poets) and parading them among one’s social peers was an instrument of aristocratic competition and prestige.
As far as the second implication of this essay is concerned, I would argue that some of the fundamental and historically most influential aspects of the aristocratic culture were due to the fact that its various manifestations, notwithstanding the original circumstances of their production or of their performance, had been created in order to be “consumed” by the representatives of social elites and by the “commoners” in their respective social circles. In other words, the aristocratic culture of the archaic and early classical period was attractive and influential far beyond the its own milieu.23 This was not simply due to the natural appeal of “higher” cultural models, but most importantly anchored in the mechanisms of social advancement in the Greek communities of the time.
Ultimately, then, by aristocratic culture I mean the overall “cultural capital” indispensable to seal one’s elite status or to promote one’s social advancement to achieve this status. Accordingly, both the remarkable social mobility within archaic Greek communities and the extraordinary geographical spread and geographical mobility of the archaic Greek culture were due to the predominantly aristocratic character of this culture. One of the most important riddles of early Greek history, i.e., the essential cultural uniformity of archaic and early classical Greek civilization achieved and maintained despite the fundamental (geographic and political) fragmentation of the Hellenic world, can perhaps be accounted for from this perspective. The unity in question was primarily due to the aristocratic culture that provided a common denominator for the universally valid modes of social recognition—both for individual aristocrats striving to secure their position among their peers and for the commoners at large, striving to find their way into the ranks of their local elites. As a result, cultural novelties travelled extremely fast into every corner of the Greek world since those ready to “praise that song the most which comes the newest to their ears,” as Homer puts it (Od. 1.351–352), were to be found both among the aristocrats and among the commoners across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea region.
*
As a coda to this paper, one may rightfully ask oneself if two crucial characteristics of the Greek, and especially Athenian culture of the classical era, namely its constant drive for novelty and its integrative force combining the appeal of a popular and an elite culture— characteristics at least partly responsible for the universal allure of this culture ever since—were not rooted in the aristocratic culture of the archaic period as analyzed in this essay. But this is another story.
FURTHER READING
The starting point for modern studies on Greek aristocracy of the archaic period was by Murray (1993a) [originally published 1978], especially chapter XII, which deals with the aristocratic lifestyle. For a selection of studies, see Donlan 1999. Murray 2009 represents a magisterial study of sympotic culture. For recent analyses of aristocratic culture and the symposium, see Węcowski (2014) and van Wees and Fisher (2015).
Notes
1 1 My essay owes a lot to a constant source of inspiration that has been for me the work of, and incessant discussions with, Benedetto Bravo. In particular, see Bravo 1989, 1996 as well as his essay on classical Greek culture, Bravo 2009 (in Polish). I am also thankful to Mirko Canevaro, Tomasz Gromelski, and Irad Malkin for our conversations on the issues discussed here, to B. Bravo, Adam Ziółkowski, and to my colleagues from the research project of Poland’s National Science Center that subsidized this study (NCN grant no. 2016/21/B/HS3/03096): Xenia Charalambidou, Katarzyna Kostecka, Cameron Pearson, and Roman Żuchowicz, for having read and commented on this chapter.
2 2 See esp. Duplouy 2006, 2018; Yatromanolakis 2009b; Fisher and van Wees 2015.
3 3 This criticism is directed against the influential work by Ian Morris (see, e.g., Morris 1996, 1997; cf. Kurke 1999). For previous criticism, see in particular Hammer 2004 and Kistler 2004.
4 4 For critical assessments of this idea in my previous work (Węcowski 2014), see Fisher & van Wees 2015: 42 n. 5 and 44 n. 37; Duplouy 2018: 41.
5 5 E.g., in Theognis, 39–52, it is clear that to deserve their name, the agathoi (“the good ones”) must be morally good and that this very quality seems rare among the leaders of Greek communities.
6 6 See, e.g., 3.143.1; 6.39; 6.73; 6.101.3; 8.46.3; 9.16.1; 9.17.2; 9.78.1.
7 7 Cf. Ulf 2014.
8 8 Below, I will also use meaningful Homeric names. The paradigmatic value of this poetry makes it possible for us to skip the famous debate on the “historicity” of the “Homeric world” (see, e.g., Węcowski 2011).
9 9 In general, cf. the collective volume edited by Hornblower and Matthews 2000.
10 10 Cf. the famous case of the Athenian Miltiades marrying a daughter of the Thracian king Oloros in Herodotus, 6.39.2.
11 11 Cf. in general, Kurtz and Boadman 1971.
12 12 A good case in point is the convergence of both these factors in the traditions regarding Greek colonial enterprises in the West, e.g., as described by Thucydides in 6.4.3, where we are told that Gela was founded “jointly” by Antiphemus of Rhodes and Entimos of Crete—no doubt two eminent members of their respective communities.
13 13 For all the historical changes this institution must have undergone throughout the centuries of its long history, I would argue that its essential characteristics were already there in the eighth century BCe (see in general Węcowski 2014). For a series of important mutations marking its decline and its fall in the fourth century BC, see now Węcowski 2018.
14 14 This is implied, e.g., in the Adesp. eleg. fr. 27 W2. Cf. Plut. Quaest. conv. 620 A–622 A.
15 15 Cf. Fehr 1990. An early allusion to humiliations awaiting a déclassé aristocrat may be Archilochus, fr. 124b W2.
16 16 In general, cf. Glazebrook and Henry 2011.
17 17 For sources and earlier scholarship, cf. Jacquet-Rimassa 1995.
18 18 As in the case of the year-long testing of the suitors of Agariste in Sikyon (see above).
19 19 See, e.g., the idealizing elegy by Xenophanes, fr. 1 W2 and Adesp. eleg. fr. 27 W2.
20 20 See Węcowski 2014: 171–174 and 183–187, for archaic sanctuaries, such as Eretria, Isthmia, or the Samian Heraion, where such social dynamics of public feasting can be postulated in some cases already for the Late Geometric period.
21 21 See the essays of Lucia Athanassaki and Adrian Kelly as well as the essays in Section 1 of this volume.
22 22 The very fact that Solon used his poetry to promote and later to defend his reforms bespeaks his ambition to target his non-aristocratic fellow-citizens at least indirectly. Additionally, the folkloristic element of the utterances of the Seven Sages, often set in a sympotic context and in elegiac verse, seems to suggest a rather wide social circulation of such traditions. I take it as one more argument for the social “permeability” of the ideological divide between the agathoi and the kakoi I advocate in this chapter.
23 23 In a way, this study deals with a set of social and cultural phenomena that foreshadowed the situation remarkably analyzed, for classical Athens, by Mirko Canevaro, in that already in the archaic period and long before the first Greek democracies saw the light of the day, the “official culture” (my “aristocratic culture,” in the event) was largely “geared toward the vast majority of the people” (Canevaro 2017: 40), although in a very different manner.
CHAPTER 6 Politics
Jonathan M. Hall
The Lyric Author
For as long as the study of the Greek past rested on almost exclusively literary authorities, the world evoked by the early lyric poets constituted the first fully historical chapter in accounts of Greek antiquity. True, following Schliemann’s