4
THE RELATIONS OF POWER IN THE PRE-STATE AND EARLY STATE POLITIES

Walter Donlan

I

This chapter discusses the nature and distribution of power and authority in the pre-state period (roughly the ninth century) and in the formational and early developmental stages of the city-states (roughly the eighth and seventh centuries respectively). There are sharp differences of opinion about these things. My reconstruction of social development in post-(Mycenaean Greece is briefly as follows.

From the tenth century to the eighth, the regional communities (demos= territory and the people in it) were organized as ‘simple’ or ‘low-level’ chiefdoms, which replicated themselves from generation to generation with no movement towards greater complexity. The chiefdoms represent a severe devolution from the centralized mini-kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age. The archaeological evidence from sub-Mycenaean to Late Geometric gives us a clear idea of just how severe the civilizational decline was, and how long it took for states to form again in Greece. As in all chiefdoms, unequal power and status arrangements separated the basileis (both paramount and subordinate) from the rest of the demos, but, typical of low-level chiefdoms, these arrangements gave them little coercive power. During the eighth century, as a result of economic changes triggered by rising populations, the leading families gained differential access to the means of subsistence, which gave them real coercive power. The tribal communities became ‘stratified’ societies after a long period as ‘rank’ societies.¹

The distribution of power oscillated during the eighth century through to the sixth century. The changes at the top were particularly dramatic during the formational period. The office of the paramount basileus was severely downgraded and its powers and functions were distributed among a number of governmental roles, which were non-hereditary, limited in term of office, and restricted in scope.² The emergence of the city-state aristocracy, which shared the power more or less equally among its members and was unified in protecting its privileges, altered the traditional leader-people relationship. The system of officials and boards, joined to the traditional institutions of the boule and the agora, was an efficient response to the growing size and complexity of the communities, and also gave the landed nobility a platform for social control that had not been available to the basileis of a century earlier.

Ordinary people around 700 experienced considerably less individual autonomy and had less power collectively than their great-grandparents had. A much greater percentage of them than before were economically dependent on elite households, which were much wealthier than they had been before. For a period of several generations (c. 750–650) the landlord class enjoyed an almost unrestricted hegemony; yet, by the end of the seventh century, the majority of families (to plethus) were reasserting their collective power and reducing the power differential. I will argue that the locus of majority power was the class of middling farmers.

In the view proposed here, the polis-state emerged out of established communities of free farmers, with an ancient tradition of citizen rights within the demos. The relationship of the families with their local rulers (basileis) and, as the demos, with the paramount basileus was reciprocal.³ This supposes fundamental continuities between the pre-state and the early-state polities. Other scholars see fundamental discontinuity, arguing that strict class stratification existed continuously from the Mycenaean period. Throughout the Dark Age, a closed aristocracy of birth and wealth ruled as masters over a large dependent and economically exploited peasantry. In this view, peasants and serfs transformed themselves by struggle into the citizens of the ‘citizen state’ during the early developmental period.⁴

Concerning the use of Homer as an historical source for this period, my position has been that the social and political and ideological structures portrayed in the epics belong to around 800, the near past to ‘Homer’, and that very little of the systemic social changes that occurred in the eighth century leaked into the traditional narrative content.⁵

II

Dark Age leaders had considerable authority but little power. Archaic Age leaders had actual power, that is, they could apply sanctions. Let us be clear in our definitions. By power, I mean the ability, on a continuing basis, to compel compliance with one’s wishes. Authority, a more elusive concept, has been defined succinctly as ‘the faculty of gaining another man’s assent’.⁶ Ideologically legitimated authority, though it cannot force, can command obedience even from the unwilling, at least for a time.

The essential differences between authority and power lie in the ability to control. Authority rules mainly through persuasion and example, and tradition. Power, while not neglecting these, rules by compulsion. The measure of power is the sanctions it can impose. By sanctions is meant the mechanisms of restrictive and punitive social control that are available to the leaders. Rulership of the restrictive and punitive kind, according to sociologists, comes about when, and only when, first of all, the leaders control the sources and distribution of wealth, and thus can offer or withhold the means of subsistence, and second, when they possess some organized means of physical coercion, and thus can directly force mass obedience. The ideological acceptance of the rulers as a special and superior class of persons legitimizes their economic exploitation and use of physical force.⁷

A useful method of illustrating the extent of increase of aristocratic power in early Archaic Greece is to compare ‘refusal and compliance costs’ in the chiefdom and in the early-state societies with respect to the three forms of sanction. As Jonathan Haas explains it, when people are subjected to demands by a ‘power-holder’, they ponder the costs to themselves of refusing or complying. Their decision and response, therefore, are a good measurement of relative power at that time.⁸ Here we must remind ourselves that the dynamics of the interactions between individual power-holders and individual ‘respondents’ are different from those between a power-holder and a mass of respondents, and that the nature of the interactions will differ depending on the social levels of the individuals and groups involved. Epic poetry naturally concentrates on confrontations between high-ranking individuals. Still, Homer gives enough examples of the leader-people relationship to show that refusal and compliance costs to the people (demos/laos) were both fairly low in the Dark Age.

Force is the ultimate sanction; its possession assures compliance. There are limits, however, to the application or threat of violence in Homer. While chiefs, backed up by their friends and relations (philoi) and retainers (therapontes), are able physically to coerce individuals, it is made plain that a chief and his followers, or a combination of chiefs and their followers, could not force the collective people to comply with their will.⁹ The suitors of Penelope take for granted that the Ithacans, if sufficiently aroused, can stop them and their followers from their mission and send them packing from the demos (Od. 16.370– 82). In this situation the compliance costs to the Ithacans were low; it cost them nothing to allow the suitors to consume Telemachus’ patrimony and undermine the chiefly line. Plainly, though, they had the power, through sheer numbers and righteousness, to force the leaders to comply with their will. Antinous’ father, Eupeithes, was stripped of his leadership authority and threatened with confiscation of his property and death for going against the people’s wishes. The powerlessness of the leaders in the face of mass opposition is one of the things that separates chiefdoms from states.¹⁰

Turning now to economic relationships, we read that the demos honours the basileis ‘like gods’, with gifts.¹¹ The fact that Homeric basileis demand and duly receive gifts from the people is commonly taken to mean that the basileis imposed economic sanctions on the populace. We should regard this requirement rather as an ideological sanction. To enrich the basileus with gifts was in accordance with the natural order of human society. It was themis. There is no hint in Homer that what anthropologists call ‘chiefly dues’ were excessive or were extorted by threats of violence. As Timothy Earle formulates it, ‘in simple chiefdoms the actual amount of labour and goods being mobilized from a dependent population was sufficiently small to present a low cost of compliance [while]…the cost of refusal need be only minimal’.¹² On the other hand, for an individual or oikos to refuse to give to a chief was a violation of custom, and the use of force by the basileus might well be justified in the eyes of the other oikoi.

There is no irony intended in the use of the word dora for the people’s compliance costs. The givers think of them as gifts; and gifts suppose a reciprocal gift. The chief’s obligatory counter-gift to his people was competent and just leadership.¹³ The fact that materially the basileus comes out the overall gainer is perfectly right and proper, so long as the profit extracted does not violate the underlying principle of reciprocity, that is, does not degenerate into negative reciprocity, taking without giving back. There is no evidence in Homer that the chiefs either controlled access to the means of subsistence or played a significant role as collectors and redistributors of the people’s production. This is what we would expect in Dark Age Greece where, from the eleventh to the eighth century, there was much unused and underused land and few people. This is not a landscape in which to imagine a large portion of the demos being dependent on the chiefs for their daily bread. The assumption, on the contrary, is that the member families hold allotments of farmland (kleroi) which provide them with an independent living.¹⁴

Why then, if not through force or economic compulsion, do the laoi heed and obey the basileis, honour them like gods with gifts, treat them with a respect bordering on reverence, and submit to their occasional acts of hubris? The answer is that their compliance is rooted in the belief that Zeus has ordained and sustains the office of basileus. There is no reason to doubt that the living Greeks of 800, or of 900, or of 1000, for that matter, believed that the right of a basileus to rule in the manner of a basileus was divinely sanctioned.¹⁵ The office of basileus embodied what Max Weber called ‘traditional authority’. The Greeks of 800, for whom the chiefdom was an ancient institution, could not have entertained any notion or wish that the system could change. This implies, by the way, that the low-level chiefdom was functional, that is, that it served the practical requirements of government effectively and efficiently until it changed in the eighth century.

The effectiveness of a given leader depended to a significant degree on his ‘charismatic authority’ (Weber again), the belief of the followers in the leader’s special personal qualities and capacities. In Homeric society, charismatic authority is especially connected to military leadership. In the Catalogue of the Ships, Nireus of Syme leads only three ships, fewer than half of the next smallest contingent, because he was ‘a weak man (alapadnos) and few people (pauros laos) followed him’ (Il. 2. 671–5). Nireus was the sanctioned leader of the Symeans because he was the son of the anax Charops. He held traditional or ‘patriarchal’ authority but lacked charismatic authority.

A fundamental factor of the instability of chiefdoms is that leadership roles in chiefdom societies are both ascribed and achieved. What gave an ineffectual warrior like Nireus the right to lead the people, and to sacrifice to the gods on their behalf, and to judge their disputes, was the office itself which, by virtue of these functions, endowed the holder with a halo of charismatic authority. On the other hand, it becomes questionable whether the lineage of Charops will keep the power in Syme, since competitiveness and merit by achievement are dominant cultural values. The tension between achievement and position is so prominent a theme of Greek epic that it must reflect the contemporary society’s recognition of this as a social-structural problem.

A charismatic personality would be magnified by the traditional authority of the office and vice versa. A strong leader could make the chieftainship powerful, while a less able leader was protected, or at least cushioned somewhat, from threats to his tenure by rivals or the disgust of the people. Thus, the suitors have severe misgivings about assassinating Telemachus, despite his total lack of power. As Amphinomus says to them, it is a dread thing to kill a man of chiefly lineage’—and he warns them that before they act they would first have to consult the will of Zeus (Od. 16. 400–5). Let us note that the religious function per se was not a source of sanction. In many societies on the way to statehood the religious role of the leaders expands enormously, giving them exceptional ideological power from which they derive economic and political power. There was none of that in Greece. The Homeric basileus is not a priest-king; he neither speaks for the gods, nor can he threaten the people with divine punishment if he is disobeyed.¹⁶ As guardian of the themistes, the basileus possesses something of the Weberian ‘legal-rational authority’; yet this constitutional power is not absolute, but is diffused among the elders in council and assembly.

Thus, in brief, a basileus may claim his word and will as law, yet this will be so only if he can make it so, and the structural means available to him to do this are extremely limited. When we add up and average out, so to speak, refusal and compliance costs to both sides in the power equation, we find a rough equivalency. The leaders and the people understood that their relationship was reciprocal. All social relationships were based on the idea of reciprocity, both positive and negative, but the relationship of a basileus and a laos was a special kind of reciprocity, that had evolved in the post-Mycenaean chiefdoms into a quasi-formal contract expressing the mutual rights and obligations of the abstract ‘people’ (demos/laos) and the abstract ‘figure of the leader’ (basileus).

III

By 700, power relations had altered considerably in the areas of the emerging city-states. The governing elite were now big landowners who increased their ownership of farmland at a time of rapid population growth.¹⁷ A growing number of land-poor families were dependent on them for their livelihoods, while average smallholders found fewer opportunities for wealth under the aristocrats’ now hereditary monopoly of the best farmland. Tighter economic control was accompanied by tighter political control. Throughout the seventh century, for the most part, oligarchies of wealth and birth retained exclusive control of the positions of authority, the magistracies and the councils, and constricted the power of the assembly to initiate public policy. Governmental power was greatly enhanced by the mighty sanction of the law, which evolved rapidly as an instrument of social control in the seventh century. On both the practical and ideological levels, the costs of refusing to obey the laws and the magistrates were greatly higher than the compliance costs. The evidence shows that the oligarchs successfully used the laws and the law-courts and the power of their offices to commit injustices, as the eupatrid leaders of the people’ did in seventh-century Attica.¹⁸

Yet in all their apparent strengths lay weaknesses. First, the governors of the city-states, lacking a state police force, and with only the resources of their own households and clients, were collectively little better equipped to coerce an unwilling majority by physical force than the Dark Age basileis had been. Second, rule by laws that were arrived at publicly and posted in public naturally worked towards levelling the advantages of wealth and birth and curbing aristocratic excesses. By the sixth century, even though the few still controlled the assembly, councils and law-courts, the administration of justice was becoming an agent for restoring balance and reciprocity. Third, the leadership lost ideological authority in the transition from the chiefdom to the city-state. Though the laws had majesty, the magistracies did not. The polis-leaders inherited none of the charisma that had attached to the figure of a basileus; the new governmental roles were intentionally depersonalized and functional posts, with no tradition behind them and no association with divine authority.¹⁹

Ideologies, as always in the history of societies, were a major factor in the development of the relations of power in the emerging poleis. The fragments of the seventh- and sixth-century poets reveal something of the vigorous debate about ‘class’ that, in retrospect, the aristocrats appear destined to lose. The self-styled agathoi claimed that their illustrious ancestry, old wealth, and ennobling paideia raised them far above the rest of the people, towards whom they displayed an undisguised contempt, calling them hoi kakoi and other words that described their economic, mental, moral, aesthetic, and genetic inferiority. This construction of society, of course, had little legitimacy among the kakoi. In the end, the kaloi k’ agathoi, as the elite called themselves in the fifth century, were compelled, in order to keep their leadership positions, to adapt to the competing egalitarian ideology.²⁰

On the other hand, aristocratic attitudes and beliefs were conditioned by the ideology of the polis, which demanded an even higher degree of tribal loyalty than before, and heightened the traditional expectation that the leaders work for the good of the demos. In claiming to be better than the common citizens, aristocrats could ultimately only claim to be better citizens. A key facet of the aristocratic self-presentation was the image of themselves as hoi chrestoi, the useful and the capable, in the polis, as the rest were achreioi, unfit to lead.²¹ Competitive display was as important as ever for acquiring kleos and time, though, as we would expect, ‘individualising’ displays of wealth give way in the early polis to ‘communalising’ consumption of resources for the ‘construction of monuments emphasising the group as a whole’.²²

IV

My argument has been that in the early city-states the refusal and compliance costs to the common people rose, putting them in a much more tense relationship with the leaders than before. Yet the increase of aristocratic power, though significant, was not enough for them to rule unchallenged and unchecked. Only power can curb power. In the seventh century, the checks on aristocratic dominance came from the small-farmer hoplites, the direct descendants of the rank-and-file warriors of the chiefdoms. Even though the old vertical ties still held to some extent, the hoplite farmers were emerging as a distinct social and economic third group, neither the rich nor the poor, and occupying a social level in the society that was ambivalently positioned between the superior and inferior families.

The type of polity will be determined to a great extent by the numbers of people in the three groups. Unfortunately, we have almost no numerical evidence. My guess, which is all one can do, is that in the seventh-century poleis, on a rough average, the ruling elite (defined as those whose landholdings afforded them a leisured life-style) made up, at the very most, 20 per cent of the families.²³ I have suggested that wealthy landowners possessed the means to employ brute force against the poorest citizens, although, since the legal and economic sanctions available to the agathoi made intimidation easy, actual violence, even when legally sanctioned, need not have been usual. My guess is that the exploited group, those with insufficient land to support themselves, or none at all, amounted to 30 per cent of the families at most.

The 50 per cent, or more, of citizens who were neither rich nor dependent tenants or thetes ranged in the seventh century from the well-off, though not leisured, families to those who lived at a meagre subsistence level. Assuming that half of all the free men physically able to bear arms met the hoplite requirement (a figure that I consider a minimum, rather than a maximum), then as many as six out of ten of the non-dependent-farmer group fought in the phalanx. If we take the more frequently cited estimate of a third as the maximum, then only one out of five independent farm-families and only about one of eight of all non-elite families furnished hoplites. Three of eight non-agatboi seems more reasonable.

I do not hesitate to call this subset the ‘middle group’ in the early polis. They were visibly different from the poor, who fought as light-armed troops (gumnetes) and were quite possibly excluded from the assemblies at that time. And they were distinct from the rich and well-born agathoi, who commanded them in war and peace and had their own social orbit from which the middle group were excluded. There are indications that they had articulated a self-identification as hoi mesoi by the sixth century.²⁵ These families, though not immune from aristocratic hubris, could not be ruled by force, nor, though they were economically circumscribed, were they dependent on the agathoi for their living. When they acted collectively, as in the militia and the assembly, in both of which they were the majority, they made a formidable group, and their opinion was powerful. Paradoxically, the division of the middle mass of Dark Age households into two distinct strata, with different refusal and compliance costs, increased the influence of the hoplite families in the power arrangements.

V

It is historically, and logically, sound to conclude that the mesoi were the independent variable in the frequent and extremely rapid constitutional shifts within the Archaic and Classical city-states. Where on the continuum from narrow oligarchies to full democracies a community stood was largely determined by the hoplite-farmer group. If they were content with the narrow distribution of power and agreed to, or were complicit in, the marginalization and exploitation of the weak, oligarchical regimes reigned secure. If the middle 30 per cent of families opposed the status quo, and sympathized with the bottom half of the citizenry, the balance of power shifted from the elite to the mass.²⁶ The common alternative polity in the seventh and sixth centuries of a single strong man was similarly controlled by the non-elite hoplites, whose support, or at least acquiescence, a tyrant needed to seize and keep control of the polis. In like manner, these farmer-hoplites could assume an active role in curbing aristocratic in-fighting. The unprecedented concepts of citizen equality and citizen power, which evolved in the city-states, were rooted in an ancient tradition of the worth of the individual and the collective authority of the people, and were realized in the emergence of the unprecedented ‘middle class’.

NOTES

1The Evolution of Political Society.

2 Van Wees, Status Warriors, 56.

3 See Raaflaub, pp. 53–7 below.

4 Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, chapter 2; Morris, Burial and Ancient Society, 93–6 in chapter 10.

5 See K.Raaflaub, in Latacz (ed.) Zweihundert Jahre Homer-Forschung, 207–15; van Wees, op. cit. (n. 2), ch. 1.

6 Fried, op. cit. (n. 1), 13.

7 W.G.Runciman, Comp. Stud. in Soc. & Hist. 24 (1982), 361.

8 Haas, The Evolution of the Prehistoric State, 155–8, 168–70, 175–6.

9 Il. 1.320–5, though it concerns two basileis, is evidence of the methods.

10 Od. 16.418–30; cf. 12.279–97.

11 Il. 9.154–6; Il. 5.78; 10.33; 11.58; 13.218; 16.605; Od. 14.205.

12 T.Earle, in Earle (ed.) Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology, 8. See Donlan, CW 75 (1982), 159–61.

13 Finley, The World of Odysseus, 2nd edition, 96–7: ‘military leadership and protection…and little else’ greatly underrates the basileus’ material and service obligations.

14 Il. 15.496–9; Od. 6.9–10; 14.63–5; Hes. W.D. 37, 340–1.

15 Il. 2.205–6; 9.96–9. See Carlier, La Royauté en Grèce, 190–4.

16 Carlier, op. cit. (n. 15), 162–5; Arist. Pol. 3.1285b10.

17 For an attempt to show how they did this, see Donlan, MH 46 (1989), 144–5.

18 Solon, 4.5–25; 36.5–20 West. Callinus (fr. 1 West) and Tyrtaeus (frs 10, 11, 12 West) put compliance and refusal costs and compliance gains in the context of psychological and symbolic sanctions and rewards from politai.

19 Officials and colleges continued to bear the title of basileus, appropriately, since their responsibilities were judicial and religious. See J.Lenz, ‘Kings and the Ideology of Kingship in Early Greece’, 198–334.

20 Donlan, The Aristocratic Ideal in Ancient Greece; Stein-Hölkeskamp, Adelskultur und Polisgesellschaft, Starr, The Aristocratic Temper of Greek Civilization.

21 This kind of social class terminology expanded in the sixth and even more greatly in the fifth century. See Donlan, QUCC 27 (1977), 94–111

22 Morris, op. cit. (n. 4), 189–90. Starr, op. cit. (n. 20), 49–51, emphasizes the costs to the aristocrats, ‘harnessed within the polis’.

23 More likely closer to 15 per cent. The ruling families perhaps made up 5 per cent of the population. Van Wees, op. cit. (n. 2), 276, estimates 12 per cent elite; Morris, op. cit. (n. 4), 157, guesses one ‘noble’ family to five or six ‘non-noble households’ (i.e. 17–20 per cent).

24 Estimates of one-third to less than a half: A.M.Snodgrass, JHS 85 (1965), 114; P.Cartledge, JHS 97 (1977), 23. V.D.Hanson, The Other Greeks, 479, estimates that half the citizens in fifth-century Athens were in the ‘hoplite, landowning class’. Morris, op. cit. (n.
4), 94, 206, guesses that the agathoi (=the hoplites) varied between 25 and 50 per cent of the adult populations.

25 For example, Phocylides, 12 Diehl. Thus of the free families: 20 per cent = cavalry and hoplites=hoi agathoi (the top families being a fraction of these); 30 per cent=hoplites=hoi mesoi (hoi kakoi to the elite); 20 per cent=gumnetai= poorer farmers below hoplite census; 30 per cent=landless (many, if not all, would have fought as light-armed or as seamen). Of the Boeotian forces at the battle of Delium (Thuc. 4.93.3) about 6 per cent were cavalry, 39 per cent hoplites, 55 per cent light-armed. See Hanson, op. cit. (n. 24), 210–11. On mesoi =kakoi, see ibid., 109.

26 See J.Holladay, G&R 24 (1977), 51; de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 291–2.

27 The assembly elected Pittacus aisumnetes in Mytilene around 600 (Alcaeus, fr. 348 Lobel and Page=163 LGS).