The Archaic Greek City-States

c. 800–650 B.C.The city and the shield

The Greek word polis is usually translated city-state, but it meant the citizens before it meant the place. A polis was a body of men who governed themselves, worshipped together, and fought side by side; it had a stronghold, an acropolis, a market and meeting place, the agora, a temple to its god, and a territory of farms whose owners were its citizens. Kings of the Homeric kind faded early in most cities into annual magistrates drawn from the noble families, who sat in council and dispensed justice, and against whose crooked judgments Hesiod had already complained.

About 700 B.C. the way of fighting changed and with it the balance inside the city. The round shield, the hoplon, held on the left forearm, covered a man’s own left side and his neighbour’s right; it only worked in a line. The hoplite phalanx, a wall of shields several ranks deep advancing at a walk and pushing until one side broke, was a formation for farmers who could afford bronze and who trusted the man beside them. It made the middling landowner the backbone of the army, and men who hold the line together do not long accept that only the well-born should hold office. Aristotle later observed that constitutions followed the arm of the service that mattered.

c. 735–550 B.C.Sparta makes itself

In the eighth century Sparta, a cluster of villages in the Eurotas valley, did what no other Greek city did: instead of sending its surplus overseas it conquered its neighbour. The First Messenian War, dated by tradition about 735 to 715 B.C., gave Sparta the rich plain west of Mount Taygetus and reduced its Greek inhabitants to helots, serfs bound to the soil who worked the estates of Spartan citizens and gave them half the crop. A great revolt in the seventh century, the Second Messenian War, nearly undid the conquest; the poet Tyrtaeus, whose lines survive, urged the young men to stand in the front rank and die rather than yield.

Sparta’s answer to living on top of a subject people that outnumbered it was to turn the whole citizen body into a standing army. The tradition credited a lawgiver, Lycurgus, whom even Plutarch could not date, with the system: boys taken from home at seven into a common upbringing, the agoge; men eating in common messes and forbidden trade; equal lots of land worked by helots; two hereditary kings, a council of elders, five annual ephors to watch the kings, and an assembly that shouted yes or no. Laconian bronze, pottery and the poetry of Alcman show a Sparta that until about 550 B.C. was as artistic as any Greek city. After that the arts wither and the barracks remain. From the mid sixth century Sparta led a league of Peloponnesian allies and was, by common consent, the strongest power in Greece, and it made the ending of tyrannies elsewhere its business.

c. 657–510 B.C.The age of tyrants

The word tyrannos was borrowed from Lydia and at first meant simply a man who held power without hereditary right; the sneer came later. In city after city in the seventh and sixth centuries a nobleman with popular backing seized sole rule from the feuding aristocracy and held it, often for two generations. Cypselus took Corinth about 657 B.C. and his son Periander ruled it for forty years, a byword later for cruelty but also the builder of Corinth’s harbours and colonies. The Orthagorids held Sicyon for a century. Polycrates of Samos kept a fleet of a hundred ships and a court of poets. The tyrants built temples, minted coin, founded festivals, gave work and land to the poor and broke the nobles who had excluded them. Their sons were usually worse and their grandsons were expelled, often with Spartan help; and a city that had seen a tyrant do without the aristocracy did not always give the aristocracy its power back.

594–508 B.C.Athens: Solon, Pisistratus, Cleisthenes

Athens came late to all of this and came furthest. About 621 B.C. Draco wrote down its laws, remembered as savage. In 594 the Athenians, torn between nobles and a peasantry sinking into debt-slavery, gave Solon, a merchant-aristocrat and a poet, power to remake the state. He cancelled debts and forbade loans on the security of the person, so that no Athenian could again be enslaved for debt; he divided the citizens into four classes by the yield of their land and opened office to wealth rather than birth; he gave every citizen the right of appeal to a popular court. His own verses, which survive, say he stood with his shield over both parties. Both were dissatisfied, which is usually the sign of a fair settlement.

Faction returned, and in 546 B.C., after two failures, Pisistratus made himself tyrant with mercenaries and Thracian silver. He kept Solon’s laws and ran them himself, taxed the land lightly, sent judges into the villages, built temples, began the great festival of Dionysus at which tragedy would be born, and had the Homeric poems, tradition said, put in order. His son Hippias ruled after him until 514, when the other son, Hipparchus, was murdered in a private quarrel and the tyranny turned harsh. In 510 the exiled noble family of the Alcmaeonids brought in the Spartan king Cleomenes, who drove Hippias out.

The Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes then did the unexpected thing. Losing the aristocratic contest to a rival, Isagoras, he turned to the people, and in 508 or 507 B.C. rebuilt the state from the ground. He dissolved the four old tribes, through which the noble clans had controlled votes and offices, and created ten new ones, each made up of villages, demes, drawn from the city, the coast and the inland so that no region and no family could dominate any tribe. A council of five hundred, fifty from each tribe chosen by lot, prepared business for the assembly of all citizens, which decided it. The Athenians called the result isonomia, equality under the law; the word democracy came a generation later. Isagoras summoned Cleomenes again, and the Spartans occupied the Acropolis; the Athenians besieged them there and sent them home. It was the first act of the new state, and it was done against Sparta.