Class in Archaic Greece

Archaic Greece saw a number of decisive changes, including the emergence of the polis, the foundation of Greek settlements throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea, the organization of panhellenic games and festivals, the rise of tyranny, the invention of literacy, the composition of the Homeric epics and the emergence of lyric poetry, the development of monumental architecture and large scale sculpture, and the establishment of 'democracy'. This book argues that the best way of understanding them is the application of an eclectic Marxist model of class struggle, a struggle not only over control of agricultural land but also over cultural ideals and ideology. A substantial theoretical introduction lays out the underlying assumptions in relation to alternative models. Material and textual remains of the period are examined in depth for clues to their ideological import, while later sources and a wide range of modern scholarship are evaluated for their explanatory power.

Introduction: theoretical considerations; 1. Class in the Dark Age and the rise of the polis; 2. Homer's Iliad: alienation from a changing world; 3. Trade, colonization, and the Odyssey; 4. Hesiod: Cosmogony, Basileis, farmers, and justice; 5. Tyranny and the Solonian crisis; 6. Sparta and the consolidation of the oligarchic ideal; 7. Athens and the emergence of democracy.

Provides a fresh and unapologetically Marxist approach to the history of one of the formative periods of Western civilisation, which saw the invention of politics, the spread of Greek culture over most of the Mediterranean, the invention of literacy, epic, lyric, highly influential architecture, sculpture and painting.

Peter W. Rose is a Professor of Classics at Miami University, Ohio. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, Massachusetts and taught at Yale University, Connecticut for eight years. His publications include Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece (1992) and articles on Pindar, Sophocles, Homer, Marx and the Study Women in Antiquity, Thucydides, Cicero, film and pedagogy, Marxism and ideology.