Origins of States: The Case of Archaic GreeceAuthor(s): W. G. RuncimanSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Jul., 1982), pp. 351-377Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178506Accessed: 14/03/2010 13:27

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Origins of States: The Case of Archaic Greece W. G. RUNCIMAN

Trinity College, Cambridge

The plurals in my title carry two implications, neither of which I take to be controversial, if they ever were: first, that there is more than one kind of "original" state; second, that there is more than one way in which states originate. There is, admittedly, continuing controversy over the definition of "state." But for the purposes of this article, I assume that there are four necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the emergence of a state from nonstate or stateless forms of social organization: specialization of governmen- tal roles; centralization of enforceable authority; permanence, or at least more than ephemeral stability, of structure; and emancipation from real or fictive kinship as the basis of relations between the occupants of governmental roles and those whom they govern. All four admit of differences of degree. But they furnish an adequate framework within which the different processes by which different states have come into being can be analyzed and compared.

Once, however, monocausal theories of the decisive importance of trade, or warfare, or religion, or population growth have all been abandoned, what is it about the origins of states which either ought to, or can, be explained in general terms at all? Something, to be sure, has to happen to bring about an evolution from statelessness to statehood. It is not an automatic sequence. But it may be that once certain initial conditions are fulfilled, one or other of a range of functionally equivalent processes is bound sooner or later to get under way which will in due course bring one or more states into being. In what follows, I shall argue that the critical transition depends on the condi- tions for a cumulative accretion of the power available to the incumbents of prospective governmental roles; and I shall do so with particular but not exclusive reference to the case of archaic Greece.

The choice of Greece is for two reasons. First, the emergence of statehood out of the unpromising background of post-Mycenaean poverty and depopula- tion is no less remarkable an example than is afforded by the Near or Far East, or North India, or Peru, or Central America. Second, the Greek example

I am indebted to Sir Moses Finley, S. C. Humphreys, and G. S. Kirk for useful criticisms of earlier drafts.

0010-4175/82/3156-7348 $2.50 ? 1982 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

351

352 W. G. RUNCIMAN

carries the advantage of literary as well as archaeological evidence. It is true that much of the literary tradition is of little value for reconstruction of the events of the Archaic Age: the narratives recounted centuries later by Strabo and Pausanias have to be heavily discounted in the absence of contemporary corroboration. But it is only necessary to ask what we would not give to have a Mesopotamian or Mesoamerican Thucydides and Aristotle, or indeed Homer and Hesiod, to appreciate the value of literary materials, problematic as their interpretation may be. Precise chronology, moreover, is not essential to the argument. In order to document the critical stages of the transition from statelessness to statehood, it is only the sequence, not the dates, which must be right.1

PROTOSTATES AND SEMISTATES

A distinction is often drawn between states which originate independently of the influence of preexisting states and states which originate through emula- tion of, or coercion by, others. But to give priority to the analysis of primary over secondary state formation is to ignore the likelihood that different an- tecedent events may generate similar processes. As it is put by Ronald Cohen, "primary and secondary states differ in the way they are set into motion: the

triggering events are dissimilar. But the internal interactions necessary to transform a non-state society into one recognizable as a state do not vary significantly from one kind of state to the other. "2 Furthermore, even where states are recreated in conscious imitation of a remembered or mythologized past, the same kind of transitional process may still be necessary and/or sufficient for the attempt to succeed. The more important distinction is that between what I propose to call "semi" and "proto" states. Both have

passed beyond the stateless stage of primitive hunter-gatherers, nomadic pas- toralists, slash-and-burn cultivators, or such aggregations of autonomous pa- triarchal households as Homer's mythical Cyclopes.3 But the difference be-

' It follows that the Iliad and Odyssey can be used in evidence even if it is agreed with A. M. Snodgrass, "An Historical Homeric Society?" Journal of Hellenic Studies, 94 (1974), 114-25, that they cannot possibly reflect the institutions of Greek society as they were at any one period. It is no doubt true for the purposes of an archaeological historian such as J. N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece (London, 1977), 18, that "Homer we cannot use." But for the purposes of a sociologist, it is not. From this point of view, the discussion by M. I. Finley in The World of Odysseus (London, 1956) remains fundamental, irrespective of whether he is right that the Odyssey gives a picture of "the tenth and ninth centuries B.C., distorted here and there by misunderstandings and anachronisms" ("The World of Odysseus Revisited," Proceedings of the Classical Association, 71 (1974), 23).

2 Ronald Cohen, "Introduction," in Origins of the State, Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service, eds. (Philadelphia, 1978), 12-13.

3 Odyssey IX. 112-15: They have no assembly and no customary law (themistes), but each individual patriarch lays down the law (themisteuei) for his own wives and children regardless of any other. The fact that no such actual society exists in the ethnographic record does not alter its significance as an ideal type with which Homer and his audience contrasted their own societies. But it is a contrast between civilization and the absence of it, not between statehood and stateless- ness.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 353

tween them is that the quasi-governmental roles by which semistates are structured carry no inherent potential for progress in the direction of statehood as defined above. In a protostate, by contrast, they do.

The difference can be well illustrated by a comparison of Capetian France with traditional Hawaii. Both are instances of what Aidan W. Southall calls "segmentary states"4-societies, that is, in which there is no central coer- cive, but only ritual, authority and the roles constitutive of the central author-

ity are or might well be duplicated at the peripheries. But the Hawaiian chiefs, for all their apparent power over their commoners, were not and never became kings: "they had not broken structurally with the people at large."5 The Capetian kings, on the other hand, for all their apparent powerlessness over their vassals, were engaged in rebuilding a central authority with the support of specialized, permanent administrators. In Hawaii, no chief could ever establish a state. Political roles were still constrained within a framework of kinship; force could not be effectively applied at any distance from the centre; the danger of rebellion was endemic; and the exaction of tribute could never be organized on a basis adequate to sustain a bureaucracy which could con- tinue to exact it. But in eleventh- and twelfth-century France, a king was able to retain and even extend the royal demesne, to raise an army independent of contingents from his immediate vassals, and to draw on the services of a household which included a seneschal, a constable, a butler, a chamberlain and his staff, and a chancellor and clerks who "became almost exclusively responsible for political decisions, royal grants of privilege, and the determi- nation of legal proceedings."6

In those examples, the evidence is sufficient to document the difference in roles directly. But even where the evidence is archaeological only, it is possi- ble to identify protostatehood in, for example, the evolution of San Jose in the Oaxaca Valley; and even where, as for example in the case of the Shilluk of the Upper Nile, there is a well-attested "kingly" role, it is possible to show that this is a case of no more than semistatehood. The Oaxaca excavations provide unmistakable evidence for a cumulative accretion of power: out of a group of villages of roughly comparable size, one can be seen to begin to develop as a trading and ceremonial centre and from there to what can uncon- tentiously be labelled a regional capital. Although no direct evidence exists for the emergence of kings, magistrates, generals, ministers, or other gov- ernmental roles, there can be no doubt whatever that, by the end of the process, offices and positions necessary and sufficient for the administration and maintenance of a centralized state had evolved.7 Among the Shilluk, by

4 Aidan W. Southall, Alur Society (Cambridge, England, 1957), ch. 9. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London, 1974), 148.

6 Ch. Petit-Dutaillis, The Feudal Monarchy in France and England, E. D. Hunt, trans. (London, 1936), 80.

7 See Warwick Bray, "From Village to City in Mesoamerica," in The Origins of Civilization, P. R. S. Moorey, ed. (Oxford, 1979), 78-102.

354 W. G. RUNCIMAN

contrast, although the powers and privileges ofo the reth are fully documented in the ethnographic record, there seems equally little doubt that they never accu- mulated to the point that the "structural break," in Sahlins's phrase, could be achieved. It is true that the reth was a real king to the extent that he was the sole recognized hereditary mediator. But he had no coercive authority, and any attempt on his part to exercise it, whether on his own account or under the pressure of a colonizing power, met the immediate and effective opposition of the constituent segments of the society.8

No such clear-cut and decisive examples can be cited from the ancient world, since the evidence is not there to vindicate them. But the difference between a semistate and a protostate can still be brought out by contrasting Odysseus's Ithaca as Homer describes it with the Germanic tribes of the first century A.D. as described in Tacitus's Germania. For this purpose, it does not matter how far either account may fall short of the standards of the trained academic ethnographer;9 the similarities and differences as presented to us still serve to illustrate the crucial difference between a society with a political organization stuck, as it were, midway between statelessness and statehood and one in which statehood is already visibly embryonic in the accretion of power available to the incumbents of identifiable governmental roles.

The two are initially similar not only in having passed the stage at which political and kinship roles are coterminous but also in having evolved roles to which authority attaches which is superior in both kind and degree to that of the lineage head, the village elder or the leader of a hunting band. Fur- thermore, both are societies in which brigandage is customary and admired ("materia munificentiae per bella et raptus" is very Homeric), and in which the combination of heroic prowess and eloquence in debate ("auctoritas suadendi" is just what Odysseus possessed to the full) is the basis of leader- ship. But these similarities are overridden by three all-important differences. First, landholding among Tacitus's Germans is on the basis of distribution according to rank by villages as a whole, not distribution among autonomous oikoi.'0 Second, Tacitus's reges and duces, unlike the basileis who ruled Ithaca, can command genuine military retinues: they are not dependent on the support only of their own friends and servants,1 and the career of a

8 Cf. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, "The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan," reprinted in his Essays in Social Anthropology (London, 1962), 73, and P. P. Howell, "Observa- tions on the Shilluk of the Upper Nile. The Laws of Homicide and the Legal Functions of the Reth," Africa, 22:2 (1952), 106.

9 I do not, in other words, seek to dissent from the remark of J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971), 2, that "the Germania is not only an unsafe guide to future German society, it also affords no solid ground for generaliza- tion about Germanic society at large of the historian's own time."

10 Tacitus, Germania 26: "agri pro numero cultivorum ab universis vicis occupantur, quos mox inter se secundum dignationem partiuntur. "

1 It is worth noting how, when Telemachus has to find a crew, he can only do so among those

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 355

Maroboduus was feasible among them in a way that it could not be for any of the basileis of Ithaca, including Odysseus himself.'2 Third, a legal system is in existence such that, according to Tacitus, there are fixed rules for the settlement of feuds; it is permissible to lay capital charges before the assembly (at which the priests, rather than the reges, have ius coercendi); and principes chosen by the assembly are sent out with supporting retinues to administer the law (jura) in the villages. Despite the similarities, therefore, there are no governmental roles in the Ithacan case which go beyond patriarchal domina- tion in the Weberian sense.13 But in the German case there are. It may, admittedly, be relevant to point out both that Ithaca is an island and that the plot of the Odyssey depends on Odysseus being absent for twenty years during the minority of his only son, whereas Germany by the first century A.D. was ripe for secondary state formation in response to Roman pressure. But what- ever the particular causes behind it, a critical process has been at work in the one case which has not been at work in the other. In the first, something will have to happen to bring about statehood; in the second, something will have to happen to prevent it.

It might perhaps be objected that the distinction between semistates and protostates is teleological-that the difference is merely between those societies which do and those which don't become states. But if the diagnosis is correctly made, it can in principle be predicted in advance which will do which. It is a matter at once of the roles which have been evolved and of the power available to attach to them. Sahlins contrasts the societies in which prestigious hunters or big-men must "personally construct their power over others" with chieftainships "properly so-called" in which men "come to power,"'4 and it is this difference which is critical. When Herodotus is giving his account of the origins of the Macedonian royal house, he talks of Perdiccas as having acquired (ktesamenos) the "tyranny" or, in a later passage, the "sovereignty" (VIII. 137, 139), which is to say that the power was there to be come to, or taken. But in Homeric Ithaca, the power from which Laertes has abdicated, which Odysseus has not come back to take up, and which Tele- machus is too young to assume, is of the kind which has to be built up and maintained by the personal prowess of the incumbent of the "kingly" role.

of his contemporaries who are also his friends (Odyssey III.363), and when Antinous asks how he achieved it (IV.642-44), the only alternative he puts is that of household servants of Telemachus's own.

12 Maroboduus appears in Germania 42 as a rex of noble genus, but his assumption of a royal title apparently rendered him fatally unpopular (Annals II.xliv: Maroboduum regis nomen in- visum apud popularis). E. A. Thompson, The Early Germans (Oxford, 1965), 68, speaks of him as a "permanent autocrat" who had "won despotic power," but in the event, his power, despotic as it may have been, was temporary only.

13 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 4th ed. (Tiibingen, 1956), II, 588: "Bei der patriarchalen Herrschaft ist es die personliche Unterwerfung unter den Herrn...."

14 Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 139.

356 W. G. RUNCIMAN

Indeed, the description of Laertes living away from the town on his farm "unable," as M. I. Finley puts it, "to rule iphi, by might"15 is more reminis- cent of an ousted Anuak headman who has retired to the village of his mater- nal kin where he has kept a separate set of gardens16 than of a deposed or abdicated ex-king in the full monarchical sense. In more general terms, the difference between a world in which semistates only are possible and one in which protostate power is available to be come to or taken is implicit in Thucydides's celebrated opening chapter. He had, to be sure, less knowledge of the actual societies of Mycenaean Greece than we do. But he was fully aware of the significance of the change from a world of nomadic tribes, shifting allegiances, chronic piracy, and impermanent cultivation to one of investible surpluses (periousia chrematon), effective navies, inherited ruler- ships, and the permanent subjection of smaller towns by larger ones-or, in other words, a world with the foundations on which roles constitutive of statehood could be built.

A different objection might be that if protostates are defined by the emergence of governmental roles, then there can be no real difference be- tween a protostate and a state. But the critical transition does not happen overnight; it is not a "phoenix-like birth"17 by which a city-state, or any other, is brought into being. It is true that there can be instances of secondary state formation where the imitation or imposition of the institutions of a central government is a single event rather than a gradual process. It is also true that at one point in the course of a gradual process a lawgiver may codify legal and governmental practices into what thereafter remains their established form. But it is still necessary to allow for a stage corresponding to what Henri J. M. Claessen calls the "transitional," as opposed to the "inchoate," type of

early state.18 If, after a generation or two, the structure of governmental roles is sufficiently stable for one group or faction of incumbents to be replaced by another (even if by violence) without bringing about regression to semistate- hood or anarchy, then and only then can the society in question be designated without qualification as a state.

EMERGENCE OF GOVERNMENTAL ROLES

It is a safe assumption that the cumulative accretion of power in the hands of the incumbents of emerging, specialized, permanent, nonkin, governmental roles will be mirrored in the language of the society concerned. But there is a

15 Finley, World of Odysseus, 95. 16 Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Oxford, 1965), 125. For

Gluckman, as for some other anthropologists, the Anuak (and indeed the Shilluk) count as a "state," but on a definition so broad as to include any form of minimal government of what on the definition advanced here is only a "semistate" kind.

17 Carl Roebuck, "Urbanization in Corinth," Hesperia, 41:1 (1972), 127. 18 Henri J. M. Claessen, "The Early State: A Structural Approach," in The Early State,

Claessen and Peter Skalnik, eds. (The Hague, 1978), 589.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 357

danger of reading back into "their" terminology assumptions about political institutions and activities which they may not have held or even been capable of formulating: the extent to which the power of a ruler can properly be categorized as "political" as opposed to "economic," or "secular" as op- posed to "religious," is as problematic for the Mycenaean wanax as for the Sumerian lugal19 and not always straightforward even in the much fuller literary sources for the archaic Greek basileis. There is also the further diffi- culty that by the time the powers attaching to governmental roles have been clearly formulated, it is likely that the critical transition will already have been made: the cosmoi and titai of the poleis of archaic Crete were magistrates whose functions already presuppose a permanent central authority with the capacity to enforce the rules and punishments which the law lays down.20 Vocabulary alone, therefore, cannot by itself be used to distinguish semi- from protostates. But where their terms can be traced through a succession of changing meanings, it does at least document the sequence by which there has accrued to recognized governmental roles a kind and degree of power such that the critical transition has been made.

One example is the role of aisymnetes, which in the Odyssey (VIII.258) is merely that of one of a number of umpires chosen to supervise the games organized for Odysseus's benefit by the Phaeacians, but which in Aristotle's Politics (1285a) is that of an elected dictator. In between, aisymnetai are to be found in Miletus, Megara, Teos, and Cyme in what appear to be gov- ernmental roles, although the sources unfortunately do not make it possible to specify their powers at all precisely.21 The case which Aristotle particularly cites is that of Pittacus, who was elected aisymnetes at Mitylene in order to fight off the rival party which had been driven into exile. But irrespective of the variations in their tenure, on which he specifically comments, Aristotle makes it clear that aisymnetai were by definition elective. The role seems, accordingly, to have developed from that of a judge or arbitrator chosen for a particular occasion to that of an elected magistrate to that of a dictator who comes to power, in the first instances at least, by popular acclaim. The obvious parallel is to the North Italian cities in the late Middle Ages, and to the roles of consul, podesta, captain-general, and ultimately signore: all were elective in some sense, but as the power attaching to them progressively increased, there came a point at which tyranny was the appropriate descrip- tion.22

More illuminating are the changes in the role of basileus. Whether or not

19 Cf. Joan Oates, Babylon (London, 1979), 25, and J. T. Hooker, Mycenaean Greece (London, 1977), 183.

20 See R. F. Willetts, Aristocratic Society in Ancient Crete (London, 1955), 105-8. 21 L. H. Jeffery, Archaic Greece (London, 1976), 47, 158, 226, 238. 22 Cf. Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics (London, 1969), 231, and the quotation from

Machiavelli's Discorsi there cited.

358 W. G. RUNCIMAN

derived from the qa-si-re-u who appears as a subordinate official of some kind in the Linear B tablets from Pylos, the basileis of post-Mycenaean Greece can not be considered true monarchs such as the Mycenaean wanakes. Both Thucydides (I.13) and Aristotle (Politics 1285b) are quite explicit in their belief that the archaic basileis occupied a hereditary position of leader- ship whose powers were circumscribed by custom. In Homer, the basileis are nobles, not kings in the proper sense, and their poleis are communities with a residential centre, not states. A "palace" like that of Alcinous does not make its occupant a monarch any more than a wall and a place of assembly make a village a capital. Nor are the dorophagoi basilies of Hesiod's Works and Days "bribe-devouring kings," although sometimes translated as such; they are nobles who receive gifts as mediators in local disputes.23 The role of basileus did, to be sure, survive the transition to statehood. But it then became one governmental role among several, as in Sparta, or retained only its ritual authority, as in Athens. When the shadowy but impressive-sounding Pheidon established himself as ruler of Argos, then in Aristotle's description (Politics 1310b), he turned from a basileus into a tyrannos. The word basileus appears in an inscription of the early sixth century from Chios in a context which appears to relate to the acceptance of what were, by then, bribes; but it appears alongside the role of demarchos.24 An inscription relat-

ing to the foundation of Cyrene in the late seventh century designates the founder as archagetes and basileus, which parallels Herodotus's designation of him (IV. 153) as higemon and basileus; but the role here is that of an oecist sent out from a mother-state.25 Only much later, as in Macedonia, can basileus be correctly translated into English as "king." When in the post- Mycenaean period the term designates the single topmost role, it is a semistate role, and once statehood has evolved, the role which is designated is no longer the single topmost one.

The critical transition is discernible also in the role of the "people." Al-

ready in the semistates of the Homeric poems there are not only identifiable

superordinate and subordinate roles but also distinctions between the public and the private realms. When Telemachus arrives in Sparta, he at once tells Menelaus that the business which brings him is private, as opposed to public (demios) (Odyssey III.82; cf. IV.314); and it seems clear in both the Iliad (XIII.669ff.) and the Odyssey (XIV.239ff.) that the decision to send a contin-

gent with Agamemnon to Troy was at least in part a public one. But the members of the Homeric demos are not quite citizens: their role in the assem-

bly is essentially that of an audience. Nor are they quite subjects: they are

23 Cf. M. L. West, ed., Works and Days (Oxford, 1978), 151. 24 Russell Meiggs and David Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of

the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford, 1969), 14-17. 25 Ibid. 6-9.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 359

neither conscripted nor taxed.26 Nor is there epigraphic evidence for a demos exercising a fully political function before the damioi of Dreros, in Crete, in the second half of the seventh century, by which time the polis appears along with them in the same inscription as a full-fledged state.27 At the same time, where there are identifiable subject peoples who are excluded from govern- ment but who have therefore to be controlled by a central coercive authority, a whole range of new terms appears by which to designate them. Again, it may be dangerous to infer too much from the mere existence of a vernacular term: the Thessalian penestai, whom Aristotle (Politics 1269a) likens to the Spartan helots, may or may not have required the same degree of centrally organized policing, and the precise position of the Cretan apetairio and klarotai, or the Argive gymnetes, or the Locrian woikiatai, or the Maryandinians subjected to the colonists of Heraclea Pontica, is at least as difficult to reconstruct as the precise role of aisymnetai or basileis. But they are equally symptomatic of a common process.

Similarly revealing is the transition of demiurgos, which in the Odyssey (XVII.382-84 and XIX.135) covers prophets, doctors, builders, minstrels, and heralds, but which by the classical period designates either magistrates on the one hand or artisans on the other. This "very strange fact"28 poses a problem in itself. But it seems clear that the Homeric demiurgoi, although they may have travelled from place to place and thus occupied a social position outside the normal structure of the communities where they resided, had quite high status. It is significant that heralds, who were virtual aristo- crats, are included among them;29 and there is a parallel to the status of goldsmiths, in particular, in Anglo-Saxon England, who are known some- times to have been rewarded by their patrons with grants of land.30 It is not therefore as puzzling as at first appears that the term should have come to be applied to those whose "demiurgy" was an oligarchical magistracy in a polis which was making the transition from arbitration by a council of elders to the exercise of legal-cum-political office.

26 Finley, World of Odysseus, 70, does at one point speak of "taxes and other dues to lords and kings" in the Homeric world; but he subsequently qualifies this by the observation that "no word immediately denoting compulsion, like 'taxes' or even feudal 'dues,' is to be found in the poems for payments from people to ruler, apart from the context of the special prerogative in the distribution of booty and the meat of sacrificial animals" (p. 105).

27 Meiggs and Lewis, Greek Historical Inscriptions, 2-3. 28 Kentaro Murakawa, "Demiurgos," Historia, 6:4 (1957), 386. 29 Ibid., 399. D. J. Mosley, "Diplomacy in Classical Greece," Ancient Society, 3 (1972), 14,

cites R. Numelin, The Beginnings of Diplomacy (London, 1950), 132, on the heralds of the Fijian Mata-Ki, "whose functions correspond almost exactly with what we know of the Homeric heralds." L. H. Jeffery, "Demiourgoi in the Archaic Period," Archeologica Classica, 25-26 (1973-74), 319, comments that "not only heralds and judges, but theoroi, proxenoi, presbeis and the like might all be termed 'workers' of this sort; for before the rise of government by democracy all such public duties needed a social background of leisure, wealth and office-holding...."

30 Dorothy Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society, 2d ed. (Harmondsworth, England, 1954), 105.

360 W. G. RUNCIMAN

On this point, too, Homer can be cited as evidence. In the arbitration depicted on the shield of Achilles (Iliad XVIII.497-508), the disputants are seeking a resolution of their dispute at the hands of a wise man (istor), and the elders (gerontes) stand up to speak in turn as the people (laoi) cheer on one or other side. It is a scene which can be paralleled almost exactly from the Nyakusa of what is now Tanzania, where arbitrations are carried out by appointed chiefs and "great commoners" chosen for their experience and standing but where the hearing is public and the outcome is observably swayed by public opinion as expressed in the shouts of disapproval voiced in court.31 The elders or chiefs in such semistates cannot yet be called the incumbents of judicial roles. They are, at most, experts in precedent or ac- knowledged repositories of customary law, or what Plutarch (Theseus 25) calls nom6n didaskaloi and hosion kai hier6n exegetai. Only when a perma- nent central authority can count on the implementation of its decrees can law, and statehood with it, be said to have been reached, and only then does there follow the further differentiation and specialization of roles which turns thes- mothetai from lawgivers into a body of junior archons specially charged with collating and systematizing the laws (Aristotle, Constitution ofAthens III.4.).

Finally, the transition is visible in the field of international relations. In the Homeric world, these are conducted, such as they are, through "guest- friendship" (xenia) between one noble or chief and another acting in semipublic roles: the practice is partly a means of securing alliances but partly also one of ensuring marriages for children and a place of refuge in the event of

dispossession or exile (cf. Solon, Fr. 13). Proxenia, on the other hand, is a

properly consular role which was a natural development in the context of

systematic and continuing relationships between emerging states. It can be documented from about the last quarter of the seventh century in an inscrip- tion from Corcyra which, in the comment of Meiggs and Lewis, "has a

fascinating tension between its Homeric echoes and the political circum- stances of a new age. "32 The inscription commemorates a certain Menecrates, who had represented the Corcyreans in West Locris, and it provides firm evidence not only for trading relations but for the role of a damos as the citizen body whose representative and benefactor the proxenos was.

FORMS OF POWER

But if the roles constitutive of statehood are a matter of the power attaching to them, that power is a matter of the sanctions with which to enforce it. How- ever many different "triggering events" may set the critical process off, there

31 See Godfrey Wilson, "Introduction to Nyakusa Law," Africa, 10:1 (1937), 34. 32 Meiggs and Lewis, Greek Historical Inscriptions, 5. M. B. Wallace, "Early Greek Pro-

xenia," Phoenix, 24:3 (1970), 192, suggests that the "political precocity" implied by the Meiggs and Lewis dating is a reason for lowering the date. But the sociological point still stands.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 361

are only as many ways for states to originate as there are means for the incumbents of specialized, permanent, nonkin governmental roles to secure the obedience of their subjects and/or fellow-citizens. The question raises wider issues of sociological theory than can be accommodated within the limits of this article. But it is central to my argument about the cumulative accretion of power, and I accordingly propose to assume without further discussion that there are three and only three forms of power, and therefore varieties of sanction, on which the roles constitutive of statehood can be based. These correspond to the familiar distinction between the economic, the social (in the sense of social status) and the political. That is to say, the powers of any and all rulers derive from some combination of (1) possession of or control over the sources and distribution of wealth and therewith the ability to offer or withhold the means of subsistence, (2) attribution by sub- jects and/or fellow-citizens of superior honour or prestige, whether deriving from sacred or secular personal or institutional charisma, and therewith the ability to attract and retain a following, and (3) command of the technical and organizational means of physical coercion and therewith the ability to impose obedience by force.

Now there are, in the literature on archaic Greece, rival accounts of the emergence of states which deliberately assign priority to one or the other on a priori grounds. A distinctively Marxian account can be found, for example, in the work of George Thomson,33 for whom the story is one of neolithic self- sufficiency followed by the introduction of metal and therefore the extraction of surplus value placed in the hands of chiefs who, by waging wars of conquest with superior weapons and tilling their demesne lands with captured slaves, arrive at the stage of a landed aristocracy engaged in commodity exchange and production for profit rather than use. A distinctively Durkheim- ian account can be found in the work of Louis Gernet,34 for whom it is a story of Homeric priest- (or magician-) kings, aristocratic gene, and peasant communities held together by communal festivities whose conscience collec- tive evolves the legal and political institutions of the polis in response to a largely religious anomie. A distinctively Weberian account can be found in the work of Weber himself,35 for whom it is a story of the evolution of military organization and technique, the subordination of the demiurgoi to the military needs of a warrior class, and the consolidation of that class through the process of synoecism as rulers of the emergent poleis. No doubt all three

33 George Thomson, Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The Prehistoric Aegean (London, 1949), esp. 353-58.

34 Louis Gernet, Anthropologie de la Grece antique (Paris, 1968), esp. I, 2 ("Frairies an- tiques") and IV, 1 ("Les Nobles dans la Grece antique"). See also S. C. Humphreys, "The Work of Louis Gernet," History and Theory, 10:2 (1971), 172-96.

35 Max Weber, "Agrarverhaltnisse in Altertum," in his Gesammelte Aufsitze zur Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Tiibingen, 1924), esp. 93-128.

362 W. G. RUNCIMAN

are valid in part. No doubt, too, they may apply with particular relevance to particular societies at particular stages in their history. But the cumulative accretion of power can be nontrivially cited as critical to the transition to statehood because, among other things, the three varieties of sanctions rein- force one another. What is more, no protostate will survive into statehood if it rests on one form of power alone. It is the combination of economic pro- ductivity, ideological legitimacy, and military organization which is decisive. Once two negative preconditions are fulfilled-the absence of fragmentation on the one hand or conquest on the other-any trigger which augments the economic or ideological or military power available to potential rulers will also augment the other two.

The point is perhaps particularly worth making with regard to social-cum- ideological sanctions. There is nothing novel in the assertion that increases in disposable economic surplus and in the means of destruction, as opposed to production, reinforce one another: in the dictum which Dio (XLII.49) attrib- utes to Julius Caesar, it is the money obtained by soldiers and the soldiers obtained by money which between them create, preserve, and add to dynas- teias. But legitimacy is no less important than money and/or soldiers to the ability of a protostate to achieve the permanence which makes it a state. The deliberate quest for supernatural or dynastic prestige by those who have taken or come to economic and political power can be documented across an enor- mous range of places and times. Although not all incumbents of monarchical roles claim divine descent (as the Spartan kings did and Herodotus appears to accept at face value), a claim to more than ordinary descent is commonplace; and a long list could be put together of rulers each of whom, as Marc Bloch

put it in speaking of Pepin in 751, "eprouva le besoin de colorer son usurpa- tion d'une sorte de prestige religieux. "36 Penelope's suitors in an Ithaca

already at the semistate stage had the means to murder Telemachus and Laertes and then fight it out for the kingship among themselves, yet they not

only refrained from doing so but sought and acknowledged the legitimacy which would accrue to the successful aspirant to the hand of Odysseus's widow. This may be one of the points on which the Odyssey as a work of fiction is a poor guide to the sociological realities of contemporary Greece. But the respect accorded to good birth-the agathon genos of Odyssey XXI.335 or agathon haima of IV.611-is sufficiently well attested both in Homer and elsewhere37 that it cannot be discounted as a source of power independent of but contributory to the power attaching to ownership or control of land and the capacity to defend or add to it by force of arms. The pedigrees

36 Marc Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges (Strasbourg, 1924), 68. 37 It may be objected that the surviving literary sources, with the sole exception of Hesiod,

reflect an aristocratic bias. But complaints like those of Theognis (54-58) about the rise of base-born parvenus are nonetheless evidence of a time when greater power did accrue to birth.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 363

may have been short, as they were bound to be, and there is no way of calculating the relative importance of superior descent in securing the obedi- ence of nonkin followers or dependents. But there is a ready parallel in the type of Anglo-Saxon king depicted by Bede, whose command over his fol- lowers rests partly on birth and partly on personal prowess.38 Statehood is still embryonic. But for that very reason, the economic and military resources available to the incumbent of a protostate role may be no more important than his ability either to attach or to carry over to it a legitimacy deriving from genealogical or charismatic prestige.

The threefold character of the accretion of power sufficient for statehood can be illustrated in some detail from two instructive case studies in the recent anthropological literature where the process can be much more directly ob- servcd than anywhere in archaic Greece-Cohen's study of the Pabir of northeastern Nigeria39 and Maurice Bloch's study of the Merina kingdom of Madagascar.40 The Pabir, as Cohen describes them, evolved in the direction of statehood under pressure from a powerful neighbour. Previously they were a semistate in which land was owned by village founders, lineage groups were stratified only to a limited degree, and the highest-ranking role was no more powerful than that of an Homeric basileus: "The village chief who later became king was not appreciably different from others. "41 The initial move to protostatehood was triggered by the awareness of a need for defence against Boro raiders, and thus the construction of walled and moated settlements. But as soon as this was done, not only was land use intensified (and segmenta- tion thereby made less attractive), but the supernatural powers and priestly role of the settlement headman became much more elaborate. The royal burial ground became a national shrine, and queenship, which in the previous stage had been a focus of local segmentation, came to symbolize the subordination of subgroups to the central government. The roles of the heads of leading lineages were transformed from that of council elders to that of titled nobles of the realm, who then evolved into an endogamous class of governmental officials. Not only did the king by that time fulfill all three of what Aristotle (Politics, 1285b) defined as the traditional functions of a basileus-military leadership, performance of collective rituals, and adjudication of disputes- but, although there was no system of taxation as such, he received regular tribute sufficient to enable him to organize raiding and/or trading expeditions

38 Ecclesiastical History III. 14 on King Oswine of Northumbria; cf. both Thompson, Early Germans, 58, and Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, 85-86.

39 Ronald Cohen, "State Foundations: A Controlled Comparison," in Cohen and Service, Origins, esp. 147-50.

40 Maurice Bloch, "The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process: An Outline of the Development of Kingdoms in Central Madagascar," Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, 18:1 (1977), esp. 110-20.

41 Cohen, "State Foundations," 157.

364 W. G. RUNCIMAN

on his own. Ultimately, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Pabir of Biu united with other Pabir towns to drive out the Fulani; and a full-fledged expan- sionist state was in the making when the British arrived.

In the Madagascar example, the semistates (Bloch calls them "pre-take-off states") of the earlier period were petty kingdoms based on fortified mountaintop camps from which the "kings" and their followers exercised such domination as they could over the peasants of the valleys, from whom they exacted regular "gifts" in return for protection. Bloch comments that "the multiplicity of these kingdoms is quite extraordinary and it is matched only by their impermanence."42 The transition to protostatehood could be made only when some of these petty kingdoms were able to achieve a military superiority over their rivals for long enough to involve themselves directly in building dikes and draining marshes. The higher productivity thereby made possible triggered in its turn a need both for increased corvee or slave labour and for a permanent bureaucracy located in a central capital. The rulers of the resulting protostates sought at the same time to establish their legitimacy by inventing a rule of succession to justify their title to the spiritual-cum- traditional authority (hasina) held in the Malagasy ideology to attach to ruler- ship. Yet despite the dramatic increase in their power and the creation of the roles of administrative officers to implement it, the stability necessary for statehood proved difficult if not impossible to achieve. Warring factions within, and alliances between hostile neighbours without, checked the con- tinual expansion which the rulers required to maintain their supremacy, and many of them were driven back to their fortified mountaintops. It was not until the Merina kingdom of Adrianampoinimerina obtained preferential ac- cess to European firearms that it was able to create a state which, by 1890, embraced the whole of Madagascar.

Both of these examples, accordingly, point the same threefold moral. First, it is not the particular triggering event which is decisive for the transition from semi- to protostatehood, but the process by which a sufficient accretion of

power is generated. Second, that accretion of power is a function of the mutually reinforcing effect of sanctions of all three kinds-economic, mili-

tary, and ideological. Third, the process is as effective when triggered by the decision of a semistate to defend itself against aggression as by a decision that it will become an aggressor itself.

FROM SEMISTATES TO PROTOSTATES: DARK AGE TO ARCHAIC

GREECE

But how was the critical transition effected in the case of Greece? It was not

only widespread, but rapid. It had still not occurred in the rather backward Boeotia of Hesiod as depicted in the Works and Days. "Polis" as used there

42 Bloch, "Disconnection," 113.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 365

cannot, any more than in Homer, be construed as designating a city-state. The local basileis have not been replaced by tyrants or magistrates. There is, of course; warfare between poleis (line 191), but nothing that could be called conscription or taxation, or international relations. Hesiod's word for the army of a polis is still the Homeric stratos or "host" (line 246). Law, or rather predroit, is still purely customary: there is no code or constitution to which Hesiod appeals in his denunciation of the judgments of the unjust basileis, but only the hope that supernatural misfortune may befall them. There is a wide disparity in power between basileis and smallholders, but the power is not exercised through the incumbency of central specialized governmental roles: "state" can only be used, if at all, in inverted commas.43 Yet by 700 B.C., which is the approximate date given to Hesiod, statehood had unmistakably arrived in some parts of Greece, and it spread within a relatively short time to dozens or even hundreds of separate communities.

One necessary condition was population growth. But to say this is not to say very much. No reliable demographic statistics can be reconstructed. The evidence from datable burials suggests that there had been a remarkably sharp increase in births between the second and fourth quarters of the eighth century in the Argolid, Attica, and Athens itself.44 But there is no comparable evi- dence for other parts of Greece where states also emerged at about the same time, such as Corinth and Sparta, and there is no way of establishing that population growth causes states to emerge rather than being itself a common effect of other causes.45 All that can safely be said is that before the eighth century Greece appears to have been relatively depopulated and that until there was some substantial increase in numbers relative to land area the possibility of statehood could hardly arise at all.

Much more significant is the relative stability which itself contributes to population growth. Whatever were the causes of the Mycenaean collapse, and whoever may have been the "Dorian invaders," the migrations and distur- bances which accompanied it came to an end. No doubt there was continuing danger of brigandage or piracy (cf. Thucydides 1.7). But conditions in which the advent of an emerging protostate would merely invite the fatal depreda- tions of semi-nomadic neighbours no longer obtained. It is true that before, during, and after the transition to statehood the obstinate particularism of the multifarious separate communities, both in the islands and on the mainland, broke out time and again into war. But these wars were not on such a scale as to result in depopulation or anarchy and a consequent regression from proto- to semistatehood. The communities of archaic Greece remained for the most part settled and autonomous within stable natural boundaries. To say this is

43 As is done by W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy (London, 1966), 58. 44 Anthony M. Snodgrass, Archaic Greece (London, 1980), 23, fig. 4. 45 Cf. Henry T. Wright and Gregory A. Johnson, "Population, Exchange and Early State

Formation in Southwestern Iran," American Anthropologist, 77:2 (1975), 284.

366 W. G. RUNCIMAN

not to invoke geography as furnishing in itself the explanation of statehood. The political frontiers which emerged with statehood cannot be mapped di- rectly onto the most obvious physical dividing lines: even in the Aegean, there might emerge more separate states in a small island (like Ceos) than a large one (like Chios). But in the course of their emergence they were not merely spared the irruption of a further wave of "Dorians," "Sea People," or other predators from outside. They also engaged in hostilities with one another which were sufficiently frequent and serious to encourage a sense of political identity without being so destructive as to inhibit the emergence of states.

At the same time, and no less significantly, the geography of Greece discouraged the dispersal of populations and consequent fragmentation of power. There was not, as over most of Africa, the almost limitless availability of free land which made dispersal the obvious response to the pressure of numbers on cultivable area.46 Nor was there an insular geography like that of Hawaii to tempt would-be heads of states into quasi-imperial centralization while at the same time helping to ensure their failure. Nor were the inhabitants of the semistate poleis nomadic pastoralists whose economic resources con- sisted of herds and tents which could be transported elsewhere at will.47 Greece was an area of sharp "ecotones"48-that is, boundaries beyond which migrants will find their circumstances less favourable than if they stay where they are, even at the cost of political subjection.

The one other option which the archaic Greeks did have open to them, and

frequently took, was colonization; and indeed it is arguable that, by imposing a requirement for conscious political organization, colonization reciprocally influenced the institutions of the communities from which the colonists were sent out. But colonization proper-as opposed, that is, to mere unorganized migration or the settlement of trading posts-presupposes that the transition from semi- to protostatehood has already been made. The decision to appoint an oecist, to recruit or conscript a suitable body of citizens, and to allocate the land of the chosen site in accordance with a formula laid down in advance can

hardly be taken by Homeric or Hesiodic basileis who have not yet evolved the institutions necessary for enforceable central decision making. Nor does the mere fact of urbanization in the sense of residential concentration inside a defensible perimeter such as excavated at Old Smyra or Ischia or Zagora (on the island of Andros) either suggest or require permanent specialized gov-

46 Cf. Jack Goody, Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (London, 1971), 29. 47 Cf. P. C. Salzman, "The Proto-State in Iranian Baluchistan," in Cohen and Service,

Origins, 135: "Each baluchi sardar, therefore, led a population of nomadic tribesmen who controlled their own capital resources the major part of which, the herds, was mobile. The sardar had virtually no economic patronage to dispense and had little way of coercing mobile followers with independent resources. Even if a sardar had managed somehow to form a military arm loyal to him alone the other tribesmen could have massed in opposition, or else could have loaded their camels and disappeared."

48 See Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism (New York, 1979), 101-2.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 367

emmental roles. It may well be true that archaic Greek colonization, like archaic Greek warfare, did something to help and nothing to hinder the evolu- tion towards statehood. But it was not, any more than warfare (or population growth, or trade, or religion) "the" cause of it. The critical process, in colonial and parent communities alike, was the accumulation of power avail- able to the incumbents of the governmental roles which were coming into being.

Uncertain as the details of the chronology remain, there is clear evidence that over roughly speaking the course of the eighth century B.C. there was indeed a mutually reinforcing accumulation of power of all three kinds. Eco- nomically, it has plausibly been hypothesized that there was a significant shift from stock rearing to arable farming which could be expected not only to support a larger population but also to endow the more fortunate households with a significant disposable surplus. The model granaries already to be found in Athenian and other graves of the second half of the ninth century, or the remains of a circular granary excavated at Old Smyrna, cannot be used to make any quantitative inference about land use, any more than can the refer- ences to ploughing and harvesting in Hesiod or Homer, and there is not (or not yet) the kind of archaeological evidence which might prove conclusive.49 But as nomadism and pastoralism declined, which they evidently did, there was a progressive shift to agriculture; and if population was simultaneously increas- ing, intensification of land use is the natural concomitant as well. Fur- thermore, there is tangible evidence for a periousia chremat6n in the sudden upsurge in metallic dedications. The table assembled by Anthony Snodgrass to show the increase from the eleventh and tenth centuries through to the later eighth and seventh must, with even the most sceptical allowance for possible sources of distortion, be admitted as evidence for the "major rise of wealth in metals, both in toto and per capita" for which he argues.50

Ideologically, the transition is most readily visible in the appearance of temples associated with the worship of a patron deity of the community which constructs them. A temple cannot by itself be taken as evidence of statehood: a semistate might house a cult statue in a building constructed for the purpose, and a pan-Hellenic sanctuary site might well be able to attract the wealth sufficient for the construction of a monumental temple and adjoining treasury. But by the time of, say, the temple of Apollo at Corinth early in the seventh century, the scale of construction is such as to testify to a qualitative dif- ference not only in the community's capacity to organize the labour and material resources, but also in its sense of civic pride. The date of the earliest temples remains uncertain, and recent preliminary reports of a long, apsidal tenth-century monumental building at Lefkandi may require some revision of

49 See Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 313-14. 50 Snodgrass, Archaic Greece, 53.

368 W. G. RUNCIMAN

earlier assumptions. But by 700 B.C., at any rate, there are over seventy known places of worship of which nearly half have temples.51 Moreover, the late eighth century was also a period of sudden and substantial increase in dedications at tombs and sanctuaries. Explanation is complicated by the coin- cidence of their distribution with the circulation of the Homeric poems. But this does not undermine the inference from the rise of hero-cults to the quest for legitimacy in the occupation of a given locality-a quest which sub- sequently reached its extreme in the literal importation of the hero Melanippus from Thebes into Sicyon by its tyrant Cleisthenes in order to transfer to him the honours previously paid to Adrastus (Herodotus V.67). Unfortunately, there is no literary evidence bearing directly on the transition from personal allegiance to civic patriotism: Tyrtaeus, who is generally accepted as having written towards the end of the seventh century, clearly celebrated the new civic virtues, but by then the transition to a hoplite state was complete. It would not, however, be warranted to argue that the transition was simply a function of increased population density in adjoining communities and the rivalries thereby generated between them. It was a function also of religious sentiments and practices already existing in Dark Age Greece which were available to be fostered and in due course manipulated by rulers moving from the personal or kin-based leadership of retainers and followers to the cen- tralized command of subjects or fellow citizens themselves aware of a patriotic attachment to their common institutions.

Finally, the improvements in armour and tactics known to have taken place towards the end of the eighth century further augmented the power available to the rulers of the emerging protostates. The "hoplite revolution," if such it was, fell later than the period within which the transition from the heroic style of Homeric warfare between uncoordinated leaders and their followings had already taken place. But the phalanx may well have been devised before 675 B.C.,52 and the archaeological evidence leaves no doubt that by the last quarter of the eighth century the hoplite shield, the "Corinthian" helmet, and the new

type of body-armour had all made their appearance. It is also possible to see in the fragmentary evidence for the "Lelantine" war fought between Chalcis and Eretria some time before the turn of the century the signs of an incipient evolution both in tactics and in international relations. Thucydides (I.15), although he refers to this conflict in a context suggestive of a boundary dispute between neighbours, at the same time remarks on its significance in bringing allies in on both sides. Hesiod (Works and Days, lines 651-59), who went over to Euboea to compete in the funeral games for Amphidamas, a basileus (as he is designated in the Contest of Homer and Hesiod) of Chalcis, makes the occasion sound very Homeric. But the later reference by Archilochus

51 Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 317. 52 J. Salmon, "Political Hoplites?", Journal of Hellenic Studies, 97 (1977), 90.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 369

(Fr.3) to "spear-famous lords of Euboea" and their style of fighting perhaps implies retrospective allusion to a change to what had become normal in his own time. Euboea was relatively advanced in metallurgy, and Chalcis had the reputation for bronzeworking implied by its name. Aristotle (Politics 1289b) refers to the Chalcidians and Eretrians, along with some of the Ionians, as using horses in battle, which is generally held to be evidence for mounted aristocrats who descended from their horses to fight on foot rather than for cavalry engagements as such, and is hardly compatible with hoplite tactics. But it is not incompatible with a scale of warfare such as is suggested by an inscription noted by Strabo (X.1) from a neighbouring shrine of Artemis, which would call for a degree of organization exceptional for the time. The details evidently are, and are likely to remain, conjectural. But these years unmistakably witnessed a significant change in armour and tactics and the emergence of a decisively augmented capacity for aggression and/or defence and/or the subjection of perioecic territories.

It is, perhaps, plausible to allow also for some exogenous influence from the states which were already in existence elsewhere and which could become increasingly well known as trade with both Egypt and the Levant began to expand after its virtual cessation in the eleventh and tenth centuries. But there had still to have taken place the accumulation of power within the Greek communities without which any imitation of alien examples of statehood would have been impossible. The decisive difference from the previous cen- tury is that, in the absence of conquest or fragmentation, sufficient power could begin to accumulate in the mutually reinforcing ways just summarized. Only two possibilities were then open: either a single ambitious or prominent basileus could take the power into his hands and rule as monarch, dictator, tyrant, or commander-in-chief, or the power could be shared among a group of nobles through a division of labour among archontes, prytaneis, cosmoi, demiurgoi, or some other form of collegiate magistracy. It is true that there may be a division of political labour in semistates too: in New Guinea, "there are shrine priests, hunt leaders, advisers to the headman, youth leaders, war party leaders, often with special titles signifying their offices."53 But the magistrates who superseded the basileis of archaic Greece were explicitly seen to have come to power sufficient for there to be a risk that an overambitious incumbent might use his role as a steppingstone to tyranny: Aristotle's reference (Politics 1310b) to the danger inherent in the archaic type of magistracy with long tenure is well illustrated by the Dreros inscrip- tion forbidding a cosmos who has held annual office to hold it again for ten years (which in turn is paralleled by the restrictions imposed by the North Italian cities on reelection to the podesteria). Whichever the outcome, the

53 Ronald Cohen, "State Origins: A Reappraisal," in Claessen and Skalnik, The Early State, 53.

370 W. G. RUNCIMAN

governmental role, or set of roles, by now amounts to a headship of state. In Corinth, where in the mid-eighth century a hereditary basileia was replaced by an elective magistracy, the change may initially have been no more than what E. Will calls "un amenagement de 1'exercice du pouvoir au sein d'un

genos.' 54 But by that time the initial group of villages had coalesced into a territorial entity, the pottery industry had begun to expand, the Gulf was being regularly navigated, and the naval supremacy for which Corinth was later celebrated was perhaps beginning to be achieved with the help of an im-

provement in naval architecture (Thucydides I.13).s5 It is not necessary to resuscitate now discredited overstatements about nascent industrialism, rising merchant classes, extensive foreign trade, and far-sighted colonial expan- sionism in order to agree that, by about 700, the power being shared at Corinth between prytanis, basileus, and polemarchos was enough to mark the

change from personal acknowledgment of the authority of a Homeric basileus to "effective ties of an institutional nature which could operate the state

continuously as a political unity. "56 When, half a century later, the oligarchy of the Bacchiad clan was broken by Cypselus in a successful coup d'etat, it was undeniably a state which he took over.

POLEIS AND ETHNE

Any analysis of the origins of states in archaic Greece must, however, take some account of the distinction which the Greeks themselves regarded as fun- damental between the mutually exclusive categories of "ethnos"' and "polis. "57

It is not, although sometimes taken to be, a distinction between states without, and states with, an urban centre, as the single knock-down example of Sparta is enough to show. Nor is it a difference between centralized and segmentary states: Macedon was both centralized and an ethnos.58 There is undoubtedly a contrast to be drawn in their respective forms and degrees of permanent, specialized, nonkin governmental authority. As J. A. O. Larsen points out, it is significant that Greek usage classified all federal states as ethne,59 and as

54 Ed. Will, Korinthiaka (Paris, 1955), 298. 55 W. G. Forrest, "Two Chronographic Notes. I. The Tenth Thalassocracy in Eusebius,"

Classical Quarterly, 19:1 (1969), 95-106, shows just how uncertain the naval history of the period remains, although he accepts a Corinthian supremacy in the Bacchiad period, which was lost subsequently.

56 Roebuck, "Urbanization in Corinth," 126. 57 The old Amphictionic oath quoted by Aeschines (III. 110) clearly shows the distinction to be

exhaustive, since the only other category of possible offenders is that of individuals: J. A. O. Larsen, "Representation and Democracy in Hellenistic Federalism," Classical Philology, 40:2 (1945) 78, n.72. Cf. also the later inscription from Epidauros cited by Larsen in Greek Federal States (Oxford, 1968), 4, n.l.

58 Jean Baechler, "Les Origines de la democratie grecque," Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, 21:2 (1980), 226-28, attempts to get round this by preserving an emphasis on the

segmentary character of ethne while classifying Macedon and Epirus separately as "monarchies tribales." But this only weakens the value of the distinction still further.

59 Larsen, Greek Federal States, 4.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 37I

Snodgrass points out, it is not coincidental that in due course democracy should be found in poleis rather than ethne.60 But it is a distinction about which even Thucydides is biased,61 and Aristotle inconsistent.62 For purposes of the argument here, the point is that no priority should be attached to the polis as a model of the transition to statehood. The cumulative accretion of economic, ideological, and military power within a defined territory and the consequent emergence of protostate from semistate roles can be documented for ethne as well as for poleis.63

The most striking example is Thessaly and the role of what the Thessalians called the tagos. Unfortunately, the fifth-century inscription which is au- thoritative for the Thessalian usage is ambiguous about terms of tenure,64 and there is also the difficulty that, although the title was retained, Thessaly regressed during the classical period to a weak federal sympolity. But the role seems to have been permanent except for the brief periods of atagia between the death of one incumbent and the election of the next; and the later history is irrelevant to the earlier transition from a segmentary structure (in which large landed proprietors controlled their own penestai and levied their own contin- gents of troops) to the recognition of a central governmental authority em- powered to wage war, contract alliances, and exact tribute. As so often happens, the major constitutional change is attributed to a figure who is probably legendary-the Aleuas the Red in whose historicity Aristotle was readier to believe than modem scholars have been. But there is no doubt that the Cineas who appears in Herodotus (III.63) leading a large troop of cavalry to support the Peisistratids against the Spartans was "basileus" (i.e., tagos) of all the Thessalians and that he led his expedition in response to a request under a preexisting alliance between Thessaly and Athens. The original in- vaders from the northwest who drove out or subjugated the earlier Boeotian inhabitants of the Thessalian plain had established a "kingdom" which was no more a state than, for example, the kingdom of Scotland created by

60 Snodgrass, Archaic Greece, 46. 61 Cf. Thucydides III. 94ff., on the Aetolians. For a parallel to the allegation by the Messe-

nians that the Eurytanians, the largest segment (meros) of the Aetolian ethnos, ate their meat raw, cf., e.g., the legend of the Nyoro, Toro, and Nkole that the dynasty of kings who introduced the arts of government into the territory of western Uganda likewise found the country inhabited by omophagoi cited by Lucy Mair, Primitive Government (London, 1962), 129.

62 The difficulties which his fragment on the constitution of Thessaly has posed for successive commentators are set out in detail by H. T. Wade-Gery, "Jason of Pherae and Aleuas the Red," Journal of Hellenic Studies, 44 (1924), 55-64. But Larsen, Greek Federal States, 17, dismisses attempted emendation as only making matters worse, and prefers the simple explanation that there was a tendency in the fourth century, which Aristotle here follows, to adopt polis as the name for every kind of state.

63 Analogously, the emergence of statehood in pre-Inca Peru took the form both of the building of substantial cities and synoecism of surrounding villages in the south, and of the organization of the population into functionally equivalent dispersed communities focussed on ceremonial centres in the north. Edward P. Lanning, Peru before the Incas (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), 115-20.

64 Larsen, Greek Federal States, 14, n.6.

372 W. G. RUNCIMAN

Kenneth MacAlpin's conquest of the Picts in 843 A.D.65 But they remained a single political entity; and out of the investible surplus generated by the forced labour of the penestai, the dynastic legitimacy of a restricted number of aristocratic families, and the military advantage of a strong cavalry in a terrain suitable for it, there came an accumulation of power sufficient for the role of an elective head of state whose subordinate tetrarchai were authentic federal officials who were accordingly called "tetrarchs of the Thessalians."66

The transition can be documented equally well for the Locrians, who

although an ethnos appear to have arrived at statehood by a process inter- mediate, so to speak, between the Thessalian and the Corinthian. The principal evidence is a long inscription laying down the relationship to their com- munities of origin of East Locrians who are going to settle in the town of Naupactus in West Locris.67 Much in the inscription remains obscure. But although sovereignty was divided between the principal town or city of Opus and the different local poleis from which the settlers came, they were between them in a position to adjudicate, legislate, and levy taxes in a manner which clearly indicates that the transition to statehood has effectively taken place. Whether it came about through a sort of synoecisis in which Opus played the same role as Athens did in Attica must be uncertain. But it is noticeable that the inscription refers to the "Opuntians" (or alternatively "Hypocnemi- dians") in the sense in which all the inhabitants of Attica were "Athenians."' There is an archos, whose role is evidently that of highest-ranking magistrate, and an assembly, the "Thousand"; and although the number is not to be taken

literally, this must be presumed to be a federal assembly of all the adult male citizens of East Locris. Anomalous as the constitution implied by the inscrip- tion may be, it affords a further demonstration that the evolution of gov- ernmental roles did not have to follow the model of a single central city dominating its subordinate rural hinterland.

The Locrian inscription is, however, relatively late. Russell Meiggs and David Lewis date it (?) 500-475 B.C. By that time, we are dealing with

secondary states whose constitutional variants are the outcome of imitations and experiments made after several generations of statehood in other parts of Greece. By that time, too, literacy had been reestablished and professional codifiers of law were being commissioned to formulate and record the enact- ments of the proliferating magistrates and councils. It is true that one of the earliest of these, Philolaus of Corinth, became a nomothetes for Thebes (Aristotle, Politics 1274b) at about the beginning of the last quarter of the eighth century. But his introduction of a law on adoption to preserve the number of individual land allotments is a symptom, not a cause, of protostate-

65 Cf. T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830 (Glasgow, 1969), 20: "It would be wrong to think of it [the Alban Kingdom] in any sense as a state...."

66 Larsen, Greek Federal States, 16. 67 See Meiggs and Lewis, Greek Historical Inscriptions, 35-40.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 373

hood: he could not have performed his role if there were not already a gov- ernmental authority in Thebes which was, or at least wished to proclaim itself as, capable of enforcing his proposal. The profusion of legislation, the variety of oligarchic constitutions, the shifting patterns of interstate alliances and federations, and the range of permutations on the continuum from ethnos to polis cannot themselves explain the transition from semistatehood which made them possible. Local basileis had first to have agreed on a transfer or pooling of their augmented power and thus transformed the roles of one or more among them from that of individual landlords-cum-employers, arbitrators-cum-priests, and generals-cum-policemen to that of rulers holding offices in which they could wield economic, ideological, and military sanc- tions on behalf of their ethnos or polis as a whole.

OFFENSIVE VS. DEFENSIVE PROTOSTATEHOOD: SPARTA VS. ATHENS

Once, therefore, neither fragmentation nor conquest was any longer a danger, and the accumulation of economic, ideological, and military power within stable communities had begun, the transition from semi- to protostatehood could take place whether the community was an ethnos or a polis and whether the permanent, specialized, nonkin governmental roles of its ruler or rulers were monarchical or collegiate. Furthermore, the transition could take place, as in the contrasting examples of the Pabir and Merina, whether the commu- nity's relations with its neighbours were defensive or aggressive-a contrast which, as it happens, can best be illustrated by reference to the two Greek states which are the most famous and the best documented of all, Athens and Sparta. It is impossible to reconstruct in any reliable detail their transition from semistates to protostates; here, ironically, the task is made harder rather than easier by the literary tradition and its insistence on the heroic constitution making of an undoubtedly mythical Theseus in Athens and a very probably mythical Lycurgus in Sparta. But it is clear that in the course of the eighth century both Athens and Sparta did make the transition and that they did so in equally successful but almost diametrically contrasting ways.

In Athens, continuous occupation throughout the post-Mycenaean period is archaeologically attested, and some scholars have seen in this the continuation of a Mycenaean synoecisis of Attica. But there is no evidence of a kingship constitutive of more than semistatehood at best. There is no tomb of an Athenian Childeric; a tomb of the kind which has been described as the "princess's tomb"68 on the north side of the Acropolis should only be de- scribed, as J. N. Coldstream does a similar one, as "the grave of a rich Athenian lady. "69 The literary tradition attributes to the legendary King Cec-

68 Oscar Broneer, "Athens in the Late Bronze Age," Antiquity, 30:117 (1956), 14. 69 Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 57, fig. 13. No doubt it is possible to be over-sceptical of

the inferences about roles which can be drawn from archaeological finds. The contents of Childeric's tomb, for example, surely licence the conclusion that "this was no leader of a small

374 W. G. RUNCIMAN

rops a first synoecisis by which Attica was divided into twelve town districts (Strabo IX. 1), before which its inhabitants lived merely nomades and spora- den.70 But even if anything remotely so specific ever took place, it did not amount to statehood. No doubt Athens dominated the Attic peninsula through- out the disturbances in which the legendary Codrus, son of Melanthus, was supposed to have died fighting the Dorians (Pausanias I. 19), and it is plausible to suppose that the adjacent villages and settlements should look to an Athe- nian basileus as their Heerfuhrer. But Thucydides's description of them (11.15) as poleis with their own council-houses (prytaneia) and magistrates (archontes) is palpably anachronistic. There is nothing to warrant a supposi- tion that they were "little states"71 rather than agricultural communities dominated by their own local aristocracies in the manner of Hesiod's Boeotia, whether or not in continuation of Mycenaean settlement. All that can be said is that if these local aristocracies were to accept formal subordination to Athens, this would both imply and indeed necessitate a transition from semi- to protostatehood, and that if Athens were thereafter to hold together, it would become a state both large and powerful by the standards of eighth-century Greece.

This, of course, is just what happened. It is not necessary to believe either in Theseus or in a literal synoecism to accept the tradition of a political unification which, whatever local battles may have been fought in Attica, was not brought about by Athenian conquest (and which, if it had been, would surely have left traces in the literature to that effect). Geographically, the East Attic nobility had an unmistakable interest in a defensive alliance with the rulers of the Acropolis, and it is they whose economic, social, and military role would most be changed by a unification.72 Moreover, the Acropolis was

important as a ritual centre as well as a stronghold, and the suspicion that the transition was not as abrupt as Thucydides and Plutarch (borrowing from Aristotle) believed is further strengthened by the oddity of a simultaneous creation of the role of "the" eponymous archonship together with two others: it may be more plausible to suppose that the archonship was created first and the polemarchy second, with life-tenure of a by then ritual kingship being

war-band, but an established federate king...." (Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship, 18; cf. H. Ament, "The Germanic Tribes in Europe," in The Northern World, David M. Wilson, ed. (London, 1980), 64: "Even if the signet-ring had not been found, one would have to speak of a 'king's' rather than a 'noble's' tomb. ") But there is no such trace of a Greek Childeric in Dark Age Athens or anywhere else.

70 See F. Jacoby, Atthis (Oxford, 1949), 126. 71 As they are described by C. Hignett, History of the Athenian Constitution (Oxford, 1952),

30. 72 Cf. G. Alfoldy, "Der attische Synoikismos und die Entstehung der athenischen Adels",

Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, 47:1 (1969), 14, who is prepared to speak of an "Umwandlung der politischen, wirtschaftlichen, sozialen und zweifellos auch militarischen Rolle des attischen Adels, die durch eine Art von Zentralisierung dieses Adels erfolgte. "

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 375

abolished thereafter.73 In any event, however long or short the intermediate stage of protostatehood, the transition did take place from what was at the very most a segmentary Attic semistate to a centralized oligarchy whose office-holders were drawn from the Attic nobility as a whole-the so-called eupatrides. Nor can there be any doubt that the power attaching to their roles was by then jointly sufficient for statehood. The attempted coup d'etat by Cylon in the second half of the seventh century raises the difficulty that the accounts of it given by Thucydides and Herodotus cannot readily be recon- ciled in detail. But that does not affect the conclusion that if Cylon had succeeded, he would have secured for himself just as much of a headship of state as Cypselus did at Corinth. It was a peaceable and (for the time being) inward-looking state whose aristocracy appears from the archaeological evi- dence to have "decentralized" out into the Attic countryside.7 But its con- tinuance up to and after the time of Cylon's abortive coup presupposes a permanent central authority to be wielded either by a collegiate magistracy or a tyrant.

In Sparta, by contrast, the only continuity of occupation was at Amyclae, which survived from Late Helladic IIIB. But far from constituting the nucleus of a subsequent political unification, it was conquered and absorbed by an expanding Sparta in the mid-eighth century. Whatever the reasons of the first "Spartans" for settling when and where they did, by 800 B.C. at the latest, they constituted an identifiable semistate formed by the amalgamation of four (and perhaps more) villages under the joint rule of two basileis. The details of their early campaigns against their neighbours and their relations with the local populations after defeating them remain obscure. It is impossible to be certain either why Pharis and Geronthrai should have been left with perioecic status whereas Amyclae was absorbed, or why the inhabitants of Helos should have been enslaved. Nor can much reliance be placed on the traditions pre- served by Strabo (VIII.4) and Pausanias (11.6) that Teleclus, having planted settlements in southeast Messenia, was subsequently assassinated by the Mes- senians. But it is certain that Sparta expanded by conquest, that in the process it made the critical transition from semi- to protostatehood, that its struggles against Messenia were decisive in that transition, and that the distinctive governmental role in which the transition is clearly visible is the ephorate.

It may or may not be that "the so-called First Messenian War (c. 735-715) was triggered by relative overpopulation in the Eurotas valley."75 But in any case, the war, whatever triggered it, itself triggered Sparta's transition to statehood. Messenia was exceptionally fertile by the standards of Greece. Its conquest, therefore, made possible a cumulative cycle of economic exploita-

73 As is argued by Hignett, History, 41-43. 74 Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 133. 75 Paul Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia (London, 1979), 115.

376 W. G. RUNCIMAN

tion, the ideological legitimation of a nonproductive warrior elite, and more effective repression and/or conquest. With this mutually reinforcing accumu- lation of power, both the possibility and the need arose for some specialized, central governmental role going beyond the ritual-cum-military leadership of a semitribal warrior host by hereditary dyarchic chiefs. Aristotle (Politics 1313a) thought that the ephorate was a conscious device to preserve the power of the basileis while appearing to diminish it. Plutarch in one place (Lycurgus 7) echoes Aristotle, but in another (Cleomenes 10) says that because the basileis went on long campaigns, it was necessary for them to leave friends of theirs behind to govern in their absence, although this is difficult to reconcile with the tradition of a preexisting religious function. Other authors, both ancient and moder, have had other ideas (including Xenephon in his Con- stitution of the Lacedaimonians VIII, who at least admits that he is guessing). But however it was first instituted, the ephorate was used as a means of professionalizing, as it were, the government of a protostate whose expansion by conquest could not but carry a risk of fragmentation or anarchy. Conceiva- bly, an exceptionally able and ambitious basileus might have succeeded in

subordinating his counterpart and becoming, like Pheidon at Argos, a tyrant: Cleomenes, in particular, virtually did. But dyarchy must in itself have made this more difficult, and, once the ephorate had been instituted, it performed the double function of enforcing laws approved by the damos and ensuring that the basileis did not overstep their constitutional powers-to the point, in due course, that they had the authority even to arrest and imprison Pausanias, the victor of Plataea (Thucydides I.131). The dating offered by Apollodorus which would put its institution in the middle of the eighth century is evidently an attempt to relate it to the lifetime of Theopompus:76 it cannot have preceded the First Messenian War. On the other hand, its apparent omission from the "Great Rhetra" preserved by Plutarch (Lycurgus 6) does not prove that it was only developed after a formal division of governmental authority between basileis, council, and damos. Either way, the Spartan constitution in its final form reflects an apportionment of the power which had been built up through conquest and made some stable combination of permanent, specialized, non- kin governmental roles imperative.

The significance of the parallel with the Merina and Pabir is thus apparent. The sequence by which semistates evolve into states is bound to be different if it is triggered, as in Sparta and Madagascar, by success in a series of expan- sions by force of arms rather than, as in the case of the Athenians and the Pabir, by a defensive consolidation which at the initial stage-whatever may happen later-is unmotivated by desire for conquest. But the cumulative accretion of power which follows in the absence of internal fragmentation or external invasion is equally decisive to the transition. The processes which

76 G. L. Huxley, Early Sparta (London, 1962), 38.

ORIGINS OF STATES: THE CASE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 377

can be documented in detail for the Merina and Pabir are not, of course, to be

projected back into the conditions of archaic Greece. But the functional

equivalents are there: in all four cases, there is a combination of intensified land use, improved military organization, and enhanced ideological legitima- tion, however different the forms which they take. In none of them is the

explanation to be found by isolating trade, warfare, religion, population growth, or anything else as the cause of the transition to statehood. It is to be found by ascertaining how there came to be built up a sufficient accumulation of power of all its three separate but mutually reinforcing kinds.

CONCLUSION

The abandonment of attempts to ground "the" origin of "the" state in a single monocausal theory does not mean that there is nothing left to be explained. But the example of archaic Greece offers strong support for the view that statehood is bound to emerge once defined communities occupying a territory which they are able to hold against invaders, and from which their populations have no incentive to disperse on any large scale, accumulate a reserve of economic, ideological, and military power large enough for gov- ernmental roles constitutive of proto- rather than semistatehood to be virtually forced upon them. In the circumstances of post-Mycenaean Greece, it was only a matter of time before protostates began to appear in such various constitutional forms as might follow from local differences in the process by which power had accumulated in the hands of the nobilities of increasingly prosperous, well-armed, and legitimated semistates. To this extent, therefore, it is true to say that there would be more left to be explained if they had not made the transition which in fact they did.