à l’Univers de la Précision’, Critique, September 1948, pp. 806–8. By doing so, he explicitly hoped to avoid a sociological explanation of the phenomenon. But as he himself implicitly admitted elsewhere, the Middle Ages equally knew no physics, yet produced a dynamic technology: it was not the itinerary of science, but the course of the relations of production, which printed out the fate of technique.
The emergence of the Hellenic city-states in the Aegean zone predates the classical epoch proper, and only its outlines can be glimpsed from the unwritten sources available. After the collapse of Mycenean civilization about 1200 B.C., Greece experienced a prolonged ‘Dark Age’ in which literacy disappeared and economic and political life regressed to a rudimentary household stage: the primitive and rural world portrayed in the Homeric epics. It was in the succeeding epoch of Archaic Greece, from 800 to 500 B.C., that the urban pattern of classical civilization first slowly crystallized. At some time before the advent of historical records, local kingships were overthrown by tribal aristocracies, and cities were founded or developed under the domination of these nobilities. Aristocratic rule in Archaic Greece coincided with the reappearance of long-distance trade (mainly with Syria and the East), the adumbration of coinage (invented in Lydia in the 7th century), and the creation of an alphabetic script (derived from Phoenicia). Urbanization proceeded steadily, spilling out overseas into the Mediterranean and Euxine, until by the end of the colonization period in the mid 6th century, there were some 1,500 Greek cities in the Hellenic homelands and abroad – virtually none of them more than 25 miles inland from the coastline. These cities were essentially residential nodes of concentration for farmers and landowners: in the typical small town of this epoch, the cultivators lived within the walls of the city and went out to work in the fields every day, returning at night – although the territory of the cities always included an agrarian circumference with a wholly rural population settled in it. The social organization of these towns still reflected much of the tribal past from which they had emerged: their internal structure was articulated by hereditary units whose kin nomenclature represented an urban translation of traditional rural divisions. Thus the inhabitants of the cities were normally organized in descending order of size and inclusiveness – into ‘tribes’, ‘phratries’ and ‘clans’; ‘clans’ being exclusive aristocratic groups, and ‘phratries’ perhaps originally their popular clienteles.1 Little is known of the formal political constitutions of the Greek cities in the Archaic age, since – unlike that of Rome at a comparable stage of development – they did not survive into the classical epoch itself, but it is evident that they were based on the privileged rule of a hereditary nobility over the rest of the urban population, typically exercised through the government of an exclusive aristocratic council over the city.
The rupture of this general order occurred in the last century of the Archaic Age, with the advent of the ‘tyrants’ (c. 650–510 B.C.). These autocrats broke the dominance of the ancestral aristocracies over the cities: they represented newer landowners and more recent wealth, accumulated during the economic growth of the preceding epoch, and rested their power to a much greater extent on concessions to the unprivileged mass of city-dwellers. The tyrannies of the 6th century, in effect, constituted the critical transition towards the classical polis. For it was during their general period of sway that the economic and military foundations of Greek classical civilization were laid. The tyrants were the product of a dual process within the Hellenic cities of the later archaic period. The arrival of coinage and the spread of a money economy were accompanied by a rapid increase in the aggregate population and trade of Greece. The wave of overseas colonization from the 8th to the 6th centuries was the most obvious expression of this development; while the higher productivity of Hellenic wine and olive cultivation, more intensive than contemporary cereal agriculture, perhaps gave Greece a relative advantage in commercial exchanges within the Mediterranean zone.2 The economic opportunities afforded by this growth created a stratum of newly enriched agrarian proprietors, drawn from outside the ranks of the traditional nobility, and in some cases probably benefiting from auxiliary commercial enterprises. The fresh wealth of this group was not matched by any equivalent power in the city. At the same time, the increase of population and the expansion and disruption of the archaic economy provoked acute social tensions among the poorest class on the land, always most liable to become degraded or subjected to noble estate-owners, and now exposed to new strains and uncertainties.3 The combined pressure of rural discontent from below and recent fortunes from above forced apart the narrow ring of aristocratic rule in the cities. The characteristic outcome of the resultant political upheavals within the cities was the emergence of the transient tyrannies of the later 7th and 6th centuries. The tyrants themselves were usually comparative upstarts of considerable wealth, whose personal power symbolized the access of the social group from which they were recruited to honours and position within the city. Their victory, however, was generally possible only because of their utilization of the radical grievances of the poor, and their most lasting achievement was the economic reforms in the interests of the popular classes which they had to grant or tolerate to secure their power. The tyrants, in conflict with the traditional nobility, in effect objectively blocked the monopolization of agrarian property that was the ultimate tendency of its unrestricted rule, and which was threatening to cause increasing social distress in Archaic Greece. With the single exception of the landlocked plain of Thessaly, small peasant farms were preserved and consolidated throughout Greece in this epoch. The different forms in which this process occurred have largely to be reconstructed from their later effects, given the lack of documented evidence from the pre-classical period. The first major revolt against aristocratic dominance that led to a successful tyranny, supported by the lower classes, occurred in Corinth in the mid 7th century, where the Bacchiadae family was evicted from its traditional grip over the city, one of the earliest trading centres to flourish in Greece. But it was the Solonic reforms in Athens that furnish the clearest and best recorded example of what was probably something like a general pattern of the time. Solon, not himself a tyrant, was vested with supreme power to mediate the bitter social struggles between the rich and the poor which erupted in Attica at the turn of the 6th century. His decisive measure was to abolish debt bondage on the land, the typical mechanism whereby small-holders fell prey to large landowners and became their dependent tenants, or tenants became captives of aristocratic proprietors.4 The result was to check the growth of noble estates and to stabilize the pattern of small and medium farms that henceforward characterized the countryside of Attica.
This economic order was accompanied by a new political dispensation. Solon deprived the nobility of its monopoly of office by dividing the population of Athens into four income classes, according the top two rights to the senior magistracies, the third access to lower administrative positions, and the fourth and last a vote in the Assembly of the citizenry, which henceforward became a regular institution of the city. This settlement was not destined to last. In the next thirty years, Athens experienced swift commercial growth, with the creation of a city currency and the multiplication of local trade. Social conflicts within the citizenry were rapidly renewed and aggravated, culminating in the seizure of power by the tyrant Peisistratus. It was under this ruler that the final shape of the Athenian social formation emerged. Peisistratus sponsored a building programme which provided employment for urban craftsmen and labourers, and presided over a flourishing development of marine traffic out of the Piraeus. But above all, he provided direct financial assistance to the Athenian peasantry, in the form of public credits which finally clinched their autonomy and security on the eve of the classical polis.5 The staunch survival of small and medium farmers was assured. This economic process – whose inverse non-occurrence was later to define the contrasting social history of Rome – seems to have been common throughout Greece, although the events behind it are nowhere so documented outside Athens. Elsewhere, the average size of rural holdings might sometimes be bigger, but only in Thessaly did large aristocratic estates predominate. The economic basis of Hellenic citizenry was to be modest agrarian property. Approximately concomitant with this social settlement in the age of the tyrannies, there was a significant change in the military organization
