Hello! χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History, Episode 7: The Period Formerly Known as the Dark Age of Greece. I’m Scott Emmons.  

A couple of episodes ago we looked at the Mycenaean civilization of Bronze Age Greece, which is known for its elaborate palaces, massive fortifications, and thriving trade networks. Well, this is the episode where that all comes crashing down, ushering in a new era that was known for a long time as the Dark Age of Greece. That term has recently been going out of fashion for reasons we’ll discuss. Some people still call it that, you’ll still see it in some textbooks, but it’s becoming more and more common to call it the Early Iron Age. I’m not crazy about the term Dark Age myself, so I’ll be using the updated language.

But whatever we call it, we’re talking about a period that brought big changes to Greece, and those changes start with an event known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Sometime around 1200 BCE, the great powers of the Mediterranean and the Near East started to come under attack. Cities and even whole civilizations were destroyed. We saw in the episode on the Trojan War that the Hittite Empire had been a major player with power over a huge expanse of Anatolia. That was completely wiped out. Troy was also destroyed around this time. Egypt was attacked repeatedly and managed to fight off the invaders, most famously under the pharaoh Rameses III. We can still hear Rameses bragging about that, because he left behind a mortuary temple full of reliefs and inscriptions proclaiming his victories. But even though Egypt survived, its power in the region was permanently diminished. 

Now, no one really knows what caused the Late Bronze Age collapse. Historians have advanced a lot of hypotheses, often involving things like climate change and widespread drought. No doubt there was a combination of causes. One agent of destruction that gets a lot of play in the history books is a group of invaders known as the Sea People. The term comes from those Egyptian records, which make it clear that the Sea People weren’t just raiders. The reliefs show not only warriors, but women and children, as well as oxcarts loaded with household goods. So it seems these were migratory groups, probably fleeing violence or maybe natural disasters in their homelands and looking for a new place to settle. The Late Bronze Age collapse is a huge topic, but I’ll avoid that rabbit hole and just say this was a time when a lot of different people were on the move and causing a lot of destruction. And one casualty of all that destruction was the palace culture of Mycenaean Greece. 

It's easy to look back over three millennia and think of the Mycenaean collapse as a sudden event, but it actually took several decades to play out. Pylos, the great palace center on the southwestern coast, was destroyed by an attack from the sea in about 1200 BCE. The palace at Mycenae was destroyed around 50 years later. And it’s not like the palaces were caught off guard. At Mycenae, archaeology shows that the fortification walls were extended about the time Pylos was destroyed. And the new construction included a hidden passage leading to a huge underground cistern that would provide a water supply in case of a siege. You can still see that cistern if you visit Mycenae today, and it’s yet another one of those amazing testaments to Bronze Age engineering. 

So the Mycenaeans had plenty of warning that they were in danger, but despite all those preparations, the palaces all eventually fell. And that means not just the palaces, but whole economies. Remember, a Mycenaean palace was a redistribution center, bringing in produce and other goods from the surrounding area, then sending them out under the direction of the king or the palace bureaucracy. So the destruction of a Mycenaean palace meant the collapse of that whole system. And when a system like that falls apart, what comes next?

Well, as I said at the start, what came next has traditionally been called a Dark Age. Which is an ambiguous term. In one sense, it’s dark because we don’t know a lot about it. The archaeological record doesn’t offer the kinds of monumental buildings and precious objects that we have from the Mycenaean era. On top of that, writing completely disappears. The Linear B script that told us so much about the Mycenaean world was almost exclusively a tool for keeping records of inventories, transactions, all the things the palace regulated. Once the palaces are gone, there’s no need for that tool, so it goes away forever.  

So a comparative lack of information makes this period “dark” in the sense that we can’t see much of what’s going on. But the term “Dark Age” obviously has a negative connotation, and it’s meant to describe the depopulation and economic decline that took place in much of Greece. Trade networks were disrupted, so there wasn’t the same vibrant exchange of goods that we saw at the height of the Bronze Age. Greece became less connected with the broader Mediterranean world. Even communities within Greece became less tightly connected to one another, so that the cultural unity of the Mycenaean period was weakened. Some popular histories, when they discuss this period, make statements like “The slate was wiped clean.” The idea being that the culture had to start over from square one and develop into the city-state system that we think of as ancient Greece.  

In its broad outlines, that conventional view has some truth to it, but like a lot of historical narratives, it’s oversimplified. As we’ll see, overseas trade was disrupted, but it didn’t stop altogether. And in some ways, the whole paradigm may be changing. A scholar by the name of Alex Knodell (that’s Knodell with a K) has recently suggested that maybe we’ve been looking at Mycenaean Greece through the wrong lens. Because even at the height of the palatial period, a great deal of Greek territory was outside the direct control of the palaces. There were plenty of agricultural villages where life probably didn’t change much after the palaces fell. So maybe the era of great Mycenaean palaces was really just a flash in the pan, and when they fell, Greek life continued more or less as before. It’s an interesting way of looking at it. But the fact remains that the centers of Mycenaean civilization, with their bustling economies and connections throughout the Mediterranean, were either abandoned or went into deep decline.

Well, scholars can keep debating those points. But what can the ancient Greeks tell us about this period? Interestingly, they had no tradition of a Dark Age or any kind of a sharp break. They did have the idea that there was an earlier heroic age when people were stronger, braver and better looking than in their own day; but there was no sense that civilization had come crashing down and had to start over from scratch. What we get instead is a picture of instability following the Trojan War, which was usually thought of as the last great event of the heroic age. The Greek historian Thucydides, as translated by Richard Crawley, says, quote: 

The late return of the Greeks from Troy caused many revolutions, and factions ensued almost everywhere; and it was the citizens thus driven into exile who founded the cities. 

Unquote.

So in Thucydides, we have a picture of an unsettled time with a lot of violence, political upheaval, and migration. In a general way, it fits with what we know about the end of the Bronze Age. 

A few lines later, he mentions a couple of legends that tell a lot about the way the Greeks thought about their own past. Quote: 

…the Dorians and the Heraclids became masters of the Peloponnesus; so that much had to be done and many years had to elapse before Greece could attain to a durable tranquility undisturbed by removals, and could begin to send out colonies, as Athens did to Ionia and most of the islands...

Unquote. 

In that passage Thucydides touches on two big migration stories involving two major subgroups of the Greek people: the Dorians and the Ionians. There’s all kinds of debate about how much actual history these stories preserve, but it’s still important to understand them because they’re central to the ways these different groups of Greeks thought about themselves and their relations with each other. So I’m going to spend the rest of this first segment looking at each of these two stories in turn. 

Migration Story Number 1: The Return of the Heraclids. 

It’s such a dramatic name, I just felt like it needed some reverb. But that’s what it was called, the Return of the Heraclids. Okay, so who were they? The word just means the descendants of Heracles — better known these days as Hercules. And the story goes that the sons of Heracles, who had a rightful claim to the Peloponnese, were driven out. But an oracle predicted that a hundred years later, their descendants would return to reclaim it. These Heraclids were identified with the Dorian tribes, and according to the legend, they returned to the Peloponnese and established their dominance in a good part of it. So in classical times, if you were a Dorian living in the Peloponnese, that was your origin story.

Now, for a long time, in the 19th and well into the 20th century, historians thought that story preserved a memory of what they called the Dorian Invasion. According to this theory, the Dorians were a tougher, more primitive, more warlike group of Greeks who swept down from the north and conquered the more civilized, less hardened Mycenaeans. Not only were they tougher, but they used iron weapons, which were stronger than the bronze that the Mycenaeans used, so they had a technological advantage in addition to brute strength.  

Well, archaeology eventually showed that the Dorian Invasion theory didn’t quite hold up, at least in that simple version. There was just too much cultural continuity to support the idea of one culture storming in and replacing another. So there was no sudden Dorian invasion on a grand scale. Some scholars now hold a modified version of the theory, that there was a more gradual influx of Dorian invaders over time. Others argue that the Dorians were there all along and somehow established dominance from within. What’s clear, though, and in some ways more important, is that the Dorians of the Peloponnese thought of themselves as descendants of those conquering Heraclids.  

So that’s the Dorian story. Migration Story Number 2 we can call the Ionian Migration. (Not as dramatic a name, so no echo effects needed here.) This narrative says that when invaders came in and started driving out Ionian Greeks from where they’d been living, the refugees ran away to Athens and its surrounding region of Attica. Now, for whatever reason, Athens at the end of the Bronze Age escaped the wholesale destruction that we saw in places like Mycenae and Pylos. So it was a likely place for refugees to flee to. A number of legends tell of Ionians fleeing to Athens — and not only settling there but using it as a springboard to go out and found cities in the islands and on the coast of Anatolia on the other side of the Aegean. Those included cities like Miletus, Ephesus, and others that grew to be important players in the area. In fact, one coastal region came to be called Ionia.  

It’s hard to find clear evidence to show exactly how or when this all happened. We do know that the Attic dialect that the Athenians spoke had a lot in common with Ionian, and they celebrated some religious festivals in common. So there were definitely cultural connections. The details about the Ionian migration are murky. But here again, the most important thing to my mind is that classical Athens thought of itself as the mother of those Ionian cities and considered them as something like family. And that’s going to play an important part in later Greek history. 

And that’ll take us to our first break. Epic Greek History is ad-free, and I plan to keep all my content free. But there are costs to producing it. And on that note, I’d like to thank my very first paid subscriber, Ian Munro. If you’d like to be like Ian and help support the podcast, you can subscribe for as little as three dollars a month by clicking the support button at www.epicgreekhistory.com. For now, let’s take a non-ad break for…

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A few episodes ago, I explained that my greeting, χαίρετε, at the beginning of each episode literally means, “Be happy.” Although it can mean both hello and goodbye, you may have noticed that I’ve been signing off with a different word, εὐτυχεῖτε. I’ve translated it loosely as “be well,” but a more accurate rendition would be something like “be fortunate.” It’s related to the noun τύχη, which means luck or chance. The prefix “eu-” means “well” or “good,” and you can see it in a lot of our Greek-derived words like “euphoria,” “euphemism,” and so on. Εὐτυχεῖτε is a fairly formal way of saying goodbye, so it wouldn’t often be used in casual conversation, but it’s a polite way to close a letter — and probably a podcast if the ancient Greeks had had them. And that’s today’s moment of Greek!

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So far we’ve been talking mostly about legends, but most of our hard information about this period has to come from archaeological evidence. That’s a challenge right there, because in a lot of places the archaeological remains are pretty sparse. It’s also hard to get a general picture of Early Iron Age Greece, because one of its key characteristics is diversity from one place to another. And we’re talking about a long span of time — between four and five hundred years. There’d be no way to do a complete survey in one podcast episode. So in this segment I’m going to sample two well-known archaeological sites that give us different perspectives on this period, and then we’ll look at a couple of important technological developments that helped shape the evolution of Greek culture. 

The first site we’ll visit is called Nichoria, and it fits pretty well with the narrative of a return to more primitive conditions after the Mycenaean collapse. Nichoria was in the southern Peloponnese, and it had been a thriving town back in Mycenaean times. It was in the territory controlled by the palace of Pylos, so it would have been a part of that whole palace-centered economy we’ve talked about. Well, Pylos was wiped out in about 1200 BCE, and Nichoria was abandoned around that time. But sometime roughly a century later it started to be settled again, and it grew to be a fairly prosperous village. When I say fairly prosperous, bear in mind that we’re talking about a simple economy and a very small community. At its height, in the early to mid 9th century BCE, it seems to have had a total population of about 200.

 Nichoria sat on a ridge overlooking a fertile plain, and the inhabitants supported themselves partly by agriculture. But in this period, a lot of that land is used for grazing herds of cattle, sheep and goats rather than for growing crops. With a lower population, and with a lot of land reverting to wilderness, hunting and herding animals becomes a more efficient way to use that land. To quote from Carol Thomas and Craig Conant in their book Citadel to City-State: 

Animal husbandry offers several advantages in an unstable environment. Animals are a source of food, labor, and secondary products that can be stored until they are needed. In addition, animals are movable wealth and, as such, can serve as objects of exchange.

Unquote.

That equivalence of animals with wealth shows up in the Homeric epics. At one point in the Iliad, Homer describes a bronze tripod as being worth 12 head of cattle.

So what was community life like for the inhabitants of Nichoria? From the archaeological remains we can tell that they lived in simple houses with mud brick walls and thatched roofs. One of those houses was centrally located and considerably bigger than the rest. Metal finds from Nichoria are scarce and mostly unimpressive, but most of them come from that bigger house, and they include one small scrap of gold wire. So whoever lived there must have been someone important, and that little bit of gold suggests they were comparatively wealthy. But apart from its size, there’s not much to differentiate that house from all the others. It has the same packed earth floor and mud brick walls as the rest. So it’s a fair guess that this was the chief’s house. But even if he had a great deal of power and prestige, his standard of living wasn’t that much higher than in the rest of the community. We’re not dealing with a Mycenaean-style king in a great palace, with a lot of ranks between him and the lowest class. We seem to be in a much more egalitarian society.  

So, if we were to judge only from Nichoria, we’d conclude that, yes, Greece had fallen back into a kind of simple, pastoral existence. But we’ll see some striking contrasts when we move on to a site called Lefkandi. These names, by the way, Nichoria and Lefkandi, are not their ancient Greek names — we have no idea what they were called in the Early Iron Age — but they get their names from the modern towns where the archaeological sites are located. Anyway, Lefkandi was in Euboea, which is a long, narrow island that runs parallel to much of Greece’s eastern coast. Like Nichoria, it had been a prosperous Mycenaean town, but it seems to have been continuously inhabited into the Early Iron Age. It also came to be a lot wealthier and more connected with the outside world.

 The most impressive discovery at Lefkandi is the remains of a monumental building dated sometime around 1000 to 950 BCE. It was about 30 feet wide by 160 feet long, so a little over half the length of an American football field — which makes it the biggest Greek building known from the Early Iron Age. And inside this structure, archaeologists discovered two burial shafts. In the first shaft were two bodies. One was a cremated warrior, with his remains inside a bronze urn made in Cyprus, and an iron sword and other goods buried with him. The other body was an inhumation, in other words a non-cremated body, of a woman with gold earrings, a gold necklace, and disks made of hammered gold over her breasts. The second shaft held the bodies of four horses, which were evidently offered as sacrifices at the time of the burial. 

 So, obviously, we’re seeing a lot more wealth here. And some features of the burial, like the horse sacrifice and the gold ornaments that accompanied the woman, look a lot like throwbacks to Mycenaean funerary practices. Scholars have speculated that the elites of Lefkandi might have been deliberately resurrecting bits and pieces that were remembered from the Mycenaean world to associate themselves with a heroic past. And just to add more to the mystery, soon after the burial, the whole building was destroyed and a huge mound was built on top of it. This big structure is often called the heröon, in other words a shrine dedicated to a hero. The people buried there may have had such prestige in life that they were honored as semi-divine figures after their death. 

 Whatever the case, soon after the building was destroyed, the wealthier people in the community started using a cemetery near the heröon for their own burials. The grave goods that have turned up there include high-quality pottery, weapons, and jewelry from different parts of the Mediterranean world. That alone is enough to put a dent in the old idea that trade between Greece and the broader Mediterranean came to a standstill in this period. I don’t want to give the impression that trade just continued at the same level as in the Bronze Age. But the island of Euboea, being just off the east coast of Greece on the way to the islands and Anatolia, was well situated for overseas trade. In any case, there was enough activity in a place like Lefkandi that the elites could enjoy luxury goods from places farther afield.

 The last thing I’ll mention about Lefkandi is that it seems to have been one of the key players in bringing ironworking to Greece. This was another import from the Near East, and it was a major technological development. Iron has some definite advantages over bronze. When it’s worked properly, it’s harder and more durable, so it makes better tools and weapons. Also, iron ore is much more available in Greece than the copper and especially the tin needed to make bronze, so it’s cheaper and easier to come by. So why didn’t it catch on earlier? Mainly because it’s much harder to produce iron that really is superior to bronze. It takes a much hotter furnace, plus special techniques to bring the carbon level up to a point where the iron takes on some of the properties of steel. The breakthrough came in the Near East — some say in Cyprus — in about the mid-11th century BCE, and soon after that, iron implements started to spread to Greece, along with the techniques for making them. Bronze never goes away completely, but for things like swords, or for that matter ploughshares, iron largely replaces it. So the period we’re talking about literally is an iron age.

 Well, unless you’ve studied a lot of Greek history or archaeology, you’ve probably never heard of Nichoria or Lefkandi before. But everyone’s heard of Athens, and that’s where we’re headed next. Like Lefkandi, it was an early adopter of ironworking, but it was also ground zero for another big technological and cultural development — this one in the area of ceramics. Now, I have a confession to make. It’s pretty hard for me to get excited about pottery. I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum. If a Grecian urn gets John Keats’s poetic juices flowing, more power to him. For me, unless it has a really interesting image on it, my eyes glaze over pretty fast.  But if you’re like me, and pottery isn’t your cup of tea — or your amphora of wine — just bear with me for the next few minutes. Because pottery is super important for archaeologists. It’s the most common type of artifact that remains from the ancient world, and it tells us all kinds of things about chronology, trade patterns, cultural trends, and probably a few things I haven’t even thought of. 

 So two Athenian advances in ceramics have a major impact on the Greek world. One is a faster potter’s wheel, which allows for more control and precision in the shaping of the pots. That leads to a heightened sense of proportion and aesthetics. The other innovation is that potters start using a compass with multiple brushes attached to decorate their products with concentric circles and semicircles. That kicks off a whole new style that’s known as Protogeometric. John Boardman, in his classic book The Greeks Overseas, makes an interesting observation about the Protogeometric style. Quote:

 It was as though Athens was sloughing off the worn-out idioms of Greece’s Bronze Age, and replacing them by the new discipline and precision which were to remain hallmarks of Greece’s later achievements in the arts.

Unquote.

 That Protogemetric trend spread quickly to other parts of Greece, where local variations then developed. That serves as another reminder that we shouldn’t think of Early Iron Age Greek settlements as being isolated from each other. Clearly, either Athenian potters were setting up shop in other places, or potters in those places were learning the techniques and imitating the styles. We can really see two different forces at work here. There were enough connections between communities for Protogeometric pottery to spread, but at the same time the growth of different styles points to more regionalism across the Greek world.

 And that’ll take us to our second break. When we pick up again, we’ll see if the earliest Greek literature can tell us anything about Greek society and politics in the Early Iron Age. But first…

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 One of the most intriguing questions to me, in this prehistoric era, is how much continuity there was from early Greece to later periods. Were there patterns of thought or behavior we don’t even know about that continued to be part of Greek culture? Here’s an example of what can happen with cultural continuity. If you visit Greece today and chat with some of the locals, you may notice that the gestures for “yes” and “no” are different from the ones we use in the U.S. “Yes” is a downward nod of the head, pretty much what we’re used to, but the “no” gesture is just the opposite — an upward tilt of the head instead of a shake back and forth. It can be really confusing for a foreigner. Even if you know about it, we’re just conditioned from an early age to interpret an up or down motion as a “yes” answer. Well, that Greek “no” gesture appears as early as Homer. In one scene of the Iliad, the Trojan women pray to Athena for her help against the Greek forces. Athena answers “no” by tilting her head upwards. So there you have a 2700-year-old reference to a habit that’s still in force today. My point is, if that can happen, what cultural traits from classical Greece had their beginnings in the mists of prehistory? And that’s today’s random fact.

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 We’ve seen how the physical remains at places like Nichoria and Lefkandi can tell us a little about the social organization and power structure. But is there anything beyond things like differences in the sizes of houses or the richness of grave goods to tell us about Early Iron Age society? I’ll answer that with a definite… maybe. The Homeric epics, as far as we can tell, took shape sometime in the late eighth century BCE. That puts them in a transitional period at the very end or soon after the time we’re talking about. Scholars have argued for centuries about whether the epics reflect any real historical conditions at all. But one view that seems reasonable to me is that when the singers performed these epics, the society they described had to be relatable to a contemporary audience. The content had to be familiar enough for the listeners to understand and accept it. This is all very hypothetical, of course, and I’d recommend taking it with a grain or two of salt. But with that caveat in mind, we can look at the society depicted in Homer in the hope that it can tell us something about Early Iron Age Greece.

 For this segment, I want to keep myself honest and call out one of my sources. As always, I’m drawing on different books, web articles and whatnot, but for the structure of this and for a lot of the examples, I’ve leaned heavily on another podcast — which isn’t really a podcast at all, but the Open Yale Courses series of lectures on Greek history by the late Professor Donald Kagan. I feel like Dr. Kagan did a lot of the spade work for me here, so I wanted to be sure to give him a shout-out. 

 Okay, then, when we look at the society depicted in Homer, who’s calling the shots? The simple answer, of course, is the king, but that can mean different things. Back in the Mycenaean age, we saw that the “wanax” was a true monarch at the top of a multi-level hierarchy. A few steps below him was an official called a qa-si-re-u in Linear B, and that word passes into Homeric and later classical Greek as “basileus,” the standard word for a king. But in Homer’s world, a basileus is far from an all-powerful monarch. He’s more like a chief who has to have the support, or at least the acquiescence, of other men of similar rank. Even Agamemnon, the leader of the whole expedition to Troy, can’t unilaterally make decisions and tell his underlings, “Make it so.” He has to hold a council meeting, and the other basileis (plural of basileus) are not just there to sit and nod their heads. 

 The council scene at the start of the Iliad gives us a great illustration of this power dynamic. We looked at that scene back in the episode on the Trojan War, but just to provide a refresher... A plague has hit the Greek camp, bringing death and destruction, so they hold a council to decide how to solve the problem. They learn from a seer that Apollo is angry because Agamemnon has taken a young girl as a war prize, and she happens to be the daughter of a priest of Apollo. So the only way to get back on the god’s good side is to give the girl back. Agamemnon is pretty irked at this news, but he says he’ll give the girl back on one condition. It would be a disgrace for the generalissimo to go without a war prize, so someone has to give him one to make up for it. Well, that idea doesn’t sit well with Achilles, who’s the greatest warrior of them all. He stands up, calls Agamemnon a few not-so-flattering names, and tells him, “You give the girl back now, and after we take Troy, we’ll reward you several times over.” Well, that only escalates the argument. Agamemnon says, “No you don’t. I’m going to have my prize, even if I have to take it by force. Maybe I’ll even take yours!” Achilles fires back, as translated by Robert Fagles, quote:

 Shameless — armored in shamelessness — always shrewd with greed!

How could any Argive soldier obey your orders,

freely and gladly do your sailing for you

or fight your enemies, full force? Not I, no…

(Skipping ahead a few lines)

My honors never equal yours,

whenever we sack some wealthy Trojan stronghold—

my arms bear the brunt of the raw, savage fighting,

true, but when it comes to dividing up the plunder

the lion’s share is yours, and back I go to my ships,

clutching some scrap, some pittance that I love

when I have fought to exhaustion. No more now—

back I go to Phthia. Better that way by far,

to journey home in the beaked ships of war. 

I have no mind to linger here disgraced,

brimming your cup and piling up your plunder.

Unquote.

 Just imagine someone talking that way to King Henry VIII or the emperor Nero. They’d be lucky to get away with their head. But there’s no sense that Achilles has broken any rules by being insubordinate. Like all the other basileis, he joined the expedition against Troy expecting to get his fair share of booty, which more importantly represents honor. If he’s dishonored, he might as well take his ships and go home. The other heroes may think he’s being unreasonable, but he’s not going to get court-martialed.

 So that illustrates the power dynamic within the inner circle. In the second book of the Iliad, we get a glimpse of a different relationship, the one between the upper and lower classes. This time Agamemnon calls not a council of basileis, but an assembly of the entire army. He does this because Zeus has messed with his head and sent him a dream that makes him think he’s going to take Troy the next day. So he calls the assembly to announce that Troy is as good as theirs, but then he does the dumbest thing you could imagine. He decides that he’s going to first test the soldiers’ loyalty with a gigantic psych. He gets up in front of the troops and says, “Well, this has been a bust. We’ve been out here fighting for ten years, the gods are obviously against us, so let’s all just cut our losses and head home.” Of course he’s expecting they’ll all shout, “No, Agamemnon, we’ll fight and die for you to the end!” Instead, they all erupt in an explosive cheer and rush for their ships. So now Odysseus, who’s clever enough to understand what Agamemnon is doing, has to go and herd everybody back to the assembly. Here’s how Homer describes it:

 Whenever Odysseus met some man of rank, a king,

he’d halt and hold him back with winning words:

“My friend—it’s wrong to threaten you like a coward,

but you stand fast, you keep your men in check!

Unquote

 So he gently admonishes these noblemen and assures them that Agamemnon was just testing them. Then Homer goes on…

 When he caught some common soldier shouting out, 

he’d beat him with the scepter, dress him down:

“You fool — sit still! Obey the commands of others,

your superiors — you, you deserter, rank coward,

you count for nothing, neither in war nor council.

Unquote

 So you can see there are two distinct levels in the social order, and they can expect to be treated very differently, either with respect or contempt. And then, as soon as everyone’s been herded back to the assembly, a common soldier by the name of Thersites stands up. Homer describes him as “the ugliest man who ever came to Troy.” And he really goes out of his way to describe just how ugly he was — bandy-legged, with a clubbed foot, stooped shoulders, and a skull that went up to a point with scraggly wool on top. This is a thread that runs all through ancient Greek culture, by the way, the idea that the “better” people are good-looking. So this ugly common soldier lashes out at Agamemnon, and what he says isn’t really much different from what Achilles said earlier. He says essentially, we do all the fighting, and you get all the rewards. But since he’s Thersites and not Achilles, Odysseus tells him, “You can’t talk to kings like that!” He goes on for several lines, calling him every name in the book, and then, quote:

 …he cracked the scepter across his back and shoulders.

The rascal doubled over, tears streaking his face,

and a bloody welt bulged up between his blades,

under the stroke of the golden scepter’s studs.

He squatted low, cringing, stunned with pain,

blinking like some idiot… rubbing his tears off dumbly with a fist.

Unquote

 And how do the other common soldiers react? Maybe not the way we’d expect. Quote:

 …the men laughed now,

good hearty laughter breaking over Thersites’ head—

glancing at neighbors they would shout, “A terrific stroke!

A thousand terrific strokes he’s carried off — Odysseus,

taking the lead in tactics, mapping battle plans.

But here’s the best thing yet he’s done for the men —

he’s put a stop to this babbling, foulmouthed fool!

Never again, I’d say, will our gallant comrade 

risk his skin to attack kings with insults.

Unquote.

 It’s okay for Achilles to talk back to Agamemnon. But for Thersites, just getting up and expressing an opposing viewpoint is over the line. He’s not a member of that class, so he doesn’t have that right. It’s worth noting that, with the exception of “anax” for Agamemnon, Homer really only has one word for a man of high social rank — basileus. The one clear dividing line in Homer is between high and low. There are the basileis and there’s everybody else.

 And yet, the fact that there’s an assembly of the whole army at all has some importance for the future development of Greek politics. The two most basic instruments of government in Greek city-states were the council, which is a smaller, select group, and the assembly, which includes all the citizens. In the earliest stages, the aristocrats would hold virtually all the cards. The assembly might express its approval or maybe its disapproval for a decision made by the council, although in this period I imagine it usually acted as a rubber stamp. A commoner certainly wouldn’t participate in the debate. But still, from very early on, it seems to have been a given that at least in matters of war, the fighting men had to have some voice in the decision.

 But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re still in the world of Homer, where the basileus is the chief of his city or village. So where does his authority come from? At its core it’s a matter of having the most land, the biggest herds, and the most people in your sphere of influence. In theory, power is passed down from father to son. But birth alone isn’t enough. He has to be strong and warlike, because there are other nobles who’ll jump at the chance to take his place if he shows any weakness. Think of the Odyssey, where the nobles in Ithaka are all jockeying for the top position while Odysseus is missing in action. A word that occurs again and again in Homer is “iphi” — “by might.” It’s how a king needs to rule if he wants to stay in power. When Odysseus finally gets back home, he reasserts his authority “by might,” in a battle as bloody as anything that happened at Troy.

 Still, along with physical strength and courage, a basileus also has to have what we would call leadership skills. The ability to speak well and to be persuasive is valued almost as highly as the ability to fight. There’s a flashback in the Iliad where Achilles’ father Peleus sends him off to fight in the Trojan War. Achilles is very young at the time, and so Peleus sends his tutor along to teach him to be, quote, “both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.” A basileus has to have both of those qualities. 

 Now, again, when we’re using Homer as a guide to early Greek social and political structures, we’re on shaky ground. We really don’t know how much is rooted in historical reality. But we can speculate that the power structure in this period was something like what I’ve been describing. It certainly must have varied from one place to another. We can imagine that a village like Nichoria may have been more egalitarian, since the chief’s house wasn’t all that different from the others. In Lefkandi, we may have an instance of a warrior king whose accomplishments were so great that he achieved the status of a hero. But without more concrete evidence, we can’t draw any firm conclusions.

 That’s going to start changing in the next episode, at least the next full-length one. In the eighth century BCE, we’ll see an upswing in economic conditions, the first panhellenic festivals, the return of writing to the Greek world, and the emergence of the polis, the characteristically Greek city-state. 

 And that concludes Episode 7! If you’d like to see photos of some of the things I’ve mentioned, head on over to epicgreekhistory.substack.com. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, and if you did, please subscribe and share. If you have comments or corrections, shoot me an email at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. Or leave a comment on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons, my theme music was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp, and my logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.