# Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens  ## Metadata - Author: [[Robin Waterfield]] - Full Title: Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens - Category: #books ## Highlights - in the ancient world there was no single place called “Greece” (“Hellas” to the Greeks, then as now). The land that currently makes up the modern country of Greece was occupied by a large number of peoples, living typically in city-states (that is, towns with their surrounding farmland), and other city-states, equally populated by peoples who called themselves “Greeks,” were dotted all the way around the coastlines of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In the Classical period, there were well over a thousand of these statelets. When the ancient Greeks spoke of “Greece,” they meant the abstract sum of all these communities, but in reality there was no shared homeland, and the citizens of each city-state gave their loyalty primarily to the place where they lived: they were Athenians, rather than Syracusans or Spartans. ([Location 87](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=87)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This was a view that was held by generations of scholars, for whom the Archaic age was merely a forerunner of Classical perfection and the Hellenistic era a disappointment after Classical glories, but it is a view that is firmly rejected in this book. All three periods are given equal weight, because they are equally important and exciting stretches of Greek history. ([Location 129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=129)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Greek peninsula, the heartland of the Greek world, sits right on top of the most active tectonic plate in the Mediterranean, and as a result approximately 75 percent of the Greek mainland consists of hills and mountains, usually of limestone, which make good farmland scarce and communication by land difficult. ([Location 379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=379)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The chief features of the Mediterranean climate are mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers. In many places, the summers are dry enough to arrest natural plant growth, but, on the other hand, the growing season is long. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=412)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Greece includes four main hydrographic regions, with rainfall varying from less than four hundred millimeters (sixteen inches) a year in a zone that covers Attica (the territory of Athens), the Aegean islands, and the southern tip of the Peloponnese, to more than two thousand millimeters a year in the high mountains of the Peloponnese and northern Greece. This simple fact had profound consequences: the drier areas could not grow wheat, for instance, and had to import wheat or rely on barley, which is less nutritious and harder to process. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=416)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Greek climate was and is extremely capricious. It is no exaggeration to say that anywhere in ancient Greece might have experienced a difference of up to 60 percent in its annual rainfall, with the variations occurring especially in autumn and spring, the most critical times for crop growth in a dry-farming regime. In regions where the rainfall was barely sufficient, a year or two of relative drought could be disastrous, and it is likely that catastrophic crop failure occurred several times a century. “It is beyond human ability,” Xenophon of Athens remarked around 350 BCE, “to foresee the majority of factors relevant to agriculture. Hailstorms and occasional frosts, droughts, unexpected rainstorms, crop diseases—all these and other factors often undo even well-planned and well-executed work.”2 Living also with frequent warfare, Greek peasants were threatened by fear, grief, hunger, injury, and early death. It is little wonder that Greek gods were fickle and unpredictable. ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=422)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: This is a very interesting point - that the fickleness of the Greek gods may have been reflecting the real world fluctuation of climate in Greece and the difficulties of agriculture - As a rule of thumb, the annual grain yield of one hectare (about 2.5 acres) could maintain one member of a household, but many farms were so small and poor that the owners must have struggled to make ends meet and put food on the table. Farming was essentially dry farming, with little or no reliance on irrigation other than that provided by the weather. ([Location 436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=436)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Greek subsistence farmers were forced to diversify in order to manage the risks they faced; the “Mediterranean triad” of grain, olives, and grapes was supplemented by legumes (in wetter areas, where they grow well) and a little animal husbandry. A certain amount of food was also foraged, trapped, hunted, and fished from countryside, forest, wetlands, rivers, and sea. It was crucial not just to survive, but also to make enough of a surplus to trade for items such as salt, tools, storage jars, and footwear. ([Location 450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=450)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A horse’s demand for rich pasturage largely limited commercial horse-rearing to regions with sufficient and well-watered flatland, such as Macedon and Thessaly. In central and southern Greece, it was a rich man’s hobby: no one else could afford to give up so much productive land. ([Location 475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=475)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rich and poor ate much the same food, although the rich had more; they also had greater access to spices and other imports. Cereal products dominated the diet. Wheat was usually eaten in the form of bread (leavened or unleavened), and barley as porridge. Cereals are a good source of calories and protein, and they have a couple of important vitamins (B and E), but other elements of the diet had to supply the other vitamins. Generally speaking, the Greek diet was nutritious enough, provided one had an adequate supply of it. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=521)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A certain degree of malnutrition was widespread in Greece, and helps to explain the high incidence of child mortality and the fairly short stature of ancient Greeks: even in the relatively prosperous Classical period, men averaged about 170 centimeters (67 inches), women about 156 centimeters (61.5 inches). A tall woman was judged beautiful by that standard alone. ([Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=527)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Population growth was constrained by late marriage for men (they were in their late twenties or even early thirties, typically, while their brides were fourteen or fifteen), by birth control (either by spacing out pregnancies, by practicing anal sex, or by contraception, for which a wide range of more or less effective herbs was available), by abortion (again, certain herbs were known to be effective), or by abandoning unwanted infants. Some of these were found and reared as slaves in other homes, but not all. Seriously deformed children were more likely to be exposed; a second son was at risk because, if two sons lived, the estate would be divided between them, with the possibility of making it too small to be viable, or of dropping a rung on the status ladder; a second daughter was at risk, or even a first, because of the need to give her a dowry in due course of time and her negligible economic value. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=538)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Cultural incentives pushing against population growth here. What could have happened if these were lifted? (Especially when Greece was prosperous enough to import substantial food) - So powerful did some Mycenaean states become that they were able to extend their influence to Crete and dominate the declining Minoan culture there. And the legends preserved for us most notably by Homer (under whose name the first European books, the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, have come down to us) tell of a Greek assault on the city of Troy in northwestern Anatolia. The Mycenaeans were a dynamic and warlike people, and proud of it; weapons are common in their graves. ([Location 597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=597)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A fairly high degree of cultural homogeneity, in combination with political diversity, is the recurrent pattern of Greek life and history, and a recurrent theme of this book. ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0787X7PRL&location=605)) - Tags: [[blue]]