Greek art and national life

Front matter

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3"

Boston Public Library

Preface

Theologians and missionaries seldom see eye to eye, but both are necessary to the faith ; and on the whole there are more theologians than missionaries.

That is my excuse for having written these essays. There are many handbooks for students of archaeology ; many works, didactic and controversial, for the more mature seeker after the exactitudes of the science ; it is not my aim to add to their number.

I would have no one admire a thing — a statue, a poem, a personality — because it is Greek. But I would have those who read this book love such things because they are human. For antiquity is_ nothing: however long ago King Minos died, while he lived he was flesh and blood ; though the ashes of Perikles have been for ages no more than a'" handful of the world's dust, he lived once, not a name, not a shadowy figure of history, but a human being. The men and women of to-day are no more than that, and no less.

That is'^why"16 admire Greek sculpture, Greek literature, Greek art as a whole, to study them, even to love them, solely as art^ is not to understand them wholly. To proclaim the Greeks the greatest artists of all time is cold gospel ; they were so, they are still, not because they are so long dead, but vi PREFACE

because they were once so intensely alive. It is their eternal modernity that matters.

Let us then remember that enthusiasm is wasted on dead things, but that life needs it sorely. To share the fire of Sappho is greater gain than to be the world's authority on Aeolic forms : to find the heart of the man who fashioned the sculptures of the Parthenon, to find

"... what led The hand to this perfection . . .",

is better worth while than to know to the last touch the methods of his skill. For the man was part of the time in which he lived, and his art was its mirror ; and as the great events of history are directed by the few, but are made possible by the spirit of the many, so also, though powet of expressi?)ii 4s the artist's gift, the soul that shines through his work is the soul of a nation.

Pemembering this, we shall find in the great achievements of Hellenic art, not merely the superficial beauty of cunningly-fashioned marble and bronze, but the deeper beauty of faith and worship, of enthusiasm and endeavour, qualities that our common humanity can share and understand.

This book bears the same title as a course of lectures which I have delivered in many University Extension centres during the past twelve years ; but I feel that I owe an apology to the publishers in response to whose courteous and most welcome invitation it was written, for of those lectures, of which, so far as I know, no written record exists, there is

PREFACE vii

little here except the title. I trust that the many shortcomings of a book written with enthusiasm, and with the object of communicating it to others, may be forgiven by those readers to whom a different treatment of the subject would have made a greater appeal. As in my lectures, my aim has been, not to teach, but to arouse the desire to learn, and also to set before those to whom the technical aspect of Greek art is already familiar, a picture of the human conditions which dictated its progress and decline.

My best thanks are due to Sir Arthur Evans and to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press for their kind permission to use the illustrations of Cretan scripts and seals from Scripta Minoa. My debt to Professor E. M. Burrows' Discoveries in Crete will be apparent to those who have read that admirable summary of the great work of Sir Arthur Evans, whose Scripta Minoa has of course been indispensable : and I acknowledge with gratitude the influence of the late Andrew Lang in Homeric criticism. In my inquiry into the meaning of Hellenic sculpture, I have followed a line of thought evolved during the years that I have devoted to lecturing upon the subject ; and while I may be permitted to claim for it some originality, and to hope that it has some value, I willingly admit its faults to be my own.

I date this preface from the same deep woodland upon whose ever-changing beauty I have drawn, in the pages that follow, in my endeavour to uphold the claim of England to her own peculiar realm in art ; and to the friends who have given me the freedom of their goodly heritage I owe my thanks.

viii PREFACE

To the " pruner of my periods," whose sympathetic criticism, untiring help, and unfailing encouragement have inspired and guided my efforts from the inception to the conclusion of this work, such gratitude is due as cannot be expressed here ; the book itself must be my messenger.

S. C. K. S.

The Great Wood, Northaw, August ^rd, 1913.

Contents

I. Introduction II. Knossos ....

III. The Sack of Knossos .

IV. The " Mycenaean " Civilisation V. The Homeric Age

Introduction

The rise of Greek art from the most crude beginnings to astounding perfection has been regarded, until recent years, as one of the miracles of history. The time was so short — a mere matter of three hundred years, or even less — the stride was so enormous, that it seemed impossible to measure the genius of the Greeks, in sculpture at least, by any human standard.

The effect of this point of view upon the student was unfortunate. It removed the Hellenic race from the category of flesh and blood, and made it superhuman, or rather ^.r^r^^^-human, with the consequence that everything produced by it was liable to be regarded with a cold and academic interest, as a thing apart.

So long as the modern understanding of Greek sculpture was confined, in default of better material, to the ideas suggested by the most decadent of Greek sculpture and by Grseco-Roman copies, with the stamp of affectation and of trade-production broad upon them, the harm done was not great. Indeed, the fact that the critics of a century ago were able to

A extract so much of the true Hellenic spirit as is shown, for example, in Lessing's ** Laocoon," from the material at their disposal, speaks well for their perception. To go further back, that the fire of Hellas should have shone through the ice of the ** antique " is one of the marvels of the Renaissance.

When, however, the science of archaeology, with its systematic methods of excavation and investigation, came into being in the nineteenth century, adding almost yearly to the priceless store of European museums, and to the means of studying the architectural and sculptural monuments of Greek lands, the rapidity and certainty of Hellenic progress, between the eighth and the fifth centuries B.C., became more puzzling as it became more apparent. As the scientific Hellenism of the seventies superseded the sentimental Hellenism of the twenties, the true spirit of the work itself tended to be lost, in an inverse ratio to the discovery of the work itself.

Enthusiasm was not lacking, but the enthusiasm was for the process rather than for the result. The archaeologist saw in his finds evidence of the progress of an art rather than that of a people. Art was studied — even loved — for art's sake, and the artist was forgotten.

It was a necessary phase. The unscientific admiration of the *' antique " had led to grave, and sometimes to ludicrous errors of judgment. I believe it is true that Payne Knight, to whom the nation owes a tremendous debt of gratitude for his sincere love of Hellenic art, and perhaps above all, for the ** Athena" with the diamond eyes, that exquisite little archaic bronze, with which, among many other treasures, he enriched the collection of the British Museum, actually advised the rejection by the Museum Trustees of the pedimental figures of the Parthenon, on the ground that they were Grseco- Roman work of Hadrian's time, and poor at that ! In the days of indiscriminate sentimentalism, there was no settled chronology of Greek art, and the names of great Greek sculptors were tacked, almost haphazard, on to shop-copies of Roman days. Taste was the only criterion, and taste varies.

But now that a great part of the spade-work — in the literal as well as in the metaphorical sense — has been accomplished ; now that more or less exact data for the settlement of questions of style and date have been patiently accumulated on a scientific basis, the time has come once more for the human love, coupled with a clearer understanding, of the art which has made Hellas more than a name through so many ages. In the light of a more exact knowledge, placed at our disposal by workers who set aside sentiment in the search for fact, our pictures will be more actual, more sharply defined, and more glowing, than they ever could be when intuition and imagination were all whereon we had to rely for our guidance in forming them.

Much of the magic has gone in the process, but that is no loss. It was an unreality, and only served as a mist to confuse the picture. In exchange for it we have fairy tates come true, heroes, no longer looming gigantic, but firm-set on solid ground, endued with the romance of a real and human character, not m'^re vague embodiments of strength and power, but warm and sentient beings, lovable, not merely admirable, weak as well as strong.

It was a strange freak of perversity that made the scholars of the last years of the eighteenth century first cut away the ground from which Greek civilisation grew, and then wonder that it should have grown from nothing. The marvels at which they laughed were nothing to the marvel that they postulated. The same spirit that dubbed Herodotos the " father of lies " laughed Theseus to scorn, and made Herakles a sun-god. So far from admitting that there had been great men before Agamemnon, criticism denied Agamemnon himself a real existence. Troy never was, Odysseus never wandered, even the coming of the Dorians was a doubtful thing. Time was not, for Greece, before the first Olympiad. Imagination baulked at anything to which a date could not be attached in neat figures. History began in 77^ B.C.

No wonder, then, that the bewildered student, cumbered with common sense, was fain to regard the Greek civilisation by whose evidences he was surrounded as a thing supernatural and incomprehensible, like Athena sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus — or even more remotely incomprehensible, for where was the head of Zeus ?

As the story of the birth of Athena was a desperate expedient — a lie, if the plain name be better — so was this story, from the German schools, of the birth of Greek civilisation. Both were born of slow time, with due gestation, due growth, and due maturity. There were great men before Agamemnon, and greater far than he. The civilisation of Hellas grew out of the wreck of a civilisation greater in some respects than her own, though less articulate, and the stories of Greek legend contain the truths out of which prehistory must be built. The task is far from complete. To the great figures of those long dead days still cling the magnifying and distorting mists of forgetfulness, but once they were real. The spade has proved it, and that within these last forty years.

Yet, here again, it was enthusiasm rather than scholarship that was the driving force. The story of Schliemann's discoveries is a romance, and none but an essentially romantic temperament could have undertaken the task that he brought to a triumphant issue.

We have all built castles in Spain, I think — dream-castles on some distant hill, full in sight, very splendid and very far. But the way to them was long and hard, and it wound so that we had to turn our backs awhile upon our castle, and so perhaps we chose an easier way, and the towers crumbled into forgetfulness. But here is the story of a man who found his dream-castle, though the way was very long and very hard.

His castle was Troy. This son of a poor German parson, born when the last great struggle of Hellas for her freedom was just beginning, seems far enough from the battle-field of the heroes of romance and legend. But he heard from his father the story of Troy's fall, and saw in a childish picture-book the burning gates, and Aeneas, with old Anchises on his back, little Ascanius at his hand, fleeing from the destruction — and the picture sank deep into his mind. The child knew nothing of the arguments that had turned Homer from a poet into a patchwork of poets, nothing of the criticism that sought to destroy the fabric whereon his dream was built — the dream of seeing Troy, of facing the gates on which Aeneas had turned his back. To him the story was real, and its setting must be real also.

Then came life, and life seemed to lead always away from the dream. There was little enough romance in serving out butter and bacon and potatoes and cheap spirit in a general store. One day there came into the shop a broken-down, drunken schoolmaster, who, for all his degradation, had not forgotten his Homer. More than a hundred of the splendid lines he recited there and then — and there and then was paid, out of the lad's scant earnings, with three glasses of brandy to repeat them three times more — and that to one who could not understand a single word, but nevertheless could catch their poetry. "From that moment," says Schliemann, '*! never ceased to ask God, that He would of His grace grant me the joy, some day, of learning Greek."

Once the ideal was in danger, but Fate intervened. At the end of five and a half years, an overstrain which left him physically unfit for his grinding work compelled him to give it up. He tramped to Hamburg, and sought work there in vain. At last he sold his only decent coat, and signed on as ship's boy on the brig Dorothea, bound for Venezuela. Here might well have ended his dream. But the ship, fatefully named, brought him God's gift in the form of shipwreck off the Dutch coast ; and after nine hours in an open boat, he landed in Holland, penniless, and with the last of his small possessions at the bottom of the sea, a boy of nineteen at the mercy of the world. We need not follow him through his years of toil. Clerk, book-keeper, agent, merchant, contractor, always, in every spare moment, widening his knowledge, adding to his store of modern languages, increasing his commercial value to his employers; ''doing the next thing" with unflagging pertinacity, he seemed to . be bound hand and foot to the routine of a life leading further and further away from the aim that he always kept in view. For seventeen years, from 1841 to 1858, he was pursuing, first in Amsterdam and later in St. Petersburg, what to all appearances was no more than a " successful commercial career," much like that of hundreds of other " self-made men."

But in 1858 a fortune made during the Crimean War brought him to the point of prosperity at which he felt justified in turning to the work of his heart — the study of archaeology. For the last two years of the war he had been learning ancient Greek, and Homer was no longer a sealed book to him.

I think it is well to notice that even so, he did not rush straight from the counting-house to the field of his ambition. It was not until after an extended tour of Europe, and a visit to Egypt, that at last, in 1860, he set foot in Athens : then, when he was on the point of visiting Ithaka, the home of Odysseus, a lawsuit called him back to St. Petersburg, and it was only in 1863 that he was able finally to dispose of his business and to take up the work upon which his heart had been set from his childhood's days.

A tour round the world, to complete his education, a maiden effort as an author, in a book on China and Japan, and a long stay in Paris, to learn the elements of archseological science, brought him to the threshold of his desires. In 1868 he paid his first visits to the sites with which his fame is linked.

In 1870 the first sod was turned at Hissarlik, where his faith in the accuracy of Pausanias insisted that ancient Troy lay buried, in the face of modern archaeology, which, if it allowed that Troy had ever been at all, placed it further inland, at Bunarbashi. He was laughed at, and at first meagre results mocked his efforts, but the man who had persisted for five and thirty years could persist for three years more, and in 1873 the world knew that the scholars were wrong and the enthusiast was right.

It was in the diary of that year that, working in bitter weather, Schliemann wrote, *' At night, we have nothing but our enthusiasm for the great work of the discovery of Troy, to keep us warm." Such enthusiasm as his was fire enough.

Mycenae, '' rich in gold " in our time as in Homer's, next gave up her secrets, and Schliemann stood beside the dust of those who were great men before Agamemnon, in their graves set within the circle that Pausanias had seen, surrounded by treasure that justified the city's title. Ithaka had little to give him, still remote and poor now as in Odysseus' day, but what was there to find, he found. And all the controversy that raged, and rages still, about the discoveries that he gave to the world, can never take away from the greatness of his achievement, and can never undo the fact that the faith of a child in the truth of a splendid story has gone far to restore its splendour to a generation of scholars, who, when he first heard and believed, would have been absorbed in the niceties of its grammar, and would have passed by its humanity without a thought.

Perhaps I have spent too much time on this tale of patient endeavour and of rich reward. Of the discoveries themselves I shall speak in their due place. But I wanted to make it clear that enthusiasm is not wasted, and that even in the study of things long past, sympathy and common sense and poetic feeling are qualities that it is dangerous to discard. The grammarians of the eighteenth century all but robbed us of our Homer. The grocer's boy of the nineteenth century gave him back to us, for love of his poetry, and of the living men of whom he sang.

Now I would have you consider carefully the enormous importance of this removal of the Homeric story from the domain of fairy tale to that of actuality. If this story had its foundation laid on solid walls, if it spoke of real cities, of real things, why not also of real men ? And if criticism was justified in approaching the Iliad and the Odyssey from this standpoint, why not also the great mass of legend manifestly pre-Homeric in its origin? The stories of Herakles, of Pelops, of Theseus, of Minos himself, might they not too contain their grain of truth ? Where was the limit of history to be set ? Were the walls of the well-built house of Erechtheus, King of Athens, and friend of Athena, beyond discovery? Was the Labyrinth of Knossos — was the Minotaur himself — all myth? Was Herodotos really the father of lies ? These were the questions that sprang into men's minds. These are the questions that archaeology has answered, at least in part, since Schliemann laid down the spade and the pen for the last time.

In short, there is truth in every legend of old Greece that deals with men and the deeds of men. The discoveries in Melos, by the British School of Archaeology in Athens, led the way to the discoveries of Dr. Evans, and Dr. Halbherr principal among others, in Crete. Finds scattered far and wide over Greek lands and beyond, from Spain to Palestine, from the Crimea to Egypt, have revealed the widespread influence of a civilisation that was great long before the first king of the house of Atreus ruled in Argos and Mycenae. The pictured walls of Knossos have given to the bull-headed monster of the Cretan city, if not reality — we need no touch of the supernatural in our picture — at least a reason. We can even trace, by a sign here and there, the affinities of races of a world-old antiquity, who played their part in the building of the foot walls of the civilisation of to-day. History now begins for us, not with the first date in a systematised chronology, but with the first rough flint fashioned to the needs of men dwelling in the shelter of the rocks.

The gain is great : and it consists not so much in the actual process of reconstruction and of discrimination and selection, as in the main result, namely, that the unintelligible element has been eliminated from the growth of classical Greece. We are no longer compelled to regard the progress of art in the Hellas of recorded history as an uncanny, even an inhuman thing, for we know that behind it lie ages of progress and of change, which built up the national conditions and the national character, and left the legacy of national skill of hand, which combined to produce the meteoric wonder of classical art. Further consideration of the place of legend in the making of history will show how the one factor which, in pre-Homeric times, was lacking to produce a truly inspired art, was introduced into Hellas, and an aspect of truth will be given to stories that for too long had ranked merely among the world's most fascinating fairy tales.

I make no apology for the length of this introduction. I have set out on my task with the deliberate intention of showing that as enthusiasm created, so it alone can rediscover, the *' glory that was Greece."

II

ScHLiEMANN discovered Troy. He excavated Mycense, finding tombs of kings, and treasure of kings. He established the existence of a great prehistoric civilisation in Greece ; vv^hether that civilisation could be connected wdth the story told by Homer, or not, it was by his faith in Homer that he revolutionised the attitude of historians towards tradition. . It was rather a striking irony, therefore, that the one thing which he did not discover should have been the natural medium of literary expression, the art of writing. Inspired by a great literary monument, he found no trace of anything which could then be recognised as an inscription. So far as his discoveries went, even the solitary reference made to written signs by Homer, namely, the a->//xaTa Xvypa, the dire signs, carried by Bellerophon from Proitos of Tiryns to the Lydian king, was without archaeological substantiation.

Taking into consideration the remote antiquity of picture-writing in Europe, traceable to the days of the cave-dwellers, so far back that no more than the vaguest estimate of their date can be made, it seemed inconceivable that a civilisation like that of the builders of Mycenae should have been ignorant, of the art of writing in one form or another.

It is due to the efforts of Dr. (now Sir) Arthur Evans to clear up this anomaly that the history of the Greek world has been carried back another 2000 years at least : in the process, a tremendous lost civilisation has been revealed, and names that were great in pre-Homeric legend have begun to take their place in a reconstructed history of European civilisation.

It is to the works of Dr. Evans that we must turn for the history of his excavations in Crete, and of their results. In an essay of this kind we can attempt no more than to give a conjectural shape to their meaning, and to visualise from the buildings, the pottery, paintings, and other works of art, something of the life which produced them.

From 1889 onwards, Dr. Evans was engaged in collecting and tracing the provenance of certain engraved stones, bearing a general resemblance to stones found at Mycense, but engraved with forms and symbols which seemed to have the character of a kind of pictographic script, vaguely suggestive to the lay eye of the well-known Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Gradually the evidence which he accumulated made it plain that Crete was the source from which all these stones had come, and a journey in Crete brought to light a very large number of similar stones, many still actually being worn by women as " milk-stones," or charms. Other evidence was brought to light, of a very ancient and advanced civilisation in the island, and a clay tablet, found at Knossos, scratched with linear signs of different forms from those on the seal stones, but obviously belonging to the same line of development, made it plain that if anything was to be discovered with regard to prehistoric Greek writing, it was in Crete that the search must be made.

Excavations in the most ancient sanctuary of the Cretan Zeus, the Dictsean cave, resulted in the discovery of a great deposit of votive offerings, and, deep in the deposit, a fragment of a small altar table of black stone, having three bowl-like depressions for libations, and, most important of all, an inscription in characters of the linear script along its upper surface.

The next step was dictated by tradition. The great city of Cretan tradition was Knossos. It was in Knossos that Minos the king had reigned — in Knossos the Labyrinth was built by the master-craftsman, Daidalos, to conceal the Minotaur, the bull-headed monster. There the same Daidalos had made the dancing-floor for Ariadne, the daughter of the king. To Knossos Theseus had come to win her heart and to slay the monster, and thereby to liberate his city of Athens from a shameful tribute.

If in these fantastic legends there was a grain of truth, it was that Knossos had been, long ages ago, the greatest city in Crete, great enough to hold a far-off city of the mainland in fee.

So, patiently surmounting one obstacle after another. Dr. Evans, in the spring of 1900, at last began to excavate the mound known as Kephala tou Effendi — "the Gentleman's Head" — which marked the traditional site of Knossos, lying about four miles inland from Candia, on the west bank of the Kairatos river.

Tradition was right, and so was legend. A few inches of digging proved the one, a few short months of work revealed the basis of the other.

The palace, as revealed by years of continuous excavation, presents a bewildering complex of walls, chambers, courts, and corridors, well meriting the name of Labyrinth. The work has now been carried so far, however, that it is possible to form some estimate of the history of the buildings and of their use. They lie upon a hill sloping from west to east towards the Kairatos river, and are arranged around a great central court, some 200 feet long from north to south, and 100 feet wide. The buildings on the west or upper side of the court, and at each end of it, rise from the same level as the court itself, but those on the east or lower side have one story below its level, and are consequently better preserved, the western buildings being for the most part razed nearly to the ground level, while the eastern still rise in some places to a height sufficient to indicate that they had two and perhaps three stories. A thick wall, with well-placed bastions and guard-houses at intervals, surrounded the entire group, which was approximately square. Recent excavation has shown that there was a still larger court to the west of this square, with buildings upon its western side ; but the latest palace appears to have been complete and self-contained within its cincture wall.

The arrangement of the quarters of the palace no doubt varied at different times in its development, but in its final form it was far more simple than the complicated appearance of the plan would lead us at first sight to suppose. The wing west of the central court was divided into two main portions by a great corridor running north and south : west of this corridor, the ground floor was devoted to stores, and east of it the official and sacred apartments were grouped. In the wing east of the court, the dividing corridor runs east and west, the northern portion of the building being occupied by workshops, offices, and an oil-press, and the southern consisting of the private apartments — the '^ palace " proper. The main entrances to the palace were at the northern and southern ends ; at the north-east and north-west angles were guard-houses, and there appears to have been a large guard-tower overlooking a portico on the west side of the palace, at the end of the store-rooms ; the floor or floors above the store-rooms may have been occupied by the palace guard, which was probably numerous.