Piracy in ancient Greece

Piracy in ancient Greece


http://www.historyextra.com/blog/skull-and-cross-bones-ahoy

Tuesday 13th July 2010
Submitted by: Michael Scott

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Piracy has been in the headlines in the UK a lot recently, particularly following the on-going abduction of a British couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean in 2009. The realities of this gruesome situation are a far cry from the romanticised notion of pirateering embodied in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

In the ancient Greek world, however, piracy was, much more than just an occasional headline, it was an endemic part of how the ancient world operated. Alongside the continual military campaigns that crisscrossed the Aegean sea, a citizen of any city was perfectly free to fit out a private ship, capture enemy vessels and keep the spoils for themselves.

Often these ‘pirate’ ships would band together into their own pirate fleets to increase their chances of success. Certain islands in the Aegean were renown for providing safe harbour for pirates, like the island of Melos, and others were well known as places in which to trade stolen goods and slaves, like the island of Aegina just off the coast of Athens.

Outside the Aegean was no safer. The Adriatic sea, between Italy and Greece, had an even more cosmopolitan mix with Greek and Etruscan (the native inhabitants of Italy before the Romans) pirates sharing the waters. Indeed the city of Zankle (modern day Messina) on the coast of Sicily was well known for producing some of the most ferocious and successful pirates in the whole of the ancient world.

But what is even more interesting is the reaction of the city and state authorities of ancient Greece to the problem of piracy. There were occasional attempts to attack pirate vessels and ransoming captured individuals was not unheard of. But much more often, city authorities chose to work with the pirates.

Generals would sometimes employ pirate ‘fleets’ as a ‘shock and awe’ first wave of attack before sending in their own troops. Conversely the admirals of large city fleets would often extract protection money from islands in the Aegean to keep them safe from pirates.

But perhaps the most outrageous case is this. In 355 BC, according to the orator Demosthenes, Athenian ambassadors were on their way to Karia in Turkey on state business when they made a detour to capture a ship sailing from Egypt and pocketed for themselves the wealth on board!

Reprinted from Neos Kosmos www.neoskosmos.com

Looking at ancient Greece... from South America

Looking at ancient Greece... from South America


http://www.historyextra.com/blog/looking-ancient-greece-south-america

Tuesday 28th December 2010
Submitted by: Michael Scott

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I was recently working in Rio di Janeiro at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) university where I was invited to give a course of lectures about ancient Greek democracy to Brazilian students of international politics, law, economics and history. It was, I must admit, a surprising request to be invited to Brazil to teach about a place 10,000 km and 2,500 years away.

While people often turn to ancient Greece for explanations of the language, culture, art, architecture, philosophy and politics in Western Europe, the US and in Australia, it seems slightly more bizarre to imagine ancient Greece being thought of as a subject directly relevant to South America. It is equally more bizarre to have written this column about ancient Greece, in Rio, for publication in Australia (and the UK) – an image of the globalised world in which we live!

Working with the students in Rio, though, has helped me realise just why ancient Greece is relevant, even in Brazil. It is not only Brazil's Portuguese and French heritage that has imported linguistic, cultural and architectural echoes of ancient Greece into modern-day Brazil. Nor is it only because of the importance FGV attaches to providing a classically ´well-rounded´ education fostered within a Brazilian outlook that has traditionally been orientated towards Europe rather than the rest of Latin America. Nor indeed is it only because ancient Greece has recently been used to test modern theories of international politics, like democratic peace theory (the idea that democracies don’t make war on one another – sadly the ancient Greek example doesn't obviously support that idea).

But it is also, more importantly, because of the way in which ancient Greece is still continually used as an active currency for comparison, exhortation and justification in our modern world, a world in which Brazil is playing an increasingly important role.

To the students of international politics at FGV in Brazil, it is worth learning about ancient Greece because they want to be able to understand and judge better the use made of 'the [ancient] Greek example' across the international political world. Interestingly, Brazil itself has also begun to make its own use of that example.

Following the recent clamp-down by police on drug trafficking in the favelas in Rio over the last month, a great deal of praise has been heaped on the police and particularly its crack units, to such an extent that they have been compared to the warriors of ancient Sparta (as have US Marines over the last years, too). It seems that the legacy of ancient Greece is alive and well in Brazil and the rest of the world.

Reprinted from Neos Kosmos www.neoskosmos.com

Ancient Greek healthcare: as contentious as today?

Ancient Greek healthcare: as contentious as today?


http://www.historyextra.com/blog/ancient-greece/ancient-greek-healthcare-contentious-today

Thursday 13th May 2010
Submitted by: Michael Scott

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America has just voted through its biggest health-care reform in decades. But what was medical treatment like in ancient Greece?

Ancient Greece was, first and foremost, a world full of gods – gods who determined much of people’s lives. So, it will come as no surprise that when ancient Greeks were ill, they often believed a god was responsible for the illness. Epilepsy, for example, was known simply in ancient Greece as the Sacred Disease.

In search for a cure, the Greeks also turned to the gods – either in an effort to appease the god who have caused their illness or to the god of healing, Asclepius, who they hoped would cure them.

The great sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros – which so many people still visit today for its magnificent theatre – was one of the sanctuaries to the god of healing built during the early part of the 4th century BC. People would come to the temple in the sanctuary and pay a fee to the priests to sleep there, hoping the god would come to them in a dream and cure them, or tell them how they could be cured.

But, over time, the god-cure route stopped being the only option. During the 4th century BC, the development of medical knowledge about the human body, and about human illness started to take off.

Hippocratus, for example, whose Hippocratic oath doctors still swear today, was making his investigations of the human body and human disease at just this time and offering alternative practical remedies to many problems that did not depend on the gods.

The sacred disease, it is argued in the Hippocratic corpus of medical writing, had nothing to do with the gods, but had human causes and human solutions. The era of scientific medicine had begun.

By the end of the 4th century BC, the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros may have been genuinely worried about the threat this new ‘medicine’ posed to its flow of ‘customers’. The sanctuary responded by commissioning a whole series of ‘success stories’ to be written up on stone and displayed at the sanctuary.

Those ‘stories on stone’ have survived to today and make fascinating reading. The god is claimed to have helped a woman pregnant for 5 years to give birth, to have cured wounds that had seeped pus for years, to have given the dumb back their voice and even the bald their hair. It seems that, even in ancient Greece, there was disagreement about who provided better healthcare.

Reprinted from Neos Kosmos www.neoskosmos.com

An Ancient Greek sense of humour

An Ancient Greek sense of humour

http://www.historyextra.com/blog/ancient-greek-sense-humour


Tuesday 14th December 2010
Submitted by: Michael Scott

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Were the ancient Greeks funny? It’s a question not often asked. When thought about, most people will turn to the ‘comedies’ put on at different religio-theatrical festivals across ancient Greece, most notably in Athens. The majority surviving for us today are by Aristophanes, writing across the divide of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, but some also survive by Menander writing later in the 4th century BC.

Aristophanes makes political jokes, imitates the politicians of the day (who without doubt were often sitting in the audience) and uses exaggeration and caricature to pass comment on the social and political well being of the city. The caricature of ‘Demos’ – the people – is, for example, an old man who is easily hood-winked. What we have of Menander on the other hand seems to reveal a comic writer much more concerned with representing a kitchen-sink-drama style portrayal of domestic hilarity.

But did the Ancient Greeks tell jokes? Yes they did. Sources tell of ‘joke-groups’ who met to trade and test their wit, like the group of 60 who met in the Temple of Heracles in Athens in the 4th century BC, and whom even Philip of Macedon paid to send him a collection of their best.

A much later text that has survived down to us is the ‘Philogelos’ – 'the laughter lover' – compiled by Hierocles and Philagrius (of which almost nothing is known) in perhaps the AD 4th century. Here the compilation reveals something of the nature of Greek jokes – and they are surprisingly like are own.

There are those that focus on the ‘buffon’, the idiot, who does something stupid and funny, which have a remarkable parallel, as some scholars have already pointed out, with the ‘English, Scottish and Irish’ jokes still told in Britain today in which the Irish person always does something ridiculous (and which, I’d wager, every country has a version, which simply varies the nationalities).

One ancient Greek idiot joke reads: “An idiot, wanting to go to sleep but not having a pillow, told his slave to set an earthen jar under his head. The slave said that the jug was hard. The idiot told him to fill it with feathers.”

There are also the comic insults, listed so as to be used in instant one-line put downs – “You don’t have a face, but a fireplace” reads one. But my particular favourites are the ‘doctor’ jokes: “A person went to a doctor and said “doctor, whenever I get up from sleeping, I’m groggy for a half an hour afterwards and only after that am I all right” To which the doctor replied: “Get up half an hour later.”

Reprinted from Neos Kosmos www.neoskosmos.com

Ancient Greek democracy: as similar to ours as we think?

Ancient Greek democracy: as similar to ours as we think?




Thursday 18th March 2010
Submitted by: Michael Scott
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Ancient Greece’s most famous export to this day is arguably democracy. America, alongside many nations, recently celebrated the 2500th ‘anniversary’ of the invention of democracy in ancient Athens and its links with today’s democracies in America and around the globe. But was ancient Athenian democracy as alike to democracies of today as we may like to think?

The more you look at the facts, the more the ancient democracy of Athens and the democracies of today look different. Ancient Athens only allowed a very small group of men resident in Athens the vote. Women and foreigners were excluded.

Athens’ democracy also demanded a lot of time: adult male citizens who had the vote had to put a halt to their jobs and take up positions of authority within the democratic system on a rota system. They also had to go to the Athenian assembly (the Pnyx) on a regular basis to debate and vote on important issues like going to war.

This dedication of so much time to the democratic system was made easier because many of these citizens had a good number of slaves working for them, and Athens also eventually decided to encourage citizens further by paying them to come to the assembly and to undertake other democratic duties like acting as jurors in the law courts.

So, Athenian democracy was not our ideal of equal freedom and rights, but more like a select club, facilitated to some extent by a slave population and in addition only really made possible, many scholars argue, by Athens’ control over a large and profitable empire which kept money pouring into the city.

But at the same time we should not be too complacent as to think that we are more ‘democratic’ now. It is my bet that just as we may not want to recognize Athens’ democracy as properly democratic, so too an ancient Athenian would not recognize many of our democratic systems today as ‘true’ democracies.

Ancient Athenians participated in a direct democracy: every citizen went to the assembly and voted on the issues. Moreover, if they were voting on whether or not to go to war, the voters did not go home afterwards to put their feet up while professional soldiers carried out their orders, they went home to pick up their armour and go off to fight.

To a democrat of ancient Athens, today’s democracies, where the majority of voters elect representatives to make most of the decisions for them (and who then rely on professionals to carry out those decisions), wouldn’t merit the label of democracy either.

Reprinted from Neos Kosmos www.neoskosmos.com

希臘城邦

希臘城邦

        城邦或稱城市國家,是在一定歷史條件下由原始公社演化而來的一種公民集體。公元前8～前4世紀古代希臘歷史的顯著特點是各地區經濟﹑政治﹑文化發展不平衡,數百個城邦并存,出現過許多城邦聯盟。一般情況下,一個城邦包括城市和鄉村兩部分。這裹所說的城市,系指易於防守﹑往往筑有城2c牆的政治和宗教中心。很大一批城邦是由原有城邦派出的移民建立的。

城邦的面積和居民

所有希臘城邦都是小國。處於鼎盛時期的斯巴達 是當時希臘首屈一指的大國,也祗擁

特爾斐城邦遺址 有約8 400平方公里土地。雅典的面積約2 550平方公里,阿爾戈斯約1 400平方公里。面積約8 260平方公里的克里特島上有近百個城邦,面積約1 650平方公里的位於中部希臘的福基斯地區有22個城邦。

希臘城邦的居民按照政治地位可以分為3大類:①擁有公民權因而能夠參加政治活動的自由人。公民之間一般有源於氏族部落的血緣關系,男子成年後要舉行成丁禮,履行一定手續取得公民權。公元前451年雅典的法律規定,祗有父母均為雅典人的成年男子才能取得公民權。②沒有公民權的自由人。他們或是來自外邦的移民(例如雅典的“异邦人”),或是由於特定的歷史原因而與當權的公民集體處於不平等地位者(例如斯巴達的“邊民”),或是因貧困而失去公民資格者,或是因違法而被剝奪了公民權者,或是被釋放的奴隸。在一定的條件下,他們可能獲得或恢復公民權。但城邦一般不輕易將公民權授予這些人,并且嚴格禁止冒稱公民。③處於被剝削﹑奴役地位的奴隸。奴隸多系非希臘人,但也有一部分是希臘人,例如斯巴達的“黑勞士”。

多數希臘城邦公民人數不足5 000。公元前479年,普拉蒂亞的公民約不超過2 000人,而邁錫尼祗有600人左右。斯巴達的公民在公元前7世紀最多時曾達9 000人,以後逐漸減少,至公元前371年,祗有2 500～3 000人。公元前480年左右,雅典有公民2.5～3萬人。至於其他居民,公元前371年,斯巴達的沒有公民權的自由人有4～6萬人,黑勞士有14～20萬人。公元前480年左右,雅典的沒有公民權的自由人有4 000～5 000人,奴隸3～4萬人。

每個城邦的公民作為一個整體構成統治集團,與沒有公民權的自由人和奴隸相對立。公民集體剝削和統治沒有公民權的自由人和奴隸,但并非所有城邦的每個公民都是奴隸主。多數城邦的多數公民是自食其力的小生產者。在沒有公民權的自由人中,也有不少人擁有相當數量的奴隸。作為剝削階級的奴隸主分為公民和非公民兩部分,這是城邦這種早期國家的特點之一。

所有城邦在形成時期,農業都是最主要的生產部門,作為主要生產資料的土地祗有公民才有權佔有。除斯巴達在“平等者公社”形成之後公民完全不從事生產勞動外,大多數城邦中多數公民從事農業生產。在雅典﹑科林斯等工商業一度頗為發達的城邦中,從事手工業﹑航海業和商業的公民也在經濟和政治生活中起重要作用。

城邦的各種制度

城邦的重要任務是保衛國家的獨立和內部安全。在城邦中,全體成年男性公民組成一個軍人團體,每個公民有隨時應征參戰的義務,而且在一般情況下由應征者自己負擔軍需和武器裝備。除僭主當政時期外,一般城邦內部沒有脫離公民集體﹑凌駕於公民集體之上的常備軍。公民兵制的瓦解和雇傭兵制的發展是城邦衰落的重要標誌。

富有公民必須履行廣泛的公益捐獻義務,這是希臘城邦的一項重要制度。所謂公益捐獻,乃是富有公民對國家的不可推卸的捐獻義務。以雅典為例,公益捐獻可分為兩類:一類與戰爭有關,如負責裝備戰艦;一類與祭祀﹑舉辦節慶日的各項活動有關,如組織悲劇﹑喜劇的演出及競技等。富有公民的公益捐獻從一個方面揭示了城邦這種公民集體的特點。即使在民主得到充分發展的雅典,左右國家事務的主要還是公民中的富有階層,領袖人物幾乎全由富人充當。富有公民將其剝削所得的一部分拿出來供公民中的貧窮階層分享,既可增強他們自己在公民集體中的地位,又可加強公民集體的凝聚力。公民集體的團結則是保障有效地向外擴張﹑維護獨立以及鎮壓和統治沒有公民權的自由人﹑奴隸和外邦的最重要的條件。

城邦沒有職業官吏組成的官僚機構和向公民徵收直接稅的常設財政機構。一般說來,每個城邦都有3種政治機構:由成年男子構成的公民大會﹑議事會(如斯巴達的長老會議﹑雅典的五百人會議)和經選舉產生的(或至少需得到公民大會確認的)公職人員,首先是負責軍事指揮的公職人員。在希臘城邦的歷史上有過君主制,也有過具有個人獨裁色彩的僭主政治;但在城邦制度發達時期,以共和政體居多。共和政體中又有民主共和與貴族共和之別。長期實行民主共和政治的主要是雅典等少數城邦。在古代希臘,任何社會組織,無論家庭﹑氏族﹑胞族﹑部落或國家,同時也是宗教聯合體,有各自的祭祀偶像。當時沒有獨立的祭司階層,族長和各種公職人員兼起祭司作用。祭神和組織各種節慶活動是城邦政權機構的重要職責。

城邦的衰落和歷史意義

以雅典和斯巴達為代表的希臘城邦,在公元前5世紀經歷了繁榮時期。從公元前4世紀起逐漸衰落。由於公民中貧富分化加劇,公民權與土地的關系日趨松弛,公民集體內部矛盾增加,公民兵制開始瓦解。公元前338年馬其頓國王亞歷山大大帝的征服以及公元前323～前30年的希臘化時代許多國王對希臘的奴役,剝奪了希臘絕大多數城邦的政治獨立,瓦解了原有的公民集體,使這些城邦演變成在龐大的中央集權管轄下的地方自治單位。 作為經濟﹑政治﹑社會﹑意識形態統一體的城邦的產生和發展,對古代希臘的歷史有著深刻的影響。希臘文化,無論是文學藝術,還是哲學﹑倫理學﹑政治學和宗教等,無不打上城邦制度的深刻印記。

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