Culture Passport

Introduction

In the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City in Rome there is a painting that Raphael, one of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, completed around 1511. It depicts many individuals in Classical Greek dress in an ancient agora or market. At the centre are two individuals who are the clear focus of the work. These, scholars are uniformly in agreement, are meant to be the two great philosophers of Classical Athens, Plato and Aristotle.

The School of Athens, as Raphael’s work is now known, is a testament to the manner in which individuals like Raphael believed that they were the direct successors during the Renaissance era of the cultural legacy of Classical Greece and of Athens in particular. So what was so special about the Classical period that we find Italian painters like Raphael two millennia later making such grand gestures about their indebtedness to it? 

The Greek World During the Classical Period

In many ways the Classical Greek world closely mirrored that of Italy in Raphael’s time. The Italian Renaissance took place across the Italian Peninsula in the two centuries between the mid-fourteenth and the mid-sixteenth century, during which time Italy was divided into dozens of little states, some republics, some ruled by military dictators and others by dukes and lords. War was everywhere as these states constantly vied with each other for power and prestige. Classical Greece was no different. When the Classical era began around the middle of the sixth century BC the Greek world was divided into literally hundreds of small states ruling small patches of territory on the Greek mainland, the Greek islands and further afield on the western coast of what is now Turkey and further west in Sicily and southern Italy. Many of these were very weak powers. They were often little more than a small town of a few thousand people and some surrounding farmland. But others were much more powerful, like Sparta, the greatest military power of the Peloponnese mainland region. What held these hundreds of city states together was a common culture, one based on religion, mythology, literature and stories of the fabled Trojan War, and of course a certain outlook on existence. Already by the beginning of the sixth century BC this was beginning to produce great philosophers in places like the city of Miletus on the coast of what is now western Turkey. Here individuals like the philosopher Thales were blending basic scientific exploration of what we would now call physics with philosophical introspection. It was the beginning of Greek Classical culture. 

The Persian Wars and the Rise of Athens 

The Classical Period very nearly never had a chance to really flourish. Beginning around 550 BC a new power burst forth from what is now Iran, but was then known as Persia, to conquer vast portions of the Middle East in the space of a quarter of the century. The Persian Empire had expanded to the borders of the Greek world before long and beginning in the early fifth century BC its ruler began plotting to conquer the wealthy trading cities of the Greek world. Two invasions of Greece were launched, the first in 492 BC and the second in 480 BC. The second of these in particular, led by King Xerxes of Persia, involved an enormous army of Persians and their allies, one which very nearly led to the subjugation of the Greeks by the Persians. The events of it are famous, especially the stand of the 300 Spartan warriors at the pass of Thermopylae in northern Greece where they held off the Persian hordes for several days, slowing their advance into Greece while the allied Greeks prepared their defences further south. The Persians continued to advance thereafter, destroying the city of Athens not long afterwards as the Greeks retreated to the Isthmus of Corinth believing that this was the best place to make a united stand. In the end it would never come to this. The Athenians led a naval force which defeated the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis in the waters of Athens and then in 479 BC the united Greeks won a major land battle against the Persians at Plataea not far from Thebes in  north-central Greece. With this the Persian invasion faltered and was eventually pushed backwards. The Greeks had survived an existential threat. What was more, though their city had been levelled to the ground, the Athenians had emerged as a naval power, one which began building a military alliance at sea to rival that of Sparta on land from the 470s BC. More broadly the Athenians began to prosper through enormous trade connections as they rebuilt their city. Athens rose from the ashes of the Persian Wars to become the cradle of Classical Greek culture.    

Classical Greek Culture 

So what was Classical Greek culture? The answer is that it was multi-faceted. It embraced a wide range of disciplines that we take for granted today, but which were completely novel at the time. One such was history. In the second half of the fifth century BC two Greek writers, one from Athens and one who became resident there, compiled the first two history books ever written, or at least written in a systematic fashion. Herodotus’s Histories was the story of the Persian Wars, though he also has a claim to being the first every socio-anthropologist, as the first half of his work was concerned with itemising the cultures and people of the known world on the eve of the Persian invasions. The second was Thucydides, a figure who wrote a much more sober and factual account of the Peloponnesian War, a conflict we will return to hear more about shortly. 

It wasn’t just history, many elements of literature as we know it today emerged in cities like Athens in the fifth century BC for the first time. Such was the case with comic and tragic plays. The first famous playwrights in history wrote in Athens in the fifth century BC, specifically Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Dozens of their works have survived down to modern times because subsequent generations considered them so good that they kept copying them out again and again, generation to generation. Shakespeare was a huge fan of Sophocles in particular and some of his plays are directly influenced by the plays of Classical Athens. Other elements of Greek culture that flourished in tandem included art and architecture, specifically the fine black and red figure vase painting that is synonymous with ancient Greece and the grandiose temples, with the fine Ionic and Dorian columns, so many specimens of which are still standing around the Greek world today. The Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, towering over the Greek capital, is the finest example today. This is what we mean when we speak of Classical Greek Culture. 

The Peloponnesian War

What’s unusual about all of this is that so much of it was created in the midst of war and instability. In 431 BC a war broke out between Sparta and Athens, each dragging in dozens of their allies amongst the Greek city states. The Peloponnesian War, as it became known from the Athenian perspective, had been brewing for decades as Athenian power increased year on year and threatened Sparta’s position as the most powerful of the city states of mainland Greece. It was an unusual war. Sparta was the great land power and so it invaded the Attic region where the city of Athens lay every year. But Sparta lacked the capacity to breach Athens’s great walls connecting it to its port at Piraeus. So long as Athens controlled the seas with its navy and its walls remained intact, Sparta could never defeat it, something which the great Athenian statesman Pericles cautioned his fellow citizens about before he died early in the war. Pericles’s passing was unfortunate for Athens. In the years that followed the cautious approach he had counselled was abandoned as ambitious younger statesman like Alcibiades convinced the Athenian assembly that Athens should engage in a more aggressive approach to winning the war. When they launched a costly expedition to try and conquer the Greek colonies on the island of Sicily far to the west, many of which were Spartan allies, it was their undoing. Their armies were destroyed in Sicily and Sparta gained the upper hand, eventually wearing Athens down and defeating it in 404 BC after nearly three decades of war. With this, Athens’s walls were torn down, its fleet was dispensed with and it was reduced to a second-rate power. 

The School of Athens 

Athens might have been humbled politically and militarily, but it still retained its place as the cultural centre of the Greek world. Indeed even in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, Euripides and others had continued to produce plays on an annual basis. It was also towards the end of the war that the figures that Raphael depicted in The School of Athens began to emerge. The founder of the philosophical tradition that we know Athens for today was Socrates, a philosopher who had gained a following in Athens by the final years of the war. He never wrote anything down, but his pupil Plato did and it is from Plato’s dialogues that we learn about how Socrates was eventually persecuted by the Athenian state in the years following the end of the Peloponnesian War and was forced to drink hemlock to commit suicide. Yet while he might have died prematurely, he had started a movement which would lead to the emergence of great figures like Plato and Aristotle who founded the first philosophical schools in Athens, the Lyceum and the Academy. These are often cited as the progenitors of the modern university. More broadly the intellectual frameworks which they devised in terms of philosophy, political science and the natural sciences, Platonism and Aristotelianism, would become the basis of European thought for the next 2,000 years. It was for this reason that Raphael painted them at the centre of his painting in the early sixteenth century. 

The Decline of Sparta and the Rise of Thebes 

All good things come to an end. Sparta emerged from the Peloponnesian War as the dominant Greek power, but it had over-stretched itself and then continued to do so by launching wars against Persia in Asia Minor in the 390s BC. Moreover, power and success brought prosperity and that in turn brought corruption and luxury which destroyed Sparta’s warrior ethos. By the 370s BC it was a spent force and a new power emerged in the shape of the city of Thebes to the north of Athens. It formed the Boeotian League, a coalition of city states which in 371 BC defeated the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra. Scholars debate when the Classical era came to an end. Leuctra is as good a date as any other. Thereafter a slumbering power further north on the edges of the Greek world, the Macedonians, were growing in strength and preparing to conquer the Greek city states and unite them under their rule. By the time of Leuctra Athens’s culture was also in major decline and eventually Aristotle would leave Athens himself and seek employment at the Macedonian court in the city of Pella in the mid-340s BC. But long before he left it, Athens’s culture had changed the world forever.