What do you mean by a high-trust society and what makes Eretria a high-trust society versus any other Polis of similar ability as us?
Eretria is not a normal polis that leaves and goes off somewhere else. Eretria was a ragtag collection of a random strata of Eretrian society, disproportionately poor, and augmented by the freeing and granting of citizenship to slaves, that began with a revolution in which the remaining wealthy aristocrats had to concede effectively all of their domination at once to the poor. Then many of those aristocrats either had to go into trade because of a lack of land (with many of the early distributions giving out small plots to hoplites) or simply fell in status. Meanwhile, new men who owed their entire fortune, status, and glory to the revolution (Herodion, Antipater, Drako) rose up in status and attempted to emulate the old aristocracy without actually being old aristocracy themselves.
The "founding families" are effectively the Fathers of the Eretrian Revolution, and some of them rose from effectively nothing to their position. All of this is to say that because of this, and because of the circumstances of the early quest (Eretria didn't have a real freaking wall for decades), the priority was survival above all in a desperate and outnumbered situation during which Eretria faced something like five different opportunities to be totally destroyed. As a result its institutions trended towards high cohesion and trust and a willingness to invest extraordinary powers in ordinary people, because of the presumption of an equality of outcome, that outcome being death if they lost. Remember that the assembly
was the only institution for several years, and new offices were only really elected after almost a decade in. At first it was truly "the people" and no one else who decided the course of the city.
Since then, obviously, things have begun to change. Memories of the revolution have faded and it sometimes been rewritten as a far more simple and less radical founding. The new aristocracy has re-trenched itself but has an entirely different relationship with the people than it would normally, because it is theoretically the safeguard of democracy, not its opposition. At the same time, like the Soviet
nomenklatura or the French notables, this lies in contradiction to their fundamental class interest as wealthy aristocrats, and so that's why you see sometime trends towards a more oligarchical system (the deme factions) and their willingness to revert back to democracy in the face of popular pressure.
What's most important is the giant "break" that happened when the city was founded. Every single other democracy in the Mediterranean is evolutionary; it was founded as a development from prior situations and as democracies emerged, whether through popular revolt or through reform, they did so in the context of prior institutions. Eretria however was purely
revolutionary, in the sense that it emerged as a decisive and complete break in the past. Compare with the Athenian Demokratia, which took decades to transform into a form that decentralized power from a few powerful demagogues and wealthy families, or the Roman Republic, which took
centuries to grant full rights to the Plebeians and where much of the structure of the Roman Republic was clearly there, in some form, during the Kingdom.
And of course, saying it's revolutionary is not necessarily the same thing as saying it's
good, so much as a matter of fact. The revolution was paid for by the blood of the indigenous peoples Eretria fought, and is now based upon the backs of the metics which the city is not just using as an urban labour force as in Athenai but as a peasantry. Many Metics are drawn from some of the poorest and most marginal areas of Hellas, like some of the smaller Aegean islands, Arkadia, Akhaia, and Central Greece. They're willing to make the trip to Eretria because of the opportunity it offers, but it's not
that much better a life at home. In that sense the colonial reform is going to see some big changes.
