Europe: A History (24 page)
The Persian Wars gave a permanent sense of identity to the Greeks who escaped Persian domination. Free Hellas was seen as the ‘Glorious West’, ‘the Land of Liberty’, the home of Beauty and Wisdom. The East was the seat of slavery, brutality, ignorance. Aeschylus put these sentiments into the mouth of the
Queen of Persia. The scene is the royal palace at Susa, where news has arrived of her son’s defeat at Salamis:
NOMISMA
N
OMISMA
, meaning ‘coin’, was used by both Greeks and Romans. Our own word ‘money’ derives, via the French
monnaie
, from the Latin
moneta
, meaning the mint, where coins are struck. (In early Rome the mint was situated on the Capitoline Hill in the temple of Juno Moneta.)
Money, in the sense of coinage, began to circulate in the Aegean in the early seventh century
BC.
According to Herodotus it was the Kingdom of Lydia which minted the first coins. A
stater
or two-drachma piece of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver, struck either in Lydia or in Ionia, is often described as the world’s oldest coin.
1
Certainly the kings of Phrygia, from the legendary Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold, to Croesus (r. 561–546 BC), whose name was synonymous with fabulous wealth, were closely connected with the origins of money. They owned the ‘golden sands’ of the River Pactolus, near the Lydian capital, Sardis.
The island of Aegina also participated in the early days of coinage. Aegina’s silver coins, introduced in 670
BC,
were certainly the first in Europe. Stamped with the emblem of a sea tortoise, they mark the beginning both of the widespread ‘aeginetic’ system of weights and measures and of numismatic art.
2
Each of the subsequent mints adopted a similar emblem—the owl or the olive-branch for Athens, the pegasus for Corinth, the Arethusan nymph for Syracuse. From an early date, heads of divinities and inscriptions identifying the mint or the ruling authority were also common. Coins bearing the head of the ruler did not come into fashion until Hellenistic times, but were the norm under the Roman Empire.
Numismatics, the study of coins, is one of history’s auxiliary sciences. It deals with some of the most durable evidence of ancient times, and is particularly valuable for dating the layers of archaeological sites. Coins struck in hard metal speak with great precision about time and space. They bear witness not only to material conditions but also to the ramifications of international trade and cultural contacts.
From the seventh century Aegean coins have spread throughout the world. They form the basis of most monetary systems and of most commercial exchange. The right to mint coins has become one of the hallmarks of political sovereignty. 1,500 mints are known from ancient Greece alone. The Lydian
stater
has its descendants in the coinage of Rome, of Christian Europe, and now of all countries. Like the silver drachma of Aegina, some coins have gained currency far beyond the times and the territories for which they were intended. Indeed, the charisma of nomisma became so powerful that many came to fear it. ‘The love of money’, wrote St Paul from Macedonia in
AD
65, ‘is the root of all evil.’
[DOLLAR]
QUEEN.
My friends, where is this Athens said to be?
CHORUS.
Far toward the dying flames of the sun.
QUEEN.
Yet my son lusts to track it down.
CHORUS.
Then all of Hellas would be subject to the King.
QUEEN.
So rich in numbers are they?
CHORUS.
So great a host as dealt to the Persians many woes.
QUEEN.
Who commands them? Who is shepherd to their host?
CHORUS.
They are slaves to none, neither are they subject.
5
The notion that Greece was all liberty, and Persia all tyranny, was an extremely subjective one. But it provided the foundation of a tradition which has persistently linked ‘civilization’ with ‘Europa’ and ‘the West’ (see Introduction, p. 22).
[BARBAROS]
The rise of Macedonia, a hellenized country to the north of Greece, reached its peak in the reigns of Philip of Macedon (r. 359–336
BC)
and of Philip’s son, Alexander the Great (r. 336–323
BC).
In a series of campaigns of unparalleled brilliance, which ended only with Alexander’s death from fever in Babylon, the whole of Persia’s vast domains were overrun and the Greek world was extended to the banks of the Indus. According to one admiring opinion, Alexander was the first man to view the whole known world, the
oikoumene
, as one country. But for the senior English historian of Greece, at the end of his twelfth volume and his 96th chapter, the passing of ‘Free Hellas’ was to be lamented even more than Alexander was to be praised. ‘The historian feels that the life has departed from his subject,’ he wrote, ‘and with sadness and humiliation brings his narrative to a close.’
6
In the political sense, this Hellenistic Age, which began with the Macedonian supremacy, lasted until the systematic elimination of Alexander’s successors by the growing power of Rome,
[MAKEDON]
The geographical expansion of the Greek world was impressive. The miniature island- and city-states which ringed the stony shore of the Aegean often lacked the resources to support a growing population. Arable land was at a premium. Commercial outlets grew, even without a modern sense of enterprise. Friendly trading-posts were needed for effective contacts with the continental interior. For all these reasons, the foundation of clone colonies offered many attractions. From the eighth century onwards, therefore, several of the most ancient cities of the Greek mainland and of Asia Minor—Chalcis, Eretria, Corinth, Megara, Phocaea, and, above all, Miletus—were engaged in active colonization. The most frequent locations were found in Sicily and southern Italy, in Thrace, and on the coasts of the Euxine or ‘Hospitable’ Sea—so named, like the Pacific, in the hope that its name might offset its nature,
[CHERSONESOS]
In time, as the early colonies themselves gave birth to further colonies of their own, whole chains or families of cities were established, each with its lasting devotion to the parent foundation. Miletus constructed the largest of such families, with up to eighty members of various generations. In the west, in Sicily, the first
Chalcidian colonies, Naxos and Messana (Messina), dated from 735
BC.
Emporia (Ampurias) in Iberia, Massilia (Marseille), Neapolis (Naples), Syracusae (Syracuse), Byzantium on the Bosporus, Cyrene in North Africa, and Sinope on the southern Euxine shore all date from the same early centuries. At a later date, following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek cities arose in the depths of Asia. Foundations which bore the name of the Macedonian conqueror included Alexandria-at-World’s-End (Khojent, in Turkestan), Alexandria in Areia (Herat), Alexandria in Arachosia (Kandahar), Alexandria in Syria, and, above all, Alexandria in Egypt (332
BC).
From Saguntum (Sagunto near Valencia) in the far west to Bucephala (Jhelum) in the Punjab at the eastern extremity, named after Alexander’s faithful charger, the interlinked chains of Greek cities stretched for almost 4,500 miles, that is, for almost twice the distance across North America.
[MASSILIA]
(See Appendix III, p. 1222.)
BARBAROS
E
VERY
textbook stresses the formative influence of the Persian Wars in uniting the people of ‘Free Hellas’ and in fixing their sense of Greek identity. Less obvious is the fact that those same wars set in motion a process whereby the Greeks would define their view of the outside, ‘barbarian’ world. Yet ‘inventing the Hellene’ went hand in hand with ‘inventing the barbarian’; and Athenian drama of the 5th century provided the medium through which the effect was achieved.
1
Prior to Marathon and Salamis, the Greeks do not appear to have harboured strong feelings about their neighbours as enemies. Archaic poetry had often made heroes out of supernatural outsiders, including Titans and Amazons. Homer treated Greeks and Trojans as equals. Greek colonies on the Black Sea Coast lived from fruitful co-operation and interchange with the Scythians of the steppe,
[CHERSONESOS]
In the 5th century, however, the Greeks became much more self-congratulatory and xenophobic. One finds the ethnic factor raised by Herodotus (b. 484), who, whilst appreciating the older civilizations, especially Egypt, laid great store by the ‘shared blood’ and common language of the Hellenes.
But the most effective catalysts of changing attitudes were the tragedians, especially Aeschylus (b. 525), who had himself fought at Marathon. In his
Persae
, Aeschylus creates a lasting stereotype whereby the civilized Persians are reduced to cringing, ostentatious, arrogant, cruel, effeminate, and lawless aliens.
Henceforth, all outsiders stood to be denigrated as barbarous. No one could compare to the wise, courageous, judicious, and freedom-loving Greeks. The Thracians were boorish and mendacious. The Macedonians were not
echte hellenisch
. By Plato’s time, a permanent barrier had been raised between Greeks and all foreigners. It is assumed that the Greeks alone had the right and the natural disposition to rule. In Athens, it was simply not done to liken the conduct of foreign tyrants to the ways that Athenians could themselves behave towards subject peoples.
The ‘superiority complex’ of the ancient Greeks inevitably raises questions about similar ethnocentric and xenophobic ideas which surface in Europe at later dates. It was certainly adopted by the Romans, and must be held in the reckoning when one considers the various purveyors of ‘Western Civilization’ who, like the Romans, have felt such an affinity for ancient Greece. Nor can it be irrelevant to the resentments which combine attacks on ‘Western Civilization’ with a particular brand of Classical revisionism.
[BLACK ATHENA]
Some commentators hold that the conclusions which the ancient Greeks drew from their encounter with the otherness of neighbouring peoples have passed into the body of European tradition:
In this particular encounter began the idea of ‘Europe’ with all its arrogance, all its implications of superiority, all its assumptions of priority and antiquity, all its pretensions to a natural right to dominate.
2
Sicily and southern Italy (then known as Magna Graecia or ‘Greater Greece’) had a special role to play. They developed the same relationship with the Greek mainland that the Americas would develop with Europe. Until the Persian conquest of Asia Minor in the sixth century, the focus had remained very firmly in the Aegean. Miletus had been an even larger and more prosperous city than Athens. But once ‘Europa’ came under threat, first from Persia and then from Macedonia and Rome, the cities of Magna Graecia assumed a new importance. Sicily, full of luxury and tyrants, thrived on its special symbiosis with the surrounding Phoenician world. Syracuse was for Athens what New York was to be for London. On Greek Sicily and its internecine wars, Michelet waxed specially eloquent:
It grew in gigantic proportions. Its volcano, Etna, put Vesuvius to shame … and the surrounding towns responded to its grandeur. The herculean hand of the Dorians can be seen in the remains of Acragas (Agrigentum), in the columns of Posidonia (Paestum), in the white phantom that is Selinonte… Yet the colossal power of these cities, their prodigious riches, their naval forces … did nothing to retard their ruin. In the history of Magna Graecia, one defeat spelt disaster. Thus Sybaris and Agrigentum passed from the world, the Tyre and the Babylon of the West…
7
Magna Graecia commanded a region of great strategic importance, where the Greek world came into direct contact with the rival spheres first of the Phoenicians and then of Rome.
Phoenicia, homeland of Europa, flourished in parallel to Greece and in similar style. Indeed, Phoenicia’s city-states were considerably senior to their Greek counterparts, as were the Phoenician colonies. Sidon and Tyre had risen to prominence at the time when Crete was in terminal decline.
Kart-hadshat
, or ‘New City’ (Kartigon, Carthago, Carthage) had been founded in North Africa in 810
BC,
reputedly by Phoenician colonists led by Pygmalion and his sister Dido. Neighbouring
Atiq
(Utica) was still older. When old Phoenicia was overrun, like Asia Minor, by the Persians, Carthage and Utica were left, like the cities of the Greek mainland, to thrive on their own.
Carthage built a huge empire through naval power, trade, and colonization. Its daughter colonies stretched from beyond the Pillars of Hercules at Gades (Cadiz)
and Tingis (Tangier) to Panormus (Palermo) on Sicily. In its heyday it was probably the most prosperous of all city-states, dominating all the islands and coasts of the western Mediterranean. From the fifth century onwards, it fought and destroyed many of the Greek cities of Sicily, where its ambitions were cut short only by the arrival of Roman power.
CHERSONESOS
C
HERSONESOS, ‘Peninsular City’, was founded in 422–421
BC
by Dorian colonists from Heraclea Pontica. It stood on a headland on the western coast of the peninsula of Táurica,
*
3 km beyond modern Sevastopol. It was one of a score of Greek cities on the northern shore of the Euxine Sea, most of them colonies of Miletus—Olbia (‘Prosperity’), Panticapaeum on the Cimmerian Bosphorus (The Straits of Kerch), Tanais on the Don, Phanagoria, and others. Its foundation coincided very closely with the visit to neighbouring Olbia of the historian, Herodotus, who recorded the first description of the Scythian and Tauric peoples inhabiting the Pontic steppes. Like its neighbours, it lived from commerce with the inland tribes, and from the resulting seaborne trade in wheat, wine, hides, and salted fish. Its population of perhaps 20,000 inhabited a typical grid of straight stone streets, replete with the usual agora, acropolis, theatre, and port.
1
Exceptionally, Chersonesos survived all the turbulence of the next 1,700 years, passing through successive Greek, Sarmatian, Roman, and Byzantine phases. After its initial period as a solitary Greek outpost, it was absorbed in the 2nd century
BC
by the growing ‘Kingdom of the Bosphorus’, based at nearby Panticapaeum. The Kingdom, whose huge wealth grew from the grain trade, especially with Athens, was dominated by the latest wave of immigrants from the steppe, the Iranic Sarmatians, whose ability to assimilate into preceding Greek civilization created a brilliant new synthesis. Its goldsmiths, who worked to order for the Scythian chiefs of the interior, produced some of the most magnificent artistic jewellery of the ancient world. Its Spartocid dynasty, which was not Greek, eventually sought the protection of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus—the subject of Mozart’s early opera,
Mitridate, Re di Ponto
—who died in Panticapaeum in 63
BC
(the acropolis at Kerch is still called Mount Mithridates). The Roman garrison, installed at that time, did not impose full imperial rule for nearly two centuries.
Despite repeated invasions, particularly by the Goths, Huns, and Khazars, the late Roman/early Byzantine period saw some fifty Christian churches built at Chersonesos. In one of them, in 988 or 991, the latest barbarian visitor, Prince Wolodymyr (or Vladimir) of Kiev, stepped into the marble pool of the baptistery to be christened before his marriage to the Byzantine Emperor’s sister. By that time, Khazar overlordship had waned, and the Byzantines were able to re-establish Chersonesos as capital of the Theme of Klimata.
2
The final destruction of the ‘Peninsular City’ came in 1299 at the hands of the Mongol Tartars, who were busy turning Crimea into their homeland. It lived to see neither the arrival of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century nor the Russian conquest of 1783.
Excavations at Chersonesos began in 1829. They were intensified before the First World War, and resumed in the 1920s by a Soviet Archaeological Commission. The Tsarists were mainly looking for evidence of St Vladimir’s baptism. In 1891 they erected a vast domed basilica, now shattered, on the wrong spot. The Soviets were looking for remains of the material culture of a slave-owning society.
3
Possession of the classical Black Sea sites gave their modern owners a strong sense of historical pride. The naval port of Sevastopol was founded beside the ruins of Chersonesos with an appropriate Greek name meaning ‘City of Glory’. The Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, built for the conqueror of Crimea, Prince Potemkin, started Russia’s ‘native classical style’. After the attack of the British and French in 1854–6, and the heroic Russian defence, the Crimean coast became a favourite resort for the summer palaces of tsarist courtiers and Soviet Party bosses. They all justified their presence through the dubious Russian Version of History that starts with St Vladimir. In 1941–2, after a second heroic siege of Sevastopol, the Crimea was briefly occupied by the Nazis, whose ‘Gotland Project’ would have returned the peninsula into the hands of German colonists. In 1954, on the tercentenary of another dubious event, the Soviet Government in Moscow presented Crimea to Ukraine. The gift was intended to symbolize the indissoluble links of Crimea and Ukraine with Russia. Instead, on the collapse of the USSR, it had exactly the opposite effect. In August 1991, the last Soviet General Secretary was caught holidaying in his villa at Foros, along the coast from Sevastopol, when the abortive coup in Moscow brought the Soviet era to an end.
4
(See p. 1126.)
In recent times, the great variety of Crimea’s native population has all but disappeared. The ancient Tauri and Tauro-Scythians were long since over-run. The Crimean Goths defended their inland stronghold of Mangup until 1475. The Tartars were deported en masse by Stalin in 1942.
5
The Pontic Greeks survived until their deportation in 1949. A handful of Jews, who had escaped the Nazis, left for Israel in the 1980s. Russians and Ukrainians were left in an absolute majority.
In 1992, as families of the ex-Soviet military from Sevastopol shared the pebbly beach with the tourists, seeking their suntans beneath the ruined clifftop columns of Chersonesos, they looked on anxiously at the returning Tartars, at Ukrainian claims to the Black Sea Fleet, and at Russian demands for an autonomous Crimean republic. No location could have reminded them more of the impermanence of glory.