Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Ancient Greek civilization
historical region, Eurasia
Table of Contents
Introduction
The early Archaic period
The later Archaic periods
Classical Greek civilization
The 4th century
Conclusion
Ancient Greek civilization, the period following Mycenaean civilization, which ended about 1200 bce, to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 bce. It was a period of political, philosophical, artistic, and scientific achievements that formed a legacy with unparalleled influence on Western civilization.
The early Archaic period The post-Mycenaean period and Lefkandi
The period between the catastrophic end of the Mycenaean civilization and about 900 bce is often called a Dark Age. It was a time about which Greeks of the Classical age had confused and actually false notions. Thucydides, the great ancient historian of the 5th century bce, wrote a sketch of Greek history from the Trojan War to his own day, in which he notoriously fails, in the appropriate chapter, to signal any kind of dramatic rupture. (He does, however, speak of Greece “settling down gradually” and colonizing Italy, Sicily, and what is now western Turkey. This surely implies that Greece was settling down after something.) Thucydides does indeed display sound knowledge of the series of migrations by which Greece was resettled in the post-Mycenaean period. The most famous of these was the “Dorian invasion,” which the Greeks called, or connected with, the legendary “return of the descendants of Heracles.” Although much about that invasion is problematic—it left little or no archaeological trace at the point in time where tradition puts it—the problems are of no concern here. Important for the understanding of the Archaic and Classical periods, however, is the powerful belief in Dorianism as a linguistic and religious concept. Thucydides casually but significantly mentions soldiers speaking the “Doric dialect” in a narrative about ordinary military matters in the year 426. That is a surprisingly abstract way of looking at the subdivisions of the Greeks, because it would have been more natural for a 5th-century Greek to identify soldiers by home cities. Equally important to the understanding of this period is the hostility to Dorians, usually on the part of Ionians, another linguistic and religious subgroup, whose most-famous city was Athens. So extreme was this hostility that Dorians were prohibited from entering Ionian sanctuaries; extant today is a 5th-century example of such a prohibition, an inscription from the island of Paros.
Ancient Greece.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Phenomena such as the tension between Dorians and Ionians that have their origins in the Dark Age are a reminder that Greek civilization did not emerge either unannounced or uncontaminated by what had gone before. The Dark Age itself is beyond the scope of this article. One is bound to notice, however, that archaeological finds tend to call into question the whole concept of a Dark Age by showing that certain features of Greek civilization once thought not to antedate about 800 bce can actually be pushed back by as much as two centuries. One example, chosen for its relevance to the emergence of the Greek city-state, or polis, will suffice. In 1981 archaeology pulled back the curtain on the “darkest” phase of all, the Protogeometric Period (c. 1075–900 bce), which takes its name from the geometric shapes painted on pottery. A grave, rich by the standards of any period, was uncovered at a site called Lefkandi on Euboea, the island along the eastern flank of Attica (the territory controlled by Athens). The grave, which dates to about 1000 bce, contains the (probably cremated) remains of a man and a woman. The large bronze vessel in which the man’s ashes were deposited came from Cyprus, and the gold items buried with the woman are splendid and sophisticated in their workmanship. Remains of horses were found as well; the animals had been buried with their snaffle bits. The grave was within a large collapsed house, whose form anticipates that of the Greek temples two centuries later. Previously it had been thought that those temples were one of the first manifestations of the “monumentalizing” associated with the beginnings of the city-state. Thus, that find and those made in a set of nearby cemeteries in the years before 1980 attesting further contacts between Egypt and Cyprus between 1000 and 800 bce are important evidence. They show that one corner of one island of Greece, at least, was neither impoverished nor isolated in a period usually thought to have been both. The difficulty is to know just how exceptional Lefkandi was, but in any view it has revised former ideas about what was and what was not possible at the beginning of the 1st millennium bce. Colonization and city-state formation
The term colonization, although it may be convenient and widely used, is misleading. When applied to Archaic Greece, it should not necessarily be taken to imply the state-sponsored sending out of definite numbers of settlers, as the later Roman origin of the word implies. For one thing, it will be seen that state formation may itself be a product of the colonizing movement. The Olympic Games
The first “date” in Greek history is 776 bce, the year of the first Olympic Games. It was computed by a 5th-century-bce researcher called Hippias. He was originally from Elis, a place in the western Peloponnese in whose territory Olympia itself is situated. This date and the list of early victors, transmitted by another literary tradition, are likely to be reliable, if only because the list is so unassuming in its early reaches. That is to say, local victors predominate, including some Messenians. Messene lost its independence to neighbouring Sparta during the course of the 8th century, and this fact is an additional guarantee of the reliability of the early Olympic victor list: Messenian victors would hardly have been invented at a time when Messene as a political entity had ceased to exist. Clearly, then, record keeping and organized activity involving more than one community and centring on a sanctuary, such as Olympia, go back to the early 8th century. (Such competitive activity is an example of what has been called “peer-polity interaction.”) Records imply a degree of literacy, and there too the tradition about the 8th century has been confirmed by late 20th-century finds. A cup, bearing the inscription in Greek in the Euboean script “I am the cup of Nestor,” can be securely dated to before 700 bce. It was found at an island site called Pithekoussai (Ischia) on the Bay of Naples. Overseas projects
The early overseas activity of the Euboeans has already been remarked upon in connection with the discoveries at Lefkandi. They were the prime movers in the more or less organized—or, at any rate, remembered and recorded—phase of Greek overseas settlement, a process known as colonization. (Euboean priority can be taken as absolutely certain because archaeology supports the literary tradition of the Roman historian Livy and others: Euboean pottery has been found both at Pithekoussai to the west and at the Turkish site of Al-Mina to the east.) This more-organized phase began in Italy about 750 and in Sicily in 734 bce; its episodes were remembered, perhaps in writing, by the colonies themselves. The word organized needs to be stressed, because various considerations make it necessary to push back beyond that date the beginning of Greek colonization. First, it is clear from archaeological finds, such as the Lefkandi material, and from other new evidence that the Greeks had already, before 750 or 734, confronted and exchanged goods with the inhabitants of Italy and Sicily. Second, Thucydides says that Dark Age Athens sent colonies to Ionia, and archaeology bears this out—however much one discounts for propagandist exaggeration by the imperial Athens of Thucydides’ own time of its prehistoric colonizing role. However, after the founding of Cumae (a mainland Italian offshoot of the island settlement of Pithekoussai) about 750 bce and of Sicilian Naxos and Syracuse in 734 and 733, respectively, there was an explosion of colonies to all points of the compass. The only exceptions were those areas, such as pharaonic Egypt or inner Anatolia, where the inhabitants were too militarily and politically advanced to be easily overrun.