The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (5 page)

The presiding spirit over all this was Pericles. He dominated Athens from 461
BC
, when he was thirty-four, until his death in 429
BC
of plague, and everything he did or said was inspired by a passionate love for his native city. He did his best to adorn it in every way possible–by restoring the temples destroyed by the Persians and organising the construction of new ones, particularly on the Acropolis, where he was directly responsible for the Propylaea, the Odeon, the Erechtheum and the Parthenon itself. But he was also a war leader and an incorrigible imperialist–for it should never be assumed that the fifth century in Athens was a time of peace. On the contrary, there was almost constant fighting with Sparta, as also with many other Greek states who resented and resisted Athenian expansionist policies, the pressures steadily building up until in 431
BC
they exploded in the Peloponnesian War. That war–one of the chief reasons for which was the determination of each side to control the trade routes linking Greece to the Adriatic–lasted for just over a quarter of the glorious fifth century. Anyone wanting to know the full story can read Thucydides; here it need only be said that it ended with a winter-long siege of Athens (405–04
BC
), during which the city was starved into surrender. So much, it might be thought, for the Golden Age. But the Golden Age was never about politics; it was about art and thought. In the field of literature–and in particular that of Greece’s greatest strength, the drama–the first great name was that of Aeschylus. Having been born in 525
BC
, he had certainly fought at Marathon, and probably also at Salamis and Plataea. During his long life he wrote over eighty plays, of which seven have survived, including the only extant Greek trilogy, the
Oresteia
. Aeschylus was in many ways a pioneer. His tragedies were the first to explore human personality, and the first also to use a second actor, thus reducing to some degree the importance of the chorus. He made two prolonged visits to Sicily–at that time still an integral part of the Greek world–and it was there, in 456
BC
, that he died–killed, according to a venerable tradition, by an eagle which mistook his bald head for a rock and dropped a tortoise on to it in order to crack the shell.

Sophocles, some thirty years younger than Aeschylus, was still more prolific, with 123 plays to his credit; once again, seven tragedies have come down to us, including three which deal with the Oedipus legend. Apart from these–
Oedipus Rex
,
Antigone
and
Oedipus at Colonus
–his masterpiece is unquestionably
Electra
, which tells the story of the murder by Electra and her brother Orestes of their mother, Clytemnestra–wife of Agamemnon–and her lover, Aegisthus. Sophocles too was an innovator. Aristotle tells us that he added a third actor, and he also introduced the art of scene-painting. On top of all this, he somehow found the time to distinguish himself in Athenian public life. Treasurer of the Delian League, he served twice on the military council of ten generals; he was also a priest of Halon, another, lesser god of healing. He died in 406
BC
, at the age of ninety. Some time before his death his sons took him to court on the grounds that he had grown senile and was no longer competent to manage his affairs. He replied by reciting from memory a long extract from his most recent play,
Oedipus at Colonus
–and won his case.

Third and last of the great tragedians was Euripides. Born in 484
BC
, he was twelve years younger than Sophocles and died a few months before him in 406
BC
. (At the festival of Dionysus in that year, Sophocles dressed the chorus and actors in black in his memory.) In a later age, Euripides would have been hailed as a Renaissance man. As well as a playwright he was a fine painter and a skilled musician; his library was one of the best in Athens. He is believed to have written ninety-two plays, nineteen of which have survived. They include
Andromache, Hippolytus, Medea
and
The Trojan Women
: the same old myths used by his predecessors, but usually given an unexpected–often contemporary–twist.

The only other dramatist of the day who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as these three was a writer not of tragedies but of comedies, and highly satirical ones at that. Aristophanes, who was born around 445
BC
, was a generation younger than Euripides and–as might be expected–still more down to earth. He wrote some fifty-four plays, of which we have eleven in their entirety; in them he mercilessly caricatured the leading figures of Athenian political, cultural and social life, including Socrates (in
The Clouds
), Cleon (in
The Knights
) and Lamachus, one of the leading Athenian generals during the Peloponnesian War (in
The Acharnians
). In
The Frogs
Dionysus, god of the theatre, goes down to Hades to fetch back Euripides, but after a mock trial scene brings back Aeschylus instead. Most famous of all, perhaps, is
Lysistrata
, in which the women of the Greek cities withhold their favours from their husbands until peace is restored.

Of the great Athenian philosophers, only Socrates–who lived from 469 to 399
BC
–properly belongs to the fifth century. He wrote nothing, simply because he claimed to know nothing–nor, he believed, did anybody else–and so he did not feel justified in teaching. Instead, he discussed–anything and everything: good, evil, truth, justice, virtue, religion. This last subject proved to be his downfall. In the early spring of 399
BC
he was accused of impiety, having, it was said, introduced strange new gods whom the state did not recognise; moreover, though he had a wife, Xanthippe, and two sons, he was also accused of having habitually seduced young men. These two charges together were enough to have him found guilty by a jury of 501 citizens and sentenced to death. His friends offered to bribe the prison authorities to let him escape; he refused on moral grounds. A month later he publicly drained a cup of hemlock and died.

Plato, who was to immortalise him, was twenty-eight when he attended the trial of Socrates and was deeply shaken by his death, after which he spent some years travelling in Egypt, Italy and Sicily. Unlike his friend, he wrote copiously, often expounding his philosophical theories in the form of dramatic dialogues in which Socrates plays a prominent part. He himself remains in the background and–though he argues with consummate brilliance–never quite commits himself to any particular doctrine of his own. Some time in the 380s
BC
he founded a school just outside Athens, in a grove sacred to the hero Academus. It consequently became known as the Academy, a word later adopted by nearly all the languages of Europe.

Plato’s star pupil–whom he described as ‘the mind of the school’–was a young Ionian Greek from Thrace by the name of Aristotle, born at Stagira near Thessalonica in 384
BC
. Aristotle remained at the Academy until Plato’s death in 347
BC
, when he settled at Assos in Asia Minor and opened a school. In 342
BC
he received an invitation from Philip II of Macedon to be private tutor to the King’s fourteen-year-old son, Alexander, a post he held for two years. His charge then became regent for Philip, at which point Aristotle returned to Athens to found another school of his own–this time in a grove sacred to Apollo Lykeios, which earned it the name Lyceum. Aristotle was more than a philosopher; his surviving oeuvre also contains works on ethics, history, science, politics, literary and dramatic criticism, nature, meteorology, dreams and–a particular interest of his–zoology. He was, in short, a polymath–perhaps the first in history. And he left behind him the first true library, a vast collection of manuscripts and maps which was the prototype for Pergamum, Alexandria and all the other great public libraries of antiquity.

For some years after the end of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta ruled the Greek roost; but early in the next century the spotlight shifted to a place both unexpected and unfamiliar. In those days of antiquity, Macedonia must have seemed rather like Scotland appeared to medieval Englishmen: a land of wild and uncouth barbarians divided into endlessly warring clans, their almost total lack of culture and
politesse
rivalled only by a prodigious capacity for alcohol. All this was certainly true of the Macedonian highlands; but the lowlands included the city of Pella from which, for a century already, a dynasty known as the Argeads had held sway–at least in theory–over the entire country.

For our purposes the story begins with King Philip II, who succeeded to the throne on the death of his brother in 359
BC
. The country he inherited was poor and disorganised; he immediately established a professional army, which he subjected to intensive training and kept mobilised not just in summer, as was the usual practice, but all the year round. In twenty years he made Macedonia the most powerful state in eastern Europe, dramatically upsetting the balance of power throughout the Greek world. In 338
BC
he led his army southward, forcing the city-states of southern Greece–led by Athens and Thebes–to make a hasty alliance. They despatched an army to meet him, and the opposing forces met on 4 August at Chaeronea in Boeotia. The result was a resounding victory for Philip. To this day, by the roadside just to the east of the modern village, a stone lion marks the common tomb of the Theban ‘Sacred Band’, a body 300 strong which was traditionally composed of 150 pairs of male lovers; 254 skeletons have been found nearby.

Among the ambassadors sent by Philip to Athens to offer terms for a settlement was his son Alexander. Though still only eighteen, the young prince had fought with distinction at Chaeronea, leading the cavalry on the left wing. From childhood he had been brought up as his father’s eventual successor; his tutor Aristotle–one of the most reactionary intellectuals that ever lived–had given him a strong sense of his divine right to rule, and gone so far as to advise him ‘to be a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’. The boy was consumed with ambition, and so impatient to assume the reins of kingship that Philip soon began to suspect a conspiracy against him. He may well have been right: in 336
BC
, in the course of festivities to celebrate the alarmingly incestuous marriage of his wife’s brother with her own daughter, the King was assassinated by a member of his own bodyguard.

Was Alexander implicated in the murder? Nothing was ever proved, but what evidence there is points fairly convincingly to him and to his mother, Olympias, whom Philip had recently divorced. It certainly came at a providential moment. With the unanimous consent of the army, Alexander at once assumed his father’s command. Then, pausing only to institute a swift campaign against Thebes–of which he left not one stone standing on another–in the spring of 334
BC
he crossed the Hellespont and started off on the great expedition that was to occupy the remainder of his short but astonishing life: an expedition launched with the dual purpose of freeing the Greek cities of Asia Minor from Persian domination and then forging a great empire of his own in eastern lands. While still on Mediterranean territory he won two historic battles over the Persian king Darius III, the first on the river Granicus (now the Çan Çay1) about thirty miles east of Troy, the second in the following year on the plain of Issus, between Alexandretta and Antioch (now Iskenderun and Antakya respectively). After this there was little opposition as he led his army south along the coast of Palestine and across the north of the Sinai peninsula into Egypt, where he spent the winter of 332–31
BC
. With the coming of spring he struck east again, first to Tyre and then over the mountains to Damascus. And so he passes out of our story.

Alexander died in Babylon on 13 June 323
BC
aged thirty-two, leaving chaos behind him. His only surviving son, Heracles, was a bastard; his wife, Roxane, was pregnant at the time of his death, but the baby might well have proved to be a girl and nobody was prepared to wait another six weeks to see. Fierce infighting broke out among his generals and the noble Macedonians who formed his court. This soon spread to the Mediterranean, and before long the entire Greek world was being torn apart by ambition and avarice. It was, in its way, inevitable. Alexander’s empire could never have lasted. It was too large, too unwieldy, too quickly conquered. A victim of his own ambition, the young adventurer had thought only of advance, never of consolidation. And the almost random fragmentation of the empire after his death made its further dissolution inevitable.

Infinitely more important than Alexander’s short-lived empire was the cultural legacy that he left behind him. The eastward extension of Greek culture as far as Afghanistan and the Indus valley, and its fusion with that of Persia, both fall outside the scope of this book; but the Hellenistic period
¹³
also had a huge impact throughout the eastern Mediterranean. There as elsewhere Greek-style cities sprang up, with temples and agoras, theatres and gymnasia, but the vast majority were no longer independent city-states as they had been in the past. They were now part of a larger polity, richer and stronger, able to launch programmes of shipbuilding on a scale which would have been unthinkable in previous centuries. Moreover, they were eventually to provide a fertile field for the spread of a new religion, which was to develop out of Judaism while professing none of the latter’s exclusiveness: Christianity, as preached and developed by St Paul.