About the year 1104 b.c. a new wave of immigration or invasion came down upon Greece from the restlessly expanding north. Through Illyria and Thessaly, across the Corinthian Gulf at Naupactus, and over the Isthmus at Corinth, a warlike people, tall, roundheaded, letterless, slipped or marched or poured into the Peloponnesus, mastered it, and almost completely destroyed Mycenaean civilization. We guess at their origin and their route, but we know their character and their effect. They were still in the herding and hunting stage; now and then they stopped to till the soil, but their main reliance was upon their cattle, whose need for new pasturage kept the tribes ever on the move. One thing they had in unheard-of quantity-iron. They were the emissaries of the Hallstatt culture to Greece; and tile hard metal of their swords and souls gave them a merciless supremacy over Achaeans and Cretans who still used bronze to kill. Probably from both west and east, from Elis and Megan, they came down upon the separate little kingdoms of the Peloponnesus, put the ruling classes to the sword, and turned the Mycenaean remnant into helot-serfs. Mycenae and Tiryns went up in flames, and for some centuries Argos became the capital of Pelops' isle. On the Isthmus the invaders seized a commanding peak – the Acrocorinthus – and built around it the Dorian city of Corinth.", The surviving Achaeans fled, some of them into the mountains of the northern Peloponnesus, some into Attics, some overseas to the islands and coasts of Asia. The conquerors followed them into Attics, but were repulsed; they followed them to Crete,' and made final the destruction of Cnossus; they captured and colonized Me1as, Theta, Cos, Cnidus, and Rhodes. Throughout the Peloponnesus and Crete, where the Mycenaean culture had most flourished, the devastation was most complete.

This terminal catastrophe in the prehistory of Aegean civilization is what modem historians know as the Dorian conquest, and what Greek tradition called the Return of the Heracleidae. For the victors were not content to record their triumph as a conquest of a civilized people by barbarians; they protested that what had really happened was that the descendants of Heracies, resisted in their just re-entry into the Peloponnesus, had taken it by heroic force. We do not know how much of this is history, and how much is diplomatic mythology designed to transform a bloody conquest into a divine right. 1t is difficult to believe that the Dorians were such excellent liars in the very youth of the world. Perhaps, as disputatants will never allow, both stories were true: the Dorians were conquerors from the north, led by the scions of Heracles.

Whatever the form of the conquest, its result was a long and bitter interruption in the development of Greece. Political order was disturbed for centuries; every man, feeling unsafe, carried arms; increasing violence disrupted agriculture and trade on land, and commerce on the seas. War flourished, poverty deepened and spread. Life became unsettled as families wandered from country to country seeking security and peace. Hesiod called this the Age of Iron, and mourned its debasement from the finer ages that had preceded it; many Greeks believed that "the discovery of iron had been to the hurt of man." The arts languished, painting was neglected, statuary contented itself with figurines; and pottery, forgetting the lively naturalism of Mycenae and Crete, degenerated into a lifeless "Geometrical Style" that dominated Greek ceramics for centuries.

But not all was lost. Despite the resolution of the invading Dorians to keep their blood free from admixture with that of the subject population despite the racial antipathies between Dorian and Ionian that were to incarnadine all Greece-there went on, rapidly outside of Laconic, slowly within, a mingling of the new stocks with the old; and perhaps the addition of the vigorous seed of Achaeans and Dorians with that of the more ancient and volatile peoples of southern Greece served as a powerful biological stimulant. The final result, after centuries of mingling, was a new and diverse people, in whose blood "Mediterranean," "Alpine," "Nordic;" and Asiatic elements were disturbingly fused.

Nor was Mycenaean culture entirely destroyed. Certain elements of the Aegean heritage – instrumentalities of social order and government, elements of craftsmanship and technology, modes and routes of trade, forms and objects of worship, ceramic and toreutic skills, the art of fresco painting, decorative motives and architectural forms – maintained a half-stifled existence through centuries of violence and chaos. Cretan institutions, the Greeks believed, passed down into Sparta; and the Achaean assembly remained the essential structure of even democratic Greece. The Mycenaean megaron probably provided the ground plan of the Doric temple," to which the Dorian spirit would add freedom, symmetry, and strength. The artistic tradition, slowly reviving, lifted Corinth, Sicyon, and Argos to an early Renaissance, and made even dour Sparta, for a while, smile with art and song; it nourished lyric poetry through all this historyless Dark Age; it followed Pelasgian, Achaean, Ionian, Minyan exiles in their flight-migration to the Aegean and Asia, and helped the colonial cities to leap ahead of their mother states in literature and art. And when the exiles came to the islands and Ionic they found the remains of Aegean civilization ready to their hands. There, in old towns a little less disordered than on the Continent, the Age of Bronze had kept something of its ancient craft and brilliance; and there on Asiatic soil would come the first reawakening of Greece.