Reading History: the Birth of Greek Civilisation

Reading History: The Birth of Greek Civilisation

Paul Cartledge surveys the historiographical treatment of the ancient Greeks.

There would appear to be two main reasons for our continuing fascination with the ancient Greeks. The first is that they are the fountainhead of what we are pleased to call Western civilisation or culture: to know the ancient Greeks is to learn more about what, and the ways in which, we think and see, as Sir Kenneth Dover has well shown inThe Greeks (BBC Publications, 1980, Oxford University Press paperback, 1982). The second reason is precisely the opposite. For institutionally speaking, Greek society and culture – or rather societies and cultures, since there were well over a thousand separate and often very diverse communities – are desperately foreign, irreducibly alien to our own. To comprehend the modes and concepts of ancient Greek democracy, for example, is to discover the unbridgeable gulf between them and any modern interpretations of that sorely abused term – but also to gain thereby a less distorted perception of both.

These two reasons why the ancient Greeks should continue to be a primary focus of our scholarly and general historical interest are explored in a collective volume edited by Professor Sir Moses Finley, The Legacy of Greece .A New Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 1981); historians of ideas who have enjoyed Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Blackwell, 1980) might profitably compare this with the original Legacy edited by Sir Richard Livingstone in 1921. A similar function will be served rather differently by another collection, Greece Old and New , edited by T. Winnifrith and P. Murray of the University of Warwick (Macmillan, 1983). The latest bout of controversy over the proper home and label of the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles makes such comparative essays unusually topical, and it is fitting that History Today will be devoting three of its 'Reading History' features to the ancient Greek world.

For most non-Classicists perhaps 'ancient Greece' means in practice Classical Greece from the Persian Wars of 480-479 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, or even just the Golden Age of Periclean Athens which gave birth to the Parthenon and a great deal else in our cultural pantheon. But unlike the goddess Athena who, according to usually reliable sources, leaped fully armed from the head of her father Zeus, the Parthenon did not spring fully formed from the brain of Pericles. Behind this now sadly ruinous masterpiece there lay a tradition of monumental temple-building stretching back at least three and a half centuries to the beginning of the era known as 'Archaic'. It is with the birth of Greek civilisation in this pre-Classical period from about 800 to 500 BC that the present discussion is chiefly concerned.

History, if it is to be other than historical fiction (a distinction admittedly elided in a work like Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark ), requires evidence – ideally contemporary, documentary sources of known date and certifiable authenticity. Archaic Greece is not exactly overflowing with such sources, as may be ascertained from a glance at the 'documents' translated in Charles W. Fornara, Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge University Press, second edition 1983). But it was in the Archaic period, probably around 750, that some Greeks somewhere for some reason invented the world's first fully phonetic alphabetic script – the ultimate ancestor of our own.

Whatever the reason, a subject of continuing controversy, the alphabet was soon used for writing down not just the inevitable obscene graffiti but also poetry, most notably the Iliad and Odyssey . Before 600 BC some Greek states had seen its value for transcribing public regulations onto such durable materials as stone and bronze, and about 550 or rather earlier Anaximander of Ionian Miletos (a city on what is now Turkey's Aegean seaboard) apparently produced the first prose work. Anaximander, like his fellow Ionian philosophers, was a student of the non-human cosmos rather than of mankind: their 'scientific' contribution has been usefully assessed in C.J. Emlyn- Jones, The Ionians and Hellenism (Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1980). But his use of the prose medium and his method of abstract, rational enquiry (historia in Greek) were directly ancestral to the invention of history in something like our sense of a critically objective investigation and rational explanation of the human past.

The credit for that intellectual breakthrough is probably due to Herodotus of Halikarnassos (another East Greek city, not far south of Miletos), one of the great innovating geniuses of the fifth century. Why it should have been he who became, in Cicero's phrase, the'Father of History' is an insoluble puzzle. But the marginal and ambivalent political and cultural situation of his native city, together with his enforced exile from it, surely help to explain why he published his researches 'in the hope of preserving from decay the remembrance of what men had done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and above all to put on record the reason why they fought with one another' (translation by George Rawlinson in Dent's Everyman Library ). Those who do not wish to read Herodotus merely for his enormous entertainment value will find this and other problems surveyed clearly and with panache in John Hart, Herodotus and Greek History (Croom Helm, 1982).

Given his brief, Herodotus began his Histories in earnest with the foundation of the Achaemenid Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great in about 550 and ended with the repulse of his grandson Xerxes' massive invasion of mainland Greece in 479. It is richly instructive to compare his story of the early Achaemenid kings with that of J.M. Cook in The Persian Empire (Dent, 1983), the most authoritative modern account. Leaving aside literary skill, the chief differences between them stem from their diametrically opposed attitudes to sources: whereas Herodotus was a monoglot oral historian, using written documents only incidentally and indirectly and archaeological evidence hardly at all, Cook exploits contemporary documents in several languages, together with the surviving material remains, in order to supplement and correct Herodotus' still indispensable narrative outline.

Herodotus requires close attention partly because he is the widely recognised progenitor of the historian's craft (or art) but no less because he alone provides us with the skeleton of a narrative framework for all Archaic Greek history. However, since Greek states never developed the bureaucratic, ration-card mentality of their Middle Eastern neighbours and overlords, the only real resource we have for improving on Herodotus today is archaeology. The difficulty here is that the spade, though it may not be able to lie, has to be made to speak and different interpreters notoriously ventriloquise very differently. Still, it is no accident that of the extraordinary number of recent synthetic works on Archaic Greece – no less than eleven in English alone since 1975 – the most original, and to me the most stimulating and enlightening, has been written by an archaeologist, Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece. The Age of Experiment (Dent, 1980).

How to account for this recent preoccupation with Archaic Greece is a problem in itself: its intrinsic interest, the omne ignotum pro magnifico syndrome and boredom with the glory that was Classical Greece all have something to do with it. But single-minded concentration on pre- Classical Greece can have a major corollary, as Snodgrass has brilliantly illustrated. All periodisation of human history is primarily due to convention and convenience. Some 'periods', though, seem to possess more than a merely notional actuality, and it has hitherto been universally assumed that two such are the Archaic and Classical eras of ancient Greek history, punctuated by the Persian Wars of 480-479: see, for example, the explicit statements in L.H. Jeffery, Archaic Greece. The City-States c. 700-500 BC (Benn, 1976, Methuen paperback, 1978) or P. Oliva, The Birth of Greek Civilisation (Orbis, 1981). Snodgrass, however, has systematically queried the linear evolutionary perspective built into this fossilised terminology (invented for art- historical purposes), has shown reason to doubt whether the Persian Wars do mark a natural break between historical epochs except in terms of certain intellectual developments, and has claimed that the Archaic period, which he would end towards 500, is the most important in all Greek history. This last claim is unlikely to evoke a universal chorus of assent, if only because the respective importance of eras is a nebulous and subjective issue. But no one can fail to be provoked in some way by Snodgrass. As a stimulant, his nearest rival in the field is Oswyn Murray, Early Greece , 1980, a volume in the Fontana History of the Ancient World of which Murray is the general editor. Unlike Snodgrass, who as an archaeologist appropriately adopts a primarily materialist approach, Murray prefers to operate through the history of ideas: since 'man lives in his imagination', he claims, ideas are fundamental and he articulates his book by distinguishing on socio-cultural grounds three sub- periods which he characterises as 'sets of interlocking life-styles'. My preference in explanatory emphasis lies firmly with Snodgrass' materialism: 'grub first, then morality', as Brecht put it. But the non-specialist reader for whom the Fontana series is expressly designed will gain from Murray a vivid impression of the rampantly competitive era that Jacob Burckhardt dubbed the 'age of agonal man' and will relish the fact that as much space is devoted to the potatory and copulatory habits of the Archaic Greeks as to their political history. Those seeking a sober and reliable guide to the latter should consult rather Jeffery's Archaic Greece or chapters by various hands in the revised third volume of the Cambridge Ancient History (1982), both of which are organised on a regional basis.

If the terminus of the Archaic period is controversial, its rough upper limit is not. For despite such remarkable recent finds as those from Lefkandi on the island of Euboia (see Antiquity vol. 56, 1982, pp. 169-74), it is still unobjectionable to describe the two to three centuries preceding 800 as a Dark Age, not least because the Greeks had totally lost the art of literacy. (This is one of the several converging arguments for postulating a sharp cultural break with the Mycenaean Bronze Age.) Darkness is of course in the eye of the beholder, and M.I. Finley in Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Ages (Chatto &Windus, second edition 1981) is adamant that it is only legitimate to speak of a Dark Age in the sense that, for lack of evidence, we are at present in the dark. But his attempt in his methodologically seminal The World of Odysseus (Chatto &Windus, 1978, Penguin 1979) to locate the details of social life portrayed in the Odyssey in the tenth and ninth centuries is not wholly successful, and at least in the eleventh and tenth centuries all areas of Greece except perhaps Euboia and Crete suffered a cultural recession. In the ninth century things do seem to pick up, at any rate in east-central Greece, and permanent contact was re- established with the Near East after an interval of three to four hundred years. But it is only after 800 that the pace and nature of cultural change alter to such an extent that it is possible to speak of a structural revolution occurring in the second half of the eighth century.

Different aspects of this revolution have been variously stressed, and there is a fundamental cleavage between those scholars who believe the process of culture change to have been internally generated and self-sustaining and those who argue that it was set in motion and crucially influenced by renewed contacts with the orient. The rise of the polis – a unique and untranslatable creation whose distinguishing characteristics include political independence and the political unification of town and country – is a litmus test of all explanatory hypotheses. My own would run something like this. Gradual population increase during the Dark Age, fostered by temporary political stability and the spread of iron-using, became exponential in some areas in the eighth century and markedly faster everywhere. This stimulated, indeed in some cases necessitated, a wholesale switch from pasturage to arable farming, as the community's principal vital resource, and at the same time increased both communication by land and travel abroad for purposes of either trade or permanent settlement. The challenge of travel and emigration, coupled with the need to define and secure adequate arable land, promoted community solidarity and the crystallisation of independent, self-governing political entities. The tangible expression of such solidarity, and a rough test of the achievement of polis status, was the construction of a monumental temple to a universally acknowledged protective deity.

The polis was so successful an experiment that by the end of the Archaic period there were Greek poleis sitting all round the Mediterranean and Black Sea shores – like frogs around a pond, to borrow the graphic simile of Plato's Socrates. The physical remains of these 'colonies' as they are inaptly named are comprehensively surveyed and illustrated in John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas. Their Early Colonies and Trade (Thames &Hudson, 1980), more selectively in Alan Johnston, The Emergence of Greece (Elsevier-Phaidon, 1976); while the literary sources are given closer attention in the revised Cambridge Ancient History .

The credit for this achievement must of course go in part to the adventurous leadership provided by the aristocracies who sponsored this massive population movement, as indeed it was individual aristocrats who spearheaded many of the political, economic, military and cultural innovations of the Archaic era. But more allowance should be made for or more credit given to the activities of the non-aristocrats, on whose physical labour and political support the wealth and power of the aristocrats were ultimately based, than is done, for example, in Chester G. Starr, The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece 800-500 BC (Oxford University Press, New York, 1977), summarised in his chapter for the CAH. Starr consciously minimises the role of forced labour in this revolutionary epoch and further distorts economic realities by importing a good few anachronistically modernising concepts. For, as Snodgrass has succinctly shown, trade and manufacture were of far less economic moment than agriculture, warfare and religious cult, and 'it is indeed to the economic life of Greece generally that the word "archaic", with all the force of its implications, seems to apply most closely'. I have attempted to reinforce this conclusion in a position paper included in Trade in the Ancient Economy , edited by P. Garnsey, K. Hopkins and C.R. Whittaker (Chatto &Windus, 1983).

The case of high culture is quite otherwise. Students of Archaic Greek visual art are amply provided for, most recently by R. Hampe and E. Simon, The Birth of Greek Art (Thames &Hudson, 1981); and the co-operative GreekHistory of the Hellenic World . The Archaic Period 1100-479 BC edited by G.A. Christopoulos (Ekdotike Athenon/ Heinemann, 1975) is sumptuously illustrated throughout. But interpretation in historical as opposed to purely art-historical terms is in much shorter supply. There are useful vignettes appended to Jeffery's regionally arranged chapters, and on a subject which occasioned much of the finest art there are typically thought- provoking comments in E.T. Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Literature (California University Press, 1979). But it is to Snodgrass that one turns for original insights. Even if his claim that 'the innovatory sculptors of the sixth century were making a contribution to Western thought which stands comparison with that of their contemporaries the philosophers, takes some swallowing at first bite, it goes down more easily after some meditative mastication, aided perhaps by what is still the most invigorating historical account of Archaic Greek hterature and open speculation, A.R. Burn, The Lyric Age of Greece (Edward Arnold, 1960, paperback reprint 1978).

At the outset of the Archaic period most Greek communities had been ruled by aristocracies or limited patriarchal monarchies. (See the author's review of Robert Drew’s Basileus [Yale University Press, 1983] in next month's History Today ). By its close, apart from the East Greek cities under Persian suzerainty where quisling dictatorships were the rule, virtually all were governed by more or less broadly based oligarchies of various kinds. Paradoxically it was dissident aristocrats, profiting from a transformation in the social basis of land warfare, who had often played a major role in this widening of political power by overthrowing aristocracies and establishing themselves as personal dictators known to the Greeks as tyrants. Sparta, however, odd in so many ways, never experienced a tyrant. Instead, having achieved a peculiar form of oligarchic 'good order' at home relatively early on, she used her armed might to champion good order – that is, rule by traditional oligarchies bound to Sparta by personal ties of ritual friendship – throughout the Peloponnese. But her attempt to export this congenial system of empire to Athens misfired disastrously. For in 508 Kleisthenes, an aristocrat of unusually expansive sympathies, sponsored a political revolution that ushered in the world'3 first democracy – 'a brilliant example of the power of political ideas in the field of action as well as a vindication of the principle of the independent city-state' (Snodgrass) and the first 'systematic application of reason to the creation of a constitution' (Murray).

However, the new system was not actually called democracy at first, and when that word was coined within the next half century it connoted something rather more like the dictatorship of the proletariat than anything we are familiar with in our representative democracies. Thus we return to our starting-point, the opposite attractions of similarity and difference presented by the ancient Greeks. Whether or not the Archaic period is or was more important than the Classical, let alone the most important in all Greek history, it undeniably merits the continuing scrutiny of all who seek to penetrate the roots of our Western civilisation.

 Paul Cartledge is a lecturer in Ancient History and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He is the author of Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History c. 1300- 362 BC (1979).