In the long term, the European Iron Age sees interactions between the positive impact of iron technology and other advances in agriculture and craft, boosting population levels to new highs, and growing political, commercial, and cultural exchanges between its high cultures and civilizations (Bintliff 1984, 1997a). Complex societies develop in parallel in Greece, Anatolia, Italy, Spain, and Temperate Europe. For the medium term, cycles of several hundred years mark the rise and fall of such societies or their transformation into radically different forms: ecological failings, military expansion, and the unsustainability of particular political systems all play a role. Much of the South Aegean sees such a cycle between 600 and 200 BC. The typical fragile small polis can flourish in a large space free from overpowering empires for a limited time, before it either succumbs to such systems intruding from outside (surviving the Persian attempt, but not the Roman), or from empires arising out of meg-alopoleis or non-polis territorial states within the Aegean (Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and then Macedon in chronological order). The fate of Italian city-states between 1100 and 1600 AD follows a very similar path (Waley 1988). In the short term, the decisive intervention of a person or event can open up surprising opportunities: the defeat of the Persians, Themistocles’ ability to divert Athens’ silver from short-lived handouts to its citizens into a great fleet, and the supernova ability of Alexander to conquer enormous foreign lands and change the place of the Aegean in the Greek world for ever. How often events and their wider consequences might have turned out otherwise.
World History
