Maps and Battle Plans xiii
Preface xiv
New to the Fourth Edition xv
Trrmslations Used by Permission xvi
Timeline xviii
Int ro duction 1
A Bird's-Eye View of Greek History 1
Sources: How We Know About the Greeks 4
Retrieving the Past: The Material Record 5
Retrieving the Past: The Written Record 6
Periodization 7
Frogs Around a Pond 8
City-States 8
Greek City-States 9
CHAPTER ONE
Earl y Gr eece and the Bron ze Age 12
Domestication 17
Sources for Early Greek History 17
The Land of Greece 18
Greece in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages (c. 30001600 BC) 22
Minoan Civilization 26
Greece and the Aegean in the La te Bronze Age (16001200 BC) 34
The Years of Glory (c. 1400-1200 sc) 38
The End of the Mycenaean Civilization 51
C H AP T lR 1 \\0
The Earl y Ir on Age (c. 120 0-75 0/700 BC) 56
Sources for the Early Iron Age 57
Decline and Recovery, Early Iron Age I (c. 1200-900 sc) 59
The New Society of Early Iron Age II sc) 64
Revival (c. 900-750 sc) 69
Homer and Oral Poetry 71
Homeric Society 73
Community, Household, and Economy in Early Iron
Age II 84
The End of Early Iron Age II (c. 750-700 sc) 88
C H A P TER THRE E J1
Archaic Gr eece (750/7 00-480 BC) 101
Sources for the Seventh and Sixth Centur ies 104
The Format ion of the City-State (Polis) 105
Government in the Ea rly City-States 107
Emigration and Expansion: The Colonizing Movement 110
Economic and Social Divisions in the Early Poleis 116
Hesiod: The View from Outside 120
The Hoplite Army 124
The Archaic Age Tyrants 126
Art and Architecture 130
Lyric Poetry 135
Philosophy and Science 142
Panhellenic Religious Institutions 145
Relations Among States 148
CHAPTER FouR .itl
Sparta 154
Sources for Spa rtan History and Institutions 154
The Early Iron Age and the Archaic Period 158
The Spartan System 162
Demography and the Spartan Economy 173
Spartan Government 176
Sparta and Greece 180
His torical Change in Sparta 181
The Spartan Mirage in Western Th ought 183
C H APT ER FI V l
Th e Gro wth of Ath ens a nd the Pers ian Wars 186
Sources for Early Athens 186
Athens from the Bronze Age to the Early Archaic Age 187
The Reforms of Solon 192
Pisistratus and His Sons 197
The Reforms of Cleisthenes 202
The Rise of Persia 206
The Wars Between Greece and Persia 209
The Other War: Carthage and the Greek Cities of Sicily 227
C H A P TER SIX
The Riva lri es of th e Gr eek Ci ty -Sta te s a nd the Growth of Ath e ni an Dem ocracy 23 1
Sources for the Decades After the Persian Wars 232
The Aftermath of the Persian Wars and the Foundation
of the De !ian League 234
The First (Undeclared) Peloponnesian War
(460-445 BC) 241
Pericles and the Growth of Athenian Democracy 244
Literature and Art 248
Oikos and Polis 257
The Greek Economy 270
C H APTER SEVEN
Gr eece on th e Ev e o f th e Pel opo nnes ian War 277
Sources for Greece on the Eve of the War 277
Greece After the Thirty Years' Peace 279
The Breakdown of the Peace 282
Resources for War 287
Intellectual Life in Fifth-Century Greece 288
Historical and Dramatic Literature of the Fifth Century 291
Currents in Greek Thought and Education 303
The Physical Space of the Polis: Athens on the
Eve of War 310
C H APTER El(,HT
Th e Pelopo nn es ian War 325
Sources for Greece During the Peloponnesian War 326
The Archidamian War (431-421 BC) 327
The Rise of Comedy 338
Between Peace and War 342
The Invasion of Sicily (415-413 ac) 345
The War in the Aegean and the Oligarchic Coup at Athens (413-411 BC) 351
Fallout from the Long War 357
The War in Retrospect 364
CHAPTER NINE
T he Greek World of the Earl y
Fourt h-Cent ur y 369
Sources for Fourth-Century Greece 370
Social and Economic Strains in Postwar Greece 371
Law and Democracy in Athens 382
The Fourth-Century Polis 388
Philosophy and the Polis 392
CHAPTER
Phi l ip II a nd Macedo nian Supr emacy 409
Sources for Macedon ian History 409
Early Macedonia 410
Macedonian Society and Kingship 411
The Reign of Philip II 415
Macedonian Domination of Greece 426
CHAPTER
Ale xand er the Gr e at 434
Sources for the Reign of Alexander 436
Consolidating Power 437
From Issus to Egypt: Conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean
(332-331 BC) 449
From Alexandria to Persepolis: The King of Asia
(331-330 BC) 452
The High Road to India: Alexander in Central Asia 455
India and the End of the Dream 460
Return to the West 463
CHAPTER TWELVE .II
Al exand e r' s Su ccesso rs and the Cosmopolis 470
A New World 470
Sources for the Hellenistic Period 471
The Struggle for the Succession 474
The Regency of Perdiccas 474
The Primacy of Antigonus the One-Eyed 476
Birth Pangs of the New Order (301-276 sc) 479
The Place of the Polis in the Cosmopolis 484
The Macedonian Kingdoms 489
Hellenistic Society 494
Alexandria and Hellenistic Culture 496
Ethnic Relations in the Hellenistic World 507
EPILOGUE 515
The Arrival of the Romans 519
A Greco-Roman World 526
Glossary 535
Art and lllustratiou Credits 548
Index 555
Color plates follow pp. 178 and 386
MAP AND BATTLE PLANS
Mycenaean sites in the thirteenth century BC 42
Greek colonization: 750-500 BC 112
The Athenian Agora in the Archaic period, c. 500 sc, showing the earliest public buildings 134
Peloponnesus 157
Att ica 204
The Persian empire in the reign of Darius 213
The Persian wars 224
The Athenian empire at its height 237
Sicily and southern Italy 278
Alliances at the outset of the Peloponnesian War in 431 284
Theaters of operation dur ing the Peloponnesian War 328
Diagram of Syracuse and Epipolae 348
Macedonia and its neighbors 413
Alexander's campaign 440
Plan of the Battle of Iss us 446
Plan of the Battle of Gaugamela 452
The Greek view of the inhabited world 459
The Hellenistic world 480
The Greek World in the Roman Period 516
Introduction
One of the greatest of the Greek cultural heroes was Odysseus, a man who "saw the towns of many men and learned their minds, and suffered in his heart many griefs upon the sea . . . " (OdysseJj 1.3-4). Like their legendary hero, the Greeks were irresistibly drawn to distant shores. From early in their history and
continually throughout antiquity they ventured over the seas to foreign lands seeking their fortunes as traders, colonizers, and mercenary soldiers. Their limited natural resources forced the Greeks to look outward, and they were fortunate in being within easy reach of the Mediterranean shores of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
By the fifth century BC, they had planted colonies from Spain to the west coast of Asia and from North Africa to the Black Sea. Those far-flung Greeks left a priceless legacy of achievements in art, literature, politics, philosophy, mathematics, sci - ence, and war. Their story is a long and fascinating one.
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF G REEK H ISTORY Greek
culture was forged in the crucible of the Bronze Age civilizations that cropped up in worlds as diverse as unified Egypt and fragmented Mesopotamia.
Absorbing key skills from these highly developed neighbors metallurgy, for example, and writing the Greeks built a distinctive culture marked by astonishing creativity, versatility, and resilience. In the
end, this world dissolved, as Greek civilization, having reached from France and Italy in the west to Pakistan in the east, merged with a variety of other culturesMacedonian, Syrian, Iranian, Egyptian, Roman, and finally Byzantine . Greek became the common language throughout the Near East and was the language in which the texts collected in what we call the New Testament were written. Through its incorporation into the Roman Empire and the fusion of Greek and Italian elements in mythology and architecture, a hybrid culture known as "Classical" came to hold an important place in the traditions of Europe and the Americas.
Between the decline of the Bronze Age and the diffusion of Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean world, Greek civilization attained an extraordinary richness marked by diversity within unity. The world of the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, was radically different from that of the fifth and fourth centuries.
Yet the epics remained the texts most commonly taught in schools, and Alexander was rumored to have
carried a copy of Homer's work as he traveled, lamenting that he had no great poet to immortalize him as Homer had immortalized Achilles.
Although religion inspired much of architecture, literature, and even athletic and musical competitions, which were held to honor the gods, Greek government and society often seemed to function in an entirely secular manner. Marriage, for example, was a purely civil affair, and divorce was not believed to distress the gods at all. The gods were nowhere and everywhere. Ideals of equality were preached by men who usually owned slaves and believed in the inferiority of women. Stolid, warlike Sparta and cultivated, intellectual Athens considered them- selves polar opposites. The funeral prayer for the war dead Thucydides put in the mouth of the Athenian statesman Pericles encapsulated many of the differences seen from the Athenian point of view. Yet people in both cities lived by agriculture, worshiped Zeus and the other Olympian gods, subjected women to men, believed firmly in slavery (provided they were not slaves themselves!),
sacrificed animals, considered war a constant in human life, preached an ethic of equity among male citizens, cherished athletics and delighted in the Olympics and other competitions, enjoyed praising the rule of law, considered Greeks superior to nonGreeks, and accepted as axiomatic the primacy of the state over the individual. The history of the ancient Greeks is one of the most improbable success stories in all of world history. A small people inhabiting a poor country on the periphery of the civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, the Greeks created one of the world's most remarkable cultures. In almost every area of the arts and sciences they made fundamental contributions, and their legacy is still alive in western and Islamic civilizations. Through the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, Sparta was cherished as the model of a mixed and therefore stable constitution. Both Sparta and Rome with constitutions based on checks and balances were the models for American government. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more attention was focused on Athens,
where it is possible to witness the gradual erosion of privilege based on wealth and lineage and the growth of democratic machinery- law codes and courts, procedures for officials selecting and holding they accountable, and public debates and votes on matters of domestic and foreign policy. Athens and Sparta fought ruinous wars with each other, and the propensity of the Greek states for fighting one another shaped much of their history.
The devastating Greek world war of 431-404 known as the Peloponnesian War (because of Sparta's location on the peninsula of the Peloponnesus) placed a damper on the extraordinary burst of creativity that had marked the fifth century—the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the comedies of Aristophanes; the building of the Parthenon at Athens and the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Throughout this painful era and the decades that followed, thinkers continued to explore the questions that had intrigued Greek intellectuals at least as far back as the sixth century - the origins of the universe and the mechanisms by which it functioned; the relationship
between physis (nature) and nomos (custom, or Jaw); how and what mortals can know about the gods; wha t these gods might want from people; whether indeed true knowledge was possible for humans; what the best rules could be by which people could live together in society; what the best form of education was-who was most qualified to direct it, and how many could profit from it; under w hat circumstances the rule of a single wise man might after all be best. New questions were also posed- whether involvement in politics ought really to be the focus of a man's life; w hether the individual might find identity separate from the state; w hether war was worth the sacrifices it entailed; and even whether slavery and the disfranchisement of women were necessary (although those radical speculations did not result in social change). Inevitably, the conquests of Alexander, the mass m arriages he celebrated among Macedonian soldiers and women from Persia and Med ia in 324 BC, and the hybrid culture that was forged throughout western Asia and Europe challenged conventional Greek
assumptions about the clear line that divided Greeks from the non-Greek peoples they called barbarianspeople whose language sounded like "bar, bar." In some of the lands incorporated into the new Macedonian empires, women enjoyed higher status than in most of the Greek world, and this sometimes rubbed off on the colonial Macedonian aristocracy, changing long-entrenched mores.
The country that the poet Byron labeled the '1and of lost gods" continues to live on in the modern imagination. During the past decades, our understanding of ancient Greece has vastly expanded. Even though the Greeks left us a comparatively rich record, we possess only a tiny fraction of what was originally there. Yet there is good news, too. Every year new discoveries are made that continue to enlarge our fund of information, while, at the same time, new ways of looking at the old. sources have broadened our perspectives. Archeology has revealed the critical importance of the Early Iron Age, for example, while comparative anthropology has illuminated the nature of Archaic society and made clear the oral character
of early Greek culture. historians have veered away from the traditional preoccupation with the elite, who left written records of their doings, and have been tireless in ferreting out evidence that throws light on the lives of those who do not generally speak for themselves- women, for example, and slaves.
SOURCES: HOW WE KNOW ABOUT THE GREEKS
Sources are the raw material of history out of which historians weave their stories.
Just abo ut everything preserved from antiquity is a potential source for writing ancient history. Our sources fall into two broad categories: the physical remains, which include anything material, from bones to buildings, and the written remains, which include
the words of the Greeks themselves or of others who wrote about them in antiquity. Of course, the line between the material and the written is often blurred, as in the case of words scratched on a piece of pottery, or an inscription carved on a stone pillar.
Historians, using documents, inscriptions, and literary texts, construct an account of past events. They are concerned, however, not only with events but also with the people involved in them: what they did, why they did it, and the changes brought on by their actions. Given that our primary sources are at least two thousand years old, and in many cases much older, it is not surprising that most of them require rehabilitation or reconstruction before they can be of use. But, fortunately, historians do not have to examine such artifacts from scratch. They rely on archaeologists to excavate, classify, and interpret most of the material evidence; paleographers to decipher and elucidate the texts written on papyrus and patchment; epigraphists and numismatists to interpret inscriptions on stones and coins. Without the
expertise of specialists who process the raw sources, the work of historians would not be possible.
RETRIEVING THE PAST: THE MATERIAL RECORD
The material record has expanded enormously during the past two centuries thanks to archaeology. Some of the most remarkable discoveries have been made underwater. Modern scuba gear has allowed archaeologists to explore the remains of cities built on now stmken shorelines, such as Phanagoria in the Black Sea and the royal quarter of Alexandria (see Plate XXI), and to recover lost works of art as the spectacular Riace bronzes. Less dramatic but more informative are shipwrecks, virtual time capsules which provide invaluable evidence about ancient ships, their crews and cargoes, and patterns of trade. (See Plate 1.) However, the reality is that most of Ancient Greece lies underground. Most of what has been excavated in recent centuries and still stands was what the Romans, Byzantines, and Western
Europeans valued and considered worthy of preservation.
Except for a few stone buildings, mostly temples, which have survived above grotmd, the vast bulk of the material record of Greek history has been dug up from beneath, very often from dozens of feet below the present surface. Materials decay, and the soil of Greece, in contrast to the dry sands of Egypt, is not good for preserving things. Accordingly, artifacts made of wood, cloth, and leather are rarely found. Metals fare better: gold and silver last almost forever; bronze is fai rl and durable, iron more subject to corrosion. Another material, virtually indestructible, is terracotta, clay baked at very high temperatures. Clay was used in antiquity for many different objects, including figurines and votive plaques, but most of our clay objects are vessels that archaeologists have found by the thousands in graves and other sites. It is mainly on the basis of pots that they are able to construct a chronology for prehistoric and early historic Greece that can be translated into current dates.
Clay pots were made wide-bellied or slender-bodied, long-necked or wide-mouthed, footed or footless, with one, two, three, four, or no handles. Some pots, such as the perfume flasks called arybal/oi, stood only two or three inches high; others, like the pithoi used for storing olive oil, grain, and other things, were often as great as a human being. In the ancient world, clay vessels served virtually every purpose that a container can serve; t hus they had to be made in all sizes and shapes. These were our bags, cartons, and shipping crates, our cooking pots, bottles, and glasses, as well as our fine stemware and "good" china bowls. Because they underwent gradual changes in style and decoration while preserving their basic shapes, vases can be placed in relative chronological sequences. Earthenware from one site is cross-dated with examples from other sites, thus confirming that site A is older or younger than sites B and C. But if a datable object from an outside society is found amidst the Greek material, it is often possible to es- tablish "absolute" or calendar dates. Given a scarab inscribed with the
name of an Egyptian king, the dates of whose reign are independently known, it follows that the Greek objects found with it in that deposit belonged approximately to the same time. Through the repeated process of establishing key cross-dates, a work-able chronology emerges that allows us to place an object or grave or building in real time: "late fourteenth century sc" or "around 720 sc." Today's archaeologists also have at their disposal more scientific techniques for dating objects and sites, such as measuring the radioactive decay of organic materials (radiocarbon dating) and dendrochronology (the counting of tree rings). In fact, archaeologists today depend heavily on the work of scientists from many different fields such as geophysics, geoarchaeology, bioarchaeology, and zooarchaeology so that they can learn more about the diet, habits, and standard of living for all ancient Greeks, not just the elites.
Yet, notwithstanding the success that modem archeology has had in bringing the ancient past to light, wordless objects can tell us only so much about
how people lived, what they experienced, or what they thought. Find the Full Original Textbook (PDF) in the link
