"The Heroic Age"

Amphora by Exekias, Achilles and Ajax engaged in a game, c.540-530 BC, Vatican Museums, Vatican City.This is the depiction of Achilles and Ajax on duty and playing a game. They carry their javelins and are dressed in elaborate, detailed armor. This expresses the view of the Mycenaean ancestors from the 6th century BCE. Marvelous, golden, and armed to the teeth even in their free time.

The illiterate Greeks who lived after the Mycenaeans tried to imagine the lives of their ancestors. The answers to their questions came in the form of legends about the past. These legends told of heroes that were mightier than any men of the modern day. They were children of gods and they occupied cities "rich in gold." They lived in palaces surrounded by walls built by gods and stones so large only Cyclops could have lifted them. These heroes had superhuman strength far superior to the men who told the stories. Homer references this strength several times in The Iliad:

...A man could not easily
hold [the great jagged stone], not even if he were very strong, in both hands
of men such as men are now, but he heaving it high threw it,
and smashed in the four-sheeted help, and pounded to pieces
the bones of the head inside it, so that Epikles dropped
like a diver from the high bastion, and the life left his bones.

Il., 12.381-386

Scholars refer to this legendary imagination as the "Heroic Age," the thought that the race of men before must have been heroes. The Heroic Age contains events like the stories of Oedipus, the Theban War, and the Trojan War.