Early Greece
Oswyn Murray
Now available in ebook format.Within the space of three centuries, up to the great Persian invasion of 480BC, Greece was transformed from a simple peasant society into a sophisticated civilisation which dominated the shores of the Mediterranean from Spain to Syria and from the Crimea to Egypt - a culture whose achievements in the fields of art, science, philosophy and politics were to establish the canons of the Western world. The author of this book places this development in the context of Mediterranean civilisation, providing an account of the transformation that launched Western culture.
Dedication (#ulink_9b9fd261-93e6-5094-aeae-311bda534e2b)
for
J.A.H.M.
O.M.
A.E.M.
M.P.M.
R.J.M.
Contents
Cover (#u6d610b92-94cf-5fc1-9011-963233d66bdb)
Title Page (#u35e114c4-9e7c-501c-8b4e-2358fb80e3b8)
Dedication (#ulink_a5d51039-6066-5848-9d94-36f17e69372f)
Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#ulink_a67c0ab9-4d37-5409-83a8-7a6b2179742e)
List of Plates (#ulink_8af76923-ca90-56ad-90f5-986dfd913673)
List of Maps (#ulink_e7269e73-7de8-512c-8d33-6207fcc768c1)
The Spelling of Greek Names (#ulink_8f470daf-6b5d-58f0-a97a-2a188f070e9f)
Preface to First Edition (1980) (#ulink_91116696-7002-575f-a60f-ae5fedf23cca)
Preface to Second Edition (1993) (#ulink_94574347-2a50-5fe1-bdef-becbdc227e62)
I. Myth, History and Archaeology (#ulink_3b874c85-b47e-5fb8-bafc-e97d1ecc9593)
II. Sources (#ulink_777568c4-3737-54ac-89c0-d7069ad5c99e)
III. The End of the Dark Age: the Aristocracy (#ulink_fb1daa39-cadf-5cf9-849f-4029800b7faf)
IV. The End of the Dark Age: the Community (#ulink_b8ed6d02-89c9-5453-a0ee-bbe80ff58a5f)
V. Euboean Society and Trade (#ulink_118d32c4-e15a-5587-83fe-250ba12028e5)
VI. The Orientalizing Period (#litres_trial_promo)
VII. Colonization (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII. Warfare and the New Morality (#litres_trial_promo)
IX. Tyranny (#litres_trial_promo)
X. Sparta and the Hoplite State (#litres_trial_promo)
XI. Athens and Social Justice (#litres_trial_promo)
XII. Life Styles: the Aristocracy (#litres_trial_promo)
XIII. Life Styles: the Economy (#litres_trial_promo)
XIV. The Coming of the Persians (#litres_trial_promo)
XV. The Leadership of Greece: Sparta and Athens (#litres_trial_promo)
XVI. The Great Persian War (#litres_trial_promo)
Maps (#litres_trial_promo)
Plate Section (#litres_trial_promo)
Date chart (#litres_trial_promo)
Primary sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Further reading (#litres_trial_promo)
General index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#ulink_db07c8d3-1f1a-578c-ba07-0e3407b0e346)
No justification is needed for a new history of the ancient world; modern scholarship and new discoveries have changed our picture in important ways, and it is time for the results to be made available to the general reader. But the Fontana History of the Ancient World attempts not only to present an up-to-date account. In the study of the distant past, the chief difficulties are the comparative lack of evidence and the special problems of interpreting it; this in turn makes it both possible and desirable for the more important evidence to be presented to the reader and discussed, so that he may see for himself the methods used in reconstructing the past, and judge for himself their success.
The series aims, therefore, to give an outline account of each period that it deals with and, at the same time, to present as much as possible of the evidence for that account. Selected documents with discussions of them are integrated into the narrative, and often form the basis of it; when interpretations are controversial the arguments are presented to the reader. In addition, each volume has a general survey of the types of evidence available for each period and ends with detailed suggestions for further reading. The series will, it is hoped, equip the reader to follow up his own interests and enthusiasms, having gained some understanding of the limits within which the historian must work.
Oswyn Murray
Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History,
Balliol College, Oxford
General Editor
Plates (#ulink_84728cd3-9329-5d89-b0fc-3f4e2c2ee1ce)
1 Trade and warfare (#litres_trial_promo)
a The site of Pithecusae (Ischia) (#litres_trial_promo)
b Bronze armour from the Warrior Grave at Argos (#litres_trial_promo)
c Corinthian helmet of Miltiades (#litres_trial_promo)
2 Commemorative pottery (#litres_trial_promo)
a Panathenaic prize vase (#litres_trial_promo)
b Geometric funerary vase from Athens (#litres_trial_promo)
3 Miniature sculpture (#litres_trial_promo)
a Ivory Astarte figure from Athens (#litres_trial_promo)
b Images of Sparta: the warrior (#litres_trial_promo)
c Images of Sparta: the woman (#litres_trial_promo)
4 Rituals (#litres_trial_promo)
a The sacrifice (#litres_trial_promo)
b The symposion (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Writing and the Law (#litres_trial_promo)
a Constitutional law from Chios (#litres_trial_promo)
b Attempts to ostracize Themistokles (#litres_trial_promo)
6 The international aristocracy (#litres_trial_promo)
a Arkesilas of Cyrene supervising trade (#litres_trial_promo)
b Miltiades kalos (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Monumental sculpture (#litres_trial_promo)
a Korē by Antenor (#litres_trial_promo)
b King Darius in audience, Persepolis Treasury (#litres_trial_promo)
8 The wealth of the west (#litres_trial_promo)
a Victory coin of Syracuse 479 BC (#litres_trial_promo)
b Temple of Athena, Paestum (#litres_trial_promo)
Maps (#ulink_44780031-2197-593c-98ce-392ce44c5f4b)
1 Greece and the Aegean (#litres_trial_promo)
2 Greeks in the western Mediterranean (#litres_trial_promo)
3 Greeks in the north-east and Black Sea areas (#litres_trial_promo)
4 The Persian Empire in the reign of Darius (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Early trade routes, east and west (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Attica: the divisions of Kleisthenes (#litres_trial_promo)
The Spelling of Greek Names (#ulink_830d0918-9e59-51e2-8083-91c7b856ccb6)
The traditional spelling of Greek names follows Latin rather than Greek practice; recently some scholars and translators have tried with more or less consistency to render Greek names according to their original spelling. In the interests of clarity we have adopted a compromise: generally geographical places and names of extant authors appear in their conventional Latinized form, other names in Greek spelling; but where this would lead to confusion we have not hesitated to be inconsistent. Apart from variations in the endings of names, the main equivalences are that Latin C represents Greek K, and the diphthongs Latin ae represents Greek ai. Where the difference in spelling is substantial, both forms are given in the index.
Preface to First Edition (1980) (#ulink_2e8c89a1-5ff1-53be-9221-5bd872262935)
THIS BOOK would have been very different if it had been written at the time of its conception, ten years ago. The difference is due not to myself, but to the work of the archaeologists whose publications I cite: in early Greek history no historian can be unaware of his debt to those who work in the field. If my approach is new, it is because I have tried to emphasize three aspects. Firstly, the role of concepts in history: man lives in his imagination, and his history is the history of ideas. Secondly, the unity of the eastern Mediterranean, and the importance of communication in fostering that unity. Thirdly, the significance of social customs for the understanding of all aspects of history. But it is no longer necessary to justify a book which spends as much space on the drinking habits and the sexual customs of the Greeks as on their political history; since Tolstoy, we have known that the breaking of the wave is the product of forces far out in the ocean of time.
My thanks are due to those who have read and commented on different chapters of the manuscript: Antony Andrewes, Paul Cartledge, John Davies, Penny Murray, Martin Ostwald, Mervyn Popham, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood – and most of all, for his encouragement in unorthodoxy, to Russell Meiggs. Then to my skilled typist, Mary Bugge. Lastly, to those members of Fontana Paperbacks who have watched over the beginnings, the middle and the achievement of this series: Michael Turnbull (with whom the idea was first formulated), Bob Woodings, Colin Murray, and Helen Fraser – a succession of publishers whose enthusiasm and patience have carried the project through to completion.
Preface to Second Edition (1993) (#ulink_c6045ea6-91c6-5b43-89a7-d95349b75d68)
TWELVE YEARS on this little book takes on a different character; conceived as a call to change the way that history is understood, it has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams: translated into Spanish, German and Italian, it is in danger of becoming the new orthodoxy. I hope that a second generation of readers will view it critically, as a starting point for their own perceptions. My aim was and remains to demonstrate that history is not a fixed narrative of facts, but a continuing effort to understand the past and the interconnections between events.
Some chapters are little changed, either because they still satisfy me, or because they seem worth preserving as a basic statement from which subsequent research has proceeded. I am especially proud of two chapters: that on Euboean society (ch. 5) was the first attempt to bring together the scattered evidence in a coherent account; and it was due to chapter 6 that the ‘Orientalizing Period’ is now recognised as a significant age; it was this book which first took the concept from art history, and applied it to society as a whole. In other chapters new discoveries and new thoughts have led me to make significant revisions. One notable omission, the neglect of Peisistratid Athens, has been made good. The Further Reading section has been completely revised; and, when changes have not been made in the text, it often explains the reasons or refers to subsequent discussion of the question.
Reviewers were kind to the work; but I learned most from the longest and most critical of these reviews, by S.M. Perevalov in the Russian Journal of Ancient History 1983 no. 2, pp. 178–84. He pointed out a number of basic presuppositions behind my approach of which the reader should be aware. It is true that in the development of early Greece I have tended to emphasise external factors over internal social development; and it is true that I attribute especial importance to military developments and trade, rather than to land tenure and the development of slavery, as factors leading to change.
On this occasion I should like to thank especially Kai Brodersen of Munich, who was responsible for the elegant German translation, and for making many improvements to the text of the English version in the course of his work. Two new members of Fontana also deserve the thanks of all who read this series. The love of history and personal encouragement of Stuart Proffitt ensured the appearance of a second edition of the series, and Philip Gwyn Jones has patiently steered it through the press.
I (#ulink_53f140dd-0e90-5ad2-8c3c-608444745ec3)
Myth, History and Archaeology (#ulink_53f140dd-0e90-5ad2-8c3c-608444745ec3)
UNTIL A CENTURY AGO historians accepted the distinction first made in a slightly different form by the Greeks themselves, between legendary Greece and historical Greece. It was not of course an absolute distinction; the Greek legends about the age of heroes, and in particular the poems of Homer, were thought by many to be a distorted reflection of a real past, from which it might in principle be possible to discover what had actually happened, even if no reconstruction had yet won general acceptance. What was needed was a basis of solid fact against which to determine both the time-scale and the comparative reality of the events related in heroic myth.
This basis has been provided by archaeology. From 1870 to 1890 Heinrich Schliemann, a German merchant who left school at the age of fourteen and taught himself Greek in order to read Homer, excavated at Troy, at Mycenae, and at other sites in mainland Greece, in order to prove the reality of Homer’s Trojan War and the world of the Greek heroes. He discovered a great bronze age palace culture, centred on ‘Agamemnon’s palace’ at Mycenae; later archaeologists have added other palace sites in central and southern Greece, and have defined the limits of Mycenean influence as far as the Greek islands and Asia Minor. The age of heroes reflected the existence of a lost culture, which had lasted from about 1600 BC until the destruction of the main palace sites around 1200.
The excavations of Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete from 1900 onwards revealed a still earlier non-Greek palace culture, with its zenith from about 2200 to 1450 BC; it was named Minoan, after the legendary king of Crete, the first lawgiver in Greece and judge in the underworld. The influence of Minoan civilization explained the rise of a palace culture in the comparatively backward area of mainland Greece; from about 1450 the Myceneans seem indeed to have taken control of Knossos itself. Thus the origins of the earliest civilizations in the land of Greece and the existence of a historical core to the Greek legends about the heroic age were established. But whereas Minoan culture was definitely non-Greek, the status of Mycenean culture was uncertain, until in 1952 a young English architect, Michael Ventris, deciphered the tablets from the destruction levels at Pylos on the mainland and at Mycenean Knossos. The syllabic script known as Linear B had been developed from the earlier still undeciphered Minoan Linear A; but the language it was used to record was shown by Ventris to be Greek, of a form closest to the most archaic elements in Greek previously known. For the first time it was shown that the history of Mycenean culture is both geographically and ethnically part of the history of Greece.
But this world of Mycenae is separate from the world of classical Greek civilization, both as a subject of study, in the way in which its history can be reconstructed, and also in reality. The Mycenean written records consist of lists of equipment and provisions stored in the palace, and relate to the particular year of destruction (the clay tablets survive only because they were accidentally baked in the fires which burnt the palaces). Moreover the limitations of the script make it unlikely that it was used for any other purpose: Mycenean culture was not properly literate. Thus the culture of the Mycenean world has to be reconstructed almost entirely from archaeology, in terms of its material remains. For if Greek myths have been vindicated as containing a historical basis by the discoveries of archaeology, they still cannot be used to supplement archaeology to any great extent. The studies of psychology, comparative mythology and anthropology, by men such as Freud, Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss, have as a common factor the basic assumption (which is surely correct) that myth is not history, but rather a means of ordering human experience related primarily to the preoccupations of the age that produces or preserves it: the social and psychological attitudes expressed in Greek myths about gods and heroes are those of the successive generations who shaped and reshaped them, from Homer and Hesiod onwards; and the hypothesis that the nature of Mycenean society could be reconstructed from myth or heroic poetry has been shown to be untenable, by the disparity between the evidence on social institutions provided by archaeology and the Linear B tablets, and that implied in the Greek legends.
The detailed reconstruction of the Mycenean world therefore rests on archaeology, and must in general be confined to its material culture; in this sense, to use a conventional distinction, it belongs to prehistory rather than to history. In contrast, the Greek world from the eighth century onwards is a fully historical world, in which the evidence of archaeology can be combined with the expression of the thoughts and feelings of contemporary individuals, to produce a comparatively detailed account, not only of what men did, but of why they did it, and of the pressures and limitations on their actions. The reason for this difference is the advent of literacy: rather than contrast prehistory with history, we should perhaps talk of the difference between our knowledge of non-literate and literate societies.
Again, in reality the civilization of Mycenae is fundamentally different from that of later Greece. It is an example of a phenomenon found elsewhere, when a warrior people falls under the influence of a more advanced civilization: the barbarian kingdoms of the early Byzantine world, such as the Ostrogoths in north Italy or the Vandals in north Africa, or later in the Middle Ages the Normans, offer obvious parallels. The world which influenced Mycenae was the world of Knossos, itself on the fringes of an area where the centralized palace economy and the oriental despotisms of Mesopotamia and Egypt had already flourished for some two thousand years. Mycenean civilization is linked far more to these cultures than to later developments in Greece.
The period from 1250 to 1150 was one of widespread destruction in the eastern Mediterranean. The Hittite Empire in Asia Minor collapsed about 1200; the resulting pressures caused movements of population which seriously disturbed Syria and Palestine, and which are recorded in Egyptian history in attempted invasions of Egypt itself by ‘the Peoples of the Sea’, who may have included groups of Achaeans or Mycenean Greeks in flight. In the Mycenean world itself, the destruction of Troy found in level VIIa, between 1250 and 1200, is generally agreed to be the historical basis of the Homeric Trojan War, and to represent the last major effort of the Myceneans. At almost the same time there are clear signs of preparations against attack in the settlements of the Greek Peloponnese. Then around 1200, Mycenae, Pylos and other centres were burned; and the surviving remnants of Mycenean culture were again attacked around 1150. The whole military and political organization of the palace economy disappeared, with its attendant skills in the fine arts and writing; most sites were deserted or only partially occupied; some were even given over to the dead. This was accompanied by emigration to outlying areas of the Mycenean world such as Cyprus, and widespread depopulation on the mainland. The archaeological evidence of a certain continuity in the debased style of sub-Mycenean pottery serves to demonstrate the level to which material culture had sunk.
The result of the collapse of Mycenean culture was a dark age, lasting for some three hundred years. Discontinuity with the past was virtually complete: later Greeks were unaware of almost all the important aspects of the world that they portrayed in heroic poetry, such as its social organization, its material culture and its system of writing. Even the Dark Age itself dropped out of sight: in his sketch of early Greece in book 1 of his history, Thucydides saw a gradual but continuous advance from the world of the Homeric heroes to his own day. Records of the past such as genealogies reached back only as far as about 900: in dim awareness of the resulting gap between their world and that of the heroes, the Greeks resorted to adding spurious names to the lists, and reckoning the average length of a generation at forty years instead of the more correct thirty years.
The Greek world from the eighth century onwards is a product, not of Mycenae, but of the Dark Age. Its darkness is the darkness of a primitive society with little material culture, and consequently one which has left little trace for the archaeologist. But in order to understand the society which emerged, it is necessary to know something of the preceding centuries. Three types of evidence can be used to reconstruct the outlines of Dark Age history.
The first is once again legend. These legends of course have to be treated with caution, in this case not only because folk tradition becomes distorted to fit the interests of later generations, but also because the sources from which we can reconstruct the legends are themselves scattered and very late, and have often been reworked and expanded to suit literary or quasi-historical needs: there is a great danger of reconstructing an account of the legends far more complete or systematic than ever actually existed in early Greece. Yet two events are recorded in the legends which seem to have some importance for history. The first is the explanation of the origins of the Dorians.
In historical times the Dorians were distinguished from other Greeks primarily by their dialect, but also by certain common social customs: for instance, each Dorian state was divided into three tribes, always with the same names; and there are a number of primitive institutions which can be found in widely separated Dorian communities, such as Sparta and Crete. The Dorians were unknown to the Homeric account of heroic Greece; yet later they occupied most of what had once been the centre of Mycenean power, the Peloponnese, and in certain areas such as Argos and Sparta they ruled over a serf population of non-Dorian Greeks. Legend explained that they had arrived only recently; the sons of the semi-divine hero, Herakles, had been exiled from Mycenae, and later returned with the Dorians to claim their inheritance. The legend of the ‘return of the sons of Herakles’ is a charter myth, explaining by what right a people apparently unknown to the heroic world had inherited the land of the Mycenean Greeks and enslaved some, part of its population. How much historical truth this legend also contains must be decided in relation to evidence of a different type.
A second group of legends concerns an expansion of the Greeks across the Aegean to the coast of Asia Minor to form another cultural and linguistic block, that of the Ionian Greeks. The stories are complicated, involving the foundations of individual cities, but the centre of departure is for the most part Athens: groups of refugees passed through Athens on their way to find new homes.
Thucydides describes how the victors from Troy had a hard homecoming to a land no longer fit for heroes, and the migrations that followed:
Even after the Trojan war there were still migrations and colonizing movements, so that lack of peace inhibited development. The long delays in the return of the Greeks from Troy caused much disturbance, and there was a great deal of political trouble in the cities: those driven into exile founded cities … Eighty years after the Trojan war the Dorians with the sons of Herakles made themselves masters of the Peloponnese. It was with difficulty and over a long period that peace returned and Greece became powerful; when the migrations were over, she sent out colonies, the Athenians to Ionia and many of the islands, and the Peloponnesians to most of Italy and Sicily and some parts of the rest of Greece. All these places were founded after the Trojan war.
(Thucydides 1.12)
There are obvious weaknesses in this account. Thucydides had no knowledge of the extent of cultural collapse in the Dark Age, largely because he had little conception of the power and wealth of Mycenean Greece. He writes of political troubles in terms appropriate to the revolutionary activity of his own day; he equates the Ionian migration with the later and more organized colonizations of southern Italy and Sicily, discussed in chapter 7. The reason for these limitations is clear enough: Thucydides is performing the same operation as a modern historian, attempting to construct a historical narrative out of myth and heroic poetry by applying the standards of explanation accepted in his own day. And in the legends and folk memory available to him, he could see much the same general pattern as we can.
The legends of the migration period find some confirmation in the distribution of dialects in historical Greece. The Greek language itself belongs to the Indo-European family; it seems to have entered Greece shortly before 2000, when the archaeological evidence suggests the arrival of a new culture; these new peoples will be the later Mycenean Greeks. Evidence of an earlier non-Indo-European language can be found in the survival of certain place names (for instance those ending in -nthos and -assos), which are those of known centres of culture in the third millennium; the extent to which the language spoken by the newcomers was transformed by contact with this earlier language is uncertain. But at least by the Mycenean period the language of the Linear B tablets was recognizably Greek.
In classical times Greek was split into various dialects, more or less closely interrelated. The Doric dialect was spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, that is in what had once been the Mycenean heartland, Laconia and the Argolid (and perhaps Messenia). From there it had spread across the southern group of Aegean islands to Crete, Rhodes and the south-west coast of Asia Minor. The Ionic dialect was spoken in Attica, Euboea, the central islands of the Cyclades, and the central coast of Asia Minor. Further north in Asia Minor, the Lesbian (Aeolic) dialect is related to those spoken in Thessaly and Boeotia, though the language of these two areas is also connected to the north-western dialects spoken in Aetolia, Achaea and Elis. Finally in two remote and separate enclaves, the mountains of Arcadia and the distant island of Cyprus, an archaic form of Greek survived, known as Arcado-Cypriot.
This distribution obviously relates at least in part to the legends of the migrations in the Dark Age. The Arcado-Cypriot dialect seems closest to Mycenean Greek, and Ionic can be seen as a development from a common original; the distribution of Ionic clearly reflects the same events as the legends of the Ionian migration; and, given the continuity in Cyprus between Mycenean and classical times, it is reasonable to see Arcado-Cypriot as evidence for the survival of Mycenean Greek enclaves in remote and inaccessible areas. It has usually also been held that the relation between Doric and north-west Greek and their distribution support the legends of the post-Mycenean invasions from the north-west into the Peloponnese. In many ways that still seems the most reasonable hypothesis; but it is of course conceivable that some part of this dialect pattern goes back earlier, to the time of the first entry of the Greeks; and it is clear that many of the differences between the dialects are the result of divergent development after the various groups had reached their final homes.
The third type of evidence is archaeological; its contribution is more ambiguous. Strictly it is not even clear whether Troy VIIa or the Mycenean palaces fell first; and there is no archaeological evidence of who destroyed either culture. The sub-Mycenean period is one of extreme poverty and deprivation; its most striking characteristic is the absence of evidence, which points to extensive depopulation: there is no positive sign of the influx of a new people. The only major change that can be detected is in burial habits – the abandonment of communal burials and large chamber tombs for a return to the older practice of individual burial in cist tombs, and the gradual spread of cremation in place of inhumation. About a century after the final collapse of Mycenean culture occur the first signs of a reawakening. Renewed contact between Athens and Cyprus, the area of the Greek world which offers most archaeological continuity with the Mycenean past, brought from southern Asia Minor a major new technological advance, iron smelting; from about 1050 iron began to replace bronze as the metal in everyday use. About the same time in Athens a new style of pottery began to emerge, of considerably higher quality than before – Proto-Geometric (from about 1050 to 900), decorated with simple repeated geometric patterns and broad bands of dark and light. Again it is to this period, from about 1050 to 950, that the Ionian movement across the Aegean Sea from Athens to the coast of Asia Minor can be dated on the evidence of a number of excavated sites.
The site that has revealed most about development within the Dark Age is Lefkandi, a small low promontory on the inner coast of Euboea; here a single trial hole 8.5 metres deep to bedrock has provided an almost continuous sequence of artefacts from the early Mycenean period (about 2000 BC) through the Dark Age period to about 825 BC, with only a short gap of perhaps fifty years around 1150–1100; successive excavations in the surrounding area have revealed large cemeteries from the Dark Age period. This was clearly a substantial settlement with a remarkable level of continuity and prosperity across the Dark Age.
The most remarkable discovery at Lefkandi was made in 1980. A local headmaster chose the August bank holiday to hire a bulldozer in order to clear a tiresome unexcavated site in his garden: he revealed and half destroyed the most important and most puzzling Dark Age monument yet found. It is a building dating from about 950 BC, apsidal with a porch at the other end, at least 47 metres long by 10 metres wide, with complex internal dividing walls, an external wooden colonnade and a central row of supporting pillars for the roof. The clay floor was laid on levelled rock; the walls are of mud brick on a base of roughly shaped stone, and faced with plaster internally; the roof was thatched. It is clearly a public or religious building similar in form both to the major houses of the late Dark Age and to the earliest religious buildings such as the late Geometric temple of Apollo at Eretria. But it is some two hundred years earlier than these buildings, and is neither a chief’s house nor a temple. For the purpose of the structure is clear: centrally placed in the main room, two adjacent pits were dug at the same time as the building was constructed. In the first were the skeletons of four horses; in the second were two burials. One was a cremation: a bronze amphora decorated with hunting scenes around the rim contained the ashes of a man. The top of the vessel was closed with a bronze bowl, under which the decorated funeral shroud had been folded and was still preserved; beside the amphora was placed the iron sword, spearhead and whetstone of the cremated warrior. The other burial was that of a woman, not cremated, but laid out with feet and hands crossed; there were gilt hair coils by her head, a gold decorated pendant at her throat and a necklace of gold and faience beads; her breasts were covered by gold discs joined with a large gold plaque; beside her lay decorated pins. By her head was an iron knife with an ivory handle. Part of the building was constructed over the remains of the funeral pyre.
The burial rites recall those of Patroklos in Iliad 23, with its ritual sacrifice of his favourite horses and of human victims, or the accounts of Viking burials in south Russia two thousand years later, as described by Arab observers; in the words of Ibn Rustah,
When one of their notables dies, they make a grave like a large house and put him inside it. With him they put his clothes and the gold armlets he wore, and, moreover, an abundance of food, drinking bowls and coins. They also put his favourite wife in with him, still alive. Then the grave door is sealed and she dies there.
Such a building in the Greek world would normally have been designed for use; yet as soon as it was constructed the roof was smashed in and the entrance closed up. Ramps were constructed up the walls and the building was filled with rubble. It remained thereafter as a long mound, remembered sufficiently to be the focal point for the orientation of a group of later rich graves in the cemetery, which seem to be significantly grouped around one end, and perhaps belong to members of the same powerful family.
We stand at the midpoint between the Mycenean world and historical Greece, in the presence of a ritual murder such as was often re-enacted with horror in later myth. The world revealed is a world of wealth and power unknown elsewhere for two centuries either way. At present this discovery is unique, and we should remember that Lefkandi shows a continuity from the Mycenean period not found elsewhere. But it shows that, if it were ever possible to excavate the Lefkandi settlement in its entirety, the Dark Age would no longer be quite so dark.
The picture elsewhere is very different. From the archaeological evidence the Ionian migration and the importance of Athens in it are confirmed. But the earlier period is very obscure. The change in burial customs might indicate the arrival of a new people, the Dorians; but it could be explained as merely a reversion to older habits (the more spectacular forms of Mycenean burial were bound to disappear anyway), and burial customs are not always evidence for population change: the Roman empire saw a total change from cremation to burial during the first three centuries AD, for no reason that anyone has yet been able to discern. Some archaeologists have therefore preferred not to believe in a Dorian invasion, and to claim that the different groups in mainland Greece had been present since the beginning of Mycenean culture: the palaces were destroyed either by passing raiders, like the later Viking harassment of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon culture, or by local uprisings of a subject people. But despite the existence of some cultural continuity after the fall of the palaces, it is the general impression of discontinuity, the desertion of old settlements for new, and the instances of the use of old settlements for burial, which suggest most strongly the influx of a new population. And if any weight is to be given to legend, though they cannot be shown to have destroyed Mycenean culture, it would seem likely that it was the mysterious Dorians who benefited from the vacuum created. Other ages have known the same phenomenon, a people without culture leaving no sign of their coming but desolation, and a world that has to be created anew.
II (#ulink_b2356759-f8cc-5d38-bc78-4ee6e24e4724)
Sources (#ulink_b2356759-f8cc-5d38-bc78-4ee6e24e4724)
SOCIETIES without writing are dependent on the human memory for the transmission of knowledge of the past and of information in the present. Mnemonic devices, the use of recurrent story patterns and folk-tale motifs and repetitive phraseology serve also an aesthetic purpose, to produce a pleasing effect on the audience; it is for such reasons that the rhythmic patterns of poetic metre are widespread among primitive peoples. Those who achieve special skill in composing metrically will acquire special status as the spokesmen of the community, in their dual functions of preserving the past and interpreting the present. The earliest surviving literary evidence for the history of Greece is poetic; the advent of writing in the eighth century changed the position only slowly: it takes generations for the poet to lose his inherited status, and it was not until the middle of the sixth century that prose literature began to develop.
The aoidos or singer of epic was a professional oral poet, composing and reciting from a stock of traditional material. His theme was the exploits of the heroes of a distant past, the end of the Mycenean period; there seems to have been no attempt to reach back earlier, or to compose poems on more recent events. This oral epic flourished solely or primarily in Ionia, and its nature can best be illustrated from the linguistic peculiarities it exhibits. The dialect of epic is artificial: to an Ionic base have been added numerous borrowings from Aeolic and other east Greek dialects, to create a language whose forms are especially adapted to the flowing hexameter metre. The oral poet doubtless relied on memory to repeat with variations already existing poems, but he also needed to be able to compose as he sang. Apart from the repetition of descriptions of material objects or recurring scenes such as feasts, debates, battles or the sunrise, he acquired a whole vocabulary of formulae – metrical units adapted to particular positions in the hexameter line. As a result of the work of Milman Parry on the similarities between Homeric poetry and the practices of the surviving tradition of Serbo-Croatian oral epic, the principles of Homeric oral composition are now much better understood. Apart from more complex metrical formulae, names and nouns have different adjectives attached to them, whose function is not primarily to add to the sense, but to accompany the noun in particular metrical positions and in different grammatical cases; the economy of the system is such that each noun seldom has more than one epithet giving a particular metrical value.
The Greek oral epic poet was thus considerably limited by the tradition in which he worked. He was singing of a legendary past of which he knew little, in a language which encouraged the survival of descriptive elements long after they had ceased to exist in the real world, with limited scope for innovation. On the other hand he was a creative artist, composing as he sang, and living in a world with its own institutions, social customs and values; he must have used these extensively in his attempt to recreate a long lost heroic world. Indeed studies of oral literature in other cultures have noted that one of the main functions of traditional elements is to increase the scope for creativity: the purpose of the formulaic language of Greek epic is to facilitate composition, not repetition. There is therefore nothing strange in the view that a great individual artist can stand at the end of an oral epic tradition, relying on the achievements of his predecessors but transforming their art; and other examples show that the point of transition from oral culture to written text often provides an impulse for the traditional poet to attempt a monumental poem with a complex structure, which is still based on oral techniques, but exploits the possibilities of preservation and overall planning provided by the new medium. The Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are literary masterpieces, far surpassing all comparable material from Greek or other cultures.
It may not be certain whether Homer is one man or two, or a proper name for a generic class of professional singers; and it may be disputed at what point in the oral epic tradition the intervention of a great poet is most likely. The second epic poet of Greece is a more distinct personality. Hesiod composed around 700, and may well be a contemporary or within a generation of Homer; he is the first poet to name himself. At the start of the Theogony he describes how the Muses came to him on Mount Helicon as he was tending his sheep; they gave him the laurel staff of the aoidos and breathed a sacred voice into him. It is part of his consciousness of possessing an autonomous artistic personality outside the tradition of oral poetry that his other main work, the Works and Days, is conceived of as an address to his brother Perses on a real occasion, a dispute between the two over the division of their father’s land. Hesiod does not therefore seem to belong to an oral epic tradition in the same sense as Homer: his call to poetry was like the call of a contemporary Old Testament prophet. His father, unsuccessful as a sea trader, had emigrated from the town of Cyme in Aeolic Asia Minor to establish himself as a farmer on marginal land at Ascra in Boeotia: neither area is known to have possessed a native epic tradition.
Certainly Hesiod saw himself as a Homeric aoidos, and even describes how the only time he ever sailed across the sea was the few yards to Chalcis in Euboea, to take part in a contest at the funeral games of Amphidamas; he won a tripod which he dedicated to the Muses at the place where he had been granted his original vision: the occasion was a typical oral epic contest. But his technique is not the technique of an oral poet working within a fixed tradition. The dialect, metre and vocabulary are learned from epic, but they are used with a freedom and an awkwardness which suggest that Hesiod only half understood the skills of oral composition: this is partly because he lacked a set of formulae suitable to his subject matter, and partly because much of this subject matter, in the Works and Days at least, had to be reworked from the simpler speech rhythms of popular sayings. His fundamental originality explains the stiffness, inferior quality and line by line composition, which is so different from the easy flow of Homeric epic: it may well be that, rather than composing orally, Hesiod used writing in composition, and learnt his poems by heart for recitation. The clear signs of eastern influence in Hesiod’s poetry (ch. 6) also distinguish him from the Homeric tradition.
The evidence of inscriptions on pottery shows that the alphabet was used as a natural medium for recording quite trivial occasional poetry by the late eighth century: there is nothing implausible in the view that epic poets were also recording their compositions in writing by then, and even using the new skill to help them in composition. Poetry continued to be an important vehicle for public expression in the seventh and sixth centuries, but it was influenced in various ways by literacy: these ways are all related to the function of writing in preserving accurately the work of particular poets. References in Homer show that other types of poetry, songs of celebration, wedding songs, victory songs and dirges, already existed alongside epic; but there seems to have been no guild of professional singers to ensure their survival. With writing, various types of poetry emerged to establish separate identities; the existence of the different traditions from now on encouraged continuous development; writing also allowed the recording of more complex rhythms, and could almost function as a musical notation. After Hesiod, the concept of the poet as an individual was paramount: poems were known to be by a certain author, and this in turn will have affected the subject matter and tone of poetry towards the expression of personal emotions. With few exceptions lyric poetry did not survive the end of the ancient world: the fragments that remain are preserved in quotation by classical authors or have been found in the papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt; the last fifty years have increased our knowledge of lyric poetry enormously.
The earliest of the lyric poets, Archilochos (about 680–40), exemplifies many of these trends. The illegitimate son of an aristocrat on Paros, he went to Thasos when his father led a colony there, and spent most of his life as a soldier until he was killed in battle. His poetry, whose language is often Homeric but whose metres are both popular and epic, is concerned with his personal circumstances – warfare, life in a frontier community, drink, love and sex, and abuse of his enemies: his most recently discovered poem, the longest fragment yet known, about the seduction of his girl-friend’s younger sister, was published in 1974. True lyric poetry, solo songs for the lyre, is represented by Alkaios (born about 620) and Sappho (born about 610), both from Lesbos and both members of aristocratic families. Alkaios was involved in political struggles against popular leaders: his political attitudes, exile, travels and descriptions of military life are typical; Sappho offers an unusual view of female society.
More important for the social function of poetry are the didactic poets. Kallinos of Ephesus in the early seventh century and Mimnermos of Kolophon about 600 encouraged their fellow citizens in struggles against the nomadic Cimmerian invaders from south Russia and the advancing power of Lydia. Tyrtaios towards the end of the seventh century did the same for the Spartans fighting against their Messenian neighbours, and also praised the social ethic of the new mass armies of heavy armed troops and their ideal of government, eunomia (good order). His poetic influence on Solon of Athens was great. Solon was appointed chief magistrate of Athens in 594 to solve serious economic and social unrest; his early fragments attack the injustices of Athenian society in a way that shows the use of poetry as political weapon; later he defended his reforms against extremists on both sides in the same way. The poetry attributed to Theognis of Megara (about 540) describes the dissatisfaction of an aristocrat at the influx of new wealth and the breakdown of traditional values, and also portrays upper-class homosexuality. In contrast, Xenophanes left Colophon in Asia Minor as a young man because of the Persian conquest in 545, and spent the rest of his life in the western colonies; he wrote on philosophical and scientific problems, and also attacked the contemporary emphasis on athletics and military virtues.
All early Greek poetry has a social function and a place of performance which influence its content; the different generic forms in origin reflect these different purposes. The lyric and elegiac poets composed for performance to the lyre and the double flute in drinking parties: their subject matter reflects the interests and preoccupations of particular social groups, the warriors and the aristocrats in their symposia.
Choral lyric was usually performed at religious festivals or other great occasions by trained choirs of men or girls singing and dancing to instrumental accompaniment, often antiphonically. Alkman was a younger contemporary of Tyrtaios, and his hymns offer an interesting contrast to the impression of Sparta as a military society. Simonides of Ceos (about 556–468) was court poet of the Athenian tyrant Hipparchos, and later commemorated the dead and the victors of the Persian Wars. Finally the greatest of the choral lyric poets, Pindar, in the fifth century, wrote for the Greek aristocrats and rulers who competed at the international games.
Lyric poetry presents a complex and varied picture of the world of early Greece: though its purpose was never overtly historical (there is no tradition of historical epic or descriptive panegyric), the poet’s role was still central; and so satisfactory for public expression were the varied poetic forms that they may well have delayed the appearance of a prose literature. Men of course spoke in prose, but they composed in verse. Composition in prose is related to a new need, that of precise and critical analysis; and it is a product of the Ionian enlightenment. The effort to formulate a critical scientific theory of matter, which began in Miletus with Thales in the early sixth century, led to the first known Greek work in prose, Anaximandros’ book on nature of about 550. Anaximandros attempted to explain both the underlying structure of the physical world and its development down to the creation of man – it was the substitution of science for myth. He was also the first Greek geographer and astronomer: the work contained the earliest known maps of the earth and the heavens, which were accompanied by a ‘description of the earth’ and a discussion of the stars and their movements.
Philosophers continued the scientific interests of Anaximandros; but it is another Milesian who carried his interest in human geography further, and so initiated the analysis of human societies. Hekataios, a prominent statesman around 500, also published a map and wrote a ‘description of the earth’, of which many short fragments survive in later authors. His concern was not with scientific theory, but with accurate geographical description. He himself had travelled at least in Asia and Egypt, and the detailed information given in the fragments suggests an ethnographic description of the Mediterranean world based on personal observation and the reports of other travellers. A second work by Hekataios discussed the heroic myths and the genealogies of those families who claimed descent from gods or heroes – as did Hekataios himself in the sixteenth generation. It seems to have been not merely a retelling of the hero myths, but a critical attempt to rationalize them and, if not produce history from them, at least make them portray a relatively normal human world. The critical approach of his book is emphasized in the first sentence:
Hekataios the Milesian speaks thus: I write these things as they seem to me; for the stories of the Greeks are many and absurd in my opinion.
(F.G.H. 1 frag, 1)
Hekataios saw the importance of travel and personal observation for the understanding of the human world; he may also be responsible for removing the gods from history by his curious and misguided attempt to remove them from mythology. Other early writers of prose are more shadowy figures. There were men who compiled mythological books without Hekataios’ critical attitude. And since antiquity there has been controversy as to whether there were any true historians before Herodotus; the evidence is unreliable, and even if the four dim Ionians in question did write before Herodotus, they had no influence on him, for they compiled a type of local history very different from his broad conception.
For the ancient world Herodotus was ‘the father of history’, and that judgement must stand. But he had also the reputation of being a liar, and the generally unfavourable opinion of his reliability lasted until the sixteenth century, when the accounts of travellers and missionaries from such areas as South America, Turkey and the far east revealed that tall stories about other cultures were not necessarily false. Since the nineteenth century accurate knowledge of the main civilizations about which Herodotus wrote, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia, has accumulated; and in the present age, when the difficulties in studying primitive societies and the problems of writing about their past are better appreciated, we can begin to understand the real achievement of Herodotus.
He was born in 484, between the two Persian invasions, at Halicarnassus in southern Asia Minor; he lived through the establishment of Athenian imperial power and died some time after 430, during the first ten years of the great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. His family was literary and aristocratic; he was brought up in exile on Samos; he travelled extensively in the Greek world, as far as Sicily and south Italy, north Africa, the Black Sea and south Russia; he visited Sardis in Lydia, and Phoenicia; he travelled up the Nile as far as Elephantinē and down the Euphrates as far as Babylon, and probably also went to the Persian capital of Susa. Well known as a literary figure in fifth century Athens, he finally became a citizen of the Athenian colony of Thurii in south Italy (founded in 444/3), where he died.
The scope of Herodotus’ book is described in its first sentence:
This is the account of the investigation of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, undertaken so that the achievements of men should not be obliterated by time and the great and marvellous works performed by both Greeks and barbarians should not be without fame, both other things and the reasons why they fought one another.
(Herodotus 1. 1)
The Greek word historiē translated by ‘investigation’ is the word which has entered the European languages as ‘history’; Herodotus uses it elsewhere to describe his enquiries, and it is connected with the Greek root ‘to know’, usually in the sense of knowing by personal observation, for instance as the witness in a lawsuit. Herodotus’ work is a series of descriptions of the various peoples of the Mediterranean and the near east arranged around the theme of the wars between Greeks and Persians: within this basic structure the digressions, or separate ‘accounts’ or ‘stories’ (which Herodotus calls logoi), are geographical, ethnographic and historical, ranging over the known world as far as its mysterious fringes and the encircling ocean. The modern word ‘historian’ scarcely covers all these activities; contemporaries used a vaguer term when they called him a ‘logos-maker’ or ‘logos-writer’. Thucydides was thinking of Herodotus when he claimed that his own readers should trust his conclusions, rather than ‘what the poets have composed about events in exaggeration, or what logos-writers have collected together, which is rather aimed at pleasing the ear than at the truth’. And he makes the proud statement:
The lack of invention in this narrative may seem less pleasing to the ear, but it will be enough if it is useful to those who wish to grasp clearly the past and the future, which, given human nature, will see these or similar events happening sometime again. This work is designed as a possession for all time rather than a display piece for instant listening.
(Thucydides 1. 21–2)
In these criticisms, and particularly the last, Thucydides seems to agree with later evidence in seeing Herodotus as a professional lecturer, giving his ‘stories’ or logoi in public as ‘display pieces for instant listening’; the final collection of these ‘stories’ in the present structured narrative was almost certainly published by 425, when Herodotus’ account of the causes of the Persian War was parodied by the comic poet Aristophanes. Herodotus may well in fact have begun like other contemporary literary figures, by lecturing on his travels and researches, and have only later arranged these lectures around the theme of the Persian Wars; but it is possible that he may have had his general theme in mind from the start.
Two literary influences on Herodotus are obvious. He owed much to Hekataios, whom he had certainly read, and whom he attacked both in his account of Egypt and as a map maker (Herodotus 2.143, 4.31): the early parts of the work must often cover the same ground in greater depth. Herodotus is also rightly described by a later Greek critic as ‘most Homeric’; Homer lies behind the conception of the whole enterprise as a war between Greeks and barbarians, and its declared intent to preserve ‘the great deeds of men’ (one of the acknowledged functions of epic poetry); the complex construction and digressive technique of Herodotus is similar to that of Homer, as are many of the more imaginative elements in the work.
Very few of Herodotus’ sources of information were written: details of the provinces of the Persian empire and its tribute, and of the organization of the Persian invasion force, may ultimately come from official Persian documents; and there are passing references to poetry and literature. But in general Herodotus was excluded from knowledge of the extensive literary and documentary evidence of the near east by his ignorance of foreign languages. As he himself makes clear, his work was based primarily on two types of evidence – what he had seen and what he had heard; it is a systematic and serious attempt to record oral traditions about the past. His practice was in each place to seek out ‘the men with knowledge’, usually priests or officials, and record their account with the minimum of comment. Only occasionally will he give variant traditions, and these have usually in fact been gathered by chance from different places; when he does this, he seldom declares which version he believes to be correct.
It is obvious that such a method left Herodotus largely at the mercy of his informants, who might be frivolous, ill-informed or biased. From Thucydides onwards Herodotus has been attacked as unscientific; but modern oral historians in fact hold that each tradition should be recorded separately: the contamination of two or more traditions produces an account which it is impossible to check or interpret, and which is an artificial invention of the modern anthropologist, not a true oral tradition.
All oral tradition consists of a chain of testimonies; in general the effective range for resonably detailed knowledge of the past is about two hundred years: it is very noticeable that Herodotus’ information is both qualitatively and quantitatively better for the period from the mid seventh century onwards. The historical worth of oral tradition is also related, not so much to the number of steps in the chain of testimonies, as to the purpose behind the recording of the tradition, the milieu in which it was remembered, and the cultural influences which may have affected its literary structure. The past is remembered not so much for its own sake as for its relevance to the present interests of a particular group; and each group imposes its characteristic deformation on the oral tradition.
In mainland Greece much of Herodotus’ information came from the great aristocratic families in each city: aristocratic tradition is of course especially liable to political distortion. For instance the Spartan aristocratic account played down the reforms of the age of Tyrtaios, and later the importance of their greatest king, Kleomenes; the Corinthian aristocracy travestied the history of their tyranny; the Athenian aristocratic family of the Alkmeonidai protested overmuch their anti-Persian stance and claimed the credit for the overthrow of the tyranny, minimizing the role of other families and popular support; Macedonian royal sources claimed that they had been secretly pro-Greek during the Persian Wars. There are many other examples.
Another group of traditions is very different. Here the great religious shrine of Delphi is of central importance: the Delphic tradition is not usually political; it is rather popular and moralizing. Often the stories are clearly related to particular monuments or offerings at the shrine (which is how we can detect their origin); and they centre round particular benefactors like Croesus king of Lydia. The obvious presence of folk-tale motifs might suggest the professional story-teller; but the clearest tendency is to impart a moral dimension to the past. Events are preserved in a framework in which the hero moves from prosperity to over-confidence and a divinely sanctioned reversal of fortune. This is no aristocratic ethic; it belongs to the priests of a shrine closely identified with a cooperative ethic, who engraved over the doors of their temple the two mottoes, ‘Know yourself, and ‘Nothing too much’.
The traditions of the eastern Greeks are far closer in form to the Delphic stories than to the aristocratic traditions of the mainland. For here too there is very little evidence of deformation due to particular political groups; yet even in quite recent history there are clear signs of recurrent patterns, folk motifs, and distortion for moral purposes. Thus the story of the tyranny of Polykrates of Samos as late as the second half of the sixth century could be transformed into a folk-tale, and the account of the Ionian revolt in the early fifth century contains many popular elements. At first sight this is surprising, for Herodotus was closer to events in the Greek east than on the mainland; he had for instance spent his youth on Samos only a generation after the death of Polykrates, and must have known many of those who fought in the great revolt; yet his east Greek history is in fact less reliable than his history of the mainland.
This curious characteristic of the east Greek tradition is related to the overall pattern of his work: it too is a moral story, of the pride of Persia, symbolized in the arrogance of Xerxes and humbled by the Greeks. Once more the gods punish those whose prosperity passes human limits; and the framework in which this happens is a framework designed to recall to the listener the steps by which the gods achieve their ends – the deeds of pride, the warnings disregarded, the dreams misinterpreted and false ones sent to deceive. This overall pattern has been imposed by Herodotus on his material, and its consonance with the pattern of east Greek stories suggests an interesting conclusion. Behind the preservation of the past in Ionia lies a moralizing tradition of story-telling found in mainland Greece only at Delphi, a tradition of which Herodotus is himself a representative: just as the Homeric poems are the culmination of the activity of generations of professional bards, so Herodotus the logos-writer has ‘collected together’ (to use Thucydides’ description) the results of an oral prose tradition, of folk stories told perhaps by professional or semi-professional ‘logos-makers’ in Delphi and the cities of Ionia. And he himself is the last and greatest of these logos-makers, weaving together the stories with all the skill of a traditional artist into a prose epic, whose form mirrors the form of its components. That this form is traditional and not of his own making is shown by its absence from the mainland Greek tradition: if he had been deliberately and consciously imposing a new pattern, he would surely have made this material conform to it; yet the comparative absence of moralizing folk-tale motifs in the stories of obvious mainland folk heroes like Kleomenes, Themistokles and others is remarkable.
Herodotus’ Athenian contemporaries scarcely understood the Ionian tradition within which he worked: they found his methods and his attitudes curiously old-fashioned. Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnions (lines 509–39) produced a brilliant and unfair parody of Herodotus’ conception of the causes of the Persian Wars; Thucydides’ whole methodology was based on a rejection of the techniques of Herodotus: he failed to see the nature of Herodotus’ achievement because he was writing a very different type of history – contemporary history.
Within the realm of observation Herodotus was faced with the same problem as modern ethnographers and anthropologists. We may describe alien cultures in terms of some model, whether it is a typological or ‘historical’ model, or a theory of the fundamental structure of all human societies; or we may less consciously describe a society in relation to our own. Herodotus attempted the latter, and his descriptions are often unbalanced by a search for comparisons and contrasts. He notices especially the similarities and the oppositions between Greeks and barbarians; he also (and here perhaps the entertainer is most apparent) has a keen eye for marvels and strange customs. Such an attitude can produce an unbalanced picture, as when he says ‘the Egyptians in most of their manners and customs exactly reverse the ordinary practices of mankind’ (Herodotus 2.35); but it is a less insidious fault than the imposition of a single conceptual scheme on the manifold variety of human societies. Herodotus remains not only the first practitioner of oral history, but also a model for a type of history whose importance is greater today than ever before.
Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, composed in Athens and in exile during and just after the war (432–04), contains a number of digressions on past history, which are mostly designed to correct or expose the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries; even when they show little sympathy for the problems of discovering about the past, they are written with care, using either rigorous argument or documentary evidence. In particular the first twenty-one chapters of book 1 are an attempt to demonstrate the type of historical generalization that can safely be made about the past; they represent a minimalist attitude to what can be known, and an implicit rejection of Herodotus’ attempt at more detailed history.
Thucydides pointed out many of the weaknesses of past history composed from oral tradition, but he failed to offer any serious alternative; it was his contemporaries who made the next major advance, by turning from general history to local history. A later critic described them:
These men made similar choices about the selection of their subjects, and their powers were not so very different from one another, some of them writing histories about the Greeks and some about the barbarians, and not linking all these to one another but dividing them according to peoples and cities, and writing about them separately, all keeping to one and the same aim: whatever oral traditions were preserved locally among peoples or cities, and whatever documents were stored in holy places or archives, to bring these to the common notice of everyone just as they were received, neither adding to them nor subtracting from them.
(Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Thucydides 5)
Whatever the aim of such writers, this is a somewhat favourable account of their actual achievement; still the discovery of local archives added a new dimension to the history of the past in at least one respect. The records surviving in local archives were primarily of chronological interest – lists of priests, victors at the games, and annual magistrates.
About the end of the fifth century the sophist and antiquarian lecturer Hippias of Elis published the Olympic victor list, which took chronology back to 776 in a four-year cycle: his system of Olympiad dating became standard for later historians. Another writer, Hellanikos of Lesbos, published a whole series of local histories in the late fifth century, whose character can be seen from two examples. The Priestesses of Hera at Argos was based on the records of the famous temple of Hera, which it apparently used to provide a general chronological framework for early Greek history: presumably the Argive records preserved not only the names of priestesses but also the length of office of each of them, and perhaps even some major historical events during their terms. Hellanikos’ other important work was a local history of Attica. It was almost certainly arranged round the list of annual magistrates going back to 683/2, of which a number of fragments on stone have been found in the Athenian agora. The fact that this complete list was publicly inscribed for the first time in the 420s, and not added to, suggests that it had probably been discovered by Hellanikos during his researches and brought by him to the attention of the Athenian people as an important historical document.
None of these works survive, but they were used by later authors, and in the case of Athens at least their characteristics are reasonably clear. They are marked by antiquarian interest in myth and origins, and by the importance they give to chronology; authors were often from priestly families (Kleidemos) or politicians (Androtion) or both (Philochoros). The influence of earlier local historians can be seen most clearly in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, a work which was discovered almost complete on a papyrus from Egypt in 1890. It is the only survivor of 158 constitutions of Greek states written by Aristotle and his pupils in the late fourth century, as part of his collection of evidence for the study of political science. The portion that survives is roughly eighty pages long, and consists of two sections, the first giving a constitutional history of Athens down to 404, the second describing the actual offices and working of the constitution at the time of writing. The historical part contains much material on political and institutional history, often distorted by later political prejudice; it must however be said that some of the political analyses are so crass and some of the documents so blatantly forged that many modern scholars have wanted to believe the work was compiled by a rather unintelligent pupil of Aristotle.
Later writers occasionally add information, which is of value only in so far as it derives from a trustworthy source. The most important of these authors are the Augustan geographer Strabo, Pausanias, the compiler of an antiquarian guide to Greece in the second century AD, and the essayist and biographer Plutarch (roughly AD 50–120), whose lives of Lykourgos, Solon and Themistokes reflect a late and imaginative tradition. Diodorus’ Historical Library (written in Rome before about 30 BC) preserves in its history of early Greece a précis of parts of the general history of the fourth century writer Ephoros, a rhetorical work largely derivative on Herodotus for this period.
The earliest inscriptions of more than a few words are in verse, but writing was quickly and widely used to record almost anything; for the period from the beginning of Greek writing down to the Persian Wars well over 5000 inscriptions are known, most of them of course very short. They are found in those types of material that can survive, bronze, lead, and especially pottery and stone; we should not forget the many documents that once existed on wood, parchment, wax tablets and papyrus. Some of the more important documents will be used as evidence later; these are mostly religious or commemorative (tombstones or dedications at shrines), or political (laws and treaties). The earliest surviving law is late seventh century, but the practice of putting up laws in public on stone or wood was common by the period of the Persian Wars.
The Mediterranean has been a hunting ground for European archaeologists for a century. The most useless site is the one which is still inhabited: Thebes, Chalcis, Greek Marseilles and early Syracuse are virtually unknown. The Athenian agora is only partly excavated because its true extent was miscalculated when the expropriations of owners by the government were carried out; more successful was the physical transplantation of the village of Delphi to a pleasanter and archaeologically barren site, against the wishes of the inhabitants and at French government expense (the French had won the right to excavate by removing the duty on Greek currants). Many sites in Asia Minor especially are disappointing because there was extensive rebuilding there in Hellenistic and Roman times: Delos and Cyrene are other examples. Particularly fruitful are sites that have been abandoned or sparsely occupied, with or without violent destruction (for instance Smyrna, the shrine of Perachora on the Isthmus of Corinth, Paestum); but the sacking and rebuilding of a city can also preserve – the survival of late archaic art is due largely to the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480 and the Periklean rebuilding, which caused the temple sculptures of Peisistratid Athens to be buried in the new foundations soon after they were carved. Excavations have been conducted at most of the obvious sites, the centres of archaic culture – Sparta, Aegina, Olympia, Athens, Samos, the Argolid, the Sicilian colonies; some less obvious sites turn out to be particularly rewarding because of their position – for instance Al Mina in north Syria or Naucratis in Egypt. Fringe areas such as the Scythian royal tombs or Celtic Gaul often provide important evidence because of their different burial customs: the cemeteries and other sites of Etruria have yielded so much Greek pottery that the eighteenth century thought Greek vases were Etruscan (Josiah Wedgwood called his pottery factory Etruria); there are few Greek museums whose collections can rival those of the great Italian Etruscan museums.
In relating different sites to each other and archaeological evidence in general to other types of evidence, the primary need is for an adequate chronological framework. For archaic Greece this is provided by pottery. In contrast to other artefacts pottery is of comparatively little value even when decorated, breakable, and when broken both useless and indestructible; in early Greece, painted pottery was a major art form whose styles varied from city to city and changed continually, so that it is comparatively easy to work out a relative chronology within each style. The styles of many areas were not widely distributed; Laconian pottery for instance is virtually confined to Sparta and its colony Tarentum; the various east Greek potteries are often difficult to distinguish, and their places of origin and chronological relationships are not yet fully determined. Such local styles are of limited interest in recording the presence of Greeks from a particular area in a particular place. Two cities, however, successively captured a wider market for their pottery: it is these styles, found all over the Mediterranean, which provide a relative chronology for archaeological sites in general, which can then be tied to absolute dates through known fixed points. Thus the dates of foundation of the Sicilian colonies given by Thucydides fix the beginnings of the early proto-Corinthian style; the sack of Athens in 480 offers another fixed point at the end of the archaic age, and there are a number of such fixes in between.
The pottery of Corinth was the first to achieve widespread circulation, helped of course by the city’s position as the starting point of the route to the west. Contact with the near east and the import of textiles and metalwork brought various decorative motifs to Greek art, and especially an interest in the realistic portrayal of animal and vegetable life: this orientalizing style appears in Corinthian pottery first about 725, when the late Geometric style gives way to early proto-Corinthian. The invention of the Black Figure technique of painting came within a generation (middle proto-Corinthian, c. 700–650); in this the figures are painted in black silhouette and details are then engraved on the figures after firing.
Corinthian pottery was the only ware widely exported for about a century; in the sixth century it was superseded by Athenian. Attic Black Figure began under the influence of Corinth (610–550), but quickly won pre-eminence, and in its mature phase (c. 570–25) reached an artistic perfection which has made it famous ever since. By about 530 a new technique of painting had been invented in Athens, the Red Figure technique, in which it is the background which is painted black, and the details of the figures are drawn in by brush. So individual are the styles of the different Black Figure and Red Figure artists that the same methods can be applied to distinguishing their hands as have been applied to Renaissance and later painters: the work of Sir John Beazley has resulted in the more or less certain identification of the work of over a thousand artists, and their classification both chronologically and into schools. Quite apart from our knowledge of painted pottery as an art form, this has given a chronological precision unknown in any other area of archaeology.
In more general terms the contribution of archaeology to the study of early Greek history is enormously greater than for most periods of history. It has explained many aspects of the origins and growth of Greek culture, its interdependence and local variations, the external influences on it and the means by which they arrived. It has illuminated the patterns of trade and colonization, and the major advances in warfare which lie at the basis of Greek geographical expansion and the diffusion of political power to a widening circle. Archaeology of course has obvious limitations, in that it can only offer partial insight into the less material aspects of life – religion, politics, culture and ideas; but it is more important to point out the areas where it still has more to contribute. Archaeologists have tended to concentrate on change rather than on continuity, and to direct their attention to certain areas of culture whose relative importance is not obvious. Thus we still know more about town centres than about towns, and about towns than about the countryside, or about weapons than about agricultural implements, and much more about the dead than the living. Despite the fact that Greek archaeology has stood as a model for other periods for so long, much remains to be done; and what is done will illuminate especially those areas about which literary and epigraphic sources are comparatively silent. The light thrown on the Dark Age in the last generation is an outstanding example of what can be achieved; and recent developments in survey archaeology have begun to illuminate the history of the countryside.
III (#ulink_c081ef76-aac4-543a-8895-4be0fe2220b0)
The End of the Dark Age: the Aristocracy (#ulink_c081ef76-aac4-543a-8895-4be0fe2220b0)
ABOUT THE late eighth century, with Homer and Hesiod, literary evidence becomes available to supplement the fìndings of archaeology. But whereas Hesiod describes a real world contemporary with himself, it is obvious from the character of the Greek oral epic tradition that there are difficulties in using the Homeric poems for history. In some respects Homeric society is clearly an artificial literary creation. It is a natural tendency of all heroic epic to exaggerate the social status and behaviour of everyone involved, so that characters appear generally to belong to the highest social class and to possess great wealth and extraordinary abilities, in implicit contrast with the inequalities and squalor of the present age. Equally it is agreed that there are some minor elements in the Homeric poems from almost every period; the presence or absence of isolated phenomena cannot therefore be held to count for or against any particular date. This rule can be given a general negative extension, for the oral epic tradition consciously or unconsciously excludes whole areas of experience as irrelevant, or as known to be later than the heroic age: thus all signs of the coming of the Dorians and the Ionian migration are absent, as are many aspects of the poet’s own period. In general, omissions, however large, carry little weight for the argument.
Nevertheless I would argue that there is a historical basis to the society described in Homer, in the poet’s retrojection of the institutions of his own day. Archaeological evidence suggests this. Though the poems show a number of Mycenean survivals, the Linear B tablets have revealed a society wholly different from that portrayed in Homer; equally the scanty evidence from the early Dark Age is incompatible with the material culture of the Homeric poems. Only in the later Dark Age do the archaeological and literary evidence begin to coincide over a wide range of phenomena. To take examples which have been used in the controversy, the emphasis on Phoenicians as traders points most probably to a period between 900 and 700, as does the typical display of wealth through the Storage and giving away of bronze cauldrons and tripods. The architecture of the Homeric house fìnds its closest parallels in the same period. Homeric burials are by cremation which points away from the Mycenean inhumation to the later Dark Age and onwards, though the actual funerary rites owe much to poetic invention, which in turn affected contemporary practices. The earliest and most striking instances have been found at Salamis in Cyprus, whose rulers, in close contact with Euboea and possessed of great wealth as vassals of Assyria, were practising complicated ‘Homeric’ funeral rites from the second half of the eighth century. On the mainland offerings of almost the same date found inserted into Mycenean tombs suggest that epic had created a new interest in the heroic past which itself influenced the development of hero cult.
Admittedly some central aspects of Homeric society have been thought to show a basic confusion. In descriptions of fìghting, for instance, the chariot, which disappeared as a weapon of war at the end of the Mycenean period, is still an essential item of the aristocrat’s equipment; but the epic tradition no longer under stood its military use. Instead it has become a transport vehicle taking the heroes from place to place on the battlefield, and standing idly by as they dismount and fìght on foot: occasionally it even takes on the attributes of a horse and performs feats such as jumping ditches. This seems to be a combination of a Mycenean weapon with the tactics of the aristocratic mounted infantry of the late Dark Age. Again the Homeric warrior fights with a jumble of weapons from different periods: he can even start off to battle with a pair of throwing spears and end up fìghting with a single thrusting one. The metal used for weapons is almost invariably bronze, but for agricultural and industrial tools it is iron – a combination unknown in the real world, where the replacement of bronze by iron came first in the military sphere. Such examples do not however prove the artificiality of Homeric society. The elements all seem to belong to real societies: it is only their combination which is artifìcial; and when the different elements can be dated, they show a tendency to fall into two categories, dim reflections of Mycenean practices and a clearer portrayal of the late Dark Age world.
More general considerations reinforce this conclusion. The process of continual re-creation which is implied by an oral epic tradition means that the factual basis of epic is little different from that implied in any oral tradition: the focus is sharpest on contemporary phenomena, but the existence of fixed linguistic rhythms and conventional descriptions leads back into the past; and since the poet is consciously re-creating the past, he will discard the obviously contemporary and preserve what he knows to be older elements. The reality of the resulting society must be tested by using comparative evidence from other cultures to show how compatible the different institutions described by Homer are, and whether the overall nature of the society resembles that of other known primitive societies. Finally there is a clear line of development from the institutions described in Homer to those which existed in later Greece.
The differences in the way Homer and Hesiod portray society are not then to be explained chronologically: Homer’s society is of course idealized, and reaches back in time through the generations of his predecessors; Hesiod’s is fully contemporary. And the towns of Ionia which produced Homer were in many respects more sophisticated, more secure and more conservative than the social tensions of the peasant communities in Boeotia. But also Homer describes society from above, from the aristocratic point of view, whereas Hesiod’s vision is that of the lower orders, unable to envisage change but obsessed with the petty injustices of the social system and the realities of peasant farming. It is for this reason that I have not distinguished sharply the evidence of Homer and Hesiod, but have used them to create a composite picture of society at the end of the Dark Age. Given the different characteristics of the two types of epic it is however obvious that inferences drawn from Hesiod are more certain than inferences from heroic epic.
The subject matter of Homeric epic is the activities of the great, and it is their social environment which is portrayed most clearly. The word basileus, which is the normal title of the Homeric hero, in later Greek came to mean king; but in the Linear B tablets the king himself is called by a title which survives in certain passages of Homer, wanax: somewhere much lower in the hierarchy at loca1 level is a group of people called by a name which is clearly the later Greek basileus; presumably when the palace economy disappeared, it was these men who were left as the leaders in their communities. In Homer and Hesiod the word basileus is in fact often used in a way which is much closer to the idea of a nobility, a class of aristocrats, one of whom may of course hold an ill-defined and perhaps uneasy position of supremacy within the community. Agamemnon at Troy is the highest basileus among a group of equals whose powers and attributes are not essentially different from his. When Odysseus visits the ideal land of Phaeacia he meets many basilēes feasting in the house of Alcinous and Alcinous himself says, ‘twelve honoured basilēes rule as leaders over the people, and I am the thirteenth’ (Odyssey 8. 390–1 ). The basilēes to whom Hesiod appeals for justice are a group of nobles. Monarchy probably ceased to be a widespread phenomenon in Greece at the beginning of the Dark Age: once again Homer’s ambivalence is due to the combination of Mycenean reminiscence with later society.
The basilēes of early Greece are a group of hereditary nobles largely independent of each other and separated from the rest of the community by their style of life as much as by their wealth, prerogatives or power. Each stands at the head of a group which can be viewed in two different ways: in terms of hereditary descent, as his genos or family, and in terms of its economic counterpart, the oikos (household or estate).
The Homeric family is not a particularly extended group. It comprises essentially the head of the house, his wife and his adult sons with their wives and offspring, together with other members of the immediate family. On his death the property is divided equally by lot among his sons, who then set up separate households; male children by slave women mostly have some status, though a lower one than sons of the wife: at one point Odysseus claims to be a bastard from Crete; his father treated him the same as his other children, but when he died the estate was shared among these, while he received only a house and little else (Odyssey 14.202ff). The basic Greek word for a man’s land is klēros, what he has inherited by lot; his dearest possessions which he will not leave and for which he will fight are his family, his oikos and his klēros (Iliad 15.498; Odyssey 14.64). It is the details of the division by lot of their father’s estate which Hesiod and his brother are quarrelling about (Works and Days 37), and Hesiod proclaims, work hard ‘that you may buy the klēros of others, not another yours’ (341). Beyond the immediate kin, the genos seems to have little significance; genealogies are not important and seldom go back beyond the third generation. Names for more distant kin are few, though kinship by marriage has a special term, as do certain members of the mother’s family. A man may expect help from his father-in-law or son-in-law as from his friends (Odyssey 8.58iff; Hesiod, Works and Days 345). But in general it is the immediate family which counts: blood-money for killing a man is described as due to his brother or father (Iliad 9.632f), not to any wider group; and when Odysseus kills the suitors, the father of one takes up the blood-feud with the words ‘it brings great shame for future men to hear if we do not take vengeance for the deaths of our sons and brothers’ (Odyssey 24.433ff). Curiously it is only killing within the family which involves a wider group of relatives or supporters (Iliad 2.66iff; Odyssey 15.272ff). It is somewhat misleading therefore to translate genos as clan rather than family.
The patriarchal nature of the family is shown not only by the rules of inheritance. Marriages are arranged by the heads of the genos, often for reasons of political friendship; the bride comes from the same social class, but is not necessarily related or even from the same area. Achilles says that if he returns from Troy, his father Peleus will himself seek a wife for him; ‘for there are many Achaean women in Hellas and Phthia, daughters of nobles who defend their citadels, one of whom I shall make my beloved bride if I wish’ (Iliad 9.394ff). The arranging of the marriage seems to involve both the giving of bridegifts (for which there is a special word, hedna) by the family of the bridegroom to that of the bride, and the provision of a dowry for the bride by her relatives. It has been suggested that these practices are incompatible, and represent two different historical layers in Homer; but they are in fact found together in other societies. The purpose of the dowry is to endow the future household; the bridegift has a different aim, which is neither to purchase the bride nor to initiate a gift-exchange involving the bride: it is rather to impress the bride’s family with the wealth and status of the bridegroom’s family. This is shown by the competition for a particularly desirable bride: Penelope complains to her suitors, ‘this has not been established in the past as the right way for suitors to behave, who wish to woo a noble lady and the daughter of a rich man, and compete with one another; but they themselves bring oxen and fat sheep as a feast for the friends of the bride, and they give splendid gifts: they do not eat another’s livelihood without repayment’ (Odyssey 18.275ff). The gifts of such suitors are not conditional on winning the bride’s hand: the losers lose all, so that there is here no exchange agreed, merely a contest in giving. The bride joins the bridegroom’s genos: when Telemachus arrives at Menelaus’ palace, a double wedding feast is in progress: his (bastard) son is bringing home a bride; and his daughter, long ago promised by Menelaus to Achilles’ (bastard) son, is leaving home (Odyssey 4. 1ff). The submergence of the wife in the new family of her father-in-law is shown by the survival in the Iliad of a kinship term found also in other Indo-European languages, e(i)nater, for the relationship between the wives of brothers, who would normally have lived together in the same household. The greatest tragedy is the premature death of the head, leaving his sons too young to assert their rights; this is what Andromache fears for her son in Troy, now Hector is dead (Iliad 22.484ff), and it is this struggle which Telemachus faces on Ithaca as his father’s prolonged absence makes it more and more likely that he has died.
Lower down the social scale marriage was a more practical affair, closely related to inheritance. Hesiod regards women as a curse sent by Zeus, ‘a great pain for mortals, living with men, sharing not in dread poverty but in prosperity’, like drones in the hive, but necessary in order to avoid the worse fate of others sharing the inheritance (Theogony 590–612). A man will marry at thirty a virgin in her fifth year from puberty (Works and Days 695fr; rather old: 14–16 was later the common age of marriage for girls), and he will have only one son if possible; though if one lives long enough there are compensations in more (376ff). Despite the strength of certain incest tabus shown in myth, endogamy, marriage within a relatively restricted cycle of relations, was the rule in Greece, and served to preserve existing patterns of ownership: in classical Athens an heiress could legally be claimed in marriage by her father’s closest male relative, beginning with her uncle; the procedure involved a herald publicly inviting claimants to come forward.
Many of these differences between the aristocracy and the ordinary citizen survived. Throughout the archaic period marriage outside the community was common between aristocrats, and contributed considerably to their political power and to the development of relations between cities; when in the mid fifth century Athens passed a law that citizens must in future be of Athenian parentage on both sides, this was a popular, anti-aristocratic move; the proposer, Perikles, like other Athenian aristocrats, would have found many earlier members of his family debarred from citizenship by such a rule.
A similar tension between aristocracy and peasantry perhaps explains the development in the status of women in early Greece. Hesiod reflects the general attitude then and later; but, though the portraits of Penelope and Nausicaa are idealized, Homer suggests that there was a time when women of the aristocracy had a high social status and considerable freedom: they could move freely without escorts, discuss on equal terms with their husbands, and might even be present at the banquets in the great hall. They were responsible for a large part of the household’s economic activities, weaving, grinding corn, and the supervision of the women slaves and the storechamber. In later Greek society respectable women were largely confined to their quarters, and took little part in male social activities at home or in public. This change in status is probably related to the movement from an estate-centred life to a city-centred one: the urbanization of Greek culture in most communities saw the increasing exclusion of women from important activities such as athletics, politics, drinking parties and intellectual discussion; these characteristically group male activities resulted also in the growth in most areas of that typically aristocratic Greek phenomenon, male homosexuality – though in the Symposium (182a) Plato mentions Ionia as an exception. Apart perhaps from Achilles and Patroclus and Zeus and Ganymede, Homer portrays early Greek society as markedly heterosexual. Marriage customs seem to show a similar shift; the bridegifts so prominent in Homer disappear, and in classical Greece only the dowry is known. In other words women had once been valuable social assets in an age when family and marriage alliances were more important; in the developed city-state they were no longer at a premium.
Around the immediate family lay the oikos. The early Greek basileus worked his estate with the help of slaves and occasional hired labour. The status of hired labourer (thēs) is the worst on earth: ‘spare me your praise of death’, says Achilles to Odysseus in the underworld, ‘I would rather be on earth and hire myself to a landless man with little for himself to live on, than rule over all the corpses of the dead’ (Odyssey 11.488ff). The life of a labourer is scarcely different from that of a beggar, for both are free men who have lost their position in society as completely as they can, and are dependent on the charity of another – only the beggar is preserved from starvation by the protection of Zeus; as an insult one of Penelope’s suitors offers the beggar Odysseus a job on an upland farm in return for food and clothing (Odyssey 18.357ff). This attitude to wage labour as private misfortune and public disgrace was widely prevalent later, and had a profound effect in shaping the economy’s dependence on slave labour: casual labour or skilled labour were acceptable types of employment, but free men would not willingly put themselves in the power of another by hiring themselves out on a regular basis. By contrast the slave had a value and a recognized position in society; nor was he responsible for his own misfortune. ‘But at least I shall be master of my own house and of the slaves whom great Odysseus captured for me’, says Telemachus (Odyssey 1.397ff): in raiding and warfare it was traditional to kill the males of any captured city and enslave the women and children; kidnapping, piracy and trade were also sources of supply: the faithful swineherd Eumaeus tells how his city was not sacked, nor was he captured while tending the flocks: he was the son of a noble, stolen by Phoenician traders with the help of his Phoenician nurse (herself captured by Taphian pirates) and sold to Odysseus’ father, who had brought him up with his youngest child (Odyssey 15.352ff). For such reasons women were relatively common as household slaves; men were few, reared from childhood and highly valued: they were put in charge of farms and allowed families of their own.
The basic source of wealth in ancient Greece was agriculture, which changes slowly if at all. Barley, because of its hardiness, was always the chief crop in Greece; wheat was a secondary cereal. The widespread use of linen for clothing and ropes shows that flax was also grown. The scenes portrayed on the shield of Achilles include ploughing, reaping and the vintage (Iliad 18.541–72); Hesiod’s description of the farmer’s year largely concerns the same activities (Works and Days 383–617): ploughing and sowing must begin when the Pleiades set and the cranes pass overhead (October), at the start of the rainy season: this was the hardest work of the year, for the plough was a light wooden one tipped with iron, which merely scratched the surface without turning it, and had to be forced into the earth by the ploughman as he drove the oxen. Hesiod recommends two ploughs ready in case one splits, and a strong forty-year-old man; on the shield of Achilles the fallow is ploughed three times, and each man is given a drink as he reaches the end of the furrow; Odysseus watches the setting sun ‘as when a man longs for his supper, for whom all day two dark oxen have dragged the jointed plough through the fallow, and welcome to him the sunlight sinks, so that he may leave for his supper; and his knees shake as he goes’ (Odyssey 13.31ff).
Autumn and winter are the times for cutting wood for tools: keep away from the talkers round the fire in the smithy. With the rising of Arcturus (February-March) work begins again; the vines must be pruned before the swallow returns: when snails begin to climb the plants (May) it is time to start the harvest; the rising of Orion (July) signals the winnowing and storing of the corn. High summer is the only time that Hesiod recommends for resting, in the shade by a spring with wine and food – until the vintage when Orion and the Dog Star are in the centre of the sky (September).
Apart from these staple crops, various types of green vegetable and bean were cultivated, and fruit in orchards: outside the house of Alcinous there is a large orchard with pears, pomegranates, apples, fìgs and olives, together with a vegetable garden and two springs for irrigation (Odyssey 7.112ff). One fruit mentioned had not yet obtained the central importance it possessed later – the olive. Olive oil was already used in washing (like soap), but not yet apparently for lighting and cooking: the main hall was lit with braziers and torches, not oil lamps, and they cooked with animal fat. It seems that there was no specialized cultivation of the olive: this had to wait for a change in habits of consumption, and the growth of a trade in staple commodities between different areas; for the concentration on olive oil in Attica from the sixth century onwards presupposes both a more than local market and the ability to organize corn imports.
Another characteristic of early Greek agriculture has caused controversy since ancient times. Classical Greece was largely a cereal-eating culture, deriving its proteins from beans (the ancient equivalent of a vegetarian, the Pythagorean, abstained from them), fish, and dairy produce from goats and sheep. Meat was eaten mainly at festivals, after the animal had been sacrifìed to the gods and their entrails burned as offerings. But ancient scholars noted that the Homeric heroes were largely meat-eating. Moreover wealth was measured in head of cattle: slaves, armour, tripods, ransoms, women are valued at so many cattle, and the general adjectives for wealth often refer to livestock. Eumaeus describes his master’s wealth: ‘twelve herds of cattle on the mainland, as many flocks of sheep, as many droves of pigs, as many wandering herds of goats, that strangers graze and his own herdsmen’ (that is, hired and slave labour: Odyssey 14.100ff). In contrast, though Hesiod himself had his vision while tending sheep on Mt Helicon and could think of nothing better than tender veal or goat to go with his cheese and wine in the summer heat, he gives no instructions about animal husbandry: mules and oxen were beasts of burden, sheep and goats produced wool and milk products, but they were sidelines in the main business of agriculture. Horses were outside his interests, for they were few and belonged to aristocrats, to be used only in sport and warfare.
This clearly reflects a basic shift of emphasis in Greek agriculture away from animal husbandry, but the problem is how to date it. The Linear B tablets show that the Mycenean kings possessed large herds; and some scholars have seen the transition as occurring early in the Dark Age. But it seems more likely that it is a later phenomenon almost contemporary with Hesiod. Populations in movement tend to be pastoral rather than crop-growing; the animal bones found by tombs show that meat continued to be widely available for the funeral feast throughout the Geometrie period, and there are many terracotta fìgurines of domestic animals dedicated at early sanctuaries. But animals are wasteful in land-use. As the population began to grow, and men like Hesiod’s father moved into the uplands, animal husbandry gradually gave way to arable farming, until only the mountains were left for sheep and goats. It will have been the aristocrats who had the lands to keep to the old style longest; and it may also be that in Asia Minor pastures could be extended into the hinterland, in a way not possible in Greece and the islands. Homer and Hesiod between them record the transition.
The physical shape of the noble’s house provides the key to the relationship between production of wealth and its use to establish the social status of the basileus. Stripped of its heroic embellishments (so much easier to build in words than with the primitive technology of early Greece), it consists essentially of a courtyard, stables, perhaps a porch where guests might sleep, private chambers for storing wealth and weapons and for women’s quarters, and the great hall or megaron – a long room with seats round the walls and a central hearth. The master of the house may have his own private chamber, as Odysseus did, or he may sleep in the hall.
Archaeological evidence relates primarily to town settlements, and so to ordinary housing; but even these single room dwellings provide analogies to the wall seats and central hearths of the aristocracy, as if either the larger had grown from the smaller or peasants were imitating the nobility. The comparative absence of larger and more complex houses has worried archaeologists, and led many to try to relate the Homeric house across the Dark Age to the Mycenean palace. But such worries may be unfounded, for it seems that many of the nobles did not live in the towns; so that the fact that their houses have not been found is not surprising, for the countryside of Anatolia and even mainland Greece has been little explored. Essentially the oikos-economy is estate-centred and suggests a period when aristocrats lived separately from the community. The transition to city life was part of the same development whose effects have been seen in the social position of women and in agriculture. In these respects Asia Minor may well have been more conservative than mainland Greece, until the disturbances from the seventh century onwards, with the Cimmerian invasion and the attacks of Lydia, drove the Ionian Greeks into their coastal cities. Even then it seems that in some areas fortified farmsteads preserved a little of the old style of life.
Not all basilēes lived in the country: Alcinous’ house for instance is within the city walls (Odyssey 6 and 7). And two archaeological finds give reality and proportion to the poetic descriptions. At Zagora on Andros a housing complex of the late eighth century seems to belong together as a unit: it is prominently placed in the middle of the settlement near an open space and the site of a later temple. The main room in the complex is square and about 8 metres across, with a central hearth and benches along three walls. The eighth century settlement at Emporio on Chios is even more interesting. A primitive defence wall, which can hardly have been more than 2 metres high, ran round the hilltop, enclosing about 6 acres; the only two buildings within it were a later seventh century temple and, built into the wall and contemporary with it, a megaron hall 18 metres long, with three central columns and a porch supported by two more columns. Below the walls lay a village of perhaps 500 inhabitants; the larger houses were of the same megaron type with central columns and hearth, others had stone benches against the walls. Here perhaps is the roughly fortified residence of a loca1 basiletis, a refuge for his herds and for those living outside it, who must have regarded the owner of the main megaron as their leader. It was in such dim and smoke-fìlled halls as those of Zagora and Emporio that the poems of Homer were originally sung.
Early Greek society was not feudal: there was no class owing obligations to an arìstocracy in return for land, and no general serf population separate from the slaves, who were always recruited from outside the community. The various scattered forms of obligated servitude found later in Dorian communities like Sparta and Argos, or colonial cities like Syracuse, or in the static population of Athens, are not individual survivals of a general phenomenon, but special developments conditioned by the history of each area. Generally early Greece was a land of free peasantry, in which the distinction between aristocracy and people (dēmos) was a question of birth and life style, unencumbered by complex social structures.
In the absence of permanent ties of allegiance, despite the hereditary nature of the aristocracy, the establishment of personal status (timē) created a competitive society: status was important because activities such as warfare, raiding and piracy required the ability to attract supporters from outside the genos. It is for this reason that feasting and the entertainment of male companions (hetairoi) was an essential activity for the man of influence; it was this function of achieving rank by feasts of merit which the great hall served, and towards which the surplus production of the oikos was largely directed. For hetairoi seem to have been attracted by such displays of personal generosity, by the reputation of the leader and by ties of guest-friendship (xenia), more often than through marriage or blood connection.
Those who feasted in the great hall were men of the same class as their host. So Alcinous entertains the basilēes of Phaeacia, and Agamemnon the leaders of his contingents before Troy; even the suitors in Odysseus’ house are a band of aristocratic hetairoi merely outstaying their welcome. The feasting is reciprocai; the ghost of Odysseus’ mother in the underworld gives him news of Telemachus, who still ‘feasts at equal feasts’, ‘for all invite him’ (Odyssey 11.185f); Telemachus himself tells the suitors ‘leave my halls and prepare other feasts, eating your own belongings, going in turn from house to house’ (Odyssey 2.139f). Architecture and the activity of feasting are interwoven in Odysseus’ recognition of his own house: ‘Eumaeus, this must surely be the fine house of Odysseus: it would be easy to recognize and pick out even among many. There are buildings on buildings, and the court is well finished with a wall and cornice, and the double gates are well protected: no man could force it. And I see many men are feasting within, for the smell of fat is there and the lyre sounds, which the gods have made as companion to the feast’ (Odyssey 17.264ff). The emphasis laid on descriptions of feasting in the Homeric poems is no mere literary convention: it corresponds to a central feature in the life-style of the aristocracy, and the poetry of epic was already represented as the main form of entertainment at the feast. For Hesiod on the other hand the feast has a very different signifìcance: everyone brings their own contributions to a communal meal (Works and Days 72ff).
Two other characteristics of Homeric society helped to create the network of obligations which sustained the power of the nobility – the institution of guest-friendship and the role of the gift within it. Beyond his immediate geographical neighbourhood, the basileus could expect to be welcomed on his travels by men of the same class as himself: with them he would establish, or fìnd already established by his ancestors, that relationship between guest and host (both called xenos, the word for a stranger) which was especially sacrosanct, under the protection of Zeus Xenios: this was one of the epithets of Zeus related to his general role as guardian of those outside the community – guests, suppliants and beggars.
The stranger travelled empty-handed, but he was given not only board and lodging: everywhere he called he received also gifts (xeneia); indeed it is clear that this was the main purpose and profìt of peaceful travel. Menelaus and Helen travelled in order to amass great wealth and carne home from Egypt bringing rich gifts from their hosts (Odyssey 4.78ff); Menelaus suggests to Telemachus that they should make a journey together through Greece, ‘nor will anyone just send us away, but he will give us one thing to take, some well-made bronze tripod or cauldron or pair of mules or a gold cup’ (Odyssey 15.82ff). Such gifts were due under all circumstances as a matter of honour, even for a one night stand: ‘there they stayed the night, and he gave them xeneia’ (Odyssey 3.490). Odysseus had typically turned the custom to his own profìt and was even prepared to ask for his due: he would have been back home long ago if he had not been keen to ‘collect wealth through travelling over many lands, for Odysseus knows about gain above all other men’ ; ‘he is bringing much good treasure, acquired by asking among people’ – ‘enough to keep a man and his heirs to the tenth generation’ (Odyssey 19.268ff).
Though Homer must exaggerate their worth, he shows that these gifts were always of luxury items, and particularly of metalwork, drawn from the treasures of the household – copper, gold, Silver, fine fabrics and wines, cauldrons, mixing bowls, tripods, decorated armour and swords. They may have been given before: Menelaus presents Telemachus with a mixing bowl which he had received from the king of Sidon (Odyssey 15.113ff). If the thing got out of hand, one could perhaps recoup one’s outlay by a levy among the people, as Alcinous suggests (Odyssey 13.14f). As with marriage gifts there is not usually a direct exchange involved: in the first instance it is an expression of competitive generosity. The immediate return is the pleasure of news and stories; but there is the creation of a link for the future: ‘choose a good present and the return will be worthy’ (Odyssey 1.318ff); ‘you gave those gifts in vain though you gave thousands: for if you had come to the land of Ithaca while he was alive he would have sent you away with good return for your presents and a worthy xeneia, as is right when someone begins it’ (Odyssey 24.284). An old guest-friend of Priam ransoms one of his sons (Iliad 21.42). There is the great scene when Glaucus and Diomedes meet in battle and establish their lineage: ‘then you are a guest-friend of mine of old through my father’, for their fathers had met long ago and gifts had been exchanged. The two heroes agree not to fìght, and cement their ancestral friendship by an exchange of armour in which Zeus took away Glaucus’ wits, for he accepted bronze for gold (Iliad 6.119ff: this is the only passage where direct gift exchange is mentioned). A breach of the rules of guest-friendship was indeed the main cause of the Trojan war: for Paris stole Helen from Menelaus on such a visit, and Troy is therefore doomed.
Though they may resemble primitive commercial transactions in the element of immediate or ultimate return expected, such gift relations are really a quite different mode even of regulating exchange in the societies and areas where they operate, as Marcel Mauss has shown. In the Homeric world their purpose is not primarily related to profìt or even ultimate benefit, but (like bridegifts and the feasting of peers) to the acquisition of honour, and the creation of a network of obligations.
The relationships thus established both enhanced the standing of the basileus within the community, and created a band of hetairoi who might be called on to enable him to engage in the traditional activities of cattle raiding and piracy. The first of these must have caused considerable trouble, since the private action of a group could easily lead to public reaction from aggrieved neighbours. The dangers of the situation are well brought out in the story told by Nestor of his reprisal raid against the men of Elis, which seems initially to have been a private family venture. But the spoils were publicly distributed to any of the Pylian nobility who had a claim against the men of Elis, with the fortunate result that, when the entire Elean forces attacked, there was enough support in Pylos for a full scale battle to ensue (Iliad 11.67off). It is not surprising that these land raids seem normally to have been somewhat minor and clandestine affairs, and are mainly referred to as phenomena of the past.
Sea-raiding was different. As Thucydides says,
In early times the Greeks and the barbarians of the mainland coasts and islands, as they began to voyage abroad on ships more, turned to raiding, led by men of power for the sake of their own profit and the support of the poor; they would attack and plunder the towns which were unwalled or composed of isolated settlements; they triade most of their living from this, having no sense of shame in the profession, but rather glorying in it.
(Thucydides 1.5)
He goes on to note that in Homer the questions traditionally asked of new arrivals are ‘Strangers, who are you? From whence do you sail the watery wastes? Is it for trade, or do you wander at random like raiders over the sea, who voyage risking their lives and bringing harm to foreigners?’ (Odyssey 3.71ff and elsewhere). Raiding was carried on in long boats with up to fìfty oars (pentekonters), single banked, and a primitive sail for running before the wind. They were rowed by the fìghting men, who would beach the ship by a settlement and rely on surprise for success. It seems to have been carried on primarily against foreigners, not Greeks: the aims were cattle, women slaves and other booty; the chief danger was in delay, allowing the natives to call in help and counterattack. The activity was normally regarded as honourable; only Eumaeus the swineherd, as a representative of a lower class and a different morality, has his doubts: ‘the blessed gods do not love evil deeds, but honour justice and uprightness in men: when fierce and hostile men go against a foreign land and Zeus gives them booty, and they have filled their ships and departed for home, even in the hearts of these men falls mighty fear of divine vengeance’ (Odyssey 14.83ff). Odysseus is more realistic, cursing his belly ‘which gives much evil to men, for whose sake benched ships are rigged out to bring harm to enemies over the waste sea’ (Odyssey 17.286ff). Booty was shared among the participants according to their standing: the ‘share of booty’ (geras) of a man is also his ‘share of honour’.
Though primarily and perhaps originally related to the interests of the aristocracy, the way in which these warrior bands might benefit the community is clear. Odysseus spins a long story about his imaginary life in Crete, which shows this. After the account of his upbringing mentioned above (p. 38), he describes how, in spite of his dubious birth and poverty, he had married a wife from a landed family because of his prowess. Nine times he led a fleet against foreigners, and became rich and respected; so that when the expedition set off to Troy, public opinion forced him to be one of the leaders. The expedition it seems was a public venture. When he returned he went back to sea-raiding on his own account: he found it easy enough to fill nine ships. The companions feasted for six days and then set off for Egypt. There the expedition carne to grief as a result of delay, and the troubles of its imaginary leader began (Odyssey 14.199ff).
There are other indications that the poet envisaged the expedition to Troy as a public one: a public fine is mentioned for those who refused to go (Iliad 13.669ff), and the feasting was at public not private expense: ‘dear leaders and captains of the Argives, who drink at public cost with the sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, and each command your bands’ (Iliad 17.248ff; compare 4.3428ff). Institutionalized warfare was an area where the community had an interest in the maintenance of its aristocracy and their fìghting bands; the warrior might even be given a special grant of land by the people, a temenos (the word survives from Myceanean Greek, though its meaning may have changed): ‘Glaucus, why are we two especially honoured, with seats of honour and meat and full cups, in Lycia, and everyone looks on us as gods, and we possess a great temenos by the banks of the Xanthus, fair orchards and wheat-bearing fìelds? Now we must stand with the first of the Lycians and face fiery battle, so that the Lycians in their thick breastplates may say “Our nobles that rule in Lycia are great men, they eat fat sheep and drink the best honey-sweet wine. But they are powerful men, for they fìght with the first of the Lycians”’ (Iliad 12.310ff).
Homeric descriptions of fìghting are confused; but, combining them with the archaeological evidence from grave goods, it seems that warfare in the late Dark Age was heavily dependent on the individual champion and his companions, who constituted almost a warrior class. Only they had the resources to acquire the metal for their equipment: the rest of the community seems to have been lightly armed with primitive weapons, and to have done little more than watch the duels of the nobility. They were armed with bronze cuirass, greaves and helmet, and shields in a variety of shapes, held from a central grip and made from leather or bronze plates. The primary offensive weapons were iron swords and two or more spears, which could be thrown and used for thrusting. If it is right to interpret the anachronistic chariots as horses, it would seem that the warriors rode to battle with a mounted squire, but fought on foot: the development of a true cavalry is later.
Oral epic created a heroic past for a particular group in society and glorified its values; since the Homeric poems established themselves as the bible of the Greeks, the ethic they portray had a permanent influence on Greek morality. It is essentially a competitive ethic, expressed in the words of Glaucus, ‘always to be best and pre-eminent over others, and not to shame the seed of my fathers’ (Iliad 6.208f). The moral vocabulary concerns principally success or skill: a good man is good at something, at fighting or counsel; the word aretē is closer to ‘excellence’ than ‘virtue’. It is a public attribute measured by the amount of honour (timē) given by others to a man; and timē itself had a physical expression in the geras or share of booty due to him. It was also an individualistic ethic: a man’s timē was his own concern, even the gods cared little for any timē but their own; the chief exception to this self-regarding ethic was the duty to help a friend.
It has been described as a shame culture rather than a guilt culture: the sanctions protecting morality were not internal to a man but external, in the sense of shame (aidōs) that a man must feel at losing status before his peers: so public penalties were in terms of loss of property, for property was one aspect of honour. The gods have little to do with this morality, except in the sense that they largely conform to it. Only Zeus in a general way has some concern with the triumph of right, or at least the preservation of certain basic rules like those of guest-friendship. It is typical of such a culture that internal states of conflict are little recognized, and that admissions of fault or failure are hard to make, for they involve public loss of face: Homeric heroes do not deny responsibility for their actions, but they often also claim that an external divine force was responsible, and see no incompatibility. In fact the whole language of psychic phenomena is reified and externalized: mental states are identical with their physical symptoms, and head, lungs, belly and knees are thought of as the seats of the emotions.
This aristocratic style of life had its roots in a distant past of nomadic warrior bands, and never wholly disappeared in Greece. Its continuity can be illustrated from the history of the Greek word phratra, which is cognate with the almost universal Indo-European kinship term for brother (German Bruder, Celtic brathir, Latin frater, French frère). In Greek the word is not used of blood relationship; it rather designates a ‘brotherhood’, a social group. It is used twice in Homer: ‘divide your men by tribes (phylai), by phratries, Agamemnon, so that phratry may help phratry and tribes tribes’ (Iliad 2.362f see also 9.63). The tribes were originally military divisions, the phratries presumably also – the old word perhaps for the bands of hetairoi. They seem to have been widespread as a political division smaller than the tribe. The power of the aristocratic genos in many cities down to the Persian Wars was dependent on the continuity of these political and social groupings around the genos; the names of the Bacchiadai and Kypselidai of Corinth or the Philaidai, Alkmeonidai and Peisistratidai of Athens, with their characteristic suffixes, claim descent from an often quite recent ancestor as a genos: but these aristocratic families clearly had far wider traditional support. In Athens for instance at least until Kleisthenes the phratries were a major political force; and each phratry seems to have been dominated by one or two noble families (see below p. 276). And long after they lost their political role the phratries continued as cult groups and social clubs.
Other less tangible attitudes survived. The moral code was one; the importance of drinking clubs another. The philosophic or literary symposium of Plato and others was one descendant, as were the rowdy hetaireiai or aristocratic clubs; these could be organized to influence court cases and elections and even used to overthrow the government of Athens through Street murders in 411 BC. And the prevalence of cases of drunken assault (hybris) by young aristocrats in the legal literature of the fourth century shows that the suitors were never really taught to behave.
A third continuity is the place of the gift or benefit in social relationships. The Christian notion of charity, giving without expectation of return (except in heaven) comes through Judaism from the ancient near east, a world of such gross inequalities that giving served merely to emphasize the gap between classes and the merits of the powerful in the eyes of God. In the more equal societies of Greece and Rome giving is for a return, and establishes a social relationship between giver and recipient in which one is temporarily or permanently under an obligation to the other.
IV (#ulink_54f2d89f-f507-5b00-998a-4a4cdece1fb0)
The End of the Dark Age: the Community (#ulink_54f2d89f-f507-5b00-998a-4a4cdece1fb0)
BEYOND THE aristocratic world of the oikos lay the community as a whole, which in Homer is presupposed or glimpsed occasionally on the outskirts of the main action, but in Hesiod takes the central position. The chief social division is that between aristocracy and the people (dēmos), who are primarily the free peasantry, though there is no sign that the landless thēs was excluded from any rights. In contrast the craftsman or dēmiourgos (‘public worker’) held an ambiguous position. He was often an outsider, travelling from community to community; Eumaeus claims such men are welcome as xenoi, and lists them: the seer, the healer of pains, the worker in wood, the inspired singer (Odyssey 17.382ff). The class also surely includes metal workers; heralds, who seem to have been public officiate, were dēmiourgoi of a rather different sort. The presence of outsiders among the craftsmen is one reason for their ambiguous status; another is the fact that they possessed skills which were highly valued by the aristocracy, without being aristocratic: an artist was in some sense both divinely inspired and less than mortal. This ambivalence is reflected in myth: the gods both give and take away. Blindness is a common motif: insight replaces outsight when Apollo blinds his prophets. Demodocus was ‘the favourite bard whom the Muse loved especially, and gave him both good and evil; she took away his eyes but gave him sweet song’ (Odyssey 8.62ff). Rightly or wrongly Demodocus was seen as Homer.
The mythic prototypes of human skills are themselves physically marred. The blacksmith is important enough to have a god, but in social terms he is lame like his god, Hephaistos: ‘From the anvil he rose limping, a huge bulk, and his thin legs moved under him … with a sponge he wiped his face and hands, and his sturdy neck and hairy chest’ (Iliad 18.41 off). To the other gods he is a figure of fun: ‘unquenchable laughter fìlled the blessed gods when they saw Hephaistos bustling through the house’ (Iliad 1.599f); even his marriage to Aphrodite is a marriage of opposites, which leads to the delightful folk-tale of Aphrodite and Ares, love and war, caught in adultery by his golden net (Odyssey 8.266ff). In contrast the goddess who presides over the women’s work of weaving, Athene, was normal; for that activity was fully integrated into the home, not a skilled craft. In Hesiod, Prometheus, the embodiment of forethought, stole fire from heaven for man, and so created technology; in retaliation Zeus created woman (Theogony 535ff; Works and Days 42ff). Such attitudes to the craftsman and his skills in myth reflect the early ambivalence of his social status; in the case of manual skills this attitude persisted: Greece was a society which never carne to terms with technology.
The basic forms of Greek political organization remained the same throughout the history of the city-state, and are already present in Homer; it was the powers apportioned to the different elements and the criteria for membership which varied in different periods. In early Greece an assembly of all adult male members of the community (the agora or gathering) was subordinate to the boulē (council) of the elders, which seems to consist of the heads of the noble families, the basilēes. The existence of an executive or magistracy, whether elective or hereditary, is obscured by the memories of Mycenean kingship in Homer; but slightly later evidence shows many varied forms, principally that of the annual magistrate or board of magistrates, whose powers were effectively limited by the existence of the elders in council, and the fact that the magistrates themselves were young men who only entered the council through holding such offices.
Debate within the council or before the people was the basis of decision-making, though there was no formal voting procedure. The traditional pair of activities of the basileus is warfare and debate, which are of equal importance. Odysseus is ‘the best in good counsel and mighty in war’ (Iliad 2.273); Achilles claims, ‘I am the best of all the bronze-clad Achaeans in war, even though others are better in assembly’ (Iliad 18.105f); of Hector and his hetairos it is said, ‘one was far better at words, the other with the sword’ (Iliad 18.252). These proverbial distinctions show the enormous importance of the spoken word and persuasion in public debate from the beginning.
There are several detailed descriptions of political decision-making in Homer; the longest and most revealing is that in book 2 of the Iliad. As a result of a dream, Agamemnon orders ‘the loud voiced heralds to summon the long haired Achaeans to the Gathering … but first he called a council of the great hearted elders’. The council is seated except for the speaker; he reveals a plan to test the troops by proposing withdrawal from Troy; the other elders must oppose this in assembly. Nestor speaks in favour, and the councillors proceed to the assembly, which is controlled by nine heralds. After the people are seated, Agamemnon takes his skēptron or staff of office and addresses them standing. His proposal is so popular that it starts a rush for the ships, and the meeting looks like breaking up in chaos. But Odysseus takes the skēptron as a badge of authority and intercepts the flight, using persuasion on the nobles and ordering the troops. When the assembly has returned and settled down, there is one recalcitrant man of the people, Thersites, lovingly described as the archetypal agitator, ‘the ugliest man who came to Troy, bandy legged and lame in one foot, his two shoulders rounded over a hollow chest; his head above was misshapen and sprouted a scanty stubble’. He proceeds to abuse Agamemnon, until Odysseus threatens him, and hits him with the skēptron; whereupon the people mutter their approval of the best thing that Odysseus has ever done. Athene disguised as a herald secures silence, and Odysseus and Nestor in turn persuade the army to stay and fight; Agamemnon ostensibly gives way, and dismisses the Achaeans to prepare for battle.
From this and other accounts the essentials of procedure are clear. Business was normally first discussed in the council of elders and then presented to the Gathering of the people: on both occasions there was debate, and disagreement was possible. But only elders were expected to speak: the assembly’s role was as much to hear the decision of the council as to ratify it. On the other hand the assembly had to be held for major decisions; and the importance and power of public opinion was recognized. It is the dēmos who gives geras to the nobles (Odyssey 7.150); in Odysseus’ Cretan story it was the dēmos who forced him to sail to Troy (Odyssey 14.239); and even though Telemachus hoped in vain to appeal to the people of Ithaca against his fellow aristocrats the suitors, he did at least force them to justify their position in open assembly (Odyssey 2). There was a regular place of assembly even in the Achaean camp before Troy, ‘where the meeting and law (themis) was, and the altars of the gods were set up’ (Iliad 11.807f); the rituals and procedures essential for the orderly conduct of mass meetings were well established, and show remarkable similarities with the highly complex rituals surrounding the only later assemblies whose workings are known in detail, those of democratic Athens. Continuity and development are both present in the growth of the machinery of government from the primitive warrior assemblies of Homer to the classical city-state.
Outside the political and military spheres, the most important function of the basilēes was the regulation of disputes between individuals, in ways which are especially important, because they were the basis of the subsequent development of Greek law and legal procedure. Beyond a group of primitive tabus and customs, there was no conception of crime or system of justice in the modern sense, with laws written or unwritten of divine or human origin, and punishments inflicted by the community. The essential characteristic of Greek law is that it was originally a human system of public arbitration to settle the compensation due for injury.
In Homer the vocabulary is concrete, and refers to individual cases and specific rules: the actual decisions (dikai) are ‘straight’ or ‘crooked’ according to the extent to which they conform to the customs (themistes), the unwritten rules and precedents which justify decisions. The singular dikē is used in its later abstract sense of justice only twice in Homer, the singular themis only in the rather doubtful case quoted above (Iliad 11.807). The relation of these specifìc decisions and customs to the general order of the universe is expressed by the claim that the official staff (skēptron) and the themistes are a gift from Zeus: ‘the men who give dikai carry the skēptron in their hands, those who guard the themistes for Zeus’ (Iliad 1.238f); Zeus has given the basileus the skēptron and the themistes that he may take counsel for the people (Iliad 2.205f; 9.98f.), and ‘he is angry with men who in assembly judge with crooked themistes and drive out justice, not caring for the eye of the gods’ (Iliad 16.386ff: this is the only case in the Iliad of dikē in an abstract sense; the other example is Odyssey 14.84).
Two forms of procedure are known. The first is a primitive oath-taking test: Menelaus formally takes the skēptron in a dispute and demands that Antilochus swear a public oath by Poseidon that he did not cheat him in the chariot race; Antilochus refuses the challenge and offers compensation (Iliad 23.565ff). More complex is the procedure described as a scene on the shield of Achilles:
But the people were gathered in assembly. There a dispute had arisen and two men were quarrelling over the price of a dead man. One claimed to pay the full amount, addressing the people, the other refused to accept anything. Both were eager to accept a solution from an expert; the people were cheering both, supporting each side, and the heralds were restraining the people. But the elders sat on polished stones in a sacred circle, and held the sceptres in their hands. Then they rose before them, and in turn gave judgement. And in the middle lay two talents of gold to give to him who among them spoke judgement most straightly.
(Iliad 18.497ff)
This describes a formal arbitration. The proceedings are public, with all the ceremonies appropriate to a full assembly. The elders act as individual mediators not as judges; no decision can be enforced: rather the solution must be acceptable to both sides, and the elder whose opinion is accepted receives the mediation fee offered by one or both parties in the arbitration. The only sanction available to produce a solution is the pressure of public opinion, which at present is equally divided.
There are also a number of unusual features. Murder or homicide must always impose a strain on systems of arbitration, since the alternative to settlement is the commencement of a blood feud detrimental to the community. Public opinion will therefore be in favour of a settlement, but the blood price demanded may be too high for the murderer to pay, or the relatives may refuse compensation altogether; in either case the murderer must go into exile. The main reason given in Homer for being an exile is that one has killed a man, an action that carries no moral blame, and can indeed serve as an introduction to the best circles. Ajax, in trying to persuade Achilles to accept the compensation offered by Agamemnon, argues, ‘a man has accepted recompense from the murderer of his brother or his son; and the murderer may remain at home among the people, having paid a great price; while the heart and noble anger of the other is appeased by the recompense he has received’ (Iliad 9.632ff); the implication is that a man may also refuse compensation or stand out for more than the other possesses. The case on the shield of Achilles has a further twist: the amount of blood price is not in dispute, but the aggrieved relative wishes to refuse it and so force the murderer into exile; the case has actually been brought by the murderer in order to put public pressure on the other to accept a blood price. The issue is therefore a complex one, for it is almost exactly on the borderline in the development of a system of arbitration towards a code of law involving public sanctions.
The basileus has a duty to mediate in disputes, but they are also a source of profìt: the mediator whose verdict is accepted receives the mediation fee; so Agamemnon tempts Achilles by offering him seven citadels inhabited by wealthy men ‘who will honour him like a god with gifts and perform fat themistes under his skēptron’ (Iliad 9.156ff); in other words he is likely to gain considerable profìt from mediation fees.
It was this system which galled Hesiod: as he warned his brother, the only people likely to derive profìt from their dispute were the ‘gift-eating basilēes’. Hesiod was clearly not referring to bribery: these gifts are the right of a mediator, and it is not suggested that they will make any direct difference to the verdict; on the other hand there was considerable doubt in Hesiod’s mind whether the verdict, the dikē, would be straight. In Boeotia the system seems to have developed far enough to have legal force.
So Hesiod took the decisive step in political thought of warning the rulers that there is such a thing as Justice.
She is the virgin Dikē born of Zeus, glorious and honoured by the gods who dwell on mount Olympus; and whenever anyone harms her by casting crooked blame, straightway sitting by her father Zeus, son of Kronos, she tells him of the minds of unjust men, until the people pays for the arrogance of its nobles who, plotting evil, bend judgements astray and speak crookedly. Take thought of this, you gift-eating nobles, straighten your words, utterly forget crooked judgements.
(Works and Days 256ff)
For Hesiod dikē (justice) has replaced timē (honour) as the central virtue for the community and its leaders: he speaks as a prophet warning the nobles that their misdeeds will destroy society: the whole city suffers from the vengeance of Zeus on them; he causes plague and famine, barrenness in women, and poverty; he destroys their army and their walls and their ships at sea (Works and Days 24off).
Hesiod’s concern with social justice led him to create a political vocabulary. His thought is not normally expressed in truly abstract concepts; instead he speaks through the manipulation of myth: the eastern myth of the ages of man is retold to reveal the flight of justice from earth in the fifth and worst age, the age of iron (p. 91); the traditional form of the animal fable is given a new political dimension in the story of the hawk and the nightingale, which Hesiod himself probably invented. And the structure of political argument, the relationships between concepts, are expressed through a mode of thought which is specifically Greek, and which has had a deep effect on the cultural tradition of the western world – personification. Ideas derived from concrete institutions become abstract by acquiring the status of a divinity; the connections between these abstractions are expressed in terms of family relationships. The random examples in Homer (mostly concerned with physical states like Fear and Death and Sleep) have become in Hesiod a complex and meaningful system. Individual dikai (judgements) are parts of the goddess Dikē, who is hurt when they are perverted; she is the daughter of Zeus. Zeus indeed becomes the protector of human society:
He married second rich Themis (Custom), who bore the Hōrai (Norms), Eunomiē (Social Order), Dikē (Justice) and blessed Eirēnē (Peace).
(Theogony 901ff)
Or in modern terms, the relationship between divine order and human order produces the norms which establish good rule, justice and peace. A whole social ethic is expressed in terms of myth and personification, an ethic in Which justice and social order have replaced the self-regarding virtues of the Homeric nobility.
The characteristic form of political organization of the Greeks was that of the polis or city-state, the small independent community, self-governing and usually confined to one city and its immediate countryside; Aristotle described man as ‘by nature an animal of the polis’ (Politics 1.1253a); the central theme of Greek history is the development of the city-state to become the dominant form of government in the Greek-speaking world for roughly a thousand years, enabling city dwellers to control directly all or much of their own government, and to feel a local loyalty to an extent which no modern society has achieved. It is a natural question to ask, when and how did the polis arise? Some features of the Homeric poems point to an earlier state; but as far as social and political organization are concerned, despite the importance of the genos and the oikos, Homer and Hesiod show that the polis already existed in all essential aspects by the end of the Dark Age. Homer takes the same view of human nature as Aristotle: the Cyclopes are utterly uncivilized, not only because they ignore the rules of guest-friendship; ‘they possess neither counsel-taking assemblies nor themistes, but dwell on the tops of high hills in hollow caves, and each one utters judgements for his children and wives, and they take no heed of one another’ (Odyssey 9.112ff). But though Homer recognized the existence of the polis, it was Hesiod who gave it the language of self-awareness. He stands at the beginning of Greek thought about politics, as about science and theology.
The origins of the polis are one of the great themes of early Greek history, whose various aspects form the main subject of this book. The problem is best explored from two points of view. The first concerns the origins and development of Greek political institutions, the continuing process of change and reform towards a form of political rationality which seems unique in world history. A society with little or no previous history emerged from the Dark Age without social or religious constraints, and was able to create a sense of community based on justice and reason, perhaps because its institutions were primitive and its forms of leadership as yet insecure. The chieftains or big-men of the Homeric world developed into an aristocracy only slowly and in competition with more egalitarian forms of communal life, which ultimately proved superior because they were based on the citizen army. In this sense the polis is a conceptual entity, a specifìc type of political and social organisation.
But the development of the polis is also a process of urbanisation, which can be traced in the physical remains. The physical characteristics of the polis in the late Dark Age are described by Nausicaa:
Around our city is a high fortified wall; there is a fair harbour on either side of the city, and the entrance is narrow. Curved ships are drawn up on either side of the road, for every man has a slipway to himself; and there is their assembly place by the fine temple of Poseidon, laid with heavy paving sunk in the earth.
(Odyssey 6.262ff)
The walled city is common in Homer: similes and descriptions show cities being besieged and cities on fire; even the camp of the Achaean heroes before Troy is fitted out with the essential characteristics of a city: city wall, meeting place and religious altars.
Smyrna was according to one tradition the city of Homer himself; it was destroyed about 600 BC by the Lydians, and excavations in a suburb of the modern city of Izmir have revealed one of the most impressive urban sites of the archaic age. The walled city on what was once a natural promontory with two harbours fits Nausicaa’s description well. The earliest evidence of Greek settlement there is around 1000 BC; it used to be thought that the first walls were constructed in the mid ninth century; and although archaeologists now doubt that date, they cannot be later than the early eighth century. Some time later the walls were remodelled, and by then the area within them was densely built, with four or fìve hundred houses of mud brick on stone foundations; the population is estimated at around two thousand, with perhaps half as many again living outside the walls. After destruction caused probably by earthquake around 700 Bc, the walls were rebuilt on a massive scale and the city was laid out on a regular plan; the archaeologist who excavated the site has described this redistribution of land and central planning as ‘the first certain and unambiguous apparition of the organized Hellenic polis’ (J. M. Cook); but it is clear in fact that community life and some form of community organization goes back to around 800 and the first walls.
The same picture of increasing prosperity and the increasing complexity of social and political life emerges from other sites: walled cities must have been common by the eighth century. The earliest evidence of civic institutions apart from walls must be temple building, for the Gathering Place (agora), being empty, is hard to find without total excavation, and virtually impossible to date. The earliest temples come from the mid eighth century and by 700 they are appearing in most city centres; a clay model from the shrine of Hera at Argos shows their form – a megaron-type hall with porch virtually identical with the housing of the nobility, which is the prototype of the archaic and classic Greek temple.
The growing importance of city life and city institutions is related to other changes already mentioned, the shift from animal husbandry to arable farming and the declining importance of the oikos as a social phenomenon; behind them all may He a major new factor: population growth. Absolute figures are unobtainable; and attempts to argue from the analysis of graves in the well-explored region of Attica have proved controversial. What is clear is that, whereas the number of datable graves per generation in Attica remained relatively Constant in the period 1000–800, between 800 and 700 they multiplied by a factor of six; if these statistics were taken to reflect the population reasonably accurately, they would reveal an increase in birthrate equal to that reached only occasionally and under optimum conditions in the history of man, of around 4% per annum. But the idea that within the period 800–750 the population of Attica may have quadrupled, and almost doubled again in the next fifty years, has met with strong resistance. It has been suggested that the number of graves reflects, not an increasing population but an increasing deathrate, due perhaps to water shortage, climatic change and plague: this theory seems implausible, since the period is in general one of increased prosperity throughout the Greek world. Alternatively it has been suggested that the figures for graves discovered are distorted by changes in burial customs and perhaps by the absence of whole social classes from the archaeological record; this has the advantage of being a hypothesis for which there can be no evidence. No theory has yet won wide acceptance; and it is unlikely that any explanation can do more than influence slightly the basic fact that the eighth century was a period of unprecedented population growth in Attica, and indeed throughout Greece: a half empty landscape was repeopled. Initially this must have led to a dramatic increase in prosperity and in urbanization, until the problems of overpopulation began to show themselves.
The religion of the Greeks must always have lacked unity; for it was both polytheistic and localized: Indo-European elements from the Mycenean Greek and later invasions fused with native pre-Greek Cycladic elements and borrowings from Minoan and Anatolian cult, to create a complex of myths, rituals and beliefs about the gods without any clear unifying principles. What unity Greek religion possessed, carne late, as Herodotus claims:
The origins of each of the gods, whether all of them had always existed, and their forms, were unknown to us until the day before yesterday, if I may say so. For I believe Hesiod and Homer to be about four hundred years before my time and no older. These are the men who created the theogony of the Greeks and gave the gods their names, distributed their honours and spheres of operation, and described their forms; the poets who are claimed to be older than these men are in my opinion later.
(Herodotus 2.53)
The date Herodotus gives is perhaps a hundred years too early; but his count may well be based on generations of 40 instead of 30 years. More interesting is the claim that Greek religion began with Hesiod and Homer: even when actual ritual practices were at variance with this picture, it is clear that the epic tradition on the one hand, and the individual genius of Hesiod on the other, did influence permanently the development of Greek religion.
For instance the dominance of myth over ritual is in marked contrast to other polytheistic religions, as is the comparative absence of more bizarre mythic elements. The consistent tendency to anthropomorphism and the organization of the world of the gods in terms of political and social relationships are characteristics which, if not epic in origin, derive their continuing impetus from epic. Such uniformity as Greek religion possesses derives to a large extent from the picture of the Olympian and subsidiary gods in Hesiod and Homer. On the other hand there is a whole area of the Greek religious experience, ignored by them and therefore by later literary sources, which was the focus for emotions strong enough to survive the silence of the epic poets: fertility cults, orgiastic rites, propitiation of the dead and hero cult. These aspects never found their systematic theologian, but remained powerful because they were rooted in a particular locality.
Most of the central practices of Greek religion are as old as the later Dark Age. In Homer temples are mentioned, and on one occasion the cult statue housed there; altars for animal sacrifìces are common. Professional priests existed at certain shrines, but they stood outside the normal organization of society; it is a characteristic of early Greece that the nobility performed most civic religious rituals by virtue of themselves holding priesthoods (often hereditary), without the intervention of a professional priestly caste. The sacrifice was the occasion for a feast, at which (for reasons which obviously worried Hesiod: Theogony 535ff) the gods received the entrails and the worshippers the edible portions.
Oracular shrines, from which by various means the enquirer might obtain advice about his future actions and their consequences, were already widely known: Homer mentions the shrine of Zeus at distant Dodona in Epirus and that of Apollo at Delphi. The interpretation of dreams was practised and the lot was also considered to reveal the will of the gods. The seer (mantis) was a valued member of the community: he knows ‘present and future and past’ (Iliad 1.70); though any unnatural or sudden natural phenomenon like lightning or thunder was material for his art, his primary means of discovering the right time for action was through watching the flight of birds according to fixed principles:
You tell me to obey the long winged birds; but I do not care whether they fly on the right to the dawn and the sun, or on the left to shadowy darkness. I put my trust in the counsel of mighty Zeus, who rules all things mortal and immortal: one bird is best, to fight for the fatherland.
(Iliad 12.237ff)
The evidence of heroic epic is fragmentary and potentially misleading; but it can be related to the subsequent development of Greek society. It can also be supported from comparative material: all the institutions of the Homeric world outside those of the polis find many parallels in other societies. But the usefulness of comparative material is not only in the way that it reveals the presuppositions behind isolated phenomena and suggests interpretations of them. It is also the interrelations between the institutions which can best be understood through comparing societies with similar structures. For instance, the Waigal valley area of Nuristan (eastern Afghanistan) possesses a ‘society in which leaders have influence rather than authority and where an uncomplicated technology is used to meet the demands of a highly competitive ethos’. In this pastoral community, rank is sought and achieved through competitive feasts of merit, bridewealth and dowry are exchanged, disputes are settled by mediation through the elders. The objects of status are made by a separate and inferior class of craftsmen, and are even tripods, bowls and cups. The original warrior aims of killing Muslims in raids have had to be suspended; but the society exhibits the structural interrelation of many of the central aspects of early Greek society, and an ethic which is remarkably similar.
Similarly the process of state formation has been studied in a number of traditional societies in Africa and Polynesia. The Homeric society fits well this picture of the development of more complex political structures from a low basis of material culture through the emergence of the ‘big-man’, whose power rests initially on his ability to persuade the community to follow him as leader, but who succeeds in institutionalising his status in warfare, the judgment of disputes, and through ritual hospitality. Such personalised leadership, being fluid and without stable support structures, can often lead forward into more complex forms of social organisation.
The slow evolution of the Dark Age resulted in a world which might seem static and fixed in its aristocratic ideas. But the differences between nobility and people were not great in economic terms; the distinction rested on birth and consequent style of life. As the organs of the polis gained more signifìcance, the tension between the noble’s world of honour and the people’s world of justice became increasingly apparent; and the structural dissonance already present reacted with new factors to produce a century of change as swift and as fundamental as any in history.
V (#ulink_ea139570-6472-552f-b6b0-a8b9d7c8dfa8)
Euboean Society and Trade (#ulink_ea139570-6472-552f-b6b0-a8b9d7c8dfa8)
AS CONSERVATIVE philosophers like Plato and Aristotle saw, one of the most powerful elements leading to change in early Greece was a natural one – the sea, offering a constant invitation to contact and to trade with other peoples. The Greek world created by the migrations of the Dark Age was already not so much a land as a sea unit, centred on the Aegean; local trade on a small scale existed from the eleventh century onwards, and a certain number of eastern artefacts or skills found their way into the area, by stages from Cyprus to Crete or Rhodes and on, or as a result of sea-raiding.
Short-haul trading was never an activity of high social status; in a land famed for its seamanship, Odysseus is insulted by a Phaeacian nobleman: ‘you seem like one who travels with a well-benched ship, a master of sailors that are merchantmen, a man mindful of his cargo, watching his route and the gains he has snatched: you look no athlete’ (Odyssey 8.159ff). Hesiod’s instructions on seafaring (Works and Days 617–94) are mainly concerned with when and why not to go to sea: his gloomy view of trade is based on his father’s experience, and reflects the small profits and comparatively high risks involved in such Aegean trading.
But this was not the only form of trade. Most attempts to assess the role of trade in the earliest period misunderstand it because they fail to distinguish between local and long distance trade; they assume a model of trade which is in fact only appropriate in the more developed economic conditions of the late archaic and classical periods, when bulk trade in commodities had developed. Because this was increasingly carried on by professional merchants, and because the quantity of trade earlier (and hence its strictly economic effect) must have been slight, there is a tendency to underestimate the importance of trade in early Greece both as a political factor and as a catalyst of social and cultural change.
It was the aristocracy who must have given the initial impetus to wider exploration beyond the Aegean, by creating a demand for two commodities. The first was metals, and especially crude iron from which to manufacture their increasingly complex weapons and armour; the goddess Athene, visiting Ithaca in disguise, claims to be an aristocrat, ruler of the oar-loving Taphians, on a voyage carrying shining iron to Temesa in exchange for copper (Odyssey 1.180ff). The second requirement of an increasingly prosperous aristocracy was for the finished luxury goods which their competitive life style demanded and which were often beyond the skills of Greek craftsmen. It was in these two spheres that the high risks of long distance trade were offset by high profits; and one area which could clearly supply both needs was the near east.
The earliest Greek contacts were with the Canaanites of the Levantine coast, a people known to the Greeks as Phaenicians, probably because of their monopoly of the only colour-fast dye in antiquity, the purple (phoinix) extract from the murex shellfish. The coastal cities of Phoenicia controlled the great pine and cedar forests of the Lebanon, the chief source of timber for Egypt, as for King Solomon; they had long owed their prosperity to this and to their position as middlemen between Mesopotamia and Egypt. The collapse of Hittite and Egyptian power in the early Dark Age left them independent; and even after Assyrian expansion began in the ninth century, their position was little affected: the navies of Sidon, Tyre and Byblos controlled the south and eastern Mediterranean seaways for themselves or as Persian vassals until the conquests of Alexander the Great.
Phoenician culture was urban: the cities were usually independent of each other, and built on heavily fortified coastal islands or headlands. Their art shows the typical characteristics of a trading civilization: eclecticism in forms and motifs from Mesopotamia and especially Egypt, mass production, and a concentration of craftsmanship on small easily transported objects in precious materials such as metal and ivory ; the textiles for which they were famous have not survived. Their prosperity is denounced by the Old Testament prophets; Ezekiel for instance in the sixth century describes the trade of Tyre in detail:
Tarshish (in Spain) was a source of your commerce, from its abundant resources offering silver and iron, tin and lead, as your staple wares. Javan (Ionia, the Greeks), Tubal (in Cappadocia) and Meshech (Phrygia) dealt with you, offering slaves and vessels of bronze as your imports … Rhodians dealt with you, great islands were a source of your commerce, paying what was due to you in ivory and ebony… Dealers from Sheba (Aden) and Raamah (S. Arabia) dealt with you, offering the choicest spices, every kind of precious stone and gold, as your staple wares. Harran, Kanneh and Eden (in Mesopotamia), dealers from Asshur (Assyria) and all Media, dealt with you; they were your dealers in gorgeous stuffs, violet cloths and brocades, in stores of coloured fabric rolled up and tied with cords; your dealings with them were in these.
(Ezekiel 27.12–24)
The Greeks themselves believed that there had been earlier Phoenician settlements both in mainland Greece and the islands, and at the sites of many of their western colonies; the most famous of these stories is that of Kadmos (p. 93). But there is no archaeological evidence for such settlements, and the picture given in the Odyssey seems more plausible. Here the Phoenicians are traders, welcomed if mistrusted by the Greeks; such casual trade can be supported by eastern finds on Greek sites, and can be dated between the tenth and eighth centuries. More permanent contact began in the ninth century when the Phoenicians moved into eastern Cyprus, and founded Kition.
Many aspects of the culture and development of the Phoenician and Greek cities in this period are so similar that it is not always easy to see which was the innovator; for both were city-state cultures in a stage of rapid expansion, with a similar pattern of settlement in walled coastal sites, and perhaps even similar forms of government. Initially at least contact was friendly. Phoenician culture was technically more advanced, and literate: Phoenician craftsmen may have worked in Greek cities, on Rhodes, Crete and at Athens; and in the north Syrian trading posts Phoenicians and Greeks lived together from the early eighth century. The cultural consequences of this period of collaboration are discussed in the next chapter. The Phoenicians may have been the pioneers in opening up the western Mediterranean to trade, and perhaps in the foundation of colonies there: the traditional foundation date of their greatest colony, Carthage (814/3), is some two or three generations before any Greek venture; though the earliest archaeological evidence is late eighth century. At least it seems that the Phoenicians were responsible for the main technical innovations in naval architecture from the pentekonter to the trireme, and for showing the Greeks the importance and potential both of trade and seapower. But the ultimate result of such interchange was increasing conflict in Cyprus and rivalry for control of the west, which meant the gradual establishment of exclusive spheres of interest in the eastern Mediterranean, and in north Africa, Sicily and Spain, from the seventh century onwards.
The second phase of Greek contact with the east carne with the establishment of permanent Greek trading posts. It has long been obvious that the great changes in Greek art and culture which took place in the late eighth century were connected with the near east, and that this ‘orientalizing’ movement was only partly due to Phoenician trading or foreign craftsmen; but it used to be thought that the influences carne first to Ionia, whether through trade or overland across Asia Minor. More refined analysis of local pottery styles has shown that Ionian orientalizing is late and derivative; the earliest appearance of the style was in mainland Greece, at Corinth about 725. With recent excavations the routes of diffusion have become clear.
The excavations of Sir Leonard Woolley from 1936 to 1949 area classic example of the use of archaeology to solve a particular historical problem. He argued that the line of communication between Greece and the east in both the Mycenean and the archaic period must have passed between the Hittite and Egyptian spheres of influence, and therefore up the valley of the Orontes on the borders of Turkey and Syria; in a series of planned excavations he established the detailed history of this trade.
The Orontes valley was well known to the Myceneans; but there is no sign of Greek presence during the Dark Age, until the establishment shortly before 800 of what rapidly became a major trading post, at Al Mina on the mouth of the river. Unfortunately the town centre and residential quarters were not discovered, so that little can be said of the organization of the settlement: these areas had either been swept away when the river changed course, or had been built separately on higher ground. The excavations revealed the commercial quarter of a large port, with a succession of levels containing warehouses, offices and shops: the later warehouses were substantial single storey buildings of mud brick on stone foundations; they were arranged in blocks of fairly uniform size with a rectangular Street plan, and in some cases there was evidence of specialized trade – particular types of pottery container, a silversmith’s shop, and ivory tusks. There is little doubt that this was the main port for Greek trade with the east from about 800 until at least 600; and it remained important for a further 300 years.
The pottery shows that the site was occupied from the start by Phoenicians, Cypriots and Greeks. The early Greek pottery can be divided into two periods: the first lasts from 800 to 700, when there is a definite though short break in the occupation of the site. Sargon of Assyria conquered the area around 720; and under his successor Sennacherib, Cilicia and Syria revolted: the break in occupation probably coincides with the crushing of the revolt and the sack of Tarsus in 696. The shapes and decoration of the Greek pottery in this early period are distinctive; more recent excavations have shown that they derive from Euboea.
The place where these Euboeans (led perhaps by Greeks from Cyprus) established their settlement shows the typical signs of a trading post: it is on the fringes of an area of advanced civilization, where political control was weak, and where they could gain access to the luxury goods of Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and (through the Phoenicians) Egypt. The metals of south-east Anatolia were also exploited, for in the same period Greek geometric pottery similar to that at Al Mina is found at Tarsus; but whereas in Tarsus the Greeks seem to have lived in a native town, Al Mina was an established emporion or trading post, whose mixed community must have been reflected in its political and religious organization. The Greeks received iron, worked metal objects, fabrics, ivories and other semi-precious ornaments; it is far less easy to determine what they offered in exchange. Silver is relatively common in the Aegean area; and the later interest of Euboean towns in backward regions such as the west and the Chalcidice in north Greece, suggests that they may have engaged in slave-raiding to finance their eastern trade; Ezekiel at least mentions slaves as a typical Greek commodity.
The same pattern has been revealed in the west. The earliest western colony of the Greeks was also for some time the most distant – on the bay of Naples. The original settlement was a joint venture from the two main towns in Euboea, Chalcis and Eretria, on the island of Pithecusae (Ischia); the site is a steep-sided peninsula previously uninhabited, with two good harbours but little cultivable land nearby. Later, whether from political troubles or because the desire for security lessened, most of the settlers moved to the mainland where they founded Cumae. Excavations from 1952 at the original island settlement show that the Greeks arrived around 775; by 750 their numbers were substantial. The earliest pottery is mainly Euboean and Corinthian; one of the chief occupations of the community was iron smelting: a group of buildings used for metal-working and a number of clay mouthpieces for bellows have been found, together with iron slag which appears from analysis to come from Elba. Although no military or aristocratic tombs have yet been found, the early graves of the settlers show a high degree of sophistication; in particular they contain a large number of eastern objects – from the eighth century alone over a hundred Egyptian scarabs, and almost as many seals from north Syria and Cilicia, together with near eastern pottery; these objects must have come as a result of trade through Al Mina.
The history of Greek settlement on the bay of Naples is parallel to the history of Al Mina, though with important differences. The settlement may or may not have been an official colony of Chalcis and Eretria, rather than a trading post; the presence of Corinthian pottery is explained by the fact that Corinth was an essential staging point on the journey to the west, for Greeks tended to avoid the voyage round the Peloponnese by taking ship from Corinth. Once again the settlement was founded on the edge of the sphere of influence of a major power; for there is an obvious connection between its position and the Etruscans to the north, who were able to control the sources of metal in their area and also the tin and amber routes from Britain and the north. But whereas Phoenicia and Mesopotamia were more advanced than the Greeks, Etruscan culture was only just entering its urban phase.
The Etruscans are absent from Homer; they appear first in Hesiod (Theogony 1016), and in one of the archaic Homeric hymns to Dionysos (7), which describes how the god was carried off when ‘there carne swiftly over the wine-dark sea Tyrsenian (Etruscan) pirates on a well-decked ship’. The urbanization of Etruscan settlements from the eighth century onwards may be a natural development; but in most respects contact with Greeks transformed Etruscan culture. The Phoenicians do not seem to have penetrated as far north as this before the early seventh century; so it must have been on the basis of Greek seafaring that an area of hill towns so devoid of natural harbours took to the sea, and won its reputation for piracy. The beginnings of Etruscan culture are marked by an ‘orientalizing phase’; the first signs of eastern imports begin around 750, and the phase is at its height from 700 to 600. The exact significance of this phenomenon is linked to the controversial question of the origins of the Etruscans, since it has been used to support the ancient theory that they were immigrants from Lydia. But the objects themselves are not Lydian: they are no different from those found in contemporary Greek sites. It seems likely therefore that this trade was not in the hands of Etruscans or Phoenicians (at least initially), but rather of Greeks; even before 750 Euboean pottery is found at Veii and elsewhere in south Etruria, and a distinctive form of dress pin is known from both Etruria and Pithecusae. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the orientalizing phase is followed from 600 by a period in which Etruscan culture is dominated by Greek imports and Greek artistic techniques; and the adaptation of Greek writing and Greek infantry tactics (below pp. 95, 124) are further signs of the importance of Greek influence on Etruria. As with the Phoenicians, the later evidence of piracy, rivalry and open warfare between Greeks and Etruscans is a product of close contact which initially was friendly. So began the process of the Hellenization of Italy, which was to culminate in the culture of Rome, whose early culture was deeply influenced by contact with the Greeks.
The trade route which can be traced from the near east to Etruria through Al Mina and Pithecusae was in the first instance the product of a search for metals and luxury goods on the part of the aristocracy of Euboea: at its centre lay a society whose life style was influenced as much by the wanderings of Odysseus as by the warrior virtues of the Iliad. Of the two chief cities on Euboea, Chalcis probably lies under the modern town and has not been excavated; but Swiss and Greek excavations at Eretria show that it emerged suddenly as a prosperous community some time after 825. The period 750–700 was one of major temple building, and in the next century there were considerable public works in fortification and to control the river course. The absence of earlier remains is perhaps explained by a site half way between Chalcis and Eretria on the edge of the Lelantine Plain at Lefkandi: here British excavations have revealed a large settlement, with remarkable continuity and increasing prosperity throughout the Dark Age, until a sharp decline after 825; the site was finally abandoned around 700. It has reasonably been suggested that this was the original Eretrian settlement, which moved to the later Eretria in the late ninth century. The importance of the community at Lefkandi is shown by the continutuity and size of the settlement throughout the Dark Ages, and by the comparatively large amount of gold ornaments and eastern imports found in the tombs; the working of metal is attested by a ninth century bronze foundry.
A pale reflection of the last age of this society survives in the literary sources, with memories of a great war fought between Chalcis and Eretria for possession of the Lelantine Plain. In a brief sentence Thucydides contrasts it with other early border wars: ‘it was particularly in the old war between the Chalcidians and the Eretrians that the rest of the Greek world also divided in alliance with one side or the other’ (Thucydides 1.15). Scattered references to early friendships between cities can be used to establish a tentative list of those on each side:
Other cities may be added with less certainty, but these names are already impressive enough to justify Thucydides’ claim that the conflict split Greece into two rival camps, and that in this respect it differed from earlier border wars; he does not however suggest that the war was comparable in its organization to the Trojan or Persian Wars, with which it is implicitly contrasted. The evidence suggests not so much joint expeditions or grand alliances, as a series of limited border wars with their epicentre in the Lelantine Plain: Thessalians helped Chalcis on the battlefield, but in most cases the conflict was more indirect; it is noticeable that pairs of neighbours, traditionally hostile to each other, tend to be found in opposite camps. The earlier co-operation between Chalcis and Eretria ended abruptly; political troubles between the settlers may be behind the move from Pithecusae to Cyme; Corinthians drove out Eretrian settlers from Corcyra in 733, Chalcidians in Sicily expelled their fellow Megarian settlers from Leontinl; Corinth and Samos helped Sparta against the Messenians. The various episodes seem to belong to the last thirty years of the eighth century. The consequences of this series of conflicts was a set of alignments which remained remarkably stable in the subsequent century, and had great influence on the political and economic geography of Greek expansion. The Eretrians and their friends were frozen out of the west by Chalcis and Corinth, to the ultimate advantage of Corinthian trade; the oracle at Delphi became closely linked with western colonization and the friends of Corinth. On the other side the position of Eretria and Miletus with their allies (especially Megara) was stronger in the area of the Black Sea and its approaches.
But these long term consequences need bear little relation to the origins of the conflict, which seem to have been in the struggle for territory between two neighbouring aristocratic communities. Two factors transformed this border war into a larger conflict. The first was that the two states involved were the centre of a nexus of trade carried on by or on behalf of the aristocracy; this trade will have resulted in a series of guest-friendships between individual aristocrats like those described in the Homeric poems; in the new world of the polis the increasing institutionalization of the position of these aristocrats meant that as magistrates they could speak for their respective communities, and so involve them in international political relations for the first time. The transition from aristocratic household to city-state had been made in the field of international relations, though vestiges of an older style of diplomacy always remained. In classical Greece a state would appoint as its representative abroad a native of the foreign state, who would belong to a prominent family in his city, as hereditary proxenos or guest-friend: the old concept of aristocratic guest-friendship lies behind this system.
The Lelantine War marked the end of an era in another way. It was the last war fought in the old style between the leading proponents of that style; an early oracle ran:
Best of all land is Pelasgian Argos,
the horses of Thessaly, the women of Sparta,
and the men who drink the water of holy Arethusa (in Chalcis)
(Palatine Anthology 14.73)
Strabo, who mentions this poem, claims also that Eretria controlied Andros, Teos, Ceos and other islands; and he records an inscription from the shrine of Artemis Amarynthios near Eretria which mentioned a procession of 3000 infantry, 600 horsemen and 60 chariots (Strabo 10.448) – a large force for such a city, and an impressive display of horsepower. The aristocracy of Chalcis was called the ‘horse-rearers’ (hippobotai), and ancient descriptions of the fighting emphasize the importance of ‘cavalry’ (that is probably aristocratic mounted infantry); it was in fact a gentleman’s war, for another inscription in the shrine of Artemis recorded an agreement ‘not to use long distance missiles’, that is the stones and arrows of the lower classes. The style of fighting was perhaps remembered in the next generation, for despite the future tenses Archilochos seems to look back in saying:
No bows will be stretched in numbers, nor slings in multitudes, when Ares joins the struggle in the plain; but it will be the dour work of swords, for this is the style of battle that they are masters of, the spear-famed lords of Euboea.
(Archilochos Fragment 3)
It was a truly epic war. One by one the champions fell; Kleomachos the Thessalian was commemorated with a pillar in the gathering place of Chalcis; the funeral of Amphidamas champion of Chalcis was celebrated with heroic contests modelled on those in epic, at which Hesiod won his prize (Works and Days 654–7). And on the other side excavations at Eretria have revealed by the West Gate looking towards the road to the Lelantine Plain a shrine with many seventh century offerings and sacrifices over a group of six warrior cremations from the period 720–680; the central and earliest one was of a noble buried with four iron swords, five spearheads of iron and one of bronze (a Mycenean heirloom, perhaps serving as his skēptron), and a handsome Phoenician scarab in a gold setting – a basileus of Eretria who (like Glaucus and Sarpedon in the Iliad) was with his companions especially honoured during his life and looked on as a god after his death.
How long the war lasted is uncertain, as is its outcome. The Chalcidians won one battle with Thessalian help, but the archaeological evidence from Eretria suggests that it suffered no major setback. Lefkandi was finally abandoned; but that is not surprising, for it stands half way between Chalcis and Eretria on the edge of the disputed Lelantine Plain, which geographically belongs to Chalcis. At Al Mina Euboean interest virtually disappears; after the break around 700, the pottery from the period 700–600 is largely Corinthian (perhaps carried by Aeginetans, who produced no pottery of their own) and east Greek, from such centres as Rhodes, Samos, Chios and (probably) Miletus. It seems that as usual neither protagonist in the war benefited: exhausted by the conflict, they were never again politically important. The rewards of their exploits overseas and the leadership in Greece passed to others; the old oracle was continued to fit a new generation:
….But better still than these are they who dwell between Tiryns and Arcadia rich in sheep, the linen-corseleted Argives, goads of war.
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