Historical Background

The first advanced civilisation in Greece, the bronze-age Mycenaean civilisation of the second millennium, was based not on city states governed by their citizens, but on powerful kingdoms. This civilisation broke up in the twelfth century, and was followed by a dark age in which the population of Greece dwindled, partly through emigration to the islands of the Aegean and the west coast of Asia Minor, and life returned to more primitive levels.

Recovery began in the tenth century, and from c. 800 to c. 500 we have what is called the archaic period of Greek history, a semi-historical period which resembles an incomplete jigsaw puzzle in which we have the pieces to reconstruct parts of the picture but not the whole. The Greeks were now organised in some hundreds of separate states, which had developed out of the separate, self-sufficient communities of the dark age. A typical state comprised an urban centre and the agricultural land within a few miles of it; its population might be numbered in thousands, but not usually in tens of thousands. At first, it seems, these states had been ruled by kings, but there was no gulf between the kings and the nobility formed by the families which by the end of the dark age had acquired the largest quantities of good land, and before long hereditary monarchy had given way to collective government by the nobles: officials were appointed with limited tenure, to advise them there was a council of leading men, and on occasions when solidarity was important there might be an assembly of all adult male citizens.