It was a way of comprehending the world that was destined to have an enduring afterlife.
Tell me Lies
In Athens, of course, they saw things rather differently. In 425 BC, a dramatist by the name of Aristophanes made comic play of just how differently. Fifty-four years had passed since Xerxes put the Acropolis to the torch, and the summit of the rock, cleaned of rubble and adorned with ‘marks and monuments of empire’,13 bore dazzling witness to the scale of the city’s revival. Below the Parthenon, largest and most beautiful of the temples that now adorned the Athenian skyline, citizens would gather every winter within the natural curve of the hillside, there to take their seats in a theatre for an annual display of drama.* In a year marked by the rhythm of festivals, the Lenaia was a particular celebration of comedy – and Aristophanes, although only at the start of his career, had already proven himself a master of the medium. In 425, he made his debut in the Lenaia with a play, The Acharnians, that ridiculed everything it touched – and among its targets were the vaunts of the Persian king.
‘He has many eyes.’14 To the Greeks, the claim of their traditional enemy to a universal rule could hardly help but seem sinister in the extreme. Within the limits of his empire, spies were believed to enforce a perpetual surveillance. ‘Everyone feels himself under watch by a king who is omnipresent.’15 Such a target, for Aristophanes, was too tempting to resist. When the actor given the part of a Persian ambassador in The Acharnians walked onto the stage, he did so wearing an enormous eye on his head. Invited to deliver the Great King’s message, he solemnly declaimed a line of gibberish. Even his name, Pseudartabas, was a pointed joke: for just as arta in Persian meant ‘truth’, so did pseudes in Greek mean ‘lying’.16 Aristophanes could recognise a deserving target when he saw it. Insolently, indomitably, he exposed the profoundest convictions of Darius and his heirs to the laughter of the Athenian crowd.
That truth might deceive was a paradox with which the Greeks were well acquainted. In the mountains north-west of Athens, at Delphi, there stood an oracle; and so teasing were its revelations, so ambiguous and riddling its pronouncements, that Apollo, the god who inspired them, was hailed as Loxias – ‘the Oblique One’. A deity less like Ahura Mazda it would have been hard to imagine. Greek travellers marvelled at peoples in distant lands who obeyed oracles to the letter: for those delivered by Apollo were invariably equivocal. In Delphi, ambivalence was the prerogative of the divine. Apollo, most golden of the gods, who in time would come to be identified with the charioteer of the sun, dazzled those he raped. Famed though he was for his powers of healing, and for the magical potency of his musicianship, he was dreaded too as the lord of the silver bow, whose arrows were tipped with plague. Light, which the Persians saw as the animating principle of the universe, wholly good and wholly true, was also the supreme quality of Apollo; but there was a darkness to the Greek god as well. He and his twin sister Artemis, a virgin huntress no less deadly with the bow, were famed for their sensitivity to insult. When a king’s daughter named Niobe boasted of how many more children she had than Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, who had only ever had the two, the twin gods exacted a terrible vengeance. A firestorm of golden arrows felled her sons and daughters. For nine days their corpses lay unburied in their mother’s hall, caked with blood. The princess herself, worn to the bone with weeping, took to the hills. ‘There, stuck into stone, Niobe still broods on the spate of griefs the gods poured out to her.’17
How were mortals to avoid offending these capricious and ever status-conscious deities? It was not enough merely to refrain from insulting an immortal’s mother. There were dues of sacrifice to be paid, as well as of respect. The bones of animals slaughtered before white-chalked altars, glistening with fat and burned in fires perfumed with incense, were the portion owed the gods. While offerings certainly never guaranteed their favour, failure to make sacrifice was bound to provoke the gods’ rage. The risk was one shared by all. No wonder, then, that it should have been the rituals of sacrifice which tended to bring a community most closely together. Men and women, boys and girls, free and slaves: all had their part to play. Festivals, hallowed by time, were hallowed as well by mystery. There were some altars built entirely out of blood; others where no flies ever swarmed around the shambles. The whim of a god was a variable thing, and differed from place to place. In her shrine at Patrae, in southern Greece, Artemis demanded a holocaust of living creatures, birds, and boars, and bears; at Brauron, east of Athens, the robes of women who had died in childbirth; at Sparta, the blood of young men lashed to ribbons. Naturally, with so many different ways of paying the gods what was owed them, and with so many different gods to honour, there was always a nagging anxiety that some might be overlooked. A citizen set the task of collating and inscribing the traditions of Athens discovered, to his horror, a long list of sacrifices that everyone had forgotten. The expense of restoring them, so he calculated, would bankrupt the city.
The grim truth was that the immortals, with the passage of time, had withdrawn from the company of men, and a golden age become an age of iron. Once, back in the distant past, even Zeus, the king of the gods, who ruled from the heights of Mount Olympus, had delighted in joining the banquets of mortals. Increasingly, though, he had chosen to disguise himself, and to descend from his palace not to share in a feast, but to rape. Whether as a shower of gold, or as a white bull, or as a swan with beating wings, he had forced himself on a whole succession of women; and thereby bred a race of heroes. Warriors of incomparable prowess, these men had cleansed mountains and swamps of monsters, ventured to the limits of the world, and fathered entire peoples, ‘the noblest and most righteous of generations’.18 The doom of the heroes, when it finally arrived, had proven fully worthy of their peerless stature; for they had been culled in the most renowned and terrible of wars. Ten years it had lasted; and at the end of it, when Troy, the greatest city in Asia, had been left a pile of smoking ruins, few were the victors who had not themselves then succumbed to shipwreck, or to murder, or to a battalion of sorrows. Justly could it be said of Zeus, ‘No one is more destructive than you.’19
The fate of Troy never ceased to haunt the Greeks. Even Xerxes, arriving at the Hellespont, had demanded to be shown its site. The Iliad, the poem that enshrined the memory of those who had fought amid the dust of the Trojan plain, also provided the Greeks with their most popular window onto the workings of the gods, and of their relationship to mortals. Its author, a man whose dates and place of birth were endlessly debated, was himself a figure touched by a certain quality of the divine. Some went so far as to claim that Homer’s father had been a river and his mother a sea-nymph; but even those who accepted that his origins had been more mundanely human stood in awe of his achievements. ‘Best and most godlike of all poets’:20 so he was hailed. Never had there been a poem as vivid with a sense of brightness as the Iliad. The play of light was everywhere in its verses. No woman in it was so insignificant that she could not be described as ‘white-armed’; no man so fleetingly mentioned that he might not be cast as ‘bronze-armoured’. The queen who dressed herself did so by putting on robes that dazzled the eye. The warrior preparing for battle sheathed himself in refulgence, ‘brighter than gleaming fire’.21 Beauty was everywhere – and invariably it hinted at violence.