Assembly vote, while leaving the social fabric virtually intact. All Greek reformers, as we shall see, were reactionaries at heart (and not necessarily the worse for being so), who made an even nicer distinction than we do between social and political privileges. Thersites, in the last resort, could always - when force or bribery failed - be neutralized by grudging, piecemeal reform from within. But there was a short period, between the decline of the Homeric-style basileus ('baron' rather than 'king') and the full emergence of the polis, during which the individual voice could and did make itself heard, to memorable effect.

A classic case in point is Hesiod, the farmer-poet from Ascra, fl. c. 700 BC. This nagging, exhortatory character, well described as a fore runner of the Presocratics, had an itch to sort out not only the world but the gods too: perhaps he saw both as an indistinguishable con tinuum. The very fact that a mere lay poet took upon himself the priestly task of systematizing divine myth is a significant pointer to the temper of the age. Hesiod classified phenomena according to the only pattern he knew, that of the family tree (genos). He saw the world as a muddled, confusing, chaotic place (which in eighth-century Boeotia it must indeed have been) where the only hope lay in working out man's right relations with the gods, his fellow men, his natural environment, the weather, the sea around him, and all the rest of the messy, sprawling, half-known, barely controllable natural scene.

Hesiod is the spokesman of this transitional age in more ways than one. With him, Homeric morality, Homeric ideals are swept away under the pressure of brute necessity. The individual suddenly rises

out of the collective, thrusting, acquisitive, desperate. Though Hesiod betrays nostalgia for the good old days, he knows, from bitter personal experience, that it is the world he lives in with which men must come to terms. That curious work, the Contest between Homer and Hesiod, may be fictional in the strict sense, but it embodies much symbolic truth. The prize is awarded to Hesiod, on the grounds that he stands for peace and husbandry rather than for war and slaughter - a complete reversal of the heroic ideal. Here we see the new civic morality emerging in embryo; those who cannot enforce their wishes by force majeure or upper-class sanction must appeal to general principles because they have nothing else.

By Hesiod's day, the first hints of social discontent which Thersites symbolized have crystallized into a surly, articulate diatribe against corrupt and irresponsible basileis, now no more than local squires. Yet the Works and Days does not offer a programme of economic or political reform. Instead, Hesiod attacks the problem from a moral angle - though his promotion of hard work as the panacea for all ills is an uncharacteristic solution for a Greek: the 'gospel of labour' has never been popular in Mediterranean countries. His morality, like his theology, is that of the underprivileged, based on practical peasant self-interest; and his emphasis on the omnipotence of Zeus (echoes here of the Old Testament Jehovah) suggests a subject-race fantasizing divine vengeance in the hereafter against those who cannot be annihilated by main force here and now.

Though Hesiod sometimes appears to be preaching grim might-isright pessimism (e.g. in his fable of the Hawk and the Nightingale, Works and Days 202 ff.), he also suggests that while it may be natural for bird and beast to prey on each other, Zeus nevertheless has a deuce in the human pack, the gift of justice (dike), and that crime does not, ultimately, pay - 'for justice wins over violence as they come out in the end.' Those familiar with the work of Christian theologians will recognize a hard-worked escape clause here. Hesiod was by no means the last man in an economic impasse who found himself driven to nudge divine morality a little further up the steep and rocky hill of ethics. Mapping this landscape for the average man also meant clearing up and reorganizing (in some cases bowdlerizing) the murky, archaic, often inconsistent myths regarding the gods. This task Hesiod attempted in his Theogony. Here he stands between the symbolic, paratactic world outlook of Homer and that subsequent struggle to achieve linear, conceptual thought (as exhilarating as it was painful) which we can see in the early Milesian philosophers (pp. 96 ff.).

The Theogony is a remarkable pioneering work. True, Hesiod's terms of reference are still largely non-linear; his categorizing remains at an elementary level (no distinction, for instance, between moral and

non-moral); while his semi-conceptualized figures, such as Eris (Strife), are persons rather than personified abstractions, for the simple reason that Hesiod did not know what an abstraction was. Yet the originality and penetration of his unprecedented attempt to grapple with the real and perennial problems of life are clear from the fact that, in one way or another, the hares he started from the dilemma of divine omniscience and divine morality to that of determinism and free will are still running vigorously today. With Hesiod, Greek intellectual thought may be said to have begun and in a charac teristically bold manner. The ferment is now at work; the process, once set in motion, will never stop.

'Men make the polis'

One odd feature about Hesiod's work is a singular lack of reference, in the social scene he portrays, to the polis as a dominant force: final authority still rests with the bribe-devouring basileis. Yet less than a generation later evidence for polis rule is everywhere and unmistakable: Archilochus (see p. 75), writing during the first half of the seventh century, may be an individualist, but nevertheless already operates within a collective context, civic as well as military. Perhaps Hesiod's Boeotia - then as later - was a backward region; but it also seems clear that the idea of the city-state crystallized very fast - and in direct political response to precisely those injustices which Hesiod himself had noted in his Works and Days. Again and again we find it taken for granted that the main function of any polis is to promote justice and eunomia - the latter a somewhat vague concept, variously interpreted according to one's political persuasion (for conservatives it meant maintenance of the traditional status quo, for radicals reform), but most often translated as 'good government'.

First, though, just what was the polis? Later Greek writers had no doubts on this score. Alcaeus, writing soon after 600, said: ‘it is not well-roofed houses or well-built stone walls or canals and dockyards which make a polis, but men able to use their opportunity'. Thucydides (c. 460-c. 400) was even more succinct: 'Men,' he said, 'make the polis.' Yet the polis, like most Greek ideas or abstractions, was concrete enough to begin with, as we have seen: a central fortress, round which huddled the (originally unwalled) asty, or agricultural village, with its agora - the 'gathering-place' where men met to exchange goods or opinions as a secondary focal-point. But how, and why, did the basileis disappear from the scene with so little fuss? And how did the physical polis come to embody that disciplined, collective ideal which sustained the Greeks throughout the classical period - and which, indeed, they cherished long after it had become politically obsolete?

The basileus did not rule solely by virtue of his blood. Land and capital came into it as well, enabling him to afford the chariots, horses, weapons and armour essential for a cavalry-led feudal defence force. Above all, like a medieval baron, he had his own retainers, his readymade private army. Originally both priest and judge for the demos, he had always been most valued in his capacity as their military defender, Homer's 'shepherd of the people'. Developments in the eighth and seventh centuries, however, made drastic inroads into his traditional functions and privileges. The codification of law into written records severely circumscribed his hitherto arbitrary judicial powers. The dispersal of hereditary priestly offices among a number of noble families confirms this levelling trend. The most significant development, however, datable to about 700 BC, was the emergence of

the hoplite phalanx - a well-equipped, well-drilled heavy infantry force, recruited (on a part-time emergency basis) from citizens who could afford the new, cheaper, much-improved panoply now being imported from the Near East, or manufactured locally in imitation of it.

The psychological and political implications of this new civic defence force, in which farmers, merchants, well-to-do artisans and indigent aristocrats fought shoulder to shoulder for their community, were nothing short of momentous. Homeric individualism vanished overnight, and the whole concept of a chariot-borne monarch cheered on by the peasantry went with it. Most true-blue aristocrats, choosing social prestige over effective power, hived off into the small, costly, exclusive cavalry arm; since from now until Philip II's day (mid fourth century: see pp. 161 ff.) the issue of a battle was never decided by cavalry alone, they could no longer pose as their city's indispensable protectors. There was no democratic leveller to match the phalanx, where each man's shield defended his neighbour, and social distinc tions went for nothing. The hoplites' collective achievement inspired a collective sense of pride. Here, if anywhere, we can glimpse the roots of the concept identifying the polis with its citizens.

This sense of collective identity was made possible by the minuscule numbers involved. With a few key exceptions (fifth-century Athens had a voting population of perhaps fifty to sixty thousand, while cities like Thebes or Argos varied between this figure and forty thousand over all), most Greek poleis were lucky if they could muster five thousand inhabitants. Space, too, was limited, often to a few square miles. Both restrictions were looked on as a virtue, and actively cultivated, since the constant polis ideal was direct representation for every citizen with a vote: collective concentration and, if possible though in practice this could seldom be obtained - self-sufficiency (autarkeia). (Aristotle claimed that the ideal was for citizens to avoid manual labour, a characteristic prejudice on his part which does not seem to be borne out by the facts.) Justice must not only be done, but, in the most literal sense, be seen to be done, in a place of assembly where one man could, physically, address the whole enfranchised body. There must also be political unity: a mere federation of states or villages did not qualify. Nor, most important of all, did barbarians; the polis was an exclusively Greek phenomenon.

What general pattern emerges? A conscious working towards the machinery of collectivism, exemplified by the codification of laws, the multiplication of administrative posts, the swing against ex officio life appointments (though there were exceptions, e.g. the Areopagus Council in Athens, composed of ex-archons, or the Gerousia at Sparta), the tendency to elect officials by majority vote for a one-year