012 Oligarchs and Hesiod

Hello, and welcome back to the History of Ancient Greece. Episode 12, Oligarchs and Hesiod. Last time, we talked about the development of a socio-political structure unique to Greece called the polis and its abstract nature. This week, we will discuss the governmental apparatuses that developed alongside this new political construct. Because in order for a polis to be strong and to compete successfully against other polis, it had to create a more powerful and more intrusive central government than it had possessed before unification. A more complex system of organization and social control was a necessary response to the new conditions of rapidly growing populations, greater exploitation of the land and resources, increasing productivity and wealth, expanding trade, and more complicated relations with neighboring states. Especially pressing was the need for warfare, for as population increased and land became scarcer, polis fought each other over territory, a more serious business than the raids and counter-raids for animals and booty that characterized the Dark Age. Strong control from the center was therefore both necessary and good for the polis as a whole. The steps that led to the establishment of a polis were the work of a group of nobles that arose in the 8th century BC. Political union could not have occurred unless the local basileus wished it to be done, as they became the leaders of the new central governments. In this way, the development of the polis mirrored the development of a new political concept. The later Greeks called this kind of government an oligarchy, from the Greek words oligos, meaning few, and arco, meaning to rule. Thus, rule by the few. Once the polis emerged, most Greek cities were no longer governed by a chieftain, but instead by a council of nobles. These were developed in order to vote on the larger issues facing the polis. Essentially, the concept behind the council was that instead of having a king, the king's various powers would be divided between multiple offices. Of course, this was not arrived at immediately. The sources make it clear that the process of determining which villages and districts were to be included in the polis and what kind of government it would take took more than two or three generations. Each polis developed its own system of magistries according to its own needs and circumstances. Larger states, such as Athens, required more offices, while small states needed fewer. As polis grew in population and complexity, they added more officials with more specialized functions, such as treasurers, supervisors of public works, and so forth. By the end of the 6th century BC, in Athens, for example, there were several dozen officeholders, and by the end of the 5th century BC, the number had grown to around 700. The number of major magistracies, however, remained small. In general, there was no hierarchy among the major offices, although many polis did have a principal office, who was regarded as the chief administrator. Common names for such a person were Archon, which was found in Athens and elsewhere in central Greece, and Pyrtanes, at Corinth and in Ionia. Both are very general titles. Archon means simply leader and Pyrtanes means something like presiding officer. A more specifically named early officer at Athens and Megara was the polamarchus, or war leader. Many polis, though, especially the smaller ones, were governed by small boards of magistrates who divided the functions of government among themselves without stipulating the specific duties. In most polis, by the mid-7th century BC, term of office was limited to a single year and could not be held again until a stipulated number of years had passed. These measures had the dual purpose of curbing the power of any single magistrate and of distributing honors among all the nobles. The true center of power in the government of the early polis, however, was not the magistracies, but the council. Once the magistrates finished their terms, they were granted membership into the council, usually for life. The council thus had a natural supremacy over the archons and other magistrates, who had limited terms and who would often hesitate to oppose them as they wished to join their ranks someday. This council made policies and drafted the laws for the polis. Furthermore, as the power of the council of nobles increased, the power of the assembly of the people decreased. Although the position of basileus ceased to exist in its traditional dark-aged form, it survived in other forms. Usually, the title of basileus was reserved for an annual magistrate whose responsibilities varied between polis. In some, the chief magistrate bore the title of basileus, while a few appear to have been officials, equivalent to the polimarchis. The large majority, however, were in charge of religious matters and also had judicial duties, especially in cases having to do with homicides. The widespread designation of the title basileus for officials of religion signals how great a reverence the name still held, and thus they felt a need to keep the very important religious sphere of the polis life connected to the ancestral heroes of the demos. There were even some cases of polis, mostly those of Dorian origin, keeping alive a form of the traditional chiefdom. In Argos, for example, a dynasty of hereditary basileus retained authority into the 7th century BC, resisting the attempts of the nobles to establish oligarchic rule. The Spartans retained the monarchical system the longest, though in a unique form, as their governmental apparatus had two hereditary, lifelong basileus who ruled jointly, a custom that continued unbroken until the 2nd century BC. It is important to keep in mind that one of the things that was critical in understanding why the polis developed as a political institution is Greek morality. Greece was not a land of opulence. The rich and the poor in archaic Greece were not separated by much, which is a stark contrast to what was happening contemporarily in the Near East. Thus, the poorer classes decided to choose the slightly wealthier nobles, since they had much more in common with them than did the poorer classes in the Near East with their nobles. It was their support that allowed this new political institution to develop. The basic ideal of the polis was that everyone, except for women and slaves of course, were entitled to the same protections under the law. This belief marked the first signs of local patriotism and it also put the burden on man for the first time to defend and maintain the polis, often at the expense of family ties or religious cults. This contrasts to the political happenings contemporaneously in Egypt, where the growing power of the priesthood of Mamun clashed with the rule of the pharaohs. However, the gap between the nobles and commoners, which was not very wide in the 10th and 9th centuries BC, would begin to grow wider starting in the late 8th century BC. A major factor of change was a widespread rise in population after centuries of very slow growth. There is some disagreement about the rate of population growth. Some estimate that Greek population doubled, resulting in more and larger settlements than previously. Regardless, there is general concurrence that there were considerably more people in Greece in the late 8th century BC than at any time within the preceding four centuries, and population would continue to rise in most regions for the next 200 years. The reason for this increase remains one of the many unsolved questions of early Greek history. A sharp upturn in population after a long period of slow growth is not an uncommon historical phenomena, and certainly the material and social conditions at the end of the 9th century BC were favorable for population increase. It is believed that it was part of a wider phenomenon of population growth across the Mediterranean region at this time, which may have been caused by a climatic shift that took place between 850 and 750 BC, making the region cooler and wetter. This would have led to the expansion of population into uncultivated areas of Greece. Regardless, the presence of a lot more people where there had been only a few a generation or two before was bound to have a great impact on Greek society. Evidence from human remains showed that the average age of death increased over the Archaic period, but there is no clear trend for other measures of health. The size of houses gives some evidence for prosperity within society. In the 8th and 7th centuries BC, the average house size remained constant, but the number of very large and very small houses increased, indicating increasing economic inequality. From the end of the 7th century BC, this trend reversed, with houses clustering closely around a growing average. Another popular theory is that the population rise was related to a shift from a predominantly animal economy to a predominantly agricultural economy. In order to feed a growing population, land that had traditionally been pasture land was converted to the production of grain, a much more effective use of land in terms of sustenance, yield per acre. Extension of farmland was accompanied by more intensive methods of farming to increase yield and variety of crops. By 700 BC, at any rate, an agrarian economy was in place, and it was dominated by an elite group of large landowners. The term aristocracy, from the Greek words aristos, meaning best, and kratos, to rule, meaning rule of the best, is often employed as a shorthand for this elite social group, but the term can be misleading because of its varying connotations. In later history, aristocracy has been illegally constituted and formally recognized nobility, the members of which inherited their status by being born into a family designated as aristocratic. Ancient Greece never had such an official nobility. For this reason, it is more accurate to refer to the leading members of Greek society as elite or noble rather than aristocratic. Regardless, they were the wealthiest, most prestigious, and most powerful members of the social hierarchy that developed in Greece by the later part of the Dark Ages. These rich landowners cultivated an image of themselves to be far superior to the rest. They claimed exclusive entitlement to the term hoi agathoi, meaning the good, purely on the basis of their birth into illustrious and wealthy families, and labeled as hoi kakoi, the bad, to those who were not born into the land at nobility. This presumptuous arrogance was a large leap from what is found in Homer. For Homeric heroes descend from great warriors, though a matter of pride was not automatic proof of excellence, and they did not demand honors or privileges on that basis. Their claims to be called agathos and aristos were measured solely by their performance as warriors and leaders. In Homer, kakos had meant unskilled in war or cowardly, but now was being referred to anyone who was not a member of the small group of the wealthy and well-born. Similarly, they signaled their separateness from the rest of the community by narrowing the term demos from its inclusive usage as the whole people to mean the masses or the poor, whom they also referred to despairingly as hoi poloi, or the many. Later written sources do not mention how the class of large landowners came into being, so we can only speculate about the various ways in which elite families might have originally gained their designation, but it is not difficult to piece together what might have happened. They were most certainly the leading households that were most active in converting pastureland into agricultural land, although grazing land was nominally open to all for usage. In reality, the basiliscus families had long before appropriated the best land for themselves. Generations of use had given them what amounted to exclusive grazing rights. No doubt this prior occupancy gave the leading families some legal right to plow and plant there. In any case, as arable land became more precious, the basiliscus and other prominent family heads came to own a disproportionate amount of it. In the span of two or three generations, they transformed themselves into large-scale farmers with smaller flocks and herds. The rest of the population continued to live off their small-to-medium-sized farm plots with few sheep and goats. The growing disparity in land distribution began to have a severe effect as rising populations and the custom of dividing the kleros equally among sons made family plots smaller for the non-elite oikoi. One early sign of land hunger was the emigration, starting in the late 8th century BC, of substantial numbers of people from mainland Greece into southern Italy and Sicily, beginning a long wave of colonization that would eventually create Greek communities from Spain to the shores of the Black Sea. The trade and the profits that could be earned attracted some, but for most it was the promise of a good-sized kleros on good soil. Among these no doubt were landless men, while others were seeking a better livelihood than their land at home could give them. Although scarcity of land was certainly the primary motivation for emigration, this scarcity must be put into perspective. Nowhere in the 8th century BC did the population of Greece approach the carrying capacity of the land. In fact, the filling in of the countryside continued through the 7th and into the 6th centuries BC. The problem was not that there was no land, but rather that the most productive land was concentrated in the hands of a minority of the families. Sons whose inherited share of their paternal kleros was insufficient for a decent livelihood were forced either to seek marginal land in the demos or to emigrate overseas. Colonization and the tremendous impact it would have on the political, economic, and cultural development of the homeland during the late 8th, 7th, and 6th centuries BC will be discussed in future episodes. The land-owning elite exploited the labor of the poorest farmers, who were eking out a precarious existence on small plots of land. Some of the poor families rented land from the rich as sharecroppers in return for a portion of the harvest, while others mortgaged their land to the rich, and were compelled to pay a stipulated amount of the crops as payment on the debt. In this way, small farmers could fall easily into debt. One bad year meant borrowing next year's seed from a wealthy neighbor, and a run of lean years could put a family so deeply into debt that it lost its land. We may assume that the number of fetes, those who contracted to work as hired hands in return for food, clothing, and shelter, increased considerably during this time. Estimates on the size of the land-owning elite range between 15-20% of the families, and of the landless between 20-30%. Of course, the percentages would have varied from polis to polis. These figures allow for between 50-65% of the families to have been neither rich nor dependent upon the rich. Aristotle calls this group the middle. Within each of these three divisions was a gradation of wealth and social rank. For instance, the small number of noble households were dominated by a smaller number of families that were preeminent because of their nobler bloodlines and greater wealth, a nobility within a nobility, if you may. Moreover, mobility could occur as one family might rise into the ranks of the upper nobility, while another might drop down into the lesser nobility. Nevertheless, the land-owning elite, as a whole, remained clearly marked off from the groups below them. The agathoi protected and protracted their economic and social exclusiveness by marrying only within the group. The idea was to main-class solidarity and at least the facade of equality among the noble families. Some non-noble oikoi shared in the rising prosperity of the archaic period and were fairly well off, while others were barely keeping out of debt. Upward mobility, though not impossible, was not easy. If a commoner family became wealthy enough, it could marry into the nobility. The 6th century B.C. poet Theognis complains that an agathoi will not hesitate to marry the daughter of a kakoi if she brings with her a good dowry. He says, Wealth corrupts a lineage. Downward mobility, on the other hand, was much more common. As the precarious farmers slipped into dependence, the chances for economic betterment for poorer farmers were slight. The increase in trade offered some opportunities for employment, but only as sailors and other low-wage and low-status occupations. And the skilled crafts were mostly closed to the poor, because crafts were family affairs and few apprenticeships were available to poor outsiders. The erosion of the independent farmer in the 7th century B.C. became a serious problem within the poleis. One man who suffered under this system was Hesiod, a poet from Boeotia that illustrates perhaps to a greater extent than anyone else the major literary link between Dark Age and Archaic Greece. Hesiod took an intensely personal outlook, unlike Homer. At the beginning of his major work, Erga kai hamerai, or Works and Days, Hesiod says that his father was involved in shipping and marine transportation, suggesting that they belonged to the nobility of the period. But his father failed at business and his family migrated from Chaim in Aeolus on the coast of Asia Minor to mainland Greece, where he settled in a town called Askra, near Thespiae in Boeotia. He describes Askra famously as, "...a cursed place, awful in the winter, miserable in the summer, and pleasant never." He said that his father came because of poverty and a sort of reverse migration, which is unusual as it was often the case that mainland Greeks fled to Asia Minor due to poverty, as we have seen in previous episodes. In any event, the Works and Days is over 800 lines and deals with the small farmer's life. The Works refer to the happenings of the farming year, and the Days deals with recording the days of the month on which it is either lucky or unlucky to do certain things. Unlike the Homeric Epics, which were set in a distant age of heroes, and told of the triumphs and tragedies of great warrior chiefs, the Works and Days was set in the present and told about ordinary people and their ordinary lives. Hesiod's poem revolves around two general truths, arduous manual labor is the universal lot of man, and only those who are willing to work hard will succeed. He says things like, "...there will be no rest ever from toil and hardship during the day, nor from suffering at night, for the gods will give us pain and anxiety." His primary aim of this poem was to give advice to farmers on how to live righteously. He has a whole litany of proverbial do's and don'ts. He counsels that when borrowing from a neighbor, pay back fairly the same amount, or more if you can, so that when you need something later you can count on him. Then Hesiod goes into a discussion of agricultural labor, such as what's appropriate to various seasons and what methods to use in the field. There are times after the harvest when you can celebrate and take it easy, at which point Hesiod says, "...give me then the shade of a rock and wine, a curd cake, and creamy goat's milk." Hesiod is asserting that through hard work the ordinary farmer may win that which could only be attained by heroes in the Homeric epics. Wealth, the special favor of the gods and glory, thus unremitting toil in the farm fields, becomes a virtue equivalent to great deeds on the battlefield. To Hesiod, wealth meant having your granaries full of the sustenance of life at harvest time, and renown was being admired and respected by your neighbors. This is a pragmatic and non-nobility system of values. In addition to being a farmer's almanac, it also contains two mythical etiologies for the toil and pain that define the human condition. The story of Prometheus and Pandora, and the so-called myth of five ages of men. Hesiod depicts a golden period, when life was easy and good, followed by a steady decline in behavior and happiness through the silver, bronze, and iron ages. But he inserts a heroic age between the bronze and iron though, whose warlike men were better than their bronze predecessors. He is currently living in the iron age, where life is tough and the only way to survive is through hard labor. Scholars have interpreted Hesiod's poem against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, which inspired a wave of documented colonization in search of new land. This poem is one of the earliest known musings on economic thought. Works in Days also contains a story about his inheritance quarrel with his brother, Persus, who had cheated him out of his birthright and seized the best part of their father's kleros, which was a small piece of land near the foot of Mount Helicon, by bribing the judges. The control of property by a family was a topic of importance to the Greeks. Persus later squandered his wealth and tried to freeload off of Hesiod, for which Hesiod frequently calls him a nitwit, a layabout, or a no-good. Instead of giving him money or property, which he will no doubt spend in no time, Hesiod finds it better to teach him the virtue of hard work and to impart his wisdom, which can be used to generate an income. He tries to tell Persus that there are two kinds of eris, or strife, the good kind that makes you want to excel by competing with one another, and the bad kind that leads to quarreling and wars between mankind. He tells him to embrace the first, shun the second, and to start doing hard work, instead of wasting his time frequenting the arguments in the Agora. Hesiod regards labor as the source of all good, in that both gods and men hate the idol, who resemble drones in a hive. The quarrel provides a pretext for Hesiod to sermon his brother, and he was clearly influenced by the ancient genre of Near Eastern wisdom literature, which consisted of exhortations and admonitions addressed to a son or other relative, or even to a king, and was spiced with stories and proverbs about right and wrong. Some scholars see Persus as a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing of Hesiod, since it is quite common for works of moral instruction to have an imaginative setting, as a means of getting the audience's attention. But in this instance, it is difficult to see how Hesiod could have traveled around the Boetian countryside, entertaining people with a narrative about himself, if the account was known to be fictitious. Hesiod also directs his sermonizing to the judges. He called them bribe-devouring basileys, and accused them of rendering their verdicts with crooked judgments. From this poem, we learn that the Greeks of Hesiod's time still had rulers, as these judges would have come from the nobility. But the one key difference is that these rulers were no longer defined by hereditary means, but instead by their inherited wealth. Hesiod's overarching concern, though, is not with who rules, but whether they rule justly. Hesiod believed that it was better to take the path leading to decay, or justice, rather than succumb to the wickedness of injustice. Only through justice can the polis prosper. Those who are unjust would be punished by Zeus. The entire polis could be punished for one man's unjust actions. Man is the center, and the gods are now conceived as merely ethical forces. Also, one ought to take action on behalf of the polis, not for thyself. Thus, the fact that Hesiod is vehemently supporting the polis tells us that the concept of the polis was strong by this time. Also, there was in place this concept of justice, connected only with the polis. These community values are very different from those of Homer. In short, Hesiod belongs to a world in which political authority was being debated and explored. Power was not simply inherited. Social status correlated closely with access to power, but did not fully define it. Public speaking and arguing out a case in a public forum was normal. Rhetorical skills were both admired and highly developed. The works and days also gives us an outlook towards marriage. Among the upper class, marriage was primarily a means of establishing alliances and enhancing family prestige. Noble families often sought advantageous matches outside of their polis. And as in Homer, suitors competed against one another with expensive gifts and shows of manliness in athletic contests. Aristocratic women, though they lived highly circumscribed lives, had a high status and were treated with great respect by the men. The different, much narrower view of the farmer class shows through on Hesiod's advice on marriage. Marry a virgin so that you can teach her proper habits, and especially marry one who lives near you. And check all around so that your marriage will not be a joke to your neighbors, for nothing is better for a man than a good wife, and nothing more horrible than a bad one. We see here that prestige was not confined to just the aristocracy. But Hesiod's overarching concern was not in finding a wife that will bring him advantageous connections, but one that will not cause him to lose respect if she should turn out to be lazy or unfaithful, typical faults that he often attributes to women. The misogyny expressed in Hesiod was a common attitude found during the archaic period and continued throughout Greek history. He best exemplifies this way of thinking in the myth of Pandora. Hesiod says that all women inherit Pandora's shameless mind and deceitful nature. He says further that women live off men like drones among bees. He also warns, don't let a woman fool you with her flattering chatter and wiggling behind, she's only after your granary. The man who trusts a woman trusts thieves. This differs greatly with the way Homer treated women in his epics. Hesiod also wrote the Theogony. I'm not going to go into too much detail since we spoke about this poem in episode 2 when we talked about the Greek creation myths. But as a short recap, the Theogony is an epic poem of over a thousand lines that explains the creation of the universe, the primordial gods and goddesses, the titans, the monsters, the Olympians, and mankind. It reflects a world in which relationship of gods and men is based on rational motive, as opposed to being chaotic and arbitrary, and with justice as the ultimate aim. Zeus is seen as the sponsor of good, and his daughters, the nine muses, are tasked with guiding human rulers to act with wisdom and justice. In its division of responsibilities between gods, struggles between different generations, and ability of wise men to trick the gods, the Theogony has a great deal in common with Mesopotamian creation myths, suggesting that Hesiod had some familiarity with Near Eastern cosmology, which was probably due to his family's association with Asia Minor, although the Greek world might have already developed its own versions of them after coming back into contact with the Near East via the Phoenicians. Regardless, Hesiod's retelling of the myths became, according to Herodotus, the accepted version that linked all Hellenes. Hesiod wrote that his Theogony was divinely inspired through visions and a dream from the muses. There was no challenge to these views until the 6th century BC by the philosophers at Miletus. There will be more on them in future episodes. Hesiod has been attributed to various other poems, but his authorship has been questioned on all of them. They are generally referred to as forming part of the Hesiodic corpus. Most are only left in fragments, except for two. The Catalogue of Women was attributed to Hesiod because it is similar in style to the Theogony, but the subject of this poem is the genealogies of the mortal women who had made it with the gods, and of the offspring and descendants of these unions that became the heroes and legends of Greek myths. A fourth poem, The Shield of Heracles, was attributed to Hesiod by ancient commentators, but modern scholars believe it was written in the 6th century BC because their language usage and meter is different than his other works. Regardless, its main subject is Heracles' victory over Cygnus, the son of Ares, but the greater part of the poem is devoted to describing Heracles' shield, hence the name. A similar description of Achilles' shield can be found in the Iliad of Homer. Some scholars surmise that Hesiod may have learned about world geography, especially the Catalogue of Rivers and Theogony, listening to his father's accounts of his own sea voyages as a merchant. His father probably spoke in the Aeolian dialect of Chime, but Hesiod probably grew up speaking the local Boetian dialect. However, while his poetry features some Aeolisms, there are no words that are certainly Boetian, and he composed in the main literary dialect of the time, Ionian, which was also Homer's dialect. However, his handling of the dactylic hexameter was not as masterful or fluent as Homer's, and one scholar has even referred to it as hobnailed hexameters. It is probable that Hesiod wrote his poems down or dictated them, rather than pass them on orally as rhapsodes did, otherwise the pronounced personality that now emerges from the poems would surely have been diluted through oral transmission from one rhapsode to another. If he did write or dictate, it was perhaps as an aid to memory, or because he lacked confidence in his ability to produce poems off the cuff as trained rhapsodes could do. It certainly wasn't in a quest for immortal fame, since poets in his era had no such notions. However, some scholars suspect the presence of large-scale changes in the text, and attribute this to oral transmission. It's also possible that he wrote out his poems, performed them orally, and then went back and made changes. Possibly he composed his verses during idle times on the farm, in the spring before the May harvest, or the dead of winter. The personality behind the poems, though, isn't typical of a rhapsode, but is instead argumentative, suspicious, ironically humorous, frugal, fond of proverbs, and weary of women. He tried to understand the life of his times and to better it with moral precepts. His works are preoccupied with issues of good versus evil, and how a just and all-powerful god can allow the unjust to flourish in life. He rejects the idealized hero of epic literature in favor of an idealized view of the farmer. Yet the fact that he could glorify kings in the theogony and denounce them as corrupt in works and days suggests that he could resemble whichever audience he composed for. His aim was to teach, not to entertain. Thus, Hesiod is considered the father of the didactic epic poem and proverbial philosophy, and stands in contrast to Homer, the bard of the old heroic world. Many later Greeks actually considered that Hesiod was either older than Homer or was his contemporary. But most scholars today tend to agree that Homer was earlier, since Hesiod's work was written down and the fact that in his theogony he mentions the sanctuary at Delphi, which was of little national significance until the mid-8th century BC, and he lists rivers that flow into the Black Sea, a region that wasn't explored by Greek colonists until the 8th century BC. He certainly predates the lyric and elegiac poets, as imitations in his work has been observed in some of them. Thus, he is believed to have lived sometime around 750-650 BC. Unfortunately, the tale of Hesiod which involves him in a poetry contest with Homer is more than certainly false. Two different traditions record the site of Hesiod's grave. One states that the Delphic oracle warned Hesiod that he would die in Nemea, and so he fled to Locris, where he was killed at the local temple to Nemean Zeus and buried there. This tradition follows a familiar ironic convention, the oracle that predicts accurately after all. The other tradition claims that Hesiod lies buried at Orchimenus, a town in Boeotia. However much he railed against the wealthy and the powerful, Hesiod though was not a champion of the oppressed. Rather, his was the voice of the middle-class farmer. Underpinning all that he says is the firm belief that Zeus and the other gods will look favorably on those who are pious, hard-working, and righteous, and will punish in the end those who are not. The stage of revolt has not yet been reached, but the grievances were aired. On the next episode, hand-in-hand with a society that developed in the wake of the political formation of the polis, revolutionary changes in warfare were also taking place that were strictly Greek and reflect the abstract nature of the polis. So join me next time on the History of Ancient Greece, episode 13, Hoplite Warfare. Melodies and using the techniques of the past. A new song will be played every episode. This one is titled, Ode to Aion, from his album, The Ancient Greek Liar. If you like what you heard and are curious to learn more about ancient Greek music, check out his website at ancientliar.com. His albums are available in every major digital music store, including iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify.