Before Cleisthenes, the lawgiver Solon, around 594 BCE, made laws that evened out the political power of Athenian citizens and gave democracy its groundwork. Around 507 BCE Cleisthenes brought in a new form of government that today is recognized as democracy. The word democracy comes from the Greek dΔmos, the whole body of citizens, and kratos, meaning rule. The Assembly met at least once a month, more likely two or three times, on the Pnyx hill, in a space that could hold around 6,000 citizens. A council of 500 citizens, chosen by lot and serving for one year, prepared the business for the Assembly. The Athenians chose many officials by lottery because, in theory, pure chance could not be influenced by money or popularity.
Every day more than 500 jurors were chosen by lot from a pool of male citizens older than 30. Ostracism let the Athenians vote to send a citizen out of Athens for 10 years; voters scratched a name on a piece of broken pottery called an ostrakon. But Athenian democracy left out women, foreigners and the many enslaved people. Citizens were probably only 10-20% of the population of the polis, and perhaps only about 3,000 of them took an active part in politics. Critics of the system, such as Thucydides and Aristophanes, pointed out that a rich elite dominated the proceedings. They said the people could be swayed by a good speaker. In Athens in the middle of the 4th century BCE there were about 100,000 citizens, about 10,000 resident foreigners and 150,000 slaves.
Sparta had three main groups: the Spartans, who were full citizens, the helots, who were enslaved farm workers, and the perioeci, who were neither slaves nor citizens. The Spartans depended on the helots, whose name means captives, to do the farming and daily work. The helots were fellow Greeks the Spartans had conquered and turned into slaves. Sparta had two royal families, with annual officials called ephors, a Council of Elders, and a gathering of Spartans over thirty. Spartan boys left home at age 7 and entered a hard state training program called the agoge. The agoge stressed obedience, endurance, courage and self-control.
It was said that Sparta used bars of iron as money until its first coins, which came in the reign of King Areus. The word laconic, meaning pithy and concise, comes from the Spartans, who prized brevity of speech. The word spartan means self-restrained, simple, frugal and austere. Unlike Athens, a centre for the arts, learning and philosophy, Sparta was built around a warrior culture. In 371 BCE Sparta suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Leuctra. Afterwards it continued only as a second-rate power. Spartan women could own property, and they became among the richest members of society, eventually controlling two fifths of Spartan land.
Aeschylus added a second actor and more dialogue, and Sophocles added a third actor and painted scenery. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, but only seven survive, including the tragedies Oedipus Rex and Antigone. Plays competed at the festivals. A panel judged them on the day, and the prize for the winner, besides honour and prestige, was often a bronze tripod cauldron. At the Great Dionysia each day featured a succession of three tragedies by one playwright, followed by a satyr play, a whimsical parody with lighthearted jokes. Aristophanes wrote comedies full of sharp political satire; his play The Clouds made fun of education and of the teachings of Socrates. Actors changed costumes in a small tent behind the stage, the skene, which later grew into a monumental façade. With so few actors each performer played several roles, so masks, costumes, voice and gesture mattered. The works of Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes formed the foundation on which all modern theatre is based.
Little is known about the historical Homer; the name may simply mean one who fits a song together, and ancient writers disputed which poems he wrote. The Iliad has 15,693 lines of verse and the Odyssey 12,109, and each is divided into 24 books, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet. Historians date the Iliad to about 750 BCE and the Odyssey to about 725 BCE. Historians think Greek myths were probably believed by some people and doubted by others, and were also used for teaching and plain entertainment.
Plato's theory of forms holds that abstract ideals exist beyond the physical world. Aristotle rejected Plato's theory of Forms, yet he never disparaged his former teacher's basic philosophy. Aristarchus's sun-centered model was rejected because it challenged the accepted view of the size of the universe and of Earth's special place at its center. His model survives because Archimedes described it in The Sand Reckoner. Archimedes' principle says that any floating object displaces its own weight of the fluid it is in. The Hippocratic Corpus, a large collection of medical writings credited to Hippocrates, was compiled in Ptolemaic Alexandria, and modern scholars think it was written by many authors. Many legendary accounts of Archimedes' war machines have been exaggerated or possibly made up.
The Parthenon was built between 447 and 432 BCE. It had 92 carved metopes and a frieze running around the building. Pericles paid for the Parthenon with money from the Delian League, an organization of Greek city-states formed for mutual defense. The Parthenon looks perfectly straight, but it contains no straight lines and no right angles. Greek builders gave Doric columns a slight inward lean and a slight bulge in the middle, to make a large temple seem perfectly straight.
Words to know
- ostracism: vote to expel
- helots: enslaved farmers
- satire: mocking humor
- laconic: using few words
- forms: ideal patterns
