Sweating the Details

“Don’t tell me what you think,” said Edward R. Murrow, “tell me what you know.” Clearly a lot has changed in journalism since the twentieth century.

We contend this month with A History of the Archaic Greek World by Jonathan M. Hall. Key facts: this one is a graduate textbook, and Hall assumes an undergraduate education in Classics…not for nothing did we choose the verb, “contend.” We are in the Archaic period of Greek history, the years 1200-479 B.C. History that ancient seems about as far as you get from Murrow and twentieth century news reporting, except that Murrow-like, Hall sets out to dissect what we actually know about Archaic Greece — as attested in the literary and physical records — from what we think we know about the period, much of which has been deduced by generations of scholars, some of them ancient, eminent, and occasionally wrong. Unfortunately, the work also suffers to a minor extent from academic faddism (more toward the end), but the sheer mass of detail leaves our author with precious little time to indulge himself in philosophy.

The Archaic Period in Greece opens at the fall of the Mycenean Empire around 1200 B.C. Just what happened to the Myceneans is anybody’s guess: their world was destroyed by a mass migration of a northern population through southern Europe, the Levant, and into Egypt…the so-called Sea Peoples, whom we have considered previously. Since Hall sticks rigorously to facts, he is unconvinced the Sea Peoples actually existed and prefers to date the fall of Mycenae to a style of pottery, Late Helladic IIIC (LHIIIC)…when pushed for hard data, ancient historians often hand you pot shards. The four centuries that followed, from the twelfth through the ninth centuries B.C., are lightly documented and are considered a Dark Age. It does seem that times were tough: archeological information shows small populations sparsely distributed; homes were simple one- or two-room affairs. As befits a Dark Age, little written record survives of the time.

Here begins the main body of Hall’s work, considering Greek culture from the eighth through the fifth centuries B.C. In this period, both the archeological and the literary records are sufficiently deep that we can get some insight into Greece’s development. Hall believes that while we can gain insight into the period, the historic record is not sufficient to establish a firm chronology of events. He therefore proposes to treat the material thematically, not chronologically. Almost…he does give the chapters thematic titles (“New Homes Across the Sea,” “Defining the Political Community,” etc.), but the reader quickly realizes that underneath the subjective names, the chapters march to a fairly strict, linear chronology.

Despite its title, A History of the Archaic Greek World is at least as much about the methods of the professional historian as it is about names and dates…Hall even tells us that in the first few pages. As an opening example, he considers the Lelantine War. Fought at the end of the eighth century (710-650 B.C.) between the city-states of Chalis and Eretria, it was a regional conflict that grew out of control, with various allies taking sides with one city or the other until all of what is now Greece was caught up in the conflagration. Massive.

Or not.

Hall then goes on to examine that narrative. There is no contemporary history of the war itself, so what we know was pieced together across nine hundred years, in works written by numerous authors. References to the war come in a variety of forms, including histories, political speeches, histories quoting political speeches, and inscriptions etched on walls. Archaic Period politicians were not averse to exaggerating the past to suit their then-current needs, so some of that writing has to be taken with a grain of salt. Historians, of course, quote one another, and across time that set up an echo effect, where a bad fact or massive assumption got re-quoted over generations. And even writers who were contemporary to the war may not have been directly involved in its fighting. So after close analysis, Hall determines that the Lelantine War may have been the massive undertaking we think; or it might have been a smaller regional conflict; or it may never have happened at all. Sheesh.

Hall is clear that he is giving us a pattern example, and it is a pattern he repeats in most of the chapters that follow. First, he presents a linear narrative, then he blows it up with a detailed analysis of sources and counter facts. Missing is the expected synthesis, the resolution of the standard narrative with the counter arguments that Hall advances. He points out the flaws in the standard narrative and leaves it up to us to resolve them…he simply tells us, “what he knows.”

There are some interesting facts along the way. Greece began colonizing the Italian peninsula in the eight century B.C., so its history with the Italians began early on, although Rome itself goes unmentioned in the volume…the Romans are too nouveau. After the destruction of 1200 B.C., the polis, the mass political consciousness, had to be rebuilt. Hall’s consideration of that process and its role in the emergence of (limited) Greek democracy is worth the read. The late Bronze Age, pre-LHIIIC, was characterized by extensive international trade…Hall describes how that trade rebuilt itself, along with the rise of coins as money. And while Athens gets its own chapter (“City of Thesus”), one strength of the volume is that it attempts to consider the region as a whole, not just Athens and Sparta.

The Archaic Age came to an end with the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Hall takes us to 479 B.C. to wrap up loose ends. What followed is the age of Classical Greece, much better documented and much more widely known, the world of Aristotle and Plato.

In the end, what are we to make of this volume? It is very recent, first published in 2007, and the current edition is its second, published in 2014. Its newness makes it difficult to assess. We have noted the author’s pattern of rehearsing a narrative and then countering it with detail. It is hard to tell how much of that activity is honest academic nit-picking, and how much is the current mania for tearing down icons, the perpetual need to find all feet made of clay. (This is the academic faddism we cited in opening.) Linguistically at least, Hall proves himself a man of his time: where we normally speak of, “the aristocracy,” or “the rich,” he speaks of, “elites.” Hmm.

A History of the Archaic Greek World has value to two audiences. Certainly there is the specialist in Greek studies, who needs and fully appreciates every counter fact and conundrum. But it turns out that Hall’s method — the very method we questioned in the preceding paragraph — is of interest to the generalist audience, meaning you and me. History is like a digitized image: if you get too close, all you see is pixels; get too far away, and you miss the picture completely. All writers of history have to make a critical decision about how close to stand to a topic in order to capture its essence. Hall is a little “close,” a little pixelated, for most purposes. But I am indebted to the man for showing us how a professional historian makes those choices.

“Seeing the big picture” only works, it turns out, when one has considered an enormous amount of detail.