So too in the early archaic period - the period reflected in the Homeric poems - we find small, pre-state societies dominated by wealthy galley-owners, who take their companions (hetairoi) with them on summer plundering voyages; these raiders sometimes settled in distant lands too. We have seen (see Owain William's article) that the first mention of Greeks in cuneiform sources aligns very much with this model. The ships used by these raiders were literally 'longboats' (ploia makra in Greek), though they differed in numerous respects from Viking longboats. Early Greek raiders typically used ships such as penteconters ('fifty-oared' galleys) and triaconters ('thirty-oared' galleys).
As time went by, most Greek communities grew into states, with all that this term implies - public finances, written laws, and so on. The informal position of 'Big Man' or Chief () of the early archaic period eventually morphed into the formalized magistracies of the emergent Greek states, and by the 520s, large publicly owned trireme fleets (with crews of around 200 per vessel) had appeared in the Aegean, funded by complex fiscal systems. In most places, the private ownership of raiding galleys by wealthy men became a thing of the past … but not everywhere. In his , Thucydides (1.5) noted that in some northern parts of Greece such as Aetolia, people still acted like Homeric raiders. Thucydides may as well have added Crete, conventionally translated as 'piracy') along rather archaic lines. Some non-Greeks such as Illyrians and Tyrrhenians (i.e. Etruscans) pursued similar practices into Aegean waters, and from the 130s onwards we have the remarkable outbreak of so-called 'Cilician' piracy. Although referred to as 'Cilician' from its main base in Cilicia, this phenomenon involved mariners of multiple ethnicities operating out of a network of bases and landfalls, possibly in concert with Cretan pirates. Down to Pompey's campaign against the pirates in 67 BC (and even beyond), ancient Mediterranean history was therefore marked by the violent exploits of small crews of men aboard galleys haunting the seas in search of captives to enslave or ransom, and any other booty that could be seized.
