From around 800 BC Greek society began to be transformed in different ways. Firstly, the Greeks founded a multitude of colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean and Black seas. Linked to this, Greek city states underwent profound social and political changes. These developments created the conditions for the brilliant flowering of Greek civilization.
Expansion
The traditional date for the beginning of Greek civilization is 776 BC, the year of the first pan-Hellenic Olympic Games. (Actually, this date was worked out centuries later, and is almost certainly wrong.) Of course, an entire civilization does not suddenly spring into being in a single year, but this date does provide a convenient marker.
From about 800 BC the horizons of the Greeks began to enlarge. The precursor to this was an upswing in the population. The causes of this are not known, but the effect was to create a shortage of good farmland. The poorer people were increasingly crowded out of the better land on the valley bottoms and found themselves cutting down the forests on the mountain slopes and farming the thinner soil there.
At the same time Phoenician merchants were developing their trade links with the Greeks. The inhabitants of several coastal Greek states responded by developing overseas trading connections of their own. Given the Phoenician dominance of the eastern Mediterranean, this meant looking to the west.
The Ionians (that is, those Greeks who had migrated to the coast of Asia Minor after 1200 BC) were the first to take up this challenge, and the city-state of Kyme despatched a colony to the west coast of Italy in around 750 BC. The aim was probably to establish a trading station in the west, but very soon the potential for solving the land shortage was recognized. Other states followed Kyme’s example, and soon a string of Greek colonies had been founded along the coast of southern Italy and Sicily.
These new city-states, frequently situated on broad, fertile plains, flourished. In due course some of them, above all Syracuse in Sicily, grew to be amongst the wealthiest and most influential states in the Greek world, and almost immediately they were exporting corn to their mother cities. This stimulated commercial and industrial development in Greece and the Aegean to produce the luxury goods to pay for the corn.
Greek craftsmanship and artistry reached new height, maritime trade expanded enormously, and the wealth of the Greek cities rose accordingly. They were soon planting colonies in the east as well, notably on the shores of the Dardanelles, the Black Sea the North African coast, west of the Nile Delta (Kyrenaica).
Society Transformed
Whilst the Greeks were reaching out beyond the sea, revolutionary changes were transforming all aspects of their societies and politics back at home.
Population growth and the inflow of new wealth caused many cities to grow into true urban communities, with many thousands of inhabitants. Many people benefited from the economic expansion, but others suffered. The introduction of metal money from Lydia, sometime during the seventh century BC, streamlined business transactions, quickened economic activity and gave a large boost to the market economy; but it also led to more and more people falling into debt.
Differences in wealth were becoming far more apparent than before. Many poorer people lost their farms, and some even had to sell themselves and their families into slavery. In the cities landless proletariats grew. So to did a new class of able, ambitious, often widely travelled men whose wealth challenged that of the old landed aristocracy.
One of the most momentous changes – THE most momentous, when set against the broad backdrop of world history - happened in the political sphere, but is of course rooted in the wider social transformation taking place. In most of the city-states the Greeks began to get rid of their kings.
A Revolution in Politics
Before the nineteenth century, most nations were ruled by kings, princes or other monarchs. Apart from in the ancient Mediterranean, only the exceptional few were republics, and (in Europe at any rate) all of these were city-states until the rise of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.
Few though they have been, city republics such as Florence, Venice and the other northern Italian cities have contributed much more than their fair share to the advance of western civilization. The reasons for this cannot be gone into here, but briefly put, the citizens of a republic seem to be more aware of the need to think for themselves than the subjects of a sacred or semi-sacred monarch. Decisions don’t simply arrive “from on high” but are the result of the interplay (or frequently clash) of opposing views. Positions have to be argued, people have to be persuaded, opposing views are valued (except of course by the protagonists). No republic can function without some measure of freedom of thought and speech. Monarchies, on the other hand, tend to be suspicious of such freedoms.
The First Republics
It was the Greeks who invented republics, at least in Europe. How exactly this came about is not known. A speculative answer might go something like this: As greater wealth and higher material culture began to flow in to the city-states in Greece and the Aegean from overseas, the kings began to enlarge their ambitions – it would have been natural to transform themselves into palace-based rulers, just like their Bronze-Age predecessors had done.
However, this was not the Bronze-Age. Iron was plentiful and cheap, and weapons were no longer expensive. This meant that every nobleman (who were at this time heads of their clans) could arm his followers. So, resenting the increasingly autocratic ways of the king, hitherto merely first amongst equals but now aiming for higher things, the nobles ganged up on him and either (probably over time) drastically reduced his power, as in some city-states, or ousted him altogether, as in others.
The result was the first republics. These had begun to appear by about 750 BC. These were oligarchies, ruled by a small group of noblemen. Political power was restricted at first to this tiny group. However, iron weapons were cheap - affordable, in fact, by the ordinary farmer. The ceaseless wars between the states meant that it was not long before states were arming them and forming them into armies - the extremely effective armies of Greek "hoplites", or heavy-armed infantry.
This gave the common people a potential power they had never had before. Moreover, the noblemen inevitably squabbled amongst themselves, and their quarrels let the common man in.
Tyrants
In many city-states, the first step in this process was the rise of “tyrants”. These were normally members of the aristocratic ruling group who, for one reason or another, decided to aim for supreme power in the state. To do this he would normally appeal for support from the soldier-farmers, who now represented the greater part of the state’s fighting capability, by promising to address their grievances.
This was not hard. The aristocrats, being human, had governed in their own narrow interests, frequently at the expense of other groups within the state. For example, they had used their control of the law courts to deal harshly with those in debt to them and extend their own estates at the expense of their less fortunate neighbours, and even to force them and their families into slavery.
The simmering resentment that this sort of rule had created was easily tapped by a bold and ambitious noble, and so in city after city tyrants, backed by the common people, seized power.
The word “tyrant” did not then have the pejorative meaning it has today; it simply meant “boss”. And the Greek tyrants usually did a great deal of good for their states – at least in the first generation. They ensured that the larger landowners could not take ordinary farmer’s land, and indeed many tyrants carried out some measure of land distribution in favour of the poorer sections of the community. Many of them also beautified the cities they ruled; it was above all these rulers who gave their cities their new temples, market places, city walls and so on. This was not only to glorify themselves, but also to give employment to the poor, especially in times of famine. Also, they encouraged trade, and favoured the merchant classes at the expense of the old landed aristocracy.
Things often started to go wrong for the tyrants in the second generation, when a capable ruler was followed by his sons. Too often these were quite unfit for their jobs, and in some cases fiendishly cruel to their opponents. All sections of society grew sick of them. So, another revolution would oust the tyrant and bring to power another group.
Towards Democracy
Sometimes this was a faction of the original group of aristocrats, in other cases it was members of the newer, merchant elites. In either case, intelligent leaders knew that power in the state had to take account of the common people, and so they set about creating a more broad-based constitution, and moved the state down the road towards democracy. By no means all states followed this trajectory. Some, especially in the more backward areas, never got rid of their monarchies; others oscillated between tyranny and oligarchy. But many in the course of time developed a fully democratic form of government.
While these political developments were transforming the political landscape, the artistic, material and philosophical culture of the Greeks was going through revolutionary change.
Next:
The History of Ancient Greece, Part 4: The Revolution in Art and Ideas
Article © TimeMaps 2007.
Last updated: 13th August 2007
