Early Greece

The scope of Herodotus’ book is described in its first sentence:

This is the account of the investigation of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, undertaken so that the achievements of men should not be obliterated by time and the great and marvellous works performed by both Greeks and barbarians should not be without fame, both other things and the reasons why they fought one another.

(Herodotus 1. 1)

The Greek word historiē translated by ‘investigation’ is the word which has entered the European languages as ‘history’; Herodotus uses it elsewhere to describe his enquiries, and it is connected with the Greek root ‘to know’, usually in the sense of knowing by personal observation, for instance as the witness in a lawsuit. Herodotus’ work is a series of descriptions of the various peoples of the Mediterranean and the near east arranged around the theme of the wars between Greeks and Persians: within this basic structure the digressions, or separate ‘accounts’ or ‘stories’ (which Herodotus calls logoi), are geographical, ethnographic and historical, ranging over the known world as far as its mysterious fringes and the encircling ocean. The modern word ‘historian’ scarcely covers all these activities; contemporaries used a vaguer term when they called him a ‘logos-maker’ or ‘logos-writer’. Thucydides was thinking of Herodotus when he claimed that his own readers should trust his conclusions, rather than ‘what the poets have composed about events in exaggeration, or what logos-writers have collected together, which is rather aimed at pleasing the ear than at the truth’. And he makes the proud statement:

The lack of invention in this narrative may seem less pleasing to the ear, but it will be enough if it is useful to those who wish to grasp clearly the past and the future, which, given human nature, will see these or similar events happening sometime again. This work is designed as a possession for all time rather than a display piece for instant listening.

(Thucydides 1. 21–2)

In these criticisms, and particularly the last, Thucydides seems to agree with later evidence in seeing Herodotus as a professional lecturer, giving his ‘stories’ or logoi in public as ‘display pieces for instant listening’; the final collection of these ‘stories’ in the present structured narrative was almost certainly published by 425, when Herodotus’ account of the causes of the Persian War was parodied by the comic poet Aristophanes. Herodotus may well in fact have begun like other contemporary literary figures, by lecturing on his travels and researches, and have only later arranged these lectures around the theme of the Persian Wars; but it is possible that he may have had his general theme in mind from the start.

Two literary influences on Herodotus are obvious. He owed much to Hekataios, whom he had certainly read, and whom he attacked both in his account of Egypt and as a map maker (Herodotus 2.143, 4.31): the early parts of the work must often cover the same ground in greater depth. Herodotus is also rightly described by a later Greek critic as ‘most Homeric’; Homer lies behind the conception of the whole enterprise as a war between Greeks and barbarians, and its declared intent to preserve ‘the great deeds of men’ (one of the acknowledged functions of epic poetry); the complex construction and digressive technique of Herodotus is similar to that of Homer, as are many of the more imaginative elements in the work.

Very few of Herodotus’ sources of information were written: details of the provinces of the Persian empire and its tribute, and of the organization of the Persian invasion force, may ultimately come from official Persian documents; and there are passing references to poetry and literature. But in general Herodotus was excluded from knowledge of the extensive literary and documentary evidence of the near east by his ignorance of foreign languages. As he himself makes clear, his work was based primarily on two types of evidence – what he had seen and what he had heard; it is a systematic and serious attempt to record oral traditions about the past. His practice was in each place to seek out ‘the men with knowledge’, usually priests or officials, and record their account with the minimum of comment. Only occasionally will he give variant traditions, and these have usually in fact been gathered by chance from different places; when he does this, he seldom declares which version he believes to be correct.

It is obvious that such a method left Herodotus largely at the mercy of his informants, who might be frivolous, ill-informed or biased. From Thucydides onwards Herodotus has been attacked as unscientific; but modern oral historians in fact hold that each tradition should be recorded separately: the contamination of two or more traditions produces an account which it is impossible to check or interpret, and which is an artificial invention of the modern anthropologist, not a true oral tradition.

All oral tradition consists of a chain of testimonies; in general the effective range for resonably detailed knowledge of the past is about two hundred years: it is very noticeable that Herodotus’ information is both qualitatively and quantitatively better for the period from the mid seventh century onwards. The historical worth of oral tradition is also related, not so much to the number of steps in the chain of testimonies, as to the purpose behind the recording of the tradition, the milieu in which it was remembered, and the cultural influences which may have affected its literary structure. The past is remembered not so much for its own sake as for its relevance to the present interests of a particular group; and each group imposes its characteristic deformation on the oral tradition.

In mainland Greece much of Herodotus’ information came from the great aristocratic families in each city: aristocratic tradition is of course especially liable to political distortion. For instance the Spartan aristocratic account played down the reforms of the age of Tyrtaios, and later the importance of their greatest king, Kleomenes; the Corinthian aristocracy travestied the history of their tyranny; the Athenian aristocratic family of the Alkmeonidai protested overmuch their anti-Persian stance and claimed the credit for the overthrow of the tyranny, minimizing the role of other families and popular support; Macedonian royal sources claimed that they had been secretly pro-Greek during the Persian Wars. There are many other examples.

Another group of traditions is very different. Here the great religious shrine of Delphi is of central importance: the Delphic tradition is not usually political; it is rather popular and moralizing. Often the stories are clearly related to particular monuments or offerings at the shrine (which is how we can detect their origin); and they centre round particular benefactors like Croesus king of Lydia. The obvious presence of folk-tale motifs might suggest the professional story-teller; but the clearest tendency is to impart a moral dimension to the past. Events are preserved in a framework in which the hero moves from prosperity to over-confidence and a divinely sanctioned reversal of fortune. This is no aristocratic ethic; it belongs to the priests of a shrine closely identified with a cooperative ethic, who engraved over the doors of their temple the two mottoes, ‘Know yourself, and ‘Nothing too much’.

The traditions of the eastern Greeks are far closer in form to the Delphic stories than to the aristocratic traditions of the mainland. For here too there is very little evidence of deformation due to particular political groups; yet even in quite recent history there are clear signs of recurrent patterns, folk motifs, and distortion for moral purposes. Thus the story of the tyranny of Polykrates of Samos as late as the second half of the sixth century could be transformed into a folk-tale, and the account of the Ionian revolt in the early fifth century contains many popular elements. At first sight this is surprising, for Herodotus was closer to events in the Greek east than on the mainland; he had for instance spent his youth on Samos only a generation after the death of Polykrates, and must have known many of those who fought in the great revolt; yet his east Greek history is in fact less reliable than his history of the mainland.

This curious characteristic of the east Greek tradition is related to the overall pattern of his work: it too is a moral story, of the pride of Persia, symbolized in the arrogance of Xerxes and humbled by the Greeks. Once more the gods punish those whose prosperity passes human limits; and the framework in which this happens is a framework designed to recall to the listener the steps by which the gods achieve their ends – the deeds of pride, the warnings disregarded, the dreams misinterpreted and false ones sent to deceive. This overall pattern has been imposed by Herodotus on his material, and its consonance with the pattern of east Greek stories suggests an interesting conclusion. Behind the preservation of the past in Ionia lies a moralizing tradition of story-telling found in mainland Greece only at Delphi, a tradition of which Herodotus is himself a representative: just as the Homeric poems are the culmination of the activity of generations of professional bards, so Herodotus the logos-writer has ‘collected together’ (to use Thucydides’ description) the results of an oral prose tradition, of folk stories told perhaps by professional or semi-professional ‘logos-makers’ in Delphi and the cities of Ionia. And he himself is the last and greatest of these logos-makers, weaving together the stories with all the skill of a traditional artist into a prose epic, whose form mirrors the form of its components. That this form is traditional and not of his own making is shown by its absence from the mainland Greek tradition: if he had been deliberately and consciously imposing a new pattern, he would surely have made this material conform to it; yet the comparative absence of moralizing folk-tale motifs in the stories of obvious mainland folk heroes like Kleomenes, Themistokles and others is remarkable.

Herodotus’ Athenian contemporaries scarcely understood the Ionian tradition within which he worked: they found his methods and his attitudes curiously old-fashioned. Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnions (lines 509–39) produced a brilliant and unfair parody of Herodotus’ conception of the causes of the Persian Wars; Thucydides’ whole methodology was based on a rejection of the techniques of Herodotus: he failed to see the nature of Herodotus’ achievement because he was writing a very different type of history – contemporary history.

Within the realm of observation Herodotus was faced with the same problem as modern ethnographers and anthropologists. We may describe alien cultures in terms of some model, whether it is a typological or ‘historical’ model, or a theory of the fundamental structure of all human societies; or we may less consciously describe a society in relation to our own. Herodotus attempted the latter, and his descriptions are often unbalanced by a search for comparisons and contrasts. He notices especially the similarities and the oppositions between Greeks and barbarians; he also (and here perhaps the entertainer is most apparent) has a keen eye for marvels and strange customs. Such an attitude can produce an unbalanced picture, as when he says ‘the Egyptians in most of their manners and customs exactly reverse the ordinary practices of mankind’ (Herodotus 2.35); but it is a less insidious fault than the imposition of a single conceptual scheme on the manifold variety of human societies. Herodotus remains not only the first practitioner of oral history, but also a model for a type of history whose importance is greater today than ever before.

Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, composed in Athens and in exile during and just after the war (432–04), contains a number of digressions on past history, which are mostly designed to correct or expose the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries; even when they show little sympathy for the problems of discovering about the past, they are written with care, using either rigorous argument or documentary evidence. In particular the first twenty-one chapters of book 1 are an attempt to demonstrate the type of historical generalization that can safely be made about the past; they represent a minimalist attitude to what can be known, and an implicit rejection of Herodotus’ attempt at more detailed history.

Thucydides pointed out many of the weaknesses of past history composed from oral tradition, but he failed to offer any serious alternative; it was his contemporaries who made the next major advance, by turning from general history to local history. A later critic described them:

These men made similar choices about the selection of their subjects, and their powers were not so very different from one another, some of them writing histories about the Greeks and some about the barbarians, and not linking all these to one another but dividing them according to peoples and cities, and writing about them separately, all keeping to one and the same aim: whatever oral traditions were preserved locally among peoples or cities, and whatever documents were stored in holy places or archives, to bring these to the common notice of everyone just as they were received, neither adding to them nor subtracting from them.

(Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Thucydides 5)

Whatever the aim of such writers, this is a somewhat favourable account of their actual achievement; still the discovery of local archives added a new dimension to the history of the past in at least one respect. The records surviving in local archives were primarily of chronological interest – lists of priests, victors at the games, and annual magistrates.

About the end of the fifth century the sophist and antiquarian lecturer Hippias of Elis published the Olympic victor list, which took chronology back to 776 in a four-year cycle: his system of Olympiad dating became standard for later historians. Another writer, Hellanikos of Lesbos, published a whole series of local histories in the late fifth century, whose character can be seen from two examples. The Priestesses of Hera at Argos was based on the records of the famous temple of Hera, which it apparently used to provide a general chronological framework for early Greek history: presumably the Argive records preserved not only the names of priestesses but also the length of office of each of them, and perhaps even some major historical events during their terms. Hellanikos’ other important work was a local history of Attica. It was almost certainly arranged round the list of annual magistrates going back to 683/2, of which a number of fragments on stone have been found in the Athenian agora. The fact that this complete list was publicly inscribed for the first time in the 420s, and not added to, suggests that it had probably been discovered by Hellanikos during his researches and brought by him to the attention of the Athenian people as an important historical document.

None of these works survive, but they were used by later authors, and in the case of Athens at least their characteristics are reasonably clear. They are marked by antiquarian interest in myth and origins, and by the importance they give to chronology; authors were often from priestly families (Kleidemos) or politicians (Androtion) or both (Philochoros). The influence of earlier local historians can be seen most clearly in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, a work which was discovered almost complete on a papyrus from Egypt in 1890. It is the only survivor of 158 constitutions of Greek states written by Aristotle and his pupils in the late fourth century, as part of his collection of evidence for the study of political science. The portion that survives is roughly eighty pages long, and consists of two sections, the first giving a constitutional history of Athens down to 404, the second describing the actual offices and working of the constitution at the time of writing. The historical part contains much material on political and institutional history, often distorted by later political prejudice; it must however be said that some of the political analyses are so crass and some of the documents so blatantly forged that many modern scholars have wanted to believe the work was compiled by a rather unintelligent pupil of Aristotle.

Later writers occasionally add information, which is of value only in so far as it derives from a trustworthy source. The most important of these authors are the Augustan geographer Strabo, Pausanias, the compiler of an antiquarian guide to Greece in the second century AD, and the essayist and biographer Plutarch (roughly AD 50–120), whose lives of Lykourgos, Solon and Themistokes reflect a late and imaginative tradition. Diodorus’ Historical Library (written in Rome before about 30 BC) preserves in its history of early Greece a précis of parts of the general history of the fourth century writer Ephoros, a rhetorical work largely derivative on Herodotus for this period.

The earliest inscriptions of more than a few words are in verse, but writing was quickly and widely used to record almost anything; for the period from the beginning of Greek writing down to the Persian Wars well over 5000 inscriptions are known, most of them of course very short. They are found in those types of material that can survive, bronze, lead, and especially pottery and stone; we should not forget the many documents that once existed on wood, parchment, wax tablets and papyrus. Some of the more important documents will be used as evidence later; these are mostly religious or commemorative (tombstones or dedications at shrines), or political (laws and treaties). The earliest surviving law is late seventh century, but the practice of putting up laws in public on stone or wood was common by the period of the Persian Wars.

The Mediterranean has been a hunting ground for European archaeologists for a century. The most useless site is the one which is still inhabited: Thebes, Chalcis, Greek Marseilles and early Syracuse are virtually unknown. The Athenian agora is only partly excavated because its true extent was miscalculated when the expropriations of owners by the government were carried out; more successful was the physical transplantation of the village of Delphi to a pleasanter and archaeologically barren site, against the wishes of the inhabitants and at French government expense (the French had won the right to excavate by removing the duty on Greek currants). Many sites in Asia Minor especially are disappointing because there was extensive rebuilding there in Hellenistic and Roman times: Delos and Cyrene are other examples. Particularly fruitful are sites that have been abandoned or sparsely occupied, with or without violent destruction (for instance Smyrna, the shrine of Perachora on the Isthmus of Corinth, Paestum); but the sacking and rebuilding of a city can also preserve – the survival of late archaic art is due largely to the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480 and the Periklean rebuilding, which caused the temple sculptures of Peisistratid Athens to be buried in the new foundations soon after they were carved. Excavations have been conducted at most of the obvious sites, the centres of archaic culture – Sparta, Aegina, Olympia, Athens, Samos, the Argolid, the Sicilian colonies; some less obvious sites turn out to be particularly rewarding because of their position – for instance Al Mina in north Syria or Naucratis in Egypt. Fringe areas such as the Scythian royal tombs or Celtic Gaul often provide important evidence because of their different burial customs: the cemeteries and other sites of Etruria have yielded so much Greek pottery that the eighteenth century thought Greek vases were Etruscan (Josiah Wedgwood called his pottery factory Etruria); there are few Greek museums whose collections can rival those of the great Italian Etruscan museums.

In relating different sites to each other and archaeological evidence in general to other types of evidence, the primary need is for an adequate chronological framework. For archaic Greece this is provided by pottery. In contrast to other artefacts pottery is of comparatively little value even when decorated, breakable, and when broken both useless and indestructible; in early Greece, painted pottery was a major art form whose styles varied from city to city and changed continually, so that it is comparatively easy to work out a relative chronology within each style. The styles of many areas were not widely distributed; Laconian pottery for instance is virtually confined to Sparta and its colony Tarentum; the various east Greek potteries are often difficult to distinguish, and their places of origin and chronological relationships are not yet fully determined. Such local styles are of limited interest in recording the presence of Greeks from a particular area in a particular place. Two cities, however, successively captured a wider market for their pottery: it is these styles, found all over the Mediterranean, which provide a relative chronology for archaeological sites in general, which can then be tied to absolute dates through known fixed points. Thus the dates of foundation of the Sicilian colonies given by Thucydides fix the beginnings of the early proto-Corinthian style; the sack of Athens in 480 offers another fixed point at the end of the archaic age, and there are a number of such fixes in between.

The pottery of Corinth was the first to achieve widespread circulation, helped of course by the city’s position as the starting point of the route to the west. Contact with the near east and the import of textiles and metalwork brought various decorative motifs to Greek art, and especially an interest in the realistic portrayal of animal and vegetable life: this orientalizing style appears in Corinthian pottery first about 725, when the late Geometric style gives way to early proto-Corinthian. The invention of the Black Figure technique of painting came within a generation (middle proto-Corinthian, c. 700–650); in this the figures are painted in black silhouette and details are then engraved on the figures after firing.

Corinthian pottery was the only ware widely exported for about a century; in the sixth century it was superseded by Athenian. Attic Black Figure began under the influence of Corinth (610–550), but quickly won pre-eminence, and in its mature phase (c. 570–25) reached an artistic perfection which has made it famous ever since. By about 530 a new technique of painting had been invented in Athens, the Red Figure technique, in which it is the background which is painted black, and the details of the figures are drawn in by brush. So individual are the styles of the different Black Figure and Red Figure artists that the same methods can be applied to distinguishing their hands as have been applied to Renaissance and later painters: the work of Sir John Beazley has resulted in the more or less certain identification of the work of over a thousand artists, and their classification both chronologically and into schools. Quite apart from our knowledge of painted pottery as an art form, this has given a chronological precision unknown in any other area of archaeology.

In more general terms the contribution of archaeology to the study of early Greek history is enormously greater than for most periods of history. It has explained many aspects of the origins and growth of Greek culture, its interdependence and local variations, the external influences on it and the means by which they arrived. It has illuminated the patterns of trade and colonization, and the major advances in warfare which lie at the basis of Greek geographical expansion and the diffusion of political power to a widening circle. Archaeology of course has obvious limitations, in that it can only offer partial insight into the less material aspects of life – religion, politics, culture and ideas; but it is more important to point out the areas where it still has more to contribute. Archaeologists have tended to concentrate on change rather than on continuity, and to direct their attention to certain areas of culture whose relative importance is not obvious. Thus we still know more about town centres than about towns, and about towns than about the countryside, or about weapons than about agricultural implements, and much more about the dead than the living. Despite the fact that Greek archaeology has stood as a model for other periods for so long, much remains to be done; and what is done will illuminate especially those areas about which literary and epigraphic sources are comparatively silent. The light thrown on the Dark Age in the last generation is an outstanding example of what can be achieved; and recent developments in survey archaeology have begun to illuminate the history of the countryside.