A Note on Early Iron-Age Greece, & Its Poverty: Something I Almost Surely Will Not Get to Teach This Fall...

As I think more about what to teach in my courses next fall, I find myself contracting my aspirations for what I can cover of the pre-1870 world. Right now I am thinking: ¼ pre-1870; ¼ 1870-1980, ¼ the rise & fall[?] of the Neoliberal Order; & ¼ how the current situation & the future are rooted in & are rhyming with the past. Which means all my hopes about taking a tour of much of the world before 500—covering the Yamyana & the Beaker People, the Babylonians & the Haxamanishya, Great Zimbabwe, Mali & Mansa Musa, the Mexica or the Maya, the Han & the Maurya, the collapse of the Late Bronze-Age Order, Classical & Hellenistic Greece, & Republican & Imperial Rome—go out the window. I will need to shrink down to Greece & Rome. & I may find myself without time for Greece…

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There were perhaps 300,000 people who called themselves “Hellenes” in the year -800. There were perhaps 4 million in the year -300. Houses got bigger—a lot bigger. The skeletons we dig up grew taller. Trade and the division of labor flourished. Alongside the extraordinary growth over the half-millennium after the year -8-00 of the Hellenic population is a remarkable increase in the average age of death among adults. There appears to be much less violence inflicted upon adults—either through violence directly applied, or through violence depriving adults of the resources that they need to keep living.

And the run from -800 to -300 was only the appetizer. Thereafter, following in the wake of the armies of Alexander the Great, and then the expansion of the Roman Empire to the Danube River, Greeks colonized city after city and spread out into the countryside from the Al-Fayyum oasis in Egypt to the Punjab, and from Alexandria Eschate near modern-day Tashkent to Marseilles in France. Perhaps 25 million people spoke Greek in the year 150.

How far then did Greekness extend? Consider this: In the -200s Gallic mercenaries from the tribes of the Tectosages, the Trocmii, and the Tolistobogii were hired by Nicomedes I of Bithynia for his war against his brother Zipoetes II. After they had won him his war, they looked around and decided central Anatolia looked like a nice place to live. They took it over. They brought their families in and conquered a Gallic enclaves for themselves. 300 years later St. Paul writes to the Christians living in this Gallic enclave in Asia Minor, to the people consequently named Galatians—inhabitants of the land of the Gauls. St. Paul tells them that they are Christians, and that among them “Ouk eni Ioudaios oude Hellēn”—literally “not being Judean nor Hellene”, with the standard translation being “there is neither Greek nor Jew”. In St. Paul’s eyes—and probably in their own—the non-Judean inhabitants of a place called the land of the Gauls are not Gauls, but rather Greeks.

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But let us situate ourselves back in the year -800, when a guy named Homeros may or may of may not have been stitching together what we call the Odyssey.

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Consider what Odysseus says in the Odyssey about what he and the soldiers he commanded after the Trojan War was over, immediately after he and the twelve ships of Ithaka departed the shore:

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What of my sailing, then, from Troy?
What of those years of rough adventure, weathered under Zeus?
The wind that carried west from Ilion
brought me to Ísmaros, on the far shore,
a strongpoint on the coast of the Kikonês.
I stormed that place and killed the men who fought.
Plunder we took, and we enslaved the women,
to make division, equal shares to all—
but on the spot I told them: ‘Back, and quickly!
Out to sea again!’



My men were mutinous,
fools, on stores of wine. Sheep after sheep
they butchered by the surf, and shambling cattle,
feasting,—while fugitives went inland, running
to call to arms the main force of Kikonês.
This was an army, trained to fight on horseback
or, where the ground required, on foot. They came
with dawn over that terrain like the leaves
and blades of spring. So doom appeared to us,
dark word of Zeus for us, our evil days.



My men stood up and made a fight of it
backed on the ships, with lances kept in play,
from bright morning through the blaze of noon
holding our beach, although so far outnumbered;
but when the sun passed toward unyoking time,
then the Akhaians, one by one, gave way.
Six benches were left empty in every ship
that evening when we pulled away from death.



And this new grief we bore with us to sea:
our precious lives we had, but not our friends.
No ship made sail next day until some shipmate
had raised a cry, three times, for each poor ghost
unfleshed by the Kikonês on that field…

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At the moment when he says this, Odysseus has just been washed up, a castaway and a stranger, on the shore of the land of the Phaiakia.

They ask him how he got there.

And the story he tells them is: I got here because I am a pirate.

He is, moreover, a pirate who keeps pirating, and then pirating some more, even when you would think he would be exhausted of pirating, and killing, and risking death.

When Odysseus leaves Troy, he has just finished fighting the long and brutal Trojan War. He and his crew have their plunder from Troy. Yet the first thing they do is pirate.

Plus they are rather stupid and undisciplined about pirating.

In such an environment, is anybody going to save and invest a lot? Or, rather, is anybody going to save and invest in anything other than weapons and weapons training both to (a) make you and yours a hard and difficult target for the pirates, and (b) make yourself more effective when you go pirate? The economy’s ratio of savings to depreciation s/δ  is surely going to be low, depressing average productivity, and in any Malthusian model, the population density.

Moreover, the risk is very real that, as you mind your own business, Odysseus and company, well-trained, well-equipped, battle-hardened, will come along and, just because they can, “stormed that place and killed the men who fought. Plunder we took, and we enslaved the women…”—such high risks of violent death must, in any Malthusian equilibrium, be offset by reduced mortality risk from disease and such. Hence the economy’s level of subsistence-necessities consumption will also be high: you will need to have mothers fed well enough that they have nine or ten rather than eight children so that three rather than two can survive to reproduce—or, rather, that three would survive to reproduce were it not for the fact that one of the three gets spitted on the sword of Neoptolemos. That also depresses the population density.

Not in the model, but potentially very real: A low population density means that ideas that are known and deployed somewhere will have a difficult time diffusing throughout a civilization. A low population density means that the “Smithian” productivity gains from using those ideas to build an extensive and highly productive division of labor will be difficult to attain.

Yet from this Early Iron-Age Dark-Age beginning after the collapse of the high Mycenaean civilization of the Late Bronze Age, the Greek peoples built a civilization. As Josiah Ober has written, the Greeks moved out of:

the violence and gift-exchange economy that characterized what Finley (1965) famously called “the world of Odysseus”….  There was in fact sustained and substantial growth in the Greek economy between the ages of Homer and of Plato and Aristotle… driven by (1) efficient methods of production, predicated on relative advantage and aimed at increasing the quantity as well the quality of goods produced, and (2) by market exchanges based on voluntary contracts. Moreover, the rational Greek state (notably, but not exclusively Athens) was increasingly cognizant—through its legislative, judicial, and administrative functions (ch. 5)—of the social (and taxable) value of providing rules and infrastructure aimed at facilitating the profitable production and exchange of goods…. Ancient Greeks, as individuals and collectives, frequently employed economic rationality, i.e. rationally instrumental reasoning in economic contexts….

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All-in-all, this appears to be a remarkable civilizational accomplishment, and not one limited simply to the enrichment of a luxurious predatory upper class. There is a reason that the Greeks have a predominant place in our cultural memory. That reason is not that they are “our” ancestors, whoever “we” happened to be. The people who decided that universities should study the Greeks lived on the island of Britain, in the upper Thames river valley near Oxford and in the fins of Norfolk near Cambridge. They were in nowise descendants, biologically or culturally, of the ancient Greeks. Nobody in England in 1450 could speak or read Greek. Yet in a strange act of inverse adoption, the inhabitants of the valley and the fens adopted them as their predecessors in what they decided to call “western civilization”.

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