Archaic Greece: The Formative Age, 800-480 BCE

Today I would like to discuss Archaic Greece. Archaic Greece is the time period in Greek history between 800 and 480 BCE. It's during this period that we see almost all of the institutions and cultural characteristics of later classical Greece emerge. They don't quite reach maturity yet, that will happen in the classical period, but during this age these characteristics will first really emerge and start to take shape. So, without any further ado, let's go ahead and check out the history of Archaic Greece. So, what are the major characteristics of Archaic Greece? Well, this period, as I said earlier, is the time span between 800 and 480 BCE. Our evidence for this period, we have quite a bit of evidence, however, it's not very consistent and it is not nearly as full as the picture that we have for, say, classical Greece. So, we kind of know what Archaic Greece started as and we know how it ends, but we're not quite clear on what happens in between or exactly how it got from point A to point B. So, what we do know is that there was significant population growth after 800 and that will really enable a lot of things that we're going to talk about when you have population pressure and an extra number of people that you can use for various things. So, some of the debates that we'll get into are the 8th century revolution, we'll talk about whether or not that is a thing. We'll talk about the rise of the polis, the sort of characteristic Greek form of government in the classical period which emerges in the Archaic. We'll talk about colonization, where the Greeks went and why. We'll also talk about the evolution of monarchs into tyrants and we'll go into what tyrants are and how and why they emerged. We'll also talk about, well, in a different video, I have a different video, we're talking about the Ionian Awakening. That is basically an intellectual movement which will later lead to the intellectual flowering of classical Greece. That is something which starts in the Archaic period, actually fairly early in the Archaic period. See the other video for details. This period also sees significant Near Eastern cultural influences and along with the rise of the polis, we'll also see that new political systems will emerge, tyranny, oligarchy and even democracy. One of the major developments in ancient Greece was that the Greek people steadily expanded out of mainland Greece. We'll look at the Mycenaean period, they expanded into Crete and a lot of the Aegean islands and even in the Dark Ages, there's evidence of Greek settlers in places like Cyprus. In the Archaic period, this is when the Greek world will take on its full dimensions and it will establish coastal colonies all around the Mediterranean. This is basically what the Greek world looked like by the end of the Archaic period with all of the settlement that they had done in various parts of the Mediterranean world. We'll see that the major places that they settle are the west coast of Asia Minor and South Italy and Sicily with some other stuff sprinkled around like in southern France where they found the city that becomes Marseille and they also found a major colony at Cyrene in what is now Libya and they even get the rights to found their own colony in Egypt at now Kratos. Archaeological finds and architectural remains are some of our best evidence for the Archaic period and we can see that the beginnings of what became classical art are in clear evidence in the Archaic period. By the late Archaic period, the Koros statue and the Kore statue had been developed and were on the cusp of really delving into an unprecedented level of realism. On the left is a Koros statue from approximately 530 give or take and on the is a Kore statue. The one on the left in that picture is an original and the one on the right is a reconstruction of what it would have looked like when it was first made and still had its color. So, these statues of course still kind of have a little bit of an Egyptian styling to them and later on the Greeks will improve the level of realism and we'll see that by the classical period what they have is a real interest in capturing I guess what we call something approaching photorealism in their statuary. During the Archaic period, we also see quite a bit of evolution when it comes to Greek pottery. So, on the left this is an early Archaic Greek pot and we see here that there are human figures but that the styling on them is very basic indeed and there's also a lot of activity. It's very busy. On the right is a mature example of black figure pottery which was a major product of Athens in the late Archaic period. In the classical period, a black figure will give way to red figure but a lot of the styling will remain pretty similar. So, by the late Archaic we have pottery that is really close to what the Athenians and will be putting out during the classical period. So, as we've established the period between 800 and 480 saw a rapid expansion of the Greek world and also a great deal of cultural development that we can see in the material record. So, what's the context of this development? Well, what happens is that around 800 the world transitions into a climatic period which is generally called the Classical Optimum and that period will run with only some very minor interruptions from 800 BCE all the way to 500 CE and that roughly corresponds with the period of ancient civilization around the world. It's not all that long before 500 when the Western Roman Empire falls if you'll keep in mind. What we see is that around 800 or a little bit before we see revivals in the Near Eastern Empires of Assyria, Babylon, Media, Lydia and also the emergence of Persia for the first time. This led to an increase in global trade and a growth of these empires and that benefited everyone except the Phoenicians who were now once again subject to their more powerful inland neighbors. By 750 or so BCE Greeks began to colonize the Mediterranean world. Now they had enough people to do it. There was population growth but unlike some earlier scholarship where they thought that this must have been explosive, it looks like this population growth was relatively modest and it looks like one of the main reasons for a lot of this colonization had more to do with political strife at home and an attempt to alleviate that strife by simply having some groups leave. The main areas that went on to be colonized were South Italy and Sicily, Western Turkey, the Black Sea region and North Africa and the reason is pretty simple actually. This farmland in all these places was superior to that in Greece. The soil was much richer and in fact the Greeks in South Italy and Sicily will be so successful that that region will become known as Magna Graecia to the Romans meaning greater Greece. So that is basically the general context for this period and also the rationale for all of the colonization. So now let's get into some thornier issues and in this upcoming section we're not going to be talking about known facts so much as speculation based on an insufficient number of facts. There are three major narratives about the archaic period. One of them is the rise of the polis. The polis is the distinctive Greek form of government. So what is a polis? Well a polis simply speaking is a political entity. Normally the easiest English translation is something like city state but that's a bit of an oversimplification since the polis is not only one's political source of identity but it's also one's source of kinship with other people. The idea usually within any polis is that everyone there has some sort of almost familial relationship with one another. The polis is where you get your religious identity as well. Each polis has slightly different religious beliefs and practices and it's really hard to quite capture how important polis identity was to a Greek in the archaic and classical period. It's a lot more than being a home city or a country. Outside of that it's really hard to explain it any more precisely. It's sort of a category of analysis that we really don't have in today's world. Another process that you should be familiar with that's important for the rise of the polis is synoikism. So what synoikism is, is when you have surrounding villages in a small area and they grow together and become one political entity or a polis. We know in Sparta that there were a few different villages nearby each other and that at some point in the unknown past they decided to band together. The Spartans had a memory of that happening. They couldn't really date it but they knew that it happened. It also looks like that's how the city of Rome in the west formed which was a non-Greek city. The polis also was something that was not really easily defined by its characteristics or features and a polis was very different from many other polis. Some of them were primarily on the sea and based around fishing. Some of them had relatively large middle classes. Others didn't. Some were dominated by agriculture. Some were dominated by trade. Some were dominated by crafts. Some were balanced. Some were built near good soil. Some were built near bad soil. Those things would massively impact how people make a living and how they live their lives. There also are cultural differences between them. Some of them have different dialects of Greek. There's a lot of things. It's really hard to even cover all of them. Another thing is that the political arrangements of the polis can be very diverse especially in the archaic period. During the classical period the polis become more similar to each other but during the archaic period they're still fairly not well defined and pretty internally diverse. So some polis in the early archaic are still under kings. Later on some of them will become the subjects of tyrants. Others of them will become oligarchies. That becomes the dominant form of government, the rule of the few. And also democracies will emerge and some of those democracies will predate Athens. So the polis is a pretty complex phenomenon. It's very difficult to define in any precise way but it is something that originates during this archaic period at some unknown point which would largely depend on how you would choose to define polis. What are your chief criteria? So let's look at the second great debate in the scholarship of archaic Greece, the 8th century revolution and whether or not it's a real thing. So in red I've highlighted the case for the 8th century revolution and in green I've highlighted the case against it. And this is another case where you have to try to take what we know about the classical period and try to figure out when it originated based on very scanty evidence within the archaic period. So the case for the 8th century revolution, something that's been promoted by Ian Morris who is a prominent scholar. He recently or not recently but within the last several years wrote Why the West Rules for Now. So he's moved on from archaic Greek scholarship to asking broad popular questions. He also apparently has some sort of link to Iron Maiden. Maybe he was their backup bass player at some point if I remember correctly. Anyway, total tangent back to the 8th century revolution. So the case for the 8th century revolution is that what we see from the beginning starting around the year 800 and accelerating at a rapid rate is that there's a massive cultural shift toward democracy and rationality. The polis emerges and it's immediately all about participation. And whenever you have a society based on participation, democracy becomes inevitable. And when you have democratic deliberation that also highly encourages rationality. When you have to persuade other people you have to be rational and make your case in a way that is compelling. The idea of the 8th century revolution is also that there is a change in popular consciousness that occurs all over the Greek world all at once. So this isn't an isolated thing or something that spread from region to region. This is something that kind of occurred all at once. A great awakening if you will. The case against it is that it looks like from the evidence that we have the changes in Greek culture and political identity were probably a lot more gradual. It also looks like the lines of political and cultural development in the Greek world were a lot more diverse. That they developed along different lines and at different rates and that everybody kind of got on the same page only during the classical period. And also when it comes to participation, the thing about participation is that it was stronger in some places than others. For instance it looks like places in south Greece where the polis was more populated were more participatory. So places like Argos and Athens and even Sparta had greater participation. Whereas even during the classical period a lot of places in northern Greece tended to be a little behind the curve when it came to participation and they really still had traditional aristocracies who kind of lived their lives according to the way that aristocrats are described in Homer. So I would say that the case against the 8th century revolution is far greater than the case for it, but this is still an ongoing debate among scholars to this day. The third great debate in archaic Greek history is about the supposed hoplite revolution. The idea being that the emergence of the hoplite as the dominant form of military power more or less encouraged and strengthened democracy since this meant that middling farmers now participated in war and had an equally important role when compared to aristocrats. Therefore they deserved and received equal political rights. This theory has largely been dismissed at this point. Now it's still popular in the popular literature, so if you read a popular account of Greek history this narrative will still be present. However it's not something that most scholars support now. The evidence suggests that not all hoplites were equal, that the adoption of hoplite tactics and arms was something that took a while, and that we can also see even with many strong hoplite polis that they did not move towards democracy. So the adoption of hoplite arms and tactics did not necessarily mean that the men in the hoplite ranks went on to receive full political recognition and a share in the political direction of the polis. So it's debunked, but if you read popular histories of Greece you will still run into the hoplite revolution. So our last major controversy for the archaic Greek period, tyrants. What are they, where did they come from, and who supported them? They seem to have emerged in about the middle of the archaic period, give or take, maybe towards the middle late part of that period, so say by 600 or so. And just to give you something of a view of how scholars usually fall on this subject, so the old view that scholars had based heavily on the sources and a rather literal reading of the sources, is that the tyrants were champions of the people against the aristocrats. Now a tyrant would be an aristocrat, but he would gain his power by telling the people to support him and he would uphold their rights against the aristocrats, and he would advance their economic interest. In return he got sole power. The new view tends to be that the tyrant was simply the aristocrat in charge of one of the aristocratic factions, and he was the guy who was the dominant person, the guy who was in charge of the faction which won out. So in some ways if you think of tyrants and their little aristocratic armies fighting each other as sort of a party system, the tyrant would be the prime minister, and the other guys would be sort of the opposition parties. And then rather than having an election they would fight in the streets and a new tyrant would emerge. The truth, who knows? The problem is the evidence is thin and what we have is pretty biased, and much of our ancient information is from later sources which were written during the democratic period. Now Athens overthrew its tyranny and established a democracy, so they had lots and lots of rhetoric about the evils of tyranny. However there are other traditions that the Peisistratids in Athens for instance accomplish quite a bit. There also are some very positive traditions about Periander pictured on the right who was a tyrant from Corinth who actually went down as one of the seven sages of Greece. On the left is Solon of Athens who is known as a lawgiver and usually is not regarded as a tyrant, but depending on how you read the evidence, he was entrusted as a lawgiver during a time of civil strife, you could make the case that he was a tyrant. He just was one who happened to be benevolent and well remembered, and during the democratic period because of his great legitimacy and reputation, people tended to regard him as one of the founders of their law and also of the democracy. So this tradition is fairly complicated and another complication is that a lot of the older scholarship sees tyranny as a phase between sort of the bacillus of the dark ages and then democracy in the classical age without realizing two things. One, most poleis never had a tyrant. The only ones that we know of are usually the major ones like Athens and Corinth where there actually were tyrants. We have no evidence of there being tyrannies in a lot of the smaller cities and granted this is also partly due to a general lack of evidence. Another thing is that most cities in the classical world as we'll discover when we get to that topic did not become democracies. So this whole evolutionary scheme that a lot of old school scholars from say before world war ii especially saw doesn't really hold up if you look at the evidence. And as I mentioned Periander was regarded as a sage and so was Solon. So tyrants were actually seen in a positive light for the most part during the archaic period and this connotation of them being illegal and what we'd call tyrannical only comes about during the classical period and the first people to be labeled as such were the tyrants of Syracuse during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. But we'll get to them when we get to them for right now we're still talking about archaic Greece. In the modern world we tend to view religion and politics as two separate categories of analysis and we also tend to think of religion as separable from the political entity in which it exists i.e. there is a clear distinction between the United States and Christianity or Judaism. However in Greek antiquity that distinction didn't really exist. Now today we can talk about a Greek religion but there really is no unified Greek religion as I've talked about in previous videos. There is a very strong relationship between an individual polis and the religious beliefs and practices in that polis. One thing about a polis is that it has full jurisdiction and legislative competence over matters of religion. Religion is not something which is only regulated by religious authorities. For instance if you lived in a democracy like Athens in the classical period, the assembly could vote on matters pertaining to the gods. They could vote on the correct interpretation of an oracle for instance as happened in the Persian War. The point I'm trying to make is that these two things are deeply intertwined. If we go back into the archaic period what we see is that each polis will try to compete for the favor of the gods by building the biggest and best temples that they can. The idea being that you display your piety through works. And this of course contributes to interpolis competition and the increase in identity and the importance of being from a place. People would associate large building projects with a city and the largest building projects especially in the archaic period but also going into the classical period were large temples. Here we see a frieze from the original Parthenon, the one that the Persians burned and that was prior to the erection of the current Parthenon that we see today in Athens. This is called the blue beard temple because these guys had beards that have a bluish hue to them and this would have been one of the bigger temples in archaic Greece as well. Possibly about the same size maybe a little smaller than the classical Parthenon. Another thing that all of this competition shows is that we have an increase in resources and specialized professions. The increase in the size of these buildings, the complexity of these buildings, the complexity of the sculpture, the number of friezes, the number of festivals, the complexity of those festivals, the expense involved. Those things show that these polis in Greece during the archaic period have increasingly more resources and that they're willing to put a lot of the resources they have into religion because they thought that it was a good investment since this is how you secure the favor of the gods. Up to this point I have tried to capture the general nature of archaic Greece and talk about some of the major scholarly controversies when it comes to the study of this era and now what I'd like to do is shift gears and look more at the specific polis which were involved in this period and trace their historical development and in doing this what I'm going to try to do is to attach equal coverage to several different polis which were all about equally important during the archaic period. So what you'll notice is that my coverage of Athens and Sparta may seem a bit choppy and that is not because I don't know more about those topics, I do, it's just that I don't want to give a false impression that Athens and Sparta had already pulled so far ahead of the rest of Greece. That doesn't really happen until the very end of the archaic period and into the classical period. Actually we'll see that Corinth, Argos and Samos and Thebes are also equal to if not superior at certain times to the much better known Athens and Sparta. So without any further ado let's dig in and look at the polis of archaic Greece and trace their historical development. Let's begin our investigation with archaic Corinth. Now one thing that's really odd about Corinth during the archaic period is that despite the fact that it was the best natural port in Greece, it was completely unoccupied during the greek dark ages until 900. So they're about 200 years or so following the bronze age collapse where no one seems to have lived at Corinth. But then it gets resettled and a monarchy arises and rules until 747 or so BCE. In 747 the monarchy is overthrown by the Bacchidae who are sort of an aristocratic family which rules cooperatively. And the Bacchidae managed to accomplish quite a bit and they oversaw Corinth's rise to prominence. So under the Bacchidae the Corinthians were building large public buildings and they also established what would later become their two most important colonies Corsaira and Syracuse. They founded probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 80 colonies something along those lines. But Corsaira which is modern Corfu became a major power in its own right later in the classical period and Syracuse became the strongest greek city in the west and was even powerful enough to build coalitions that were able to fight Carthage one-on-one. So those were fairly major accomplishments even if they took a long time to come to full fruition. By about 730 or so Corinth was one of the largest poleis. They had over 5,000 people and it was presumably out of this population growth that a lot of their colonization efforts began. Now the 5,000 number sounds pretty modest but you should keep in mind that Greece is not very well suited for agriculture and this is mostly just looking at the site of Corinth itself. So they probably had more people within their general territory. One other thing which we might be able to attribute to the period of the Bacchidae is that the Corinthians were known as innovators in shipbuilding and it seems if tradition is to be believed that the Corinthians developed the trireme in the late archaic period and they may have also developed the pentaconter pictured here and say the early to middle part of the archaic period. So the Corinthians made some fairly major contributions to greek culture. Let's see what else did they do? Anything that we need to talk about? Oh they also we'll talk about their pottery in a minute after we get through the two tyrants. So in 657 the Bacchidae were overthrown by the tyrant Kypsilas and he seems to have taken power with the aid of an oracle which gave him the right to do so. You can imagine how Kypsilas going against an aristocratic rule by a group like the Bacchidae was fuel for the fire of scholars who said that tyrants were basically popular leaders who were leading the people against the aristocrats. At any rate Kypsilas in due time was succeeded by his relative Periander and Periander was so successful as ruler that he went down as one of the seven sages of Greece and he died in 585 which is not too far removed from when Solon was active so they were fairly contemporary and it looks like after Periander died that the Kypsilid dynasty ended and Corinth became sort of what we'd call an oligarchy or aristocracy and it remained a major commercial power. Now it was losing ground vis-a-vis its neighbors but it was still growing in absolute terms and Corinth was also important in the development of new pottery techniques and during the 6th century Corinth and Athens would really compete hard to design the greatest and most innovative pottery that they could. It was only towards the very end of the archaic when Athens seems to have completely won out in that competition and then Corinth started taking a artistic direction from the Athenians but for much of the archaic period Corinth was actually the dominant cultural influence. So while we're on the subject of naval powers let's talk about Samos. Samos is an island just off the coast of Asia Minor with a large port and it was a major naval power. Now Samos really started making waves when it fell under the control of the tyrant Polycrates in the late archaic period. Polycrates ruled from 538 until 522 BCE and his regime was backed up by a fleet of a hundred pentaconners. Those are ships with 50 oars like the ones pictured above in my slide on Corinth and he additionally had a force of a thousand archers who presumably gave his pentaconners some hitting power during naval engagements. Pentaconners it seems didn't really use ramming tactics yet and they relied on boarding tactics so archers were at a premium. The major construction project by Polycrates was the Eupolinian aqueduct pictured here. This was a major underground aqueduct project and it would have been an engineering marvel by the standards of the 6th century and it really shows the extent of Polycrates' power and the wealth of Samos to be able to do something like this. Samos of course was also famous for being the home of Pythagoras, the famous mathematician and later cult leader who had to flee from Polycrates' reign and go to Italy to pursue his attempt at making an ideal society. Moving back to the mainland of Greece, let's take a look at Thebes during the archaic period. Now Thebes was a major Mycenaean center during the bronze age but along with all the rest of the major bronze age sites it was destroyed around 1100 or so. Thebes is located in Boeotia and this is a fertile farmland area so the site was never totally abandoned however unlike Corinth. To distinguish Thebes from the city of Thebes in Egypt, Thebes in Greece is known as seven gated Thebes whereas Thebes in Egypt which was much larger is called hundred gated Thebes. In mythology Thebes is founded by Cadmus from Phoenicia and then it is ruled over by Oedipus who famously murdered his father and accidentally married his mother, sired a bunch of offspring illegitimately and whose death then precipitated the seven against Thebes episode where seven different contenders all attacked each one attacking a different gate of Thebes. Anyway, the reason why this mythology is important is because Greek cities would later base a lot of their prestige on how ancient they were and how important they were during the mythological period. So Thebes could claim quite a bit of authority due to the fact that so many really important mythological events happened there and because Thebes disgraced itself by siding with Persia in the Persian wars a lot of the prestige that Thebes enjoyed during the archaic period is not as evident today as it most likely was at the time. Thebes during most of the archaic period was competing neck and neck with Orchomenus for dominance in Boeotia and by the end of the archaic period it had defeated Orchomenus and emerged as the dominant player in the region. However, Orchomenus was still a fairly big contender and would be able to cause Thebes grief from time to time and occasionally try to challenge its power. So let's move south to Argos. Now the city of Argos is generally considered a traditional Greek polis. Scholars for various reasons consider Argos to be the most typical of all of the Greek polis and they think that it's just a bigger version of the average Greek polis. You could easily challenge those assumptions but those are fairly standard assumptions at this juncture. They might be subject to change, we'll see. Anyway, Argos is the largest polis in the Argolid region and it is not very far at all from the ruins of ancient Mycenae. Now Argos is a city which kind of gets overlooked because of the rise of Sparta in the late archaic and early classical period. However, for the majority of the archaic period Argos was the most dominant power in the Peloponnese and even during the 5th century Sparta was worried about what Argos might do and Argos very much perceived of itself as a major rival to Sparta. This rivalry began in time immemorial, so sometime probably in the fairly early archaic period and continued well into the classical period. And actually, while we normally think of the Spartans as being the preeminent hoplites in the Greek world, for most of the archaic period the Argives were neck and neck with the Spartans for being the best hoplites and at some points may have been considered a little bit better. In one famous battle between Argos and Sparta, each side sent out 300 champions to fight over a dispute and two Argives were the only men left standing at the end and went home. Then there was a Spartan who was only wounded, he woke up and then later claimed victory on that account. So if that story is to be believed, then it was a very close contest indeed and if anything the Argives were slightly better. But that all changed because Sparta decided to really reform in order to better deal with the Argives. So let's take our attention and go to Sparta. Due to the revolution that occurred in Sparta during the archaic period, much of its early history is misty to say the least. So far as we can tell based on archaeology, Sparta was a traditional Greek state not all that different from Argos or Athens or Thebes or Corinth. During the 8th and 7th centuries, Sparta produced pottery, poetry, and all the other things that we associate with any given Greek polis. However, at this time it also began having some very deep-seated rivalries with its neighbor to the west, Mycenae, and its neighbor to the north, Argos. The two sort of most important conflicts in Spartan history were the First Mycenaean War from 743-724 BCE and the even more important Second Mycenaean War from 685-668 BCE. At the conclusion of the Second Mycenaean War, the Spartans had conquered the entirety of the region of Mycenae and they added this to their own dominance of the region called Laconia. Now the Mycenaeans perceived themselves as being a separate power and Sparta had to expend a lot of time and effort and blood to keep the Mycenaeans down. And during this time, a semi-mythological figure named Lycurgus became a lawgiver and issued what is known as the Great Retra. And in this Great Retra, he fundamentally remade Sparta into what we think of today as the Sparta of the classical world, the Sparta of Frank Miller's imagination. This warrior society where all other considerations are put aside and there's this professional cast of warriors who which does nothing but train for war and then fight wars. It's not really clear exactly how this system came into place. Most likely it was the result of a slower process and there either was no such person as Lycurgus or else there was a person named Lycurgus but there were other people involved and it was a process which took half a century or more to fully take hold. At any rate, once the Spartan system is in place and it seems to be fully in place by let's say 550 or so BCE, maybe even a little later, the key feature is that there's an agoge, a special education system for full citizen boys and girls. And this starts at about the age of seven. If you're a girl, you would train in athletics and you would also train in all of the other things that girls normally train in like weaving. And the idea is to make you better breeding stock. The idea is that women who exercise will be healthier and they will be better able to give birth to great male warriors. And there's a certain amount of truth in that and it was certainly better than keeping women cloistered in terms of being conducive to good health and child rearing. As for boys in the agoge, they would leave their families at age seven and they would go and live in the public barracks until they were adults. And they would train day and night for war. Some of their training included things like being deliberately underfed a bit so that way they would be inspired to try to develop sneakiness in order to steal food. Of course they got caught to be punished, but they were encouraged to do it so long as they didn't get caught. This is of course something a warrior might need to do to be able to sneak around to gather intel or whatever. There are three basic classes in Sparta during this period and then a whole host of subclasses that I'm not going to even try to get into at this point. So we have the Spartiates at the top. These are the full citizens. At the beginning there were 10,000 of them and they all had equal allotments of land and this land would be worked over by helots. We'll talk about the helots in more detail in a bit. The proceeds from this land, both in terms of food and revenue, would sustain each Spartiate in leisure so that he could dedicate his entire life to training for war and participating in Spartan politics. Because Spartans, at least Spartiate citizens, were so devoted to war, they left the basic functions of say business and trade and things like that to a group of people called the perioikoi, which literally means the dwellers roundabout. These are free men who would also serve as hoplites alongside their Spartiate brethren and they were basically the business class of Sparta. They also engaged in things like making pottery and you know what we call normal jobs. And at the very bottom of the rung were the helots and there's some debate as to the ethnic identity of the helots, but for the most part most helots were conquered Mycenaeans and they were more or less treated as public slaves to the entire Spartan state. They would be forced to work on the estates of all of these Spartiates and to produce food for them. And they were seen as a constant source of revolt and indeed they did try to revolt plenty of times. And to combat that the Spartans had what was known as the cryptia, a secret police. And a secret police would be composed of young men who had just finished the agoge and they were sent out in the countryside with daggers and they were told to stay hidden and if they caught helots out after a certain hour, when they're basically violating curfew, they would murder the helots and sort of spread random terror and just show them that the world was a dangerous place and needed to know their role. There was also a tradition in Sparta of making an annual declaration of war on helots and this shows that Sparta was dedicated to the system and that they had a certain bloody mindedness that is not to be underestimated. Due to all of this military training by the end of the archaic period the Spartans were by far the best hoplites in Greece and they could perform maneuvers that other more amateur hoplites could only dream of like being able to retreat in order and then suddenly wheel about regain formation and counterattack. This is not something that most Greek hoplite forces were able to do at this time because they weren't professionalized. So Spartans had quite a reputation and they also produced a lot of great athletes, not surprisingly since one way to prepare for war is to get really good at sports. So Spartans would often win at athletic contests starting in the archaic and moving into the classical period as well. So let's dig into archaic Athens and I'm going to have to try hard to resist the temptation to go into great detail since this is something that really interests me and since I don't want to give the impression that Athens during the archaic period was more powerful than the other poleis that we've already talked about. So one myth that the Athenians perpetuated about themselves is that from time immemorial Athens had ruled over all of Attica. If we look at archaeology however it's pretty clear that Athens was only really unified by the end of the 6th century and possibly only by the introduction of democracy during the Cleisthenic reforms of 508 and 507. So if we look at the history of Athens so far as we can determine it from both literary sources and a little bit of epigraphy here and there it looks like there was a lot of aristocratic factionalism starting in 700 and that there were also conflicts between Athens on the one hand and the large Attic towns of Eleusis and Marathon on the other and it looks like Eleusis and Marathon were their own independent poleis at one point. There were three great families in Athens and it looks like these three families would have their own personal followers and they would fight for preeminence during the 7th and 6th centuries. Sometimes these families are recorded as the three factions like one from the plains, one from the city, one from the coast but most likely these were not really factions that had a lot of popular support in the city itself as we'll see when we talk about Solon. In 620 or so one of the aristocrats who was very ambitious named Cylon actually managed to seize the Acropolis of Athens and claim power for himself but then someone from the Alcmyonidae family captured and killed him and that created a miasma, a religious pollution because this member of the Alcmyonidae family killed someone within a sanctuary to the goddess Athena and later on this guy's descendants who included Pericles, Alcibiades and a lot of other classical Athenians that you've probably heard of would have to deal with the stigma and their political opponents would bring it up constantly. At any rate around 590 or so people had gotten tired of all of this infighting and these aristocratic power games and the city had turned to the wisdom of someone named Solon who was given the power to become a lawgiver and to reform Athens laws and Solon enacted a bunch of laws including a sized Acthea which was a temporary cancellation of all debts and he also outlawed the practice which was deeply unpopular among common people of enslaving Athenians due to their debts. In his poems he brags that he was the representative of the middle way in politics and that he pleased no one. Ultimately though his reforms did not bring about peace and there was continued factionalism. The person who rose to the top of the heap in due time was Peisistratus and here at one point one of the times that he came to power was by taking a six foot tall woman named Theae, dressing her up as Athena and then getting in a chariot with her and riding into the center of Athens. Another time he tried stabbing himself and then claiming it was his opponents and trying to get the Athenians to vote him a bodyguard. At any rate we're not really sure what to what degree Athens was representative during the 6th century prior to the democratic reforms. There are a bunch of references to assemblies and voting but because our sources are all later and because the Athenians told themselves later that their democracy had been founded by King Theseus, I want you to think about the inherent contradiction and people like Solon that the assembly had always existed. Anyway, so Peisistratus ruled and his descendants took over. Peisistratus himself died in 527 or so and then his son Hippias took over. Hippias' brother Hipparchus was assassinated in about 514. Hippias got paranoid and then he was overthrown in 510 and factionalism returned. And now the people were really fed up with this kind of bullshit and they decided to try a new system of government. So one of the major leaders named Cleisthenes passed what are known as the Cleisthenic reforms and this enacted what we now think of as democracy. And during the early period of this democracy from about 508 when it was originated until 494, the Athenians fought off the Spartans who tried to intervene on behalf of one of the factions and end this nascent democratic experiment and they also fought wars in the field against their neighbors the Thebans. Herodotus tells us that the Athenians fought well in both of these conflicts and that it took the Greek world by surprise because the Athenians now fought with such zeal whereas they had not been known for that before the enactment of democracy. And later on in the 490s when Ionia revolted against Persian rule, the Athenians actually voted to send help to the Ionians and thereby incurred the wrath of Persia which is the primary reason or at least the stated reason why the Persians decided to invade Greece. But that's a different story for a different day and we'll get to that in due time. I think that's enough on Athens for now. Obviously there's way more to say about the foundation of democracy than this but I think that this is sufficient for now. One other thing I'd like to point out in case you've forgotten, Athens was not the first democracy and there were other poleis in Greece which already had democratic systems before this but of course Athens is the one that we all know about and that we know the most details about. So I'll leave you with that thought. Next time when we continue this particular series we'll talk about classical Greece both in terms of its history and also its culture.