The Invention of Politics in Archaic
Greece- Hanover
We begin today with a definition of a key word: polis.
Conventionally, this word is translated as "city-state." This is
somewhat inaccurate, because not all poleis were cities in our
sense of the word (and even the biggest these days would look
pretty small to us). Poleis varied in size, constitution, and
wealth. Some had an extensive territory covered with many
villages; others were quite small, hardly bigger than the main city
or town at their cores.
Each polis, however, was considered by its inhabitants to be
a single community, with a single religious center, a single judicial
center, a single market. A polis was a community where the whole
numerous citizen body could gather together to do business, fight,
or celebrate quite easily; where the citizens often met most of their
fellows face to face.
Ancient Greeks believed that people (or should we say
"men," as they did?) were meant to live in such small intimate
communities. When Aristotle made the famous statement "Man is
a political animal," he was really saying, in the words of the
translation we are using in our book, "Man is by nature an animal
intended to live in a polis." Men outside of such an association
could not attain the good life. If they were isolated, or members of
a very small group, they were hicks, or more likely savages
without justice. If they lived in a larger grouping, such as an
extensive kingdom, the individual would be swamped. A polis
allowed people to cooperate and compete in an environment large
enough and small enough to bring out the best in them.
The Greeks prized the polis precisely because they thought it
was human-scale. The things that people prize about Greek culture
came out of the poleis in the archaic and classical periods, between
roughly 800 B.C. and 323 B.C.
During the archaic period, an important idea emerged in
these communities. It was that in some essential way, all citizens
(not, we should note, all inhabitants), all free men, were equal.
Athens eventually took this idea quite far, and created Greek
democracy. But the idea of citizen equality was not restricted to
Athens. Neither was it just a political idea in our narrow sense of
the word. It was an important cultural idea, too, one that made
possible the great achievements of the classical period, especially
Athens. That is why we are looking at politics first.
Let's begin, once again, with the Homeric society we have
looked at briefly before, that heroic, aristocratic society of the
warriors before Troy or of Odysseus' Ithaka, which existed before
800 B.C.. How was it run? What was its structure?
Briefly, it was run by family connections. What family, what
clan, and what larger kin-group you belonged to, and your position
you held in those groups determined your status within the
community at large. The subjection of slaves was symbolized and
made concrete by the fact that they had no family at all. If there
was a serf population, as in Sparta, they were outside the whole
system.
The free all lived within a recognized network of kin
relationships that supported them and sometimes oppressed them.
Every free person was a member of an oikos or household, roughly
similar to our own families with parents, children and sometimes
other relatives living under a single roof. Each oikos was joined
with others in a clan, called a genos. Further up, each genos was
grouped with others in a phratry, like the clan based on a
supposed common descent. Phratries were grouped in tribes, and
two or three tribes made up the community. The details of this
scheme are not important -- just the idea that your social position
depended on your family and clan connections. Even in the free
population, not all families were equal.
The great families dominated the councils under the kings
(where there were kings) or ran the communities themselves. At
times, especially when some big decision had to be made, an
assembly of all the free men was called together. The lesser men,
however, were there to listen, not to talk.
There is a telling scene in the Iliad that demonstrates this. A
man called Thersites, "the ugliest man that had come to Ilium,"
criticized King Agamemnon. Odysseus immediately put him in his
place:
"Thersites, this may be eloquence, but we have had enough
of it. You drivelling fool, how dare you stand up to the kings? It is
not for you, the meanest wretch of all that followed the Atreidae to
Ilium, to hold forth with the kings' names on your tongue"...and as
he finished Odysseus struck him on the back and shoulders with
his staff. Thersites flinched and burst into tears...He sat down
terrified while the rest of the assembly had a hearty laugh. "Good
work," cried one man...and [said] what they were all feeling..."I do
not think that Thersites will be in a hurry to come here again and
sling insults at the kings."
W.G. Forrest has this comment on it: "Thersites ... was not a
lovable man but he was not beaten just for that. He was beaten
because he did not know his place."
In fact Odysseus had made clear the place of the lesser
members of the army when he was convening the assembly:
"When he found any man of the demos [common people] giving
tongue, he struck him with his sceptre and rated him severely. 'You
there,' he said, 'sit still and wait for orders from your betters, you
who are no warrior and a weakling, counting for nothing in battle
or debate.'" [Forrest, 63-64]
The political and social superiority of the Homeric and early
archaic aristocrats was due to two things: their military role and
their wealth. The princes were single combat champions, who
because of their superior armor and specialized skills made a big
impact on the field of battle, where most fought with light weapons
and no armor. Like the medieval knight, the Homeric hero was
worth a dozen lesser men. Like the medieval knight, his military
capability was related to his economic superiority: the hero could
afford equipment and training. In both war and peace, lesser men
clustered around the great for protection. Thersites and the other
members of the demos were not anywhere near the bottom of
society -- but even within the more privileged part of society, men
had masters. The heads of the phratries had economic, social, and
judicial power over their free dependents. This dark age/early
archaic society of 800 B.C. is obviously not the dynamic and
innovative society of classical Greece.
The dynamic polis of later times only slowly emerged from
this aristocratic framework. Three factors led to the formation of
the polis of equal citizens. One was increased contact with the
outside world; the second was economic change; the third was
developments in military equipment and tactics. We have already
said something about the first, outside contacts. From 800 B.C. on,
colonization opened up the world to the Greeks. It led them to
meet foreigners, and compare their traditional customs with Greek
customs. Colonization involved the setting up of new
communities, in which the old customs did not apply in quite the
same way that they had in the mother city.
Of course colonization had important economic results, too.
Most Greek poleis were soon involved in a wide trade network,
and this shook up the local economy. Commerce shakes things up - makes some people richer, others poorer, and life in general just a
little more unpredictable. Thus the static rank structure of the early
archaic community came under tension, both psychologically and
economically.
As some Greek poleis became considerably wealthier, and
the wealth became a little more widely spread, the aristocrats also
found their military prominence threatened. When war came, they
no longer dominated the battlefield in quite the same
way. Increasingly the support troops, those men like Thersites,
were not just throwing stones, but wearing good armor and
carrying shields, things that were now more available because
Greece was wealthier and the small farmers were wealthier.
These new armored troops were the hoplites, and they introduced a
new era into Greek warfare. Hoplites were not just more singlecombat champions. Hoplites fought in formation, turning a group
of warriors into a small fortification plus battering ram, that could
best not only champions but even cavalry. The appearance of large
numbers of hoplites, fighting differently, as a group, newly
confident in their common strength, eventually undermined the old
aristocratic style of war and government.
Recall that Odysseus had berated the common man at Troy as
being "no warrior and a weakling, counting for nothing in battle or
debate." Now that common man counted for something in battle.
Eventually his voice would also have to be heard in debate.
So in the early archaic period, Greek society was being changed in
a variety of ways. Revolution was a possibility. Three archaic
revolutions, all of which took place between about 675 and 590
B.C. show us the direction of political movement in Greek society.
These revolutions took place in Corinth, Sparta and Athens.
The Corinthian revolution took place in 657 B.C. At that point,
Corinth was the leading Greek commercial city. The polis, like
many others, was run by a single dominant clan, the Bacchiads,
and their allies. They must be rated as pretty successful rulers,
given the wealth of the city, but the prosperity itself undermined
their hold. Other people, especially wealthy people who were
excluded from the favored circle, resented the Bacchiad monopoly
of power. Lesser people had their own resentments.
In 657, some of the dissatisfied supported a bastard member
of the Bacchiad family, a talented soldier named Kypselos, who
took over the government. With the backing of aristocrats,
hoplites, and the sanction of the gods (as indicated by an oracle
from Delphi), Kypselos ruled Corinth as a tyrant (tyrannos).
What does it mean that Kypselos was a tyrant? It doesn't
mean that he was brutal, as the term usually does today. To be a
tyrant was to seize power by untraditional means, and establish a
non-traditional, one-man rule. Kypselos, like many Greek tyrants,
appealed to resentment of the arbitary rule of the traditional rulers.
His slogan, to be echoed later, was dikaiosei Korinthon, "putting
Corinth to rights."
This was a first step to political theory. People in Corinth
were unwilling to defer to the men in charge, just because they
were in charge. They could visualize something better, a type of
government that was less arbitrary, and somewhat less exclusive.
Though Kypselos was a one-man ruler in one sense, he had his
allies and tools, and they at least felt that the government had been
opened up.
Tyranny of this sort became quite common in archaic and
classical Greece. The very existence of tyranny further shook up
any society that experienced it. There was now a boss able and
willing to change the rules, even, quite often, to write down the
rules. Written rules hemmed in the traditional aristocrats, who had
run things on a purely personal and family basis, and created the
possibility of political participation for people lower down on the
social scale -- such as the hoplite class.
Kypselos's family became a dynasty, which was eventually
overthrown, to be replaced by an oligarchy of important people.
Political participation did not widen very much. But similar shakeups elsewhere led to more radical re-adjustments.
Sparta is an excellent example of a society rewriting the rules
extensively. Sparta usually passes for the most conservative of
Greek societies, which from some points of view it was. It was a
non-commercial inland society, where a small group of citizens (if
that's the word) dominated a much larger number of serfs.
Sometime before 700, the Spartans conquered their
neighbors, the Messenians, and became masters of a vast
underclass of helots. This forced them to always be on their guard
against revolts. In the years after 700, conflict among the rulers
endangered the very existence of the Spartan community. About
675, by one chronology {Forrest's}, a legislator was appointed, or
perhaps took power: his name was Lykurgus, and he wrote the
rules that Sparta would live by for centuries.
Detail about the Spartan constitution will come later.The
point to remember is that there was a detailed Spartan constitution:
one that regulated the life of each citizen in great detail and
subjected most citizens to equal obligations: they wereequally
subject to a strict military discipline that prepared them for war,
especially war against their own serfs.
To create this equality, the old tribal and family methods of
organization were broken down and replaced with an organization
based on geographical principles. Also, the idea was established in
Sparta that was not present in Kypselos's Corinth:
constitutionalism, the supremacy of law over all individuals and
their interests. Kypselos put Corinth to rights, or said that he did,
or would. Lykurgus defined precisely what was right, and how
right would be enforced.
It is in Athens that the idea of constitutionalism was taken
up, and led to a whole line of further development.
In the year 650, Athens was a slowly developing commercial
polis run by a group not unlike the Bacchiads of Corinth -- though
instead of a single family, you had a group called the Eupatrids,
"the well-born." As at Corinth, dynamism threatened stability. In
620, to avoid civil war, the polis turned to a respected figure,
Drakon (Draco), to set up a written code of law, so that everyone
would know what was what. Drakon's laws were harsh, in
particular on debtors, who could be sold into slavery, even slavery
abroad, but they were a first step toward constitutionalism.
It has been suggested that the very existence of Drakon's code
made the inequalities in Athens less tolerable. Not only was there
the law of debt -- there was also a form of sharecropping in which
many small farmers owed their aristocratic master a sixth of their
harvest. If times were bad and the 1/6 share could not be paid, a
sharecropper might also be sold into slavery. At the same time,
growing commercial opportunities were giving some people a new
prosperity. Export of olive oil made some larger farmers much
richer than they had been. Yet they still found themselves excluded
from real political power.
These two kinds of dissatisfaction led to the reforms of Solon
in 594. Solon undertook the difficult task of dissuading Athenians
from bloodshed, civil war, and confiscation and redistribution of
property. Rather than become a tyrant, he became the Athenian
Lykurgus. He freed the sharecroppers from their 1/6 obligation; he
forbade the enslavement of debtors, and brought home people who
had been sold abroad; and gave the poorer citizens relief from
aristocratic justice. The decision of an aristocratic magistrate could
now be appealed to the citizen assembly or a court appointed by it.
At the same time the new rich were appeased. The monopoly of
top offices by the Eupatrids was ended by making wealth and
wealth alone the qualification for them. Solon's settlement was far
from revolutionary. The old rich kept their estates, their position on
the council, their prestige, and in most cases their predominance
over their lesser neighbors.
Solon had given Athens a balanced constitution -- one that
satisfied the main political forces of the time. He also, by
abolishing debt slavery and sharecropping, made possible a
republic based on the small freeholder and the free urban citizen.
This is the beginning of developments in Athens that would lead to
the development of its famous democratic system.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks
W.G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, 800-400 B.C.
George Forrest, "Greece: The History of the Archaic Period,"
Oxford History of the Classical World