Europe: A History (23 page)
HELLAS
Ancient Greece
T
HERE
is a quality of excellence about Ancient Greece that brooks few comparisons. In the same way that the quality of Greek light enables painters to see form and colour with exceptional precision and intensity, so the conditions for human development in Greece seem to have favoured both the external environment and the inner life of mankind. Indeed, high-intensity sunlight may well have been one of the many ingredients which produced such spectacular results—in which case Homer, Plato, and Archimedes may be seen as the product of native genius plus photochemistry.
Certainly, in trying to explain the Greek phenomenon, one would have to weigh a very particular combination of factors. One factor would have to be that sun-drenched but seasonal climate which provided optimal encouragement for a vigorous outdoor life. A second factor would be the Aegean, whose islands and straits provided an ideal nursery in the skills of seafaring, commerce, and colonization. A third factor would be the proximity of older, established civilizations whose achievements were waiting to be imported and developed. There were other parts of the world, such as present-day California or southern Australia, which possessed the same favourable climate. There were other enclosed seas, such as the Baltic or the Great Lakes of North America, which were suited to primitive navigation. There were numerous regions adjacent to the great River Valley civilizations that were perfectly habitable. But nowhere—with the possible exception of the Sea of Japan—did all three factors coincide as they did in the eastern Mediterranean. The rise of Ancient Greece often strikes its many awestruck admirers as miraculous; but it may not have been entirely fortuitous.
No doubt a touch of caution should be added to prevailing comment on ‘the most amazing period of human history’. Modern opinion has been so saturated by the special pleading both of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism that it is often difficult to see ancient Greece for what it was. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), ‘The Discoverer’, sometime Prefect of Antiquities at Rome, invented an aesthetic scheme which has deeply affected European attitudes
to Greece ever since. In his
Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works
… (1755) and his
History of Art Among the Ancients
(1764), he wrote of ‘the noble simplicity and serene greatness’ and ‘the perfect law of art’ which supposedly infused everything Greek.
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The motto was taken to be ‘Nothing in excess’ or ‘Moderation in all things’. One can now suspect that many classical scholars have imposed interpretations which owed more than they knew to the rationalism and restraint of Winckelmann’s era. It was not the fashion to give emphasis either to the irrational element in Greek life or to its sheer
joie de vivre
. The philhellenic Romantics of the nineteenth century held priorities of their own. First there came John Keats with his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:
Map 6. Prehistoric Europe
O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed:
Thou silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As does eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Then there is Shelley enthusing on ‘Hellas’:
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn.
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
Above all, there was the young Lord Byron dreaming about ‘The Isles of Greece’:
Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep
Where nothing save the waves and I
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep.
There, swan-like, let me sing and die.
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The Romantics wrote on Greece with beguiling genius; and it is not surprising that they can ‘tease us out of thought’. Even the most distinguished critics can lose their critical faculties. One of them can be found writing on Greek literature about ‘results so satisfactory in form and so compelling in substance that their work has often been held up as a type of perfection’. Another can be found waxing on the joys of digging ‘at any classical or sub-classical site in the Greek world … where practically every object you find will be beautiful’. Yet another claimed that ‘the spirit of Ancient Greece … hath so animated universal nature that the very rocks and woods, the very torrents and wilds burst forth with it’. It may be that moderns are fired by nostalgia for a time when the world was young, or moved by a misplaced desire to prove the uniqueness of ancient Greece. Or
perhaps, in marvelling at the surviving masterpieces, they forget the dross which has not survived. It was ‘a liberal education even to walk in the streets of that wonderful city’, wrote a popular historian of Athens, ‘to worship in her splendid shrines, to sail the Mediterranean in her fleets’.
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Negative aspects can undoubtedly be found by those who seek them. Those noble Greeks, who are so admired, were none the less surrounded by ‘degrading superstitions, unnatural vices, human sacrifice, and slavery’.
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Many commentators compare the high-minded vigour of the early period with the violence and decadence of later centuries. Still, the facts remain. When the civilization of Ancient Greece first came into focus, its links to the older worlds of Egypt and Mesopotamia were tenuous,
[BLACK ATHENA] [CADMUS] [EPIC]
Yet in the space of three or four hundred years it had created breathtaking achievements in almost every field of human endeavour. European history knows no such burst of vital energy until the era of the Renaissance. For Greece, apparently, did not develop slowly and methodically. It blazed.
The political history of Ancient Greece spanned more than a thousand years, and passed through several distinct ages. The initial prehistoric age, which looked to the twin centres of Minoan and Mycenean civilization, came to an end in the twelfth century
BC.
In its later stages it coincided to a large extent with the so-called ‘Heroic Age’ which culminated in the Trojan War, and which later Greek literature peopled with the legendary names of Hercules, Ajax, Achilles, and Agamemnon. Troy was built on the Asian side of the Aegean which, especially in Ionia, supported the major centres of Greek settlement for centuries. The traditional date for Troy’s fall is 1184
BC.
Excavations have shown that the historical basis of the legends is stronger than was once supposed.
After that, an extended ‘Dark Age’ ensued, where the historical and even the archaeological record is meagre.
The ‘Golden Age’ of the Greek city-states lasted from the eighth to the fourth centuries, and itself passed through several distinct periods. The Archaic period reached the historical record with the first Olympiad whose traditional date of 776
BC
was to be adopted as the arbitrary starting-point of the Greek chronology. The central period of Greece’s greatest glory began in the fifth century and ended in 338
BC,
when the Greeks were forced to surrender to the Macedonians. Thereafter, in the period of dependence, the Greek cities laboured under foreign rule, first Macedonian, then Roman,
[ECO] [NOMISMA]
The principal conflicts of this Golden Age were provided by the wars against the empire of Persia, which under Cyrus the Great (558–529) absorbed the eastern half of the Greek world, and later by the Peloponnesian War (431–404), where the Greek cities fought in fratricidal strife. The battles where the invading Persians were held and repulsed, at the Plain of Marathon (490
BC),
or at the Pass of Thermopylae and the Bay of Salamis (480
BC)
have inspired endless panegyrics. In contrast, Sparta’s inglorious victory over Athens in 404
BC,
which was
accomplished with Persian support, or the merciless suppression of Sparta by Thebes, have received less attention.
ECO
E
COLOGICAL
devastation had already caught the attention of Greek rulers in the early sixth century
BC.
Solon the Law-giver proposed that the cultivation of steep slopes should be banned to prevent soil erosion; and Pisistratus introduced a bounty for farmers who planted olive trees to counteract deforestation and over-grazing. Two hundred years later Plato noted the damage inflicted on the land in Attica:
What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away…. There are some mountains which now have nothing but food for bees, but they had trees not long ago … and boundless pasturage. Moreover, it was enriched by the yearly rains from Zeus, which were not lost to it, as now … [providing]… abundant supplies of springwaters and streams, whereof the shrines still remain even now, at the spots where the fountains formerly existed.
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From the ecological point of view, ‘the adoption of agriculture was the most fundamental change in human history’. It is known as the ‘First Transition’, since it created the first form of artificial habitat—the cultivated countryside. Europe, in this process, served as a latter-day appendage to the main developments in south-west Asia, moving in parallel with China and Mesoamerica. But it shared all the consequences—a permanent food surplus and hence the potential for demographic growth; an ordered, hierarchical society; an increase in social coercion, both in labour and in warfare; the emergence of cities, organized trade, and literary culture—and ecological disasters.
Above all, particular ways of thinking about mankind’s relationship to Nature were engendered. The Judaeo-Christian tradition, which was destined to triumph in Europe, derived from the era of the ‘First Transition’. It stressed Man’s supremacy over the rest of Creation:
Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, upon every fowl of the air, upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.
Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb, have I given you all things. (Gen. 9)
For Thou hast made him [Man,] a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet… (Ps. 8)
The heavens are the Lord’s, but the earth he has given to the sons of man. (Ps. 115)
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Dissident thinkers, such as Maimonides or St Francis, who rejected these exploitative nostrums must be counted a distinct minority.
Nor did attitudes change with the emergence of secular thought during
the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution (see Chapter VII). ‘Man, if we look to the final causes,’ wrote Francis Bacon, ‘must be regarded as the centre of the world.’ Progress, including open-ended material progress, was one of the ideals of the Enlightenment. Mankind was judged perfectible, among other things through the application of the new science of economics. Yet in the eyes of the true ecologist, ‘economics has enthroned some of our most unattractive predispositions: material acquisitiveness, competition, gluttony, pride, selfishness, shortsightedness, and just plain greed’.
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[MARKET]
Of course, by the time of the Enlightenment, the world was moving into the era of the ‘Second Transition’. The logic of exploitation was advancing from ‘the rape of nature’, i.e. of renewable botanical and zoological resources, to the unbridled consumption of non-renewable resources, especially of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. At this stage, Europe definitely took the lead. The Industrial Revolution vastly increased the sheer weight of human numbers, the urban sprawl, the expectation of affluence, and the rate of consumption, pollution, and exhaustion. Above all, it magnified mankind’s capacity for causing ecological trauma on a scale which Solon and Plato could never have imagined.
It has taken a long time for people to take the effects of a damaged environment seriously. When the ex-Emperor Napoleon lay dying at Longwood House on St Helena in 1821, his terminal illness aroused much disquiet. A post-mortem stated the cause of death to have been abdominal cancer. But tests conducted in 1840, when the body was returned to France for reburial, revealed traces of arsenic in the hair roots. Earlier suspicions of murder seemed confirmed. Various persons in his entourage were named as the poisoner. Over a hundred years later, however, a fresh suspicion emerged. In the early nineteenth century, arsenic compounds were sometimes used to fix the colours of fabrics; and close examinations at Longwood House showed that a strong constituent of arsenic was present in the wallpaper of the ex-Emperor’s specially redecorated rooms. The subject still arouses controversy. But it is not beyond possibility that Napoleon’s death was a case not of murder but of environmental pollution.
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(See p. 762.)