The period dealt with here extends from about 700 B.C. to the time of Polycrates' rule in the 530s and 520s. In the wider historical perspective it saw the rise of the Mermnad dynasty in Lydia, the aggression of Gyges and his successors against the cities of the Ionian coast and their subjection by Croesus, and finally the conquest of Croesus' realm by Cyrus and the establishment of Persian rule over the eastern Greeks of the Asiatic mainland. It does not reach so far as the organization and extension of Persian rule by Darius. As regards our sources of information, archaeology gives occasional glimpses of habitations and sanctuaries and casts light on trade movements; and the works of art that have been discovered testify to a taste and sense of form that is peculiarly East Greek. Inscriptions have little to offer; contemporary ones that are relevant from a historical point of view can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Among the literary sources Herodotus is pre-eminent. But his aim was to present the sequences of events that preceded and led up to the conquests of the kingdoms of Asia and Egypt by Cyrus and his successors and to the Persian Wars; and as far as Asia Minor is concerned the rulers of Lydia and the Medes were more central to his theme than the history of the East Greek cities, of which he tells us many things but offers no continuous narrative. Later writers provide scraps of information which can not be entirely neglected.

Euboea, 700–500 B.C.

If the end of the Lelantine War (CAH III.1, 760–3) shed the light of peace on a troubled Euboea, it brought none of any kind to its history. We are left with a Chalcis still stubbornly unyielding of any archaeological truth, an abandoned Lefkandi, a prospering New Eretria and the other cities, so far as we know, much as they were before. But none of them, not even Eretria, figures more than occasionally and usually accidentally in anything that can be called the mainstream of Greek history, nor can much be said of their domestic affairs.

The aristocracies under which the war had been fought, and won or lost, were not unaffected by the challenges that faced aristocracies elsewhere and before 600 a tyrant, Tynnondas (an interestingly Boeotian name) imposed himself on the ‘Euboeans’ (Plut. Sol. 14) and others, Antileon and Phoxus, on Chalcis (Arist. Pol. 1304a, 1316a), but Tynnondas is remembered only for his name, Antileon and Phoxus for their departures not their presence (one was succeeded by an oligarchy, the other by a democracy). But what Aristotle, our source for both, meant by ‘oligarchy’ or ‘democracy’ is unclear. The only firm fact is that when the Athenians won a famous victory over the Chalcidians about 506 and, in effect, took over Chalcis, they settled 4,000 of their citizens on the lands of the Hippobotae, the ‘Horse-breeders’, a name that has a sufficiently traditional aristocratic flavour to suggest that whatever tyrannies, oligarchies or democracies had gone before did little to shake Chalcidians from their inherited ways (Hdt. V. 74–7).

The distinctive achievements of Cretan civilization in the colonization period, based within a framework of early urbanization and of alphabetic literacy, owed much to the legacies of a famous past. Though it is not possible to present these influences in detail, our ancient sources illustrate their prevalence and their stimulus towards a remarkable renaissance, which once more allowed the island to make abiding contributions to Greek and European cultural history.

Opinion differed in antiquity as to whether Homer taught others the art of framing lies in the right way. However, the considerable evidence now available to us from archaeological exploration and epigraphic sources, confirms the correctness of Homeric descriptions of Crete as an island of many cities. Similarly, the discovery of pre-alphabetic Bronze Age scripts has brought a fresh significance to the familiar passage of the Odyssey (XIX. 172–9) describing Crete as thickly populated, with ninety cities including Cnossus, with a mixture of languages, and naming Achaeans, Eteocretans, Cydonians, Pelasgians and also Dorians with their three tribes. The possibility that this description may really apply to prehistoric times is supported by an ancient tradition of a Dorian incursion into Crete which preceded the so-called ‘Dorian invasion’ of the mainland. If there is a genuine substance in this tradition it could be that some Dorians had indeed followed Achaean settlers into Crete in the later Bronze Age. For it seems to be the case that Dorians normally possessed themselves of mainland areas and islands already settled by Greek speakers. They were not, as compared with earlier arrivals, in the habit of taking over places which had been occupied by older indigenous peoples.

Solon to Pisistratus

Solon's reform broke the monopoly of office enjoyed till his time by the Attic nobility. This was bound to be resented, and the following years were punctured by strife over the appointment of the archon. The bleak record in Ath. Pol. 13.1–2 tells of two occasions when faction prevented an appointment, and then of Damasias who, though legitimately archon, held on to office for two years and two months till he was driven out by force. The first regular celebration of the Pythian games, in 582, is dated to the year of Damasias (Marm. Par. ep. 38; hyp. Pind. Pyth.): this must be his first and legal year, which is therefore 582/1, and this enables us to sort out Aristotle's indications of interval and so to date the two earlier years of anarchy to 590/89 and 586/5. We may doubt if anything certain was known beyond the fact that these two years were labelled anarchia in the official list, as for 404/3 when the succeeding democracy refused to recognize Pythodorus the archon of the Thirty. The case could have been similar here, not that Athens was literally without a chief magistrate in these years but that their successors did not recognize these elections as valid.

Damasias' usurpation was followed, acording to Ath. Pol. 13.2, by a decision, ‘ because of the faction, to appoint ten archons, five from the Eupatridae, three from the αγροικοι (agroikot), two from the δημιουργοι (demiourgoi), and these held office for the year after Damasias', that is presumably for the remaining ten months of 580/79.

The burgeoning prosperity of Crete in the Geometric period continues through the seventh century. The record is clear from the archaeological evidence of its many sites and this is a record which must be respected, for there is no other. The reticence of ancient authors about this period in Cretan history stands in marked contrast with their readiness to discuss Crete's laws and society: the latter is due to Crete's distinctive practices and their alleged similarities to those of Sparta, the former to the island's comparative unimportance economically and militarily in the Classical period. Crete's society and laws will be discussed in the following section: here we deal with her archaeology and the history of her material culture.

Crete of the hundred – or ninety – cities (Il. II. 649; Od. XIX. 174) was not the only part of Greece to enjoy a wholly distinctive orientalizing culture, nourished by continued contact with Cyprus, Egypt and the Near East. But in Crete the culture is idiosyncratic and it is mainly inbred. It is expressed in a great diversity of products – painted and relief vases, jewellery, sculpture, bronzework and especially armour – and from city to city there seems to have been no less diversity in ways of life, and death.

In the later Geometric period (the second half of the eighth century and a little later) and the rest of the seventh century close on one hundred sites are known in the island. The Late Geometric is the period of maximum activity, it seems, though the fact that nearly two fifths of the sites seem not to survive far into the seventh century could well be illusory since the later material is not always easily identified or it has yet to be found.

Names and places

The Hellenes, ever since their great movement of renewed expansion that began in the ninth century B.C., have had different names in east and west. Westerners came to know them as Graeci, Greeks. Easterners call them Ionians. Even today, a Greek is an Ionian – a Yūnāni – in Arabic, Turkish and Persian. For the people of the Levant and Mesopotamia to name the Greeks after the Ionians was natural, for it was the Ionians who had come to be the chief inhabitants of the eastern parts of the Greek homeland: the Aegean Islands and the coastline of western Asia Minor. The peculiar form of the name ‘Ionians’ that the ancient Near East adopted is just what we should expect to have resulted from ninth- and eighth-century contacts. From the archaic Greek Iāones < * Iāwones is derived the Yawan of the Bible. The Mesopotamians probably pronounced it the same, though the convention of their syllabary resulted in the spelling Yaman. The name could only have come into use after the Ionians occupied their East Greek territories in the post-Mycenaean period. Homer looked back to an age in which there was as yet no such Ionian settlement. The ‘Iāones with trailing tunics’ only appear once in the Iliad, named together with mainland Greeks in an anachronistic-looking passage (XIII.685). The Iliad here uses the archaic form, as does the Homeric Hymn describing the Ionians' festival on the island of Delos (III. 147, 152), and it was still in use in Solon's time, c. 600 B.C.

Introduction

Greek colonies of the Archaic period are found on or off the coasts of modern Spain, France, Italy, Sicily, Albania, Greece, Turkey in Europe, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Turkey in Asia, Egypt and Libya. Hence this is often regarded as the ‘age of colonization’ or period of Greek colonization par excellence. In fact colonization was practised in all periods of Greek history. What distinguishes the colonization of the Archaic period is, firstly, its scale and extent, only rivalled by the very different colonization of Alexander and the Hellenistic period, and, secondly, its character, as a product of the world of the independent city-state, the polis. Later colonization of the Classical, and, even more clearly, of the Hellenistic, periods reveals in many ways that it emanated from a world dominated by larger political units. It is more difficult to distinguish Archaic colonization from its predecessor in the migratory period, when the Greeks settled the islands of the Aegean and west coast of Asia Minor. Indeed, the ancients themselves made no such distinction. However, it seems doubtful if the dominating political units of those days could properly be called poleis. In any case, a distinction is required by the great difference in the quality of our knowledge of the colonization of the migratory period as compared with that of Archaic times. With some over-simplification one might say that the literary sources for the Archaic period present real historical evidence, even though they are partly contaminated by legendary elements, whereas those for the migratory period are all legend, even if a kernel of truth is concealed somewhere within them.

The unification of Attica

The Iliad speaks of the Athenians as a single people. Homeric references to them are indeed sparse and disputable: it is anomalous that the Athenian entry in the Catalogue (II. 546–56) names only Athens itself, whereas elsewhere a king's own city is followed by a string of further place-names, the places where his warriors lived. Whatever the date when this entry was composed or the reasons for its abnormality, it is further testimony to the feeling that the inhabitants of Attica were a homogeneous people with the single city of Athens as their centre. They emerged from the Dark Age with no consciousness of any internal racial difference to divide them, they spoke the same dialect, they were organized in a unitary system of tribes, and in spite of substantial local specialities they shared a common framework of rites and festivals. Of the process by which this was achieved, much necessarily remains obscure.

The Mycenaean collapse left a remnant on the Acropolis, perhaps literally beleaguered in the early stages while they still used the water supply to which access had been elaborately engineered in the thirteenth century. In eastern Attica the cemetery at Perati attests a relatively prosperous twelfth-century community whose links were not with western Attica but with other Mycenaean survivors in the Aegean (CAH II.2, 666–7). This faded away, in circumstances not now discoverable, and the occupation of the Acropolis also came to an end. Though the development through sub-Mycenaean to Protogeometric shows that there was no sharp cultural break but a continuous process, the Mycenaean way of life had finally ceased.