Archaic and Classical Greece A Selection of Ancient Sources in Translation

The archaic period – conventionally the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries – is a uniquely interesting and important era of Greek history. It is also uniquely difficult to study in detail, especially through the medium of a source-book of this kind, chiefly because (as already explained, p. 5) the developments which characterise it were already under way before the appearance of any record, literary or epigraphical, to document them. Already by the eighth century, for example, the Greeks probably perceived themselves as an entity, racial and cultural, distinct from all others (see 1–2); and although the part played by the formation of a shared system of values can often be adequately illustrated (5, 6, 12, 13), it remains extraordinarily hard to make sense of the period and its trends, and marshal the meagre and diverse data in the service of some sort of explanation of what was happening. One theme predominates: the evolution of what was to become, and remain, the characteristic form and expression of Greek society – the polis. (See above, pp. 1–4. There is an excellent discussion of this (problematical) historical development by Austin and Vidal-Naquet, Economy, 49–53.)

At the beginning of the first millennium, Greek communities formed the population of mainland Greece, the Aegean islands, some areas of western Asia Minor and parts of Cyprus (the last two as a result of recent settlement). In the core of this area – Greece, the Aegean and coastal Asia Minor – they lived in small, poor, static communities, with little contact with the rest of the Mediterranean. Five centuries later, the communities of this core of the Greek world were – by ancient standards – wealthy, organised and creative; and similar communities were spread throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.