The Classical Age as a historical epoch, it may be argued, is the most important period of Greek history. It certainly has traditionally been a focus of scholarly debate, and popular imagination, mainly because of the two most important political powers of the time: Athens and Sparta. The present chapter, however, sets out to explore the other regions of mainland Greece as well as the Aegean islands and western Asia Minor: the ‘Third Greece beyond Athens and Sparta’ around the Aegean Sea, as Gehrke (1986) has called it in an influential work. Given the bias of the extant literary and non-literary sources towards Athens and, at least indirectly, Sparta, our survey can only be based on scarce and very unbalanced evidence (for which see, e. g., Fornara, Harding, M&L, R&O). Generalizations are therefore especially risky, but an attempt may still be of some use if we try to organize the uneven material and thus to contribute to an understanding of this ‘Third Greece’.
What is it then that makes the ‘Third Greece’ a more or less coherent entity? The usual ‘historical’ answer is that, during the Classical Age, large parts of it belonged to one of the two main leagues, either the Peloponnesian League comprising Sparta and her allies, formed in the sixth century and active until 365 (cf. Wickert 1961; Baltrusch 1994), or the first (or Delian) Athenian League comprising Athens and her allies (480/79 - 404; cf. Meiggs 1979); to which one must add, during the fourth century, the Second Athenian League (378/7 - 338; see R&O 23; Cargill 1981), and the Korinthian League formed by Philip II of Macedon after his victory over the combined Greek forces at Chaironeia in 338 (R&O 76).
However, a far more fundamental coherence is based on the geographical facts: the first and foremost factor connecting Aegean Greece is of course the Aegean Sea, which has always encouraged fishing and sailing (both in voyages along the coast, and in ‘island hopping’), and has enabled lively communications between the Greek mainland, the islands and western Asia Minor throughout history. Hardly of less importance, however, were the common natural conditions for the communities’ subsistence, which in the ‘Third Greece’ is often quite similar, as stated by Herodotos (3.1), who notes a uniformity of natural conditions in Greece: ‘The most outlying nations of the world have somehow drawn the finest things as their lot, exactly as Greece has drawn the possession of far the best seasons.’
In fact, most of its regions lack mineral resources such as iron (let alone precious metals), but have three factors in common: (1) the sea, allowing for fishing and communications; (2) alluvial plains in ‘far the best seasons’, that is in a Mediterranean climate, often not well watered, but fertile enough to enable the cultivation of grain, olives, vines, fruit and vegetables, and less commonly animal husbandry of cattle and the prestigious horses; (3) mountain ranges for firewood and timber (cf. already Homer Iliad 23.114 - 22), for transhumance (especially goats and sheep) or - in the rougher areas - only for hunting.
Although the physical world and the economic realities will be dealt with in later chapters, it seems necessary to state at the outset the two single most important environmental - and therefore, as in any pre-industrial society, economic - factors which tied the Aegean world together and the varying qualities of which may help towards a classification of the regions under discussion: ease of access to the sea, and the availability and fertility of agricultural land.
Variations in these two factors allow us to organize our survey along the lines of a simplified systematic classification - a necessarily simplistic approach which cannot be more than a first attempt to identify comparable communities in the classical Greek World around the Aegean.
World History
