The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox Read Free Book Online

archaeological survivals. Instead, the main relics of aristocratic life are fragments of its painted pottery which was cast in many specialized shapes and styles. The setting for so much of this pottery was the stylized drinking-party, or
symposion
, held by male diners after dinner. Arguably, its origins go back into the mid-eighth century BC . 4 At the
symposion
, male aristocrats reclined in parties of a dozen or so on couches. They mixed water into their wine and drank from cups with short ‘stems’, allowing them to slip them between their fingers and swirl wine and water together. Civilized parties also included poetry and songs and games of riddles or the capping of one another’swords. Free women were excluded, but there was music from the slave-girls who played the
kithara
, or lyre.
    Despite being mixed with water, wine led to drunkenness and sex was always near the surface. One reason, indeed, for changing from sitting at tables to reclining on couches was said to be the greater ease for sex on a sofa during the evening. The height of a symposiast’s skill became the game of
kottabos
, most famous in Sicily, in which reclining male players would flick drops of wine at a cup hung on a stick or peg. They are even believed to have exclaimed, while flicking, that ‘so-and-so is beautiful’, naming their own or a widely admired male pin-up. During the party, male guests might touch up one another; female courtesans might join in, and on one view the winner in contests or at
kottabos
was given one of the musical slave-girls as a sexual prize. 5
    The male
symposion
was one part of the accomplished web of a nobleman’s life: it was not the key to it all. Like the giving of justice, it is a reminder that not all aristocratic life was ruthlessly competitive (or ‘agonal’, from
agon
, the Greek word for a contest), as if the only aim was to defeat and humiliate rivals. Good counsel, good manners and companionship were every bit as valued as the more ‘combative’ virtues: the aristocratic ideal was rounded, and many-sided. In our more generous moments, we think of aristocrats nowadays as above competition and too naturally grand to worry about petty titles or sordid gain. We think of them as unworldly, and perhaps best at planning a model estate. Landscape gardening, or any gardening at all, is not the recorded interest of early Greek aristocrats. In Attica, the ‘estates’ of the nobles were ranked in the highest class if they were no more than about fifty acres. 6 Elsewhere, in spacious Thessaly perhaps, a nobleman might own rather more, farming it with lowly serfs, but estates of a thousand acres or more, like a modern duke’s, were most unlikely even there. Nonetheless, noblemen’s riches existed to be spent and displayed, especially on the widely seen splendour of their marriage-feasts and funerals. Aristocrats also used finely made objects to mark out their graves: at first they used big, decorated pottery vessels and then, from the later seventh century BC , sculpted statues and reliefs. By then Greek craftsmen had learned from renewed contact with Egypt the art of making big sculptures in stone of thehuman form: for their aristocratic patrons, they began to innovate in representing the balance and proportion of human figures. Sculptures thus became another noble mark of status. They were put up for the ‘special dead’, for athletic victors or for womenfolk who had served in the cults of one of the divinities. Inscriptions helped to personalize these statues and to attach names to them even if they were statues of women. However, the statues of athletes were statues of famed individuals and so they were sometimes personalized directly as quasi-portraits. ‘Portraiture,’ the great cultural historian of ancient Greece, Jacob Burckhardt, observed, ‘in this case, begins by and large with the whole, necessarily naked figure and it never again had such an origin anywhere in the world. The athlete forms