As has been seen, it was the island of Euboea, especially its two main cities, Eretria and Chalcis, which provided the impetus for early colonization. At the end of the eighth century, however, the relationship between the two cities broke down. The conflict seems to have centred on control of the rich Lelantine plain between their territories, and the war is known for this reason as the Lelantine War. Details of the war are very fragmentary, and like the Trojan War, it may even have been a later construct, but tradition tells how it drew in many cities of the Greek world. This may be a recognition that there were a number of festering disputes between cities and it took the Lelantine War to bring them into the open.
The war has been seen as a war of the old aristocratic Greece. The Euboeans had become involved in trade primarily to bolster their aristocratic elites and now the heroes from these fought out their battles. In a tone reminiscent of medieval chivalry, there was even an agreement (although only mentioned much later by the geographer Strabo) not to use ‘plebeian’ missiles such as arrows and javelins. A burial of a warrior hero at Eretria, dated to about 720 Bc, has the ashes of the dead man wrapped in a cloth and placed with jewellery in a bronze cauldron. Around it were swords and spearheads and even the bones of what appears to have been a sacrificed horse. This is an echo of the same rituals surrounding the burial of the Homeric hero Patroclus. The Iliad may draw as much on the experience of this war as on the folk memories of those of Mycenaean Greece.
The war probably ended in the exhaustion of both of the leading cities, and it appears that the influence they retained was now exercised in different spheres of the Mediterranean. Eretria may have become associated with the colonial enterprises of her allies Megara and Miletus in the Black Sea, while Chalcis was now linked to Corinth. It was, in fact, the city of Corinth that emerged as the leading city of Greece after the war. Al-Mina, the trading-post patronized by the Euboeans, was sacked at this time by the Assyrians, and the archaeological record shows that when it was rebuilt it was Corinthian, not Euboean, pottery that predominated.
Corinth was not an old foundation, despite enjoying fertile land and having the shelter of Acrocorinth, the massive fortress rock that dominates the city. In the eighth century it was still a cluster of villages, but it then expanded quickly. It has been suggested (though the evidence is weak) that Corinth gained control of the Isthmus during the Lelantine War, seizing land from Megara, one of Eretria’s allies. This would have given her both timber and pasture but, more significantly, control of the main route from east to west as well as the only land route from the Pelopon-nese to the north. The sea voyage around the Peloponnese with its rocky coast was dangerous, and many seafarers preferred to drag their ships and goods across the Isthmus (on a specially constructed road-way, the diolkos, parts of which still survive). Under the Bacchiadae, a ruling clan of perhaps 200 households, who intermarried only with each other, and who selected one of their number to hold office as the chief magistrate, theprytanis, for a year, the city enjoyed fifty important years of stability and was able to exploit its position to the full.
In contrast to the more traditional parts of Greece where craftsmen were still despised, the Bacchiadae welcomed them and used their talents. One major industry was shipbuilding, carried out, probably by foreigners, at workshops on the coast. It seems that prospective colonists could charter their ships from Corinth, but the Corinthians also pioneered faster and more efficient warships. Their pentekonters were narrow and undecked, with the keel beam prolonged and fitted with bronze so that they could ram opponents. With such ships the Corinthians could challenge any merchantman. As mentioned above, they also kept close contact with their colonies, and it is possible in the late seventh century to speak of a Corinthian empire.
The most pervasive sign of Corinth’s dominance is the city’s pottery. It flooded the Greek world in the seventh century and its styles are so well known that many
Sites can now be dated to within twenty-five or even ten years by the pottery found there. Most of it was in small domestic ware in the shape of perfume flasks (the perfume itself being another import from the east), jugs, and cups. Its decoration provides some of the best evidence for the spread of Oriental motifs. The city was far more responsive to the east than Athens was at this period, and, from about 725 bc, pots in the so-called Proto-Corinthian style are covered with animals, foliage, flowers, and rosettes. Human figures are less common, but one vase, the Chigi vase of about 650 bc, stands out for its magnificent representation of hoplites, armed foot soldiers, the new mass troops of the Greek world. Another innovation, from about the same date, is black-figure drawing, figures in black with details of their anatomy incised on them set against the natural buff background of the clay. It is a process that was probably learnt from eastern metalworkers and remained exclusive to Corinth until the Athenians adopted it a hundred years later (setting their black figures against an orange background). Corinthian dominance in the pottery world lasted into the sixth century when, for reasons not fully understood, it was supplanted by that of Athens (see further below, p. 191).
In the middle of the seventh century another part of the east became open to the Greeks. King Psammetichus (Psamtek) of Egypt, in the process of establishing the independence of his state from Assyria (p. 103), welcomed Greek mercenaries and later traders. For the Greeks the rich corn surplus of the Nile valley was the main attraction, but papyrus and linen were probably also a lure. In return the Greeks may have brought oil and wine, and silver, always rarer and more precious to the Egyptians than gold. The Greeks were given their own trading-post at Naucratis in the western Delta on a tributary of the Nile, and it appears to have been in operation by 620 bc. Soon Greeks were visiting Egypt not only as merchants but as awe-inspired tourists. The poetess Sappho’s brother came as a merchant. (He was reputed to have fallen in love with a pricey courtesan in Naucratis.) Egypt was seen as the fount of traditional wisdom, and some Greeks even mistakenly believed it to have been the origin of their own culture.
World History
