Thomas R. Martin, An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander

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5. The Archaic Age

The term Archaic Age, meaning the “Old-Fashioned Age” and designating Greek history from approximately 750 to 500 B.C., stems from art history. Modern scholars of Greek art judged the style of works from this period as looking more old fashioned than the more naturalistic art of the following period (the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.), which they saw as producing models of beauty and therefore named the Classical Age. Archaic sculptors, for example, made free-standing figures who stood stiffly, staring straight ahead in imitation of Egyptian statuary. By the Classical Age, sculptors depicted their subjects in more varied and lively poses. During the Archaic Age the Greeks developed the most widespread and influential of their new political forms, the city-state, or polis .

5.1. The Characteristics of the City-state (Polis)

Polis, from which we derive our term “politics,” is usually translated as “city-state” to emphasize its difference from what we today normally think of as a city. As in many earlier states in the ancient Near East, the polis included not just an urban center, often protected by stout walls in later centuries, but also countryside for some miles around with its various small settlements. Members of the polis, then, lived both in the town at its center and also in the villages scattered around its territory. Presiding over the polis as protector and patron was a particular god, as, for example, Athena at Athens. Different communities could chose the same deity as their protector; Sparta, Athens' chief rival in the Classical period, also had Athena as its patron god. The members of a polis constituted a religious association obliged to honor the state's patron deity as well as the community's other gods. The community expressed official homage and respect to the gods through its cults, which were regular sets of public religious activities overseen by citizens serving as priests and priestesses and paid for at public expense. The central ritual of a city-state's cults was the sacrifice of animals to demonstrate to the gods as divine protectors the respect and piety of the members of the polis .

• Members of the polis, then, lived both in the town at its center and also in the villages scattered around its territory.: Thuc. 1.16.1 [Text]
• Athena at Athens: Aesch. Eum. 288 [Text]; Athena's Parthenon [Architecture]; Athena on vase [View]; Athena on coins [Browser]
• chief rival: Thuc. 1.10.2 [Text]
• also had Athena as its patron god: Xen. Const. Lac. 13.2 [Text]
• sacrifice: Example of sacrifice in Homer [Text]; References to different kinds of sacrifice [Encyclopedia]; Sacrifice on vases [Browser]

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OCLC: 33900145
ISBN: 0300069561

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