The
term Archaic Age, meaning the “Old-Fashioned Age” and
designating Greek history from approximately 750 to 500
B.C., stems from art history. Modern scholars of Greek art
judged the style of works from this period as looking more
old fashioned than the more naturalistic art of the
following period (the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.),
which they saw as producing models of beauty and therefore
named the Classical Age. Archaic sculptors, for example,
made free-standing figures who stood stiffly, staring
straight ahead in imitation of Egyptian statuary. By the
Classical Age, sculptors depicted their subjects in more
varied and lively poses. During the Archaic Age the Greeks
developed the most widespread and influential of their new
political forms, the city-state, or polis .
The
Characteristics of the City-state (Polis)
Polis,
from which we derive our term “politics,” is usually
translated as “city-state” to emphasize its difference
from what we today normally think of as a city. As in many
earlier states in the ancient Near East, the polis
included not just an urban center, often protected by
stout walls in later centuries, but also countryside for
some miles around with its various small settlements. Members of the polis,
then, lived both in the town at its center and also in
the villages scattered around its territory.1 Presiding over
the polis as protector and patron was a particular god,
as, for example, Athena
at Athens2.
Different communities could chose the same deity as their
protector; Sparta, Athens' chief rival3 in the Classical
period, also had
Athena as its patron god4. The members of a
polis constituted a religious association obliged to honor
the state's patron deity as well as the community's other
gods. The community expressed official homage and respect
to the gods through its cults, which were regular sets of
public religious activities overseen by citizens serving
as priests and priestesses and paid for at public expense.
The central ritual of a city-state's cults was the sacrifice5 of animals to
demonstrate to the gods as divine protectors the respect
and piety of the members of the polis.
Citizenship and
the City-state
A polis was
independent of its neighbors and had political unity among
its settlements. Together the members of these settlements
made up a community of citizens comprising a political
state, and it was this partnership among
citizens6
that represented the distinctive political characteristic
of the polis. Only men had the rights of political
participation, but women still counted as citizens of the
community legally, socially, and religiously. The Greeks
may have been influenced in the organization of the polis
by their contacts with the Near East, where the
city-monarchies of Cyprus and the states of Phoenicia,
situated on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean,
provided possible precedents. The distinctiveness of
citizenship as an organizing concept was that it assumed
in theory certain basic levels of legal equality7, essentially the
expectation of equal treatment under the law, with the
exception that different regulations could apply to women
in certain areas of life such as acceptable sexual
behavior and the control of property. But the general
legal equality that the polis provided was not dependent
on a citizen's wealth. Since pronounced social
differentiation between rich and poor had characterized
the history of the ancient Near East and Greece of the
Mycenaean Age and had once again become common in Greece
by the late Dark Age, it is remarkable that a notion of
some sort of legal equality, no matter how incomplete it
may have been in practice, came to serve as the basis for
the reorganization of Greek society in the Archaic Age.
The polis based on citizenship remained the preeminent
form of political and social organization in Greece from
the time of its earliest appearance about 750 B.C. until
the beginning of the Roman Empire eight centuries later.
The other most common new form of political organization
in Greece was the ethnos
8
(“league” or “federation”), a flexible form of association
over a broad territory which was itself sometimes composed
of city-states.
Geography and
the Population of City-states
The
geography of Greece greatly influenced the process by
which this radically new way of organizing human
communities came about. The severely mountainous terrain
of the mainland meant that city-states were often
physically separated by significant barriers to easy
communication, thus reinforcing the tendency of
city-states to develop separately and not to cooperate
with one another. A single Greek island could be home to
multiple city-states maintaining their independence from
one another; the large island of Lesbos9, for
example, was the home for five different city-states.
Since few city-states controlled enough arable land to
grow food sufficient to feed a large body of citizens,
polis communities no larger than several hundred to a
couple of thousand people were normal even after the
population of Greece rose dramatically at the end of the
Dark Age. By the fifth century Athens had grown to a size
of perhaps forty thousand adult male citizens and a total
population, including slaves and other non-citizens, of
several hundred thousand people, but this was a rare
exception to the generally small size of Greek
city-states. A population as large as that of classical
Athens could be supported only by the regular importation of food10 from abroad,
which had to be financed by trade and other revenues.
Aristotle on
the City-state
The
most famous ancient analyst of Greek politics and society,
the philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), later insisted
the emergence of the polis had been the inevitable result
of the forces of nature at work.
“Humans,”
he said, “are beings who by nature live in a polis.”11
Anyone who existed outside the community of a polis,
Aristotle only half-jokingly maintained, must be either a
beast or a deity. In referring to nature, Aristotle meant
the combined effect of social and economic forces.
Early
Colonization
Some
Greeks had emigrated from the mainland eastward across the
Aegean Sea to settle in Ionia12 as
early as the ninth century B.C. Starting around 750 B.C.,
however, Greeks began to settle even farther outside the
Greek homeland. Within two hundred years, Greek colonies
were established in areas that are today southern France,
Spain, Sicily and southern Italy, and along North Africa
and the coast of the Black Sea. Eventually the Greek world
had perhaps as many as 1,500 different city-states. A
scarcity of arable land certainly gave momentum to
emigration from Greece, but the revival of
international trade13 in the
Mediterranean in this era perhaps provided the original
stimulus for Greeks to leave their homeland, whose economy
was still struggling. Some Greeks with commercial
interests took up residence in foreign settlements, such
as those founded in Spain in this period by the
Phoenicians from Palestine. The Phoenicians were active in
building commercially-motivated settlements throughout the
western Mediterranean. Within a century of its foundation
sometime before 750 B.C., for example, the Phoenician
settlement on the site of modern Cadiz in Spain had become
a city thriving on economic and cultural interaction with
the indigenous Iberian population.
Economic
Motives for Colonization
Like
other peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, Greeks also
established their own trading posts abroad. Traders from
Euboea, for instance, had already established commercial
contacts by 800 B.C. with a community located on the
Syrian coast at a site now called Al Mina. Men wealthy
enough to finance risky expeditions by sea ranged far from
home in search of metals. Homeric poetry testifies to the
basic strategy of this entrepreneurial commodity trading.
In the Odyssey , the goddess Athena once appears
disguised as a metal trader to hide her identity from the
son of the poem's hero: “I am here at
present,” she says to him, “with my ship and crew on our
way across the wine-dark sea to foreign lands in search
of copper; I am carrying iron now.”14 By about 775
B.C., Euboeans, who seem to have been particularly active
explorers, had also established a settlement for purposes
of trade on the island of Ischia, in the bay of Naples off
southern Italy. There they processed iron ore imported
from the Etruscans, who lived in central Italy.
Archaeologists have documented the expanding overseas
communication of the eighth century by finding Greek
pottery at more than eighty sites outside the Greek
homeland; for the tenth century, by contrast, only two
pots have been found that were carried abroad.
Mother-city and
Colony
Learning
from overseas traders of likely places to relocate, Greek
colonists set out from their “mother city” ( metropolis 15 in Greek), which
selected a leader called the “founder” (ktistes ). Even
though they were going to establish an independent
city-state at their new location, colonists were expected
to retain ties with their metropolis. A colony that sided
with its metropolis' enemy in a war, for example, was
regarded as disloyal.
Sometimes
the colonists enjoyed a friendly welcome from the local
inhabitants where they settled; sometimes they had to
fight to win the land for their new community. The
colony's founder was in charge of laying out the
settlement properly and parceling out the land, as Homer
describes in speaking of the foundation of a fictional
colony: “So [the
founder] led them away, settling them in [a place
called] Scheria, far from the bustle of men. He had a
wall constructed around the town center, built houses,
erected temples for the gods, and divided the land.”16
Demographic
Motives for Colonization
Commercial
interests perhaps first induced Greeks to emigrate, but
greater numbers of them began to move abroad permanently
in the mid-eighth century B.C., probably because the
population explosion in the late Dark Age had caused a
scarcity of land available for farming. Because arable
land represented the most desirable form of wealth for
Greek men, tensions caused by competition for good land
arose in some city-states. Emigration helped solve this
problem by sending men without land to foreign regions,
where they could acquire their own fields in the territory
of colonies founded as new city-states. Since colonizing
expeditions were apparently usually all male, wives17 for the
colonists had to be found among the locals, either through
peaceful negotiation or by violent kidnappings.
The Tensions of
Colonization
The
case of the foundation
of a Greek colony in Cyrene18 (in what is now
Libya in North Africa) in about 630 B.C. reveals how full
of tensions the process of colonization could be. The
people of the polis of Thera, on an island north of Crete,
apparently were unable to support their population.
Sending some people out as colonists to Cyrene therefore
made sense as a solution to population pressures. A later
inscription purports to tells us what happened at the time
of colonization and reveals the urgency of the situation
at the time: “One adult son [from each family] is to be
conscripted....If any man is unwilling to leave when the
polis sends him, he shall be subject to the death penalty
and his property shall be confiscated.” (M. Crawford and
D. Whitehead, Archaic and Classical Greece: A
Selection of Ancient Sources in Translation,
Cambridge, 1983, no. 16B) Evidently the young men of Thera
were reluctant to leave their home for the new colony.
This evidence shows, then, that colonization in response
to population growth was not always a matter of individual
choice of the people feeling the pressure. The possibility
of acquiring land in a colony on which a man could perhaps
grow wealthy obviously had to be weighed against the
terrors of being torn from family and friends to voyage
over treacherous seas to regions filled with unknown
dangers. Greek colonists had reason to be scared about
their future. Moreover, in some cases, colonies were
founded to rid the metropolis of undesirables whose
presence was causing social unrest. The Spartans, for
example, colonized Taras19 (modern Taranto)
in southern Italy in 706 B.C. with a group of illegitimate
sons whom they could not successfully integrate into their
citizen body. These unfortunate outcasts certainly did not
go as colonists by their own choice.
Contact with
Eastern Mediterranean Civilizations
The
participation of Greeks in international trade and in
colonization increased their contact with the peoples of
Anatolia, Egypt, and the Near East. They admired and
envied these older civilizations of the eastern
Mediterranean for their wealth, such as the gold of the
Phrygian kingdom of Midas20, and their
cultural accomplishments, such as the lively pictures of
animals on Near Eastern ceramics, the magnificent temples
of Egypt, and the alphabets of the Phoenician cities.
During the early Dark Age, Greek artists had stopped
portraying people or other living creatures in their
designs. The pictures they saw on pottery imported from
the Near East in the late Dark Age and early Archaic Age
influenced them to begin once again to depict figures in
their paintings on pots. The style of Near Eastern reliefs
and free-standing sculptures also inspired creative
imitation in Greek art of the period. When the improving
economy of the later Archaic Age allowed Greeks to revive
monumental architecture in stone, temples for the worship
of the gods emulating Egyptian architectural designs
represented the most prominent examples of this new trend
in erecting large, expensive buildings. The Greeks began
to mint coins in the sixth century B.C., a technology they
learned from the Lydians, who invented coinage
in the seventh century21. Long after this
innovation, however, much economic exchange continued to
be made through barter, especially in the Near East.
Highly monetized economies took centuries to develop.
Knowledge
of writing was the most dramatic contribution of the
ancient Near East to Greece as it emerged from its Dark
Age. The Greeks probably originally learned the alphabet from the
Phoenicians22
to use it for record keeping in business and trade, as the
Phoenicians did so well, but they soon started to employ
it to record literature such as Homeric poetry. Since the
ability to read and write remained unnecessary for most
purposes in the predominately agricultural economy of
archaic Greece and there were no schools, few people at
first learned the new technology of letters.
International
Commerce
Success
in competing for international markets affected the
fortunes of Greek city-states during this period. The
city-state of Corinth23, for
example, grew prosperous from ship building and its
geographical location controlling the narrow isthmus of
land connecting northern and southern Greece. Since ships
plying the east-west sea lanes of the Mediterranean
preferred to avoid the stormy passage around the tip of
southern Greece, they commonly off-loaded their cargoes
for transshipment on a special roadbed built across the
isthmus and subsequent reloading on different ships on the
other side. Small ships may even have been dragged over
the roadbed from one side of the isthmus to the other.
Corinth became a bustling center for shipping and earned a
large income from sales and harbor taxes. Taking advantage
of its deposits of fine clay and the expertise of a
growing number of potters24, Corinth also
developed a thriving export trade in fine decorated
pottery, which non-Greek peoples such as Etruscans in central
Italy seem to have prized as luxury goods25. By the late
sixth century B.C., however, Athens began to displace
Corinth as the leading Greek exporter of fancy painted
pottery, especially after consumers came to prefer designs
featuring the red color for which its clay was better
suited than Corinth's.
The Oracle at
Delphi and Colonization
The
Greeks were always careful to solicit approval from their
gods before setting out from home, whether for commercial
voyages or colonization. The god most frequently consulted
about sending out a colony was Apollo in his
sanctuary at Delphi26, a hauntingly
beautiful spot in the mountains of central Greece. The
Delphic sanctuary began to be internationally renowned in
the eighth century B.C. because it housed an oracular
shrine in which a prophetess, the Pythia27, spoke the will
of Apollo in response to questions from visiting
petitioners. The Delphic oracle operated for a limited
number of days over nine months of the year, and demand
for its services was so high that the operators of the
sanctuary rewarded generous contributors with the
privilege of jumping to the head of the line. The great
majority of visitors to Delphi consulted the oracle about
personal matters such as marriage and having children.
That Greeks hoping to found a colony felt they had to
secure the approval of Apollo of Delphi demonstrates the
oracle was held in high esteem already as early as the
700s B.C., a reputation that continued to make the oracle
a force in Greek international affairs in the centuries to
come.
The Emergence
of the City-State
The
reasons for the change in Greek politics represented by
the gradual emergence
of the city-state28
in the Archaic Age remain controversial. An insurmountable
difficulty to forming a clear interpretation of this
complex process is that the surviving evidence for the
change mainly concerns Athens, which was not a typical
city-state in significant aspects, as in the large size of
its population. Much of what we can say about the reasons
for the emergence of the city-state therefore applies
solely to Athens. Other city-states certainly emerged
under varying conditions and with different results.
Nevertheless, it seems possible to draw some general
conclusions about the slow process through which
city-states began to emerge starting around 750 B.C.
The
economic revival of the Archaic Age and the growth in the
population of Greece evident by the eighth century B.C.
certainly gave momentum to the process. Men who managed to
acquire substantial property from success in agriculture
or commerce could now demand a greater say in political
affairs from the hereditary aristocrats, who claimed
status based on their family lines. Theognis of Megara, a
sixth-century poet whose verses also reflect earlier
conditions, gave voice to the distress of aristocrats at
the emergence of new avenues to social and political
influence: “... men today prize possessions, and noble men
marry into “bad” [that is, non-aristocratic] families and
“bad” men into noble families.
Riches
have mixed up lines of breeding ... and the good breeding
of the citizens is becoming obscured.” The increase in
population in this era probably came mostly in the ranks
of the non-aristocratic poor. Such families raised more
children, who could help to farm more land, which had been
empty for the taking after the depopulation of the early
Dark Age. Like
the Zeus of Hesiod's Theogony , who acted in
response to the injustice of Kronos29, the growing
number of poorer non-aristocrats apparently reacted
against what they saw as unacceptable inequity in the
leadership of aristocrats, who sometimes acted as if they
were petty kings in their local territory and dispensed
what seemed “crooked”30 justice to those
with less wealth and power. This concern for equity and
fairness gave a direction to the social and political
pressures created by the growth of the population.
Aristocrats and
Non-aristocrats in the City-state
For
the city-state to be created as a political institution in
which all free men had a share, non-aristocratic men had
to insist that they deserved equitable treatment31, even if
aristocrats were to remain in leadership positions and
carry out the policies agreed on by the group. The
invention of the concept of citizenship as the basis for
the city-state and the extension of citizen status to
non-aristocrats responded to that demand. Citizenship
above all carried certain legal rights, such as access to
courts to resolve disputes, protection against enslavement
by kidnapping, and participation in the religious and
cultural life of the city-state. It also implied
participation in politics, although the degree of
participation open to poor men varied among the different
city states. The ability to hold public office, for
example, could be limited in some cases to owners of a
certain amount of property or wealth. Most prominently,
citizen status distinguished free men and women32 from slaves33 and metics (resident
aliens)34,
foreigners who were officially granted limited legal
rights and permission to reside in a city-state that was
not their homeland. Thus, even the poor had a distinction
setting themselves apart from others.
Inequality and
Women in the City-state
Social
and economic inequality among citizens persisted as part
of life in the polis despite the legal guarantees of
citizenship, The incompleteness of the equality that
underlay the political structure of the city-state
especially revealed itself in the status of citizen women.
Women became citizens of the city-states in the crucial
sense that they had an identity, social status, and local
rights denied metics and slaves. The important difference
between citizen and non-citizen women was made clear in
the Greek language, which included terms meaning “female citizen”35 (politis), in
certain religious cults reserved for citizen women only,
and in legal protection against being kidnapped and sold
into slavery. Citizen women also had recourse to the
courts in disputes over property and other legal wrangles,
but they could not represent themselves and had to have
men speak for their interests, a requirement that reveals
their inequality under the law. The traditional
paternalism of Greek society—men acting as “fathers” to
regulate the lives of women and safeguard their interests
as defined by men—demanded that every woman have an
official male guardian ( kurios 36 ) to protect
them physically and legally. In line with this assumption
about the need of women for regulation and protection by
men, women were granted no rights to participate in
politics. They never attended political assemblies, nor
could they vote. They did hold certain civic priesthoods,
however, and they
had access along with men to the initiation rights37 of the popular
cult of the goddess38 Demeter at
Eleusis near Athens. This internationally renowned cult, about which more is
said elsewhere in the Overview39, served in some
sense as a safety valve for the pressures created by the
remaining inequalities of life in Greek city-states
because it offered to all regardless of class its promised
benefits of protection from evil and a better fate in the
afterworld.
The so-called
Hoplite Revolution
Despite
the only limited equality characteristic of the Greek
city-state, the creation of this new form of political
organization nevertheless represented a significant break
with the past, and the extension of at least some
political rights to the poor stands as one of the most
striking developments in this process of change.
Unfortunately we cannot identify with certainty the forces
that led to the emergence of the polis as a political
institution in which even poor men had a vote on political
matters. The explanation long favored by many makes a
so-called hoplite revolution responsible for the general
widening of political rights in the city-state, but recent
research has undermined the plausibility of this theory as
a completely satisfactory explanation. Hoplites40 were infantrymen
clad in metal
body armor41,
and they constituted the main strike force of the citizen
militias that defended Greek city-states in the period
before navies became important. Men armed as hoplites
marched into combat shoulder to shoulder in a rectangular
formation called a phalanx42. Staying in line
and working as part of the group was the secret to
successful phalanx tactics. A good hoplite, in the words
of the seventh-century B.C. poet Archilochus, was “a short
man firmly placed upon his legs, with a courageous heart,
not to be uprooted from the spot where he plants his
feet.” Greeks had fought in phalanxes for a long time, but
until the eighth century B.C., only aristocrats and a
relatively small number of their non-aristocratic
followers could afford the equipment to serve as hoplites.
In the eighth century B.C., however, a growing number of
men had become sufficiently prosperous to buy metal
weapons, especially since the use of iron had made them
more readily available. Presumably these new hoplites,
since they paid for their own equipment and trained hard
to learn phalanx tactics to defend their community, felt
they, too, were entitled to political rights. According to
the theory of a hoplite revolution, these new
hoplite-level men forced the aristocrats to share
political power by threatening to refuse to fight and
thereby cripple the community's military defense.
The
theory correctly assumes that new hoplites had the power
to demand an increased political say for themselves, a
development of great significance for the development of
the city-state as an institution not solely under the
power of a small circle of aristocrats. The theory of a
hoplite revolution cannot explain, however, one crucial
question: why were poor men as well as hoplites given the
political right of voting on policy in the city-state?
Non-hoplites as
Citizens
Most
men in the new city-states were too poor to qualify as
hoplites. It is usually assumed that poor men most likely
could contribute little to military defense because they
lacked hoplite armor and metal weapons and Greek armies at
this date made scant use of light-armed troops43 like
skirmishers, slingers, and archers44. Nor had the
Greeks developed navies yet, the military service for
which poor men would provide the manpower in later times
when a fleet was a city-state's most effective weapon. If
being able to make a contribution to the city-state's
defense as a hoplite45 was the only
grounds for meriting the political rights of citizenship,
the aristocrats along with the old and new hoplites had no
obvious reason to grant poor men the right to vote on
important matters. Yet poor men did become politically
empowered citizens in many city-states, with some
variations on whether a man had to own a certain amount of
land to have full political rights or whether eligibility
for higher public offices required a certain level of
income. In general, however, all male citizens, regardless
of their level of wealth, eventually were entitled to
attend, speak in, and cast a vote in the communal assemblies46 in which policy
decisions for the city-states were made. That poor men
gradually came to participate in the assemblies of the
city-states means they were citizens possessing the basic
component of political
equality47.
The hoplite revolution fails as a complete explanation of
the development of the city-state above all because it
cannot account for the extension of this right to the
poor. Furthermore, the emergence of large numbers of men
wealthy enough to afford hoplite armor seems to belong to
the middle of the seventh century B.C., well after the
period when the city-state as an innovative form of
political organization was first coming into existence.
The
Contribution of the Poor
No
thoroughly satisfactory alternative or complement to the
theory of hoplite revolution has yet emerged to explain
the rise of the
polis as a political organization that opened
citizenship to poor citizens as well as those better off48. The laboring
free poor—the workers in agriculture, trade, and
crafts—contributed much to the economic strength of the
city-state, but it is hard to see how their value as laborers49 could have been
translated into political rights. The better-off elements
in society certainly did not extend the rights of
citizenship to the poor out of any romanticized vision of
poverty as spiritually noble. As one contemporary put it,
“Money is the man; no poor man ever counts as good or
honorable.” One significant boost to extending political
rights to the poor perhaps came from the sole rulers,
called tyrants50, who seized
power for a time in some city-states and whose history
will be discussed subsequently. Tyrants could have used
grants of citizenship to poor or disenfranchised men as a
means of marshaling popular support for their regimes.
Another, more speculative possibility is that the
aristocrats and hoplites51 had simply
become less cohesive as a political group in this period
of dramatic change, thereby weakening opposition to the
growing idea that it was unjust to exclude the poor from
political participation. When the poor agitated for power
in the citizen community, on this view, there would have
been no united front of aristocrats and hoplites to oppose
them, making compromise necessary to prevent destructive
civil unrest. Or it may be that we underestimate the
significance of lightly-armed combatants in the eighth
century, when hoplites were presumably not as numerous as
in later times and perhaps the sheer force of the numbers
of poor men—wielding staves, throwing rocks, employing
farming implements as weapons—could have helped their
city-state's contingent of hoplites to sway the tide of
battle against an opposing force.
Communal
Decision Making
The
hallmark of the politics of the developed Greek city-states52 was certainly
the practice of the citizen men making decisions
communally. Aristocrats continued to be powerfully
influential in Greek politics even after city-states had
come into existence, but the unprecedented political
influence non-aristocratic men came to enjoy in
city-states constituted the most remarkable feature of the
change in the political organization of Greek society in
the Archaic Age. This process was gradual, as city-states
certainly did not suddenly emerge fully formed around 750
B.C. Three hundred years after that date, for example, the
male citizens of Athens were still making major changes in
their political institutions to disperse political power
more widely among the male citizen body.
Slavery in
Dark-Age Greece
The
only evidence for slavery in the Dark Age—the language of
the poetry of Homer and Hesiod—reveals complex
relationships of dependency among free and unfree people.
Some people taken prisoner in war seem to be chattel
slaves (slaves53 regarded as
property, like cattle—hence the term), wholly under the
domination of others, who benefit from the captives'
labor. Other dependent people in the poems seem more like
inferior members of the owners' households. They live
under virtually the same conditions as their superiors and
enjoy a family life of their own. If the language of this
poetry reflects actual conditions in the Dark Age, chattel
slavery was not the primary form of dependency in Greece
during that period.
The Synergy
between Slavery and Freedom
The
creation of citizenship as a category to define membership
in the exclusive group of people constituting a polis
inevitably highlighted the contrast between those included
in the category of citizens and those outside it. Freedom
from control by others was a necessary precondition to
become a citizen with full political rights, which in the
city-states meant being a free-born adult male. The
strongest contrast citizenship produced, therefore, was
that between free and unfree. In this way, the development
of a clear idea of personal freedom in the formation of
the city-state as a new political form may ironically have
encouraged the complementary development of chattel
slavery in the Archaic Age. The rise in economic activity
in this period probably also encouraged the importation of
slaves by increasing the demand for labor. In any case,
slavery as it developed in the Archaic Age reduced unfree
persons to a state of absolute dependence; they were the
property of their owners. As Aristotle later categorized
them, slaves54 were “living tools.”55
Sources of
Slaves
Captives
taken in war provided an important source of slaves56, and relatively
few slaves seem to have been born and raised in the
households of those for whom they worked. Slaves were also
imported from the regions to the north and east of Greek
territory, where non-Greek people would be seized by
pirates or foreign raiders. The fierce bands in these
areas would also capture each other and sell the captives
to slave dealers. The dealers would then sell their
purchases in Greece at a profit. Herodotus, a Greek
historian of the fifth century B. C., reported that some
of the Thracians57, a group of
peoples living to the north of mainland Greece, “sold
their children for export.” But this report probably meant
only that one band of Thracians sold children captured
from other bands of Thracians, whom the first group
considered different from themselves. The Greeks lumped
together all foreigners who did not speak Greek as “barbarians”58—people whose
speech sounded to Greeks like the repetition of the
meaningless sounds “bar, bar.” Greeks, like Thracians and
other slave-holding peoples, found it easier to enslave
people whom they considered different from themselves and
whose ethnic and cultural otherness made it easier to
disregard their shared humanity. Greeks also enslaved
fellow Greeks, however, especially those defeated in war,
but these Greek slaves were not members of the same polis
as their masters. Rich families prized Greek slaves with
some education because they could be made to serve as
tutors for children, for whom there were no
publicly-financed schools in this period.
The Extent of
Slavery
Chattel
slavery became widespread in Greece only after about 600
B.C. Eventually, slaves became cheap enough that people of moderate
means could afford one or two59. Nevertheless,
even wealthy Greek landowners never acquired gangs of
hundreds of slaves like those who maintained Rome's water
system under the Roman Empire or worked large plantations
in the southern United States before the American Civil
War. Maintaining a large number of slaves year around in
ancient Greece would have been uneconomical because the
cultivation of the crops grown there called for short
periods of intense labor punctuated by long stretches of
inactivity, during which slaves would have to be fed even
while they had no work to do.
By the
fifth century B.C., however, the number of slaves in some
city-states had grown to as much as one-third of the total
population. This percentage still means that most labor
was performed by small land-owners and their families
themselves, sometimes hiring free workers. The special
system of slavery
in Sparta60
provides a rare exception to this situation.
The Occupations
of Slaves
Rich
Greeks everywhere regarded working for someone else for
wages as disgraceful, but their attitude did not
correspond to the realities of life for many poor people,
who had to earn a living at any work they could find. Like
free workers, chattel slaves61 did all kinds of
labor. Household
slaves62,
often women, had the physically least dangerous existence.
They cleaned, cooked, fetched water from
public fountains63,
helped the wife with the weaving64, watched the children65, accompanied the
husband as he did the marketing, and performed other
domestic chores. Yet they could not refuse if their
masters demanded sexual favors. Slaves who worked in small
manufacturing businesses, like those of potters66 or metalworkers67, and slaves
working on farms often labored alongside their masters.
Rich landowners, however, might appoint a slave supervisor
to oversee the work of their other slaves in their fields
while they remained in town. The worst conditions of life
for slaves obtained for those men leased out to work in
the narrow, landslide-prone tunnels of Greece's few silver
and gold mines68. The conditions
of their painful and dangerous job were dark, confined,
and backbreaking. Owners could punish their slaves with
impunity, even kill them without fear of meaningful
sanctions. (A master's murder of a slave69 was regarded as
at least improper and perhaps even illegal in Athens of
the classical period, but the penalty may have been no
more than ritual purification.) Beatings severe enough to
cripple a working slave and executions of able-bodied
slaves were probably infrequent because destroying such
property made no economic sense for an owner.
Public Slaves
Some
slaves enjoyed a measure of independence by working as public slaves70 owned by the
city-state instead of an individual. They lived on their
own and performed specialized tasks. In Athens, for
example, public slaves in the classical period had the
responsibility for certifying the genuineness of the
city-state's coinage as well as many other administrative
jobs in city service. Athenian public slaves also formed a
corps of assistants to the citizen magistrates responsible
for the punishment of criminals, and the city-state's
official executioner was a public slave. In this way,
citizens were able to maintain an arm's-length distance
between themselves and distasteful jobs like the arrest
and execution of fellow citizens.
Slaves
attached to temples also lived without individual owners
because temple slaves belonged to the god of the
sanctuary, for which they worked as servants. Some female
temple slaves served as sacred prostitutes71 at the temple of
Aphrodite in Corinth, and their earnings helped support
the sanctuary.
The Lives of
Slaves
Under
the best conditions, household slaves72 with humane
masters might live lives free of violent punishment. They
might even be allowed to join their owners' families on
excursions and attend religious rituals such as
sacrifices. Without the right to a family of their own,
however, without property, without legal or political
rights, they lived an existence alienated from regular
society. In the words of an ancient commentator, chattel
slaves lived lives of “work, punishment, and
food.”73
Their labor helped maintain the economy of Greek society,
but their work rarely benefited themselves. Yet despite
the misery of their condition, Greek chattel
slaves—outside Sparta74—almost
never revolted on a large scale, perhaps because they were
of too many different origins and nationalities and too
scattered to organize themselves for rebellion. Sometimes
owners freed their
slaves voluntarily75, and some
promised freedom at a future date to encourage their
slaves to work hard in the meantime. Freed slaves did not
become citizens in Greek city-states but instead mixed
into the population of resident foreigners (the metics).
They were expected to continue to help out their former
masters when called upon.
Women and the
Household
The
emergence of slavery76 in the
city-state on a large scale gave women new and bigger
responsibilities for the household (oikos, oikia),
especially rich women, whose lives were especially
circumscribed by the responsibility of managing their
large households. As partners in the
maintenance of the family with their husbands77, who spent their
time outside farming, participating in politics, and
meeting their male friends, wives were entrusted with the
management of the household ( oikonomia 78, whence our word
“economics”). They were expected to raise the children,79, supervise the
preservation and preparation of food, keep the family's
financial accounts, weave cloth to make
clothing,80,
direct the work of the household slaves, and nurse them
when they were ill. Households thus depended on women,
whose work permitted the family to be economically
self-reliant and the male citizens to participate in the
public life of the polis .
Women Outside
the Home
Poor
women worked outside the home, often as small-scale merchants81 in the public
market that occupied the center of every settlement. Only at Sparta did
women have the freedom to participate in athletic
training along with men.82 Women played
their major role in the public life of the city-state by
participating in funerals, state festivals, and religious
rituals. Certain festivals were reserved for women only,
especially in the cult of the goddess Demeter, whom the
Greeks credited with teaching them the indispensable
technology of agriculture83. As priestesses,
women also fulfilled public duties in various official
cults; for example, women officiated as priestesses84 in more than
forty such cults in Athens by the fifth century B.C. Women
holding these posts often enjoyed considerable prestige,
practical benefits such as a salary paid by the state, and
greater freedom of movement in public.
Marriage and
Divorce
Upon
marriage women became the legal wards of their husbands,
as they previously had been of their fathers while still
unmarried. Marriages were arranged by men. A woman's guardian85—her father, or
if he were dead, her uncle or her brother—would commonly
betroth her to another man's son while she was still a
child, perhaps as young as five. The betrothal was an
important public event conducted in the presence of
witnesses. The guardian on this occasion repeated the
phrase that expressed the primary aim of marriage: “I give you this woman
for the plowing [procreation] of legitimate children.”86 The marriage
itself customarily took place when the girl was in her
early teens and the groom ten to fifteen years older.
Hesiod advised a man to marry a virgin in the fifth year
after her puberty, when he himself was “not much younger than
thirty and not much older.”87 A legal marriage
consisted of the bride's going to live in the house of her
husband. The procession to his house served as the
ceremony. The woman brought with her a dowry88 of property
(perhaps land yielding an income, if she were wealthy) and
personal possessions that formed part of the new
household's assets and could be inherited by her children.
Her husband was legally obliged to preserve the dowry and
to return it in
case of a divorce89.
Procedures for divorce were more concerned with power than
law: a husband could expel his wife from his home, while a
wife, in theory, could on her own initiative leave her
husband to return to the guardianship of her male
relatives. Her
freedom of action could be constricted, however, if her
husband used force to keep her from leaving.90Except in certain
cases in Sparta91,
monogamy was the rule in ancient Greece, and a nuclear
family structure (that is, husband, wife, and children
living together without other relatives in the same house)
was common, although at different stages of life a married
couple might have other relatives living with them.
Citizen men could have sexual relations without penalty
with slaves, foreign concubines, female prostitutes, or
willing preadult citizen males. Citizen women had no such
sexual freedom, and adultery carried harsh penalties for
wives, as well as the male adulterer, except at Sparta
when a woman was childless, the aim of the liaison was to
produce children, and the husband gave his consent.
Paternalism and
Women
More
than anything else, a dual concern to regulate marriage
and procreation and to maintain family property underlay
the placing of the legal rights of Greek women and the
conditions of their citizenship under the guardianship of
men. The paternalistic attitude of Greek men toward women
was rooted in the desire
to control human reproduction92 and,
consequently, the distribution of property, a concern that
gained special urgency in the reduced economic
circumstances of the Dark Age. Hesiod, for instance, makes
this point explicitly in relating the myth of the first
woman, named Pandora93. According to
the legend, Zeus, the king of the gods, created Pandora as
a punishment for men when Prometheus, a divine being
hostile to Zeus, stole fire from Zeus to give it to
Prometheus's human friends, who had hitherto lacked that
technology. Pandora subsequently loosed “evils and
diseases” into the previously trouble-free world of men by
removing the lid from the jar or box the gods had filled
for her. Hesiod
then refers to Pandora's descendants, the female sex, as
a “beautiful evil” for men ever after, comparing them to
drones who live off the toil of other bees while
devising mischief at home.94 But, he goes on
to say, any man who refuses to marry to escape the
“troublesome deeds of women” will come to “destructive old
age” without any children to care for him. After his
death, moreover, his relatives will divide his property
among themselves. A man must marry, in other words, so
that he can sire children to serve as his support system
in his waning years and to preserve his holdings after his
death by inheriting them. Women, according to Greek
mythology, were for men a necessary evil, but the reality
of women's lives in the city-state incorporated social and
religious roles of enormous importance.
The Archaic period in
Greece (800 BC – 480 BC) is a
period of ancient Greek history that followed
the Greek Dark
Ages. This period saw the
rise of the poleis
(singular polis, generally translated as
"city-state"), the founding of colonies, the annexation of
some of the eastern poleis by the Persian empire, as well as the first
inklings of classical philosophy. The newly invented Greek theatre created tragedies that were performed
during Dionysia; written poetry appeared
alongside the reintroduction of written language, which
had been lost during the Greek Dark Ages; and the oral
epics, the Iliad
and the Odyssey were written down for
the first time, ostensibly by Homer himself. The term archaic
thus covers cultural developments as well as social,
political and economic changes.
The
starting point of the Archaic period in 800 BC is
defined as the "structural revolution", meaning the sudden
upsurge of population and material goods that occurred
c. 750 BC, and the "intellectual revolution" of
classical Greece.[1] The sharp rise in
population at the start of the Archaic period led the
settlement of new towns and the expansion of the older
population centres within poleis. Increases in the
population also led to the establishment of colonies along the Mediterranean
and Black Sea coasts that began about 800 BC. The
reason for this phenomenon has been described by Greek
authors as stenochoria, or "the lack of land", but
in practice it was caused by a great number of reasons,
such as rivalry between political groups, a desire for
adventure, expatriation, the search for trade
opportunities, etc.[2] The end of archaism is
conventionally marked by Xerxes' invasion of Greece in
480 BC.
Contents
1
Etymology
2 Crisis and
consolidation of the polis
2.1 Reorganization and
consolidation of Athens
3 Themes
3.1 Colonization
3.2 Tyrants
4 Art
4.1 Architecture
4.2 Sculpture
4.3 Ceramics
5 Conflicts
6 Important people
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
Etymology
The
term archaic describes things belonging to ancient
times and is derived from the Greek word archaikos,
which means primitive.[3] This term arose from the
study of Greek art, where it mainly refers to styles of surface
decoration and sculpture, placing it
chronologically between geometric and Classical
Greek art. These styles are
considered archaic in the sense that they contain the
seeds of Classical art. Modern historians think
of the term archaic as a misnomer,[4] as the archaic period is
considered to be one of the most fruitful periods of Greek
history.[5]
Crisis
and consolidation of the polis
Mycenaean
Greece
of the Bronze Age had been divided into kingdoms, each
containing a territory and a population distributed into
both small towns and large estates owned by the nobility.
Each kingdom was ruled by a king claiming authority under
divine right by descent from a heroic ancestor who ruled
from a palace situated within a citadel, or acropolis. During the Greek Dark
Ages, the palaces, kings, and
estates vanished, the population declined, towns were
abandoned or became villages in ruins, and government
devolved into authority being held by minor officials on a
tribal structure.
By the
middle of the 8th century the societal structure of Greece
had come under immense pressure, and the polis was at risk
of collapse. Three distinct pressures developed for each
stratum of archaic society- the farmers, the aristocracy,
and the commoners. By 750 BC these pressures became
impossible to reconcile due to an explosive growth of
population of about 4% per year. These three factors were
in many ways connected and tended to reinforce one
another.[6]
Greek
farmers lived under a subsistence lifestyle and were
frequently subject to crop failures. Hesiod wrote of many
different circumstances that could befall an archaic Greek
farmer, all of which would force him to borrow goods from
his neighbours. Failure to pay back these goods could lead
to loss of the farm, debt, or enslavement. Due to the
sharp increase in population, arable farmland, which had
always been scarce, became insufficient to support all the
people in Greece. 750-600 BC in Greece was marked by
widespread famines, and by 600 BC almost all of the
farmers in Athens had been dispossessed of their property
and worked as slaves on the same.
The aristoi,
aristocratic families, were constantly competing against
one another to gain territory, money, or status. The
elegant clothes, jewellery, pottery, artworks etc. from
the archaic period were by and large made to the tastes of
this part of Greek society. Aristoi in the archaic
period existed in a closed community of symposion,
festivals, lavish meals, and athletic games that had
nothing to do with the commoners or farmers of Greece.
However an aristoi's status was predicated on his
wealth - if he were to lose it, he would also lose his
nobility. The advent of sea trade routes placed the aristoi
at risk of losing everything through failed overseas
investments.[6]
The
commoners the aristoi governed were repeatedly
drawn into the conflicts of the aristoi as
soldiers, disrupting their lives with every new power
struggle between nobles. They levied much criticism at the
aristoi for neglecting the farmers and for living
very extravagant lifestyles. As overseas trade became more
common in Greece, some commoners found themselves very
wealthy, and increasingly began to challenge the authority
of the aristoi, posing a political threat to
regional monarchies.[6]
Reorganization
and consolidation of Athens
From
the beginning of the 6th century BC, many changes in the
social structure and government of Greece were formalized
in order to administer to the growing needs of the poleis.
Among these changes was the formalization of certain
aspects of the Athenian democracy, and as Athens
consolidated itself into a formal city-state, political
tensions grew within it.
Towards
the end of the Archaic period, the power of the basileus, or king, was reduced as
aristocratic gatherings, such as the Council of Elders,
increased in power. The sharing of power among powerful
families occurred in many poleis, which saw oligarchies established. The Archaic
Period was also marked by tyrants, or strong rulers who
seized power from the aristocracy and ruled as central,
dominating figures.[7]
A new form of government had evolved, the city-state, which Hellenes termed
the polis.
The kingdoms were not restored, even though in many cases
offshoots of the royal families remained. Instead, each
major population center became autonomous and was ruled by
a republican form of government. The
ancient Greek term is synoikismos, from which comes the
term synoecism "conurbation", meaning
the absorption of villages and the incorporation of their
tribes into the substructure of the polis. The akropoleis
became the locations of public buildings, typically
temples.[8]
Themes
Colonization
As a
reaction to the overpopulation, economic problems, and
rising political tension within Greece between 750 and 600
BC, many Greeks left the mainland by ship to establish new
colonies. Some went freely to escape tensions, while
others were sent as exiles. Any given expedition consisted
of about 100-200 people, mostly young men, and was led by
a Greek noble, searching to gain more power and wealth
outside of Greece. A citizen who left Greece to go to one
of these colonies gave up his Greek citizenship in
exchange for citizenship in the new colony.
These
colonies were widespread, and arose in places including
southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the southern
French coast, the eastern Spanish coast, the coast of the
Black Sea, and Cyprus, among others. These colonies were
not provinces of the poleis from which they came but
independent cities entirely, who traced their heritage
back to a mother polis within Greece proper. Relations
between colonial Greeks and the indigenous populations of
the countries they governed were mixed - some cultures met
in harmony and others were conquered and enslaved by the
Greeks. An important consequence of Greek colonization was
the spread of Greek culture, religion, and design
throughout the Mediterranean, including sites that would
come to great importance later in history.[6]
The
exceptional success of the move to colonize the rest of
the Mediterranean happened in harmony with a consolidation
of the Greek poleis into cohesive city-states with social
and political order. This process was frequently
interrupted between the 6th and 7th centuries BC by
numerous aristocrats. These tyrants, a Greek word meaning
"ruler of the polis", tended to set up dictatorships
within the poleis, raise armies, and attack other poleis
to expand their influence. Tyrants were not social
reformers, but while ruling they were forced to make laws
and arbitrate disputes. A rising Greek distaste for
tyrants led to the creation of alternative systems of
self-government, which eventually led to the Athenian
democracy. Tyrants were never
directly followed by pure democracies; however, their
behaviour created the political will among the Greeks to
develop a more efficient and fair system of governance.[6]
Art
The
period takes its name from what, in art history, was considered the
archaic or old-fashioned style of sculpture and other
forms of art and craft that were characteristic of that
time, as opposed to the more natural look of work made in
the following Classical
period (see Classical
sculpture).
Sculptures in limestone and marble, terra cotta, bronze, wood,
and rarer metals, both free-standing and in relief, were used to adorn
temples and funerary monuments. They mostly had mythical
or daily life themes. The creation of life-sized statues
began suddenly at about 650 BC. The following three
periods have been identified:[9]
·Early
Archaic,
660 BC - 580 BC
·During
the period, the major sculptural forms were the kouros and its female
equivalent, the kore.
Some
notable distinctions an observer can use to determine if a
piece is from the archaic period are the Egyptian-like
"left foot forward", the "archaic smile", and the very
patterned and conventionalized hair, or "helmet hair".
The
Archaic Period in Greece refers to the years between 750
and 480 B.C., more particularly from 620 to 480 B.C. The
age is defined through the development of art at this
time, specifically through the style of pottery and
sculpture, showing the specific characteristics that would
later be developed into the more naturalistic style of the
Classical period. The Archaic is one of five periods that
Ancient Greek history can be divided into; it was preceded
by the Dark Ages and followed by the Classical period. The
Archaic period saw advancements in political theory,
especially the beginnings of democracy, as well as in
culture and art. The knowledge and use of written
language, which was lost in the Dark Ages was
re-established.
The
Dark Ages were as unenlightening as they may sound. They
brought about the solidification of the Greeks' religion,
mythology and founding history. The Greek people no longer
lived in cities, after the collapse of the Mycenaean
civilization (known as the "fall of the palaces"), but
instead they formed small tribes. Some of these tribes
were sedentary and agricultural, whereas others were
nomadic and traveled Greece throughout the seasons.
However these small tribes began to form one of Greece's
greatest political achievements: the 'polis', meaning the
city-state, which is what the word 'politics' is derived
from. From around 800 B.C. trade flourished between the
communities as market places were built up in the
villages, and they began working together to form
defensive units and fortifications.
In
this way the Greek people developed to have strong
city-states as their political centers. Cities on the
Greek mainland, peninsula and the coast of Asia Minor had
close interaction with one another, however each city
still established its own unique culture and political
structure. Originally they were all ruled by a 'basileus',
meaning a hereditary king. However most monarchies were
overthrown in the 8th century B.C. and replaced by a
variety of political arrangements. The most common of
these systems was the oligarchy, meaning "ruled by a few".
The oligarchs were formed from a select group of the
wealthiest citizens of the state, who had most of the
powers usually given to a monarch. Although these powers
were dispersed amongst them, the oligarchic power was
notably totalitarian. These early oligarchies, as well as
the few remaining kings, were mostly overthrown by tyrants
who took total control of the city. These tyrannies are
generally looked on disapprovingly, however some did
manage successful rules. This form of governing was always
unstable, with the tyrant's power relying on their control
of armies and holding the citizens in fear. Tyrannies most
often began when a city was faced with a crisis, and this
opportunity was seized by a political figure to take
control of the city, frequently with the support of the
people. Once their tyranny was established though, they
lost their popularity with the citizens who saw them as
illegitimately commandeering political power. Many tyrants
attempted, and some succeeded to make their tyranny
hereditary, and gave themselves the power of a monarch.
Due to the instability of this system though, tyrants
would only rule for short lengths of time before they
would be replaced. Despite this, tyranny existed as a
widespread political arrangement for much of Greece, Asia
Minor and even reaching as far as Sicily.
Oligarchies
and
tyrannies ruled in this way until a new alternative
emerged around the 6'th century BC. Ancient Greek
democracy, meaning "ruled by the demos (people)",
was unlike what we would associate with modern day
democracy. The cities were not represented by governments,
but actually by the citizens. However not all citizens had
a say in the running of the city; this was the privilege
held by the free, male citizens, excluding all women,
slaves and foreigners from democracy. So, in a way,
democracy began as an expanded version of the original
oligarchy, with the city-state being ruled by an exclusive
group of people, although the size of this group had
increased dramatically. This new political system required
a complex set of laws in order to keep this complicated
social structure organized. These advanced legalities
enforced a certain amount of equality between the
citizens, despite their varying economic statuses, and
ensured an easier coexistence between the classes. This
laid the groundwork for the further Democratic principles
that were to be developed in Athens in two hundred years
time.
The
growth of the polis,
the traditional Greek city state, coupled with a relative
population explosion, forced the city states to look
abroad for places to settle. This led to a period of
frenetic colonization. A variety of settlements began
appearing across the Mediterranean, including Ionia (the
coast of Asia Minor) southern Italy Sicily and North
Africa. The nature of these settlements varied, from the
basic trading posts that began to emerge in Italy and
Sicily, such as Syracuse, and the more advanced mini
city-states that broke away from the mother city, such as
Cyrene in Libya and Carthage in modern Tunisia.
Colonization was significantly aided by the cultural
exchange than began around 800 BC. Dialogue between the
Greek states and Phoenicia, for example, broadened the
horizons of both nations and encourage the exploration of
the Mediterranean. By the beginning of the Classical
period, these states, settlements, and trading posts
numbered in the hundreds, and became part of an extensive
commercial network that involved all the advanced
civilizations of the time. It is important to note that
colonization in the Archaic Greek period was very
different to how we understand colonization today. While
the cities that sent out settlers to found new settlements
may have held on to some of their trading posts, such as
the Athenian trading posts in the Black Sea, the majority
swiftly became independent, breaking from the mother
cities. A example of this is Cyrene, which was founded by
settlers from the island of Thera. Yet within a century of
their founding, the colony had become fully independent of
the metropolis, to the point where the Therans were coming
to Cyrene for help. See Book 3 in Herodotus' The Histories for
more on this. Thus, unlike the British Empire, where
colonies were firmly under the control of the mother
nation, Archaic Greek colonies were much more independent.
The
current theory on colonization is more revisionist than
its predecessor outlined above. This is due to new sources
that have become available to us, such as an Assyrian
letter from the governor of Samsimuruna (close to city
Sidon, today Lebanon), found in Nimrud/Kalhu (the Assyrian
capital) to Assyrian king Tiglat-Pileser III (744-727 BC),
that indicate an early age of colonization that was not
Greek-based, as has been previously thought. Another
problem that has been raised recently by scholars is the
motivation behind colonization. Many now believe that the
colonies set up took many years to evolve into what we
would call settlements, going through many aborted
attempts and years of immigration to the colony.
This
rethink has come about due to archaeological finds in the
Bay of Naples, at a settlement called Pithekoussai. This
settlement was rebuilt around a century after its
foundation, with a new street layout being apparent from
the excavation. The new theory essential says that, rather
than colonization being a deliberate and concerted policy
of the emerging Greek city states, it was far more
haphazard and scattered, and tries to grant more credit to
the Near Eastern civilizations of Assyria and Phoenicia.
The difference between the initial trading post and the
later colony is well demonstrated by the settlement at
Pithekoussai, taking over a century to be developed to
what we call a colony.
In the
Archaic period, the growth of culture was not coherent,
but fragmented across the peninsula, depending on the
city-state, they developed separate cultures. Thanks to
increasing international trade and relations however,
culture spread across the Greek world. The key early
developments in culture in the Archaic period happened in
Ionia (Asia Minor), such as the islands of Miletus and
Samos. The birth of Western philosophy occurred in Miletus
with the philosopher and thinker Thales, and early
literary output, such as the Homeric epics and the poetry
of Hesiod, began in Ionia. Sculpture almost began to
emerge in the Archaic period. Sculptural forms such as the
/kouros, /a statue of a male youth , and its female
equivalent the /kore/, originated in this period. These
/kouroi/ were inspired by Egyptian sculpture of the time,
following a set pattern of artistic devices, the figures
were formulaic and although admirable, they were
unrealistic and severe. It was development of these
original statues that lead to the artistic peak of
classical sculpture. Elsewhere, pottery from this period
advanced the simple Geometric Style to a more Oriental
style, another example of the benefits in increasing trade
and international contact, thanks to accumulating
influences from Phoenicia and Syria. Black figure painting
of the later Archaic, and the red figure painting of the
6^th century found in Corinth and Argos, shows the
development of a culture becoming more and more advanced
at at ease with itself.
The GreekArchaic Period (c. 800- 479 BCE)
started from what can only be termed uncertainty, and
ended with the Persians being ejected from Greece
for good after the battles of Plataea
and Mykale in 479 BCE.
The
Archaic Period is preceded by the Greek Dark Age (c.1200-
800 BCE), a period about which little is known for sure,
and followed by the Classical Period (c. 510- 323 BCE),
which is one of the better documented periods of Greek
history, with tragedies, comedies, histories, legal cases
and more surviving in the form of literary and epigraphic
sources. Each of these periods had its own distinctive
cultural identity, yet despite this, there is a certain
degree of flexibility with the dates given to the periods.
They are modern terms that try to frame various aspects of
change in Greek culture which by no means occurred either
over one particular year or all together in the same year.
In the
Archaic Period there were vast changes in Greek language,
society, art, architecture, and politics. These changes
occurred due to the increasing population of Greece and
its increasing amount trade,
which in turn led to colonization and a new age of
intellectual ideas, the most important of which (at least
to the modern Western World) was Democracy. This would
then fuel, in a rather circular way, more cultural
changes.
IN
THE ARCHAIC PERIOD THERE WERE VAST CHANGES IN GREEK
LANGUAGE, SOCIETY, ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND POLITICS.
POLITICS
& LAW
The
politics of Athens underwent a series of
serious changes during the archaic period, and the first
change was quite possibly for the worse, with the laws of
Draco, in around 622/621 BCE (the semi-legendary nature of
these laws and its namesake should be noted, and secondly
the semi-legendary nature of most occurrences during the
first couple of hundred years of the period). As Aristotle says of Draco “there is
nothing peculiar in his laws that is worthy of mention,
except their severity in imposing heavy punishment” (Politics
2.1274b).
The
legacy of their infamy (loans could be made on the
security of one’s own person), still exists in the modern
word ‘draconian’. Most brutal of all however were the
death penalties; Plutarch relates that “it is said that
Draco himself, when asked why he had fixed the punishment
of death for most offences, answered that he considered
these lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater
punishment for more important ones”. Whilst Aristotle
comments that there was nothing particular about the laws,
what is important is that the laws, for the first time in
Athens, were written down for all to see, and to read (for
those who were literate).
The
next major changes that came were brought about by Solon
(c. 594 BCE), whose historical authenticity is more
certain than Draco's due to fragments of his poetry that
Plutarch relates as still existing in his time. His
changes to Athenian law were the first to give the lower
classes a fairer chance -- however, the positions of power
were still only available to those of wealth. It was the
effects of class inequality that Solon tackled, not the
causes of them. The most notable change implemented by
Solon was the seisachtheia, the
‘shaking-off-of-burdens’. This decree cancelled debts,
banned the use of one’s own person as security for a
loan, and recalled all of those who had been sold as
slaves and those who had fled to escape such a fate.
There
were also Solon's reforms of weights and measures, the
right of third party appeal was introduced among other
developments. In order that he might not be pressured into
changing these laws, Solon left Athens for ten years
(according to Herodotus) and went to Egypt
where he wrote political poems.
It was
only after Solon that a sense of self-conscious democracy
in Athens began to develop; a development that could be
seen as either a social phenomenon or a political and
institutional phenomenon. The changes then came thick and
fast. The age of tyrants that had started with Draco would
soon nearly be over, but not if the Peisistratids had
anything to do with it.
The
Peisistratids were a short line of Athenian tyrants that
started with Peisistratos, and it should be noted that the
term ‘tyrant’ during this period did not have the negative
connotations that it has today. In fact, Peisistratos was
no draconian ruler, but one who felt a certain amount of
sympathy with the poorer classes of Athens. Aristotle
gives a good account of the events that follow. After
Pesistratos’ death his sons Hippias and Hipparchus held
the tyranny until an assassination plot was launched
against them by Harmodias and Aristogen.
Cleisthenes
came
to power in the political gap that was left after the
tyrannicides and is famous for introducing isonomia
(equal laws) in Athens. He achieved this through various
reforms which meant that less importance was given to
aristocratic background. The biggest reform that
Cleisthenes made was to the tribal system of Athens.
Previous to his reform there had been four tribes (based
on family ties), Cleisthenes changed this to ten tribes,
each formed by a slightly complicated subsystem.
The
tribes were formed by a collection of demes (similar
to an English Parish; small localities of residence) which
were themselves placed into one of thirty trittyes, 'thirds'
(three per tribe); a deme would be in either one
of three regions depending on its location: the coast, the
city,
or the inland. The trittyes therefore were an
amalgamation of ten demes from each of the
three regions; each tribe therefore had three trittyes
in it, one composed of demes from the city, one with demes
from the coast, and one of demes from inland. Further to
this Athenians would no longer take their ‘surname’ from
their father, but from their deme. This all meant
that the family ties, traditions and allegiances that had
caused prior political friction (and had led in some way
to the Peisistraid tyrannies) had been broken up. It was
also during Cleisthenes’ time that many Athenian official
positions began to be selected by lot. Aristotle and
Herodotus cover these events in quite good detail.
ART
& ARCHITECTURE
The
art and architecture of the Archaic Period also underwent
various overhauls; the earlier geometric style was
replaced with an orientalising style, which in turn was
replaced by black
figure pottery.
Black figure pottery
was first starting to be used in Corinth
c. 700s BCE, but the first signed example dates to c. 570
BCE, when attic black figure pottery was in its heyday (c.
630- 480 BCE) and is of Sophilos. As this technique was
further developed and explored, it gave way to Red Figure
pottery, which started to develop c. 530 BCE.
It
was also during this period that many changes and
developments were made to temple
building. The first phase of the Heraion at Samos was
built in the mid. 8th C. BCE, yet its final, unfinished,
reincarnation wasn’t begun until c. 530 BCE. Many changes
had occurred by then. The Heraion at Olympia,
built c. 600 BCE, was the first temple to have a stone
stylobate and lower wall
course, but was still built with wooden columns, one of
which still survived to Pausanias day. Today the remnants
of this development can be seen in the varying sizes and
styles of the temple’s Doric stone columns since they were
created by different hands in different times in order to
replace wooden columns as needed.
The
Corcyra
Artemision (c. 580/ 70 BCE) was the first Greek temple to
have a stone entablature and the Temple of Apollo
(c. 580-550 BCE) at Syracuse
is now known as the Cathedral of Syracuse, being the
longest continually lasting single building to remain
consecrated ground, in this case, since its Archaic
origins. The age of tyrants can also be witnessed in
one particular temple, in this case, not relating to
Athens’ tyrants, but to Samos’, namely Polykrates (c.540-
520 BCE) who commissioned the fourth stage Heraion
at Samos. Greece's developing international realtionships
can be witnessesed in this was too, with King Croeus
dedicating a column
of the Temple of Artemis
and Ephesus;
and it still bears his mark to this day.
PANHELLENIC
GAMES
It was
during the Archaic period that the four major panhellenic
games of Greece were founded. In 776 BCE the Olympic games were traditionally begun
by Hercules
and Pelops (and their influence can be seen in the
sculptural decoration of the classical Temple of Zeus there), whilst at Delphi
athletic games had taken place from c. 586 BCE, the home
of the Pythian games, and the panhellenic Isthmian games
were founded at Corinth c. 581 BCE. The last of the ‘big
four’ was founded c. 573 BCE, and this was the Nemean
games.
However,
in the normal Archaic tradition, each of these games was
surrounded by its own foundation myth, not just the Olympics.
The Pythian games, which had originally been solely a
games of music and dance, were supposedly founded by
Apollo himself (according to Pindar), the Isthmian games
(according to Pausanias) by the legendary King of Corinth,
Sisyphus, and the Nemean Games after Hercules had slain
the Nemean lion. But when we think of victory at the
games, there is one name that jumps out, and it isn’t that
of a victor, but of a poet, Pindar, who was composing
between c. 500- 446 BCE, writing
his Pythian odes and others in honour of the various
victors at the games.
From Homer
and Hesiod, through to Pindar and
Aeschylus, the Archaic Period underwent a vast development
in the field of Greek literature, and language too, with
the first Greek alphabet being developed. The Greek
alphabet developed out of the Phoneician alphabet, and is
in itself a tribute to the increase in trade and
exploration in the period that made this cultural exchange
possible: the earliest Greek writing being dated to c. 750
BCE. However, despite the development of the Greek
alphabet, the oral tradition of poetic composition and
transmission was still the method used by Hesiod and
Homer; it wasn’t until c. 670 BCE and the rule of
Peisistratus that a definitive version of the Iliad and
Odyssey was attempted.
The
end of the Archaic period also had a literature that is
just as influential, less well known perhaps, but it set
the stage for the later classical tragedians and
comedians. 535 BCE was the year of the first dramatic
festival in Athens and in 485 BCE comedy was added, and
one year later Aeschylus had won his first dramatic
competition in Athens, but it wasn’t until 472 BCE that
Aeschylus’ Persians was composed.
PERSIAN
WARS
The
Persian Wars, perhaps the most influential set of events
in the Archaic period, which couldn’t possibly be given
justice to here, started with the Ionian revolt of Greek
colonies and settlements in Asia
Minor
from the Persian Empire which prompted Darius
I’s
retaliation to invade Greece, which failed at the Battle
of Marathon in 490 BCE. This was
later avenged by the second invasion of Greece by Xerxes, who was finally
expelled with the combined victories at Plataea and
Mykale, though only after the equally as famous battles of
Thermopylae and Salamis.
Salamis was won by the fleet that Themistocles had
persuaded the Athenians to build from the silver mines at
Laurium, and this silver would continue to be vitally
important into the Classical Period.
However,
there
were loses in these wars; the sacking of the Athenian acropolis
and Agora, the death of Leonidas,
and in the end, the freedom of the Ionic tributaries to
Athens as the Delian League soon became the Athenian
League. The change being that in the Archaic period there
was war
with Persia, in the Classical
period, diplomacy.
The
Archaic Period is, therefore, a highly important time
period in its own right, but is also highly important in
putting the events of the Classical Period into context.
However, this definition only covers some of the many
events and developments, and covers some of them only
briefly: the Archaic Period is perhaps the richest and
most complicated in Greek history.
750-700
City-states emerge; Homers composes Iliad (750) and
Odyssey (720)
730-700
First Messenian War; Lelantine War
720
“Orientalizing period” in Greek art
700-650
development of hoplite phalanx warfare; Hesiod composes
Theogony; Works and Days
687-652
Gyges of Lydia
675
Archilochus, Greek lyric poet from Paros, active
670-500
Tyrants rule in many city-states
669
Battle of Hysiae; Pheidon of Argos defeats the Spartans
with his hoplite phalanx.
664
First naval battle of Greeks on record between Corinth
and Corcyra
655
tyrants Pheidon at Argos and Cypselus at Corinth
(Pheidon possibly the first to mint coins)
650
Second Messenian War; Tyrtaeus Spartan poet of war
650
Colonization of Black Sea areas begins; “Lycurgan
Reforms” at Sparta; the “Great Rhetra”;
earliest
known stone inscription of a law; first temples built of
marble and stone; Corinthian
black-figure
technique; Lydians mint the first electrum coins
632
Cylon’s attempted tyranny at Athens aided by Theagenes,
tyrant of Megara
627
Periander tyrant of Corinth
621
Draco’s law code
594
Solon’s archonship
585-546
Milesian (or Ionian) school; the first Greek
philosophers/scientists; members include
Thales,
Anaximander and Anaximenes
585
Thales of Miletus predicts the solar eclipse of 28 May
566
Great Panathenaea first established
560-547/6
Croesus king of Lydia
559-530
Cyrus the Great King of Persia
550
Anaximander draws first map of the world; Theognis,
aristocratic poet of Megara, active
546-528/7
Peisistratus tyrant of Athens (unsuccessful attempts in
561/0 and in 557/6)
530-522
Cambyses King of Persia
527-510
Hippias tyrant of Athens
521-486
Darius I King of Persia
508/7
‘Cleisthenic Revolution’
500-400
Ionian logographers; the predecessors and contemporaries
of Herodotus who were the pioneers of history-writing
and the earliest Greek prose writers, especially
Hecataeus of Miletus who wrote a pioneering work of
systematic geography, Periegesis, and a mythographic
work, the Genealogies.
500
Hecataeus advises against the Ionian revolt
499
Ionian revolt provokes the Persians
6
Chronological Table for Greek Colonization
·775-550
Greeks, under population pressure, set forth from the
mainland, the Aegean islands and the coast of Asia Minor
to establish colonies from the Crimea to the Nile Delta
and from the Caucasus to Spain, on the shores of the
Mediterranean, Hellespont, Propontis, Bosporus and Black
Sea; colonizing activity begins with the emergence of the
polis. Colonies are independent city states, free from
political connection with and subordination to the mother
cities.
·775 first
Greek colony set up at Pithecusae (Ischia), a small island
off Naples, by colonists from Chalcis and Eretria in
Euboea and from Cyme in Aeolis in search of precious
metals–especially copper and iron–from the Etruscans;
Euboeans (Ionians) colonize Chalcidice in Thrace.
·750 Greeks
found Cumae; first Greek community with which Etruscans
and then Romans have contact; Homer’s Odyssey provides
evidence for a revival of knowledge of the West; Odysseus’
wanderings in Books 9-12 reflect tales told by adventurers
and traders (i.e., Scylla and Charybdis associated with
the straits of Messina and the Cyclopes with Mt. Etna).
·734 Naxos
established off the east coast of Sicily
·733
Corinthians found Syracuse; they also establish a colony
on the island of Corcyra, driving out the earlier
settlement of the Eretrians; acquire a dominant position
on the route to Sicily, opening up trading possibilities
for the Bacchiad oligarchy of Corinth; increasing numbers
of wares, pottery and bronzes, come to Syracuse and the
Sicilian cities; Syracuse soon becomes the greatest city
in Sicily.
·731 Megara
establishes colony, Megara Hyblaea, north of Syracuse
(Hybla was a native
·community in
Sicily).
·730 the first
evidence of Chalcidic alphabet found on cup, the drinking
cup of Nestor; Chalcidians of Euboea the most active early
Greek colonizers.
·728 Sicilian
Naxians colonize Leontini and Catana to the south of their
city.
·725
Chalcidians found Zancle on the Sicilian side and
Rhegiumon the Italian side of the straits of Messina for
commercial and political reasons.
·730-720 First
Messenian War; Chalcidians, suffering from overpopulation,
found Rhegium; Messenians driven out of Messenia because
unwilling to come to terms with Sparta join the
Chalcidians in settling Rhegium.
·720 Achaeans
establish Sybaris in south Italy, which rapidly grows rich
from its fertile lands and commerce; whereas the
Chalcidians and Corinthians were the most active
participants in colonizing Sicily, the Achaean states on
the south shore of the Corinthian Gulf took the lead in
migration to south Italy.
·710 Achaeans
found Posidonia (Paestum).
·708 Achaean
colonists establish Croton in south Italy; the city
flourishes with its fertile lands and becomes famous for
its athletes, doctors and its school of Pythagoras.
·706 Partheniai
from Sparta found Taras (Roman Tarentum); dissatisfied
with their political position, the Partheniai had
organized a rebellion, but were finally persuaded to
depart for Taras, a Doric city in its dialect and
institutions; the only colony in the west of the Spartans,
who solved their land hunger problem through the conquest
of Messenia.
·700 Lelantine
War; Chalcis and Eretria in one of the earliest recorded
wars in Greece battle for the Lelantine plain which lay
between the two cities. Ionians of the Aegean island of
Paros send colonists, including the poet Archilochus, to
Thasos and the adjacent Thracian coast.
·688 Gela
founded (45 years after Syracuse) by colonists from Rhodes
and Crete.
·675-650
king Gyges of Lydia gives consent to Miletus to establish
Abydos on the Asiatic side of the Hellespont.
·673
Locrians establish Locri Epizephyrii (Italy); Zaleucus,
known as the earliest of the Greek law givers, drew up a
code of laws for Locri.
·663-609
Psammetichus I, pharaoh of Egypt, grants Ionian and Carian
pirates land known as the Camps, on either side of the
Pelusian mouth of the Nile.
·650
Clazomenae found Abdera, home of two of the most important
fifth-century philosophers or sophists–Democritus and
Protagoras; Achaeans establish Metapontumon the instep of
Italy; prosperous in agriculture.
·648
settlers from Zancle establish town ofHimera which brings
Greeks into close contact with the Phoenicians in the
western part of Sicily.
·631
Dorian settlers from Thera, an island in the southern
Aegean, found Cyrene on the north coast of Africa.
·628
Megara sets up a colony, Selinus, in the fertile land on
the south west coast of Sicily.
·630-600
Megara, neighbor of Corinth, founds colonies Chalcedon and
Byzantium on the Asiatic and European sides, respectively,
of the Bosporus; Chalcedon with its fertile land was
established 17 years before Byzantium, which, with its
excellent harbor, could dominate the shipping up and down
the Bosporus due to the nature of the currents.
·625-600
colonization of the Black Sea region begins; area rich in
metals, timber, grain, fish and many other products;
Milesians found Sinope on the shore of the Black Sea, a
flourishing trading city and home of the fourth-century
Cynic philosopher Diogenes and the fourth- and
thirdcentury comic poet Diphilus; Sinope sent out many
small trading colonies, including Trapezus (Trebizond),
famous as the place where Xenophon and the remnants of the
Ten Thousand first sighted the sea after their march back
from the interior of Babylonia.
·600
The Phoenicians colonizeMessalia (Marseilles) and several
smaller out posts on the east coast of Spain; Corinth
settles Potidaea, Corinth’s only settlement in the north
Aegean; Corcyra founds Epidamnus at the end of the seventh
century. Rhodians found Rhode on the north-east coast of
Spain and give their name to the river Rhone; subsequently
Phocaeans change name Rhode to Emporiae (market).
·600-550
Heraclea in Bithynia founded; rich in tunny fish and
timber
·580
Having expanded, Gela establishes the agricultural colony
of Acragas, which soon outstripped the mother city in size
and prosperity.
·570-526
Egyptian pharaoh Amasis, a philhellene, grants Naucratis
as a city to live in for Greeks who come to Egypt; a great
temple precinct (temenos) called the Hellenion is later
built by Greek merchants granted land by Amasis (i.e.,
Ionians from Chios, Teos, Phocaea and Clazomenae, Dorians
from Rhodes, Cnidos, Halicarnassus and Phaselis, and
Aeolians from Mytilene (in Lesbos).
·546
Phocaeans found Elea, the last of the Greek settlements in
Italy during this period of colonization; important school
of philosophy develops in Elea (Eleatic philosophers
include Parmenides, Zeno and Melissus).
(Where
you can also find links to all of the Metropolitan
Museum’s Greek Archaic Art Holdings)
A
striking change appears in Greek art of the seventh century
B.C., the beginning of the Archaic period. The abstract geometric patterning that was dominant between about
1050 and 700 B.C. is supplanted in the seventh century by a
more naturalistic style reflecting significant influence
from the Near East
and Egypt.
Trading stations in the Levant and the Nile Delta,
continuing Greek colonization in the east and west, as well
as contact with eastern craftsmen, notably on Crete and Cyprus,
inspired Greek artists to work in techniques as diverse as gem
cutting, ivory carving, jewelry making, and metalworking (1989.281.49-.50). Eastern pictorial motifs were
introduced—palmette and lotus compositions, animal hunts,
and such composite beasts as griffins (part bird, part
lion), sphinxes (part woman, part winged lion), and sirens
(part woman, part bird). Greek artists rapidly assimilated
foreign styles and motifs into new portrayals of their own
myths and customs, thereby forging the foundations of
Archaic and Classical Greek art.
Greek artists
rapidly assimilated foreign styles and motifs into new
portrayals of their own myths and customs, thereby forging
the foundations of Archaic and Classical Greek art art.
The Greek world of the seventh
and sixth centuries B.C. consisted of numerous autonomous
city-states, or poleis, separated one from the
other by mountains and the sea. Greek settlements
stretched all the way from the coast of Asia Minor and the
Aegean islands, to mainland Greece, Sicily, North Africa, and even Spain. As they grew
in wealth and power, the poleis on the coast of
Asia Minor and neighboring islands competed with one
another in the construction of sanctuaries with huge stone
temples. Lyric poetry, the primary literary medium of the
day, attained new heights in the work of such notable
poets as Archilochos of Paros and Sappho of Lesbos.
Contact with prosperous centers like Sardis in Lydia, which was ruled in the sixth
century B.C. by the legendary king Croesus, influenced
eastern Greek art. Sculptors in the Aegean islands,
notably on Naxos and Samos, carved large-scale statues in
marble. Goldsmiths on Rhodes specialized in fine jewelry,
and bronzeworkers on Crete fashioned armor and plaques
decorated with superb reliefs (1989.281.49-.50).
The prominent artistic centers
of mainland Greece—notably Sparta, Corinth, and Athens—also
exhibited significant regional variation. Sparta and its
neighbors in Laconia produced remarkable ivory carvings
and distinctive bronzes (38.11.3). Corinthian artisans invented
a style of silhouetted forms (1997.36) that focused on tapestry-like
patterns of small animals and plant motifs. By contrast,
the vase painters of Athens were more inclined to
illustrate mythological scenes. Despite variance in
dialect—even the way the alphabet was written varied from
region to region at this time—the Greek language was a
major unifying factor in Greece. Furthermore,
Greek-speaking people came together for festivals and the games that were held at the major
Panhellenic sanctuaries on mainland Greece, such as
Olympia and Delphi. Dedications at these sanctuaries
included many works from the eastern and western regions
of Greece.
Throughout the sixth century
B.C., Greek artists made increasingly naturalistic
representations of the human figure. During this period,
two types of freestanding, large-scale sculptures
predominated: the male kouros, or standing nude youth, and
the female kore, or standing draped maiden. Among the
earliest examples of the type, the kouros in the
Metropolitan Museum (32.11.1) reveals Egyptian influence in
both its pose and proportions. Erected in sanctuaries and
in cemeteries outside the city walls, these large stone
statues served as dedications to the gods or as grave
markers. Athenian aristocrats frequently erected expensive
funerary monuments in the city and its environs,
especially for members of their family who had died young.
Such monuments also took the form of stelai, often
decorated in relief.
Sanctuaries were a focus of
artistic achievement at this time and served as major
repositories of works of art. The two main orders of Greek
architecture—the Doric order of mainland
Greece and the western colonies, and the Ionic order of
the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor and the Ionian
islands—were well established by the beginning of the
sixth century B.C. Temple architecture continued to be
refined throughout the century by a process of vibrant
experimentation, often through building projects initiated
by rulers such as Peisistratos of Athens and Polykrates of
Samos. These buildings were often embellished with
sculptural figures of stone or terracotta (26.60.73), paintings (now mostly lost),
and elaborate moldings. True narrative scenes in relief
sculpture appeared in the latter part of the sixth century
B.C., as artists became increasingly interested in showing
figures, especially the human figure, in motion. About 566
B.C., Athens established the Panathenaic games. Statues of
victorious athletes were erected as dedications in Greek
sanctuaries, and trophy amphorai were decorated with the
event in which the athlete had triumphed.
Creativity and innovation took
many forms during the sixth century B.C. The earliest
known Greek scientist, Thales of Miletos, demonstrated the
cycles of nature and successfully predicted a solar
eclipse and the solstices. Pythagoras of Samos, famous
today for the theorem in geometry that bears his name, was
an influential and forward-thinking mathematician. In
Athens, the lawgiver and poet Solon instituted
groundbreaking reforms and established a written code of
laws. Meanwhile, potters (both native and foreign-born)
mastered Corinthian techniques in Athens and by 550 B.C.,
Athenian—also called "Attic" for the region around
Athens—black-figure pottery dominated the export market
throughout the Mediterranean region. Athenian vases of the second half of the sixth
century B.C. provide a wealth of iconography illuminating
numerous aspects of Greek culture, including funerary
rites, daily life, symposia, athletics, warfare, religion, and mythology. Among
the great painters of Attic black-figure vases, Sophilos,
Kleitias, Nearchos, Lydos, Exekias, and the Amasis Painter
experimented with a variety of techniques to overcome the
limitations of black-figure painting with its emphasis on
silhouette and incised detail. The consequent invention of
the red-figure technique, which offered greater
opportunities for drawing and eventually superseded
black-figure, is conventionally dated about 530 B.C. and
attributed to the workshop of the potter Andokides.
Citation
·Department of Greek and Roman
Art. "Greek Art in the Archaic Period". In Heilbrunn
Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2000–.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/argk/hd_argk.htm (October
2003)
Further Reading
·Cook, R. M. Greek Painted
Pottery. 3d ed. New York: Routledge, 1996.
·Grant, Michael, and John Hazel.
Who's Who in Classical Mythology. London: Dent,
1993.
·Hornblower, Simon, and Antony
Spawforth, eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
3d ed., rev. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
·Langdon, Susan, ed. From
Pasture to Polis: Art in the Age of Homer.
Exhibition catalogue. Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1993.
·Lawrence, A. W. Greek
Architecture. 4th ed., rev. by R. A. Tomlinson.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
·The World of Athens: An
Introduction to Classical Athenian Culture: Background
Book. Joint Association
of Classical Teachers' Greek Course. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988.
·Padgett, J. Michael, ed. The
Centaur's Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art.
Exhibition catalogue. Princeton: Princeton University Art
Museum, 2003.
·Pomeroy, Sarah B., et al. Ancient
Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
8a
Greek Legend Authenticity --
How
many
Greek legends were really true? By Armand
d'Angour University of Oxford
BBC
News
– Business22 July
2014 Last updated at 19:00 ET
The culture and
legends of ancient Greece have a remarkably long legacy in
the modern language of education, politics, philosophy,
art and science. Classical references from thousands of
years ago continue to appear. But what was the origin of
some of these ideas?
1. Was there ever really
a Trojan Horse?
The story of the Trojan Horse is first mentioned in
Homer's Odyssey, an epic song committed to writing around
750BC, describing the aftermath of a war at Troy that
purportedly took place around 500 years earlier.
After besieging Troy (modern-day Hisarlik in
Turkey) for 10 years without success, the Greek army
encamped outside the city walls made as if to sail home,
leaving behind them a giant wooden horse as an offering to
the goddess Athena.
The Trojans triumphantly dragged the horse within
Troy, and when night fell the Greek warriors concealed
inside it climbed out and destroyed the city.
Archaeological evidence shows that Troy was indeed burned
down; but the wooden horse is an imaginative fable,
perhaps inspired by the way ancient siege-engines were
clothed with damp horse-hides to stop them being set
alight by fire-arrows.
2. Homer is one of the
great poets of ancient Greek legends. Did he actually
exist?
Not only is the Trojan Horse a colourful fiction,
the existence of Homer himself has sometimes been doubted.
It's generally supposed that the great epics which go
under Homer's name, the Iliad and Odyssey, were composed
orally, without the aid of writing, some time in the 8th
Century BC, the fruit of a tradition of oral minstrelsy
stretching back for centuries.
While the ancients had no doubt that Homer was a
real bard who composed the monumental epics, nothing
certain is known about him. All we do know is that, even
if the poems were composed without writing and orally
transmitted, at some stage they were written down in
Greek, because that is how they have survived.
3. Was there an
individual inventor of the alphabet?
The date attributed to the writing down of the
Homeric epics is connected to the earliest evidence for
the existence of Greek script in the 8th Century BC.
The Greeks knew that their alphabet (later borrowed
by the Romans to become the western alphabet) was adapted
from that of the Phoenicians, a near-eastern nation whose
letter-sequence began "aleph bet".
The fact that the adaptation was uniform throughout
Greece has suggested that there was a single adapter
rather than many. Greek tradition named the adapter
Palamedes, which may just mean "clever man of old".
Palamedes was also said to have invented counting,
currency, and board games.
The Greek letter-shapes came to differ visually
from their Phoenician progenitors - with the current
geometrical letter-shapes credited to the 6th Century
mathematician Pythagoras.
4. Did Pythagoras invent
Pythagoras' theorem? Or did he copy his homework from
someone else?
It is doubtful whether Pythagoras (c. 570-495BC)
was really a mathematician as we understand the word.
Schoolchildren still learn his so-called theorem about the
square on the hypotenuse (a2+b2 =c2). But the Babylonians
knew this equation centuries earlier, and there is no
evidence that Pythagoras either discovered or proved it.
In fact, although genuine mathematical
investigations were undertaken by later Pythagoreans, the
evidence suggests that Pythagoras was a mystic who
believed that numbers underlie everything. He worked out,
for instance, that perfect musical intervals could be
expressed by simple ratios.
5. What made the Greeks
begin using money? Was it trade or their "psyche"?
It may seem obvious to us that commercial
imperatives would have driven the invention of money. But
human beings conducted trade for millennia without
coinage, and it's not certain that the first monetised
economy in the world arose in ancient Greece simply in
order to facilitate such transactions.
The classicist Richard Seaford has argued that the
invention of money emerged from deep in the Greek psyche.
It is tied to notions of reciprocal exchange and
obligation which pervaded their societies; it reflects
philosophical distinctions between face-value and
intrinsic value; and it is a political instrument, since
the state is required to act as guarantor of monetary
value.
Financial instruments and institutions - coinage,
mints, contracts, banking, credit and debt - were being
developed in many Greek cities by the 5th Century BC, with
Athens at the forefront. But one ancient state held the
notion of money in deep suspicion and resisted its
introduction: Sparta.
6. How spartan were the
Spartans?
The legendary Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus decreed
that the Spartans should use only iron as currency, making
it so cumbersome that even a small amount would have to be
carried by a yoke of oxen.
This story may be part of the idealisation of the
ancient Spartans as a warrior society dedicated to
military pre-eminence. While classical Sparta did not mint
its own coins, it used foreign silver, and some Spartan
leaders were notoriously prone to bribery.
However, laws may have been passed to prevent
Spartans importing luxuries that might threaten to
undermine their hardiness. When the Athenian playboy
general Alcibiades defected to Sparta during its war with
Athens in the late 5th Century, he adopted their meagre
diet, tough training routines, coarse clothing, and
Laconic expressions.
But eventually his passion for all things Spartan
extended to the king's wife Timaea, who became pregnant.
Alcibiades returned to Athens, whence he had fled eight
years earlier to avoid charges of shocking sacrilege, one
of which was that he had subjected Athens' holy Mysteries
to mockery.
7. What were the secrets
of the Greek Mystery Cults?
If I told you, I'd have to kill you. The secrets
were fiercely guarded, and severe penalties were
prescribed for anyone who divulged them or who, like
Alcibiades, were thought to have profaned them. Initiates
were required to undergo initiation rites which may have
included transvestism and centred on secret objects
(perhaps phalluses) and passwords being revealed.
The aim was to give devotees a glimpse of the
"other side", so that they could return to their lives
blessed in the knowledge that when their turn came to die
they could ensure the survival of their soul in the
Underworld.
Excavations have uncovered tombs containing
passwords and instructions written on thin gold sheets as
an aide-memoire for deceased devotees. The principal Greek
Mystery Cults were those of Demeter, goddess of
agriculture, and of Dionysus (also known as Bacchus), god
of wine, ecstasy - and of theatre.
8. Who first made a
drama out of a crisis? How did theatres begin?
In 5th Century Athens, theatre was closely
connected to the cult of Dionysus, in whose theatre on the
southern slopes of the Acropolis tragedies and comedies
were staged at an annual festival.
But the origin of theatre is a much-debated issue.
One tradition tells of the actor Thespis (hence
"thespian") standing on a cart and playing a dramatic role
for the first time around 532BC; another claims that drama
began with ritual choruses and gradually introduced
actors' parts.
Aristotle (384-322BC) supposed that the choruses of
tragedy were originally ritual songs (dithyrambs) sung and
danced in Dionysus' honour, while comedy emerged out of
ribald performances involving model phalluses.
As a god associated with shifting roles and
appearances, Dionysus seems an apt choice of god to give
rise to drama. But from the earliest extant tragedy,
Aeschylus' Persians of 472BC, few surviving tragedies have
anything to do with Dionysus.
Comic drama was largely devoted to making fun of
contemporary figures - including in several plays (most
famously in Aristophanes' Clouds) the philosopher
Socrates.
9. What made Socrates
think about becoming a philosopher?
Socrates (469-399BC) may have had his head in the
clouds, and was portrayed in Aristophanes' comedy as
entertaining ideas ranging from the scientifically absurd
("How do you measure a flea's jump?") to the socially
subversive ("I can teach anyone to win any argument, even
if they're in the wrong").
This picture is at odds with the main sources of
biographical data on Socrates, the writings of his pupils
Plato and Xenophon. Both the latter treat him with great
respect as a moral questioner and guide, but they say
almost nothing of Socrates' earlier activities.
In fact our first description of Socrates, dating
to his thirties, show him as a man of action. He served in
a military campaign in northern Greece in 432BC, and
during a brutal battle he saved the life of his beloved
young friend Alcibiades. Subsequently he never left
Athens, and spent his time trying to get his fellow
Athenians to examine their own lives and thoughts.
We might speculate that Socrates had toyed with
science and politics in his youth, until a life-and-death
experience in battle turned him to devoting the remainder
of his life to the search for wisdom and truth.
As he wrote nothing himself, our strongest image of
Socrates as a philosopher comes from the dialogues of his
devoted pupil Plato, whose own pupil Aristotle was tutor
of Alexander, prince of Macedon.
10. Was Alexander the
Great really that great?
Alexander (356-323BC) was to become one the
greatest soldier-generals the world had ever seen.
According to ancient sources, however, he was
physically unprepossessing. Short and stocky, he was a
hard drinker with a ruddy complexion, a rasping voice, and
an impulsive temper which on one occasion led him to kill
his companion Cleitus in a violent rage.
As his years progressed he became paranoid and
megalomaniacal. However, in 10 short years from the age of
20 he forged a vast empire stretching from Egypt to India.
Never defeated in battle, he made use of innovative siege
engines every bit as as effective as the fabled Trojan
Horse, and founded 20 cities that bore his name, including
Alexandria in Egypt.
His military success was little short of
miraculous, and in the eyes of an ancient world
devoted to warfare and conquest it
was only right to accord him the title of "Great".
Dr Armand D'Angour is associate professor of
classics at the University of Oxford
8b
Cleobis and Biton
From
Herodotus, with an English translation by A. D. Godley.
Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.
The myth of Cleobis and Biton is told in Herodotus,
1.31. The two sons pulled their priestess mother by cart
in place of oxen. They travelled from Argos to the
Argive Heraion, some 45 stadia.
At their arrival they
collapse, and their mother prays to Hera that they may
die in their sleep - the easiest death for mortals.
Herodotus tells this story as part of Solon’s answer to
Croesus’ questioning as to who
the happiest man is.
Herodotus
Histories 1.31
When
Solon had provoked him by saying that the affairs of
Tellus were so fortunate, Croesus asked who he thought was
next, fully expecting to win second prize. Solon answered,
“Cleobis and Biton. [2] They were of Argive stock, had
enough to live on, and on top of this had great bodily
strength. Both
had won prizes in the athletic contests, and this story is
told about them: there was a festival of Hera in Argos, and
their mother absolutely had to be conveyed to the temple
by a team of oxen. But
their oxen had not come back from the fields in time, so
the youths took the yoke upon their own shoulders under
constraint of time. They
drew the wagon, with their mother riding atop it,
traveling five miles until they arrived at the temple. [3] When they had
done this and had been seen by the entire gathering, their
lives came to an excellent end, and in their case the god
made clear that for human beings it is a better thing to
die than to live. The
Argive men stood around the youths and congratulated them
on their strength; the Argive women congratulated their
mother for having borne such children. [4] She was
overjoyed at the feat and at the praise, so she stood
before the image and prayed that the goddess might grant
the best thing for man to her children Cleobis and Biton,
who had given great honor to the goddess. [5] After this
prayer they sacrificed and feasted. The youths then lay
down in the temple and went to sleep and never rose again;
death held them there. The
Argives made and dedicated at Delphi
statues of them as being the best of men.”
In
my
previous hub Oikos and
Basileus, we encountered
the small communities of early Greece, which from a
sociological perspective are categorized as "prestate"
societies. The term "prestate" is used for political units
that do not have enforceable state authority and that rely
on traditions rather than formally enacted laws as
principles of community life. We saw that the basileus, as
a man of influence, did not dominate decision-making and
dispute resolution by top-down decrees, but rather lead
through consensus building. Early Greek communities did
not act without the assent of its citzens.
In
this
hub, we will discuss the development of these early Greek
communities from prestate to states, or "poleis" to use
the ancient Greek term (polis sg., poleis pl.). We will
also see how the self-made basilees (pl. of basileus) of
the earlier periods evolved into a hereditary aristocracy.
The
period
between 725 B.C. and 675 B.C. saw a rapid transformation
from "basileutic prestates" into the aristocratic poleis.
Evidence of this transformation is derived from
archaeologists who document both a rapid rise in the
general population and a rapid increase in wealth among
the elites. Archaeologists interpret these two trends as
evidence of a shift in the social and political
configuration of ancient Greek society--specifically, a
transition from prestate to state with increased social
stratification and political/institutional formality.
A. Population Increase
Between
780
and 720 B.C., archaeologists estimate that the population
of Greece increased by 300% to 600%. Evidence includes the
number and size of settlements, increased burials, new
well-digging, internal colonization and emigration abroad
to Sicily, Italy and to regions around the Black Sea. In
800 B.C., land was plentiful in mainland Greece and social
status was fluid as the land was still being settled. As
land become increasingly scarce, greater disparities in
wealth began to arise within the poleis, since ultimately
the ownership of land was the source of most wealth in
antiquity.
The
scarcity
of land also caused poleis to compete for interjacent land
with border wars becoming more frequent. As conflicting
claims for land were resolved, the borders of each polis
became more defined. The informal military hierarchy of
earlier periods was transformed into more organized
hoplite militias with a more unified command. The rise of
increasingly formal political and military structures were
key elements in the transformation from prestate to
state--both in terms of the creation of institutions with
official authority and the development of a patriotic
consciousness.
In
addition
to external competition for increasingly scarce land,
internal competition arose among the citizens of
individual poleis as well. Citizens begin to colonize and
claim less desirable land around the polis. Agriculture
become more labor intensive as populations found
themselves increasingly investing their energy in
developing irrigation and cultivating the slopes of hills
and mountains for orchard crops such as olives and grapes.
As the demand for agricultural output increased, the need
for plowing and manure also increased, thereby making
agriculture even more labor intensive. At this point,
slave labor become increasingly prevalent to satisfy the
ever increasing demands for labor. Unlike modern society,
unemployment was rarely an issue in antiquity; rather
manpower shortages were a perennial problem where many of
the labor saving devices we take for granted today were
unknown.
One
of
the distinguishing characteristics of the ancient Greek
population as compared to their neighbors in the Near East
(Anatolia, Persia, Egypt) is that they were "citizens" of
their local community rather than subjects of some distant
and perhaps foreign monarch. Citizens of the Greek polis
had three defining characteristic: landownership, militia
participation and religious participation. Foreigners
("xenoi") and slaves ("douloi") were excluded from
citizenship; and therefore were not permitted to own land
or participate in the civic and religious activities of
polis.
B. Elite Wealth
The
second
body of evidence that indicates a transformation from
prestate to state pertains to elite wealth. "Wealth" in
ancient Greek society should not be equated with a
post-industrial conceptualizations of wealth (i.e. capital
or other income producing assets). Wealth in ancient Greek
society signifies the possession of scarce personal
property (gold, silver, horses, objects of art) which was
used primarily as a display of social status.
Increasingly,
wealth
and social worth came to be inherited by limited segments
of the population. Because the elites likely had more
labor (slaves) at their disposal, it meant they had enough
of an agricultural surplus to exchange for metalware and
display goods. The elite became increasingly conscious of
itself as "superior" calling itself "aristoi" (the best)
whence we derive our word aristocracy. This class ideology
was played-out with flaunting displays of wealth including
extravagant weddings, funerals and festivals. Another sign
of social consciousness is endogamy, or the exclusive
intermarrying among members of the aristocracy.
Increasingly,
we
find textual evidence from this period of class ideology
and consciousness where personal excellence and social
worth are described as being biological or inherited from
divine ancestry. In addition, we find a conflation of
social and moral worth where the lowly are now
spoken of as "poneroi" ("wicked, despicable") and "kakoi"
("bad, mean"); the elite are "kaloskagathos ("the virtuous
and good"). This is a stark contrast to the later
Christian equation of virtue with humility and poverty.
Famous aristocratic clans included inter alia: the
Bakchiadai of Corinth, the Aiakiadai of Aigina, the
Basilidai of Ephesus, the Neleidai of Miletos, the
Medontidai of Athens.
10 The Late Archaic City-State
From -- Perseus Digital Library
Thomas R. Martin, An Overview of Classical Greek History
from Mycenae to Alexander
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0009%3Achapter%3D6
Although the Greek city-states differed among themselves in
size and natural resources, over the course of the Archaic
age they came to share certain fundamental political
institutions and social traditions: citizenship, slavery,
the legal disadvantages and political exclusion of women,
and the continuing influence of aristocrats in society and
politics. During this time, however, different city-states
developed these shared characteristics in strikingly
different ways. Monarchy had died out in Greece with the end
of Mycenaean civilization, except for the dual kingship that
existed in Sparta as part of its complex oligarchic system
rather than as a monarchy in the ordinary sense. In Sparta
and some other Greek city-states, only a rather restricted
number of men exercised meaningful political power (thus
creating a political system called an oligarchy, meaning
“rule by the few.”) Other city-states experienced periods of
domination by the kind of sole ruler who seized power in
unconstitutional fashion and whom the Greeks called a
tyrant. Tyranny, passed down from father to son, existed at
various times across the breadth of the Greek world from
city-states on the island of Sicily in the west to Samos off
the coast of Ionia in the east. Still other city-states
created early forms of democracy (“rule by the people”) by
giving all male citizens the power to participate in
governing. Assemblies of men with some influence on the king
had existed in certain early states in the ancient Near
East, but Greek democracy broke new ground with the amount
of political power that it invested in its male citizen
body. The Athenians established Greece's most renowned
democracy, in which the individual freedom of citizens
flourished to a degree unprecedented in the ancient world.
By examining these different paths of political and social
development, we can grasp the great challenge faced by the
Greeks as they struggled to construct a new way of life
during the Archaic Age. In the course of this struggle, they
also began to formulate new ways of understanding the
physical world, their relations to it, and their
relationships with each other.
The Power of Sparta
The Spartans made oligarchy the political base for a society
devoted to military readiness, and the resulting Spartan way
of life1 became famous for its discipline, which showed most
prominently in the Spartan infantry, the most powerful
military force in Greece during the Archaic Age. Sparta's
easily defended location2—nestled on a narrow north-south
plain between rugged mountain ranges in the southeastern
Peloponnese, in a region called Laconia (hence the
designation of Spartans as Laconians)—gave it a secure base
for developing its might. Sparta had access to the sea
through a harbor3 situated some twenty-five miles south of
its urban center, but this harbor opened onto a dangerous
stretch of the Mediterranean whipped by treacherous currents
and winds. As a consequence, enemies could not threaten the
Spartans by sea, but their relative isolation from the sea
also kept the Spartans from becoming adept sailors. Their
interests and their strength4 lay on the land.
The Early History of Sparta
The Greeks believed the ancestors of the Spartans were
Dorians5 who had invaded the Peloponnese from central Greece
and defeated the original inhabitants of Laconia around 950
B.C., but no archaeological evidence supports the notion
that a “Dorian invasion” actually took place. From wherever
the original Spartans came, they conquered the inhabitants
of Laconia and settled in at least four small villages, two
of which apparently dominated the others. These early
settlements later cooperated to form the core of what would
in the Archaic Age6 become the polis of the Spartans. The
Greeks gave the name “synoecism”7 (“union of households”) to
this process of political unification, in which most people
continued to live in their original villages even after one
village began to serve as the center of the new city-state.
One apparent result of the compromises required to forge
Spartan unity was that the Spartans retained not one but two
hereditary military leaders of high prestige, whom they
called kings. These kings8, perhaps originally the leaders
of the two dominant villages, served as the religious heads
of Sparta and commanders of its army. The kings did not
enjoy unfettered power to make decisions or set policy,
however, because they operated not as pure monarchs but as
leaders of the oligarchic institutions that governed the
Spartan city-state. Rivalry between the two royal families
periodically led to fierce disputes, and the initial custom
of having two supreme military commanders also paralyzed the
Spartan army when the kings disagreed on strategy in the
middle of a military campaign. The Spartans therefore
eventually decided that the army on campaign would be
commanded by only one king at a time.
Spartan Oligarchy
The “few” (oligoi ) who made policy in the oligarchy ruling
Sparta were a group of twenty-eight men over sixty years
old, joined by the two kings. This group of thirty, called
the “council of elders” ( gerousia 9), formulated proposals
that were submitted to an assembly of all free adult males.
This assembly had only limited power to amend the proposals
put before it; mostly it was expected to approve the
council's plans. Rejections were rare because the council
retained the right to withdraw a proposal when the reaction
to it by the crowd in the assembly presaged a negative vote.
“If the people speak crookedly,” according to Spartan
tradition, “the elders and the leaders of the people shall
be withdrawers [of the proposal].” The council could then
bring the proposal back on another occasion after there had
been time to marshal support for its passage.
A board of five annually elected “overseers” ( ephors 10)
counterbalanced the influence of the kings and the gerousia.
Chosen from the adult male citizens at large, the ephors
convened the gerousia and the assembly, and they exercised
considerable judicial powers of judgment and punishment.
They could even bring charges against a king and imprison
him until his trial. The creation of the board of ephors
diluted the political power of the oligarchic gerousia and
the kings because the job of the ephors was to ensure the
supremacy of law. The Athenian Xenophon later reported11:
“All men rise from their seats in the presence of the king,
except for the ephors. The ephors on behalf of the polis and
the king on his own behalf swear an oath to each other every
month: the king swears that he will exercise his office
according to the established laws of the polis , and the
polis swears that it will preserve his kingship undisturbed
if he abides by his oath.”
The Laws of Sparta
The Spartans were sticklers for obedience to the law (nomos
) as the guide to proper behavior on matters large and
small. When the ephors entered office, for example, they
issued an official proclamation to the men of Sparta: “Shave
your moustache and obey the laws.” The depth of Spartan
respect for their system of government under law was
symbolized by their tradition that Apollo of Delphi had
sanctioned it with an oracle called the Rhetra12. A Spartan
leader named Lycurgus, they said, had instituted the reforms
that the Rhetra institutionalized. Even in antiquity
historians had no firm information about the dates of
Lycurgus's leadership or precisely how he changed Spartan
laws. All we can say today is that the Spartans evolved
their law-based political system during the period from
about 800 to 600 B.C. Unlike other Greeks, the Spartans
never had their laws written down. Instead, they preserved
their system from generation to generation with a
distinctive, highly structured way of life based on a
special economic foundation.
The Dangerous Situation of Sparta
The distinctiveness of the Spartan way of life13 was
fundamentally a reaction to their living in the midst of
people whom they had conquered in war and enslaved to
exploit economically but who outnumbered them greatly. To
maintain their position of superiority over their conquered
neighbors, from whom they derived their subsistence, Spartan
men had to turn themselves into a society of soldiers
constantly on guard. They accomplished this transformation
by a radical restructuring of traditional family life
enforced by strict adherence to the laws and customs
governing practically all aspects of behavior. Through
constant, daily reinforcement of their strict code of
values, the Spartans ensured their survival against the
enemies they had created by subjugating their neighbors. The
seventh-century poet Tyrtaeus, whose verses exemplify the
high quality of the poetry produced in early Sparta before
its military culture began to exclude such accomplishments,
expressed that code in his ranking of martial courage as the
supreme male value: “I would never remember or mention in my
work any man for his speed afoot or wrestling skill, not if
he was as huge and strong as a Cyclops or could run faster
than the North Wind, nor more handsome than Tithonus or
richer than Midas or Cinyras, nor more kingly than Pelops,
or had speech more honeyed than Adrastus, not even if he
possessed every glory—not unless he had the strength of a
warrior in full rush.”
Spartan Neighbors and Slaves
Some of the conquered inhabitants of Laconia, the territory
of Sparta, continued to live in self-governing communities.
Called “those who live round about” (perioikoi ), these
neighbors were required to serve in the Spartan army and pay
taxes but lacked citizen rights. Perhaps because they
retained their personal freedom and property, however, the
perioikoi 14 never rebelled against Spartan control. Far
different was the fate of the conquered people who ended up
as helots 15, a word derived from the Greek term for
“capture.” Later ancient commentators described the helots
as “between slave and free” because they were not the
personal property of individual Spartans but rather slaves
belonging to the whole community, which alone could free
them. Helots had a semblance of family life because they
were expected to produce children to maintain their
population, which was compelled to labor as farmers and
household slaves as a way of freeing Spartan citizens from
any need to do such work. Spartan men in fact wore their
hair very long to show they were “gentlemen” rather than
laborers, for whom long hair was an inconvenience.
In their private lives, helots could keep some personal
possessions and practice their religion, as could slaves
generally in Greece. Publicly, however, helots lived under
the threat of officially sanctioned violence.16lived under
the threat of officially sanctioned violence. Every year the
ephors formally declared a state of war to exist between
Sparta and the helots, thereby allowing any Spartan to kill
a helot without any civil penalty or fear of offending the
gods by unsanctioned murder. By beating the helots
frequently, forcing them to get drunk in public as an object
lesson to young Spartans, marking them out by having them
wear dogskin caps, and generally treating them with scorn,
the Spartans consistently emphasized the otherness of the
helots compared to themselves. In this way, the Spartans
erected a moral barrier between themselves and the helots to
justify their harsh treatment of fellow Greeks.
The Helots of Messenia
When the arable land of Laconia, which was predominately
held by aristocrats, proved too small to support the full
citizen population of Sparta, the Spartans attacked their
Greek neighbors to the west in the Peloponnese, the
Messenians17. In the First Messenian War18 (c. 730-710 B.C.)
and then in the Second (c. 640-630 B.C.), the Spartan army
captured the territory of Messenia, which amounted to forty
percent of the Peloponnese, and reduced the Messenians to
the status of helots. With the addition of the tens of
thousands of people in Messenia, the total helot population
now more than outnumbered that of Sparta, whose male
citizens at this time amounted to perhaps between 8,000 and
10,000. The terrible loss felt by the Messenians at their
fate is well portrayed by their legend of King
Aristodemus19, whom the Messenians remembered as having
sacrificed his beloved daughter to the gods of the
underworld in an attempt to enlist their aid against the
invading Spartans. When his campaign of guerrilla warfare at
last failed, Aristodemus is said to have slain himself in
despair on her grave. Deprived of their freedom and their
polis , the Messenian helots were ever after on the lookout
for a chance to revolt against their Spartan overlords.
The Contribution of Helots
Their labor made helots valuable to the Spartans. Laconian
and Messenian helots alike primarily farmed plots of land
that the state had originally allotted to individual Spartan
households for their sustenance. Some helots also worked as
household servants. By the fifth century, helots would also
accompany Spartan hoplite warriors on the march to carry
their heavy gear and armor. In the words of the
seventh-century B.C. poet Tyrtaeus, helots worked “like
donkeys exhausted under heavy loads; they lived under the
painful necessity of having to give their masters half the
food their ploughed land bore.”20 This compulsory rent of
fifty percent of everything produced by the helots working
on each free family's assigned plot was supposed to amount
to seventy measures of barley each year to the male master
of the household and twelve to his wife, along with an
equivalent amount of fruit and other produce. In all, this
food was enough to support six or seven people. The labor of
the helots allowed Spartan men to devote themselves to
full-time training for hoplite warfare in order to protect
themselves from external enemies and to suppress helot
rebellions, especially in Messenia. Contrasting the freedom
of Spartan citizens from ordinary work with the lot of the
helots , the later Athenian Critias commented “Laconia is
the home of the freest of the Greeks, and of the most
enslaved.”
The Existence of Spartan Boys
The entire Spartan way of life was directed toward keeping
the Spartan army at tip-top strength. Boys lived at home
only until their seventh year, when they were taken away to
live in communal barracks with other males until they were
thirty. They spent most of their time exercising, hunting,
training with weapons, and being acculturated to Spartan
values by listening to tales of bravery and heroism at the
common meals presided over by older men21. The standard of
discipline was strict, to prepare young males for the hard
life of a soldier on campaign. For example, they were not
allowed to speak at will. (Our word “laconic” meaning “of
few words” comes from the Greek word “Laconian,” one of the
terms for a Spartan; another is Lacedaimonian, from the name
Lacedaimon applied to Sparta). Boys were also purposely
underfed so that they would have to develop the skills of
stealth by stealing food. Yet if they were caught,
punishment and disgrace followed immediately. One famous
Spartan tale taught how seriously boys were supposed to fear
such failure: having successfully stolen a fox, which he was
hiding under his clothing, a Spartan youth died because he
let the panicked animal rip out his insides rather than be
detected in the theft. By the Classical period, older boys
would be dispatched to live in the wilds for a period as
members of the “secret band”22 whose job it was to murder
any helots who seemed likely to foment rebellion.
The Equals
Spartan boys who could not survive the tough conditions of
their childhood training fell into social disgrace and were
not certified as Equals23 (homoioi), the official name for
adult males entitled to full citizen rights of participation
in politics and the respect of the community. Only the sons
of the royal family were exempted from this training,
perhaps to avoid a potential social crisis if a king's son
failed to stay the course.
The Spartan Common Messes
Each Spartan Equal had to gain entry to a group that dined
together at common meals, in a “common mess”24 (sussition),
each of which had about fifteen members. If not blackballed
when he applied, the new member was admitted on the
condition that he contribute a regular amount of barley,
cheese, figs, condiments, and wine to the mess from the
produce provided by the helots working on his family plot.
Some meat was apparently contributed, too, because Spartan
cuisine was infamous for a black, bloody broth of pork
condemned as practically inedible by other Greeks. Perhaps
it was made from the wild boars Spartan men loved to hunt,
an activity for which messmates were formally excused from
the compulsory communal meals. If any member failed to keep
up his contributions, he was expelled from the mess and lost
his full citizen rights. The experience of spending so much
time in these common messes schooled Sparta's young men in
the values of their society. There they learned to call all
older men “father”25 to emphasize that their primary loyalty
was to the group and not to their genetic families. There
they were chosen to be the special favorites of males older
than themselves to build bonds of affection, including
physical love, for others at whose side they would have to
march into deadly battle. There they learned to take the
rough joking of army life for which Sparta was well known.
In short, the common mess took the place of a boy's family
and school when he was growing up and remained his main
social environment once he had reached adulthood. Its
function was to mold and maintain his values consistent with
the demands of the one honorable occupation for Spartan men:
a soldier obedient to orders. Tyrtaeus enshrined the Spartan
male ideal in his poetry: “Know that it is good for the
polis and the whole people when a man takes his place in the
front row of warriors and stands his ground without
flinching.”
Women at Sparta
Spartan women26 were renowned throughout the Greek world for
their relative freedom. Other Greeks regarded it as
scandalous that Spartan girls exercised with boys and did so
wearing minimal clothing. Women at Sparta were supposed to
use the freedom from labor provided by the helot system to
keep themselves physically fit to bear healthy children and
raise them to be strict upholders of Spartan values. A
metaphorical formulation of the male ideal for Spartan women
appears, for example, in the poetry of Alcman in the late
seventh century, who wrote songs for the performances of
female and male choruses that were common on Spartan civic
and religious occasions. The dazzling leader of a women's
chorus, he writes, “stands out as if among a herd of cows
someone placed a firmly-built horse with ringing hooves, a
prize winner from winged dreams.”
Land Ownership at Sparta
Spartan women, like men, could own land27 privately.
Ordinary coined money28 was deliberately banned to try to
discourage the accumulation of material goods, but the
ownership of land remained extremely important in Spartan
society. More and more land came into the hands of women in
later Spartan history because the male population declined29
through losses in war, especially during the Classical Age.
Moreover, Spartan women with property enjoyed special status
as a result of the Spartan law forbidding the division of
the portion of land originally allotted to a family. This
law meant that, in a family with more than one son, all the
land went to the eldest son. Fathers with multiple sons
therefore needed to seek out brides for their younger sons
who had inherited land and property from their fathers
because they had no brother surviving. Otherwise, younger
sons, inheriting no land from their own family, might fall
into dire poverty.
Reproduction at Sparta
The freedom of Spartan women from some of the restrictions
imposed on them in other Greek city-states had the same
purpose as the men's common messes30: the production of
manpower for the Spartan army. By the Classical Age, the
ongoing problem of producing enough children to keep the
Spartan citizen population from shrinking had grown acute.31
Men were legally required to get married32, with bachelors
subjected to fines and public ridicule. Women who died in
childbirth were apparently the only Spartans allowed to have
their names placed on their tombstones, a mark of honor for
their sacrifice to the state.
With their husbands so rarely at home, women directed the
households, which included servants, daughters, and sons
until they left for their communal training. As a result,
Spartan women exercised more power in the household than did
women elsewhere in Greece. Until he was thirty, a Spartan
husband was not allowed to live with his family, and even
newly-wed men were expected to pay only short visits to
their brides by sneaking into their own houses at night.
This tradition was only one of the Spartan customs of
heterosexual behavior that other Greeks found bizarre. If
all parties agreed, a woman could have children by a man
other than her husband, so pressing was the need to
reproduce in this strictly ordered society.
The Obligations of Spartans
All Spartan citizens were expected to put service to their
city-state before personal concerns because Sparta's
survival was continually threatened by its own economic
foundation, the great mass of helots33. Since Sparta's
well-being depended on the systematic exploitation of these
enslaved Greeks, its entire political and social system by
necessity had as its aim a staunch militarism and a
conservatism in values. Change meant danger at Sparta. As
part of its population policy, however, Spartan conservatism
encompassed sexual behavior34 seen as overly permissive by
other Greeks. The Spartans simultaneously institutionalized
a form of equality as the basis for their male social unit,
the common mess35, while denying true social and political
equality to ordinary male citizens by making their
government an oligarchy. Whatever other Greeks may have
thought of the particulars of the Spartan system, they
admired the Spartans' unswerving respect for their laws 36
as a guide to life in hostile surroundings, albeit of their
own making.
Tyranny in the City-States
Opposition to oligarchic domination brought the first Greek
tyrants37 to power in numerous city-states, although Sparta
never experienced a tyranny. Greek tyranny represented a
distinctive type of rule for several reasons. For one,
although tyrants were by definition rulers who usurped power
by force rather than inheriting it like legitimate kings,
they then established family dynasties to maintain their
tyranny, with sons inheriting their fathers' position as the
head of state. Also, the men who became tyrants were usually
aristocrats, or at least near-aristocrats, who nevertheless
rallied support from non-aristocrats for their coups. In
places where propertyless men may have lacked citizenship or
at least felt substantially disenfranchised in the political
life of the city-state, tyrants perhaps won adherents by
extending citizenship and other privileges to these groups.
Tyrants moreover sometimespreserved the existing laws and
political institutions38 of their city-states as part of
their rule, thus promoting social stability.
Tyranny at Corinth
The most famous early tyranny arose at Corinth39, a large
city-state in the northeastern Peloponnese, around 657 B.C.
in opposition to the rule of the aristocratic family called
the Bacchiads. Under Bacchiad rule in the eighth and early
seventh centuries B.C., Corinth had blossomed into the most
economically advanced city40 in Archaic Greece. The
Corinthians had forged so far ahead in naval engineering41,
for instance, that other Greeks contracted with them to have
ships built. Corinth's strong fleet helped the Bacchiads42
in founding overseas colonies at Corcyra43 in northwest
Greece and Syracuse44 on Sicily, city-states which would
themselves become major naval powers.
The Bacchiads became unpopular despite the city's prosperity
because they ruled violently. Cypselus45, himself an
aristocrat whose mother was a Bacchiad, readied himself to
take over by becoming popular with the masses: “he became
one of the most admired of Corinth's citizens because he was
courageous, prudent, and helpful to the people, unlike the
oligarchs in power, who were insolent and violent,”
according to a later historian. Cypselus engineered the
overthrow of Bacchiad rule with popular support and a
favorable oracle from Delphi. He then ruthlessly suppressed
rival aristocrats, but his popularity with the people
remained so high that he could govern without the protection
of a bodyguard. Corinth added to its economic strength
during Cypselus' rule by exporting large quantities of fine
pottery, especially to markets in Italy and Sicily. Cypselus
founded additional colonies along the sailing route to the
western Mediterranean to promote Corinthian trade in that
direction.
When Cypselus died in 625 B.C., his son Periander46
succeeded him. Periander aggressively continued Corinth's
economic expansion by founding colonies on the coasts both
northwest and northeast of Greek territory to increase trade
with the interior regions there, which were rich in timber
and precious metals. He also pursued commercial contacts
with Egypt, an interest commemorated in the Egyptian name
Psammetichus he gave to one of his sons. The city's
prosperity encouraged flourishing development in crafts,
art, and architecture. The foundations of the great stone
temple to Apollo begun in this period can still be seen
today. Unlike his father, however, Periander lost the
support of Corinth's people by ruling harshly. He kept his
power until his death in 585 B.C., but the hostile feelings
that persisted against his rule led to the overthrow of his
successor, Psamettichus, within a short time. The opponents
of tyranny thereupon installed a government based on a board
of eight magistrates and a council of eighty men.
Tyrants and Popular Support
As in the case of the Cypselid tyranny at Corinth, most
tyrannies needed to cultivate support among the masses of
their city-states to remain in power because their armies
were composed primarily of non-aristocrats. The dynasty of
tyrants47 on the island of Samos48 in the eastern Aegean
Sea, for example, who came to power about 540 B.C., built
enormous public works to benefit their city-state and
provide employment. They began construction of a temple to
Hera49 meant to be the largest in the Greek world, and they
dramatically improved the water supply of their urban center
by excavating a great tunnel connected to a distant spring.
This marvel of engineering with a channel eight feet high
ran for nearly a mile through a 900-foot high mountain. The
later tyrannies that emerged in city-states on Sicily50
similarly graced their cities with beautiful temples and
public buildings.
By working in the interests of their peoples, some
tyrannies, like that founded by Cypselus at Corinth,
maintained their popularity for decades. Other tyrants
experienced bitter opposition from aristocrats jealous of
the tyrant's power or provoked civil war by ruling brutally
and inequitably. The poet Alcaeus of the city-state of
Mytilene on the island of Lesbos in the northeastern Aegean,
himself a rebellious aristocrat, described such strife
around 600 B.C.: “Let's forget our anger; let's quit our
heart-devouring strife and civil war, which some god has
stirred up among us, ruining the people but bestowing the
glory on our tyrant for which he prays.” In short, the title
tyrant in Archaic Greece did not automatically label a ruler
as brutal or unwelcome, as the use of the same word in
English implies. Greeks evaluated tyrants as good or bad
depending on their behavior as rulers.
Theseus and Democracy at Athens
It was a traditional Greek practice to explain significant
historical changes such as the founding of communities or
the codification of law as the work of an individual
“inventor” from the distant past. Just like the Spartans,
for whom the legendary Lycurgus51 was remembered as the
founder of their city-state, the Athenians also believed
their polis owed its start to a single man in the distant
past. Athenian legends made Theseus52 responsible for
founding the polis of Athens at a remote date by the
synoecism of villages in Attica, the name given to the
peninsula at the southeastern corner of the mainland of
Greece that formed the territory of the Athenian polis.
Since Attica had several fine ports along its coast, the
Athenians were much more oriented to seafaring and
communication with other peoples than were the
almost-landlocked Spartans. Theseus made an appropriate
mythical founder because he was described as a traveling
adventurer, sailing, for example, to the island of Crete to
defeat the Minotaur53, a cannibalistic monster, half-human
and half-bull. This exploit, like his other legendary
adventures, or “labors” as they are called in imitation of
those of Heracles, became favorite subject matter for vase
painters. There can be no historical reality to the story of
Theseus as the founder of Athenian democracy, but the
civilizing nature of his legendary labors—he defeated many
monsters who threatened travelers and polis residents
alike—made his story appropriate to the aspirations of
Athenian civic life.
The Athenian Population in the Dark Age
Unlike most other important sites inhabited in the Mycenaean
period, Athens had apparently not suffered any catastrophic
destruction at the end of the Mycenaean period.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that Athens wholly
escaped the troubles of this period, and its population
shrank in the early Dark Age. By around 850 B.C., however,
archaeological evidence such as the model granary from a
woman's burial54 mentioned elsewhere in the Overview shows
that the Athenian agricultural economy was reviving. When
the population of Attica apparently expanded at a phenomenal
rate during the century from about 800 to 700 B.C., the free
peasants constituted the fastest-growing segment of the
population as economic conditions improved in the early
Archaic Age. These small agricultural producers apparently
began to insist on having a say in making Athenian policies
because they felt justice demanded at least a limited form
of political equality. Some of these modest land owners
became wealthy enough afford to afford hoplite55 armor, and
these men probably made strong demands on the aristocrats
who had previously ruled Athens as what amounted to a
relatively broad oligarchy56. Rivalries among the
aristocrats for status and material wealth prevented them
from presenting a united front, and they had to respond to
these pressures to insure the allegiance of the hoplites, on
whom depended Athenian military strength.
The Beginnings of Athenian Democracy
By the late seventh century B.C., Athens' male citizens
rich, middle-class, and poor had established the first
beginnings of a limited form of democratic government57.
Determining why they moved toward democracy instead of, for
example, toward a narrow oligarchy like that of Sparta
remains a difficult problem. Two factors perhaps encouraging
the emergence of the Athenian polis as an incipient
democracy were rapid population growth and a rough sense of
egalitarianism among male citizens that survived from the
frontier-like conditions of the early Dark Age, when most
people had shared the same meager existence. These same
factors, however, do not necessarily differentiate Athens
from other city-states that did not evolve into democracies
because the same conditions pertained across the Greek world
in the Archaic Age. Perhaps population growth was so rapid
among Athenian peasants that they had greater power than at
other places to demand a share in governing. Their power and
political coherence was evident, for example, in about 632
B.C. when they rallied “from the fields in a body” to foil
the attempted coup of an Athenian nobleman named Cylon58. A
former champion in the Olympics and married to a daughter of
Theagenes, tyrant of Megara, Cylon and some of his
aristocratic friends had planned to install a tyranny.
Athens also had some influential aristocrats like Solon and
Cleisthenes who worked to strengthen Athenian democracy for
differing reasons.
The Institutions of Incipient Democracy
The scanty evidence seems to indicate that by the seventh
century all free-born adult male citizens of Athens had the
right to attend open meetings, in a body called the
assembly59 (ekklesia ), which elected nine magistrates
called archons (rulers) each year. The archons, still all
aristocrats in this early period, headed the government60
and rendered verdicts in disputes and criminal accusations.
As they had earlier, aristocrats at this time still
dominated Athenian political life by using their influence
to secure election as archons , perhaps by marshaling their
traditional bands of followers as supporters and by making
alliances with other aristocrats. The right of middle-class
and poor men to serve as members of the assembly as yet had
only limited value because little business besides the
election of archons was conducted in its gatherings, which
probably met rarely in this period and then only when the
current archons decided the time was right.
The Laws of Draco
Aristocratic political alliances often proved temporary in
Athenian politics, as elsewhere, and rivalries among
aristocrats jealous of each other's status continued under
early Athenian democracy. In the aftermath of Cylon's
attempted tyranny, an Athenian named Draco was appointed in
621 B.C., perhaps after pressure by the hoplites, to
establish a code of laws promoting stability and equity.
Unfortunately, Draco's laws61 somehow further destabilized
the political situation; the Athenians later remembered them
as having been as harsh as the meaning of his name (drakon,
“dragon, serpent”), and our word Draconian, meaning
excessively severe, reflects this view. A deterioration in
the well-being of Athens's free peasants, which had been
slowly building for a long time, also further undermined
social peace. Later Athenians did not know what had caused
this economic crisis, only that it pitted the rich against
the middle-class and the poor.62
Economic Crisis and Subsistence Agriculture
One cause of the economic crisis that plagued Athens in the
later seventh century around the time of Draco63 may have
been that the precariousness of agriculture in this period
could sometimes lead to the gradual accumulation of the
available farm land in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
In subsistence agriculture, the level at which many Athenian
farmers operated, a lean year could mean starvation.
Moreover, farmers lacked any easy method to convert the
surplus of a good year into imperishable capital, such as
coined money, which could be then be stored up to offset bad
years in the future, because coinage was not even invented
until late in the seventh-century B.C.64 in Lydia in
Anatolia and took a long time to become common in Greece.
Failed farmers had to borrow food and seed to survive. When
they could borrow no more, they had to leave their land to
find a job to support their families, most likely by
laboring for successful farmers. Under these conditions,
farmers who became more effective than others, or simply
more fortunate, could acquire the use and even the ownership
of the land of failed farmers. In any case, many poor
Athenians had apparently lost control of their land to
wealthier proprietors by the late seventh century. The
crisis became so acute that impoverished peasants were even
being sold into slavery to pay off debts65. Finally,
twenty-five years after Draco's legislation, conditions had
become so acute that a civil war threatened to break out.
The Reforms of Solon
In desperation, the Athenians in 594 B.C. gave Solon special
authority to revise their laws66 to deal with the economic
crisis and its dire social consequences that had brought
their society to the brink of internecine war. As he
explains in his autobiographical poetry, Solon tried to
steer a middle course67 between the demands of the rich to
preserve their financial advantages and the call of the poor
for a redistribution of land to themselves from the holdings
of the large landowners. His famous “shaking off of
obligations”68 somehow freed those farms whose ownership had
become formally encumbered without, however, actually
redistributing any land. He also forbade the selling of
Athenians into slavery for debt and secured the liberation
of citizens who had become slaves69 in this way,
commemorating his success in the verses he wrote about his
reforms: “To Athens, their home established by the gods, I
brought back many who had been sold into slavery, some
justly, some not ...”70
Attempting to balance political power between rich and poor,
, Solon ranked male citizens into four classes according to
their income71: “five-hundred-measure men”
(pentakosiomedimnoi , those with an annual income equivalent
to that much agricultural produce), “horsemen” (hippeis ,
income of three hundred measures), “yoked men” (zeugitai ,
two hundred measures), and “laborers” (thetes, less than two
hundred measures). The higher a man's class, the higher the
governmental office for which he was eligible, with the
laborer class barred from all posts. Solon did reaffirm the
right of this class to participate in the assembly (ekklesia
), however. Solon probably created a council (boule) of four
hundred72 men to prepare an agenda for the discussions in
the assembly, although some scholars place this innovation
later than Solon's time. Aristocrats could not dominate the
council's deliberations because its members were chosen by
lot, probably only from the top three income classes. Solon
may also have initiated a schedule of regular meetings for
the assembly. These reforms gave added impetus to the
assembly's legislative role and thus indirectly laid a
foundation for the political influence that the “laborer”
(thete ) class would gradually acquire over the next century
and a half.
Solon and Democracy
Despite the restriction on office holding by the lowest
income class, Solon's classification scheme supported
further development of conditions leading to democracy
because it allowed for upward social mobility: if a man
managed to increase his income, he could move up the scale
of eligibility for office. The absence of direct taxes on
income made it easier for entrepreneurial citizens to better
their lot. From Solon's reforms, Athenian male citizens
gained a political and social system far more open to
individual initiative and change than that of Sparta.
Equally important to restoring stability in a time of acute
crisis was Solon's ruling that any male citizen could bring
charges on a wide variety of offenses against wrongdoers on
behalf of any victim of a crime.73 Furthermore, he provided
for the right of appeal74 to the assembly by persons who
believed a magistrate had rendered unjust judgments against
them. With these two measures, Solon made the administration
of justice the concern of ordinary citizens and not just of
still predominately aristocratic magistrates. He balanced
these judicial reforms favoring the people, however, by
granting broader powers to the “Council which meets on the
Hill of the god of war Ares,” the Areopagus (meaning “Ares'
hill”). Archons became members of the Areopagus75 after
their year in office. This body of ex-archons could, if the
members chose, exercise great power because at this period
it judged the most serious judicial cases, in particular
accusations against archons themselves. Solon probably also
expected the Areopagus to use its power to protect his
reforms.
Opposition to Democracy
For its place and time, Athens' emerging democracy was
remarkable, even at this early stage in its development,
because it granted all male citizens the possibility of
participating meaningfully in the making of laws and the
administration of justice. But not everyone found the system
admirable. A visiting foreign king is reputed to have
expressed the scornful opinion that he found Athenian
democracy ludicrous.76 Observing the procedure in the
Athenian assembly, he expressed his amazement that leading
aristocratic politicians could only recommend policy in
their speeches, while the male citizens as a whole voted on
what to do: “I find it astonishing,” he remarked, “that here
wise men speak on public affairs, while fools decide them.”
Some Athenians who agreed with the king that aristocrats
were wise and the poor foolish did their best to undermine
Solon's reforms77 after their creation in 594 B.C., and such
oligarchic sympathizers continued to challenge Athenian
democracy at intervals throughout its history.
Tyranny at Athens
Strife among aristocrats, combined with the continuing
discontent of the poorest Athenians, lay behind the period
of strife in the mid-sixth century following Solon's reforms
that led to Athens' first tyranny. At this time an Athenian
aristocrat named Pisistratus78 began a violent effort to
make himself sole ruler with the help of his upper-class
friends and the poor, whose interests he championed. He
finally established himself securely as tyrant at Athens in
546 B.C. Pisistratus made funds available to help peasants
acquire needed farm equipment and provided employment for
poorer men while benefiting Athens by building roads and
initiating major public works, such as a great temple to
Zeus and fountains to increase the supply of drinking water.
The tax that he imposed on agricultural production79, one of
the rare instances of direct taxation in Athenian history,
financed the loans to farmers and the building projects. He
also arranged for judicial officials to go on circuits
through the outlying villages of Attica to hear cases, thus
saving farmers the trouble of having to leave their fields
to seek justice in Athens, the urban center of the polis.
Like the earlier tyrants of Corinth, he promoted the
economic, cultural, and architectural development of Athens.
Athenian pottery, for example, now began to crowd out
Corinthian in the export trade.
Hippias80, the eldest son of Pisistratus, continued the
tyranny after his father's death in 527 B.C. He governed by
making certain that his relatives and friends occupied
magistracies, but for a time he also allowed his
aristocratic rivals to hold office, thereby defusing some of
the tension created by their jealousy of his superior
status. Eventually, however, the aristocratic family of the
Alcmaeonids arranged to have the Spartans send an army to
expel Hippias.81
The Struggle between Isagoras and Cleisthenes
In the ensuing vacuum of power at Athens after the expulsion
of the tyrant Hippias, the leading member of the
aristocratic Alcmaeonid family, a man named Cleisthenes,
sought support among the masses by promising dramatic
democratic reforms. The promise of such reforms seems to
have been a response to the success of Cleisthenes'
bitterest rival, Isagoras, an aristocrat from a different
family, in becoming archon in 508 B.C. Cleisthenes had
apparently despaired of winning political success other than
by appealing to the non-aristocratic masses at Athens. When
Isagoras tried to block Cleisthenes' reforms82 by calling in
the Spartans again, the Athenian people united to force
Isagoras and his Laconian allies out83. The ensuing conflict
between Athens and Sparta ended quickly but sowed the seeds
of mutual distrust between the two city-states.
The Democratic Reforms of Cleisthenes
His popular support gave Cleisthenes the authority to begin
to install the democratic system for which Athens has become
famous, and the importance of his reforms84 led later
Athenians to think of him as a principal founder of their
democracy. First, he made the pre-existing villages of the
countryside and the neighborhoods of the city of Athens
(both called “demes85,” demoi ) the constituent units of
Athenian political organization. Organized in their demes,
the male citizens participated directly in the running of
their government: they kept track in deme registers of which
males were citizens and therefore eligible at eighteen to
attend the assembly to vote on laws and public policies. The
demes in turn were grouped for other administrative
functions into ten so-called tribes (phylai ), replacing an
earlier division into four tribes. Cleisthenic democracy
used its ten tribes for purposes such as choosing fifty
representatives by lot from each tribe to serve for one year
on the council (boule ) of five hundred, which replaced
Solon's council of four hundred. The number of
representatives from each deme was proportional to its
population. Athenian men were also called up for service in
the citizen militia by tribal affiliation. Most importantly,
the ten men who served each year as “generals” (strategoi ),
the officials with the highest civil and military authority,
were elected one from each tribe. Cleisthenes'
reorganization was complex, but its general aim seems to
have been to undermine existing political alliances among
aristocrats in the interests of greater democracy.
Persuasion and Cleisthenic Democracy
By about 500 B.C. Cleisthenes had succeeded in devising an
Athenian democracy based on direct participation by as many
adult male citizens as possible. That he could put such a
system in place successfully in a time of turmoil and have
it endure, as it did, means that he must have been building
on pre-existing conditions favorable to democracy.
Certainly, as an aristocrat looking for popular support,
Cleisthenes had reason to invent the kind of system he
thought ordinary people wanted. That he based his system on
the demes, the great majority of which were country
villages, suggests that some conditions favoring democracy
may have stemmed from the traditions of village life.
Possibly, the notion of wide-spread participation in
government gained support from the custom village residents
often have of dealing with each other on relatively
egalitarian terms. That is, each man in a village is
entitled to his say in running local affairs and must
persuade, not compel, others of the wisdom of his
recommendations. Since many aristocrats increasingly seem to
have preferred to reside in the city, their ability to
dominate discussion in the demes was reduced. In any case,
the idea that persuasion86, rather than force or status,
should constitute the mechanism for political
decision-making in the emerging Athenian democracy fit well
with the spirit of the intellectual changes which were
taking place during the late Archaic Age. That is, the idea
that people had to present plausible reasons for their
recommendations corresponded to one of the period's new ways
of thought. This development has proved one of the most
influential legacies of Greek civilization.
Lyric poetry
Poetry represented the only form of Greek literature until
the late Archaic Age. The earliest Greek poetry, that of
Homer and Hesiod, had been confined to a single rhythm. A
much greater rhythmic diversity characterized the new form
of poetry, called lyric, that emerged during the Archaic
Age. (These texts are not yet available to Perseus.) Lyric
poems were far shorter than the narrative poetry of Homer or
the didactic poetry of Hesiod, and they encompassed many
forms and subjects, but they were always performed with the
accompaniment of the lyre87 (a kind of harp that gives its
name to the poetry). Choral poets like Alcman88 of Sparta
wrote songs to be performed by groups on public occasions to
honor the gods, to celebrate famous events in a city-state's
history, for wedding processions, and to praise victors in
athletic contests. Lyric poets writing songs for solo
performance on social occasions stressed a personal level of
expression on a variety of topics. Solon and Alcaeus89, for
example, wrote poems focused on contemporary politics.
Others self-consciously adopted a critical attitude toward
traditional values such as strength in war. For instance,
Sappho90, a lyric poet from Lesbos born about 630 B.C. and
famous for her poems on love, wrote, “Some would say the
most beautiful thing on our dark earth is an army of
cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships, but I say it's
whatever a person loves.” In this poem Sappho was expressing
her longing for a woman she loved, who was now far away.
Archilochus91 of Paros, whose lifetime probably fell in the
early seventh century, became famous for his range of poems
on themes as diverse as friends lost at sea, mockery of
martial valor, and love gone astray. The bitter power of his
poetic invective reportedly caused a father and his two
daughters to commit suicide when Archilochus ridiculed them
in anger after the father had put an end to Archilochus's
affair with his daughter Neobule. Some modern literary
critics think the poems about Neobule and her family are
fictional, not autobiographical, and were meant to display
Archilochus's dazzling talent for “blame poetry,” the mirror
image of lyric as the poetry of praise. Mimnermus of
Colophon92, another seventh century lyric poet, rhapsodized
about the glory of youth and lamented its brevity, “no
longer than the time the sun shines on the plain.” Lyric
poetry's focus on the individual's feelings represented a
new stage in Greek literary sensibilities, one that
continues to inspire poets.
The Ionian Thinkers
Thinkers usually referred to today as philosophers, but who
could equally well be described as theoretical scientists
studying the physical world, gave impetus to new ways of
thinking in the late Archaic age. These thinkers, who came
from the city-states of Ionia93 along the eastern Aegean
coast, were developing radically new explanations of the
world of human beings and its relation to the world of the
gods. In this way began the study of philosophy in Greece.
Ionia's geographical location next to the non-Greek
civilizations of Anatolia, which were in contact with the
older civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, meant Ionian
thinkers were in a position to acquire knowledge and
intellectual inspiration from their neighbors94 in the
eastern Mediterranean area. Since Greece in this period had
no formal schools at any level, thinkers like those from
Ionia had to make their ideas known by teaching pupils
privately and giving public lectures. They also used writing
to record their doctrines, and some of them developed prose
in Greek to express their new ways of thought. Some Ionian
thinkers composed poetry as well to explain their theories
and gave public recitations of their works. People who
studied with these thinkers or heard their presentations
would then help to spread knowledge of the new ideas.
Near Eastern Influence on the Ionian Thinkers
Knowledge from the ancient Near East influenced the Ionian
thinkers, just as it had influenced Greek artists of the
Archaic Age. Greek vase painters and specialists in
decorating metal vessels imitated Near Eastern designs
depicting animals and luxuriant plants; Greek sculptors
produced narrative reliefs like those of Assyria and statues
with the stiff, frontal poses familiar from Egyptian
precedents; Egypt also gave inspiration to Greek architects
to employ stone for columns, ornamental details, and,
eventually, entire buildings. In a similar process of the
transfer of knowledge from east to west, information about
the regular movements of the stars and planets developed by
astronomers in Babylonia proved especially important in
helping Ionian thinkers reach their conclusions about the
nature of the physical world. The first of the Ionian
theorists, Thales95 (c. 625 - 545 B.C.) from the city-state
of Miletus96, was said to have predicted a solar eclipse in
585 B.C., an accomplishment implying he had been influenced
by Babylonian learning. Modern astronomers doubt Thales
actually could have predicted an eclipse, but the story
shows how influential eastern scientific and mathematical
knowledge was to the thinkers of Ionia. Working from
knowledge such as the observed fact that celestial bodies
moved in a regular pattern, scientific thinkers like Thales
and Anaximander97 (c. 610- 540 B.C.), also from Miletus,
drew the revolutionary conclusion that the physical world
was regulated by a set of laws of nature rather than by the
arbitrary intervention of divine beings. Pythagoras98, who
emigrated from Samos to south Italy about 530 B.C., taught
that the entire world was explicable through numbers. His
doctrines inspired systematic study of mathematics and the
numerical aspects of musical harmony.
The Cosmos and Logos
The Ionian thinkers insisted that the workings of the
universe could be explained because the phenomena of nature
were neither random nor arbitrary. The universe, the
totality of things, they named cosmos 99 because this word
meant an orderly arrangement that is beautiful (hence our
word “cosmetic”). The order characteristic of the cosmos,
perceived as lovely because it was ordered, encompassed not
only the motions of the heavenly bodies but also everything
else: the weather, the growth of plants and animals, human
health and psychology, and so on. Since the universe was
ordered, it was intelligible; since it was intelligible,
explanations of events could be discovered by thought and
research. The thinkers who conceived this view believed it
necessary to give reasons for their conclusions and to
persuade others by arguments based on evidence. They
believed, in other words, in logic (a word derived from the
Greek term logos 100 meaning, among other things, a reasoned
explanation). This way of thought based on reason
represented a crucial first step toward science and
philosophy as these disciplines endure today. The rule-based
view of the causes of events and physical phenomena
developed by these thinkers contrasted sharply with the
traditional mythological view of causation. Naturally, many
people had difficulty accepting such a startling change in
their understanding of the world, and the older tradition
explaining events as the work of gods lived on alongside the
new ideas.
The ideas of the Ionian thinkers probably spread slowly
because no means of mass communication existed, and few men
could afford to spend the time to become followers of these
thinkers and then return home to explain these new ways of
thought to others. Magic101 remained an important
preoccupation in the lives of the majority of ordinary
people, who retained their notions that gods and demons
frequently and directly affected their fortunes and health
as well as the events of nature. Despite their perhaps
limited immediate effect on the ancient world at large, the
Ionian thinkers had initiated a tremendously important
development in intellectual history: the separation of
scientific thinking from myth and religion. Some modern
scholars call this development the birth of rationalism, but
it would be unfair to label myths and religious ways of
thought as irrational if that term is taken to mean
“unthinking” or “silly.” Ancient people realized that their
lives were constantly subject to forces beyond their control
and understanding, and it was not unreasonable to attribute
supernatural origins to the powers of nature or the ravages
of disease. The new scientific ways of thought insisted,
however, that observable evidence had to be sought and
theories of explanation had to be logical. Just being old or
popular no longer bestowed veracity on a story purporting to
explain natural phenomena. In this way, the Ionian thinkers
parted company with the traditional ways of thinking of the
ancient Near East as found in its rich mythology and
repeated in the myths of early Greece.
Rational Thinking
Developing the view that people must give reasons to explain
what they believe to be true, rather than just make
assertions that they expect others to believe without
evidence, was the most important achievement of the early
Ionian thinkers. Along with the invention of democracy based
on citizenship, their achievement gave real distinction to
the Greek Archaic Age. The insistence of the Ionian thinkers
on rationality, coupled with the belief that the world could
be understood as something other than the plaything of
divine whim, gave human beings hope that they could improve
their lives through their own efforts. As Xenophanes102 from
Colophon103 (c. 580 - 480 B.C.), put it, “The gods have not
revealed all things from the beginning to mortals, but, by
seeking, human beings find out, in time, what is better.”
Xenophanes, like other Ionian thinkers, believed in the
existence of gods, but he nevertheless assigned the
opportunity and the responsibility for improving human life
squarely to human beings themselves. Human beings themselves
were to “find what is better.”
A hoplite
(from ta hopla meaning tool or equipment) was the
most common type of heavily armed foot-soldier in ancient
Greece from
the 7th to 4th centuries BCE, and most ordinary citizens
of Greekcity-states
with sufficient means were expected to equip and make
themselves available for the role when necessary.
Athens
had a system of compulsory military service for 18-20 year
olds, but during a war all
male citizens up to the age of 60 could be called up to
the armed forces. Other city-states followed a similar
policy which meant that hoplites were not professional
soldiers and often lacked sufficient military training,
although some states did maintain a small elite
professional unit, the epilektoi. The most famous
of these was the Sacred Band of Thebes,
a unit composed of 150 pairs of male lovers who swore to
defend their partner to the death. Sparta,
where all male citizens over 20 were members of a
permanent professional army, was the notable exception to
this approach of only calling up an army when absolutely
needed.
WEAPONS
&
ARMOUR
The principal weapons of a hoplite infantryman were
a long ash wood spear (doru) and a short sword (xiphos).
The spear measured on average 2.5 metres (8 ft.) in length
and was fitted with a bronze or iron blade
and a four-sided end spike (sauroter). The sword
was also of iron with a straight or sometimes curved blade
(machaira or kopis) no more than 60 cm in
length. No doubt many hoplites also carried a dagger (encheiridion)
as an extra insurance. Protection was provided by a
leather-lined bronze helmet which could vary in design,
was often crested, and protected the head, neck, and face.
A corselet or breastplate (thorax) of bronze or
leather (later reduced to a laminated linen vest to save
weight - a linothorax), bronze greaves (knemides)
to protect the shins, and sometimes arm-guards were also
worn. The hoplite carried a large circular shield (hoplon
or aspis) some 80 cm (30 in.) in diameter and
weighing as much as 8 kg. This was made of wood or stiff
leather, faced with bronze, and was held with the left arm
placed through a central band (porpax) and gripped
via a strap (antilabe) attached to the shield rim.
Shields often carried particular designs - the most famous
being the inverted V-shape of Spartan hoplites - and
emblems - particularly popular was the gorgon from Greek
mythology with
its association with changing the onlooker into stone.
Surviving examples of breastplates and helmets also
display engraved decoration. Fully armoured then, the
hoplite was required to carry some 20 kg of equipment and
so good physical training must have given one side a
strong advantage (e.g. the well-trained and professional
Spartans). Precisely because all of this equipment
amounted to quite an investment, being a hoplite also
indicated that the individual had a certain status in
wider Greek society.
HOPLITE
PHALANX
Hoplites were organised into regiments or lokhoi
(several hundred men strong), and they fought in ranks
eight or more men deep (known as a phalanx), and standing
close together, half of the shield of one man protected
his neighbour on his left side. This, interestingly, meant
that the phalanx often moved forward at a slight angle to
the right as men sought to keep behind the shield of their
neighbour. This resulted in the left flank usually
breaking formation first, and so this was the flank a
competent commander would attack with priority, and he
would therefore ensure he had his best troops on his own
right flank. The phalanx advanced at a walk or faster,
often accompanied by rhythmic music from aulos
players, and shouting a tremendous war-cry (paean).
On engaging the enemy the hoplites first thrust their
spears, usually over-arm. After that initial contact the
opposing lines usually went through a series of pushing
and shoving (othismos) and close-quarter fighting
with swords which only ended when one side broke ranks.
Pursuit of retreating hoplites was usually only over a
short distance in order to maintain the protective
close-formation.
Hoplites were instrumental in the Greek victories
over Persia at
the battles of Marathon (490
BCE) and Plataea (479
BCE). The weaknesses of the phalanx formation - attack
from the flanks, rear, or when on rough terrain - were
sometimes exploited by more wily commanders; however, the
formation, albeit with lighter-armed infantry, was still
in use through Hellenistic and
early Roman
times.
Ancient Greek weapons and armor were primarily geared
towards combat between hoplites, armored foot soldiers.
The most common combat formation was the phalanx, a massed shield wall,
which required heavy frontal armor and medium-ranged
weapons such as spears.[1]
Soldiers were required to provide their own panoply, which could prove
expensive,[2]
however the lack of any official peace-keeping force meant
that most Greek citizens carried weapons as a matter of
course for self-defence.[3]
Because individuals provided their own equipment, there
was considerable diversity in arms and armour among
Grecian troops.[4]
The
poorest citizens, unable to afford the purchase or upkeep
of military equipment, operated on the battlefield as psiloi or peltasts; fast, mobile
skirmishing troops.
Weapons
were primarily constructed from iron, wood and bronze.
Contents
1
Personal weapons
1.1
Spears
1.2
Swords
1.3
Ranged Weapons
2
Armor
3
Shields
4
Helmets
5
Other
5.1
Chariots
5.2
Catapults
6
References
Personal
weapons
Spears
The
primary weapon used by Greek troops was a two-to-three
meter spear with a leaf-shaped blade at one end and a
short spike at the other known as the doru. The doru was
used one-handed (the other hand supporting the soldier's
shield).[5]
Mounted cavalry were known to have used a thinner spear or
very long lance which provided a range advantage over
shorter infantry spears.[6]
Under
Philip II of
Macedon, hoplites were equipped
with extremely long spears (up to 21 feet) called sarrisae. Used in conjunction
with the phalanx formation, this made an impregnable wall
of spears in front of the infantry, the enemy's shorter
weaponry could not reach the phalanx because of the
sarissae .[7]
Swords
As a
secondary weapon, hoplites are known to have carried a
short sword known as the xiphos which was made from iron
or bronze depending on the era. This was used in the event
of a broken spear, or if close melee combat was necessary.[8]
Hoplites mounted on horseback likely used a heavier,
curved sword known as the kopis, meaning "chopper" in the
Greek language. [2][9]
Light infantry known as peltasts or "peltast" would carry
a number of javelins used to pepper enemy formations,
avoiding close combat whenever possible. The job of the
peltast was not to engage in formation combat, therefor,
many carried nothing more than javelins.
Ranged
Weapons
While
the majority of fighting was done hand-to-hand, light
support troops such as the psiloi were often armed
with ranged weapons. Popular ranged weapons were the bow (toxa),
javelin (akontia) and sling (sfendonai).
while the bow was a relatively uncommon weapon (the wooden
stave bow used had a limited range), some troops treated
their arrows by thrusting them into rotting corpses, thus
creating a crude form of biological weapon.[10]an
unbarbed bronze head to facilitate recovery of the weapon;
they were usually thrown with the aid of an amentum.[11]
Slings used both lead pellets and stones; stones were also
commonly thrown by hand.[12]
Armor
A
heavy bronze breastplate was the most common form of
infantry torso armour, usually in the form of a bell
cuirass
or linothorax. Little other armor was
worn, and fatal blows to unprotected areas (such as the
bladder or neck) are recorded in ancient art and poetry.[13] Cavalry armor was
designed to be lightweight; over a sleeveless tunic called
a chitoniskos the cavalry soldier would wear a muscle
cuirass
designed to leave the arms as free as possible.[9]
Hoplites wore greaves to protect the lower
leg, as did cavalry, but otherwise the torso and head were
the only body parts protected by armour.
Shields
The
most vital part of the panoply was the hoplon, a large, round shield
commonly made from a layer of bronze, wood and leather.
The hoplon was around a meter in diameter, and
weighed around 16 lbs, making it awkward to hold for
long periods.[13] Peltasts were armed with
wicker shields called pelte, which were much
lighter, allowing for greater movement on the battlefield.
These were designed to defend against in-coming javelins
from opposing
peltasts,
not necessarily to fend off the thrust of a spear or
sword.[14]
Helmets
Helmets
for the infantry came in various types. The earliest
standard hoplite helmet was the Corinthian
helmet,
developed around 600BCE.[13] Later, this was replaced
by the Phrygian
helmet and Chalcidian
helmet, which were lighter and
did not impair the wearer's vision or hearing so severely.
Helmets often had a horsehair crest, for decorative
purposes and as an additional level of protection. The Boeotian
helmet was commonly used by
cavalry troops due to their need for unimpeded vision and
hearing. Helmets were mainly used for protecting the head
but leaving the eyes, mouth and nose unprotected.[15]
Other
Chariots
The chariot, though ineffective for
warfare in the hilly terrain of the Greek mainland, was
used by the Myceneans in some circumstances.
The vehicle used was generally a single-axled chariot,
drawn by two horses and carrying two passengers (a driver
and a spearman or archer); the construction was generally
bronze-plated wood.[13]
Catapults
The
Ancient Greeks used two principal types of heavy catapults
as siege engines. The ethytonos
was a type of stationary bow, mounted on a tripod and
similar in design to a ballista.[16]
A larger version, the palintonos, fired stone
projectiles.[17]
References
1. ^
Richard Holmes (1 April 2008). Weapon. Dorling Kindersley.
p. 40. ISBN978-1-4053-1619-4. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
Hoplites.
Heavy
infantry, spearmen first and foremost, who would fight in
an organized fashion, with each hoplite's shield covering
the one in his left, while covered in his right by the
shield of his fellow hoplite. The spear would be held
overhand, and have two business ends, as more often than
not, one of them would break during battle. In that case,
the hoplite would use the opposite end, then his sword,
either the straight xiphos,
or from 500 BCE onwards, the curvy slasher, kopis. Hoplites
mostly used xiphos though or even smaller swordknives as
Spartans did after the Persians wars.
Historically
the
last hoplites fought in 146 BCE for the Achaian league,
and later on in 86 BCE, in the siege of Athens by Sulla;
their era ended for most Hellenic cities in about the time
[the Roman period] begins. Sarissa pike phalanxes "armed in the
Makedonian way" were the norm. Boeotian Koinon turned its
hoplites into pikemen in 250 BCE, Sparta in 227, and
Achaians in 223, and massively so in 209 BCE. Hoplites
could still be used as flank guards, but the use of Thureos' shield
armed troops was preferred. The obvious reason was that
they could be used for both skirmishing, as well as close
style fighting. Hoplites would soon become the dodo bird
of infantry evolution. Rather than being the only heavy
infantry, they became one of many types, not too good at
anything in particular. That doesn't change the fact
however that many Greek cities fielded hoplites for as
long as they remained independent, or that their reign
wasn't long lasting. They ruled the battlefield for more
than 400 years. Carthaginians, Persians, Etruscans and
even Romans fielded hoplitic armies themselves at some
point.
I
guess the best tribute to the hoplites is to say that all
other heavy infantry formations used at the time, were
designed specifically to beat hoplites and their
shieldwall phallanx. One way to do that would be by being
heavier than the hoplitic phallanx. That's how the Macedon
Kingdom united Greece. Phillipos' II Macedonians copied
Jason of Pherrai, tagos
(leader) of Thessaly and his pikemen phallanx. In a way Sarissa pikes
carrying phallanxes are the penultimate evolution of the
phallanx, as it can be called hoplitic phallanx evolved.
Another way is to become more agile than the hoplitic
phallanx. Romans had their thureos carrying
peltasts form
into maniples and throw pilae after pilae after pilae, and
assault on the most weakend point of the phallanx with Hastati. Retreat
if failing and try again, with more experienced and
armored troops, aka the Principes. Then
if that fails retreat behind the shieldwall of the Roman
veteran hoplites, the Triarii.
"Tactics"
or
"TAKTIKH" in
ancient greek meant the knowledge of how to arrange the
hoplites in a "taxis"=order
of a phallanx.
Catapults
were
developed as a way to defend the hoplites from the
skirmishers, and especially slingers who could decimate a
phallanx and run away before the heavier and slower
hoplites could catch up.
Hoplites
are
divided in Archaic hoplites, Classic hoplites and the last
ones Hellenistic hoplites, by the time they were fielded
in. There are other divisions as well, the most important
one of them being their type. Epilektoi or
chosen hoplites would be the elite and professional,
always on call. Plain hoplites would be the middle class
and lower middle class, who would be drafted into service
at time of need. Levy hoplites would be the underclass of
freemen with helmet, shield and spear being provided for
by the state. A military service for them would mean a
change, any change at all, from a dreary existence.
Historically,
first
were the Archaic hoplites. People consider them an off
shoot of the "dark [age]" era which followed the Dorian
[incursions] and the fall of Mycenaean kingdoms in
mainland Hellas. The social and economical changes as well
as the mountainous terrain riddled with valleys of Hellas
caused the city states to form. A union of villages would
create the polis, aka a union of freemen some of which
were slightly better off. It was only later when some
became very rich, while others were left to fend for
themselves.
An
archaic
hoplite wouldn't necessarily fight in a phallanx, but like
Achaimenid Persians, heavy infantry would shield the
slingers and archers who would pepper the enemy while
protected. There wasn't a clear cut distinction between
skirmishers, missile troops and heavy infantry. In Illiad,
the first written account of an early phallanx (especially
so when the battle around Achilles or the first landing in
Troy is conducted) is riddled with hoplites protecting
missile troops. Teukros shoots with his bow, while
protected by his brother Aias (Ajax). Other anonymous
Achaians are described to be doing the same, while covered
from shields in the first line of combat. In Tyrtaios
depiction of a battle, in 7th century BCE, the familiar
figure of a lightly armed figther is repeated. In the
first line of combat, while protected by hoplites, he
shoots all sorts of missiles, even rocks at the enemy.
Later on in the 6th century and even much later, Skythians
are shown to be firing among Athenian hoplites who are
covering them. -Note that this could very well be the "epilektoi"
Athenians at Plataiai who used the "Skythai" archers to
break off Mardonios' cavalry charge, for more further down
under "Epilektoi".
As
such,
to allow for skirmishers, the phallanx per se was either
very shallow (2-3 lines deep) or not crystalized as it was
in the classical period.
Not
until
medieval footknight would an infantryman be as armored in
Europe proper. Egyptians of this time called mercenary
hoplites "Men of bronze". It is easy to tell why.
While
body
armor fell out of use by the 5th century BCE, for
hoplites, parts of it kept being in use in far flung
territories and for horsemen.
Most
of
the above gear was ditched in the way. Only the helmet,
thorax (cuirass), either bronze or in most cases linothorax, round
aspis shield/
argive shield and greaves remained. This would also be
known as the Classical hoplite, as the Hoplites fought the
Persians armed in this configuration. Achaimenid Persians
who invaded Greece did have a very good chance of success.
Especially in Plataiae, had all the Persians engaged the
Greek force, it is quite possible that the battle would
have turned out differently. Even in Thermopylae. Persians
didn't evolve an "assault infantry" of the time of Hastati/principes that
Romani evolved. Their light archer/spearmen had been
created to fight the Horse Archers of the Steppes, not
hoplites. As such their defeat was more of a matter of
false doctrine, rather than lack of martial valor.
Besides,
their
attack created the classical Hellenic civilisation, and
was directly responsible for the First Athenian alliance,
whose greatest Project "Akropolis" can be
seen today, hanging about in the same place (even if its
greatest works have been relocated to nearby Akropolis museum,
which itself is brand new, especially when compared to Akropolis of
Athens). It was the first time that a majority of Greeks
would band together under a joint cause.
Isokrates
Pan-hellenic
movement began there and then. "KoinonHellenon" of
Phillipos II of Makedonia, the great unifier of all
mainland Greeks, was based on the joint struggle against
the Persians.
Later
on,
during the Peloponnesian war, realities of war and the
grim financial state of all Hellenic greek city states,
obliged the abandonment of all defensive equipment other
than a cheap "Pilos" helmet and the argive shield.
Then
a
revolutionary occurence took place. Catapults.
(First
ones
to be constructed around 400 BCE by Dionysios' engineers
at Syracuse-THOSE
are the original Catapults from KATA=against and
ΠΕΛΤΗ/ΠΕΛΤA
=small flat round shield of the skirmishers, meaning to be
used against all javelineers and slingers, and especially
Ballearic slingers who wrought havoc against the Greek
Hoplites in Sicily.)
.
Dionysos
of
Syracuse used them to conquer Carthagenian cities,
therefore obliging Hoplites to reintroduce armor, for fear
of dying under a catapult bolt (which was known to pass
through argive shields as if they were made of paper).
Newer and stronger types of catapults followed.
Then,
as
Phillipos of Makedonia united Hellas, and his son
Alexandros o Megas conquered the known world, more changes
occurred. His own hoplites, now called Hypaspistai would
have a double role. One of them would be as elite hoplites
holding the flanks of the pike phalanx, the other would be
elite armored skirmishers.
The
shield
would become smaller in an attempt to make the hoplite
more agile and also to ensure survival as, if the hoplitic
phalanx lost its cohesion the large 1.2m diameter hoplitic
shield could become a dead weight, whereas a more nimble
0.75m shield could actually be used in a solo encounter
with an enemy, even after phalanx had broken down and
people would be running around trying to save their lives.
A bigger shield would be cumbersome. Of course not all
hoplites used those smaller shields. …
The
hoplites
would struggle to fit in the battle plan of their
generals. It wasn't easy, especially in a fluid political
climate where today's enemies would be tomorrow's allies
and vice versa. Hoplites, however, were a city-states'
prime means of defense and remained so to the end.
…
tried to depict in its AOR implementation of hoplites the
difference which existed between the various hoplites.
Levies would be dirt cheap to field and a lot of them
could be, but that wasn't done in most of the times. A
city would either lack the funds or the numbers needed for
this. Only great city-states like Syracuse would have
both. Most cities would field linothorax armed
hoplites, such as Cyrenaica and Massalia, but the richest
of them, (as Pergamon, Athens and Bosporos' cities were)
could go the extra mile and afford the richest of its
citizens to be turned into a "round the clock heavy
guard", ready to be deployed at a moments' notice wherever
a city states' interest might lie.
Historically
Athens
used them to keep its Aegean dominions in check, whereas
in Argos, its Epilektoi
must have been those who actually killed Pyrrhos of
Epeiros' (an old woman had toppled him off his horse
first). In the account of the battle, Argos' men are
described to be running into "designated places of
defense" which were scattered around the city (possibly to
arm themselves) and then emerged to fight.
--An
explanation
of the differences between the hoplites, from “levy”, to
“plain” hoplite and on to Epilektoi
(chosen) hoplites.
Epilektoi hoplites,
(Those
would
be the city states' finest- basically the aristocracy,
able to afford a full bronze muscle cuirass and a 10 mm
bronze coated aspis). They were small in number and a
force which was always on standby, rather than conscripted
or levied into action like the two following categories.
(Only the finest of helmets for those, aka (phrygian,
with/without facemask, rich attic, or thracian or
thraco-attic, with engraved cheekguards etc)
[“Plain”] Hoplites (Linothorax
cuirass, 5 mm bronze coated aspis shield). These would
mean the "medium" hoplites who would be the sons of middle
class citizens, aka merchants, farmers, with good armament
mostly and elaborate helmets (Attic, Thracian, even the
odd Corinthian from great great grandpa who fought in
Salamis and his descendants won't let anybody forget.
Later on the Italo-Corinthian/Pseudo-Corinthian would come
into effect, but more so in S. Italy/Sicily, whereas in
mainland Ascalon/Sidon type helmets would prevail). These
are the most known of hoplites, and so not much more is
needed for them.
Levy Hoplites, what Europa Barbarorum calls "Hoplitaihaploi" (Plain
wooden aspis shield without even bronze coating). Those
would be the large majority of the city dwellers in the
ancient times. Living in bad conditions, 2nd or 3rd sons,
with not much to go on with, and as Hammond writes in
"Phillip of Macedon"..."In any slave-owning society every
citizen without a capital of sorts find himself in direct
opposition to the slave-labor which works without
payment". As such what Aristophanes (famous comedian)
writes in 393 BCE. "Let's send a fleet! The poor vote
YES!, while the "moneyed" [meaning the well off, store
owners, artisans, aka middle class] and farmers NO!". The
poor always hoped for loot or even a "klerouchy"
meaning the killing off of original people and the
creation of an Athenian colony in there. According to
Isokrates, they were most pleased with the Rhetors who would
ask for war than those who wanted peace. In fact in 355
when Athens tried to mobilize its allies for war, the real
reason was its poor citizens who had reached a "boiling
point" so far as their living conditions were concerned.
Being poor in ancient Greek world was just about the worst
fate, with the absolute worst being a slave in the mines.
A house-slave would be sure to have something to eat, for
a poor freeman this wasn't guaranteed. It was that reason
why as Aristoteles wrote "The Demos tried to alleviate
some of that pressure on the poor with altruism payments,
but those never managed to raise the living standard of
those poor beyond that of a (minimum wage) worker".
Their
greatest
chance was a succesful war. In that they would serve
either as rowers, or as levy hoplites with all the
necessary equipment provided for them by the state. In
fact Hammond considers that "Theorikon Tameion"
(=Theorikon
fund, in name a way to supplement the ticket for poorer
people to watch the theatrical plays of greats as
Euripides, Sophokles and others) was established in 354
BCE in Athens as a way to insure a "ready to be
conscripted" force for Poor Athenians to go to war. Those
who would sign up for free tickets would be called up for
service. Their loss whould help stabilize the state, while
their off chance of winning would create a "Kleruchy". This
meant that the Aegean island which would have that Kleruchy
installed on (as was the case in 90% of the time) would
stay Athenian. (Look up the history of Samos Island for
more details)
Levy
hoplites
would have a Konos
or pilos
helmet, or as Syracuse levy hoplites, an evolved Boetian.
They would wear a simple chiton or exomis, or even a
loincloth, and their equipment was as good as the cheapest
weapon supplier that won the contract. A knife would have
to do where the richer hoplites would have a xiphos or kopis, and
having a knife to use wouldn't be sure. Again, it depended
on what the state was willing to pay for armament. The
bronze coating on their shields would be non existent, and
the leather layer which all aspis/argive
shields had underneath the bronze coating would have to
suffice.
Draco
(fl. c. 7th century BCE) was the first legislator of Athens in Ancient Greece. He replaced the
prevailing system of oral law and blood feud by a written code to be enforced only by a
court. Draco's written law became known for its harshness,
with the adjective "draconian"
referring to similarly unforgiving rules or laws.
Contents
1 Life
2 Draconian constitution
3 Law of Homicide
4 Council of Four Hundred
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links
Life
During
the 39th Olympiad, in 622 or 621 BCE,
Draco established the legal code with which he is
identified.
Little
is known about his life. He may have belonged to the Greek
nobility of the Attica, with which the 10th-century Suda
text records him as contemporaneous, prior to the period
of the Seven Sages of
Greece. It also relates a folkloric story of his death in
the Aeginetan theatre.[1]
In a traditional ancient Greek show of approval, his
supporters "threw so many hats and shirts and cloaks on
his head that he suffocated, and was buried in that same
theatre".[2]
The laws
(θεσμοί - thesmoi) he laid down were the first
written constitution
of
Athens.
So that no one would be unaware of them, they were posted
on wooden tablets (ἄξονες - axones), where they
were preserved for almost two centuries, on steles
of the shape of three-sided
pyramids
(κύρβεις - kyrbeis).[citation
needed] The tablets were
called axones, perhaps because they could be
pivoted along the pyramid's axis, to read any side. The
constitution featured several major innovations:
·Instead
of oral laws known to a special class, arbitrarily applied
and interpreted, all laws were written, thus made known to
all literate citizens (who could make appeal to the Areopagus for injustices):
"... the constitution formed under Draco, when the
first code of laws was drawn up." (Aristotle: Athenian
Constitution,
Part 5,
Section 41)
The
laws, however, were particularly harsh. For example, any debtor
whose status was lower than that of his creditor was forced into slavery.[3]
The punishment was more lenient for those owing debt to a
member of a lower class. The death
penalty
was the punishment for even minor offences, such as "stealing a
cabbage".[4]
Concerning the liberal use of the death penalty in the
Draconic code, Plutarch states: "It was a lot
for himself, when asked why he had fixed the punishment of
death for most offences, answered that he considered these
lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater
punishment for more important ones."[5]
All
his laws were repealed by Solon in the early 6th century
BC, with the exception of the homicide law.[6]
Law
of Homicide
After
much debate from the Athenians, it was decided to revise
the laws, including the homicide law, in 409 B.C. The
homicide law is a highly fragmented inscription, but it
does state that it is up to the victim’s relatives to
prosecute a killer. According to the preserved part of the
inscription, unintentional homicides receive a sentence of
exile. It is not clear whether Draco's law specified the
punishment for intentional homicide. In 409 B.C.,
intentional homicide was punished by death, but Draco's
law begins καὶ ἐὰμ μὲ ‘κ [π]ρονοί[α]ς [κ]τ[ένει τίς τινα,
φεύγ]ε[ν], which is ambiguous and difficult to translate.
One possible translation offers 'Even if a man not
intentionally kills another, he is exiled',[7] which leads to the
presumption that exile must have been the normal penalty
for intentional homicide at the time Draco wrote his law.
Council
of Four Hundred
Draco
introduced the lot-chosen Council of Four Hundred [8]—distinct
from
the Areopagus—which evolved in later
constitutions to play a large role in Athenian
democracy. Aristotle notes that
Draco, while having the laws written, merely legislated
for an existing unwritten Athenian constitution,[9] such as setting exact
qualifications for eligibility for office.
Draco
extended the franchise to all free men who
could furnish themselves with a set of military equipment.
They elected the Council of Four Hundred from among their
number; nine Archons and the Treasurers were
drawn from persons possessing an unencumbered property of
not less than ten minas, the generals (strategoi)
and commanders of cavalry (hipparchoi) from those
who could show an unencumbered property of not less than a
hundred minas, and had children born in lawful
wedlock over ten years of age. Thus, in the event of their
death, their estate could pass to a competent heir. These
officers were required to hold to account the prytanes
(councillors), strategoi (generals) and hipparchoi
(cavalry officers) of the preceding year until their
accounts had been audited. "The Council of Areopagus was
guardian of the laws, and kept watch over the magistrates
to see that they executed their offices in accordance with
the laws. Any person who felt himself wronged might lay an
information before the Council of Areopagus, on declaring
what law was broken by the wrong done to him. But, as has
been said before, loans were secured upon the persons of
the debtors, and the land was in the hands of a few."[10]
To
resolve unequal accessibility to the acquirement
of legal knowledge of oral law by replacing such
with a written constitution.[3]
The Draconian constitution,
or Draco's code, was a written law
code
created by Draco near the end of 7th
century BC in response to unjust interpretation and
modification of oral law by Athenian aristocrats.[4]
With most societies of Greece establishing official
primitive laws during the middle of seventh century BC,[5]
advantageous ascendancy by the Athenian aristocracy [6]
over the concept of willfully manipulating the set of oral
laws in Athens transpired through time until the emerging
of Draco's code. Being a prominent prejudicial activity to
the people of Athens that segregated both parties from
their perception of acquirement of legal knowledge, the
people commissioned a man named Draco around 620 BC to
devise a written law code and constitution; thus,
bequeathing him the title of the first legislator of
Athens. Those literate could read the script at a
centralized location that could be accessed by anyone.[a]
This
enactment of an attempt of a rule of law is one of the first
features of Athenian
democracy in its infant stages of
development.
Contents
1 Background
2 Suffrage
3 The Council and the
Assembly
4 Controversial matters
of Aristotle's description of the Draconian constitution
in Constitution of the Athenians
4.1 Setting of the
development of the Draconian constitution
4.2 Prytanes
4.3 Grammatical ambiguity
of relation between concurrent Athenian officials and
preceding officials
4.4 Grammatical
contradiction of the sex of Council members
4.5 Draco's position
5 Effects and reform
6 Notes
7 Reference list
Background
The
need for a codified text of written laws commences with
unequal access to legal knowledge between the aristocracy
and the people. This was so because the established laws
of Athens were inefficiently formulated via spoken
language and often modified and re-evaluated. Lucrative
and aristocratic use of this system began during the
middle seventh century BC. The laws were often amended
when willful seizes happened to the aristocracy.[7]
As a consequence, initiations of blood feuds and vendettas between families
uneducated of the law instinctively occurred to substitute
as an adequate scheme of justice and tool of avenging.[8] Due to subsequent and
seemingly obscure manipulations to the oral law, it is
inferred that the Athenians were prone to legal violation
and personal infliction of punishment.
Due to
the inhibition of equal legal knowledge, the governing
aristocratic families of Athens decided to abandon the
concealed system of legal proposals and amendments and
promulgate them to all of Athenian society through the
medium of written language. This was done by authorizing
an individual to construct the written constitution, who
was an aristocratic legislator[9]
named Draco and was prompted to
concoct the governing text around 621 BC. To circulate the
equal acquirement of knowledge of the new Draconian
constitution, the text was inscribed on a surface of a
displaying device, in which is negotiated in specificity.[10]
As a result, the Draconian constitution was informatively
and directly attainable to those literate.
Under
the Draconian constitution, the freedom of a person could
be used as a collateral for debt, virtually becoming a
slave, but, in point of fact, this law only applied to
constituent members of lower socio-economic classes.[11]
Draco also introduced the concept of intentional and
unintentional homicide[12]
with both torts being administered by the Council of
Areopagus.[13]
With murder cases being tried by the state, the practice
of blood feuds and vendettas as regimes of justice were
subsequently illegal. The homicide laws were the only laws
that were retained in the movement to the formation of the
Solonian
Constitution.[14]
And Draco himself, they
say, being asked why he made death the penalty for most
offences, replied that in his opinion the lesser ones
deserved it, and for the greater ones no heavier penalty
could be found.
Although
a specific codified script of the complete Draconian
constitution is absent, legends claim consequential severe
punishments were issued to convicts of whom executed
offenses as inferior as stealing an apple.[15]
There may have been only one penalty for all convicted
offenders of the Draconian constitution, in which was
execution.[16]
Eccentrically, they were described to be written present
with blood rather than ink.[17] These legends of
repression and cruelty of a past legal world have
incorporated themselves into the linguistic apparatus of
the English language, with the adjective "draconian"
referring to similarly unforgiving rules or laws.[18]
Suffrage
The
authorized franchise to whom were given permission to gain
political position consisted of anyone who could outfit
themselves with military equipment,[19]
more specifically, with that of a hoplite.[20]
This formality that was administered was the minimum
condition in terms of possessing a quantity of valuable
physical and abstract properties for suffrage,
correspondingly being eligible for relatively less
important state official positions.[21] Alternatively to acquire
higher positions, such prerequisite could only be executed
in conjunction with other statuses possessed by the
individual, ranging from pecuniary to marital personal
properties. From the body of persons capable of appending
military equipment, those who could present a property
free of financial debt or liability and of value of not
less than ten minas could serve along the
nine Archons and the Treasurers.[22]
The Strategi, or the generals, and the Hipparchi, or the
commanders, of the cavalry of Athens were chosen from the
equivalent body of persons but of those who contrarily
possessed an unencumbered property of value not less than
one hundred minas as well as offspring of over 10 years of
age and of being born from parents in a state of wedlock.[23]
Four hundred one integral members of the Council were
chosen from the body of persons who possessed the basic
authorized franchise of holding capability of appending
equipment of that of a hoplite as well as holding a
chronological age of over 30 years.[24] No individual from this
body of people could be elected by lot more than once to
serve in the Council until the Council were to "cast the
lot afresh," meaning the lot was resuscitated in terms of
including every eligible individual into the next
sortition of the next Council as everyone eligible in the
previous Council already acquired a position in the
magistracy.[25]
The
election of political positions of the state of Athens
from these bodies of persons was dependent on sortition,[26]
except for the Council of Areopagus, which consisted of
retired Archons.[27]
The
Council and the Assembly
Transcribed
within
the framework of the Draconian constitution, the Council
was another concept Draco introduced to Athenian
government.[28]
In Aristotle's historical disquisition Constitution of
the Athenians, the Council is not portrayed its
duties or authority other than vaguely being characterized
as no more than a magistracy.[29]
The
Assembly is another magistracy of the Athenian state that
is minutely described in Aristotle's text in terms of its
general duties and authority. Even its eligibility of
acquiring a position of the magistracy lacks.[30]
Fines
were issued as penalties to members of the Council and the
Assembly who were absent to a sitting or meeting.[31] Fines varied
proportionally with the rank of each social class of
Athens, with constituency of higher classes resulting in
higher penalty fees and vice verca. If the absent Council
or Assembly member was of the Pentacosiomedimnus class, the individual
was penalized with a mandatory fee of three drachmas.[32]Knight social class members
were penalized with 2 drachmas,[33] and Zeugites social class members
were punished with 1 drachma.[34]
Controversial
matters of Aristotle's description of the Draconian
constitution in Constitution of the Athenians
Setting
of the development of the Draconian constitution
Having
supplied literary description, Aristotle's illustration of
the fixture of time of the establishment of the Draconian
constitution is rather obscure and precarious with the use
of the transitioning words "not very long after" that
corresponds in relation to a preceding event that must
have transpired for a relatively prolonged period of time.
This preceding event, which appears to constitute as the
framework and political development of the first
constitution of Athens, exists as the following:
Such,
then, is the relative chronological precedence of these
offices. At that time the nine Archons did not all live
together. The King occupied the building now known as the
Boculium, near the Prytaneum, as may be seen from the fact
that even to the present day the marriage of the King's
wife to Dionysus takes place there. The Archon lived in
the Prytaneum, the Polemarch in the Epilyceum. The latter
building was formerly called the Polemarcheum, but after
Epilycus, during his term of office as Polemarch, had
rebuilt it and fitted it up, it was called the Epilyceum.
The Thesmothetae occupied the Thesmotheteum. In the time
of Solon, however, they all came together into the
Thesmotheteum. They had power to decide cases finally on
their own authority, not, as now, merely to hold a
preliminary hearing. Such then was the arrangement of the
magistracies. The Council of Areopagus had as its
constitutionally assigned duty the protection of the laws;
but in point of fact it administered the greater and most
important part of the government of the state, and
inflicted personal punishments and fines summarily upon
all who misbehaved themselves. This was the natural
consequence of the facts that the Archons were elected
under qualifications of birth and wealth, and that the
Areopagus was composed of those who had served as Archons;
for which latter reason the membership of the Areopagus is
the only office which has continued to be a
life-magistracy to the present day.
Such
was, in outline, the first constitution, but not very long
after the events above recorded, in the archonship of
Aristaichmus, Draco enacted his ordinances.
With
the presumed founding of the city of Athens by king Cecrops I and the consequential
establishment of the first ancient Athenian constitution
in 1556 BC, this infrastructure of the ancient Athenian
constitution would have functioned for virtually 900 years
before Draco would have codified the Athenian laws and
drafted the Draconian constitution around 620 BC. This
factual premise defies the use of the words "not very long
after." Subsequently, commentators pose the problem with
assuming that these transitioning words refer to the Cylonian
affair, which occurred much
closer to the political development of Draconian
constitution than that of the ancient Athenian
constitution.
Prytanes
Aristotle's
undefined use of the word "Prytanes" refers to a multitude
of Athenian state positions during and after the
development of the Draconian constitution. This is
transcribed and evident in the following text.
Such
was, in outline, the first constitution, but not very long
after the events above recorded, in the archonship of
Aristaichmus, Draco enacted his ordinances. Now his
constitution had the following form. The franchise was
given to all who could furnish themselves with a military
equipment. The nine Archons and the Treasurers were
elected by this body from persons possessing an
unencumbered property of not less than ten minas, the less
important officials from those who could furnish
themselves with a military equipment, and the generals
[Strategi] and commanders of the cavalry [Hipparchi] from
those who could show an unencumbered property of not less
than a hundred minas, and had children born in lawful
wedlock over ten years of age. These officers were
required to hold to bail the Prytanes, the Strategi, and
the Hipparchi of the preceding year until their accounts
had been audited, taking four securities of the same class
as that to which the Strategi and the Hipparchi belonged.
In
subsequent times, the term "Prytanes" attributed to the
fifty presiding members of the Council. The only
supplementary mention of the term in historical context
that is placed within the fixture of time of the
development of the Draconian constitution is in Herodotus' account of the Cylonian
affair, in which the "Prytanes of Naucrari" are mentioned.
This may have occurred due to Herodotus', a Dorian himself, habit of
referring to the first magistrates of Dorian cities as
"Prytanes of Naucrari" and consequently merging it with
the superior or first magistrates of Athens, who were the
Archons at the time. In further approbation of this
possible argument, Thucydides' more detailed version
of the event refers to the same persons Herodotus refers
to as "Prytanes of Naucrari." "Those," the historian says,
"to whom the people had confided the keeping of the
citadel, seeing the partisans of Cylon perish at the feet
of the statue of Minerva, caused them to go out of the
citadel, promising them that no harm would be done to
them." As Thucydides had mentioned before in his personal
account of the Cylonian affair, the nine Archons were the
people that had entrusted the care of the citadel.
Therefore,
it may be possible that Herodotus' "Prytanes of Naucrari"
were equivalent to the nine Archons if its referral was in
fact an influence of a habit of the historian's. Other
possibilities may account for the "Prytanes" of
Aristotle's text being chairmen of the important office of
the "Naucrari" that saliently existed. [35]
Grammatical
ambiguity of relation between concurrent Athenian
officials and preceding officials
One
correlation between the concurrent officials and the
Prytanes, Strategi, and Hipparchi of the preceding year
concerning financial securities partakes as one of the
most controversial texts of Aristotle’s Constitution
of
the Athenians
in the Oxford
Classical Text edition by translator Frederic G.
Kenyon. The translated text
constitutes an ambiguous syntactical metalinguistic
structure, and any inferred assumptions are naturally
precarious due to the text's indefinite grammatical
structure.
These
officers
were required to hold to bail the Prytanes, the Strategi,
and the Hipparchi of the preceding year until their
accounts had been audited, taking four securities of the
same class as that to which the Strategi and the Hipparchi
belonged.
Grammatical
contradiction of the sex of Council members
A
grammatical contradiction with an antecedent exists in the
Oxford
Classical
Texts
edition of Frederic G.
Kenyon's translation of Constitution
of the Athenians concerning the sex of the
subsidiary members of the Council. The following quote
establishes information that the sex of the members of the
Council is indefinite, being that the authorized franchise
did not include any member of any specific sex.
There
was also to be a Council, consisting of four hundred and
one members, elected by lot from among those who possessed
the franchise.
The
following quote contrarily refers to the Council members
as accommodating male gender.
Both
for this and for the other magistracies the lot was cast
among those who were over thirty years of age; and no one
might hold office twice until every one else had had his
turn, after which they were to cast the lot afresh.
Due to
the contradiction of sex referral in the antecedents of
the texts, it is unknown surely if Draco's
conceptualization of the Council segregated the sexes of
the Athenians.
Draco's
position
Until
the discovery of Aristotle's disquisition Constitution
of the Athenians, the opinion that Draco's position
a political reformer of the ancient Athenian constitution
was absent. Being contemplated along with other historical
texts of the development of Athenian democracy, an
abundance of the features of the Draconian constitution
appear spasmodic with Draco's duties of employment of
crafting the Draconian constitution, in which most reforms
constituent of Draco's code, as described by Aristotle,
are prevailed in the concluding portion of the fifth
century BC. The Draconian constitution is not mentioned by
other historian writers of Draco's time, and Draco's
position as a political and constitutional reformer is
intermittent with Aristotle's emphasized description.
What
is definitively known is Draco's position as a lawgiver,
despite the fact that most laws of the Draconian
constitution were all repealed except for the homicide
law. With the assumption of a special Archon appointed by
the Athenian aristocracy, Draco's autocratic position
seemed absolute, unconfined to revising and introducing
laws.
Notes
· ^ Also note that
illiterate individuals were conscious of the laws
indirectly as they probably were informed by literate
persons of knowledge of the Athenian law through different
media of communication.
Reference
list
1. ^"Around 620 BC
Draco, the lawgiver, wrote the first known written law of
2. ^
"Such was, in outline, the first constitution, but not
very long after the events above recorded, in the
archonship of Aristaichmus, Draco enacted his ordinances."
- http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, "Part 4"
3. ^
The result of the institution of the Draconian
constitution resulted as such, becoming its essential,
consequential purpose of existence and incorporation: "The
rulers decided that all the cruel laws they had passed
whenever the impulse seized them should be arranged in a
single plainly stated system; thus, at least, the nobles
could no longer twist the laws as they willed; and a poor
man might know what the law really was, and so avoid
breaking it unconsciously." - http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/The_Story_of_the_Greatest_Nations_and_the_Worlds_Famous_Events_Vol_1/whatisd_bei.html, an excerpt of The
Story of the Greatest Nations and the World's Famous
Events by Edward S. Ellis and Charles F. Home, PhD
6. ^
"Not only do the aristocratic families of Attica hold
nearly all political power..." - http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/plaintexthistories.asp?historyid=ac45 (The text is set in
context during the time of aristocracy of the state of
Athens before the establishment of the Draconian
constitution, so before circa 620 BC)
7. ^
"The distinctive privilege which the nobles had always
enjoyed was the exclusive knowledge and administration of
the laws. They were, then, open to the charge of
exercising this privilege in their own favor." - Athenian
Political Commissions by Frederick Danesbury Smith
9. ^
"He was elected as one of the nine archons, but was not
the archon eponymous." - Athenian Political
Commissions, page 12, by Frederick Danesbury Smith
10. ^ "'Axones' and 'kyrbeis'
are names given to structures that contained the law codes
of Draco and Solon in ancient Athens during the Archaic
Age." - http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/greekterms/g/Axones.htm; These two terms are
debated in specificity to their materialistic structure
and functionality. The following quote describes both
terms: "Robertson says [describes such information in Solon's
Axones and Kyrbeis, and the Sixth-Century Background
(Figs. 1-2), Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte
Geschichte, (2nd Qtr., 1986), pp. 147-176] axones
and kyrbeis were not names for the same thing: the axones
were revolving wooden beams, while kyrbeis were standing
pillars in the Royal Stoa." - http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/greekterms/g/Axones.htm; The following describes
the term "axone" particularly: "These beams were called
axones, a word meaning 'axles,' because the ends of each
beam were pivoted and placed within a frame in such a way
that they could be rotated." - James Sickinger, Literacy,
Documents, and Archives in the Ancient Athenian
Democracy, The American Archivist, (Fall,
1999), pp. 229-246
11. ^ "Through the laws of
Draco, those in debt could be made slaves -- but only if
they were members of the lower class. This means members
of a genos (the gennetai) could not be sold as slaves, yet
their hangers-on (orgeones) could." - http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/greecehellas1/a/cylonanddraco_3.htm
13. ^ "Any person who felt
himself wronged might lay an information before the
Council of Areopagus, on declaring what law was broken by
the wrong done to him." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
14. ^ "We know nothing about
what Drakon's [Draco's] nomoi were. Solon repealed all of
the nomoi of Drakon except for one about Homicide, and the
Athenians quickly forgot them." - Solon: The Lawmaker
of Athens, Page 25 by Bernard Randall
16. ^ "Athenians later said
that Drakon [Draco] gave the death penalty for most
crimes, even for stealing fruit." - Solon: The
Lawmaker of Athens, Page 25 by Bernard Randall
18. ^ "The English word
'draconian,' meaning very harsh, comes from his [Draco's]
name." - Solon: The Lawmaker of Athens, Page 25 by
Bernard Randall
19. ^ "The franchise was given
to all who could furnish themselves with a military
equipment." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
21. ^ "...the less important
officials from those who could furnish themselves with a
military equipment..." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
22. ^ "The nine Archons and
the Treasurers were elected by this body from persons
possessing an unencumbered property of not less than ten
minas..." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
23. ^ "...and the generals
[Strategi] and commanders of the cavalry [Hipparchi] from
those who could show an unencumbered property of not less
than a hundred minas, and had children born in lawful
wedlock over ten years of age." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
24. ^ "Both for this [the
Council] and for the other magistracies the lot was cast
among those who were over thirty years of age..." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
25. ^ "...and no one might
hold office twice until every one else had had his turn,
after which they were to cast the lot afresh." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
27. ^ "...and that the
Areopagus was composed of those who had served as Archons;
for which latter reason the membership of the Areopagus is
the only office which has continued to be a
life-magistracy to the present day. " - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 3 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
28. ^ "There was also to be a
Council, consisting of four hundred and one members,
elected by lot from among those who possessed the
franchise." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 3 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
29. ^ "Both for this [the
Council] and for the other magistracies the lot was cast
among those who were over thirty years of age;" - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
30. ^ The mere mention of
description of the Assembly is contributed towards a
statement outlining the penalization of dismissing a
sitting of the Council or the Assembly: "If any member of
the Council failed to attend when there was a sitting of
the Council or of the Assembly, he paid a fine..." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
31. ^ "If any member of the
Council failed to attend when there was a sitting of the
Council or of the Assembly, he paid a fine..." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
32. ^ "...he [absent Council
or Assembly member] paid a fine, to the amount of three
drachmas if he was a Pentacosiomedimnus" - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
33. ^ "...two [two drachmas]
if he [absent Council or Assembly member] was a Knight..."
- http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
34. ^ "...and One [one
drachma] if he [absent Council or Assembly member] was a
Zeugites" - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Part 4 by Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
35. ^ "Each tribe was divided
into three Trittyes [=Thirds], with twelve Naucraries in
each; and the Naucraries had officers of their own, called
Naucrari, whose duty it was to superintend the current
receipts and expenditure." - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.1.1.html, Constitution of the
Athenians, Aristotle, Frederic G. Kenyon
(translator)
In
desperation, the Athenians in 594 B.C. gave Solon special
authority to revise their laws1 to deal with the
economic crisis and its dire social consequences that had
brought their society to the brink of internecine war. As
he explains in his autobiographical poetry, Solon tried to
steer a middle
course2
between the demands of the rich to preserve their
financial advantages and the call of the poor for a
redistribution of land to themselves from the holdings of
the large landowners. His famous “shaking off of
obligations”3
somehow freed those farms whose ownership had become
formally encumbered without, however, actually
redistributing any land. He also forbade the selling of
Athenians into slavery for debt and secured the liberation
of citizens who had become slaves4 in this way,
commemorating his success in the verses he wrote about his
reforms: “To
Athens, their home established by the gods, I brought
back many who had been sold into slavery, some justly,
some not ...”5
Attempting
to balance political power between rich and poor, , Solon ranked male
citizens into four classes according to their income6:
“five-hundred-measure men” (pentakosiomedimnoi , those
with an annual income equivalent to that much agricultural
produce), “horsemen” (hippeis , income of three hundred
measures), “yoked men” (zeugitai , two hundred measures),
and “laborers” (thetes, less than two hundred measures).
The higher a man's class, the higher the governmental
office for which he was eligible, with the laborer class
barred from all posts. Solon did reaffirm the right of
this class to participate in the assembly (ekklesia ),
however. Solon probably created a council (boule) of
four hundred7
men to prepare an agenda for the discussions in the
assembly, although some scholars place this innovation
later than Solon's time.
Aristocrats
could not dominate the council's deliberations because its
members were chosen by lot, probably only from the top
three income classes. Solon may also have initiated a
schedule of regular meetings for the assembly. These
reforms gave added impetus to the assembly's legislative
role and thus indirectly laid a foundation for the
political influence that the “laborer” (thete ) class
would gradually acquire over the next century and a half.
14 Against all odds:
archaic Greek in a modern world
An
endangered
Greek dialect spoken in Turkey has been identified by Dr
Ioanna Sitaridou as a "linguistic goldmine" because of its
closeness to a language spoken 2,000 years ago.
Although
Romeyka can hardly be described as anything but a Modern
Greek dialect, it preserves an impressive number of
grammatical traits that add an Ancient Greek flavour to
the dialect’s structure – traits that have been
completely lost from other Modern Greek varieties.
Dr Ioanna
Sitaridou
Until Medieval times, the area of Trabzon, on the
Black Sea coast of Turkey, lay at the heart of the
Greek-speaking world. The land of the legendary Amazon
kingdom was colonised by the Greeks in the 8th and 7th
centuries BC and was immortalised in Greek mythology as
the area from which Jason and his crew of 50 Argonauts
began their journey across the Black Sea on his quest for
the Golden Fleece.
Remarkably, despite millennia of change in the
cultural and socio-political history of the surrounding
area, in this mountainous and isolated north-east corner
of Asia Minor its people still speak Greek. The uniqueness
of the dialect – known as Romeyka – is providing a
fascinating window on language past and present, as Dr
Ioanna Sitaridou, University Lecturer in Romance Philology
at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Fellow
and Director of Studies in Linguistics at Queens’ College,
is discovering.
On the verge of extinction
Romeyka is proving a linguistic goldmine for
research because of the startling number of archaic
features it shares with the Koiné (common) Greek of
Hellenistic and Roman times, spoken at the height of Greek
influence across Asia Minor from the 4th century BC to the
4th century AD.
‘Although Romeyka can hardly be describeed as
anything but a Modern Greek dialect,’ explains Dr
Sitaridou, ‘it preserves an impressive number of
grammatical traits that add an Ancient Greek flavour to
the dialect’s structure – traits that have been completely
lost from other Modern Greek varieties.’
As devout Muslims, Romeyka speakers in the Trabzon
area were exempt from the large-scale population exchange
between Greece and Turkey following the Treaty of Lausanne
in 1923. Using religion as the defining criterion to
re-settle Christians in Greece and Muslims in Turkey, the
Treaty resulted in the exchange of some two million people
between the two countries. For Pontus, the result was an
exodus of Greek-speaking Christians, leaving small
enclaves of Greek-speaking Muslims in Turkey.
Repeated waves of emigration from Trabzon, coupled
with the influence of the dominant Turkish-speaking
majority, have left the dialect vulnerable to extinction
(UNESCO have designated Pontic Greek as ‘definitely
endangered’). ‘With as few as 5,000 speakers left in the
area, before long Romeyka could be more of a heritage
language than a living vernacular,’ says Dr Sitaridou.
‘With its demise would go an unparalleled opportunity to
unlock how the Greek language has evolved. ’
Language cartography
Dr Sitaridou’s research project is uncovering the
secrets of this little-studied dialect. Her expertise is
both in syntax, which is the study of a language’s
grammatical rules and sentence structure, and in how and
why language changes. ‘With Romeyka, I have the most
wonderful opportunity to study these two things in tandem.
Not only does the dialect demonstrate elements that are
proving problematic for the current linguistic theory but
it also presents us with a living example of an evolving
language.’
In collaboration with Professor Peter Mackridge
(University of Oxford), who has carried out pioneering
research on Pontic dialects since the 1980s, Dr Sitaridou
is also working with Dr Hakan Özkan (University of
Münster), Professor Stavroula Tsiplakou (Open University
of Cyprus), the European Dialect Syntax network (Meertens
Institute) and three postgraduate students: Stergios
Chatzikyriakidis, Petros Karatsareas and Dimitrios
Michelioudakis.
At the core of her work are fieldtrips to villages
in Pontus to map the cartography of the language – how it
works, how much micro-variation there exists (known as
synchrony) and how the morpho-syntactic structure has
changed through time (diachrony). Information is gathered
through video and audio recordings of the villagers
telling stories, as well as through specially structured
questionnaires that Dr Sitaridou has designed to collect
the complex data needed for unpicking the structure of a
language.
Window on the past
Studying language change is, in general,
notoriously difficult because of the lack of living
speakers who can positively tell us what they think is
ungrammatical or not (in contrast to texts, from which we
can only recover what is grammatical). Investigating the
history of Greek is no different despite the plethora of
old texts.
‘Imagine if we could speak to individuals whose
grammar is closer to the language of the past; not only
could we map out a new grammar of a contemporary dialect
but we could also understand some forms of the language of
the past. This is the opportunity that Romeyka presents us
with,’ says Dr Sitaridou, who is also a member of the
Cambridge Group for Endangered Languages and Cultures
(CELC).
Last of the infinitives
The first results of the study are already
providing remarkable insights, as Dr Sitaridou announced
during the first ever linguistics conference on Romeyka
last March at Queens’ College, Cambridge: ‘Unlike ancient
forms of Greek, use of the infinitive has been lost in all
other Greek dialects known today – so speakers of Modern
Greek would sayI
want that I goinstead ofI want to go.
But, in Romeyka, not only is the infinitive preserved,
making this essentially the last Greek infinitive of the
Greek-speaking world, but we also find quirky infinitival
constructions that have never been observed before – only
perhaps in the Romance languages are there parallel
constructions.’
All the more astonishing, the results so far seem
to be indicating that Romeyka is closer to Hellenistic
Koiné than all other Modern Greek dialects, which are
generally considered to have emerged from the later
Medieval Greek spoken in the 7th to the 13th century AD.
Change ‘in real time’
Dr Sitaridou’s research is ultimately trying to
pinpoint how Pontic Greek evolved. ‘We know that Greek has
been continuously spoken in Pontus since ancient times and
can surmise that its geographic isolation from the rest of
the Greek-speaking world is an important factor in why the
language is as it is today,’ says Dr Sitaridou. ‘What we
don’t yet know is whether Romeyka emerged in exactly the
same way as other Greek dialects but later developed its
own unique characteristics which just happen to resemble
archaic Greek. Or whether it developed from an earlier
version of Greek in contrast to the rest of the Greek
dialects and as a result of this more direct lineage, as
well as its isolation from other dialects for centuries,
it maintains archaic features.’
Nevertheless, Romeyka also demonstrates
considerable innovation especially as a result of contact
with Turkish. In this respect, Dr Sitaridou is interested
in modelling what influence the contact with Turkish and
Caucasian languages has had on the evolution of the
dialect. Given the linguistic and socio-historic context
of Romeyka, she notes that ‘in Pontus, we have
near-perfect experimental conditions to assess what may be
gained and what may be lost as a result of language
contact.’ It is precisely these questions she will pursue
further as the recipient of the prestigious Stanley J.
Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in Hellenic Studies at
Princeton University in Spring term 2011.
The implications of such research are, however, far
more pervasive, since understanding how language functions
could provide some insight into cultural identity and
people’s sense of themselves, as well as what happens when
cultures connect.
Dr Sitaridou, whose own great-grandparents were
from the region, believes that the linguistic evidence
will help to unravel the thread of language evolution; we
have yet to see whether the thread takes us all the way
back to the time of Jason and the Argonauts and whether
more surprises await us.
Cambridge Group for Endangered
Languages and Cultures
Linguists and anthropologists from
across Cambridge have created Cambridge Group for
Endangered Languages and Cultures (CELC) as a forum for
researchers with common interests not just in seeking to
document languages that are under threat, but also the
literatures and ideas about cultural identity that they
help to maintain. For more information, please visit http://groups.pwf.cam.ac.uk/celc/
This
work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Licence. Originally on
the Internet at:
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/against-all-odds-archaic-greek-in-a-modern-world