Boardman J., Hammond N.G. L. The Cambridge Ancient History Volume 3, Part 3: The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries BC
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MACEDONIA
285
Macedones spoke Illyrian or Thracian. Indeed, it has become clear from
the inscribed stelai at Vergina which Andronikos has found recently,
that the fathers of Philip's Macedonians had entirely Greek names, and
we may deduce that their parents spoke Greek at the beginning of the
fourth century. What then of earlier times ? Hesiod certainly thought
them to be Greek-speaking; otherwise he would not have made Magnes
and Macedon into cousins of Dorus, Xouthus and Aeolus, who were
the eponymous ancestors of the three main forms of the Greek language
(Dorian, Ionian and Aeolian). Hellanicus, writing late in the fifth
century, made Macedon a son of Aeolus; he would not have done so
unless he had supposed the Macedones to be speakers of some form
of Aeolic Greek. As the twin people, the Magnetes, did speak an Aeolic
dialect (this we know from inscriptions), there is no good reason to
deny that the Macedones spoke an Aeolic dialect, retarded indeed and
broad, because the Macedones, like the Vlachs of Vlakholivadhi, had
been a self-sufficient community on the foothills of Olympus for many
centuries.
43
If we are correct in our conclusions, the Greek speech of the tribes
in Epirus and in Macedonia west of the Axius should not be ascribed
to the influence of the Greek colonies on their coasts. Nowhere in fact
did Greek colonies convert the peoples of a large hinterland to Greek
speech; for the differences in outlook and economy between colonists
and natives were too great. Equally so in Epirus and Macedonia. For
example, Eretria planted a colony at Methone before 700 B.C., but it
had no effect whatsoever on the culture of the people who buried their
dead at Vergina, only some fifteen miles away as the crow flies. So too
the Greek colonies in Chalcidice had no influence on the Bottiaei during
our period, as far as the archaeological evidence goes. If these tribes
of the hinterland spoke Greek, it was because they had done so before
the Dark Age. What we have seen in this chapter is the consolidation
of the Greek-speaking tribes in the north, which enabled them to fulfil
their future role of defending the frontiers of
a
city-state civilization and
later of leading that civilization into wider areas.
43
See CAH m.i
2
, %^S for a different view. There is a summary of the problem in
E
34,11
46ff.
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CHAPTER
41
CENTRAL GREECE AND THESSALY
W.
G. G.
FORREST
For the period before about 700
B.C.
the chief tools
of
the historian
of
Central Greece must be the spade
or
the map, though a few strokes
of
ancient pens add a welcome touch of political definition to some events
of the second half
of
the eighth century
in
stories
of
colonization and
especially of the Lelantine War (CA.H
in.
i
2
,
pp.
,760—3,
and here
ch.
39^)
which involved
not
only the cities
of
Euboea,
but
southern Thessaly,
Megara, Delphi and other states besides.
More importantly, it was about the same time that Boeotia produced
in the poet Hesiod our only contemporary literary evidence for the social
and political atmosphere
of
Late Geometric Greece.
1
1.
HESIOD
Hesiod's life spanned, roughly, the second half
of
the eighth century,
spilling over, perhaps, into the seventh. His father,
a
trader
of
Aeolic
Cyme, had turned his back on the dangers of the sea to settle on
a
farm
at Ascra
on the
north-west slopes
of
Mt Helicon,
a
miserable village
according
to
the poet, awful
in
winter and worse
in
summer, but
not
perhaps quite so bad as Hesiod's gloom would have us think
-
at least
it was famed
in
antiquity
for
its beetroot (Ath. 4D). There Hesiod and
his brother Perses were born and there, after their father's death, they
fell
to
quarelling over the estate,
a
quarrel which prompted that hard
picture
of
the farmer's year and stern sermon on justice, the Works
and
Days, this around 700 B.C. Somewhat earlier
he
composed
his
other
surviving work, the
Theogony,
an account of the genealogies of the gods
of Greece attached
to
the myth
of
the succession
of
Cronus
to
Uranus
and
of
Zeus to Cronus as Lord of the Gods, the backbone of the poem.
Of other works we have only fragments.
Hesiod, like Homer, lived
in the
time
of
transition from oral
to
written composition. Indeed
it
seems likely that each was the first,
or
among
the
first,
to
commit
to
manuscript his own version
of a
long
oral tradition.
We can
assess their merits
as
artists
but not
with
any
1
A
71;
A
72;
E 144.
286
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HESIOD
287
precision their own contribution in terms of content or the stages of
growth in what they inherited.
For the historian two questions pose themselves. First that of the
inspiration of
the
Theogony.
Primitive accounts of the origin of
the
world
and the gods abound from Polynesia to Persia, from Germany to Japan,
but the closeness of parallels with near-Eastern versions, especially with
the Babylonian Enuma EM, show that the Greek was no spontaneous
local creation. But when imported? Two periods of oriental contact
suggest themselves, the Minoan-Mycenaean and that of the re-opening
of eastern links with the founding of Al Mina, a little before 800
B.C.
For the former it is argued that time would be needed for the complete
absorption of eastern elements, for the latter that it offers more positive
association of the east with Greece, especially with Central Greece, and
that seventy-five years or so would be time enough. But even in this
second context further choice is offered. That the story came via the
Hittite empire to Phrygia and thence across the Aegean is unlikely if
not impossible. But a route from Al Mina through Crete to Delphi (both
figure in the
Theogony)
is as attractive as the more direct one to Euboea
and thence Boeotia; either is
a
trifle more attractive than the assumption
of a Mycenaean survival. If so, we have a powerful religious element
to add to a possible political and a striking artistic one in the sum of
Greece's debt to the east.
2
Herodotus (11.
5 3)
may not have been too
far from the truth when he said that Hesiod and Homer were the first
to set down a 'theogony' for the Greeks and give the gods their
appropriate functions. He need only have added a note on their sources.
Secondly we have to ask about the society in which and for which
Hesiod wrote. Here the difference of his subject-matter from that of
Homer justifies the assumption that what he says still applies in his own
day even if much of it was inherited from the past, an assumption
bolstered, for the
Works and
Days,
by the autobiographical presentation.
This is the origin of the gods we still revere today. This is how farmers
should plan their year now, be it the way they always have or not.
The structure of Greek societies around 700 B.C. was a simple one.
There was the
demos,
either the whole people or the people excluding
those who in Solon's later words 'had power'. At this time it was the
aristocrats who had power. There were also slaves and in a few cases,
but not in Boeotia, a class somewhere 'between free and slave'. Hesiod
was of the
demos
in its second sense, not perhaps so poor a member as
his surly grumblings might suggest, for he speaks of farm-labourers and
slaves, of mules and oxen, but what mattered in society was the line
between noble and commoner, not that between richer and poorer, and
Hesiod was of the commons.
2
A 71 Introduction; E 145.
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288 4
1
- CENTRAL GREECE AND THESSALY
His rulers
he
calls
basileis,
a
word which normally means ' kings'
but
here
as
elsewhere
can
hardly
be
pushed further
up the
social scale than
'lords'.
His
attitude towards them
is
somewhat equivocal.
In the
Theogony
(esp.
8off) they
are
eloquent and just, the fathers of their people,
in
the
Works
and
Days ruthless, corrupt, oppressive.
But
the
contradiction is easily resolved.
The
Theogony
may well have
been
the
poem which Hesiod sang
at the
games
in
honour
of the
nobleman Amphidamas
of
Chalcis;
for,
therefore,
an
audience
of
noblemen. Abuse would not have won
him the
tripod
of
which
he was
so proud {Works 654flF).
3
In
humbler circles
he
could tell
the
truth
as
he
saw it,
that some
basileis
were hungry
for
bribes, that some
basileis
behaved
as the
hawk
had
behaved
to the
nightingale
in the
fable:
Good bird,
why
all this twittering?
A stronger bird than you
Has
got
you, singer though
you be,
and what he will he'll
do.
{Works
207-9;
trs.
H.
T.
Wade-Gery)
But Hesiod
had one
friend
in
court,
the
highest court
of
all,
Olympian
Zeus himself who through his countless agents abroad on earth was kept
informed
of
crooked judgements
and of
straight ones
and
would deal
out prosperity
or
disaster as appropriate.
Here,
as in
other things, Hesiod stood
at a
moment
of
transition,
a
moment
of
questioning between blind acceptance
of
aristocratic rule
and revolt against it. Whether we
go
on to see him primarily as a private
grumbler with
a
private grudge against individual nobles
or as the
precursor of Solon, Aeschylus and Euripides for whom' the Nightingale
was
a
real power
in
Greek opinion
and
behaviour,
and the
Hawk
had
to listen
\
4
whether, that
is, he was
near
the
beginning
or the end of
question-time,
is of
little moment. What matters
is
that there
is an
element of generalization, the notion of
a
norm to which
a basileus
should
conform,
but at
the same time that there is no hint that he himself could
enforce conformity. There was only Zeus.
II.
BOEOTIA, 70O—5OO
B.C.
There
was
similar grumbling
in
other parts
of
Greece. Sooner
or
later
than that
of
Hesiod, more
or
less coherent,
we do not
know.
But it is
to these other parts that
we
must look
for its
translation into action.
In
our
area
the
spark remained unkindled.
The reason
is not far to
seek.
The
Boeotian plain
was
large enough
and fertile enough
to
keep Boeotians happy with
its
vegetables
and
3
Cf.
A
72 ad
loc.\
A
37,
79.
4
E
144,
12.
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BOEOTIA
289
grain, the fowls of Tanagra and the eels of Lake Copais, and for the
rich, to support their horses (the team of one Pagondas carried off the
prize at Olympia in 680: Paus. v. 8.7). There was not much to tempt
a Boeotian to lift his eyes above the surrounding hills and mountains
to the sea, no great urge to colonize or to exploit the new economic
opportunities that came with or after colonization elsewhere. Access to
the sea was there, to the east or south-west to the Corinthian
Gulf;
the
possibility of maritime adventure could occur to Hesiod, as it did later
to Epaminondas, but one ferry-trip to Euboea was enough to satisfy
the one (while brother Perses was warned against anything more
daring), and the other's naval ambitions were short-lived. Boeotia, then,
was essentially an agricultural area, and a stale agrarian economy does
not breed social, political or even much cultural excitement.
As befits a country folk, the Boeotians were not unversed in music
and song. The tradition was that the legendary founder of Thebes,
Amphion, could charm stones to move with his lyre, the gift of the
Muses; more substantially, the noted reeds of Lake Copais furnished
Boeotians with the
aulos
(a clarinet- or oboe-type instrument) and a
famous school of innovators, performers and teachers
thereof,
famous
and fashionable
—
the great Pronomus of Thebes was tutor to Alcibiades
(Ath. 184D). At the same time, a country which can produce a Hesiod,
a Pindar or a Corinna is scarcely backward.
Similarly in peasant manner, religion flourished. The gods are
everywhere in Pindar and Hesiod as they were everywhere throughout
the countryside. There were oracular sites in plenty, of Trophonius at
Lebadia, of Ismenian Apollo in Thebes, Ptoian Apollo near Acraephia,
Amphiaraus at Thebes and Oropus; cults, some brought with the
migration from Thessaly, some local, of Athena Itonia at Coronea,
Artemis at Aulis, of Heracles and the Cabiri at Thebes, and hundreds
more.
5
Around these grew sanctuaries, some substantial, respectably
rich and not unattractive to foreign dedicators or competitors (Croesus
of Lydia made gifts to Amphiaraus; Athenians and others won prizes
at the games),
6
but nothing to raise the eyebrows, nothing to suggest
any startling Boeotian artistic inspiration.
There was some not utterly disreputable sculpture and bronzework
but pottery gives the fullest picture.
7
There, alongside much imported
Corinthian ware and some Attic, exists local work in quantity. But it
is
in the main derivative and dated
stuff,
no capturer of a foreign market.
From Geometric through orientalizing to black-figure the Boeotian
potter plodded along behind his Corinthian and Attic models and it is
hard to find studies which do not include judgements such as 'crudely
4
A. Schachter, The Cults
ofBoeotia
(1981-).
6
Hdt. 1. 52; A 36, 7j, 75, 91. '
H
29, 1005.
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s
m
Ml Parties i
GS
E
n
w
z
I-J
O
SB
W
w
n
w
>
z
a
w
Map 16. Boetia.
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BOEOTIA
2
9
I
44.
A Boeotian 'bird-cup' from Thebes. Mid
sixth century B.C. Height 232 cm. (Paris, Louvre
Museum
A
;
72;
after
Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum
Louvre xvn, pi. 10.3.)
filled', 'primitive', 'humbly decorated'. There is only one original
group, the colourful and attractive 'bird-cups' (fig. 44) which roughly
span the sixth century - though even there the birds are often painted
upside-down (Boeotian taste, or painter's laziness?).
It is not that Boeotians were saving their talents for invention in other
directions. Of political development within the cities we hear very little
and that is almost certainly because there was little to record. Oligarchic
in 700 B.C., they were still oligarchic at the time of Xerxes' invasion.
One early 'law-giver' at Thebes is mentioned, Philolaus, a Bacchiad
nobleman from Corinth, whose activities, if tradition is correct, cannot
come much later than 700 (Arist.
Pol.
1274a). But given his background,
his measures are more likely to have been regulative than revolutionary.
Only one is recorded, a law of adoption designed to maintain the
number of property-owners. More interesting is the unanswerable
question
—
had an oligarchy of birth moved at all towards an oligarchy
of wealth? The likely descent of Pagondas, Boeotian general in 424,*
from the Olympic victor of 680 argues some survival of the former,
but there was once a law in Thebes, says Aristotle
{Pol.
1278325), which
permitted political office only to those who had abandoned commercial
pursuits for ten years. In the absence of date or context its import cannot
be judged (e.g. whether it was permissive or restrictive), but at least
it means that by the fifth century or before some Boeotians were selling
pigs as well as breeding them - and had political ambitions besides.
Indeed Herodotus at one moment mentions an ' assembly' in Thebes.
But how constituted he does not say and in practice a
'dynasteia
of a
few men' still ruled in 480
B.C.
(Hdt. v. 79; Thuc. in. 62).
' Thuc. iv. 91; cf. Paus. v. 8.7.
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41.
CENTRAL GREECE AND THESSALY
4;.
Reconstruction
of a
tripod dedication
at the
Ptoion
sanctuary. Late sixth century B.C. (After E 107, 1, pi. 15.1;
11,
49,
fig.
3; cf.
A
36, 93, pi. 8, no. 13.)
More significant, however, is the political structure
of
Boeotia as
a
whole. By the later fifth century
it
was
a
well-organized federal state,
dominated by Thebes, but unification had been slow and in our period
'Boeotia did this', 'Boeotia did not do that' are dangerous phrases
to
use without thought. Geography and racial identity imposed some sense
of unity celebrated by the festival
of
the Pamboeotia
at
the sanctuary
of Athena Itonia,
a
festival not attested before the third century
B.C.
though likely to be primitive.
9
But the unity it advertised will have been
more akin to that of the Panionia than the Panathenaea. There was no
political cohesion
to
back it,
at
least
at
the outset.
Homer lists no fewer than thirty-one contingents from Boeotia in the
Greek army before Troy, and though the number had been reduced by
destruction, abandonment or absorption, there were still a dozen or so
independent cities
in
existence around 700, among them Orchomenus
and Coronea to the west of Lake Copais, Thespiae, Haliartus, Thebes,
Acraephia to the south and east and further south again, on or near the
border with Attica, Plataea, Tanagra and Oropus. Factors encouraging
separatism were many, pride in past glory (Orchomenus had once been
• See n.
5.
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BOEOTIA 293
46.
Silvercoin of Haliartus. Late sixth century
B.C. (London, British Museum; after BMC
Central Greece pi. 7.14.)
mighty and was still a serious rival to Thebes), the hostility of close
neighbours (Thespiae was only about 24 km from Thebes), religious
rivalry (Thebes coveted Acraephia's Ptoion), proximity to other states
(Larymna wavered between Boeotia and Locris, Oropus between
Eretria or Athens and Thebes, Plataea was drawn towards Athens).
There are too many variables and a sad lack of evidence.
Excavations at the Ptoion are invoked to place Theban encroachment
there early in the first half of the sixth century.
10
Two sanctuaries are
involved, one at Perdikovrysi (Apolline), one at Kastraki nearby
(belonging to the hero Ptoios), and, the argument runs, it was when
Apollo, under Theban pressure and bringing with him Theban rites,
moved in to Perdikovrysi in the late seventh century, that the locals of
Acraephia transferred the hero to Kastraki and with him the custom
of dedicating tripods in his sanctuary (fig. 45). But the chronological
and dedicatory patterns are not clear enough to impose such a simple
story. That the establishment at Kastraki was later, that there was some
shift in tripod concentration, that there was a close resemblance of the
Apollo cult with that of Ismenian Apollo at Thebes, and that Thebes
expanded northwards at some point, these are all facts, and perhaps are
best explained by some rather more haphazard version of the same
account, but a further suggestion that the fight in southern Thessaly
between (Theban) Heracles and Cycnus, retailed in the Hesiodic
Shield
of
Heracles,
reflects Theban ambitions still further north at the same
period rests more on hope than evidence.
11
Later in the century, certainly not before 550, appears the first
Boeotian coinage (fig. 46),
12
a common 'federal' type marked by a
Boeotian shield on the obverse, from Tanagra and Haliartus (identified
by their initials) and from Thebes, significantly without an initial. To
these a second issue, from about the end of the century, adds mints
at Acraephia, Coronea, Mycalessus and Pharae (near Tanagra). Mean-
while, however, Orchomenus had begun to advertise its continued
10
E 107, 116-34 and review;
E
96;
E
97, 437-50; cf. in general E 120, 11, in.
11
E 109, 79-84.
12
H 48, 108-10.
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294 4
1
- CENTRAL GREECE AND THESSALY
independence, real or imagined, with an issue of its own, an ear of corn
in place of the shield and on the reverse an incuse following Aeginetan
types
(a
recollection
of
past association?)
13
while
a
dedication
at
Olympia of the third quarter of the century celebrates an Orchomenian
victory over (already federated?) Coronea.
14
Thus
it
would seem that by about 500 Thebes controlled the whole
of Boeotia south
of
Copais. Or almost.
In
506 the Thebans recite the
names
of
some loyal, local allies, the men
of
Thespiae,
of
Coronea, of
Tanagra (Hdt.
v.
79.2). One name is missing, that
of
the little city of
Plataea, south-west across the Asopus river, which, possibly
in
519,
15
had appealed
to
Athens against Theban pressure, and with Athenian
(and some Corinthian) help had saved her autonomy, help which she
more than repaid
at
Marathon and then on her own doorstep in 479.
One thorn
in
the flank of the Boeotian pig.
III.
THESSALY,
7OO—
JOO
B.C.
Thessaly is little other than a bigger and better Boeotia.
A
still larger,
even flatter plain, surrounded
by yet
more formidable hills
and
mountains which gave only one opening
to
the sea
at
the south-east
corner. True, this was
to the
superb natural shelter
of
the Gulf
of
Pagasae through which foreign influence had spread well into the heart
of the country in early centuries. But, by and large, we are dealing with
another self-sufficient, stable agricultural society.
In earlier days young Jason had been able
to
acquire
a
gentleman's
education at the feet of the centaur Chiron before becoming Thessaly's
only great merchant-explorer, and Achilles learnt enough
of
the lyre
to accompany
his
barrack-room ballads before Troy; later
a
much-
embroidered tale may conceal
a
real colonial venture
via
Crete
to
Magnesia on the Maeander;
16
throughout the Dark Ages a combination
of imported and local inspiration produced unpretentious but present-
able Protogeometric and (less confident) Geometric pottery.
17
But,
after about 700, there
is
little
of
native culture
or art
(beyond
a
line
in miniature bronzes), no interest
in
the world abroad. Alcman sums
U
P'
He was no rustic boor, nor a lubber.. .nor a
Thessalian by race...(fr. 16 Page: trs. Bowra)
The
basileis
who exploited the riches
of
the plain and controlled its
cities,
Larissa and Crannon to the north-east, Pharsalus and Pherae in
the south, are a little more real than those of Boeotia
—
at least we have
13
See
n.
12; P-Wn 'Kalaureia'.
I4
A 36, 93, no. 11.
15
Hdt. vi. 108; Thuc. in. 68 (for the date, Gomme, ad loc).
16
E 130, nos. 378-82.
"
H 25, 158-63.
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