"‘There were about 1000 separate Greek cities. So you can't say that there was one thing, ancient Greek democracy. Those cities which had democracy had their own democracy. So in other words, each one will be slightly different from all the others. And the majority of Greek cities never had any form of democracy, it's important to remember that of those 1000, perhaps a quarter, perhaps 250, had a form of democracy at some time, not necessarily for all the period. Well, the earliest form, the earliest type of democracy is the Athenian, and it was created round about 500 BC. And its main point is not to be what the Athenians had before, which was tyranny and tyranny, and I'm going to come on to this later, is not a constitutional form of government, but it is a way in which a sole ruler rules by might based on force. He might observe the pre existing laws, he might not, but he rules by force. Well the Athenians decided no, we want constitutional government, we want a republic. And this is where democracy comes in... Athens was the leader, Athens’s form of democracy was more complete, more advanced, more developed than any other Greek city.'...
'When in the early modern period, the 16th 17th 18th century, the word democracy starts creeping back, especially in England in the 17th century in France and in America in the 18th century, then democracy acquires a salience and people start looking back to the ancient Greeks. Well, what did they do? How did they do it? But, there was a universal agreement in the 19th century when democracy starts expanding quite considerably, that the system we must have, partly because of size, must be indirect. It must be representative, parliamentary, not direct on the ancients’ model. And there was, in fact, quite a lot of discussion about the danger of direct democracy of the ancient time. Namely, the danger of it shifting over into, well, the tyranny of the mob. Mob rule. So, emotion instead of reason governing public decisions and then turning on minorities, something actually the ancients weren't particularly fussed about because there weren't the sort of minorities that we have developed in our very much more plural systems. So that wasn't a concern. By our standards, the ancients were very intolerant. They didn't have any concern for either racial or ethnic or gender minorities. The majority rule, and they should rule and they're all pretty much the same because they're all adult male Greeks...
You and I probably think that election is a very democratic sort of thing. Oddly enough, the ancient Greeks thought that election tended to favor the rich, the famous, the well born, in other words, the elite. And if you have an egalitarian spirit as the ancients did, you don't actually want to privilege elites anymore than they already are. However, this is where prudence, rationality kicks in. If you're going to have a general leading thousands of your fellow citizens in a very key battle and the Greeks were often fighting, each other, as well as foreigners, both on land and at sea, then you need to have people who are above averagely intelligent, smart, well connected, experienced. And so, you keep election for the top military offices, and you keep election for the top financial offices on the basis that if somebody is very rich, they're going to be used to handling lots of money. They'll know how to account for it and they’re not going to be so tempted to put their hand in the till, as if you were poor, whereas most Athenians were poor. And so most people holding offices by lot were poor'...
‘Whether you're a citizen, or not a citizen, and you might actually live in a city, you're a Greek, let's say from Corinth, but you decide you want to go and live in Athens because the business opportunities are better for you. So you then become a resident alien, you don't become a citizen. This is a very big difference between the Greek world and the Greek idea of what it is to be a citizen and the Roman one. In Rome, it's possible even for a freed slave, to become a citizen, a Roman citizen. If you are freed in Greece, you're typically not Greek by ethnicity, and you now become a resident alien, you're free, but you're never a citizen. So that's a big status distinction…
Big difference between Greece and Rome here. You typically both come into Athens or wherever, Corinth as a slave and you die as a slave. The Greeks were not so keen on manumitting, on freeing their slaves, as the Romans were. And as I say, if they did choose, let's say, the slave gets very old, has an accident, and they wish to free them or they wish to sell them on to someone else, then that slave doesn't cease to be a slave or doesn't become a citizen, but becomes a resident alien. I suppose if they had any natal ties, they might still want to go back to their original homeland, but that we don't really know much about.’… They all live with their masters except those very skilled craftsmen slaves, and they were typically male, who lived apart. That is they were established by the master in a workshop. And for example, the politician Demosthenes, his father had two lots of slaves like that. One lot made couches and the other lot made knives and they lived apart and so to some extent determined their own lifestyle, their own rate of work and all that, of course, subject to producing the goods that Demosthenes’ dad required. But most slaves if they were in agriculture, they lived on the farm and most Greeks lived actually in the country, not in urban environments… normally they were not allowed to have sex except forced to by the master or mistress. I mean, it's not a great scenario.
But the Greeks did not typically want their slaves to breed. They didn't want them to have children because it was cheaper to buy a new slave on the market than it was to rear the slave. The mother, after all, if she was a female slave might die in childbirth. The male slave as a young boy might get sick, and that would be time off work. It's not efficient. So whereas the Romans seem to have gone in for breeding, as the old south in America did, they had to because they couldn't import slaves after 1807, the Greeks relied on imports.
Now Sparta is in many ways a peculiar society. It's rather remote in the sense it's way down south. It's not a commercial town. It does have craftsmen, but it's basically agricultural. And it is a conquest state. So the Spartans expanded from Sparta out over the whole of the Southern Peloponnese. So they had a mini Empire, their city’s territory, was the largest in the entire Greek world by a factor of over three. I mean, it was really hugely bigger than anywhere else. So how do they work? How was the basically agricultural produce produced and by whom? It was done by a whole population. These are Greeks. They're not bought on the market from abroad. They're not foreigners, they're locals, whom at one point the Spartans had enslaved and called, and it's a very unpleasant term, helots. And the Greek word heílotes means a captive. So, their very name, their collective name, bears witness to how their ancestors had originally been enslaved thereafter. Now this is unlike slavery in Athens and elsewhere. Reproduction, breeding was the only way in which the Spartans reproduce their slave community’…
Every year, the chief officials of the Spartan state uttered a declaration and the Declaration was in two parts. First to the Spartans, shave your mustaches and obey the laws and it's very interesting. There are sculptures which show I mean, they're presumably meant to be Spartans in bronze or in stone, without a mustache so they grew a full beard, but no mustache, shave your mustache, obey the laws. Second half of the proclamation was to declare the helots enemies of state. So that and it’s really partly not so much a pragmatic thing, but it's a religious thing. If you kill another human being in everyday converse, and everyday transactions, you commit homicide. Well that in Greek eyes, incurred pollution, it meant you were polluted in some way, you needed to be purified of that blood guilt. If on the other hand, and this is similar to us, I'm afraid, if you kill an enemy in war, say I go over and we're in Afghanistan, I kill a Taliban. That's not murder. That's homicide, but it's not murder. In the same way, if a Spartan killed a helot, because of this decree, this declaration, he was not committing murder, he was committing homicide. And so he was absolved in advance from pollution, encouraging him therefore, not to hold back killing a helot if that was thought to be necessary or desirable. So the helots are at the same time the workforce of the entire Spartan state, but they're also slaves under constant threat of death."
Everything You Wanted To Know About Ancient Greece (Part 2) | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘What about the perception of homosexuality more widely? Was it celebrated in ancient Greece? Was Oscar Wilde right in his suggestion of a sort of gay utopia?’
‘Well, he's both right and wrong insofar as there was no religious argument against it as there was for him. Judeo-Christian tradition is very down on homosexuality. Insofar as it was celebrated in myth, in the ancient world, Heracles had boyfriends. And that was great. In those terms, compare it with late 19th century Victorian England. Boy, I would have taken Ancient Greece any time if I was gay then. But on the other hand, it's complicated. For the reasons I've given. You've got to be careful. The protocols, how you do your pederasty matter, it wasn't just that it wasn't criminalized, it had to be done in the proper way. And then there's a famous or rather notorious passage of Plato, and it's in The Laws and he's talking about well, how should we regulate sexual relations?
Are homosexuals, as we call it - it’s a modern term - are same sex relations okay between men? Well, no because they are unnatural. Why are they unnatural? Because they don't give rise to offspring. Reproductive naturalism. He anticipates the Christian view of the purpose of marriage being to produce legitimate offspring, to have sex only within marriage. Well Plato, having previously in an earlier work, celebrated through his mouthpiece Socrates, same sex relationships of a, they could be sexual but not exclusively sexual kind, which elevates the behavior of both of them. It's a sort of higher form of converse than purely physical which is what male-female might be thought to be. Because women were not educated to be equals with men, typically in ancient Greece.
So Plato goes from, in a way celebrating a form of idealized spiritualized, same sex homosexuality to a position of very negative down on it. And if I was to be crude, I'd say well as he got older, he wasn't that interested or that capable of having sex with anybody. He never married, which is very unusual. And I think therefore whether or not he was a, as it were a preferred homosexual, by the end he's pretty sour and embittered, and he's quite down on any sort of what he considers deviant behavior. And he has fierce punishments in this ideal state, which is not very ideal by most of our standards’...
‘Why was homosexuality and bisexuality accepted in ancient Greece, but not in Rome?’
‘I've thought about this. It's very, very hard to say. I mean, one reason is if you conquer a people, and you think yourself, therefore superior to them, you look for the things that differentiate your civilization from theirs. And the Romans singled out their abhorrence, their rejection of this deviant custom among the Greeks of homosexuality, which they thought was effeminate. At least one party in any homosexual relationship they thought must play the part of the woman. So it's not what a true Roman masculine man should do. And you may, might immediately think, as I immediately think, what about the Spartans? They institutionalized pederasty, homosexuality? They were no wimps. So the point is, the Romans were being very selective in what they chose not to adopt from the Greeks. They actually adopted a great deal of other stuff, but this was one custom which they, like, I mean, there have been many other cultures that have thought did a terrible thing. And of course, typically any Judeo Christian culture does, officially, think of it as a terrible thing in terms of its primary documents. So I think that's the answer. The Romans conquered the Greeks. Greeks were feeble. One reason they were feeble, or one manifestation of their feebleness was their addiction to buggery.’...
'There were separate spaces. The Greeks actually had a word meaning a cut out space. So a sanctuary which might or might not include a temple was. So there were as it were shrines and specifically religious spaces in terms of an altar, and a temple. But religion was practiced everywhere. You go to battle, you slaughter a an animal before the battle to get the will of the gods, you look at its lip, liver, and then if it's favorable you go to battle. If it's not, you don't. So battlefield. You're at home, you wake up in the morning, you have your family Hermes, just outside your back door, you pour a libation, that is wine, or some other liquid, it might be olive oil, and that is your way of making your peace with the gods constantly.
There's a tooing and froing. There’s a sort of notion of a contract, that if you the human, do the gods favors, if you look after them, and if you worship them, give them their due, then the gods are bound by contract to do you a favor in return. It's a give and take. So religion was everywhere in principle and just about any phenomenon could be given a religious interpretation. A rainbow, well the Greeks had a word for that, a goddess called Iris. The sun is a god, Helios. Or you look at a spring, ah there's a nymph playing there, female, you pour a libation to that nymph. So everywhere, Greeks were massively religious, and that's why it's a bit of a paradox that some Greeks were able to draw a distinction and actually to even question whether the gods I mean, Zeus, Hermes and so on were real, or whether they were figments of human imagination. So in other words, you get the beginnings of atheism, through humanism, as well as normally most Greeks being what you and I would call very religious.'
‘And you mentioned Zeus and Hermes there. How many Greek gods and goddesses were there?’
‘Absolutely countless in the sense that you can multiply one god or goddess by giving her or him a different epithet. I'll just give you one example. Athena. Athena Polias is the patron goddess of Athens. But if you go up on the Acropolis there are two other temples, to different Athenas. One of them is Athena Parthenos, the virgin, the maiden. That's the Parthenon. And then there's another one called Athena Nike, if you own running shoes by Nike, that means victory. So there's one goddess, three different manifestations for the Greeks, three different goddesses’"
So much for the myth that Ancient Greece was a gay paradise
