Early Greece

This distribution obviously relates at least in part to the legends of the migrations in the Dark Age. The Arcado-Cypriot dialect seems closest to Mycenean Greek, and Ionic can be seen as a development from a common original; the distribution of Ionic clearly reflects the same events as the legends of the Ionian migration; and, given the continuity in Cyprus between Mycenean and classical times, it is reasonable to see Arcado-Cypriot as evidence for the survival of Mycenean Greek enclaves in remote and inaccessible areas. It has usually also been held that the relation between Doric and north-west Greek and their distribution support the legends of the post-Mycenean invasions from the north-west into the Peloponnese. In many ways that still seems the most reasonable hypothesis; but it is of course conceivable that some part of this dialect pattern goes back earlier, to the time of the first entry of the Greeks; and it is clear that many of the differences between the dialects are the result of divergent development after the various groups had reached their final homes.

The third type of evidence is archaeological; its contribution is more ambiguous. Strictly it is not even clear whether Troy VIIa or the Mycenean palaces fell first; and there is no archaeological evidence of who destroyed either culture. The sub-Mycenean period is one of extreme poverty and deprivation; its most striking characteristic is the absence of evidence, which points to extensive depopulation: there is no positive sign of the influx of a new people. The only major change that can be detected is in burial habits – the abandonment of communal burials and large chamber tombs for a return to the older practice of individual burial in cist tombs, and the gradual spread of cremation in place of inhumation. About a century after the final collapse of Mycenean culture occur the first signs of a reawakening. Renewed contact between Athens and Cyprus, the area of the Greek world which offers most archaeological continuity with the Mycenean past, brought from southern Asia Minor a major new technological advance, iron smelting; from about 1050 iron began to replace bronze as the metal in everyday use. About the same time in Athens a new style of pottery began to emerge, of considerably higher quality than before – Proto-Geometric (from about 1050 to 900), decorated with simple repeated geometric patterns and broad bands of dark and light. Again it is to this period, from about 1050 to 950, that the Ionian movement across the Aegean Sea from Athens to the coast of Asia Minor can be dated on the evidence of a number of excavated sites.

The site that has revealed most about development within the Dark Age is Lefkandi, a small low promontory on the inner coast of Euboea; here a single trial hole 8.5 metres deep to bedrock has provided an almost continuous sequence of artefacts from the early Mycenean period (about 2000 BC) through the Dark Age period to about 825 BC, with only a short gap of perhaps fifty years around 1150–1100; successive excavations in the surrounding area have revealed large cemeteries from the Dark Age period. This was clearly a substantial settlement with a remarkable level of continuity and prosperity across the Dark Age.

The most remarkable discovery at Lefkandi was made in 1980. A local headmaster chose the August bank holiday to hire a bulldozer in order to clear a tiresome unexcavated site in his garden: he revealed and half destroyed the most important and most puzzling Dark Age monument yet found. It is a building dating from about 950 BC, apsidal with a porch at the other end, at least 47 metres long by 10 metres wide, with complex internal dividing walls, an external wooden colonnade and a central row of supporting pillars for the roof. The clay floor was laid on levelled rock; the walls are of mud brick on a base of roughly shaped stone, and faced with plaster internally; the roof was thatched. It is clearly a public or religious building similar in form both to the major houses of the late Dark Age and to the earliest religious buildings such as the late Geometric temple of Apollo at Eretria. But it is some two hundred years earlier than these buildings, and is neither a chief’s house nor a temple. For the purpose of the structure is clear: centrally placed in the main room, two adjacent pits were dug at the same time as the building was constructed. In the first were the skeletons of four horses; in the second were two burials. One was a cremation: a bronze amphora decorated with hunting scenes around the rim contained the ashes of a man. The top of the vessel was closed with a bronze bowl, under which the decorated funeral shroud had been folded and was still preserved; beside the amphora was placed the iron sword, spearhead and whetstone of the cremated warrior. The other burial was that of a woman, not cremated, but laid out with feet and hands crossed; there were gilt hair coils by her head, a gold decorated pendant at her throat and a necklace of gold and faience beads; her breasts were covered by gold discs joined with a large gold plaque; beside her lay decorated pins. By her head was an iron knife with an ivory handle. Part of the building was constructed over the remains of the funeral pyre.

The burial rites recall those of Patroklos in Iliad 23, with its ritual sacrifice of his favourite horses and of human victims, or the accounts of Viking burials in south Russia two thousand years later, as described by Arab observers; in the words of Ibn Rustah,

When one of their notables dies, they make a grave like a large house and put him inside it. With him they put his clothes and the gold armlets he wore, and, moreover, an abundance of food, drinking bowls and coins. They also put his favourite wife in with him, still alive. Then the grave door is sealed and she dies there.

Such a building in the Greek world would normally have been designed for use; yet as soon as it was constructed the roof was smashed in and the entrance closed up. Ramps were constructed up the walls and the building was filled with rubble. It remained thereafter as a long mound, remembered sufficiently to be the focal point for the orientation of a group of later rich graves in the cemetery, which seem to be significantly grouped around one end, and perhaps belong to members of the same powerful family.

We stand at the midpoint between the Mycenean world and historical Greece, in the presence of a ritual murder such as was often re-enacted with horror in later myth. The world revealed is a world of wealth and power unknown elsewhere for two centuries either way. At present this discovery is unique, and we should remember that Lefkandi shows a continuity from the Mycenean period not found elsewhere. But it shows that, if it were ever possible to excavate the Lefkandi settlement in its entirety, the Dark Age would no longer be quite so dark.

The picture elsewhere is very different. From the archaeological evidence the Ionian migration and the importance of Athens in it are confirmed. But the earlier period is very obscure. The change in burial customs might indicate the arrival of a new people, the Dorians; but it could be explained as merely a reversion to older habits (the more spectacular forms of Mycenean burial were bound to disappear anyway), and burial customs are not always evidence for population change: the Roman empire saw a total change from cremation to burial during the first three centuries AD, for no reason that anyone has yet been able to discern. Some archaeologists have therefore preferred not to believe in a Dorian invasion, and to claim that the different groups in mainland Greece had been present since the beginning of Mycenean culture: the palaces were destroyed either by passing raiders, like the later Viking harassment of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon culture, or by local uprisings of a subject people. But despite the existence of some cultural continuity after the fall of the palaces, it is the general impression of discontinuity, the desertion of old settlements for new, and the instances of the use of old settlements for burial, which suggest most strongly the influx of a new population. And if any weight is to be given to legend, though they cannot be shown to have destroyed Mycenean culture, it would seem likely that it was the mysterious Dorians who benefited from the vacuum created. Other ages have known the same phenomenon, a people without culture leaving no sign of their coming but desolation, and a world that has to be created anew.

II

Sources

SOCIETIES without writing are dependent on the human memory for the transmission of knowledge of the past and of information in the present. Mnemonic devices, the use of recurrent story patterns and folk-tale motifs and repetitive phraseology serve also an aesthetic purpose, to produce a pleasing effect on the audience; it is for such reasons that the rhythmic patterns of poetic metre are widespread among primitive peoples. Those who achieve special skill in composing metrically will acquire special status as the spokesmen of the community, in their dual functions of preserving the past and interpreting the present. The earliest surviving literary evidence for the history of Greece is poetic; the advent of writing in the eighth century changed the position only slowly: it takes generations for the poet to lose his inherited status, and it was not until the middle of the sixth century that prose literature began to develop.

The aoidos or singer of epic was a professional oral poet, composing and reciting from a stock of traditional material. His theme was the exploits of the heroes of a distant past, the end of the Mycenean period; there seems to have been no attempt to reach back earlier, or to compose poems on more recent events. This oral epic flourished solely or primarily in Ionia, and its nature can best be illustrated from the linguistic peculiarities it exhibits. The dialect of epic is artificial: to an Ionic base have been added numerous borrowings from Aeolic and other east Greek dialects, to create a language whose forms are especially adapted to the flowing hexameter metre. The oral poet doubtless relied on memory to repeat with variations already existing poems, but he also needed to be able to compose as he sang. Apart from the repetition of descriptions of material objects or recurring scenes such as feasts, debates, battles or the sunrise, he acquired a whole vocabulary of formulae – metrical units adapted to particular positions in the hexameter line. As a result of the work of Milman Parry on the similarities between Homeric poetry and the practices of the surviving tradition of Serbo-Croatian oral epic, the principles of Homeric oral composition are now much better understood. Apart from more complex metrical formulae, names and nouns have different adjectives attached to them, whose function is not primarily to add to the sense, but to accompany the noun in particular metrical positions and in different grammatical cases; the economy of the system is such that each noun seldom has more than one epithet giving a particular metrical value.

The Greek oral epic poet was thus considerably limited by the tradition in which he worked. He was singing of a legendary past of which he knew little, in a language which encouraged the survival of descriptive elements long after they had ceased to exist in the real world, with limited scope for innovation. On the other hand he was a creative artist, composing as he sang, and living in a world with its own institutions, social customs and values; he must have used these extensively in his attempt to recreate a long lost heroic world. Indeed studies of oral literature in other cultures have noted that one of the main functions of traditional elements is to increase the scope for creativity: the purpose of the formulaic language of Greek epic is to facilitate composition, not repetition. There is therefore nothing strange in the view that a great individual artist can stand at the end of an oral epic tradition, relying on the achievements of his predecessors but transforming their art; and other examples show that the point of transition from oral culture to written text often provides an impulse for the traditional poet to attempt a monumental poem with a complex structure, which is still based on oral techniques, but exploits the possibilities of preservation and overall planning provided by the new medium. The Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are literary masterpieces, far surpassing all comparable material from Greek or other cultures.

It may not be certain whether Homer is one man or two, or a proper name for a generic class of professional singers; and it may be disputed at what point in the oral epic tradition the intervention of a great poet is most likely. The second epic poet of Greece is a more distinct personality. Hesiod composed around 700, and may well be a contemporary or within a generation of Homer; he is the first poet to name himself. At the start of the Theogony he describes how the Muses came to him on Mount Helicon as he was tending his sheep; they gave him the laurel staff of the aoidos and breathed a sacred voice into him. It is part of his consciousness of possessing an autonomous artistic personality outside the tradition of oral poetry that his other main work, the Works and Days, is conceived of as an address to his brother Perses on a real occasion, a dispute between the two over the division of their father’s land. Hesiod does not therefore seem to belong to an oral epic tradition in the same sense as Homer: his call to poetry was like the call of a contemporary Old Testament prophet. His father, unsuccessful as a sea trader, had emigrated from the town of Cyme in Aeolic Asia Minor to establish himself as a farmer on marginal land at Ascra in Boeotia: neither area is known to have possessed a native epic tradition.

Certainly Hesiod saw himself as a Homeric aoidos, and even describes how the only time he ever sailed across the sea was the few yards to Chalcis in Euboea, to take part in a contest at the funeral games of Amphidamas; he won a tripod which he dedicated to the Muses at the place where he had been granted his original vision: the occasion was a typical oral epic contest. But his technique is not the technique of an oral poet working within a fixed tradition. The dialect, metre and vocabulary are learned from epic, but they are used with a freedom and an awkwardness which suggest that Hesiod only half understood the skills of oral composition: this is partly because he lacked a set of formulae suitable to his subject matter, and partly because much of this subject matter, in the Works and Days at least, had to be reworked from the simpler speech rhythms of popular sayings. His fundamental originality explains the stiffness, inferior quality and line by line composition, which is so different from the easy flow of Homeric epic: it may well be that, rather than composing orally, Hesiod used writing in composition, and learnt his poems by heart for recitation. The clear signs of eastern influence in Hesiod’s poetry (ch. 6) also distinguish him from the Homeric tradition.

The evidence of inscriptions on pottery shows that the alphabet was used as a natural medium for recording quite trivial occasional poetry by the late eighth century: there is nothing implausible in the view that epic poets were also recording their compositions in writing by then, and even using the new skill to help them in composition. Poetry continued to be an important vehicle for public expression in the seventh and sixth centuries, but it was influenced in various ways by literacy: these ways are all related to the function of writing in preserving accurately the work of particular poets. References in Homer show that other types of poetry, songs of celebration, wedding songs, victory songs and dirges, already existed alongside epic; but there seems to have been no guild of professional singers to ensure their survival. With writing, various types of poetry emerged to establish separate identities; the existence of the different traditions from now on encouraged continuous development; writing also allowed the recording of more complex rhythms, and could almost function as a musical notation. After Hesiod, the concept of the poet as an individual was paramount: poems were known to be by a certain author, and this in turn will have affected the subject matter and tone of poetry towards the expression of personal emotions. With few exceptions lyric poetry did not survive the end of the ancient world: the fragments that remain are preserved in quotation by classical authors or have been found in the papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt; the last fifty years have increased our knowledge of lyric poetry enormously.

The earliest of the lyric poets, Archilochos (about 680–40), exemplifies many of these trends. The illegitimate son of an aristocrat on Paros, he went to Thasos when his father led a colony there, and spent most of his life as a soldier until he was killed in battle. His poetry, whose language is often Homeric but whose metres are both popular and epic, is concerned with his personal circumstances – warfare, life in a frontier community, drink, love and sex, and abuse of his enemies: his most recently discovered poem, the longest fragment yet known, about the seduction of his girl-friend’s younger sister, was published in 1974. True lyric poetry, solo songs for the lyre, is represented by Alkaios (born about 620) and Sappho (born about 610), both from Lesbos and both members of aristocratic families. Alkaios was involved in political struggles against popular leaders: his political attitudes, exile, travels and descriptions of military life are typical; Sappho offers an unusual view of female society.

More important for the social function of poetry are the didactic poets. Kallinos of Ephesus in the early seventh century and Mimnermos of Kolophon about 600 encouraged their fellow citizens in struggles against the nomadic Cimmerian invaders from south Russia and the advancing power of Lydia. Tyrtaios towards the end of the seventh century did the same for the Spartans fighting against their Messenian neighbours, and also praised the social ethic of the new mass armies of heavy armed troops and their ideal of government, eunomia (good order). His poetic influence on Solon of Athens was great. Solon was appointed chief magistrate of Athens in 594 to solve serious economic and social unrest; his early fragments attack the injustices of Athenian society in a way that shows the use of poetry as political weapon; later he defended his reforms against extremists on both sides in the same way. The poetry attributed to Theognis of Megara (about 540) describes the dissatisfaction of an aristocrat at the influx of new wealth and the breakdown of traditional values, and also portrays upper-class homosexuality. In contrast, Xenophanes left Colophon in Asia Minor as a young man because of the Persian conquest in 545, and spent the rest of his life in the western colonies; he wrote on philosophical and scientific problems, and also attacked the contemporary emphasis on athletics and military virtues.

All early Greek poetry has a social function and a place of performance which influence its content; the different generic forms in origin reflect these different purposes. The lyric and elegiac poets composed for performance to the lyre and the double flute in drinking parties: their subject matter reflects the interests and preoccupations of particular social groups, the warriors and the aristocrats in their symposia.

Choral lyric was usually performed at religious festivals or other great occasions by trained choirs of men or girls singing and dancing to instrumental accompaniment, often antiphonically. Alkman was a younger contemporary of Tyrtaios, and his hymns offer an interesting contrast to the impression of Sparta as a military society. Simonides of Ceos (about 556–468) was court poet of the Athenian tyrant Hipparchos, and later commemorated the dead and the victors of the Persian Wars. Finally the greatest of the choral lyric poets, Pindar, in the fifth century, wrote for the Greek aristocrats and rulers who competed at the international games.

Lyric poetry presents a complex and varied picture of the world of early Greece: though its purpose was never overtly historical (there is no tradition of historical epic or descriptive panegyric), the poet’s role was still central; and so satisfactory for public expression were the varied poetic forms that they may well have delayed the appearance of a prose literature. Men of course spoke in prose, but they composed in verse. Composition in prose is related to a new need, that of precise and critical analysis; and it is a product of the Ionian enlightenment. The effort to formulate a critical scientific theory of matter, which began in Miletus with Thales in the early sixth century, led to the first known Greek work in prose, Anaximandros’ book on nature of about 550. Anaximandros attempted to explain both the underlying structure of the physical world and its development down to the creation of man – it was the substitution of science for myth. He was also the first Greek geographer and astronomer: the work contained the earliest known maps of the earth and the heavens, which were accompanied by a ‘description of the earth’ and a discussion of the stars and their movements.

Philosophers continued the scientific interests of Anaximandros; but it is another Milesian who carried his interest in human geography further, and so initiated the analysis of human societies. Hekataios, a prominent statesman around 500, also published a map and wrote a ‘description of the earth’, of which many short fragments survive in later authors. His concern was not with scientific theory, but with accurate geographical description. He himself had travelled at least in Asia and Egypt, and the detailed information given in the fragments suggests an ethnographic description of the Mediterranean world based on personal observation and the reports of other travellers. A second work by Hekataios discussed the heroic myths and the genealogies of those families who claimed descent from gods or heroes – as did Hekataios himself in the sixteenth generation. It seems to have been not merely a retelling of the hero myths, but a critical attempt to rationalize them and, if not produce history from them, at least make them portray a relatively normal human world. The critical approach of his book is emphasized in the first sentence:

Hekataios the Milesian speaks thus: I write these things as they seem to me; for the stories of the Greeks are many and absurd in my opinion.

(F.G.H. 1 frag, 1)

Hekataios saw the importance of travel and personal observation for the understanding of the human world; he may also be responsible for removing the gods from history by his curious and misguided attempt to remove them from mythology. Other early writers of prose are more shadowy figures. There were men who compiled mythological books without Hekataios’ critical attitude. And since antiquity there has been controversy as to whether there were any true historians before Herodotus; the evidence is unreliable, and even if the four dim Ionians in question did write before Herodotus, they had no influence on him, for they compiled a type of local history very different from his broad conception.

For the ancient world Herodotus was ‘the father of history’, and that judgement must stand. But he had also the reputation of being a liar, and the generally unfavourable opinion of his reliability lasted until the sixteenth century, when the accounts of travellers and missionaries from such areas as South America, Turkey and the far east revealed that tall stories about other cultures were not necessarily false. Since the nineteenth century accurate knowledge of the main civilizations about which Herodotus wrote, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia, has accumulated; and in the present age, when the difficulties in studying primitive societies and the problems of writing about their past are better appreciated, we can begin to understand the real achievement of Herodotus.

He was born in 484, between the two Persian invasions, at Halicarnassus in southern Asia Minor; he lived through the establishment of Athenian imperial power and died some time after 430, during the first ten years of the great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. His family was literary and aristocratic; he was brought up in exile on Samos; he travelled extensively in the Greek world, as far as Sicily and south Italy, north Africa, the Black Sea and south Russia; he visited Sardis in Lydia, and Phoenicia; he travelled up the Nile as far as Elephantinē and down the Euphrates as far as Babylon, and probably also went to the Persian capital of Susa. Well known as a literary figure in fifth century Athens, he finally became a citizen of the Athenian colony of Thurii in south Italy (founded in 444/3), where he died.