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The Development of the Greek World, 800-500 BC

Emergence of Greek city states

Jeffrey Lumb

Blacktown Girls High School

Outcomes

H1.1	describe and assess the significance of key people, groups, events, institutions, societies and sites within the historical context
H2.1	explain historical factors and assess their significance in contributing to change and continuity in the ancient world
H4.1	use historical terms and concepts appropriately
H3.4	explain and evaluate differing perspectives and interpretations of the past
H3.3	analyse and evaluate sources for their usefulness and reliability

Principal Focus: Through an investigation of the archaeological and written sources for the development of the Greek world 800 - 500 BC, students learn about significant developments, forces and relevant historiographical issues that shaped the historical period.

Students learn about:

Colonisation and tyranny:

emergence of Greek city states

Glossary

Content

The Greek migrations
New political order: the polis
The basis of cultural cohesion for the Greeks
In summary
Revision
Looking further

The Greek migrations (1200 B.C.- 1000 B.C.)

View a map of Greece in the Archaic age

This period is also known as the Dorian migrations. These migrations were initiated by the advance of the Illyrians to the Mediterranean Sea. North-western Greeks settled in Epirus, Aetolia and Acarnanla; the Dorians reached Crete and south-western Asia Minor by sea, and the Peloponnesus via the land route. They drove the Archaeans to the Ionian Islands.

Attica, Euboea and the Cyclades were untouched by the migrations and remained in Ionian hands.

There was also settlement of the western coast of Asia Minor.

The course of these migrations is reflected in the spreading of the most important dialects of the Greek tribes: Ionian, Archaean (Aeolian) and Dorian. The invaders were militarily superior because of their new battle technique: mounted warriors with weapons of iron against charioteers with weapons of bronze.

New political order: the polis

1. Continued settlement around ancient Mycenaean castles led to the development of the city states.

2. Settlements in newly conquered territories developed into villages which gave up the old military order (the assembly of king and free warriors), and a new property-owning class (noble) was formed.

3. The monarchical form of government was retained in the border areas of Greece (Epirus and Macedonia).

The Iliad and the Odyssey-the epic stories attributed to Homer-tell how Greeks from many city states, among them, Sparta, Athens, Thebes, and Argos, joined forces to fight their common enemy Troy in Asia Minor (the Trojan War).

This story is taken as evidence for two important factors in the development of Greece:

Firstly, that the land mass we know as Greece was composed of a number of city states.
Secondly, that these city states were quite independent, but they might unite to fight a common enemy (as was the case in the Trojan War).

What is also clear from Homer's account is the fact that the only patriotism the ancient Greeks knew was loyalty to their city state or, to use the Greek term, polis (poleis, if more than one). This seems particularly strange today, as the city states were very small. Athens was probably the only Greek city state with more than 20,000 citizens.

These poleis had developed from urban settlements and their surrounding communal lands. This process of joining a number of towns and villages into a single unit was known as synoecism. The development of the city state possibly owes its origins to the geographical features of mountainous Greece and to the need for protection and for centres of trade.

The polis was characterised by internal and external independence (autonomy and eleutherism), economic self-sufficiency (autarky), and local cults (political and religious community). Political relations between city states were regulated by peace treaties and alliances. The polis was not named after its location, but after the name of its inhabitants, which derived from the location. The polis was protected by a deity and governed by the laws it decreed.

Areas of city states
Attica 2,500 sq km
Corinthium 880 sq km
Argos 1,400 sq km
22 city states in Phocis together occupied some 1,650 sq km.

Ancient Greece was divided into many of these small city-states. Sometimes the Greek city-states were separated by mountain ranges. Often, however, a single plain contained several city-states, each surrounding its acropolis (literally "high town"), or fortified part of the polis.

An aerial photo of modern Athens showing the acropolis (the white elevated area in the foreground) and ruins of the Parthenon.

Carefully study the photograph. What natural defensive feature can you detect that made the Acropolis the ideal area for fortification?

These flat-topped, inaccessible rocks or mounds are characteristic of Greece and were first used as places of refuge.

On the Corinthian isthmus rose the Acrocorinthus, from Attica the Acropolis of Athens (see above), from the plain of Argolis the mound of Tiryns, and, higher still, the Larissa of Argos.

On these rocks the Greek cities built their temples and their king's palace. Below there was an open space reserved for gatherings of the people. This was the agora, an assembly place for market day, religious events, athletic contests, entertainments and functions of government.

As the polis developed, the town's main civic and religious buildings sprang up alongside the agora, as well as stalls and shops, but the agora itself remained open and became in many ways the heart of the community. There were also houses, city walls and surrounding fields and groves.

All this formed the polis, but there was much more. The polis was also the people of the community. It was their cultural and political life, their beliefs, their ideals, a living and functioning unit of which they were all very much a part.

Only in a few cases did a city state push its holdings beyond very narrow limits.

Athens held the whole plain of Attica, and most of the Attic villagers were Athenian citizens.

Argos conquered the plain of Argolis.

Sparta made a conquest of Laconia and part of the fertile plain of Messenia. The conquered people were subjects, not citizens.

Thebes attempted to become the ruling city of Boeotia but never quite succeeded.

The scale of the polis was indeed small. When the philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) came to discuss the origins of the polis in his book Politics in the early 4^th century B.C. he suggested that "it is necessary for the citizens to be of such a number that they know each other's personal qualities and thus can elect their officials and judge their fellows in a court of law sensibly." Before Aristotle, Plato fixed the number of citizens in an ideal state at 5040 adult males. For Plato (c.427-c.347 B.C.), as it was for Aristotle, the one true criterion of the size of the polis was that all the citizens know one another. The issue at stake here is between public and private worlds. The ancient Greeks did not really see two distinct worlds in the lives of the citizenry. Instead, the public world was to be joined with the private world.

The citizens in any given polis were related to one another by blood, and so family ties were very strong. As boys, they grew up together in schools, and as men, they served side-by-side during times of war. They debated one another in public assemblies, they elected one another as magistrates, they cast their votes as jurors for or against their fellow citizens. In such a society - the society of the polis - all citizens were intimately and directly involved in politics, justice, military service, religious ceremonies, intellectual discussion, athletics and artistic pursuits. To shirk one's responsibilities was not only rare but reprehensible in the eyes of the Greek citizen. Greek citizens did not have rights, but duties. A citizen who did not fulfill his duties was socially disruptive. In the polis of Sparta, such a citizen was called "an inferior." In Athens, a citizen who held no official position or who was not a habitual orator in the Assembly was branded as idiotai.

Every polis was different from the others. For example, some poleis had different names for the months of the year. Although there were similarities and differences between the city states, they all made the effort to preserve their own unique identity. What we call the ancient Greek world was really hundreds of independent city states or poleis. Those who lived within the confines of a city state considered everyone else to be inferior. Furthermore, those people who did not speak Greek were referred to as barbar, the root of our word barbarian.

Importantly, from these ideas developed these extremely important concepts in the Greek-speaking world:

Hellenes: participants in Greek civilisation or, more simply, Greek-speaking, and

Barbarians: those who spoke bar bar (an unintelligible language) or more simply, non-Greek-speaking.

The basis of cultural cohesion for the Greeks

Although the Greek city states were independent, there were a number of features they shared in common.....basically: language, literature and religion.

The common features that drew them together included:

Their form of writing and alphabet, which they adopted from the Phoenicians and further developed. (Vowels were represented by means of superfluous consonant symbols, amounting to the first pure form of phonetic writing). It was using this system of writing that the epic stories of the Greek-speaking heroes were first recorded.
The myths of the Mycenaean epoch (then included The Atrides, Perseus, Oedipus, Seven Against Thebes, Helena, and Menelaus). These were the antecedents of the Homeric epics.
Greek religion made use of the sacred shrines important to all Greeks (Delphi, Delos, Samos and Olympia). The athletic contests which grew out of them made this religion into a Pan-Hellenic institution (Greek agon = contest). The Olympic Games themselves were dedicated to Zeus: victors were recorded from 776 B.C.; the Pythian Games were held in honour of Apollo at Delphi; the Isthmian Games were held at Corinth in honour of Poseidon; the Nemean Games were held at Nemea in Argolid in honour of Zeus. Oracles were also a factor that acted in unifying the Hellenes, the most important being the oracle of Apollo at Delphi (the Delphic Oracle).

In summary

Greece became a country of city states.
1. After the fall of the Mycenaean and Minoan civilisation, Greek culture retrogressed for almost 300 years.
2. The art of writing was lost.
3. Cities were destroyed and plundered.
4. The native Ionian population was enslaved by invading Dorians from the northern Balkan plains.
5. Eventually cities began to grow again.
6. These cities were walled for protection.
7. Each city state was independent of each other.

The city state, or polis, became the dominant governmental structure of Greece.

The polis was small in size; Athens was the largest, yet only small in geographic size.
The population remained relatively low; Athens at its height had only 40,000 people.
Each polis had an akropolis, or high point, where the governmental and religious buildings were constructed.
The market-place, or agora, was the meeting-place for most of the people and was the economic centre of the polis.
The surrounding farmland supported the large population inside the walled cities.

Separated by barriers of sea and mountain, by local pride and jealousy, the various independent city states never conceived the idea of uniting the Greek-speaking world into a single political unit. They formed alliances only when some powerful city state embarked on a career of conquest and attempted to make itself mistress of the rest.

Many influences made for unity-a common language, a common religion, a common literature, similar customs, the religious leagues and festivals, the Olympic Games-but even in times of foreign invasion it was difficult to induce the cities to act together.

Revision

Research the following important aspects in the development of the polis during this period:

(1) Olympia

(2) the Delphic oracle

(3) the Pythian Games

(4) the Isthmian Games

(5) the Nemean Games.

Carefully study the aerial photograph above. Consider these questions:

Why would the early settlement of Athens need such a defensive site?
What does it tell us about life during these early times?
What evidence is there that the acropolis was an important religious site in ancient times?
What was the agora? What was its function?

From the aerial photograph, locate where the agora might have been situated.
Using the library, find what you can about:

the Acrocorinthus of Corinth,

the mound of Tiryns,

the Larissa of Argos.

How do these locations compare in size and function with the acropolis of Athens?

Looking further

All of these books are easily obtainable:

Bradley, P.	Ancient Greece: using evidence, pp 8-19
Hennessy, D. (ed.)	Studies in Ancient Greece, p. 35
Koutsoukis, A. J.	History of the Ancient World - Ancient Greece, pp 24-26
Roebuck, C.	The World of Ancient Times, pp 191-192

The following Internet sites are excellent sources for a number of aspects relating to this historical period:

Classics Resources
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/classics.html
An excellent site that has links to everything in the ancient world

The Perseus project
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Another excellent source for ancient Greece

Ancient History Source Book for Greece http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/asbook07.html

Good overview of the period: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/GREECE/ATHENS.HTM

The Greeks: Crucible of Civilisation (also has Flash 4 version)
http://www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/
An excellent animated site with sound based around the acclaimed T.V. series

The Herodotus web site: http://www.herodotuswebsite.co.uk/

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