Achaeans (Homer) - Homeric Versus Later Use

Homeric Versus Later Use

The Homeric "long-haired Achaeans" would have been a part of the Mycenaean civilization that dominated Greece from ca. 1600 BC, with a history as a tribe that may have gone back to the prehistoric Hellenic immigration in the late 3rd millennium BC.

However, by the Archaic and Classical periods, the term 'Achaeans' referred to inhabitants of the much smaller region of Achaea. Herodotus identified the Achaeans of the northern Peloponnese as descendants of the earlier, Homeric Achaeans. According to Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, the term 'Achaean' was originally given to those Greeks inhabiting the Argolis and Laconia. However, this is clearly not the manner in which Homer uses the term.

Pausanias and Herodotus both recount the legend that the Achaeans were forced from these homelands by the Dorians, during the legendary Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese. They then moved into the region that later bore the name of Achaea.

A scholarly consensus has not yet been reached on the origin of the historic Achaeans relative to the Homeric Achaeans, and is still hotly debated. Former emphasis on presumed race, in which John A. Scott could write an article on Achaean blondness, compared to the dark locks of "Mediterranean" Poseidon, on the basis of hints in Homer, has been laid aside.

The contrasting view that "Achaeans", as understood through Homer, are "a name without a country", an ethnos created in the Epic tradition, has modern supporters among those who conclude that "Achaeans" were redefined in the fifth century, as contemporary speakers of Aeolic Greek.

Karl Beloch has suggested that there was no Dorian invasion, but rather that the Peloponnesian Dorians were the Achaeans. Eduard Meyer, disagreeing with Beloch, has instead put forth the suggestion that the real-life Achaeans were mainland pre-Dorian Greeks. His conclusion is based on his research on the similarity between the languages of the Achaeans and pre-historic Arcadians. William Prentice disagrees with both, noting that archeological evidence suggests that the Achaeans instead migrated from "southern Asia Minor to Greece, probably settling first in lower Thessaly" probably prior to 2000 BC.

Emil Forrer went as far to claim that there existed a "great empire" called Ahhijawa, which stood as equal by the side of the old states of the east. However, his conclusions were disproven by later researchers, especially by Ferdinand Sommer.