Tyrants & Lawgivers · Solon & Cleisthenes · Sparta · Coinage · Lyric Poetry · The Birth of Philosophy
As the polis matured, most Greek cities came to be ruled by narrow aristocracies (the aristoi, "the best") of wealthy landowning families, who monopolised political office and the new art of hoplite warfare. Around 700 BC a revolution in warfare occurred: the armed citizen–soldier fighting in the close-order phalanx, armed with spear, shield (hoplon) and helmet, replaced the individual aristocratic champion as the decisive force on the battlefield. The hoplite phalanx required ordinary citizens to fight side by side, and with their military importance rose their political claims — a key motor of political change (World History Encyclopedia, "Hoplite," worldhistory.org/hoplite/).
Out of these tensions emerged the tyrant (from tyrannos, an Eastern loanword for a sole ruler). The tyrants — ambitious nobles who seized power often with popular support against a resentful aristocracy — were a fixture of the seventh and sixth centuries. The most famous were Cypselus and his son Periander at Corinth (whose rule made Corinth rich and powerful); Peisistratus and his sons Hippias and Hipparchus at Athens; Polycrates of Samos; and the brutal Phalaris of Acragas. Though "tyrant" later acquired its modern meaning of oppressive despot, the archaic tyrants were often popular and constructive rulers who built temples, fostered trade and sponsored poets. Tyranny, however, was unstable, and by the end of the sixth century most cities had thrown off their tyrants (World History Encyclopedia, "Tyrant," worldhistory.org/tyrant/).
Alongside the tyrants, a new figure emerged: the lawgiver (nomothetes), a specially-appointed reformer who codified a city's laws. At Athens, the first was Draco (c. 621 BC), whose laws were famously so severe that the term "draconian" still means brutal — nearly every offence, we are told, was punishable by death. Yet his greatest legacy was the very idea of written, published law known to all citizens, which took justice out of the hands of aristocratic judges and made it public and predictable (World History Encyclopedia, "Draco," worldhistory.org/legislator/).
More transformative was Solon (c. 638–558 BC), chosen as sole archon (chief magistrate) in 594 BC to resolve a grave social crisis. Athens was split by intense class conflict: the poor, burdened by debt and threatened with enslavement for defaulting, faced an armed revolt. Solon's reforms were celebrated as a turning point in the march toward democracy. He abolished debt-bondage (“seisachtheia,” the "shaking off of burdens"), cancelled debts and freed Athenians enslaved for debt; he divided the citizen body into four property classes and opened political office to the wealthier of the non-aristocratic citizens; and he created the Council of Four Hundred and opened the popular assembly (ekklesia) to all citizens. He later refused the offer of tyranny, departing into exile to let his laws work — the model of the wise and moderate statesman (World History Encyclopedia, "Solon," worldhistory.org/solon/).
After Solon, Athens fell again into factional strife, and in 546 BC Peisistratus, a popular champion, seized power as tyrant. His rule (with interruptions until his death in 527 BC) was efficient and generous: he beautified Athens, built temples, and advanced the cult of Dionysus — which would one day give birth to theatre. His sons Hippias and Hipparchus succeeded him, but after the murder of Hipparchus in 514 BC and the growing tyranny of Hippias, the exiled aristocrat Cleisthenes led a rising that expelled Hippias in 510 BC with Spartan help (World History Encyclopedia, "Peisistratus," worldhistory.org/peisistratus/).
In 508/507 BC Cleisthenes carried out the revolution that made Athens a democracy and earned him the title "father of Athenian democracy." He reorganised the citizen body into ten new tribes, each a mixture of inland, coastal and city dwellers, breaking the power of the old aristocratic clans; he created the Council of Five Hundred (50 men from each tribe, chosen by lot) to run daily affairs; and he gave real sovereign power to the Assembly of all citizens. He also introduced ostracism — the procedure by which a citizen deemed too powerful could be voted into exile for ten years. With Cleisthenes, the principle that the community of citizens, not a king or clique, ruled itself became the defining feature of Athens (World History Encyclopedia, "Cleisthenes," worldhistory.org/Cleisthenes/).
While Athens moved toward democracy, Sparta developed the opposite model: a rigid, militarised oligarchy that made it the greatest land power in Greece. In the eighth century BC the Spartans conquered the neighbouring region of Messenia, enslaving its people as helots (state serfs) who vastly outnumbered the Spartan citizens. This constant fear of helot revolt drove Sparta to become a permanent armed camp. Legend attributes the constitution to the lawgiver Lycurgus; its institutions included the dual kingship (two kings, from the Agiad and Eurypontid houses, who claimed descent from Heracles), the gerousia (council of elders), the ephors (five annually-elected overseers), and the apella (assembly) (World History Encyclopedia, "Lycurgus," worldhistory.org/lycurgus/).
Spartan society was organised entirely for war. Boys were taken from their families at age seven to begin the brutal agoge (state training); life was communal, austere and disciplined; money and ostentation were discouraged; and the citizen-soldier was the ideal. The Spartan hoplite phalanx was the finest in Greece, and Spartan women — unusually for the ancient world — enjoyed considerable freedom, property rights and physical training, precisely because they were to raise strong soldiers. Sparta's power, however, was built on the oppression of the helots and was therefore fragile and conservative, hostile to change and democracy (World History Encyclopedia, "Sparta," worldhistory.org/sparta/).
The archaic age also saw economic transformation. The invention of coinage — struck metal money stamped with a city's emblem as guarantee of value — revolutionised trade and government. Coinage was first developed in the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor (c. 600 BC) in electrum (a gold-silver alloy), and the Greeks quickly adopted and perfected it, with Athens’ silver owl tetradrachms becoming the standard currency of the eastern Mediterranean. Coinage made wealth portable and measurable, fuelled commerce and state expenditure, and gave cities a powerful instrument of self-advertisement (World History Encyclopedia, "Coinage," worldhistory.org/coinage/).
Alongside it grew a wealthy merchant class, the rise of the great trading and manufacturing cities (Corinth, Aegina, Miletus, Athens), and the building of magnificent temples and sanctuaries funded by trade and by the panhellenic festivals. The age of the tyrants was thus an age of sudden wealth and cultural flowering, in which the ambitious sole rulers of the cities competed to beautify their homes and endow their gods.
The most momentous achievement of the archaic age was the invention of philosophy, in the Greek cities of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor. Around 585 BC a tradition of rational inquiry began at Miletus, where Thales — the first of the "pre-Socratic" philosophers named in the tradition — sought to explain the world not by myths and gods but by underlying natural principles, proposing that all things come from water and famously predicting a solar eclipse. He is regarded as the first philosopher and scientist of the western tradition (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Pre-Socratic Philosophers," iep.utm.edu/presocra/).
Thales' student Anaximander posited the apeiron (the boundless) as the origin of all things and produced an early map of the world; Anaximenes proposed air as the primary substance. At Ephesus, Heraclitus taught that all is in flux and that the world is governed by logos (reason), in his famously obscure aphorisms. Xenophanes of Colophon criticised the anthropomorphic gods of Homer. At Elea in Italy, Parmenides argued that change is an illusion and only the unchanging One truly exists — founding the Eleatic school — while his follower Zeno of Elea produced the famous paradoxes of motion. In the northern Aegean, Democritus of Abdera — with his teacher Leucippus — proposed an atomic theory of matter, that all things are composed of indivisible atoms moving in the void, an astonishing anticipation of modern physics (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Democritus," iep.utm.edu/democrit/).
And at Croton in southern Italy, Pythagoras (c. 570–495 BC) founded a religious-scientific community. He taught that numbers are the ultimate reality, discovered the mathematical ratios of musical harmony, believed in the transmigration of souls, and gave his name to the Pythagorean theorem for right-angled triangles. Philosophy had been born, and it would grow into the supreme achievement of Greek civilisation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Pythagoras," plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/).
The archaic age also produced a revolution in poetry. With the collapse of the great epic tradition, a new "lyric" poetry emerged, sung to the lyre, that spoke in the first person — expressing personal love, politics, war and grief. The great lyricists were Alcaeus of Mytilene and, above all, Sappho (c. 630–570 BC), also of Lesbos, the most celebrated woman poet of antiquity, whose fragments of love poetry and hymns survive and whose name gave us "sapphic." At Boeotia, the poet Pindar (c. 518–438 BC) composed magnificent victory odes celebrating the winners of the Olympic and other games, works that are masterpieces of elevated praise. The elegiac poets Tyrtaeus (whose martial poems stirred the Spartans) and Theognis, and the iambic satirist Archilochus, completed a literary landscape of extraordinary richness (World History Encyclopedia, "Sappho," worldhistory.org/sappho/).
By the late sixth century BC, the Greek world had reached a peak of wealth, culture and political experimentation — and was on the brink of a mortal test. The growing Persian empire under Darius I had absorbed the Greek cities of Ionia and was pressing west into the Aegean and mainland Greece. In 499 BC the Ionian Greeks rose in revolt, igniting the conflict that would become the Persian Wars — the subject of the next volume. The archaic age ends with that revolt, and with it the independent political history of Ionia as the torch of Greek culture passed to mainland Greece.
At the heart of the Archaic Age was the maturation of the polis — the city-state that became the defining form of Greek life. Each polis centred on the acropolis (the high town, seat of the chief sanctuaries and often the old citadel), the agora (the open space for markets, meetings and laws), and the surrounding countryside (chora) of farms and villages. What made the polis distinct was not wealth or size but community: a body of citizens who shared cults, gods, laws and festivals, and who governed themselves. In the Archaic period the old aristocracies gave way to new forms — first the tyrannies, then (at Athens and elsewhere) the beginnings of elected government and law. The poleis evolved a range of political forms: oligarchy (rule of the few, at Corinth, Sparta), timocracy (rule by property, as in early Athens), democracy (rule of the people, emerging at Athens with Cleisthenes), and monarchy (retained in Sparta with its two kings and in the developing kingdom of Macedon). The citizen — the male native born to a citizen family — owed military service in the hoplite phalanx and, in return, enjoyed rights of property, law and (in democracies) political voice. The polis also developed characteristic institutions: written law codes (Draco, Solon, Zaleucus of Locri, Charondas of Catana), the Council (boule) and assembly (ekklesia), the magistracies (archons at Athens, ephors at Sparta), and the system of tribal and deme organisation that Cleisthenes reformed. The intense competitiveness of the poleis — in war, in the games, in art and in colonising — drove the unparalleled creativity of the age, even as that same division made Greece vulnerable to conquest from without (World History Encyclopedia, "Polis," worldhistory.org/Polis/).
Archaic art and architecture laid the foundations of classical Greek achievement. In architecture, the great monumental stone temples were built in the new orders: the austere Doric (as at the temple of Hera at Olympia, c. 600–590 BC, and the temple of Apollo at Corinth, c. 550 BC) and the more slender, ornate Ionic (as at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, begun c. 550 BC, one of the Seven Wonders). The temple, with its columns, pediments and sculpted metopes, became the supreme expression of Greek religion and civic pride. In sculpture, the age produced the kouroi (standing nude youths) and korai (clothed maidens), life-size marble figures of a stiff, frontal, smiling "Archaic smile"; masterpieces include the Kroisos kouros of Anavysos (c. 530 BC) and the Peplos Kore from the Acropolis. In pottery, the black-figure technique (Athens and Corinth, from c. 625–600 BC; mastered by Exekias) and then, from the late sixth century, the red-figure technique gave the world the splendid painted vases depicting every aspect of myth and daily life. The Orientalising style — of the seventh century, full of Eastern motifs of lions, sphinxes and exotic patterns — shows how closely Greece was in contact with the Near East, whose art, myth and ideas it was absorbing and transforming. By the end of the Archaic age, the technical and artistic vocabulary of Greek art was fully formed, ready for the perfection of the classical period (World History Encyclopedia, "Archaic Greek Art," worldhistory.org/Archaic_Period/).
The hoplite revolution of the eighth–seventh centuries BC deserves emphasis, for it reshaped both war and society. The hoplite — a citizen-soldier who could afford the panoply of hoplon (large round shield), bronze helmet, breastplate, greaves, and a spear of 2–3 metres with a sword — fought in the dense phalanx, a formation usually many ranks deep in which each man’s shield protected his neighbour’s right side. The phalanx was a blunt instrument: two masses of armoured men bore down on each other until one gave way, in battles that were brief, brutal and, for the losing side, catastrophic. The social consequence was profound. Because the defence of the city now depended on the mass of middling farmers and citizens rather than on a few mounted aristocrats, the common hoplite gained prestige and a claim to a share in government — helping to erode aristocratic privilege and to open the way to wider citizenship and (at Athens) democracy. It also encouraged the ideal of the citizen-soldier, fighting for his own land and polis, which the Greeks prized above the mercenary or the subject. The hoplite panoply spread across Greece, and hoplite battles between city-states became the most characteristic form of Greek warfare until Philip II’s Macedonians transformed it with the sarissa phalanx two centuries later (World History Encyclopedia, "Hoplite," worldhistory.org/hoplite/).
https://www.worldhistory.org/hoplite/https://www.worldhistory.org/tyrant/https://www.worldhistory.org/solon/https://www.worldhistory.org/peisistratus/https://www.worldhistory.org/Cleisthenes/https://www.worldhistory.org/lycurgus/https://www.worldhistory.org/sparta/https://www.worldhistory.org/coinage/https://www.worldhistory.org/sappho/https://iep.utm.edu/presocra/https://iep.utm.edu/democrit/https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/Some say a host of horsemen, some of infantry, some of ships, is the fairest thing on the dark earth; but I say it is whatever one loves.— Sappho, Fragment 16 (trans. Diane Rayor)