A related factor is Phoenician influence (related, because the early Phoenicians were great colonizers, who must often have met trading Greeks). The Phoenician coast was settled by communities similar in many respects to the early Greek poleis. It is arguable that Phoenician influence, and Semitic influence generally, on early Greece has been seriously underrated.
Theories such as these are stimulating and may each contain a particle of truth. The better position, however, is that generalization itself is as yet premature; in particular, archaeologically based theoretical reconstructions need much more refining. All one can say in summary is that in roughly the same period—namely, the 8th century—a number of areas, such as Corinth and Megara, began to define their borders, deny autonomy to their constituent villages, and generally act as separate states. Attica’s political synoecism, which occurred a little earlier, was complete perhaps about 900. Tempting though it is to seek a single explanatory model for those very roughly contemporaneous processes, one should perhaps allow that different paths of development were followed in different areas, even in areas next door to each other. After all, the Archaic and Classical histories of mighty democratic imperial Athens, of the miserable polis of Megara which nevertheless colonized Byzantium, of wealthy, oligarchic Corinth, and of federal Boeotia were all very different even though Athens, Megara, Corinth, and Boeotia were close neighbours.
One is perhaps on firmer ground when one examines the evidence for prepolis aggregations of larger units, often religious in character. There are a number of such associations whose origins lie in the Dark Age and whose existence surely promoted some feeling of local and particularist identity among the participants. The Ionians in Anatolia formed themselves into a confederation of 12 communities, the Ionian Dodecapolis, with a common meeting place; and there were comparable groupings among the Dorian Greeks of Anatolia and even among the Carians (partially Hellenized non-Greeks) in the same part of the world. The central location for such organizations was characteristically small and insignificant. One poorly attested but intriguing early Archaic league was the “Calaurian Amphictyony” (an amphictyony was a religious league of “dwellers round about”). Calauria, the small island now called Póros, was not a place of any consequence in itself, but the league’s seven members included Athens and Aegina, two major Greek poleis. The most famous and enduring such amphictyony, however, was the one that, originally from a distance, administered the affairs of the sanctuary of Delphi in central Greece. That sanctuary contained the most-famous, though not the oldest, Greek oracle (the oldest was at Dodona); oracles were a mechanism by which divinely inspired utterances were produced in answer to specific questions. Finally, it is worth noting an adventurous suggestion that Lefkandi itself might have been the centre of some kind of religious amphictyony, but, if so, this would be an exception to the principle that religious centres tended themselves to be insignificant, however mighty their participating members. Early Archaic Greek civilization The sources
Before attempting to characterize Archaic Greece, one must admit candidly that the evidence is unsatisfactory. Only for Athens is anything like a proper political tradition known, and Athens’s development toward the democracy of the 5th century was amazingly and untypically rapid by comparison with other states, many of which never became democratic at all. A tiny but salutary scrap of evidence makes this point: Thucydides in Book II of his History of the Peloponnesian War casually mentions a man called Evarchus as “tyrant” of a small northwestern Greek polis called Astacus in the 420s bce. But for this chance mention, one would never have guessed that tyranny could have existed or persisted in such a place so late or so long. Another difficulty is that, while a fair amount about the social structure of Classical Athens is known, some of it must go back to Archaic times; just how much is disputed.
There is a further complication. In both the political and the social spheres, one has to reckon—chiefly at Athens, but elsewhere too—with “invented tradition,” a distorting element for which proper allowance is only now beginning to be made. Thus, it seems that not just Lycurgus, the famous Spartan lawgiver (whose historicity was doubted even in antiquity), but even a reforming figure like Solon of Athens, who certainly existed in the 6th century and large fragments of whose poetry still survive, was in some respects what anthropologists call a “culture hero.” Much was projected onto him anachronistically or just wrongly, and reformers in later generations established their credentials by claiming (if they were reactionaries) that they were trying to “get back to Solon” or (if they were democrats) that Solon was their founding father. Such errors should not induce too much pessimism: at Athens at least, individual aristocratic families preserved oral traditions, which affected the later literary records in ways that can be properly understood with the help of anthropological analogy. That is to say, not all the evidence so preserved is unusable, but it needs handling in special ways.
It has even been argued that social life too was creatively manipulated. Later Greek cities contained, alongside such transparent political institutions as the Popular Assembly and the Deliberative (“Probouleutic”) Council, a more-opaque set of institutions, ostensibly based on kinship groupings. The biggest and most basic of these groupings were the phylae, or “tribes,” according to which the citizen body was subdivided. Thus, all Dorian states had the same three tribes, and there were four Ionian tribes (although Ionian states were less conservative than Dorian, and one finds among them a greater readiness to innovate; late 6th-century Athens, for example, switched from a four-tribe hereditary system of citizenship to a 10-tribe one based on simple residence as well as descent). Smaller subdivisions were the phratry, a word connected with a philological root meaning “brother,” and the genos, a smaller cluster of families (oikoi).
The existence of these groupings in historical times is beyond question; one finds them controlling citizen intake (as in the so-called “Demotionidai” inscription from the Attic village of Decelea, datable to as late as the early 4th century bce) and entering into complicated property arrangements. What has become a matter of debate, however, is the question of just how old they actually were. According to the most-skeptical view, the whole apparatus of tribe and genos was an invention without any Dark Age history to legitimate it. This view, which rests partly on the near absence of the relevant kinship terminology in Homer, is not ultimately convincing in its hypothesis of a kind of complicated collective fraud on posterity. Yet it is right to allow for an element of conscious antiquarianism at certain periods (the 320s in Athens being one), which may well have affected specific traditions. Society and values Bacchiadae and Eupatridae
The world of the colonizing states was aristocratic in the sense that a small number of exclusive clans within cities monopolized citizenship and political control. At Corinth, for example, political control was monopolized by the adult males of a single clan, the Bacchiadae. They perhaps numbered no more than a couple of hundred. At Athens there was a general class of Eupatridae, a word that just means “people of good descent”—i.e., aristocrats. (The word may have had a simultaneous but narrower application to one single genos. This, however, is disputed, and, in any event, that hypothetical family was only one among many privileged genē. The case, therefore, is not analogous to that of the Bacchiadae.) It is unlikely that the Eupatridae were as rigidly defined as the Bacchiadae, and the negative tradition that Solon in the early 6th century deprived them of their exclusive claim to political office may just be the excessively formal and precise way in which later ancient commentators described a positive change by which power was made more generally available than it had been before.