The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  We may assume that just as there was some distinction between the chiefs and the other armed men, there were distinctions between the fighting men and the rest of the community’s male population. But once again, in the absence of substantial surpluses, distinctions could not be reinforced by great material inequality. Just how porous social distinctions were in a given community no doubt varied from place to place. Very occasionally, an individual was given a spectacular funeral: The “Hero of Lefkandi” was buried in about 950 BCE in a cemetery on the island of Euboea with what appears to be a big part of his community’s stock of high-value goods and in a burial mound that required a great deal of labor. We remain in the dark as to why he was so finely treated after his death, but in any event this sort of large-scale community investment in commemorating an individual was evidently rare.10

  The survival of an EIA community required cooperation, and its price appears to be recognition by the chiefs of relatively high standing for at least some other local men. This was still a long way from citizenship, but it provided the background norms from which historically distinctive approaches to citizenship were later devised.

  The Greek Early Iron Age was neither static nor culturally homogeneous. In the generations after the great collapse, Greek material culture (pottery, weaponry, burial practices) changed over time and varied by region. Yet some elements of a shared culture extended across local communities: Regionally distinctive but recognizably Greek styles of pottery and distinctive ways of speaking the shared Greek language both distinguished and integrated networks of larger and smaller communities. By the eighth century, some more substantial towns were on their way to becoming poleis. Smaller settlements were being incorporated or subordinated by larger neighbors; social norms crystallized into more formal (if not yet written) rules; leadership positions were institutionalized as offices.

  MODELING THE EMERGENCE OF THE POLIS FRAMEWORK

  As the Dark Age lightened in the later ninth and eighth centuries BCE and the Greek world became relatively more prosperous, the basic framework of the decentralized ecology of citizen-centered city-states was set into place. But why did it happen that way? Viewed from of a neo-Hobbesian perspective or from the perspective of the other great civilizations of antiquity, post-Bronze Age Greek state formation might be characterized as lacking in adequately centralized authority. Why were Iron Age Greek rulers unable to create more centralized social orders that would be ripe for consolidation into a few larger states (on the model of the Bronze Age city-states of western Syria, or the Iron Age Phoenician city-states: ch. 3), or perhaps into an extensive imperial state (on the model of Carthage or Rome)? How can we explain the emergence and persistence of such a large number of small states within a single cultural zone? And why, in these many small states, was authority so often distributed among a relatively large body of citizens, rather than being concentrated within a narrow ruling elite? Why, historically, did Greece go so wrong, or so right—depending on whether the point of view is that of Hobbes, or of Aristotle (ch. 3)?

  The answer may be sought in a combination of distinctive geography, the nature of the EIA collapse, and the timing of the collapse. Geography certainly played its part. We have considered (ch. 5) the role played by the mountainous geography of Greece in inhibiting imperial consolidation on the Greek mainland, as well as in helping to protect Greece against the endemic threat of predation by steppe nomads. We have also seen (ch. 3) that city-state ecologies remained viable in other parts of the Mediterranean world of the first millennium BCE. But geography and the general viability of ancient city-state culture does not explain the sheer number of Greek states or the failure of elites in many of the emerging Greek states to gain a stable monopoly on political authority. The palace-based society of the Bronze Age shows that Greek geography was not political destiny: citizen-centered poleis were decidedly not the only option for ancient Greek communities.

  The collapse that terminated Bronze Age societies in western Asia was especially severe in Greece—severe enough to overthrow large-scale social order. The collapse eliminated the Bronze Age Greek palace economies, along with economic specializations and social relationships based on formalized and assymetrical exchanges between palace-based patrons and their clients. The collapse also lasted long enough to drown out positive memories of Bronze Age monarchy. The end of the organized Mycenaean kingdoms allowed for the development of new and highly localized social identities. The difficult conditions of the era fostered local interdependence along with relatively low levels of political and economic inequality: Everyone was poor, elite control was weak, and the threats of famine and piracy were endemic.

  Along with its severity, the timing of the collapse precluded the possibility of further consolidation of the Mycenaean world. The Mycenaean states seem to have been coalescing near the end of the Bronze Age, with Mycenae taking an increasingly prominent position. But Bronze Age Greece never coalesced into anything resembling a unitary imperial state, or even into a few large states. Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, there was, therefore, no deep imperial ideology available for would-be rulers to draw upon during the recovery era. Had the Mycenaeans counterfactually enjoyed another few centuries in which to fight their way toward consolidating the palace-states into an empire, with an ideology to match, the postcollapse Greek social order might have looked quite different.11

  The timing of the collapse coincided with two technological innovations with huge social implications. The most obvious was the increasingly widespread use of iron across western Asia and the Mediterranean. Known, but very rarely used before the mid-eleventh century BCE, iron became increasingly common over the next several centuries. The influential Cambridge archaeologist Antony Snodgrass very plausibly argues that the shredding of the Bronze Age trade routes after the collapse led to a severe scarcity of bronze in the eastern Mediterranean world. As a consequence, ironsmiths—first on Cyprus, but soon thereafter in Aegean Greece—were motivated to improve iron technology. Iron ore was readily mined at a number of locations across the Mediterranean, and so, once they had proved their capacity to produce good tools, the smiths had no lack of raw material with which to work their craft. One unanticipated result of the collapse was, therefore, the increasingly ready availability of superior tools.12

  Whereas bronze—an alloy of copper and tin, neither of which was mined in core Greece—was costly, iron was cheap. Moreover, as iron-working technology improved, iron implements were increasingly effective. Iron weapons were, therefore, both deadly and inexpensive. In the Bronze Age, expensive bronze weaponry had been the monopoly of a warrior elite. In the Iron Age, given the right social will on the part of the community’s leaders, it was relatively easy for many local men to be outfitted with the basic infantry equipment of iron-tipped spear, wooden shield, and headgear—the equipment that was eventually elaborated and canonized as the “hoplite panoply.” The ready availability of iron thus made it more difficult for Iron Age elites to monopolize the potential for organized violence.

  A second technological innovation, developed in western Asia during the Early Iron Age and adopted by the Greeks, was the alphabet. Like iron weapons, alphabetic writing had potential egalitarian implications: Once the Greeks had a renewed social need for writing, the availability of alphabetic technology meant that basic literacy could be attained by ordinary people—quite unlike the complex Linear B syllabary writing systems employed by specialized palace scribes of the Bronze Age. Since the severity of the collapse had ended the occupation of scribe, and with it Linear B literacy, there was no “path dependency or legacy system” problem to overcome, that is, no body of people with a vested interest in resisting adoption of the new writing technology because of their investment in the old one.

  The severity, duration, and timing of the EIA collapse in Greece, along with Greek geography, conspired to blaze a distinctive variant on a relatively familiar city-state path to state formation, a strongly citizen-centered path that
led toward the political and economic developments that are the subject of this book (see figure 5.1). It is not possible, given the state of our evidence, to trace in detail the actual emergence of a marketlike ecology of a great many citizen-centered states in various parts of the Greek world over the half-millennium ca. 1000 to ca. 500 BCE. But the emergence of the framework can be modeled in ways that are consistent with the evidence that we do have—for example, the histories of the major poleis that are discussed in this and the next chapter. The following scenario is hypothetical. But it conforms to the known evidence, presented in subsequent chapters of this book, and I believe that it captures the main lines of early Greek historical development.

  In the first part of the Early Iron Age, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse, Greek communities were relatively egalitarian.13 But beginning in the later EIA, local elites in certain Greek communities sought to increase their social distance from other local adult males and thereby to establish themselves as an exclusive and closed order of rulers and warriors. Other Greek communities, however, rejected the claims of local elites to special status, choosing to retain, reinstate, or even to strengthen egalitarian norms that had arisen after the fall of the Bronze Age palaces. These more citizen-centered regimes were stabilized when rules (in the form of social norms) were adopted that allowed citizens to coordinate their actions against violators (see ch. 7, on tyrants). Coordination was achieved when citizens used their common knowledge of the rules as bright-line trigger points for precipitating action and as focal points for mobilizing collective action. In some places, certain of these norms were codified as early forms of formal law.14

  Meanwhile, intercommunity armed conflicts constantly erupted over disputes concerning control of border territories, stock raiding, and so on. The victor in any given battle might be determined by a number of factors, including charismatic leadership, superior planning, and luck. But states that were able to mobilize more men with higher morale had an advantage over their rivals. Because iron technology had lowered the cost of weaponry, it was social choice rather than economic constraint that determined how many of a community’s men could be mobilized. I assume that, under these conditions, higher mobilization rates and superior morale were positively correlated with citizen-centered institutions and negatively correlated with the rule of small and exclusive bodies of elites. Over a long period of time, there were many conflicts fought over by many local communities. Assuming that innovations in equipment and tactics (notably the weapons and tactics typical of hoplite heavy infantry) were quickly disseminated and that other success factors tended to wash out, a quasi-Darwinian process of selection would therefore have favored the more citizen-centered states. Citizen-centric politics was, under these conditions, adaptive.15

  Some intercommunity conflicts would result in larger communities absorbing local neighbors (in the process the Greeks called sunoikismos—“coming to dwell together”). But local territorial expansion was limited by the very norms of citizenship that gave citizen-centered regimes an adaptive advantage over regimes dominated by narrow elites. Because (by hypothesis) citizen-centered poleis had beaten the most dangerous of their elite-dominated neighbors by the time that citizen norms were sufficiently advanced to inhibit further growth in polis size, the scaling advantage that might have accrued to centralized, elite-dominated regimes was preempted. The result was a marketlike ecology of citizen-centered states.

  Athens and Sparta were among these emerging city-states. The villages and smaller towns of the culture zone of Attica were, in the eighth century, mostly located along the coasts. But they increasingly looked to the larger town of Athens as a center of trade, cult, and political authority. In later generations, this process of unification and pacification of the Attic countryside would be mythologized as the work of an order-bringing hero-king named Theseus, but there is no historical evidence for strong monarchical authority in early Athens. Meanwhile, a similar process was under way in Laconia, where the Spartans, the residents of a cluster of villages near the Eurotas River, were exerting greater authority over nearby settlements and claiming the region of Laconia as their own.16

  AGE OF EXPANSION

  Historians of ancient Greece generally refer to the era that followed the Early Iron Age as the Archaic period. The historian Chester Starr more evocatively dubbed it the Greek Age of Expansion. In the eighth century BCE, the low ceiling that had kept Greece below the demographic and material level of the Bronze Age seems suddenly to have lifted. Farmers across the Mediterranean climate zone may have benefited by the ending of an unusually dry period and a return to the somewhat wetter and cooler weather that had been the norm since the middle Holocene. Greek growth was certainly pushed by the revival of trade with the advanced civilizations to the east and south.17

  By the eighth century, Greece was growing rapidly; there were more people and more wealth. Higher quality luxury goods were, once again, being produced by Greek artisans. Athenian potters were, for example, now capable of turning out huge vases, beautifully decorated in the Geometric style and used in elaborate funerary rites by prominent families with enough surplus wealth to expend some part of it for dramatic public display. Literacy returned to Greece, after the alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians—the dynamic, trade-oriented city-state culture centered in what is now Lebanon. The Greeks modified the Phoenician alphabet by adding vowels; the Greeks’ writing system would eventually be adopted and adapted to a wide variety of purposes by Etruscans, Romans—and us. Unlike the Bronze Age, when literate scribes used an arcane writing system to keep palace accounts, the new alphabet-based Greek literacy was used widely by creative writers and political innovators: by poets, lawmakers, and later by historians, philosophers, scientists, traders, and many others.

  The Age of Expansion was powered, in the first instance, by demographic growth. Yet the growth of the population of Greece was not yet matched by a comparable broadening and deepening of economic specializations—most Greeks continued to focus their efforts on pastoralism or diversified subsistence agriculture. More people therefore required more land to be brought under cultivation. In some parts of the Greek world, as populations approached Bronze Age peaks, local territories soon reached and then threatened to exceed their carrying capacity. As emergent poleis contested control of productive agricultural land with neighboring poleis, the organizational demands of war contributed powerfully to the processes of state formation. According to later traditions, the first great war of the Greek world, the war over control of the fertile Lelantine Plain in central Eubeoa, was fought in the eighth century BCE between coalitions led by Chalkis (i365), and Eretria (i370), two poleis that were in the forefront of the early post-Dark Age breakout.18

  A burgeoning population led to increased Malthusian pressure in the most developed parts of the Greek world, pressure that could not readily be alleviated within the nascent institutional and economic structures of the early city-states. The short-term solution, anticipating the response to Greek demographic conditions in the late nineteenth century CE, was emigration: The choice to assume the risks of moving abroad was made more reasonable by limited opportunities at home. The result, beginning in the mid-eighth century BCE and continuing for the next 200 years, was a wave of colonization that expanded the world of the Greek city-states into Sicily, Italy, North Africa, and later around the Black Sea (map 3). The colonization movement, initially led by men from Chalkis, Eretria, and a handful of other relatively advanced poleis in central Greece and western Anatolia, was eventually joined by residents of many other poleis. The impetus to form a new colony may often have come from individual social and economic entrepreneurs, rather than a formal decision by a single state’s government. But at least some early colonies in the western Mediterranean, and then around the Black Sea, were strongly identified with a specific “mother city.” State involvement at some level seems likely.19

  Greek colonies were founded at sites well suited for trade (Pithekouss
ai: i65), or agriculture (Metapontum: i61), or both (Syracuse). Although the numbers of colonists must initially have been modest, the long-term effect of Greek colonization on populations in the western Mediterranean was profound, both culturally and genetically. While initially driven by growing Malthusian pressure as a result of rapid population growth in a society with a relatively low level of economic specialization, one of the striking knock-on effects of colonization was increased economic specialization. The new colonies soon proved to enjoy some striking advantages relative to their mother cities—for example, ready access to new markets (with the establishment of Massalia in the early sixth century, the ancestors of the French first learned to drink wine) and climates better adapted to the large-scale production of grain—spectacularly so at Metapontum in south Italy, which was probably already exporting grain by the end of the eighth century.20

  MAP 3 Expansion of the Greek world, 800–300 BCE.

  Meanwhile, the homeland retained some advantages relative to the new colonies: initially in production of olive oil—under ancient conditions of cultivation, olive trees take at least a human generation to begin producing olives in harvestable quantities—and later in terms of cult and culture, notably the major interstate festivals at Olympia and Delphi. Differential relative advantages stimulated exchange and rewarded deeper specialization and wider networks of exchange. As the Greek world grew, the Greeks further intensified their contacts with the great civilizations of Egypt and western Asia. Technologies and artistic styles innovated by advanced societies outside the Greek world were quickly incorporated into rapidly developing Greek manufacturies of pottery, stonework, leather, textiles, and metallurgy. Some new crops and agricultural techniques were adopted and adapted to the Greek milieu.21