knows about ancient Athens. It proved surprisingly robust because of its relative moderation. Instead of being executed, those who threatened the system could be ‘ostracised’, or sent packing after a vote – conducted with pieces of broken pottery – of the assembly. Many were allowed back from exile after doing their time.

Democracy as a system survived in Athens for nearly two hundred years, on and off, though it never caught on widely in the ancient world. To work, it demanded an educated citizenry, though only perhaps a tenth of them could actually read, as well as people who had learned how to speak publicly, to reason and to follow complicated arguments. This development of what we might call civil society was as important as the results of the voting.

Athenian ‘democracy’ did not include women, younger men or slaves, however. As Athens developed her gorgeous architecture and sculpture, her theatre and music and philosophy, she relied on slaves just as much as unsmiling Sparta did. And as Athens came to depend ever more on her silver mines to buy the corn she could not grow herself, huge numbers of slave miners were imported: one account suggests 150,000 at one time.
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But slaves were used heavily on farms as well – the historian Xenophon refers to twenty thousand absconding from Athenian farms during a Spartan invasion – and as paid craftsmen, including for the great public buildings. It has been estimated that for every free male Athenian citizen there were two slaves. Without the slaves, captured in wars, the Greek farmers could not possibly have spared the time to learn to speak and vote, or to serve as
active citizens; nor could the Greek aristocrats have enjoyed the wealth and leisure to study philosophy. Again, it was war that underpinned the ‘Greek miracle’ – and rather more substantially than many of its admirers like to admit.

The fighting against the armies of the Persians went on by land and sea. It had begun with the Ionian revolt of 499
BC
, a rebellion by Greeks in Asia against their masters, which ended in Persian victory. But then Cyrus’s successor Darius, taking over after an interlude dominated by less-than-great Kings of Kings, determined to punish Athens for supporting the rebels. The campaign began well for the Persians, who mopped up small Greek island states and destroyed the rebel
polis
of Eretria before landing on Attica to make for Athens. There, at Marathon in 490
BC
, the Athenians won a surprising and remarkable victory. They were heavily outnumbered. Even modern historians accept that the Persian army was anything from twice to ten times as large, and had both cavalry and archers, which the Athenians lacked. But these citizen soldiers did a most surprising thing: they charged the Persian enemy at the run, with a deliberately weak centre but strong wings, and rolled them up, producing a great slaughter.

The robustly partisan Herodotus says the Greeks

The Persians got back to their ships and tried to sail round to Athens for another attack; but the Athenian army had beaten them to it. The story of this extraordinary run in armour back to the city is believed to have produced the 26-mile marathon race of modern times. Another legend has it that the Athenian courier Pheidippides ran the twenty-six miles back to his city to tell them of the victory and stiffen their determination to resist, dying after he delivered the message. Unfortunately there seems no historical evidence for this.

After Darius’s death and a ten-year hiatus, his son Xerxes mounted a much larger invasion, intended to finish the Greeks off. By now the federation led by Athens and Sparta embraced more than seventy other Greek states, though even more were standing on the sidelines
or supporting the enemy. Herodotus calculated the Persian army at 5.2 million men, a ludicrous figure; but it was certainly a huge force, brought across the Hellespont by rope bridge and barges, including special horse-barges. Herodotus gives a vividly exciting account of the famous fight at the narrow pass of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas and three hundred Spartans whom he had selected himself – ‘all men in middle life and all fathers of living sons’ – held back the Persians for days, until they were betrayed and all died.

Xerxes’ army then poured down towards Attica and the Athenians had to evacuate their city, which was burned behind them. Eventually, in the narrow straits of Salamis, the combined Greek fleet won a crucial victory over the Persians. Two further major battles, at Plataea on land and Mycale by sea, were also Greek victories, ending the invasion. Historians have argued since that these fights were crucial to Western civilization because it relied so heavily for its development on the thought, art and politics of the Greeks, which would otherwise have been snuffed out by Persian despotism. Like other historic military turning-points, the imbalance of forces was probably exaggerated, but these Greek victories were the prototype of ‘the war to save civilization’, a trope used by the Russians before Borodino, by the British in 1940, and by scores of other forces.

The Greek victory did lead to a golden age for Athens, since rather oddly Sparta did not seize the leadership of Greece that her achievement in battle suggested she deserved. The eighty years from around 450
BC
embrace the rise of the great statesman Pericles, the writing of the first historians – including, of course, Herodotus – and the rebuilding of the Athenian Parthenon under the sculptor Phidias. Athenian drama had emerged, exuberantly, from its origins in the performance of sacred song. And alongside the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides flourished a riotous and very rude tradition of comedies, most of them now lost, which acted as a constant criticism and heckle of Athenian life.

These performances became ever more showy and expensive, as rich Athenians competed to fund them (rather like later Roman emperors competed to show the best games). They were originally staged with full musical accompaniment for the chorus, the main players in exotic masks and intoning in rhythmic speech – bright, open-air celebrations of urban life at festivals attended by tens of thousands of
people, enjoying the food stalls, the wine and the gossip. Having just the words of some of the dramas is a little like knowing the operas of Handel or Verdi only from their librettos. In a similar way, seeing the superbly crafted statues of Athenian heroes and gods in galleries, in cool white stone, hardly reflects the vividly painted public presences they would originally have been. And above all, of course, towered the philosophers, arguing about the nature of reality, what might constitute the good life, and how best to organize human societies.

This wealth and confidence came from the great conflict. It originated in decisive military victory over the Asian superpower of the day. The crackle of criticism and laughter came from democratic winners, sure enough of themselves to laugh at themselves. The intense search to
understand
– to understand the constitutions of the 158 Greek states studied by Aristotle, and the differences between Asian and Greek societies, as Herodotus sought to do; to understand the causes of civil war as Thucydides tried to, or the nature of the good society, as Socrates and Plato attempted – all this curiosity was not idle, and certainly not simple: it was the rich fruit of war.

Aborigines and Aryans

Among the forces in the Persian army marching under Xerxes towards the Spartans, Herodotus tells us, were a group dressed in cotton, armed with iron-tipped cane bows, and in chariots pulled by horses or wild asses. These were from India. The early history of that vast triangular protrusion from Eurasia is one of the most lively, still-developing subjects of study. As described earlier, it is now thought that the world-changing migration out of Africa brought people to India much earlier than to the Mediterranean, Europe or China. The indigenous forest-dwellers of southern India still look more like the aboriginal Australians and East Asian islanders who were part of humanity’s first southern march than like northern Aryan Indians, who came much later.

For almost as soon as the early history of India was opened up by British scholar-explorers in the nineteenth century, it was assumed that India’s great civilizations came from outside, rather than being cooked and shaped at home. And it is true that waves of migrants and
conquerors, from tribal Asian herders to Greeks, Persians and Mongols, pushed their way into India through the north-west gap between the Himalayas and the sea. Each of them radically changed the subcontinent. The British were different only in that they, like the Portuguese and French, arrived by sea. Yet it may well be that India’s earliest-known civilization, the mysterious urban centre of the Indus valley, or Mohenjo-Daro, was indeed home-grown. At the start of the new Indian republic in 1947, one leading politician, Jaipal Singh, a representative of the tribal (or forest) people, claimed to speak for the ancient Indus valley tradition, labelling other Indians newcomers: ‘The whole history of my people is one of continuous exploitation by the non-aboriginals of India.’
¹⁴

So what was this, perhaps aboriginal, civilization? The baked-brick cities of the Indus River plain had excellent water systems and plumbing, writing that has not been decoded, and some interesting art. This includes a small figure who could be practising yoga, and another which could be a very early version of the later Hindu deity Siva. There are many finely cut seals showing the bulls, elephants and tigers so important to later Indian religion and art. And there is a very sexy nude dancing-girl, whose challenging pose and bangles prefigure the erotic sculpture of much younger Hindu temples but whose face is that of an aborigine. So it is possible – no more than that – that the very first human migrants from the Horn of Africa who had stayed in India created the essentials of Indian religion and art long before invaders arrived from the north.

By the time these Indians were marshalled under Persian banners against the Greeks, however, they were ethnic cousins of the people they were fighting. Connected by the tips of their empires, the Indians of the fifth and fourth centuries
BC
certainly knew of the Greeks, calling them ‘Yona’, a word derived via the Persian for ‘Ionians’. These northern Indians, like the Persians, spoke a language that had the same origins as Greek, Latin and every major European language of today. This is old news, thanks to a discovery made in 1785 by a brilliant English lover of India, who had been sent to Calcutta as a High Court judge, Sir William Jones.
¹⁵

Jones, a superb linguist, had become one of the first Europeans to learn Sanskrit, the academic language of Hindu scholarship. Spotting clues in key words and in the grammatical structure, he
saw that it was part of what would be called the ‘Indo-European’ family of languages. This was originally the language of the Aryans, ancestors of so many later noisy tribes. They had been pastoral people, depending on cattle and horses, who had migrated in waves from their original homeland, which was probably around the Caspian Sea or the Ukraine. ‘Aryan’ is a word whose implication of racial superiority, after the Europe of the Nazis, can make modern ears twitch. But it is just a useful label. We could as well say that Indians, Mediterranean people and Europeans are ‘all Caspians’ or ‘all Ukrainians’ (though we don’t).

Because ancient peoples can be tracked by words as well as by stones, it is generally accepted that the Aryans moved to the west, driving into Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, as well as into what is now Iran, and into India too. They had probably crossed into today’s Pakistan at around the time of the Trojan war, and were reaching the great Ganges plain a couple of hundred years after that. It is possible that the Dorians were another branch of the Aryan migration, displacing the Mycenaean Greeks at roughly the same time – in which case, at the battle of Marathon distant cousins had confronted one another on the battlefield without knowing it.