Episode 1 Who Were the Greeks?

Language, literature, art, philosophy, politics,

architecture, sport, culture -

the very bones, sinews, muscles, and lifeblood of our modern world

are often said to be indebted to the Ancient Greeks.

But scratch the surface of that culture

and you find, amidst the democracy, the philosophy and the literature,

what can seem to us a seething tornado

of alien,

unsettling

and sometimes downright outrageous customs and beliefs.

I'm Dr Michael Scott.

As an Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient History,

I study the strange world of the Ancient Greeks.

In these two programmes, I'll be asking two big questions.

How did they live?

And what have they given us?

HE SPEAKS IN ANCIENT GREEK

In this programme, I'll be finding out who these people were.

The Ancient Greeks who invented democracy

but who engaged in wrestling matches sometimes to the death.

What were their lives like?

They came up with the Olympics

but dined on a filthy mix of vinegar and blood soup.

A tough food for tough men.

They gave us philosophy

but were happy to abandon newborn babies outside their city walls.

How did this mix of the bizarre and the familiar

create such an impressive civilisation?

I want to find out, who were the Greeks?

I'm in the hills above a place that changed the world.

It doesn't look that impressive today,

scattered with modern houses and beach hotels.

But down there on that very shore, one of the most important

battles in history was fought and won by the Ancient Greeks.

In 490 BC, a relatively small Greek force

took position down there on the plain of Marathon to face up

against a vast invading Persian army.

There were around 10,000 Greeks and probably 25,000 to 30,000 Persians,

although some of the sources talk about hundreds of thousands.

The Greeks were outnumbered...

..and supposedly totally outmatched.

But they were fighting for their freedom.

By 490 BC, when the Greeks were facing the Persians at Marathon,

they had already invented the world's first democracy.

Greek architecture, art, philosophy and medicine were flourishing too.

But all of this could have been wiped out

with a sweep of the Persian sword.

There was a huge amount at stake.

But at Marathon, the Greeks broke all the rules of battle

in order to win.

They ran at the Persian line, taking them by surprise.

The Greeks did not normally run into battle in those days.

It was an extraordinary thing for them to do.

After the Battle of Marathon, Miltiades, the Athenian general,

travelled to the sacred site of Olympia to make offerings of thanks

to the gods for their miraculous victory against the Persians.

And in the Sanctuary of Zeus,

he dedicated possibly the very helmet he wore in battle to the god.

This is Miltiades' helmet.

And we know this because the helmet is inscribed

"Miltiades anetheken to Dii,"

"Miltiades dedicated this to the god Zeus."

For me, there's no better way of getting up close and personal

with history two and a half thousand years ago

than standing in front of this incredible object.

But this object right next to it tells a very different story.

It's a helmet, but you can see the difference in styles.

This is a Persian helmet.

And what it's doing here, well, again,

an inscription tells us the story. Here it is.

"Di," to the gods, "athenioa," the Athenians,

"medon," the Persians, "labontes," took it.

The Athenians took this helmet, probably off a dead Persian,

and dedicated it to their gods.

So what does this tell us?

There was more to Ancient Greece than the traditional image

we might have in our minds of philosophy, politics and art.

The Greeks were ferocious warriors, they took battle trophies,

and were quite happy to put thousands of their enemies

to the sword.

The political philosopher, John Stuart Mill,

once claimed Marathon was more important

in the story of English history than the Battle of Hastings.

If the Greeks had not won that day,

our world would be unrecognisably different.

Who were these people

who accomplished such an extraordinary victory?

In the fifth century BC, when the Greeks fought at Marathon,

Greece's political organisation was very unusual.

Its population was divided by mountain ranges

and dotted across myriad islands.

It was a patchwork of thousands of small territories

rather than anything resembling a nation.

Ancient Greece was composed of a huge number of tribes,

monarchies and city-states, called "polis".

Now these weren't anything like our modern cities today.

They were much more country towns or villages

surrounded by an amount of territory that provided the community

with, by and large, everything they needed - olives, grain, animals.

And most of them were fairly small.

One area of Ancient Greece, Boeotia,

which is a bit smaller than our Kent,

there were 12 of these independent city states sitting side-by-side

but every one of them, whatever size, had their own traditions,

their own laws, their own ideas about how things should be done.

Every one of them had their own unique identity.

More often than not,

the Ancient Greeks referred to the Athenians,

the Spartans or the Corinthians,

rather than talking about Athens, Sparta or Corinth.

They spoke of communities made up of people

rather than cities made up of buildings.

How did this mosaic of independent communities link together?

Well, one of the ways they did it was through alliances.

This is a copy of a bronze tablet

that was originally discovered in 1813

and it would have been fixed to a wall.

These are nail holes here and here.

And it details an alliance, a treaty alliance between two city states.

That of Elis in the Peloponnese and Haria in Arcadia.

But the terms of the alliance are fascinating.

It's a treaty for 100 years and it works like this -

if one city goes to war, the other city state will join in.

If someone makes war on one of the city states,

the other will come to its aid.

And there's a fine

if one of the city states doesn't live up to its obligations.

A talent - 6,000 days' pay which had to be paid over to Olympian Zeus.

The truth was that each independent polis needed treaties and alliances

because the city states of Ancient Greece

were almost constantly at war with one another.

They fought over land, they had long-running feuds

and bitter rivalries for power.

Every man grew up knowing how to fight

and was instilled with a deep desire to win, no matter what the cost.

At the Battle of Marathon, the reality was that only the Athenians

and their allies, the Plataeans, turned up to fight the Persians.

It was one loose alliance that saved the whole of Greece.

Winning was everything in Ancient Greece, second place meant nothing.

Pindar, who wrote victory odes for Olympic winners, wrote one

in which he gloats about how a loser will be shunned by their mother

and have to creep around in the back streets,

"Nor returning to their mothers

"did sweet laughter arouse joy around them,

"but down the alleys they slunk,

"keeping aloof from their enemies, bitten by defeat."

Success was everything.

In a world in which only wealth, breeding or achievement

could really distinguish you,

the thing you could do most about was achievement.

You had to fight and you had to win.

Within the city states of Ancient Greece,

if you were a man and a citizen, you had a great deal of responsibility.

All citizens had to serve as soldiers

because there was no professional army.

Because all citizens had to be battle-ready,

a good deal of any spare time was spent keeping fit in Ancient Greece.

And the Greeks were extremely competitive about it.

Today, at the Olympic Centre in Athens,

there is still a legacy

of one of the most brutal forms of Ancient Greek combat sport.

The no-holds barred Pankration is still practised here.

Pankration was a sport in the ancient Olympics,

but it was also used in battle.

When the Greeks were disarmed, when they lost their weapons,

they could still fight to the death using this sport.

Competition was at the core of the Greek psyche.

The Greek word for "competition" is "agon" - our "agony".

A Syrian writer named Lucian

wrote a guide to Greece for foreigners in the second century AD,

and he said that the Greek obsession with competition

bordered on insanity.

'Pankration still looks pretty dangerous today,

'but I'm here to give it a try.'

I understand Pankration as part of the ancient world.

What does it mean to you?

We are very proud to do this sport.

We love it, we do it every day.

So it's a part of our life.

In the ancient world Pankration was thought of

as the most difficult sport, the toughest,

almost no rules whatsoever.

Is it like that today?

No, today we have rules.

Would you show me some moves? You will be gentle?

-Yes, of course. Don't be afraid.

-OK.

You can do this move.

OK, yeah. It's impossible to move.

You cannot move when you're down here.

It's very difficult.

'All the throws and moves in modern Pankration

'come from the ancient sport.

'It's an incredibly effective martial art.'

Wow.

-So you can throw someone of any weight?

-Yes.

It doesn't matter how heavy or tall they are?

-No, it's about technique.

-Amazing.

'The fact that the Greeks developed and competed in sports

'that doubled as battle tactics,

'marked out the militaristic nature of their society.

'Yet there were some in Ancient Greece

'who took the idea of military training and combat to the extreme.'

If you want to know how tough life could be in Ancient Greece,

you have to look at Sparta - a place of wild mountains and deep forests.

In Ancient Greece, nobody was tougher than the famous Spartans.

We still use their name today in our word "spartan"

meaning simple, austere, frugal.

But Spartan society went a lot further than just austerity,

it was a society where you had to survive in the wild

and fight for life from the moment you were born.

Sparta was essentially a military society.

Boys were taken away from their families aged six,

and taught in packs.

They were subjected to rigorous training

to make them soldiers and also punished with things like whipping

for even minor offences,

and there they became used to the incredible intensity of observation

that defined Spartan society.

One source tells us that

a Spartan's body was checked for physical perfection every ten days.

The Spartans strove to be perfect warriors,

they sought glory in battle and to instil fear in their enemies.

They were a ruthless fighting force.

Spartan warriors, when going into battle, wore a red cloak,

much like this one.

Now, you might think it's a bit luxurious for those hardy Spartans

to have a nice red cloak but, the way they explained it was that,

the red colour covered up the sight of their blood

if they were bleeding on the battlefield.

If you saw these, you knew you were facing Spartans.

You knew you were facing soldiers trained within a society

that was tuned to the highest pitch of competition, obedience

and self-mastery.

'Tough Spartan training

'and the Spartan way of life is still admired today.

'I've arranged to meet some modern-day Spartan re-enactors,

'who have agreed not to beat me or check me for physical perfection,

'but they have cooked up an ancient Spartan recipe for me to try.'

So, Spiro, what are we making here?

OK, this is the black broth.

It's the typical food for the Spartan fighter.

It is a food that is adapted to the military lifestyle of the time.

Does that mean it doesn't taste very nice?

It tastes horrible.

The main reason because it's called black broth

is that it has a lot of pig blood.

OK, so what else?

It has barley flour, it has salt, it has vinegar, it also has pork meat.

OK, I've heard a story about this food

that a man from Sybaris, a man from Sybaris in southern Italy,

said that once he'd tried this

he understood why Spartans were so willing to die on the battlefield.

That is correct, that's correct.

-Because it tasted so horrible.

-Yes.

-Right.

THEY LAUGH

I think I might be with Sybaris on this.

You can taste the vinegar, that's really strong.

And the thickness of the barley.

But you can taste the blood as well.

Yes, there is a small taste of blood.

This is a, you can say, a tough food for tough men.

It strengthens the mentality of those people

and it makes them feel they were strong.

Spartans had to compete constantly, carry out orders,

test themselves to the limits of their endurance.

And it wasn't just the men, it was also the women.

This is a replica of an ancient bronze statuette of a Spartan girl.

And it sums up everything you need to know about the women of Sparta.

The key detail is here.

Look at her pulling up her skirt

to reveal her thigh so that she can run faster.

That's exactly what the ancient Athenians

labelled Spartan women as - thigh-flashers.

They talked about their intolerable, unrespectable behaviour,

not least because Spartan women were out there as young girls,

training, wrestling with one another in order to become as fit

as they possibly could to be the perfect mother.

But what the Spartans thought was a perfect mother,

would not be a perfect mother to us today.

Spartan mothers had to be prepared to give up their babies

for examination by the Spartan council of elders.

And if the elders thought the child was imperfect,

it would not be allowed to live.

Here in Sparta, if a child was judged weak or unhealthy in any way,

then its father was ordered to carry it to the slopes of Mount Taygetos

and leave it to die

because, as the ancient sources say,

"The life which nature has not provided with health and strength

"can be of no use to itself or to the state."

This practice of infant exposure,

leaving babies to die if they weren't considered strong enough,

didn't just happen in Sparta either.

It was allegedly practised all over Ancient Greece, even in Athens,

the birthplace of our modern sense of democracy and freedom.

It's estimated that the rate of female exposure was perhaps

as high as 10% in Athens.

Baby girls were certainly abandoned more frequently than boys.

Sons could grow up to become citizens,

they could fight for their polis

and did not need to be provided with a dowry.

A comic writer of the third century BC wrote,

"If you have a son you bring him up, even if you're poor,

"but if you have a daughter, you abandon her, even if you're rich."

It seems shocking that a culture that we so much admire

practised what we would now call infanticide and eugenics.

But in the Athenian agora, the ancient city centre,

a startling discovery was made in the 1930s

that helps us put these practices into context.

An ancient well full of baby bones was uncovered.

Today, archaeologists

at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens

have analysed the entire contents of the well.

'Osteologist, Dr Sherry Fox,

'has agreed to share some of their findings with me.'

How common is it to find a well full of bones in the ancient city?

This is a unique burial in that we have only the remains of infants,

for the most part, around 450.

It dates to the second century BC,

and from a fairly narrow window, we think around 15 years.

What sense can we get of what killed these children?

Well, prematurity for certain, I believe it's 15%.

We have also some other defects that we're not so certain about

and we found a number of cases of cleft palate.

We also have infection

and here we have an example of infection on the back of the head.

This is the occipital bone.

It's the same bone that I have here

and oftentimes we will see pitting within this area.

And what kind of infection creates this pitting on the skull?

Well, one of the more common infections is meningitis,

and it's a problem today.

And was anything else found alongside the infants in the well?

Absolutely. In addition to those infants, we have about 150 dogs.

Yeah, those definitely aren't children's.

Dog burials are often associated with human burials

in many different cultures.

They look green, and the reason for that is,

in addition to the infants and the dogs,

about 18 kilograms of bronze were recovered from the well.

Right, so this is the staining of the dog bones from the bronze.

It is.

So, what are we dealing with here?

Is it the family dog being thrown down the well

after the child has died?

It may be a sacrifice.

It's possible that it could be a sacrifice.

'In Ancient Greece, sacrifices were payments, almost bribes,

'to accompany your prayers to the gods

'if you wanted something to go well

'or if you wanted to rid yourself of bad luck.'

Socrates recorded that the people of Argos sacrificed female dogs

to ensure successful childbirth.

Dogs were also sacrificed to Hecate, a goddess of the underworld,

who was accompanied by the souls of those who had died prematurely.

The dogs in the agora well may have been sacrificed

to accompany the babies to the underworld.

Or they might have been sacrifices

simply to help rid the midwives and families of the bad luck

associated with death and childbirth. We just don't know.

This extraordinary archaeological discovery, for me,

I think, focuses two absolutely crucial things.

The first is that in trying to understand

why you would throw dogs down a well after dead babies,

it really brings home to us just how different a world Ancient Greece

was to our own - how weird, alien and strange it should seem to us.

But the second is this,

those 450-odd babies were part of a bigger picture.

We estimate that something like 25% of babies

died in their first year in Ancient Greece.

And in that context, it can seem an anathema that the Greeks

would have wanted to add to that number

with the intentional exposure,

the intentional killing of more imperfect children.

But I think the reality was very simple,

this was a harsh world in which only the fittest could survive

and anything or anyone else was a burden.

The Greeks had to fight to survive from the day they were born.

You needed all the help you could get to survive in Ancient Greece

and that was why the Greeks constantly appealed to their gods,

many of them still famous today, like Zeus, god of thunder,

and Aphrodite, goddess of love.

The Greeks believed that the gods

were involved in every aspect of their lives.

Land, sea, harvest, love, wine-making, weaving -

you name it, and there was a Greek god behind it.

The best way I've heard of describing it is like this,

"The Greek gods spilled like clothes from an over-filled drawer

"that no-one felt obliged to tidy."

And yet, at the same time,

those gods could be actively for you or against you

and you had to do everything in your power to keep them on your side,

to keep them well disposed towards you, to keep them happy.

There wasn't even a word for religion in Ancient Greece.

Worshipping the gods was so much a part of life

that it could not be considered separately.

But here's the paradox,

because alongside believing in a vast array of gods, the Greeks

were also fundamentally interested in scientific thought and medicine.

They were, in a way, rational and irrational all at the same time.

I'm on my way to Epidaurus, across the sea from Athens,

in the Peloponnese.

Epidaurus was a medical sanctuary where the Greeks came to be healed,

and it was a place where Greek religion and medicine

were perfectly combined.

There's no better symbol of the very curious,

but ultimately very successful, interweaving, of what are to us,

rational and irrational approaches to medicine, here at Epidaurus,

than these things -

these stelae that were put up right by the abaton.

The top line of the inscription here tells us what they are.

"Mata to Apollonos..."

"The cures of the god Apollo and the god Asclepius."

And what follows are success stories, testimonials,

stelae of them.

And on the one hand, some of them are absolutely fantastical.

The very first one - "Cleo, who was pregnant for five years,

"came here and gave birth."

And it gets better because then, apparently,

her son got up immediately and washed himself in the fountain.

But on the other hand, some of them feel very real.

A man who had an arrow in his lung,

that had seeped 67 bowlfuls of pus before he got here, was cured.

And even those who came here disbelieving in the god Apollo

had their ailments cured.

'Here at Epidaurus, I've arranged to meet Dr Stefanos Geroulanos,

'a professor of surgery and a scholar of Ancient Greek medicine,

'to find out exactly how this sanctuary,

'with its gods and doctors, actually worked.'

They were offering to the gods,

they were bringing some presents to ask to be cured.

And what sort of things would they offer?

Mainly food.

If there was something more important,

they would bring an animal and eventually sacrifice.

And this is the altar of Asclepius here, this is where they came to?

Definitely, it is the main altar and it is here

where they would offer what they had brought from home.

What would happen in the days after they had arrived

and made their initial sacrifices?

The physicians would take the history,

they would examine the patient and come to a diagnosis.

Then they would ask the patient that he has to sleep in the abaton.

In the night, the god would come with all his followers

and tell to the patient what he had to do to be cured.

It seems a little like

we've stepped over here from medicine into hallucination.

Do you think there were some kind of tricks that these people,

when they came to sleep in the abaton,

encouraged them to have these sorts of dreams?

Definitely.

They were giving them drinks, not with hallucination drugs,

but definitely to make them sleep.

The second thing that was extremely important, I think,

is that if the treatment, the first treatment, wouldn't work,

so what should we do?

God could not make a mistake. You didn't hear very well.

Go sleep again and then they could give the second treatment.

'It wasn't simply faith healing in the sanctuary at Epidaurus.

'Ancient Greek physicians administered cures

'and even performed operations here.

'And in his own private collection now on exhibition, Dr Geroulanos

'has examples of the tools which the ancient surgeons used.

'I'm about to see an Ancient Greek medical kit.'

Stefanos, tell me about this array

of rather nasty-looking pieces of equipment here?

Let's start from the top, there are some knives and scalpels.

This one is to open up a small vein

to have blood letting out

and it was the only way to put your blood pressure down.

That one looks a little bit more than a small vein opener?

It is there for a small amputation, it was very suitable.

There's an incredible variety, of specialisation, of tool here.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

How would you judge this in terms of the sophistication

of the ancient surgery kit compared to the modern?

For example, the curettes are exactly the same today as they were before.

The same is this spoon sort of a curette, exactly the same.

The hooks, and especially the sharp ones, are identical.

Really, obviously, we've advanced in terms of knowledge and technology,

but the bones of the kit are here.

It is like all tools.

When the tools reach a certain standard, they stay for ever.

I mean, think of the hammer.

And what are these?

These are cupping glasses.

I was going to say, I've never heard of a cupping glass,

I don't know what a cupping glass is.

You are too young.

I had them when I was a young boy, I had them on my back

when I had a flu.

It was one of the best therapies at the time

because it makes your immune response better.

You put some fire in, up to the end that the fire disappears,

so it has taken all the oxygen away.

And then you put it on the skin.

Now, having a vacuum, the skin goes up

and creates under the skin...

..a dome.

The effect is that the body needs much more white blood cells

and it creates more, that they are not going only there,

but they go to your pri-monia,

or to another place where there is an infection.

So this is a device which sort of encourages the body

to go into overdrive and to get the immune system in overdrive.

Exactly, and they were used up to the 1960s.

'After their treatment in medical sanctuaries,

'the Greeks would also leave replicas

'of whatever parts of their body

'had been cured as offerings to the gods.

'And it would seem from the objects found that then, just as now,

'there was a fair degree of concern about a whole range of body parts.

'It might seem strange to make a public display

'of a part of your anatomy that had been afflicted.

'But the healing sanctuaries weren't the only places in Ancient Greece

'where your body could be seen.

'In the gym, nobody had a stitch on.'

Now our word "gymnasium" comes from the Greek word "gymnos"

which effectively means "naked".

So, in a sense,

to get the proper understanding of the word "gymnasium"

we should really be saying "nuditorium".

And that's the crucial point.

Here, in these spaces, Greek men were naked,

wrestling, exercising with one another.

And it will come as no surprise, that in such spaces,

given such nudity, given such close physical contact,

gymnasia were centres of sexual attraction in Ancient Greece.

And they were part of a much wider sexual landscape

which was very different to our own.

Looking around the Athens tourist market today,

it would seem that from the replicas on sale,

sex was the only thing on Ancient Greek minds.

And a lot of what they thought about sex seems to us very strange indeed.

The Greeks believed that sex was good for women

because it kept their wombs from drying out

and wandering around the body.

And, of course, from a male perspective,

it also supposedly kept them under better control.

So, according to the laws of Athens, Athenian men were supposed

to have sex with their wives at least three times a month.

And from the male perspective, though,

there were also lots of other options.

They could go with a high-class geisha girl prostitute

called a "hetaerae",

they could have a live-in lover-mistress, a "palleacae",

or they could go to a brothel for a street prostitute, a "pornai".

Anal sex with their wives was repugnant

but with any of the other three, absolutely fine.

It really was an unfair state of affairs

because, for women, adultery was a much worse crime than rape.

In addition to having carnal relations

with their wives or prostitutes, in Ancient Greece,

it was also expected that young men would court adolescent boys.

The beauty of youth was celebrated and much sought-after,

and pederastic relationships were seen as very much the norm.

Girls were married off when they were 13 or 14,

at the same stage,

boys would attract the attention of older male lovers.

Something that today would be labelled as pederasty,

or even perhaps paedophilia, was considered by the Ancient Greeks

an exalted and important form of love.

The relationship between the "erastes", the older man,

and the "eromenos", the younger boy, was governed by strict rules.

The older man had to be in his 20s but not yet married,

and his role was to protect, to love, to educate the younger boy.

And he had to win his affection.

He had to sleep on his doorstep, he had to shower him with gifts

and the younger boy had to agree to the match.

Although it was said that many fathers were furious

when they heard that their sons had male admirers,

fathers would also wish for their sons to be beautiful

so as to attract the best lover.

These relationships were almost a final stage of a boy's education,

an exchange of wisdom and youth.

The images on Greek vases offer us sometimes a suggestive

and sometimes a fairly graphic picture

of the erastes/eromenos relationship.

So, this one here shows an older man, a suitor, offering a cockerel,

a gift, towards the youth, the potential eromenos.

And just in case there's any doubt

about how to interpret this image,

the inscription around the edge reads

"hoptite kalos" - "the beautiful boy".

But this one over here, on the other hand,

is a little bit more vivid an image, perhaps,

of the erastes/eromenos relationship later on in the evening.

Here, both are naked

and the youth stretches out with his arm to cradle the older man's head.

The older man, clearly excited,

reaches out with his own hand towards the youth's genitalia.

The images give us a picture of everything

the erastes/eromenos image could be -

affection, love and lust.

Older man/younger boy relationships were celebrated in Ancient Greece.

There were even famous eromenos and erastes couples.

These relationships weren't hidden in the backstreets,

they were front and centre in Greek society.

There were also strict rules

about when the erastes/eromenos relationship should be over.

In an ideal world, the man should be married by the time he was 35,

otherwise he faced a fine.

And the young boy's days as an eromenos were said to be over

when he had "hair on thigh and down on cheek".

And if the relationship carried on,

well, the younger boy was subject to shame

and the older man to ridicule.

So we shouldn't think about sexual orientation as something

that was set for life in Ancient Greece,

much rather, it was that there were different sexual relationships

appropriate at different ages.

The admiration of youth, the cult of admiring the physique

and promise of adolescent boys on the brink of manhood

was a huge part of Ancient Greek culture.

'Professor Olga Palagia, of Athens University,

'is an expert in classical sculpture,

'and has studied the hundreds of statues of perfect young males

'known as kouros figures.

'And Olga believes that these statues give us a real sense

'of how the Greeks thought about young men and young women.'

So, Olga, where are you taking me?

I'm taking you to the statue of the kouros

that was standing on his grave in Attica outside of Athens,

probably with his sister, who is the next statue over there.

And what strikes you immediately

about so many of the statues from Ancient Greece,

the male statues, is the nudity, isn't it?

What did the nudity say?

What would a viewer have thought when they saw this kind of statue?

I think, first, they would think

that this is an aristocratic young man

because he had the leisure to exercise.

We know that the sons of good families

could go to the gym every day and exercise

and they were really obsessed with athletics and exercise,

very much like we are.

When we see nudity today, we think sexuality, we think lust,

we think attraction. Is there that element to it as well?

Yes. If we're men, we're supposed to be attracted,

because in ancient Athens, older men would be attracted by young boys.

Because they wouldn't have a chance to look at young girls.

Young girls were confined at home.

And in statues, they are very different, aren't they?

They are, of course, always dressed, heavily dressed.

There was a lot of emphasis on virginity

because young women were going to get married

and have the heir to the family, so they weren't supposed to see anyone.

And the difference is key, you can't see, really, any features

of her body underneath at all, compared to our gentleman over here.

That's right.

If you had that perfect physical body,

what did it say about your character?

It had no implications at all.

So it really is body beautiful and it doesn't matter

what their brain is like or what their character is like

or what their soul is like, but it is the body above all.

Well, the brain was a challenge for the mature lover

who would like to teach the young boy various things,

so he would be very happy to take him on

and teach him all sorts of things...

..and, you know, develop his mind.

Ancient Greece was awash with images,

many of them sculptures of people with perfect physiques.

Indeed, more often than not, uber-perfect physiques.

And that cacophony of perfection set the bar high

when it came to expectations of what people looked like in real life.

And more than that it fed into a wider set of expectations

about how what you looked like said something about who you were

and how who you spent time with said something about who you were.

Plutarch put it like this -

"If you live with a lame man, you'll start to limp."

So, the ideal in Ancient Greece was to look good,

spend your time with good-looking people, avoiding the ugly

and anyone who didn't match up to the ideal.

The Ancient Greeks enjoyed spending a great deal of their time

drinking, discussing and carousing with good-looking people

and those with great minds.

And much of this appreciation of the good-looking and good-minded,

fuelled by good wine, took place in "symposia",

which were drinking parties held behind closed doors.

But even these Ancient Greek parties were not what you might think,

they weren't relaxed events,

rather they were a series of tests on how to conduct yourself.

The male guests at the symposium were asked to recline on benches,

to take up positions something like this.

And to assume this position was to prove yourself

a fully-fledged member of Greek society.

Youngsters, for instance, weren't allowed to recline, they had to sit.

But even when you'd obtained this privileged position and place,

that was only the beginning because the symposium

was a continual series of tests on how to behave -

one of which was how to drink your wine.

Now this is a kylix, an Ancient Greek drinking cup,

and it's a lot harder to drink out of than you might first imagine,

not least because of the wide brim

and the shallow nature of the vessel,

but also because I'm reclining so I can only drink with one hand.

As you tip it towards you, the wine comes forward

and makes the whole thing very unbalanced.

It's easy for a novice, particularly like me,

to make a complete mess of it.

A bit of an epic fail on my part.

But what this shows is what the symposium did in the Greek world.

It proved who was in and who was out,

but then proved whether or not

you knew how to behave within Greek society.

It wasn't, like down the pub today, how many pints can you drink?

It was do you know how to drink?

And that's why I think that,

on so many of the vessels that were used in the symposium,

you see this, you see an eye, a reminder to all the guests

that society was looking right back at them.

There's an impression that symposia were wild orgies with drinking,

high-class prostitutes, dancing girls and flautists,

young men and older men enjoying the pleasure of close contact,

reclining two to a couch,

everyone getting drunk.

Well, maybe that's a taste of what happened when they got out of hand,

but symposia were also governed by exact social etiquette.

There was a master of ceremonies

who decided how strong the wine for the evening would be

and oversaw what happened when.

There were cleansing rituals and libations to the gods,

which had to take place.

Wine was mixed with water in great jars known as kraters.

Everything would start off in a very civilised manner.

Now, of course, some symposia went much further than that

and the playwright Eubulus tells us about what each krater,

each bowl of mixed wine,

means, when drunk, for how the evening will continue.

He puts it like this,

"For sensible men, I prepare only three kraters -

"one for health, the second for love and pleasure,

"and the third for sleep.

"And after that the sensible man goes home.

"But if you stay, well, the fourth krater belongs to hubris,

"the fifth is for shouting, the sixth is for rudeness and insults,

"the seventh is for fighting,

"the eighth is for breaking the furniture,

"the ninth is for depression,

"and the tenth, well, that's for madness and unconsciousness."

It does sound to me exactly how a ten-pint evening might pan out.

The symposium was not just about drinking and having a good time,

it was really supposed to be a place

for intellectual discussion and debate.

And as for what was discussed before the shouting, rudeness

and unconsciousness ensued,

the philosopher Plato wrote a whole philosophical discourse

about one famous symposium party that took place one night in Athens.

In Plato's Symposium, all the guests are invited

to debate and discuss about the nature of love.

That is until Socrates' on-off lover, Alcibiades,

turns up half drunk to ruin the party.

But in that story of a symposium gone wrong,

Plato underlines what a symposium should be about -

debate, discussion, investigation, argument,

all the hallmarks of what made the Greek psyche so unique

are on display in the symposium.

It wasn't mindless drinking, then, in Ancient Greece,

quite the opposite.

Wine was crucial to the symposium because it facilitated

exactly what the event was intended for - talking.

It was expected that you had to lead a public life in Ancient Greece

just as you had to display your body in the gymnasium,

you had to display your mind in the symposium.

In Greek, the word for a "private person" is "idiotes" - our "idiot".

Opting out of society was really not an option.

The Ancient Greeks were very different to us today.

They lived in a world of exorbitantly high expectations

in almost every aspect of their lives.

And they had to debate and discuss and argue

and to do it all publicly

without any real value attached to a private life.

They weren't slaves to conformity but they were driven

by an internal anxiety and need to meet those expectations

and to prove themselves publicly - a good sportsman,

a good soldier, a good citizen, a good Greek.

All these pressures to prove oneself worthy,

were part of what the Athenians felt they were protecting

more than anything else on the battlefield at Marathon -

their democracy,

the biggest talking shop and opt-in system of them all.

This rather unprepossessing place

on one of the hills above central Athens

is, in fact, the beating heart of the ancient Athenian democracy.

This is the assembly.

Now, today we are used to electing representatives

who will meet to take decisions on our behalf.

But in ancient Athens, it was very different.

Every single citizen had the right to come here to the assembly

to listen to the debates about all sorts of issues

from what to do with the financial surplus

to whether or not to go to war.

6,000 or so people and every one of them had the right to step up there,

to the speakers' platform, and to make their opinion known.

And then a vote was taken, probably just with a show of hands.

The direct nature of the democracy in ancient Athens

is unlike anything we know today.

Life could be brutish and short here in Athens,

but if you did survive childhood and adolescence,

you would, at some point,

be directly involved in governing your city.

It was also a hands-on world.

In the law courts, there were no lawyers

and no Criminal Prosecution Service.

If you wanted to try a case, you had to bring it

and you had to speak to the jury.

But it was not all fair and ideal.

There were still dirty politics.

These pieces of pottery are called "ostraca"

and they've given us our word "ostracism" today

because they were used in a particularly important vote

in ancient Athens.

The way it worked was this, you took your piece of pottery

like our replica here,

and you wrote on it the name of an Athenian

who you wanted to expel from the city

for a period of up to ten years,

a person you wanted to ostracise.

Now, all of these pieces here, like our replica,

have the same name on it and it's Themistocles.

Themistocles was an incredibly important politician in Athens

in the years after the battle of Marathon.

But it seems like he might have got a bit too big for his boots

because these pieces are part of a larger collection of 190 ostraca

all with his name on it.

But here's the rub -

because when these pieces were analysed by archaeologists

it was discovered that all 190 were written by just 14 different people.

And that can be for one of two reasons.

Firstly, that there were some enterprising people

pre-writing these to sell them to citizens

who perhaps couldn't write so well for themselves

or else, that there was some pretty extensive vote-rigging going on.

Democracy in Athens meant complete citizen participation.

If you were a man and a citizen, you were part of the process.

But along with all these participatory politics

came something we probably wouldn't want to thank the Greeks for -

bureaucracy.

The Athenians, it seems, were in love with it, and the city was awash

with countless inscriptions holding anyone and everyone accountable.

Here at the Epigraphic Museum in Athens,

many of these inscriptions can be found on display.

The Athenians published in profusion

every aspect of the workings of their democracy.

We have laws, decrees, honours, contracts,

registers, scrutiny lists, calendars, the list goes on.

What we get is a sense of the incredible accountability

and transparency that defined the ancient Athenian democracy.

And this stelae symbolises that above all it's,

as the first line tells us,

"a summ grafai", a set of building specs

for what is effectively a bit of a storeroom down in the Piraeus,

the ancient port of Athens.

And what follows is an incredibly detailed description

of what the building should look like.

This tells us, not just the general outline of the building,

but where the windows should be,

how deep the foundations should be, every detail.

But the best bit is the final clause because this is the penalty clause

and it tells us that the building contractors

must finish everything they promised "en teus cronos" -

"in the specified time".

So builders back then, just like builders now,

had to be pushed to finish the job on time.

Some things never change!

But how did the Greeks afford all their monumental building,

their drinking parties, sculpture, art and architecture?

Citizens would not work for free, there were rates of pay

and civic duties to attend to.

The uncomfortable truth is that Ancient Greece

was a civilisation built on the backs of slaves.

Slavery was a fact of life in Ancient Greece.

Slaves were captured in war or bought from overseas.

One census states that in fourth century BC Athens,

there were 400,000 slaves

to a citizen population of around just 35,000.

Not all Greeks were free,

but even those that were knew what slavery meant.

And the prospect of becoming a slave,

or of your wife and children being forced into slavery,

would have terrified them,

mainly because Greece and even the fabled democracy of ancient Athens

ran on slave labour.

Ancient Athens ran on slaves and silver.

At Laurion, just 40 miles southeast of Athens,

were the silver mines which provided Athens with much of its wealth.

And they were mines worked by thousands of slaves.

Off the beaten track today, you can still find the galleries

and tunnels of these ancient silver mines.

This is not a place you often get the chance to explore.

The silver from the mines here at Laurion

in part went to making Athens' famous coinage,

the Attic silver owl.

Each one of these is worth about four days' wage

for a skilled worker in ancient Athens.

And the slaves that worked here came from, amongst other places,

Thrace and Paphlagonia.

That's modern day Northern Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey.

And in these dark and cramped conditions,

they must have felt a long, long way from home.

Oil lamps, like this replica here, have been found in the mines.

And from the amount of oil that they contained,

we can estimate that a shift

might have lasted something like ten hours.

That's a long time to be down these tunnels

with just this kind of light.

Of all the types of slave you could be in Ancient Greece,

being a silver mine slave was considered to be the worst.

Plato talked about these places as being, in Greek, "vari"

which means "dark, heavy, depressing".

And I can see what he meant.

Unsurprisingly, the life expectancy of a Laurion slave was short.

But what is surprising in Ancient Greece

is that not all slaves were treated badly.

Many led quite comfortable lives.

Slaves could be well cared for by their masters,

they could be well educated

and some had important administrative positions

in Greek cities.

Indeed, Plutarch tells us that he would rather be a slave in Athens

than the king of some poxy little island.

And other sources talk about the way that in Athens

you couldn't tell between a slave and a non-slave

because everyone wore the same clothes.

House slaves served as cooks,

cleaners, porters, tutors as "pedagogues",

escorting their master's sons to school,

watching over them to make sure they completed their lessons.

Slaves were messengers, nurses and companions.

Some were even buried alongside their masters and mistresses

in the family burial plot at the end of their lives.

Let's not get too carried away, though, with this idea

of a cosy slave-master relationship.

Slaves were essentially seen as subhuman.

Slave testimony in Ancient Greek courts, for example,

was only allowed if it had been extracted under torture

because slaves were seen as natural liars.

Starvation and flogging were common punishments.

And, of course, if your master wanted sex,

you had no business refusing.

As offensive as it is to our modern concepts of liberty,

slavery didn't really bother the Ancient Greeks.

Slaves could be seen as the working class,

the people who kept the cogs turning.

But there were ways to work your way out of slavery in Ancient Greece.

You could be granted your freedom. You could even make a lot of money.

There was one slave

who actually became one of the richest men in Greece.

His name was Pasion and he had the ultimate rags-to-riches story.

'To learn more about Pasion, I've come to the ancient port of Athens,

'the Piraeus, where Pasion first worked as a slave.

'And I'm hoping Dr Paul Millett, an expert on Ancient Greek slavery,

'can tell me more about Pasion's extraordinary story.'

So, Paul, tell me about this character, Pasion.

What do we know about him?

So he was born, we think, some time around 430

and he came to Athens as an outsider, a non-Greek,

and almost certainly also would have been landed here at the Piraeus

before being taken to the slave market,

and we think being bought by a couple of Athenian bankers.

What happened next in Pasion's story?

He was a great success as their assistant, one presumes,

because they gave him his freedom

and he continued to manage the bank.

And somehow, we don't know quite how it came about,

he ended up owning this bank.

The idea that you could rise up from being a slave to be freed,

that was fairly typical in Ancient Greece?

Well, my view is absolutely not.

I see this career path as being one pursued

by a tiny minority of slaves.

So Pasion, I see, as being very much the exception.

Once he becomes free, what happens next?

I mean, does he continue to work in the same business?

He became a successful, what we might say, businessman in his own right,

with other interests apart from banking

and was able to be sufficiently generous to the Athenian state.

One donation, we know about, was in the shield factory.

He gave a thousand shields.

He provided a number of "triremes", "warships" for the Athenian navy,

a very expensive thing to do,

and was, in the end, rewarded with citizenship,

which is very, very rare indeed for a slave.

And can we get any sense of just how rich Pasion was

as an individual by the time he died?

Well, we think he may have been the wealthiest man in Athens.

'Many slaves would have dreamed of gaining their freedom

'and becoming a citizen, having a say in the Athenian democracy

'which Pasion became a part of.

'But the equality that was the hallmark of democracy in Athens

'also demanded crushing conformity.

'Every citizen was supposed to have a modest house,

'obey the rules and even wear the same clothes.

'But as always with the Greeks,

'things weren't quite as straightforward as they may seem,

'not even when it came to your funeral.'

The Athenians tried to enforce equality amongst their citizens

even in death.

So there were rules about

the maximum size of funerary mat you could have,

the number of garments that could be put in your grave,

the extent of your funeral procession,

and even in relation to the size of your grave monument.

The idea was that no-one should stand out

as being more worthy than anyone else.

But, of course, this didn't work.

The Ancient Greeks, as ever, found a way around the rules.

These are some of the gravestones from Athens' Cemetery

and while they are all fairly similar in type,

you can immediately see there are vast differences in size,

in the quality of the sculpture and, of course, as a result in the cost.

So what I think this room shows is

that despite all the laws that Athens put in place

to try and ensure that everyone looked equal,

actually the desire for individualisation,

the desire to be different, to demonstrate your wealth,

your birth, the desire to be remembered,

just kept breaking through.

And this is one of my favourites.

This is Hergesso.

Hergesso, the daughter of Proximos.

She's beautifully carved and out of her jewellery box,

she's picking her favourite piece of jewellery

that would have been put in in paint or precious metal.

There's no way, when walking past this in Athens Cemetery,

that you would have thought Hergesso was the equal of everyone else.

She was, and she would be remembered as being, quite rightly,

something special.

The Ancient Greeks were full of contradictions.

They lived in an incredibly tough environment

but they created magnificent art and architecture.

They invented democracy but their world ran on slave labour.

They had philosophy and logic

but they would bend over backwards to please the gods.

It was a society that can seem like a vicious free-for-all,

but actually followed strict, if slightly odd, rules.

And it was that explosive mix

that propelled the Greeks to extraordinary creations, discoveries

and achievements in almost every aspect of human society,

including victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon.

Ancient Greece is probably not a place that any of us today

would want to find ourselves in.

But it is also a place, I would argue,

that we would never want to be without.

Next week, I'll be exploring the great legacies

of the Ancient Greeks and asking, "Why are they so enduring?"

I'll travel across the Greek world

to reveal the extent of their creative and scientific genius

and I'll uncover the strange realities

of the Olympic Games and ancient theatre...

You've got a golden heterae or prostitute,

so she turns out to have a heart of gold.

..and I'll find out how modern science is enlivening our quest

-to discover who were the Greeks?

-How amazing.

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