Although it is very hard to reconstruct social structure from archaeological data alone, and using Homer as a source of data is fraught with problems, it is reasonably clear that the Dark Age saw the collapse of the strongly hierarchical Mycenaean order and its replacement with a much more egalitarian society’`’ A number of authors have argued that the political structure of the Dark Age was one of low-level chiefs, heavily dependent on followers who did not fail to voice their own views, with perhaps an occasional and evanescent paramount chief. Such societies are balanced between low-level hierarchy and considerable egalitarianism. Walter Donlan uses evidence from the Odyssey to describe what these societies were like:
I doubt there exists a clearer description in all ethnography of a lowlevel chiefdom, and of its internal stresses, than in these books of the Odyssey. The chief possesses considerable authority, but he must bend to the collective will of the fighting men, who are naturally disposed to be critical of his leadership. It is important that we understand that the epic tradition constantly underscores the fact that the leader-people tension is the cause of social dysfunction. Odysseus is consistently represented as being as good a leader as a people could realistically hope for; yet the message is unmistakable, that personal leadership is fragile and unstable and that the intrinsic opposition between the two social vectors of autocracy on the one hand and egalitarianism on the other, is a frequent prescription for social breakdown.15
In spite of the emphasis in Homer on outstanding individuals, we can still see a society with only the beginning of the idea of hereditary rank. Terminology with respect to leadership was in flux. As noted above, basileus was a term of such varied usage that it more often meant “leader” than “king.” Although Hesiod will refer to the Homeric leaders as “heroes,” in the Homeric texts themselves even the rank and file could be called heroes or aristoi (“best,” the origin of our term “aristocracy”).” Still, many of the leaders had a special relation to the gods: Achilles or Menelaus or Odysseus or Patroclus can all be called diotrephes, “Zeus-nurtured,” or diogenes, “Zeus-born.” Some leaders (for whom the term “heroes” would later be reserved) were literally Zeus-bornSarpedon, for example. But lineage, even divine lineage, did not itself provide status, nor did divine favor. Paris was Aphrodite’s favorite, but because of his inadequacy as a warrior, Greeks and Trojans alike despised him. When it came time for Sarpedon, beloved son of Zeus, to die, Zeus pondered intervening to save his life, but Hera prevailed on him not to do so as it would cause strife among the gods, many of whom would then want to save their children from fate-appointed death. This incident indicates that Zeus’s monarchy was far from absolute. Homer shows us a society in which status was based on valor, but also one in which leaders, basileis, could be seen as “godlike,” and therefore superior to common men.
There was a clear understanding, however, that the warrior elite owed its position to the services it provided to the larger community: the leaders were part of society, of a whole greater than its parts, even its leading parts, an idea the Greeks would never abandon before the Macedonian conquest. Like many others the Greek aristocracy began as a warrior aristocracy. Sarpedon’s words to Glaukos in the Iliad, however, express the social basis of their claim to high status:
Despite our need to moderate the notion of a monarchical past in early Greece, there were still some reminders of a kind of rule that was closer to the old Near Eastern magico-religious pattern than had actually been the case for a long time. In the Odyssey we find Odysseus disguised as a beggar praising Penelope with the words:
And in Hesiod’s Works and Days we have a similar picture of a good basileus, paired with an opposite one of the bad basileus, whom he often characterizes as “bribe-devouring”:
In a fascinating passage near the beginning of his 7beogony, Hesiod writes of the gifts that the Muses, the daughters of Zeus, can give to kings:
Hesiod then goes on to say that the muses give similar wisdom and persuasive speech to the “singers and lyre players of this earth” (7beogony, 1.94), thus implying a link between the singing poet and political power in a way we will need to examine further below.21 In Homer and Hesiod, then, echoes of a kind of kingship that had long been vestigial in Greece can still be heard.
If Walter Donlan, as we have seen, saw Odysseus and his band of followers as archetypal of early Greek society, W. G. Runciman does something similar with Odysseus’s Ithaca. Runciman describes Ithaca as a “semi-state” rather than a “proto-state”-that is, a kind of society with some rudiments of statehood but no sign of an inevitable development in that direction. Ithaca had “passed the stage at which political and kinship roles are coterminous but also [had] evolved roles to which authority attaches which is superior in both kind and degree to that of the lineage head, the village elder or the leader of a hunting band.” It was a society in which “the combination of heroic prowess and eloquence in debate (auctoritas suadendi’ was just what Odysseus possessed to the full) is the basis of leadership.”” Runciman’s point is that no independent set of political roles had emerged in such a society, no “secondary formation” as we have called it, so that the “semi-state” depended very much on the personality of its leader, and in Odysseus’s absence tended to fall apart altogether. We will have to consider the degree to which the polis ever transcended the limits of what Runciman calls a semistate, and the fact that the polis never developed a full-fledged secondary formation, as keys both to its cultural dynamism and its ultimate political demise.
In trying to understand early Greek society, we need to keep a number of things in mind. We could, almost by default, call it a tribal society, though that doesn’t get us very far. Unlike many tribal societies, or even axial China, extended kinship does not seem to have been a major focus of social organization. The lineage, genos (pl. gene), was of some significance among the nobility, but not among the common people. The household, oikos, whose core was a nuclear family, but which could include three generations, unmarried females, and non-kin dependents, was the basic kinship unit among both nobles and peasants. A village was a collection of households, but when did a village become a polis?
The Eighth Century
In the eighth century we begin to see unmistakable signs of cultural revival, so much so that scholars have begun to speak of “The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth Century BCE.“23 “Renaissance” is a problematic word if we take the analogy too seriously. The Italian Renaissance involved the revival of classical culture on the basis of a great many classical texts as well as the survival of ancient architecture and sculpture. The eighth-century Greeks had no texts (Linear B script would not have been legible to them if they had seen it) and only fragments of Mycenaean architecture and sculpture. Nonetheless, the text of Homer as we have it (long preceded by oral recitation), dating from around 700 and even perhaps committed to writing by that date, does project an image of some sort of Greek society purportedly from that earlier age but more likely reflecting mainly social conditions in the more recent past.
Homer is one element in an aspect of the eighth-century revival that is referred to as Panhellenism-that is, a consciousness of the Greeks as Greeks, even though there was no political unity among them. The Iliad, in which the Greeks are not yet called Hellenes, being referred to by several names, most commonly as Achaeans,244 depicts a Greek army, composed to be sure of highly diverse elements, but under the command of a single king, Agamemnon, and pitted against a city on the Anatolian coast, Troy, that differs little from the Greeks in culture, yet that unites the Greeks in their common effort to destroy it. The Iliad is the story of men more than gods, but the gods are everywhere evident within it, and it is the great Panhellenic Olympian gods-Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, Hermes, and so forth-who are in evidence, not the diverse local deities of every village and hamlet that we know actually existed at the time. And there was unity not only at the level of legend and myth, but of cult as well.
The first firm date we have in
Greek history is that of the first Olympiad, 776 BCE (not uncontested), and we should remember that the Olympic games were first of all ritual occasions, inaugurated by sacrifices to Zeus and celebrated as religious festivals. Although local authorities managed the games, their participants came from all the Greek communities. The four-year cycle of games was later augmented by the cyclic Nemean, Isthmian, and Pythian games, also open to all Greek contestants. Perhaps even more important in the long run was the emergence of the Delphic Oracle, located at the remote site of Delphi and not controlled by any major city. The Oracle was consulted by people from all over greater Greece and had a significant influence on policy, in particular supporting the deliberate colonization of much of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coastline from about 750 to 600 BCE.
Yet the very same period that saw the rise of Panhellenic ideology, ritual, and institutions also saw the emergence of a new social form, the polis, which emphasized local loyalty and solidarity as strongly as the Panhellenic institutions emphasized a common Greek identity. The eighth century saw for the first time the building of temples all over Greece, temples that, with the festivals associated with them, were the very symbols of the unity of the polis. It also saw the emergence of significant civic officials and institutions, not the least important of which was a strong military organization as the expression of the autonomy of the polis.
Because the polis is a unique Greek institution, a society without a king, though variously governed, related clearly to the Greek cultural achievements that were to come, we would like to know where it came from and how it developed. We would especially like to know how a strong Panhellenic identity and a strong local polis identity emerged at the same time, and whether they reinforced each other or were a source of conflict, or perhaps some of both.25 We have little written evidence from the eighth century, for alphabetic writing was in its earliest stages even late in that century and not much more written information from the seventh century. However, for these centuries as well as for the dark ages before the eighth century, archaeology continuously provides us with new data.26
It would seem that the polis was the primary residence of the nobles, though they may also have had country seats.27 Thus the distinction between nobles (agathoi, “the good”) and the common people (demos, but also, pejoratively, kakoi, “the base,” or “bad”), was in part between town-dwelling landowners and country-dwelling peasants, yet the polis was fundamentally a people, one that included the peasants, so the distinction between town and country was never as great as in medieval Europe. We must also remember that, in spite of claims of immemorial attachment to their locale, both nobles and people had been in more or less continuous movement for centuries. It is difficult to look at a map of Greek dialects without seeing that people had been moving around a lot, and moving meant fighting-even after they settled down there was still a lot of fighting going on between neighboring poleis. So perhaps the first claim to noble status was based on taking the lead in warfare.
Perhaps the Greek nobles were originally warrior bands who emerged after the fall of Mycenaean royal legitimacy, not too different from the warrior bands that replaced the fall of chiefly legitimacy in some of the Polynesian islands described in Chapter 4. Still they laid claim to a shadow of the ancient past in several ways. As noted above, the term anax, derived from the Mycenaean wanax, meaning “great king,” survived in Homer, where it was applied, however problematically, to Agamemnon and Priam, as well as oc casionally to other Greek leaders, and the term basileus, applying to officials of some sort in Mycenaean times, was used as a general term for leaders in Homer and Hesiod, but retaining some degree of legitimacy beyond the sheer attribute of force. Hesiod, whose text is usually dated to around 700 BCE, distinguishes between good basileis, whose actions are in accordance with themis, customary law, as bringers of prosperity through natural fertility as well as social harmony, and bad basileis, who give rise to drought and famine as well as social unrest. They thus represent, in however attenuated a form, the relation between this world and the world of the gods that was the case with high chiefs and archaic kings. Not surprisingly they also often functioned as priests. A hereditary priest in Athens was called basileus, though his religious importance was not great and he had no political power at all.
Even though groups of nobles ruled most Greek poleis before the rise of democracy in the fifth century, and even after that often supplied the leaders in democratic or quasi-democratic poleis, we should not exaggerate their power, their cohesion, or their closure to other groups. They were landholders, but not great landholders in comparison, say, with the senatorial class in Rome. The poleis themselves were on the whole quite small in both territory and population, with only a few that could be called cities. Athens, the largest, had a population of no more than 250,000 at its height. The degree to which slave labor was used in agriculture is debated, but it seems unlikely that Greek nobles ever had vast slave estates. Noble families had clients and tenants, but seldom amounting to any great number.
Very significant is the fact that nobles were a far from cohesive group: they viewed themselves as equals and resisted domination by any particular family. They competed for excellence and virtually created the culture of athletics as we know it even today, in which winning was of enormous importance. But the effort of one family to dominate the polis would be resisted by other noble families, even more, initially, than by non-nobles.
Although the nobility were the prime movers in creating the polis as we know it from the eighth century, it was they who took the lead in creating Panhellenic culture and institutions as well.28 Members of noble families, though always jockeying for power in their own poleis, were also often abroad, cultivating guest-friendships with noble families in other parts of Greece, and contracting marriages with such families as well. The tyrants who controlled a number of poleis, usually briefly, mainly in the sixth century, were nobles who mobilized support from the people against their fellow nobles, but who also called on their friends and relatives abroad to help them take power by force. Their lack of cultural legitimacy and the resentment they aroused among the nobles as well as the common people combined to make their rule relatively short: none created a stable monarchy.
The Greek conception of status hierarchy was complex, but because it was the context of Greek cultural innovations, we must try to understand it. At the highest level there were the immortal gods. In the heroic age they had coupled with mortals, and the children of these unions were often the founders of noble lineages, but the days of divine-human intercourse were long over and perhaps the most important distinction of all was between mortals and immortals. Even so, Sarpedon said to Glaukos, “All men look on us as if we were immortals.” Great men-leaders in war and peace, major poets, wise men-could be called “godlike,” though it was not until Alexander that the idea of divine parentage as against divine descent reappeared in Greece under foreign influence. But even the children of a divine-human coupling were mortal, and it was human mortality that created the great divide between gods and humans.
The distinction between the immortals and mortals provided a template for how the nobles (agathoi, the good) viewed the demos (kakoi, the base), yet the nobility was never closed to new members, and wealth could lead to noble status in no great period of time. But the citizens, including the people as well as the nobles, could view themselves as radically distinguished from another group, the slaves. The extent and degree of slavery in ancient Greece is debatable, but the definition of slaves was that they were, in contrast to citizens, unfree. Orlando Patterson has argued persuasively that the very idea of freedom so central in Greece and in later Western civilization, was intelligible only in contrast to the unfree status of slaves; that is, a society without slaves would not have developed that particular notion of freedom.29 Perhaps the drastic inequality of immortals and mortals made it easier for the Greeks to accept the distinction between slaves and free without question. Indeed, the gods might be cha
racterized as having hyperfreedom, being free of many human limitations, notably mortality. Relative to the gods, even free humans could be considered slaves.
There were other status distinctions as well. Unlike Rome, no Greek city readily extended its citizenship to foreigners, so that resident aliens, particularly in a great commercial city like Athens, were an important group, often rich, but without political rights. And, of course, women, though they played a significant role in mythology, drama, and occasionally even in philosophy, were excluded from political participation. They were, however, full partici pants in many of the rituals that to an extraordinary degree defined the polis. We can say that they were cultic citizens, even though not political citizens.30 The wise and warlike divinity who protected Athens was, of course, the goddess Athena. Nor was Athens alone in this regard: Hera was the goddess of Argos and Samos, for example.
Having given a sense of what Greek society was like in the first centuries after the eighth-century renaissance, we must ask: Why did so many new developments occur in the eighth century? In answering this question it is important to remember that early Greece, whose geographical extent was constantly changing at least from 1200 to 600 BCE, was part of the “Orient,” as Mycenaean civilization had been. There was as yet no “Europe.” When the archaeologists discovered that the town of Lefkandi in Euboea was a significant center of commerce from 900 if not earlier, it was commerce with the Near East.31 The Greeks who had established themselves along the west coast of Anatolia before or after 1000 BCE were in constant contact with peoples to their east, and it was no accident, as they say, that these towns, such as Miletus, would be in the forefront of cultural innovation in the earliest phase. There is, for example, a tradition that Homer came from the island of Chios off the Anatolian coast. But rather than seeing the Greeks, as nineteenthcentury scholars tended to do, as Indo-Europeans who were “influenced” by the Orient or even “Orientalized” to some degree, we should see them from Mycenaean times on as the western periphery of “the Orient,” indelibly part of it, and only gradually creating a distinct civilization of their own. In this they are more closely parallel to ancient Israel than we usually imagine.
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