Early Greece. Oswyn Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ harms her by casting crooked blame, straightway sitting by her father Zeus, son of Kronos, she tells him of the minds of unjust men, until the people pays for the arrogance of its nobles who, plotting evil, bend judgements astray and speak crookedly. Take thought of this, you gift-eating nobles, straighten your words, utterly forget crooked judgements.

      (Works and Days 256ff)

      For Hesiod dikē (justice) has replaced timē (honour) as the central virtue for the community and its leaders: he speaks as a prophet warning the nobles that their misdeeds will destroy society: the whole city suffers from the vengeance of Zeus on them; he causes plague and famine, barrenness in women, and poverty; he destroys their army and their walls and their ships at sea (Works and Days 24off).

      Hesiod’s concern with social justice led him to create a political vocabulary. His thought is not normally expressed in truly abstract concepts; instead he speaks through the manipulation of myth: the eastern myth of the ages of man is retold to reveal the flight of justice from earth in the fifth and worst age, the age of iron (p. 91); the traditional form of the animal fable is given a new political dimension in the story of the hawk and the nightingale, which Hesiod himself probably invented. And the structure of political argument, the relationships between concepts, are expressed through a mode of thought which is specifically Greek, and which has had a deep effect on the cultural tradition of the western world – personification. Ideas derived from concrete institutions become abstract by acquiring the status of a divinity; the connections between these abstractions are expressed in terms of family relationships. The random examples in Homer (mostly concerned with physical states like Fear and Death and Sleep) have become in Hesiod a complex and meaningful system. Individual dikai (judgements) are parts of the goddess Dikē, who is hurt when they are perverted; she is the daughter of Zeus. Zeus indeed becomes the protector of human society:

      He married second rich Themis (Custom), who bore the Hōrai (Norms), Eunomiē (Social Order), Dikē (Justice) and blessed Eirēnē (Peace).

      (Theogony 901ff)

      Or in modern terms, the relationship between divine order and human order produces the norms which establish good rule, justice and peace. A whole social ethic is expressed in terms of myth and personification, an ethic in Which justice and social order have replaced the self-regarding virtues of the Homeric nobility.

      The characteristic form of political organization of the Greeks was that of the polis or city-state, the small independent community, self-governing and usually confined to one city and its immediate countryside; Aristotle described man as ‘by nature an animal of the polis’ (Politics 1.1253a); the central theme of Greek history is the development of the city-state to become the dominant form of government in the Greek-speaking world for roughly a thousand years, enabling city dwellers to control directly all or much of their own government, and to feel a local loyalty to an extent which no modern society has achieved. It is a natural question to ask, when and how did the polis arise? Some features of the Homeric poems point to an earlier state; but as far as social and political organization are concerned, despite the importance of the genos and the oikos, Homer and Hesiod show that the polis already existed in all essential aspects by the end of the Dark Age. Homer takes the same view of human nature as Aristotle: the Cyclopes are utterly uncivilized, not only because they ignore the rules of guest-friendship; ‘they possess neither counsel-taking assemblies nor themistes, but dwell on the tops of high hills in hollow caves, and each one utters judgements for his children and wives, and they take no heed of one another’ (Odyssey 9.112ff). But though Homer recognized the existence of the polis, it was Hesiod who gave it the language of self-awareness. He stands at the beginning of Greek thought about politics, as about science and theology.

      The origins of the polis are one of the great themes of early Greek history, whose various aspects form the main subject of this book. The problem is best explored from two points of view. The first concerns the origins and development of Greek political institutions, the continuing process of change and reform towards a form of political rationality which seems unique in world history. A society with little or no previous history emerged from the Dark Age without social or religious constraints, and was able to create a sense of community based on justice and reason, perhaps because its institutions were primitive and its forms of leadership as yet insecure. The chieftains or big-men of the Homeric world developed into an aristocracy only slowly and in competition with more egalitarian forms of communal life, which ultimately proved superior because they were based on the citizen army. In this sense the polis is a conceptual entity, a specifìc type of political and social organisation.

      But the development of the polis is also a process of urbanisation, which can be traced in the physical remains. The physical characteristics of the polis in the late Dark Age are described by Nausicaa:

      Around our city is a high fortified wall; there is a fair harbour on either side of the city, and the entrance is narrow. Curved ships are drawn up on either side of the road, for every man has a slipway to himself; and there is their assembly place by the fine temple of Poseidon, laid with heavy paving sunk in the earth.

      (Odyssey 6.262ff)

      The walled city is common in Homer: similes and descriptions show cities being besieged and cities on fire; even the camp of the Achaean heroes before Troy is fitted out with the essential characteristics of a city: city wall, meeting place and religious altars.

      Smyrna was according to one tradition the city of Homer himself; it was destroyed about 600 BC by the Lydians, and excavations in a suburb of the modern city of Izmir have revealed one of the most impressive urban sites of the archaic age. The walled city on what was once a natural promontory with two harbours fits Nausicaa’s description well. The earliest evidence of Greek settlement there is around 1000 BC; it used to be thought that the first walls were constructed in the mid ninth century; and although archaeologists now doubt that date, they cannot be later than the early eighth century. Some time later the walls were remodelled, and by then the area within them was densely built, with four or fìve hundred houses of mud brick on stone foundations; the population is estimated at around two thousand, with perhaps half as many again living outside the walls. After destruction caused probably by earthquake around 700 Bc, the walls were rebuilt on a massive scale and the city was laid out on a regular plan; the archaeologist who excavated the site has described this redistribution of land and central planning as ‘the first certain and unambiguous apparition of the organized Hellenic polis’ (J. M. Cook); but it is clear in fact that community life and some form of community organization goes back to around 800 and the first walls.

      The same picture of increasing prosperity and the increasing complexity of social and political life emerges from other sites: walled cities must have been common by the eighth century. The earliest evidence of civic institutions apart from walls must be temple building, for the Gathering Place (agora), being empty, is hard to find without total excavation, and virtually impossible to date. The earliest temples come from the mid eighth century and by 700 they are appearing in most city centres; a clay model from the shrine of Hera at Argos shows their form – a megaron-type hall with porch virtually identical with the housing of the nobility, which is the prototype of the archaic and classic Greek temple.

      The growing importance of city life and city institutions is related to other changes already mentioned, the shift from animal husbandry to arable farming and the declining importance of the oikos as a social phenomenon; behind them all may He a major new factor: population growth. Absolute figures are unobtainable; and attempts to argue from the analysis of graves in the well-explored region of Attica have proved controversial. What is clear is that, whereas the number of datable graves per generation in Attica remained relatively Constant in the period 1000–800, between 800 and 700 they multiplied by a factor of six; if these statistics were taken to reflect the population reasonably accurately, СКАЧАТЬ