The Glory That Was Greece: a survey of Hellenic culture and civilisation. J. C. Stobart

      Warrior Stelé from Mycenæ

This is not all fancy: the Bronze Age is history, as we have seen; so is the Iron Age. What then of the age between, the Age of Heroes? It comes in awkwardly, for it disturbs the poet’s picture of degeneration. But it has to be inserted in deference to the beliefs of Hesiod’s audience. Hesiod is more or less consciously writing a Bible for the Greeks—that is, putting their religious customs into literary form. This is his concession to hero-worship or ancestor-worship. The Heroic Age of Demigods, the milieu of Homeric poems and Attic tragedy, is not historical, and it is vain to make it so.

      The men of Iron came in from the North in wave after wave of conquest. There were Achæans, Thessalians, and finally Dorians. The process began in earnest, perhaps, with the fall of the Minoan empire, which Professor Burrows assigns to a date between 1414 and 1380 B.C. The Dorians, who were the last-comers, are generally supposed to have been coming in between 1100 and 1000 B.C. Dr. Ridgeway has proved the Northern origin of these various invaders by consideration of their remains, which he has traced back to Central Europe. They were armed with long iron swords, iron-pointed spears, they carried round shields with a central boss, and were dressed in a full panoply of bronze armour, helmet with crest and plume, hauberk of mail, greaves on their legs, and a studded belt of bronze and leather. Underneath they wore a tunic or chiton, which they fastened on the shoulder with a fibula, or safety-pin brooch. They rode to battle in chariots. Thus they differ in every essential from the people of the Ægean culture, whose warriors wore nothing but a loin-cloth or short breeches, and had no armour but a huge figure-of-eight or oblong shield made of wicker and leather, who fought mainly with slings and arrows, who scarcely knew the horse, whose women were dressed in petticoats with flounces and sometimes in tight-fitting bodices narrow at the waist, needing no pin or brooch to fasten them. The Ægean warriors are so depicted on their monuments.[12] Some hints as to their religious beliefs we can gather from their different customs of disposing of the dead. For whereas the Ægean race had preserved their dead carefully underground in shafts and domes, pouring in libations of wine or blood to feed their hungry ghosts in a dark lower world, crowded with powerful