What is surprising about a return to a book I wrote thirty years ago is how fresh it feels in my mind, as if I have kept writing it ever since. In my later studies, I have explored many of the same themes that I first discussed in this book, such as ethnicity, networks, and the ’small world’ effect on the rise of Greek civilization, some Mediterranean issues, the impact of myth and quasi-historical accounts on history, the validation and legitimization of conquest and settlement, the evidence of nomima and their usefulness for the ancient historian, the historical and archaeological evidence of settlement, and even the role of drawing lots in ancient Greece.

In the past, architectural change in Archaic Greece was often explained as a somehow natural, coherent evolution from “primitive” wooden structures to sophisticated stone temples. Following the ancient writer Vitruvius, modern authors have attempted to demonstrate that the architectural orders, in particular the Doric, can be traced back to functional necessities typical of wooden buildings. While this explanation of the Doric order has long been questioned, few attempts have been made to explore alternative explanations. The chapter lays out a methodology to analyze architectural change by asking how the experience of sacred spaces and landscapes changed and who were the social groups interested in promoting such change. The chapter highlights the kinetic and multisensorial dimension of the experience of space and architecture, as stressed also by authors from other fields. Further, a survey of recent contributions to the study of the Doric and Ionic orders suggests that they emerged suddenly in the early sixth century BC, rather than evolving slowly over centuries. The emergence of the Doric order went hand in hand with the emergence of architectural sculpture on pediments and friezes. By looking at a series of case studies the book aims to shed light on the relation between the various transformation processes.

Thucydides’ History is a rich source for our understanding of the character and interrelations of the ethnic sub-groups of the Greeks and different communities within the Greek world, as well as the relations between Greeks and non-Greek (‘barbarian’) communities. After establishing some key methodological principles relating to studying ethnicity in the Greek world, this chapter explores Thucydides’ contribution to our understanding of Greek ethnicity. It analyses the role of descent and cultural factors in the construction of ethnicity. It also explores the role that ethnicity plays in Thucydides’ description and analysis of the Peloponnesian War.

The main subject of Chapter 2 is the motifs and the content of the Greeks’ myth-historical tales and songs. The Greeks’ past was very clearly structured: the main axis was the battle for Troy with the generations before and after. The more distant past led back to the origin of the world, gods, and men. On the other hand, the stories have led to the present day. Concepts of kinship, mediated by genealogies, played an essential role. This was connected with stories of migrations, colonisation, expulsions, and re-migrations. These narratives served as elements in order to structure the past, to constitute familiarity and difference, to explain relations of friendship or enmity, among the Greeks themselves and in relation to foreigners. We cannot see these stories of migration as evidence for older ‘historical’ events. But they reflect very clearly the dynamics of their time of origin, the time of the so-called Great Colonization. The identity-forming power of the Greek myth-history lay precisely in the fact that it re-located its own experiences into the past. What they had constructed themselves appeared to the Greeks as their past.