II
The opening of contact between the Greeks of the Aegean (specifically, Euboia) and the lands facing the Tyrrhenian Sea has enthusiastically been described as a moment ‘of greater lasting significance for western civilisation than almost any other single advance achieved in antiquity’.17 It was an important moment not just for the Italian lands into which the first Greek traders and settlers penetrated, but for the lands back home which flourished as centres of trade: after the eclipse of the Euboian cities, Corinth came to dominate this traffic, sending its fine vases westwards in their thousands, and bringing back raw materials such as metals and foodstuffs; and after Corinth, Athens acquired a similarly dominant role in the fifth century. It was these outside resources and contacts that enabled the Greek lands to experience their great Renaissance after the collapse of Bronze Age civilization, and to disseminate objects in the distinctive styles favoured by Greek craftsmen and artists, with the result that the art of the Greeks became the point of reference for native artists among the Iberians and Etruscans in the far west. To write the history of Greek civilization as the story of the rise of Athens and Sparta without much reference to the waters of the central and western Mediterranean is like writing the history of the Italian Renaissance as if it all happened in Florence and Venice.
The first contact between Greeks and the Bay of Naples dates back to Mycenaean times, to judge from pottery finds on the island of Vivara. The Euboians established a base on the neighbouring island of Ischia around 750 BC. There is no sign that they were consciously following in the footsteps of their Bronze Age precursors; all the same, there is something strange about the fact that the first Greek settlement in Iron Age Italy lay so deeply within the Tyrrhenian Sea. A mainland settlement soon followed at Kyma (Cumae) in the same great bay.18 A half-century later the Spartans founded a colony at Taras (Taranto) in the heel of Italy, within easy sailing distance of the Ionian islands and the Gulf of Corinth, and this seems a much more logical location for a first, tentative implantation on Italian soil. Still, the Phoenicians had reputedly been sailing to North Africa and out beyond Gibraltar to Tartessos even before this time. These long, ambitious routes found their rationale in the search for metals, whether the copper and iron of Tuscany and Sardinia or the silver of Sardinia and southern Spain. A late Greek account of the Phoenician voyages to Tartessos expressed wonder at the wealth that could be found in the far west, telling how these merchants took oil westwards and then returned with ‘so great a quantity of silver that they were no longer able to keep or receive it, but were forced when sailing away from those parts to make of silver not only all the articles which they need, but also their anchors’.19 And it will be seen that there is enough evidence of friendly contact between Greeks and Phoenicians in these waters to suggest that the opening of these sea routes was to some degree a joint enterprise, even if the major settlements, such as Carthage and Kyma, acquired a distinctive ethnic identity (in the case of the Greek cities not as Greek, but as Euboian, Dorian or Ionian).
There is a mystery at both ends of the route linking Euboia to Ischia. Why Euboia should have emerged as the first significant centre of overseas trade and settlement after the long recession of the ‘Dark Age’ is far from clear.20 Euboia is a long, well-wooded island that flanks mainland Greece; the distance from the mainland is only a few miles at most, though Hesiod described his unreasonable terror at crossing even that narrow channel. The most likely explanation is that its two major cities, Chalkis and Eretria, commanded excellent natural resources and began to exploit them in local trade down to Athens and Corinth. Euboia was rich in timber, essential for its shipbuilders; indeed, one of the Homeric Hymns – a series of poems in praise of the gods written in the seventh or sixth century in what passes for a Homeric style – dedicated to Apollo, described it as ‘famous for its ships’. Wine was another resource – the early Greek word woinos was transmitted to Italy, where the Etruscans transformed it into a word the Romans heard as vinum.21 The name of one of its towns, Chalkis, suggests that the area was a source of copper (khalkon), and moulds for the casting of tripod legs, found at Lefkandi on Euboia, date from the late tenth century BC. Lefkandi was then a flourishing centre. A substantial building, with an apse at its end, has been excavated there; measuring 45 metres by 10 metres, it dates from before 950 BC, and was constructed out of mudbrick on stone foundations, while its roof was made of thatch. It was the mausoleum of a great warrior, who was found wrapped in a linen cloak of which fragments still survive, along with his iron sword and spear, and he had been accompanied to the next world by three horses. A woman was also buried within the building, along with gold jewellery and pins made of bronze and iron.22
The Euboians did not pour all their efforts into Ischia. Indeed, their aim was to make Chalkis and Eretria into mid-points between the trading networks of the western and the eastern Mediterranean. As early as the late eleventh century ceramics reached Lefkandi from the Syrian coast; ties to Syria were strengthened with the establishment of a trading counter at al-Mina around 825 BC. This site was excavated before the Second World War by Sir Leonard Woolley, who clearly demonstrated its importance as a centre of trade and industry looking out in all directions of the compass – towards the thriving empire of the Assyrians in the east, down the coast to Tyre and Sidon, but also across the open sea to the lands of Yavan, ‘Ionia’, the Greeks.23 Closer still were the ties with Cyprus, which gave access to the towns of Syria, southern Anatolia and the Nile Delta. It was a place where all the cultures of the seaboard met; the Phoenician colony at Kition coexisted comfortably enough with the Greek settlers and merchants. Sites in Euboia have also yielded a bronze mace-head from Cyprus, and goods made of gold, faience, amber and rock crystal originating in Egypt or the Levant.24 The fragments of fine cloth in the warrior’s grave at Lefkandi indicate that high-quality textiles were another attraction; the reputation of the Syrian coast as a source of cloths and dyestuffs drew Greek eyes towards the Levant. All this made Euboia into the most prosperous part of the Greek world in the ninth century, apart from partly Hellenized Cyprus. Less clear is who brought these goods to Euboia. The boom there began before Chalkidian and Eretrian sailors established their settlement in Ischia, in the eighth century. Probably the merchants who arrived from Cyprus and the Levant were not Greeks at all, but Phoenicians; and this would account for the knowledge of Phoenician traders and of their sharp techniques among the earliest Greek poets.
The other mystery is what the Euboians were able to obtain in exchange for the goods they acquired from Cyprus and the Levant. As they opened up the routes to the west, they gained access to supplies of metals such as copper and iron, for local resources had apparently become inadequate to meet the excited demand among Euboians for oriental goods. Mostly, however, they met their obligations with items that leave no clear record in the soil: sacks of grain, amphorae filled with wine and oil, stoppered jars containing perfumes. When their pottery reached places as distant as the kingdom of Israel or Cilicia, in southern Anatolia, it may well have been appreciated for its design, but what mattered most were the contents. And then, as this commerce became regular, the strains of paying for more and more eastern luxuries stimulated further searches for metals and other goods that could be used in payment; and this brought the Euboians to the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea. There was direct or indirect contact with Sardinia, documented in finds of pottery of Euboian origin, or at least in the Euboian style. Better still were the resources in iron of the Tuscan shores and hinterland, a region of prosperous villages which were about to coalesce into the rich city-based culture of the Etruscans. So, gradually at first, the Euboians began to make contact with the lands surrounding the Tyrrhenian Sea, first by way of Phoenician mediators, and then in their own ships.
Ischia was the base the Euboians chose, and they oddly called it Pithekoussai, ‘the place of the monkeys’; one of the island’s attractions was its vineyards, and another was its safe offshore location – it w
as a point from which Euboian traders could radiate outwards in search of the produce of southern and central Italy and the Italian islands.25 Between about 750 and 700 BC there existed a flourishing commercial and industrial base at the site now known as Lacco Ameno, and two extraordinary finds there illuminate the links between this far-flung settlement and the Greek world. One is a drinking-cup, made in Rhodes, and deposited in the grave of a boy who died when he was only about ten years old. After its manufacture the cup was decorated with a light-hearted inscription:
Nestor had a fine drinking-cup, but anyone who drinks from this cup will soon be struck with desire for fair-crowned Aphrodite.26
Nestor’s cup, the Odyssey relates, was made of gold, but the wine poured into it acquired a potency that gold alone could not confer.27 There are many striking features of this inscription. It is written in the version of the Greek alphabet favoured by the inhabitants of Chalkis, supporting the argument that the inscription was not made along with the cup itself in Rhodes, but added by Euboian Greeks, who had learned the alphabet from Phoenician visitors to Euboia. It was the Euboians who carried the alphabet westwards to the peoples of Italy, and it was therefore their version (rather than the Attic version that came to triumph in the Greek world) that gave birth to the Etruscan alphabet, and, derived from that, the Roman one. These hexameter lines are the only eighth-century verses to have survived outside the Homeric canon. With their reference to Nestor, they offer further evidence of the central role of the Trojan War in the life and thought of the archaic Greeks. The link to Rhodes, whether directly or by way of Chalkis and Eretria, is confirmed by the discovery on Ischia of a good many aryballoi, small perfume jars, of Rhodian manufacture, discarded at the cemetery after being emptied during funerary rites.
The second remarkable find from Lacco Ameno is a shallow vase or krater that depicts on its rim a shipwreck. This too is the first object of its type, the first figured narrative painting to survive from an Italian site; and it was made locally. A ship, similar to those later depicted on Corinthian pottery, has capsized and its sailors are in the sea swimming for their lives, but one of them has drowned and another is about to be swallowed by an enormous fish. Since a further image shows a well-fed fish standing upright on its tail he seems not to have escaped. There is nothing here that is recognizable in the Odyssey or other tales of returning heroes; the story could be a local and very familiar one, about real men who went to sea and never returned. Other evidence from graves also testifies to the importance of sea traffic to the inhabitants of Pithekoussai. Some vases came south from Etruria, in the plain black style known as bucchero; it was their shape rather than their decoration that gave them elegance. Links to the east were particularly lively; about a third of the graves dating from the third quarter of the eighth century contained items of Levantine origin or produced under Levantine influence.28 A scarab amulet found in a child’s grave carries the name of Pharaoh Bocchoris, which provides a date somewhere around 720 BC, and there is a faience vase from the Etruscan site at Tarquinia which also mentions this Pharaoh, so we can deduce that traffic was moving from Egypt, probably via Phoenicia or the settlement at al-Mina in Syria, to Greece and then into the Tyrrhenian Sea; Pithekoussai was not by any means the end of the line, for merchants pressed on until they had arrived on the metal-rich Tuscan shore. Just as the Phoenicians overseas eventually became busier traders than the Phoenicians of the Levant, so too the Euboians in the far west built up their own lively trading world linking Syria, Rhodes, Ionia and eventually Corinth to Pithekoussai.
The people of Pithekoussai were traders, but they were also craftsmen and craftswomen. One fragment of iron slag is probably of Elban origin, underlining the importance of the link to Etruria, since Ischia could offer no metals. Crucibles have been found, and it is clear from the survival of small lengths of wire and of ingots that bronze goods as well as iron ones were manufactured. This was a hard-working community of expatriates, numbering, according to the best estimates, between 4,800 and 9,800 people in the late eighth century. What had been founded as a trading-post thus developed into a sizeable town, in which not just Greeks but some Phoenicians and mainland Italians made their home. A jar containing the remains of an infant carries what seems to be a Phoenician symbol.29 Just because Pithekoussai was a Greek foundation we should not assume it was inhabited only by Greeks, or specifically Euboians. Foreign craftsmen were welcome if they could bring their styles and techniques with them, whether they were Corinthian potters, who began to settle in nearby Kyma by about 725 BC, or Phoenician carvers, who could satisfy the craving of the Italian peoples for oriental goods. Pithekoussai thus became the channel through which ‘orientalizing’ styles were funnelled through to the west. The Pithekoussans observed how hungry the growing village communities of southern Etruria, in places such as Veii, Caere and Tarquinia, were for eastern goods, and they sold the early Etruscans what they wanted, in exchange for the metals of northern Etruria. Whether they noticed a collection of villages grouped around seven hills, across the river Tiber just to the south of Etruria, is less certain.
III
Thucydides told of how the cities of Euboia became enmeshed in the ‘Lelantine War’, which in his view was the most serious internecine war among the Greeks before the Peloponnesian War. But the conflict is impossible to date, and there is little detail about what occurred; it may have been a contest for control of the copper and iron that lay beneath the Lelantine plain, or for the vineyards and pastures of the plain itself.30 In any case, Euboia had passed its peak by 700. A precocious pioneer, Euboia was unable to sustain its lead once other centres such as Corinth became serious competitors. The trade to the west made the fortune of Corinth. Homer already described the city as aphneios, ‘wealthy’.31 The traditionalist fifth-century poet Pindar sang in his Olympian Odes of how ‘I shall come to know fortunate Corinth, Poseidon’s porch on the Isthmus’.32 In the fifth century Corinth was only about a third the size of Athens in territory and population; but it was able to take advantage of its situation to draw great profit from commerce across the Aegean and, to an even greater degree, commerce from Greece westwards to the Adriatic, Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas. Sitting astride the route linking northern Greece to the Peloponnese, the Corinthians could also draw benefit from the land trade that passed through the isthmus.33 The inhabitants of what was probably still a collection of villages below the steep citadel of Acrocorinth had established contact with the wider world by about 900 BC, when Corinthian Proto-Geometric pottery reached Boiotia; by 800, a good amount of Corinthian pottery was reaching Delphi as votive offerings.34 By the mid-eighth century much Corinthian pottery was arriving at Pithekoussai, and from there it was passed down the trade routes into the villages of early Etruria.35 In the seventh century BC, the Corinthians developed ports on both sides of the isthmus, one at Lechaion on the Gulf of Corinth, and a second at Kenchreai, giving access to the Aegean through the Saronic Gulf – here the waters were calmer but access from Corinth took longer. No less important was the creation of a great slipway, the diolkos, across which teams of Corinthian slaves could heave boats overland from one port to the other. Only Aristophanes had the imagination to compare the diolkos to a sexual act: ‘What is this business with the Isthmus? You are shoving your penis up and down more than the Corinthians shove ships across the diolkos!’36 Evidence that lively contacts existed with both east and west – Chios, Samos, Etruria – can be found in the ceramics excavated within Corinth itself.37 Thucydides confirms that Corinth was a centre of shipbuilding, for ‘it is said that the first triremes ever built in Hellas were laid down in Corinth’.38
The Corinthian tyrant Periandros made a treaty with the ruler of Miletos on the coast of Asia Minor some time between 625 and 600, seeking a network of alliances as far away as Ionia and Egypt – the tyrant’s nephew Kypselos was nicknamed Psammetichos, after a Pharaoh with whom Periandros had business ties. An Ionian trading settlement developed at Naukratis in the Nile Delta, where
Corinthian pottery soon appeared.39 By the middle of the sixth century BC the Greeks in Italy and Sicily bought Corinthian pottery in preference to all competitors. The Carthaginians copied Corinthian designs in the late eighth century, and then succumbed to a minor invasion of authentic Corinthian pottery. And the Etruscans had the discrimination to buy the best pieces, such as the Chigi vase of about 650 BC, regarded as the finest surviving product of the Corinthian potters. It was only in the course of the sixth century that Athens came to dominate the export of ceramics to Italy.40
No one really believes that these flourishing connections with east and west were sustained solely by demand for Corinthian pottery, however elegant it may have been; the areas given over to pottery production within the city were not large. Much of the pottery was carried as ballast on board ships full of perishable products, of which rugs, blankets and fine linen cloths, coloured crimson, violet, flame-red and sea-green, were probably the most prestigious items.41 The manufacture of such items depended on the supply of dyestuffs, and here links to the Phoenician purple traders were of great importance. One point of contact was the emporium at al-Mina in the Levant, where Greeks, Phoenicians, Aramaeans and others mingled and traded.42 But the strength of Corinth lay in its diversity. Its merchants handled agricultural produce, pastoral products, timber, fine wares, terracotta tiles (sent in quantity to the shrines at Delphi, so that nearly every structure there, apart from those roofed in marble, had Corinthian clay roof-tiles). Small bronzes were favoured exports, as were arms and armour made of bronze and iron, for which Corinth became famous as early as 700 BC.43
The price of success was envy, and there were occasions, during wars with Sparta, when Lechaion fell into the hands of Corinth’s enemies. But the general trend in Corinthian policy was to try to keep the peace with as many of its neighbours as possible, until the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in the late fifth century. After all, conflict at sea and on land would do a trading city no good. But it is less clear whether this trade was carried in Corinthian ships. The discovery in Corinth itself of large numbers of amphorae made in Carthage from about 460 BC onwards suggests that a lively trade in foodstuffs between Corinth and the western Mediterranean was shared between the Corinthians and the Carthaginians. It has been argued that the main product carried towards Corinth in these jars was the processed sauce garon (Latin garum), made from fish intestines and brought from as far away as the Phoenician trading-station at Kouass in Atlantic Morocco.44 Amphorae made in Corinth between the late eighth and mid-third centuries BC have been found all over the western Mediterranean, as far west as Algeciras and Ibiza, as well as in southern Italy and in the Greek settlements in Cyrenaica. These jars were made in order to be filled with something, and what their presence reveals is a lively trade in grain, wine and oil; as the population of the maritime cities of the Greek mainland increased, demand for the grain of areas such as Sicily grew, and a lifeline linking the Greeks in the west to their ancestral lands was created through the Gulf of Corinth. Corinth responded by selling excess oil and wine from the area the city controlled to buyers in Sicily and beyond.45
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