THE WARS OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS
On a fifteenth-century fresco uncovered on the Aegean island of Thera these early Mycenaean invaders advance as skirmishers with cowhide body shields and especially long spears. Scholars had long wondered about Homer's mention of a boar's-toothed helmet. But the discovery of this wall painting, and the excavated remains of such headgear, proved the authenticity of Homer's description - one of the few truly Mycenaean artifacts in the Iliad, and a helmet that went out of use at least six centuries before Homer's own birth. Still, in this line-drawing adaptation from the fresco, we must allow for a great deal of artistic license on the part of the ancient painter, since it is difficult to imagine how the M ycenaeans held such a long pike in one hand and managed the entire weight of the body shield with the other.
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PLUNDERING AND RAIDING IN THE GREEK DARK AGES Yet between the Mycenaean citadel and Greek city-state falls a shadow. For the next 400 years (1200-800) Greece lapsed into a Dark Age. Writing vanished, monumental architecture disappeared, and population declined to perhaps less than a fifth of its previous Mycenaean high. Centralized government was lost, and with it most long-distance trade and wellorganized agricultural regimens. Pictorial representation largely vanished from vases. Agricultural production plummeted. In place of a palace bureaucracy, local strongmen and barons carved out spheres of influence in small fortified hamlets. Small populatio;s were no longer fixed and often migrated when threatened. The effects on Greek culture were far more catastrophic than the collapse of Roman civilization seventeen centuries later. Our only sure evidence for four centuries of fighting rests mostly with a few partial remains of arms and armor uncovered from aristocratic burials. At Lefkandi on the island of Euboea and at Salamis in Cyprus such tombs reveal aristocratic fighters, interred along with their iron weapons and horses. Dark Age warfare - as Aristotle implied of all pre-polis fighting apparently revolved around such mounted strong men, who led into battle loosely organized infantrymen, armed with leather and wicker shields and spears, javelins and arrows. While greaves and most metallic body armor seem to have disappeared in the wreckage of Mycenaean civilization, there' .was a surprising increase in iron-working in the Dark Ages, lending a new destructiveness to the old Mycenaean long sword and spear. The fifth-century historian Thucydides recalled this murky time before the polis, 'There were no wars by land, not at least by which power was acquired.' And he emphasized that there were no large confederations, no stable populations of tree and vine farmers, no extended campaigns, no real fighting other than local squabbling between rival neighbors. In such pre-state societies, vengeance, blood-feuds, raids in search of livestock