The Dorian Invasion

Abstract

The Orthodox TheoryThe orthodox theory about the Dorian invasion and the Ionian migration is that the Dorians broke into the Peloponnese and destroyed the Mycenaean castles—a destruction, incidentally, that is not mentioned in the ancient tradition—and that the Ionians (or the people who became the Ionians) took refuge in Attica and after an interval moved on to Ionia; this interval is generally put at sixty years by the ancient chroniclers, though not apparently by Thucydides (1, 12, 4), and at from 125 to 200 years by modern archaeologists. The interval by itself makes this theory improbable. Could Attica have supported many refugees for sixty or more years, particularly if (as the pre-historians assert) the Late Mycenaean period was one of high population? And if they could have been supported, would they not have been absorbed into the Attic community, so that the migration would have been essentially Attic and not ‘Ionian’? There are, besides, die Ionian traditions that by-pass Attica.