The Classical World Read Online Free PDF Page B

city-states, adoption was permissible, a crucial social fiction, and, as riches spread into non-noble hands, marriage to a non-noble rich bride could re-establish the fortunes of a noble line. So a nobility could maintain itself sufficiently across the generations. But so far, nothing found in the archaeology of archaic Greece confirms the existence of whole families in Greece with a long record of persisting noble splendour. The existence, therefore, of true aristocrats in eighth-century Greece has been questioned by some modern historians who rely on ‘material evidence’: were the Greek communities, perhaps, more egalitarian between
c.
850 and
c.
720 BC , led by only temporary ‘big men’ or local ‘chiefs’? However, archaeology is not the best guide to this sort of question, and the aristocrat’s splendour lay in goods which would not survive for posterity, in textiles, in metals which might be melted down and reused and, above all, in horses.
    The older, more persuasive view among historians is that in the aftermath of the age of ‘Mycenaean’ kings or during the disorders of what we call the early ‘dark age’ (
c.
1100–900 BC ) particular families in mainland Greece established themselves with greater holdings of land in the former territories of their kings and princes. These families may have been powerful under the previous kingship, or even the descendants of its royal line. Those who maintained their power pointed back to their ancestry and sometimes traced it to a god or hero. They also controlled particular cults of the gods in theircommunity’s territory and passed the priesthoods of these gods down their direct family line. They were not a ‘sacred caste’: landowning was their basic distinction and the priesthoods were only another one. As and where
poleis
or city-states formed, these superior families dominated them. By
c.
750 BC those who owned the most land and held such priesthoods were described as the ‘best’ or the ‘good’ or the well-born (hence the ‘Eupatrids’). In most Greek communities, the aristocratic families, or
gen ē
, stood at the head of groups of social inferiors, pyramids of dependence of which the best known are ‘brotherhoods’, or ‘phratries’. These phratries were not a new eighth-century invention, but into them the male members (in my view, all members) of the early Greek citizen-bodies were grouped. Those who were not noble or ‘good’ were simply ‘bad’ or ‘wicked’. From an early date, Greek aristocrats invented a frank vocabulary of social incorrectness.
    The life of an aristocrat involved prowess and display, but it also brought duties and responsibilities. It was the nobility who decided on all wars and treaties and led the fighting. Nowadays, we think of aristocrats as amateurs, but there was nothing amateurish about early Greek aristocrats in action. They were champion fighters in war and expected a due reward of the booty and prizes. Homer’s heroes fight on foot in memorable, stylized duels with swords and ‘long-shadowing’ spears. Real aristocrats might also fight such ‘battles of champions’, but, unlike Homer’s heroes, they also fought from their beloved horses. They rode them without stirrups or heavy leather saddles (at most, they sat on padded horse-blankets) and the horses were not even shod, although the dry climate helped to toughen their hoofs. Literary and artistic evidence for early Greek cavalry is so scarce that some modern historians have doubted its existence. But many hundreds of horses are attested in later literary texts for some of the early Greek city-states, and they were not kept solely for competitions or for use in farming: there was no efficient horse-collar which would allow horses to pull heavy loads. On horseback, a nobleman could scatter and pursue the ill-armoured groups of lower-class foot followers whom his noble opponents brought to war. Noblewomen, by contrast, never rode at all. They were