The Mountains look on Marathon

This August marks the anniversary of the Battle of Marathon, fought exactly 2,500 years ago on the plains of Attica. It was a victory for a small Athenian army over a Persian host, said by Herodotus to be carried to Greece in six hundred triremes. Plutarch and Puasania, later historians, were to estimate the number of Persians at 300,000, clearly a wild exaggeration. Even so, the victory was incredibly significant. For once I do think it possible to say that Marathon was indeed one of the decisive battles of world history.

Darius, emperor of the Persians, had been angered that the Athenians had given help to Ionian rebels on what is now the western coast of Turkey. Although the rebellion had been crushed he was still determined on a major reprisal against the Greeks. The size of the force he sent makes it clear that he was determined on something more systematic than a mere punitive raid, evidenced by attacks on both Naxos and Euboea.

No sooner had the Persians landed at Marathon, just twenty-five miles to the north of Athens, the city set about mustering all the soldiers that it could find, a mere 10,000 according to the ancient sources. A runner by the name of Pheidippides was sent south to ask for help from the Spartans, some one hundred and forty miles from Athens. But they were in the middle of one of their religious festivals, saying that it would be another ten days before their forces could be mustered. Pheidippides at once ran back with the news.

As always number can be a liability in battle as much as an advantage. The Persian host, as big as it was, could only bring a fraction of its power to bear, because the Greeks had blocked the narrow passes that lead south from the plain of Marathon to Athens. Seizing the initiative, and deciding to break the deadlock, Militiades, one of the two generals in command of a joint Athenian and Plataean force, decided to attack, surprising the Persians not just with the boldness of the move, but the ferocity of his citizen soldiers. Herodotus says that they ran into battle.

No sooner were the weak Persian flanks broken than the Greeks turned on the centre. In confusion the Persians broke, hurrying back to the ships, many drowning in the marshes adjacent to the coast. Once embarked what was left of the Persian host sailed south to Athens, only to find the Greeks ready for them in full battle array, the army having marched south from Marathon. Not willing to risk a second encounter the Persians sailed for home.

Marathon is still remembered today in the long-distance Olympic running event. This supposedly commemorates Pheidippides running to Athens with news of the victory, after which he promptly dropped dead! But the only running that he did according to Herodotus, the closest source we have to the battle, was to Sparta and back. It is not until three centuries later that the story of a single runner from Marathon was set down, and not until 180AD was the runner named by Lucian as Pheidippides, an event eventually commemorated by Robert Browning in a poem of the same name.

The words about Marathon that moves me most come from Byron’s The Isles of Greece, written shortly before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821;

The mountains look on Marathon---
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

Remembering Hypatia

Hypatia of Alexandria is one of the women from whom I have a lasting reverence. For me she represents the last flourishing of the scholarship of the old classical pagan world. Born sometime after 350AD, she became a noted mathematician, philosopher and astronomer. In philosophy she was a Neo-Platonist, following in the tradition of Plotinus, a third century thinker, placing her greatest intellectual stress not on empirical inquiry but on logic and mathematical studies.

The daughter of Theon, himself a noted mathematician, she travelled to both Athens and Italy before becoming head of the Platonist school in her native Alexandra in about 400AD. One contemporary account notes of her;

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.

Admired as she was Hypatia came to an appalling end. Believed to be the source of friction between Orestes, the Imperial Prefect, and Bishop Cyril of Alexandra, she was attacked and murdered by a Christian mob in March 415. The same source reports;

Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her by scraping her skin off with tiles and bits of shell. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.

Although her reputation, and her scholarly achievements, went into hibernation for a long time, she made a reappearance during the Age of Reason and has never really gone away since. In 1843 W. G. Soldan and H. Heppe, two German authors, published The History of the Witchcraft Trials, in which they argued that she may have been history's first famous witch, not a terribly plausible contention, I have to say. Pagan martyr, certainly, but there is really no evidence that she practice or was accused of witchcraft.

It's not just in scholarly monographs that the great lady makes an appearance, no; she's is to be found in painting, poetry and literature. Charles Kingsley devoted a whole novel to her; she even makes a brief appearance within the pages of Proust. More recently she made it into the movies in Agora, with Rachael Weisz in the lead. And she has not been forgotten by science, especially astronomy. An asteroid belt, 238 Hypatia, was named after her, as was a lunar crater. Hypatia, unlike the monsters who tortured her to death, will truly live forever.

Mad, Bad and Wonderful to Know

Although Dionysus-also known as Bacchus-is popularly regarded as the God of Wine, he is far more than that. The spirit of vegetation, of fertility and of generation, he presides over the mysteries of life and death. Beyond that he represents wildness and danger, danger in nature, danger in magic. He is the spirit of the wilderness, of untamed energy, of male sexual power, intoxication, joy, shamanism and madness. In the most complete sense he is a God of nature, at once creative and destructive.

Dionysus is the original Green Man, his image draped with grapevines and ivy. Although incorporated into the Olympian pantheon his original homeland is though to be Thrace in what is now Bulgaria. Besides, there is something different, older and wilder about Dionysius which makes him less than comfortable among the more settled Greek deities. According to Marija Gimbutus, an archaeologist, he is the most ancient of the Indo-European gods, one who began as a botanic spirit.

What I found of particular fascination to Dionysus, what attracted me to his cult, was the fact that this wild male God was originally served only by women. And what women! They were the Maenads-the Bacchanals in Latin-the leaders and initiators of the Dionysian rite. Descriptions in the Middle Ages of naked, wild-haired women dancing in the forest around the figure of a lone, virile and horned man, taken to be witches and Satan, might very well derive from the Maenads and Dionysus. The Maenads were later to be joined by male satyrs, so it’s reasonably easy to imagine what went on in their parties!


Dionysus, followed by women, always had a particular reverence for women. His first act as a God was to travel to Hades to bring his mother, Semele, a mortal woman, up to Olympus, where she shared in his glory. Interestingly, and despite his reputation, he was the only God among the Olympians to be happily married.

The festivals of Dionysus featured most frequently processions by moonlight, masked revellers processing to music. At the very heart of his worship lay one of the great rites of the ancient world, the Dionysian Mysteries, in which participants used wine and other stimulants to enter into a trance-like sate, a state in which all inhibitions were lost. Only the true initiates were allowed into the heart of the mystery and, as no description survives, that too is lost.

Given its nature, that of freedom and wild release, the cult of Dionysus was popular with those on the margins of society, particularly women in a male-dominated world. Worship of the God spread rapidly across the Greek and Roman world. In the fourth century AD women in the British Channel Islands crowned themselves with leaves to perform Dionysian rites. According to one report they “shouted even louder than the Thracians.”

Dionysus was a sociable God most often surrounded by a large retinue, not just of Maenads and Satyrs but also sacred animals and other Gods. He is closely allied with Pan, Hecate, Kybele, and with Demeter and Persephone, her daughter. He also has close associations with Apollo and the two divinities were eventually to achieve equal status at the great oracle at Delphi, taking seasonal shifts, so to speak, Apollo in the summer, Dionysus in the winter. Thinking about it the two represent the conflicting forces in nature and civilization, Apollo symbolising rationality and Dionysus wild ecstasy, a contrast and a tension that Nietzsche was to recognise in The Birth of Tragedy.

Popular as it was, the cult of Dionysus survived well into the Christian era. Subject to continuing persecution, the maenads fled to the forest where they became-dare I say it-the first witches of the new age. But Christianity could not free itself entirely from the spirit of Dionysus. For you see Dionysus was wine and by drinking wine one shared in the sacrament of his body. I wonder if the Pope is mindful of that residue of the ancient world. :-)

Ancient Sex

I’m rather sorry not to be in Athens just at the present, for an exhibition has just opened telling the story of love and desire in the ancient world, the erotica of Eros! Over two-hundred and seventy objects d’art have been put on display in the Museum of the Cycladic Art, where they will remain on show for the next six months. It’s quite an achievement as the artefacts, dating from the sixth century BC to the fourth century AD, have been gathered together from more than fifty international museums.

The exhibition centres on a unifying theme: the evolution of Eros, a powerful Greek god, into the Roman Cupid, an altogether tamer, less potent figure, the mere companion of Venus. But this kind of axis has produced a superabundance of all kinds of sexually inspired artefacts. The director of the museum says that that there was no deliberate intention to shock, though some of the depictions, particularly of Eros’ cruelty towards the goddess Psyche, seems to have caused some unease among early visitors. One cameo shows him dragging her by the hair and hitting her with a mallet, illustrating, one supposes, the dual nature of desire.

After that one proceeds to the upper galleries, where children under sixteen are warned not to enter ‘unattended’ which I imagine will have the said children arriving in hordes, especially as there is no insistence that they be attended! There, in three rooms, ancient sexual union is depicted in all of its inventiveness and variety; from pederasty, anal sex, mutual oral sex to what the exhibition quaintly terms the ‘bucolic love affair’. There are giant phalluses, manufactured as lucky charms, as well as engravings of furious orgies involving satyrs and silens. In a text highlighted on the wall one scribe gives note of his own particular enthusiasm;

I delight in the prime of a boy at twelve. One of thirteen is much more desirable. He who is fourteen is a still sweeter flower of the lovers. And one who is beginning his fifteenth year is yet more delightful. The sixteenth year is that of the gods. And as for the seventeenth, it is not for me but for Zeus to seek it.

So, there! Oh, yes, it would be super to be in Athens. Still better to be there in the company of Aristophanes.:-))

The Queen of the Night

…witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate’s offerings.
Macbeth, Act II, Scene 1, lines 51-2.

Hekate, whose name is shrieked at night at the crossroads of cities.
The Aeneid, 4: 609

When I was nine mother and father took me to see a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at Covent Garden. It’s was a lovely production, with some super stage settings. At the time I could not make that much of the story, though of one thing I was certain: I loved the Queen of the Night just as much as I hated Sarastro, quite the opposite message from that Mozart was trying to convey. For me the Queen of the Night was elemental and beautiful, while Sarastro, for all his rationality, artificial and bombastic. I wanted the night and magic, not reason and sterility. What I wanted was Hecate, though that understanding came later.

Hecate, one of the oldest of the Greek deities, is the Spirit of the World and of Witchcraft. It was the poet Sappho who naed her the Queen of the Night. As the daughter of the Titans Perses and Asteria she is older than the Olympian gods themselves. According to the poet Hesiod her power dates, as he puts it, from the beginning. She survived Zeus’ purge of all of the other pre-Hellenic deities because he fell in love with her.

Worship of Hecate can be dated as far back as the eight century BC. The mythology associated with her clearly identifies her with witchcraft and magic. She also holds dominion over life death and regeneration. More than that, she is the great guardian on the frontiers between this life and the next, an intermediary between the living and the dead. She was the only deity to assist Demeter in her search for Persephone. When it was discovered that Persephone had to spend six months of the year in the underworld with Hades after accepting six pomegranate seeds from him, Hecate agrees to accompany her as a lady-in-waiting.

Hecate is most often depicted in a triple form, with three bodies, each facing in a different direction. One hand holds a knife, the tool of the midwife, another a torch to illuminate darkness, and the last a serpent, representing medical and magical wisdom. The goddess can also be depicted with a woman’s body surmounted by three animal heads-those of a dog, a horse and a lion.

Her sacred time is black night, when all rites associated with her are celebrated. Her sacred place is the crossroads, specifically three-way crossroads, giving her the name Hecate Trivia, meaning three ways. In ancient times her image was to be found most often in these intersections. Devotees of the goddess would rituals known as Hecate Suppers at a crossroads at the end of each month. As late as the eleventh century AD the church was still trying to eradicate Hecate Suppers.

It was the advance of Christianity that demonised Hecate. Her name became synonymous with witch, while the toad, the broom and the cauldron, her symbols, turned into witchcraft stereotypes. Symbols of fertility were reinterpreted, in other words, as symbols of evil. Her sacred dogs were turned into the Hounds of Hell. This degeneration helped disguise her original purpose as a deity of healing and protection.

It’s time to think again about the Queen of the Night. :-)

Suicide in Greece and Rome

To begin with consider the example given by Titus Livy of the colony of Massalia, the present day Marseilles, where those who wanted to kill themselves merely applied to the senate, and if their reasons were judged sound they were then given hemlock free of charge!

In general the pagan world, both Roman and Greek, had a far more relaxed attitude towards the whole concept of suicide, a practice that was only finally outlawed with the advent of the Christians, who condemned it at the Council of Arles in 452 as the work of the Devil.

There is, however, some echo of later Christian hostility in earlier pagan thinkers. Pythagoras, for example, was against the act, though more on mathematical than moral grounds, believing that there was only a finite number of souls for use in the world, and that the sudden and unexpected departure of one upset a delicate balance. Aristotle also condemned suicide, though for quite different, far more practical reasons, in that it robbed the community of the services of one of its members.

A reading of Phaedo suggests that Plato was also against the practice, inasmuch as he allows Socrates to defend the teachings of the Orphics, who believed that the human body was the property of God, and thus self-harm was a direct offense against divine law. Yet, it's not quite so simple, because after Socrates says than no man has a right to suicide, this is then qualified by the statement "...unless God sends some necessity upon him, as has now been sent upon me." After all, let's not forget that Socrates himself was a suicide, perhaps the most famous in history!

In Rome suicide was never a general offence in law, though the whole approach to the question was essentially pragmatic. It was specifically forbidden in three cases: those accused of capital crimes, soldiers and slaves. The reason behind all three was the same-it was uneconomic for these people to die. If the accused killed themselves prior to trial and conviction then the state lost the right to seize their property, a loophole that was only closed by Domitian in the first century AD, who decreed that those who died prior to trial were without legal heirs. The suicide of a soldier was treated on the same basis as desertion. If a slave killed her or himself within six months of purchase, the master could claim a full refund from the former owner.

But the Romans fully approved of what might be termed 'patriotic suicide'; death, in other words, as an alternative to dishonour. For the Stoics, a philisophical sect which originated in Greece, death was a guarantee of personal freedom, a way out of an intolerable existence. And so it was for Cato the Younger, who killed himself after the Pompeian cause was defeated at the Battle of Thapsus. This was a 'virtuous death', one guided by reason and conscience. His example was later followed by Seneca, with as much courage and virtue, though under somewhat more straightened circumstances.

A very definite line was drawn by the Romans between the virtuous suicide and suicide for entirely private reasons. They disapproved of Mark Antony not because he killed himself, but that he killed himself for love, a very un-Roman thing to do!