Year: 2011
Type: reference-entry
Abstract: Archaic Age From about 750 BCE onwards, the Greek world developed and expanded at a rapid rate: city-states with republican governments, militia armies, and a distinctive material and intellectual culture emerged, and Greeks began to travel and settle all over the Mediterranean.The composition of the ILIAD and ODYSSEY is most often dated near the start of these developments, 750-650 BCE, though some would argue that the epics remained fluid until they began to be performed at the Panathenaia festival, ca.550-530 BCE (see ATHENS AND HOMER).Either way, the Archaic Age is a crucial period in the history of the epics.To what extent the poems reflect the time of their composition remains a matter of debate.Traditionally, scholars have looked to the Bronze and Early Iron Ages as models for the world of the heroes (see MYCENAEAN AGE; DARK AGE), and acknowledged only a few Archaic elements, which they have often dismissed as later "INTERPOLATIONS."More recently, the trend has been to identify many more late 8th-and 7thcentury elements, and to argue that the epics drew heavily on their contemporary world, as well as on older ORAL TRADITION.The Archaic period saw the rise of cities in Greece.The small and scattered settlements of the Early Iron Age grew larger, more densely inhabited, and acquired public facilities and spaces, such as TEMPLES, fortification walls, meeting places, and eventually also government buildings.The earliest temples appeared ca.800 BCE, in the shape of large houses of wood and brick with thatched roofs; in the course of the 7th century, such sanctuaries gradually acquired their familiar monumental form, and the associated complexes of treasuries and stoas.City walls are attested from about 750 BCE onwards (the sole earlier wall, at Smyrna, is likely to have been a sea-defense rather than a fortification), while designated open spaces serving as an AGORA appeared only a little later.Whereas older HOUSES were singleroom structures standing in relative isolation from one another, from about 725 BCE we find multi-roomed houses, often directly abutting their neighbors and sometimes lined up to form regular streets and even grids, as at Megara Hyblaea in SICILY and Vroulia in RHODES.Public
Source: The Homer Encyclopedia
Author: Hans Van Wees
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4238068437