Early Greece

by Oswyn Murray

  He married second rich Themis (Custom), who bore the Hōrai (Norms), Eunomiē (Social Order), Dikē (Justice) and blessed Eirēnē (Peace).

  (Theogony 901ff)

  Or in modern terms, the relationship between divine order and human order produces the norms which establish good rule, justice and peace. A whole social ethic is expressed in terms of myth and personification, an ethic in Which justice and social order have replaced the self-regarding virtues of the Homeric nobility.

  The characteristic form of political organization of the Greeks was that of the polis or city-state, the small independent community, self-governing and usually confined to one city and its immediate countryside; Aristotle described man as ‘by nature an animal of the polis’ (Politics 1.1253a); the central theme of Greek history is the development of the city-state to become the dominant form of government in the Greek-speaking world for roughly a thousand years, enabling city dwellers to control directly all or much of their own government, and to feel a local loyalty to an extent which no modern society has achieved. It is a natural question to ask, when and how did the polis arise? Some features of the Homeric poems point to an earlier state; but as far as social and political organization are concerned, despite the importance of the genos and the oikos, Homer and Hesiod show that the polis already existed in all essential aspects by the end of the Dark Age. Homer takes the same view of human nature as Aristotle: the Cyclopes are utterly uncivilized, not only because they ignore the rules of guest-friendship; ‘they possess neither counsel-taking assemblies nor themistes, but dwell on the tops of high hills in hollow caves, and each one utters judgements for his children and wives, and they take no heed of one another’ (Odyssey 9.112ff). But though Homer recognized the existence of the polis, it was Hesiod who gave it the language of self-awareness. He stands at the beginning of Greek thought about politics, as about science and theology.

  The origins of the polis are one of the great themes of early Greek history, whose various aspects form the main subject of this book. The problem is best explored from two points of view. The first concerns the origins and development of Greek political institutions, the continuing process of change and reform towards a form of political rationality which seems unique in world history. A society with little or no previous history emerged from the Dark Age without social or religious constraints, and was able to create a sense of community based on justice and reason, perhaps because its institutions were primitive and its forms of leadership as yet insecure. The chieftains or big-men of the Homeric world developed into an aristocracy only slowly and in competition with more egalitarian forms of communal life, which ultimately proved superior because they were based on the citizen army. In this sense the polis is a conceptual entity, a specifìc type of political and social organisation.

  But the development of the polis is also a process of urbanisation, which can be traced in the physical remains. The physical characteristics of the polis in the late Dark Age are described by Nausicaa:

  Around our city is a high fortified wall; there is a fair harbour on either side of the city, and the entrance is narrow. Curved ships are drawn up on either side of the road, for every man has a slipway to himself; and there is their assembly place by the fine temple of Poseidon, laid with heavy paving sunk in the earth.

  (Odyssey 6.262ff)

  The walled city is common in Homer: similes and descriptions show cities being besieged and cities on fire; even the camp of the Achaean heroes before Troy is fitted out with the essential characteristics of a city: city wall, meeting place and religious altars.

  Smyrna was according to one tradition the city of Homer himself; it was destroyed about 600 BC by the Lydians, and excavations in a suburb of the modern city of Izmir have revealed one of the most impressive urban sites of the archaic age. The walled city on what was once a natural promontory with two harbours fits Nausicaa’s description well. The earliest evidence of Greek settlement there is around 1000 BC; it used to be thought that the first walls were constructed in the mid ninth century; and although archaeologists now doubt that date, they cannot be later than the early eighth century. Some time later the walls were remodelled, and by then the area within them was densely built, with four or fìve hundred houses of mud brick on stone foundations; the population is estimated at around two thousand, with perhaps half as many again living outside the walls. After destruction caused probably by earthquake around 700 Bc, the walls were rebuilt on a massive scale and the city was laid out on a regular plan; the archaeologist who excavated the site has described this redistribution of land and central planning as ‘the first certain and unambiguous apparition of the organized Hellenic polis’ (J. M. Cook); but it is clear in fact that community life and some form of community organization goes back to around 800 and the first walls.

  The same picture of increasing prosperity and the increasing complexity of social and political life emerges from other sites: walled cities must have been common by the eighth century. The earliest evidence of civic institutions apart from walls must be temple building, for the Gathering Place (agora), being empty, is hard to find without total excavation, and virtually impossible to date. The earliest temples come from the mid eighth century and by 700 they are appearing in most city centres; a clay model from the shrine of Hera at Argos shows their form – a megaron-type hall with porch virtually identical with the housing of the nobility, which is the prototype of the archaic and classic Greek temple.

  The growing importance of city life and city institutions is related to other changes already mentioned, the shift from animal husbandry to arable farming and the declining importance of the oikos as a social phenomenon; behind them all may He a major new factor: population growth. Absolute figures are unobtainable; and attempts to argue from the analysis of graves in the well-explored region of Attica have proved controversial. What is clear is that, whereas the number of datable graves per generation in Attica remained relatively Constant in the period 1000–800, between 800 and 700 they multiplied by a factor of six; if these statistics were taken to reflect the population reasonably accurately, they would reveal an increase in birthrate equal to that reached only occasionally and under optimum conditions in the history of man, of around 4% per annum. But the idea that within the period 800–750 the population of Attica may have quadrupled, and almost doubled again in the next fifty years, has met with strong resistance. It has been suggested that the number of graves reflects, not an increasing population but an increasing deathrate, due perhaps to water shortage, climatic change and plague: this theory seems implausible, since the period is in general one of increased prosperity throughout the Greek world. Alternatively it has been suggested that the figures for graves discovered are distorted by changes in burial customs and perhaps by the absence of whole social classes from the archaeological record; this has the advantage of being a hypothesis for which there can be no evidence. No theory has yet won wide acceptance; and it is unlikely that any explanation can do more than influence slightly the basic fact that the eighth century was a period of unprecedented population growth in Attica, and indeed throughout Greece: a half empty landscape was repeopled. Initially this must have led to a dramatic increase in prosperity and in urbanization, until the problems of overpopulation began to show themselves.

  The religion of the Greeks must always have lacked unity; for it was both polytheistic and localized: Indo-European elements from the Mycenean Greek and later invasions fused with native pre-Greek Cycladic elements and borrowings from Minoan and Anatolian cult, to create a complex of myths, rituals and beliefs about the gods without any clear unifying principles. What unity Greek religion possessed, carne late, as Herodotus claims:

  The origins of each of the gods, whether all of them had always existed, and their forms, were unknown to us until the day before yesterday, if I may say so. For I believe Hesiod and Homer to be about four hundred years before my time and no older. These are the men who created the theogony of the Greeks and ga
ve the gods their names, distributed their honours and spheres of operation, and described their forms; the poets who are claimed to be older than these men are in my opinion later.

  (Herodotus 2.53)

  The date Herodotus gives is perhaps a hundred years too early; but his count may well be based on generations of 40 instead of 30 years. More interesting is the claim that Greek religion began with Hesiod and Homer: even when actual ritual practices were at variance with this picture, it is clear that the epic tradition on the one hand, and the individual genius of Hesiod on the other, did influence permanently the development of Greek religion.

  For instance the dominance of myth over ritual is in marked contrast to other polytheistic religions, as is the comparative absence of more bizarre mythic elements. The consistent tendency to anthropomorphism and the organization of the world of the gods in terms of political and social relationships are characteristics which, if not epic in origin, derive their continuing impetus from epic. Such uniformity as Greek religion possesses derives to a large extent from the picture of the Olympian and subsidiary gods in Hesiod and Homer. On the other hand there is a whole area of the Greek religious experience, ignored by them and therefore by later literary sources, which was the focus for emotions strong enough to survive the silence of the epic poets: fertility cults, orgiastic rites, propitiation of the dead and hero cult. These aspects never found their systematic theologian, but remained powerful because they were rooted in a particular locality.

  Most of the central practices of Greek religion are as old as the later Dark Age. In Homer temples are mentioned, and on one occasion the cult statue housed there; altars for animal sacrifìces are common. Professional priests existed at certain shrines, but they stood outside the normal organization of society; it is a characteristic of early Greece that the nobility performed most civic religious rituals by virtue of themselves holding priesthoods (often hereditary), without the intervention of a professional priestly caste. The sacrifice was the occasion for a feast, at which (for reasons which obviously worried Hesiod: Theogony 535ff) the gods received the entrails and the worshippers the edible portions.

  Oracular shrines, from which by various means the enquirer might obtain advice about his future actions and their consequences, were already widely known: Homer mentions the shrine of Zeus at distant Dodona in Epirus and that of Apollo at Delphi. The interpretation of dreams was practised and the lot was also considered to reveal the will of the gods. The seer (mantis) was a valued member of the community: he knows ‘present and future and past’ (Iliad 1.70); though any unnatural or sudden natural phenomenon like lightning or thunder was material for his art, his primary means of discovering the right time for action was through watching the flight of birds according to fixed principles:

  You tell me to obey the long winged birds; but I do not care whether they fly on the right to the dawn and the sun, or on the left to shadowy darkness. I put my trust in the counsel of mighty Zeus, who rules all things mortal and immortal: one bird is best, to fight for the fatherland.

  (Iliad 12.237ff)

  The evidence of heroic epic is fragmentary and potentially misleading; but it can be related to the subsequent development of Greek society. It can also be supported from comparative material: all the institutions of the Homeric world outside those of the polis find many parallels in other societies. But the usefulness of comparative material is not only in the way that it reveals the presuppositions behind isolated phenomena and suggests interpretations of them. It is also the interrelations between the institutions which can best be understood through comparing societies with similar structures. For instance, the Waigal valley area of Nuristan (eastern Afghanistan) possesses a ‘society in which leaders have influence rather than authority and where an uncomplicated technology is used to meet the demands of a highly competitive ethos’. In this pastoral community, rank is sought and achieved through competitive feasts of merit, bridewealth and dowry are exchanged, disputes are settled by mediation through the elders. The objects of status are made by a separate and inferior class of craftsmen, and are even tripods, bowls and cups. The original warrior aims of killing Muslims in raids have had to be suspended; but the society exhibits the structural interrelation of many of the central aspects of early Greek society, and an ethic which is remarkably similar.

  Similarly the process of state formation has been studied in a number of traditional societies in Africa and Polynesia. The Homeric society fits well this picture of the development of more complex political structures from a low basis of material culture through the emergence of the ‘big-man’, whose power rests initially on his ability to persuade the community to follow him as leader, but who succeeds in institutionalising his status in warfare, the judgment of disputes, and through ritual hospitality. Such personalised leadership, being fluid and without stable support structures, can often lead forward into more complex forms of social organisation.

  The slow evolution of the Dark Age resulted in a world which might seem static and fixed in its aristocratic ideas. But the differences between nobility and people were not great in economic terms; the distinction rested on birth and consequent style of life. As the organs of the polis gained more signifìcance, the tension between the noble’s world of honour and the people’s world of justice became increasingly apparent; and the structural dissonance already present reacted with new factors to produce a century of change as swift and as fundamental as any in history.

  V

  Euboean Society and Trade

  AS CONSERVATIVE philosophers like Plato and Aristotle saw, one of the most powerful elements leading to change in early Greece was a natural one – the sea, offering a constant invitation to contact and to trade with other peoples. The Greek world created by the migrations of the Dark Age was already not so much a land as a sea unit, centred on the Aegean; local trade on a small scale existed from the eleventh century onwards, and a certain number of eastern artefacts or skills found their way into the area, by stages from Cyprus to Crete or Rhodes and on, or as a result of sea-raiding.

  Short-haul trading was never an activity of high social status; in a land famed for its seamanship, Odysseus is insulted by a Phaeacian nobleman: ‘you seem like one who travels with a well-benched ship, a master of sailors that are merchantmen, a man mindful of his cargo, watching his route and the gains he has snatched: you look no athlete’ (Odyssey 8.159ff). Hesiod’s instructions on seafaring (Works and Days 617–94) are mainly concerned with when and why not to go to sea: his gloomy view of trade is based on his father’s experience, and reflects the small profits and comparatively high risks involved in such Aegean trading.

  But this was not the only form of trade. Most attempts to assess the role of trade in the earliest period misunderstand it because they fail to distinguish between local and long distance trade; they assume a model of trade which is in fact only appropriate in the more developed economic conditions of the late archaic and classical periods, when bulk trade in commodities had developed. Because this was increasingly carried on by professional merchants, and because the quantity of trade earlier (and hence its strictly economic effect) must have been slight, there is a tendency to underestimate the importance of trade in early Greece both as a political factor and as a catalyst of social and cultural change.

  It was the aristocracy who must have given the initial impetus to wider exploration beyond the Aegean, by creating a demand for two commodities. The first was metals, and especially crude iron from which to manufacture their increasingly complex weapons and armour; the goddess Athene, visiting Ithaca in disguise, claims to be an aristocrat, ruler of the oar-loving Taphians, on a voyage carrying shining iron to Temesa in exchange for copper (Odyssey 1.180ff). The second requirement of an increasingly prosperous aristocracy was for the finished luxury goods which their competitive life style demanded and which were often beyond the skills of Greek craftsmen. It was in these two spheres that the high risks of long distance trade were offset by
high profits; and one area which could clearly supply both needs was the near east.

  The earliest Greek contacts were with the Canaanites of the Levantine coast, a people known to the Greeks as Phaenicians, probably because of their monopoly of the only colour-fast dye in antiquity, the purple (phoinix) extract from the murex shellfish. The coastal cities of Phoenicia controlled the great pine and cedar forests of the Lebanon, the chief source of timber for Egypt, as for King Solomon; they had long owed their prosperity to this and to their position as middlemen between Mesopotamia and Egypt. The collapse of Hittite and Egyptian power in the early Dark Age left them independent; and even after Assyrian expansion began in the ninth century, their position was little affected: the navies of Sidon, Tyre and Byblos controlled the south and eastern Mediterranean seaways for themselves or as Persian vassals until the conquests of Alexander the Great.

  Phoenician culture was urban: the cities were usually independent of each other, and built on heavily fortified coastal islands or headlands. Their art shows the typical characteristics of a trading civilization: eclecticism in forms and motifs from Mesopotamia and especially Egypt, mass production, and a concentration of craftsmanship on small easily transported objects in precious materials such as metal and ivory ; the textiles for which they were famous have not survived. Their prosperity is denounced by the Old Testament prophets; Ezekiel for instance in the sixth century describes the trade of Tyre in detail: