in Ithaca, is smaller than the developed city-state. Despite the boisterous contri-
bution of the common man, Thersites, at the council of the Greeks at Troy in the
Iliad(2, 209–77), and despite the existence of an assembly of the people to which
Telemachus makes his appeal in the Odyssey(2, 7), the political and social
organization of the Greek world as represented in the Homeric poems is thoroughly
aristocratic. In war, the fighting is conducted predominantly by the great nobles
themselves. In peace, power lies with the lord of the palace and, in his absence, there
is no external authority that has the power to intervene. The people of Ithaca are
entirely passive and can do nothing to control the aristocratic suitors. Nevertheless,
in the description of the city at peace on the great shield of Achilles, we clearly see
the beginnings of public justice and criminal law; in the market place, the agora, two
men in dispute over a homicide argue their case before the city elders. Though
Homer uses the word polisfor city, the word does not yet describe the developed
city-state which existed in the Classical period. Yet, paradoxically, at the time when
the Homeric poems are now generally considered to have been composed, in the
eighth century long after the collapse of the Mycenaean culture of the Bronze Age,
the city-states were beginning to acquire institutions of government in a more unified
and sophisticated form.
For the Greeks themselves a landmark date in their early history was the year of
the first Olympiad in 776, and it is in the eighth century at the beginning of what has
been called the Archaic period that a number of developments took place that
transformed the Greek world. From the examination of burial sites, archaeologists
have established that there was a general growth in population, which in turn may
have led to an increased desire for land that initiated the age of colonization. An
alternative motive might have been the desire for new raw materials and metals. One
of the earliest, if not the earliest colony was sent from the island of Euboea to
Pithekoussae, an island off the west coast of Italy in the bay of Naples, the modern
Ischia, around 750. Here archaeologists have unearthed evidence of blacksmiths’
workshops where iron was smelted from the nearby island of Elba. Examination of
the cemetery has suggested that within a generation of its founding the new city had
a population of between five and ten thousand. The next century saw the rapid growth
of colonies westward in the coastal areas of southern Italy known subsequently as
Magna Graecia. Alater wave of colonies went eastwards with settlements on coastal
areas around the Black Sea.
The process of colonization was not undertaken haphazardly by pioneering
individuals but was organized by the mother state, which chose the site and the
founder, the oikistes. The Delphic oracle might be involved in these choices or their
confirmation, as indicated in a fourth century inscription found at Cyrene in Libya
recording the original decision taken in the late seventh century by the people of
Thera, an island in the southern Aegean.
46 THE GREEKS