The reconstruction of the Archaic Greek world that has been offered in previous chapters might well strike the reader as fairly eventless. I have had occasion to cast doubt on the value of the traditions for both the Lelantine War and the First Sacred War. I have omitted mention of the Thessalian defeat at Keressos, near Boeotian Thespiae - an “event” that Plutarch dates at one point to before 571 (Cam. 19.4) and at another to “shortly before” the Persian War of 480-479 (Mor. 866f). There has been no account of the Phocians’ acts of resistance against Thessalian encroachments - be it the successful attempt to throw the Thessalian infantry into panic by painting themselves white with gypsum and launching a night attack, the laming of the Thessalian cavalry by luring it towards trenches filled with broken amphorae, or the solemn oath to immolate their women, children, and property on a giant pyre should they be defeated in battle (Herodotus 8.27-28; Plutarch, Mor. 244b-d). Nor have I attempted to reconstruct the tempestuous internal politics of Mytilene that are supposed to have ousted the Penthilid aristocracy and thrown up various autocrats such as Melankhros, Myrsilos, and Pittacus (Aristotle, Pol. 5.8.13; Strabo 13.2.3; Diogenes Laertius 1.4, 74), or the bitter civil war at Miletus between the Aei-nautai (eternal sailors) and Kheiromakhia (manual workers?), in which Paros is said to have adjudicated in favor of the former (Herodotus 5.28; Plutarch, Mor. 298c-d).
I do not mean to suggest that none of these events can possibly have occurred. Rather, the evidence for them is anything but secure. In some cases we are reliant on the testimony of authors who are writing much later (Keressos; Miletus). In others, we are patently at the mercy of propagandistic exaggeration and romanticized embellishment (Phocis). The case of Mytilene, instead, involves the rather haphazard assemblage of fragments that probably are approximately contemporary to the events they seem to describe but that are clearly partisan in intention and run the risk of being severely compromised if we choose not to read Alcaeus’ poetry autobiographically (p. 6). All are the products of evolving traditions whose primary purpose was not to preserve a faithful or disinterested record of the past, and attempts to strip away the accreted elements to expose some historical account of “what actually happened” are unrewarding, if not futile.
All is not lost, however. If the evidence at our disposable is not generally amenable to reconstructing an events-based narrative, it is at least possible to construct a more processual account focusing on spheres such as society, economics, and culture. Two developments within the study of this period of history have facilitated such an endeavor. The first is the increased willingness to incorporate the evidence of material culture. Settlement patterns, burial practices, votive behavior, and artifact style do not often have much to communicate about specific events - especially when detailed literary reflections on significant events are absent. They do, however, have plenty of information to offer us concerning more gradual and long-term processes such as shifting residence patterns, land use, social differentiation, and ethnic and social self-definition. The second is the marked readiness to look to disciplines in the social sciences - particularly anthropology - for possible models that might be compatible with the scant data we possess. This is not to say that we should force our data to comply with a model derived from an entirely different chronological or geographical context. The point is, rather, that the scarcity and uneven distribution of the evidence, together with the variability that exists between different types of evidence, can be configured in a number of ways, and comparative models are often useful in suggesting possible broader pictures that would not have been entirely self-evident were we to focus all of our attention on the few pieces of the jigsaw that survive. Admittedly, both of these developments were in large part responses to the particular exigencies that exist for this early period of Greek history but their application has been so successful that similar approaches are now beginning to be adopted in the study of the Classical and Hellenistic periods.
The story, then, that we can write for the Archaic period of Greek history will look rather different from that which can be told for, say, fifth-century Athens or first-century Rome but, for all its broad-brushed strokes and abstract realization, it is nevertheless a story. It is a story that, without seeking to deny the unsettled and introspective conditions of the Dark Age, nevertheless traces some important continuities from the preceding Late Bronze Age. Although it has become a virtual truism that the ancient Greek state differed from the modern nation state in the absence of any strong conception of place as opposed to community, we have instead found that spatial notions were intrinsic to political self-identification from the outset and were probably a legacy of Mycenaean administrative structures. If ancient authors chose to refer more often to the Corinthians (hoi Korinthioi) rather than Corinth (he Korinthos), it remains the fact that the former term is derived from the latter and not vice versa.
In physical terms, then, the origins of the polis lie further back in the Dark Age than has often been assumed. The evolution of a fully conscious political society, on the other hand, was a far more lengthy process. Archaeological evidence suggests that the communities that emerged from the Dark Age were not entirely egalitarian or acephalous but neither were they fully stratified. Collections of households were rather grouped together under the authority of more powerful chieftains, whose status and rank depended on maintaining a delicate balance of reciprocity with their followers. It makes no sense to talk about a “state” in any recognizable modern sense until we can track the emergence of a new class of elites - something that the evidence seems to suggest did not occur prior to the seventh century. There were not commensurably more leadership positions for the new elite than there had been under their chiefly predecessors and so the ruling class decided to share power through the principle of the rotation of office; such early laws as we are able to identify appear to have been designed to regulate such power-sharing among an aristocratic class. Those who were reluctant to relinquish their authority to their peers would go down in later historical tradition as tyrants, though there is little to suggest that their rule had an adverse effect on the long-term development of the polis and some indications that their appeal to the populace for support against aristocratic peers may have served as a catalyst for the emergence of a more politicized demos.
The rights and responsibilities of the non-elite members of society were also spelled out in this period - earlier perhaps at Sparta, rather later at Athens. It would, however, be a mistake to confuse the participation of the demos in elite-controlled government by consensus with a political egalitarianism. Previous scholars were right to draw attention to the close connection between political participation and the obligation to go to war on behalf of the polis. But, through the political offices for which he was eligible or from which he was barred and from his position in the hoplite phalanx, be it in the heavily armed front row or the more lightly armed rear, every citizen rehearsed on a regular basis and in full knowledge his position within a very hierarchically stratified society.
All this was to change from around the middle of the sixth century. The contours of the political community seem to have been defined largely by residence and the ownership of property; those who derived the maximum return from their landed property constituted the governing class and might, from time to time, invest some of their surplus in the procurement of merchandise from overseas - much, though not all of it, in the form of prestige goods designed to bolster the procurer’s status at home. Non-elite smallholders expected to derive more than simple subsistence from their plots of land but their involvement in market exchange was almost certainly modest. In the sixth century, however, a more professionalized, profit-driven commerce began to assume greater importance, facilitated by the introduction of coinage and the establishment of important trading posts in the Nile Delta, the western Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. While earlier, landed wealth had - at least in part - derived from status, there was now an increasing demand that the acquisition of wealth from other sources should be recognized with a concomitant status - the poetry attributed to Theognis is pervaded by the theme of the nouveaux riches and the threat that these presented to the traditional landed aristocracy. It is also towards the end of the sixth century that the demos - especially at Athens - grew cognizant of the potential role it had to play in the governance of the polis and began to question the aristocrats’ right to rule. The full realization of that potential did not take place until a few decades into the Classical period and was to some degree associated with a new ethnic self-conception of Greekness. To demarcate oneself from the “barbarian” was, in part, to seek to elide socioeconomic differences within Greek society. At Athens, however, the demonization of the barbarian also served to proscribe elite practices and thus represents an attempt, on the part of the demos, to usurp a Hellenic identity that had originally been created a century earlier by elite competitors at the great Panhellenic sanctuaries.
The reconstruction suggested here furnishes the Archaic period with a rather different “shape” than that under which it is normally conceived. In recent decades, there has been a virtual consensus that it was the eighth century - dubbed a “Renaissance” by some - that witnessed the epiphany of virtually everything that was significant about Archaic Greece and that the seventh and sixth centuries were primarily epochs of consolidation. Certainly, there are indications of greater settlement nucleation in the eighth century and the sharp rise in the quantity and variability of votive dedications in sanctuaries is nothing but distinctive. This is also the century in which the first overseas foundations are established in the west - though that is a process that continues well into the seventh century. In many other respects, however, the eighth century is not so significant a watershed - especially when viewed against the various gradual developments that were playing out across the whole period from ca. 1200 to 479. By contrast, the sixth century, far from being a century of consolidation, witnessed a number of significant innovations, including the introduction of coinage and escalation in long-distance commerce, a new monumentality in art and architecture, the provision of dedicated public buildings for administrative functions, the development of a circuit of “stephanitic” games, the emergence of Hellenic consciousness, and a more concrete definition of citizenship. But what justification is there, in the first place, for considering the Archaic period as a single chronological entity?
World History
