Preface

The history of Greece is the story of one of the world's most durable cultures. Even omitting the earliest wanderers into the Greek mainland who began to arrive about 70,000 years ago, the story reaches back to nearly 7,000 bce1 with the first settled villages of farmers and herders. No written evidence exists to identify these peasants as Greek speakers. However, one view is that agriculture and domestication spread from what is now Turkey to Greece and then further west and that the carriers were people who spoke an Indo-European language. Greek is an Indo-European language. Thus, if not in the form that Thucydides and Socrates spoke, the language of these early farmers would have been the ancestral version of Classical Greek. Inasmuch as an abiding characteristic of Greek identity is the Greek language, the account of people living in the peninsula jutting into the Aegean Sea and on the islands of that same sea reaches deep into prehistory.

This view that agriculture and Indo-European languages spread together is not universally accepted but, even so, it is certain that the language of the second millennium Bronze Age civilization in Greece was an early form of Greek. Tablets discovered in the remains of citadel centers like Mycenae, Pylos, and Thebes were inscribed in a syllabic mode of writing that has been deciphered as an archaic form of later Greek. Thus the heroic age associated with the Homeric epics can be associated with the latter-day heroes of the Persian Wars. While the Bronze Age centers in the Aegean underwent the same time of troubles that disrupted life in the entire eastern Mediterranean, shrunken relics of the past glorious world persisted through a 400 year period often known as the Dark Age, although as we will see it was not completely dark. After the widespread destruction and depopulation at the end of the second millennium, inhabitants of tiny hamlets survived, then slowly but steadily they began to grow in numbers and skills. By the end of the eighth century bce, an age of revolution marked the end of darkness. The product was the Classical Age, the age of the polis (the type of community that formed the basis of this period of Greek history) and the brilliant institutional and intellectual life it produced. Its language attested in texts and inscriptions was Greek.

When the Macedonian kings Philip II and his son Alexander III harnessed Greek hoplite strength to the Macedonian army and proceeded to conquer the east as far distant as the Indus River Valley, the Greeks found themselves in a larger, different world. Nonetheless, this world did not lose its Hellenic base and the three centuries from 323 to 30 bce are known as Hellenistic, or Greek-like, due to the strong continuing Greek elements that helped to secure its foundations. The language of the Hellenistic kingdoms was Greek, albeit influenced by languages in the territories brought under Greco/Macedonian control.

Much the same situation prevailed when the Romans replaced the Hellenistic kings: Greece became a province to be sure but some of the best of the Romans agreed with the Roman poet Horace that “Conquered Greece took its captor captive.”2 One concrete example is the important polis of Corinth which had been destroyed in the mid-second century bce and was re-founded as a Roman city; its inhabitants were Latin-speaking Romans. Within two generations, however, the dominant language had become Greek. In fact, the eastern portion of the once-unified empire was spared the collapse of the western half, surviving after 476 ce to become a new empire centered on the city of Constantinople, which had been founded a millennium earlier as a Greek colonial polis. Changes in institutions, beliefs, and values were numerous, certainly. However, the official imperial language reverted to Greek and treasures from the past – both physical and intellectual – were deliberately preserved.

Constantinople could not withstand either the Crusaders from the west or the Ottoman Turks from the east; the Byzantine Empire officially disappeared in 1453 ce. Nonetheless, Ottoman rule left much of the governance of its Greek appendage to local authority. Consequently, Orthodox Christianity, the Greek language, and basic patterns of daily existence persisted through the more than 350 years of Ottoman control. In the last decades of that control, support for Greek freedom was fueled by a philhellenism that was grounded as much in the glory of the Greek past as in the present-day nature of the land and its people.

Knowledge of the link between the past and the present increased with the recognition of the new, independent Greek state. It is valuable to note the concurrence of three events in the year 1834: a king of Greece (Otho) made his official entry into the new capital, Athens; restoration of the Parthenon was begun; and the Governmental Archaeological department was established. The success of the Modern Greek state was an incentive to learn more about the past history of the country as it emerged from subject status to become a fledging independent state under the tutelage of major powers and, finally, became an active partner in international affairs.

Thus, evidence to connect Greek-language speakers with the eastern-most peninsula of Europe exists but, even if the story is connected, how can the wealth of information of 9,000 years be packed into a short history? The father of history, Herodotus, crafted an account of the war between the Greeks and the Persians which dates to roughly a decade from 492 to 479 bce. His history covers 400 pages in the Oxford Greek edition!

Two helpful aids exist. First, life in Greece has produced clear divisions between major periods of time. At some points an existing way of life was almost completely destroyed. The Age of Heroes, identified now with the Bronze Age, is a powerful example: some, but not many, people were spared from events yet unknown and they managed to reconstruct a stable life from the existing elements over five centuries. At other points in its long history, Greece was taken captive by non-Greeks – the Romans and later the Ottoman Turks. Greece survived the fall of Rome and recreated the Greek Byzantine Age. With the initial defeat of the Ottomans in 1821, Greeks began to reshape their Modern Greek culture. These changes create manageable periods of the nature of Greek life over time.

The existence of neatly defined periods is extremely useful but there are nine of them. How is it possible that the complete story of each of them be told in a short history? The standards of Herodotus would require about 3,600 pages of printed text! A second tool of archaeologists and anthropologists offers a solution. It is termed Systems Theory and focuses on the two elements in a “system” – people and the natural environment in which they live. The interplay of humans with the environment produces the six basic features of a culture:

1. means of subsistence: how the environment can maintain human life;
2. material goods and technology: how the environment can provide tools;
3. social structure and intrapersonal relations;
4. political organization;
5. communication and trade beyond the immediate community;
6. symbolic attributes: ways of expressing knowledge, beliefs, and feelings about the world.

As is often the case with theoretical analysis, the Systems Theory approach is not universally admired or employed although appreciation of its value has increased from the time of its introduction in the mid-twentieth century. It is extremely useful in providing a picture of the six aspects of a given culture and, when joined with the pattern of life in the several periods of the long story, it offers a tool for comparison. Has the life of inhabitants of Greece over 9,000 years demonstrated a persistent similarity in the interaction between people and their environment or rather does that way of life reveal fundamental differences?

The use of this approach has the additional merit of allowing us to consider both positive and negative change in the larger picture of the culture as the result of specific developments in one or more of the aspects of interaction between people and their environment. The six basic features of this interaction are liable to damage or even collapse the existing structure if changed conditions cannot be absorbed. As mentioned above, the story of Greece has fragile as well as strong ages. An important question, consequently, is whether a rebuilding after collapse will retain earlier features or whether the new structure will be entirely different.

These tools, then, facilitate a coherent short history of the long story of Greece: a focus on the phases of that narrative will concentrate on the six aspects of culture produced by the interaction of people with their environment. However, a history of a way of life based on features created between people and their environment may be boring as well as incomplete since history is the story of people, many of whom shaped the events and products of their own times. For each chapter, specific individuals will personalize the nature of Greece during that period of time. The choices reflect that variety of participants in the long story: women and men; the common members of society as well as the elite; farmers, philosophers, and political leaders, and even non-Greeks, are all excellent windows to a culture.

The first...