An Overview of Ancient Greek History

The ancient Greeks are pivotal in the development of Western Spirituality. Currently undergoing a Neopagan revival in the form of Hellenic Paganism, Ancient Greek religion is vast, complicated and a potent source of spiritual empowerment and connection. 

"Ancient Greece" as most people know it existed from the Greek Dark Ages from around the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (c. AD 600) and comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and other territories. Most of these regions were officially unified only once, for 13 years, under Alexander the Great.

Many are often surprised to know that "Ancient Greece" was not a unified thing, but a series of successive and interrelated cultures that were culturally and linguistically related. 

The earliest of these cultures was the Minoan Civilisation. 

The Minoans were a Bronze Age civilisation centred around the island of Crete, but had influence in other Aegean Islands. Their earliest beginnings date to c. 3500 BC, with their complex urban civilisation began around 2000 BC. Their civilisation began declining from c. 1450 BC until it ended around 1100 BC, during the early Greek Dark Ages, as part of a wider Bronze Age collapse around the Mediterranean. 

The Minoans were the first advanced civilisation in Europe, leaving behind a number of massive building complexes, sophisticated art, and writing systems (Linear A). Its economy benefited from a network of trade around much of the Mediterranean.

They built large and elaborate palaces up to four stories high, and had elaborate plumbing systems and decorated frescoes. The largest Minoan palace is that of Knossos, followed by Phaistos. The function of the palaces, like most aspects of Minoan governance and religion, remains unclear. 

The Minoan period saw extensive trade by Crete with Aegean and Mediterranean settlements, particularly those in the Near East. Through traders and artists, Minoan cultural influence reached beyond Crete to the Cyclades, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, copper-bearing Cyprus, Canaan and the Levantine coast and Anatolia.

The Minoans wrote in the Linear A script and also in Cretan hieroglyphs, encoding a language hypothetically labelled Minoan, however, we still haven't been able to decipher it. The reasons for the slow decline of the Minoan civilization, beginning around 1550 BC, are unclear, but theories include Mycenaean invasions from mainland Greece and the major volcanic eruption of Caldera on Santorini.

This eruption was one of the largest in history, and was catastrophic. It devastated the island of Thera (today called Santorini) around 1600 BCE. It destroyed the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri there, as well as communities and agricultural areas on nearby islands and the coast of Crete, causing subsequent earthquakes and tsunamis. This event is one of the possible historical influences on Plato's story of Atlantis.

Minoan Religion

It's very difficult to reconstruct any religion or spiritual practice definitively for the Minoans due to the absence of readable texts from most of the period, modern scholars have reconstructed what they can almost totally on the basis of archaeological evidence of such as Minoan paintings, statuettes, vessels for rituals and seals and rings. 

It seems Minoan religion was closely related to other Near Eastern ancient religions, and its central deity is generally agreed to have been some kind of mother goddess, although a number of deities are now generally thought to have been worshipped, particularly the famous "Snake Goddesses" (although there is a chance these statues may actually be showing priestesses and not gods).

 

The big Minoan Goddess was often associated with animals and escorted by fantastic creatures. She seems to have been served by priestesses, and one complicating issue is that some scholars have proposed that they imitated or performed as the deity in the course of rituals, confusing what images in Minoan art represent the Goddess and which ones show her worshippers.

Recent scholarly opinion sees a much more diverse religious landscape although the absence of texts, or even readable relevant inscriptions, leaves the picture very cloudy. 

Until after the Mycenaean conquest we have no names for deities, nor any real idea of how Minoans thought of them and their relationship with their devotees.

The Mycenaeans

In the Swan Song days of the Minoans, Mycenaean Greece started to get more control. The Mycenaeans were the last phase of the Bronze Age in Ancient Greece, spanning the period from 1750 to 1050 BC. They represents the first advanced and distinctively Greek civilization in mainland Greece with palatial states, urban organization, works of art, and writing system (Linear B). 

The Mycenaeans were mainland Greek peoples who were likely galvanised by their contact with Minoan Crete and other Mediterranean cultures to develop a more sophisticated sociopolitical culture of their own. They introduced several innovations in the fields of engineering, architecture and military infrastructure.

Their language, written in Linear B, offers the first written records of the Indo-European Greek language, and their religion already included several deities that can also be found in the Olympic Pantheon later on. Mycenaean Greece was dominated by a warrior elite society and consisted of a network of palace-centered states that developed rigid hierarchical, political, social and economic systems, all of which was headed by a king, known as a wanax.

Mycenaean Greece fell with the collapse of Bronze Age culture in the eastern Mediterranean, and was followed by the Greek Dark Ages, a recordless transitional period leading to Archaic Greece where a big shift occurred from palace-centralized to de-centralised forms of socio-economic organisation.

Theories such as natural disasters, climatic changes and invasions from the Sea Peoples have been suggested as the cause of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. The Mycenaean period is the historical setting of much later ancient Greek literature and mythology, including Homer's Iliad & Odyssey.

Mycenaean Religion

From what we can tell, Mycenaean religion was the mother of the later Greek Classical Religion. The pantheon already included many deities that can be found in classical Greece. However, it is again difficult to pick out anything distinctly religious in Mycenaean society with certainty.

The big question is how much of Mycenaean religion is "native" (i.e from mainland Greece) and how much is a continuation and adaption from Minoan. At least 600 years lie between the first Pre Greek speakers and the earliest Linear B writings. Unfortunately, of the Linear B texts we have, the few lists of offerings that give names of gods as recipients of goods reveal nothing about religious practices outside of those names, and there is no other surviving literature.

That said, there do seem to have been some major differences in Mycenaean religion compared to the later Greek one. For starters, Poseidon seems to have been the head of pantheon originally, not Zeus. He seems to have also had an interesting chthonic aspect, being connected with the earthquakes and also seemed to be a god of the underworld, representing the river spirit of it as it often happens in Northern European folklore.

Along with Poseidon, there seems to have been a core focus around two feminine deities, known as the Ladies. On a number of tablets from Pylos, we find a reference to a goddess called Potina ("Lady"/"Mistress"). In an inscription at Knossos we find someone referred to as the "mistress of the Labyrinth".

The title was applied to many goddesses. In a Linear B tablet found at Pylos, the "two queens and the king" are mentioned, and John Chadwick relates these with the precursor goddesses of Demeter, Persephone and Poseidon.

While it's far too deep for me to go into here, we do know that the Greek Mysteries were established during the Mycenaean period at the city of Eleusis. It seems that they were based on a pre-Greek vegetation cult with Minoan elements. The cult was originally private and there is no information about it, but certain elements suggest that it could have similarities with the cult of Despoina ("the mistress")—the precursor goddess of Persephone—in isolated Arcadia that survived up to classical times.

In a nutshell, it appears that Persephone may be one of the oldest deities in all of Greece and was originally some kind of Eldritch Dark Mother Goddess who ruled the underworld (c.f Ereshkigal in Sumerian). That whole myth of her getting abducted by Hades seems to have been a much later invention to try and explain how she ended up in the underworld because she was already there from the start.

Equally, among her epithets in the Iliad & Odyssey are "Dread Persephone", and in Book 10 of the Odyssey when Odysseus summons the shades of the dead to speak with Tiresias, he thinks Persephone is the one who's sending them, not Hades...

Given all her cult titles (Kore ("Maiden"/"The Girl"), Desponia ("The Lady") etc), and the fact that almost every Greek dialect pronounces and spells her name differently seems to imply a custom where it was taboo to even speak her true name because people were so terrified of her. 

So naturally.... Persephone is actually my main Patron because I love me a dark feminine queen....

Classical Period

Around the 8th century BC, the Archaic Period began and saw early developments in Greek culture and society leading to the Classical Period. 

The Classical Period is characterised by a "classical" style, which is what everyone thinks of when they hear the name Greece. 

Politically, the Classical Period was dominated by Athens and the Delian League during the 5th century, but displaced by Spartan hegemony during the early 4th century BC, before power shifted to Thebes and the Boeotian League and finally to the League of Corinth led by Macedon. This period was shaped by the Greco-Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian War, and the Rise of Macedon.

Following the Classical period was the Hellenistic period (323–146 BC), during which Greek culture and power expanded into the Near and Middle East from the death of Alexander until the Roman conquest. 

Roman Greece is usually counted from the Roman victory over the Corinthians at the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC to the establishment of Byzantium by Constantine as the capital of the Roman Empire in AD 330. Finally, Late Antiquity refers to the period of Christianization during the later 4th to early 6th centuries AD, consummated by the closure of the Academy of Athens by Justinian I in 529.