Macedonia: From bad to worse

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Thessaloniki
The White Tower of Thes­saloniki, Mace­do­nia, Greece. Photo (cc) dun­godung.

I’ve been read­ing the let­ter to Pres­id­ent Obama signed by vari­ous clas­sical schol­ars regard­ing the claims over Mace­do­nia, It’s about 50% suc­cess­ful in my case. It’s got me tak­ing the Mace­do­nia prob­lem much more ser­i­ously, but I couldn’t sign the letter.

Cri­ti­cising prom­in­ent pro­fess­ors when you’re job-hunting is a very bad idea. Non­ethe­less as far as the archae­ology of eth­ni­city goes it’s poor. The simple equa­tion of lan­guage with eth­ni­city, which the let­ter fol­lows, has been given a thor­ough kick­ing in other areas of archae­ology. Worse, even if the archae­ology was right, it would still be a bad argu­ment to say Greece’s claim to Mace­do­nia rests on the ancient Mace­do­ni­ans being Greek. To show this I’ll con­duct a little thought experiment.

Let’s say for the sake of argu­ment that next year there’s a sur­pris­ing find in Thes­saloniki. A marble tab­let from a temple dat­ing to 350 BC is found. To everyone’s sur­prise the table is inscribed with Cyril­lic let­ters rather than Greek, and the lan­guage is a vari­ant of Bul­garian. Would that mean Greece would have to hand over Mace­do­nia to its north­ern neigh­bour?
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Being a citizen

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Of all the civil­isa­tions of antiquity, the Egyp­tian seems to me to have been the most pleas­ant. The excel­lent pro­tec­tions which desert and sea provide for the Nile val­ley pre­ven­ted the excess­ive devel­op­ment of the spirit of hero­ism which must often have made life in Greece hell on earth.

Otto Neuge­bauer — The Exact Sci­ences in Antiquity 2nd Edi­tion, page 71.

In ancient Greece to be a cit­izen was to be a sol­dier. March­ing along­side your fel­low cit­izens was a priv­ilege as was as a duty. But march­ing to where? The thing that sol­diers exist to do is fight, so ideally to be the equal of the men who have gone before you you’re going to want to have fought in one battle. The money gained from booty is another wel­come bonus. There’s also the mat­ter of skills. If you’ve been prac­tising some­thing it’s nat­ural to want to try it out for real. So what ancient Greece had was a lot of men who prob­ably wanted a minor fight.

Mak­ing things worse, unlike Egypt, Greece never really uni­fied from within. This meant that find­ing an enemy to fight was a lot less effort for the Greeks than the Egyp­tians. There were peri­ods of divi­sion in Egypt, but ulti­mately the Nile val­ley mean that war­fare would have to be pretty much one-dimensional. The Greeks on the other hand could sail away in a tri­reme and fight over all sorts of dif­fer­ent coasts or islands.

So one of the reas­ons war was com­mon in ancient Greece was that it was polit­ic­ally and eco­nom­ic­ally reward­ing as well as being easy to indulge in if you were a major power. It was built into the social sys­tem that to be mil­it­ar­ily suc­cess­ful was the mark of a man. Thank­fully we live in more enlightened times where a politi­cian would never be enriched by a cyn­ical war.

Seven Wonders II: The Parthenon

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Athens, Parthenon

I said in the pre­vi­ous entry that the seven won­ders would be a per­sonal choice. There are plenty of reas­ons why the Parthenon wouldn’t make the list. It’s hardly intact, espe­cially given the sli­cing of the monu­ment to ship parts of it to west­ern Europe. It’s not the biggest Greek temple, nor the old­est. It’s not the holi­est. It was built with money extor­ted from other Greek states, sup­posedly for guar­an­tee­ing free­dom. Argu­ably the ancients didn’t see it as the greatest Greek site either as it wasn’t on the canon­ical list of the seven won­ders of the ancient world.

None of that mat­ters. This is the apo­gee of architecture.

One of Jostein Gaarder’s favour­ite phrases is that the Parthenon was built without a single straight line. There are many optical effects built into the temple. One is that the sty­lob­ate, the plat­form the temple sits, on rises slightly in the middle so that, viewed from a dis­tance, it appears flat — or pos­sibly just clear of rain­wa­ter. The columns are angled slightly inward to avoid look­ing splayed. They’re also built with a slight bulge, pos­sibly to stop them look­ing con­cave. The tech­niques weren’t new, but it’s where they were all put together to cre­ate some­thing amazing.

It might be explic­able for conquered peoples to adopt the archi­tec­ture of their con­quer­ors, but the Romans did the oppos­ite, tak­ing the design of the Greek temple and mak­ing it their own. The Parthenon embod­ies this idea which sur­vived the Roman con­quest and has since spread around the world. It’s not just found in Europe but also in the New World and Asia. Any place with pre­ten­sions to inter­na­tional prestige will in some way or another have build­ings which employ Doric columns as an echo of the façade of the Parthenon. The Parthenon is a won­der because its image rep­lic­ated by aris­to­crats mak­ing the Grand Tour cre­ated the archi­tec­tural lan­guage to describe prestige.

Estimate of the dove population of ancient Greece reduced by one

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Greek Dove
Greek Dove. Photo (cc) Kristie’s Natures­Por­traits.

Sci­en­tific­ally speak­ing a neg­at­ive res­ult is as import­ant as a pos­it­ive res­ult. Non­ethe­less while pos­it­ive res­ults which no-one expec­ted are pub­lish­able, neg­at­ive res­ults — which people would have expec­ted if they’d thought about it a bit — are dif­fi­cult to get published.

As an example, I’m look­ing at con­nec­tions between ancient Greek con­stel­la­tions and the Greek cal­en­dar. One nice cor­rel­a­tion is that the dove migra­tion sea­son in Greece starts about the same time that the con­stel­la­tion Columba, the Dove, rises in the morn­ing sky for the first time. It’s par­tic­u­larly neat because doves tend to fly at night, so as Columba took to the skies, so did the doves. It would have slot­ted nicely into my model. There’s a small problem.

Columba is Noah’s Dove and wasn’t inven­ted till AD 1679. Not only that, but if you read Aratus’s Phaenom­ena, which is a descrip­tion of the sky dat­ing from the 3rd cen­tury BC, he goes on at great length how there’s no con­stel­la­tion in that region. Unlike mod­ern con­stel­la­tions, the Greek con­stel­la­tions were fig­ures not regions and not all stars were thought to be in con­stel­la­tions. Some were con­sidered amorphoi or unformed. If I’d really been awake I wouldn’t have needed to look up the con­stel­la­tion, as there are already doves in the ancient Greek sky. The Plei­ades are, among other things, doves. That’s what the name means.

It’s sur­pris­ing how spe­cific the ancient sources are about which stars are in con­stel­la­tions or not. It raises the ques­tion of whether con­stel­la­tions named in ancient texts exis­ted in more archaic times, because stars don’t have to be in a constellation.

Did ancient Greek women sunbathe?

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6th Century BC, Athenian black-figured neck amphora with Satyrs
6th Cen­tury BC, Athenian black-figured neck amphora with Satyrs. Photo (cc) Mary Harrsch.

I thought the answer was no. There’s a reason for this and it’s due to the proper place of a good woman. For the Greeks a chaste woman would remain in the house as much as pos­sible. This wasn’t always pos­sible, women could have duties out­side the house like get­ting water from the local foun­tain, but in the ideal world the Greek woman would be at home attend­ing to her duties there. One of the phys­ical effects of this is that a woman who was at home wouldn’t be exposed to sun­light so much and so a good woman would be con­sid­er­ably more pal­lid than her hus­band. In the photo above we can deduce some­thing of the pos­i­tion of the woman being temp­ted by the satyrs in that des­pite this being black-figure ware, the pig­ment for the woman’s skin is pale. In this period men are in black when they appear on pot­tery, emphas­ing their tan.

Flute girl
Black-figured mas­tos Cup with Young Woman play­ing the Pipes Greek made in Athens 520–510 BCE attrib­uted to Psiax. Photo (cc) Mary Harrsch.

The fig­ure right is another woman. She’s a flute-girl and there’s a couple of con­clu­sions we can draw from this fig­ure. She’s dark so she must be out­side a lot and there­fore not the sort of girl you’d take home to meet your par­ents. She’s an aulêtris, a flute-girl. These would ply their trade in the streets of a Greek city. Their pub­lic pur­pose would be to play for enter­tain­ment, but the real­ity was that they were paid for addi­tional ser­vices dur­ing the course of the symposium.

A lot of the pot­tery from Athens is expli­cit about this, as are many plays. But you didn’t have to have a flute to be a pros­ti­tute in ancient Greece. There was a lot of grad­a­tion in the mar­ket. The Het­aira were expens­ive cour­tes­ans val­ued for their con­ver­sa­tion as much as their bod­ies. At the other end of the scale were the por­nai who eked a liv­ing at the edge of town. There are descrip­tions of women who worked by the grave­yards on the roads into town. For many women in the ancient world life was miserable.

So what about sun­bathing? I didn’t think it would hap­pen. If being out­side is a state­ment about your moral char­ac­ter then pale skin is surely more desir­able. Even if you were a woman who worked out­doors wouldn’t paler skin make you more fash­ion­able? I was flip­ping though Cour­tes­ans and Fish­cakes for inform­a­tion on ancient depli­ation for grue­some reas­ons, when I found this frag­ment from Xenarchus:

For there are young ladies here at the brothels who are most amen­able, ladies you are not banned from look­ing at as they sun-bathe with bare breasts, stripped for action in semi-circular ranks; and from among these ladies you can select whichever one you like: the, fat, tall, short, young, old middle-aged and past it. Much bet­ter than going through the adul­ter­ous busi­ness of a lad­der against a wall and tip­toe­ing about, or climb­ing in under the vent below the roof, or smug­gling your­self in under a pile of straw.

To some extent this con­firms what I thought, the chaste woman being hid­den away inside and the whores out­doors, but I was sur­prised to read about the top­less sun­bathing. The top­less bit I under­stand, it’s about put­ting the goods on view, but why sun­bathe if that’s going to give you an undesir­able tan?

In mod­ern terms it’s a pleas­ant way to spand an after­noon, but these women would be unlikely to be in this situ­ation from choice. If they’re weren’t work­ing, then you’d expect them to be put to work spin­ning whilst wait­ing from a cli­ent. It’s the brothel own­ers who have put them out on dis­play. By doing so the ladies are get­ting tanned and which surely makes then vis­ibly cheaper. Where’s the sense in this?

I think part of it might be due to the eco­nom­ics and part due to the law. The law laid down the max­imum cost of a pros­ti­tute, which was two drach­mas for a night. This kept the women within the price range of the typ­ical skilled Athenian worker who could earn between a drachma and two drach­mas a day. This may sound like the woman’s skills were val­ued, but she would have been a slave and the owner would take his share of the fee. The pres­ence of price con­trols sug­gests demand was high, so tan­ning would not dam­age the value of the slave and may have had another legal benefit.

Greek law had strict and dire pen­al­ties for people found guilty of adul­tery. The quote above shows the sub­ter­fuge neces­sary to see another man’s wife. The stand­ard of evid­ence in Greek law was also aston­ish­ingly low. Some legal speeches which sur­vive boast of hav­ing no evid­ence other than hearsay. In this light a tanned woman would be help­ful as it would prove her legal status. Her pos­i­tion in Greek soci­ety would be vis­ible in her skin.

This may be all old hat to any­one who stud­ies ancient pros­ti­tu­tion, but it struck me how much the act of sun­bathing has changed. Any­way I can recom­mend Cour­tes­ans and Fish­cakes, but it’s a grim­mer read than Try­ing Neaira.

The Antikythera Mechanism

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A paper on the Mech­an­ism appears in tomorrow’s Nature. In brief what it is these days is a rather unim­press­ive look­ing lump of heav­ily cor­roded metal. I have a photo of it some­where, but it’s a very bad blurry photo which doesn’t do justice to its lumpy unim­press­ive­ness. For­tu­nately Wiki­pe­dia has this much bet­ter photo.

Antikythera Mechanism
The Anti­kythera Mech­an­ism in the National Museum, Athens. Photo from Wiki­pe­dia.

The reason why it’s news is that there’s been a lot of painstak­ing work to try and see bey­ond the cor­ro­sion, and its proven spec­tac­u­larly suc­cess­ful. The mech­an­ism has been examined using X-ray tomo­graphy, which is where X-rays are used to build up a cross-section of a sub­ject slice by slice without phys­ic­ally pulling the sub­ject apart. The res­ults are con­firm­ing that Greek tech­no­logy could be stag­ger­ingly soph­ist­ic­ated.
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Mystery of ancient astronomical calculator unveiled

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A press release on the Anti­kythera Mech­an­ism, see the next entry for comment.

Antikythera Mechanism
The Anti­kythera Mech­an­ism. Photo from Wiki­pe­dia.

An inter­na­tional team has unrav­elled the secrets of a 2,000-year-old com­puter which could trans­form the way we think about the ancient world.

Pro­fessor Mike Edmunds and Dr Tony Freeth, of Cardiff Uni­ver­sity led the team who believe they have finally cracked the work­ings of the Anti­kythera Mech­an­ism, a clock-like astro­nom­ical cal­cu­lator dat­ing from the second cen­tury BC.

Rem­nants of a broken wooden and bronze case con­tain­ing more than 30 gears was found by divers explor­ing a ship­wreck off the island of Anti­kythera at the turn of the 20th cen­tury. Sci­ent­ists have been try­ing to recon­struct it ever since. The new research sug­gests it is more soph­ist­ic­ated than any­one pre­vi­ously thought.
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Searching for Ithaca

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Ithaca?
Ithaca? Photo by Jo Sal­mon.

As Γλαυκôπις poin­ted out last week­end Robert Bittle­stone, James Diggle and John Under­hill are look­ing for Ithaca, home of Odys­seus and think they’ve found it. A lot of people thought it’s already be found, there’s an island called Ithaki. How­ever, they argue that the geo­graphy doesn’t match Homer’s descrip­tion. Ithaca is described in the Odys­sey:

I am Odys­seus, Laertes’ son, world-famed
For stratagems: my name has reached the heav­ens.
Bright Ithaca is my home: it has a moun­tain,
Leaf-quivering Neri­ton, far vis­ible.
Around are many islands, close to each other,
Dou­li­chion and Same and wooded Zacyn­thos.
Ithaca itself lies low, fur­thest to sea
Towards dusk; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun.
Odys­sey 9, 19–26 (trans. James Diggle)

This describes Ithaca as a low island and to the west. This doesn’t match mod­ern Ithaki. Instead they argue that Ithaca was where the pen­in­sula of Pal­iki is on the island of Keph­a­lo­nia. So far this isn’t any­thing major, there are geo­graph­ical dis­putes about vari­ous places. How­ever they’ve come up with an eleg­ant way to test their idea.
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Stars and Festivals

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Patrick Gets A Head
Not quite an ancient Greek at Eleusis.

I’ve sug­ges­ted else­where that there’s a link between some stel­lar events and the schedul­ing of fest­ivals in archaic Greece. What I haven’t had is a nice bit of text say­ing this. At least not till now. While wait­ing for a cata­logue to come avail­able recently I star­ted brows­ing The Attic Fest­ivals of Demeter and Their Rela­tion to the Agri­cul­tural Year by Allaire Chandor Brumfield.

One of the fest­ivals she talks about is Pro­er­o­sia. This seems to be a sac­red plough­ing fest­ival held on Pyanep­sion 5 at Eleusis before the mys­ter­ies and this is firmly dated by his­tor­ical inscrip­tion. There is another clue as to when it’s held as she’s found a quote from Hesychius.

καὶ ὸ δε̂μος δὲ αύτὰ προαρκτούρια καλεῖ

The key bit is προαρκτούρια, proark­touria, before Arcturus. The date she uses for the heli­acal rising of Arcturus, the first appear­ance of Arcturus in the morn­ing sky, is Septem­ber 18. She cites a book I haven’t read for this, so I’ll have to look into it, but it seems approx­im­ately right. This is a bit of a prob­lem because the quote doesn’t match the inscrip­tion.
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Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy by Hugh Bowden

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Classical Athens and the Delphic OracleAlso pos­ted to Revise and Dis­sent.

Athens is the city that gave the world demo­cracy. While the idea has been inher­ited, the real­ity was rather dif­fer­ent to a mod­ern demo­cracy. In ancient Athens all the cit­izens voted on the laws, whereas these days people vote for people who vote for the laws. Or even vote for the per­son who will uni­lat­er­ally decide the laws for them­selves. While that might make Athens more demo­cratic, in some ways Athens was also less free. Cer­tainly all the cit­izens voted but so be a cit­izen you had to be male, quite old and the son of Athenian par­ents. If your par­ents were slaves or met­ics (res­id­ent for­eign­ers or Atheni­ans deprived of cit­izen status) then you had no vote. A lot of these dif­fer­ences are the meat and drink of usual stud­ies into ancient demo­cracy. But it wasn’t just the human world which was viewed dif­fer­ently, so was the divine. This is the sub­ject Bowden’s book Clas­sical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divin­a­tion and Demo­cracy exam­ines, the rela­tion­ship between the will of the Gods and the will of the people in ancient Athens. Spe­cific­ally he looks at the will of Apollo as it was revealed by the Delphic Oracle. The intro­duc­tion makes the case for doing this well:

What is the rela­tion­ship between reli­gion and demo­cracy? More pre­cisely, to what extent should reli­gious con­sid­er­a­tions affect the decisions taken by cit­izens in a demo­cracy? In the mod­ern world it is gen­er­ally thought that reli­gion and polit­ics occupy, or should occupy, two dif­fer­ent spheres. Reli­gion may pro­mote moral good­ness, and moral good­ness may be con­sidered desir­able in a com­munity, but the idea of giv­ing pref­er­ence to the divine will — how­ever it is estab­lished — over the will of the people — as revealed by a vote — would be seen as fun­da­ment­ally undemo­cratic. This under­stand­ing per­vades not only approaches to mod­ern demo­cra­cies, but also the study of demo­cracy in the ancient world.

For the rest of the book Bowden shows how this can­not be the case for the ancient world. In world where the Gods are thought to umbrage and exact revenge in unpleas­ant ways it’s a brave ruler to defies them.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of ima­gin­a­tion to think about the role of reli­gion in mod­ern polit­ics at the moment. Usu­ally match­ing ancient Greek reli­gion with mod­ern fun­da­ment­al­ism would make a clas­si­cist wince. The idea of fun­da­ment­al­ism is that there is a canon­ical will of the God(s) which can be known. Greek reli­gion in con­trast had no core texts, but Bowden makes a couple of very good points. One is that fun­da­ment­al­ism is about the prac­tice of reli­gion. It is pos­sible to debate the finer points of reli­gion with a fun­da­ment­al­ist, so long as you fol­low the prac­tices. If you’re a woman for instance you’d have to cover your head, stay silent and not express any opin­ions. Which is very sim­ilar to the ideal­ised pos­i­tion of women in ancient Greece. Bowden says that Greek reli­gion was also about prac­tice of reli­gion and notes Mar­garet Attwood’s fun­da­ment­al­ist Chris­tian state in A Handmaid’s Tale is sim­ilar to the ancient Greeks in their treat­ment of women. He’s not arguing that Greeks were fun­da­ment­al­ists, but that there other ways of think­ing about how reli­gion inter­acts with demo­cracy. This is all from the first couple of pages of the intro­duc­tion.
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