Читать книгу Early Greece - Oswyn Murray - Страница 12

SOCIETIES without writing are dependent on the human memory for the transmission of knowledge of the past and of information in the present. Mnemonic devices, the use of recurrent story patterns and folk-tale motifs and repetitive phraseology serve also an aesthetic purpose, to produce a pleasing effect on the audience; it is for such reasons that the rhythmic patterns of poetic metre are widespread among primitive peoples. Those who achieve special skill in composing metrically will acquire special status as the spokesmen of the community, in their dual functions of preserving the past and interpreting the present. The earliest surviving literary evidence for the history of Greece is poetic; the advent of writing in the eighth century changed the position only slowly: it takes generations for the poet to lose his inherited status, and it was not until the middle of the sixth century that prose literature began to develop.

The aoidos or singer of epic was a professional oral poet, composing and reciting from a stock of traditional material. His theme was the exploits of the heroes of a distant past, the end of the Mycenean period; there seems to have been no attempt to reach back earlier, or to compose poems on more recent events. This oral epic flourished solely or primarily in Ionia, and its nature can best be illustrated from the linguistic peculiarities it exhibits. The dialect of epic is artificial: to an Ionic base have been added numerous borrowings from Aeolic and other east Greek dialects, to create a language whose forms are especially adapted to the flowing hexameter metre. The oral poet doubtless relied on memory to repeat with variations already existing poems, but he also needed to be able to compose as he sang. Apart from the repetition of descriptions of material objects or recurring scenes such as feasts, debates, battles or the sunrise, he acquired a whole vocabulary of formulae – metrical units adapted to particular positions in the hexameter line. As a result of the work of Milman Parry on the similarities between Homeric poetry and the practices of the surviving tradition of Serbo-Croatian oral epic, the principles of Homeric oral composition are now much better understood. Apart from more complex metrical formulae, names and nouns have different adjectives attached to them, whose function is not primarily to add to the sense, but to accompany the noun in particular metrical positions and in different grammatical cases; the economy of the system is such that each noun seldom has more than one epithet giving a particular metrical value.

The Greek oral epic poet was thus considerably limited by the tradition in which he worked. He was singing of a legendary past of which he knew little, in a language which encouraged the survival of descriptive elements long after they had ceased to exist in the real world, with limited scope for innovation. On the other hand he was a creative artist, composing as he sang, and living in a world with its own institutions, social customs and values; he must have used these extensively in his attempt to recreate a long lost heroic world. Indeed studies of oral literature in other cultures have noted that one of the main functions of traditional elements is to increase the scope for creativity: the purpose of the formulaic language of Greek epic is to facilitate composition, not repetition. There is therefore nothing strange in the view that a great individual artist can stand at the end of an oral epic tradition, relying on the achievements of his predecessors but transforming their art; and other examples show that the point of transition from oral culture to written text often provides an impulse for the traditional poet to attempt a monumental poem with a complex structure, which is still based on oral techniques, but exploits the possibilities of preservation and overall planning provided by the new medium. The Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are literary masterpieces, far surpassing all comparable material from Greek or other cultures.

It may not be certain whether Homer is one man or two, or a proper name for a generic class of professional singers; and it may be disputed at what point in the oral epic tradition the intervention of a great poet is most likely. The second epic poet of Greece is a more distinct personality. Hesiod composed around 700, and may well be a contemporary or within a generation of Homer; he is the first poet to name himself. At the start of the Theogony he describes how the Muses came to him on Mount Helicon as he was tending his sheep; they gave him the laurel staff of the aoidos and breathed a sacred voice into him. It is part of his consciousness of possessing an autonomous artistic personality outside the tradition of oral poetry that his other main work, the Works and Days, is conceived of as an address to his brother Perses on a real occasion, a dispute between the two over the division of their father’s land. Hesiod does not therefore seem to belong to an oral epic tradition in the same sense as Homer: his call to poetry was like the call of a contemporary Old Testament prophet. His father, unsuccessful as a sea trader, had emigrated from the town of Cyme in Aeolic Asia Minor to establish himself as a farmer on marginal land at Ascra in Boeotia: neither area is known to have possessed a native epic tradition.

Certainly Hesiod saw himself as a Homeric aoidos, and even describes how the only time he ever sailed across the sea was the few yards to Chalcis in Euboea, to take part in a contest at the funeral games of Amphidamas; he won a tripod which he dedicated to the Muses at the place where he had been granted his original vision: the occasion was a typical oral epic contest. But his technique is not the technique of an oral poet working within a fixed tradition. The dialect, metre and vocabulary are learned from epic, but they are used with a freedom and an awkwardness which suggest that Hesiod only half understood the skills of oral composition: this is partly because he lacked a set of formulae suitable to his subject matter, and partly because much of this subject matter, in the Works and Days at least, had to be reworked from the simpler speech rhythms of popular sayings. His fundamental originality explains the stiffness, inferior quality and line by line composition, which is so different from the easy flow of Homeric epic: it may well be that, rather than composing orally, Hesiod used writing in composition, and learnt his poems by heart for recitation. The clear signs of eastern influence in Hesiod’s poetry (ch. 6) also distinguish him from the Homeric tradition.

The evidence of inscriptions on pottery shows that the alphabet was used as a natural medium for recording quite trivial occasional poetry by the late eighth century: there is nothing implausible in the view that epic poets were also recording their compositions in writing by then, and even using the new skill to help them in composition. Poetry continued to be an important vehicle for public expression in the seventh and sixth centuries, but it was influenced in various ways by literacy: these ways are all related to the function of writing in preserving accurately the work of particular poets. References in Homer show that other types of poetry, songs of celebration, wedding songs, victory songs and dirges, already existed alongside epic; but there seems to have been no guild of professional singers to ensure their survival. With writing, various types of poetry emerged to establish separate identities; the existence of the different traditions from now on encouraged continuous development; writing also allowed the recording of more complex rhythms, and could almost function as a musical notation. After Hesiod, the concept of the poet as an individual was paramount: poems were known to be by a certain author, and this in turn will have affected the subject matter and tone of poetry towards the expression of personal emotions. With few exceptions lyric poetry did not survive the end of the ancient world: the fragments that remain are preserved in quotation by classical authors or have been found in the papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt; the last fifty years have increased our knowledge of lyric poetry enormously.

The earliest of the lyric poets, Archilochos (about 680–40), exemplifies many of these trends. The illegitimate son of an aristocrat on Paros, he went to Thasos when his father led a colony there, and spent most of his life as a soldier until he was killed in battle. His poetry, whose language is often Homeric but whose metres are both popular and epic, is concerned with his personal circumstances – warfare, life in a frontier community, drink, love and sex, and abuse of his enemies: his most recently discovered poem, the longest fragment yet known, about the seduction of his girl-friend’s younger sister, was published in 1974. True lyric poetry, solo songs for the lyre, is represented by Alkaios (born about 620) and Sappho (born about 610), both from Lesbos and both members of aristocratic families. Alkaios was involved in political struggles against popular leaders: his political attitudes, exile, travels and descriptions of military life are typical; Sappho offers an unusual view of female society.

More important for the social function of poetry are the didactic poets. Kallinos of Ephesus in the early seventh century and Mimnermos of Kolophon about 600 encouraged their fellow citizens in struggles against the nomadic Cimmerian invaders from south Russia and the advancing power of Lydia. Tyrtaios towards the end of the seventh century did the same for the Spartans fighting against their Messenian neighbours, and also praised the social ethic of the new mass armies of heavy armed troops and their ideal of government, eunomia (good order). His poetic influence on Solon of Athens was great. Solon was appointed chief magistrate of Athens in 594 to solve serious economic and social unrest; his early fragments attack the injustices of Athenian society in a way that shows the use of poetry as political weapon; later he defended his reforms against extremists on both sides in the same way. The poetry attributed to Theognis of Megara (about 540) describes the dissatisfaction of an aristocrat at the influx of new wealth and the breakdown of traditional values, and also portrays upper-class homosexuality. In contrast, Xenophanes left Colophon in Asia Minor as a young man because of the Persian conquest in 545, and spent the rest of his life in the western colonies; he wrote on philosophical and scientific problems, and also attacked the contemporary emphasis on athletics and military virtues.

All early Greek poetry has a social function and a place of performance which influence its content; the different generic forms in origin reflect these different purposes. The lyric and elegiac poets composed for performance to the lyre and the double flute in drinking parties: their subject matter reflects the interests and preoccupations of particular social groups, the warriors and the aristocrats in their symposia.

Choral lyric was usually performed at religious festivals or other great occasions by trained choirs of men or girls singing and dancing to instrumental accompaniment, often antiphonically. Alkman was a younger contemporary of Tyrtaios, and his hymns offer an interesting contrast to the impression of Sparta as a military society. Simonides of Ceos (about 556–468) was court poet of the Athenian tyrant Hipparchos, and later commemorated the dead and the victors of the Persian Wars. Finally the greatest of the choral lyric poets, Pindar, in the fifth century, wrote for the Greek aristocrats and rulers who competed at the international games.

Lyric poetry presents a complex and varied picture of the world of early Greece: though its purpose was never overtly historical (there is no tradition of historical epic or descriptive panegyric), the poet’s role was still central; and so satisfactory for public expression were the varied poetic forms that they may well have delayed the appearance of a prose literature. Men of course spoke in prose, but they composed in verse. Composition in prose is related to a new need, that of precise and critical analysis; and it is a product of the Ionian enlightenment. The effort to formulate a critical scientific theory of matter, which began in Miletus with Thales in the early sixth century, led to the first known Greek work in prose, Anaximandros’ book on nature of about 550. Anaximandros attempted to explain both the underlying structure of the physical world and its development down to the creation of man – it was the substitution of science for myth. He was also the first Greek geographer and astronomer: the work contained the earliest known maps of the earth and the heavens, which were accompanied by a ‘description of the earth’ and a discussion of the stars and their movements.

Philosophers continued the scientific interests of Anaximandros; but it is another Milesian who carried his interest in human geography further, and so initiated the analysis of human societies. Hekataios, a prominent statesman around 500, also published a map and wrote a ‘description of the earth’, of which many short fragments survive in later authors. His concern was not with scientific theory, but with accurate geographical description. He himself had travelled at least in Asia and Egypt, and the detailed information given in the fragments suggests an ethnographic description of the Mediterranean world based on personal observation and the reports of other travellers. A second work by Hekataios discussed the heroic myths and the genealogies of those families who claimed descent from gods or heroes – as did Hekataios himself in the sixteenth generation. It seems to have been not merely a retelling of the hero myths, but a critical attempt to rationalize them and, if not produce history from them, at least make them portray a relatively normal human world. The critical approach of his book is emphasized in the first sentence:

Hekataios the Milesian speaks thus: I write these things as they seem to me; for the stories of the Greeks are many and absurd in my opinion.

(F.G.H. 1 frag, 1)

Hekataios saw the importance of travel and personal observation for the understanding of the human world; he may also be responsible for removing the gods from history by his curious and misguided attempt to remove them from mythology. Other early writers of prose are more shadowy figures. There were men who compiled mythological books without Hekataios’ critical attitude. And since antiquity there has been controversy as to whether there were any true historians before Herodotus; the evidence is unreliable, and even if the four dim Ionians in question did write before Herodotus, they had no influence on him, for they compiled a type of local history very different from his broad conception.

For the ancient world Herodotus was ‘the father of history’, and that judgement must stand. But he had also the reputation of being a liar, and the generally unfavourable opinion of his reliability lasted until the sixteenth century, when the accounts of travellers and missionaries from such areas as South America, Turkey and the far east revealed that tall stories about other cultures were not necessarily false. Since the nineteenth century accurate knowledge of the main civilizations about which Herodotus wrote, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia, has accumulated; and in the present age, when the difficulties in studying primitive societies and the problems of writing about their past are better appreciated, we can begin to understand the real achievement of Herodotus.

He was born in 484, between the two Persian invasions, at Halicarnassus in southern Asia Minor; he lived through the establishment of Athenian imperial power and died some time after 430, during the first ten years of the great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. His family was literary and aristocratic; he was brought up in exile on Samos; he travelled extensively in the Greek world, as far as Sicily and south Italy, north Africa, the Black Sea and south Russia; he visited Sardis in Lydia, and Phoenicia; he travelled up the Nile as far as Elephantinē and down the Euphrates as far as Babylon, and probably also went to the Persian capital of Susa. Well known as a literary figure in fifth century Athens, he finally became a citizen of the Athenian colony of Thurii in south Italy (founded in 444/3), where he died.

The scope of Herodotus’ book is described in its first sentence:

This is the account of the investigation of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, undertaken so that the achievements of men should not be obliterated by time and the great and marvellous works performed by both Greeks and barbarians should not be without fame, both other things and the reasons why they fought one another.

(Herodotus 1. 1)

The Greek word historiē translated by ‘investigation’ is the word which has entered the European languages as ‘history’; Herodotus uses it elsewhere to describe his enquiries, and it is connected with the Greek root ‘to know’, usually in the sense of knowing by personal observation, for instance as the witness in a lawsuit. Herodotus’ work is a series of descriptions of the various peoples of the Mediterranean and the near east arranged around the theme of the wars between Greeks and Persians: within this basic structure the digressions, or separate ‘accounts’ or ‘stories’ (which Herodotus calls logoi), are geographical, ethnographic and historical, ranging over the known world as far as its mysterious fringes and the encircling ocean. The modern word ‘historian’ scarcely covers all these activities; contemporaries used a vaguer term when they called him a ‘logos-maker’ or ‘logos-writer’. Thucydides was thinking of Herodotus when he claimed that his own readers should trust his conclusions, rather than ‘what the poets have composed about events in exaggeration, or what logos-writers have collected together, which is rather aimed at pleasing the ear than at the truth’. And he makes the proud statement:

The lack of invention in this narrative may seem less pleasing to the ear, but it will be enough if it is useful to those who wish to grasp clearly the past and the future, which, given human nature, will see these or similar events happening sometime again. This work is designed as a possession for all time rather than a display piece for instant listening.

(Thucydides 1. 21–2)

In these criticisms, and particularly the last, Thucydides seems to agree with later evidence in seeing Herodotus as a professional lecturer, giving his ‘stories’ or logoi in public as ‘display pieces for instant listening’; the final collection of these ‘stories’ in the present structured narrative was almost certainly published by 425, when Herodotus’ account of the causes of the Persian War was parodied by the comic poet Aristophanes. Herodotus may well in fact have begun like other contemporary literary figures, by lecturing on his travels and researches, and have only later arranged these lectures around the theme of the Persian Wars; but it is possible that he may have had his general theme in mind from the start.

Two literary influences on Herodotus are obvious. He owed much to Hekataios, whom he had certainly read, and whom he attacked both in his account of Egypt and as a map maker (Herodotus 2.143, 4.31): the early parts of the work must often cover the same ground in greater depth. Herodotus is also rightly described by a later Greek critic as ‘most Homeric’; Homer lies behind the conception of the whole enterprise as a war between Greeks and barbarians, and its declared intent to preserve ‘the great deeds of men’ (one of the acknowledged functions of epic poetry); the complex construction and digressive technique of Herodotus is similar to that of Homer, as are many of the more imaginative elements in the work.

Very few of Herodotus’ sources of information were written: details of the provinces of the Persian empire and its tribute, and of the organization of the Persian invasion force, may ultimately come from official Persian documents; and there are passing references to poetry and literature. But in general Herodotus was excluded from knowledge of the extensive literary and documentary evidence of the near east by his ignorance of foreign languages. As he himself makes clear, his work was based primarily on two types of evidence – what he had seen and what he had heard; it is a systematic and serious attempt to record oral traditions about the past. His practice was in each place to seek out ‘the men with knowledge’, usually priests or officials, and record their account with the minimum of comment. Only occasionally will he give variant traditions, and these have usually in fact been gathered by chance from different places; when he does this, he seldom declares which version he believes to be correct.

It is obvious that such a method left Herodotus largely at the mercy of his informants, who might be frivolous, ill-informed or biased. From Thucydides onwards Herodotus has been attacked as unscientific; but modern oral historians in fact hold that each tradition should be recorded separately: the contamination of two or more traditions produces an account which it is impossible to check or interpret, and which is an artificial invention of the modern anthropologist, not a true oral tradition.

All oral tradition consists of a chain of testimonies; in general the effective range for resonably detailed knowledge of the past is about two hundred years: it is very noticeable that Herodotus’ information is both qualitatively and quantitatively better for the period from the mid seventh century onwards. The historical worth of oral tradition is also related, not so much to the number of steps in the chain of testimonies, as to the purpose behind the recording of the tradition, the milieu in which it was remembered, and the cultural influences which may have affected its literary structure. The past is remembered not so much for its own sake as for its relevance to the present interests of a particular group; and each group imposes its characteristic deformation on the oral tradition.

In mainland Greece much of Herodotus’ information came from the great aristocratic families in each city: aristocratic tradition is of course especially liable to political distortion. For instance the Spartan aristocratic account played down the reforms of the age of Tyrtaios, and later the importance of their greatest king, Kleomenes; the Corinthian aristocracy travestied the history of their tyranny; the Athenian aristocratic family of the Alkmeonidai protested overmuch their anti-Persian stance and claimed the credit for the overthrow of the tyranny, minimizing the role of other families and popular support; Macedonian royal sources claimed that they had been secretly pro-Greek during the Persian Wars. There are many other examples.

Another group of traditions is very different. Here the great religious shrine of Delphi is of central importance: the Delphic tradition is not usually political; it is rather popular and moralizing. Often the stories are clearly related to particular monuments or offerings at the shrine (which is how we can detect their origin); and they centre round particular benefactors like Croesus king of Lydia. The obvious presence of folk-tale motifs might suggest the professional story-teller; but the clearest tendency is to impart a moral dimension to the past. Events are preserved in a framework in which the hero moves from prosperity to over-confidence and a divinely sanctioned reversal of fortune. This is no aristocratic ethic; it belongs to the priests of a shrine closely identified with a cooperative ethic, who engraved over the doors of their temple the two mottoes, ‘Know yourself, and ‘Nothing too much’.

The traditions of the eastern Greeks are far closer in form to the Delphic stories than to the aristocratic traditions of the mainland. For here too there is very little evidence of deformation due to particular political groups; yet even in quite recent history there are clear signs of recurrent patterns, folk motifs, and distortion for moral purposes. Thus the story of the tyranny of Polykrates of Samos as late as the second half of the sixth century could be transformed into a folk-tale, and the account of the Ionian revolt in the early fifth century contains many popular elements. At first sight this is surprising, for Herodotus was closer to events in the Greek east than on the mainland; he had for instance spent his youth on Samos only a generation after the death of Polykrates, and must have known many of those who fought in the great revolt; yet his east Greek history is in fact less reliable than his history of the mainland.

This curious characteristic of the east Greek tradition is related to the overall pattern of his work: it too is a moral story, of the pride of Persia, symbolized in the arrogance of Xerxes and humbled by the Greeks. Once more the gods punish those whose prosperity passes human limits; and the framework in which this happens is a framework designed to recall to the listener the steps by which the gods achieve their ends – the deeds of pride, the warnings disregarded, the dreams misinterpreted and false ones sent to deceive. This overall pattern has been imposed by Herodotus on his material, and its consonance with the pattern of east Greek stories suggests an interesting conclusion. Behind the preservation of the past in Ionia lies a moralizing tradition of story-telling found in mainland Greece only at Delphi, a tradition of which Herodotus is himself a representative: just as the Homeric poems are the culmination of the activity of generations of professional bards, so Herodotus the logos-writer has ‘collected together’ (to use Thucydides’ description) the results of an oral prose tradition, of folk stories told perhaps by professional or semi-professional ‘logos-makers’ in Delphi and the cities of Ionia. And he himself is the last and greatest of these logos-makers, weaving together the stories with all the skill of a traditional artist into a prose epic, whose form mirrors the form of its components. That this form is traditional and not of his own making is shown by its absence from the mainland Greek tradition: if he had been deliberately and consciously imposing a new pattern, he would surely have made this material conform to it; yet the comparative absence of moralizing folk-tale motifs in the stories of obvious mainland folk heroes like Kleomenes, Themistokles and others is remarkable.

Herodotus’ Athenian contemporaries scarcely understood the Ionian tradition within which he worked: they found his methods and his attitudes curiously old-fashioned. Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnions (lines 509–39) produced a brilliant and unfair parody of Herodotus’ conception of the causes of the Persian Wars; Thucydides’ whole methodology was based on a rejection of the techniques of Herodotus: he failed to see the nature of Herodotus’ achievement because he was writing a very different type of history – contemporary history.

Within the realm of observation Herodotus was faced with the same problem as modern ethnographers and anthropologists. We may describe alien cultures in terms of some model, whether it is a typological or ‘historical’ model, or a theory of the fundamental structure of all human societies; or we may less consciously describe a society in relation to our own. Herodotus attempted the latter, and his descriptions are often unbalanced by a search for comparisons and contrasts. He notices especially the similarities and the oppositions between Greeks and barbarians; he also (and here perhaps the entertainer is most apparent) has a keen eye for marvels and strange customs. Such an attitude can produce an unbalanced picture, as when he says ‘the Egyptians in most of their manners and customs exactly reverse the ordinary practices of mankind’ (Herodotus 2.35); but it is a less insidious fault than the imposition of a single conceptual scheme on the manifold variety of human societies. Herodotus remains not only the first practitioner of oral history, but also a model for a type of history whose importance is greater today than ever before.

Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, composed in Athens and in exile during and just after the war (432–04), contains a number of digressions on past history, which are mostly designed to correct or expose the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries; even when they show little sympathy for the problems of discovering about the past, they are written with care, using either rigorous argument or documentary evidence. In particular the first twenty-one chapters of book 1 are an attempt to demonstrate the type of historical generalization that can safely be made about the past; they represent a minimalist attitude to what can be known, and an implicit rejection of Herodotus’ attempt at more detailed history.

Thucydides pointed out many of the weaknesses of past history composed from oral tradition, but he failed to offer any serious alternative; it was his contemporaries who made the next major advance, by turning from general history to local history. A later critic described them:

These men made similar choices about the selection of their subjects, and their powers were not so very different from one another, some of them writing histories about the Greeks and some about the barbarians, and not linking all these to one another but dividing them according to peoples and cities, and writing about them separately, all keeping to one and the same aim: whatever oral traditions were preserved locally among peoples or cities, and whatever documents were stored in holy places or archives, to bring these to the common notice of everyone just as they were received, neither adding to them nor subtracting from them.

(Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Thucydides 5)

Whatever the aim of such writers, this is a somewhat favourable account of their actual achievement; still the discovery of local archives added a new dimension to the history of the past in at least one respect. The records surviving in local archives were primarily of chronological interest – lists of priests, victors at the games, and annual magistrates.

About the end of the fifth century the sophist and antiquarian lecturer Hippias of Elis published the Olympic victor list, which took chronology back to 776 in a four-year cycle: his system of Olympiad dating became standard for later historians. Another writer, Hellanikos of Lesbos, published a whole series of local histories in the late fifth century, whose character can be seen from two examples. The Priestesses of Hera at Argos was based on the records of the famous temple of Hera, which it apparently used to provide a general chronological framework for early Greek history: presumably the Argive records preserved not only the names of priestesses but also the length of office of each of them, and perhaps even some major historical events during their terms. Hellanikos’ other important work was a local history of Attica. It was almost certainly arranged round the list of annual magistrates going back to 683/2, of which a number of fragments on stone have been found in the Athenian agora. The fact that this complete list was publicly inscribed for the first time in the 420s, and not added to, suggests that it had probably been discovered by Hellanikos during his researches and brought by him to the attention of the Athenian people as an important historical document.

None of these works survive, but they were used by later authors, and in the case of Athens at least their characteristics are reasonably clear. They are marked by antiquarian interest in myth and origins, and by the importance they give to chronology; authors were often from priestly families (Kleidemos) or politicians (Androtion) or both (Philochoros). The influence of earlier local historians can be seen most clearly in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, a work which was discovered almost complete on a papyrus from Egypt in 1890. It is the only survivor of 158 constitutions of Greek states written by Aristotle and his pupils in the late fourth century, as part of his collection of evidence for the study of political science. The portion that survives is roughly eighty pages long, and consists of two sections, the first giving a constitutional history of Athens down to 404, the second describing the actual offices and working of the constitution at the time of writing. The historical part contains much material on political and institutional history, often distorted by later political prejudice; it must however be said that some of the political analyses are so crass and some of the documents so blatantly forged that many modern scholars have wanted to believe the work was compiled by a rather unintelligent pupil of Aristotle.

Later writers occasionally add information, which is of value only in so far as it derives from a trustworthy source. The most important of these authors are the Augustan geographer Strabo, Pausanias, the compiler of an antiquarian guide to Greece in the second century AD, and the essayist and biographer Plutarch (roughly AD 50–120), whose lives of Lykourgos, Solon and Themistokes reflect a late and imaginative tradition. Diodorus’ Historical Library (written in Rome before about 30 BC) preserves in its history of early Greece a précis of parts of the general history of the fourth century writer Ephoros, a rhetorical work largely derivative on Herodotus for this period.

The earliest inscriptions of more than a few words are in verse, but writing was quickly and widely used to record almost anything; for the period from the beginning of Greek writing down to the Persian Wars well over 5000 inscriptions are known, most of them of course very short. They are found in those types of material that can survive, bronze, lead, and especially pottery and stone; we should not forget the many documents that once existed on wood, parchment, wax tablets and papyrus. Some of the more important documents will be used as evidence later; these are mostly religious or commemorative (tombstones or dedications at shrines), or political (laws and treaties). The earliest surviving law is late seventh century, but the practice of putting up laws in public on stone or wood was common by the period of the Persian Wars.

The Mediterranean has been a hunting ground for European archaeologists for a century. The most useless site is the one which is still inhabited: Thebes, Chalcis, Greek Marseilles and early Syracuse are virtually unknown. The Athenian agora is only partly excavated because its true extent was miscalculated when the expropriations of owners by the government were carried out; more successful was the physical transplantation of the village of Delphi to a pleasanter and archaeologically barren site, against the wishes of the inhabitants and at French government expense (the French had won the right to excavate by removing the duty on Greek currants). Many sites in Asia Minor especially are disappointing because there was extensive rebuilding there in Hellenistic and Roman times: Delos and Cyrene are other examples. Particularly fruitful are sites that have been abandoned or sparsely occupied, with or without violent destruction (for instance Smyrna, the shrine of Perachora on the Isthmus of Corinth, Paestum); but the sacking and rebuilding of a city can also preserve – the survival of late archaic art is due largely to the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480 and the Periklean rebuilding, which caused the temple sculptures of Peisistratid Athens to be buried in the new foundations soon after they were carved. Excavations have been conducted at most of the obvious sites, the centres of archaic culture – Sparta, Aegina, Olympia, Athens, Samos, the Argolid, the Sicilian colonies; some less obvious sites turn out to be particularly rewarding because of their position – for instance Al Mina in north Syria or Naucratis in Egypt. Fringe areas such as the Scythian royal tombs or Celtic Gaul often provide important evidence because of their different burial customs: the cemeteries and other sites of Etruria have yielded so much Greek pottery that the eighteenth century thought Greek vases were Etruscan (Josiah Wedgwood called his pottery factory Etruria); there are few Greek museums whose collections can rival those of the great Italian Etruscan museums.

In relating different sites to each other and archaeological evidence in general to other types of evidence, the primary need is for an adequate chronological framework. For archaic Greece this is provided by pottery. In contrast to other artefacts pottery is of comparatively little value even when decorated, breakable, and when broken both useless and indestructible; in early Greece, painted pottery was a major art form whose styles varied from city to city and changed continually, so that it is comparatively easy to work out a relative chronology within each style. The styles of many areas were not widely distributed; Laconian pottery for instance is virtually confined to Sparta and its colony Tarentum; the various east Greek potteries are often difficult to distinguish, and their places of origin and chronological relationships are not yet fully determined. Such local styles are of limited interest in recording the presence of Greeks from a particular area in a particular place. Two cities, however, successively captured a wider market for their pottery: it is these styles, found all over the Mediterranean, which provide a relative chronology for archaeological sites in general, which can then be tied to absolute dates through known fixed points. Thus the dates of foundation of the Sicilian colonies given by Thucydides fix the beginnings of the early proto-Corinthian style; the sack of Athens in 480 offers another fixed point at the end of the archaic age, and there are a number of such fixes in between.

The pottery of Corinth was the first to achieve widespread circulation, helped of course by the city’s position as the starting point of the route to the west. Contact with the near east and the import of textiles and metalwork brought various decorative motifs to Greek art, and especially an interest in the realistic portrayal of animal and vegetable life: this orientalizing style appears in Corinthian pottery first about 725, when the late Geometric style gives way to early proto-Corinthian. The invention of the Black Figure technique of painting came within a generation (middle proto-Corinthian, c. 700–650); in this the figures are painted in black silhouette and details are then engraved on the figures after firing.

Corinthian pottery was the only ware widely exported for about a century; in the sixth century it was superseded by Athenian. Attic Black Figure began under the influence of Corinth (610–550), but quickly won pre-eminence, and in its mature phase (c. 570–25) reached an artistic perfection which has made it famous ever since. By about 530 a new technique of painting had been invented in Athens, the Red Figure technique, in which it is the background which is painted black, and the details of the figures are drawn in by brush. So individual are the styles of the different Black Figure and Red Figure artists that the same methods can be applied to distinguishing their hands as have been applied to Renaissance and later painters: the work of Sir John Beazley has resulted in the more or less certain identification of the work of over a thousand artists, and their classification both chronologically and into schools. Quite apart from our knowledge of painted pottery as an art form, this has given a chronological precision unknown in any other area of archaeology.

In more general terms the contribution of archaeology to the study of early Greek history is enormously greater than for most periods of history. It has explained many aspects of the origins and growth of Greek culture, its interdependence and local variations, the external influences on it and the means by which they arrived. It has illuminated the patterns of trade and colonization, and the major advances in warfare which lie at the basis of Greek geographical expansion and the diffusion of political power to a widening circle. Archaeology of course has obvious limitations, in that it can only offer partial insight into the less material aspects of life – religion, politics, culture and ideas; but it is more important to point out the areas where it still has more to contribute. Archaeologists have tended to concentrate on change rather than on continuity, and to direct their attention to certain areas of culture whose relative importance is not obvious. Thus we still know more about town centres than about towns, and about towns than about the countryside, or about weapons than about agricultural implements, and much more about the dead than the living. Despite the fact that Greek archaeology has stood as a model for other periods for so long, much remains to be done; and what is done will illuminate especially those areas about which literary and epigraphic sources are comparatively silent. The light thrown on the Dark Age in the last generation is an outstanding example of what can be achieved; and recent developments in survey archaeology have begun to illuminate the history of the countryside.