When the German American businessman Heinrich Schliemann commenced excavations near the Turkish village of Hisarlik in 1871, he brought with him all the patience of a visionary—which is to say none at all. Never one to be constrained by the rigors of archaeological method, Schliemann hired some 80 workers—later expanded to 150—and immediately set them to work uncovering what he’d dreamed of finding since childhood: Troy, the great city of the Iliad, surrounded, just as Homer had described it, by walls. Following Schliemann’s imprudent orders, the workers ignored all antiquities deemed insignificant as they cut through layers of history. They smashed ancient structures and tossed aside relics with abandon. Centuries flew by in shovelfuls of dirt. In just three years Schliemann cleared away over three hundred thousand cubic yards of earth, all of it impregnated with the detritus of the ages. This was archaeology at its worst and most primitive—amateurish, unscientific, and utterly tainted by confirmation bias—but the results were straight out of Hollywood. To the chagrin of careful practitioners ever since, Schliemann and his mercenary crew found exactly what they were looking for. A ring of walls, six and a half feet thick, emerged from underneath the ruins of the Roman city once known as New Troy.
The buried walls were impressive but not, in Schliemann’s mind, sufficiently Homeric, and so the self-made millionaire promptly committed yet another in his long series of methodological sins and continued digging. He renewed the excavations with all the reckless haste of a true believer. Eighty workers once more plunged into the ancient hillside, clattering with mattocks and shovels and making a proper hash of the site until they had found yet another set of walls, this time more than eight feet thick. Here Schliemann might well have stopped, but he didn’t. He remained at Hisarlik for another two years, finding walls beneath walls beneath walls beneath walls. More than a century later, another German archaeologist would suggest something that never even occurred to Schliemann: the ancient ramparts at Hisarlik, he argued, represented nothing more than Troy’s royal citadel, itself enclosed within a far larger fortified perimeter that defended a larger ancient city.
Schliemann departed Troy without exploring the surrounding plain. Temporarily barred from Hisarlik for having smuggled out the cache of gold jewelry he’d discovered there—it was last seen on the neck of his young Greek bride—the pioneering archaeologist turned his attention to another Homeric target: Troy’s ancient enemy, Mycenae. There his task was considerably easier. The massive stone walls of Mycenae were still plainly visible. That was all the luck he needed. Schliemann knew next to nothing about the painstaking craft of archaeological excavation, but he was intuitive enough to realize one key thing: that if he wanted to find a forgotten city, all he needed to look for was the wall.
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The Greeks of the classical era (479–338 BC) were, like Schliemann, separated from the heyday of Mycenae by more than a few centuries. Unlike Schliemann, they were somewhat bemused by the ruins of Agamemnon’s city. They imagined that Mycenae’s massive limestone fortifications were the work of monsters. Their own cities were considerably more refined. In Athens and other places, townspeople enjoyed all those institutions that were conspicuously lacking even in the great capitals of the ancient Near East—marketplaces, gymnasiums, sports stadiums, theaters, artists’ workshops, and schools. The building blocks of Western society had at long last made their splashy debut in Greece, although not without the accompaniment of their older chaperones: temples and, of course, walls.
The Greeks had been building walls at least since the Bronze Age, when their ancestors established the civilization that historians call Mycenaean (flourishing roughly 1600–1100 BC). However, this prologue is not well understood. Greek poets remembered their Bronze Age forebears as fearless heroes—chariot-borne warriors and freebooters, such as Achilles and Odysseus—yet whatever swagger these mighty champions once felt when they steered their boats toward Troy or Egypt clearly gave way to trepidation when they turned their attentions north to the barbarian lands beyond Greece. In the late thirteenth century BC, the Mycenaeans of the Peloponnesian peninsula constructed a fortified wall to separate them from the rest of the Balkans. Panic was also evident north of the Peloponnesus. There, the ancestors of the Greeks first built their famous wall at Thermopylae some seven centuries before a Persian threat even existed. The ingenious defenders even channeled water over the pass to erode away the ground and create untraversable gullies. Cities throughout Greece prepared for attacks by enclosing and securing their water supplies.
Inevitably, trouble found its way past the border walls and into the urban areas of Bronze Age Greece. Mycenaean civilization came to a violent end during the twelfth century. In the space of just a few decades, virtually all the cities of southern Greece were abandoned or destroyed. Mycenae itself fell around 1150 BC, burned in an inferno that melted even stone.
It took several centuries for civilization to revive in Greece. When new cities finally arose on the ashes of the old, they, too, had walls. The new fortifications rested on foundations of limestone masonry, but they otherwise differed little from their Mesopotamian, Trojan, or Mycenaean predecessors. This much had not changed since Jericho. A city was a thing with walls, just as it had always been—except in the extraordinary case of Sparta.
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The Spartans repudiated nearly ten thousand years of urban tradition in their rejection of walls. But then, this was for them a matter of principle. Spartan men, unlike their rivals from Athens—or anywhere else for that matter—viewed the habit of sleeping securely behind walls as a demonstration of cowardice. They saw nothing admirable about a peaceful population of civilian basket carriers refusing to come out and fight. Indeed, more than once a Spartan is said to have quipped that city walls were nothing more than “women’s quarters.”
Women’s quarters? Now there’s a phrase packed with meaning. To be sure, the Spartans were renowned for their economy of expression. They honed it through long years of practice, beginning in childhood. Spartan elders regularly prompted young boys with hard questions just to see if the lads could respond laconically—that is, with the proper pithiness of someone from the Spartan country of Laconia. Spartan women also learned to restrain any natural garrulity. Their penchant for crisp, clever speech eclipsed even that of their husbands, and more than a few screenwriters have poached a zinger from Plutarch’s Sayings of the Spartan Women. Still, it’s a bit of a shock to see the venerable concept of walls dispatched so summarily. Two words—women’s quarters—and an ages-old institution lies wounded and bleeding, as if stabbed by a Spartan spear.
The Spartan perspective contradicts nearly everything we know about early attitudes toward walls. The Mesopotamians had viewed walls as sacred features of their environment. They took great pride in fortifications that “gleamed like copper” or had been raised “as high as the mountains.” A particularly massive set of fortifications might give rise to boasting, but never shame. Defensive barriers—and most especially the walls surrounding cities—were everywhere accepted as a necessary and god-ordained fact of civilized life. Homer tells us that Troy’s ramparts were the work of Poseidon and Apollo. Even the Israelites, who claimed descent from wandering shepherd clans, established the principle that houses in walled cities belonged to their owners in perpetuity, whereas houses in unwalled villages belonged to the open country. Little wonder, too, that the Egyptian hieroglyph for city depicted two crossroads meeting inside a set of walls. During peacetime, those walls made it possible for an unwarlike populace to go about its proper business of making shoes or painting pots in relative security, and if the people were ever to graduate to writing plays, novels, or poems, then that would require security, too. How, then—or why—would the Spartans alone have conceived this nonsense of a city without walls?
Naturally, the Spartans discarded any notion that they might have descended from the Mycenaean wall builders of the Bronze Age. The latter were, in their eyes, the very weaklings whom their ancestors had conquered and subjugated. As for those ancestral conquerors, they could be none other than the sons of Heracles, a mighty clan of invading warriors. The Spartans thus imagined themselves an invincible nation of champions. They could not envision their ancestors as civilians who took shelter during periods of danger. If they feared anything, it was that they might someday become fearful. The conservative element in Spartan society resisted any institution that might weaken Sparta’s men. Inspired by an unwavering belief in the primitive vigor of their ancestors, they embarked on one of the most extraordinary social experiments in history—the complete repudiation of walls and, with walls, all things civilized.
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The Spartan economy, in its early days, could have supported the loftiest ambitions of civilization. Spartan citizens owned land yet were generally freed from the burden of toiling in the fields. They possessed abundant leisure that might have been turned toward literature, mathematics, art, philosophy, or theater. In fact, the early Spartans may well have dabbled in many of these activities. Traces of a Spartan literature survive, most notably in a martial poetry that inspired generations of Greeks to hold their positions in battle without flinching. In the end, however, the Spartans would not pursue literary or artistic excellence. They opted for a forced, artificial barbarism over high culture. Like so many radical thinkers before and after them, they concluded that the fruits of civilization itself had weakened them and they could only regain their strength by abstaining from those fruits altogether. It was this conviction that prompted their rejection of walls.
The archaeology of Sparta is rather straightforward. At some point during the sixth century BC, the Spartans looked about at their fine Laconian pottery, their imported amber and ivory, their bronze and wooden statues, their tens of thousands of objets d’art, and chose to do away with it all. Henceforward, Sparta would not evolve like other Greek states. The city would not feature grand monuments, walls, or even a planned urban center but would remain an unprepossessing collection of villages. At least one Greek author, the historian Thucydides, reckoned that future generations of Greeks, surveying the remains of Sparta, would have a hard time believing such a city could have once dominated Greece. They might not realize it had ever been a city at all.
The powers that remade Sparta in the sixth century, stifling its cultural development and rejecting the construction of walls, did so in the name of the city’s legendary lawgiver, Lycurgus. Unfortunately, his life is now more or less a cipher. He comes down to us only in confusing and contradictory reports as a kind of Spartan Moses, a quasi-historical legislator who allegedly received divine assistance in his work. Even the sixth-century reformers knew him only as a figure of myth.
A Spartan king was once asked what gain the laws of Lycurgus had brought to Sparta. “Contempt for pleasures” was his reply. He might as well have said, “Contempt for civilization.” The Lycurgan reforms were thorough and pervasive. Anything that hinted of civilization, anything that might dazzle the eye or tickle the intellect, was banished from the city. All at once, the Spartans expelled those goods that they regarded as superfluous because they brought only pleasure. Henceforward, Spartans could no longer possess gold or jewelry. They were required to keep their homes simple, the wood beams crudely fashioned with axes rather than fine carving tools. The interiors, the reformers insisted, were left so plain that beds with silver legs or extravagant purple bedspreads would look entirely out of place.
Spartan clothing developed a reputation all its own. Athenian playwrights, being constitutionally incapable of passing up a good insult, ridiculed Spartan visitors for their ragged, filthy cloaks. Thucydides, a more evenhanded observer, was somewhat more kind. He credited Spartans for being the first to dress simply—rich and poor alike. They were the first, too, he said, to play games naked and to take off their clothes in public. Perhaps this helped with the odor.
Not that the Spartans smelled of potpourri. The Lycurgans (if we might coin a name for the reformers) banned perfumes, which were deemed wasteful, and dyes because they were thought to pander to the senses. The ears were treated no better than the eyes and the nose. One Spartan leader famously took an adze and cut away two of the nine strings of a musician’s lyre. Who needed the rest of the scale?
The rejection of walls didn’t make the Spartans any more open or cosmopolitan; if anything, it intensified their xenophobia. The reformers took great pains to ensure that none of the products of civilization would creep back into their unwalled, primitivist paradise. They denied citizens the right to travel lest they acquire from abroad a taste for luxury. They banished gold and silver currency from the city to deter the importation of foreign goods. No Eastern trader would peddle his exotic wares in Sparta, knowing that he would receive in return only the heavy iron pieces that the Spartans used for currency.
It wasn’t enough that Spartans should deny themselves the luxuries that they feared softened them. From cradle to grave their lives were reshaped to provide the benefits of a more primitive, barbarian experience. Do primitives wear fine gowns or take frequent baths? No? Then neither should a Spartan. Spartan babies were denied swaddling clothes and left alone in the night, so as to grow accustomed to cold and dark. As children, Spartans learned the rudiments of reading and writing, but such education was kept to a minimum. It was considered far more important that the boys get used to going about barefoot and naked because shoes cause children’s feet to grow soft, and changing clothes to suit the weather creates a delicate constitution.
The great experiment encompassed women as well as men. A proper Spartan recoiled at the thought that women should enjoy sheltered upbringings or develop feminine characteristics. The reformers mandated that young women walk nude in processions, showing off the bodies they had developed by working out, running, wrestling, and throwing the discus and javelin. They talked tough, too. The famous Spartan saying “Come home either with your shield or on it,” a warning to those who would toss aside their shields to flee faster, originated as a parting message from mothers to their sons. One mother, upon hearing that her son had committed an act of cowardice, murdered him. In her defense, she remarked that he had been raised to die for Sparta and had now done so.
For meals, the Spartans established mess halls where citizens were expected to dine communally. They reasoned that it would do no good to allow men to return home at the end of the day, lie on expensive couches, and fatten themselves up, undoing their physical and moral training. Eating alone was considered a gateway to far worse behavior: sleeping in, taking a warm bath, napping. Spartans were instructed to eat plain foods, without wine. Table talk was jocular—teasing and, of course, laconic. Not only were citizens trained to remain taciturn, responding to questions only with pithy answers, but the teaching of rhetoric was forbidden as well. They left the talking to the Athenians.
The purest signal of the reformers’ intentions can be seen in their drive to eliminate all civilian careers from the city. The list of professionals expelled from Sparta is long: teachers of rhetoric, fortune-tellers, pimps, prostitutes, mimes, conjurors, dancing girls, harpists, and craftsmen of all sorts. Once, a Spartan king is said to have addressed soldiers from Sparta and its allies, asking first that the potters stand, then the metalsmiths, the carpenters, the builders, and the rest of the craftsmen. By the end, virtually every allied soldier was on his feet, but not a single Spartan. Sparta had become an entirely militarized state.
Greek writers record that Sparta inevitably loosened its strict discipline. After the Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century BC, an influx of gold and silver allegedly reintroduced all the evils that the Lycurgans had sought to expel. The newly wealthy indulged a growing taste for the civilized life, while the mass of the population continued to squat in the city, more interested in revolt than defense. More than once a king would arise and, like some prophet of Israel exhorting his people to return to the wilderness, demand that Sparta revive its primitivist experiment. In the late 240s BC, the Spartan king Agis IV convinced the city’s young men to support his plan for a complete restoration of the Lycurgan system. The king and his supporters stripped off their clothes to show that they would sacrifice anything to return Sparta to what it had once been. The defeat of Agis’s reforms was only temporary. Within a decade, yet another young Spartan king had taken up the cause of revitalizing the Spartan experiment. Cleomenes III began with a ruthless purge of the opposition. He then restored the system of physical training, as well as the old mess halls.
The Lycurgan constitution of Sparta experienced its cyclical ups and downs, but the central premise of Spartan society endured for hundreds of years. The Spartans possessed a clear vision of what it meant to be a man, and sleeping inside “women’s quarters” formed no part of it. Sparta didn’t require fortifications of limestone blocks because it was defended by “walls of men.” Three concepts—walls, civilization, and effeminacy—were inextricably linked in the Spartan mind, where they formed an unholy trinity of weakness, but why? What did the Spartans see that led them to conclude that this seemingly unconnected threesome was, in reality, a unity?
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The Greek historian Thucydides was frequently given to marvelous moments of insight, not the least of which came when he divided Greek societies into two types: those that went about armed at all times and those in which the men had set aside their weapons and devoted themselves to other aspirations. The former weren’t terribly evolved, in Thucydides’s eyes. They harkened back to an earlier age when the Greeks still viewed raiding and robbing as acceptable, even honorable activities. However, the latter weren’t above criticism, either. Having abandoned their warrior ways, the men of these civilian societies had devolved into dandies, wearing linen underwear and golden hair clasps.
It was the Athenians, according to Thucydides, who were first among the Greeks to take the initial step of setting aside their weapons in everyday life. The accuracy of this statement cannot be tested, but the Athenians certainly played a key role in spreading the more civilized form of Greek society. The Athenians were also Greece’s most prolific builders of walls. They erected ramparts for themselves and then sometimes for their allies and colonies.
The Athenians weren’t weak, but neither were they Spartans. Military service in Athens was an occasional duty, discharged by amateurs. Athenian men underwent no real training for war and ridiculed those peoples who did. Athenian children were shielded from war, and not until the fourth century did Athenian teenagers receive any preparation for battle—a brief period of mandatory exercise preparatory to receiving arms. Even this experiment proved short-lived, going against the spirit of an age in which philosophers were proposing that civilians should be relieved of all military duties and that a separate class of soldiers should fulfill all combat roles. The training of eighteen-year-olds was quickly converted into a system of general intellectual, moral, and physical education.
To a man, the great leaders of classical Athens were wall builders, and this observation applies even to that redoubtable hero of the second Persian War, Themistocles. To be sure, Themistocles was more of a statesman than a soldier. His political skills were formidable. Like politicians in every age, Themistocles believed in democracy just as long as he could dupe the people into following his lead, and he didn’t care how he made that happen. When he wanted the populace of Athens to approve his naval strategy, for example, he invoked bogus omens and prophecies and even employed theater machines to fool the people into believing that the gods were on his side. Eventually he resorted to spreading the rumor that the goddess Athena had fled the city for the sea, and this proved fairly effective at convincing the founders of Western civilization to support his plan.
Themistocles led the drive to fortify Athens in the fifth century BC. To obtain funding for the new walls, he sailed about the Aegean, demanding tribute from all of Athens’s allies. He told them he’d brought with him two goddesses: Persuasion and Force. The inhabitants of one island replied that they, too, had two goddesses and that theirs—Poverty and Impossibility—prevented them from making payments. In the end, Themistocles had his walls.
The culmination of Athens’s great fortifying enterprise came in the mid-fifth century with the construction of the Long Walls. Designed to protect the city’s lifeline to the outside world, the Long Walls stretched several miles from the center of Athens to its seaports on the Aegean. Cimon, the driving force behind the construction of the Long Walls, carried on proudly in Themistocles’s tradition of duping the populace. He once announced that he had found the bones of the mythical hero Theseus, news that the Athenians celebrated by erecting three of the head-and-penis statues, or herms, that they thought conferred good luck.
By following Cimon’s plan and extending the city’s walls all the way to the sea, Athens could maintain its maritime umbilical cord even under siege. Pericles—yet another politician who possessed a knack for getting his way, although he preferred straightforward bribery to hocus-pocus—even convinced his fellow Athenians that they could dispense with farming altogether and supply their needs entirely by sea. The Athenians thus sealed themselves off from enemy armies without cutting themselves off from the world.
By the mid-fifth century, Athens was more physically secure than it had ever been. An Athenian golden age dawned behind the new walls. The walled Athenians were as open to the outside world as the unwalled Spartans were closed. Philosophers poured into the city. Theater flowered, along with sculpture, mathematics, architecture, and painting. Protected by walls that simultaneously sealed off the city from attack while keeping its ports open, the Athenians experienced war in an entirely new way. Year after year, even with the city under siege, the playwrights composed new works, entered them into contests, and staged them at the theater. Philosophers delighted their pupils and annoyed rivals. Artists carried on their work with exquisite skill.
The clearest picture of Athenian society behind the fifth-century walls comes from the plays of Aristophanes, who spent nearly his entire career trapped in the city by a conflict he viewed as unnecessary. Aristophanes, at least judging from his works, must have been some character, well suited to the city that had produced Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles. He took his humor broad. He appreciated the value of a well-timed fart. And if ever an author enjoyed repeatedly thrusting a double entendre into the right spot until his audience convulsed in ecstasy, it was he. In his most famous play, the women of Athens—still wearing fine gowns, cosmetics, perfumes, and slippers, even during the war—complain that their husbands are too often absent and the supply of foreign dildos has dried up. Elsewhere, Aristophanes satirizes a besieged populace that does little more than argue over politics, gamble on horse racing, or engage in fruitless philosophical speculations. Most incredibly, he was able to satirize the city’s political leaders with impunity. Business as usual behind the Long Walls.
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An apparent irony presents itself: the Spartans, who lived openly, without walls, possessed not even a modicum of freedom. Their elders taught them what to do and how to do it. They were instructed in how to speak; how, what, and where to eat; how to interact with sons, wives, husbands, and daughters; and what they could and could not possess. The Athenians, by contrast, built walls and behind those walls became the freest people on earth. Secure in their enclosed city, they argued politics, discussed philosophy, attended theater, and developed mathematics and science. As for the notion that art might weaken men, they were having none of it. “Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance,” declared Pericles. “Our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft.”
These differences were reflected on every level. The Spartans in their wide-open country were wholly dependent on slaves. Sparta’s open borders required that the men remain in constant military preparedness, relegating all productive labor to the unfree. In walled Athens, meanwhile, slavery was already fading. The city produced the first openly abolitionist sentiments in world history.
To the teacher or professor of ancient history, it is all but irresistible, when the lessons turn to Greece, to ask for a show of hands: Whom do you admire more—the Spartans or the Athenians? Invariably, an enthusiastic contingent prefers the Spartans. A few tentative hands rise in support of Athens, but these votes are cast without conviction, as if the students suspect that the teacher has asked a trick question. I suspect that this general Spartaphilia is widespread, even if it hasn’t been fully thought out. How many students, given the option, would voluntarily go a year without bathing or changing clothes, all the while dining on black broths and owning nothing, their security entirely dependent on their own strength?
In the end, the Spartan solution to the problem of security—though widely romanticized today—was no solution at all. It was simply not possible to defend a civilized people by demanding that they toughen up by becoming uncivilized. The lure of money and material comfort repeatedly overwhelmed the Spartan constitution, and in the long run, Sparta’s enemies would, too.
Yet whatever merits the Athenian model might have had, the citizens themselves could never agree on it. The Athenians were good at nothing if not debating, and for more than fifty years politicians and philosophers argued over the wisdom of fortifications. Plato took the Spartan position. In his eyes, the crumbled walls of Athens, torn down joyfully, to the music of flutes, by the victorious Spartans at the end of the Peloponnesian War, were best left sleeping in the ground. Walls make men soft, he argued, lulling them into a false sense of security and tempting them to seek refuge rather than fight. Aristotle wasn’t so sure. He considered it “old-fashioned” to believe like the Spartans that a city could not have both courage and walls.
A middle position soon emerged. The perfect state, concluded Plato, should defend its entire border, not merely its urban core. In the case of Athens, he argued that guards should be sent out to dig moats and build walls to block passes through the mountains in the Attic countryside. Athens should be defended by border walls, defending every entry into Athenian territory. The philosopher knew that this would require fundamental changes in Athenian society. City walls, such as those built by Themistocles and Cimon, were compact and easily accessed by a ready population of instantly available defenders. Border walls were too far from the town center to be defended by ad hoc forces. They necessitated the formation of professional troops who could garrison the border at all times.
For a while at least, Plato had his way. The Athenians fortified the borders of their country rather than their city. Unfortunately—for historians at least—the Athenian experiment with border walls didn’t last long enough to provide any evidence as to the wisdom of the strategy. After the invading Macedonians defeated the defenders of Greece in 338 BC, Athens abruptly rediscovered its ardor for traditional city walls. As one Athenian observed, “Some set themselves to building walls, others to make ditches and palisades. Not a man in the city was idle.”
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Idleness seems never to have been a problem for wall builders, although some walls were built voluntarily and others at the crack of a whip. In our next chapter, we encounter forced labor on a scale that was never even imagined by the Greeks. An emperor with a magic whip is said to have overseen the construction of China’s first border wall. The stories of the First Emperor are often fanciful in that way. But they contribute as much to our understanding of history’s greatest wall builders as do the careful records of scribes, and perhaps much more.