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priestesses, objects of competition (if they were rich and pretty) and mothers, without any political power.
    In city-states beside the sea, nobles also had a close relationship with the bigger ships. They owned them, surely; perhaps in their youth they sometimes fought or went raiding with a crew of social dependants. It is a subject on which, as yet, we lack clear information. However, already in the eighth century, we see scenes of warships rowed by two levels of oarsmen on some of the fine pottery painted in Attica, fit for noble owners. Warships would probably be a nobleman’s responsibility, and were co-ordinated by magistrates even in early city-states (the
naukraroi
). In due course they developed into the supreme Greek warship, the trireme, propelled by three levels of oars and armoured with a metal ram on its prow. Phoenician warships probably showed the Greeks the way here, and in my view they had shown it by the late eighth century BC (the great historian Thucydides thought so too, although many modern scholars adjust his dating to refer to the late seventh century, or even the sixth). Triremes were not merchant-ships (no Greek state had a ‘merchant navy’). They could travel up to seven knots an hour and as we shall see, conditions aboard them were awesome. As crews constantly needed water, they tended to stay close to coastlines, but even so they could cover 130 (even 180) sea miles in a long day. Nobles have left us an image of themselves as horse-lovers, but in Corinth or Euboea or islands like Chios and Samos they were lords with an eye for the sea.
    In peacetime a nobleman was expected to arbitrate disputes and pronounce justice. At the start of his poem the
Theogony
, Hesiod gives us an idea of such an aristocrat in action (
c.
710 BC ). He speaks ‘gentle words’; he persuades, and ‘mild words’ flow from his mouth. He gives ‘straight justice’ with ‘discrimination’ and can put an end to a ‘great dispute’ with ‘knowing skill’. In another poem, however, the
Works and Days
, Hesiod chides these same nobles for ‘devouring gifts’ as bribes. 1 But the ideals are important too: persuasion, insight and a degree of gentleness, before disputants who have caused and suffered damage. Without written laws, even more depended on the nobleman’s own judgement, or lack of it: ‘gifts’ were a frequent means of influencing it.
    These godlike judges were revered, but they did not receive godlike honours themselves: rather, they presided over the rites and offerings to their community’s gods. Their priesthoods did not require anyspecial religious knowledge. The priest would say a prayer in public when an animal was being sacrificed to a god, but another assistant would kill the beast on his behalf. There was no special training, and so noblemen’s wives and daughters might serve as priestesses too. A priest or priestess, often finely dressed, would then allot the all-important meat to people present at the sacrifice. Except for a kill during hunting, a religious sacrifice was the main occasion when a Greek ate meat. The priest also retained the animals’ hides and skins, a valuable privilege as they were the community’s main source of leather.
    Aristocrats also monopolized the magistracies of their communities. In Corinth, the Bacchiads monopolized all these jobs; in rural Elis, Aristotle later recalled, ‘the citizen-body was small in number and very few of them ever became councillors, because there were only ninety of them, and the election was limited to a few dynasties’. 2 In Attica, the region we know best, magistracies were limited to members of the noble Eupatrid caste. There were nine such magistracies, and a nobleman could probably aspire to all but the top magistracy in sequence, holding each one for a year at a time. After holding office, an Athenian nobleman then became a lifelong member of the prestigious council, the Areopagus. Political life in their city-state’s