The Early Greek World and Herodotus' Histories: 650 to 479 BC

Our knowledge of Greek History down to the great war with Persia is based on historical allusions in the works of archaic poets, traditions handed down largely by oral transmission and preserved in Herodotus or later writers, and on the archaeological record (Greats paper IV.1, The Greeks and the Mediterranean World, with which this subject may usefully be combined, differs in concentrating much more on the archaeological record). This course rather emphasizes the literary evidence and in particular the oral and written traditions preserved in Herodotus and the evidence of earlier texts and attitudes to earlier history preserved in the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians.

The stories which fifth-century and later Greeks told of the events of the three centuries before the Persian Wars shaped their perceptions of their own identities and shaped also their political agenda: stories of tyranny formed the backdrop to claims of freedom, stories of warfare and alliance shaped friendships and enmity between cities, stories of settlement abroad shaped claims to goodwill, political support and economic advantage across the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Mediterranean as a whole. Just as individual city-states shaped their own claims to distinctness by the stories they told about other city-states, so the Greeks as a whole came to define what it was to be Greek by the stories they told about non-Greek peoples, and not least by the accounts through which they described their Persian enemies and explained that enmity. By studying these Greek traditions and the ways in which they intersect with the evidence of the meagre surviving remains of archaic literature and the mute testimony of archaeology, we are able to recover both the story of the formation of the Greek state and the story of the formation of Greek political self-consciousness, which we trace here as far as the establishment of democracy at Athens following the reforms of Kleisthenes.

If you offer this period as a text-based subject, passages for compulsory comment and translation will be set from: Herodotus I. 141-177, III.39-60, V.28-VI end; Aristotle, Athenaion Politeia i-xxiv.

This subject may not be combined with IV.1, The Greeks and the Mediterranean World c. 950 BC - 500 BC.

It has been decided that (where possible) tutorials for this period of Greek History will take place in Trinity and the first half of Michaelmas Terms, and Lectures on this subject will normally take place in Trinity and Michaelmas.