It is a longstanding convention that the lower chronological terminus for the Archaic period is marked by the Persian War of 480-479. Determining the upper limit, on the other hand, is trickier. Traditionally, the Archaic period was considered to have begun ca. 700 with the works of the lyric poets - indeed, in earlier treatments the Archaic period is sometimes referred to as the “Lyric Age.” Yet this particular periodization was originally adopted at a time - the mid-nineteenth century - when the period prior to 700 was believed to represent a barely knowable “Heroic Age,” for which the Homeric epics were the only contemporary witness. All that changed with Schliemann’s excavations at Mycenae and Tiryns and the realization, through synchronizations with Egyptian material, that the Mycenaean civilization had gone into steep decline ca. 1200, thus opening up a “gap” of five centuries immediately before the “historical” age. Initially, this “Dark Age” attracted little scholarly interest but, with the decipherment of Linear B in 1952 and the recognition that Mycenaean Greece bore little resemblance to the world that Homer describes, an awareness emerged that archaeological evidence could go a long way in illuminating these centuries of darkness. By the 1980s, when a virtual consensus had arisen among both historians and archaeologists concerning an eighth-century “renaissance,” it became clear that no account of early Greece could begin as late as 700. Even more recently, it has become increasingly clearer that the eighth-century developments cannot be satisfactorily explained without some consideration of what was going on in the tenth and ninth centuries. As a result, there has been a tendency to push back the upper terminus for the period and this is certainly not the first book to begin an account of Archaic Greece ca. 1200.
In reality, however, there is actually more rationale for the upper terminus than for the lower one. Whatever the cause of the destructions that rocked the Mycenaean palaces ca. 1200, the consequences were extremely far-reaching with few regions remaining unaffected. Lefkandi displays an almost unparalleled degree of prosperity as early as the tenth century but there is evidence for only modest settlement prior to the twelfth century. By contrast, at those settlements where some continuity of occupation across the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age is suspected, there is no doubt that it was at a much lower level and density than before. The disappearance of palatial administrations had profound effects on the culture, society, and economy of the Greek world. There was little need any longer for scribal literacy or specialized manufacture, and subsistence strategies had to adapt to the new circumstances. The fraught and unsettled conditions almost certainly prompted and even compelled people to seek a living elsewhere and the traditions concerning the Ionian and Dorian migrations are best seen as later attempts to understand and explain the considerable mobility that must have existed at the beginning of our period.
By contrast, no such cataclysmic watershed divided the 470s from the 480s. There was, of course, a human cost to the conflict with Persia but in terms of politics, society, and culture, life in Athens was not so different after the repulsion of Xerxes than it was before. The Cleisthenic constitution had already been in place for a couple of decades and the final anti-aristocratic reforms of Ephi-altes lay almost two decades in the future, as did the more material benefits that the Athenians were to derive from the formation of the Delian League in 478. The Greek cities in Asia Minor merely exchanged a Persian master for an Athenian one. No major upheavals or disruption took place at Sparta; there, too, it was the 460s that would witness more momentous happenings with a particularly devastating earthquake and the revolt of the Messenian helots. Indeed, we need to remind ourselves that, of the hundreds of poleis that existed in 480, only thirty-one took a stand against the Persian invaders. One city that sat out the conflict was Argos where there seem to be no significant changed circumstances in the early 470s. Far more traumatic was the annihilation of the Argive army at the hands of the Spartan king Cleomenes some fifteen years earlier (Herodotus 6.76-83; Plutarch, Mor. 245c-f; Pausanias 2.27.7-8), but, once again, the most important transformation of Argive society came in the 460s with the destruction of neighboring cities, the incorporation of their inhabitants within the Argive citizenry, and probably the introduction of democracy. In other words, had we been unaware of the circumstances of the Persian invasion, it is not at all obvious that we would have regarded the 470s as particularly distinctive. It has even been suggested that the origins of the innovations that characterize the “Severe” or “International” style of Greek sculpture, once assumed to be the cultural celebration of the freedom won at Salamis and Plataea, should actually be situated in the first two decades of the fifth century.
Perhaps the picture would have looked rather different had the Persians been victorious. Some reflections on what might have happened had the battles of Salamis and Plataea gone differently surface in the writings of Classical authors: Herodotus (7.139) maintains that Greece would not have continued to enjoy its liberty had the Athenians not decided to resist the Persians; similarly, Plato (Laws 699a-d) notes that the Athenian state would have become scattered and broken up into a diaspora community had the Athenians not made the decision to unite in self-defense and defend their temples, tombs, country, relatives, and friends. But imagining the counterfactual is, by definition, the precise opposite of lived experience and there is little to indicate that such thoughts arose in the immediate aftermath of the Persian War or that they were of much widespread concern outside Athens. Nor is it at all certain that the Persians entertained any intentions of exercising direct rule over Greece as a satrapy.
Carving up space and time for the purposes of historical study is, of course, a practical necessity and it should therefore come as no surprise that the terminal dates that frame any period turn out to be artificial, if not arbitrary. But neither is it easy to identify any particular themes, issues, structures, or institutions that serve either to endow the Archaic period with a specific internal coherence or to mark it out from the periods that preceded and succeeded it. It is sometimes suggested that the concept of freedom, both personal and communal, was an especially notable feature of the period but there is no clearly identifiable transformation in the status of freedom immediately after the Persian War. The issue of communal freedom, for example, only really began to gather momentum in the late fifth and fourth centuries as poleis sought to preserve their autonomy within hegemonic leagues. The Archaic period certainly witnessed many innovations that had not existed in the Late Bronze Age but all of these continued to develop in subsequent periods.
There is, however, one respect in which the Archaic period is different from both the Mycenaean and the Classical periods and it is here that we return to issues of historical method and the fact that it should be the specific character of the available evidence rather than the theoretical or ideological preferences of the historian that dictate the most appropriate method to apply to a body of material. Archaeological evidence is available for all periods, but the nature of the literary evidence is different for each of the three different epochs. In the Mycenaean period, the literary evidence is restricted to the Linear B inscriptions on clay tablets and vases but this provides important contemporary testimony about the functioning of the Bronze Age palaces. In the Classical period, a burgeoning number of inscriptions on stone similarly furnish a wealth of contemporary evidence for the administration of the polis but this is also the period in which historiography - the self-conscious practice of recording recent or contemporary events with a view to explaining their causes and connections - is born. Fifth-century tragedy and comedy also provide an invaluable insight into the political, cultural, and moral issues that interested contemporary audiences. In short, one of the distinctive features of the Classical period - and, to a certain extent, the Mycenaean period - is the contemporaneity of the written evidence on which our reconstructions are based.
That is a luxury that is rarely available for the Archaic period. For a start, there are very few complete works of literature that have survived. The Homeric and Hesiodic poems are obvious exceptions, but neither was composed with the needs of the future historian in mind and, in the case of the former especially, the consciously archaizing world of the heroes presents its own problems. The lyric and elegiac poets offer precious hints of the sorts of preoccupations that concerned the topmost stratum of society, but the picture that can be built up from the scattered and isolated scraps of their poetry that later authors saw fit to cite can only ever be fragmentary. Inscriptions exist, particularly in the later phases of the period, but they are notoriously scant compared with subsequent periods and the information that they purvey is often haphazard and difficult to accommodate within any overarching, coherent set of legal or political practices. As for “events” and the circumstances that caused them, we are, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, almost entirely dependent upon the testimony of authors writing much later. The specific nature of the materials available for the Archaic period, then, requires considerable caution but also a good degree of imagination to compensate for the deficiencies of our evidence. It necessitates, in other words, a specific set of methodological skills that is rather different from those required to study other periods of Greek history.
There is, however, one final respect in which the nature of the evidence at our disposal prefigures the object of study. Greek historians are sometimes charged with too narrow a vision of their subject matter. Early Greece, it is argued, was merely part of a broader network of intellectual, cultural, and informational currents that spanned the entire Mediterranean - especially its eastern half - the Near East, and Egypt and to focus solely on one little part of this wider world is little more than parochial Hellenocentrism. That Greece was not isolated from its neighbors in the Archaic period goes without saying and much useful research has been conducted over the past few decades into the nature and frequency of such interactions. But the methodological justification for geographically separating the Greek world from its Mediterranean context extends beyond simply practical issues of expertise and competence. If one were content to limit oneself to material cultural studies, the playing field would, in a certain sense, be more level. But historians are obliged to resort to every piece of evidence at their disposal and once literary testimony is introduced into the mix, the prospect for a genuinely Mediterranean history becomes decidedly more problematic.
The reason for this is that many of the populations with whom the Greeks came into contact have now become “people without history” - or, rather, people without their own history. From an early period, the Greeks sought to accommodate non-Greek populations within their world view by usurping the right to create myths of origins for them: the tendency becomes especially common in the ethnographies that appear in the early fifth century, beginning with the works of Hecataeus, but is already anticipated both in the Odyssey and in Hesiod’s account (Th. 1011-18) of how the sorceress Circe gave birth to Latinos, the eponymous ancestor of the Latin people. It is sometimes assumed that indigenous peoples were happy to accept passively such myths from Greek authors because they lacked their own cognitive schema for the world and their place in it, although there are some hints that Greek versions of such myths were not entirely unaffected by what local populations said about themselves. It nevertheless remains the case that Greek writers reveal a particular obsession not only with coining such origin myths but also with committing them to writing and hence preserving them for posterity. The end result is - as scholars of Achaemenid Persia or Etruscan Italy admit with considerable frustration - that the literary component of the evidence for the Greeks’ neighbors is often largely a product of Greek authors and carries the inevitable myopic partiality and interested agenda that one might expect under such circumstances. From a methodological point of view, then, there is not a great deal of commensura-bility between a reconstruction of Greek history based on archaeology and Greek written sources and a reconstruction of, say, Lydian or Etruscan history similarly based on archaeology and Greek written sources. The former may require some imagination on the part of the historian, but the latter comes dangerously close to a flight of fancy if it is set alongside - and granted the same “factual” status as - the former. The past may be translated in many and various meaningful ways but it cannot be written from scratch.
In the end, a sensitivity to issues of historical method serves to highlight the fundamental point that history is a practice rather than merely a synonym for the past. It is not about passively absorbing facts and figures but about engaging with a variety of materials for which appropriate methodological tools are required and that active engagement must, of necessity, result in self-interrogation as to the values and assumptions under which each one of us operates. This is why, for all the indubitable benefits that disciplines in the social sciences have contributed to our inquiries, the discipline of history will always remain firmly part of the humanities.
World History
