Greek cities in the first millennium bce

IAN MORRIS AND ALEX R. KNODELL

The Greek cities of the first millennium bce were, by almost any definition, among the most successful episodes of urbanism in history. Around 1000 bce there were about 500,000 Greeks, and their biggest town had perhaps 5,000 residents; a millennium later Greeks were ten times as numerous, with several cities of 100,000 or more.

This chapter begins with a brief description of the nature of historical and archaeological evidence concerning ancient Greek cities, and the environ­mental and agricultural context in which they were situated. The next sections discuss the diachronic development of the Greek city, from the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic period and the beginning of the Roman Empire, focusing on issues of population, settlement size, and urban form, as well as political systems and the distribution of power.

During the first millennium bce Greek settlement and political hierarchies steadily grew steeper. Both remained shallow (by the standards of complex pre-modern societies) until nearly 300 bce, but after that the Greeks were incorporated into the Macedonian and Roman Empires, and took over the urban legacy of southwest Asia. After documenting these claims with a review of new archaeological evidence and recent reinterpretations of the texts, we suggest that it was their position on the fringe of expanding empires and economies in the eastern Mediterranean at a time of improving climate and increasing population, rather than any sort of a “Greek miracle,” that accounts for their success. The Greeks were better placed than other

The original text of this chapter was written by Ian Morris for the March 2011 “A World of Cities” conference, on which this volume is based.

groups to capture the benefits of these processes; thus, geography, environ­ment, and the wider historical context of the eastern Mediterranean played major roles in the development of Greek culture, and must be considered together to understand the origins and expansion of Greek urbanism in the first millennium bce.

Historical and archaeological evidence

Ancient Greece is best known for its amazing literary record, and the surviving sources (which begin around 750-700 bce, shortly after the inven­tion of the alphabetic script) often convey a vivid sense of what it felt like to live in Greek cities. Many thousands of pages of text survive, most of which were written in Athens, particularly in the fourth century bce (most fam­ously the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle), or in the great cities of the Hellenistic kingdoms (especially Alexandria) in the third and second centuries.

From the late fifth century onward, growing numbers of public inscriptions on stone survive, which provide some balance to the geographical and class biases of the literary sources, and after roughly 330 bce enormous numbers of documentary papyri and private letters survive from Ptolemaic Egypt.

The Aegean is also one of the most intensively explored archaeological regions in the world. Western European antiquarians greatly increased their collection of ancient art during the eighteenth century, and vaguely modern excavations began with Schliemann at Troy in 1870 (Map 16.ι). This long tradition makes Greece home to some of the longest-running excavations of ancient cities in the world, for example, the excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Ancient Corinth (1896-present) and the Athenian Agora (1931-present). However, in the mid- and late twentieth century the focus on art often led to delays in adopting methods pioneered in other parts of the world, but by the end of the century the best field work in Greece could bear comparison with any other regional tradition.

Map i6.i Map of sites mentioned in the text (drawn by Alex R. Knodell).

The natural environment and agriculture

Mediterranean climates are defined as having (a) enough rain for regular dry farming, but not enough to support substantial forests; (b) cool, wet winters and hot, dry summers; and (c) a great deal of micro-regional variability. Greece generally meets this definition, though with the higher latitudes and elevations in the northwest, the climate is more Balkan. Rainfall varies significantly year by year, resulting in relatively high incidences of crop failure thus necessitating diversification.² This led Theophrastus to com­ment, “the year makes the crop, not the soil” (History of Plants 8.7.6).

The geography is also typical of the Mediterranean. Travel to and from the sea through small plains, foothills, and rough mountains is often over only a few kilometers, and farmland can be just a day's walk from higher pastures. Environment was also a factor as Greeks moved outside the overview of sources of evidence and disciplinary history, see James Whitley, The Archaeology of Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

² L. Jeftic, John D. Millman, and G. Sestini, “The Mediterranean Sea and Climate Change - An Overview,” in L. Jeftic, John D. Millman, and G. Sestini (eds.), Climatic Change and the Mediterranean (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), pp. 1-14; and Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.

Aegean, favoring zones like southern Italy and Sicily, ecologically like their homeland, but with more consistent rainfall and wider plains.^[309]

For agriculture, dry-grain farming was most common. Irrigation was only occasional, but fertilization was common through the use of manuring: intensive surveys have revealed “halos” of low-density sherd scatters around higher-density “sites,” which some scholars attribute directly to the spread­ing of manure and other waste as fertilizer.^[310] Family farms in the Greek countryside would have produced only small surpluses to sell to cities, typically working only 5 or 6 hectares with little labor from outside the family. It would have also been sensible to store as much grain as possible in case of crop failure.^[311]

It is difficult to quantify the cost of concentrating population. Some city dwellers would have walked out to their fields to work the land, but to feed some 20,000 non-farmers, urban markets would have needed surpluses from around 200,000 agriculturalists. Rural population density, transport technol­ogy, the nature of urban control over rural production, and farmers' assessments of the incentives for bringing grain to market would have all been important factors.

Textual and archaeological evidence indicates a strong preference for urban living, though the costs of this would have increased as urban populations grew. However, the nature of our evidence will always be skewed toward cities, due to the nature of the archaeological and textual record. The texts and architecture of city life are much more likely to last and be reproduced than the ephemera of country life, which was home to the people and practices that sustained Greek cities and allowed them to

Table 16.1 Standard periodization of pre-Roman Greek history

exist. Moreover, Greek landscapes and culture were more suited to small­scale farming than the semi-industrial, irrigated agriculture that played such a major role in other early cities, which may be reflected in, or at least related to, political and social organization.

Greek cities: the Early Iron Age, c. 1050-750 bce

Through most of the first millennium bce, Greek cities were quite small. Around 1000 bce, in the period often called the “Dark Age,” the largest towns had probably just 1,000-5,000 residents. There is much controversy, however, over the precise numbers. Houses in this period were very light constructions, and little has survived: the most important Early Iron Age settlements tended to remain important throughout Greek antiquity, bury­ing or destroying earlier remains. Moreover, compared to other periods, archaeologists have shown relatively little interest in Early Iron Age settlements.

Early Iron Age finds are often scattered across quite large areas - 50 hec­tares at Argos, 100 at Knossos, and 200 at Athens - but what evidence there is suggests small clusters of huts separated by spaces over 100 meters wide. Densities were probably rarely higher than 12.5-25 people/hectare, suggest­ing populations of 600-1,200 people at Argos, ι,250-2,500 at Knossos, and 2,500-5,000 at Athens. Lefkandi may have been somewhere around the same size as Athens, but despite the new excavations underway in the settlement, much remains obscure. It is likely that most Greeks lived in small hamlets of just a few dozen people throughout the Dark Age, yet there remains a remarkable amount of diversity in size and type of settlement.^[312]

Greek cities: the Archaic period, c.

There is a marked turning point in the history of Greek settlement in the middle of the eighth century bce, often referred to in terms of “renaissance” or “revolution.” At Eretria, one of the best-explored sites, a scattering of huts around 850 bce turned into a group of interlinked villages covering 100 hectares by 700 bce, with a population of perhaps 5,000. Corinth, Knossos, and Argos were surely at least as big as Eretria by 700 and there were probably dozens of communities like Smyrna, Thebes, and Miletus with populations over 1,000.^[313]

The eighth and seventh centuries also saw the expansion of Greek settlement into the west Mediterranean and Black Sea. The total number of migrants was small - probably in the 30,000-50,000 range - but they founded some quite large settlements. Pithekoussai, the earliest (founded c. 775-750 bce), probably had 4,000-5,000 residents in the late eighth century, although very probably not all were Greeks. Megara Hyblaea, founded in 728, probably began with just 240-320 settlers, growing to about 2,000 by 625 bce.^[314]

In the eighth century bce the Greek world changed from one of villages to one of towns. Overall population grew very sharply - perhaps doubling between 800 and 700 - and the Greek world began developing its famous political landscape of several hundred tiny city-states, each with a territory (the chora) ranging from a few dozen to about 2,500 square kilometers centered on a small town (the asty or polis) with somewhere between a few hundred and 10,000 residents. By the sixth century there were at least 500 such poleis.^[315]

In theory, each polis was an independent political unit, though in practice many were controlled by stronger neighbors. After 550, Sparta's Pelopon­nesian League (a name coined by modern historians) began incorporating other poleis into a loose alliance, in which allied cities provided troops for Sparta's wars and Sparta supported local oligarchies against rivals and coups (Herodotus, Histories 1.65-68). This turned Sparta into the greatest military power in Greece (Herodotus, Histories 1.69, 141, 152; 5.49).

The historical sociologist Charles Tilly laid out a very useful framework for thinking about European state formation since 1000 ce in terms of a spectrum of organizing principles, ranging from coercion-intensive to capital­intensive, with the former more typical of territorial states and the latter of city-states.¹⁰ Sparta was extremely unusual in this regard: its power rested on the military domination of the neighboring region of Messenia, whose people labored as helots providing food so that Spartan citizens could concentrate on becoming full-time warriors.¹¹

Most poleis, by contrast, seem to have pursued more capital-intensive paths toward state formation. Greek commerce developed rapidly: Greek goods (particularly wine) were traded widely across the Mediterranean, and almost as soon as the Lydians invented coined money in the late seventh or early sixth century, Greeks also began minting coins. By 500 bce, small change was common. There has been much debate among historians over the exact causes of these developments, and whether early Greek coinage was in fact more a political statement than an economic tool. It now seems clear, though, that despite the fascinating ideological conflicts over the meanings of coined money, the introduction of coinage sharply lowered transaction costs.¹²

Across the eighth through sixth centuries, Greek cities began taking on their canonical “classical” form. Some villages were laid out on grid plans as early as 850 bce, and in the late eighth century orthogonal grids seem to have been normal in the new colonies founded in Sicily and southern Italy. By 500, though, they were also common in cities in the old Aegean

IO

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Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Malden: Blackwell, 1992).

At least, this is the traditional interpretation of the evidence: see, for example, Stephen Hodkinson, Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (London: The Classical Press of Wales, 2000); but several revisionist accounts have suggested that in fact Sparta's labor regime was less peculiar than this: for example, Nino Luraghi and Susan E. Alcock (eds.), Helots and Their Masters in Laconia and Messenia: Histories, Ideologies, Structures (Cambridge, MA: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2003).

Henry S. Kim, “Archaic Coinage as Evidence for the Use of Money,” in Andrew Meadows and Kirsty Shipton (eds.), Money and Its Uses in the Ancient Greek World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 7-21; and Leslie Kurke, Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Figure i6.i Plan of Miletus, showing a typical Hippodamian layout with gridded streets and public buildings in the center (A. Gerkan and B. F. Weber).

heartland. This type of urban planning was traditionally (though anachron- istically) attributed to Hippodamus of Miletus (c. 498-408 bce), who was most famous for his role in the design of Athens' harbor town, Piraeus, and the rebuilding of Miletus itself after its destruction by the Persians (Figure 16.ι). The grid of streets divided Greek cities into blocks, and each block would be divided between several houses, typically organized around a courtyard, ringed by a wall with just one or two small doors.^[316] The spatial arrangement of courtyard houses also became a central metaphor in Greek literature for the biological household.

By 700 cities were typically adorned with one or more large temples, where anyone was free to offer sacrifice or give gifts to the gods. The Doric and Ionic architectural canons stabilized across the seventh and sixth cen­turies and the Greek visual language began being widely imitated in the central Mediterranean. The height of temple building came in the sixth century, by which time the richer Greek cities also boasted fountain houses, stoas, and public sculpture. Such monuments were often concentrated in the civic and religious centers of cities, and in the Archaic and Classical periods typically were associated with the polis itself, rather than private individuals (a practice which did not become widespread until the Hellenis­tic and Roman periods).

It also became common after 700 bce to ring cities with simple fortifica­tions. As the Ionians (Greeks living along the west coast of modern Turkey) discovered after 600, these defenses could not deter large Near Eastern armies, but they were more than adequate to keep out the Greeks' own much smaller forces. Naval warfare became much more organized in the late sixth century, as Greek states' tax revenues reached the point that they could equip and maintain small fleets of triremes, the type of vessel that would become the dominant form of military machinery in the subsequent period.^[317]

Greek cities: the Classical period, 480-323 bce

Population growth accelerated in the fifth century. By the 430s there may have been as many as 5 or 6 million Greeks spread between the Black Sea and eastern Spain. Athens and Syracuse, the largest cities, grew to perhaps 50,000 residents, and the total populations of these cities plus their hinter­lands were probably about 350,000 for Athens and 250,000 for Syracuse. Population densities rose extremely high in the fifth century, reaching about 139 people/square kilometer in the territory of Athens, while the carrying capacity of the region was around 35-42 people/square kilometer. Syracuse's density was more like 53-75 people/square kilometer, just one-third to one- half of Athens', but still high by pre-industrial standards.^[318]

Because of this rapid growth, Greek cities came to depend on food imports. High levels of inter-annual variability in rainfall meant that Greek farmers had long needed ways to mobilize resources from outside their households in bad years, but by the fifth century Athens, Corinth, Aegina, and probably a dozen or more other poleis came to need imports every year. In the fifth and fourth centuries, much of the Mediterranean was drawn into a marketing network to feed Greece.

Greek cities were not large - at its peak in the early fourth century, Syracuse may have had 100,000 residents, and Athens probably never had more than 50,000 - but a remarkable proportion of Greeks lived in towns of 5,000-plus people.^[319] The result was a highly nucleated culture with a very shallow settlement hierarchy. Greece's demographic success depended on its commercial success in creating and exploiting a Mediterranean food market, focused above all on Athens' great harbor of Piraeus. The import­ance of this harbor was emphasized by the construction, between 462 and 456 bce, of the “long walls” that ran about 7 kilometers between Athens and Piraeus, making it impossible to besiege the city by land.

Remarkably, not only did the number of Greeks roughly double between 550 and 350 bce (from perhaps 3 million to 6 million), but Greek standards of living also rose sharply across this same period. By 300 bce, the typical Greek probably consumed about 50 percent more than his or her predecessors had done 500 years earlier. The combination of archaeological and real wage data suggests that Classical Greece had some of the highest standards of living known from pre-modern times.^[320]

On the face of it, this seems to fly against Malthusian orthodoxy, since we might expect rising numbers to have triggered declining marginal returns and a positive check on population. However, economic historians have recently recognized numerous examples of similar “efflorescences” in pre­modern times, and Scheidel has shown how a long wave of rising standards of living between 8oo and 300 bce can be reconciled with Malthusian cycles.¹⁸

The Classical period saw the peak of the canonical polis forms of social organization, focused on the relatively egalitarian male citizen community. Compared to most ancient societies, Greek cities strongly resisted class distinctions within the group of free, locally born male citizens. This sense of male egalitarianism developed gradually across the period 800-400 bce, and underpinned the development of male democracy.¹⁹ The first democra­cies appeared in the late sixth century (Athens' is usually dated to 508/507), and by the fourth century there were several hundred.

Greek cities rarely had kings or powerful priesthoods. The difficulties elites faced in convincing other Greeks that they were godlike (itself closely linked to the elites' financial and military weakness, relative to the strength of elites in other ancient societies) probably had much to do with the success of democracy as an answer to what Morris has elsewhere called “the Greek Question,” of how a community can pursue the good life and make proper decisions in the absence of individuals who know what the gods want.²⁰

Many poleis even went so far as to rotate important religious and political offices among male citizens by lot, without property qualifications. However, some Greek cities also practiced large-scale chattel slavery, importing slaves particularly from Anatolia and Ukraine. Some historians have seen chattel slavery as a logical concomitant of male citizen freedom, but others have emphasized the importance of free wage and slave price ratios in driving chattel slavery.²¹

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19

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Jack A. Goldstone, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethink­ing the ‘Rise of the West' and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 13 (2002), 323-89; and Walter Scheidel, “Demographic and Economic Development in the Ancient Mediterranean World,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 160 (2004), 743-57.

Ian Morris, “The Strong Principle of Equality and the Archaic Origins of Greek Democracy,” in Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (eds.), Demokratia: A Historical and Theoretical Conversation on Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Contemporary Significance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 19-48.

Ian Morris and Barry B. Powell, The Greeks: History, Culture, and Society (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009).

Moses I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Penguin, 1980); and Scheidel, “Real Wages in Early Economies.”

Greek-style democracy was always a form of minority government. At Athens, the best-documented and also perhaps the most radical example, about two-thirds of the adult males were citizens, with the rest being slaves or resident aliens. So far as we know, no polis ever made women full citizens with political rights. Consequently, even in the most developed democracies, only one-third of the resident adults (or one- sixth of the total resident population) were enfranchised. However, compared to non-Greek ancient states, this was an extraordinarily high rate of political participation. Poor Athenians wielded quite aston­ishing power, and the openness of democratic institutions may explain much of the success of Classical Greek cities in solving collective action problems.^[321]

Fifth-century Greece was highly nucleated, with perhaps as many as 75 percent of the population living in towns of 5,000-plus people. These towns were often laid out in very regimented ways, with equal-sized lots and repetitive ''Typenhauscr'' that may well reflect contemporary theories of egalitarian living like those developed by Hippodamus.^[322]

In the fourth century, however, a partial shift away from nucleated settlement began. This is best documented in data from intensive surface survey, which suggest that a minority of the population - perhaps about 10 percent - shifted away from nucleated sites toward dispersed rural settle­ment. The significance of this has been much debated, but it may reflect a further intensification of farming and shift toward production for the market. Another much discussed class of evidence, off-site pottery scatters, may well reflect levels of manuring, which seem to have reached a pre­modern peak in the fourth and third centuries.^[323]

The overall impression is that by about 350 bce Greek cities were larger and richer than ever before, were involved in wider, denser, and more varied exchange systems, and were reaching levels of commercial develop­ment that have rarely been matched by pre-modern cities. In Athens, probably no more than half the population was engaged primarily in farming.

But while the economic and cultural integration of Classical Greece reached impressive levels, its political integration did not. The Persian Empire's push into the Aegean under Darius I from 522 bce onward eventually forced the Greek cities to cooperate on defense. When the Ionian Greeks rebelled against Persia in 499, Athens and Eretria decided to help them, with the consequence that Persia then tried to punish Athens and Eretria. A Persian army sacked Eretria in 490 but was defeated by Athens at Marathon - with the result that a much larger Persian army and navy returned in 480.

To avoid destruction, Athens and Sparta cooperated against Persia, but victory just confronted them with the new problem of how to keep Persia out of the Aegean. After a certain amount of jostling between the two cities, Athens organized the anti-Persian Delian League in 477, and rapidly began converting it into a kind of Greater Athenian State, with Athens functioning as the capital city. Several dozen formerly independent cities started paying taxes to Athens, using Athenian weights and measures, submitting cases to Athenian courts, sharing in Athenian rituals, surrendering foreign policy decisions to Athens, recognizing an Athenian monopoly on legitimate violence, and allowing Athenians to own real property within their territor- ies.^[324] Athens used the taxes acquired to finance the construction of the most powerful navy in the Aegean, and to embellish its city and territory with a variety of new projects, most famously with the Periclean building program that included the monuments of the Athenian Acropolis.

These developments terrified the Spartans, who fought two long wars (460-446 and 431-404) against Athens to disrupt them. The second ended in a decisive Spartan victory, thanks to massive financial and naval help from Persia. This effectively closed off the capital-intensive path of state forma­tion that Athens had been following. Sparta, however, proved quite incap­able of taking over and running the cities Athens had ruled, and after suffering catastrophic battlefield defeats in 371 and 362 bce lost control of the Aegean.

The western Greek world followed a different but in the end equally fruitless path of political integration. For reasons that are now obscure, in the 490s the city of Gela defeated most of its rivals in eastern Sicily, but followed a much more patrimonial path of state formation. In 485 the tyrant Gelon shifted his base from Gela to the much larger city of Syracuse, and after defeating a Carthaginian invasion in 480 effectively divided most of Sicily between his own family and that of Theron of Akragas.

West Greek fiscal structures seem to have been much weaker than those developed by Athens, and in the 460s popular uprisings brought down the tyrannies all over the island and broke up the multi-city organizations. As early as the 440s Syracuse's demographic and economic weight began to swell again, though, and by the 420s the eastern part of Sicily was breaking into pro- and anti-Syracusan alliances. It took an Athenian intervention against Syracuse in 427-424 to scare the Sicilians sufficiently that they agreed to return to a situation of multiple independ­ent city-states.

This balance was shattered by a major Athenian attack on Syracuse in 415-413 and then a Carthaginian invasion that destroyed most of the major Greek cities in Sicily between 409 and 405. The major outcome was that a new tyrant, Dionysius I, seized power in Syracuse and finally brought most of the island under his control. The ruinous wars that he and his son fought against Carthage and other Greeks, though, left Sicily in chaos, and by the 350s attempts to create multi-city organizations were no further forward in the west than they were in the Aegean.

Greek cities: the Hellenistic period, 323-30 bce

The growth of Greek economic networks and the constantly expanding wars of the fifth and fourth centuries drew in many of the city-states' neighbors. In particular, the large, loose kingdom of Macedon became a major supplier of timber and silver. The Greek cities intervened regularly in its politics, playing factions off against each other; but at the same time, bold adventurers learned to make use of Greek financial, military, and political institutions in a Macedonian setting. Between 359 and 338 the boldest of these adventurers, Philip II, brilliantly exploited these techniques to make himself master of the Aegean.^[325]

Philip probably wanted nothing more from the Greeks than to raise some cash and to secure his southern flank as a prelude to plundering Persia, and after his murder in 336 his son Alexander certainly focused entirely on Asia. Between 334 and 323 Alexander overran the entire Persian Empire, bringing Greek civilization into contact with a wider array of cultures than ever

Map i6.2 Map of the Hellenistic expansion, showing the extent of Alexander's conquests (drawn by Alex R. Knodell).

before and founding cities throughout newly conquered territories. This, in combination with Macedonian hegemony in the Aegean, drastically changed the politics of power in the Greek world.^[326]

Between Alexander's death in 323 and 301 his former generals carved the old empire up into a group of kingdoms, and tens of thousands of Macedo­nians and Greeks migrated to the new frontier (Map 16.2). In addition to new foundations, they took over much older and bigger cities than anything in the original Greek world, including Babylon, which probably had a population of 150,000 in the fourth century bce. New cities, such as Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia, tapped into the taxable wealth of the Near East to grow even larger. By 100 bce Alexandria may have had between 300,000 and 400,000 residents, dwarfing Classical cities like Athens and Syracuse.^[327] The rapid expansion in the size of Greek political units after 334 bce was paralleled by an equally rapid increase in the gradient of the settlement hierarchy.

By about 250 bce, the great Greco-Macedonian migration to the Near East had slowed down, but it had already permanently transformed the situation of the Greek cities. The old Aegean and Sicilian worlds began turning into backwaters. Their populations shrank and trade routes shifted eastward.^[328] After 264, Syracuse became a client of Rome; after a crushing defeat in 262, Athens reinvented itself as a kind of theme park, though maintaining its role as a cultural center; and by the 240s, Sparta was in the grip of a conservative revolution.

When nineteenth-century historians coined the term “Hellenistic” to describe this period, they meant to evoke a picture of decadence, as the once proud Hellenic culture became mixed with Oriental elements. In some ways, though, the third century has a good claim to have been the golden age of Greek civilization. The numbers of people speaking Greek and thinking of themselves as Greeks were larger than ever before. Greek explorers ventured into the Atlantic and Central Asia. Greek science and technology reached new heights. Greek cities were the biggest in the world, and the Museum at Alexandria was probably the most sophisticated cultural institution on the planet. It is not yet clear whether standards of living kept rising in the old Greek world after 300 bce, but they certainly did so in the new world of Egypt and the Near East.

From 200 bce onward, the Hellenistic Greek cities were increasingly swamped by Roman military intervention. The political narrative is compli­cated and messy, but by the 160s it was clear that none of the Hellenistic kingdoms would be able to stop Rome on the battlefield. Roman generals fought out many of their rivalries in the Greek world, with sometimes devastating results. In 167, the Romans enslaved 150,000 people in Epirus in a single day. In 146, they destroyed Corinth, by then the largest of the mainland Greek cities. Security was collapsing, piracy had become a major problem, and population was falling sharply. The old Seleucid kingdom, undermined by Roman assaults, was largely overrun by Parthian immigrants.

An anti-Roman revolt under Mithridates in 88 bce led to the devastation of much of the Greek world, with Athens being brutally sacked in 83. In the Roman civil wars of the 40s-30s, competing generals treated the Greeks as a cash machine, and for propaganda purposes Octavian converted the final phase of his civil war with Antony into a war between Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt, the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms. With the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra VII in 30 bce, the last politically independent Greek state was absorbed into the Roman Empire.

The last two centuries bce were a time of military, political, economic, and demographic disaster for the Greek cities, but in cultural terms this was an age of renewed success. Rome itself, like much of Italy, had been heavily influenced by Greek culture since the colonial expansion of the eighth century bce. Rome's conquests in the third and second centuries brought in much plunder from the Greek world, including artwork and slaves educated in Greek literature, which set off intense debates over whether the Roman elite wanted to assimilate itself to the older, more prestigious Greek high culture. Meanwhile, Roman elites became active benefactors (yet at the same time oppressors) of cities in the Greek east, a trend that continued with Roman emperors in the following centuries. By 100 bce a Roman reinterpretation of Hellenistic culture was emerging, with the cities that Rome founded around its west Mediterranean empire being, to a large extent, Hellenistic in form. By the end of the first millennium bce Greek urbanism had, in a sense, conquered the entire Mediterranean Basin and been carried as far afield as the Danube, Rhine, and England.

Conclusion

The Greek cities of the first millennium bce were remarkably successful. In 1000 bce there was not really any such thing as a Greek city, with the largest site having probably fewer than 5,000 residents. By the third century Alexandria had probably more than 300,000 residents; by the first century, the Hellenized city of Rome had a million. With the Roman Empire acting as a conduit, the physical form of the Greek city could be found everywhere from England to Afghanistan.

This happened largely because the Greeks were particularly well placed to exploit larger social, material, and environmental changes during the first millennium bce. The shift from the “Sub-Boreal” to the “Sub-Atlantic” climate regime that began in the ninth century bce was probably particularly important. This generated stronger Westerlies off the Atlantic Ocean, bring­ing longer, cooler winters with more rainfall. In the Mediterranean Basin, the greatest challenge for farmers was lack of winter rain to fertilize their crops; the Sub-Atlantic regime must have been an economic blessing. The major causes of death in the pre-modern Mediterranean seem to have been intestinal complaints, with mortality concentrated in the summer months; cooler, wetter weather would have been a demographic boon. Although no one has systematically collected the evidence, it is clear that population started growing almost everywhere from Iberia to western Iran between 8oo and 500 bce, and by the end of the first millennium bce the Mediterra­nean's total population had probably doubled.^[329]

North of the Alps, by contrast, the major problems for farmers were wet, heavy soils and short growing seasons, and the major killers were pneu­monic illnesses in winter months. By bringing colder, wetter weather, the Sub-Atlantic regime was a disaster, and population in temperate Europe generally shrank between 700 bce and the onset of the “Roman Warm Period” 500 years later.^[330]

Population grew particularly rapidly in the Aegean, in part because the region had seen an uncommonly severe contraction after 1200 bce, but in part because Greece was unusually well placed to emerge as a commercial hub linking the reviving empires of the eastern Mediterranean to raw materials in the west.^[331]

Across the eighth and seventh centuries the Phoenicians, on the fringe of the Assyrian Empire in modern Lebanon, initially seem to have benefited from these processes even more than the Greeks, but by 600 Greeks mas­sively outnumbered Phoenicians in the west Mediterranean and Greek urban forms were having a much bigger impact on west Mediterranean populations. Whether this was simply a consequence of weight of numbers or whether Greek urban culture had a particular appeal that the Phoenician version lacked remains an open question.

In the Archaic period Greece was very much a periphery to the Near Eastern core, flourishing in a power vacuum that persisted from the fall of the Hittite Empire around 1200 to the expansion of Lydia after 600. This gave the Greeks space to pursue low-coercion, capital-intensive paths of state formation, and by the time the Persians began seriously trying to draw the Aegean into an empire after 522, the Greek cities were in a position to convert their capital into impressive military power. After the victories of 480-479, the Aegean and Sicily began developing into cores in their own right, and in the 330s-320s the Macedonians were able to tap the Aegean core to overthrow the Persian Empire.

In this historical and geographical context, remarkable material changes took place as urbanism developed in the Greek world. Changes in the form and function of public spaces, monumental architecture, and urban planning occurred with remarkable uniformity across long distances and within relatively short periods of time. The general pattern was one of increasing homogeneity in the form of Greek cities as time progressed from the Early Iron Age to the Roman period, which can be attributed to intensifying trade networks and expanding political integration.

From a very early stage public monuments in Greek cities had a very different function than in other early urban centers. While often built under state sponsorship, they were not necessarily tied to a particular ruler, especially in the case of democratic Athens, which is a good example of the relationship between monumentality and public spaces. Relatively little is known about the urban form of Athens in the Early Iron Age, but by the Archaic period the agora (Figure 16.2) was home to various religious, economic, and political activities and was a clearly demarcated space, though only a few basic religious and administrative buildings were to be found. In the Classical period this changed significantly, with the addition of several buildings related specifically to the administration of the democracy (namely the tholos, the bouleuterion, and the mint). In contrast to palace- or temple-administered states, this made public the business of government, and emphasized accessibility, rather than exclusivity. Even in the Hellenistic period when we see particular rulers (and not Athenians) attaching their names to public monuments, these were meant to be seen as gifts, given to the city of Athens by Hellenistic kings who aimed to achieve cultural prestige, rather than assert political authority.

This chapter has suggested that the broad outlines of first millennium bce Mediterranean history were driven by the interactions between geography and rising social development.^[332] The extraordinary success of Greek urban­ism is very much part of this pattern. However, the question has received very little attention in recent years.

Figure 16.2 Plan of the Athenian Agora, showing buildings of the Archaic through Roman periods (Agora Excavations, American School of Classical Studies).

The historical theories of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries tended to see Greek success as being a function of a superior culture. Since the 1980s many scholars influenced by postcolonial thought have tried to redress this picture by emphasizing the agency of indigenous populations, but as a result they often seem uncomfortable acknowledging the fact that Greek urbanism was spectacularly successful.^[333] In this chapter

we have tried to show that Greek urbanism was in fact one of the greatest success stories in pre-modern history; yet this depended on a complex set of interactions between geography, history, and the numerous cultural trad­itions with which the Greeks came into contact as their civilization developed and transformed over time.

further readings

Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, London: Harper & Row, 1972.

Cahill, Nicholas, Household and City Organization at Olynthus, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

De Polignac, Francois, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State, Janet Lloyd (trans.), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Hansen, Mogens H., Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City State, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Hcilscher, T., “Urban Spaces and Central Places: The Greek World,” in Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne (eds.), Classical Archaeology, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 164-81.

Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000.

Morris, Ian (ed.), Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Murray, Oswyn, and Simon Price (eds.), The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Osborne, Robin, Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and Its Countryside, London: George Philip, 1987.

Osborne, Robin, and Barry Cunliffe (eds.), Mediterranean Urbanization, 800-600 bce, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Snodgrass, Anthony M., Archaeology and the Emergence of Greece, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.