Archaic Greece

Between 800 and 500b. c.e., Greece, which already had achieved a remarkably advanced civilization, saw the city-state organization of its society grow and adopted a more advanced economy that promoted trade.

Date: 800-500 b. c.e.

Category: Cities and civilizations

Locale: Greek peninsula, Crete, Cyprus, Cyclades

Introduction During Greece’s Archaic (ahr-KAY-ihk) period, the economy was transformed by the invention of coinage, which inevitably led to an expansion of trade and commerce. As its population grew and prospered, Greece, hungry for land, colonized Mediterranean areas and moved into the territories surrounding the Black Sea. The relatively unsophisticated economy of the ancient Greek villages was much disturbed by this expansion. Land wars were common.

History The ancient Greeks called themselves Hellenes, but the Roman name for the area in southern Italy to which thousands of Hellenes migrated in the period of great colonization between 750 and 500 b. c.e. was Magna Graecia, from which the words “Greek,” “Greece,” and “Grecian” are derived. During the Archaic period, which began around 800 b. c.e. and continued until the Golden Age of Athens shortly after 500 b. c.e., there was considerable emigration from the Greek islands and the Peloponnese.

Population growth, combined with agrowing shortage of land, led many of the country’s citizens to colonize areas ranging from southern Spain to the Black Sea, North Africa, and the Near East. In the first half of the eighth century alone, the population of Attica quadrupled. In the next half century, it doubled.

The only city-states that did not engage in colonization were Athens and Sparta. During the early Archaic period, Athens had sufficient fertile land to support its population, so it did not establish external colonies. When Sparta needed land to accommodate its swelling population, it used military might to overcome Messeniato its west (725 and 668 b. c.e.) and Arcadia to its north (560 and 550 b. c.e.), making colonization unnecessary.

The historian Herodotus recounts how famine struck the island of Thera, causing the Therans to exile some of their number. When these exiles failed to find a suitable place in which to begin a new colony, they returned to Thera, only to be rebuffed by arrows that prevented their landing, forcing them to depart hastily.

Archaic Greece had scores of city-states. The topography of the area lent itself to the establishment of isolated enclaves that originally were tribal but, by the beginning of the Archaic period, were centered around the polis, or city. The population in the outlying areas were also considered part of the political unit that was called the city-state. High mountain ranges separated many of the city-states from one another. Others grew on the islands of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas.

Most of the cities around which the city-states formed were small. Sparta, geographically the largest of the city-states with an area of 3,360 square miles (8,712 square kilometers), had fewer than five thousand residents. Athens, during its Golden Age, with an area of 1,060 square miles (2,749 square kilometers), claimed an adult male population of forty-three thousand. Small villages existed outside the major cities. Their inhabitants were citizens of the city-state. Boeotia, whose major city was Thebes, had twelve villages in its outlying areas, each with an average size of 52 square miles (135 square kilometers).

Even though conflicts arose and border wars were fought among the city-states, an underlying unity existed, particularly as colonization in far-off venues became more common. A major unifying thread was Greek mythology, the basis for the religion of most Greeks regardless of their citizenship in individual city-states. The temple of Apollo at Delphi became a center to whose oracle most Greeks turned for advice.

Four major Panhellenic religious festivals united the citizens of disparate areas. Festivals and games held at Olympia and Nemea honored Zeus, the father of the gods. Corinth regularly honored Poseidon, god of the sea. Apollo was similarly honored at Delphi. The Olympic, Nemean, Isthmian, and Pythian Games were Panhellenic events during which any warring factions observed an inviolable truce. The Greeks measured time by Olympiads, using 776 b. c.e., the date of the first Olympic Games, as a starting point.

Festivals and games were held at Olympia during the Archaic Age. (F. R. Niglutsch)

Archaic Greece provided the blueprint for Western civilization. In approximately three hundred years, the country moved from a collection of tribes to federations of city-states. During this period, governments were formed, laws were codified, a simplified alphabet was adopted, enabling large numbers of Greeks to gain literacy, money was coined for the first time, and education became available to increasing numbers of citizens.

The art of the period moved from the stiff, geometrical art of the preceding period to a more fluid art that reflected Asian influences. Intellectual Greeks studied rhetoric and oratory, developing skills that enabled them to pose searching questions concerned with the position of humans in the universe and to articulate complex ideas according to the rules of formal logic.

Government became stratified according to class during this period. Initially ruled monarchically by kings, in time, the government became oligarchic, ruled by a wealthy, landed aristocracy that ruled autocratically, much as the kings had. They denied political power to those who did not own land. Following 680 b. c.e., when the first coinage of money took place, commerce developed, and the economy changed, creating new groups of landless but affluent people, a rising middle class, who, beginning around 650 b. c.e., grasped political power.

From among these citizens, mostly engaged in trades, crafts, and agriculture, emerged tyrants who wrested control from the aristocrats. These tyrants usually had the support of the slaves and the serfs. Among the city-states, only Sparta continued to be controlled by aristocrats. Many of the early tyrants were shrewd rulers. They spearheaded significant social improvement and offered hope to the serfs and the slaves who supported them. In time, however, many of them became autocratic and isolated from their constituencies, only to be overthrown by the lower classes on whom their power depended. After 500 b. c.e., no tyrants remained in the Greek city-states.

Government and Law In the early Archaic period, the Greek city-states, originally ruled by monarchs who inherited their kingships, often became oligarchies, ruled by a landed gentry that excluded from the power structure those who did not own land and were not, therefore, aristocratic. As commerce grew during the mid-seventh century, a middle class of merchants, tradesmen, and farmers began to gain power. Supported by serfs and slaves seeking to improve their bleak lives, tyrants emerged as the rulers.

Although the tyrants initially were usually well-qualified men who engineered desirable change, many of them eventually became as autocratic as their aristocratic and monarchical predecessors had been. As they lost touch with the people, they were usually overthrown.

As early as the ninth century b. c.e., Lycurgus of Sparta, a lawgiver, had created a representative form of government that became a model for many city-states. This government consisted of a bicameral body. Its upper house, the gerousia, had twenty-eight elders, each over sixty years old. The lower house, the apella, was composed of citizens who were qualified to serve if they were more than thirty years old. Two kings ruled, but five powerful magistrates, called ephors, supervised and controlled these kings, whose tenure was in their hands.

The lawgivers in the city-states had almost unlimited power. The citizens chose them and trusted them, abiding by their judgment. The most renowned lawgiver, Solon, served Athens at the beginning of the sixth century b. c.e., a critical time in its existence. The Athenians had suffered a severe drought and an ensuing famine. Many Athenians who had borrowed money were unable to pay their debts and were enslaved by fellow citizens.

Solon resolved this dilemma through the controversial expedient of canceling all debts, thereby restoring some order to a society in crisis. He also mandated that no Athenian could incur further indebtedness but that any who did so and failed to repay his debts could be enslaved. Any son whose father failed to teach him a trade or profession was absolved from having to support that father in his old age. Solon also prohibited the export of all agricultural products except olive oil, of which Athens had an abundance. Under Solon, an assembly of citizens met regularly and a court of appeals was established to limit the power of magistrates. Solon’s laws represent the most significant steps Athens took toward establishing a democracy.

Religion and Ritual Throughout the Greek city-states of the Archaic period, religion was a major unifying force. The mythology that had been imparted in oral form from a time when Greek society was largely tribal is recorded in the Homeric epics, the Iliad (c. 750 b. c.e.; English translation, 1611) and Odyssey (c. 725 b. c.e.; English translation, 1614). In these epics, the hierarchy of the ancient gods of the sea, of fertility, of war, and of various other elements of human existence was established, with Zeus, the king or father of the gods, holding the preeminent position.

Even into the fifth century b. c.e., when Euripides’ dramas were mocking the gods as they were presented in the Homeric epics, polytheism flourished. One could mock the gods much as modern comedians mock prominent political figures, but it was unthinkable to deny them.

Settlements and Social Structure As Greece’s city-states grew during the eighth century b. c.e., land became scarce and people had limited means of earning their livelihoods. As a result, hundreds of citizens from every city-state except Athens and Sparta were forced to leave their homes to colonize other places that offered them greater opportunities and less crowded conditions. Considerable numbers sailed west to Sicily and southern Italy, where numerous Greek colonies were established. Others traveled east to the shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Mamara.

Each new colony maintained a sentimental and usually a commercial connection with the original city-state, often carrying a sacred flame from the mother city to the new colony. Nevertheless, these colonies were independent and, unlike Roman colonies, were not connected politically to the city-state from which they came.

Usually about two hundred men from an overcrowded city-state would set out to establish a colony elsewhere. Once they had set down some roots, they would bring their women—mothers, wives, daughters, sweethearts— to the new colony.

Economics Unlike the economies of many ancient societies, the Archaic Greek economy was not wholly agricultural, although agriculture played an important role in it. Manufacturing, which flourished during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, was a major economic factor in many Greek city-states. A turning point in commerce came with the first coinage of silver in the mid-seventh century b. c.e.

During this century, small villages grew into cities as manufactured goods such as pottery, textiles, metal utensils, and weapons found ready markets throughout the areas that bordered the Mediterranean and Black Seas. The rise in manufacturing created jobs for many who had previously been unemployed and in a number of city-states reduced considerably the pressure to colonize. Some exiles from the colonies were also able to return to their native homes to work in manufacturing.

Philosophy Until the sixth century b. c.e., Greeks explained natural and social phenomena in terms of the myths that had been handed down through the ages. During the sixth century b. c.e., however, thinking Greeks began to seek deeper explanations for phenomena they could not easily understand. The pre-Socratic philosophers, notable among them Heraclitus, Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras, Anaximenes, and Anaximander, pondered such questions as the source and meaning of life. They sought the “world-stuff,” or basis of all the material world. Heraclitus, considered the founder of metaphysics, postulated the philosophy that everything changes, that nothing ever remains the same.

Essentially, the early Greek philosophers had a pessimistic view of life. During the sixth century b. c.e., despite the notable strides they had made, most of the philosophers were still steeped in the myths with which they had been brought up and found it difficult to assess the world in other than the mythical terms that were so familiar to them.

Women’s Lives Although many city-states bestowed citizenship on their female residents, Greece was largely a male-dominated society. Women generally did not serve in public office. Colonizing was done by males, who usually established their colonies and then sent for their women. Women’s activities were usually domestic in nature, although some notable women, such as Sappho in the sixth century b. c.e., gained recognition as poets. Women were unable in most city-states to vote. Most married early because they required men in their lives as protectors.

Writing Systems In the ancient Greek script, now designated Linear B, each sign represented a single syllable. This script, recorded on clay tablets by using sharp instruments, died out around 1200 b. c.e. Greece was essentially illiterate for the next four hundred years. At the beginning of the Archaic period, however, the Greeks began to trade with the Phoenicians, from whom they adapted a sixteen-letter alphabet to which they added seven vowel sounds. The earliest extant examples of the Greek alphabet date to about 740 b. c.e.

War and Weapons With its vast coastline, Greece was vulnerable to naval attack. As a result, various city-states that bordered the sea had substantial navies manned partly by citizens who were given land and money in return for their services and partly by mercenaries. Such was also true of the armies formed for the protection of individual city-states, the strongest of which was Sparta.

Sparta, being inland, had more need for foot soldiers and cavalry than for a strong navy. Its soldiers were armed mostly with spears, clubs, and bows and arrows. Many mercenaries came to Greece to fight for various city-states. They accounted for the first coinage of money in Greece, but the currency minted for them was in denominations too large to be ofmuch use to ordinary citizens. Within a short time, however, silver coins had become trading vehicles.

Although Athens is not renowned for its army or navy, it will be forever remembered for its victory at the Battle of Marathon in 490 b. c.e. Vastly outnumbered by a fierce contingent of Persian troops, the Athenians, aided by only a small contingent from Plataea, a nearby polis, scored an incredible victory. The Persians lost more than 6,400 men; the Athenians suffered 192 casualties.

Further Reading

Boardman, John. Early Greek Vase Painting, Eleventh-Sixth Centuries B. C. : A Handbook. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

Cartledge, Paul. The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization. New York: TV Books, 2000.

Coldstream, J. N. Geometric Greece, 900-700 B. C. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Durando, Furio. Ancient Greece: The Dawn of the Western World. New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1997.

Garland, Robert. Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Osborne, Robin. Archaic and Classical Greek Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Pomeroy, Sarah B., Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan, and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Sansson, David. Ancient Greek Civilization. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2004.

Shanks, Michael. Art and the Greek City State: An Interpretive Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

R. Baird Shuman

See also: Art and Architecture; Athens; Classical Greece; Coins; Daily Life and Customs; Delphi; Government and Law; Hellenistic Greece; Homer; Homeric Hymns; Inscriptions; Language and Dialects; Linear B; Literature; Lycurgus of Sparta; Magna Graecia; Marathon, Battle of; Military History of Athens; Mycenaean Greece; Mythology; Olympic Games; Oratory; Philosophy; Pre-Socratic Philosophers; Religion and Ritual; Settlements and Social Structure; Solon; Solon’s Code; Sports and Entertainment; Technology; Thera; Trade, Commerce, and Colonization; Warfare Before Alexander; Women’s Life; Writing Systems.