LECTURE 2: THE DARK AGE, OLYMPICS AND HOMER
The Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1100 BC–750 BC) refers to Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean civilization in the 11th century BC to the first Greek city-states in the 9th century BC. The archaeological evidence shows a collapse of civilization in the eastern Mediterranean world during this period, as the great palaces and cities of the Myceneans were destroyed or abandoned. Around this time, the Hittite civilization collapsed and cities from Troy to Gaza were destroyed. The writing of Greek language appears to cease. Greek Dark Age pottery has simple geometric designs and lacks the figurative decoration of Mycenean ware. The Greeks of the Dark Age lived in fewer and smaller settlements suggesting famine and depopulation. It was previously thought that contact was lost between foreign powers during this period yielding little cultural progress or growth; however, artifacts from excavations at Lefkandi on the Lelantine Plain in Euboea suggest that there was significant culture and trade links with the east, particularly Asia Minor.
From around 1200 BC the palace centres and outlying settlements of the Mycenaean’s highly organized culture began to be abandoned or destroyed. By 1100 BC the kingdoms and elaborate systems of the Mycenaean culture were gone. The Eastern Mediterranean region collapsed taking the Hittite Empire with it. Many explanations attribute the fall of the Mycenaean civilization to environmental catastrophe combined with a Dorian invasion. Whatever the reason, there was an irrevocable systems collapse which resulted in the complete failure of two civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
In the Dark Ages after the collapse of the palace cultures, there were no more monumental stone buildings, writing ceased, vital trade links were lost, and towns and villages were abandoned. The population of Greece fell and the world of organized state armies, kings, officials, and redistributive systems disappeared.
Some regions in Greece recovered from this faster than others and places such as Athens had continued occupation without interruption. Life for the poorest Greeks would have remained relatively unchanged from previous centuries. There was still farming, weaving, metalwork and pottery in this time, albeit at a lower level of output.
There were some technical innovations over this time such as the superior pottery technology, which resulted in a faster potters wheel for superior vase shapes and the use of a compass to draw perfect Geometric shapes. Better glazes were achieved by higher temperature firing of clay. This improved pottery style was called Protogeometric (1050-900 BC).
During this time, after copper and tin trade links were lost, the smelting of iron was exploited and improved upon, using local deposits of iron ore previously ignored by the Mycenaeans. From 1050 BC many small local iron industries appeared and by 900 almost all grave goods weapons are iron.
From 1050 onwards there was movement from the mainland of Greece to the Anatolian coast. Miletus, Ephesus, and Colophon were settled although populations still remained low.
Greece in this time was divided into independent regions known as demos. A demos contained the main town and outlying settlements. The title of a war leader in this time was basileus; such a leader was not quite a king, but held a position of power with a limitation of his powers over others.
Excavations of Dark Age villages such as Nichoria in the Peloponnesus have shown how a Bronze Age town was abandoned in 1150 but then returned as a small village cluster by 1075. There were only around forty families living there with plenty of good farming land and grazing for cattle.
The remains of a 10th century building, including a megaron, on the top of the ridge has led to speculation that this was the chieftain’s house. Possibly a place of communal storing of food and religious significance, this was a larger structure than those surrounding it but it is still made from the same materials (mud brick and thatched roof) High status individuals did exist then in the Dark Age but their standard of living is not much different than others in their village.[Snodgrass 1971]
Most Greeks did not live in isolated farmsteads but in small settlements. Law was customary and most disputes were resolved by the village chieftain (basileus) or a simple council of elders. Murder was a private affair with settlement through material compensation or exile.
The main economic resource for families was the household's (oikos) ancestral plot of land, the kleros or allotment; without this a man could not marry. [Hurwitt 1985]
Lefkandi on the Island of Euboea was a wealthy settlement in the Bronze Age. It recovered quickly from the collapse of the palace culture and in 1981 excavators of a burial ground found the largest known Dark Age building. A narrow building (150 feet by 30 feet) it contained two burial shafts . In one were placed two horses and the other contained a cremated male and an inhumed woman. The woman was clad with gold coils in her hair, rings, breast plates, an ancient Near Eastern elaborate necklace dated at least 600 years before her burial and a ivory handled dagger at her head.
Lefkandi shows that Protogeometric Greece or the latter stages of the Dark ages were not uniformly impoverished or isolated as was once thought
The syllabary of the Mycenaean Linear B script was replaced with a new alphabet system, adopted from the Phoenicians. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, notably introducing scripts for vowel sounds and creating the first truly alphabetic (as opposed to syllabic) writing system. The adapted alphabet quickly spread throughout the Mediterranean and was used to write not only the Greek language, but also other languages in the Eastern Mediterranean. As Greece sent out colonies west towards Sicily and Italy, the influence of their new alphabet extended further. The Etruscans benefited from the innovation: Old Italic variants spread throughout Italy from the 8th century. Other variants of the alphabet appear on the Lemnos Stele and in the alphabets of Asia Minor. The previous Linear scripts were not completely abandoned: the Cypriot syllabary, descended from Linear A, remained in use on Cyprus in Greek and Eteocypriot inscriptions until the Hellenistic era.
It is around this time that large-scale revolts took place and attempts to overthrow existing kingdoms by surrounding people who were already plagued with famine, hardships but most likely as a result of economic and political instability occurring in whole of the Mediterranean. The Hittite kingdom was invaded and conquered by the so-called Sea Peoples, a group of peoples originating from surrounding areas around the Mediterranean, such as the Black Sea, the Aegean and Anatolian regions. A similar assemblage of peoples may have attempted to invade Egypt twice, once during the reign of Merneptah about 1224 BC, and then again during the reign of Ramesses III about 1186 BC. War monuments were built by the Egyptians for each conflict. The 13th and 12th c inscriptions and carvings at Karnak and Luxor are the only sources for Sea Peoples, a term invented by the Egyptians themselves (Sandars 1978).
"The foreign countries...made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were on the move, scattered in war. No country could stand before their arms...Their league was Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh." [Edgerton and Wilson 1936, pl 46, p.53; and Wilson, J. 'Egyptian Historical Texts' in Pritchard 1969.]
There are many myths surrounding the origin of the ancient Olympic Games. The most popular legend describes that Heracles was the creator of the Olympic Games, and built the Olympic stadium and surrounding buildings as an honor to his father Zeus, after completing his 12 labours. According to that legend he walked in a straight line for 400 strides and called this distance a "stadion" (Greek: "Στάδιον")- (Roman: "stadium") (Modern English: "Stage") that later also became a distance calculation unit. This is also why a modern stadium track is 400 meters in circumference — the distance a runner travels in one lap (1 stadium = 400 m). Another myth associates the first Games with the ancient Greek concept of ἐκεχειρία (ekecheiria) or Olympic Truce. The date of the Games' inception based on the count of years in Olympiads is reconstructed as 776 BC, although scholars' opinions diverge between dates as early as 884 BC and as late as 704 BC.
From then on, the Olympic Games quickly became much more important throughout ancient Greece, reaching their zenith in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. The Olympics were of fundamental religious importance, contests alternating with sacrifices and ceremonies honouring both Zeus (whose colossal statue stood at Olympia), and Pelops, divine hero and mythical king of Olympia famous for his legendary chariot race with King Oenomaus of Pisatis, and in whose honour the games were held. The number of events increased to twenty, and the celebration was spread over several days. Winners of the events were greatly admired and were immortalised in poems and statues.[9] The Games were held every four years, and the period between two celebrations became known as an 'Olympiad.' The Greeks used Olympiads as one of their methods to count years. The most famous Olympic athlete lived in these times: the sixth century BC wrestler Milo of Croton is the only athlete in history to win a victory in six Olympics.[10]
The Games gradually declined in importance as the Romans gained power in Greece. After Emperor Theodosius I proclaimed Christianity the religion of the Empire and banned pagan rites, the Olympic Games were outlawed as a pagan festival in 393 AD.[11]
During the ancient times normally only young men could participate.[10] Competitors were usually nude, not only as the weather was appropriate but also as the festival was meant to be, in part, a celebration of the achievements of the human body. Upon winning the games, the victor would have not only the prestige of being in first place but would also be presented with a crown of olive leaves. The olive branch is a sign of hope and peace.[12]
Even though the bearing of a torch formed an integral aspect of Greek ceremonies, the ancient Olympic Games did not include it, nor was there a symbol formed by interconnecting rings. These Olympic symbols were introduced as part of the modern Olympic Games.
Homer (ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος, Homēros) is an ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was a historical individual, but some modern scholars are skeptical: no reliable biographical information has been handed down from classical antiquity. According to Martin West, "Homer" is "not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name."[1] The poems are now widely regarded as the culmination of a long tradition of orally composed poetry, but the way in which they reached their final written form, and the role of an individual poet, or poets, in this process is disputed. By the reckoning of scholars like Geoffrey Kirk, both poems were created by an individual genius who drew much of his material from various traditional stories. Others, like Martin West, hold that the epics were composed by a number of poets. Gregory Nagy maintains that the epics are not the creation of any individual; rather, they slowly evolved towards their final form over a period of centuries and, in this view, are the collective work of generations of poets.
The date of Homer was controversial in antiquity and is no less so today. Herodotus said that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at about 850 BC;[2] but other ancient sources gave dates much closer to the Trojan War.[3] For modern scholarship, "the date of Homer" refers to the date of the poems' conception as much as to the lifetime of an individual. The scholarly consensus is that "the Iliad and the Odyssey date from the extreme end of the 9th century BC or from the 8th, the Iliad being anterior to the Odyssey, perhaps by some decades."[4],i.e. somewhat earlier than Hesiod[5], and that the Iliad is the oldest work of western literature. Over the past few decades, some scholars have been arguing for a 7th-century date. Those who believe that the Homeric poems developed gradually over a long period of time, however, generally give a later date for the poems: according to Nagy, they only became fixed texts in the 6th century.[6]
Homer's works form the cornerstone of the Western Canon and are universally praised for their genius. Their formative influence in shaping key aspects of Greek culture was recognised by the Greeks themselves, who considered him their instructor.[7]
Aristotle remarks in his Poetics that Homer was unique among the poets of his time, focusing on a single, unified theme or action in the epic cycle.[41] The cardinal qualities of the style of Homer are well articulated by Matthew Arnold:
[T]he translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author:—that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and finally, that he is eminently noble.[42]
The peculiar rapidity of Homer is due in great measure to his use of hexameter verse. It is characteristic of early literature that the evolution of the thought, or the grammatical form of the sentence, is guided by the structure of the verse; and the correspondence which consequently obtains between the rhythm and the syntax, the thought being given out in lengths, as it were, and these again divided by tolerably uniform pauses, produces a swift flowing movement, such as is rarely found when periods are constructed without direct reference to the metre. That Homer possesses this rapidity without falling into the corresponding faults, that is, without becoming either fluctuant or monotonous, is perhaps the best proof of his unequalled poetic skill. The plainness and directness, both of thought and of expression, which characterise him were doubtless qualities of his age, but the author of the Iliad (similar to Voltaire, to whom Arnold happily compares him) must have possessed this gift in a surpassing degree. The Odyssey is in this respect perceptibly below the level of the Iliad.
Rapidity or ease of movement, plainness of expression, and plainness of thought are not distinguishing qualities of the great epic poets, Virgil, Dante[43], and Milton. On the contrary, they belong rather to the humbler epico-lyrical school for which Homer has been so often claimed. The proof that Homer does not belong to that school, and that his poetry is not in any true sense ballad poetry, is furnished by the higher artistic structure of his poems and, as regards style, by the fourth of the qualities distinguished by Arnold, the quality of nobleness. It is his noble and powerful style, sustained through every change of idea and subject, that finally separates Homer from all forms of ballad-poetry and popular epic.
Like the French epics, such as the "Chanson de Roland", Homeric poetry is indigenous and, by the ease of movement and its resultant simplicity, distinguishable from the works of Dante, Milton and Virgil. It is also distinguished from the works of these artists by the comparative absence of underlying motives or sentiment. In Virgil's poetry, a sense of the greatness of Rome and Italy is the leading motive of a passionate rhetoric, partly veiled by the considered delicacy of his language. Dante and Milton are still more faithful exponents of the religion and politics of their time. Even the French epics display sentiments of fear and hatred of the Saracens; but, in Homer's works, the interest is purely dramatic. There is no strong antipathy of race or religion; the war turns on no political events; the capture of Troy lies outside the range of the Iliad; and even the protagonists are not comparable to the chief national heroes of Greece. So far as can be seen, the chief interest in Homer's works is that of human feeling and emotion, and of drama; indeed, his works are often referred to as "dramas".
The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik in the late 19th century provided initiatory evidence to scholars that there was a historical fundament for the Trojan War. Research into oral epics in Serbo-Croatian and Turkic languages, pioneered by the aforementioned Parry and Lord, began convincing scholars that long poems could be preserved with consistency by oral cultures until they are written down.[40] The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris (and others) convinced many of a linguistic continuity between 13th century BC Mycenaean writings and the poems attributed to Homer.
It is probable, therefore, that the story of the Trojan War as reflected in the Homeric poems derives from a tradition of epic poetry founded on a war which actually took place. It is crucial, however, not to underestimate the creative and transforming power of subsequent tradition: for instance, Achilles, the most important character of the Iliad, is strongly associated with southern Thessaly, but his legendary figure is interwoven into a tale of war whose kings were from the Peloponnese. Tribal wanderings were frequent, and far-flung, ranging over much of Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean.[44] The epic weaves brilliantly the disiecta membra of these distinct tribal narratives, exchanged among clan bards, into a monumental tale in which Greeks join collectively to do battle on the distant plains of Troy.
In the Hellenistic period, Homer was the subject of a hero cult in several cities. A shrine, the Homereion, was built devoted to him in Alexandria by Ptolemy IV Philopator in the late 3rd century BC. This shrine is described in Aelian's 3rd century work Varia Historia. He describes how Ptolemy "placed in a circle around the statue [of Homer] all the cities who laid claim to Homer" and mentions a painting of the poet by the artist Galaton, which apparently depicted Homer in the aspect of Oceanus as the source of all poetry.
A marble relief, found in Italy but thought to have been sculpted in Egypt, depicts the apotheosis of Homer. It shows Ptolemy and his wife or sister Arsinoe III standing beside a seat poet, flanked by figures from the Odyssey and Iliad, with the nine Muses standing above them and a procession of worshippers approaching an altar, believed to represent the Alexandrine Homereion. Apollo, the god of music and poetry, also appears, along with a female figure tentatively identified as Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses. Zeus, the king of the gods, presides over the proceedings. The relief demonstrates vividly that the Greeks considered Homer not merely a great poet but the divinely-inspired reservoir of all literature.[45]
Homereia also stood at Chios, Ephesus and Smyrna, which were among the city-states that claimed to be his birthplace. Strabo (14.1.37) records a Homeric temple in Smyrna with an ancient xoanon or cult statue of the poet. He also mentions sacrifices carried out to Homer by the inhabitants of Argos, presumably at another Homereion.[46]
Though evincing many features characteristic of oral poetry, the Iliad and Odyssey were at some point committed to writing. The Greek script, adapted from a Phoenician syllabary around 800 B.C.E., made possible the notation of the complex rhythms and vowel clusters that make up hexametric verse. Homer's poems appear to have been recorded shortly after the alphabet's invention: an inscription from Ischia in the Bay of Naples, circa 740 B.C.E., appears to refer to a text of the Iliad; likewise, illustrations seemingly inspired by the Polyphemus episode in the Odyssey are found on Samos, Mykonos and in Italy in the first quarter of the seventh century B.C.E.. We have little information about the early condition of the Homeric poems, but Alexandrian editors stabilized the text in the second century BC, from which all modern texts descend.
In late antiquity, knowledge of Greek declined in Latin-speaking western Europe and, along with it, knowledge of Homer's poems. It was not until the fifteenth century that Homer's work began to be read once more in Italy. The first printed edition appeared in 1488.
The archaic period in Greece (750 BC – 480 BC) is a period of Ancient Greek history. The term - which arose in the 18th century and has been standard since - arose from the study of Greek art, where it refers to styles mainly of surface decoration and plastique falling in time between Geometric Art and the art of Classical Greece. As it is transitional to the latter it is considered "archaic." Since the Archaic period followed the Greek Dark Ages, and saw significant advancements in political theory, and the rise of democracy, philosophy, theatre, poetry, as well as the revitalization of the written language (which had been lost during the Dark Ages), the term archaic was extended to these aspects as well.
Most recently Anthony Snodgrass embraced and extended this holistic approach suggesting that "historians extend their interests from political and military events to social and economic processes" and "classical archaeologists turn from the outstanding works of art to the totality of material products ...." The Archaic Period is thus a "rapprochement" of various threads and is not just "archaic" but is "a complete episode in its own right."[1] Michael Grant also objects to the term archaic "because it possesses the dictionary significance of 'primitive' and 'antiquated.' No such pejorative epithets are appropriate for the early Greeks, whose doings and sayings added up to one of the most creative periods in world history."[2]
Snodgrass defines the termini of the Archaic Period as a "structural revolution", meaning a sudden slope up of population and material goods that occurred with mid-point at 750 BC, and the "intellectual revolution" of classical Greece.[3] The end of archaism is conventionally defined as Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 BC. It should not be thought for a moment, however, that all the various threads begin and end on these dates. For example, red-figure pottery, which characterized the classical Greek period, began in the archaic. Snodgrass says: "... it must always be borne in mind that such demarcations of history ... although reasonably acceptable for the convenience of later ages, are entirely artificial categories ....[4]
Mycenaean Greece had been divided into kingdoms each containing a territory and a population distributed into both small towns and large estates owned by the nobility. The kingdom was ruled by a king claiming authority under divine right and physically established at a capital city, or polis, where he resided in a palace situated within a citadel, or acropolis ("high city") located for defense on the highest hill that could be found, preferably precipitous. During the Greek Dark Ages the palaces, kings and estates vanished, population declined, towns were abandoned or became villages situated in ruins and government devolved on minor officials and the tribal structure.
The sharp rise in population at the start of the Archaic Period brought reurbanization, settlement of new towns with re-expansion of the old centres. Margalit Finkelberg[5] has discussed the succession patterns of legendary and historical kings in pre-Classical Greece, where succession from father to son is not the norm, but where instead the new king, traditionally exiled from a royal line elsewhere, wins the right as son-in-law of the old king, legitimised through his marriage to the daughter. This pattern is immediately familiar to a reader of Greek mythology, in Pelops, Bellerophon, Melampous, Peleus, Telamon, Teukros, Andraimon, Diomedes, Menelaus, and others. In Greece, until quite a late Hellenistic date, there is an absence of the king list that' is so familiar a feature everywhere in the Near East and Anatolia. If the king is succeeded by his son-in-law, Finkelberg notes (1991:305), that means the queen is succeeded by her daughter, in a culture that was on its surface relentlessly patriarchal: "That is to say, in Sparta, and obviously in other places for which kingship by marriage is attested, rather than a line of kings, we have a line of queens that runs from mother to daughter."
Towards the end of the Archaic period, the kings were driven out , and under the tyrants a new form of government that had evolved slowly, the city-state, also termed the polis. The kingdoms were not restored even though in many cases offshots of the royal families remained. Instead each major population center became autonomous and was ruled by a republican form of government. The ancient Greek term is synoikismos, from which the term synoecism "conurbation" comes from meaning the absorption of villages and the incorporation of their tribes into the substructure of the polis. The akropoleis became the locations of public buildings, typically temples.[6
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