Evidence of an early Dark Age basileus was recently discovered at the site of Lefkandi on the island of Euboea. A bustling Mycenaean town, Lefkandi had declined during the collapse and then revived in the Submycenaean period, enjoying exceptional prosperity (by Dark Age standards) until 700, when it was abandoned. In 1981, the excavators made a surprising discovery: the largest Dark Age building yet found, measuring 30 by 146 feet, constructed around 1000 BC.
By 1100 BC, these Bronze Age lords were being overwhelmed by new invaders from the north with iron weapons and greater manpower. Most of the massive Mycenaean strongholds perished by fire and sack. The Dorian Greeks were illiterate, incapable of the organization which sustained Minoan-Mycenaean culture; for centuries, Greece reverted to a primitive way of life. The heroes of the Iliad, who behaved like Dorian Greeks, though their legend is Mycenaean, are warriors akin to the heroes of sagas everywhere. The famous war against Troy, which commanded the Hellespont, probably records a genuine expedition, undertaken at the end of the thirteenth century, perhaps to promote colonization on the Black Sea, not by Mycenaeans, but by Dorian Greeks. These heroes are northerners; they feast on fat oxen and recognize only a shadowy pre-eminence of their war-lords. They are aristocrats, like the Celts who were their contemporaries in Central Europe, touchy on points of honor, apt to sulk in black tents, avid for women and plunder; they are alien to the retainers of a highly organized Mycenaean palace, or to the courtiers and bureaucrats of a Great King; they lead passionate lives and suffer their ordained fates. But the populace whom they exploited and despised continued to cultivate the olive terraces, orchards, and vineyards, and herd their goats and gather their harvests; craftsmen still worked the mines and made the pottery. The basic skills of Minoan-Mycenaean antiquity were never lost.
The Danish Bronze Age (c. 1500-800 BC) is particularly interesting. The amber trade brought wealth, and elaborate grave goods have survived. Even garments have been preserved, the oldest textiles in the north. Cut to resemble skins and precariously secured; brown woolen tunics were fastened behind by bronze buttons, under bare shoulders, while long cloaks were surmounted by brimless caps. At Skrydstrup, the most dramatic of these relics have come to light: wrapped in a cowskin in a great oaken coffin, lay a woman in an elaborate coiffure, swept low across her forehead, and in her ears gleamed spiral rings of gold; tall, enigmatic, she lies today under a glass case at Copenhagen.
A Mediterranean civilization determined Europe’s political and religious future: in literature, architecture, and the arts, this influence was equally overwhelming, directly, and through the Renaissance — a term unfashionable but just. For Roman writers gave Hellenic and Hellenistic literature a new turn, and it was mainly through Latin that civilization filtered through to the Western barbarians, if the Byzantine legacy to Russia was Greek, and, during the twelfth century, the West regained contact with Hellenistic literature and science through the Arabs. It is, indeed, impossible to imagine modern Western civilization without this background, for the Northern literature of epic and saga, though sometimes magnificent, is in general murky and barbaric. The order and clarity of Latin were decisive in the transmission of the rudiments of culture, in the organization and discipline of the Church, in law and administration, so that when a Norman King says Moneo et praecipe at the beginning of a writ, the words still echo the commands of Rome.
As Western civilization went down, and as Byzantium withdrew into its Eastern territories after the short-lived attempt under Justinian and Belisarius to regain North Africa and Italy in the sixth century, the West confronted the future in an intellectual economic and technical degradation unparalleled by any great contemporary civilization. But it possessed in the Christian religion, which, like Graeco-Roman culture, had come out of the East, a creed full of obstinate Semitic vision and fire, inspired by a novel charity and hope.
Science thus began in Ionia, but by far the greatest Greek scientist was Aristotle ( 384-322 BC), whose influence on European civilization has been greater than that of any other philosopher. The weight of his immense learning, from physics and zoology to politics, which he rightly regarded as a branch of biology, make him the outstanding scientific co-ordinator of classical antiquity; his belief that society should aim at the ‘good life’ within the bounds of the human condition is the most important principle of political science, in terms of Humanism and Christianity. Thus the scientific speculations of Ionia spread back to mainland Greece, whose philosophers often surpassed their mentors.
This kind of analysis had also been applied to philosophy and ethics. In Athens, Socrates had been put to death in 399 BC; with his indefatigable dialectic, he had for years compelled and cajoled the youth of Athens into examining the basis of their conduct and beliefs. In Plato’s, Symposium Alkibiades declares, ‘I have been bitten by philosophical discourse, which implies pain sharper than the adder’s sting in the young and sensitive intelligence it attacks.’ Doubtless, the pain was pleasurable for the scintillating wits of the Agora. Plato ( 427-347 BC), who was influenced by Indian ideas, sought to find ‘reality in the shift of change: his doctrine of permanent ‘forms,’ which phenomena reflect, may have misled philosophy, and his advocating an authoritarian closed society is a counsel of despair, but the beauty of his exposition and the balanced candor of his judgments are incontestable.
Alexander the Great ( 355-323 BC) now changed the course of world history. A Balkan background early proved his metal. When his father, Philip II, of Macedon, left him in charge of a kingdom at fifteen, he had at once put down a revolt, and he had succeeded to the throne four years later when Philip was murdered by one of his own guards. Through his mother, Olympias, Alexander was an Epirote from the harsh Illyrian mountains; she probably connived at her husband’s murder and was killed six years after her son’s death, having massacred most of the leading families of Macedonia. Philip, who was assassinated at forty-seven, had organized the armies Alexander led and himself planned the invasion of Asia. The Macedonian phalanx was a deep wedge of pikemen, whose weapons in the rear ranks were twenty feet long and whose right arms were overlapped by the next man’s shield. They were employed with cavalry to protect their flanks and to envelop the enemy when the phalanx had smashed into him. These tactics were deadly against large and ill-organized oriental armies, which often still used chariots.
The Roman Empire, in spite of the frequent atrocity of its politics, thus created the political framework of European civilization. It embodied a Mediterranean way of life whose inspiration was Greek and whose administration, derived from the Republic and the household of the Princeps, was also modeled on Hellenistic bureaucracy. In spite of the modern revolution in the industry, scientific knowledge, and overseas settlement, which have since dwarfed the Mediterranean world, the Roman tradition is still decisive.