Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (7 page)

The Christian Church began by being suspicious about Aristotle, preferring the otherworldliness of Plato's thought, but there was no other scheme for understanding the organization of the world as remotely comprehensive as his. When Christians were faced with making theological comments on natural subjects like biology or the animal kingdom, they turned to Aristotle, just as Christian theologians today may turn to modern science to inform themselves about matters in which they are not technically expert. The result was, for instance, that two millennia after the death of this non-Christian philosopher two monks in a monastery somewhere in northern Europe might consider an argument settled if one of them could assert, 'Well, Aristotle says . . .' Right down to the seventeenth century, Christian debate about faith and the world involved a debate between two Greek ghosts, Plato and Aristotle, who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ. Aristotle fuelled the great renewal of Christian scholarship in the Western Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (see pp. 398-9), and even in the last twenty years the leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome have reaffirmed the synthesis of Christianity and Aristotelian thought which Thomas Aquinas devised at that time.

The Greek experiment with direct democracy had other creative results. One was the creation of drama, the foundation of the Western tradition of theatre, which, like the various athletic competitions of Greek culture such as the Olympic Games (see p. 22), grew out of public religious ceremonies. An audience at an open-air Greek theatre, sitting massed in the sun, characteristically overlooking a panoramic landscape stretching behind the stage, was given the chance to ponder extreme versions of the sort of situations on which they might find themselves voting in the assembly of the
polis
. Because of its immediacy theatre, even more than philosophy, confronts and crystallizes the most profound dilemmas in human life, and it may provide perverse comfort in revealing that dilemmas have no solutions, as human misery is played out against the indifference of the cosmos, in the same way that the landscape stretches behind the Greek theatre stage and dwarfs it. From Athens in particular, a series of writers in an astonishingly brief period of little more than a century, from the early fifth to the beginning of the fourth centuries BCE, created the classic works of this theatrical tradition. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides explored the depths of human tragedy and folly, in ways which have never been surpassed. In the second half of the same period, Aristophanes wrote comedies which often poked outrageous fun at the very Athenian audiences who watched and enjoyed them. They knew that they had to laugh at themselves if they were to remain sane - and indeed, as we will see, the effort of sanity and balance proved too much even for the Athenians.

Another way in which Greeks could explore means of understanding and controlling their world was to build up experience by studying the past. Out of their urge to comprehend came a tradition of historical writing which has become particularly associated with the culture of the Christian West; this book stands in that tradition, and it is worth the reader seeing how historical writing originated. The impulse seems to have started in the Greek cities of the coast of Asia Minor, which were forced to take a particular interest in the affairs of 'barbarians' because of the inescapable fact that they were ruled by the Persian Empire. They began gathering data about their neighbours, describing their differences, sometimes even with sympathy or admiration. A crucial stage came when the Persian Empire started coming into conflict with the city-states of mainland Greece, which it saw as encouraging its own Greek subjects to rebel. Full-scale war broke out and lasted over a half-century from 499 BCE. It ended in the defeat of Persia, one of the most powerful polities that the world had so far seen, by a coalition of Greek city-states led by Athens. Greek democracy and the culture that went with it were saved.

One Greek from Asia Minor, Herodotos of Halikarnassos, decided to write a work which would climax in an account of these Persian Wars, the greatest known clash between Greek and non-Greek, but it would also encompass all that he could find out about other peoples and places, which he would try to visit in person (often he succeeded). He called this enterprise a
historia
: an inquiry, in which any form of knowledge he could gather might contribute towards the great whole. Hesiod and the 'mythographers' had developed the method to understand the stories of the gods, but we know of no one before Herodotos who had tried to gather memories and documents together on such a scale to tell a connected story about the past. It was a very brave undertaking: the Persian Wars had finished around the time of his birth and had been over for more than a generation by the time he was writing. We owe Herodotos so much that, for all his unreliability and untidiness, it would be unjust to pick up the gibe made about him by some ancient authors who, following the lead of a prolonged and peevish attack on him by the later historian Plutarch, claimed that he was the Father of Lies rather than the Father of History.
²²
Plutarch's anger with him stemmed from the fact that Herodotos was too entranced by the glorious mess of history to turn it into edifying and improving stories for the young. Modern historians should sympathize with Herodotos's engaging unwillingness to ignore the inconvenient, or to mistake moralizing for morality.

Herodotos's work in history was taken further by Thucydides, a leading Athenian whose career in his city's affairs was ruined by a further round of warfare during the later fifth century BCE, this time among the Greeks themselves. This 'Peloponnesian War' was as great a disaster for Athenian confidence and self-respect as the Persian Wars had been a triumph, and it ultimately destroyed their power. The defeat of Persia left Athens at the head of a victorious group of city-states, the Delian League. The Athenians yielded to the temptation of using their leading role to turn the League into an empire for themselves. Their sudden access of wealth and power stimulated and funded some of their most striking achievements in art, but it also attracted jealousy and resentment, especially from the rival
polis
of Sparta. Sparta was very different from Athens: a small minority of its people ruled a conquered and cowed population through military force and deliberately sustained terror, keeping themselves in permanent armed readiness by means of a tradition of brutal training for their male elite.
²³
When Plato, an Athenian alienated from his own democratic culture, portrayed his authoritarian and supposedly 'beautiful city' in
The Republic
, his Athenian readers would have recognized his mixture of fascination with and repulsion from Sparta, that other version of Greek identity.

The Athenians' increasingly selfish and greedy behaviour in the Delian League encouraged Sparta to intervene against them, paradoxically as the defender of Greek liberties. After a bitter twenty-seven years of war (431-404 BCE), Sparta and its allies left Athenian power shattered. One victim of events was Thucydides, a general forced into exile after being involved in defeat - according to his own account, a disgrace which he did not deserve. He used his two decades of enforced leisure to ponder why such a catastrophe had befallen him and his fellow Athenians. He decided to write an account of what had happened, spending his time and wealth on travelling to find out as much as possible about the detailed circumstances of the prolonged tragedy. His startlingly original idea was to look for deep underlying causes for the catastrophe. They had emerged not from the whims and fancies of a single individual, as Herodotos might have told the story, or from a clash in lovers' passion and divine tantrums, as Homer had portrayed the cause of the Trojan War, but from the collective corruption of an entire society. The Athenians had been brought low by their pride and decline in political morality. Like the view of humanity presented in the cynical governmental structures of Plato's
Republic
, this was a bleak assessment of the true potential of human nature and the flaws of Athenian democracy, born of bitter experience; and although it was an emphatically moral view of history, it was not one which especially involved divine intervention - if at all.
²⁴

Thucydides had grasped that vital historical insight that groups of people behave differently and have different motivations from individual human beings, and that they often behave far more discreditably than individuals. He saw his task as the production of a history which was a work of art, as cool, balanced and perfectly structured as a Greek temple. Such harmony might clash with the need to depict accurately the messiness and randomness of the ways in which chance interacts with human motivation and collective folly. There is a struggle in the knotty prose of Thucydides between the reporting of events and the deployment of rhetoric, both in his own meditations and in the fictional speeches he allotted to various participants in events, but that struggle is apparent in any work of history which seeks to move on beyond chronology towards analysis. Perhaps it is not surprising that in such a novel undertaking his history has come down to us unfinished, yet he remains the greatest historian that the ancient world produced and an example to all those who have written history since his time.

HELLENISTIC GREECE

If Thucydides had known the fate of his society half a century after his death, he might well have observed that fourth-century Greeks, still rent by wars between states and quarrels within cities, deserved the Macedonians. This non-Greek kingdom lay to the north of mainland Greece; King Philip II of Macedon launched a war of conquest southwards and in 338 BCE sealed his control of the Greek peninsula in a close-run but decisive victory over combined Greek forces at Chaeronea. Philip's murder by a bodyguard drawn into the tangle of his homosexual love life resulted in the succession of the King's twenty-year-old son as Alexander III. Alexander took the expansionist traditions of the Macedonian royal house to extraordinary lengths, earning him posterity's nickname of 'the Great': his eastward conquests overwhelmed both the Persian Empire and Egypt and took him and his armies as far as northern India, all before his death aged only thirty-two. Alexander brought destruction and misery to great swathes of the Balkans, Egypt and Asia; yet he achieved much more of lasting significance than most of the sadistic megalomaniacs whose sudden conquests over the next sixteen hundred years down to the time of Timur (see pp. 273-5) swept through the same lands. He and his father had immersed themselves in Greek modes of life and social or intellectual assumptions, far beyond their ready adoption of same-sex love. Alexander transformed modes of thought and culture for the Near East and for Egypt in ways which were still the norms for that world in the time of Jesus Christ. His imperial style much impressed those later imperial conquerors, the Romans, who treated his cultural legacy with reverence and created an enduring empire in his mould.
²⁵

It was hardly surprising that Alexander's overextended empire could not survive as a political unit when he died. His Greek and Macedonian generals manoeuvred and fought each other until they had divided the empire up and established themselves as monarchs rather like the rulers whom Alexander had defeated, semi-divine potentates with armies and tax-collecting bureaucracies. There was even a Macedonian soldier, Ptolemy
Soter
('the Saviour'), as the new Pharaoh of Egypt, founder of the latest in the long series of Pharaonic dynasties, whose last descendant the Romans eventually swept away. These semi-Greek inheritors of ancient non-Greek tradition followed Alexander in founding new cities or refounding old ones, complete with temples in Greek style and theatres where Greek drama was performed. Little local imitations of the Classical Greek
polis
sprouted and survived for centuries as far away as the Himalayas in the east. So the Afghan city of Kandahar is called by a disguised version of the name which Alexander and his admirers gave to a scatter of cities across his conquests: Alexandria. The greatest Alexandria of all arose in the Nile Delta in Egypt, the port-city which Alexander himself had founded from a tiny village and named. Thanks to Ptolemy, it was equipped with a famous academy of higher learning - the ancient equivalent of the medieval and modern university - and the most splendid library in the ancient world, a symbol of how Greek learning and curiosity had taken new roots in an alien setting. To remain Greek in the setting of an ancient culture before whose antiquity and sophistication even Greek self-confidence faltered was to indulge in an almost adolescent act of self-assertion. It was in this Alexandria that many of the most self-conscious decisions were made about what was important among the works of Greek literature and what was not, forming a literary 'canon', a repertoire of acceptable classics which Christianity inherited and which have shaped our own view of what Greek civilization was like.
²⁶

So Alexandria became one of the most important cultural exchange points in the Mediterranean, and it was a major force in changing the nature of what it was to be Greek. Nineteenth-century scholars started calling this world created in the wake of Alexander's conflicts 'Hellenistic', to show how Greek it was, but also in order to differentiate it from the Greece which had gone before it.
²⁷
Classical Greece, however briefly, had fostered democracy, while here were states which were undisguised dictatorships. Their rulers took on divine trappings which Greeks had long ago rejected, but which Philip II had revived for himself; Alexander had turned this strategy into a major programme of identification with a variety of Greek and oriental divinities.
²⁸
Even when the newly minted monarchs wore their Greek guises, they usurped forms of worship which the Greeks had reserved for the Olympian gods alone. Never again did the Greek
polis
enjoy the true independence which was its ideal. The new Hellenistic cities remained little elite colonies, rather as two millennia later British colonial officials created imitations of an English village from Surrey when they wanted somewhere to relax in the India of Queen-Empress Victoria.