The light bearers; stories of old Greece

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Glory of Greece. 11

The beautiful little land itself, today, where every corner is alive with undying memo¬ ries. Why it, rather than any other tiny island-girt peninsula, is held in such honor, as having handed down to us so much worth having and knowing. The legends of Homer, that make word-pictures of the ways of thinking and living of the early Greeks.

Chapter I

I F SOME daring traveler could go journeying far, far back through the ages, and pass across the centuries that lie between as if they were hills and valleys, he would come at last into what we love to call “the Morning of the World”—that wonderful time when almost everything about which we know was beginning freshly, like a new day at sunrise.

Men and women were living then, scattered here and there over many parts of the earth as we know it today; but those who dwelt a few hundred miles inland had no clear ideas about the stormy seas which beat upon the shores of their own country. They knew even less that was true about the people who had settlements along the seacoast, either on islands or near sheltered inlets and bays. Traders who ventured to travel from one tribe to another always had stories to tell each one about what its neighbors did and how they lived. But stories that were simple in the beginning would be passed on, told and retold, until many tellings twisted them into strange tales full of adventures and marvels.

The tribes who lived near a seacoast knew just as little of things inland as the inland peoples knew of them, but they were apt to have clearer ideas of what the world, as a whole, was like. They saw the sea surging around their rocky shores and rolling up the sandy beaches—that sea was what made it possible for them to reach new places. In fair weather they would often catch glimpses of neigh¬ boring islands or of some nearby mainland beyond the white-capped surf. So they would contrive ways to reach the shores they saw. The bravest of them soon went paddling away from their own beaches on rafts made of logs tied together with thongs or tough vines, or in rude boats hollowed by fire from the trunks of trees.

Sometimes such bold voyagers made friends and traded with the strangers they visited; sometimes they banded together and fought them until the stronger tribe had won.

Famous among those lands where men lived and learned from each other, fought and strove with each other, in the Morning of the World, was a rugged little peninsula. It reached out then, just as it does today, southward from what we now call Europe, into the Mediterranean (which means midland) Sea, to the east of Italy. Wise men have studied the shape of this peninsula on the map and the way its mountains rise sharply in places close to the sea. They say that some great earthquake must have broken it across through the middle, from the west¬ ern side almost to the eastern. This happened long, long ago. It came near turning the southern half of the country into an island, for the sea came flowing into the long gorge or valley made by the earthquake

THE GLOKY OF GREECE and washed against the mountains on either side of it. It may have been that same great earth shock which tore away from the mainland many rocky

Drawn by A. H. Bumslead © National Geographic Society

The Little Broken Peninsula and Its Clustering Islands

fragments which became islands, great and small, that cluster around it in the sea.

In the northern part of this rugged little country, along its western coast, was a tiny tribe of men who called themselves “Graikoi”; and these people traded with the Latins, over in Italy, from the earli¬ est times. The Latins, finding the name strange to their tongues, twisted it a bit and gave these neigh¬ bors from across the Ionian Sea the name of “Greeks.’’ The land from which they had come sailing westward became known as Graecia, or Greece. Through those Latins these names have come down to us; hut from the olden time, even until today, the people themselves have always loved to call their little broken peninsula and its clustering islands by the ancient name of Hellas and them¬ selves, its people, the Hellenes.

When some one writes or speaks of the beauty and wonder of Greece, and of the honor we owe the men who lived there long ago, a question may come into the minds of boys and girls. Even older people do not always understand why so small a country, far away in southeastern Europe, should mean so much to American men and women, or to American boys and girls. They look at the map and see that Greece is but half the size of Florida, and only one-third as large as Corea. Then they ask us why Greece and its old-time stories should be more to them than Corea and its history, or that of Alaska, which is two hundred times the size of Greece and is part of the United States as well.

They will say, too, that few Americans had fore¬ fathers who were Greeks, or who had ever seen or spoken with Greeks.

It is quite true that most of our own ancestors came from countries far up in the northwestern parts of Europe, on or near the shores of the At¬ lantic. Many of them knew nothing about the his¬ tory or language of Greece; yet without that brave little country their own lives and ways of living would have been very different, and so would ours be today.

The reason is quickly told and easily understood. Greece was the teacher of Rome. The Romans con¬ quered and taught the rest of Europe. Just as the wisest one in a party of sayage lads will gather to¬ gether and guard the scattered brands of the camp¬ fire and keep them alive and burning with fresh fuel so that he and his companions may not lack warmth and light when they need them, so the Greeks, in the Morning of the World, gathered for use all sorts of knowledge worth having. They were Guardians of the Fire of Knowledge. From every tribe or nation with whom they traded, or fought, or made friends, they learned something worth knowing, and kept it safely for their own use. They were quick¬ witted, and when they passed on to their children what they had found out, it was a thing tested and improved and even better worth remembering than when they first heard of it.

What the old tribes of Florida and Corea and Alaska knew has never come down to us for our use. Our customs today would be exactly the same if there had never been such tribes. We trace the growth of our knowledge directly back to Greece— the land that gathered wisdom from far and wide, in little things and in large ones, and taught not only Rome, but many great cities founded by Greek sailors and traders, all around the Mediterranean.

When Rome learned from Greece—carrying that wisdom-fire onward and giving it to all peoples and lands conquered by Roman armies—she was giving it to the peoples and lands from which our own forefathers came, and where our customs of today began.

There is something still greater for us to know and to remember about them. The Greeks loved beautiful things, and taught others why and how to love them. They gave high honor to noble and brave deeds, and kept alive the memory of men who had performed them. They were a free people for hun¬ dreds of years, and through all their wars, great or small, they held strongly to the love of freedom. In after years many nations remembered what splendid things so small a people had done—how they had beaten back tyrants and invaders and kept them¬ selves from slavery; and the memory gave these later nations courage, too, to fight for liberty and to win it for themselves.

In their own homes, nearly three thousand years ago, in what is called the Achaean age, the Greek boys and girls were told stories which are still known, about gods and heroes who were mighty in war; who did many wonderful deeds. These stories woven together recalled things that had really hap¬ pened to their forefathers, and legends of what the gods had done to help or hinder those real men in battle and in other adventures.

Those Greeks of long ago believed that there were gods and goddesses, like stronger, wiser and more beautiful men and women, who lived on Mount Olympus, in Thessaly, and were ruled by Zeus (or Jupiter). They really believed that many of the heroes from whom they themselves were descended were children of the gods or goddesses. This ac¬ counted to them for the power and courage of their bravest kings and warriors.

They believed that when heroes fought against each other in battle, the different gods and goddesses took sides. That they would hasten down from Olympus and try to win victory for their own chil¬ dren, either by giving them wise counsel, or by bringing them armor that could not be pierced, or even by taking the shapes of human warriors and fighting beside their sons, until Zeus forbade this practice. A Greek boy or man who counted one of the mighty heroes as his forefather would feel that he too must show himself brave and worthy of de¬ scent from the gods.

Zeus, his wife Hera (or Juno) and their brother and sister gods and goddesses were said to be sons and daughters of Saturn (or Time), who had tried to devour all his children, but who had been con¬ quered by Zeus. Zeus then shared his power with the brothers and sisters whom he had rescued. Pluto was made ruler over the Lower World, where the spirits of men were said to go after death, and where no sunshine came. Poseidon (or Neptune) was be¬ lieved to rule the sea and the rivers running into it. Zeus himself had power over all the fair, bright earth, with its mountains and forests.

Apollo, the son of Zeus, was god of the sun, was learned in music and medicine and in all beautiful arts. Ares (or Mars) was god of war, and Athene (or Minerva), their younger sister, was goddess of wisdom. From her the lovely city of Athens took its name.

Hermes (or Mercury), another son of Zeus, was the messenger of the gods. He held rule over wind and rain and was the especial friend and helper of travelers and merchants, shepherds and thieves! He

Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom “From her the lovely city of Athens took its name” (p. 18).

also had charge of taking the souls of the dead down to Hades, the kingdom of Pluto.

So it came to be that any unusual thing which happened to those old-time Greeks, or anything they believed had happened to their fathers, was said to be the act of some god or goddess. In this way many of the old hero legends grew.

From some sea voyage, made in search of gold and adventure, came the story of Jason, who sailed boldly away with a ship full of hero-comrades, to win the Golden Fleece of a wonderful ram, which was guarded by a dragon. From deeds of strength and daring, done to free a country from terrible wild animals and fierce robbers, came the stories about Theseus, who slew giants and the monster, man-devouring bull called the Minotaur; and about Hercules, the strongest of all living men, so mighty that he was held to be the son of Zeus himself.

A dispute arose between Hera, Athene and Aphro¬ dite (or Venus), the goddess of love, as to which of tJSAn was most beautiful. To make mischief, some We had flung among them a golden apple, on which were the words: “To the fairest,” and each of the three goddesses claimed it as hers by right. At last they appealed to Paris, the son of the king of Troy (or Ilium), to decide for them; and each goddess tried to bribe him with the promise of some gift. Aphrodite offered him a wife as beautiful as herself, and to her Paris gave the prize. The lovely bride was already the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta. Aphrodite helped Paris to steal her away; and men told over and over again the story of how all the heroes of Greece sailed across the iEgean Sea to fight for the fair Helen and bring her back from

TIIE LIGHT BEARERS

Ilium. This legend grew into one of the most noble story-poems of the ages: the Iliad. The Greeks say that it was a blind old poet, named Homer, who, having gathered together all the traditions about this war between Greeks and Trojans, wandered through the lovely land of Hellas, singing of them, until those who heard him learned his words by heart and took pride in claiming the mighty war¬ riors of whom he sang as their own forefathers.

More than anything else, it was this widespread love for the wonder songs of Homer which helped to knit together the different Greek tribes into a people using the same language, when otherwise they might have grown apart and picked up instead the speech of settlers who came to their shores from foreign lands.

Homer was said to have been the singer of an¬ other grand story-poem. This was the Odyssey, which told of the wanderings of Ulysses (or Odys¬ seus) after Troy had been taken by the Greeks and the other heroes had sailed safely home. Ulysses had offended the sea-god, Poseidon, who caused great storms to arise and thus prevented him from returning to his island home of Ithaca. He had marvelous adventures before he ever saw it again.

A siege of Troy, in which it was sacked and burned, there certainly was; the date is fixed by historians at 1194 to 1184, B. C. Whether the other features of these great stories happened exactly as told in the Iliad and Odyssey does not really matter. What is important is that these traditions, handed down for three thousand years, tell, as part of the story, so much about the daily life of an ancient Greek that by reading them we can picture the sort of house in which he lived, what he planted in his garden and orchard, of what his clothes were made, how his ships were built and how they sailed across the seas, and with what weapons he fought. We know what he thought about and what he believed.

Many hundred years from now people will read our story books to know how we lived. Perhaps they will wonder why certain queer old customs of the year nineteen hundred and something never died out, but could still be found in quiet country places— just as travelers in modern Greece of today are sur¬ prised to find, among the mountains and on the little islands, customs that Homer sang of, so far back through the ages.

Chapter II Legend And History

I N THAT wonderful Morning of the World the Mediterranean Sea was the center of the known earth. All around it and bordering on it were the older and more civilized nations from whom the Greeks drew much of their knowledge. To travel away from it northward into Europe or southward into Africa was to find countries and tribes more and more fierce and barbarous the farther one went. Traders and travelers to those wild lands were glad when it was time to turn back again to the shores of the Midland Sea.

In some of these older nations were wise men and priests, who kept records of their kings and wars, and of trading and exploring voyages to neighboring countries. These records were carved on stone, or pictures of the happenings were painted on the walls of temples and tombs and palaces, where some of them can still be found. These records go back farther than anything which the Greek traditions reveal to us. By studying what they tell of Greek lands and people, we learn how the beautiful legends of ancient Hellas grew out of actual happenings.

Egypt and Phoenicia were among those older coun¬ tries. Their trading ships and long-oared galleys went back and forth along the coasts of the H^gean Sea, which is that part of the Mediterranean be¬ tween Greece and Asia Minor. Its western shore was Greece itself. The islands that shut it in, almost like a lake, were counted part of Greece; and many Greek settlements rose along its eastern side, which was the coast of Asia Minor. These colonies were an important part of ancient Greece, and some of them grew rich and powerful.

Even if the learned priests in Egypt had kept no record, men today would know that ships sailed and traded between that country and Greece. In Argolis, once a kingdom of Greece, are the ruins of an old, old city called Mycenae. The Iliad tells of its mighty king, Agamemnon, who was chosen by the Greek heroes to lead them in their war against the Trojans. Less than sixty years ago, men exploring those an¬ cient ruins of Mycenae found among them the tombs of kings who ruled over Argolis thousands of years ago. In those tombs were pottery and jewelry from Egypt; while pictures of Mycenaean vases have been found painted on walls in the Egyptian city of Thebes. Those paintings were made fifteen hundred years before the time of Christ, proving that in days very far off the Egyptians had dealings with the rugged little peninsula of Greece.

The Phoenicians, too, came and went in trading ships from their cities of Tyre and Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast of Asia, farther to the south than the Greek colonies which grew up on that shore and close to the country now called Palestine. Those Phoenician merchants were daring mariners. They ventured out into the stormy Atlantic itself to trade with the islanders of far Britain. Such fearless voyagers were no strangers to the Greek islands and mainland, their near neighbors. They had much to do with the up-building of Greece.

LEGEND AND HISTORY

Long before the days of the Greek hero-legends, and even before the famous old Greek cities of Athens and Mycenae, Tiryns and Sparta and Corinth were built, a savage race, the Pelasgians, lived among the hills and valleys of the Greek peninsula. At first they knew little of building, or of the sim¬ plest kinds of useful arts. Often their homes were nothing but caves in the mountain-sides. It was when the Egyptian and Phoenician trading ships be¬ gan to come to their coasts that they found out from these visitors how to use fire for cooking food, and how to build great stone walls in the manner that even now is called “Pelasgian.” For so strongly did they build, once they had learned their lesson, that even today, in that land of clear light and blue skies, their walls, made of great, rough-liewn blocks of stone, set together without mortar of any kind, are still standing.

The Pelasgians were quick to learn from the new¬ comers who landed on their shores. It was not long before they were making weapons for themselves and tools of iron and bronze. Then, as settlers came from Egypt and other Mediterranean countries to live among them, cities commenced to grow, and what is called the ‘ ‘ Heroic Age ’’ began.

The real history of the way in which the Greek people grew out of those half savage tribes has come down to us in such a tangle of wonder legends, that it is not easy for the wisest scholars to draw the line between fact and fairy tale. But no single year passes in which wonderful things are not learned, as explorers find and uncover cities long buried and forgotten; and many fairy tales have turned out to be very like facts, after all.

Throughout hundreds of years there were many learned men who did not believe that there had ever been such a city as Troy, conquered and burned by invading Greek warriors. The story Homer sang of the battling under its walls and of its capture, was held by them to be .just as much a wonder tale as any of those told about the gods.

It was about the year 1870 that a scholar and traveler, Dr. Schliemann, set out to find and uncover the lost cities of the Heroic Age. He had always loved the old stories about them, and as he read and studied, he grew more and more convinced that something more than a hero-legend was at the root of the story of high-walled Troy. He believed that such a city had really existed, somewhere on the northwestern coast of Asia Minor, where the black¬ hulled ships of the Greek heroes could have reached it by sailing eastward from Aulis, on the Grecian mainland, across the .ZEgean Sea. He believed that he could find it.

Dr. Schliemann gave his money and much of his life to this work. The place to which he thought the old legends of Troy pointed was the hill at Hissarlik, in Asia Minor, which is now part of the Turkish Empire. There he studied the hills and valleys and running streams, comparing them with all that the old stories told about the place where Troy stood. At last he felt so certain of his ground that he gath¬ ered laborers from all the country near and paid them well to dig out carefully and carry away the earth covering the great mound of Hissarlik. Little by little they uncovered, not one city alone, but the stone walls and pillars and pavements of six or seven

LEGEND AND HISTORY cities, one built above the other, at different times, ages apart.

In each of these layers were found armor and jewelry and bits of shaped stone and pottery, unlike those in the layers next above and below. And in one of the lowest layers of all, Dr. Schliemann came on traces of a great fire and a battle, and so many other things of which both legends and records had spoken, that he himself felt no more doubt that that ancient city, long forgotten, had once been mighty Troy.

It was in one of the deepest layers that an axehead of white jade was discovered—a stone found nowhere outside of China. So it must have been brought thousands of miles by traders.

While there are scholars who do not agree with Dr. Schliemann as to those marvelous ruins having surely been Troy (or Ilium) itself, yet about his dis¬ coveries among the ruined cities on Argos plain there can be no doubt whatever.

This plain of Argos in Greece, lying south of the gulf and city of Corinth, was once a powerful little kingdom by itself. There today are to be found the remains of three great cities famous long before the times of which Homer sang. Tiryns, the giant fortress, which Homer called “the well walled city,” is the oldest of all; yet so stoutly were its massive walls built that their immense blocks of stone still endure in place, with the gateways through which Greek men and women, boys and girls, passed in and out thousands of years ago.

Here, as at Mycenae, farther inland, where excava¬ tions were begun in 1876, palaces of ancient rulers have been uncovered, showing both where and how they lived. “Mycenae, rich in gold,” was what Homer called this second city, which took over the power from Tiryns; and among the ruins of its palaces and tombs Dr. Schliemann found treasures of wrought gold—cups and jewels, crowns and masks —that proved the name was surely given with good reason. It was the Greek tradition that Agamem¬ non, the great commander of the Greeks against the Trojans, had ruled both her© and in the city of Ar¬ gos, not far from Tiryns. It was to Argos that the beacon fires flashed, from far-off mountain peaks to those near by, telling its people that Troy had fallen after a siege of ten years, and that their king was coming hack to his own land again.

But while there are ruins at Argos almost as an¬ cient and full of interest as those at Tiryns and Mycenae, it is unlike them in one important respect. Those two older cities were overthrown, at last, by their younger and stronger neighbor, and they van¬ ished from history as living towns. But Argos, though its power rose and fell, is one of the bright and thriving towns of modern Greece, with a history that does not need legends to give it interest.

Even greater than Argos, and more noted in later history, was Sparta, farther south in the Pelopon¬ nesus. This long name was the one given by the Greeks to the southern half of their country—that part which was so nearly divided from the northern mainland by the Gulf of Corinth. Nowadays that lower part is called the Morea —people say because it is shaped like the mulberry leaf, or “ morns.’’ But the name Peloponnesus means “the Island of Pelops.” The old stories said that Pelops was a grandson of Zeus himself, and that Atreus, son of

LEGEND AND HISTORY

Pelops, was the father of the two royal brothers, Agamemnon, the Argive king, and Menelaus, who ruled in Sparta. It was the stealing by Paris, son of the Trojan king, of the lovely Helen, wife of Mene¬ laus, that led to the war between Greeks and Tro¬ jans, and to many adventures which came after, of which the Iliad and the Odyssey tell the stories.

The Peloponnesus is claimed to have been the birthplace also of Hercules, strongest of all heroes. Traditions told how his descendants, the Heraclidse, had been conquered and driven away into the north by the Pelopidae, sons of Pelops. A hundred years later, or about 1104 B. C., the Heraclidae, with their kinsmen and allies, the men of Doris, came sweeping down from Thessaly, in the far north of Greece, took Mycenae and Argos and Sparta, and made their leaders kings over those cities.

The Dorians, by way of paying themselves for fighting well against the Pelopidae, drove out all who dwelt in that fertile part of the Peloponnesus which was called Ionia, and took possession of the land. So the sons of Pelops and the Ionians wandered off to settle in other parts of the Greek mainland and islands. Some of them made new homes for them¬ selves along the coast of Asia Minor, and so began certain of the Greek colonies there. But always, from those days, the descendants of the Dorians and the people whose forefathers had been driven from Ionia considered themselves born enemies, through peace and war.

One can hardly blame either race; the Dorians for wanting to hold the fair plains of Sparta, or the Ionians for their anger at being banished; for it is a very lovely country, shut in by snowcapped mountains and rich in orchards of lemons and oranges, and in vineyards. Sparta, like Argos, has been a living city or town from the time it was built to this very hour; but no very old buildings are to be found there, as at Argos. There is no longer any trace of the ancient hero-city, nor of the palace of King Menelaus. The Dorian invaders must have torn them down, in order to build for themselves in some other fashion. Earthquakes, too, have de¬ stroyed many ruins of the ancient houses and tem¬ ples. But after all, it was its people, rather than the houses and walls of Sparta, that won for it an undying name.

But the city which was to become the most famous of all in Greece, the city which is still a wonder of the world for the beauty remaining to it, was Athens. More than almost any other Grecian race, the men of Athens were proud to call the soil on which they dwelt their “fatherland.’’ They looked on them¬ selves as “earthborn,” descending from the most ancient dwellers in the land, who had no need to count back for ancestors to any tribes of outland invaders, although they might be sons of the gods.

Yet while the Athenians themselves were “earthborn,” they believed the founder of their city to have been Cecrops, a wise prince from Egypt, who had taught the Pelasgians many useful things. From him they had learned how to till the soil and how to plant vineyards and groves, as well as the arts of plowing and weaving wool. At first the city was called Cecropia, from him; but the name was soon changed to Athens, in honor of Pallas Athene, its patron goddess, the wise daughter of Zeus.

There came other kings after Cecrops and then,

© Underwood & Underwood

Athens Old and New

In the foreground is the modern city of Athens. In the distance is the rock of the Acropolis, which rises to a height of 180 feet above the Plain of Attica and is about 1,100 feet long and 500 feet broad. On it stand the ruins of the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and the temples of the Wingless Victory and of Artemis.

at last, Athens was ruled by Theseus, son of HCgeus, who had been one of the heroes with Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece. Later Theseus had slain the Minotaur, a monster which devoured young men and maidens, and he had had many other marvelous adventures among gods and men. Athens claimed him as her greatest hero; and in after years the Athenians built a temple to him, where he was honored as a god.