Apart from the vital improvement in our knowledge that the revival of literacy provides, a second great innovation is the spread of the city-state (polis) over large areas of Greece (Figure 9.1). This political structure was rapidly transported abroad through contemporary Greek colonial foundations around the
Mediterranean and Black Sea. Essentially it signifies a form of state dependent on a single urban center, normally with villages and farms surrounding the latter as rural satellites. The agricultural basis of city-states in general (although there are rare exceptions, where commerce (Corinth) or empire (Athens) formed an equally important economic support), shapes the city-state as an inseparable duo of town and an agricultural territory (chora) belonging to it. Indeed most polis-citizens were required to own farmland to justify their political rights, whilst the typical territorial scale allowed all citizens, whether residing in the town or permanently in the country, to move in or out of the urban center in rarely more than an hour’s journeytime on foot or donkey.
Politically, Classical Greece can be very broadly divided into two forms of state. In the first, mostly in the north, power remained with an elite or a king. These northern regions were dominated by a “tribal” or federal organization, the ethnos. The second form of state is found predominantly in the south and here state authority was vested in power-sharing between the middle (hoplite) class and an upper class, only rarely and discontinuously reaching down to the poorest free citizens. The Southern Mainland, and the Aegean and Ionian islands, thus adopted more egalitarian constitutions within a city-state organization. The transformation, so pregnant for European and later global history, from a common kind of elite politics
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John Bintliff. © 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Figure 9.1 Map of the distribution of city-states or poleis in Classical Greece. The remaining areas were organized in “ethne” (tribal or confederate states) and/or kingdoms.
A. Snodgrass, Archaic Greece. The Age of Experiment. London 1980, Figure 43 (after Kirsten 1956). Courtesy of Professor A. Snodgrass.
Found cross-culturally around the world, to a more unique experimentation with moderate democracy within Greece, took place essentially within the Archaic era (ca. 700-500 BC).
The ethnos and polis
The ethnos initially appears to be less a constructed civic community like the city-state, than a society resting on real or legendary kinship ties. Aristotle’s negative distinction between the superior polis and the less advanced ethnos was followed till recently by historians and archaeologists researching how societies like democratic Athens emerged out of the “Dark Age.” Nineteenth and twentieth-century cultural evolutionary theory predicted that Greek society should pass from a “tribal” model, with or without “chiefdoms,” toward “the state,” with ethnos frequently translated as “tribe.” Since ethne were often large regions (e. g., Thessaly or Boeotia), ethnographic evidence for tribal subdivisions of increasing geographical scale was successfully sought in ancient texts. Even Classical Athens possessed small-scale political and religious associations, the phratry andgenos, whose names implied real or fictional kinship or neighborhood groupings. The idea arose that in the Early Iron Age all of Greece existed in kin-based and neighborhood-based political formations, sometimes linked into regional tribes. In the context of early migrations, such ethnic populations could probably cooperate on a larger scale, when people from a particular tribe spread widely around the Aegean, yet kept their original Greek dialect and specific aspects of cult (such as the Ionians or the Dorians). Arguably, as Greek society, especially in the precociously advanced Southeastern Mainland and the Cyclades, recovered population and a complex culture, these traditional forms of organization were replaced by the city-state and civic society, although remnants of the old kin system were retained for specific organizational purposes by the new states.
Over recent decades, this narrative has been widely deconstructed (cf. Snodgrass 1980). However this leaves archaeologists new problems. If we no longer accept the idea of large tribes acting in self-conscious coordinated polities in the EIA, we need to account for the historic existence in Archaic-Classical times of regions with named “peoples,” some under kings, or forming confederacies. Even in the other world, of independent large and small city-states, we find occasional appeals to wider kinship affiliation (for political alliances), that are matched by the use of internal social divisions which are given an identical kinship terminology. Much light has been shed on these problems through the study of social anthropology and politics, notably by Hall (1997, 2004) who has applied such knowledge to questions of ethnicity and political organization in ancient Greece.
EIA Greece seems composed of a patchy dispersal of villages and rare small towns, organized around elite families, probably with much instability of power. Interactions within regions (due to intermarriage, migration, trade) probably account for the rise of large-scale patterns in ceramic styles during Geometric times (Snodgrass 1980), and, once literacy returns in early Archaic times, to regional variants in forms of the alphabet. In Early Modern Europe, farming villages and small agricultural town societies tend to practice exclusive identity politics (“campanilismo”) (Tak 1990), so the dominant EIA social group may well have been the nucleated community one lived within. However, as groups of villages came under the sway of emergent city-states, or dominant towns in ethnos regions, new identity requirements may have led to the naming of regions by a common identifier, probably taken from the dominant merger community, or some geographic or dialect label. Within these larger groupings older subdivisions may have persisted. Thus in the federal region of Boeotia (Central Greece) the “Boeotians” often act in war or religion together, but citizens preferred to be identified by their city of origin within the region. Hall (1997, 2004) and McInerney (1999: for the region of Phocis), argue that ethnic politics in Greece was creative and adaptive rather than reflecting an historical closed “race,” and responded to changing social and political configurations. Luraghi (2002) believes that the Messenian “people” in the Southwestern Peloponnese, dominated by Sparta during the Archaic-Classical era, were largely “fabricated” into being at the time of their later revolt against Sparta. Their origin was forged at the rebellion’s focus at the community of Messene. In conclusion, as local elites create larger political blocs from disparate local communities, appropriate new identities are formed, with suitable origin myths.
Current scholarship thus argues that the creation of regional federations and kingdoms, as well as the innumerable large, medium, and small city-states, found across Greece by early historic times (the seventh to sixth centuries BC or Archaic era), represents a political mosaic that is not due to inherent tendencies of character within “races” defined by Greek dialects, nor even by historical migration processes involving “peoples” (also marked by dialect distributions in historic times). The alternative scenario suggests that the final Bronze Age/earliest Iron Age disruptions initiated small and large population displacements as well as considerable population continuity at a reduced level of density. These were followed in the middle-late Geometric and early Archaic eras by the recrystallization of intercommunal political structures, ranging from “village-states” through territorial oligarchic states, to federations of towns or villages and finally to territorial kingdoms of towns and villages. Internal evolution is the central factor behind such emergent supra-family and supra-village communities, interacting however with external political and commercial contacts. It is further argued (Hall 2004, Tsetskhladze 2006) that the concept of a shared “Greek”
Solon’s Reforms: An Archaeological Perspective
In mid-Archaic times, a severe crisis afflicted Athens, an impoverishment to the point of enslavement of many poorer citizens. The issue was rights over agricultural land, and although the exact nature of peasant indebtedness to rich citizens is unclear, the latter apparently possessed cripplingly exploitative control over peasant livelihoods. Solon found the land itself “enslaved,” and his task was to “free” the land, rehabilitate peasant livelihoods, and release those sold into slavery from land-debt. However Solon clearly did not redistribute land in favor of the lower classes but probably gave them freehold rights to their existing plots. How did such indebtedness come about ca. 600 BC? Two major models are discussed by ancient historians:
1. Increasing population led to the poor being forced onto marginal land and a consequent dependency on the rich for economic help.
2. There had been a traditional dependency of the lower classes on the upper classes, dating back to the “Dark Age.”
There is certainly an accelerating rate of settlement infill of the Southern Greek polis homeland landscapes from EIA through LG into Archaic and then Classical times (Bintliff1997b). The issue here is the degree of pressure between population and available land by mid-Archaic times in the heartland of early demographic growth, which includes Athens and Attica.
Early Iron Age settlement in Southern Greece was low in density, nucleated, and typically consisted of small communities. Only in late Archaic times, the sixth century BC, but more especially in the Classical fifth to fourth centuries, will the Southern Greek landscape be filled in modular fashion by a complete network of villages and towns of comparable territorial scale. A further stage is very marked in intensive survey: the crea-(kome) territories of a dispersed settlement pattern of small farms and hamlets dependent on these nucleations. Yet Archaic farms and hamlets are rare and usually late in the period, compared to the explosion of Classical sites. Thus the database of landscape and urban surveys indicates an underpopulated Archaic countryside and cities yet to reach maximum size.
In contrast, Morris’s reinterpretation (1987) of burial customs for Athens and Attica and by implication for other early polis societies, implies a rigidly enforced social gulf between an upper dominant and lower subordinate class throughout the EIA. Morris highlights the local peculiarity in Attica and Athens, that the opening up of burial to the lower class during the eighth century BC is subsequently rejected in the seventh century, where the old symbolism of exclusivity reappears, and only in the late sixth century will the “democratization” of burial return and persist. This seems to agree with the timing of the Solonic class crisis. The central problem for this elite of EIA chiefs and “middle-class” farmers was not land shortage or control over international commerce, but labor to work their fields with them (for the numerous second-rank elite) and for them (for the chiefly families). We can argue that Morris’s upper class 33—50 percent of the population in Dark Age settlements used the labor of the lower class 67—50 percent to support them.
The Archaic crisis of Attic peasants, marked by their fluctuating burial rights, appears to have been solved by Classical times, but probably inaugurated an equally radical process of labor substitution for the other classes. The limits to production for ancient farmers were quite low (Foxhall 2003): cultivating a yeoman or hoplite farm of say 5—6 hectares (Burford 1993), as well as participating in political and military activity in the new polis center, normally required tied (tenant) or hired labor. Michael Jameson has argued that in Classical Attica agricultural slaves largely replaced tied labor for this essential role ( Jameson 1977-1978, 1992). In Classical Boeotia, in contrast, calculations (BmtlifF 1997a) suggest that the poorer half of the population could only have survived economically through working as paid labor on the estates of the middle and upper class (or as artisan and traders), leaving little scope for agricultural slavery, and not so surprising in a region where democracy was rarely in favor. In Classical city-states, whether fully democratic or run by the hoplite and noble class, the free lower class were a useful support force of lightly-armed troops (peltasts) or exceptionally (for Athens) this class manned the prime weapon of its Classical maritime empire, as warship rowers (the thetes). Unsurprisingly it is in Athens where this latter class achieves its greatest political freedoms. However in a considerable number of Archaic-Classical polis or ethnos regions, the support of the hoplite-elite class continued to rest on a large body of serfs; societies of this types could be found ranging geographically from Crete through the Peloponnese to Central Greece and Thessaly.
We might propose that in the EIA-Archaic era there were two forms of estate: the personal lands belonging to the middle and upper-class families, worked with the aid of the lower class and slaves, and the personal estates of lower-class peasants, which were subject to tenancy charges to the upper two classes. Crucially, this implies that the upper classes must have laid claim to all land taken into cultivation by the community, either by assuming direct, or indirect, rights to its surplus product. This model explains how peasant oppression remains in place, regardless of how intensely the countryside was being farmed. There was no land shortage at this point in Southern Greece, and colonization of the countryside was progressing at an increasing rate; but when peasants opened up new land, the upper classes assumed rights to its surplus, as well as to the labor of the peasants on their own expanding acreage.
Why did this long-established system come into crisis in Athens ca. 600 BC? Historians suggest that the pressure for reform came from the middle class, and the gains for the lower class were modest. Plausibly, large-scale overexploitation of peasants by some groups of the elite classes appeared to threaten the effectiveness of their labor, making it preferable in the long term to give them freehold over their own land plots and eventually convert their tied labor on others’ estates into free wage labor. In any case, political instability and limited rights for the lower class seem to continue through the sixth century in Attica, until Kleisthenes resolved their status more radically. Appropriately, as Morris shows, the changes in Attic burial norms closely reflect this.
We argued earlier that in the EIA the use of violence and armed men (van Wees 1998, 1999) enforced an unequal social structure, an alliance of the chiefs and the yeoman class keeping peasants in their place. Could peasants escape to live in free communities? Solon’s claim that he brought back families who had fled abroad to avoid debt may reflect such refugees. Studies of peasant history however underline the risks of abandoning one’s land to set up a new life far away, pressurizing peasants to choose security and past investment by remaining on tied farms. Just such risks however may have been taken, increasingly, by farmers in the Greek colonization movements of the eighth to sixth centuries BC, such as the poet Hesiod’s father, who left Western Anatolia to create a new independent farm in Central Greece.
Identity was weak until the Persian and Carthaginian Wars of the fifth century forged this in opposition to threatening civilizations.
In future city-state regions, the heartland for the rise of moderate democratic constitutions in some half of Classical Greece states, the tight control exercised over peasant clients by warrior elites loosened in Late Geometric times, with the relaxation of the ban on lower-class formal burial. In the following early Archaic period a military reform occurred in which the cavalry and individualized combat on foot, centering on the rich, yielded on the battlefield to massed ranks of heavily-armed foot soldiers drawn mostly from the middle-class “yeoman” peasantry (the hoplites). Significantly, Morris (1987) estimates that one half to two-thirds of the population had suffered burial exclusion in the EIA. In Classical city-state armies, around half was aristocrat and middle (hoplite) class and the other half was composed of lightly-armed poorer citizens. This implies that the EIA elite was a very broad social group, later to form the upper and middle class of Classical times, whilst the EIA serf class usually remained a less privileged class of free citizens even in Classical city-states (Athens excepted). Thus the rise of moderate democratic institutions in Archaic-Classical times primarily reflects a shift in power from the dominant upper elite families to lesser, client-elite families, rather than the rise of a suppressed serf class.
The hoplite “reform”
Iron Age warfare in Homer’s epics arguably portrays both contemporary (LG-early Archaic) fighting techniques and memories of Mycenaean practices. Nobles conduct personal combat with their peers in open skirmishes, utilizing chariots as “taxis” around the field of combat. There are bodies of support troops, but till recently these were dismissed as a second-quality mass whose success depended on the actions of their leaders. The contrast was drawn to the citizen armies of the mature Archaic polis, where the ranked formations of heavily-armed foot soldiers (hoplites) were decisive for any battle. This hoplite phalanx was predominantly composed of the middle-class citizenry rather than upper or lower class. Recent rethinking has nuanced this picture, arguing that IA-early Archaic aristocratic warriors were too small a group, so that successful warfare rested as much on the greater numbers of middling farmers, fit, healthy, and effectively armed from their own means or from equipment provided by their patrons (Raaflaub 1997). Ah this removes the lower-class peasantry, perhaps half the population, from a significant role in formal conflicts, apart from food support. This picture meshes well with Morris’s pre-polis cemeteries, where the lowest class is absent, whilst the middle class is celebrated with the elite in formal burial rites.
Snodgrass forges a convincing compromise position (1980, 1993) by reanalyzing Homeric accounts
Figure 9.2 Early scene of a hoplite phalanx piped into battle ca. 675 BC.
Chigi jug, detail of warriors, c. 640 BC. Rome, Museo di Villa Giulia. © 2011. Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali.
And scrutinizing the surviving bronze equipment of the Archaic period. Thus the open skirmishing in which elite individuals fronted their client soldiers, both groups in open formations, is reflected in limited heavy armor and helmets with easy vision to both sides as well as forwards. With the foundation of the polis it was the middle rather than the lower class which gained significant power-sharing with the traditional aristocracy, although legal rights were in theory open to all. The significance of this soon emerges in the appearance of a new military formation, a solid block of citizen-soldiers wedged together with spears to the fore like a hedgehog: the phalanx. The bulk of this army comes from the middle class, called the “hoplites” (from their heavy bronze and wood shields), with the aristocrats playing a minor role as support cavalry, or abandoning their horses and fighting on foot, anonymously, as hoplites. Often helmets reflect these new fighting conditions (Figure 9.2), with better side protection but a limited forward vision. A new heavier shield protected the left side of each warrior, the right being protected by the offensive weapons of spear and sword, but it also indicates limited mobility, as do metal greaves. The formation was key, not the individual, and once the phalanx was broken it was difficult to escape the subsequent rout. For Snodgrass the developing power of the middle-class citizens of the polis is still linked to a fundamental revolution in warfare, because it was precisely the military potential of the burgeoning hoplite class in LG-early Archaic times which challenged the traditional powerbase of the basileis. The threat of a coup from below, and/or the advantages of a hoplite phalanx in intercity warfare, were decisive considerations in persuading aristocrats to share power. The Archaic polis is defined less in terms of city walls (which are uncommon) but by its citizen-wall on the battlefield. As early as the end of the eighth century on Paros there has been claimed a possible communal military cemetery. Lower-class citizens could now act as light-armed support troops, but in Athens exceptionally, their decisive role as rowers in creating its maritime empire led to their achieving equal access to the other classes in holding all offices of the state during the Classical fifth century (Morris 2000).
The rise of tyrants in Archaic Greece
The emergence of the polis and the growing assertion of the middle classes not only leads to, or possibly is driven forward by, the hoplite reform in most city-states, but frequently to a further stage in which aristocratic domination of politics is confronted head-on. It seems that the pressure to broaden control of city-state decision-making, of the judicial process, and of rights to land, was being inadequately dealt with through partial concessions to the non-aristocratic classes. Two responses appear, sometimes both in the same city. Firstly, a dictator (tyrannos) may arise through manipulating the support of the competing factions, generally an opportunistic aristocrat. Alternatively the city may appoint an internal or external “lawgiver,” to resolve the bitter and often bloody disputes between the classes, through creating a formal constitution enshrining an improved balance of citizen rights. The most famous tyranny is the Peisistratid dynasty in Athens, ruling for almost half the sixth century. Like tyrannies in other Greek states Athens experienced some beneficial effects, through sponsored economic growth as well as encouragement to the arts, especially if it served as propaganda for the ruler. Athens had already prevented revolution in the early sixth century through the reforms of the lawgiver Solon (see preceding Text Box), but after the ousting of the last Peisistratid a second lawgiver was appointed, Kleisthenes. His remarkable constitutional reforms in 507 BC formed the basis for the inspirational Athenian democracy of Classical times.
World History
