The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote that ‘man is by nature a political animal’, that is, one for whom life can best be lived in poleis, or city states (Politics, I. 1253 a 2–3, III. 1278 b 19). The purpose of this book is to present the world of the Greek city states, through a selection of ancient texts in translation, to students of ancient Greece and to students of political institutions. Its primary concern is with how the various states were governed, though a few texts of a more theoretical nature are included; it is not intended as a source book for narrative history, though inevitably it includes some texts of importance to students of narrative history.

It is not always certain what the correct reading of an ancient text should be (cf. p. 8). I have translated what I believe to be the correct readings, occasionally but not systematically mentioning alternatives which may be encountered: some texts have to be identified by reference to particular modern editions, but these editions are cited for purposes of identification only, and I have felt free to diverge from them at points where I believe them to be mistaken.

The translations are all my own. I have consulted other translations intermittently, so when my version is identical with another this will be due sometimes to coincidence, sometimes to my finding in the other version an expression on which I could not improve.

The standard Greek ideal was of self-sufficient agricultural communities, in which most households lived primarily off the produce of their own land. Ownership of land and citizenship tended to be linked, so that in Athens the right to own land and a house was a privilege granted to specially favoured metics but not enjoyed by most (cf. passage 168). In practice, even in the smallest and simplest communities some men might earn their living as craftsmen (though they might still own and cultivate some land); and, as communities developed, activities became more specialised and contact between different communities in different places increased, there will have been a growing range of possible livelihoods and a growing number of men who lived otherwise than as farmers (cf. already Solon of Athens, at the beginning of the sixth century: passage 32). The availability of slaves to do menial work led to its being considered degrading for a free man to be permanently employed in working for another (cf. passage 181).

FARMING

Farming the most basic occupation

Plato in his Republic envisages as a minimal community a farmer and a few crafts men.

The topic of slavery in the Greek world attracted a good deal of attention in the heyday of Marxism, and more recently there has been interest in excluded categories of people more generally. Earlier parts of this book have focused on the perioikoi and helots of Sparta (passages 75–87), and on metics and other foreigners, and slaves, in Athens (passages 166–87). Throughout the Greek world within citizen families children (as still in the modern world, though there is disagreement over the age at which childhood ends) and women (as still everywhere until the end of the nineteenth century ad) also lacked the full rights of citizens. In this chapter I give an indication of what we know about their rights and their lives. As on all topics, for the classical period in Greece we have a larger quantity and a wider range of evidence for Athens than for other states, so most of the texts presented here are from Athens or refer to Athens; but I include some texts referring to other states, which sometimes agree but sometimes contrast with the Athenian evidence. Even from Athens, our evidence largely concerns the upper strata of society, and if upper-class women did lead largely secluded lives the same is not so likely to be true of lower-class women (cf., for instance, passage 173, and Aristotle, Politics, IV. 1300 a 6–7).

By the eighth century the Greeks were recovering from the primitive conditions of the dark age. As life became more secure and more prosperous, there was increasing contact among the Greeks, and between the Greeks and their non-Greek neighbours (the ‘barbarians’, people whose language was an unintelligible babble). Population grew, to the point where (in bad years, if not in all years) there was not enough home-grown produce to feed everyone: the problem was solved partly by trade, to import food (and other commodities in short supply at home, such as metals), and partly by exporting surplus population to apoikiai (‘colonies’), settlements around the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea which usually became independent city states in their own right.

This growth was thus a cause of tension within the cities. Although for a long time land remained the principal form of wealth, the availability of luxury goods from the east, and the possibility of a successful trading voyage, enabled a few men to become rich whose fathers or grandfathers had not been rich, while natural disasters or divison between too many sons might impoverish an old-established family whose wealth had seemed secure. (The adoption of that most hoardable and transportable form of wealth, coinage in precious metal, is now thought not to have occurred until near the middle of the sixth century, but precious metal was available earlier than coinage.)

Historical Background

The first advanced civilisation in Greece, the bronze-age Mycenaean civilisation of the second millennium, was based not on city states governed by their citizens, but on powerful kingdoms. This civilisation broke up in the twelfth century, and was followed by a dark age in which the population of Greece dwindled, partly through emigration to the islands of the Aegean and the west coast of Asia Minor, and life returned to more primitive levels.

Recovery began in the tenth century, and from c. 800 to c. 500 we have what is called the archaic period of Greek history, a semi-historical period which resembles an incomplete jigsaw puzzle in which we have the pieces to reconstruct parts of the picture but not the whole. The Greeks were now organised in some hundreds of separate states, which had developed out of the separate, self-sufficient communities of the dark age. A typical state comprised an urban centre and the agricultural land within a few miles of it; its population might be numbered in thousands, but not usually in tens of thousands. At first, it seems, these states had been ruled by kings, but there was no gulf between the kings and the nobility formed by the families which by the end of the dark age had acquired the largest quantities of good land, and before long hereditary monarchy had given way to collective government by the nobles: officials were appointed with limited tenure, to advise them there was a council of leading men, and on occasions when solidarity was important there might be an assembly of all adult male citizens.

The earliest surviving works of Greek literature are the Iliad and the Odyssey, epic poems attributed to Homer. The poems were written c. 750–700, and represent the culmination of generations of oral poetry. They tell stories of the late Mycenaean world, the Iliad an episode in a siege of Troy by the combined forces of the Greek states which was believed to have taken place early in the twelfth century, and the Odyssey the delayed return of Odysseus to Ithaca after that siege. Whether there is any truth behind the stories is disputed; it is certain that details were incorporated in the epic tradition at various times between the Mycenaean age and Homer's own age. The states which Homer depicts are simpler than the Mycenaean states, with none of the bureaucracy attested in the Linear B tablets, and with no peaceable intercourse between states except on the basis of guest-friendship between noble families. In this respect the world depicted is most like that of the ‘dark age’ between the Mycenaean age and the time of Homer. There was no one time when life was exactly as depicted by Homer, but the world which he depicts is important, because it was believed by classical Greeks to be the world out of which their own had developed.

The poems are composed as much of phrases forming part or the whole of a hexameter line as of individual words.

Greek religion was polytheistic. It is commonly said that it required correct practice rather than correct belief or a healthy spiritual state. Of course, people would not worship the gods unless they believed that the gods existed and believed certain things about them; and, if they did hold such beliefs, good performance of their religious duties and worldly success which they might attribute in part to that performance, or the reverse, would have some effect on their spiritual state. However, it is largely true that there was no body of doctrine by which people might be judged orthodox or heretical (but see passage 325, on the charges against Socrates) and that Greek religion was much less concerned than Christianity with people's internal spiritual state: a religious person was one who was punctilious in performing religious rites, and in letting oracles, omens and the like influence decisions in day-to-day life, and an irreligious person was one who was not.

GREEK RELIGION

Local variations on a Greek theme

Not only were there major gods and various lesser divinities. What were thought of as the same gods had different manifestations in different places: there was Apollo of Delphi and Apollo of Delos; in Athens Athena was primarily Athena Polias, the protector of the polis; but there was also on the acropolis a temple of Athena Nike, the goddess of victory (cf. passage 327).

Athens went a long way in the direction of egalitarian democracy, and provides a quantity of documentation which enables us to study the working of this democracy in some detail.

In the late seventh century, the earliest period for which we have evidence, the whole of Attica already belonged to the single polis of Athens; and monarchy had given way to an aristocracy in which the basileus was an annual official, one of a board of nine archons. In the 630s or 620s there was an unsuccessful attempt by Cylon to make himself tyrant; in 621/0, perhaps in response to Cylon's attempt and its aftermath, Athens was given a written code of laws by Draco. In 594/3 Solon liberated those Athenians who were dependent serfs, and revised the constitution and the code of laws so as to weaken the stranglehold of the aristocracy. Pisistratus became tyrant in the middle of the sixth century, and left his power to his sons, but the tyranny was brought to an end in 511/0.

Cleisthenes laid the foundations of the democracy in 508/7, when he organised the citizens in ten new tribes and devised a system of government which required a high degree of participation by the citzens. Ephialtes in 462/1 transferred to more representative bodies the politically important powers still being exercised by the council of the Areopagus; and shortly afterwards Pericles began for jurors the system of state payments which made it possible for the poorer citizens to play an active part in public affairs.

The world in which Homer lived, in the late eighth century, was probably not strikingly different politically from the world represented in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Greeks – in mainland Greece, the islands of the southern Aegean and the west coast of Asia Minor – lived in some hundreds of poleis, ‘city states’, each of which comprised a village with some farm land around it, usually separated by hills from neighbouring states. Within the state the clearest line was that between nobles and commoners: kings were not so clearly set apart from the other nobles, and by the end of the eighth century most states had at their heads not hereditary kings but officials appointed from the nobility (sometimes basileus, ‘king’, survived as the title of one of these officials): there was a council of nobles to advise the king or chief officials; and an assembly of adult male citizens could be summoned, but probably it did not meet often and its ordinary members were not expected to play an active part in the proceedings (Homer had perhaps witnessed the humiliation of a Thersites).

KINGS AND ARISTOCRATS

The replacement of kingdoms by aristocracies

Classical Greeks were unaware of the dark age, the period after the fall of the Mycenaean kingdoms in which the population of Greece declined and the level of civilisation dropped.

Sparta and Athens were the largest and, in the classical period, the most powerful of the Greek city states; and they are the states about which we have most information, in the case of Athens because of the extensive publication of state documents and lawcourt speeches, in that of Sparta, because of the fascination which the Spartans exercised over the other Greeks. Documents in Sparta were rare, Thucydides in trying to give an account of the Spartan army complained of ‘the secrecy of the state’ (passage 146) and individual Spartans were not much given to writing (cf. passage 95); but until her defeat by Boeotia at Leuctra in 371 Sparta appeared to be a successful state, and her success and discipline were admired by intellectuals who found it easier to teach and write elsewhere.

In the course of the fifth century Sparta came to be regarded as the model of oligarchy and Athens as the model of democracy, but Sparta's was an oligarchy of a peculiar kind. The Spartiates, the full citizens who were members of the assembly and had some say in the running of the state, were a small minority in a population which also included perioikoi, free men with the power to run their own communities but in greater matters subject to the Spartiates, and helots, men reduced to a state of servitude.

Sparta and Athens were abnormally large and abnormally powerful city states. In addition, Athens came to be seen as the model of democracy, and Sparta exercised a particular fascination over opponents of democracy. These two states therefore interested ancient writers far more than any others, and our information on the working of other states is meagre. Aristotle's school produced studies of 158 constitutions, but of these only the Athenian Constitution has survived, and the short fragments quoted by other ancient writers from the remainder are not enlightening to the student of political institutions. More useful is Aristotle's Politics, the work of theory for the sake of which Aristotle and his pupils collected details of constitutional practice: the theory in the Politics is illustrated by a large number of particular examples, and these examples are by no means confined to Sparta and Athens.

Some information on other cities in the archaic period has been given in Chapters Two and Three. In this chapter I give some early documents; a selection of interesting constitutional details, mostly from the Politics; and, because of the predominant position of Sparta and Athens in the Greek world, some texts showing the way in which they influenced the constitutions of other states.

DOCUMENTS FROM THE ARCHAIC PERIOD

An early law from Crete

Though Athens was the greatest publisher of state documents in the fifth and subsequent centuries, we have older inscribed documents concerning political institutions from elsewhere.

I am grateful to Dr M. L. Sharp of Cambridge University Press for inviting me to prepare a second edition of this book, and to Routledge (as successors to Croom Helm) and to the University of Oklahoma Press for making that possible by returning my rights in the book to me.

The book originated in a request from Mr R. Stoneman, then of Croom Helm, that I should compile a source book on ‘Greek political systems’. In revising it I had in any case wanted not only to correct a few errors and to do some updating but also to make a clearer typographical distinction between the ancient texts and my editorial material than was possible in the first edition, and to add some further texts; and further changes in presentation and additions to the texts were suggested by the publisher's advisers. The upshot is that in this edition all the material in the first edition has been retained, but the texts are now numbered in a single sequence; in Chapter Five what was a section on ‘citizens, metics and slaves’ has become a section on ‘citizens, foreigners and slaves’, with a few additional texts; there are new chapters on women and children, on economic life and on religion (though there is some material on all of these dispersed through the other chapters); and the chapter on the Hellenistic and Roman periods has been enlarged with a section showing ‘variations on a theme’ (though there was more material on these periods in the first edition than one hasty reviewer supposed).

Although the city state, as a wholly independent entity with subdivisions of purely internal significance, is represented in Greek literature as the normal and indeed the natural political unit, and the basis of the Common Peace treaties of the fourth century was that every city should be independent (cf. passages 439–46), the political organisation of the Greeks was in fact more complex than that. In this chapter we look first at larger units in which individual city states could be combined. There were federal states, where there was a single organisation for a whole region but the separate cities (or non-urban units) within the region are to be regarded as states in their own right. There were religious unions, where states whose independence was undeniable had joint meetings because of their joint responsibility for a cult centre. Sparta and Athens built up leagues of allies, as a means of extending their power beyond the limits of their own state without theoretically doing away with the freedom and independence of the states which were in fact subjected to them.

This leads us to the other alliances and peace treaties made between Greek states, and especially to the Common Peace treaties of the fourth century, which in theory sought to unite all the Greek states not in subjection to any one state but in respect for the freedom of all.