Ancient Greece

I just hate it when all the cliches about history turn out to be true. Mainly, it makes it tough to say something new on the subject...the Curmudgeon labors mightily on your behalf.

The topic at hand is the ancient Greeks generally and Ancient Greece by Thomas Martin in particular. I griped about this one, bitching that it was a slow read. It is, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing…the author packs a lot into a sentence. The volume is brief but expansive, covering the years from 4000 B.C. to about 30 B.C. Now a deep, dark confession: I am one of those who when you say “sixteenth century,” I do a quick internal sanity check, saying to myself “…so the 1500s.” That’s working with normal, A.D.-style, positive numbers; in the book at hand we’re in the weird, B.C.-driven world of negative numbers and it’s even worse. If you enjoyed the New Math and number lines, this volume has a lot of charms. The book was developed as a companion to lectures and a web site the author had put together, and each section of each chapter covers about what a 50 minute college lecture could hold.

Which includes a great deal of homosexuality.

For context, recall that most of what we think we know about ancient Greece is actually stuff we think we know about Athens; Sparta was the other big noise, but Greece as such was loosely constructed of city states whose sense of “Greece” was at least as amorphous as “Europe” before the EU. And I say “think we know” not for lack of scholarship, just that I had so much of it tangled up in my own brain that it’s a little scary. The main narrative of the book opens with the Bronze Age (for once the James Michener, “It all started with a bird crapping a seed” introduction is appropriate) and one of its ongoing concerns is how humans organized themselves into communities and the various methods of government they tried, pretty much in parallel. It is a topic we will return to, but easily its oddest manifestation is the city state of Sparta.

First of all, it was an oligarchy. Two oligarchs in their case, nobody knew why although it seemed to be that Sparta happened when two towns grew together, kind of like Dallas and Fort Worth minus the airport. Like many before and since, they had the good fortune to conquer their neighbors only to discover that governing a large group is expensive. The only way they could maintain control was to strictly enforce a social hierarchy that kept a small number of Spartans ruling everybody else in an extended geographic area. The Spartans were less than nice about it all…the infantry (the hoplites, if you recall that term) were just a notch up from slaves and the Spartans forced them wear helmets made of human skin. That sort of thing. Even with a strict hierarchy governing a large area, food was so scarce that the whole of Sparta lived on the edge of starvation. That, coupled with the need for every male of the city to participate in holding down the rabble, led them to take boys at the age of 7 to live in barracks. They purposely underfed the boys so they would have to steal food, then beat them badly if they were caught in order to make them good at it. And they really did line them up naked every week to make sure they weren’t getting fat, although in context that would mean someone holding out food that the group desperately needed.

Attitudes about gay sex varied greatly among the Greek city states. Most had some level of social tolerance, although Sparta went in for it big time. Recall that in Sparta the men and boys were living in dorms until they were married or 30. (Or dead, which often came first.) The Spartans encouraged sex between older men and younger boys, the stated reason being that the boys fought harder for men to whom they had formed emotional attachments. There was also the vague hope that it might teach the kids some sense. And let’s face it, if you can’t stop it you might as well institutionalize it.

Over in Athens social organization looked a whole lot more like what we’re used to. Which makes their traditions in signage all the more disturbing. Turns out the Athenians took the human penis as a symbol of power and protection….so far so good in a Jungian sort of way. They tried to invoke said power and protection at points of physical danger by setting up two fully realized stone phalluses (phalli?) with a stone plank on top, from head to shining head. The whole affair made an inverted U shape, although one with a lot of upward thrust. On top of the plank they set a statue of a man sporting a full erection, also run up in stone. Athenians as it turns out had a pretty liberal notion of what constituted a physically dangerous place; as in, intersections. Yes, just where you and I would expect a diamond sign or a red octagon, the Athenians had an altar made of stone dildos. History does not record whether property/casualty losses went up or down as a result of this early work in risk management.

Turns out, however, if you’re looking for the best Greek sex, you need a Macedonian man.

Yes, that legend is true, too: Alexander the Great was a major woo-woo. The lovely Empress the Great was a fellow named Hephaistion. Alex and Hef had been close since childhood, an intimacy they preserved as Alex’s busy work schedule took him off conquering Persia, Egypt, and the Western parts of India. (One of Alexander’s successors sold the Indian holdings off for six hundred war elephants. Not quite a handful of beads, but one of history’s great real estate deals, regardless.) Both boys could tie one on, apparently, and Hef died finally after a hard night of partying and drinking. Alexander was “wild with grief,” as our author puts it. Alex proceeded to make Hef a god, just like Hadrian would do for his lover a few centuries and an Empire later. There was talk of a temple, and it might have been quite the place except for Alexander drinking himself to death in Babylon in 323 B.C. (Admittedly he had a fever; the thought was that wine was curative.) You know, you gotta love a guy with style like that: we all have to die, so why not do it in…Babylon!

Predictably Alexander’s one miss was in producing an heir. He was married, of course, to a perfectly bland girl named Roxane who only managed to produce a child “some months after” Alexander’s death. Asked on his deathbed to whom the empire should go, Alexander merely said, “To the most powerful.” Great line…queenly, even. Dreadful policy, however, since Alexander’s empire then was broken apart into four pieces ruled by his former generals. Including, God help us, a General Ptolemy who took Egypt. Which gave us the Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt, including (a century or so later) Pharoah Ptolemy III and his lovely wife, Bernice. (I’m not making any of this up.) She was his cousin, but at least not his sister…in an effort to fit in with the locals, the Ptolemys started marrying siblings and had themselves declared gods, an example of why you should never talk to the locals. It also explains why their successor Cleopatra VII (yes, that Cleopatra, the Liz Taylor one) is considered Greek…as the offspring a very few generations removed of a Greek general, she was. Especially with the inbreeding and all. Only a few decades later, regrettably, Cleopatra “bet on the wrong side” in the war with Rome and in 30 B.C. Octavian became ruler of Egypt, completing the Roman conquest of Greece. And with that, ended tres-gay Ancient Greece.

One of the author’s concerns throughout the book is how various forms of government took root. That which we think of as “Greek democracy” is really only Athens; and then only really for 120 years or so; and even that with a strict political caste system based on pure, bottom-line personal income. Martin’s treatment of democracy has a certain special interest to it, but he doesn’t try to make that the theme of the book or even do much special pleading for it. The Greeks sure didn’t: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all thought democracy was a low, debased form of government. Slavery was near-universal, such that even the hoplites (remember them, with the human skin?) took one slave each into battle. (Part of Alexander’s genius was training the hoplites to carry their own gear, which nearly halved his cost for food. He then leveraged that into world conquest…it’s that certain flair again.) And Demosthenes once bashed Alexander’s father by saying he came from a place so terrible “that not even the slaves there are worth their salt.” I mean, really…why make the trip if you can’t pick up a few things for the house?

Martin’s epilogue points out that the moral value of most of Greek history can be argued both ways. A professor to the end, he has an extensive list of additional reading. In his view, one should prioritize next reading the historical works (literature and history written before the Roman conquest) before secondary “analytic” texts because:

“…ancient Greeks prided themselves on their freedom of speech. For them, the crucial component of freedom of speech was being able to say things to people you know they will not be happy to hear. This seems to me a concept worth remembering because it is liberating for those willing to do the demanding work of investigating sources, which is the effort that earns them the standing to express judgments worth listening to.”

Martin wrote that sentence in 1999 for an educated but generalist audience. I grieve for the difference that twenty years has brought us.