• 1 Generally, Morris (1987), Murray (1993), Osborne (2009). Colonization: Osborne (1998). Symposion: M (...)
• 2 On Snodgrass and his influence, Bintliff & Rutter (2016).

2The above is of course a pastiche or collage, but hopefully not an unfair one (for it describes the teaching I both received and doled out as a graduate and a teacher within British higher education). The components of this vulgate are by now too familiar to need detailed exemplification,1 but the full intellectual history of the scholarship on archaic Greece in the late 12th century remains to be written. Apart from the desire to nuance or dispel master narratives (built on watersheds such as the “hoplitic revolution” or tyranny), the following factors deserve emphasis. First, the rise of a “new archaeology” for early Greece (pioneered by figures such as Anthony Snodgrass) Second, as already mentioned, engagement with anthropology and social theory (as embodied notably by the “Paris School” but also by the reworkings of Paris‑style structuralism in other academic contexts such as Italy or the UK). Third, the effects of the “linguistic turn”, namely an interest in discourse rather than positivism, in complexity rather than linearity, in interdisciplinarity rather than a “classical” canon of texts, in new social history rather than old political history.2

• 3 Morris (1991), Berent (2000). cf. Berent (2004), Anderson (2003) on the institutional thinness of e (...)

3In addition to these intellectual debates, the broader cultural, political social influences of the last decades of the century need consideration, for instance the impact of neo‑liberalism, Thatcherism, New Labour… The neo‑liberal context may be relevant for one striking characteristic of English-speaking scholarship on the archaic period, namely the explicit desire to minimize or do away with the state, as a useful analytical category and as ancient reality, in favour of a model of competitive interaction between social actors—in practice, “aristocratic” or elite groups. In Moshe Berent’s bold thesis, inspired by the anthropology of P. Clastres, the polis was a stateless, acephalous society; in this analytical frame, early Athens seems less a state than aggregate of competing interests, a sort of chieftain-society, shaped and dominated by the power-relations of elite groups and families.3

• 4 Thomas (2007).
• 5 After fifteen years teaching Greek history in the United Kingdom, I can still instantly identify do (...)
• 6 Nomima I.32; Syll.³ 4. I seem to remember that the historian and epigraphist P. Thonemann, as a sec (...)

4In such an account of the archaic Greek world, epigraphy occupied a marginal place. Private epigraphy, especially when written in verse, illustrated themes of elite display and performed identity, thus corroborating the fuller literary and archaeological evidence.4 As for public epigraphy suffered a continuous process of minimizing. Some of the material was forgotten. The stele documenting fiscal privileges granted to Manes at Kyzikos, though included in Syll.³ (no. 4) did not make it into the collection by Russell Meiggs and David Lewis (a teaching collection which exercised an outsize influence on English-speaking research and scholarship on the archaic period),5 and dropped out of the scholarly discourse on the period and out of the teaching vulgate (since Charles Fornara’s collection was based on ML for the epigraphical material).6 Many such documents, by being included in Lilian H. Jeffery’s compendium on the scripts of archaic Greece (1990), became illustrative documents for paleography, and hence lived in a technical, limited part of the field.

• 7 Ehrenberg (1937). Lack of literacy in Crete: Whitley (1998).
• 8 Hölkeskamp (1992).

5Other famous documents were carefully circumscribed and minimized, from multiple angles. The “constitutional law” of Dreros, in Crete, once analysed by Victor Ehrenberg as an astonishing index of early institutional development, could be all too easily downplayed, as related to tyranny, and hence to elite conflict. Furthermore, James Whitley strikingly posits that as a written law, the Dreros inscription belonged to a world of restricted literacy and elite power. The argument for this interpretation is the general lack of written artifacts showing casual, widespread literacy—in this view, literacy is an elite technology of rarefied use.7 The decree of Datala for the remembrancer Spensithios (Figures 1–2) seemed to suggest the elite nature of writing, since there was need a specialist scribe to handle such matters as the “Phoenician things (letters)”. Law in Crete concerned the elite and hence confirmed the elitist view of archaic poleis; in any case it was a specifically Cretan development, a curiosity. In the case of other epigraphical documents, they could be made to illustrate developments in Athens, whose history embodied the really important story of democracy: the mid‑6th century “constitutional law” from Chios offered a parallel for some features of the Solonian reforms. Generally, the downplaying of written law was a required trope, a shibboleth, for serious work on the archaic period. Rather than effect any foundational social magic through the “rule of law”, written law concerned elite disputes, was an ad hoc affair, and proved unable to restrain elite competition and the rise of tyrants such as Peisistratos, who ruled while leaving previous “law codes” in place.8

• 9 Perlman (2014).
• 10 Nomima I.1, 27, 48, 64, 66, 68, 81. Also in Gagarin & Perlman (2016): 7 items.

6It is possible to challenge this view of Greek law on the details. For instance, Cretan literacy may have been more widespread than James Whitley allows for, and, as P. Perlman established, Cretan laws themselves exhibit reading marks, such as punctuation and separations, which must have facilitated perusal by a wider public than just a scribal elite.9 But what Henri van Effenterre and Françoise Ruzé achieved with Nomima, especially the first volume, was on a different scale altogether. The sheer quantity of material gathered imparted massive authority to the work, making it impossible to marginalize particular texts as unica or curiosities. The Dreros law showed the city limiting service as kosmos, and the intervention of some obscure bodies in the city; Nomima now illuminated the Dreros law from multiple angles, which brought out salient characteristics. First, the law appeared in its context as one of several inscriptions containing public acts from the archaic period.10 Even though the corpus is ultimately tiny, it shows the existence of multiple complex institutions that regulated public and social life. The kosmos, with his adjudicatory functions, was only one of these: in addition to the damioi (administrators of public goods or representatives of the countryside) and the “Twenty of the City” mentioned in the law on the kosmos, the polis also had an agretas, “gatherer”, probably a military leader endowed with executive powers (which themselves could be curtailed by the city’s decree), and ithyntai, “straighteners”(?), perhaps entrusted with oversight powers and certainly endowed with the capacity to pass their own decisions which had regulatory effect. The citizen body was oragnized in two systems, the hetaireiai, “companion bands”, and the agelai, “herds”, perhaps corresponding to age groups, and regulated by public decision, using legal analogy (since whatever measure was taken for the hetaireiai was a calcque of existing institutions for the agelai). There was some procedure for constituencies to introduce proposals to the polis, since a decree was passed upon the initiative of two groups, a (fictional) descent group, the Prespidai collaborating with a locality, the inhabitants of Milatos, itself some sort of well‑defined sub‑group within the city.

• 11 Nomima I.82.
• 12 Nomima I.61; Nafissi (2010). The purported list of gifts by the hero Phanotos to his daughter, insc (...)

7This glimpse of the “Constitution of the Drerians” allowed for connections to be drawn with other archaic Greek cities. In 6th century Gortyn, the kosmos appeared alongside other magistrates (the titas, the gnômôn), as well as a special kosmos of the foreigners; magistrates clearly enjoyed some form of power (they are enjoined to “release” indivduals in certain cases), but were themselves subject to enforcement and accountability.11 Most importantly, Nomima allowed for a web of parallels across the archaic Greek world. “Straighteners” appear in early 5th century Argos, and “straightness” is an important political concept in archaic Greek culture. It notably appears in Sparta, in the cluster of testimonia for the “Great Rhetra”, whatever the nature of that act was (perhaps a 6th century document that puports to be an older document, incorporating fragments of legislation and combining them with narrative known through Tyrtaios).12 Another feature possibly shared between the Great Rhetra and the mini‑corpus from Dreros is the involvement of civic subdivisions as part of decision-making: the explicit heading of a Drerian law as “it seemed good to the polis inasmuch as the tribes were consulted / distributed” (πόλι ἔϝαδε διαλήσασι πυλᾶσι—both the polis and the tribes are in the dative and depend on the same verb of decision) might find a parallel in, and indeed explain, the mysterious expression “tribing the tribes and obing the obes” in the Great Rhetra. Consultation by tribes certainly appears in the decree for Spensithios at Datala, where five men per tribe seem to participate in decision-making or ratification. Such parallels remove the Drerian law from its isolation, and make it part of a general phenomenon of institutionalization. Generally, the effect of reading Nomima in bulk was to counteract any attempt to minimize written law: rather than being presented as isolates or curios, elements such as the Chian constitutional law (ML 8), the decree concerning Spensithios the remembrancer at Datala, or the early homicide law at Athens became part of a network of institutionalization.

• 13 E.g. Osborne (1996 and 2009), Hall (2007 and 2014). Survey of approaches and evidence: Fisher and v (...)

8It might have been supposed that Nomima triggered a wide revolution in the writing of archaic Greek history, and Greek history in general. The question of the impact of Nomima in bringing archaic epigraphy to the field’s attention as a major source on a par with the traditional literary sources, the art‑historical material and the dynamic new archaeological sources and approaches is a broader one which needs an answer across the field of archaic Greek history on an international scale. However, it must immediately be said that the potential contribution and implications of Nomima do not seem to figure very prominently in English-language textbooks of the archaic period (for instance by Robin Osborne or Jonathan Hall), largely dominated by archaeology and the non‑institutionalist paradigm mentioned at the start of this essay. The same applies for research-focussed surveys of approaches and evidence, such as the important volume of papers assembled by Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees (where, indeed, the non‑institutionalist paradigm is developed, for instance by Ian Morris, Robin Osborne, James Whitley).13 Nor did the epigraphical material and approach in Nomima play any pivotal role in attempts to rehabilitate institutions and the state as important features of Greek history—for instance in Eric Robinson’s reconstruction of early democracies (which appeared in 1997 but was based on a doctoral thesis defended in 1994, the same year as Nomima I came out), or in theoretical defences of the notion of the polis as a state, such as those offered by Mogens Hansen (2002) and Greg Anderson (2009), whose focus is in any case mainly classical.

• 14 Osborne (1996 and 2009). The essays are in Mitchell & Rhodes (1997). For a similar critique of a vi (...)

9The sense of a law‑shaped, state-shaped hole in approaches to the archaic Greek world may have been felt, and was occasionally voiced. In 1996 already, Robin Osborne completed a set of conference papers on “the development of the polis in archaic Greece” with a polemical essay, taking a stand against Hölkeskamp’s minimalist interpretation of archaic Greek law. Though not drawing on any of the available collections of archaic Greek inscriptions with legal content (Koerner, 1993, Nomima), the evidentiary basis is drawn from a much wider basis than the narrow selection in ML, namely from several places in the Argolid, Elis, Arkadia.14 All the same, it took nearly two decades until an image of the polis as centralized and institutionalized was clearly proposed on the basis of the epigraphical evidence. Hans-Joachim Gehrke’s explicit description of archaic poleis as clear examples of states with institutions and extensive powers, albeit different from modern liberal states (2009), is based on careful readings of epigraphical material, as gathered by Koerner (1993) or in Nomima. Likewise, Jonathan Hall explicitly speaks of the rise of state action as a major development in early Greek history (2013), albeit within a nuanced appreciation of the diversity of powers and connectivity in the archaic world. On a larger scale, Hans van Wees’ book‑length analysis of archaic public finance and fiscality (2013) argues strongly for state organization and capacities, based on documents such as an archaic inscription from Eretria as well as the indirect evidence for the archaic Athenian polis. The reasons for the delayed impact of Koerner (1993) and Nomima constitute an intriguing point of academic and intellectual history—contributing factors must include the language of publication, the national tradition these works represent, or the general social context; I have already alluded to such factors above, since they are the same that led to downplaying the state in Greek history. What matters is trying to catch up on the missed opportunity which Nomima represents for the study of the archaic Greek world.

• 15 Odyssey, II.178–193: an aristocratic suitor of Penelope threatens to fine an Ithakan for displeasin (...)
• 16 E.g. Nomima I.91 (Eretria), 62 (Chios), 101 (Mykenai, “said things”), 109 (Elis).
• 17 Nomima I.88 (Argos; see also Probert & Dickey (2015), including photographs), 52 (Elis).

11The contrast with the world of the Homeric basileis is enormous. These basileis sit in judgment based on their own status, in a world where the assembly meets infrequently, can be by‑passed by groups, families and individuals pursuing their own interests (such as vendettas or freebooting). and does not have the openly recognized authority to constrain individual action. Charismatic individuals can, at their discretion, impose fines as a means of social control.15 In contrast, almost any document of the early polis supposes structure in the community: public affairs are managed by public officials elected by the assembly, according to permanent, binding rules decided collectively, sometimes posted in monumental form, but also conceived us as the performative speech act of the people: wrhatra, wewrhemena (the “said things”).16 In other words, there exists a public sphere of legitimate, permanent powers and rules that is distinct from, but endowed with authority and coercion over, private individuals and their actions. In 6th century Argos, a whediastas from taking sacred implements out of the precinct of Athena Polias, but it can be used in a public context (“before the city”); infractions are punished under compulsion (epanankassatô) by the damiorgos in consultation with a priestly official. The contrast between private individual and public official appears in Elis, where possible offenders are described as “individual (wetas), official (telestas), or community (damos).17 At 49 items, the section on the powers of officials and official bodies in the polis is the longest in the first volume of Nomima, as befits its focus on public or “constitutional” law.

• 18 The deliberate omission of “sacred law” from Nomima I masks the importance of religion as a collect (...)
• 19 Nomima I.25 (dating by magistrates at Argos), 12 (foreigners, cattle, pigs; also Gagarin & Perlman, (...)
• 20 Nomima I.75 (Sikyon hestiatorion), 32 (Manes), 74, building from revenues of shrine; I follow L. Ro (...)
• 21 Kroll (2020).
• 22 Levi (1988) for the economist’s view of these problems, and the role of the state.

12There is no reason not to describe these phenomena as constituting a form of early state, albeit a very specific one, based not on hierarchy and the domination of a small group, but on the self‑imagination of a group as equivalent to the community, the “people”. This image acts as the source of the state’s legitimacy and its far‑reaching concerns: religion as a collective manifestation,18 the organisation of social groups such as age‑classes, the managing of time which is differentiated by official markers such as eponymous magistrates, land‑tenure and agriculture. An inscribed stone capital from Lyktos bears both a document on the treatment of foreigners involving laws and the competences of the kosmos, and a law on the sorting of cattle and pigs.19 The polis further deployed its institutions to raise collective funds, through fines but also taxation, which then could be used to produce public goods, notably in the religious sphere. A sacred dining hall in a locality of Sikyon was open to those who resided and paid their telê, thus making clear the link between membership, participation, and financial contributions. The 6th century decree of Kyzikos for Manes gives a sense of some of the taxes raised by the polis, namely indirect taxes or fees for services. In the same region, a commission managed a shrine’s fortune (estates and the hides from sacrificial victims) to build a temple.20 Likewise, the scrap of lead bearing accounts of the shrine of Artemis at Ephesos shows the latter in receipt of profits from indirect taxes and rent, at some point in the late 7th century BCE.21 Of course, such concerns are also those of hierarchical “early states”; this convergence reflects the distinctiveness of the path by which the archaic polis arrived at the horizon of state institutions—and the reality of polis as state. What the polis as state does is to extract surplus to produce public goods (and ensure equal participation in the process) and to protect public goods from private depredation. In other words, the polis solves problems of collective action, fairness and defection, to prevent the “tragedy of the commons” arising from individual interests.22

• 23 Adak & Thonemann (2022), docs 2–3, superseding earlier editions (Nomima I.104–5; also in ML 30; Koe (...)

13A particular consequence of stateness in the case of the archaic polis is the appearance of a set of interconnected second-order problems and paradoxes. One such problem is the protection of the state itself, in its legal and institutional manifestations; the last section of Nomima, vol. 1, is devoted to standing measures and solutions to try and safeguard the state’s authority, often as embodied in written law. The public curses from Teos and Abdera, dating to the early 5th century BCE, constitute a famous example of such measures.23 Another such problem is the management of potential conflict between different forms of authority. In Elis, legislation was framed in terms of earlier laws (to graphos tarchaion, ta graphea), which could be changed only by the Council and the People, probably in majority vote (zamon plathuonta), as we can tell from a fragmentary law; a more complete document shows nuances and adjustments:

• 25 Nomima I.62.

14The relations between magistrate’s decision, law, and popular decree are weighed and decided on, and the authority of each defined. The magistrate must decide in accordance with law, and the popular decree has force of law, either by its sovereignty over preexisting law, or in cases where there is no written law. The latter interpretation is perhaps more likely, seeing the abundance of precautions imposed on any effort to amend existing law—consultation of Zeus, and duly passed decrees. The rule that changes should be voted on three times might itself be an addition to the decree as first proposed or passed, to impose extra hurdles to the procedure. The fragmentary law from Chios also specifies that officials “guard the rhêtrai of the demos”, perhaps both in the sense of actively protecting (on which more below), but also of following and observing.25

• 26 I follow the interpretation of van Effenterre and Ruzé on Nomima I.81.

15A final second-order problem is that of enforcement. Collective decisions and laws, though legitimate, do not automatically and magically ensure their own efficacy. The rule on non‑iteration of the office of kosmos at Dreros imposes penalties in the form of exclusion from office (or the civic body?) and a punitive payment of twice whatever amounts the perpetrator awarded in deciding lawsuits. The measure had to be reinforced with a curse (thiosoloion), whose mention is added into the original inscription.26 More practically, officials were instructed to take care of implementation and enforcement, by coercion or, especially, by punishing infraction. The responsibility of levying fines created yet another problem, namely that of possible negligence by the official: the solution was to make the official liable in turn for punishment by another official.

• 27 Nomima I.82 (double fine proposed by F. Blass, M. Guarducci; same text Gagarin and Perlman, 2016, G (...)
• 28 OR 153 (earlier version in IG I³ 71).

16The cascade of enforcement can be seen at Gortyn, where an individual can be punished by a fine of 50 cauldrons, to be levied by the kosmos; if the kosmos should fail to levy the fine, he becomes personally responsible for the payment, and liable for exaction of the fine by the titas—who is duly responsible for this amount, and liable to pay it, or a fine (perhaps the double of the initial amount?), if he fails in this duty.27 Demarchs and basileis on Chios, in case of failure to execute some clause of the law, are liable for a fine, which will be exacted by another official. Such measures are perhaps expected in democratic Athens (for instance, the decree on the reassessment of the tribute in 425 BCE imposes penalties on the prutaneis for failure to execute the measures);28 their presence in archaic laws suggests that a serious concern with making institutions and collective decisions work was an important part of the life of the polis.

• 29 Nomima I.78 (favouring 600–575 BCE), also published in SEG 30.380, Koerner (1993).

17From Tiryns, in the Argolid, comes a remarkable document about the importance of institutionalization, the more striking for the obscure nature of the actors involved. Directly inscribed on Late Bronze Age masonry in long winding lines of big letters, this text preserves, albeit in highly fragmentary state, a set of rules concerning the responsibilities of officials called the platiwoinarchoi (“leaders of the wine-proximate men”), who seem to be empowered to levy fines but are themselves answerable of their actions. They operate together with other officials (hieromnamōn or “sacred remembrancer”, epignōmōn or “controller”), within a context of collective goods (ta qoina), written law (grathmata), and assembly meetings (aliaia and even ochlos, “crowd”). This inscription, whose appearance is so primitive but whose institutional content seems so sophisticated, might date to the 7th century BCE (judging by the letter forms), making it another document offering a single glimpse of well‑established institutions and governance in an early polis.29 The title platiwoinarchoi (“drunkards”, as suggested in Nomima?) might suggest a riotous assembly—a cultic association parodying public institutions, or on the contrary a set of feasters integrated within state structures. Whatever its exact context, the document not only illustrates the various features of institutionalization, but shows them at work in a coherent manner in a single context, giving a sense of what the archaic polis as state might have looked like.

• 30 Duplouy (2006), Duplouy & Brock (2018), Duplouy (2019).
• 31 Ismard (2010).
• 32 Müller (2014); See also Kamen (2013) for a similar view in the case of Classical Athens; Davies (20 (...)

18Of course, bringing the state back in does not mean throwing all the rest out. A survey of political institutions, the competences of official powerholders, the authority of written law, may counter statements about the ad hoc nature of law or the minimal nature of the state, but we still have to understand the workings of social behaviour and relations in the archaic Greek world, and specifically the fluidity, plurality, and diversity so apparent in the archaeological evidence, the literary sources (narrative and non‑narrative) and the epigraphical material, especially if one looks at the private sphere of dedications and funerary inscriptions. A recent body of scholarship has focused on these traits as constitutive of ancient Greek communities, especially in the archaic period. Rather than being defined by a static and statist body of institutions and law, archaic citizenship, in Alain Duplouy’s view, was a matter of performed identity and habitus, which allowed individuals to compete for prestige in multiple ways, and negotiated belonging to the community.30 If we focus on the richness of social ties and associative activities, the polis appears as a “city of networks”, in Paulin Ismard’s striking formulation, for the well‑documented test‑case of Athens—not a top‑down state of legally defined institutions, but an entity constructed by multiple ways of belonging and interacting.31 This polis of performance, negotiation, and connectivity seems to require a redefinition of citizenship itself as fluid and multiple, as part of a whole spectrum of diverse statuses and privileges that emerge through interactions—politeia deconstructed, as Christel Müller titled a programmatic article.32

• 33 Maffi (1997, 437–8). “The authors” notion is that the classical concept of citizenship was preceded (...)

19This tendency in recent research may have been a response to the debates on the stateness of the polis (notably to the strong focus on the state in Mogen Hansen’s immense body of work) or to the strong positivist interest in institutions which has been a traditional part of the field of ancient history (this also characterizes Hansen’s work). The recent research on performance, pluralism and privileges built on the interests in cultural history, material culture and anthropology which had characterised earlier scholarship. In fact, the interests of the recent pluralist current are already foreshadowed in Nomima itself. The state-centered, institutionalist reading of Nomima given above ranges widely over the documents gathered in that collection (volume 1), but at the price of neglecting the very distinctive order in which Nomima deploys the documents to construct a narrative of the early polis. In Nomima, van Effenterre and Ruzé adduce documents such as the Gortynian fragmentary law on legal procedure (Nomima I.1) or the decree of the Dataleis for the scribe Spensithios not to illustrate institutions, but as part of arguments on the construction of civic identity out of instable situations, and the diversity of statuses in the early polis. In his review of Nomima I, Alberto Maffi shrewdly noted this feature, as one of the great originalities of the volume: “L’idée des auteurs est que la notion classique de citoyenneté a été précédée par ‘un agrégat de situations variées’ qu’il proposent d’appeler pre‑politeia. Les inscriptions montrent que le rapport fondamental entre l’homme et la cité se construit peu à peu en cumulant ‘questions de résidence, de moyens de vivre, d’attachement personnel à la communauté, enfin de service rendu’ (I, p. 27‑28). Cette approche est très convaincante, et tout historien du droit, plus intéressé à l’histoire qu’à la dogmatique du droit, y adhérera pleinement.”33 Henri van Effenterre and Francoise Ruzé’s “pre‑politeia” is closely akin to the non‑institutionalist views of Duplouy, Ismard, or Müller, with perhaps a teleological aspect which the latter scholars might recuse.

• 34 Nomima I, pp. 163–207; quotation from 168: “the right of blood, the right of the soil” as “the two (...)
• 35 Burckhardt (2002, 37–254, esp. 39–63).
• 36 Nomima I, p. 209.

20Nomima I posits complexity and fluidity at the start of the polis. The latter hence emerges out of processes of foundation, that establish a community (hence Nomima’s interest in colonial foundations as a clear‑cut example of defining moments), and out of the definition of territory (hence Nomima’s interest in laws where the polis is seen closely involved in issues of land tenure and even cultivation). Nomima (somewhat unsettlingly) speaks of “droit du sang, droit du sol” as “les deux expressions d’une même réalité : l’implantation du citoyen dans le sol de la cité, un enracinement dans un tissu social exclusif”.34 Communities, once defined, develop manifestations of sovereign personality in relationship with peers, through agreements, and internal forms of power. This particular narrative of the rise of the polis deserves more recognition as such, than it has received; its postulate of a moment (related to the mythic “age of legislators” which acts a preface to Nomima I) might be compared to Jacob Burckhardt’s reconstruction of the polis as founded on greats acts of synoikismos which he sees as essentially violent).35 The authors’ approach to the documents is peculiar and deserves notice. They read individual documents as symptoms, or as repository of fossils, that allow us to guess at the remote past of “pre‑politeia”. As already noted, the existence of privileges like those of officials in the decree for Spensithios, the presence of foreigners or subordinate groups, the complex problems of citizenship in the 5th century “colonization” documents from Lokris, are not interpreted in their own context, but seen as indications of the situation which the early polis dealt with and emerged out of. Likewise, van Effenterre and Ruzé consider inter‑polis treaties as evidence for a primordial mobility of individuals; in this light, Nomima is an astonishingly modern, “Purcellian” book.36

• 37 Nomima I.66 (at Dreros).
• 38 Nomima I.69 (agelai), 22 (andreia), 22, 61, 64, 76 (tribes, with Roussel, 1976, on their artificial (...)
• 39 Nomima I.68 (kouros at Ptoion), 69 (phiale dedicated at Thebes).

21However, it is possible to read such documents within the state-centred paradigm I proposed earlier. When considered in their context, they show diversities or tensions generated by the institutions themselves, in other words, more second-order problems or phenomena rather than primordial ones. The definition of a group of entitled and empowered citizens that raises the issue of how to treat outsiders, be they resident foreigners or strangers passing through the town or its territory, or subordinate groups.37 The existence of individuals wielding authorized power in the polis could lead to the emergence of a privileged group—to which Spensithios was admitted, by public decision. Many of the groups which appear in Nomima belong to the polis’ institutions: the “herds” (agelai) and the men’s clubs (andreia) attested in Crete and regulated by public decisions, the tribes, the group of men sharing in the dining hall at a settlement in Sikyon.38 Indeed, dedications by groups such as the Akraiphian “companions” and the Theban “chosen men” are classified in Nomima alongside constitutional documents (part III.A) rather than in the opening sections on civic identity.39

• 40 Nomima I.71–2.
• 41 Nomima I.65.

22The existence of such associations as part of polis institutions naturalized the state by giving the appearance of a networked society. The same effect was produced by institutions behaving as if they were associations: the board in charge of a shrine, at Kyzikos(?), present themselves as the xuneones of the official, as if they were a dining group. But the stately nature of associations within polis institutions is shown by their own institutionalization. The phratry of the Labyadai at Delphi has its own officials, handles collective property under rules of accountability, and levies fines off people who break its rules.40 By the first half of the 5th century, the tribe of the Hyrnathioi, at Argos, has its officials and finances, and procedures for accountability, involving its own subdivisions (phratries) to structure recruitment to its boards of officials.41 The effect was to distribute institutional and legal workings into polis society, as a fractal presence, which further naturalized and reinforced the legitimacy of state institutions.

• 42 Nomima I, pp. 252 (polis avoids “les incohérences de l’émiettement systématique des arkhai”, “the i (...)

23Hence I would like to suggest that the polis generated complexities and conflict through its very institutions, and that such complexity is not necessarily the legacy or reliquia of a fluid world of “pre‑politeia.” One response to complex problems was more institutionalization, through collective decision-making or actions by legitimate agents of the state. Another response of the polis was the naturalization of institutions through mimicry of social forms, which itself created manifold ways in which members of the polis could mediate participation and belonging. A particular example of problem-solving in the early polis when faced by second-order complexities is the way in which the multiplication of magistrates with different competences, instead of leading to competing focuses of authority and power, drew them into interlocking structures, referring back to the authority of the people.42 To describe the early polis in this fashion seems to ascribe agency to it, or at least to admit of the idealism but also self-reinforcing tendency of institutions. What model of the polis’ origins is compatible with the picture given above? Without giving a full narrative, a variant on the story told in Nomima I would be to place this process of self-reinforcing, problem-solving institutions at the origin of the polis, perhaps in response to conflicts over collective-action problems in circumstances of community consolidation, and in the face of continuous, rolling second-order problems leading to further thickening of state powers. In an appendix to this paper, I rearrange the documents in Nomima in a rough chronological sequence, as an exercise in recreatinging a sense of historical change or simply of the texture of the evidence, out of the thematic, abstract prehistory of the polis which van Effenterre and Ruzé inscribed in their peculiar ordering of the documents.

• 43 Gagarin & Perlman (2016); Brisart (2011), but see Arrington (2022) for qualifications about the not (...)
• 44 Datala: Gagarin & Perlman (2016, 181–2); Viviers (1994), on historical geography but also on the ma (...)

25The most obvious cases are in fact the same regions where the epigraphical evidence abounds. In Archaic Crete, the evidence is dense enough to allow for thick description of Cretan society (especially if the lawcode of Gortyn is used), as offered by Gagarin and Perlman, but also essays that reconstruct the balance of social power within political communities, as proposed by Thomas Brisart or Gunnar Seelentag.43 The question is how to balance the diverse elements of social practice as attested in Crete. The display of individual prowess is suggested by the dedicatory inscriptions on the highly decorated mitrai (groin-guards) from Afrati, recording their capture by individuals: Figure 3); this coexisted with communal feasting, organized by the polis (attested archaeologically at Azoria); the Afrati mitrai may have been displayed in a common feasting hall of the polis of Datala. Such feasts were fed by institutionalized social forms which served to concentrate and distribute public goods (as we known from Aristotle); these forms were part of the whole apparatus of institutionalization studied above, and connected to civic spaces (attested at Dreros or, again, at Azoria). Political institutions took care decision-making, administration and record keeping, common religious activities: profane and divine affaires are explicitly mentioned as the remit of the remembrancer Spensithios at Datala. The decree on Spensithios is incised on a mitra of the same type dedicated by individuals in the feasting hall of Datala (albeit without the decorations: Figures 1–2): the coexistence of elite society, communal feasting, and institutionalization is perfectly summarized by the material from this polis. Finally, the imbrication of social and institutional in the Cretan polis needs inserting in a broader context, namely a social structure combining full citizens and some form of serfdom; subordinate groups,44 and the total picture read as part of a long history of landscape and settlement in the Cretan landscape.

• 45 E.g. Kelly (1978), Hägg (1982), Piérart & Touchais (1996), Hall (1997).

26The other holistically documented case is that of the archaic Argolid, and especially that of the polis of Argos. Here, too, the evidence for coherent institutionalization must be combined with the material record (which tells a long story of urbanization and consolidation, from the Early Iron Age onwards, but also that of changes in social representation, as seen in the funerary material). The literary narratives portray a conflictual history at the regional level, seeing the gradual emergence a dominant, expansionary state. The political history of early Argos must also be combined with the indirect evidence for a regime excluding and subordinating rural elements, at least before the social upheavals of the early 5th century.45 The similarity with Crete is striking; the same questions about the relationship of political, social and institutional need exploration.

• 46 Van Wees (2013).
• 47 Arrington (2022).

27Other poleis pose the same challenge of integrating institutionalization within a complex record. Most obviously, archaic Athens, even if there is no direct, epigraphical example of law‑giving and institutionalization, was still structured by laws (attested indirectly through one 5th century reinscription, and a rich array of literary testimony) and political and governmental institutions; the latter form the basis for the picture developed by van Wees of an Athenian state with a strong fiscal capacity.46 Yet early Athens is also known by literary sources to have been riven by political competition between elites and regions, and the archaeological evidence for the 7th century has been reinterpreted by Nathan Arrington as showing considerable social diversity and regional differences.47 Finally, the same tension between institutions and social practice might be posited for poleis where there is no direct evidence for law or political institutions such as office-holding and accountability, and yet the whole picture allows us to guess at their existence.

• 48 Herodote, III, 57.2–4; Neer (2001).
• 49 Fearn (2011).
• 50 IG IV.² 2.1038 (shrine of Aphaia), 1002–3 (phratries), 1058 (road: also in Nomima II.87), 1061 (shr (...)

28Another example is archaic Siphnos, with its mines, distributions of profits to citizen shareholders, public goods, coinage, and monumental offerings in the pan‑hellenic shrine of Delphi. The operation of this whole ensemble is only conceivable within some form of institutionalization, even if the latter is not directly attested; hence the polis as state, as documented in Nomima I, must have been as much part of the politics of archaic Siphnos as the ideological debates which Richard Neer has detected in the frieze of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi.48 Yet another example might be found on archaic Aigina. This polis is richly documented through archaeology, art history and the poetry of Pindar, written for elite patrons in the early 5th century.49 At the same time, the temple building and rebuilding suppose some form of political organisation, which the scanty epigraphical documents from archaic Aigina confirm. The dedicatory inscriptions of buildings for the deity Aphaia (ca. 550 BCE) recording the precious material used (ivory), make clear that public expenditure as a transaction needed public oversight. Inscriptions relating to civic subdivisions, a terse text protecting a public road from private attempts to build a skopos (perhaps a lookout point for such private activities as herding, hunting or fishing?), and the fragmentary interdiction to take sacred property away from the shrine, hint at the state as a structuring principle of the community as well as a active presence in creating a public sphere and keeping the tragedy of the commons at bay.50 In other words, Nomima can help us understand the workings of the polis even when there is no extensive Nomima-like evidence for written law or institutionalization.

• 51 Academics with exposure to administrative affairs may have witnessed the spectrum of such situation (...)

30Nor is the story of the relationship between institutions and power in the polis necessarily a unitary one. What exactly is the balance of power in the decree of the Dataleis for Spensithios? The collective nature of the decree makes it unlikely that it is the case of the power of a scribal group. But the recording of common and divine affairs, entrusted to the remembrancer, must have an impact on public affairs. Is the matter a benign one—namely a reflection of a political community handling complex business, with binding decisions, regulations, public goods, accountability, which it cannot entrust to collective memory and constantly renewed negotiation at every meeting? The resort to professional recorders would be a step, for amateur, part‑time citizen administrators, on the road to statehood. Or is the matter more serious, namely the imposition of records on a community where certain powerful, influential men have an interest in controlling the agenda and making sure that decisions are precisely not recorded from meeting to meeting? In this case, the resort to professional recorders, ratified by the whole community, would be an incident in a struggle to establish a public sphere with a trace of decisions, rules and collective actions.51

• 52 The histories of class in the ancient Greek world proposed by Ste Croix (1981) or Rose (2012) remai (...)
• 53 Van Wees (2003).
• 54 Colley (2021).

31Beyond such obvious aspects of institutionalization, a deeper question is the relationship of institutions and written law to the social structure of the polis, and to possible struggles for power in the polis. One crucial, and still understudied, question is that of the question of the relations of the state and of class within the archaic polis. The epigraphical material shows the complexity and autonomy of institutions; it is time to realize that the idealism, agency and self-reinforcing tendencies of institutions, mentioned above, are partly ideological and hence only raise the problem of power and struggles more pointedly.52 Van Effenterre and Ruzé, as mentioned above, noted the interest of the state in regulating land tenure, as a trace of the original foundational moment of the polis, in defining the community and its relationship to the territory. As the case of Crete or Argos, but also Sparta or other poleis show, this relationship is potentially both one of inclusion and of exclusion, and hence the result of violence;53 conversely, the decision not to base citizenship on a small elite group (as may have happened with the Solonian seisachtheia) is also a violent and consequential decision. As the historian Linda Colley has observed,54 modern written constitutions are closely linked with warfare, upheaval and struggle, as well as technological innovations (the printing press) and ideological changes (the nation-state). Could an analogous joined‑up social and political history of the polis in which Nomima as well as the social archaeology of archaic Greece figure, could be written? What is the relationship of stateness with social power in the realm of gender, personhood, slavery? The history of the polis as state does not have to be a static one, but sets the scene for further questions about power in archaic Greece.