The Greek State

Victor Ehrenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135026738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book charts the development and character of the political forms that grew out of the age of Greek immigration into the Aegean, and establishes the forms which in the course of history were decisive. It also examines the impact which the various forms of state exerted on Greek civilization and in so doing strengthens the bridge between political history and the history of civilization. This volume encompasses many disciplines: political, social history, and religious history, law, administration and geography.

Part I

The Hellenic State

Chapter One

The Origins of the Greek States

In this first chapter I shall try to sketch the conditions, geographical, ethnic, religious, social, and political, that led to the rise of the Greek states. There is much that is still unexplained, and the views represented here often remain mere assumptions, probable or perhaps only possible.

I. Land and Sea

I base the remarks that follow on the recognized fact that geography and history stand to one another in a relation of mutual influence, equally important whether we are thinking in terms of geography or of history. Of these two related elements one is essentially constant, the other essentially changing; the facts of space and nature remain constant through all the changes of time and history, yet vary in their significance and their effects. The history of the area first occupied by the Greeks, from the Helladic period down through Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman times into the Turkish period and the development of modem Greece, supplies unmistakable evidence both of changelessness and of change.

The region in which the Greek state had its original home embraces not only the peninsula that we call Greece, but also the islands and coasts of the Aegean Sea – the Aegean, as we call it for short. Sharply separated from the outside world by the open sea south of Crete and in the west, by the Balkan mountains in the north, and by the western edge of the plateau of Asia Minor in the east, this region may be regarded as a true geographical unit, with its base in its geological prehistory, when the land-bridge still existed between Europe and Asia. In the course of history, the Ionic migration (late in the second millennium or even later) and the ensuing movements from west to east over the Aegean Sea made this geographical unit a Greek unit, and thus formed, beyond all inner political frontiers, an area entirely Greek, the motherland of the multitude of Greek states. Its centre is the sea, but this sea is so thickly sown with islands, and the shores of Greece and the western coasts of Asia Minor are so broken up by the sea, that land and sea appear to be indissolubly connected; thus, the whole region is closely bound together by nature. Though it belongs to two continents, the Aegean is still a unit, for it is ‘thalassocentric’, centred on the sea and situated around the sea and its parts. A people that had no name for the sea when they first entered the Aegean area, learnt there to think of the sea as central, and never quite lost the habit.

The same geographical factors worked together to create a multitude of units and a great variety of forms. The fact that land and sea were so broken up led also to the erection of innumerable barriers. The land was torn in pieces by the bays, gulfs, and arms of the sea, and not less by the mountains which belong to a number of systems, created by mighty geological convulsions. Thus the Greek area displays an interlocked pattern of land and sea, mountains and mountainous districts, plains and valleys, islands and peninsulas, and the result is a wealth of small, sharply separated regions: nature sets an example of fragmentation that was followed and even surpassed by the political world. It was hard to find a place that offered any possibility for larger developments of power; even where (as, for example, in Asia Minor) extensive river plains might have served as a basis for it, the political and historical requirements were lacking.

We have indicated in the last paragraph the small extent of the natural and, even more, of the political districts. The whole area of the Aegean is very narrow in its scope; but the full meaning of this narrowness was only felt and realized when it was broken up internally into small and ever smaller divisions. For the sailor the sea never vanishes into infinity and, even where islands are scarce, some high peak like that of Athos or the Cretan Ida is always there as a landmark; so too on land there is never a plain that is not soon bounded by a mountain or an inlet of the sea. This among other things forced the political units to renounce expansion and led to a swift and complete seizure of the space available and to the early development of numerous political bodies. Painfully recoiling from its narrow boundaries and concentrated on itself, the state preserved a unity which displayed the features of a human community rather than of a political organization. The narrow space, admitting of little variation, produced a marked unification of the civic type and a very distinct political consciousness, limited though it was by its small scale. Neither power nor expansion could be the true aim of the growing state, but from the narrowness of space sprang high tensions that stimulated the creativeness of the community.

The limited space of the single political unit was again the main cause of Greek colonization and was responsible for the wide extent of the area of Greek settlements and the great number of their cities. The reason for the foundation of most colonies was the insufficiency of the homeland for housing and feeding a growing population. Political strife, either among rival groups of the ruling aristocracy or between nobles and non-nobles, could also be a cause of emigration. Even where trade and warlike energy led states to colonize, it was, in the last instance, the lack of a territory that could be exploited economically that drove men to the sea and created markets abroad. The age of colonization meant the spread of the Greeks of the Aegean over the whole of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea as well. A map, containing not only the Aegean, but the sea to the south of Crete, south Italy, east Sicily, the interior of the Balkans, and the coasts of Asia Minor, or, better still, a map stretching from Massilia to Sinope and from Cyrene to Olbia, will help us to realize that the Aegean is in the centre of an area, knit into one by the bonds of the sea and both limited and defended by the surrounding mountains, steppes, and deserts.

The sea, then, served as a safety valve for tensions within the narrow space, and so the exact position in relation to the sea was of decisive importance for political development. In the Aegean, in particular, the shores with their wealth of harbours called for trade and commercial intercourse and created economic prosperity and intellectual vitality, with a city-state as their living centre. Lands as close to one another as Argolis and Laconia, or Attica and Boeotia, illustrate the difference between regions that turn their faces or their backs to the sea. As the city developed, there emerged two characteristic forms of settlement – the settlement round a citadel, which was based on Mycenaean traditions, and the ‘Phoenician’ pattern, especially popular with the colonies, on a jutting peninsula or an island lying off the coast. A city’s situation within the Aegean was no less important. The Aegean was a much frequented market between two continents; it was therefore of the highest importance for the individual state to be near the routes of traffic and points of intersection. A map will show that favourable position usually coincided with a favourable configuration of the coast. In general, it is the coasts that face the Aegean which are moulded into peninsulas and bays. It was here, then – in a historical movement from east to west – that those Greeks lived who held the political and cultural leadership; the western countries of the homeland were far behind and had hardly woken out of their sleep outside history when a new Greece, intensely alive, had arisen still farther in the west. The slowing down of the pace of historical development in the Aegean world from Asia Minor to the islands, then to the east coast of Greece, and finally to her central and western districts played an important part in the manifold variety of the Greek world of states.

If we disregard some fertile plains, mostly small, Greece was always a poor country, poor in water – springs were especially important in determining settlement –, poor in arable land, poor in mineral wealth. The land trained the Greek peasant not so much to hard work and intensified methods as to frugality. The limitation and poor quality of the soil meant an early decline of grain crops in many districts and their replacement by vines and olive trees. The import of com became necessary, while of wine and oil there usually was more than enough for the producer; the basic conditions of agriculture, remaining everywhere more or less the same, drove the peasant to the city market and, in time, increasingly to trade and seafaring.

The economic and political effects of the conditions innate in the soil were reinforced by the influence of the climate, the mild heat, the low rainfall, and the short winter. The climate took life out into the open. House and family were far less important for daily life and social meetings than the market and the wrestling-school. A man’s profession too came to matter less. Public life was almost the sole environment of the citizen. Man proved himself to be indeed a ζῶον πολιτικόν, a creature bound to the Polis, the community both urban and political.

Natural conditions in the Aegean thus led to the creation of numerous self-contained communities, characterized as much by their rich variety and mutual rivalries as by narrow space and inner coherence. In the colonies, too, the type of state, developed in the Aegean, was in all essentials retained. Colonization depended entirely on the sea – in contrast to Rome which colonized by land – and was almost exclusively confined to settlements on the shore. Difficulties of navigation, lack of harbours, or of suitable land along the coast, occasionally discouraged the colonists. In other cases there were historical difficulties that made Greek colonization impossible, as, for example, in the south-east and on the north-west coast of Africa, where Phoenicians, the Assyrian power, or Carthage stood in the way. Conditions varied widely in the different areas of colonization. What the colonists sought chiefly were good harbours, fertile soil, and protection against pirates and hostile natives. Here, too, the life of the state was strongly directed inwards rather than outwards. The natural requirements were in all important points the same, and that despite the larger territories of the Greek cities in Italy and Sicily. Out of the character of the Mediterranean world, both in east and west, grew the Greek state that at once shaped and revealed the Greek character. The close packing of states inside the Greek world, and of men inside the states, was the essential cause of the universal urge towards the agon, the passion to compete with your neighbour.

2. Tribe and Town

Some of the Greeks, the Athenians for example, believed that they were autochthonous. In point of fact, it hardly admits of doubt that all the Greeks were forced south from their earlier positions north of the Balkans through movements of various peoples. More recently different views have been expressed, chiefly based on linguistic arguments. One is that the Greeks entered Greece and the Aegean from Asia Minor by way of the sea; another that the Greek language took shape in Greece after the invasion. In the latter case, the invaders would be pre-Greek Indo-Europeans; they might have entered Greece in several waves or in one only, since the dialects which might prove several waves of immigration would not yet have existed at that early stage. This kind of hypothetical construction is supported by uncertain evidence (archaeological or otherwise), and it is not yet the time for the historian to take a definite stand. There were, at any rate, Greeks in Greece from about the turn of the third to the second millennium. There they probably found an earlier Indo-European stratum, and above all ‘Mediterranean’ tribes which almost certainly had come from Asia Minor. The Greeks everywhere either absorbed or expelled the earlier population. Nothing is known of the political organization of these pre-Greek peoples except in Crete, where a mighty kingship existed. The Greeks themselves came into the land as ‘tribes’. To what extent during the immigration and settlement large tribes divided or small tribes united lies outside our knowledge; the result certainly was that the tribe already in existence, or fragments that subsequently broke off, shaped themselves independently into a large number of political units. In this, the differences between the later main tribes (Dorians, Ionians, Aeolians) or any special characteristic of any one of them played a very small part.

The first immigrants, the Ionians and Achaeans, did not come in one wave, still less as one compact body. Freely mixing, it seems, with the original pre-Greek population, they became as rulers the exponents of the Mycenaean civilization which was spread most intensely over the eastern lands of Greece and was very much under the cultural influence of Crete. In the political life of the Mycenaean Greeks, as in their culture generally, we can establish a connection of Greek elements from the north with non-Greek elements from the east. Thanks to the decipherment of the documents written in the Linear script B, the political, social, and economic conditions of the Mycenaean age are becoming a little clearer, as the reading of the inscriptions proceeds; it is probable that these conditions were subject to non-Greek influence, perhaps not only Cretan but also Asiatic. The centre of the Mycenaean state was the royal citadel, and as the earliest Greek name for it was πόλις (πτόλις), it is very probable that the Polis as city and as state is derived from it. To the strong and walled citadel, of which the royal palace was the centre, was often attached a settlement which, though not fortified, usually gained much of the character of a town. Citadel and settlement (ἄστυ) formed a centre of courtly, political, and economic life, whereas mere citadels of refuge (Fluchtburgen) hardly existed; they only survived in north-western Greece. There was almost certainly beside the king a class of noble lords whose dwellings and graves lay near the royal citadel or in citadels of their own. Of the people we know little, but the gigantic buildings prove that a very numerous section of them – the subject pre-Greek population, of course, in the first place – were bound to forced labour. Kingship, the power of which is at once proved by its cultural achievements, had grown beyond tribal chieftainship into a strong monarchy, and often, as it seems, into supremacy over numerous vassal kings. The position of Agamemnon in the Iliad certainly shows traces of a kingship by the grace of God, but, in his relation to the other kings, he is only the commander-in-chief of the army. It is unlikely that there ever was a large Achaean empire on Greek soil. In spite of the unity of the Achaean civilization and language and the wide diffusion of the Achaean name, it is in no way certain that the Greeks of that age felt themselves to be a single people, still less a ‘nation’.

From the fifteenth century B.C. onwards the Mycenaean Greeks pushed out in various directions, in a movement which led to struggles with Crete and Asia Minor, to the occupation of Crete, and the gradual settlement on the Aegean islands, on the south-west and south coasts of Asia Minor, and in Cyprus. The earlier period of this movement has been established by the tablets in Linear script B found in Cnossus and its dependencies. It received a new and stronger stimulus from the second large wave of immigration: that of the Dorians and the northwestern Greeks (probably during the twelfth to eleventh century B.C.). This was the first attempt at colonization made by the Greeks and, by it, the Mycenaean Greeks to some extent freed themselves from their soil and their traditions. This process determined the form given to the cities that gradually rose on colonial ground. In Asia Minor in particular, where the Greeks settled among an alien population, on the fringe of a large non-Greek hinterland, usually attaching themselves to earlier places of habitation on peninsulas and isthmuses, everything tended towards urban settlement. Here, the Mycenaean Polis became a city in its narrow and most precise sense, with walls and, as seems evident at least from the example of Smyrna, with a planned layout based on axial streets from north to south. This takes us back as far as the eighth century B.C., and it would be proof of a forerunner, earlier than those in the west, of the later rectangular scheme of town planning connected with the name of Hippodamus. A city is not yet a state, but exercising its sway over barbarians, it must have become a state. It is likely, though by no means certain, that the type of political community, which we call the Polis, entered history in Ionia.

In the homeland, the collapse of Mycenaean Greece due to fresh immigration, together with the renewed tendency to split up larger units, brought with it a general revival of primitive conditions, with political forms to correspond; such conditions had already prevailed when the earlier immigrants arrived (as can still be shown in Arcadia), but had, in the main, been ousted by the Mycenaeans. Whether we can only now begin to speak of the genuine growth o...