Greekness
The Greeks of the classical period never managed to translate their psychological awareness of their ‘Greekness’ into political unity. The history of the classical Greek city-states is a history of failure to achieve unity: Sparta would not, and Athens could not, impose it indefinitely by force as Macedon and Rome were to do. There is a way of achieving unity without force, namely by federalism, and this method was experimented with in the fourth century by a third great Greek power, Boeotian Thebes, which in the time of Epaminondas (below, pp. 149 f.) exported federalism beyond the frontiers of Boeotia (but not without a compulsion which was fatal to Theban popularity). The classical Greek cities valued their independent traditions too highly to be prepared to subordinate themselves to a system in which their vote would be one among several. (The Athenians and Spartans both found ways of controlling decision-making within their leagues so effectively that they might better not be called leagues at all.) We call this attitude ‘valuing independence’; a candid Greek might have called it phthonos, envy. It is above all the phthonos felt by Sparta for Athens which determines the course of fifth-century Greek history. Unwilling, for reasons we shall discuss, to lead the Greek world herself, Sparta (or rather, some Spartans, some of the time) could not bear to see Athens do the job instead: the ‘dog in the manger’ is in origin a Greek story, one of the fables of Aesop. As Arrian makes the Spartans say at the beginning of Alexander the Great’s reign, Sparta traditionally leads, she does not follow. Greece, and especially the east-Greek islands still threatened by the Persians, needed a leader in 478. Nothing, except perhaps the heroic nude, provokes recognition of Greekness more readily than ornaments such as meander, egg-and-dart, palmette friezes. Subsidiary ornament was subjected to the same discipline as major designs, and in some periods and media we find objects devoted wholly to pattern. The need to articulate and frame friezes or panels allowed the development of orientalizing florals which adopted the rows of palmettes and lotuses of eastern art, created new and less botanically correct patterns, and established a decorative scheme that only in the fifth century gave way to more realistic florals with some observation of live forms, and the evolution of leafy, but strictly controlled, arabesques. Many patterns belong to woodwork, but have become more familiar translated and enlarged on to stone architecture. Care was taken to see that the profile of a moulding and its decoration were matched. The Eastern volute-trees could become adjusted in scale or use to Ionic columns or to decorative details of furniture or utensils. (Boardman, 1986)