A Short History of Ancient Greece

Cover illustration: Silver tetradrachm depicting Gorgon,

from Syracuse, fifth century B.C. (Photo by

DeAgostini/Getty Images)

www.ibtauris.com

Classical Greece and its legacy have long inspired a powerful and passionate fascination. The civilization that bequeathed to later ages drama and democracy, Homer and heroism, myth and Mycenae and the Delphic Oracle and the Olympic Games has, perhaps more than any other, helped shape the intellectual contours of the modern world. P J Rhodes is among the most distinguished historians of antiquity. In this elegant, zesty new survey he explores the archaic (8th–early 5th centuries BC), classical (5th and 4th centuries BC) and Hellenistic (late 4th–mid-2nd centuries BC) periods up to the beginning of Roman hegemony. His scope is that of the peoples who originated on the Greek mainland and Aegean islands who later migrated to the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and then (following the conquests of Alexander the Great) to the Near East and beyond. Exploring topics such as the epic struggle with Persia; the bitter rivalry of Athens and Sparta; slaves and ethnicity; religion and philosophy; and literature and the visual arts, this authoritative book will attract students and non-specialists in equal measure.

P J Rhodes, FBA, is Honorary Professor and Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Durham.

A SHORT HISTORY OF ANCIENT

GREECEP J Rhodes

AN

CIENT G

REEC

E P J R

hodes

‘An expert new history of ancient Greece … Readers looking for a reliable introductory account of the major political, diplomatic and military events need look no further than here.’ PAul CARTlEDGE, A G lEvENTIS PROfESSOR Of GREEk CulTuRE, uNIvERSITy Of CAMBRIDGE

‘Rhodes’ widely acknowledged mastery of the material allows him to compress an immense amount of information into crisp and direct prose without ever sacrificing the most important details.’ JONATHAN M HAll, PHyllIS fAy HORTON DISTINGuISHED SERvICE PROfESSOR IN THE HuMANITIES AND PROfESSOR Of HISTORy AND ClASSICS, uNIvERSITy Of CHICAGO

A Short History of . . .the American Civil War Paul Anderson (Clemson University)the American

Revolutionary War Stephen Conway (University College London)Ancient China Edward L Shaughnessy (University of Chicago)Ancient Greece P. J. Rhodes, FBA (Durham University)Ancient Rome Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (University of Cambridge)the Anglo-Saxons Henrietta Leyser (University of Oxford)the Byzantine Empire Dio nysios Stathakopoulos (King’s College

London)the Celts Alex Woolf (University of St Andrews)the Crimean War Trudi Tate (University of Cambridge)English Renaissance

Drama Helen Hackett (University College London)the English Revolution

and the Civil Wars David J Appleby (University of Nottingham)the Etruscans Corinna Riva (University College London)Irish Independence J J Lee (New York University)the Italian Renaissance Virginia Cox (New York University)the Korean War Allan R Millett (University of New Orleans)Medieval Christianity G R Evans (University of Cambridge)Medieval English

Mysticism Vincent Gillespie (University of Oxford)the Minoans John Bennet (University of Sheffield)the Mongols George Lane (SOAS, University of London)the Mughal Empire Michael Fisher (Oberlin College)Muslim Spain Alex J Novikoff (Rhodes College, Memphis)New Kingdom Egypt Robert Morkot (University of Exeter)the New Testament Halvor Moxnes (University of Oslo)Nineteenth-Century

Philosophy Joel Rasmussen (University of Oxford)the Normans Leonie Hicks (Canterbury Christ Church University)the Ottoman Empire Baki Tezcan (University of California, Davis)

IBT060 - SH – Ancient Greece.indd 3 10/09/2014 11:40

the Phoenicians Mark Woolmer (Durham University) the Reformation Helen Parish (University of Reading)the Renaissance in

Northern Europe Malcolm Vale (University of Oxford)the Risorgimento Nick Carter (Australian Catholic University)the Russian Revolution Geoffrey Swain (University of Glasgow)the Spanish Civil War Julián Casanova (University of Zaragoza)the Spanish Empire Felipe Fernández-Armesto (University of Notre Dame) and José Juan López-Portillo (Pembroke College, Oxford)Transatlantic Slavery Kenneth Morgan (Brunel University)Venice and the Venetian

Empire Maria Fusaro (University of Exeter)the Vikings Clare Downham (University of Liverpool)the Wars of the Roses David Grummitt (University of Kent)Weimar Germany Colin Storer (University of Nottingham)


ANCIENT GREECEP. J. RHODES


Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by PalgraveMacmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © 2014 P. J. Rhodes

The right of P. J. Rhodes to be identified as the author of thiswork has been asserted by him in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introducedinto a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, withoutthe prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the useof the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectifiedin future editions.

ISBN: 978 1 78076 593 8 (hb)ISBN: 978 1 78076 594 5 (pb)eISBN: 978 0 85773 551 5

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryA full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset in Sabon by Ellipsis Digital Limited, Glasgow

Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. International, Padstow, Cornwall


Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations viii Preface xv Words and Names; References to Sources xvi Principal Dates xviii Chapter 1: Prologue 1 Archaic Greece, c.800–500

Chapter 2: The Archaic Greek World 9Chapter 3: Sparta and Athens 32Chapter 4: The Greeks and the Near-Eastern Kingdoms 50 Classical Greece, c.500–323

Chapter 5: The Pentecontaetia, 478–431 65Chapter 6: The Peloponnesian War, [435–] 431–404 85Chapter 7: Life in the Greek World 105Chapter 8: After the Peloponnesian War, 404–c.360 120Chapter 9: The Rise of Macedon, c.360–323 138 Hellenistic Greece, 323–146

Chapter 10: Alexander’s Successors, 323–272 163Chapter 11: Life in the Hellenistic World 179Chapter 12: Until the Roman Conquest, 272–146 189Chapter 13: Epilogue 207 Guide to Further Reading 211 Glossary 213 Notes 216 Index 230


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PROLOgUE

The history of Ancient Greece is interesting in its own right, and for Europeans it is important because it is a significant formative element in our own past. Thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great, in the fourth century bc, Greek language and culture became the language of the ruling class throughout the eastern Mediterra-nean and what students of antiquity still call the Near East. Thanks to the absorption of that Greek world by the Romans, in the second and first centuries, Greek language and culture were added to their own by the people who came to rule all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Thanks to the inclusion of the land of the Jews in the territory which became first Greek and afterwards Roman, Jews displaced from that land, and Christianity when it was founded, spread westwards into the Mediterranean world more than east-wards into Asia. And, although the Western part of the Roman Empire was eventually overthrown by peoples from the north, who have made their own contributions to the mixture which today’s Europeans have inherited, and at one time the south-west of Europe was dominated by Muslim Arabs and at a later time the south-east of Europe was dominated by Muslim Turks, much of what we are familiar with today has come to us from this ancient world of Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians.

Specifically Greek influence can be found in various aspects of present-day life: political practice and political thought; philosophy; literature, which has reworked Greek genres and sometimes reused Greek stories; visual arts, and particularly sculpture; architecture, where ‘classical’ styles have been fashionable in certain periods. Many of the words which we use are of Greek origin, and reflect


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ways of thinking which we have inherited from the Greeks: for instance, history; democracy, oligarchy, monarchy; philosophy, and its subdivisions politics, ethics, logic, metaphysics; mathematics, arithmetic, geometry; physics, biology, archaeology, anthropology; epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric.

The Mediterranean Sea is divided into halves by the peninsula of Italy, and its eastern half is subdivided into quarters by the Balkan peninsula, at the southern end of which is mainland Greece. Within mainland Greece a narrow isthmus separates the Gulf of Corinth on the west from the Saronic Gulf on the East, with the Peloponnese to the south and central and northern Greece to the North. In the period on which this book concentrates, the Greek heartland com-prised mainland Greece, the Aegean Sea with its many islands to the east of it, and, forming the east coast of the Aegean, the western coastal strip of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). However, as we shall see in Chapter 2, from the eighth century bc onwards Greeks spread out from that heartland, establishing settlements all round the coasts of the Mediterranean (except the western half of the coast of north Africa) and the coasts of the Black Sea; and later the con-quests of Alexander the Great took Greeks into the Near and Middle East.

In this book the primary focus will be on the history of the Greek heartland, but we shall look also at the Greek settlements elsewhere and their interaction with the non-Greeks among whom they settled. I shall say something in this Prologue about the bronze age civili-sations of the second millennium bc; but the main body of the book will begin with the emergence of the Greeks from the dark age which followed the breakdown of those civilisations, an emergence which gathered pace in the eighth century, and the book will continue to the absorption of the Greeks into the Roman world in the second and first centuries. Many aspects of Greek life continued without major change for some centuries after that, and we shall look at that period briefly in the Epilogue; but the unchallengeable suprem-acy of Rome meant that the Greeks’ freedom for manoeuvre then was much less than it had been in the previous centuries.

The earliest advanced civilisations of the Greek heartland devel-oped in the third and particularly the second millennium: what have


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been called the Mycenaean in mainland Greece (Mycenae in the north-east of the Peloponnese was one of its principal centres), the Cycladic in the Aegean (the Cyclades are the islands of the southern Aegean which surround Delos) and the Minoan in Crete (named after Minos, a king of Crete in the classical Greeks’ legends about their past). These were based on elaborate ‘palaces’, from which the agriculture of the surrounding regions was controlled, and which functioned also as religious centres. Writing was used for record-keep-ing, and, while the Cretan scripts have not yet been deciphered, the Linear B script of the Mycenaeans was deciphered in the 1950s, when it was shown that the Mycenaeans’ language was an early form of Greek. In the first half of the second millennium the Minoans were influential in mainland Greece and the Cyclades; in the second half of the second millennium the Mycenaeans controlled Crete, and reached through the Cyclades to Asia Minor in the area of Miletus.

Reliable knowledge of these civilisations is based on archaeology; but the classical Greeks’ legends about their past give stories from the history of this period as they imagined it, for instance about a Greek war against Troy. Troy has been identified, in the north-west corner of Asia Minor, and one of the many settlements on the site (VIIa) was destroyed, apparently by human agency, about the time when Greek chronographers dated the war (c.1180); but it is doubt-ful how much authentic memory, if any, lies behind the stories, and much of the background material in the Iliad and Odyssey attributed to Homer seems to belong not to that period but to the period shortly before the poems were written down, in the eighth century.

From the thirteenth century there were upheavals both in the Greek world and in the Near East; these civilisations broke down, and there followed a ‘dark age’ of depopulation and migration. It is now somewhat less dark than it used to be, both in that we now know a little more about it than we did and in that the decline was not everywhere as drastic as was previously believed: in particular, a major site has been discovered at Lefkandi, in Euboea between Chalcis and Eretria, which was occupied from the early bronze age until c.700, and in the dark age prospered and had connections in various directions. But it remains true that for this period we know less, and what we do know suggests a smaller population and more


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primitive conditions of life, than for the periods before and after. Some archaeologists now prefer to call this the early iron age, and it is certainly true that it was during this period that techniques for smelting iron were developed, and iron largely replaced bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) as the metal used for a variety of purposes. However, the Greeks of the classical period were not aware of the dark age, but envisaged a continuous advance from primitive begin-nings to the heights of their own time.1

The bottom of the trough was reached c.1000, and after that a recovery and renewed contact with the wider Mediterranean world began. The peoples to the South and East of the Greek heartland, in Egypt and the near east, were more advanced than the Greeks, and the Greeks were influenced by them in various ways, while the peoples to the north and west were less advanced; Classical Greeks sometimes saw themselves as occupying an ideal position between excessive softness and excessive harshness.2 Mainland Greece and the islands are mountainous, without large areas of level and fertile land except in the North of the mainland, and western Asia Minor offers only narrow coastal plains before the mountains begin. The communities were essentially farming communities, cultivating par-ticularly the ‘Mediterranean triad’ of cereals, vines and olives. Early communities were largely self-sufficient, but growth in size and increasing contact with other Greek communities, and contact with and settlement in other parts of the Mediterranean world, made it increasingly practicable for communities to focus on goods which they could produce well and in quantity, and export the surplus, and to import from elsewhere goods which they did not have at all or in sufficient quantity and quality at home.

The bronze age Greek world seems to have been one of fairly large kingdoms, with bureaucracies and hierarchies of titles, but the dark-age population lived in separate small and simple communities, and separate small communities remained the norm in the first millennium. The typical though not universal community was the polis, the city state, of which there were about a thousand in the whole Greek world (as opposed to the heartland alone) at any one time down to the fourth century: of these only thirteen had a ter-ritory of more than 1,000 km2 = 390 sq. miles, while about 60 per


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cent had 100 km2 = 39 sq. miles or less and a correspondingly small population – so the conventional term ‘city’ can give a misleading impression. Particularly to the North and West, we sometimes find regional entities in which the individual settlements were less sub-stantial and less independent than cities; but in this book I shall sometimes for convenience write of ‘cities’ when referring to states of various kinds.

While larger and stronger cities tried to absorb smaller and weaker neighbours, and sometimes succeeded in doing so, even the smaller and weaker cities were strongly attached to their separate existence, and resisted absorption, so that the most expansive cities had to find ways to attach others as dependants without directly incorporating them. If at first the cities had kings, as later Greeks believed, these were leading men but not mighty monarchs like those of the near east, and by the time for which we have reliable evidence these kings had been replaced, except in Sparta,3 by the collective rule of the leading men, who took it in turn to hold short-term (often annual) offices. Each city had its own laws and its own pattern of offices, but underlying the differences in detail was an overall similarity in the problems which the laws confronted and the solutions which they offered, and in the basic structure of governance. Similarly they had their own calendars with their own irregularities (though all with a year based on 12 lunar months with a thirteenth added in some years in order not to stray too far from the solar year); and different parts of the Greek world had different weights and measures, giving different values to units with the same names. (Many cities began their year at midsummer: in this book 594/3 denotes an official year beginning in 594 and ending in 593; 594/3 or 594/3, with underlining, the earlier or the later part of that year.)

Beyond that, the Greeks will have become increasingly conscious of what united them as Greeks, as, through the trading and colo-nising discussed in Chapter 2, they had increasing dealings with non-Greeks, ‘barbarians’ whose languages sounded to the Greeks like bar-bar. They were (or believed themselves to be) ‘of one blood’, they spoke (dialects of) the same language, and they worshipped in the same ways the same gods (with different local cult titles and


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rituals, though there were also sanctuaries, such as Olympia and Delphi, which attracted Greeks from many places).4

At the end of the dark ages the Greeks had no form of writing. The scripts of the bronze age kingdoms, which used characters for syllables and would be learned only by specialist scribes, had died with the kingdoms, and the alphabet, using about two dozen char-acters to express consonants and vowels, and capable of being learned by anybody, was developed from the Phoenicians’ script in the first half of the eighth century. They also had no coins, pieces of precious metal bearing a stamp to guarantee their quality and value. For some time before the introduction of coinage weighed pieces of precious metal could be used to make payments, but coins were first produced in Lydia, in western Asia Minor, about the beginning of the sixth century (in electrum, an alloy of gold and silver), and Greek states began issuing coins (mostly in silver) about the middle of the century.5


A Short History of Ancient Greece

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