Politics and Power. John Collis and Raimund Karl Throughout the first millennium BC we can see two conflicting forces at work, both in the Latin and Greek written sources and in various aspects of the archaeological record. On the one hand we can see ever increasing social differentiation which reaches its apogee in the last decades of the millennium when substantial areas of Mediterranean and temperate Europe were under the rule of just one man, the Roman emperor Augustus. On the other hand there was an ideology of egalitarianism, most famously in the Athenian concept of democracy, and even Augustus in his rise to power had to use sleight of hand to disguise the reality of what was happening and he assiduously avoided the use of the term ‘king’ claiming he was only the leading citizen, the primus inter pares. The complexity of the societies with which we are dealing are, as a broad generalisation, grouped around two major axes. The first is geographical; the further societies are to the north and west of the Mediterranean the less complex they are politically, socially, economically and technologically. The second axis is time; societies everywhere tend to become more complex from the beginning to the end of the millennium. However we must beware of thinking of this as a simple unilinear development. In all areas – Mediterranean, temperate and northern European – there is great variety with, for instance, urbanised and non-urban societies existing side by side, and in some places there are very clear reversions with hierarchical or urban societies being replaced with simpler decentralised societies, in Greece at the beginning of the first millennium BC, in much of central and western temperate Europe in the fourth century BC, or in southern Germany and the Czech Republic in the first century BC. The nature of the evidence. Contemporary written sources. Written sources from the Greek and Roman world are the best informants we have, but in addition to the usual scepticism we need to use – political and social biases of the authors, a tendency to use stereotypes, or to plagiarise earlier sources – even for the Greek world, for instance, we may have considerable information for Athens or Sparta, but for the majority of poleis and colonies we have no information, perhaps not even the precise location of the site. Discussion of social and political structures at this time revolves around three poles. At one extreme is monarchy which in the Roman world starts with semi-mythical hereditary kings who, though they were credited with the foundation of the city, the organisation of religious rituals and the setting up of a legal system, in the end the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, abused his power and was ousted. Under the subsequent republic, in military or political crises a supreme leader, the dictator, might be appointed for a limited time only. The ideal was the semi-mythical Cincinnatus who was summoned to take control while ploughing his fields, and who laid aside power as soon as he had completed the tasks required of him. The abhorrence of kingship in the first century BC was symbolised by Julius Caesar’s rejection of the crown, and Augustus disguising the steps to supreme power. In the Greek world it was the 1