years. Most of the Libyan cities were settled by 600 B.C., but further expansion to the west was contained by Phoenicians (in Carthage, Sardinia, and Spain), although in Sicily they had been confined by Greeks
to the western end of the island. In Italy Spina and Gravisca were Greek settlements beside Etruscan towns. The principal colonizing cities were, in the eighth century, the Euboean Eretria and Chalcis (who
had also opened trade through Al Mina), followed by Corinth in Sicily and North Greece (with Megara and Achaea), and Miletus and the Ionian cities in the Black Sea.
These examples show how foolish it is to generalize about colonization. We must argue for confusion, a confusion which by about 600 B.C. found Greeks established in southern France, northern Africa, Egypt,
the Black Sea and the entrance thereto, along the north coast of the Aegean, above all in Sicily and southern Italy. Similar confusion upset the established order at home and produced the political revolution to
which we must now turn.
The Invention of Politics
Throughout the Mediterranean, eighth-century Greeks had absorbed new experiences: in Egypt wealth and civilization at a level they could not have imagined; in the Near East power and organization, in the
west barbarism and potential wealth, in the north a mixture. Being Greeks, they exploited all to their profit and their progress. Artists were captivated by oriental motifs, arms makers by oriental weaponry,
traders by hauls of metal, timber or grain, poor farmers by the chance to emigrate, richer farmers by the chance to grow crops that would sell abroad (wine and oil), the sophisticated by different kinds of
political life, poets and thinkers and businessmen by the alphabet-above all, everyone by the dawning of the idea that other places existed and might have something to contribute, material or mental. In the late
eighth century a peevish Boeotian poet and farmer, Hesiod (below, pp. 88 ff.) was making discontented, but unsatisfiable, noises about the narrow aristocratic society in which he lived, a society pictured, a few
years before, from within by the first and greatest epic poet known to us, Homer (below, Ch. 2). The epic does not grasp a particular moment in history though it claims to describe one. It grows with the society
for which it is performed, and we cannot now separate the stages of growth. But Homer's heroes at the siege of Troy in his Iliad, proud, brave, honourable, touchy, vengeful, were understood by his aristocratic
audience, and their values cannot have been wholly dissimilar, nor can their total disregard for men like Hesiod be unreal. But by the early seventh century Hesiod's peers were claiming regard.
It is vital to insist that this opening of the Greek mind is much more important than the particular forms of government which were produced by the opening. Here there was 'tyranny'; there 'oligarchy'; here 'a
constitution'; there 'anarchy'. Common to all of the more flexible societies is turmoil, and common to all is the achievement in the end of some sort of what we are prepared to describe as the constitutional
government of the city-state.
But the routes were indeed diverse. In Sparta in the early seventh century a great lawgiver, Lycurgus, it was said, laid down the rules for a system of military training (one could hardly call it education) which
turned Sparta into the most efficient military power in Greece, helping it to hold ruthless mastery over the southern half of the Peloponnese, and by stages to acquire a more subtle control over the rest of the
peninsula. At the same time he formalized and thus reformed Sparta's social structure and produced a constitution which guaranteed to all Spartans some form of political equality the like of which had not been
imagined by Hesiod and was not to be realized elsewhere for many a day.
Sparta's position as mistress of vast tracts of conquered territory and vast numbers of subjects, compared with her own population (the notional figure was 9,000 adult males, outnumbered seven to one), was
rare, but not unparalleled; her solution was to expropriate the bulk of the territory for state-controlled, but privately managed, exploitation and enslave, but not quite enslave, the subjects. Again, the state 'owned'
the slaves (called 'helots'), but the individual Spartan took half the production. The numbers of the breed and its real or imagined racial coherence established helot discontent, the danger of helot revolt, as the
key to much of Spartan behaviour for centuries. At the same time a fair number of more significant communities in the subjected area were given special treatment and recognized as having some independence
in their own domestic affairs. These were the perioikoi, the neighbours, who had much less to complain about than the helots, but were not always as docile as a Spartan might like.
It is against this background that we must see the development and, after Lycurgus, the freezing of Spartan institutions. If her position was rare, her solutions made her unique. Most Greeks retained some traces
of a state-imposed military training for the young; in Crete, for example, many close similarities to Spartan customs can be seen. But only in Sparta, so far as we know, was a child completely robbed of home
and family between the ages of five and thirty and even thereafter compelled to devote his days to military training and his evenings to the company of his messmates. Most Greeks entered the archaic age with
aristocratic attitudes, and in most some faint elements of these attitudes long survived. But of the states that mattered it was only in Sparta that these were captured and preserved so early and with so little
chance of change in the composition or the interests of the aristocracy. And there was the compounding factor that Sparta retained its hereditary kingship, no mere titular kingship, when others had or were in
the process of losing theirs. More oddly still there were two kings, drawn from two great houses, who by their friendships or rivalries could only emphasize the basic aristocratic principle of dependence of the
small on the great.
In its constitution Sparta also stood apart, but here in a different way. The kings were the military commanders; with the aristocratic council, the Gerousia, they initiated most political and took most judicial
decisions. But there was also an assembly of all Spartan citizens which met at fixed times and passed final judgements on most things that mattered-all Spartan citizens, that is, as defined by the great Lycurgus,
all who had survived their training, who had been allotted state land in the conquered territory with helots to work it, and who continued to obey the rules. They called themselves homoioi, equals, and by doing
so not only registered discontent with their earlier status, whatever it may have been, but justify the use a few lines ago of the word 'citizens'. Equality was more a statement of a basic minimum than of any
absolute standard, but it does not matter much that some Spartans were rich (private as opposed to state-allotted land existed), others comparatively poor; it does not matter that some Spartans were of noble
birth, others ordinary people; it does not matter that in a militarily based society political independence is not encouraged or even tolerated. What does matter is that, by the assertion of the basic minimum,
Spartans were beginning to grope towards a definition of the citizen as a member of a society who was automatically entitled to certain rights (however small), who had a sense of community (however much it
was merely the product of a shared fear of helots or a shared desire to exploit those helots for their own profit).
To the mechanics of the Spartan revolution we shall return. Spartan aristocrats did not cede 'equality' with good grace, but they used little violence. Elsewhere the process was different. In Corinth, for example,