A&HH6577 sp2009/Inventing

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At the start of the Archaic age, Athens was not a powerful polis, nor a particularly distinctive one. The poleis were autonomous and contingent. They were autonomous in the sense that whatever their form of government might be, each governed itself from within. The poleis were contingent first because they could easily cease to exist, for wars among them were not infrequent and victors could deal harshly with the vanquished, killing the males and enslaving the women and children. They were also contingent because many sent out new cities, planning and setting a polis up from scratch with settlers drawn from the founding polis. Whether the city was newly founded or long established, leadership within a polis tended to be in the form of oligarchies, representing the interests of aristocratic families, dominant families that controlled land and other sources of well-being. These families competed among themselves to draw the maximum benefits from the resources of their city and its environs. There were expectations, norms, patterns of deference, spheres of influence, laws that were what the powerful said they were, and sometimes a softening, community spirit voiced by those held by custom to be in communion with the gods. Extrapolate back three thousand years from the Godfather trilogy, or the Sopranos, subtracting out the FBI, police, and other organs of the state, and you will have an approximation of the starting point as the Greeks emerged from their Dark Age.

Against this backdrop, the concept of inventing Athens takes on substance. The citizens had to invent their awareness of themselves as free men, participants in a self-governing community. They had to invent the practices of making laws public and common to all, isonomia, a principle the Athenians slowly articulated and put into practice as a way of coping with the turbulence of events and the flux of self-interest. Classical Athens, like all historical achievements, was unprecedented. It came to be through discoveries, inventions, steps taken over several centuries, sometimes with foresight and sometimes through happy accidents, by persons facing the future ignorant of what it would bring.