Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Zurbach, Julien

Titel

The Making of Ancient Greek City-States: Status, Class, and the System of Land Tenure

Ist Teil von

• Annales : histoire, sciences sociales (French ed.), 2013-10, Vol.68 (4), p.957-998

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A distinction is usually drawn between two opposite notions of Archaic Greek societies, based either on a legal and static definition of status or on a personal and fluid notion of status linked to diversified strategies of social distinction. This article seeks to move beyond this opposition by examining the history of status groups in the Archaic period. It analyzes the most important moments within the complex historiography devoted to this subject and provides a history of status groups during the formative period of the city-states. The creation of new status groups was an essential feature of the city-states' history and was primarily linked to indebtedness and war. Although statuses were collective and often imposed from the outside, they nevertheless display a historical development that is central to the formation of city-states. In the seventh century BCE, the aristocracy created new groups in response to the need for a workforce. The resulting conflict led to an evolution of the systems surrounding access to land and food. This reorganization of entitlement, which was how communities responded to the social and economic crisis they faced, was in turn based on the creation of new status groups. Social conflict led to the definition of a new system of status groups. Adapted from the source document.