A BRIEF HISTORY of ANCIENT GREECE Politics, Society, and Culture

TITLE PAGE A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREECE Politics, Society, and Culture Sarah B. Pomeroy Stanley M. Burstein Hunter College and California State University, the City University of New York Los Angeles Graduate Center Walter Donlan Jennifer Tolbert Roberts University of City College and California, Irvine the City University of New York Graduate Center New York • Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2004 3 ARCHAIC GREECE (C. 700–500 BC) The forces of change that had swept over Greece in the eighth century continued at an accelerated pace in the seventh and sixth. Population continued to rise, and in response Greeks founded more colonies, spreading all across the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Trade, helped by colonization, dis- persed Greek goods far beyond the limits known to the Bronze Age traders. The Panhellenic shrines, festivals, and oracles grew in number and importance, further fostering the sense of a common Greek identity. The Archaic period also saw new forms of literary, artistic, and intellectual expression. The Archaic period did have its dark side. Wars among Greeks became more frequent, and warfare itself became more lethal. Worse, strife within a demos became commonplace, as the leaders wrangled among themselves over power- sharing and the poorer citizens fought for economic relief and their civic rights. All this movement for good or for bad took place within a new social and political framework, the city-state, which by 700 had replaced the old chieftain system in many parts of the Greek world. THE FORMATION OF THE CITY-STATE (POLIS) The term “city-state” is a modern coinage, yet city-states themselves are ancient political formations, going back to the Early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia. Basi- cally, a city-state is a defined geographical area comprising a central city and its adjacent territory, which together make up a single, self-governing political unit. The Greeks called this arrangement a polis, which gives us “political,” “politics” and “policy.” As we saw in Chapter Two, the essential elements of the Greek city-states were already in place during the later Dark Age. The capital cities of what became city-states existed all through the Dark Age, and most of them had been 61 62 A Brief History of Ancient Greece the major centers of their regions during the Mycenaean period. The territorial community, the de¯mos in its joint sense as “the land” and “the people” appears fully evolved in the Homeric epics, as are the two primary governmental organs of the Greek city-state, the assembly of men of fighting age and the council of “elders.” All that was lacking to make the demos-communities of 800 BC into the polis-states of 700 BC were certain necessary formalities: formal political unification of the demos and the creation of a central government. Political Unification (Synoecism) In all city-states, from ancient Mesopotamia to Renaissance Europe, the capital city is the focal point of the state. And it is often the case that those who live outside the city have a lower civic or social status than the city dwellers. Among the Greeks, however, all members of the demos, whether they lived in the capital or the countryside, were called politai (members of the polis) as if they all lived together in the polis (city). So, for example, the inhabitants of the several settle- ments in the plain around the main town of Megara called themselves (and were called by others) “the Megarians.” The process by which a demos became unified is called “synoecism,” from sun-oik-ismos (“uniting the oikoi”). The vast majority of new city-states were quite small (25 to 150 square miles in area) often consisting of a single main town and its adjacent plain, holding a couple of outlying villages. In such cases, political unification was a simple matter. Polis (the state) and polis (the town) were nearly identical entities. Everyone lived within a few miles of everyone else, and many of the few hundred families in the demos would have been interrelated. Draw- ing them together into a single political unit was merely a matter of making formal the ancient ties of kinship and neighborliness. Political unification of regional territories that contained several important towns and villages besides the central polis was more complex and is not well understood. It seems likely that synoecism in these regions was a drawn-out process, beginning possibly in the late ninth century BC and crystallizing between about 750 and 700. Regional unification appears for the most part to have been voluntary and peaceful. For some places, however, there is evidence that intimi- dation and even force were used to integrate reluctant towns and villages into a political union. Such was the case in the region of Laconia, where the four origi- nal villages of Sparta absorbed the village of Amyclae, 3 miles south, into the Spartan polis against its will. Synoecism was also incomplete in some regions. Ar- gos, for example, never fully succeeded in unifying the whole of the large region of Argolis. Several small, independent city-states continued to exist outside the plain of Argos, and even in the plain itself some villages retained a good deal of local autonomy. By the early seventh century, dozens of independent city-states had been es- tablished all across the Mediterranean, from Ionia in the east to Sicily and southern Italy in the west, and many more would be added as the Greeks further ex- panded their geographical horizons. Not all Greeks lived in city-states, however. Archaic Greece 63 In a number of large regions of the Peloponnesus and central and northern Greece the inhabitants opted for a different form of political organization. The ethnos, as the city-state Greeks called it, consisted of a people and its territory (a demos) but without a capital polis, or a central government, or formal political union. The separate towns and villages of an ethnos were independent and autonomous, yet they also had a strong sense of common identity: “the Aetolians” as distinct from “the Phocians” to their east, and so on. They were united in religious cult, and they had institutions for reaching common decisions and unified action when necessary, as in the case of attack from outsiders, for example. GOVERNMENT IN THE EARLY CITY-STATES Political union could not have occurred unless the local basileis, the leaders of the districts, towns, and villages of the demos, wished it. These men, the new landowning aristocracy, were the planners and architects of the new centralized government of the emerging city-states. The key decision was to eliminate the po- sition of the paramount basileus and rule collectively, a relatively easy matter, since the paramount chief had little power over the other chiefs to begin with. The governmental structures of the early poleis differed in specifics, yet all fol- lowed a similar pattern: (1) The office of paramount basileus was either abolished completely or was greatly reduced in power. (2) The various leadership roles of the basileus were distributed among several officials drawn from the elite. (3) The importance of the council of aristocratic “elders” increased, while that of the assembly of the people decreased. Of course, these decisions were not arrived at in a single year or even a single generation. Yet it is likely that once the process of city-state formation had begun, determining which villages and districts were to be included in the polis and what system of government it would have taken no more than two or three generations. The new, more complex systems of organization and social control that arose in the city-states were a necessary response to changing conditions: sustained population growth, increasing productivity and trade, and more complicated re- lationships with neighboring states. Especially pressing was the need for ways to mobilize manpower and resources efficiently for warfare, for as population increased and land became scarcer, poleis fought each other over territory, a more serious business than the raids and counterraids for animals and booty that char- acterized war in the Dark Age. The new system of governance was thus good for the polis as a whole, but it was especially good for the large landowners who made up the government and, like all dominant groups in human history, were highly motivated to preserve their economic and political power. The basileus did not disappear completely. In a few poleis, a type of the tradi- tional hereditary chiefdom, with severe limits on the paramount leader’s power, appears to have continued on through the Archaic period. The Spartans retained the chieftain system the longest, though in a unique form, with two hereditary, life- long basileis ruling as equals. In this “dual kingship” the Spartan basileis exercised 64 A Brief History of Ancient Greece considerable authority, especially in the military sphere, but their powers were curbed by five annually elected magistrates, called ephoroi (“overseers”). Their job was to make sure that the basileis ruled lawfully and to prosecute them if they did not. In most poleis, however, the title “basileus” became just the name for one of a number of officials who made up the collective leadership of a city-state. The powerful families divided up the spheres of authority—administrative, military, religious, and judicial—among themselves, creating magistracies and boards. Later Greeks called this form of government oligarchy or “rule by the few” (oligoi = few). Unlike in the previous system, positions of authority could not be inher- ited, and their tenure was brief. In most states, by the middle of the seventh century, term of office was limited to a single year and could not be held again until a stipulated number of years had passed.

Load more