ARCHAIC

GREECE
The Age of Experiment

ANTHONY SNODGRASS

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

© Anthony Snodgrass 1980

All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publisher.

First California Paperback Printing 1981

ISBN 0-520-04373-1

Printed in the United States of America

304 SEOMuaGn9
 Contents

Preface

List of Figures

List of Plates

Introduction

Structural Revolution: the Human Factor

Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence

The Just City?

Economic Realities 123

The Rise of the Individual 161

The End of Archaism 201

Bibliography PANS)

Index 229
For Anne-Marie
 Preface

I began to write this book sitting at a table over which were

scattered half a dozen books dealing wholly or partly with the
same period, the majority of them written by personal friends.
Now, more than a year later, they are still there, joined by one
or two others which have been published since then. I can think
of no better way of acknowledging my most obvious debts than
to express here my gratitude to their authors. In two cases, those
of Aristotle and of Victor Ehrenberg, it is too late to do this per-
sonally; but I now convey my thanks to the others — Michel
Austin, Nicolas Coldstream, Moses Finley, George Forrest, Sally
Humphreys, Ann Jeffery, Chester Starr and Pierre Vidal-Naquet
— whose works will be found listed, with many others, in the
bibliography. They cannot be saddled with any responsibility for
my own book, not least because none of them has seen any part
of it in draft. If this. preface nevertheless arouses in the reader a
suspicion that there are already more than enough books about
archaic Greece, and that most of them have been written by the
members of a tightly-knit circle of conspirators, then I can only
hope that what follows will weaken the second of these beliefs,
if not the first.

Cambridge, 1979
 List of Figures

Fig. Greece — sites mentioned in the text

Fig. N Italy and Sicily — sites mentioned in the text
Fig. Estimated population-growth in Athens and Attica
c. 950-700 BC
Fig. Estimated population-growth of (i) Athens, (ii) the
Argolid, (iii) the Attic countryside, c. 950—700 BC
Fig. Distribution of early burials in Athens
Fig. Plan of the eighth-century settlement at Zagora on
Andros
Fig. Distribution of hero-cults at Bronze Age tombs
Fig. Greece: the extent of city life
Fig. Greece: the extent of the city-state and of the ethnos in
the Archaic period
Fig. Plan of early temples at Eretria
Fig. Plan of the temple area at Corinth in the Archaic period
Fig. The early Greek local alphabets
Fig. Plan of the civic centre of Athens, c. 500 BC
Fig. The geographical effect of Kleisthenes’ reforms
 List of Plates

Between pp. 64 and 65

1 Model granaries from Athens
2 Olympia tripod (Deutsches Archdologisches Institut, Athens)
3 Geometric vase with bier (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
4 Dress-pins
5 Geometric vase with battle (Musée du Louvre; photograph
M. Chuzeville)
6 Sack of Troy (detail) (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
7 View of Menidhi tomb
8 Protoattic Orestes vase (Antikenmuseum, Berlin)
9 Corinthian Tydeus vase (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
10 Late Geometric vase showing Siamese twins (left) and
Dipylon shield (right) (Antikensammlungen, Miinchen)
11 Corinthian vase with phalanx
12 Hoplite shield (Deutsches Archdologisches Institut, Athens)
13 Corinthian vase with arms
14 Attic vase with peltast (detail) (National Museum, Copenhagen)

Between pp. 128 and 129

15 Bronze panoply from Argos
16 Corinthian helmet (Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Athens)
17 View of Brauron sanctuary (Photo Hannibal, Athens)
18 Law code inscription from Dreros (Miss L. Jeffery)
19 Attic vase with agricultural scenes (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
20 Bronze lion dedicated by Eumnastos, from Samos (Deutsches
Archdologisches Institut, Athens)
21 Early coins (Aigina and Miletos) (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
22 Attic vase with merchantman and galley (reproduced by
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum)
23 Athena from Archaic pediment (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Muinchen)
24 View of the diolkos at the Isthmus of Corinth (Deutsches
Archdologisches Institut, Athens)
25 View of Eupalinos’ tunnel, Samos (Deutsches Archdologisches
Institut, Athens)
26 Late Archaic coin (Syrakuse) (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
27 Attic r.f. vase with arming of Hektor (Hirmer Fotoarchiv,
Miinchen)
28 Torso of statue of doctor (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)

Between pp. 192 and 193

29 Attic r.f. vase with kithara-player (Fratelli Alinari, Firenze)
30 Archaic kouroi, Kleobis and Biton (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Muiin-
chen)
31 Calf-bearer (Moschophoros) (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
32 Rampin horseman (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
33 Stele of discus-thrower (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
34 Herakles and Triton from limestone pediment (Hirmer Fotoar-
chiv, Miinchen)
35 Theseus and Antiope from Eretria pediment (Hirmer Fotoar-
chiv, Miinchen)
36 Attic b.f. vase with scene of Circe and Odysseus’ crew
(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
37 Protoattic vase with Polyphemos and Gorgons (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
38 Attic r.f. vase with Theseus and Korone (Hirmer Fotoarchiv,
Miinchen)
39 Attic r.f. vase with Greek fighting Persian (Royal Scottish
Museum, Edinburgh)
40 View of temple on Aigina
41 Kore dedicated by Euthydikos (Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Miinchen)
42 Torso of warrior (‘Leonidas’) from Sparta (Deutsches Archa-
ologisches Institut, Athens)
43 Figure number III in East pediment from Aigina (Glyptothek,
Miinchen)
 Introduction

‘The archaic period is perhaps the most important period in

Greek history’
M. M. Austin and P. Vidal-Naquet,
Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece (1977), p. 49.

Until quite recently, it is doubtful whether anyone would have

ventured an opinion like this, at least in public. On the accepted
view, the Archaic period was by definition merely a prelude to
the decisive achievements of Classical Greece. It did not make
any difference which criterion one chose to appeal to — literary,
intellectual, artistic, political - there appeared to be an unans-
werable case for the supremacy of the Classical period as a
whole and, in Greece, of the fifth century BC in particular. Pro-
fessional historians, so far from dissenting from this view,
tended to endorse it with special warmth. The Classical period
was the age in which their most highly esteemed ancient
authorities had lived, and about which they had mainly written.
It was natural, therefore, to conclude that the Classical period
was of the greatest historical importance; and school and univer-
sity curricula have continued to reflect this belief.
Why, then, is there room for a dissenting view today? The
answer is that ancient historians have undertaken a major reap-
praisal of their subject. In so doing, they have acknowledged
several lessons from historians of other periods. To begin with,
12 Archaic Greece

there has been some change in attitudes towards the ancient

written sources, whose dominance had once been almost total. It
was, after all, strange that ancient historians were prepared to
describe as ‘sources’ these accounts, many of which (in addition
to their fragmentary or contradictory character) were written
centuries after the events in question. Once a wider range of
evidence came to be admitted, and a wider range of problems
tackled, it was natural to apply these methods to a wider span of
time as well. There were, for example, categories of evidence in
which the Archaic period was richer than the Classical. Much has
also been learned from other disciplines besides history,
whether in method, or by analogy, or more directly by drawing
on independent sources of evidence for the ancient world itself.
Archaeology is one of these independent sources and, since
this book is written by an archaeologist, it is right to say some-
thing about its potential contribution and about its recent
development. For Classical archaeology, as traditionally under-
stood, was bound by limitations at least as clear as those which
have operated in ancient history. The artistic achievements of
the Greeks were so awe-inspiring that to discover, classify and
interpret them seemed for long a sufficient goal. Inscriptions
were left to the historians, field-surveys to the prehistorians,
while excavations were directed primarily towards the recovery
of works of art. Classical archaeologists who pursued such aims
were likely to look at the products of the Classical period, and
then to fall in with the majority view that this period had been
the focal point of Greek cultural history. But here, too, lessons
are now being learned from elsewhere: above all, from non-
Classical archaeology. If it is accepted elsewhere that the field of
archaeology is the entire material culture — so far as it is recover-
able — of an ancient society, then why should this not be true of
Classical archaeology as well? It is probably true that Classical
archaeologists are slower to accept such arguments than ancient
historians have been in the corresponding case, but there are
still signs of change to be seen.
Two consequences of these new attitudes in ancient studies
seem to me of vital importance, and they have formed the main
Introduction 13
inspiration for the writing of this book. First, by enlarging their
horizons in this way, ancient history and Classical archaeology
have also come much closer together. Once historians extend
their interests from political and military events to social and
economic processes, it is obvious that archaeological evidence
can offer them far more; once Classical archaeologists turn from
the outstanding works of art to the totality of material products,
then history (thus widely interpreted) will provide them with a
more serviceable framework, not least because Greek art is
notoriously deficient in historical reference. As a result of this
rapprochement, it will be difficult for a future researcher to embark
on an historical subject in the field of Archaic Greece without
becoming involved in archaeological questions, or vice versa.
The second, more interesting, consequence is that the Archaic
period of Greek history appears in an entirely new light. No
longer is it of interest solely because of what it led to; suddenly it
becomes possible to see it as, in some respects, a complete
episode in its own right. It would be pointless to deny the mag-
nitude of the intellectual revolution which divided the Archaic
period from the Classical, transforming something remarkable
into something unique. But opposite that intellectual revolution,
we have to set up another, earlier revolution of a more material
or structural kind, although it also had its purely intellectual
component. This ‘structural revolution’ took place not merely
within the Archaic period but at its beginning. It established the
economic basis of Greek society, as well as the main outlines of
its social framework; it drew the political map of the Greek
world in a form that was to endure for four centuries; it set up,
with even greater permanence, the forms of state that were to
determine Greek political history; it provided the interests and
goals, not merely for Greek but for Western art as a whole,
which were to be pursued over the next two and a half millen-
nia; it gave Greece in the Homeric epics, an ideal of behaviour
and a memento of past glory to sustain it; it provided much of
the physical basis, and perhaps also of the spiritual basis, of
Greek religion;and it furnished many lesser things, among them
the means for Greek society to defend its independence militar-
 14 Archaic Greece

ily. Not all of these features were without parallel in other, older
cultures; but it is doubtful whether, before or since, they have
ever come about in one country with such concertedness and
above all with such speed.
The Archaic period of Greek history is thus bounded, at either
end, by these two revolutions. It is a field of study of which,
despite generations of past work, we know neither as much as
we need, nor as much as we might know in the present state of
our evidence. This book is only a preliminary step in approach-
ing the problems afresh, not a definitive statement; it is undeni-
ably attempting to make a case as well as, indeed in preference
to, presenting a subject; omissions, even quite major ones, are
inevitable. There will be mistakes, too. But both will have served
a purpose of a kind if they help to provoke wider discussion.
 <>
Structural Revolution:
the Human Factor

About the tall white gods who landed from their open boat,
Skilled in the working of copper, appointing our feast-days,
Before the islands were submerged, when the weather was calm,
The maned lion common,
An open wishing-well in every garden;
When love came easy.
Perfectly certain, all of us, but not from the records, ... .

W. H. Auden, The Orators

By the ninth century BC, all significant trace of the former

Mycenaean civilization had disappeared from the Greek world,
apart from its physical vestiges. That complex and highly-
stratified society, with its kings ruling from citadels and palaces,
its elaborate system of land-ownership, its laboriously detailed
monitoring of production and taxation, its specialization of
crafts, its armed forces and its road network, was gone for ever.
Not that the Greeks had forgotten the Mycenaean episode; if
translated backwards in time, they would have been able to rec-
ognize most of its outstanding features. But the fact was that
their own activities now bore so small a resemblance to those of
their ancestors that there was little that they could have usefully
learned from them. It is, for example, doubtful whether there
was a single Greek alive who could have understood the sym-
bols of the various writing-systems of the Bronze Age Aegean,
much less convinced society of their utility. Like the other out-
 MACEDONIA

Corcyra
THESSALY
® Dodona Pherai @

@ (Philia)

AITOLIA DORIS
Delphi
@ Thermon
W. LOKRIS SPHOKISB Mt Ptoora xe
rae? se Tanagra

ip
UBD
Perachora yer Eleusis ef}Moet
ACHAIA
Lechaion AY Bre ® Aner
h
Sikyon e thens
oe “Sorinth® Brauron
Cenchreai @ Aigina oe
® Mycenae
' ARKADIA Argos®_re ¢ Sons
sine’
PETEalaurei Se
Olympia 8 Mantineia @ at
Py we
a é D
Bassai g Tegeae
(Mavriki)
us Paros
MESSENIA @ Sparta Siphnos @ a é
o
re a)
\ 3

CRETE Dre

@ Gortyn

Fig. 1
Greece — sites mentioned in the text. (Solid squares indicate sanctuary sites)
ai0US Pithekoussai gp 2

30S

Lokroi
Phokaia
- Smyrna
SICILY
LYDIA
bgKolophon Megara Hyblaia
Syracuse
Se, e@ Ephesos 100 Kilometres
os @ Magnesia
fy g “ae @ Priene
Ro Miletos .
Fig. 2 Italy and Sicily — sites mentioned in the text
i > lasos

s)

as Lie Knidos <

&
es Lindos

RHODES
18 Archaic Greece

wardly impressive attributes of the Mycenaean world, they had

been ultimately dependent on a social system for which Greece
had no further use; the same was apparently true of the fortified
citadels, the elaborately-built tombs, the frescoes, the ornate but
impractical weaponry, the personal seals and signets engraved
with such skill and labour. These things were an object of awe
and perhaps wistful nostalgia, hardly of serious emulation; just
as today even fervent imperialists would be taken aback if pre-
sented with a detailed plan of re-conquest. One of the greatest_
attractions of a Heroic Age is the impracticability of any return to
it. In the case of Iron Age Greece, the change of outlook is
merely a local manifestation of a greater change which passed
over the Old World at the end of the Bronze Age, and which can
be recognized in different forms from the Celtic West to China.
It was as if the adoption of a new basic material, iron, had
brought with it a new ethos, as severely practical as the metal
itself.
But if the old world had been entirely obliterated, then neither
had the new, in the form of the historical Hellenic world, yet
arrived. By the eighth century BC, and especially its latter part,
we can see the outlines of that world clearly delineated, but in
the ninth there are still too many unfamiliar features. For a start,
although there were nucleated settlements, there can have been
no city life, mainly because the settlements were so small and
few. We have at least one instance, Lefkandi in Euboia, where
we can believe that a substantial proportion of the community’s
graves have been discovered. There are some 63 burials in an
earlier cemetery whose period of use is estimated at about 125
years; then a further total of 82 in two later cemeteries, covering
about 100 years which bring us into the ninth century. If we
make the assumption of an average life-expectancy of 30 years,
we may be being generous (for comparison in the late eighteenth
century of our era it was 28.8 in France, while about 1850 it was
40.2 in England as a whole, but only 24.2 for men in Manches-
ter); even so, the extant graves will then represent a community
rising from about 15 persons in the earlier phase to about 25 in
the later. If there is a way of making a fair comparison with
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 19
earlier, Mycenaean settlements, it is perhaps by considering
analogous evidence from the cemetery of Perati in eastern Attica,
which centres on the twelfth century BC — the very end of the
Mycenaean era — and which is fairly self-contained. Its extant
burials number about 600, covering a period estimated at
110-115 years; on the same assumption as before, this will mean
a community of about 160 people in the associated settlement.
Fortuitous or not, these figures of the shrinkage in settlement-
size echo the message of the general evidence of depopulation
over the whole country, as we shall see presently.
If ninth-century Greece lacked sizeable towns, this is only one
of a series of characteristic features of historical Greek culture
which are missing. There is no writing. There is no community
of artistic and technological development across the Aegean
world. There is no colonization outside the Aegean, and even
within it there are famous sites - Sparta, Tegea, Mantineia, Eret-
ria, Ephesos, Chios town — where, if anyone was yet living, we
have not found material trace of them. There is but a handful of
sanctuaries where we can see any physical trace of cult, and that
on a minimal scale. Among the sites that are prominent, there
are at least three — Lefkandi, Zagora on Andros and the partially
Greek trading settlement established by the end of the century
at Al Mina in Syria — whose role in later developments was so
slight that we do not even know their Classical names for sure.
There is hardly a single temple which can be shown archaeologi-
cally to have been constructed within the ninth century. Of the
personalities and deeds which later Greek tradition would have
assigned to this century, almost all can be shown to belong later;
what is left is a handful of empty names.
To bring this state of affairs to an end required a revolution
indeed. Of the many elements of this revolution which we can
detect today, almost all look forward, in that they are intelligible
and even familiar to us from later history. Yet the first in impor-
tance, and one of the first chronologically, was a development
for which nature must take perhaps greater credit than man: the
population explosion of eighth-century Greece. The presence of
this phenomenon has been vaguely perceived by modern scho-
20 Archaic Greece

larship for some years past, but it is, at such an ill-documented

period, extremely difficult to measure. Nor is it quite self-
evident that such a development was either desirable in itself or
necessary for the growth of Greek culture. It is therefore worth
pausing to consider both the size and the implications of this
change in the Aegean scene.
To begin with, we can see today that Greece in the preceding
dark age must have been woefully under-populated. A crude
calculation, based on the numbers of known sites in occupation,
will show the genesis of this predicament. For the Aegean area
as a whole in the thirteenth, twelfth and eleventh centuries BC, it
was calculated a few years ago that the number of known sites
was something in the order of 320, 130 and 40 respectively for
the three centuries. Fieldwork since then has added a few to
these totals, but completeness is not relevant to this kind of
computation: it is the relationship of the figures which counts,
and this is not likely to be materially altered — erratic as the ear-
lier fieldwork had been, there is no cogent reason why it should
have produced such differential results, unless widespread
abandonment of settlements had in fact taken place. If the
number of settlements were really reduced to something like
one-eighth of its former level between the thirteenth and the
eleventh centuries BC, then we may add to this our earlier find-
ing that the evidence of two of our most thoroughly-explored
cemeteries hints at an equally drastic fall in the size of settle-
ments over a slightly different time-span, between the twelfth
and the tenth centuries approximately. It all adds up to a picture
of depopulation on an almost unimaginable scale, and there may
indeed be an element of fortuitous exaggeration in these figures.
Yet there is one thing which provides independent and rather
startling confirmation of the reality of this decline in population:
it is that the statistical evidence of the subsequent rise in popula-
tion after 800 BC shows this to have been equally dramatic in its
steepness, as we shall soon see. This evidence is derived from
data of a slightly different kind, namely the numbers of burials
per generation in certain communities and areas; and the poten-
tial flaws in these data are of a different order from those of the
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 21
earlier period of depopulation. It is quite possible that exaggera-
tion has once again crept in, but it is a somewhat suspicious
coincidence for it always to operate in the same direction. A high
proportion of the evidence, in all the relevant periods, comes
from burials rather than settlements, so that it will hardly do to
explain the shortfall in the years between about 1100 and 800 BC
by claiming that people were using some unrecognized and
therefore undatable pottery at that time: this might cover the
case of settlements, but not that of cemeteries unless there were
a large number of undated graves, which is not the case. The
most respectable route of escape from the conclusion of depopu-
lation might be that there is some hidden selectivity in the
burial-practices of Greece which operates only between 1100 and
800, and leads us to underestimate the numbers of burials and
indeed to overlook whole sites for the disposal of the dead.
Some such practice as exposure of the dead, to the total exclusion
of burial, would meet the case. But there is no shred of positive
evidence for such a custom; and furthermore we can point to the
fact that the cemeteries which we do have represent a fairly
complete range of ages and sexes, while their general poverty is
such as to make it an almost laughable claim that they should
represent any kind of élite or privileged group.
For all these reasons, I believe that it is now the most sensible
course to accept that there was indeed a most drastic depopula-
tion of Greece at the end of the Bronze Age. Of course, it may be
that the level of population in the thirteenth century BC, the last
era of the Mycenaean heyday, was dangerously high and that
‘this contributed to the economic disaster which may well have
brought about the downfall of that culture. But if so, then the
pendulum subsequently swung much further than was good for
Greece. It does not require too much imagination to picture
some of the effects of living in small settlements, some of them
shrunken survivals of the greater Mycenaean ones among whose
ruins they were set, with long distances between them and with
large areas of usable land unoccupied. The memory of ancestral
achievements must have been clear enough to emphasize the
falling-off to the latter-day Greeks (if also to console them for it);
22 Archaic Greece
nowhere more so than in the field of population where the
power of the former armies was not easily forgotten, while the
size of the towns, together with the manpower and specializa-
tion of labour required for their associated feats of engineering,
were features inherent in the still-visible remains. (Compare the
evidence of the relative sizes of Perati and Lefkandi, neither of
them probably a centre of major importance, pp. 18-19.)
The low level of population in the eleventh-century Aegean as
a whole shows no sign of having risen any more markedly in the
tenth and ninth centuries than does that of the settlement of
Lefkandi. These are not questions on which one can speak with
any certainty; one can only say that nothing, least of all the
quantities of surviving pottery, does anything to suggest a major
recovery. This is especially clear on the Greek mainland: across
the Aegean in Ionia, where comparatively recent settlements
had been established on largely unexploited territory, and on the
Aegean islands, many of which were probably entirely deserted
and offered scope for new settlers to make a fresh start, the pic-
ture may have been more positive; some at least of the factors

300 a a a

243

Graves
generation
per

LG Il
T=
serrrr
rrr
rege
pewrwrrn

950 900 850 800 750

Dates BC

Fig. 3 Estimated population-growth in Athens and Attica, c. 950-700 Bc (the

points are located at the mid-point of each pottery-phase; chronology after
J. N. Coldstream, Greek Geometric Pottery (1968))
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 23

which govern changes in population — in morale, in health and

above all in availability of resources — may have already begun
to operate favourably.
If so, this was nothing compared with what was to happen in
the eighth century. I have tried elsewhere to calculate the rate of
population-growth in one area, Attica, at this time, using the
evidence of the datable burials from this region (Fig. 3). My con-
clusion was that in the space of two thirty-year generations,
between about 780 and 720 BC, the population may have multi-
plied itself by a factor of approximately seven, and I tried to
show grounds for finding this credible. In the accompanying
diagram (Fig. 4), I have elaborated on this conclusion by further
subdividing the burials into those from within the area of
Athens itself, and those from the Attic countryside around it.
The result suggests a slight net emigration from the town to the
country, in that the curve rises more steeply towards the end for
the latter area than for the former; we have no grounds for infer-
ring any significant immigration from outside at this period. I
have also shown (Fig. 4 dashed line) the apparent growth, based
150 ———
ly *G
29
noi Athens |
——— Argos etc f 114
S Attica outside Athens S
= | S
< 100 | 90
4 le
x /
8 /
:
2 50/f
/!
(5 50 +————- mS a
SS !
7 PG ED G M G a7 | fk, G
22 we al Il
Wii PEP ECP EPO OP ECE EEE I ann Se 17 | i

9 338 a fad
e--- 8 | |
> | ! | oe

950 900 850 800 750

Dates BC

Fig. 4 Estimated population-growth of (i) Athens, (ii) the Argolid and (iii) the
Attic countryside, c. 950-700 BC (points located as in Fig. 3 but the dates and
durations of the periods are different at Argos; Argive chronology after P.
Courbin La Ceramique geometrique de l’Argolide (1966))
24 . Archaic Greece

on a parallel calculation, for one of the few other regions which

offer something approaching an adequate sample on which to
base one’s conclusions: the Argolid with the town of Argos and
a group of lesser towns in or near the Argive plain (Asine,
Lerna, Mycenae, Nauplia and Tiryns, with a few outlying
graves). Being from essentially town-centred cemeteries, this
evidence is to be compared with that from the town of Athens
(Fig. 4, barred line); the relationship within the Argive group is
not like that between Athens and its territory, since the other
centres were at this time largely independent of Argos, as the
Attic countryside was not. The Argive graph shows an increase
from approximately the same period as the Athenian one.
Despite the exodus that we have inferred, from Athens to the
country, the Argive increase looks slighter, but this is very prob-
ably the result of a much smaller sample (182 closely datable
graves, aS against 424 from Athens and 673 from Attica as a
whole). The rate of increase in the Argolid and in Athens town is
similar; and in the long term the salient feature is the marked
rise in population everywhere during the eighth century. Its
appearance in the Argolid makes the alternative explanations for
Attica (p. 21 above) seem even less likely, for the burial-customs
both traditional and contemporary were quite different in the
Argolid.
Once again, it is possible to imagine some of theconsequences”
for Greek society of a dynamic change like this. ‘As settlements
increase in number, communication between them becomes
easier and more frequent; new ideas spread more widely; the;
pace of change accelerates.As the same settlements increase in
size, greater division of labour becomes possible and, more
important, political change becomes almost mandatory. A loose
organization under a dominant family, with ad hoc decisions
taken by a local ruler and only occasional assemblies of any
larger group, becomes unworkable when the community more
than doubles in size within a single generation. Greater
resources of land are needed; new houses and whole settlements
have to be built. Problems arise of a kind never experienced in
the collective memory; and long-term decisions, some of them
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 25
hard ones, have to be made. The survival of the group is now
replaced, as the top priority, by more unfathomable considera-
tions. A tighter and more complex social organization is needed.
If the population factor, on its own, could thus create a poten-
tially revolutionary situation, it still requires some specific politi-
cal steps to fulfil the potential. The eighth-century Greeks pro-
duced one great notion which was in many respects new,
although it drew on some natural sources of inspiration in the
earlier history of their land, and perhaps on others from outside.
The dominant geographical unit in their past, especially the
recent past had been a region of territory, whose area could
reach a thousand square miles or more; we can be more certain
about this geographical element than about the corresponding
political one. One thinks naturally of a tribal system, but in
recent years this hypothesis has been very strongly contested.
On the face of it, tribal survivals in later Greek political systems
are strong enough to suggest a considerable previous impor-
tance. Greek historical records abound in tribal names, and
many states also show evidence for the survival of a hierarchy of
lesser subdivisions of the tribe: the phratry or ‘brotherhood’
which at least purported to be a kinship-grouping, and the smal-
ler genos, a group of related families (although not every tribes-
man necessarily belonged either to phratry or genos). What is
more, the same tribal names recur, again and again, among dif-
ferent states speaking the same dialect of Greek: among the
Ionic-speakers, a recurrent group of four tribe-names, among
those speaking Doric a different group of three. This would
make best sense if the system derived from a stage when all the
Ionic Greeks were still united in mainland Greece, and the
Doric-speakers similarly but separately concentrated.
But at this point difficulties begin to arise, and they have been
recently developed by French scholars who have argued, with
great thoroughness and ingenuity, that this whole picture of a
‘tribal order’ in early Greece is a mirage: It is indeed a surprising
fact that, of the two main forms of state in the historical Greek
world, it is only in the more advanced one, the polis (below p.
28), that the apparatus of tribal survivals occurs, and not in the
26 Archaic Greece

simpler ethnos (p. 42), which so much more closely resembled

the supposed ancestral model of organization. The next obstacle
is that the subdivisions of the system are suspiciously hard to
trace, and the genos in its technical sense of an established social
organization is entirely absent, in the texts of Homer and
Hesiod. If we argue that the system was already, by their time,
in an advanced state of decay, then it is reasonable to ask why it
later reappears, in robust health albeit in a ‘technical’ form, in
the states of the historical period, with the genos particularly
widely attested. Furthermore there is disagreement as to pre-
cisely what form the genos took in historical times, with some
arguing that it had changed its nature from being a kind of
clan-organization to which everyone of a certain minimal status
belonged into an exclusive aristocratic group, while others hold
that, on the contrary, it had allowed its original prowess to be
diluted by the admission of non-aristocratic outsiders. These and
other difficulties largely disappear if we merely make the
assumption that the system had no ancient pedigree; that the
tribe, phratry and genos were the late and artificial creations of
the developed Greek state, in whose workings they played an
indispensable part, enabling such matters as military enlistment
and minor religious festivals to be handled by small and man-
ageable groups.
This is a clever theory and, like others of its kind, it is destruc-
tive as well as constructive in its effects. For if there was no tribal
order in the era before the formation of the Greek states, then
what system was there? To what group larger than the family
did men owe allegiance? Archaeology may help here, for it sug-
gests that, throughout the dark age and even to some extent in
the last years of the Mycenaean epoch, some organized entity
had existed which — whatever its name — could function over
fairly large geographical areas. When common features of mater-
ial culture appear in each such area, and change as the bound-
aries of the territory are reached, it is fair to infer some human
grouping which is coterminous with the area; and it is difficult to
think of a better model than a tribal system to explain these
phenomena. We have our first glimpse of these divisions in the
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor D7,
full Bronze Age, in one or two features (but not many) of the
culture of the Mycenaeans, and this is not surprising: every civil-
ization can be expected to show some degree of regional differen-
tiation, and the remarkable thing is that the divisions at this
period are not stronger. But later we see them, more strongly
marked, in such things as the burial-practices of the Pro-
togeometric period, when central control had broken down, the
trappings of civilization had disappeared, and loose-knit groups
were scattered thinly over the landscape. The regional schools of
Geometric pottery in the ninth and eighth centuries BC reveal
them in an even more clearly developed form. Nor are they
detectable only in material objects. The spread of the alphabet to
Greece leads to the growth of a mass of ‘epichoric’ alphabets,
each distinguishable in minor ways from its neighbours in the
same dialect-group, and more obviously from those in other
groups; their divisions more or less coincide with those of the
material phenomena. This regional pattern calls out for an
explanation: what ties can have bound together the practices of
men living in such small numbers and at times more than fifty
miles apart? Certainly they were such ties as could survive the
growth of the historical city-state, offer a rival to it as a focus for
loyalty, and on occasions supplant it; while in areas where the
city-state did not arise, they continued to define the political unit
of the ethnos. Geographical and environmental factors are
hardly enough on their own; furthermore, the pattern must have
had to grow up in reaction against the very different tendencies
of the Mycenaean world, which had been characterized by
entrenched and affluent monarchies, living on a pattern superfi-
cially similar to each other but markedly different from that of
their subjects. The ensuing dark age is the best time for such a
system to have grown up; it is comforting, too, that some form of
tribal state seems to be detectable in the Homeric poems,
although at certain points it is overlaid with reminiscences of the
snaean kingdoms (as for example in the Catalogue of Ships in’
i of the Iliad) and at others contaminated by the poet's
wareness of the growth of the city-state in his own time; and
although as a result the incidence of substantial towns is
28 Archaic Greece

unrealistically high. The standard way for Homer to refer to

king’s subjects, to a state, or to a component
in the armies2
Troy, is by the plural ethnic- ‘theMyrmidons’, ‘the Boiotians’
‘the Cilicians’ and so forth. This bears wie aioe tribalism, if

There may be ways in which a tribal system could accommo-

date a soaring rise in population without disintegrating. But in
the event the more advanced communities in Greece adopted a
different solution, one which led to urbanization, but only by an
indirect route. The distribution of these more developed states
coincides fairly well with that of the more advanced areas of
Mycenaean culture, where towns had once existed. Memory of
the names of the former towns, though not always their loca-
tion, certainly survived. But the new system was to be no mere
re-establishment of the old. The towns were to be quite different
physically and, above all, they were to form part of a quite dif-
ferent political system. We know that in the Mycenaean world a
kingdom normally included a number of towns all subject to the
king’s rule, and we suspect a very marked discrimination bet-
ween town and country. These were features that were not to be
revived in the new states.
As so often happens, the name adopted for the new institu-
tion was a well--worn term with many meanings besides the one
now intended. ‘Polis’, since the time when it outgrew its earlier
meaning of ‘citadel’ or ‘stronghold’, had probably meant merely
a conurbation of a certain minimum size. Now, in its strictest
usage, it came to mean a settlement with two essential and new
qualities: first, political independence (not always unqualified)
from its neighbours; second, political unity with a tract of coun-
try surrounding it, this time entirely unqualified, in that no for-
mal distinction was normally made between the inhabitants of
the countryside and the inhabitants of the main settlement.
Although in one or two cases the institution of monarchy sur-
vived into the lifetime of the new system, and although it later
proved possible to reconcile the two in the rather different
régime of the Archaic tyrannies, the growth of the polis coin-
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 29

the general disappearance

of hereditary monarchies.
The idea ai a king ruling over a single town and its territory had
perhaps not been quite unknown in Mycenaean times; but we
do not find it in the Catalogue of Ships, the place in Homer where
above all we should expect it to occur if it were a regular
Mycenaean feature and its appearances elsewhere in the poems
are few and controversial. Appropriately enough in the cases
where hereditary monarchy still lingered on in the eighth cen-
ay and later, the word now used for ‘king’, basileus, had in
enaean Greek apparently signified a mere nobleman or
petty chiefta in

Noe was the typical early polis simply a Mycenaean town

resurrected: hardly surprisingly, since the process which had
begun in the Neolithic period and reached its final stage in the

Fig. 5 Distribution of
early burials (ninth
and eighth centuries
BC) in Athens

os
Later
ee
ie

metres
30 Archaic Greece

metres

Fig. 6 Plan of the eighth-century settlement at Zagora on Andros

Structural Revolution: the Human Factor ill
Mycenaean town had suffered a total interruption. The most
obvious difference was in the degree of concentration.
Mycenaean towns tended to be centred on a fortified citadel,
which housed either the royal palace or, in subordinate towns, a
chieftain’s or governor’s stronghold. The town-houses could
often not be accommodated inside, although in the cause of sec-
urity they tended to crowd against the outer walls or slopes of
the citadel as closely as they could. By contrast the early polis,
except in special geographical circumstances, was hardly a town
at all, but rather a fairly close cluster of villages — close enough,
certainly, to make use of a communal citadel which would in
many cases be none other than the former Mycenaean royal
citadel (cf. Fig. 5). The villages would also, in some cases, be
sufficiently close together for a really sharp rise in population to
have the automatic effect of unifying them physically. When
particular factors of remoteness or vulnerability applied, a
fortification-wall around the whole site was often a very early
feature. But even then, the area thus enclosed was not always
entirely built up: sometimes it was dotted with clusters of hous-
ing, as if the ‘village’ habit was so engrained as to survive in |
rather inappropriate circumstances (Fig. 6).
The Greeks launched this new model of settlement with such
success that it rapidly grew to become, in reality, what we usu-
ally call it when translating ‘polis’: a city-state. But where had
the idea come from in the first place? Some of the difficulties of
deriving it from the Mycenaean era have already been seen. In
default of such an origin, the natural place to look next is outside
Greece. The city-state is such a characteristic feature of Greek
civilization that the tendency has been to assume that — along
with other such features, from the Hellenic temple to the ideal of
individual freedom — it was the spontaneous creation of the
Greek people. But the truth may be more complex. At a time
when the Greeks were in fresh contact with the older civiliza-
tions of the Near East, it would have been surprising if many of
their ideas had not been coloured by that relationship; a society
recovering from such a profound economic, social and demo-
graphic recession as that which had enveloped Greece will be
32 Archaic Greece

eager to learn from those who have progressed further. So with

the city-state, there was at least one potential model within the
ken of eighth-century Greeks: that of the Phoenician coastland.
The cities of Phoenicia had some important qualities in common
with the Greek polis as it eventually emerged: they were mutu-
ally independent; each was ruled by its own monarchy with the
aid of a political assembly, and had a small territory of its own; a
further point whose significance will become apparent later is
that the population of each city was united by devotion to the
same religious cults. What we do not know is whether, like the
Greek polis, they extended their citizenship to the free indigen-
ous population of their own territories; but if they did, this
makes the parallel closer.
If there was some influence here, we should look for it at the
time when the Greek polis took on its distinctive form. There is
some disagreement as to when this was, particularly in the last
thirty years, since the excavation of the Ionian site of Old
Smyrna revealed urbanization beginning to take place in the
ninth century, and a fortification-wall surrounding the settle-
ment from about 850 BC onwards - an unexpectedly early
appearance for both phenomena. More recently, other sites have
shown fortifications no later than 800 Bc: Iasos in Caria (further
south on the coast of Asia Minor) and Zagora on the island of
Andros. Are all these to be taken as signs of the rise of the polis
idea in the ninth century? If so, we should at once concede that
the Greek mainland had as yet no part in the process, for neither
fortification nor anything approaching urban concentration is
visible so early there; excavations in Athens and Corinth suggest
strongly that, until well after this time, they still conformed to
the pattern of scattered and unfortified villages that we noted
just now (p. 31). But in fact the early fortifications outside the
mainland can perhaps be explained otherwise. Security was
clearly a prime motive behind them: there was a tradition that
dark age settlements like Smyrna and Iasos had been planted in
the face of native resistance, and the potential threat of sur-
rounding alien population certainly existed. It is significant that
the most important Mycenaean settlement on this coast, Miletos,
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 33
had not had the usual fortified stronghold within the settlement
but instead a defensive circuit which apparently ran round the
whole of it. If this was an abiding local consideration here, then
for Zagora and other sites in the Cycladic islands piracy is likely
to have been an equally persistent threat. If it was simply that no
settlement of any size or prosperity could afford to do without a
fortification, then this need carry no implication of citizenship or
other recognition for those inside it, much less for any who lived
in the adjacent countryside. A tribal community could own
towns and strongholds without conferring a special status on
them, and the Ionian and Cycladic towns may have been closer
to this model in their very early stages.
So fortification and urbanization, being neither necessary nor
sufficient conditions for the advent of the polis, are poor criteria
for its formation. Will any other serve better? A possible answer
lies in the field of religion. Every Greek polis was, among other
things, a religious association; its citizens accepted a community
of cult, with a patron deity presiding over each state. To impose
this regularity of worship was probably a difficult feat after the
diversity of local practices which must have existed in the condi-
tions of the dark age. The presiding deity was very often female
(as for example Athena at Athens, Sparta and elsewhere; Hera
in Argos, Tiryns and Samos; probably Artemis at Smyrna), but
Apollo was also strong in this role (as at Corinth, Eretria in
Euboia, Thermon in Aitolia or Dreros in Crete). Anecessary
element in such an official cult was a central city sanctuary — not
necessarily a temple at first, but a sanctified place at which all
could detect the deity’s presence. An approximate indication of
the establishment of such a cult will be given, first at the date of
the earliest dedications on a site which can be identified as that
of the patron god, and later by the construction of an actual
temple. Both criteria prove to indicate that the same period, the
eighth century BC, was the critical one. In each of the examples
mentioned above, the dedications begin within that century or
occasionally just before; the first temple-construction is usually
towards its end or just afterwards. An eighth-century date for
the decisive phase in the rise of the Greek polis is, among other
34 Archaic Greece

things, compatible with the idea that the Phoenician model

could have had some influence on it: this is a time at which
Graeco-Phoenician relations were on a familiar level without
becoming indiscriminately close — just as they are portrayed in
the Odyssey, in fact.
Of the actual processes of formation, written records present
us with one classic model, that of synoecism. Here too, as with
the ‘polis’, the term is an irritatingly ambiguous one in Greek
usage. It covers everything from the notional acceptance of a
single political centre by a group of pad da Ah apes
whose inhabitants stay firmly put, to the physical Setion ofa
population into ya new political centre, which could be either an
existing or a purpose-built city. The crucial element in all cases is
the political unification. The earliest case of synoecism of which
we hear, that of Attica, took place long before the advent of his-
torical records, probably in the ninth and eighth centuries BC,
and is described for us in the often anachronistic phrases of
much later writers: Thucydides portrays it as a unification of
magistracies, council-chambers and town-halls (ii 15, 2); Livy,
despite the distancing effect of writing in Latin, perhaps catches
more of the spirit of seeing it as a contributio (strictly, a form of
federation) of people who had been hitherto villagers (pagatim
habitantes) (xxxi 30, 6). But it is clear enough that the Attic
synoecism conformed to the abstract and not the physical
model. The people of Attica, whether settled in Athens, in coun-
try villages, or actually on their holdings, agreed to accept
Athens as their political centre. Athens itself, as we have seen,
was no more than an unusually substantial and close constella-
tion of villages in the eighth century, and that is the latest period
at which this synoecism can have taken place. But other synoec-
isms followed, some rapidly and others many centuries later, in
which populations were moved bodily into the city. There is a
faint hint that something of the kind could have happened with
another early case, that of Corinth. Here the population of the
surrounding Corinthia seems to have dwindled after the eighth
century, but the case is also linked with the other great migrat-
ory phenomenon of the age, colonization abroad. And coloniza-
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 35
tion in turn is closely bound up with the twin issues of popula-
tion, which we have been considering, and of agricultural land,
to which we must now turn.
In an era as dynamic as that of the eighth century in Greece, it
is almost to be expected that we should find some kind of
economic revolution underlying the more obvious develop-
ments, and this I think we do. The evidence is very scanty, but it
all points in the same direction. Throughout history, the loose
structure of tribalism has constantly been associated with stock-
raising. It is the natural medium of subsistence both for a
nomadic people and for a widely-scattered sedentary one; it is
also a common form of wealth in insecure environments. Some
or all of these considerations applied to the preceding dark age
in Greece and there are signs, if we look for them, that stock-
rearing had flourished then. Homer speaks with more than one
voice on this question as on others, but there is no denying that
herds form the predominant medium of wealth, and meat the
regular diet, of his heroes. Yet it is a fact, not just of Greek but
of all Mediterranean civilization in later centuries, that arable —
farming and a grain-based diet predominate. This facet of
Homer’s picture is therefore likely to derive from an early epoch;
and here too, as with the tribal system itself, the likeliest context
is that of the dark age. A severely diminished population,
unable to cultivate all the available land, can effectively occupy
and use it by pastoral methods. Even such a paradox as the sur-
vival of place-names for deserted sites can be easily explained by
the hypothesis of grazing herds. Archaeological evidence hasas yet
made only a limited contribution to this question, but there are
two areas in particular where further material should prove
enlightening: the study of animal-bones from settlement-sites,
and even from graves where they are often left as refuse from
funerary feasts; and the study of dated pollen-deposits. As far as
they go, both classes of evidence give some support to the
hypothesis of dark age pastoralism: the bones from the grave-
side feasts attest to widespread consumption of the meat of
domestic animals, especially sheep and goats, in the eleventh,
tenth and ninth centuries BC; while the pollen-analyses hint at
 36 Archaic Greece

sharp local reductions in arable farming at the same period, with

an apparent growth in olive-cultivation. By contrast, there is
evidence from the eighth century and even from the later ninth
that arable farming has begun to gain ground. We find, espe-
Plate 1 cially in Attica, model granaries being included in the grave-
goods that accompany the dead, a practice which should point
to the economic preoccupations of the deceased in their lifetime.
Again, in several passages of Homer the ‘stock-rearing’ stratum
is overlaid by a thinner, and probably later, stratum of arable
farming: the clearest instances are given by the formulaic
phrases found in the Odyssey, ‘barley-meal, the marrow of man-
kind’ and the generic phrase ‘bread-eating’ to denote civilized
humanity as distinct from gods and savages. Most explicit of all
is the message conveyed by Hesiod’s Works and Days, composed
probably at a date close to 700 BC. It is a poetic manual of arable
farming which shows awareness of its wider economic context
and social implications, yet reverts to a fairly rudimentary level
of instruction in husbandry — a combination which suggests an
uneven spread of experience, and thus a moment when the
decisive concentration on arable farming was in the very process
of diffusion across Greece.
There is a parallel, of far wider significance, in later history for
the kind of agricultural revolution which I have postulated here.
In northern Europe in the earlier Middle Ages, the adoption of
the open field system was also accompanied by a big rise in
population in some localities, to a level far above even that of
Roman times. Furthermore, some authorities argue that the
severe depopulation of the intervening centuries, so far from
impeding the onset of the new system, actually facilitated its
progress, since it left large areas of land unburdened with
ownership-rights, and thus available for a new method of dis-
tribution. The similarities between these conditions and those at
the end of the dark age of Greece are clear. If there was also a
real similarity in the effects, then the impact of the later revolu-
tion for Europe, and ultimately for the world, would suggest a
proportionate significance for the earlier one within the narrow
confines of the Greek world.
 Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 37

In particular, there was surely a close connection between the

ee the advent
of the polis and the
the sveres RCHEfor in the Classi-—
there is han that between .
ackeToaatathig sae ats ip of land. Three centuries
after this period, in 403 BC, it seems that Hees three-quarters
and four-fifths of the citizens of Athens were still landowners
(that is, all but 5,000 of a total citizen population of between
20,000 and 25,000). Such a regime of smaliholders was in total
contrast to the pastoralism which I believe had prevailed in ear-
lier centuries. This made the original apportionment of plots of
land, and the subsequent legislation as to their transferability,
especially significant matters. Although we may doubt the literal
truth of later claims that the land-lots were totally inalienable, it
is clear that legislation was often introduced early on to keep
their number and size as constant as possible. When there is a
continuing rise in population within a state, such provisions will
obviously lead to tension; emigration is the most familiar and

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Fig. 7 Hero-cults at Bronze Age tombs (bracketed sites: cult only after c. 650 BC)
38 Archaic Greece

perhaps in the long run the least painful remedy that suggests
itself.
But before we consider the logical consequence, in the form of
the colonization process, there is a category of evidence which
may bear on the problem of land-ownership at home.
Repeatedly, when Greeks of the historical period engaged in
land-disputes, we hear of their having recourse to the legendary
past as a source of justification: if a party could claim to be
linked by descent or other close association, plausibly or even _
implausibly, with a legendary personage who had once inhabited
a place, then their claim to ownership of that place was greatly
enhanced. Where no really eligible personage existed, it was
necessary to invent him, if only by forming a personal name out
of the name of the locality in question; but the trump-card was
the physical discovery of the legendary hero, in the form of a
skeleton in a tomb. Herodotus tells two excellent stories about
such practices in sixth-century Greece: first, how the tide was
turned in the hitherto unsuccessful warfare of Sparta against
Tegea when the resourceful Spartan Lichas, with some help
from the Delphic oracle and a garrulous Tegean blacksmith,
located the bones of Orestes and brought them to Sparta; and
again how Kleisthenes, tyrant of Sikyon, in order to pursue his
anti-Argive policy, actually persuaded the Thebans to exhume
the remains of the legendary hero Melanippos, deadly enemy of
the Argive Adrastos, so that he could re-inter him on the site
where Adrastos was worshipped and thus ‘drive out’ the cult of
Adrastos (i 68; v 67, 2-4). Even more pragmatic was the use to
which the hero Theseus was put by the fifth-century Athenian
Kimon. The legend that the great hero of Athens had been killed
and buried on the island of Skyros gave Kimon, first, a pretext
for conquering the island and then, when he had ‘found’
Theseus’ bones, a sensational political success when he brought
them back to Athens (Plutarch, Life of Theseus xxxvi 1-2; Life of
Kimon viii 3-6). I believe that we can trace the beginnings of this
practice, albeit at a lowly and unofficial level, in the later eighth
century. From shortly after 750 BC, in the regions of Attica,
Boiotia, Phokis, the Argolid and Messenia, with a few outlying
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 39

occurrences in the islands, we begin to find the almost entirely

new practice of making dedications in, or otherwise showing
reverence to, tombs of the Bronze Age. In nearly every case, Plat.
these are of the Mycenaean age - that is to say, of a period about
500 years earlier than the institution of cult. Separated as they
were by centuries of change, migration and sheer oblivion from
the world in which the burials had been made, the worshippers
must have known that they were working in the dark. The peo-
ple of Eleusis who, at this date, surrounded with an enclosure-
wall a group of graves identified with those of the Seven Against
Thebes, heroes of the generation before the Trojan War, in fact
chose not Mycenaean but even earlier Middle Helladic burials:
an archaeological error of about 300 years. But they and their
contemporaries went ahead with their veneration and dedica-
tions; and what is more, they convinced a more sophisticated
posterity: the Eleusis graves were pointed out, more than 800
years later, to the traveller Pausanias; while the dedications at
many graves, once instituted, go on well into the Classical
period. What thinking or imagining lay behind this odd practice?
The likeliest explanation is that it originated in local attempts to
consolidate the ownership of land. As such, it would be uncon-
nected with the contemporary rise of the city sanctuaries (p. 33)
except in the very indirect sense that both are linked with the
rise of the polis, and thus with settled land-holding. But by
instituting a cult of a local hero, a community could acquire a
sense of security in an age of apparently fluid and unpredictable
settlement. Some at least of these cults became important
enough to be taken over officially, at any rate in Athens, and
transplanted to the city; but of the cults at graves of which we
know archaeologically, most continue to be practised in situ.
Only in rare cases can we guess at the pretended identification
of the dead. It is also noteworthy that the cults do not appear in
all regions of Greece: they are conspicuously absent, for exam-
ple, from three regions — Lakonia, Crete and Thessaly — where
we know that land-ownership was not distributed among a free
peasantry, but was worked by a population of serfs who were
bound to the lands on behalf of its owners, their masters. One
40 Archaic Greece

can imagine only too well that there would be no attraction for
such people in this crude proprietary propaganda, while the
owners of the land would often live some way off. But else-
where, the practice makes best sense as that of a social class
which was humble and potentially insecure, but had aspirations;
the offerings are never intrinsically precious, but they are not
rubbish either — indeed, their quality is often above that of offer-
ings in contemporary burials.
All this emphasis on land becomes intelligible when we reflect
that it was the only significant medium of wealth; that it was
itself on occasion the personified object of worship and offer-
ings; that a new political system was being widely introduced in
which it was the only qualification for citizenship; and that (if I
am right) its full fruitfulness was only now in the process of
being rediscovered after centuries of neglect. Competition for
land was at its most intense in the newly-arising polis. There is
little doubt that, as Thucydides held, of the manifold causes and
facets of colonization this one is the most fundamental. In many
areas, land-shortage would in any case have resulted from the
rise in population, and the measures taken over ownership may
have accentuated it. At all events, from around 735 BC groups of
aristocrats and their followings began to set out, with a rather
abrupt intensity, for the West. These were not however the very
earliest Greek settlements overseas, even if we set aside the
rather different case of the Ionian migration in the early dark
ages. We now know in some detail about the early development
of Pithekoussai on Ischia, the earliest Greek settlement com-
monly called a ‘colony’. It was planted by the cities of Chalkis
and Eretria no later than the second quarter of the eighth cen-
tury; since the site of one of its mother-cities, Eretria, has been
shown (also by very recent excavation) to have been settled no
earlier than 800 BC itself, this seems surprising. We have little -
sign that, in these early years of the century, the pressure of
population had anywhere begun to be significant. It is therefore
encouraging to find that the evidence from early Pithekoussai
points strongly to a commercial motive behind this pioneer
western enterprise, and not the usual agricultural one of land-
 Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 41

shortage. The desire for access to the great mineral wealth of

Etruria may have been the foremost consideration. It looks,
therefore, as though the success of this isolated venture, con-
ceived for a special and non-recurrent purpose, later suggested
a ready-made solution for a new and different problem which
afflicted a much wider area of Greece. Thus people from Chalkis
and Eretria themselves, together with others from Corinth,
Sparta, Naxos, Paros, Lindos and other towns in Rhodes and in
Crete — all of them city-states - and men from Achaia and Lok-
ris, which were not, all alike within little more than a generation
then turned to colonization as one solution to their troubles.
The foundation of these colonies and the fact that the majority
of them were swiftly successful will have encouraged political
developments in the homeland. In a true colony, the survival of
the settler depended on his being allocated a portion of land in
the territory surrounding the town, exactly the principle on
which citizenship was determined in the polis at home. But
Pithekoussai, although showing some of the expected physical
characteristics of a polis — it is centred on a natural akropolis, on
the coast of an island of 46 square miles, for whose population it
was presumably the only urban centre — may yet not conform to
the true polis pattern. For one thing, the soil of this steep and
rocky island was not well suited to agriculture; for another, there
are the chronological difficulties posed by its early date. Signs of
a pre-existing polis system in the Greek homeland are hard to
detect as early asc. 770 BC, even if the particular problem about
Eretria (p. 40) can be resolved by the explanation that the
mother-city had itself recently moved from an older site, and
that this very move was part of the process of synoikismos, the
_ physical andpolitical unification of a city-state; something simi-
lar could have happened, roughly simultaneously, at Chalkis.
A town in the Greek homeland, founded as it necessarily was
by countrymen, posed new problems for the status of the free
population living around it. Without their assistance in the culti-
vation of the land, the town could not survive. In many civiliza-
tions, the countrymen would have become in some way subor-
dinated to the dictates of the town-dwellers, or even have gravi-
42 Archaic Greece

tated en masse to the town; in others, their own smaller villages

might have aspired to become autonomous communities. The
Greek solution was different, and, once it had been applied with
success in the colonies of the third quarter of the eighth century,
all Greeks must have become aware of its possibilities: why
should those who stayed at home be treated worse than those
who had emigrated? That some kind of lateral influence oper-
ated is suggested by the fact that the form of the colonizing state
did not always determine that of the colony. An early founda-
tion like Lokroi in Italy could become a polis, despite the fact
that its settlers came from a region, Lokris, where the city-state
was not prevalent and where urbanization of any kind was lag-
gardly.
This last point brings us face to face, however incidentally,
with a substantial and often ignored fact. Just as the polis as a
state-form was not the peculiar property of Greek lands, so too
it was not universal in them. Alongside it there continued to
flourish a very different conception of the state, the ethnos. In
many studies of ancient Greece the ethnos is almost ignored,
either as being an embarrassing legacy of a more primitive era,
or more respectably because its contribution to the great intellec-
tual revolution of the fifth century seems so marginal when
compared to that of the polis. There are some problems of defin-
ition here. In its purest form, the ethnos was no more than a
survival of the tribal system into historical times: a population
scattered thinly over a territory without urban centres, united
politically and in customs and religion, normally governed by
means of some periodical assembly at a single centre, and wor-
shipping a tribal deity at a common religious centre. But bet-
ween this extreme and that of the polis, there were many inter-
mediate stages possible: if a number of urban centres grew up
within the territory of the ethnos, they might attain intermittent
autonomy as separate states, and pay only occasional homage to
the concept of a unified ‘nationality’; if on the other hand a
single city grew to power, it might forcibly establish itself as the
political centre of at least a part of the ethnos, and make this part
effectively into a polis: if both these processes happened succes-
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 43

sively, in that order, a very large polis might be the final pro-
duct. The importance of the ethnos lies, chronologically as geog-
raphically, near the boundaries of classical Greek culture: firstly
it recalls the antecedent culture of the dark age, and secondly,
by remaining in inconspicuous existence throughout the rise and
fall of the polis, it provided the basis for a fresh venture in
state-formation in the autumn of Greek civilization. What it i

offered above all was size: a disadvantage in the eyes of a true

child of the polis like Aristotle (‘a polis with excessive population
becomes like an ethnos’, he wrote (Politics 1326 b 4)), but an
advantage when the issue was power — particularly when, after ©

Fig. 8 Greece: the extent of city life (drawn after E. Kirsten Die griechische Polis
als historisch-geographisches Problem des Mittelmeerraumes (1956), figure 13)
44 Archaic Greece

Aristotle’s death, Greece was embroiled in the ‘Great Power’

politics of the Hellenistic age. The form of this revitalization of
the ethnos was that of a federation of autonomous entities, each
of which could individually have been either polis or ethnos
previously, but which was prepared to accept a central political
and military authority; often, the whole federation was still cal-
led by the name of ethnos. The success of the notion is shown
by the fact that the Achaean League of the third century BC
attracted no less than 60 cities into its orbit, including such dis-
tinguished former exponents of the polis idea as Argos, Corinth,
Sikyon and Megara.
But we should not read these impressive attributes into the
ethnos of the early days. The most common forms at this date
were those of the primarily rural ‘canton-state’ like Lokris or
Doris; and the fairly loose union of towns and their territories
like Arkadia, Achaia or Boiotia — towns which, to tell the truth,
were individually given the label ‘polis’ by contemporary Greeks
without discrimination, a usage which has blurred the distinc-
tions for modern minds. They cannot nevertheless be designated
as city-states. The point at issue is that of political autonomy
versus mere urbanization; the difference in effect is shown if we
compare a map showing the extent of city-life, the polis in its
loosest Greek sense, with one showing the much smaller extent
of the true city-state (cf. Figs. 8&9). The former was drawn by E.
Kirsten, to illustrate the fact that urbanism is more or less co-
extensive with the earlier spread of Mycenaean culture. What
this suggests is that urbanization in Greece was in some way
indebted to the Mycenaean precedent; it gives no ground for
attributing any such origins to the political idea of the city-state,
and we have already seen (pp. 28-31) how unlikely this would
be.
The maps show that not even urbanization, let alone the city-
state system, won unanimous acceptance among the Greeks,
particularly in the western half of the Greek mainland. Yet the
superiority of both seemed, to their own products, beyond all
argument; they explained the rejection of city-life on the part of
a substantial number of Greeks by more or less condescending
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 45

EPEIROS
THESSALY

&é
EO oe kOe
W. LOKRISRHOKIS Nis
IAW LOIS BOIOTIA
y Meg
ACHAIA
ELIS

Fig. 9 Greece: the extent of the city-state (shaded) and of the ethnos
(unshaded) in the Archaic period

references to the backwardness of the latter. Modern analysts

have offered different explanations of their own, like that of Kir-
sten who attributed the divergence of practices between eastern
and western Greece to geological and ecological factors, opera-
tive in Mycenaean as in Classical times. But the ancients would
probably have claimed as adherents of the polis-system many
Greeks whose cities fell under the authority of an ethnos of the
more developed type: the people of Tegea and Mantineia in
Arkadia, for example, or of Thebes and Plataia in Boiotia. It took
a purist like Aristotle to make the point that ‘a polis differs even
from
an ethnos where the people live, not in scattered villages,
46 Archaic Greece

but like the Arkadians’ (Politics 1261 a 27). Certainly there is no

reason to think that such Greeks were any less fervent believers
in city life. One of the most cogent expositions of its merits is a
speech put into the mouth of Alexander the Great, who quelled
the discontent of his troops in Mesopotamia by appealing to the
services his father had done them: ‘Philip . . . gave you cloaks to
wear instead of sheepskins, brought you down from the moun-
tains to the plains, made you a match in war for your barbarian
neighbours, so that you no longer relied on natural fastnesses
for your defence, as much as on your own courage; and he made
you into city-dwellers, endowing you with excellent laws and
customs’ (Arrian, Anabasis vii 9, 2). This rehearsal of the benefits
of civilization was addressed to Macedonians who had never
experienced the system of the city-state. When we evaluate the
contribution to Greek civilization of those who did not live in
city-states we can, if we take a long-term view, see that their
systems had a greater durability built into them, and that this
resilience had not a little to do with the apparently technical
discrepancies to which Aristotle was referring in the quotation
about the Arkadians. In the Archaic period, too, a city like Tegea
or Thebes owned a higher allegiance than did Athens, and could
in adversity fall back on a broader base of supprt. It is only if we
concentrate exclusively on the achievements, intellectual, artis-
tic, political and military, of the fifth and earlier fourth centuries
BC that we shall judge the contribution of these Greeks to be
slight or marginal.
Throughout Greek history, a rough but detectable correlation
can also be seen between the polis-system and the growth of
democracy on the one hand, and the ethnos and oligarchy on
the other. Such significant political phenomena of the Archaic
period as tyranny, too, prove to have been largely confined to
the polis. In this field it seems that progress was especially dif-
ficult in the environment of the ethnos; and there is an amusing
illustration of this on one of the rare occasions when historical
processes were reversed. The city of Mantineia was razed and its
inhabitants dispersed into villages by the Spartans after a war in
385 BC. Initially, says Xenophon, there was resentment; ‘but
Structural Revolution: the Human Factor 47

since the landowners were living nearer to the estates which

they owned in the vicinity of the villages, and had an aristocratic
government and were rid of the troublesome demagogues, they
became pleased at what had been done’ (Hellenica v 2, 7). The
Mantineians, like Alexander’s audience, had not belonged to a
fully autonomous city-state; it was urbanism in general that they
were passing judgment on, and in some respects they and other
city-dwellers outside the polis system had contributed quite sub-
stantially to Greek culture in the past. If we look back to the
material revolution of the later eighth century in Greece, we find
that it did not wholly run its course in the context of the embryo
city-state, even though the subsequent birth of the latter was to
be its most conspicuous achievement; the developed ethnos, too,
was after all essentially a creation of this era, by the refinement
of the primitive tribal order into a settled cultural unit, less dis-
tinctively Greek than the polis, but also more adaptable.

All this and much else was achieved in Greece within the short
space of about a hundred years, between the early eighth and
the early seventh centuries BC. Before this episode, the Greek
world was an enclave whose boundaries hardly extended
beyond Rhodes or Ithaka to the east and west, Macedonia and
Crete to the north and south; the tentative contacts with south-
ern Italy and the Levant had, as yet, no significant effect for
anyone. After it, colonization and commerce had between them
taken Greeks, repeatedly or even permanently, to the south of
Spain, to Italy and Sicily, to North Africa, to the coast and even
the hinterland of the Levant; the Greeks of Cyprus, isolated for
so long, had been brought back into the cultural commonwealth.
Before it, the low population and cultural level of the Greeks
had made them certainly an obscure and perhaps even a back-
ward people by the standards of the Mediterranean world; by its
end, they were conspicuous everywhere as leaders and
innovators. Before, they had been just another tribal society with
fond memories of a better past; after, they were the expansive
prophets of a new political system whose future must have
48 Archaic Greece

seemed very bright. Before, they had orally-transmitted poetry

of uncertain content and variable antiquity, which they were
unable to record permanently; after, they had the songs of
Homer and the means to write them down. The evidence of this
extraordinary transformation is most clearly presented by their
material culture: its growth, its range, its diffusion and its
development. This evidence will form the subject of the next
chapter.
 Structural Revolution:
the Material Evidence

Clio loves those who bred them better horses,

Found answers to their questions, made their things ,
Even those fulsome
Bards they boarded:
W. H. Auden ‘Makers of History’

The remarkable developments of the eighth century in Greece, it

is true, seem almost all to be centred round an abstract idea: the
new conception of the state. But the material and technical
advances associated with this idea soon developed a momentum
of their own. It is difficult to decide whether any one of them
should be treated as the independent and necessary advance
without which the others would have been ineffective. The
importance of an agricultural revolution (pp. 35-7), although
potentially decisive, is too obscure and controversial to be
invoked without further proof. Some would dispute the reality
of any such revolution, others would claim that it was much
more gradual and imperceptible than I have argued. But there is
another area in whicha change at least as dramatic is visible at
this period, and that is metallurgy. The interpretation of this
change is still far from obvious, but at least we can agree that it
is there. We can first consider the historical background against
which this change happened; then try, however crudely, to
quantify it; and finally attempt to explain it.
In eighth-century Greece, ‘metalwork’ means large quantities
of bronze and iron, a modicum of silver and gold, and a little
50 Archaic Greece

lead. Such a description could not be applied to any earlier era

of Greek metallurgy. As one moves backwards in time through
the ninth and tenth centuries BC, one finds an impoverishment,
steadily more acute, which reaches a climax in the years around
1000 BC when it seems that there was no real bronze industry at
all, and when gold, silver and even lead are almost absent; iron
reigns supreme, but only in a kingdom of the utmost poverty. If
one looks back further still, the pattern changes again because
iron virtually drops out of consideration; but the Mycenaean pic-
ture is otherwise extremely rich. The scope of the bronze indus-
try is really impressive, with vessels, tools, weapons, defensive
armour and dress-accessories in a wide range of variant types.
Bronze fibulae and dress-pins were two common and important
classes of object added in the closing phases of Mycenaean civil-
ization. Why the production of all these artefacts apparently
ceased is a problem which only marginally concerns us here;
there is, however, one factor which operates in the reverse direc-
tion in the question that we are faced with, the later revival of
the Greek metal industries. This is that of the tin trade and, toa
less marked degree, of the copper trade. A viable bronze indus-
try requires considerable quantities of copper, and a supply of
tin that needs to be only about a tenth as large. In both cases,
requirements are modified by the fact that bronze is reusable,
through the melting down of existing objects. As long as the
Aegean remained in contact with Cyprus, the supplies of copper
were likely to be adequate: but tin is a different story. Opinions
differ as to which was the main source of tin for the Aegean,
whether in the Mycenaean or in the Classical period; but no con-
vincing source has been found much nearer than a thousand
miles from Mycenae, and most of those that there were lay at
the ends of arduous and insecure overland routes. Without the
small but vital supply of tin, no effective bronze industry could
maintain itself for long, let alone develop. A people who, like
the Greeks, have ample supplies of iron ore and have mastered
even the rudiments of iron-working, will at least have an alter-
native metal technology when tin supplies are threatened or cut
off. When that eventuality arose in the eleventh and tenth cen-
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 51
turies BC, the rise of Greek iron-working followed swiftly. There
may be a partial parallel with precious metals — for Greece also
possessed silver deposits; and whereas gold, along with costly
non-metallic materials like ivory and glass, became exceedingly
rare at this same period, there is solid evidence for the progress
of silver-extraction in Attica and the Argolid.
But when at last the metal trade revived, when copper and
tin became freely available and gold and ivory could again be
obtained, then Greece found herself with a much better
economic basis than even at the height of the Mycenaean era.
Iron was now available as an alternative to bronze, and there
were many purposes for which aptitude or mere economy made
it preferable; yet the unprecedented extent and frequency of
Greek voyages overseas also meant that the tin and copper sup-
plies were on a more secure basis than before. Choice was to a
large extent free, as indeed it again was between native silver
and imported gold. Doubtless it needed to be, with the huge
increase in population which had now to be supported. Of the
pressures which a population-boom would bring to bear on an
ancient society, none are more immediate than those on
farming-land and on metals. Both could be dynamic in their
effects, but that on metals much the more so. In the case of
Greece, the overall extension of agricultural land and the inten-
sification of its use will have increased the sum of wealth; so,
less directly, will the resultant diffusion of Greek settlers over-
seas. But there, it seems, the process halted for a time in its
tracks, and lost itself in internal agrarian disputes and external
territorial wars; there is no evidence that Greek agriculture
achieved further technical advances for a while. Metals, unlike
land, are portable, almost endlessly adaptable, and dynamic:
they lead not to mere emigration, but to exchanges between the
homeland and foreign parts; they encourage specialization of
labour as well as just employment. Increased metal supplies
stimulate not only internal developments in metallurgy: they
invade other activities and transform them. A rise in metal-
production, especially if the rate of increase exceeded that in the
level of population, could change the whole economy. Is there a
 52 Archaic Greece

point at which we can intercept this process, and verify empiri-

cally what is still no more than a hypothesis?
There is one class of evidence, until recently a most neglected
one, which is sufficiently bound up with this process to throw
some light on it. This is the metallic dedications from the Greek
sanctuaries. It is true that they represent metalwork in an
unproductive context, economically speaking: an object once
dedicated becomes static in every sense. But the mere existence
of this unproductive sector is a strong hint, if not a proof, of the
existence of a much larger productive counterpa rt: of
a weapon
war, for example, will be dedicated only by a man who can
spare it, or has captured it from enemies who will then need to
late 2 supply its replacement; and although the great bronze tripods
may have been constructed exclusively for ceremonial uses,
these latter extended far beyond the field of dedications
(as
prizes, for example, and in gift-exchange). Even objects
designed purely for dedication, like bronze figurines, were using
up valuable metal. So that an increase in dedication is, prima
facie, a sign of increased total resources; and in the event the rate
of increase that we find is of a startling order, as the following
figures show. (Different time-divisions have been used, accord-
ing to the manner in which the objects have been published, and
one class of non-metallic finds is included for comparison; the
date of the relevant publication is shown on the right-hand
side.)
One does not need a computer to see that the rise in dedica-
tions in the eighth century is of an extraordinarily abrupt kind,
far more so than any conceivable rise in population. There may,
indeed there must, be at least one further hidden factor at work
behind these figures: an increasing proportion of the available
wealth is being dedicated to the gods. Some of the sanctuaries
probably did not even exist before the eighth century; even the
earliest dedications, while of eleventh or tenth century type, may
yet have enjoyed long use before their final dedication. But
when allowance is made for the distorting factors — increasing
population and increasing emphasis on dedications, which
operate in one direction, long retention of objects which oper-
 Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 53

ates in the other — figures of this order must convey a major

m. rise
of wealth ini aia moe in toto and per capita. It ,and
nted out that th * rise in dedications roughly | coin-
als. This is Prin a significant fact, but rs we
must note that there is a chronological overlap: the sharp rise in
sanctuary-dedications comes, as we have seen, during the
eighth century, while the discontinuation of grave-goods falls at
its very end; and secondly, to set things in proportion, let us
note that the total yields of metalwork from graves are small by
comparison with some of the figures we have just considered. In
Attic and Argive graves of the tenth to eighth centuries BC, for
example, it is only a proportion of the graves which contain

Eleventh
and tenth Ninth Eighth
centuries BC century century
Bronze figurines at Delphi 0 i 152 (1969)
Bronze tripods at Mount
Ptodn (Boiotia) 0 0 Zz (1971)
Bronze dedications on
Delos 0 1 19 (1973)
Terracotta figurines at
Olympia 10 24 837 (1972)
Eleventh Ninth Later
and tenth and early eighth and
centuries BC eighth seventh
Bronze fibulae at Philia
(Thessaly) 0 2 1783+ (1975)
Bronze pins at Philia 1 4 37. (1975)
Bronze fibulae at
Perachora vi it 50+ (1940)
Bronze pins at Perachora 0 15 81 (1940)
Bronze fibulae at the
Argive Heraion 16 10 88 (1905)
Bronze pins at the Argive
Heraion 3 c. 250 c. 3070 (1905)
Bronze fibulae at Lindos
(Rhodes) 0 52 1540 (1931)
Bronze pins at Lindos 0 0 42 (1931)
54 Archaic Greece

bronzes — between one third and a half at the height of the prac-
tice, less than one quarter after about 800 BC. The total numbers
of fibulae and pins known from eighth-century graves in central
and southern Greece are to be numbered in hundreds rather
than thousands; tripods and pieces of armour are rarities, bronze
figurines unknown.
We are dealing, therefore, with more than one simultaneous
phenomenon here. There is a big sagedecane ao elemsee
direction of attention towards the nunal sanctuary arn
away from the individual grave: more will be aa of this
development later. But independent of this, there is a change
in the level of metal-use. People were beginning to use metal
implements for tasks which either had been undertaken hitherto
without the benefit of metal, or else had not been achieved at all
before; this must have been of enormous benefit to technology.
The material evidence does not offer us many glimpses of this
transformation, but two fields where we can detect its impact are
carpentry, with the appearance of lathe-turned furniture, espe-
cially the legs of funerary biers in contemporary vase-painting,
and stone-working, with the increased incidence of dressed
masonry (below, pp. 60-1), A third and yet more significant
area where technological advance would be reflected would be
communication by sea; and we do indeed hear from Thucydides
of a major development in shipbuilding towards the end of the
eighth century (i 13, 3). But this last was an activity which must,
in turn, have contributed greatly to the increase in metal wealth,
through the expansion into remoter areas rich in metallic ores,
not to speak of its warlike potential, including the capture of
booty from nearer neighbours. A circle is thus completed. What
we are seeing is a phenomenon familiar in systems theory, the
‘multiplier effect’ whose operation in the same lands two
thousand years earlier has been described by Professor Renfrew
in his book The Emergence of Civilization. (Advances, however
impressive, in one area of human activity will not necessarily
change the society which introduces them: an increase in food- |
production, for instance, will not in itself suffice to bring about a
change in institutions. But the moment that two or more such
—.
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 55
independent areas witness major advances, and the results
interact, the rate of progress — both material and social — may
elerate violently. We have evidence of a major re-settlement
agricultural land in Greece in the eighth century, and we may
ther suspect an intensification in land-usage; at the sam
riod we have quite independent evidence of a sudden incre
in metal supplies, and of a consequent diversification of m
ducts, some of them making possible a greater specializati
crafts, others already its product. We have also evidence,
again quite independent, that overseas communications were
increasing at this time both in extent and in frequency. The
obvious indicator to use here is pottery: in the tenth century BC
we know of just two Greek pots which definitely found their
way beyond the Aegean sea-coasts and their hinterlands; in the
ninth, there is still no more than a handful of sherds from a very
few sites; by the end of the eighth, the exported pieces are
almost literally too numerous to count and the known sites
number over eighty. We cannot assume that the carriers were
always Greek, nor may we know in every case what motives
inspired their long and dangerous journeys. But although these
various developments may not even be the most important mat-
erial advances of the age, the point is that any two of them
together would be capable of producing a change in society;
while their concerted effect could well carry it across the border-
line into full civilization.
The rise of the sanctuary-sites, as we shall see presently, is
also one of these interacting processes. We have used the quan-
tity of dedications to demonstrate the general and sudden rise in
activity in the eighth century BC. But it should not be imagined
that all Greek sanctuaries were of a similar nature and function.
There is first a small group of sites which combined exceptional
religious importance with relative remoteness from any great
centre of political power. This enabled them to achieve a pan-
Hellenic status, usually insulated from the inter-state dissension
which dominated almost every aspect of Greek relations, and in
some ways even an international one. Three names dominate
this group: Olympia and Delphi, whose athletic festival and ora-
56 Archaic Greece

cle, respectively, had already acquired much more than local

esteem before the end of the eighth century; and the isle of
Delos, famed as the birthplace of two of the twelve Olympian
deities, Artemis and Apollo. With them we may place another
oracular seat, Dodona in Epirus: this, too, achieved fame early
enough to be known to Homer, although the material record of
early dedications is a little disappointing in the light of this. Here
also belongs a special class of inter-state sanctuary, best rep-
resented by the Panionion on Mount Mykale in Asia Minor,
founded as a communal shrine by the league of the twelve origi-
nal cities of Ionia. Other early league sanctuaries existed, such as
that on the island of Kalaureia (Poros), but none is thoroughly
explored. Olympia, Delphi and Delos, as we should expect,
have all produced a wealth of dedications both from this early
period and from later times; with the subsequent rise of Greek
monumental sculpture and architecture, for example, all three
acquired famous temples and statues. But neither at Olympia
nor at Delphi do we have direct evidence of an eighth-century
temple, while at Delos the first definite cases arise with the con-
struction, around 700, of temples to Artemis and Hera. The
former is much the larger, but even so its area (just over 80
square metres) compares unfavourably with contemporary tem-
ples in some other sanctuaries, and is smaller than some domes-
tic structures of the day. By such standards, these were late and
unprepossessing developments.
A rather different pattern emerges from the sanctuaries of the
individual states. Perhaps the most characteristic of these are
sited in the heart of a city-state, on an akropolis or beside the
civic centre (Athens, Eretria, Corinth, Sparta, Smyrna, Miletos,
Lindos on Rhodes and Syracuse in Sicily all offer well-attested
examples); but sometimes the most prestigious sanctuary of a
polis was at a short distance outside the main settlement, like
the great temples of Hera near Argos and on Samos. An ethnos,
too, could boast famous sanctuaries within its territory, some-
times in its towns (as at Tegea in Arkadia or Thebes in Boiotia),
but often in open country, as at Aetolian Thermon or Philia in
Thessaly, and occasionally on remote mountain-tops (Apollo’s
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence S/F
sanctuary on Mount Ptoon in Boiotia, Artemis’ at Lousoi and
Mavriki in Arkadia). These state sanctuaries varied greatly in
importance, and few attracted the quality and quantity of dedi-
cations of an Olympia. Nevertheless, examples like the Athenian
Akropolis and the Samian Heraion show what could happen if
the prestige of the state in question was high; and many hum-
bler state sanctuaries at least show an ability to attract dedica-
tions from beyond their own frontiers. Sometimes a political
importance has been claimed for this;ithas been argued that the
changing character of the dedications at Perachora near Corinth
reflected the struggle for control of the area between the
Argives, the Megarians and the ultimately successful Corin-
thians; and certainly more convincing instances of Corinth exer-
cising her influence in overseas sanctuaries can be found in
Ithaka, Delphi, Dodona and later Thermon. But there are many
other cases where a different explanation must be sought.
Argive and Corinthian pottery, besides Arkadian, is found at
Tegea, and the same wares along with Lakonian at Sparta; Spar-
tan bronze figurines, in turn, are dedicated, with many Argive
examples, at Arkadian Lousoi. Further afield, there are Argive
and Euboian as well as Corinthian finds at the Ithakan sanctu-
ary; Corinthian bronzes at Thessalian Pherai; while Euboian and
Rhodian pottery occurs at the Samian Heraion, together with
(rather more surprisingly) bronze figurines from the Pelopon-
nese. All of this evidence comes from the later years of the
eighth century; when we consider the sanctuaries in the later
Archaic period, we shall find richer and better-documented evi-
dence for the cosmopolitan range of dedications. With the
monumental offerings of the later period, the explanation is
simply that Greek artists travelled widely in search of commis-
sions; with our more portable objects, it may be no more than
that other Greeks also travelled — but travelled in almost every
case as individuals. At this early stage of Greek society, the
religious pilgrimage was more likely to be a private affair than
one of official representation; economically- or commercially-
motivated ventures were undertaken on one’s own initiative and
at one’s own risk; even diplomacy, in so far as it existed, largely
58 Archaic Greece

took the form of hospitality and exchange of gifts with one’s

peers, relatives and guest-friends in other places. It is therefore
only when the pattern of extraneous dedications is of a marked
and enduring bias that we can begin to infer any deeper political
significance.
There is another feature of the state sanctuaries which is of
greater significance, and that is the growth of monumental tem-
ples. We have already considered this (p. 33) from the point of
view of the link between the establishment of the polis and the
construction of the temple. If it is accepted that the erection of a
substantial and durable cult-building is a natural consequence of
the state adopting responsibility for the cult of its patron deity,
then the nature of the building may tell us something further
about the intentions of the state. The first thing that strikes us is
the relative pretension of the buildings, though this will come as
no surprise if we are familiar with the pattern of later centuries,
when a Greek city was invariably dominated by its temples, and
when the contrast with domestic architecture was as obvious to
contemporaries as it is from the ruins today. In the eighth cen-
tury, standards on both sides were lower, and we may even
have difficulty in recognizing these early shrines as the ancestors
of the Classical temple. There were severe constraints on con-
temporary building techniques, notably the virtual absence of
dressed masonry and roof-tiles, and the apparent limitation of
roof-spans to about eight metres, even with internal supports.
This last factor meant that the possibilities of enlarging a build-
ing were more or less confined to its longitudinal axis, so that
considerations of proportion were likely to be overruled.
Nevertheless some remarkably ambitious structures were
attempted, and in a few cases (as with Anglo-Saxon churches)
they were still to be seen eight or more centuries later.
Pride of place may be given to the first temple of Hera at
Samos, partly because of its date — it was probably constructed
quite early in the eighth century - and partly because it is
already a most striking building. With a rectangular plan and a
row of columns down the centre, the great length of 100 Greek
feet gave it an original ground area of as much as 213 square
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 59
metres; before the end of the century, the area had been
enlarged and the appearance enhanced by the addition of the
first encircling colonnade that we know of in Greece, a ‘peri-
style’ of 43 wooden columns. Before very long, a similar-sized
temple to Apollo had been built at Eretria, apsidal in plan and
lacking an exterior colonnade but again well over 200 square
metres in area. Another very large temple-building has been
excavated at Gortyn in Crete; its total area, including what was
probably an open-air courtyard, was even larger than that of the
Samian Heraion; the dedications do not suggest that it was ear-

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lier than the eighth century. A fourth outsize building was

erected at the sanctuary of Apollo at Thermon in Aetolia, obs-
cure in date and somewhat hybrid in plan, being basically
rectangular but with a distinct convex curvature in its walls.
This, too, received an added circuit of external supports (lean-to
posts, perhaps, rather than columns). Whatever its original pur-
pose, it almost certainly ended its days as a temple. These are
not the only substantial state undertakings of the era: a prob-
lematic building at Tiryns, very similar in area and proportions
to the Thermon temple, may well be the first temple of Hera on
60 Archaic Greece

the site, but its date is again a source of great controversy. Smal-
ler temples are known to have been built in this period by sev-
eral other cities: such as Asine, Mycenae and Sparta in the
Peloponnese; Corinth in its outlying sanctuary at Perachora;
Smyrna in Ionia and Dreros in Crete; while the still semi-
Hellenized islands of Lesbos and Lemnos have also produced
what are probably sacred buildings of this date.
In these impressive architectural projects, we can surely see
not only the self-assertion but also the incipient rivalry of the
new-born states. The correspondence of measurements between
the Samos and Eretria temples, and between the somewhat
smaller pair in Tiryns and Thermon, suggests at least a mutual
consciousness. It was probably very early in the seventh century
that one city, Corinth, found the means to put herself beyond
the reach of her rivals in this field for several generations. In the
centre of the city a temple of Apollo was erected which, even
though it apparently lacked a colonnade and despite uncertainty

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Fig. 11 Plan of the temple area at Corinth in the Archaic period

Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 61

over its exact dimensions, easily excelled its known predecessors

in both length and breadth. What is more, it had walls of dres-
sed stone and a tiled roof, features which for centuries past had
not been seen in buildings of any kind in Greece. Not content
with this, the Corinthians built, perhaps a generation later, a
temple for Poseidon at his nearby sanctuary of the Isthmos,
which was in some ways even more imposing. It had a peristyle
of wooden columns and its masonry walls carried mural paint-
ings on plaster; the total area, on the foundations and inclusive
of the colonnade, was about 560 square metres. Thus began a
process which operated throughout the Archaic age and into the
fifth century, when all-stone temples had long since become the
rule and the introduction of architectural marble had carried the
competition onto an even costlier plane. It is clear that, from its
early years, the Greek state could command a loyalty that
extended far beyond the essential utilitarian functions; and that
this loyalty should manifest itself so conspicuously in the religi-
ous field is a fact of great significance. There was no factonttmore
important in the composition of the state than the devotion
common cults.
At the same time, the development of the early temple-plan
may reflect two successive stages in the establishment of the
state sanctuaries. Our difficulty in distinguishing some early
temples from private houses may well arise from the fact that, in
origin, they were one and the same. Not only did they favour
the same two types of plan — rectangular, with the entrance in
one of the short sides, and apsidal — but also, as has been
observed, many early temples have taken over from domestic
structures the feature of a central hearth. At first, it is argued,
the main celebration of cult took the form of a ceremonial meal
cooked and eaten at this hearth: a survival of the formal enter-
tainment that would have taken place in a chieftain’s house.
One could well imagine a shrine of this kind serving a smaller
community than the whole city-state or ethnos - a kinship-
group for example. What finally and irrevocably set off the tem-
ple from its domestic antecedents, according to this view, was
the addition of an external colonnade, and the introduction of a
 62 Archaic Greece

cult-image of the deity to replace the central hearth; this final

step would presumably coincide with the state’s assumption of
responsibility for the cult. The truth was probably more complex
than this: there are many proven temples which never acquired
a peristyle, and there are buildings which were from their
beginnings unsuitable for housing any sort of communal or
social function: the Heraion of Samos, for example, in its earliest
phase, with its elongated plan and obtrusive interior colonnade
down its central axis. Nevertheless this theory has the merits of
offering a credible evolution for the building-form, before it
emerges from its obscurity into the familiar shape of the Hellenic
temple.
The discussion of this essentially religious activity may appear
to have taken us far away from the economic activities which we
were previously discussing. But in fact there are links in almost
every direction. The growth of the sanctuaries is connected,
late 2 through the medium of the innumerable bronze dedications,
with the growth in metal supplies; that the link could be more
direct is shown by an inscription of a later period from Ephesos
which specifically mentions gifts of gold and silver as contribut-
ing towards temple costs, and another from sixth-century
Athens which refers to the ‘collecting’ of bronzes. A more obvi-
ous correlation exists between the growth of craft and technol-
ogy and the rise of the temples: not only did the actual problems
of their construction call for techniques which had scarcely been
employed in the impoverished architecture of the preceding cen-
turies, but even before the existence of a temple, many sanc-
tuaries were attracting dedications of a specialized and elaborate
kind, not found in utilitarian contexts. The obvious example is
that of the great bronze tripod-cauldrons, at first cast and later
also hammered, which since the earlier eighth century had
reached dimensions of a quite unpractical kind (some of them
stood over five feet high), and whose ornate relief-work was
never to be sullied by placing them over a fire. They must have
been the products of specialist craftsmen, perhaps even of a
separate branch of industry. Other dedications, from the huge
and elaborate dress-pins, nearly three feet long, to the small but
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 63
often competent bronze and terracotta figurines, are also pro-
ducts expressly designed for the sanctuary.
A less predictable connection existed, on the part of at least
one sanctuary, with the Greek expansion overseas. Several
ancient narratives of early colonial foundations begin with an
account of a consultation of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.
Whether or not this had a practical purpose from the start, in
that real and useful geographical information was already in the
hands of the Delphic priests, there can be no doubt that after the
success of the first ventures, and as a result of the habitual piety
and gratitude of the colonists in giving divine credit where it
was due (and even where it was not), Delphi must soon have
become a repository of such knowledge. Nor was it only colo-
nial voyages for which divine approval was sought, and thank-
offerings made in the event of success: we hear of several com-
mercial undertakings that had such backing; Delphi again fea-
tures prominently, but Hera of Samos also received credit. Both
the states and some private individuals were thus implicated in
the rise of the sanctuaries.
But the network is much more extensive even than this.
Mutual dependence between the sanctuaries ae the land, both
for arable and for livestock farming, was close. Sacrifices, it goes
without saying, commonly took the form of agricultural produce
and farm animals. There is a further illustration of this link in
the story told by Herodotus (i 31) of Kleobis and Biton, the Plate
Argive twins who pulled their mother in an ox-cart to the Argive
Heraion, a distance of over five miles. The story is set in the late
seventh century BC, and later writers explain that the mother
was priestess of Hera at the time. It is striking that her proces-
sional vehicle should have been an agricultural cart, and that the
specific occasion for her sons’ feat of strength was the fact that
the oxen to pull the cart were late in coming home from the
fields. A final link which is worth emphasizing is that between
the sanctuaries and warfare. Many Greek sanctuaries were in a
real sense war museums, and on occasion they served as
armouries too. Not only were the portable dedications of arms
and armour usually a tithe of the spoils taken from defeated
64 Archaic Greece

enemies, or else personal offerings of their own equipment by

grateful victors; but sometimes the temples themselves were
built with the proceeds of successful campaigns. In later times,
at least, booty-dedications took other forms as well: we hear of
male and female captives being dedicated as temple-slaves, and
of plots of profitable land being made over to the sanctuary to
increase its revenue. It will be clear by now that the activities
of ©
a Greek sanctuary, far from being a detached and spiritual
sphere, were very close to the heart of all political, economic and
military life. The evidence of the sudden growth of dedications
is thus also evidence for a quickening in many aspects of human
activity, and we shall continue to use the development of the
sanctuaries during the later Archaic period as a kind of index of
general growth.
The sites that we have been considering represent only a
small, if prominent, fraction of the total number of centres of
cult in the Greek world. The reader of Pausanias’ Description of
Greece will be impressed, dismayed and finally perhaps irritated
by the seemingly endless catalogue of shrines which the
travel-writer visited. In a few pages on Sparta, for instance,
where he is describing the town and its outskirts and before he
has even arrived at the Acropolis where the main temples were
traditionally located, he lists over seventy shrines and cult-
centres (iii 12, 4-17, 1). Of most of these no physical trace has
ever been found nor, one suspects, ever will be. We have earlier
considered (p. 38-40) one small category of these obscurer
sanctuaries, the hero-cults centred on prehistoric tombs; but
there were countless others consisting of no more than an altar,
a statue or an alleged grave. Although some of the shrines were
in the care of smaller communities, whether occupational or
kinship-groups, it is clear that the state had responsibility for
maintaining a vast number of them, including (for example) the
great majority of those described by Pausanias at Sparta. Not all
of these sanctuaries scattered across Greece were of great anti-
quity when Pausanias saw them in the second century AD: the
one recurrent feature that they share is that, where archaeologi-
cal investigation has proved possible, the date at which cult
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Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 65
appears to begin is most often the eighth century. They thus
illustrate the most striking fact about the developments of this
era, their relative permanence. Almost all the features which
appeared in Greek life at this time, and the total structure which
they composed, had come to stay. Very few innovations were
abortive, and the more successful of them lasted till the downfall
of the ancient world over a thousand years later. One can claim
even more for some of them: they enrich mankind to this day. In
two prominent cases, it is by the material evidence that we can
associate the advances in question with this same eventful cen-
tury.
Representational art in Greece is not in itself the creation of
the eighth century. It had enjoyed a vigorous life during the 500
years of the Mycenaean culture, and a few hesitant works of the
ensuing dark centuries — clay figurines, the occasional painted
representation on a pot — had kept the spark from being exting-
uished totally. But, as with so much else, there is a complete
transformation towards the middle of the eighth century,
accompanied in this case with an important stylistic idea. The
principles of the Geometric system of decoration and form -
symmetry, proportion, articulation, discipline —- had been
observed for generations past by every Greek artisan of any real
attainment: the bronze-workers who produced the superb
dress-pins of the ninth-century Argolid, as much as the potters Plate
of contemporary Athens. The more elaborate products could
even claim a certain intellectual content, the precursor of that
concern with number and space which later led Plato to inscribe
over the entrance to his Academy: ‘Let no one enter who is
ignorant of geometry’. Against such a background, it is not
perhaps so surprising that figure-scenes were slow in appearing:
the few early human and animal figures on tenth- and ninth-
century vases are isolated, inconspicuous to the point of being
apologetic, and not especially ‘geometric’ in conception. Yet the
feeling that man and his actions were the proper subject for the
artist can hardly have been entirely suppressed in the Greek
mind and, furthermore, there were sometimes figured scenes on
the Oriental objects now being imported to Greece, to inspire
 66 Archaic Greece

emulation. Was there a way of reconciling tradition and innova-

tion? The solution to the problem, obvious perhaps in retrospect
but daring in original conception, was to geometricize the fig-
ures too. It was not a lasting solution: within two generations
the vase-painters had become dissatisfied with it and with the
whole Geometric style. Indeed, the Geometric episode in Greek
art left so little overt trace that it was totally forgotten. In the
fifth century BC, there are grounds for thinking that Geometric
pottery, found in some re-opened graves, was judged by the
savants of the day (including Thucydides, i 8, 1) to be Carian;
nineteenth-century archaeologists preferred to call it Phoenician.
Yet the introduction of silhouette-figures into the final stages of
Geometric art was, in its own time, a great success. Not only
was its convention for artistic representation eagerly taken up by
craftsmen in other media but, unlike the abstract motifs which
composed the main bulk of Geometric decoration, it offered a
real basis for innovation and experiment. A silhouette figure can
be geometrically rendered, but need not always be so; it can be
shown frontally, in profile or in a mixture of the two; it can be
grouped in many kinds of composition; and finally it can
develop away from being silhouette at all. In the event, all these
experiments were made, many of them successfully. Much cre-
dit therefore belongs to the originators of the convention.
The development passed through several stages in rapid suc-
cession, all probably within the 770s and 760s BC. One artist,
who dominated the final stage, can be identified by the tradi-
late 3 tional methods of attribution; some seven major works of his
survive in whole or in part, plus forty-odd others produced
under his close influence; and the best known, a monumental
amphora from the rich Dipylon Gate cemetery at Athens, gives
him his modern name, the Dipylon Master. That he and his pre-
decessors were Athenian is only to be expected; Athens had
produced all the most important advances of the last three
hundred years in Greek ceramics, and it was also a considerable
force in some other artistic fields at the time when his career
began. Some notions relevant to figure-drawing were pioneered
by his immediate predecessors (the dependence on silhouette,
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 67
the use of a ground-line on which the figures stand, the enlarge-
ment of certain pot-shapes to monumental size to provide a
worthy field), and the Dipylon Master himself shows such a
conservative tendency in some respects that we can call him a
traditionalist at heart. At first sight, his figure-style too might be
interpreted as a mere stylization of that of his predecessors, but
this would be to overlook the compositions for which he emp-
loyed it. To judge from works of which only large fragments
survive, he was prepared to accommodate well over a hundred
figures on a single vase, and forty or more in the same scene; to
distinguish men, women and children as well as horses, birds,
fish, chariots, warships and funerary biers. As far as action goes,
however, he constrains his figures rigidly: they depart as little as
possible from a static pose, and he groups them with an eye to
symmetry. But this very inhibition gives his scenes a majestic
quality; and he shows a steadiness of hand and a sheer physical
co-ordination which his predecessors had not achieved, and
which his contemporaries strove hard but unsuccessfully to
match. We feel the presence of a strong artistic personality.
But it would be a simple anachronism to regard the Dipylon
Master as a free agent, in the manner of a great artist of a later
age. It was the society of eighth-century Athens which had pro-
duced him, which commissioned his works, which required that
the most elaborate of them should be funerary in function and,
consequently, that the figure-scenes on them should also be
funerary in content. It also, at the period in question, approved
the use of the large decorated pots as monuments, open to view
and providing for the edification of generations yet to come.
Since it was the values of his clients which thus determined his
subjects, this should offer some guidance in their interpretation
— for guidance is sorely needed. The impersonal and timeless
quality of the scenes is, at the very least, a barrier to the reading
of their narrative content; indeed, in the opinion of many it is a
gurantee that they have no such content. This may be going too
far: what is the point of crowding twenty or more figures, fight- Plate
ing, falling and lying dead, into a single scene if there is no
intention to convey a story? But it must be admitted that many
 68 Archaic Greece

scenes, particularly those of the corpse lying in state at a funeral,

present less scope for narrative because so little happens in
them. Yet even if these scenes could, to a contemporary spec-
tator, carry some of that particularity of message which is the
essential part of narrative, the deeper question would remain:
what kind of setting was intended? Was it the commemoration of
recent events, relevant to the deceased? Or was it a more
glorified vision of events, either recreating a heroic past or at
least idealizing the present on the model of such a past?
A salient fact about contemporary society — and it is essentially
Attic society which is relevant to the Geometric figure-scenes — is
that its interests were actively engaged in the Heroic Age. The
cults initiated at Bronze Age tombs, in Attica as much as any-
where, testify to this preoccupation, albeit in a vague and appar-
ently anonymous form. Worship of a more explicit kind was
presently established at the official hero-shrines, where the
privileges and duties of cult-observance still formed a subject of
almost obsessive concern centuries later; but on present showing
none of these major cults was instituted quite as early as this.
The attention given to the Heroic Age was a reflection ofthe
alarming seriousness with which the early Greeks took it. Let
anyone who doubts this consider the case of the Lokrian
Maidens (Lykophron Alexandra, lines 1141-73). At the sack of
late 6 Troy, the legend was that the Lokrian Ajax raped Kassandra as
she clung to Athena’s statue in the goddess’ sanctuary. In
atonement for this, the Lokrians continued to send every year,
down to at least the third century BC and probably much later,
two girls from noted families to serve as temple-assistants at
Troy; not only this, but the girls had to run the gauntlet from the
moment that they were landed on the coast of the Troad until
they reached the safety of the temple; the local people were
encouraged to kill them if they caught them. Of all the elements
in the Trojan saga, there are few which are less convincing in
circumstantial detail than the episode of Ajax and Kassandra; yet
for the sake of this legend, the ruling class of Lokris were pre-
pared to sentence their own and their friends’ daughters to the
alternatives of a possible violent death and a certain lifetime — or
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 69
at the least a period — of drudgery. We can make some estimate
as to when this cruel observance began, for it would have been
physically impossible until a settlement and sanctuary were
re-established at Troy in the late eighth century. In all likelihood
the legend is older than the practice; and certainly a ‘ritualist’
explanation, whereby a legend was concocted to explain a pre-
existing ritual, will not fit this case. If such exacting reverence for
the legendary past and the continuity of tradition was possible
in the later Classical period, its grip on the Greeks of this period,
a fortiori, must have been fierce. In a more general way, the
‘Heroic Age’ is a concept quietly assumed in the poems of
Homer, and explicitly described in those of Hesiod.
An interest in heroic questions was thus present in the society
of the day; but how would this affect the products of its artists?
To begin with, it would be a mistake to imagine that we can
draw a clear distinction between ‘heroic’ subjects on the one
hand, and ‘real’ or ‘contemporary’ ones on the other, in the art
of any early society. Indeed, in the light of some evidence it
seems doubtful whether a clear distinction existed even in the
minds of the artists. As far as the physical setting goes, neither
they nor their public would have found it objectionable for past
events to be given ‘modern’ trappings; this attitude is common
to Classical Greece and most eras down to very recent times,
and there is no reason to doubt its existence in the eighth cen-
tury BC. It emphasizes the factor of continuity and common
experience between the past and the present, which would
appeal to the early Greeks. And yet, some of the effect of such
subjects will be lost if their past setting is entirely forgotten. That
the artists of the Attic figure-scenes, while feeling their way
towards a wholly new narrative art, should have had thought to
spare for such considerations may seem unlikely. But anti-
quarianism is an attitude amply attested in the contemporary
Homeric poems: it is for instance remarkable that three hundred
ee i. iron had begun to replace bronze as the material for”
é nd spearheads, not one single case of iron being used
for these ‘weapons has crept into the battle-scenes of the Iliad
and Odyssey. In the artistic field, evidence for conscious anti-
 70 Archaic Greece

quarianism is generally agreed to exist from the early seventh

century BC, and from almost as early a date the converse practice
is also attested: that is to say, an artist would render an appar-
ently unexceptionable contemporary scene and then transform
its setting by the mere addition of a few heroic names as cap-
tions to the figures.
These are all external considerations, drawn from other
periods or other aspects of society. Can we relate them more
directly to the Geometric figure-scenes of Athens? There is one
ate 7 point where they at once impinge. The tholos tomb at Menidhi
in Attica not only offers a case of dedications at a heroic grave
from around the middle of the eighth century, but the dedica-
tions there actually include pottery decorated with figure-scenes,
including processions of chariots. This single instance should in
fairness be set against the much more frequent cases where such
vessels stood as markers over the graves of ordinary eighth-
century Athenians, but at least it shows that there was no
incongruity in using such products in a heroic context. Nor did
their use for contemporary burials necessarily exclude a heroic
theme in their decoration: early in the following century, for
instance, a splendid amphora decorated with scenes of Odysseus
feo7 blinding Polyphemos, and Perseus escaping from the Gorgons,
was used as the actual container for the burial of a young boy at
Eleusis.
The arguments so far deployed would lead us, if not to expect,
then at least not to exclude some kind of heroic content in the
Geometric figure-scenes. Yet the majority of experts in the field
would be against us; at best, such interpretations would be
allowed in a few instances and by a few authorities. Why is this?
The answer may lie in one presupposition which seems to be
shared by both parties in the disagreement. This is, that the
main inspiration behind heroic scenes whenever present in
Greek art is that of epic poetry. The sceptics who deny all possi-
bility of heroic narrative in the art of the eighth century, when
faced with its evident presence in the early seventh, explain the
change by appealing to the sudden diffusion of epic poetry
around 700 BC. Their opponents argue (or assume) that it was a
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 71

somewhat earlier diffusion of this poetry which put the notion of

heroic illustration in the Geometric artists’ minds.
But what if both sides are mistaken in this assumption? It is
surely not a regular phenomenon, at any period, for artists to
respond directly to a literary stimulus and take their inspiration
entirely from it. Here again, we do not have to follow the later
course of Greek art very far before we find solid evidence. The
number of mythical scenes which were then actually taken from
the Iliad and Odyssey, the two Homeric epics, prove to be a very
small minority; by a cautious reckoning of the representations
dated before about 650 BC, they number 5 out of 57 pictures from
heroic saga as a whole. Far more numerous are those which
illustrate moments from other sagas altogether — certain deeds of
Herakles and perhaps of Theseus, events from the Theban
stories — or those from the sequence of Trojan War episodes
which take place before, between and after the actions of the Plate
Iliad and Odyssey. Others again are characterized as generally
legendary by their portrayal of centaurs, sphinxes and monsters;
but even so they can be excluded from having a strictly Homeric
inspiration. Now the episodes which fell outside the Iliad and
Odyssey were certainly described in other early epic poems, and
in some cases we can deduce that these were earlier than
Homer: for example, an epic on the Argonaut story is presup-
posed in Odyssey xii, 69-72. But can there really have been a
complete epic ‘coverage’ of the whole heroic age so early? In the
case of the Trojan saga, the ‘missing’ episodes were covered by
the poems of the Epic Cycle, which survived into Classical times:
the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis, Nostoi and Telegoneia.
The verdict of antiquity was that most or all of these were
post-Homeric and modern authorities, faced with the rather
sorry fragments that survive, have agreed; some recent experts
have placed their composition largely in the late seventh century
BC, far too late to have inspired the illustrations referred to
above. Did they have pre-Homeric antecedents? Very possibly,
at least in some cases; but to infer the existence of these from the
early illustrations is to beg the whole question.
There is in any case a further difficulty. When, in the later
 Fe Archaic Greece

Archaic period, mythical scenes become ever more frequent in

occurrence and explicit in identification, often making use of
inscriptions for the latter purpose, they show a tendency to
depart from the ‘official version’ of an episode as enshrined in
the epic. This was not from any decline in the status of epic — on
the contrary, its prestige was never higher — nor is it likely that
alternative literary versions were a significant factor. A more
likely, indeed an almost obvious explanation, is that there was a
great web of unsystematic, orally-transmitted mythology, which
existed all through early Greek history without ever being
enshrined in verse form. Some of it can be assumed to have
been of great antiquity, old enough at least to be known to the
eighth-century artists; some doubtless consisted of later vernacu-
lar variants, or even personal versions of an individual artist.
Not all of these variants came to be recorded in a written source
at any time during the next thousand years of Greek and Latin
literature, as we discover when some distinct episode, on which
our written sources have virtually no light to throw, is portrayed
in a work of art: Jason swallowed by the dragon that guarded
late 9 the Golden Fleece, or Tydeus murdering the Theban princess
Ismene in an obscure context of sexual dalliance. The whole
phenomenon was well summed up by the Dutch scholar J. M.
Hemelrijk: ‘I suspect that the Brygos Painter rather drew what
his granny told him as a boy, than what he may have known of
our Iliad.’ If the Brygos Painter, a consummate Athenian artist of
the first decades of the fifth century, an age of widespread liter-
acy, could by-pass the direct inspiration of literature, then how
much more likely is it that vase-painters would draw on non-
literary sources 250 years earlier, when writing was in its infancy
in Greece and epic recitations must have been rare and perhaps
socially exclusive events? At no time were these craftsmen likely
to move among the cultural élite.
If this line of argument is sound, then two conclusions follow
for the art of Geometric Athens. First, we cannot use the diffu-
sion of the Homeric epic as a necessary or even a likely occasion
for the first appearance of legendary scenes in art. It is question-
able whether the artists were dependent on epic of any kind;
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 73

and even if they were, their choice of subjects shows that in the
great majority of cases the epics in question were quite uncon-
nected with Homer, and could have been composed either much
earlier or much later than the Iliad and Odyssey. Secondly, we
cannot presume to dismiss scenes as non-legendary, especially
when they occur in the very earliest phases of representational
art, simply because they correspond with nothing in our incom-
plete ancient handbooks of mythology; nor to deny legendary
status to an individual scene on the grounds that, although cer-
tain features seem recognizable, no literary source tells the
legend in exactly this form. All this opens up a much wider
range of interpretation. We can approach whole categories of
scene and compare them, on the one hand with what is known
of Athenian society and life in the period when they were
painted, on the other hand with the picture (rather better
documented) of what life in the Heroic Age was imagined as
having been like. We can consider individual scenes and sub-
jects of a potentially legendary kind, without having to be
guided by the epic versions of the stories, still less by their status
and prominence within the Homeric epic. Let us try an example
of each of these two approaches.
The funerary subjects commonly treated on the front side of
the Geometric kraters used for male graves and the battle-scenes
sometimes shown on their reverse side, have two conspicuous
recurrent features: the use of chariots, and a curious form of
shield with two large lateral embrasures, leaving a narrow
‘waist’ at the middle. Their incidence is variable: the chariots are
very common in the funeral scenes, where their occupants are
very often armed, but rare in the actual battles; while the shields
are at first common in both, but decrease in frequency as the
Geometric style nears its end. From contemporary life, we can
bring to bear evidence on the chariots only: some points of dis-
agreement exist among modern scholars, but it is agreed that
chariot-racing and, less commonly, chariot-processions did take
place in Archaic Greece, usually as a part of a festival or pro-
gramme of-games; and they can be traced back almost to the
period when the first Geometric scenes were painted. Chariot-
 74 Archaic Greece

warfare, by contrast, is not likely to have existed in Greece

proper after the Mycenaean age, when it had been fairly wide-
spread. But races and processions at funerals are inherently
unlikely to have been a commonplace event. We hear of funeral
games for Amphidamas of Chalkis, described in one version as a
basileus of Euboia, who died around 700 Bc. Athens alone has
produced about twenty-five examples of chariot-races or proces-
sions on vases within two generations, well over half the
number of sufficiently well-preserved funeral scenes; and we
can guess what a tiny proportion of the original production
these twenty-five represent. For funerals of the Heroic Age, on
the other hand, such events were thought of as de rigueur, as the
Iliad shows us; while chariot-warfare is the epitome of heroic
combat in Homer, who here probably reflects some memory of
the Mycenaean practice. From consideration of the chariot-
scenes, therefore, the impression emerges that a certain idealiza-
tion of reality is taking place. When chariots are shown in battle,
the model must be that of a bygone society; when they appear at
funerals, either the same process, or a more mundane one of
unreal social aspiration, would seem to be at work. In neither
case do the pictures inspire confidence as literal portrayals of
eighth-century practice.
te 10 The shields are a more controversial subject. The suggestion
ight) was first made in 1955 by T. B. L. Webster that they too have no
place in contemporary life, but are a piece of ‘heroic property’
indicating that any scene in which they appear is thought of as
legendary in setting. No one has been able to invoke positive
proof that the shield did or did not exist — the argument is con-
ducted in terms of probabilities and logical consistency — but
Webster’s theory has met with general rejection. A number of
specific points have been brought against it, but in my view they
can all be answered by an appeal to the external evidence, old
and new. The testimony of Homer (p. 69) shows that conscious
archaism was not entirely foreign to the spirit of the times. The
evidence of the re-discovery of Mycenaean graves (pp. 38-40)
suggests one means by which the Athenians of the day could
have had access to Mycenaean representations of shields as a
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 75

basis for their own imaginative reconstructions. It is no longer

necessary to argue, as Webster did, that these strange ‘Dipylon’
shields in Geometric art were a distorted memory of the
Mycenaean ‘figure of eight’ shield, a view which was open to
the valid objection that they bear no real resemblance to it. A
much better model has now been revealed in Mycenaean art: a
series of representations, ranging in date from about 1400 to
1200 BC, have been found to show the same basic outline, with
lateral embrasures, as that of the ‘Dipylon’ form. In the other
direction chronologically, there is evidence that later artists so
far misunderstood the ‘Dipylon’ shield as to represent it turned
on one side, with the embrasures now appearing in the upper
and lower edges, and an incongruous armband and hand-grip
set athwart its long axis. This misunderstood version of the
shield was to be used, though haphazardly and without any
consistent system, for centuries afterwards as a token of legen-
dary context. The first picture that we have of the shield so mis-
used is on a Corinthian vase as early as about 675 BC; and indeed
there is an earlier and rather extraordinary piece of evidence
from Cyprus: and eighth-century vase on which the painter was
so unfamiliar with the ‘Dipylon’ shield as not to realize that it
was a Shield at all, so that he equipped his warriors with an
additional small target held in their left hands. Even on the Attic
vases, portrayals of the shield vary so widely as to suggest no
real acquaintance with it. In these circumstances, it seems very
hard to accept the ‘Dipylon’ shield as a real element in eighth-
century warfare. Nor can one go to the other extreme: the shield
is not a necessary, but merely perhaps a sufficient, condition for
conveying a legendary setting.
I have lingered on this specialized problem because its impli-
cations are in fact very wide. Indeed this is, I think, the real
reason why scholars have found it so hard to accept the view
presented here. For if all the scenes containing the ‘Dipylon’
shield portray something other than contemporary life, then our
whole understanding of the Geometric figure-scenes is affected
thereby, so ubiquitous is it in the early funeral and battle-scenes.
It will mean that, in effect, the Athenian artists were consistently
 76 Archaic Greece

thinking in terms of another world when they painted their

scenes, even when they do not signal them as such. In an era as
ill-documented as this, it goes against the grain to reject the
most substantial body of representational evidence — the figure-
scenes on vases — as evidence for their times. In fact, however,
our interpretation is doing nothing of the kind. It is merely
changing the nature of the evidence that the pictures offer, by
bringing them into line with the other evidence that demons-
trates an interest in the heroic past in these years. That the
Athenians should have committed their dead to the grave in the
image, so to speak, of their heroic ancestors may seem less sur-
prising when we consider another practice of the time, that of
giving an actual ‘heroic burial’ to the newly-deceased members
of a ruling class. The most spectacular manifestations come from
a far-away corner of the Greek world, Salamis in Cyprus, where
a whole series of burials, beginning about 750 BC, emulate the
great funeral rituals of the Iliad: slaughter of animals (including
the chariot-horses), offering of jars of oil, human sacrifice, cre-
mation of the dead (a new practice for Cyprus), quenching of the
pyre with wine, placing of the ashes in an urn wrapped in cloth,
and final heaping-up of a tumulus. Nearer home, a warrior at
Eretria in Euboia was given a similar though more modest fun-
eral around 720 BC and his tomb, surrounded by those of a small
group of presumed relatives, presently received the signal hon-
our of having a hero-shrine constructed over it, which received
votive offerings for centuries afterwards. Other less explicit cases
of epic influence on contemporary funerary practice have been
detected elsewhere in Greece, including Attica.
To return to the Attic vase-paintings: in four of the funerary
scenes, and on six representations from outside Attica, all of
them falling within about three generations after 750 BC, there
e 10 occurs the peculiar theme of a pair of Siamese twins. As it hap-
left) pens, we have evidence that would give an immediate explana-
tion of this oddity. Twice in the Iliad (xi 709-52; xxiii 630-42)
Homer tells stories involving a famous pair of twins, the sons of
Aktor: once in the context of a battle, once in that of a chariot-
race; but he makes only a veiled allusion to their deformity, and
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence if

they cannot
be said tobe conspicuous figures in his story. Not
much later, however, Hesiod describes them in more detail
(fragment 17B), mentioning that they had ‘two bodies, joined to
each other’. Later literary sources tell us that they were finally
killed by Herakles. One might have thought that this lucky
opportunity to explain an obscure theme would be gratefully
taken. But no: sceptics have pointed out that the twins are
shown more than once in the same chariot-scene and argued,
with a perhaps inappropriate application of logic, that they can-
not represent the famous twins, but are merely an artist’s con-
vention for showing two warriors standing together. The argu-
ment that they figure too inconspicuously in Homer to be
expected in art has also been applied; we have seen some of the
objections to this line of reasoning already. It happens that one
of the pictures — not the earliest — shows the helmet-crests of the
two warriors joined together at the back, an unmistakable sign
that they are Siamese twins; so the argument is that, by a happy
coincidence, an artistic convention was taken over and put to
new use when the urge to depict the Siamese twins — inevitably,
through the diffusion of the epic — first arose. Here I think that
the sceptical view flies in the face of probability: one has only to
posit the existence of a vernacular tradition involving the twins
and their story, independent of and indeed ancestral to the epic
version, and the imagined difficulties vanish. But once again,
the implications are wide: the earliest picture of the twins is
close to the beginning of the Attic series of figure-scenes, on a
work by an associate of the Dipylon Master. Once the principle
is conceded, that Geometric artists might wish to portray specific
episodes as well as the general ambience of the Heroic Age, then
other, more doubtful cases (and there are a number of them)
begin to appear in a different light.
It begins to look as if this attitude of deference to the heroic
past was an important element in the revolution that was sweep-
ing through Greek life.Itwas not that the achievements of the
Mycenaean age could make much practical contribution to prog-
ress now. Rather, as in Renaissance Europe, it was the general
inspiration which was offered by a conception of the distant
78 Archaic Greece

past: ‘the more idealized, the better. In some respects the

accepted picture was historically very distorted and, again as in
the Renaissance, there was a tendency to credit the earlier age
with a greater share than it deserved in prompting present
achievements. This is seen, for example, in the heroic ancestry
which was claimed for some of the religious and _ political
developments of these times., But without such an example, it is
doubtful whether the Greek advance would have been quite so
swift; and even centuries later, people were still enlisting their
heroes for countless purposes of their own.
But of all the achievements of this time, there is perhaps none
that impresses the Western world today so much as the recovery
of the art of writing — particularly as it took the form of the adop-
tion of an alphabet from which our own is still derived. It is the
material evidence on which we mainly base not only our
attempts to date this achievement but also our belief in a preced-
ing age of illiteracy. There may still be a need today to justify
this latter belief: that a formerly literate society should lose the
gift of writing for several hundred years is a notion so foreign to
our experience that it is not easily accepted. There is in this case
another category of evidence which may help: that of the
Homeric poems, whose method of composition has been widely
accepted for the past fifty years, since the discoveries of Milman
Parry as to the extensive use of formulae in Homer, as being of a
kind peculiar to illiterate societies. But if this conclusion is like
almost every other one reached about Homer, then it is unlikely.
to stand unchallenged for ever. We should thus be unwise to
depend entirely on the epic as decisive proof of the disappear-
ance of literacy in Greece.
Let us revert to the physical evidence. What it tells us is that
the syllabic script known as Linear B was in use (but apparently
restricted use) down to the destruction of most of the
Mycenaean palaces in the years round 1200 BC; that a fully-
formed alphabetic system, modelled on the Phoenician, was
adopted no later than about 750 BC; but that the intervening
years offer virtually no evidence for the knowledge of either sys-
tem. The difference between the two forms of writing, and the
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 79
absence of any influence of the older one on the newer, are so
absolute and complete that we should in any event be surprised
to find that they were in consecutive use, without any interven-
ing break. After all, even when making the change from a syl-
labic script, where each single sign is used for an open syllable
of the form -ba-, to an alphabetic script with a separate letter for
b and a, there are opportunities for assimilation: Linear B, for
example, had to have signs for the simple vowels, mainly for use
in the initial position. The Greek alphabet entirely ignores these
pre-existing symbols, and derives its vowels from Phoenician
signs, such as glottal stops, aspirates and the consonantal y, for
which Greek had no use in their received form.
Then there are the differences in the range of literacy under
the two systems. Linear B was essentially an administrative
script, used by palace scribes for official documentation, and
occasionally by craftsmen for what appears to be communication
within a very restricted group: thus one- to three-word painted
inscriptions (mostly apparently place-names) were sometimes
applied to a pot before it was fired; but these do not seem to
have been of general circulation. But graffiti hardly appear, and
public inscriptions not at all. We infer that very few people could
read the script, and perhaps fewer still write it. If it was the
almost exclusive preserve of the palace bureaucracies, as seems
likely, then their disappearance will have removed its raison
d’étre. The early alphabetic inscriptions show a sharp contrast.
Pottery is again favoured as a writing-surface, but now most of
the inscriptions are not painted by the makers, but scratched
later by the users. They refer to private matters — ownership,
entertainment, personal comments; a striking proportion of
them are in verse. Some time later, makers’ signatures also
begin to appear on pottery; the actual learning process is illus-
trated by a few abecedaria; and permanent inscriptions on stone
follow. Already before 700 BC alphabetic inscriptions are known
from a dozen sites — more than have produced Linear B inscrip-
tions from the whole of its life of 200 years or more. It is clear
that the conditions of literacy have changed, and that the simpl-
icity of the alphabet was making it accessible to almost everyone.
 sow]¢| [cu] S]ulal [al ile wl<[s[2f To =n Tae SH] > To] xT>[7 12.3
they nevertheless credited the Heroic Age, in the person of

trates a major anachronism. Those few scholars who believe in

Archaic Greece

sign, now or later, that anyone in Greece had more than a faint
A completely fresh start had been necessary; and there is no

able to present his heroes as living in an essentially illiterate soc-

but the legend almost certainly refers to the alphabetic script,

continuity of literacy through the dark age would probably pre-

too, was

iety and later Greeks were not disturbed by this. True to form,

Kadmos, with having brought writing to Greece from Phoenicia;

fer to bridge the gap by extending the use of the alphabet back-
not the syllabic. It thus reflects a geographical truth, but perpe-

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lea ies S ajefi| [ete fl ow EOI ae) He eee
notion that an earlier script had even existed. Homer,

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sods soe saved |L1O| < aS | 3) oo a sin ApS irra2ee Cea et law al oie (eI
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Fig. 12 The early Greek local alphabets

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TABLE OF LETTERS
BR
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NTMole [Wee [SAT Hola eS SES CINE eo «| 3/8 aa cea en
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a
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 81
wards in time, rather than that of Linear B forwards; but even
they must concede that it was not the script of the Mycenaean
age. When one adds to these arguments the weight of negative
evidence, the case seems well established: for 450 years, not so
much as a letter of Greek alphabetic writing is known. About the
only apparent survival of Linear B in Greece proper is on the
stones of a building, probably of eleventh century date, at Iolkos
in Thessaly, where a single symbol which resembles a sign of
that script is used as a mason’s mark; but such practices have a
history in Greece which goes back well before the first writing-
system was known there, and in no sense imply real literacy.
Present evidence thus suggests that the alphabet was intro-
duced to an illiterate Greek world, probably not very long before
750 BC. The common features between the various local Greek
alphabets — all of which from the very start add four or more
vowels, with other letters, to the vowel-less Phoenician alphabet
— further suggests that the innovation was originally diffused
through a single Greek source. There is room for some dis-
agreement as to the geographical setting of this event, between
the Levant on one hand and some part of the Aegean on the
other; and as to the identity of the first Greeks involved —
Euboians perhaps or Athenians, with Cretans a less likely pos-
sibility. But nevertheless the transmission of the alphabet to
Greece is relatively well understood, in comparison with another
and ultimately more significant problem: the motives for its
adoption. The evidence here is perplexing. Since the alphabet
unquestionably came from Phoenicia, and since Greek relations
with the Phoenicians appear to have been largely commercial in
nature, it is only natural itial iitaius for the
adoption of this writ é
with commerce: that Greek traders, for example, saw the com-
mercial advantages which their Phoenician counterparts were
deriving from recording and even transacting business in writ-
ing. This may be true of the very first steps in the process; and
the likelihood increases if (according to the currently prevailing
view) these steps were taken somewhere on the Levantine coast,
since the Greek settlers known to us at this time were largely
82 Archaic Greece

traders. Another argument in favour of this view is that the

script chosen as a model for the Greek one was the cursive
North Semitic version, used for business activity. On the other
hand, it must be observed, first, that none of the early surviving
Greek inscriptions has anything to do with commerce, and sec-
ond, that the commercial explanation does not satisfactorily
account for the distinctive feature of the Greek alphabet — one
which in the view of some purists makes it the first truly
alphabetic system: the addition of the vowels. The Phoenicians
and other Semitic peoples had long conducted their activities,
including commercial and religious transactions, with a conso-
nantal script, and continued to do so; the Etruscans, who pres-
ently adopted an alphabet based on the Greek, complete with
vowels, later became indifferent to the value of the vowels and
began to omit them; the Cypriots remained largely satisfied with
their syllabic script, whose unbroken survival from its Bronze
Age forbears one is tempted to ascribe to pure chance. What
gave the Greeks the urge to develop, before the date of the ear-
liest surviving alphabetic inscription, a complete set of six
vowel-signs (including both a long and a short e) and to retain
and even add to this range in later years?
The answer should lie in some peculiar feature of Greek soci-
ety at this time, but it is not easy to see which. The most impor-
tant features, the rise of the state with its need for an official
system of recording, and the proliferation of religious cult with
its attendant dedications, rituals and contributions, though both
would benefit from the availability of writing, do not seem
specific enough as explanations; and anyway it is some time
before we know of the Greeks using the alphabet for either pur-
pose. We might ask, too, whether either of them marked a suffi-
ciently radical departure from the earlier practices of the Phoeni-
cians. If one looks around for a unique feature of Greek society,
there is no doubt as to which is the first to offer itself: the epic.
To many, the suggestion that the peculiar features of the Greek
alphabet were designed as a notation for epic poetry appeared
far-fetched, when it was first voiced by H. T. Wade-Gery in
1952. The best arguments in its favour might seem to be the
Structural Revolution: the Material Evidence 83

frequency of verse-inscriptions in early Greek writing (see p.

79), and the fact that vowel-notation does indeed serve the pur-
pose of poetic communication — as will be apparent to anyone
who compares a critical edition or translation of the Iliad with
one of, say, the Psalms of David. It seems to me just possible
that this was the decisive factor in the Greek modification of the
alphabet, but only after commercial motives had inspired the
original desire to use alphabetic writing at all. If so, it offers an
illustration of the central place in eighth-century life that epic
poetry had now assumed and, indirectly, of the pervasive con-
cern with the Heroic Age. This explanation of the rise of the
Greek alphabet (and for that matter most others) presupposes a
vastly more extensive use of writing, both in length of texts and
in range of writing-material, than is reflected by our tiny sample
of early incised sherds and stones. But since a literary purpose
was best served by writing on perishable materials, especially
papyrus, the theory seems more plausible than, for instance,
those which would posit an extensive use of stone for public
inscriptions, none of which happens to have survived.
What is muc arer is habet, once adopted,
proved an enormous ARS to he progress of Greck society. By
making the art of reading and writing widely available, it
enabled organizations to communicate beyond the close circle of
those actually operating them, and individuals beyond their
immediate acquaintances. Governments could write down pro-
cedures and law-codes, cult-associations could record forms of
rituals and names of officials, sanctuaries could list their prop-
erty and record information of wider interest, as the priests of
Apollo may have done at Delphi (see p. 63). At the same
time, merchants could record payments, craftsmen sign their
products, property-owners publish their claims against potential
usurpers, poets set down their compositions. But permanency
did not necessarily mean immutability: on the contrary, once a
thing is set down in writing, it becomes inherently more open to
analysis and criticism than when it is secreted in the memories
of a specialist group. In this way alphabetic writing, despite the
fact that in our view it was adopted with no such intention,
84 Archaic Greece

must have made a considerable contribution to the speed of

development in the institutions of Archaic Greece. It provides a
final illustration of the way in which a discovery in one field can
precipitate advances in quite another. But only in the full
Archaic period, which forms the subject of the following chap-
ters, were the full effects to be seen.
 <>
The Just City?

The choice of patterns is made clear

Which the machine imposes, what
Is possible and what is not,
To what conditions we must bow
In building the Just City now.
(W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, iii)

By the seventh century BC, most of the decisive steps that were
to shape Greek civilization had already been taken. After the
tremendous structural changes of the later eighth century, sev-
eral generations were needed to absorb their full implications;
but because it was this process of absorption which carried
Greek civilization visibly ahead of its rivals and into uncharted
territory, its period is often styled the ‘Age of Revolution’. The
facts seem hardly to support such a description, which should
embrace as a central feature the idea of political revolution; and
that we do not really find in Archaic Greece. Experiment rather
than revolution is what distinguishes these years; for all their
undoubted vitality and originality, the developments took place
within certain accepted norms.
Of these last, one is of paramount importance: the fact that the
forms of state in Greece were now accepted. The implications of
this were wide. The state was the whole basis of society, the
society which in turn created every aspect of the Greek
achievement. Henceforward, few questioned that the proper
medium for true civilization was a network of small independent
states, and few could yet envisage the notion of a Panhellenic
culture. Once the multifarious pattern of polis and ethnos came
86 Archaic Greece

into being — the numbers ran into hundreds in Greece and the
Aegean alone, not counting colonies — then relatively little
occurred to alter it during the Archaic period. Occasionally a
small polis was swallowed up by a more powerful neighbour, or
a town within an ethnos would aspire to the status of an inde-
pendent polis, or even to the subordination of its fellow-
nationals; but as a whole the framework remained at least for-
mally secure, down to and beyond the end of Archaic times. The
early developments, the differences and the struggles took place
almost entirely within this framework: they concerned the form
of government, not the form of state. Of course there was inter-
state warfare as well; but its aim was much more often that of an
advantage, an ascendancy, even a hegemony for one’s own
state, rather than the complete eclipse of another one. Attempts
in this latter direction, as for example by Corinth against Megara
and later Epidauros (below, p. 92), usually ended in failure. It is
significant that the biggest successful war of outright conquest of
Greek by Greek was fought just before the general acceptance of
this political pattern: the Spartan conquest of Messenia, which
may even have resembled a traditional tribal conquest, in that
the later traditions about it show a certain lack of geographical
concentration, and make vague references to feuds and cattle-
rustling. Most other cases of the conquest, destruction or merg-
ing of independent states, by contrast, belong not to the Archaic
but to the Classical period.
There can be no doubt that much of the variety and richness
of Greek civilization arose from just this multiplicity of political
units. There were many different directions in which a state and
its constitution could develop and in Archaic Greece the choice
between these rested with the citizen-body, independent of out-
side pressure; probably no two states followed exactly the same
path. But who composed the citizen-body? This was the first
critical question, one so fundamental that it seems reasonable to
make it the basis of any classification of Archaic states. Already
there were many different answers to it in the different states;
but it should be frankly admitted that the largest group consists
of those for whom we have no reliable evidence at all.
The Just City? 87
We can, however, make a beginning by distinguishing first an
important group of states where there was a permanently sub-
jected population, excluded from citizenship and many other
rights, and broadly to be described as serfs. It is interesting to
find that they include states of every form, from an extremely
scattered and even primitive ethnos like that of the Thessalians,
to the island of Crete which in many opinions carried the polis
principle to excessive lengths. Predictably, the status of the serfs
was not identical in all these communities. We may begin with
Thessaly which, if only because we know less about it, appears
to be one of the more straightforward cases. A sizeable propor-
tion of the population, known as the penestai (‘toilers’ or ‘poor-
men’), seem to have been dependent peasants, contributing a
part of the produce of their land in return for certain minimal
rights. They occasionally served in warfare along with other
Thessalian troops but, at least according to Aristotle (Politics 1269
a 36), they were also repeatedly in revolt against tireir masters.
That is virtually all that is known about them, although there
was some ancient speculation as to how they came to find them-
selves in this posture of subjection: generally it was believed that
they represented an earlier stratum of population overlaid by the
arrival of the conquering Thessalians. Politically, Thessaly was
unusual in other ways, too — governed by a warrior aristocracy
who, at least on occasion, elected a war-leader called the tagos;
and surrounded by a population of outlying subject allies or
perioikoi, in addition to the serfs. There were numerous substan-
tial towns in Thessaly but instead of being independent they
were incorporated in a tribal state which was loosely-grouped,
huge by Greek standards, and at first entirely dominated by a
landed aristocracy.
These features, together with the subjugation of the penestai,
are. foreign and indeed repugnant to the accepted vision of the
civilized Greek state. Yet there is another side to the story. Thes-
saly might be culturally backward, but she was politically a
major force in early Archaic Greece. Her institution of serfdom
might be offensive, but it can be shown to have acted, here and
elsewhere, as an effective deterrent to the growth of another
88 Archaic Greece

equally unpleasant practice, chattel-slavery, which at the begin-

ning of the Archaic period was a more or less negligible factor,
but by its end had become a mainstay of many Greek states,
particularly those of the polis type. The warrior-characteristics of
the ruling element, the existence of perioikoi and of agricultural
serfs, also at times liable for military service, are paralleled in the
most powerful polis of the Archaic period, Sparta. All of this
may cause us to reflect critically on the traditional dichotomies
between polis and ethnos, ‘enlightened’ and ‘primitive’, ‘central’
and ‘peripheral’, in whose terms Greek history has often been
interpreted. The ethnos of the Thessalians is far less well-
documented than the polis of the Athenians, but both alike are
part of Archaic Greece and there may have been moments when
the prospects of the former would have looked the more favour-
able to a contemporary.
For all the greater complexity of the state and institutions of
Sparta, there can be no doubt whatever that the serfdom of the
Helots was equally essential to its existence. The difference here
is that the process of subjugation, or at least its later stages, had
happened recently enough to become a matter of historical
record rather than pseudo-historical surmise on the part of the
Greeks. Militant resistance and brutal repression are both recur-
rent and well-documented. In Thessaly we can only dimly
envisage the composition of the citizen-body: it obviously
excluded perioikoi and penestai, yet though dominated by the aris-
tocrats its scope was in due course extended to allow of a federal
assembly and subordinate bodies, which had their own special
centres of civic and political activity set aside in the towns. In
Sparta we can be much more precise: the system that emerged
there, although not without internal struggle and not earlier
than the seventh century BC, provided for an exceptionally
homogeneous citizen-body, the Spartiatai or homoioi (‘Equals’),
who were defined by the criteria of military function and pecul-
iar life-style as well as the expected one of landholding, and who
comprised a small minority (probably less than a fifth) of the
adult male population of the state. The excluded parties com-
prised, again, perioikoi and Helots, and some more obscure
The Just City? 89
groups of temporarily or permanently disenfranchised ‘Equals’:
the ‘Tremblers’ who had shown cowardice in battle and the
‘Inferiors’ who had failed to keep up with the property qualifica-
tion. But the status of these groups did not correspond exactly
with those in Thessaly: the Spartan perioikoi, in particular,
formed part of the Spartan state and enjoyed powers of local
government under it, rather than being mere external allies as in
Thessaly. For about three centuries, the Spartan system dis-
played a quite exceptional stability, helped in a marginal way by
the provisions which existed for promotion into (as well as
demotion from) the citizen body.
Argos, Lokris and the numerous cities of Crete may provide
further examples of what we may call the exclusive pattern of
citizenship. In Argos, once again, we hear of perioikoi and of an
additional tribe, composed of a different stock from the main
Argive citizen body and perhaps not admitted to citizenship
until the fifth century; and again there is what may be a serf or,
perhaps more probably, another under-privileged citizen class,
the gymnesioi or ‘Light-armed’. But the organization of the state
is obscure here, and even more so in the ethnos of the Lokrians.
Only the Cretan cities offer further detailed information. Here
we find the whole gamut of non-citizen groups: the disenfran-
chised, the perioikoi, and not just one but two classes of serf, the
public- and the privately-owned. All these cases — Thessaly,
Sparta, Argos, Lokris, Crete — show a high correlation with
some further important features: first, they were ‘conquest-
states’, in that their main population spoke the Dorian and
north-western dialects of Greek which were held, rightly or
wrongly, to belong to the last great immigrant groups which had
occupied their homelands at the end of the Heroic Age. Thus the
differential treatment of ‘indigenous’ peoples could be explained_
if not justifed. Secondly, they all had deep-rooted and lasting
aristocratic tendencies in their government, often with leanings
towards militarism too. The great ruling clans of Thessaly, with
their baronial estates, retained their grip on the country into the
Classical period; so did the ‘Hundred Families’ who ruled Lok-
ris, with the aid of an assembly of the entire Lokrian citizen-
90 Archaic Greece

body, revealingly named the Thousand. In Argos, there was an

all-powerful oligarchy until near the end of the Archaic period,
and it elected from its number a small executive of magistrates
called demiourgoi or ‘public workers’. The Cretan cities had a
similar practice, with annually-elected kosmoi (‘Marshals’) chosen
from the ruling clan (startos or ‘host’) — both of them significantly
military titles. Only in Sparta was there even the show of inter-
nal egalitarianism among the ‘Equals’; indeed, although by Clas-
sical times it had come to look restrictive, at the time of its first
institution this will have appeared an unusually broadly-based
citizen body; in the seventh century even the cry for redistribu-
tion of land, that ultra-radical slogan whose implementation was
normally only possible under a tyranny (below, p. 97), was
raised in Sparta. The trouble was that the reality did not for long
match even this limited ideal; and ever wider discrepancies, both
in wealth and in political influence, appeared within the body of
the ‘Equals’. The third recurrent feature is the survival of some
notion of monarchy — again, usually with explicit military over-
tones. The famous dual kingship of the Spartans and the elected
war-lord of the Thessalians are clear examples. But in Argos,
too, a hereditary monarchy survived later than in most places;
and, even when it was abolished, a system of elective kingship
took its place for a time. In some of the cities of Crete, also, there
are signs that kingship lasted well into the Archaic period. The
correlation of all these phenomena may be inexact, but the
group of states which exhibits them is an important and distinct
one, offering a model of conservative political development. As
such, it shows what might have been the general result, had the
more radical developments in other Archaic states never hap-
pened. There might have been considerable political and military
achievements, on this hypothesis, but not many cultural ones;
much of the impact, one feels, would have been of local and
short-term significance only, particularly if exclusiveness shaded
into xenophobia, as at Sparta: just a few ideas would have
attracted wider notice. The total achievement might have com-
pared with that of the Etruscan or Phoenician cities.
The exclusive pattern of citizenship is repeated, in a slightly
The Just City? 91
different form and with different origins, in another distinct
group of states: those of colonial type, including the settlements
of the Ionian migration which were, strictly speaking, pre-
colonial. The pattern is widespread, though not universal,
among these cities, and it derives from the fundamental fact that
they were planted among alien populations. Theoretically
(although this first alternative was seldom taken) the indigenous
peoples could be assimilated entirely into the state; they could
be excluded from citizenship but allowed to remain within the
state’s territory on terms of peaceful intercourse; they could be
allowed to remain as dependent serfs; or they could be expelled
altogether. The second of these alternatives was common, but a
significant number of Greek colonial settlements is known to
have taken the third, reducing the native element to serfdom
and sometimes even empowering the citizens to buy and sell
them. We hear of this relationship most explicitly at Syracuse
(with the Sicilian Killyrioi), at Byzantion on the Bosporos (with
the Bithynians) and at Herakleia on the south shore of the Black
Sea (with the Mariandynoi); it is probably not significant that
these, and others such as Gela where the policy was also based
on force, were all colonies of Dorian Greeks; certainly there is
little sign of an internal political system such as existed in the
group of homeland Dorian states that we have just considered,
and anyway there is more than a suspicion that similar methods
were used in some of the cities of Ionia too, such as Miletos with
its native Gergithes. More probably, the truth was simply that
non-Greeks were seen as, by definition, unsuited to partnership
in any form of Archaic state, the polis most of all.
On the other side, we can define a large group of Archaic
states where the citizen body was allowed to become much more
broadly-based. The clearest test of citizenship was membership
of the Assembly, and it was characteristic of the progressive
states that they allowed the Assembly to increase in size and,
eventually, in powers as well. Inevitably it is at Athens that we
find our best example of this group; but there are glimpses from
other states, showing that there too the citizen body was grow-
ing. There was nothing in the least inevitable about this growth:
92 Archaic Greece

the starting-point of development was in some respects quite

close to that of the ‘exclusive citizenship’ states and, as time
went on, there could have been assimilation in other respects
too.
To give examples: in early Corinth, under the rule of the Bac-
chiads (c. 747-657 BC), citizenship was strictly confined to the
adult males of the Bacchiad clan, which probably included some
200 families. Here was an aristocracy as exclusive as almost any
of those that we previously considered (p. 89). The numerous
body of outsiders, increasingly resentful as the years passed,
eventually brought about its downfall by means of a tyranny.
But things might have gone the other way, with the aboriginal,
non-Dorian element in Corinth reduced to serfdom on the
model of Sparta or Crete. Much later, with the fall of the tyranny
(c. 585), we find an oligarchic régime in control; but it is
broader-based than the aristocracy of the Bacchiads had been
and, although the effective power remained concentrated in rela-
tively few hands, there was at least a full citizen body now in
existence too. For this, Corinth probably had her tyrants to
thank; certainly Kypselos, the first of them, was credited with
having re-distributed land, and the equation of landownership
with citizenship will have given this wider implications. Two
other neighbours of Corinth, both of which had undergone
tyrannies and both of which had also suffered brief periods of
actual subjugation to Corinth, show similar developments.
Epidauros had an extremely narrow ruling-class of 180 men (or
perhaps families); sometimes this is interpreted as the number of
the Assembly and thus of the total citizen body, but it seems
more likely that our defective evidence has preserved memory
only of a smaller Council, with whom the real power resided
and who called a full Assembly only when they chose to. That
was the usual arrangement in oligarchies and, as at Epidauros, it
could be even more restrictive than in an ‘exclusive citizenship’
state like Sparta. But the point is that, unlike Sparta, it had the
potential for reform, by re-allocation of powers, in the direction
of liberalization and even democracy. So, too, with the other
neighbour, Megara: here we learn from the poetry of the diehard
The Just City? 93
Theognis that, in the second half of the sixth century at least, the
citizen body had been enlarged to a degree repugnant to him,
and political power was temporarily in the hands of non-
aristocrats.
The case of Athens, however, is sufficiently well documented
to show us, not only what happened, but also what might
otherwise have happened. The foundation of the Athenian state
and the expansion of its population in the later eighth century
(pp. 23, 24) proved to have been in some respects premature.
The ruling aristocrats had behaved like men of their time in ter-
minating the monarchy during the eighth century; while the
far-sighted unification of the state, and the extension of citizen-
ship to the free male population of all Attica, were actions well
ahead of the times. By the seventh century, the same aristocrats,
presiding oppressively over a more or less stagnant society, have
an air of living in the past. The opportunity to participate in the
great wave of western colonization had, rightly or wrongly, not
been taken. The evidence of the graves gives reason for thinking
that the rise in population had stopped, rather abruptly, after
700. Only when the second wave of colonial ventures, in the
north and east, was far advanced did Athens make her small
and almost posthumously late intervention, with the founda-
tions of Sigeion and Elaious at the Hellespont. There was little
overseas trade: the great natural harbour of the Piraeus, almost
unbelievably, had not yet been brought into use; and Athens
relied on the open roadstead of Phaleron. An attempt at setting
up a tyranny, by Kylon in 631, was a fiasco because the people,
instead of supporting him, united in suppressing the coup; but
the fact remained that the disparity in wealth among the popula-
tion was now acute: trouble in some form was bound to erupt.
Large numbers of poorer Athenians were reduced to the state of
debt-bondage: some at least were hektémoroi, compelled to pay
over one-sixth of their produce to their creditors, on pain of
being sold into slavery (often abroad) in case of default. Many
had fled into exile to avoid this fate. It seemed that Athens was
regressing into the pattern of the serf-based states.
What prevented this happening was the inspired decision,
 Archaic Greece

which must have been formally taken by the ruling aristocracy,

but probably under pressure from the citizen body as a whole, to
appoint one of their number, Solon, as annual magistrate
(archon) with special powers of arbitration. Solon was an excep-
tional man for his class and epoch: a thinker, a poet and a
businessman with widespread foreign connections. It was his
decisions which set Athens on the path to the exceptional
achievements of the next two hundred years. He saw that the
strength of Athens lay in the number and potentialities of her
citizens, and that at all costs their individual rights must be
restored and protected. This was done by the abolition of the
debts, by the redemption of the Athenians sold into slavery, and
by the prohibition of such practices in the future. He is also said
to have introduced (or more probably restored) the right of the
poorest citizens to vote in the Assembly. At the other end of the
scale, he introduced a major reform of the Athenian ruling class:
eligibility for the highest magistracies (and thus also for the
Council of the Areopagus which was made up of retired magis-
trates) was now decided on a basis of agricultural wealth, not of
aristocratic descent. Lesser privileges were allocated on the same
criterion but at a lower level, and among these were the power
to elect to a second Council, the Four Hundred, and to hear
appeals against the legal judgments of magistrates. We shall
consider something of the economic effects of his reforms in the
next chapter. Posterity has come to regard Solon as a man of
peace and a gradualist, and he did suffer the fate of so many
‘moderates’ in being attacked from both sides. His own image
for his plight, however, was that of a wolf at bay among a pack
of hounds; we need not doubt that the crisis in Athens had been
a desperate one.
That his solution could be thought of, in some quarters, as
insufficiently radical is a tribute to the progressive acts of his
predecessors in other cities, some of them unknown to us,
others paradoxically familiar in the guise of the tyrants, to whom
we shall turn presently. Meanwhile, let us note two other cities
where measures reminiscent of Solon’s are attested at much the
same epoch, and thus betoken similar conditions. Mytilene, on
The Just City? 95

the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos, was in one of the regions of

Greece where non-Greek serf- or slave-labour was available; her
citizen body is therefore unlikely to have been reduced to the
same straits as that of Athens. Many other things had gone
wrong, however: aristocratic feuding had torn the city apart and
two short-lived tyrannies had been set up. When the citizens of
Mytilene, perhaps following the recent Athenian example,
elected Pittakos with powers of arbitration, they did so for a
ten-year term instead of one year. Pittakos, lacking Solon’s liter-
ary gifts, has been commemorated largely in the testimony of his
political enemy, the poet Alkaios. Despite this hostile bias, he
emerges as a peer for Solon. Alkaios’s gibes of ‘tyrant’ and
‘low-born’ are contradicted by other evidence: like Solon, Pit-
takos was an aristocrat who could see the limitations of aristocra-
tic politics; like Solon, he introduced legislation against the
extravagance of the rich, and then peacefully abdicated his
powers, leaving his city still an oligarchy but a more settled one.
Both men were rewarded by being later numbered among the
Seven Sages. We know far fewer details here but, judged by
the results, Pittakos may have been, on his own terms, at least
as successful as Solon in the long run. Chios, the next island to
the south of Lesbos, furnishes evidence of a quite different kind:
a famous inscription, dating fromc. 575-550 BC, fragmentary but
tell-tale, which provides for an elected Council of the Assembly,
and lays down its duties as, among others, to meet monthly, to
transact the affairs of the people, to exact penalties and to hear
appeals against the magistrates’ verdicts. If there was an element
of Athenian influence on Chios here, then the next episode may
have seen a reversal of the influence; for the tradition was that
the men of Chios were the first to practise chattel-slavery on a
large scale, and it is not long before the men of Athens were
following suit.
That political progress should result in an increase of
enslavement is shocking to modern notions; but in the eyes of
most Greeks, the important feature of this kind of slavery was
that it mainly involved barbarians and foreigners, and was thus
clearly preferable to the reduction of fellow-Greeks to serfdom
96 Archaic Greece

or slavery. For the historian, every institution should be judged

primarily against the effective alternatives available at the time.
So too with tyranny; we shall return to this topic later (pp.
111-16), but at this point a few basic facts about the Archaic tyr-
ants can be appropriately stated.
First, the institution of tyranny took its name from a foreign
language, probably Lydian; at the very beginning it may have
been used simply as another word for kingship, but the first
sense that we can definitely identify is that of a special kind of
monarchy, one that was usurped by force and not inherited.
Monarchy did not have the unacceptable overtones in the Greek
states that it did in, say, republican Rome: for one thing, the
extinction of the early kingships in the various states had been
gradual and, it seems, usually peaceful; for another, monarchy
of a kind still persisted in a number of the more conservative
states, as we have seen (p. 90). ‘Tyranny does not exist in the
order of nature,’ says Aristotle loftily (Politics 1287 b 39); it is
certainly a pity that we do not have more guidance from him
over this vital new development. For the truth is that itwas”
through tyranny that most Greek states had their first taste é
radical policies and, conversely, there were few leading progres-
sive states which had not passed through a phase of tyranny at
some stage in the Archaic period, though usually it was of fairly
brief duration. There is a strong modern tendency to regard
tyranny as a widespread but not a very positive phenomenon.
This is partly because it had no specific constitutional framework
associated with it (hence Aristotle’s lack of interest), but was
simply superimposed on whatever constitution the state in ques-
tion currently had. That said, however, one must go on to ack-
nowledge that the tyrants used their power to enforce changes
which, in good time, transformed societies and even constitu-
tions. We have already seen the example of Kypselos of Corinth
(p. 92): by redistributing the land of the now-exiled aristocrats
who had hitherto monopolized the government (and, one sus-
pects, much of the territory too) he not only averted potential
serfdom but made possible the growth of a class of prosperous
smallholders, who made up Corinth’s notable citizen-army. His
The Just City? 97

son and successor, Periander, besides completely reversing the

foreign policy of the earlier aristocracy, is represented in one
episode (Herodotus v, 92) as seeking to undertake a reform of
government, before resorting to more drastic methods.
Other tyrants too, such as Periander’s father-in-law Prokles of
Epidauros, Theagenes of Megara and even Peisistratos of Athens
a century later, are vaguely associated in our sources with such
questions as land-reform and grazing-rights. In several cities,
the tyrant’s desire to increase the numbers of his adherents may
have led him to extend citizenship more widely — to the land-
less, to the disenfranchised, to foreigners. Certainly, by Solon’s
time, redistribution of land in particular had become tarnished
by its close association with tyranny, and was therefore to be
avoided by a man who wished himself to avoid the charge of
despotism. Thus Solon in the 590s was seen to be acting less
radically than Kypselos sixty years earlier. Politically, the tyrants
were not initiators so much as catalysts for forces which would
have erupted in some form anyway; it is the high incidence of
tyranny per se which is the most significant political phenome-
non, emphasizing as it does the utter dissatisfaction with the
methods of the ruling aristocracies, in state after state, on the
part of those citizen bodies who had some means of expressing
their feelings.
There was at least one common element in the make-up of
every Greek state, which had a bearing on every distinctive fea-
ture, not excluding the form of the state itself: this was warfare
and the armed forces. We can detect its operation in countless
incidental names and phrases. The ruling-class in some aristo-
cratic states was known collectively as ‘Knights’, ‘Horse-rearers’
and by other such names. The magistrates and the ruling
families could have revealing titles in conservative societies like
Crete, as we have seen (p. 90), but not only there: in many states
the word for the assembly of the people was the same as that for
the army (stratos). The word for ‘tribe’ (phylé) also served for
‘regiment’ on the battlefield. The kings of Sparta were called not
only ‘kings’, but also by the old title ‘war-lord’ or ‘commander’
(archagetas). When the Delphic oracle wished to insult Kleis-
98 Archaic Greece

thenes, tyrant of Sikyon, it called him a ‘skirmisher’ (literally,

‘stone-thrower’). All of this suggests the underlying presence of
a military hierarchy, which indeed was the case; but there was
more than that. The original and most important raison d’étre of
Greek kingship had been for the king to lead the tribe and
(where he survived in existence long enough) the state in war-
fare. What brought this role to an end was probably — although
this is an obscure and controversial matter — the general rise of
equitation, which was at all events an episode that took place
during the dark age and becomes detectable at its end.
Once the ownership of horses offered a man the chance of
actually riding on horseback — in place of the more costly, cum-
bersome and unreliable practice of chariotry — then military and
social conditions were transformed. It is a debated question
whether a phase of true cavalry warfare, in which a warrior
actually fought from horseback, ever existed in early Greece; the
balance of recent opinion is against it. But even without this, the
advantages conferred on the rider were enormous. Strategically,
he could travel further, faster and with less effort than the foot-
soldier; tactically, he could hope (in the words of a famous
American cavalry commander) to ‘git thar fust with the mostest
men’, even when he dismounted for the actual fighting. Further
differentiation existed in the horse-owning classes: spare mounts
were needed and with horses (as aristocrats still meaningly
observe today) breeding really counts. So, in Aristotle’s words,
‘we ask how many horses a man keeps’ (Politics 1289 b 35): and,
he goes on, ‘horse-rearing is always expensive’. For a time, war-
fare seems to have become almost the preserve of those who
fulfilled these conditions, and they were of course the aristocrats.
But their phase of supremacy is not well-documented, and
was probably a short one, except in some outlying regions
where it survived almost indefinitely. Homer, who must have
witnessed it in part, almost entirely excludes it from his story,
no doubt because it was too recent a development to be approp-
riate for his heroic society; indeed, a recent theory holds that his
suppression of the ridden horse in warfare, though systematic,
is So conscious and artificial that we can detect tell-tale traces of
The Just City? 99
it in what purport to be descriptions of chariotry. Hesiod,
another presumed witness, is not concerned with the battlefield;
and by the time of the military poets of the seventh century,
such as Archilochos and Tyrtaios, we find that Greek warfare
has entered its next stage of development — one in which cavalry
indeed persisted within the restraints imposed by dismounting to
fight, but where the developments in infantry warfare had
seized the military initiative, permanently as far as Archaic
Greece was concerned, and so exposed the limitations of a
cavalry which could not similarly develop.
This last change was the most momentous in early Greek war-
fare, even (in some opinions) in Archaic Greek history as a
whole. Since it involves a substantial and costly product, bronze
defensive armour, it also puts us back into contact with the mat-
erial evidence, thus imposing a check on the very indirect writ-
ten testimonies as well as offering a number of insights which
would otherwise escape us altogether. The first archaeological
fact to emerge is that the introduction of the new armour almost
(but not quite) coincides with the discontinuation of burial with
arms (p. 53), a fact of some social significance. It means that the
time-honoured and individualistic desire to give a man the dis-
tinctive attributes of a warrior, in death as in life, had given way
to something more practical and broadly-based: the realization
that the self-esteem of the dead is less important than the needs
of the living, especially when costly materials and long hours of
is eemecrins ceemae into me products in question. If a
man’s arms could be handed on, to remain in the service of the
state, then all alike would benefit; thus the needs of the com-
munity were given preference over those of the family, and
above all of the aristocratic family, which had particularly sub-
scribed to the warrior ethic. A new spirit was abroad; if I may
again quote from a poem of Auden’s:
Nobody I know would like to be buried
with a silver cocktail shaker,
a transistor radio and a strangled
daily help,....
About the House, ii, ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’
 100 Archaic Greece

There may be another factor as well: aristocrats may no longer

have seen themselves as warriors before all else, but rather as ©
leaders of the new community in all itss functions. They certainly
appear to have dropped the practice, at about this time or
shortly after, of going about their ordinary daily business armed.
The coincidence between these two changes is not quite exact,
te 15 however. Shortly before 700 BC we have two graves at Argos in
which pieces of the new bronze defensive armour were included
in graves, and there may have been one or two others excavated
long ago elsewhere. After 700, as one would expect from the
social systems involved, burial with arms continues sporadically
in the more conservative states of ethnos type: we have fully-
fledged panoply-burials of the seventh and sixth centuries in
western Achaia and Lokris, and we have: what look like more
economical compromises in several regions — Crete, Thera in
the Cyclades, Cyprus - where men who may have worn a
bronze panoply in battle are buried with the more expendable
offensive weapons only. This evidence suggests that the new
bronze armour began its life in the more advanced states, and
continued in the less advanced ones, in association with the aris-
tocratic warrior-ethic. If this were so, we should expect to find
some association with the horse as well; and so we occasionally
do, although it was not until ten years ago that one of the vital
pieces of evidence came to light: a late eighth-century Attic vase,
on which a rider is shown clad in the metal cuirass of the
newly-adopted shape, and leading a second horse behind him.
He is presumably an example of the aristocratic ‘cavalryman’,
who will in practice dismount to fight while his mounted squire
(symbolized by the second horse) will look after both horses.
Already it had been seen that a number of other contemporary
Athenian vases show mounted men wearing helmets, which
were easier for the painter to indicate. In later centuries, when
styles of painting became more expressive, we see numerous
portrayals of these panoplied riders, often explicitly attended by
an unarmed squire; doubtless they attract the painters’ attention
for their social, not their numerical prominence, for by this time
it is clear from our historical sources that cavalry were seldom
The Just City? 101

the decisive arm in Greek warfare. The specialism of a few ter

ions like Thessaly and Macedonia kept alive the art of true
cavalry and the associated breeding techniques, but seldom
applied them successfully away from their home ground. At
least two Thessalian attempts at southward expansion were
defeated by the Phokian and Boiotian infantry. On a famous
occasion in 511 BC, Thessalian allied cavalry won a decisive vic-
tory for the Athenian tyrant Hippias over the invading Spartan
army (Herodotus v 63); but, significantly, only after the plain of
Phaleron had been specially prepared and cleared for the charge
— an attempt to repeat the experiment a year later met with
total disaster. Elsewhere, the use of ‘mounted infantry’ was
continued, and at times combined with true cavalry; a few
further states — certain Ionian cities, Boiotia, Chalkis and Eretria
in Euboia — had a reputation for higher standards than the
average.
How was it that the mere development of bronze defensive
armour brought about such a dramatic shift of power on Greek
battlefields? On its own, it could never have done so. What gave
such effect to this change was, first, the social and economic
position in which the more prosperous Greek states were
already placed and, secondly, the growth of a new form of milit-
ary tactics. The former point becomes clear once we realize that
the primary aspect of bronze armour was its costliness; the
number of people who could afford it turned out to be very con-
siderably greater than the number of people who had hitherto
been engaged in warfare and since landownership was over-
whelmingly the most important category of wealth, this means
that there were numerous substantial landowners who were not
aristocrats. But substantial they had to be: the making of a
bronze panoply required days of work, done to close specifica- Plate
tion, on the part of a highly skilled artisan using expensive raw
materials. That the state did not normally equip a whole army
with panoplies is both a tribute to their cost and a sign of the low
level of taxation or other revenue in the early states.
But what incentive can have existed to bring these land-
owners out to war? The ultimate answer is that it was one of the
 102 Archaic Greece

conditions of the survival of the state and one of the burdens of

citizenship, that all should serve who could; but were those the
terms in which the proposition was put in the mid-seventh cen-
tury BC? Much more probably the ruling aristocracies, who had
themselves (as we have seen) tried out the equipment, decided
to broaden their military base by calling on the help of men who,
while they could not afford to mount themselves, could turn out
on foot, sufficiently protected with armour, alongside the aris-
tocrats. The Council would decree the necessary property cen-
sus; then the word would go out that all men who were above a
certain qualifying level were to find themselves a suit of armour.
Reluctance could be overcome in several ways: most obviously,
by ruling that certain rights of citizenship, hitherto taken for
granted, would in future be restricted to those who complied
with the military requirements. To this, those who qualified
would have a very strong counter-condition: it must be the state
that they served, not an aristocratic grouping and not for some
purpose of civil strife. But different arguments would apply in
different cases. Where development had been slower and there
were fewer privileges to withdraw, then aristocratic disfavour
might serve instead: a man who could truthfully say ‘I am your
landlord, judge, priest and commander; in future I shall require
your help to defend my property; and (assuming that you agree
to serve) your own will be looked after too’ — such a man could
offer persuasive arguments. They could also, indeed, be applied
in the interests of other groups besides the state as a whole, and
we do find cases of armoured infantry taking part in the civil
wars of aristocratic factions.
The other main factor is that of tactics. Here we must appreci-
ate that, ever since infantry had existed, some kind of primitive
tactical formation, usually in parallel ranks, must have been
desirable. It is ranks of this form which Homer presumably
denotes by his repeated use of the word phalanges, for the largely
passive and ineffectual infantrymen of the Iliad. What was now
developed was a real ‘phalanx’ in the sense in which we under-
te 11 stand the word today: a close-order formation, several ranks
deep. The offensive weapon was the spear which, whether used
The Just City? 103
for throwing or thrusting, requires the minimum of lateral space;
the main defence, more important even than body-armour, was
a shield large enough to form an almost continuous surface
when the men closed up; it was round, with a double grip, for
the left fore-arm as well as the hand. The individual infantryman
took his name, hoplités, from the hoplon or shield. But at this Plat
point we enter an area of controversy: was the shield invented
with phalanx tactics in mind? Or, in other words, do the tactics
of the phalanx go back to the very earliest appearance of this
type of shield? We cannot answer this question from the external
evidence, which merely tells us that the form of shield had been
invented before 700 BC — almost as early as the metal breastplate
and helmet, and taking us back into what we would otherwise
judge to be the era of supremacy of the mounted aristocrat. The
tactics, on the other hand, are not unmistakably to be seen in
representations until some way on in the following century,
when they appear on Corinthian vases with a frequency which
suggests that they were an innovation. One might add that the
arrangement of double handles, which is the most distinctive
feature of this type of shield, appears (at least in later art) on the
shields of many other types of soldier than the heavy infantry-
man in phalanx formation; it is even seen on the arm of the Plat
Greek peltastés or skirmisher, who by definition operated in
loose array. It cannot therefore be said to be incompatible with
individual combat, as is often claimed.
These are less than conclusive arguments. But a different line
of argument leads to similar results. The phalanx tactics can
hardly ever, for reasons of numbers, have been used in exclu-
sively aristocratic forms of warfare. So the crucial modifications
of the shield — adding the arm-band and increasing the size and
weight of an existing type of round shield — were either
designed to improve the aristocrats’ equipment or else brought
into immediate mass-production with the specific aim of equip-
ping a whole infantry phalanx, drawn from the lesser land-
owners as well as the aristocrats. This latter alternative would
posit a triple coincidence: of the political will to broaden the corps
d’élite of the army; of the military insight to devise a new forma-
 104 Archaic Greece

tion that would promote the strength of the new force; and of
the technical skill to invent a shield-type that would in turn
promote the formation. The other explanation, which involves
no such coincidence, therefore seems the more plausible, espe-
cially as there is positive evidence so much earlier for the shield
than for the phalanx.
If this is right, then we have to make sense of the shield and
the rest of the bronze panoply as a series of technical improve-
ments, initially adopted by the ruling aristocracies to strengthen
their domination of the battlefield. There were cultural reasons
why these steps were taken now and not earlier: not so much
the availability of bronze, for the dedications of the giant bronze
ate 2 tripod-cauldrons — at Olympia, Delphi, Delos, the Athenian
Akropolis and Ithaka — had been going on in considerable num-
bers and for about a century beforehand; more probably, it was
the encounter with other peoples who were making sporadic use
of the same ideas, both to the west and to the east of the Greek
worid. Chieftains in Iron Age Italy were wearing bronze helmets
and probably breastplates when the first Greek settlers arrived
there, and it has been recently shown that a few of their
accoutrements ended up as dedications in Greek sanctuaries;
while whole armies of Assyrians, equipped with bronze-faced
shields and metal helmets were now appearing on the eastern
Mediterranean seaboard. Sometimes it may have been actual
clashes of arms which brought home to the Greeks the advan-
tages of bronze armour. At some point, too, a contribution may
have come from the unlikely source of their own collective
memory, as enshrined in epic poetry. Two rarer additions to the
panoply, bronze greaves and metal ankle-guards, had been
worn by Mycenaeans, are mentioned in the epic, and were pres-
ently revived in Archaic Greece. There are no likely outside
sources in this case, and a purely Greek transmission seems
more probable.
None of the pieces of armour was unthinkingly borrowed;
there was always some intelligent modification, whether by the
invention of the double shield-handle or merely by the elimina-
tion of unnecessary surface-decoration on breastplates and
The Just City? 105
shield-facings. Helmets developed a more close-fitting and less
top-heavy contour, thus again putting function before ostenta-
tion. A developed Greek helmet, of the Corinthian type espe- Plate
cially, has that same extraordinary combination of economical
form and organic-looking curves which we can recognize in a
masterpiece of sixth-century Attic pottery: in the modern sense
of the phrase, it ‘has style’. More significant, perhaps, are the
economic implications of the new armour. Where was the
bronze to come from? The main answer seems to have been
through the abandonment of production of the great tripod-
cauldrons which had been piling up in Greek sanctuaries since
the beginning of the eighth century.
Towards the end of that century, the variety and quality of
these objects reaches a peak, but then production tails off rather
rapidly and two new phenomena make their appearance: firstly,
from shortly before 700, imported Oriental cauldrons, on sepa-
rate stands, are found in quantities large enough to replace, in
part, the native Greek products; and secondly, the dedication of
helmets, shields and other armour begin to appear in force.
Finds in graves or settlements are extremely rare (cf. p. 53
above), and it is the sanctuaries which provide the overwhelm-
ing bulk of the evidence; of these, Olympia is easily the most
prolific site for this kind of dedication. It may be worth giving
some figures of the finds there, dividing the material into arbit-
rary periods of equal length since the chronology, being based
on style, is imprecise:

c.800-725 c.725-650 c.650-575 c.575-500 — (Date of

latest
publication)
Tripod-cauldrons c.280 c.240 - - (1957)
Oriental cauldron- attachments ~ 58 2 - (1966)
Early conical helmets - i - - (1967)
‘Illyrian’ helmets - 30 Uf ils} (1967)
Corinthian helmets - WA c.65 Oar (1964)
Hoplite shields ~ 8 frags. c.90+ c.80 frags. (1964)
Breast- and back-plates - 2 c.10 ilee (1960)
Decorated Hoplite shield
arm-bands - - 35+ 40+ (1950)
106 Archaic Greece

Although the available publications are not equally up to date

in all cases (right-hand column), the picture is reasonably clear.
From a date in the region of 675 BC, the dedications of the
monumental tripod-cauldrons seem to come to an abrupt end.
By that time, the role that they performed had been partly taken
over by Oriental imports, while the practice of dedicating bronze
helmets (but not other armour) had become quite common. Not
until the mid-seventh century did the main wave of armour-
dedications begin, with the appearance en masse of breastplates
and other armour such as greaves (not show here), of the
improved helmets of Corinthian type, and above all of the
characteristic hoplite shields, the most important single item. If
Olympia is a reliable guide, it would seem that these years at the
mid-century witnessed the widespread appearance of the hop-
lite phalanx, as was argued above. It must be conceded, how-
ever, that experiments in the handling of massed infantry had
been undertaken before this: an observant critic has recently
drawn attention to the presence, in a battle-scene on a Corin-
thian vase of about 675, of a piper — an indispensable participant
in the later Spartan phalanx where his music kept the men in
step, and therefore perhaps a sign of incipient phalanx tactics,
although the moral-boosting effect of military pipers, as modern
parallels show, is not confined to those operating in close forma-
tion. What, though, is the significance of the dedications of
bronze helmets of earlier types, shown in the second column of
the table? Surely they are examples of just that sort of improve-
ment in equipment which the traditional warrior class would
adopt, and to which the isolated earlier shields and breastplates
from elsewhere in Greece (above, pp. 100, 103) also testify. Both
the conical and the so-called ‘Illyrian’ helmets are open-faced
types, suited to men operating independently; whereas the
Corinthian type, encasing the whole head except for small aper-
tures for the eyes and mouth, bought greater protection at the
price of restricting the wearer’s vision and hearing, besides con-
ferring on him an anonymity that was, in turn, partly relieved
by the use of individual devices on the shield. After a time, it
seems that this price was found to be acceptable, if the disadvan-
The Just City? 107

tages could be offset by the solidarity of the phalanx. It is not in

the nature of military innovation for essentially defensive
devices such as these to outpace the offensive capacities of the
enemy; SO we may see these developments as reactions, origi-
nally to the attacking power of the long swords and spears of the
eighth century, and perhaps to that of cavalry as well; and later,
to the vulnerability of the individual man-at-arms.
This change, great in its implications, must not be regarded as
revolutionary in intention: as it was defensive militarily, so it
was politically neutral as a conception. By calling on others to
join them on the battlefield, the aristocrats can have had little
notion that they were thereby jeopardizing the structure of soci-
ety: it was only a small sector of the community, after all, who
could afford the equipment necessary for that kind of warfare.
Their assumptions, too, could well have been correct: elsewhere
in the ancient world, phalanx-tactics were adopted without any
apparent disturbance of the old order, and even in the Greek
world the new military system was sometimes harnessed to a
political régime which then underwent little change. But in other
cases it was a very different story: the military reform came to be |
associated, at least by Aristotle, with the earliest steps on the
road to democracy. Yet we cannot regard it as the very first step:
that place must be given to a purely intellectual development,
the realization that there were alternatives to unsatisfactory aris-
tocratic rule. The military reform, as has been well observed,
merely provided a means for bringing such alternatives into
effect, when a hundred war-hardened aristocrats suddenly
found themselves in confrontation, not only with their opposite
numbers in a neighbouring state, but with a thousand well-
armed commoners in their own. A possible solution lay in com-
promise; but in some cities events had already moved too fast
for that. The military reform falls close in time to another, more
notorious phenomenon of the age: the rise of tyranny.
Before we consider the complex relation between these two
developments, there are other results of the military reform to be
mentioned. First, the inter-state and even the international bal-
ance of power was transformed by the military change. There
108 Archaic Greece

was no reason why the states with a prominent military aristoc-

racy should be the same as those which could put into the field a
powerful yeoman force of heavy infantry; and events show that
it was otherwise. Chalkis and Eretria in Euboia, with their aris-
tocrats whose traditional names of ‘Horsemen’ and ‘Horse-
grazers’ were still remembered by Aristotle, begin to decline
from the status of major powers in Greek politics from about this
time; despite the copper-mines which allegedly gave Chalkis her
name, there is little sign that she was a major producer of bronze
armour. The cities of Ionia, which had displayed precocious fea-
tures in some aspects of the development of the Greek state and
were to continue to do so in others, make a poor showing in
land-warfare from now on; they too had been famed as centres
of horse-breeding, but they offer significantly little archaeologi-
cal evidence for armour, and they later proved unable to defend
their independence for long against invaders. Thessalian cavalry
were a name to fear in the eighth century and later, but Thessaly
simply lacked the social structure which would have made it
possible to field a hoplite army: her aristocrats were too few, her
farmers too impoverished.
Instead, new powers came to the forefront, especially in the
Peloponnese. Two cities, Corinth and Argos, claim pride of
place because they gave their names to staple components of the
hoplite panoply. ‘Argive’ was the common name for the big
two-handled round shield which was to remain the standard
arm of the hoplite for over three centuries; here literary evidence
can be supported by art-historical arguments, which show excel-
lent grounds for connecting the regular decoration of the
shields, and particularly of their arm-bands, with Argos. Some-
where about this time, too, a low lens-shaped hill on the edge of
the city of Argos may have been re-named ‘Aspis’, the shield,
for its profile closely resembles the newly-adopted shape. Simi-
larly, ‘Corinthian’ was almost certainly the name by which the
commonest and most protective form of infantry helmet was
known in ancient Greece; here, too, there is some confirmatory
evidence in the frequency with which it is shown on Corinthian
vases and in the signs of Corinthian workmanship in at least one
The Just City? 109
group of the surviving examples. What this must mean is that
these two cities, taking a serious initiative in military innovation,
either originally pioneered or else later specialized in the mass-
production of the respective pieces of armour. If the former,
then the relevant date in both cases was the years shortly before
700 when each type first appeared; if the latter, then we should
think rather in terms of the middle and later seventh century.
Since this is in any case when the material evidence for the con-
nection with Argos and Corinth appears, the second is perhaps
the more likely alternative; certainly the two were major powers
within Greece by then.
Inexorably, however, they and other states were coming to be
overshadowed by Sparta. Late and perhaps reluctant in their
acceptance of the new military order, the Spartans — perhaps
under the duress of a desperate struggle in the Second Messe-
nian War — came to adopt it with an obsessive intensity. For
their unusually restricted concept of citizenship (pp. 88-90)
permitted a unique relation to exist: the citizen body, instead of
comprising a far wider group than the hoplite army, was actu-
ally a narrower one. Citizens who defaulted on their obligations
could be relegated to the ranks of “Tremblers’ and ‘Inferiors’, but
they still seem to have kept their places in the phalanx; non-
citizens — the perioikoi regularly, the Helots on occasion — could
be used to augment the hoplite army when heeded. Sparta may
well have instituted another unique feature in that the state and
not, as elsewhere, the individual soldier may have furnished the
panoply, at least on occasion. (When non-citizens were enrolled,
it certainly did so.) This was only one step in the long process
that converted Sparta into that strange phenomenon which was
to attract such admiration, envy or disgust on the part of other
Greeks and moderns alike; but militarily it was the most impor-
tant one. Together with their educational system, it enabled
Sparta’s citizens to make an almost total identification between a
uniform military role on the one hand and citizenship on the
other. Trained from birth as full-time infantry soldiers, insulated
from agricultural and other labour, they came to see the defence
of the state as an honoured privilege. On top of all this, the
110 Archaic Greece

enrolment of the periokoi meant that for a long time the Spartan
phalanx was actually bigger than that which any other single
state could put in the field. No wonder that by 500 Bc the Spar-
tan infantryman was a figure whose repute extended even to the
Persian capital, a thousand miles to the east.
This mention of the outside world raises a second point: as the
internal balance of power in Greece was changed by the reform, |
so too was the external relationship of Greeks with other peo-
ples. A few foreign powers acknowledged the breakthrough by
adopting the heavy armour and the tactics of the Greek infan-
tryman themselves; in one case, that of the Carians of south-
western Asia Minor, they did this so early that the Greeks
charitably credited them with having invented some elements of
the panoply; in another a little later (the Etruscans), the histori-
cal result of their having done so was momentous, since the
Romans borrowed the idea from them in turn. Most foreign
states, however, lacked the appropriate social system and did
not attempt to follow, though some pieces of the Greek hoplite’s
equipment proved to be adaptable, as mere hardware, to the
traditional practices of warfare. But it was the Greek infantry-
man himself who was found to be more widely exportable than
either ideas or objects on their own; in particular his services
were keenly sought in the role of mercenary. It may be signific-
ant that the earliest Greeks whom we find serving as mer-
cenaries abroad came from areas where the new military system,
though known, seems to have fallen short of full fruition,
whether military or political: that is, lonia and the islands of the
Aegean. The poet Archilochos of Paros at least envisaged serv-
ing as a mercenary; a group of Ionians and Carians who actually
did so in Egypt around 664 BC established a major precedent by
their action, for they played a leading part in bringing about a
change of dynasty and the new Pharaohs took to employing
them on a permanent basis. Their prestige may have spread
from Egypt: early in the next century we find Antimenidas of
Lesbos (brother of another poet, Alkaios) serving with distinc-
tion in the army of the king of Babylon. Mercenaries seldom
enjoy a favourable reputation, nor are they a good advertise-
The Just City? 111

ment for the health of society in their homeland; but the fact
remains that in the prowess of Greek heavy infantry, we have
the very earliest proof of recognition by foreign peoples of the
achievements of Archaic Greece.
Nor was this an entirely eccentric feature to choose. To a great
extent, the strength of an Archaic state was the strength of its
citizen infantry, and thus of the landowning middle class who
provided the infantry. There is certainly a loose correlation be-
tween the political achievements of the Greek states and their
prowess in the new form of warfare. For example, when we seek
to explain the surprising fact that Athens, so prominent in the
preceding and succeeding epochs, passes through a long period
of eclipse during the seventh century BC, we may note the evi-
dence for a deepening agrarian depression, and eventually of a
crisis, during these years (p. 93), and infer that the non-
aristocratic landowners of Athens were ineffective politically.
But they also appear to have been backward militarily, and
Athens’ indifferent military fortunes continued (notwithstanding
the laboured performance of an alliance of Thessalians, Athe-
nians and Sikyonians in defeating the little city of Kirrha in the
First Sacred War in the 590s) until her successful attack on Meg-
ara in about 565; and the commander in that campaign, Peisis-
tratos, was eventually to be rewarded with the first tyranny in
Athens.
But what exactly was the connection between the rise of the
new military class and the establishment of the first tyrants? For,
a hundred years before Peisistratos, tyrannies had begun to
grow up in Argos, Corinth, Sikyon, Megara, Epidauros and Pisa
— all probably within a generation — and many other states pres-
ently followed suit. This long-drawn-out resurgence of monar-
chy in Greece thus had its origins in the same period as the
military reform. But if the latter was itself a lengthy process as I
have argued (pp. 100-7), then it is difficult to disentangle cause
and effect here. At the date when the very first tyrannies arose,
a self-confident middle class of trained infantrymen is still, so far
as we can see, only just emerging. On the other hand the early
tyrannies, once established, generally lasted long enough to
£12 Archaic Greece

witness a very considerable advance in this respect. It seems a

reasonable conclusion that the new military class and the tyrants
found some interests in common: that the tyrants seized power
with the acquiescence of the citizen soldiers and finding, then or
later, that some ‘support could be mustered among them, they
accelerated the process of enlarging and training the citizen ~s
army. The more positive inference, that the new armies actually
precipitated the coups d’état which brought the tyrants to
power, seems less likely: not only would such a revolution be
improbably precocious, but the whole episode of the rise of
tyranny appears to have been conducted on the level of aristoc-
ratic power-politics. The tyrants themselves were almost
always dissident aristocrats, who exploited the unpopularity of
their fellows in the ruling class, killed or exiled those currently in
power, and often recalled to favour other recalcitrants. Thus far
they were dealing entirely in the traditional units of politics —
aristocratic families and their followings. It was their policies
once in power that were innovatory; and there is no reason why
these should not have included the furtherance of the military
reform. This last suggestion is supported by a further fact: all the
early tyrannies listed above arose in or close to the Peloponnese,
between about 675 and 640 Bc. This is the same epoch in which
the sudden upsurge in dedications of armour at Olympia begins
(p. 106) and the style and workmanship of the new dedications,
in almost all ascertainable cases, proclaim them as Pelopon-
nesian too: Argive in the case of the shields and probably a
group of the helmets, Corinthian for the broader class of hel-
mets, probably Corinthian for the breastplates, more generally
Peloponnesian for some other items. Of course, Olympia was
itself a Peloponnesian sanctuary; but this does not detract from
the fact that the major Peloponnesian states were producing —
large quantities of infantry armour at just the period when they |
had recently been taken over by tyrants.
Whether or not this sequence is correct, there is certainly an
important difference between a Greek tyrant’s and a modern
dictator’s seizure of power: the absence of a standing army in
the Archaic state. There could be nothing to correspond with
The Just City? 113
secret indoctrination and the rolling of tanks: instead, the ‘army’
was everywhere, in the more substantial town-houses, villages
and farms, its weapons hanging on the walls of private rooms.
To mobilize it was the supreme and weightiest duty of the state.
To the aristocrat launching his coup, the first question was
whether the army would mobilize at all, and the second, on
which side if so. It happens that the first instance where we
have a detailed account is one in which the citizens opposed the
prospective tyrant. This is the coup of Kylon at Athens in 631 (p.
93), which received military support from one of the Pelopon-
nesian tyrants whose recent successes Kylon was emulating, his
father-in-law Theagenes of Megara (not to mention the moral
support of the Delphic oracle). But the citizens, under the com-
mand of the current magistrates (also of course aristocrats)
mobilized and besieged him on the Akropolis. Kylon’s use of
foreign troops shows that the citizen army was, at best, an
unknown quantity to him. Even eighty-five years later, when
Peisistratos made his successful bid for the same objective, he
used the same methods, landing with a force of foreign mer-
cenaries. This time a sufficient proportion on the citizens joined
him to bring victory, but only after a pitched battle between two
armies of Athenian infantry. It would be easy to reconstruct the
course of further successful coups in these terms; very much
harder to do so in terms of a spontaneous move by the scattered
citizen-soldiers.
Tyranny was, for better or worse, a form of monarchy.
Further, the earliest tyrant of whom we know, Pheidon of
Argos, is said by Aristotle (Politics 1310 b 26) to have been one of
several hereditary kings who exceeded their constitutional pow-
ers and so became tyrants. In his person, therefore, the oldest
form of government extant in Greece reached out to touch the
newest. Again, a symbolic factor of some importance was the
tyrant’s place of residence: just as Kylon’s attempt on Athens
began with the seizure of the Akropolis, so later Peisistratos,
after his final and successful attempt, resided permanently on
the Akropolis. (It has even been suggested that some of the
sculptures found there may have decorated his palace.) By so Plate
114 Archaic Greece

doing he gave the people an inescapable reminder of the royal

line of Erechtheus who had been the last human occupants of
the citadel, and even challenged comparison with the gods and
heroes who had held it undisputed since then. He also followed
most of his predecessors in trying to establish a hereditary
dynasty: it lasted 35 years in his case, but the record was held by
the Sikyonian tyrants who survived for just a century. With the
second and third generations of hereditary tyrants succeeding,
we may well ask whether such a tyranny could be distinguished
from the monarchies of the traditional kind, several of which still—
survived elsewhere in Greece. Indeed, at no time in Gr
tory, even if one leaves Sparta out of account, was monarchy
entirely extinguished. |
How much does all this imply? Doubtless a ruler like Pheidon
will have invoked his time-honoured authority (in at least one
context he posed as the heir of Herakles) to justify his policies.
But more important is the nature of those policies, and in the
particular case of Pheidon we know little of them. Elsewhere,
however, there are recurrent features: a number of tyrants, after
an initial flurry of violence, settled down to a rule that was in
many respects constitutional, leaving the operation of internal
politics almost unchanged and placing themselves partially
under the rule of the laws; this, as Aristotle grudgingly admits
(Politics 1315 b 14) was the secret of the long life of the tyranny at
Sikyon. Other tyrants, he says, came to the fore as ‘leaders of
the people’, including two of the greatest names, Kypselos of
Corinth and Peisistratos of Athens: such radical measures as
property-tax and the institution of circuit-judges, as well as
redistribution of land, are attributed to these rulers. Then there
is their exercise of propaganda through religion and myth,
which was relentless. Sometimes it was blatant to the point of
absurdity, as when Kleisthenes of Sikyon drove out the cult of
the Argive hero Adrastos (p. 38); or when Peisistratos, on his
second bid for power, dressed up a tall and beautiful girl in full
armour, stood her beside him in a chariot, and drove into
Athens proclaiming that she was Athena, endorsing his right to
the tyranny (Herodotus i 60, 3-5).
The Just City? 115
Behind all these stories, we can detect a deeper theme: in
Archaic Greece, the policies of the tyrants, as of other reformers
like Solon, could be presented as a reversion to older ways. In
due course, the narrowly restricted egalitarianism of Sparta and
the radical democracy of Athens alike came to acquire ancient
pedigrees. The object was to reach back far enough into anti-
quity to achieve precedence over those who had wielded the
effective power in more recent centuries; that is, over the aristo-
cracies. Sometimes it was enough to reverse policies which had
taken effect almost within living memory; we can imagine, for
example, that this was how Solon would see his cancellation of
debt-bondage (p. 94), restoring the position before the excesses
of the aristocrats had taken their toll. Sometimes it was neces-
sary to go back much further: in many Peloponnesian states, for
instance, the ruling aristocracies were recognizable as the speak-
ers of the Doric dialect, who were believed to have immigrated
at the end of the Heroic Age. Thus reformers and dissidents
looked to pre-Dorian (or at least non-Dorian) heroes for inspira-
tion and patronage. Pheidon of Argos claimed sovereignty over
the ‘Heritage of Temenos’, a territorial concept going back five
hundred years; Kypselos of Corinth actually claimed non-Dorian
descent on his father’s side; Kleisthenes of Sikyon, grandson of
a cook and also apparently non-Dorian, pursued an all-out
propaganda war against the hitherto dominant Dorian element,
adopting derogatory tribal names for them and an honorific one,
archelaoi (‘Leaders of the People’), for his own tribe. Even the
very king of Sparta, Kleomenes I, was prepared to play the
anti-Dorian card when it suited his convenience (Herodotus v
[peed
Another general tendency of tyrants was the institution and
enlargement of state cults and festivals, to the detriment of the
exclusive, family-based cults which widely prevailed: this is
especially recorded of Peisistratos, while Pheidon and Kleis-
thenes both went so far as to interfere (at Olympia and Delphi
respectively) with the running of major inter-state festivals. The
main losers in every case were the local aristocracies. The time-
honoured associations of monarchy were also exploited to the
116 Archaic Greece

full: a ‘good king’ from the Heroic Age like Theseus could be
credited with having given Athens democratic institutions. It
helped greatly that he was supposed to have won his kingdom
by defeating an aristocratic clan, the Pallantids; the fact that the
aristocrats also claimed Theseus’s patronage for their exclusive
council, the Areiopagos, was no serious obstacle. It recalls the
way in which, in seventeenth-century England, the imaginary
statutes of Edward the Confessor were invoked against the sub-
sequent legislation of the upstart Normans, whose usurpation
dated from a mere six hundred years earlier. Religion and myth, &

then, could be enlisted on either side in Greek political con-

troversy, and very often it was the more radical party which
searched the more diligently through the legendary past to find
respectable precedents.
All of this is part of the process whereby religion, along with
much else, was now being pressed into the service of the com-
munity as a whole; that is, of the state rather than of any one
faction, class, family or individual. Part of the strength of the
tyrant lay in his ability to pose as representative of this whole
community, and at the time of the rise of the first tyrannies the
appeal would still have been a fresh one. The military reform
likewise put the ultimate sanction in the hands of men who
would be reluctant to fight in any cause but that of the state as a
whole. Nothing was more natural, in Archaic Greece, than that
religion should be enlisted too. There are innumerable examples
which one could give, and if a disproportionate number of them
is taken from Athens this reflects merely the familiar Athenian
bias of our evidence, not the historical reality. But Peisistratos
does appear to have been most assiduous in his centralizing of
cults. It is to his tyranny that we can date either the foundation
or a major expansion of the Great Panathenaia, the four-yearly
festival of Athena (the heroes Erechtheus and Theseus were,
predictably, enlisted as forerunners). Another festival with an
even greater cultural future, the City Dionysia, was probably
founded in his time; significantly, this involved transferring a
cult of Dionysos from the border-town of Eleutherai to Athens
itself and, even more significantly, that act was symbolic of the
The Just City? d17
political incorporation of Eleutherai into Attica, detaching her
from the Boiotian confederation. He intervened at Eleusis in the
area of his own first military successes (p. 111), and very likely
established Athenian control over the Eleusinian Mysteries for
the first time. He gave a great stimulus to the festival of Artemis
at his own birthplace, Brauron, and probably also created a pre- Plate
cinct for the goddess on the Akropolis itself. Nor was it only
divine cults which engaged attention; heroes too, associated
with outlying districts where they could prove a troublesome
focus of local aristocratic prestige, might find themselves trans-
planted and installed at shrines in the middle of Athens; this is
what probably happened to Eurysakes the son of Ajax, at some
time in the Archaic period; and his father followed him in 508 BC
when he was needed for ‘tribal duty’ under the new constitution
of the Athenian Kleisthenes. Peisistratos was neither the first
nor the last to manipulate the festivals of Athens. Already in
Solon’s reforms we find the institution of an annual state festival
in honour of the dead, the Genesia; as far as we can see, this was
a stroke aimed at the Athenian clans, whose celebrations of the
funeral rites of their aristocratic leaders were an occasion for
ostentatious and divisive demonstrations (we know that Solon
also legislated against excessive expense on funerals).
There were many less obvious ways in which religious events
entered into the state’s calculations. We might hardly expect, for
instance, that one of the main supports of Corinth’s economic
prosperity would be the revenue brought by the crowds attend-
ing the Isthmian Games; but this is the factor singled out for
special emphasis by Strabo (viii 6, 20) and there is no reason to
reject his opinion. The atmosphere of Greek athletic festivals is
above all enshrined in the victory-odes of Pindar, and here too
one notices how persistently the poet stresses, not merely the
noble lineage of his patrons, but their attachment to their home
state, and the glory that their victory will bring to it. That the
°

construction of temples should form a major element of state

Lee wm Td

that it did — that is, until one appreciates the general truth that
118 Archaic Greece

religion was perhaps, apart from war, the biggest single factor in
political and economic life. For the Classical period, it has been
estimated that (to quote a leading authority) ‘sacred administra-
tion absorbed . . . probably a fifth of the total internal revenue’.
This statement, it is true, applies to Athens, which by the fifth
century BC was notorious among Greek states for the frequency
and costliness of its festivals; nor did all this expenditure have to
be found by the state, since financial patronage was by then
imposed on rich private individuals. In the Archaic period, the
total will have been less but the state share of it probably grea-
ter. As for the material evidence, whichever test we prefer to
apply — the incidence of stone-cut inscriptions (themselves
laborious to execute) with religious content, the religious pre-
dominance in the content of stone sculpture (even more costly),
the frequency of divine scenes in art — we shall find a resound-
ing confirmation of a verdict suggested in the previous chapter:
that the heart of an Archaic Greek state was in its sanctuaries.
In the formation of the city there is one element — some would
say a central element — which has so far been mentioned only
indirectly, and this is the law-code. It was indeed a fundamental
need, sometimes consciously felt but more often, one suspects,
unconsciously at first: as by Hesiod, who protests against the
injustice of his rulers but can invoke no remedy and, except on a
supernatural level, no sanction either. Law-courts and litigation
can exist and flourish for centuries without a codified set of laws
(Hesiod is again a clear witness of this stage), so long as the
absolute power rests in the same hands inside the court-room as
out of it: that is, in the hands of a monarch or narrow ruling-
class. If a set of laws is published, and inscribed on stone, then
the same conditions can continue to exist for a little while, but
not for long: sooner rather than later, the general result of hav-
ing an accessible writing system (cf. pp. 78-84) will show itself
here too. The mere fact that the laws exist outside the prejudice
of an individual magistrate is the first and greatest check on his
power. But hard on its heels follows another effect: the public
exhibition of the laws, where they can be pondered at leisure by
anyone who can read, may be designed to compel deference,
The Just City? Tio
but will inevitably also invite criticism. It is now open to citizens
to notice omissions, anachronisms, inconsistencies and absur-
dities; ultimately there will be pressure to improve the laws.
Reform of the laws may then provoke a third step: reform of the
bodies that administer them. In some cases, the court became no
less than the full assembly of citizens. In Classical times, control
of the law-courts was still an important and central issue for
progressive politicians, and the strength of the opposition to
such changes is an equally strong hint of its seriousness. Yet the
first of these steps is still the greatest: the existence of a publicly
accessible law-code — any law-code — is a direct, if long-term,
threat to the survival of absolutism. Perhaps this fact was
already understood in Archaic Greece, almost from the time of
the first experiments in this line. This would explain why the
names of the early law-givers were still revered centuries later,
often to the complete exclusion of any memory of the content of
their codes: which was as well, for posterity would have been
shocked by their primitive brutality. But the instinct was sound:
to bring a law-code into existence was a greater achievement
than merely to improve one.
Our evidence for the earliest Greek law-codes is defective, but
fundamentally consistent. Everything suggests that, during the
seventh century BC, city after city followed the example of adopt-
ing or commissioning a code of laws. The incidence of borrowed
doctrines and codes, and even of borrowed law-givers, shows
how diffusive this process was (Crete was said to have been
exceptionally generous here). But who was the first in the field?
The literary tradition is strong in favour of the western colonies.
Zaleukos of Lokroi, said by one authority to have compiled the
very first written code, lived around 660; while of the travelling
law-givers, few could rival the fame of his pupils Charondas of
Katane and Androdamas of Rhegion. This may remind us that at
a yet earlier stage, when the state itself was coming into being,
there were grounds for thinking that the western colonies may
have acted as pacemakers (pp. 40-2). It has been well observed
that the colonists, some of them constrained in one way or
another to emigrate, may have had a keener sense of injustice
 120 Archaic Greece

than their contemporaries in the homeland. Yet there is another

strong tradition giving primacy to Crete, and here we can call on
the surviving evidence. Early law-code inscriptions exist from
ate 18 several Cretan cities, and that from Dreros is the earliest extant
one of all (rather before 600 BC). Even before this, Archilochos of
Paros (see below, pp. 169-73) had made a sarcastic reference to
‘cretan lands’. The early presence of Phoenicians and other
Levantine craftsmen in Crete has been invoked to suggest a
potential source of inspiration, for Semitic law-codes had existed
over a thousand years before this (here again, there is a reminis-
cence of an earlier suggestion about the formation of the state
(see p. 32)). A third view, based on modern inference from
ancient sources rather than any direct statement in them, gives
priority to Sparta and the reforms later attributed to Lykourgos.
One law-giver, though hardly a codifier, belongs not in the
seventh century at all but in the later eighth: Philolaos of
Corinth, an exiled aristocrat who devised a law on adoption for
the Thebans.
To decide between the claimants is difficult, and really not
very important, so swift was the diffusion. Wherever we look,
the notion of the demand for order and codification springs up:
at Corinth, where the tyrant Kypselos receives encouragement
from the Delphic oracle to ‘put Corinth straight’; at Sparta, in
the contemporary references of the poets Terpander and Tyr-
taios to constitutional advance in the years before 650; at Athens,
in the proverbially severe code of Drakon (c. 621), which follows
significantly closely after the abortive Kylon coup (pp. 93-4); at
Mitylene, where the rise of Pittakos (p. 95) saw the publication
of a code of laws — all but the last of these, and many others too,
are to be dated well before 600. Like the rise of the Archaic
tyrannies with which it partly overlapped in time, this was a
seemingly irresistible movement which swept across the Greek
states. That it was the stronger wave of the two is shown by the
studied policy of many tyrants to leave the laws intact and
express their power by other means; and it was also ultimately
the more productive of progress in later generations.
In the last three chapters, the rise of the Greek state has been
The Just City? 121
presented as a series of great steps forward, several of them
unprecedented in history, and most of them in some way para-
doxical in that they appear to have been contrary to the interests
of the group that initiated them. There was first of all the establ-
ishment of the state itself, which can only be explained as the
action of the leaders of the aristocratic groups in a locality. It is
in the polis that this paradox appears in its most intense form;
indeed it has proved too intense for one modern school of
thought, which has questioned the reality of the aristocratic
groupings of the preceding era. Denis Roussel, in his brilliant
book Tribu et Cité which was referred to on p. 25, writes that
‘Without doubt, the city would never have come to birth if such
systems had been implanted everywhere in Greece’ (although
he allows of their operation in the area of an ethnos like Thes-
saly). But it is unsafe to rely on such ‘laws’ of historical neces-
sity, when we have so much evidence from all phases of Archaic
Greek history that the aristocrats were political innovators on a
large scale. Nor were the Greek aristocrats less enterprising than
their counterparts in areas like Phoenicia and Etruria; and small
independent states grew up at the initiative of aristocracies
there. But the fact was that neither they nor anyone else could
predict the results during the next two hundred years of their
experiment in Greece. They saw only the advantages to be
gained from greater cohesion among prominent families; and
some of them may have hoped, with reason and subsequent jus-
tification, to continue their former dominance on the higher level
offered by the formation of the new state.
So, too, with the later processes of founding colonies, enact-
ing military reform and accepting law-codes: it is easy to see,
with hindsight, that these steps would ultimately circumscribe
the power of the aristocracies, but much harder to reconstruct
them as they appeared, in prospect, to the aristocrats of the
seventh century BC. But if we are confident as to where the
power to take action lay, we should not allow our necessary
uncertainty as to the possible motives for that action to get the
better of us; and everything suggests that these steps were taken
on aristocratic initiative. The colonial founders, the early tacti-
122 Archaic Greece

cians and the early law-givers will have been drawn from the
aristocracy, just as inevitably as the early tyrants were. The cru-
cial difference is that the rise of the tyrants, and their acts once
in power, were the first moves consciously directed against the
interests of the aristocracy as a whole. In the tyrants, the swing
of the pendulum of power towards a wider community of the
state gains new pace, and this is their ultimate importance.
There is also a more general argument, which may apply to all
these more surprising developments. The pressures exerted by
economic factors, about which we know particularly little in the
earliest stages and which have played a minor part in the discus-
sion so far, could be responsible for many otherwise improbable
changes. It is time to turn and examine them.
 Economic Realities

Serious historians care for coins and weapons,

Not those re-iterations of one self-importance
By whom they date them, . .
W. H. Auden, ‘Makers of History’

In the past three chapters, our main problem in discussing the

development of Archaic Greece has been lack of evidence, and
especially the absence of any contemporary historical writing.
That shortcoming will persist; but to it we must now add a new
one. If we were able to summon a well-informed early Greek
from the grave, he would readily understand our desire to find
out about the political history of his culture, and could doubtless
offer an answer to many of our questions. But as soon as we
began to question him about economic developments, a gulf of
incomprehension would open. Neither economic history nor
economic theory was a field of study among the ancient Greeks
(or indeed anyone else until the eighteenth century of our era).
That does not preclude us from trying to write the economic
history of Archaic Greece today; but it makes one pause to ask
why the intellectual achievements of the Greeks did not extend
further in this direction.
There are several established answers to this question, and
between them they do convey much of the truth: that in the
Greek scale of values, commercial and industrial activity were
rated so low as to be thought unworthy of the expenditure of
any intellectual effort; that the economic structure of Archaic
Greece (though this is more controversial) was in any case sim-
 a

124 < r 3 Archaic Greece

_ ple to the point of being almost primitive, and so attracted little

attention from contemporaries. Especially significant, now that
linguistics has educated us into understanding more of the rela-
tionship between language and thought, is the fact that the
Greek language was not then equipped with a proper economic
vocabulary: oikonomia itself was a common Greek word, used in
more than one sense; but not in one that corresponds to the
meaning of the modern term which we have derived from it. Its
original and most frequent sense was that of management of a
household in all its respects, from budgeting to the treatment of
slaves; indeed one ancient author, probably a disciple of Aristo-
tle rather than the master himself, states in quite specific terms
that oikonomia is to the household as politics is to the state (ps.—
Aristotle, Oikonomika i, 1). When its use was extended, it was
extended across this whole broad front to mean management of
some larger unit up to and including the state — but again, in all
its aspects. The term was thus applied, first to the province
which we might mentally assign to Mrs Beeton, later to that
covered by Machiavelli, without at any time specifying that of
Adam Smith.
None of this prevented individual Greeks from recognizing
specifically economic problems or, on occasion, applying
economic remedies; what it did was to discourage any kind of
economic analysis, and practically to exclude the growth of
economic theory even in the Classical period (to which the ling-
uistic evidence mentioned above belongs), let alone the Archaic
period. The truth seems to be that all Greeks regarded what we
call economic activity as an inseparable part of a larger whole,
the operation of a community big or small; just as economic his-
tory was merged into political history. Few economic decisions
were consciously taken by Greek states; most economic change
came about as the incidental result of political decisions or, even
more indirectly, as the result of a general shift in moral values.
Yet it is obvious to us today that social and political changes, as
radical as those which came to pass in Archaic Greece, will have
created acute economic problems, many of them foreign to all
previous experience. It also happens that a substantial propor-
Economic Realities 125

tion of the evidence that has come down to us has a potential

bearing on economic problems. This is true of many of the clas-
ses of material objects studied by archaeologists: of coins, almost
by definition; of a few official inscriptions recorded on stone and
of a number of unofficial ones preserved on other materials; and
even of a surprising proportion of the poetic literature of the
period (one thinks especially of the surviving works of Hesiod
and Solon). But, having said this, one must at once add that this
evidence is not only economic in implication: the point about the
Greek view of economics cuts both ways. If the Greeks did not
divide economic activity from social and political activities, then
neither can we study it in isolation from these.
So there is not necessarily a conflict here; only a gulf. Whether
the ancient Greeks could not see that the state was in part an
economic enterprise, creating effects which were not controllable
by purely political instruments, or whether they saw it but did
not think it worth recording their observations, the result is ini-
tially the same: we must try to investigate those effects without
their help. The danger comes when we start to make inferences
from those effects, back to the nature of their economic struc-
tures and even to hypotheses as to their economic policies. On
the latter question, I have already implied my view, which is
today almost an orthodox one: that the Greek states, especially
in the Archaic period, did not really have economic policies, in
the sense of allocating the state’s resources, and so did not
directly bring about the effects which we can see in the evidence
by any kind of communal design. The most that they are likely
to have done is to realize that these would be among the results
of their social or political policies; and even that, one suspects,
only rarely. By the Classical period, for example, there are
examples of Greek states adopting, as a policy, the importation
of grain from overseas. How such a policy would be
implemented in the Archaic period is a difficult question; the
important thing at this stage is to realize that, even when
achieved, it carried no implication whatever of any correspond-
ing state direction of exports. The grain would have to be paid
for by the individual private carrier, but it was not found neces-
126 Archaic Greece

sary for the state to control or facilitate the means of payment

and there was a considerable choice of regions — the Black Sea
littoral, Egypt, Sicily - where surplus grain was apparently
freely available. In any case, in the Archaic period there were
very few places where the ratio of population (and particularly
urban population) to arable land was high enough to necessitate
even such rudimentary economic planning.
Economic structures are another matter. It is easy to say that
they too were bound up with social and political structures; but
we seldom have a sufficiently detailed knowledge of the latter to
make this an enlightening statement. Our written historical
sources, concerned above all with political history, can pass on
traditional generalizations about Boiotian agriculture or Arka-
dian pastoralism; but our knowledge of populations and land-
holdings would have to be greatly increased before we could
begin to reconstruct the economic development of these areas.
Even for Athens, it is only in the Classical period that we can
build up a tentative picture of the state’s economy from a com-
bination of written references, inscriptions and environmental
studies.
There is thus a natural tendency to turn, with some degree of
expectancy ranging from optimism to sheer desperation, to the
archaeological evidence as an alternative source of knowledge
which has a considerable bearing on economic life and which
differs from our documentary evidence in being almost infinitely
extendable. But here there are fresh pitfalls: attempts at
economic reconstruction have been beset, above all, by a special
form of ‘positivist fallacy’, which assumes that the importance of
a class of evidence for antiquity stands in some relation to the
quantity in which it survives to be studied today. The obvious
example is painted pottery, by far the richest category of ancient
artefact from which economic inferences have been drawn.
When fragmentary material is taken into account, the quantity of
Greek painted pottery retrieved by excavation and now more or
less available in museum showcases, storerooms and basements,
or still under scrutiny by its excavators, or even thrown away
and re-buried by exponents of an earlier archaeological ethic,
Economic Realities 127
must be greater than most non-archaeologists would imagine in
their wildest fantasies. Also, the quantity of Greek painted pot-
tery that has survived is certainly large enough to form a vali
statistical sample of the total original production: at least in 5ne
class of vessel, the Panathenaic amphora, there are grounds for
thinking that it represents rather more than one five-hundredth
(equivalent to 70,000 voters in an opinion-poll in modern Bri-
tain). Furthermore, Greek pottery-fabrics have been studied to
the point where their geographical provenances are better estab-
lished than those of any other common kind of uninscribed
artefact, and their chronology even better than that of inscrip-
tions and coins. Pottery was in antiquity a material of exception-
ally wide use, extending over a range that would have been
covered jointly in more recent times by fine porcelain, glass,
wood, basketry and leather, and comparable with that of the
stouter forms of plastics in our own days. Potentially, therefore,
the study of painted pottery would be expected to release a flood
of basic information on economic and other aspects of ancient
life.
But, the more one thinks about it, the more objections spring
to mind. In the first place, painted pottery plays a smaller part in
the broad economic activities — that is, the exchange of the com-
modities contained in it — than does unpainted pottery, which
has been immeasurably less well studied and is, in its nature,
less susceptible to identification from photographs or descrip-
tions. The production of fine pottery was, by comparison,
almost a luxury industry, and trade in it had little connection
with the essentials of life. Again, there is some evidence that
indirect trade in fine pottery, whereby the carriers (who would
absorb much of the profit) belonged neither to the state which
produced the ware in question nor that to which it was
exported, was quite common. Next, much painted pottery con-
sists of shapes like cups, bowls and jugs, which cannot be used
for the transport of commodities, but can only be transported for
themselves. Here too it must be remarked that a fine pottery
industry simply did not exist in the majority of Greek states; and
in those where it did, it seems to have been a very minor com-
128 Archaic Greece

ponent of the economy. In Athens in the fifth century BC, when

rival industries elsewhere had been virtually eliminated and
Athenian production was at its peak, it is doubtful whether the
whole industry employed more than 500 people; productivity
must therefore have been extremely high, but this was hardly a
‘commanding height’ of the Athenian economy. The comparison
with metalwork is a chastening one: here the surviving material
is far sparser, and it is much harder to give either a date or a
geographical provenance to it; yet the economic significance of
the industry, both for the fundamental importance of its applica-
tions and for the intrinsic costliness and relative scarcity of the
raw materials, must have been vastly greater than that of
pottery-production. The non-specialist reader of works on
ancient Greece should therefore look somewhat warily at the
economic conclusions he is often asked to accept, and in particu-
lar ask himself how far they depend on the evidence of painted
pottery alone. ‘Trade leagues’ and ‘flourishing mercantile cities’
appear less often in the literature nowadays than they once did,
but caution is still sometimes needed.
It is in fact the increasing sophistication achieved by pottery-
studies which has made possible the revision of some views
which had been based on earlier interpretations of the same kind
of evidence; the new insights have sometimes been quite unex-
pected. Take, for instance, the location of centres of production.
By the ‘thirties of this century, it was believed that most of the
major problems of determining geographical provenance had
been solved, though a few wares remained ‘homeless’. The
identification of the main fabrics by visual methods was almost
universally accepted and it did not encourage belief in multiple
centres of production for one and the same fabric. Western col-
onies, for example, were normally thought to have imported vir-
tually all their fine ware. Then, in the early 1950s, the excavators
found a sixth-century potter’s kiln at Megara Hyblaia in Sicily,
which prompted reflection; by 1964 they were able, in their pub-
lication, to distinguish by visual methods a substantial compo-
nent of the painted pottery as locally made, even if in overall
proportions it remained fairly small. By a different line of reason-
15 Bronze panoply from Argos, c. 720 BC

Corinthian helmet, c. 625 BC

 LO
LSS) De y
<
SZ

17 View of Brauron sanctuary

18 Law code inscription from Dreros

19 Attic black
figure cup with
agricultural scenes,
65 (S215) BE
20 Bronze lion dedicated by Eumnastos
from Samos, c. 550 BC

21 Early coins from Aigina (left)

and Miletos (right), c. 550 and c. 575 BC
23 Athena from Archaic pediment, Athens, Akropolis, c. 525 BC

.eft) Attic black figure cup with merchantman and galley, c. 520 BC
24 View of the diolkos at the 25 View of Eupalinos’ tunnel, Samos
Isthmus of Corinth

26 Late Archaic coin

(Syrakuse)
 ee.

2
RD
RT

_
CO
|
é
ES
7S
ON

JZ
CT
\
Cc

q <\
~

\ vEN
oo

\
AZ
NS
<
Ye

7 Attic red figure amphora with arming of Hektor, c. 510 Bc

:
Ze

28 Torso of statue of doctor from Megara Hyblaia, c. 550 Bc

Economic Realities 129

ing, similar conclusions have been reached for Marseilles and

other Phokaian colonies founded in southern France and eastern
Spain. Here, a large element of the early pottery of the colonies
consisted of the unpainted ‘Aeolic grey bucchero’; this was
assumed to have been brought initially, and imported subse-
quently, from the mother-city of Phokaia in Asia Minor, which
lay within an area where pottery of this general type had long
been characteristic. But now the total absence of this ware from
contemporary levels at another Phokaian colony, Elea in Italy,
has led to reconsideration: is it possible that much of the ware
found in France and Spain was made locally after all? More
startling still have been the results of applying the technique of
trace element analysis at an eastern site, Istria in Roumania, a
colony of Miletos. For here a new and in many ways more objec-
tive method was applied to material which could hardly be dis-
tinguished, by any visual test, from the imported Ionian wares
from Miletos and her neighbours; and this time the finding is
that a very substantial proportion of the painted pottery was
probably locally made. The implications are becoming steadily
wider; the more local centres of production emerge, the less the
part played by long-distance trade.
When we take the evidence as a whole, from written sources,
from inscriptions and from archaeological evidence of all kinds
and all contexts, the same conclusion is insistently forced upon
us: that the economic life of Archaic Greece was dominated by a
very few activities. First place among these activities must go not
to commerce but to agriculture. Its importance, impossible to Pla
quantify accurately, nevertheless becomes obvious almost by
elimination: as soon as we consider the small scale and relative
lateness of urbanization in early Greece and contrast it with the
number and spread of small settlements, as soon as we compare
the country’s poverty in minerals with its modest sufficiency
(often underrated in modern studies) of viable farming-land,
then it becomes difficult to see this as other than an agrarian
society. Centuries later, urban intellectuals still hankered after
these conditions and looked around the obscurer states of
Greece for instances of their survival: the agrarian type of demo-
130 Archaic Greece

cracy, Aristotle held, was the oldest and the best (Politics 1318 b
6-9).
Next in significance, perhaps, is warfare, as much an
economic activity in Archaic Greece as it was a politica! one. It
was through the medium of war that the individual expressed
his economic status as well as his political loyalty, thanks to the
form of military organization that the Greeks adopted (pp.
100-7). More practically, however, warfare was seen as an
instrument which could be applied directly to the essential ele-
ments of economic life, food, wealth and labour. Aristotle
describes it, with cold-blooded simplicity, as ‘a way of acquiring
property’ (Politics 1256 b 23). It was by warfare that Greek states
increased their agricultural potential and threatened the liveli-
hood of their neighbours, through the acquisition or devastation
of the farming-land; it was wholly appropriate that Archaic
Greek battles should be fought by tactical methods operable only
on a fairly level plain, and between armies composed of farmers.
But there was also the element of movable property: successful
armies could expect to acquire booty and, to judge from the later
evidence of the Classical period, they did so on a surprising
scale. We hear of numerous cases where, even after the intro-
duction of state pay, whole armies maintained themselves more
from booty than from official sources. The proportion of the
booty which found its way back to the homeland was often suf-
ficient to have significant economic effect there. Some of it (often
the traditional tithe) ended up in the sanctuaries, in the form of
private or state dedications; and here at last we can pick up its
trail by means of the contemporary archaeological evidence.
Only a small proportion of the innumerable dedications in
Archaic sanctuaries was inscribed, and some of it has nothing to
do with war; but the evidence of these surviving pieces opens
up a wide vision of military and diplomatic activities, and it is
reasonable to extend our inferences to the great majority of
uninscribed dedications, which may also convey less explicit
information of their own through their provenance, use, condi-
tion or value. At an exceptionally rich site like Olympia, we
learn of the wide geographical area from which dedications were
Economic Realities 131
attracted, from the colonies in Italy to fairly remote mainland
sites like Tanagra in Boiotia, embracing non-Greek states (not-
ably the Etruscan cities) and including peoples such as the
Anaitoi, Akroreioi or Serdaioi, so obscure that we are uncertain
of their identity and location.
The sheer numbers of these dedications give them a signifi-
cance in their own right, quite apart from the activities that they
represent. Of course we cannot estimate accurately the original
quantities of objects dedicated: to take the multiplier suggested
for the Panathenaic amphorae (above, p. 127) and apply it to the
bronzes recovered at Olympia (p. 105) would give startling
results. Few would countenance the idea of 250,000 tripod-
cauldrons dedicated at Olympia alone in rather more than a cen-
tury, or of 100,000-odd helmets in the two hundred years be-
tween 700 and 500 BC; and it would be easy to think of argu-
ments against such a calculation. Yet bronze in general does not
have a high survival-rate; and when we read in Herodotus (viii
27, 4) that on a single occasion in the late Archaic period, the
Phokians dedicated as many as 2000 captured shields at Delphi,
then we may fairly believe that, over the centuries, the major
inter-state sanctuaries amassed vast quantities of war-booty. All
of this serves to emphasize that the vet great field of economic
activity was simply religious cult itself. We have already seen
some illustrations of this fact (p. 118); and we may also take into
account the wide range of religious activity which would leave
little if any archaeological trace: communal meals, festivals,
dedications of ‘first-fruits’, dancing, processions, initiations —
some of them quite expensive events which would have to be
financed by the state or some smaller body.
Each of these main activities — agriculture, warfare and relig-
ion — thus occupied a much more important position in Archaic
Greece than it does in a modern developed economy, which can _
only mean that, correspondingly, commerce and industry were
assigned a lesser role. We must also pay heed to a further impor-
tant argument: that out of those who were occupied full-time in
industry and commerce a high proportion in any case appears to
have consisted of slaves, or non-citizens of other categories like
132 Archaic Greece

the metics of Attica. The implications of this fact are mainly

political and social, whereas economic processes affected the
population of the state as a whole; but in as much as it was the
interests of the citizen-body (or some part of it) which were
likely to play the main part in determining the state’s decisions it
was so much the less probable that consideration would be
given to commercial-based arguments in reaching those deci-
sions. So it is unrealistic to make too much of Archaic Greek
commerce. In passing, too, we may note another fact about the
three other spheres of activity just discussed: with the first two
of them, agriculture and warfare, pottery has almost nothing to
do, and it plays a very subordinate role in the third. Pots do, of
course, occur as religious dedications, and they also featured in
some festivals and as prizes in games; but at the major sanc-
tuaries they are uncommon compared with the surviving
bronzes, even though their value is pro rata so much less. Pottery
studies, however thorough, must therefore inevitably reflect
only a partial picture of Greek economic activities.
We should, finally, remind ourselves that even exchanges of
goods, which we naturally identify today with the exercise of
commerce, did not necessarily have that character in antiquity.
Even if we leave out the whole category of gifts to sanctuaries as
being essentially one-sided in material terms, there was a further
field of transaction in Archaic Greece which could hardly be cal-
led commercial: this was the whole network of gift-exchange,
guest-friendship and hospitality. In the Homeric epics, this net-
work is so prevalent that it has reasonably been called the life-
blood of Homeric society. It has also been argued that such a
society must have existed at a comparatively remote epoch of
Greek history, some time earlier even than Homer’s own day.
Yet this element in it, the phenomenon of gift-exchange and
hospitality, particularly with foreigners, remained entirely famil-
iar in the Greek world long after Homer. We can find only occa-
sional direct references to the practice, as contrasted with their
frequency in Homer, but that is mainly because the subject-
matter of Greek literature is no longer that of the epic narrative
with its capacious appetite for detail. But when Herodotus, for
Economic Realities 133
example, turns to the actions of kings or tyrants, it emerges as
quite an important element in their foreign policies. Amasis,
Pharaoh of Egypt, sends gifts not only to Greek sanctuaries but
to the Spartan state; while in the reverse direction, the same
Spartans — and, somewhat earlier, Periander of Corinth — are
found sending presents to the kings of Lydia (Herodotus iii 48,
2; 170, 1). Nor did these activities take place only on the level of
‘affairs of state’; a surviving fragment of Solon (fr. 13) reckons as
an essential condition of happiness for the man of means the
possession of ‘a friend in foreign parts’, and he legislated about
gifts of property. Even at the close of the Archaic period, the
odes of Pindar, which again belong to the world of the well-to-
do, are pervaded by the same spirit. How far down the social
scale such transactions extended, and what proportion of all
exchanges of goods they represented, are harder questions. But
their role may have been larger than one would expect. To take
just one instance, the first Herodotus passage mentioned above
was concerned with an episode of Spartan military intervention
in the island of Samos in the 520s. It has been remarked in this
connection that an unexpectedly large quantity of Spartan
painted pottery (that is, in relation to its thin distribution else-
where) has turned up in the sanctuary of Hera on Samos, from
approximately this period. Such humble dedications are not
likely to represent official gifts from state representatives, so
what was the process which brought them to a Samian sanctu-
ary? It is easy to assume that the initial stage of their journey
was a commercial one, but there are a number of other pos-
sibilities. They could have been brought by Spartan soldiers or —
perhaps more likely since the Spartan military presence was a
fleeting one — by individual Spartans on peaceful errands, as
was evidently the case with a fine bronze lion offered to the
goddess by the Spartiate Eumnastos on some occasion a little Plat
earlier than this; equally, they might have been taken back home
by the Samian exiles who had called at Sparta to seek her milit-
ary help. In most other cases where Greek pottery has ‘travel-
led’, we do not have even this glimpse of the context in which
such a process took place, but this may serve as a warning
 134 Archaic Greece

against attributing it, without argument, to the operation of

commerce.
A similar warning may be needed with early coinage, since its
economic application, though obviously in one sense real
enough, is hardly that which modern analogy, or even the anal-
ogy of the Classical period, would lead one to suppose. Recent
numismatic studies have produced broad agreement on three
conclusions, each of them negative in its implications for the
commercial use of coins. First, the dates of the earliest Greek
coin-issues have had to be lowered by a considerable margin
from the dates which were widely accepted when many studies
of early Greek economic history were written. It now seems
doubtful whether the very beginning of the development, when
late 21 the cities of Greek Asia Minor adopted from the Lydians the
(right) idea first of standardizing the weight of small nuggets of preci-
ous metal and then of stamping them with designs, occurred
before about 600 BC. For the preceding stage, a recent find at
Gordion in the interior has yielded what seems to be the earliest
known group of Lydian coins; they are dated to the years
c.625-610, and would thus belong in part to the reign of king
Sadyattes. For the ensuing stage, it now appears most likely that
late 21 Aigina — agreed to be the first state in Greece proper to issue a
(left) silver coinage — did so only after 575. Any possibility of connect-
ing a reform of coinage with historical figures such as Pheidon
and Solon seems therefore to be excluded on chronological
grounds.
Secondly, there is the question of the value of the earliest
coin-issues. The first specimens in Asia Minor were of electrum,
an extremely costly alloy at any period and one which, even in
very small denominations, gave values too high to be useful in
retail trade. Only later were they joined by silver issues, and
bronze came in generations later stiil. In any case, the incidence
of small denominations in the early finds is very low; some
states seem to have had no regular supply of anything smaller
than a drachma (a modest day’s wage for an artisan). Thirdly,
Archaic Greek coin-issues, with very few exceptions, show a
tendency not to travel far beyond the vicinity of the state where
Economic Realities 135

they were minted. Very late in the Archaic period, a few silver-
producing areas (notably Athens and the Greek colonies on the
coasts of Macedonia and Thrace) seem to have hit on the idea of
using their coinage for overseas trade, and their high-
denomination silver coins are found dispersed over a wide area.
But this serves only to draw attention to the absence of this prac-
tice elsewhere and earlier. Even the view that Archaic coinage
was intended for internal trade is open to the second objection
mentioned above.
Greek coins, in nearly all ascertainable cases, were minted by
governments and heads of state, and there is no reason to doubt
that this was true of the first issues. From what has already been
said, it will be clear that a commercial motive for the early issues
is unlikely in these circumstances. There has been no shortage of
suggestions for alternative uses: from the state’s point of view,
income in coin might be expected from fines, harbour dues,
leases and taxes; while likely heads of expenditure would be
public works, the payment of mercenaries, the retention of
services of specialists and the distribution of surpluses among
citizens. Some of these practices are attested by more or less con-
temporary evidence: the first-named, for instance, on a fragmen-
tary legal inscription from Eretria which belongs as early as
c.550-525, and which prescribes that penalties be paid ‘in legal
tender’. Distributions among the citizen population may appear
unexpectedly in the list, but that this too was an established
practice, in some form, is shown by two passages in Herodotus,
one referring to Siphnos in the years before 525 (iii 57, 2) and the
other to Athens in 483 (vii 144, 1).
In Archaic Greece, all these activities had in common the offi-
cial involvement of the state; and the prime function of early ©
coinage was the political one of emphasizing the authority, or
merely the independence, of the body that issuedit. Economic
functions were secondary and even incidental to this political
one; least of all did the invention of coinage transform the
Archaic world into a ‘monetary economy’. Indeed, in many
respects it merely streamlined the processes which were already
in operation with the use of pre-coinage ‘currencies’, more cum-
faore . rch reece
bersome and susceptible of variation, which had for centuries
existed in Greece. Just as in ancient China, which adopted coin-
age a few centuries later, we hear of ‘knife money’ and ‘spade
money’ in the preceding era, so in Greece finds of unmarked
gold, silver and electrum ‘dumps’ occur, perhaps as early as 800
BC in Crete; while in written sources we read of oxen, tripods
and above all iron spits (obeloi) as pre-monetary units.
Archaeological evidence from the late eighth and seventh cen-
turies has confirmed the significance of the obeloi, for they occur
both in graves and as sanctuary-dedications. Most revealing of
all is the fact that, centuries after the first coins were struck and
not only in the consciously conservative society of Sparta, these
primitive ‘currencies’ still enjoyed a fairly wide circulation. It is
clear, therefore, that as sources of information for economic his-
tory neither the adoption nor the early development of Greek
coinage fills quite the expected role; only further work can reveal
what their precise significance was.
The object of these remarks is not to eliminate trade and
industry from the economy of early Greece, but to keep them in
proportion. Of course there was a commercial element, in this as
in many earlier and more primitive cultures. What is strikingly
absent from Archaic Greece is any kind of widespread profes-
sionalism or concentration in trade. There are many illustrations
of this: other civilizations had their commercial class, often estab-
lished in a commercial quarter of a city, or even comprising the
main population of a trading settlement — what the Greeks called
an emporion. But in Greece we have to look hard to find any of
these elements; and indeed we may say that the first of them, a
commercially-based social class, shows no sign of having
existed. It has also been noted that real trading-posts were few,
remote from the Greek homeland and usually inhabited at least
in part by non-Greeks. In eastern Spain and on the Sea of Azov,
there were places actually named ‘Emporion’, but they were not
founded until the second half of the Archaic period. Naukratis in
Egypt was somewhat earlier, and the settlement at Al Mina on
the Syrian coast very much earlier, having been frequented by
Greeks since about 800 BC. It may also be recalled that the foun-
Economic Realities 132

dation of the early Greek settlement at Pithekoussai on Ischia

seems to have had an element of commercial motivation, quite
exceptional for a colony (pp. 40-1). The Greeks also traded
with ports which were entirely in foreign hands, and often cal-
led them emporia too. This is implied in a rather mysterious pas-
sage in Herodotus (vii 158, 2): Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse, makes
a speech, set in 481 BC, to a group of envoys from the leading
states of mainland Greece, whom he castigates for their failure
to support him in an otherwise virtually unknown earlier war
against Carthage — a war whose partial aim had been ‘to liberate
the emporia, from which you have derived great profits and
benefits’. We do not know where these lay — in western Sicily,
or more probably in North Africa — but the profitability of the
emporia does not seem to have been impaired by their being in
foreign and potentially hostile possession.
Most of the Greeks living in such places were probably
occupied full-time with commerce. In this, they were hardly typ-
ical of their age, but their counterparts at home, though harder
to detect, must have existed. The notion that all trade within the
Greek world was conducted by non-citizens and foreigners is
exaggerated. What is much more persuasive is a recent sugges-
tion that it was often carried on by men who were agents or
dependents of the ship-owners and exporters, rather than being
self-employed merchants. This finds support of a kind in the
evidence of the types of ships used. The written sources and the
illustrations alike suggest that, down to the later sixth century Plate
BC, Greek and even Phoenician maritime trade was mainly car-
ried on in the same oared longships which were used for naval
warfare. This implies rather more than that trading-vessels had
to be able to defend themselves; it shows an emphatic weighting
of priorities, in which sea-going and cargo-carrying capacity and
economy of manpower were largely sacrificed to speed and
battle-worthiness; Homer himself (Odyssey ix, 127-9) refers to
‘ships which would serve all purposes, travelling to the cities of
men, as so often men cross the sea to visit one another’. One
may reasonably speculate that other motives besides commerce,
and other kinds of men than professional merchants, were
138 Archaic Greece

involved in these voyages. Only in the late sixth century do we

begin to see pictures on Greek vases of large, sail-driven and
purpose-built merchantmen; by the very end of the Archaic
period, it is no longer so surprising to find Gelon (see above, p.
137) using the incentive of the profitability of sea-trade to encour-
age the Greeks of the homeland to participate in a war against
Carthage.
By this time there were certainly independent ship-masters,
and a few of them became famous for the fortunes that they
made. The greatest name known to Herodotus was Sostratos of
Aigina (iv 152, 4), a figure who has suddenly come to life in the
past few years with the discovery of an inscribed stone cippus set
up by him at Gravisca on the Etruscan coast as a dedication to
Apollo, and with the persuasive suggestion that a series of
trade-marks scratched on fine Attic black-figured pottery of
c.530-510 BC are abbreviations of his name, implying that this
was one of the commodities in which he was trading. His pat-
ronymic hints that he may have been an aristocrat; and some
lines ascribed to Theognis of Megara (1165-6) certainly raise the
possibility of aristocrats embarking on such ventures at this
period. Sostratos’s nearest rival in good fortune was Kolaios of
Samos, whom Herodotus (rightly, it seems) places more than a
century earlier, in the context of a curious episode on the coast
of Cyrenaica (iv 152, 1); Kolaios, also described as a ship-master,
is on his way to Egypt carrying a cargo of unspecified nature
(though some archaeological evidence suggests that it may have
included ivories), and with enough spare food to supply a guide
from Crete, marooned on an off-shore island, for a whole year.
At this date, there seems to have been no permanent Greek set-
tlement in Egypt, although mercenaries had already found emp-
loyment there. Kolaios ended up on the Spanish coast beyond
Gibraltar, where his luck turned good and he found a market
(Herodotus again uses the word emporion) hungry for his wares.
The resultant profits were evidently shared by the whole com-
pany of the ship, who made a joint dedication at Samos which
Herodotus appears to have seen with his own eyes. There is
room for speculation as to what their original aims had been;
Economic Realities 139
they hardly look like that of short-term commerce, what with
the initial destination in Egypt (where there are actually no signs
of Greek imports so early), the ample provisioning and the col-
lective nature of the enterprise.
Tackling the question from the opposite end, we may take two
heavy commodities which, we may be absolutely certain, were
transported over considerable distances in the Archaic Greek
world: metal ores of various kinds, and marble. The evidence in
both cases is mainly archaeological, apart from the elementary
fact that neither substance is universally distributed geologically:
they run, in descending order of frequency in Greek lands, from
the relatively plentiful but unevenly distributed iron ore,
through marble, copper and silver, to the rare gold and the
non-existent tin. The mere presence of artefacts in all these mat-
erials, over virtually the whole area settled by Greeks, thus
proves that there was an extensive network of distribution,
which in some cases though not all could be described as trade.
Small objects in precious metals, for example, may very often
have changed hands in the form of gifts. But these materials are
alike in requiring the medium of special skills and equipment
before they reach the final form in which they are attested for us
by the evidence.
As far as base metals are concerned, there are theoretically at
least three stages of transportation involved: from the point of
extraction to the smelting location, from there to the craftsman’s
workshop, and from him to the ultimate owner, with or without
the intervention of a retailer or distributor. In fact, however, we
have grounds for thinking that in Archaic Greece the second
stage was commonly eliminated: evidence for the iron-foundry
and the blacksmith’s forge lying side by side was found in two
early sites on islands, Pithekoussai on Ischia and Motya off the
western end of Sicily. In both instances the ore must have been
brought from some distance away - in the case of Ischia, we
know that it was from the mines of Elba nearly 250 miles to the
north-west — and worked locally, probably for local customers.
Even at so remote and inaccessible a site as the sanctuary of
Apollo at Bassai, 3,500 feet up in the hills of Arkadia, traces of
140 Archaic Greece

iron-smelting in the Archaic period were found on the spot:

here, the destination of the obiects must have been as offerings
in the temple a few yards away. Such a procedure, if widely
followed, would have reduced the element of profitable traffick-
ing to a minimum: an occasional voyage by the ore-shipper
might be all that was involved, with the diffusion of the finished
metal objects, often over very wide distances, being accomp-
lished after they entered the final owner’s possession. Even the
most remarkable cases of this last phenomenon would often fit
this kind of explanation better than one of long-distance sea-
trading; some of them are exceptional in the remoteness of the
find-spot: the early seventh-century Greek helmet found in the
River Jerez in south-western Spain, the gigantic bronze krater in
a princess’ tomb at Vix in Burgundy, the gold harness-plate in
the shape of a fish from a Scythian tomb near Vettersfelde in
northern Germany. Others are notable more for the proportion
of extraneous (but still Greek) finds among the total of objects
found: the early Cretan bronzes at Delphi, the Athenian tripod-
cauldrons and the armour-dedications from the Italian colonies
at Olympia, the Ionian fibulae at Perachora. At the same time,
there are other groups of finds, such as the 132 Egyptian bronzes
at the Heraion on Samos, which do admit of an explanation at
least partly commercial, since a major influx of Egyptian visitors
to Samos is unlikely and we know that Samians were commer-
cially active in Egypt in the sixth century. It will be noted that
the last four are all sanctuary-sites; and behind all studies of
Greek metalwork the old theme of religion (together with war)
looms insistently.
The traffic in marble has a rather different pattern, but it
shares this last feature with metalwork: any material primarily
employed for monumental sculpture and architecture, as marble
was, must inevitably gravitate towards the major sanctuaries
before anywhere else. A degree of scepticism about the scientific
basis for determining the origin of the various Aegean marbles is
no doubt proper, but need not impede us here; for the plain fact
is that several regions of Greece contain no deposits of marble
(even more have none of white marble), and some of the major
Economic Realities 141
sanctuaries lie within these regions. The early statues and,
beginning in the later sixth century, the marble-built treasuries
and temples at these places had therefore to be made from mat-
erial brought over considerable distances. Periklean Athens was
fortunate in having to transport the huge quantities of marble for
the new Akropolis buildings no further than the 18-odd
kilometres from the Mount Pentelikos quarries.
It is thanks to inscriptions and historical sources that, in this
last case, we can state quite categorically that such was the
source of the Akropolis marble. The same kind of evidence
throws light on one or two occasions in the Archaic period as
well. At Delphi, so Herodotus tells us (v 62, 3), the exiled Athe-
nian family of the Alkmaionidai won the favour of the oracle by
paying for a new marble-fronted temple of Apollo, with much
sculpture, to be built in the years between 513 and 510 BC. The
marble, he says was brought from Paros. This is an early
attested example of a laborious feat of transport, over a route
that probably included three land-portages and two sea-
passages, of many tons of heavy materials. Even without such
evidence from explicit literary sources, we may nevertheless
safely infer the execution of similar projects on a smaller scale
well before this. The construction of the treasuries of Knidos and
of Siphnos, also at Delphi and also of marble, took place in
about 560-550 and 525 BC respectively. Both buildings show a
mixture of stones, but the main component in each case is a
marble closely allied to that of the Apollo temple and reasonably
classed as Parian, the more so because, in the later case,
Herodotus tells us that the people of Siphnos had _ their
meeting-place and town-hall fitted out with Parian marble at
about the same period (iii 57, 4).
All over the Greek world, Archaic marble statues have been Plate
found which do not, however, carry comparable written evi-
dence for the source of the stone of which they are carved. What
they do offer nevertheless is some very valuable epigraphic evi-
dence on another question: the origins of the artists who carved
them. There is enough of this to make it likely that the common
practice of Archaic marble-sculptors was to travel to the places
142 Archaic Greece

where they could find commissions for work. This must have
been especially true of the craftsmen from the Cycladic islands,
which were mostly too small to offer a continuous livelihood,
but which were rich sources both of artistic talent and of fine
marble. It is impossible to prove that, in every case, the two
quite literally went together, sculptor and raw material, rather
than the sculptor receiving the commission at home and export-
ing the finished product; but for the Archaic period, most con-
siderations favour this conclusion. We have a body of written
testimony to the effect that sculptors often travelled far from
home: Cretans in Tegea, Sikyon, the Argolid and even Aitolia;
an Aiginetan in Argos and Samos; Corinthian exiles in Etruria;
an Ionian from Magnesia at Sparta; Spartans at Olympia; an
Athenian in Ionia; a Sikyonian in Miletos. In all these cases,
either we are told in so many words that the artist travelled to
carry out the commission, or the size and elaboration were such
as to make execution on the spot essential. The sources of
information are often relatively late and not entirely reliable;
nevertheless, inscriptions and other evidence give us much gen-
eral support, and in one or two cases more than that. There is,
for example, an unfinished female statue, in imported Greek
(probably Parian) marble, at Taranto in Italy, which seems at any
rate not to be of local workmanship. If the artist did not go to the
site himself, there was the risk of damage to a fully finished
statue in transit (many Archaic statues were carved from a single
block, and some were more than life-sized); there was also the
problem of ascertaining the client’s desires, and securing his
approval of the final product. In the rather better-documented
case of Archaic temple-builders, the incidence of non-native
architects speaks for itself as to the readiness of craftsmen to
travel.
It looks, therefore, as if it was the general practice of the
Archaic marble-sculptor to travel to the site of his commission.
Sometimes, perhaps, he would be accompanied by a marble
block, chosen by himself, from which the’ statue was to be
worked, or else by an already roughed-out version of the statue.
Some interesting traces of this latter practice have been found in
Economic Realities 143

or near ancient quarries: three statues, at least two of them of

Archaic date, are still to be seen around the quarry-sites on
Naxos, and another was found close to one of the Mount Pen-
telikos quarries. The remarkable thing about them is the degree
to which they have been worked: some have been carved to
within about an inch of their final surface. What does this mean?
Clearly, either that the sculptor had visited the quarry to give
detailed instructions to the mason, or else that sculptor and
mason were the same man; so the sculptor was often closely
involved at one end of the operation. But since even a short
journey would be dangerous to a fully-finished statue of stone,
he must often have had to be present at the other end too, to
bring the work to completion. For the execution of a work in
imported marble, the likeliest picture that emerges is of the
journey from quarry to final site, which might involve a sea-
passage hundreds of miles long, being made by the artist and
the material in company. The necessary transactions would be,
first a payment by the sculptor to the quarry-owner (who might
in some cases be the state); then a further payment to the ship-
per, for passage and freight; and finally the artist’s fee, which
would have exceeded the sum of the first two, plus perhaps a
year’s keep for the artist while he did the carving. Marble must
have been one of the very heaviest commodities which Archaic |
ships were asked to transport over long distances; yet in all of
this, at least for the Archaic period, nothing emerges that could |
be called precisely a ‘marble trade’.
So two kinds of ‘trade’ or ‘commerce’, when examined more
closely, have shown themselves to be in reality no such thing.
Rather, they speak for a range of other operations, some purely
social, some yet again religious or warlike, and only seldom
motivated by considerations of profit. It is time to consider the
economic implications for Archaic society. What we have disco-
vered so far suggests that, for this society, such an eventuality as
a falling-off in trade would be very much less significant than,
say, a run of poor harvests; that a successful war might have a
deeper economic impact than the growth of a new industry; that
the amassing of great wealth by a sanctuary could happen more
144 Archaic Greece

easily than a rise of the general standard of living within a state.

If we look for signs of economic tension, we are accordingly
more likely to find them in other than purely commercial
spheres. The causes of inter-state wars provide an illustration of
these tensions in extreme form: of the three earliest for which we
have a clear explanation in ancient sources, the Spartan con-
quest of Messenia and the Lelantine War in Euboia were
brought about by the desire of one or more states to extend their
agricultural land, while the ‘First Sacred War’ was fought, a cen-
tury later than the other two (c. 595-586), for the control of one of
the great sanctuaries, Delphi. All three were big enough to draw
a number of states, not all of them adjacent geographically, into
the fighting. So we may infer similar causes for other, more obs-
cure early conflicts: a sea-battle between Corinth and her colony,
Corcyra, dated to c.664 BC by Thucydides (i 13, 4), is more likely
to have been fought for political reasons than for control of the
western trade-routes, especially as somewhat later we find
Corinth trying, successfully, to seize political control of Corcyra;
a battle between Argos and Sparta at Hysiai in 669 BC is suspici-
ously close in time to an episode of interference, plausibly con-
nected with Pheidon of Argos, in the Olympic festival of 668.
To turn from greater conflicts to lesser and more local ten-
sions, we should be wise to begin with the best-documented
economic crisis of Archaic Greece, the one which faced Solon of
Athens in 594. We have seen that his solution to it was in part
political and only partly economic (p. 94): in this at least he was
characteristic of his age. But where had the crisis arisen? Predict-
ably, in the agricultural sphere. It was the concentration of land-
ownership in the hands of an unacceptably small minority and
the dispossession, debt-bondage or even enslavement of many
smallholders which had brought Athens to the brink of civil war.
We are also told that Solon’s system of constitutional class-
divisions, which henceforth decided eligibility for offices of vari-
ous kinds, was based on a criterion which was not merely
economic but specifically agricultural: namely the yield of a citi-
zen’s land-holding in terms of produce. It is true that this is not
one of the Solonian measures which is attested by the surviving
Economic Realities 145

fragments of his own poetry; other legislation which is men-

tioned only in much later sources includes one episode — a
reform of coins, weights and measures — which cannot be
regarded as entirely historical, for reasons of chronology (above,
p. 134), and other episodes — such as those giving encouragement
to industrial crafts, and forbidding all agricultural exports but
olive oil — which are to be treated with a little scepticism. But the
distinction of land-based classes still survived in Aristotle’s day,
and seems then to have been generally credited to Solon; we
have no serious reason to reject it, and we have Solon’s own
word for his having supported the policy of conquering the off-
shore island of Salamis, which looks like an act of pure land-
acquisition.
Solon the agricultural reformer, it is fair to conclude, is better
attested in the primary evidence than is Solon the ‘industrial
revolutionary’. Even Plutarch, our main source for the latter
kind of initiative on Solon’s part, presents him as motivated by
the lack of maritime trade and of exportable commodities in
Athens hitherto; and this underlines the fact that, at the mid-
point of the Archaic period, Athens had become an economically
backward state. But there is at least one category of independent
evidence to support the idea that Solon did something about the
industrial aspect of the Athenian economy, and it is again that of
painted pottery. Both the production and the export of Athenian
pottery show an upsurge in about the 580s, which is maintained
throughout the remainder of the Archaic period; furthermore,
there are strong indications of Corinthian influence and even a
hint of actual Corinthian participation in this production, which
recalls another act credited by Plutarch to Solon: the encourage-
ment given to foreign artisans to immigrate to Athens.
Another indication of a rather different kind is given by Attic
marble statues. Our judgment here is to some extent coloured by
subjectivity and weakened by chronological uncertainty; but on
a reasoned estimate of the dating evidence it seems that there
begins, rather after 600 BC, an unprecedented series of both male
and female figures. Some were dedications at sanctuaries, some
acted as grave-monuments; all appear to be made of imported
146 Archaic Greece

marble. In quantitative terms, the Attic group comprises rather

over a third of the surviving Greek stone statues of this early
phase, between about 600 and 570; qualitatively, they can only
be described as outstanding. All of this is in dramatic contrast
with the previous century, which had not seen many notable
achievements by Athenian artists, in this or most other media,
and which had not produced comparable signs of ostentatious
prosperity. It is a reasonable inference that Solon’s economic
reforms had something to do with these new phenomena; but
where exactly their impact was effective is another question.
Since the agricultural potential of Attica had strict and perma-
nent limits, which no mere reform of land-holding could over-
come, it is tempting to assume that there were great advances in
the non-agricultural spheres. But the evidence of sculpture, in
its very nature, tends to throw its main light on the prosperity of
those rich enough to afford monuments; and here the relevant
point in Solon’s reforms was his substitution of a criterion of
landed wealth for one of birth, which admitted a new group of
families to the ranks of the politically prominent and the socially
self-assured. The sudden appearance of the Attic sculptures,
executed for private individuals, looks more like a reaction to
this new situation than a result of a slow-working economic pro-
cess. In a similar way, the presence of several funerary monu-
ments among them, in the face of Solon’s reputed legislation to
limit expenditure at funerals, must mean that this kind of com-
memoration lay outside the scope of his law, and was maybe
even stimulated by the wish to compensate for the ban on osten-
tation of a more ephemeral kind.
If Athens is an example of an economically backward state,
then the obvious choice for an advanced counterpart in the
mid-Archaic period would be Corinth. ‘From an indefinite time’,
writes Thucydides (i 13, 5), she had been a commercial
emporium; even Homer had called her ‘rich’, and Herodotus
observes that it was her citizens who ‘despised craftsmen least’
(ii 167, 2). This is an impressive range of testimony, and it is
supported by the undoubted vitality of the Corinthian pottery
industry between about 725 and 575 BC. But closer examination
Economic Realities 147

of the evidence, particularly that of Thucydides, shows that it

does not quite yield the conclusion which is often drawn from it.
It is clear that, for Thucydides, the wealth of Corinth is derived
from the duties imposed on traders from other states who use
her unique amphibious facilities: overland trade from the
Peloponnese must pass the Corinthian isthmus, while sea-trade
from the Aegean to the western Mediterranean, by using the
same isthmus as a land-portage in the transverse direction, can
escape the dangers of the passage round the Peloponnese. Simi-
larly the most impressive piece of physical evidence, the diolkos Plat
or causeway for haulage across the isthmus which was con-
structed around 600, probably at the behest of the tyrant Perian-
der, had been studied for some time before the observation was
made that it can have served little purpose for Corinth’s own
trade, and not much more for her naval dispositions. Since the
diolkos measured some 6 kilometres in length, and Corinth had
a harbour on either gulf at Kenchreai and Lechaion, about 10
and 4 kilometres respectively from the city, her import- and
export-trade gained nothing by use of the diolkos, while naval
contingencies were best met by keeping a fleet on each sea. It
was the traders of other states, particularly neighbouring ones,
who gained most advantage by using the isthmus, and Corinth
who stood to gain in revenue. This process may have begun
long before the construction of the diolkos: we may recall that
the conspicuous and at first isolated occurrence of temples of
dressed stone at Corinth (p. 60) belongs nearly a century earlier
than this. But it is also a fact that the quality (though not the
quantity) of agricultural land in the Corinthia far excels that of
Attica, and the legendary wealth and power of the Bacchiad aris-
tocracy seems to have begun improbably early for it to have been
founded in commerce. Corinth was also a noted naval and mil!’
ary power and, under her tyrants, went to the unusual length of
forcibly subduing some of her own colonies and reducing them
to political dependence. Nor should the profitability of her Isth-
mian Games (p. 117) — the only great inter-state festival under the
territorial control of one of the major powers — be forgotten.
Even Herodotus does not say that artisans were actually admired
148 Archaic Greece

in Corinth; and the direct contribution of commerce and indus-

try to her wealth, though probably far greater than in most
Archaic states, was hardly overwhelming.
If this disparaging general estimate of Archaic Greek trade is
to gain some credibility, it requires a supporting explanation on
one level or another. The favoured practice as we have seen (p.
123) is to seek a cause, for this as for other phenomena in Greek
culture, in ideological factors. It is true that the manufacturing
and trading occupations were regarded as a social and even
more as a political disqualification in Greek society. In the words
which Xenophon put into the mouth of Sokrates (Oikonomikos iv,
2), anyone whose occupation forced him to work ‘seated and in
the shade’ was liable to be weakened in soul as well as in body.
Such attitudes would not encourage industrial growth; instead,
they harmonized with the progressively stronger assumption
that activities of this kind were better allocated to slaves. But
possibly another level of explanation may serve to complement
this, even though the ideological one may prove to underlie it as
well: I mean the consideration of technology in Archaic Greece.
There has been a marked absence in these pages of any great
technical advances, to match the breakthroughs in ideas and the
feats of organization, many of them without precedent, which
were surveyed in the earlier chapters. Though I have drawn
attention to such things as the growth of maritime communica-
tion and shipbuilding in the eighth century (pp. 54-5), the con-
struction of temples in dressed masonry shortly afterwards (pp.
60-1), or the development of sheet bronze armour (p. 99), these
events should always be seen as part of a longer perspective of
ancient achievement. Masonry of similar quality had been com-
mon in Egypt two millennia earlier; bronze defensive armour
had been developed by the Mycenaeans 700 years before; while
sea-travel, at much the same period, had reached the point
where twenty-eight different classes of ship were recorded in
the documents of Ugarit in the Levant.
A feature of these phenomena in Greece is their early date
within the Archaic period. In technology as in much else, one
has the impression of a spate of advances in the years around
Economic Realities 149
700 BC which was not, indeed could not be, maintained. Another
Greek tendency, well illustrated here, was that of borrowing
devices, technological as much as any other, from the older civil-
izations to the east. But what differs very markedly is the sequel
to such borrowing, according to whether it lay in a purely tech-
nological field or not. Again and again we find that, if a bor-
rowed idea had an application to intellectual, political or artistic
life, it was soon modified out of all recognition after the Greeks
had inherited it. This is the pattern which we have already
found with the possible inspiration of the city-state (p. 32), with
the borrowing of the alphabet (p. 82), with the revival of rep-
resentational art (pp. 65-6) or with the taking-over of military
devices from the powers of the Near East (pp. 104-5); and we
shall encounter perhaps the classic instance of it in the relation-
ship between Egyptian and Greek sculpture later. In contrast,
the technology of Archaic Greece was, by and large, an assemb-
lage of borrowed and inherited processes which had not under-
gone much change once they reached Greece.
A good recent illustration of this was given by J. J. Coulton in
the field of constructional methods. He noticed the remarkable
fact that the weights of single blocks used in the early phases of
Greek architecture and sculpture extended, at the upper end of
their range, to some 70 tons or more, with many specimens in
the bracket of 20 to 40 tons; but that from about 515 BC, and for
two centuries thereafter, the maximum weight of block drops,
with virtually no exceptions, below 20 tons. Conversely, signs of
cutting for lifting-tongs and lewis-irons, and of channels for
rope-slings, are largely or entirely absent in the earlier period,
but become suddenly and widely prevalent in the later. The log-
ical inference from these two observations is that, in the late
sixth century BC, the Greeks began using a system of hoists and
pulleys which had not been available (indeed had probably not
been invented) until then; that this meant operating with mod-
erate loads only, since the system was at an early stage of its
development; and that the preceding era must have used
methods in which the direct lifting of blocks played no part, and
the strict limitation of size was not yet the overriding concern.
150 Archaic Greece

But what were these methods? We have a piece of literary evi-

dence which is, however, from such a relatively late and unreli-
able source that archaeologists had hesitated to accept it. The
elder Pliny (Natural History xxxvi, 96-7) describes how the upper
works of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos were raised into
place by means of a ramp of sandbags; he seems to be describing
the Archaic temple built in the 550s BC, although there is some
confusion in the account. The Ephesos temple was one of the
very largest built in the Archaic (or any other) period and the
biggest block of its architrave may have weighed over 40 tons;
but there are other huge Archaic buildings, and there are several
smaller temples where opportunities are taken to introduce
fewer and larger monolithic blocks (for example, in columns),
where later builders used more and smaller ones. Since we
know that both the Egyptians and the Assyrians had long been
using ramps of earth and mud-brick, supplemented by levers,
for constructing large stone buildings and erecting obelisks, it
seems highly likely that the Greeks had learned these methods
from them in the seventh century when, for the first time for at
least 500 years, they had occasion to apply them. In the course
of that century, we find them graduating from the half-ton
building-blocks of the early stone temple at Isthmia to the col-
ossal statue, now only fragmentarily preserved but originally
weighing over 20 tons, erected by the Naxians on Delos.
Methods like these are instinctively associated in modern
minds with authoritarian régimes and with massed, unskilled
(and therefore presumably slave) labour. This may in part
explain the reluctance to accept Pliny’s account as typical of the
practices of the Archaic Greek states. But they are technological
methods, without any very serious implication for the intellec-
tual world, and this is just the sphere in which we find Archaic
Greece to be least original and inventive. Indeed, some positive
attraction may have been found in the spectacular nature of the
physical feats which were possible only with such laborious
techniques. Pliny’s account of the Ephesos temple (or rather,
that of his source) is characterized by pure admiration, and some
similar response must have been sought by the Naxians who
Economic Realities 151
inscribed on the base of their colossus: ‘I am of the same stone,
statue and base.’ (The statement is not literally true and may
constitute a deliberate attempt at deception; otherwise, and less
interestingly, it is best interpreted as meaning ‘of the same type
of stone’, that is fine marble.)
A question remains as to where the ultimate invention of the
hoist and compound pulley took place, which brought this era of
antiquated constructional methods to an end. The presumption
that it was in Greece is based on the monumental evidence sur-
viving in Greek buildings; if this is right, then it shows that the
Greeks were not indefinitely satisfied to cling to inherited
methods; and it also coincides in time with some other evidence,
suggesting that in the late sixth century BC a second, if lesser,
wave of technological advance swept over the Greek world, 200
years after the initial revolution which we discussed in chapters 1
and 2. The appearance of purpose-built sailing merchantmen
(above, p. 137) is probably another feature of the period in
Greece. We shall return to the remarkable developments of the
final Archaic epoch in the last chapter.
Meanwhile the evolution of military technology, on which we
touched before (pp. 101-7) can be shown to follow a similar
path. In the late eighth century, there is a series of radical inno-
vations: the adoption of bronze plate-armour, the invention of
the two-handled shield, the development of the Corinthian form
of one-piece helmet and, then or shortly after, the revival of the
greave. With the evolution of a new form of tactics to accom-
pany the new hardware, things were then allowed to rest essen-
tially unchanged for well over 150 years. Greeks outside Crete
ignored the art of archery. Little was done to improve the quality
of cavalry, despite the possible introduction of a stronger breed
of horses in the seventh century. Infantry armour and tactics
saw only marginal modifications: a hoplite of 700 BC could have
fought a hoplite of 550 BC on more or less even terms. But then
towards the end of the sixth century we sense an air of unease
and renewed experimentation. It is in the nature of military
technology to be more than usually sensitive to external
developments, since they present a potential threat. From the
 iL5Z Archaic Greece

late 540s onwards, the cities of Greek Ionia were falling one by
one to the besieging armies of Cyrus of Persia; while the sea,
about 535 a fleet manned by Phokaian refugees who had settled
in Corsica was worsted by the Etruscans and Carthaginians. In
c.520-510 a Spartan colonial venture in the West was first
repulsed in Tripolitania and then defeated in Sicily, its leader
Dorieus being killed in battle with the Elymians and Carthagi-
nians. Greek military and naval prowess had for long appeared
supreme in Mediterranean warfare; was it now to pay the pen-
alty for its seeming complacency? Cyrus himself had
threatened Sparta with retribution for intervening in Ionia;
though he still lacked the naval power to implement this, it
probably seemed only a matter of time before he acquired it.
At all events, some change in Greek military thinking is
ite 27 detectable. Around 530 BC, a new type of composite cuirass,
leather-based with metal reinforcements (often including scales),
begins to appear on Greek vases, in place of the plate-armour
which had been universal for the past two centuries. Its most
obvious advantage was its relative lightness, and the resultant
mobility that it conferred on the infantryman. Then we hear
(Pausanias v 8, 10) that in 520 a new event made its appearance
at the Olympic Games: the hoplitodromos or race in armour, in
which the runner covered nearly a quarter of a mile wearing a
helmet and carrying a shield. In later years, when it had outlived
its military application, this event became something of a joke;
but its original institution suggests an interest in the training of
mobile infantry. A new type of one-edge sword, very possibly
itself of Persian inspiration, is seen in battle-pictures of the same
period. Next, we learn of two experiments on the part of tyrants,
both around 530, in the field of archery: Polykrates of Samos
recruited a special corps of a thousand bowmen (Herodotus iii
39, 3 and 45, 3) which formed an important part of his land
forces; while a series of Athenian vases, from the later part of
Peisistratos’s reign and that of his son Hippias, shows archers
(who appear in this case to be Skythian mercenaries) operating
in close concert with the heavy infantry. All of these measures
point to a general concern with tactics, and a specific desire to
Economic Realities 153
confront on equal terms enemies who were strong in the handl-
ing of light-armed infantry — such as the Persians, and perhaps
also those Greek states who had been swiftest in emulating the
Persians. In the event, the increased mobility of the Athenian
troops was to be triumphantly vindicated at Marathon in 490;
while by the time of Plataia in 479, it is clear that Athens had
an effective corps of archers of her own (Herodotus ix 22, 1
and 60, 3).
More momentous than any of these advances in land warfare
was a naval change, the invention of the trireme, a warship with
three banks of oars; but the difficulty is that scholars cannot
agree as to its date. There are two main schools of thought:
those who, with the somewhat ambiguous support of
Thucydides and the explicit testimony of some later writers,
make it a Corinthian invention of the seventh century BC,
whether early or late in that century; and those who believe that
it was first adopted in the Aegean in the time of Polykrates
around 530 BC, relying partly on the negative evidence of our
main historical accounts of naval warfare and on the correspond-
ing absence of artistic representations of triremes before that
date. The second view at least leaves open the possibility of an
important corollary: that the trireme was actually invented by
the Phoenicians at some earlier date, and then taken over by
Polykrates and other Greeks. The arguments are extremely
complicated and the choice between them correspondingly dif-
ficult. But, in different ways, each view would conform fairly
well to a pattern that appears in other technological aspects of
Archaic Greece: the early invention by the Corinthians would be
admitted, even by its supporters, to have been followed by a
long period of relative inactivity in which the triremes are not
built in quantity and do not dominate Greek sea-power; the late
adoption by Polykrates would correspond neatly in time with
the evidence of military innovation under the threat of new
enemies (for it was the acquisition of the Phoenician fleet which
was shortly to convert Persia into an amphibious power). It also
recalls Herodotus’ great enthusiasm for Samian technology (iii
60): for him, the three greatest feats of Greek engineering were
 154 Archaic Greece

the building of the Heraion, the construction of the tunnel of

e€ 25 Eupalinos and the construction of the harbour mole — all three of
them to some degree visible to this day on Samos, and all dat-
able between about 540 and 520 BC.
The development of technology illustrates neither the steady
advance nor the ‘compulsory originality’ which observers have
rightly detected in may other aspects of Archaic Greek history.
But how does this relate to the other ‘explanation’ for the rela-
tively slow development of the commercial sector of the Greek
economy which we cited earlier (p. 148), namely the low prestige
of manufacturing and trade? Did ideological prejudice discourage
technological progress, or was the relative stagnation of Greek
technology a reason for the low repute of those whose work
depended on it? For several reasons the first alternative is to be
preferred, though it does not contain anything approaching the
whole truth. Greek technology proved itself capable of swift
response when society, in the cause of growth or survival, pres-
sed it hard enough or when, for reasons of prestige, it valued
sufficiently highly a particular contribution that technology
could offer. But for long periods, Archaic society made no such
demands. Technological activity, like economic activity, had
proved to be merely a subordinate part of the social and political
system; the modern notion of technology positively shaping the
development of human society seems not to fit Archaic Greece.
It is indeed to the economic life of Greece generally that the
word ‘archaic’, with all the force of its implications, seems to
apply most closely. The physical form of the Archaic ‘cities’ is
another case in point. Throughout this book, the repeated use of
the word ‘polis’ and its common translation as ‘city-state’ have
probably allowed a picture of a fairly well-developed urbanism
to form. Such a picture would be utterly misleading for a good
part of the Archaic period. The very fact that we found the first
glimmerings of urbanism as early as the ninth century at Smyrna
(p. 32) in a way adds force to the claim that this was a late and
hesitant, if not an almost unconscious development. For when
we look at the physical evidence of the period around 600 BC, we
find a disconcerting lack of progress. That Athens at this time
Economic Realities 155

AGORA C. 500 BC

« T

4 ny, », Royal Stoa S Y

: ;" a,
JUeD

KOLONOS
AGORAIOS
Temple of ‘oot
oe [s
Temple of A

Orchestra

metres

Fig. 13 Plan of the civic centre of Athens c. 500 BC

should correspond so little to the modern conception of a city (or

even of a town) may not seem so surprising after what was said
about its lack of economic development (above, pp. 144-6). But
it is certainly true that, down to Solon’s time, the site which was
to become the market-place and civic centre (or agora) of Athens
had not yet been designated as such: wells are found to contain
domestic débris, burials had ceased not very long before and rec-
ognizable public buildings are virtually non-existent. There may
have been an earlier nucleus on the upper slopes of the
Akropolis, but if so the nature of the terrain excluded anything
in the direction of urban planning. The recognizable centres of
habitation, indicated by cemeteries, are numerous, small and
156 Archaic Greece

widely scattered; we have once again the choice of regarding

Athens either as a very extensive settlement or as a collection of
separate villages. Many considerations, and above all the
absence of any physical trace of a city-centre, support the latter
alternative. But soon after Solon, things appear to change: in the
agora area, the domestic deposits cease, the area is cleared,
buildings of political function begin to appear and are presently
joined by monumental sanctuaries. (By a curious coincidence —
or it may not be entirely coincidental — another city with a great
cultural future, Rome, was undergoing a similar development at
a similar date, with the laying out of a monumental forum). In
Athens, Peisistratos and his sons are predictably prominent not
only in establishing cult-centres, but also in providing facilities
like water-supply and drainage. A fortification-wall was possibly
constructed before the end of the Archaic period. By 500 Athens
would at last have been physically recognizable as a city, albeit a
modest one, by an inhabitant of Memphis or Tyre.
It is fortunate that Corinth, in this as in much else the first
place that one would look to for a contrast with Athens, pro-
vides some of the best evidence for Archaic urbanization, or the
lack of it. For in fact this evidence shows that there was no con-
trast at all: on the contrary, evidence for an early civic centre at
Corinth is even more negative than at Athens. Not only are the
centres of population equally widely separated, but there are
signs that one of them, a potters’ quarter about a mile away from
the ultimate city-centre, was disposing of its products at the
place of manufacture, a strong pointer to the absence of any cen-
tral market. There is even a hint that it may have had its own
private fortification-wall. This state of affairs apparently con-
tinued to exist long after Athens had taken its first steps towards
centralization. The remarks which Thucydides made about
Sparta in the late fifth century (i 10, 2) are an object-lesson as to
how far the political development of the polis, the growth of its
power and the extension of its cultural and even its commercial
activity could be combined with an absence of urbanization:
from ‘scattered villages after the ancient fashion of Greece’ there
emanated a mystique which has been with us ever since.
Economic Realities 157
It was not necessarily the same story everywhere in the Greek
world. Greek communities which settled either within the
sphere of influence of older urban cultures, or on colonial sites
where they found themselves surrounded not by their own rural
citizens but by indigenous and potentially hostile aliens, natur-
ally proceeded to a more concentrated form of urbanism. As we
saw, fortification-walls may appear much earlier at such sites;
so, too, may urbanization and even rudimentary forms of
town-planning. The excavators of Smyrna found seventh-century
housing wherever they dug within the fortification-circuit; the
fact that this was not true of earlier periods, together with the
very early date of the wall, shows that here too we have a sequ-
ence of developments attested elsewhere (cf. p. 31): the wall-
circuit is first built and then, with greater or less delay, urban
growth takes place inside it. Smyrna by now had its main sanctu-
ary and perhaps an agora as well. The reconstructed drawing of
the late seventh-century city has become familiar, and may well
be fairly representative of certain types of Greek settlement
overseas; but it should not be taken (as it often is) to illustrate
the typical early polis in the Greek homeland.
Away to the west, the excavators of Magara Hyblaia in Sicily
have dated the creation of the agora to the middle years of the
seventh century — about three generations after the first founda-
tion of the colony. A roughly parallel development, just a cen-
tury later, can be seen at Selinous, founded itself as a colony of
Megara Hyblaia; here some scheme of organization must lie
behind the arrangement of the sanctuaries of the various
divinities, beginning about 550 BC, in carefully-aligned rectangu-
lar blocks. With urbanization, as with an earlier stage of state-
formation (pp. 41-2), it is not impossible that the overseas set-
tlements exercised some reflexive influence on the homeland; in
fact, if one includes Ionian foundations like Smyrna, this
becomes positively likely. In this way, for instance, western col-
onial experience could have effect both on a non-Greek com-
munity such as Rome, which lay within its circle of contact (p.
156), and on a mainland city like Athens. But we are bound to
conclude that, whatever factors made possible the achievement
 158 Archaic Greece

of Archaic Greece, an advanced urban culture was not one of

them.
And yet, despite everything - despite their own low social
standing and exclusion from any informed intelligentsia despite
the framework of a backward economic structure in which they
had to seek employment, despite the slow growth of urban
centres and industrial technology — the craftsmen of Archaic
Greece consistently achieved things which still command our
unqualified admiration. It is only thanks to their workmanship
that one can begin to write a study of Archaic Greece such as
this, based on the material culture of the age. But because of the
shortage of literary celebration of their products and the virtual
absence of any kind of historical reference in the subject-matter
of their art, it is extraordinarily difficult to relate their activities to
those of their better-known or more articulate contemporaries.
Later ages remembered the names (and little more than the
names) of only a handful of Archaic artists. It is almost as if they
were working in a milieu like that of Etruria or Phoenicia, where
no literary and little historical record survives; we have to judge
their products on their own merits, and they pass the test
triumphantly.
Almost every characteristic type of artefact which we associate
with the Greek achievement was pioneered and brought to
maturity in the Archaic age: temples of the Doric order, Ionic
buildings ranging from the miniature treasury to the gigantic
temple, polygonal masonry jointed with a perfection that later
Greeks never surpassed, beautifully executed stoichédon inscrip-
tions, studies of the human body at its ideal best and in a variety
of actions, figured coin-dies with the familiar symbols of
e 26 Athena’s owl, the Arethusa-head of Syracuse or the Corinthian
Pegasos, hollow-cast bronze statues of life size, hammered
bronzes of an expertise that has been the despair of imitators
over the next two thousand years, grave-reliefs that manage to
combine reticence about death with poignancy, functional
objects from water-jars to dress-pins with real beauty of design —
the list could be almost indefinitely extended. There are even
classes of handiwork in which the Archaic accomplishments
Economic Realities 159

greatly overshadow the Classical, such as mythical and legen-

dary scenes on vases, or decorated armour. The anonymous
executants of these triumphs must inevitably live in the shadow
of their fellow-countrymen who operated in the sphere of the
mind rather than with the hands, and whose achievement we
shall consider in the next chapter; but they live none the less.
Yet it has to be admitted that the hope expressed at the end of
the previous chapter remains unfulfilled. Economic factors have
not sufficed to explain the more paradoxical developments in the
political history of Archaic Greece. The truth seems to be that
the economic realities are not especially remarkable, let alone
unique. Our search for really distinctive features and decisive
causes must be pushed further.
 The Rise of the Individual
Have you heard of someone swifter than Syrian horses?
Has he thrown the bully of Corinth in the sanded circle?
Has he crossed the Isthmus already? Is he seeking brilliant
Athens and us?
W. H. Auden, The Orators

For us today, it is perhaps the intellectual advances, and the

things that they made possible, which transform the achieve-
ments of Archaic Greece from a series of precocious and small-
scale innovations into something timeless and indestructible. For
this reason alone, it would be an act of cowardice to omit all
discussion of them; yet such discussion, in a book by an
archaeologist, may be suspected of possible pretension or even
hypocrisy. It is the written word which, in the form of extant
original texts and later descriptions, gives the proof positive of
the reality of these advances. Luckily, however, they are also
reflected in other fields besides that of the written word. Indeed,
they are probably inseparable from the material record, and cer-
tainly we can use the material evidence as one aid in following
them. Nor are the literary texts always impossible for the non-
specialist to penetrate.
To describe these discoveries as intellectual advances perhaps
disguises the most important single fact about them: that they
were accessible to many people besides intellectuals, and in time
affected the lives of almost everyone in the Greek world. (This is
also the reason why they came to be reflected in physical and
durable form.) It is the distinguishing characteristic of Greek cul-
ture that, long before the notion of democracy had been con-
ceived, there was an established sense of rights of the individual
The Rise of the Individual 161
citizen; one of these rights was that of a degree of free cornmuni-
cation and, on some issues at least, of criticism. It is this ‘open-
ness’ of Greek society which is its most precious single legacy
and, as with so much else, we detect it coming into being in the
Archaic period. There is little doubt that a close link exists be-
tween the intellectual speculations of the few and individual
freedom among the many: it is not so much that the operation of
the first encouraged the growth of the second, as that the sec-
ond, once it existed, encouraged the first. If we begin, therefore,
by examining the progress of intellectual speculation, it is
because of the wider freedom of society as a whole that this
activity implies, and which it expresses in unusually articulate
form.
It is difficult to identify a unifying thread running through the
intellectual activities of the Archaic Greeks which were remem-
bered by later ages; they covered a wide variety of fields and
they differed greatly in the length of time that elapsed before
they were supplanted by new theories, or even entirely new
methods. The most that we can do at first is to isolate certain
common features. First, a prerequisite for nearly all of them was
leisure; few of the discoveries were of the kind which can arise
from consideration of working problems, encountered in a
man’s pursuit of his trade, and even these required a period of
withdrawal for contemplation. The majority were not of this
type, nor did they allow of profitable material application after-
wards. It follows that the Greek intellectual of the Archaic
period was usually a man of independent means. This in turn
has a chronological implication; it means that prosperity had to
reach a level adequate for the support of such a group, broad
enough to include the very highest range of intelligence, and in
many states this level was simply not reached until some way
into the Archaic period. It is very difficult, for example, to see
any room for a group of this kind in the worlds of Homer or
Hesiod.
Next, there is a geographical concentration to be observed.
Perhaps the six greatest names in the philosophy of the sixth
century BC — Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras,
162 Archaic Greece

Herakleitos and Xenophanes - were all Ionians, the first three

from Miletos, the others from Samos, Ephesos and Kolophon
respectively. Of these, Thales also acquired a sufficiently lasting
reputation for practical wisdom to be later included among the
‘Seven Sages’, men who applied their brains to political and
especially to legislative problems. The list of the Seven Sages
was not quite unanimously agreed, but it certainly included four
men — Pittakos of Lesbos, Bias of Priene, Kleoboulos of Lindos
(in Rhodes) and Thales — who came from the coastland and
islands of the eastern Aegean. To an earlier generation of mod-
ern scholarship, the great reputation of the thinkers of eastern
Greece implied a truly dominating role for this region in the
growth of Archaic Greek culture generally. This impression is
hardly borne out by the evidence we have examined in the pre-
vious chapters; and in fact the inference was always essentially
false, for two main reasons. First, there is the chronological
point made above: none of the ‘great Ionians’ was active much
before 600 BC and by then Archaic civilization had essentially
taken shape. The second reason is one of geography and poli-
tics: its easterly location might give Ionia the advantage in those
fields (such as the intellectual ones) where there was much to be
learned from the civilizations further east, but it also meant that
it was particularly exposed to military threats from the same
quarter — from the kings of Lydia, from the Kimmerian raiders
and above all from the Persians. Already by 540, we find mass-
emigration of communities of Ionian Greeks in the face of the
Persian threat. The intellectual élite not only advocated this pol-
icy (we hear of Bias advising the Ionians to emigrate en bloc and
settle Sardinia), but in several known cases followed it them-
selves, if for more personal reasons: both Pythagoras and
Xenophanes became political exiles in the west. Thus after a life
of little more than fifty years the flowering of Ionian culture
began to be cut short by a progressive draining of human
resources. It was Ionia’s misfortune, and the Greek mainland’s
salvation, that a further fifty years separated the onset of the
Persian threat in the two areas.
The other great common feature of early Greek intellectual
The Rise of the Individual 163
speculations was that they dealt in observation, rational
thought, theory and explanation, but seldom in experiment or
application. To some contemporary Greeks, this will doubtless
have seemed as serious a shortcoming as it does to many mod-
erns, for whom ‘theoretical’, ‘abstract’ and ‘academic’ are mainly
pejorative words. Thus the Seven Sages were largely disting-
uished from, and on many counts preferred to, the philosophers
of Archaic Ionia. Even in the thought of the one man who com-
bined membership of both groups, Thales, the striking thing is
the lack of connection between the theoretical and the practical.
This said, it must also be stated that in Ionia, during the sixth
century BC, the essential foundations of modern philosophy,
astronomy, mathematics and geography were all laid. That is a
very large achievement, even though the Ionians did have some
predecessors in other cultures on whose work they could in part
build. Observations of the sun, stars and planets, for example,
had been made for thousands of years before this. It is an ines-
capable conclusion that these had occurred (though to what
degree of sophistication is highly debatable) among the
megalith-builders of prehistoric north-western Europe. More
relevant to Thales’ circumstances is the fact that some astronom-
ical observations of the Babylonians may actually have been
available to him. In the same way, geographical knowledge had
already, before 2000 BC, reached the point where a crude map of
northern Mesopotamia could be drawn on clay. But the
achievement of Thales in astronomy and of Anaximander in
geography was still original and, one is tempted to think, would
hardly have been possible at this stage outside Greece. Thales
probably appropriated some Babylonian knowledge (astronomy
being a subject in which the building-up of observational data is
a very long-term process), but without adopting Babylonian
astrology and religion; instead, he used it to forecast an eclipse
of the sun (probably that of May 585 BC) at a moment when
military fortunes were affected by the portent. Anaximander col-
lected geographical information in order to draw a map, not of
his own homeland but of the known world, and his Ionian suc-
cessors built on his work. Around 500 BC, Aristagoras of Miletos
164 Archaic Greece

was able to impress the king of Sparta by showing him a map of

the world engraved on bronze (Herodotus v 49, 1), which gives
an inkling of the Ionian pre-eminence in this field. In a similar
way. Pythagoras and the other Ionian mathematicians had a
basis of Egyptian geometrical work to build on, but the perfec-
tion of the procedure of pure deduction, whether in geometry or
in arithmetic, was largely their own achievement.
Most original of all (though also, one suspects, most difficult
of general access) was the Ionian adventure in physical specula-
tion. Here our own age should be better placed than many of its
predecessors to appreciate, without a feeling of patronization,
the enterprise of the early Greek thinkers. A common feature of
both our era and theirs is the growth of a new crop of far-
reaching, intellectually exciting and mutally contradictory
theories. The composition of matter and the origins of the uni-
verse are in any case questions which still inspire such respect as
to make the most complacent modernist seem small. They are
also questions which divide the expert from the layman by a gulf
which is formed not merely by ignorance, but also by a kind of
revulsion: if the truth is so abstruse, alarming and remote from
any ordinary kind of empirical verification as the experts’
theories maintain, then the layman tends to feel that he would
rather not think about it at all.
These feelings may still arise whe . we contemplate the find-
ings of astro-physics in the past fifteen years. Let us take a series
of statements from Professor Steven Weinberg’s recent book The
first three minutes, which reconstructs the opening stages of the
existence of our universe, using at one point the image of a
cinematic film. The film starts not at the absolute beginning, but
after a lapse of about one-hundredth of a second. At this
moment ‘The temperature of the universe is 100,000 million
degrees Kelvin (10"* °K). The universe is simpler and easier to
describe than it ever will be again. It is filled with an undifferen-
tiated soup of matter and radiation, each particle of which col-
lides very rapidly with the other particles.’ As to its size, ‘Since
the temperature of the universe falls in inverse proportion to its
size, the circumference at the time of the first frame was less
The Rise of the Individual 165
than at present by the ratio of the temperature then (10" °K) to
the present temperature (3°K); this gives a first-frame circumfer-
ence of about 4 light years.’
The thoughtful reader of these sentences may experience
much the same conflict of feelings as a Milesian reader of Anax-
imander’s treatise of the mid-sixth century BC on the origins of
matter, a work in which the idea of the Infinite was put forward,
probably for the first time, as the origin of all things, and which
was the more arresting because the author expressed himself in
the new medium of continuous prose. For Anaximander, the
world (itself one of many worlds in the universe) was the pro-
duct of conflicting pairs of elements, separated out from the
Infinite, whose interaction was controlled by some kind of law
or justice. Man’s development was itself a form of evolution
from these beginnings. The symmetry and elegance of Anaxi-
mander’s abstractions, and their obvious social analogies, might
have evoked the same degree of respect in the minds of contem-
poraries as does the precision of Professor Weinberg’s physics
and mathematics, and their objective basis, in ours. But the
respect would be mixed with doubts: in the earlier case, Does he
really know this? in the later, Did this really happen? and in
either instance, By what means is the layman ever going to be
able to establish whether the theory is even approximately right?
This reaction is disarmingly anticipated by Weinberg himself: ‘I
cannot deny a feeling of unreality in writing about the first three
minutes as if we really know what we are talking about.’ In both
cases, too, we suspect that there is some kind of lingering para-
dox: how did the Infinite come to be there anyway? What was it
that exploded during the first one-hundredth of a second to
produce the universe? And if the layman holds religious views
of any kind, there will be the further worry: how can I possibly
reconcile this account with my own, or perhaps with any, religi-
ous beliefs? Just how serious this last consideration was in Anax-
imander’s day is debatable, but one can again suspect that in the
sixth century BC it would probably have brought the thinker into
acute trouble anywhere but in Greece. And even in Greece,
another Ionian scientist, Aristarchos of Samos, found it still a
 166 Archaic Greece

threat three hundred years later: his contemporary and fellow-

intellectual, Kleanthes the Stoic, felt that he should be prose-
cuted for impiety in ‘disturbing the hearth of the universe’,
because of his revolutionary doctrine that the earth both rotated
and revolved round the sun (Plutarch, Moralia 923 A).
It has never been too difficult, however, for later ages to
appreciate the moral courage of the Ionian thinkers. Where our
own generation is especially fortunate is in being able to see
itself, once again, as their intellectual heir. We suddenly find
ourselves placed, as they were, in a state of genuine uncertainty
about these most fundamental of questions; and we live, as they
evidently did, in a social and religious climate which does not
discourage, at any rate to the point of active prevention, specula-
tions and calculations aimed at answering the questions.
Whether the analogy is strong enough to allow of any guesses as
to their impact on their society, or of society’s influence on
them, is more doubtful. For what it is worth, it does not suggest
that the former effect was immediately significant: it does not
appear to make any difference to our behaviour whether we
accept or reject the view that the universe is expanding and cool-
ing, though at a deeper level there may be some ultimate effect.
But the converse factor, the influence of the social system on the
individual thinker, is widely thought to have been important
~ then (as it doubtless is now)\.Some hold that the successful
evolution of the early Greek state fostered the belief that mind
alone could solve any other problem equally well; others, that
ge eve the acceptance of a new form of social justice in the city encour-
Svat
Vonant’s
aged the search for a similar operation of justice and order in
naturé.)There may be truth in both contentions; but perhaps a
more fundamental factor was that early Greek society, by per-
mitting the individual to function as citizen or express himself as
artist, was also (probably at first unwittingly) offering the chance
for him to indulge in speculative thought; and at the same time,
if less directly, the chance for his listeners and readers to study,
question, interrupt and answer his expositions. The philosophi-
cal meeting was as revolutionary and durable an innovation as
the political assembly. Other societies before had achieved the
The Rise of the Individual 167
level of prosperity which permitted the growth of a leisured
class from which the intellectual could emerge, but they had not
combined this with a withdrawal of the constraints on his
thought.
Before we leave the Ionian scientists, we should attempt some
summary of the elements of their own view of science. They did
not see it as a vehicle for social, material or any other sort of
progress, except that of their own vocation. This of course
limited their social impact, and may even help to explain some
of the respects in which Archaic Greece failed to develop as fast
as might have been expected. But at the same time, they
pioneered not only fields of study, but methods of study, on
which we still depend today. The mere rejection of supernatural
causes for natural phenomena was perhaps the most important
single step for the subsequent growth of science; by taking this
step, they inevitably brought into focus problems whose very
existence had, in some cases, hitherto been obscured by religi-
ous dogma, but which have occupied scientists ever since. By
applying mathematics to natural phenomena, too, they set mod-
ern physics on its path, though they did not themselves care to
follow it very far. Further, the whole notion of empirical
research, although seldom conspicuous in modern accounts of
Ionian thought, is nevertheless an essential background to it;
this too is a foundation-stone of all subsequent science.
One field where we should expect to find this last method in
operation is that of medicine. The progress of Archaic Greek Plate 28
medicine is essentially charted for us in individual terms, as is so
much of the thought of the times: it is the attainments of a few
outstanding doctors which the sources mainly record, although
modern experts have also detected passages of Archaic origin
embedded in the later corpus of Hippokratic writings. Alkmaion
of Kroton was one of the leaders of a school of medicine in that
city (Cyrene had another distinguished school), which won
proverbial fame over the whole Greek world in the later sixth
century; he was a philosopher as well (probably a pupil of
Pythagoras) and applied to medical practice the philosophical
theory, going back to Anaximander, of the conflict of opposites,
168 Archaic Greece

in what might seem to us a rather doctrinaire way. But then we

learn that Alkmaion also operated on the eye, and that he was
perhaps the first to locate the centre of thought in the human
brain; these were hardly the activities of either a pure theoreti-
cian or a primitive. His fellow-citizen and perhaps slightly older
contemporary, Demokedes, is best known from a long and excit-
ing, but in part patently fictitious, story in Herodotus (iii,
129-37). The bare bones of the story, however, cannot have
been simply invented; and the picture of a Greek doctor not only
successfully treating King Dareios of Persia for a severe ankle-
sprain, but specifically excelling his Egyptian rivals in so doing,
is a credible one by the late Archaic period. Here again, the story
contains a tell-tale element (also credible) as to the influence of
the Greek social and political system on the career of
Demokedes: on emigrating to Aigina and arriving there without
any medical equipment, he nevertheless establishes a surgery
there with such success that, a year later, his services are
retained at a very handsome annual salary by the state of
Aigina; there then ensues, in subsequent years, an auction for
his services between other Greek states, as a result of which his
salary rises from about 15 to about 30 times the wage of a skilled
workman. Finally the fortunes of war bring him to Persia as a
captive, with the result that we have seen; but it was his reputa-
tion in the Greek world which brought him to the Great King’s
notice, and this had been essentially created by two Greek fea-
tures: the existence of public (as against royal) employment, and
the scope given to individual excellence.
Our consideration of philosophy, astronomy, geography and
medicine has brought us down to a late stage in the Archaic
period. As a manifestation of what was possible in Greece when
some of the constraints on individual freedom of thought and
action were lifted, this achievement is certainly very remarkable.
But it is by no means the earliest such manifestation. For that,
we may fittingly turn to literature and the visual arts. We have
given some consideration to the development of these, and their
relation to each other, at an earlier stage, the second half of the
eighth century (above, pp. 65-73). But quite soon after that, the
The Rise of the Individual 169
whole course of development in both fields changed dramati-
cally. It is difficult and possibly misguided to look for evidence
of one medium influencing the other, except in isolated
instances of common subject-matter; they are better regarded as
independent manifestations of the same historical process (and
once again, it is a process wholly confined to Greece). It is in
literature that we can follow this process more clearly, if in social
terms also more narrowly.
Already in Homer, there are fleeting signs that an Epic poet,
entirely dependent on aristocratic houses for his employment
and his immediate cultural response, could yet voice in passing,
or put into the mouths of his characters, sentiments that were
critical of the aristocratic ethos, or at least showed that there
were other values which might command equal respect. At the
turn of the century, Hesiod in his Works and Days makes a prin-
ciple of such sentiments, and repeatedly cautions the aristocrat
against abuse of his position. In positive terms, however, he has
little to offer either of political alternatives or of ideals: hard
work is his prescription, a laudable but hardly an inspiring one.
The rise of the Greek state had not yet, it seems, generated an
articulate literary expression of its accompanying ideology. But
the gap was soon filled, and the thing which perhaps did most
to bring this about was the emergence of a new poetic form, the
short lyric. In a poem of short compass, much can be said; but
the more personal the statement, the greater is likely to be the
impact. Choral anthems and brief narratives in Epic style con-
tinued to be written, but the most talented writers saw that a
whole new field of personal expression was opened to them,
which the great length and timeless subject-matter of the Epic
had not offered. They took their opportunity with startling
promptness. The expression of anything like an ideology did not
come at once; first, there had to be the discovery of an individual
voice and of its ability to command attention. But, within
perhaps a generation of the Odyssey and the Works and Days, we
are confronted with the extraordinary figure of Archilochos of
Paros.
Modern comment on Archilochos tends to fall into two dis-
170 Archaic Greece

tinct categories, according to whether it dates from before or

after 1973. For it was in that year that potentially the greatest
single step forward in our understanding of the Greeks of early
Archaic times for at least a century, the most direct new com-
munication from them to us, was made possible by the reading
of a papyrus with a long fragment of a lyric poem of epode form
— easily the longest surviving and restorable extract of
Archilochos. On the strength of the smaller fragments that had
been known previously, and of a number of references in later
writers (for Archilochos was seen to be a great poet in antiquity),
a reasonably consistent and recognizable picture had been built
up: the first surviving personality of the western world emerged
as that of a cynical, headstrong, sometimes coarse pragmatist.
Critics have long since agreed that it is a fallacy to take all first-
person statements of Archilochos and his successors literally, as
being necessarily autobiographical. Nevertheless, it is likely that
the man did experience more or less the kind of career with
which we credit him: born probably in the lifetime of Hesiod, of
aristocratic family but possibly illegitimate, politically a maverick
who combined a mocking distrust of the propaganda of his own
class with contempt for his inferiors, he fell from favour in his
native island of Paros and spent at least a period of his life
abroad and at sea, fighting; at one time he seems to have served
as a mercenary, at another he was a leading figure in the found-
ation of the most famous Parian colony, Thasos. But he found
time to write some of the fiercest Greek love-poetry that has
survived and later biographers (perhaps falling victim to the
‘autobiographical fallacy’ mentioned above) linked his name
with the daughters of a prominent Parian named Lykambes.
The new discovery belongs to this last context. The surviving
part of the papyrus gives us thirty-five lines —- apparently the
middle and end — from the new poem, and then starts on
another poem which was already known and attributed to
Archilochos. This was the first strong hint that Archilochos
might be the author; the next was the appearance of the familiar
name of one of Lykambes’ daughters in line 16. The metre and
dialect do nothing to contradict the inference. Nevertheless,
The Rise of the Individual ‘wen
within under a year a group of respected scholars had come out
against the attribution and, although they appear to remain in a
minority, their view cannot simply be ignored. Even they, how-
ever, must admit the likelihood that the new poem was accepted
as being by Archilochos in antiquity, not only because the
manuscript is of the second century AD, but also because in the
fifth century AD the lexicographer Hesychios recorded a four-
word phrase from line 10, translated below as ‘besides the main
one’, and gave its (by then probably long accepted) explanation
as meaning ‘apart from sexual intercourse’. No one would have
troubled to interpret this phrase if they had realized that its con-
text was that of a mere Hellenistic pastiche of Archilochos
(which is what some at least of the sceptics suppose the poem to
be). I will say no more than that the poem seems to me almost
certainly genuine, and simply give what seems from some
points of view the most satisfactory published translation of the
poem, that of Professor John Van Sickle of Brooklyn College.
Professor Van Sickle has preceded his translation by a series of
plausible, though entirely conjectural, restorations of the pos-
sible content of the missing lines at the beginning of the poem,
incorporating also one or two single known lines of Archilochos
which could belong to this passage; while even the main section
of the poem has lost letters or words from the beginnings and
ends of lines, through the tearing of the edges of the papyrus, so
that the text contains many smaller restorations here too. By his
generous permission, I print the whole:

eebut
longing thatmakesa man’s limbs goslack, my friend, still breaks my stride
. . once I saw
alone Lycambes’ child, the younger one,
gathering flowers in the close of Hera . .
. . . spoke to her these words:
‘.. . keen desire... heart...
VOU eer eles vas,
...now... my very own.’
So much I said. She answered point for point:
4
 T72 Archaic Greece

totally keeping yourself, and I’d hold out to do the same;

but if you are pressed, if your heart drives hard,
here in our household there is — and wants so much to marry now —
a lovely, tender girl: you won’t I think,
find any fault in her looks. Make her, not me, your very own.’
So much she said. I answered point for point:
‘Daughter of Amphimedo, that woman excellent and wise
whom now the moldering earth keeps down below,
many delights are derived from Aphrodite for young men
10 besides the main one. One of those will do;
while as for this, in good time, whenever you have grapes grown ripe,
both you and I, god willing, will decide.
I’m going to do as you say: you think I’m pressing very hard;
but here beneath the rim and shading gates
45 don’t make a thing of it, dear, since I will keep my course to
grassy gardens — that for now. Neobule, no!
Somebody else marry her! Aiai! She’s more than overripe:
her girlhood flower has withered and dropped off,
also the grace that was there. Her fill she never ever got;
20 the woman’s crazed; she long since showed her prime.
Out to the crows! Keep her off! May never he who rules the gods
decree that I, for keeping one like her,
stand as a neighbourhood butt. Instead I much prefer you,
for you are neither faithless not two-faced.
23 She, though, is only too keen, makes many men her very own
I fear I'd get a misfit —- premature —
pressing on quickly with her: just like the hasty bitch, blind pups.’
So much I said, but then I took the girl
into the flowers in bloom and laid her down, protecting her
30 with my soft cloak, her neck held in my arms.
Though out of fear like a fawn she hindered, I encouraged her
and her breasts with my hands I gently grasped.
She, thenand there, herself showed young flesh-the onset of her prime—
and, all her lovely body fondling, I
also let go with my force, just touching, though, her tawny down.

© John Van Sickle 1977

The Rise of the Individual 15
One further comment is necessary: by accepting the explana-
tion in Hesychios of the first half of line 10 (see above), we
determine to some degree our interpretation of what happens in
the last line. Some, apparently rejecting the Hesychian gloss,
and at the same time succumbing once again to the ‘autobiog-
raphical fallacy’, have branded ‘Archilochos’ as an unregenerate
seducer, even a psychopathic rapist. But on the other view, it
seems likely that the narrator practises some form of last-minute
restraint. Again, I will only state my view that the context
favours the latter alternative. If the delicacy of this and other
episodes in the poem then seems hard to reconcile with the
crude Archilochos that we know from elsewhere, the ferocity of
the passage on Neobule in lines 16 to 27 may once again revive
our faith in the authenticity of the poem.
It seems a pity to dull the impact of these lines with so much
exposition, but their message comes through none the less. This ‘Cn

is a poem of sophistication, showing a relationship between the

lt LY
sexes which would pass as entirely normal today in, say, a YOY
Mediterranean country or any other society which lags some- dy
what behind full western emancipation. The apparent aristocra-
tic background of the participants has little effect on the content:
the poet seeks to interest us in their experience for its own sake,
and we have to care about them as individuals in order to
become involved. As if in one stride, Archilochos carries us from
traditionalism to modernity. Yet it must be admitted that, as a
genuine work of the seventh century BC, the poem is hardly typ-
ical of its kind (that indeed is the main importance of its discov-
ery). What is unusual is the absence of any attempt to give the
narrator’s experience a permanent or general significance, or to
pass on a message to society. Even Archilochos, the archetypal
misfit, usually felt moved to involve the community as a whole
in his complaints and insults, and to give it the benefit of his
advice; he was capable, too, of looking beyond the confines of
his native Paros and its colony to the wider world around. In the
work of his younger contemporaries and successors, these qual-
ities become much more conspicuous.
Some poets, notably the elegists Tyrtaios of Sparta and Kal-
174 Archaic Greece

linos of Ephesos, addressed the community with whole poems

of exhortation, in which the new civic virtues of solidarity, mod-
eration, frugality and, presently, justice were extolled at the
expense of their opposites. Another important feature of the rise
of seventh-century lyric is indeed the fact that its practitioners
were often drawn from other walks of life, notably the political
and the military: Terpander of Lesbos, a pioneer of the lyre, had
been summoned to Sparta, traditionally as early as 676 BC, to
play a statesman’s role in settling political disputes there, and he
was the first of a long line. Tyrtaios and Kallinos were particu-
larly concerned with the citizen as a soldier; Tyrtaios might have
been equally well fitted by the description which Archilochos
gave of himself, as first a servant of the war-god and then a
poet. But in other respects, the military contexts of these three
men’s poems look rather different. Archilochos portrays himself
as a freelance warrior, sometimes a mercenary; although evi-
dently familiar with the new-style equipment, he is interested in
the individual fortunes of war and not in general morale or tac-
tics. Kallinos too, though a little later (c. 640), seems still to
express the values of the aristocratic champion, in a way that
recalls the other evidence for Ionian backwardness in adopting
phalanx warfare (see above, p. 108); but his object is both com-
munal and propagandist. Tyrtaios, at the same period, has simi-
lar aims, but writes like a man determined to impress the pre-
cepts of massed infantry tactics on an army with different and
less disciplined habits.
But whereas the great military reform of the seventh century,
once fully achieved, could be taken for granted in the more static
conditions that followed, the political situation in most Greek
states remained unstable. The result was that the role of the poet
as an instructor in the conduct of civilian life continued, and was
even extended, in the later Archaic period. Tyrtaios contributed
here as well, with typically earnest generalities in a conservative
vein that was well designed to win acceptance at Sparta; later in
the century, we find Alkman inculcating in the Spartans some
other ideals of the new, state-centred morality: he praises simple
food and urges collaboration of neighbour with neighbour
The Rise of the Individual 175
(meaning of course citizen (Spartiate) neighbour). But one of the
most eloquent spokesmen for civic virtues is also one of the most
obscure: Phokylides of Miletos. A recent study suggests that he
lived in the first half of the sixth century, a time when Miletos
was passing through first tyranny and then two generations of
political unrest. To Phokylides — or to a later writer who used his
persona — we are indebted for the quintessential statement of
what differentiated the Archaic Greek state from its older and
more powerful Eastern neighbours:

Phokylides says this too: a small, well-ordered city

When it is built on a rock, is better than senseless Nineveh.

(fr. 5)

The general sentiment had been anticipated by other poets:

Archilochos had rejected both the wealth and the political power
of Gyges, king of Lydia; while Alkaios of Lesbos had discerned
that it was men, not fortifications, that made up the Greek city.
What is new here is the insistent claim on the reader’s attention
of the individual authority: repetition of his name in this same
formula is a feature of Phokylides’ surviving fragments. New,
too, is the attempt to identify the essential differences between
Greek and other political systems; and, one might add, the uni-
que near-contemporary reference to what had been the most
formidable to date of all such alien systems, the Assyrian Empire
based on Nineveh, which fell in 612 BC. Other lines credited to
Phokylides express complementary attitudes, and give advice of
the expected kind. Like Hesiod, he advocates arable farming
(though no longer from first principles) and discourages ill-
timed borrowing; like Archilochos, he distrusts fine appearances
and self-styled ‘breeding’. At one point, he even appears to anti-
cipate Bertolt Brecht’s dictum, ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann
kommt die Moral’; but when Phokylides says ‘Seek first for a
livelihood; when you have it, then look for virtue’, it is probable
that he is using the Greek word for virtue in its older sense of
‘quality’ or high social status. Neither a revolutionary (‘I want to
have a middle place in the city’) nor a diehard reactionary like
 176 Archaic Greece

his younger contemporary’ Theognis of Megara, Phokylides is

the authentic spokesman for the citizenry of an Archaic Greek
state and for the values that it had adopted; his apparent lack of
originality does not detract from this.
By the early sixth century, the poet-statesman is joined by a
different and equally significant figure, the statesman-poet. That
Solon should have used elegy as the medium, first for his politi-
cal appeals and then, after holding office, for his justificatory
propaganda, is both a token of his poetic gifts and a recognition
of the great power which lyric poetry had won as a means of
public communication. For that, Archilochos must take the
greatest credit: by proving that such verse could be forceful,
memorable and quotable, he fashioned an instrument for others
with wider concerns than his. A further tribute was paid later in
the sixth century by Xenophanes of Kolophon, the most radical
of the great philosophers of Ionia; he abandoned his predeces-
sors’ use of the prose treatise, and instead put his theories -—
which were in their nature intended for a wider public — into
verse-form. Where others had sought scientific alternatives to
the received account of the universe, Xenophanes tackled
head-on those aspects of the traditional religion which he found ©
obsolete, and dared to propose his own form of monotheism.
This was one of many assaults on established convention: nick-
named the ‘Homer-trampler’, he apparently found the values of
the Epic poets unacceptable in the community of his day; he -
disliked the violent and divisive tendences in the subject-matter
of their lyrical successors; he ridiculed the aristocratic love of
luxury and the popular adulation of athletes. Xenophanes was —
not only ahead of his times, but in many respects too advanced
even for later Classical thought. One is not surprised to learn —
that he became a political exile, but at least he seems to have _
_ reached a wide audience.
This raises again a question which we encountered at the very
beginning of this chapter: how far could an intellectual in
Archaic Greece communicate beyond a closed circle, or at most a
restricted élite? Each of the activities that we have been describ-
ing had its origins in some fairly exclusive social setting: where
The Rise of the Individual 177
epic poets had often sung in the great hall of an aristocrat’s
household, the lyric poet typically performed at a private sym-
posium or drinking-party. In one respect, as has been observed,
this change actually increased the exclusiveness of the occasion,
since women (or at any rate respectable women) would no
longer be in the audience. Philosophers presented their theories
to small groups of educated colleagues. A man like Xenophanes,
who combined the last two roles, was evidently at home in
either milieu. The basic requirement of leisure for these activities
in any case made them exclusive socially. This might suggest
that new ideas, new art-forms and new methods of thought
were unlikely to spread very widely among the population. Yet
the evidence is very much against this conclusion. On the con-
trary — to anticipate a little and give almost random examples —
we Shall find that the citizen population as a whole was recep-
tive to new political ideas, that literacy spread to a degree appar-
ently unprecedented in earlier cultures, that religious festivals
involved the participation of all classes, that the tastes of craft-
smen and their customers were often the same at different social
levels.
It is easy to point out some of the ‘egalitarian’ factors which
brought about this state of affairs: for instance, lyric poets might
be lionized in the aristocratic symposium, but they also com-
posed choral odes which were both commissioned and _ per-
formed publicly, and were heard by everyone; the widespread
tradition of citizen assemblies meant that political oratory was
judged by large audiences; the writing-system was an easily
accessible one. Music would be heard as widely as poetry Plate .
(indeed, at this time it existed only as an accompaniment to
poetry), and in Greece it must have acted as a unifying force.
The musical instruments of Archaic Greece were not extensive
either in number or in range; characteristically, they had been
adopted from the neighbouring cultures of the East at the begin-
ning of the Archaic period, with just a few modifications being
devised later. It is hardly surprising that there is little evidence
for a distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘popular’ in Greek
music. Perhaps most important of all, the structure of Archaic
178 Archaic Greece

thought was in general such that it could be widely com-

prehended. I mean by this that there had not yet taken place
that growth of theory, as such, which later ages have taken so
much for granted. There was as yet no real political theory, only
individual political measures; military theory was for long kept
to the minimum, if not excluded, by the Archaic forms of war-
fare; the social sciences were not yet founded and, as we have
noted, economic theory did not come into being even in the
Classical age; philosophical theory was only in its infancy. The
rarity of prose writing may have acted as a deterrent factor.
There may be some quickening of development in the last
decades of the Archaic period — perhaps in military and naval
theory for example (see pp. 151-3), but until then the doctrines
of intellectuals were couched in more accessible form than they
have ever been since. But there is also a particular proof of the
diffusion of culture through Archaic society, and it is to be found
in works of art.
If there is one product of the visual arts in Archaic Greece
which stands duty for the whole period, it is the type of stand-
ing nude male figure which we conventionally call the kouros.
Not only is it the commonest single category of Archaic statue,
but for experts it forms a kind of framework to which other
works of art must be related: it provides both a chronological
index of the progress of the sculptor’s art and, to some extent, a
guide to regional style, enabling us to discriminate between
artistically ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ schools or to distinguish,
for example, ‘graceful’ Attic from ‘sinewy’ Peloponnesian or
‘fleshy’ Ionian characteristics. It is also often used as an illustra-
tion of the inborn Greek love of order, symmetry and discip-
line, taking over the role assigned in the preceding era to
Geometric vases; and it is cited as an early example of the lasting
pre-occupation of Greek art with mankind as a subject, and with
physical beauty as both an ideal in itself, and a symbol of other
admired qualities (good birth, good exercise, even sexual desira-
bility). All of these claims have some justification, but some are
more debatable than is often realized; and all, it could be argued,
miss the most important points.
The Rise of the Individual 179
In the first place, the kouros-type as a criterion of the artistic
attainments of Archaic Greece is almost entirely misleading.
From most specialist treatments and from virtually all general
books, one would infer that the cream of sculptural talent used
the kouros as a prestigious medium in which to display their
highest skill and their newest anatomical discoveries. This view
is based on the undoubted frequency of occurrence of the type,
which in turn arises from its equally undoubted versatility of
function in society: a kouros could serve as a grave-monument
or as a dedication to a deity, in both cases without any necessity
for the person concerned to be of appropriate age and appear-
ance. On occasion, it could even serve as the actual cult-statue of
a male deity in his sanctuary. It thus had an extremely broad
social significance; but this does not mean that it had an equally
wide artistic importance. A good case could be made for saying
that, on the contrary, after the early stages the better sculptors
came to regard it as a tiresomely inhibiting and convention-
bound medium, which they were compelled to adopt for the
majority of their commissions, but from which they would
escape with relief when opportunity arose. The advantages of
the kouros-type would be most apparent to the mediocre sculp-
tor: its pose might have been designed (indeed, probably was
originally designed) to require the minimum modification of a
tall, prism-shaped block of about 6 feet by 1 foot by 12 feet (or of
other dimensions in similar proportion) — equivalent to two
small building-blocks superimposed on end. The task of getting
the proportions right, always a difficult one for beginners in rep-
resenting the human figure, could be greatly eased by the prac-
tice of drawing in the frontal, profile and back views on the
appropriate faces of the block, before the carving was begun;
and this process in turn became easier if even an approximate
scheme of accepted ratios existed for the various measurements
(as seems very likely in the early stages of Greek sculpture), for
then a grid of guide-lines could be drawn in, as the first step,
and the positions of the limbs easily plotted. We have already
considered some evidence (p. 143) which has a bearing on this
process: the existence of ‘pre-carved’ kouros statues either in situ
180 Archaic Greece

at a quarry, or nearby. Our conclusion then was that either the

quarryman had been closely briefed by the sculptor, or the quar-
ryman was the sculptor. The former alternative becomes more
credible, and is perhaps only credible, if there existed a system of
proportions of the kind mentioned above. But the latter is also
easy to accept, if we reflect for a moment on the background of
the first sculpture in Greece.
A civilization which is undertaking or reviving the practice of
a new art must of necessity recruit its practitioners from another
art (or from another country — for which supposition there is no
evidence whatever in Greece at this time, although Egyptian
influence is highly likely). The quarrying and carving of hard
stone was, in seventh-century Greece, the preserve of the build-
ing trade, which would therefore be the obvious place to look for
established expertise. The idea of the sculptor’s trade as an
independent occupation would take time to develop; its growth
into an art would take longer still. The evidence mentioned just
now - the residual influence of the four-sided block, the prob-
able scheme of proportions, the pre-carved figures — mostly
relates to the early stages of Archaic sculpture, betweenc. 650 and
575 BC. It seems very likely that during this period statues were
still often produced by men whose professional training had
been as masons or quarrymen (both professions, incidentally,
which appear to have achieved quite high standards in Archaic
Greece). As such, their aim would probably be to produce very
competent, beautifully-finished products which would also con-
form to the social requirements for human figure-sculpture —
such as those of standard pose and proportions for an upright
male statue. They might have ‘artistic’ aims as well, but not
necessarily those which we would consider appropriate to the
art of sculpture: a well-executed decoration in pattern form, for
instance, would come naturally to men who were already apply-
ing patterned mouldings to architectural members. Much less
plausible would be the aim, which has nevertheless been
imputed to kouros-sculptors by their most influential student,
the late Gisela Richter, of a conscious progress towards a
naturalistic rendering of the body. Since this aim had never been
The Rise of the Individual 181
fully realized before, least of all by sculptors in Greece, it is
highly unlikely that an Archaic sculptor would have even recog-
nized it as an aim. There is little ground for believing that Archaic
sculptors often worked from the living model, and less for think-
ing that medical dissection was practised. More likely, as at
other periods, artists will have looked primarily at other works
of art. What society asked from them was_ recognizable
‘schemata’ (to use E. H. Gombrich’s term) for the human figure,
in three dimensions and with a certain minimum size; that is,
typical renderings, effective as representations of the human
body but not consciously trying to simulate its appearance. Even
the very pose of the kouros, we may note, is an unnatural one,
both feet being flat on the ground even though the position of
the legs is for walking.
But during these same years, there began to appear men who,
by some unexplained inspiration, were not content with this
achievement. They wanted to give their products both original-
ity and individuality. The originality was to prove, within the
field of sculpture, total and unqualified: they had ideas which,
unknown to them, were to lead sculpture into doing what it had
never done before, anywhere in the world. The individuality
was not usually that of the subject, in the sense of producing the
recognizable appearance of some individual, real or imaginary; it
was that of themselves as creators. One sign of this is their wish
to have their statues recognized as having been produced by no
one else; to this end, they began the frequent practice of inscrib-
ing bases with their own name, either as well as or instead of
that of the dedicator (as had been the older custom). We cannot
prove that they were full-time sculptors even now; to a certain
extent they had been forestalled by practitioners of other arts
(notably vase-painting), and there may have been at least some
indirect influence from there. But to adapt these new aims to the
sculptor’s art was none the less a huge advance.
Where can we see their handiwork? There are some much-
admired statues from as early as about 600 Bc. A fragmentary
kouros from the Dipylon cemetery in Athens is perhaps the first
Greek statue carved with real sensitivity as well as skill: the
 182 Archaic Greece

sculptor was aiming for something ‘extra’; if it was naturalism,

then he can hardly be said to have significantly excelled his con-
temporaries but, even if that provided some of the impulse, the
ultimate effect has more often been described as ‘architectural’
(an appropriate term perhaps in more ways than one). To the
same period belong the twin kouroi from Delphi, executed and
signed by an Argive sculptor to celebrate a famous and poignant
ate 30 episode in his city’s history, the exploit of Kleobis and Biton (see
above, p. 63). Some critics have seen in his work a conscious
attempt to express the essential quality of the brothers, their
physical strength, and the great exertion required by their feat.
Even if they are right, the distinctive aim is still of a generic, not
a specific kind, and it was not apparently often repeated in the
medium of the kouros. What we instead find is that, when male
statues of truly outstanding quality appear, a high proportion of
them are not kouroi at all: this is one argument for the view
advanced earlier (p. 179) as to the artistic status of the kouros
type.
One of the earliest works which actually seizes our attention
ate 31 by its quality is the Calf-bearer from the Athenian Akropolis, a
work of about 570-560: the complexity of this, a true group-
sculpture, is of a kind that required deep thought on the sculp-
tor’s part. A man carrying an animal was not an uncommon sub-
ject in early art, but nowhere had the two been integrated as
fully as by this sculptor. The result shows many stylistic features
of his time — the group is still a brilliant piece of design rather
than a study of nature — but to these he added several of his
own: above all, a feeling for the roundness of human and animal
limbs. This last is a naturalistic feature, but that does not mean
that naturalism is being systematically or even consciously pur-
sued. If there were any kouroi of this period of a quality
approaching this, then we simply do not have them. The same
could be said of two other brilliant works of about the middle of
ite 32 the century, the ‘Sabouroff’ head in Berlin and the ‘Rampin’
horseman (the head, found long ago, is in Paris), both probably
Athenian too. There are also outstanding grave-reliefs of this
ite 33 period from Athens, one of a discus-thrower (probably by the
The Rise of the Individual 183
sculptor who carved the horseman) and a magnificent study of a
boxer; again, we look in vain for similar quality of carving
among the kouroi. (I am confining this discussion to male
statues, in the hope of keeping the comparisons fair; if female
figures were included, the same arguments would not apply
because the main concentration is on drapery as much as on the
human figure.)
Above all, there began to appear, from this time on, sculp-
tures of vigorous and even violent action. The context which
permitted this was not, of course, that of the kouros, nor even
that of the isolated statue or group of any kind; it was that of
architectural sculpture, and in particular of temple pediments.
The claim that relief-sculpture is simply a different medium,
with different ideals and different practitioners, has some gen-
eral force; but it wears thin when it is applied to figures in sculp-
tured pediments which, from about the mid-century, begin to be
carved almost entirely in the round and on a scale approaching
life-size. To compare these studies of striding, lunging, crouch-
ing and collapsing figures with their contemporary kouroi is to
realize what a limiting medium the kouros had become; and yet
it still had three generations’ life in front of it. It is the pedimen-
tal figures which should be held up as examples of the attain-
ment of Archaic sculptors; for very practical reasons, they are
not given the same degree of finish as a statue which could be
studied at eye level and at close quarters, but their adventurous-
ness in pose and subject was the biggest contribution of the age
to later sculpture. Where the Archaic pedimental sculptors
sowed, Classical, Hellenistic and ultimately Renaissance artists
reaped; the full fruit of the discoveries was denied to their
immediate contemporaries by the force of the conventions that
bound free-standing sculpture.
What was it that made possible, indeed perhaps necessitated,
this artistic enterprise? The answer is clear: narrative and, speci-
fically, mythical narrative. The fact that the narrative art had by
this time reached such heights in Greece — first in the medium of
epic poetry, then more tentatively in some of the two-
dimensional arts, and then with increasing confidence in lyric
 184 Archaic Greece

and choral ode, vase-painting and work in shallow relief — made

it inevitable that, when placing a series of figures side by side in
the triangular frame of a pediment, sculptors would try to relate
them to each other by involvement in a story. So that their por-
trayal would be clearly intelligible to a spectator looking up from
ground-level, actions and gestures had to be forthright and
ite 34 expressive. If the contest of Herakles against a monster was to
be shown, it was not enough for Herakles to take up a statues-
que pose facing his enemy; he must actually fight it. Thus it is
that we find this very subject represented, virtually in the
round, in a pediment on the Athenian Akropolis by the mid-
ate 23 century; a generation later, a Battle of the Gods and Giants
adorned the new temple which the tyrants constructed, and
here the participants on both sides are shown in postures of con-
tortion as well as exertion. By the end of the century, pedimental
groups at Eretria and Aigina were showing such ambitious sub-
ate 35 jects as Theseus abducting the Amazon queen Antiope, archers
crouching to shoot, or Greeks and Trojans fighting and dying.
By this fusion of the twin arts of narrative and sculpture in the
round, the Greeks were simply carrying to a more spectacular
level the process which had begun with the first tentative com-
positions of the Dipylon Master and his associates in the vase-
painting of the mid-eighth century. The role played by the ele-
ment of narrative does something to validate E. H. Gombrich’s
claim that it was this ‘free evocation of mythological events’
which enabled the Greeks to steer the visual arts into this unpre-
cedented course. The theory is not without difficulties, but it
does fit in impressively with some of the evidence: the age-long
devotion of the Greeks to myth as the subject-matter for the vis-
ual arts, for example, might perhaps to some degree result from
the richness and power of their mythology, but it is much more
convincingly explained by the view that myth provided not
merely a subject-field for the arts but an actual driving force
behind their development. As we have seen, this same theory
accounts persuasively for the fact that in sculpture - an art
which we today instinctively associate with free-standing, self-
contained works — the most enterprising early developments
The Rise of the Individual 185
should have taken place in what would seem an ancillary field,
the architectural sculpture grouped in the gable-ends of temples.
By comparison, the kouros type appears as the embodiment of
artistic conservatism. It is, I would argue, a medium which tells
us more about social convention than it does about sculptural
progress. Some of the inhibitions which society imposed lasted
throughout the 150 years of the life of the kouros type: the
uncomfortable pose, the narrow permissible range of age and
physique, the almost total absence (in the funerary statues) of
any attributes which would express the manner of life or of
death. But other vogues were less durable and one of them, the
notorious ‘Archaic smile’ which appeared during the sixth cen-
tury and vanished at its end, has aroused much inconclusive
discussion. It is not only found on single statues, but appears in
group-sculptures, on the faces of figures engaged in life-and-
death combat. One thing that seems clear is that it is better
explained by social than by artistic causes. Indeed, as a conven-
tion it should not be unintelligible to an age which shows similar
tastes in photography — even when (to pursue the analogy) the
photograph illustrates a newspaper story in which the violent
death of the subject is reported.
The same society which exacted such conservatism from its
artists in one medium is hardly likely to have been the motive
force behind the developments in another, closely-related field.
Therefore this free play of the inspiration of myth was, we infer,
something which operated on the artists directly, or else through
a different kind of social influence. The latter possibility is cre-
ated by the fact that the kouros must have been essentially the
medium of a priviliged clientéle, rich enough to pay for many
months of a sculptor’s time; whereas architectural sculpture was
typically executed for the community and paid for by the state,
belonging as it usually did to the temple, which itself had the
same connotations. So it is conceivable that the upper-class
ethos denied to the sculptor of private dedications that freedom
which the community as a whole encouraged in architectural
sculptors. But this is perhaps too formal a rationalization; the
simple fact is that Greek myth was a force so potent, so acces-
186 Archaic Greece

sible and in a sense, as we'shall see, so egalitarian that it was at

the disposal of any group, including the artisan class from which
sculptors came, who wished to make use of it.
All this makes the development of Archaic sculpture as much
an intellectual as an artistic advance; and I believe that this is a
fair description. The innovatory sculptors of the sixth century
were making a contribution to Western thought which stands
comparison with that of their contemporaries the philosophers.
Their advances required a similar exercise of individualism and a
similar kind of intellectual, perhaps even moral courage. Their
achievement was also typical of their age in another way. Tech-
nologically, the two great steps forward were the introduction of
life-sized stone statues in the mid-seventh century, and the dis-
covery of a means of hollow-casting life-sized bronzes. This sec-
ond step is placed by our literary sources just a hundred years
later, in the mid-sixth century; the surviving physical evidence,
which begins a generation after that, suggests that they are not
far out in their dating. But both techniques had been mastered
centuries earlier in Egypt; and the chronology of Greco-Egyptian
relations, despite some difficulties in the case of the earlier
development, is just compatible with the view that both ideas
were borrowed from Egyptian sculptors. That is exactly what
one might expect from other instances of the period (see above,
pp. 148-54), and it is strongly supported by the general
resemblance in the poses of standing and seated figures, and by
one or two more specific details of anatomy and proportions.
Typical, too, is the sequel: sculpture proved to be a means of
giving physical shape to several ideas that were in the forefront
of the Greek mind, and so it had to develop. Within two genera-
tions of the first contact, sculptors were beginning to abandon
the notions which they had uncritically borrowed (such as the
carving of colossi) and to attempt things which the Egyptians
had never practised (such as the first tentative use of narrative
pedimental compositions). From then on, the speed of develop-
ment was such that, arguably, it outran technology; the intro-
duction of life-sized bronzes was delayed perhaps later than one
would have expected, and it certainly came late enough to lead,
The Rise of the Individual 187
this time, to an immediate breakaway from Egyptian practices.
Bronze statues had no sooner appeared than they were adopting
freer poses than their marble contemporaries, with arms extend-
ing free of the body; and although bronze was not normally
acceptable for architectural sculpture, its influence made itself
felt there too, one of the results being the revolutionary freedom
of pose in the Eretria and Aigina pediments (p.184).
Sculpture once created was, like choral odes, political
speeches and alphabetical writing, widely accessible. Even the
funerary kouroi of an aristocratic family stood in a cemetery
where anyone could look at them. The myths which were
narrated in temple sculptures were not the recondite material of
higher education or priestly mystique, they were myths which
everyone knew. The language of the visual arts could be com-
prehended without literacy (only a minority of narrative works
were inscribed), and in this way art could function as a medium
of popular culture. For proof that it did so, however, we have to
turn away from sculpture and look at painted pottery. The two
arts are linked by the fact that both were produced by men who
were essentially regarded in their own time (as distinct from
later antiquity) as artisans — men with exceptional skill who
could expect to be paid accordingly, but who would be admitted
only exceptionally and on sufferance to the cultural élite of their
city. The important difference is in the context and the cost of
the sculptor’s work as against the vase-painter’s. One natural
result of this difference is that, whereas a modest collection of
literary comment (most of it considerably later) on Greek sculp-
ture survives from antiquity, the art of the vase-painter rose,
flourished, declined and vanished with barely a single notice in
any literary source to acknowledge its existence. There may be
other contributory reasons for this too, such as the chronologi-
cal: we today generally consider that the greatest age of Greek
vase-painting was the last century, and particularly the last
half-century, of the Archaic period. The great age of sculpture
has, rightly or wrongly, been considered since antiquity to have
begun just at the time when vase-painting was going into
decline, and we find that very few of the ancient literary pas-
188 Archaic Greece

sages on sculpture refer back to the Archaic period. Yet there

were still fine vases painted in the heyday of Classical sculpture
and literature; but they were neither mentioned at the time nor,
it seems, treasured long enough for later antiquity to admire
them. So it is a fair inference that the status of the two arts was
different. Greek vases, however finely decorated, were with rare
exceptions functional objects, as their shapes make clear. They
were produced in large quantities, dozens of them at a time in
each firing of the kiln, and were not often commissioned pieces;
their price was within the range of all but the poorest customers
and, equally important, the people who produced and decorated
them were probably from no more elevated a social stratum than
that of most of their customers.
This last statement stands in need of a little closer examina-
tion. What we know about Greek potters is not much, and
mostly derives from the internal evidence of their works. A pot-
ter’s workshop was a small business, with an owner and a few
employees, including the painters. The only vase-painter fleet-
ingly portrayed in Classical comedy (Aristophanes, Ekklesiazousai
995-6) is clearly not a rich man, although in the Archaic period
the occasional potter did become rich enough to make a sculp-
tural dedication. The paintings themselves convey evidence on
two main questions: that of geographical origins and that of lit-
eracy. The potters’ and painters’ names, signed on a minority of
the Athenian vases, contain a surprising number (though rela-
tively speaking again a minority) of foreign names — foreign, that
is, to Greece and not just to Athens. Many of them look less like
personal names than foreign ethnics -— ‘the Lydian’, ‘the
Mysian’, ‘the Scyth’, ‘the Kolchian’, ‘the little Syrian’, ‘the
Brygan’ (a tribe in Thrace) — such as might be used by an Athe-
nian populace which could not master some unpronounceable
proper name. The significance of these names, if they mean
what they appear to mean and are not simply nicknames, is that
those who bore them can never have been Athenian citizens.
Their status must have been either that of metics (resident aliens
with certain rights that did not include political ones) or else that
of slaves; even the former, though it would not exclude them
The Rise of the Individual 189
from becoming rich, would not make for easy access to the
world of private education, the symposium, the philosophical or
the political debate. These same inscriptions, together with the
much more numerous ones explaining or commenting on the
content of the pictures, are in fact the most copious general
source of evidence, of any kind, about literacy in the Archaic
period. As applied to the vase-painters themselves they are a
little ambiguous, since we cannot always be sure that it is the
same man who is painting the figures and writing the captions.
What they suggest is that the painters lived in a world of partial
literacy, with at times a hazy knowledge of spelling; and that is
entirely compatible with the other inferences made above. The
first painted alphabetical inscription is before 700 BC, but even in
the sixth and fifth centuries they are hardly frequent.
So we come to the content of the paintings themselves. Leav-
ing aside the problematical era of the later Geometric paintings
(see above, pp. 65-78), and confining ourselves to the human
figure-scenes, we find certain general features to be present
throughout the seventh, sixth and early fifth centuries. Firstly,
for a long time myth predominates very heavily in the subject-
matter of these scenes and even when, in the late sixth century,
genre scenes begin to be commoner they do not yet displace
mythology as a focus of interest. Secondly, the mythological pic-
tures show certain marked biases: heroes appear with greater
frequency than divinities, and the exploits of the heroes are
somewhat selectively portrayed with an eye to a simple and
intelligible picture: that is presumably why we have among the
deeds of Herakles, for example, over five hundred representa-
tions of the Nemean Lion and not a single one of the Augean
Stables. Such an approach leads to repetitiveness, especially
when coupled with the age-long tendency of artists to observe
each other’s work and choice of subjects.
To these general characteristics we can add another, less
commonly discussed outside specialist circles: the vase-painters’
approach to the iconography of a given subject. Even when he is
directly inspired by a literary source, an artist in any other
medium has to make a conceptual change or adjustment of some
 190 Archaic Greece

kind, and none more than the painter. It is obvious that he can-
not ‘paint a story’ just as he has heard or read it; what is less
obvious is what he must do instead. The ‘simple’ solution of
picking a single, climactic moment in the story and representing
that is in fact neither so simple nor necessarily appropriate. The
notion of taking a story — that is a set of parallel sequences of
events on a personal scale —- and portraying those stages of the
sequences which happen to be exactly simultaneous in time, is
one that has become familiar to our minds mainly since the
invention of still photography; and it is in fact a rare photograph
which encapsulates, in itself, the elements of a whole sequence
of events. This solution is thus seldom adopted in narrative
vase-painting. In a different way, the next most natural alterna-
tive for us was equally unlikely to be appropriate for them,
namely the presentation of a series of pictures in which one or
more characters appear repeatedly, on the analogy of the car-
toon strip or the cinematograph, to show the successive
episodes of a story. Historically, the Greeks appear to have
adopted this method only in the Hellenistic period, and to have
left its full exploration to the Romans; but a more serious objec-
tion is anyway that the surface of a vase is generally too small an
area to allow of such treatment; and the few apparent breaches
of this limitation are in fact examples of something slightly dif-
ferent, a series of pictures on one vase representing a series of
exploits by the same hero, each separate tale having one picture.
What Greek narrative painters, together with most other early
artists, adopted instead was a method which seems descriptively
more complex than either of the above, although psychologically
it is doubtless more primitive. This is the method best called
‘synoptic’, in which the artist presents as contemporaneous a
ate 36 number of events which are in fact successive, either by taking a
climactic episode and expanding it forwards and backwards in
time, or by mentally arranging the episodes in their proper order
and then simply telescoping them together (expert opinion dif-
fers as to which of these two variants predominated). The
method came so naturally to the artist that he probably used it
without thinking; and so naturally to his public (ourselves
The Rise of the Individual ie
included) that we often do not notice it unless it is pointed out.
For instance, every picture of the living Gorgon Medusa,
accompanied by the winged horse Pegasos, is an example of the
‘synoptic’ method since the story relates that Pegasos was born
by emerging from the Gorgon’s headless trunk after her decapi-
tation. Less obscurely, any scene of the blinding of Polyphemos Plate3
in which the victim holds a cup is a further example since, as
Homer relates, the deed could only be done when Polyphemos
had fallen asleep, and his sleep was in turn the effect of the
drunkenness which the cup in turn is there to symbolize. There
is, in short, more of a history of analytical thought, however
primitive, behind the simple forms of a Greek vase-painting
than might appear.
But as well as being produced by a different form of thought-
process from that of a literary version of a myth, the vase-
paintings sometimes show independence at a more detailed
level: that is, they sometimes tell what is recognizably the same
myth in different terms. It is tempting, when this happens, to
say that they have simply got the story wrong. If a vase-painter
is clearly representing a well-known literary episode, such as the
chariot-race in book xxiii of the Iliad, and shows the ‘wrong’ hero
winning the race, then indeed we may perhaps be entitled to
suspect a mistake. But often the position is more ambivalent
than this. We looked at this question briefly in the context of the
Late Geometric paintings (p. 72) and the tentative conclusion
there was that the surviving literary accounts of the Greek
myths may have been neither complete nor incontestable. There
are later pictures on Greek vases which show clear and coherent
legendary scenes that are otherwise virtually unknown to us:
Ajax and Achilles playing dice is an unusally familiar example;
as well as appearing on one of the most famous of Greek vases,
it was frequently represented over a period of fifty years or so,
in sculpture as well as on pottery. There are many other pictures
which tell a well-known story in an unfamiliar form, yet are not
necessarily to be explained as misunderstandings of the familiar
literary version. After all, even within the literary tradition there
was room for gradual modification of the details of a story
192 Archaic Greece

through time (as we see, for instance, by comparing a Homeric

and a fifth-century tragedian’s version of the same myth); room,
too, for two or more absolutely contradictory versions to have
existed, even contemporaneously.
The importance of the vase-paintings for this question is,
firstly, that they go back to a date earlier than most of, in some
cases earlier than all, our literary accounts of a given myth; and
secondly, that they bring to light ‘buried’ stories, or versions of
stories, which were not merely the result of an individual artist’s
whim. Sometimes an early vase gives a version of a story which
is only confirmed by some very obscure, or very much later,
literary source. A clear example is the story of Tydeus and
Ismene (cf. p. 72). As representatives of opposite sides in one of
the great wars of the Heroic Age, the expedition of the Seven
against Thebes, these two might have been thought unlikely to
become acquainted, still less intimate; even if they had, the
‘accepted’ version of the sequel, as given in Sophokles’ Antigone
(c. 440 BC), is one in which Ismene, Antigone’s sister, plays an
important secondary role in the action at a time when Tydeus,
along with most of the Seven, has already been killed in battle.
Yet on a Corinthian vase of about 550 BC we see Tydeus
threatening Ismene with imminent death as she lies in bed,
while a naked man named Periklymenos makes his escape. It is
only in an introduction to the text of the Antigone, written nearly
a thousand years later, that a commentator named Sallustius
tells us why. Tydeus, he explains, killed Ismene at Athena’s
command for committing adultery with a man named Theok-
lymenos (rather than Periklymenos). What is most significant is
that this commentator refers the story back to the Archaic poet
Mimnermos of Kolophon; he thus shows that a version of this
myth was current in Archaic times that was not merely different
from, but directly contradicted by, the more familiar version. He
also gives, unsolicited, a vindication of the vase-painter, whose
work he cannot possibly have known, and whom we might
otherwise have thought a mere victim of confusion. If anyone, it
is Sophokles who emerges as the likeliest ‘heretic’ in the trans-
mission of the legend.
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The Rise of the Individual 193
At one level, this can be taken as just another example of the
way in which Greek vase-painting often does duty as a primary
source. Just as, through his genre scenes, the vase-painter quite
often informs us of real-life practices which are not known to us
from literature, so too he acts as guardian, through his myth-
scenes, for stories of whose currency we should otherwise be
ignorant. But there may be more to it than that. The vase-painter
has, I would argue, a kind of social significance, as a link be-
tween the social and intellectual élite and the common man. In
the Classical period, such a role is primarily filled (at least from
our point of view) by the comic poet, who might have a fairly
high social status, but presented genre settings and down-to-
earth characters. In Archaic times, comedy did not yet exist in
the full dramatic sense. The vase-painter is the reverse of the
comedian in that, having relatively low social status, he deco-
rated his products in such a way that they would appeal to aris-
tocrats, among others. More particularly, the genre scenes on
late Archaic vases show a very marked social exclusiveness in
their subject-matter: few Athenians had the leisure or wealth to
frequent the gymnasium, the wrestling-school or the sym-
posium; to engage musicians and reciters; to keep mistresses or
solicit beautiful boys with gifts; to own horses and serve in the
cavalry (or even, come to that, in the heavy infantry). Yet these
are the commonest of genre subjects, and painted vases were
owned and used by a far wider clientele than that represented in
the scenes. Likewise, the ‘love-names’ on vases, praising the
beauty of boys (and occasionally girls, see below) in contempor-
ary Athens, are usually applied to people of aristocratic birth,
whom the painters are unlikely to have known personally. Many
societies since then (our own not least) have sought to divert
their masses with the spectacle of the upper class at play, and it
seems that late Archaic Athens was another such.
But the subject-matter of myth and legend was one of the
interests that were common to all; and mythical narration was an
activity that could not be kept exclusive. The trite repetition of
established ‘favourites’ among the mythological repertoire is
usually seen as a popular feature; and I believe that the occur-
 194 Archaic Greece

rence of the numerous ‘aberrant’ versions of myths should also

be seen as a kind of vernacular or ‘alternative’ culture for the
many who lacked a literary outlet, and in some cases were even
without literary access. There is an attractive instance of this on
a vase of just before 500 BC painted by Euthymides. A famous
> 38 exploit of Theseus had been his abduction (at a very early age,
long before the Trojan episode) of Helen. On this vase, how-
ever, Theseus is carrying off a girl with the name, unknown to
mythology, of Koroné, while it is another woman, evidently try-
ing to restrain him, who is labelled as ‘Helen’. There is an obvi-
ous temptation, which most authorities have not resisted, to say
that Euthymides became confused over his captions, that the
abduction-victim should have been ‘Helen’ and the other girl
(perhaps an obscure maidservant in the story) ‘Koroné’. But
when we learn that Koroné was the name of a pretty girl in
Athens, fervently praised for her looks on another vase of
approximately the same date, then a different and more pleasing
explanation comes to mind. The attractions of a reigning beauty
are being presented as superior even to those of Helen, and she
is temporarily given a legendary context in which to prove the
point: even Theseus cannot resist her.
Such examples, rare as they are, can illustrate for us a
genuinely popular handling of myth, and thus lift the curtain for
a moment on the thoughts and actions of ordinary people in
Archaic Greece. At this time, we may be sure, there was no
great contrast between town and country life: urban citizens
owned land in the open country, rural citizens came to the town
to take part in certain festivals, and to attend assemblies. For
both alike, much of life consisted of a round of work (mainly
agricultural) and sleep; recreational activity would be dominated
by the festivals, some local, some involving the whole state. By
the fifth century, these had become sufficiently numerous in
Athens to cover something like sixty days in a year (not an
excessive number for a civilization which knew no week-ends or
sabbaths). The performance of rituals ensured that the religious
inspiration of these occasions was remembered; but this did not
prevent religion being used, as so often in the Greek world, as
The Rise of the Individual 195
an excuse for many other things. The festival would involve a
visit to a sanctuary of some kind, where new and advanced
works of sculpture might be on view; a choir might perform a
hymn, either traditional or specially written for the occasion,
accompanied by musicians whose art was as widely appreciated
as was the poet’s. Not that all the contributions would be of
such an obviously appropriate kind: there were festival contexts
for which a poem like Archilochos’ story of seduction (above,
pp. 170-3) would be in the expected genre — thus perhaps
strengthening our doubts about its autobiographical element. At
a festival, people hoped to eat meals of a quality that they did
not taste in the rest of the year; lavish consumption of wine was
often not merely permitted but expected. The presence of aris-
tocrats and other well-to-do people who might have attended
inter-state festivals in places like Delos and Olympia would have
acted as some sort of guarantee of artistic standards; yet, at local
festivals in particular, almost all classes of the community,
including women, participated. For these and the other reasons
that we have considered, it seems likely that the values of
Archaic Greece - artistic, intellectual and (so far as they went)
spiritual — were broadly based and universally shared.
In such circumstances, one would expect that political ideas,
too, would be actively shared by a wide range of the population.
That they must have been in late sixth-century Athens at least is
guaranteed by the way in which the decisive steps were taken
towards one of the last great achievements of Archaic Greece —
democracy. In 508 BC, with the tyrants gone for good and the
apparatus of aristocratic politics undergoing hasty repairs after
decades of disuse, the politician Kleisthenes took a fateful step.
He realized, apparently, that the rule of Peisistratos and his sons
had changed Athens too deeply for a reversion to the old system
to be acceptable. An even stronger incentive may have been
that, under this briefly-revived ‘old system’, his own party was
getting the worst of the struggle. He was a member of the family
of the Alkmaionidai which, despite an earlier phase of comprom-
ise with the tyranny in the 520s when Kleisthenes himself had
held high office, could claim to have been latterly the focus of
196 Archaic Greece

resistance to the tyrants. By some combination of all these con-

siderations, he conceived the idea of ‘taking the people into
partnership’, as Herodotus puts it (v 66, 2), and thus securing
his own position. But he could only do this by offering a prog-
ramme which commanded wide support, and here he showed a
level of statesmanship and administrative insight which is still
impressive from our own distance of time. His programme
embraced an extension of the citizenship to a number of new
people — metics, foreigners, even slaves according to Aristotle
(Politics 1275 b 37); this was a traditional and often effective
measure, whose popularity was in this case all the greater for
the fact that his opponents had just been violently reversing it
by a purge of the citizen-rolls. It has been plausibly suggested
that Kleisthenes was here re-instating one of the popular policies
of the tyranny, possibly even reinstating the very ‘new citizens’
whom the tyrants had enrolled and his opponents purged.
By far his greatest undertaking, however, was a proposed
reform of the whole government and organization of Attica. The
traditional four tribes of an Ionic polis were to be replaced, for all
political purposes, by ten new ones, each of which would meet
to elect one general and fifty members of a newly-established
Council of 500, which in turn was to have direct control of a
wide range of state affairs. Some old institutions — the archons
(annual magistrates) and the long-established aristocratic council
of the Areiopagos, composed of former holders of the archon-
ship — were allowed to survive, but gradually declined in power
and prestige: by 487 it was found acceptable to decide the
appointment of archons by lot, while in 462 the Areiopagos was
deprived of its last political powers. Most complex of all was
Kleisthenes’ proposed system for his tribal divisions: each tribe
was composed of three trittyes (‘ridings’), of which there were
therefore thirty; but the three had to be drawn, one each from
three geographical divisions of Attica — the City, the Coast and
the Inland - which Kleisthenes proposed to form. Each tribe
would therefore be a microcosm of the Attic state, with no room
for undue bias derived from either locality or kinship. At the
lowest level, an equally important change was made with the
The Rise of the Individual 197
reorganization of the demes; these already existed as centres of
population, but under Kleisthenes their number was to become
probably 139 in all Attica, and they were now designated as
sub-divisions of each trittys (although in a very populous area,
where there was an established deme which could not easily be
divided, there might be only one deme to a trittys). A recent

aa

* wet PARNES

) Inland

5 Kilometres

Fig. 14 The geographical effect of Kleisthenes’ reforms (after J. S. Traill, The

political organization of Attica (Hesperia, supplement 14, 1975)). The circles are
the demes, the networks are the trittyes, the numerals show the number of
counsellors elected
198 Archaic Greece

discovery suggests that a similar system of artificial tribes, each

with members recruited from three different geographical dis-
tricts, existed at Corinth by the mid-fifth century, and probably
goes back to a time earlier than Kleisthenes’ reforms at Athens.
If this is right, it underlines two salient features of Kleisthenes’
thinking: first, a willingness to adopt ideas from external sources
which makes him more of an eclectic reformer than a visionary
or radical; and secondly, an absence of anything that was neces-
sarily democratic about his administrative provisions, as is
shown by the fact that Corinth was a thorough going oligarchy
at the time in question.
There is, accordingly, much to be said for the modern view
that Kleisthenes, for all his administrative ability, was a skilled
manipulator of the traditional forms of Archaic politics who
unwittingly stumbled on a democratic solution. On this view, he
misjudged the majority of his fellow Athenians, who proceeded
to harness his measures to their own purpose with a speed
which can only be explained by the existence of a strong, ready-
formed movement towards democracy. The political actions of
the next four years after 508 are dazzling in their self-confidence
and heady with success. The first and hardest test came within
months: the Spartans, whose army had been the actual instru-
ment that brought about the fall of the Athenian tyranny in 510,
had been hoping to secure a powerful ally under the leadership
of Isagoras, Kleisthenes’ chief opponent, who favoured govern-
ment by oligarchy. Now they were dismayed at the radical turn
which Athens’ affairs had taken. When Isagoras called for help —
democracy was indeed seeking ‘brilliant Athens and us’ — King
Kleomenes of Sparta was quick to answer, and a Spartan force
was soon installed on the Athenian Akropolis. But the plan
failed: by a great spontaneous convulsion, the people of Athens
repudiated Isagoras and the Spartans, and the resistance was led
by the Council. This showed the mettle both of the electors and
of the men they had chosen to represent them.
Kleomenes and his Spartans were allowed to leave under
truce; but they could not easily accept such a reverse and in 506
they were back in the field with a more dangerous plan: a
The Rise of the Individual 199
three-cornered invasion of Attica by the Boiotians from the
north, the Chalkidians from the north-east, and the Spartans
and their allies from the south-west. This time, Isagoras was
actually to be installed as tyrant, showing that Sparta found
democracy even more menacing than tyranny. But the new
democracy stood its ground: the allies of the Spartans refused to
take part in such a blatantly interventionist move and withdrew,
provoking a split in the Spartan leadership; the Athenian army,
in a brilliant double victory, meanwhile routed the Boiotians and
the Chalkidians severally. Even this was not the end: the Boio-
tians incited Aigina to launch a naval war against Athens, and in
about 504 there was one more abortive plan by the Spartans,
which this time aimed at no less than the restoration as tyrant of
Peisistratos’ son Hippias, whom they themselves had expelled in
510 and who was now living under Persian protection. It was to
no avail: the solidarity of the Athenians with their state and its
new constitution was unshakable. Yet all these decisive
achievements were carried through anonymously, as it were,
and without the names of individual leaders coming down to us.
Kleisthenes was not in continuous control any longer: he had
been exiled by Isagoras during the first attempted counter-
revolution and could take no part in the crucial events of that
year; he soon came back, but presently faded from the picture.
One item of his policy, that of submitting to the Great King of
Persia in return for Persian help against Sparta, was unaccept-
able to the Athenians, and they repudiated it utterly when the
attempt to restore Hippias was made in 504. The democracy was
in a mood to take on all comers if necessary.
These events of the last decade of the sixth century are a bril-
liant example of the power of political ideas in the field of action,
as well as a vindication of the principle cf the independent city-
state. They stand comparison with any of the similar and
better-known episodes in later Western history, such as those in
England after 1642, in France after 1789 or in Russia after 1917;
and the fact that they were carried through without a Cromwell,
a Napoleon or a Lenin is perhaps the most significant thing
about them. The individual Greek had begun by expressing
200 Archaic Greece

himself in poetry, in thought and in art; now the individual

Athenian was claiming, as of right, the responsibility of political
participation in a democracy, and backing his claim with extra-
ordinary success. Other Greeks, some in a directly political way,
others less consciously, were soon to follow along the path that
had been opened to them.
 The End of Archaism
The houses of our City
Are real enough but they lie
Haphazardly scattered over the earth...
. . . Where the
Power lies remains to be seen,
The Force, though, is clearly with Them: perhaps only
By falling can She become
Her own vision, but we have sworn under four eyes
Toikeep Herup. 2.

W. H. Auden,
‘On installing an American Kitchen in Lower Austria’

The claims made for Archaic Greece in the preceding chapters

may seem inflated. If so much had been done, then what worlds
were there left for the Classical Greeks to conquer? And why
should we continue to regard the later fifth century BC as the
climax of Greek civilization? These are reasonable questions, and
it might seem that we could answer them by a kind of hypothet-
ical test. The Archaic period is conventionally divided from the
Classical by a military episode, the Persian Wars and the con-
temporaneous wars of the Sicilian Greeks against Carthage;
although it is an episode for which scholars have tried to discern
correlatives of a more cultural kind, making it into a landmark
for the arts and for political developments too. I hope to show
that some of these attempts have been misguided; but even if I
am wrong, it must always be borne in mind that such demarca-
tions of history as ‘Archaic’ and ‘Classical’, ‘Medieval’ and
‘Renaissance’, although reasonably accepted for the convenience
of later ages, are entirely artificial categories which would have
202 Archaic Greece

been only dimly perceptible, if that, to the people who lived

through the transition.
Accepting, then, the landmark of Xerxes’ invasion of 480-479
BC as the terminus for the Archaic period, let us put the question
first in the hypothetical form: suppose that the predictable (and
indeed the widely-predicted) had happened, and the armies and
fleets of the Greek states had gone down before the overwhelm-
ing numerical superiority of the forces of Persia. What then
would be our estimate of the contribution of the Greeks to West-
ern civilization? The question, however, contains a hidden
assumption: that the later development of Greek culture, with
the country permanently incorporated in the Persian Empire,
would have been stunted beyond recognition. That is not
perhaps an extravagant assumption; the best evidence that we
can cite in its support is the experience of the Ionian Greeks in
the two final generations of the Archaic period, during which
many of them were in fact subjects of the Persian Empire. The
experience was not a happy one: both culturally and economi-
cally, Ionia seems to have suffered a marked regression; politi-
cally, too, the Persians had at first pursued an interventionist
policy, installing pro-Persian tyrants in most of the cities that
they controlled. The mass-exodus of leading cultural figures and
the elimination of the former political leadership did nothing to
help. If this is the pattern that would have been imposed on
mainland Greece, then we must assume an equally discouraging
outcome. Yet even then the evidence is not entirely unambigu-
ous: for it is also true that in the fifth century, with their inde-
pendence of foreign powers restored, the Ionians did not enjoy
anything like a restoration of their former glories; the economic
picture is particularly cheerless. If this was because, in exchange
for Persian rule, they found themseives subject to the increas-
ingly exacting demands of membership of the Athenian confed-
eracy, then this constitutes another ‘hidden variable’ for which
allowance must be made.
In fact, the tissue of superimposed hypotheses soon becomes
unmanageable, and it is better to re-phrase our question in a
different and less hypothetical way. What was it that the Greeks
The End of Archaism 208
sought to preserve by fighting the Persians? What was it that
drove, firstly the Ionian Greeks to make their unsuccessful
attempt to shake off Persian rule in 499-494; then the Athenians
and Eretrians, having supported that revolt, to stand their
ground against the inevitable Persian retribution in 490, with
results as triumphant for the one as they were disastrous for the
other; and finally, the thirty-one Greek states to send their con-
tingents into action against Xerxes’ forces in 480-479? By any
rational calculation, the odds against success on each occasion
were long; they had not appreciably shortened even at the
moment when the opposing armies faced each other for the final
encounter on the field of Plataia in 479. The alternative course of
entering into some kind of peace-negotiations was open
throughout, and was specifically offered to the Athenians, on
very favourable terms, as late as 479 when the Persian general
Mardonios saw the chance of exploiting a conflict of interest
between Athens, in her exposed position north of the Isthmos,
and the bulk of her allies who lived in the Peloponnese. Many
Greek states — not just the northern ethné of Macedonia and
Thessaly, but powerful poleis like Thebes, Argos and, for a time,
Aigina, took what seemed the reasonable course and submitted
to Persian rule. Likewise, in Sicily, the powerful city of Selinous
was committed to the side of the Carthaginian invaders.
The behaviour of the remaining states can only be explained
by some intuitive belief, backed by one or two favourable por-
tents like the good showing of the Chian navy in the Ionian
Revolt and the signal success of the Athenian infantry at
Marathon, that the reasonable would not happen, and that the
risk of war was worth taking. Other factors doubtless contri-
buted to their calculations, such as a well-founded faith in the
superiority of Greek arms and armour when the fighting came to
close quarters (this is a recurrent theme in Herodotus’ accounts
of the battles — see v 49, 5; vii 211, 2; ix 62, 4 and 63, 3). Then
there were the geographical features in central and southern
Greece, which favour a defender who not only knows the coun-
try, but also prefers fighting on battlefields of restricted extent
by land, and in enclosed waters at sea; this last factor largely
204 Archaic Greece

explains why the decision of the northern Greeks, with their dif-
ferent physical environment, tended to be against resistance. But
still the question remains: the risk of war was worth taking, but
for the sake of what?
The answer of an individual Greek would almost certainly
have included the word ‘freedom’. When submitted to closer
analysis, his use of the word could probably be broken down
into two main headings, one affecting the community as a whole
and the other referring to the individual; and he might have
added that neither could properly be applied to the soldier who
faced him in the Persian army. A community, first of all, is a
group of people who share some kind of common life and who
give and receive some kind of reciprocal services and benefits; its
organization need by no means be democratic, as long as the
roles performed by its different classes of membership are
widely accepted. The soldier in a Greek army could point to an
obvious fact here: whatever it was that he was fighting for, his
fellow citizens were all in the fight beside him. Some of the
richest landowners might still have their horses waiting out of
sight, but when the battle joined they were in their place in the
infantry line; so too was the army commander (in two of the
three main land-battles of the Persian Wars, Marathon and
Thermopylai, the Greek commander was killed fighting bravely
in the front line). The poorer classes might be unable to afford
the arms which could give them a place in the phalanx, but they
were still there in some strength as auxiliaries, to face the risk of
Persian missile-fire and the possible consequences of defeat;
while in a sea-battle between fleets of oared ships, their con-
tribution as rowers was the primary one. The soldier in the Per-
sian army could not make similar claims; he might be a member
of any one of the subject peoples (including Ionian Greeks) who
had been conscripted into service in the Persian forces, or he
might be Persian-born; in either case, he was_ probably
thousands of miles from home, under the command of represen-
tatives of an inaccessibly remote monarch, many of them cavalry
officers who could contribute to victory, but were likely to desert
him in defeat. Nor did the consequences of victory offer him
The End of Archaism 205
much positive advantage, beyond being preferable to those of
defeat. He had played no part whatsoever in the choice of the
representatives who had brought about the war, or who led him
in the battle. Many such considerations could have run through
the minds of the ordinary Greek (and Persian) soldiers as they
prepared to fight; and in the Western conflict similar factors
applied, for the Carthaginian army was again a confederacy of
subject peoples, even though at Carthage itself the same
extremes of authoritarianism did not prevail.
As for the freedom of the individual, this will have meant dif-
ferent things to men of different contingents and statuses. We
may start at the darkest end of the spectrum: the thousands of
Helots who marched out on campaign with their Spartan mas-
ters did so not from any free choice, but probably on pain of
death. Yet even they could hope for a grant of their personal
freedom if they distinguished themselves in the fighting; failing
that, victory offered them the security of keeping as their mas-
ters men who were at least fellow-Greeks and whose ways were
long familiar to them. These ways could run in very sinister
directions: on occasion, brave or otherwise distinguished Helots
were victimized as being a menace to the security of the system
(e.g. Thucydides iv 80, 4). But the hard fact is that the Helots as
a whole were trusted to fight rather than desert, and did so;
which implies that they expected no improvement in their lot
from a Persian victory, a belief which may or may not have been
justified. The Helots, however, represent an extreme and a
minority case of the Greek side; the Greek armies and navies
were otherwise largely composed of free citizens, men with a
civilian occupation which they had abandoned in preparation for
war. The majority of these could expect, if they survived, to go
back to the same work and the same life-style after the fighting
was over, whoever won; so it was hardly this that they were
fighting for. If they had an economic motive at all, it could be
connected with a distinguishing feature of the Greek system
which had been pointed out fifty years earlier, according to
Herodotus (i 153, 1), by no less a figure than King Cyrus of Per-
sia, when he said ‘I have never yet been afraid of a people who
206 Archaic Greece

have a special place set aside in their city where they can come
together and tell each other lies under oath’. The permanent
market (to which he was referring) was certainly by now a regu-
lar feature of a Greek town and this anecdote, even if apoc-
ryphal, suggests that that was not the case in the Persian
Empire.
But the opportunity for individual enterprise in trading was
only one instance of a whole set of values which had grown up
in the shelter of the Archaic Greek state: the right to attend the
assembly and, if not to participate in the taking of decisions, at
least to hear them justified; the right to appeal to a recognized
code of laws; the right to speak one’s mind about politics, moral-
ity, the arts and, up to an appreciable point, even religion —
these were some of the things which a Greek of 480 BC had
already come to expect, and which he could have felt to be at
stake in the war against Persia. They were, however, somewhat
abstract ideals and not always easy to articulate. In so far as a
more explicit sentiment appears in the expressions of Greek feel-
ings at this time of crisis, it is to do with self-respect: the revul-
sion at the degree of servility expected of the subjects of the
Great King, and the fanatical extremism which, under the stress
of warfare, showed itself in both the Persian and the Carthagi-
nian military systems. This again reflects the implicit expecta-
tions of the Greek, that even though all men were not yet to be
regarded as equal, yet there was an irreducible minimum of
esteem (and self-esteem) for the free individual in society. If
taxed with the condition of the Athenian slave or the Spartan
Helot, he might well have replied that it was in order to escape
this same condition for himself that he was fighting.
Every historian of Greece suffers the temptation of extending
false generalizations, based on the unique case of Athens, to
Greek culture as a whole; and this is especially true in the late
Archaic period when the Athenian experiment in democracy
was so isolated. Nevertheless Athens did play an outstanding
part in the resistance to Persia and it is justifiable to point out
the way in which her institutions contributed to her achieve-
ment. The freshly established board of ten generals, one elected
The End of Archaism 207
by each of Kleisthenes’ new tribes, was put to the supreme test
within less than a generation, when the landing of a Persian
force, first on Euboia and then on Athenian soil at Marathon,
demanded a series of swift strategic and tactical decisions. War-
fare by democracy is not everybody’s prescription for success,
yet that is essentially the process that Herodotus describes (vi
103-110) in the tense days before battle was joined, with the
vote of the majority of the Assembly going in favour of Mil-
tiades’ proposal to send out the army to Marathon, and that of
the majority of the generals eventually supporting the best tacti-
cal proposal, that for a frontal attack. Even more crucial was the
vote of the Assembly a few years later, against applying the
new-found revenues of the Laurion silver-mines to a free hand-
out to all citizens, and in favour of the building of a fleet as
proposed by Themistokles, who had begun this policy ten years
earlier by fortifying the great natural harbour of the Piraeus. In
480, this fleet was to contribute more than any other single force
to the deliverance of Greece; in Classical Athens, the political
advancement of the poorer classes who manned its galleys was a
direct result of this decision and an equally direct influence on
Athenian policy.
But how far can these years, militarily so crucial, be judged to
form a precise cultural landmark, such as is conventionally seen
in the division of Archaic and Classical? It is my contention that
most of the main contributions of the Greeks to later civilization
were the result of processes already well under way in Archaic
times, if in some cases only from near its end. The orthodox
view, by contrast, takes its stand essentially on literature and
art, and claims that in these fields a great new era came into
being after, and at least partly as a result of, the Greek victory in
the Persian Wars. In the words of J. B. Bury, ‘Men seemed to
rise at once to the sense of the high historical importance of their
experience’. The two great literary genres used to illustrate this
view are drama and prose (especially historical prose); while in
art, the favoured examples are the rise of free painting and the
achievements of so-called fifth-century sculpture (meaning,
nearly always,-sculpture between 480 and 400). Now as long as
208 Archaic Greece

the criterion is that of the survival of literary works in their own

right, and of works of art together with later copies and literary
descriptions of them, then the case is clear and beyond question:
of surviving Greek drama and prose literature, something over
99 per cent must date to after 480 BC, while in the case of art
there is a glaring contrast between the scrappy and unreliable
testimonies about Archaic art and the relatively copious flow of
detailed information, and of later copies, from the early Classical
period onwards. These survivals are, however, essentially the
product of opinions formed in later centuries (in some cases,
very much later) and it is not self-evident that, had it the choice,
our own age would necessarily have shared all those opinions.
Furthermore, we do have some factual knowledge which tells
against regarding the Persian Wars as an absolute and epoch-
making division.
For a start, many of the writers and artists who became fam-
ous in the years immediately after 480 had, naturally, begun
their careers well before that date. To name the most conspicu-
ous, Aischylos and Pindar had both reached early middle age by
the time of Xerxes’ invasion, had formed their styles and had
won some fame, in the same way as the outlines of Athenian
policy in the fifth century were shaped by statesmen like
Themistokles whose greatest achievements were by then behind
them. Tragedy, in particular, was an established medium in
Athens, where a cause célébre broke out over the production,
probably in 492, of a play about the fall of Miletos in the Ionian
revolt, by Phrynichos (another artist active both before and after
the Persian Wars). The revolution in Greek wall- and panel-
painting, which is associated with the names of Polygnotos of
Thasos and Mikon of Athens, looks like a clear case of a post-
war development, in as much as their most famous works were
to be seen in buildings only erected at that time, and indeed on
occasion made use of the Persian Wars themselves as subject-
matter. Closer examination, however, has revealed some inter-
esting features: the influence of this revolution has been
detected in Athenian red-figure vases, some of which are
thought to date from rather before 480; at least one innovatory
The End of Archaism 209
painter, Kimon of Kleonai, was believed to have lived in the late
Archaic period. Famous late Archaic buildings, such as the
Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi and the new Temple of Plate 40
Aphaia on Aigina, require the eye of an expert to distinguish
them from architecture of the full Classical period. Above all,
there is the evidence of sculpture to support the notion that,
independently of the Persian Wars, and well before, for main-
land Greece, their issue had been decided, the great series of
innovations which brought into being what we call the ‘Early
Classical’ or ‘Severe’ style, was already well under way.
In the case of sculptural development, enough evidence sur-
vives either in monumental form or in descriptions to make the
conclusions fairly secure. Once again, we can point to the names
of great artists, like the Aiginetan sculptors, Onatas and
Glaukias, whom we know to have been active and successful
before 480, but whose reputation was at its peak in the 470s and
460s, suggesting that the revolution in style was not an entirely
post-war phenomenon. No original works survive which can be
definitely attributed to them, however. What we have instead is
a series of works, original but anonymous, which adequately
illustrate the nature and timing of the change that took place in
sculpture. It has been fully studied in several books, of which
one of the most recent, Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway’s The Severe
Style in Greek Sculpture, gives an acceptable summary of the fea-
tures of the new style. By comparison with most Archaic sculp-
ture, the aptly-named ‘Severe’ style presents a new simplicity:
surface elaboration is rejected in favour of a greater feel for vol-
ume and three-dimensionality; the ornate and mannered
drapery-folds are drastically pared down; the ‘Archaic smile’, for
inactive figures, is finally banished in favour of a serious expres-
sion, while figures involved in physical activity are given expres-
sions of appropriate emotion; the use of bronze for the most
prestigious works is greatly increased. Perhaps most significant,
the poses of free-standing statues begin to show the freedom which
had hitherto been confined to architectural sculpture. Instead of
the hundred-year-old pose of the kouros, male figures could
now be shown in violent action: an athlete sprinting or throwing
 210 Archaic Greece

the discus, a soldier in battle, a satyr stepping quickly back-

wards. Statues, in short, have begun to have a subject instead of
merely conforming to one of a narrow range of types.
If we examine these features one by one, we shall find nearly
all of them present in the sculpture of the years between 500 and
480, and one or two perhaps even earlier than that. There is first
the stratigraphic evidence from the Athenian Akropolis. When
the Persians occupied Athens in the weeks before the battle of
Salamis, they destroyed or damaged many of the buildings and
sculptures that they found; the Athenians, returning after their
victory, evidently decided to dispose of a group of irreparably
damaged dedications on the Akropolis, most of them of the type
of standing female statue known as the koré, by burying them in
a trench near the site of the later Erechtheion, and there they lay
undisturbed until discovered by the excavators of the 1880s. Any
statue found in this particular deposit will almost certainly have
been carved before 480, particularly if it shows signs of burning;
but we have to be more careful with other groups of Archaic
sculpture found elsewhere on the Akropolis; they may not have
been buried in identical circumstances, especially since they are
sometimes associated with other works which, on the accepted
stylistic chronology, would be dated after the Persian Wars.
However, there is one critically important work of which at least
one piece seems to have been buried in the main deposit: it is
ite 41 the koré Akropolis 686, dedicated by a man named Euthydikos,
which should therefore be counted as a victim of the destruction
of 480. It is critical because it shows several of the features of the
‘Severe’ style: the drapery has been simplified, in the cause of
emphasizing the underlying bodily forms; the expression is so
remote from the old Archaic smile as to give the statue its nick-
name of ‘La Boudeuse’ (the sulky girl). With this objective
dating-evidence before us, we may even think again about the
accepted post-war dating of certain other works, which look
stylistically even later, but were buried at other spots on the
Akropolis.
Other works of sculpture, in different ways, support an early
dating for ‘Severe’ style characteristics: anguished expressions
The End of Archaism 211
are found on the face of a dying figure, both on a relief from a
temple in far-away Selinous in western Sicily, which is normally
dated to about 500, and in the mysterious ‘second east pedi-
ment’ of the Temple of Aphaia on Aigina, which is thought to
have been installed as a replacement for the original east pedi-
ment and cannot therefore be dated by the temple to which it
belongs. Nevertheless, the orthodox stylistic date for this later
pediment is between 500 and 480; it includes other figures rep-
resented in very ambitious poses, in particular two warriors who Plate 43
are in the act of falling over backwards and are shown off bal-
ance; but here again there are vase-paintings, universally dated
before 480, which show closely similar poses. Next, a freestand-
ing statue of a warrior in a vigorous, thrusting pose was found Plate 42
in the 1920s at Sparta, near the site of the tomb of Leonidas, and
was thought by its discoverers to be a memorial to that Spartan
king who died so heroically at Thermopylai in 480. Later stu-
dents have seen stylistic features which look too early for that
date, and have therefore doubted the identification; but its pose
remains typical of what we call ‘Early Classical’. More famous in
antiquity was another work, remarkable once again for its pose
(to judge from Roman copies, for the original is lost this time),
but much more so for its subject, which was politically almost
explosive: the group of the Tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aris-
togeiton, shown in the act of striking down Hipparchos (the
brother of Hippias), as they had done in 514 BC. Here, surely, is
the very embodiment of the ‘Severe’ style, in terms of pose and
execution, but even more in terms of subject; furthermore, we
know that the group was originally erected two years after the
final Persian defeat, in 477, so that it would seem to tell against
my argument about the chronology of sculptural development.
But then we learn that it was merely a replacement for an origi-
nal group, carved by the Archaic sculptor Antenor some time
soon after the establishment of the democracy in 507. We know
nothing of the pose of Antenor’s group — perhaps it was simply
a pait of kouroi side by side, like Kleobis and Biton — but the
point is that the intellectual step of representing in sculpture a
highly topical political subject had been taken well before the
212 Archaic Greece

end of the Archaic period. Even the Persians paid their tribute to
this revolutionary artistic advance, by carrying off Antenor’s
group to their capital (from where it was returned to Athens
centuries later), rather than destroying it like the other sculp-
tures. As to the popularity of bronze in the new style, this was
certainly exemplified by the work of Aiginetan sculptors like Kal-
lon, Onatas and Glaukias, and their influence can in turn be
detected in the ‘second east pediment’ of Aphaia, mentioned
just now; even Antenor’s Tyrannicides were bronze (Arrian,
Anabasis iii 16, 7). And so on.
It seems to me that the notion of a great war as an inescapable
influence, actually causing artistic change, may in this case at
least be misconceived. There is a more recent parallel which
comes to mind. Let us imagine that a historian, thousands of
years hence, has documentary evidence proving that the First
World War broke out in 1914, but has (like us) only vaguer
archaeological dating for the great innovations of the early twen-
tieth century in painting and music. If he were to conclude that
these changes were directly caused by the great disruption of the
established order in Europe, he would be making the same kind
of deduction which has led some authorities to think that the
‘Early Classical revolution’ in art was caused by the Greek
triumph in the Persian Wars. But consider how wrong he would
be. Of the great early twentieth-century movements in painting,
many of the most distinctive and innovatory began well before
1914: the ‘Fauvisme’ of Matisse and his school is detectable from
about 1904, and Cubism from 1907; Kandinsky painted his first
abstract work in 1910 and, with Marc, set up the ‘Blaue Reiter’
group in 1911; German Expressionism becomes prominent from
1912 on. Or take music: Schoenberg’s First String Quartet was
first performed in 1907, and the break away from acceptable tonal-
ity had begun; Stravinsky’s Firebird was heard in 1910 and his Le
sacre du printemps in 1913; Webern’s Five Orchestral Pieces were
composed in 1911. In no accepted sense of the word can these
developments have been ‘caused’ by the cataclysm of 1914; if
there was a connection of any kind, it would be more reasonable
to say that a feeling, detectable among European artists, of dis-
The End of Archaism 213
satisfaction with conventions which had been accepted for cen-
turies past also showed itself subconsciously in some collective
urge towards conflict in a political and ultimately in a military
sense.
That some similar process worked itself out in the last genera-
tion of the Archaic period is likely enough, though impossible to
prove. The invasion of Xerxes was, after all, simply a further act
in a drama which had been inaugurated in the 540s when the
Persians reached Ionia, and which had been approaching a
climax since the outbreak of the Ionian Revolt in 499. Many
Greeks, artists among them, will have felt that a supreme crisis
was shortly to be upon them, and their thoughts may have
turned more strongly in the direction of change. But I have not
laboured this point at such length merely in order to establish a
detail of relative chronology. If we modify the original
hypothesis, made at the beginning of this chapter, from one of a
final Greek defeat in the Persian Wars to one in which the final
confrontation had not occurred at all - once again, a far from
inconceivable eventuality historically - then the inference will
become clear. It is that, irrespective of the great military events
of 480 and 479, the society of Archaic Greece (and especially of
Archaic Athens) was embarked on a course which would cer-
tainly have generated major political and cultural developments,
and possibly ones essentially similar to those which, in the
event, did take place. I am not for one moment disputing the
fact that the onset of the Persians, once we remember that it was
a process covering two generations, was the catalyst which
brought Archaic Greece to its highest pitch of achievement. But
the decision of the thirty-one states to march and sail against a
people whose empire already stretched from the Indus to
Cyrenaica, and whose soldiers had been seen far up the Nile
and north of the Danube, was a decision as important in its
antecedents as in its sequel. It was the culmination of a long
process of ferment among the Greeks, resulting in the conclu-
sion that it was worth almost anything to be able to carry on
following their own ways and serving their own values.
We cannot know that such thoughts went through the minds
214 Archaic Greece

of the participants. But I hope that at least the foregoing chap-

ters have made clear what some of these ways and values might
have been. Looking back over the generations which had contri-
buted to them, I still find that the most remarkable develop-
ments are the initial ones, and that the ‘structural revolution’ of
the later eighth century was the greatest turning-point in
Greece’s earlier history. It was a greater step to conceive of the
small independent state than to let it develop along its own
course. The idea of citizenship, of the free members of such a
state having certain inalienable rights, led naturally to the exten-
sion of those rights. Yet the independence of the state was also a
guarantee of the many variations in the speed of developments,
allowing one state to learn from the example and the experience
of others. Together, these ideas were almost a prescription for
political innovation, so long as the precarious balance of power
within Greece, and the equally precarious immunity from exter-
nal interference, were maintained. It was Greece’s good fortune
that, for over two centuries, these conditions were permitted to
exist; by the end, it was clear to most Greeks that the gains that
they had made were worth fighting for.
In the same way, the introduction of the military innovations
of the first half of the seventh century (see above, pp. 99-107) is
in many ways a more remarkable event for its time than is their
employment, two hundred years later and after only minor mod-
ifications, to defend Greece successfully against the Persians.
This outcome itself runs so very much counter to man’s experi-
ence of warfare in other periods of history, when the long-
entrenched system of warfare has almost inevitably fallen victim
to the new and untried opponent with no such preconceptions,
that it argues an exceptional degree of precociousness in the
original introduction. So, too, does the promptitude with which
these innovations were imitated by other peoples all over the
Mediterranean area in the seventh and sixth centuries; we have
already noted (p. 111) the fact that this was almost the first
episode since the Bronze Age in which the doings of the Greeks
became a matter for serious concern in neighbouring lands.
Doubtless it was in part this experience which gave rise to the
The End of Archaism PANS
entirely unfeigned self-confidence with which the Spartans, at
any rate, contemplated the rising power of Persia. Their message
to King Cyrus when he threatened the cities of Ionia (it drew
the rejoinder mentioned earlier, on p. 205) exemplified this
attitude: ‘The Spartans would not permit him to molest any city
of Greece.’
Likewise, the fact that the individual gained the liberty to
express himself at all — in poetry, in the arts, in oral speech or in
prose — is in retrospect almost as notable as the use to which this
freedom was later put. Archaic Greece, by no means in all ways
a permissive society, seems to have generated from an early
stage a wide freedom of spontaneous comment in some areas.
Because of the tension between this freedom and that love of
order which was equally clearly present in early Greek society,
we find an alternate ebb and flow in the degree of self-
expression permitted. But in some instances at least, the high
tide of this freedom can be observed in the first half of the
seventh century BC, the era which produced the poem of
Archilochos which we considered earlier (pp. 170-3), together
with a brief outbreak of imaginative creativity in the visual arts —
including vase-painting, a medium where such ideas seem to
have been firmly repressed both earlier and later. If one looks at
the products of the ‘Protoattic’ school of this period, in particu-
lar, one sees the mysterious and unexpected at every turn. The
painter of the Polyphemos amphora from Eleusis (c. 675 BC), not Plate 37
content with an unprecedented use of internal shading in the
figure of Odysseus in his main scene, has also drawn his Gor-
gons in the picture below, on the body of the vase, with caul-
drons for heads, thus anticipating by over 26 centuries Picasso’s
much-admired use of the same kind of idea, when he gave the
head of his bronze ‘Baboon and young’ the shape of a child’s toy
motor-car. A little later, the painter of the Orestes krater in Ber-
lin is not the only artist of his day who introduced into the mar-
gins of his mythological scenes strange, sometimes hairy,
dwarf-like figures, which certainly contribute to the aura of ten-
sion, but whose exact significance — since they vanish without
trace under the régime of sobriety and order that follows —
216 Archaic Greece

remains unexplained. This brief, exuberant interlude is in

equally strong contrast with the style of the preceding Geometric
period, when the contrary principle had prevailed almost to
excess, and with the later development of painting in the sixth
and fifth centuries, where in a more sophisticated form it domi-
nates once again.
In the literary field, the outbreak of spontaneity is not such an
abrupt and ephemeral thing. It has been observed, for example,
that the erotic scene in the Archilochos poem owes something to
the Homeric episode of Hera and Zeus in book 14 of the Iliad;
although to compare the two is to see the measure of
Archilochos’ liberation as well. Here, too, the latitude once
gained was extended to later writers in certain genres, such as
Classical comedy. Similarly, it seems clear that the elaborate tis-
sue of double standards which the Greeks wove around the
question of male homosexuality also came into existence during
the Archaic period; as a recent authority observes, ‘overt
homosexuality was already widespread by the early part of the
sixth century BC’. This is an issue on which Homer is notably
restrained; some would attribute this to a convention of the epic
craft rather than to the general tenor of Greek opinion in the
eighth century; but, even if this is true, one can still claim that
the inhibitions on literary expression in this matter were lifted.
These cases are alike in that the initial concession of freedom
was the really significant step in all of them.
I hope these claims on behalf of the Archaic Greeks will not
appear to have been pushed to excessive lengths. But I do
believe that the famous revolution in Greek culture which occur-
red towards the close of the Archaic period is matched in impor-
tance by that which occurred at its beginning. When seen in the
short term, both were fairly gradual processes, occupying more
than one generation. Modern scholarship, by compressing the
later revolution into what I believe is an artificially short span of
time, has made it appear much the more dramatic. But that is an
argument which cuts two ways, since, if it was the climax of the
Persian Wars which transformed Archaic Greece, all at once, into
Classical Greece, then all those remarkable events which clearly
The End of Archaism PANif
antedate 480 BC remain unadulterated ‘Archaism’: the establish-
ment of Athenian democracy and the achievements of its first
five years, the original decision of several Greek states to chal-
lenge Persia, the foundation of tragic drama, the building of
Athens’ fleet, the undermining of the canons of Archaic statu-
ary, and so on. It is wiser, I think, to recognize that we are deal-
ing with processes, rather than events, at both periods.
It is relevant to the comparison that the later revolution is
immeasurably the better-documented of the two, in both ancient
and modern sources. Indeed, the very fact that our knowledge
of the earlier one is to some extent derived from archaeology
may have made some of the more traditionalist historians fight
shy of it, and even perhaps doubt its reality. Yet, ironically, it is
by working backwards from our earliest historical documentation
that we reach the point, in the later eighth century BC, where we
are faced with two stark alternatives: either the pattern of
Archaic civilization was established at this period, or it goes back
beyond it; and, if the latter, then there is really no convincing
reason for stopping our backwards search through history until
we arrive at the Mycenaean era. The civilization of Classical
Greece will then have grown organically out of the Mycenaean
civilization. This latter view has had some distinguished suppor-
ters and is not entirely indefensible even today; but in totally
rejecting it, as I have in this book, I have preferred to appeal to
the arguments, rather than invoke the support of the great
majority of modern authorities with whom, here at least, I am in
agreement. I have portrayed the Archaic period as a long era of
restrained experiment, bounded at either end by shorter periods
of more hurried, at times almost feverish innovation. This recon-
struction may prove mistaken, but here again I do not think that
it runs violently counter to general opinion.
The achievement of the generations after 750 BC, although we
can establish something of its magnitude by empirical means,
remains historically an obscure one, whereas there has been by
comparison a floodlight trained on the era of the Persian Wars
and what appears to be their direct consequence, the Classical
achievement. As with history, so in literature and the arts there
218 Archaic Greece

had been successive waves of reverberation from the events of

the Persian Wars and successive resurrections of later fifth-
century Greece, from the Persai of Aischylos in 472 BC to the
nineteenth century of our era, before the modern rediscovery of
Archaic art had even occurred, and before the modern rehabilita-
tion of the early poets had progressed very far. Now at last, in
the later twentieth century, the wheel has turned full circle.
Archaic art suddenly finds favour where the ‘complacent’, ‘life-
less’, ‘too-perfect’ or ‘boring’ Classicism palls; the earlier periods
of ancient history are heavily in favour with younger resear-
chers. It is a fashion, to whose influence doubtless the present
writer is also subject. But behind the fashion lies a serious and
justifiable interest in the more spontaneous and unaffected
epochs of art, and the more innovatory and experimental cul-
tures of history. To find the real roots of innovation is perhaps
the underlying quest which unites these modern approaches;
the aim is a very elusive one, and I doubt whether these pages
have brought its attainment much closer. But the achievements
of this period deserve wider attention — and here I include expert
attention. The range of expertise, however, needs to be wider
than that of the disciplines traditionally concerned with the
period. There was a time when the achievements of Classical
Greece were judged to be little, if at all, short of miraculous;
what I have claimed as the achievement of Archaic Greece is that
it made many of them predictable.
 Bibliography

On the period as a whole, the most continuously valuable ancient

sources are Herodotus, The Histories and Aristotle, The Politics (Penguin
Classics translations by A. de Selincourt, 1954 and T. A. Sinclair, 1962
respectively).
The following recent studies in English concentrate on the Archaic
period, or aspects of it (the abbreviations used for some of them in
these notes are given on the left hand side):

(LSAG) L. H. Jeffery, The local scripts of Archaic Greece

(1964)
J. Boardman, The Greeks overseas (1964, 2nd ed.
1973)
(Forrest) W. G. Forrest, The emergence of Greek democracy
(1966)
A. R. Burn, The Warring States of Greece (1968)
M. I. Finley, Early Greece: the Bronze and Archaic
ages (1970)
G. A. Christopoulos and J. C. Bastias, History of
the Hellenic world ii, The Archaic period (translation,
Athens, 1975)
R. J. Hopper, The early Greeks (1976)
J. Charbonneaux, R. Martin and F. Villard, Archaic
Greek art (1971)
(AGCS) L. H. Jeffery, Archaic Greece: the city states,
c.700-500 Bc (1976)
A. W. Johnston, The emergence of Greece (1976)
(ESH) M. M. Austin and P. Vidal-Naquet, Economic and
social history of ancient Greece (1977), with a long
review of the earlier French edition by J. K.
Davies in The Phoenix 29 (1975), 93-102
(Starr) C. G. Starr, The economic and social growth of early
Greece (1977)
220 Bibliography
These regional studies concentrate on the Archaic period:
G. L. Huxley, Early Sparta (1962)
G. L. Huxley, The early Ionians (1966)
T. Kelly, A history of Argos to 500 BC (Minneapolis,
1976)
Other abbreviations used are:
(Humphreys) S. C. Humphreys, Anthropology and the Greeks
(1978)
(JHS) Journal of Hellenic Studies

CHAPTER 1
Recent works that cover this early period in some detail include J. N.
Coldstream, Geometric Greece (1977) and, less fully, my The dark age of
Greece (1971). There is also a very useful, though undocumented, article
in English by J. Sarkady, ‘Outlines of the development of Greek society
in the period between the 12th and 8th centuries BC’ in Acta Antiqua
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 23 (1975), 107-125.
Pp. 19-24: see in general E. A. Wrigley, Population and history (1969); on
early Greek demography and other questions, my Archaeology and the
rise of the Greek state with references (notes 6, 12) for the statistics in
figs. 1 and 2; see also The dark age of Greece, 360-67. For Perati, Sp.
Iakovidis, Perati: to Nekrotapheion ii (Athens, 1970), 28-9, 391-410, 422,
467-8 and for Lefkandi, V. R. Desborough, The Greek dark ages (1972),
188-99.
P, 25: the reference is to D. Roussel, Tribu et cité (Paris, 1976) and F.
Bourriot, Recherches sur la nature du genos (Lille, 1976). There are three
useful articles dealing with the early state in Homer and elsewhere, by
W. Hoffmann in Festschrift fiir Bruno Snell (Munich, 1956), 153-65; C.
G. Thomas in La Parola del Passato 21 (1966), 1-14; and F. Gschnitzer in
Chiron 1 (1971, 1-17. The observations on Phoenician cities on page 32
owe much to discussion with Martin Bernal.

Pp. 28-47: the classic account of Greek state-forms is by V. Ehrenberg,

The Greek state (2nd edition, 1969); see also ESH, chapter iii.
Pp. 36-7: on the medieval agricultural revolution, see Lynn T. White,
Medieval technology and social change (1962), chapter ii; for Athens, ESH
97, passage no. 66.
Pp. 38-40: on hero-cults, see J. N. Coldstream, ‘Hero-cults in the age of
Bibliography 291
Homer’, in JHS 96 (1976), 8-17, with a different explanation for their
distribution. Fig. 7 is based on this map.
P. 40: two of the fuller recent reports on Pithekoussai are by G.
Buchner in Archaeological Reports (supplement to JHS) 17 (1970-1), 63-7
and by D. Ridgway in Greeks, Celts and Romans (ed. C. F. C. Hawkes)
(1973), 5-38.
Pp. 43-4: see E. Kirsten, Die griechische Polis als historisch-geographisches
Problem des Mittelmeerraumes (Bonn, 1956), 100-101 with figs. 12-13.

CHAPTER 2

P. 53: I list not only the publications referred to here, but also the most
important earlier publications of metal dedications from sanctuaries,
for general reference: A. Furtwangler, Olympia: die Ergebnisse iv (Berlin,
1890); C. H. Waldstein, The Argive Heraeum ii (Boston and New York,
1905); P. Perdrizet and others, Fouilles de Delphes v (1908——); Chr.
Blinkenberg, Lindos ii (Berlin, 1931); H. G. G. Payne, Perachora i (1940).
In recent years, these have been supplemented by full and up-to-date
studies of the same and other sites: C. Rolley in the latest instalments
of Fouilles de Delphes v (fascicles 2 (1969) and 3 (1978)), and (for Delos)
in Etudes déliennes (Bulletin de Correspondance Héllénique, suppl. 1 (1973),
491-524; J. Ducat, Les kouroi du Ptoion (Paris, 1971); for Olympia
terracottas, W-D. Heilmeyer, Friihe Olympische Tonfiguren (Olympische
Forschungen 7, Berlin, 1972); on Philia (and Pherai) in Thessaly, K.
Kilian, Fibeln in Thessalien (Prahistorische Bronzefunden xiv, 2, Munich,
1975); on Samos, various authors, Samos i — (Berlin, 1961——).

P. 53: for the grave-finds, see my The dark age of Greece, chapter 5.
P. 54: Colin Renfrew, The Emergence of Civilization (1972), especially
chapter 21.
Pp. 55-62: recent discussions of sanctuary excavations, to be added to
those listed above under p. 53; on Corinthian exports of pottery to
sanctuaries, J. N. Coldstream, Greek Geometric pottery (1968), chapter 14;
on early temples at various sites and their interpretation, H. Drerup,
Griechische Baukunst in geometrischer Zeit (Archaeologia Homerica, chapter
O, Gottingen, 1969), to which must now be added, for Eretria,
communications in Bulletin de Correspondance Héllénique 96 (1972),
752-65 and 98 (1974), 687-9; for Corinth, H. S. Robinson in Hesperia 45
(1976), 203-39; for Isthmia, O. Broneer, Isthmia i: The Temple of Poseidon
(Princeton, 1971).
0920: Bibliography

P. 62: the two inscriptions referred to appear in Jeffery, LSAG 339, 334,
no. 53; and 72, 77, no. 21. The view of Delphi expressed here follows
W. G. Forrest, ‘Colonization and the rise of Delphi’, Historia 6 (1957),
160-75.
Pp. 65-7: the process is charted in detail by Coldstream in Greek
Geometric pottery, chapter 2. On Thucydides, R. M. Cook, Annual of the
British School at Athens, 50 (1955), 267-9.
Pp. 67-75: the more controversial matters of interpretation have been
discussed at great length by a series of writers, of whom I single out
two for their forceful and lucid expression of views contrary to mine:
K. Fittschen, Untersuchungen zum Beginn der Sagendarstellungen bei den
Griechen (Berlin, 1969) and J. Carter, ‘The beginning of narrative art in
the Greek Geometric period’, in Annual of the British School at Athens 67
(1972), 25-58; in the same periodical, 50 (1955), 38-50 appeared T. B. L.
Webster’s article ‘Homer and Attic Geometric vases’; J. M. Hemelrijk’s
remark is quoted from a review in Gnomon 42 (1970), 169. Funerary
scenes are fully discussed and illustrated by G. Ahlberg, Prothesis and
ekphora in Greek Geometric art (GOteborg, 1971). For shields (p. 75) cf. P.
Cassola Guida, Le armi difensive dei Mecenei nelle figurazioni (Rome,
1973), 38-44. fig. 3.
P. 76: for the Salamis burials, see V. Karageorghis, Salamis in Cyprus:
Homeric, Hellenistic and Roman (1969); for those at Eretria, C. Berard,
Eretria iii: L’Héroon a la porte de l’ouest (Berne, 1970).

P. 77: see the edition of Fragmenta Hesiodea by R. Merkelbach and M. L.

West (1967). Discussions of the Siamese-twin pictures appear in
Fittschen, Carter and Ahlberg (see above under pp. 67-75).
Pp. 78-84: the classic study of the early alphabet is Jeffery, LSAG. The
reference on p. 82 is to H. T. Wade-Gery, The poet of the Iliad (1952).

CHAPTER 3

P. 86: the fullest, though hardly the most reliable, ancient account of
the First Messenian War is in Pausanias, Description of Greece iv, 4-13.
Pp. 87-92: fuller accounts of the early state are given by Austin and
Vidal-Naquet in ESH, chapters 3 and 4, and by Jeffery in AGCS,
especially chapter 3.
Pp. 93-4: on Solon’s reforms, see ESH 59-60 and 69--72 with passages
nos. 36-38; Starr, 181-6.
Bibliography 223
Pp. 96-7 and 111-16): on tyranny, see A. Andrewes, The Greek tyrants
(1956), with further details of specific early tyrants in Jeffery, AGCS:
Chios inscription, LSAG 336-7, no. 41.

Pp. 98-9: on early cavalry, see P. A. L. Greenhalgh, Early Greek Warfare

(1973), chapter 3.
Pp. 101-7: there has been a considerable recent literature on the
military reform. Since the appearance of my Early Greek armour and
weapons (1964), additions and modifications have been proposed by J.
K. Anderson, Military theory and practice in the age of Xenophon (Berkely
and Los Angeles, 1970), chapter 2; and by Greenhalgh, Early Greek
warfare, chapter 4. See also a series of articles in JHS: my ‘The hoplite
reform and history’ in vol. 85 (1965), 110-22; J. Salmon, ‘Political
hoplites?’, 97 (1977), 84-101; and, especially relevant to Sparta (pp.
109-10), P. A. Cartledge, ‘Hoplites and heroes’, 97 (1977), 11-27. It will
be seen that I have tried in some places to accommodate the criticisms
of Greenhalgh, Salmon and Cartledge, in others to consolidate on such
common ground as exists between the four of us. On the two graves at
Argos, see P. Courbin in Bulletin de Correspondance Héllénique 81 (1957),
322-86 and E. Protonotariou-Deilaki in Arkhaiologikon Deltion 26 (1971),
Chronika, 81-2, fig. 13.

P. 105: the details of the relevant Olympia publications are:

E. Kunze, Archdische Schildbander (Olympische Forschungen 2, Berlin,
1950)
F. Willemsen, Dreiftisskessel von Olympia (OF 3, 1957)
(I have not yet seen M. Maass, Dreifiisse in Olympia (OF 10, 1978))
H. V. Herrmann, Die Kessel der orientalisierenden Zeit i (OF 6, 1966)
On armour, see E. Kunze and others, I — VIII Bericht tiber die
Ausgrabungen in Olympia (Berlin, 1936-67), supplemented by
shorter reports in Arkhaiologikon Deltion 17 (1961-2), Chronika,
107-24 and Bulletin de Correspondance Héllénique 84 (1960), 714-20
and 88 (1964), 751-5.

Pp. 113-15: on Athenian cults, see H. W. Parke, Festivals of the

Athenians (1977) (for the suggestion about Peisistratos’ palace, J.
Boardman, Greek sculpture: the Archaic period (1978), 153-4).

P. 118: the quotation is from A. M. Andreades, A history of Greek public

finance i (translation, Harvard, 1923) 23L

Pp. 118-20: on the lawgivers, see Jeffery, AGCS 42-4 and passim;
Forrest, 143-5.

P. 121: the quotation is from p. 113 of Roussel’s book, where he is

224 Bibliography
criticizing the view represented by Forrest, chapter 2 and A.
Andrewes, The Greeks (1967), chapter 5.

CHAPTER 4

Pp. 123-6: very helpful accounts of these problems are to be found in

ESH, chapter 1 with passages nos. 1-6, and in Starr, passim.
Pp. 127-8: the most valuable attempt at the quantification of Greek
pottery-production remains R. M. Cook’s article, ‘Die Bedeutung der
bemalten Keramik’, in Jahrbuch des deutschen archdologischen Instituts 74
(1959), 114-23.
P. 129: for Megara Hyblaia, see G. Vallet and F. Villard, Mégara Hyblaea
ii: La céramique archaique (Paris, 1964); for Phokaian colonies, J. P. Morel,
‘L’expansion phocéenne en Occident’, in Bulletin de Correspondance
Héllénique 99 (1975), 853-96; for Istria, P. Dupont’s study ‘Une
approche en laboratoire des problemes de la céramique de Gréce de
l'Est’, first delivered at a colloquium in Naples in July 1976 and to be
expanded for inclusion in Histria, vol. v (Bucharest); a fourth
illustration, more complex but giving some parallel results, is provided
by M. Farnsworth, I. Perlman and F. Asaro, ‘Corinth and Corfu: a
neutron activation study of their pottery’, in American Journal of
Archaeology 81 (1977), 455-68.

P. 130: Olympia dedications, Jeffery, LSAG 219-20, no. 12; W.

Dittenberger and K. Purgold, Olympia v (Berlin, 1896), no. 258; E.
Kunze, VII Bericht tiber die Ausgrabungen in Olympia (Berlin, 1961),
207-10.
P. 133: on Spartans at Samos, see Jeffery, AGCS 216-7.

Pp. 134-6: this account of early coinage owes most to C. M. Kraay’s

fundamental article, ‘Hoards, small change and the origin of coinage’,
in JHS 84 (1964), 76-91 (see also his Archaic and Classical Greek coins
(1976)); and to P. Grierson, The origins of money (1977). For the early
Lydian coins, see A. R. Bellinger in Essays in Greek coinage presented to
Stanley Robinson (1968), 10-15.

Pp. 137-9: for ship-representations, cf. Humphreys, 166-9, with

references to recent studies published by B. Bravo; on Sostratos, see M.
Torelli and A. W. Johnston, in La parola del passato 26 (1971), 44-67 and
27 (1972), 416-23 respectively; for Kolaios, cf. Humphreys, 168, and
Starr, 52, 210 n. 69.

Pp. 138-40: iron ore transport: Pithekoussai, G. Buchner, ‘Recent work

Bibliography 225
at Pithekoussai’, Archaeological Reports (suppl. to JHS) 17 (1970-1), 63-7;
Motya, B.S.J. Isserlin and others, ‘Motya, a Phoenician-Punic site near
Marsala, Sicily’, in Annual of the Leeds University Oriental Society 4
(1962-3), 84-131; Bassai, N.Ph. Yalouris in To Ergon tis Arkhaiologikis
Etaireias 1959, 106-9.
P. 140: far-travelled finds, J. Boardman, The Greeks overseas 205-6,
213-14, 260; sanctuary-dedications, see publications listed above under
p. 53, and Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 334-8, on tripod-cauldrons.

Pp. 140-3: on marble provenances, see the exchange in the Annual of

the British School at Athens, vol. 63 (1968), 45-66 (A. C. Renfrew and J.
Springer Peacey); 65 (1970), 1-2 (B. Ashmole); 68 (1973), 349-53 (R. E.
Wycherley). On travelling sculptors and unfinished works at quarries,
G. M. A. Richter, Kouroi (3rd edition, 1970), 6, 11.

Pp. 144-6: on Solon, see above, under pp. 93-4; for the statues, see
Richter, Kouroi (above) and Korai (1968).

Pp. 147-80: on the diolkos, see now R. M. Cook’s note, ‘Archaic Greek
trade: three conjectures’ in JHS 99 (1979), 152-5.
Pp. 148-9: on Greek technological thinking, compare J-P. Vernant,
‘Remarques sur les formes et les limites de la pensée technique chez les
Grecs’, Revue d'Histoire des Sciences et de leurs Applications 10 (1957),
205-25.
P. 148: for Ugarit, F. Thureau-Dangin, ‘Vocabulaires de Ras Shamra’,
in Syria 12 (1931), 228-30, no. 5.
Pp. 149-51: J. J. Coulton, ‘Lifting in early Greek architecture’, JHS 94
(1974), 1-19.
Pp. 151-4: on military changes, see chapters 3 and 4 of my Arms and
armour of the Greeks (1967); on the origins of the trireme, the most
recent stage of the controversy is represented by an exchange between
A. B. Lloyd and L. Basch in JHS 95 (1975), 45-61 and 97 (1977), 1-10;
on Samian engineering feats, R. Télle-Kastenbein, Herodot und Samos
(Bochum, 1976), part ii.
Pp. 154-8: for these sites, see respectively: Athens, H. A. Thompson
and R. E. Wycherley, The Agora of Athens (The Athenian Agora, vol. xiv,
Princeton, 1972); Corinth, C. A. Roebuck, ‘Some aspects of urbaniza-
tion at Corinth’, Hesperia 41 (1972), 96-127; Smyrna, J. M. Cook and
others, ‘Old Smyrna’, Annual of the British School at Athens 53-4
(1958-9), 1-181; Megara Hyblaia, G. Vallet, F. Villard and P.
Auberson, Mégara Hyblaea i: Le quartier de l’Agora archaique (Paris, 1976),
226 Bibliography

Selinous, E. Gabrici, ‘Studi archeologici Selinuntini’, Monumenti Antichi

43 (1956), 205-408.

CHAPTER 5

Pp. 161-8: painfully attenuated though it is, this account owes much to
G. E. R. Lloyd’s Early Greek science: Thales to Aristotle (1970) and, here
and in the treatment of other intellectuals (pp. 176-8) to Humphreys,
chapter 9, to J-P. Vernant, Les origines de la pensée grecque (Paris,
1962), and to W. Donlan’s article in Historia 22 (1973), 145-54.

Pp. 170-3: on the new epode of Archilochos, I refer to the publications

by John Van Sickle in Classical Journal 71 (1975), 1-15 and Arethusa 9, 2
(1976), 129-150. The first edition of the text was by R. Merkelbach and
M. L. West in Zeitschrift fiir Papyrologie und Epigraphik 14 (1974), 97-113.
Pp. 170-5: there are stimulating discussions of Archilochos and
Tyrtaios in Forrest, 78-88 and 125-35.
Pp. 175-6: on Phokylides, see M. L. West in JHS 98 (1978), 164-7.

Pp. 178-82: on kouroi, the references are to Richter, Kouroi and E. H.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960), chapter 4.

Pp. 181-4: the works described here are conveniently collected and
perceptively discussed in M. Robertson, A history of Greek art (1975),
93-9, 109, 159-67 with plates 24-5, 27, 30 and 50; and by J. Boardman,
Greek sculpture: the Archaic period (1978), 72-5, figs. 112-4, 117.

Pp. 188-9: on the status of vase-painters, see J. Boardman, Athenian

black-figure vases (1974), 11-13, with references to earlier work on page
235; T. B. L. Webster, Potter and patron in Classical Athens (1972).

Pp. 189-94: the pioneer study of Greek myth-iconography was Carl

Robert's Archaologische Hermeneutik (Berlin, 1919); on the recent writings
of N. Himmelmann-Wildschitz, see especially J. M. Hemelrijk’s
review (in English) in Gnomon 42 (1970), 166-71; the latest general
treatment is Jane E. Henle, Greek myths: a vase-painter’s notebook
(Bloomington and London, 1973). On subjects, see especially J.
Boardman, Athenian red-figure vases: the Archaic period (1975), chapters 7
and 8.
P. 194: the vases naming Koroné (there are several) are discussed by D.
von Bothmer, Amazons in Greek art (1957), 96-7, whose lead I have
followed. |

Pp. 194-5: on Athenian festivals, see Parke, Festivals of the Athenians,

with calendar on pp. 26-7.
Bibliography 227,

Pp. 195-9: for the interpretation of Kleisthenes’ reforms, I follow

Forrest, chapter 8; the sequence of events is described and documented
by Jeffery in AGCS 99-105 with notes 8 and 9; the resultant
arrangements are presented in impressive detail by J. S. Traill, The
political organisation of Attica (Hesperia, supplement 14, Princeton,
1975).Corinth: AGCS 153. 160'n. 6.

CHAPTER 6

P, 202: on Ionia in the 6th and 5th centuries, see Jeffery, AGCS,
chapter 13 and J. M. Cook, The Greeks in Ionia and the East (1962),
chapter 10.
P. 205: on the Helots, compare ESH pp. 86-90 with passages nos. 50,
58-61.
Pp. 209-12: the sculptures mentioned are discussed, illustrated and
documented in B. S. Ridgway, The severe style in Greek sculpture
(Princeton, 1970), chapters 2 and 3, although her chronological
conclusions are the opposite of mine; on the Tyrannicides, see her
chapter 6: also Robertson, A history of Greek art 165-7, 173-4, 184-6
with plates 50, 52, 54.

P. 215: on Protoattic vases, Robertson A history of Greek art 27-8, 50-1

and J. D. Beazley, The development of Attic black-figure (1951), chapter 1;
Picasso’s ‘Baboon and young’ is illustrated in Gombrich, Art and illusion
89, figure 70. On homosexuality, see K. J. Dover, Greek homosexuality
(1978); the quotation is from page 1; cf. 194-6 on the development from
Homer on.
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Index
 Index

Achaia 41, 44, 100 113-14, 124, 130, 196

Adrastos 38, 114 Arkadia 44-6, 126, 139
agriculture 35-40, 49, 51, 55, 129-31, armour 99-107, 151-3, 203
144-5 Arrian 46
Aigina 142, 168, 184, 187, 203, 212 art, artists 65-77, 149, 166, 168,
Aischylos 208, 218 178-94, 207-13
Aitolia 141 Artemis 56-7, 150
Aktor, sons of 76-7 Asine 24, 60
Alexander the Great 46-7 Assyrians 150, 175
Alkaios 95, 110 astronomy 163
Alkmaion (of Kroton) 167-8 Athena 33
Alkmaionidai 141, 195 Athens 32, 33, 34, 38, 81, 111, 140-1,
Alkman 174-5 145-6, 203, 206-7
Al Mina 19, 136 festivals of 116-17
alphabet 27, 78-84, 118, 149, 189 inscriptions from 62
Amasis 133 institutions of 91-4, 113, 116, 195-9
Amphidamas 74 pottery of 65-7, 69-70, 72-7, 100,
Androdamas 119 128, 145, 188, 215-16
Antenor 211-12 sanctuaries of 56-7, 104, 210
Apollo 33, 59, 63, 83, 138-9, 141 sculpture in 181-4
Archilochos 99, 120, 169-74, 195, urbanization in 154-7
215-16 Attica 38, 196
Argive Heraion 53, 63 graves in 53-4, 68, 70
Argolid 38, 57, 65, 141 land-ownership in 37
graves in 24, 53-4 population of 234
Argos 33, 44, 56, 100, 108-9, 111-13, synoecism of 34, 93
144, 182, 203
institutions of 89-90
population of 24 Babylon 163
Aristagoras 163-4 Bacchiads 92, 147
Aristarchos 165-6 basileus 29, 74
aristocracy, aristocrats 96, 99-104, Bassai 139
107, 115-17, 121-2, 138, 195 Bias 162
Aristophanes 188 Black Sea 91, 126
Aristotle 43-6, 87, 96, 98, 107-8, Boiotia, Boiotians 28, 38, 44-5, 101,
Zoe Archaic Greece

117712677199 Demokedes 168

booty 63-4, 130-1 diolkos 147
bronze 49-54, 99-106, 148, 151, 158, diplomacy 57-8
186-7 Dipylon Master 66-7, 77
Brygos Painter 72 Dodona 56-7
burials, used for demography 20-1, 93 Doric, Dorians 25, 89, 91, 115
with arms etc. 53, 99-100, 105 Dorieus 152
with funerary vases 73-4 Drakon 120
Byzantion 91 Dreros 33, 60, 120

Carthage 137, 152, 201, 205-6 economic factors 123-59 passim

Catalogue of Ships 27, 29 Egypt 126, 132, 136, 138-40, 148-50,
cavalry 98-101, 107-8 168, 180, 186-7
Chalkis 40-1, 74, 101, 108, 199 Elaious 93
chariots 73, 99 Elba 139
Charondas 119 Elea 129
Chios 19, 95, 203 Eleusis 39, 117
citizenship 85-93, 110, 132-3, 188, 214 Emporion 136
city-state 25-47 passim, 49, 85-122 Ephesos 19, 150; inscription from, 62
passim, 149 epic poetry 70-74, 82-3, 104
coinage 134-6, 145, 158 Epic Cycle 71
colonization 34, 38, 40-2, 93, 119-21 Epidauros 86, 92, 111
commerce 57, 81-2, 123-48 passim, 206 Erechtheus 114, 116
copper 50-1 Eretria 19, 33, 40-1, 56, 59, 76, 101,
Corcyra 144 108, 135, 184, 187, 203
Corinth 324, 41, 44, 56-7, 60-1, 86, inscription from 135
108-9, 111-12, 114, 144, 146-8 ethnos 26, 42-4, 85, 87-8, 121
156, 158 Etruria, Etruscans 41, 82, 90, 121, 131,
institutions of 92, 120, 198 138, 142, 152, 158
pottery of 57, 75, 103, 146, 192 Euboia, Euboians 57, 74, 76, 81, 101
Crete, Cretans 39, 41, 47, 81, 87,
89-90, 92, 100, 119, 136, 140, 151
Cyclades 33, 142 fibulae 53-4, 140
Cyprus 47, 50, 75-6, 82, 100 figurines, bronze 52-4, 63
Cyrene 138, 167 terracotta 53, 63, 65
Cyrus 152, 205-6, 215 fortification 32-3, 156

Dareios 168 Gela 91

dark age 27, 35-6, 43 Gelon 137-8
Delos 53, 56, 104, 150, 195 genos 25-6, 117
Delphi 53, 55-7, 104, 115, 131, 140-1, gift-exchange 58, 132-3
144, 182 glass 51
oracle of 63, 83, 97, 113 gold 49-51
120 Gordion 134
democracy 46, 195-200, 207, 217 Gortyn 59
Index 233
grain imports 125-6 Kadmos 80
Kalaureia 56
Kallinos 173-4
hektemoroi 93-4 Kenchreai 147
helmets 105-6 Kimmerians 162
Helots 88, 109, 205 Kimon 38
Hera 33, 56, 58-9, 63 Kirrha 111
Herakleia 91 Kleanthes 166
Herakleitos 162 Kleisthenes of Athens 195-9
Herakles 71, 77, 184, 189 of Sikyon 38, 97-8, 114-15
hero-cults 37-40, 68, 74-5 Kleobis and Biton 63, 182, 211
Herodotus 38, 63, 101, 114, 131, 133, Kleoboulos 162
135-8, 141, 146, 152-3, 164, 196, Kleomenes 115, 198-9
203, 205 Knidos 141
Heroic Age 18, 37-40, 68, 74, 76-8, 80, Kolaios 138-9
115, 192 kouroi 178-85
Hesiod 36, 69, 77, 118, 125, 169, 175 Kroton 167
Hesychios 17T Kylon 93, 113, 120
Hippias 101, 152, 211 Kypselos 92, 96-7, 114-15, 120
Homer, Homeric poems 27-9, 35, 48,
56, 69, 71, 74, 76-7, 98-9, 132,
136, 169, 176, 191, 216 Lakonia 39
homosexuality 216 land, ownership of 37-40, 51, 55, 101,
hoplite 103, 151 126, 144
houses 61-2, 157 redistribution of 90, 92, 96-7, 114
Hysiai 144 law-codes 83, 118-22
lead 50
Lechaion 147
Iasos 32 Lefkandi 18-19, 22
Iliad 27, 29, 71, 76, 83, 191 Lelantine War 144
Iolkos 81 Lemnos 60
Ionia 101, 140, 152, 162-7, 176, 202, Lesbos 60, 95, 162
215 Levant 47, 81
dialect 25 Lindos 41, 53, 56, 162
Ionian Migration 91 Linear B 15, 79, 81
population in 22 Livy 34
iron 49-50, 139 Lokrian Maidens 68
Isagoras 198-9 Lokris 41-2, 89-90, 100
Ischia 40-1, 137, 139 Lokroi 42, 119
Isthmos, Isthmian Games 61, 117, Lousoi 57
147, 150 Lydia 134, 162
Istria 129 Lykophron 68
Ithaka 47, 57 Lykourgos 120
ivory 51

Macedonia 46-7, 101, 203-4

Jason 72 Magnesia 142
Mantineia 19, 45-7
234 Archaic Greece

Marathon 153, 203 pastoralism 35-6

marble 139-43 Pausanias 39, 64, 152
Mardonios 203 Peisistratos OZ, lilly lo, 17152756)
Marseilles 129 195
masonry, dressed 54, 58, 60-1, 148 penestai 87
Mavriki 57 Perachora 53, 57, 60, 140
medicine 167-8 Perati 19, 22
Megara 44, 57, 86, 92-3, 111 Periander 97, 147
Megara Hyblaia 128-9, 157 perioikoi 86-9, 109-10
Melanippos 38 Persia, Persians 152-3, 162, 168,
Menidhi 70 201-10, 213-17
mercenaries 110-11, 170 phalanx 102-3
Messenia 38, 86, 144 Phaleron 93, 101
metals, metallurgy 49-54, 99-106, 128, Pheidon 113-15, 134, 144
139 Philia 53, 56
Miletos 32-3, 56, 91, 129, 142, 175 Philip of Macedon 46
Mimnermos 192 Philolaos 120
Mitylene 94, 120 Phoenicians 32, 34, 78-81, 90, 120-1,
monarchy 90, 96, 115-16 UBS, iss}, ists}
Motya 139 Phokaia 129, 152
‘multiplier effect’ 54-5, 62-4, 84 Phokis 38, 101, 131
music 177, 195 Phokylides 175-6
Mycenae 24, 60 phratry 25-6
Mycenaean culture 15-19, 21, 26-32, pilgrimage 57
39, 44-5, 65, 74-5, 77-8, 148, 217 Pindar 117, 133, 208
mythology 183-94 pins 53-4, 62, 65, 158
piracy 33
Piraeus 93, 207
Pisa 111
Naukratis 136 Pithekoussai 40-1, 137, 139
Nauplia 24 Pittakos 95, 120, 162
Naxos 41, 143, 150
Plataia 45, 153, 203
Near East 31, 47, 81, 120
Plato 65
Pliny the Elder 150
Plutarch 145, 166
Odyssey 34, 71, 136, 169 polis: see city-state
oligarchy 46, 92, 95 Polykrates 152-3
olives 36, 145 population, growth of 19-25, 51
Olympia 53, 55-7, 104-6, 112, 115, pottery 126-9, 132-3, 187-94
130-1, 142, 144, 152, 195 Athenian 65-7, 69-70, 72-7, 100,
Orestes 38, 215 128, 145, 188, 215-16
Corinthian 57, 75, 103, 146, 192
Geometric 27, 55, 65-77,100
other local styles 57
Panathenaic amphorae 127, 131 Prokles 97
Panionion 56 Ptoon, Mt. 54, 57
Paros 41, 141, 170 Pythagoras 161, 164, 167
Index 255
religion 33, 114, 118, 131-2, 194-5, tactics 102-4, 106-7, 121-2, 151-3, 178,
206: see also sanctuaries, temples 214
Rhodes 41, 47 Tanagra 131
Rome 96, 156-7 Taranto 142
technology 148-54
Tegea 19, 38, 45, 56, 142
temples 19, 31, 33-4, 39, 56, 58-62,
117, 141-2, 147-9, 158, 183
Salamis (Attica) 145, 210 Terpander 120, 174
(Cyprus) 76 Thales 161, 163
Samian Heraion 56-9, 62-3, 133, 140 Thasos 170
Samos 33, 56-7, 152-4 Theagenes 97, 113
sanctuaries 33-4, 39, 52-65, 83, Thebes 45, 56, 120, 203
116-17, 143, 145 Themistokles 207
sculpture 141-3, 145-6, 149, 158, Theognis 93, 138, 176
178-87, 207-13 Thera 100
Selinous 157, 211 Thermon 33, 56-7, 59
settlements, size of 18-19 Thermopylai 204, 211
Seven against Thebes 39, 192 Theseus 38, 71, 116, 194
Seven Sages 95, 162-3 Thessaly, Thessalians 39, 87-90, 101,
shields 74-5, 103-6 OSM iva 2 1203
ship-building 54-5, 137-8, 148, 151, Thucydides 39, 54, 144, 146-7, 153,
USS, ZO, ily 156, 205
Sicily 47, 126, 201-2 tin 50-1
Sigeion 93 Tiryns 24, 33, 59-60
Sikyon 38, 44, 111, 114, 142 travelling artists 57, 141-3
silver 49-51, 207 tribalism 25-8, 35, 42, 47
Siphnos 135, 141 tripods 52-4, 62, 105, 140
Skyros 38 trireme 153
Skythians 152 Trojan War 71
slavery 64, 88, 93-6, 131, 196 Troy 68-9
smile, Archaic 185, 209-10 Tydeus 72, 192
Smyrna, Old 32, 56, 60, 154, 157 Tyrannicides 211-12
Solon 94-5, 97, 115, 117, 125, 133-4, tyrants, tyranny 90, 92, 96-8, 111-16,
144-6, 155, 176 120-2, 195, 198-9, 202
Sophokles 192 Tyrtaios 99, 120, 1734
Sostratos 138
Spain 47, 129, 138, 140
Ugarit 148
Sparta, Spartans 19, 33, 38, 41, 46, 86,
urbanization 32-3, 129, 154-8
133, 142, 144, 152, 156, 164,
198-9, 205, 215
institutions of 88-90, 92, 97, 109-10, Vettersfelde 140
dS; 120 Vix 140
sanctuaries at 56, 60, 64
Strabo 117
synoecism 34-5, 93 warfare 102-4, 106-7, 121-2, 130-1,
Syracuse 56, 91,137, 158 151-3, 214
236 Archaic Greece

Xenophanes 162, 176-7

Xenophon 46-7, 148
Xerxes 202, 213

Zagora 19, 30-3

Zaleukos 119