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15-05-2015, 05:51

Introduction

In the eighth century bc the communities of central Aegean Greece (see table 4.1; figure 4.1) and their colonies overseas laid the foundations of the economic, social, and cultural framework that constrained and enabled Greek achievements for the next five hundred years. Rapid population growth promoted warfare, trade, and political centralization all around the Mediterranean. In most regions, the outcome was a concentration of power in the hands of kings, but Aegean Greeks created a new form of identity, the equal male citizen, living freely within a small polis. This vision of the good society was intensely contested throughout the late eighth century, but by the end of the archaic period it had defeated all rival models in the central Aegean, and was spreading through other Greek communities. Only a minority of Greeks were free male citizens, but the struggles around this social category made Greek society distinctive.

Ever since a post-Mycenaean Dark Age was defined in the 1890s, archaeologists have seen the eighth century as the beginning of a revival from it. In the first archaeological synthesis of early Greek history, Starr suggested that “the age of revolution, 750-650, was the most dramatic development in all Greek history” (1961: 99), and Snodgrass’s interpretation of the period as a “structural revolution” (1980a: 15-84) has shaped all subsequent scholarship. Snodgrass argued that population growth stimulated state formation, and that Greeks made sense of the changes going on around them through artistic, poetic, and religious innovations.

In the 1990s some scholars suggested that this model exaggerated the scale of collapse after 1200 bc, the depth of the Early Iron Age depression, and importance of the eighth-century revival (e. g., de Polignac 1995b; Foxhall 1995; Langdon 1997a; S. Morris 1992). They were right that the explosion of fieldwork since the 1960s had complicated the picture, syntheses (Lemos 2002) still reveal tenth-century Greece as impoverished, simple, and isolated compared to the Late Bronze or archaic ages. The critics also pointed out that Greek society continued to change throughout archaic

Figure 4.1 Four material culture regions in Aegean Greece

And classical times; post-eighth-century Greece inherited much from the Early Iron and even the Bronze Age; there were variations within the Greek world; and posteighth-century Greece had much in common with other Mediterranean societies. All these assertions were true: classical Greece did not leap fully formed and unique from Zeus’ head in the eighth century in an absolute break with the past. But these criticisms of the structural revolution thesis, nevertheless, missed the core point: there are few episodes in world history before the industrial revolution when a society experienced such profound change in the course of a hundred years. A quarter-century of research has modified Snodgrass’s model in many ways, but its core features (demography, state formation, social conflict) must remain at the heart of any balanced discussion. The 1990s revisionists systematically avoided such economic and sociological issues. The title the editors chose for this chapter - “the eighth-century revolution” - is appropriate.