Episode 2 Who Were the Greeks?

This great icon standing heroically on the Acropolis,

alone against the sky, dominates the city of Athens today

just as it did when it was first built over 2,000 years ago.

This is the Parthenon and today, it is the symbol of ancient Greece.

It stands for everything that that world has given us -

democracy, philosophy, literature, art, architecture,

science and sport.

It is a beacon of culture and civilisation.

I'm Dr Michael Scott and in this series I've been finding out

more about the people who created this extraordinary monument.

In the last episode, I explored how the ancient Greeks lived.

I looked at their life cycle, city life, beliefs and strange

mindsets and I discovered a world of gods, myths, democrats and warriors,

inhabited by a people who could be as brutal as they were brilliant.

But in this programme I want to explore the great legacies

of the ancient Greeks and trace them back to the people who created them.

I want to return to the home of the Olympic Games

to reveal its harsh and strongly religious reality.

I want to visit Athens to find out why the city that gave us

philosophy also put to death one of its greatest minds.

And I want to see the Parthenon

as the Greeks themselves would have seen it.

The Greeks were so successful that their culture

and way of life ended up spreading from western Europe to Asia.

And even when the Greek golden age ended, their legacies remained.

I want to know why the Greeks were so successful,

why their legacies are so enduring, and why

they still have such a powerful hold over our imaginations today.

I want to find out, Who Were The Greeks?

The Parthenon is one of the most famous structures on the planet.

Its very creation testifies to the scientific, mathematic

and creative genius of the ancient Greek world.

One fact in particular always blows me away,

although the lines of the building appear to be perfectly straight,

this is actually an optical illusion.

The building is made almost entirely of curves, but these

are exactly the right arc to appear perfectly straight to the naked eye.

This foundation is actually six centimetres higher in the centre

than it is at the sides and these columns are all meticulously

curved to create a vision of absolute harmony and balance.

This building is a powerful insight into the mentality

of the ancient Greeks, their faultless precision,

their limitless ambition and their fastidious eye for detail.

And yet at the same time the people who built the Parthenon were

vastly different to us.

Their beliefs, their motivations, their ways of life can seem

strange, unsettling and sometimes downright alien.

So much of what we think we know about ancient Greece turns

out to be different from the reality.

Even this iconic building behind me is not quite what it seems.

To get to the bottom of the great legacies of the ancient Greeks

we have to understand the realities of their world.

2,500 years ago, there was no such thing as Greece.

Instead, the Greek world was made up of over 1,000

independent communities spread across the Mediterranean, described

by the philosopher Plato as being like "frogs around a frog pond."

These communities inhabited different landscapes,

and had distinct forms of government, different loyalties and

contradictory ideas that frequently set them against each other.

Yet there was something that linked all these different

communities together and distinguished them

from other cultures, those who the Greeks called barbarians.

It was Herodotus, the father of history, who first

put into words what made these disparate communities gel together.

He put it like this,

"Common blood, common language,

"common shrines and rituals and common customs."

That was, he said, what made up To Hellenikon - The Greek Thing.

It was these elements that allowed the Parthenon in Athens

and the community that surrounded it to be linked to those in Sicily,

and to Greeks in North Africa and to Asia Minor.

The ancient Greek world possessed a unique dynamic,

a winning combination of rivalry and difference on the one hand,

and shared culture, what we now call Hellenism, on the other.

The great legacies that are still with us

today are a product of this tension.

And there's no better place to understand this than

one of the few locations where Greeks from all over this

diverse world regularly came together.

Olympia, home of the Olympic games,

one of the greatest of Greek legacies.

Every four years, something like we think 40,000 Greeks

came from all over the Greek world here, to Olympia.

They came from Italy and Sicily, from Greece, from Asia Minor,

from Africa, and they sailed along rivers, crossed seas,

travelled on horseback, in chariots or even on foot.

And when they got here, there were no hotels,

most of them just pitched tents.

This was the single biggest gathering of people

in the ancient Greek world.

It's said that by the time the sun rose on the first

day of the games, there was not a single space left.

In the words of the ancient Greek poet Pindar,

"As in the daytime, there is no star in the sky warmer

"and brighter than the sun,

"likewise there is no competition greater than the Olympic Games."

The games lasted for five days

and consisted of a small selection of sports.

There were running races, the discus, the long jump -

which was performed from a standing start with the aid of stones

or lead jumping weights - and the javelin.

There were also horse races and chariot races.

And there was the boxing, and the pankration,

a no-holds-barred kind of martial art.

But in ancient times, these sports weren't carried out with

quite the same Olympic spirit that defines the games today.

In 484 BC, the boxer Kleomedes was disqualified for an illegal

manoeuvre that left his opponent dead.

A couple of years earlier, a wrestler had had his throat

crushed in the pankration.

And a boxer talked about how he had lost an ear in a bout, another

time an eye, and before that he had been stretchered off, presumed dead.

The ancient Olympics were violent, and fiercely competitive and many of

the athletes bore the scars of their engagements and some ended up dead.

Now, in our Olympic games, of course winning is important

but we also subscribe to the idea that it's the taking part

that counts, but in ancient Greece that would have been an anathema.

Winning was everything.

This shared belief in winning, in excellence,

was one of the bonds of Hellenism that united

the thousands of disparate peoples who journeyed here to Olympia.

But all this striving and all this violence also had a greater,

and more surprising purpose.

Winners were seen as being touched by the gods

and were raised above the station of mere mortals.

For the ancient Greeks, competitive sport was an act of worship.

And the real focus of the games lay outside the stadium, with the Gods.

Olympia was the home of one of the Greek world's most sacred

sanctuaries.

This whole area would have been covered with monuments to the

gods, particularly to Zeus, the ruler of all the gods.

In fact, the entire Olympic games were held in his honour.

And most impressive of all the monuments here at Olympia

was the magnificent Temple of Zeus.

This enormous block of stone gives you a great sense of just how

big the Temple of Zeus really was.

It's my height, six feet in width,

and this was just one of the column drums that made up

the columns of the Temple of Zeus.

And it was inside that temple that stood one of

the seven wonders of the ancient world, the colossal statue of Zeus

himself, made in ivory and gold by the master sculptor, Pheidias.

It's the cost, the attention, the effort paid to this temple

and to the statue that underlines that it was religion,

not sport, that was the real focus of the games.

In fact, the climax of the Olympics was not an athletic

event at all but a great ritual procession to the altar of Zeus.

But this was no altar as we know it.

The culmination of this religious occasion was

the sacrifice of 100 oxen.

They were led in, their throats were slit, their bodies cut up

and then their thigh bones wrapped in fat,

deposited on Zeus's altar and burned as an offering to the god.

But this was no altar made of stone. Zeus's altar here at Olympia

was made up of the surviving ash and congealed remains from every single

one of these sacrifices, from every single Olympics in ancient history.

So we know that by the second century AD this altar was

standing over 20 feet high.

I can imagine the blood, the smoke the smell, the ash

settling on everyone around as they watched this incredible sight.

Today, all that remains of the altar are these votive offerings

which were once buried amongst the ash.

Not only does this emphasis on religion

change our understanding of the Olympics, it's also something

of an earthier, grubbier view of the ancient Greeks than we're used to.

We think of these sites with their stunning architecture

and sculpture as somehow elevated above worldly realities.

But the beauty of the monuments can blind us to the

way they would have been viewed in ancient times.

This beautiful sculpture once stood around the Temple of Zeus

here at Olympia.

You can see her flying through the air,

her cloak billowing out behind her.

Of course, at this time in Greek art, the sculptor was not allowed

to show a woman fully naked. It just wasn't done.

But here the sculptor has brilliantly got around the rules

by having her flying though the air.

Her dress is pressed back against her.

She might as well be naked, but the crucial thing is she's not.

But this is also no ordinary woman.

This is Nike,

the Greek personification of victory itself.

We look at statues like this today and marvel at their beauty.

But to the ancient Greeks, they would also have been loaded with

a very different, very violent, symbolism.

The inscription here reads:

HE SPEAKS GREEK

The Messenians

and the Naupactians set up to the Olympian gods, a tenth,

a tithe, from the spoils of war.

This is no victory monument to athletic success.

This is a victory monument for battle.

And not just any battle, but one of Greeks against Greeks -

the Messenians and Naupactians against the Spartans.

Olympia was a place where the brutal reality of war,

of Greeks fighting against Greeks, was inescapable.

All over this site, archaeologists have found

hundreds of pieces of armour -

helmets, shields and greaves - from real battles

engraved to commemorate different military victories.

These would have been displayed all over the grounds during the

games, including in the middle of the spectators in the stadium.

They would have been constant reminders of both glorious

victories and devastating defeats.

As well as bringing Greeks together through religious ritual,

Olympia reminded them of the things that split them apart.

This is where the Nike would have been placed,

on top of the tall, triangular column

facing off against the temple and

against a Spartan monument that had been put there some years earlier.

And around it was a cacophony of monuments to competition,

rivalry and conflict and this was the realities of ancient Olympia.

To get a sense of it today, I guess we have to take our Olympic games

and add in the emotional tension of a highly charged international

football match, the religious importance of an event like Easter,

and then dial in the political tension of a United Nations summit.

Take away any proper sanitation and let it

stew for a week in the Greek heat, that's the ancient Olympics.

No wonder in the ancient world they said

if you wanted to punish a slave you sent him to the Olympic Games.

For the ancient Greeks, art and architecture

was much more than just works of beauty to be admired.

As well as honouring the gods, they were also

the means by which the different cities

and individuals announced themselves to each other and to the world.

Each monument carries a message about the person,

or people who created it.

And there is no better example of this than the Parthenon itself.

The Parthenon was born in a particular time and place,

Athens in the 5th century BC, around 30 years after the Greeks had

finally defeated the invading armies of the great Persian Empire.

This victory over the Persians was one of the finest

hours for Greece and, in particular, for Athens.

For the Athenians the victory over the Persians came at a high price.

The invaders swarmed across the city, ransacking the buildings.

Then they moved on to the Acropolis.

They scaled the walls, killed the defenders,

and then burnt its temples to the ground.

For the next 30 years, the Athenians left the Acropolis in ruins

as a constant memorial to the sacrilege of the barbarians.

Standing above the city as it does, it must have been that

kind of everyday reminder of just how badly the Persians had

behaved, but also how close the Athenians had come to defeat.

That was all until just after the mid-5th century BC

when under the guidance of Pericles,

the Athenians finally decided to rebuild their monuments.

These new monuments are a record of how 5th century Athenians saw

themselves, and of how they wanted to be seen by the wider world.

The new Acropolis was built, quite literally,

from the foundations of the old.

These column drums, built into the wall,

are remnants of one of the old temples that the Persians destroyed.

And on top of the rock, guarding the summit,

stood the original statue of liberty.

The first site to have greeted visitors as they emerged

on to the Acropolis was the giant statue of Athena

that stood right there.

She was bronze, about nine metres tall,

and she held a giant spear in her hand.

She had been sculpted by Pheidias,

who made the statue of Zeus at Olympia, and she was made

out of the spoils of war taken by the Athenians from the Persians.

But the crowning glory was of course the new Parthenon itself.

Standing on top of its ruined predecessor,

it rose like a phoenix from the ashes.

Around all four sides of the temple there were sculptures

depicting epic battles from the world of Greek myth.

They told a story of the struggle between civilisation and barbarism,

and symbolised the triumph of heroic Athenians over savage Persians.

These examples show Greeks fighting centaurs.

The Greeks look noble and brave,

whereas the centaurs look cruel and savage.

Here is a brutal centaur about to trample a fallen Greek.

But overall it's the Greeks who have the upper hand.

Here, a heroic Greek has grabbed the centaur and is poised to strike.

All of these images contributed to the same overall story,

which culminated with another amazing statue.

Inside this enormous temple stood a gigantic

statue of Athena in gold and ivory.

And in her hand, she held a figure of Nike, of victory.

Everything around us on the Acropolis speaks to that victory,

from the walls to the Parthenon, of Athens' victory over the Persians.

So in reality the Parthenon is not just a temple,

it's actually the most beautiful victory monument in the world.

Just like the monuments at Olympia,

the monuments of Athens reflected the identity of their creators.

They proclaimed to the world what it was that made Athens different

and successful.

But although they tapped into an important idea in Greek

thought of superiority over the barbarians, not everyone

in Greece would have agreed with the Athenians' glorious self-portrait.

After the Persian Wars were over, Athens had established a league

of Greek states, mostly those Greeks in the Aegean and in Asia who

resided closest to Persia, in order to resist future Persian invasions.

But it was not long before Athens had turned this

league into a tax-paying empire.

The Parthenon was built with monies extracted from the cities

under the thumb of the Athenian Empire,

and when it was built it became the bank where the monies that

continued to be collected from the Athenian Empire were kept.

So while to some this was a symbol of victory and freedom, to

others in ancient Greece it was a symbol of oppression.

As Plutarch put it, he said,

"The Greeks must consider this an unendurable insult when Athens uses

"these moneys to gild and beautify the city, like some vain harlot,

"all dolled up with precious stones, statues and temples worth millions."

Plutarch's comments about being dolled up like a harlot

make much more sense

when you realise that in ancient times, the Parthenon

would have looked very different

from the clean marble structure we admire today.

We're so used to thinking of the sculptures and buildings

of the ancient Greek world as being clean, off-white shining marble,

stone and clay, but this sculpture paints a very different picture.

What we're looking at is surviving paint here on the cloak

but also down here is the outline of the armour, of the greaves.

And this is the reality. The ancient Greek world wasn't monochrome.

It was technicolour.

Many sculptures and fragments of buildings still bear traces

of colour today, but in most cases the paintwork vanished long ago.

We know that parts of the Parthenon building were painted,

but the great mystery has always been

whether its sculptures were also once covered in glorious colour.

Today, with the help of infra-red imaging,

experts at the British Museum have discovered

traces on the Parthenon sculptures of a pigment called Egyptian Blue.

It's having a huge impact on the way we view the ancient Greeks.

Their most iconic image,

the clean, off-white marble Parthenon, is actually

a misunderstanding of the ancient reality.

And we're looking at the figure of Iris who was

the goddess of the rainbow.

To the naked eye there is nothing there.

Yes, yes.

But with these techniques you all of a sudden have a view that

hasn't been there for anyone for thousands of years.

Because what happens is that Egyptian Blue

has a very special property.

It absorbs visible light,

holds it in and then will re-emit it as infra-red light, which will

show as a glowing white against a grey background.

Fantastic. Well, let's take it away. How do we start the process?

OK, so this is what the sculpture looks like with no LED lights.

If I go there and move the light, you look in the screen.

So at the moment I'm seeing exactly the same picture.

But if I turn the lamp you will see small...

It's just coming out of nowhere.

Yes, those are single particles of Egyptian Blue.

How amazing.

So what I'm seeing there is the colour that was

originally painted onto the belt of Iris on the Parthenon?

Yes.

But this screen is very small, we can actually look at it here.

Yeah, that's really coming through there.

It's sparkling, almost like diamonds.

It is, it is almost like diamonds.

You can see that all these particles seem to be all merging together.

This seems to suggest that the actual band was entirely painted

using Egyptian Blue.

And if we assume that, for example, the garment was painted

white, it would have had like a strong contrast.

Something very visible when they were so far up above human height.

Correct.

I assume that as the sculptures are so well sculpted they would have

been equally well painted, so she would have been even more beautiful.

Than she is already.

Giovanni's techniques have been a revelation.

As well as bands of colour like Iris's belt,

they have revealed patterns and shapes.

When used on this relief from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus,

the imaging reveals that this soldier would once have held

a sword in his hand.

And when shone on this horse,

we can see the decorative pattern on the saddlecloth for the first time.

We are so wedded to the idea of ancient Greek sculpture being

clean and white that this is not an easy concept for us accept.

It's even harder when you realise just how bright

pigments like Egyptian Blue really were.

So can we get a sense of what this Egyptian Blue

would have looked like?

Yes, here are two samples.

A block of raw pigment and a bottle.

This was scraped off an architectural block

by Charles Newton in the 1850s,

and he feared he would be disbelieved,

so he took the precaution

of bottling some blue and bringing it back with him to England.

It really is a strong blue, isn't it?

Yes, exactly, a deep blue.

-The sea in the afternoon.

-The sea in the afternoon.

So for how long have we known or suspected that the Parthenon

and other Greek buildings and sculptures were painted?

The travellers, the architects who went to Greece

and Turkey in the 18th and 19th century, they became instantly

aware of the probability that all ancient architecture was coated.

This is the colouring, the geometric patterning in colour

decorating the entablature of the Parthenon.

How shocking would that have been to people in the 18th

and 19th century to hear that these buildings were painted?

It's the habit of every generation to corporately forget, isn't

it, that architecture in antiquity was coloured, and sculpture too.

And it's the privilege of every generation to rediscover that,

and our own generation recently did

so in a dramatic way, with the discoveries of Giovanni Verri.

When we imagine an ancient world full of colour, what does that

do to our understanding of what being in the ancient Greek

world was really like?

We shouldn't think of it as a one material marble culture at all.

We should think of it as composite.

In marble sculpture, the drill holes were to fit the bits

and harness of the horses.

It increases the presence of the monuments.

For example, cult statues were highly coloured,

their eyes were inlaid,

and when you approached a cult statue standing in its temple,

you approached an impersonation of the god or goddess.

And the great impact was overwhelming

and the colour assisted that sense of awe.

Do you think,

given this revolutionary moment and the discovery of colour,

do you think future generations

will again forget and re-discover for themselves?

I do hope so because, having

participated in the rediscovery of colour, I would hope that future

generations will have the same joy of new discoveries to be made.

I never expected that after 200 years of searching

the Parthenon sculptures would reveal

the secret of the sparkly blue belt of the messenger goddess, Iris.

And it enlivens our understanding,

but also energises our quest to unravel the mystery

of the ancient world

and to understand it better in the modern world.

We're still a long way from knowing exactly how the Parthenon

would have been coloured, but we do know that instead of looking

like this, it would have looked something like this.

It's an amazing riot of colour,

with bronze adornments glinting in the sun.

It makes us realise that some of the most enduring

legacies of the ancient Greeks,

our sense of Classical Greek architecture and sculpture,

have been shaped by our own misunderstanding of the Greek world.

But there's also something else we can learn from colour,

and it comes from looking at where the different pigments

used by the ancient Greeks actually came from.

This is gypsum, coming from Epirus in northern Greece.

This is realgar, coming all the way from the Caucuses.

This one is called limonite, known to us as ochre,

coming from the island of Cyprus.

This is chrusicalla, coming from Attica in central Greece.

This is haematite, coming from the island of Kea in the Aegean.

This is Cinabar, coming all the way from Spain.

Lastly, my favourite, lapis lazuli all the way from Afghanistan.

What this shows us is that the temples

and sculptures of ancient Greece were coloured with materials

that came not just from Greece but from across Europe and Asia.

They were the result of a network

that criss-crossed the ancient world.

But it was more than just coloured pigments.

There were all kinds of goods involved.

And one of the biggest hubs on this entire network was Athens.

Athens was one of the most cosmopolitan

places in all of Greece.

Traders were drawn here from far and wide, bringing everything

from fish and fruit, to spices, cushions and carpets.

As the Athenian statesman Pericles boasted,

Athens was a city that threw open its doors to the world.

And it wasn't just goods travelling on this network,

it was people, and with people came ideas.

Some of the most famous Greeks to inhabit this city in antiquity

did not actually come from Athens,

but rather from the very boundaries of the Greek world.

Aristotle came from Stageira in northern Greece,

but came here to study

in Plato's Academy and eventually to set up his own school of philosophy.

The father of history, Herodotus was an outsider here.

He came from Halicarnassus in modern day Turkey.

And the scientist-philosopher Theophrastus

was from the island of Lesbos.

They were all part of a group known here as metics,

coming from the Greek metoikos which means "one who dwells among".

They could never be Athenian citizens,

but they could live and work in Athens.

The result was one of the most dynamic intellectual

environments in history.

An environment that bred something new, an intense

focus on what it is to be human.

This way of exploring the world was pioneered by an Athenian

philosopher called Socrates.

He relentlessly questioned the people of Athens,

encouraging them to investigate the great issues of life -

courage, justice, virtue, love and the soul.

He famously said that an unexamined life

is not worth living.

And after Socrates came his pupil, Plato.

In one of his most famous works, The Republic,

he grappled with the question of what makes

a good and just individual, and what makes an ideal state.

Questions that we are still struggling with today.

But what's most impressive about the great philosophers

is the vast range of their interests.

The book Problems contains examples of the work of Aristotle.

It's not what he's most famous for, but for me,

it brilliantly illustrates the unbelievable extent of the curiosity

that defined him and his successors.

Why in response to others yawning do people usually yawn in return?

Why don't the parts of the body in hot water sweat?

Why does everything appear to be travelling in a circle

to those who are very drunk?

Why it is that the onion makes the eyes water

to such an excessive degree?

All these problems begin with the same word - why.

And with this question,

the ancient thinkers probed every possible realm of knowledge.

This desire to question everything was one of the defining

characteristics of the intellectuals

who came together in Athens.

And it is reflected in the meaning of the word philosophy itself.

First coined by the Greeks, Philosophia, our philosophy,

simply means "love of wisdom".

I asked Professor Paul Cartledge why Athens provided

the perfect climate for the pursuit of wisdom, and what it might have

been like to live here alongside such giants of Western thought.

You could call Athens a city of words.

It really is, very importantly, a city in which

matters are thrashed out verbally.

And it's very striking that these intellectuals couldn't have done

what they did without the, if you like, wireless network

that Athens provides, which dynamises, galvanises thoughts.

Paint a picture for me of what it might have been like to interact

with these people in Athens. Where would you go to find them?

Well, we know that they were star showmen.

Some philosophers, in other words, gave display lectures

at which Athenians would sit for entertainment.

After all, no movies in ancient Athens.

And they did love talk, so they loved hearing speeches.

Athens had a big space in the middle, where people would hang out.

The Greek word is "Agora," somewhere where you gather together.

Hyde Park corner, if I can give a very English analogy.

In other words, not a formal, actual physical space - that comes later.

And we might think our picture of ancient Greece was that they were

all sitting around doing nothing all day, discussing philosophy.

I think we should get out of the way first the idea that all Greeks,

as it were, all ancient Greeks were philosophers.

Most Greeks, 90+% of them were doing something to do with agriculture

and that's pretty time-consuming and pretty back-breaking,

and actually you don't tend to want, instantly to ponder

extremely difficult philosophical problems.

Another Greek word, problem.

Obviously, some of the most famous names that have come to us,

Aristotle, Plato, Socrates.

Socrates was asking the very big questions - what is?

And then big abstract and justice.

And his technique would be to make people realise that they knew

either nothing, or they knew very much less than they thought

they knew, and quite often a dialogue would end

on what was called "Aporia," no way forward.

Well, that's very dispiriting. Most people like to be shown

the way to go, not to be told, "You're at a dead end, mate."

And so a lot of Socrates' lessons are questioning

how should one think about this question - let's say justice.

Today we think of men like Socrates with reverence.

But perhaps that's because we never had to live alongside them.

For everyday Athenians, his incessant questioning

provoked something closer to irritation or even ridicule.

Socrates is said to have considered himself

the gadfly of ancient Athens, there to sting the city out of its stupor,

to make them reject any tradition

that didn't stand up to rational argument.

But the result of it was

that he was always pointing out Athens' moral weaknesses.

He was always criticising, always philosophising

and it all got rather annoying.

The comic poet Eupolis put it like this,

"I loathe that poverty-stricken windbag Socrates,

"who's always contemplating everything in the world,

"and yet doesn't know where his next meal is coming from."

Even 2,000 years ago, no-one liked an insufferable know-it-all.

But what happened next to Socrates was quite shocking.

In 399 BC, Socrates was put on trial and imprisoned.

He was charged with corrupting the youth of Athens, of not believing

in the gods of the state and of introducing his own divinities.

It didn't help that his political affiliations

were also extremely unpopular.

He was found guilty by a jury of 501 Athenians,

who sentenced him to death.

Athens, a city so proud of its democracy and its freedom,

put to death one of its brightest minds,

one of the founding fathers of philosophy.

This extraordinary explosion of philosophy in 5th century Athens

has had an enormous influence on our thinking ever since.

One of the reasons why we see the Greeks as our forefathers

is that they were the first civilisation in Europe to ask

the big questions about life that we still wrestle with today.

But the case of Socrates reminds us of what we saw at Olympia,

that the Greeks were a people

who could be as ruthless as they were remarkable.

Despite producing some of the greatest minds in history

no-one was put on a pedestal.

A result of this was that the ancient Greeks

could never get too comfortable.

They had to keep moving, keep striving.

It was a trait of Hellenism that defined the entire Greek world.

These are some of the most impressive Greek ruins in the world,

but this is not Athens. It's not even Greece.

This is the ancient Greek city of Selinus, in Sicily.

Now, the ancient Greeks had been moving around

the wider Mediterranean world for centuries,

but it was in the last part of the 8th century BC that this process,

of not just travel but of establishing new communities,

really took hold.

The colonists would have brought with them the sacred flame,

the embers of the flame that burned in the heart of their home community

to establish here in their new world.

And, of course, with that flame they also brought their customs,

their cultures, their way of life.

And in setting out that blueprint, they would have established

their new community's temples.

This is a classic example of Doric Greek architecture, and there

would have been sculptures adorning this temple of Greek myths and gods.

But the architecture here was about more than merely replicating

the culture of the mainland.

It was also about outdoing it. This city contains the ruins of temples

that were destined to be amongst the largest in antiquity.

Their floor plan alone gives some sense of their size and scale.

Yet the greatest of them was never completed.

In 409 BC, Selinus was invaded by the Carthaginians in North Africa.

The inhabitants of Selinus fled and their city was destroyed.

But this terrible disaster has given us a rare insight

into the secrets of ancient Greek construction.

An old road leads to the quarry which provided the stone

for the city's temples.

When the invaders arrived, the stonecutters fled.

And these incomplete column drums have lain here,

as monuments to that moment, ever since.

The column drums of the extraordinary temple at Selinus

began life just like this one, hewn out of the solid limestone,

and these ones are here today because the quarry

was literally abandoned overnight,

the craftsmen never returning to complete their work,

but on the other hand, it's because of that catastrophe

that befell the city that we can today still unlock the secrets

of how they created these incredible monuments.

The shape of the column would have been drawn out

onto the top of the rock,

before the stonecutters began carving downwards.

These are the tell tale signs, the striations

of all the chisel marks and tool marks as slowly, slowly

this gap was worked down and down around what would become

the column of the temple, until they'd finally got far enough down

to create this extraordinary height.

Then, using wooded wedges that had been soaked in water

so they expanded, or metal wedges to drive in and cut off

each column drum, topple it over

and then start the hard business of moving it towards the temple itself.

Wooden frames would have been constructed around the columns,

and they were moved on wheels or carts.

These square holes were used to attach the wheels

and wooden frameworks to the column drums.

The fluting, or vertical grooves, common to Greek columns on temples

were only carved once the pieces were all in place.

This temple never reached that stage,

but if it had been finished, it would have been enormous.

Each one of these column drums weighs around 100 tons,

and the columns themselves would have been over 16 metres high.

This incredible architectural skill produced some of the most

colossal feats of architecture in the ancient west.

And we may well ask why here? Why Sicily?

In part it was because Sicily was on the edge of the ancient Greek world,

and people at the edge of a community tend to shout louder

to make themselves heard as part of that group.

And shout loud the Sicilians definitely did.

But it was also to do with competition,

not just between the different peoples of Sicily

but also with entirely different parts of the ancient Greek world.

This was keeping up with the Joneses writ large,

and that continual process of competition

provoked artistic innovation and perfection,

making Sicily one of the key melting pots for the creation

of the physical legacies that have defined the ancient Greek world.

In ancient Greece, there was a fine line

between creative competition and violent conflict.

These two forces were described brilliantly by a Greek writer

called Hesiod as "good strife" and "bad strife".

He said that bad strife was destructive and led to war

and battle, but that "agathe eris" - "good strife" - was when people

competed creatively and pushed each other to even greater success.

Good strife pitted potter against potter, craftsman against craftsman

and architect against architect, inspiring an outpouring

of creativity that has only ever been equalled by the Renaissance.

I would argue that it was this need to balance good and bad strife

that pushed the Greeks to reach such astounding levels

of achievement and to create such an extraordinary legacy.

And this good strife was at the heart of another

great Greek invention - theatre.

Theatre emerged in Athens in the form of a drama competition,

but soon spread throughout the Greek world.

It was particularly popular in Sicily,

and this island is still home to some of most beautiful

Greek theatres ever built, like this one,

hewn into the hillside in Segesta.

The Greeks gave us the two defining dramatic genres,

tragedy and comedy.

Without them, there would be no Shakespeare, no Oscar Wilde,

no soap operas and no sitcom.

And it's here, in the theatre, that the Greeks feel simultaneously

at their most familiar and at their most alien.

Greek tragedy has given us some of the most strange,

dark and brutal stories of all time.

There are tales of murder, vengeance, and incest,

of insanity and mutilation.

There are men who kill their fathers and marry their mothers,

lovers who commit suicide, and women who kill their own children.

These are bloody and violent stories,

but they're much more than some sort of weird form of entertainment

for the ancient Greeks.

They spoke to the dark side of humanity and to the harsh

and unpredictable nature of life itself.

And here in the Greek theatre, these stories did something more

than that as well. They were lessons. They were challenges.

My favourite line in Greek tragedy is in Aeschylus' Libation Bearers,

and it's when Orestes is about to get his revenge.

He's there, knife in hand, about to kill his mother

and he panics and asks the question "ti draso?" - "What shall I do?"

That is the key question of tragedy.

Tragedy didn't just tell a nasty story

and let the audience walk away. No.

It asked them to respond, it challenged them. What would they do

if they were caught in such an impossible situation?

The result of all this

was something Aristotle called catharsis.

It refers to the relief and clarity that can come

from experiencing extreme emotions

in the controlled environment of the theatre, and which leaves

the audience better equipped

to deal with their problems in real life.

Tragedy, therefore, while it seems violent and strange,

had a real purpose in the Greek world.

But for me, it's actually with comedy that we can see

most clearly what we have inherited from the Greek theatre.

One of the most famous comic playwrights in Greece

was an Athenian called Menander, and as with all Greek theatre,

his plays were performed with masks.

Comedy masks appear especially alien and strange,

but when we look more closely at the characters that they represent,

we find a society not that dissimilar to our own.

In a typical plot you'd have maybe a young man falling in love

with an experienced prostitute.

He's going to get a clever slave who helps him along the way.

He's going to have a father who might object, and somehow,

one way or another,

by the end of the play, they're going to be happily married.

And obviously we've got a collection here of masks.

How do they relate to the comedy that we're talking about?

For Menander,

it was really helpful to have these masks for the stock characters.

You could tell immediately, as the audience, that you're looking at

the clever slave, just from the mask.

So, who do we have here?

Well, let's start with the lady.

Here we have, often called the golden hetaerae,

which is just a word for prostitute.

She would be someone with a lot of front,

someone who seems like she's disinterested maybe in the plot,

but then turns out to have a heart of gold and get involved and help out.

Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, right? We're hoping.

Who else do we have down here?

Here, we've got your standard young man.

In many of the plots, he's going to be the one who falls in love,

but then he may be more or less streetwise, depending on how

he's done, so you might think about the difference

between Tim in The Office and Simon in The Inbetweeners.

-OK!

-Both are young men who are in love,

but here we have the possibility of different characterisation.

And this is obviously your favourite down here,

you're keeping him close to your heart.

This is the ruler slave.

He's cleverer than his master, and he's often quite a deceptive

character, but really in quite a charming way at the same time.

So I guess the modern equivalent here would be Blackadder?

Blackadder, exactly, Jeeves in Jeeves And Wooster,

maybe Humphrey in Yes, Minister.

So I guess step one is to recreate the mask,

but step two, to really understand this,

is to put them back into performance.

Seeing them in action is where you get to see that, really,

they're not just static, they don't just have one fixed expression.

That's where you see how a character can really colourfully

be brought out by masked theatre.

So this is giving us more of the anxious face, the anxious slave.

Exactly. He's anxious, he's worried about something, you can

see that by looking straight at him there.

And then here's this transition, where, actually, maybe he's having

an idea, and at that point you start to see the eyes more.

And when you start to see the eyes more, you get this sense of,

wait a minute, the cogs going round in the brain

and, yes, he's got the idea!

And then looking up even further, you're seeing the eyes,

the bulging eyes appearing.

Which tell us he's got the idea but also bring out his cunning.

You can see now those crossed eyes which make you think,

"Wait a minute, maybe I don't really trust this guy."

So what do you think watching this in performance does

for our understanding of how alien ancient Greek theatre might seem?

I think it's exactly that idea that it's alienating, but actually, when

you start watching a performance,

and seeing what the mask can do and the emotions it brings out,

these characters become really familiar.

And you realise actually this is drama that we can understand,

this is drama we can tap into.

Tragedy, comedy, philosophy, art, architecture and sport -

these were some of the great innovations of the ancient Greeks.

But their mere invention isn't enough to explain

why they have spread so far or endured so long.

Something else happened that spread what Herodotus called

"the Greek Thing" as far as the Middle East and Asia.

That something was the impact

of a father and son from Northern Greece.

King Philip II of Macedon, and his son, Alexander the Great.

The question of who were the Greeks cannot be answered

without considering two of the most famous Greeks of all.

The Kingdom of Macedon was a land of horses, huntsmen and warriors,

and under the leadership of Alexander's father, King Philip II,

it had become a power to rival Athens.

These treasures testify to the wealth and artistic achievements

of Macedon, but also reveal Philip's own ambition,

which was to become the single leader of all the Greeks.

This silver banqueting set belonged to Philip.

It features a representation of the hero Heracles from Greek mythology.

The Macedonians emphasised their Greekness by tracing

their royal line back to Heracles himself.

This gold oak crown is one of the most impressive artefacts

in all of Greece.

It has 313 leaves, 68 acorns and would have been made

by some of the most skilled craftsmen in the Greek world.

Philip was drawing the best artists in Greece away

from Athens to Macedon.

This suit of armour was found in Philip's tomb.

The ivory design on the shield shows a classic scene

from Greek myth of the Greeks defeating the Amazons,

and the armour itself includes this - Athena, the symbol of Athens.

By becoming a patron of all that the Greeks excelled in creating,

and by engaging with Greeks myths and traditions, Philip preserved

and augmented the legacies of the ancient Greek world.

With a combination of military might and diplomacy, Philip brought

the independent cities of mainland Greece under his leadership.

He prepared to embark on a war of revenge

against Greece's age-old enemy, Persia.

But before he could begin, he was assassinated,

and the leadership of Greece passed to Alexander.

Alexander pursued his father's campaign,

and in the process, conquered a vast empire

that stretched from Europe to the shores of India.

And it's the way in which he secured his empire

that helps to explain the lasting endurance of Greekness.

These are the ruins of Priene,

a small Greek city near the Turkish coast.

And in ancient times, this city had one great claim to fame.

In the fourth century BC, the citizens of Priene decided

to rebuild their city in this extraordinary location,

and at its heart would be the Temple of Athena Polias,

the temple to the city's main deity.

It was designed by one of ancient Greece's master architects, and its

architecture came to be seen as a perfect example of the Greek style.

But what's really fascinating about this temple is an inscription

that once stood on the south wall of the temple,

facing out over the plain below.

And it read like this,

"King Alexander dedicated this temple to Athena Polias."

Alexander the Great came here and paid for this temple

as part of his conquests heading east.

Alexander spread Greek culture across his empire.

He founded new Greek-style cities, sponsored temples to the Greek gods,

and got his generals to stage Greek plays.

But he also realised that he could not secure his power and position

through force alone.

He had to work with local inhabitants.

Alexander took Greek culture further east,

but he also mixed it as he went with local traditions,

so he used Persian officials and systems of government.

He wore Persian dress, he and his officers married Persian wives.

And what he created as a result was a much bigger but also much

more mixed, cosmopolitan world and there's no better example

of how that cosmopolitanness defined that world than this.

This is a replica of a coin minted by one of Alexander's successors,

and it shows Alexander wearing the ram's horns of the god Zeus Ammon,

a god that was itself the creation of a mix of Greek culture

and Egyptian culture -

the Greek god Zeus and the Egyptian god Ammon.

It was a god that Alexander claimed to be a descendent of,

and the fact that his successors have chosen this hybrid image

shows that it was a powerful symbol in a world in which Greek culture

mixed with local traditions from the Nile all the way to the Himalayas.

This mixing of cultures is one of the things that allowed

the great legacies of ancient Greece to take hold

across Alexander's empire,

and to be woven into the fabric of the civilisations that followed.

But that isn't the end of the story.

Alexander the Great soon left Priene to continue his conquests

further east, but this temple wasn't completed for another 300 years,

and it's this inscription that tells us who was finally responsible.

It reads like this,

"Demos" - the people, "Athenai Poliadi" - to Athena Polias,

and - "kai".

"Autokratori kaisari, theowhoyoui theoi, sebastoi anatheykin."

The people erected this temple to Athena Polias

and to the emperor, Caesar, son of a god, god, Sebastos -

the Greek for the Roman Emperor Augustus.

In the second century BC,

Greece was conquered by the expanding Roman Empire.

It was Augustus, who came to power in the late first century BC,

who oversaw the completion of this Greek temple.

But he chose to keep the original Greek design.

The Romans saw the Greeks as military weak,

but artistically supreme.

They adopted and promoted Greek cultural achievements so much

that one writer quipped that, in effect,

though Greece had lost the battle, it had won the war.

To understand the power and tenacity of the Greek legacies,

we need to realise that the Romans were fundamentally involved

in shaping what we see as ancient Greece today.

One of Augustus's successors was the emperor Hadrian,

who was a lover of Greek culture. In fact, it's in part thanks to

Hadrian that the city of Athens was transformed into a beacon

for the greatness of Greece in the Roman world.

And there's no better example of that transition

than the extraordinary temple of Olympian Zeus.

The Greeks failed to finish it, whereas Hadrian completed it.

And in that process of not just the preservation but the augmentation

of the realities of ancient Greece, Hadrian was part of the way Rome

stage-managed Greece's transition into the icon that it is today.

The Romans were just the first of many cultures who have,

in admiring and learning from the Greeks, also shaped their legacy.

It's a process that continues to this day.

There's no better symbol of the ways in which the wonders

of ancient Greece have been reshaped and reworked over time

than the Parthenon.

It began as a symbol of victory and freedom,

but became the place from which the Greeks honoured the Roman emperors,

and since then it's been a Christian church, a mosque,

even a gunpowder store, amongst other things.

And today it is being restored to one moment in that story,

to the golden age of ancient Greece, but without the paint,

because we're still not ready to accept

that version of ancient Greece.

We are still absolutely implicit

in shaping the answer to the question, who were the Greeks?

The Greeks gave us some amazing legacies,

things we can't imagine living without today.

Because of their brilliance and appeal to societies ever since,

their genius is still all around us.

Their legacy is so strong that, in a way, I believe we are all Greeks.

And when we trace these legacies back to the people who created them,

we find an unexpectedly large, diverse and interconnected world.

We find a people propelled by good strife,

to reach ever-greater creative achievements.

A people who never stopped asking why.

But they also challenge some of our strongest preconceptions

about their world and our own.

They painted their sculptures in vibrant colours,

they could be violent and cruel

and they refused to put anyone on a pedestal.

Without doubt, the ancient Greek world has had a major impact

on our own, but its legacy has also been a movable feast,

because of the way that every generation

has reformulated and recast it.

And that makes ancient Greece

the perfect combination of icon and enigma.

And that, for me, is what's so unique about their legacy.

Asking who were the Greeks means asking who we are,

and stops us from becoming too comfortable in the answer,

and that can only be a good thing.

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