The Dark Age of Ancient Greek Civilization

Around 1200 BC, Dorian invaders brought a dark age to Greece. The great palaces of Mycenaean kings fell to ruin, trade collapsed, and writing all but disappeared. For centuries, Greece lived in silence, its people scattered, its achievements forgotten. Yet in that darkness, small communities endured, carrying forward the stories and traditions that would one day spark the rebirth of Greek civilization. After the devastating victory at Troy, the Mycenaean ships had limped or blown back to the mainland of Greece, only to find that their homes had grown poor and troubled. Odysseus battled for ten years to get home and found his house overrun with enemies. Agamemnon returned to his wife and was murdered in his bath by her and her lover. This was only a foretaste of disaster to come. Around 1200 BC, a rash of fires spread across the peninsula. The Mycenaean city of Sparta burned to the ground. The city of Mycenae itself fought off an unknown enemy. The fortress survived, although damaged, but the houses outside the walls were left in ashes and never rebuilt. The city of Pylos was swept by fire. A score of towns were shattered by some other disruption. Archaeology suggests that the cities were resettled by a new people who had no knowledge of writing. None appears in their remains. No skill in building with stone or brick and no grasp of bronze working. These new settlers came from the northern part of the peninsula and were now moving south. Later historians called them the Dorians. Both Thucydides and Herodotus credit the Dorians with a massive armed takeover of the Mycenaean cities. Herodotus tells of four Dorian invasions of Attica, the land around Athens, the first happening in the days when Codrus was the king of Athens. The later Greek writer Conan preserves the traditional story of the earliest attack. An oracle at the Dorian camp told the savage invaders that they would win the battle for Athens as long as they didn't kill the Athenian king Codrus. When Codrus heard of this, he disguised himself as an ordinary Athenian, left his city, and went into the Dorian camp where he picked a fight with armed Dorian warriors. In the brawl afterwards, he was killed, thus fulfilling the The Dorians, amazed at such nobility, lifted the siege of Athens, but the retreat was only temporary. By the time the invasion was over, Thucydides tells us the Dorians had become the masters of the Peloponnese, the southernmost part of the Greek peninsula. Thucydides and Herodotus both write of a violent eruption that spread across the land of the heroes and destroyed it. Like the Egyptian historians who recorded the invasion of the Hyksos, they could not conceive of any reason why their great ancestors should be defeated except for overwhelming military might. But the ruins of Mycenaean cities tell a slightly different story. Pylos and Mycenae burned as much as 90 years apart, which means that the Dorian influx itself spread slowly down over the peninsula over the course of a century. It was hardly a surprise attack. The Mycenaean Greeks had plenty of time to organize some sort of resistance, but whatever defense these experienced soldiers mounted was too feeble to protect them, even against the Dorian newcomers who were neither sophisticated nor battle-hardened. And in some cities there is no evidence of fighting at all. The tales of Athenian resistance among the Mycenaean cities only Athens boasted of repelling the invaders may preserve a slightly different reality. No one ever attacked Athens. Excavations at Athens show no layer of destruction, no fire scars, but even so the population of Athens shrank alarmingly. By 1100, a century and a half after the war with Troy, the northeast side of the Athenian Acropolis, the high rock at the city's center, its most secure and defensible spot, had been peacefully abandoned. The Sparta that the Dorians burned down was already empty. Its inhabitants had gone some years before. The northerners poured down into a south already weakened and disorganized. The war with Troy certainly had something to do with the slow decay of the Mycenaean cities, something which Thucydides himself makes note of. The late return of the Helenes from Troy, he remarks, provoked strife so severe that many Mycenaeans were driven from their own cities. But there must have been other factors at work. Two or three years of bad weather in a row, lessening crops just at a time when the old reliable sources of grain from Egypt and Asia Minor had also been disrupted by wars in both places, would have forced the Mycenaean cities to compete for food. Hunger can kindle wars between cities and send city dwellers into exile, and in fact the rings of Irish oaks and some trees from Asia Minor show signs of a drought that came sometime in the 1150s. Another more fearful enemy may have stalked the Mycenaeans as well. In the opening scenes of the Iliad, the Trojan priest Chryseis begs the god Apollo to send illness on the attacking Greeks in repayment for the kidnapping of Chryseis' daughter by the Greek warrior Agamemnon. Apollo answers his prayer and fires down arrows of sickness on the enemy ships. The result is deadly. He made a burning wind of plague rise in the army. Rank and file sickened and died for the ill their chief had done. Very likely the Mycenaeans encamped on the shore were struck by plague, and the sickness was probably bubonic. The Trojans didn't know, any more than other ancient peoples, exactly how bubonic plague was spread. But they knew that the sickness had something to do with rodents. The Apollo who spread sickness was honored at Troy with the name peculiar to Asia Minor. He was called Apollo Smythian, Lord of the Mice. The Iliad also tells us that Apollo Smythian's arrows carried off not just men, but horses and dogs. This spreading of sickness through the animal population is a constant in ancient accounts of bubonic plague. This pest raged not only among domestic animals, but even among wild beasts, wrote Gregory of Tour 1500 years later. A ship with no sick people on board, docking on an uninfected shore, might still have plague-carrying rats in its hold. In fact, plague tended to follow famine. Grain shipments from one part of the world to another carried rats from one city to the next, spreading disease across an otherwise unlikely distance. Plague, drought, and war. These were enough to upset the balance of a civilization that had been built in rocky, dry places, close to the edge of survival. When existence became difficult, the able-bodied moved away. And so not only Mycenaeans, but Cretans and residents of the Aegean islands spread out from their homeland in small bands, looking for new homes and hiring themselves out as mercenaries. It is impossible to tell how many of the sea people fighting against Egypt were hired hands, but Egyptian accounts tell us that in the years before the sea people invasion, the pharaoh had hired troops from the Aegean to fight for Egypt against the Libyans of the western desert. By the middle of the 11th century, the Dorians, not the Mycenaeans, were masters of the south, and Mycenaean soldiers were available to the highest bidder. The Dorian settlers had no king and court, no taxes and tributes, and no foreign sea trade. They farmed, they survived, and they had no particular need to write anything down. Their occupation plunged the peninsula into what we call a dark age. We cannot peer very far into it because there are no written records. Greece began to slowly recover and rebuild after the dark age in the early 8th century BC. Archaeological evidence shows that by the beginning of this century, the Greek economy was undergoing noticeable recovery. Populations increased, city-states, polis, began to form, and the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, which led to a resurgence of literacy. Trade networks were re-established, and cultural developments, such as more elaborate pottery styles and religious sanctuaries, indicated a cultural revival. The traditional date marking the end of the dark age and the start of recovery is around 800 BC, which also sees the rise of major events like the first Olympic games and the writing of the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey by the poet Homer. Historians still argue whether 1200 to 800 BC was truly a dark age, but there is no question that it was a time when the voices of history fell silent and the written word nearly vanished. Yet from that silence, something stirred. This so-called darkness became the forge in which Greece was remade, tempering the culture, the ideas, and the spirit that would ignite the classical age, an era that would shape the very foundations of Western civilization.