The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  Nevertheless, what really attaches us to Greek thought is science, reason and our own intellectual pride. Our passions and illusions do the rest. Surely the place that ‘the Greek miracle’ holds in our modern western world results from the need of every civilization or human group to choose its origins, to invent forefathers of whom it can be proud. Belief in this ancestry has become a virtual necessity.

  I Greece: a land of city-states

  The first embodiment of Greece to be considered takes us from the archaic period (eighth to sixth centuries BC) to the classical period (fifth to fourth) – in other words the age of the extraordinary flowering of the Greek city-states. Unique though it was, this age is not without analogies, in particular with the Italian cities of the Renaissance. Like them, the Greek cities were self-governing: archaic and classical Greece was divided up into many political units of small dimensions.

  Wherever it took place, the appearance of such autonomous urban centres is only conceivable in the absence of large-scale territorial states, which always have gargantuan appetites for conquest. The Italian cities in their prime in the fourteenth century ad would have been unimaginable without the great recessions of the Middle Ages, which dealt a mortal blow to those two political giants, the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy as operated by Innocent III. It ismy belief that the ancient Greek cities would not have seen the light of day if it had not been for the recession of the twelfth century BC . They grew up during the dark ages following the Dorian invasion, since what had collapsed with the end of Mycenaean civilization was the palace-centred state, with its mighty rulers and their all-powerful scribes, a greedy state as so many others were in the second millennium BC.

  But these cities which grew up after the storm remained fragile constructs, unprotected against possible threats from the ogre. The ogre for the cities of the Italian Renaissance (although the image does not fit terribly well at first sight) took the form of the little French king Charles VIII when he crossed the Alps in September 1494. For the Greek cities, nemesis might have taken the form of the Persian Empire under the Achaemenids, on whom the sun took a long time to set: it had the requisite monstrous proportions – but in fact this was not to be. The real menace turned out to be the barbarian of Macedonia (at least he spoke Greek!).

  The influence of geography

  Greece was a collection of city-states. In marginal or remote areas like Epirus, Arcadia, Aetolia, or in the more backward north, urban life was probably not very developed. But within the confines of the Greek world proper, the city provided the model, with its petty quarrels, its freedoms, its irreplaceable way of life. This dispersion into small political units seemed logical: for the Greeks it was simply the way things were.

  The natural fragmentation of the relief map of Greece, and the small size but large number of plains (zo per cent of the overall surface) seemed to pre-ordain this political crystallization. For Aubrey de Selin-court (The World of Herodotus, 1962), Greece was a pattern of islands, whether real islands in the sea or ‘islands on dry land’. Each of the Greek city-states occupied a limited terrain, with a few cultivated fields, two or three areas of grazing land for horses, enough vines and olive-groves to get by, some bare mountain slopes inhabited by herds of goats and sheep, an indented coastline with a harbour, and a city which would before long build ramparts – a little world cut off by both mountains and sea. Yes, Greece was indeed a pattern of islands.

  An accident of geography was often enough to alter the balance of power between these tiny units. A few veins of gold and silver were enough to make sea-girt Siphnos a prosperous island; quarries yielding some of the finest marble, and in such quantities that people said it grew again after being extracted, made the fortune of Paros; the intensive traffic of a few ships made Chalcis, Eretria, Megara and Aegina the envy of other towns; the export of pottery vases and olive oil set Athens on the road to greatness in the days of Pisistratus ‘the cleverest of politicians’, ‘the most republican of tyrants’, a sort of forerunner of the enlightened despot.

  All things being relative, there were of course some larger units. Sparta (8400 sq km) added to its original territory of Laconia, the land of olive-trees, the neighbouring state of Messenia, a colony in the modern sense of the term, conquered so brutally and exploited so cruelly that a rebellion seemed likely at any moment. Compared to the other city-states, Sparta had a comparatively large area – the first but not the only difference between them. But even this area should not be exaggerated: it was the equivalent of less than two present-day French dtpartements, and that included bleak mountains, covered in snow in winter. Another ‘monster’, Athens, covered no more than 1400 sq km – about the size of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg today. The four plains making up Attica were of modest proportions. Athenians would have had plenty of opportunity to go from Eleusis to Marathon, or from Oropos in the north to Cape Sunion in the south. There overlooking the sea stands the temple of Poseidon, where we know that Plato liked to walk and talk, surrounded by his pupils. When Socrates and Phaedo followed the course of the river Ilissos, which in summer had shrunk to a trickle (taking off their sandals and walking in the stream to cool off), they could leave the Athenian plain before they were aware of it, circle round the back of Mount Hymettus and reach the plain of Mesogea. The distances were all quite small: when smoke rose from the Pnyx to announce the next meeting of the Assembly, the peasant citizen took up his staff and walked into town, summoned by both duty and pleasure.

  So Greek cities always had human dimensions, and could be crossed on foot. Most of them had fewer than five thousand citizens. If theyhad a rich, tranquil and well-balanced hinterland, in theory they could lead an uneventful and contented existence. Sparta tried in vain to maintain a self-contained prosperity of this kind. Thebes, despite the existence of its sturdy cavalry and hoplites, did not go in for military glory (short-lived in the event) until the age of Epaminondas and Pelopidas: the Boeotian plain was simply too prosperous in the area around Lake Copais and its irrigation schemes. And since such things tend to be linked, the Boeotian countryside always followed the development of the Greek world with some delay and at a distance. The fashion for the oriental came late here, and archaic geometrical designs persisted longer than anywhere else, giving its decorative art a certain rustic charm which is missing from the great amphorae and craters of Attica. Cities with less in the way of advantages tended to look outwards. Sooner or later they had to sail the sea, to ‘marry it’ as Venice did in a later age, to enter into conflict with those who stood in their way, and to sail to the ends of the earth. And for good or ill, there was no shortage of this kind of city.

  Cities shaped by the economy

  Until the eighth century BC, we may imagine Greece as a somewhat backward region, such as Thrace or Epirus were even in the classical period, with isolated villages, places of refuge where a still tribal way of life survived, and a few overlords who possessed land, underlings, rights, and in some cases religious privileges. It was something like Arcadia, still in a time-warp even in the age of Pausanias, or like Ithaca under Odysseus, reigned over by farmer-kings who faced unruly challengers, also farmers, while the mass of country people looked on in silence. There were no towns in those days, of course. When the Mycenaean culture collapsed, the old urban superstructure had disappeared almost everywhere.

  Time, and favourable circumstances which started things moving again after the eighth century, were required for the city to rise above its rural and quasi-feudal origins. In fact, the critical factor was a very long crisis – economic, social, intellectual and religious; its origins and history were complex and many-sided. The Greek city was a sort of prototype which appears to have developed in the Greek part of Asia Minor a little more rapidly than elsewhere, before spreading to the rest of the Greek world. Since the area covered by Greek influence was a heterogeneous one – Greater Greece was much larger than Greece proper – the geographical explanation often put forward is of only partial val
ue in its uncomplicated determinism. Similarly, economic factors, however important they may appear, can only explain one aspect (a significant one, it is true) of that curious phenomenon, the city-state.

  In the first place, the population had grown. As a result, the area of land under cultivation needed to expand and the towns born of unions between villages had to absorb the people whom the countryside could no longer feed, providing a home for any who did not emigrate. At the same time, the new division of labour required more artisans. In the eighth century, metal-working was spreading, and industry was tending to cluster in the poorer district of the towns. Colonization also boosted the general economic advance. The wheels of trade performed miracles, or at any rate changed ways of life.

  The most important factor was probably the arrival in the ports of mainland Greece of grain from overseas, either from Greater Greece and Sicily, in which case the distribution centre was Corinth; or from the Black Sea, in which case it was handled by the merchants and ships of Miletus, and later Athens. Even before this, grain had been shipped in from Egypt. This cheap foreign grain was itself a kind of revolution whose meaning is clear. It was a revolution, since imported grain reduced what an economist would today call the activity of the primary sector, never very profitable in itself. With this grain, carried in ‘hollow ships’ to the port of Zea (a section of Piraeus harbour used only by the grain trade), the fields of Attica, even in the time of Pisistratus, could be devoted to more profitable produce such as olives and vines, while its industry could be developed: a process familiar in history. Holland in the seventeenth century ad embarked on its golden age only when it started to import Baltic grain in large quantities. That is why the grain trade was revolutionary: it modified the structures of the Greek economy and subsequently those of society. Even a great ‘feudal’ lord, as Louis Gernet would say, would thus become a ‘gentleman farmer’, watching commodity prices on foreign markets.

  Two other ‘accelerators of change’ were the development of thealphabet and of currency. The adoption of an alphabet reintroduced writing into a world which had lost it. And once writing was within the grasp of all, it became not only an instrument of command but a tool of trade, of communication and often of demystification. Secret laws became public thanks to the alphabet; and literature began to play the immense role it later assumed.

  As for currency, the need for it had been felt before it appeared. There had been a series of primitive forms of money. In the Iliad (VI, 236) Diomedes’ armour is described as being worth a hundred oxen; while a ‘woman skilled at doing many tasks’ was worth only four (XXIII, 705). Goldingots were certainly used, as were bronze ingots in the shape of oxhides, though these were less numerous than iron roasting spits (obeloi). It was in about 685 BC that authentic money (coins made of electrum, a mixture of gold and silver) appeared for the first time in history in Lydia, the rich realm of Croesus; it was in about 625, though the date is disputed, that Aegina minted the first Greek coins, soon to be imitated in all the cities of the Aegean and Phoenicia; and in 592 that Solon, the legislator of Athens, devalued by 33 per cent the Athenian drachma which had previously been aligned on the Aegina standard. So currency manipulation began almost as soon as money was invented. But most specialists think that a true monetary economy was not in place until the fourth century BC and the achievements of the Hellenistic period. In the eighth and seventh centuries, this stage was still a long way off.

  Nevertheless, throughout the Aegean, things were stirring. Having been long cut off from the eastern world, Greece now made contact with it again through the cities on the Syrian coast, in particular Al-Mina. The luxury of this area dazzled the Greeks, whose way of life was still modest. Along with artefacts from Phoenicia and elsewhere– ivories, bronzes and pottery – Greece began to import a new style of living. Foreign decorative art came as a contrast to the stiff geometrical style. With works of art came fashions, the first elements of Greek science, superstitions, and possibly the beginnings of Dionysiac cults. All round the Aegean, the Greek cities began to grow: tiny independent worlds, basically similar but competing with each other as rivals.

  City and city-state

  The Greek city-state was a strange little world, very different from the medieval town in western Europe. The latter was quite separate from the countryside: it was self-contained, with political and economic benefits reserved to the privileged townspeople who lived intra muros. The Greek polis on the other hand, while ‘linked to an urban centre, was not identical with it’. The ‘citizens’ were residents of a territory greater than the city itself, which was only one element in the state, though an important one of course, since everyone made use of its market-place or agora, its citadel as a place of refuge, and its temple devoted to the divine protector of the polis. Politically however, it was of a piece with the surrounding territory. Even Corinth, the guardian of the roads across the isthmus, and a major trading and industrial centre, had, ‘like all the Greek city states an economy based on agriculture: the existence of a city was inconceivable without a surrounding territory, the division of which among the citizens was the basis of civic identity’ (E. Will).

  During the first years of the terrible Peloponnesian war (which began in 431), the Spartans would arrive in serried ranks on the pass above Eleusis every spring, as soon as the anemones were in bloom, ready to attack Attica. According to Pericles’ plan of campaign, there was no point in defending the outlying territory which was so regularly invaded. The peasants had to abandon their homes and fields, leaving the invader to enter an empty countryside. The population would take refuge inside Athens and there, from the high walls of the Pelargicon, with nothing more to occupy them, they could watch the enemy arriving in the distance. The city, enclosed within its walls, and linked to the harbour at Piraeus by the Long Wall, was an island, safe from invasion: at this point state and city became one.

  Taming the nobility

  The dual nature of the Greek city-state, uniting city and countryside, helps us to understand the probable pattern of its creation. The process began after the Dorian invasion, as soon as peasant life once more picked up the threads of an existence which still survived in the classicalperiod in the form of the religious festivals following on each other’s heels all winter, when nature and human hands were resting from their labours. They took the form of feasts, dancing, processions, bonfires, sacrificial holocausts, all very ancient cults attached to the Earth Mother. This peasant society was linked, after the Dorian invasion and possibly even earlier, to a system of clans, patriarchal families known as the gene. Each genos was a small primitive group, self-sufficient and quarrelsome: the slightest dispute caused conflict between neighbouring clans and in this society without a regular system of justice, the vendetta or law of blood became the code of honour. Each unit had its gods, its pretensions, its myths, its chieftains who boasted of their own exploits or of those of their ancestors who had been the sons of heroes, in other words demi-gods. This all-enveloping mythology is in fact the most irrefutable proof of the ancient nature of the clans.

  This all-powerful aristocracy can be glimpsed at the dawn of Greek history. Quite numerous, these clans, the ‘substantial’, ‘the best’, the ‘well-born’ (the eupatridae of Attica), derived prestige too from their priestly functions, the wealth of their domains and their many flocks of livestock. Around them gravitated a following of clients, day-labourers and villagers in semi-serfdom. A genos or patria might join together with other gene to form a phratry thus uniting several cantons. So the nobles were the first potential basis for the foundation of a state when expanding trade made it desirable or necessary to create one. They would then be the first people to occupy the city, which turned into a useful command post: from here they could survey their land and their peasants from a convenient distance.

  A city at its beginnings often had a king, but kingship (basileia) was soon powerless when faced with great independent landowners, rival kings themselves. They were the only
ones, with their chariots, who could defend the city in time of war. They were the only people with sufficient leisure to devote themselves to public affairs, in which they could also make their own rights prevail. And they also had the power of the priesthood. The rest of the people – the demos – was otherwise occupied. So the early elimination of kingship was to the benefit of the patricians. In Athens, the royal power was finally divided among nine magistrates, the archons: the basileus who presided at sacrifices; the eponymous archon, the chief magistrate who gave his name to the year; the polemarchos who commanded the army; and the six thesmo-thetai who rendered justice. This aristocratic government eventually led to the permanent institution known as the Areopagus, in which the former magistrates took their place.

  As always, to govern was to create resentment. It could arise in the first place among the peasants, who were more or less reduced to serfdom by the property rights of the nobles. Then there were the increasing numbers of newcomers to the city, drawn in by the expansion of the economy: there was a sort of ‘bourgeoisie’, if the term is allowable, made up of the new rich, and on the other hand an urban proletariat of thetes: paid labourers, impecunious artisans, metics (foreigners) and slaves. The conditions were present, if not for a class struggle, at least for a series of social tensions and hostilities. This crisis was endemic throughout the Greek universe where patterns tended to repeat themselves; political fragmentation did not prevent a strong cultural unity from emerging.