Early Greece

III

The End of the Dark Age: the Aristocracy

ABOUT THE late eighth century, with Homer and Hesiod, literary evidence becomes available to supplement the fìndings of archaeology. But whereas Hesiod describes a real world contemporary with himself, it is obvious from the character of the Greek oral epic tradition that there are difficulties in using the Homeric poems for history. In some respects Homeric society is clearly an artificial literary creation. It is a natural tendency of all heroic epic to exaggerate the social status and behaviour of everyone involved, so that characters appear generally to belong to the highest social class and to possess great wealth and extraordinary abilities, in implicit contrast with the inequalities and squalor of the present age. Equally it is agreed that there are some minor elements in the Homeric poems from almost every period; the presence or absence of isolated phenomena cannot therefore be held to count for or against any particular date. This rule can be given a general negative extension, for the oral epic tradition consciously or unconsciously excludes whole areas of experience as irrelevant, or as known to be later than the heroic age: thus all signs of the coming of the Dorians and the Ionian migration are absent, as are many aspects of the poet’s own period. In general, omissions, however large, carry little weight for the argument.

Nevertheless I would argue that there is a historical basis to the society described in Homer, in the poet’s retrojection of the institutions of his own day. Archaeological evidence suggests this. Though the poems show a number of Mycenean survivals, the Linear B tablets have revealed a society wholly different from that portrayed in Homer; equally the scanty evidence from the early Dark Age is incompatible with the material culture of the Homeric poems. Only in the later Dark Age do the archaeological and literary evidence begin to coincide over a wide range of phenomena. To take examples which have been used in the controversy, the emphasis on Phoenicians as traders points most probably to a period between 900 and 700, as does the typical display of wealth through the Storage and giving away of bronze cauldrons and tripods. The architecture of the Homeric house fìnds its closest parallels in the same period. Homeric burials are by cremation which points away from the Mycenean inhumation to the later Dark Age and onwards, though the actual funerary rites owe much to poetic invention, which in turn affected contemporary practices. The earliest and most striking instances have been found at Salamis in Cyprus, whose rulers, in close contact with Euboea and possessed of great wealth as vassals of Assyria, were practising complicated ‘Homeric’ funeral rites from the second half of the eighth century. On the mainland offerings of almost the same date found inserted into Mycenean tombs suggest that epic had created a new interest in the heroic past which itself influenced the development of hero cult.

Admittedly some central aspects of Homeric society have been thought to show a basic confusion. In descriptions of fìghting, for instance, the chariot, which disappeared as a weapon of war at the end of the Mycenean period, is still an essential item of the aristocrat’s equipment; but the epic tradition no longer under stood its military use. Instead it has become a transport vehicle taking the heroes from place to place on the battlefield, and standing idly by as they dismount and fìght on foot: occasionally it even takes on the attributes of a horse and performs feats such as jumping ditches. This seems to be a combination of a Mycenean weapon with the tactics of the aristocratic mounted infantry of the late Dark Age. Again the Homeric warrior fights with a jumble of weapons from different periods: he can even start off to battle with a pair of throwing spears and end up fìghting with a single thrusting one. The metal used for weapons is almost invariably bronze, but for agricultural and industrial tools it is iron – a combination unknown in the real world, where the replacement of bronze by iron came first in the military sphere. Such examples do not however prove the artificiality of Homeric society. The elements all seem to belong to real societies: it is only their combination which is artifìcial; and when the different elements can be dated, they show a tendency to fall into two categories, dim reflections of Mycenean practices and a clearer portrayal of the late Dark Age world.

More general considerations reinforce this conclusion. The process of continual re-creation which is implied by an oral epic tradition means that the factual basis of epic is little different from that implied in any oral tradition: the focus is sharpest on contemporary phenomena, but the existence of fixed linguistic rhythms and conventional descriptions leads back into the past; and since the poet is consciously re-creating the past, he will discard the obviously contemporary and preserve what he knows to be older elements. The reality of the resulting society must be tested by using comparative evidence from other cultures to show how compatible the different institutions described by Homer are, and whether the overall nature of the society resembles that of other known primitive societies. Finally there is a clear line of development from the institutions described in Homer to those which existed in later Greece.

The differences in the way Homer and Hesiod portray society are not then to be explained chronologically: Homer’s society is of course idealized, and reaches back in time through the generations of his predecessors; Hesiod’s is fully contemporary. And the towns of Ionia which produced Homer were in many respects more sophisticated, more secure and more conservative than the social tensions of the peasant communities in Boeotia. But also Homer describes society from above, from the aristocratic point of view, whereas Hesiod’s vision is that of the lower orders, unable to envisage change but obsessed with the petty injustices of the social system and the realities of peasant farming. It is for this reason that I have not distinguished sharply the evidence of Homer and Hesiod, but have used them to create a composite picture of society at the end of the Dark Age. Given the different characteristics of the two types of epic it is however obvious that inferences drawn from Hesiod are more certain than inferences from heroic epic.

The subject matter of Homeric epic is the activities of the great, and it is their social environment which is portrayed most clearly. The word basileus, which is the normal title of the Homeric hero, in later Greek came to mean king; but in the Linear B tablets the king himself is called by a title which survives in certain passages of Homer, wanax: somewhere much lower in the hierarchy at loca1 level is a group of people called by a name which is clearly the later Greek basileus; presumably when the palace economy disappeared, it was these men who were left as the leaders in their communities. In Homer and Hesiod the word basileus is in fact often used in a way which is much closer to the idea of a nobility, a class of aristocrats, one of whom may of course hold an ill-defined and perhaps uneasy position of supremacy within the community. Agamemnon at Troy is the highest basileus among a group of equals whose powers and attributes are not essentially different from his. When Odysseus visits the ideal land of Phaeacia he meets many basilēes feasting in the house of Alcinous and Alcinous himself says, ‘twelve honoured basilēes rule as leaders over the people, and I am the thirteenth’ (Odyssey 8. 390–1 ). The basilēes to whom Hesiod appeals for justice are a group of nobles. Monarchy probably ceased to be a widespread phenomenon in Greece at the beginning of the Dark Age: once again Homer’s ambivalence is due to the combination of Mycenean reminiscence with later society.

The basilēes of early Greece are a group of hereditary nobles largely independent of each other and separated from the rest of the community by their style of life as much as by their wealth, prerogatives or power. Each stands at the head of a group which can be viewed in two different ways: in terms of hereditary descent, as his genos or family, and in terms of its economic counterpart, the oikos (household or estate).

The Homeric family is not a particularly extended group. It comprises essentially the head of the house, his wife and his adult sons with their wives and offspring, together with other members of the immediate family. On his death the property is divided equally by lot among his sons, who then set up separate households; male children by slave women mostly have some status, though a lower one than sons of the wife: at one point Odysseus claims to be a bastard from Crete; his father treated him the same as his other children, but when he died the estate was shared among these, while he received only a house and little else (Odyssey 14.202ff). The basic Greek word for a man’s land is klēros, what he has inherited by lot; his dearest possessions which he will not leave and for which he will fight are his family, his oikos and his klēros (Iliad 15.498; Odyssey 14.64). It is the details of the division by lot of their father’s estate which Hesiod and his brother are quarrelling about (Works and Days 37), and Hesiod proclaims, work hard ‘that you may buy the klēros of others, not another yours’ (341). Beyond the immediate kin, the genos seems to have little significance; genealogies are not important and seldom go back beyond the third generation. Names for more distant kin are few, though kinship by marriage has a special term, as do certain members of the mother’s family. A man may expect help from his father-in-law or son-in-law as from his friends (Odyssey 8.58iff; Hesiod, Works and Days 345). But in general it is the immediate family which counts: blood-money for killing a man is described as due to his brother or father (Iliad 9.632f), not to any wider group; and when Odysseus kills the suitors, the father of one takes up the blood-feud with the words ‘it brings great shame for future men to hear if we do not take vengeance for the deaths of our sons and brothers’ (Odyssey 24.433ff). Curiously it is only killing within the family which involves a wider group of relatives or supporters (Iliad 2.66iff; Odyssey 15.272ff). It is somewhat misleading therefore to translate genos as clan rather than family.

The patriarchal nature of the family is shown not only by the rules of inheritance. Marriages are arranged by the heads of the genos, often for reasons of political friendship; the bride comes from the same social class, but is not necessarily related or even from the same area. Achilles says that if he returns from Troy, his father Peleus will himself seek a wife for him; ‘for there are many Achaean women in Hellas and Phthia, daughters of nobles who defend their citadels, one of whom I shall make my beloved bride if I wish’ (Iliad 9.394ff). The arranging of the marriage seems to involve both the giving of bridegifts (for which there is a special word, hedna) by the family of the bridegroom to that of the bride, and the provision of a dowry for the bride by her relatives. It has been suggested that these practices are incompatible, and represent two different historical layers in Homer; but they are in fact found together in other societies. The purpose of the dowry is to endow the future household; the bridegift has a different aim, which is neither to purchase the bride nor to initiate a gift-exchange involving the bride: it is rather to impress the bride’s family with the wealth and status of the bridegroom’s family. This is shown by the competition for a particularly desirable bride: Penelope complains to her suitors, ‘this has not been established in the past as the right way for suitors to behave, who wish to woo a noble lady and the daughter of a rich man, and compete with one another; but they themselves bring oxen and fat sheep as a feast for the friends of the bride, and they give splendid gifts: they do not eat another’s livelihood without repayment’ (Odyssey 18.275ff). The gifts of such suitors are not conditional on winning the bride’s hand: the losers lose all, so that there is here no exchange agreed, merely a contest in giving. The bride joins the bridegroom’s genos: when Telemachus arrives at Menelaus’ palace, a double wedding feast is in progress: his (bastard) son is bringing home a bride; and his daughter, long ago promised by Menelaus to Achilles’ (bastard) son, is leaving home (Odyssey 4. 1ff). The submergence of the wife in the new family of her father-in-law is shown by the survival in the Iliad of a kinship term found also in other Indo-European languages, e(i)nater, for the relationship between the wives of brothers, who would normally have lived together in the same household. The greatest tragedy is the premature death of the head, leaving his sons too young to assert their rights; this is what Andromache fears for her son in Troy, now Hector is dead (Iliad 22.484ff), and it is this struggle which Telemachus faces on Ithaca as his father’s prolonged absence makes it more and more likely that he has died.

Lower down the social scale marriage was a more practical affair, closely related to inheritance. Hesiod regards women as a curse sent by Zeus, ‘a great pain for mortals, living with men, sharing not in dread poverty but in prosperity’, like drones in the hive, but necessary in order to avoid the worse fate of others sharing the inheritance (Theogony 590–612). A man will marry at thirty a virgin in her fifth year from puberty (Works and Days 695fr; rather old: 14–16 was later the common age of marriage for girls), and he will have only one son if possible; though if one lives long enough there are compensations in more (376ff). Despite the strength of certain incest tabus shown in myth, endogamy, marriage within a relatively restricted cycle of relations, was the rule in Greece, and served to preserve existing patterns of ownership: in classical Athens an heiress could legally be claimed in marriage by her father’s closest male relative, beginning with her uncle; the procedure involved a herald publicly inviting claimants to come forward.

Many of these differences between the aristocracy and the ordinary citizen survived. Throughout the archaic period marriage outside the community was common between aristocrats, and contributed considerably to their political power and to the development of relations between cities; when in the mid fifth century Athens passed a law that citizens must in future be of Athenian parentage on both sides, this was a popular, anti-aristocratic move; the proposer, Perikles, like other Athenian aristocrats, would have found many earlier members of his family debarred from citizenship by such a rule.

A similar tension between aristocracy and peasantry perhaps explains the development in the status of women in early Greece. Hesiod reflects the general attitude then and later; but, though the portraits of Penelope and Nausicaa are idealized, Homer suggests that there was a time when women of the aristocracy had a high social status and considerable freedom: they could move freely without escorts, discuss on equal terms with their husbands, and might even be present at the banquets in the great hall. They were responsible for a large part of the household’s economic activities, weaving, grinding corn, and the supervision of the women slaves and the storechamber. In later Greek society respectable women were largely confined to their quarters, and took little part in male social activities at home or in public. This change in status is probably related to the movement from an estate-centred life to a city-centred one: the urbanization of Greek culture in most communities saw the increasing exclusion of women from important activities such as athletics, politics, drinking parties and intellectual discussion; these characteristically group male activities resulted also in the growth in most areas of that typically aristocratic Greek phenomenon, male homosexuality – though in the Symposium (182a) Plato mentions Ionia as an exception. Apart perhaps from Achilles and Patroclus and Zeus and Ganymede, Homer portrays early Greek society as markedly heterosexual. Marriage customs seem to show a similar shift; the bridegifts so prominent in Homer disappear, and in classical Greece only the dowry is known. In other words women had once been valuable social assets in an age when family and marriage alliances were more important; in the developed city-state they were no longer at a premium.

Around the immediate family lay the oikos. The early Greek basileus worked his estate with the help of slaves and occasional hired labour. The status of hired labourer (thēs) is the worst on earth: ‘spare me your praise of death’, says Achilles to Odysseus in the underworld, ‘I would rather be on earth and hire myself to a landless man with little for himself to live on, than rule over all the corpses of the dead’ (Odyssey 11.488ff). The life of a labourer is scarcely different from that of a beggar, for both are free men who have lost their position in society as completely as they can, and are dependent on the charity of another – only the beggar is preserved from starvation by the protection of Zeus; as an insult one of Penelope’s suitors offers the beggar Odysseus a job on an upland farm in return for food and clothing (Odyssey 18.357ff). This attitude to wage labour as private misfortune and public disgrace was widely prevalent later, and had a profound effect in shaping the economy’s dependence on slave labour: casual labour or skilled labour were acceptable types of employment, but free men would not willingly put themselves in the power of another by hiring themselves out on a regular basis. By contrast the slave had a value and a recognized position in society; nor was he responsible for his own misfortune. ‘But at least I shall be master of my own house and of the slaves whom great Odysseus captured for me’, says Telemachus (Odyssey 1.397ff): in raiding and warfare it was traditional to kill the males of any captured city and enslave the women and children; kidnapping, piracy and trade were also sources of supply: the faithful swineherd Eumaeus tells how his city was not sacked, nor was he captured while tending the flocks: he was the son of a noble, stolen by Phoenician traders with the help of his Phoenician nurse (herself captured by Taphian pirates) and sold to Odysseus’ father, who had brought him up with his youngest child (Odyssey 15.352ff). For such reasons women were relatively common as household slaves; men were few, reared from childhood and highly valued: they were put in charge of farms and allowed families of their own.

The basic source of wealth in ancient Greece was agriculture, which changes slowly if at all. Barley, because of its hardiness, was always the chief crop in Greece; wheat was a secondary cereal. The widespread use of linen for clothing and ropes shows that flax was also grown. The scenes portrayed on the shield of Achilles include ploughing, reaping and the vintage (Iliad 18.541–72); Hesiod’s description of the farmer’s year largely concerns the same activities (Works and Days 383–617): ploughing and sowing must begin when the Pleiades set and the cranes pass overhead (October), at the start of the rainy season: this was the hardest work of the year, for the plough was a light wooden one tipped with iron, which merely scratched the surface without turning it, and had to be forced into the earth by the ploughman as he drove the oxen. Hesiod recommends two ploughs ready in case one splits, and a strong forty-year-old man; on the shield of Achilles the fallow is ploughed three times, and each man is given a drink as he reaches the end of the furrow; Odysseus watches the setting sun ‘as when a man longs for his supper, for whom all day two dark oxen have dragged the jointed plough through the fallow, and welcome to him the sunlight sinks, so that he may leave for his supper; and his knees shake as he goes’ (Odyssey 13.31ff).

Autumn and winter are the times for cutting wood for tools: keep away from the talkers round the fire in the smithy. With the rising of Arcturus (February-March) work begins again; the vines must be pruned before the swallow returns: when snails begin to climb the plants (May) it is time to start the harvest; the rising of Orion (July) signals the winnowing and storing of the corn. High summer is the only time that Hesiod recommends for resting, in the shade by a spring with wine and food – until the vintage when Orion and the Dog Star are in the centre of the sky (September).

Apart from these staple crops, various types of green vegetable and bean were cultivated, and fruit in orchards: outside the house of Alcinous there is a large orchard with pears, pomegranates, apples, fìgs and olives, together with a vegetable garden and two springs for irrigation (Odyssey 7.112ff). One fruit mentioned had not yet obtained the central importance it possessed later – the olive. Olive oil was already used in washing (like soap), but not yet apparently for lighting and cooking: the main hall was lit with braziers and torches, not oil lamps, and they cooked with animal fat. It seems that there was no specialized cultivation of the olive: this had to wait for a change in habits of consumption, and the growth of a trade in staple commodities between different areas; for the concentration on olive oil in Attica from the sixth century onwards presupposes both a more than local market and the ability to organize corn imports.

Another characteristic of early Greek agriculture has caused controversy since ancient times. Classical Greece was largely a cereal-eating culture, deriving its proteins from beans (the ancient equivalent of a vegetarian, the Pythagorean, abstained from them), fish, and dairy produce from goats and sheep. Meat was eaten mainly at festivals, after the animal had been sacrifìed to the gods and their entrails burned as offerings. But ancient scholars noted that the Homeric heroes were largely meat-eating. Moreover wealth was measured in head of cattle: slaves, armour, tripods, ransoms, women are valued at so many cattle, and the general adjectives for wealth often refer to livestock. Eumaeus describes his master’s wealth: ‘twelve herds of cattle on the mainland, as many flocks of sheep, as many droves of pigs, as many wandering herds of goats, that strangers graze and his own herdsmen’ (that is, hired and slave labour: Odyssey 14.100ff). In contrast, though Hesiod himself had his vision while tending sheep on Mt Helicon and could think of nothing better than tender veal or goat to go with his cheese and wine in the summer heat, he gives no instructions about animal husbandry: mules and oxen were beasts of burden, sheep and goats produced wool and milk products, but they were sidelines in the main business of agriculture. Horses were outside his interests, for they were few and belonged to aristocrats, to be used only in sport and warfare.

This clearly reflects a basic shift of emphasis in Greek agriculture away from animal husbandry, but the problem is how to date it. The Linear B tablets show that the Mycenean kings possessed large herds; and some scholars have seen the transition as occurring early in the Dark Age. But it seems more likely that it is a later phenomenon almost contemporary with Hesiod. Populations in movement tend to be pastoral rather than crop-growing; the animal bones found by tombs show that meat continued to be widely available for the funeral feast throughout the Geometrie period, and there are many terracotta fìgurines of domestic animals dedicated at early sanctuaries. But animals are wasteful in land-use. As the population began to grow, and men like Hesiod’s father moved into the uplands, animal husbandry gradually gave way to arable farming, until only the mountains were left for sheep and goats. It will have been the aristocrats who had the lands to keep to the old style longest; and it may also be that in Asia Minor pastures could be extended into the hinterland, in a way not possible in Greece and the islands. Homer and Hesiod between them record the transition.