Dorian Invasion. History

The ancient Greeks attempted to account for the differences in dialect through mythological stories. The Trojan War marked a clear delineation in Greek history. Events occurred either before or after this great war, and it provided a clear understanding of Greek culture in antiquity. While this neat break did not really exist as a single point in time, such as a battle, it did create a distinction between what was before and what came afterward; it provided the Greeks with a starting point to account for regional variations that they witnessed and experienced during their lifetime, often centuries later.

It was clear to the Greeks during the Classical Age that their culture, politics, and ethnic lives were different than the Mycenaean period. The ancient Greeks called this break in continuity the Dorian invasion. The Mycenaean period was wrapped up in folklore when Greece was united through language, and the Great King of Mycenae ruled over a variety of minor kingdoms that owed him allegiance. According to Greek mythology, when this civilization was swept away, it left remnants that spoke Ionic.

The arrival of this new group around 1100 produced a period of upheaval. During the tenth and ninth centuries, the arrival of a new group speaking a Greek dialect, the Dorians, arrived from the northwest between Thessaly and Epirus. The traditional view had the Dorians coming into Greece, destroying the Mycenaean Bronze Age culture and replacing it with a different culture from the Iron Age. This is probably too simplistic and should be seen as a transition from the twelfth-century Mycenaean Age to the Geometric pre-Classical Age of the eighth century.

The Greeks viewed the Dorians as the return of the descendants of Heracles, since Hyllus, his son, had already come to Greece, and died, before the Trojan War. These new invaders appropriated the story of Heracles’s descendants returning and occupying Greece. The legends help explain the dialects that soon developed among the Greeks. Areas like Attica and Euboea claimed that they were not conquered, and their dialect, Ionian, was the tongue of the original inhabitants. Fleeing the Dorians, they would sail east to Asia Minor and establish colonies there.

The various dialects, Dorian, Aeolian, Ionian, Achaean, and Arcadian, which were based upon geographic divisions of Greece, accounted for the ethnic divisions in their mythology. The story was that the Dorians came from the north by land, crossing the Pindos Mountains and moving south. They were blocked from traversing the Isthmus of Corinth by the Thessalians and Boeotians, who were already there.

The Thessalians prevented the Dorians from moving on the eastern side of Greece, forcing them to move through the western side of Greece, and upon their arrival in the south, the Boeotians blocked the southeastern passage through the isthmus. The legend then had the Dorians moving south, to the northern coast of the Gulf of Corinth through Doris to Naupaktos, where their guide, Oxylos, a relative of the Heraclids, led them by sea to the northern shore of the Peloponnese.

They bypassed Elis, which did not speak Dorian, since Oxylos wanted that region for himself. Upon arrival in the Peloponnese, the Dorians moved south and east to Argos, which displaced the inhabitants to Achaea, and those peoples in turn displaced the Ionians to Athens. The second area attacked by the Dorians in the Peloponnese was Laconia, while a third wave moved to the south and west toward Messenia, pushing the indigenous inhabitants into the mountain regions.

Some ancient Greeks believed that this third invasion did not really take place then, but rather was part of the later Sparta (Laconian) expansion during the seventh century. The Arcadians were left alone and had favorable relations with the Dorians. The region of Corinth came under the influence of the Dorians only at a later time.

The stories said that the Dorian invasions occurred over a period of generations and discussed the different geographical and ethnic regions that came into existence. In the mythology, the Dorians were ultimately located in the Peloponnese, with the exception of the northern Arcadian region. The Isthmus of Corinth was taken over eventually, while in the north, the region of Attica became Ionian and Boeotia Aeolian. The purpose of these stories was to show how the Greeks viewed themselves through the different dialects.

This division also was used for the eastern Aegean, where the Ionians, from Attica, colonized the middle region of Asia Minor, traditionally in twelve cities that included Miletus, Ephesus, Samos, and Teos. The Dorians colonized five cities south of Ionia in Asia Minor, among them Rhodes, Kos, and Knidos. Finally, north of Ionia, the Aeolians established twelve cities. This division corresponded to the ethnic division in Greece consisting of the Ionians in Attica, the Dorians south in the Peloponnese, and the Aeolians north of Attica in Boeotia.

The Dorian invasion, then, must be seen as a way for the Greeks to explain their position in the post-Mycenaean age. The mythology had the Dorians as originally part of the heroic age (i.e., the Mycenaean Age) as the offspring of Heracles (a Greek) who had left the Greek world and now they returned to take up their position as leaders of the Greeks by virtue of their ancestor (Heracles). This would then account for the arrival of the Dorians into Greece. Homer put the Dorians in Crete and the Eastern Aegean islands.

The later Greeks said that the Dorians pushed north into Thessaly by the Cadmeans, the Bronze Age Greeks, or the Mycenaean Greeks. They were then led back to Greece, the so-called “return” by the Herakeidai, or descendants of Heracles, and retook the southern part of Greece, or the “Achaean” world of Homer. The Greeks indicated that the Dorians had tried several times and succeeded only after two generations, after the Trojan War.

The Greeks explained that the Hylleis, one of the tribes of invaders, were led by Hyllos. This group was viewed as the elite group of Dorians rather than the mixed group under the second tribe, the Pamphyloi, whose name means “of mixed race.” The third tribe, the Dymanes, has unclear origins. It appears, however, that these invaders did not come in as waves, but probably during a period of time when various groups moved simultaneously from the northwest, collectively known as the Dorians.

The term Dorian Invasion, however, does not explain the entire picture. The dialects, customs, and institutions that developed did not occur so neatly. The various regions, with their dialects, were divided even further into subdialects, making the determination even more difficult. In addition, most of the surviving texts, who go back only to the eighth century, are written in the Ionian dialect and not in the Dorian dialect, the language of the invaders. The archaeological remains are not very conclusive as to their origin and differences with the Mycenaean and pre-Geometric eras.

The division of the dialects then fell into two major categories aligned with geographic regions. The West Greeks and North-West Greeks, seen as Dorian, were the most recent arrivals after the fall of the Mycenaean period. The preDorian East Greeks were divided into the Aeolians, Ionians, and Arcadians. The Dorians settled in the south-central Peloponnese and North-West Greece, while the pre-Dorians occurred in Thessaly, Boeotia, and Attica, north of the Peloponnese; Arcadia, in the northern part of the Peloponnese in a mountainous region; and Cyprus, which had the same dialect as Arcadia.

The protogeometric pottery during the tenth century, with circular designs, differed from the hand-painted Mycenaean-era creations. The protogeometric pottery then looked more toward the new Greeks rather than to the previous Mycenaean Age. The following period, in the tenth and ninth centuries, produced a more settled condition, allowing for growth. This in turn led to an increase in population, colonization, and the rise of a new political system based upon the city-state, or polis. This period created a rise in urbanization that differed from the Mycenaean period, which was founded upon the palace and not the households and mercantile development in a region.

The Dorian invasion was viewed by the classical Greeks as a watershed event that separated the Mycenaean period from the pre-Classical age. Although the invasion is now known to have been a series of migrations over several centuries, the classical Greeks viewed it as a relatively quick event. The end result of the influx of new Greek-speaking immigrants was to divide Greece and foster a divergence of cultural and eventually political cultures. The Dorians, mainly in the south, pushed their colonies out to Sicily and southern Asia Minor. The major classical Greek conflict would be between the Dorian Sparta and the Ionian Athens.