The Classical World Read Online Free PDF

earlier contact with France’s south coast, the first wine to be drunk in France was ‘Italian’. In the mid-fifth century, however, a Greek at the Cap d’Antibes inscribed two verses on a black stone shaped like a penis: ‘I am Mister Pleaser, the servant of the holy goddess Aphrodite.’ 10 The first person in France to record himself as a great lover is therefore a Greek.
    Meetings with so many non-Greeks, from Spain to the Crimea, can only have helped to sharpen the settlers’ existing sense of their Greekness. They also had a strong sense of kinship with the distantGreek
poleis
which had founded them. By
c.
650 BC we first encounter the word ‘Panhellenes’, ‘all Greeks together’; by
c.
570 Greek visitors to Naucratis in the Nile Delta had a special temple, a Greek ‘Hellenion’. Across the Mediterranean, settlement had helped to reinforce the settlers’ underlying Greek identity. Within it, of course, local Greek pride remained very strong. When Hadrian visited the Greek settlement of Cyrene in north Africa, he flattered the citizens by referring to their connection with ancient Sparta and to the oracles from the god Apollo which had guided the first settlers. 11 The oracles by then were seven and a half centuries old, and the Spartan connection was supposedly very much older still. But the citizens still prized them: the widened Greek world was patterned with these tales of kinship and affinity, within the sense of Greekness which the settlers and their parent
poleis
shared.

3
    Aristocrats
    Happy is the man who has dear children and sound horses and hunting hounds and a friend abroad
…
    Solon, F23 (West)
    In rams and donkeys and horses, Cyrnus, we look for noble thoroughbreds, and anyone wants to breed from noble parents. But a noble man is not concerned if he marries the ignoble daughter of an ignoble father so long as he gives plenty of money with her.
Theognis (
c.
600–570 BC ), lines 183–6
    At home in what we call Greece, the mother-cities of these settlements were not ‘state-less’ societies. Already in the eighth century these home-grown
poleis
had magistrates and ruling councils who could enforce and co-ordinate a foreign settlement. They could also impose fines and tithes, agree treaties and declare wars. But the men who ruled them were drawn from a very small class: their cliques had aristocratic names, like the Eupatrids, the noble caste of the Athenians, or the Bacchiads, the dominant family at Corinth. Their social attitudes and style of life were the dominant image of power in their world: they even shaped Greeks’ ideas of their gods. On Mount Olympus, Homer’s gods regard mortal men much as aristocrats, in Homer’s world, regard their social inferiors. As Greeks’ moral thinking changed, so did their ideas of their gods, but the cultural pursuits of the first aristocrats persisted for centuries. In many aspects of his life, even the Emperor Hadrian was still the heir to them, a thousand years later.
    The word ‘aristocracy’ is of Greek origin, but does not occur in our surviving Greek texts until the fifth century BC : perhaps it was coined then, as an answer to common ‘democracy’. But, as often in Greek history, the absence of a general word for something is certainly not evidence that the thing did not exist. In Homer’s poems, particular Greek leaders are already ‘the best’ (
aristoi
) by family and breeding. In many Greek city-states, the ruling families had the names of exclusive kin (‘Neleids’ or ‘Penthelids’) and in Attica, the name of the ruling caste, the ‘Eupatrids’, meant ‘of good fathers’. Aristocrats differ from others, including the merely rich, by their noble descent from other aristocrats. In the eighth and seventh centuries these clans and castes were certainly aristocratic, even before the word ‘aristocracy’ was in use.
    In any society, particularly a pre-scientific one, noble families are at risk from infertility. In the Greek