Little is known about the people who inhabited the land of Greece
from earliest times. Presumably they lived in a condition of typical
neolithic savagery. They were settled in small villages, were
organized in clans or tribes, scratched their existence from the
land, worshiped fertility deities, practiced magic, and shaped
their tools and weapons out of stone.
To the original inhabitants were added ethnic and cultural stocks brought in by migrations of two groups of peoples from abroad. One group, from Asia Minor or Syria, occupied southern Thessaly: another, whose precise origin is unknown but which possibly originated in the Danube valley to the north, settled in Macedonia and northern Thessaly. These invaders merged with the native population and raised the culture of the area from savagery to barbarism by the introduction of more advanced techniques of farming and animal husbandry, the use of metals, and more complex social institutions, thereby creating the bases for a more stable social life.
The process of ethnic fusion was complete by about 1900 B.C.,
and no further incursions disturbed the style of life thus established
until around 1180 B.C., when fresh invasions from the north strengthened
the ethnic and cultural elements that had originated in the Danubian
plain. From the latter date on we may properly designate the inhabitants
of the Greek mainland as Hellenes, or Greeks, for as they moved
southward from Thessaly into Attica and the Peloponnese, they
brought with them the characteristic dialects that provided the
basis of what we recognize as the Greek language.
Higher civilization, however, first appeared in the Aegean
basin not on the Greek mainland, but to the south, on the island
of Crete. Migrants whose origin is unknown but who were familiar
with the advanced agricultural life developed in the Fertile Crescent
in the fourth millennium B.C. had settled the islands of Crete,
Cyprus, and the Cyclades by about 3000 B.C.. The people that settled
in Crete are called Minoan after the legendary king Minos, who
is supposed to have united the island under a single dynasty at
one time.
The Minoans quickly applied advanced technical skills to agriculture, seafaring, manufacturing, and trade and created a civilization almost as rich and sophisticated--though not as enduring--as those that appeared in Mesopotamia and Egypt at about the same time. During the second millennium B.C., the Minoans traded with the barbarian mainland of Greece and the richer centers of civilization in Egypt and Syria. By around 2000 B.C. they had created an autonomous sphere of economic activity. The appearance of rich cities such as Knossos on the northern coast of Crete attests to the growing importance of Minoan trade with the barbarian Greeks who were then settling around the Aegean basin.
By 1700 B.C. the Minoans had developed a more efficient written language for the maintenance of records and communication within the vast commercial empire thus created. They abandoned the pictographic form of writing that they had originally used and created a linear script which we call Linear A, comprising a syllabary without vowels.
The Minoans control of the sea allowed them the luxury of living in great cities that stood open to the water and gave them that security without which higher civilization is impossible.
What is most striking about the Minoans is the apparently secondary role that religious worship and ritual played in their public life. That the Minoans were religious is undeniable But they seem to have been neither fearful of their gods nor particularly grateful to them for services rendered in the creation of their particular style of life.
Their art, which appears in sculpture, in frescoes decorating the great palaces, and on pottery depicts the human body with grace, elegance, and a distinct feeling of delight with life equaled in ancient times only by the Egyptians during the Old Kingdom. Evidence offered by artistic remains suggests that the men and women of this civilization mixed freely in sports and games. In fact, the feminine element seems to have predominated in the Minoan imagination. Scenes of war are rare, and there is little evidence of profound meditation on the fact of death The Minoans apparently did not worship their dead, as did most other peoples of the time, out of fear of departed spirits or in hope that the dead would aid them in living their lives on earth; this suggests that they contemplated the afterlife without either anxiety or optimism.
They seem to have channeled their energies all but exclusively into the exploitation of the material opportunities offered by their favored position at the center of eastern Mediterranean trading routes, their advanced technology, and the pleasures offered by their wealth and security. It has been suggested that the secular character of Minoan culture was inspired by the apparent ineffectiveness of fertility gods brought from their original homeland to the barren soil of Crete The absence of great temples and the presence of small personal shrines in individual homes may bespeak a certain lack of interest in the gods. Perhaps after their arrival in Crete, the Minoan gods ceased to produce the sustenance for the people in their usual way and were, as a result, relegated to the hearth and household, to serve as protectors of the fertility, wealth, and power of the family alone.
This conclusion is supported by the plans of Minoan cities, which, unlike their counterparts in the Fertile Crescent, seem to be laid out, not according to some liturgical specification, symmetrically in relation to the cardinal points of the imagined cosmos or with reference to a great central temple, but randomly and asymmetrically, as though they had grown by chance and in response to primarily practical needs. In any event, if the later Greeks, who borrowed from this civilization, required a precedent for their attempt to build a culture dedicated to the enjoyment of the earthly life, they possessed such a precedent in their ancestors, the Minoans.
The fusion of Cretan civilization and the Greek culture of the mainland began sometime after 2000 B.C., with influences working from south to north originally, as Minoan trade and political relations with the barbaric mainland increased. But influences soon began to move in the other direction.
Traces of the mainland culture appear most dramatically in the Cretan city of Knossos between 1450 and 1400 B.C. Here we find a new linear script, definitely Greek in origin, called Linear B and only recently deciphered, which remained in use until around 1200 B.C. Other evidences of mainland influence are manifested in the art, technology, and increasingly warlike tone of the life of the city.
The reasons for the changes in the life of Knossos are not known. Perhaps the city was seized by a Mycenean raiding party. In any event, the transformation of Knossos marked the beginning of the end for the Cretans. Around 1400 B.C. Knossos was sacked and burned to the ground.
A similar fate befell most of the other major Cretan cities shortly thereafter. It was long believed that the destruction of the Cretan cities was the work of northern marauders who had grown tired of being exploited by their richer but more effete neighbors to the south. Some scholars now think that the fall of Crete was caused by an alliance of piratical powers in the eastern Mediterranean, located on Cyprus perhaps, who were desirous of breaking the Creatan monopoly of trade with the northern Aegean. Still others incline to the view that the cities were destroyed by earthquakes and tidal waves caused by a massive volcanic eruption on the island of Thera.
In any event, Crete never recovered its former position. Although it remained an important center of wealth and culture in the Aegean, exercising considerable civilizing influence on the cruder peoples of the Greek mainland, especially in the Pelponnese, for another three centuries, military power now shifted definitively to the north, where a new culture called Mycenaean--had taken shape. This was the world of Agamemnon, as the former had been the world of Minos.
By around 1450 B.C. a semicivilized culture, the Mycenaean, influenced by Minoan civilization but dominated by an interest in war rather than trade, in expansion by force rather than commerce, had taken shape in the northern Peloponnese. Two centuries later, this culture had spread its influence over most of the Greek mainland, owing largely to its mastery of a new technology. New building techniques allowed the Mycenaeans to construct great fortified strongholds. While new forms of military organization gave them a decisive advantage over their foes in Asia Minor and Crete.
The Mycenaeans worshiped deities connected with the sky, thunder, and the mountains--the gods of war and blood--rather than the dove, the snake, and the bull, symbolic of the creative forces of the earth, which were venerated by their move peaceful neighbors. It is true that the Mycenaeans did not depend upon war alone to sustain them n subject peasantry worked the land for them, and they learned the advantages of trade from the Minoans. But they preferred to fight and often banded together in great expeditions, such as the one that sacked Troy in the thirteenth century B.C. and provided the subject for Homer's Iliad. They might have undergone a normal evolution to higher civilization had the martial element in their culture not been strengthened by the necessity of withstanding invaders from the north and west, who infiltrated the eastern Mediterranean in the late thirteenth century B.C. Gradually the great Mycenaean feudal baronies broke up into smaller fighting bands, each dedicated to the destruction of all the others and all contributing to the weakening of the whole.
The result was that when, in the twelfth to eleventh centuries B.C., a barbarian people from the Balkans, the Dorians, found their way into Greece, they were able to move virtually unopposed all the way to Crete, sacking and pillaging wherever they went.
The Dorians spoke a Greek dialect and could ultimately be assimilated, but not before they had effected the last major reshuffling of the Greek ethnic map. Bypassing Attica, the Dorians moved down into the Peloponnese, where they formed the basis of the later Spartan population of Laconia. They then pushed out onto the islands of the Aegean and the western coast of Asia Minor. Evidences of their impact are discernible as far as Cyprus in the south. They dealt the death blow to Cretan culture and hurled the Greek world into an age of chaos as dark as that of the early Middle Ages in Europe.
From the eleventh to the eighth centuries B.C., literate civilization
virtually disappeared in the Aegean. When it finally reappeared
in the seventh century, it was centered, not on the Greek mainland,
but in Asia Minor, in Ionia, where the Greeks had come into contact
with the city-dwelling peoples of the Mesopotamian cultural bloc.
A. Science and Philosophy
Here the unique elements of Greek culture as we know it made their
first appearance. What we recognize as Greek literature, Greek
science and philosophy, and Greek political institutions took
shape in cities such as Chios, Samos, and Miletus in Ionia. From
there they were exported to the Greek mainland to flourish in
the sixth century in cities such as Athens, Thebes, and Corinth.
Our knowledge of this world of Ionia and of the cast of mind that characterized its people is provided by the closest thing to the Hebrew Bible ever produced in Greece, the epic poems of Homer. The Greeks about whom Homer writes in the Iliad; were organized in clans held together by belief in descent from a common ancestor and devotion to a common pantheon of gods. On great cooperative enterprises such as the attack on Troy, the clans formed into larger fighting units (tribes) under the leadership of a war-chief (such as Achilles).
The tribes in turn were marshaled under a king, such as Agamemnon, whose authority was always very tenuous and whose power of command waxed and waned with the success or failure of the enterprise. At the end of the expedition, the clans dispersed, each returning to its own territory to devote itself to fighting with neighboring clans, to maintaining control over the slaves and peasants who worked the land, or to intra-clan feuding among heads of families.
Within the clan itself the basic unit was the male head of family. whose power over his wives and children was absolute. The head of the family sacrificed to the ancestral gods and spirits, voted in the clan councils, and represented all members of the family in judicial disputes over property or defended the family's honor by the code of the blood feud. Only the head of family had what we might term a public personality, or rights within the clan. The women and children of the family owed everything to the father, who might dispose of their property and even their lives as he desired. As can be readily seen, the social system was potentially unstable, for the principal guarantee of justice was individual physical strength or cunning. In enterprises that required large-scale cooperation, the safety of the entire group might be endangered by the whim of a single warrior, such as Achilles who, offended by Agamemnon's confiscation of a captive woman, withdrew from the fight against the Trojans at a critical moment and sulked in his tent with impunity until his offended honor had been satisfied.
Members of the clan who lacked the strength of an Achilles
were dependent upon their families alone to guarantee security
and justice to them. If the family to which the individual belonged
was poor or weak, that family could hope for very little of justice
or security. So, too, the individual members of the family. The
son or daughter subjected to the rule of a tyrannical father had
no recourse; he had to comply with whatever the father demanded
of him or leave the family and set out on his own.
This system was adequate for the relatively simple needs of barbarian
existence The continual movement of the tribe, its ceaseless wars,
and the variable food supply, which all too often ebbed below
the level of subsistence, kept the group at relatively constant
size and allowed only the strongest to survive. But once the warrior-nomads
settled on the lands of Hellas, became more domesticated, turned
to farming and animal husbandry, and achieved a more stable social
order, the resulting security combined with an increased food
supply to cause a radical increase in the population.
The increase in the population meant that the holdings of the
individual family soon became inadequate to the needs of all the
individuals in it, which led to chronic land-hunger. Younger sons
were unable to support themselves on inherited lands, and the
family, which had once been a source of security, became increasingly
a burden against which the more adventurous spirits among the
Greeks soon rebelled.
The Beotian poet Hesiod, writing around 700 B.C., gave literary
expression to the growing dissatisfaction with the older tribal
society, in which might alone made right. In his Works and
Days, Hesiod defended the cause of the peasant who worked
the land and earned his bread through his mastery of the secrets
of nature. He deplored the rule of force, which allowed the warrior
to deprive the farmer of the fruits of his toil, and called for
a rule of law that would lead to an order among men similar to
the harmony the farmer had discovered in nature.
The population explosion of the eighth century B.C. had a profound effect on Greek social institutions and cultural ideals. Only younger sons left the family to seek their fortunes elsewhere, as soldiers of fortune and marauders, as colonists in foreign lands, or as traders and manufacturers. The emotional and religious ties that had linked the individual to the family and the family to the clan were challenged as unnecessarily restrictive and productive of strife rather than of security and justice. During this period, there developed in the cities that grew up on the Greek mainland a great division between those who worked the soil and those who derived their livelihood primarily from manufacture and trade. The lyric poets of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. reflect the resulting social tension, some of them speaking in pessimistic tones of the awful future awaiting a mankind that has lost respect for its traditional gods and values, others lamenting the decline in the status of the warrior, or aristocratic, class.
But there was no turning back to the older ways. In the end, the Greeks abandoned the society based on blood kinship and formed a new society based on the exchange of mutually beneficial social and economic functions. For the older rule of brute force and tradition they substituted codes of written laws designed to assure security for the individual and justice in the group. without appeal to force. In place of the tribe, clan, and family, the Greeks of the sixth century substituted the city-state (polis) as the basic social unit
The idea of the city-state was not unique
with them, but among the Greeks it was given a unique development.
This affected Greek culture definitively. It made of the Greek
people one of the most explosively creative forces in the ancient
world.