Warriors into traders

The emergence of the early Greek world of the eighth century B.C. appears startling in contrast to the "darkness," of the several preceding centuries, centuries about which we know little. David Tandy investigates the roles of the economy and of poetry in that emergence, using tools from political and economic anthropology to argue that the so-called miracle of the polis was fundamentally exclusive and involved enormous human and cultural costs, that wrenching adjustments in the way status and wealth were distributed within the Greek communities led to this peculiarly Western political…