South America: land of gold

SHORT-LIVED EMPIRE

The Inca empire, which grew to control a 2,500-mile-long stretch of the Anded in South America, survived for less than 100 years. Until the reign of Pachacuti Yupanqui (c.1440-71) the Incas had  spent almost 250 years as a small tribal group centered around their  capital, Cuzco, in the Peruvian highlands. Then, after repelling an attack by neighboring Chanca warriors in 1438, Pachacuti and his successors, Tupac Yupanqui (1471-93) and Huayna Capac (1493-1525), launched a series of campaigns that established Inca rule from present-day southern Colombia through Ecuador and  Peru to central Chile, spilling over into Bolivia and Argentina.

The culture gets its name from the word Inca, a shortened form of Sapa Inca, meaning the “unique Inca.” The word which comes from the Quechua term inka (”king”), was used as a title by the rulers, who were worshiped as gods. The empire was toppled by a mere 180 Spanish soldiers uder Francisco Pizarro. Taking advantage of his men’s superior fire power, of epidemics introduced by the Spaniards to which the Indians had no immunity, and of divisions among  the Incas themselves after a 7-year civil war, Pizarro conquered the whole of the empire within 6 years of his arrival in 1532.

MUMMIFIED MONARCHS

Inca kings were worshiped even in death.This sketch, from a Spanish chronicle published in about 1610, shows how their mummified bodies were carried out into the main square of the capital, Cuzco,each day. There, the corpses were honored with prayers and the sacrifice of white llamas.

ancientRome_Full

Roman festivals were a mixture of public holiday and religious ritual. One of the oldest  was a fertility rite called the Lupercalia, which was celebrated every year on February 15.

The celebrations began with the ritual sacrifice of goats and a dog at the Lupercal,a cave on Rome’s chief hill, the Palatine, in  which Romulus and Remus,the legendary founders of Rome, were reputedly suckled by a she-wolf.

Two youths, naked except for leather girdles, were smeared with the blood from the sacrifices and then ran around the Palatine Hill, carrying thongs cut from the goats’s skins. By striking any woman they passed with the thongs, the runners were thought to confer the gift of fertility.

This particular ceremony was known as februa (”purification”). It is from this that the name of the second month of the year is derived.

VIRGIN PRIESTESSES

One of the chief rituals in the worship  of Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, was  keeping a fire burning in her circular temple. This fire was allowed to go out  only once a year, on March 1, the Roman New Year’s Day.

Tending the fire was the responsibility of six priestesses, the vestal virgins. These were girls of noble birth, who were recruited between the ages of 6 and 10 and remained  in the service of the goddess for 30 years. They swore to remain chaste during that time, though at the end of it they could leave their order to marry if they wished.

Discipline could be severe. For even minor offenses a vestal was liable  to be flogged, but if she broke her oath of chastity a worse fate lay in store. She would be taken to an underground room beneath a mound near  one of the city gates. There, she was given a bed, a lamb, and some food. The entrance to the mound was then closed and covered with earth , and the unfortunate vestal was left, in theory, to starve to death. In some cases, however, condemned vestals were secretly released from their  underground tombs, perhaps by their families or lovers.

The story that the emperor Nero (A.D.54-68) deliberately started  the fire that roared through Rome  in A.D.64 is fiction. When the fire broke out, he was at his villa in Actium, 35 miles from the city. Far from celebrating the blaze by playing his favorite instrument, the lyre, Nero raced to the capital to take charge of the fire fighting. His concern was no doubt heightened by the news that his new palace was a fire.

The legend appears to have sprung from the resentment that the citizens of Rome felt about Nero’s behavior after the fire. He used the destruction as an excuse  to begin his most ambitious building project-the so called Golden House- which he intended as a palace fit for a god . Had it been finished, this monumental building would have covered one-thrid of the entire city of Rome.

FIGHT TO THE DEATH

Public fights between gladiators were among the msot popular spectator sports in ancient Rome. The first of these bloddy combats was recorded in 264 B.C. The spectacles continued until they were finally banned by the emperor Honorius (A.D. 395 -423) in 404. Most battles were fought to the death, and they were held  so often that several hundred gladiators were killed  in the arena every year. Some of the fighters were volunteers, but most were prisoners of war, slaves, or condemned criminals.

There were several categories of gladiator. The retiarius carried a net to entangle his opponent, and a trident, with which to kill him. The mirmillo was armed with a sword, shield, and helmet. The laqueator was armed with a noose. All gladiators were trained in their art at special schools.

WRITING ON THE WALL

Rome marketplace

The writing and drawing of graffiti is by no means new. It was rife in Roman times. The word graffiti itself is derived from the Latin graphium, meaning”stylus,” a pointed instrument for scratching letters onto tablets. Walls in the coastal town of Pompeii, for instance, preserved by ash from the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, are still daubed with inscriptions and scribblings of all kinds, from brief election addresses to offers of rewards for the return of stolen property. In addition, there are obscenities, rude drawings, and many complaints from lovers, such as: “what use to have a Venus, if she is made from marble?”

LEATHER BIKINI

The wearing of bikinis goes back at least to Roman times. Girls wearing similar two-piece costumes are  portrayed on a Roman mosaic that was found in the ruins of a villa near Piazza Armerina in Sicily. Apparently, the fashion spread as far north as Britain. A leather bikini made by the Romans in the late 1st century A.D. was found in a well in London.

BATHING BEAUTY A painted bikini adorns this statue of Venus from the town of Pompeii. Whether propriety or  fashion inspired the painter is not known.

The Roman Empire

ETERNAL ROME

At its height  in A.D. 117, the mighty Roman Empire was almost as big as Australia, covering an area of around 2.5 million square miles. So confident were  Romans of the  enduring power of their  empire that they spoke of their city as Roma eterna (”eternal Rome”) and of the Mediterranean as mare nostrum (”our sea”).

WITH THIS RING

Two modern wedding traditions derive from pagan Roman customs. Brides were wedding rings on teh thrid finger of their left hand because the Romans believed that a nerve led  directly from that finger to the heart. And a bride was carried over teh threshold of her new home to avoid the risk that she might stumble in the doorway or enter left foot first. Either happening was thought to bring bad luck from the gods.

HIGH-RANKING HORSE

The mad Roman emperor Caligula,   who ruled Rome from A.D. 37 to 41, favored his stallion, Incitatus, above many men who had proved themselves loyal servants of the state. Incitatus was housed in an ivory stall  in a marble stable  and had a retinue of slaves to care for him. He wore a jeweled collar, and his blankets were woven of imperial purple- a color usually reserved for the highest -ranking Romans.

Caligula is thought to have planned to honour Incitatus further by making  him a member of teh college or priests and then promoting him to consul, one of the highest offices of state. But when Caligula was assassinated, Incitatus was stripped of his privileges.

SAMURAI’S LAST STAND The 14th century samurai Kusunoki Masashige killed himself rather than surrender to the enemies of his emperor, and so became a Japanese hero. He committed suicide in 1336 after  unsuccessfully defending the capital of the emperor Daigo II against shogun rebels. This print of his last battle was made in 1851.

BUSHIDO-THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR

The proud warrior class of the samurai (meaning “those who serve”) grew from bands of mercenaries  hired by feudal landowners  in the 11th century to win control of Honshu, Japan’s main island. These mercenaries lived by the cult of the sword, worshiping athletic prowess and  martial skills. They developed a fierce loyalty  to their masters and a fearlessness that made them  formidable adversaries. They  fought in elaborate armor, wielding  their most prized possession, a  double-edged saber with which  they could cut a man in half.

Later, the spartan principles of Zen Buddhism, with its love of nature, softened their fighting  zeal. It became fashionable for samurai to live sparse and frugal lives during the Kamakura era  (1192-1333), when the ruling warrior family  Minamato moved its seat of power to the eastern city of Kamakura. Confucian thought, with its emphasis on honesty, also influenced the samurai.

Oriental knights

By the 16th century these principles had become codified into Bushido(”the way of the warrior”). First loyalty remainded to the samurai lord and to skill with the sword, but the warriors also became an Oriental  version of the Christian knights, embracing duty, honor, and nobility of spirit. In 1871 the last 400,000 samurai were  pensioned off and became shizoku, Japanese gentry. Most were absorbed into the civil service and business management. Five years later it became illegal for anyone but the military to wear a sword.

Nevertheless, the virtues of the samurai were kept as an ideal for the whole nation to follow, with the emperor as the  supreme object of loyalty. It was this ethos that in times of crisis turned Japanese nationalism into a potent force.

A GIFT OF DEMOCRACY

The Greeks gave democracy to the world. The word itself comes from the Greek words demos, meaning “the people”, and kratos, meaning”rule.”  Begining in the 7th century B.C., democracy evolved from the mosaic of independent city-states that then covered Greece.

Not all the city-states were democratic. Sparta, for example, was ruled by landowning aristocrats. But some of the  city-states shared more power among more people than had any earlier civilizations. The leading democracy was Athens, which overthrew its aristocracy early in the 6th century and under the reformer Solon (c. 638-559 B.C.) established a constitution giving supreme power to a citizens’ assembly known as the ecclesia. The right to vote at the assembly’s meetings in the marketplace was by  no means universal, however. Only freeborn male citizens-about 40,000 people out of a total population of between 300,000 and 400,000 – had the vote. Women, slaves, freed slaves, and immigrants were all excluded.

BORN TO BE SOLDIERS

In the city-state of Sparta the elite male citizens, the Spartiates, were groomed for a life of military service. The Spartan existence beganat birth, when babies were inspected by the elders, and weak infants were put on a mountainside to die of exposure. From the time they were 7, boys were trained in the skills of a soldier. They  wore no clothes until they reached the age of 12; then they  were allowed one mantle a year. They lived in military barracks up to the age of 30 and moved into clubs until they were 60.

The men were encouraged to marry in order to produce storng and healthy children for  the state. But they were not allowed to spend the whole night with their wives. They had to slip out after dinner and then return to the barracks to sleep. Spartan girls also received physical training so that they would give birth to sturdy babies.

All the Spartiates’ work-including  farming and trading-was  done by  helots, serfs who were owned by the state.

BOUND FOR GLORY Success in athletic contests was a passport to fame for the ancient Greeks. Competition was  almost always between individuals rather than teams, and a champion could become a hero throughout the Greek world. Statues of him would  be made and songs composed about his exploits. Success in the Olympic Games-held every 4 years between 776 B.C. and A.D. 393 at Olympia in the western Peloponnesus- was particularly prestigious. Athens welcomed  its Olympic champions with  banquets. Some athletes were  exempted  from paying taxes. Theogenes of Thasos, a wrestler who competed in the Olympic Games for 22 years in the 4th century B.C., was  so revered that he was declared a descendant of the  legendary Heracles (Hercules). The chief events were running, wrestling, boxing, the  long jump, throwing the discus, throwing the javelin, and the pankration (a boxing and wrestling contest). Many Games also included horse and chariot races. This picture  of a footrace appears on a jar dating from about  350 B.C. Filled with oil from holy olives, the jar was one of the prizes at the Panathenaea, a religious and sporting festival held every year in Athens to celebrate the birth of the goddess Athena.

Athletes were traditionally portrayed naked, but many modern scholars believe that was an artistic convention , and Greek athletes may actually have stripped only for boxing and wrestling while remaining clothed for other events.

Greece: democracy’s birthplace

RISE AND FALL OF ALEXANDER’S EMPIRE

Alexander

Alexander the Great created the greatest empire the world had yet seen -and also the shortest-lived. He became king of Macedonia in 336 B.C. at the age of 20 and then subdued the Greek states. Two years later, in 334 he led a large army to conquer Persia. During the next 11 years Alexander conquered an area nearly as large as the United States. His empire extended from Greece and Egypt in the west to beyond the Indus River in the east. When his weary army refused to march farther eastward into India, Alexander retired to Babylon. He died there of a  fever in 323 B.C, at 33. The empire he had  built in13 years was broken up as quickly as it had been formed. Within13 years of his death, the countries Alexander had united were divided again, their territories carved up between his generals.

CONSULTING THE ORACLE

Delphi was the site of Greece’s  most important oracle, where the advice of the gods was sought. The answer was given by a Pythia, a priestess who went into a trance and shouted wildly. Her cries were “interpreted” by priests, who gave the answers, often very ambiguous, in doggerel verse.

It is said that Croesus, the king of Lydia, in Asia Minor, whose name has become a symbol of wealth,asked the oracle if he should attack the Persian Empire. He was  told  that if he did  he would destroy a great empire. Croesus duly attacked in 546 B.C. and did indeed destroy an  empire: his own. Cyrus the Great defeated his army, annexed his kingdom, and took Croesus hostage.