Revisiting the historiography of ancient Greek cities

Researchers at the University of São Paulo's Museum of Archeology & Ethnology are helping rewrite the history of ancient Greece.

By José Tadeu Arantes

Agência FAPESP – Ancient Greek cities are often identified solely with their visible urban core, as exemplified by the Acropolis in Athens. However, archeological research has shown that the polis encompassed a much larger area, including the asty, the extended urban center, and the chora, located outside the walls and occupied mainly by farmers and woodcutters.

The multifaceted relations between center and periphery in the organization of the polis are the subject of two Thematic Projects supported by FAPESP: “The organization of the chora: the Greek city and its hinterland” (under way) and “City and territory in ancient Greece: organization of space and society” (completed). These studies are contributing to a profound revision of ideas about social organization and daily life in Greece during the archaic and classical periods.

“How we think about the Greek world has been deeply influenced by a certain connotation attributed to the word ‘political,’ an adjective derived from polis. And this is the main concept we’re revising,” said historian Maria Beatriz Borba Florenzano, Full Professor of Classical Archeology at the University of São Paulo’s Museum of Archeology & Ethnology and coordinator of the projects.

“Ever since the creation of the European nation-states between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, what people have looked for in classical antiquity focuses on such aspects as authority, power structure, institutions, and so on. So Aristotle’s famous saying that ‘man is a political animal’ has been understood in terms of organization into factions, disputes for control of the state, participation in government or opposition, and so on. A more accurate reading, however, shows that when Aristotle uses the word ‘political,’ he’s referring to a specific form of life in the Greek world centered organizationally on the city as an extended space that encompasses asty and chora, rather than just participation in institutions we now call political in the narrow sense of the word,” Florenzano said.

This revisionist approach derives from recent archeological research that has enabled scholars to re-read the classical texts with a better understanding of their context, Florenzano explained.

The Ancient City Research Laboratory (LABECA) has contributed to this process. Established in 2006 at MAE-USP, the lab is closely involved with both of the Thematic Projects mentioned.

“Historiography has always been based on the study of ancient texts,” Florenzano said, “but archeology reveals other aspects not shown by the texts. This is the kind of information LABECA seeks to disseminate.” The lab has a website where the public can find out more about its research at http://labeca.mae.usp.br/en/.

The picture of ancient Greece offered by this material differs starkly from the conventional representation. There was a well-known Hellenic identity, reinforced by the fact that everyone spoke Greek and worshipped the same gods, although some were linked to specific places or had different attributes, depending on the location. Most ancient Greeks lived in independent cities with no central state until Philip II of Macedon forced the entire region into submission in the fourth century before the common era (BCE), but villages and the countryside were far more important than historians used to think. “There were many poleis with no more than 1,000 inhabitants, and there were also several large poleis, such as Athens with 150,000, or Syracuse with 100,000,” Florenzano said.

According to Florenzano, “The traditional account of ancient Greek society placed enormous emphasis on the city-state with its temple in the agora, the central square at the heart of the ancient city. If we study these great temples in the overall context of the polis, however, we discover that they were connected with other sacred spaces located in the asty and chora. There were roads or paths running from one to the other, and all these routes formed a web that integrated the entire territory.”

“What we find,” Florenzano continued, “is that the city’s dominion covers a far more extensive territory than the densely populated urban center. This helps us understand the references made in ancient texts to the paths taken by processions like the great procession along the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis, the city in which the mysteries associated with Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and her daughter Kore, the maiden embodying the terrestrial form of Persephone, were celebrated. These paths energized the entire territory and imbued it with a special sacredness.”

A specific example studied by Elaine Farias Veloso Hirata, a researcher at LABECA, is the cult of Demeter and Kore at Gela, an ancient Greek city in Sicily, now an autonomous region of Italy. The study is described in “Religious practices and spatial organization in archaic Sicily: artifacts and structures between asty and chora at Gela,” a chapter in Imagem, gênero e espaço: representações da Antiguidade, an anthology edited by Alexandre Carneiro Cerqueira Lima (Niterói, Editora Alternativa/CAPES, 2014).

“Our research hypothesis focuses on the role played by the Demeter-Kore sanctuaries located in the vicinity of the asty and on the outskirts of the chora, as territorial marks of Greco-Balkan dominion over the arable inland plain occupied by the local populations,” Hirata wrote.

Gela’s 25 sanctuaries dedicated to these goddesses of agriculture were a means for the Greeks, who were foreigners, to build ties with the natives, making their presence felt and securing their conquests, according to Hirata. The fertility cult festivals held in Demeter-Kore sanctuaries, the Thesmophoria, were open only to women married to citizens.

This and other examples diverge from the model constructed by traditional historiography of a society in which the only agents were citizens, a category that excluded women, children, foreigners and slaves.

Historian Fabio Augusto Morales Soares addresses this question in his article “Citizens and inhabitants: toward a dialectics of the polis,” published as a chapter in Estudos sobre a cidade antiga, a collection edited by Maria Beatriz Borba Florenzano and Elaine Farias Veloso Hirata (São Paulo, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2000). Publication of the book was supported by FAPESP.

“Between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, historians tended to conceive of the polis as the central category in the organization of a narrative about the ‘history of ancient Greece’, and that polis was Athens in the classical period. The polis identified itself with a ‘community of citizens’ or a ‘community of citizens in their institutions’,” Soares wrote.

Citing several attempts by contemporary historians to include non-citizens (women, children, foreigners and slaves) as social subjects, the article concludes: “On one hand, citizens sought institutionally to monopolize politics and hence appropriation of the polis, identifying with it and formulating their ‘Others.’. On the other hand, non-citizens had non-institutional means to practice politics, and through these they acted as political subjects to appropriate the polis as a community of inhabitants.”

In his master’s dissertation (“Athenian democracy inside out: metics, identity and daily life in Lysias”), which was supported by FAPESP, Soares focused on the example of Lysias, the famous classical orator who was a resident alien or metic.

Revisiting available material

Archeological digs have been conducted in Greece since the Renaissance. European museums and heritage institutions hold massive collections and publish voluminously. Given the extent of these resources and the difficulty of obtaining permission for new digs in Greece, Italy or Turkey, the researchers at LABECA opted to revisit the material available in collections and publications.

“We’ve gone on many field trips, of course, conducting bibliographical searches, looking for old maps, and visiting archeological sites to take photographs and shoot films because our students are also involved in landscape archeology. We take technicians and students with us, set up databases, and make many contacts in Greece, Italy and France. But we don’t do any digging,” Florenzano said.

The ongoing Thematic Project, for which Florenzano is principal investigator, focuses on the many ways found by ancient Greeks to occupy territory in their cities and establish borders with other Greeks as well as with non-Greeks.