The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Two centuries or so later, by the 1200s BC, at least some of the later palaces were massively fortified. The ancient Greeks of classical times were much impressed by the great blocks of the prehistoric defences of Mycenae, hailing them as the work of giants. One of Schliemann’s more famous finds at Mycenae was a ceramic vase about 16 inches high, made at this time and also now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. The painted decoration shows a march of bearded men, armed and armoured to the teeth. They may indeed be taking part in a funeral, as has been suggested. Even so, these figures clearly represent a class of fighters in the society that built the Mycenaean palaces.

  Why the end came when it did, and how, no one really knows. Fire engulfed the palaces around 1200 BC in a general catastrophe devastating Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos and Thebes. There was a larger instability at this time – the capital of the Hittite Empire, ancient Hattusa, some 200 miles east of modern Ankara, was also destroyed. Giving these far-off events a modern resonance, some experts have proposed climate change as an underlying factor. Core samples from the bed of Lake Galilee show a sudden rise in the types of plants found in desert terrain in the years between around 1250 and 1100 BC, as if there was a severe drought event in the eastern Mediterranean.

  On the Greek mainland, whatever else it may have been, the Mycenaean collapse was definitely political. The state system that built the palaces vanished, along with the record keeping, the luxury goods and other signs of a complex society. Judging from the archaeological record, survivors now lived a much simpler life for two to three centuries.

  During these centuries, ironworking slowly spread in Greece, with important economic implications. Deposits of iron ore are common in Greece. Over time this domestic abundance of such a strategic raw material would undermine the old system of long-distance trade in copper and tin. Oral traditions kept alive by survivors slowly turned the increasingly dimly remembered world of the Mycenaeans into the stuff of legend.

  As well as this wealth of stories, the legacy of the Mycenaeans to subsequent centuries included abandoned monuments, some of the Greek gods and, in places, a population of Greek-speakers. Prehistoric times had laid a cultural base on which later Greeks built. Yet the shape of what emerged in the centuries after the palaces fell would be startlingly different from what had gone before, as the next chapters will show.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE RISE OF THE HELLENES

  The classical Greeks knew nothing about the catastrophic end of Mycenaean civilization as revealed by modern archaeology. They had their sacred stories about cosmic origins and the earliest times. These myths – as we would call them – told of catastrophes marking major boundaries in the beginnings of time, including wars between gods and a great flood.

  For the Greeks contemplating their remote past, the watershed separating legend from fact was the Trojan War, fought between their ancestors and the people of Troy. Later Greeks located Troy on the north-west coast of Turkey, near the Dardanelles. In later times noble families in ancient Greece claimed to descend from warriors who fought in this conflict, such as Ajax or Achilles. In classical times, Greek scholars produced dates for the war. One of these dates placed the fall of Troy precisely 407 years before another event for which the history-minded Greeks had also worked out a precise year. This was the first celebration of the Olympic games on record, supposedly in 776 BC. By such reckoning, Troy fell in 1183 BC.

  Archaeologists from Schliemann onwards have excavated an archaeological site at Turkish Hissarlık in the belief that this was ancient Troy. They have found the remains of an important city of the late Bronze Age, one repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. They date two of these destructions on either side of the archaeological date for the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces, around 1200 BC. This approximate coincidence of archaeological dates with ancient Greek dates for the Trojan War abets the long line of eminent scholars who believe that this war was a real war fought by Mycenaean Greeks against an Asiatic enemy.

  Whether this view is correct remains an open question. The later Greeks also saw migration as an important part of the story of how their world came into being, and here the corroborating evidence is more reliable. Our words ‘Greece’ and ‘Greeks’ derive from ‘Graecia’ and ‘Graeci’, diminishing names that the condescending Romans bestowed. Late in the 400s BC, the Athenian historian Thucydides wrote about the beginnings of the land he knew by its Greek name: ‘it is evident that the country now called Hellas had in ancient times no settled population; on the contrary, migrations were of frequent occurrence, the several tribes readily abandoning their homes under the pressure of superior numbers.’ Thucydides thought that the first migrations fell before the Trojan War. Eighty years later, he writes, ‘the Dorians and the descendants of Heracles became masters of the Peloponnese.’ These Dorian Greeks were the supposed invaders from whom the later Spartans proudly claimed descent.

  Experts in two different fields, historical linguistics and historical genetics, are helping to flesh out these dim traditions repeated by the later Greeks. Linguists long ago showed that the language of the ancient Greeks descended from the same lost proto-language as a raft of modern languages in both Europe and Asia. These include both Welsh and Hindi, the majority language of modern India. So it has always seemed likely that the prehistoric language that evolved into the Linear B of the Mycenaeans and, centuries later, into the dialect of Greek spoken and written by Thucydides, entered prehistoric Greece from elsewhere.

  Some archaeologists think that the first farmers of Neolithic Greece were outsiders who brought with them a proto-Greek language around 8000 BC. The growing field of ancient DNA points provisionally in another direction. Recent studies of genomic information taken from prehistoric human remains identify a seemingly large-scale migration into Europe from the Eurasian Steppe to the north of the Black Sea. This would have taken place around 2500 BC. More tests on Mycenaean DNA may show whether it was this migratory movement that could have brought the ancestors of the Mycenaean Greeks into the southern Balkans.

  That different Greek-speaking groups arrived in Greece at different times is borne out by the fact that Greece in historic times was a land of regional dialects. Thucydides stigmatized one Greek-speaking subgroup in the central Greece of his own day (later 400s BC) as ‘speaking a dialect more unintelligible than any of their neighbours’. These dialects emerge into the light of history after the return of writing to Greece in the 700s BC, about which more shortly. They can be studied from inscriptions on stone, potsherds and so on. Linguists discern five major ‘families’ of these dialects, each based on its own geographical region.

  Generally speaking, when different dialects of the same language co-exist, this is because their speakers live isolated lives in tight-knit communities. Much of north-east England, where I used to teach, is a region rich in living dialects. Academics who study them assign their formation to centuries of migratory movements, Angles, Scandinavians and so on, stretching back to Roman times. Movements of this kind are the usual explanation given for the regional dialect families of Ancient Greek.

  So experts can say that the evidence of language does not flatly contradict the later traditions of the Greeks themselves about ancient migrations into their land. The ancient Greeks did not have the concept of ‘dialect families’. Still, they knew that among themselves they spoke different varieties of Greek. Thucydides wrote of the ‘Doric dialect’ spoken in his day by descendants of the ‘Dorian’ incomers.

  The second of the five major dialect families identified by modern scholars, so-called ‘Attic-Ionic’, was common to both the Athenians living on the Greek mainland and the Ionians. In historical times Ionian Greeks were settled in the region south of modern Izmir on Turkey’s west coast. They gave this area their name, ‘Ionia’. Dorian Greeks pronounced the ‘e’ of Attic-Ionic as ‘a’, Attic-Ionic final ‘s’ as ‘r’, and so on.

  After the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, archaeologists mainly rely on pottery to
chart the conditions of human existence in Greece. For the next century and a half pot-making slumped, literally: the shapes seem to sag. They look homemade. In those impoverished times, makers and users of pots no longer lived in a human environment demanding well-crafted objects. The catastrophic events of around 1200 BC had triggered nothing less than a societal collapse. Conditions in Greece then perhaps can be likened to the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s harsh vision of humanity bereft of any form of political community or commonwealth: ‘No arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and the danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’

  After the Mycenaean breakdown, archaeologists infer from such finds – and the fact that suddenly there are so few of them – the crumbling of pre-existing political communities. A dark age in other words. There were fewer people and many fewer communities. The survivors were poorer. There were migrations. Then, from around 1050 BC, the humble clay pot starts to tell a more hopeful story.

  In the archaeological museums of Greece one omnipresent artefact from these times is a distinctive way of decorating pottery known as Geometric. The potter painted the surface with concentric circles, key patterns, zigzags, lozenges, dots and so on. Just by looking at them you can see that many of these pots show great technical virtuosity. The style originated around 1050 BC. Its advent marks an unmistakable, if modest, sign of a return of more settled conditions in some parts of Greece, allowing cultural ambitions slowly to rise.

  Over the next three centuries the style became common to the whole Aegean region and defines a shared culture: ‘Geometric Greece’, as some archaeologists label the period. It is a shame that nothing certain can be said about the symbolism of the style, assuming that it was not purely decorative. There has been no shortage of modern speculation – that the concentric circles and pointy discs represent the sun, for instance, or that the tidy patterns channel a yearning for order.

  Another corner of Greece around 1000 BC has lit up the kind of Greek society that used this pottery. My first proper academic job was as assistant director of the British School at Athens, a research centre. I well remember great consternation in the office one morning in August 1981. Reports had come in of major vandalism at an archaeological site where Greek and British archaeologists had been excavating together for some time. It turned out that a local landowner had taken a bulldozer overnight to a plot of land on which he planned to build a summer house. Before he was stopped he had managed to erase the middle portion of a huge ancient building.

  As a direct result, the Greek authorities confiscated the land, and Greek and British archaeologists carefully excavated what was left. The place was modern Lefkandi to the north-east of Athens, on the coast of the large offshore island known in ancient times as Euboea. Nowadays visitors to the site enter a modern shed where they confront unglamorous remnants of mud-brick walls and not a great deal else.

  What they cannot miss is the scale of this hairpin-shaped structure. This was a big building. It measured 164 feet long – about half the length of a modern football field – and 46 feet wide. Archaeologists estimate that its ancient builders would have used up many hundreds of days of human labour. It was a building that was meant to impress people. What really surprised archaeologists was the early date, as revealed by the finds of Geometric pottery – around 1000 BC.

  The architecture is like nothing of earlier date in Greece. Recent research suggests that a wooden fence may have surrounded the structure, not the wooden veranda usually posited. Finds included a pottery creature, man above, horse below: one of the earliest known images of a centaur, a fantasy figure of the legends which later Greeks recorded in writing. The biggest discoveries were two burials inside the building.

  Excavators found a subterranean shaft shared by an inhumed female and her companion, a cremated male. They were clearly of high status to judge from the grave goods. These included a dagger with a handle of ivory imported from the Near East. There were also ‘antiques’. One was a Mycenaean bronze bowl originally made on Cyprus, the other a solid-gold throat piece, or gorget, apparently made by Babylonian craftsmen a thousand years earlier.

  Academics are still discussing these startling finds. In this part of Greece, around 1000 BC, once again society had grown more complex. There was a stratum of wealthy aristocrats. They enjoyed the power to command the labour of their inferiors and had access to exotic materials like ivory. Seemingly, vessels used the island’s nearby shoreline to offload, and perhaps on-load, objects of long-distance trade. Socially these leaders distinguished themselves by owning rare heirlooms, and by celebrating elaborate funerals. Some archaeologists believe that the deceased pair had previously lived in the hairpin building and that this was ritually ‘killed’ by being pulled down over their graves.

  The finds at Lefkandi offer a link to the two poems which stand today as the lasting legacy of Geometric Greece. The university department where I used to teach displays a plaster bust of a bearded old man with lifeless eyes. Somehow he has survived years of rag days and student parties unscathed. This modern cast, one of thousands, replicates an ancient Greek sculptor’s imagining of Homer as a blind, philosopher-like sage. Already in ancient times he had become a figure of myth. Whether a Homer ever actually existed is something which the experts debate.

  The two poems ascribed to him by the ancients are the earliest surviving literature of the ancient Greeks, and so of the whole Western tradition. The Iliad explores a dramatic moment in the ten-year Trojan War. The Odyssey tracks the adventures of a Greek warrior as he makes his way home over ten years from Troy. One only has to think of Hollywood’s retelling of these poems, most recently in 2004 with the feature film Troy, to be reminded of their place in world culture.

  I myself inherited a translation of Homer once belonging to my grandfather’s grandfather. Published in 1801, its three volumes are pocket-sized, literal companions. My ancestor possessively signed his name in flowing copperplate to each volume. The translation was once a popular one, by the English poet Alexander Pope, who died in 1744. When he took on Homer, Pope was still in his twenties.

  Pope’s rather free translation gives the general sense of the original. His stately English now has an additionally eighteenth-century ring. It captures something of the archaic sound of Homer for the Greeks of later antiquity themselves:

  Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring,

  Of woes unnumber’d, heav’nly Goddess sing!

  That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign

  The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;

  Whose limbs unbury’d on the naked shore,

  Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore:

  Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,

  Such was the sov’reign doom, and such the will of Jove!

  Homer portrays a legendary world which faintly resembles that of the Norse sagas. Divinities and supernatural creatures share a stage with human heroes who excel at fighting. There is poignant humanity in the recognition of our common destiny:

  Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,

  Now green in youth, now with’ring on the ground;

  Another race the following spring supplies.

  As well as poetry that has proved timeless and universal, Homer also offers demonstrable touches of archaeological reality. He describes a helmet given to the hero Odysseus:

  A well-prov’d casque, with leather braces bound

  (Thy gift Meriones) his temples crown’d;

  Soft wool within, without, in order spread,

  A boar’s white teeth grinn’d horrid o’er his head.

  Archaeologists have found several of these boar’s-tooth helmets in Mycenaean graves. Also in the Iliad, Homer describes the funeral of a Greek warrior, Patroclus, who has fallen before the walls of Troy. The description shows similarities to the burials at Lefkandi. It includes the cremation of the dead man; pla
cing his bones in a special jar (gold in the Iliad, a bronze heirloom at Lefkandi); wrapping the relics in a special fabric (Lefkandi’s is the earliest find from Greece of ancient cloth); and the accompanying sacrifice of horses (four in the Iliad, the same number at Lefkandi).

  Modern insights suggest an explanation for Homer’s curious referencing of cultural goods and practices separated, as in these examples, by three centuries or so. In the 1930s, a young American scholar, Milman Parry, argued that the Homeric poems were the cumulative outcome of generations of oral performance. Bards would have sung earlier versions during a lengthy phase in which the Greeks had no writing, only speech. These performances would have been fluid, combining memory with improvisation. Bards would use a repertoire of fixed expressions. This made it easier for them to fit their spontaneous additions to the pattern of beats which runs through all the poetry.

  Different generations of oral bards would have introduced contemporary colour to make a core legend about a war long ago, and its aftermath, more realistic for their audience. One of these formative performances perhaps took place at funeral games at Lefkandi around 1000 BC. A bard might have flattered his aristocratic listeners gathered in the hall of the hairpin building by matching local rites for a princely couple with the funeral of Patroclus.

  In the centuries to come, the poems of Homer achieved a fundamental importance for the ancient world. Known to all, their portrayal of gods and mortal men and women, of divine power and human fortunes, profoundly shaped how the Greeks imagined the world, both seen and unseen. Quotations from Homer’s poems seeped into ancient discourse in much the same way that phrases from the King James Bible have enriched spoken and written English in more recent times. Later Greek literati wrote with Homer’s verses ringing in their heads.

  All this culturally momentous future was possible because, at some point, the oral poetry of Homer was committed to writing. There had been no writing in Greece since the ruination of the Mycenaean palaces. Recent researchers push the origins of the new writing into the late 800s BC. This may well be the date of three copper plaques found in Egypt and now in European collections. Tested for authenticity in the Getty Conservation Laboratory in Malibu, California, each is covered on both sides with the type of Greek inscription known as an abecedary, letters of the alphabet.