The Greek Dark Age

Greeks apparently lost their knowledge of writing when Mycenaean civilization fell. The Linear B script they had used was probably known only by a few scribes, who used writing to track the redistribution of goods. When the Mycenaean palaces collapsed, scribes and writing disappeared. Only oral transmission kept Greek cultural traditions alive.

Compared with their forebears, Greeks in the early Dark Age cultivated much less land and had many fewer settlements. There was no redistributive economy. The number of ships carrying Greek adventurers, raiders, and traders dwindled. Most people scratched out an existence as herders, shepherds, and subsistence farmers bunched in tiny settlements as small as twenty people. As agriculture declined, more Greeks than ever before made their living by herding animals. In this transient lifestyle, people built only simple huts and kept few possessions. Unlike their Bronze Age ancestors, Greeks in the Dark Age had no monumental architecture. They also stopped painting people and animals on their ceramics (their principal art form), instead putting only abstract designs on their pots.

The Greek Dark Age, 1000–750 B.C.E.

Dark Age Greece did, however, retain a small but wealthy social elite. On the island of Euboea, for example, archaeologists have discovered the tenth-century B.C.E. grave of a couple who took such enormous riches with them to the next world that the woman’s body was covered in gold ornaments. They had done well in the competition for prestige and wealth; most people of the time were, by comparison, desperately poor.

Geography allowed the Greeks to continue seaborne trade with the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean even during their Dark Age. Trade promoted cultural interaction, and the Greeks learned to write again about 800 B.C.E., adopting and adapting the alphabet from the Phoenicians, seafaring traders from Canaan. Near Eastern art inspired Greeks to resume the production of ceramics with figural designs (as on the Corinthian vase). Seaborne commerce encouraged better-off Greeks to produce agricultural surpluses and goods they could trade for luxuries such as gold jewelry and gems from Egypt and Syria.

Most important, trade brought the new technology of iron metallurgy. Greeks learned this skill through their eastern trade contacts and mined their own iron ore, which was common in Greece. Iron eventually replaced bronze in agricultural tools, swords, and spear points. (The Greeks still used bronze for shields and armor, however, because it was easier to shape into thin, curved pieces.) The iron tools’ lower cost allowed more people to acquire them. Because iron is harder than bronze, implements kept their sharp edges longer. Better and more plentiful farming implements of iron helped increase food production, which sustained population growth. In this way, technology imported from the Near East improved people’s chances for survival and thus helped Greece recover from the Dark Age’s depopulation.

With the Mycenaean rulers gone, leadership became an open competition in Dark Age Greece. Individuals who proved themselves excellent in action, words, charisma, and religious knowledge joined the social elite, enjoying higher prestige and authority in society. Excellence—aretê in Greek—was earned by competing. Men competed with others for aretê as warriors and persuasive public speakers. Women won their highest aretê by managing a household of children, slaves, and storerooms. Members of the elite accumulated wealth by controlling agricultural land, which people of lower status worked for them as tenants or slaves.

The Iliad and The Odyssey, the eighth-century B.C.E. poems of Homer, reflect the social elite’s ideals. Homer was the last in a long line of poets who, influenced by Near Eastern mythology, had been singing these stories for centuries, orally transmitting cultural values from one generation to the next. In telling the story of the Greek army in the Trojan War, The Iliad focuses on the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles, who proves his aretê by choosing to die in battle rather than accept the gods’ offer to return home safely but without glory. The Odyssey recounts not only the hero Odysseus’s ten-year adventure sailing home after the fall of Troy but also the struggle of his wife, Penelope, to protect their household from the schemes of rivals.

Homer reveals that the white-hot emotions inflamed by the competition for excellence could provoke a disturbing level of inhumanity. Achilles, in preparing to duel Hector, the prince of Troy, brutally rejects the Trojan’s proposal that the winner return the loser’s corpse to his family and friends: “Do wolves and lambs agree to cooperate? No, they hate each other to the roots of their being.” The victor, Achilles, mutilates Hector’s body. When Hecuba, the queen of Troy and Hector’s mother, sees this outrage, she bitterly shouts, “I wish I could sink my teeth into his liver to eat it raw.” The endings of Homer’s poems suggest that the gods could sometimes help people achieve reconciliation after violent conflict, but human suffering in his stories shows that the pursuit of excellence is painful.