The first work to be written in prose rather than poetry is generally believed to be an astronomical treatise, now known only from fragments, composed by Anaximander of Miletus around the middle of the sixth century. The first complete prose work to have survived to the present, however, is Herodotus’ Histories, written more than a century later. In acclaiming Herodotus the “father of history,” Cicero (Laws 1.1.5) also admitted that his account contained many tales (fabulae) and this tendency was further impugned by writers such as Plutarch and Lucian. By the time of the Renaissance, the evidently fabulous quality of many of the descriptions and accounts included in the Histories failed to persuade the Tuscan scholar Francesco Petrarca of Herodotus’ credentials as a historian; indeed, the sixteenth-century Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives argued that he should more properly be regarded as the father of lies than as the father of history. Herodotus’ fortunes revived in the age of exploration when the opening up of the New World spawned travel accounts that seemed no less fabulous than those to be found in the Histories, but with the rise of “positivist” history in the nineteenth century, Herodotus’ qualities could hardly fail to suffer in comparison with Thucydides, considered to be the first truly “scientific” historian.
In recent decades Herodotus’ reputation has been rehabilitated as scholars have come to recognize that he was concerned with such fundamental historical considerations as source criticism (to the extent that this was possible) and causation. Nonetheless, although Herodotus’ work has frequently been mined for information concerning the Archaic period, it is important to remember that his principal aim was not to document the earlier history of Greece for its own sake but to record the great conflict between Greece and Persia in 480-479 and to explore the reasons why they fought one another. Chronologically distanced from the war he describes, let alone the events that had occurred previously, his intention in discussing earlier events and personalities is almost invariably dictated by the consequences that he believed these had for the origins and course of the great war and this makes the tests of contextual fit and intention-ality especially urgent.
Our only contemporary literary evidence for the Archaic period is almost exclusively poetic in character. Although largely anonymous epic narratives such as the Homeric Hymns or the Shield of Heracles have survived, the predominant literary expression in this period is what is generally dubbed “lyric poetry.” These poems share the characteristic that they were intended to be chanted or else accompanied by the lyre or double-pipe, but in other respects the category of lyric poetry embraces a wide diversity of types. Some poets (e. g. Alcman, Simonides, and Pindar) composed choral verses for religious and civic festivals and we can probably assume that the values expressed are broadly representative of wider social opinion. Others (e. g. Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Phocylides, and Xenophanes) composed solo songs, especially for the symposium or male drinking-party, and these inevitably exhibit more factional interests or personal viewpoints; the verses ascribed to Theognis of Megara purport to represent the last-ditch attempt of an embattled aristocrat to defend traditional values against the growing influence of the nouveaux riches. Poets such as Tyrtaeus of Sparta or Callinus of Ephesus composed exhortatory martial poetry while those such as Mimnermus of Colophon or Solon of Athens turned their hand to didactic poetry. The poems of Archilochus of Paros treat the popular lyric themes of love, sex, and inebriation but employ an ironic and satirical stance that was exploited further in the abusive and often obscene verses of Hipponax of Ephesus.
With the partial exception of Pindar, no complete works have survived from any of these lyric poets. All we have are fragments. These may be fragments in the literal sense - scraps of papyrus, normally preserved in the arid conditions of Egypt, on which Hellenistic or Roman scholars copied verses from earlier texts. More frequently, however, we employ the term “fragments” to denote citations in the works of later authors. Nearly all of the verses ascribed to Solon, for example, are quotations from the fourth-century Aristotelian Athenian Constitution, Plutarch’s Life of Solon, and the Anthology compiled by the fifth-century CE scholar Stobaeus. With fragments of now lost prose works it is sometimes difficult to determine whether a later author is citing his source verbatim or merely paraphrasing it, but the fact that poetry was written in meter and often in a rather distinctive literary dialect means that it is generally easy to identify where the quotation begins and ends.
Archaic poets score well on the test of temporal proximity and, given that their intention was seldom to provide for posterity the sort of information that the historian seeks, this testimony is potentially extremely valuable for documenting ideas, attitudes, and values among various sectors of society in the Archaic period. Unfortunately, the recent philological challenge to the “autobiographical” nature of lyric poetry and the suggestion that the verses ascribed to Archilochus or Theognis are more a cumulative synthesis of a city’s poetic traditions than the oeuvre of a single, historical individual (see p. 6) mean that it is hazardous to use them to date events. Take Tyrtaeus: one of his poems (fr. 4), preserved in the sixth chapter of Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, has often been taken to paraphrase some of the wording of the Great Rhetra. Since a Byzantine encyclopaedia known as the Suda dates Tyrtaeus to the thirty-fifth Olympiad (640-637), scholars have generally assumed that the Great Rhetra must therefore predate the midseventh century. But we cannot be entirely sure how the Suda derived its date for Tyrtaeus and if the poems traditionally attributed to Tyrtaeus were not, in fact, the work of a single individual but part of a continuous poetic tradition at Sparta, then we lose an important chronological indication for the adoption of the Spartan constitution. The anti-autobiographical viewpoint is, of course, only a hypothesis (though one that carries conviction in the case of Theognis), but until such time as the matter can be resolved to near satisfaction, the historian would be well advised to exercise caution in using the evidence of Archaic poets to date events with any precision.
It is in some senses surprising that our most complete poetic works from the Archaic period are also the earliest - the Iliad and the Odyssey, traditionally ascribed to Homer, and the Theogony and Works and Days, assigned to Hesiod. Although there is some debate as to whether each pair of works was really composed by the same author, there is general agreement that the Iliad precedes the Odyssey and that the Theogony precedes Works and Days. Most scholars also now believe that, save for the closing verses of the Theogony and perhaps the final section of the Works and Days, the internal artistic and literary unity of the four poems points to a single composer for each rather than a continuous poetic tradition (though the Homeric epics certainly employed motifs and narratives that had been circulating orally for centuries). What meets with less consensus is the relative dating of the Hesiodic poems vis-a-vis the Homeric epics and the absolute dates that should be assigned to each. Modern scholarship has generally favored the anteriority of the Homeric poems and stylistic analysis of the diction in the four works would appear to argue for the traditional sequence: Iliad, Odyssey, Theogony, Works and Days. But several ancient authors list Hesiod before Homer when citing the earliest Greek poets and it has recently been argued that several passages of the Iliad actually echo Hesiodic poetry rather than vice versa.
In terms of absolute dates, ancient authors provide varying estimates for when Homer and Hesiod lived: Herodotus (2.53.2) dates them to the later ninth century, Strabo (1.2.9) to the mid-seventh. For this reason scholars have turned to independent, external indications, though here too consensus has proved elusive. It was once thought that the appearance of mythical scenes known from Homer on pottery dating to the second half of the eighth century and the contemporary appearance of votive offerings at Late Bronze Age tombs betrayed an awakened interest in the mythical age, inspired by the dissemination of the Homeric epics. However, the pictorial scenes could represent mythical episodes that were independently followed by both artist and poet while the tomb offerings are probably to be connected with cults to anonymous ancestors rather than named, Homeric heroes. In fact, this is a tradition that seems to stretch back earlier: at Grotta, on the Cycladic island of Naxos, funerary enclosures were constructed towards the end of the tenth century within the ruins of an abandoned Late Bronze Age settlement, accompanied by evidence for ritual dining that continues into the eighth century. A late eighth-century East Greek kotyle, found in a grave at Pithecusae, carries a metrical inscription which seems at first sight to echo the Homeric description of Nestor’s drinking cup in the Iliad (11.632-37), though several scholars believe that the Pithecusae cup follows in an entirely different tradition.
For some, Odysseus’ wanderings reflect the great age of colonization in the last third of the eighth century, but others regard them as more indicative of a “protocolonial” phase dating to the late ninth century. Hesiod’s reference (Th. 490-500) to the sanctuary at Delphi could belong to any time after ca. 800 - the date from which cultic activity is first attested at the shrine. Descriptions in the Homeric epics of weaponry and battle tactics seem to presuppose the advent of hoplite warfare, which is normally dated to the first half of the seventh century (see pp. 167-73). Finally, it has been suggested that the Homeric description of Achilles’ shield (Il. 18.468-608) parallels early seventh-century Cypro-Phoenician metal vessels and that the premonition of the sack of Troy in the Iliad (12.17-32) consciously echoes accounts of the sack of Babylon at the hands of the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 689. For these reasons, there is a growing view among scholars that the Homeric and Hesiod poems date to the first half of the seventh century but no universal agreement has been reached and detailed chronological arguments based exclusively on the supposed dates of the poems are untenable.
In the case of the Homeric epics, problems are compounded by the fact that both the Iliad and the Odyssey purport to portray the distant world of a Heroic Age. Earlier assumptions that this world matched the Mycenaean palatial civilization of the sixteenth to thirteenth centuries were finally dispelled after the decipherment, in 1952, of Late Bronze Age documents (the so-called Linear B tablets) revealed a society that was structured and organized very differently from that depicted by Homer (see pp. 42-3). Moses Finley, the ancient historian who had already anticipated the implications of the decipherment of Linear B, believed that the society portrayed in the epics was, from the standpoint of sociological and anthropological analysis, coherent and consistent and to be dated to the Dark Age of the tenth and ninth centuries. He urged this date partly because the polis or city-state barely figures in the epics and partly because he believed that other features represented in the poems - for example, the emphasis on bronze tripods and cauldrons, the practice of cremation burial, and the apparent monopoly that Phoenicians exercise over trade - could hardly date as late as the eighth century. Yet tripods continued to be manufactured and dedicated in the eighth century, cremation remained in many areas an elite mode of funerary disposal even after the reintroduction of inhumation in the eighth century, and it is now no longer certain that the Phoenicians were traversing the seas so much earlier than the Greeks. As for the polis, there is some danger of a circular argument since many scholars have attempted to date its emergence on the basis of the Homeric epics. Neither poem has any intrinsic reason for being concerned with the polios: the Iliad focuses on the tenth year of an overseas military campaign waged in Asia Minor while the Odyssey is about the wanderings of an individual and the survival of his oikos or “household.” Yet, for all this, the polis does feature in the Odyssey and many have observed how, in the Iliad, both the city of Troy and the makeshift camp of the besieging Achaeans betray features normally associated with the polis.
Archaeologists have typically paid attention to objects or institutions mentioned by the epics that can be dated by independent means; observing that they belong to widely divergent periods, they assume that “Homeric society” is composite in nature - a sort of fantastic or utopian community that existed in no single place or point in time. More recently, however, historians have argued that the social structures and behavioral values portrayed in the Homeric epics are broadly consistent and that the apparent anachronisms or artificial elements identified by archaeologists are deliberately employed by the poet(s) as an archaizing “patina,” intended to provide epic distance from the here and now. Ultimately, they argue, the society depicted by Homer, for all its apparent remoteness in time, had to make sense to a contemporary audience much in the same way that science fiction seldom represents a world that is incomprehensible to a modern audience or readership (we are expected to identify with the values and ideals held by the crew of the Starship Enterprise). If so, the society that Homer portrays should match to some degree the historical conditions of the late eighth century. Again, however, caution is required.
Of the two poems ascribed to Hesiod, the Theogony is valuable for the conception it projects of the relationship between gods and mortals - particularly with regard to divine justice - and for what it reveals about Greek religious thought and practice in the early period (though it is a moot point whether Hesiod describes or prescribes conventional thinking in this regard). Of more interest to the social historian, however, is Works and Days - a poem that takes a supposed inheritance dispute between the author and his brother Perses as a starting-point for a discussion of moral behavior. Whether the poem should really be read autobiographically is the subject of dispute. One wonders how an individual who, in some senses, conforms to all the characteristics of a peasant society and continuously urges the necessity of labor to avoid falling below the breadline managed to find the time to compete in poetic contests (WD 650-9). One may also wonder whether Boeotian smallholders were typically imbued in the sort of oriental myths and aphorisms from Near Eastern wisdom literature that are so prevalent in the poem and it is for this reason that some scholars regard “Hesiod” as a poetic persona, adopted by the author of Works and Days for narrative purposes. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that the world depicted by the poet is the contemporary world - the moral and didactic purpose of the poem would make no sense otherwise - and for this reason, Works and Days can rightfully be regarded as one of the most significant literary documents for the historian of the Archaic Greek world.
World History
