Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (26 page)

Mycenae and most other settlements on the Greek mainland were destroyed sometime after 1200 BCE, ushering in a Greek Dark Age, the third major period in Greek history, which lasted until about 800 BCE. Historians do not know why Mycenaean Greece fell into chaos. Perhaps climate change led to famine. Suspicion also falls on the invasion of another group, Greek-speakers called Dorians, from northern Greece, who moved south into the region, forcing many Mycenaeans to flee to Asia Minor. One reason the lights went out during this Dark Age was that somehow Greek knowledge of writing (which used a form called Linear B adapted from the Minoans) was lost, and the Greeks only began to write again sometime after 800 BCE.

That is about the time that someone familiar with Phoenician writing invented the Greek alphabet. Phoenician writing only had signs for consonants; some clever but anonymous Greek added indications for vowel sounds. For the first time—experts generally agree—writing could approximate the sound of the human voice (and that system is the basis for the writing you are now reading). With that development, the two great epics, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, were presumably written down for the first time sometime after 800 BCE, along with the works of a Greek poet named Hesiod, who conveniently catalogued the history and exploits of the gods.

The Dark Ages gave way to a fourth historical period, called the Archaic Age (800–490 BCE), with the emergence of the written Greek language, the return of those who had moved away, and the spreading of colonies in the west—in Southern Italy and Sicily. This period marked the beginnings of the polis, or Greek-city states, which would usher in the greatest developments in Greek history. Established as centers of trade and religion, each city-state was surrounded by walls to protect it against invasion. Within the city, there was usually a fortified hill—an acropolis—and at the center of each city was the agora—an open area that served as a market area and city center.

Finally, Greece flowered spectacularly in the Classical Period (490–323 BCE). This Golden Age was centered in Athens and had its earliest flowering with the Athenian lawmaker Solon’s democratic reforms in 594 BCE. It continued to grow over the next few centuries, bursting into full bloom in the Greece many of us think of when we think of the ancient world. A key moment came with the defeat of the Greeks’ great foreign rivals, the Persians, in a series of wars fought between 490 and 479 BCE. Shared religion, language, and culture played a central role in Greek life, and served the Greeks well when the Persian Empire threatened. The usually fiercely independent city-states joined under Athenian leadership to defeat two separate Persian invasions in one of the most fascinating turning points in Western history.
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These wars were the central subject of Herodotus’s
Histories
, in which he proudly wrote, “This proved, if there were need of proof, how noble a thing is freedom.” Freedom is a good thing, but so is heavy, bronze armor—helmet, shield, and breastplate. Which is what was worn by the hoplites, the citizen-soldiers who were the Greek city-states’ version of the National Guard and who fought in tight, well-organized formations—another key to the victory over the lighter-armored Persians.

With the victory over Persia by a united Greece, Athens emerged as Greek’s leading city and reached its pinnacle. Over the next century and a half, the great philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle walked the streets of Athens, the agora, or marketplace, and established their schools—the model for the university—in which the ideas that form the basis of Western philosophy were discussed and debated. This was also the time of voting-rights experiments and the flourishing of the great trio of playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—whose tragedies were performed in front of tens of thousands of Athenians in a dramatic competition that had its roots in a religious festival honoring the agricultural god, Dionysus, who was also credited with the invention of wine.

In all of these periods, myths played a central role in Greek life and society; they were at the core of religious observances and entertainment. Along with language and a common culture, myths provided a bond that no central Greek government ever could. But clearly, sometime around 800 BCE, as the so-called Dark Ages began to give way, something changed. A switch was thrown. And from then on, some Greeks began to abandon the notion that the gods controlled the universe. It was perhaps a singular moment in human history. Before this tipping point, most other ancient civilizations viewed life as the work of the gods, who needed to be served and worshipped, and their divine representatives on earth, kings and pharaohs—who also demanded to be served and worshipped.

Suddenly, in Greece, the fundamental understanding of the universe and man’s place in it was transformed through a revolution in thinking. A range of Greek thinkers began to search for natural explanations—a humanistic mind-quest to discover a rational system of creation in which order was not dependent on sacrificing animals to the gods and invoking magical oracles.

Of course, not everyone liked those notions, which challenged the status quo. That was one reason that the philosopher Socrates would eventually be placed on trial and sentenced to death in 399 BCE. His concepts were actually not so much antireligious as they were threatening the Athenian powers-that-be. But there was no turning back the sweeping tide of change. An unstoppable series of ideas had been set in motion, and history would never be the same.

Was Greece ever a theocracy?

Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece never produced a heavy-handed, monolithic central government ruled by divine kings. Even in Greece’s earliest times, there is no evidence that Minoan or, later, Greek kings ruled with the sort of divine sanction that Egyptian and Mesopotamian rulers claimed—and Rome’s emperors would later attempt to claim. Over the course of its history, Greek civilization had developed chiefly in small city-states, like Athens and Sparta, consisting of a city or town and the surrounding villages and farmland. Small, fiercely independent, and often quarrelsome, these city-states were strongly patriotic, and full of citizens—free and male, that is—who made that great leap into participating proudly in public affairs, both as a ready army of hoplites, and then as participants in the decision-making. The ancient Greek city-states were never united as a “nation” in the modern sense of the word. More to the point, they were never “nations under gods,” or theocracies.

Even so, a shared “public” religion played a central role in Greek life. The cult practices and deities among the different Greek communities had enough in common to be seen as one system. Herodotus later characterized this shared religion as “Greekness,” by which he referred to common temples and rituals. Chief among these rituals were various forms of sacrifice. (There is some evidence of human sacrifice in prehistoric Greece and on Crete, but the practice disappeared.) And a typical ritual was the “libation”—the pouring of water, wine, olive oil, milk, or honey—in honor of the gods, heroes, or the dead, usually before a meal.

With temples dedicated to the favorite patron god or goddess in every city-state, the Greeks believed that certain deities actively watched over them and directed daily events. Both priests and priestesses served in the temples to perform rituals. Families tried to please household deities with gifts and ceremonies that included animal sacrifice and offerings of food. Like Athens, which was protected by its namesake, Athena, each city-state honored one or more deities as the patron deity of the community, and held annual festivals in their honor.

Large crowds also gathered in ancient Greece for religious festivals that included feasts, colorful processions, and choral performances, which evolved into the first Greek drama. In Athens, for instance, there was a great civic festival called the Panathenea in late summer, during which there were sacrifices and a large procession by groups representing the different segments of Athenian society.
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Every four years there was “greater Panathenea,” which included major athletic and musical competitions open to all Greece. Athletic festivals were also popular, and the Olympic games, the most famous of these festivals, involved all of the Greek city-states. Held in honor of Zeus, the first recorded Olympics took place in 776 BCE and continued every four years for more than a thousand years. Even wars were usually—but not always—halted during the Olympic festival.

The Greeks also believed that their deities could help them foresee the future, and people flocked to shrines called oracles to consult seers, both male and female, who played a central role in the lives of Greeks, whether highborn or common. One of these was Dodona, a sacred site where priests interpreted the sounds of the wind blowing through the leaves of a sacred oak tree. The most important shrine in ancient Greece was Delphi, home of the sacred oracle of the god Apollo, site of the omphalos, or sacred “navel stone,” believed to be the center of the world. A conical stone thought to be part of the Greek Creation myth (see below,
How do you get Creation from castration?
), the navel stone was the mystical connection to the navel of Mother Earth. The Greeks, like other ancient civilizations, were also devoted to the possibility of magic, and sacred objects, such as amulets and household idols, and spells and other magical rituals were all part of everyday Greek life.

But as classicist Barry Powell points out, “The Greek gods had personalities like those of humans and struggled with one another for position and power. They did not love humans (although some had favorites) and did not ask to be loved by them. They did not impose codes of behavior.”

Clearly that was starkly different from the state religions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel, where long traditions established the nearly unbreakable connection between worship, personal conduct, and the politics of the state. The Greeks had their public and private rituals, and they were important, but no Greek ruler ever tried to elevate himself to pharaoh or introduce a single deity, as Akhenaten had done in Egypt. Nor were the Greek gods believed to be in complete control of the universe or human destiny. As historian Charles Freeman noted about the Greeks, “They never pretended that their gods were always benevolent or omnipotent in human affairs, and so bad fortune could be rationalized as a natural element of existence.”

And the concept of a “natural element” would soon be viewed by many Greeks as far more important—and interesting. Judging from their extraordinary achievements across the many disciplines—literature, art, science, mathematics, philosophy—these ancient Greeks clearly came to prize a way of life that stressed the importance of the individual, encouraged creative thought, and elevated the power of observation. Greek thinkers laid the foundations of science and philosophy by seeking logical explanations for what happened in the natural world. They could see that the eclipse of the moon wasn’t the capricious act of a god, but the shadow of the earth, and from that they discerned that earth was round. And although the classical Greeks had Homer and Hesiod and the great works of the tragedians, it is also important to note that they had no Bible and no
Enuma Elish
to dictate their lives and behavior, no strict concepts like the Egyptian
maat
or the Mesopotamian
me
rigidly ordering their existence. To them, the gods were not the source of truth, justice, and laws. Quite to the contrary, writes Barry Powell, “The Greeks invented ethics, a way to tell right from wrong without divine authority, and secular law, which together make up humanism.”