The Late Archaic City-State
Although the Greek city-states differed among themselves in size and natural resources,
over the course of the Archaic age they came to share certain fundamental political
institutions and social traditions: citizenship, slavery, the legal disadvantages and
political exclusion of women, and the continuing influence of aristocrats in society and
politics. During this time, however, different city-states developed these shared
characteristics in strikingly different ways. Monarchy had died out in Greece with the end
of Mycenaean civilization, except for the dual kingship that existed in Sparta as part of
its complex oligarchic system rather than as a monarchy in the ordinary sense. In Sparta
and some other Greek city-states, only a rather restricted number of men exercised
meaningful political power (thus creating a political system called an oligarchy, meaning
“rule by the few.”) Other city-states experienced periods of
domination by the kind of sole ruler who seized power in unconstitutional fashion and whom
the Greeks called a tyrant. Tyranny, passed down from father to son, existed at various
times across the breadth of the Greek world from city-states on the island of Sicily in
the west to Samos off the coast of Ionia in the east. Still other city-states created
early forms of democracy (“rule by the people”) by giving all male
citizens the power to participate in governing. Assemblies of men with some influence on
the king had existed in certain early states in the ancient Near East, but Greek democracy
broke new ground with the amount of political power that it invested in its male citizen
body. The Athenians established Greece's most renowned democracy, in which the individual
freedom of citizens flourished to a degree unprecedented in the ancient world. By
examining these different paths of political and social development, we can grasp the
great challenge faced by the Greeks as they struggled to construct a new way of life
during the Archaic Age. In the course of this struggle, they also began to formulate new
ways of understanding the physical world, their relations to it, and their relationships
with each other.
The Power of Sparta
The Spartans made oligarchy the political base for a society devoted to military
readiness, and the resulting
Spartan way of life1 became famous for its discipline, which showed most prominently in the Spartan
infantry, the most powerful military force in Greece during the Archaic Age.
Sparta's easily defended
location2—nestled on a narrow north-south plain between rugged mountain ranges
in the southeastern Peloponnese, in a region called Laconia (hence the designation of
Spartans as Laconians)—gave it a secure base for developing its might. Sparta
had access to the sea through a
harbor3 situated some twenty-five miles south of its urban center, but this harbor
opened onto a dangerous stretch of the Mediterranean whipped by treacherous currents and
winds. As a consequence, enemies could not threaten the Spartans by sea, but their
relative isolation from the sea also kept the Spartans from becoming adept sailors.
Their interests and
their strength4 lay on the land.
The Early History of Sparta
The Greeks believed the ancestors of the Spartans were
Dorians5
who had invaded the Peloponnese from central Greece and defeated the original
inhabitants of Laconia around 950 B.C., but no archaeological evidence supports the
notion that a “Dorian invasion” actually took place. From wherever
the original Spartans came, they conquered the inhabitants of Laconia and settled in at
least four small villages, two of which apparently dominated the others. These early
settlements later cooperated to form the core of what would in the
Archaic
Age6 become the polis of the Spartans. The Greeks gave the name
“synoecism”7 (“union of households”) to this process of political
unification, in which most people continued to live in their original villages even
after one village began to serve as the center of the new city-state. One apparent
result of the compromises required to forge Spartan unity was that the Spartans retained
not one but two hereditary military leaders of high prestige, whom they called kings.
These kings8, perhaps originally
the leaders of the two dominant villages, served as the religious heads of Sparta and
commanders of its army. The kings did not enjoy unfettered power to make decisions or
set policy, however, because they operated not as pure monarchs but as leaders of the
oligarchic institutions that governed the Spartan city-state. Rivalry between the two
royal families periodically led to fierce disputes, and the initial custom of having two
supreme military commanders also paralyzed the Spartan army when the kings disagreed on
strategy in the middle of a military campaign. The Spartans therefore eventually decided
that the army on campaign would be commanded by only one king at a time.
Spartan Oligarchy
The “few” (oligoi ) who made
policy in the oligarchy ruling Sparta were a group of twenty-eight men over sixty years
old, joined by the two kings. This group of thirty, called the “council of
elders” (
gerousia
9), formulated proposals that were submitted
to an assembly of all free adult males. This assembly had only limited power to amend
the proposals put before it; mostly it was expected to approve the council's plans.
Rejections were rare because the council retained the right to withdraw a proposal when
the reaction to it by the crowd in the assembly presaged a negative vote. “If
the people speak crookedly,” according to Spartan tradition, “the
elders and the leaders of the people shall be withdrawers [of the proposal].”
The council could then bring the proposal back on another occasion after there had been
time to marshal support for its passage.
A board of five annually elected “overseers” (
ephors
10) counterbalanced the influence of the kings and the gerousia. Chosen from the adult male citizens at large, the
ephors convened the gerousia and the
assembly, and they exercised considerable judicial powers of judgment and punishment.
They could even bring charges against a king and imprison him until his trial. The
creation of the board of ephors diluted the political power of the
oligarchic gerousia and the kings because the job of
the ephors was to ensure the supremacy of law. The Athenian
Xenophon
later reported11: “All men rise from their seats in the presence of the king, except
for the ephors. The ephors on behalf of the polis
and the king on his own behalf swear an oath to each other every month: the king swears
that he will exercise his office according to the established laws of the
polis , and the polis swears that it will preserve his
kingship undisturbed if he abides by his oath.”
The Laws of Sparta
The Spartans were sticklers for obedience to the law (nomos ) as the guide to proper behavior on matters large and small. When
the ephors entered office, for example, they issued an official
proclamation to the men of Sparta: “Shave your moustache and obey the
laws.” The depth of Spartan respect for their system of government under law
was symbolized by their tradition that Apollo of Delphi had sanctioned it with an oracle
called the
Rhetra12. A Spartan leader named
Lycurgus, they said, had instituted the reforms that the Rhetra institutionalized. Even
in antiquity historians had no firm information about the dates of Lycurgus's leadership
or precisely how he changed Spartan laws. All we can say today is that the Spartans
evolved their law-based political system during the period from about 800 to 600 B.C.
Unlike other Greeks, the Spartans never had their laws written down. Instead, they
preserved their system from generation to generation with a distinctive, highly
structured way of life based on a special economic foundation.
The Dangerous Situation of Sparta
The distinctiveness of the Spartan
way of life13 was fundamentally a reaction to their living in the midst of people whom they
had conquered in war and enslaved to exploit economically but who outnumbered them
greatly. To maintain their position of superiority over their conquered neighbors, from
whom they derived their subsistence, Spartan men had to turn themselves into a society
of soldiers constantly on guard. They accomplished this transformation by a radical
restructuring of traditional family life enforced by strict adherence to the laws and
customs governing practically all aspects of behavior. Through constant, daily
reinforcement of their strict code of values, the Spartans ensured their survival
against the enemies they had created by subjugating their neighbors. The seventh-century
poet Tyrtaeus, whose verses exemplify the high quality of the poetry produced in early
Sparta before its military culture began to exclude such accomplishments, expressed that
code in his ranking of martial courage as the supreme male value: “I would
never remember or mention in my work any man for his speed afoot or wrestling skill, not
if he was as huge and strong as a Cyclops or could run faster than the North Wind, nor
more handsome than Tithonus or richer than Midas or Cinyras, nor more kingly than
Pelops, or had speech more honeyed than Adrastus, not even if he possessed every
glory—not unless he had the strength of a warrior in full rush.”
Spartan Neighbors and Slaves
Some of the conquered inhabitants of Laconia, the territory of Sparta, continued to
live in self-governing communities. Called “those who live round
about” (perioikoi ), these neighbors were
required to serve in the Spartan army and pay taxes but lacked citizen rights. Perhaps
because they retained their personal freedom and property, however, the
perioikoi
14 never rebelled against Spartan control. Far different was the
fate of the conquered people who ended up as
helots
15, a word derived from the Greek term for “capture.” Later
ancient commentators described the helots as “between slave and
free” because they were not the personal property of individual Spartans but
rather slaves belonging to the whole community, which alone could free them.
Helots had a semblance of family life because they were expected to
produce children to maintain their population, which was compelled to labor as farmers
and household slaves as a way of freeing Spartan citizens from any need to do such work.
Spartan men in fact wore their hair very long to show they were
“gentlemen” rather than laborers, for whom long hair was an
inconvenience.
In their private lives, helots could keep some personal possessions and
practice their religion, as could slaves generally in Greece. Publicly, however,
helots lived under the threat of officially sanctioned
violence.16lived under the threat of officially sanctioned violence. Every year the
ephors formally declared a state of war to exist between Sparta and the
helots, thereby allowing any Spartan to kill a helot without any civil
penalty or fear of offending the gods by unsanctioned murder. By beating the
helots frequently, forcing them to get drunk in public as an object
lesson to young Spartans, marking them out by having them wear dogskin caps, and
generally treating them with scorn, the Spartans consistently emphasized the otherness
of the helots compared to themselves. In this way, the Spartans erected a
moral barrier between themselves and the helots to justify their harsh treatment of
fellow Greeks.
The Helots of Messenia
When the arable land of Laconia, which was predominately held by aristocrats, proved
too small to support the full citizen population of Sparta, the Spartans attacked their
Greek neighbors to the west in the Peloponnese, the
Messenians17. In the
First Messenian War18 (c. 730-710 B.C.) and then in
the Second (c. 640-630 B.C.), the Spartan army captured the territory of Messenia, which
amounted to forty percent of the Peloponnese, and reduced the Messenians to the status
of helots. With the addition of the tens of thousands of people in
Messenia, the total helot population now more than outnumbered that of
Sparta, whose male citizens at this time amounted to perhaps between 8,000 and 10,000.
The terrible loss felt by the Messenians at their fate is well portrayed by their legend
of King
Aristodemus19, whom the Messenians remembered as having sacrificed his
beloved daughter to the gods of the underworld in an attempt to enlist their aid against
the invading Spartans. When his campaign of guerrilla warfare at last failed,
Aristodemus is said to have slain himself in despair on her grave. Deprived of their
freedom and their polis , the Messenian helots were ever after
on the lookout for a chance to revolt against their Spartan overlords.
The Contribution of Helots
Their labor made helots valuable to the Spartans. Laconian and Messenian
helots alike primarily farmed plots of land that the state had originally
allotted to individual Spartan households for their sustenance. Some helots
also worked as household servants. By the fifth century, helots would also
accompany Spartan hoplite warriors on the march to carry their heavy gear and armor. In
the words of the seventh-century B.C. poet Tyrtaeus, helots worked
“like donkeys exhausted under heavy loads; they lived under the
painful necessity of having to give their masters half the food their ploughed land
bore.”20 This compulsory rent of fifty percent of everything produced by the
helots working on each free family's assigned plot was supposed to amount
to seventy measures of barley each year to the male master of the household and twelve
to his wife, along with an equivalent amount of fruit and other produce. In all, this
food was enough to support six or seven people. The labor of the helots
allowed Spartan men to devote themselves to full-time training for hoplite warfare in
order to protect themselves from external enemies and to suppress helot
rebellions, especially in Messenia. Contrasting the freedom of Spartan citizens from
ordinary work with the lot of the helots , the later Athenian Critias
commented “Laconia is the home of the freest of the Greeks, and of the most
enslaved.”
The Existence of Spartan Boys
The entire Spartan way of life was directed toward keeping the Spartan army at tip-top
strength. Boys lived at home only until their seventh year, when they were taken away to
live in communal barracks with other males until they were thirty.
They spent most
of their time exercising, hunting, training with weapons, and being acculturated to
Spartan values by listening to tales of bravery and heroism at the common meals
presided over by older men21. The standard of discipline was strict, to prepare young males for the hard life
of a soldier on campaign. For example, they were not allowed to speak at will. (Our word
“laconic” meaning “of few words” comes from the
Greek word “Laconian,” one of the terms for a Spartan; another is
Lacedaimonian, from the name Lacedaimon applied to Sparta). Boys were also purposely
underfed so that they would have to develop the skills of stealth by stealing food. Yet
if they were caught, punishment and disgrace followed immediately. One famous Spartan
tale taught how seriously boys were supposed to fear such failure: having successfully
stolen a fox, which he was hiding under his clothing, a Spartan youth died because he
let the panicked animal rip out his insides rather than be detected in the theft. By the
Classical period, older boys would be dispatched to live in the wilds for a period as
members of the
“secret band”22 whose job it was to murder any helots who seemed likely to foment rebellion.
The Equals
Spartan boys who could not survive the tough conditions of their childhood training
fell into social disgrace and were not certified as
Equals23 (homoioi), the
official name for adult males entitled to full citizen rights of participation in
politics and the respect of the community. Only the sons of the royal family were
exempted from this training, perhaps to avoid a potential social crisis if a king's son
failed to stay the course.
The Spartan Common Messes
Each Spartan Equal had to gain entry to a group that dined together at common meals, in
a
“common mess”24
(sussition), each of which had about fifteen members.
If not blackballed when he applied, the new member was admitted on the condition that he
contribute a regular amount of barley, cheese, figs, condiments, and wine to the mess
from the produce provided by the helots working on his family plot. Some
meat was apparently contributed, too, because Spartan cuisine was infamous for a black,
bloody broth of pork condemned as practically inedible by other Greeks. Perhaps it was
made from the wild boars Spartan men loved to hunt, an activity for which messmates were
formally excused from the compulsory communal meals. If any member failed to keep up his
contributions, he was expelled from the mess and lost his full citizen rights. The
experience of spending so much time in these common messes schooled Sparta's young men
in the values of their society. There they learned to call all older men
“father”25 to emphasize that their primary loyalty was to the group and not to their
genetic families. There they were chosen to be the special favorites of males older than
themselves to build bonds of affection, including physical love, for others at whose
side they would have to march into deadly battle. There they learned to take the rough
joking of army life for which Sparta was well known. In short, the common mess took the
place of a boy's family and school when he was growing up and remained his main social
environment once he had reached adulthood. Its function was to mold and maintain his
values consistent with the demands of the one honorable occupation for Spartan men: a
soldier obedient to orders. Tyrtaeus enshrined the Spartan male ideal in his poetry:
“Know that it is good for the polis and the whole people when a
man takes his place in the front row of warriors and stands his ground without
flinching.”
Women at Sparta
Spartan women26 were renowned throughout the Greek world for their relative freedom. Other
Greeks regarded it as scandalous that Spartan girls exercised with boys and did so
wearing minimal clothing. Women at Sparta were supposed to use the freedom from labor
provided by the helot system to keep themselves physically fit to bear healthy children
and raise them to be strict upholders of Spartan values. A metaphorical formulation of
the male ideal for Spartan women appears, for example, in the poetry of Alcman in the
late seventh century, who wrote songs for the performances of female and male choruses
that were common on Spartan civic and religious occasions. The dazzling leader of a
women's chorus, he writes, “stands out as if among a herd of cows someone
placed a firmly-built horse with ringing hooves, a prize winner from winged
dreams.”
Land Ownership at Sparta
Spartan women, like men, could own land27 privately.
Ordinary coined money28 was deliberately banned to try to discourage the accumulation of material goods,
but the ownership of land remained extremely important in Spartan society. More and more
land came into the hands of women in later Spartan history
because the male
population declined29 through losses in war, especially during the Classical Age. Moreover, Spartan
women with property enjoyed special status as a result of the Spartan law forbidding the
division of the portion of land originally allotted to a family. This law meant that, in
a family with more than one son, all the land went to the eldest son. Fathers with
multiple sons therefore needed to seek out brides for their younger sons who had
inherited land and property from their fathers because they had no brother surviving.
Otherwise, younger sons, inheriting no land from their own family, might fall into dire
poverty.
Reproduction at Sparta
The freedom of Spartan women from some of the restrictions imposed on them in other
Greek city-states had the same purpose as the men's
common messes30: the production of manpower for the Spartan army. By the Classical Age,
the ongoing problem of producing enough children to keep the Spartan citizen
population from shrinking had grown acute.31 Men were
legally required to get married32, with bachelors subjected to fines and public ridicule. Women who died in
childbirth were apparently the only Spartans allowed to have their names placed on their
tombstones, a mark of honor for their sacrifice to the state.
With their husbands so rarely at home, women directed the households, which included
servants, daughters, and sons until they left for their communal training. As a result,
Spartan women exercised more power in the household than did women elsewhere in Greece.
Until he was thirty, a Spartan husband was not allowed to live with his family, and even
newly-wed men were expected to pay only short visits to their brides by sneaking into
their own houses at night. This tradition was only one of the Spartan customs of
heterosexual behavior that other Greeks found bizarre. If all parties agreed, a woman
could have children by a man other than her husband, so pressing was the need to
reproduce in this strictly ordered society.
The Obligations of Spartans
All Spartan citizens were expected to put service to their city-state before personal
concerns because Sparta's survival was continually threatened by its own economic
foundation, the great mass of
helots33. Since Sparta's well-being depended on the systematic exploitation of these
enslaved Greeks, its entire political and social system by necessity had as its aim a
staunch militarism and a conservatism in values. Change meant danger at Sparta. As part
of its population policy, however, Spartan conservatism encompassed
sexual
behavior34 seen as overly permissive by other Greeks. The Spartans simultaneously
institutionalized a form of equality as the basis for their male social unit, the
common mess35, while denying true social and political equality to ordinary male citizens by
making their government an oligarchy. Whatever other Greeks may have thought of the
particulars of the Spartan system, they admired the Spartans'
unswerving respect
for their laws 36 as a guide to life in hostile surroundings, albeit of their own making.
Tyranny in the City-States
Opposition to oligarchic domination brought the first Greek
tyrants37 to power in numerous city-states, although
Sparta never experienced a tyranny. Greek tyranny represented a distinctive type of rule
for several reasons. For one, although tyrants were by definition rulers who usurped
power by force rather than inheriting it like legitimate kings, they then established
family dynasties to maintain their tyranny, with sons inheriting their fathers' position
as the head of state. Also, the men who became tyrants were usually aristocrats, or at
least near-aristocrats, who nevertheless rallied support from non-aristocrats for their
coups. In places where propertyless men may have lacked citizenship or at least felt
substantially disenfranchised in the political life of the city-state, tyrants perhaps
won adherents by extending citizenship and other privileges to these groups. Tyrants
moreover sometimes
preserved the existing laws and political
institutions38 of their city-states as part of their rule, thus
promoting social stability.
Tyranny at Corinth
The most famous early tyranny arose at
Corinth39, a large city-state in the northeastern Peloponnese, around 657 B.C. in
opposition to the rule of the aristocratic family called the Bacchiads. Under Bacchiad
rule in the eighth and early seventh centuries B.C., Corinth had blossomed into the most
economically advanced city40 in Archaic Greece. The
Corinthians had forged so far ahead in
naval engineering41, for instance, that other Greeks contracted with them to have ships built.
Corinth's strong fleet helped the
Bacchiads42 in founding overseas colonies at
Corcyra43 in northwest Greece
and
Syracuse44 on Sicily, city-states which would themselves become major
naval powers.
The Bacchiads became unpopular despite the city's prosperity because they ruled
violently.
Cypselus45, himself an aristocrat whose mother was a Bacchiad, readied himself to take over
by becoming popular with the masses: “he became one of the most admired of
Corinth's citizens because he was courageous, prudent, and helpful to the people, unlike
the oligarchs in power, who were insolent and violent,” according to a later
historian. Cypselus engineered the overthrow of Bacchiad rule with popular support and a
favorable oracle from Delphi. He then ruthlessly suppressed rival aristocrats, but his
popularity with the people remained so high that he could govern without the protection
of a bodyguard. Corinth added to its economic strength during Cypselus' rule by
exporting large quantities of fine pottery, especially to markets in Italy and Sicily.
Cypselus founded additional colonies along the sailing route to the western
Mediterranean to promote Corinthian trade in that direction.
When Cypselus died in 625 B.C., his son
Periander46 succeeded him. Periander aggressively continued Corinth's economic expansion by
founding colonies on the coasts both northwest and northeast of Greek territory to
increase trade with the interior regions there, which were rich in timber and precious
metals. He also pursued commercial contacts with Egypt, an interest commemorated in the
Egyptian name Psammetichus he gave to one of his sons. The city's prosperity encouraged
flourishing development in crafts, art, and architecture. The foundations of the great
stone temple to Apollo begun in this period can still be seen today. Unlike his father,
however, Periander lost the support of Corinth's people by ruling harshly. He kept his
power until his death in 585 B.C., but the hostile feelings that persisted against his
rule led to the overthrow of his successor, Psamettichus, within a short time. The
opponents of tyranny thereupon installed a government based on a board of eight
magistrates and a council of eighty men.
Tyrants and Popular Support
As in the case of the Cypselid tyranny at Corinth, most tyrannies needed to cultivate
support among the masses of their city-states to remain in power because their armies
were composed primarily of non-aristocrats. The
dynasty of tyrants47 on the island of
Samos48 in the eastern Aegean Sea, for example, who came to power
about 540 B.C., built enormous public works to benefit their city-state and provide
employment. They began construction of a
temple to Hera49 meant to be the
largest in the Greek world, and they dramatically improved the water supply of their
urban center by excavating a great tunnel connected to a distant spring. This marvel of
engineering with a channel eight feet high ran for nearly a mile through a 900-foot high
mountain. The
later tyrannies that emerged in city-states on Sicily50 similarly graced their cities with beautiful temples and public buildings.
By working in the interests of their peoples, some tyrannies, like that founded by
Cypselus at Corinth, maintained their popularity for decades. Other tyrants experienced
bitter opposition from aristocrats jealous of the tyrant's power or provoked civil war
by ruling brutally and inequitably. The poet Alcaeus of the city-state of Mytilene on
the island of Lesbos in the northeastern Aegean, himself a rebellious aristocrat,
described such strife around 600 B.C.: “Let's forget our anger; let's quit our
heart-devouring strife and civil war, which some god has stirred up among us, ruining
the people but bestowing the glory on our tyrant for which he prays.” In
short, the title tyrant in Archaic Greece did not automatically label a
ruler as brutal or unwelcome, as the use of the same word in English implies. Greeks
evaluated tyrants as good or bad depending on their behavior as rulers.
Theseus and Democracy at Athens
It was a traditional Greek practice to explain significant historical changes such as
the founding of communities or the codification of law as the work of an individual
“inventor” from the distant past. Just like the Spartans, for whom
the legendary
Lycurgus51 was remembered as the founder of their city-state, the Athenians also believed
their polis owed its start to a single man in the distant past. Athenian
legends made
Theseus52 responsible for founding the
polis of Athens at a remote date by the synoecism of villages in Attica,
the name given to the peninsula at the southeastern corner of the mainland of Greece
that formed the territory of the Athenian polis. Since Attica had several
fine ports along its coast, the Athenians were much more oriented to seafaring and
communication with other peoples than were the almost-landlocked Spartans. Theseus made
an appropriate mythical founder because he was described as a traveling adventurer,
sailing, for example, to the island of Crete to defeat the
Minotaur53, a cannibalistic
monster, half-human and half-bull. This exploit, like his other legendary adventures, or
“labors” as they are called in imitation of those of Heracles,
became favorite subject matter for vase painters. There can be no historical reality to
the story of Theseus as the founder of Athenian democracy, but the civilizing nature of
his legendary labors—he defeated many monsters who threatened travelers and
polis residents alike—made his story appropriate to the
aspirations of Athenian civic life.
The Athenian Population in the Dark Age
Unlike most other important sites inhabited in the Mycenaean period, Athens had
apparently not suffered any catastrophic destruction at the end of the Mycenaean period.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that Athens wholly escaped the troubles of this
period, and its population shrank in the early Dark Age. By around 850 B.C., however,
archaeological evidence such as the model
granary from a woman's burial54 mentioned elsewhere in the Overview shows that the Athenian agricultural economy
was reviving. When the population of Attica apparently expanded at a phenomenal rate
during the century from about 800 to 700 B.C., the free peasants constituted the
fastest-growing segment of the population as economic conditions improved in the early
Archaic Age. These small agricultural producers apparently began to insist on having a
say in making Athenian policies because they felt justice demanded at least a limited
form of political equality. Some of these modest land owners became wealthy enough
afford to afford
hoplite55 armor, and these men probably made strong demands on the
aristocrats who
had previously ruled Athens as what amounted to a relatively broad
oligarchy56. Rivalries among the
aristocrats for status and material wealth prevented them from presenting a united
front, and they had to respond to these pressures to insure the allegiance of the
hoplites, on whom depended Athenian military strength.
The Beginnings of Athenian Democracy
By the late seventh century B.C., Athens' male citizens rich, middle-class, and poor
had established the
first beginnings of a limited form of democratic
government57. Determining why they
moved toward democracy instead of, for example, toward a narrow oligarchy like that of
Sparta remains a difficult problem. Two factors perhaps encouraging the emergence of the
Athenian polis as an incipient democracy were rapid population growth and a
rough sense of egalitarianism among male citizens that survived from the frontier-like
conditions of the early Dark Age, when most people had shared the same meager existence.
These same factors, however, do not necessarily differentiate Athens from other
city-states that did not evolve into democracies because the same conditions pertained
across the Greek world in the Archaic Age. Perhaps population growth was so rapid among
Athenian peasants that they had greater power than at other places to demand a share in
governing. Their power and political coherence was evident, for example, in about 632
B.C. when they rallied “from the fields in a body” to foil the
attempted coup of an Athenian nobleman named
Cylon58. A former
champion in the Olympics and married to a daughter of Theagenes, tyrant of Megara, Cylon
and some of his aristocratic friends had planned to install a tyranny. Athens also had
some influential aristocrats like Solon and Cleisthenes who worked to strengthen
Athenian democracy for differing reasons.
The Institutions of Incipient Democracy
The scanty evidence seems to indicate that by the seventh century all free-born adult
male citizens of Athens had the right to attend open meetings, in a body called the
assembly59 (ekklesia ), which elected nine magistrates
called archons (rulers) each year. The archons, still all aristocrats in
this early period, headed the
government60 and rendered verdicts in disputes and criminal
accusations. As they had earlier, aristocrats at this time still dominated Athenian
political life by using their influence to secure election as archons ,
perhaps by marshaling their traditional bands of followers as supporters and by making
alliances with other aristocrats. The right of middle-class and poor men to serve as
members of the assembly as yet had only limited value because little business besides
the election of archons was conducted in its gatherings, which probably met
rarely in this period and then only when the current archons decided the
time was right.
The Laws of Draco
Aristocratic political alliances often proved temporary in Athenian politics, as
elsewhere, and rivalries among aristocrats jealous of each other's status continued
under early Athenian democracy. In the aftermath of Cylon's attempted tyranny, an
Athenian named Draco was appointed in 621 B.C., perhaps after pressure by the hoplites,
to establish a code of laws promoting stability and equity. Unfortunately,
Draco's
laws61 somehow further destabilized the political situation;
the Athenians later remembered them as having been as harsh as the meaning of his name
(drakon, “dragon, serpent”), and
our word Draconian, meaning excessively severe, reflects this view. A deterioration in
the well-being of Athens's free peasants, which had been slowly building for a long
time, also further undermined social peace.
Later Athenians did not know what had
caused this economic crisis, only that it pitted the rich against the middle-class and
the poor.62
Economic Crisis and Subsistence Agriculture
One cause of the economic crisis that plagued Athens in the later seventh century
around the time of
Draco63 may have been that the precariousness of agriculture in this period could
sometimes lead to the gradual accumulation of the available farm land in the hands of
fewer and fewer people. In subsistence agriculture, the level at which many Athenian
farmers operated, a lean year could mean starvation. Moreover, farmers lacked any easy
method to convert the surplus of a good year into imperishable capital, such as coined
money, which could be then be stored up to offset bad years in the future, because
coinage was not even invented until late in the seventh-century B.C.64 in Lydia in Anatolia and took a long time to become common in Greece. Failed
farmers had to borrow food and seed to survive. When they could borrow no more, they had
to leave their land to find a job to support their families, most likely by laboring for
successful farmers. Under these conditions, farmers who became more effective than
others, or simply more fortunate, could acquire the use and even the ownership of the
land of failed farmers. In any case, many poor Athenians had apparently lost control of
their land to wealthier proprietors by the late seventh century. The crisis became so
acute that impoverished peasants were even being
sold into slavery to pay off
debts65. Finally, twenty-five years after
Draco's legislation, conditions had become so acute that a civil war threatened to break
out.
The Reforms of Solon
In desperation, the Athenians in 594 B.C.
gave Solon special authority to revise
their laws66 to deal with the economic
crisis and its dire social consequences that had brought their society to the brink of
internecine war. As he explains in his autobiographical poetry, Solon tried to steer a
middle course67 between the demands of the rich to preserve their financial advantages and the
call of the poor for a redistribution of land to themselves from the holdings of the
large landowners. His famous
“shaking off of
obligations”68 somehow freed
those farms whose ownership had become formally encumbered without, however, actually
redistributing any land. He also forbade the selling of Athenians into slavery for debt
and
secured the liberation of citizens who had become slaves69 in this way, commemorating his success in the verses he wrote about his reforms:
“To Athens, their home established by the gods, I brought back many
who had been sold into slavery, some justly, some not ...”70
Attempting to balance political power between rich and poor,
, Solon ranked male
citizens into four classes according to their income71: “five-hundred-measure men”
(pentakosiomedimnoi , those with an annual income
equivalent to that much agricultural produce), “horsemen” (hippeis , income of three hundred measures), “yoked
men” (zeugitai , two hundred measures), and
“laborers” (thetes, less than two
hundred measures). The higher a man's class, the higher the governmental office for
which he was eligible, with the laborer class barred from all posts. Solon did reaffirm
the right of this class to participate in the assembly (ekklesia ), however. Solon probably created
a council (boule) of four hundred72 men to prepare an agenda for the discussions in the
assembly, although some scholars place this innovation later than Solon's time.
Aristocrats could not dominate the council's deliberations because its members were
chosen by lot, probably only from the top three income classes. Solon may also have
initiated a schedule of regular meetings for the assembly. These reforms gave added
impetus to the assembly's legislative role and thus indirectly laid a foundation for the
political influence that the “laborer” (thete ) class would gradually acquire over the next century and a half.
Solon and Democracy
Despite the restriction on office holding by the lowest income class, Solon's
classification scheme supported further development of conditions leading to democracy
because it allowed for upward social mobility: if a man managed to increase his income,
he could move up the scale of eligibility for office. The absence of direct taxes on
income made it easier for entrepreneurial citizens to better their lot. From Solon's
reforms, Athenian male citizens gained a political and social system far more open to
individual initiative and change than that of Sparta.
Equally important to restoring stability in a time of acute crisis was Solon's ruling
that
any male citizen could bring charges on a wide variety of offenses against
wrongdoers on behalf of any victim of a crime.73 Furthermore, he provided for the
right of
appeal74 to the assembly by persons
who believed a magistrate had rendered unjust judgments against them. With these two
measures, Solon made the administration of justice the concern of ordinary citizens and
not just of still predominately aristocratic magistrates. He balanced these judicial
reforms favoring the people, however, by granting broader powers to the
“Council which meets on the Hill of the god of war Ares,” the
Areopagus (meaning “Ares' hill”). Archons became
members of the
Areopagus75 after their year in office. This body of
ex-archons could, if the members chose, exercise great power because at
this period it judged the most serious judicial cases, in particular accusations against
archons themselves. Solon probably also expected the Areopagus to use its
power to protect his reforms.
Opposition to Democracy
For its place and time, Athens' emerging democracy was remarkable, even at this early
stage in its development, because it granted all male citizens the possibility of
participating meaningfully in the making of laws and the administration of justice. But
not everyone found the system admirable.
A visiting foreign king is reputed to
have expressed the scornful opinion that he found Athenian democracy ludicrous.76 Observing the procedure in the Athenian assembly, he expressed his amazement
that leading aristocratic politicians could only recommend policy in their speeches,
while the male citizens as a whole voted on what to do: “I find it
astonishing,” he remarked, “that here wise men speak on public
affairs, while fools decide them.”
Some Athenians who agreed with the
king that aristocrats were wise and the poor foolish did their best to undermine
Solon's reforms77 after
their creation in 594 B.C., and such oligarchic sympathizers continued to challenge
Athenian democracy at intervals throughout its history.
Tyranny at Athens
Strife among aristocrats, combined with the continuing discontent of the poorest
Athenians, lay behind the period of strife in the mid-sixth century following Solon's
reforms that led to Athens' first tyranny. At this time an Athenian aristocrat named
Pisistratus78 began a violent effort to make himself sole ruler with the
help of his upper-class friends and the poor, whose interests he championed. He finally
established himself securely as tyrant at Athens in 546 B.C. Pisistratus made funds
available to help peasants acquire needed farm equipment and provided employment for
poorer men while benefiting Athens by building roads and initiating major public works,
such as a great temple to Zeus and fountains to increase the supply of drinking water.
The tax that he imposed on agricultural production79, one of the rare instances of direct taxation in Athenian history, financed the
loans to farmers and the building projects. He also arranged for judicial officials to
go on circuits through the outlying villages of Attica to hear cases, thus saving
farmers the trouble of having to leave their fields to seek justice in Athens, the urban
center of the polis. Like the earlier tyrants of Corinth, he promoted the
economic, cultural, and architectural development of Athens. Athenian pottery, for
example, now began to crowd out Corinthian in the export trade.
Hippias80, the eldest son of Pisistratus, continued the tyranny after
his father's death in 527 B.C. He governed by making certain that his relatives and
friends occupied magistracies, but for a time he also allowed his aristocratic rivals to
hold office, thereby defusing some of the tension created by their jealousy of his
superior status.
Eventually, however, the aristocratic family of the Alcmaeonids
arranged to have the Spartans send an army to expel Hippias.81
The Struggle between Isagoras and Cleisthenes
In the ensuing vacuum of power at Athens after the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias, the
leading member of the aristocratic Alcmaeonid family, a man named Cleisthenes, sought
support among the masses by promising dramatic democratic reforms. The promise of such
reforms seems to have been a response to the success of Cleisthenes' bitterest rival,
Isagoras, an aristocrat from a different family, in becoming archon in 508
B.C. Cleisthenes had apparently despaired of winning political success other than by
appealing to the non-aristocratic masses at Athens.
When Isagoras tried to block
Cleisthenes' reforms82 by calling in the
Spartans again, the
Athenian people united to force Isagoras and his Laconian
allies out83. The ensuing conflict between Athens and Sparta ended quickly but sowed the
seeds of mutual distrust between the two city-states.
The Democratic Reforms of Cleisthenes
His popular support gave Cleisthenes the authority to begin to install the democratic
system for which Athens has become famous, and the importance of his
reforms84 led later
Athenians to think of him as a principal founder of their democracy. First, he made the
pre-existing villages of the countryside and the neighborhoods of the city of Athens
(both called “
demes85,” demoi ) the constituent units of
Athenian political organization. Organized in their demes, the male citizens
participated directly in the running of their government: they kept track in deme
registers of which males were citizens and therefore eligible at eighteen to attend the
assembly to vote on laws and public policies. The demes in turn were grouped for other
administrative functions into ten so-called tribes (phylai ), replacing an earlier division into four tribes. Cleisthenic
democracy used its ten tribes for purposes such as choosing fifty representatives by lot
from each tribe to serve for one year on the council (boule ) of five hundred, which replaced Solon's council of four hundred.
The number of representatives from each deme was proportional to its population.
Athenian men were also called up for service in the citizen militia by tribal
affiliation. Most importantly, the ten men who served each year as
“generals” (strategoi ), the
officials with the highest civil and military authority, were elected one from each
tribe. Cleisthenes' reorganization was complex, but its general aim seems to have been
to undermine existing political alliances among aristocrats in the interests of greater
democracy.
Persuasion and Cleisthenic Democracy
By about 500 B.C. Cleisthenes had succeeded in devising an Athenian democracy based on
direct participation by as many adult male citizens as possible. That he could put such
a system in place successfully in a time of turmoil and have it endure, as it did, means
that he must have been building on pre-existing conditions favorable to democracy.
Certainly, as an aristocrat looking for popular support, Cleisthenes had reason to
invent the kind of system he thought ordinary people wanted. That he based his system on
the demes, the great majority of which were country villages, suggests that some
conditions favoring democracy may have stemmed from the traditions of village life.
Possibly, the notion of wide-spread participation in government gained support from the
custom village residents often have of dealing with each other on relatively egalitarian
terms. That is, each man in a village is entitled to his say in running local affairs
and must persuade, not compel, others of the wisdom of his recommendations. Since many
aristocrats increasingly seem to have preferred to reside in the city, their ability to
dominate discussion in the demes was reduced. In any case, the idea that
persuasion86, rather than force or status, should constitute the mechanism for
political decision-making in the emerging Athenian democracy fit well with the spirit of
the intellectual changes which were taking place during the late Archaic Age. That is,
the idea that people had to present plausible reasons for their recommendations
corresponded to one of the period's new ways of thought. This development has proved one
of the most influential legacies of Greek civilization.
Lyric poetry
Poetry represented the only form of Greek literature until the late Archaic Age. The
earliest Greek poetry, that of Homer and Hesiod, had been confined to a single rhythm. A
much greater rhythmic diversity characterized the new form of poetry, called lyric, that
emerged during the Archaic Age. (These texts are not yet available to Perseus.) Lyric
poems were far shorter than the narrative poetry of Homer or the didactic poetry of
Hesiod, and they encompassed many forms and subjects, but they were always performed
with the accompaniment of the
lyre87 (a
kind of harp that gives its name to the poetry). Choral poets like
Alcman88 of Sparta wrote songs to be performed by groups on public occasions to honor the
gods, to celebrate famous events in a city-state's history, for wedding processions, and
to praise victors in athletic contests. Lyric poets writing songs for solo performance
on social occasions stressed a personal level of expression on a variety of topics.
Solon and
Alcaeus89, for example, wrote poems focused on contemporary politics. Others
self-consciously adopted a critical attitude toward traditional values such as strength
in war. For instance,
Sappho90, a lyric
poet from Lesbos born about 630 B.C. and famous for her poems on love, wrote,
“Some would say the most beautiful thing on our dark earth is an army of
cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships, but I say it's whatever a person
loves.” In this poem Sappho was expressing her longing for a woman she loved,
who was now far away.
Archilochus91 of Paros, whose lifetime probably fell in the early seventh century, became
famous for his range of poems on themes as diverse as friends lost at sea, mockery of
martial valor, and love gone astray. The bitter power of his poetic invective reportedly
caused a father and his two daughters to commit suicide when Archilochus ridiculed them
in anger after the father had put an end to Archilochus's affair with his daughter
Neobule. Some modern literary critics think the poems about Neobule and her family are
fictional, not autobiographical, and were meant to display Archilochus's dazzling talent
for “blame poetry,” the mirror image of lyric as the poetry of
praise. Mimnermus of
Colophon92, another seventh century lyric poet, rhapsodized about the glory of youth and
lamented its brevity, “no longer than the time the sun shines on the
plain.” Lyric poetry's focus on the individual's feelings represented a new
stage in Greek literary sensibilities, one that continues to inspire poets.
The Ionian Thinkers
Thinkers usually referred to today as philosophers, but who could equally well be
described as theoretical scientists studying the physical world, gave impetus to new
ways of thinking in the late Archaic age. These thinkers, who came from the city-states
of
Ionia93 along the eastern Aegean coast, were developing radically new explanations of
the world of human beings and its relation to the world of the gods. In this way began
the study of philosophy in Greece. Ionia's geographical location next to the non-Greek
civilizations of Anatolia, which were in contact with the older civilizations of Egypt
and the Near East, meant Ionian thinkers were in a position to acquire
knowledge
and intellectual inspiration from their neighbors94 in the
eastern Mediterranean area. Since Greece in this period had no formal schools at any
level, thinkers like those from Ionia had to make their ideas known by teaching pupils
privately and giving public lectures. They also used writing to record their doctrines,
and some of them developed prose in Greek to express their new ways of thought. Some
Ionian thinkers composed poetry as well to explain their theories and gave public
recitations of their works. People who studied with these thinkers or heard their
presentations would then help to spread knowledge of the new ideas.
Near Eastern Influence on the Ionian Thinkers
Knowledge from the ancient Near East influenced the Ionian thinkers, just as it had
influenced Greek artists of the Archaic Age. Greek vase painters and specialists in
decorating metal vessels imitated Near Eastern designs depicting animals and luxuriant
plants; Greek sculptors produced narrative reliefs like those of Assyria and statues
with the stiff, frontal poses familiar from Egyptian precedents; Egypt also gave
inspiration to Greek architects to employ stone for columns, ornamental details, and,
eventually, entire buildings. In a similar process of the transfer of knowledge from
east to west, information about the regular movements of the stars and planets developed
by astronomers in Babylonia proved especially important in helping Ionian thinkers reach
their conclusions about the nature of the physical world. The first of the Ionian
theorists,
Thales95 (c. 625 - 545 B.C.) from the
city-state of
Miletus96, was said to have predicted a solar eclipse in 585 B.C., an accomplishment
implying he had been influenced by Babylonian learning. Modern astronomers doubt Thales
actually could have predicted an eclipse, but the story shows how influential eastern
scientific and mathematical knowledge was to the thinkers of Ionia. Working from
knowledge such as the observed fact that celestial bodies moved in a regular pattern,
scientific thinkers like Thales and
Anaximander97 (c. 610- 540 B.C.), also from Miletus, drew the revolutionary conclusion that
the physical world was regulated by a set of laws of nature rather than by the arbitrary
intervention of divine beings.
Pythagoras98, who
emigrated from Samos to south Italy about 530 B.C., taught that the entire world was
explicable through numbers. His doctrines inspired systematic study of mathematics and
the numerical aspects of musical harmony.
The Cosmos and Logos
The Ionian thinkers insisted that the workings of the universe could be explained
because the phenomena of nature were neither random nor arbitrary. The universe, the
totality of things, they named
cosmos
99 because this word meant an orderly
arrangement that is beautiful (hence our word “cosmetic”). The order
characteristic of the cosmos, perceived as lovely
because it was ordered, encompassed not only the motions of the heavenly bodies but also
everything else: the weather, the growth of plants and animals, human health and
psychology, and so on. Since the universe was ordered, it was intelligible; since it was
intelligible, explanations of events could be discovered by thought and research. The
thinkers who conceived this view believed it necessary to give reasons for their
conclusions and to persuade others by arguments based on evidence. They believed, in
other words, in logic (a word derived from the Greek term
logos
100 meaning, among other things, a reasoned explanation). This way
of thought based on reason represented a crucial first step toward science and
philosophy as these disciplines endure today. The rule-based view of the causes of
events and physical phenomena developed by these thinkers contrasted sharply with the
traditional mythological view of causation. Naturally, many people had difficulty
accepting such a startling change in their understanding of the world, and the older
tradition explaining events as the work of gods lived on alongside the new ideas.
The ideas of the Ionian thinkers probably spread slowly because no means of mass
communication existed, and few men could afford to spend the time to become followers of
these thinkers and then return home to explain these new ways of thought to others.
Magic101 remained an
important preoccupation in the lives of the majority of ordinary people, who retained
their notions that gods and demons frequently and directly affected their fortunes and
health as well as the events of nature. Despite their perhaps limited immediate effect
on the ancient world at large, the Ionian thinkers had initiated a tremendously
important development in intellectual history: the separation of scientific thinking
from myth and religion. Some modern scholars call this development the birth of
rationalism, but it would be unfair to label myths and religious ways of thought as
irrational if that term is taken to mean “unthinking” or
“silly.” Ancient people realized that their lives were constantly
subject to forces beyond their control and understanding, and it was not unreasonable to
attribute supernatural origins to the powers of nature or the ravages of disease. The
new scientific ways of thought insisted, however, that observable evidence had to be
sought and theories of explanation had to be logical. Just being old or popular no
longer bestowed veracity on a story purporting to explain natural phenomena. In this
way, the Ionian thinkers parted company with the traditional ways of thinking of the
ancient Near East as found in its rich mythology and repeated in the myths of early
Greece.
Rational Thinking
Developing the view that people must give reasons to explain what they believe to be
true, rather than just make assertions that they expect others to believe without
evidence, was the most important achievement of the early Ionian thinkers. Along with
the invention of democracy based on citizenship, their achievement gave real distinction
to the Greek Archaic Age. The insistence of the Ionian thinkers on rationality, coupled
with the belief that the world could be understood as something other than the plaything
of divine whim, gave human beings hope that they could improve their lives through their
own efforts. As
Xenophanes102 from
Colophon103 (c. 580 - 480 B.C.), put it, “The gods have not revealed all things
from the beginning to mortals, but, by seeking, human beings find out, in time, what is
better.” Xenophanes, like other Ionian thinkers, believed in the existence of
gods, but he nevertheless assigned the opportunity and the responsibility for improving
human life squarely to human beings themselves. Human beings themselves were to
“find what is better.”