Greek city-states: Sparta, Corinth and the colonies

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates says that the people between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Black Sea live around the sea like ants or frogs around a pond.

More than a thousand states

Greece in the 7th century BCE was not one country. It was a patchwork of small, self-governing communities, each called a polis. A modern inventory by the Copenhagen Polis Centre lists more than a thousand of them across the Archaic and Classical periods. Most were tiny: a walled town, a market square called the agora, a hilltop sanctuary, and farmland for a few thousand people. They shared a language, gods and festivals such as the Olympic Games, yet they fought one another constantly over border land.

Why Greeks sailed away

From about 750 BCE, cities began sending groups of citizens overseas to found new cities. A founder, called the oikist, led the settlers, and it was customary to ask the oracle of Apollo at Delphi for approval first. The reasons were practical: too many sons for too little farmland, quarrels at home, and the lure of trade in grain, metal and timber. Corinthian settlers founded Syracuse in Sicily around 733 BCE. Megara founded Byzantium, traditionally in 667 BCE. Settlers from Thera founded Cyrene in Libya around 631 BCE, and people from Phocaea in Asia Minor founded Massalia, now Marseille, around 600 BCE. A colony was an independent polis, not a province; it usually kept religious ties to its mother city and nothing more.

Hoplites, tyrants and coins

Greek armies of this age were made of hoplites: citizen farmers who could afford a bronze helmet, a spear and a round shield almost a metre across. They fought shoulder to shoulder in a block called the phalanx, each man’s shield partly covering the man to his left. Because the city needed these men, they began to demand a say in how it was run. In many cities ambitious nobles seized power with popular support; the Greeks called such a ruler a tyrannos, which at first meant a ruler who took power outside the normal rules, not necessarily a cruel one. Cypselus took Corinth this way, traditionally around 657 BCE. Coins arrived in the same period. The first were struck in Lydia, in western Turkey, in the 7th century BCE (the British Museum dates its earliest examples to about 650 to 600 BCE), and Greek cities soon minted their own, each with its badge: an owl for Athens, a turtle for Aegina.

Sparta, a city run like a camp

Sparta, in the southern Peloponnese, took a different path. It conquered its neighbours in Laconia and Messenia and turned them into helots, serfs who belonged to the state and farmed the land so that Spartan citizens did not have to. Because helots far outnumbered citizens, Sparta lived in fear of revolt. Boys left home at about seven for the agoge, a hard state training in fighting, obedience and endurance. Sparta had two kings at once, a council of 28 elders plus the two kings, and five elected officials called ephors who watched over the kings. Spartan women could own land and were expected to be fit; Aristotle complained that women held about two fifths of Spartan land. Full citizens were never numerous. Herodotus has a Spartan say there were about 8,000 of them in 480 BCE.