History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200-479 BCE

Jonathan M. Hall is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities and Professor in the Departments of History and Classics and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997), Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (2002), and Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian (2013).

• List of Maps xList of Figures xiList of Documents xiiiPreface xvPreface to the Second Edition xviiTimeline xix1 The Practice of History 1The Lelantine War 1The Lelantine War Deconstructed 4What is History? 8History as Literature 11Method and Theory 122 Sources, Evidence, Dates 16Evaluating Sources 16Dating Archaic Poets 21Non-Literary Evidence 26Ancient Chronography 29Archaeological Dating 333 The End of the Mycenaean World and Its Aftermath 41Mycenaean Greece 41Gauging the Historicity of the Dorian Migration 44Alternative Explanations 51The Loss and Recovery of Writing 56Whose Dark Age? 594 Communities of Place 68Defining the Polis 68The Urban Aspect of the Polis: Houses, Graves, and Walls 72Political and Economic Functions 81Cultic Communities 85Polis and Ethnos 905 New Homes Across the Seas 96On the Move 99The Credibility of Colonial Foundation Stories 105Pots and Peoples 111A Spartan Foundation? Taras, Phalanthos, and the Partheniai 116Hunger or Greed? 1206 The Changing Nature of Authority 126Charting the Genesis of the State 126Kings or “Big-Men”? 127The Emergence of an Aristocracy 134Laws and Institutions 138The Return of the “Big-Man” 144Excursus I. A Cautionary Tale: Pheidon of Argos 1547 Fighting for the Fatherland 165A Hoplite Revolution? 165Some More Equal Than Others 174Conquest, Territory, and Exploitation 181Excursus II. Archaeological Gaps: Attica and Crete 1908 Defining the Political Community 200Looking to the End 200The Role of the Dêmos and the Great Rhetra 205Drawing Boundaries 211Land, Labor, and the Crisis in Attica 214The “Second Sex” 220Excursus III. Evaluating the Spartan Mirage 2279 The City of Theseus 235The End of the Tyranny 235The Birth of Democracy? 238The Unification of Attica 243Theseus: Democrat or Autocrat? 251The (A)typicality of Athens 25510 Making a Living 260Conceptualizing Ancient Economic Activity 260A Peasant Economy? 262Plying the Seas 268The Introduction of Coinage 275Excursus IV. The Rise of Persia and the Invasions of Greece 28211 Imagining Greece 290“Greek” Culture: Unity and Diversity 290Greeks and Others: The External Dimension 293The Emergence of Panhellenism: The Internal Dimension 301The Invention of the Barbarian 30812 Writing the History of Archaic Greece 312The First Sacred War: Fact or Fiction? 312The Limits of Narrative History 317Dividing up Time and Space 320Abbreviations and Glossary of Literary Sources 326Works Cited in the Further Reading 330Guide to Electronic Resources 339Index 342