19 - The Geometric Culture of Greece

Summary

We owe our knowledge of Geometric Greece almost wholly to archaeology, and we name it from that style of pottery decoration by which it is most readily identified. But its importance transcends the archaeologist's terminology, for we stand also at the threshold of history: the cities and villages of Geometric Greece are those whose leagues and rivalries, whose tyrants and assemblies, are to weave the political history recorded by fifth-century and later historians; the ruling families are already established, their lands defined; representational art and writing are ‘invented’ to record and comment on both the current scene and that wealth of myth and folk tale through which later artists are to express their own views of man and his dilemmas; there is virtually nothing-of Archaic and Classical Greece – its enrichment from older cultures, its exploration of the barbarian world for new wealth or new ideas, its speculation about the place of man in the world and the role of divine justice – that cannot be seen to take its origin in the behaviour, culture, art of Geometric Greece. Yet, that said, the material culture of this world in which the new Greece is born is hard to grasp from the tangled and lacunose evidence of excavation, and is if anything harder to deduce from the allusions to contemporary life in the lines of Homer or in Hesiod's sour commentary on a Boeotian farmer's life.

Earlier chapters have explored the local history of Geometric Greek lands in terms of their emergence from the Dark Ages and in terms of their later, better documented history, some of which may, sometimes, be justly used to reflect on earlier centuries when all contemporary evidence is dumb.