Our first historic sources around 700 BC in Southern Greece term the controlling elite the basileis (princes, lords). “Basileus” is a minor official in Mycenaean archives (pa2-si-re-eu). Plausibly, during the collapse of palace civilizations, regional kingship disappeared, and power fragmented into a myriad of district chiefdoms. The Lefkandi-type residence fits this hypothesis well, as does the survival of the term.
Based on class distinctions and class sizes in Classical times, the EIA restriction of formal burial to an elite of some third to a half of the Southern Greek population (in Archaic times dubbed the “good” or agathoi), would encompass an upper basileus class but also a sizeable middle class of “yeoman farmer” rank (later dubbed the hoplite class). This middling group presumably controlled its own resources, whilst available as military support for the dominance of the basileis over the remaining half to two-thirds of the population: a subservient peasant class (in Archaic times designated the “kakoi” or the “bad”), whose land and labor appear to be controlled by the upper and middle classes. The existence of such distinctions within the “buried” elite in the PG-MG centuries is shown in grave gifts. One of the richest, presumably genuine aristocratic, graves is a cremation burial of EG period ca. 850 BC from Athens, accompanied by gold, faience, and glass jewelry. Being female, this burial underlines the centrality of kinship and wealth inheritance in the close-knit elite clans of this era. Crielaard (1998) notes that the EIA upper-class graves in Greece and Cyprus are marked by weapons, drinking, and dining equipment including cauldrons and roasting-spits: “Eminent warriors and feasters” (p. 189).
For the EIA we have postulated a countryside with generally low populations and considerable uncultivated spaces, later to be filled and exploited (in some regions to crisis proportions), between Archaic and Early Hellenistic times (ca. 700—200 BC). In such landscapes land had low value and aspiring chieftains maintained power by controlling a more critical scarce resource: manpower. Arguably through a mutually beneficial alliance with the free middle class, basileis attached the lowest class of peasantry to their households. Chiefly power passed between families and this often encouraged continuity within settlement chambers, but perhaps equally commonly a change of elite might be signaled by a displacement of the seat of dynastic power, causing community migration around the thinly-settled countryside or even abroad.
How was the aristocratic grip on the working peasantry sustained? A popular model (Sherratt and Sherratt 1993) for such a comparatively undeveloped and fTag-mented society, not far from the expanding commercial power of the Levantine Phoenicians, would be a “coreperiphery system.” This model emphasizes the inflow of Eastern prestige goods for the Greek elite, in return for the latter supplying those raw materials and surplus foodstuffs that had been channeled into the local chieftain’s trading capital as tribute fTom his dependents. However, the model fails to account for how peasant dependency arises in the first place and is then maintained. Intriguingly, changing clothing fashions in figured vases from LG to earliest Classical times (ca. 800480 BC) indicate a stronger reason (van Wees 1998).
Although ceramics throughout the main part of the EIA avoid representing people (Lemos 2000), the situation changes dramatically in the eighth century BC “Renaissance” of the LG period (Hagg 1983), when in all aspects of life we see major positive changes toward a more populous, politically complex society in most parts of Greece, also artistically and architecturally experimental and ambitious. A striking series of large vases illustrate aristocratic life, with the addition of anachronistic details deriving from the popular legends of Troy and the Bronze Age heroic world (clearly to underline claims to heroic ancestry for the living elite) (Colour Plate 8.1). These large pots from Athens are also themselves power statements since they were placed above the graves of prominent individuals. Highly significant is the portrayal of the elite and their male retinue on these LG ceramics as armed at all times, with swords or spears.
The implication for the organization of EIA society is that force was law and a mere claim to preeminence was inadequate. Just as the chief, and the retinue he sustained (the middle class) through feasting and giftgiving, were always armed, ready to take on rival families or intruders from neighboring districts, so we could hypothesize that a similar threat of instant violence kept dependent peasantries in their place. The latter, through their labor and agricultural surpluses, were the essential foundation for the daily rations, banquets, gifts, and supply of metal which the elite superstructure required for its maintenance. The clashing clans of Romeo and Juliet’s Verona come to mind, but closer to its time the episode of “The Return of Odysseus” in Homer’s epic The Odyssey is a vivid illustration of the period’s ethos. When Homer produced the definitive version, perhaps around 700 BC, of a series of overlapping epic poems, which seem to have been growing in scale and detail from the Middle Bronze Age into Homer’s own time (the final Geometric-earliest Archaic era) (Sherratt 1990), much ofthe action is describing the poet’s own society. So in this instance: in Odysseus’ absence at Troy and then on his wanderings around the Mediterranean, a group of basileis insolently encamp in his palace on the island of Ithaka, hoping to marry the abandoned wife/widow, while squandering Odysseus’ resources. Odysseus and his son secretly remove weaponry and armor hanging in the dining-hall, doubtless placed for his own followers, then massacre the defenseless suitors.
The Late Geometric “Renaissance”
The restriction in artistic representation of the era 1100—800 BC, as we have just noted, changes dramatically with the “LG Renaissance.” An explosion of ornament occurs on decorated vessels in bronze and ceramic, whilst complex scenes in both media present the viewer with clear reminders of the correct social order. In the Kerameikos Cemetery, Athens (Color Plate 8.1), very large, highly-painted storage vessels (Dipylon vases) stood at elite graves over the cremation burial-pit, kraters for men, amphorae for women. Some tombs were mounded and had stone constructions around and within them. Cemetery studies suggest that cremation burial may have begun in the EIA as an elite fashion, but across the Geometric era a more general shift away from inhumation reflects emulation of this practice amongst the “middle-class” elite. It was not a Mycenaean custom, but to suit contemporary aristocratic associations Homer’s poems made it the custom of the “heroes” described in his tales of the Trojan War.
The funerary marker-vessels portray a “theater of power”: in the example illustrated the aristocratic deceased lies on a high bier atop a horse-drawn cart, whilst a great crowd of mourners processes round the pot’s profile (rows of war-chariots, lines of wailing men and women). It is likely that such public displays of prominent kin and large retinues occurred during elite funeral ceremonies, yet there are also conscious anachronisms. War-chariots and figure-of-eight shields are allusions to Homeric epics, half-remembered features of Late Bronze Age warfare, rather than contemporary realities. The eighth century is when the Homeric version of the epics finalized endless local versions of older tales. However, art until the later Archaic sixth century BC was still responding to wider, more varied heroic tales of the Iron Age and later Bronze Age (Snodgrass 1998).
The commissioners of these vases, by combining funeral scenes with pictorial references to the heroic life, expressed their belief in an afterlife where aristocratic death merged with the immortal community of legendary heroes, hence anachronism appears appropriate. This identification was reinforced by the probable development by the LG era, if not much earlier, of the elite feast or drinking party, later called the symposium (Murray in Hagg 1983, Morris 2000), where professional storytellers would perform the formulaic recitals of the epic tales, rehearsing the elite values to which references in art could be associated.
Indeed some believe that the erection of such power statements in contemporary cemeteries, commemorating prestigious public funerals, and the sudden burst of figurative scenes, are an elite response to a perceived threat to its dominance, due to the emergence of the city-state and the giving of new rights to non-elite males (such as the privilege of formal burial to the lower class) (Snodgrass 1980). Such art was then designed to remind onlookers that the city still belonged to its aristocratic families. Probably linked to display tomb-pots is the emergence in LG times of giant storage-vessels (pithoi) with elaborate decoration in relief (Ebbinghaus 2005), which would have been costly items. The conspicuous ornamentation combined with one’s possession of numerous such storage-vats would have emphasized agricultural wealth in an increasingly competitive society. The supposed chief’s house at Zagora had 16 pithos emplacements, mostly for vessels of this dimension.
The assertions of early historic elites that they were descended from royal families of the Mycenaean era are probably, with some exceptions, as unlikely as they were strongly emphasized by these local chiefly families. With much mobility around the landscape and the limited scope of district warrior-leaders, continuity of actual power and blood lines is rather implausible. But the aristocrats who were rather more reliant on a gang of armed followers and their own aggressiveness to claim power over a dependent peasantry, nonetheless were keen to bolster supposed ties to legendary Mycenaean heroes. Thus was born the later Classical Greek conception that there was no Dark Age, allowing the legendary Theseus to be both an early Mycenaean Athenian prince who destroyed the Cretan Minotaur (plausibly a memory of the Mycenaean takeover of the Minoan palace at Knossos ca. 1500 BC), and the founder ofa unified Attic state focused on Athens in the middle era of the Early Iron Age some 700 years later.
These claims to ancestral power by LG-Archaic period elites have been associated with the widespread re-consecration of Bronze Age monumental tombs as foci of“hero cults” during this era (Snodgrass 1980, 1988, Antonaccio 1994). This late manifestation is also interpreted as a specific response to the changing conditions of the period 800—500 BC. Population rise, internal colonization of the landscape, and growing competition between elite families led to the need for traditional elites to reassert their authority over a burgeoning class of middling citizens and the lower classes in the emergent city-states and towns. One way to convince people that your family was descended from Bronze Age heroes is to identify an elite burial of that era and commence to make offerings to one’s supposed ancestors in its precincts. It has recently been suggested however, that such “created” links to “local heroes” may also have been instituted by the emergent city-state communities themselves, as they built up their sense of regional identity through claimed ties to the legendary past of their territories. This is also evidenced by cities erecting shrines over Bronze Age palaces (Hall 1997).
Feasting, so central to Homeric aristocratic gatherings, seems to have been equally important to the warrior-elite society of the Dark Age, and we can suppose that large buildings such as the EIA Lefkandi or Emborio houses were already the focus of elite-controlled banqueting, as well as a repository of prestigious items obtained by the upper class through trade, gift exchange or dowry, to emphasize their relative wealth and status to their middle-class retinue and the dependent peasants who were their clients. Mazarakis-Ainian (1997) has argued that communal cult activity was primarily based in the chief’s house and under his supervision, a further source of power to reinforce armed might and stores of food and valuables, although we do have clear evidence of separate shrines and sacrificial places and the thesis is controversial (Dickinson 2006).
World History
