Greek city states were ruled by kings with loyal followers. One of the great mythical heroes of the ancient Greek world was Ulysses, otherwise known as Odysseus.37 He is a key figure in both the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, who was revered as the chronicler of these two epics that revolve around the Trojan War, believed to have occurred about 1200 BCE. Homer, who may have been a composite figure, wrote down these oral traditions hundreds of years after the actual events.38 They were the most pervasive myths of the Greeks at the time of Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BCE and influenced hundreds of plays (most of them lost) by the tragic playwrights of that time, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. They provided the everyday entertainment of the Greeks in addition to shaping their myths and history.
The Iliad tells most of the story of the expedition to Troy by about 1000 ships under the leadership of King Agamemnon of Mycenae.39 The goal was to retrieve the legendary beauty Helen, who left her husband Menelaus (Agamemnon’s brother), to run off with Paris, prince of Troy. The Odyssey follows Ulysses home after this war of ten years and on further adventures. In these myths and the plays based on them there is little reference to democracy. There were clear consequences for the losers of these wars – and not much had changed by the time of Thucydides, who wrote a history of the Peloponnesian war in which Athens was ultimately defeated by Sparta in 405 BCE. The pattern in most of these wars was that the winners shared the spoils of the cities that were defeated. The men were killed or enslaved and the women and children became the property of the victors.40
Solon was the legendary giver of the laws that led to Athenian democracy. In about 570 BCE he reformed aristocratic rule and created a system that provided shared governance among a greater number of land owners. He reversed the slide toward tyranny in which the wealthiest aristocrats took away the property and liberty of farmers and others who had become indebted to them.41
According to legend the Olympic Games began in 776 BCE, and were held every four years.42 The competitions included racing, boxing, wrestling and horse racing. The extensive site of Olympia still can be visited, including the housing area for athletes who spent months traveling from the cities they represented throughout the Greek world, and the stadium where the foot race took place on the second of five days of competition.
Delphi, high in the hills northwest of Athens, was the religious center of ancient Greece. Those in search of answers to life’s problems – personal or political – made the pilgrimage and awaited the wisdom of the Oracle, sometimes for months, which often was delivered in vague terms that made interpretation uncertain.
The Athenians practiced a form of participatory democracy that was very different from the style of representative government found in modern democracies. Those who were allowed to participate – about 10% of the population – voted on major state decisions such as whether to go to war and also were required to participate in juries by lottery.43 It was an Athenian jury that voted in 399 BCE to execute Socrates.
In 431 BCE, when a war began between Athens and Sparta, each engaged a large group of city states to fight on their side. Athens was led by Pericles, who evoked the spirit of democracy as perhaps has not been done as effectively until Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Pericles’ Funeral Oration – as related by Thucydides – gave an account of Athenian democracy at the battle site where the bodies of many still awaited removal:
Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.44
This “equal justice to all” actually applied only to the ten percent of persons who were citizens.
The Athenians and Spartans both voted on whether to enter the war against each other.45 Athens was the largest and most influential democracy of its time, but engaged in increasing subjugation of other city states who were members of its “alliance” – even some that wished to remain independent.
The Peloponnesian war increased in intensity over the course of twenty-seven years, and according to Thucydides, both the Athenians and Spartans provided severe punishments for “allies” who sought to break free.46 With the defeat of Athens ended the first great experiment with democracy we know of – an idea that, according to many scholars, was not revived in practice for nearly two thousand years. But Athens was a direct democracy rather than the representative model that we have today. The vast majority of the population was made up of slaves, women and children who were ineligible to vote or participate in government. And as we shall see, there have been elements of democracy in many states since that time, although most have not been called by that name.
Socrates – as portrayed by his pupil Plato – championed the idea of questioning all that we think we know about others, the world, and ourselves. He taught that as we rid ourselves of preconceptions we arrive at a greater sense of truth.47 Plato’s pupil Aristotle pioneered what today we might call the “scientific method,” or “empiricism,” which advocated using actual observation to establish our concepts of the world rather than relying solely on beliefs or logic.
About a century after the Peloponnesian war, Alexander (“the Great”) of Macedonia (north of Athens) rose to power. He forged the first Western empire that spanned from North Africa to India. He marched with 10,000 or more men across thousands of miles, recruiting more along his path who were fascinated by his legend. He overthrew the Persian Empire and was welcomed by the Egyptians in 332 BCE because of the oppression of the Persians. In Egypt he established his new city, Alexandria, which replaced Athens as the most important cultural center of the ancient world. Alexandria had the greatest library and museum of its time, and had many of the great thinkers of the era among its residents, including Galen, the renowned physician, and the mathematician Euclid who laid the foundations for geometry.48 Alexander’s sudden death in 323 BCE at the age of 33, perhaps from influenza, caused a battle for succession among his generals, with Egypt being taken over by Alexander’s friend and general, Ptolemy I.49 One legacy of Alexander was that so large a geographical area could be united under one rule – soon to be imitated by Rome.
At around the time that the Greeks were moving from prehistory to written history, a well-documented civilization already was aging in China, which was on its third dynasty. Traditional Chinese history tells us that there was a gradual transition from a tribal society based on clans, from about 5000 BCE, to a state-level society, with the establishment of the Xia Dynasty in 2000 BCE, although modern archeological evidence doesn’t always match this narrative. This yielded to the Shang Dynasty starting in about 1600 BCE, which practiced writing, had walled cities and horse-drawn carriages. Although this system has been compared with feudalism, it was centrally governed, and eventually yielded to the Zhou Dynasty, starting in about 1000 BCE, which lasted through the time of classical Greece, to 256 BCE. Rulers sought to shift allegiance from the more democratic clan to the less democratic state, and provided severe punishments for those who resisted the new order. Their dynastic system included burying hundreds of “companions” with the elite in their tombs.50
The Greeks were well-known for their consumption of wine at lengthy philosophical seminars, as portrayed by Plato, and at their feasts at which Bacchus, the god of good living, was invoked.
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