Ancient Greece Read online




  Ancient Greece

  SECOND EDITION

  Ancient Greece

  From Prehistoric to

  Hellenistic Times

  THOMAS R. MARTIN

  Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

  New Haven & London

  Published with assistance from the Mary

  Cady Tew Memorial Fund.

  First edition 1996. Updated in 2000 with new suggested readings and illustrations. Second edition 2013.

  Copyright © 1996, 2013 by Yale University.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Martin, Thomas R., 1947–

  Ancient Greece : from prehistoric to Hellenistic times / Thomas R. Martin.—Second Edition.

  pages cm.

  Includes bibliographical refences and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-16005-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Greece—History—To 146 B.C. I. Title.

  DF77.M3 2013

  938—dc23 2012043154

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to the students who have over the years asked questions that continually kept me thinking anew about the history of ancient Greece, to the colleagues who have so often helped me work through the challenges of presenting that history in the classroom, to the readers who have sent me comments and suggestions, and to the people of Greece, past and present, whose xenia has always inspired and humbled me, in good times and bad.

  CONTENTS

  Timelines appear on pages 15, 26, 47, 66, 92, 123, 159, 187, 222, 254

  List of Maps, Plans, Tables, and Figures

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  List of Abbreviations

  Note on Citations, Sources, and Dates

  Chapter 1: Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History

  Chapter 2: From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans

  Chapter 3: The Dark Age

  Chapter 4: The Archaic Age

  Chapter 5: Oligarchy, Tyranny, and Democracy

  Chapter 6: From Persian Wars to Athenian Empire

  Chapter 7: Culture and Society in Classical Athens

  Chapter 8: The Peloponnesian War and Its Aftermath at Athens

  Chapter 9: From the Peloponnesian War to Alexander the Great

  Chapter 10: The Hellenistic Age

  Epilogue

  Suggested Readings

  Index

  MAPS, PLANS, TABLES, AND FIGURES

  Maps

  1. Neolithic, Minoan, and Mycenaean periods

  2. Areas of Indo-European language groups

  3. Phoenician and Greek colonization, c. 800–c. 500 B.C.

  4. Magna Graecia, Greece, and Anatolia

  5. The Persian Wars

  6. The Peloponnesian War

  7. Alexander’s route of conquest, 334–323 B.C.

  8. The Hellenistic world, c. 240 B.C.

  Plans

  1. Attica showing Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) and Battle of Salamis (480 B.C.)

  2. Athens near the end of the fifth century B.C.

  Tables

  1. Examples of words in Linear B script

  2. Examples of letters from early alphabets

  Figures

  1.1 Fifth-century B.C. Athenian inscription

  1.2 Mount Olympus

  1.3 Neolithic sculpture of a man

  2.1 Minoan palace at Knossos

  2.2 Gold “Death Mask” of Agamemnon from Mycenae

  2.3 Fortification wall and gate at Mycenae

  3.1 Sculpted metal bands from Nimrud, showing trade goods and timber

  3.2 Dark Age model of grain storage containers

  3.3 Dark Age figurine of a centaur

  4.1 Theater and temple of Apollo at Delphi

  4.2 Metal hoplite helmet

  4.3 Archaic Age marble statue of an unmarried girl wearing finery

  5.1 Vase painting of trade at Cyrene

  5.2 Temple of Apollo at Corinth

  5.3 Vase painting of a wedding procession

  6.1 Vase painting of warriors

  6.2 The Parthenon temple on the Acropolis at Athens

  6.3 Bronze statue of a god

  7.1 Painting of preparations for an animal sacrifice

  7.2 Theater at Epidaurus

  7.3 Vase painting of a symposium, including a hetaira

  8.1 Both sides of a silver coin (an “owl”) of Athens

  8.2 Vase painting of a comic actor

  8.3 Statuette of Socrates

  9.1 Mosaic scene of Plato’s Academy

  9.2 Reconstructed head of Philip II of Macedonia

  9.3 Gold medallion with portrait of Alexander the Great

  10.1 Sculpture of a queen or goddess from Hellenistic Egypt

  10.2 Hellenistic statue of veiled female dancer

  10.3 Statuette of goddess Isis in Greek dress

  PREFACE

  The first edition of this book came out in 1996, as a companion and a supplement to the overview of ancient Greek history included in the Perseus Project. At that time, before the explosion of the Internet, Perseus was released on CD-ROM, which was the only medium then available that allowed the integration of narrative, illustrations, and access to the full texts in translation and the original languages of ancient sources. That original overview has now been online for more than a decade as part of the Perseus Digital Library (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) under the title An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0009). As best as can be estimated, it has been viewed online more than a million times from all around the world. I take heart from that figure that the history of ancient Greece retains its fascination for many, many people, myself included.

  As a policy decision taken for multiple reasons, the overview in Perseus has remained unchanged over the years. This printed book has now been updated twice (though with the same coverage and arrangement of topics). It can no longer be said to be a companion to the Perseus overview, but its inspiration remains the spirit and dedication to the goal of the wide dissemination of knowledge that has motivated the Perseus team throughout the history of that groundbreaking project. For this and more, the world of those interested in ancient Greece in particular and digital libraries in general owe a boundless debt of gratitude to and admiration for Gregory Crane, Professor of Classics and Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University and Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of Leipzig, scholar and friend and fellow Red Sox fan through thick and thin.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Again, I want to express in the first place my abiding appreciation for the patience, encouragement, and guidance that Jennifer Banks (senior editor, Yale University Press) has repeatedly given me; her many contributions have been invaluable. Piyali Bhattacharya and Heather Gold (editorial assistants) were unstinting in their attention to the project, as was Suzie Tibor in her art research in locating the new images for this edition. Kate Davis (copy edito
r) earns warm thanks for her prompt and meticulous editing to improve the text, as does Margaret Otzel (senior editor, Yale University Press) for her unfailingly responsive and encouraging work to turn the manuscript into a book. The honest criticisms and thorough analysis of the anonymous reviewers aided me greatly in improving the narrative from beginning to end. My wife and fellow philhellene, Ivy Suiyuen Sun, has supported me from the very beginning forty years ago, when we began our marriage and our love of things Hellenic during our first sojourn in Greece.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  CAF Theodorus Kock. Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta (Leipzig, Germany: Teubner, 1880–1888; reprint, Utrecht, Netherlands: HES, 1976).

  D.-K. Hermann Diels. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Ed. Walther Kranz. 11th ed. (Zurich: Weidmann, 1964).

  FGrH Felix Jacoby. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1954–1964).

  GHI Russell Meiggs and David Lewis, eds. A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

  IG Inscriptiones Graecae. Vol. 4, 2nd ed.; vol. 1, 3rd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1929–; 1981–).

  OGIS Wilhelm Dittenberger. Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae (Leipzig, Germany: S. Hirzel, 1903–1905; reprint, Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 1970).

  NOTE ON CITATIONS, SOURCES, AND DATES

  The term primary sources, as used here (and commonly in classical studies), refers to ancient texts, whether literary, documentary, epigraphic, or numismatic. To help readers find the passages in primary sources that are embedded in the text of this book, citations will be presented wherever possible using the standard internal reference systems of those sources that are conventional in modern scholarly editions and that are used in many, but not all, modern translations. So, for example, the citation “Pausanias, Guide to Greece 4.2.3” means that the passage is book 4, section 2, subsection 3 of that work by Pausanias. This will enable readers to find the passage in question in any modern edition or translation that includes the internal reference system.

  Secondary sources accordingly refers to postclassical or modern scholarship about these ancient sources and the history that they describe. The embedded citations of secondary sources contain the name of the author or a short title, with the relevant page numbers or, in the case of catalogued objects such as inscriptions or coins, the reference number of the object.

  Full bibliographic information on modern translations of primary sources and on secondary sources can be found in the Suggested Readings at the end of this book.

  Dates not marked as B.C. or A.D. should be assumed to be B.C. Dates given in parentheses following the name of a person indicate birth and death dates, respectively, unless preceded by “ruled,” which indicates regnal dates.

  ONE

  Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History

  “Most things in the history of Greece have become a subject of dispute” is how Pausanias, the second-century A.D. author of a famous guide to sites throughout Greece, summed up the challenge and the fascination of thinking about the significance of ancient Greek history (Guide to Greece 4.2.3). The subject was disputed then because Pausanias, a Greek, lived and wrote under the Roman Empire, when Greeks as subjects of the emperor in Rome no longer enjoyed the independence on which they once had prided themselves and had fought fiercely to protect. One dispute he focused on was why Greeks had lost their liberty and what it meant to live as the descendants of more-glorious ancestors. Today, the study of ancient Greek history still remains filled with disputes over how to evaluate the accomplishments and the failures that its story so dramatically presents. On the one hand, the accomplishments of the Greeks in innovative political organization, including democracy, history writing, literature, drama, philosophy, art, and architecture, deserve the description that the fifth-century B.C. historian Herodotus used to explain why he included the events and people that he did in his groundbreaking work: They were “wonders.” On the other hand, the shortcomings of the ancient Greeks, including their perpetuation of slavery, the exclusion of women from politics, and their failure to unite to preserve their independence, seem equally striking and strongly disturbing. For me, after nearly forty years of studying, teaching, and writing about ancient Greece, the subject in all its diversity remains fascinating—and often perplexing—because it is awe inspiring. Awe, a word in English derived from the ancient Greek noun achos, meaning “mental or physical pain,” can, of course, have two opposite meanings: “wonder and approval” or “dread and rejection.” I have both those reactions when thinking about ancient Greece and the disputes that its history continues to stimulate.

  Ancient Greece is a vast subject, and this overview, written to be a concise introduction, necessarily compresses and even omits topics that others would emphasize. Whenever possible it tries to signal to readers when interesting disputes lie behind the presentation and interpretation of events or persons, but it cannot offer anything like a full treatment and still achieve the goal of brevity. My hope is that readers will be inspired, or at least provoked, to investigate the evidence for themselves, starting with the ancient sources. For this reason, those sources will be cited in the text from time to time to give a glimpse of the knowledge and delight to be gained from studying them. An extensive list of English translations of those sources is provided in the Suggested Readings, along with modern scholarly works that present fuller accounts and sometimes dueling interpretations of important topics, especially those that give rise to dispute.

  The narrative of the overview covers the period from prehistory (so called because no written records exist to document those times) to the Hellenistic Age (the modern term for the centuries following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.). Geographically, it covers, as much as space allows in a book meant to be very brief, the locations in and around the Mediterranean Sea where Greeks lived. The majority of the narrative concerns the Archaic and Classical Ages (the modern terms for the spans of time from 750 to 500 and 500 to 323 B.C., respectively) and the settlements in the territory of mainland Greece, especially Athens. This coverage admittedly reflects a traditional emphasis on what remain the most famous events, personalities, writings, art, and architecture of ancient Greece. It also reflects the inescapable fact that the surviving ancient sources for this four-hundred-year span are more copious and have been studied in greater depth by scholars than the sources for the earlier and later spans of Greek history, although that imbalance is being reduced by discoveries and modern scholarly work. Finally, that this book focuses above all on the Classical Age reflects my interest in the awe-inspiring (in both positive and negative senses) deeds and thoughts of Greeks over those few centuries.

  Relatively small in population, endowed with only a limited amount of flat and fertile agricultural land, and never united as a single nation, ancient Greece eagerly adopted and adapted many ideas and technologies from its more-numerous, prosperous, and less-factional neighbors in the Near East (the southwestern edge of Asia at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea). Building on these inspirations from others, Greeks incubated their own ideas and practices, some of which still resonate today, thousands of years later. It is also true that ancient Greeks, like other ancient peoples, believed and did things that many people today would regard as “awesome” in the sense of morally repugnant. In this context, I agree with those who regard the past as a conceptual “foreign country” largely populated by people who can seem strikingly “other” from what most people today believe, or at least proclaim that they believe, about what sort of persons they are and what moral standards they live by. I also think that admirers of modernity sometimes express a supercilious moral superiority in their judgments regarding antiquity, which recent history scarcely merits. In any case, writing history inevitably involves rendering judgments, if only in what the historian chooses to include and exclude, and I hope that my skepticism about the assertion that the present is far “better” than the past will
not seem inconsistent or hypocritical when I occasionally offer critical evaluations in this history. These judgments are made with a deep sense of humility and a keen awareness of how they certainly may miss the mark. Those are the sentiments, along with awe, that studying ancient history constantly renews in me.

  The Greek achievements that strike me as the most impressive, and the failures that seem the saddest, took place beginning in the eighth century B.C., when Greece gradually began to recover from its Dark Age—the centuries of economic devastation, population decline, and political vacuum from about 1000 to 750 B.C. Earlier, in the Bronze Age of the second millennium B.C., life had been stable and, relatively speaking, prosperous throughout Greece in tightly organized, independent communities ruled by powerful families through “top-down” political, social, and economic institutions. Spurred by growing trade and cultural interaction with especially the peoples in the lands bordering the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, Greeks slowly rebuilt their civilization, but in doing so they diverged both from their previous ways of life and also from those of everyone else in their world: Organizing themselves into city-states, they almost universally rejected the rule of royalty as the “default value” for structuring human society and politics. For them, the new normal became widespread participation in decision making by male citizens who earned that privilege by helping to defend the community. Most astonishing of all, some Greeks implemented this principle by establishing democracies, the first the world had ever seen (some scholars see roots of democracy in earlier communities in the eastern Mediterranean, but the evidence is unconvincing because, for one thing, it shows no concept of citizenship). At Athens, the guiding principle of democratic government became “equality before the law” and “equality of speech,” regardless of a male citizen’s wealth, birth, or social status. These concepts of equality represented a radical departure from the usual expectations and norms of politics in the ancient world.