emerged from the Dark Age without social or religious constraints, and was able to create a sense of community based on justice and reason, perhaps because its institutions were primitive and its forms of leadership as yet insecure. The chieftains or big-men of the Homeric world developed into an aristocracy only slowly and in competition with more egalitarian forms of communal life, which ultimately proved superior because they were based on the citizen army. In this sense the polis is a conceptual entity, a specifìc type of political and social organisation.
But the development of the polis is also a process of urbanisation, which can be traced in the physical remains. The physical characteristics of the polis in the late Dark Age are described by Nausicaa:
Around our city is a high fortified wall; there is a fair harbour on either side of the city, and the entrance is narrow. Curved ships are drawn up on either side of the road, for every man has a slipway to himself; and there is their assembly place by the fine temple of Poseidon, laid with heavy paving sunk in the earth.
(Odyssey 6.262ff)
The walled city is common in Homer: similes and descriptions show cities being besieged and cities on fire; even the camp of the Achaean heroes before Troy is fitted out with the essential characteristics of a city: city wall, meeting place and religious altars.
Smyrna was according to one tradition the city of Homer himself; it was destroyed about 600 BC by the Lydians, and excavations in a suburb of the modern city of Izmir have revealed one of the most impressive urban sites of the archaic age. The walled city on what was once a natural promontory with two harbours fits Nausicaa’s description well. The earliest evidence of Greek settlement there is around 1000 BC; it used to be thought that the first walls were constructed in the mid ninth century; and although archaeologists now doubt that date, they cannot be later than the early eighth century. Some time later the walls were remodelled, and by then the area within them was densely built, with four or fìve hundred houses of mud brick on stone foundations; the population is estimated at around two thousand, with perhaps half as many again living outside the walls. After destruction caused probably by earthquake around 700 Bc, the walls were rebuilt on a massive scale and the city was laid out on a regular plan; the archaeologist who excavated the site has described this redistribution of land and central planning as ‘the first certain and unambiguous apparition of the organized Hellenic polis’ (J. M. Cook); but it is clear in fact that community life and some form of community organization goes back to around 800 and the first walls.
The same picture of increasing prosperity and the increasing complexity of social and political life emerges from other sites: walled cities must have been common by the eighth century. The earliest evidence of civic institutions apart from walls must be temple building, for the Gathering Place (agora), being empty, is hard to find without total excavation, and virtually impossible to date. The earliest temples come from the mid eighth century and by 700 they are appearing in most city centres; a clay model from the shrine of Hera at Argos shows their form – a megaron-type hall with porch virtually identical with the housing of the nobility, which is the prototype of the archaic and classic Greek temple.
The growing importance of city life and city institutions is related to other changes already mentioned, the shift from animal husbandry to arable farming and the declining importance of the oikos as a social phenomenon; behind them all may He a major new factor: population growth. Absolute figures are unobtainable; and attempts to argue from the analysis of graves in the well-explored region of Attica have proved controversial. What is clear is that, whereas the number of datable graves per generation in Attica remained relatively Constant in the period 1000–800, between 800 and 700 they multiplied by a factor of six; if these statistics were taken to reflect the population reasonably accurately, they would reveal an increase in birthrate equal to that reached only occasionally and under optimum conditions in the history of man, of around 4% per annum. But the idea that within the period 800–750 the population of Attica may have quadrupled, and almost doubled again in the next fifty years, has met with strong resistance. It has been suggested that the number of graves reflects, not an increasing population but an increasing deathrate, due perhaps to water shortage, climatic change and plague: this theory seems implausible, since the period is in general one of increased prosperity throughout the Greek world. Alternatively it has been suggested that the figures for graves discovered are distorted by changes in burial customs and perhaps by the absence of whole social classes from the archaeological record; this has the advantage of being a hypothesis for which there can be no evidence. No theory has yet won wide acceptance; and it is unlikely that any explanation can do more than influence slightly the basic fact that the eighth century was a period of unprecedented population growth in Attica, and indeed throughout Greece: a half empty landscape was repeopled. Initially this must have led to a dramatic increase in prosperity and in urbanization, until the problems of overpopulation began to show themselves.
The religion of the Greeks must always have lacked unity; for it was both polytheistic and localized: Indo-European elements from the Mycenean Greek and later invasions fused with native pre-Greek Cycladic elements and borrowings from Minoan and Anatolian cult, to create a complex of myths, rituals and beliefs about the gods without any clear unifying principles. What unity Greek religion possessed, carne late, as Herodotus claims:
The origins of each of the gods, whether all of them had always existed, and their forms, were unknown to us until the day before yesterday, if I may say so. For I believe Hesiod and Homer to be about four hundred years before my time and no older. These are the men who created the theogony of the Greeks and gave the gods their names, distributed their honours and spheres of operation, and described their forms; the poets who are claimed to be older than these men are in my opinion later.
(Herodotus 2.53)
The date Herodotus gives is perhaps a hundred years too early; but his count may well be based on generations of 40 instead of 30 years. More interesting is the claim that Greek religion began with Hesiod and Homer: even when actual ritual practices were at variance with this picture, it is clear that the epic tradition on the one hand, and the individual genius of Hesiod on the other, did influence permanently the development of Greek religion.
For instance the dominance of myth over ritual is in marked contrast to other polytheistic religions, as is the comparative absence of more bizarre mythic elements. The consistent tendency to anthropomorphism and the organization of the world of the gods in terms of political and social relationships are characteristics which, if not epic in origin, derive their continuing impetus from epic. Such uniformity as Greek religion possesses derives to a large extent from the picture of the Olympian and subsidiary gods in Hesiod and Homer. On the other hand there is a whole area of the Greek religious experience, ignored by them and therefore by later literary sources, which was the focus for emotions strong enough to survive the silence of the epic poets: fertility cults, orgiastic rites, propitiation of the dead and hero cult. These aspects never found their systematic theologian, but remained powerful because they were rooted in a particular locality.
Most of the central practices of Greek religion are as old as the later Dark Age. In Homer temples are mentioned, and on one occasion the cult statue housed there; altars for animal sacrifìces are common. Professional priests existed at certain shrines, but they stood outside the normal organization of society; it is a characteristic of early Greece that the nobility performed most civic religious rituals by virtue of themselves holding priesthoods (often hereditary), without the intervention of a professional priestly caste. The sacrifice was the occasion for a feast, at which (for reasons which obviously worried Hesiod: Theogony 535ff) the gods received the entrails and the worshippers the edible portions.
Oracular shrines, from which by various means the enquirer might obtain advice about his future actions and their consequences, were already widely known: Homer mentions the shrine of Zeus at distant Dodona in Epirus and that of Apollo at Delphi. The interpretation of dreams was practised and the lot was also considered to reveal the will of the gods. The seer (mantis) was a valued member of the community: he knows ‘present and future and past’ (Iliad 1.70); though any unnatural or sudden natural phenomenon like lightning or thunder was material for his art, his primary means of discovering the right time for action was through watching the flight of birds according