THE DARK AGE (c. 1100 TO 776)

Oleh Eka

07 December 2011

Bagikan:

Tweet

THE DORIANS: THE COLONIZATION OF AEOLIS, IONIA, AND DORIS

SECTIONS: DIPYLON ANTIQUITIES: HESIOD: THE PHOENICIANS AND SOME OTHER NATIONS DURING THE DARK AGE 

OF the age that we have been considering, that of the Achaean supremacy, we have in Homer's poems a wonderfully distinct, though perhaps somewhat imaginative, picture. These Homeric men and women and the world in which they lived, although we have no memorials of
them but words, seem very near to us--nearer by far than many nations of whom we have abundant relics, such as the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Egyptians--nearer, too, than many a people of an age not far removed from our own. Without its vates sacer this Achaean age would doubtless be as much of a blank as the three centuries which followed it-- an epoch which is indeed fairly rich in myths, but about which we know for certain much less than we do about the far earlier Minoan and Egyptian civilizations. One fact, however, is indubitable. It was an epoch of great invasions or 'migrations,' which rapidly changed the character of the population and the civilization in many parts of Greece and extended the Hellenic name to large tracts of country on the other side of the Aegaean Sea.

First, let us see what the myths say.

MYTHICAL ACCOUNTS OF THE MIGRATIONS

Hellen, king of Phthia, in Thessaly, and son of Deucalion (the Greek Noah), was the mythical ancestor of all the Hellenes. Aeolus and Dorus were his sons, Achaeus and Ion his grandsons
through another son. From these 'eponymous' heroes were descended the Aeolians, Dorians, Achaeans, and Ionians. The Aeolians lived in Thessaly and the Dorians in Doris, a
small district in central North Greece. The Ionians settled in the country afterwards called Achaea, and the Achaeans conquered the whole of the Peloponnese except this district
of the Ionians and the mountain strongholds of the Arcadians.

Now in the Peloponnese there had been before the coming of the Achaeans two great reigning dynasties--the descendants of Perseus (who is said to have founded Tiryns and Mycenae) and the Pelopid princes of Pisa, Olympia, and Amyclae, with whom, as we have already seen, the northern Achaean invaders probably intermarried and identified themselves. The last of the Perseid dynasty had been Eurystheus (the king of Argos who enslaved Heracles). He was succeeded by the Pelopid Atreus. On the death of Heracles (traditional date 1209) his children were exiled from Argos. They endeavoured to return and recover their possessions, but after Hyllus, the son of Heracles, had been killed in single combat they promised to renounce all further attempts for a hundred years. At the end of this time ( 1104) they put themselves at the head of a great army of Dorians, ¹ who espoused their cause, and who were finding the little district of Doris between Oeta and Parnassus too narrow for their needs. This Dorian host, helped by the Aetolians and Locrians, built a fleet at a port thereafter known as Naupactus ('Place of Shipbuilding'), and overran most of the Peloponnese, which was divided among the Heracleidae and their Dorian allies. The most powerful of the Peloponnesian monarchs was the Pelopid-Achaean Tisamenus, son of Orestes (and, therefore, grandson of Agamemnon). He was either slain or else compelled to retire with his Achaeans to the northern district of the Peloponnese, which was, as already stated, inhabited by Ionians. These Ionians were driven out by the Achaeans, and took refuge in Attica.

Now the king of Athens about this time was Codrus, of the race of Nestor, whose descendants had been driven out of Pylos by the Dorians. When the Dorians also attacked Attica Codrus devoted himself to death, and thus (in accordance with an oracle) saved his country. His sons quarrelled, and when the oracle gave its verdict for one of them the other went off with a 'mixed multitude' consisting to a great extent of the Ionian refugees, and, making his way from island to island across the Aegaean, founded colonies on the coast of Asia Minor, which ultimately developed into Ionia with its twelve great cities.

The story of the 'Aeolic migration' is thus narrated by old writers.

On the 'Return of the Heracleidae'--i.e. invasion of the Peloponnese by the Dorians--those of the Achaeans who did not remain with Tisamenus in Achaea crossed the Isthmus and made their way to Boeotia and thence through Thessaly and Thrace to the Hellespont; or else they reached the port of Aulis, the very place where Agamemnon had been delayed by winds and had started with his assembled fleet for Troy, and thence, accompanied by many Euboeans and others, they sailed across the Aegaean by the chain of islands that stretches from Euboea to the Troad. They made settlements in Lesbos and the adjacent mainland, capturing or founding twelve cities, of which Cyme, named after a town in Euboea, was the first--the mother- city of Smyrna, and mother, or perhaps sister, to the more famous Cyme in Italy, the Cumae of the Romans.

Other forms of the legend, one of which is given by Pindar, make this Aeolian migration take place some twenty years before the 'Return of the Heracleidae' (i.e. in 1124), and affirm that Orestes himself led the emigrants. According to the Augustan writer Strabo, Orestes started with them, but died in Arcadia--a version which agrees with the story of Herodotus that the bones of Orestes were discovered some five and a half centuries later at Tegea, in Arcadia.

____________________

1

Plato gives a very different story, namely, that the Achaeans who returned from Troy were not received by the people at home, and, being expelled, put themselves under the leadership of a chief named Dorieus and changed their name to Dorians. They then allied themselves with the Heracleidae and recaptured the Peloponnese. This is worth mentioning if only to show the very great variations in such old myths.