Greece - Korina Miller [13]
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Homer’s classic work, the ‘Iliad’, relates in poetic epithet a mythical episode of the Trojan War. Its sequel, the ‘Odyssey’, recounts the epic adventures of Odysseus and his companions in their journey home from the Trojan War.
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Athens’ elegant temples and monuments built during this time, such as the Parthenon and the Erechtheion, and were the pinnacle of architectural brilliance as well as enduring symbols of power. Elsewhere, many fine temples were also being constructed, including the Temple of Zeus at Olympia and the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion. It was also during this Classical period that sculptors developed a more naturalistic, aesthetic style for marble pieces and bronze casts; and it was Pericles who commissioned the Athenian sculptor Pheidias to create the enduring marble friezes of the Parthenon.
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THE SPARTANS
During the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, one of the most celebrated battles in history, a few hundred soldiers held an entire Persian army at bay and died to a man doing so. What kind of soldiers could display such selfless bravery? Spartan ones, of course.
Admired and feared, the Spartans were held in mythic awe by their fellow Greeks for their ferocious and self-sacrificing martial supremacy, marching into battle in a disciplined, lock-stepped phalanx, living (and very often dying) by the motto ‘return with your shield or on it’.
They were the product of harsh ideology. Every Spartiate (usually the male full citizen) was by definition a soldier (hoplite), who began his training almost from birth. Poor recruits were weeded out early – a citizens’ committee decided which newborn babies did not pass muster (they would then be left on a mountain top to die).
The surviving children endured 13 years of training to foster supreme physical fitness from the age of seven, and suffered institutionalised beating ‘competitions’ to toughen them up.
All hoplites were bound to military service until the age of 60, lived in barracks until the age of 30 (even if married) and were obliged to eat at the phiditia (mess hall). Shame and often death awaited retreaters, cowards and those who didn’t live up to their tough code of battle.
But the Spartiates were the lucky ones. Helots, Sparta’s slaves, had no rights at all and those suspected of any kind of misdemeanour were hunted and killed by Sparta’s secret police.
A measure of the contempt in which the Spartiates held their helots (and also a sign of their galloping paranoia) came after the Peloponnesian Wars (in which Sparta was the ultimate victor). Dwindling numbers of Spartiates meant that the lower orders had to fight as well. Asked by their helot masters to pick 2000 of their bravest, these fighting helots, who thought they were to be made full citizens, were then executed en masse.
Although admired by some Greek thinkers, most notably Plato (albeit from the safety of an easygoing democracy), an authoritarian system that could motivate a body of men to sit calmly under a hail of arrows also necessarily stifled individual initiative and the introduction of new ideas.
This rigidity and lack of innovation contributed, along with the exhausting Peloponnesian Wars, to the decline of Sparta, which did not quite know what to do with its dominance. The battle of Leuctra in 371 BC was the first major defeat of the Spartans in open battle and marked the beginning of the collapse of their power.
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With the Aegean Sea safely under its wing, Athens began to look westwards for further expansion, bringing it into conflict with the Sparta-dominated Peloponnesian League. A series of skirmishes and provocations subsequently led to the Peloponnesian Wars.
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The web portal www.ancientgreece.com is great for all things ancient and Greek.
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ORIGINAL OLYMPICS
The Olympic tradition emerged around the 11th century BC as a paean to the Greek gods in the form of contests,