The polis and its cultureRobin OsborneINTRODUCTION‘We love wisdom without becoming soft’, Thucydides has the Athenianpolitician Pericles claim, using the verb
philosophein.
1 Claims to, and respectfor, wisdom in archaic Greece were by no means restricted to those whom thewestern tradition, building on Aristotle’s review of past thinkers in
MetaphysicsBook 1, has effectively canonized as ‘philosophers’. This chapter has twofunctions: to reveal something of the social, economic and political conditions ofthe world in which Greek philosophy, as we define it, was created; and toindicate some of the ways in which issues which we would classify as‘philosophical’, or which have clear philosophical implications, were raised anddiscussed by those whose work is nowadays classed as ‘literature’ or ‘art’ ratherthan ‘philosophy’, and thus to put
philosophia back into the wider context of
sophia—‘wisdom’.Discussions of the background to early Greek philosophy frequently stress theintimate link between philosophical and political developments.
2 Part of my aimin this chapter is to make the case for the importance of other factors, and tostress the extent to which self-conscious articulation of ethical, political,epistemological and indeed metaphysical questions precedes the development oflarge-scale political participation in practice. It is for this reason, as well asbecause of their subsequent importance as texts universally familiar throughoutthe Greek world, that the longest section of this chapter is devoted to a detaileddiscussion of certain themes in the works of Homer and Hesiod. Greekphilosophy as we define it is, I argue, simply one remarkable fruit of a culturalsophistication which is the product of the rich contacts between Greece and theworld of the eastern Mediterranean and of the somewhat precarious conditions ofhuman life within Greece itself, conditions which demanded both determinedindependence and access to, and relations with, others.The Greece of the archaic and classical polis belonged to, and was intimatelylinked with, a wider eastern and central Mediterranean world. The Minoan andMycenaean palaces of the late Bronze Age had had strong links with Cyprus andwith southern Italy; it is increasingly clear that during the period which we knowas the Dark Ages, from
c.1100 to
c.800 BC, when archaeological evidencesuggests that human activity in Greece was restricted to a very small number ofsites, those wider contacts were maintained, albeit at a rather low level ofintensity. During the eighth century that contact seems to have focused upon theexchange of goods, whether by trade or by what might rather be termed piracy,but during the following centuries Greeks were persistently involved in directhostilities in the eastern Mediterranean, hostilities which culminated, but by nomeans ended, with the ‘Persian Wars’ of the early fifth century. Contact withthat wider world played a major part during the eighth and seventh centuries instimulating many essential features of the culture of the Greek polis, includingalphabetic writing and the development of narrative and figurative art; during theperiod from 600 to 370 BC direct borrowings from the East are more difficult todetect, but the perceived need for self-definition in the face of the ‘barbarian’came to be one of the most important factors in shaping the nature and ideologyof the Greek city and was an undeniable ingredient in late-sixth and fifth centurysensitivity to cultural relativism.But the Greek polis and its culture were also shaped by conditions that wereclosely bound up with the lands where Greeks lived, Mediter-ranean lands whichare marginal for the cultivation of some cereals and many vegetable crops, butwhich also enjoy widely varying ecological conditions within restrictedgeographical areas. To farm is to run serious risks of crop failure, and the farmerwho isolates himself ends by starving himself.
3 These, then, are lands whichcompel people to move and make contact with others if they are to survive, butthey are also lands (and this is particularly true of the Greek mainland itself) inwhich mountainous terrain renders movement difficult. The political history ofGreece is marked by a constant tension between isolation and independence onthe one hand—the Greek world as a world made up of hundreds of selfgoverningcities tiny in area and in population -and a sense of a common identityand dependence on the other—a world where cities are linked for survival, inempires, leagues, and confederacies which are often at war with one another.This tension between independence and common identity also marks the culturalhistory of Greece.
GREEKS AND THE EASTGreeks of the late Bronze Age wrote in a syllabary, known as Linear B, thedecipherment of which in the 1950s has enormously increased our knowledge ofthe political and social organization of Mycenaean palace society, of theMycenaean economy, and of Mycenaean religion. Linear B was, however, ameans by which scribes could keep detailed records rather than a means ofgeneral, let alone mass, communication. Like all syllabaries it required a largenumber of separate symbols; with the fall of the palaces the motivation forrecord-keeping disappeared, and Linear B disappeared with it, although a(different) syllabary is found in use in classical Cyprus. As far as we know,between
c.1200 and a little after 800 BC Greeks possessed no means of writtencommunication. Then in the eighth century writing reappears in the Greek world,but now it is alphabetic rather than syllabic and the letters of the alphabet arelargely those of the Semitic alphabet used by the Phoenicians. There is no doubtthat Greeks borrowed not only the idea but the very means of alphabetic writingfrom the East. However, the Greek alphabet differs crucially from its easternMediterranean model: Greek from the beginning represents vowels, as well asconsonants, with full letters. The invention of the vowel made Greek writingboth more flexible and more straightforward than Phoenician, but it did not, as issometimes claimed, mean that there was a different symbol for every differentsound; the earliest alphabets do not, for instance, distinguish between long andshort vowels. Given this limitation, it is unclear whether representing vowels wasa stroke of individual genius on the part of the Greek who first took up the idea ofan alphabet, or was simply a happy accident of someone who translated the initialsounds of some Phoenician letter names into Greek vowel sounds.
4The distinction between Phoenician and Greek alphabets rests not simply onthe representation of vowels, but also on what the alphabet was used for. Manyof the earliest examples of writing in Greek are metrical, their purpose more toentertain than to inform. So a graffito on a pottery jug from Athens of
c.750 BCdeclares that jug to be a prize for the person ‘who dances most friskily’, another,of slightly later date, on a cup found in a grave of the Greek community onIschia, plays on the epic tradition about Nestor and declares itself to be Nestor’scup, expressing the wish that whoever drinks from it might be visited with desireby the goddess of love, Aphrodite. The frequency with which verse occurs inearly Greek writing has led some to suggest that it was the desire to make apermanent record of oral epic poetry that led to the invention of the Greekalphabet.
5 That the script local to Ionia, the homeland of epic poetry, was theearliest to distinguish long and short vowels might be held to suggest that the firstGreek scripts needed adaptation to be truly useful for quantitative verse. But inany case it is clear that early Greek uses of writing were not at all limited byPhoenician practice.Early Greek writing illustrates well the unity and at the same time the diversityof the Greek world. Writing is early attested from a very large number of cities inthe Greek world, and always the fundamental character of the alphabet, therepresentation of vowel sounds, is the same; indeed the use of the Greekalphabet served as one way of defining who was and who was not Greek (Creteis, Cyprus not). But the symbols that were added to the core of twenty-twosymbols borrowed directly from Phoenician, and the symbols adopted forparticular sounds, differ, showing particular localized groupings. What is more,the purposes to which writing was put varied from area to area: written laws (onwhich see below) figure prominently in Crete, for example, but not at all inAttica. Greek cities had common interests, but they also had differing prioritiesand were as little constrained by what neighbours were doing as by whatPhoenicians did.
6A similar picture can be painted with regard to artistic innovation. Thatarchaic and classical Greek art owed a great deal to the Near East there can be nodoubt. One of the skills lost at the end of the Mycenaean era was figurative art.We have little Dark Age sculpture (all we have are small bronzes) and decorationon pottery vessels took the form of geometric decoration, initially dominated bycircular motifs against a dark background and then increasingly dominated byrectilinear patterns over the whole surface of the pot. When animal and humanfigures made their appearance they too took on very geometric shapes. Near-Eastern art of this period had no such devotion to geometric patterns: it was richin motifs drawn from the natural world. These natural motifs, and with them amuch more curvilinear and living approach to the depiction of animal and humanfigures, came to take the place of the geometric in Greek art, but they were notadopted wholesale and they were adopted in different media and in differentplaces at different times. Purely geometric designs were first supplemented andthen largely replaced with motifs drawn from the natural world by the potters ofCrete in the second half of the ninth century BC, plausibly under the influence ofthe Phoenician goldsmiths for whose products and residence on Crete there issome evidence; on the Greek mainland too, at Athens, metalwork showedoriental borrowings, and perhaps oriental presence, by the middle of the eighthcentury, although it was another fifty years before potters found a use for andtook up the possibilities offered by the eastern artists.With the motifs which Greek artists took up from the East came whole newpossibilities for art as a means of communication. The geometric figures ofeighth-century pottery from the Greek mainland could very satisfactorily conjureup scenes of a particular type, with many figures involved in identical or similaractivities, and were used in particular to conjure up funerary scenes and battlescenes. But the stick figures were not well adapted to telling a particular story orhighlighting individual roles in group activities. The richer evocation of naturalforms in Near-Eastern art made possible the portrayal of particular stories,stories which can be followed by the viewer even in the absence of guidancefrom a text. With the adoption of such richer forms the Greek artist took on thispossibility of creating a sense of the particular unique combination ofcircumstances. But again, the Near-Eastern means were not used simply toreplicate Near-Eastern narrative techniques, rather the most ambitious of seventhcenturyGreek artists chose to exploit the fact that invoking a story by pictorialmeans demands the viewer’s interpretative involvement and to juxtapose quitedifferent scenes in ways which challenge the viewer to make, or to resist making,a particular interpretation. Even when we may suspect that particularcompositional gambits have been taken over wholesale from Near-Easternprecedents, the application of the gambit to a different story context producesvery different effects.One further, striking, instance of Greek adaptation of ideas from the Eastdeserves mention because of its religious significance. At the end of the seventhcentury the Greeks began, for the first time, to produce monumental sculpture instone. There can be no doubt, from analysis of the proportions of these statues,that the ancient tradition that Greek sculptures of standing male figures werebased on Egyptian prototypes is correct.
7 But where the Egyptian figures whichserve as models are figures of rulers and are clothed in loin cloths, the Greekmale figures, known as
kouroi, are from the beginning naked, and beardless, andstand in no simply representative relationship to any particular man. And from thebeginning too, Greeks sculpt figures of (clothed) women
(korai) as well as men.
Kouroi and
korai are primarily found in sanctuaries and although (or perhapsbetter because) they do not themselves simply represent either the gods or theirworshippers, there is little doubt that they came to be a way of thinking aboutrelations between men and gods: the variable scale of these statues (some
kouroiare monumental, reaching 3, 6, or almost 10 metres in height) drew attention tohuman inability to determine their own physical bulk; the unvarying appearanceof the statues raised issues of human, and divine, mutability; the way theirfrontal gaze mirrored that of the viewer insistently turned these general questionsof the limits of human, and divine, power back on the individual viewer, and, inthe case of
korai, their nubile status and gestures of offering served to querywhether exchanges of women and of fruitfulness within human society wereimages for men’s proper relationship with the gods. Such questions about theform of the gods and the ways in which men relate to them are questions whichexercised such thinkers as Heraclitus and Xenophanes also. Both
kouroi and
korai, in versions of human scale, came to be used also in cemeteries, figuringthe life that had been lost, sometimes with epitaphs explicitly inviting the viewerwhose gaze met that of the statue to ‘stand and mourn’, using the mirroring gazeof the statue to emphasize the life shared by viewer and deceased. Conventionswhich in Egypt translated political power into permanent images of dominationwere thus adapted in the Greek world to stir up reflection about what peopleshared with each other and with the gods, and about how people should relate togods.
8This consistent pattern in which Greeks borrow the means from the East butuse those means to distinctly different ends, is one that can be seen in the realmof the history of ideas also, where a case can be made for Ionian thinkers takingadvantage of the new proximity of the Iranian world with the Persian conquest ofLydia in order to take up ideas and use them in their arguments against each other.Extensive cosmological and cosmogonical writings are known from variouspeoples in the Near East which can plausibly be held to date from the early firstmillennium BC or before. The case for taking up eastern ideas is perhaps clearestin the work of Pherecydes of Syros, active in the middle of the sixth century,who wrote a book obscurely entitled ‘Seven (or Five) Recesses’ (
Heptamukhos or
Pentemukbos). His account of creation and of struggles for mastery among thegods, although in some ways in the tradition of Hesiod’s
Theogony (see below),differs crucially in the order of presentation of material and may have beendirectly indebted to oriental sources.
9 Similar claims have also been made for theMilesian Anaximander whose order of the heavenly bodies, with the starsnearest to the earth, is found in the East but not otherwise in Greece, and whoseview of the heavenly bodies as turning on wheels has similarities with the visionsof the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. Pherecydes was individualist in histreatment of traditional stories, Anaximander highly eclectic in any borrowings;such eclectic, individualist, and often directly critical, attitudes towards the ideasof others, other Greeks as well as non-Greeks, is indeed a remarkable feature ofthe Greek world.
10 But this is not to suggest that transformation in the borrowingis unique to Greeks: it is found too in what later cultures have done with theGreeks themselves. Milton’s epics, to take but one example, depend upon theclassical epic tradition yet use that tradition to convey a religious and theologicalworld entirely alien to that tradition; so too the cultural achievements of archaicand classical Greece are unthinkable without Near Eastern resources to drawupon, but the different economic, social and political circumstances of theGreek world bring about transformations which result in something entirelydifferent.
11This critical assimilation of ideas is only comprehensible against a pattern ofextraordinary mobility. It is often unclear from the archaeological record whocarried eastern goods to Greece or Greek goods to other parts of theMediterranean, but that Greeks were themselves frequently on the move, evenduring the Dark Ages, there can be no doubt. The culture of the Greek polis is nota culture found simply within the boundaries of what is present-day Greece, noris it limited to those places described by the second century AD travellerPausanias in his ‘Guide to Greece’; it is a culture which grew up as much incommunities found on the coasts of Asia Minor, the Black Sea, Italy, Sicily,southern France, Spain and Cyrenaica as in mainland Greece itself. Historianssometimes talk of the ‘age of Greek colonization’, but the truth of the matter isthat Greeks migrated to, and formed or took over settlements in, coastal districtsof other parts of the mainland at every period known to us. Greek presence incoastal Asia Minor seems to have been established, or in some places perhapsrather reinforced, during the early Dark Ages, at the same time as other Greeksfounded settlements in the northern part of the Aegean. Settlement on the coastsof Sicily and Italy began in the eighth century, the Black Sea and Africa followedin the seventh. Scope for Greek settlement in the eastern Mediterranean wasmore limited, but there is no doubt that Greek enclaves existed at a number ofsettlements in the Levant, and the town of Naukratis was set aside for Greeks inEgypt.Greek settlements abroad generally laid claim not just to a particular ‘founder’but also to a particular ‘mother city’ but models of colonization drawn from theRoman or the modern world are unhelpful for an understanding of what washappening. The population of the new settlements abroad was almost invariablydrawn from a number of cities. Movement across the Greek world in the archaicperiod seems to have been easy: the poet Hesiod tells us that his father movedback from the ‘new’ Greek world of Asia Minor to mainland Boiotia, craftsmenmigrated, temporarily or permanently, from Athens to Corinth, from Corinth toEtruria, and so on. Economic opportunities were one factor causing men to move,local crises, as frequently of a political as of an economic nature, were another.Underpopulation was at least as common a worry for cities as wasoverpopulation and newcomers were often welcome. Intermarriage with non-Greeks was frequent: the philosopher Thales is said by Herodotus to have hadPhoenician ancestry; Pherecydes’ father seems to have come from southernAnatolia; the historian Herodotus himself came from Halikarnassos, a mixedGreek and Carian community within the Persian empire; the historianThucydides’ father’s line came from Thrace. Sparta, perhaps already in the archaicperiod, and Athens, from the mid fifth century, were unusual in the way in whichthey prevented men or women from other Greek cities from acquiring the samerights as, or even marrying, existing members of the community.
HESIOD AND HOMERGreek literature starts with a bang with the monumental
Theogony and
Worksand Days of Hesiod and the
Iliad and
Odyssey ascribed to ‘Homer’. All fourworks are the products of oral traditions with long histories of which tracesremain, but the nature of the oral traditions behind the works of Hesiod is ratherless clear than that behind ‘Homer’, and Hesiod may owe his unique position inpart to being able to plug in to both mainland, and, perhaps through his father,Aeolian traditions. That it is these poems that survive to represent the oraltraditions may be connected not just to their high quality but to the way in whichthey gave a pan-Hellenic appeal to what had previously been local traditions, atthe moment when the Greek world was significantly expanding its horizons.
12Hesiod’s works are not epic adventure stories but didactic poems aiming directlyto teach: morality and practical wisdom in the case of the
Works and Days, andthe structure of the world of the gods in the case of the
Theogony. Neither ofHesiod’s poems has any real successor extant in the corpus of Greek literature orany obvious impact on the imagination of visual artists, but comments andcomplaints in later writers, both philosophers and others, make it clear thatknowledge of his works was widespread and that public views of the gods owedmuch to them. Herodotus (II.53.1–2) wrote that,It was only the day before yesterday, so to speak, that the Greeks came tounderstand where the gods originated from, whether they all existedalways, and what they were like in their visible forms. For Hesiod andHomer, I think, lived not more than four hundred years ago. These are theywho composed a theogony for the Greeks, gave epithets to the gods,distinguished their spheres of influence and of activity, and indicated theirvisible forms.Hesiod’s influence on poets is clearest not in the immediately succeeding periodbut in Hellenistic times.The
Works and Days belongs to the genre of wisdom literature familiar fromNear Eastern examples and well represented in the Old Testament. The end ofthe poem consists of a succession of maxims about what to do, or not do, andwhen (‘Don’t piss standing and facing the sun’; ‘On the eighth of the month geldthe boar and loud-bellowing bull, but hard-working mules on the twelfth’). Butthe beginning of the poem structures its advice on how to live around a morespecific situation, a dispute, whether real or invented, between Hesiod and hisbrother Perses over sharing out the land inherited from their father. Not onlydoes this introduce us to Hesiod’s expectations about dispute settlement—it isclear that local rulers, ‘bribe-devouring princes’, decide such matters—and aboutagricultural life,
13 but it gives scope for a mythological explanation of the needfor labour in terms of two separate myths, the myth of the ‘five ages’ and that ofPrometheus and Pandora. Through these myths Hesiod ties issues of justice totheological issues, and attempts to make the arbitrary features of the naturalworld, so manifest in the collection of maxims with which this poem ends,comprehensible within a systematic structure. In doing so Hesiod actually takesover the function of the king as the authority who by his judgements determineswhat is and what is not right, implicitly raising the issue of how, and by whom,political decisions should be made.
14The myth of the five ages (
Works and Days, lines 109–201) explains both thecurrent state of the world and also the existence of beings between humans andgods. It tells how once the gods made a race of gold, who lived in happiness,plenty and leisure, but when this generation died it was replaced by a race ofsilver who respected neither each other nor the gods, to whom they did notsacrifice as they should, and were short-lived; these two generations havebecome two orders of
daimones. The third generation was a strong race ofbronze, smitten with war and destroyed by their own hands, which was replacedby a more just, godlike, race of heroes, including the heroes who fought at Troy,demigods who were taken to dwell in the isles of the blest. After the heroes camethe current generation, the race of iron, marked by the disappearance of youthand destined itself for destruction after lives marked by injustice. The interest ofthis myth lies in the way in which it is not simply a story of decline from agolden age: Hesiod’s picture of the race of silver is extremely negative, that of therace of heroes rather more positive. What is more, the neat sequence of metals inorder of value is upset by the introduction of the generation of heroes. Hesiodexploits the structures offered by the ageing processes of the natural world andthe value-system of exchange of metal to provide a model for a hierarchy ofpowers between humanity and gods, but at the same time he introducessystematic contrasts between just and unjust behaviour, between goodcompetition and evil strife, which tie this myth into the overall concerns of hispoem. He is doing ethics as well as theology.
15Hesiod’s concern not just with theology but, as it were, with its practicalconsequences, emerges still more clearly in the myth of Prometheus and Pandora,a myth which he explores not only in
Works and Days (lines 42–105) but also inthe
Theogony (lines 507–616). In
Works and Days Hesiod tells how Prometheus(whose name means ‘Forethought’) stole fire from the gods, hiding it in a fennelstalk, and Zeus in punishment had the other gods fashion Pandora who is givenas wife to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus (Afterthought); with her she brings ajar from which comes all the mischief in the world. In the
Theogony Hesiod tellshow when gods and mortals were separated from one another at MekonePrometheus divided up an ox unequally and tricked Zeus into taking the panconsisting merely of fat and bones. In revenge Zeus withholds fire fromhumanity (so rendering possession of meat useless), but Prometheus then stealsfire and Zeus has Pandora, and through her the race of women, made as apunishment (no mention of a jar or of Epimetheus), and Prometheus himself isfastened in torment, his liver perpetually devoured by a bird, until Zeus agrees tohave Herakles free him in order to glorify Herakles, his bastard son. Both thesestories turn on concealment and trickery: Prometheus makes Zeus take aworthless gift that looks good, and then runs away with a good gift (fire) thatlooks worthless (a fennel stalk); Zeus makes men take a gift that looks good(woman in her finery) but turns out to be full of trouble.In the context of the
Works and Days Hesiod’s telling of the myth emphasizesthat there are no free gifts in this world and no avoiding hard labour. In thecontext of the
Theogony his telling of the myth not only explains Greeksacrificial practice but emphasizes both the parallelism and the divide betweenhumanity and the gods. Human life as we know it depends on women and on thefact that men, like Epimetheus, find them desirable and only think about theconsequences later; in that way human life depends on men’s ‘bad faith’ ingiving the gods the worthless portion of the sacrifice. At the same time humanlife as we know it also depends upon sharing all the gifts of the gods, includingthe fire which makes tricking the gods out of meat worthwhile. The deceitfulrelationship of humans to gods itself mirrors the deceitful relationship of humansto beasts which is required by arable agriculture, which needs the labour input ofoxen but must reduce to a minimum the number of appetites satisfied during thewinter, and which is most dramatically demonstrated in feeding up domesticanimals for sacrificial slaughter: human life both depends on perpetuating, butalso concealing, acts of bad faith to beasts, and suffers from the gods’concealment of good things (the grain concealed in the ground) and from theirbad faith (producing irregular fruitfulness in plant and beast).
16The use of these myths by Hesiod reveals a concern to find some way ofunderstanding how humanity relates to the world and some reason behind humanritual activities. The course of the mythical narrative assumes that actions arereasonably responded to by like actions, assumes the principle of reciprocity,while recognizing also that bad faith may be ongoing. The place of the myth inthe
Works and Days, in particular, constitutes an argument that recognition of theway reciprocity operates involves a commitment to labour, as well as acommitment to justice. Although never spelt out by Hesiod in those terms, thewhole structure of his account of the gods presupposes that justice is a principlerespected among gods as well as mortals.Hesiod generally appears in histories of early Greek philosophy for hiscosmogony and cosmology, and indeed the account near the beginning of the
Theogony (lines 116ff.) of ‘Chaos’ (‘Gap’) coming to be first and then Earth,Tartaros (Hell), Eros (Desire), Night and Day, etc. being successively createddoes seem to represent an important conceptual leap by comparison with NearEastern cosmologies or indeed with the highly anthropomorphic succession mythwhich follows in the
Theogony.
17 I have dwelt here, at some length and in somedetail, on rather different aspects of Hesiod’s poetry in order to bring outsomething of the importance of his overall enterprise in the history of Greekthought. Hesiod’s poems are not simply rag-bags in which genealogies andmaxims are collected, they employ genealogical myths in order to support notjust maxims but a set of social priorities.
18 The struggles between successivegenerations of gods, in the
Theogony, struggles which have been argued to owesomething, perhaps at some rather earlier stage of the oral tradition, to NearEastern succession myths, are used to put both order and hierarchy into thedivine pantheon. The
Works and Days constitutes an argument that the strugglebetween Hesiod and Perses should be settled in the light of the principles whichemerge from the Prometheus myth. The congruence of human and divine worlds,which is implicit within any anthropomorphic religion, is here being used toestablish consequences for human society. This mode of argument, not to befound in the Near Eastern literature, is an important forerunner for some earlyIonian philosophy, one might note in particular Anaximander’s claim that thingsin the material world ‘pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injusticeaccording to the assessment of time’.Homer’s place in and influence on the culture of the Greek polis is moremanifest than that of Hesiod, no doubt in part because the
Iliad and
Odyssey hadan institutionalized place in the Greek city through their festival performance byrhapsodes. Although neither artists nor dramatists choose, on the whole, to maketheir works dependent on the details of Homer’s texts, the spirit of the Homericpoems comes to pervade classical Athenian art and drama. The extent towhich modes of thought and argument characteristic of later philosophicalthought, and particularly arguments about ethical and moral values on the onehand and self-conscious analysis of the means of persuasion on the other, arealso anticipated in the Homeric poems has, however, frequently beenunderestimated, and it is to those aspects of the Homeric poems that mostattention will be given in what follows.Much work on Homer during this century has been devoted to exploring theoral tradition out of which
Iliad and
Odyssey were created. This work has madeit clear, on the one hand, that the techniques and building blocks required tocreate these monumental poems were forged over a long period. The
Iliad and
Odyssey are built upon a skeleton of repeated name-epithet combinations andrepeated scenes, which constitute about a third of the poems, which enabled apoet to reconstruct, rather than simply repeat from memory, a poem inperforming it. Those repeated phrases and scenes made possible monumentalcomposition, and to some extent shaped the subject-matter, personnel, and thesorts of things said about them; but they did not foreclose on the poet’s freechoice at any point or determine the order of scenes or development of thenarrative. It is likely that many of the stories told in
Iliad and
Odyssey werestories that had been told before, but telling them in the particular context inwhich
Iliad and
Odyssey (re)tell them is the decision of the monumentalcomposer(s) responsible for these poems.As strife is at the centre of
Theogony and
Works and Days so also it is at thecentre of
Iliad and
Odyssey. The
Iliad relates the quarrel between Achilles andAgamemnon, the commander of the Greek expedition against Troy, overwhether Agamemnon had the right to claim a captive girl, Briseis, who had initiallybeen awarded to Achilles, when the girl awarded to himself had been reclaimedby her father. Achilles withdraws his labour from the battlefield in protest atAgamemnon’s seizure of the girl, and is deaf to an appeal made to him to rejointhe fray after the Greeks have proceeded to have the worst of it. Finally he agreesto let his companion Patroclus enter battle, wearing his armour, Patroclus iskilled by the Trojan champion Hector and Achilles himself re-enters battle totake revenge on Hector whom he kills and mercilessly drags round the walls ofTroy. The poem ends with Achilles agreeing to ransom the body of Hector to hisaged father Priam who comes alone to the Greek camp for the purpose. The
Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus’ homecoming to Ithaca, with its manyviolent and remarkable encounters with fabulous creatures, both vicious andvirtuous, on the way, and his violent resolution of the struggle for control inIthaca between his son Telemachus and the suitors assembled to claim the handof Odysseus’ wife Penelope.The
Iliad is not the story of a war and its topic is not the sack of Troy. Thestruggle upon which it focuses is not the struggle between Greeks and Trojans—indeed it has recently been stressed that the
Iliad does not treat Trojans asbarbarians, as a people inferior in nature or morals to the Greeks19—but thatbetween Achilles and Agamemnon. This struggle raises issues of authority,allegiance, of conflict between different virtues, and of glory as a zero-sumgame: one man’s glory is bought at the cost of others’ suffering and death.Although scholars have often written as if the
Iliad simply illustrates the ‘heroiccode’ of behaviour, in fact the struggle between Agamemnon and Achilles isbased on a disagreement about ethics and value, and both in the case of the attemptsto persuade Achilles to change his mind and in the case of his final agreement toransom the body of Hector issues of ethics and value are argued about anddecisions are made on the basis of changing judgements about them.
20 But thepoem is not simply about morality; basic political and theological issues aresubject to debate too. In what follows I will indicate briefly some of the majorissues that are raised.The quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles questions the limits ofAgamemnon’s authority: Achilles has come to Troy to please Agamemnon andwith the promise of honour to be won, and the question is what Agamemnon cando without forfeiting that loyalty, without outweighing the honour with dishonour.Early in the quarrel Achilles raises the question of Agamemnon’s own abilities inwar, claiming that he never goes out to fight, with the implication that his claimsto leadership and booty are thereby compromised: status and office, on this view,are not enough. The aged Nestor responds to this by urging Agamemnon not topull rank and Achilles to respect Agamemnon’s office, on the grounds that theirdispute does good only to their enemies, as if office should command authorityeven if it is unable to assert itself. Nestor himself is heard but ignored. The issueof who has and who speaks with authority is sharply raised again in Book II:when Thersites joins in the attack on Agamemnon, using terms which aregenerally milder than those employed by Achilles, he is smartly treated tophysical punishment by Odysseus, who goes on to call for loyalty not because ofwho Agamemnon is but because to depart from Troy empty-handed would be tolose face. In Book IX the issue of Agamemnon’s authority is once more raised,over his shortcomings as a deviser of counsel revealed in his desire to abandonthe expedition: Diomedes questions Agamemnon’s authority on the grounds thatAgamemnon lacks courage—so turning back on Agamemnon an allegation hehad once made about Diomedes—only to have Nestor, once more, intervene withrival advice which he presses on the grounds that his age gives him authority.Nestor goes on to urge that Agamemnon’s authority requires that he be preparedto receive as well as give advice.Exploration of the techniques of persuasion is closely tied into the issue ofauthority.
21 When, in Book IX, Nestor again urges Agamemnon to placateAchilles he adopts a formal mode of address: ‘Most glorious son of Atreus, lordof men Agamemnon, I will finish with you and start from you because you are lordof many men and Zeus has entrusted you with the sceptre and power to decidewhat is law, in order that you might take counsel for them.’ This rhetoricsuccessfully softens the critical sentiments which follow, and makes it possiblefor Agamemnon to admit that he was wrong. When, as a result, an embassy issent to Achilles, the opening speech of Odysseus is marked by argumentsdeployed in a sequence showing consummate skill. He begins by explaining thedire need that the Greeks have of him, and goes on to appeal to Achilles’ father’sadvice to and expectations of his son, and to enumerate the immediate andprospective rewards Achilles will receive if he re-enters battle, including theprospect of political authority back in Greece, before reiterating the appeal topity the Greeks, this time adding the imminent prospect of killing Hector.Achilles’ response is very different in kind, an outpouring whose effect is creatednot by any carefully reasoned sequence of points but by vivid similes (‘I havebeen like a bird bringing her unfledged nestlings every morsel that she takes,however badly off she is herself), by urgent rhetorical questions, by theincreasingly direct and passionate way in which he reacts to what Odysseus hassaid, and by the way in which he spells out himself what Odysseusdiplomatically left unsaid. The tension between logic and passion, and indeed theimpossibility of ethical argument which does not involve both, is brilliantlyhighlighted by this interchange, and further explored in the exchanges whichfollow between Achilles and his old tutor, Phoenix.Gods frequently intervene directly in the course of events throughout the
Iliad,and issues of the powers and morality of the gods are repeatedly in play. Humancharacters express the view that the gods support morality, but the debates anddecisions on Olympus reveal no such moral imperative; so Menelaus (
Iliad XIII.620–22) assumes that Zeus will destroy Troy because of Paris’s abuse ofhospitality, but Zeus shows no awareness of this responsibility in the Council ofthe Gods in
Iliad IV. Indeed what debates on Olympus reveal is that divineinterests are in conflict and that there is a constant bargaining between gods as towhose interest is to prevail. Disputes among the gods are conducted much as arehuman disputes, although in the
Iliad trickery is predominantly a divine attribute.But gods differ from mortals in two important respects: first, among gods there
isan all powerful figure who can insist that his will be done; Agamemnon may bebetter than other men (
Iliad I.281) but Zeus is best (
Iliad I.581) and when Zeuswarns that the consequences of resisting him are terrible (
Iliad I.563) we knowthat that means something rather different from when Agamemnon says the samething (
Iliad I.325); second, gods are immortal and the divine perspective islonger than the human perspective, so that major events in human life can beseen to be resolved over the longer course of time. Through conflicting divineinterests and powerful divine oversight the
Iliad explores and explains theexistence of evil and moral dilemmas.
22The struggle at the heart of the
Odyssey also raises issues of authority andtheology, but it raises further issues too upon which I wish to focus here.
23 Platohas Socrates quote the father of his friend Eudicus as saying that ‘the
Iliad is afiner poem than the
Odyssey by as much as Achilles is a better man thanOdysseus’ (
Hippias Minor 363b), and it is Odysseus’ cautious, secretive anddeceitful behaviour that introduces a whole new set of issues into the
Odyssey.The poem traces Odysseus’ return from his long enforced residence with thenymph Calypso to his eventual triumph, against all the odds, over the suitors onIthaca to reclaim his wife and his political control—although we are told offurther wanderings to come. The story of how Odysseus came to be strandedwith Calypso, which Odysseus tells to the Phaeacians with whom he is nextwashed up, the stories of the homecomings of other Greek heroes told in thecourse of the epic, and the episode of the slaughter of the suitors are all stronglymoral: in every case before disaster strikes warnings are given about theconsequences of behaviour which breaks the rules. Although magic plays alarger part in this poem than in the
Iliad, it is the logic of morality rather than anysupernatural force or arbitrary intervention of the gods that governs events. EvenOdysseus brings disaster upon himself and his companions by ignoring wiseadvice or by arrogant behaviour—as in the foolish bravado which reveals hisidentity to the Cyclops when he mocks him as he departs. By the end of the poemOdysseus himself is generally more circumspect, but he retains a tendency to beso excessively cautious about revealing more than he has to that, as his failure toreveal what was in the bag of winds led his companions to ruin by opening it, sohis reluctance to reveal his identity to his own father Laertes leads to Laertes’unnecessary grief. Reticence as well as rashness can be a fault, and getting it rightin every circumstance demands powers of foresight which are greater than evenOdysseus’ accumulated experience of human feelings and motives can supply.Odysseus’ deception of others, as he spins false tales of his identity to all hemeets, not only raises moral issues, it also raises issues about language andrepresentation. Odysseus’ briefest deceptive tale is also the most famous: hisclaim to the Cyclops Polyphemos that ‘No One is my name; my mother andfather and all other companions call me No One’ (IX.366–7), a claim whichleads Polyphemos to tell the other Cyclopes that ‘No One is killing me’. Thereare two jokes here, not just one, for according to the rules of Greek syntax ‘No One’appears in two forms,
Ou tis and
Me_ tis, and the latter form is indistinguishablefrom the word
me_tis, meaning ‘guile’ or ‘deceit’ (as also in the repeated phrase
Polyme_tis Odysseus, ‘Odysseus of the many wiles’). This brief demonstrationof the way in which to name is to tell or imply a story, and not simply to refer tosome object, of the way in which the name is ‘inscribed in the network ofdifferences which makes up social discourse’
24 paves the way to the repeateddeceptive tales of the second half of the
Odyssey.Six times in the second half of the
Odyssey Odysseus spins long false talesabout his past, in all but the last to Laertes claiming to be a Cretan. These tales,which are closely akin to the tales told of their own past by such figures asEumaios and Theoclymenos, themselves tell of acts of deception. They drawfrom those who hear them concrete reactions, reactions which reveal thequalities of listener (as Penelope’s deceitful tale to Odysseus about their bed iswhat draws Odysseus to reveal himself), and also concrete actions (Odysseusgets a cloak out of Eumaios for one of his tales, having failed to get the promiseof one out of an earlier tale). But they also reveal Odysseus himself: the tales arenot merely ‘like the truth’ (XIX.203), they are telling about Odysseus, literally(the fictive characters he claims to be claim various things about Odysseus), inthe sense that the fictive characters do resemble Odysseus, and in the sense thatpart of what it is to be Odysseus is to be a teller of tales. But Odysseus’ fictionsdo something still more dramatic: they raise the question of how we distinguishtruth and falsehood. If Odysseus’ tales in the second half of the
Odyssey aredeceptive, how can we be sure that the tale he tells in Phaeacia, the tale of hiswanderings, of Circe, the Cyclops, Calypso and the rest, is not also partly or whollydeceptive? In raising this question, the boundary between fact and fiction, andthe role which fiction, including works such as the
Odyssey itself, plays, arethemselves opened up for scrutiny. It is impossible to read the
Odyssey withouthaving your attention drawn to the way in which people create themselves bycreating their own past, by telling their own story, and without appreciating thepower which stories about the past have to determine action in the present. It isperhaps not surprising that while it is hard to find a Greek before Alexander theGreat who had a life-story modelled on Achilles, many politicians, perhaps mostnotably Themistocles, seem to have had one modelled on Odysseus.To grow up with Hesiod and Homer, as the children of the Greek polis didfrom the seventh century onwards, was to grow up familiar, among other things,with moral dilemmas, with questions of how political authority is earned andjeopardized, with issues of the relationship between individual and group, withsensitivity to the theological basis for human action, and with an awareness ofthe tricky way in which language creates people and events even as it representsthem. Although in their course these poems tell many ‘myths’, it is not as arepository of myths that they made their mark on later generations, but asintroductions to modes of thought and of argument, and to the ways in whichlanguage represents issues. Such discussions of what sort of life a person shouldlead continue to dominate Greek poetry (and drama) from Homer and Hesiodonwards, in a culture where the poet both aspired to, and was expected to, offermoral instruction.
25RELIGION: RITUALS, FESTIVALS AND IMAGES OF THE GODSConcentration on the Homeric poems as exemplary explorations of moral,ethical and rhetorical problems can make it seem as if moral and ethical issuesarose only out of struggles for power. As we will see, struggles for politicalpower were indeed important in the archaic city, but it would be wrong toimagine the political to be the only context for debate. To grow up in the Greek citywas to grow up in a world where life was shaped from the beginning by rituals,rituals in which encountering the gods was regular and important. The entry forthe year 776 BC in Eusebius’
Chronology notes both that this was the year of thefirst Olympiad and that, ‘From this time Greek history is believed accurate in thematter of chronology. For before this, as anyone can see, they hand down variousopinions.’ That the history of the Greek city should be deemed to be reliable fromthe time of the first Olympic games is highly appropriate, for it was indeed festalevents which gave cultured regularity to the natural seasons of the year, andfestal events even claimed priority over the irregular events of war and politics;wars between Greek cities respected truces for the Olympic games, meetings ofthe Athenian citizen body avoided festival days. Cities and groups within citiesproduced and displayed calendars of their ritual activities, and the conflictingclaims of traditional piety and of economy might give scope for politicalargument.Greek religious life was markedly communal.
26 The sacrifice of an animal to agod was not a solitary action, but involved—created, reflected, and defined—agroup, the group of those who shared the meat. Processions, and every act ofsacrifice involved at least a minimal procession, displayed the sacrificing group.In many cities the markers of growing up were ceremonies at festivals at whichthe young person was formally enrolled in the celebrating group. Competitions,which honoured the god for whom the festival was held by displaying the best ofphysical or mental prowess, as often glorified the group to which the winnerbelonged (his city if the victory was pan-Hellenic, his tribe in an event limited tolocal competitors) as the individual himself. In its festival life a city displayeditself and its divisions and citizens observed their own social as well as politicalplace in it. It is not by chance that for many cities the surviving records aredominated by sacred laws and other records to do with sanctuaries and theirrunning of festivals.Festivals displayed the city at leisure, however. It was not just that to competein pan-Hellenic competitions at Olympia demanded the leisure to spare thecompulsory thirty days before the event when all had to be at the site training;the competitive events, in local as well as pan-Hellenic festivals, although largein number and wide in variety, all involved achievements of little direct practicalvalue: chariot-racing, running, physical beauty, singing and dancing, etc. Therewere indeed beneficial consequences of an indirect sort from such events, andeven more obviously from such things as armed dancing, but neither craft skillsnor mainstream fighting skills were ever displayed or tested: the drinkingcompetition at the Athenian Anthesteria, for instance, was about speed ofconsumption, not quality of production. At the Olympic games victory broughthonour but no tangible rewards beyond an olive wreath, but in other places theremight be considerable profits to be had from victory, or even from comingsecond or third in an event. And the home city might add to the honours bothmarks of respect (Spartan Olympic victors fought next to the king in war) andfurther material rewards, in particular free meals.
27 These rewards constituted arecognition that there was more to the city than the practical skills that directlysustained it.If their festivals dominated the calendar of the city, their temples, whichhoused the gods and the dedications which they attracted, dominated itsbuildings and often, given prominent placing on an acropolis, its skyline. In acity such as Sparta, which did not go in for monumental buildings for publicbusiness, it is the temples in and around the town which dominate thearchaeological record. Cities devoted enormous resources of money and energyto temples and to the cult statues which they housed, and competition betweencities is visible in the competing dimensions of temples (the Athenian Parthenonjust outdoes the temple of Zeus at Olympia, for instance). Unlike festivals,temples were permanent; when the glorious processions or elaborate dramaswere gone the temples remained as symbols of the devotion of resources to thegods. But not just the temples. Sanctuaries also accumulated dedications, many ofthem humble but others precious gold and silver plate, marble and bronze statues.Victors, and this is particularly a mark of the classical city, dedicated sculpturesof athletes either at the sanctuary which was the scene of their victory, as withGelon’s monument at Delphi, known as the Delphic Charioteer, or in their homecity.It is easy to make Greek religious activities seem essentially political,contrived to enable elite groups to show off to each other and to those effectivelysubject to them their wealth and the prowess acquired in leisure. Festivals, onthis view, sugared the pill of elite political domination by promoting solidaritythrough their processions, by inducing feelings of well-being through theirpomp, and by rewarding attendance through nourishing with a meat meal thosewho gathered. But there was another side. Modern sensibilities may find it hardto see scope for religious feeling in the ritual cutting of a domestic animal’sthroat, but the symbolic importance of this slaughter in an agrarian economy,where animal labour is vital but where draught animals threaten to eat up all toomuch of the harvest, is considerable, and the combination of elaborate ritual withthe smell of fresh blood is likely to have made this a memorable and evocativesensory experience.
28 More accessible to us, perhaps, is the other side of cultactivity, the confrontation with the god involved in viewing the cult statue. Cultstatues, and this is true of statues such as the Herms (pillars with stump arms,erect phalluses and heads of the god Hermes) found in places other than templesas well as of statues in temples, regularly stare straight forward towards viewer/worshipper, and some temples certainly used external sculpture or other devicesto enhance the revelation of the god. So, at Lykosoura in Arcadia, Pausanias tellsus that as you come out of the temple of Despoina and Demeter ‘there is a mirrorfitted to the wall; when you look into this mirror you see yourself very dimly ornot at all, but you have a clear view of the goddesses and their throne’ (VIII.37.7).
29 This stress on revelation is something which seems to have been furtherdeveloped in certain ‘mystery’ cults into which, unlike normal sacrificial cult,specific initiation was required, though what was revealed seems not normally tohave been images of the deity. Without awareness of this intensity of religiousexperience, the theological speculations of Empedocles or of the Pythagoreans(see Chapters 4, 5) can only seem inexplicably eccentric.It is likely that animal sacrifice was a feature of cult in the Greek world froman early date, but the presentation of the god in sculptural form developed, alongwith the canonical schemes of Greek temple architecture, during the archaicperiod. Clay figurines that may have functioned as cult statues in Crete areknown from the Dark Ages, and from the eighth century the Cretan site ofDreros has yielded some hammered bronze statues that may have been cultimages. But the nature of the divine presence in the temple changed markedlywith the development of monumental stone sculpture in the late seventh and thesixth centuries, and the gold and ivory excesses of the Athenian Parthenon andthe temple of Zeus at Olympia took yet further advantage of the overpoweringforce of large-scale sculpture. Even more liable to change were the dedicationswith which the gods and their temples were surrounded: the nature of dedicationsin any single sanctuary changes over time (so at Olympia dedications of animalfigurines are extremely common during the eighth century but decreasedramatically in number in the seventh century), and one sanctuary differs fromanother even within the confines of the same city.
30 Certain differences indedicatory assemblage seem determined by the identity and interests of the deityinvolved, but it is clear that even within a polytheistic system there was no neatcompartmentalization of interests restricting the invocation of specific deities tospecific areas of life. Not that the influence of political factors can be ruled out,even here: that ‘exclusive’ Sparta has many dedications at the sanctuary ofArtemis Orthia that are influenced by oriental products but few actual orientaldedications seems more than coincidental.
POLITICS, CONSTITUTIONS, LAWS: THE CONSEQUENCES OF LITERACY?It is exclusive Sparta that provides some of our earliest detailed data aboutconstitutional arrangements. In the world of Homer and Hesiod the basis for thepower of particular rulers may be disputed and the way they carry out their ruledespised but there is no sign that there are formal rules within which theyoperate. Beginning from the seventh century, however, there is epigraphic andliterary evidence for quite widespread concern to define and limit the role ofthose in authority.
31 The Spartan evidence is literary: Plutarch quotes, almostcertainly from Aristotle’s work
The Constitution of the Lakedaimonians, anenactment known as the Great Rhetra which, having referred rather obscurely totwo subdivisions of the citizen body, tribes and obes, enjoins that the Kings andCouncil of Elders are to hold a regular assembly at a specified site and that thepeople in the assembly should have the right to speak and to decide to do or notto do things; crooked decisions by the people, however, may be laid aside by thekings and elders. The antiquity of this enactment seems guaranteed because theseventh-century poet Tyrtaeus paraphrases it in an elegy also quoted by Plutarch.The precise circumstances in which these rules were formulated areirrecoverable, as is the manner in which they were preserved in a city which laterprided itself on not writing down laws, but despite this uncertainty the GreatRhetra is of central importance because of its concern with the authority ofoffices and the role it grants the people as a whole.A similar concern with defining the authority of named office holders appearson laws preserved on stone from other parts of the Greek world in the seventhcentury. At Dreros, in Crete, a single enactment was passed stipulating that whena man had held the (annual) office of
kosmos he could not hold it again for tenyears, and that if he did arrogate to himself the judicial powers of the
kosmosafter the end of his term of office then he should be punished with a double fine,loss of the right to hold office again, and the invalidation of his actions. AtTiryns in the Argolid recently discovered fragments of a series of injunctionsreveal a whole network of officials:
platiwoinoi, who are perhaps pourers oflibations of wine,
platiwoinarchoi, the officials in charge of the
platiwoinoi, a
hieromnemon or sacred remem-brancer, who is a man with powers to imposefines and not just a repository of traditional knowledge, a popular court and an
epignomon, who has authority to order the whole people about.
32Without the onset of literacy we would not have all this evidence aboutdetailed legal arrangements. But was literacy actually a factor in enabling law tohappen in the first place? It has certainly been suggested in the past that literacyencourages, if it does not require, certain intellectual operations which an oralculture manages to do without: logical deduction and exercises in classification,it is claimed, feed upon, if they do not rely upon, written lists, and writing allowsmore thorough analysis of the modes of communication.
33 The ancientsthemselves certainly thought that writing, and in particular the writing down oflaw, made a difference. Euripides has Theseus in the
Suppliant Women (lines433–4) say, ‘When the laws have been written down, both the weak and the richhave equal justice’, a view echoed by Aristotle. No one would argue forwidespread ability either to write or to read in archaic Greece, so how plausibleare these views that the
existence of writing changed how people thought or howthey interacted with each other? Whether or not one believes that the Homericpoems, which only once refer to writing (
Iliad VI.168–9), were themselveswritten down shortly after 700 BC, they reveal that the oral culture in which theywere created was distinctly capable of analysing techniques of communicationand making play with subtle variations in wording. Equally, it is clear that lawdid not have to be written to be fixed: ‘remembrancers’, who continue to exist evenwhen law is written, seem to have been charged with the precise recall ofenactments, and references to early law being sung suggest that music was onemeans by which precision of memory was ensured. Nor does the fixing of law atall guarantee ‘equal justice’, for, as the procedural emphasis of so much earlywritten law itself emphasizes, power remains with the interpreters of the law.
34What writing does enable is communication
at a distance, something withconsiderable consequences for the general dissemination of information. Evenonce writing was available, much that might have been written down continuedto be unwritten, and it is not clear that communications which were of theirnature dependent upon writing developed before the invention of the architecturaltreatise, giving the precise ‘rules’ according to which a particular building wascreated, in the sixth century BCThere might be a stronger case for believing that law codes, rather than simplylaw itself, were literacy dependent, but although later tradition talks of earlylawgivers inventing whole codes of laws for cities, the earliest laws look to havebeen single enactments brought in to deal with particular problems. And it issignificant that while the disputes to be settled in
Iliad XVIII, where Achilles’new shield’s scene of city life includes a dispute being settled, and in Hesiod’s
Works and Days are personal, disputes over property and homicide, these earlylaws are dominated by broadly ‘constitutional’ issues.Other evidence too suggests that political arrangements were very much underdiscussion in the seventh century, and that the question of the authority ofparticular offices and officials was a crucial one. The situation which is imaginedin the Dreros law, that a magistrate takes advantage of the possibilities forpopular support which an office with a judicial role offers in order to ignore thetime limit set upon the holding of that office, is precisely the situation which onelate source alleges enabled Cypselos to become tyrant in Corinth: he gainedpopular support by the way in which he settled the cases which came to him aspolemarch and then refused to hand on the office. Such seizures of power byindividuals are a mark of the archaic period in the Greek cities, but tyrants werenot at all restricted to the archaic period; they can be found, and not just inSicily, throughout the classical period. Greek tyrants were not necessarilydespotic, though most later accumulated some tales about a ‘reign of terror’, andthey did not necessarily take all powers into their own hands, many simplyoverseeing the continued functioning of the existing constitution but controllingaccess to and the execution of magistracies.
35It was not simply magisterial authority which gave the opportunity to theambitious individual to seize power. Disputes between groups within a citymight equally give an individual a chance to insert himself as a person who couldbring stability. At Athens factional disputes, fuelled by popular discontent withthe unequal distribution of resources, not only produced an attempted
coup in thelate seventh century, when an Olympic victor endeavoured to cash in that gloryfor political power, but led in the first decade of the sixth century to the grantingof extraordinary powers to one man, Solon, to reform the laws and theconstitution. So much is later falsely ascribed to Solon that it is unclear whatexactly the limits of his legal reforms were, but there is no reason to doubt thathe not only took a stand on major social and economic issues such as debtbondage,but also reformed legal procedure to make recourse to law morepractical, and regulated all aspects of citizens’ lives, including agriculturalpractice, verbal abuse, testamentary disposition, and funerals. Although even inthe case of Solon it is probably an exaggeration to talk of a ‘law code’, he seemsto have attempted to deal with sources of discontent over a very wide range.Without success. Within a few years one magistrate had attempted to keep hispowers beyond their allotted span, and within half a century protracted factionaldisputes gave an opportunity for Peisistratos, backed by mercenary troops, toestablish himself as tyrant.Possession of overriding power by a particular individual was rarely popularwith all, and much of the continued foundation of settlements elsewhere byGreeks should probably be seen as prompted by dissatisfaction with the regimein the home city, if it was not occasioned by actual expulsion of a group. Twoepisodes of colonization by Sparta, the colonization of Taras in south Italy
c.700and the two attempts to found a city by Dorieus at the end of the sixth century,are traditionally held to belong to these categories. Taras was founded by a groupcalled the Partheniai whom the Spartans had expelled; Dorieus went off tocolonize of his own accord to get away from his half-brother Cleomenes when thelatter succeeded to the throne.Although one early tyrant, Pheidon of Argos, was later associated withmilitary reform, most tyrants seem to have left war on one side, not seeking tocreate empires for themselves, and to have devoted more time and resources tothe buildings and institutions of the city. It was indeed during the period of theCypselids at Corinth that Corinth acquired one of the earliest Doric temples andthat Corinthian pottery became most elaborate in design and reached its widestmarket. But the outstanding example of the tyrant who monumentalized his cityis Polycrates of Samos who was reputedly responsible for a massive moleprotecting the harbour, a great tunnel more than a kilometre long dug nderneath amountain, and an enormous temple, never completed, measuring 55 by 112metres. Other tyrants concentrated on enterprises which more directly involvedthe citizens as a whole. Cleisthenes of Sikyon insisted on altering the wholeinternal organization of the citizen body, thereby breaking up traditionalgroupings and destroying old associations. The Peisistratids in Athens devotedconsiderable resources to the development of civic festivals, being particularlyconcerned with putting the performance of the Homeric poems at thePanathenaic festival in order, inviting poets from other Greek cities to theircourt, and perhaps developing dramatic festivities at the festival of the GreatDionysia.
36Individual cities, once they had removed their tyrants, tended to rememberthem as repressive, perhaps in part to cover the truth about widespreadcollaboration with a regime no longer regarded as politically correct.
37 But oneof those subject to the nastiest tales, Periander son of Cypselos and tyrant ofCorinth, came, along with certain men now regarded as philosophers and suchmediator figures as Solon, to be regarded as a ‘sage’ and found his way on to alist of ‘seven sages’ (in fact seventeen men figure on some list or other of sevensages in antiquity). A variety of anecdotes accumulated around these figures, butthe source of their reputation for wisdom seems to lie with their poeticcompositions (even Periander is said to have written a didactic poem of some 2,000 lines), their reputation for political astuteness (Thales is said to have advisedthe Milesians not to ally themselves with Croesus the king of Lydia), and theirprominence as performers of effective practical gestures (Bias of Priene got goodterms for his city from Alyattes of Lydia by producing fat donkeys and sandheaps covered in grain to suggest enormous prosperity).
38 The probable falsity ofmost of the stories, and indeed the quasi-fictional nature of some of the sagesthemselves, is unimportant: what these stories show is the particularcharacterization of worldly wisdom in the culture of the Greek polis. In many ofthe stories, the sage does not himself say anything but simply points to therelevance of an everyday scene: in a single transferable anecdote one tyrant issaid to have advised another on how to control his city by walking into acornfield and slashing off the ears of those stalks of grain that grew taller thanthe rest. It is the ability to take advantage of ambiguity and deceptive appearanceand to see the parallelism between disparate situations that marks out the wiseman.The admiration for the ‘practical joker’ embodied in Homer’s image ofOdysseus and in the tradition of the seven sages is a central feature of thatcharacteristic aristocratic form of association, the symposium. From the classicalperiod we have selective descriptions of symposia from both Xenophon andPlato but our knowledge of the archaic symposium is largely dependent on theliterature and pottery produced for it.
39 It was a setting for performance bothformal and extemporized (where song passed round the circle of guests and eachwas expected to cap the previous singer’s lines), accompanied by the
aulos. Afavourite ploy of the singer is to imagine himself as a character, not necessarilymale, in a particular situation which has some analogical relevance to the actualsituation; the listeners are invited to see their environment as if it were another,and so to see it with new eyes. Much sympotic poetry is explicitly political, withstorms and shipwrecks proving images as appropriate to turmoil within the cityas to inebriation, much also is personal and concerned in particular with the lifeof love, and much is self-reflexive. The personal side dominated the games of thesymposium, such as the game of
kottabos in which the last drops of wine wereflung from the flat cup and aimed at or dedicated to one’s lover, and that side ismost evident in sympotic pottery. Sympotic pottery reflects the symposium bothdirectly, with images of reclined symposiasts, singers at the symposium, and soon, and also indirectly: it is full of jokes. There are explicitly joke vases, vaseswith hidden compartments which enable them to be filled as if by magic, dribblevases, and so on. Many cups have eyes painted on them, but some take theanalogy with the body further, replacing the standard round foot, which thedrinker grips to raise the cup for drinking, by male genitalia. The images on thevases take the jokes further, extending the sea imagery of the poetry by havingships or sea creatures swimming on the wine, concealing images of inebriation atthe bottom of the cup, or exploring the limits of acceptable sympotic behaviourby representing satyrs behaving unacceptably.The cultural importance of the symposium lies in part in the context which itprovided for poetic and artistic creativity: almost all surviving archaic elegaicpoetry, including the poetry of the ‘philosopher’ Xenophanes, was written for thesymposium; and whether or not directly made for use at symposia, the imageryof much archaic Athenian pottery presupposes and exploits the sympotic context.But the symposium is important too for the way in which it provided amicrocosm of the city itself in which the issues of city life were explored in anintensely self-critical milieu. Drinking at the symposium was strictly regulatedby rule and convention, political positions were explored, personal relations wereexposed and the boundary between private and public behaviour both tested andpatrolled. As there was no room for inhibitions, so also there was no room forpomposity. Dominated by the elite, and often closely linked with official orreligious events, the symposium was nevertheless always oppositional, a forumfor disagreement rather than laudation. In the symposium the competitive ethosencouraged in religious festivals was internalized and intellectualized.
MYTHOLOGY: INVENTION, MANIPULATIONThe world of sympotic poetry is largely the present world of everydayexperience; the world of epic and of temple sculpture is a world of themythological past; archaic painted pottery shares in each of these worlds, andalso in the timeless world of the fantastic. The observed world of shipwrecks, ofpolitical struggles, and of wolves surrounded by hunting dogs, and the fabulousworld inhabited by centaurs and the heroes of epic tales, are taken up by writersand artists of the archaic age as equally good to think with. Solon finds an imagefor his own political stance in the battlefield: ‘I threw a strong shield around bothparties and did not allow either unjustly to get the upper hand’ (fr. 5 West);Sappho finds an image for the power of desire in Helen’s desertion of Menelaus(fr. 27 Diehl);
40 Pindar repeatedly invokes the world of myth to promote thinkingabout the glorious achievements of the athletes whom his victory odes celebrate.What is notable is that the immediate past, what we would call ‘history’, haslittle or no exemplary role in archaic Greek art or literature.The distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘history’ with which we operate is not adistinction made by any Greek writer before the late fifth century.
41 The termswhich come, in the hands of Thucydides, Plato and others, to stand for theopposing poles of ‘myth’ and ‘reason’,
muthos and
logos, are used virtuallyinterchangeably by earlier writers. Even Herodotus, ‘the father of history’,writing in the 430s or 420s BC happily regards Homer, Hesiod, and the TrojanWar as having the same status. This is important not because it shows how‘unsophisticated’ even fifth-century Greeks continued to be, but because itreveals that despite the possibilities of written records, the past had not yetbecome something fixed. Pindar’s First Olympian Ode, with its explicit rejectionof one version of the story of Pelops for another less gruesome one, shows thatdifferent ‘versions’ of the ‘same’ myth coexisted; and so too different versions ofthe past. Herodotus’
Histories are distinguished from most later histories in theancient world (as well as from what most modern historians write) by theirwillingness to give more than one version of a past event—we have the Theranand the Cyrenaean version of the colonization of Cyrene from Thera—and byHerodotus’ declared indifference to the truth of the versions he relates: ‘It is myduty to record what is said, but not my duty to give it complete credence’ (VII.152.3). Aristotle calls Herodotus a ‘mythologist’, a teller of exemplary tales (
Onthe Generation of Animals 756b6).Many subsequent readers of Herodotus have found his apparent indifference tothe truth of the stories which he repeats incomprehensible or even scandalous. Indoing so they have followed the lead given by Thucydides who points to the lackof
muthos in his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, whichdominated the last thirty years of the fifth century, and claims that his carefullyresearched account of what actually happened will be a surer guide to the futurethan the ‘easier listening’ which traditional story-telling produced.
42 Theinvention of ‘mythology’ and the invention of ‘history’ went together, togetherwith each other but also together with the invention of the category of metaphorand the scientific and philosophical revolution which that entailed.
43 They alsowent together with a new attitude towards stories detectable in both an andliterature: in art, where previously it had been the general story that had beenevoked, particular texts are now illustrated; in literature, explorations of thedilemmas of myth characteristic of tragedy go out of fashion and in Hellenisticpoetry (very little poetry survives from between 390 and 330) myths are now toldin ways which draw attention to the art of the teller and play with a reader who isassumed to be learned enough to detect and respond to copious allusions toearlier literature.The separation of ‘myth’ from ‘history’ and the insistence that ‘metaphor’ hasa distinct status can both be seen as part of a move to be more precise about thestatus of comparisons by directing attention at the effect of context. The issues oftruth and falsehood, already explored in the
Odyssey and enthusiastically takenup by the sophists as part of their interest in rhetoric, are now relentlesslypursued in the course of an attempt to find the undeceptive ‘truth’, and notmerely to be aware of the ever deceptive nature of words and images. But it istempting to see the creation of mythology as political, too.Herodotus begins his work by stating that his aim is to ensure that past eventsdo not grow faint, to record the great achievements of Greek and barbarian, andin particular to explain how they came to fight each other. Herodotus treats theconflict between Greeks and Persians broadly, not concentrating simply on theactual battles of 490 and 480–79 BC, but taking every opportunity to delve backinto the past history of the Greek cities. He ends his work, however, at the end ofthe Persian invasion of the Greek mainland, at a point when armed conflictbetween Greeks and Persians to remove the Persians from the Aegean and AsiaMinor had many years still to run, years during which he himself had been aliveand with whose story he must himself have been particularly familiar. By endingin 479 BC Herodotus limited himself to that part of the conflict between Greeceand Persia when Greece could be presented as pursuing a broadly united courseof action; from the point at which he stops the Athenians took over the leadershipof the campaign, to increasingly divided reactions among other cities, and, withinrelatively few years, turned the pan-Hellenic ‘crusade’ into what was, theyadmitted, blatant imperial rule.The Persian wars, and the imperialism which they brought in their wake,changed history. This is most graphically illustrated by the contrasting rolewhich stories of the past play in Herodotus and Thucydides. Characters inHerodotus do, from time to time at least, invoke examples from the past in orderto influence present action, but they do so in a way which is only in the broadestsense political. So, Socles the Corinthian tries to discourage the Spartans fromrestoring tyranny to Athens by telling of the increasingly terrifying rule of theCypselids at Corinth (Herodotus V.92): any story will do, it is the aptness of theanalogy that matters, not the particular example chosen. When characters inThucydides invoke the past it is in order to justify a present claim or excuse apast blemish, in order to determine others’ attitudes to themselves in the present,and the failures of the past are visited upon the present. So the Plataeans, whenthey succumb to the Spartan siege, are asked at their trial what good they havedone Sparta in the past, and when they cannot come up with anything areexecuted: any story won’t do, it is what (you can convince others) actuallyhappened that matters.In the archaic world of the independent city-state it was possible to live in thepresent. Reputations were established, friends and political power won and lost.Appeal might be made to the achievements of ancestors, and the misdeeds ofancestors used against current opponents, but few owed their current positionentirely to parading past actions. Cities threatened by their neighbours tended tocome to battle once a generation, and when peace was made it was for an equallyshort term. Persia’s intervention in Greek affairs changed that. The resistance toPersian invasion showed that uniting the military resources of many cities couldgive previously unimagined power; the continued threat of Persian return,reinforced by the determined ‘barbarization’ of the Persians, especially on thestage (another trend which Herodotus equally determinedly resists), preventedcities from opting out of collective action against Persia for long enough toenable the Athenians to transform the earlier voluntary union into their ownempire. Sparta too, who in the sixth century had built up her PeloponnesianLeague by treaties of mutual advantage, found herself in the twenty years afterthe Persian invasion repeatedly at war with her allies; for them too independencewas no option. Unlike individuals’ histories, those of cities lasted more than ageneration; what actually happened, whose citizen actually betrayed themountain path to the Persians (cf. Herodotus VII.213–14), now mattered. Wherepreviously different people might happily tell different versions of the same events—the Therans telling one version of the colonization of Cyrene in order to keeptheir claims to a stake in the colony alive, the Cyrenaeans telling another toreinforce their own independence and their monarchy (Herodotus IV.150–6)
44—now, getting your version accepted as true was likely to be of considerablepolitical importance. Herodotean history focused on how Greeks constructedthemselves and others through the stories they told; that sort of history of eventsafter 479 BC was impossible, and Thucydides’ insistence that there was asingle true version was inevitable in an Athenian. Not surprisingly, it is theAthenian version of events after 479 BC that Thucydides gives.The role which the essentially transferable story about the past plays inHerodotus came to be left to the now distinct world of ‘myth’ and to be at thecentre of tragic drama, not prose histories.
45 Aeschylus did write about thehistorical battle of Salamis in his
Persians, and got away with it, but even beforethat Phrynichus, attempting to replay the Persian capture of Miletus on stage,was fined for ‘recalling to the Athenians their own misfortunes’ (Herodotus VI.21). Otherwise fifth-century tragedy exploits a rather limited selection of myths,myths predominantly centred not on Athens but on other cities, and particularlyon Thebes. Political issues are aired in these plays in generalized terms andspecific items of domestic or foreign policy are rarely alluded to (scholars debatethe extent to which Aeschylus’
Eumenides is an exception to this rule). Althoughtragedy avoids replaying Homeric stories, its explorations of clash betweenindividual and group, of religious duty and political expediency, of deceptivemeans to worthwhile ends, and of representation, blindness, and the problems ofcommunication, are very much extensions of the Homeric task.
46 Tragedy takesfurther the self-analysis present already in the Homeric poems, with extensiveexploration of the way in which people are persuaded and of the power andproblems of linguistic communication. Like the Homeric poems, tragedy was fora mass audience in a festival context, as thousands of Athenians sat through threedays of tragic drama, each day featuring three tragedies and a satyr play by asingle playwright, possibly followed by a comedy—some eight hours or more ofperformance. Even once divorced from ‘history’ it was myth that continued todominate the cultural life of the polis.
POLITICAL AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISMBoth Athens and Sparta engaged in imperialistic activities in the wake of thePersian Wars, so creating the possibility of what Thucydides, with somejustification, regarded as the greatest war ever to have engulfed the Greek world,the long struggle which eventually reduced Athens, if only briefly, to being tiedto Spartan foreign policy, no stronger than any other Greek city. But it wasAthens, not Sparta nor any other Greek city, which was the home of Thucydides,of the great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, of Socrates and ofPlato. Although a leading centre of the visual arts in the sixth century, Athenscan boast only one significant literary figure before the fifth century-Solon. I havesuggested above that we should not neglect the importance of the Persian Warsin changing the way in which cities related one to another and changing howcities related to their own past, but the Persian invasions and their consequenceswill not of themselves explain the way in which Athens became the culturalcentre of the Greek world, both attracting leading intellectuals from elsewhere—men like Anaxagoras or Protagoras in the fifth century, Aristotle andTheophrastus in the fourth—and also herself nurturing innovative thinkers.Contemporary observers had little doubt about the secret of Athenian success:Herodotus (V.78) observes that the military transformation of Athens whichfollowed the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias in 510 demonstrates what animportant thing it is that people should have an equal say in the running of theircity. The Athenians themselves turned the annual ceremony to mark those whohad died in war into the occasion for a heavily stylized speech in praise ofAthenian democracy and liberty, attributing Athenian foreign policy successesand cultural hegemony alike to her constitution47 ‘Democracy’ currently carrieswith it a self-satisfied glow very like that which Athenian funeral orations for thewar dead evoked, yet historically Athens has more frequently been held up as anexample of how not to run a constitution than how to do so, and the principlesupon which Athenian democracy was constructed and the principles on whichmodern western democracies are founded have relatively little in common.
48How justified are claims that Athens’s constitution had a transformative effectupon her cultural life and, through it, upon the history of philosophy?Herodotus is unusual among ancient writers in the importance which heascribes to the reforms introduced by Cleisthenes in 508/7 BC. The Atheniansthemselves were more inclined to claim that their democratic constitution wasowed to Solon, or even to Theseus.
49 Cleisthenes left much unchanged, and hisreforms were in any case very much in the tradition of earlier Greekconstitutions. Strict controls on the duration and powers of magistracies,insistence on one magistrate checking another, the existence of popular courtsand a large council, are all features that can be paralleled in the early laws andconstitutions discussed above.
50 The power of the mass of the people, both inassembly and in riot, is likely to have played an important part both inPeisistratos’ success in factional politics, paving the way for his tyranny, and inCleisthenes’ own ability to bring in major reforms. Nor did Cleisthenessignificantly increase the range of those in fact participating in politics. It wasonly in the fifth century that property qualifications for office were almost alllifted, that magistrates came to be chosen largely by lot, and that pay wasintroduced for those serving in Council and Courts. Cleisthenes’ achievementwas not to invent new principles, or even to apply old principles morerigorously, it was to change the way Athenians related to one another.Athenian politics in the sixth century had frequently been marked by divisionson family and local lines, and Cleisthenes himself belonged to one of thefamilies with the longest continuous history of political involvement at thehighest level, the Alcmaeonidae. Cleisthenes added a whole new network ofcitizen groupings to the existing network, and ensured that his new groups couldnot be dominated by family or local ties, as the old had been. Where citizenshiphad previously effectively been controlled by the kin group known as thephratry, now it depended on being registered in a village community or deme;each deme returned a fixed number of representatives to the Council; the men ofeach deme fought in war as part of one of ten new tribal units which were madeup of men from demes drawn from three different areas of Athens’ territory;villages bound to their neighbours in cult units were frequently ascribed todifferent tribes. The old phratries, old tribes, and old cult units were notabolished, but they could no longer dominate the lives of individuals.
51Individuals found themselves part of many different groups, there was nocommon denominator between the level of the individual citizen and the level ofthe city as a whole. Together with this removal of the individual from thedominance of the kin group went the deliverance of the city from structuresfounded upon the gods. Modern scholars have stressed how Cleisthenes’ demes,unlike the phratries, were not primarily cult groups, how laws now came to beregarded not as ‘given’ but as ‘made’ (
nomoi rather than
thesmoi) and how awhole new, secular, calendar, dividing the year into ten equal periods, wasdeveloped to run alongside the sacred calendar.
52 Cleisthenes’ aims in makingthese changes may have been narrowly political—destroying existing powerbases in order to give himself more chance of lasting political influence—but theeffect was far from narrow: the citizen was effectively empowered as a rationalindividual.Athens’s cultural achievements were not, however, simply the product ofCleisthenic social engineering; the success of Athenian democracy was alsodependent on social and economic factors, and prime among them, slavery. Justas the precocious constitutional developments in Sparta are inseparable from herexploitation of a subject population of helots who were responsible for allagricultural production, so the democratic equality of citizens in Athens wassustained only because it was possible to get ‘dirty jobs’, tasks which clearlyshowed up the worker’s dependent status, performed by slaves.
53 Outstandingamong those jobs was the mining at Laurium of the silver; this silver enabledAthens to build, in the first decades of the fifth century, the fleet by which thePersian threat was repulsed, and that
victory bolstered the self-confidence vital toindividual political participation, to a willingness to allow critical andspeculative thought, and to the maintenance of democracy itself.The practice of democracy further stimulated critical thought.
54 One measureof this is the way in which classical Greek political thought is dominated byworks critical of democracy. The process of turning issues over to a massmeeting of some 6,000 or so people for debate and immediate decision raisedvery sharply epistemological issues of the place of expertise and of how rightanswers could be reached; it also raised more generally the question of naturaland acquired skills. The ways in which officials carried out their duties and thereactions of the people to this raised questions about responsibility and therelationship of individual and group interests. The importance of not simplysaying the right thing but saying it in the right way raised questions of rhetoricand persuasion and the ethics of dressing up bad arguments well.Critical reaction to, and exploitation of, the world in which they lived had beencharacteristic of the Greeks of both archaic and classical periods. Both the naturalconditions of life in an area marginal for agriculture and the accident of contactwith sophisticated peoples in the eastern Mediterranean can be seen to stimulateGreek cultural products from the eighth century onwards. Theologicalspeculation in Homer, Hesiod, and embodied in the sculptural presentation ofdivinities, tries to make sense of the arbitrariness of human fortunes and thenature of human experience in terms of the nature of the gods; ethical issuesconcerning the place of the individual in the community and political issuesconcerning the basis of and limits to authority in
Iliad and
Odyssey seem directlyrelated to cities’ concern with self-determination and constitutionalexperimentation; those constitutional experiments themselves show a willingnessto tackle problems by emphasizing the question rather than the answer. It is inthis cultural milieu that western philosophy, that the conscious asking of ‘secondorder questions’, is born and it is by the transformations of this milieu, as a resultof the developments in internal and external politics in the Greek city, that theSophistic Movement and the Socratic revolution grew. Just as the Greeksthemselves saw poets, statesmen, and those whom we call philosophers as all‘wise men’
(sophoi) so, I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, it is a mistaketo think that it was some particular feature of the Greek city that gave rise to‘philosophers’, for asking philosophical questions was never the exclusiveprerogative of philosophers, and it is only in the context of the culture of theGreek city as a whole that we can properly understand the development ofphilosophical discourse.
55NOTES1 Thucydides II.40.1, part of the Funeral Oration.2 So the pioneering work of Vernant [1.14]. For a classic statement see Lloyd [1.7],ch. 4 and compare [1.9], 60–7.3 Osborne [1.12].4 Thomas [1.59].5 Powell [1.20].6 On the invention of the Greek alphabet see Jeffery [1.18], which contains thedefinitive study of the local scripts of archaic Greece.7 See Guralnick [1.17].8 See generally Hurwit [1.4].9 See especially West [1.21], and, on Pherecydes also KRS [1.6], 50–71.10 See Lloyd [1.7], 229–34; [1.8], ch. 2.11 Much work on relations between Greece and the East has been stimulated in recentyears by Martin Bernal’s books. For two different approaches to the problem seeMorris [1.19] and Burkert [1.16].12 See particularly the work of Nagy [1.30, 1.31, 1.32].13 Millett [1.29].14 Nagy [1.31].15 My treatment here closely follows J.-P. Vernant [1.38], chs 1–2.16 Again the pioneering analysis of the myth is by Vernant in Gordon [1.25], chs 3–4.17 KRS 34–46. At p. 45 n. 1 the authors aptly draw attention to the similar doublesuccession myth in Genesis: 1 and 2.18 See West [1.41], ch. 1, [1.39], 31–9.19 See Hall [1.27].20 For the view that the ‘heroic code’ is simple and unambiguous see Finley [1.23],and cf. Adkins [1.22], Against, among many, Schofield [1.36], Taplin [1.37].21 I take the examples which follow from Rutherford [1.35]; 60–1.22 On the gods in the
Iliad see Griffin [1.26], Redfield [1.33].23 For what follows see Rutherford [1.34] and [1.35].24 Goldhill [1.24], 36. My discussion of deception in the
Odyssey owes much toGoldhill.25 See Aristophanes
Frogs 1008–112, Plato
Protagoras 325e, and Heath [1.28], ch. 2.26 On Greek religion in general see Burkert [1.43], and Bruit Zaidman and SchmittPantel [1.42].27 See Kurke [1.44].28 Osborne [1.12], ch. 8.29 In general see Gordon [1.45]. For another example of elaborate preparation of theworshipper see Osborne [1.47].30 Morgan [1.46], esp. ch. 6.31 On early Greek law see Gagarin [1.51] and Hölkeskamp [1.54].32 The Dreros law is Meiggs and Lewis [1.10], no. 2, the Tiryns laws
SEG(Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum) 30 (1980): 380.33 For this view see Goody and Watt [1.53], modified somewhat in Goody’slater work (e.g. Goody [1.52]). For critiques of Goody’s position see Lloyd [1.7],Thomas [1.59].34 On written law see Thomas [1.60],35 On tyranny Andrewes [1.48] is still classic.36 Shapiro [1.58].37 For this case argued in detail for Athens see Lavelle [1.55].38 On the sages see Martin [1.57].39 For what follows see Bowie [1.49] and [1.50], Lissarrague [1.56].40 The standard numbering of the fragments of Solon follows M.L. West
Iambi etElegi Graeci II, Oxford, 1972. Likewise, the now-usual numbering of Sapphofollows E.Diehl
Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, I. Leipzig, 1922.41 For what follows see Detienne [1.62].42 For an introduction to Herodots see Gould [1.64]; for Thucydides, Hornblower [1.65].43 On the invention of metaphor see Lloyd [1.8], esp. ch. 4. See also Padel [1.67],esp. 9–19.44 See Davies [1.61].45 See generally Goldhill [1.63], Winkler and Zeitlin [1.68].46 Knox [1.66], ch. 1.47 Loraux [1.75].48 See Hansen [1.72], Dunn [1.69], [1.70], Roberts [1.79].49 Hansen [1.72].50 Cf.Hornblower [1.73], 1, ‘The history of European democracy begins, arguably,not in Athens but in Sparta.’51 The classic exposition of Cleisthenes’ reforms is Lewis [1.74]. See also Ostwald [1.77].52 Ostwald [1.77], Vidal-Naquet and Levêque [1.80].53 Osborne [1.76].54 See Farrar [1.71], Raaflaub [1.78].55 I am grateful to Christopher Taylor for the invitation to write this chapter and tohim, Simon Goldhill, Catherine Osborne, Richard Rutherford and MalcolmSchofield for improving an earlier draft.
BIBLIOGRAPHYGeneral1.1 Davies, J.K.
Democracy and Classical Greece, 2nd edn, London, Fontana, 1993.1.2 Dougherty, C. and Kurke, L. (eds)
Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1993.1.3 Hornblower, S.
The Greek World 479–323 BC, 2nd edn, London, Routledge, 1991.1.4 Hurwit, J.
The Art and Culture of Early Greece, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press,1985.1.5 Jeffery, L.H.
Archaic Greece: The City-States c. 700–500 BC, London, Benn, 1976.1.6 Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E. and Schofield, M.
The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd edn,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983. For this work we use the universallyaccepted abbreviation KRS. The numbers following that abbreviation in citations arethose of the excerpts in KRS; where the reference is to pages of KRS, rather thanexcerpts, the form of citation is ‘KRS p. xx’.1.7 Lloyd, G.E.R.
Magic, Reason and Experience, Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1979.1.8—
The Revolutions of Wisdom, Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1987.1.9—
Demystifying Mentalities, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1990.1.10 Meiggs, R. and Lewis, D.M.
A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the Endof the Fifth Century BC, rev. edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988.1.11 Murray, O.
Early Greece, 2nd edn, London, Fontana, 1993.1.12 Osborne, R.G.
Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and itsCountryside, London, George Philip, 1987.1.13 Snodgrass, A.M.
Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment, London, Dent, 1980.1.14 Vernant, J.-P.
The Origins of Greek Thought, London, Methuen, 1982.
Greeks and the East1.15 Boardman, J.
The Greeks Overseas, 2nd edn, London, Thames and Hudson, 1980.1.16 Burkert, W.
The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culturein the Early Archaic Age, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1992.1.17 Guralnick, E. ‘Proportions of kouroi’,
American Journal of Archaeology 82 (1978):461–72.1.18 Jeffery, L.H.
Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, 2nd edn rev. by A.W.Johnston,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990.1.19 Morris, S.P.
Daidalos and the Origins of Greek art, Princeton, NJ, PrincetonUniversity Press, 1992.1.20 Powell, B.B.
Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991.1.21 West, M.L.
Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient, Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress, 1971.
Hesiod and Homer1.22 Adkins, A.W.H.
Merit and Responsibility, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1960.1.23 Finley, M.I.
The World of Odysseus, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972.1.24 Goldhill, S.D.
The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.1.25 Gordon, R.L. (ed.)
Myth, Religion and Society, Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1981.1.26 Griffin, J.
Homer on Life and Death, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980.1.27 Hall, E.
Inventing the Barbarian, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.1.28 Heath, M.
The Poetics of Greek Tragedy, London, Duckworth, 1987.1.29 Millett, P.C. ‘Hesiod and his world’,
Proceedings of the Cambridge PhilologicalSociety 30 (1984): 84–115.1.30 Nagy, G.
The Best of the Achaeans, Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1979.1.31—‘Hesiod’, in T.J.Luce (ed.)
Ancient Writers, vol. 1, New York, Charles ScribnersSons, 1982, pp. 43–72.1.32—
Pindar’s Homer, Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.1.33 Redfield, J.M.
Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 2nd edn, Durham and London, DukeUniversity Press, 1994.1.34 Rutherford, R.B. ‘The Philosophy of the
Odyssey’,
Journal of Hellenic Studies 106(1986): 143–62.1.35—
Homer, Odyssey
Books XIX and XX, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1992.1.36 Schofield, M. ‘
Euboulia in the
Iliad’,
Classical Quarterly 36 (1986): 6–31.1.37 Taplin, O.P.
Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad, Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press, 1992.1.38 Vernant, J.-P.
Myth and Thought among the Greeks, London, Routledge, 1983.1.39 West, M.L.
Hesiod Theogony, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966.1.40—
Hesiod Works and Days, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978.1.41—
The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Its Nature, Structure and Origins, Oxford,Oxford University Press, 1985.
Religion: Rituals, Festivals and Images of the Gods1.42 Bruit Zaidman, L. and Schmitt Pantel, P.
Religion in the Ancient Greek City,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.1.43 Burkert, W.
Greek Religion, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985.1.44 Kurke, L. ‘The economy of
kudos’, in Dougherty and Kurke [1.2], pp. 131–63.1.45 Gordon, R.L. ‘The real and the imaginary: production and religion in the Graeco-Roman world’,
Art History 2 (1979): 5–34.1.46 Morgan, C.A.
Athletes and Oracles: The Transformation of Olympia and Delphi inthe Eighth Century BC, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.1.47 Osborne, R. ‘The viewing and obscuring of the Parthenon Frieze’,
Journal ofHellenic Studies 105 (1985): 94–105.
Politics, Constitutions, Laws and the Consequences of Literacy1.48 Andrewes, A.
The Greek Tyrants, London, Hutchinson University Library, 1956.1.49 Bowie, E. ‘Early Greek elegy, symposium, and public festival’,
Journal of HellenicStudies 106 (1986): 13–35.1.50—‘Greek table-talk before Plato’,
Rhetorica 11 (1993): 355–71.1.51 Gagarin, M.
Early Greek Law, New Haven, Conn. Yale University Press, 1986.1.52 Goody, J.
The Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1986.1.53 Goody, J. and Watt, I. ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, in J.Goody (ed.)
Literacy inTraditional Societies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968, pp. 27–68.1.54 Hölkeskamp, K. ‘Written Law in Archaic Greece’,
Proceedings of the CambridgePhilological Society 38 (1992): 87–117.1.55 Lavelle, B.M.
The Sorrow and the Pity: A Prolegomenon to a History of Athensunder the Peisistratids, c.560–510 BC, Historia Einzelschriften 80, Stuttgart, FranzSteiner, 1993.1.56 Lissarrague, F.
The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet, Princeton, NJ, PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990.1.57 Martin, R.P. ‘The Seven Sages as performers of wisdom’, in Dougherty and Kurke[1.2], pp. 108–28.1.58 Shapiro, H.A. ‘Hipparchos and the rhapsodes’, in Dougherty and Kurke [1.2];pp. 92–107.1.59 Thomas, R.
Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992.1.60—‘Written in stone: Liberty, equality, orality and the codification of law’,
Bulletin ofthe Institute of Classical Studies 40(1995): 59–74.
Mythology: Invention, Manipulation1.61 Davies, J.K. ‘The reliability of the oral tradition’, in J.K.Davies and L. Foxhall (eds)
The Trojan War: Its Historicity and Context, Bristol, Bristol Classical Press, 1984,pp. 87–110.1.62 Detienne, M.
The Creation of Mythology, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1986.1.63 Goldhill, S.D.
Reading Greek Tragedy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1986.1.64 Gould, J.
Herodotus, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989.1.65 Hornblower, S.
Thucydides, London, Duckworth, 1987.1.66 Knox, B.
Word and Action, Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.1.67 Padel, R.
In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self, Princeton, NJ,Princeton University Press, 1992.1.68 Winkler, J.J. and Zeitlin, F.I. (eds)
Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama inits Social Context, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990.
Political and Cultural Imperialism1.69 Dunn, J. (ed.)
Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress, 1992.1.70—‘The transcultural significance of Athenian democracy’, in M.B.Sakellariou (ed.)
Athenian Democracy and Culture, Athens, forthcoming.1.71 Farrar, C.
The Origins of Democratic Thinking, Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1988.1.72 Hansen, M.H. ‘The 2500th anniversary of Cleisthenes’ reforms and the tradition ofAthenian democracy’, in R.Osborne and S.Hornblower (eds)
Ritual, Finance,Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts Presented to David Lewis, Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press, 1994, pp. 25–37.1.73 Hornblower, S. ‘Creation and development of democratic institutions in ancientGreece’, in Dunn [1.69], pp. 1–16.1.74 Lewis, D.M. ‘Cleisthenes and Attica’,
Historia 12 (1963): 22–40.1.75 Loraux, N.
The Invention of Athens, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press,1986.1.76 Osborne, R. ‘The economics and politics of slavery at Athens’, in C.A. Powell (ed.)
The Greek World, London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 27–43.1.77 Ostwald, M.
Nomos and the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy, Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press, 1969.1.78 Raaflaub, K. ‘Contemporary perceptions of democracy in fifth-century Athens’, inJ.R.Fears (ed.)
Aspects of Athenian Democracy, Classica et Mediaevalia:Dissertationes XI, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 1990.1.79 Roberts, J.T.
Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought,Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1994.1.80 Vidal-Naquet, P. and Levêque, P.
Cleisthenes the Athenian, Ithaca, NY, CornellUniversity Press, 1993.