Ancient Greece

Social and Historical Documents from Archaic Times to the Death of Alexander the Great

Matthew Dillon, Lynda Garland, Matthew Dillion, Matthew Dillon, Lynda Garland, Matthew Dillon, Lynda Garland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415473309
• eBook ISBN: 9781136991370
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In this revised edition, Matthew Dillon and Lynda Garland have expanded the chronological range of Ancient Greece to include the Greek world of the fourth century. The sourcebook now ranges from the first lines of Greek literature to the death of Alexander the Great, covering all of the main historical periods and social phenomena of ancient Greece. The material is taken from a variety of sources: historians, inscriptions, graffiti, law codes, epitaphs, decrees, drama and poetry. It includes the major literary authors, but also covers a wide selection of writers, including many non-Athenian authors. Whilst focusing on the main cities of ancient Greece - Athens and Sparta- the sourcebook also draws on a wide range of material concerning the Greeks in Egypt, Italy, Sicily, Asia Minor and the Black Sea.

Ancient Greece covers not only the chronological, political history of ancient Greece, but also explores the full spectrum of Greek life through topics such as gender, social class, race and labour. This revised edition includes:

• Two completely new chapters - "The Rise of Macedon" and "Alexander ?the Great?, 336-323" BC
• New material in the chapters on The City-State, Religion in the Greek World, Tyrants and Tyranny, The Peloponnesian War and its Aftermath, Labour: Slaves, Serfs and Citizens, and Women, Sexuality and the Family

It is structured so that:

• Thematically arranged chapters arranged allow students to build up gradually knowledge of the ancient Greek world
• Introductory essays to each chapter give necessary background to understand topic areas
• Linking commentaries help students understand the source extracts and what they reveal about the ancient Greeks

Ancient Greece: Social and Historical Documents from Archaic Times to the Death of Alexander the Great. Third Edition, will continue to be a definitive collection of source material on the society and culture of the Greeks.

1 The Polis: The Greek City-State

DOI: 10.4324/9780203854556-1

The central focus of civilisation for the Greeks, after the oikos or family unit, was the polis (plural: poleis). Polis is usually translated as ‘city-state’ as a polis was generally an independent state, with its own laws, customs, political system, military force, currency and sometimes calendar. According to Aristotle those who did not live in a polis were ‘tribeless, lawless, hearthless’, and to the Greeks the fact that they lived in a city-state was proof that they were a civilised people (doc. 1.1). But the polis should also in Aristotle’s opinion be limited in size and self-sufficient. He was the first to employ the metaphor of the ‘ship of state’. Too few inhabitants and the polis could not be self-sufficient, too many and the ship would be too big, and the administration of the polis would be adversely affected (doc. 1.3).

Aristotle’s well-known statement that ‘man is a political animal’ should in fact be translated as ‘man is a creature who lives in a polis’ (Arist. Pol. 1253a 2–3: doc. 1.1), while according to Thucydides (7.77.7) ‘it is men who are the city, and not walls or ships with no men inside’. Much of the history of the Greeks is the history of the interaction between its cities. City-states were generally independent, and, though various cities at different times attempted to dominate the other cities in Greece, these attempts were generally short-lived. The cities, rather than uniting with each other, were prone to fight amongst themselves, and nearby neighbours were often the most implacable enemies, such as Sparta and Argos. While there was a concept of mutual identity when faced with an outside enemy, as when during the Persian Wars the Hellenic League was formed to combat Xerxes (docs 11.19, 11.24), most Greeks saw themselves not primarily as Greek, but as a member of their city-state. Aristotle viewed the Greeks as superior to other peoples; the Greeks attained the ‘highest political development’ and Greece ‘could rule everyone else, if it could achieve political unity’ (doc. 1.2). But such unity was achieved only under Philip and Alexander of Macedon.

Apart from links with a mother-city which had sent out a colony, individual communities preferred to be self-sufficient, though many states were members of leagues, larger organisations formed to protect smaller cities or contribute to the power of the largest city-state in the region, such as the Peloponnesian League and Boeotian federation (docs 1.57–58, cf. 6.62–63). Athens was to gain power over a number of cities through the Delian League. There could also be cultural and religious unions between different cities (docs 1.59–60). While the Greek states shared several cultural features, such as the same language, religious beliefs, and system of writing (doc. 3.90), there were still differences between states: there were dialectical variations, each state had its own tutelary deities with different cults, names and festivals, and there could be differences of alphabet (cf. doc. 2.10).

Athens was the largest mercantile and commercial centre but had a rival in Corinth whose position on the Isthmus made it a major shipping centre and trading depot, with goods being transferred across the Isthmus to avoid the longer sail around the Peloponnese (docs 1.61–62). From the available sources, it is possible to obtain a clear impression of some of the economic priorities of Greek city-states. Obviously by the fifth century the import of grain was of great importance to certain states like Teos (doc. 1.65), and there was legislation to stop corruption and consumer exploitation, as in the wine trade at Thasos, which not only regulated when wine could be sold, but specifically prevented adulteration and retail dealing, in terms which imply that these were a common occurrence (doc. 1.66). The most specific evidence for the economy of a city-state of course derives from Athens. Athens controlled trade (doc. 1.69), and levied customs duties (doc. 1.68), and had revenues drawn from a wide variety of taxes (doc. 1.28). All cities would have had their own system of taxation, both direct and indirect (doc. 1.47), and in the sixth as well as the fifth century BC most states would have had quite complex taxation and commercial systems in place.

Aristotle’s discussions of the various types of government point to the diversity of political organisation in Greece: kingship, aristocracy and constitutional government (politeia), from which the ‘deviations’ were, respectively for him, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy (doc. 1.1). Naturally the constitutions of cities changed over time, and the Athenaion Politeia listed eleven changes in constitution (politeia) from Athens’ earliest history down to the 320s BC (doc. 1.4). In a democracy, Aristotle notes that all the citizens ‘must be equal’; each citizen is governed by the others but in turn governs them (through rotation of who holds the political offices). The majority of citizens should decide what is to be done (doc. 1.5). Theophrastos in discussing the laws of Eresos saw ‘merit, adequate property and common sense’ as defining the criteria for office (doc. 1.6), but Perikles summed up a different political ideology for democratic Athens: it was merit alone, not the property a citizen owned, which was the determining principle in political participation: no one was denied office because of being poor (doc. 1.17).

While the poorer citizens in a democracy did ensure that they enjoyed sacrifices and civic amenities (doc. 1.8, cf. 1.18), and Aristotle defined democracy as looking only to the ‘interests of the poor’ (doc. 1.1), citizenship carried specific obligations. Perikles in his Funeral Oration outlined the privileges citizens enjoyed: to stand for political office and to speak in the assembly, with the majority managing the affairs of the city and ‘not just a few’ (doc. 1.17). All citizens were to participate in Athenian affairs of state: Solon had passed a law against political apathy in 594/3 BC (doc. 8.21). More importantly, Perikles described the citizen who took no part in politics as ‘totally useless’ (doc. 1.17). A citizen had to be prepared to lay down his life for his city (cf. doc. 1.41); he had to look at Athens and become its lover (doc. 1.17).

Aristotle’s concern that if the citizens are unknown to each other then the ‘management of political positions’ suffers (docs 1.1, 1.3) was overcome in Athens by the people having control over the officials, who were examined before they took office and had to give an account of their term of office when it was over (docs 1.19, 1.22). Widespread political participation by the citizens was ensured at Athens by paying the citizens for political duties, such as holding office, being a member of the boule, serving on a jury, and in the fourth century for attendance at the assembly (ekklesia). The vast majority of citizens had to work hard for a living and needed financial reimbursement for working time spent in political duties. In particular, payment for serving on juries was fundamental to Athenian practice because the law courts made so many decisions (doc. 9.23), particularly in the fourth century BC when laws proposed in the assembly could be declared illegal, with the juries deciding on the issue. Despite Aristophanes’ comic caricatures of the jurors as cranky old men who loved deciding a lawsuit (docs 1.25–26, 1.28), the judicial system worked efficiently; arbitrary punishment, imprisonment, execution and confiscation of property were not hallmarks of the democracy but of the two periods of oligarchy in 411 and 404–403 BC.

Most of the evidence about the workings of city-states comes from Athens. This was an unusually large city, with several important urban areas, such as Eleusis, and various villages (demes) scattered throughout the territory of Attica (though Syracuse in Sicily was also larger and more important than many mainland Greek cities). Every citizen had the right to vote and also to speak in the assembly, which in fifth-century Athens was the decision-making body (doc. 1.18; cf. 7.26 for Mytilene). Nevertheless there were constitutional constraints on the assembly, and from Kleisthenes’ time the agenda for the meeting was drawn up beforehand by the boule, the Council of Five Hundred, which served rather like a standing committee. Of the five hundred councillors, fifty were chosen from each of the ten tribes and one of the tribes was in office (‘held the prytany’, each prytany being one-tenth of the year) at any one time, the fifty councillors from that particular tribe being responsible for the day-to-day business that came up in the Council and procedure in the assembly, such as putting questions to the vote. But the procedure did not always run normally, as after the battle of Arginousai in 406 BC (doc. 1.20). In the seventh and sixth centuries the most important officials of Athens had been the archons: there were nine of these – the basileus (or king) archon, the eponymous archon, after whom the year was named, and the polemarch (war archon), plus six thesmothetai. In the time of Kleisthenes, the archons were joined by a tenth, the secretary of the thesmothetai, and now corresponded to the new ten tribes, with one archon was elected from each. In fact, in the fifth century the most important officials were the ten generals (strategoi), who were appointed annually, one from each tribe, but were eligible for re-election and thus became the real political leaders of Athens as well as the commanders of the armed forces.

Perikles’ Funeral Oration is a valuable document for the Athenians’ concept of the responsibilities of a citizen in a democracy as well as making clear the fact that Athens in particular prided itself on its independence and political system (doc. 1.17). Nevertheless, there was no ‘model’ for a city-state, despite Aristotle’s theoretical propositions. It would be unwise to take Athens as representing the ‘average’ Greek polis: Sparta was in many respects the very antithesis of Athens, in political structure and constitution, society, economy and culture. All Greek city-states were different and possessed their own constitutions and social practices (cf. docs 1.45–54), but all were of course equally important to their inhabitants, whose lives revolved entirely around this integral component of Greek civilisation and culture.

The Government of the City-State

1.1 Aristotle Politics 1252b28–1253a7, 1279a22–1279b10: Man Is a ‘Political Animal'

The phrase ‘man is a political animal’ is a famous mistranslation of Aristotle’s phrase: ‘man is by nature a creature of the polis’. That is, man functions with and belongs to the city-state (the polis; pl.: poleis), which was the essential building block of Greek civilisation and one of its defining characteristics. Aristotle defines various types of government but what is crucial is that the individual citizen has a role in the polis; he here sees democracy, like that of fifth-century Athens, as a deviation from normal rule by the people. The amalgamation of villages into a single unit was synoikismos, synoecism (for which see docs 1.7, 1.55–56).

1252b28 The amalgamation of numerous villages creates a unified city-state, large enough to be self-sufficient or nearly so, starting from the need to survive, and continuing its existence for the sake of a comfortable lifestyle. So, the city is natural just like the earlier forms of society. It is the outcome of them, and the nature of a thing is its outcome, for what each thing is when its development has been completed we call this its nature, whether we are talking of a man, or a horse, or a household. Moreover the final cause and outcome of a thing is the best, and to be self-sufficient is the best outcome.

1253a2 From this it is clear that the state is a creation of nature and that man is by nature a creature of the polis. And anyone who by nature and not by chance is without a polis is either a bad man or far above humanity, and like the ‘tribeless, lawless, hearthless’ person whom Homer (Iliad 9.63) condemns, this man is by nature necessarily a lover of war, and may even be compared to an isolated piece in a board-game like draughts.

1279a22 Then, with regard to the different types of government, we have to find out how many there are, and what they are, and first of all what their true forms are — for when these are defined the deviations from them will at once become clear. The words constitution and government have the same meaning and the government, which is the supreme authority in poleis, must be in the hands of one, or of a few, or of the many, and the true forms of government therefore are those in which the one, or the few, or the many are ruling with a view to the common interest, while those which rule with a view to private interests, whether of the one, or of the few, or of the many, are deviations. For, the citizens, if they are truly so, ought to share in the benefits of government.

1279a32 Of the types of government which look to the common interest we normally call that in which one person rules kingship; that in which more than one but not many rule, aristocracy — either because the rulers are the best men, or because they promote the best interests of the state and citizens; and, when the many administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by its generic name – constitutional government … 1279b4 Of the above-mentioned types, the deviations from these are as follows: from kingship, tyranny; from aristoc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Maps
• Glossary
• Some useful definitions
• How to use and cite Ancient Greece
• Preface to the third edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the first edition
• 1 The polis: the Greek city-state
• 2 Colonisation
• 3 Religion in the Greek world
• 4 Women, sexuality, and the family
• 5 Labour: slaves, serfs and citizens
• 6 Sparta
• 7 Tyrants and tyranny
• 8 The law-givers of Athens: Drakon and Solon
• 9 Peisistratos and his sons
• 10 Kleisthenes the reformer
• 11 The Persian Wars
• 12 The Delian League and the Pentekontaetia
• 13 The Peloponnesian War and its aftermath
• 14 The rise of Macedon
• 15 Alexander ‘the Great’ of Macedon, 336–323 bc
• 16 The ancient sources
• Chronological table
• Bibliography
• Index of ancient sources
• General index
• Genealogical tables
• Maps