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Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History
Origins of States: The Case of Archaic GreeceAuthor(s): W. G.
RuncimanSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.
24, No. 3 (Jul., 1982), pp. 351-377Published by: Cambridge
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Origins of States: The Case of Archaic Greece W. G. RUNCIMAN
Trinity College, Cambridge
The plurals in my title carry two implications, neither of which
I take to be controversial, if they ever were: first, that there is
more than one kind of "original" state; second, that there is more
than one way in which states originate. There is, admittedly,
continuing controversy over the definition of "state." But for the
purposes of this article, I assume that there are four necessary
and jointly sufficient conditions for the emergence of a state from
nonstate or stateless forms of social organization: specialization
of governmen- tal roles; centralization of enforceable authority;
permanence, or at least more than ephemeral stability, of
structure; and emancipation from real or fictive kinship as the
basis of relations between the occupants of governmental roles and
those whom they govern. All four admit of differences of degree.
But they furnish an adequate framework within which the different
processes by which different states have come into being can be
analyzed and compared.
Once, however, monocausal theories of the decisive importance of
trade, or warfare, or religion, or population growth have all been
abandoned, what is it about the origins of states which either
ought to, or can, be explained in general terms at all? Something,
to be sure, has to happen to bring about an evolution from
statelessness to statehood. It is not an automatic sequence. But it
may be that once certain initial conditions are fulfilled, one or
other of a range of functionally equivalent processes is bound
sooner or later to get under way which will in due course bring one
or more states into being. In what follows, I shall argue that the
critical transition depends on the condi- tions for a cumulative
accretion of the power available to the incumbents of prospective
governmental roles; and I shall do so with particular but not
exclusive reference to the case of archaic Greece.
The choice of Greece is for two reasons. First, the emergence of
statehood out of the unpromising background of post-Mycenaean
poverty and depopula- tion is no less remarkable an example than is
afforded by the Near or Far East, or North India, or Peru, or
Central America. Second, the Greek example
I am indebted to Sir Moses Finley, S. C. Humphreys, and G. S.
Kirk for useful criticisms of earlier drafts.
0010-4175/82/3156-7348 $2.50 ? 1982 Society for Comparative
Study of Society and History
351
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352 W. G. RUNCIMAN
carries the advantage of literary as well as archaeological
evidence. It is true that much of the literary tradition is of
little value for reconstruction of the events of the Archaic Age:
the narratives recounted centuries later by Strabo and Pausanias
have to be heavily discounted in the absence of contemporary
corroboration. But it is only necessary to ask what we would not
give to have a Mesopotamian or Mesoamerican Thucydides and
Aristotle, or indeed Homer and Hesiod, to appreciate the value of
literary materials, problematic as their interpretation may be.
Precise chronology, moreover, is not essential to the argument. In
order to document the critical stages of the transition from
statelessness to statehood, it is only the sequence, not the dates,
which must be right.1
PROTOSTATES AND SEMISTATES
A distinction is often drawn between states which originate
independently of the influence of preexisting states and states
which originate through emula- tion of, or coercion by, others. But
to give priority to the analysis of primary over secondary state
formation is to ignore the likelihood that different an- tecedent
events may generate similar processes. As it is put by Ronald
Cohen, "primary and secondary states differ in the way they are set
into motion: the triggering events are dissimilar. But the internal
interactions necessary to transform a non-state society into one
recognizable as a state do not vary significantly from one kind of
state to the other. "2 Furthermore, even where states are recreated
in conscious imitation of a remembered or mythologized past, the
same kind of transitional process may still be necessary and/or
sufficient for the attempt to succeed. The more important
distinction is that between what I propose to call "semi" and
"proto" states. Both have passed beyond the stateless stage of
primitive hunter-gatherers, nomadic pas- toralists, slash-and-burn
cultivators, or such aggregations of autonomous pa- triarchal
households as Homer's mythical Cyclopes.3 But the difference
be-
' It follows that the Iliad and Odyssey can be used in evidence
even if it is agreed with A. M. Snodgrass, "An Historical Homeric
Society?" Journal of Hellenic Studies, 94 (1974), 114-25, that they
cannot possibly reflect the institutions of Greek society as they
were at any one period. It is no doubt true for the purposes of an
archaeological historian such as J. N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece
(London, 1977), 18, that "Homer we cannot use." But for the
purposes of a sociologist, it is not. From this point of view, the
discussion by M. I. Finley in The World of Odysseus (London, 1956)
remains fundamental, irrespective of whether he is right that the
Odyssey gives a picture of "the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.,
distorted here and there by misunderstandings and anachronisms"
("The World of Odysseus Revisited," Proceedings of the Classical
Association, 71 (1974), 23).
2 Ronald Cohen, "Introduction," in Origins of the State, Ronald
Cohen and Elman R. Service, eds. (Philadelphia, 1978), 12-13.
3 Odyssey IX. 112-15: They have no assembly and no customary law
(themistes), but each individual patriarch lays down the law
(themisteuei) for his own wives and children regardless of any
other. The fact that no such actual society exists in the
ethnographic record does not alter its significance as an ideal
type with which Homer and his audience contrasted their own
societies. But it is a contrast between civilization and the
absence of it, not between statehood and stateless- ness.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 353
tween them is that the quasi-governmental roles by which
semistates are structured carry no inherent potential for progress
in the direction of statehood as defined above. In a protostate, by
contrast, they do.
The difference can be well illustrated by a comparison of
Capetian France with traditional Hawaii. Both are instances of what
Aidan W. Southall calls "segmentary states"4-societies, that is, in
which there is no central coer- cive, but only ritual, authority
and the roles constitutive of the central author- ity are or might
well be duplicated at the peripheries. But the Hawaiian chiefs, for
all their apparent power over their commoners, were not and never
became kings: "they had not broken structurally with the people at
large."5 The Capetian kings, on the other hand, for all their
apparent powerlessness over their vassals, were engaged in
rebuilding a central authority with the support of specialized,
permanent administrators. In Hawaii, no chief could ever establish
a state. Political roles were still constrained within a framework
of kinship; force could not be effectively applied at any distance
from the centre; the danger of rebellion was endemic; and the
exaction of tribute could never be organized on a basis adequate to
sustain a bureaucracy which could con- tinue to exact it. But in
eleventh- and twelfth-century France, a king was able to retain and
even extend the royal demesne, to raise an army independent of
contingents from his immediate vassals, and to draw on the services
of a household which included a seneschal, a constable, a butler, a
chamberlain and his staff, and a chancellor and clerks who "became
almost exclusively responsible for political decisions, royal
grants of privilege, and the determi- nation of legal
proceedings."6
In those examples, the evidence is sufficient to document the
difference in roles directly. But even where the evidence is
archaeological only, it is possi- ble to identify protostatehood
in, for example, the evolution of San Jose in the Oaxaca Valley;
and even where, as for example in the case of the Shilluk of the
Upper Nile, there is a well-attested "kingly" role, it is possible
to show that this is a case of no more than semistatehood. The
Oaxaca excavations provide unmistakable evidence for a cumulative
accretion of power: out of a group of villages of roughly
comparable size, one can be seen to begin to develop as a trading
and ceremonial centre and from there to what can uncon- tentiously
be labelled a regional capital. Although no direct evidence exists
for the emergence of kings, magistrates, generals, ministers, or
other gov- ernmental roles, there can be no doubt whatever that, by
the end of the process, offices and positions necessary and
sufficient for the administration and maintenance of a centralized
state had evolved.7 Among the Shilluk, by
4 Aidan W. Southall, Alur Society (Cambridge, England, 1957),
ch. 9. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London, 1974),
148.
6 Ch. Petit-Dutaillis, The Feudal Monarchy in France and
England, E. D. Hunt, trans. (London, 1936), 80.
7 See Warwick Bray, "From Village to City in Mesoamerica," in
The Origins of Civilization, P. R. S. Moorey, ed. (Oxford, 1979),
78-102.
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354 W. G. RUNCIMAN
contrast, although the powers and privileges ofo the reth are
fully documented in the ethnographic record, there seems equally
little doubt that they never accu- mulated to the point that the
"structural break," in Sahlins's phrase, could be achieved. It is
true that the reth was a real king to the extent that he was the
sole recognized hereditary mediator. But he had no coercive
authority, and any attempt on his part to exercise it, whether on
his own account or under the pressure of a colonizing power, met
the immediate and effective opposition of the constituent segments
of the society.8
No such clear-cut and decisive examples can be cited from the
ancient world, since the evidence is not there to vindicate them.
But the difference between a semistate and a protostate can still
be brought out by contrasting Odysseus's Ithaca as Homer describes
it with the Germanic tribes of the first century A.D. as described
in Tacitus's Germania. For this purpose, it does not matter how far
either account may fall short of the standards of the trained
academic ethnographer;9 the similarities and differences as
presented to us still serve to illustrate the crucial difference
between a society with a political organization stuck, as it were,
midway between statelessness and statehood and one in which
statehood is already visibly embryonic in the accretion of power
available to the incumbents of identifiable governmental roles.
The two are initially similar not only in having passed the
stage at which political and kinship roles are coterminous but also
in having evolved roles to which authority attaches which is
superior in both kind and degree to that of the lineage head, the
village elder or the leader of a hunting band. Fur- thermore, both
are societies in which brigandage is customary and admired
("materia munificentiae per bella et raptus" is very Homeric), and
in which the combination of heroic prowess and eloquence in debate
("auctoritas suadendi" is just what Odysseus possessed to the full)
is the basis of leader- ship. But these similarities are overridden
by three all-important differences. First, landholding among
Tacitus's Germans is on the basis of distribution according to rank
by villages as a whole, not distribution among autonomous oikoi.'0
Second, Tacitus's reges and duces, unlike the basileis who ruled
Ithaca, can command genuine military retinues: they are not
dependent on the support only of their own friends and servants,1
and the career of a
8 Cf. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, "The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk
of the Nilotic Sudan," reprinted in his Essays in Social
Anthropology (London, 1962), 73, and P. P. Howell, "Observa- tions
on the Shilluk of the Upper Nile. The Laws of Homicide and the
Legal Functions of the Reth," Africa, 22:2 (1952), 106. 9 I do not,
in other words, seek to dissent from the remark of J. M.
Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the
Continent (Oxford, 1971), 2, that "the Germania is not only an
unsafe guide to future German society, it also affords no solid
ground for generaliza- tion about Germanic society at large of the
historian's own time."
10 Tacitus, Germania 26: "agri pro numero cultivorum ab
universis vicis occupantur, quos mox inter se secundum dignationem
partiuntur. "
1 It is worth noting how, when Telemachus has to find a crew, he
can only do so among those
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 355
Maroboduus was feasible among them in a way that it could not be
for any of the basileis of Ithaca, including Odysseus himself.'2
Third, a legal system is in existence such that, according to
Tacitus, there are fixed rules for the settlement of feuds; it is
permissible to lay capital charges before the assembly (at which
the priests, rather than the reges, have ius coercendi); and
principes chosen by the assembly are sent out with supporting
retinues to administer the law (jura) in the villages. Despite the
similarities, therefore, there are no governmental roles in the
Ithacan case which go beyond patriarchal domina- tion in the
Weberian sense.13 But in the German case there are. It may,
admittedly, be relevant to point out both that Ithaca is an island
and that the plot of the Odyssey depends on Odysseus being absent
for twenty years during the minority of his only son, whereas
Germany by the first century A.D. was ripe for secondary state
formation in response to Roman pressure. But what- ever the
particular causes behind it, a critical process has been at work in
the one case which has not been at work in the other. In the first,
something will have to happen to bring about statehood; in the
second, something will have to happen to prevent it.
It might perhaps be objected that the distinction between
semistates and protostates is teleological-that the difference is
merely between those societies which do and those which don't
become states. But if the diagnosis is correctly made, it can in
principle be predicted in advance which will do which. It is a
matter at once of the roles which have been evolved and of the
power available to attach to them. Sahlins contrasts the societies
in which prestigious hunters or big-men must "personally construct
their power over others" with chieftainships "properly so-called"
in which men "come to power,"'4 and it is this difference which is
critical. When Herodotus is giving his account of the origins of
the Macedonian royal house, he talks of Perdiccas as having
acquired (ktesamenos) the "tyranny" or, in a later passage, the
"sovereignty" (VIII. 137, 139), which is to say that the power was
there to be come to, or taken. But in Homeric Ithaca, the power
from which Laertes has abdicated, which Odysseus has not come back
to take up, and which Tele- machus is too young to assume, is of
the kind which has to be built up and maintained by the personal
prowess of the incumbent of the "kingly" role.
of his contemporaries who are also his friends (Odyssey
III.363), and when Antinous asks how he achieved it (IV.642-44),
the only alternative he puts is that of household servants of
Telemachus's own.
12 Maroboduus appears in Germania 42 as a rex of noble genus,
but his assumption of a royal title apparently rendered him fatally
unpopular (Annals II.xliv: Maroboduum regis nomen in- visum apud
popularis). E. A. Thompson, The Early Germans (Oxford, 1965), 68,
speaks of him as a "permanent autocrat" who had "won despotic
power," but in the event, his power, despotic as it may have been,
was temporary only.
13 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 4th ed. (Tiibingen,
1956), II, 588: "Bei der patriarchalen Herrschaft ist es die
personliche Unterwerfung unter den Herrn...."
14 Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 139.
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356 W. G. RUNCIMAN
Indeed, the description of Laertes living away from the town on
his farm "unable," as M. I. Finley puts it, "to rule iphi, by
might"15 is more reminis- cent of an ousted Anuak headman who has
retired to the village of his mater- nal kin where he has kept a
separate set of gardens16 than of a deposed or abdicated ex-king in
the full monarchical sense. In more general terms, the difference
between a world in which semistates only are possible and one in
which protostate power is available to be come to or taken is
implicit in Thucydides's celebrated opening chapter. He had, to be
sure, less knowledge of the actual societies of Mycenaean Greece
than we do. But he was fully aware of the significance of the
change from a world of nomadic tribes, shifting allegiances,
chronic piracy, and impermanent cultivation to one of investible
surpluses (periousia chrematon), effective navies, inherited ruler-
ships, and the permanent subjection of smaller towns by larger
ones-or, in other words, a world with the foundations on which
roles constitutive of statehood could be built.
A different objection might be that if protostates are defined
by the emergence of governmental roles, then there can be no real
difference be- tween a protostate and a state. But the critical
transition does not happen overnight; it is not a "phoenix-like
birth"17 by which a city-state, or any other, is brought into
being. It is true that there can be instances of secondary state
formation where the imitation or imposition of the institutions of
a central government is a single event rather than a gradual
process. It is also true that at one point in the course of a
gradual process a lawgiver may codify legal and governmental
practices into what thereafter remains their established form. But
it is still necessary to allow for a stage corresponding to what
Henri J. M. Claessen calls the "transitional," as opposed to the
"inchoate," type of early state.18 If, after a generation or two,
the structure of governmental roles is sufficiently stable for one
group or faction of incumbents to be replaced by another (even if
by violence) without bringing about regression to semistate- hood
or anarchy, then and only then can the society in question be
designated without qualification as a state.
EMERGENCE OF GOVERNMENTAL ROLES
It is a safe assumption that the cumulative accretion of power
in the hands of the incumbents of emerging, specialized, permanent,
nonkin, governmental roles will be mirrored in the language of the
society concerned. But there is a
15 Finley, World of Odysseus, 95. 16 Max Gluckman, Politics, Law
and Ritual in Tribal Society (Oxford, 1965), 125. For
Gluckman, as for some other anthropologists, the Anuak (and
indeed the Shilluk) count as a "state," but on a definition so
broad as to include any form of minimal government of what on the
definition advanced here is only a "semistate" kind.
17 Carl Roebuck, "Urbanization in Corinth," Hesperia, 41:1
(1972), 127. 18 Henri J. M. Claessen, "The Early State: A
Structural Approach," in The Early State,
Claessen and Peter Skalnik, eds. (The Hague, 1978), 589.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 357
danger of reading back into "their" terminology assumptions
about political institutions and activities which they may not have
held or even been capable of formulating: the extent to which the
power of a ruler can properly be categorized as "political" as
opposed to "economic," or "secular" as op- posed to "religious," is
as problematic for the Mycenaean wanax as for the Sumerian lugal19
and not always straightforward even in the much fuller literary
sources for the archaic Greek basileis. There is also the further
diffi- culty that by the time the powers attaching to governmental
roles have been clearly formulated, it is likely that the critical
transition will already have been made: the cosmoi and titai of the
poleis of archaic Crete were magistrates whose functions already
presuppose a permanent central authority with the capacity to
enforce the rules and punishments which the law lays down.20
Vocabulary alone, therefore, cannot by itself be used to
distinguish semi- from protostates. But where their terms can be
traced through a succession of changing meanings, it does at least
document the sequence by which there has accrued to recognized
governmental roles a kind and degree of power such that the
critical transition has been made.
One example is the role of aisymnetes, which in the Odyssey
(VIII.258) is merely that of one of a number of umpires chosen to
supervise the games organized for Odysseus's benefit by the
Phaeacians, but which in Aristotle's Politics (1285a) is that of an
elected dictator. In between, aisymnetai are to be found in
Miletus, Megara, Teos, and Cyme in what appear to be gov- ernmental
roles, although the sources unfortunately do not make it possible
to specify their powers at all precisely.21 The case which
Aristotle particularly cites is that of Pittacus, who was elected
aisymnetes at Mitylene in order to fight off the rival party which
had been driven into exile. But irrespective of the variations in
their tenure, on which he specifically comments, Aristotle makes it
clear that aisymnetai were by definition elective. The role seems,
accordingly, to have developed from that of a judge or arbitrator
chosen for a particular occasion to that of an elected magistrate
to that of a dictator who comes to power, in the first instances at
least, by popular acclaim. The obvious parallel is to the North
Italian cities in the late Middle Ages, and to the roles of consul,
podesta, captain-general, and ultimately signore: all were elective
in some sense, but as the power attaching to them progressively
increased, there came a point at which tyranny was the appropriate
descrip- tion.22
More illuminating are the changes in the role of basileus.
Whether or not
19 Cf. Joan Oates, Babylon (London, 1979), 25, and J. T. Hooker,
Mycenaean Greece (London, 1977), 183. 20 See R. F. Willetts,
Aristocratic Society in Ancient Crete (London, 1955), 105-8.
21 L. H. Jeffery, Archaic Greece (London, 1976), 47, 158, 226,
238. 22 Cf. Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics (London,
1969), 231, and the quotation from
Machiavelli's Discorsi there cited.
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358 W. G. RUNCIMAN
derived from the qa-si-re-u who appears as a subordinate
official of some kind in the Linear B tablets from Pylos, the
basileis of post-Mycenaean Greece can not be considered true
monarchs such as the Mycenaean wanakes. Both Thucydides (I.13) and
Aristotle (Politics 1285b) are quite explicit in their belief that
the archaic basileis occupied a hereditary position of leader- ship
whose powers were circumscribed by custom. In Homer, the basileis
are nobles, not kings in the proper sense, and their poleis are
communities with a residential centre, not states. A "palace" like
that of Alcinous does not make its occupant a monarch any more than
a wall and a place of assembly make a village a capital. Nor are
the dorophagoi basilies of Hesiod's Works and Days "bribe-devouring
kings," although sometimes translated as such; they are nobles who
receive gifts as mediators in local disputes.23 The role of
basileus did, to be sure, survive the transition to statehood. But
it then became one governmental role among several, as in Sparta,
or retained only its ritual authority, as in Athens. When the
shadowy but impressive-sounding Pheidon established himself as
ruler of Argos, then in Aristotle's description (Politics 1310b),
he turned from a basileus into a tyrannos. The word basileus
appears in an inscription of the early sixth century from Chios in
a context which appears to relate to the acceptance of what were,
by then, bribes; but it appears alongside the role of demarchos.24
An inscription relat- ing to the foundation of Cyrene in the late
seventh century designates the founder as archagetes and basileus,
which parallels Herodotus's designation of him (IV. 153) as higemon
and basileus; but the role here is that of an oecist sent out from
a mother-state.25 Only much later, as in Macedonia, can basileus be
correctly translated into English as "king." When in the post-
Mycenaean period the term designates the single topmost role, it is
a semistate role, and once statehood has evolved, the role which is
designated is no longer the single topmost one.
The critical transition is discernible also in the role of the
"people." Al- ready in the semistates of the Homeric poems there
are not only identifiable superordinate and subordinate roles but
also distinctions between the public and the private realms. When
Telemachus arrives in Sparta, he at once tells Menelaus that the
business which brings him is private, as opposed to public (demios)
(Odyssey III.82; cf. IV.314); and it seems clear in both the Iliad
(XIII.669ff.) and the Odyssey (XIV.239ff.) that the decision to
send a contin- gent with Agamemnon to Troy was at least in part a
public one. But the members of the Homeric demos are not quite
citizens: their role in the assem- bly is essentially that of an
audience. Nor are they quite subjects: they are
23 Cf. M. L. West, ed., Works and Days (Oxford, 1978), 151. 24
Russell Meiggs and David Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical
Inscriptions to the End of
the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford, 1969), 14-17. 25 Ibid. 6-9.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 359
neither conscripted nor taxed.26 Nor is there epigraphic
evidence for a demos exercising a fully political function before
the damioi of Dreros, in Crete, in the second half of the seventh
century, by which time the polis appears along with them in the
same inscription as a full-fledged state.27 At the same time, where
there are identifiable subject peoples who are excluded from
govern- ment but who have therefore to be controlled by a central
coercive authority, a whole range of new terms appears by which to
designate them. Again, it may be dangerous to infer too much from
the mere existence of a vernacular term: the Thessalian penestai,
whom Aristotle (Politics 1269a) likens to the Spartan helots, may
or may not have required the same degree of centrally organized
policing, and the precise position of the Cretan apetairio and
klarotai, or the Argive gymnetes, or the Locrian woikiatai, or the
Maryandinians subjected to the colonists of Heraclea Pontica, is at
least as difficult to reconstruct as the precise role of aisymnetai
or basileis. But they are equally symptomatic of a common
process.
Similarly revealing is the transition of demiurgos, which in the
Odyssey (XVII.382-84 and XIX.135) covers prophets, doctors,
builders, minstrels, and heralds, but which by the classical period
designates either magistrates on the one hand or artisans on the
other. This "very strange fact"28 poses a problem in itself. But it
seems clear that the Homeric demiurgoi, although they may have
travelled from place to place and thus occupied a social position
outside the normal structure of the communities where they resided,
had quite high status. It is significant that heralds, who were
virtual aristo- crats, are included among them;29 and there is a
parallel to the status of goldsmiths, in particular, in Anglo-Saxon
England, who are known some- times to have been rewarded by their
patrons with grants of land.30 It is not therefore as puzzling as
at first appears that the term should have come to be applied to
those whose "demiurgy" was an oligarchical magistracy in a polis
which was making the transition from arbitration by a council of
elders to the exercise of legal-cum-political office.
26 Finley, World of Odysseus, 70, does at one point speak of
"taxes and other dues to lords and kings" in the Homeric world; but
he subsequently qualifies this by the observation that "no word
immediately denoting compulsion, like 'taxes' or even feudal
'dues,' is to be found in the poems for payments from people to
ruler, apart from the context of the special prerogative in the
distribution of booty and the meat of sacrificial animals" (p.
105).
27 Meiggs and Lewis, Greek Historical Inscriptions, 2-3. 28
Kentaro Murakawa, "Demiurgos," Historia, 6:4 (1957), 386. 29 Ibid.,
399. D. J. Mosley, "Diplomacy in Classical Greece," Ancient
Society, 3 (1972), 14,
cites R. Numelin, The Beginnings of Diplomacy (London, 1950),
132, on the heralds of the Fijian Mata-Ki, "whose functions
correspond almost exactly with what we know of the Homeric
heralds." L. H. Jeffery, "Demiourgoi in the Archaic Period,"
Archeologica Classica, 25-26 (1973-74), 319, comments that "not
only heralds and judges, but theoroi, proxenoi, presbeis and the
like might all be termed 'workers' of this sort; for before the
rise of government by democracy all such public duties needed a
social background of leisure, wealth and office-holding...."
30 Dorothy Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society, 2d ed.
(Harmondsworth, England, 1954), 105.
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360 W. G. RUNCIMAN
On this point, too, Homer can be cited as evidence. In the
arbitration depicted on the shield of Achilles (Iliad
XVIII.497-508), the disputants are seeking a resolution of their
dispute at the hands of a wise man (istor), and the elders
(gerontes) stand up to speak in turn as the people (laoi) cheer on
one or other side. It is a scene which can be paralleled almost
exactly from the Nyakusa of what is now Tanzania, where
arbitrations are carried out by appointed chiefs and "great
commoners" chosen for their experience and standing but where the
hearing is public and the outcome is observably swayed by public
opinion as expressed in the shouts of disapproval voiced in
court.31 The elders or chiefs in such semistates cannot yet be
called the incumbents of judicial roles. They are, at most, experts
in precedent or ac- knowledged repositories of customary law, or
what Plutarch (Theseus 25) calls nom6n didaskaloi and hosion kai
hier6n exegetai. Only when a perma- nent central authority can
count on the implementation of its decrees can law, and statehood
with it, be said to have been reached, and only then does there
follow the further differentiation and specialization of roles
which turns thes- mothetai from lawgivers into a body of junior
archons specially charged with collating and systematizing the laws
(Aristotle, Constitution ofAthens III.4.).
Finally, the transition is visible in the field of international
relations. In the Homeric world, these are conducted, such as they
are, through "guest- friendship" (xenia) between one noble or chief
and another acting in semipublic roles: the practice is partly a
means of securing alliances but partly also one of ensuring
marriages for children and a place of refuge in the event of
dispossession or exile (cf. Solon, Fr. 13). Proxenia, on the other
hand, is a properly consular role which was a natural development
in the context of systematic and continuing relationships between
emerging states. It can be documented from about the last quarter
of the seventh century in an inscrip- tion from Corcyra which, in
the comment of Meiggs and Lewis, "has a fascinating tension between
its Homeric echoes and the political circum- stances of a new age.
"32 The inscription commemorates a certain Menecrates, who had
represented the Corcyreans in West Locris, and it provides firm
evidence not only for trading relations but for the role of a damos
as the citizen body whose representative and benefactor the
proxenos was.
FORMS OF POWER
But if the roles constitutive of statehood are a matter of the
power attaching to them, that power is a matter of the sanctions
with which to enforce it. How- ever many different "triggering
events" may set the critical process off, there
31 See Godfrey Wilson, "Introduction to Nyakusa Law," Africa,
10:1 (1937), 34. 32 Meiggs and Lewis, Greek Historical
Inscriptions, 5. M. B. Wallace, "Early Greek Pro-
xenia," Phoenix, 24:3 (1970), 192, suggests that the "political
precocity" implied by the Meiggs and Lewis dating is a reason for
lowering the date. But the sociological point still stands.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 361
are only as many ways for states to originate as there are means
for the incumbents of specialized, permanent, nonkin governmental
roles to secure the obedience of their subjects and/or
fellow-citizens. The question raises wider issues of sociological
theory than can be accommodated within the limits of this article.
But it is central to my argument about the cumulative accretion of
power, and I accordingly propose to assume without further
discussion that there are three and only three forms of power, and
therefore varieties of sanction, on which the roles constitutive of
statehood can be based. These correspond to the familiar
distinction between the economic, the social (in the sense of
social status) and the political. That is to say, the powers of any
and all rulers derive from some combination of (1) possession of or
control over the sources and distribution of wealth and therewith
the ability to offer or withhold the means of subsistence, (2)
attribution by sub- jects and/or fellow-citizens of superior honour
or prestige, whether deriving from sacred or secular personal or
institutional charisma, and therewith the ability to attract and
retain a following, and (3) command of the technical and
organizational means of physical coercion and therewith the ability
to impose obedience by force.
Now there are, in the literature on archaic Greece, rival
accounts of the emergence of states which deliberately assign
priority to one or the other on a priori grounds. A distinctively
Marxian account can be found, for example, in the work of George
Thomson,33 for whom the story is one of neolithic self- sufficiency
followed by the introduction of metal and therefore the extraction
of surplus value placed in the hands of chiefs who, by waging wars
of conquest with superior weapons and tilling their demesne lands
with captured slaves, arrive at the stage of a landed aristocracy
engaged in commodity exchange and production for profit rather than
use. A distinctively Durkheim- ian account can be found in the work
of Louis Gernet,34 for whom it is a story of Homeric priest- (or
magician-) kings, aristocratic gene, and peasant communities held
together by communal festivities whose conscience collec- tive
evolves the legal and political institutions of the polis in
response to a largely religious anomie. A distinctively Weberian
account can be found in the work of Weber himself,35 for whom it is
a story of the evolution of military organization and technique,
the subordination of the demiurgoi to the military needs of a
warrior class, and the consolidation of that class through the
process of synoecism as rulers of the emergent poleis. No doubt all
three
33 George Thomson, Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The
Prehistoric Aegean (London, 1949), esp. 353-58.
34 Louis Gernet, Anthropologie de la Grece antique (Paris,
1968), esp. I, 2 ("Frairies an- tiques") and IV, 1 ("Les Nobles
dans la Grece antique"). See also S. C. Humphreys, "The Work of
Louis Gernet," History and Theory, 10:2 (1971), 172-96.
35 Max Weber, "Agrarverhaltnisse in Altertum," in his Gesammelte
Aufsitze zur Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Tiibingen, 1924),
esp. 93-128.
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362 W. G. RUNCIMAN
are valid in part. No doubt, too, they may apply with particular
relevance to particular societies at particular stages in their
history. But the cumulative accretion of power can be nontrivially
cited as critical to the transition to statehood because, among
other things, the three varieties of sanctions rein- force one
another. What is more, no protostate will survive into statehood if
it rests on one form of power alone. It is the combination of
economic pro- ductivity, ideological legitimacy, and military
organization which is decisive. Once two negative preconditions are
fulfilled-the absence of fragmentation on the one hand or conquest
on the other-any trigger which augments the economic or ideological
or military power available to potential rulers will also augment
the other two.
The point is perhaps particularly worth making with regard to
social-cum- ideological sanctions. There is nothing novel in the
assertion that increases in disposable economic surplus and in the
means of destruction, as opposed to production, reinforce one
another: in the dictum which Dio (XLII.49) attrib- utes to Julius
Caesar, it is the money obtained by soldiers and the soldiers
obtained by money which between them create, preserve, and add to
dynas- teias. But legitimacy is no less important than money and/or
soldiers to the ability of a protostate to achieve the permanence
which makes it a state. The deliberate quest for supernatural or
dynastic prestige by those who have taken or come to economic and
political power can be documented across an enor- mous range of
places and times. Although not all incumbents of monarchical roles
claim divine descent (as the Spartan kings did and Herodotus
appears to accept at face value), a claim to more than ordinary
descent is commonplace; and a long list could be put together of
rulers each of whom, as Marc Bloch put it in speaking of Pepin in
751, "eprouva le besoin de colorer son usurpa- tion d'une sorte de
prestige religieux. "36 Penelope's suitors in an Ithaca already at
the semistate stage had the means to murder Telemachus and Laertes
and then fight it out for the kingship among themselves, yet they
not only refrained from doing so but sought and acknowledged the
legitimacy which would accrue to the successful aspirant to the
hand of Odysseus's widow. This may be one of the points on which
the Odyssey as a work of fiction is a poor guide to the
sociological realities of contemporary Greece. But the respect
accorded to good birth-the agathon genos of Odyssey XXI.335 or
agathon haima of IV.611-is sufficiently well attested both in Homer
and elsewhere37 that it cannot be discounted as a source of power
independent of but contributory to the power attaching to ownership
or control of land and the capacity to defend or add to it by force
of arms. The pedigrees
36 Marc Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges (Strasbourg, 1924), 68. 37
It may be objected that the surviving literary sources, with the
sole exception of Hesiod, reflect an aristocratic bias. But
complaints like those of Theognis (54-58) about the rise of
base-born parvenus are nonetheless evidence of a time when greater
power did accrue to birth.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 363
may have been short, as they were bound to be, and there is no
way of calculating the relative importance of superior descent in
securing the obedi- ence of nonkin followers or dependents. But
there is a ready parallel in the type of Anglo-Saxon king depicted
by Bede, whose command over his fol- lowers rests partly on birth
and partly on personal prowess.38 Statehood is still embryonic. But
for that very reason, the economic and military resources available
to the incumbent of a protostate role may be no more important than
his ability either to attach or to carry over to it a legitimacy
deriving from genealogical or charismatic prestige.
The threefold character of the accretion of power sufficient for
statehood can be illustrated in some detail from two instructive
case studies in the recent anthropological literature where the
process can be much more directly ob- servcd than anywhere in
archaic Greece-Cohen's study of the Pabir of northeastern Nigeria39
and Maurice Bloch's study of the Merina kingdom of Madagascar.40
The Pabir, as Cohen describes them, evolved in the direction of
statehood under pressure from a powerful neighbour. Previously they
were a semistate in which land was owned by village founders,
lineage groups were stratified only to a limited degree, and the
highest-ranking role was no more powerful than that of an Homeric
basileus: "The village chief who later became king was not
appreciably different from others. "41 The initial move to
protostatehood was triggered by the awareness of a need for defence
against Boro raiders, and thus the construction of walled and
moated settlements. But as soon as this was done, not only was land
use intensified (and segmenta- tion thereby made less attractive),
but the supernatural powers and priestly role of the settlement
headman became much more elaborate. The royal burial ground became
a national shrine, and queenship, which in the previous stage had
been a focus of local segmentation, came to symbolize the
subordination of subgroups to the central government. The roles of
the heads of leading lineages were transformed from that of council
elders to that of titled nobles of the realm, who then evolved into
an endogamous class of governmental officials. Not only did the
king by that time fulfill all three of what Aristotle (Politics,
1285b) defined as the traditional functions of a basileus-military
leadership, performance of collective rituals, and adjudication of
disputes- but, although there was no system of taxation as such, he
received regular tribute sufficient to enable him to organize
raiding and/or trading expeditions
38 Ecclesiastical History III. 14 on King Oswine of Northumbria;
cf. both Thompson, Early Germans, 58, and Wallace-Hadrill, Early
Germanic Kingship, 85-86.
39 Ronald Cohen, "State Foundations: A Controlled Comparison,"
in Cohen and Service, Origins, esp. 147-50.
40 Maurice Bloch, "The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a
Process: An Outline of the Development of Kingdoms in Central
Madagascar," Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, 18:1 (1977), esp.
110-20.
41 Cohen, "State Foundations," 157.
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364 W. G. RUNCIMAN
on his own. Ultimately, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Pabir
of Biu united with other Pabir towns to drive out the Fulani; and a
full-fledged expan- sionist state was in the making when the
British arrived.
In the Madagascar example, the semistates (Bloch calls them
"pre-take-off states") of the earlier period were petty kingdoms
based on fortified mountaintop camps from which the "kings" and
their followers exercised such domination as they could over the
peasants of the valleys, from whom they exacted regular "gifts" in
return for protection. Bloch comments that "the multiplicity of
these kingdoms is quite extraordinary and it is matched only by
their impermanence."42 The transition to protostatehood could be
made only when some of these petty kingdoms were able to achieve a
military superiority over their rivals for long enough to involve
themselves directly in building dikes and draining marshes. The
higher productivity thereby made possible triggered in its turn a
need both for increased corvee or slave labour and for a permanent
bureaucracy located in a central capital. The rulers of the
resulting protostates sought at the same time to establish their
legitimacy by inventing a rule of succession to justify their title
to the spiritual-cum- traditional authority (hasina) held in the
Malagasy ideology to attach to ruler- ship. Yet despite the
dramatic increase in their power and the creation of the roles of
administrative officers to implement it, the stability necessary
for statehood proved difficult if not impossible to achieve.
Warring factions within, and alliances between hostile neighbours
without, checked the con- tinual expansion which the rulers
required to maintain their supremacy, and many of them were driven
back to their fortified mountaintops. It was not until the Merina
kingdom of Adrianampoinimerina obtained preferential ac- cess to
European firearms that it was able to create a state which, by
1890, embraced the whole of Madagascar.
Both of these examples, accordingly, point the same threefold
moral. First, it is not the particular triggering event which is
decisive for the transition from semi- to protostatehood, but the
process by which a sufficient accretion of power is generated.
Second, that accretion of power is a function of the mutually
reinforcing effect of sanctions of all three kinds-economic, mili-
tary, and ideological. Third, the process is as effective when
triggered by the decision of a semistate to defend itself against
aggression as by a decision that it will become an aggressor
itself.
FROM SEMISTATES TO PROTOSTATES: DARK AGE TO ARCHAIC
GREECE
But how was the critical transition effected in the case of
Greece? It was not only widespread, but rapid. It had still not
occurred in the rather backward Boeotia of Hesiod as depicted in
the Works and Days. "Polis" as used there
42 Bloch, "Disconnection," 113.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 365
cannot, any more than in Homer, be construed as designating a
city-state. The local basileis have not been replaced by tyrants or
magistrates. There is, of course; warfare between poleis (line
191), but nothing that could be called conscription or taxation, or
international relations. Hesiod's word for the army of a polis is
still the Homeric stratos or "host" (line 246). Law, or rather
predroit, is still purely customary: there is no code or
constitution to which Hesiod appeals in his denunciation of the
judgments of the unjust basileis, but only the hope that
supernatural misfortune may befall them. There is a wide disparity
in power between basileis and smallholders, but the power is not
exercised through the incumbency of central specialized
governmental roles: "state" can only be used, if at all, in
inverted commas.43 Yet by 700 B.C., which is the approximate date
given to Hesiod, statehood had unmistakably arrived in some parts
of Greece, and it spread within a relatively short time to dozens
or even hundreds of separate communities.
One necessary condition was population growth. But to say this
is not to say very much. No reliable demographic statistics can be
reconstructed. The evidence from datable burials suggests that
there had been a remarkably sharp increase in births between the
second and fourth quarters of the eighth century in the Argolid,
Attica, and Athens itself.44 But there is no comparable evi- dence
for other parts of Greece where states also emerged at about the
same time, such as Corinth and Sparta, and there is no way of
establishing that population growth causes states to emerge rather
than being itself a common effect of other causes.45 All that can
safely be said is that before the eighth century Greece appears to
have been relatively depopulated and that until there was some
substantial increase in numbers relative to land area the
possibility of statehood could hardly arise at all.
Much more significant is the relative stability which itself
contributes to population growth. Whatever were the causes of the
Mycenaean collapse, and whoever may have been the "Dorian
invaders," the migrations and distur- bances which accompanied it
came to an end. No doubt there was continuing danger of brigandage
or piracy (cf. Thucydides 1.7). But conditions in which the advent
of an emerging protostate would merely invite the fatal depreda-
tions of semi-nomadic neighbours no longer obtained. It is true
that before, during, and after the transition to statehood the
obstinate particularism of the multifarious separate communities,
both in the islands and on the mainland, broke out time and again
into war. But these wars were not on such a scale as to result in
depopulation or anarchy and a consequent regression from proto- to
semistatehood. The communities of archaic Greece remained for the
most part settled and autonomous within stable natural boundaries.
To say this is
43 As is done by W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy
(London, 1966), 58. 44 Anthony M. Snodgrass, Archaic Greece
(London, 1980), 23, fig. 4. 45 Cf. Henry T. Wright and Gregory A.
Johnson, "Population, Exchange and Early State
Formation in Southwestern Iran," American Anthropologist, 77:2
(1975), 284.
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366 W. G. RUNCIMAN
not to invoke geography as furnishing in itself the explanation
of statehood. The political frontiers which emerged with statehood
cannot be mapped di- rectly onto the most obvious physical dividing
lines: even in the Aegean, there might emerge more separate states
in a small island (like Ceos) than a large one (like Chios). But in
the course of their emergence they were not merely spared the
irruption of a further wave of "Dorians," "Sea People," or other
predators from outside. They also engaged in hostilities with one
another which were sufficiently frequent and serious to encourage a
sense of political identity without being so destructive as to
inhibit the emergence of states.
At the same time, and no less significantly, the geography of
Greece discouraged the dispersal of populations and consequent
fragmentation of power. There was not, as over most of Africa, the
almost limitless availability of free land which made dispersal the
obvious response to the pressure of numbers on cultivable area.46
Nor was there an insular geography like that of Hawaii to tempt
would-be heads of states into quasi-imperial centralization while
at the same time helping to ensure their failure. Nor were the
inhabitants of the semistate poleis nomadic pastoralists whose
economic resources con- sisted of herds and tents which could be
transported elsewhere at will.47 Greece was an area of sharp
"ecotones"48-that is, boundaries beyond which migrants will find
their circumstances less favourable than if they stay where they
are, even at the cost of political subjection.
The one other option which the archaic Greeks did have open to
them, and frequently took, was colonization; and indeed it is
arguable that, by imposing a requirement for conscious political
organization, colonization reciprocally influenced the institutions
of the communities from which the colonists were sent out. But
colonization proper-as opposed, that is, to mere unorganized
migration or the settlement of trading posts-presupposes that the
transition from semi- to protostatehood has already been made. The
decision to appoint an oecist, to recruit or conscript a suitable
body of citizens, and to allocate the land of the chosen site in
accordance with a formula laid down in advance can hardly be taken
by Homeric or Hesiodic basileis who have not yet evolved the
institutions necessary for enforceable central decision making. Nor
does the mere fact of urbanization in the sense of residential
concentration inside a defensible perimeter such as excavated at
Old Smyra or Ischia or Zagora (on the island of Andros) either
suggest or require permanent specialized gov-
46 Cf. Jack Goody, Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa
(London, 1971), 29. 47 Cf. P. C. Salzman, "The Proto-State in
Iranian Baluchistan," in Cohen and Service,
Origins, 135: "Each baluchi sardar, therefore, led a population
of nomadic tribesmen who controlled their own capital resources the
major part of which, the herds, was mobile. The sardar had
virtually no economic patronage to dispense and had little way of
coercing mobile followers with independent resources. Even if a
sardar had managed somehow to form a military arm loyal to him
alone the other tribesmen could have massed in opposition, or else
could have loaded their camels and disappeared."
48 See Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism (New York, 1979),
101-2.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 367
emmental roles. It may well be true that archaic Greek
colonization, like archaic Greek warfare, did something to help and
nothing to hinder the evolu- tion towards statehood. But it was
not, any more than warfare (or population growth, or trade, or
religion) "the" cause of it. The critical process, in colonial and
parent communities alike, was the accumulation of power avail- able
to the incumbents of the governmental roles which were coming into
being.
Uncertain as the details of the chronology remain, there is
clear evidence that over roughly speaking the course of the eighth
century B.C. there was indeed a mutually reinforcing accumulation
of power of all three kinds. Eco- nomically, it has plausibly been
hypothesized that there was a significant shift from stock rearing
to arable farming which could be expected not only to support a
larger population but also to endow the more fortunate households
with a significant disposable surplus. The model granaries already
to be found in Athenian and other graves of the second half of the
ninth century, or the remains of a circular granary excavated at
Old Smyrna, cannot be used to make any quantitative inference about
land use, any more than can the refer- ences to ploughing and
harvesting in Hesiod or Homer, and there is not (or not yet) the
kind of archaeological evidence which might prove conclusive.49 But
as nomadism and pastoralism declined, which they evidently did,
there was a progressive shift to agriculture; and if population was
simultaneously increas- ing, intensification of land use is the
natural concomitant as well. Fur- thermore, there is tangible
evidence for a periousia chremat6n in the sudden upsurge in
metallic dedications. The table assembled by Anthony Snodgrass to
show the increase from the eleventh and tenth centuries through to
the later eighth and seventh must, with even the most sceptical
allowance for possible sources of distortion, be admitted as
evidence for the "major rise of wealth in metals, both in toto and
per capita" for which he argues.50
Ideologically, the transition is most readily visible in the
appearance of temples associated with the worship of a patron deity
of the community which constructs them. A temple cannot by itself
be taken as evidence of statehood: a semistate might house a cult
statue in a building constructed for the purpose, and a
pan-Hellenic sanctuary site might well be able to attract the
wealth sufficient for the construction of a monumental temple and
adjoining treasury. But by the time of, say, the temple of Apollo
at Corinth early in the seventh century, the scale of construction
is such as to testify to a qualitative dif- ference not only in the
community's capacity to organize the labour and material resources,
but also in its sense of civic pride. The date of the earliest
temples remains uncertain, and recent preliminary reports of a
long, apsidal tenth-century monumental building at Lefkandi may
require some revision of
49 See Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 313-14. 50 Snodgrass,
Archaic Greece, 53.
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368 W. G. RUNCIMAN
earlier assumptions. But by 700 B.C., at any rate, there are
over seventy known places of worship of which nearly half have
temples.51 Moreover, the late eighth century was also a period of
sudden and substantial increase in dedications at tombs and
sanctuaries. Explanation is complicated by the coin- cidence of
their distribution with the circulation of the Homeric poems. But
this does not undermine the inference from the rise of hero-cults
to the quest for legitimacy in the occupation of a given locality-a
quest which sub- sequently reached its extreme in the literal
importation of the hero Melanippus from Thebes into Sicyon by its
tyrant Cleisthenes in order to transfer to him the honours
previously paid to Adrastus (Herodotus V.67). Unfortunately, there
is no literary evidence bearing directly on the transition from
personal allegiance to civic patriotism: Tyrtaeus, who is generally
accepted as having written towards the end of the seventh century,
clearly celebrated the new civic virtues, but by then the
transition to a hoplite state was complete. It would not, however,
be warranted to argue that the transition was simply a function of
increased population density in adjoining communities and the
rivalries thereby generated between them. It was a function also of
religious sentiments and practices already existing in Dark Age
Greece which were available to be fostered and in due course
manipulated by rulers moving from the personal or kin-based
leadership of retainers and followers to the cen- tralized command
of subjects or fellow citizens themselves aware of a patriotic
attachment to their common institutions.
Finally, the improvements in armour and tactics known to have
taken place towards the end of the eighth century further augmented
the power available to the rulers of the emerging protostates. The
"hoplite revolution," if such it was, fell later than the period
within which the transition from the heroic style of Homeric
warfare between uncoordinated leaders and their followings had
already taken place. But the phalanx may well have been devised
before 675 B.C.,52 and the archaeological evidence leaves no doubt
that by the last quarter of the eighth century the hoplite shield,
the "Corinthian" helmet, and the new type of body-armour had all
made their appearance. It is also possible to see in the
fragmentary evidence for the "Lelantine" war fought between Chalcis
and Eretria some time before the turn of the century the signs of
an incipient evolution both in tactics and in international
relations. Thucydides (I.15), although he refers to this conflict
in a context suggestive of a boundary dispute between neighbours,
at the same time remarks on its significance in bringing allies in
on both sides. Hesiod (Works and Days, lines 651-59), who went over
to Euboea to compete in the funeral games for Amphidamas, a
basileus (as he is designated in the Contest of Homer and Hesiod)
of Chalcis, makes the occasion sound very Homeric. But the later
reference by Archilochus
51 Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 317. 52 J. Salmon, "Political
Hoplites?", Journal of Hellenic Studies, 97 (1977), 90.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 369
(Fr.3) to "spear-famous lords of Euboea" and their style of
fighting perhaps implies retrospective allusion to a change to what
had become normal in his own time. Euboea was relatively advanced
in metallurgy, and Chalcis had the reputation for bronzeworking
implied by its name. Aristotle (Politics 1289b) refers to the
Chalcidians and Eretrians, along with some of the Ionians, as using
horses in battle, which is generally held to be evidence for
mounted aristocrats who descended from their horses to fight on
foot rather than for cavalry engagements as such, and is hardly
compatible with hoplite tactics. But it is not incompatible with a
scale of warfare such as is suggested by an inscription noted by
Strabo (X.1) from a neighbouring shrine of Artemis, which would
call for a degree of organization exceptional for the time. The
details evidently are, and are likely to remain, conjectural. But
these years unmistakably witnessed a significant change in armour
and tactics and the emergence of a decisively augmented capacity
for aggression and/or defence and/or the subjection of perioecic
territories.
It is, perhaps, plausible to allow also for some exogenous
influence from the states which were already in existence elsewhere
and which could become increasingly well known as trade with both
Egypt and the Levant began to expand after its virtual cessation in
the eleventh and tenth centuries. But there had still to have taken
place the accumulation of power within the Greek communities
without which any imitation of alien examples of statehood would
have been impossible. The decisive difference from the previous
cen- tury is that, in the absence of conquest or fragmentation,
sufficient power could begin to accumulate in the mutually
reinforcing ways just summarized. Only two possibilities were then
open: either a single ambitious or prominent basileus could take
the power into his hands and rule as monarch, dictator, tyrant, or
commander-in-chief, or the power could be shared among a group of
nobles through a division of labour among archontes, prytaneis,
cosmoi, demiurgoi, or some other form of collegiate magistracy. It
is true that there may be a division of political labour in
semistates too: in New Guinea, "there are shrine priests, hunt
leaders, advisers to the headman, youth leaders, war party leaders,
often with special titles signifying their offices."53 But the
magistrates who superseded the basileis of archaic Greece were
explicitly seen to have come to power sufficient for there to be a
risk that an overambitious incumbent might use his role as a
steppingstone to tyranny: Aristotle's reference (Politics 1310b) to
the danger inherent in the archaic type of magistracy with long
tenure is well illustrated by the Dreros inscrip- tion forbidding a
cosmos who has held annual office to hold it again for ten years
(which in turn is paralleled by the restrictions imposed by the
North Italian cities on reelection to the podesteria). Whichever
the outcome, the
53 Ronald Cohen, "State Origins: A Reappraisal," in Claessen and
Skalnik, The Early State, 53.
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370 W. G. RUNCIMAN
governmental role, or set of roles, by now amounts to a headship
of state. In Corinth, where in the mid-eighth century a hereditary
basileia was replaced by an elective magistracy, the change may
initially have been no more than what E. Will calls "un amenagement
de 1'exercice du pouvoir au sein d'un genos.' 54 But by that time
the initial group of villages had coalesced into a territorial
entity, the pottery industry had begun to expand, the Gulf was
being regularly navigated, and the naval supremacy for which
Corinth was later celebrated was perhaps beginning to be achieved
with the help of an im- provement in naval architecture (Thucydides
I.13).s5 It is not necessary to resuscitate now discredited
overstatements about nascent industrialism, rising merchant
classes, extensive foreign trade, and far-sighted colonial expan-
sionism in order to agree that, by about 700, the power being
shared at Corinth between prytanis, basileus, and polemarchos was
enough to mark the change from personal acknowledgment of the
authority of a Homeric basileus to "effective ties of an
institutional nature which could operate the state continuously as
a political unity. "56 When, half a century later, the oligarchy of
the Bacchiad clan was broken by Cypselus in a successful coup
d'etat, it was undeniably a state which he took over.
POLEIS AND ETHNE
Any analysis of the origins of states in archaic Greece must,
however, take some account of the distinction which the Greeks
themselves regarded as fun- damental between the mutually exclusive
categories of "ethnos"' and "polis. "57 It is not, although
sometimes taken to be, a distinction between states without, and
states with, an urban centre, as the single knock-down example of
Sparta is enough to show. Nor is it a difference between
centralized and segmentary states: Macedon was both centralized and
an ethnos.58 There is undoubtedly a contrast to be drawn in their
respective forms and degrees of permanent, specialized, nonkin
governmental authority. As J. A. O. Larsen points out, it is
significant that Greek usage classified all federal states as
ethne,59 and as
54 Ed. Will, Korinthiaka (Paris, 1955), 298. 55 W. G. Forrest,
"Two Chronographic Notes. I. The Tenth Thalassocracy in
Eusebius,"
Classical Quarterly, 19:1 (1969), 95-106, shows just how
uncertain the naval history of the period remains, although he
accepts a Corinthian supremacy in the Bacchiad period, which was
lost subsequently.
56 Roebuck, "Urbanization in Corinth," 126. 57 The old
Amphictionic oath quoted by Aeschines (III. 110) clearly shows the
distinction to be
exhaustive, since the only other category of possible offenders
is that of individuals: J. A. O. Larsen, "Representation and
Democracy in Hellenistic Federalism," Classical Philology, 40:2
(1945) 78, n.72. Cf. also the later inscription from Epidauros
cited by Larsen in Greek Federal States (Oxford, 1968), 4, n.l.
58 Jean Baechler, "Les Origines de la democratie grecque,"
Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, 21:2 (1980), 226-28, attempts
to get round this by preserving an emphasis on the segmentary
character of ethne while classifying Macedon and Epirus separately
as "monarchies tribales." But this only weakens the value of the
distinction still further.
59 Larsen, Greek Federal States, 4.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 37I
Snodgrass points out, it is not coincidental that in due course
democracy should be found in poleis rather than ethne.60 But it is
a distinction about which even Thucydides is biased,61 and
Aristotle inconsistent.62 For purposes of the argument here, the
point is that no priority should be attached to the polis as a
model of the transition to statehood. The cumulative accretion of
economic, ideological, and military power within a defined
territory and the consequent emergence of protostate from semistate
roles can be documented for ethne as well as for poleis.63
The most striking example is Thessaly and the role of what the
Thessalians called the tagos. Unfortunately, the fifth-century
inscription which is au- thoritative for the Thessalian usage is
ambiguous about terms of tenure,64 and there is also the difficulty
that, although the title was retained, Thessaly regressed during
the classical period to a weak federal sympolity. But the role
seems to have been permanent except for the brief periods of atagia
between the death of one incumbent and the election of the next;
and the later history is irrelevant to the earlier transition from
a segmentary structure (in which large landed proprietors
controlled their own penestai and levied their own contin- gents of
troops) to the recognition of a central governmental authority em-
powered to wage war, contract alliances, and exact tribute. As so
often happens, the major constitutional change is attributed to a
figure who is probably legendary-the Aleuas the Red in whose
historicity Aristotle was readier to believe than modem scholars
have been. But there is no doubt that the Cineas who appears in
Herodotus (III.63) leading a large troop of cavalry to support the
Peisistratids against the Spartans was "basileus" (i.e., tagos) of
all the Thessalians and that he led his expedition in response to a
request under a preexisting alliance between Thessaly and Athens.
The original in- vaders from the northwest who drove out or
subjugated the earlier Boeotian inhabitants of the Thessalian plain
had established a "kingdom" which was no more a state than, for
example, the kingdom of Scotland created by
60 Snodgrass, Archaic Greece, 46. 61 Cf. Thucydides III. 94ff.,
on the Aetolians. For a parallel to the allegation by the
Messe-
nians that the Eurytanians, the largest segment (meros) of the
Aetolian ethnos, ate their meat raw, cf., e.g., the legend of the
Nyoro, Toro, and Nkole that the dynasty of kings who introduced the
arts of government into the territory of western Uganda likewise
found the country inhabited by omophagoi cited by Lucy Mair,
Primitive Government (London, 1962), 129.
62 The difficulties which his fragment on the constitution of
Thessaly has posed for successive commentators are set out in
detail by H. T. Wade-Gery, "Jason of Pherae and Aleuas the Red,"
Journal of Hellenic Studies, 44 (1924), 55-64. But Larsen, Greek
Federal States, 17, dismisses attempted emendation as only making
matters worse, and prefers the simple explanation that there was a
tendency in the fourth century, which Aristotle here follows, to
adopt polis as the name for every kind of state.
63 Analogously, the emergence of statehood in pre-Inca Peru took
the form both of the building of substantial cities and synoecism
of surrounding villages in the south, and of the organization of
the population into functionally equivalent dispersed communities
focussed on ceremonial centres in the north. Edward P. Lanning,
Peru before the Incas (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), 115-20.
64 Larsen, Greek Federal States, 14, n.6.
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372 W. G. RUNCIMAN
Kenneth MacAlpin's conquest of the Picts in 843 A.D.65 But they
remained a single political entity; and out of the investible
surplus generated by the forced labour of the penestai, the
dynastic legitimacy of a restricted number of aristocratic
families, and the military advantage of a strong cavalry in a
terrain suitable for it, there came an accumulation of power
sufficient for the role of an elective head of state whose
subordinate tetrarchai were authentic federal officials who were
accordingly called "tetrarchs of the Thessalians."66
The transition can be documented equally well for the Locrians,
who although an ethnos appear to have arrived at statehood by a
process inter- mediate, so to speak, between the Thessalian and the
Corinthian. The principal evidence is a long inscription laying
down the relationship to their com- munities of origin of East
Locrians who are going to settle in the town of Naupactus in West
Locris.67 Much in the inscription remains obscure. But although
sovereignty was divided between the principal town or city of Opus
and the different local poleis from which the settlers came, they
were between them in a position to adjudicate, legislate, and levy
taxes in a manner which clearly indicates that the transition to
statehood has effectively taken place. Whether it came about
through a sort of synoecisis in which Opus played the same role as
Athens did in Attica must be uncertain. But it is noticeable that
the inscription refers to the "Opuntians" (or alternatively
"Hypocnemi- dians") in the sense in which all the inhabitants of
Attica were "Athenians."' There is an archos, whose role is
evidently that of highest-ranking magistrate, and an assembly, the
"Thousand"; and although the number is not to be taken literally,
this must be presumed to be a federal assembly of all the adult
male citizens of East Locris. Anomalous as the constitution implied
by the inscrip- tion may be, it affords a further demonstration
that the evolution of gov- ernmental roles did not have to follow
the model of a single central city dominating its subordinate rural
hinterland.
The Locrian inscription is, however, relatively late. Russell
Meiggs and David Lewis date it (?) 500-475 B.C. By that time, we
are dealing with secondary states whose constitutional variants are
the outcome of imitations and experiments made after several
generations of statehood in other parts of Greece. By that time,
too, literacy had been reestablished and professional codifiers of
law were being commissioned to formulate and record the enact-
ments of the proliferating magistrates and councils. It is true
that one of the earliest of these, Philolaus of Corinth, became a
nomothetes for Thebes (Aristotle, Politics 1274b) at about the
beginning of the last quarter of the eighth century. But his
introduction of a law on adoption to preserve the number of
individual land allotments is a symptom, not a cause, of
protostate-
65 Cf. T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830
(Glasgow, 1969), 20: "It would be wrong to think of it [the Alban
Kingdom] in any sense as a state...."
66 Larsen, Greek Federal States, 16. 67 See Meiggs and Lewis,
Greek Historical Inscriptions, 35-40.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 373
hood: he could not have performed his role if there were not
already a gov- ernmental authority in Thebes which was, or at least
wished to proclaim itself as, capable of enforcing his proposal.
The profusion of legislation, the variety of oligarchic
constitutions, the shifting patterns of interstate alliances and
federations, and the range of permutations on the continuum from
ethnos to polis cannot themselves explain the transition from
semistatehood which made them possible. Local basileis had first to
have agreed on a transfer or pooling of their augmented power and
thus transformed the roles of one or more among them from that of
individual landlords-cum-employers, arbitrators-cum-priests, and
generals-cum-policemen to that of rulers holding offices in which
they could wield economic, ideological, and military sanc- tions on
behalf of their ethnos or polis as a whole.
OFFENSIVE VS. DEFENSIVE PROTOSTATEHOOD: SPARTA VS. ATHENS
Once, therefore, neither fragmentation nor conquest was any
longer a danger, and the accumulation of economic, ideological, and
military power within stable communities had begun, the transition
from semi- to protostatehood could take place whether the community
was an ethnos or a polis and whether the permanent, specialized,
nonkin governmental roles of its ruler or rulers were monarchical
or collegiate. Furthermore, the transition could take place, as in
the contrasting examples of the Pabir and Merina, whether the
commu- nity's relations with its neighbours were defensive or
aggressive-a contrast which, as it happens, can best be illustrated
by reference to the two Greek states which are the most famous and
the best documented of all, Athens and Sparta. It is impossible to
reconstruct in any reliable detail their transition from semistates
to protostates; here, ironically, the task is made harder rather
than easier by the literary tradition and its insistence on the
heroic constitution making of an undoubtedly mythical Theseus in
Athens and a very probably mythical Lycurgus in Sparta. But it is
clear that in the course of the eighth century both Athens and
Sparta did make the transition and that they did so in equally
successful but almost diametrically contrasting ways.
In Athens, continuous occupation throughout the post-Mycenaean
period is archaeologically attested, and some scholars have seen in
this the continuation of a Mycenaean synoecisis of Attica. But
there is no evidence of a kingship constitutive of more than
semistatehood at best. There is no tomb of an Athenian Childeric; a
tomb of the kind which has been described as the "princess's
tomb"68 on the north side of the Acropolis should only be de-
scribed, as J. N. Coldstream does a similar one, as "the grave of a
rich Athenian lady. "69 The literary tradition attributes to the
legendary King Cec-
68 Oscar Broneer, "Athens in the Late Bronze Age," Antiquity,
30:117 (1956), 14. 69 Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 57, fig. 13. No
doubt it is possible to be over-sceptical of
the inferences about roles which can be drawn from
archaeological finds. The contents of Childeric's tomb, for
example, surely licence the conclusion that "this was no leader of
a small
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374 W. G. RUNCIMAN
rops a first synoecisis by which Attica was divided into twelve
town districts (Strabo IX. 1), before which its inhabitants lived
merely nomades and spora- den.70 But even if anything remotely so
specific ever took place, it did not amount to statehood. No doubt
Athens dominated the Attic peninsula through- out the disturbances
in which the legendary Codrus, son of Melanthus, was supposed to
have died fighting the Dorians (Pausanias I. 19), and it is
plausible to suppose that the adjacent villages and settlements
should look to an Athe- nian basileus as their Heerfuhrer. But
Thucydides's description of them (11.15) as poleis with their own
council-houses (prytaneia) and magistrates (archontes) is palpably
anachronistic. There is nothing to warrant a supposi- tion that
they were "little states"71 rather than agricultural communities
dominated by their own local aristocracies in the manner of
Hesiod's Boeotia, whether or not in continuation of Mycenaean
settlement. All that can be said is that if these local
aristocracies were to accept formal subordination to Athens, this
would both imply and indeed necessitate a transition from semi- to
protostatehood, and that if Athens were thereafter to hold
together, it would become a state both large and powerful by the
standards of eighth-century Greece.
This, of course, is just what happened. It is not necessary to
believe either in Theseus or in a literal synoecism to accept the
tradition of a political unification which, whatever local battles
may have been fought in Attica, was not brought about by Athenian
conquest (and which, if it had been, would surely have left traces
in the literature to that effect). Geographically, the East Attic
nobility had an unmistakable interest in a defensive alliance with
the rulers of the Acropolis, and it is they whose economic, social,
and military role would most be changed by a unification.72
Moreover, the Acropolis was important as a ritual centre as well as
a stronghold, and the suspicion that the transition was not as
abrupt as Thucydides and Plutarch (borrowing from Aristotle)
believed is further strengthened by the oddity of a simultaneous
creation of the role of "the" eponymous archonship together with
two others: it may be more plausible to suppose that the archonship
was created first and the polemarchy second, with life-tenure of a
by then ritual kingship being
war-band, but an established federate king...."
(Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, 18; cf. H. Ament, "The
Germanic Tribes in Europe," in The Northern World, David M. Wilson,
ed. (London, 1980), 64: "Even if the signet-ring had not been
found, one would have to speak of a 'king's' rather than a
'noble's' tomb. ") But there is no such trace of a Greek Childeric
in Dark Age Athens or anywhere else. 70 See F. Jacoby, Atthis
(Oxford, 1949), 126.
71 As they are described by C. Hignett, History of the Athenian
Constitution (Oxford, 1952), 30.
72 Cf. G. Alfoldy, "Der attische Synoikismos und die Entstehung
der athenischen Adels", Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire,
47:1 (1969), 14, who is prepared to speak of an "Umwandlung der
politischen, wirtschaftlichen, sozialen und zweifellos auch
militarischen Rolle des attischen Adels, die durch eine Art von
Zentralisierung dieses Adels erfolgte. "
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 375
abolished thereafter.73 In any event, however long or short the
intermediate stage of protostatehood, the transition did take place
from what was at the very most a segmentary Attic semistate to a
centralized oligarchy whose office-holders were drawn from the
Attic nobility as a whole-the so-called eupatrides. Nor can there
be any doubt that the power attaching to their roles was by then
jointly sufficient for statehood. The attempted coup d'etat by
Cylon in the second half of the seventh century raises the
difficulty that the accounts of it given by Thucydides and
Herodotus cannot readily be recon- ciled in detail. But that does
not affect the conclusion that if Cylon had succeeded, he would
have secured for himself just as much of a headship of state as
Cypselus did at Corinth. It was a peaceable and (for the time
being) inward-looking state whose aristocracy appears from the
archaeological evi- dence to have "decentralized" out into the
Attic countryside.7 But its con- tinuance up to and after the time
of Cylon's abortive coup presupposes a permanent central authority
to be wielded either by a collegiate magistracy or a tyrant.
In Sparta, by contrast, the only continuity of occupation was at
Amyclae, which survived from Late Helladic IIIB. But far from
constituting the nucleus of a subsequent political unification, it
was conquered and absorbed by an expanding Sparta in the mid-eighth
century. Whatever the reasons of the first "Spartans" for settling
when and where they did, by 800 B.C. at the latest, they
constituted an identifiable semistate formed by the amalgamation of
four (and perhaps more) villages under the joint rule of two
basileis. The details of their early campaigns against their
neighbours and their relations with the local populations after
defeating them remain obscure. It is impossible to be certain
either why Pharis and Geronthrai should have been left with
perioecic status whereas Amyclae was absorbed, or why the
inhabitants of Helos should have been enslaved. Nor can much
reliance be placed on the traditions pre- served by Strabo (VIII.4)
and Pausanias (11.6) that Teleclus, having planted settlements in
southeast Messenia, was subsequently assassinated by the Mes-
senians. But it is certain that Sparta expanded by conquest, that
in the process it made the critical transition from semi- to
protostatehood, that its struggles against Messenia were decisive
in that transition, and that the distinctive governmental role in
which the transition is clearly visible is the ephorate.
It may or may not be that "the so-called First Messenian War (c.
735-715) was triggered by relative overpopulation in the Eurotas
valley."75 But in any case, the war, whatever triggered it, itself
triggered Sparta's transition to statehood. Messenia was
exceptionally fertile by the standards of Greece. Its conquest,
therefore, made possible a cumulative cycle of economic
exploita-
73 As is argued by Hignett, History, 41-43. 74 Coldstream,
Geometric Greece, 133. 75 Paul Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia
(London, 1979), 115.
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376 W. G. RUNCIMAN
tion, the ideological legitimation of a nonproductive warrior
elite, and more effective repression and/or conquest. With this
mutually reinforcing accumu- lation of power, both the possibility
and the need arose for some specialized, central governmental role
going beyond the ritual-cum-military leadership of a semitribal
warrior host by hereditary dyarchic chiefs. Aristotle (Politics
1313a) thought that the ephorate was a conscious device to preserve
the power of the basileis while appearing to diminish it. Plutarch
in one place (Lycurgus 7) echoes Aristotle, but in another
(Cleomenes 10) says that because the basileis went on long
campaigns, it was necessary for them to leave friends of theirs
behind to govern in their absence, although this is difficult to
reconcile with the tradition of a preexisting religious function.
Other authors, both ancient and moder, have had other ideas
(including Xenephon in his Con- stitution of the Lacedaimonians
VIII, who at least admits that he is guessing). But however it was
first instituted, the ephorate was used as a means of
professionalizing, as it were, the government of a protostate whose
expansion by conquest could not but carry a risk of fragmentation
or anarchy. Conceiva- bly, an exceptionally able and ambitious
basileus might have succeeded in subordinating his counterpart and
becoming, like Pheidon at Argos, a tyrant: Cleomenes, in
particular, virtually did. But dyarchy must in itself have made
this more difficult, and, once the ephorate had been instituted, it
performed the double function of enforcing laws approved by the
damos and ensuring that the basileis did not overstep their
constitutional powers-to the point, in due course, that they had
the authority even to arrest and imprison Pausanias, the victor of
Plataea (Thucydides I.131). The dating offered by Apollodorus which
would put its institution in the middle of the eighth century is
evidently an attempt to relate it to the lifetime of Theopompus:76
it cannot have preceded the First Messenian War. On the other hand,
its apparent omission from the "Great Rhetra" preserved by Plutarch
(Lycurgus 6) does not prove that it was only developed after a
formal division of governmental authority between basileis,
council, and damos. Either way, the Spartan constitution in its
final form reflects an apportionment of the power which had been
built up through conquest and made some stable combination of
permanent, specialized, non- kin governmental roles imperative.
The significance of the parallel with the Merina and Pabir is
thus apparent. The sequence by which semistates evolve into states
is bound to be different if it is triggered, as in Sparta and
Madagascar, by success in a series of expan- sions by force of arms
rather than, as in the case of the Athenians and the Pabir, by a
defensive consolidation which at the initial stage-whatever may
happen later-is unmotivated by desire for conquest. But the
cumulative accretion of power which follows in the absence of
internal fragmentation or external invasion is equally decisive to
the transition. The processes which
76 G. L. Huxley, Early Sparta (London, 1962), 38.
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ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 377
can be documented in detail for the Merina and Pabir are not, of
course, to be projected back into the conditions of archaic Greece.
But the functional equivalents