history

Lecture 5: Ancient and Archaic Greece

Lecture 5: Ancient and Archaic Greece (ca. 2000-500 B.C.)

 

This lecture will trace the history of Greek civilization from its Ancient origins in the age of the Iliad through the devastation in the “Dark Ages” when Greece was conquered by a foreign people called the Dorians for approximately three centuries, through the Archaic Age, the era between ca. 800-500 B.C. when the Greek people, after liberating themselves from the Dorians, developed around the polis, or city-state, with distinctions between different poleis based chiefly on kinship relations which developed into what the Greeks termed someone’s “ethnos” – the word from which we get terms like “ethnic” and “ethnicity”. The focus of study in the Archaic Age will be two models of development – the Spartan (which is pretty unique to Sparta) and the Athenian (which is somewhat like the pattern that develops in most other poleis), down to ca. 500 B.C. on the eve of the first Persian invasion – the conflict between “East” and “West” which decides, in large part, the direction and fate of “Western Civilization” – a Persian victory would have meant the triumph of the monarchical-with-satrapy model as the tradition and heritage of “the West”, while the triumph of the Greeks (not to give away the ending here!) insures that the concepts of democracy/the republic and critical/questioning philosophy would be central to the inheritance of the “western World” from its ancient ancestors even when, as you will see in the next three weeks after this one, that western world largely ignores that legacy – it is still there, waiting to be rediscovered in the 18th Century and beyond – aka. Why we all had bar-b-que and fireworks a couple months before this class started!

Some notes first about Greek civilization and society in general. Greeks called themselves “Hellene” (the word for “Greece” in the Greek language is “Hellas”) and called non-Greeks “barbaroi” or “babblers” – in other words, those who could not speak some form of Greek. Thus Greek identity was based mainly on language, not skin color. But, because Greece is a mountainous area with long mountain chains surrounding narrow fertile valleys, their culture developed with very little interaction between people in different villages – you likely worked with, socialized with, and intermarried with the people of the village in your particular valley. Over time, each village then developed not only a real kinship relationship with the other residents of the village and valley, but also a sense of belonging with each other – which the Greeks called one’s ethnos. This became even more pronounced during the enforced non-contact between different Greeks during the Dorian conquest – aka. The “Dark Ages”. Thus, people of Athens also belonged to the Athenian ethnos, the people of Sparta to the Spartan ethnos, the people of Thebes to the Theban ethnos, and so on for the thousands of poleis across Greece and the islands that surround it in the Aegean Sea. All Greek poleis divided their societies into two basic classes: the Aristoi were those who owned land (“stoi” means “land” in Greek) and the Demes were everyone else. Thus a government of the wealthy and/or landholders is an “aristocracy” and a government that allows the non-landholders to make decisions is a “demos kratia” – a government of the demes, aka. Democracy. Below is a map of Ancient Greece and its close neighbors - Athens is located on the tip of the southeastern-most blue area in the lower middle of the map, Sparta is located in the Peloponnese to the lower left, and the western-most part of the vast Persian Empire is the white/gray area ominously to the right...

 

A.Mycenaean Age (ca. 2000-1100 B.C.)

Mainland Greeks settled both on the Peloponnesus, the near-island to the SW of the mainland, and at the tip of the mainland, called Attica.  In the late Bronze Age, the civilizations located on the Peloponnesus took the leading role.  They centered their settlements on the plateau of a hill, which they then called an acropolis, or “high city.”  The three chief cities of this era were Argos (home of the Argonuats, who sailed with Jason in one of the Greek legends), Thebes, and the chief city from whom the civilization draws its name, Mycenae.

Mycenaeans were a people of great wealth, based on trade – it seems that they simply took over all the trade routes developed by the Minoans on the island of Crete and further expanded them, serving a central role in trade, especially in metals – they acted as the distributors of copper, tin, bronze, iron and gold and made their profits as merchants, not by exploiting their own natural resources, with the exceptions of wine and pottery.  There is a reason that museums, like the Getty here in LA, are filled with Greek pottery – it was one of the major trade items by which Greek civilizations got rich and so there is a whole lot of it that was made, and a lot of locations where it can be found.  Pottery serves as an important tool to trace where Greeks had contact with the rest of the world and it can be found as far east as Persia and as far west as Cornwall, in the SW part of England.  It seems that Mycenaeans were the leaders in Mediterranean trade for some time before ca. 1300 B.C., but they seemed at that time to begin to lose out on their eastern trade to first, Byblos, and subsequently, Tyre and Sidon, the great Phoenician trading cities we discussed last unit.

As far as Mycenaean society is concerned, it seems to have been organized on a tribal level, with each commoner belonging to a brotherhood, roughly an extended family based on kinship, with numerous brotherhoods being formed into tribes.  Family life was centered around the hearth in each home, with the elder patriarch controlling the family.  The hearth was not only the center of focus for real world events for the family, but also of worship – families apparently worshiped the Gods at the hearth in their own home, with the King’s Temple serving as one really big and elaborate hearth.  Anyone who was not a member of a brotherhood was an outcast from society with few rights.  Below the members of the society, outsiders were classified in a number of ways.  Outsiders were classified as those with no rights or privileges unless they served as “a worker for the public” – jobs such as seer, doctor, shipbuilder or even minstrel.  Below these independent workers were the thetes – those who worked on land owned by another person.  Finally, this society had slaves, both war captives, who were used for manual labour, and debt slaves, who were often used as domestic slaves (cooks, cleaners, etc.) in noble houses.

Mycenaean society was led by the king, who was called a Wanax, who could call an Assembly or Council but was under no obligation to do so, or to listen to the suggestions that they offered.  Mycenaean kings acted as civil, military and religious leaders – they made law, adjudicated disputes, led the armies, took the lion’s share of the spoils (a point that will be at the center of the dispute that begins the Iliad), and presided over the rituals and sacrifices at annual feasts, also personally holding sacred lands.  His obligations were that of the good Shepard – to protect his people and assure their well-being, much as Pharaoh’s were to guarantee ma’at, though no Greek king was ever thought to be a god on earth.  Religion was rather ill-defined in the Mycenaean Era though it was clearly present as the active presence of the Gods in the Iliad makes clear.  The Mycenaean Wanax, lived in a fortified palace, the largest is the Lion’s Gate Citadel at Mycenae.  It was called this because, above the gate, which was cut into a hillside which made a natural wall, there were huge sculptures of two standing lionesses on either side of the top of the arch with their front paws resting on a sacred pillar which rose above the arch’s peak.  Beyond the gate was a huge courtyard which led up to the Palace and which also contained a gravecircle of past kings as well as a storehouse for grains and other housing.  The complex was built on an incline, so that a drain could be cut into the area below the back wall and waste could be expelled outside the complex.  The Palace itself was two-stories, with the throne room on the top story.  The whole complex was surrounded by walls 20’ thick – a direct contrast to the Palace of Minos at Knossos, Crete which had no outer protective wall. 

Mycenaean armies begin appearing in the records of Egyptian and Hittite accounts of battles after ca. 1350 B.C., often at first as mercenaries.  A Hittite record of a successful attack on Cyprus, at that time, controlled by the Hittite Empire, mentions the invasion being led by “Attarissyas of Ahhiyava”.  This document can be dated to sometime between 1250 and 1225 B.C.  It is very possible that Attarissyas was Atreus, the historical king of Mycenae and father of Agamemnon, the leader of the allied Greek force that besieged and sacked Troy between 1250 and 1200 B.C.  – the story of which is the subject of the Iliad.  Troy had been an important trading partner for most of the century – if you’ll look at the map, you can see that Troy’s location allowed it to exert some control over access to the Hellespont and the narrow strip of land that connects Anatolia to Europe.  This allowed Troy to exact tariffs from everyone who wanted to trade between the two – Mycenaean, Assyrian, Egyptian and Babylonian alike.  We do not know whether Troy was a Hittite city, a former Hittite colony or outpost that developed some measure of independence as the central power of the Hittite government declined, or perhaps a city founded by a tribe related to the Hittites but independent of them, who used their wealth in trade to continually purchase their freedom for the Hittite Empire, but we do know that the Trojan War described by Homer in the Iliad took place at around the same time as the decline and destruction of the Hittite Empire, as I mentioned last unit.

 

B. The Dorians and the “Dark Ages” (ca. 1100-800 B.C.)

Unfortunately, around ca. 1100 B.C., the Mycenaean civilization was invaded by unknown forces which seem to have quickly destroyed it – it is entirely probable that the invaders had iron technology and overwhelmed the bronze-wielding Mycenaeans.  These northern invaders, known as the Dorians, swept down and sacked the great cities of the Peloponnese and established their rule over Greece, reducing the peoples of Greece to servitude.  Since Dorians had no script of their own and wanted to impose as much of their culture on the conquered peoples as possible, writing fell into disuse. This is an important reason why the Dorian period – from ca. 1100-800 B.C. – is known as the Dark Ages.  Since there were a number of distinct Dorian tribes, Greek developed a number of different dialects as the peoples mixed over the course of the next three-to-three-and-a-half centuries.  Along with the isolation that was the result of geography, these linguistic distinctions would also contribute to the tendency of Greek civilization to be centered in city-states, as opposed to the centralization and fostered rivalries between the people of the Peloponnese and of Attica which would dominate the golden age of Greek civilization. In addition, by the end of three centuries, it would fall to the Phoenicians to introduce the alphabet, a system of writing, and literacy to Greece, as we noted in last week’s lecture.

The head of the community, which was organized as a collection of families, was called a Basileus, or king.  They would call an assembly of the leaders of important families who became the noble citizens, known as the aristoi, and be somewhat bound by the decisions of that body, though, again, since almost nothing survives of this period, we know little of how this actually worked.  It is clear that status as an aristoi was hereditary, though one could earn entry into the class.  Society seems to be divided into only two classes in Dorian Greece: the aristoi and everyone else, known as the demes, a carry-over term for commoner from the Mycenaean era.  Obviously, you can see the origins of the words aristocrat and democracy in these terms.  Each of these leading families was allotted a plot of land and controlled all the revenue from it, and these families also gained profits from the lands held in common for the city.

It is at this time that a clearer picture of the Greek Gods comes into focus as well.  The Greek pantheon draws from Minoan, Mycenaean and Dorian deities and, by the end of the Dark Ages, the familiar Greek myths have largely been passed down via the oral tradition.  The Anax, or Lord of the Gods is Zeus, who represents the sky and thunder, his wife and sister is Hera, a jealous goddess who has good reason to be, since Zeus spends much of his time having affairs and making offspring with gods and mortals alike.  Athena (goddess of wisdom and defensive battle) and Apollo (god of the sun, music, and art), Aphrodite (goddess of love), Poseidon (god of the sea), Hades (god of the underworld), Ares (god of war and enraged offensive battle)…. Greek Gods are active in the Iliad and are spoken to often.  They are said to live at the top of Mt. Olympus, in Macedonia, and numerous oracles are said to be conduits where a god would speak through a maiden or prophet – the most noted one is the Oracle at Delphi, dedicated to the god Apollo.  It is a mystery why a civilization that will ultimately be so centered on man’s activities here in this world would also hold to beliefs in prophesies as well as beliefs that the gods were present and active in people’s lives.

 

C. Archaic Age (ca. 800-500 B.C.)

The recovery and emergence from the Dark Ages is marked by the development of the Polis throughout Greece and in Western Anatolia.  This period is called the “archaic age” because archaic comes from the Greek word for “beginning” and this period is when the foundations of art, architecture, politics and philosophical inquiry, which would mature in the classical period, are laid.  The polisbegins from the notion of ethnos, which meant, roughly, tribal group, and is obviously the root beginnings of the notion of ethnicity.  Each ethnos was ruled by a king but most importantly, each ethnos was subject to the rule of law and the ideal of justice under that law. 

The stages of the development of the polis, the transition from tribal ethnos to established polis occurs over time after ca. 800 B.C. We can see the beginnings of the process in a work by the political philosopher Hesiod called Works and Days, which is considered the first work of political philosophy in the Western tradition, and is written sometime after 700 B.C.  Hesiod wrote of the need for both law and justice to define societal norms and provide for all members of society – and adopted the term “diké” to describe it.  Diké, meant “the correct way” – similar to ma’at in Egypt.  Hesiod typified dike as a goddess, a daughter of Zeus, whose sisters were the personifications of “good government” and “peace”.  The important difference in Hesiod though is, while diké is called a goddess, it was up to the society to promote and insure it – not a living god like Pharaoh.  Thus we have the beginnings of a social contract, which states that a society agrees to follow certain rules and gives up certain rights for the betterment of all its citizens. 

Hesiod also calls for a rule by a council rather than by a single king, as he believed that a King could be more easily corrupted than a body of men.  Note that Hesiod writes Works and Days at a time when tyrants, single-man rulers, dominated most poleis (poleis is the plural of polis) and his work is, in part, a commentary on that state of affairs. He cites several examples wherein ancient Wanax and Dark Age Dorian Basileuses were bribed to circumvent the rule of law in those societies, which, to Hesiod, means that justice and the correct way of life had been circumvented as well. When such a thing occurs, or when a society turns away from justice, Hesiod writes that diké flees back to her father Zeus, who then sends a plague or defeat in a war to that community.  In Hesiod, then there is the need for the rule of law to protect and promote justice and, if diké is absent, bad things will occur to the polis. Hesiod's model would serve as the basis for nearly all Greek poleis as they developed – the sole exception was the Peloponnesus city of Sparta.  The chief political philosopher of that city, Tyrtaeus, wrote in 640 B.C.  that citizens had a dual responsibility to be both citizens under law and soldiers.  This philosophy would lead Sparta to emphasize the military to such an extent that their polis developed like an armed camp, or a military society. 

Greek poleis also colonized the Mediterranean after the liberation from the Dorians. The first colony was established at the bay of Naples on the SE coast of Italy, over the next 200 years, Greek colonies will supersede the majority of Phoenician colonies and the Greeks will colonize the whole of the Mediterranean world, spreading their culture, language and beliefs to a vast number of peoples.  Colonization, in world history, is driven by a number of factors: (1) Overpopulation (such as with Chinese colonization), (2) Political/religious desire for “a better way of life” (such as the British who colonized North America), (3) Expansion of trade and establishment of supply bases for future expansion (such as the British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Phoenicians), (4) a projection of power (such as the British and Roman empires), (5) to expand religion to the unconverted (such as the Spanish), and (6) the banishment of undesirables (such as Australia).  Greek colonization was driven by a number of these factors, including overpopulation, interest in the larger world and resource expansion. The original colonists, organized into 300 households, would become charter citizens of the newly established polis, which, after establishment, would owe no necessary loyalty to the mother polis, or “metropolis” (though if Superman actually lived there, it wouldn't be a bad idea, right?!) and were free to choose the form of governance they wanted, though evidence suggests this was often negotiated in advance of the voyage.

When the Greeks emerged from the Dark Ages, their earliest poleis were run by the aristoi class, who created a group of three magistrates, elected at first for ten-year terms, but eventually for only one year.  These magistrates divided civic, religious and military duties between them, with the religious magistrate acting as first among equals and called King. One of the earliest kings was Pheidon of Argos, who defeated the Spartan army in 664 B.C., the structure of his army will change the politics of the polis and have a huge influence towards Sparta becoming more militaristic as well.  Pheidon had employed almost 40% of the male citizens as hoplites, the Greek word for citizen-soldier, and paid them to be a standing army, not just a force called to arms when needed.  Soon, this hoplite class began to challenge the aristoi, who made up 10% of the population, for political power.  The hoplites supported their leader, Pheidon, and, in the social revolution that followed, the hoplites gained power at the expense of the aristoiand Pheidon seized power in his person.  This pattern was repeated in various poleis so that, by 600 B.C., most poleis are being ruled by single rulers called “tyrants” – those who seized power illegally. So each tyranny may have its own characteristics, but all follow the same pattern: a challenge to the aristoi by the hoplites, which brings to power one man, usually one who has been opposed by the aristoi in the past, a period of one-man rule that is often passed down by heredity and is then followed by an expansion of that power base to the wider community, so that the age of tyrants gives way to a more democratic form of government.  Now let’s look at the two quintessential poleis of archaic and classical Greece to see the similarities and differences between them as they went through this transitional pattern: Sparta and Athens.

 

D. Archaic Age Sparta & Oligarchy

Sparta is a polis located on the Peloponnese and was founded during the Bronze Age – note that Helen of Troy in the Iliad is the Queen of Sparta.  It, more so than even other Greek poleis, was a closed society, frowning on emigration and immigration and allowing for no assimilation.  It was the strongest of the Greek city-states militarily and the most stable of the poleis with little of the civic strife that marked life in the other city-states – preaching the superiority of the collective good over that of the individual.  After the Dark Age, the Spartan polis began as an alliance of villages that surround the original settlement in the valley of Laconia.  By the mid-8th century, Sparta was facing the same pressures of over-population that drove other Greek poleis to establish colonies, but Sparta instead, looked to the neighboring fertile valley of Messina to relieve population pressures and gain resources.  Beginning in 750 B.C., Sparta invaded Messina and, within thirty-years, they had conquered the peoples living there and reduced them to slave status – called Helots.  Sparta treated the Helots like workers on a plantation, with Spartans acting as the overseer and owners.

Some of what happens next is possibly legendary.  According to Spartan history, sometime after Pheidon’s defeat of Sparta, a Spartan king called Lycurgus traveled to an oracle and received a document called the Rhetra, which laid out a system and form of government for the Spartan polis.  Now, later Greek historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides admitted that they could find no direct evidence that a man named Lycurgus ever lived, let alone traveled to the Oracle at Delphi and received laws and a constitution for Sparta – it is possible that there was a real Lycurgus and events and actions were attributed to him later – like with Gilgamesh and Agamemnon; or that this was a story that Spartan created to give their form of society divine approval; or perhaps it is true after all – we simply do not know.  It is interesting to note the parallels to the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments, though Sparta is so extremely isolationist it is really unlikely that the Mosaic story influenced or inspired the Lycurgan story.  In any case, the Lycurgan system of government places power in three bodies: 2 kings, so that no one king could ever gain absolute power, advised by a 28-man council, called a Gerousia, which was made up only of men over 60, and an assembly of all male citizens, with day-to-day administration carried out by 5 Ephors, who were elected to short terms of office. 

Soon after the defeat by Argos, the Helots saw an opportunity and rebel against their Spartan masters, beginning in ca. 650 B.C., first by withholding food produced on plantations then, finally, by taking up arms.  At this time, there are about 10 Helots for every Spartan, so this is a serious rebellion.  It is in the midst of this rebellion that the political philosopher I mentioned earlier, Tyrtaeus, wrote that citizens had a dual responsibility to be both citizens under law and soldiers for the state.  After 20+ years, but the rebellion is finally defeated for good by 620 B.C., enslaving the Messenians as Helots again.  It is at this point that Sparta totally embraces the idea of the city-state as armed camp to protect all gains and insure the obedience of the helots and the safety of their gains.  All Spartan citizens became full-time hoplite soldiers. 

At birth, and in the first 6-12 months of life, all Spartan babies would be examined and all those with a handicap or weakness would be exposed on a hillside to die.  All those children not exposed in the first year would be educated and trained at state expense.  All men leave the home at age six to enter the youth barracks, where each is will be eventually coupled with an older citizen, with whom they bond educationally, spiritually and physically – there is no taboo about homosexuality in Sparta.  The training consists of athletics and warfare tactics; students are routinely starved and exposed to the elements to test their toughness.  By the way, if you’re curious, this Spartan training of young men was the inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America, according to statements of their founder, Baden-Powell – which makes the Boy Scouts’ stance on homosexuality somewhat ironic.  Anyway, those who survive to eighteen years of age are given equipment and pledge to a fraternity, with whom they will eat together for the rest of their lives.  The only ways out of a Spartan fraternity are to die, to show cowardice (which leads to exile) or to fail to provide food for the brothers (which, of course, one gets from one’s helots).  Marriage was primarily a means to produce more warriors, most husbands only saw their wives at night to try to procreate, they did not live together, and the men lived in the fraternity barracks.  There was also no taboo against having affairs with another man’s wife in Spartan society – again, the primary purpose of marriage is to produce offspring.  Finally, it was accepted that the only real way to keep one’s military training sharp was to fight in wars so, nearly every year, if no foreign war presented itself, Sparta simply declared war on the Helots, invaded the villages where the helot workers lived off the plantations, and slaughtered enough of them to keep in practice but not so many that the food supply they produced was imperiled.  This made killing the helots both legal and patriotic.

As you’d imagine about a society like this, it was not at all open to outside influences.  Sparta did not establish colonies and in fact discouraged its citizens to travel to other poleis or lands.  In addition, Sparta closed its borders to trade, an action it could take because it produced enough food on its Messenian plantations to supply itself.  Because of this, we have almost no examples of Spartan art or pottery or literature; they seem to have lived very simple and militaristic lives – which gives us the term “Spartan existence”.  They did have those who performed craft tasks; builders, smiths, potters, etc. but they too were hoplites first.

 

E. Archaic Age Athens & Democracy

In direct contrast, we have the polis of Athens.  Athens is located in Attica, on the SE tip of mainland Europe.  The chief source we have for the development of Athens, a city dedicated to the goddess Athena, is a book by Aristotle.  Athens unified a number of Attic villages around its acropolis by ca. 700 B.C..  It too was a city during the Bronze Age, and was continuously inhabited during the Dark Ages.  Unlike Sparta, all peoples absorbed by Athens from the surrounding villages were afforded citizenship in Athens with no helots, serfs or slaves – though money and possessions still determined status. In the beginning, there was also a formal division between aristoi (10%) and demes (90%) as well and, after the Dorian Basileus was abolished, government by aristoi was the first political structure.  By 682 B.C., the final king had been abolished and was replaced by 3 archons, divided between civil, military and religious authority as described above.  Once they retired, ex-archons joined the Aeropagus – the council of advisers to the next set of archons.

As in other poleis, Athens’ militia eventually evolved into more of a standing army, in Athens, the professional soldier class was divided between the cavalry and the foot-soldiers, with the majority of the people, still called thetes, at the bottom of the social pyramid.  As I described earlier, when this new social class of soldiers evolves into something of a middle class, eventually, one of these archons will try to seize total power for himself in their name, as Pheidon of Argos did.  In Athens, this occurred in 632 B.C. when an archon named Cylon attempted a coup d’etat.  Cylon was a popular Olympic champion and well-known and admired and he tried to parlay this popularity into seizing power as a tyrant.  He marched up to the Temple of Athena on the acropolis and declared himself tyrant.  Unfortunately, the common demes did not support him and one of the other archons marched up to the Temple and killed Cylon.  This other archon was then exiled for shedding blood at the Temple, and probably for not merely arresting Cylon, and the hoplite class puts pressure on the remaining archon, Draco, to codify the laws of Athens and bring social peace to the polis. Draco’s law code, which he merely recorded, was published in 621 B.C. and, after that point, Athenians come under the true rule of law.  The publication of a law code, as I mentioned when talking about Hammurabi’s code in Babylon, is a liberal act, as it lets all citizens know what the rules are and takes them out of the realm of the arbitrary and into the concrete.  We get the term “draconian”, which describes harsh, unforgiving law, from this code, because it is quite harsh in many areas, with many crimes bringing the death penalty and rents to creditors rising as high as 80% of crops produced in some cases – note that, since subsistence is about the best a farmer can hope for, once one falls into debt, it is almost impossible to produce enough to buy one’s way out.  This eventually leads to farm foreclosures and the growth of large capital farms under the landlords.  The harshness of the codified law and the social crises brought about by the farm situation threaten social upheaval for nearly 30 years until an aristoinamed Solon speaks out in favor of reform that would favor the demes.  He is elected archon in 594 B.C. with a mandate to reform the system to avoid open social conflict.

Solon’s first action is to abolish the debts of the smaller farmers and abolishes the system that would allow someone to borrow against their own labor or the labor of their families.  He refuses to redistribute wealth however and then abolishes the export of all food stuffs except for olive oil.  This sparks a boom in olive production as well as trade, and the jobs associated with it – shipbuilding, pottery, etc.  To appease the aristoi, he further divides that class into aristoi and the super-wealthy, defined as those who produce 500+ bushels of food per year, called pentacosiomdimini.  Solon restricts the high offices of state to this new class, eventually; entrepreneurs will be able to buy their way into this class. He then establishes a council and law court open to all citizens.  Solon then leaves office after his year is up and goes into a voluntary 10-year exile, traveling to other poleis as an “adviser”.

While Solon’s reforms appeased both rich and poor, neither were fully satisfied, and his year in power was followed by a period during which archons were difficult to elect.  In the 570's and 560's B.C., Athenian politics divided into three factions, each named for the region from which they came: The Plain, the most conservative; the Shore, the most moderate; and the Hill, the most radical.  Eventually, the aristoi who led the Hill faction, Peisistratus, made himself tyrant in 546 B.C. after two unsuccessful tries, including one in which he dressed up as Athena and tried to tell the Council that the Goddess had manifested herself to instruct them to make him tyrant! Finally, he succeeds by more conventional means – he hires a mercenary army and successfully invades Athens.

Peisistratus ruled for twenty years before dying and during that time he institutes no radical reforms of Solon’s system.  He also encourages trade and commerce, plus establishes colonies in the grain-rich Black Sea area, which increases the food supply to Athens and the polis’ prosperity.  He was harsh to his enemies, but on the whole, his rule was a time of prosperity for Athens.  After his death in 526 B.C., his supporters lacked the power and charisma to carry on his tyranny without conflict – the aristoi rebel against the tyrants in 514 B.C. and even go so far as to invite the Spartans to invade Athens in 510 B.C. to expel the ruling tyrant.  The Spartan invaders capture the tyrant and exile him, which leads to the vast majority of demes seizing on this moment to promote their champion, Cleisthenes, an aristoi who had proposed reforms to give real power to the demes and thetes for the first time.  The majority of the population of Athens besieges the Spartans at the Acropolis, and the Spartans, unprepared to occupy Athens as a conquering force long-term, withdraw, leaving the city to the demes, who elect Cleisthenes as archon in 508 B.C.

Cleisthenes institutes a program of reform that brings something approaching true democracy to Athens.  He enacts a bill that grants full Athenian citizenship to all free males in Attica, regardless of ancestry.  He then divided the citizens into 10 tribes, 30 trittyes, and 140 demes, based on geographic location without regard to economic status. Further, each tribe would contain demes of different regions, so regionalism would be little factor in politics – thus each tribe would have a hill trittye, a shore trittye, and a plain trittye.  This encourages identification by ethnos rather than by region or class.  He then creates an Assembly of 500, which would have 50 members per tribe, so that all segments of society were represented.  He divided the army into 10 regiments each of whom would elect a single general who would then meet as a sort-of joint chiefs of staff.  These reforms led to the citizenry of Athens identifying themselves as Athenians first, which greatly strengthened the polis in the years to come.

So we can see how Athens and Sparta, from semi-similar beginnings at the end of the Dark Ages, evolved into very different poleisby the end of the Archaic Age.  The pattern of Athens is much closer to that which was followed by other Greek poleis such as Thebes, Corinth and Argos, though none of them became as democratic as did Athens after the reforms of Cleisthenes.  Sparta followed her own path and soon enough, these paths would come into conflict, but only after all Greece would be threatened by a vast and powerful enemy: the Persian Empire.