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.

Assyrian domination and a century of independence

The middle of the eighth century B.C. marks the initial stage of the Cypro-Archaic I period. This was previously put at the very end of the century, about 700 B.C.., but recent research, based especially on the Greek ceramic material found in Cyprus, has rightly raised the date. Part of this period has been discussed already in CAH III.1, ch. 12, down to the year 709, when Sargon II conquered Cyprus, this event appearing as an appropriate landmark for the end of that chapter.

In this chapter we shall cover a period of about two centuries and the basic evidence will again be archaeological; but for the latest part of the period, from the Egyptian domination onwards (about 560 B.C.), we have information from Herodotus, mainly with regard to the period of Persian rule in Cyprus. We also possess some Assyrian records which throw light on the names of the various kingdoms of Cyprus. In Volume III.1, 533, reference was made to the inscription on the stele of Sargon II, where the names of the seven kings of Yadnana (Cyprus) who accepted his sovereignty are mentioned. The conquest of Cyprus by Sargon (724–705 B.C.) is mentioned also in his ‘Display inscription’ at Khorsabad, which reads as follows: ‘I cut down all my foes from Yadnana which is in the sea of the setting sun.’

Assyrian rule continued firm, and some thirty years after the occupation of Cyprus by Sargon Assyrian domination is mentioned again in the prism-inscription of Esarhaddon, which was written in 673/2 B.C. to commemorate the rebuilding of the Royal Palace of Nineveh.

Some problems of chronology

Every shepherd and every farmer needs to know the details of the seasons and the tally of the years. Although literacy lapsed in the Dark Age, men remained numerate and counted the lunar months, each within his own small group. When these groups coalesced into a community or state, or when they engaged in a joint activity, a common standard of time-reckoning was needed. Each state created its own calendar, naming the months by a number or a deity or a festival and beginning the year wherever it pleased; occasionally a month-name, such as the Carnean month in honour of Apollo Carneus, was common to several states, but usually each state drew its names from its own sources and sometimes even had Mycenaean names. As trade and intercourse developed, the need to label the years within a community was met by naming each year after an ‘eponymous’ official, whether priest or magistrate, and keeping a list of the names, e.g. that of Elatus as the first eponymous ephor of Sparta in 754 B.C. (Plut. Lyc. 7). A system which several states could share was devised at Olympia, where the festival was held once every four years and a sacred truce for its duration was observed by the participating states. The festival years were numbered consecutively and named after each winner of the foot-race (stadion), the first Olympiad in 776 B.C. being that of Coroebus of Elis (Paus. VIII. 26.4). Where an official held office for life, as the priestess of Hera at Argos did, the years of his or her tenure were numbered.