Apollo in Homer's time.

Compared with Mycenae civilization, Homer's era did retrogress to primitive society, but on the other hand, it also had a very important positive factor, that is, the use of iron. With the invasion of Dorians, iron spread all over Greece from north to south. It turns out that the Hittites in Xiaoya were the first people to use iron in the Mediterranean region, and the time was about16-15th century BC. However, the Hittites monopolized the smelting of iron and kept it secret, and the outflow of iron was very small, so it didn't play any role in ancient eastern civilized countries. After the Hittite collapse in the 3rd century BC/KLOC-0, smelting iron spread in Xiaoya, but it was also widely used by backward tribes in mountainous areas. Therefore, at the end of Mycenae civilization, ironware was unknown, while Dorians in northern Greece learned to smelt iron because of the land route to Xiaoya Mountain. They invaded Greece and brought the Greek region into the Iron Age.

During BC 10-9 century, iron was widely used in all parts of Greece, and Athens became the main iron smelting center. Iron not only means a higher level of productivity, but also has an inestimable impact on agriculture and handicraft production under the specific conditions in Greece. Like Greece, the mountains are very thin, and only iron can make a big breakthrough in agricultural production. At that time, the biggest problem faced by agricultural production was the reclamation of cultivated land, not only the original Pingchuan cultivated land of Mycenae civilization was mostly barren and needed to be reclaimed again; What's more, with the large-scale migration tide, new villages and new houses all over Greece need to cut down trees to open up wasteland and turn hills and slopes into fields. Whether it is raw and ripe wasteland, shrub or hard slope mixed with earth and stone, it can't be effective without iron axe and hoe, which is one of the reasons why the development of cultivated land in Greece in the Bronze Age was still greatly restricted. Now there are iron axes to cut Lin Mang, iron hoes to dig roots, wasteland to be reclaimed, and Greek agricultural production has advanced beyond the Bronze Age. Therefore, among the agricultural tools, the most commonly used and valued ones at that time were the iron axe and the iron hoe, followed by the iron plow. The most common agricultural tools found in archaeological excavations in Athens and other places are axes and hoes. Homer's epic also vividly reflects the use of iron in agriculture in several places. In "Heriat", it is described that Achilles held a competitive meeting when he held a grand funeral for his fallen comrades-in-arms, and the prize for the discus champion was a big round pig iron. The poet boasted: "Even if he has a lot of fertile land, this iron is enough for him to use for five years. Neither his plowman nor his shepherd will go to the city because of lack of iron, because there is enough iron at home. Iron is best used as an axe, so the poem goes on to say that the prize for the pigeon shooter champion is an iron axe: "He gave the shooter black iron as a prize and made ten double-edged axes and ten single-edged axes with it." With the iron axe and hoe (pickaxe) and the plow of two strong cows praised in the epic, the agricultural production in Greece can achieve a bumper harvest under the conditions of mountainous and thin soil. Engels said: "Iron makes it possible to cultivate a larger area of farmland and open up a vast forest area." This sentence can be said to be the most applicable to Greece.