Also in the 4th century a great number of citizenships were granted to individuals from whom favours were expected or by whom they had already been conferred, or both. (One standard motive, occasionally made explicit, for the recording of such honours in permanent form was to induce the recipient to continue his generosity.) Most of the evidence is Athenian, but the phenomenon was surely not confined to Athens. Even Persian satraps like Orontes could be enrolled as Athenian citizens, not to mention Macedonians like Menelaus the Pelagonian, a king of the Lyncestians (an independent Macedonian subkingdom until annexed by Philip). Menelaus received citizenship in the 360s because he was reported by the Athenian general Timotheus as helping Athens in its wars in the north. A further and frequent motive for such honours, and one that anticipates the Hellenistic age, is an expression of gratitude for gifts of grain. The Spartocid kings of the Bosporus (southern Russia) were honoured because they had promised to provide Athens with wheat, as their father Leucon had done before them.
That kind of benefaction is called euergetism (the word derives from euergesia, or “doing good deeds”). Now that Athens no longer had the naval power to direct all grain forcibly toward its own harbours, much had to be done by exploiting benefactors. Euergetism of this sort, however, was not entirely new: as early as 444 bce, Egyptian grain in large quantites had been sent by a rebel pharaoh at a time when Athens was certainly not (as it gradually became) a city armed merely with a cultural past and a begging bowl. Conclusion
No treatment of the main period of Greek civilization should end without emphasizing the continuity both with what went before and with what came after. Continuity is clearest in the sphere of religion, which may be said to have been “embedded” in Greek life. Some of the gods alleged to have been relatively late imports into Greece can in fact be shown to have Mycenaean origins. For instance, one Athenian myth held that Dionysus was a latecomer, having been introduced into Attica from Eleutherae in the 6th century. There is reference to Dionysus (or di-wo-no-so-jo), however, on Linear B tablets from the 2nd millennium bce.
Looking forward, Dionysus’s statue was to be depicted in a grand procession staged in Alexandria in the 3rd century bce by Ptolemy II Philadelphus. (The iconographic significance of the king’s espousal of Dionysus becomes clear in light of the good evidence that in some sense Alexander the Great had identified himself with Dionysus in Carmania.) Nor was classical Dionysus confined to royal exploitation: it has been shown that the festivals of the City Dionysia at Athens and the deme festival of the Rural Dionysia were closely woven into the life of the Athenian empire and the Athenian state. Another Athenian, Euripides, represented Dionysus in a less tame and “official” aspect in the Bacchae; the Euripidean Dionysus has more in common with the liberating Dionysus of Carmania or with the socially disruptive Dionysus whose worship the Romans in 186 bce were to regulate in a famous edict. The longevity and multifaceted character of Dionysus symbolizes the tenacity of the Greek civilization, which Alexander had taken to the banks of the Oxus but which in many respects still carried the marks of its Archaic and even prehistoric origins. Simon Hornblower
Citation Information
Article Title: Ancient Greek civilization
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 20 June 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Greece
Access Date: August 10, 2019
Additional Reading General works
A wealth of information on ancient Greek civilization is provided by the relevant volumes of The Cambridge Ancient History (1923–2005), most of which are in their 2nd edition, some in their 3rd edition. Of special note are John Boardman et al. (eds.), Persia, Greece, and the Western Mediterranean, c. 525–479 B.C., vol. 4, 2nd ed. (1988); D.M. Lewis et al. (eds.), The Fifth Century B.C., vol. 5, 2nd ed. (1992); and D.M. Lewis et al. (eds.), The Fourth Century B.C., vol. 6, 2nd ed. (1994). Note also the excellent accompanying Plates to Volume IV, new ed. (1988), and Plates to Volumes V and VI, new ed. (1994), both ed. by John Boardman. There is a great deal of new and up-to-date material in Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (2012). John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray (eds.), The Oxford History of the Classical World (1986), is also worth consulting. Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger (eds.), Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, 3 vol. (1988), discusses the geography, inhabitants, arts, language, religion, politics, technology, and economy of the area from the early 1st millennium bce to the late 5th century ce. Broad coverage of the physical and cultural settings and of archaeological discoveries is also provided by Peter Levi, Atlas of the Greek World (1980); and Nicholas G.L. Hammond (ed.), Atlas of the Greek and Roman World in Antiquity (1981, reissued 1992). Overviews of the histories of Greek civilization include Nicholas G.L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C., 3rd ed. (1991); J.B. Bury and Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, 4th ed., with revisions (1991); Oswyn Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (1993); J.K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece, 2nd ed. (1993); F.W. Walbank, The Hellenistic World, rev. ed. (1992); Amélie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East, c. 3000–330 BC, 2 vol. (1995); Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200–479 BC, 2nd ed. (2009); Simon Hornblower, The Greek World, 479–323 BC, 4th ed. (2011); and Graham Shipley, The Greek World After Alexander, 323–30 B.C. (2000). Many ancient historical sources are available in The Loeb Classical Library series, with original text and parallel English translation; and in the series Translated Documents of Greece and Rome. The early Archaic period
The Mediterranean world in Classical antiquity is impressively portrayed in Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000). John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade, 4th ed. (1999), is a well-illustrated and fully documented account of Greek colonization. David Ridgway, The First Western Greeks (1992; originally published in Italian, 1984), is also of interest. Skepticism about the word colonization is expressed in Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making (cited above) and in his essay, “Early Greek Colonization?: The Nature of Greek Settlement in the West,” chapter 9 in Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees (eds.), Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (1998), pp. 251–269. Interesting new approaches to traditions about colonization are set forth in Irad Malkin, Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (1987), Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (1994, reissued 2003), and The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (1998). Commercial factors are stressed by Martin Frederiksen, Campania, ed. and with additions by Nicholas Purcell (1984). Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World (1988), is skeptical of the “land-hunger” explanation. Also useful is Robert Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (1991), a discussion of problems of demography and food supply. The importance of rural sanctuaries to the growth of the polis is argued in François de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State (1995; originally published in French, 1984); Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne (eds.), Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece (1994, reprinted 2001); and Robin Osborne, Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and Its Countryside (1987), which also discusses the ways in which the Greek countryside was exploited in different regions. “Monumentalization” is stressed in a good general account of the period, Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (1980). Ian Morris, Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (1987), discusses burial and the Greek polis. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 3 vol. (1987–2006), is a controversial work about Phoenician influence on Greece. All aspects of the Archaic and Classical Greek polis are addressed in the many volumes produced by the Copenhagen Polis Centre since 1993, most edited or coedited by the centre’s director, Mogens Herman Hansen, and in the series Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre. Also worth noting are Oswyn Murray and Simon Price (eds.), The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander (1990); and Lynette G. Mitchell and P.J. Rhodes (eds.), The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece (1997). Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997); and Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (1989), discuss Greek ethnicity.