THE CREATION OF GREECE

Life was changing fast for the Greeks of the eighth century BC. They explored farther afield and traded with distant peoples, opening up ever-more remote horizons. In their homeland, the sparse and scattered coastal and island settlements that had populated the centuries since the collapse of the Mycenaeans waged war on one another. At the same time, they began to become more centralized into city-states and to hold regular meetings at shared religious centers, such as the sanctuary of their supreme god, Zeus, at Olympia. But there was a crucial additional development, related to the Greeks’ inherent distrust of authority. In some Greek city-states a radical new idea emerged of the free male who was fundamentally equal in status to his peers, even if he possessed no inherited wealth or aristocratic identity whatsoever. The free Greek man was able to call, moreover, upon men of the same status to show solidarity with him in defense of his rights and privileges. By the late sixth century this vision of the ideal citizen of the polis (city-state) was to lead, after grueling struggles, to democracy.

These tendencies—expansion abroad, centralization at home, conflict between social and economic classes—were in some ways contradictory. Yet they collectively resulted in the creation of an ethnic identity based on those fundamental aspects of life that any one Greek speaker intuitively felt he shared with any other, despite remoteness of residence or disparity in wealth and status. These included the cherished ideal of individual self-sufficiency, often by making a living from a small farm. This in turn went in tandem with competitive values and a distinctive pride in the independence of the free individual. Men with this outlook were clear-eyed about the inevitability of conflict between rich and poor, those privileged by heredity and those who had to win wealth and respect by simply being excellent at what they did. This value system was in turn tied to the ideal of political autonomy for individuals and communities, who, however, subscribed to a joint set of practices agreed on by Greeks everywhere. In the fifth century, these practices are defined by Herodotus’s Athenians as sharing a genealogy, language, ritual sacrifices, and nomoi—laws or customs, agreed-upon rules of conduct, taboos and imperatives, such as the protection of vulnerable people conducting embassies, and rights of the dead to burial.

The outlook of the Greeks of this era is crystallized in the earliest Greek literature: four long poems. They are the Iliad and the Odyssey, epic narratives that have come down to us under the name of Homer, and Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony. The rebellious, independent element of the Greek character is fundamental to all of them. It is the motor of the wrath of Achilles, which drives the Iliad—the contradiction between traditional values, embodied in Agamemnon’s insistence that he deserves the greatest rewards from the Trojan War because he is by bloodline the supreme king, and rebellious, meritocratic ones, embodied in Achilles, a lesser king by birth status but a far greater warrior. The meritocratic and egalitarian tendency may have been an inevitable result of the near-subsistence economy of much of archaic Greece, which could not support the extreme wealth that the Greeks noticed among Near Eastern neighbors, especially the Lydians and Egyptians, and which they envied. In the Odyssey, for example, the property of even the king of Ithaca amounted to only fifty-nine herds of livestock and one chamber of treasure.

In another chapter I use these four early poems to explore both the internal political tensions and the emergent collective ethnic self-consciousness of these proud, self-determining Greeks, whose name for themselves was Hellenes. The poems offer an imagined backstory (with some history mixed in) for the contemporary situation in the eighth century. The Homeric epics narrate the story of the Trojan War and raise the question of the location of Troy and the historical reality of the war. Hesiod’s Theogony traces the history of the Greeks much further back, to the origins of mankind after the creation of the physical and moral universe.

 But all four poems offer unforgettable scenes of fighting, sailing, and farming—the three activities central to the archaic economy and to the archaic Greek male experience of life. They were performed at festivals where self-governing Greeks, from diverse communities, met as equals in shared sacred spaces to worship their shared gods and, in doing so, invented the competitive athletics festivals of which we possess a descendant in the Olympics. The poems recited at these gatherings were the collective cultural property of the independent-minded Greek warrior peasants wherever they sailed and were fundamental to the transmission of their values. They remained so until the end of pagan antiquity.

The poems’ core constituents—heroic narrative and wisdom literature—originated in oral composition and had been developed in the process of being memorized, repeated, supplemented, and adapted over the course of decades and (parts of them, at least) centuries. But between 800 and 750 BC, Greek culture changed forever. Some resourceful speakers of Greek, probably traders, borrowed the signs used by the ingenious Phoenicians to represent consonantal sounds, adopted some other signs to indicate vowels, and used them to write down in Greek their already canonical authors. In inscribing them, no doubt the poet-scribes (perhaps individuals really called Homer and Hesiod) made changes that ornamented the language and improved the poems’ structure. The classical Greeks knew that the Iliad was aesthetically superior to other epic poems because it is not made up of episodes loosely strung together: It is unified by one incident during the Trojan War, a period of a few weeks when Achilles became angry with both Agamemnon and Hector, but it looks backward and forward in time to engage the listener with the war’s antecedents and consequences. Older inherited material—lays about heroes, animal fables, proverbs and maxims, astronomical lore—was also shaped to express the concerns of the self-reliant eighth-century Greek male, as well as (in Hesiod’s case) personal information. In writing down these poems, the freedom-loving Greeks, newly empowered by Phoenician technology, invented and cemented themselves and their collective past.

Hesiod and Homer composed in a distinctive meter, the dactylic hexameter, consisting of lines of six feet, or emphases. These long lines create a rolling, insistent rhythm, which Victorians liked to imitate in English, as in this translation of line 8 of the Iliad: “Who of the great gods caused these heroes to wrangle and combat?” Every line is in the same meter, and there are no subdivisions into groups of verses or stanzas. But the rhythm is flexible, since half of each foot can consist of either short or long vowel sounds. Homeric and Hesiodic dactyls can dance and sparkle with a light, tripping rhythm of seventeen syllables, most of them short, or groan plangently in just thirteen mostly long ones. Poetry that is originally produced without the aid of writing is qualitatively different from the work of literate poets, and the distinctive features of Homeric and Hesiodic verse derive from its oral nature—lists, repetitions, mirror scenes, and the use of formulae. A “formula” sounds off-puttingly clinical, but it is just the name given to the marrying of two or more words in a recurrent rhythmic cluster—“rosyfingered Dawn,” for example, or “thus spoke swift-footed Achilles.”

The Iliad, “Poem about Ilium (Troy),” created for the entirety of the Aegean Greeks a picture of their obstreperous warrior forefathers. It provided them with a detailed narrative of voyage of the Greek-speaking men of the heroic age over the Aegean to Asia, outraged by the insult to their reputation when one of their wives—Helen—ran away with the Trojan Paris. The poem begins in the Greek camp ten years into the war, which has reached stalemate. Helen is living with Paris inside Troy, and neither Greeks nor Trojans have gained the upper hand on the battlefield. But Agamemnon, the Greek commander, quarrels with his best warrior, Achilles, who withdraws his goodwill and refuses to fight at all. This allows Hector, son of the Trojan king Priam, to lead the Trojans to score some important military successes. Achilles only comes back onto the battlefield when he is thrown into despair by the death of his best friend, Patroclus, killed in a duel with Hector. At the climax of the poem, Achilles kills Hector and desecrates his corpse by tying it to his chariot and dragging it around the walls of Troy. Although he does give the body back to the Trojans for burial eventually, the death of Hector marks the decisive moment in the war when Greek victory becomes inevitable.

The Iliad does not call the Greeks “Hellenes” but makes the story sound archaic by using the ancient clan names Achaeans, Argives, and Danaans; at this point in history the name Hellas only designated one small district in Thessaly. The word Panhellenes, or All Greeks, which occurs only once, may still refer only to the population of northwest Greece, not the Peloponnese. The Iliad, however, provided the charter myth of Greek ethnicity for at least twelve centuries. The catalogue of Achaean ships in the poem enacts a roll call, designed to suit the eighth century BC, of the twenty-eight contingents of Greeks, in more than a thousand vessels, who participated in the Trojan War centuries before the poem was written. These Greeks come from mainland strongholds including Pylos, Lacedaemon, Mycenae, Argos, Athens, and Boeotia (although no northern districts) and several islands, including Ithaca, Rhodes, and Crete.

The list has been scrutinized by historians seeking a straightforward account of Mycenaean Greek populations, but this reading cannot succeed. The catalogue may contain much older, inherited Mycenaean material, but it was given its present form after the Greek migrations to Asia, and this must interfere with the way that it portrays the distant past. Imagine a screenplay writer and film director who are planning a movie about, for example, the reign of the English king Alfred the Great in the ninth century AD. They want to film a spectacular scene at his court in Wessex, where the camera pans delegations from Mercia, Anglia, Wales, Kent, and so on, summoned for a council to organize defensive operations against the Vikings. The cinema professionals would be able to draw on some historical records, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But they would interpret these, to an extent, in the light of twenty-first-century viewers’ knowledge of their country, the names of its counties, and their regional boundaries. The invention of Great Britain in 1707 under the terms of the Act of Union would also interfere in the reconstruction of Arthur’s world.

Similarly, by the eighth century BC, many Greeks lived in new settlements on the Asiatic seaboard, and this is where the relationship between the social geography of the Iliad and that of the eighth-century epic poets becomes opaque. The Iliad’s list of forces mustered to defend Troy includes the Bronze Age residents of the areas in Asia Minor in which the Greeks later built cities, but it describes them as they were retrospectively visualized in the eighth century. The largest contingent by far is furnished by the Trojans and their immediate neighbors the Dardanians, both of whom share language, culture, religion, and protocols with the Greeks. The Phrygians, Lydians, and Thracians who lived farther away, but also in the northern part of Asia Minor and across the Hellespont, fight for Troy. But the poet of the Iliad carefully includes allies who “speak other tongues” from regions that lay to the south of Troy down the coast—Mysia, Caria, and Lycia—which his audience knew were in their own day heavily populated by Greeks. Listening to the Iliad required them to engage in the act of remembering, or more likely imagining, Asia before the Greeks came. Perhaps, for them, the Greek conquest of Troy, regardless of its historicity, symbolically represented the Ionian forefathers’ arrival on the Asiatic seaboard, during the putatively dark centuries, from the Greek mainland and islands. The ambiguous ethnicity of the Iliadic Trojans themselves, similarly, may have functioned to represent the fusion of cultures, Greek and Asiatic, that had necessarily resulted.

This raises the problems of the location of Troy and whether the Trojan War actually happened. There is no contemporary historical documentation of Homer’s Trojans, except a handful of controversial references in tablets inscribed by the Hittites, who from the eighteenth to the twelfth centuries BC ran a massive empire approximately coextensive with modern Turkey. Hittite tablets refer to places named Wilusa and Taruisa, which may be Ilium and Troy. One precious Hittite text, known as the Tawagalawa letter, may even mention the Trojan War. Written by a Hittite king, probably in the thirteenth century, it is addressed to the king of the Ahhiyawa (perhaps the Achaeans, one of the names of the Greeks in the Iliad) and refers to an incident in the past, now resolved, when the Ahhiyawa were involved in hostile military operations. One of the allies of Troy in the poetic tradition was Eurypylus, said in the Odyssey to be leader of the Keteioi, who might be the Hittites.
The archaeological evidence is tantalizing. The Persian king Xerxes, the Greek Alexander the Great, and the Roman Julius Caesar all later visited Troy. They identified it with the ruins of the deserted settlement they could see at what is now called Hissarlik, near the Dardanelles. But archaeologists today distinguish between many levels of occupation on the site. The two levels that have most often been identified with the Troy of the Iliad are technically known as Troy VIh (fifteenth to thirteenth centuries BC) and Troy VIIa (thirteenth to twelfth centuries BC). Troy VIh, which had imposing bastions and sloping walls, was destroyed in the mid-thirteenth century. This can be made to correspond with the assumed date of the Trojan War. But trying to fit the story told in the Iliad to thirteenth-century history is not the best way to understand it. The story told in the Iliad is how the Greeks of five hundred years later liked to imagine their past. They would have been able to see ruins at Troy, and no doubt durable antiques—armor, for example, or shards of pottery—could help them elaborate the tale. But the concerns addressed in the Homeric epics are those that occupied the minds of the Greeks of the eighth century, transposed into their fictionalized prehistory.

How should we visualize the audiences of these poems when they were first written down? The epics themselves provide several pictures of bards in action. In the Odyssey Phemius, Odysseus’s minstrel in Ithaca, is already singing about the Trojan War and plays at banquets to entertain aristocrats, and Demodocus, in Phaeacia, performs to mark the climax of a day of athletics competitions. In the Iliad, Achilles himself whiles away his self-exile from the battlefield at Troy by strumming a lyre and singing “of the glories of heroes.” But the picture of epic performance that corresponds to the experience of most Greeks in the eighth to sixth centuries features in another text attributed to Homer. It is a hymn to Apollo of Delos, the tiny central Aegean island where the god Apollo was worshipped, along with his mother, Leto, and twin sister, Artemis, and received one of his most important cults. The island, which lies near the center of the “circle” of the Cyclades, was the traditional site of the birth of the god. From as early as the ninth century, Ionian Greeks were meeting there to dedicate offerings to him and his sister in the famous sanctuary. In the Homeric hymn, the authorial voice describes the audience at a festival of Apollo on Delos, where Ionian Greeks have assembled after arriving in “their swift ships”:

The Ionians, in trailing robes, gather in your honor with their children and decorous wives: holding you in their minds, they delight you with boxing and dancing and song, whenever they hold their contests. If someone came across the Ionians assembled in such crowds, he would say that they were immortal and did not age. He would see how graceful they were, and enjoy gazing at the men and well-girdled women with their swift ships and numerous possessions.

The poet then describes the famous Delian Maidens, mysterious women who perform choral songs for Apollo; in “a hymn commemorating men and women of past days” they “charm the tribes of men.” But finally, perhaps in a bid to win the bardic competition at the festival itself, the poet tells us more about the hymns that male soloists performed on the island. First, he tells the Deliades that if asked the identity of the sweetest singer to visit the island, and their favorite, they are to respond, “He is a blind man, who lives in craggy Chios, and his songs are supreme forever.” Since Chios is the traditional birthplace of Homer, and one of the chief Ionian islands, this text shows that the participants at Ionian festivals on Delos believed that Homer had sung for them or their ancestors there. The voice singing the hymn adds that he will spend his life spreading the fame of Delos and “far-shooting Apollo, god of the silver bow, whom rich-haired Leto bore,” and will travel between sanctuaries praising the Panhellenic gods.

The Delian sanctuary became one of the richest in the ancient world, attended not only by Ionians but all the Greeks. It later became a major trading post where people of every Mediterranean ethnicity congregated. But this Homeric hymn shows Greek identity being consolidated, during the archaic period, at the shared sanctuaries to which the Greeks traveled to meet each other. It is from the eighth century that much of the earliest evidence dates for the worship of Greek gods in many other sanctuaries, always open-air spaces marked off as sacred, with low walls or rows of stone, and an altar on which to burn offerings. Many sanctuaries soon gained a temple and a dining room. Sanctuaries could be inside cities and could provide a focus for the community (Athena and Apollo were popular choices as “city-protecting” gods). Or they could be outside, used by a city in negotiating the limits of its territory or as venues for formal meetings with members of other states. A few sanctuaries were truly Panhellenic in that they belonged to all the Hellenes in a neutral space. Zeus, the supreme god of the Greek pantheon, presided over several key sanctuaries of “all the Greeks.” At Dodona, for example, his prophecies were decoded from the rustlings of the leaves on his sacred oak trees. Of the four major Panhellenic centers in Greece that were, from early on, the venues for big athletics festivals, two were sanctuaries of Zeus—Olympia and Nemea.

The Nemean games in the northern Peloponnese were the last to become established, in the early sixth century, but Olympia was already in use as a sanctuary of Zeus in the ninth or even tenth century. According to ancient tradition, it was in 776 that the famous Olympic Games were founded. Archaeological evidence shows that by 800 BC, leaders of Peloponnesian communities were meeting at Olympia to consult the oracle of Zeus and compete in athletics contests. Impressive votive offerings of varying origin, especially bronze tripods, show that Olympia and its games began to attract Greeks from ever farther afield. A similar pattern applies at Delphi, where the earliest competitions in honor of Apollo were in musical performance rather than sport. When Greeks of different tribes accomplished something together, they began to name it a “Hellenic” achievement. In the seventh century BC, eastern Greeks and men from Aegina arrived at what was then the principal port in the Nile Delta, which they called Naucratis (Ship Power); they offered their services as mercenaries to the pharaoh, exchanged silver, oil, and wine for Egyptian grain, linen, and papyrus, and created a crucial site of cross-fertilization between Egyptian and Greek culture. Some of the Greeks there built a joint shrine, which they naturally called the Hellenion, thus defining their joint Greek identity despite coming from nine different cities.

The Panhellenic shrines arose to fulfill two functions. Through the oracles they pronounced, they mediated relationships between the emerging states of Greece, who were as keen to maintain independence from one another as individual Greeks were anxious to be self-sufficient, autonomous, and indebted to no one. But they also provided a venue for aristocrats and parvenu tyrants to compete in the display of their wealth through athletics and the dedication of fabulous offerings to the gods. In their home communities, powerful families may have been under pressure not to indulge in excessively ostentatious self-promotion; at the Panhellenic shrines, they could compete with their peers in other city-states, thus declaring their joint membership in a Panhellenic elite class. The games at Olympia, held only every four years, did not satisfy their desire for such opportunities, and so further games were established at Delphi in the early sixth century (the Pythian games), and at Nemea and the Isthmus. The games were arranged to occur sequentially so that there was a Panhellenic gathering every year.

The foundation myths of all four festivals with major games claimed that they were associated with funerals, and athletics events in ancient Greece were all developed out of military training exercises. In the twenty-third book of the Iliad, Achilles holds games to honor the funeral of his comrade Patroclus. These epic games would have felt evocatively Panhellenic to archaic audiences because the competitors in the poem, like them, came from many Greek regions and islands. Games, Panhellenism, military funerals, and war formed an associative cluster in the archaic Greek mind. These poems gave the Greeks a way to think about the exciting aspects of war, of the mustering of armies and the clanging of armor, but the audience is never allowed to forget that this excitement comes at a terrible price. In episode after episode, strong, sympathetic characters enunciate their emotional pain. The Iliad shows young men dying on the battlefield, to be lamented by parents and widows. It shows the last parting of Hector from his wife, Andromache, and little son. It shows the elderly Priam and his supposed enemy Achilles weeping together over their respective losses. It foreshadows the extreme situations and moral crises of Athenian tragedy in the dilemma of Achilles, who had to choose between dying young but gloriously, or old but in obscurity. It adumbrates the harsh metaphysical conditions under which mortals in tragedy live, utterly vulnerable to the fickle whims of vindictive and childish gods.

If the Iliad gave the Greeks their sense of a collective past as warriors, the Odyssey gave them their archetypal descriptions of sailing, and provided its itinerant hero with more diverse challenges. For the free Greek male of the mid-eighth to sixth centuries, identification with the seafaring and resourceful Odysseus and his overseas adventures must have been profound. Odysseus may be a king, but he is also the definitive self-sufficient farmer whose small island produces all that his personal household requires, and who asserts his rights to autonomy as a result. Odysseus is also exciting company but by no means perfect. His mistakes include boasting to the Cyclops, falling asleep when in charge of the bag of winds, and arguably losing his head during his bloody slaughter of his wife’s potential suitors. But as the philosopher Aristotle pointed out, we identify better with a hero who is neither too virtuous nor too wicked—that is, with a hero rather like ourselves.
The cast of the Odyssey is an expression of the egalitarian streak in the Greek character in that its characters are not confined to an elite, aristocrat group. Besides the significant slave characters (Eurycleia, Eurynome, Melantho, and Eumaeus), the poem includes an ordinary rower (Elpenor) and the beggar Irus. Men and women, rich and poor, and old and young were offered sympathetic characters with whom they could identify. The poem also includes stories about lowlife merchants and pirates, and much backbreaking peasant labor, in the fields, in the orchards, and at the loom.

In the practical and resourceful Odysseus, archaic Greek men could enjoy a hero who was a glorified version of their own self-image. A competent all-rounder, gifted with brains as well as brawn, he possesses the skills to survive anything life on land or at sea can throw at him. He is a supreme orator and world-class warrior, seen in fighting action in books 22 and 24 of the Odyssey and as an expert city-sacker in book 9. Odysseus is an excellent navigator and swimmer, the ideal pioneer, frontiersman, and colonizer. Besides his moral qualities (diplomacy, courage, self-control, patience, self-reliance, and so forth), Odysseus has surprising skills, grounded in the life experience of the seagoing archaic Greeks: He is a shipwright who builds a sizable raft in four days, from tree felling to sailmaking. His expertise at carpentry is also exemplified in the bedroom, with its built-in bed, which he made for himself and his bride, Penelope. Odysseus is no slouch as a farmer, either; he is an expert behind the plow, and his father promised him trees and vines of his own to tend when he was a boy (thirteen pear trees, ten apple trees, forty fig trees, and fifty rows of vines). But the Odyssey also celebrates its hero’s status as a prizewinning athlete. He not only wins the discus-throwing competition at the Phaeacian games but is an able wrestler, javelin thrower, and, of course, archer. His amazing feat with his bow at the contest organized by Penelope, ostensibly to find her a new husband, heralds his return to the Ithacan throne.

Odysseus’s success with women will also have endeared him to many archaic Greek males. He had the asset of a loyal wife, Penelope, whose resourcefulness matched his own. But he has affairs with two beautiful supernatural females, Calypso and Circe, is attractive to the much younger Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, and even the goddess Athena flirts with him when he awakes on a beach in Ithaca. The Iliad offered ancient Greek men a model of idealized love between men in the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, but Odysseus is one of antiquity’s few exclusively heterosexual heroes. This is part of the poem’s anthropological dimension, which defines, among other things, the patriarchal social structure of archaic Greek communities by sending Odysseus into encounters with feminine power from which he invariably emerges with the upper hand. The Odyssey defines the male psychology that went with patriarchy by presenting various versions of the feminine—as desirable and nubile (Nausicaa), sexually predatory and matriarchal (Calypso, Circe), politically powerful (Arete, queen of the Phaeacians), domineering (the Laestrygonian king Antiphates has a huge daughter and a wife “the size of a mountain”), monstrous and all-devouring (Scylla, Charybdis), seductive and lethal (Sirens), but also as faithful, domesticated, and maternal (Penelope). In the “real” world of Greek island peasant farming, a good wife, like Penelope, protects her husband’s interests and in his absence keeps her legs crossed for twenty years.

The distinction between the supernatural world through which Odysseus wanders and the reality of Ithaca provides an insight into other aspects of the archaic Greek’s life. In Ithaca, men toil to produce food, whereas the Phaeacians are magically supplied from nature. The Cyclopes drink milk, but Greeks drink wine. Greeks abhorred the idea of eating human flesh, in contrast to the cannibalistic habits of both the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians. But perhaps the strongest contrast with the Greeks is provided by the mysterious people whom Tiresias says Odysseus must visit on one more journey. They live so far inland that they have never heard of the sea, do not use salt, and know nothing of ships or oars. There Odysseus is to plant his oar in the earth and make a sacrifice to Poseidon, before returning to meet a gentle death that will come to him, mysteriously, “from the sea.” It would be hard to imagine any story more profoundly Greek in its symbolism.

The other portrait of the fiercely independent farmer in the earliest Greek poetry is Hesiod’s self-portrait in his agricultural poem Works and Days. Hesiod is the first author in world literature we feel we can understand as an individual. He exemplifies several of the ten characteristics that collectively constituted the distinctive ancient Greek mind-set, especially his strong authorial “I” voice and the emotional directness and mordant humor of his advice: “Do not let a flaunting woman coax and flatter and deceive you: she is after your barn.” He despises his idle, litigious brother, Perses, and scathingly suggests that he stop worrying about legal disputes and do some work: “the man who has not laid up a year’s store of food, Demeter’s grain, has no business concerning himself with quarrels and courts of law.”

Hesiod was a farmer in Ascra, a village in Boeotia he describes as “dismal in winter, excruciating in summer, never pleasant.” Ascra lay below Mount Helicon, a name that became associated forever with poetic inspiration and idyllic visitations by Muses, since it was there that Hesiod realized his poetic vocation. Hesiod’s father came from the trading city of Kymai in Asia Minor but had been driven to move by poverty. Hesiod was thus an archetypal ancient Greek: His family had undergone sea voyages, deracination, and transplantation, and he was a farmer. The leitmotif of his Works and Days, from which we learn about his personal situation, and which furnished the Greeks with seminal aspects of their collective identity, was the ever-present threat of hunger.

More than three-quarters of citizens in almost all Greek states, at least in the archaic and classical periods, eked out their living from the land (Sparta, where the ruling class forced slaves to do the agricultural labor, was in this, as in other ways, an exception). The three essential crops were grains, vines, and olives—the plants sacred to Demeter, Dionysus, and Athena, respectively, all of whom have appeared in Linear B. Hesiod gave the Greek farmer this memorable instruction: “Strip to sow, and strip to plough and strip to reap, if you want to harvest all the fruits of Demeter in due season.” The farmer’s priority is to “get a house and a woman and ploughing ox—a slave woman, not a wife, to follow the plough.” The image of the cantankerous old Boeotian poet, asserting his independence by stripping naked to the waist and sweating behind his plow, speaks volumes about the reality of life for the less wealthy Greek—and his slave woman—everywhere. If poor Greeks were to avoid starvation or enslavement, they must do all Hesiod advises, and “add work to work and yet more work.” The early Greeks had little help from mechanical devices or power not supplied directly by humans and animals. It was not until Hellenistic Egypt that sophisticated water-lifting devices were developed to aid irrigation, under the influence of the treatise On Pneumatics, by Philo of Byzantium. The water mill also dates from this later period.

The farmer’s calendar began in late autumn with the plowing of a fallow field. Hesiod advises plowing the soil three times. The plowing needed to be repeated because the ancient plow, rather than turning the soil, simply drew a line with a bronze or iron plowshare. Wheat, barley, corn, and cereals were sown with hand and hoe, and the field needed to be weeded through the winter and spring. In May or June, unremitting labor commenced. The reaper stood with his back to the wind and cut every clump and stalk near the roots with a sickle, before binding them into portable bundles. These were carried to the threshing floor and trampled by oxen until the precious seeds were released. Even then they had to be winnowed hard, with basket and fan or shovel, to remove every fragment of chaff.

The olive has been cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean since 3000 BC. In mainland Greece the olive lay at the heart of the economy, because it thrives in a climate with long summer droughts. The olive is hard work and requires planning and intelligence. It takes years for trees to come to fruition, so a man who planted them might expect to benefit not himself but his son or grandson. They require rigorous pruning, watering, and fertilizing, and can only be harvested every other year. Creating olive oil is labor-intensive. Harvesting the olives required several workers to cooperate in shaking and beating the tree, with one of them climbing to the top to get the highest fruit, before the olives were gathered as they fell on the ground. These were then processed, from fruit to sealed jar of oil, in work areas near the groves where they were grown. A wealthy household might have owned between two hundred and three hundred olive trees. Olives were not only a dietary staple, olive oil was also a luxury, both as a condiment and as a toiletry. It was used for cleaning precious wooden statues and marble tiles. Until the Hellenistic era, it was usually produced on a small scale for domestic use, by farming families themselves, on unsophisticated presses.

The other plant at the center of Greek identity was the grapevine. Like olive farming, viticulture requires brains to supplement intensive labor. The Greeks planted grapevines wherever they settled, except when the climate would not allow it. Vineyards were dug in spring, and vines were grown from cuttings planted in carefully prepared holes. Barley or pulses (legumes) were grown between the vines to maximize yield in relation to land available, especially while one waited for the vines to mature. Once the vines were well established—which could take three years—they needed to be pruned hard every autumn and trained on stakes. The new leaves and shoots were thinned by hand. The ripening grapes were coated with dust in order to delay their maturation and thus increase their sugar content. The soil needed to be hoed regularly and parasitic weeds removed. Once ripe, the vintner picked the grapes and put them in baskets. The juice was extracted by treading the grapes in a wickerwork tray over a board or vat with a spout, through which the juice flowed into jars. The Greeks were not alone in drinking wine. The Mesopotamian elite imported wine from farther north, and Egyptian kings as early as the fourth dynasty (circa 2613–2494 BC) were buried with supplies of wine. But wine was not an elite luxury for ancient Greeks: It was integral to their religion and ethnic identity everywhere.

In Works and Days, the eighth-century Greek peasant farmer’s life is a relentless struggle to survive, and this is contrasted with a mythical age long ago when men of the “golden race” lived in primordial bliss, until Pandora—the first woman—caused their fall. Up until this event, they did die, but painlessly and without aging first. They lived like the gods, did not have to work, and feasted constantly. But after the fall the gods replaced them with the second, silver race. Silver people took a hundred years to emerge from childhood and then did not last long, because they constantly wronged one another and did not honor the gods with sacrifice. The third race, made of bronze, was enormously strong, but so addicted to war and violence that they wiped each other out. The fourth generation were actually an improvement. They were the heroes of myth—Cadmus and Oedipus at Thebes; the heroes of the Trojan War. But the fifth race, of which Hesiod and his audience are members, the race of iron, know nothing but work, sorrow, and death. Only further decline awaits the iron men in the future according to Hesiod. They will all become incapable of agreement, dishonor their parents, break oaths, and bear false witness. Men will no longer feel ashamed of themselves or indignant at malefactors. They will become entirely amoral. Hesiod’s view of mankind’s existence through time places remarkably little emphasis on the gods, making humans themselves largely responsible for their own terminal moral decline.

This lapsarian, or Fall, myth describes humanity’s past in ways that foreshadow the Greek historians. Hesiod is interested in the earlier races of men because they may help to explain the world he inhabits himself. Later, Herodotus and Thucydides both stressed that they did not just want to record events but to explain the nature of the present and help to illuminate the future. But Hesiod’s myth of the Fall also adumbrates Greek rational philosophy. His vision of the races of man is on a universal scale. It has a secular tendency—humans’ choices about actions determine what happens to them just as much as divine intervention. The information communicated in this myth is also given unity by its overarching moral lesson: the importance of moral decency and of living an upright life.

Hesiod’s vision of history explained aspects of Greek ethnic identity. In a poem about famous heroines, which has unfortunately survived only in fragments, Hesiod related how heroes were often descended from male gods’ sexual encounters with mortal women. He traced the heroic families’ genealogies to their three tribal ancestors—Dorus (the Dorian Greeks), Xuthus (the Ionians), and Aeolus (the Aeolians). They were all sons of Hellen, the original Greek and the son of the only couple to survive the Greeks’ version of the Flood myth, Deucalion and Pyrrha. But the human race itself crashes into world history in the Greeks’ Creation story, told in Hesiod’s Theogony.

In the beginning there was only Chaos (the word means something more like “void” than “chaos” implies nowadays). Chaos is followed by five primordial entities: Earth, who contained Tartarus (the lowest region of the cosmos) within her, Eros (Love), Erebos (Shadowland), and Night. From Night and Earth the other residents and elements of the universe sprang: Night mated with Erebos and produced Aether (Air) and Day. But it was Earth who became the mother of most primary beings. By parthenogenesis she created a son, Ouranos (Heaven), the Mountains, and Pontus (Seawater). But then she lay with her son Ouranos, and conceived numerous children, representations of both elemental principles and more ethical or cultural ones.

So, by this stage, male and female constituents of the universe are being brought together sexually, and the physical and material scenography of the world has already been created—earth, air, mountains, sea. Earth produces beautiful daughters, including the personifications of three immaterial concepts that distinguish (the Greeks believed) human experience from that of animals: belief in gods (Theia), morality (Themis), and an ability mentally to transcend the here and now of bodily experience to move around in time (Memory). But the first, shocking conflict is about to afflict this elemental, dominantly feminine, and womblike world of mountain summits, watery beings, and incipient consciousness. The next child whom Earth bears by Ouranos is a “terrible” boy, Cronos, who, for no reason, detests his father. Without justification, long before Freud invented the Oedipal complex, this boy-child sets up the first intergenerational antagonism within the first nuclear family.

Cronos bides his time before attacking the father he loathes, by whom Earth has now conceived six further male children: Three mighty one-eyed Cyclopes are followed by three overpowering monsters with fifty heads and a hundred arms each (Hecatoncheires). These six hideous youths are all “terrible” and, according to Hesiod, “hated immediately by their own father.” Earth and Ouranos’s large brood have now set the stage of the universe for the ethical conflict that became the stuff of Greek myth. Cronos feels for his father the first unmotivated hatred to corrupt the peaceful coexistence that had characterized the earlier world. Equally, the Cyclopes and their hundred-armed brothers may be unpleasant to look at but do not deserve their father’s odium.

To make matters worse, Ouranos thrusts the last six children back inside Earth the minute each is born, delighting in what Hesiod calls his “evil deed.” The unfortunate mother of his children, distended to bursting point, decides that enough is enough. Ouranos is now abusing her as well as the six of their children “straining” to leave her womb, which is what their Greek title, Titans, means. Here we see conflict between parents enter the history of the world. Earth invents flint, makes a sickle, and asks her sons to punish their father. The all-important principle of revenge now arises. Ouranos has done a bad deed, and one of the sufferers (Earth) wants retribution. But even this first retaliatory violence is not a simple case of a victim punishing her persecutor. The only son who offers to help her is not an injured party. It is the son and elder brother of Ouranos’s victims. Cronos’s motive, as we have seen, was an unaccountable loathing of his father felt from birth.

Hesiod shows through their cosmic origins that conflict and revenge are nuanced. Hatred, like Cronos’s for his father, can be irrational. Sometimes hatred, like Ouranos’s dislike of his six monstrous sons, is unfair but understandable. Some cruelty is arbitrary and—worse—can give the cruel party pleasure, as interring his children inside Earth gave pleasure to Ouranos. Some victims do not attempt revenge: The Cyclopes and Hundred-Handers did not dare defy their father. Other victims may use surrogates, who are not victims themselves, in order to exact revenge, as Earth uses Cronos to punish Ouranos.

She lets Ouranos lie with her again so that Cronos can perform his ambush. He slashes off his father’s genitals and throws them down behind him. The bloody drops that fall from them engender new entities. Drops falling onto Earth produce the Erinyes (Vengeance Spirits or Furies), the Giants, and the Ash Tree Nymphs. Drops falling onto the sea produced the foam from which Aphrodite—sexual desire—emerged near the island of Cyprus. For the Greeks, not only was Aphrodite the first Olympian god to be created, but she is born from the same ejaculation as her half-sisters the Erinyes, personifications of revenge—the dark impulse that often accompanies sexual passion in human experience.

After this cataclysmic showdown—the cruelty of the father-husband, the revenge of the hate-filled son, the genesis of Revenge and Lust—cosmic reproduction accelerates. Night establishes a dynasty of vile entities including Doom, Fate, and Death (Thanatos). Seawater is the progenitor of the aquatic deities. Monsters (many of them destined to be killed by Heracles) are the offspring of Ocean’s daughter Callirhoe. A daughter of Earth produces the Sun, Moon, and Dawn; Dawn in turn gives birth to the winds and stars. Ocean begets the rivers, both those in Greece and those in the rest of the world, such as the Nile, the Ister (Danube), Phasis (Rioni in Georgia), and several in modern Turkey—the Granicus, Parthenius, and the Scamander at Troy. Cronos begets six major Olympians by Earth’s daughter Rhea: Hestia, goddess of the hearth, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. In due course Zeus vanquishes his father, Cronos, assumes supremacy in the universe, gives Hades and Poseidon their portfolios, and puts the navel stone beneath the earth at Delphi.

Hesiod introduces humans abruptly. The third generation of gods has been born, including Death, although it is not yet clear who is subject to this dread divinity. Political affiliations between the immortals are tense: Zeus has dislodged Cronos from power and established the first cult center, at Delphi, and relationships are strained between the Titans (Earth’s children) and the aerial Olympians. The ascendancy of the gods over other supernatural beings (giants and monsters) is not yet settled, either.

Gods require humans to worship them. So within this politically unstable world, Hesiod suddenly presents human beings. Rather, he introduces us, specifically, to “mortal humans”—beings vulnerable to death—who will all turn out to be male. The historical development that Hesiod is about to explain is sacrifice—the slaughter of animals to provide burnt gifts for the gods, the ritual that defined pagan religion for all antiquity. “For when the gods and mortal humans were contending at Mecone, Prometheus with forward thinking cut up a great bull and set out portions, trying to deceive the mind of Zeus.” Mecone is in the heart of Greece, near the Gulf of Corinth. It is here that the scene of the primordial sacrificial feast is set. But before the meat is sliced, gods and mortals are already contending. The verb here, krinein, related to the modern terms crisis and critical, is both problematic and astonishing. It is problematic because it encompasses a range of meanings in English. It could, with equal legitimacy, be translated “were distinguishing themselves from each other” or “were in the process of coming to a legal settlement.” Just how hostile were the negotiations at Mecone? Gods and mortals are equally involved in determining their relative positions; they are both agents of the identical verb. The relationship between the divine and human inhabitants of the universe seems surprisingly balanced. It is also, undeniably, politicized.

The issue is dealt with—though by no means resolved happily—by Prometheus’s invention of animal sacrifice and establishment of the customary way of dividing the meat among participants. Parts of the animal, however, are more desirable than others. Prometheus tries to trick Zeus into accepting a portion that contains not meat but bones cleverly dressed in fat. Hesiod is providing an etiology (a mythical explanation) for a traditional practice: The meat was always allocated to the humans, while the aroma of burning bones and sizzling fat was sent up from the altars to the gods. Zeus does not fight over the meat, but he is wrathful, and refuses to give mortals fire (which they would need, among other things, to conduct more sacrifices). But this time Prometheus, the original rebel, successfully deceives Zeus, stealing fire in a fennel stalk and carrying it to man. In the myths of the Greeks, ever suspicious of established power, the origin of human progress is thus made to depend on a primeval flouting of authority.

When Zeus realizes that men have fire, he punishes them with the creation of Pandora, beautiful but deceitful, foremother of the race of women who brought suffering to mankind, especially poverty and labor. Despite the obvious parallel with Eve, there are large differences between this account of the creation of humankind and the story told in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Humans—at least male ones—are on the cosmic scene and already in arbitration with the gods, before the power politics have been fully settled on the divine level. At least one immortal—the Titan Prometheus—favors mortals: He gives them not only superior servings at the first sacrifice but also fire, the emblem of mental and technological advancement. At Mecone there is no temptation by serpents, no woman’s sin of biting an apple of knowledge, no shame and no expulsion from paradise. There are preexisting power struggles, in which men are implicated; as a result of Mecone, they receive the means by which to communicate with the immortals (sacrifice) and to develop technology (fire), but they also are introduced to marriage and endure labor and misery. Unlike Eve, Pandora is given little sympathy: Eve, as Genesis acknowledges, will have her own sufferings in childbirth; Pandora is just there to harass men. But the way that Hesiod presents human’s relations with Zeus and the other gods is also radically different: It is politicized. The mortals who are already “contending” with the immortals, on their first appearance in history, are the forefathers of all the philosophers, scientists, and democrats who subsequently put the distinctive, striving, and often rebellious dynamism into Greek society.

By the end of the eighth century BC the Greeks knew who they were as a group and what they had in common through their shared history. They treasured their independence both as individuals and city-states but met in joint sanctuaries to affirm their bonds by sacrificing and competing in athletics and musical performances. In their epic poems, which they transported as written texts across the sea, they possessed a portable library of images that affirmed that identity. The Iliad gave Greek men images of iconic warriors, battles, and military funerals that sustained them in their constant fighting. But it also offered them a poetic idiom of melancholy and grandeur, a picture of their shared heroic past and—however mediated by myth and fantasy—their sense that they had achieved conquests in Asia. The Odyssey gave them scenes of sailing and a charismatic quest hero who embodied an idealized version of the self-reliant, versatile farmer-seafarer of the archaic period, sufficient unto himself and equipped with advanced mental, practical, and social skills. Hesiod’s psychologically astute poems outlined the Greeks’ joint family tree leading back to Hellen, but also crystallized their relations with the gods, their ethical outlook, the power of hatred, revenge, and sex, their identity as farmers who might have to move because of poverty, their wit, and their contentious streak. Above all, the archaic period put human experience—of sea and land, war and travel, sex and work, food and drink—at the center of its cultural output. In the pictures painted on Athenian pottery, by the mid-eighth century, the human figure becomes increasingly dominant, but also glamorized, as if there was a conscious effort among the artists to create generic scenes that lent human activities prestige and heroism. With the eighth-century self-invention of the disputatious Greeks, the stage had finally been set for their expansion across the entire Mediterranean and Black Sea worlds.

Written by Edith Hall in "Introducing the Ancient Greeks", Bodley Head (is part of the Penguin Random House), London, UK, 2015, chapter 2.Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

(Edith Hall is one of Britain’s foremost classicists, having held posts at the universities of Royal Holloway, Cambridge, Durham, Reading, and Oxford. She regularly writes in the Times Literary Supplement, reviews theater productions on radio, and has authored and edited more than a dozen works on the ancient world. She teaches at King’s College London and lives in Gloucestershire.