Early Greece

Dedication

for

J.A.H.M.

O.M.

A.E.M.

M.P.M.

R.J.M.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World

List of Plates

List of Maps

The Spelling of Greek Names

Preface to First Edition (1980)

Preface to Second Edition (1993)

I. Myth, History and Archaeology

II. Sources

III. The End of the Dark Age: the Aristocracy

IV. The End of the Dark Age: the Community

V. Euboean Society and Trade

VI. The Orientalizing Period

VII. Colonization

VIII. Warfare and the New Morality

IX. Tyranny

X. Sparta and the Hoplite State

XI. Athens and Social Justice

XII. Life Styles: the Aristocracy

XIII. Life Styles: the Economy

XIV. The Coming of the Persians

XV. The Leadership of Greece: Sparta and Athens

XVI. The Great Persian War

Maps

Plate Section

Date chart

Primary sources

Further reading

General index

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World

No justification is needed for a new history of the ancient world; modern scholarship and new discoveries have changed our picture in important ways, and it is time for the results to be made available to the general reader. But the Fontana History of the Ancient World attempts not only to present an up-to-date account. In the study of the distant past, the chief difficulties are the comparative lack of evidence and the special problems of interpreting it; this in turn makes it both possible and desirable for the more important evidence to be presented to the reader and discussed, so that he may see for himself the methods used in reconstructing the past, and judge for himself their success.

The series aims, therefore, to give an outline account of each period that it deals with and, at the same time, to present as much as possible of the evidence for that account. Selected documents with discussions of them are integrated into the narrative, and often form the basis of it; when interpretations are controversial the arguments are presented to the reader. In addition, each volume has a general survey of the types of evidence available for each period and ends with detailed suggestions for further reading. The series will, it is hoped, equip the reader to follow up his own interests and enthusiasms, having gained some understanding of the limits within which the historian must work.

Oswyn Murray

Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History,

Balliol College, Oxford

General Editor

Plates

1 Trade and warfare

a The site of Pithecusae (Ischia)

b Bronze armour from the Warrior Grave at Argos

c Corinthian helmet of Miltiades

2 Commemorative pottery

a Panathenaic prize vase

b Geometric funerary vase from Athens

3 Miniature sculpture

a Ivory Astarte figure from Athens

b Images of Sparta: the warrior

c Images of Sparta: the woman

4 Rituals

a The sacrifice

b The symposion

5 Writing and the Law

a Constitutional law from Chios

b Attempts to ostracize Themistokles

6 The international aristocracy

a Arkesilas of Cyrene supervising trade

b Miltiades kalos

7 Monumental sculpture

a Korē by Antenor

b King Darius in audience, Persepolis Treasury

8 The wealth of the west

a Victory coin of Syracuse 479 BC

b Temple of Athena, Paestum

Maps

1 Greece and the Aegean

2 Greeks in the western Mediterranean

3 Greeks in the north-east and Black Sea areas

4 The Persian Empire in the reign of Darius

5 Early trade routes, east and west

6 Attica: the divisions of Kleisthenes

The Spelling of Greek Names

The traditional spelling of Greek names follows Latin rather than Greek practice; recently some scholars and translators have tried with more or less consistency to render Greek names according to their original spelling. In the interests of clarity we have adopted a compromise: generally geographical places and names of extant authors appear in their conventional Latinized form, other names in Greek spelling; but where this would lead to confusion we have not hesitated to be inconsistent. Apart from variations in the endings of names, the main equivalences are that Latin C represents Greek K, and the diphthongs Latin ae represents Greek ai. Where the difference in spelling is substantial, both forms are given in the index.

Preface to First Edition (1980)

THIS BOOK would have been very different if it had been written at the time of its conception, ten years ago. The difference is due not to myself, but to the work of the archaeologists whose publications I cite: in early Greek history no historian can be unaware of his debt to those who work in the field. If my approach is new, it is because I have tried to emphasize three aspects. Firstly, the role of concepts in history: man lives in his imagination, and his history is the history of ideas. Secondly, the unity of the eastern Mediterranean, and the importance of communication in fostering that unity. Thirdly, the significance of social customs for the understanding of all aspects of history. But it is no longer necessary to justify a book which spends as much space on the drinking habits and the sexual customs of the Greeks as on their political history; since Tolstoy, we have known that the breaking of the wave is the product of forces far out in the ocean of time.

My thanks are due to those who have read and commented on different chapters of the manuscript: Antony Andrewes, Paul Cartledge, John Davies, Penny Murray, Martin Ostwald, Mervyn Popham, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood – and most of all, for his encouragement in unorthodoxy, to Russell Meiggs. Then to my skilled typist, Mary Bugge. Lastly, to those members of Fontana Paperbacks who have watched over the beginnings, the middle and the achievement of this series: Michael Turnbull (with whom the idea was first formulated), Bob Woodings, Colin Murray, and Helen Fraser – a succession of publishers whose enthusiasm and patience have carried the project through to completion.

Preface to Second Edition (1993)

TWELVE YEARS on this little book takes on a different character; conceived as a call to change the way that history is understood, it has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams: translated into Spanish, German and Italian, it is in danger of becoming the new orthodoxy. I hope that a second generation of readers will view it critically, as a starting point for their own perceptions. My aim was and remains to demonstrate that history is not a fixed narrative of facts, but a continuing effort to understand the past and the interconnections between events.

Some chapters are little changed, either because they still satisfy me, or because they seem worth preserving as a basic statement from which subsequent research has proceeded. I am especially proud of two chapters: that on Euboean society (ch. 5) was the first attempt to bring together the scattered evidence in a coherent account; and it was due to chapter 6 that the ‘Orientalizing Period’ is now recognised as a significant age; it was this book which first took the concept from art history, and applied it to society as a whole. In other chapters new discoveries and new thoughts have led me to make significant revisions. One notable omission, the neglect of Peisistratid Athens, has been made good. The Further Reading section has been completely revised; and, when changes have not been made in the text, it often explains the reasons or refers to subsequent discussion of the question.

Reviewers were kind to the work; but I learned most from the longest and most critical of these reviews, by S.M. Perevalov in the Russian Journal of Ancient History 1983 no. 2, pp. 178–84. He pointed out a number of basic presuppositions behind my approach of which the reader should be aware. It is true that in the development of early Greece I have tended to emphasise external factors over internal social development; and it is true that I attribute especial importance to military developments and trade, rather than to land tenure and the development of slavery, as factors leading to change.

On this occasion I should like to thank especially Kai Brodersen of Munich, who was responsible for the elegant German translation, and for making many improvements to the text of the English version in the course of his work. Two new members of Fontana also deserve the thanks of all who read this series. The love of history and personal encouragement of Stuart Proffitt ensured the appearance of a second edition of the series, and Philip Gwyn Jones has patiently steered it through the press.

I

Myth, History and Archaeology

UNTIL A CENTURY AGO historians accepted the distinction first made in a slightly different form by the Greeks themselves, between legendary Greece and historical Greece. It was not of course an absolute distinction; the Greek legends about the age of heroes, and in particular the poems of Homer, were thought by many to be a distorted reflection of a real past, from which it might in principle be possible to discover what had actually happened, even if no reconstruction had yet won general acceptance. What was needed was a basis of solid fact against which to determine both the time-scale and the comparative reality of the events related in heroic myth.

This basis has been provided by archaeology. From 1870 to 1890 Heinrich Schliemann, a German merchant who left school at the age of fourteen and taught himself Greek in order to read Homer, excavated at Troy, at Mycenae, and at other sites in mainland Greece, in order to prove the reality of Homer’s Trojan War and the world of the Greek heroes. He discovered a great bronze age palace culture, centred on ‘Agamemnon’s palace’ at Mycenae; later archaeologists have added other palace sites in central and southern Greece, and have defined the limits of Mycenean influence as far as the Greek islands and Asia Minor. The age of heroes reflected the existence of a lost culture, which had lasted from about 1600 BC until the destruction of the main palace sites around 1200.

The excavations of Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete from 1900 onwards revealed a still earlier non-Greek palace culture, with its zenith from about 2200 to 1450 BC; it was named Minoan, after the legendary king of Crete, the first lawgiver in Greece and judge in the underworld. The influence of Minoan civilization explained the rise of a palace culture in the comparatively backward area of mainland Greece; from about 1450 the Myceneans seem indeed to have taken control of Knossos itself. Thus the origins of the earliest civilizations in the land of Greece and the existence of a historical core to the Greek legends about the heroic age were established. But whereas Minoan culture was definitely non-Greek, the status of Mycenean culture was uncertain, until in 1952 a young English architect, Michael Ventris, deciphered the tablets from the destruction levels at Pylos on the mainland and at Mycenean Knossos. The syllabic script known as Linear B had been developed from the earlier still undeciphered Minoan Linear A; but the language it was used to record was shown by Ventris to be Greek, of a form closest to the most archaic elements in Greek previously known. For the first time it was shown that the history of Mycenean culture is both geographically and ethnically part of the history of Greece.

But this world of Mycenae is separate from the world of classical Greek civilization, both as a subject of study, in the way in which its history can be reconstructed, and also in reality. The Mycenean written records consist of lists of equipment and provisions stored in the palace, and relate to the particular year of destruction (the clay tablets survive only because they were accidentally baked in the fires which burnt the palaces). Moreover the limitations of the script make it unlikely that it was used for any other purpose: Mycenean culture was not properly literate. Thus the culture of the Mycenean world has to be reconstructed almost entirely from archaeology, in terms of its material remains. For if Greek myths have been vindicated as containing a historical basis by the discoveries of archaeology, they still cannot be used to supplement archaeology to any great extent. The studies of psychology, comparative mythology and anthropology, by men such as Freud, Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss, have as a common factor the basic assumption (which is surely correct) that myth is not history, but rather a means of ordering human experience related primarily to the preoccupations of the age that produces or preserves it: the social and psychological attitudes expressed in Greek myths about gods and heroes are those of the successive generations who shaped and reshaped them, from Homer and Hesiod onwards; and the hypothesis that the nature of Mycenean society could be reconstructed from myth or heroic poetry has been shown to be untenable, by the disparity between the evidence on social institutions provided by archaeology and the Linear B tablets, and that implied in the Greek legends.

The detailed reconstruction of the Mycenean world therefore rests on archaeology, and must in general be confined to its material culture; in this sense, to use a conventional distinction, it belongs to prehistory rather than to history. In contrast, the Greek world from the eighth century onwards is a fully historical world, in which the evidence of archaeology can be combined with the expression of the thoughts and feelings of contemporary individuals, to produce a comparatively detailed account, not only of what men did, but of why they did it, and of the pressures and limitations on their actions. The reason for this difference is the advent of literacy: rather than contrast prehistory with history, we should perhaps talk of the difference between our knowledge of non-literate and literate societies.

Again, in reality the civilization of Mycenae is fundamentally different from that of later Greece. It is an example of a phenomenon found elsewhere, when a warrior people falls under the influence of a more advanced civilization: the barbarian kingdoms of the early Byzantine world, such as the Ostrogoths in north Italy or the Vandals in north Africa, or later in the Middle Ages the Normans, offer obvious parallels. The world which influenced Mycenae was the world of Knossos, itself on the fringes of an area where the centralized palace economy and the oriental despotisms of Mesopotamia and Egypt had already flourished for some two thousand years. Mycenean civilization is linked far more to these cultures than to later developments in Greece.

The period from 1250 to 1150 was one of widespread destruction in the eastern Mediterranean. The Hittite Empire in Asia Minor collapsed about 1200; the resulting pressures caused movements of population which seriously disturbed Syria and Palestine, and which are recorded in Egyptian history in attempted invasions of Egypt itself by ‘the Peoples of the Sea’, who may have included groups of Achaeans or Mycenean Greeks in flight. In the Mycenean world itself, the destruction of Troy found in level VIIa, between 1250 and 1200, is generally agreed to be the historical basis of the Homeric Trojan War, and to represent the last major effort of the Myceneans. At almost the same time there are clear signs of preparations against attack in the settlements of the Greek Peloponnese. Then around 1200, Mycenae, Pylos and other centres were burned; and the surviving remnants of Mycenean culture were again attacked around 1150. The whole military and political organization of the palace economy disappeared, with its attendant skills in the fine arts and writing; most sites were deserted or only partially occupied; some were even given over to the dead. This was accompanied by emigration to outlying areas of the Mycenean world such as Cyprus, and widespread depopulation on the mainland. The archaeological evidence of a certain continuity in the debased style of sub-Mycenean pottery serves to demonstrate the level to which material culture had sunk.

The result of the collapse of Mycenean culture was a dark age, lasting for some three hundred years. Discontinuity with the past was virtually complete: later Greeks were unaware of almost all the important aspects of the world that they portrayed in heroic poetry, such as its social organization, its material culture and its system of writing. Even the Dark Age itself dropped out of sight: in his sketch of early Greece in book 1 of his history, Thucydides saw a gradual but continuous advance from the world of the Homeric heroes to his own day. Records of the past such as genealogies reached back only as far as about 900: in dim awareness of the resulting gap between their world and that of the heroes, the Greeks resorted to adding spurious names to the lists, and reckoning the average length of a generation at forty years instead of the more correct thirty years.

The Greek world from the eighth century onwards is a product, not of Mycenae, but of the Dark Age. Its darkness is the darkness of a primitive society with little material culture, and consequently one which has left little trace for the archaeologist. But in order to understand the society which emerged, it is necessary to know something of the preceding centuries. Three types of evidence can be used to reconstruct the outlines of Dark Age history.

The first is once again legend. These legends of course have to be treated with caution, in this case not only because folk tradition becomes distorted to fit the interests of later generations, but also because the sources from which we can reconstruct the legends are themselves scattered and very late, and have often been reworked and expanded to suit literary or quasi-historical needs: there is a great danger of reconstructing an account of the legends far more complete or systematic than ever actually existed in early Greece. Yet two events are recorded in the legends which seem to have some importance for history. The first is the explanation of the origins of the Dorians.

In historical times the Dorians were distinguished from other Greeks primarily by their dialect, but also by certain common social customs: for instance, each Dorian state was divided into three tribes, always with the same names; and there are a number of primitive institutions which can be found in widely separated Dorian communities, such as Sparta and Crete. The Dorians were unknown to the Homeric account of heroic Greece; yet later they occupied most of what had once been the centre of Mycenean power, the Peloponnese, and in certain areas such as Argos and Sparta they ruled over a serf population of non-Dorian Greeks. Legend explained that they had arrived only recently; the sons of the semi-divine hero, Herakles, had been exiled from Mycenae, and later returned with the Dorians to claim their inheritance. The legend of the ‘return of the sons of Herakles’ is a charter myth, explaining by what right a people apparently unknown to the heroic world had inherited the land of the Mycenean Greeks and enslaved some, part of its population. How much historical truth this legend also contains must be decided in relation to evidence of a different type.

A second group of legends concerns an expansion of the Greeks across the Aegean to the coast of Asia Minor to form another cultural and linguistic block, that of the Ionian Greeks. The stories are complicated, involving the foundations of individual cities, but the centre of departure is for the most part Athens: groups of refugees passed through Athens on their way to find new homes.

Thucydides describes how the victors from Troy had a hard homecoming to a land no longer fit for heroes, and the migrations that followed:

Even after the Trojan war there were still migrations and colonizing movements, so that lack of peace inhibited development. The long delays in the return of the Greeks from Troy caused much disturbance, and there was a great deal of political trouble in the cities: those driven into exile founded cities … Eighty years after the Trojan war the Dorians with the sons of Herakles made themselves masters of the Peloponnese. It was with difficulty and over a long period that peace returned and Greece became powerful; when the migrations were over, she sent out colonies, the Athenians to Ionia and many of the islands, and the Peloponnesians to most of Italy and Sicily and some parts of the rest of Greece. All these places were founded after the Trojan war.

(Thucydides 1.12)

There are obvious weaknesses in this account. Thucydides had no knowledge of the extent of cultural collapse in the Dark Age, largely because he had little conception of the power and wealth of Mycenean Greece. He writes of political troubles in terms appropriate to the revolutionary activity of his own day; he equates the Ionian migration with the later and more organized colonizations of southern Italy and Sicily, discussed in chapter 7. The reason for these limitations is clear enough: Thucydides is performing the same operation as a modern historian, attempting to construct a historical narrative out of myth and heroic poetry by applying the standards of explanation accepted in his own day. And in the legends and folk memory available to him, he could see much the same general pattern as we can.

The legends of the migration period find some confirmation in the distribution of dialects in historical Greece. The Greek language itself belongs to the Indo-European family; it seems to have entered Greece shortly before 2000, when the archaeological evidence suggests the arrival of a new culture; these new peoples will be the later Mycenean Greeks. Evidence of an earlier non-Indo-European language can be found in the survival of certain place names (for instance those ending in -nthos and -assos), which are those of known centres of culture in the third millennium; the extent to which the language spoken by the newcomers was transformed by contact with this earlier language is uncertain. But at least by the Mycenean period the language of the Linear B tablets was recognizably Greek.

In classical times Greek was split into various dialects, more or less closely interrelated. The Doric dialect was spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, that is in what had once been the Mycenean heartland, Laconia and the Argolid (and perhaps Messenia). From there it had spread across the southern group of Aegean islands to Crete, Rhodes and the south-west coast of Asia Minor. The Ionic dialect was spoken in Attica, Euboea, the central islands of the Cyclades, and the central coast of Asia Minor. Further north in Asia Minor, the Lesbian (Aeolic) dialect is related to those spoken in Thessaly and Boeotia, though the language of these two areas is also connected to the north-western dialects spoken in Aetolia, Achaea and Elis. Finally in two remote and separate enclaves, the mountains of Arcadia and the distant island of Cyprus, an archaic form of Greek survived, known as Arcado-Cypriot.