The official website for BBC History Magazine
The Spartans: Everything You Wanted to Know
Paul Cartledge answers listener questions on the the ancient Greek city-state famed for its martial prowess
How remarkable was the Spartans' stalwart resistance against the Persians at Thermopylae? Was their military training as tough as historians would have us believe? And just how austere were they? The people of the ancient Greek city-state have left an indelible mark on history, and for today's Everything You Wanted to Know episode, Spencer Mizen sat down with the ancient historian Paul Cartledge to answer your questions on their culture, politics and military endeavours. View Green Video on the source website
The history of Athens: exploring the birthplace of democracy and philosophy
History's greatest cities podcast series
The city that’s now the capital of modern Greece has been an influential hub of civilisation and culture for more than two and a half millennia. Paul Cartledge guides us on a concise journey through its turbulent and triumphant past
Legend tells of a line of seven kings who if real would have ruled Athens from around 1500 BC to 1200 BC, the first of whom was Cecrops I. During his reign, the Olympian gods Athena and Poseidon vied to become the new city’s deity; having gifted its people the olive tree, Athena prevailed – and the city was named after her. So runs one foundational myth. Ancient Athens: what do we know? Evidence has been found of habitation as far back as about 9000 BC. And in the late Neolithic, around 4000 BC, people were living in caves on the north side of the Acropolis. The National Archaeological Museum displays wonderful examples of painted pottery from this period, as well as artefacts from the next era of Athens’ history. Around the time of the legendary Cecrops I – the late Bronze Age, from around 1500 BC – the region of Attica around Athens, and indeed much of mainland Greece and Crete, was inhabited by a civilisation now known as Mycenaean. These were the people (mainly from the Peloponnese, but also Thessaly and Boeotia and Crete as well as Athens) who, according to Homer in his Iliad, attacked Troy under the great King Agamemnon. Archaeological evidence shows that Athens was one of the great centres of late Bronze Age Mycenaean Greek civilisation and settlement. Such evidence includes the huge stones used to build walls on the Acropolis – limestone chunks so big that later Greeks thought they could only have been hefted by the one-eyed giants called Cyclopes. Also in this period, from about 1300 BC, Athenians began to be buried in the first cemetery, known as the Kerameikos or “potters’ quarter”, because it was sited where craftsman potters worked. Athens’ ‘dark age’ Around 1200 BC, major settlements across Greece suffered severe attacks and conflagrations – and it was in some of those fierce fires that clay tablets bearing the earliest-known Greek writing were inadvertently baked hard and preserved. These administrative tablets are inscribed with a syllabic script known as Linear B, revealing the nature of a Middle-Eastern kind of bureaucratic civilisation, based around palaces ruled by kings. We don’t know exactly what happened to spark this period of destruction, but it seems to have resulted in a kind of dark age, interspersed with shafts of light, lasting about four centuries. The population of Athens plummeted by perhaps 90 per cent between the 13th and 11th centuries BC, and the various centres of population became disconnected, with communications between them severed. Yet it was also during that period that the Homeric epics, which were orally transmitted, were developed by a series of illiterate poets during the 11th to eighth centuries. Greece experienced a renaissance from the later ninth century, with a gradual reopening of contact between different parts of the mainland, then between Greece and the Middle East. A key sign of this was the development of the ancient Greek alphabet which, unlike the Linear B syllabary, was a fully phonetic alphabetic script, based on signs borrowed from Phoenicia in what’s now Lebanon. Athens the ‘city-state’ From about the eighth century BC, an institution developed called the polis, sometimes translated as “city-state”. However, “citizen state” might be more accurate: never did the Greeks say “Athens did this”; rather, they said “the Athenians” – and by Athenians they meant the adult male citizens. By the seventh century, Athens was run by a narrow clique of what the Greeks called the eupatridae, literally “sons of good fathers”. Their council was known as the Areopagus, because it met on the pagos (hill) of the god of war, Ares. You can climb slippery steps west of the Acropolis to visit the bare, rocky mound where those ancient assemblies were held. Athens, from aristocracy to democracy By the start of the sixth century BC, though, Athens was in a bad state, both economically and politically. In 594 BC, the eupatrids appointed one of their number as archon, or “leader”, to repair the situation. That man, Solon, instituted a wide-ranging set of reforms addressing economic, political, legal, moral and social issues. That wasn’t the end of Athens’ troubles, but it seeded ideas that came to fruition towards the end of the sixth century. After the overthrow of the tyrant Hippias, another great statesman – the lawgiver Cleisthenes – introduced in 508 BC the framework of what we now called democracy, from the ancient Greek demos (the people) and kratos (power). Following Cleisthenes’ reforms, an area just to the north-west of the Acropolis, now known as the Ancient Agora, came to be the focus of both political assembly and commerce. You can still wander among remains of political, religious, social and commercial structures here. To the south of the Ancient Agora rises the Pnyx Hill, another important site where democracy was enacted in regular open-air assemblies. Athens and the Persian Empire As Athens established this more equitable political system, a threat was emerging to the east: the Achaemenid empire, founded by Cyrus the Great in Persia (now Iran) in the mid-sixth century. The empire rapidly expanded, stretching east as far as what’s now Afghanistan and Pakistan, south into Egypt, and through Anatolia to its western shore, which had been settled by Greeks. When those subjugated Asiatic Greeks rose up in 499 BC, the Athenians supported the revolt – which was finally crushed at sea off what’s now western Turkey, and which prompted Persian expeditions to mainland Greece. After the Athenians and their allies defeated Persian forces at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC, the invaders returned with a much bigger army under Xerxes I. His forces devastated Athens in 480–479 BC, destroying major public buildings, especially religious buildings – including temples on the Acropolis and in the Agora – as well as private houses, which they put to the torch. By the time Persia was decisively defeated, in 449 BC, Athenian coffers had been refilled and a major rebuilding programme was launched in the city under its great leader, Pericles. That included rebuilding the three big temples to Athena on the Acropolis: the Temple of Athena Polias (of the City), the Parthenon, and the Temple of Athena Nike (Victory). This period also witnessed an astonishing cultural flourishing, with the city’s burgeoning wealth fuelling endeavours such as theatre and philosophy. Great dramatists such as Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes created enduring works. And Athens attracted minds from elsewhere, including the early philosophers Protagoras and Democritus, joining local Socrates. His student Plato founded the Academy, the remains of which you can still see today, along with sparse remnants of his pupil Aristotle’s Lyceum. Athens’ place in the wider world Perhaps 1,000 Greek cities were scattered around the Mediterranean and Black Sea at this time – and there was much rivalry, not least between Athenians and Spartans, who dominated the Peloponnese to the south. Sparta proved victorious in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), only to be overtaken in the following decades by Thebes, in central Greece. Then the Macedonians arrived from the north, first under Phillip II and then his son, Alexander III, later Alexander the Great. That marked another sea-change, beginning when Alexander spread Greek civilisation and ideas across his newly conquered lands – essentially, much the same territory that had been ruled by the Persians he defeated, from Greece to Pakistan and Egypt. Was Athens known to the Romans? Greek influence had also spread west, so Republican Rome (a name that, incidentally, means “strength” in Greek) was well aware of the civilisation across the Adriatic. From the later third century BC, the Romans pushed east until, with victory at the battle of Corinth in 146 BC, they took the Greek peninsula. Subsequently, Roman territory stretched right around the Mediterranean and beyond – including to Britain. Athens felt this change profoundly, and was largely transformed under two Roman emperors. The first, Augustus (reigned 27 BC to AD 14) – known in Greek as Sebastos – was less popular in Greece, largely because he defeated Mark Antony and the last Macedonian Greek ruler of Egypt, Cleopatra. A notable relic of his rule is the Pedestal of Agrippa, dedicated to Augustus’ son-in-law, which still stands on the Acropolis. The second was Hadrian, who reigned from AD 117 to 138, and who was a great philhellene – a lover of Greek culture. Indeed, he liked to be depicted as a Greek philosopher with a full beard like Socrates. He left his mark in the form of the great Arch of Hadrian, linking his new city with the ancient centre. It stands near the Temple of Olympian Zeus – the largest in Greece – begun in the sixth century BC but only completed under Hadrian in AD 131. You can also see the Roman Agora, Roman baths, a library founded by Hadrian, and a great theatre, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built into the Acropolis, where open-air concerts are still staged. When the Roman empire split in the fourth century, Athens naturally fell within the territory of the eastern part ruled in the fourth century by Constantine, which became the Christian Byzantine empire. Athens and the Byzantine empire For some thousand years, from the fifth century AD to the 15th century, Athens was quite insignificant, and fell prey to attack by a succession of invaders. In the 13th century, it was crusaders from France; in the 14th century, Catalans; later that century and the next, it was Florentines. Orthodox Catholic Christianity was the official religion during this time, and many Byzantine churches were built. Most were destroyed – some as recently as the 1930s – but one important monument survives, the Church of the Holy Apostles in the Ancient Agora. It dates from the 10th century and gives a sense of what Byzantine Athens might have looked like. Athens and the Ottoman empire That era ended abruptly with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, followed by Athens in 1456. The whole of Greece had become part of the Ottoman empire, and remained so for nearly four centuries. Their conqueror, Ottoman sultan Mehmet II, spoke Greek and purportedly revered Homer and other ancient Greek culture. During Ottoman rule, the Plaka district on the north-east slopes of the Acropolis was considered the Turkish quarter. Today you can find a few visible remains of that period here and elsewhere in Athens, in the form of the 17th-century Fethiye Mosque and nearby hamam (Turkish baths) by the Roman Agora. Athens’ place in modern Greece In 1821, Greeks launched a revolt against Ottoman rule, sparking a war of independence that led to the foundation of the modern Greek state in 1832. Yet in some ways it wasn’t true independence. Western powers installed a Bavarian prince, Otto, who ruled as Othon, establishing a German dynasty of Greek kings. Then, in 1863, a Danish dynasty took over – the line that led to the future Prince Philip, and which ruled (apart from an 11-year hiatus from 1924) till the monarchy was abolished in 1973. When Athens was named capital of the new Greek state in 1834, mainly for symbolic reasons, it was really just a village. So it was redeveloped, with the construction of great neoclassical buildings along Vasilissis Sofias Avenue and Panepistemiou Street (University Street). Into the 20th century, Greece, and Athens, remained preoccupied with Turkey. After the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918, Greece made the fateful decision to invade western Anatolia – at the cost of vast numbers of lives. Following defeat in the Greco-Turkish War in 1922, Athens received huge numbers of Greek-speaking exiles from Turkey. Today you can see the results in the names of districts of Athens: for example, Nea Smyrni, where people from that city (now Izmir) settled, and Nea Ionia, housing exiles from that wider region of western Anatolia. Nazi occupation during the Second World War was followed by a bitter civil war; even after peace returned, political faultlines endured and enabled a right-wing military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. Since then, Athens has developed into a big, modern city, boosted by moments such as the 2004 Summer Olympics. But visitors can still immerse themselves in the relics of more than two and a half millennia of turbulent and influential history. Professor Paul Cartledge was talking to Paul Bloomfield, travel journalist and host of our podcast series History's Greatest Cities. Listen to the companion podcast on Athens or explore the entire series
In this series exploring the sights and stories of Europe’s most historic cities, Paul Cartledge delves back through thousands of years to unearth the glories and trials of the Greek capital
In episode eight of this new series exploring the sights and stories of Europe’s most beautiful, intriguing and historic cities, travel journalist Paul Bloomfield is joined by historian and author Professor Paul Cartledge for a trip to Athens. Delving back through thousands of years of often tumultuous history they visit monuments dating back to before the days of the world's original democracy, as well as reminders of the later Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman eras. Along the way, Paul introduces some of the fascinating personalities that shaped Athens and the world around it, and offers some top advice for history-loving explorers. Explore the series so far – Listen to all episodes of History's Greatest Cities
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
From Achilles and Agamemnon to the Trojan horse, Paul Cartledge answers listener questions on the ancient city that supposedly fought an epic war with the Greeks
The story of the Trojan War – featuring the daring Achilles, beautiful Helen and one very deceptive horse – is a classic of western literature. But did this famous war ever really happen? And was Troy even a real place? On today’s ‘Everything you wanted to know’ episode, Professor Paul Cartledge answers listener questions on these ancient mysteries. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, he discusses the discovery of archaeological remains believed to be Troy, and why Homer’s Iliad may not be the most reliable historical source.
The ancient Greek alphabet: when was it invented, how many letters are there and how do you pronounce them?
From college fraternities and the fields of maths and science through to the Bible, ancient Greek letters appear to be everywhere. Professor Paul Cartledge, A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture emeritus at the University of Cambridge, gives us a primer on the history of the ancient Greek alphabet – and why it really should be alphabets…
Ancient Greek letters appear to be everywhere. Most of us have probably heard of the Nile delta, even if we don’t automatically associate that geographical designation with the shape of the fourth letter of the ancient Greek (and modern Greek, as it happens) alphabet. Any film set in an American college is almost certain to feature ‘frat boys’ and ‘sorority sisters’ (though some fraternities now welcome girls), aka ‘Greeks’, whose fraternities and sororities are named after letters of the ancient Greek alphabet. Read more | Three thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks turned an even older civilisation into a monster These ancient Greek letters appear in other fields too, including mathematics (most famously perhaps, pi) and astronomy (where Greek letters are used to designate the brightest stars in a constellation). Sadly, we’re probably all nowadays familiar with the use of Greek letters to denote variants of the coronavirus, the latest of which is the still rather mysterious strand named omicron. Did the ancient Greeks invent the alphabet? The ancient Greeks didn’t invent the alphabet, though they may be credited with inventing an alphabet – a new form of alphabetic writing, one that added signs for vowels to signs for consonants. Thereby their alphabet is the world’s first fully phonetic alphabetic script, which emerged sometime around 800 BC. Or rather, their alphabets, plural: for there were several, local or regional versions of the ancient Greek alphabet, with differing numbers of letters ranging from 24 to 28. Usually, the ancient Greeks were less than keen to credit non-Greeks – ‘barbarians’ as they sometimes derogatorily called them – with anything positive. But in this exceptional case they acknowledged the immediate source of their borrowing: for they called their alphabets ‘Phoenician letters’ after the ancient people that then occupied what is today Lebanon, and parts of Syria and Israel. Read more | Who’s who in ancient Greece? Meet 14 influential ancient Greeks The very names of the first two Greek letters are a bit of a clue to alien origins: in Greek alpha and beta mean nothing, but that’s because they are in fact Hellenised versions of Semitic words – aleph ‘ox-head’ and beth ‘house’ – which were so called because schematically that’s what those two letters look like in the original, Semitic alphabets. However, that wasn’t the only difference between Phoenician and Greek alphabets. Precisely because the Greeks’ source script, Phoenician, represented a Semitic language, like all Semitic scripts it did without signs for vowels. Greek on the other hand was an Indo-European language and had sounds which the Phoenicians didn’t, and vice versa for Phoenician. So the real genius of the Greek invention (or re-invention) of an alphabetic script was that it not only copied roughly the Phoenician signs for sounds that the Greeks themselves used, but also brilliantly borrowed Phoenician signs for the Phoenicians’ non-Greek sounds and applied them to write Greek vowel sounds: alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron, omega, upsilon. How many letters were there in the ancient Greek alphabet? Though there were several local variations of the alphabet in classical Greece, it was the Ionic alphabet that was eventually adopted by Athens and became dominant across the Greek-speaking world. This ancient Greek alphabet has 24 letters. What are the letters of the ancient Greek alphabet and what order are they in? The ancient Greek alphabet we are familiar with begins with alpha and ends with omega – something referenced in the Bible. The chart below includes uppercase and lowercase variations of each letter, alongside its anglicised equivalent. There are two lowercase forms for sigma, which is written as σ unless it is at the end of a word – in which case it appears as ς. Also, a letter called digamma – roughly a ‘w’ sound – appeared in early versions of the Doric alphabet but was later dropped. Greek Alphabet chart – all 24 letters How should we pronounce ancient Greek letters? We know of course how modern Greek is pronounced, but – notoriously – we can’t actually say for certain how any version of ancient Greek was pronounced, partly because there’s a dispute over what the accent markings of an ancient Greek text signified. Was it pitch? Or was it stress or emphasis? Did the one succeed the other, and if so when? The precise answers elude us. Not quite as notoriously, scholars of ancient Greek differ amongst themselves as to how we should pronounce ancient Greek. Take, for instance, the letter name omicron: was it o-mike-ron? Or, as seems to have become the announcer’s norm, o-mick-ron? The word itself means ‘little o’ (in contrast to omega – ‘big O’), so the first ‘o’ of omicron is definitely a short syllable, as in ‘hot’. Contrary to today’s norm, it used to be taught to pronounce ancient Greek as if the (male) Greeks themselves had been British gentlemen, so omicron becomes ‘o-mike-ron’, with the emphasis/stress on the ‘mike’ syllable. Read more | How do you read and write Roman numerals? What did the ancient Greek alphabet mean for those in classical Greece? One of the very earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions to survive speaks worlds. It consists of three lines of verse scratched on a relatively humble clay pot made in Asia Minor (now western Turkey) but found in a grave on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. The regional form of the lettering employed is associated with the island of Euboia (modern Evvia) near Athens, which is where the emigrant Greek settlers of Ischia (ancient Pithekoussai) had originally come from, looking for a better life in southern Italy. What’s more, the three-line message seems to be making a rather good joke. In the Iliad, the epic poem about the Trojan War ascribed to Homer, the aged Greek king Nestor is said to have possessed a large and expensive, precious-metal drinking goblet. Read more | Why do we say Achilles' Heel? The writer of the Ischia graffito acknowledges the merit of Nestor’s goblet – but caps that by adding humorously as well as amorously that anyone who drinks (wine) from his (relatively humble, clay) cup will immediately be seized with irresistible sexual desire. There are scholars who believe that one of the greatest impulses behind the spread of alphabetic literacy in the Greek world of the eighth and seventh centuries BC was the felt need to write down and so make permanent versions both of the Iliad and of Homer’s other epic masterpiece, the Odyssey. Whether or not that hypothesis is correct, the Greeks’ new alphabets were certainly revolutionary, being in a cultural sense democratic. A child of five could now be fully literate – whereas for writing the earliest, abandoned form of Greek script, the so-called Linear B, only professional scribes could master and use the 200 or so signs and ideograms required. How closely is ancient Greek related to modern Greek and other languages? The alphabetic Greek language represents, besides the (non-alphabetic) Chinese, the oldest continuous written literary tradition in the world. Greek as a language has of course evolved and mutated in the hundreds of years since the eighth century BC, but a modern Greek speaker confronted with a printed ancient text of Homer would have no difficulty reading it. It is within ancient Greek that we find the ultimate origin of our own English alphabet. Ancient Greek formed the root Etruscan alphabet and the Latin alphabet of the Romans, and was thence via the European Middle Ages and Renaissance passed down to us. It was also during the Middle Ages that the ancient Greek alphabet formed the basis for Cyrillic, just as the ‘Phoenician letters’ had done so before. More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives Quiz | How much do you know about ancient Greece? Michael Wood on the future of the Parthenon Sculptures Naked statues, naughty gods & bad wine Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers
Bucephalus: why is Alexander the Great's horse famous?
Alexander the Great was famous for many things – including his bond with his horse Bucephalus. Professor Paul Cartledge explains exactly how the Macedonian empire builder came to cherish his steed
Bucephalus (c355-326 BC) is among the most famous horses in history, and it was said that this he could not be tamed. The young Alexander the Great, of course, tamed him – and went on to ride his beloved equine companion for many years and into many battles. Bucephalus finally died after the battle of the Hydaspes in what is now Pakistan. Here, Paul Cartledege, AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, explains the bond between Alexander and his steed... One day Philoneicus of Thessaly brought Philip a horse named Bucephalas, offering him for sale. They went down to the plain to look at him and found him to be apparently unmanageable. He allowed no one to mount him, refused to obey the commands of Philip’s grooms, and reared up against anyone who approached him. Philip was angry at being offered an unbroken and vicious animal and told Philoneicus to take him away. The young Alexander the Great exclaimed “What a horse they are losing! And just because they lack the knowledge or courage to handle him”. Philip at first kept silent, but, impressed by the distress of Alexander’s repeated exclamations, he asked him: “Do you think you know more than your elders? Do you criticise them because you believe you can manage horses better?” “Yes”, replied Alexander. “At least I can manage this one better”. “And if you cannot”, said his father, “what price are you prepared to pay for your insolence?” “The price of the horse”, replied the boy. How did Alexander the Great die? Also, where is Alexander the Great buried, and has his tomb actually been found? Professor Paul Cartledge gives his view… Amid general laughter father and son settled the terms of the bet, and Alexander ran over to Bucephalas, grasped his reins and turned him towards the sun. For he had noticed that the horse was panicked by the sight of his own shadow ... When he saw that the horse was over his fears and eager for a gallop, Alexander urged him forward, controlling him with his commanding voice and with a touch of his heels ... Philip wept for joy, kissed Alexander and said: “My son, Macedonia is too small for you – you’d better find a kingdom your own size”. This content first appeared in BBC History Magazine
How to build a democracy (Athenian-style)
Two-and-a-half millennia ago, the citizens of Athens pioneered a form of government that inspired many of today’s political systems. Paul Cartledge offers eight tips for those wishing to emulate one of history’s purest forms of people-power
Select your site The mighty Acropolis provided the firmest of foundations for Athenian people-power “Democracy,” as Winston Churchill famously observed, “is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” And if any city can lay claim to being the cradle of this ‘least imperfect’ method of ordering society, then it is surely Athens. The Greek capital is, after all, where a form of democracy worthy of the name was first invented, where it was taken furthest, and where it lasted longest in the ancient world. And that democracy was very much the product of Athens’ location. Two-and-a-half millennia ago, Athens was the largest town in a region known as Attica, a pocket of south-east Greece that was roughly the size of modern-day Luxembourg. Attica was blessed with two extraordinary natural resources: silver-bearing lead deposits (a “treasure of the earth”, as the playwright Aeschylus called them) and good harbours. How democratic was ancient Greek democracy, really? But towering over all those – literally as well as metaphorically – was the sacred Acropolis or ‘High-City’, bang dead centre in the main town of Athens. If you’re going to build a democracy, build it on and around such a mighty rock. The needs of defence as well as sanctity and religious worship were well served at this 150-metre-high citadel. Alongside, and within eyeshot, was the Pnyx Hill. This was where the democratic Assembly met, in the open air, in almost all weathers (rain and snow did stop play), and where statesmen such as Pericles and Demosthenes addressed the masses. But the Pnyx was not the Athenians’ original place of civic assembly: that was the Agora at the foot of the Acropolis, a place of private commerce and public politics. Here was where the offices of all the city’s main officials were located, but also where you could buy perfume – or a slave. And, finally, into the slopes of the Acropolis was built the Theatre of Dionysus, a political as well as a religious and dramatic space. Choose your people To survive, Athenian democracy had to walk a tightrope between the elite and the masses ‘Democracy’ is a loan word, borrowed from ancient Greek demokratia. This is a portmanteau term, composed of two parts: demos and kratos. Kratos is unambiguous: meaning ‘power’. But the meaning of demos is less certain. On the one hand, it means ‘the people’, as in all the people who went to make up the polis or citizen-state of the Athenians. On the other hand, demos could also be used to mean ‘masses’, the poor majority of the Athenian citizen body. If you were not a democrat, you perhaps didn’t mind the first meaning of demos. But the chances are you hated the second – to you, that could mean mob rule. In Athens, all free men over the age of 18 were entitled to vote – that included rich and poor. At its maximum, the Athenian citizen body may have numbered as many as 50,000–60,000, but 30,000 was more usual. To us that’s minuscule, but most citizen-bodies in the ancient Greek world numbered between 500 and 2,000 people, making Athens a giant outlier. Listen | Paul Cartledge discusses ancient Greek democracy, Alexander the Great, and what life was like for slaves The great political analyst Aristotle opined that democracy was always, by definition, the rule of the poor, whereas oligarchy was essentially the rule of the rich. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, said that a city governed by an oligarchy was really two cities: the city of the rich set in dead opposition to the city of the poor. (By the way, neither Aristotle nor Plato was a democrat.) For the most part, the Athenians cleverly avoided outright class warfare in their democracy. But the system wasn’t fail-safe: democracy was overthrown twice in periods of extreme tension caused by failure in war. Be lucky in your founder In Cleisthenes, Athens had a statesman with the foresight and courage to institute a radical new political system The Athenians were greedy in this respect: they claimed not one, but three founders, each contributing something different, each foresighted and far-sighted. One of them, Theseus, was mythical: to him Athenians attributed the political unification of Attica under Athens as capital. The second founder, the lawyer, statesman and poet Solon (c630–c560 BC), was a real human being – one who dominated Athenian politics in the early sixth century (see step 4). But only the third, Cleisthenes (c570–c508 BC), can be called the true founder of the first democracy. Cleisthenes was born an aristocrat, and his maternal grandfather was a foreign tyrant, but he threw in his lot with far-reaching, democratic political reform. His path to power was far from smooth – he twice went into exile, the second time after being forced out of Athens by the Spartan king Cleomenes. But he soon returned at the invitation of the people and, in c508 BC, implemented a reform package that would introduce democracy to the city-state. What was pederasty in ancient Greece? Cleisthenes’ reforms saw Athens’ political map being redrawn, with the deme – village, parish, ward, of which there were about 140 scattered through Attica – at its centre. It was by being registered in your local deme at the age of 18 that you became an Athenian citizen in the first place. (Women were also citizens, but politically disempowered, as were minors, foreigners and slaves.) By a complex system of cross-regional division and addition, Athenians found themselves grouped into 10 ‘tribes’. These new tribal groupings were the basis of the Council of 500, which consisted of 50 men from each of the 10 tribes, who served for one year. The Council could issue decrees on its own but its main function was to prepare the agenda for meetings of the Assembly (for more on this, see step 6). Cleisthenes rather strangely disappears from the scene straightaway; perhaps he died. But the fruits of his reforms were soon borne, in both political and cultural change at home, and military success abroad. Seize your moment The threat of invasion supercharged Cleisthenes' democratic reforms For Cleisthenes, timing was everything. And that time arrived in the late sixth century BC, when long-term background conditions and more immediate events coalesced fruitfully. The favourable background conditions were provided by a raft of economic and social reforms pushed through by Solon at the start of the century. These made wealth rather than birth the principal foundation of political entitlement. They also improved the lot of many of Attica’s poorest people and, in doing so, headed off the threat of revolution. Following Solon, the tyrant Peisistratus and his son Hippias gave Athens political stability and economic prosperity over a 35-year period, partly by seeing that Solon’s reforms were put into effect. But precisely because they ruled as tyrants, Peisistratus and Hippias also outlived their utility and acceptability. When Athens became a democracy, thanks to the reforms sponsored by Cleisthenes, its ideological glue was a hostility to one-man, autocratic rule, and a privileging of freedom and equality for citizens. But it was more immediate threats to Athenian security that gave Cleisthenes the red alert his democratic programme needed. The first threat came from the anti-democratic city-state of Sparta, which intervened twice in Athens’ internal affairs: once to overthrow Hippias, the second time to try to install a different, pro-Spartan tyrant. A further contributing factor was the rising menace of the Persian empire to the east. When Hippias was forced into exile, where did he turn to try to secure his restoration? Persia, the ultimate autocracy. Persia and Sparta were thus bogeymen for the democratic Athenians, and so they remained for many years to come. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: what were they, and what happened to them? Pick your battles Democracy brought the best out of Athens' warriors – as Persia discovered to its cost The fledging democracy’s very existence was threatened first by Sparta, then by its immediate Greek neighbours to the west (the Boeotians) and the east (the Euboeans). Those were easily dealt with. But Persia soon posed an even greater existential challenge. Admittedly, this was partly of the Athenians’ own making. Early in the 490s, Athens had sent help to the Greeks and non-Greeks of the Asiatic mainland who had risen in revolt against their Persian overlords. That revolt was crushed in 494, and four years later Athens had to face an invasion by sea launched by King Darius I of Persia. The resulting battle of Marathon was a huge victory for the Athenians, ideologically, as well as militarily. As the historian Herodotus put it, it was the Athenians’ devotion to political equality that had enabled them to punch militarily above their weight – by bringing the most able statesmen and generals to the fore. The Athenians made a huge song-and-dance of their Marathon result. But even that was to be overshadowed by another victory, at sea this time, 10 years later. To punish the Athenians, and turn mainland Greece into a European province of the Persian empire, Darius’s son and successor, Xerxes, launched a massive amphibious expedition in 480 BC. Athens, including its Acropolis citadel, was laid waste twice. But a crushing Greek victory in the naval battle off the islet of Salamis in September 480 more than made up for that, forcing Xerxes to withdraw to Asia with much of his army. Moreover, the triumph at Salamis gave extra political power to the elbows of the Athenian masses. These were the poor citizens who had rowed the trireme warships to victory over the Persian fleet. Now the masses could demand – and receive – extra democratic powers (see step 8). Listen | Paul Cartledge heads back to Ancient Greece to explore the roots of mass participation in politics Let the citizens speak Athenians could vote on anything from the price of grain to the war on tyranny The wheels of Athenian democracy often started turning as soon as the sun rose. The day might start with a summons by a herald to a meeting of the Assembly on Pnyx Hill. All male citizens who wished to attend made sure they got there early enough to receive their modest allowance, compensating them for time away from their workplaces. Proceedings would begin with a ritual purification of the space, involving the sacrifice of piglets and the scattering of their blood. Then the herald would start by inviting “anyone who wished to speak” on Item 1 of the prearranged Agenda to come up on to the bema (podium) and address what could be as many as 6,000 citizens seated before him. At the conclusion of the speeches, a vote would be registered by the raising of right hands. If the majority was clear, that was that. If not, then votes would be counted individually. This was direct, in-your-face democracy. Such meetings were held as frequently as every 10 or so days, and routinely addressed matters such as religion, defence and the grain supply. An Assembly might also be called in response to more urgent developments, such as a debate over a law against tyranny, or how best to resist the threat of a Persian invasion. There was no ‘second chamber’ and no ‘supreme court’, but issues voted on in the Assembly might be reopened in the courts before a popular jury of hundreds. Sometimes the trial of an individual – Socrates, for example, on charges of impiety – might involve matters of great social, political and moral concern. As Cleisthenes exemplifies, putting yourself forward as a policymaking politician could be an enormously rewarding undertaking. However after his trial, Socrates, who’d repeatedly criticised his fellow Athenians, was put to death – proof that entering Athens’ political arena was far from a risk-free enterprise. Allow artists to flourish Political freedom breathed new life into Athenian theatre and architecture Athenian democracy was a matter not only of formal political institutions but also of culture, including what we today call high culture. Tragic theatre and public architecture both flourished, and in peculiarly democratic forms. Within 75 years or so of democracy’s foundation, Aeschylus had produced his Persians (a celebration of democracy as well as of the Salamis victory) and Oresteia trilogy; Sophocles had written his Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus; and Euripides his Medea. All challenged the Athenian audiences to think deeply about the ideological as well as pragmatic basis of their democratic political institutions. In the 440s and 430s the Athenians also constructed the architectural miracle that is the Parthenon. Athens was a city of gods and goddesses as well as humans, and the divine patroness was indomitably warlike, pro-arts Athena. The Parthenon honoured her as an untamed virgin, one who was widely portrayed in a breastplate and helmet, carrying a spear. As such, she made for a suitable role model for citizen men struggling on two fronts against Sparta and Persia. The Parthenon was the St Paul’s Cathedral of an empire that the Athenians had, by now, constructed as a bulwark against Persian expansion. This multi-state Aegean alliance was a paltry affair by Persian standards, but it kept many Greek cities free, and offered a framework for widespread advances in democratic self-government. Don’t be afraid of reform Athens' democracy moved in a progressive direction, as autocracies prepared to pounce Following the trauma of the Graeco-Persian Wars of 480–479, it was time for further internal reform, in a progressive, democratising direction. The men of the hour were Ephialtes and his junior adjutant, Pericles. Their key move was to strip any old, originally aristocratic institutions of their last vestiges of power and transfer that to the masses – to the people in both senses of demos. This was done by establishing people’s jury courts, and staffing them with jurors selected by the democratic process of the random lottery. Such jurors were also judges, not only of criminality but of the law too, and they were paid from public funds to perform this public duty. This system flourished until the Atheno-Peloponnesian War of 431–404, when Athens was defeated by its perennial foes Sparta and Persia. That wasn’t the end of the story, however. A revived, if modified, Athenian democracy was destined for a further 80 or so years’ existence, until that too was crushed by a foreign imperial power, Macedon. This time defeat was terminal. With successive autocracies casting a long shadow over Greece, full-blown citizen people-power would not return to ancient Athens. But its legacy lives on in the 21st century. This extraordinary experiment did more than any other system to inspire our own western idea of democratic government – for good or ill. This article was first published in the December 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
Ancient Greece: everything you wanted to know
Paul Cartledge responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about one of the most renowned and influential ancient civilisations.
In the latest of our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, ancient historian Paul Cartledge responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about one of the most renowned and influential ancient civilisations. The discussion is split over two episodes and you can listen to both below Listen to more episodes in our ‘Everything you wanted to know’ podcast series Where is Alexander the Great buried? And other questions about his death… Part 1 Part 2
Alternate history: what if Alexander the Great had lived longer?
Alexander the Great created one of the most expansive empires the world has ever seen – only for it to crumble in the aftermath of his early death at the age of 32. But if he had lived, would he have carried on conquering? Jonny Wilkes talks to Prof Paul Cartledge about whether an older Alexander the Great could have formed an even bigger empire or grown even more impressive reputation
Each month BBC History Revealed asks a historical expert for their take on what might have happened if a key moment in the past had turned out differently. This time, Jonny Wilkes asks Paul Cartledge what if… Alexander the Great had not died so young? Few rulers throughout history, if any, can compare to Alexander the Great in terms of his military mind, warrior leadership and campaign of conquest. The King of Macedon built an empire that stretched from Greece and Egypt to the Indian subcontinent, and forever changed the ancient world by ushering in a new Hellenistic epoch of Greek culture and influence. And all by the time of his death at the age of just 32, which causes one to wonder what Alexander could have done if he had kept going or lived longer. Alexander reached as far as the Punjab (modern-day Pakistan and northwestern India) less than a decade after launching a brutally successful invasion of the Persian Empire in 334 BC. There, his army, which had not once tasted defeat, faced its sternest test against the well-armed men and war elephants of King Porus of the Indian kingdom of Paurava. They won the Battle of the Hydaspes at a cost – including a personal one for Alexander as he lost his beloved horse, Bucephalas – but he chose to march on. Read more: Where is Alexander the Great's tomb? “Alexander had the impression that he was within striking distance of ‘Ocean’, the great river imagined as encircling the ‘oikoumene’, or inhabited cosmos,” says Paul Cartledge, Emeritus A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. “His teacher as a boy, Aristotle, had failed to tell him about China as he didn’t know himself.” Had Alexander pushed on eastwards, he would have come up against the Chinese in their ‘Warring States Period’ and so quickly met the powerful Qin State, which a century later would unify all China. Yet it was unlikely that he would have reached China anyway, says Cartledge. After years of campaigning in unknown lands far from home, his men refused to go any further. More alternate history What if... Boudica had defeated the Romans? What if... the Spanish Armada had landed in England? “Alexander tried everything: threats, shaming, promises, self-flagellation, feigned or genuine illness. If even that combination, reliant on his aura, didn’t do the trick, clearly there was to be no going on,” says Cartledge. “But he does seem to have taken revenge: he had no need to return to Persia via modern Baluchistan along the Persian Gulf, where fighting and disease caused the unnecessary deaths of thousands of his own troops.” When did Alexander the Great die and how old was he? Alexander returned to Babylon, where he died in 323 BC aged 32. Had he lived, he almost certainly would have set about securing his conquests while preparing for another invasion, this time to Arabia. “He wasn’t absolutely the world’s greatest administrator, rather a better conqueror,” says Cartledge, but the establishment of his empire utterly relied on effective administration, as adding further territories would stretch his resources and armies too thin to control. Alexander seemed to prefer a wholesale reliance on elites from the captured regions, as opposed to Macedonians or other Greeks, to act as satraps (provincial governors or viceroys) and for chief military officers. Explore some of the other famous Greats in history: From conqueror to youth icon: who was Cyrus the Great? Who was King Alfred the Great? Your guide to King Cnut: the fierce Danish warrior who ruled England “He had seen the wisdom of devolving some local government. Immediately after the Hydaspes battle, Alexander gave back to defeated Porus his own territory, and indeed added more,” says Cartledge, which meant maintaining a strong presence in the region via a proxy. “Chandragupta Maurya then founded the Mauryan kingdom in 321 BC, something Alexander would not just have tolerated, but actively encouraged. In other words, Alexander would have anticipated, in miniature, the Roman Empire’s system of ‘client kings’ – subordinate, but largely independent local or native rulers operating at the fringe of the empire.” While this would have made the day-to-day control of Alexander’s empire easier, the incorporation of foreigners into his administrative and military structures caused much resentment among Macedonians. Alexander tended towards ruthless punishments in order to impose his will. “However, his poor handling of his childhood pal Harpalus – whom he first appointed as treasurer of the entire empire, then sacked, then reappointed, and who then ran off to Greece with masses of imperial treasure – suggests Alexander wouldn’t have been above pernicious cronyism.” Did you know? As his army swept across Egypt, Persia and farther east, Alexander celebrated by founding as many as 70 towns and cities, more than a dozen of which he named after himself. He even named one, Bucephala, after his horse Bucephalas. With his empire governed by appointees and client kingdoms, Alexander would have been able to focus on expansion. His wish to head deeper east may have been stamped out, but there were many more targets for his ambition. After Arabia, he could turn west. “Not to Rome,” asserts Cartledge, though. “Until 265 BC, Rome was still struggling to master its own backyard, and even then the Romans didn’t get all of Italy under their thumb until well into the first century BC.” A more tempting proposition for Alexander would have been Carthage, on the northern coast of Africa. Cartledge says: “The Athenians had already thought of taking them on in the late 5th century BC, and Dionysius I of Greek Syracuse (405-367 BC), did succeed in ejecting the Carthaginians from Sicily. Alexander might well have fancied his chances. When his appetite for conquering was sated, if it could be at all, the matter of succession would be of paramount importance. Could the empire survive without the aura of Alexander? Cartledge is unsure: “I think the empire would have broken or been stolen away regardless of how long Alexander had lived. But had he lived long enough to make quite clear who was to succeed him, and prepared that person to assume the succession, then Alexander would have pre-empted the pretty much immediate post-mortem outbreak of the wars of his successors.” What really happened Alexander III came to the throne in 336 BC at the age of 20. His father, Philip II, had transformed the peripheral state of Macedon into the dominant power in Greece, and had planned to invade the Persian Empire. Alexander took that ambition up himself, crossing the Hellespont with more than 30,000 infantry soldiers and 7,000 cavalry. Crushing the Persians at every battle, Alexander became the most powerful man in the ancient world. His decade-long campaign only came to an end, in the Punjab, when his exhausted and demoralised army demanded they return home. Alexander acquiesced, but his spirit was broken as he gave in to drinking and megalomania. Back in Babylon, he fell ill and died in 323 BC, aged 32. Alexander’s empire, which covered more than two million square miles, did not survive much longer, but it did lay the foundations of a Hellenistic world where Greek culture, language and thought spread from Europe to Asia. Paul Cartledge is Emeritus A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. He was speaking to freelance writer Jonny Wilkes This content first appeared in the May 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed