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00:00What is civilisation?
00:10We recognise it when we see it, don't we?
00:15The Greeks had a word for all this.
00:20To Helenikon, meaning Greekness, or the Greek thing.
00:25It was first used by the historian Herodotus
00:29to sum up all the things the ancient Greeks had in common.
00:33Language.
00:36Religion.
00:39Customs.
00:42Blood.
00:45Today, the Greek thing has become a kind of shorthand
00:48for values that we like to think are at the root of who we are.
00:53Rational. Cultured.
00:56Humane. Civilised.
00:59But beneath the civilised skin was a fierce, volatile pulse.
01:04It gave the Greek thing its energy, its passion, its life,
01:09and its capacity for sudden, shocking violence.
01:23CROWD CHANTING
01:40If you'd come here in 370 BC to Argos,
01:43you'd have seen another side of the Greek thing.
01:46In that year, an aristocratic plot
01:48to overthrow the democratic government of this city was uncovered.
01:52Seizing the political advantage,
01:54democratic demagogues whipped up a mob with fiery speeches
01:59directed against the city's wealthiest citizens.
02:02What happened next was a reign of terror.
02:07Trumped-up charges, confiscation of property,
02:11summary trial and execution.
02:14The Greeks were handed over to the mob,
02:16who beat them to death with clubs.
02:19It was only when the body count reached 1,200 or more
02:23that the democratic leaders began to have second thoughts
02:26about this cull of the city's elite.
02:30But when they tried to calm things down, the mob turned on them
02:34and clubbed them to death as well.
02:40Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher,
02:42had some interesting things to say about the Greeks.
02:45These most humane of men in ancient times, he wrote,
02:49have a trait of cruelty, a tigerish lust to annihilate,
02:53which really must strike fear in our hearts.
03:00In the story of ancient Greece,
03:02in the evolution of the city-states to their wars with Persia
03:06and then with each other,
03:08there's as much to shudder at as to admire.
03:11It's a thing of art, philosophy and science
03:14that went hand in bloody hand with political discord,
03:18social injustice, endless war
03:22and ultimately a complete failure
03:25to forge a common political identity,
03:28despite all that shared Greekness.
03:37And that's the story that I have for you now.
03:40It's the story of everything, for better or worse.
04:11The last time we met the Greeks, they were a long way from home,
04:15a predatory army camped outside the walls of Troy,
04:19intent on vengeance and plunder.
04:25Homer's Iliad gave the heroes who fought in the Trojan War
04:29epic grandeur, and it left the Greeks who came after
04:33feeling they had a lot to live up to.
04:37But though they dreamed of being an Achilles,
04:40sacking cities and slaying their enemies,
04:43their glory would come from the hard graft that was needed
04:46to rebuild their civilisation.
04:54To understand these Greeks,
04:56you have to leave the killing fields of Troy behind
04:59and travel west to the Greek mainland.
05:06This is Boeotia, in the heart of Greece.
05:12It's a very long way from the world of heroes and battles.
05:18But this landscape has its poetry too.
05:23Though of a very different kind to the Iliad.
05:26If Homer's theme was the tragedy of war,
05:29the poet who wrote about this poetry
05:32explored the everyday heroism of work.
05:37Gods and men disapprove of the man who lives without working.
05:41Wealth brings worth and prestige.
05:44But whatever your fortune, work is preferable.
05:48If your spirit yearns for riches, do as follows and work.
05:53Work upon work.
05:56This is Ascra, a beautiful spot at the head of the Valley of the Muses.
06:01Ascra never really amounted to much.
06:04More of a village than a town.
06:06There was certainly no Athens.
06:08But Ascra deserves its measure of fame
06:11for being the home town of Hesiod the Great.
06:14He was the king of Ascra.
06:16He was the king of Ascra.
06:18He was the king of Ascra.
06:20He was the king of Ascra.
06:22Ascra deserves its measure of fame
06:24for being the home town of Hesiod,
06:26the poet laureate of the new down-to-earth Greece
06:29which followed the Age of Heroes.
06:36We're not sure of Hesiod's dates,
06:38but most experts believe that he owned and worked a small farm
06:42somewhere in the valley in the period immediately after Homer.
06:47This puts him sometime after 700 BC,
06:51when the Greek world was emerging from the darkness
06:54that had followed the collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms of Mycenae
06:58some six centuries before.
07:01After a long period of stagnation, things were changing fast.
07:10Tribal systems that had returned during the Dark Ages
07:15were breaking down
07:17as the more impersonal mechanisms of civilisation revived.
07:21Loyalties and obligations based on family, kith and kin
07:25dissolved as colonisation, trade and a surge in population
07:30offered people new opportunities for personal enrichment,
07:34undermining notions of the collective and the common good.
07:44New technologies, from metallurgy to the alphabet,
07:48accelerated these processes
07:50as the Greeks reconnected with the modern world of the late Iron Age.
07:55And in this world, the voices and opinions of ordinary people
08:00would play a vital role in the shaping of these new societies.
08:07Crucially in the new Greece,
08:09the role and status of the high kings of the Mycenaean Age
08:12were called into question like never before.
08:15Typically, these new settlements were small
08:18and the gap between rich and poor was small too.
08:21When you could see the top of the social pyramid,
08:24it became much easier to ask,
08:26why is he up there and why am I down here?
08:30And why should he tell me how to live my life?
08:43In Works and Days, Hesiod's most famous poem,
08:47he tells the parable of the nightingale
08:50struggling in the claws of the hawk.
08:53Why do you cry out? asked the hawk.
08:55One much stronger than you holds you fast
08:58and you must go wherever I take you.
09:01But the point is that Hesiod was crying out,
09:04railing against the corruption of the new age of Arn
09:07and threatening divine retribution.
09:13There is angry murmuring when right is dragged off
09:16wherever the bribe-eaters choose,
09:19as they give their crooked verdicts.
09:23Beware of this, lords, and keep your judgments straight.
09:27A man fashions ill for himself who fashions ill for another.
09:34The all-seeing eye of Zeus
09:37sees the kind of justice the community has within it.
09:43The struggle between elite privilege and ancient rights
09:47would be a theme for politics as well as poetry.
09:51The battleground between hoi oligoi, the few,
09:54and hoi poloi, the many.
09:56But the arena for this battle
09:58wouldn't be out of the way places like Ascra,
10:00but the city-states,
10:02the nuclei around which the new Greece was beginning to crystallise.
10:13The city-state, or polis,
10:15was a remarkably successful and adaptable concept.
10:21Over a period of about 500 years,
10:24starting around 700 BC,
10:26some 1,500 were established in Greece
10:29and in Greek colonies from Spain to Afghanistan.
10:35Some, like Athens, Sparta, Argos or Corinth,
10:38had populations topping 10,000 and territories to match,
10:43but the average city-state had a population of around 1,000.
10:48So these were intimate, independent places.
10:53Geography added to this sense of inwardness.
10:57Cut off by rugged mountains and hemmed in by the encroaching sea,
11:02few city-states had the elbow room needed to become powers in their land.
11:09Those that did owed their prominence to powerful strategic locations,
11:14a pinch point along trade routes
11:16or a defensible citadel on a rocky hill,
11:19which both protected and controlled the territory below.
11:27At nearly 2,000 feet above sea level,
11:30the Acrocorinth of Corinth is the most impressive.
11:38From up here, one of the defining characteristics of the city-state
11:42is immediately clear.
11:44The political centre is embedded in the farmlands that surround it.
11:49With one foot in the street and the other in the fields,
11:53these city-states bred citizen farmers,
11:56hyphenated people for these hyphenated places.
12:02Small, inward-looking and isolated,
12:05the city-states ran on a brand of local politics
12:08that was intensely personal.
12:10More village pump than city hall,
12:13with all the predictable rivalries, feuds and vendettas.
12:17But it was in the interests of the most powerful clans to work together,
12:22because if they didn't, they knew a big man could emerge
12:26who would rule over everyone.
12:29By the 8th century BC, most Greek city-states had kicked out their kings.
12:34The ancient world's default position when it came to political leadership.
12:38And this meant that the power and prestige,
12:41which had previously been the preserve of individuals,
12:44was now divvied out amongst the members of the elites, the oligarchs.
12:50Oligarchy broke down kingship into its component parts,
12:54justice, war, religion and so on,
12:57creating a whole new range of public offices
12:59for ambitious aristocrats to fill.
13:02And it could also impose time limits on length of service,
13:06introducing the hallowed concept of Buggins' turn into the political process.
13:11My turn to be archon this year, your turn next.
13:22Passions inside the city-state ran high.
13:26This wasn't just the place you came to buy and sell or do business.
13:30It was the place where you learnt to be a politician.
13:35A creature of the polis, a political animal.
13:41So your polis provided an economic hub and security during times of danger.
13:46But it went deeper than that.
13:48The polis was something to which you belonged,
13:50the place that gave you your identity.
13:52According to Aristotle, the polis completed you as a human being.
13:57A man who, in his self-sufficiency, has no use for others, he wrote,
14:01is like a beast or a god.
14:09Love of polis was so intense,
14:12it was sometimes described as himeros, sexual desire.
14:21But alongside love was the opposite, hatred of the other lot.
14:26In fact, opposition and polarities
14:28were central to the Greek way of making sense of their world.
14:34The best way to define anything was to say what it was not.
14:38So cold was the opposite of heat,
14:41dark was the opposite of light,
14:43peace was the opposite of war.
14:46Athens, the opposite of Sparta.
14:50This black-and-white take on the world brought a clarity of thought
14:54that would spark the intellectual, philosophical and scientific revolutions
14:59of the Greek-speaking world.
15:01But it also gave politics a rancorous edge.
15:05White hats versus black hats.
15:09And if you're not with us, you're against us.
15:20Stirred by powerful and contradictory passions,
15:23the city-states of ancient Greece were a long way
15:26from the rational and well-ordered utopias which they aspired to be.
15:31They were like test tubes packed full of combustible materials,
15:35always threatening to blow up.
15:43Blame the ghost of Achilles for the bitter rivalry
15:46that divided the city-states, internally and externally.
15:51All Greek males were haunted by the matchless warrior of the Iliad.
15:57Achilles taught them the lesson that he had learnt from his father.
16:01Always be first and excel the others in all things.
16:05Glory cannot be shared.
16:12The Achilles principle was at the heart of the events
16:15that took place here every four years.
16:25This is Olympia, home of the famous games.
16:30But there was nothing playful about what went on here.
16:35The games were a deadly serious affair.
16:39The first Olympic Games took place in 776 BC,
16:43and the first event was a 200m sprint.
16:47Over the next 1,000 years, more events were added.
16:51But that was the essence of the games,
16:53a mad dash from here to there to discover who was the best.
16:57It was none of this pious nonsense of,
16:59oh, it's the taking part that matters.
17:01The Greeks always played to win.
17:04There was no silver or bronze for the runners-up.
17:07All they could expect were derision and ignominy.
17:11The poet Pindar describes them slinking back home,
17:15spurned by their mothers and girlfriends,
17:18lurking in byways, hoping to avoid their enemies,
17:22stung by their ill fortune.
17:25Losers.
17:28The temples at Olympia were stuffed full of mementos
17:32of athletic prowess, dedicated to the gods.
17:37But they were also hung with military gear,
17:40much of it showing signs of active service.
17:47This was the place where the Greeks had their first games.
17:51Much of it showing signs of active service.
17:59Evidently, the Greeks saw a link
18:01between prowess on the sports field and on the battlefield.
18:05But in practice, they were very different things.
18:09For a start, there were no team sports in the Olympics.
18:13But when it came to the business of war, teamwork was essential.
18:22This is hoplite gear,
18:25battle kit for a hugely effective infantry fighting technique.
18:31Hoplites formed into densely packed ranks, known as a phalanx,
18:36their round shields overlapping,
18:38protecting their neighbour rather than themselves.
18:43Committed to mutual protection,
18:45the phalanx advanced as a unit in carefully choreographed movements,
18:50each fighter a small but essential part
18:53of a formidable fighting machine.
18:58Two phalanxes butted up against one another on the battlefield.
19:02There was no room for the heroic man-to-man combat
19:05described in the Iliad.
19:07No-one could break ranks, the line had to hold.
19:11This was unheroic push and shove.
19:14Brutal, collective, anonymous.
19:17A rugby scrum with spear points and edged weapons.
19:24But fighting for your city was an important source of kudos,
19:28and the introduction of hoplite tactics made it possible
19:31for more people to take part than ever before.
19:36Some body armour, a helmet, a spear and a shield to protect your neighbour
19:41bring those to the field of battle and you can expect to get a game.
19:48The hoplite revolution, as it's been rightly called,
19:53was far more than just a matter of military tactics.
19:56It brought with it profound political change.
19:59As Aristotle would later observe,
20:01the class that does the fighting wields the power.
20:05And as more and more ordinary citizens stood shield to shield
20:08with the well-to-do, the whole balance of power within the city-state
20:12must have been called into question
20:14every time the phalanx advanced into battle.
20:27Given the threat of war from without and civil war from within,
20:31it's not surprising that by the end of the 7th century BC,
20:35the critical question for the city-states was,
20:38how should we best be governed?
20:40The Greeks, being Greek, could never agree on a single answer.
20:44But the ones they did come up with were test runs
20:47for many of the political concepts that we live with today.
20:51Totalitarianism, collectivism, tyranny, oligarchy, democracy,
20:57all of them were tried out in the test tubes that were the city-states.
21:03The Greeks seemed prepared to consider any system
21:06that might deliver the blessings of good order and self-sufficiency.
21:11Anything, that is, except monarchy.
21:14All over Greece, royal dynasties were out.
21:17Kings were a relic of the past.
21:20Or for the barbarians.
21:25But there was one exception.
21:29On the Greek mainland, in the heart of the Peloponnese,
21:32was a city-state that didn't just have one king, it had two.
21:38And that was just the beginning,
21:40for Sparta was the strangest test tube in the whole laboratory.
21:52Sparta was a looking-glass world.
21:55The ingredients that you would expect to find in a city-state
21:58were absent here.
22:00There was no one single political centre.
22:03There were no city walls.
22:05No public buildings to speak of.
22:08No written laws, no money.
22:11And a constitution apparently designed by Heath Robinson.
22:21Sparta's two rival dynasties were guaranteed to get in each other's way.
22:27But there was also a public assembly that voted but didn't debate,
22:31and five annually elected overseers
22:34who squabbled over the levers of this ramshackle political machine.
22:38This partly radical, partly authoritarian system
22:42was overseen by a council of elders,
22:45presumably the only ones with enough experience to make sense of it all.
22:51This complex constitution was designed to defend the people
22:55and was designed to defy the laws of political gravity.
22:59Its aim was to create and sustain a stable society
23:03based on the absolute equality of all its male citizens,
23:07the homeoi, the equals as they were known.
23:10This ideal was reinforced by a strict code of behaviour
23:13that suppressed any outward signs of status or wealth,
23:17from clothes to food to houses.
23:20There was to be no us and them,
23:22destroying the unity of this totalitarian utopia,
23:26where everything which wasn't forbidden was, of course, compulsory.
23:34There was a reason for all this extreme social engineering.
23:39The Spartans believed that they had achieved good order
23:42and self-sufficiency here in the fertile Eurotas Valley.
23:47And they were prepared to do all that they could to hang on to them,
23:51as their neighbours had learnt to their cost.
23:55The rise of Sparta came at the expense of the Mycenaeans,
23:59whose territory lay about 40 miles to the west,
24:02over there, across the other side of the Tegitos Mountains.
24:06Sometime in the 8th century BC,
24:08Spartan hoplites crossed the mountain passes
24:11and waged a long and bitter war against their neighbours.
24:15It took 20 years, but finally the Spartans defeated the Mycenaeans
24:19and reduced them en masse to the status of helots, feudal slaves.
24:27The radical reordering of Spartan society that followed the war
24:31turned just another city-state into a full-time military training camp,
24:36where the needs of the individual
24:38were sacrificed for the good of the collective.
24:41But it was the helots who sacrificed most.
24:46The helots served the Spartans as body servants, shield-bearers,
24:50cooks, potters, breeding machines and agricultural labourers,
24:55handing over half their harvests to a military elite
24:59whose prime purpose was now their subjugation.
25:07But the Spartans were also tough on themselves.
25:12They killed off any newborn male deemed to be weak or infirm.
25:18The ones that survived were sent at the age of seven to the Agoge,
25:22a brat camp to end all brat camps.
25:26Here they began 13 years of savage training
25:30to prepare them for their vocation as full-time warriors.
25:35With the men away training, fighting,
25:38or just hanging out together in the all-male barracks
25:41where homosexuality was obligatory,
25:44Spartan women enjoyed educational, economic and sexual freedoms
25:49that were unheard of in the ancient world,
25:52indeed in some parts of the modern world today.
26:05The rest of the Greek world looked on all of this
26:08with a mixture of horror and fascination,
26:11but they accepted the Spartan assertion
26:13that their extreme social system was, in fact, traditional.
26:21But despite this reputation for conservatism,
26:24Sparta was no more stable than the other city-states.
26:29In its passionate desire to keep things the way they had always been,
26:33it was constantly having to tinker with its time-honoured traditions.
26:37In times of manpower shortage,
26:39a constant problem for these elitist warriors,
26:42they even had to admit they despised helots into their ranks
26:46to fight and die alongside them.
26:50Like everyone else, Sparta was struggling to come to terms
26:53with a fundamental but unsettling truth
26:56about the stability of all civilisations.
27:00The Greek philosopher Heraclitus would sum it up like this.
27:05To Panterre, everything changes.
27:09And not even the most conservative society
27:12can step into the same river twice.
27:21In Athens, the river of change flowed just as forcefully,
27:25but here there was a greater willingness to go with the flow.
27:29Like most of the other city-states,
27:31Athens had shrugged off its hereditary kings early on,
27:35replacing monarchy with oligarchy,
27:37which is where things began to get interesting.
27:46As the Greek city-states began to emerge from the Dark Ages,
27:50they began to reconnect with the rest of the ancient world
27:53through trade and colonisation.
27:55This new entrepreneurial activity was privately funded
27:59and the profits remained in private hands.
28:02So, in Athens, the rich got richer as the poor got poorer.
28:06And many had to sell themselves and their families into slavery
28:10to service mounting debts.
28:12So, towards the end of the 7th century BC,
28:15the Athenian poor were becoming the helots of the Athenian rich.
28:20In Sparta, the destabilising effects of inequality
28:24had been neutralised by a social revolution.
28:27But in Athens, the ruling class reluctantly trod the path
28:31of cautious reform.
28:36This is the Areopagus, or Rock of Ares,
28:39and from this lofty perch during the 6th century BC,
28:43the Council of the Areopagus governed the affairs of Athens.
28:47Its membership was exclusively aristocratic,
28:50and all who previously held the position of archon
28:53were chief magistrate.
28:55So what we have here is the perfect closed circle
28:58of aristocratic power, self-selecting and self-serving,
29:02insulated from the voices of the agora,
29:05or the marketplace, down below.
29:12But the wealth gap was becoming so big
29:15that it threatened the unity and stability of Athens.
29:22In 594 BC, the Areopagus chose Solon to be chief magistrate.
29:28He was an aristocrat, but not a wealthy one.
29:31In fact, he had crossed the class lines
29:34and worked as a merchant in order to support himself.
29:37He also had a reputation for fairness,
29:40which was recognised by rich and poor,
29:43Solon granted protection from debt slavery
29:46and access to the law courts to the poorest in the community.
29:50Careful reforms, designed to diffuse tensions
29:54rather than transform a society.
29:58Cautious as they were, they were like pebbles that precede an avalanche.
30:02Within a century, Athens would have a new form of government,
30:06as the oligos, or oligarchs,
30:09would have a new form of government,
30:11as the oligos, the few, retreated step by reluctant step
30:15in the face of the power of the demos, the people.
30:29In the stories told about Athens,
30:31reformers like Solon are inevitably the good guys.
30:36Far-sighted visionaries fighting the good fight,
30:39paving the way for the triumph of democracy.
30:46But, of course, it was more complicated than that.
30:51Solon's reforms were more the product of the fears of the ruling class
30:56than the idealism of a would-be democrat.
30:59Placating the masses headed off the threat of civil war.
31:03The trick for the aristocracy was to feed the many-headed beast
31:07without being swallowed by it.
31:11But in the political jungle of ancient Greece,
31:14there were other animals on the prowl.
31:18The tyrants.
31:21Today, in the democratic West, we don't look on them kindly,
31:25but their influence was just as significant as the reformers
31:28in the story of the Greek city-states.
31:32There was once another Parthenon,
31:34which stood where this Parthenon now stands,
31:37building every bit as iconic as the one that we're so familiar with.
31:41It was built by Peisistratus,
31:43one of the most intriguing characters from the early days of classical Athens.
31:48In 546 BC, he became Tyrannos, or Tyrant of Athens.
31:53In Greek-speak, that meant a leader who had illegally seized power
31:57and then maintained his position by appealing to the people,
32:01rather than the elites.
32:03Now, Peisistratus was guilty on both counts.
32:06But during his 20-year reign, Athens would come of age
32:10as one of the dominant cities of Athens.
32:13He first came to prominence by allying himself with the hill-dwellers,
32:17the lowest of the low in the pecking order of Athenian politics,
32:21turning them into a formidable power base.
32:25He then faked an attack on himself,
32:27which persuaded the Athenians to vote him a bodyguard.
32:32He was the first of his kind.
32:34He was the first of his kind.
32:36He was the first of his kind.
32:38He was the first of his kind.
32:40He persuaded the Athenians to vote him a bodyguard.
32:43He used these club-wielding thugs to stage his first coup,
32:48occupying the Acropolis and declaring himself Tyrant.
32:53The Athenians eventually dislodged him and threw him out of the city,
32:57but he wasn't finished.
33:00He drove back into the city in a chariot,
33:02accompanied by the tallest woman that he could find,
33:05kitted out as the goddess Pallas Athena.
33:08She commanded the citizens of her city to take back the prodigal son,
33:13and the stunned Athenians obeyed.
33:19The protection of the fake Athena didn't last for long,
33:22and Peisistratus was exiled for a second time.
33:27He then came here to Larian, some 40 miles away from Athens,
33:32where silver was both mined and processed.
33:35He spent a decade here, becoming filthy rich,
33:38before, in 546 BC, returning to Athens,
33:42but this time at the head of a mercenary army.
33:45The city was now his.
33:59What followed wasn't bloodshed or revenge,
34:02but a renaissance, as Peisistratus embarked
34:05on a series of very public, grand projects.
34:09He commissioned the first edition of Homer's Iliad,
34:12an event of huge cultural significance for the Greeks,
34:16and for the world.
34:18And he commissioned the first Parthenon,
34:21the remnants of which can be seen today in the new Acropolis Museum.
34:27Athens was Athens long before democracy
34:30came along to claim it as its own.
34:38This brand of public works and canny populism
34:41helped Peisistratus establish a dynasty,
34:44but his son and successor, Hippias, fell foul of the liberators.
34:50Hormodius and his lover, Aris the Gaeton,
34:53ended tyranny in Athens by murdering the tyrant's brother.
35:00This created a political crisis, which led to the ousting of the tyrant
35:05and a return to power of the oligarchs.
35:12Now all too aware of the Athenians' weakness
35:15for charismatic, unscrupulous chances,
35:17the oligarchs decided to neutralise the threat of tyranny for good
35:21by finally offering the despised Deimos
35:24a real stake in the running of their city.
35:27The final churn of the political cycle
35:29that had begun with Solon's cautious reforms
35:32came with the rise to power of Cleisthenes.
35:35Cleisthenes was one of those canny aristocrats
35:37who realised that his own class
35:39were going to have to give up some of their privileges
35:42in order to conserve the good order of the city-state as a whole.
35:50Cleisthenes laid the foundations
35:52of the first recognisably democratic system in Athens.
35:56Under his reforms, elections to the public bodies,
35:59political and judicial,
36:01were thrown open to all male citizens, chosen by lot.
36:08Members of the boule, or council,
36:10swore an oath to advise according to the laws
36:13what was best for the people.
36:16Cleisthenes called his reforms isonomia,
36:19equality before the law.
36:21Hesiod would surely have approved.
36:27Cleisthenes is also credited with the introduction of these.
36:31Ostrica.
36:33It took 6,000 of these pottery sherds with your name scratched on them
36:37for you to be ostracised.
36:39Exile from Athens for ten years.
36:45This system was originally designed
36:47to guard against the return of the tyrants.
36:50But, predictably, it soon became a political weapon
36:53to be used against anyone who became too prominent.
36:56It's also worth noting that one of the first victims
36:59of this tall poppy syndrome
37:01was the father of democracy himself, Cleisthenes.
37:12By the beginning of the 5th century BC,
37:14the city-states of Greece
37:16had each evolved their own distinctive set of characteristics.
37:20They were all Greek, but they were Greek in their own peculiar way.
37:26It would take an external threat of apocalyptic proportions
37:30to force them to pull together.
37:35In the centuries since the Dark Ages,
37:38during which the Greeks had been slowly groping their way back
37:41towards the light of civilisation,
37:43in the east, mighty empires had come and gone.
37:48The Assyrians fell to an alliance of the Medes and the Babylonians,
37:52and they, in turn, had been devoured by a new power in the land.
37:57The Persians.
38:00By the 5th century BC, the Persian Empire was a monster.
38:07Five million square miles, spanning three continents,
38:12from Afghanistan in the east to Libya in the west.
38:16And on the hem of this mighty empire,
38:19Greek colonists had stitched a dozen or so city-states.
38:25The fate of the Ionian cities, as they were known,
38:28would entangle the Persians and Greeks for centuries to come.
38:35Say what you like about the Greeks,
38:37they certainly didn't lack self-confidence.
38:39According to Herodotus, the Greek historian,
38:42one Spartan king sent a herald to Cyrus, great king of Persia,
38:47demanding that he not harm the Greek cities in his domain.
38:51The Persian king's response was surprisingly reasonable.
38:56Who were the Spartans?
39:06The provocations didn't end there, but it would be a tyrant,
39:10one of those catalysts of the Greek world,
39:12who would spark the first great war of civilisation between east and west.
39:19His name was Aristagoras.
39:21He was tyrant of the city of Miletus, one of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor,
39:26that paid tribute to the Persian great king.
39:30Restless and ambitious, like all tyrants,
39:33his first move had been to try and annex the Greek island of Naxos
39:37for the great king.
39:39But his enterprise failed.
39:41He turned on his Persian master
39:43and stirred up rebellion amongst the Ionian cities.
39:51Aristagoras, imperial lackey, turned Hellenic freedom fighter,
39:55headed for the Greek mainland,
39:57looking for military support for his plans.
40:00Sparta, as cautious and conservative as ever, turned him down.
40:04But he had more luck in Athens,
40:06the city always willing to give a hearing to a silver-tongued demagogue.
40:10First he appealed to their greed,
40:12telling them about all the easy pickings to be had in the east.
40:16And then he appealed to the Greek thing,
40:18wrapping up his opportunism in the cloak of a pan-Hellenic crusade.
40:23The Athenians liked what they heard
40:25and sent 25 ships to support the rebellion.
40:28These ships, Herodotus wrote, were the beginning of all evils,
40:32for Greeks and barbarians alike.
40:37The bloody sequel could be told in a sequence of resonant names
40:43and noteworthy dates.
40:46Sardis, the Persian capital in Ionia,
40:49burnt by Aristagoras in 498 BC.
40:54Miletus, Aristagoras' city, destroyed by the Persians
40:58and its population massacred in 494 BC.
41:03The Plains of Marathon on the Greek mainland,
41:06where a Persian punitive force was repulsed
41:09by hoplites from Athens and Plataea in 490 BC.
41:15Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans
41:18and 1,500 hoplites from Thebes and Thespiae
41:22sacrificed themselves trying to halt the Persian onslaught in 480 BC.
41:28Athens, occupied and burnt in revenge for Sardis by the Persians
41:32that same year.
41:36The Bay of Salamis, where a Greek fleet led by Athens
41:40defeated the Persians also that year.
41:45Plataea, where an army of Greeks led by Sparta
41:48defeated the Persians in 479 BC.
41:51The last great battle of the Persian Wars.
42:15At Marathon, at Thermopylae,
42:18and here at the Bay of Salamis,
42:20the Greeks had resisted the greatest empire
42:23that the ancient world had ever seen,
42:25preserving their freedoms against all the odds.
42:29Forced to fight together for once,
42:31they'd faced their own Dunkirk, Blitz and Battle of Britain.
42:37And they had endured.
42:41You might think that this was the perfect time for the Greek thing,
42:45to take some kind of permanent political form.
42:48An alliance, a federation,
42:50or perhaps even a United States of Greece.
42:52But it didn't happen.
42:54The two dominant city-states, Athens and Sparta,
42:57sniffed around each other for a while,
42:59foregoing their separate ways with their allies.
43:02And when they next came together,
43:04they'd be at each other's throats in a destructive war
43:07which would ultimately cost both sides everything that they had.
43:12The truth is that Sparta and Athens had become so different
43:16that they had difficulty understanding each other.
43:20There was an antagonism built to last.
43:22Even today, Sparta versus Athens remains shorthand
43:26for opposite ends of the political spectrum
43:29that runs from totalitarianism to radical democracy.
43:34Sparta distrusted Athenian democracy,
43:38fearing that it would infect their helot slaves
43:41with the virus of freedom.
43:43It was also unwilling to seize the opportunities
43:46and obligations that came with victory over the Persians.
43:51It was said that after the Persian War, Sparta slept.
44:01Athens, on the other hand, was galvanised by the Persian war.
44:05Athens, on the other hand,
44:07was galvanised by the adrenaline rush of victory.
44:11The Ionian Awakening, as it was called,
44:14embraced art, architecture and theatre,
44:17as well as science and philosophy.
44:20But this first European renaissance
44:23was powered by radical democracy.
44:36During the Persian War, as the enemy advanced towards Athens,
44:40every available man of fighting age
44:43had hurried down to the port of the Piraeus,
44:46boarded the triremes that were moored there
44:48and rowed out to face the Persian fleet in the Bay of Salamis.
44:54You didn't even need a shield to fight in this battle.
44:57All you needed was a rowing cushion
44:59and enough muscle to drive the bronze ram
45:02with which your ship was armed into the hull of the enemy.
45:09In the democratic stew of the rowing benches,
45:12aristocratic sweat mixed with that of the lowest of the low,
45:16and the war against the Persians became a people's war.
45:21When the war was finished, the people expected that to be remembered,
45:25and the naval rabble, as their enemies called them,
45:28would become a power to be reckoned with in Athens.
45:33Post-war Athens was the Conservatives' worst nightmare,
45:38a vocal, powerful, self-confident citizenship
45:42under the spell of a charismatic democrat called Pericles,
45:46a radical aristocrat with the tactical skills and oratorical training
45:51to turn the aspirations of the naval rabble into a political reality.
45:58Pericles completed the transfer of power
46:01from an aristocratic warrior elite with a stake in the land
46:05to a seaborne working class
46:07which had emerged during the Persian War as the city's protector
46:11and which was now its master.
46:18Under Pericles, democracy, people power,
46:21became inseparable from thalassocracy, sea power.
46:32But people power did not come cheap.
46:35With all of the city's male citizens
46:37now being paid to serve on city councils and juries,
46:41and with more money being poured into the shipbuilding programme,
46:44who would foot the bill for all of this democracy?
46:49Fortunately, Athens had armies of slaves
46:52to do the dirty work in the fields and the mines.
46:55But there were others who were also paid to do the dirty work.
47:00But there were others who were also ripe for exploitation.
47:03Her allies.
47:08If you think that your tax bill is too big,
47:11then just take a look at this.
47:13This 3.5-metre-high inscription
47:16records the payments made over 14 years
47:19by members of the Delian League,
47:21a collection of around 170 Greek city-states
47:25who, after the Persian Wars,
47:27joined Athens in an alliance of mutual protection.
47:35Originally, the League's treasury
47:37had been on the sacred island of Delos,
47:39but in 451 BC, about 25 years after the defeat of the Persians,
47:44the bank and all of its assets had been relocated to Athens.
47:51That shift revealed the League's true nature,
47:54and an alliance of equals had become, in effect,
47:57an Athenian empire,
47:59bankrolled by the contributions of its vassal states.
48:08Under the seductive terms of the League,
48:11members could contribute ships and men to fight for the common cause,
48:15or they could contribute money
48:17and Athens would take care of the fighting for them.
48:20Most League members preferred to pay rather than fight,
48:24and so the Athenians used their money
48:26to build more and more triremes,
48:28which made them more and more powerful.
48:32The Athenian ships carried names like Freedom,
48:36but it proved to be Freedom for Athens rather than its allies.
48:45The allies soon discovered that the ships that they had paid for
48:49were being used not only to fight against their common enemies,
48:52but also to keep the League together by force, if necessary.
48:57So, within two generations,
48:59the Mutual Defence League had become an imperial protection racket.
49:07As the power of Athens grew,
49:09the city-states outside the Delian League
49:12looked to Sparta to protect them from its crushing embrace.
49:17Sparta dithered,
49:19but finally, prompted by fear as much as fighting spirit...
49:25..it struck.
49:47HE SIGHS
49:57The vicious conflict between the Athenians and Spartans
50:00goes under the label of the Peloponnesian War.
50:03This just shows you the value of historical labels.
50:07In the 27 years that the Peloponnesian War raged,
50:10the Spartan heartland here in the Peloponnese was rarely troubled.
50:17Athens was more directly affected.
50:19Each year in the late summer,
50:21Spartan hoplites persistently and doggedly marched north
50:25to disrupt the harvest.
50:27But with its full coffers and naval supremacy,
50:30Athens could afford to buy in what it couldn't grow.
50:33No, as usual, it was the poor, bloody allies,
50:36both Athenian and Spartan,
50:38who paid the full price for this decades-long brawl.
50:42Their Athenian Spartan masters spent almost as much time and energy
50:47bullying them into line as they did bludgeoning their common foe.
50:51Like the hoplite phalanx, the line had to hold.
51:05There is something depressingly futile
51:08about all this Greek-on-Greek violence.
51:12But if we judge it harshly,
51:14it's only because the Greek thing allows us to.
51:19Thanks to historians as inquisitive as Herodotus
51:22and as clear-sighted as Thucydides,
51:25both products of the Greek thing,
51:27we can understand, and therefore deplore,
51:30the vanity, viciousness and short-sightedness
51:33that drove the ideal of Greekness onto the rocks.
51:42We have Thucydides to thank for a dramatic historical reconstruction,
51:47which has framed all subsequent debates about the morality of war
51:51and the reality of politics.
51:53It is known as the Melian Dialogue,
51:55and it concerns events that took place in 415 BC,
51:59roughly the midpoint of the Peloponnesian War,
52:03when the island of Melos, a reluctant ally of Sparta,
52:07was forced by the arrival of an Athenian fleet on its shores
52:11to make a fateful decision.
52:13Either join the Athenians or face destruction.
52:19The Athenian position was stated bluntly by its envoys.
52:24The question of justice only comes
52:27when both sides feel under equal pressure.
52:30In reality, the stronger take what they can
52:34and the weak concede what they must.
52:38But will you not allow us to remain neutral
52:41and be friends instead of enemies?
52:43What would you lose from that?
52:46Your enmity is less dangerous to us than your friendship.
52:51Your hate is an argument of our power,
52:54your friendship of our weakness.
53:04We've been here before.
53:07300 years earlier, the poet Hesiod had described the nightingale
53:12crying out in the talons of the hawk.
53:15"'Why do you cry out?' asks the hawk.
53:18"'One far stronger than you holds you fast,
53:21"'and you must go wherever I take you.'"
53:24For all the subtle niceties of the debate,
53:27that, in effect, was how the Athenian hawk
53:30regarded the Melian nightingale.
53:33In the end, Melos defied Athens
53:35and the Athenians made good on their menaces.
53:38They took the island, killed the men,
53:40deported the women and children
53:42and repopulated it with their own people.
53:44Some dialogue.
53:48But it wasn't just the tyranny at the heart of Athenian democracy
53:52that was exposed by this cruel war.
53:55The ideals of Sparta, too, were called into question as never before.
54:00Their merciless exploitation of the Helots continued unabated,
54:04even as they increasingly called on these semi-slaves
54:07to make up for their dwindling manpower.
54:10But ruthless suppression of the Helots could not prevent threats
54:14that came from within the ranks of the equals.
54:17As the war dragged on, the egalitarian warrior code,
54:21that had done so much to create cohesion in Spartan society, disintegrated.
54:27One of the few glittering success stories of Sparta's dogged
54:31and undistinguished war was Gallippus,
54:34a general who was dispatched to Sicily
54:36to help the city of Syracuse resist a massive Athenian invasion.
54:41This bare-footed warrior in a red cloak
54:44single-handedly helped stiffen the resolve of the Syracusans
54:48and then led them on the offensive,
54:50before eventually inflicting a terrible defeat
54:53upon the Athenians.
54:58So far, so Spartan.
55:00But just a few years later,
55:02this same Gallippus was exposed as an embezzler.
55:05Silver that had been sent by the Persian king
55:08to aid the Spartan war effort
55:10was found hidden in the thatched roof of his house.
55:16What this squalid story suggests
55:19is that the further Spartan warriors went from home
55:22and the more they saw of the world
55:24beyond the narrow horizons of the Eurotas Valley,
55:27the less satisfied they were with the austere utopia they'd created there.
55:32If the Athenians had been corrupted by power,
55:35the Spartans lost their innocence by exposure to a wider world
55:39that they had struggled for so long to keep at bay.
55:44The war without end ended here,
55:47at the mouth of the Goat River on the Dardanelles.
55:51It was the Spartan general Lysander who dealt the final blow
55:55with a fleet bought and paid for by Persian silver.
56:00Lysander trapped and destroyed the Athenian fleet on the beach here,
56:04seizing control of this vital waterway
56:07and severing the link between the two.
56:10With no fleet to defend it and no corn to feed it,
56:14Athens was defenceless and the city surrendered in 404 BC.
56:21Just under 80 years before,
56:23it had been the barbarian army of Persia that took the city.
56:27Now it was an army of Greeks.
56:30The city was war-torn,
56:32and the city was under the control of the Spartans.
56:36This area of western Turkey
56:38played a major role in the history of ancient Greece.
56:42Just south-west of here is the city of Troy,
56:45where, according to ancient legend, at least,
56:48the Greek army fought a long and bitter war
56:51with the Spartans and the Athenians.
56:54It was here that the Spartans and the Athenians
56:57were defeated by the Greeks,
56:59and the city was conquered by the Greeks.
57:02The Greek army fought a long and bitter war
57:05against a foreign power,
57:07right at the very beginning of Greek history.
57:11While the Peloponnesian War, which ended here,
57:14lasted longer than the Trojan War,
57:16it pitted Greek against Greek in a merciless conflict,
57:20which in the end compromised the ideals of everybody that took part.
57:25And it finished with a foreign ruler,
57:28a Persian barbarian, no less, pulling the strings,
57:31whilst Greeks slaughtered Greek
57:33in the name of democracy, freedom and justice.
57:39A century later, the philosopher Aristotle wrote,
57:43if only the Greeks could achieve a single politeia, or constitution,
57:48then they would rule the whole world.
57:51It was, and would remain, the biggest, if only, of ancient Greece.
58:02In the end, it would take a dynasty of outsiders
58:06to unite the fractious Greeks.
58:08Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander,
58:11known to history as the Great.
58:14Alexander would carry the Greek thing forward
58:17on the spear points of his Macedonian army.
58:21And the ancient world would never be the same again.
58:32There's double drama coming up now on BBC HD
58:36as Luther has to bury his feelings at 10.45 after Mad Men, next.