This is a survey of ancient Greek history from the Bronze Age to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. Along with studying the most important events and personalities, we will consider broader issues such as political and cultural values and methods of historical interpretation.
The Polis
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En provenance du cours de Wesleyan University
The Ancient Greeks
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À partir de la leçon
The Archaic Age (ca. 800-500 BCE)
Module 2 brings us into the turbulent, creative Archaic Age, during which the Greeks acquired a cultural identity distinct from that of their neighbors in the Eastern Mediterranean. They developed their characteristic form of community, the polis, or “city-state.” With a rebound in population, moreover, they founded numerous colonies abroad. In addition, the Greeks recovered literacy, which enabled them to write down law codes for the poleis. The newly established communities had a new form of military organization, the hoplite army, manned by citizen-soldiers. The lyric poets of that era wrote verses that address such great social changes, and also offer vivid accounts of individuals’ emotions and opinions. The module ends with another poet, Hesiod, somewhat later and less famous than Homer, but also very significant. His subjects range from the origins of the cosmos and the gods, to personal ethics, to practical advice about farming.
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Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, PhDProfessor
Classical Studies
We've spoken about the enormous changes that occurred after the collapse of
Mycenaean civilization, the three centuries that constituted the Dark Ages.
For these next few sessions, we're going to be talking about another three century
period called the Archaic Age. Lasting roughly from 800 to 500 BCE.
For a very long time, this had been sort of eclipsed by the glory of the classical
period in the 5th century with it's temples and it's plays, etc.
But now, the Archaic Age has come to be recognized as one of the most important
formative periods in Greek history. It's also just so complicated, so
interesting, there's so much going on. The Greek world saw enormous changes in
economy, military practice, agriculture, social values, law, it goes on and on and
on. We'll try to summarize the most parts of
it. This is the time that we can see the
formation of a uniquely Greek cultural identity.
And we'll have to figure out what are the components that made that up, but we can
start with a start date, not 800 but actually 776 BCE.
This was the date of the first Olympic games.
This was one of the few genuine dating methods that went across all of the Greek
world. You could do account, say in the third
year of the 15th Olympiad. You do a little bit of math and you can
figure it out no matter what your local calendars were.
But, this brings me back to what I was just talking about a second ago, which is
the fact that this is the time that Greek identity separated itself out, became
distinct from the other Eastern Mediterranean communities.
So, what were some of the elements? We've already talked about one, which is
Homer. Homer is a cultural possession as a
defining cultural entity for the Greeks. Another was The Polis.
This is the sort of community that the Greeks adopted.
In Homer, Odysseus we're told at the beginning of the Odyssey, saw the towns
and learned the minds of many different men.
The different kinds of community in the Odyssey.
But, one of the things that Homeric society has in common that is both in the
Iliad and the Odyssey is a sort of three part division of king, council and
assembly. The king is the leader in battle, can be
the high priest and chief judge. The Council, often made up of elders,
serves as ad, advisers to the King, and the assembly is generally made up of the
army. This is sort of the base for the
development of the polis. I've put up here our old familiar map
showing you a number of the polis , which is the plural.
Both on the mainland, on the islands, on the coast of Asia Minor.
We'll talk much more about these as we go on.
You've read, I hope, a little bit of Aristotle's politics.
Aristotle lived and wrote in the 4th Century BCE, in a time when the polis was
already as an institution in decline. But the way he writes about it is it's
where we can start. We can start with his analysis.
And to do that, we'll look at a few terms.
Top is polis, which is in English, usually translated slightly clumsily as
city state. Polis had two principle features.
One is, a kind of internal unity. And secondly, a, an independence,
sometimes just nominal, from other communities nearby.
Along with that is it's definition by its politeia.
This is a word that is incredibly complicated.
It can mean, as you can see here, the constitution.
That is how a community defines itself. It can mean the citizen body as a whole.
It can mean citizenship abstractly defined, and that is then the word here
that is for citizen which is a polites. Someone who participates who is an actor
in the polis. It's worth noting here.
And at the outset, it's something we're going to come back to again and again.
That no matter what the political structure of a polis was, a citizen was
always and only a native-born, free, adult, male.
Democracy certainly existed. But, women, foreigners, children, slaves
were excluded from full participation in political life.
This is one of the ways that polis defined itself.
We can start thinking a little bit about these communities by thinking about
Aristotle's first criteria, in which is community of place.
The polis varied enormously in size. Here, I've given you just a little map of
central Greece. This is Attica, which was very large for
a polis. So, it was about 1,000 square miles.
Sparta in the south, with it's huge possessions in the area called Messini
had about 3,300 square miles. But Corinth, an enormously important
polis for the entire period that we're going to be studying, it was about 340
square miles. And some of the island communities, which
were also polis, were smaller yet. So, place is one thing, but this sort of
definition by constitution, by politeia is much more important.
This leads me to one other essential fact of the polis, which is that it always
included both the urban center, called the Astu, and the landscape around it,
the farmland, the agricultural area. No matter if you were living in downtown
Athens, or out here in Dhekelia, you were equally a citizen of Athens.
Aristotle defines the first association of human beings as the household.
And then, he says that households agglomerate into villages.
And then, by a process of what the great historian Lewis Mumford called an urban
implosion, called Synoecism, the villages come together to form a polis.
I mentioned just a moment ago that there was a sort of urban core called the Astu,
which was the site of the administrative buildings.
The central shrine, the gathering place called the Agora, which also becomes a
market certainly in Athens. But to repeat, this was always just one
part of the polis conceived as a whole. In Athens, of course, everything is
centered around the Acropolis, we'll see that in a few moments.
We'll talk much more about Athens as we go on, it's our best documented polis.
The citizen body, the constitution, the right of a community to decide who
belongs. These are essential to the polis.
And there is also underlying this all a kind of ideology of equlaity.
By which, I mean, that citizens were thought to be equal.
It's not that they all had equal rights in terms of, say holding office.
There are certain communities in which you had to have a certain amount of
property, a certain degree of wealth in order to hold office.
This was the case in Athens early on and then changed as we'll see.
But, there was an idea that somehow every citizen shared equally in, belonging to
and in having responsibilities toward the community in which he lived.
Aristotle sees the polis as the natural habitat for a human being.
He says, the polis is the highest and best form of association.
Well, maybe so, maybe not. We'll see that and we'll have reason to
critique that as we go on. But the combination of rights and
responsibilities, of belonging, of serving in the military, if necessary, of
holding public office, when called on, etc.
These are all defining features of this kind of community.
And, of course, polis gives us all of the Western roots for politics, politician,
even police as we go on. So, the influence of this kind of
community structure is enormous and long lasting.
I'm going to come back to all of these different points as we go on, but I'd
like to take a quick look at the story of Theseus, the mythical king of Athens.
Because his story, especially is told by Plutarch and by other writers, is a kind
of myth for the creation of the polis of Athens.
We see him here about to depart on an adventure, he's leaving his mother.
And there are famous parts of the Theseus story.
Probably the most famous of which is his visit to Crete, where he slays the
Minotaur, the bestial bull-man who has been kept in the labyrinth by King Minos.
he gets assistance from Minos' lovely daughter Ariadne whom he then dumps.
Oh well, that's what happens. But, when he comes back to Athens, and on
this wonderful red figure vase, we have him being greeted.
This is Theseus, and it's Athena, the patron deity who is welcoming him back.
And Plutarch tells us that when Theseus got back to Athens, he had a great idea.
He was going to bring all of the villages together and make one community.
This is Synoecism. This is the idea of communities
combining. What did this involve?
Well, as in the Theseus' story, it involves a common shrine.
We're told that Theseus sets up a temple where everyone can come and worship
Athena. In addition, he sets up games.
Sounds almost trivial, doesn't it? But it's not.
Because as a marker of community identity, these sorts of competitions,
which we saw in Homer as well, we talked about the agnostic quality of Homeric
life. But these sorts of competitions created a
sense of civic identity. He also welcomed in foreigners, this is
part of Athenian ideology. It was thought to be an open city.
We'll see that it wasn't really, but this is one of the ways the Athenians tried to
define themselves. And altogether then, he sets up a polity.
He sets up a community that comes to be called Athens, the citizens of Athena.
When Aristotle is writing in the 4th century, as I said earlier, the polis was
in decline. But for Aristotle, the polis is a
location where human beings are meant to live.
He has the famous phrase that man is a political animal, a Zoon Politikon.
And what this means is, as I said a moment ago, that the polis is the natural
habitat for a human being. And Aristotle goes on to say, that
someone who lives outside of a polis is not human.
He's either a beast or a god. Because to be fully human, one has to
reside in this kind of community. For the Greeks, polis identity becomes
part of personal identity. You can see this at the beginning of the
two great histories that we have been reading.
When Herodotus sets out in his great, great exploration of the Persian wars,
it's the first thing he says. He says, Herodotus of Halicarnassus.
This is his polis. Thucydides, his great successor, begins
Thucydides the Athenian. The intensity of the identification
between citizen and city state is something that I think is difficult for
us to imagine. But we have to imagine it if we're going
to understand how the Greeks understood their place in the world.
What we're also going to see is that the polis as an ideal travels well.
Because another factor, in the Archaic Age, is that the polis starts to be
diffused. And that's what we'll talk about in our
next lecture.
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