Dorians settle Knidos (Cnidus) on the Carian Chersonese on the southern coast of the Resadiye peninsula on the southwest coast of Anatolia (later Cnidians will claim that they are of Spartan origin).

Athens, unlike the Peloponnese, with its tradition of Dorian invasion from the north, claims to be “autochthonous”—that is, its inhabitants have occupied the same land forever.

Though largely fiction, it helps to make up for Athens' relative poverty in religion and myth: it has nothing to compare with the great legends of Thebes (the Oedipus story) or the Peloponnese (Heracles; the house of Atreus).

There is one hero, however, who can be regarded as especially Athenian, and that is Theseus, to whom the original political synoecism of Attica is attributed.

At whatever date one puts this “Thesean” synoecism, or centralization (900?), the late Dark Age in Attica appea r to have seen the opposite process taking place at the physical level; that is, the villages and countryside of Attica are in effect “colonized” from the center in the course of the eighth century. (The process may not be complete until even later.)

This explains why Athens is not one of the earliest colonizing powers: the possibility of “internal colonization” within Attica itself is (like Sparta's expansion into Messenia) an insurance against the kind of short-term food shortages that force such places as Corinth and Thera to siphon off part of their male population.

Agis, an early Spartan king, is traditionally held to be the son of Eurysthenes (in legend, one of the twins who founded Sparta).

Because the Agiad line of kings is named after him, Agis is perhaps a historical figure.

The fourth-century BCE Greek historian Ephorus attributes to Agis the capture of the city of Helos in Laconia and the reduction of its people to helot (serf) status.

The state of Sparta, historically Lacedaemon, the eventual capital of the Laconia district of the southeastern Peloponnese, is reputedly founded in the ninth century BCE with a rigid oligarchic constitution.

Lycurgus, by tradition the founder of the constitution of Sparta, and the lawgiver who designs this city-state's unique social and military structure, lives (according to fifth century BCE Greek writer Herodotus) about 900, (but later writers, including the biographer Plutarch, date him to the early eighth century BCE.

Scholars have been unable to determine conclusively whether Lycurgus was a historical person and, if he did exist, which institutions should be attributed to him.

Herodotus claimed that the lawgiver belonged to Sparta's Agiad house, one of the two houses (the other being the Eurypontid) that held Sparta's dual kingship.

According to Herodotus, the Spartans of his day claimed that the institutions of Crete inspired Lycurgus' reforms.

The historian Xenophon, writing in the first half of the fourth century BCE, apparently believed that Lycurgus had founded Sparta's institutions soon after the Dorians invaded Laconia around 1000 BCE and reduced the native Achaean population to the status of serfs, or helots.

It was generally accepted by the middle of the fourth century BCE hat Lycurgus had belonged to the Eurypontid house and had been regent for the Eurypontid king Charillus.

On this basis, Hellenistic scholars dated him to the ninth century BCE.

The Greek biographer Plutarch in his Life of Lycurgus will piece together popular accounts of Lycurgus' career.

Plutarch will describe Lycurgus' journey to Egypt and claim that the reformer had introduced the poems of Homer to Sparta.

A great wave of renewed colonization beginning in the eighth century BCE brings Dorian settlers to the island of Corcyra (modern Corfu), to Syracuse and Gela in Sicily, to Taras (now Taranto) in Italy, and to Cyrene in North Africa, as well as to scattered sites in the Crimea and along the Black Sea.

Sparta, Corinth, and Argos are among the most important cities of Doric origin.

The Greeks of Megara begin active colonization, founding Megara Hyblaea in Sicily and Chalcedon on the Bosporus.

Expansion and accompanying colonization from about 700 BCE bring the Ionians of Euboea to eastern Sicily and Cumae near Naples, and Samians to Nagidus and Celenderis in Pamphylia.

The Phocaeans, lacking arable land, establish colonies in the Dardanelles at Lampsacus, on the Black Sea at Amisus, and in the Crimea.

The Greek colonists begin to disseminate their culture throughout the Mediterranean and even into the southern Ukraine, opening new markets for Greek oil, wine, and other wares in return for precious metals, timber, grain, and other goods.

The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BCE, the year of the first Olympic Games.

The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the seventh or eighth centuries BCE.

With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerge various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, which spread to the shores of the Black Sea, Southern Italy ("Magna Graecia") and Asia Minor.

These states and their colonies reach great levels of prosperity that result in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy.

The earliest inhabitants of Messenia are thought by the Greeks of the Classical period to have been 'Pelasgians', as in other regions of Greece.

The Hellenic tribes had then supposedly arrived in Greece, and Messenia was settled by Aeolian Greeks.

The Homeric poems suggest that during the Mycenaean period, eastern Messenia was under the rule of Menelaus of Sparta, while the western coast is under the Neleids of Pylos; after Menelaus’s death, the Neleids pushed the frontier as far as Taygetus.

The Mycenaean city of Pylos almost certainly lay in Triphylia, and not at the site in Messenia, which in historic times bore that name.

Excavations at Pylos and Nichoria have revealed for Messenia's late Bronze Age (1300s BCE) a bureaucratic, agricultural kingdom ruled by the wanax at Pylos.

The Messenians spoke Mycenaean Greek, and worshiped the Greek gods at local shrines like that at Sphagianes.

Messenia was supposedly invaded by Dorians under Cresphontes, arriving from Arcadia, during the legendary Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese during the Greek Dark ages, taking as their capital Stenyclarus in the northern plain, and then extending over the whole district first their suzerainty, then their rule.

The relative wealth of Messenia in fertile soil and favorable climate attracts the neighboring Spartans during the Archaic period.

The first Messenian War breaks out as a result of the murder of the Spartan king Teleclus by the Messenians, it is claimed, which, in spite of the heroism of King Euphaes and his successor Aristodemus, ends around 720 BCE in the subjection of Messenia by Sparta.

The result is a Spartan victory, the loss of sovereignty by Messenia, and the transfer of land ownership to the Spartans.

The Second Messenian War between the Greek states of Messenia and Sparta starts around forty years after the end of the First Messenian War with the uprising of the enslaved.

The long war will end with a Spartan victory 668 BCE, with Messenia remaining under Spartan control.

Most of the Greek city-state governments begin to be run by archons, state magistrates of the highest order.

Athens, initially, has three archons: one each to exercise civil, military, and religious authority.

The tenure of the three Athenian archons, typically ten years in the eighth century BCE is reduced to one year by 683.

The six junior archons (thesmotetai), or magistrates, are said by Aristotle to have been instituted in Athens after 683 BCE to record the laws.

Trade begins to flourish beginning in the eighth century BCE between the developing city-states of Greece and Italy, many of which, like Athens, are building states that include wider sectors of society in their political activity than had any previous society, laying the basis of democracy.

Athens becomes the largest polis, combining several regions of the peninsula of Attica; its huge size and favorable configuration makes it unusual by any standards among Greek poleis.

Its territory is far larger than that of Corinth or Megara; while Boeotia, though in control of a comparable area, resorts to the federal principle as a way of imposing unity.

Like Corinth but unlike Thebes (the greatest city of Classical Boeotia), Athens has a splendid acropolis (citadel) that has its own water supply, a natural advantage making for early political centralization.

Athens is, moreover, protected by four mountain systems offering a first line of defense.

Second, Attica has a very long coastline jutting into the Aegean, a feature that invites it to become a maritime power (one may contrast it with Sparta, whose port of Gythion is far away to the south).

This in turn is to compel Athens to import quantities of the shipbuilding timber it lacks, a major factor in Athenian imperial thinking.

Third, although Attica is rich in certain natural resources, such as precious metal for coinage—the silver of the Laurium mines in the east of Attica—and marble for building, its soil, suitable though it is for olive growing, is thin by comparison with that of Thessaly or Boeotia.

Athens, whose territory became more densely populated after the post-Mycenaean depopulation, which had affected all Greece, had had to look for sources of grain outside Attica: to secure those sources, it had to act imperialistically.

Animal representations, floral motifs, and, by the eighth century BCE, human figures in stylized silhouettes, have intruded gradually into the traditional abstract geometric decorations of Greek pottery, particularly abundant in Attica.

The contemporary “Dipylon Krater”, a large vase originally used as a grave monument, depicts dancers, processions of horsemen and chariots, battle scenes, and men and women lamenting the dead.

Sparta has already, in the Dark Age, coerced into semisubject, or “perioikic,” status a number of its immediate neighbors, having gradually conquered Laconia, the southeastern quarter of the Peloponnesus.

Many of the conquered pre-Dorians became helots, or serfs; the Spartans grant members of various neighboring groups in Laconia the semiautonomous status of “perioikoi,” but require them to serve in the army.

It undertakes the wholesale conquest of Messenia in the second half of the eighth century, from about 735 BCE to 715 BCE.

One consequence is the export of an unwanted group, the Partheniai, to Taras in southeastern Italy.

These are sons of Spartan mothers and non-Spartan fathers, procreated during the absence in Messenia of the Spartan warrior elite.

A still more important consequence of the conquest of Messenia, “good to plow and good to hoe” as the seventh-century Spartan poet Tyrtaeus puts it, is the acquisition of a large tract of fertile land and the creation of a permanently servile labor force, the “helots,” as the conquered Messenians are now called.

The helots are state slaves, held down by force and fear, bound to the soil and assigned to individual Spartans to till their holdings; their masters can neither free them nor sell them, and the helots have a limited right to accumulate property, after paying to their masters a fixed proportion of the produce of the holding.

Owing to their own numerical inferiority, the Spartans are always preoccupied with the fear of a helot revolt.

Sparta begins to develop as a militant polis in the eighth century and early seventh century BCE, with a rigid social structure and a government that includes an assembly representing all citizens.

Archidamus, the twelfth king of Sparta of the Eurypontid line, and the son of Anaxidamus, rules shortly after the close of the second Messenian War in about 660 BCE and toward the outset of the long war between Sparta and Tegea (the Tegean War).

The geographer Pausanias describes his reign as quiet and peaceful.

Mediterranean Southwest Europe (765–622 BCE):

Greek Colonization, Phoenician Expansion, and Early Etruscan Influence

Between 765 and 622 BCE, Mediterranean Southwest Europe—including Italy, southwestern Spain, Andorra, and the Western Mediterranean Islands (excluding Corsica)—undergoes dynamic cultural and political transformations. This period sees intensified Greek colonization in Sicily and southern Italy (Magna Graecia), expanded Phoenician settlement across the region, and the rising prominence of the Etruscans, setting the stage for Rome's early development.

Greek Colonization of Magna Graecia

Greek settlers, notably from Chalcis, Corinth, Megara, and Sparta, begin establishing permanent colonies in Sicily and southern Italy from about 750 BCE onward. Important early settlements include Cumae (founded ca. 750 BCE), the first significant Greek mainland colony in the west, serving as a key center of trade and culture near present-day Naples. In Sicily, Chalcidian Greeks found Naxos (734 BCE), Zankle (Messina) (730 BCE), and Catana (ca. 729 BCE). Corinthian Greeks under Archias settle Syracuse (734 BCE), soon to become a dominant city-state in Sicily.

The Megaran Greeks establish commercial colonies such as Megara Hyblaea (728 BCE), subsequently founding the influential colony of Selinus in western Sicily around 651 BCE. Settlements like Leontini (729 BCE), Gela (688 BCE), and Himera (649 BCE) rapidly expand Greek influence throughout Sicily.

On mainland Italy, Achaeans from Sybaris and Croton found prosperous cities including Metapontum (ca. 700 BCE) and Caulonia. The Spartans colonize the strategic site of Taras (Taranto) around 706 BCE, establishing Spartan political and cultural practices. Another significant colony, Locri Epizephyrii, emerges in 680 BCE, becoming notable for adopting one of Europe's earliest written law codes under Zaleucus (ca. 660 BCE).

Phoenician Maritime Expansion and Settlement

Phoenician traders from Tyre actively expand their settlements along the Western Mediterranean shores, consolidating their economic and cultural presence in the region. Around 800 BCE, Phoenicians settle extensively on Sardinia, including the strategic port of Karalis (modern Cagliari), providing crucial links to their African trade networks.

Further west, they establish the colony of Ibossim (modern Ibiza) around 654 BCE, which rapidly emerges as a vital hub for maritime trade. Phoenician expansion on the Iberian Peninsula continues with the reinforcement of cities like Gadir (Cádiz) and Malaka (Málaga), cementing Phoenician influence across southern Iberia.

Early Rome and the Villanovan Cultural Legacy

Central Italy experiences significant cultural continuity and transformation. The Villanovan culture (900–700 BCE), associated with the early Iron Age in Italy, establishes a foundation for subsequent Etruscan civilization. In approximately 753 BCE, local Latins and Sabines associated with the Villanovan tradition found Rome, according to tradition, under Romulus on the Palatine Hill.

Roman mythology vividly details Rome’s foundation, including stories such as the Rape of the Sabine Women, representing early integration of Latin and Sabine populations. Numa Pompilius, Rome's second king (715–673 BCE), introduces significant religious and calendar reforms, creating the position of Pontifex Maximus around 712 BCE, which profoundly shapes Roman religious practices.

Emergence and Expansion of the Etruscans

The Etruscans, arising from the Villanovan cultural milieu, significantly impact central Italy. Notable artistic achievements, such as finely decorated tombs (Tomb of the Ducks, ca. 675–650 BCE) at Veii, demonstrate the sophistication of Etruscan art and culture. Around 625 BCE, Etruscan power extends into Latin territories as they cross the Tiber to dominate the settlements collectively known as Roma, introducing the influential Tarquinian dynasty. Their urban planning, governance structures, and cultural practices lay essential groundwork for Rome's future prominence.

Legacy of the Era

The era from 765 to 622 BCE fundamentally transforms Mediterranean Southwest Europe. Greek colonization dramatically reshapes Sicily and southern Italy, creating lasting cultural and economic connections between Magna Graecia and mainland Greece. Concurrent Phoenician maritime expansion secures extensive trade networks and solidifies cultural influence across Sardinia, Ibiza, and southern Iberia. In Italy, the rise of the Etruscans and their integration with Latin and Sabine peoples profoundly influences early Roman civilization, setting crucial foundations for subsequent historical developments in the Western Mediterranean.