The Girls of Sparta

Plutarch records Philip II of Macedonia saying that forms of homosexual love are only found among the most warlike races, including the Spartans. It would hardly be surprising in the Spartan case, considering males had to live together for prolonged periods without female company. But, as always, it is best to treat such generalisations with a degree of caution. Xenophon, one of the best sources on ancient Sparta, specifically denies the existence of widespread homosexuality; and Aristotle noted that the power of women in Sparta was typical of militaristic societies without a strong emphasis on male homosexuality. In addition to this, the first recorded heterosexual love poem was written by a Spartan, expressing his admiration for Spartan girls. And what girls they were!

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!

Juvenile Crime in Greece and Rome

The Classical world never, of course, identified juvenile crime as a distinct issue, which makes the whole thing quite difficult to investigate, but it is possible to build up a limited and partial picture by sifting through the evidence. In Athens, for example, Demosthenes describes the case of a young man called Ariston, a victim of an unprovoked assault while walking home at night through the agora. He subsequently accused one Konon and his son Ktnesis, with whom he had served in the military. Ktnesis and his brother were seemingly in the habit of getting drunk at lunchtime, and then amusing themselves by pouring the contents of chamber pots over the heads of the personal slaves of their fellow soldiers!

The Athenians, and other Greek communities, had laws against 'the mistreatment of parents', which suggests that the practice was widespread. In Aristophanes' Clouds Pheidippides even argues that if fathers beat their sons then why should sons not be allowed to beat their fathers?

There is very little in the way of evidence to suggest that the casual public vandalism, a feature of contemporary youth crime, was a general problem, apart, that is, from one tantalising little detail concerning the actions of the Hermokopidal or 'Herm-mutilators' in 415BC. A Herm, from the God Hermes, was a stone pillar surmounted by a head. The only other feature was a prominent phallus. The Hermokopidal were those who went around removing these cocks! This crime, though, had a clear political purpose, intending to frustrate a planned Athenian expedition to Sicily. Hermes was the God of travelers, so the destruction of his statues would be taken as a bad omen. Sadly for Athens the message was not heeded.

In Sparta the 'hoodies' might be said to have been used in the service of the state. Youths between seventeen and nineteen were obliged to serve in an organisation known as the krupteia, which, among other things, was expected to terrorise the helots, thus ensuring that they were kept in place.

The Romans placed a particularly strict interpretation on notions of filial obedience, though again theatrical depictions suggest, perhaps, that all was not quite what it seems. Plautus makes use of the stereotype of the spendthrift young man in his plays. In Pseudolus there is the figure of Calidorus, who is prepared to cheat his father and mother in order to purchase the freedom of a prostitute called Phoenicium. When encouraged by the pimp Ballo to steal from his father he says that filial duty forbids this, to which Ballo responds "OK, then, just snuggle up to filial duty at night, instead of Phoenicium."

The nearest evidence we have to gang culture in the Roman world is with the circus factions, those who followed the four main chariot colours. These faction, most often made up of young men, were responsible on occasions for fairly serious public order incidents, including one notorious incident in Constantinople.

I should also mention that high-born Roman youths were more or less a law unto themselves, wandering the streets at night without restraint, beating up passers-by, assaulting women and smashing shops, Even the Emperor Nero was a member of one such gang in his youth. Perhaps even Saint Augustine himself was a hoodie, for in the Confessions he describes as a sixteen-year old how he stole some pears from a neighbours garden while he was part of a company of 'lewd young fellows';

And this we did, because we would go whither we should not...It was foul, yet I loved it, I loved to undo myself, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I committed the fault, but even the very fault itself...Alone, I would never have committed the theft...but even because when one cries: 'Let us go, let us do this or that', then 'tis a shame not to be shameless.

And he became a saint. :))

Making a Statement: Fashion in the Ancient World

There is a lovely passage from Plutarch about Alcibiades, the Athenian politician, worth quoting at length;

All his statecraft and eloquence and lofty purpose and cleverness was attended with great luxuriousness of life, with wanton drunkenness and lewdness, and with effeminacy in dress-he would trail long purple robes through the agora...He also had a golden shield made for himself and decorated not with ancestral insignia but with the likeness of Eros wielding a thunderbolt. The reputable men of the city looked on all these things with loathing and indignation, and they feared his contemptuous and lawless spirit.

Now, there's a guy who really wanted to stand out!

Obviously Alcibiades is making an extravagant personal statement, the mirror, perhaps, of his extravagant political style. But there were also group trends that excited comment among the more conservative Athenians. Here the most prominent were the young men who copied the styles of Sparta, with long beards and short cloaks, taken as a sign of their estrangement from the city's democratic culture. It was Aristophanes who coined the term 'Laconomania' for this phenomenon, describing its adherents in The Birds as 'long-haired, hungry, dirty and acting like Socrates by carrying the Spartan cane.'

Changing trends in fashion, political or otherwise, were really nothing new in Athens. Before the outbreak of the Persian Wars men who started to adopt more elaborate hairstyles. Thucydides describes one of these, in which the hair was tied behind the head in a knot called a chignon, and then fastened with a clasp of golden grasshoppers. This and other stylistic changes were influenced by the fashions of the Persian east. Not surprisingly all such affectations were abandoned as 'effeminate' in the wake of the ensuing wars.

The Greeks were no different from other cultures in following the trends set by political icons. Just as the toothbrush moustache became commonplace in the Third Reich, so the fashion-conscious Greek male followed the clean-shaven look of Alexander the Great. Indeed, Alexander was so significant here that he set the trend in the whole of the Greek world for at least half a millennium after his death. I think this was probably due to the fact that he was the first ruler to recognise the link between personal image and propaganda, restricting and controlling artistic representations of himself with great care, in sculpture, in paintings and on coins.

The Roman sense of fashion was even more refined than that of the Greeks. While the Greek made distinctions in dress primarily on the basis of gender, the Romans introduced a dress code which allowed determination's to be made of an individuals status and function. Concepts of 'correct dress', and proper grooming, lay at the very centre of Roman culture. Both dress and manner of speech were thought to reflect a person's moral character. Seneca, tutor to the Emperor Nero, writes:

The truly great man speaks informally and easily; whatever he says, he speaks with more assurance than pains. You are familiar with the carefully coiffed young men, with their gleaming beards and hair-everything from a box; you can never hope for anything strong or solid from them.

When Cicero wanted to be particularly cutting about public figures he held in distaste he focused on perceived idiosyncrasies of style. He was at his most acidy in his descriptions of Gabinus and Piso, the Consuls for the year 58BC. He describes Gabinus 'dripping with unguents', with his hair artificially waved. And as for Piso;

Great Gods! How repulsively he walked, how fierce, how terrible to look at! You would say that you saw one of those bearded men of old, a very exemplum of the ancient regime, an image of antiquity, a pillar of the state. He was clothed harshly in our common purple, which was nearly black, with his hair so shaggy that at Capua, where he held the office of a duumvir in order to add another title to the wax portrait image he would leave for posterity, he looked as if he were ready to carry off the street of perfumers and hairdressers on his locks.

It was always dangerous for a Roman in public life to depart from the strict standards of 'Republican virtue', for this was invariably taken as a sign of frivolity or effeminacy. But the fact that such criticism appears regularly over prolonged periods of time shows that there were many prepared to challenge convention by making small personal fashion statements. Designs themselves were fairly consistent, so innovations in material and colouring were the most obvious ways of individualising dress or capturing a popular trend. Pliny noted this, criticising such innovations as 'sheer vanity.'

Women, too, were as fashion conscious as the men, with hairstyle being the main way of expressing personal preferences. Ovid noted "It is impossible to enumerate all the different styles: each day adds more adornments." This was another trend that unsettled the censorious Seneca, as he makes clear in his tribute to his mother, Helvia;

You-unlike so many others-never succumbed to immorality, the worst evil of the century; jewels and pearls did not bend you...The bad example of lesser women-dangerous even for the virtuous-did not lead you to stray from the old-fashioned, strict upbringing you received at home...You never polluted yourself with makeup, and never wore a dress that covered about as much on as it did off. Your only ornament, the kind of beauty that time does not tarnish, is the great honour of modesty.

So, yes, there was fashion, even if Seneca disapproved!

Diocletian and Government

Diocletian's system of government, an answer to the murderous political chaos of the third century, was essentially an exercise in good-faith, the assumption that those in power will give way peacefully, and by their own volition, to successors, already in the wings. Better, yes, than succession by murder, the preferred practice after the death of Septimius Severus, but it still failed to recognise that power has its own attractions, whatever the risks. The late imperial system of government, absolutist and uncompromising as it was, certainly contributed to the continuing decline of the empire. Quite simply it depended too much on the capacity and talents of a limited number of individuals; for when the Emperor was good he was very, very good; and when he was bad...well, he was much more than horrid!

The Divine Sappho

Sappho of Lesbos is one of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets and one of the few female artists whose voice has been carried from the ancient world.

I have not had one word from her

Frankly I wish I were dead
When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to me, "This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly."
I said, "Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love
"If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared
"all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck
"myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them
"while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song...


Please

Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,
You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.
There hovers forever around you delight:
A beauty desired.
Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
Whom I now beseech
Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see.

Fragment 52

The silver moon is set;
The Pleiades are gone;
Half the long night is spent, and yet
I lie alone.

Fragment 96

She honoured you like a goddess
And delighted in your choral dance.
Now she is pre-eminent among the ladies of Lydia
As the rose-rayed moon after the sinking of the Sun
Surpasses all the stars and spreads it's light upon the sea
And the flowers of the fields
To beautify the spreading dew, freshen roses
Soft chervil and the flowering melilot .....

Restless, she remembers gentle Atthis -
Perhaps her subtle judgement is burdened
By your [ fate ] .....

For us, it is not easy to approach
Goddesses in the beauty of their form
But you ....

The Fall of the Western Roman Empire

The crisis for both parts of the Roman Empire really begins with the defeat and death of the Emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople in 378AD. Theodosius the Great managed to stabilise the situation for a time by co-opting the semi-independent barbarian tribes into the army as foederatii.

As a strategy this was not new; the Romans had been in the practice of absorbing potentially useful auxiliaries for centuries. The problem was on this occasion there were simply too many, and the conventional Roman forces were too weak to deal with these new allies if the turned troublesome, as they did after the death of Theodosius in 395.

The commander of the Visigoths, Alaric, declared himself a king and started to ravage the eastern provinces. This came at an especially bad time, for the empire was divided between two particularly weak rulers, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west, whose governments intrigued shamelessly, one against the other. Caring nothing for the wider welfare of the Empire, and anxious only to be rid of Alaric, the chamberlain Eutropius, chief minister to Arcadius, tempted Alaric to the west by granting him the top command of the province of Illyricum. Now another dangerous precedent had been set; for Alaric was both Barbarian king and Roman general, well placed to exploit the political divisions within the empire.

Eutropius' actions had, with deliberation, created huge problems for Stilicho, guardian of Honorius and a talented soldier, who was viewed in the east as a political enemy. To defend Italy Stilicho was forced to find troops wherever he could, abandoning Britain, and weakening the Rhine fortresses, which added still further to his problems by allowing new groups of barbarians to cross the river in force, entering Gaul virtually without opposition. They were never to be removed. Stilicho's enemies used this as an excuse to have him executed, causing thousands of troops loyal to him only to join up with Alaric, who entered Rome itself in 410AD.

The east learned quickly from the process of disintegration and collapse in the west by closing ranks among the leading political class, thus avoiding the destructive public struggles which was doing so much to weaken the remainder of the empire. Barbarian commanders in the eastern army were, in time to come, not allowed to become too powerful, usually by keeping them separate from a foederatii power base.

In the west-what was left of the west-stability could only be achieved by granting ever greater concessions to barbarian strongmen, and by allowing ever larger foederatii 'kingdoms'. In the east power was transmitted through established bureaucratic structures in church and state; in the west much depended on the transitory and uncertain authority of a single strongman, like Stilicho, Flavius Aetius and then Ricimer. By this means a serious gap grew up between the nominal authority of the Emperor, usually hidden away in Ravenna, and the real authority of a virtual military dictator.

When the Attila and the Huns came there was nothing at all in the west to deter their progress, no great strategic barrier like Constantinople in the east. At the Battle of Chalons in 451, the last epic contest of the Roman west, one barbarain army faced another barbarian army; the barbarians won.

After the murder of Aetius the empire in the west was really no more that a series of dying fragments, with almost no tax base, where the fate of one shadowy emperor after another lay in the hands of Ricimer, before the last was sent packing by yet another ambitious commander in 476.

In the east the great gate of Constantinople kept the Huns and others out of the rich and populated provinces of Anatolia and beyond, safe for as long as relations were good with the Persian Empire. The east was certainly saved by its shorter frontiers, by its greater wealth and by its strategically placed capital. But in the end perhaps the only thing that really mattered was that it had a far higher degree of statecraft; a reliance not on the strength of generals but the cunning of politicians

Gladiators

I suppose movies like Spartacus and Gladiator- which I hated-have served to colour forever the popular impression of the men who fought in the arenas of ancient Rome. Gladiator at least gets one thing right; good fighters were the popular sporting heroes of the day. But the assumption that these men were thrown willy-nilly into the contest to sink or to swim is completely wrong. They were nurtured, and carefully nurtured, by prolonged and intensive training. Those who were unable to meet the standards set simply never made it to the arena. The assumption that they were all slaves is also erroneous. Many volunteered for a profession where the rewards, both in money and in popular adulation, were gratifying and welcome for men who would have lived and died in servitude and obscurity.

Ave Sol Invictus-in Celebration of the Solstice

Christmas Day, the 25th of December, the day that Jesus was born in a manger, is it not? Well, actually, no, it isn’t. The Gospels make no mention of the day, or the time of year, when Christ entered the world. It was centuries after his death that the Church alighted on 25 December.

And why that specific date? For the simple reason that the church was adept at grafting its own feast days on to pre-existing pagan holidays. Late December was the very height of the Roman holiday, the time of Saturnalia, with the 25th day of the month celebrated as the birthday of the Sun God, Sol Invictus, who had originally come to Rome from the east.

The cult was first brought to the city by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, an emperor of the Severan dynasty, who had grown up in Syria , where he served as a priest of the local sun god, El-Gabal. From this he was to be known to history as Heliogabalus or, more commonly, Elagabalus, one of the most notorious of all of the emperors. Sun worship had been growing in popularity in the years before Elagabalus’ ascent, presenting him with the opportunity to install his favoured version of the cult into the Roman Pantheon, renamed as Deus Sol Invictus, standing over Jupiter himself. The new cult did not survive Elagabalus’ downfall and death in 222AD, though emperors continued to be shown on coins wearing the sun-crown.

It was Aurelian, the great soldier-emperor, who brought it back, after his victories in the east later that same century. This was at a time when the Empire needed unity before all else. Sol Invictus was to be the premier divinity of the Empire, uniting all sections, east and west, in the worship of a single god without betraying their local cults. The birthday of the Undefeated Sun was officially given as 25 December-Dies Natalis Solis Invictus.

In a sense this was a foretaste of what was to follow under Constantine and his successors, though Christianity, in contrast, was premised on the death of all other cults.

So, please, next Christmas, each and all who may come to read this, think not of Jesus but of Sol Invictus, and shine always with the Sun!

Palmyra, Queen Zenobia and the Christmas Star

Next time you celebrate Christmas Day, if you do celebrate Christmas Day, you might care to give passing thanks to Palmyra and Queen Zenobia!

A rich trading centre, Palmyra was also vital to the defence of Rome's eastern provinces, especially after Ardashir created a new Persian Empire on the ruins of the Parthians. It was Prince Odenathus of Palmyra who drove back the Persian invasion of 262AD, for which he received the title of totius Orientis imperator from the grateful Emperor Gallienus in Rome.

But Zenobia, his wife and successor, was altogether more ambitious. Mindful of the decline of Roman power, she constructed the Palmyrene Empire, an echo of that of an earlier Arab queen, Semiramis. Palmyra under Queen Zenobia was the centre of many cults and religions; but standing above all was Sol Invictus-the Unconquered Sun. This cult had previously come to Rome in the form of Elagabalus Sol Invictus. It was discredited, to some degree, by association with the decadent Emperor Heliogabalus, though it never entirely went away.

After Aurelian defeated Zenobia he built a huge temple to Sol Invictus on his return to Rome, a celebration both of his triumph and a way of harnessing the power of this supreme God. It was the first serious attempt to create a unifying religion for the whole Empire, a way of binding the fragments together after the prolonged Crisis of the Third Century. Aurelian was god on earth and the Sun was god in heaven. In 274AD the Emperor declared that the annual festival of Sol Invictus would fall on the winter solstice-25 December. And it was thus that Christmas came on a star, from the east and in the company of a Queen!

The Battle of Adrianople-the Beginning of the End of the Roman World

It is not too much of an exaggeration, I think, to suggest that the Roman defeat by the Goths, and the death of the Emperor Valens, at the Battle of Adrianople in August 378AD was truly one of the decisive events of the western world. Ammianus Marcellinus, the Roman historian, was to write of, "Those ever irreparable losses, so costly to the Roman state." It changed the character of the Empire: the Goths, though partly tamed by Theodosius I, were to remain as a distinct entity within its frontiers; sometimes allies; other times enemies. Roman losses could only be made good by co-opting Barbarians into the army as Foederati under their own commanders; and, as always, military power has ways of translating into political influence.

Adrianople also changed forever the essential character of the Roman military. It was to end the reliance on the infantry legions, the formations that had proved so formidable in the past, and upon which the Empire had been built in the first place. Less than a hundred years after the battle heavy cavalry had become the main offensive arm in the Imperial army, changing by stages into the Byzantine cataphracts and the armoured horsemen of the Middle Ages

Sulis-Minerva

The brilliance and all-encompassing nature of Roman paganism is fully demonstrated by the tendency to adapt local cults and fit them within a wider pantheon. A perfect example of this can be found in the treatment of Sulis or Sul, the Celtic goddess of healing, long associated with the hot springs in what is now the city of Bath in south-west England.

After the occupation of Britain Sulis was conflated with Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. It was at the heart of the cult of Sulis-Minerva that the new city of Aquae Sulis arose, a destination for pilgrims from across the Empire. It is reasonable to assume that while the cult of Sulis had been in part latinised, the Celtic element was always uppermost, in that her name always came before that of Minerva.

Sulis, like most ancient deities, had more than one dimension their power. She was a gentle goddess, whose curative waters could be used to cure a whole range of conditions. But her name could also be invoked to bring vengeance upon the enemies of those who sought her protection.

Demeter, Opium and Winter

Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the Greek goddess of fertility, was obliged to stay in Underworld for part of the year as the wife of the god, Hades, after she ate six pomegranate seeds. To forget her grief, Demeter went into hibernation, bringing on the winter. To aid her sleep she ate poppies. The poppy plant then became one of her symbols, often depicted alongside corn. So, it might be said, winter is a sleep induced by the power of opium. :)

Eleusinian Mysteries

I’ve been looking into to this, the ancient celebrations in honour of Demeter, the goddess of crops and fruit, held in Eleusis in the province of Attica close to Athens. The various ceremonies, or mysteries, once drew thousands of believers, causing the temple complex to become ever grander over time.

The object of the various rites was to ensure that the participants would be well-placed in the afterlife. Over the course of a few days people would take part in religious processions and drams, take part in sacrifices, utter profanities of all sorts, undergoing a form of self-abasement, and finally purifying themselves by bathing in the seas. The most important rites, the core mysteries, were kept secret, with participants vowing never to discuss what they had experienced.

These most solemn rites were carried out at the sanctuary of Eleusis itself. Such was the authority of the goddess and her acolytes that the mysteries were preserved and we still have no clear idea what was involved. One suggestion is that involved a reenactment of the central myths surrounding Demeter and her daughter Persephone, queen of the underworld, the one symbolizing life and the other death. Ritual drinks were involved, that much we do know, which may possibly have contained some kind of opiates. After all, one of the symbols of Demeter is the opium poppy.

The whole festival concluded with dancing and feasting, the high point of which was the sacrifice of a bull. At the end libations were poured in honour of the dead.

The ceremonies continued on this basis for over a thousand years, popular also with the Romans, who identified Demeter with Ceres, their own corn goddess. It was finally brought to and end by the Emperor Theodosius, who abolished all pagan practices, as a new spirit of intolerance entered the world. But the mysteries have, in a sense, never really died, remaining an object of enduring fascination.