Ancient Worlds (2010) s01e03 Episode Script
The Greek Thing
What is civilisation? We recognise it when we see it don't we? The Greeks had a word for all this to Hellenikon, meaning Greekness or the Greek Thing.
It was first used by the historian Herodotus to sum up all the things the Ancient Greeks had in common - language .
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religion customs .
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blood.
Today, the Greek Thing has become a kind of shorthand for values that we like to think are at the root of who WE are - rational, cultured, humane, civilised.
But beneath the civilized skin was a fierce, volatile pulse.
It gave the Greek Thing its energy, its passion, its life and its capacity for sudden, shocking violence.
CHANTING AND SIRENS BLARING If you'd come here in 370 BC to Argos, you'd have seen another side of the Greek Thing.
In that year, an aristocratic plot to overthrow the democratic government of the city was uncovered.
Seizing the political advantage, democratic demagogues whipped up a mob with fiery speeches directed against the city's wealthiest citizens.
What happened next was a reign of terror, trumped-up charges, confiscation of property, summary trial and execution.
The victims were handed over to the mob who beat them to death with clubs.
It was only when the body count reached 1,200 or more that the democratic leaders began to have second thoughts about this cull of the city's elite.
But when they tried to calm things down, the mob turned on them and clubbed them to death as well.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, had some interesting things to say about the Greeks - "These most humane of men in ancient times," he wrote, "have a trait of cruelty, a tigerish lust to annihilate which really must strike fear in our hearts.
" In the story of Ancient Greece, from the evolution of the city-states to their wars with Persia and then with each other, there's as much to shudder at as to admire.
A blossoming in art, philosophy and science that went hand in bloody hand with political discord, social injustice, endless war and, ultimately, a complete failure to forge a common political identity, despite all that shared Greekness.
And that's the story that I have for you now - The Greek Thing, for better or worse.
The last time we met the Greeks they were a long way from home, a predatory army camped outside the walls of Troy, intent on vengeance and plunder.
Homer's Iliad gave the heroes who fought in the Trojan War epic grandeur and it left the Greeks who came after feeling they had a lot to live up to.
But though they dreamed of being an Achilles, sacking cities and slaying their enemies, their glory would come from the hard graft that was needed to rebuild their civilization.
To understand these Greeks you have to leave the killing fields of Troy behind and travel west to the Greek mainland This is Boeotia in the heart of the Greece.
It's a very long way from the world of heroes and battles, but this landscape has its poetry too .
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though of a very different kind to the Iliad.
If Homer's theme was the tragedy of war, the poet who wrote about this place explored the everyday heroism of work.
Gods and men disapprove of the man who lives without working.
Wealth brings worth and prestige.
But whatever your fortune, work is preferable.
If your spirit yearns for riches, do as follows and work, work upon work.
This is Askra, a beautiful spot at the head of the Valley Of The Muses.
Askra never amounted to much, more of a village than a town, it was certainly no Athens.
But Askra deserves its measure of fame for being the home town of Hesiod - the poet laureate of the new down-to-Earth Greece which followed the Age Of Heroes.
We're not sure of Hesiod's dates, but most experts believe that he owned and worked a small farm somewhere in the valley in the period immediately after Homer.
This puts him sometime after 700 BC, when the Greek world was emerging from the darkness that had followed the collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms of Mycenae some six centuries before.
After a long period of stagnation, things were changingfast.
Tribal systems that had returned during the Dark Ages were breaking down as the more impersonal mechanisms of civilisation revived.
Loyalties and obligations based on family, kith and kin dissolved as colonisation, trade and a surge in population offered people new opportunities for personal enrichment, undermining notions of the collective and the common good.
New technologies, from metallurgy to the alphabet, accelerated these processes as the Greeks reconnected with the modern world of the late Iron Age.
And in this world, the voices and opinions of ordinary people would play a vital role in the shaping of these new societies.
Crucially, in the new Greece the role and status of the high kings of the Mycenaean Age were called into question like never before.
Typically, these new settlements were small, and the gap between rich and poor was small too.
When you could see the top of the social pyramid, it became much easier to ask, "Why is he up there? "Why am I down here? Why should he tell me how to live my life?" In Works And Days, Hesiod's most famous poem, he tells the parable of the nightingale struggling in the claws of the hawk.
"Why do you cry out?" asked the hawk "One much stronger than you "holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you.
" But the point is that Hesiod was crying out, railing against the corruption of the new age of iron and threatening divine retribution.
There is angry murmuring when Right is dragged off wherever the bribe-eaters choose, as they give their crooked verdicts.
Beware of this, lords, and keep your judgments straight.
A man fashions ill for himself who fashions ill for another.
The all-seeing eye of Zeus sees the kind of justice the community has within it.
The struggle between elite privilege and ancient rights would be a theme for politics as well as poetry.
The battleground between hoi oligoi - the few, and hoi polloi - the many.
But the arena for this battle wouldn't be out-of-the-way places like Askra, but the city-states, the nuclei around which the new Greece was beginning to crystallise.
The city state, or polis, was a remarkably successful and adaptable concept.
Over a period of about 500 years, starting around 700 BC, some 1,500 were established in Greece and in Greek colonies, from Spain to Afghanistan.
Some, like Athens, Sparta, Argos or Corinth, had populations topping 10,000 and territories to match.
But the average city state had a population of around 1,000, so these were intimate, independent places.
Geography added to this sense of inwardness, cut off by rugged mountains and hemmed in by the encroaching sea, few city-states had the elbow room needed to become powers in their land.
Those that did, owed their prominence to powerful strategic locations - a pinch-point along trade routes or a defensible citadel on a rocky hill which both protected and controlled the territory below.
At nearly 2,000 feet above sea level, the Acrocorinth of Corinth is the most impressive.
From up here, one of the defining characteristics of the city-state is immediately clear - the political centre is embedded in the farmlands that surround it.
With one foot in the street and the other in the fields, these city-states bred citizen-farmers - hyphenated people for these hyphenated places.
Small, inward-looking and isolated, the city-states ran on a brand of local politics that was intensely personal.
More village pump than city hall, with all the predictable rivalries, feuds and vendettas.
But it was in the interests of the most powerful clans to work together, because if they didn't, they knew a big man could emerge who would rule over everyone.
By the 8th century BC, most Greek city-states had kicked out their kings - the ancient world's default position when it came to political leadership.
This meant that power and prestige, which had previously been the preserve of individuals, was now divvied out amongst the members of the elites, the oligarchs.
Oligarchy broke down kingship into its component parts - justice, war, religion, and so on, creating a range of public offices for ambitious aristocrats to fill.
And they could also impose time limits on length of service, introducing the hallowed principle of Buggins' turn into the political process - "My turn to be archon this year, your turn next.
" Passions inside the city-state ran high.
This wasn't just the place you came to buy and sell or do business, it was the place where you learned to be a poli-tician - a creature of the polis, a political animal.
So, your polis provided an economic hub and security during times of danger, but it went deeper than that - the polis was something to which you belonged, the place that gave you your identity.
According to Aristotle, the polis completed you as a human being - "The man who in his self-sufficiency has no use for others," he wrote, "is like a beast or a god.
" Love of polis was so intense it was sometimes described as Himeros - sexual desire.
But alongside love was the opposite - hatred of the other lot.
In fact, opposition and polarities were central to the Greek way of making sense of their world.
The best way to define anything was to say what it was not.
So cold was the opposite of heat, dark was the opposite of light, peace was the opposite of war, Athens the opposite of Sparta.
This black-and-white take on the world brought a clarity of thought that would spark the intellectual, philosophical and scientific revolutions of the Greek-speaking world.
But it also gave politics a rancorous edge - white hats versus black hats, and if you're not with us, you're against us.
CHANTING Stirred by powerful and contradictory passions, the city-states of Ancient Greece were a long way from the rational, and well-ordered utopias which they aspired to be.
They were like test tubes packed full of combustible materials always threatening to blow up.
Blame the ghost of Achilles for the bitter rivalry that divided the city-states, internally and externally.
All Greek males were haunted by the matchless warrior of the Iliad.
Achilles taught them the lesson that he'd learned from his father - always be first and excel the others in all things.
Glory cannot be shared.
The Achilles principle was at the heart of the events that took place here every four years.
This is Olympia, home of the famous games, but there was nothing playful about what went on here.
The Games were a deadly serious affair.
The first Olympic Games took place in 776 BC, and the first event was a 200-metre sprint.
Over the next 1,000 years more events were added, but that was the essence of the Games - a mad dash from here to there to discover who was the best.
There was none of this pious nonsense of, "Oh, it's the taking part that matters," the Greeks always played to win.
There was no silver or bronze for the runners-up, all they could expect were derision and ignominy.
The poet Pindar describes them slinking back home, spurned by their mothers and girlfriends, "Lurking in byways, "hoping to avoid their enemies, stung by their ill fortune.
" Losers.
The temples at Olympia were stuffed full of mementoes of athletic prowess dedicated to the gods.
But they were also hung with military gear, much of it showing signs of active service.
Evidently, the Greeks saw a link between prowess on the sports field and on the battlefield.
But in practice, they were very different things.
For a start, there were no team sports in the Olympics, but when it came to the business of war, teamwork was essential.
This is hoplite gear - battle kit for a hugely effective infantry fighting technique.
Hoplites formed into densely packed ranks known as a phalanx, their round shields overlapping, protecting their neighbour rather than themselves.
Committed to mutual protection, the phalanx advanced as a unit in carefully choreographed movements, each fighter a small but essential part of a formidable fighting machine.
When two phalanxes butted up against one another on the battlefield, there was no room for the heroic man-to-man combat described in the Iliad.
No-one could break ranks, the line had to hold.
This was un-heroic push and shove - brutal, collective, anonymous, a rugby scrum with spear points and edged weapons.
But fighting for your city was an important source of kudos and the introduction of hoplite tactics made it possible for more people to take part than ever before.
Some body armour, a helmet, a spear and a shield to protect your neighbour - bring those to the field of battle and you could expect to get a game.
The Hoplite Revolution, as it's been rightly called, was far more than just a matter of military tactics, it brought with it profound political change.
As Aristotle would later observe, "The class that does the fighting wields the power.
" As more and more ordinary citizens stood shield to shield with the well-to-do, the whole balance of power within the city-state must have been called into question every time the phalanx advanced into battle.
Given the threat of war from without and civil war from within it's not surprising that by the end of the 7th century BC, the critical question for the city-states was, "How should we best be governed?" The Greeks being Greek could never agree on a single answer, but the ones they did come up with were test-runs for many of the political concepts that we live with today - totalitarianism, collectivism, tyranny, oligarchy, democracy - all of them were tried out in the test-tubes that were the city-states.
The Greeks seemed prepared to consider any system that might deliver the blessings of good order and self sufficiency.
Anything, that is, except monarchy.
All over Greece, royal dynasties were out.
Kings were a relic of the past, or for the barbarians.
But there was one exception.
On the Greek mainland, in the heart of the Peloponnese, was a city-state that didn't just have one king, it had two.
And that was just the beginning, for Sparta was the strangest test-tube in the whole laboratory.
Sparta was a looking-glass world.
The ingredients that you would expect to find in a city-state were absent here.
There was no one single political centre, there were no city walls, no public buildings to speak of, no written laws, no money, and a constitution apparently designed by Heath Robinson.
Sparta's two rival dynasties were guaranteed to get in each other's way, but there was also a public assembly that voted but didn't debate and five annually elected overseers who squabbled over the levers of this ramshackle political machine.
This partly radical, partly authoritarian system was overseen by a council of elders, presumably the only ones with enough experience to make sense of it all.
This complex constitution was designed to defy the laws of political gravity.
Its aim was to create and sustain a stable society based on the absolute equality of all its male citizens - the homoioi, the equals, as they were known.
This ideal was reinforced by a strict code of behaviour that suppressed any outward signs of status or wealth, from food, to clothes, to houses.
There was to be no us and them destroying the unity of this totalitarian Utopia, where everything which wasn't forbidden was of course compulsory.
There was a reason for all this extreme social engineering.
The Spartans believed that they had achieved good order and self-sufficiency here in the fertile Eurotas Valley.
And they were prepared to do all that they could to hang on to them, as their neighbours had learned to their cost.
The rise of Sparta came at the expense of the Messenians, whose territory lay about 40 miles to the west, over there, across the other side of the Taygetus mountains.
Sometime in the 8th century BC, Spartan hoplites crossed the mountain passes and waged a long and bitter war against their neighbours.
It took 20 years, but they finally the Spartans defeated the Messenians and reduced them en masse to the status of helots - feudal slaves.
The radical re-ordering of Spartan society that followed the war turned just another city-state into a full-time military training camp, where the needs of the individual were sacrificed to the good of the collective.
But it was the helots who sacrificed most.
The helots served the Spartans as body servants, shield bearers, cooks, potters, breeding machines, and agricultural labourers, handing over half their harvests to a military elite whose prime purpose was now their subjugation.
But the Spartans were also tough on themselves.
They killed off any new-born male deemed to be weak or infirm.
The ones that survived were sent at the age of seven to the agoge - a brat camp to end all brat camps.
Here they began 13 years of savage training to prepare them for their vocation as full-time warriors.
With the men away training, fighting or just hanging out together in the all-male barracks, where homosexuality was obligatory, Spartan women were left to enjoy educational, economic and sexual freedoms that were unheard of in the ancient world.
Indeed in some parts of the modern world today.
The rest of the Greek world looked on all of this with a mixture of horror and fascination, but they accepted the Spartan assertion that their extreme social system was, in fact, traditional.
But despite this reputation for conservatism, Sparta was no more stable than the other city-states.
In its passionate desire to keep things the way they had always been, it was constantly having to tinker with its time-honoured traditions.
In times of manpower shortage, a constant problem for these elitist warriors, they even had to admit the despised helots into their ranks, to fight and die alongside them.
Like everyone else, Sparta was struggling to come to terms with a fundamental but unsettling truth about the stability of all civilisations.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus would sum it up like this - "ta panta rhei", everything changes.
And not even the most conservative society can step into the same river twice.
In Athens, the river of change flowed just as forcefully, but here there was a greater willingness to go with the flow.
Like the most of the other city-states, Athens had shrugged off its hereditary kings early on, replacing monarchy with oligarchy.
Which is where things began to get interesting.
As the Greek city-states began to emerge from the Dark Ages, they began to reconnect with the rest of the ancient world through trade and colonisation.
This new entrepreneurial activity was privately funded and the profits remained in private hands.
So in Athens, the rich got richer as the poor got poorer.
And many had to sell themselves and their families into slavery to service mounting debts.
So towards the end of the 7th century BC, the Athenian poor were becoming the helots of the Athenian rich.
In Sparta, the destabilising effects of inequality had been neutralised by a social revolution.
But in Athens, the ruling class reluctantly trod the path of cautious reform.
This is the Areopagus, the Rock of Ares, and from this lofty perch during the 6th century BC, the Council of the Areopagus governed the affairs of Athens.
Its membership was exclusively aristocratic, and all had previously held the post of archon, or chief magistrate, so what we have here is a perfect closed circle of aristocratic power - self-selecting and self-serving, insulated from the voices of the agora, or the marketplace, down below.
But the wealth gap was becoming so great that it threatened the unity and stability of Athens.
In 594 BC, the Areopagus chose Solon to be chief magistrate.
He was an aristocrat, but not a wealthy one.
In fact, he'd crossed the class lines and worked as merchant in order to support himself.
He also had a reputation for fairness which was recognised by rich and poor alike.
Solon granted protection from debt slavery and access to the law courts to the poorest in the community.
Careful reforms designed to defuse tensions, rather than transform a society.
Cautious as they were, they were like pebbles that precede an avalanche.
Within a century Athens would have a new form of government as the olegos, the few, retreated step by reluctant step in the face of the power of the demos, the people.
CHANTING In the stories told about Athens, reformers like Solon are inevitably the good guys, far-sighted visionaries fighting the good fight, paving the way for the triumph of democracy.
But of course it was more complicated than that.
Solon's reforms were more the product of the fears of the ruling class than the idealism of a would-be democrat.
Placating the masses headed off the threat of civil war.
The trick for the aristocracy was to feed the many-headed beast without being swallowed by it.
But in the political jungle of Ancient Greece, there were other animals on the prowl The tyrants.
Today in the democratic West, we don't look on them kindly, but their influence was just as significant as the reformers' in the story of the Greek city-states.
There was once another Parthenon which stood where this Parthenon now stands, a building every bit as iconic as the one that we're so familiar with.
It was built by Peisistratos, one of the most intriguing characters from the early days of classical Athens.
In 546 BC, he became tyrannos, or tyrant of Athens, In Greek-speak, that meant a leader who had illegally seized power and then maintained his position by appealing to the people, rather than the elites.
Peisistratus was guilty on both counts, but during his 20-year reign, Athens would come of age as one of the dominant city-states of classical Greece.
He first came to prominence by allying himself with the hill dwellers, the lowest of the low in the pecking order of Athenian politics, turning them into a formidable powerbase.
He then faked an attack on himself, which persuaded the Athenians to vote him a bodyguard.
He used these club-wielding thugs to stage his first coup, occupying the Acropolis and declaring himself tyrant.
The Athenians eventually dislodged him and threw him out of the city, but he wasn't finished.
He drove back into the city in a chariot accompanied by the tallest woman he could find kitted out as the goddess Pallas Athena, She commanded the citizens of her city to take back the prodigal son and the stunned Athenians obeyed.
The protection of the fake Athena didn't last for long and Peisistratus was exiled for a second time.
He then came here to Laurion, some 40 miles away from Athens, where silver was both mined and processed.
He spent a decade here, becoming filthy rich, before in 546 BC returning to Athens, but this time at the head of a mercenary army.
The city was now his.
What followed wasn't bloodshed or revenge, but a renaissance as Peisistratos embarked on a series of very public grand projects.
He also commissioned the first edition of Homer's Iliad, an event of huge cultural significance for the Greeks and for the world.
And he commissioned the first Parthenon, the remnants of which can be seen today in the new Acropolis Museum.
Athens was Athens long before democracy came along to claim it as its own.
This brand of public works and canny populism helped Peisistratus establish a dynasty, but his son and successor Hippias fell foul of the liberators.
Harmodius and his lover Aristogeiton ended tyranny in Athens by murdering the tyrant's brother.
This created a political crisis which lead to the ousting of the tyrant and a return to power of the oligarchs.
Now all too aware of the Athenians' weakness for charismatic, unscrupulous chancers, the oligarchs decided to neutralise the threat of tyranny for good by finally offering the despised demos a real stake in the running of their city.
The final churn in the political cycle that had begun with Solon's cautious reforms came with the rise to power of Cleisthenes.
Cleisthenes was one of those canny aristocrats who realised that his own class were going to have to give up some of their privileges in order to conserve the good order of the city-state as a whole.
Cleisthenes laid the foundations of the first recognisably democratic system in Athens.
Under his reforms, election to public bodies, political and judicial, was thrown open to all male citizens, chosen by lot.
Members of the boule, or council, swore an oath to advise according to the laws what was best for the people.
Cleisthenes called his reforms isonomia - equality before the law.
Hesiod would surely have approved.
Cleisthenes is also credited with the introduction of these - ostraca.
It took 6,000 of these pottery sherds with your name scratched on them for you to be ostracised - exiled from Athens for ten years.
The system was originally designed to guard against the return of the tyrants, but predictably it soon became a political weapon to be used against anyone who became too prominent.
It's also worth noting that one of the first victims of this tall poppy syndrome was the father of democracy himself, Cleisthenes.
By the beginning of the 5th century BC, the city-states of Greece had each evolved their own distinctive set of characteristics.
They were all Greek, but they were Greek in their own peculiar way.
It would take an external threat of apocalyptic proportions to force them to pull together.
In the centuries since the Dark Ages, during which the Greeks had been slowly groping their way back towards the light of civilisation, in the East, mighty empires had come and gone.
The Assyrians fell to an alliance of the Medes and the Babylonians, and they in turn had been devoured by a new power in the land, the Persians.
By the 5th century BC, the Persian empire was a monster.
5 million square miles, spanning three continents, from Afghanistan in the East to Libya in the West.
And on the hem of this mighty empire, Greek colonists had stitched a dozen or so city-states.
The fate of the Ionian cities, as they were known, would entangle the Persians and Greeks for centuries to come.
Say what you like about the Greeks, they certainly didn't lack self-confidence.
According to Herodotus, the Greek historian, one Spartan king sent a herald to Cyrus, Great King of Persia, demanding that he not harm the Greek cities in his domain.
The Persian king's response was surprisingly reasonable.
"Who are the Spartans?" The provocations didn't end there, but it would be a tyrant, one of those catalysts of the Greek world, who would spark the first great war of civilisation between East and West.
His name was Aristagoras.
He was tyrant of the city of Miletus, one of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor that paid tribute to the Persian Great King.
Restless and ambitious, like all tyrants, his first move had been to try and annex the Greek island of Naxos for the Great King.
But when this enterprise failed, he turned on his Persian master and stirred up rebellion amongst the Ionian cities.
Aristagoras, imperial lackey turned Hellenic freedom fighter, headed for the Greek mainland looking for military support for his plans.
Sparta, as cautious and conservative as ever, turned him down, but he had more luck in Athens, a city always ready to give a hearing to a silver-tongued demagogue.
First he appealed to their greed, telling them about all the easy pickings to be had in the East, and then he appealed to the Greek Thing, wrapping up his opportunism in the cloak of a pan-Hellenic crusade.
The Athenians liked what they heard and sent 25 ships to support the rebellion.
"These ships," Herodotus wrote, "were the beginning of all evils for Greeks and barbarians alike.
" The bloody sequel can be told in a sequence of resonant names and noteworthy dates.
Sardis, the Persian capital in Ionia, burned by Aristagoras in 498 BC.
Miletus, Aristagorus' city, destroyed by the Persians and its population massacred in 494 BC.
The plains of Marathon on the Greek mainland, where a Persian punitive force was repulsed by hoplites from Athens and Plataea in 490 BC.
Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans and 1,500 hoplites from Thebes and Thespiae sacrificed themselves trying to halt the Persian onslaught in 480 BC.
Athens, occupied and burned in revenge for Sardis by the Persians that same year.
The Bay of Salamis, where a Greek fleet lead by Athens defeated the Persians, also that year.
Plataea, where an army of Greeks lead by Sparta defeated the Persians in 479 BC The last great battle of the Persian wars.
At Marathon, at Thermopylae and here at the bay of Salamis, the Greeks had resisted the greatest empire that the ancient world had ever seen, preserving their freedoms against all the odds.
Forced to fight together for once, they had faced their own Dunkirk, Blitz and Battle of Britain .
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and they had endured.
You would have thought that this was the perfect time for the Greek Thing to take some kind of permanent political form.
An alliance, a federation, or perhaps even a united states of Greece.
But it didn't happen.
The two dominant city-states, Athens and Sparta, sniffed around each other for a while before going their separate ways with their allies.
And when they next came together, they would be at each other's throats in a destructive war which would ultimately cost both sides everything that they had.
The truth is that Sparta and Athens had become so different that they had difficulty understanding each other.
It was an antagonism built to last.
Even today, Sparta versus Athens remains shorthand for opposite ends of the political spectrum that runs from totalitarianism to radical democracy.
Sparta distrusted Athenian democracy, fearing that it would infect their helot slaves with the virus of freedom.
It was also unwilling to seize the opportunities and obligations that came with victory over the Persians.
It was said that after the Persian War, Sparta slept.
Athens, on the other hand, was galvanised by the adrenalin rush of victory.
The Ionian Awakening, as it was called, embraced art, architecture and theatre, as well as science and philosophy.
But this first European renaissance was powered by radical democracy.
During the Persian War, as the enemy advanced towards Athens, every available man of fighting age had hurried down to the port of the Piraeus, boarded the triremes that were moored there and rowed out to face the Persian fleet in the bay of Salamis.
You didn't even need a shield to fight in this battle.
All you needed was a rowing cushion and enough muscle to drive the bronze ram with which your ship was armed into the hull of the enemy.
In the democratic stew of the rowing benches, aristocratic sweat mixed with that of the lowest of the low, and the war against the Persians became a people's war.
When the war was finished, the people expected that to be remembered.
And the naval rabble, as their enemies called them, would become a power to be reckoned with in Athens.
Post-war Athens was a conservative's worst nightmare.
A vocal, powerful, self-confident citizenship under the spell of a charismatic democrat called Pericles, a radical aristocrat with the tactical skills and oratorical training to turn the aspirations of the naval rabble into a political reality.
Pericles completed the transfer of power from an aristocratic warrior elite, with a stake in the land, to a sea-borne working class, which had emerged during the Persian War as the city's protector, and which was now its master.
Under Pericles, democracy - people power - became inseparable from thalassocracy - sea power.
But people power did not come cheap.
With all of the city's male citizens now being paid to serve on city councils and juries, and with more money being poured into the ship-building programme, who would foot the bill for all of this democracy? Fortunately, Athens had armies of slaves to do the dirty work in the fields and the mines, but there were others who were also ripe for exploitation - her allies.
If you think your tax bill is too big, just take a look at this.
This three-and-a-half metre high inscription records the payments made over 14 years by members of the Delian League, a collection of around 170 Greek city-states who after the Persian Wars joined Athens in an alliance of mutual protection.
Originally, the League's treasury had been on the sacred island of Delos, but in 451 BC, about 25 years after the defeat of the Persians, the bank and all of its assets had been relocated to Athens.
That shift revealed the League's true nature, an alliance of equals had become, in effect, an Athenian empire bankrolled by the contributions of its vassal states.
Under the seductive terms of the League, members could contribute ships and men to fight for the common cause, or they could contribute money and Athens would take care of the fighting for them.
Most League members preferred to pay rather than fight, and so the Athenians used their money to build more and more triremes, which made them more and more powerful.
The Athenian ships carried names like "Freedom", but it proved to be freedom for Athens, rather than its allies.
The allies soon discovered that the ships that they had paid for were being used not only to fight against their common enemies, but also to keep the League together, by force if necessary.
So within two generations, the mutual defence league had become an imperial protection racket.
As the power of Athens grew, the city-states outside the Delian League looked to Sparta to protect them from its crushing embrace.
Sparta dithered, but finally, prompted by fear as much as fighting spirit, it struck.
The vicious conflict between Athens and Spartans goes under the label of the Peloponnesian War, which just shows you the value of historical labels.
In the 27 years that the Peloponnesian War raged, the Spartan heartland, here in the Peloponnese, was rarely troubled.
Athens was more directly affected.
Each year in the late summer, Spartan hoplites persistently and doggedly marched north to disrupt the harvest.
But with its full coffers and naval supremacy, Athens could afford to buy in what it couldn't grow.
No, as usual, it was the poor, bloody allies, both Athenian and Spartan, who paid the full price for this decades-long brawl.
And their Athenian and Spartan masters spent almost as much time and energy bullying them into line as they did bludgeoning their common foe.
Like the hoplite phalanx, the line had to hold.
There is something depressingly futile about all this Greek-on-Greek violence, but if we judge it harshly, it's only because the Greek Thing allows us to.
Thanks to historians as inquisitive as Herodotus, and as clear-sighted as Thucydides, both products of the Greek Thin, we can understand, and therefore deplore, the vanity, viciousness and short-sightedness that drove the ideal of Greekness on to the rocks.
We have Thucydides to thank for a dramatic historical reconstruction which has frames all subsequent debates about the morality of war and the reality of politics.
It is known as the Melian Dialogue, and it concerns events that took place in 415 BC, roughly the mid-point of the Peloponnesian War, when the island of Melos, a reluctant ally of Sparta, was forced by the arrival of an Athenian fleet on its shores to make a fateful decision - either join the Athenians or face destruction.
The Athenian position was stated bluntly by its envoys.
The question of justice only comes when both sides feel under equal pressure.
In reality, the stronger take what they can, and the weak concede what they must.
But will you not allow us to remain neutral and be friends instead of enemies? What would you lose from that? Your enmity is less dangerous to us than your friendship, your hate is an argument of our power, your friendship of our weakness.
We've been here before.
300 years earlier, the poet Hesiod had described the nightingale crying out in the talons of the hawk.
"Why do you cry out?" asks the hawk.
"One far stronger than you holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you.
" For all the subtle niceties of the debate, that in effect was how the Athenian hawk regarded the Melian nightingale.
In the end, Melos defied Athens, and the Athenians made good on their menaces.
They took the island, killed the men, deported the women and children and repopulated it with their own people.
Some dialogue(!) But it wasn't just the tyranny at the heart of Athenian democracy that was exposed by this cruel war.
The ideals of Sparta, too, were called into question as never before.
Their merciless exploitation of the helots continued unabated, even as they increasingly called on these semi-slaves to make up for their dwindling manpower.
But ruthless suppression of the helots could not prevent threats that came from within the ranks of the equals.
As the war dragged on, the egalitarian warrior code that had done so much to create cohesion in Spartan society disintegrated.
One of the few glittering success stories of Sparta's dogged and undistinguished war was Gylippus, a general who was despatched to Sicily to help the city of Syracuse resist a massive Athenian invasion.
This barefooted warrior in a red cloak single-handedly helped stiffen the resolve of the Syracuseans and then led them on the offensive before eventually inflicting a terrible defeat on the Athenians.
So far, so Spartan.
But then, just a few years later, this same Gylippus was exposed as an embezzler.
Silver that had been sent by the Persian king to aid the Spartan war effort was found hidden in the thatched roof of his house.
What this squalid story suggests is that the further Spartan warriors went from home, and the more they saw of the world beyond the narrow horizons of the Eurotas valley, the less satisfied they were with the austere Utopia they had created there.
If the Athenians had been corrupted by power, the Spartans lost their innocence by exposure to a wider world that they had struggled for so long to keep at bay.
The war without end ended here, at the mouth of the Goat River on the Dardanelles.
It was the Spartan general Lysander who dealt the final blow with a fleet bought and paid for by Persian silver.
Lysander trapped and destroyed the Athenian fleet on the beach here, seizing control of this vital waterway, and severing the link between Athens and its corn supplies from the Black Sea.
With no fleet to defend it, and no corn to feed it, Athens was defenceless and the city surrendered in 404 BC.
Just under 80 years before, it had been the barbarian army of Persia that took the city.
Now it was an army of Greeks.
The city walls were torn down and an oligarchic regime, known as the 30 tyrants, was installed, which set about slaughtering its democratic enemies.
This area of Western Turkey played an important part in the history of Ancient Greece.
Just south-west of here is the city of Troy, where, according to legend at least, the Greek army fought a long and bitter war against a foreign power right at the very beginning of Greek history.
Well, the Peloponnesian War, which ended here, lasted longer than the Trojan War.
It pitted Greek against Greek in a merciless conflict which in the end compromised the ideals of everybody that took part.
And it finished with a foreign ruler, a Persian barbarian no less, pulling the strings whilst Greek slaughtered Greek in the name of democracy, freedom and justice.
A century later, the philosopher Aristotle wrote, "If only the Greeks could achieve a single politeia, or constitution, "then they would rule the whole world.
" It was, and would remain, the biggest "if only" of Ancient Greece.
In the end it would take a dynasty of outsiders to unite the fractious Greeks.
Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander, known to history as "the Great".
Alexander would carry the Greek Thing forward on the spear-points of his Macedonian army and the ancient world would never be the same again.
It was first used by the historian Herodotus to sum up all the things the Ancient Greeks had in common - language .
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religion customs .
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blood.
Today, the Greek Thing has become a kind of shorthand for values that we like to think are at the root of who WE are - rational, cultured, humane, civilised.
But beneath the civilized skin was a fierce, volatile pulse.
It gave the Greek Thing its energy, its passion, its life and its capacity for sudden, shocking violence.
CHANTING AND SIRENS BLARING If you'd come here in 370 BC to Argos, you'd have seen another side of the Greek Thing.
In that year, an aristocratic plot to overthrow the democratic government of the city was uncovered.
Seizing the political advantage, democratic demagogues whipped up a mob with fiery speeches directed against the city's wealthiest citizens.
What happened next was a reign of terror, trumped-up charges, confiscation of property, summary trial and execution.
The victims were handed over to the mob who beat them to death with clubs.
It was only when the body count reached 1,200 or more that the democratic leaders began to have second thoughts about this cull of the city's elite.
But when they tried to calm things down, the mob turned on them and clubbed them to death as well.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, had some interesting things to say about the Greeks - "These most humane of men in ancient times," he wrote, "have a trait of cruelty, a tigerish lust to annihilate which really must strike fear in our hearts.
" In the story of Ancient Greece, from the evolution of the city-states to their wars with Persia and then with each other, there's as much to shudder at as to admire.
A blossoming in art, philosophy and science that went hand in bloody hand with political discord, social injustice, endless war and, ultimately, a complete failure to forge a common political identity, despite all that shared Greekness.
And that's the story that I have for you now - The Greek Thing, for better or worse.
The last time we met the Greeks they were a long way from home, a predatory army camped outside the walls of Troy, intent on vengeance and plunder.
Homer's Iliad gave the heroes who fought in the Trojan War epic grandeur and it left the Greeks who came after feeling they had a lot to live up to.
But though they dreamed of being an Achilles, sacking cities and slaying their enemies, their glory would come from the hard graft that was needed to rebuild their civilization.
To understand these Greeks you have to leave the killing fields of Troy behind and travel west to the Greek mainland This is Boeotia in the heart of the Greece.
It's a very long way from the world of heroes and battles, but this landscape has its poetry too .
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though of a very different kind to the Iliad.
If Homer's theme was the tragedy of war, the poet who wrote about this place explored the everyday heroism of work.
Gods and men disapprove of the man who lives without working.
Wealth brings worth and prestige.
But whatever your fortune, work is preferable.
If your spirit yearns for riches, do as follows and work, work upon work.
This is Askra, a beautiful spot at the head of the Valley Of The Muses.
Askra never amounted to much, more of a village than a town, it was certainly no Athens.
But Askra deserves its measure of fame for being the home town of Hesiod - the poet laureate of the new down-to-Earth Greece which followed the Age Of Heroes.
We're not sure of Hesiod's dates, but most experts believe that he owned and worked a small farm somewhere in the valley in the period immediately after Homer.
This puts him sometime after 700 BC, when the Greek world was emerging from the darkness that had followed the collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms of Mycenae some six centuries before.
After a long period of stagnation, things were changingfast.
Tribal systems that had returned during the Dark Ages were breaking down as the more impersonal mechanisms of civilisation revived.
Loyalties and obligations based on family, kith and kin dissolved as colonisation, trade and a surge in population offered people new opportunities for personal enrichment, undermining notions of the collective and the common good.
New technologies, from metallurgy to the alphabet, accelerated these processes as the Greeks reconnected with the modern world of the late Iron Age.
And in this world, the voices and opinions of ordinary people would play a vital role in the shaping of these new societies.
Crucially, in the new Greece the role and status of the high kings of the Mycenaean Age were called into question like never before.
Typically, these new settlements were small, and the gap between rich and poor was small too.
When you could see the top of the social pyramid, it became much easier to ask, "Why is he up there? "Why am I down here? Why should he tell me how to live my life?" In Works And Days, Hesiod's most famous poem, he tells the parable of the nightingale struggling in the claws of the hawk.
"Why do you cry out?" asked the hawk "One much stronger than you "holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you.
" But the point is that Hesiod was crying out, railing against the corruption of the new age of iron and threatening divine retribution.
There is angry murmuring when Right is dragged off wherever the bribe-eaters choose, as they give their crooked verdicts.
Beware of this, lords, and keep your judgments straight.
A man fashions ill for himself who fashions ill for another.
The all-seeing eye of Zeus sees the kind of justice the community has within it.
The struggle between elite privilege and ancient rights would be a theme for politics as well as poetry.
The battleground between hoi oligoi - the few, and hoi polloi - the many.
But the arena for this battle wouldn't be out-of-the-way places like Askra, but the city-states, the nuclei around which the new Greece was beginning to crystallise.
The city state, or polis, was a remarkably successful and adaptable concept.
Over a period of about 500 years, starting around 700 BC, some 1,500 were established in Greece and in Greek colonies, from Spain to Afghanistan.
Some, like Athens, Sparta, Argos or Corinth, had populations topping 10,000 and territories to match.
But the average city state had a population of around 1,000, so these were intimate, independent places.
Geography added to this sense of inwardness, cut off by rugged mountains and hemmed in by the encroaching sea, few city-states had the elbow room needed to become powers in their land.
Those that did, owed their prominence to powerful strategic locations - a pinch-point along trade routes or a defensible citadel on a rocky hill which both protected and controlled the territory below.
At nearly 2,000 feet above sea level, the Acrocorinth of Corinth is the most impressive.
From up here, one of the defining characteristics of the city-state is immediately clear - the political centre is embedded in the farmlands that surround it.
With one foot in the street and the other in the fields, these city-states bred citizen-farmers - hyphenated people for these hyphenated places.
Small, inward-looking and isolated, the city-states ran on a brand of local politics that was intensely personal.
More village pump than city hall, with all the predictable rivalries, feuds and vendettas.
But it was in the interests of the most powerful clans to work together, because if they didn't, they knew a big man could emerge who would rule over everyone.
By the 8th century BC, most Greek city-states had kicked out their kings - the ancient world's default position when it came to political leadership.
This meant that power and prestige, which had previously been the preserve of individuals, was now divvied out amongst the members of the elites, the oligarchs.
Oligarchy broke down kingship into its component parts - justice, war, religion, and so on, creating a range of public offices for ambitious aristocrats to fill.
And they could also impose time limits on length of service, introducing the hallowed principle of Buggins' turn into the political process - "My turn to be archon this year, your turn next.
" Passions inside the city-state ran high.
This wasn't just the place you came to buy and sell or do business, it was the place where you learned to be a poli-tician - a creature of the polis, a political animal.
So, your polis provided an economic hub and security during times of danger, but it went deeper than that - the polis was something to which you belonged, the place that gave you your identity.
According to Aristotle, the polis completed you as a human being - "The man who in his self-sufficiency has no use for others," he wrote, "is like a beast or a god.
" Love of polis was so intense it was sometimes described as Himeros - sexual desire.
But alongside love was the opposite - hatred of the other lot.
In fact, opposition and polarities were central to the Greek way of making sense of their world.
The best way to define anything was to say what it was not.
So cold was the opposite of heat, dark was the opposite of light, peace was the opposite of war, Athens the opposite of Sparta.
This black-and-white take on the world brought a clarity of thought that would spark the intellectual, philosophical and scientific revolutions of the Greek-speaking world.
But it also gave politics a rancorous edge - white hats versus black hats, and if you're not with us, you're against us.
CHANTING Stirred by powerful and contradictory passions, the city-states of Ancient Greece were a long way from the rational, and well-ordered utopias which they aspired to be.
They were like test tubes packed full of combustible materials always threatening to blow up.
Blame the ghost of Achilles for the bitter rivalry that divided the city-states, internally and externally.
All Greek males were haunted by the matchless warrior of the Iliad.
Achilles taught them the lesson that he'd learned from his father - always be first and excel the others in all things.
Glory cannot be shared.
The Achilles principle was at the heart of the events that took place here every four years.
This is Olympia, home of the famous games, but there was nothing playful about what went on here.
The Games were a deadly serious affair.
The first Olympic Games took place in 776 BC, and the first event was a 200-metre sprint.
Over the next 1,000 years more events were added, but that was the essence of the Games - a mad dash from here to there to discover who was the best.
There was none of this pious nonsense of, "Oh, it's the taking part that matters," the Greeks always played to win.
There was no silver or bronze for the runners-up, all they could expect were derision and ignominy.
The poet Pindar describes them slinking back home, spurned by their mothers and girlfriends, "Lurking in byways, "hoping to avoid their enemies, stung by their ill fortune.
" Losers.
The temples at Olympia were stuffed full of mementoes of athletic prowess dedicated to the gods.
But they were also hung with military gear, much of it showing signs of active service.
Evidently, the Greeks saw a link between prowess on the sports field and on the battlefield.
But in practice, they were very different things.
For a start, there were no team sports in the Olympics, but when it came to the business of war, teamwork was essential.
This is hoplite gear - battle kit for a hugely effective infantry fighting technique.
Hoplites formed into densely packed ranks known as a phalanx, their round shields overlapping, protecting their neighbour rather than themselves.
Committed to mutual protection, the phalanx advanced as a unit in carefully choreographed movements, each fighter a small but essential part of a formidable fighting machine.
When two phalanxes butted up against one another on the battlefield, there was no room for the heroic man-to-man combat described in the Iliad.
No-one could break ranks, the line had to hold.
This was un-heroic push and shove - brutal, collective, anonymous, a rugby scrum with spear points and edged weapons.
But fighting for your city was an important source of kudos and the introduction of hoplite tactics made it possible for more people to take part than ever before.
Some body armour, a helmet, a spear and a shield to protect your neighbour - bring those to the field of battle and you could expect to get a game.
The Hoplite Revolution, as it's been rightly called, was far more than just a matter of military tactics, it brought with it profound political change.
As Aristotle would later observe, "The class that does the fighting wields the power.
" As more and more ordinary citizens stood shield to shield with the well-to-do, the whole balance of power within the city-state must have been called into question every time the phalanx advanced into battle.
Given the threat of war from without and civil war from within it's not surprising that by the end of the 7th century BC, the critical question for the city-states was, "How should we best be governed?" The Greeks being Greek could never agree on a single answer, but the ones they did come up with were test-runs for many of the political concepts that we live with today - totalitarianism, collectivism, tyranny, oligarchy, democracy - all of them were tried out in the test-tubes that were the city-states.
The Greeks seemed prepared to consider any system that might deliver the blessings of good order and self sufficiency.
Anything, that is, except monarchy.
All over Greece, royal dynasties were out.
Kings were a relic of the past, or for the barbarians.
But there was one exception.
On the Greek mainland, in the heart of the Peloponnese, was a city-state that didn't just have one king, it had two.
And that was just the beginning, for Sparta was the strangest test-tube in the whole laboratory.
Sparta was a looking-glass world.
The ingredients that you would expect to find in a city-state were absent here.
There was no one single political centre, there were no city walls, no public buildings to speak of, no written laws, no money, and a constitution apparently designed by Heath Robinson.
Sparta's two rival dynasties were guaranteed to get in each other's way, but there was also a public assembly that voted but didn't debate and five annually elected overseers who squabbled over the levers of this ramshackle political machine.
This partly radical, partly authoritarian system was overseen by a council of elders, presumably the only ones with enough experience to make sense of it all.
This complex constitution was designed to defy the laws of political gravity.
Its aim was to create and sustain a stable society based on the absolute equality of all its male citizens - the homoioi, the equals, as they were known.
This ideal was reinforced by a strict code of behaviour that suppressed any outward signs of status or wealth, from food, to clothes, to houses.
There was to be no us and them destroying the unity of this totalitarian Utopia, where everything which wasn't forbidden was of course compulsory.
There was a reason for all this extreme social engineering.
The Spartans believed that they had achieved good order and self-sufficiency here in the fertile Eurotas Valley.
And they were prepared to do all that they could to hang on to them, as their neighbours had learned to their cost.
The rise of Sparta came at the expense of the Messenians, whose territory lay about 40 miles to the west, over there, across the other side of the Taygetus mountains.
Sometime in the 8th century BC, Spartan hoplites crossed the mountain passes and waged a long and bitter war against their neighbours.
It took 20 years, but they finally the Spartans defeated the Messenians and reduced them en masse to the status of helots - feudal slaves.
The radical re-ordering of Spartan society that followed the war turned just another city-state into a full-time military training camp, where the needs of the individual were sacrificed to the good of the collective.
But it was the helots who sacrificed most.
The helots served the Spartans as body servants, shield bearers, cooks, potters, breeding machines, and agricultural labourers, handing over half their harvests to a military elite whose prime purpose was now their subjugation.
But the Spartans were also tough on themselves.
They killed off any new-born male deemed to be weak or infirm.
The ones that survived were sent at the age of seven to the agoge - a brat camp to end all brat camps.
Here they began 13 years of savage training to prepare them for their vocation as full-time warriors.
With the men away training, fighting or just hanging out together in the all-male barracks, where homosexuality was obligatory, Spartan women were left to enjoy educational, economic and sexual freedoms that were unheard of in the ancient world.
Indeed in some parts of the modern world today.
The rest of the Greek world looked on all of this with a mixture of horror and fascination, but they accepted the Spartan assertion that their extreme social system was, in fact, traditional.
But despite this reputation for conservatism, Sparta was no more stable than the other city-states.
In its passionate desire to keep things the way they had always been, it was constantly having to tinker with its time-honoured traditions.
In times of manpower shortage, a constant problem for these elitist warriors, they even had to admit the despised helots into their ranks, to fight and die alongside them.
Like everyone else, Sparta was struggling to come to terms with a fundamental but unsettling truth about the stability of all civilisations.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus would sum it up like this - "ta panta rhei", everything changes.
And not even the most conservative society can step into the same river twice.
In Athens, the river of change flowed just as forcefully, but here there was a greater willingness to go with the flow.
Like the most of the other city-states, Athens had shrugged off its hereditary kings early on, replacing monarchy with oligarchy.
Which is where things began to get interesting.
As the Greek city-states began to emerge from the Dark Ages, they began to reconnect with the rest of the ancient world through trade and colonisation.
This new entrepreneurial activity was privately funded and the profits remained in private hands.
So in Athens, the rich got richer as the poor got poorer.
And many had to sell themselves and their families into slavery to service mounting debts.
So towards the end of the 7th century BC, the Athenian poor were becoming the helots of the Athenian rich.
In Sparta, the destabilising effects of inequality had been neutralised by a social revolution.
But in Athens, the ruling class reluctantly trod the path of cautious reform.
This is the Areopagus, the Rock of Ares, and from this lofty perch during the 6th century BC, the Council of the Areopagus governed the affairs of Athens.
Its membership was exclusively aristocratic, and all had previously held the post of archon, or chief magistrate, so what we have here is a perfect closed circle of aristocratic power - self-selecting and self-serving, insulated from the voices of the agora, or the marketplace, down below.
But the wealth gap was becoming so great that it threatened the unity and stability of Athens.
In 594 BC, the Areopagus chose Solon to be chief magistrate.
He was an aristocrat, but not a wealthy one.
In fact, he'd crossed the class lines and worked as merchant in order to support himself.
He also had a reputation for fairness which was recognised by rich and poor alike.
Solon granted protection from debt slavery and access to the law courts to the poorest in the community.
Careful reforms designed to defuse tensions, rather than transform a society.
Cautious as they were, they were like pebbles that precede an avalanche.
Within a century Athens would have a new form of government as the olegos, the few, retreated step by reluctant step in the face of the power of the demos, the people.
CHANTING In the stories told about Athens, reformers like Solon are inevitably the good guys, far-sighted visionaries fighting the good fight, paving the way for the triumph of democracy.
But of course it was more complicated than that.
Solon's reforms were more the product of the fears of the ruling class than the idealism of a would-be democrat.
Placating the masses headed off the threat of civil war.
The trick for the aristocracy was to feed the many-headed beast without being swallowed by it.
But in the political jungle of Ancient Greece, there were other animals on the prowl The tyrants.
Today in the democratic West, we don't look on them kindly, but their influence was just as significant as the reformers' in the story of the Greek city-states.
There was once another Parthenon which stood where this Parthenon now stands, a building every bit as iconic as the one that we're so familiar with.
It was built by Peisistratos, one of the most intriguing characters from the early days of classical Athens.
In 546 BC, he became tyrannos, or tyrant of Athens, In Greek-speak, that meant a leader who had illegally seized power and then maintained his position by appealing to the people, rather than the elites.
Peisistratus was guilty on both counts, but during his 20-year reign, Athens would come of age as one of the dominant city-states of classical Greece.
He first came to prominence by allying himself with the hill dwellers, the lowest of the low in the pecking order of Athenian politics, turning them into a formidable powerbase.
He then faked an attack on himself, which persuaded the Athenians to vote him a bodyguard.
He used these club-wielding thugs to stage his first coup, occupying the Acropolis and declaring himself tyrant.
The Athenians eventually dislodged him and threw him out of the city, but he wasn't finished.
He drove back into the city in a chariot accompanied by the tallest woman he could find kitted out as the goddess Pallas Athena, She commanded the citizens of her city to take back the prodigal son and the stunned Athenians obeyed.
The protection of the fake Athena didn't last for long and Peisistratus was exiled for a second time.
He then came here to Laurion, some 40 miles away from Athens, where silver was both mined and processed.
He spent a decade here, becoming filthy rich, before in 546 BC returning to Athens, but this time at the head of a mercenary army.
The city was now his.
What followed wasn't bloodshed or revenge, but a renaissance as Peisistratos embarked on a series of very public grand projects.
He also commissioned the first edition of Homer's Iliad, an event of huge cultural significance for the Greeks and for the world.
And he commissioned the first Parthenon, the remnants of which can be seen today in the new Acropolis Museum.
Athens was Athens long before democracy came along to claim it as its own.
This brand of public works and canny populism helped Peisistratus establish a dynasty, but his son and successor Hippias fell foul of the liberators.
Harmodius and his lover Aristogeiton ended tyranny in Athens by murdering the tyrant's brother.
This created a political crisis which lead to the ousting of the tyrant and a return to power of the oligarchs.
Now all too aware of the Athenians' weakness for charismatic, unscrupulous chancers, the oligarchs decided to neutralise the threat of tyranny for good by finally offering the despised demos a real stake in the running of their city.
The final churn in the political cycle that had begun with Solon's cautious reforms came with the rise to power of Cleisthenes.
Cleisthenes was one of those canny aristocrats who realised that his own class were going to have to give up some of their privileges in order to conserve the good order of the city-state as a whole.
Cleisthenes laid the foundations of the first recognisably democratic system in Athens.
Under his reforms, election to public bodies, political and judicial, was thrown open to all male citizens, chosen by lot.
Members of the boule, or council, swore an oath to advise according to the laws what was best for the people.
Cleisthenes called his reforms isonomia - equality before the law.
Hesiod would surely have approved.
Cleisthenes is also credited with the introduction of these - ostraca.
It took 6,000 of these pottery sherds with your name scratched on them for you to be ostracised - exiled from Athens for ten years.
The system was originally designed to guard against the return of the tyrants, but predictably it soon became a political weapon to be used against anyone who became too prominent.
It's also worth noting that one of the first victims of this tall poppy syndrome was the father of democracy himself, Cleisthenes.
By the beginning of the 5th century BC, the city-states of Greece had each evolved their own distinctive set of characteristics.
They were all Greek, but they were Greek in their own peculiar way.
It would take an external threat of apocalyptic proportions to force them to pull together.
In the centuries since the Dark Ages, during which the Greeks had been slowly groping their way back towards the light of civilisation, in the East, mighty empires had come and gone.
The Assyrians fell to an alliance of the Medes and the Babylonians, and they in turn had been devoured by a new power in the land, the Persians.
By the 5th century BC, the Persian empire was a monster.
5 million square miles, spanning three continents, from Afghanistan in the East to Libya in the West.
And on the hem of this mighty empire, Greek colonists had stitched a dozen or so city-states.
The fate of the Ionian cities, as they were known, would entangle the Persians and Greeks for centuries to come.
Say what you like about the Greeks, they certainly didn't lack self-confidence.
According to Herodotus, the Greek historian, one Spartan king sent a herald to Cyrus, Great King of Persia, demanding that he not harm the Greek cities in his domain.
The Persian king's response was surprisingly reasonable.
"Who are the Spartans?" The provocations didn't end there, but it would be a tyrant, one of those catalysts of the Greek world, who would spark the first great war of civilisation between East and West.
His name was Aristagoras.
He was tyrant of the city of Miletus, one of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor that paid tribute to the Persian Great King.
Restless and ambitious, like all tyrants, his first move had been to try and annex the Greek island of Naxos for the Great King.
But when this enterprise failed, he turned on his Persian master and stirred up rebellion amongst the Ionian cities.
Aristagoras, imperial lackey turned Hellenic freedom fighter, headed for the Greek mainland looking for military support for his plans.
Sparta, as cautious and conservative as ever, turned him down, but he had more luck in Athens, a city always ready to give a hearing to a silver-tongued demagogue.
First he appealed to their greed, telling them about all the easy pickings to be had in the East, and then he appealed to the Greek Thing, wrapping up his opportunism in the cloak of a pan-Hellenic crusade.
The Athenians liked what they heard and sent 25 ships to support the rebellion.
"These ships," Herodotus wrote, "were the beginning of all evils for Greeks and barbarians alike.
" The bloody sequel can be told in a sequence of resonant names and noteworthy dates.
Sardis, the Persian capital in Ionia, burned by Aristagoras in 498 BC.
Miletus, Aristagorus' city, destroyed by the Persians and its population massacred in 494 BC.
The plains of Marathon on the Greek mainland, where a Persian punitive force was repulsed by hoplites from Athens and Plataea in 490 BC.
Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans and 1,500 hoplites from Thebes and Thespiae sacrificed themselves trying to halt the Persian onslaught in 480 BC.
Athens, occupied and burned in revenge for Sardis by the Persians that same year.
The Bay of Salamis, where a Greek fleet lead by Athens defeated the Persians, also that year.
Plataea, where an army of Greeks lead by Sparta defeated the Persians in 479 BC The last great battle of the Persian wars.
At Marathon, at Thermopylae and here at the bay of Salamis, the Greeks had resisted the greatest empire that the ancient world had ever seen, preserving their freedoms against all the odds.
Forced to fight together for once, they had faced their own Dunkirk, Blitz and Battle of Britain .
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and they had endured.
You would have thought that this was the perfect time for the Greek Thing to take some kind of permanent political form.
An alliance, a federation, or perhaps even a united states of Greece.
But it didn't happen.
The two dominant city-states, Athens and Sparta, sniffed around each other for a while before going their separate ways with their allies.
And when they next came together, they would be at each other's throats in a destructive war which would ultimately cost both sides everything that they had.
The truth is that Sparta and Athens had become so different that they had difficulty understanding each other.
It was an antagonism built to last.
Even today, Sparta versus Athens remains shorthand for opposite ends of the political spectrum that runs from totalitarianism to radical democracy.
Sparta distrusted Athenian democracy, fearing that it would infect their helot slaves with the virus of freedom.
It was also unwilling to seize the opportunities and obligations that came with victory over the Persians.
It was said that after the Persian War, Sparta slept.
Athens, on the other hand, was galvanised by the adrenalin rush of victory.
The Ionian Awakening, as it was called, embraced art, architecture and theatre, as well as science and philosophy.
But this first European renaissance was powered by radical democracy.
During the Persian War, as the enemy advanced towards Athens, every available man of fighting age had hurried down to the port of the Piraeus, boarded the triremes that were moored there and rowed out to face the Persian fleet in the bay of Salamis.
You didn't even need a shield to fight in this battle.
All you needed was a rowing cushion and enough muscle to drive the bronze ram with which your ship was armed into the hull of the enemy.
In the democratic stew of the rowing benches, aristocratic sweat mixed with that of the lowest of the low, and the war against the Persians became a people's war.
When the war was finished, the people expected that to be remembered.
And the naval rabble, as their enemies called them, would become a power to be reckoned with in Athens.
Post-war Athens was a conservative's worst nightmare.
A vocal, powerful, self-confident citizenship under the spell of a charismatic democrat called Pericles, a radical aristocrat with the tactical skills and oratorical training to turn the aspirations of the naval rabble into a political reality.
Pericles completed the transfer of power from an aristocratic warrior elite, with a stake in the land, to a sea-borne working class, which had emerged during the Persian War as the city's protector, and which was now its master.
Under Pericles, democracy - people power - became inseparable from thalassocracy - sea power.
But people power did not come cheap.
With all of the city's male citizens now being paid to serve on city councils and juries, and with more money being poured into the ship-building programme, who would foot the bill for all of this democracy? Fortunately, Athens had armies of slaves to do the dirty work in the fields and the mines, but there were others who were also ripe for exploitation - her allies.
If you think your tax bill is too big, just take a look at this.
This three-and-a-half metre high inscription records the payments made over 14 years by members of the Delian League, a collection of around 170 Greek city-states who after the Persian Wars joined Athens in an alliance of mutual protection.
Originally, the League's treasury had been on the sacred island of Delos, but in 451 BC, about 25 years after the defeat of the Persians, the bank and all of its assets had been relocated to Athens.
That shift revealed the League's true nature, an alliance of equals had become, in effect, an Athenian empire bankrolled by the contributions of its vassal states.
Under the seductive terms of the League, members could contribute ships and men to fight for the common cause, or they could contribute money and Athens would take care of the fighting for them.
Most League members preferred to pay rather than fight, and so the Athenians used their money to build more and more triremes, which made them more and more powerful.
The Athenian ships carried names like "Freedom", but it proved to be freedom for Athens, rather than its allies.
The allies soon discovered that the ships that they had paid for were being used not only to fight against their common enemies, but also to keep the League together, by force if necessary.
So within two generations, the mutual defence league had become an imperial protection racket.
As the power of Athens grew, the city-states outside the Delian League looked to Sparta to protect them from its crushing embrace.
Sparta dithered, but finally, prompted by fear as much as fighting spirit, it struck.
The vicious conflict between Athens and Spartans goes under the label of the Peloponnesian War, which just shows you the value of historical labels.
In the 27 years that the Peloponnesian War raged, the Spartan heartland, here in the Peloponnese, was rarely troubled.
Athens was more directly affected.
Each year in the late summer, Spartan hoplites persistently and doggedly marched north to disrupt the harvest.
But with its full coffers and naval supremacy, Athens could afford to buy in what it couldn't grow.
No, as usual, it was the poor, bloody allies, both Athenian and Spartan, who paid the full price for this decades-long brawl.
And their Athenian and Spartan masters spent almost as much time and energy bullying them into line as they did bludgeoning their common foe.
Like the hoplite phalanx, the line had to hold.
There is something depressingly futile about all this Greek-on-Greek violence, but if we judge it harshly, it's only because the Greek Thing allows us to.
Thanks to historians as inquisitive as Herodotus, and as clear-sighted as Thucydides, both products of the Greek Thin, we can understand, and therefore deplore, the vanity, viciousness and short-sightedness that drove the ideal of Greekness on to the rocks.
We have Thucydides to thank for a dramatic historical reconstruction which has frames all subsequent debates about the morality of war and the reality of politics.
It is known as the Melian Dialogue, and it concerns events that took place in 415 BC, roughly the mid-point of the Peloponnesian War, when the island of Melos, a reluctant ally of Sparta, was forced by the arrival of an Athenian fleet on its shores to make a fateful decision - either join the Athenians or face destruction.
The Athenian position was stated bluntly by its envoys.
The question of justice only comes when both sides feel under equal pressure.
In reality, the stronger take what they can, and the weak concede what they must.
But will you not allow us to remain neutral and be friends instead of enemies? What would you lose from that? Your enmity is less dangerous to us than your friendship, your hate is an argument of our power, your friendship of our weakness.
We've been here before.
300 years earlier, the poet Hesiod had described the nightingale crying out in the talons of the hawk.
"Why do you cry out?" asks the hawk.
"One far stronger than you holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you.
" For all the subtle niceties of the debate, that in effect was how the Athenian hawk regarded the Melian nightingale.
In the end, Melos defied Athens, and the Athenians made good on their menaces.
They took the island, killed the men, deported the women and children and repopulated it with their own people.
Some dialogue(!) But it wasn't just the tyranny at the heart of Athenian democracy that was exposed by this cruel war.
The ideals of Sparta, too, were called into question as never before.
Their merciless exploitation of the helots continued unabated, even as they increasingly called on these semi-slaves to make up for their dwindling manpower.
But ruthless suppression of the helots could not prevent threats that came from within the ranks of the equals.
As the war dragged on, the egalitarian warrior code that had done so much to create cohesion in Spartan society disintegrated.
One of the few glittering success stories of Sparta's dogged and undistinguished war was Gylippus, a general who was despatched to Sicily to help the city of Syracuse resist a massive Athenian invasion.
This barefooted warrior in a red cloak single-handedly helped stiffen the resolve of the Syracuseans and then led them on the offensive before eventually inflicting a terrible defeat on the Athenians.
So far, so Spartan.
But then, just a few years later, this same Gylippus was exposed as an embezzler.
Silver that had been sent by the Persian king to aid the Spartan war effort was found hidden in the thatched roof of his house.
What this squalid story suggests is that the further Spartan warriors went from home, and the more they saw of the world beyond the narrow horizons of the Eurotas valley, the less satisfied they were with the austere Utopia they had created there.
If the Athenians had been corrupted by power, the Spartans lost their innocence by exposure to a wider world that they had struggled for so long to keep at bay.
The war without end ended here, at the mouth of the Goat River on the Dardanelles.
It was the Spartan general Lysander who dealt the final blow with a fleet bought and paid for by Persian silver.
Lysander trapped and destroyed the Athenian fleet on the beach here, seizing control of this vital waterway, and severing the link between Athens and its corn supplies from the Black Sea.
With no fleet to defend it, and no corn to feed it, Athens was defenceless and the city surrendered in 404 BC.
Just under 80 years before, it had been the barbarian army of Persia that took the city.
Now it was an army of Greeks.
The city walls were torn down and an oligarchic regime, known as the 30 tyrants, was installed, which set about slaughtering its democratic enemies.
This area of Western Turkey played an important part in the history of Ancient Greece.
Just south-west of here is the city of Troy, where, according to legend at least, the Greek army fought a long and bitter war against a foreign power right at the very beginning of Greek history.
Well, the Peloponnesian War, which ended here, lasted longer than the Trojan War.
It pitted Greek against Greek in a merciless conflict which in the end compromised the ideals of everybody that took part.
And it finished with a foreign ruler, a Persian barbarian no less, pulling the strings whilst Greek slaughtered Greek in the name of democracy, freedom and justice.
A century later, the philosopher Aristotle wrote, "If only the Greeks could achieve a single politeia, or constitution, "then they would rule the whole world.
" It was, and would remain, the biggest "if only" of Ancient Greece.
In the end it would take a dynasty of outsiders to unite the fractious Greeks.
Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander, known to history as "the Great".
Alexander would carry the Greek Thing forward on the spear-points of his Macedonian army and the ancient world would never be the same again.