The Dark Ages are often portrayed as well, dark. Soot covered serfs breaking their backs in sparse fields, while warlords bicker for power in a cycle of violence. And while there are truths in these stereotypes, these depictions do an injustice to the Dark Ages.
By Henry Stevens, Political science and international relations - University of Waterloo
Dark ages are periods of time when the written record becomes sparse. There is an urban exodus, trade slows to a crawl, and people turn to the fields and hills to feed their families. These developments are often hailed as negative by our urban societies, who see a decline in what they would call civilisation. In reality, these dark ages are the birthplaces of civilisation as we know it, and no nation’s darkest age brought light like Greece.
The first Greek Dark Age occurred after the fall of Mycenae, during the times of Achilles and Theseus. The Greeks called this time the Age of Heroes. We call it the Age of Bronze. In this time, a great catastrophe would cripple the meditteranian. From Egypt, to Greece, to Anatolia, empires and kingdoms which had stood for 3000 years crumbled in mere decades. The catastrophe’s cause is still a mystery. The resulting centuries are called a Dark Age for Greece, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It is during these Dark Ages, that the bones of Hellenic culture would be set, and through them, the birth of what we call “Western Civilisation”. I am of course referring to the greatest story of all time, The Epic Cycle of Homer, which contained the Iliad and the Odyssey.
As the princes and warriors of old settled the hillsides of Attica to tend to flocks of sheep instead of armies of men, they told stories of their conquests. These stories spread amongst the common folk, whose honest wisdom informed their contents, creating a true reflection of Greek life. Over the next few centuries, these stories were memorized and repeated by the story-tellers and priests of their time, creating an oral tradition which continues to this day. Values of courage, sacrifice, piety, and cleverness, were conveyed through these Epic Poems, while the sins of Hubris and Excess were identified and discouraged. These values became, and still are, fundamental to the western spirit. Frugal honest living, in service to others, while remaining confident in oneself, remains the antidote to the woes of our rapidly changing world.
In these mythic tales of Gods, kings, and warriors, we gain a window into the first Greek Dark Age. These times saw the development of the Greek civic spirit. Kings were not divine, but men who ruled on behalf of the Gods. Most importantly, they were expected to rule by example, lead from the front, and sacrifice themselves for their people. Athenian law has its origins in the first Dark Age as well, whose myth supposed that Athena herself presided over the first trial.
Alongside these developments, came a more nuanced understanding of war. Homer’s Iliad is often skeptical of the merits of war, and describes in detail the homelands and pasts of men slayed on the battlefield. These men were not heroes, nor the sons of heroes, but ordinary rank and file, who were granted obituaries nonetheless. These obituaries humanized the opponents of heroes, who like the super-heroes of our day, would mow down whole columns of men in mere minutes. The obituaries of common soldiers weave into one another, and the lives of the heroes, to show how interwoven their lives were, and how war was tearing that fabric apart.
These epic poems would eventually be codified, in the Greek Dark Age’s most ubiquitous contribution to western canon, the alphabet. During the Bronze age, the Mycenaen ancestors of Classical Greeks wrote in a Pictographic script. After the great collapse, the Mycenaean script faded away, to be replaced with an alphabet imported from Lebanon. This Alphabet changed the nature of Greek literature. What little writing that survives from the days of Mycenae, is the equivalent of an ancient Excel sheet. The most verbose Mycenaen literature concerned peace treaties, and they were still comparatively sparse. The alphabet freed Greek writing from the associations of economy and trade, opening up their literary world to the poems their rural revival had nursed.
Each of these advancements came not in spite of the collapse, but because of it. The rural exodus merging the refined culture of palace aristocracy with the rugged wisdom of village life. The wars which followed the collapse would inspire the greatest works of western literature, and the exchange of cultures thereafter would bring to Greece its alphabet. These advancements occurred during a period historians call Greece’s darkest age. Perhaps we should take a page from the Greeks themselves, and rather let it be known as an Age of Sages, to follow their Age of Heroes.
