In later times, the Athenians imagined that their earliest ancestors had been ruled by kings. According to Pausanias (1.2.6), hereditary succession was not always practiced: Cecrops succeeded his father-in-law, Aktaios, presumably because the latter had no male heir, while both Amphiktyon and Erichthonius seized the kingship by force. Pausanias clearly assumes, however, that the hereditary principle should have been the norm and later (1.5.3) recounts how, from Erichthonius through Pandion, Erechtheus, and Cecrops II to Pandion II, son succeeded father. The testimony is late, but it is broadly consistent with the information provided in the third-century Parian Marble (A1-16) and may ultimately derive from the genealogical works of Hellanicus of Mytilene in the later fifth century. Nor were the Athenians unique in imagining their earliest rulers to have been hereditary kings. Diodorus of Sicily (fr. 7.9.2-6) - probably following the fourth-century historian Ephorus - states that son succeeded father as king of Corinth for 447 years from the Heraclid capture of the city down to the seizure of the tyranny by Cypselus (see below). Aristotle (Pol. 4.10.10) certainly seems to take it for granted that monarchies preceded aristocracies.
The word that ancient authors use to describe such kings is basileis (singular: basileus). By the Classical period, basileus could mean one of three things. In the first place, it designated a magistrate, normally appointed on an annual basis. At Athens, for example, the basileus was the second-highest ranking of the nine archons, charged with administering “all the traditional sacrifices” (Aristotle, AC 57.1). A decree, dated ca. 450 and regulating relations between Argos and the Cretan communities of Cnossus and Tylissos, refers to the magistracy of a basileus named Melantas at Argos (ML 42 = Fornara 89), while in an inscription from Chios, dated a little more than a century earlier (ML 8 = Fornara 19), an official named the basileus is juxtaposed with another called the demarkhos (“leader of the people”). In the second place, the term was frequently used in reference to monarchs of non-Greek peoples. The most obvious example that springs to mind is the Persian king, who was called simply basileus (without the definite article). Finally, the term is, as we have seen, employed to denote those mythical rulers of Greek regions such as Attica, Corinthia, and the Argolid. Is this latter usage, however, sufficient reason to suppose that hereditary kingship had once been widespread in Greece?
It is generally agreed that the Greek word basileus is the linguistic descendant of a term pa-si-re-u (or qa-si-re-u) that is attested in the Linear B tablets. There, however, it designates a fairly low-ranking local official rather than a supreme monarch, which is instead rendered by wa-na-ka - (w)anax in Classical Greek. The tablets from Pylos, for example, imply that somewhere between nine and twelve basileis were part of the kingdom’s administrative bureaucracy. Were we to accept the notion of hereditary kingship in the early Archaic period, we would have to assume that the term basileus, having originally denoted a local administrator, then came to designate a more powerful, hereditary monarch before eventually coming to be used in a more restrictive sense again to indicate an appointed official with limited tenure of office. On any count, that is a rather unlikely sequence of events, which is why - for all the historical problems involved (pp. 23-5) - scholars have turned to the Homeric epics.
In the Odyssey, there are occasions where individuals seem to be described as rulers of populations: Odysseus’ comrades ask Antiphates’ daughter who the basileus of the Laestrygones is (10.110), while Pheidon is named as the basileus of the Thesprotians (14.316; 19.287) and Phaidimos the basileus of the Sidoni-ans (15.118); in the Iliad, Rhesos is named as king of the Thracians (10.435). What is interesting is that all these cases concern populations that were considered either non-Hellenic (the Laestrygones, Sidonians, and Thracians) or something less than Hellenic (the Thesprotians) - a usage that, in some senses, anticipates the application of the term to non-Greek sovereigns in the Classical period. On the Greek side, we do hear of basileis of the Argives (e. g. Il. 10.195) and of the Achaeans (24.404), but both these names are used virtually synonymously to designate the collective forces that marched on Troy rather than specific populations rooted in particular regions. Among the Achaeans, only Agamemnon is explicitly named as king of anything, and in this case it is not of a population but of a place - “Mycenae, rich in gold” (Il. 7.180; 11.46). Other heroes, such as Achilles (1.331) or Diomedes and Odysseus (14.379-80), are simply nominated basileis without any further specification. Similarly, in the
Catalogue of Ships, the Achaean heroes may sometimes be described as arkhoi (“leaders”) of the contingents that they bring to Troy (e. g. Il. 2.541, 2.685), but never as basileis. Agamemnon does merit the title anax (e. g. Il. 1.172), which might have suggested a more regal status were it not for the fact that the term is also applied to Aeneas (5.311) and Polydamas (15.453-4), neither of whom was a sovereign ruler.
In fact, there are three reasons why it is difficult to view Homeric basileis as kings in any sense we would understand today. Firstly, basileus appears to be a relative, rather than an absolute, term. In the Iliad (9.69), Nestor describes Agamemnon as basileutatos (“the most basileus”) while Agamemnon himself notes that he is basileuteros (“more of a basileus”) than Achilles (9.160). Some have inferred from this that Achilles belongs to a more junior cadre of princes, subordinated to a paramount ruler, Agamemnon, but a little later, Achilles refuses Agamemnon’s offer of his daughter’s hand in marriage and bids him to “choose another of the Achaeans who is more similar to himself and more of a basileus” (9.391-92). This would seem to imply that basileus designates a personal authority that is subject to various gradations rather than a formally constituted office. Secondly, we often hear of a plurality of basileis. One of Penelope’s suitors, Antinous, points out that there are “many other basileis of the Achaeans in sea-girt Ithaca, both young and old” (Od. 1.394-95) and Alcinous notes that the Phaeacians have “twelve distinguished basileis who bear sway as leaders in the region, and I myself am the thirteenth” (8.390-91). Thirdly, the principle of hereditary succession, which would seem to be a fundamental characteristic of kingship as we understand it, is by no means guaranteed in the Homeric world. Odysseus is recognized as a basileus on Ithaca, but his father, Laertes, is still alive. Nor is there any certitude that his son, Telemachus, will succeed him to royal office should news of his demise be confirmed. When, in the Odyssey, Telemachus summons the assembly, we are told that the elders make way for him as he sits in the seat of his father (2.14) but he is utterly powerless at persuading - let alone ordering - his mother’s suitors to abstain from consuming the entire wealth of his house. Nor can it be accidental that the suitors Antinous and Eurymakhos are both described as basileis (18.64-65; 24.179).
It is for these reasons that some historians have preferred to view Homeric basileis not so much as hereditary monarchs but as what the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has termed “big-men.” Sahlins was concerned with comparing political communities and structures of leadership in Melanesia and Polynesia. In the Polynesian model, a pyramidal political system is dominated by “chiefs” who occupy pre-existing and suprapersonal positions of leadership where power and status attach to the office itself rather than the personality who holds office. In the Melanesian model, by contrast, autonomous kinship-residential groups are dominated by “big-men” whose authority is more personal or charismatic rather than derived from any pre-existing office. “Big-men” emerge as a result of competition, achieving authority through public persuasion and the demonstration of skills such as magical powers, rhetoric, courage, and especially the amassment and redistribution of goods. For support, they depend initially on followers, household, and closest relatives, but then incorporate within this extended family various “strays” who, through this act of calculated generosity, are placed in a position of obligation to their patron. Because authority is vested in the person of the individual, such systems are inherently unstable and are often undermined by the death of the “big-man.”
It is important to note that the distinction between “big-men” and “chiefs” is not simply typological. When Sahlins compared the political systems of Melanesia and Polynesia, he was heavily influenced by the theories of cultural evolution that had been developed by Elman Service and Morton Fried. Service believed that most human societies had passed through four evolutionary stages, characterized by different subsistence strategies, which he named “band,” “tribe,” “chiefdom,” and “state.” The band was constituted by relatively small, patrilineally-organized groups of families engaged in hunting and gathering. “Tribe” denotes a larger, united group of communities, held together by con-fraternal relationships, that practices simple agriculture or pastoral nomadism. In a chiefdom, a common population is united under the leadership of a chief who stands at the head of a redistributive economic system. The state, on the other hand, is a larger polity with a centralized bureaucracy that is engaged in large-scale agriculture and organized along territorial rather than kinship lines. Service’s “bands” and “tribes” conform roughly with what Fried calls “egalitarian societies.” In such societies, leadership is weak because all available statuses are equal and can therefore technically be occupied by anybody. In “ranked societies,” by contrast, there are fewer status positions, meaning that individuals have to compete for leadership, while in “stratified societies” there is unequal access to available resources, resulting in institutionally complex and centralized structures of domination. For purposes of comparison, Service’s chiefdoms would straddle the transition between Fried’s “ranked” and “stratified” societies, while Sahlins’ evolution of “big-men” into “chiefs” should normally take place within a “ranked” society.
Theories of cultural evolution are not currently very fashionable. In particular, criticism has been leveled against the uniformity, unidirectionality, and teleological inevitability that they seem to presuppose. Certainly, it is patent that the political system that existed in Late Bronze Age Greece was far more complex than anything that would be seen in the centuries immediately following. There is, however, another respect in which the situation in Archaic Greece seems to have run directly counter to one of the important presuppositions of evolutionist theory. Both Service and Fried believed that the cohesion of early societies was based on kinship bonds and that, as societies became larger and institutionally more complex, such bonds weakened and were replaced by notions of territoriality. This idea has a long pedigree: in his Ancient Law of 1861, the English jurist and anthropologist Henry Sumner Maine argued that it was only as population groups became more sedentary that territoriality began to replace kinship as a principle of social organization. It is not at all clear, however, that this was the Greek experience.
We are poorly informed as to the situation in the Late Bronze Age, but there is precious little evidence for the importance of kinship as an organizing principle in Dark Age society. It is surely significant that, in the Homeric epics, the words etes (“kinsman”) and hetairos (“companion”) derive from the same Indo-European root - namely *swe-, meaning “one’s own” - thus blurring the distinction between friends, companions, and kin. In the Iliad and Odyssey, the word phylon (plural: phyla) seems to denote a small group of followers united around a local leader, while the term phratra (plural: phratrai) represents an aggregative association of phyla. This seems to imply that social organization in the Homeric epics is structured around locality rather than kinship and is fully compatible with the conclusions reached in chapter 4 concerning the primacy and centrality of place within the conception of the polis. It also allows us to understand better why Hesiod (WD 344-5) should counsel Perses to rely upon neighbors rather than kinsmen by marriage - let alone genuine blood relations, who are not even mentioned.
Yet, the term phratra, notwithstanding its adoption to designate an aggregate of phyla, does in fact have connotations of kinship (it is related to Latin frater, or “brother”). Furthermore, when we meet the term again in texts and inscriptions of the Classical period, it is as a formal subdivision of the phyle (plural: phylai) - a feminized form of the now redundant term phylon, indicating one of the principal subdivisions or “tribes” of the citizen body. An inscription from Argos, probably to be dated to the middle of the fifth century, lists twelve groups that have been identified as the phratrai that constituted the phyle of the Hyr-nathioi (Figure 6.1). What is interesting is that the suffixes adopted to indicate membership of a phratry are derived from the terminology of descent: so, for example, the Temenidai are, literally speaking, “the descendants of Temenos,” the Heraclid who is supposed to have led the Dorians in their conquest of Argos. This is no less true at the level of the phyle: by the fourth century, members of the Athenian tribe of Antiokhis referred to themselves as Antiokhidai - descendants of Heracles’ son Antiokhos, whose cult they celebrated. But there was
Temenidai
Dmasippidai
Heraieis
Sophylidai
Wariadai
Daiphonteis
Eualkidai
Diwonysioi
Melanippidai
Heraieis?
Lykotadai
Naupliadai
Figure 6.1 The twelve constituent phratriai of the phyle of the Hyrnathioi at Argos in the
Mid-fifth century
Nothing “primordial” about the Athenian phylai - they were the creations of Cleisthenes at the end of the sixth century (see pp. 238-9) - and, as we have already seen (pp. 47-8), earlier subdivisions of the citizen body into phylai can hardly predate the emergence of more complex political communities. In other words, while cultural evolutionist theory would predict a shift from kinship to residence as the fundamental organizing principle of society, the Greek case appears to witness a shift from residence to kinship, even if the kinship that was recognized was more imaginary and artificial than real.
Notwithstanding these provisos, there are some interesting parallels between Sahlins’ “big-men” and Homeric basileis. Like “big-men,” Homeric heroes do not derive their authority from any office that they hold. Instead, they achieve and maintain their status and authority through martial prowess, provision of feasts, display of wealth, and acts of calculated generosity that place others under an obligation to be therapontes or “retainers.” The example of Phoenix, welcomed as a fugitive into the household of Achilles’ father, Peleus, and given both wealth and dominion by his host (Il. 9.478-84), is a case in point. Like “big-men,” Homeric basileis lack true power, in the sense of controlling the sources and distribution of wealth. Rather, we are told on several occasions that the leader enjoys usufruct of agricultural land (temenos) that has been awarded to him by the laos or community. Phoenix, for example, recounts to Achilles the story of the Aetolian hero Meleager, promised an estate of arable land and a vineyard by the elders of Calydon if he would help defend the city against the Curetes (9.574-80). And like “big-men,” Homeric leaders are not always capable of applying punitive measures to enforce obedience: the reason such a small contingent follows Nireus from Syme is because he is “weak” (2.671-75). In many ways, then, the relationship between the Homeric basileus and his followers is one based on reciprocity.
Attempts have been made to identify this sort of authority in the material record. Some settlements, such as Athens, Argos, and Cnossus, seem to have been “stable,” in the sense that they were continuously occupied throughout the Dark Age, whereas others - e. g. Dhonoussa, Zagora, Nikhoria, or Emborio - were “unstable,” being discontinuously occupied and often abandoned early in the Archaic period. It is in these “unstable” settlements that the “big-man” model may be most appropriate. At Lefkandi, apparently abandoned ca. 700 after more than a century of decline, the monumental building in the Toumba cemetery could have served as a feasting-hall and as the residence of the community’s “big-man.” When he died, some time in the first half of the tenth century, the house with which he was so closely associated would have been demolished and buried beneath a massive earth tumulus, thus visibly symbolizing the collapse of his personal authority and prestige (see pp. 62-3). At Nikhoria, a larger structure (Unit IV-1), around which the tenth-century houses cluster, has been identified as the residence of a “big-man” (Map 4.3), while a similar function has been proposed for an apsidal building, constructed ca. 900 above the ruins of a Mycenaean palatial-like structure at Koukounaries.
As noted earlier (p. 63), the identification of the Lefkandi Toumba building as a house is not uncontroversial and it is starting to look as if renewed excavations at Xeropolis may correct the impression of settlement discontinuity there. Either way, the comparison between Lefkandi, on the one hand, and Kouko-unaries and Nikhoria, on the other, is not entirely valid. It is widely agreed that the Toumba building was constructed, occupied (if at all), and demolished within a relatively short period of time - at most, half a century and probably considerably less. At Koukounaries, the evidence is more ambiguous: the apsidal building was succeeded, in the eighth century, by a rectangular megaron, built on top of it, that continued to be occupied into the second quarter of the seventh century. Whether this represents a case of continuity across several generations is difficult to determine. Similar doubts hold at Nikhoria, where Unit IV-1, occupied for at least a century and possibly longer, was succeeded early in the eighth century by Unit IV-5, which abuts on it. In other words, it is entirely conceivable that political authority was exercised more continuously and for a longer period of time at both Koukounaries and Nikhoria, even though both would qualify as “unstable” settlements.
In fact, if we turn back to the Homeric evidence, we find that the question of political authority is far from straightforward. Although hereditary succession is not guaranteed in the epics, that does not mean that the principle might not exist. In the second book of the Iliad, we are told that Agamemnon’s scepter - the visible symbol of his authority - had been made by the god Hephaestus for Zeus, and that Zeus had given it to Hermes who, in turn, had presented it to Pelops. From there it had been transmitted from father to son, through Atreus and Thyestes to Agamemnon (2.100-108). The principal point behind recounting the scepter’s “genealogy” is, as Nestor notes earlier (1.277-79), to demonstrate that Agamemnon’s authority is greater than that of other basileis because it is derived ultimately from Zeus, but it is hard to ignore the hereditary implications of the scepter’s transmission. Attention is also given to heredity in the Odyssey (4.62-64), when Menelaus tells Telemachus and Peisistratos that their demeanor betrays their descent from “god-reared, sceptre-bearing basileis.” Along similar lines, Hesiod’s description (Th. 80-84) of how the muses honor “basileis fostered by Zeus” and “look over him when he is born and pour sweet dew upon his tongue so that honeyed words stream forth from his mouth” seems to imply a fairly widespread belief that recruitment for supreme authority might be through birth.
The Homeric basileis are not, then, kings in the conventional sense but, while they bear some striking resemblances to “big-men,” there are other features that would suggest that they are also sometimes imagined more as chieftains, occupying a formally constituted - and ideally inherited - office. Unless one subscribes to the view that the world of Homer is chronologically composite and therefore ahistorical (p. 25), it might be tempting to suppose that the society depicted in the epics is a ranked society, where the personal authority wielded by “big-men” is in the process of being transferred into a more traditional authority, occupied by hereditary chieftains. Alternatively, it might be preferable to regard the different expressions of political authority as simply typological or even regional distinctions rather than successive steps on a single evolutionary trajectory. As we have seen (pp. 64-5), the burial evidence from Lefkandi offers some hints of a ranked society after ca. 950 and, if the correlation between burial practices and social organization is valid, it is worth noting that a comparable shift does not occur at Athens until some two to three generations later. Furthermore, while separate settlement foci have been posited for Athens down to the eighth century (pp. 79-80), there are some indications that Lefkandi was more nucleated. In other words, the disparities between the two sites in terms of funerary display may be due to different structures of authority. Either way, there is little evidence in the epics for the existence of a fully stratified society.
World History
