The Fragments by Panyassis of Halicarnassus

Author:Panyassis of Halicarnassus [Halicarnassus, Panyassis of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ancient Classics
Publisher: Delphi Classics
Published: 2023-07-04T08:00:00+00:00

We may now consider briefly the chronological aspect of the Greek Heroic Age. It has already been mentioned that a passage in Hesiod’s Works and Days speaks of an age of heroes intermediate between the bronze and iron ages, and that it further defines these heroes as those who fought at Thebes and Troy. To the latter number belong no doubt the various characters of the Iliad and Odyssey and the other poems (Cypria, etc.) which dealt with the Trojan cycle of legend, while the deeds of the former must have been treated in the Thebais and the Epigonoi. In the surviving Attic dramas which deal with the Heroic Age the distribution of subjects is as follows. Sixteen plays (three by Aeschylus, three by Sophocles and ten by Euripides, including the Cyclops and Rhesos) treat of the heroes of the Trojan war or their children; six plays (one by Aeschylus, three by Sophocles and two by Euripides) deal with the Theban story; and six plays (one by Sophocles and five by Euripides) are concerned with the doings of Heracles, Theseus or Iason. It is to be observed that the heroes of the Theban story are always represented as belonging to the generation immediately preceding that of the heroes of Troy, while Heracles, Theseus and Iason are all loosely connected with one another and made roughly contemporary with the Theban heroes. The remaining three plays (Aeschylus’ Suppliants and Euripides’ Ion and Bacchai), if we are justified in regarding them as heroic at all, refer to persons much farther back in the genealogies.

It appears then that the characters who figure most prominently in stories of the Heroic Age were, with few exceptions, ascribed to a period covering not more than three or four generations. There are, it is true, a number of stories referring to much earlier generations — in addition to those treated in the three plays mentioned above — but they seem to have been distinctly less popular than the others. On the other hand there is scarcely any reference to persons later than the children of the heroes who fought at Troy.

With the evidence at our disposal it is impossible to fix any absolute dates for the Heroic Age. All that we can say is that the end of that age appears to coincide with the movement or series of movements, traditionally known as the Return of the Heracleidai, to which the Dorian states in the Peloponnesos were believed to owe their origin. According to the story, the Return took place in the second generation after the siege of Troy, and the grandsons of Agamemnon, the Achaean leader at the siege, were killed or expelled by the Dorians. Certainly it is to be noted that the scheme of tribal or political geography presented to us in the Homeric poems seems to show no trace either of Dorians in the Peloponnesos or of Ionic settlements in the eastern Aegean — another series of movements which are said to have been brought about by the Dorian conquest.

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