the Greek Dark Ages

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The Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1100 BC–750 BC) refers to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean civilization in the 11th century BC to the rise of the first Greek city-states in the 9th century BC and the epics of Homer and earliest writings in alphabetic Greek in the 8th century BC.

Archaeology shows a collapse of civilization in the eastern Mediterranean world during this period. The great palaces and cities of the Myceneans were destroyed or abandoned. The Hittite civilisation collapsed. Cities from Troy to Gaza were destroyed. The Greek language largely ceased to be written. 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, and foreign goods have not been found at archaeological sites, suggesting minimal international trade. Contact was also lost between foreign powers during this period, yielding little cultural progress or growth of any sort.

One theory holds that the Mycenaean civilization was undermined by an ecological catastrophe. The hill top fortress, forest fauna hunting, horse-based society depicted in Homer and Hesiod was supplanted by a trading culture connected more closely to the sea. The ecological deterioration was the loss of forests through human exploitation, making the prior economic structure unsustainable. Plato mentions something of this in his theory about goats denuding the hills of flora, causing erosion which led to loss of forestation. One commentator, Massey, speculates that this sense of there having been a golden age long ago is connected with this disaster and has continued as a cultural meme in societies and cultures with roots in Classical Greece. On this reading, the collapse which resulted in the Greek Dark Ages is not due primarily to a Dorian invasion, but rather to environmental damage in the first, or a contributing, instance.

Kings ruled throughout this period until eventually they were replaced with an aristocracy, then still later, in some areas, an aristocracy within an aristocracy — an elite of the elite. Warfare shifted from a focus on cavalry to a great emphasis on infantry. Due to its cheapness of production and local availability, iron replaced bronze as the metal of choice in the manufacturing of tools and weapons. Equality grew slowly among the different classes of people, leading to the dethronement of the various kings.

Families began to reconstruct their past in attempts to link their bloodlines with heroes from the Trojan War, more specifically Heracles. While most of this was legend, some were sorted by poets of the school of Hesiod. Most of these poems are lost, though, but some famous "storywriters", as they were called, were Hecataeus of Miletus and Acusilaus of Argos.

It is thought that the epics by Homer contain a certain amount of tradition preserved orally during the Dark Ages period. The historical validity of Homer's writings is vigorously disputed; see the article on Troy for a discussion.

At the end of this period of stagnation, the Greek civilization experienced a renaissance that spread the Greek world as far as the Black Sea and Spain.

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The rise of a new writing system

The use of the syllabary system of the Minoans, the so-called Linear scripts, fell into sharp decline in favour of a new alphabet system, adopted from the Semitic Phoenicians to write not only the Greek language, but also other languages in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time. Before this turbulent time, Myceneans were writing their Greek language in Linear B but after the Dark Ages when history was being recorded once again, we find this new alphabet, the more familiar alpha-beta-gamma. The Etruscans also benefited from the innovation, Old Italic variants spreading throughout Italy from the 8th century. Other variants of the alphabet appear on the Lemnos Stele and in the various alphabets of Asia Minor. The previous Linear scripts were not completely abandoned however, the Cypriot syllabary, descended from Linear A, remained in use on Cyprus for Greek and Eteocypriot inscriptions until the rise of Hellenism.

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Mediterranean warfare and the Sea Peoples

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.]

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Socyberty > History
 The End of the Greek Bronze Age
 
 
by Emma C. S., May 23, 2007
 
What explanations can we suggest for the collapse of Late Bronze Age societies in the Aegean? Which explanation or explanations do you find more plausible? Can we understand this collapse from a narrow, Aegeo-centric perspective or is it better viewed on a macro, pan-Mediterranean scale?

Our view of collapse, especially the collapse of the Bronze Age societies of Greece, is heavily influenced by the beliefs and histories left by the writers of the Classical period. Their belief that the collapse of a society was inevitable, like the death of an organism, is still shared by many today. Whether or not this is the case, the term “collapse” is a difficult one in itself, generally referring to the fall or the deterioration of the structure of a society. In the case of the Mycenaean societies, this must surely refer to the fall of the palaces and their loss of control over the surrounding “kingdoms”.

There are, as Tainter lists, eleven major explanations for collapse commonly used, some of which may be applied to the Bronze Age Aegean: the depletion or complete loss of crucial resources, the establishment of a new source of resources, a catastrophe, inadequate response to change, the influence of other societies, invasion, class conflict, social strife, mystical factors, a series of events occurring in close succession by chance, and economic factors.

In order to ascertain what caused the collapse in LHIIIC Greece, it is necessary to study the evidence surrounding this event. In Mycenae, the main fortification walls of the citadel were extended to enclose Grave Circle A and the main spring, suggesting preparations for a siege, as does the discovery of several hoards left in the surrounding area. Throughout the mainland there was a massive depopulation, particularly evident in Messenia, where the number of sites seems to have about halved. New settlements on Crete and in the Argolid have been suggested as refugee sites, where escaping mainlanders settled. The Linear B tablets show that bronze was being collected from temples to melt down to make new weapons.

There also seems to be a deterioration in material culture, from the use of scrap bronze to the significant changes in pottery styles, and trade, as can be seen from quality of the materials from the shipwreck at Gelidonya. This was clearly, then, a time of extreme hardship, if not crisis, for the societies of the Aegean.

There have been many explanations put forward for this sudden change in Mycenaean culture. One of the most plausible is that of invasion from outside forces. The extensions to the fortifications at Mycenae and Tiryns and the placing of guards along the Messenian coast implies the preparation for attack, as does the forging of new weapons. If this is the case, then who was the attacker?

The Classical sources blame the Dorians, and it does appear that the Dorian dialect covered much of the area of the former Mycenaean civilizations, which would suggest a full invasion and occupation, yet there is considerable continuity in the material culture of the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age which would suggest otherwise. One argument to rectify the “Dorian Problem” is that the Dorian dialect was one used by the Mycenaean lower classes which would have become more prominent after the fall of the palaces. Another main candidate for the attackers are the so-called “Sea Peoples”, mentioned in contemporary Egyptian texts detailing a victory against the “men of the sea”.. It is unclear exactly who they were, they are clearly not one individual culture, as the Egyptian art shows people with various different styles of clothing and headdresses, ranging from turbans to stiffened hairstyles.

The Philistines have been suggested as one of these peoples (as “Philistine” ware has been found in Palestine and around the Aegean) as have the Denyan-Danuna, mentioned in the Egyptian texts, who could be identifiable with the Biblical tribe the Dan. Another suggestion is that some of the “Sea People” invaders were from Hungary, Romania and the Balkans, and it is not impossible that it was these people who first brought the “slashing” style swords seen later in the Iron Age in Greece. With new weaponry and ships, these groups could have staged raids on the major towns around the Mediterranean without actually intending to invade.

Invasion is not the only explanation offered for this period. Natural disasters have also been suggested. Drought would be possible were it not for the fact that Messenia, naturally a more moist area of the Peloponnese, appears to have been worse affected and more depopulated, than the Argolid. Plague has also been suggested, but there is no evidence of mass graves which would be expected in such a case. Twisted walls found at Tiryns lead to the suggestion of an earthquake, but there is no evidence of this affecting any other area, and it has since been suggested that the walls were twisted after subsidence following a stream changing course. Crop failure is an interesting suggestion, as although there is no direct evidence of this, a failure in the crops, particularly of grain or flax, would not only affect the local people's survival, but also the trade on which the palaces' wealth relied, as the surplus from each crop seems to have been traded
 
 
http://www.socyberty.com/History/The-End-of-the-Greek-Bronze-Age.27218

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This would account for the deterioration in material culture and the lesser find on the Gelidonya shipwreck, though it is uncertain whether this would affect the whole of the Mediterranean or just one area. Economic strain would also push the society towards social strife. Rebellious lower classes are not an adequate explanation in themselves, as historically there are rarely lower class interventions without some form of “trigger” event. Rebellions tend not to happen unless the people involved feel they are in a situation where they have nothing to lose, but if invaders were launching skirmish attacks on the towns, or an economic crisis, it is more likely that they would make a move.

It is important also to note that the Aegean was not operating in a “void” at this time, but was actively involved in trading with the Near, East, Egypt, Italy and Central Europe (and possibly interfering with politics in Anatolia) shipwrecks and local artifacts show. During this period, many of the cultures that the Mycenaeans interacted with also suffered. Cyprus seems to have collapsed, as did the Hittite empire soon afterwards. The Egyptians suffered the loss of their hold on the Levant, previously secured during the Battle of Kadesh with the Hittites in circa 1275 BC, but their civilization recovered, defeating the invading Sea Peoples during the reign of Rameses III.

Clearly this was a time of considerable stress on the cultures of the Mediterranean, and it appears that there must be some sort of link between these collapses if so many cultures fall at about the same time. Perhaps the key is in the records of the Sea Peoples. It seems that there was no major natural disaster at this point and there is no proper evidence of the loss of resources, leaving outside attack as the only remaining key factor. If the Sea Peoples were attacking major towns in search of supplies, for example, not intending to invade but enough to force the inhabitants into the citadels of the towns, the inhabitants would not be able to tend their crops, leading to failure, which would damage the economy, leading to social strife and the collapse of the Aegean palaces.

With the people f the Mycenaean societies so closely dependent on the palaces' administration, their loss would be catastrophic. This scenario is pure conjecture, but it seems clear that the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces is due to a combination of factors, the most plausible of which are, as discussed, attack, crop failure and the eventual collapse of the administrative system itself.
 
http://www.socyberty.com/History/The-End-of-the-Greek-Bronze-Age.27218/2

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During the Greek Dark Ages, the Greeks lived in small tribal units; some of these small tribes were sedentary and agricultural and some were certainly nomadic. They had abandoned their cities between 1200 and 1100 BC for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery; the Greeks believed that a cataclysmic and ferocious invasion of northern Greek barbarians, the Dorians, had wiped out the Mycenean civilization. In reality, the decline and abandonment of urbanization in Greece was probably due to a combination of economic collapse and pressure from northern migrations. Greek life during the "Dark Ages" wasn't dark; it was, in fact, a culturally creative period. This period gave the Greeks the religion their religion, mythology, and foundational history in their final forms; the close of the Dark Ages would also gave the Greeks the rudiments of their greatest political achievement: the polis , or "city-state."

   The tribal or clan units of the dark ages slowly grew into larger political units; beginning around 800 BC, trade began to dramatically accelerate between the peoples of Greece. Marketplaces grew up in Greek villages and communities began to gather together into defensive units, building fortifications to use in common. On this foundation, the Greek-speaking people on the Greek peninsula, the mainland, and the coast of Asia Minor, developed political units that were centrally based on a single city. These city states were independent states that controlled a limited amount of territory surrounding the state. The largest of these city-states, for instance, was Sparta, which controlled more than 3000 square miles of surrounding territory.

   The period in which the city-states evolved is called the Archaic Period; while the separate states had close interaction with one another during this time and certainly learned political organization from one another, in many ways, however, each city-state developed fairly unique and independent cultures and political organizations (notice that the word "political" is derived from the word polis ).

   Politically, all the Greek city-states began as monarchies. In their earliest stages, they were ruled by a basileus , or hereditary king. The Greeks living in those city-states, however, soon tired of the kings, many of which were overthrown in the eighth century BC. A variety of political alternatives were put in place of the basileus : the most common was an oligarchy, or "rule by a few." The oligarchs were almost always drawn from the wealthiest citizens of the state ("rule by the wealthy" is called a timocracy), but a variety of oligarchic forms were invented in the eighth century. The oligarchs most often ruled absolutely; they had many of the powers granted to a king. Even though these powers were diffused among a group (which could be surprisingly large), the power of the oligarchy could be remarkably totalitarian. Most of the early oligarchic governments and a few of the kings were overthrown by "tyrants" (in Greek, tyrranos); while Greek history is generally unkind to the tyrants, we can through the haze of later Greek propaganda come to some dispassionate conclusions about the nature of the tyrranies. The Greeks believed that the tyrants were illegitimate usurpers of political power; they seem, however, to have had in many cases popular support. The Greek tyrants were often swept into power by dissatisfaction or crisis; they were more often then not extremely popular leaders when they assumed the tyrrany. Once in power, they ruled as a king would rule, and many attempted to make (and some succeeded) the tyrrany hereditary—in essence, a form of monarchy. Many of them seem to have directed their attentions to the crisis that swept them into office, but most of them set about shoring up their shaky hold on power. For the tyrants ruled only by a thread; they maintained power only by their hold on military force and often fear. The tyrranies were by nature highly unstable, and they fell apart rapidly. Even so, tyrrany was a widespread political institution throughout the Greek-speaking world: tyrranies were experimented with not only in Greece, but Asia Minor and even as far away as the Greek cities in Sicily.

   By the sixth century, the experiments began to settle around two alternatives. The tyrranies never died out, but oligarchy became the settled norm of the Greek city-states. Several of these oligarchies, however, were replaced by a second alternative that originates sometime in the sixth century: democracy. The word means, "rule by the demos (people)," but the Greek democracies looked nothing like modern democracies. First, they really mean rule by the people; the Greek democracies were not representative governments, they were governments run by the free, male citizens of the city-state. Second, all the people were not involved in the government: slaves, foreigners, and women were all disbarred from the democracy. So, in reality, the democratic city-states more closely resembled oligarchies for a minority—a very large minority, to be sure— ruled the state.

   This was a period of frenetic colonization. The Greeks, pressured by growing populations around the city-states, actively went looking for unpopulated or thinly populated areas to colonize in Greece, the Aegean Sea, and elsewhere. The Greek city-state began to appear on the Italian and Sicilian shores, and set up trading posts in the Middle East and Egypt. Greek culture was spreading across the Mediterranean, and Greek commerce was rapidly making the city-states wealthy and powerful.    There was no military, political, or cultural center of the Greek world in the Archaic period. Different city-states developed separate cultures; these developments, however, spread across the Greek world. The city-state culture, then, was in many ways a national culture because of the dynamic interactions between the city states. The greatest flowering of culture occurred on the city-states of Asia Minor, and especially Miletus. Greek philosophy begins in these city-states and soon spreads around the Greek world. Corinth and later Argos became great centers of literature. But perhaps the greatest of the city-states were Athens and Sparta. Sparta in particular dominated the political scene all during the seventh century BC, and would remain a powerful force all throughout its history until the Macdonians conquer Greece in the fourth century BC.

 http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/ARCHAIC.HTM

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  For some reason the Myceneans abandoned their civilization between 1200 and 1100 BC. The populations of their once-mighty cities dwindled rapidly until there was no urbanized culture left on the Greek mainland. Most of the cities were eventually destroyed, and all the great craftsmen of the Mycenean cities faded away when society could no longer support them. How much of their culture they abandoned, we don't know. For the one key element of their culture that they did abandon was writing , and we don't know why. Without writing, they left us no history following the collapse of Mycenean civilization; we have, instead, only five centuries of mystery: the Greek Dark Ages. Also called, the Greek Middle Ages, this period may have been precipitated by migrations and invasions of a people speaking a dialect of Greek, the Dorians. Later Greeks believed this to be the case: in Greek history and legend, the Dorians were a barbaric northern tribe of Greeks who rushed down into Greece and wrested control over the area.

   In the absence of archaeological evidence, it seems unlikely that a nomadic, tribal group could so easily overcome a highly efficient, warfare-centered society like the Myceneans. There is, though, no reason to disbelieve the Greeks. The best explanation is that a combination of economic decline and migrations of northern peoples slowly spelled the end of the Myceneans.

   From 1200 (or 1150, or 1100, take your pick) to 750, the Greeks lived a fairly sedentary, non-urbanized, agricultural life. Many villages were abandoned, and it seems likely that many Greeks returned to a nomadic life in small tribal groups. Many Greeks in this period took to the sea and migrated to the islands in the Aegean; according to Greek history, they were soon followed by the Dorians.

   Not only did the Greeks abandon writing and most crafts, they also abandoned their large commercial network. They virtually stopped trading with Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Egypt; in fact, they seem to have stopped trading with one another as well. Fortunately for the Greeks, none of the great powers had ever been interested in Europe or the Aegean, so the Greek Dark Ages, once the Dorians had settled, were probably a time of peace. This long breathing-space allowed the Greeks the leisure to slowly redevelop an urbanized culture.

   Despite the bleakness of the situation, the Greeks began to slowly urbanize in the latter part of the Dark Ages. This early urbanized culture would produce, at the very close of the Greek Dark Ages, the single greatest Greek accomplishment in the Greek view of themselves: the poetry of Homer. Not only are the two epic poems of Homer windows into the distant Mycenean past and into the darkness of the Greek Middle Ages, they are the defining moment in Greek culture; for the Greeks will turn to these poems throughout their history to define themselves culturally, politically, and historically.
Richard ****

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MINOA/DARKAGES.HTM

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SECTION 1: THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN THEATRE

Chapter 3: The Early Greek World, History and Prehistory

[For a more detailed history and cultural overview of ancient Greece, see the Perseus web site (click here).]


I. Geography and Greek Culture

The geography of Greece is a primary factor, if not the pre-eminent feature of the culture and lives of the ancient populations who lived there. Inhabiting an area that is ninety percent mountains with little arable land forced the Greeks into ways of life which did not center strictly around farming and agriculture. They were, for the most part, driven to go to sea to make ends meet. Indeed, no place in Greece is further than fifty miles from the sea, so the inevitability of fishing and maritime adventure was incumbent on many in antiquity, as it still is. To this day, many Greeks make a living in shipping, for instance, Aristotle Onassis, the multi-millionaire who acquired a fortune in international trade and married Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination of her first husband.

Ironically, while the mountainous topography pushed the Greeks to explore lands far beyond their immediate locale, at the same time it also separated the cities of Greece and obstructed intra-Hellenic contact, leading many of them to develop along discrete, sometimes incompatible lines. For instance, settlements as close as Athens and Thebes which are less than sixty miles apart not only came to see each other as "foreign" but even evolved a long-lasting rivalry that persisted into the Classical Age. Ironically, in some ways the ancient Greeks became generally friendlier with peoples across the sea than their own neighbors, because the landscape made foreign nations seem "closer" than many cities on the Greek mainland.

Overall, their geographical situation forced the ancient Greeks from early on to look outward from their immediate locality and internationalize their interests. This broadened their horizons and exposed them like few other civilizations to foreign ideas and ways of living. The ensuing cosmopolitanism played an important role in their development as a focal group in ancient Western Civilization. For a people living on the edge of nowhere, they found themselves uniquely thrust in medias res ("into the middle of things").

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II. The Prehistory of Greece

The earliest inhabitants of Greece are a mysterious—and possibly mythological—people called the Pelasgians about whom we know very little. These natives and their culture were overwhelmed and ultimately utterly annihilated by the invasion of a new people known now as the Indo-Europeans (click here to read more about the Indo-Europeans). If it were not for a handful of Pelasgian words like plinth ("brick"), a term preserved in ancient Greek, along with a few city-names like Corinth and other scattered vestiges of the Pelasgians' language, we would hardly even know these people ever existed. That's how completely devastating was the Indo-European conquest of this region.

So, when people today study the ancient Greeks, they are examining not the earliest known humans in the area but later invaders called the Indo-Europeans. This is clear because of the language the Greeks spoke. All extant forms of ancient Greek clearly derive from a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European, a language which engendered a large number of daughter languages found across much of the Eurasian continent, all the way from India to Norway. These closely related tongues show that the Indo-Europeans must have migrated over thousand of miles in different directions, displacing natives and settling themselves in lands across a wide swath of the Eurasian continent.

Another thing we know about the Indo-Europeans is that they tended to enter a region in successive waves. That is, Indo-Europeans rarely migrated into an area just once, and Greece was no exception. As early as 2000 BCE one Indo-European contingent had begun infiltrating the Greek peninsula and by the end of that millennium at least three major discrete migrations of these intruders had surged across various parts of Greece.

One racial group of these Indo-Europeans was called the Ionians. They settled along the eastern coast of Greece, in particular the city of Athens, and along the western coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Another group, the Dorians, settled the Peloponnese (the southern part of Greece) and many inland areas. The result was a "dark age" accompanied by massive disruptions in the Greek economy and civilization, including a total loss of literacy.

This dark age lasted about three centuries, from 1100 to 800 BCE and, while it seems from our perspective today like a dismal time, it must have been a dynamic and fascinating period in Greek history, perhaps a wonderful time to have lived. The lack of written historical records—the inevitable product of the age's illiteracy—leaves the impression of a vast void but, to judge the period from its outcome, it gave shape to much of the rest of Greek history. Many of the things we associate with Greek culture—for instance, vase-painting, epic poetry, and ship-building—assumed their basic and most familiar forms during this "dark" age.

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Particularly, many of the Greek myths read and studied today are traceable to this time period. Quite a few are set in the generations just before the dark age or in its early phases. For example, the famous cycle ("collection") of myths about the Trojan War—if, in fact, it is based on any real event in history—must date to some time around 1185 BCE. These myths found their most brilliant expression in the early Greek epic poems attributed to Homer, ancient Greece's greatest early poet.

Homer's first epic, The Iliad, tells the tale of the Greeks' sack of Troy and the anger of their great hero, Achilles. Among other famous characters included there are the beautiful Helen and her hapless Greek husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. His brother, Agamemnon, the king of neighboring Mycenae who leads the expedition of Greeks to Troy, is married to Helen's sister Clytemnestra with whom he has several children including Electra and Orestes. All later became enduring characters in drama as well as epic. The gods also play a large role in The Iliad, in particular, the king of the gods Zeus, the sun god Apollo, and the goddess of wisdom Athena.

Homer's other epic, The Odyssey, narrates the adventures of the Greek hero Odysseus as he wanders around the Mediterranean Sea trying for ten years to get home to Ithaca, an island on the western coast of Greece. Along the way he encounters a number of deities and monsters and much mayhem, but ultimately with the help of his patroness, the goddess Athena, he arrives back in his kingdom safe, if not entirely sound. There encounters his wife Penelope and son Telemachus after an absence of twenty years.

These stories convey such a compelling sense of realism about their day and time that more than one scholar has been tempted to see in them history rather than mere myth, but their historicity is questionable at best. One such investigator was Heinrich Schliemann, a nineteenth-century German millionaire and archaeologist, who excavated what is now known as Troy. This site in the northwestern corner of Asia Minor near the straits that separate Asia and Europe indeed contains the ruins of a once-great city that thrived in the middle to late second millennium BCE, but is this site Homer's Troy? Even if its name was Troy—and there is no firm evidence to that effect—that still leaves open the question of the extent to which Homer's epics preserve historical reality. The debate about the amount of verifiable history preserved in Homeric epic lingers unresolved to this day, a tribute to the enduring, gripping picture of humanity painted by this purportedly blind poet. [To read more about Troy, Homer and Schliemann, click here.]

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III. The Pre-Classical Age of Greek History

With the reappearance of written records after the dark age, Greek history as such comes back into focus. From the earliest extant inscriptions and vase-paintings with writing on them, we know that the alphabet was introduced to the Greek world at some point around 800 BCE, which is probably at or about the time Homer himself lived. This provides one way to explain why his epics, originally composed "orally" (i.e. as narratives which were not written down), were preserved. They came into being at just the right moment, when oral poets were still active but writing had been introduced so oral poetry could be recorded. This revolutionary period in Greek history—and indeed world history—witnessed the rise of the polis, the classical city-state (for instance, Athens, Sparta and Corinth) which would dominate the political scene for several centuries. These quasi-independent communities in their inter-political rivalry elevated Western civilization to unprecedented heights.

This epoch now known as the Pre-Classical Age (800-500 BCE) is also called the Age of Tyrants because powerful individuals came to rule the majority of these city-states by overthrowing the existing regime in a military coup. While our word "tyrant" which comes from the Greek tyrannos has strongly negative overtones, the Greek term had in antiquity both negative and neutral connotations, or sometimes even positive ones. That is, not all Greek tyrannoi (plural of tyrannos) were seen as "tyrannical."

One, in particular, Pisistratus of Athens, was a visionary who did much good for his city. He established festivals that united the Athenians culturally, boosted their economy by creating a market for Athenian exports and stabilized Attic (i.e. Athenian) coinage, making it widely respected throughout the Mediterranean world. Though he brought himself to power through force and violence, he used the position he assumed to better the lives of his fellow townsmen in general. He remained in power for many years and, when he died in the early 520's BCE, his sons inherited his power. While they did not manage Athens as well as their father had and were eventually ousted, Pisistratus' lasting contributions laid the groundwork for the Athenians' rise to prominence in the next century, the fifth century BCE (500-400 BCE), the Classical Age.

Other tyrants around the Greek-speaking world did much the same. More than one is famous as a "lawgiver," the man who, even while sole ruler, paved the way for fair and representative government in his city. Thus, this age is also known as the Age of Lawgivers. The introduction of writing, no doubt, played a great role in the advancement of law which initially entailed little more than the codification of already existing custom—in Greek, the word for "custom" is nomos which eventually became the term used for "law"—Athens had no less than two great lawgivers: Draco at the end of the seventh century (600's) BCE and Solon in the next generation (the early part of the sixth century, ca. 580 BCE). Both have left their imprint on English. A solon today means a "politician," and draconian means "extremely harsh or punitive" because Draco was famous for the severity of the punishments his laws imposed.

Also, because at this time the Greeks began to colonize large parts of the Mediterranean world—in particular, Asia Minor and Sicily (the large island southwest of Italy)—and the coastal regions of the Black Sea as well, this age has also been dubbed the Age of Colonization. In particular, the Greeks settled in large numbers in southern Italy which came to contain so many of them that the later Romans referred to the area as Magna Graecia ("Big Greece"). In part because of their essentially Greek heritage, the people and culture of southern Italy and Sicily are to this day very different from those of central and northern Italy.

The reason Greek colonization occurred on such a grand scale at this time goes back to changes in Mesopotamia (the modern Middle East), more than once the distant impetus for significant developments in the Western world. In the eighth century BCE, the Assyrians had come to dominate most of the ancient Near East. Their conquest and brutal treatment of captive states demolished many of the existing social, political and economic structures in the day.

Among those subjugated to the Assyrians were the Phoenicians who lived on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. From that crossroad, they had enriched themselves through a network of commercial exchange protected by a powerful navy but, when the Assyrians conquered and uprooted them, that navy evaporated and the trade routes of the eastern Mediterranean were opened up. The Greeks stepped into the vacuum, making a new life of wealth for themselves in shipping and cultural exchange, and went on to colonize those areas where they traveled most often, in part to protect their trade routes. Put simply, had the Assyrians not shattered the Phoenicians, the Greeks might never have found the economic energy needed to spark the cultural revolution they undertook in the Classical Age.

Yet one more way to refer to this period is the Lyric Age, a name derived the dominant form of literature in the day. While long heroic epics predominated as the principal form of narrative entertainment in earlier days, by the middle of pre-classical times (ca. 650 BCE) a new kind of poetry began to spread across the Greek world. These poems were shorter, livelier, and focused on modern life and love, not the glorious past. Because the singers of these poems often accompanied themselves on the lyre—the lyre is a stringed musical instrument which could be plucked to create certain harmonies—this sort of poetry came to be known as lyric poetry.

By 600 BCE lyric poetry ruled the ancient Greek entertainment scene. Lyric poets and their musical verse were in great demand with the public, much the way rock stars are today. Indeed, the analogy of lyric poetry and rock music is not altogether off-base. In their day, Greek lyric poets were idolized, imitated and at least one is reported to have performed in a state of intoxication.

The most famous of these, however, is also one of the few woman's voices we hear from any quarter of antiquity. Her name is Sappho, and her love poetry is perhaps the most famous of all time. The beauty of Sappho's lyrics in Greek was heralded throughout antiquity, as was the complexity, subtlety and rapturous grace of her rhythms and melodies.

Unfortunately, most of her poetry is now lost, shattered in its long passage through neglectful ages, so much so that we are not sure we have even a single poem of hers complete. But the many fragments of her songs which survive today attest to the high reputation in which the ancients held her. More important for our purposes, lyric poetry like Sappho's played an important role in the formulation of Greek drama which borrowed heavily from lyric modes of expression and, in fact, rose at the very time that lyric poetry began to fade. So, Sappho's legacy lived on, at least in part, through the tragedies and comedies which followed in her wake.

In the end, be it called the Lyric Age, the Age of Colonization, the Age of Tyrants, the Age of Lawgivers or simply the Pre-Classical Age, these three centuries of Greek civilization (800-500 BCE) are by any name one of the great revolutionary periods in human history. Were it not followed by an age even more magnificent (i.e. the Classical Age), this could easily be deemed a golden age. If nothing else, all the titles of this pivotal epoch point up the centrality of these centuries as a pivotal and formative moment in not only Greek history but all of Western Civilization. And so it will come as little surprise that this was the time and place, the laboratory if you will, where Greek drama was created.

http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/ClasDram/chapters/031gkhist.htm

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Solon

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