MASSILIA
M
ASSILIA (Marseille) was founded
c
.600 BC by Greeks from Phocaean Asia Minor. According to legend Photis, their leader, sailed his galley into the harbour just as the chieftain of the local Ligurian tribe was holding a betrothal ceremony for his favourite daughter. When the girl was invited to hand the cup of betrothal to one of the assembled warriors, she handed it instead to the handsome Greek. Thus began one of the richest and most dynamic of all Greek colonies.
Surrounded by high white-stone crags and guarded by an offshore island, the magnificent harbour of ancient Massilia has served as a major centre of commercial and cultural life for more than 2,500 years. The government was a merchant oligarchy. A Great Council of 600 citizens, elected for life, appointed a smaller Council of Fifteen, which formed the executive. The trade and exploration of the Massiliots spread far and wide. They dominated the sea from Luna in Tuscany to the south of Iberia, and they set up trading-posts at Nicaea (Nice), Antipolis (Antibes), Rhoda (Arles), and distant Emporia, all dedicated to their own patron goddess, the Ephesian Artemis. Their sailors did not fear the ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and were reputed to have reached Iceland in the north, and what is now Senegal in the south. One daring fourth-century Massiliot, Pytheas, navigated the northern coasts of Europe including the ‘Tin Islands’ (as Herodotus called Britain). His lost ‘Survey of the Earth’ was known to Strabo and Polybius.
Faced with the jealous rivalry of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Massilia had often appealed to Rome for support. But they did so once too often. In 125
BC
when they called for military aid against the Gauls, the Roman legions overran the entire country, thereby creating the Province of Transalpine Gaul (Provence). From this a trilingual community grew up, speaking Greek, Latin, and Celtic. Thereafter, the city’s life mirrored all the changes of Mediterranean politics—Arabs, Byzantines, Genoans, and, from 1481, the French. The greatest days of Marseilles’s prosperity started in the nineteenth century, with the opening of French interests in the Levant. Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, and the building of the Suez Canal by de Lesseps, were key episodes.
Modern Marseilles, like ancient Massilia, is still ruled by the sea. Le Vieux Port, immortalized by the dramatic trilogy of Marcel Pagnol, has been superseded by the vast Port Autonome beyond the digue. But the turbulent emotions of Fanny, Marius, and César, hopelessly torn by the tearful departures and arrivals of the ships, are constantly repeated:
FANNY.
Et toi, Marius, tu ne m’aimes pas? [// se
tait]
…
MARIUS.
Je te l’ai déjà dit, Fanny. Je ne peux pas me marier.
FANNY.
Alors, c’est quelque vilaine femme des vieux quartiers.… Dis-le moi. Marius …
MARIUS.
J’ai confiance en toi. Je vais te le dire. Je veux partir.
1
(Marius, don’t you love me? / I’ve told you already, Fanny, I can’t marry you. / Oh, I see: it’s one of those nasty women from the old town … Go on, say it. / No. I trust no-one but you, Fanny. I’m about to tell you. I want to leave./)
From the terrace of Notre Dame de la Garde, perched high on the site of a Greek temple, one can still gaze down on the ships slipping into the harbour like the galleys of Photis. Or, like the Count of Monte Cristo in the Château d’lf, or like Marius, one can dream of escape across the sea.
2
The Phoenicians and Carthaginians, like Jews and Arabs, were Semites. As the ultimate losers in the struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean, they did not enjoy the sympathy either of the Greeks or of the Romans. As idolaters of Baal, the ultimate graven image, they have always been singled out for derision by followers of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which the Graeco-Roman world eventually adopted. Though Europa’s Phoenician kinsfolk held sway for a millennium and more, their civilization is very little known or studied. Their story may have suffered from yet another variant of antisemitism.
Greek religion progressed from early animism and fetishism to a view of the world seen as ‘one great City of gods and men’. The Olympian pantheon was already extant in the late prehistoric age. Zeus, Father of the Gods, and Hera, his consort, ruled over the headstrong family of Olympians—Apollo, Artemis, Pallas Athene, Ares, Poseidon, Hermes, Dionysus, Demeter, Pluto, and Persephone. Their home on the summit of Mount Olympus was generally taken to stand on the northern frontier of the Greek homeland. They were joined by a rich gallery of local deities, satyrs, shades, nymphs, furies, sibyls, and muses, to whom the Greeks paid their oblations. The ritual sacrifice of animals remained the normal practice. Though it was the prerogative of the gods to be capricious, and though some, such as Ares, God of War, or Poseidon, God of the Sea, could be vengeful, there was no Devil, no power of darkness or sin to prey on people’s deeper fears. Man’s supreme fault was
hubris
or overweening pride, commonly punished by
nemesis
, the wrath of the gods,
[SPICE-OX]
A thousand myths, and a dazzling choice of cults and oracles, proliferated. They fostered an outlook where courage and enterprise, tempered by respect,
were thought to be rewarded by health and fortune. The cult of Zeus, centred at Olympia, which hosted the Olympic Games, was universal, as was the combination of piety and competitive endeavour. The widespread cult of Apollo, God of Light, was centred at his birthplace on the island of Delos, and at Delphi. The Mysteries of Demeter, Goddess of the Earth, at Eleusis, and the still more ecstatic Mysteries of Dionysus, God of Wine, developed from ancient fertility rites. The cult of Orpheus the Singer, who had pursued his dead love, Eurydice, through the underworld, turned on a belief in the existence and purification of souls. Orphism, which lasted from the seventh century until late Roman times, inspired endless poetic comment, from Plato and Virgil onwards:
SPICE-OX
P
YTHAGORAS
(
fl. c
.530
BC)
gave voice to two well-known maxims: ‘Everything is numbers’ and ‘Eating beans is a crime equal to eating the heads of one’s parents’. Scholars concerned with the origins of modern science study his mathematics. Those concerned with the working of the Greek mind study his ideas on gastronomy. (See Appendix III, p. 1221.)
Like the Pilgrim Fathers of a later age, Pythagoras was a religious dissenter, and sailed away from his native Samos to found a sectarian colony in Magna Graecia. There he found the freedom to apply his religious theories, among other things to food and diet. His central contention sprang from the concept of metempsychosis, ‘the transmigration of souls’, which could pass after death from person to person, or from persons to animals. As a result, he was opposed in principle to the custom of animal sacrifices, and held that the perfume of heated herbs and spices was a more fitting offering to the gods than the stench of roasted fat.
But if spices formed the link with Heaven, beans were the link with Hades. Broad beans, whose nodeless shoots relentlessly push their way to the sunlight, were thought to act as ‘ladders for the souls of men’ migrating from the underworld. Beans propagated in a closed pot produced a seething mess of obscene shapes reminiscent of sexual organs and aborted foetuses. Similar taboos were placed on the consumption of the noble meats, especially of beef. Some creatures like the pig and the goat, which root around and damage nature, were judged harmful, and hence edible. Others, like the sheep, which gives wool, and the ‘working ox’, man’s most faithful companion, were judged useful, and hence inedible. Joints of ignoble meat could be eaten, if necessary, but the vital organs such as the heart or the brain could not. According to Aristoxenos of Tarentum, the resultant diet consisted of
maza
(barley meal), wine, fruit, wild mallow and asphodel,
artos
(wheatbread), raw and cooked vegetables, opson seasoning, and, on special occasions, suckling pig and kid. Once, an ox rescued by Pythagoras from a beanfield was given a lifelong pension of barley meal in the local Temple of Hera.
More famously, when Pythagoras’ disciple, Empedocles of Acragas, won the chariot race at Olympia in 496
BC,
he refused to offer up the customary sacrifice of a roasted ox. Instead, he burned the image of an ox made from oil and spices, saluting the gods amidst a billowing cloud of frankincense and myrrh. The Pythagoreans believed that diet was an essential branch of ethics. ‘So long as men slaughter animals,’ the master said, ‘they won’t stop killing each other.’
1
[KONOPIPJTE]
Nur wer die Leier schon hob
auch unter Schatten,
darf das unendliche Lob
ahnend erstatten.
Nur wer mit Toten vom Mohn
aß, von dem ihren
wird nicht den leisesten Ton
wieder verlieren.
Mag auch die Spieglung im Teich
oft uns verschwimmen:
Wisse das Bild
.
Erst in dem Doppelbereich
werden die Stimmen
ewig und mild.
(Only he who has raised the lyre even among the shades can dispense the infinite praise. Only he who ate of their poppy with the Dead will never lose even the softest note. Though the reflection in the pond may often dissolve before us—
Know the image!
Only in the double realm will the voices be lasting and gentle.)
8
All these cults, as well as the Hellenistic cults of Mithras and Isis, were still in full circulation when Christianity arrived in the period after the 200th Olympiad (see Chapter III),
[OMPHALOS]
Greek philosophy, or ‘love of wisdom’, grew up in opposition to conventional religious attitudes. Socrates (469–399
BC),
son of a stonemason, was sentenced in Athens to drink hemlock for ‘introducing strange gods’ and ‘corrupting youth’. Yet the Socratic method of asking penetrating questions in order to test the assumptions which underlie knowledge provided the basis of all subsequent rational thought. It was used by Socrates to challenge what he regarded as the specious arguments of the earlier Sophists or ‘sages’. His motto was ‘Life unexamined is not worth living’. According to his disciple Plato, Socrates said: ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ It was the perfect start for epistemology.
Plato (
c
.429–347
BC)
and Plato’s own disciple Aristotle (384–322
BC)
together laid the foundations of most branches of speculative and natural philosophy.
Plato’s Academy or ‘Grove’ and Aristotle’s Lyceum, otherwise known as the Peripatetic School, were the Oxford and Cambridge (or Harvard and Yale) of the ancient world. With them in mind, it has been said: ‘the legacy of the Greeks to Western Philosophy was Western Philosophy’.
9
Of the two Plato was the idealist, creating the first imaginary utopias, fundamental theories of forms and of immortality, an influential cosmogony, a far-ranging critique of knowledge, and a famous analysis of love. Nothing in intellectual history is more powerful than Plato’s metaphor of the cave, which suggests that we can only perceive the world indirectly, seeing reality only by means of its firelit shadows on the wall. Aristotle, in contrast, was ‘the practitioner of inspired common sense’, the systematizer. His encyclopedic works range from metaphysics and ethics to politics, literary criticism, logic, physics, biology, and astronomy.
Greek literature, initially in the form of epic poetry, was one of those wonders which apparently came into being in a mature state. Homer, who probably lived and wrote in the middle of the eighth century
BC,
was exploiting a much older oral tradition. He may or may not have been the sole author of the works attributed to him. But the first poet of European literature is widely considered to have been the most influential. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
have few peers, and no superiors. Homer’s language, which classicists call ‘sublime’, proved to be infinitely flexible and expressive.
[EPIC]
Written literature depends on literacy, whose origins go back to the importation of an alphabet in the eighth century. The art of letters was greatly encouraged by the urban character of Greek life, but the extent of its penetration into the various social strata is a matter of some controversy.
[CADMUS]
Homer’s successors—his fellow epicists from Hesiod
(fl. c.700
BC)
to the unknown author(s) of the so-called ‘Homeric Hymns’; the elegists from Callinus of Ephesus (
fl
. from 690
BC)
to Xenophanes of Colophon (
c
.570–480
BC);
the lyricists from Sappho (b. 612
BC)
to Pindar (518–438
BC),
from Anacreon (
fl. c
.530
BC)
to Simonides of Ceos (556–468
BC)
—have attracted countless imitators and translators. Theocritus the Syracusan (
c
.300–260
BC)
wrote idylls of nymphs and goatherds which became the model for a pastoral tradition stretching from Virgil’s eclogues to
As You Like It
. But none sang so sweet as the ‘tenth muse’ of Lesbos:
Some say that the most beautiful thing on this dark earth
Is a squadron of cavalry; others say
A troop of infantry, others a fleet of ships;
But I say that it is the one you love.
10
Poetry-reading was closely allied to music; and the melody of a seven-stringed lyre served as a common accompaniment to the declaimed hexameters. The Greek word
musike
encompassed all melodious sounds, whether words or notes. Poetry was to be found in the simplest inscriptions, in the widespread art of epigrams:
OMPHALOS
D
elphi,
in the view of the Greeks, lay at the exact centre of the world. Its
omphalos
or ‘navel stone’ marked the meeting-place of two of Zeus’s eagles, one sent from the east and one from the west. Here, too, in a deep valley ringed by the dark pines and rose-tinted cliffs of Mt Parnassus, Apollo had slain the snake-god Python and, in a steam-filled cave above a gaseous chasm, had established the most prestigious of oracles. In historic times, the Temple of Apollo was built alongside a theatre, a stadium for the Pythian Games, and the numerous treasuries of patron cities. In 331 BC Aristotle and his nephew drew up a list of all the victors of the Pythian Games to date. Their findings were inscribed on four stone tablets, which survived to be found by modern archaeologists.
1
The procedures of the oracle followed a timeless ritual. On the seventh day of each month the high priestess, Pythia, freshly purified in the Castalian Spring, would seat herself on the sacred tripod above the chasm and, locked in an ecstatic trance among the vapours, would await her petitioners’ enquiries. The petitioners, having watched the customary sacrifice of a goat, would await her notoriously ambiguous responses, delivered in hexameters.
2
Theseus, the legendary slayer of the Minotaur and founder of Athens, was given this comfort:
THESEUS, SON OF AEGEUS … DO NOT BE DISTRESSED. FOR AS A LEATHERN BOTTLE YOU WILL RIDE THE WAVES EVEN IN A SWELLING SURGE.
The citizens of Thera, worried by their failing colony on the African coast, were told to reconsider its location:
IF YOU KNOW LIBYA, THE NURSE OF FLOCKS, BETTER THAN I DO, WHEN YOU HAVE NOT BEEN THERE … I ADMIRE YOUR WISDOM.
Moved to the mainland from its offshore island, Cyrene prospered.
King Croesus of Lydia wanted to know whether to make war or to keep the peace. The Oracle said:
‘go to war and destroy a great empire.’
He went to war, and
his
empire was destroyed.
Before Salamis in 480
BC,
an Athenian delegation implored the aid of Apollo against the Persian invaders:
PALLAS IS NOT ABLE TO APPEASE ZEUS … BUT WHEN ALL ELSE HAS BEEN CAPTURED … YET ZEUS OF THE BROAD HEAVEN GIVES TO THE TRITON-BORN A WOODEN WALL … TO BLESS YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN.
Themistocles, the Athenian admiral, rightly deduced that the key to victory lay with his wooden ships.
Lysander, the Spartan general who had entered Athens in triumph at the end of the Peloponnesian War, was warned:
I BID YOU GUARD AGAINST A ROARING HOPLITE AND A SNAKE, CUNNING SON OF THE EARTH, WHICH ATTACKS BEHIND THE BACK.
He was killed by a soldier with the emblem of a snake on his shield.
Philip of Macedon, notorious for his bribery, was reputedly told
‘TO FIGHT WITH SILVER SPEARS’.
More authentically, on preparing to fight the Persians, he received this prophecy:
‘THE BULL IS GARLANDED, THE END IS COME, THE SACRIFICER IS NIGH.’
Shortly afterwards he was murdered.
The Roman, Lucius Junius Brutus, consulted the Oracle with two companions, and asked about their future:
YOUNG MEN, HE AMONG YOU WHO FIRST SHALL KISS HIS MOTHER WILL HOLD THE HIGHEST POWER IN ROME.
Brutus’ companions took the hint literally, whilst Brutus bent down to kiss the earth. In 509
BC
Brutus became Rome’s first Consul.
Four centuries later, Cicero asked the Oracle how one achieved the highest fame. He was told:
MAKE YOUR OWN NATURE, NOT THE OPINION OF THE MULTITUDE, THE GUIDE OF YOUR LIFE.
The Emperor Nero, fearing death, was told:
‘EXPECT EVIL FROM
73’. Encouraged, he thought that he might live to be 73. In the event he was overthrown and forced to kill himself at the age of 31. Seventy-three turned out to be the age of his successor, Galba.
Most famously, perhaps, when Alexander the Great consulted the Oracle, it remained silent.
3
Belief in the omniscience of the Delphic Oracle is almost as great among enthusiastic moderns as it was among the superstitious Greeks of old. For scholars, however, the problem lies in distinguishing the Oracle’s real achievements from its limitless reputation. Sceptics point out that none of the alleged predictions was ever recorded in advance of the events to which they referred. The amazing powers of the Oracle could never be tested. A powerful cult, an efficient publicity machine, and a gullible public were all essential elements of the operation.
Many of the oracle’s most famous sayings were inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Apollo. These included ‘Nothing in Excess’ and ‘Know Thyself’.
4
They became the watchwords of Greek civilization.