Remaking Greek Civilization
In Greece, the Dark Age of depopulation and poverty persisted longer than in the Near
East. Although Greek economic improvement is evident as early as about 900 B.C., it was
not until the period around 750 B.C. that political states, now of a new kind, developed
again and the Dark Age can be seen as ended. The obscure history of Greece in years
between these general dates laid the foundation for the pronounced social, political, and
intellectual changes associated with the creation of the Greek city-state. Throughout this
period, continued contact with the Near East greatly influenced Greece, not only in
commerce and trade but also in the exchange of ideas. Entrepreneurs from the Near East
apparently often made their way to Greece, bringing with them both the knowledge of new
technologies, such as iron working, and of ideas that Greeks took over and made their own
in mythology and religion.
The Start of Economic Revival
The evidence from burials shows that Greeks in more and more locations had become
conspicuously wealthy by about 900 B.C. A hierarchical arrangement of society was
evidently spreading throughout Greece, and the few men and women at the pinnacle of
society had the riches to have expensive material goods placed in their tombs with them.
In the earlier part of the Dark Age, the best grave offerings a dead person could expect
were a few clay pots. The exceptional contents of rich graves point to significant
economic changes already under way by the ninth century B.C.
Technological Change: Using Iron
Metallurgical technology eventually helped bring about the end of the Greek Dark Age.
Archaeology allows us to see this trend, as in the evidence from the burial of a male
about 900 B.C., which consisted of a pit into which was placed a clay pot to hold the
dead man's cremated remains. Surrounding the pot were metal weapons including a long
sword, spearheads, and knives. The inclusion of weapons of war in a male grave was a
continuation of the burial traditions of the Mycenaean Age, but these arms were forged
from iron, not bronze, which had been the primary metal of the earlier period (often
referred to therefore as the Bronze Age). This difference reflects a significant shift
in metallurgy, which took place throughout the Mediterranean region during the early
centuries of the first millennium B.C.: iron displacing bronze as the principal metal
used to make tools and weapons. Greeks probably
learned to work iron1 from voyaging Near Eastern entrepreneurs who brought their skills with them from
their homelands. The island of Cyprus seems to have been particularly important as a
place where this new technology developed and then was passed on to other places further
west. In keeping with the habit of characterizing periods of history from the name of
the metal most used at the time, the Dark Age can also be referred to as the Early Iron
Age in Greece.
The Greeks, like others in the Near East, turned to iron because they could no longer
obtain the tin needed to mix with copper to make bronze. The international trading
routes that had once brought tin to Greece and the Near East from distant sources had
been disrupted in the upheaval associated with the wide-spread turmoil that affected the
eastern Mediterranean region beginning around 1200 B.C.
Iron ore, by contrast, was
available locally2 in Greece and in other areas throughout the Near East. Iron eventually replaced
bronze in many uses, above all in the production of
agricultural tools3, swords, and spear points. Bronze remained in use for shields and armor,
however. The lower cost of iron tools and weapons meant more people could afford them,
and with iron being harder than bronze, implements kept their sharp edges longer.
Agricultural Resurgence
Better and more plentiful farming implements of iron eventually helped to increase the
production of food, a development reflected by the evidence of a burial from Athens.
This grave, from about 850 B.C., held the remains of a woman and her treasures,
including gold rings and earrings, a necklace of glass beads, and an unusual chest of
baked clay. The necklace was an imported item from Egypt or Syria, and the technique of
the gold jewelry was also that of the Near East. These objects reflected
Greek
trade with the more prosperous civilizations of that region4, a relationship whose influence on Greece
increased as the Dark Age came to an end in the next century. The most intriguing object
from the burial is the woman's terracotta storage chest. It was painted with
characteristically intricate and regular designs, whose precision has led modern art
historians to give the name Geometric to this style of the late Dark Age. On its top
were sculpted five beehive-like urns that are miniature models of granaries (structures
for storing
grain5). If these models were important enough to be buried as
objects of special value, we can deduce that actual granaries and the grain they held
were valuable commodities in real life. This deduction in turn means that already by 850
B.C. agriculture had begun to recover from its devastation in the early Dark Age, when
herding animals had become more prevalent and cultivation had decreased. Whether the
woman was the owner of grain fields we cannot know, but from her sculpted chest we can
glimpse the significance of farming for her and her contemporaries.
Repopulation
Increased agricultural production in this period accompanied a growth in population. It
is impossible to determine whether a rise in population preceded and led to the raising
of more grain or, conversely, whether improvements in agricultural technology and the
placing of more fields under cultivation spurred a consequent growth in the population
by increasing the number of people the land could support. These two developments
reinforced one another: as the Greeks produced more food, the better-fed population
reproduced faster, and as the population grew, more people could produce more food. The
repopulation of Greece in the late Dark Age established the demographic conditions under
which the new political forms of Greece were to emerge.
The Definition of Aristocracy
People like the wealthy woman buried with the granary model at Athens and the earlier
couple from Lefkandi constituted the aristocracy that emerged during the later part of
the Greek Dark Age. The term
aristocracy
6 comes from Greek and means “rule of the
best.” Although the use of this term is traditional in accounts of ancient
Greek history, it is important to remember that “aristocracy” in
this context does not mean what it often means in,for example, French or English
history. That is, ancient Greece never had an aristocracy that was an officially
recognized nobility, whose members inherited their status regardless of their wealth or
other socio-economic characteristics. Rather, the term as used in ancient Greek history
refers to the social elite, whose status depended on a combination of factors, of which
wealth and public conduct were very important. When one speaks of a Greek aristocrat,
then, it is crucial to understand this designation as meaning “a member of the
social elite.” Aristocrats in ancient Greece seem to have possessed more
wealth than others in their communities, but birth was also a criterion in their
enjoying general acknowledgment as the “best” in their society
— that is, the people with the greatest social status and political influence.
We can only speculate about the various ways in which families might have originally
gained their designation as aristocratic and thus became entitled to pass on this status
to those born into them. Some aristocratic families in the Dark Age might have inherited
their status as descendants of the most prominent and wealthy families of the Mycenean
Age; some might have made themselves aristocrats during the Dark Age by amassing wealth
and befriending less fortunate people who were willing to acknowledge their benefactors'
superior status in return for material help; and some might have acquired aristocratic
status by monopolizing control of essential religious rituals.
Homer and the Social Values of Greek Aristocrats
The aristocrats' ideas and traditions on organizing their communities and about proper
behavior for everyone in them—that is, their code of social
values—represented, like the reappearance of agriculture, fundamental
components of Greece's emerging new political forms. The aristocratic social values of
the Dark Age underlie the stories told in the
Iliad and
Odyssey7, two book-length poems that first began to be written
down about the middle of the eighth century B.C., at the very end of the Dark Age.
Despite the ancient origins of Homeric poetry, the
behavioral code that it
portrayed8 primarily reflected values
established in the aristocratic society of Greece of the Dark Age before the rise of
political systems based on citizenship.
The Male Ethic
The primary characters in the Homeric poems are aristocrats, who are expected to live
up to a demanding code of values. The men are mainly warriors, like the incomparable
Achilles9 of the
Iliad. This poem tells part of the
famous story of the attack by a Greek army on the city of
Troy10, a stronghold
located in northwestern Anatolia. Although it is commonly assumed that the Trojans were
a different people from the Greeks, the poems themselves provide no definitive answer to
the question of their ethnic identity. In the
Iliad's representation of
the Trojan War, which the Greeks believed occurred about four hundred years before
Homer's time, Achilles is, in the language of the poem, “
the best of the
Greeks11” because he is a “
doer of deeds and
speaker of words12” without equal. Achilles' overriding concern in word and action is
with the glory and recognition for all time that he can win with his
“excellence” (the best available translation for Greek
arete
13, a word with a range
of meanings). Like all aristocrats, Achilles feared the disgrace that he would feel
before others if he were seen to fail to live up to the code of excellence. Under the
aristocratic code, failure and wrongdoing produced public shame.
A Woman's Excellence
A concentration on excellence (arete ) distinguishes
the code of values of the aristocrats of the Homeric poems. For an aristocratic woman
like
Penelope14, the wife of the hero of the
Odyssey, excellence consists of
preserving her household and its property by relying on her intelligence, beauty, social
status, and intense fidelity to her husband. This curatorship requires her to display
great stamina and ingenuity in resisting the attempted predations of her husband's
rivals15 at home because he, Odysseus, is away for twenty years fighting the Trojan War
and then sailing home in a long series of dangerous adventures. Although Penelope
clearly counts as an exceptional figure of literature, aristocratic women in real life,
like men, could see their proper role in life as requiring them to develop an
exceptional excellence to set themselves apart from others of more ordinary character
and status. Under this code, any life was contemptible whose goal was not the pursuit of
excellence and the fame it brought.
The Recovery of Writing and Homer
The Greeks had relearned the technology of writing as a result of contact with the
literate civilizations of the Near East and the alphabet developed there long before.
Sometime between about 950 and 750 the Greeks modified a
Phoenician
alphabet16 to represent the sounds of their own language, and the Greek version of the
alphabet eventually formed the base of the alphabet used for English today. Greeks of
the
Archaic Age17 (roughly, the period from 750 to 500 B.C.) swiftly applied their newly
acquired skill to write down oral literature, such as the
Iliad and the
Odyssey. The Greeks believed that
Homer18, a blind poet
from the Greek region called
Ionia19 (today the western coast of Turkey), had
composed the
Iliad and
Odyssey. Modern scholarship has
often disputed this attribution on the grounds that no single author could have been
responsible for these lengthy and complex poems if, as is commonly assumed, they were
originally composed and transmitted orally, without the aid of writing. If, on the other
hand, Homeric poetry as we have it was composed by writing, the authorship question is
on a different footing. Whatever the truth of this much disputed question, Homeric
poetry, even if it was put into final form by a single author, grew out of centuries of
oral performance by countless Greek poets singing of the deeds and values of legendary
aristocrats. Stories from Near Eastern poetic tales influenced this oral poetry, which
for centuries helped to transmit cultural values from one generations of Greeks to the
next.
The Olympic Games of Zeus and Hera
Excellence (arete ) as a competitive value for male
Greek aristocrats showed up clearly in the Olympic Games, a religious festival
associated with a large sanctuary of Zeus, king of the gods of the Greeks. The sanctuary
was located at
Olympia20, in the northwestern Peloponnese (the
large peninsula that forms southern Greece), where the games were held every four years
beginning in 776 B.C. During these great celebrations the aristocratic men of the age
competed in running events and
wrestling21 as individuals, not as national representatives on teams, as in the modern
Olympic Games. The emphasis on physical prowess and fitness, competition, and public
recognition by other men corresponded to the ideal of Greek masculine identity as it
developed in this period. In a rare departure from the ancient Mediterranean tradition
against public nakedness, Greek athletes competed without clothing (hence the word
gymnasium22, from the Greek word meaning
“naked,” gymnos ). Other
competitions such as horse and
chariot racing23 were added
to the Olympic Games later, but the principal event remained a sprint of about two
hundred yards called the
stadion
24 (hence our word
“stadium”). Winners originally received no financial prizes, only a
garland made from wild olive leaves25, but the prestige of victory could bring other rewards as
well. In later Greek athletic competitions prizes of value were often awarded. Admission
was free to men;
married women were not allowed to attend26, on pain of death, but women had their own separate festival at
Olympia on a different date in honor of Zeus' wife, Hera. Although less is known about
the
games of Hera27, literary sources report that unmarried young women competed on the Olympic
track in a foot race five-sixths as long as the men's stadion. In later times, international games including the Olympics were
dominated by professional athletes, who made good livings from appearance fees and
prizes won at various games held all over Greece. The most famous of them all was
Milo28, from Croton, in southern Italy. Winner of the Olympic wrestling crown six times
beginning in 536 B.C., he was renowned for showy stunts such as holding his breath until
his blood expanded his veins so much that they would snap a cord tied around his
head.
Competition and Community
The competition of the Olympic Games originally centered on contests among aristocrats,
who prided themselves on their innate distinctiveness from ordinary people, as the
fifth-century B.C. poet Pindar made clear in praising a family of victors:
“Hiding the nature you are born with is impossible. The seasons rich
in their flowers have many times bestowed on you, sons of Aletes [of Corinth], the
brightness that victory brings, when you achieved the heights of excellence in the
sacred games.”29 The organization of the festival as an event for all of Greece nevertheless
indicates a trend toward communal activity that was under way in Greek society and
politics by the mid-eighth century B.C. First of all, the
building of a special
sanctuary30
for the worship of Zeus at
Olympia provided
an architectural center as a focus for public gatherings with a surrounding space for
crowds to assemble. The social complement to the creation of this physical environment
was the tradition that the Games of Zeus and Hera were panhellenic, that is, open to all
Greeks. Moreover, an international
truce31 of several weeks
was declared so that competitors and spectators from all Greek communities could travel
to and from Olympia in security even if wars were otherwise in progress along their way.
In short, the arrangements for the Olympic Games demonstrate that in eighth century B.C.
Greece the aristocratic values of individual activity and pursuit of excellence by one's
self were beginning to be channeled into a new context appropriate for a changing
society. This sort of assertion of the importance of communal interests was another
important precondition for the creation of Greece's new political forms.
Religion, Myth, and Community
Religion provided the context for almost all communal activity throughout the history
of ancient Greece. Sports, as in the Olympic Games held to honor Zeus, took place in the
religious context of festivals honoring specific gods. War was conducted according to
the signs of divine will that civil and military leaders identified in the
sacrifice32 of animals and in omens derived
from occurrences in nature such as unusual weather. Sacrifices themselves, the central
event of Greek religious rituals, were performed before crowds in the open air on public
occasions that involved communal feasting afterward on the sacrificed meat. The
conceptual basis of Greek religion was found in myth (
mythos
33, a Greek word meaning
“story” or “tale”) about the gods and their
relationship to humans. In the eighth century B.C., the Greeks began to record their
myths in writing, and the poetry of
Hesiod34 preserved from this period (there was at this date not yet any
Greek literature in prose) reveals how religious myth, as well as the economic changes
and social values of the time, contributed to the feeling of community that underlay the
creation of new political structures in Greece.
The Mythical Origin of Justice
Hesiod35, an eighth-century B.C.
poet from the region of Boeotia in central Greece, employed myth to reveal the divine
origin of justice. His long poem
The Theogony (“The Genealogy
of the Gods”) details the birth of the race of gods from primordial Chaos
(“void” or “vacuum”) and Earth, the mother of
Sky and numerous other children. This myth about the succession of the gods owed its
inspiration to Near Eastern myths, another example of the importance of contact with
that region for the cultural as well as economic development of Greece as it emerged
from its Dark Age. Hesiod explained that, when Sky began to imprison his siblings, Earth
persuaded her fiercest male offspring, Kronos, to overthrow him by violence because
“Sky first contrived to do shameful things.”36 When Kronos later began to swallow up all his own children, Kronos's wife
had their son Zeus overthrow his father37 by force in retribution for his evil deeds. These vivid stories, which had their
origins in Near Eastern myths like those of the Mesopotamian
Epic of
Creation, carried the message that existence, even for gods, entailed
struggle, sorrow, and violence. Even more significantly, however, they showed that a
concern for justice had also been a component of the divine order of the universe from
the beginning. In his poem
Works and Days, Hesiod identified Zeus as the
fount of justice in human affairs, a marked contrast to the portrayal of
Zeus38 in
Homeric poetry as mainly concerned with the fates of his favorite aristocratic warriors.
Hesiod presents justice as a divine quality that will assert itself to punish
evil-doers:
“For Zeus ordained that fishes and wild beasts and birds
should eat each other, for they have no justice; but to human beings he has given
justice, which is far the best.”39
Justice in Dark-Age Life
Aristocratic men dominated the distribution of justice in Dark Age society. They
exercised direct control over their family members and household servants. Others
outside their immediate households would become their followers by acknowledging the
aristocrats' status as leaders. An aristocrat's followers would grant him a certain
amount of authority because, as the followers were roughly equal in wealth and status
among themselves, they needed a figure invested with authority to settle disputes and
organize defense against raids or other military threats. In anthropological terms,
aristocrats operated as
chiefs of bands40. An aristocratic chief had authority to settle arguments over property and
duties, oversaw the distribution of rewards and punishments, and usually headed the
religious rituals deemed essential to the security of the group. At the same time, a
chief's actual power to coerce unwilling members of his band was limited. When decisions
affecting the entire group had to be made, his leadership depended on being capable of
forging a consensus by persuading members of the band about what to do. The poet Hesiod
describes how an effective chief exercised leadership:
“When his people
in their assembly get on the wrong track, he gently sets matters right, persuading
them with soft words.”41 In short, a chief could only lead his followers where they were willing to
go.
Tensions between Leaders and Followers
Aristocratic chiefs sometimes abused their status and created tensions between leaders
and followers. Eventually this tension contributed to the political reorganization of
the Greek world in the creation of the city-state.
A story from the
Iliad42 provides a fictional illustration of the kind of abusive aristocratic behavior
that chiefs could exhibit in the period before the city-state emerged. According to the
Iliad, when Agamemnon, the aristocratic leader of the Greek army
besieging Troy, summoned the troops to announce a decision to prolong the war, now in
its tenth year, an ordinary soldier named Thersites spoke up in opposition. Thersites
could express his opinion because Agamemnon led the Greeks as a Dark Age chief led a
band, which required that all men's opinions be heard with respect. Thersites criticized
Agamemnon as unjustly greedy. “Let's leave him here to digest his
booty,” Thersites shouted to his fellow soldiers in the ranks. Odysseus,
another chief, immediately rose up to support Agamemnon, saying to Thersites,
“If I ever find you being so foolish again, may my head not remain on my body
if I don't strip you naked and send you back to your ship crying from the blows I give
you.” Odysseus thereupon cowed Thersites with a blow to his back, which drew
blood.
In this fictional episode, the assembled soldiers approve of Odysseus' inequitable
treatment of Thersites, who admittedly speaks without moderation or tact. For the
city-state to be created as a political institution in which all free men had a stake,
the idea that all men had the right to speak their minds, even rudely, had to emerge in
the real world. Non-aristocratic men had to insist that they deserved equitable
treatment, even if aristocrats were to remain in leadership positions and carry out the
policies agreed on by the group.
The Injustice of Chiefs to Peasants
The poet
Hesiod43 reveals that a state of heightened
tension had developed between aristocratic chiefs and the peasants (the free proprietors
of small farms, who might own a slave or two, oxen to work their fields, and other
movable property of value) in the eighth century. Their property made peasants the most
influential group among the men ranging from poor to moderately well-off who made up the
bands of followers of aristocratic chiefs in late Dark Age Greece. Assuming the
perspective of a peasant farming a small holding, the poet insisted that the divine
origin of justice should be a warning to
“bribe-devouring
chiefs,”44 who settled disputes among their followers and neighbors “with crooked
judgments.” This feeling of outrage evidently felt by non-aristocrats at not
receiving equal treatment in the settlement of disputes served as a stimulus for the
gradual movement toward new forms of political organization in Greece.
