In time, Dreros was dignified with some public buildings and a plaza for meetings, but it was never anything like a ‘city’ in the modern urban sense, nor in terms of population. A place like Dreros probably never had more than a few hundred freemen, of whom perhaps one or two score counted locally as rich and aristocratic. Archaeologists have been drawn to the site mainly because it is relatively well preserved, thanks to its location up a rocky hillside in the mountainous interior of eastern Crete.
Clearing an ancient cistern here, archaeologists found an inscribed block of grey stone. It records a decision of the local body politic:
May God be kind [?]. The Polis has thus decided; when a man has been Kosmos, the same man shall not be Kosmos again for ten years. If he does act as Kosmos, whatever judgments he gives, he shall owe double, and he shall lose his rights to office, as long as he lives, and whatever he does as Kosmos shall be nothing. The swearers shall be the Kosmos and the Damioi, and the Twenty of the Polis.
This inscription uses writing in a different way from the literate poets of Archaic Greece. Here the words are in prose rather than in the rhythmic verses that transported listeners to a supernatural world. The plain and matter-of-fact register suits the here-and-now character of the inscription. This is a written law, one of the earliest to survive from the ancient Greeks.
The inscription shows that Dreros around 650 BC was a self-governing little commonwealth making its own rules. It had established regular arrangements for the peaceful settlement of disputes and appointed a public official, called the Kosmos, who sat as a judge for a fixed term. Some abuse of power could have prompted this law. Perhaps an aristocratic Kosmos had not handed over to a successor as he should have, but had hung on to judicial power.
The law would have aimed to deter such behaviour in future with threats of fines and disqualification from public office. The people of Dreros might have supported this law as a way of discouraging local aristocrats from getting above themselves. Aristocrats themselves might have welcomed it because it assured the orderly passing round of office, satisfying their political ambitions. Writing allowed this tiny republic to give a communal ruling an air of greater permanence and solemnity by publishing it – for anyone to read who could – on imperishable stone.
Warfare looms large in any history of ancient Greece. It is not by chance that the earliest ancient tradition about relations between the Archaic city-states is about going to war with each other. Greek writings record a great war fought long ago on the offshore island of Euboea. The earliest mention, helping to date this event, is an ancient quotation from a lost Greek poet of the seventh century BC. The quotation mentions aristocratic swordplay, not plebeian archery or slings, as ‘the warfare in which those spear-famed lords of Euboea are skilled’. Two centuries later, the Athenian historian Thucydides wrote of an earlier age: ‘All wars were fought individually between neighbours. The main exception was the war fought long ago between Chalcis and Eretria, when alliance with one side or the other split the rest of Greece.’ Here the ancient historian hints how smaller Greek states, ones comparable in size to Cretan Dreros, had little choice except to align themselves with one or other of the two powerful protagonists – a pattern which would repeat itself in Greek history. He implies that the cause of the war between Chalcidians and the neighbouring Eretrians was a dispute over land ownership. The local wars between neighbours that preceded this first ‘great war’ of the Greeks presumably were also disputes about land. Modern ideas about population rise and the territorial symbolism of tomb cults at the dawn of Archaic Greece, such as that of Helen and Menelaus at Sparta, fit with this picture of a mainly agricultural society under pressure, fighting over limited amounts of good farmland.
A Greek geographer writing around the time of the birth of Jesus gives more details about the aristocratic character of this war. In his researches he had read of a great gathering of poets at this same place, Chalcis, ‘to attend the funeral of Amphidamas. Now Amphidamas was a warrior who had given much trouble to the Eretrians, and had fallen in one of the battles for the possession of the Lelantine plain.’ This plain can still be visited. We met with the large island of Euboea – nowadays an hour’s journey from Athens – in the last chapter. This was an important area in early Greek history. Driving north from Eretria up the island’s long west coast for 19 miles or so, the visitor crosses a rich plain before arriving at today’s Chalkida. The blocks of flats and commercial buildings of this, the modern island’s largest town, sit on top of the remains of ancient Chalcis.
As for the plain, today it is covered with vineyards, olive trees, fields of corn and market gardens. No one seriously doubts that this was the ancient Lelantine plain. It would have been able to support a large population for ancient times, and was well worth fighting over.
The ancient writings hint at the style of fighting. There was hand-to-hand swordplay between warriors battling on foot. Mighty Amphidamas of Chalcis sounds like a noble champion from the world of Homer, receiving a magnificent funeral with games in his memory, like Patroclus. The impression given is that the two chief states of Euboea at the time of this war – sometime in the seventh century BC – were aristocratic. Lords fought to protect the community; in Homer at least, the locals gave these lords land and food in return.
In human history war has a well-known tendency to speed up innovation. A museum in Rome displays a painted ceramic pitcher made in the potteries of Corinth, a prosperous Greek state commanding the isthmus joining the Peloponnese to central Greece. Around 640 BC a painter there chose to show in exquisite detail the front files of two Greek armies about to collide. Each side fields rows of warriors marching in close formation to the tune of a piper. The warriors hold their large circular shields by putting the shield arm inside a grip held at the elbow. Each row of warriors presents a ‘wall’ of overlapping shields to the enemy.
Many historians – not all – believe that what is depicted here is a new style of fighting which grew up in Greek lands in the 600s BC. It would have gradually supplanted the older, aristocratic, style of individual heroics as exemplified by the war over the Lelantine plain. Its key novelty was the heavily armed infantryman, who came from a less exalted background than the likes of Amphidamas. By protecting the exposed right side of his neighbour with the left side of his shield, the new-style warrior expressed a solidarity with his fellows that could be a real life saver in combat. Men who fought in unison on the battlefield could also become a new, united voice in the body politic back home.
Social tensions certainly developed inside some Archaic Greek states, even if the best-documented instance might not have been typical. Born roughly when the Corinthian potter was perfecting his pitcher, an Athenian called Solon grew up to become both a statesman and a poet. In some verses of his that have survived as quotations in other ancient authors, Solon boasts of his success in mediating social unrest in the city – possibly when he was chief magistrate in 594/3 BC:
For I gave the common folk such privilege as is sufficient for them, neither taking away nor adding to their honour; and such as had power and were splendid in their riches, I provided that they too should not suffer undue wrong. Nay, I stood throwing a mighty shield over both sorts, and would have neither to prevail over the other unjustly.
Much later Athenians remembered Solon for land reform in a society so remote that they no longer understood what it was that he had achieved. They knew of a mysterious ‘shaking off of burdens’. This alleviated the distress of a no less enigmatic group, ‘those who have to pay a sixth part’. It may be that Solon abolished gifts by peasant farmers to local lords for protection, this practice having hardened in recent generations into a grinding tax of one-sixth of the year’s produce. Whatever the case exactly, with Solon we sense the importance – and prior rigidity – of property classes in Archaic Athens, and how their loosening might have fed into the gradual extension of some political rights down the social scale.
The internal poli
tics of the Archaic Greek states gave us another word, one destined for a long life. A Greek ‘tyrant’ (tyrannos) was an unconstitutional ruler. Some experts make the analogy with modern dictators. Ancient writers suggest that tyrants were common in Archaic Greece. Athens after Solon was ruled for half a century by one of these tyrants.
Typically of what passed for politics in Archaic Greece, this Athenian tyrant rose to power against a background of rivalries between noble magnates and their supporters. One of these ambitious lords, a war hero, was able to persuade the Athenian people to give him a personal bodyguard for his own protection. Pisistratus, as he was called, then used these men of the people to capture the Athenian Acropolis. He made this rocky outcrop his tyrannical seat, before being hounded into exile by his enemies, only to return for a second spell as tyrant.
As so often in history where powerful individuals are concerned, tyrants were larger-than-life figures to whom colourful stories got attached. In one ancient anecdote, Pisistratus and a political ally dressed up a particularly handsome and tall Athenian woman as the armoured goddess Athena. This impersonator of the deity then stood beside him in the chariot in which he drove back into Athens – as if his return to power had the goddess’s blessing: ‘. . . heralds ran before them, and when they came into town proclaimed as they were instructed: “Athenians, give a hearty welcome to Pisistratus, whom Athena herself honours above all men and is bringing back to her own acropolis.”’
Athena was the patron divinity of the Athenians and at this time, around 560 BC, her sanctuary on the Acropolis was already rich with monuments and offerings. The story sheds light on religious attitudes at the time. Pisistratus neither involved any religious authority at Athens in his plan nor thought that his action showed disrespect for the goddess. This was a society in which religious rites could be present at almost all aspects of public life. Yet the story also presents religious culture as something that political leaders could try to manipulate. Pisistratus could be pragmatic about religion, as an aspect of everyday life useful for helping Athenians adapt to the changing world around them.
Creative thinking, leading to innovation, was a hallmark of the society of the Archaic Greek states. A generation after the escapade of Pisistratus, a different kind of new thinking was producing spectacular results in another Greek city-state which, like Athens, was one of the thirty or so that were sizeable and important enough to count for something in the larger world. The later ancients remembered Archaic Samos for its engineering novelties. One of these was a great tunnel. Starting on either side of a mountain and meeting in the middle, workmen successfully dug an artificial underground passage over half a mile long in order to channel water from a spring down to the ancient settlement.
Sitting in a taverna on the East Aegean island of Samos in 2015, I chatted to the proprietor, a former engineer, about this ancient project. With more than a touch of local pride, he explained how the ancient Samians, working down from the summit, could have used water as a level so as to establish the two starting points. They would have gone on to dig bores into the mountain to make checks on the slope and straightness of the tunnel as it progressed. His point was that this was relatively simple engineering if you already knew how. The genius of the Samians was that this was a first. Someone had made it up.
A short drive from the modern town of Pythagoreio takes you to the remains of the chief shrine of the ancient Samians. For centuries locals and foreigners came here to worship the goddess Hera. Flattened by time and by later quarrying of the ancient masonry, the ruins conceal traces of another man-made wonder. In the foundations of Hera’s last temple its ancient builders reused stone column-drums from a predecessor on the same site. Because it was built on the marshy terrain which Greeks associated with the worship of Hera, this earlier temple, built around 575 to 550 BC, failed structurally soon after.
The visitor can still contemplate the crisp perfection of the horizontal fluting around one of these reused drums. This precision was achieved by machine engineering. A Samian architect had invented a lathe. In the workshop, this mechanism would have rotated the work-piece – a drum, say – while a sharp tool cut into its side. This new invention became an object of lasting wonder. According to a Roman author, clearly fascinated, the mechanism was so finely balanced that a child could turn a stone held on this lathe with his hand.
The earlier Samian temple collapsed because it was an ambitious experiment that had gone wrong. It was to be vast, with a footprint roughly the size of a football pitch. Each of its forest of 132 columns reached twice the height of a giraffe. To raise this structure, unparalleled for its time, Greek architects and masons had to find solutions to problems never encountered before. The novelty of the project turned the building site into a laboratory.
The earliest Greek philosophers lived close to Samos. In recent times the narrow channel between the island and Turkey has offered a short if precarious crossing into Europe for migrants. In the 500s BC, the coast of what we think of as western Turkey was home to the Greeks of Ionia. Their prosperous cities, especially one called Miletus, produced the earliest thinkers in the western tradition.
Of ancient Greek thought, the twentieth-century English philosopher Bertrand Russell had this to say:
They [the Greeks] invented mathematics and science and philosophy; they first wrote history as opposed to mere annals; they speculated freely about the nature of the world and the ends of life, without being bound in the fetters of any inherited orthodoxy. What occurred was so astonishing that, until very recent times, men were content to gape and talk mystically about the Greek genius.
Russell was charting the foundational place of the ancient Greeks in the history of western philosophy. He was also thinking about the long-term fruits of an initial turning away from seeing supernatural beings and forces as the explanation for all things. It is not straightforward today to make sense of these pioneering ideas by a handful of contemplative Greeks. A Dutch scholar has recently offered this translation of all that survives of the first written work of Greek philosophy:
Whence things have their origin
Thence also their destruction happens,
As is the order of things;
For they execute the sentence upon one another
– the condemnation for the crime –
In conformance with the ordinance of Time.
The author of this utterance, Anaximander, was a man of Miletus. In 546 BC he was in his mid-sixties. As to what Anaximander might have reasoned about the nature of the cosmos, Russell thought that here he was expressing ‘a conception of justice – of not overstepping eternally fixed bounds’. Another interesting question, almost as hard to answer, is why Anaximander and the other first philosophers launched their scientific and rationalistic speculations in the first place. Since older civilizations nearby had not taken this philosophical turn, experts have sought to pinpoint triggers in the culture and society of Archaic Greece.
The inscribed law from Dreros, or the reforms of Solon: these were not authoritarian measures, but ones that the mini-republics of Archaic Greece adopted after some kind of public debate. If speakers had to speak out in support of their proposals, they might also have had to work out arguments based on reason in the face of possible opposition, from fellow aristocrats, for instance.
The practical inventiveness of Archaic Greek architects and engineers might also have been a stimulus to thinking ‘outside the box’. Were philosophizing Milesians inspired by visits to the great building sites of the eastern Aegean? Among these early Greek thinkers, ‘pure’ and applied problem solving could go hand in hand, as in this story from Herodotus about how one of them engineered a river crossing for a king and his army:
Thales, who was in the encampment, made the river, which flowed on the left of the army, also flow on the right, in the following way. Starting from a point on the river upstream from the camp, he dug a deep semi-circular trench, so that the stream, turned from its ancient course, w
ould flow in the trench to the rear of the camp and, passing it, would issue into its former bed, with the result that as soon as the river was thus divided into two, both channels could be forded.
In Anaximander’s day another invention was taking hold of the Greek world. The British Museum displays examples of the first Greek coins. On one of them, a lump of precious metal the size of a thumbnail, reclines a fierce lion. This example was minted around 550 BC in Anaximander’s home city of Miletus. The Greek city-states of Ionia borrowed this invention from eastern neighbours, the Lydians, of whom more in the next chapter. Once they had done so, the Ionian cities seem to have moved rapidly to production of relatively small denominations in huge quantities, as if coins were already coming into everyday use.
The new coins required their users to commit to a belief in the coin as a measure of a value that was notional only – even if in those days the piece of metal from which the coin was made came closer to replicating the coin’s stated value than with today’s coins. The users of these first Greek coins would have had to recognize the difference between something ‘being’ (the coin) and something ‘seeming’ (its supposed value).
As a result, it has been suggested, the adoption of coin had an impact on the cognitive development of the early Greeks, since it required them to recognize a different kind of underlying reality, one that was abstract and invisible. This in turn influenced the unconscious of those first philosophers who groped for new explanations of the universe based on a single, invisible, principle.
Others have sought a link between the first Greek philosophizing and the nature of Archaic Greek religion. Greek religion was not a religion of the book. The ancient Greeks never believed that their misbehaving gods had laid down rules for the regulation of mortal behaviour. No divinity either had dictated, as might be said today, a ‘creationist’ account of natural origins. In fact, once people went beyond the myths, Greek religion did not have a great deal to say about the nature of the world. Their religious system left Greeks relatively free to speculate about life and the universe.
The Story of Greece and Rome Page 7