200-623: The Dorian invasion (or Dorian migration ) is an ancient Greek myth and discredited archaeological hypothesis describing the movement of the Dorian people into the Peloponnese region of Greece. According to the myth, the Dorians migrated from central Greece shortly after the Trojan War and populated most of the southern Peloponnese, particularly the regions of Laconia , Messenia and
400-579: A pederastic light . Alexandrian poets at first, then more generally literary mythographers in the early Roman Empire, often re-adapted stories of Greek mythological characters in this fashion. The achievement of epic poetry was to create story-cycles and, as a result, to develop a new sense of mythological chronology. Thus, Greek mythology unfolds as a phase in the development of the world and of humans. While self-contradictions in these stories make an absolute timeline impossible, an approximate chronology may be discerned. The resulting mythological "history of
600-677: A Christian moralizing perspective. The discovery of the Mycenaean civilization by the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the nineteenth century, and the discovery of the Minoan civilization in Crete by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans in the twentieth century, helped to explain many existing questions about Homer's epics and provided archaeological evidence for many of
800-615: A Dorian colony on the southwest coast of Asia Minor ; following the literary tradition of the times he wrote in Ionic Greek , being one of the last authors to do so. He described the Persian Wars , giving a thumbnail account of the histories of the antagonists, Greeks and Persians. Herodotus gives a general account of the events termed "the Dorian Invasion", presenting them as transfers of population. Their original home
1000-539: A German-trained anthropologist with a professorship at the University of Athens , concurred with Nazi views as to the primacy of race in historical events and social organisation, but argued that the Dorian migrations had been "local movements" within a heterogeneous Greek race. The fundamental aspects of the racialised view of the Dorian invasion were rarely denied, even by those opposed to Nazi rule and politics, such as
1200-595: A campaign of reasserting itself as the quintessential Dorian city, including efforts to re-establish what were considered primordial Doric cultural forms, including the "hyperdoricisation" of its dialect. A reference in the work of the second-century CE geographer Pausanias , where the Messenians appeal to the Spartans on the basis of their shared Dorian ancestry during the Second Messenian War in
1400-585: A collection of epic poems , starts with the events leading up to the war: Eris and the golden apple of Kallisti , the Judgement of Paris , the abduction of Helen , the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis . To recover Helen, the Greeks launched a great expedition under the overall command of Menelaus 's brother, Agamemnon, king of Argos, or Mycenae , but the Trojans refused to return Helen. The Iliad , which
1600-492: A combination of their name and epithets , that identify them by these distinctions from other manifestations of themselves (e.g., Apollo Musagetes is " Apollo , [as] leader of the Muses "). Alternatively, the epithet may identify a particular and localized aspect of the god, sometimes thought to be already ancient during the classical epoch of Greece. Most gods were associated with specific aspects of life. For example, Aphrodite
1800-435: A continuation of that of ancient Greece. Germans were, under this paradigm, viewed as the "new Dorians". From 1794 onwards, Friedrich Schlegel promoted a Romantic and idealised view of Sparta as a definingly Dorian society. For Schlegel, Sparta represented a racial and cultural ideal, characterised by successful social integration and respect for the rights and dignity of women. This admiration and emulation of Sparta became
2000-525: A convenient framework into which to fit their own courtly and chivalric ideals. Twelfth-century authors, such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure ( Roman de Troie [Romance of Troy, 1154–60]) and Joseph of Exeter ( De Bello Troiano [On the Trojan War, 1183]) describe the war while rewriting the standard version they found in Dictys and Dares . They thus follow Horace 's advice and Virgil's example: they rewrite
2200-489: A flat disk afloat on the river of Oceanus and overlooked by a hemispherical sky with sun, moon, and stars. The Sun ( Helios ) traversed the heavens as a charioteer and sailed around the Earth in a golden bowl at night. Sun, earth, heaven, rivers, and winds could be addressed in prayers and called to witness oaths. Natural fissures were popularly regarded as entrances to the subterranean house of Hades and his predecessors, home of
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#17327693745862400-517: A fragment of the poet, Tyrtaeus , that "Sparta is a divine gift granted by Zeus and Hera" to the Heracleidae. In another version, Tyndareus gives his kingdom to Heracles in gratitude for restoring him to the throne, but Heracles "asks the Spartan king to safeguard the gift until his descendants might claim it." Hall, therefore, proposes that the Dorians are the people of the gift. They assumed
2600-558: A god "greater than he", Zeus swallowed her. She was already pregnant with Athena , however, and she burst forth from his head—fully-grown and dressed for war. The earliest Greek thought about poetry considered the theogonies to be the prototypical poetic genre—the prototypical mythos —and imputed almost magical powers to it. Orpheus , the archetypal poet, also was the archetypal singer of theogonies, which he uses to calm seas and storms in Apollonius' Argonautica , and to move
2800-513: A limited number of gods, who were the focus of large pan-Hellenic cults. It was, however, common for individual regions and villages to devote their own cults to minor gods. Many cities also honored the more well-known gods with unusual local rites and associated strange myths with them that were unknown elsewhere. During the heroic age, the cult of heroes (or demigods) supplemented that of the gods. "The origins of humanity [were] ascribed to various figures, including Zeus and Prometheus ." Bridging
3000-469: A manner not easily explained by the migration of a conquering elite. Cook published an article in 1962 in which he called the Dorian invasion "not a subject that is worth much study", citing the paucity of available evidence: he considered that the invasion probably did take place, but that it left no trace in the material record and that most elements of the mythical and historical tradition concerning it were unproven. Vincent Desborough , in 1964, demonstrated
3200-405: A musical contest with Apollo . Ian Morris considers Prometheus' adventures as "a place between the history of the gods and that of man." An anonymous papyrus fragment, dated to the third century, vividly portrays Dionysus ' punishment of the king of Thrace , Lycurgus , whose recognition of the new god came too late, resulting in horrific penalties that extended into the afterlife. The story of
3400-458: A number of local legends became attached. The story of Medea , in particular, caught the imagination of the tragic poets. In between the Argo and the Trojan War, there was a generation known chiefly for its horrific crimes. This includes the doings of Atreus and Thyestes at Argos. Behind the myth of the house of Atreus (one of the two principal heroic dynasties with the house of Labdacus ) lies
3600-563: A poem of Troy instead of telling something completely new. Dorians The Dorians ( / ˈ d ɔːr i ə n z / ; Greek : Δωριεῖς , Dōrieîs , singular Δωριεύς , Dōrieús ) were one of the four major ethnic groups into which the Hellenes (or Greeks) of Classical Greece divided themselves (along with the Aeolians , Achaeans , and Ionians ). They are almost always referred to as just "the Dorians", as they are called in
3800-607: A prominent Nazi historian and adherent of race theory, was particularly influential in entrenching the Dorian invasion in German-speaking scholarship. In February 1941, Adolf Hitler stated his belief that the Aryan race had only reached its apogee through its supposed invasion of Greece and Italy. The racialised view of the Dorians promoted in Nazi Germany was echoed by historians in other countries. Ioannis Koumaris ,
4000-450: A prominent feature of German nationalist ideologies. Müller extended his archaeological theories about the Dorians to promote a "Dorian way of life", based on his identification of the Dorians with the qualities of honour, liberty and patriotism. He argued that the god Apollo , whom he associated with the qualities of tranquillity, harmony and clarity, had been Dorian in origin. He contrasted this with Dionysus , whom he believed to embody
4200-683: A recent attempt to suggest that a comic confusion between the letter and the hand image may yet have been intended. Dorian social structure was characterized by a communal social structure and separation of the sexes. The lives of free men centered around military campaigns. When not abroad, men stayed in all-male residences focusing on military training until the age of 30, regardless of marital status. Dorian women had greater freedom and economic power than women of other Greek ethnicities. Unlike other Hellenic women, Dorian women were able to own property, manage their husbands' estate, and delegate many domestic tasks to slaves. Women in ancient Sparta possessed
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#17327693745864400-470: A rise to supremacy at the end of the Dark Age rather than during and after the fall of Mycenae. The Messenian population was reduced to serfdom . Only a few fragments of Tyrtaeus' five books of martial verse survive. His is the earliest mention of the three Dorian tribes: Pamphyli , Hylleis, Dymanes . He also says: For Cronus' Son Himself, Zeus the husband of fair-crowned Hera, hath given this city to
4600-399: A single large-scale movement of people. Cultural features previously believed to have been introduced by the Dorian invasion, such as iron-working, Protogeometric and Geometric pottery, cist graves and cremation, are now known either to have predated the palatial destructions or to have originated in areas of Greece, such as Attica and Euboea, which were not considered to have been affected by
4800-614: A smaller scale than imagined by the Dorian invasion, are now recognised as part of a broader, multi-causal systems collapse , rather than as a monocausal explanation for the changes of the period. Although cultural and linguistic change did occur between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, different aspects of the changes occurred at different times and speeds and affected different regions, rather than occurring suddenly and simultaneously, as would be expected with
5000-642: A son of Heracles , but were defeated by the Achaeans. Under other leadership they managed to be victorious over the Achaeans and remain in the Peloponnesus, a mythic theme called "the return of the Heracleidae ." They had built ships at Naupactus in which to cross the Gulf of Corinth . This invasion is viewed by the tradition of Pausanias as a return of the Dorians to the Peloponnesus, apparently meaning
5200-507: A spirit to every aspect of nature. Eventually, these vague spirits assumed human forms and entered the local mythology as gods. When tribes from the north of the Balkan Peninsula invaded, they brought with them a new pantheon of gods, based on conquest, force, prowess in battle, and violent heroism. Other older gods of the agricultural world fused with those of the more powerful invaders or else faded into insignificance. After
5400-584: Is also considered doubtful whether the events of the end of the Bronze Age should be explained as a single, interconnected collapse, and that the "collapse" was largely limited to the regions, institutions and practices associated with palatial administration. Most regions of Greece were outside the control of palatial states in the Mycenaean period and saw continuity in their populations, culture and traditions. While population movements probably occurred at
5600-520: Is from the o-grade (either ō or o ) of Proto-Indo-European *deru- , "tree", which also gives the Homeric Δούρειος Ἵππος ( Doureios Hippos , "Wooden Horse"). This derivation has the advantage of naming the people after their wooded, mountainous country. A second popular derivation was given by the French linguist, Émile Boisacq, from the same root, but from Greek δόρυ ( doru ) 'spear-shaft' (which
5800-586: Is from the o-grade of Indo-European * deru , "solid," in the sense of wood. It is similar to an extended form, * dō-ro- , of *dō- , (give), as can be seen in the modern Greek imperative δώσε ( dose , "give [sing.]!") appearing in Greek as δῶρον ( dōron , "gift"). This is the path taken by Jonathan Hall , relying on elements taken from the myth of the Return of the Herakleidai. Hall cites the tradition, based on
6000-455: Is not compatible with a Dorian invasion that brought Dorians to Crete only after the fall of the Mycenaean states. In the Odyssey , Odysseus and his relatives visit those states. Two solutions are possible, either the Odyssey is anachronistic or Dorians were on Crete in Mycenaean times. The uncertain nature of the Dorian invasion defers a definitive answer until more is known about it. Also,
6200-461: Is portrayed as a sacrificer, mentioned as a founder of altars, and imagined as a voracious eater himself; it is in this role that he appears in comedy. While his tragic end provided much material for tragedy— Heracles is regarded by Thalia Papadopoulou as "a play of great significance in examination of other Euripidean dramas." In art and literature, Heracles was represented as an enormously strong man of moderate height; his characteristic weapon
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6400-619: Is set in the tenth year of the war, tells of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, who was the finest Greek warrior, and the consequent deaths in battle of Achilles' beloved comrade Patroclus and Priam 's eldest son, Hector . After Hector's death, the Trojans were joined by two exotic allies, Penthesilea , queen of the Amazons , and Memnon , king of the Ethiopians and son of the dawn-goddess, Eos . Achilles killed both of these, but Paris then managed to kill Achilles with an arrow in
6600-476: Is that "the Greek gods are persons, not abstractions, ideas or concepts." Regardless of their underlying forms, the Ancient Greek gods have many fantastic abilities; most significantly, the gods are not affected by disease and can be wounded only under highly unusual circumstances. The Greeks considered immortality as the distinctive characteristic of their gods; this immortality, as well as unfading youth,
6800-420: Is the body of myths originally told by the ancient Greeks , and a genre of ancient Greek folklore , today absorbed alongside Roman mythology into the broader designation of classical mythology . These stories concern the ancient Greek religion 's view of the origin and nature of the world ; the lives and activities of deities , heroes , and mythological creatures ; and the origins and significance of
7000-454: Is the valedictory phrase uttered by Spartan mothers to their sons before sending them off to war: ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς ( ḕ tàn ḕ epì tâs , literally "either with it or on it": return alive with your shield or dead upon it) would have been ἢ τὴν ἢ ἐπὶ τῆς ( ḕ t ḕ n ḕ epì t ê s ) in the Attic - Ionic dialect of an Athenian mother. Tsakonian , a descendant of Doric Greek, is still spoken in some parts of
7200-749: The Homeric Hymns , in fragments of epic poems of the Epic Cycle , in lyric poems , in the works of the tragedians and comedians of the fifth century BC, in writings of scholars and poets of the Hellenistic Age , and in texts from the time of the Roman Empire by writers such as Plutarch and Pausanias . Aside from this narrative deposit in ancient Greek literature , pictorial representations of gods, heroes, and mythic episodes featured prominently in ancient vase paintings and
7400-582: The Iliad , combined with the administrative records of the former Mycenaean states, prove to universal satisfaction that East Greek (Ionian) speakers were once dominant in the Peloponnesus but suffered a setback there and were replaced at least in official circles by West Greek (Doric) speakers. An historical event is associated with the overthrow, called anciently the Return of the Heracleidai and by moderns
7600-604: The -eus suffix as very productive. One of its uses was to convert a toponym to an anthroponym; for example, Megareus, "Megarian", from Megara . A Dōrieus would be from Dōris, the only classical Greek state to serve as the basis for the name of the Dorians. The state was a small one in the mountains of west central Greece. However, classical Doris may not have been the same as Mycenaean Doris. A number of credible etymologies by noted scholars have been proposed. Julius Pokorny derives Δωριεύς, Dōrieus from δωρίς, dōris , "woodland" (which can also mean upland). The dōri- segment
7800-736: The Argolid . The myth became combined with that of the Return of the Heracleidae , such that the descendants of the hero Heracles were imagined to have led the Dorians and who founded the ruling lines of several Dorian cities, including Sparta . The myth probably emerged during the Early Iron Age as part of a process of ethnogenesis between cities claiming Dorian ancestry. In the fifth century BCE, it gained greater prominence through its use to promote unity among Sparta's Peloponnesian allies , and to differentiate Sparta from its rival Athens, believed to be of Ionian heritage. In 1824,
8000-589: The Chimera and Medusa . Bellerophon's adventures are commonplace types, similar to the adventures of Heracles and Theseus. Sending a hero to his presumed death is also a recurrent theme of this early heroic tradition, used in the cases of Perseus and Bellerophon. The only surviving Hellenistic epic, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes (epic poet, scholar, and director of the Library of Alexandria ) tells
8200-476: The Derveni Papyrus now proves that at least in the fifth-century BC a theogonic-cosmogonic poem of Orpheus was in existence. The first philosophical cosmologists reacted against, or sometimes built upon, popular mythical conceptions that had existed in the Greek world for some time. Some of these popular conceptions can be gleaned from the poetry of Homer and Hesiod. In Homer, the Earth was viewed as
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8400-619: The Dorian Invasion . This theory of a return or invasion presupposes that West Greek speakers resided in northwest Greece but overran the Peloponnesus replacing the East Greek there with their own dialect. No records other than Mycenaean ones are known to have existed in the Bronze Age so a West Greek of that time and place can be neither proved nor disproved. West Greek speakers were in western Greece in classical times. Unlike
8600-601: The Doric order of architecture, the Dorian mode in music, and the Doric dialect. These were not exclusive to communities considered Dorian, some of which used other linguistic dialects: Halicarnassus , for instance, was considered a Dorian city into the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE), but used Ionic for official inscriptions from the fifth century BCE and may never have widely spoken Doric. The Doric dialect itself
8800-520: The Geometric period from c. 900 BC to c. 800 BC onward. In fact, literary and archaeological sources integrate, sometimes mutually supportive and sometimes in conflict; however, in many cases, the existence of this corpus of data is an indication that many elements of Greek mythology have strong factual and historical roots. Mythical narration plays an important role in nearly every genre of Greek literature. Nevertheless,
9000-480: The Hellenistic and Roman ages was primarily composed as a literary rather than cultic exercise. Nevertheless, it contains many important details that would otherwise be lost. This category includes the works of: Prose writers from the same periods who make reference to myths include Apuleius , Petronius , Lollianus , and Heliodorus . Two other important non-poetical sources are the Fabulae and Astronomica of
9200-598: The Parthenon depicting the sack of Troy); this artistic preference for themes deriving from the Trojan Cycle indicates its importance to the Ancient Greek civilization. The same mythological cycle also inspired a series of posterior European literary writings. For instance, Trojan Medieval European writers, unacquainted with Homer at first hand, found in the Troy legend a rich source of heroic and romantic storytelling and
9400-774: The Peloponnese , Crete , southwest Asia Minor , the southernmost islands of the Aegean Sea , and the various Dorian colonies of Magna Graecia in Southern Italy and Sicily . After the classical period, it was mainly replaced by the Attic dialect upon which the Koine or "common" Greek language of the Hellenistic period was based. The main characteristic of Doric was the preservation of Proto-Indo-European [aː] , long ⟨α⟩ , which in Attic-Ionic became [ɛː] , ⟨η⟩ . A famous example
9600-692: The Peloponnesian kingdoms of Mycenae , Sparta and Argos , claiming, according to legend, a right to rule them through their ancestor. Their rise to dominance is frequently called the " Dorian invasion ". The Lydian and later the Macedonian kings, as rulers of the same rank, also became Heracleidae. Other members of this earliest generation of heroes such as Perseus, Deucalion , Theseus and Bellerophon , have many traits in common with Heracles. Like him, their exploits are solitary, fantastic and border on fairy tale , as they slay monsters such as
9800-589: The Roman culture because of the story of Aeneas , a Trojan hero whose journey from Troy led to the founding of the city that would one day become Rome, as recounted in Virgil's Aeneid (Book II of Virgil's Aeneid contains the best-known account of the sack of Troy). Finally there are two pseudo-chronicles written in Latin that passed under the names of Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius . The Trojan War cycle ,
10000-688: The Spartan state and its illustrious individuals are detailed at great length in such authors as Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus . The Odyssey has one reference to the Dorians: There is a land called Crete , in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair, rich land, begirt with water, and therein are many men, past counting, and ninety cities. They have not all the same speech, but their tongues are mixed. There dwell Achaeans , there great-hearted native Cretans , there Cydonians , and Dorians of waving plumes, and goodly Pelasgians . The reference
10200-622: The Tanagra campaign of 457, in which they sent troops to fight on behalf of Doris against an invasion from Phocis , an ally of Sparta's enemy Athens. During the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta at the end of the fifth century BCE, Sparta asserted kinship with its Peloponnesian allies through a claim of common Dorian heritage. Around the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian ( r. 117–138 CE ), Sparta underwent
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#173276937458610400-630: The Thessalians into Boeotia and 20 years later "the Dorians and the Heraclids became masters of the Peloponnese." So the lines were drawn between the Dorians and the Aeolians (here Boeotians) with the Ionians (former Peloponnesians). Other than these few brief observations Thucydides names but few Dorians. He does make it clear that some Dorian states aligned or were forced to align with
10600-455: The Trojan War except to say that it was full of barbarians and that there was no distinction between barbarians and Greeks. The Hellenes came from Phthiotis . The whole country indulged in and suffered from piracy and was not settled. After the Trojan War, "Hellas was still engaged in removing and settling." Some 60 years after the Trojan War the Boeotians were driven out of Arne by
10800-689: The Trojan War . The myth appears to have originated in the Argolid or in Sparta at the end of the Early Iron Age , and to have combined earlier mythic traditions concerning the Dorians and the Heracleidae. Two further Dorian migrations were believed to have occurred: the first resulted in the foundation of Doric colonies in the southern Aegean and in Asia Minor, while the second, in the eighth century BCE, established Doric-speaking communities at Cyrene and in Magna Graecia . At least initially,
11000-480: The period of Nazi rule between 1933 and 1945, German classicists universally portrayed the Dorians, in the words of Richard Wolin, as "fearless Aryan conquerors", contrasted with supposedly racially inferior Ionians. In the framing of Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillion, the Nazis cast the Dorian invasion as "saving" Greece from the "contamination" of Asiatic races . Through the Dorian invasion, they argued that classical Greece
11200-467: The two Spartan royal lines – the Agiad and Eurypontid dynasties – claimed descent from Heracles into the classical period. The version of the invasion narrative used in Sparta seems to have been a pastiche of various myths, with only a tenuous connection to the ancient Greeks' understanding of the Dorians as a people: the historian Nigel Kennell has called it "drastically underwritten" and likely to have developed in Laconia itself. Functionally,
11400-400: The 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the Dorian invasion paradigm remained dominant, partly as a result of the limited archaeological and historical evidence then available for the Greek world around and after the end of the Bronze Age. Carl Blegen , the excavator of the Mycenaean site of Pylos in Messenia from 1939, considered the site to have been destroyed by the Dorians, and adjusted his view of
11600-440: The 1960s, both in mainstream historiography and in explicitly right-wing and Neo-Nazi works. The art historian Robert Cook has written that the association between the Dorians and Geometric pottery, despite its initial scholarly popularity, was never a comfortable fit with the evidence. In 1903, Hans Dragendorff challenged it, arguing that Geometric pottery was simply a development of Mycenaean styles: Dragendorff's view became
11800-551: The 1960s. Although Müller's narrative of the Dorian invasion received early challenges, particularly from Karl Julius Beloch in 1893, it was only rarely questioned until the decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B script in 1952. Archaeological discoveries in the 1960s demonstrated that the cultural innovations previously ascribed to the Dorians were spread over a long period, often showing continuity from Bronze Age Mycenaean civilisation, and often arose in regions, such as Attica and Euboea , believed to have been unaffected by
12000-439: The 1970s, various scholars, particularly in the United Kingdom, revived Beloch's argument that the Dorians had already been present in Greece during the Mycenaean period. John Chadwick argued that Special Mycenaean, a putative dialect of Mycenaean Greek posited by Ernst Risch in 1965, was an ancestral form of Doric Greek. The Dorian invasion was therefore recast as either a revolt by a previously subject population, or else only
12200-410: The Ancient Greek pantheon, poets composed the Homeric Hymns (a group of thirty-three songs). Gregory Nagy (1992) regards "the larger Homeric Hymns as simple preludes (compared with Theogony ), each of which invokes one god." The gods of Greek mythology are described as having essentially corporeal but ideal bodies. According to Walter Burkert , the defining characteristic of Greek anthropomorphism
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#173276937458612400-437: The Athenians while some Ionians went with the Lacedaemonians and that the motives for alignment were not always ethnic but were diverse. Among the Dorians was Lacedaemon , Corcyra , Corinth and Epidamnus , Leucadia , Ambracia , Potidaea , Rhodes , Cythera , Argos , Syracuse , Gela , Acragas (later Agrigentum), Acrae , Casmenae. He does explain with considerable dismay what happened to incite ethnic war after
12600-402: The Battle-Charge which are also called Enoplia or Songs-under-Arms". These were chants used to establish the timing of standard drills under arms. He stressed patriotism: For 'tis a fair thing for a good man to fall and die fighting in the van for his native land, ... let us fight with a will for this land, and die for our children and never spare our lives. Herodotus was from Halicarnassus ,
12800-479: The Bronze Age are believed to have been relatively small in scale and generally to have been directed away from, rather than towards, the southern Peloponnese. In the classical period (that is, from c. 600 BCE ), the Dorians were an ethno-linguistic group, speaking the Doric dialect of Greek, concentrated in the southern Peloponnese , Crete, Sicily and the Dodecanese . Several cultural forms were identified as "Dorian" in classical times, such as
13000-541: The Dorian invasion "a spectre [haunting] historians of ancient Greece", and wrote that the archaeological evidence then available could support, at best, the hypothesis of "a series of violent but limited raids" rather than a theory of invasion followed by large-scale settlement. By the 1990s, the Dorian invasion was considered a myth by most scholars in the field, though it continued to have adherents, such as Birgitta Eder , Nicholas Hammond and Theodore Cressy Skeat , particularly in German-speaking scholarship. The theory that
13200-451: The Dorian invasion and to trace its route, though these efforts proved largely unsuccessful. Müller and his successors, such as Ernst Curtius , considered the Dorians to have been racially and culturally superior to the peoples whom they replaced. German nationalists, following Hermann Müller , portrayed the Dorians as belonging to a Nordic race , and so being fundamentally Germanic in character. The Dorian invasion became connected with
13400-442: The Dorian invasion as a similar point of discontinuity. The view of a break between Mycenaean and classical Greece was rejected in Greece itself: an updated 1970 edition of the History of the Greek Nation argued against it, as did a 1968 exhibition in Athens sponsored by the ruling military junta . One of the exhibition's panels characterised the Dorians as "the healthy powers of the [Greek] race". In 1980, Leonard Palmer defended
13600-418: The Dorian invasion as part of the Sonderweg hypothesis, by which the German nation was imagined to have a preordained historical path and superior racial status. Building on developments in Indo-European studies , which reconstructed the linguistic connections between German, Greek and Sanskrit , the German language was considered to be particularly strongly associated with Greek, and German culture to be
13800-472: The Dorian invasion had happened; this view was considered "drastic" by John Myres , though Myres considered the archaeological and linguistic evidence for the invasion inconclusive, and that the mythical narratives surrounding it had been exaggerated by Greek settlers in Asia Minor. In 1956, Wace suggested that the invasion was historical, but that it had involved only political rather than cultural change, since he viewed Greek culture as broadly continuous between
14000-429: The Dorian invasion hypothesis against recent criticisms, citing it as the only means of explaining the distribution of the West Greek dialects in the classical period. Robert Drews further defended it in 1988, writing that the Dorians conquered Greece by mastering new modes of warfare, to which the existing Mycenaean states failed to adapt. After the Enlightenment , eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germans developed
14200-471: The Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese to be conceived of as a homeward journey. Similarly, the term " Return of the Heracleidae " was often used to refer to the Dorian migration into that region. The most complete surviving accounts of the myth are those of the first-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus and the Bibliotheca , a mythological compendium dating to the first or second century CE, but these probably followed earlier sources closely. It
14400-490: The Dorian invasion remained the scholarly orthodoxy throughout the 1960s, and was adapted by Soviet historians, who integrated it into a Marxist view of history as the mechanism by which Greek culture transitioned from primitive communism to a mode of production based on slavery. In English-language scholarship, the focus of the debate became the effort to find material traces of the Dorians in Greek archaeological sites. Blegen stated in 1962 that "the fire-scarred ruins of all
14600-700: The Dorian invasion was the main cause of the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. The source of the West Greek speakers in the Peloponnese remains unattested by any solid evidence. Though most of the Dorians settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled on Rhodes and Sicily and in what is now Southern Italy. In Asia Minor existed the Dorian Hexapolis (the six great Dorian cities): Halikarnassos (Halicarnassus) and Knidos (Cnidus) in Asia Minor , Kos , and Lindos , Kameiros , and Ialyssos on
14800-535: The Dorian islands, dotted the southern coasts of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinus. Also Taras was a Spartan colony. A man's name, Dōrieus , occurs in the Linear B tablets at Pylos , one of the regions later invaded and subjugated by the Dorians. Pylos tablet Fn867 records it in the dative case as do-ri-je-we , *Dōriēwei , a third- or consonant-declension noun with stem ending in w. An unattested nominative plural, *Dōriēwes , would have become Dōrieis by loss of
15000-402: The Dorians did not name themselves after Dorus until they had reached Peloponnesus. Herodotus does not explain the contradictions of the myth; for example, how Doris, located outside the Peloponnesus, acquired its name. However, his goal, as he relates in the beginning of the first book, is only to report what he had heard from his sources without judgement. In the myth, the Achaeans displaced from
15200-536: The Dorians had used identical material culture to the Mycenaeans whom they replaced, and that that the received tradition as to the location of Dorian settlement was unreliable. In 1978, Klaus Kilian proposed the name "Dorian Ware" for a class of non-wheel-made pottery, now known as Handmade Burnished Ware , found in post-destruction layers of his excavation at Tiryns . He suggested that this pottery should be associated with Dorian invaders, to whom he attributed
15400-425: The Dorians invaded the Peloponnese or otherwise migrated there is now rejected as a "scholarly mirage". It is generally agreed that the collapse of Mycenaean palatial civilisation is better explained by endogenous factors, such as social conflicts or the breakdown of the palaces' socio-economic model, possibly exacerbated by external causes such as natural disaster, disease, climate change and changing technologies. It
15600-544: The Dorians is a multifaceted concept. In modern scholarship, the term has often meant the location of the population disseminating the Doric Greek dialect within a hypothetical Proto-Greek speaking population. The dialect is known from records of classical northwestern Greece, the Peloponnesus and Crete and some of the islands. The geographic and ethnic information found in the west's earliest known literary work,
15800-522: The Dorians to import his worship to Rhodes . In Greek historiography , the Dorians are mentioned by many authors. The chief classical authors to relate their origins are Herodotus , Thucydides and Pausanias . The most copious authors, however, lived in Hellenistic and Roman times, long after the main events. This apparent paradox does not necessarily discredit the later writers, who were relying on earlier works that did not survive. The customs of
16000-550: The Dorians were imagined as an Aryan people, in line with other similar hypotheses about northern or Aryan invaders in the Near East. Hermann Müller argued in 1844 for the Nordic origin of Dorian (and so classical Greek) civilisation: this view became the standard in German historiography and remained so until the mid-twentieth century. In 1870, Alexander Conze proposed that the recently identified Geometric style of pottery
16200-466: The Dorians. Overseas were the islands of Rhodes , Cos , Nisyrus and the Anatolian cities of Cnidus , Halicarnassus , Phaselis and Calydna. Dorians also colonised Crete including founding of such towns as Lato , Dreros and Olous . The Cynurians were originally Ionians but had become Dorian under the influence of their Argive masters. Thucydides professes little of Greece before
16400-599: The East Greeks, they are not associated with any evidence of displacement events. That provides circumstantial evidence that the Doric dialect disseminated among the Hellenes of northwest Greece, a highly-mountainous and somewhat-isolated region. The Dorian invasion is a modern historical concept attempting to account for: On the whole, none of the objectives has been met, but the investigations served to rule out various speculative hypotheses. Most scholars doubt that
16600-420: The German antiquarian Karl Otfried Müller published The Dorians , in which he argued that the Dorians were a northern, Indo-European people who invaded Greece and subjugated the Peloponnese. Müller's views gained general scholarly acceptance throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The Dorians were credited with introducing new forms of material culture and to have destroyed
16800-463: The German exile Werner Jaeger and the French scholars Georges Dumézil and Charles Picard . Picard wrote in 1935 that the Dorian invasion had been "no bad thing ... [since] it allowed Greek art to cross the mirages of the Asian spirit". Where Müller's view of the Dorians as superior, civilising invaders was challenged, its critics, such as Gustave Glotz , rarely disputed the underlying paradigm of
17000-431: The Greek historical tradition with recent archaeological discoveries, such as those made at Mycenae by Heinrich Schliemann and Panagiotis Stamatakis . Beloch considered the Dorians to have been indigenous to Mycenaean Greece and to have differentiated from them during the eighth century BCE. However, his views were generally rejected in favour of invasion-based narratives. In response to Beloch, Eduard Meyer called
17200-610: The Greek leaders (including the wanderings of Odysseus and Aeneas (the Aeneid ), and the murder of Agamemnon) were told in two epics, the Returns (the lost Nostoi ) and Homer's Odyssey . The Trojan cycle also includes the adventures of the children of the Trojan generation (e.g., Orestes and Telemachus ). The Trojan War provided a variety of themes and became a main source of inspiration for Ancient Greek artists (e.g. metopes on
17400-472: The Greek world and noted the stories they heard, supplied numerous local myths and legends, often giving little-known alternative versions. Herodotus in particular, searched the various traditions he encountered and found the historical or mythological roots in the confrontation between Greece and the East. Herodotus attempted to reconcile origins and the blending of differing cultural concepts. The poetry of
17600-562: The Hellenic and Roman Peoples ( Rassengeschichte des Hellenischen und des Römischen Volkes ), in which he argued that both the Greeks and Romans belonged to the Nordic race. Günther argued that references in ancient writers, such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to the mythical Hyperboreans as the ancestors of the Dorians represented a genuine memory that the Dorians had come from the far north. He also adduced linguistic arguments, such as
17800-482: The Heracleidae as reflecting a historical migration of Aryan Dorians into Greece, although this interpretation conflicted with both ancient testimony and the understanding that the earlier Mycenaeans were themselves Greek. In France, Victor Duruy linked the Dorian invasion to the autocratic nature of the Spartan state, suggesting that it made Sparta ethnically homogeneous and so more acquiescent to repressive government. In 1893, Karl Julius Beloch attempted to integrate
18000-482: The Heracleidae enlisted the help of their Dorian neighbors. Hall does not address the problem of the Dorians not calling Lacedaemon Doris, but assigning that name to some less holy and remoter land. Similarly, he does not mention the Dorian servant at Pylos, whose sacred gift, if such it was, was still being ruled by the Achaean Atreid family at Lacedaemon. A minor, and perhaps regrettably forgotten, episode in
18200-450: The Late Bronze Age and the classical period. From the 1960s onwards, linguistic arguments were advanced to support the Dorian invasion hypothesis. Certain common features of Arcadocypriot Greek , shared between Arcadia in the Peloponnese and the island of Cyprus, were held to be evidence that the two represented the remnants of a larger language group, broken up by the invading Dorians and including refugees who fled to Cyprus. The idea of
18400-719: The Messenian town of Dorium is mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships . If its name comes from Dorians, it would imply there were settlements of the latter in Messenia during that time as well. Tyrtaeus , a Spartan poet, became advisor of the Lacedaemonians in their mid-7th-century war to suppress a rebellion of the Messenians . The latter were a remnant of the Achaeans conquered "two generations before", which suggests
18600-480: The Mycenaean palaces , though both theories created conflicts between the interpretative narrative, the mythological tradition, and the archaeological evidence. The Dorians also became associated with the Sea Peoples , believed to have destroyed several Near Eastern sites at the end of the Bronze Age. During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars attempted to find archaeological and linguistic evidence of
18800-553: The Olympians, the Greeks worshipped various gods of the countryside, the satyr-god Pan , Nymphs (spirits of rivers), Naiads (who dwelled in springs), Dryads (who were spirits of the trees), Nereids (who inhabited the sea), river gods, Satyrs , and others. In addition, there were the dark powers of the underworld, such as the Erinyes (or Furies), said to pursue those guilty of crimes against blood-relatives. In order to honor
19000-522: The Pelasgians used to speak I am not able with certainty to say. But if one must pronounce judging by those that still remain of the Pelasgians who dwelt in the city of Creston above the Tyrsenians, and who were once neighbours of the race now called Dorian, dwelling then in the land which is now called Thessaliotis, and also by those that remain of the Pelasgians who settled at Plakia and Skylake in
19200-568: The Peloponnese since the Bronze Age, leading many scholars to abandon the Dorian invasion as a hypothesis. From the 1960s onwards, new archaeological discoveries pushed into the Mycenaean period the chronological horizons of key cultural changes, such as the Naue II sword, the development of iron-working, the practice of cremation and the development of what became Geometric pottery. It also became clear that these were not universally found in supposedly "Doric" areas, and were often adopted piecemeal in
19400-522: The Peloponnese. The earliest surviving attestation of the myth is in the work of the seventh-century BCE Spartan poet Tyrtaeus . The term used for the Heraclidae's return by Herodotus is kathodos , which can mean both "descent" and "return from exile". By the sixth century BCE, the ethnic divisions between the Heracleidae and the Dorians were often elided, such that the Heracleidae and Heracles himself were often imagined to be Dorians, and
19600-415: The Peloponnese. He characterised the Dorians as a "young race", superior in their individual characters, their political organisation, and their language. Müller's student, Ernst Curtius , called them "northern mountaineers", stronger than the coastal peoples of Greece due to what he saw as their vigour born of a comparative lack of development and civilisation. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
19800-422: The Peloponnesus gathered at Athens under a leader Ion and became identified as "Ionians". Herodotus' list of Dorian states is as follows. From northeastern Greece were Phthia , Histiaea and Macedon . In central Greece were Doris (the former Dryopia) and in the south Peloponnesus , specifically the states of Lacedaemon , Corinth , Sicyon , Epidaurus and Troezen . Hermione was not Dorian but had joined
20000-712: The Roman writer styled as Pseudo- Hyginus , the Imagines of Philostratus the Elder and Philostratus the Younger , and the Descriptions of Callistratus . Finally, several Byzantine Greek writers provide important details of myth, much derived from earlier now lost Greek works. These preservers of myth include Arnobius , Hesychius , the author of the Suda , John Tzetzes , and Eustathius . They often treat mythology from
20200-519: The Trojan cycle, as well as the adventures of Heracles. These visual representations of myths are important for two reasons. Firstly, many Greek myths are attested on vases earlier than in literary sources: of the twelve labors of Heracles, for example, only the Cerberus adventure occurs in a contemporary literary text. Secondly, visual sources sometimes represent myths or mythical scenes that are not attested in any extant literary source. In some cases,
20400-456: The age when gods lived alone and the age when divine interference in human affairs was limited was a transitional age in which gods and mortals moved together. These were the early days of the world when the groups mingled more freely than they did later. Most of these tales were later told by Ovid's Metamorphoses and they are often divided into two thematic groups: tales of love, and tales of punishment. Tales of love often involve incest, or
20600-405: The ancient Greeks' cult and ritual practices. Modern scholars study the myths to shed light on the religious and political institutions of ancient Greece, and to better understand the nature of mythmaking itself. The Greek myths were initially propagated in an oral-poetic tradition most likely by Minoan and Mycenaean singers starting in the 18th century BC; eventually the myths of
20800-481: The appropriation or invention of some important cultural artifact, as when Prometheus steals fire from the gods, when Tantalus steals nectar and ambrosia from Zeus' table and gives it to his subjects—revealing to them the secrets of the gods, when Prometheus or Lycaon invents sacrifice, when Demeter teaches agriculture and the Mysteries to Triptolemus , or when Marsyas invents the aulos and enters into
21000-623: The army of the dead." Another important difference between the hero cult and the cult of gods is that the hero becomes the centre of local group identity. The monumental events of Heracles are regarded as the dawn of the age of heroes. To the Heroic Age are also ascribed three great events: the Argonautic expedition, the Theban Cycle , and the Trojan War . Some scholars believe that behind Heracles' complicated mythology there
21200-454: The arrival of Dionysus to establish his cult in Thrace was also the subject of an Aeschylean trilogy. In another tragedy, Euripides' The Bacchae , the king of Thebes , Pentheus , is punished by Dionysus, because he disrespected the god and spied on his Maenads , the female worshippers of the god. In another story, based on an old folktale-motif, and echoing a similar theme, Demeter
21400-459: The arrival of newcomers, and those newcomers named as the Dorians. Destruction layers at Mycenaean palatial sites were then attributed to this putative invasion, even though such destruction went unmentioned in ancient accounts of Dorian origins. In 1824, Karl Otfried Müller published The Dorians ( Die Dorier ). He argued that the Dorians were a northern, Indo-European (in German, indogermanisch ) people who invaded Greece and subjugated
21600-556: The assistance of other Dorian states. Dorians were distinguished by the Doric Greek dialect and by characteristic social and historical traditions. In the 5th century BC, Dorians and Ionians were the two most politically important Greek ethnē , whose ultimate clash resulted in the Peloponnesian War . The degree to which fifth-century Hellenes self-identified as "Ionian" or "Dorian" has itself been disputed. At one extreme Édouard Will [ fr ] concludes that there
21800-524: The basis for the collection; however, the "Library" discusses events that occurred long after his death, hence the name Pseudo-Apollodorus. Among the earliest literary sources are Homer 's two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey . Other poets completed the Epic Cycle , but these later and lesser poems now are lost almost entirely. Despite their traditional name, the Homeric Hymns have no direct connection with Homer. The oldest are choral hymns from
22000-409: The beginnings of the universe in human language. The most widely accepted version at the time, although a philosophical account of the beginning of things, is reported by Hesiod , in his Theogony . He begins with Chaos , a yawning nothingness. Next comes Gaia (Earth), "the ever-sure foundation of all", and then Tartarus , "in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth", and Eros (Love), "fairest among
22200-403: The children of Heracles, with whom we came into the wide isle of Pelops from windy Erineus. Erineus was a village of Doris. He helped to establish the Spartan constitution, giving the kings and elders, among other powers, the power to dismiss the assembly. He established a rigorous military training program for the young including songs and poems he wrote himself, such as the "Embateria or Songs of
22400-430: The chronological inconsistency between the widespread adoption of burial in cist graves ( c. 1100 BCE ) and the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces ( c. 1180 BCE ). More broadly, archaeological studies in the 1960s moved away from migration as a dominant explanation for cultural change , leading in turn to the decline of the Dorian invasion and related hypotheses in mainstream scholarship. In
22600-512: The composition of the story of the Argonauts is earlier than Odyssey , which shows familiarity with the exploits of Jason (the wandering of Odysseus may have been partly founded on it). In ancient times, the expedition was regarded as a historical fact, an incident in the opening up of the Black Sea to Greek commerce and colonization. It was also extremely popular, forming a cycle to which
22800-451: The concept and ritual. The age in which the heroes lived is known as the Heroic age . The epic and genealogical poetry created cycles of stories clustered around particular heroes or events and established the family relationships between the heroes of different stories; they thus arranged the stories in sequence. According to Ken Dowden (1992), "there is even a saga effect: We can follow
23000-475: The culture of their day as well; their biases contribute to the traditional modern interpretation of "Dorians". Accounts vary as to the Dorians' place of origin. One theory, widely believed in ancient times, is that they originated in the mountainous regions of Greece , such as Macedonia and Epirus , and obscure circumstances brought them south into the Peloponnese , to certain Aegean islands . The origin of
23200-400: The culture, arts, and literature of Western civilization and remains part of Western heritage and language. Poets and artists from ancient times to the present have derived inspiration from Greek mythology and have discovered contemporary significance and relevance in the themes. Greek mythology is known today primarily from Greek literature and representations on visual media dating from
23400-484: The date of Troy VIIa , which he believed to be the setting of the Trojan War, to make it compatible with this theory. He frequently discussed the Dorian invasion, among other then-current archaeological topics, in letters to Wace. The invasion became linked with other putative migrating peoples, known collectively as the Sea Peoples , mentioned in Egyptian and Near Eastern sources. Manolis Andronikos denied in 1954 that
23600-461: The dead. Influences from other cultures always afforded new themes. According to Classical-era mythology, after the overthrow of the Titans, the new pantheon of gods and goddesses was confirmed. Among the principal Greek gods were the Olympians, residing on Mount Olympus under the eye of Zeus. (The limitation of their number to twelve seems to have been a comparatively modern idea.) Besides
23800-514: The deathless gods". Without male assistance, Gaia gave birth to Uranus (the Sky) who then fertilized her. From that union were born first the Titans —six males: Coeus , Crius , Cronus , Hyperion , Iapetus , and Oceanus ; and six females: Mnemosyne , Phoebe , Rhea , Theia , Themis , and Tethys . After Cronus was born, Gaia and Uranus decreed no more Titans were to be born. They were followed by
24000-473: The decoration of votive gifts and many other artifacts. Geometric designs on pottery of the eighth century BC depict scenes from the Epic Cycle as well as the adventures of Heracles . In the succeeding Archaic , Classical , and Hellenistic periods, Homeric and various other mythological scenes appear, supplementing the existing literary evidence. Greek mythology has had an extensive influence on
24200-624: The divine-focused Theogony and Homeric Hymns in both size and popularity. Under the influence of Homer the "hero cult" leads to a restructuring in spiritual life, expressed in the separation of the realm of the gods from the realm of the dead (heroes), of the Chthonic from the Olympian. In the Works and Days , Hesiod makes use of a scheme of Four Ages of Man (or Races): Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. These races or ages are separate creations of
24400-480: The earlier part of the so-called Lyric age . Hesiod , a possible contemporary with Homer, offers in his Theogony ( Origin of the Gods ) the fullest account of the earliest Greek myths, dealing with the creation of the world, the origin of the gods, Titans , and Giants , as well as elaborate genealogies, folktales, and aetiological myths. Hesiod's Works and Days , a didactic poem about farming life, also includes
24600-491: The earliest literary mention of them in the Odyssey , where they already can be found inhabiting the island of Crete . They were diverse in way of life and social organization, varying from the populous trade center of the city of Corinth , known for its ornate style in art and architecture, to the isolationist, military state of Sparta ; and yet, all Hellenes knew which localities were Dorian and which were not. Dorian states at war could more likely, but not always, count on
24800-490: The end of the Bronze Age, neither the mythical tradition nor the archaeological evidence are compatible with a single large-scale migration of a coherent population of "Dorians" into the Peloponnese. Where movements of people are believed to have occurred, they seem to have resulted in net migration away from Mycenaean centres; the population of the areas previously considered to have been settled by Dorians appears to have declined sharply. Furthermore, these population movements, on
25000-476: The evolution of their culture, of which mythology, both overtly and in its unspoken assumptions, is an index of the changes. In Greek mythology's surviving literary forms, as found mostly at the end of the progressive changes, it is inherently political, as Gilbert Cuthbertson (1975) has argued. The earlier inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula were an agricultural people who, using animism , assigned
25200-456: The fact that the Greek word iris means both "rainbow" and the iris of the eye , which he took as proof that the original speakers of Greek had had blue eyes rather than brown. In 1930, Alfred Rosenberg , a Nazi racial theorist and later war criminal, wrote of the Dorians as one of several waves of Aryan invaders into Greece, arguing that both Mycenaean and post-Mycenaean Greece, along with ancient Rome, were Nordic in racial character. During
25400-405: The fates of some families in successive generations." After the rise of the hero cult, gods and heroes constitute the sacral sphere and are invoked together in oaths and prayers which are addressed to them. Burkert (2002) notes that "the roster of heroes, again in contrast to the gods, is never given fixed and final form. Great gods are no longer born, but new heroes can always be raised up from
25600-509: The first known representation of a myth in geometric art predates its first known representation in late archaic poetry, by several centuries. In the Archaic ( c. 750 – c. 500 BC ), Classical ( c. 480 –323 BC), and Hellenistic (323–146 BC) periods, Homeric and various other mythological scenes appear, supplementing the existing literary evidence. Greek mythology has changed over time to accommodate
25800-472: The gods, the Golden Age belonging to the reign of Cronos, the subsequent races to the creation of Zeus . The presence of evil was explained by the myth of Pandora , when all of the best of human capabilities, save hope, had been spilled out of her overturned jar. In Metamorphoses , Ovid follows Hesiod's concept of the four ages. "Myths of origin" or " creation myths " represent an attempt to explain
26000-509: The great [Mycenaean] palaces" were "the telltale track of the Dorians". During the 1960s, the Dorian invasion became connected with the nineteenth-century ideas of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer , who had argued that modern Greeks were of Slavic ancestry rather than the descendants of classical Greeks; though Fallmerayer had dated this population replacement to the Byzantine period, his followers, such as Rhys Carpenter and Donald Nicol , saw
26200-417: The greatest agency and economic power, likely due to the prolonged absences of men during military campaigns. Dorian women wore the peplos , which was once common to all Hellenes. This tunic was pinned at the shoulders by brooches and had slit skirts which bared the thighs and permitted more freedom of movement than the voluminous Ionian chiton (costume) . The Doric dialect was spoken in northwest Greece,
26400-579: The growth of the power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon...." In the Platonic work Laws is mentioned that the Achaeans who fought in the Trojan War , on their return from Troy were driven out from their homes and cities by the young residents, so they migrated under a leader named Dorieus and hence they were renamed "Dorians". Now during this period of ten years, while
26600-541: The heel. Achilles' heel was the only part of his body which was not invulnerable to damage by human weaponry. Before they could take Troy, the Greeks had to steal from the citadel the wooden image of Pallas Athena (the Palladium ). Finally, with Athena's help, they built the Trojan Horse . Despite the warnings of Priam's daughter Cassandra , the Trojans were persuaded by Sinon , a Greek who feigned desertion, to take
26800-548: The heroes of the Trojan War and its aftermath became part of the oral tradition of Homer 's epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey . Two poems by Homer's near contemporary Hesiod , the Theogony and the Works and Days , contain accounts of the genesis of the world, the succession of divine rulers, the succession of human ages, the origin of human woes, and the origin of sacrificial practices. Myths are also preserved in
27000-506: The highest social prestige through his appointment as official ancestor of the Dorian kings. This probably served as a legitimation for the Dorian migrations into the Peloponnese . Hyllus , the eponymous hero of one Dorian phyle , became the son of Heracles and one of the Heracleidae or Heraclids (the numerous descendants of Heracles, especially the descendants of Hyllus —other Heracleidae included Macaria , Lamos, Manto , Bianor , Tlepolemus , and Telephus ). These Heraclids conquered
27200-425: The history of scholarship was the attempt to emphasize the etymology of Doron with the meaning of 'hand'. This in turn was connected to an interpretation of the famous lambda on Spartan shields, which was to rather stand for a hand with outstanding thumb than the initial letter of Lacedaimon. Given the origin of the Spartan shield lambda legend, however, in a fragment by Eupolis , an Athenian comic poet, there has been
27400-420: The horse inside the walls of Troy as an offering to Athena; the priest Laocoon, who tried to have the horse destroyed, was killed by sea-serpents. At night the Greek fleet returned, and the Greeks from the horse opened the gates of Troy. In the total sack that followed, Priam and his remaining sons were slaughtered; the Trojan women passed into slavery in various cities of Greece. The adventurous homeward voyages of
27600-542: The invasion "one of the few indubitably certain facts of earlier Greek history". Christos Tsountas and Ernst Meyer [ de ] , in 1893 and 1937 respectively, posited it as the reason for the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces at the end of the twelfth century BCE. At the end of the nineteenth century, Paul Kretschmer argued that an early form of the Greek language had spread from Anatolia , rather than from northern Europe, but that during this spread these proto-Greeks had divided into several tribes, of which
27800-543: The invasion. More generally, modern scholarship has problematised the relationship between cultural forms and ethnic identity, corresponding to the decline of the culture-historical paradigm by which changes in material culture were generally explained by population transfer. Modern scholarship explains the ancient narrative of the Dorian invasion as a rationalising myth, created as part of a process of ethnogenesis by Peloponnesian communities whose cultural forms gradually converged over time. Oliver Dickinson has written that
28000-406: The invasion. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, academic belief in the Dorian invasion declined, to the point where it was generally accepted as a myth. Modern archaeologists explain the collapse of Mycenaean palatial civilisation through factors including social conflicts, climate change, technological developments and the breakdown of the palaces' socio-economic model. Population movements at the end of
28200-453: The invasion: instead, they portrayed the Dorians as barbaric, destructive forces. Schnapp-Gourbeillion writes of both Glotz and contemporary pro-Dorian scholars as having "recreate[d] from scratch a past marked by its false rationality and its moralising aspects". Although "Aryan" and related terms largely disappeared from scholarship following the downfall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the underlying paradigm of heroic, migrating invaders remained into
28400-597: The island of Rhodes. The six cities would later become rivals with the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Dorians also settled Crete . The origin traditions remained strong into classical times: Thucydides saw the Peloponnesian War in part as "Ionians fighting against Dorians" and reported the tradition that the Syracusans in Sicily were of Dorian descent. Other such "Dorian" colonies, originally from Corinth, Megara, and
28600-464: The last in a series of migrations. Desborough suggested that the Dorians had retreated from their initial invasion, thereby explaining the lack of evidence for their settlement after the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces, and returned in the Submycenaean period around 50–100 years later. Anthony Snodgrass alternatively considered it most probable that the Dorian invasion had occurred, but that
28800-576: The middle of the Archaic period, myths about relationships between male gods and male heroes became more and more frequent, indicating the parallel development of pedagogic pederasty ( παιδικὸς ἔρως , eros paidikos ), thought to have been introduced around 630 BC. By the end of the fifth-century BC, poets had assigned at least one eromenos , an adolescent boy who was their sexual companion, to every important god except Ares and many legendary figures. Previously existing myths, such as those of Achilles and Patroclus , also then were cast in
29000-577: The myth of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the mythical land of Colchis . In the Argonautica , Jason is impelled on his quest by king Pelias , who receives a prophecy that a man with one sandal would be his nemesis . Jason loses a sandal in a river, arrives at the court of Pelias, and the epic is set in motion. Nearly every member of the next generation of heroes, as well as Heracles, went with Jason in
29200-427: The mythological details about gods and heroes. The evidence about myths and rituals at Mycenaean and Minoan sites is entirely monumental, as the Linear B script (an ancient form of Greek found in both Crete and mainland Greece) was used mainly to record inventories, although certain names of gods and heroes have been tentatively identified. Geometric designs on pottery of the eighth-century BC depict scenes from
29400-606: The mythological tradition; competing hypotheses developed that Geometric pottery was in fact a "peasant style", originally predating Mycenaean culture, that it represented a mixture of northern-European styles with those of the Mycenaean period, or that it had in fact been brought from the Near East by the Phoenicians . Later, the Geometric style was divided from its earlier manifestation, the Protogeometric , used until
29600-530: The myths of Prometheus , Pandora , and the Five Ages . The poet advises on the best way to succeed in a dangerous world, rendered yet more dangerous by its gods. Lyrical poets often took their subjects from myth, but their treatment became gradually less narrative and more allusive. Greek lyric poets, including Pindar , Bacchylides and Simonides , and bucolic poets such as Theocritus and Bion , relate individual mythological incidents. Additionally, myth
29800-401: The myths of the Dorian invasion are "likely to have little relevance to what actually happened", citing the long span of time between the supposed events and the composition of the retellings that survive, as well as the distorting effect of contemporary politics, ideology and society upon any historical elements that may have existed in the narratives. Greek mythology Greek mythology
30000-405: The name on taking possession of Lacedaemon. Doris was subsequently named after them. Hall makes comparisons of Spartans to Hebrews as a chosen people maintaining a covenant with God and being assigned a Holy Land. To arrive at this conclusion, Hall relies on Herodotus' version of the myth (see below) that the Hellenes under Dorus did not take his name until reaching the Peloponnesus. In other versions
30200-479: The ninth century BCE; the Protogeometric was also argued to be Dorian in origin. The paradigm of the Dorian invasion spread from German into British and French scholarship, though its tenets were rarely debated or developed outside France and Germany. Influential scholars such as William Ridgeway , Ernst Grumach [ de ] and Sinclair Hood saw the ancient myths of the Dorian invasion and
30400-660: The one never migrated from its place in any direction, while the other was very exceedingly given to wanderings; for in the reign of Deucalion this race dwelt in Pthiotis, and in the time of Doros the son of Hellen in the land lying below Ossa and Olympos, which is called Histiaiotis; and when it was driven from Histiaiotis by the sons of Cadmos, it dwelt in Pindos and was called Makednian; and thence it moved afterwards to Dryopis, and from Dryopis it came finally to Peloponnesus, and began to be called Dorian. 1.57.1-3 What language however
30600-492: The one-eyed Cyclopes and the Hecatoncheires or Hundred-Handed Ones, who were both thrown into Tartarus by Uranus. This made Gaia furious. Cronus ("the wily, youngest and most terrible of Gaia 's children") was convinced by Gaia to castrate his father. He did this and became the ruler of the Titans with his sister-wife, Rhea, as his consort, and the other Titans became his court. A motif of father-against-son conflict
30800-473: The only general mythographical handbook to survive from Greek antiquity was the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus. This work attempts to reconcile the contradictory tales of the poets and provides a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends. Apollodorus of Athens lived from c. 180 BC to c. 125 BC and wrote on many of these topics. His writings may have formed
31000-461: The opposite qualities and to have entered Greek religion from Thrace . These ideas influenced the composer Richard Wagner , who used Müller's view of the Dorians as a stand-in for his own belief in the enmity between Germany and its neighbours, particularly in France and Italy. Müller saw Dorian culture as prefiguring the hierarchical, autocratic, militarised German state of Prussia : this became, in
31200-450: The people of Creston do not speak the same language with any of those who dwell about them, nor yet do the people of Phakia, but they speak the same language one as the other: and by this it is proved that they still keep unchanged the form of language which they brought with them when they migrated to these places. 1.58 As for the Hellenic race, it has used ever the same language, as I clearly perceive, since it first took its rise; but since
31400-459: The problem of the devolution of power and of the mode of accession to sovereignty. The twins Atreus and Thyestes with their descendants played the leading role in the tragedy of the devolution of power in Mycenae. The Theban Cycle deals with events associated especially with Cadmus , the city's founder, and later with the doings of Laius and Oedipus at Thebes; a series of stories that lead to
31600-524: The proto-Dorians were the last to migrate into Greece. Some of the cultural changes, such as the widespread adoption of cremation, created similarities between Greek culture and that of the Urnfield culture of central Europe, lending support to the view that the Dorian invaders had come from the north. Alan Wace and Maurice S. Thompson advocated the northern-origin theory in their 1912 book Prehistoric Thessaly . In 1921, Stanley Casson attempted to trace
31800-684: The region of the Hellespont, who before that had been settlers with the Athenians, and of the natives of the various other towns which are really Pelasgian, though they have lost the name,—if one must pronounce judging by these, the Pelasgians used to speak a Barbarian language. If therefore all the Pelasgian race was such as these, then the Attic race, being Pelasgian, at the same time when it changed and became Hellenic, unlearnt also its language. For
32000-564: The romanticisation of ancient Sparta , and was used to assert a special connection between Prussia and ancient Greece. During the Nazi period , the association between the Dorians and the Aryans became a matter of orthodoxy, and high-ranking Nazis, including Adolf Hitler , integrated the Dorian invasion into their pseudoscientific theories of race . Racialised views of the Dorians remained common in scholarship, both inside and outside Germany, until
32200-571: The routes of the Dorian invasion based on the finds of Geometric pottery, and concluded that both Sparta and a settlement at the Dipylon Gate of Athens were Dorian. Nicholas Hammond did likewise in 1934, arguing that the Dorians had entered Greece via the Pindus mountains of Albania, contrary to the accounts in ancient Greek historians, by which they universally originated within Greece. During
32400-507: The scholarly consensus after it was demonstrated by Bernhard Schweitzer in a work of 1917. In 1939, Gaetano De Sanctis , an Italian classicist who had refused to swear allegiance to the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini , wrote a history of early Greece in which he rejected Müller's view of the Dorian invasion, and ascribed only a small historical role to the Dorians. The 1952 decipherment of Linear B indicated that Greek had been spoken in
32600-510: The seduction or rape of a mortal woman by a male god, resulting in heroic offspring. The stories generally suggest that relationships between gods and mortals are something to avoid; even consenting relationships rarely have happy endings. In a few cases, a female divinity mates with a mortal man, as in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite , where the goddess lies with Anchises to produce Aeneas . The second type (tales of punishment) involves
32800-488: The seventh century BCE, is unlikely to be historical. Early archaeological work in the nineteenth century gave the impression of a substantial break between the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age in Greece. This was considered to be marked by the introduction of new material culture , specifically bronze violin-bow fibulae , a new sword of the Naue II type, cremation, cist graves , and – of most importance – ironworking. These cultural changes were associated with
33000-593: The ship Argo to fetch the Golden Fleece. This generation also included Theseus , who went to Crete to slay the Minotaur ; Atalanta , the female heroine, and Meleager , who once had an epic cycle of his own to rival the Iliad and Odyssey . Pindar , Apollonius and the Bibliotheca endeavor to give full lists of the Argonauts. Although Apollonius wrote his poem in the 3rd century BC,
33200-410: The siege lasted, the affairs of each of the besiegers at home suffered much owing to the seditious conduct of the young men. For when the soldiers returned to their own cities and homes, these young people did not receive them fittingly and justly, but in such a way that there ensued a vast number of cases of death, slaughter, and exile. So they, being again driven out, migrated by sea; and because Dorieus
33400-477: The site's destruction. However, the same pottery was later found in layers predating the site's destruction, and it is now considered to have been of local Mycenaean manufacture, or else the work of small immigrant populations, who may already have been present in Mycenaean society. Paul Cartledge , in 1979, defended the historicity of the Dorian settlement of Sparta, though noted that such a settlement could not have occurred prior to c. 950 BCE , and so
33600-483: The society while the beliefs were held. After they ceased to become religious beliefs, few would have known the rites and rituals. Allusions often existed, however, to aspects that were quite public. Images existed on pottery and religious artwork that were interpreted and more likely, misinterpreted in many diverse myths and tales. A few fragments of these works survive in quotations by Neoplatonist philosophers and recently unearthed papyrus scraps. One of these scraps,
33800-488: The southern Argolid coast of the Peloponnese , in the modern prefecture of Arcadia . Culturally, in addition to their Doric dialect of Greek, Doric colonies retained their characteristic Doric calendar that revolved round a cycle of festivals, the Hyacinthia and the Carneia being especially important. The Dorian mode in music also was attributed to Doric societies and was associated by classical writers with martial qualities. The Doric order of architecture in
34000-451: The stone, which had been sitting in Cronus's stomach all this time. Zeus then challenged Cronus to war for the kingship of the gods. At last, with the help of the Cyclopes (whom Zeus freed from Tartarus), Zeus and his siblings were victorious, while Cronus and the Titans were hurled down to imprisonment in Tartarus . Zeus was plagued by the same concern, and after a prophecy that the offspring of his first wife, Metis , would give birth to
34200-406: The stony hearts of the underworld gods in his descent to Hades . When Hermes invents the lyre in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes , the first thing he does is sing about the birth of the gods. Hesiod's Theogony is not only the fullest surviving account of the gods but also the fullest surviving account of the archaic poet's function, with its long preliminary invocation to the Muses . Theogony also
34400-415: The stories of the Dorian migration and the Return of the Heracleidae formed separate traditions, which were combined by the time of Herodotus (that is, the mid-fifth century BCE) at the latest. By the late fifth century BCE, Greeks considered the Dorian invasion a major turning point in their history, and it was reckoned as the beginning of the main line of historical continuity for Dorian states in
34600-468: The story of the Dorian invasion, in conjunction with the story of the Heracleidae, served to assert Sparta's right to its territory in the Peloponnese, both in Laconia and in Messenia. In Messenia itself, a version of the myth held that the Dorians had killed the Heraclid Kresphontes , who was allotted the kingdom after the initial Heraclid contest: after the restoration of Messenian independence by Epaminondas of Thebes in 370 BCE, this latter version
34800-422: The tale known to us through tragedy (e.g. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex ) and later mythological accounts. Greek mythology culminates in the Trojan War, fought between Greece and Troy , and its aftermath. In Homer's works, such as the Iliad , the chief stories have already taken shape and substance, and individual themes were elaborated later, especially in Greek drama. The Trojan War also elicited great interest in
35000-404: The time when it parted off feeble at first from the Pelasgian race, setting forth from a small beginning it has increased to that great number of races which we see, and chiefly because many Barbarian races have been added to it besides. Moreover it is true, as I think, of the Pelasgian race also, that so far as it remained Barbarian it never made any great increase. Thus, according to Herodotus,
35200-477: The tradition inherited by Vitruvius included the Doric column, noted for its simplicity and strength. The Dorians seem to have offered the central mainland cultus for Helios . The scattering of cults of the sun god in Sicyon , Argos , Ermioni , Epidaurus and Laconia , and his holy livestock flocks at Taenarum , seem to suggest that the deity was considerably important in Dorian religion, compared to other parts of ancient Greece. Additionally, it may have been
35400-438: The unity between the Greek states during the Battle of Thermopylae . The Congress of Corinth, formed prior to it, "split into two sections." Athens headed one and Lacedaemon the other: For a short time the league held together, till the Lacedaemonians and Athenians quarreled, and made war upon each other with their allies, a duel into which all the Hellenes sooner or later were drawn. He adds: "the real cause I consider to be ...
35600-409: The w and contraction. The tablet records the grain rations issued to the servants of "religious dignitaries" celebrating a religious festival of Potnia , the mother goddess. The nominative singular, Dōrieus , remained the same in the classical period. Many Linear B names of servants were formed from their home territory or the places where they came into Mycenaean ownership. Carl Darling Buck sees
35800-420: The war of the Seven against Thebes and the eventual pillage of that city at the hands of the Epigoni . (It is not known whether the Seven figured in early epic.) As far as Oedipus is concerned, early epic accounts seem to have him continuing to rule at Thebes after the revelation that Iokaste was his mother, and subsequently marrying a second wife who becomes the mother of his children—markedly different from
36000-494: The words of Édouard Will [ fr ] , "a quasi-permanent temptation" in German intellectual culture. His ideas became associated with Prussian militarism ; by the 1930s, Müller, militarism and ancient Sparta were closely connected in German political culture, to a much greater extent than they had been in Müller's own work. In 1929, Hans Günther – an early supporter of the Nazi Party and major influence upon its racial theories – published Racial History of
36200-434: The world" may be divided into three or four broader periods: While the age of gods often has been of more interest to contemporary students of myth, the Greek authors of the archaic and classical eras had a clear preference for the age of heroes, establishing a chronology and record of human accomplishments after the questions of how the world came into being were explained. For example, the heroic Iliad and Odyssey dwarfed
36400-410: Was also alluded to by the Theban poet Pindar , who wrote in the early fifth century BCE. The narrative of the Dorian invasion was particularly important in Sparta, where it formed the city's foundation myth . Tyrtaeus wrote of the Spartans as Dorians, who arrived in the land of Laconia from Erineus , in Doris , with the Heracleidae. There, Zeus and Hera granted Sparta to the Heracleidae:
36600-543: Was central to classical Athenian drama . The tragic playwrights Aeschylus , Sophocles , and Euripides took most of their plots from myths of the age of heroes and the Trojan War. Many of the great tragic stories (e.g. Agamemnon and his children, Oedipus , Jason , Medea , etc.) took on their classic form in these tragedies. The comic playwright Aristophanes also used myths, in The Birds and The Frogs . Historians Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus , and geographers Pausanias and Strabo , who traveled throughout
36800-409: Was diverse and closely related to other varieties of Greek, and may not have originated from a single proto-dialect. The ancient Greeks considered the Dorians to have migrated to the Peloponnese from central Greece, led by the descendants of the hero Heracles (the Heracleidae ), around the end of the age of heroes (roughly the Late Bronze Age or the late second millennium BCE), shortly after
37000-416: Was emphasised, and the newly-founded tribes of Messenia were given the names of Heracles's descendants rather than the traditional names of the Dorian tribal groups of the region. Nino Luraghi interprets this as a means of breaking the perceived links between Messenia and Sparta: the latter was considered, in his words, "the quintessence of Dorianism". Sparta used the myth of the Dorian invasion to justify
37200-448: Was fundamentally Germanic in nature, and that Nazi Germany, which modelled its militarism and state-organised militarised training of boys on Sparta, represented the best of classical Greek virtues. The Dorians were also imagined as having invaded Italy: a 1940 work published in Leipzig argued for "indisputable connections" between protohistoric sites in northern Italy and those of Prussia and Scandinavia. The work of Fritz Schachermeyr ,
37400-405: Was in Thessaly , central Greece. He goes on to expand in mythological terms, giving some of the geographic details of the myth: 1.56.2-3 And inquiring he found that the Lacedemonians and the Athenians had the pre-eminence, the first of the Dorian and the others of the Ionian race. For these were the most eminent races in ancient time, the second being a Pelasgian and the first a Hellenic race: and
37600-418: Was incompatible with the Greek myths of the Dorian invasion and of the Heracleidae. However, he also noted that no material-culture innovations were any longer attributed to the Dorians, writing that "the Dorians, archaeologically speaking, do not exist". By the early 1980s, the reality of the Dorian invasion was widely doubted in scholarship. In 1978, Carol G. Thomas wrote that Chadwick's linguistic argument
37800-428: Was incompatible with the mythological tradition, and would imply that the Dorian invasion was a post facto ethnogenesis myth created in the Iron Age. Noel Robertson wrote in 1980 that the veracity of the invasion was widely doubted, and that the only remaining evidence for it was the Greek mythical tradition, which he considered to be better explained as a later innovation. In 1982, Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillion called
38000-478: Was insured by the constant use of nectar and ambrosia , by which the divine blood was renewed in their veins. Each god descends from his or her own genealogy, pursues differing interests, has a certain area of expertise, and is governed by a unique personality; however, these descriptions arise from a multiplicity of archaic local variants, which do not always agree with one another. When these gods are called upon in poetry, prayer, or cult, they are referred to by
38200-412: Was made of wood); i.e., "the people of the spear" or "spearmen." In this case the country would be named after the people, as in Saxony from the Saxons. However, R. S. P. Beekes doubted the validity of this derivation and asserted that no good etymology exists. It sometimes happens that different derivations of an Indo-European word exploit similar-sounding Indo-European roots. Greek doru , "lance,"
38400-586: Was no true ethnic component in fifth-century Greek culture, in spite of anti-Dorian elements in Athenian propaganda. At the other extreme John Alty reinterprets the sources to conclude that ethnicity did motivate fifth-century actions. Moderns viewing these ethnic identifications through the 5th and 4th century BC literary tradition have been profoundly influenced by their own social politics. Also, according to E. N. Tigerstedt , nineteenth-century European admirers of virtues they considered "Dorian" identified themselves as " Laconophile " and found responsive parallels in
38600-592: Was probably a real man, perhaps a chieftain-vassal of the kingdom of Argos . Some scholars suggest the story of Heracles is an allegory for the sun's yearly passage through the twelve constellations of the zodiac. Others point to earlier myths from other cultures, showing the story of Heracles as a local adaptation of hero myths already well established. Traditionally, Heracles was the son of Zeus and Alcmene , granddaughter of Perseus . His fantastic solitary exploits, with their many folk-tale themes, provided much material for popular legend. According to Burkert (2002), "He
38800-511: Was repeated when Cronus was confronted by his son, Zeus . Because Cronus had betrayed his father, he feared that his offspring would do the same, and so each time Rhea gave birth, he snatched up the child and ate it. Rhea hated this and tricked him by hiding Zeus and wrapping a stone in a baby's blanket, which Cronus ate. When Zeus was full-grown, he fed Cronus a drugged drink which caused him to vomit, throwing up Rhea's other children, including Poseidon , Hades , Hestia , Demeter , and Hera , and
39000-488: Was searching for her daughter, Persephone , having taken the form of an old woman called Doso, and received a hospitable welcome from Celeus , the King of Eleusis in Attica . As a gift to Celeus, because of his hospitality, Demeter planned to make his son Demophon a god, but she was unable to complete the ritual because his mother Metanira walked in and saw her son in the fire and screamed in fright, which angered Demeter, who lamented that foolish mortals do not understand
39200-522: Was the bow but frequently also the club. Vase paintings demonstrate the unparalleled popularity of Heracles, his fight with the lion being depicted many hundreds of times. Heracles also entered Etruscan and Roman mythology and cult, and the exclamation "mehercule" became as familiar to the Romans as "Herakleis" was to the Greeks. In Italy he was worshipped as a god of merchants and traders, although others also prayed to him for his characteristic gifts of good luck or rescue from danger. Heracles attained
39400-431: Was the goddess of love and beauty, Ares was the god of war, Hades the ruler of the underworld, and Athena the goddess of wisdom and courage. Some gods, such as Apollo and Dionysus , revealed complex personalities and mixtures of functions, while others, such as Hestia (literally "hearth") and Helios (literally "sun"), were little more than personifications. The most impressive temples tended to be dedicated to
39600-417: Was the man who then banded together the exiles, they got the new name of "Dorians", instead of "Achaeans". But as to all the events that follow this, you Lacedaemonians relate them all fully in your traditions. The Description of Greece by Pausanias relates that the Achaeans were driven from their lands by Dorians coming from Oeta , a mountainous region bordering on Thessaly . They were led by Hyllus ,
39800-450: Was the subject of many lost poems, including those attributed to Orpheus, Musaeus , Epimenides , Abaris , and other legendary seers, which were used in private ritual purifications and mystery-rites . There are indications that Plato was familiar with some version of the Orphic theogony. A silence would have been expected about religious rites and beliefs, however, and that nature of the culture would not have been reported by members of
40000-404: Was the work of Dorian invaders, whom he considered to be a Germanic people from northern Europe. This view became the most popular scholarly interpretation of Geometric pottery for the remainder of the nineteenth century, though early objections noted the continuity between Mycenaean and Geometric styles and that Geometric pottery originated in Attica, which was not affected by the Dorian invasion in
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