Ancient Greece seems like it was a pretty great place. It was the birthplace of democracy, it had
a flourishing arts scene, a vibrant mythology, and spectacular architecture. Prominent intellectuals
like Aristotle and Plato made huge leaps in scientific reasoning. The land was fertile and
the wine flowed like water. Or did it? Welcome back to Nutty History. Today, we’re looking at
the dark side of ancient Greece, and why you probably wouldn’t survive there for very long.
Despite their democracy and philosophy, the Greeks still liked to go to war. By about 500 BC,
they began relying heavily on foreign mercenaries to fight many of their battles.
But before that, the fighting was done mostly by your average citizens. In Archaic Greek times,
between 800 and 500 BC, militias were formed on a part-time basis. If you were a farmer or a common
worker, you would likely be forced to fight. Battles between competing city-states in early
Greece would be fought during the summer, and then whoever was left living would go back to
their day-jobs or farms and prepare for the harvest. This made fighting very half-hazard
back then. The citizens often had to pay for their own equipment, so if you were very poor,
you were most likely one of the pawns thrown directly into battle with very little protection.
If you had a bit more money, you could purchase or inherit armor from your family and become a
hoplite. Hoplites were infantrymen who carried spears, shields and body armor. It’s uncertain
exactly when the Greeks began using hoplites, but by 600 BC it had become a staple of Greek warfare.
If you lived in Athens in the seventh century BC, then you could’ve been given the death penalty for
stealing a cabbage. Around 621 BC, Draconian Laws took precedent and Athens instituted its
first written constitution. Before then, the legal system was based on a system of oral law. There
was no neat set of defined laws and penalties for crimes, and usually it was the victims’
responsibility to seek justice for some crime committed against them. This could lead to blood
feuds that lasted for generations. What’s more, the aristocracy would often manipulate these laws
to benefit themselves as they saw fit, which led to a vastly unequal society. So, it was eventually
agreed that reform was needed. The reform, though, ended up being a very harsh system,
where the death penalty or enslavement was handed out for even minor crimes. These first written
laws were called the Draconian Constitution. Penned by a little-known aristocrat named Draco,
they failed to end the inequality between the aristocracy and common people. For one thing, it
built a construct for the debt enslavement system we mentioned earlier, where wealthy landowners
could enslave their tenants if they didn’t pay their debts. For another, only those who carried
weapons or owned a certain amount of land had any political rights. Also, many of the punishments
didn’t seem to fit the crimes. You could be done away with for stealing, but if you accidentally
dispatched someone and then apologized to the person’s family, you’d be off the hook. Draco’s
laws were eventually deemed too…well, draconian. In 594 BC, just a few decades after they were
enacted, they were repealed by the lawmaker Solon and replaced with a more lenient set of laws.
Slavery was widespread throughout ancient Greece. Very widespread. Between the fourth and fifth
century BC, Athens was home to a staggering 60 to 80,000 slaves – more than half the estimated
population. On average, each household had at least three slaves. In Sparta, slaves known as
helots often outnumbered free Spartans by 20 to 1. Helots were state-owned indentured servants
who worked in agriculture and had to hand over most of what they farmed to the government.
Having so many slaves doing all the labor freed up many of the men to train as warriors, and the
feared Spartan military machine evolved into one of the strongest fighting forces of the time.
The Spartans did not treat these helots well, often striking them vigorously in order to keep
their spirits broken. One account of ancient Sparta, written by Myron of Priene (Preen),
stated that the helots were subject to a “stipulated number of beatings every year,
regardless of any wrongdoing, so that they never forgot they were slaves”. In Athens, too,
beatings were common for slaves. One prominent Athenian statesmen wrote that “the body of a slave
is made responsible for all his misdeeds, whereas corporal punishment is the last penalty to inflict
on a free man.” There were many ways to become a slave. You could be born into it, in what’s
called chattel slavery. If you were on the wrong side of a war, you could be captured and sold into
slavery. Even if you were a free Athenian citizen, you could potentially end up a slave. In a system
called debt enslavement, if you ended up owing too much money to a landlord you were leasing
land from, you could be enslaved and forced to work for free until your debt was paid off.
If you were living in Athens around 430 BC, there was a one-in-three chance you would’ve
perished. During the Spartan siege of Athens during the Peloponnesian war,
a mysterious outbreak terminated more than a third of the population. No one really knows
what the culprit was. Some think it was typhus, others thought influenza or measles, some said
Ebola. According to the historian Thucydides, the plague may have originated somewhere in Africa,
spreading through the Persian Empire and finally making its way into Athens. Symptoms included
fever, followed by inflamed eyes, bleeding from the mouth and respiratory failure. The
outbreak led to chaos within Athens as nearly 100,000 people perished, a tragedy compounded
by the Spartan siege. The whole situation left Athens in tatters, and ultimately signaled the
end of its Golden Age. Athens would be absorbed by Sparta about 25 years later.
If you were a woman living in Ancient Greece, and wanted to put on some makeup, it was very likely
you were applying lead to your face. Lead was a common ingredient in ancient Greek cosmetics. The
word itself comes from the Greek “kosmetica”, and the act of beautifying one’s face was to
“kommotikon.” Although Greek writers, who were mostly men, typically frowned upon “kommotikon”,
saying it was mostly used by prostitutes and lower-class women, it’s now widely accepted that
pretty much all classes of women – and even many men – used makeup to highlight their features and
brighten their skin. But the lead paste they used often led to horrible disfigurement and scarring,
eating away at the skin and causing disease. In a vicious cycle, it would be applied in thicker and
thicker amounts to cover up the damage it was already causing. The things we do for beauty.
If you were living in ancient Greece very early on in its history, around 1177 BC, then there’s
a good chance you either starved or were killed by pirates. Historians agree that around this time,
a vast, interconnected network of civilizations in the Mediterranean suddenly collapsed,
but they don’t really know why. The Mycenaeans, Egyptians, Hittites, Babylonians, and Minoans were
all advanced civilizations with thriving cultures, beautiful architecture, and economies based on
oversea trade. But then it all went south. A dark age lasted for centuries afterward. Some evidence
suggests that there was a 300 year drought around this time which led to famine, starvation, and
massive loss of life. Without enough food, these civilizations went to war, and slowly destroyed
themselves. However there are also accounts of a mysterious sea faring people, known only as the
“Sea Peoples”, who are written about and etched into stellae that depict great battles around
this time. It’s believed that the Sea Peoples were responsible for much of the death and destruction
along the Mediterranean, as they would invade and destroy prominent port cities, possibly taking
advantage of these drought-weakened Empires. Unfortunately, vague written accounts and
unidentifiable carvings are all the evidence we have that these powerful pirates ever existed.
Medicine in Ancient Greece was beyond any doubt a step up from what it was before. But it was
still outdated in many ways. For one thing, before the 5th century BC, illness was considered divine
punishment exacted by the gods. If you died, the gods were to blame, and if you got better, it
was because the gods gave you a gift. By 500 BC, things were starting to get slightly more refined,
but the distinction between science and religion was often quite blurry. The Greek god Ascelpius,
for example, was both a divine healer and a highly-skilled doctor. However,
there were no professional qualifications for being a doctor. Anyone could roam around Ancient
Greek saying they were doctors, practicing the “tekhne” or mysterious art of medicine. Had some
kind of malady? Oftentimes bloodletting would be prescribed. The ancient Greeks were big fans
of it. Bloodletting was connected to a medicinal system called Humorism, though there wasn’t much
that was funny about it. In Humorism, the human body is split into four humors: blood, yellow
bile, black bile, and phlegm. In a healthy person, these four components were in proper balance. But
pain or illness would pop up if they became out of whack. A lot of the time, temperature was
directly connected to the humors. For example, hot foods were thought to produce yellow bile,
while cold foods produced phlegm. Cities exposed to cold winds were associated with lung disease
and hot winds with digestive problems. Humorism was practiced long after Ancient Greece. It wasn’t
until the 1850s and the advent of Germ Theory that it fell out of favor among physicians
around the world. So there you have it. For all of Ancient Greece’s incredible achievements,
life for most of us during this great civilization would’ve probably been pretty nasty, brutish
and short. Thanks for watching Crunch and what history lesson would you like to learn about next!