Barbarians within the gates

Charles Glass

CLASSICAL ANATOLIA: THE GLORY OF HELLENISM by Harry Brewster I.B. Tauris, £29.50, pp. 224 It was perhaps the gentlest and most fruitful cultural conquest in history. It began a few centuries before Alexander of Macedon conquered Asia Minor, when Greek settlers established colonies along the eastern Aegean coast and gradually moved inland. The earlier inhabitants of the Carian coast took refuge from the Greeks in the mountains and began raiding their settlements. Harry Brewster, in this delightful book that tells the story of left Anatolia through the traces it left scattered across modern Turkey, recounts Vitruvius's story of an early Colonial success: • • • one of the newcomers had the brilliant idea of setting up an inn where excellent meals were provided, a restaurant, in fact, which was situated close to a spring. The water of this spring was not only crystal clear with a very pleasant flavour, but also had the effect of an aphrodisiac. Drawn by the good food exquisitely cooked and the delicious water of the spring, the barbarians came down from the hills, one by one, and mixed with the colonists, 'changing of their own accord from their rough and wild habits to Greek customs and affability'.

As Vitruvius tells it, 'the delights of civili- sation softened their savage breasts'. The c Greek were not alone in adapting to G_ reek ways before they submitted to Greek rule. Most of the peoples of Anato- lia, the ancient Phrygians, Lydians and Cappadocians, abandoned their own languages for Greek, modelled their institutions on the Greeks' and made their cities like those in the Peloponnese.

The name Hellene [the 4th-century BC Athenian orator Isocrates wrote] no longer suggests a race but an intelligence, and the title Hellene is applied rather to those that share our culture than to those who share our blood.

Brewster writes that Isocrates had in mind men like Lucian, a Syrian native of Samosata,

who spoke Aramaic as a child and yet became not only thoroughly hellenised but also one of the most polished, prolific and brilliant writers of the ancient world.

Lucian, Strabo, Pausanius and Epictetus were among the hellenised Anatolians who enriched Greek the way the Naipaul broth- ers, R. K. Narayan, Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie have English.

Brewster's task, as he describes it, is to follow visually and historically, as well as geographically, the extraordinary penetration of Hellenism into the hinterland of Anatolia by examining the sites and architectural remains of the ancient cities that were origi- nally barbarian centres of habitation.

He tells a wonderful story — the myths, the battles and the life of each hellenised city. He sees in their ruins clues to describe life there from the 4th century BC to the 6th century AD, when the Greek world spread far into Syria and Egypt and deep into Anatolia.

The identifying characteristic of Hellenic culture was a system of social organisation, the polis, the city state that comprised the town and surrounding country.

By far the greater number of the hundreds of city states that came into existence through- out Asia Minor consisted of indigenous cen- tres of habitation which became thoroughly hellenised without ever being occupied by Macedonian or Greek colonists.

Each of the hundreds of polei Brewster visited in Anatolia had 'a theatre, a stadi- um and a gymnasium, the hallmarks of the polis'. They had temples as well, but so did barbarian towns. Only in the polis was there evidence of vigorous civic life, and the evidence remains on the ground today, the academies, the stoa, the stadia, the assemblies, the public baths introduced by the Romans. The structures that survive nearly intact are the great public buildings of the Hellenistic era, made of fine-cut `It's your worst party idea so far, this magic wallpaper. . . stone without mortar, rather than private dwellings or Byzantine structures of brick and mortar. 'Man is born for citizenship,' Aristotle asserted. Brewster writes:

So the hellenised Anatolians did not feel the need for magnificent palaces to live in and enjoy their wealth, they displayed it in the public buildings of the city which enhanced their renown and gratified their pride.

The Anatolian Hellcnes, like the classical Greeks, were not feudal, and the only palaces and castles Brewster finds date from the Byzantine period and later. The Hellenic interest in public life, the educa- tional centres of the gymnasia, the plays in the theatres, the debates in the councils and the negotiations in the agora, left them uninterested in great funerary monuments, such as the Egyptians had built. One of the rare exceptions was a Carian prince who, influenced by his oriental roots and Persia, in the 4th-century BC erected a magnificent tomb that still stands in the old Carian cap- ital of Mylasa. Prince Mausolos was laid to rest in his mausoleum.

Each city has a tale, either mythical or historical. None is more fascinating than Xanthos. In 545 BC, Herodotus tells how the Xanthians resisted the Persian army under Cyrus's general Harpogos. When they were defeated, they retired

within their walls, whereupon they collected their women, children and slaves and other property and shut them up in the acropolis of the city, set fire to the place and burnt it to the ground. Then, having sworn to die, they marched out to meet the enemy and were killed to a man.

Xanthus was rebuilt and, five centuries later, Brutus arrived with a Roman army to demand money and men. As their ancestors had, the Xanthians of 42 BC began to burn their city and immolate themselves. Plutarch writes that Brutus,

extremely afflicted by their calamity, got on horseback and rode round the walls, earnest- ly desirous to preserve the city and, stretch- ing forth his hands to the Xanthians, begged them that they would spare themselves . . . Not only men and women, but even boys and little children, with a hideous outcry, leaped into the fire. Others from the walls fell upon their parents' swords . . . . There was a woman found who had hanged herself with her young child hanging from her neck, and the torch in her hand with which she had set fire to her own house.

Whether writing of Selene and Endymion or the sacred prostitutes of Sardeis, Brewster brings the stones to life. And 'on every site where an ancient city stood all over Anatolia' he finds the inscription, 'the council and the people,' the seal of the polis. He reminds his read- ers: There came a time when that life of the polis disintegrated and so the buildings lost their raison d'être. They could only survive as ghosts of the past, at the mercy of the disrup- tive forces of time.

That it ended at all is the tragedy.