“Almost everything we have been taught about antiquity is based on conjecture”
Riane Eisler

The kouros was sculpted in about 530 BC. In a historical context, that's seven centuries after the Trojan War, four centuries after Homer wrote the Odyssey, 300 years before Alexander the Great - and just before the era of Classical Greece.

From about 480 BC, Classical Greece marked an influential florescence of art, architecture, drama, philosophy, logical thought and democracy. But also inequality, supression, conflict and slavery. The Classical Greeks themselves looked back with longing to a lost golden age.

In Palaeolithic Europe, 40,000 to 7000 BC, hunter gatherer people had reverence for nature and the cycle of life, an egalitarian social system, leisure time and no killing or warfare.

In the Neolithic era, from 7000-3500 BC, settled agricultural communities of original Pelasgian people lived in the Aegean. They grew crops, bred animals, made pottery, worked metal, built sailing boats, traded, developed advanced religion and government and lived peaceably.

This way of life found fullest expression in the magnificent Bronze Age civilisation of the Minoans in Crete and other islands from about 3000 BC. Then arrived the warrior Mycaenean people, who came under the influence of the creative Minoans and built the city of Troy.
But from 1250 BC came a ‘Dark Age’ of social breakdown, destruction and migration, with violent invasion and enslavement by Achaeans and Dorians – the first Greeks.

After 3-400 years, Greece looked to the East for rebuilding and new skills. From 700 BC came an explosion of population and invention – the Archaic era. But warfare and domination had replaced peace and equality. A dysfunctional family of gods and goddesses led by a patriarch overtook belief in a single divine female force as bringer of life, death and nature’s cycle.

But did memory of the old ways, knowledge and beliefs die - or did it survive in that longing for a golden age? Does it live still in the vibrant community and stimulating contradictions of modern Greece, pulled as she is between culture and conflict, machismo and matriarchy?

Next: Archaic Greece