This course will cover the societies of Greece and Italy in the first half of the first millennium B.C., but focusing on the period from the eighth to the sixth century B.C. A major aim will be to demonstrate the interactions of these areas with one another, as well as with the cultures of the Middle East.

In Greece this is the period of the formation and consolidation of the polis, when the fundamental institutions of Greek city-states emerge. At this time the Greeks’ horizons expand in all directions, and geographical exploration is accompanied by cultural and intellectual explorations which leave a lasting imprint on Greek societies. Literacy, the beginnings of literary and philosophical traditions, religious transformations, economic expansion (including the spread of slavery and the adoption of coinage), developments in military organisation, and overseas raiding and settlement are all connected with the cultural and political explosions such explorations induced. By the end of the period Greek poleis were scattered from Spain and Libya to the Crimea and Georgia, and interacted with a vast range of cultures, including the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Empires, the kingdoms of Egypt, Israel and Lydia, and the city-states of Phoenicia, Cyprus, Syria and Carthage.

In Italy too, the emergence of city-states (along with other kinds of states), and increasingly close contacts with the wider Mediterranean world, especially with Greeks and Phoenicians, are major features of this period. Elites appropriated elements of the ‘new’ cultures which they met, in order to consolidate their own power, with the result that large-scale changes were wrought in the structures and institutions of Italian societies. This is particularly visible in Etruria where religious practices, economic contacts and transformations, political and military structures, and artistic and technological developments can be discerned in archaeological, epigraphical, and, to a lesser extent, later literary sources.