Ancient Greece

VI

Government

Five main forms of government existed in ancient Greece over the several thousand years of its history. The distinguishing factor among them was whether they depended on a strong central authority or on shared authority. Monarchy, chiefdom, and tyranny belong in the first category, oligarchy and democracy in the second.

Monarchs governed the Minoans and Mycenaeans. Sometimes called “princes” to indicate that they ruled a limited local territory instead of a widespread kingdom, these rulers combined political and religious functions. In addition to controlling defense, economics, and law, they also oversaw the worship of the gods. The rulers surrounded themselves with many servants and officials in their palace complexes. The monarchs lived more luxurious lives than their subjects because they controlled the surpluses produced by farmers and craft workers. The monarchs instituted minutely detailed accounting systems to keep track of everything under their control. They even had scribes record the number of broken chariot wheels in their storerooms.

Chiefdoms, the weakest form of central authority, prevailed during the Greek Dark Age. Chiefs had a higher status and more wealth than their followers, but could only govern successfully as long as their followers agreed to cooperate. Chiefdoms became unstable if followers became too ambitious. Chiefs tried to secure their leadership with displays of status, such as the imported Middle Eastern jewelry found in the grave of a chief and his wife who were buried about 950 bc on the island of Euboea (Évvoia).

Tyrants were sole rulers who took over city-states, generally during the Archaic or Classical periods, and established dynasties for their families. The most long-lived tyrannies existed in Corinth and city-states on Sicily, but even these tended to last no more than a couple of generations. The masses generally supported tyranny because tyrants benefited them with public employment, but the rich hated the system because it cost them power and money.

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In city-states with an oligarchy, government was shared by a limited group of people (oligoi). Some oligarchic city-states had only a handful of leaders sharing authority; others had several hundred. Some city-states had an aristocracy (rule by the best, the aristoi), a type of oligarchy in which leaders were selected only from privileged families. The justification for oligarchy was that pure equality for citizens was morally inequitable because people were not the same. The idea was that some were more capable, more devoted, and more intelligent and thus deserved to rule the masses. The most famous oligarchic city-state was Sparta. It had a dual kingship and an assembly composed of all free men over 30, referred to as “equals,” but neither the kings nor the equals came to hold real power. The 28-member Council of Elders and five elected officials held the reins of government, drafting laws that the assembly was expected to approve without debate.

Democracy gave an equal vote to every man who was liable for military service. In the most famous democracy, Athens, this included every freeborn male over 18 years old. Athenian democracy shared authority by choosing most government officials from the citizenry through a lottery and imposing term limits. Only the most sensitive positions in military and financial affairs were filled by election. Various other city-states also had democracies, but little evidence exists about them.

VII

Economy

Throughout its long history ancient Greece’s economy depended on agriculture and trade. Farmers worked small plots, rotating crops to try to preserve the land’s fertility and terracing rocky hillsides to create as much crop area as possible. Unpredictable rainfall posed the greatest hazard to successful farming. Farmers grew mostly barley and wheat, which were staple foods. The scarcity of good grazing land forced them to raise more small animals—such as sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens—than cattle. The best cash crops were grapes for wine and olives for oil, which were used in cooking and also as the base for soap and perfumes. Agricultural commodities were traded abroad. They were shipped in elongated clay storage jars called amphorae, which had spikes on the end for sticking them into a beach for loading and unloading.

Besides grain, oil, and wine, trade centered on natural resources such as metals and timber, luxury goods from jewels to spices, and craft products from painted vases to bronze mirrors. The Greeks traded ideas as well as goods across the water, acquiring an alphabet, architecture, and religious ideas from Egyptian and Middle Eastern civilizations such as Babylonia and Phoenicia. Traders plied the Mediterranean Sea from the Iberian Peninsula to Egypt looking for products that they could sell for high profits at home. Prized goods included such natural resources as iron for tools, silver for coinage, clay for pottery, marble for statues, and timber for houses and ships. These essential raw materials were relatively scarce, found only in isolated pockets. By the 6th century bc, Greeks in western Asia Minor had adopted the use of coins as money to make commerce easier between strangers, although barter never disappeared. Coinage gradually spread throughout the Mediterranean world as others realized the convenience of currency.

Most craft production took place in small shops employing a handful of workers. The largest known from the Classical period had 120 slaves manufacturing shields. Slaves worked side by side with owners and free laborers in craft shops and on farms. Paid labor was at least as important as slave labor in the Greek economy.

VIII

People and Society

The distinguishing features of ancient Greek society were the division between free and slave, the differing roles of men and women, the relative lack of status distinctions based on birth, and the importance of religion. Most surviving evidence about ancient Greeks comes from the Classical and Hellenistic city-states, but the same general pattern seems to have been true of earlier Greek civilization. Athens and Sparta, which had different systems, are by far the best-known city-state societies. Despite the relatively huge scale of Athens compared with most city-states, its way of life was more common in the Greek world than was Sparta’s special system.

A

Social Structure

Only free people could be citizens entitled to the full protection of the law in a city-state. Compared with ancient Rome, Greece rarely linked social hierarchy (ranking people by importance) to political power. In most city-states, social prominence did not convey special legal or political rights. For example, being born into a distinguished family generally brought no special privileges. Sometimes particular families controlled public religious functions, such as the worship of an important god, but this monopoly ordinarily did not give its holders extra power in the government.

In Athens, the population was divided into four classes based on wealth, with some political offices reserved for members of the higher levels, although people could change classes if they made more money. In Sparta, all men carried the title of “equal” if they finished their education. However, the Spartan “kings,” who served as the state’s dual military and religious leaders, came from two families.

Slaves had no power or status. They had no right to a family of their own, could not own property, and had no legal or political rights. The Greek philosopher Aristotle referred to them as “living tools,” and no free Greek is known to have ever advocated the abolition of slavery. By 600 bc chattel slavery (treating slaves as property) had become widespread in Greece. By the 5th century bc slaves accounted for as much as one-third of the total population in some city-states. People became slaves after being captured in war or seized by raiders, who then sold them. Children born to slaves became slaves themselves. Greeks took many slaves from non-Greek populations, but they also enslaved other Greeks in war. Greek slaves outside Sparta almost never revolted on a large scale because they were of too many different nationalities and too scattered to organize.

Most families owned slaves as household servants and laborers; even relatively poor people might own one or two slaves. Owners could beat and kill their slaves without penalty. However, hurting good workers made no economic sense because the master would be harming part of his property. To encourage slaves to work hard, owners sometimes promised freedom at a future date. Unlike in Rome, freed slaves in Greece did not become citizens. Instead, former slaves mixed into the population of metics—non-citizens, including people from foreign lands or other states, officially allowed to live in a city-state.

City-states and gods also legally owned slaves (the gods’ slaves were generally managed by the gods’ earthly intermediaries, temple priests). These public slaves enjoyed a measure of independence, living on their own and performing specialized tasks. In Athens, for example, public slaves were trained to look for counterfeit coinage. Temple slaves worked as servants of the sanctuary’s deity. Sparta had a special category of slaves called helots, Greek war captives owned by the state but assigned to Spartan families. Helots raised food and performed household chores so that Spartan women could devote their time to raising strong children and men could devote their time to training as hoplite warriors. The helots lived harsh lives and often revolted. Spartans annually sent out a secret band of young men to murder any helots who looked likely to provoke rebellion.

B

Way of Life

The way of life in Greek city-states remained mostly the same for a long time. People in the urban center lived in low apartment buildings or single-family homes, depending on their wealth. Dwellings, public buildings, and temples were situated around the agora, where people gathered for conversation and to buy food and crafts at daily markets. Citizens also lived in small villages or farmhouses scattered around the city-state’s countryside. In Athens, more people lived outside the city’s wall than inside.

Houses were simple, containing bedrooms, storage rooms, and a kitchen around a small inner courtyard, but no bathrooms. Waste was dumped in a pit outside the door and then collected for disposal in the countryside. Most families were nuclear, meaning a household consisted of a single set of parents and their children, but generally no other relatives. Fathers were responsible for supporting the family by work or by investments in land and commerce. Mothers were responsible for managing the household’s supplies and overseeing the slaves, who fetched water in jugs from public fountains, cooked, cleaned, and looked after babies. Fathers kept a separate room for entertaining guests, because male visitors were not permitted in rooms where women and children spent most of their time. Wealthy men would frequently have friends over for a symposium, a dinner and drinking party. Light came from olive oil lamps, heat from smoky charcoal braziers. Furniture was simple and sparse, usually consisting of wooden chairs, tables, and beds.

Food was simple, too. The poor mainly ate barley porridge flavored with onions, vegetables, and a bit of cheese or olive oil. Few people ate meat regularly, except for the free distributions of roasted pieces from animal sacrifices at state festivals. Bakeries sold fresh bread daily, and small stands offered snacks. Wine diluted with water was the favorite beverage.

The style of Greek clothing changed little over time. Men and women both wore loose tunics, of somewhat different shapes to fit their body types. The tunics often had colorful designs and were worn cinched with a belt. In cold weather, people wore cloaks and hats, and leather boots replaced the sandals worn in warm temperatures. Women wore jewelry and cosmetics, especially powdered lead to give themselves a pale complexion. Men sported beards until Alexander the Great started a vogue for shaving.

Medicine was limited. Hippocrates, the most famous physician of ancient times, helped separate superstition from medical treatment in the 5th century bc. Doctors knew of herbal remedies to treat injuries and reduce pain, and they could do some surgery. But they had no cures for infections, and even well-conditioned people could die quickly from disease at any age.

Men kept fit by exercising daily to be ready for military service. Before mercenaries became common in the Hellenistic period, Greek armies consisted of citizen militias manned by ordinary citizens. Every city-state had at least one gymnasium, a combination exercise building, running track, bathing facility, lecture hall, and park, open only to males. Men who lived in the city went there for physical training, ball games, gambling, and relaxation. Women entertained themselves by visiting friends and attending public festivals.

City-state festivals provided the most exciting entertainment. Gods were honored with competitions in music, dance, drama, and poetry. Athens boasted of holding a festival nearly every other day. The huge Panhellenic festivals held at Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, and Isthmia attracted spectators and professional contestants from throughout the Greek world. Athletes and musicians who won competitions became rich and famous. The most spectacular and expensive competition was chariot racing, which required excellent horses.

Although only men had the right to participate in city-state politics, women were citizens legally, socially, and religiously. Female citizens could own property and could go to court over property disputes. Nonetheless, ancient Greek society was paternalistic, with men acting as “fathers” to regulate the lives of women and safeguard their interests (as defined by men). All women were expected to have male guardians to protect them physically and legally. Women's important religious duties included control over cults reserved exclusively for them and paid service as publicly supported priestesses. Teenage women generally married men in their 20s.

Sparta had a distinctive way of life designed to produce a vigorous military. There, girls could exercise in the open so they could become strong and bear healthy children. Boys left home at age seven to live in public barracks and to begin about 12 years of rigorous physical and moral training under the strict guidance of older men. To make them tough, boys were sometimes required to steal food if they wanted to eat, but they were beaten if they got caught. They were never allowed to talk back, even in the face of humiliating insults and jokes at their expense. When they married, they were not allowed to live with their brides until they turned 30. Any boy who failed the training lost his political rights and endured constant public humiliation.

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