RICHARD MILES: What is civilisation?
We recognise it when we see it.
Don't we?
The Greeks had a word for all this, To hellenikon,
meaning Greekness or the Greek thing.
It was first used by the historian Herodotus
to sum up all the things the ancient Greeks had in common.
Language,
religion,
customs,
blood.
Today, the Greek thing has become a kind of shorthand
for values that we like to think are the roots of who we are.
Rational, cultured,
humane, civilised.
But beneath the civilised skin was a fierce volatile pulse.
It gave the Greek thing its energy, its passion, its life,
and its capacity for sudden, shocking violence.
(SIREN WAILING)
(CROWD CHANTING)
(PEOPLE SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
If you'd come here in 370 BC to Argos,
you'd have seen another side of the Greek thing.
In that year, an aristocratic plot to overthrow
the democratic government of this city was uncovered.
Seizing the political advantage, democratic demagogues
whipped up a mob with fiery speeches
directed against the city's wealthiest citizens.
What happened next was a reign of terror.
Trumped up charges, confiscation of property,
summary trial and execution.
The victims were handed over to the mob
who beat them to death with clubs.
It was only when the body count reached 1,200 or more
that the democratic leaders began to have second thoughts
about this cull of the city's elite.
But when they tried to calm things down, the mob turned on them,
and clubbed them to death as well.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher,
had some interesting things to say about the Greeks.
"These most humane of men in ancient times", he wrote,
"have a trait of cruelty, a tigerish lust to annihilate,
which really must strike fear in our hearts."
In the story of ancient Greece,
and the evolution of the city-states to their wars with Persia,
and then with each other has as much to shudder at as to admire.
A blossoming in art, philosophy and science that went hand-in-bloody-hand
with political discord, social injustice, endless war,
and ultimately, a complete failure to forge a common political identity,
despite all that shared Greekness.
And that's the story that I have for you now,
the Greek thing, for better or worse.
The last time we met the Greeks, they were a long way from home.
A predatory army camped outside the walls of Troy,
intent on vengeance and plunder.
Homer's Iliad gave the heroes who fought in the Trojan War
epic grandeur.
They left the Greeks who came after feeling they had a lot to live up to.
But though they dreamed of being an Achilles,
sacking cities and slaying their enemies,
their glory would come from the hard graft that was needed
to rebuild their civilisation.
To understand these Greeks, you have to leave the killing fields of Troy behind
and travel west to the Greek mainland.
This is Boeotia in the heart of Greece.
It's a very long way from the world of heroes and battles.
But this landscape has its poetry, too,
though of a very different kind to the Iliad.
If Homer's theme was the tragedy of war,
the poetry wrote about this place explored the everyday heroism of work.
MAN: Gods and men disapprove of the man
who lives without working.
Wealth brings worth and prestige.
But whatever your fortune, work is preferable,
if your spirit yearns for riches, do as follows and work.
Work upon work.
This is Ascra, a beautiful spot at the head of the valley of the Muses.
Ascra never really amounted to much, more of a village than a town,
it was certainly no Athens.
But Ascra deserves its measure of fame for being the hometown of Hesiod,
the poet laureate of a new down-to-earth Greece
which followed the age of heroes.
We're not sure of Hesiod's dates,
but most experts believe that he owned and worked a small farm
somewhere in the valley in the period immediately after Homer.
This puts him sometime after 700 BC
when the Greek world was emerging from the darkness
that had followed the collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms of Mycenae,
some six centuries before.
After a long period of stagnation, things were changing fast.
Tribal systems that had returned during the Dark Ages were breaking down
as the more impersonal mechanisms of civilisation revived.
Loyalties and obligations based on family, kith and kin
dissolved as colonisation, trade,
and a surge in population,
offered people new opportunities for personal enrichment,
undermining notions of the collective and the common good.
New technologies, from metallurgy to the alphabet,
accelerated these processes
as the Greeks reconnected with the modern world
at the late Iron Age.
And in this world, the voices and opinions of ordinary people
would play a vital role in the shaping of these new societies.
Crucially, in the new Greece, the role and status of the high kings
of the Mycenaean age were called into question like never before.
Typically, these new settlements were small,
and the gap between rich and poor was small, too.
When you could see the top of the social pyramid,
it became much easier to ask,
Why is he up there and why am I down here?
And why should he tell me how to live my life?
In Works and Days, Hesiod's most famous poem,
he tells the parable of the nightingale
struggling in the claws of the hawk.
"Why do you cry out?" asked the hawk,
One much stronger than you holds you fast,
and you must go wherever I take you.
But the point is that Hesiod was crying out,
railing against the corruption of the new Age of Iron,
and threatening divine retribution.
MAN: There is angry murmuring when right is dragged off
wherever the bribe eaters choose,
as they give their crooked verdicts.
Beware of this, Lords, and keep your judgements straight.
A man fashions ill for himself who fashions ill for another.
The all-seeing eye of Zeus sees the kind of justice
the community has within it.
Struggle between elite privilege and ancient rights
would be a theme for politics as well as poetry.
The battleground between
hoi oligoi, the few, and hoi polloi, the many.
But the arena for this battle
wouldn't be out-of-the-way places like Ascra,
but the city-states, the nuclei around which the new Greece
was beginning to crystallise.
The city-state or polis, was a remarkably successful
and adaptable concept.
Over a period of about 500 years, starting around 700 BC,
some 1,500 were established in Greece and in Greek colonies
from Spain to Afghanistan.
Some like Athens, Sparta, Argos, or Corinth,
had populations topping 10,000 and territories to match.
But the average city-state had a population of around 1,000.
So these were intimate, independent places.
Geography added to this sense of inwardness.
Cut off by the rugged mountains and hemmed in by the encroaching sea,
few city-states had the elbow room needed to become powers in their land.
Those that did owed their prominence to powerful, strategic locations,
a pinch point along trade routes or a defensible citadel on a rocky hill
which both protected and controlled the territory below.
At nearly 2,000 feet above sea level,
the Acrocorinth of Corinth is the most impressive.
From up here, one of the defining characteristics of the city-state
is immediately clear.
The political centre is embedded in the farmlands that surround it.
With one foot in the street and the other in the fields,
these city-states bred citizen-farmers,
hyphenated people for these hyphenated places.
Small, inward looking, and isolated,
the city-states ran on a brand of local politics
that was intensely personal.
More village pump than city hall,
with all the predictable rivalries, feuds and vendettas.
But it was in the interests of the most powerful clans to work together
because if they didn't, they knew a big man could emerge
who would rule over everyone.
By the eighth century BC, most Greek city-states
had kicked out their kings.
The ancient world's default position when it came to political leadership.
And this meant that the power and prestige,
which had previously been the preserve of individuals,
was now divvied out amongst the members of the elites, the oligarchs.
Oligarchy broke down kingship into its component parts,
justice, war, religion, and so on,
creating a whole new range of public offices
for ambitious aristocrats to fill.
And they could also impose time limits on length of service,
introducing the hallowed concept of Buggins' turn
into the political process.
My turn to be archon this year, your turn next.
Passions inside the city-state ran high.
This wasn't just the place you came to buy and sell, or do business,
it was the place where you learnt to be a politician,
a creature of the polis, a political animal.
So your polis provided an economic hub, a security during times of danger.
But it went deeper than that.
The polis was something to which you belonged,
the place that gave you your identity.
According to Aristotle, the polis completed you as a human being.
"The man who in his self-sufficiency has no use for others", he wrote,
"is like a beast or a god."
(CROWD CHEERING)
Love of polis was so intense,
it was sometimes described as Himeros, sexual desire.
But alongside love was the opposite, hatred of the other lot.
In fact, opposition and polarities was central to the Greek way
of making sense of their world.
The best way to define anything was to say what it was not.
So, cold was the opposite of heat,
dark was the opposite of light, peace was the opposite of war.
Athens, the opposite of Sparta.
This black-and-white take on the world brought a clarity of thought
that would spark the intellectual, philosophical and scientific revolutions
of the Greek-speaking world.
But it also gave politics a rancorous edge.
White hats versus black hats.
And if you're not with us, you're against us.
(CROWD CHANTING)
Stirred by powerful and contradictory passions,
the city-states of ancient Greece were a long way
from the rational and well-ordered utopias which they aspired to be.
They were like test tubes packed full of combustible materials
always threatening to blow up.
Blame the ghost of Achilles for the bitter rivalry
that divided the city-states internally and externally.
All Greek males were haunted by the matchless warrior of the Iliad.
Achilles taught them the lesson that he'd learnt from his father.
Always be first and excel the others in all things.
Glory cannot be shared.
The Achilles principle was at the heart of the events
that took place here every four years.
(PEOPLE CHATTERING)
This is Olympia, home of the famous games.
But there was nothing playful about what went on here.
The games were a deadly serious affair.
The first Olympic games took place in 776 BC,
and the first event was a 200-metre sprint.
Over the next 1,000 years more events were added,
but that was the essence of the games.
A mad dash from here to there to discover who was the best.
There was none of this pious nonsense of "Oh, it's the taking part that matters."
The Greeks always played to win.
There was no silver or bronze for the runners-up.
All they could expect were derision and ignominy.
The poet indar describes them slinking back home,
spurned by their mothers and girlfriends,
lurking in byways hoping to avoid their enemies,
stung by their ill-fortune.
Losers.
The temples of Olympia were stuffed full of momentos of athletic prowess
dedicated to the gods.
But they were also hung with military gear,
much of it showing signs of active service.
Evidently, the Greeks saw a link between prowess on the sports field
and on the battlefield.
But in practice, they were very different things.
For a start, there were no team sports in the Olympics.
But when it came to the business of war, teamwork was essential.
This is hoplite gear,
battle kit for a hugely effective infantry fighting technique.
Hoplites formed into densely packed ranks known as a phalanx,
their round shields overlapping,
protecting their neighbour rather than themselves.
Committed to mutual protection, the phalanx advanced as a unit
in carefully choreographed movements.
Each fighter, a small but essential part
of a formidable fighting machine.
When two phalanxes butted up against one another on the battlefield,
there was no room for the heroic man-to-man combat
described in the Iliad.
No one could break ranks, the line had to hold.
This was un-heroic push and shove.
Brutal, collective, anonymous,
a rugby scrum with spear points and edged weapons.
But fighting for your city was an important source of kudos.
And the introduction of hoplite tactics made it possible
for more people to take part than ever before.
Some body armour, a helmet, a spear, and a shield to protect your neighbour.
Bring those to the field of battle and you could expect to get a game.
The hoplite revolution, as its been rightly called,
was far more than just a matter of military tactics.
It brought with it profound political change.
As Aristotle would later observe,
the class that does the fighting wields the power.
And as more and more ordinary citizens stood shield-to-shield
with the well to-do, the whole balance of power within the city-state
must've been called in to question
every time the phalanx advanced into battle.
Given the threat of war from without and civil war from within,
it's not surprising that by the end of the seventh century BC,
the critical question for the city-states was
How should we best be governed?
The Greeks being Greek could never agree on a single answer.
But the ones they did come up with
were test runs for many of the political concepts that we live with today.
Totalitarianism, collectivism, tyranny,
oligarchy, democracy.
All of them were tried out in the test tubes that were the city-states.
The Greeks seemed prepared to consider any system
that might deliver the blessings of good order and self-sufficiency.
Anything that is, except monarchy.
All over Greece, royal dynasties were out.
Kings were a relic of the past or for the barbarians.
But there was one exception.
On the Greek mainland, in the heart of Peloponnese,
was a city-state that didn't just have one king, it had two.
And that was just the beginning,
for Sparta was the strangest test tube in the whole laboratory.
Sparta was a looking-glass world.
The ingredients that you'd expect to find in a city-state
were absent here.
There was no one single political centre.
There were no city walls, no public buildings to speak of,
no written laws, no money,
and a constitution apparently designed by Heath Robinson.
Sparta's two rival dynasties were guaranteed to get in each other's way.
But there was also a public assembly that voted but didn't debate,
and five annually elected overseers
who squabbled over the levers of this ramshackle political machine.
This partly radical, partly authoritarian system
was overseen by a council of elders,
presumably the only ones with enough experience to make sense of it all.
This complex constitution was designed to defy the laws of political gravity.
Its aim was to create and sustain a stable society
based on the absolute equality of all its male citizens,
the Homoioi, the equals, as they were known.
This idea was reinforced by a strict code of behaviour
that suppressed any outward signs of status or wealth,
from clothes to food, to houses.
There was to be no "us" and "them",
destroying the unity of this totalitarian utopia
where everything which wasn't forbidden was, of course, compulsory.
There was a reason for all this extreme social engineering.
The Spartans believed that they had achieved
good order and self-sufficiency here in the fertile Eurotas valley.
And they were prepared to do all that they could to hang on to them
as their neighbours had learnt to their cost.
The rise of Sparta came at the expense of the Messenians,
whose territory lay about 40 miles to the west,
over there, across the other side of the Taygetos Mountains.
Sometime in the eighth century BC,
Spartan hoplites crossed the mountain passes
and waged a long and bitter war against their neighbours.
It took 20 years,
but finally the Spartans defeated the Messenians
and reduced them en mass to the status of helots, feudal slaves.
The radical reordering of Spartan society that followed the war
turned just another city-state into a full-time military training camp
where the needs of the individual were sacrificed
to the good of the collective.
But it was the helots who sacrificed most.
The helots served the Spartans as body servants, shield-bearers,
cooks, potters, breeding machines, and agricultural labourers,
handing over half their harvests to a military elite
whose prime purpose was now their subjugation.
But the Spartans were also tough on themselves.
They killed off any newborn male deemed to be weak or infirm.
The ones that survived were sent at the age of seven
to the Agoge, a brat camp to end all brat camps.
Here they began 13 years of savage training
to prepare them for their vocation as full-time warriors.
With the men away training, fighting,
or just hanging out together in the all male barracks,
the homosexuality was obligatory.
Spartan women enjoyed educational, economic and sexual freedoms
that were unheard of in the ancient world,
indeed, in some parts of the modern world today.
The rest of the Greek world looked on all of this
with a mixture of horror and fascination.
But they accepted the Spartan assertion that their extreme social system
was in fact traditional.
But despite this reputation for conservatism,
Sparta was no more stable than the other city-states.
In its passionate desire to keep things the way they'd always been,
it was constantly having to tinker with its time-honoured traditions.
In times of manpower shortage,
a constant problem for these elitist warriors,
they even had to admit the despised helots into their ranks
to fight and die alongside them.
Like everyone else, Sparta was struggling to come to terms
with a fundamental but unsettling truth
about the stability of all civilisations.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus, would sum it up like this,
To panta rei, everything changes.
And not even the most conservative society
can step into the same river twice.
In Athens, the river of change flowed just as forcefully.
But here there was a greater willingness to go with the flow.
Like most of the other city-states,
Athens had shrugged off its hereditary kings early on,
replacing monarchy with oligarchy,
which is where things began to get interesting.
As the Greek city-states began to emerge from the Dark Ages,
they began to reconnect with the rest of the ancient world
through trade and colonisation.
This new entrepreneurial activity was privately funded,
and the profits remained in private hands.
So in Athens, the rich got richer as poor got poorer.
And many had to sell themselves and their families into slavery
to service mounting debts.
So, towards the end of the seventh century BC,
the Athenian poor were becoming the helots to the Athenian rich.
In Sparta, the destabilising effects of inequality
had been neutralised by a social revolution.
But in Athens, the ruling class reluctantly trod the path
of cautious reform.
This is the Areopagus, or the Rock of Ares.
And from this lofty perch during the sixth century BC,
the council of the Areopagus governed the affairs of Athens.
Its membership was exclusively aristocratic,
and all had previously held the position of archon
or chief magistrate.
So what we have here is the perfect closed circle
of aristocratic power.
Self-selecting and self-serving, and insulated from the voices
of the Agora, or the market place, down below.
But the wealth gap was becoming so great
that it threatened the unity and stability of Athens.
In 594 BC, the Areopagus chose Solon to be chief magistrate.
He was an aristocrat, but not a wealthy one.
In fact, he'd crossed the class lines
and worked as a merchant in order to support himself.
He also had a reputation for fairness,
which was recognised by rich and poor alike.
Solon granted protection from debt slavery
and access to the law courts to the poorest in the community.
Careful reforms, designed to defuse tensions
rather than transform a society.
Cautious as they were, they were like pebbles that proceed an avalanche.
Within a century, Athens would have a new form of government,
as the Oligos, the few,
retreated step by reluctant step
in the face of the power of the demos, the people.
(LOUD CHANTING)
In the stories told about Athens,
reformers like Solon are inevitably the good guys.
Far-sighted visionaries fighting the good fight,
paving the way for the triumph of democracy.
(CHANTING CONTINUES)
But of course, it was more complicated than that.
Solon's reforms were more the product of the fears of the ruling class
than the idealism of a would-be democrat.
lacating the masses headed off the threat of civil war.
The trick for the aristocracy
was to feed the many-headed beast without being swallowed by it.
But in the political jungle of ancient Greece,
there were other animals on the prowl.
The tyrants.
Today in the democratic West, we don't look on them kindly,
but their influence was just as significant as the reformers'
in the story of the Greek city-states.
There was once another Parthenon,
which stood where this Parthenon now stands.
A building every bit is iconic as the one that we're so familiar with.
It was built by Peisistratus,
one of the most intriguing characters in the early days of Classical Athens.
In 546 BC, he became Tyrannos, or tyrant of Athens.
In Greek-speak, that meant a leader who would illegally seize power
and then maintained his position by appealing to the people,
rather than the elites.
Now, Peisistratus was guilty on both counts,
but during his 20-year reign,
Athens would come of age as one of the dominant city-states
of Classical Greece.
He first came to prominence
by allying himself with the hill-dwellers,
the lowest of the low in the pecking order of Athenian politics,
turning them into a formidable power base.
He them faked an attack on himself,
which persuaded the Athenians to vote him a bodyguard.
He used these club-wielding thugs to stage his first coup,
occupying the Acropolis and declaring himself tyrant.
The Athenians eventually dislodged him and threw him out of the city.
But he wasn't finished.
He drove back into the city in a chariot,
accompanied by the tallest woman that he could find,
kitted out as the goddess allas Athena.
She commanded the citizens of her city to take back the prodigal son,
and the stunned Athenians obeyed.
Protection of the fake Athena didn't last for long,
and Peisistratus was exiled for a second time.
He then came here to Laurium, some 40 miles away from Athens,
where silver was both mined and processed.
He spent a decade here, becoming filthy rich,
before, in 546 BC, returning to Athens.
But this time at the head of a mercenary army.
The city was now his.
What followed, wasn't bloodshed or revenge,
but a renaissance,
as Peisistratus embarked on a series of very public grand projects.
He commissioned the first edition of Homer's Iliad,
an event of huge cultural significance for the Greeks and for the world.
And he commissioned the first Parthenon,
the remnants of which can be seen today
in the New Acropolis Museum.
Athens was Athens long before democracy came along to claim it as its own.
This brand of public works and canny populism
helped Peisistratus establish a dynasty.
But his son and successor, Hippias, fell foul of the liberators.
Harmodius and his lover, Aristogeiton, ended tyranny in Athens,
by murdering the tyrant's brother.
This created a political crisis which lead to the ousting of the tyrant
and a return to power of the oligarchs.
Now all too aware of the Athenians' weakness,
the charismatic, unscrupulous chancers,
the oligarchs decided to neutralise the threat of tyranny for good
by finally offering the despised demos
a real stake in the running of their city.
The final churn of the political cycle
that had begun with Solon's cautious reforms,
came with the rise to power of Cleisthenes.
Cleisthenes was one of those canny aristocrats
who realised that his own class were going to have to give up
some of their privileges in order to conserve the good order
of the city-state as a whole.
Cleisthenes laid the foundations
of the first recognisably democratic system in Athens.
Under his reforms, elections to public bodies,
political and judicial, was thrown open to all male citizens, chosen by lot.
Members of the boule, or council,
swore an oath to advise according to the laws, what was best for the people.
Cleisthenes called his reforms isonomia, equality before the law.
Hesiod would surely have approved.
Cleisthenes is also credited with the introduction of these,
ostraka.
It took 6,000 of these pottery sherds with your name scratched on them
for you to be ostracised, exile from Athens for 10 years.
This system was originally designed
to guard against the return of the tyrants,
but predictably it soon became a political weapon
to be used against anyone who became too prominent.
It's also worth noting, that one of the first victims
of this tall poppy syndrome, was the father of democracy himself,
Cleisthenes.
By the beginning of the fifth century BC,
the city-states of Greece
had each evolved their own distinctive set of characteristics.
They were all Greek, but they were Greek in their own peculiar way.
It would take an external threat of apocalyptic proportions
to force them to pull together.
In the centuries since the Dark Ages, during which the Greeks
had been slowly groping their way back towards the light of civilisation,
in the East, mighty empires had come and gone.
The Assyrians fell to an alliance of the Meads and the Babylonians.
And they in turn had been devoured by a new power in the land,
the Persians.
By the fifth century BC, the Persian empire was a monster.
Five million square miles, spanning three continents.
From Afghanistan in the east to Libya in the west.
And on the hem of this mighty empire,
Greek colonists had stitched a dozen or so city-states.
The fate of the Ionian cities, as they were known,
would entangle the Persians and Greeks for centuries to come.
Say what you like about the Greeks,
but they certainly didn't lack self-confidence.
According to Herodotus, the Greek historian,
one Spartan king sent a herald to Cyrus, the great king of Persia,
demanding that he not harm the Greek cities in his domain.
The Persian king's response was surprisingly reasonable.
Who are the Spartans?
The provocations didn't end there.
But it would be a tyrant,
one of those catalysts of the Greek world,
who would spark the first great war of civilisation between East and West.
His name was Aristagoras. He was tyrant of the city of Miletus,
one of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor
that paid tribute to the Persian great king.
Restless and ambitious like all tyrants,
his first move had been to try
and annex the Greek island of Naxos for the great king.
But when this enterprise failed,
he turned on his Persian master
and stirred up rebellion amongst the Ionian cities.
Aristagoras, imperial lackey turned Hellenic freedom fighter,
headed for the Greek mainland,
looking for military support for his plans.
Sparta, as cautious and conservative as ever, turned him down.
But he had more luck in Athens,
the city always willing to give a hearing to a silver-tongued demagogue.
First he appealed to their greed,
telling them about all the easy pickings to be had in the East.
And then he appealed to the Greek thing, wrapping up his opportunism
in the cloak of a Pan-Hellenic crusade.
The Athenians liked what they heard,
and sent 25 ships to support the rebellion.
"These ships", Herodotus wrote,
"were the beginning of all evils for Greeks and barbarians alike."
The bloody sequel could be told in a sequence of resonant names
and noteworthy dates.
Sardes, the Persian capital in Ionia,
burnt by Aristagoras in 498 BC.
Miletus, Aristagoras' city, destroyed by the Persians,
and its population massacared in 494 BC.
The plains of Marathon on the Greek mainland,
where a Persian punitive force
was repulsed by hoplites from Athens and Plateia in 490 BC.
Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans and 1,500 hoplites from Thebes and Thessaly
sacrificed themselves, trying to halt the Persian onslaught in 480 BC.
Athens occupied and burnt in revenge
for Sardes by the Persians that same year.
The Bay of Salamis, where a Greek fleet led by Athens,
defeated the Persians, also that year.
Plateia, where an army of Greeks lead by Sparta,
defeated the Persians in 479 BC,
the last great battle of the Persian wars.
At Marathon, the Thermopylae, and here at the Bay of Salamis,
the Greeks had resisted the greatest empire
that the ancient world had ever seen,
preserving their freedoms against all the odds.
Forced to fight together for once, they'd faced their own Dunkirk,
Blitz and Battle of Britain.
And they had endured.
You might think that this was the perfect time
for the Greek thing to take some kind of permanent political form,
an alliance, a federation or perhaps even a United States of Greece.
But it didn't happen.
The two dominant city-states, Athens and Sparta,
sniffed around each other for a while
before going their separate ways with their allies.
And when they next came together, they'd be at each others' throats
in a destructive war which would ultimately cost both sides
everything that they had.
The truth is that Sparta and Athens had become so different,
that they had difficulty understanding each other.
It was an antagonism built to last.
Even today, Sparta versus Athens
remains shorthand for opposite ends of the political spectrum
that runs from totalitarianism to radical democracy.
Sparta distrusted Athenian democracy,
fearing that it would infect their helot slaves
with the virus of freedom.
It was also unwilling to seize the opportunities and obligations
that came with victory over the Persians.
It was said that after the Persian war, Sparta slept.
Athens on the other hand, was galvanised by the adrenaline rush of victory.
The Ionian awakening, as it was called, embraced art, architecture and theatre,
as well as science and philosophy.
But this first European renaissance was powered by radical democracy.
During the Persian war, as the enemy advanced towards Athens,
every available man of fighting age had hurried down to the port of the Piraeus,
boarded the triremes that were moored there
and rode out to face the Persian fleet in the Bay of Salamis.
You didn't even need a shield to fight in this battle.
All you needed was a rowing cushion
and enough muscle to drive the bronze ram with which your ship was armed,
into the hull of the enemy.
In the democratic stew of the rowing benches,
aristocratic sweat mixed with that of the lowest of the low.
And the war against the Persians became a people's war.
When the war was finished,
the people expected that to be remembered,
and the naval rabble, as their enemies called them,
had become a power to be reckoned with in Athens.
Post-war Athens was a conservative's worst nightmare,
a vocal, powerful self-confident citizenship
under the spell of a charismatic democrat called Pericles,
a radical aristocrat with the tactical skills
and oratorical training
to turn the aspirations of the naval rabble into a political reality.
Pericles completed the transfer of power from an aristocratic warrior elite
with a stake in the land, to a seaborne working class
which had emerged during the Persian war as the city's protector
and which was now its master.
Under Pericles, democracy, people power,
became inseparable from thalassocracy, sea power.
But people power did not come cheap.
With all of the city's male citizens
now being paid to serve on city councils and juries,
and with more money being poured into the shipbuilding programme,
who would foot the bill for all of this democracy?
Fortunately, Athens had armies of slaves to do the dirty work
in the fields and the mines.
But there were others who were also ripe for exploitation.
Her allies.
If you think that your tax bill is too big,
then just take a look at this.
This three-and-a-half metre high inscription records the payments
made over 14 years by members of the Delian League,
a collection of around 170 Greek city-states
who, after the Persian wars,
joined Athens in an alliance of mutual protection.
Originally, the League's treasury, had been on the sacred island of Delos.
But in 451 BC, about 25 years after the defeat of the Persians,
the bank and all of its assets had been relocated to Athens.
That shift revealed the League's true nature,
an alliance of equals had become, in effect, an Athenian empire,
bankrolled by the contributions of its vassal states.
Under the seductive terms of the League,
members could contribute ships and men to fight for the common cause,
or they could contribute money,
and Athens would take care of the fighting for them.
Most League members preferred to pay rather than fight.
And so the Athenians used their money to build more and more triremes,
which made them more and more powerful.
The Athenian ships carried names like Freedom,
but it proved to be freedom for Athens rather than its allies.
The allies soon discovered that the ships that they had paid for
were being used not only to fight against their common enemies,
but also to keep the League together. By force if necessary.
So, within two generations, the mutual defence League
had become an imperial protection racket.
As the power of Athens grew,
the city-states outside the Delian League
looked to Sparta to protect them from its crushing embrace.
Sparta dithered.
But finally, prompted by fear as much as fighting spirit,
it struck.
(CATS HISSING)
The vicious conflict between the Athenians and Spartans
goes under the label of the Peloponnesian War,
which just shows you the value of historical labels.
In the 27 years that the Peloponnesian War raged,
the Spartan heartland, here in the Peloponnese,
was rarely troubled.
Athens was more directly affected.
Each year in the late summer, Spartan hoplites persistently
and doggedly marched north to disrupt the harvest.
But with its full coffers and naval supremacy,
Athens could afford to buy in what it couldn't grow.
No, as usual, it was the poor, bloody allies,
both Athenian and Spartan, who paid the full price
of this decades-long brawl.
And their Athenian/Spartan masters spent almost as much time and energy
bullying them into line
as they did bludgeoning their common foe.
Like hoplite phalanx, the line had to hold.
There is something depressingly futile about all this Greek-on-Greek violence.
But if we judge it harshly,
it's only because the Greek thing allows us to.
Thanks to historians as inquisitive as Herodotus,
and as clear-sighted as Thucydides, both products of the Greek thing,
we can understand and therefore deplore the vanity, viciousness
and short sightedness that drove the ideal of Greekness onto the rocks.
We have Thucydides to thank for a dramatic historical reconstruction
which has framed all subsequent debates about the morality of war
and the reality of politics.
It is known as the Milian Dialogue.
And it concerns events that took place in 415 BC,
roughly the midpoint of the Peloponnesian War,
when the island of Milos, a reluctant ally of Sparta,
was forced by the arrival of an Athenian fleet on its shores
to make a fateful decision.
Either join the Athenians or face destruction.
The Athenian position was stated bluntly by its envoys.
MAN: The question of justice only comes when both sides
feel under equal pressure.
In reality, the stronger take what they can,
and the weak concede what they must.
WOMAN: But will you not allow us to remain neutral
and be friends instead of enemies? What would you lose from that?
MAN: Your enmity is less dangerous to us than your friendship.
Your hate is an argument of our power,
your friendship of our weakness.
MILES: We've been here before.
Three hundred years earlier, the poet Hesiod had described the nightingale
crying out in the talons of the hawk.
"Why do you cry out?" asks the hawk.
One far stronger than you holds you fast
and you must go wherever I take you.
For all the subtle niceties of the debate,
that in effect was how the Athenian hawk regarded the Milian nightingale.
In the end, Milos defied Athens.
And the Athenians made good on their menaces.
They took the island, killed the men, deported the women and children
and repopulated it with their own people.
Some dialogue.
But it wasn't just the tyranny at the heart of Athenian democracy
that was exposed by this cruel war.
The ideals of Sparta, too, were called into question as never before.
Their merciless exploitation of the helots continued unabated,
even as they increasingly called on these semi-slaves to make up
for their dwindling manpower.
But ruthless suppression of the helots
could not prevent threats that came from within the ranks of the equals.
As the war dragged on, the egalitarian warrior code
that had done so much to create cohesion in Spartan society,
disintegrated.
One of the few glittering success stories
of Sparta's dogged and undistinguished war
was Gylippus, a general who was dispatched to Sicily,
to help the city of Syracuse resist a massive Athenian invasion.
This barefooted warrior in a red cloak
single-handedly helped stiffen the resolve of Syracusians.
And then led them on the offensive
before eventually inflicting a terrible defeat upon the Athenians.
So far, so Spartan. But just a few years later,
this same Gylippus was exposed as an embezzler.
Silver that had been sent by the Persian king
to aide the Spartan war effort
was found hidden in the thatched roof of his house.
What this squalid story suggests
is that the further Spartan warriors went from home,
and the more they saw of the world
beyond the narrow horizons of the Eurotas valley,
the less satisfied they were with the austere utopia they had created there.
If the Athenians had been corrupted by power,
the Spartans lost their innocence by exposure to a wider world
that they had struggled for so long to keep at bay.
The war without end ended here,
at the mouth of the Goat River on the Dardanelles.
It was the Spartan general, Lysander, who dealt the final blow
with a fleet bought and paid for by Persian silver.
Lysander trapped and destroyed the Athenian fleet on the beach here,
seizing control of this vital waterway and severing the link between Athens
and its corn supplies from the Black Sea.
With no fleet to defend it, and no corn to feed it,
Athens was defenceless and the city surrendered in 404 BC.
Just under 80 years before, it had been the barbarian army of Persia
that took the city.
Now, it was an army of Greeks.
The city walls were torn down
and an oligarchic regime, known as the Thirty Tyrants was installed,
which set about slaughtering its democratic enemies.
This area of Western Turkey
played a major role in the history of ancient Greece.
Just south-west of here was the city of Troy,
where according to ancient legend at least,
the Greek army fought a long and bitter war
against a foreign power
right at the very beginning of Greek history.
Well, the Peloponnesian War, which ended here,
lasted longer than the Trojan War.
It pitted Greek against Greek in a merciless conflict
which, in the end, compromised the ideals of everybody that took part.
And it finished with a foreign ruler. A Persian barbarian, no less,
pulling the strings whilst Greek slaughtered Greek
in the name of democracy, freedom and justice.
A century later, the philosopher Aristotle wrote,
If only the Greeks could achieve a single politeia or constitution,
then they would rule the whole world.
It was and would remain the biggest, "if only", of ancient Greece.
In the end, it would take a dynasty of outsiders to unite the fractious Greeks.
Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander,
known to history as, "the Great".
Alexander would carry the Greek thing forward
on the spear points of his Macedonian Army.
And the ancient world would never be the same again.