A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200-479 BCE (Blackwell History of the Ancient World)

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While Hall does a good job in introducing and commenting on the work of the Copenhagen Polis Centre and its definition and analysis of the polis, he fails again to take into account the most fascinating part of this work: Hansen has argued that poleis were not self-sufficient entities, but formed part of an interdependent city-state culture; and he has also organised a comparative study of city-state cultures; 12 unfortunately, this is not taken into account.

Furthermore, Hall's is a distinctly Hellenocentric perspective, and even more a Klein-Griechenland one. Sicily and the West find their place in the customary chapter on colonisation; but otherwise they are completely missing from Hall's account. His discussion of archaic tyranny e.

Hall adopts unquestioningly the standard account of the pre-classical periods: He justifies the dedication of a whole chapter to Athens because she was 'one of the most powerful poleis' in the classical period This creates a number of problems concerning what the Archaic period is about -- is it merely the long preparation for the Classical golden age? But surely what is difficult to justify is why there is no chapter devoted to probably the most important area of Archaic Greece, which is of course Sicily and the West.

Its wealth and luxury, the monumental and numerous temples, the emergence of tyrants who became the most powerful political actors of the period Hieron, Theron, Gelon , the patronage of arts and letters Stesichorus, Arion, Simonides etc , the emergence of new ideas and ideologies Eleatic school, Pythagoreanism , the monumental dedications in Olympia and Delphi would surely deserve a separate chapter; and as for the methodological problems of interpretation that this book focuses on, there are more than enough. But, for some deeply-held, but unexamined, conviction, an account of archaic Greek history has to close with Athens and the Persian Wars.

This raises a very important issue. Surely the most important finding of the postmodernist critique of history is that there is not a single, objective, perspective from which one can see history; history has a very different taste, whether seen from the perspective of the elite or the subaltern, the male or the female, the central or the peripheral point of view. Archaic history gets a very different meaning when seen from Athens, Syracuse, Miletos or Thasos.

A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. BCE by Jonathan Hall

The problem is to find a way in which one can include the many different points of view, while also accepting that in the real world the different points of view have a different gravity, because of inequalities of power and wealth. Unfortunately, Hall does not give us yet an answer showing how to do it. Another disappointing aspect of the book is the absence of cultural history. The study of cultural practices was one of the most important developments since the 90's; unfortunately the book is almost completely silent about them.

For a book that puts such a heavy stress on politics, there would have been a great chance to take seriously the thesis of Pauline Schmitt-Pantel that the archaic polis is characterised by the absence of the political as a separate field; instead, there were a number of collective activities commensality, hunting, singing and dancing which define membership in the polis. It would then have been of paramount importance to explore these collective activities, their ritualisation during the archaic period, and the problems of combining literary and archaeological evidence in their study.

Other issues like the body, athletics, gender, or attitudes to death and religion receive only cursory treatment, if any.

A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE

The same surprising silence holds regarding another very important development of the archaic age: Hall is of course right to stress that 'Greece was still an essentially oral society until well into the classical period' But there has been an enormous amount of work on the complex interplay between oral and written speech, the complex uses of literacy e. Notwithstanding the above criticisms, Hall makes two very important novel claims, which are well presented and in my view very convincing.

The first is a plea for a new conceptualisation of the archaic period. Instead of the eighth-century breakpoint, Hall argues that the process was much more gradual, which necessitates a longer perspective incorporating the Late Bronze Age; but it was also much more abrupt as one approaches the sixth century.

A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200-479 BCE

On the other hand, in contrast to a view of progressive egalitarianism from the Homeric kingdoms through the archaic polis to classical democracy, Hall argues that the archaic period shows a shift to more stratified and ranked societies than before. From this point of view, classical society and classical politics appear more as a radical break, rather than a gradual extension of archaic trends.

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I believe that Hall is right, and that we should turn our attention to the period between and BC, as a period in which in certain areas of the Greek world there was both a radical extension of previous trends and concurrently a fundamental break with earlier developments. This would span the usual distinction between archaic and classical; but it would also emphasise that certain Greek communities moved in a radically new direction from earlier centuries. These developments should not be restricted to the emergence of democracy, and did not concern only Athens, but many other Greek communities as well.

But even the areas or communities that did not move in the new direction had to deal with the new conditions in a reciprocal manner: Furthermore, these comments point out the uselessness of the concept of the polis in explaining Greek history. The concept of the polis fitted ideally the old scheme of a radical break in the eighth century, followed by gradual change all the way to the end of the classical period.

The much more complicated story presented by Hall shows that we need to move from a polis-approach to a different key concept for Greek history.

Fundamentally, Hall's book stresses the need to rethink the concept of historical change. It would be interesting to compare Hall's understanding of the epics with A. Dalby's attack on the thesis that the epics present an aristocratic point of view; see "The Iliad, the Odyssey and their audiences", CQ , 45, , It is also a pity that Hall does not take into account the important work of Dean Hammer: The Iliad as politics.

The performance of political thought , Norman, ; "Ideology, the symposium and archaic politics", AJP , , , The instability of elite power is also stressed in A.

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The traditional view is restated in C. Shanks, Art and the early Greek state. An interpretative archaeology , Cambridge, Osborne, "A crisis in archaeological history? The seventh century in Attica", BSA , 84, , Prent, "The sixth century BC in Crete: Historical and archaeological views on texts and archaeology , Leiden, Morris, "Archaeology and archaic Greek history" in N.

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A History of Byzantium Timothy E. A History of the Hellenistic World R. By revisiting theevidence from the period with a critical and analytical eye, Jonathan M.

Hall gives the reader the opportunity to investigate atfirst hand this crucial formative period of Greek history. In doingso, this book casts new light on traditional themes such as therise of the city-state, colonization, citizen militias, the originsof egalitarianism, and the emergence of a self-conscious Greekidentity. Taking into consideration feedback from the first edition, theauthor has updated the text and added further material, includingtwo new sections entitled Archaeological Gaps: Attica andCrete and 'Greek' Culture: Unity andDiversity; he has increased illustrative material, and includeda new guide to electronic resources.

In addition, Hall has expandedthe geographical coverage of all material considered within thebook. The text continues to provide an exceptionally wide range ofarchaeological evidence across a number of different specialties. The author brings a willingness to question existing notions, whichallows the reader to become involved in the practice of history byprobing and reevaluating conventional beliefs. Taras, Phalanthos, and the Partheniai Hunger or Greed? Unity and Diversity Greeks and Others: