Early Greece. Oswyn Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ an increase in birthrate equal to that reached only occasionally and under optimum conditions in the history of man, of around 4% per annum. But the idea that within the period 800–750 the population of Attica may have quadrupled, and almost doubled again in the next fifty years, has met with strong resistance. It has been suggested that the number of graves reflects, not an increasing population but an increasing deathrate, due perhaps to water shortage, climatic change and plague: this theory seems implausible, since the period is in general one of increased prosperity throughout the Greek world. Alternatively it has been suggested that the figures for graves discovered are distorted by changes in burial customs and perhaps by the absence of whole social classes from the archaeological record; this has the advantage of being a hypothesis for which there can be no evidence. No theory has yet won wide acceptance; and it is unlikely that any explanation can do more than influence slightly the basic fact that the eighth century was a period of unprecedented population growth in Attica, and indeed throughout Greece: a half empty landscape was repeopled. Initially this must have led to a dramatic increase in prosperity and in urbanization, until the problems of overpopulation began to show themselves.

      The religion of the Greeks must always have lacked unity; for it was both polytheistic and localized: Indo-European elements from the Mycenean Greek and later invasions fused with native pre-Greek Cycladic elements and borrowings from Minoan and Anatolian cult, to create a complex of myths, rituals and beliefs about the gods without any clear unifying principles. What unity Greek religion possessed, carne late, as Herodotus claims:

      The origins of each of the gods, whether all of them had always existed, and their forms, were unknown to us until the day before yesterday, if I may say so. For I believe Hesiod and Homer to be about four hundred years before my time and no older. These are the men who created the theogony of the Greeks and gave the gods their names, distributed their honours and spheres of operation, and described their forms; the poets who are claimed to be older than these men are in my opinion later.

      (Herodotus 2.53)

      The date Herodotus gives is perhaps a hundred years too early; but his count may well be based on generations of 40 instead of 30 years. More interesting is the claim that Greek religion began with Hesiod and Homer: even when actual ritual practices were at variance with this picture, it is clear that the epic tradition on the one hand, and the individual genius of Hesiod on the other, did influence permanently the development of Greek religion.

      For instance the dominance of myth over ritual is in marked contrast to other polytheistic religions, as is the comparative absence of more bizarre mythic elements. The consistent tendency to anthropomorphism and the organization of the world of the gods in terms of political and social relationships are characteristics which, if not epic in origin, derive their continuing impetus from epic. Such uniformity as Greek religion possesses derives to a large extent from the picture of the Olympian and subsidiary gods in Hesiod and Homer. On the other hand there is a whole area of the Greek religious experience, ignored by them and therefore by later literary sources, which was the focus for emotions strong enough to survive the silence of the epic poets: fertility cults, orgiastic rites, propitiation of the dead and hero cult. These aspects never found their systematic theologian, but remained powerful because they were rooted in a particular locality.

      Most of the central practices of Greek religion are as old as the later Dark Age. In Homer temples are mentioned, and on one occasion the cult statue housed there; altars for animal sacrifìces are common. Professional priests existed at certain shrines, but they stood outside the normal organization of society; it is a characteristic of early Greece that the nobility performed most civic religious rituals by virtue of themselves holding priesthoods (often hereditary), without the intervention of a professional priestly caste. The sacrifice was the occasion for a feast, at which (for reasons which obviously worried Hesiod: Theogony 535ff) the gods received the entrails and the worshippers the edible portions.

      Oracular shrines, from which by various means the enquirer might obtain advice about his future actions and their consequences, were already widely known: Homer mentions the shrine of Zeus at distant Dodona in Epirus and that of Apollo at Delphi. The interpretation of dreams was practised and the lot was also considered to reveal the will of the gods. The seer (mantis) was a valued member of the community: he knows ‘present and future and past’ (Iliad 1.70); though any unnatural or sudden natural phenomenon like lightning or thunder was material for his art, his primary means of discovering the right time for action was through watching the flight of birds according to fixed principles:

      You tell me to obey the long winged birds; but I do not care whether they fly on the right to the dawn and the sun, or on the left to shadowy darkness. I put my trust in the counsel of mighty Zeus, who rules all things mortal and immortal: one bird is best, to fight for the fatherland.

      (Iliad 12.237ff)

      The evidence of heroic epic is fragmentary and potentially misleading; but it can be related to the subsequent development of Greek society. It can also be supported from comparative material: all the institutions of the Homeric world outside those of the polis find many parallels in other societies. But the usefulness of comparative material is not only in the way that it reveals the presuppositions behind isolated phenomena and suggests interpretations of them. It is also the interrelations between the institutions which can best be understood through comparing societies with similar structures. For instance, the Waigal valley area of Nuristan (eastern Afghanistan) possesses a ‘society in which leaders have influence rather than authority and where an uncomplicated technology is used to meet the demands of a highly competitive ethos’. In this pastoral community, rank is sought and achieved through competitive feasts of merit, bridewealth and dowry are exchanged, disputes are settled by mediation through the elders. The objects of status are made by a separate and inferior class of craftsmen, and are even tripods, bowls and cups. The original warrior aims of killing Muslims in raids have had to be suspended; but the society exhibits the structural interrelation of many of the central aspects of early Greek society, and an ethic which is remarkably similar.

      Similarly the process of state formation has been studied in a number of traditional societies in Africa and Polynesia. The Homeric society fits well this picture of the development of more complex political structures from a low basis of material culture through the emergence of the ‘big-man’, whose power rests initially on his ability to persuade the community to follow him as leader, but who succeeds in institutionalising his status in warfare, the judgment of disputes, and through ritual hospitality. Such personalised leadership, being fluid and without stable support structures, can often lead forward into more complex forms of social organisation.

      The slow evolution of the Dark Age resulted in a world which might seem static and fixed in its aristocratic ideas. But the differences between nobility and people were not great in economic terms; the distinction rested on birth and consequent style of life. As the organs of the polis gained more signifìcance, the tension between the noble’s world of honour and the people’s world of justice became increasingly apparent; and the structural dissonance already present reacted with new factors to produce a century of change as swift and as fundamental as any in history.

V

       Euboean Society and Trade

      AS CONSERVATIVE philosophers like Plato and Aristotle saw, one of the most powerful elements leading to change in early Greece was a natural one – the sea, offering a constant invitation to contact and to trade with other peoples. The Greek world created by the migrations of the Dark Age was already not so much a land as a sea unit, centred on the Aegean; local trade on a small scale existed from the eleventh century onwards, and a certain number of eastern artefacts or skills found their way into the area, by stages from Cyprus to Crete or Rhodes and on, or СКАЧАТЬ