Draft:Dorians

This page is about the population of ancient Greece. For the Armenian band, see Dorians (band). For the Mexican department store, see Dorian's. For other uses, see Dorian (disambiguation).

The Dorians were an ethno-linguistic group in ancient Greece.

Distribution of the major dialects of Ancient Greek within the Aegean region and Cyprus, c. 500 – c. 323 BCE

Ethnogenesis

Origin myths

Main articles: Dorian invasion and Return of the Heracleidae

The ancient Greeks considered the Dorians to have migrated to the Peloponnese from central or northern Greece, led by the descendants of the hero Heracles (the Heracleidae), around the end of the age of heroes (roughly the Late Bronze Age or the late second millennium BCE), shortly after the Trojan War. According to mythical tradition, the Heracleidae were driven after his death from their native Peloponnese by Eurystheus, Heracles's cousin, who is named as king variously of Argos, Mycenae or Tiryns. They settled in Trachis, in the northern Greek region of Thessaly. In one version of the story, Aegimius, the king of the Lapiths and ancestor of the Dorians, adopted Hyllus, Heracles's eldest son, and gave him a third of his kingdom; Hyllus subsequently became king of the Dorians after Aegimus's sons voluntarily pledged allegiance to him upon their father's death.

Hyllus attempted, unsuccessfully, to lead the Heracleidae back to the Peloponnese. His great-grandson, Temenos, made a successful invasion of the Peloponnese with the assistance of the Dorians; they defeated Tisamenus, the king of Mycenae, Argos and Sparta, and so conquered the region. Temenos became king of Argos, while his brother Cresphontes became king of Messenia and Eurysthenes and Procles, the sons of Aristodemus, became kings of Sparta, founding that city's dual royal line.

The myths around the Dorians' migration into southern Greece to have originated in the Argolid or in Sparta at the end of the Early Iron Age, and to have combined earlier mythic traditions concerning the Dorians and the Heracleidae. Two further Dorian migrations were believed to have occurred: the first resulted in the foundation of Doric colonies in the southern Aegean and in Asia Minor, while the second, in the eighth century BCE, established Doric-speaking communities at Cyrene and in Magna Graecia. At least initially, the stories of the Dorian migration and the Return of the Heracleidae formed separate traditions, which were combined by the time of Herodotus (that is, the mid-fifth century BCE) at the latest. By the late fifth century BCE, Greeks considered the Dorian invasion a major turning point in their history, and it was reckoned as the beginning of the main line of historical continuity for Dorian states in the Peloponnese.

The idea that the Dorians invaded the Peloponnese or otherwise migrated there from is now rejected as a "scholarly mirage". Modern scholarship explains the ancient narrative of the Dorian invasion as a rationalising myth, created as part of a process of ethnogenesis by Peloponnesian communities whose cultural forms gradually converged over time. Oliver Dickinson has written that the myths of the Dorian invasion are "likely to have little relevance to what actually happened", citing the long span of time between the supposed events and the composition of the retellings that survive, as well as the distorting effect of contemporary politics, ideology and society upon any historical elements that may have existed in the narratives.

History

The earliest surviving attestation of the Dorians' origin myths is in the work of the seventh-century BCE Spartan poet Tyrtaeus. The first known invocation of Dorian identity in inter-polity relations was the foundation of the Doric Hexapolis, a federation of six cities of the southeastern Aegean based around the sanctuary of Apollo Triopios near Knidos: this probably occurred before the early sixth century BCE. Elsewhere, except in Sparta, Dorian ancestry may have been invoked primarily by ruling elites. Its prominence in inter-polity relations declined from the fourth century BCE. During the Roman period, interest in Dorian identity returned, as cities were often required to demonstrate a Dorian origin in order to be admitted to the inter-city Panhellenion league, founded by the emperor Hadrian in 131/132 CE. In Sparta, though the myth of its Dorian origins dates to at least the seventh century BCE, the city's Dorian status was relatively little emphasised until the aftermath of the Greco-Persian Wars, which ended in 479 BCE.

The term used for the Heraclidae's return by Herodotus is kathodos, which can mean both "descent" and "return from exile". By the sixth century BCE, the ethnic divisions between the Heracleidae and the Dorians were often elided, such that the Heracleidae and Heracles himself were often imagined to be Dorians, and the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese to be conceived of as a homeward journey. The most complete surviving accounts of the myth are those of the first-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus and the Bibliotheca, a mythological compendium dating to the first or second century CE, but these probably followed earlier sources closely. It was also alluded to by the Theban poet Pindar, who wrote in the early fifth century BCE.

Many of the Greek cities in Pamphylia, a region of southern Asia Minor speaking the isolated Pamphylian dialect, were probably founded by Dorian settlers; the Dorian city of Rhodes founded several in the nearby region of Lycia.

The Doric dialect

Main article: Doric Greek

In the classical period, Greeks categorised their language as divided into three dialect groups: Ionians, speaking the Attic and Ionic dialects; Aeolians, speaking the Aeolic, Beoetian and Thessalian dialects; and Dorians, speaking the Doric dialects. The precise form of each dialect varied from community to community, and common written standards did not generally emerge except within multi-polity cultural or political groupings. John Chadwick argued in 1976 that Special Mycenaean, a putative dialect of Mycenaean Greek posited by Ernst Risch in 1965, was an ancestral form of Doric, though the evidence for this is now generally rejected by scholars, and the evidence that Special Mycenaean constituted a distinct dialect considered uncertain. Instead, it is believed that the differentiation between the Greek dialects, which gave rise to Doric as a distinct form of the language, postdates the Mycenaean period.

Speakers of one Greek dialect often wrote in another; the fifth-century-BCE historians Antiochus and Herodotus, from the Dorian cities of Syracuse and Halicarnassus respectively, wrote in Ionic, as did the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus, attributed to Hippocrates from the Doric-speaking island of Kos. In tragic drama, including that of Attic-speaking Athens, choral lyric passages were universally written in a form of Doric: Simon Goldhill has suggested that this would add "Panhellenic grandeur" for an Athenian audience.

Dorian culture

In the classical period (that is, from c. 600 BCE), Dorian identity was claimed by Greek communities concentrated in the southern Peloponnese, Crete, Sicily and the Dodecanese. Several cultural forms were identified as "Dorian" in classical times, such as the Doric order of architecture, the Dorian mode in music, and the Doric dialect. These were not exclusive to communities considered Dorian, some of which used other linguistic dialects: Halicarnassus, for instance, was considered a Dorian city into the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE), but used Ionic for official inscriptions from the fifth century BCE and may never have widely spoken Doric. The Doric dialect itself was diverse and closely related to other varieties of Greek, and may not have originated from a single proto-dialect.

The worship of the sun-god Helios was particularly prominent among Dorian communities, in contrast with the rest of Greece, where Helios was played only a small religious role: the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes associated his worship with barbarism. Helios was believed to have been the original deity of the Acrocorinth in Dorian Corinth, before handing patronage of the sanctuary to Aphrodite, and to have sacred flocks of livestock at Tanaerum on the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Minor cults of Helios existed at Sicyon in the Corinthia; Argos, Hermione and Epidaurus in the Argolid; and at Mount Taleton in Laconia; Dorian settlers may also have introduced the worship of Helios to Rhodes, who was considered the patron god of the city and the ancestor of its aristocracy.

In modern culture

See also: Laconophilia

Young Spartans Exercising (c. 1860) by Edgar Degas: an idealised vision of Spartan pedagogical methods and social institutions

After the Enlightenment, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germans developed the Dorian invasion as part of the Sonderweg hypothesis, by which the German nation was imagined to have a preordained historical path and superior racial status. Building on developments in Indo-European studies, which reconstructed the linguistic connections between German, Greek and Sanskrit, the German language was considered to be particularly strongly associated with Greek, and German culture to be a continuation of that of ancient Greece. Germans were, under this paradigm, viewed as the "new Dorians". From 1794 onwards, Friedrich Schlegel promoted a Romantic and idealised view of Sparta as a definingly Dorian society. For Schlegel, Sparta represented a racial and cultural ideal, characterised by successful social integration and respect for the rights and dignity of women. This admiration and emulation of Sparta became a prominent feature of German nationalist ideologies.

Karl Ortfried Müller extended his archaeological theories about the Dorians to promote a "Dorian way of life", based on his identification of the Dorians with the qualities of honour, liberty and patriotism. He argued that the god Apollo, whom he associated with the qualities of tranquillity, harmony and clarity, had been Dorian in origin. He contrasted this with Dionysus, whom he believed to embody the opposite qualities and to have entered Greek religion from Thrace. These ideas influenced the composer Richard Wagner, who used Müller's view of the Dorians as a stand-in for his own belief in the enmity between Germany and its neighbours, particularly in France and Italy. Müller saw Dorian culture as prefiguring the hierarchical, autocratic, militarised German state of Prussia: this became, in the words of Édouard Will. "a quasi-permanent temptation" in German intellectual culture. His ideas became associated with Prussian militarism; by the 1930s, Müller, militarism and ancient Sparta were closely connected in German political culture, to a much greater extent than they had been in Müller's own work.

Nazi Germany

The military training of Spartan youths (left, as imagined by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg in 1812) was seen in Nazi Germany as a precursor to that of the Hitler Youth (right, in 1933): both were imagined as the product of a common Dorian inheritance.

In 1929, Hans Günther – an early supporter of the Nazi Party and major influence upon its racial theories – published Racial History of the Greek and Roman Peoples (Rassengeschichte des Hellenischen und des Römischen Volkes), in which he argued that both the Greeks and Romans belonged to the Nordic race. Günther argued that references in ancient writers, such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to the mythical Hyperboreans as the ancestors of the Dorians represented a genuine memory that the Dorians had come from the far north. He also adduced linguistic arguments, such as the fact that the Greek word iris means both "rainbow" and the iris of the eye, which he took as proof that the original speakers of Greek had had blue eyes rather than brown. In 1930, Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi racial theorist and later war criminal, wrote of the Dorians as one of several waves of Aryan invaders into Greece, arguing that both Mycenaean and post-Mycenaean Greece, along with ancient Rome, were Nordic in racial character.

During the period of Nazi rule between 1933 and 1945, German classicists universally portrayed the Dorians, in the words of Richard Wolin, as "fearless Aryan conquerors", contrasted with supposedly racially inferior Ionians. In the framing of Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillion, the Nazis cast the Dorian invasion as "saving" Greece from the "contamination" of Asiatic races. Through the Dorians' supposedly Nordic character, they argued that classical Greece was fundamentally Germanic in nature, and that Nazi Germany, which modelled its militarism and state-organised militarised training of boys on Sparta, represented the best of classical Greek virtues. The Dorians were also imagined as having invaded Italy: a 1940 work published in Leipzig argued for "indisputable connections" between protohistoric sites in northern Italy and those of Prussia and Scandinavia. The work of Fritz Schachermeyr, a prominent Nazi historian and adherent of race theory, was particularly influential in entrenching the Dorian invasion in German-speaking scholarship. In February 1941, Adolf Hitler stated his belief that the Aryan race had only reached its apogee through its supposed invasion of Greece and Italy.

The racialised view of the Dorians promoted in Nazi Germany was echoed by historians in other countries, including those opposed to Nazi rule and politics, such as the German exile Werner Jaeger and the French scholars Georges Dumézil and Charles Picard. Picard wrote in 1935 that the Dorian invasion had been "no bad thing ... [since] it allowed Greek art to cross the mirages of the Asian spirit". Müller's view of the Dorians as superior, civilising invaders was challenged outside Germany: his critics, such as Gustave Glotz in France, portrayed the Dorians as a barbaric, destructive force. Although "Aryan" and related terms largely disappeared from scholarship following the downfall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the underlying paradigm of heroic, migrating invaders remained into the 1960s, both in mainstream historiography and in explicitly right-wing and Neo-Nazi works.

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