Persian Fire (21 page)

But the forces for change in the world beyond Athens were not easily kept at bay, and by 600
bc
even the Eupatrids were starting to embrace them. Cosmopolitanism, for those with sufficient fashion sense, had long promised ready entry to an international fast-set. Its members felt their truest sense of identity not with compatriots from the grubbing lower classes but with fellow sophisticates from across the entire Greek world. 'I simply adore the good things of life':
⁸
a statement unimaginable upon the lips of a stern and shaggy hero, but raising no eyebrows whatsoever among those who believed that luxury held up a mirror to the gods. Even a woman, if her tastes were sufficiently elegant, her jewellery golden, her robes soft and richly dyed, might hope to glimpse and converse with the divine: 'Come, rainbow-throned and immortal goddess of love, if ever in the past you heard my far-off cries and heeded them, leaving your father's halls, travelling in your chariot of gold, your pretty sparrows bearing you swiftly upon the fluttering of their wings, down from heaven through the sky to the dark earth.'
⁹
A prayer well worth raising — for pleasures, properly enjoyed, might indeed lift scales from mortal eyes, and a dinner-party provide a better-ordered realm than any state. The seductions of high society, delicate and perfumed as they were, exerted on those who could afford them an almost spiritual allure. Taste as well as breeding had become the mark of the elite.

Yet what defined it also served to threaten it. The passion for luxuries, most of which had to be shipped from glamorous locations overseas, inevitably boosted the fortunes of those with their fingers in the import—export trade. Capital, which had previously been tied up almost exclusively in the estates of the nobility, grew increasingly liquid. By 600
bc
, a momentous innovation was being introduced to the cities of Ionia: coinage. Over the following decades, it would cross the Aegean and begin to circulate in Greece. The aristocracy, unsurprisingly, reacted with disgust and mounting alarm. They bristled at the prospect of a businessman having the same spending power as a Eupatrid, and responded with increasingly frantic insults.
'Kakoi',
they called the
nouveaux riches:
the 'low-born', the 'unpleasant', the 'cheats'. The
Kakoi
themselves, however, as they could afford to do, merely shrugged their shoulders and continued to rake in the cash. After all, as a Spartan had once pointed out, back in the days of his own city's social upheavals, 'A man is nothing but the sum of what he owns.' Fitting slogan for a new and perplexing age. 'Gold is the only thing that makes for breeding now.' So, with a curling of the lip, might the
declasse
nobleman complain. There is no other basis of esteem.'
¹⁰

The Spartans themselves, of course, once so convulsed by precisely such complaints, had long since evolved their own remedy. To many, in the Attica of the 590s
bc
, it must have seemed as though history were repeating itself. Once again, just as in Lacedaemon a century previously, a whole region of Greece was crippled by an agrarian crisis. Never before had the property market been so fluid. As impoverished noblemen, threatened with the loss of their patrimony, tightened the screws on their tenants, so misery was passed down the food-chain to the very poorest, from the mansions of great families to the barest, rockiest plots. Creditors, mapping the limits of mortgaged olive groves and fields, filled the countryside with ominous lines of stones. They might just as well have been marking out the graves of ruined peasants.

As it worsened, the land famine drew an inevitable recourse. Just over the straits from southern Attica, temptingly, indeed irresistibly, close, lay the island of Salamis. Athenian scholars, adducing complex arguments from ancient epics, were able to demonstrate, at least to their own satisfaction, that Ajax's old kingdom belonged to them. News, certainly, to the citizens of Megara, a small city midway between Athens and Corinth, which also laid claim to Salamis, and indeed had planted it with settlers. The two cities duly went to war. Athens was defeated and forced to sue for peace. All the more galling for the vanquished was the fact that Megara, tiny as she was, ranked only as a third-rate power. The Athenians plunged into a gloomy introspection. Racked by crisis at home, humiliated abroad, they could no longer deny that they were punching woefully below their weight. Something was rotten in the state of Athens.

Spectral figures began to be glimpsed on the streets of the city, seeming portents of imminent ruin. So desperate did the situation appear that the Athenians, with that Greek enthusiasm for one-man think-tanks best exemplified by the tales told of Lycurgus, began to cast around for a sage. Fortunately for them, a ready candidate was at hand. In 594
bc,
Solon, universally held to be the wisest man in Athens (not to mention one of the seven wisest Greeks who had ever lived), was given the archonship, the city's supreme magistracy, and entrusted with the task of saving the state. His appointment, remarkably in a society as class-riven as Athens', met with universal applause. The blue-blooded descendant of an ancient Attic king, Solon had also dabbled in trade, while simultaneously letting slip to the poor his sense of outrage at their plight. Here was a man who could appeal to all his constituencies.

Skilled though he was at tailoring his pitch to his audience, however, Solon was no mere idle trimmer. His brand of wisdom was of a peculiarly muscular variety. It was he, only a year before becoming archon, who had rallied Greek opinion to the defence of Delphi when the impious city of Crisa had sought to annex the oracle. His own city's defeat by Megara had inspired him to even greater heights of outrage. 'Let's head for Salamis,' he had urged in impassioned verse, 'fight for that beautiful island, wipe ourselves clean of the disgrace.'
¹²
Now, as head of state, he was in a position to do more than sloganeer. It was evident to Solon that the two great crises facing Athens, agrarian and military, both sprang from the same root: rural impoverishment was enfeebling the reserves of Attic manpower; farmers were sinking ever deeper into serfdom. The poor, if truly desperate, might even stake their freedom against their debts, perhaps ending up chained and shackled as slaves in their own fields. Solon, had he displayed the calculating mercilessness of a Lycurgus, could easily have sponsored this trend, and condemned his city's poor to a permanent helotage. Instead, he chose to redeem them. Even those who had been sold abroad, even those 'who had forgotten how to speak the Attic dialect', were liberated, while in Attica itself, wherever property had been mortgaged, Solon ordered a general pardoning of debts. Out in the fields, men were set to work 'digging up the boundary-stones where they had been set in the dark earth'.
¹³

Most landlords, naturally enough, were outraged; but Solon, playing the selfless sage to the hilt, argued sternly that his reforms were in their interests, too. After all, without the bedrock provided by a free peasantry, what hope was there of capturing Salamis, or of preserving Athens from social meltdown, or of winning for the city a rank commensurate with her size? Yes, Solon had sought to ease the sufferings of the poor — but he had also laboured hard to keep the rich in power. The Eupatrids, holding their noses, had duly been persuaded into an alliance with the
Kakoi;
wealth rather than birth made the prerequisite for office; the poor, although granted membership of a citizens' assembly, denied the privilege of speaking in it. It was a triumph not for revolution but for a hard-fought middle way. 'Envied for their wealth though they were,' Solon pointed out, 'I sought to preserve the powerful from the hatred of the oppressed. Taking my stand, I used my strong shield to protect both sides of the class divide, allowing neither to gain an advantage over the other that would be unjust.'
¹⁴

The boast, in short, of an instinctive centrist. Solon's watchword was the traditional one of
eunoinia:
that familiar Greek dream of a just and natural order, one in which all would know their place, and 'rough edges would be smoothed out, appetites tamed, and presumption curbed'.
¹⁵
What was such an ideal, after all, if not the birthright of the earth-sprung Athenian people? Far from launching a novel political experiment, Solon saw himself as engaged in an act of restoration and repair. With a talent for reinventing history that would have done credit to a Spartan, he persuaded his city that the constitution he had drafted was in fact the very one she had possessed in her distant past. Copies of his laws, inscribed in public on revolving wooden tablets, served to spell this out to every class of citizen. To the poor, they guaranteed freedom and legal recourse against the abuses of the powerful; to the rich, they gave exclusive right to magistracies and the running of the city. What could be fairer, more natural, more traditional, than that?

Before relinquishing power and departing Athens for a ten-year Mediterranean cruise,
[2]
Solon decreed that his laws should remain in force for a minimum of a century. No sooner had he set sail, however, than familiar problems began to raise their ugly heads.
Eunomia
was not as easily maintained in Athens as the departed Solon had cared to hope. Their powers left untrammelled, the nobility swaggered and feuded just as they had always done. Beyond Athens herself, Attica remained a patchwork of rival loyalties and clans. The war for Salamis, although it scored some successes, continued to drag on. Despite all Solon's efforts, Athens remained very much the sick man of Greece.

Even so, his reforms had set in train something momentous. Moved by the legends of his city, and by her claims to antiquity and to the favour of the gods, Solon had taken for granted that here was a heritage upon which every Athenian had a claim. Scandalised at the sight of his countrymen labouring in bondage amid the dust from which their ancestors had sprung, he had ordered their chains struck off. There could be no doubting, from that moment on, who was an Athenian and who was not. Nothing, of course, like the spectacle of another's servitude to boost one's self-esteem: thanks to Solon, even the poorest peasant could now look down upon a slave, and know himself to be as free as the haughtiest Eupatrid. Admittedly, he was not as much of a citizen; how could he be when he was barred from standing for office or making his voice heard in debate? Yet the rich, even though they still hugged political power to themselves, could not entirely afford to ignore him and his fellows. The poor may have been silent in the Assembly — but not without a vote. 'For in their hands lay the power to elect officials, and to review their performances — and indeed, had the people been denied even this privilege, then they would still have ranked as little more than slaves.'
¹⁶

Clearly, a new and intriguing cross-current had been added to the endless swirl of aristocratic rivalries. How best to negotiate it was a challenge that every ambitious nobleman would henceforward have to meet. There was certainly no call for him to kowtow to the poor — the very idea would have been ludicrous! — but success or failure, even for a Eupatrid, might now depend on a show of hands. Tanners, carpenters, farmhands, potters, blacksmiths: any or all of these might come to the Assembly to use their votes. Even as they continued to make policy in the closed rooms of their mansions, the elite could not afford entirely to forget where sovereignty now resided. As befitted a city with earth-sprung origins, it lay not only with the Eupatrids, nor even with the rich alone, but with the Assembly of all the Athenians, with the people —with the
'demos'.

It was no surprise that Athena should have chosen the Acropolis as her residence. For a start, there was the view. Five hundred feet

above the rest of Athens, even a mortal could see for miles around. To the south, an hour's walk away, lay Phalerum, the open bay which served the Athenians as their port; to the west, blocking off the view of Salamis, the peak of Mount Aigaleos; to the north-east another mountain, Pentelikon, where workmen from Athens would travel to quarry marble, gashing its slopes with scars. To a goddess, of course, shimmering through the brightness of the sky, this would have presented no obstruction; but to mortals, road-bound, it was altogether more of a challenge. Two trails circumvented the mountain, one winding northwards, the other circling south. Noblemen, in particular, heading out from Athens, were frequent travellers on the loop around Pentelikon — for beyond it, level and beach-fringed, lay the perfect location for one of the aristocracy's favourite sports. Horses and their trainers flourished at Marathon.