XIV. End as of 9/13/95
To Notes as of 9/13/95
1. The language seems to have stayed the same, but you could see where the division was.
a) The invaders and the areas they settled after the invasion spoke what is called Doric Greek.
b) The Greeks who fled to Asia Minor in front of the invasion (interestingly enough, invaders themselves to the people already there) spoke a more elaborate version of Greek called (after where it was spoken) Ionic.
c) Attica's poor soil spared it from the main thrust of invasion and they spoke a dialect closer to the Ionic but influenced by Doric.
d) Invasions leave footprints--the more isolated areas had their own separate dialects of Greek.
2. Why did they win?
a) Iron vs. Bronze, the old facile explanation
(1) Homer's heroes wore bronze, although he mentioned iron, and Hesiod listed the ages of man kind as a golden one of bronze followed by a harsh one of iron.
(2) The old argument went--iron is better than bronze, therefore the Dorians and their iron won.
(a) 1)Iron isn't better than bronze--it's less flexible and rusts
(b) 2)Iron has a higher melting temperature than bronze--it's more destructive to work it.BUT
(c) When international trade collapsed, no more tin to mix with copper, and the bronze-using civilization were at a disadvantage
(d) And Iron is cheaper and more common than Bronze, and that meant you could efficiently arm large numbers of invading Dorians.
b) Mycenean civilization died as thoroughly as it did largely because of the palace system that nurtured it!
(1) To conquer a defended site, the Dorians had to destroy them, which they did by fire.
(2) Once you burned the palaces, you destroyed the centers that allowed administration and the overseas trade.
(3) No need for literacy when there's nothing to buy, and art is much less important than food after your civilization is destroyed (Mad Max?)
(4) Rebuilding the palaces made no sense when you were trying simply to survive and so you end up doing what Hesiod is doing when they rediscover literacy in the 8th Century--sitting on a hill herding sheep and trying to k eep a little surplus away from the local Dorian strong man, the basileus.
(5) Again, see Th. 1.12 for his note that they'd lost everything they had from 1100 to 800.
B. We call both sets of "Dark Ages" dark because the written records stops and leaves us in the guess where...
1. No evidence of large buildings until the 8th Century when temples go up.
2. No evidence of commercial navigation, although some lucky diver could crack this one right open.
3. We don't know how many people died in and as a result of the war and the migrations.
4. What survived (helped by the ruins) were the memories, until someone descended from the refugees in Asia organized them, made them consistent, and wrote them down--that is, Homer.
XV. The Long Climb Back Up
A. Even in a dark age, people have children, and the belief that a better life could be had elsewhere seems to have kept the emigration to Asia and the Islands going
B. As the Greeks began to occupy new coasts and islands, they began to re-establish contact with the Phoenician traders, who were on their own way back up.
1. Herodotus tried to link the connection to the old myths, having the Phoenician's kidnapping Io (1.1), making it the start of his war between the East and West.
2. The Phoenician's were always kidnapping people in Homer--being taken for a slave a very common and very possible horrible fate in times of disorder (Od. 14.335-400, 15.505-585)
3. On the other hand, they were showing people what could be made, and giving people something to do with what they were making. Herod. 5.58.1-2 has them settling in Greece, or at least establishing trading outposts.
4. And since it's easier to trade when you can make a contract: History of writing
a) Tokens and clay balls in Ur
b) Akkadian wedge-writing
c) Syllabic (Linear B)vs. more economical alphabetic systems
d) Hieroglyphic vs. wedge vs. script letters
e) Phoenicians were using the alphabetic system as early as 1400 B.C.
f) The Greeks, a la Sequoyah's Cherokees, adapted the Phoenician system to their own tongue at least by 750, adding such (anyone been to Yeshiva?) innovations as "vowels!
g) Grafitti, inscribed pots, and such references as the Mycalessos Massacre in Th. 7.29 argue that the Greeks were pretty damn literate. From 591 come a series of inscriptions from bored Greek mercenaries on a statue in Egypt, essentially "Kilroy was here! in the 6th century (Fornara 24).
5. Large scale commerce and construction suddenly became possible, and so began the Greek Rennaisance.
C. Homer's poems came early, and among other things,
1. Reminded people of large buildings
2. The gods, and how to worship them
3. Overseas trade, again
4. And what makes us Greeks different and special
D. Suggestions from anywhere were welcome
1. The archaeologists call from 700-600 the "Orientalizing" period of Greek art, since the statues and the columns look markedly Egyptian, Egypt being open to foreigners, interested in trade, and easy to get to (relativel y).
E. And populations began to rise as
1. Food could be stored in granaries
2. Slavers kept off by walls and organized defense
3. Husbands and wives found at social gatherings
4. And (don't underestimate this one) morale rose.
5. People began to clump together in the poleis to the point where the resources that had drawn them thither could no longer support them and their descendants.
F. Population pressure--we're back to our biological responses. One of the reasons we're so interested in things Greek is that the Greeks spread themselves and their culture throughout much of the Mediterranean.
XVI. Archaic Greek Colonization
A. My old Teacher, John Graham, quite literally wrote the book on this subject--he wrote the article in the OCD2 (s.v.) and in the CAH 2 v.3 Ch. 3, pp. 83-195, and so I've got a lot of information to share. Copies of tha t and Graham's book C&MC should be in the Classics Seminar Room and over at the Museum library.
1. You've got legends to sanctify what became a standardized procedure:
a) Cadmus, founder of Thebes, supposedly was a son of the king of Tyre, and when his sister Europa got kidnapped (there's poetic justice for you!)got told not come back until he found her. He never found her...
b) Heracles son Tlepolemus murdered his uncle Licymius and loaded up three ships and fled for Rhodes
(1) There they had to drive off Phoenician colonists first
(2) And it's interesting--Rhodian Doric was an isolated linguistic pocket in that area and the neighboring four cities of the Doric pentapolis.
B. Herodotus 4.150-165 reports the legends of Battis, the founder of Cyrene, and it describes the entire procedure as it existed during the Archaic Age.
1. 4.152 describes how a seven year drought on Thera forced the issue of colonization after the oracle at Delphi decreed that the Therans colonize Libya.
a) Delphi was where you went to get answers from the gods
b) You can argue spies, information gleaned from pilgrims, or divine intervention, but Delphi does seem to have been well informed, with errors still getting past the ambiguity.
c) Customarily, then, you asked Delphi either where to found a colony or what you should do about the conditions at home.
2. Delphi allowed Grinnus to buy off the prophecy and make poor Battus the leader of the colonization of Libya.
a) He as oikist/<1OI)KISTH/C>1 was in single command, best for prompt and focused action.
b) Also in charge of potentially-troublesome decisions--allocating individual lots, laying out the agora and the sacred precincts of the gods.
(1) Quite often some god or other (thanks to Delphi, Apollo was a favorite) was considered the patron of the whole thing
(2) Fires at the temple of the city's patron would be kindled, if possible, from a flame sent from the mother city.
c) The oikistes got his pay-off traditionally in spiritual coin:
(1) Tomb/monument in the marketplace, see Thucydides 5.11.1 for an adopted oikistes getting that treatment, Gen. Brasidas
(2) Also sacrifices were made at the tomb, see Herodotus 6.38.1.
3. Dear old "gullible" Herodotus also supplies the variants from the Cyrenean account of the affair.
a) Battus had gone to Delphi about his speech impediment (stammerer)
b) The answer he got was to found a colony, and after that the stories match, more or less.
c) Somebody wrote a note on one of Pindar's odes (Fornara 17) that Battus was on the losing side of a political struggle and thought it advisable to take his followers and go.
XVII. End as of 9/18/95
1. But first they hired a scout, Corobius the fisherman, who thought he'd found a suitable site off the coast at Platea.
2. He was resupplied in distress by the Samian traders, who by their very presence tell you of how widely the Greeks were getting to know the Mediterranean.
3. Meanwhile back on Thera, the scouting party had reported and lots were being drawn to see who had to go and who got to stay.
a) We have a much later inscription from Thera (Fornara 18)that claims to contain the original law
b) That, ll. 23-40, has one son from each family, all free-born
c) Each male colonist will receive a portion of availible land at the site
d) If the colonists can't make it work after five years with no more help from Thera, they can return
e) BUT if they don't go, they and anyone hiding or assisting them will be put to death
f) The gods were brought in to sanctify the whole thing via a curse ceremony for anyone violating the colony's charter.
4. Confirming (or inspiring?!) this is Herodotus's line that when Battus brought his two ships back to Thera instead of landing, the Therans took them under fire.
5. They first tried to settle on an offshore island, but had to quit that after two years.
6. That which you can defend is not necessarily that where you can make a living!
7. Delphi refused to let them off, and got them on the fact that they weren't actually on the mainland.
8. Once there, after six years they'd befriended the natives who showed them a really good site.
a) Quite often, the Greeks were actually welcomed into the other areas, which weren't as crowded as Greece itself was
(1) Megara Hybla and the Sicel King Hyblos
(2) 6.38.1 had an Athenian exile named Militiades invited to found a settlement in Scythia by people who needed military support
(3) Militiades and his family ended up immensely wealthy and powerful when he struck silver there
b) The Greeks brought trade goods and know-how
c) If the reception was hostile, the colonists either fled back to their ships or out-fought the natives
d) As a unit, the polis was defensible, self-contained, and reproducible.
9. Battus (atypically), ended up the first of a line of kings BECAUSE
a) Cyrene was the sole place in the Mediterranean where <1SI/LFION>1 grew--right out of David Letterman: "It's a great food AND a medicine."
b) Usually you ended up with a colony more or less resembling the mother-city (metropolis/<1MHTRO/POLIC>1) because that was the form of government with which people were comfortable.
c) People still wanted the things they'd had at home and would buy it from there, hence trade
d) There were straight trading colonies, the most famous being the emporion/<1E)MPO/RION>1 at Naucratis in Egypt--similar to Nagasaki, and pan-Hellenic
A. Cyrene was a VERY successful colony.
B. The big colonizing cities were not the ones we hear about so much afterwards--perhaps they'd done their job too well!
1. The Phocaean traders founded cities from the Black Sea (Lampsacus) to Italy (Neopolis/Naples)to France (Massilia/Marseilles).
2. Chalcis and Eretria on Euboea were both amazingly large-scale colonizers (Chalcidice), Th. 6.3, which makes sense considering they fought the first large-scale war of which we know over the fertile Lelantine plain in t he middle of the island (Thuc. 1.15) and which sucked in much of the Greek World (6th B.C.?)
3. Corinth made her money in Western trade, and really did herself a favor by founding Syracuse the MOST successful colony, in 725.
C. And there's Athens and Sparta... Both of whom missed their boats, but we'll go into that later.
1. Athens, as noted, had served as an embarking point for a great deal of the Ionic colonization and had apparently kept it going even through the Dark Ages.
2. When the Spartans got back from the means they took of avoiding Colonization, the Messenian War, they did find a generation of partheniai, who ended up founding and supporting
3. 707) Taras/Tarentum in Southern Italy.
a) The Tarentines always thought that they had a destiny, as Sparta's sole colony, to conquer Italy (The Nike on the Globe)
b) That would cause trouble later on.
XVIII. Speaking, however, of boats, I promised a brief rundown.
A. As I said, you can get away with murder on the Mediterranean in between April and October.
1. This explains some of the more wildly improbable exploits of the really ancient seafarers
a) Such as 15 mile voyages over open sea to Milos for obsidian c. 10,000 B.C.
b) Bones of the 300 pound deepwater tuna have been found in Neolithic sites from about the same era. Think about that.
2. One very seldom stayed out of sight of the coast for any length of time, or hopped from island to island or peninsula to peninsula.
a) After at least 600 years of seafaring, Nestor would make formal sacrifice to Poseidon for a safe voyage of 110 miles from Lesbos to Euboea
b) In case of storm or adverse wind, you hoped to run the ship aground, and we've found a lot of wrecks where they tried and didn't make it.
c) The ancient galleys were horribly uncomfortable and couldn't carry a lot of food or water, so they HAD to beach to supply their large crews.
d) The sailing ships could be a little braver, but they didn't like to take chances either.
e) In time solar and celestial navigation allowed longish voyages out of sight of land.
B. Ship construction in the Ancient Mediterranean stayed a constant from AT LEAST (Uli Burun wreck) 1400 B.C.
1. Hull planks lapped together edge on edge
2. Pinned in place with mortises and tenons
3. Treenails through the tennons, real nails through them!
4. What skeleton you get is added after that.
5. This system has its advantages:
a) Very strong and resilent
b) Easy to repair and easy on the wood--we have stories of ships kept alive for centuries just by replacing them piece by piece.
c) Doesn't use a lot of metal.
6. And disadvantages
a) Very labor intensive, but, hey, that's what slaves are for
b) Very slow unless you've got a lot of people to throw at it.
7. Masts were built of composite timbers for the really big ships--the biggest trees just didn't last that long, but they were in high demand: "The Cedars of Lebanon"
8. Steering with the Steering Oar works every bit as well as a stern rudder, although it's a bit more complicated to construct.
9. Some of the greatest feats of Ancient Seafaring show you how far you can push this equipment:
a) Necho's Phoenicians almost certainly circumnavigated Africa between 610 and 594 B.C., Herodotus 4.42
(1) Red Sea to Gibraltar, easier voyage
(2) Two years, two crops
(3) Old gullible Herodotus: The sun on the other side of the sky! Who's going to believe that!
b) Madman Pythias of Massilia in the late 4th Century (Phocaean)
(1) undoubtedly made to Scandinavia, I'm not ruling out Iceland
(2) Circumnavigated Britain, maybe reached the Baltic
(3) Left remarkably accurate astronomical data to prove that he knew what he was talking about, e.g., The North Star isn't.
XIX. End as of 9/20