Category Archives: Classical History

The Plague of Athens

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 ‘The disease began, it is said, beyond Egypt in Ethiopia… then it suddenly fell upon the city of Athens’
Thucydides 2.48

Between 430-426 BCE, the Greek city state of Athens suffered a mysterious and devastating plague. Highly contagious and often fatal, the disease is reputed to have reduced the population of Athens by up to a quarter. Although the cause of the epidemic is unknown, bubonic plague, smallpox, measles, anthrax and influenza have all been suggested as possible culprits. The symptoms exhibited in Athens however, do not exactly match those of any known disease and speculation as to the nature of the epidemic continues to the modern day.

Our sole contemporary source for information on the plague is the historian Thucydides, who claimed to have suffered from the condition himself, and catalogued its symptoms and effects in minute detail. Although the objectivity of Thucydides’ account has been called into question, his description of the sufferings endured by plague victims and the effects of the epidemic upon Athenian society as a whole have proven of great interest to both physicians and historians.

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What is history?

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What is History?

An easy answer would be: everything that has gone before each moment in time. But this simply is not true. History is not the past itself, but the study of a past that, especially going back to our earliest histories, remains dynamic and changing. The old adage: ‘History is written by the victors’ has always seemed an exclusive view of our written sources and the further back we go, the less weight this idea holds.

Who wrote History?

The two canonical histories of the Classical Greek World were written in two very different styles. Herodotus (c. 484-425 B.C.), born in Halicarnassus in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), was a politically active member of his community and only after being exiled to Thurii in south Italy did he begin travelling, collecting information and writing his great work. He explored the culture and geography of the Middle East, Egypt and the Aegean in an attempt to uncover the cause of the Graeco-Persian Wars (490-479 B.C.). Themes of justice, luxury, pride and the influence of Gods and oracles abound.

Thucydides (c. 460-395 B.C.), an aristocratic Athenian, was likewise prominent in politics; he served as a general in Thrace and was subsequently exiled for his failure there. Thucydides sought the causation of The Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) through human action and politicking exclusively. His staid prose describes events as they happen and is coloured with no Herodotean digressions into subsidiary matters.

The victors?

By no means would we describe either historian as a victor. Herodotus’ Halicarnassus fought on the losing Persian side and Thucydides’ Athens was defeated by the Spartans. All we may infer is that the writing of History was of secondary interest. Contemporary politics was their bread and butter; it is only removal from this environment that allowed them the time and energy to compile their vast works.

History and Pre-History

Unlike many other disciplines we are almost certain of the start date of the concept of history. Herodotus is our first exponent of the style; specifically referring to his monumental study as a historia; this word meaning inquiry. This idea is the basis for all historical investigation and writing.

Pre-history describes human events from the dawn of mankind up to Herodotus. Though this terminology is technically correct the use of Herodotus’ History only functions as an intellectual year one. Through modern investigation we can discover far more about the development of civilisation; rendering a before and after Herodotus dateline inadequate. The written text, which was thought to be the canonical method by which to decipher the past, is now being moved to its correct position as one of many types of evidence, along with artistic, material (buildings, inscriptions etc.) and scientifically analysable data such as carbon dating or surveying. It is from these techniques that we seek to build up a picture of life and events from the remote past.

The Classical World and History

The technique applied by Herodotus in his inquiry was similar; though not as scientifically wide ranged. He travelled the Greek and Barbarian worlds seeking the stories of the locals. He weighed such stories up himself and decided upon their relative factual merits. The analysis and comparison of evidence and arguments forms the backbone of all historical investigations proceeding Herodotus. It is the attempt to answer the ‘why?’ that informs Herodotus’ work.

It is this search for causation that separates classical intellectual history from the archaic. A move away from the older idea of the gods as the ultimate perpetrators was occurring and Herodotus managed to define it in his introduction stating that he is seeking to uncover thereasons. In the same way philosophers used such questioning and weighing of evidence to explain the origin and forms of such ideas as justice and good. Likewise medical writers used close observation to try to better understand and treat disease. Thucydides description of the plague (book 2.7) at Athens during the Peloponnesian War is a masterly example of such clinical thinking. Thucydides, more so than Herodotus, expounds this classical idea in his removal of the gods from human affairs.

What is History II?

If the past and history are two different things then we return to our original question. Though the study of history has moved on, as its originator, Herodotus is very useful in deciphering a definition of the concept. I would suggest the closest we can get to specifying would be to view history as each successive epoch’s attempt to uncover and define the events of the past through interpretation of the surviving evidence, be it oral, literary or material. This evidence alone only informs us at face value. Like Herodotus we must analyse and compare it to come to any conclusion of interpretation.

John B. Knight
See also Biography – a very short history

The Fall of Rome

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Patrick Neylan provides a quick overview on the disintegration and fall of Rome and the Western Roman Empire.

Rome spent the fourth century AD trying to organise itself to counter the growing threat from the Germans in the north and the Persians in the east. Recognising that one man could not run the empire alone, the Romans tried various forms of division until Constantine, the emperor who made Christianity the state religion, founded a ‘New Rome’ in AD 330 that bore his name: Constantinople. The empire gradually became accustomed to having two emperors and two capitals, until the split became permanent after the death of Theodosius in 395.

The separation happened at an inopportune time for the Western Empire and a good time for the East. The Emperor, Julian, had led an expedition to Persia in 363 that ended in disaster. Yet the humiliation on the Persian frontier did lead to a lasting peace, which, while unfavourable to the Romans, at least gave them a breathing space to tackle their problems in Europe. While the Romans tried to deal with the arrival of the Huns, the Persians were distracted by the threat from the White Huns on their eastern frontier.

The Huns and the Ostrogoths

The Huns had spent nearly four centuries vying with the Han dynasty in China before finally being defeated and moving westwards in the 3rd century, where they lived quietly in the area of modern Kazakhstan. Meanwhile the German tribes, frustrated in their efforts to break into the Roman Empire, had begun to expand eastwards. The most ambitious of them, the Ostrogoths, slowly spread across the Ukrainian steppe until they encountered the Huns in the area of modern Volgograd (which was, ironically, the limit of German eastward expansion in the 20th century, when the city was known as Stalingrad).

The reaction of the Huns was brutal and swift. The armies of the Ostrogoths were annihilated and a century of German expansion was obliterated in the space of three years. The Huns drove westward until they reached the Roman frontier on the Danube, enslaving or displacing the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Gepids and Lombards. Some fled north into Germany proper while others sought refuge across the Danube in the Eastern Empire.

The Romans, never the most respecting of barbarian cultures, mistreated the refugee Visigoths so badly that they rebelled. In 378, the Goths destroyed an East Roman army at the battle of Adrianople after which the Visigoths roamed the Roman Empire’s European provinces at will, marching into Italy shortly after other German tribes had crossed the Rhine into Gaul in 407.

The Sacking of Rome

Over the next 50 years, these new arrivals put their military prowess to good use, either serving the empire as mercenaries or carving out their own territories. The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 before staking out their own kingdom in South-Eastern France and later Spain. The Suevi took a corner of Spain and the Vandals crossed into Northern Africa and made Carthage the capital of their new kingdom.

The Vandals sacked Rome in 455, a far more brutal affair than the Visigoths’ effort forty-five years earlier, and their name remains a byword for mindless destruction.

Meanwhile the Franks and Burgundians set themselves up in Gaul while isolated tribes of Angles and Saxons began their slow, piecemeal conquest of Britain, which the Romans had abandoned in 410. The only respite for the crumbling Roman Empire came with the collapse of the Hunnish empire following the death of Attila in 453.

The King of Italy

As the empire’s European territories fell away, the barbarian general in charge of Italy, Odoacer, deposed the last puppet emperor in 476 and set himself up as King of Italy. Odoacer is considered the first non-Roman to have ruled all of Italy. The imperial regalia were sent to Constantinople, and the Western Roman Empire had ceased to exist.

Yet the Eastern Empire survived. Constantinople guarded the waterway of the Bosphorus and kept the invaders out of its richest lands in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Barbarian generals gained power in the city but were never strong enough to threaten the position of the emperor. While the cities of the West declined, urban life continued in the East and a form of Roman civilization survived there for another thousand years.

Patrick Neylan

See also Cincinnatus – the hero who saved Rome and
Marcus Tullius Cicero: A Life in Letters

Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Corpus – a brief guide

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 ‘Concerning disease, practice two things – to help, or at least to do no harm.’
Hippocrates, Epidemics 1.11

Considered by Seneca to be the ‘father of medicine’, Hippocrates was regarded by many ancient thinkers as the greatest physician of his time. Born on the Greek island of Kos sometime in the middle of the fifth century BCE , he gained near legendary reputation as the author of the Hippocratic Corpus, a highly influential collection of medical writings which shaped the course of western medicine for over two thousand years.

The Hippocratic Corpus

The collection of texts known today as the Hippocratic Corpus takes the form of around sixty separate ‘books’, the styles of which differ widely throughout the anthology. While some texts seem almost to be lecture notes, detailing a single author’s teachings on a particular topic, others appear more like casebooks in which a doctor records a patient’s changing condition or the recognised symptoms of a known disease.  Some are slim documents, only a paragraph in length, whilst others run to several volumes.

Collected together in Alexandria during the third century BCE, theCorpus quickly became the standard reference for medical students throughout the western world with many of its teachings used well into the 19th century.

Although it is impossible to know whether the Corpus really represents the work of a single author, scholars in the Ancient and Early Modern worlds certainly believed it did and the  influence Hippocratic medicine has had upon the practice and development of medical science is unparalleled.

Medicine in Ancient Greece

‘Now all our diseases arise either from things inside the body, bile and phlegm, or from things outside it: from exertions and wounds, and from heat that makes it too hot, and cold that makes it too cold.’
Hippocrates, Diseases 1.2

Throughout human history, people have fallen ill and have tried to find both reasons for and ways of alleviating their symptoms. In many early societies, sickness and disease were blamed on the meddling of evil spirits or the wrath of the gods to whom sufferers then made desperate supplications in the hope of eliciting a divine cure.

In contrast to this, the Hippocratic Corpus is unique amongst ancient works for presenting a comprehensive philosophy of medicine centred on a belief that health and disease have physical, rather than divine or supernatural causes.

In Greek society, doctors were considered craftsmen, trained in thetechnê, the art or skill of healing the body. Hippocrates believed it was the duty of the doctor to use this skill to ‘speak the past, diagnose the present [and] predict the future’ (Epidemics 1), a feat achieved by paying careful attention to the smallest changes in those within their care. Observable differences were ascribed to imbalances between the four basic fluids, or humours within the body: yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. Health could be described as the state in which the humours were in equilibrium and the Hippocratic doctor would often let blood or prescribe emetics in order to balance the humours and achieve this effect.

Hippocrates considered good health the natural state of Man. Moreover that health was a state entirely physical in origin and therefore wholly within a knowledgeable physician’s power to effect. He believed diseases had set life-cycles that could be predicted using a doctrine of critical days (see Aphorisms) and that climate, activity and diet could all affect a person’s humoural makeup and therefore health. In one of the most famous and contentious books in theHippocratic Corpus, On the Sacred Disease, he also argues strongly against putting one’s faith in religious incantations and the quasi-magical rituals of charlatans and quacks.

The Hippocratic Oath

Possibly the most famous part of the Corpus, and certainly one of the most historically influential is the Oath, a pledge designed to be sworn by new doctors in order to govern their conduct. In it, the doctor swears to the healing gods Apollo, Asclepius, Hygieia and Panacea that he will preserve the life of his patients, proscribe medicines and treatments to the best of his knowledge but never poison those within his care nor intentionally set out to harm.

Since the ancient world had no regulation governing the use of the title ‘doctor’; any individual could claim the knowledge required to heal a sickness or wound. The Oath may therefore represent an attempt to form a guild-like association of medical professionals who could be recognised both by their patients and each other in what must have been a crowded and highly competitive medical marketplace.

We do not know whether the Oath was ever widely sworn in antiquity but the spirit contained within its lines is one familiar to us all today as the guiding ethos underlying the responsible use of medicine: a pledge to protect and extend life commonly referred to ‘Hippocratic’.

Liam A. Faulkner
See also Democracy in Athens  

Marcus Tullius Cicero: A Life in Letters

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There is only one figure in Rome during the crucial years at the end of the Republic and the rise of the Empire (c. 146 B.C.E – c. 46 AD) whom we can attempt to know in any significant detail. This only due to a combination of his voracious propensity for correspondence and the care with which one of his great friends took to conserve and later publish his letters.

Novus Homo

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 B.C.E) was a novus homo (new man i.e someone with no notable ancestors) born at Arpinium, south of Rome, to a reasonably well off family. He studied as a lawyer and, as was the done thing for a Roman barrister, began a political career. Cicero’s time in office would span the crucial years of the end of Roman Republican rule and his own part in these affairs was significant, though in the end not decisive.

Throughout his life he kept in correspondence with his good friend Titus Pomponius Atticus, a wealthy individual who lived variously in Greece and Rome and was well connected with the political elite at the time despite his own refusal to participate in such a career. Through these, and numerous other letters to leading figures of the day, we gain not only an insight into the machinations of the Republican political colossus of the epoch, but also a more personal understanding of the workings of one man’s mind within the system.

The Catiline Letter

In July 65 B.C.E, Cicero wrote Atticus with news that his wife had given birth to a son. However, though obviously important, this was not the reason for the letter. In fact it concerns the trial of Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline), a political rival of Cicero’s. The trial itself is clearly a sham with Cicero admitting the collusion of defence, jury and prosecutor but justifying his own participation in the hope that it would place Catiline in debt to him with elections approaching.

Cicero was later to withdraw from the defence team. The consequences of Catiline’s acquittal and Cicero’s refusal to participate would return to haunt him. After Cicero’s victorious election to the post of Consul (the state’s highest), Catiline formed an armed conspiracy in 63 B.C.E with the intent of grabbing power from the Consuls and Senate. Eventually this was crushed; politically by Cicero and militarily by another.

Exile

Despite this victory and his being hailed “Father of His Country”, another rival, Publius Clodius Pulcher (incidentally the prosecutor in Catiline’s earlier trial), looked to take Cicero down. He eventually did so using the treatment of the Catilinarian conspirators, specifically their murder by order of the senate, as the sword with which to bring Cicero down, and had him packed off into exile in 58 B.C.E for the crime of killing Roman citizens without trial.

The Mind of a Man

That the beginning of these tumultuous events in both the life of the individual and state can be seen in a single correspondence between friends remains one of the remarkable qualities of this collection of letters.  In the original communiqué Cicero is merely telling of an interesting, if not uncommon, legal proceeding with which he was involved. When he wrote those words he had no idea of the events about to unfold. Thus, through his ignorance, we can gain a picture of his thoughts and feelings truly without hindsight.

John B. Knight
See also: Cincinnatus – the Hero Who Saved Rome
Biography – a very short history and The Fall of Rome

Tutankhamun – a brief summary

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The first time I visited London was as a 9-year-old in 1973 when my mother took my older sister and me to see the Tutankhamun exhibition. My mother, born in 1920, and the daughter of a navy captain, spent much of her childhood in Egypt and she was determined to witness this landmark occasion. I remember we queued for what seemed like hours and I do remember seeing the famous golden mask (pictured) and being awed by its dazzling brilliance. But, as a young boy, first time out of Devon, the four hour train journey back home in the dark was even more exciting.

Here, Anthony Holmes provides a brief summary into the short life of the Egyptian boy king.

Tutankhamun is believed to be the son of Akhenaten and his secondary wife Kiya. At 9 years of age Tutankhamun succeeded his father to the throne. He was originally named Tut-ankh-Aten, (the living image of Aten) but changed to Tutankhamun as he tried to steer Egypt back to the worship of the state god Amun-Ra.

Tutankhamun’s tomb

Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, over 3,000 years after the boy king had been entombed there. The tomb was virtually intact, having only suffered minor interference in ancient times. The tomb contained priceless treasures and artefacts, as well as the king’s mummy lying in his solid gold coffin within a sarcophagus and shrines. It was a world-famous archaeological discovery and the magic of the boy king’s tomb and mummy remains to this day.

The iconic treasures found in the tomb, now on display in the Cairo Museum, include the gilded shrines that surrounded his sarcophagus, the inner solid gold coffin and the beautiful gold mask that covered the pharaoh’s face for 3,000 years. In addition there are thrones, chairs, statues, chariots, jewellery and other delights.

Tutankhamun was married to his half-sister Ankhesenamun, a daughter of Nefertiti, but the fruits of their marriage were limited to two still-born female foetuses which were buried with the pharaoh.

The Death of Tutankhamun

Tutankhamun died at the age of nineteen and recent tests indicate that he may have died as the result of a combination of factors. He suffered from a bone weakness, club foot and (minor) cleft palate, but it was a major complicated fracture of his left leg above the knee as well as cerebral malaria that were the main contributors to his demise. The trauma to his leg may have been the result of an accident or an injury sustained in combat or even an assassination attempt, there is no certainty at this stage. It is possible that the ultimate cause of death may have been either septicaemia or malarial fever.

Tutankhamun’s reign saw an attempt to undo the damage done by Akhenaten to the Egyptian state and its economy. The young king was on the way to his goal of reinstating the ancient religions when he died. Tutankhamun left no heir to the throne and his great uncle Ay, a man of 68 years of age, held the throne until he died four years later.

Anthony Holmes
Read more in Anthony’s Ancient Egypt In An Hour
See also Anthony’s article on Mummies and the process of mummification.

Biography: A Very Short History

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Biography: A Very Short History from the Classical World to the Early Medieval period .

The Lives of Great Men

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Roger Lewis’ 1995 investigation into the great actor and comedian, is a mammoth volume. Lewis studies not only the events of Sellers’ life, but each of his films in phenomenal detail, attempting to uncover what made his subject tick and why he should achieve the emotional appeal and impact Lewis’ credits him with retaining to this day. While the book itself is an excellent and worthwhile investigation into the life of one of Britain’s great actors, it is worth asking oneself the extent to which such a thorough examination of, say; ‘The Waltz of the Toreadors’ (1962) can enlighten us on Sellers the man, rather than the actor.

Plutarch

As a form of narrative storytelling, biography’s earliest extant exponent was the Greek scholar Plutarch (46 – 129 B.C.E) who wrote a series of parallel lives, in which he compared great figures from Greek history and mythology with those Romans whose achievements he felt mirrored them. As with some modern biographers Plutarch sought to gain an insight into each character and uncover the reasons for their later greatness through examining the tales told of their childhoods and early lives, onto their later successful (or otherwise) careers. It was character rather than narrative history that interested Plutarch and it was these traits with which he attempted to illuminate the actions of his subjects.

The Vitae

Another little known example of classical biography comes in the form of the Vitae (Latin for Life). We have a number of these anonymous works centering on the great Athenian dramatists; Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. To create a work elucidating the life and character of these individuals, of whom very little personal detail otherwise exists, the author extrapolated recurring ideas and comments from their own works and, in the case of Euripides, those of the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes; in whose work Euripides is often a central, and much satirised, character. The effect of this is much the same as if one attempted to write a life of James Joyce with only his poetry and prose as source material.

Suetonius

With the age of the Emperors in full swing a type of biography emerged, around the imperial court, with the Roman historian Suetonius (69? – 130 B.C.E) its principle exponent. These tales of court life and drama centred around an Emperor whose life and deeds are told using certain stories and occurrences to illustrate facets of character. Suetonius’ voice can be heard in his assessments of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Emperors. Nero, for example is shown to be kind and generous as a youth, but when corrupted by power and his own insanity because a typical example of a despot. Augustus on the other hand is treated more reverentially.

Hagiography and Charlemagne

After the Roman Empire’s conversion to Christianity, lives of saints and other martyrs, named Hagiographies (the study of saints) became the popular form of the style. Through these, miraculous deeds and heavenly intervention could be recorded and embellished, and their name has since been associated with partisan or biased factual writings. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire Charlemagne’s (742 – 814 B.C.E) Franks were the classical world’s intellectual successors and it was around the figure of the great Emperor that Einhard, a trusted courtier, wrote a life aping the style of Suetonius and thus attempting to place Charlemagne as a new Roman Emperor.

Still the Lives of Great Men

From its genesis, biography has typically been used to mark out the lives of great men, whether good or evil, and attempts to gain an insight into the individual characteristics possessed by such men that lead them to committing the deeds that they did, and achieving the glory or infamy that resulted from these actions. Pick up any modern biography, and though the content and analysis has changed; the search for what makes a man rise above his contemporaries and achieve great things remains.

John B Knight
See also What Is History?

Mummies and Mummification

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Mummification, the art of preserving a body, is a defining element of ancient Egyptian civilization. Mummification differs from the science of embalming. The latter is defined as delaying decomposition to keep the corpse looking natural. The traditional Egyptian mummy, swathed in bandages, is a far cry from an embalmed lifelike body such as that of Vladimir Lenin. However the two terms have become intertwined and are used sometimes interchangeably.

‘Mummy’ – Origins of the word

The word ‘mummy’ is derived from ‘mummia’, a bituminous resin found in ancient Persia; however ‘mummy’ is a relatively modern term. “Mummia” was not used in mummification, but when mummies were discovered coated with dark plant resin it was assumed“mummia” played a role and the term mummification was coined.

There are two elements to mummification, the physical process and the religious symbolism. The physical process was a secretive art. Our knowledge is derived from ‘reverse engineering’ of the many mummies that survived. Information has also been derived from the experiment in modern mummification conducted by Dr. Robert Brier of Long Island University.

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Thucydides’ Concept of Past and Present

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The Greatest war?

“I have found it impossible, because of its remoteness in time, to acquire a really precise knowledge of the distant past or even of the history preceding our own period, yet, after looking back into it as far as I can, all the evidence leads me to conclude that these periods were not great periods in warfare or anything else”. – Thucydides; 1.1

So Thucydides (460-395 B.C.E) opens his narrative of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.E). In terms of historical method his technique for studying the distant past, in a time where archaeology did not exist and history was but an infant branch of literature, appears sound. However this declaration is not all it seems. Thucydides’ criticisms of past culture and warfare are not exclusively based on a lack of available source material, but a more complex double edged sword. His declaration that “it was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those in the past” (1.1) seems directly aimed at his predecessor Herodotus (484-425 B.C.E).

Thucydides is aware that it is against the chronicler of the Persian Wars (499-449 B.C.E) that he and his work will be compared and thus sets out the greatness of the task which he has undertaken. Furthermore in claiming his own period to be vastly superior he is propounding the idea that Athens was at its cultural and social peak (what we now call “The Golden Age of Athens” [448-429 B.C.E]) particularly under the guidance of the statesman Pericles (495-429 B.C.E).

The Archaeologia

The vast majority of what we now view as the introduction to Thucydides’ work consists of the Archaeologia, an account of the development of Greece from its earliest inhabitants to the beginnings of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was motivated to justify claims of superiority of subject and to place the war in its historical and Hellenic (Greek) context. The available evidence for this period would likely have consisted of the Homeric Epics (The Iliad andOdyssey), lyric poetry, tradition, and anecdotal evidence. Thucydides rejects the heroic tradition that fuelled the majority of Greek thought on pre-historic events and instead concentrates on the distribution and development of power that is to provide the fulcrum for events in his own day.

His analysis of the Kingdoms and political entities of this past focuses on their power, stability, wealth, and naval capability. Through these factors he traces the birth of the great conflict of his own time. Observation of contemporary politics and behaviour is used to rationalise the heroic and legendary accounts of the past. From a modern perspective Thucydides’ Archaeologia is a good example of a theoretical framework on which the traditions and stories of the distant past can be hung, shorn of their unbelievable, supernatural, and self-contradictory detritus.

What uses does the Archaeologia have?

As a tool with which to study the events of prehistoric Greece, theArchaeologia offers very little. Thucydides’ analysis of this period is based on contemporary observation, not intensive research which, in any case, would be almost impossible given his resources. However, that it functions as a microcosm for the growth and interactions of contemporary states, the Archaeologia gives us an insight into Thucydides as a Historian; we are offered a shortened version of his theories behind the rise and fall of great powers. Furthermore he holds to the traditions and myths of his time and in doing so attempts to rationalise them (as he does contemporary events) primarily through the removal of divine explanation. The body of his great work is reflected and his methods summarised in this fascinating introduction.

John B Knight

Hipparchia the Cynic Philosopher

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Sarah Maguire writes about Hipparchia, the female philosopher who flouted the conventions regarding the role of women in Ancient Greece.

The Ancient Greek philosopher, Diogenes the Cynic (who famously lived in a barrel), was known for his teaching that human life should not be limited and complicated by the conventions and traditions of society, but should be close to nature: by living in a barrel, rather than a house, he would argue that he was saving himself all the unnecessary bother that running and maintaining a household would entail but the barrel provided necessary shelter from the elements. Diogenes seems to have been no friend to women; on seeing a tree from which some women had been hanged, he exclaimed ‘if only all trees bore such fruit!’

At least one of his followers however, applied his teachings to the question of whether women needed to live as convention dictated or whether they should behave in a way that seemed right and natural to them personally.

Crates the Philosopher

Crates the philosopher was a disciple of Diogenes, living in Maroneia in Thrace around 300 BCE. Under Diogenes’ influence he sold all his property and distributed the money to the poor. Like Diogenes, Crates cultivated an eccentric lifestyle and personal appearance, indifferent to ridicule and abuse. He was said to be very ugly, but he made his appearance even more bizarre by randomly sewing a sheepskin to his cloak. As it now better fulfilled its purpose of keeping him warm, it was unimportant that it drew adverse attention to him.

Metrocles

Metrocles was a wealthy young man of Maroneia, who, so overcome with shame and embarrassment after farting while making a speech, locked himself up in his house and resolved to starve himself to death. Crates called upon him and managed to persuade the young man that his action had been in accordance with nature and thus no cause for shame. Metrocles thus became a follower of Crates.

Hipparchia Falls in Love

While Metrocles’ parents must have been very relieved that Crates had dissuaded their son from suicide, they were less happy when their young daughter Hipparchia (pictured) also enthusiastically embraced his teachings and became enamoured of the philosopher, scorning wealthy, attractive and conventional suitors. Hipparchia threatened suicide, if she were not allowed to marry Crates. Marriage was another institution commonly scorned by Cynics. Her parents responded by appealing to Crates himself to discourage her. When all other efforts at dissuasion had failed, Crates finally removed his clothes and stood before her saying “this is your bridegroom and all he possesses. If you are to be a wife of mine, you must adopt this lifestyle.” Hipparchia joyfully agreed and they were married.

As a married woman, Hipparchia accompanied her husband to dinner parties. This was a significant breach of convention. At that period, respectable Greek women did not attend dinner parties. The only women normally present were the paid or slave entertainers – prostitutes, musicians and dancers that were provided for the amusement of the male guests.

Hipparchia’s insistence on sitting and talking among the men as an equal did not fail to arouse resentment.

Hipparchia’s Argument

During a banquet Hipparchia got into an argument with a certain Theodorus. Presumably in response to his challenging her right to participate in the symposium, she responded with the syllogism that: if something is not wrong when done by Theodorus, it cannot be wrong if done by Hipparchia, adding that if it is not wrong for Theodorus to strike himself, it cannot be wrong for Hipparchia to strike him either. In response to this playful sophistry, Theodorus attempted to rip her clothes off, to which she reacted with fearless contempt.

Theodorus added further taunts as to why she did not devote her time to the loom, to which Hipparchia replied that she had no doubt she was right to cease wasting her time in such tasks and devoting herself to knowledge.

This brief surviving account of Hipparchia, found in Diogenes Laertius’Lives of the Philosophers offers us a fascinating portrait of a female philosopher who applied and adapted her understanding of Cynic philosophy to free herself from the conventional limitations placed on women’s participation in intellectual and public life.

Sarah Maguire

Source: Diogenes Laertius: Lives of the Philosophers Book 6. 85-98