The text below is meant to be read aloud at the start of the discussion section. It compresses the week's lecture into a few minutes and hands the room to the two tasks. The fuller notes that follow are for setting each task up in turn.
This week's lecture opened with two small oil-flasks: a matched pair of Corinthian aryballoi from early in the sixth century BC, made to carry scented oil to the gymnasium on a cord. Their painted friezes show something new — not Achilles, distinguished by divine descent and personal kleos, but ordinary men in identical armour, standing shoulder to shoulder, indistinguishable one from the next. That contrast opened the lecture's central question: does a new way of fighting explain a new kind of politics? The “hoplite revolution” thesis says yes — that a citizen army of middling farmers, equipping themselves, converted military indispensability into political rights within a few generations around 700 BC. But evidence complicated the thesis at nearly every step: a horse-owning hoplite on an Athenian water-jar blurs any clean split between cavalry aristocrats and infantry farmers, and the Neo-Assyrian army's combined use of cavalry, infantry, and siege forces shows the real contrast is how resources were organised, not which weapons were carried. The double-grip aspis creates real mutual dependence in the line, but a painted jug like the Chigi Vase cannot establish a formation's depth, and the mechanics of othismos remain disputed. The panoply's cost and the zeugitai's own link to hoplite service are both debated rather than settled, and Tyrtaeus's verses are exhortation, not an exact record of how men fought. Shared service could give men grounds to claim political influence, but whether it did depended on local institutions and struggles over authority, not on the phalanx's mechanics alone.
From the hoplite the lecture turned to the polis itself: a political community, usually a town and its farmland, organising public cult, law, and foreign relations — not necessarily a democracy, even where its army was broad-based. This differs sharply from the Mycenaean palace administered by rulers and scribes; written law made rules public and citable. Synoikismos — Athens's traditional union of Attica under Theseus — explains political integration through a founder's act without proving it happened at one moment or by agreement among equals. Acropolis, agora, and temple gave the polis a recognisable form, but a community's status as a polis depended on its politics, not a complete set of monuments. The Copenhagen Polis Centre's inventory counts 1,035 archaic and classical poleis, most a small town with a few thousand citizens — Athens and Sparta matter because they are well documented, not because they are typical. Athens's own trajectory ran through Draco's homicide law, the mass graves at Phaleron — an isotope study there favours local over foreign victims — Solon's cancelled debts, and Cleisthenes's ten tribes built from the demes, with deme registration becoming central to citizenship. Sparta tied citizenship to the agōgē and the common mess, but our evidence for it comes mostly from outsiders and later idealisers — the “Spartan mirage.” Aristotle's own account of household, then village, then polis — existing for life, continuing for the good life, with man as a zōon politikon, a beast or a god if he needs none — completed the picture, though political rights stayed unequal throughout, excluding women, the enslaved, and resident metics regardless of their service to the city.
The lecture then widened the frame to the Aegean's place in a larger Mediterranean world already organised by Phoenician trade. Herodotus preserves two rival traditions about the founding of Cyrene — the Theran and the Cyrenaean — disagreeing on how Battos came to lead the expedition, a reminder that even one foundation could generate more than one origin story. An apoikia, a “home away from home,” usually kept religious ties to its mother-city without becoming its tributary dependency; founding typically meant an oikistēs, consultation of Delphi, fire carried from the metropolis's own hearth, and farmland divided into klēroi. Greek settlement moved into routes Phoenician merchants already used: Al Mina's mixed Greek and Levantine pottery from the eighth century BC is better evidence for exchange than for anyone's political identity, and Pithekoussai on Ischia housed a population and set of contacts extending well beyond one place of origin. Carthage grew into the dominant western Phoenician power, itself tributary to Assyria and then Persia, which only raised the value of the routes west. Farther still, Massalia's Phocaean founders reached up the Rhône as far as Vix in Burgundy, where a five-foot Greek bronze wine-vessel ended up in a local elite woman's grave — value travelling far beyond any coastal settlement, without telling us every hand it passed through.
The lecture's final section, “Greater Greece,” followed Greek settlement into southern Italy and Sicily, where fertile plains and good harbours let colonies grow into substantial states in their own right. Chalcidian Naxos, founded in 734 BC, and Corinthian Syracuse, founded the following year on Ortygia, anchor the traditional chronology; Gela, Megara Hyblaea, and later foundations such as Akragas multiplied Sicily's independent centres of power, each keeping its founding city's own affiliations even as shared language and cult did nothing to stop Croton from destroying its neighbour Sybaris around 510 BC. Public building at Akragas, Selinus, and Poseidonia shows western wealth rivalling the Aegean's own, and that wealth concentrated power in the hands of tyrants — Gelon, Theron, Hieron — who used hired troops and forced population transfers: Gelon moved people from neighbouring cities into Syracuse and enrolled more than ten thousand foreign mercenaries as citizens outright. At Himera, where Gelon and Theron defeated Carthage in 480 BC, isotope and DNA studies of the mass graves show roughly two-thirds of that year's soldiers carrying non-local signatures — some with ancestry reaching as far as the steppe and the Caucasus — against a far more local pattern in the graves from 409 BC and at Phaleron. Diodorus records what happened next: excluded from office once the tyranny fell, Gelon's mercenary-citizens revolted before being allowed to leave for Messene.
Two threads run from all of this into this week's tasks: the aryballoi's painted ideal of the interchangeable citizen-soldier, set against the isotope and DNA evidence for who actually stood in the line at Himera; and the sheer range the Copenhagen Inventory records, set against the temptation to let two exceptional, exceptionally well-documented cities stand in for the whole Greek world.
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Setting up the two tasks
Two tasks, each pairing an object or a reference work with a body of scientific or comparative evidence, and each testing a claim the lecture itself left open rather than settled. Both were signalled directly in the lecture; the notes here mark the line between that framing and the work the groups will do. A thread runs through both: the lecture repeatedly showed a clean, appealing model — the citizen-farmer earning political rights by fighting, the polis as a single definable form — complicated by evidence that does not quite fit, so each task is built to make students sit inside that gap rather than resolve it too quickly.
Task AWho Fought for the Polis? — The Aryballoi and the Bones of Himera
This task returns to the two aryballoi the lecture opened on, now paired with a second Metropolitan Museum object — an Amasis Painter amphora showing a man being armed — and asks groups to move in stages from plain object description (the register the object-analysis exam itself will expect: one fact per sentence, no simile, no staged scene) to the equipment-to-political-rights argument in outline, then to the two Himera studies the lecture cited: Reinberger et al.'s 2021 isotope analysis and Reitsema et al.'s 2022 DNA study of the mass graves from the 480 and 409 BCE battles there. Read together with Herodotus on Terillus's Carthaginian intervention and Diodorus on Gelon's ten thousand enrolled mercenaries, the task asks groups to name every kind of man — besides the citizen-farmer who bought his own panoply — who could end up fighting for a polis, and to say plainly where the scientific evidence stops and inference begins. The extended discussion returns to what the painted ideal cannot show and what the isotopes and DNA cannot show on their own, and asks whether Gelon's mercenary-citizens even fit the citizen-farmer model the lecture's own thesis was built to explain.
Task BHow Many Poleis? — Testing a Definition Against the Copenhagen Inventory
The second task asks groups to do what the lecture's own definition of the polis invites but does not finish: test it against the full range the Copenhagen Inventory actually records, rather than against Athens and Sparta alone. Working from Hansen and Nielsen's count of 1,035 poleis and Thucydides 6.2–5 on the peoples and Greek foundations of Sicily, groups first describe what a typical, undistinguished entry in the inventory looks like, then extend that picture across the different mother-cities behind Naxos, Syracuse, Gela, and Megara Hyblaea, before testing their working definition against four hard cases: an obscure small polis, Syracuse under Gelon (its citizen body enlarged twice over, by transferred populations and by enrolled mercenaries), Phoenician Motya, and the ethnos of Aetolia, which has no single city at all. The extended discussion asks what a history built from a typical small polis would look like instead of one built from Athens and Sparta, whether a citizen body assembled by conquest and enrolment is still self-governing in the sense the inventory's own definition assumes, and whether the polis-centred inventory risks writing less-documented, regionally organised Greeks out of the picture entirely.