Ancient Greek Civilization | The Age of Heroes (Lecture 5)

Lecture 5: With the passing of the Bronze Age between 1200 and 1100 BC, Greek culture underwent profound changes. Central authority collapsed, to be replaced in most areas by the more humble power of chieftains and clan leaders. The society that emerged during these so-called Dark Ages was organized around neither the palace nor the fortress, but around the oikos or household. This would become the principal social unit of the Greeks, and it would underpin the rise of the polis or city-state.

All was not chaos and destruction, however. In the last generation, archaeology has supplied surprising evidence of a more rapid recovery than was previously suspected. This was a critical period for the Greeks in another respect, since it was at this time that epic poetry arose. The Greeks would return to the Iliad and the Odyssey endlessly. Their codes of honor, their notions of the relation between god and human, man and woman, parent and child—in short, their entire mentality—was conditioned by the imaginative world created by Homer and the epic tradition.

Suggested Reading
Desborough, V.R. d'A. (1964) The Last Mycenaeans and Their Successors, An Archaeological Survey, c. 1200-c.1000 BC. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1972) The Greek Dark Ages. New York: St Martin's Press.
Snodgrass, A.M. (1971) The Dark Age of Greece. Edinburgh: The University Press.

Lecture 6: https://www.bitchute.com/video/Bc7UjI3a19Pz/