Dorians

• 1. Introduction

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  A Dorian mother in Sparta sent her son to war with a blunt order: return either with your shield or on it. That grim farewell hints at a people who built their lives around soldiering. Yet the Dorians themselves are surprisingly hard to pin down. Ancient writers disagreed about where they came from. Modern scholars still cannot prove that a Dorian invasion ever took place. Even the meaning of their name is argued over. Who were the Dorians, and what made a Greek city count as Dorian at all?

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• 2. Four Greek Peoples

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  Corinth and Sparta were both Dorian, yet few Greek cities looked less alike. Corinth was a populous trade center, known for an ornate style in art and architecture. Sparta was an isolationist, military state. Even so, every Hellene knew which localities were Dorian and which were not. Dorian states at war could more likely, though not always, count on help from one another. Alongside the Aeolians, Achaeans, and Ionians, the Dorians formed one of the four major ethnic groups into which the Greeks divided themselves. A Doric dialect and shared social and historical traditions marked them out.

  By the 5th century BC, the Dorians and the Ionians were the two most politically important of these peoples. Their ultimate clash produced the Peloponnesian War. How strongly fifth-century Greeks actually thought of themselves as Ionian or Dorian is itself disputed. One scholar concludes that there was no true ethnic component in the culture of the time, despite anti-Dorian elements in Athenian propaganda. At the opposite extreme, John Alty rereads the sources and concludes that ethnicity did motivate fifth-century actions.

  E. N. Tigerstedt points to nineteenth-century European admirers of what they considered Dorian virtues. These admirers called themselves Laconophile and found echoes of those virtues in their own culture. Their biases helped shape the traditional modern picture of the Dorians. A Linear B tablet from Pylos, meanwhile, holds a name that looks like a Bronze Age cousin of the word itself.

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• 3. Meaning of the Name

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  Tablet Fn867 from Pylos records a man's name, Dorieus, written in Linear B as do-ri-je-we. The tablet lists grain rations issued to the servants of religious dignitaries during a festival of Potnia, the mother goddess. Many servant names in Linear B came from a home territory or from the place where the person entered Mycenaean ownership. Carl Darling Buck sees the suffix -eus as very productive in this way. Megareus, meaning a Megarian, was formed from Megara. A Dorieus would therefore come from Doris, the only classical Greek state to give its name to the Dorians. Doris was a small, mountainous state in west central Greece, though the classical one may not match the Mycenaean one.

  Julius Pokorny derived the name from doris, a word for woodland or upland. It comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning tree, which also gives the Homeric Doureios Hippos, the Wooden Horse. That derivation names the people after their wooded, mountainous country. Emile Boisacq took the same root toward doru, a spear-shaft, which would make the Dorians the people of the spear, as Saxony takes its name from the Saxons. R. S. P. Beekes doubted this and asserted that no good etymology exists.

  Jonathan Hall proposes a third path, from doron, the Greek word for gift. He cites a fragment of the poet Tyrtaeus saying that Sparta was a divine gift from Zeus and Hera to the Heracleidae. In another version, Tyndareus gives his kingdom to Heracles, who asks the Spartan king to safeguard it until his descendants can claim it. Hall compares the Spartans to the Hebrews as a chosen people holding a covenant and a Holy Land. Critics note that he never explains why the Dorians gave the name Doris to a humbler, remoter place. He also does not address the Dorian servant at Pylos.

  A forgotten episode in scholarship tried to link doron to the word for hand. It reinterpreted the famous lambda on Spartan shields as a hand with an outstanding thumb, rather than the initial of Lacedaimon. That legend traces back to a fragment by Eupolis, an Athenian comic poet. A recent suggestion holds that Eupolis may have intended a comic confusion between the letter and the hand. Behind Hall's theory stands a myth about the descendants of Heracles, and ancient authors told it in several versions.

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• 4. The Invasion Puzzle

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  The Odyssey describes Crete as a fair, rich land with ninety cities and many tongues: "There dwell Achaeans, there great-hearted native Cretans, there Cydonians, and Dorians of waving plumes, and goodly Pelasgians." This is the earliest literary mention of the Dorians. It clashes with any story in which the Dorians reached Crete only after the Mycenaean states fell, since Odysseus and his relatives visit those states. Either the Odyssey is anachronistic, or Dorians lived on Crete in Mycenaean times. The Messenian town of Dorium in the Catalogue of Ships adds a hint. If its name comes from the Dorians, they were settled in Messenia by then as well.

  A theory widely believed in ancient times placed their origin in the mountainous regions of Greece, such as Macedonia and Epirus. From there, obscure circumstances supposedly carried them south into the Peloponnese and some Aegean islands. The Iliad and the administrative records of the old Mycenaean states show to universal satisfaction that East Greek, or Ionian, speakers once dominated the Peloponnese. They suffered a setback and were replaced, at least in official circles, by West Greek, or Doric, speakers. Ancient writers called the associated event the Return of the Heracleidai. Moderns call it the Dorian Invasion.

  That theory assumes West Greek speakers already lived in northwest Greece. Mycenaean records are the only Bronze Age records known, so that can be neither proved nor disproved. West Greek speakers did live in western Greece in classical times. Unlike the East Greeks, they are linked to no evidence of displacement. This suggests that the Doric dialect simply spread among the Hellenes of that highly mountainous and somewhat isolated region.

  The Dorian invasion is a modern idea meant to explain three things. These are the replacement of dialects and traditions in southern Greece before classical times, the distribution of Dorians in Classical Greece, and their presence in Greece at all. On the whole, none of those aims has been met, though the effort ruled out various speculative hypotheses. Most scholars doubt it was the main cause of the collapse of Mycenaean civilization. No solid evidence yet shows where the West Greek speakers of the Peloponnese came from.

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• 5. Settlers Overseas

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  Rhodes, Sicily, and what is now Southern Italy all took in Dorian settlers, though most Dorians settled in the Peloponnese. In Asia Minor stood the Dorian Hexapolis, the six great Dorian cities. Halikarnassos and Knidos lay on the mainland. Kos was on its own island, and Lindos, Kameiros, and Ialyssos were on Rhodes. The six cities later became rivals of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Dorians settled Crete as well.

  Thucydides saw the Peloponnesian War partly as Ionians fighting against Dorians. He also reported the tradition that the Syracusans of Sicily were of Dorian descent. Dorian colonies from Corinth, Megara, and the Dorian islands dotted the southern coasts of Sicily, from Syracuse to Selinus. Taras, in the south of Italy, was a Spartan colony. The traditions of origin stayed strong into classical times. One of the six Hexapolis cities, Halicarnassus, would produce a famous historian.

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• 6. Dorian Ways of Life

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  Until the age of 30, Dorian men stayed in all-male residences focused on military training, whether or not they were married. Free men centered their lives on campaigns. Dorian social structure was communal, with the sexes kept apart. Dorian women had more freedom and economic power than women of other Greek ethnicities. They could own property, manage their husbands' estates, and hand many domestic tasks to slaves. Spartan women had the greatest agency of all, likely because the men were away on campaign for so long.

  The peplos, once common to all Hellenes, remained the Dorian women's dress. This tunic was pinned at the shoulders with brooches. Its slit skirts bared the thighs and allowed more freedom of movement than the voluminous Ionian chiton.

  The Doric dialect was spoken in northwest Greece, the Peloponnese, Crete, southwest Asia Minor, and the southernmost Aegean islands. It also traveled to the Dorian colonies of Magna Graecia, in Southern Italy and Sicily. Its main feature was the preservation of an old long a sound, which in Attic-Ionic became a long e. The Spartan mother's farewell would therefore have sounded different in the mouth of an Athenian mother. After the classical period, Doric was mostly replaced by Attic, the basis of the common Greek of the Hellenistic period. Tsakonian, a descendant of Doric, is still spoken on parts of the southern Argolid coast, in the modern prefecture of Arcadia.

  Doric colonies kept a distinctive calendar built around a cycle of festivals, of which the Hyacinthia and the Carneia were especially important. Classical writers linked the Dorian mode in music with martial qualities. The Doric order of architecture, as passed down to Vitruvius, produced the Doric column, noted for its simplicity and strength. Cults of the sun god Helios were scattered across Sicyon, Argos, Ermioni, Epidaurus, and Laconia, with his holy flocks at Taenarum. That pattern suggests he mattered more in Dorian religion than elsewhere in Greece, and the Dorians may have brought his worship to Rhodes.

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• 7. Poets and Historians

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  Tyrtaeus, a Spartan poet, advised the Lacedaemonians in their mid-7th-century war to suppress a Messenian rebellion. The Messenians were a remnant of Achaeans conquered "two generations before". That hints at a Dorian rise to supremacy at the end of the Dark Age rather than during or after the fall of Mycenae. The Messenian population was reduced to serfdom. Only a few fragments survive from his five books of martial verse, but they contain the earliest mention of the three Dorian tribes: Pamphyli, Hylleis, and Dymanes.

  In one fragment Tyrtaeus says that Zeus himself "hath given this city to the children of Heracles, with whom we came into the wide isle of Pelops from windy Erineus." Erineus was a village of Doris. Tyrtaeus also helped establish the Spartan constitution, which gave the kings and elders the power to dismiss the assembly. He set up a rigorous military training program for the young, with songs of his own composition. These included the Embateria, or Songs of the Battle-Charge, also called Enoplia, or Songs-under-Arms. They were chants that set the timing of standard drills. He stressed patriotism: "For 'tis a fair thing for a good man to fall and die fighting in the van for his native land."

  Herodotus came from Halicarnassus, a Dorian colony on the southwest coast of Asia Minor. Following the custom of the time, he wrote in Ionic Greek, as one of the last authors to do so. He gave the events called the Dorian Invasion as transfers of population, starting from an original home in Thessaly. In his telling, the people moved from Pthiotis to Histiaiotis in the time of Doros, son of Hellen. They went on to Pindos, where they were called Makednian, then to Dryopis, and finally to the Peloponnesus, where they began to be called Dorian. They did not take the name of Dorus until they had arrived there. Herodotus never resolves the contradictions in the myth, such as how Doris, outside the Peloponnesus, got its name. As he says at the start of his first book, he only reports what his sources told him, without judgement.

  His list of Dorian states runs from Phthia, Histiaea, and Macedon in the northeast to Doris in central Greece. In the south Peloponnesus it includes Lacedaemon, Corinth, Sicyon, Epidaurus, and Troezen. Hermione was not Dorian but had joined them. Overseas he counts Rhodes, Cos, Nisyrus, Cnidus, Halicarnassus, Phaselis, and Calydna. On Crete the Dorians founded towns such as Lato, Dreros, and Olous. The Cynurians were originally Ionians who became Dorian under the influence of their Argive masters.

  Thucydides says little of Greece before the Trojan War, other than that it was full of barbarians. About 60 years after the war, the Thessalians drove the Boeotians out of Arne into Boeotia. Twenty years later, "the Dorians and the Heraclids became masters of the Peloponnese." He is clear that alignments in the later war were not always ethnic. Some Dorian states sided or were forced to side with Athens, while some Ionians went with the Lacedaemonians. He writes with dismay of how unity at the Battle of Thermopylae gave way to division. The Congress of Corinth split in two, with Athens heading one section and Lacedaemon the other. As he puts it, "the real cause I consider to be... the growth of the power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon."

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• 8. Rival Origin Stories

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  Plato's Laws gives the Dorians a founder named Dorieus. During the ten-year siege of Troy, affairs at home suffered under the seditious conduct of the young men. When the Achaean soldiers returned, those young people did not receive them justly, and many deaths, killings, and exiles followed. The exiles were driven out again and migrated by sea. Dorieus banded them together, and they took the new name of Dorians in place of Achaeans.

  Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, has the Dorians coming from Oeta, a mountainous region bordering Thessaly. They were led by Hyllus, a son of Heracles, and were first defeated by the Achaeans. Under other leadership they won and stayed in the Peloponnesus, a mythic theme called the return of the Heracleidae. They built ships at Naupactus to cross the Gulf of Corinth. Pausanias describes disturbances throughout the Peloponnesus except in Arcadia. He then follows the conquest and resettlement of Laconia, Messenia, and Argos, and the emigration to Crete and the coast of Asia Minor.

  Diodorus Siculus is a rich source on Dorian mythology and history in his Library of History. He draws no line between myth and history, but the fantastic nature of the earliest material marks it as legend. The myths seem to justify certain Dorian operations, which suggests that they were partly political. In his account, Heracles was a Perseid of the ruling family of Greece. Zeus meant his son to rule, but Eurystheus, born slightly earlier, claimed the throne by the rules of succession. Heracles was forced into his service and given 12 labors. Afterward he lived as a warrior without a home, helping local rulers, which by today's standards looked like mercenary work.

  When Hippocoon and his family drove the family of king Tyndareus out of Sparta, Heracles retook the city. He recalled Tyndareus as guardian regent and told him to hand the kingdom to any descendants of Heracles who claimed it. Later Heracles helped the Dorians under king Aegimius, who lived in Hestiaeotis and were campaigning against the numerically superior Lapithae. The Dorians promised him a share of Doris, which they did not yet possess. He asked Aegimius to hold that share in trust until a descendant claimed it. His jealous wife Deianeira poisoned him, and he burned himself in full armor before he "passed from among men into the company of the gods."

  Diodorus also quotes Hecataeus of Abdera on the Exodus. In that account, foreigners were expelled and the most valiant among them, under leaders such as Danaus and Cadmus, were brought to Greece.

  Strabo, relying on the books available to him, reports Staphylus on Crete. The Dorians held the east, the Cydonians the west, and the Eteo-Cretans the south, where the town of Praisos had the temple of the Dictaean Zeus. Strabo thinks the Eteo-Cretans and Cydonians were native, and the others foreigners. The Iliad names Tlepolemus, a Heraclid warrior on the Achaean side and colonist of three important Dorian cities on Rhodes. Some regard that mention as a later interpolation.

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