Persian Fire (22 page)

But the steepling heights of the Acropolis afforded more than a view alone. Down beyond its cliffs, in the cramped and booming city, the narrow alleyways were no fitting home for a goddess. Unpaved, often rocky, and invariably encrusted with filth, the streets of Athens wound and twisted without plan. Dogs and chickens, goats and pigs and cows, all of them added to the stench — and to the fleas. Carts, rumbling and creaking along specially scored grooves, added to the noise. Athens, by the 560s
bc
, had long since stopped frowsting in her

own backwardness. There were always wagons in the city, piled high with wares, and especially pottery, for in ceramics Athenian craftsmen now led the world. One area of the city was even named after it — although, in truth, the Ceramicus was just as famous for its cemetery and cheap whores.

How very much more elevated, then, in every sense, were the heights of the Acropolis. The bare rock left no doubt as to their sanctity. There, growing from the stone, rose the primal olive-tree, gift of Athena and as old as Athens herself. Indeed, it was said to be immortal; but the Athenians, playing safe, and naturally not wishing to see it stripped bare of its foliage, had elected to ban goats from the hill; all save one, once a year, which would be led up to the summit and offered in sacrifice to the gods. Indeed, only a single creature was permitted on the sacred rock: a serpent. This lived in an enclosure near the tomb of Erechtheus, the snake-tailed, earth-born first citizen of Athens, where priestesses would lovingly feed it honey cakes. Men whispered that if it vanished, then the city was doomed to fall.

Yet that the snake was content to reside on the Acropolis at all could be reckoned a miracle. Sanctified it might be, yet it was hardly a place of calm. For years, it had been a permanent building site. Around 575
bc
, a great stone ramp, some 250 feet in length, had been pile-driven up to the gateway of the ancient citadel, permanently improving access to the summit — and the workmen had promptly moved in. Over the following years, the hammering had never stopped. What had previously been a jumble of primitive ruins was transformed into a shrine as spectacular as any in Greece. Not only masonry, but statues of every conceivable size crowded the summit: those of young men with snail-shell curls and mocking smiles; of dimpled maidens with falling tresses, pleated cloaks and skin-tight gowns; of gorgons, luridly painted; of prancing horses and snarling lions. In images such as these, faint, perhaps, but unmistakable, could be caught a glimpse of the influence of the East, fabulous and rarefied, the home of unimaginably rich and mighty kings. The days of provincialism, in short, were well and truly over. There was nothing remotely inward-looking about the Athenians' sanctuary now.

Except that none of the work was actually done in the name of the Athenians. Far from signalling an outbreak of civic harmony, the dust-clouds on the Acropolis conveyed precisely the opposite message. Every building project was the gift of a different clan. What better way, after all, for a Eupatrid to show off than to adorn the city's skyline? To excel was, for a nobleman, not merely to cut a political dash but to emulate the age of heroes, to mimic the deathless gods. 'Always be the bravest', warriors in the Trojan War had been admonished. 'Always be the best.'
¹⁷
Centuries later, this was a message that an aristocrat still drank in with his milk. For the upper classes across the whole Greek world, it served as a virtual manifesto. This was why, if a partiality for dinner-parties was one mark of the cosmopolitan elite, then another distinguishing feature had become, during the seventh century
bc,
a relish for sport: spectacular contests of stamina and skill, in which the
jeunesse doree,
glistening and gym-perfected, would compete with their fellow noblemen for public glory. True, the first victor at the Olympic Games was said to have been a cook, and an occasional goat-herd might still sneak a fairytale victory, but in general only those with time and money could afford to put in the ten months' training officially required by the rules. By the first half of the sixth century, the games at Olympia had been supplemented by a whole circuit of other festivals, so competitors might, and often did, spend year after year on the road, sculpting and toning their bodies, schmoosing with other members of the Greek world's
creme de la creme.
In 566
bc,
even the Athenians, who in the previous century had been defiantly sniffy about the Olympics, got in on the act. A magnificent festival in honour of Athena, the Great Panathenaea, was inaugurated in their city, at which the prizes included, as well as glory, a huge amphora of olive oil.
Grands projets
on the Acropolis, an athlete's trophies: both spoke of'the sweetness' that was 'triumph and wondrous fame'.
¹⁸

Yet the applause was not universal. Glamour and self-glorification might be all very well at Olympia, but not, say, for hoplites advancing into battle. It was notable that the Spartans, raised as they were to subordinate their individuality to a collective, were the only people in Greece to play team games; notable also that they displayed a marked ambivalence towards their Olympic athletes. A competitor from elsewhere in Greece who won first prize at the Games might expect to have statues raised in his honour, or receive a bounty, or even breach a section of his native city's walls, 'to convey', so it was said, 'that a state with such a citizen hardly had need of fortifications'.
¹⁹
No such nonsense for the Spartans — not least because they had no city walls to pull down in the first place. Naturally, since their prestige was at stake, their athletes were expected to compete and win at Olympia, but memorials to their victories, back at Sparta, were conspicuous by their absence. The returning champions themselves were granted no reward save the distinctly hazardous one of a posting to the front line of battle, directly before the king.

For always, with the exceptional, with the god-like, there was menace. There rose, in the universe of things, a scale of perfection, towering like Mount Olympus, with the immortals on the summit, and mortals down in the foothills, eternally looking to climb higher. But it was perilous for a man to reach too far. The dangers that resulted might plunge not only the hero but all who knew him — indeed, all his city — into ruin. That the Athenians, for instance, back in the days of their insularity, were not being merely provincial in their suspicion of international athletics had been amply demonstrated by the fate of Cylon, a Eupatrid, and one of their few Olympic stars. The champion, returning home with his victor's olive crown, had eventually grown so puffed up with conceit that he had dared, in 632 BC, to occupy the Acropolis and proclaim himself master of Athens. The scandalised city had been plunged into street-fighting. Cylon and his followers had found themselves barricaded on the hill; they had sought sanctuary in a temple; granted a promise of free passage by the archon, they had duly emerged, only to be stoned and put to death.
²⁰
A salutary lesson on the bitter fruits of setting one's sights too high.

Except that in states more in tune with the modern than Athens, men such as Cylon had already proved themselves vanguards of the future. There were few leading cities anywhere in the Greek world that did not at some point during the seventh and sixth centuries
bc
fall into the hands of a high-aiming strongman — with Sparta, as ever, the exception that proved the rule.
'Tyrannides',
the Greeks called such regimes — 'tyrannies'. For them, the term did not have remotely the bloodstained connotations that the English word 'tyrant' has for us. Indeed, a Greek tyrant, almost by definition, had to have the popular touch, since otherwise he could not hope to cling to power for long. Trumpets, slogans and public works: such were the enthusiasms he would invariably parade. He would also be expected to provide, to a people that might have been racked by faction-fighting for decades, the stamp of firm government — at the very least. Most provided a good deal more: Periander, a celebrated tyrant of Corinth, for instance, proved so consummate a statesman that he was remembered, along with Solon, as one of the seven sages of Greece.* Naturally, in exchange for granting his fellow citizens the blessings of order and prosperity, a tyrant could be expected to make a few demands of his own. He might require that certain illegal measures, certain regrettable precautions, be overlooked: bodyguards, for instance; controls on free speech; the occasional midnight knocking on doors.

It was the tyrant's own peers, of course, who would wince most painfully at these humiliations. Few greater torments could be imagined for an aristocrat than to endure a tyranny: the equivalent of watching a single champion win every race, year after year. No wonder

*Other traditions, it is fair to say, remembered Periander in a far less favourable light. He is said to have been so crazed that he killed his wife, then made love to her corpse; to have castrated three hundred boys from an enemy city; and to have given silent advice on statecraft to a fellow tyrant by walking through a field and lopping off the tallest ears of corn with a stick. The contradictions in the historical record well reflect the ambivalence with which the Greeks tended to regard the institution of tyranny.