Greek Dark Ages

Our topic today is the Dark Ages and the world of Homer.

Of course, you have as one of your reading assignments a problem that deals precisely with that question that asks the subordinate questions, was there a world, a real world, Homer's poems refer to.

If so, what world was it? Was it the world of the Mycenaean Bronze Age? Was it the world that succeeded that Bronze Age that we call the Dark Ages? Was it the world in which tradition says Homer himself lived that we think of as the transition to the classical, well first to the archaic and then to the classical period, the period in which we think about the dawn of the polis? That really is the question we are wrestling with, and of course behind it all is the idea, can we seek any historical information from Homer's poems at all? It would be a terrible blow to me and everybody else in the field if the answer was no.

because just about everything we have to say about this period between the Bronze Age and the emergence of the polis, most of it involves inferences from our understanding of what the Homeric poems tell us.

but I think we need to take a hard look at what we can do.

I thought it would be worthwhile reading a sentence each from the introductory paragraphs that we provide for you in the problem to show you the range of opinion that is pretty representative of what scholars think or have thought on the subject.

Moses Finley says, if then the world of Odysseus is to be placed in time as everything we know from the comparative study of heroic poetry says it must, the most likely centuries seem to be the tenth and the ninth, that is to say what we call the dark ages.

Anthony Andrews says, it may be that the epic tradition had at some stage used as a model for the army before Troy, an idealized version of some of those bands of colonists who settled the coast of Asia Minor in post-Mycenaean times.

I mean, there's been very little so far that we've.

The Greek Dark Age was, you know, not obviously recoverable from and yet classical Greece followed it.

Right.

Black death with like science that was basically magic and prayers.

Yeah.

Uh, and then the Greek Dark Ages, the Arch- the Archaic Period, so around 700 BC, Homer praised Thracian wine in the Iliad.

Really?

Yes, he did.

Mm.

So the, the Greek Dark Ages means pre-history.

Yeah, essentially.

Yeah.

Archaic Greece runs from the eighth to the fifth centuries BC, and it is a period of renewal for the Greeks after a long period of stagnation.

called the Greek Dark Ages, which had followed the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization in Greece.

The Greeks eventually recovered.

They underwent big changes.

Anyway, so what happened? So it is a, in my opinion, reasonably faithful adaptation of the poem in terms of at least the story and the characters and key characters and so on.

So basically what the Odyssey is, is that it is an 8th century BC poem from before the famous bit of ancient Greece when Greece is emerging from the so-called Dark Ages or the end of the Greek Dark Ages.

The Mycenaean, what we

call the Mycenaean period.