The Dark Age came to an end in 750 b. c.e., and the following period, from 750 to 500 b. c.e., was the Archaic Age. The year 750 b. c.e. is the traditional date assigned to the full introduction of an alphabet into Greece (see chapter 3), heralding a new, literate age. During this period, there were new trends in the display of elitism, the initial conglomeration of the Greek city-states, as well as the birth of the idea of "Greece." Finally, it is during this period that the Greeks began their colonization of the Mediterranean.
The word renaissance means "rebirth," and the eighth-century renaissance began, as the name implies, with a lot of new births. Judging from the number of settlements discovered in various eras, there was a radical increase in the number of settlements throughout Greece starting just before 800 b. c.e. In Attica, for example, the roughly seventeen sites known from the ninth century increase to more than fifty in the eighth century. There was a proportional increase in the number of graves in Athens, with the numbers rising from about 19 in the year 825 b. c.e., to 27 in the year 775, to 114 by the year 725. Similar statistics exist at other sites for which we have adequate data, such as the Argive Plain and Corinthia (Osborne 1996, 75-79), suggesting a general population increase. The cause of this increase is still in debate. The most likely reason is that as the Greek population settled down and returned to farming (after having engaged in piracy and mercenary fighting), a steady food supply led to better health and a more fertile population.
As the graves became more numerous, however, they also displayed less affluence. The high-quality grave goods that marked the status of previous grave occupants, as at Lefkandi, dwindled during this period to merely a few personal items, a piece of jewelry or an iron knife, maybe a bit of pottery. This was because, during the eighth century, there was a change of focus in conspicuous consumption—the resources originally spent on the grave were now spent on the sanctuary.
There was certainly a logic to this change. Expressing one's wealth through grave goods only works for a very short period of time: The remains of the dead are laid to rest with copious worldly goods, which are visible only during the funerary rituals. Although this might impress those at the funeral, once the dead are buried, the lavish display is over. By contrast, a sanctuary, especially one visited by people from all over Greece, serves as a continuous and more public display of affluence. Thus, the family wishing to flaunt its wealth for the longest period of time to the greatest number of people would have done well to redirect their "investment" from the graves of humans to the houses of gods.
Such large-scale "houses" became especially prominent starting in the eighth century b. c.e., when monumental architecture reemerged in Greece after the Dark Age. There is some evidence that certain cult places remained in use from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age, notably at Kato Symi in Crete and Amyclae in Laconia. But it was only with the eighth-century renaissance that the Greeks elaborately furnished their cult centers and used them as areas of public display.
This is especially evident at one of the earliest great sanctuaries, that of Olympia in the Peloponnese, the original site of the Olympic Games. This sanctuary, dedicated to Zeus and Hera starting in the tenth century b. c.e., served as a place of worship for the peoples of both Messenia and Arcadia during the eighth century. The votive offerings from the site say much about the people who convened there and serve as excellent evidence for class stratification already in this early phase of Greek history. The two most common types of offerings at Olympia were bronze tripods and bronze figurines of sheep, oxen, horses, and chariots.
The tripods were intended as prestige items, saying something about the resources and values of the Greek upper class. (A tripod was a cauldron on a three-legged stand, used for cooking.) Tripods were highly valued as heroic items in the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, as evidenced in this passage from the Iliad 23.700-705:
The son of Peleus straightaway set up the other prizes for the third contest,
Showing them to the Danaans. For strenuous wrestling:
For the victor a great tripod to stand over the fire,
The Achaeans valued it among themselves at twelve oxen.
For the man defeated he set a woman in their midst, well-skilled in handwork, they valued her at four oxen.
Tripods were also expensive to manufacture and to transport. At this early date, tripods must have been made in individual villages and brought by wagon to Olympia. The tripods were large, requiring several pounds of bronze to make, several pounds of wood and charcoal to work, and copious amounts of hay for the horses or oxen bringing the dedication to the sanctuary. As a result, the commissioning of a tripod was quite expensive, and everyone from the home village, everyone who saw the tripod at Olympia, and everyone who saw the transport between the village and sanctuary developed a deep appreciation for the resources of the dedicator (Morgan 1995, 24). Olympian tripods were the ancient Greek equivalent of driving a custom Rolls-Royce in public today.
The second type of votive, the bronze figurines, were used by the lower class of worshippers at the sanctuary. Evidence of small-scale bronze casting, and even botched votives, have come to light at the sanctuary from this early date, indicating that these votives were made, purchased, and dedicated right at the site. Thus, there was no similar investment of resources as involved in dedicating a tripod, nor an equivalent return of prestige. Nevertheless, the focus of these dedications—herd animals and horses—shows the dedicators' concerns with farming and with such "noble" pursuits as horse raising and chariot racing. In both cases, the votives not only served as physical tokens of a prayer to the deity, but also acted as testimonials to the dedicator's presence at the sanctuary, for which the travel alone deserved some recognition (Morgan 1995, 23).
Beyond the mere flaunting of wealth by a self-conscious elite, the rise of the great sanctuaries also said something about changes in the social organization of Greece. The display of wealth in a grave or tomb was predominantly a familial affair, with the individual family investing in the grave and the goods therein. There was no higher organizational power than the family. By contrast, the sanctuaries functioned on a suprafamilial level. With the large-scale structures evident at eighth-century sanctuaries like that of Apollo Daph-nephoros at Eretria and that of Hera at Samos—and the even larger sanctuaries and temples that rose in the later centuries of the Archaic Age—it becomes clear that the resources and consensus of larger political units were at work: in short, the early stirrings of the Greek city-states (Morgan 1995, 19). The sanctuaries served as some of the earliest unifying factors in ancient Greece, around which the various neighboring families could unify and rally.
There is debate concerning whether the rise of the sanctuaries gave birth to the cities or whether the cities used the sanctuaries as a means of self-unification. In either event, one of the most important developments of the Archaic Age was the rise of the polis (pl. poleis)—the city-state—which became the standard political unit of Greece until the rise of the Hellenistic kingdoms. A polis was a small, independent, self-governing community composed of a city and its surrounding countryside (Murray 1980, 63-64). The criteria for citizenship varied from polis to polis, but citizenship was usually given to all adult male landowners, who expressed their citizenship by meeting in some manner of assembly and by being both subjected to and protected by a common set of laws. Citizenship for women did not hold the same political prerogatives, although citizen women, like citizen men, were protected under the laws of the city. Both male and female citizens participated in the various city cults.
The generally accepted theory among scholars is that up until the population "explosion" of the eighth century, most Greeks lived in small villages, probably composed of only a few families (with some exceptions, of course, as at Lefkandi). With the low population, land was relatively abundant, communications and regulation within the village easy, and those living outside the village not yet entirely important. In short, minimal infrastructure or regulation was required to get by from day to day (Snodgrass 1980, ch. 1).
World History
