by Oswyn Murray
Herodotus’ Athenian contemporaries scarcely understood the Ionian tradition within which he worked: they found his methods and his attitudes curiously old-fashioned. Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnions (lines 509–39) produced a brilliant and unfair parody of Herodotus’ conception of the causes of the Persian Wars; Thucydides’ whole methodology was based on a rejection of the techniques of Herodotus: he failed to see the nature of Herodotus’ achievement because he was writing a very different type of history – contemporary history.
Within the realm of observation Herodotus was faced with the same problem as modern ethnographers and anthropologists. We may describe alien cultures in terms of some model, whether it is a typological or ‘historical’ model, or a theory of the fundamental structure of all human societies; or we may less consciously describe a society in relation to our own. Herodotus attempted the latter, and his descriptions are often unbalanced by a search for comparisons and contrasts. He notices especially the similarities and the oppositions between Greeks and barbarians; he also (and here perhaps the entertainer is most apparent) has a keen eye for marvels and strange customs. Such an attitude can produce an unbalanced picture, as when he says ‘the Egyptians in most of their manners and customs exactly reverse the ordinary practices of mankind’ (Herodotus 2.35); but it is a less insidious fault than the imposition of a single conceptual scheme on the manifold variety of human societies. Herodotus remains not only the first practitioner of oral history, but also a model for a type of history whose importance is greater today than ever before.
Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, composed in Athens and in exile during and just after the war (432–04), contains a number of digressions on past history, which are mostly designed to correct or expose the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries; even when they show little sympathy for the problems of discovering about the past, they are written with care, using either rigorous argument or documentary evidence. In particular the first twenty-one chapters of book 1 are an attempt to demonstrate the type of historical generalization that can safely be made about the past; they represent a minimalist attitude to what can be known, and an implicit rejection of Herodotus’ attempt at more detailed history.
Thucydides pointed out many of the weaknesses of past history composed from oral tradition, but he failed to offer any serious alternative; it was his contemporaries who made the next major advance, by turning from general history to local history. A later critic described them:
These men made similar choices about the selection of their subjects, and their powers were not so very different from one another, some of them writing histories about the Greeks and some about the barbarians, and not linking all these to one another but dividing them according to peoples and cities, and writing about them separately, all keeping to one and the same aim: whatever oral traditions were preserved locally among peoples or cities, and whatever documents were stored in holy places or archives, to bring these to the common notice of everyone just as they were received, neither adding to them nor subtracting from them.
(Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Thucydides 5)
Whatever the aim of such writers, this is a somewhat favourable account of their actual achievement; still the discovery of local archives added a new dimension to the history of the past in at least one respect. The records surviving in local archives were primarily of chronological interest – lists of priests, victors at the games, and annual magistrates.
About the end of the fifth century the sophist and antiquarian lecturer Hippias of Elis published the Olympic victor list, which took chronology back to 776 in a four-year cycle: his system of Olympiad dating became standard for later historians. Another writer, Hellanikos of Lesbos, published a whole series of local histories in the late fifth century, whose character can be seen from two examples. The Priestesses of Hera at Argos was based on the records of the famous temple of Hera, which it apparently used to provide a general chronological framework for early Greek history: presumably the Argive records preserved not only the names of priestesses but also the length of office of each of them, and perhaps even some major historical events during their terms. Hellanikos’ other important work was a local history of Attica. It was almost certainly arranged round the list of annual magistrates going back to 683/2, of which a number of fragments on stone have been found in the Athenian agora. The fact that this complete list was publicly inscribed for the first time in the 420s, and not added to, suggests that it had probably been discovered by Hellanikos during his researches and brought by him to the attention of the Athenian people as an important historical document.
None of these works survive, but they were used by later authors, and in the case of Athens at least their characteristics are reasonably clear. They are marked by antiquarian interest in myth and origins, and by the importance they give to chronology; authors were often from priestly families (Kleidemos) or politicians (Androtion) or both (Philochoros). The influence of earlier local historians can be seen most clearly in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, a work which was discovered almost complete on a papyrus from Egypt in 1890. It is the only survivor of 158 constitutions of Greek states written by Aristotle and his pupils in the late fourth century, as part of his collection of evidence for the study of political science. The portion that survives is roughly eighty pages long, and consists of two sections, the first giving a constitutional history of Athens down to 404, the second describing the actual offices and working of the constitution at the time of writing. The historical part contains much material on political and institutional history, often distorted by later political prejudice; it must however be said that some of the political analyses are so crass and some of the documents so blatantly forged that many modern scholars have wanted to believe the work was compiled by a rather unintelligent pupil of Aristotle.
Later writers occasionally add information, which is of value only in so far as it derives from a trustworthy source. The most important of these authors are the Augustan geographer Strabo, Pausanias, the compiler of an antiquarian guide to Greece in the second century AD, and the essayist and biographer Plutarch (roughly AD 50–120), whose lives of Lykourgos, Solon and Themistokes reflect a late and imaginative tradition. Diodorus’ Historical Library (written in Rome before about 30 BC) preserves in its history of early Greece a précis of parts of the general history of the fourth century writer Ephoros, a rhetorical work largely derivative on Herodotus for this period.
The earliest inscriptions of more than a few words are in verse, but writing was quickly and widely used to record almost anything; for the period from the beginning of Greek writing down to the Persian Wars well over 5000 inscriptions are known, most of them of course very short. They are found in those types of material that can survive, bronze, lead, and especially pottery and stone; we should not forget the many documents that once existed on wood, parchment, wax tablets and papyrus. Some of the more important documents will be used as evidence later; these are mostly religious or commemorative (tombstones or dedications at shrines), or political (laws and treaties). The earliest surviving law is late seventh century, but the practice of putting up laws in public on stone or wood was common by the period of the Persian Wars.
The Mediterranean has been a hunting ground for European archaeologists for a century. The most useless site is the one which is still inhabited: Thebes, Chalcis, Greek Marseilles and early Syracuse are virtually unknown. The Athenian agora is only partly excavated because its true extent was miscalculated when the expropriations of owners by the government were carried out; more successful was the physical transplantation of the village of Delphi to a pleasanter and archaeologically barren site, against the wishes of the inhabitants and at French government expense (the French had won the right to excavate by removing the duty on Greek currants). Many sites in Asia Minor especially are disappointing because there was extensive rebuilding there in Hellenistic and Roman times: Delos and Cyrene are other examples. P
articularly fruitful are sites that have been abandoned or sparsely occupied, with or without violent destruction (for instance Smyrna, the shrine of Perachora on the Isthmus of Corinth, Paestum); but the sacking and rebuilding of a city can also preserve – the survival of late archaic art is due largely to the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480 and the Periklean rebuilding, which caused the temple sculptures of Peisistratid Athens to be buried in the new foundations soon after they were carved. Excavations have been conducted at most of the obvious sites, the centres of archaic culture – Sparta, Aegina, Olympia, Athens, Samos, the Argolid, the Sicilian colonies; some less obvious sites turn out to be particularly rewarding because of their position – for instance Al Mina in north Syria or Naucratis in Egypt. Fringe areas such as the Scythian royal tombs or Celtic Gaul often provide important evidence because of their different burial customs: the cemeteries and other sites of Etruria have yielded so much Greek pottery that the eighteenth century thought Greek vases were Etruscan (Josiah Wedgwood called his pottery factory Etruria); there are few Greek museums whose collections can rival those of the great Italian Etruscan museums.
In relating different sites to each other and archaeological evidence in general to other types of evidence, the primary need is for an adequate chronological framework. For archaic Greece this is provided by pottery. In contrast to other artefacts pottery is of comparatively little value even when decorated, breakable, and when broken both useless and indestructible; in early Greece, painted pottery was a major art form whose styles varied from city to city and changed continually, so that it is comparatively easy to work out a relative chronology within each style. The styles of many areas were not widely distributed; Laconian pottery for instance is virtually confined to Sparta and its colony Tarentum; the various east Greek potteries are often difficult to distinguish, and their places of origin and chronological relationships are not yet fully determined. Such local styles are of limited interest in recording the presence of Greeks from a particular area in a particular place. Two cities, however, successively captured a wider market for their pottery: it is these styles, found all over the Mediterranean, which provide a relative chronology for archaeological sites in general, which can then be tied to absolute dates through known fixed points. Thus the dates of foundation of the Sicilian colonies given by Thucydides fix the beginnings of the early proto-Corinthian style; the sack of Athens in 480 offers another fixed point at the end of the archaic age, and there are a number of such fixes in between.
The pottery of Corinth was the first to achieve widespread circulation, helped of course by the city’s position as the starting point of the route to the west. Contact with the near east and the import of textiles and metalwork brought various decorative motifs to Greek art, and especially an interest in the realistic portrayal of animal and vegetable life: this orientalizing style appears in Corinthian pottery first about 725, when the late Geometric style gives way to early proto-Corinthian. The invention of the Black Figure technique of painting came within a generation (middle proto-Corinthian, c. 700–650); in this the figures are painted in black silhouette and details are then engraved on the figures after firing.
Corinthian pottery was the only ware widely exported for about a century; in the sixth century it was superseded by Athenian. Attic Black Figure began under the influence of Corinth (610–550), but quickly won pre-eminence, and in its mature phase (c. 570–25) reached an artistic perfection which has made it famous ever since. By about 530 a new technique of painting had been invented in Athens, the Red Figure technique, in which it is the background which is painted black, and the details of the figures are drawn in by brush. So individual are the styles of the different Black Figure and Red Figure artists that the same methods can be applied to distinguishing their hands as have been applied to Renaissance and later painters: the work of Sir John Beazley has resulted in the more or less certain identification of the work of over a thousand artists, and their classification both chronologically and into schools. Quite apart from our knowledge of painted pottery as an art form, this has given a chronological precision unknown in any other area of archaeology.
In more general terms the contribution of archaeology to the study of early Greek history is enormously greater than for most periods of history. It has explained many aspects of the origins and growth of Greek culture, its interdependence and local variations, the external influences on it and the means by which they arrived. It has illuminated the patterns of trade and colonization, and the major advances in warfare which lie at the basis of Greek geographical expansion and the diffusion of political power to a widening circle. Archaeology of course has obvious limitations, in that it can only offer partial insight into the less material aspects of life – religion, politics, culture and ideas; but it is more important to point out the areas where it still has more to contribute. Archaeologists have tended to concentrate on change rather than on continuity, and to direct their attention to certain areas of culture whose relative importance is not obvious. Thus we still know more about town centres than about towns, and about towns than about the countryside, or about weapons than about agricultural implements, and much more about the dead than the living. Despite the fact that Greek archaeology has stood as a model for other periods for so long, much remains to be done; and what is done will illuminate especially those areas about which literary and epigraphic sources are comparatively silent. The light thrown on the Dark Age in the last generation is an outstanding example of what can be achieved; and recent developments in survey archaeology have begun to illuminate the history of the countryside.
III
The End of the Dark Age: the Aristocracy
ABOUT THE late eighth century, with Homer and Hesiod, literary evidence becomes available to supplement the fìndings of archaeology. But whereas Hesiod describes a real world contemporary with himself, it is obvious from the character of the Greek oral epic tradition that there are difficulties in using the Homeric poems for history. In some respects Homeric society is clearly an artificial literary creation. It is a natural tendency of all heroic epic to exaggerate the social status and behaviour of everyone involved, so that characters appear generally to belong to the highest social class and to possess great wealth and extraordinary abilities, in implicit contrast with the inequalities and squalor of the present age. Equally it is agreed that there are some minor elements in the Homeric poems from almost every period; the presence or absence of isolated phenomena cannot therefore be held to count for or against any particular date. This rule can be given a general negative extension, for the oral epic tradition consciously or unconsciously excludes whole areas of experience as irrelevant, or as known to be later than the heroic age: thus all signs of the coming of the Dorians and the Ionian migration are absent, as are many aspects of the poet’s own period. In general, omissions, however large, carry little weight for the argument.
Nevertheless I would argue that there is a historical basis to the society described in Homer, in the poet’s retrojection of the institutions of his own day. Archaeological evidence suggests this. Though the poems show a number of Mycenean survivals, the Linear B tablets have revealed a society wholly different from that portrayed in Homer; equally the scanty evidence from the early Dark Age is incompatible with the material culture of the Homeric poems. Only in the later Dark Age do the archaeological and literary evidence begin to coincide over a wide range of phenomena. To take examples which have been used in the controversy, the emphasis on Phoenicians as traders points most probably to a period between 900 and 700, as does the typical display of wealth through the Storage and giving away of bronze cauldrons and tripods. The architecture of the Homeric house fìnds its closest parallels in the same period. Homeric burials are by cremation which points away from the Mycenean inhumation to the later Dark Age and onwards, though the actual funerary rites owe much to poetic invention, which in turn affected contemporary practices. The earliest and most striking instances have been fou
nd at Salamis in Cyprus, whose rulers, in close contact with Euboea and possessed of great wealth as vassals of Assyria, were practising complicated ‘Homeric’ funeral rites from the second half of the eighth century. On the mainland offerings of almost the same date found inserted into Mycenean tombs suggest that epic had created a new interest in the heroic past which itself influenced the development of hero cult.