Early Greece. Oswyn Murray

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      These men made similar choices about the selection of their subjects, and their powers were not so very different from one another, some of them writing histories about the Greeks and some about the barbarians, and not linking all these to one another but dividing them according to peoples and cities, and writing about them separately, all keeping to one and the same aim: whatever oral traditions were preserved locally among peoples or cities, and whatever documents were stored in holy places or archives, to bring these to the common notice of everyone just as they were received, neither adding to them nor subtracting from them.

      (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Thucydides 5)

      Whatever the aim of such writers, this is a somewhat favourable account of their actual achievement; still the discovery of local archives added a new dimension to the history of the past in at least one respect. The records surviving in local archives were primarily of chronological interest – lists of priests, victors at the games, and annual magistrates.

      About the end of the fifth century the sophist and antiquarian lecturer Hippias of Elis published the Olympic victor list, which took chronology back to 776 in a four-year cycle: his system of Olympiad dating became standard for later historians. Another writer, Hellanikos of Lesbos, published a whole series of local histories in the late fifth century, whose character can be seen from two examples. The Priestesses of Hera at Argos was based on the records of the famous temple of Hera, which it apparently used to provide a general chronological framework for early Greek history: presumably the Argive records preserved not only the names of priestesses but also the length of office of each of them, and perhaps even some major historical events during their terms. Hellanikos’ other important work was a local history of Attica. It was almost certainly arranged round the list of annual magistrates going back to 683/2, of which a number of fragments on stone have been found in the Athenian agora. The fact that this complete list was publicly inscribed for the first time in the 420s, and not added to, suggests that it had probably been discovered by Hellanikos during his researches and brought by him to the attention of the Athenian people as an important historical document.

      None of these works survive, but they were used by later authors, and in the case of Athens at least their characteristics are reasonably clear. They are marked by antiquarian interest in myth and origins, and by the importance they give to chronology; authors were often from priestly families (Kleidemos) or politicians (Androtion) or both (Philochoros). The influence of earlier local historians can be seen most clearly in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, a work which was discovered almost complete on a papyrus from Egypt in 1890. It is the only survivor of 158 constitutions of Greek states written by Aristotle and his pupils in the late fourth century, as part of his collection of evidence for the study of political science. The portion that survives is roughly eighty pages long, and consists of two sections, the first giving a constitutional history of Athens down to 404, the second describing the actual offices and working of the constitution at the time of writing. The historical part contains much material on political and institutional history, often distorted by later political prejudice; it must however be said that some of the political analyses are so crass and some of the documents so blatantly forged that many modern scholars have wanted to believe the work was compiled by a rather unintelligent pupil of Aristotle.

      Later writers occasionally add information, which is of value only in so far as it derives from a trustworthy source. The most important of these authors are the Augustan geographer Strabo, Pausanias, the compiler of an antiquarian guide to Greece in the second century AD, and the essayist and biographer Plutarch (roughly AD 50–120), whose lives of Lykourgos, Solon and Themistokes reflect a late and imaginative tradition. Diodorus’ Historical Library (written in Rome before about 30 BC) preserves in its history of early Greece a précis of parts of the general history of the fourth century writer Ephoros, a rhetorical work largely derivative on Herodotus for this period.

      The earliest inscriptions of more than a few words are in verse, but writing was quickly and widely used to record almost anything; for the period from the beginning of Greek writing down to the Persian Wars well over 5000 inscriptions are known, most of them of course very short. They are found in those types of material that can survive, bronze, lead, and especially pottery and stone; we should not forget the many documents that once existed on wood, parchment, wax tablets and papyrus. Some of the more important documents will be used as evidence later; these are mostly religious or commemorative (tombstones or dedications at shrines), or political (laws and treaties). The earliest surviving law is late seventh century, but the practice of putting up laws in public on stone or wood was common by the period of the Persian Wars.

      The Mediterranean has been a hunting ground for European archaeologists for a century. The most useless site is the one which is still inhabited: Thebes, Chalcis, Greek Marseilles and early Syracuse are virtually unknown. The Athenian agora is only partly excavated because its true extent was miscalculated when the expropriations of owners by the government were carried out; more successful was the physical transplantation of the village of Delphi to a pleasanter and archaeologically barren site, against the wishes of the inhabitants and at French government expense (the French had won the right to excavate by removing the duty on Greek currants). Many sites in Asia Minor especially are disappointing because there was extensive rebuilding there in Hellenistic and Roman times: Delos and Cyrene are other examples. Particularly fruitful are sites that have been abandoned or sparsely occupied, with or without violent destruction (for instance Smyrna, the shrine of Perachora on the Isthmus of Corinth, Paestum); but the sacking and rebuilding of a city can also preserve – the survival of late archaic art is due largely to the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480 and the Periklean rebuilding, which caused the temple sculptures of Peisistratid Athens to be buried in the new foundations soon after they were carved. Excavations have been conducted at most of the obvious sites, the centres of archaic culture – Sparta, Aegina, Olympia, Athens, Samos, the Argolid, the Sicilian colonies; some less obvious sites turn out to be particularly rewarding because of their position – for instance Al Mina in north Syria or Naucratis in Egypt. Fringe areas such as the Scythian royal tombs or Celtic Gaul often provide important evidence because of their different burial customs: the cemeteries and other sites of Etruria have yielded so much Greek pottery that the eighteenth century thought Greek vases were Etruscan (Josiah Wedgwood called his pottery factory Etruria); there are few Greek museums whose collections can rival those of the great Italian Etruscan museums.

      In relating different sites to each other and archaeological evidence in general to other types of evidence, the primary need is for an adequate chronological framework. For archaic Greece this is provided by pottery. In contrast to other artefacts pottery is of comparatively little value even when decorated, breakable, and when broken both useless and indestructible; in early Greece, painted pottery was a major art form whose styles varied from city to city and changed continually, so that it is comparatively easy to work out a relative chronology within each style. The styles of many areas were not widely distributed; Laconian pottery for instance is virtually confined to Sparta and its colony Tarentum; the various east Greek potteries are often difficult to distinguish, and their places of origin and chronological relationships are not yet fully determined. Such local styles are of limited interest in recording the presence of Greeks from a particular area in a particular place. Two cities, however, successively captured a wider market for their pottery: it is these styles, found all over the Mediterranean, which provide a relative chronology for archaeological sites in general, which can then be tied to absolute dates through known fixed points. Thus the dates of foundation of the Sicilian colonies given by Thucydides fix the beginnings of the early proto-Corinthian style; the sack of Athens in 480 offers another fixed point at the end of the archaic age, and there are a number of such fixes in between.

      The pottery of Corinth was the first to achieve widespread circulation, helped of course by the city’s position as the starting point of the route to the west. Contact with the near east and the import of textiles and metalwork brought various decorative motifs СКАЧАТЬ