Hello! χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History episode 9: The Great Greek Reboot. I’m Scott Emmons. Today we’re leaving the Early Iron Age behind and moving into a time of tremendous changes. As we get into the 8th century BCE, we see major economic, social, cultural and political developments moving forward at a fast pace. This period is often called the Greek Renaissance. Which I think is a pretty good name for it, because there’s a sense of reawakening about it, a kind of renewed energy that fuels the development of Greek culture into the civilization that’s been so influential through the centuries.

Now, there’s a lot going on in this period. When I started pulling this episode together, I realized quickly that I was going to have to cover a wide range of topics. There are just a lot of moving parts. So when I was trying to organize it all into something cohesive, it felt like I was meandering from one thing to the next. And that’s when I hit on the guiding metaphor for this episode. The word “meander” comes from the Greek name of a river in Anatolia, what’s now Turkey. And that Meander River was famous for its extremely winding path. So much so that the term came to be used for anything with a lot of twists and turns. You’ve probably seen the intricate border design called the Greek Key that appears in so much Greek art and architecture. Another name for that is the Meander pattern.

 So this episode is going to twist like the Meander from trade to religion to literature, politics, and other topics, but like the turns of the river, they’re all part of a whole. As we follow its course, we’ll see that this is the period when ancient Greece as we typically imagine it starts to take shape. It’s also the earliest period in Greece that’s considered truly historical. By that I mean there are a few events that we can date with some degree of accuracy, and that ancient authors can tell us something about. So, starting in the 8th century BCE, we’re in what’s known as the Archaic Period, which will last until we get to the Persian wars between two and three centuries later. 

 We’ll start our winding journey with one of the big changes that bring us out of the Early Iron Age — a dramatic increase in population. Now, like so much in ancient Greek history, this is debated. One book will tell you there was a population explosion in the 8th century. Another will say no, there was some gradual population growth over a couple of centuries, but nothing so dramatic. It comes down to how you interpret the archaeological evidence. For example, there’s a big increase in the number of settlements, which would suggest more people, but that could be explained by redistribution of population as opposed to population growth. I’m sticking with a more or less orthodox view, what you’ll find in most textbooks, that the 8th century BCE saw significant population growth.

 Along with that growth, there’s a big upswing in economic activity. We can see that especially in renewed trade with the Near East. That had never been cut off completely, and there was a gradual increase in the 9thcentury, but now it accelerates. And if we compare it to the bustling trade we saw back in the Bronze Age, there’s one key difference. The Phoenicians have now become a powerful presence in the eastern Mediterranean, and they become major trading partners with the Greeks. These Phoenician traders would often be the intermediaries for access to goods from places farther inland, like Mesopotamia. So in this period we see more luxury goods like jewelry, ivory, expensive dyes and so on coming into Greece for use by the wealthy. And not just luxury goods, but raw materials. Greek traders at this time were always on the lookout for sources of metals, particularly iron, copper and tin, which was the hardest to get. With more wealth and more metal available, there’s a revival of bronze working. Of course, they don’t go back to making swords and farm tools out of bronze. Iron is much better for those. But bronze is easier to work, to mold into various shapes, and on top of that, it just looks cool. So in the 8th century we start to see more craft work in bronze.

 But the Greeks aren’t just getting goods from these other regions. They’re bringing in ideas. Stories. Artistic motifs. In the last core episode, we talked about the Protogeometric style in pottery, which then developed into the full-on Geometric style, where often the entire surface of a vessel is covered with intricate geometric designs. That style continues in the 8th century, but now it starts to include figures of animals and people. And the end of the century ushers in what’s known as the Orientalizing period, when floral motifs, sphinxes and other elements taken from the Near East become prominent in Greek vase painting. Myths and legends are also being transmitted and adapted to Greek sensibilities. Of course, some of those stories may have come to Greece long before this time. It's hard to tell.  What we do know is that there are unmistakable Near Eastern influences in the long poem called the Theogony, written by Hesiod around 700 BCE, which describes the birth and early history of the cosmos and the gods.  Many of his stories are clearly connected to earlier Mesopotamian tales known from cuneiform tablets. 

 Well, we’ve already meandered from trade goods to cultural influences, and the next bend will take us to another new development. For first time, we start to see monumental temples appearing in Greece. These are not yet the gleaming marble temples we think of from the classical era. They start as wood and mud brick structures, but they already show some characteristic features like freestanding columns and cult statues inside. Now, Greek religious shrines and sanctuaries had been around for centuries before this. These would typically be a place where a deity was thought to have been born or to have performed some important action — maybe where they vanquished a monster or created a sacred spring. So these holy places already exist, but with more wealth available, Greek communities are ready to honor the gods with bigger, more elaborate structures. And at this time when Greece is absorbing so many influences from the Near East, I think it’s pretty certain that the temples were another cultural import, because the Greeks would certainly have known about the great temples of Egypt and the Near East.  

 But temples are only half the story. Because when you go to a religious festival or a ceremony in ancient Greece, you often want to take a gift in the hope of pleasing the god and getting some benefit in return. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a big gift. One of the most common items dedicated in these sanctuaries is a fibula, which is basically the ancient equivalent of a safety pin — a very important item, because that was what held your clothes together. These could be simple bronze or iron pins, or if you’re in a slightly higher economic bracket, they could be fancier versions with beads or ivory attached. Wealthier people might dedicate jewelry or other precious objects. 

 Now, dedications at religious sites were nothing new, but their number skyrocketed in the 8th century BCE. And there’s more going on than just an increase in disposable wealth. When you think about the kind of monumental temple we’ve been talking about, it requires a high level of community organization just to build and maintain it. This isn’t something a single agricultural village is likely to build. There’s a larger community involved, and there needs to be some kind of central authority to direct it all. So this is one indication that we’re moving into an early stage of the Greek city-state, or what the Greeks called the polis. We’ll talk more about exactly what that means in an upcoming episode, but for now I’ll just say that one of the hallmarks of the polis is public engagement. If you’re a person of any means in a polis, it’s expected that you’re going to be active in public life. And one way you can see this developing early on is in the way rich people show off their wealth through temple dedications. 

 There’s an interesting transition going on here. Before this time, one of the main ways of displaying wealth was with elaborate funerary displays, including burial goods and grave markers. If you go to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, you’ll see a famous example known as the Dipylon Vase from about 750 BCE. This is a gigantic ceramic pot, over five feet tall, completely covered with those intricate geometric designs that were typical of the period. But it also shows that newer trend of representing human figures. It served as the grave marker for a wealthy woman, and one panel shows a scene of the woman lying on her funeral bed with mourners all around her. 

 A vessel like that would have been very expensive to produce, and it would send a message that a wealthy person was buried there. But in the second half of the 8th century, there’s a big drop-off in the number of those fancy grave markers, just when dedications at religious shrines are becoming more and more common. It may be that as the polis, the city-state, is taking shape, there’s social pressure to spend money on public dedications rather than private displays. I would imagine a lot of rich people would welcome a new opportunity to display their wealth publicly, in the way today’s public benefactors often like to have their names displayed on hospital wings, libraries, and so on. In any case, it makes a different kind of statement. Not just “Look at how rich I am, that I can afford this fancy grave marker,” but “Look at how generous I am, dedicating this magnificent gold cup to Apollo.”

 Now, typically, the kind of sanctuary I’ve been talking about was a local institution that would serve one community. But a few religious centers and festivals associated with them started to attract people from a wider area. And there’s no better example of that than the Olympic games. From our modern secular perspective, it’s easy to forget that this was a religious festival. Every four years, visitors would gather at Olympia in the Peloponnese, not just to run races, wrestle, and throw discuses, but to honor Zeus and offer dedications. Ancient sources most often dated the first Olympics to 776 BCE. We can’t take that as a really solid, accurate date, but from both archaeology and Greek writings, we know it’s not far off. And because it’s one of the earliest events that we can date at least approximately, it’s become traditional to say 776 BCE is the start of the historical period in Greece. Besides, if you’re an American, it’s a really easy date to remember.

 Well, as the Olympic festival grew, it attracted athletes and spectators from all over the Greek world. Which gives us a clue that in this period, a sense of a common cultural identity is developing, a feeling that people from different regions are all Greeks. Now, this in no way means they were politically unified. The ideal of the Greek city-state was that it was autonomous. Ancient Greece was never anything like a nation state; there was no central authority. But at the same time there was a growing sense that Greek people had something in common that made them distinct from foreign cultures.

 Well, before the first break, the Meander is now going to take a sharp turn toward another Near Eastern import — for my money, the most important one of all — namely, alphabetic writing. We don’t know exactly who started it or how it happened, but the Greeks took a Phoenician alphabet and adapted it for their own language. And in the process, they introduced an important innovation. This Phoenician writing system was a semitic script, and as such, it had no vowels. To us, it may seem like a no-brainer that an alphabet has to have signs for vowel sounds. But to ancient semitic cultures, it apparently wasn’t so important. A familiar example is biblical Hebrew. It has consonants, but no vowels. Modern printed editions have dots added in certain positions relative to the letters to indicate the vowel sounds, but a traditional Torah that’s used in a service has only the consonants, so the reader has to really know their Hebrew and fill in the vowels. Well, from the very start, the Greeks seem to have said, “Come on, we have all these vowel sounds; we need signs for them too!” So they adapted some characters representing sounds that Greek didn’t use and turned them into vowels. Eventually, they even went farther and invented different characters for different vowel lengths. So for example you could have o-micron and o-mega, “little o and big o.” In this early period, there was no standard Greek alphabet. Different communities had their own variations. But the basic structure was fairly consistent. And once it caught on, alphabetic writing spread like wildfire across the Greek world.

 To me, one of the most interesting things about this new writing system is that the Greeks seem to have used it right away for literary purposes. You’ll remember that back in the Bronze Age they had the Linear B script, which was apparently used only as a tool for recording inventories, transactions, that kind of thing. There’s no Linear B literature that we know of. But one of the earliest examples of this new Greek writing system is a literary reference. It’s an inscription scratched into a Greek cup that was found on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. And the first line reads, “I am the cup of Nestor,” which is pretty certainly a reference to the cup of the hero Nestor in the Iliad, which was supposed to be so heavy that no ordinary man could lift it. Some scholars have even gone so far as to argue that the Greeks developed their alphabet for the express purpose of writing down the Homeric epics. To me it seems much more likely that the Greeks saw the advantages of the Phoenician alphabet for trade and adapted it for that purpose. But it is striking how early it caught on as a medium for literary texts.

 Well, however it started, alphabetic writing was a game changer for Greek culture. For one thing, you could now have a fixed text of the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. That’s huge, because, as we saw a couple of episodes ago, Homer had tremendous authority in Greek culture. The alphabet also means that it’s now possible for laws to be written down and published. And that’s the first step toward breaking the aristocratic stranglehold on power. Before writing, only the people in power know what the laws are. But when a law can be inscribed on a stone and set up in a public place, anyone who can read has access to it. Even if you can’t read, you can get someone to interpret it for you. In the 8th century we’re still a long way from anything like a democracy, but when laws start to be written down, it will have a leveling effect.

 Well, we’ve covered a lot, and it feels like high time for a break. Epic Greek History is still ad-free, and I don’t ever plan to put any content behind paywalls. If you’d like to help defray the cost of producing the podcast, you can hit that “Support” button at www.epicgreekhistory.com and subscribe for as little as three dollars a month. If you’re like me, you’d fast-forward through ads anyway. But I hope you won’t fast-forward through…

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 I can’t leave the topic of writing behind without mentioning one of my favorite Greek words — “boustrophedon.” When the Greeks started using their alphabet, it took a while before they really settled the question of which direction written text should go. Most early inscriptions run from left to right, but a some run right to left. And some even zigzag back and forth. That’s the pattern called boustrophedon. A great New York Times crossword puzzle word if I ever heard one. In Greek, “boustrophedon” literally means “ox-turning.” Meaning the writing is like an ox plowing a field, and when it gets to the end of one row, it turns around and goes the other way. I can proudly say I learned this word at the age of seven. I can less proudly say I learned it from the professor on Gilligan’s Island. And that’s your moment of Greek!

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 We’ve been talking about economic and cultural developments in the 8th century BCE, and our meandering path now brings us to one of the most fundamental changes — a shift in the way land is used. Back in the Early Iron Age, you had more people engaged in herding animals that would graze in open fields. And that’s an effective use of land for a small population where some people may even be semi-nomadic. But with the population growth we talked about earlier, there are a lot more mouths to feed, and growing grain is a much more efficient way to provide the calories to keep those greater numbers of people alive. So over time, there’s a shift from herding toward agriculture. Of course that’s not black-and-white. People didn’t stop growing crops in the Early Iron Age, and throughout Greek history people continued to raise sheep and goats, even some cattle. But the general trend is that much of the best land comes under cultivation for grain.

 We don’t have a lot of evidence for exactly how this happened, but it’s a good guess that the wealthiest and most powerful people would be in a position to get control of the best arable land. As my father, the Louisiana farm boy, used to say, “Them that has, gits.” Well, having the movers and shakers in charge of grain fields rather than grazing herds makes for a more settled society. And as this happens, a different kind of political structure emerges. By the end of the 8th century, most of the Greek communities, at least those that are developing into city-states, have left kingship behind. Even those less than all-powerful kings that seem to have been typical of the Early Iron Age have mostly faded away. There are some exceptions. A few city-states continue to have hereditary kings, and Sparta has its strange system of dual kingship. But more typically in Greek cities, kingship has given way to an aristocracy, that is, a small group of wealthy landowners. And so it’s now a council of these aristocrats that holds the reins of power.

 Now, the word “aristocracy” itself has a lot to unpack. “Aristos” in Greek means “best.” It’s related to the word “arete,” usually translated as "excellence.” We’ve talked about the competitive spirit that drove individuals to prove their arete in comparison with others. But this whole class of people also has a claim to be the best simply by birth. Aristocratic families traced their bloodlines back to ancient heroes. And those heroes were typically descended from gods. So if you were an aristocrat, you could claim divine ancestry. It's probably no accident that in the 8th century BCE, Bronze Age tombs that had been forgotten for centuries started to become hero shrines. A hero receives cult worship as a semi-divine figure and is honored with sacrifices or other rituals. So if you’re an aristocrat who claims descent from a particular hero, and you can claim that this ancient tomb holds the remains of your ancestor, you can see how that would be a big boost to your prestige. It might even give you a stronger claim to a prime piece of land if your ancestor’s hero shrine is located there. In any case, it would certainly reinforce your identity as one of the “best” people by virtue of your lineage.

 So these nobles have their claim to power based on their birth. Of course, wealth plays a big part too, and that mainly boils down to agricultural wealth. But even though the aristocrats are the biggest landowners, they’re not the only ones.  There are also small farmers who own modest plots of land that can support a family and, with a little luck, even produce a surplus. Now, the evidence is pretty murky for who owned what land. As a working hypothesis, let’s assume that most of the best land for grain production is in the hands of wealthy aristocrats. So a lot of these small farms would have to be made productive by improving soil that may be less than ideal and planting whatever crops would grow there. Some scholars talk about “intensive farming” as the key to making the land productive in a situation like this. In other words, a wide variety of crops is planted, using every available bit of arable soil. The combination of crops would vary from one farm to another. One might have a patch of land that’s great for olive trees, another for grapes, and so on. 

 A classical scholar by the name of Victor Davis Hanson has argued that we can actually get a glimpse of a farm like this at the end of Homer’s Odyssey. After all of Odysseus’s wandering, he’s returned home to Ithaka and reclaimed his place as king. And now he goes to see his old father Laertes, who’s been reduced to the status of a private farmer in his son’s absence. Now, I always feel like we’re cherry picking a bit when we cite Homer and say this thing belongs to one period and that one is from another. But Hanson makes a plausible case that Laertes’ farm is a fairly accurate reflection of an independent farm around 700 BCE — one that would be familiar to Homer’s audience. Here’s what Homer tells us, as translated by Robert Fagles. Quote:

 Odysseus and his men had stridden down from town

and quickly reached Laertes’ large, well-tended farm

that the old king had wrested from the wilds,

years ago, laboring long and hard. His lodge was here

and around it stretched a row of sheds where fieldhands,

bondsmen who did his bidding, sat and ate and slept. 

With an old Sicilian woman, too, much in charge,

who faithfully looked after her aged master

out on his good estate remote from town.

Unquote

 In those few lines, Homer gives us quite a bit of detail. We hear that Laertes’ farm is large and well-tended. “Large,” of course, in the context of 8th-century family farms. By modern standards it would have been very small, just a few acres. We also learn that Laertes has converted a plot of land from wilderness into farmland, and it’s cost him a lot of hard work. He has his house there, and also dwellings for a few slaves who work as fieldhands. We’ll talk a little more about slavery later in the episode, but for the moment I’ll just point out that Laertes is nothing like our image of a plantation owner of the old South, sitting on his porch and sipping mint juleps while gangs of slaves do all the hard labor. He’s out there working the fields himself, right along with the slaves. In fact, when Odysseus first meets his father in this scene, he’s digging in the dirt around a sapling, dressed in his work clothes — an old, patched-up tunic, leather leggings that serve as kneepads, and work gloves. Well, a little further on, Odysseus refers to what’s growing on Laertes’ farm. Quote:

 All’s well-kept here; not one thing in the plot,

no plant, no fig, no pear, no olive, no vine,

not a vegetable lacks your tender loving care.

Unquote

Keep in mind that a farm like this would only be a few acres, but Laertes is growing quite a variety of crops, from fruit trees to olives to grapes and vegetables. And even though Homer emphasizes what a low state the old king has sunk to, the overall impression of the farm is that it’s well managed and very productive.

 Laertes is of course a legendary character, not a historical figure. But there was a class of small, independent landowners who worked farms that probably looked a lot like what Homer describes. And the very existence of this group is significant. In another time or under different conditions, you could easily have had a system where the nobles would own virtually all the land and they’d have serfs to do the farm work. So these people came to be an important part of the population in the early Greek city-state. The big question is, “How important?” There’s been a lot of debate about that, and it’s closely tied to their role as citizen soldiers in the hoplite infantry, the iconic Greek fighting force. Hanson, the scholar I mentioned earlier, argues that these so-called “middling farmers” became the backbone of the city-state, in large part because of their importance as hoplite soldiers, so that their values became the bedrock of the Greek polis. Other scholars have pushed back against that view and argued that the “leisure class” was dominant in both the military and the development of other city-state institutions. We can table that debate for now, but it’s going to come up again in a later episode on the rise of the polis. 

 For now, we can meander over to a related topic, the basic social structure that’s in place by this time. Whether you’re a wealthy landowner or one of those small, independent farmers, your basic social unit is what the Greeks called an oikos. Which can just mean a house, but more broadly it means a household. Our word “economy” comes from the Greek oikonomia, which means the management of a household. That was something the Greeks took very seriously. The oikos consisted of the family — a husband and wife, their children, along with all the family’s property. As you’d expect in this early, patriarchal society, the father is assumed to be the boss. 

 Ideally, the oikos is self-sufficient. And the economic foundation is a plot of land called a kleros. The literal meaning is “allotment,” which is intriguing, because it’s not really clear how the earliest of them were originally acquired. In any case, the kleros is hereditary; it’s passed down from father to son. And in that kind of system, there’s always the question of what happens if there’s more than one son. You can have a system of primogeniture, where the oldest son inherits everything, and then what happens to the others? The Greek solution was to divide the property equally among sons, which presents another obvious problem: What if my part of my parents’ kleros isn’t enough to support me and my family? You can see where that’s going to cause difficulties as time goes on. As for daughters, they don’t inherit any property, although it’s expected that some of the family’s resources will go toward a dowry. Once the daughter is married, typically at what we would consider a very young age, she becomes a part of her husband’s oikos. The role of women in ancient Greek society is a huge topic, and it’ll have to have its own episode down the line.

 So the household has the kleros as its property. But another form of property — at least as defined by the culture — is slaves. And in fact, even though slavery was nothing new, this period seems to be when chattel slavery really becomes deeply rooted in Greek culture. Those intensive farming techniques, with different crops ripening at different times of the year, create a need for farmers to have help year-round, and the solution is to acquire a slave or two. So a typical small farmer would have one or two slaves to help in the fields and maybe a female slave Like Laertes’ old Sicilian woman, to help with the cooking, spinning, weaving, and so on.

 Now, before I say this next thing, I want to make it clear that I’m in no way a defender of slavery in any form. That shouldn’t even need to be said, but in the strange times we’re living in, I’m afraid it’s necessary. I believe in human rights, and that’s just incompatible with the idea of one person owning another. But few people in ancient Greece would have seen it that way. And in fact, from a purely material standpoint, there were worse things you could be than a slave. If you were from a poor family that had no inherited land, the Greeks had a word for you — akleros, literally “without a kleros,” without that familial plot of land. Such a person might go out and try to get by as a sort of squatter on some marginal land somewhere, which would be very hard to do. Or you could be what was called a thete, spelled t-h-e-t-e. A thete was essentially a temporary hired laborer. A gig worker. You’d hope to get hired to help with planting, harvest, or whatever as long as someone needed you, and then you’d have to move on and look for your next job. 

 In Greek society of the time, being a thete was considered to be about as low as you could go. That’s in part because of that ideal of self-sufficiency. In theory, the oikos should produce everything the family needs. So working someone else’s land just to feed yourself for a day was considered a shameful way to live. A slave at least had a place in the oikos, so they were in a sense a part of the family. On the other hand, I don’t want to give the impression that the average slave had it easy. A slave who displeased the master was subject to physical punishment and had no way to fight back. In that kind of power dynamic, sexual exploitation must have been routine. And even a humane master might fall on hard times and be forced to sell a slave, and the next master might not be so nice. So being a slave was a hard lot, even if a thete was considered somehow even lower.

 Now, everything I’ve said so far has been in the context of agriculture, for the simple reason that ancient Greek society was overwhelmingly agrarian. But you still had to have potters, blacksmiths, shipbuilders, people with specialized skills to make those items that everyone uses. Where did they fit in? Well, as important as they were, they were regarded, especially by the aristocracy, as maybe just a notch above thetes. If you made your living doing craft work, you probably didn’t have an ancestral kleros, so you were at a level below landowners. If you were highly skilled, you might attach yourself to a wealthy patron or maybe an important religious shrine. And you might even be admired for your mastery of your craft. It’s an interesting dichotomy, because the Greeks always seem to have admired excellence in any field. If there was an exceptionally well-made object like a sculpture or a gold drinking vessel, they liked knowing, “Oh, Theodorus of Samos made that.” 

 Still, a craft worker was never going to be very high in the social hierarchy. Status was very much tied to land ownership. A successful artisan might become comparatively wealthy, but how do you even define wealth in a society where money hasn’t been invented yet? Fundamentally, wealth means agricultural produce or livestock. And if you’re not producing that on your own land, you’re in some way dependent on others for your living. This situation changes quite a bit over the centuries, especially in cities like Athens and others that became great commercial centers. In the classical period, successful craftsmen could eventually become very influential in the state. But even then, if you look at the works of aristocratic writers like Plato, such people are thought to be pretty low in the pecking order.

 And that’ll take us to our next break. When we come back, we’ll hear directly from one of those small farmer types we’ve been talking about. But first…

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 We’ve seen that there was a big upswing in dedications at temples in the 8th century BCE, and also that there was renewed activity in bronzeworking. The two go hand in hand, because one iconic type of high-end temple dedication was a bronze tripod. That word can be misleading if you’re hearing about this for the first time. We hear “tripod” and we think of three legs meeting at the top, like a photographer’s tripod. A Greek tripod was typically a cauldron or a bowl with three legs attached, or it could be a three-legged ring that the cauldron would sit on. A basic, utilitarian version would be used for cooking, and it would generally be made of iron or clay. But bronze tripods were often used ceremonially, for offering sacrifices. They were prestige items, and they could be very finely crafted and decorated with sculptural elements. Homer routinely mentions them as items of gift exchange between nobles. They were often given as prizes in contests, both athletic and otherwise. In fact, the street that’s often hailed as the oldest in Europe is the Street of Tripods in Athens, so-called because it was lined with monuments dedicated by victors in the dramatic competitions. And that’s today’s random fact!

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 At this point, the Meander can finally stop winding around so much and start following a straighter course. For the rest of the episode, we’ll look at this early stage in the development of the Greek city-state from one person’s perspective. Thanks to the miracle of alphabetic writing, we actually have a firsthand account from a small landowner — namely, the poet Hesiod, the same one who wrote the Theogony that I mentioned earlier. Hesiod also wrote a long poem called Works and Days, which is ostensibly a book of practical advice for how to run a farm. In that way it’s kind of like an early Greek Old Farmer’s Almanac. But before he gets to his nuggets of wisdom about when to plant and so on, he tells us a lot about his own situation. Now, I should qualify that by saying not everyone believes Hesiod was really the kind of farmer he claims to be. Some scholars think his whole persona in the poem is fictional. And I’ll admit, it seems a little suspicious to me that a farmer trying to eke out a living on a little scrap of land would have the leisure to pursue the kind of literary career that Hesiod evidently had. But, allowing for some exaggeration, I don’t see a compelling reason to think Hesiod isn’t who he says he is. In any case, Hesiod, whether fictional or autobiographical, can give us some good insights into the political world of his time.

 Early in the poem, Hesiod tells us that his father settled in the region of Boeotia, in a little village called Askra, which is, and I quote: “bad in winter, troublesome in summer, never good.” So this is the land Hesiod has to farm, and to make matters worse, he has a dispute with his brother Perses about the division of their inheritance. Remember that sons were supposed to divide their inherited land equally, which was bound to cause trouble now and then. Well, it’s caused trouble for Hesiod, because according to him, Perses has cheated him out of his fair share and bribed the nobles to deliver what he calls a “crooked judgment.” His word for these nobles is one we’ve seen a lot by now — basileis, the plural of basileus. Plural because there’s no single king anymore, no monarch, but a council of nobles who serve as both legislators and judges. And Hesiod adds a great descriptive adjective, calling them “gift-devouring judges,” in other words greedy for bribes. 

 So a lot of the early part of Works and Days is Hesiod lashing out at his brother and the nobles for their shady arrangement. He starts with a fable about a hawk and a nightingale. The hawk catches the nightingale in its claws, and when the victim cries out for mercy, the hawk says, “Look, I’m stronger than you, so you’ll go where I take you. Maybe I’ll eat you, maybe I’ll let you go.” And he ends with the line, “Only a fool tries to fight against the stronger.” The clear message is, “Might makes right.” But as soon as Hesiod finishes the story, he makes a sudden about-face. He says to his brother: “But you, Perses, listen to justice and do not foster violence.” He addresses Perses by name, but he’s really talking to the nobles too. And his message is, don’t be like the hawk. Because you have a responsibility to act justly within the community. Here in the infancy of the Greek city-state, its basic values are already taking shape. The city can only thrive when its leaders are just. Hesiod depicts Justice as a goddess, Dike, and here's what he says, as translated by Dorothea Wender in the Penguin edition. Quote:

 …The god of Oaths 

runs faster than a crooked verdict; when

Justice is dragged out of the way by men

Who judge dishonestly and swallow bribes,

A struggling sound is heard; then she returns,

Back to the city and the homes of men,

Wrapped in a mist and weeping, and she brings

Harm to the crooked men who drove her out.

But when the judges of a town are fair

To foreigner and citizen alike,

Their city prospers and her people bloom;

Since Peace is in the land, her children thrive;

Zeus never marks them out for cruel war.

Famine and blight do not beset the just,

Who till their well-worked fields and feast. 

Unquote.

 Hesiod says in that passage that Zeus and Dike, Justice, punish crooked leaders. But it doesn’t stop there. He goes on, quote:

 And often, all the city suffers for

Their wicked schemes, and on these men, from heaven,

The son of Kronos sends great punishments,

Both plague and famine, and the people die.

Their wives are barren, and their villages

Dwindle, according to the plan of Zeus.

At other times, the son of Kronos will

Destroy their army, or will snatch away

Their city wall, or all their ships at sea.

You lords, take notice of this punishment.

The deathless gods are never far away.

Unquote

 So if the nobles act unjustly, they’ll not only suffer retribution themselves, they’ll bring it on the entire community. 

 Hesiod has his beef with these “gift-eating nobles,” and he has his own views about how they should govern, but this passage is also interesting for what he doesn’t say. There’s an element of class conflict for sure, but Hesiod is no revolutionary. He never says we need to rise up and overthrow this corrupt system. The rule of the aristocracy is a given, and Hesiod doesn’t say anything against that power structure. What he does say is that those in power have a responsibility to practice justice for the good of the community. We’re already a long way from the Homeric heroes, whose greatest purpose is to gain honor and glory for themselves. Here the focus is on making sure the city thrives. And that can only happen when it’s governed according to law and justice.

 A few lines later, Hesiod makes a telling remark about what separates human beings from animals. Quote:

The son of Kronos made this law for men:

That animals and fish and winged birds

Should eat each other, for they have no law,

But mankind has the law of Right from him,

Which is the better way.

Unquote

 It seems clear to me that this is Hesiod’s answer to the fable of the hawk and the nightingale.  “Might makes right” is an okay way for animals to live, because they have nothing better. The hawk has no higher law to obey, so the nightingale is at its mercy. But humans need law and justice to live well. The polis provides the necessary structure. Around 350 years later, Aristotle would famously write that a human being was a politikon zoon, a “political animal.” That translation is a little misleading, because when we hear “political,” we think of election campaigns, slogans, and whatnot. But in Greek, “politikon” just means “having to do with the polis.” For Aristotle, a “political animal” is a being that belongs in a polis. Someone who doesn’t need a polis is somehow not human — either a beast or a god. Three and a half centuries before Aristotle, Hesiod says something similar. Humankind has the law of justice, which is the better way.

 And that’s a wrap for Episode 9. The Greek renaissance is an enormous subject, and I haven’t included everything. One very important development that begins in this period is the spread of Greek settlements to southern Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean. That’s a big enough topic that I’m going to devote a separate episode to it. Meanwhile, in the next full-length episode, we’ll do a deep dive into the polis, what it was and what made it distinctively Greek. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, and if you did, I’d be very grateful for a positive review. If you’re curious about what those giant funerary vases and bronze tripods looked like, you can see images at epicgreekhistory.substack.com. And if you have comments or corrections, please email me at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. Or leave a comment on Instagram or Facebook. I’m Scott Emmons. My theme music was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.