The Dorians (; , , singular , ) were one of the four major ethnic groups into which the Hellenes (or Greeks) of Classical Greece divided themselves (along with the Aeolians, Achaeans, and Ionians).Apollodorus, Library, I, 7.3 They are almost always referred to as just "the Dorians", as they are called in the earliest literary mention of them in the Odyssey,Homer, Odyssey, Book XIX (Line 177). where they already can be found inhabiting the island of Crete.
They were diverse in way of life and social organization, varying from the populous trade center of the city of Corinth, known for its ornate style in art and architecture, to the isolationist, military state of Sparta; and yet, all Hellenes knew which localities were Dorian and which were not. Dorian states at war could more likely, but not always, count on the assistance of other Dorian states. Dorians were distinguished by the Doric Greek dialect and by characteristic social and historical traditions.
In the 5th century BC, Dorians and Ionians were the two most politically important Greek , whose ultimate clash resulted in the Peloponnesian War. The degree to which fifth-century Hellenes self-identified as "Ionian" or "Dorian" has itself been disputed. At one extreme concludes that there was no true ethnic component in fifth-century Greek culture, in spite of anti-Dorian elements in Athenian propaganda. At the other extreme John Alty reinterprets the sources to conclude that ethnicity did motivate fifth-century actions. Moderns viewing these ethnic identifications through the 5th and 4th century BC literary tradition have been profoundly influenced by their own social politics. Also, according to E. N. Tigerstedt, nineteenth-century European admirers of virtues they considered "Dorian" identified themselves as "Laconophile" and found responsive parallels in the culture of their day as well; their biases contribute to the traditional modern interpretation of "Dorians".
Origin Accounts vary as to the Dorians' place of origin. One theory, widely believed in ancient times, is that they originated in the mountainous regions of Greece, such as Macedonia and Epirus, and obscure circumstances brought them south into the Peloponnese, to certain Aegean islands.
Peloponnesian dialect replacement The origin of the Dorians is a multifaceted concept. In modern scholarship, the term has often meant the location of the population disseminating the Doric Greek dialect within a hypothetical Proto-Greek speaking population. The dialect is known from records of classical northwestern Greece, the Peloponnesus and Crete and some of the islands. The geographic and ethnic information found in the West's earliest known literary work, the Iliad, combined with the administrative records of the former Mycenaean states, prove to universal satisfaction that East Greek (Ionian) speakers were once dominant in the Peloponnesus but suffered a setback there and were replaced at least in official circles by West Greek (Doric) speakers. A historical event is associated with the overthrow, called anciently the Return of the Heracleidai and by moderns the Dorian Invasion.
This theory of a return or invasion presupposes that West Greek speakers resided in northwest Greece but overran the Peloponnesus replacing the East Greek there with their own dialect. No records other than Mycenaean ones are known to have existed in the Bronze Age so a West Greek of that time and place can be neither proved nor disproved. West Greek speakers were in western Greece in classical times. Unlike the East Greeks, they are not associated with any evidence of displacement events. That provides circumstantial evidence that the Doric dialect disseminated among the Hellenes of northwest Greece, a highly-mountainous and somewhat-isolated region.
Dorian invasion The Dorian invasion is a modern historical concept attempting to account for: at least the replacement of dialects and traditions in southern Greece in pre-classical times more generally, the distribution of the Dorians in Classical Greece the presence of the Dorians in Greece at all
On the whole, none of the objectives has been met, but the investigations served to rule out various speculative hypotheses. Most scholars doubt that the Dorian invasion was the main cause of the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. The source of the West Greek speakers in the Peloponnese remains unattested by any solid evidence.
Post-migrational distribution of the Dorians
Though most of the Dorians settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled on Rhodes and Sicily and in what is now Southern Italy. In Asia Minor existed the Dorian Hexapolis (the six great Dorian cities): Halikarnassos (Halicarnassus) and Knidos (Cnidus) in Asia Minor, Kos, and Lindos, Kameiros, and Ialyssos on the island of Rhodes. The six cities would later become rivals with the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Dorians also settled Crete. The origin traditions remained strong into classical times: Thucydides saw the Peloponnesian War in part as "Ionians fighting against Dorians" and reported the tradition that the Syracusans in Sicily were of Dorian descent. Other such "Dorian" colonies, originally from Corinth, Megara, and the Dorian islands, dotted the southern coasts of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinus. Also Taras was a Spartan colony.
Identity Ethnonym
Dorian of Bronze Age Pylos A man's name, Dōrieus, occurs in the Linear B tablets at Pylos, one of the regions later invaded and subjugated by the Dorians. Pylos tablet Fn867 records it in the dative case as do-ri-je-we, *Dōriēwei, a third- or consonant-declension noun with stem ending in w. An unattested nominative plural, *Dōriēwes, would have become Dōrieis by loss of the w and contraction. The tablet records the grain rations issued to the servants of "religious dignitaries" celebrating a religious festival of Potnia, the mother goddess.
The nominative singular, Dōrieus, remained the same in the classical period. Many Linear B names of servants were formed from their home territory or the places where they came into Mycenaean ownership. Carl Darling Buck sees the -eus suffix as very productive. One of its uses was to convert a toponym to an anthroponym; for example, Megareus, "Megarian", from Megara. A Dōrieus would be from Dōris, the only classical Greek state to serve as the basis for the name of the Dorians. The state was a small one in the mountains of west central Greece. However, classical Doris may not have been the same as Mycenaean Doris.
Dorians of upland Doris A number of credible etymologies by noted scholars have been proposed. Julius Pokorny derives Δωριεύς, Dōrieus from δωρίς, dōris, "woodland" (which can also mean upland). The dōri- segment is from the o-grade (either ō or o) of Proto-Indo-European *deru-, "tree", which also gives the Homeric Δούρειος Ἵππος (Doureios Hippos, "Wooden Horse").Πάπυρος - Λεξικό τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς Γλώσσας (Papyros - Dictionary of the Greek Language), 2007, v. 3. pp. 37–8 This derivation has the advantage of naming the people after their wooded, mountainous country.
Lancers A second popular derivation was given by the French linguist, Émile Boisacq, from the same root, but from Greek (doru) 'spear-shaft' (which was made of wood); i.e., "the people of the spear" or "spearmen". In this case the country would be named after the people, as in Saxony from the Saxons. However, R. S. P. Beekes doubted the validity of this derivation and asserted that no good etymology exists.R. S. P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2009, p. 363.
Chosen Greeks It sometimes happens that different derivations of an Indo-European word exploit similar-sounding Indo-European roots. Greek doru, "lance", is from the o-grade of Indo-European *deru, "solid", in the sense of wood. It is similar to an extended form, *dō-ro-, of *dō-, (give), as can be seen in the modern Greek imperative δώσε (dose, "give [sing.]!") appearing in Greek as δῶρον (dōron, "gift"). This is the path taken by Jonathan Hall, relying on elements taken from the myth of the Return of the Herakleidai.
Hall cites the tradition, based on a fragment of the poet, Tyrtaeus, that "Sparta is a divine gift granted by Zeus and Hera" to the Heracleidae. In another version, Tyndareus gives his kingdom to Heracles in gratitude for restoring him to the throne, but Heracles "asks the Spartan king to safeguard the gift until his descendants might claim it."
Hall, therefore, proposes that the Dorians are the people of the gift. They assumed the name on taking possession of Lacedaemon. Doris was subsequently named after them. Hall makes comparisons of Spartans to Hebrews as a chosen people maintaining a covenant with God and being assigned a Holy Land. To arrive at this conclusion, Hall relies on Herodotus' version of the myth (see below) that the Hellenes under Dorus did not take his name until reaching the Peloponnesus. In other versions the Heracleidae enlisted the help of their Dorian neighbors. Hall does not address the problem of the Dorians not calling Lacedaemon Doris, but assigning that name to some less holy and remoter land. Similarly, he does not mention the Dorian servant at Pylos, whose sacred gift, if such it was, was still being ruled by the Achaean Atreid family at Lacedaemon.
A minor, and perhaps regrettably forgotten, episode in the history of scholarship was the attempt to emphasize the etymology of Doron with the meaning of 'hand'. This in turn was connected to an interpretation of the famous lambda on Spartan shields, which was to rather stand for a hand with outstanding thumb than the initial letter of Lacedaimon. Given the origin of the Spartan shield lambda legend, however, in a fragment by Eupolis, an Athenian comic poet, there has been a recent attempt to suggest that a comic confusion between the letter and the hand image may yet have been intended.
Social structure Dorian social structure was characterized by a communal social structure and separation of the sexes. The lives of free men centered around military campaigns. When not abroad, men stayed in all-male residences focusing on military training until the age of 30, regardless of marital status.
Dorian women had greater freedom and economic power than women of other Greek ethnicities. Unlike other Hellenic women, Dorian women were able to own property, manage their husbands' estate, and delegate many domestic tasks to slaves. Women in ancient Sparta possessed the greatest agency and economic power, likely due to the prolonged absences of men during military campaigns.Pomeroy, Sarah B. (1994). Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (2 ed.). London: Pimlico. pp. 35-42 Dorian women wore the peplos, which was once common to all Hellenes. This tunic was pinned at the shoulders by brooches and had slit skirts which bared the thighs and permitted more freedom of movement than the voluminous Ionian chiton (costume).5.87, online at Perseus.
Distinctions of language
The Doric dialect was spoken in northwest Greece, the Peloponnese, Crete, southwest Asia Minor, the southernmost islands of the Aegean Sea, and the various Dorian colonies of Magna Graecia in Southern Italy and Sicily. After the classical period, it was mainly replaced by the Attic dialect upon which the Koine or "common" Greek language of the Hellenistic period was based. The main characteristic of Doric was the preservation of Proto-Indo-European , long , which in Attic-Ionic became , . A famous example is the valedictory phrase uttered by Spartan mothers to their sons before sending them off to war: ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς (ḕ tàn ḕ epì tâs, literally "either with it or on it": return alive with your shield