II. THE MYCENÆAN AGE…

II. THE MYCENÆAN AGE

At Mycenæ in 1876 Dr. Schliemann lifted the corner of the veil which had so long enshrouded the elder age of Hellas. Year by year ever since that veil has been further withdrawn, and now we are privileged to gaze on more than the shadowy outline of a far-back age. The picture is still incomplete, but it is already possible to trace the salient features.… The name “Mycenæan” is now applied to a whole class of monuments--buildings, sepulchres, ornaments, weapons, pottery, engraved stones--which resemble more or less closely those found at Mycenæ. I think I am right when I say that archæologists are unanimous in considering them the outcome of one and the same civilisation, and the product of one and the same race.--WILLIAM RIDGEWAY.

MYCENÆAN CIVILISATION[3]

“Mycenæan” is a convenient epithet for a certain phase of a prehistoric civilisation, which, as a whole, is often called “Ægean.” It owes its vogue to the fame of Henry Schliemann’s[c] discovery at Mycenæ in 1876, but is not intended to beg the open question as to the origin or principal seat of the Bronze Age culture of the Greek lands.

The site of Mycenæ itself was notorious for the singular and massive character of its ruins, long before Schliemann’s time. The great curtain wall and towers of the citadel, of mixed Cyclopean, polygonal, and ashlar construction, and unbroken except on the south cliff, and the main gate, crowned with a heraldic relief of lionesses, have never been hidden; and though much blocked with their own ruin, the larger dome-tombs outside the citadel have always been visible, and remarked by travellers. But since these remains were always referred vaguely to a “Heroic” or “proto-Hellenic” period, even Schliemann’s preliminary clearing of the gateway and two dome-tombs in 1876, which exposed the engaged columns of the façades, and suggested certain inferences as to external revetment and internal decoration, would not by itself have led any one to associate Mycenæ with an individual civilisation. It was his simultaneous attack on the unsearched area which was enclosed by the citadel walls, and in 1876 showed no remains above ground, that led to the recognition of a “Mycenæan civilisation.” Schliemann had published in 1868 his belief that the Heroic graves mentioned by Pausanias lay within the citadel of Mycenæ, and now he chose the deeply silted space just within the gate for his first sounding. About 10 feet below the surface his diggers exposed a double ring of upright slabs, once capped with cross slabs, and nearly 90 feet in diameter. Continuing downwards through earth full of sherds and other débris, whose singularity was not then recognised, the men found several sculptured limestone slabs showing subjects of war or the chase, and scroll and spiral ornament rudely treated in relief. When, after some delay, the work was resumed, some skeletons were uncovered lying loose, and at last, 30 feet from the original surface, an oblong pit-grave was found, paved with pebbles, and once roofed, which contained three female skeletons, according to Schliemann, “smothered in jewels.” A few feet to the west were presently revealed a circular altar, and beneath it another grave with five corpses, two probably female, and an even richer treasure of gold. Three more pits came to light to the northward, each adding its quota to the hoard, and then Schliemann, proclaiming that he had found Atreus and all his house, departed for Athens. But his Greek ephor, clearing out the rest of the precinct, came on yet another grave and some gold objects lying loose. Altogether there were nineteen corpses in six pits, buried, as the grave furniture showed, at different times, but all eventually included in a holy ring.

[Sidenote: [ca. 1600-1000 B.C.]]

These sepulchres were richer in gold than any found elsewhere in the world, a fact which led to an absurd attempt to establish their kinship with the later and only less golden burials of Scythians or Celts. The metal was worked up into heavy death-masks and lighter breastplates, diadems, baldrics, pendants, and armlets, often made of mere foil, and also into goblets, hairpins, engraved with combats of men and beasts, miniature balances, and an immense number of thin circular plaques and buttons with bone, clay, or wooden cores. Special mention is due to the inlays of gold and niello on bronze dagger-blades, showing spiral ornament or scenes of the chase, Egyptian in motive, but non-Egyptian in style; and to little flat models of shrine-façades analogous to those devoted to Semitic pillar-worship. The ornament on these objects displayed a highly developed spiraliform system, and advanced adaptation of organic forms, especially octopods and butterflies, to decorative uses. The shrines, certain silhouette figurines, and one cup bear moulded doves, and plant forms appear inlaid in a silver vessel. The last-named metal was much rarer than gold, and used only in a few conspicuous objects, notably a great hollow ox-head with gilded horns and frontal rosette, a roughly modelled stag, and a cup, of which only small part remains, chased with a scene of nude warriors attacking a fort. Bronze swords and daggers and many great cauldrons were found, with arrow-heads of obsidian, and also a few stone vases, beads of amber, intaglio gems, sceptre heads of crystal, certain fittings and other fragments made of porcelain and paste, and remains of carved wood. Along with this went much pottery, mostly broken by the collapse of the roofs. It begins with a dull painted ware, which we now know as late “proto-Mycenæan”; and it develops into a highly glazed fabric, decorated with spiraliform and marine schemes in lustrous paint, and showing the typical forms, false-mouthed amphoræ and long-footed vases, now known as essentially Mycenæan. The loose objects found outside the circle include the best intaglio ring from this site, admirably engraved with a cult scene, in which women clad in flounced skirts are chiefly concerned, and the worship seems to be of a sacred tree.

This treasure as a whole was admitted at once to be far too highly developed in technique and ornament, and too individual in character, to belong, as the lionesses over the gate used to be said to belong, merely to a first stage in Hellenic art. It preceded in time the classical culture of the same area; but, whether foreign or native, it was allowed to represent a civilisation that was at its acme and practically incapable of further development. So the bare fact of a great prehistoric art-production, not strictly Greek, in Greece came to be accepted without much difficulty. But before describing how its true relations were unfolded thereafter, it may be mentioned that the site of Mycenæ had yet much to reveal after Schliemann left it. Ten years later the Greek Archæological Society resumed exploration there, and M. Tsountas, probing the summit of the citadel, hit upon and opened out a fragment of a palace with hearth of stucco, painted with geometric design, and walls adorned with frescoes of figure subjects, armed men, and horses. An early Doric temple was found to have been built over this palace, a circumstance which disposed forever of the later dates proposed for Mycenæan objects. Subsequently many lesser structures were cleared in the east and southwest of the citadel area, which yielded commoner vessels of domestic use, in pottery, stone, and bronze, and some more painted objects, including a remarkable fragment of stucco, which shows human ass-headed figures in procession, a tattooed head, and a plaque apparently showing the worship of an aniconic deity. From the immense variety of these domestic objects more perhaps has been learned as to the affinities of Mycenæan civilisation than from the citadel graves. Lastly, a most important discovery was made of a cemetery west of the citadel. Its tombs are mostly rock-cut chambers, approached by sloping dromoi; but there are also pits, from one of which came a remarkable ivory mirror handle of oriental design. The chamber graves were found to be rich in trinkets of gold, engraved stones, usually opaque, vases in pottery and stone, bronze mirrors and weapons, terra-cottas and carved ivory; but neither they nor the houses have yielded iron except in very small quantity, and that not fashioned into articles of utility. The presence of fibulæ and razors supplied fresh evidence as to Mycenæan fashions of dress and wearing of the hair, and a silver bowl, with male profiles inlaid in gold, proved that the upper lip was sometimes shaved. All the great dome-tombs known have been cleared, but the process has added only to our architectural knowledge. The tomb furniture had been rifled long ago. Part of the circuit of a lower town has been traced, and narrow embanked roadways conducted over streams on Cyclopean bridges lead to it from various quarters.

The abundance and magnificence of the circle treasure had been needed to rivet the attention and convince the judgment of scholars, slow to reconstruct ex pede Herculem. But there had been a good deal of evidence available previous to 1876, which, had it been collated and seriously studied, might have greatly discounted the sensation that the Citadel graves eventually made. Although it was recognised that certain tributaries, represented, e.g., in the XVIIIth Dynasty tomb of Rekh-ma-Ra at Egyptian Thebes, as bearing vases of peculiar form, were of Mediterranean race, neither their precise habitat nor the degree of their civilisation could be determined while so few actual prehistoric remains were known in the Mediterranean lands. Nor did the Mycenæan objects which were lying obscurely in museums in 1870 or thereabouts provide a sufficient test of the real basis underlying the Hellenic myths of the Argolid, the Troad, and Crete, to cause these to be taken seriously.

Even Schliemann’s first excavations at Hissarlik in the Troad did not surprise those familiar equally with Neolithic settlements and Hellenistic remains. But the “Burnt City” of the second stratum, revealed in 1873, with its fortifications and vases, and the hoard of gold, silver, and bronze objects, which the discoverer connected with it (though its relation to the stratification is doubtful still), made a stir, which was destined to spread far outside the narrow circle of scholars when in 1876 Schliemann lighted on the Mycenæ graves.

Like the “letting in of water,” light at once poured in from all sides on the prehistoric period of Greece. It was established that the character of both the fabric and the decoration of the Mycenæan objects was not that of any well-known art. A wide range in space was proved by the identification of the inselsteine and the Ialysos vases with the new style, and a wide range in time by collation of the earlier Theræan and Hissarlik discoveries. A relation between objects of art described by Homer and the Mycenæan treasure was generally recognised, and a correct opinion prevailed that, while certainly posterior, the civilisation of the Iliad was reminiscent of the great Mycenæan period. Schliemann got to work again at Hissarlik in 1878, and greatly increased knowledge of the lower strata, but did not recognise the Mycenæan remains in his “Lydian” city of the sixth stratum; but by laying bare in 1884 the upper remains on the rock of Tiryns, he made a contribution to the science of domestic life in the Mycenæan period, which was amplified two years later by Tsountas’ discovery of the Mycenæ palace. From 1886 dates the finding of Mycenæan sepulchres outside the Argolid, from which, and from the continuation of Tsountas’ exploration of the buildings and lesser graves at Mycenæ, a large treasure, independent of Schliemann’s princely gift, has been gathered into the National Museum at Athens. In that year were excavated dome-tombs, most already rifled, in Attica, in Thessaly, in Cephalonia, and Laconia. In 1890 and 1893 Stæs cleared out more homely dome-tombs at Thoricus in Attica; and other graves, either rock-cut “beehives” or chambers, were found at Spata and Aphidnæ in Attica, in Ægina and Salamis, at the Heræum and Nauplia in the Argolid, near Thebes and Delphi, and lastly not far from the Thessalian Larissa.

But discovery was far from being confined to the Greek mainland and its immediate dependencies. The limits of the prehistoric area were pushed out to the central Ægean islands, all of which are singularly rich in evidence of the pre-Mycenæan period. The series of Syran built graves, containing crouching corpses, is the best and most representative that is known in the Ægean. Melos, long marked as containing early objects, but not systematically excavated until taken in hand by the British School at Athens in 1896, shows remains of all the Ægean periods.

Crete has been proved by the tombs of Anoja and Egarnos, by the excavations on the site of Knossos begun in 1878 by M. Minos Kalokairinos and resumed with startling success in 1900 by Messrs. Evans and Hogarth, and by those in the Dictæan cave and at Phæstos, Gournia, Zakro, and Palæokastro, to be prolific of remains of the prehistoric periods out of all proportion to remains of classical Hellenic culture. A map of Cyprus in the later Bronze Age now shows more than five-and-twenty settlements in and about the Mesaorea district alone, of which one, that at Enkomi, near the site of later Salamis, has yielded the richest gold treasure found outside Mycenæ. Half round the outermost circle to which Greek influence attained in the classical period remains of the same prehistoric civilisation have been happened on. M. Chantre, in 1894, picked up lustreless ware, like that of Hissarlik, in central Phrygia, and the English archæological expeditions sent subsequently into northwestern Anatolia have never failed to bring back “Ægean” specimens from the valleys of the Rhyndacus and Sangarius, and even of the Halys.

In Egypt, Mr. Petrie found painted sherds of Cretan style at Kahun in the Fayum in 1887, and farther up the Nile, at Tel-el-Amarna, chanced on bits of not less than eight hundred Ægean vases in 1889. There have now been recognised in the collections at Gizeh, Florence, London, Paris, and Bologna several Egyptian or Phœnician imitations of the Mycenæan style to set off against the many debts which the centres of Mycenæan culture owed to Egypt. Two Mycenæan vases were found at Sidon in 1885, and many fragments of Ægean, and especially Cypriote, pottery have been turned up during the recent excavation of sites in Philistia by the Palestine Fund. Southeastern Sicily has proved, ever since Orsi excavated the Sicel cemetery near Lentini in 1877, a mine of early remains, among which appear in regular succession Ægean fabrics and motives of decoration from the period of the second stratum at Hissarlik down to the latest Mycenæan. Sardinia has Mycenæan sites, e.g., at Abini near Teti, and Spain has yielded objects recognised as Mycenæan from tombs near Cadiz, and from Saragossa.

The results of three excavations will especially serve as rallying points and supply a standard of comparison. After Schliemann’s death, Dörpfeld returned to Hissarlik, and recognised in the huge remains of the sixth stratum, on the southern skirts of the citadel mound, a city of the same period as Mycenæ at its acme. Thus we can study there remains of a later stage, in one process of development superposed on earlier remains, after an intervening period. The links there missing are, however, apparent at Phylakopi in Melos, excavated systematically from 1896 to 1899. Here buildings of three main periods appear one on another. The earliest overlie in one spot a deposit of sherds of the most primitive type known in the Ægean and found in the earliest cist-graves. The second and third cities rise one out of the other without evidence of long interval. A third and more important site than either, Knossos in Crete, awaits fuller publication. Here are ruins of a great palace, mainly of two periods. Originally constructed about 2000 B.C., it was almost entirely rebuilt at the acme of the Mycenæan Age, but substructures and other remains of the earlier palace underlie the later.

Since recent researches, some of whose results are not yet published, have demonstrated that in certain localities, for instance, Cyprus, Crete, and most of the Ægean islands where Mycenæan remains were not long ago supposed to be merely sporadic, they form in fact a stratum to be expected on the site of almost every ancient Ægean settlement, we may safely assume that Mycenæan civilisation was a phase in the history of all the insular and peninsular territories of the east Mediterranean basin. Into the continents on the east and south we have no reason to suppose that its influence penetrated either very widely or very strongly.

The remains that especially concern us here belong to the later period illustrated by these discoveries, and have everywhere a certain uniformity. Some common influence spread at a certain era over the Ægean area and reduced almost to identity a number of local civilisations of similar origin but diverse development. Surviving influences of these, however, combined with the constant geographical conditions to reintroduce some local differentiation into the Mycenæan products.

The Neolithic Age in the Ægean has now been abundantly illustrated from the yellow bottom clay at Knossos, and its products do not differ materially from those implements and vessels with which man has everywhere sought to satisfy his first needs. The mass of the stone tools and weapons, and the coarse hand-made and burnished pottery, might well proceed from the spontaneous invention of each locality that possessed suitable stone and clay; but the common presence of flaked blades, arrow-heads, and blunt choppers of an obsidian, native, so far as is known, to Melos only, speaks of inter-communication even at this early period between many distant localities and the city whose remains have been unearthed at Phylakopi. The wide range of the peculiar cist-grave strengthens the belief that late Stone Age culture in the Ægean was not of sporadic development, and prepares us for the universality of a certain fiddle-shaped type of stone idol. Local divergence is, however, already apparent in the relative prevalence of certain forms: for example, a shallow bowl is common in Crete, but not in the Cyclades, while the pyxis, so common in the graves of Amorgos and Melos, has left little sign of itself in Crete; and from this point the further development of civilisation in the Ægean area results in increasing differentiation. The Greek mainland has produced as yet very little of the earlier periods (the excavators of the Heræum promise additions); but the primitive remains in the rest of the area may be divided into four classes of strong family likeness, but distinct development.

The pottery supplies the best criterion, and will suffice for our end. We have no such comprehensive and certain evidence from other classes of remains. Except for the Great Treasure of Hissarlik, and the weapons in Cycladic graves, there have been found as yet hardly any metal products of the period. Of the few stone products, one class, the “island idols,” already referred to, was obviously exported widely, and supplies an ill test either of place or date. There have not been discovered sufficiently numerous structures or graves to afford a basis of classification. Fortified towns have been explored in Melos, Siphnos, and the Troad, and a few houses in Ægina and Thera; but neither unaltered houses nor tombs of undoubted primitive character have appeared in Crete as yet, nor elsewhere than in the Cyclad isles.

Above the strata, however, which contain these remains of local divergent development, there lies in all districts of the Ægean area a rich layer of deposit, whose contents show a rapid and marked advance in civilisation, are essentially uniform, and have only subsidiary characteristics due to local influence or tradition. The civilisation there represented is not of an origin foreign to the area. The germs of all its characteristic fabrics, forms, and motives of decoration exist in the underlying strata, though not equally in all districts, and the change which Mycenæan art occasions is not always equally abrupt. It is most reasonable to see in these remains the result of the action of some accidental influence which greatly increased the wealth and capacity of one locality in the area, and caused it to impose its rapidly developing culture on all the rest. The measure of the reaction that took place in divers localities thereafter depended naturally on the point to which local civilisations had respectively advanced in the pre-Mycenæan period.

As to the decorative motives in vogue, there is less uniformity. The earlier Mycenæan vessels have curvilinear and generally spiraliform geometric schemes. These pass into naturalistic vegetable forms, and finally become in the finest typical vases almost exclusively marine--algæ, octopods, molluscs, shells, in many combinations. Everywhere animal, bird, and human forms are but seldom found. Man certainly appears very late, and in company with the oriental motives which characterise the Spata objects. Insects, especially butterflies, become common, and when their antennæ terminate in exquisite spirals, decorative art is at the end of its progress.

Not only in the continuous and universal commentary of painted earthenware, but in many other media, we have evidence of “Mycenæan” art, but varying in character according to the local abundance or variety of particular materials. We have reached an age when the artist had at his disposal not only terra-cotta, hard and soft stone, and wood, but much metal, gold, silver, lead, copper, bronze containing about twelve per cent. of tin alloy, as well as bone and ivory, and various compositions from soft lime plaster up to opaque glass. If it were not for the magnificent stone utensils, in the guise of lioness heads, triton shells, palm and lotus capitals, with spirals in relief, miniature shields for handles, which have come to light at Knossos, we should have supposed stone to be a material used (except architecturally) only for such rude metallic-seeming reliefs as stood over the Mycenæ gate and circle graves, or for heavy commonplace vases and lamps.

We have discovered no large free statuary in the round in any material as yet, though part of a hand at Knossos speaks to its existence; but figurines in metal, painted terra-cotta, and ivory, replacing the earlier stone idols, are fairly abundant. For these bronze is by far the commonest medium, and two types prevail; a female with bell-like or flounced divided skirt, and hair coiled or hanging in tails, and a male, nude but for a loin-cloth. The position of the hands and legs varies with the skill of the artist, as in all archaic statuary. Knossos has revealed for the first time the Mycenæan artist’s skill in painted plaster-relief (gesso duro). The life-size bull’s head from the northern entrance of the palace and fragments of human busts challenge comparison triumphantly with the finest Egyptian work. And from the same site comes the fullest assurance of a high development of fresco-painting.

Tiryns had already shown us a galloping bull on its palace wall, Mycenæ smaller figures and patterns, and Phylakopi its panel of flying-fish; but Knossos is in advance of all with its processions of richly dressed vase-carriers, stiff in general pose and incorrect in outline, but admirably painted in detail and noble in type; and its yet more novel scenes of small figures, in animated act of dance or ritual or war, irresistibly suggestive of early Attic vase-painting. Precious fragments of painted transparencies in rock-crystal have also survived, and both Mycenæ and Knossos have yielded stone with traces of painted design. Moulded glass of a cloudy blue-green texture seems to belong to the later period, at which carved ivory, previously rare, though found even in pre-Mycenæan strata, becomes common. The Spata tomb in Attica alone yielded 730 pieces of the latter material, helmeted heads in profile, mirror handles and sides of coffers of orientalising design, plaques with outlines of heraldic animals, and so forth. Articles in paste and porcelain of native manufacture, though often of exotic design, have been found most commonly where Eastern influence is to be expected; for instance, at Enkomi in Cyprus. But the glassy blue composition, known to Homer as κύανος, an imitation of lapis-lazuli, was used in architectural ornament at Tiryns.

But it is in precious metals, and in the kindred technique of gem-cutting, that Mycenæan art effects its most distinctive achievements. This is, as we have said, an age of metal. That stone implements had not entirely passed out of use is attested by the obsidian arrow-heads found in the circle graves, and the flint knives and basalt axes which lay beside vases of the full “Mycenæan” style at Cozzo del Pantano in Sicily. But they are survivals, unimportant beside the objects in copper, bronze, and precious metals. Iron has been found with remains of the period only as a great rarity. Some five rings, a shield boss, and formless lumps alone represent it at Mycenæ. In the fourth circle grave occurred thirty-four vessels of nearly pure copper. Silver makes its appearance before gold, and is found moulded into bracelets and bowls, and very rarely into figurines. Gold is more plentiful. Beaten, it makes face-masks, armlets, pendants, diadems, and all kinds of small votive objects; drawn, it makes rings whose bezels are engraved with the burin; riveted, it makes cups; and overlaid as leaf on bone, clay, wood, or bronze cores, it adorns hundreds of discs, buttons, and blades.

Next to Mycenæ in wealth of this metal ranks Enkomi in Cyprus, and pretty nearly all the tombs of the later period have yielded gold, conspicuously that of Vaphio. From the town sites, e.g., Phylakopi in Melos, and Knossos, it has disappeared almost entirely. Detached from the mass of golden objects which show primitive or tentative technique, are a few of such elaborate finish and fineness of handiwork, that it is hard to credit them to the same period and the same craftsmen. The Mycenæ inlaid dagger-blades are famous examples, and the technical skill, which beat out each of the Vaphio goblets in a single unriveted plate, has never been excelled.

We are fortunate in possessing very considerable remains of all kinds of construction and structural ornament of the Mycenæan period. The great walls of Mycenæ, of Tiryns (though perhaps due to an earlier epoch), and of the sixth layer at Hissarlik, show us the simple scheme of fortification--massive walls with short returns and corner towers, but no flank defences, approached by ramps or stairs from within and furnished with one great gate and a few small sally-ports. Chambers in the thickness of the wall seem to have served for the protection of stores rather than of men. The great palaces at Knossos and Phæstos, however, are of much more complicated plan. Remains of much architectural decoration have been found in these palaces--at Mycenæ, frescoes of men and animals; at Knossos, frescoes of men, fish, and sphinxes, vegetable designs, painted reliefs, and rich conventional ornament, such as an admirably carved frieze in hard limestone; at Tiryns, traces of a frieze inlaid with lapis-lazuli glass, and also frescoes. The rough inner walls, that appear now on these sites, must once have looked very different.

Certain chambers at Knossos, paved and lined with gypsum, and two in Melos, have square central piers. These seem to have had a religious significance, and are possibly shrines devoted to pillar-worship. The houses of the great dead were hardly less elaborate. The “Treasury of Atreus” had a moulded façade with engaged columns in a sort of proto-Doric order and marble facing; and there is good reason to suppose that its magnificent vault was lined within with metal ornament or hanging draperies. The construction itself of this and the other masonry domes bespeaks skill of a high order. For lesser folk beehive excavations were made in the rock, and at the latest period a return was made apparently to the tetragonal chamber; but now it has a pitched or vaulted roof, and generally a short passage of approach whose walls converge overhead towards a pointed arch but do not actually meet. The corpses are laid on the floor, neither mummified nor cremated; but in certain cases they were possibly mutilated and “scarified,” and the limbs were then enclosed in chest urns. There is evidence for this both in Crete and Sicily. But the order of burial, which first made Mycenæan civilisation known to the modern world, continues singular. Similar shaft graves, whether contained within a circle of slabs or not, have never been found again.

The latest excavation has at last established beyond all cavil that the civilisation which was capable of such splendid artistic achievement was not without a system of written communication. Thousands of clay tablets (many being evidently labels) and a few inscriptions on pottery from the palace at Knossos have confirmed Mr. A. J. Evans’ previous deduction, based on gems, masons’ and potters’ marks, and one short inscription on stone found in the Dictæan cave, that more than one script was in use in the period. Most of the Knossos tablets are written in an upright linear alphabetic or syllabic character, often with the addition of ideographs, and showing an intelligible system of decimal numeration. Since many of the same characters have been found in use as potters’ marks on sherds in Melos, which are of earlier date than the Mycenæan period, the later civilisation cannot be credited with their invention. Other clay objects found at Knossos, as well as gems from the east of Crete, show a different system more strictly pictographic. This seems native to the island, and to have survived almost to historic times; but the origin of the linear system is more doubtful. No such tablets or sealings have yet been found outside Crete, and their writing remains undeciphered. The affinities of the linear script seem to be with the Asianic systems, Cypriote and Hittite, and perhaps with later Greek. The characters are obviously not derived from the Phœnician.

This Mycenæan civilisation, as we know it from its remains, belongs to the Ægean area (i.e., roughly the Greek), and to no other area with which we are at present acquainted. It is apparently not the product of any of the elder races which developed culture in the civilised areas to the east or southeast, much as it owed to those races. It would be easy to add to the singular vase-forms, script, lustrous paint, idols, gems, types of house and tomb, and so forth, already mentioned, a long list of Mycenæan decorative schemes which, even if their remote source lies in Egypt, Babylonia, or inner Anatolia, are absolutely peculiar in their treatment. But style is conclusive. From first to last the persistent influence of a true artistic ideal differentiates Mycenæan objects from the hieratic or stylised products of Egypt or Phœnicia. A constant effort to attain symmetry and decorative effect for its own sake inspires the geometric designs. Those taken from organic life show continual reference to the model and a “naturalistic grasp of the whole situation,” which resists convention and often ignores decorative propriety. The human form is fearlessly subjected to experiment, the better to attain lightness, life, and movement in its portrayal. A foreign motive is handled with a breadth and vitality which renders its new expression practically independent. The conventional bull of an Assyrian relief was referred to the image of a living bull by the Knossian artist, and made to express his emotions of fear or wrath by the Vaphio goldsmith, the Cypriote worker in ivory mirror handles, or the “island-gem” cutter.

Since we have a continuous series of links by which the development of the characteristic Mycenæan products can be traced within the area back to very primitive forms, we can fearlessly assert that not only did the full flower of the Mycenæan civilisation proper belong to the Ægean area, but also its essential origin. That it came to have intimate relations with other contemporary civilisations, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, perhaps “Hittite,” and early began to contract a huge debt, especially to Egypt, is equally certain. Not to mention the certainly imported Nilotic objects found on Mycenæan sites, and bearing hieroglyphic inscriptions and cartouches of Pharaonic personages, the later Ægean culture is deeply indebted to the Nile for forms and decorative motives.

At what epoch did Ægean civilisation reach its full development? It is little use to ask when it arose. A terminus a quo in the Neolithic Age can be dated only less vaguely than a geological stratum. But it is known within fairly definite limits when it ceased to be a dominant civilisation. Nothing but derived products of sub-Mycenæan style falls within the full Iron Age in the Ægean. Bronze, among useful metals, accompanies almost alone the genuine Mycenæan objects, at Enkomi in Cyprus, as at Mycenæ. This fact supplies a terminus ad quem, to which a date may be assigned at least as precise as scholars assign to the Homeric lays. For these represent a civilisation spread over the same area and in process of transition from bronze to iron, and if they fall in the ninth century B.C., then the Mycenæan period proper ends a little earlier, at any rate in the West. It is possible, indeed probable, that in Asia Minor and Cyprus, where the descent of northern tribes about 1000 B.C., remembered by the Greeks as the “Dorian Invasion,” did not have any direct effect, the Mycenæan culture survived longer in something like purity, and passed by an uninterrupted process of development into the Hellenic; and even in Crete, where there was certainly a cataclysm, and in the Argolid, where art was temporarily eclipsed about the tenth century, earlier influence survived and came once more to the surface when peace was restored. Persistence of artistic influence under a new order, and differences in the artistic history of different districts widely sundered, have to be taken into account. The appearance, e.g., of late Mycenæan objects in Cyprus, does not necessarily falsify the received Mycenæan dates in mainland Greece.

For the main fact, however, viz., the age of greatest florescence all over the area, a singular coincidence of testimony points to the period of the XVIIIth Pharaonic Dynasty in Egypt. To this dynasty refer all the scarabs or other objects inscribed with royal cartouches (except an alabaster lid from Knossos, bearing the name of the earlier “Shepherd King,” Khyan), as yet actually found with true Mycenæan objects, even in Cyprus. In a tomb of this period at Thebes was found a bronze patera of fine Mycenæan style. At Tel-el-Amarna, the site of a capital city which existed only in the reign of Amenhotep IV, have been unearthed by far the most numerous fragments of true “Ægean” pottery found in Egypt; and of that singular style which characterises Tel-el-Amarna art, the art of the Knossian frescoes is irresistibly suggestive. To the XVIIIth and two succeeding dynasties belong the tomb-paintings which represent vases of Ægean form; and to these same dynasties Mr. Petrie’s latest comparisons between the fabrics, forms, and decorative motives of Egypt and Mycenæ have led him. The lapse of time between the eighteenth and the tenth centuries is by no means too long, in the opinion of most competent authorities, to account for the changes which take place in Mycenæan art.

The question of race, which derives a special interest from the possibility of a family relation between the Mycenæan and the subsequent Hellenic stocks, is a controversial matter as yet. The light recently thrown on Mycenæan cult does not go far to settle the racial problem. The aniconic ritual, involving tree and pillar symbols of divinity, which prevailed at one period, also prevailed widely elsewhere than in the Ægean, and we are not sure of the divinity symbolised. Even if sure that it was the Father God, whose symbol alike in Crete and Caria is the labrys or double axe, we could not say if Caria or Crete were prior, and whether the Father be Aryan or Semitic or neither.

When it is remembered that, firstly, knowing not a word of the Mycenæan language, we are quite ignorant of its affinities; secondly, not enough Mycenæan skulls have yet been recovered to establish more than the bare fact that the race was mixed and not wholly Asiatic; and thirdly, since identity of civilisation in no sense necessarily entails identity of race, we may have to do not with one or two, but with many races--it will be conceded that it is more useful at present to attempt to narrow the issue by excluding certain claimants than to pronounce in favour of any one. The facial types represented not only on the Knossian frescoes, but by statuettes and gems, are distinctly non-Asiatic, and recall strongly the high-crowned brachycephalic type of the modern northern Albanians and Cretan hillmen. Of the elder civilised races about the Levantine area the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians may be dismissed at once. We know their art from beginning to end, and its character is not at any period the same as that of Ægean art. As for the Phœnicians, for whom on the strength of Homeric tradition a strong claim has been put forward, it cannot be said to be impossible that some objects thought to be Mycenæan are of Sidonian origin, since we know little or nothing of Sidonian art. But the presumption against this Semitic people having had any serious share in Mycenæan development is strong, since facial types apart, the only scripts known to have been used in the Mycenæan area and period are in no way affiliated to the Phœnician alphabet, and neither the characteristic forms nor the characteristic style of Phœnician art, as we know it, appear in Mycenæan products. The one thing, of which recent research has assured us in this matter, is this, that the Keftiu, represented in XVIIIth Dynasty tombs at Thebes, were a “Mycenæan” folk, an island people of the northern sea. They came into intimate contact, both peaceful and warlike, with Egypt, and to them no doubt are owed the Ægean styles and products found on Nile sites. Exact parallels to their dress and products, as represented by Egyptian artists, appear in the work of Cretan artists; and it is now generally accepted that the Keftiu were “Mycenæans” of Crete at any rate, whatever other habitat they may have possessed.

As to place of origin, Central Europe or any western or northern part of the continent is out of the question. Mycenæan art is shown by various remains to have moved westwards and northwards, not vice versa. It arose within the Ægean area, in the Argolid as some, e.g., the Heræum excavators, seem to propose, or the Cyclades, or Rhodes; or, if outside, then the issue is narrowed for practical purposes to a region about which we know next to nothing as yet, northern Libya, and to Asia Minor. So far as the Mycenæan objects themselves testify, they point to a progress not from south or west, but from east. In the western localities, notably Crete and Mycenæ, we have more remains of highly developed Mycenæan civilisation, but less of its early stages than elsewhere. Nothing in the Argolid, but much in the Troad, prepares us for the Mycenæan metallurgy. The appearance of Mycenæan forms and patterns is abrupt in Crete, but graduated in other islands, especially Thera and Melos. The Cretan linear script seems to be of “Asianic” family, and to be inscribed in Melos on sherds of earlier date than its appearance at Knossos. Following Mycenæan development backwards in this manner, we seem to tend towards the Anatolian coasts of the Ægean, and especially the rich and little-known areas of Rhodes and Caria.

It does not advance seriously the solution of the racial problem to turn to Greek literary tradition. Now that we are assured of the wide range and the long continuance of the influence of Mycenæan civilisation, overlapping the rise of Hellenic art, we can hardly question that the early peoples whom the Greeks knew as Pelasgi, Minyæ, Leleges, Danai, Carians, and so forth, shared in it. But were they its authors? and who, after all, were they themselves? The Greeks believed them their own kin, but what value are we to attach to the belief of an age to which scientific ethnology and archæology were unknown? Nor is it useful to select traditions, e.g., to accept those about the Pelasgi, and to override those which connect the Achæans equally closely with Mycenæan centres. We are gradually learning that the classical Hellene was of no pure race, but the result of a blend of several racial stocks, into which those pre-existing in his land can hardly fail to have entered; and if we have been able to determine that Mycenæan art was distinguished by just that singular quality of idealism which is of the essence of the art which succeeded it in the same area (whatever be the racial connection), it can scarcely be doubted in reason that Mycenæan civilisation was in some sense the parent of the later civilisation of Hellas. In fact, now that the Mycenæan remains are no longer to be regarded as isolated phenomena on Greek soil, but are seen to be intimately connected on the one hand with a large class of objects which carry the evolution of civilisation in the Ægean area itself back to the Stone Age, and on the other with the earlier products of Hellenic development, the problem is no longer purely one of antiquarian ethnology. We ask less what race was so greatly gifted, than what geographical or other circumstances will account for the persistence of a certain peculiar quality of civilisation in the Ægean area.[b] An eloquent summary of our Mycenæan knowledge and a lively description of life such as it may have been in Mycenæ has been drawn by Chrestos Tsountas and J. Irving Manatt in their work, The Mycenæan Age, from which we quote at length.

THE PROBLEM OF MYCENÆAN CHRONOLOGY

Whether or not the authors of this distinct and stately civilisation included among their achievements a knowledge of letters, their monuments thus far address us only in the universal language of form and action. Of their speech we have yet to read the first syllable. The vase handles of Mycenæ may have some message for us, if no more than a pair of heroic names; and the nine consecutive characters from the cave of Cretan Zeus must have still more to say when we find the key. We may hope, at least, if this ancient culture ever recovers its voice, to find it not altogether unfamiliar: we need not be startled if we catch the first lisping accent of what has grown full and strong in the Achæan epic.

But for the present we have to do with a dumb age, with a race whose artistic expression amazes us all the more in the dead silence of their history. So far as we yet know from their monuments, they have recorded not one fixed point in their career, they have never even written down their name as a people.

Now, a dateless era and a nameless race--particularly in the immediate background of the stage on which we see the forces of the world’s golden age deploying--are facts to be accepted only in the last resort. The student of human culture cannot look upon the massive walls, the solemn domes, the exquisite creations of what we call Mycenæan art, without asking--When? By whom? In default of direct and positive evidence, he will make the most of the indirect and probable.

We have taken a provisional and approximate date for the meridian age of Mycenæan culture--namely, from the sixteenth to the twelfth century B.C. We have also assumed that the Island culture was already somewhat advanced as far back as the earlier centuries of the second millennium before our era. This latter datum is based immediately on geological calculations: M. Fouqué, namely, has computed a date circa 2000 B.C. for the upheaval which buried Thera, and thus preserved for us the primitive monuments of Ægean civilisation. Whatever be the value of Fouqué’s combinations--and they have been vigorously, if not victoriously, assailed--we may reach a like result by another way round. The Island culture is demonstrably older than the Mycenæan--it must have attained the stage upon which we find it at Thera a century or two at least before the bloom-time came in Argolis. If, then, we can date that bloom-time, we can control within limits the geologists’ results.

Here we call in the aid of Egyptology. In Greece we find datable Egyptian products in Mycenæan deposits, and conversely in datable Egyptian deposits we find Mycenæan products.

To take the first Mycenæan finds in Egypt. In a tomb of 1100 B.C., or within fifty years of that either way, at Kahun, Flinders Petrie found along with some dozens of bodies, “a great quantity of pottery, Egyptian, Phœnician, Cypriote, and Ægean”--notably an Ægean vase with an ivy leaf and stalk on each side, which he regards as the beginning of natural design. Further, at Gurob and elsewhere, the same untiring explorer has traced the Mycenæan false-necked vase or Bügelkanne through a series of dated stages, “a chain of examples in sequence showing that the earliest geometrical pottery of Mycenæ begins about 1400 B.C., and is succeeded by the beginning of natural designs about 1100 B.C.”

But long before these actual Mycenæan products came to light in Egypt, Egyptian art had told its story of relations with the Ægean folk. On the tomb-frescoes of Thebes we see pictured in four groups the tributaries of Tehutimes III (about 1500 B.C.), bringing their gifts to that great conqueror; among them, as we are told by the hieroglyphic text that runs with the painting, are “the princes of the land of Keftu [or Kefa] (Phœnicia) and of the islands in the great sea.” And the tribute in their hands includes vases of distinct Mycenæan style.

On the other hand, we find datable Egyptian products in Mycenæan deposits in Greece. From Mycenæ itself and from Ialysos in Rhodes we have scarabs bearing the cartouches of Amenhotep III and of his queen Thi; and fragments of Egyptian porcelain, also from Mycenæ, bear the cartouches of the same king, whose reign is dated to the latter half of the fifteenth century.

We have already noted the recurrence at Gurob, Kahun, and Tel-el-Amarna of the characters which were first found on the vase handles of Mycenæ; and this seemed at one time to have an important bearing on Mycenæan chronology. But in the wider view of the subject which has been opened up by Evans’ researches, this can no longer be insisted upon as an independent datum. However, the occurrence of these signs in a town demonstrably occupied by Ægean peoples at a given date has corroborative value.

While it can hardly be claimed that any or all of these facts amount to final proof, they certainly establish a strong probability that at least from the fifteenth century B.C. there was traffic between Egypt and the Mycenæan world. Whatever be said for the tomb-frescoes of Tehutimes’ foreign tribute-bearers and the scarabs from Mycenæ and Rhodes, we cannot explain away Mr. Petrie’s finds in the Fayum. The revelations of Tel-Gurob can leave no doubt that the brief career of the ancient city on that spot--say from 1450 to 1200 B.C.--was contemporaneous with the bloom-time of Mycenæan civilisation.

Now most, if not all, of the “Ægean” pottery from Gurob, like that pictured in the tomb-frescoes, belongs to the later Mycenæan styles as we find them in the chamber-tombs and ruined houses--in the same deposits, in fact, with the scarabs and broken porcelain which carry the cartouches of Amenhotep and Queen Thi. The earlier period of Mycenæan art is thus shown to be anterior to the reign of Tehutimes III; and as that period cannot conceivably be limited to a few short generations, the sixteenth century is none too early for the upper limit of the Mycenæan Age. We should, perhaps, date it at least a century farther back. Thus we approximate the chronology to which M. Fouqué has been led by geological considerations; while, on the other hand, more recent inquirers are inclined to reduce by a century or two the antiquity of the convulsion in which Thera perished, and thus approximate our own datum.

For the lower limit of the Mycenæan Age we have taken the twelfth century, though certain archæologists and historians are inclined to a much more recent date--some even bringing it three or four centuries further down.

This is not only improbable on its face, but at variance with the facts. To take but one test, the Mycenæan Age hardly knew the use of iron; at Mycenæ itself it was so rare that we find it only in an occasional ornament such as a ring. No iron was found in the prehistoric settlements at Hissarlik until 1890, when Dr. Schliemann came across two lumps of the metal, one of which had possibly served as the handle of a staff. “It is therefore certain,” he says, “that iron was already known in the second or ‘burnt city’; but it was probably at that time rarer and more precious than gold.” In Egypt, on the other hand, iron was known as early as the middle of the second millennium B.C., and if the beehive and chamber-tombs at Mycenæ are to be assigned to a period as late as the ninth century, the rare occurrence of iron in them becomes quite inexplicable.

The Testimony of Art

From the seventeenth or sixteenth to the twelfth century B.C., then, we may regard as the bloom-time of Mycenæan culture, and of the race or races who wrought it out. But we need not assume that their arts perished with their political decline. Even when that gifted people succumbed to or blended with another conquering race, their art, especially in its minor phases, lived on, though under less favouring conditions. There were no more patrons like the rich and munificent princes of Tiryns and Mycenæ; and domed tombs with their wealth of decoration were no longer built. Still, certain types of architecture, definitively wrought out by the Mycenæans, became an enduring possession of Hellenic art, and so of the art of the civilised world; while from other Mycenæan types were derived new forms of equally far-reaching significance.

The correspondence of the gateways at Tiryns with the later Greek propylæa, and that of the Homeric with the prehistoric palaces, is noteworthy; so, too, is the obvious derivation of the typical form of the Greek temple, consisting of vestibule and cella, from the Mycenæan magaron. That the Doric column is of the same lineage is a fact long ago recognised by the ablest authorities. In fact, the Mycenæan pillars known to us, whether in actual examples as embedded in the façades of the two beehive tombs or in art representations, as in the lion relief and certain ivory models, while varying in important details, exhibit now one, now another of the features of the Doric column. Thus, all have in common abacus, echinus, and cymatium--the last member adorned with ascending leaves just as in the earliest capitals of the Doric order. Again, the Doric fluting is anticipated in the actual pilasters of “Clytemnestra’s tomb,” and in an ivory model. And as the Doric column has no base, but rests directly on the stylobate, so the wooden pillars in the Mycenæan halls appear to rise directly from the ground in which their stone bases are almost entirely embedded.

That Mycenæan art outlasted the social régime under which it had attained its splendid bloom is sufficiently attested by the Homeric poems. Doubtless, the Achæan system, when it fell before the aggressive Dorian, must have left many an heirloom above ground, as well as those which its tombs and ruins had hidden down to our own day. And, again, the poems in their primitive strata undoubtedly reflect the older order, and offer us many a picture at first hand of a contemporary age. Thus the dove-cup of Mycenæ, or another from the same hand, may have been actually known to the poet who described old Nestor’s goblet in our eleventh Iliad; and the cyanos frieze of Tiryns may well have inspired the singer of the Phæacian tale, or at least helped out his fancy in decorating Alcinous’ palace. Still, it is in the more recent strata of the poems that we find the great transcripts of art-creations and the clearest indications of the very processes met with in the monuments. To take but one instance, there is the shield of Achilles forged at Thetis’ intercession by Hephæstus and emblazoned with a series of scenes from actual mundane life. (Iliad, XVIII. 468-613.) The subjects are at once Mycenæan and Homeric. On the central boss, for example, the Olympian smith “wrought the earth and the heavens and the sea and the unwearying sun,” very much as the Mycenæan artist sets sun, moon, and sky in the upper field of his great signet. Again, the city under siege, while “on the walls to guard it, stand their dear wives and infant children, and with these the old men,” appears to be almost a transcript of the scene which still stirs our blood as we gaze upon the beleaguered town on the silver cup. But it is less the subject than the technique that reveals artistic heredity, and when we find Homer’s Olympian craftsman employing the selfsame process in the forging of the shield which we can now see for ourselves in the inlaid swords of Mycenæ, we can hardly doubt that that process was still employed in the poet’s time.

In this sense of an aftermath of art, Mycenæan influence outlasted by centuries the overthrow of Mycenæan power; and the fact is one to be considered in establishing a chronology. We have taken as our lower limit the catastrophe in which the old order at Mycenæ and elsewhere obviously came to an end. But the old stock survived,--“scattered and peeled” though it must have been,--and carried on, if it did not teach the conqueror, their old arts. If we are to comprehend within the Mycenæan Age all the centuries through which we can trace this Mycenæan influence, then we shall bring that age down to the very dawn of historical Greece. In this view it is no misnomer to speak of the Æginetan gold find recently acquired by the British Museum as a Mycenæan treasure.

THE PROBLEM OF THE MYCENÆAN RACE

We have seen that Mycenæan art was no exotic, transplanted full grown into Greece, but rather a native growth--influenced though it was by the earlier civilisations of the Cyclades and the East. This indigenous art, distinct and homogeneous in character, no matter whence came its germs and rudiments, must have been wrought out by a strong and gifted race. That it was of Hellenic stock we have assumed to be self-evident. But, as this premise is still in controversy, we have to inquire whether (aside from art) there are other considerations which make against the Hellenic origin of the Mycenæan peoples, and compel us to regard them as immigrants from the islands or the Orient.

In the first place, recalling the results of our discussion of domestic and sepulchral architecture, we observe that neither in the Ægean nor in Syria do we find the gable-roof which prevails at Mycenæ. Nor would the people of these warm and dry climates have occasion to winter their herds in their own huts--an ancestral custom to which we have traced the origin of the avenues to the beehive tombs.

Again, we have seen reason to refer the shaft-graves to a race or tribe other than that whose original dwelling we have recognised in the sunken hut. To this pit-burying stock we have assigned the upper-story habitations at Mycenæ. If we are right, now, in explaining this type of dwelling as a reminiscence of the pile-hut, it would follow that this stock, too, was of northern origin. The lake-dwelling habit, we know, prevailed throughout Northern Europe, an instance occurring, as we have seen, even in the Illyrian peninsula; while we have no reason to look for its origin to the Orient or the Ægean. It is indeed true that the island-folk were no strangers to the pile-dwelling, but this rather goes to show that they were colonists from the mainland.

But, apart from the evidence of the upper-story abodes, are there other indications of an element among the Mycenæan people which had once actually dwelt in lakes or marshes?

Monuments like the stone models from Melos and Amorgos have not indeed been found in the Peloponnesus, or on the mainland, but in default of such indirect testimony we have the immediate witness of actual settlements. Of the four most famous cities of the age, Mycenæ, Tiryns, Orchomenos, and Amyclæ, it is a singular fact that but one has a mountain-site, while the other three were once surrounded by marshes. The rock on which Tiryns is built, though it rises to a maximum elevation of some sixty feet above the plain, yet sinks so low on the north that the lower citadel is only a few feet above the level of the sea. Now this plain, as Aristotle asserts, and as the nature of the ground still bears witness, was originally an extensive morass. The founders, therefore, must have chosen this rock for their settlement, not because it was a stronghold in itself, but because it was protected by the swamp out of which it rose.

What is true of Tiryns holds for Orchomenos as well. The original site was down in the plain until the periodic inundations of the lake forced the inhabitants to rebuild on the slopes of Mount Acontion; and Orchomenos was not the only primitive settlement in this great marsh. Tradition tells us also of Athenæ, Eleusis, Arne, Midea--cities which had long perished, and were but dimly remembered in historic times. To one of these, or to some other whose name has not come down to us, belong the remarkable remains on the Island of Goulas or Gha, which is connected with the shore by an ancient mole. During the Greek Revolution this island-fort was the refuge of the neighbouring population who found greater security there than in the mountains.

It is usually held that, when these Copaïc cities were founded, the region was in the main drained and arable, whereas afterwards, the natural outlets being choked up, the imprisoned waters flooded the plain, turned it into a lake, and so overwhelmed the towns. But, obviously, this is reversing the order of events. To have transformed the lake into a plain and kept it such would have demanded the co-operation of populous communities in the construction of costly embankments and perpetual vigilance in keeping them intact. Where were such organised forces to be found at a time anterior to the foundation of the cities themselves? Is it not more reasonable to believe that the builders of these cities--instead of finding Copaïs an arable plain, and failing to provide against its inundation--were induced by the very fact of its being a lake to establish themselves in it upon natural islands like the rock of Goulas, on artificial elevations, or even in pile-settlements? It is possible, indeed, that on some unusual rise of the waters, towns were submerged, but it is quite as probable that without any such catastrophe the inhabitants finally abandoned these of their own accord to settle in higher, healthier, and more convenient regions.

The case of Amyclæ is no exception. The prehistoric as well as the historic site is probably to be identified with that of the present village of Mahmud Bey, some five miles south of Sparta. The ground is low and wet, and in early times was undoubtedly a marsh.

In the plain of Thessaly, again, we may trace the same early order. There, where tradition (backed by the conclusions of modern science) tells us that the inflowing waters used to form stagnant lakes, we find low artificial mounds strewn with primitive potsherds. On these mounds, Lolling holds, the people pitched their settlements to secure them against overflow.

The choice of these marshy or insulated sites is all the more singular from the environment. Around Lake Copaïs, about Tiryns and Amyclæ, as well as in Thessaly, rise mountains which are nature’s own fastnesses and which would seem to invite primitive man to their shelter. The preference for these lowland or island settlements then, can only be explained in the first instance by immemorial custom, and, secondly, by consequent inexperience in military architecture. Naturally, a lake-dwelling people will be backward in learning to build stone walls strong enough to keep off a hostile force. And in default of such skill, instead of settling on the mountain slopes, they would in their migrations choose sites affording the best natural fortifications akin to their ancient environment of marsh or lake--reinforcing this on occasion by a moat, an embankment, or a pile-platform.

That the people in question once actually followed this way of living is beyond a doubt. Amyclæ shows no trace of wall, and probably never had any beyond a mere earthwork. The Cyclopean wall of Tiryns, as it now stands, does not belong to the earliest settlement, nor is it of uniform date. Adler holds that the first fortress must have been built of wood and sun-dried bricks. This construction may possibly account for those remarkable galleries whose origin and function are not yet altogether clear. The mere utility of the chambers for storage--a purpose they did unquestionably serve--hardly answers to the enormous outlay involved in contriving them. May we not, then, recognise in them a reminiscence of the primitive palisade-earthwork? In the so-called Lower Citadel of Tiryns we find no such passages, possibly because its Cyclopean wall was built at a later date. Likewise no proper galleries have yet been found at Mycenæ, and it is highly improbable that any such ever existed there. What had long been taken for a gallery in the north wall proves to be nothing but a little chamber measuring less than seven by twelve feet. Obviously, then, the gallery was not an established thing in fortress-architecture, and this fact shows that it did not originate with the builders of stone walls, but came to them as a heritage from earlier times and a more primitive art.

In fact, we find in the terramare of Italy palisade and earthwork fortifications so constructed that they may be regarded as a first stage in the development which culminates in the Tiryns galleries. The construction of the wall at Casione near Parma is thus described:[4] “Piles arranged in two parallel rows are driven in the ground with an inward slant so as to meet at the top, and this Δ-shaped gallery is then covered with earth. Along the inside of this embankment is carried a continuous series of square pens, built of beams laid one upon another, filled with earth and brushwood, and finally covered with a close-packed layer of sand and pebbles. This arrangement not only strengthens the wall but provides a level platform for its defenders.” Thus the space between these palisades would closely resemble the “arched” corridors of Tiryns, while the square pens (if covered over without being filled up) would correspond to the chambers.

These facts strengthen the inferences to which we have been led by our study of the stone models and the upper-story dwellings. And they point to the region beyond Mount Olympus as the earlier seat of this lake-dwelling contingent of the Mycenæan people as well as of their kinsmen of the earth-huts. And we have other evidence that the Mycenæan cities, at least the four of chief importance, were founded by a people who were not dependent on the sea and in whose life the pursuits of the sea were originally of little moment. Mycenæ and Orchomenos are at a considerable remove from the coast, while Amyclæ is a whole day’s journey from the nearest salt-water. Tiryns alone lies close to the sea-board; and, indeed, the waves of the Argolic Gulf must have washed yet nearer when its walls were reared. But, obviously, it was not the nearness of the sea that drew the founders to this low rock. For it is a harbourless shore that neighbours it, while a little farther down lies the secure haven of Nauplia guarded by the impregnable height of Palamedes; and it is yet to be explained why the Tirynthians, if they were a sea-faring people, did not build their city there. Again, the principal entrance to Tiryns is not on the side towards the sea, but on the east or landward side. This goes to show that even when the Cyclopean wall was built, certainly long after the first settlement, the people must have been still devoted mainly to tilling the soil and tending flocks, occupations to which the fertile plain and marshy feeding grounds would invite them. So in historic times, also, the town appears to have lain to the east of the citadel, not between it and the sea.

Even if it be granted that these Mycenæan cities were settled by immigrants who came by sea, it does not follow that they were originally a sea-faring folk. The primitive Dorians were hardly a maritime people, yet Grote has shown that their conquest of the Peloponnesus was in part effected by means of a fleet which launched from the Malian Gulf; and their kinsmen, who settled in Melos, Thera, and Crete, in all probability, sailed straight from the same northern port.

The Minyæ, who founded Orchomenos, Curtius regards as pre-eminently a seafaring race; and he seeks to account for their inland settlement by assuming that they were quick to realise the wealth to be won by draining and tilling the swamp. But this is hardly tenable. Whatever our estimate of Minyan shrewdness, they must have had their experience in reclaiming swamp land yet to acquire and on this ground. It was the outcome of age-long effort in winning new fields from the waters and guarding them when won. The region invited settlement because it offered the kind of security to which they were wonted; the winning of wealth was not the motive but the fortunate result.

Again, if the Mycenæans had been from the outset a maritime race we should expect to find the ship figuring freely in their art-representations. But this is far from being the case. We have, at last, one apparent instance of the kind on a terra-cotta fragment found in the acropolis at Mycenæ in 1892. On this we seem to have a boat, with oars and rudder, and curved fore and aft like the Homeric νῆες ἀμφιέλισσαι. Below appear what we may take to be dolphins. But this unique example can hardly establish the maritime character of the Mycenæans.

Along with this unfamiliarity with ships, we have to remark also their abstinence from fish. In the remains of Tiryns and Mycenæ we have found neither a fish-hook nor a fish-bone, though we do find oysters and other shellfish such as no doubt could be had in abundance along the adjacent shores. In the primitive remains of the Italian terramare there is the same absence of anything that would suggest fishing or fish-eating; and, indeed, linguistic evidence confirms these observations. Greek and Latin have no common term for fish; and we may fairly conclude that the Græco-Italic stock before the separation were neither fishermen or fish-eaters. That they were slow to acquire a taste for fish, even after the separation, is attested not only by the negative evidence of their remains in the Argolid and on the Po but by the curious reticence of Homer. His heroes never go fishing but once and then only in the last pinch of famine--“when the bread was all spent from out the ship and hunger gnawed at their belly.”

Now that we find in Greece, five or six centuries earlier than the poems, a people in all probability hailing from the same region whence came the ancestors of the Homeric Greeks, with the same ignorance of, or contempt for, a fish diet, and building their huts on piles like the primitive Italians whose earthworks further appear to have set the copy for the Tirynthian galleries--can we doubt that this people sprung from the same root with the historic Greeks and their kinsmen of Italy? The conclusion appears so natural and so logical, that it must require very serious and solid objections to shake it. But, instead of that, our study of Mycenæan manners and institutions--both civil and religious--affords strong confirmation. In the matter of dress we find the historical Greeks the heirs of the Mycenæans, and the armour of the Homeric heroes--when we get behind the epic glamour of it--differs little from what we know in the Mycenæan monuments.

While our knowledge of Mycenæan religion is vague at the best, and we must recognise in the dove-idols and dove-temples the insignia of an imported Aphrodite-cult, we have beyond a reasonable doubt also to recognise a genuine Hellenic divinity with her historical attributes clearly foreshadowed in Artemis. Again, while the Homeric Greeks themselves are not presented to us as worshippers of the dead after the custom avouched by the altar-pits of Mycenæ and Tiryns, we do find in the poems an echo at least of this cult, and among the later Hellenes it resumes the power of a living belief. So, though Homer seems to know cremation only, and this has been taken for full proof that the Mycenæans were not Greeks, the traces of embalming in the poems clearly point to an earlier custom of simple burial as we find it uniformly attested by the Mycenæan tombs. And, here, again, historical Greece reverts to the earlier way. In Greece proper, at least in Attica, the dead were not burned,--not even in the age of the Dipylon vases,--and yet the Athenians of that day were Greeks. So, among the earlier Italians, burial was the only mode of dealing with the dead, and the usage was so rooted in their habits that even after cremation was introduced some member of the body (e.g., a finger) was always cut off and buried intact. We need not repeat what we have elsewhere said of the funeral banquet, the immolation of victims, the burning of raiment--all bearing on the same conclusion and cumulating the evidence that the Greeks of Homer, and so of the historic age, are the lineal heirs of Mycenæan culture.

If the proof of descent on these lines is strong, it is strengthened yet more by all we can make out regarding the political and social organisation. That monarchy was the Mycenæan form of government is sufficiently attested by the strong castles, each taken up in large part by a single princely mansion. But “the rule of one man” is too universal in early times to be a criterion of race. Far more significant is the evidence we have for a clan-system such as we afterwards find in full bloom among the Hellenes.

The clan, as we know it in historic times, and especially in Attica, was a factor of prime importance in civil, social, and religious life. It was composed of families which claim to be, and for the most part actually were, descended from a common ancestor. These originally lived together in clan-villages--of which we have clear reminiscences in the clan-names of certain Attic demes, as Boutadai, Perithoidai, Skanbonidai. Not only did the clan form a village by itself, but it held and cultivated its land in common. It built the clan-village on the clan-estate; and as the clansmen dwelt together in life, so in death they were not divided. Each clan had its burial-place in its own little territory, and there at the tomb it kept up the worship of its dead, and especially of its hero-founder.

That the Mycenæans lived under a like clan-system, the excavation of the tombs of the lower town has shown conclusively. The town was composed of villages more or less removed from one another, each the seat of a clan. We have no means of determining whether the land was held and tilled in common, but we do know that by each village lay the common clan-cemetery--a group of eight, ten, or more tombs, obviously answering to the number of families or branches of the clan. In the construction of the tombs, and in the offerings contained, we note at once differences between different cemeteries and uniformity in the tombs of the same group. The richest cemeteries lie nearer the acropolis, as the stronger clans would naturally dwell nearer the king. Thus, for its population, Mycenæ covered a large area, but its limits were not sharply defined, and the transition from the citadel centre to the open country was not abrupt. The villages were linked together by graveyards, gardens and fields, highways and squares; thus the open settlement was indeed a πόλις εὐρυάγυια--a town of broad ways.

Somewhat such must have been the aspect in primitive days of Sparta and Athens, not to mention many other famous cities. Indeed, even in historic times, as we know from the ruins, Sparta was still made up of detached villages spread over a large territory for so small a population. So, primitive Athens was composed of the central settlement on the Acropolis, with the villages encircling it from Pnyx to Lycabettus and back again. When the city was subsequently walled in, some of these villages were included in the circuit, others were left outside, while still others (as the Ceramicus) were cut in two by the wall. The same thing happened at Mycenæ; the town wall was built simply because the fortress was an insufficient shelter for the populace as times grew threatening; but it could not, and did not, take in all the villages.

Such, briefly, is the objective evidence--the palpable facts--pointing to a race connection between the Mycenæans and the Greeks of history. We have, finally, to consider the testimony of the Homeric poems. Homer avowedly sings of heroes and peoples who had flourished in Greece long before his own day. Now it may be denied that these represent the civilisation known to us as Mycenæan; but it is certainly a marvellous coincidence (as Schuchhardt[h] observes) that “excavations invariably confirm the former power and splendour of every city which is mentioned by Homer as conspicuous for its wealth or sovereignty.”

Of all the cities of Hellas, it is the now established centres of Mycenæan culture which the poet knows best and characterises with the surest hand. Mycenæ “rich in gold” is Agamemnon’s seat, and Agamemnon is lord of all Argos and many isles, and leader of the host at Troy. In Laconia, in the immediate neighbourhood of the tomb which has given us the famous Vaphio cups, is the royal seat of Menelaus, which is likened to the court of Olympian Zeus. Bœotian Orchomenos, whose wealth still speaks for itself in the Treasury of Minyas, is taken by the poet as a twin type of affluence with Egyptian Thebes, “where the treasure-houses are stored fullest.” Assuredly, no one can regard all this and many another true touch as mere coincidence. The poet knows whereof he affirms. He has exact knowledge of the greatness and bloom of certain peoples and cities at an epoch long anterior to his own, with which the poems have to do. And there is not one hint in either poem that these races and heroes were not of the poet’s own kin.

It might be assumed that there had once ruled in those cities an alien people, and that the monuments of Mycenæan culture were their legacy to us, but that the Achæans who came after them have entered into the inheritance of their fame. Such usurpations there have been in history; but the hypothesis is out of the question here. At Mycenæ, where exploration has been unusually thorough, the genuine Mycenæan Age is seen to have come to a sharp and sudden end--a catastrophe so overwhelming that we cannot conceive of any lingering bloom. Had the place passed to a people worthy to succeed to the glory of the race who reared its mighty walls and vaulted tombs, then we should look for remains of a different but not a contemptible civilisation. But, in fact, we find built directly on the ruins of the Mycenæan palace mean and shabby huts which tell us how the once golden city was succeeded by a paltry village. Centuries were to pass before the Doric temple rose on the accumulated ruins of palace and hovels, and generations more before the brave little remnant returned with the laurels of Platæa and enough of the spoil (we may conjecture) to put the walls of the Atreidæ in repair.

If the structures peculiar to the Mycenæan age are the work of foreigners, what have we left for Agamemnon and his Achæans? Simply the hovels. Of the Dipylon pottery, with which it is proposed to endow them, there is none worth mentioning at Mycenæ, very little at Tiryns, hardly a trace at Amyclæ, or Orchomenos. In the Mycenæan acropolis, particularly, very few fragments of this pottery have been found, and that mainly in the huts already mentioned. Can these be the sole traces of the power and pride of the Atreidæ?

For us at least the larger problem of nationality is solved; but there is a further question. Can we determine the race or races among the Greeks known to history to whom the achievements of Mycenæan civilisation are to be ascribed? In this inquiry we may set aside the Dorians, although many scholars (especially among the Germans) still claim for them the marvellous remains of the Argolid. The Homeric poems, they say, describe a state of things subsequent to the Dorian migration into the Peloponnesus and consequent upon the revolution thereby effected. As the Dorians themselves hold sway at Mycenæ and Sparta, they must be the subjects of the poet’s song--the stately fabric of Mycenæan culture must be the work of their hands.

On the other hand, Beloch,[i] while accepting the Dorian theory of this civilisation, dismisses the traditional Dorian migration as a myth, and maintains that Dorian settlement in the Peloponnesus was as immemorial as the Arcadian. Just as the original advent of the Arcadians in the district which bears their name had faded out of memory and left no trace of a tradition, so the actual migration of the Dorians belonged to an immemorial past.

The first of these views which attributes the Mycenæan culture to the Dorians of the traditional migration, cannot stand the test of chronology. For tradition refers that migration to the end of the twelfth century B.C., whereas the Mycenæan people were established in the Argolid before the sixteenth, probably even before the twentieth century. While Beloch’s hypothesis is not beset with this chronological difficulty, it is otherwise quite untenable. For, as the excavations at Tiryns and Mycenæ abundantly prove, the Mycenæan civilisation perished in a great catastrophe. The palaces of both were destroyed by fire after being so thoroughly pillaged that scarcely a single bit of metal was left in the ruins. Further, they were never rebuilt; and the sumptuous halls of Mycenæ were succeeded by the shabby hovels of which we have spoken. The larger domes at Mycenæ, whose sites were known, were likewise plundered--in all probability by the same hands that fired the palace. This is evidenced by the pottery found in the hovels and before the doorways of two of the beehive tombs. A similar catastrophe appears to have cut short the career of this civilisation in the other centres where it had flourished.

How are we to account for this sudden and final overthrow otherwise than by assuming a great historic crisis, which left these mighty cities with their magnificent palaces only heaps of smoking ruins? And what other crisis can this have been than the irruption of the Dorians? And their descent into the Peloponnesus is traditionally dated at the very time which other considerations have led us to fix as the lower limit of the Mycenæan Age. Had that migration never been recorded by the ancients nor attested by the state of the Peloponnesus in historic times, we should still be led to infer it from the facts now put in evidence by the archæologist’s spade.

Setting aside the Dorian claim as preposterous, we have nothing to do but follow the epic tradition. The Homeric poems consistently assume that prior to any Dorian occupation Argolis was inhabited by other peoples, and notably by Achæans whose position is so commanding that the whole body of Greeks before Troy usually go by their name. Their capital is Mycenæ, and their monarch Agamemnon, King of Men; although we find them also in Laconia under the rule of Menelaus. But the poet has other names, hardly less famous, applied now to the people of Argolis and now to the Greeks at large. One of these names (Ἀργεῖοι) is purely geographical, whether it be restricted to the narrow Argolid district or extended to the wider Argos, and has no special ethnological significance. But the other (Δαναοί) belonged to a people distinct from and, according to uniform tradition, more ancient than the Achæans. We find, then, two races in Argolis before the Dorian migration, each famous in song and story, and each so powerful that its name may stand for all the inhabitants of Greece. The Achæans occupy Mycenæ, that is to say, the northern mountain region of the district, while legend represents the Danaans as inseparably connected with Argos and the sea-board, and ascribes to them certain works of irrigation.

Whatever interpretation be put upon the myth, it seems clear that Argos could not feed its great cities without artificial irrigation, and this it owed to Danaus and his fifty daughters, “who were condemned perpetually to pour water in a tub full of holes,”--that is to say, into irrigation ditches which the thirsty soil kept draining dry.

Now our study of the Mycenæan remains has already constrained us to distinguish in the Argolid two strata of Mycenæan peoples, one of them originally dwelling on dry land in sunken huts, the other occupying pile settlements in lakes and swamps. And since tradition squares so remarkably with the facts in evidence, may we not venture to identify the marsh-folk with the Danaans and the landsmen with the Achæans?

But Achæans and Dorians were not alone in shaping and sharing Mycenæan culture; they had their congeners in other regions. Foremost among these were the Minyan founders of Orchomenos. As lake-dwellers and hydraulic engineers they are assimilated to the Danaans, whose near kinsmen they may have been, as the primitive islanders, whose abode we have found copied in the stone vases, must have been related to them both. Tradition has, in fact, preserved an account of the colonisation of Thera by a people coming from Bœotia, although it is uncertain whether it refers to the original occupation or to a settlement subsequent to the great catastrophe.

From the Danao-Minyan stock, it would appear that the Achæans parted company at an early date and continuing for a time in a different--most probably a mountainous--country, there took on ways of living proper to such environment. Later than the Danaans, according to the consistent testimony of tradition, they came down into the Peloponnesus and by their superior vigour and prowess prevailed over the older stock.

To these two branches of the race we may refer the two classes of tombs. The beehive and chamber tombs, as we have seen, have their prototype in the sunken huts: they belong to the Achæans coming down from the colder north. The shaft-graves are proper to the Danaan marsh-men. At Tiryns we find a shaft-grave, but no beehive or chamber tomb. At Orchomenos the Treasury of Minyas stands alone in its kind against at least eight tholoi and sixty chamber-tombs at Mycenæ. Hence, wherever this type of tombs abounds we may infer that an Achæan stock had its seat, as at Pronoia, in Attica, Thessaly, and Crete. Against this it may be urged that precisely at the Achæan capital, and within its acropolis at that, we find the famous group of shaft-graves with their precious offerings, as well as humbler graves of the same type outside the circle. But this, in fact, confirms our view when we remember it was the Danaid Perseus who founded Mycenæ and that his posterity bore rule there until the sceptre passed to Achæan hands in the persons of the Pelopidæ.[5] We have noted the close correspondence of the original fortress at Mycenæ with that of Tiryns, and its subsequent enlargement. Coincident with this extension of the citadel, the new type of tomb makes its appearance in the great domes,--some of them certainly royal sepulchres,--although the grave-circle of the acropolis is but half occupied. That circle, however, ceases thenceforth to be used as a place of burial, while the humbler graves adjacent to it are abandoned and built over with dwellings. With the new type of tomb we note changes of burial customs, not to be accounted for on chronological grounds: in the beehive tombs the dead are never embalmed, nor do they wear masks, nor are they laid on pebble beds--a practice which may have owed its origin to the wet ground about Tiryns.

There is but one theory on which these facts can be fully explained. It is that of a change in the ruling race and dynasty, and it clears up the whole history of Mycenæ and the Argive Plain. The first Greek settlers occupied the marshy sea-board, where they established themselves at Tiryns and other points; later on, when they had learned to rear impregnable walls, many of them migrated to the mountains which dominated the plain and thus were founded the strongholds of Larissa, Midea, and Mycenæ.

But while the Danaans were thus making their slow march to the north the Achæans were advancing southward from Corinth--a base of great importance to them then and always, as we may infer from the network of Cyclopean highways between it and their new centre. At Mycenæ, already a strong Perseid outpost, the two columns meet--when, we cannot say. But about 1500 B.C., or a little later, the Achæans had made themselves masters of the place and imposed upon it their own kings.

We have no tradition of any struggle in connection with this dynastic revolution, and it appears probable that the Achæans did not expel the older stock. On the contrary, they scrupulously respected the tombs of the Danaid dynasty--it may be, because they felt the claim of kindred blood. In manners and culture there could have been but little difference between them, for the Achæans had already entered the strong current of Mycenæan civilisation.

Indeed, we discern a reciprocal influence of the two peoples. Within certain of the Achæan tombs (as we may now term the beehives and rock chambers) we find separate shaft-graves, obviously recalling the Danaid mode of burial. On the other hand, it would appear that the typical Achæan tomb was adopted by the ruling classes among other Mycenæan peoples. Otherwise we cannot explain the existence of isolated tombs of this kind as at Amyclæ (Vaphio), Orchomenos, and Menidi--obviously the sepulchres of regal or opulent families; while the common people of these places--of non-Achæan stock--buried their dead in the ordinary oblong pits.

Achæan ascendency is so marked that the Achæan name prevails even where that stock forms but an inconsiderable element of the population. Notably this is true of Laconia, where the rare occurrence of the beehive tomb goes to show that the pre-Dorian inhabitants were mostly descended from the older stock, which we have encountered at Tiryns and at Orchomenos.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[3] [Reprinted, by permission of the publishers, from the article “Mycenæan Civilisation,” by D. G. Hogarth, in the New Volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Copyright, 1902, by The Encyclopædia Britannica Company.]

[4] Helbig,[f] Die Italiker in der Pœbene, p. 11; cf. Pigorini[g] in Atti dell’ Accad. dei Lincei, viii. 265 ff.

[5] This is not gainsaying the Phrygian extraction of the Pelopid line. “The true Phrygians were closely akin to the Greeks, quite as closely akin as the later Macedonians. We may fairly class the Pelopidæ as Achæan.” (Percy Gardner,[e] New Chapters of Greek History, p. 84.)

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III. THE HEROIC AGE

[Sidenote: [ca. 1400-1200 B.C.]]

In thinking of the mythical period with its citations of fables about gods and goddesses galore and heroes unnumbered, one is apt to become the victim of a mental mirage. One can hardly escape imagining the period in question thus veiled in mystery and peopled with half mythical and altogether mystical figures as really having been a time when men and women lived an idyllic life. As one contemplates the period he intuitively falls into a day-dream in which there dance before him light-robed artistic figures moving in arcadian bowers, tenanted by nymphs and satyrs and centaurs. But when one awakes to a practical view he recognises of course that all this is an illusion. Reason tells him that this was a mythical age, simply because the people were not sufficiently civilised to make permanent historical records. They were half barbarians, living as pastoral peoples everywhere live, striving for food against wild beasts, protecting their herds, cultivating the soil, fighting their enemies. And yet, in a sense, their life was idyllic. Heroic elements were not altogether lacking; the men were trained athletes, whose developed muscles were a joy to look upon, and no doubt the women, despite a certain coarseness, shared something of that figure. Then the people themselves believed in the gods and nymphs and satyrs and centaurs of which we dream, and so in a sense their world was peopled with them: in a sense they did dwell in Arcady. Still one cannot disguise the fact that it was an Arcady which no modern, placed under similar restrictions, would care to enter.

In that early day writing was an unknown art in Hellas, and so the people as they emerged from their time of semi-civilisation brought with them no specific tangible records of the life of that period, but only fables and traditions to take the place of sober historical records. To the people themselves these fables and traditions bore, for a long time at any rate, a stamp of veritable truth. Even the most extravagant of their narratives of gods and godlike heroes were believed as implicitly, no doubt, by the major part of the people even at a comparatively late historical period, as we to-day believe the stories of an Alexander, a Cæsar, or a Napoleon. As time went on these fables became even more intimately fixed in the minds of the people through becoming embalmed in the verses of the poet and the lines of the tragedian. Here and there, to be sure, there was a man who questioned the authenticity of these tales as recitals of fact, but we may well believe that the generality of people, even of the most cultured class, preferred throughout the entire period of antiquity to accept the myths at their face value. Not only so, but for many generations later, throughout the period sometimes spoken of as the “Age of Faith” of the western world, a somewhat similar estimate was put upon the Greek myths as recited by the classical authors. Even after the growth of scepticism and the development of the scientific spirit rendered the acceptance of the myths as recitals of fact impossible, for a long time it seemed little less than a sacrilege to think of severing them altogether from the realm of fact.

THE VALUE OF THE MYTHS

That, considered as historical narratives, they had been elaborated and their bald facts distorted by the creative imagination of a marvellous people, was clearly evident. No one, for example, in recent days would be expected to believe that the hero Achilles had been plunged into the river Styx by his mother and rendered thereby invulnerable except as to the heel by which he was held. But to doubt that the hero Achilles lived and accomplished such feats as were narrated in the Iliad would seem almost a blow at the existence of the most fascinating people of antiquity. There came a time, however, in comparatively recent generations when scepticism no longer hesitated to invade the ranks of the most time-honoured and best-beloved traditions, and when a warfare of words began between a set of critics, who would wipe the whole mass of Greek myths from the pages of history, and the champions of those myths who were but little disposed to give them up. Thus scepticism found an obvious measure of support in the clear fact that the mythical narratives could not possibly be received as authentic in their entirety. Further support was given to the sceptical party a little later by the study of comparative mythology, which showed to the surprise of many scholars that the Greek myths were by no means so unique in their character as had been supposed. It was shown that in the main they are closely paralleled by myths of other nations, and a theory was developed and advocated with much plausibility that they had been developed out of a superstitious regard of the sun and moon and elements, that most of them were, in short, what came to be called solar myths, and that they had no association whatever with the deeds of human historic personages.

Looking at the subject in the broadest way it, perhaps, does not greatly matter which view, as to the status of myths, is the true one. After all, the main purport of history in all its phases has value, not for what it tells us of the deeds of individual men or the conflicts of individual nations, but for what it can reveal of the process of the evolution of civilisation. Weighed by this standard, the beautiful myths of the Greeks are of value chiefly as revealing to us the essential status of the Greek mind in the early historical period, and the stage of evolution of that mind.

The beautiful myths of Greece cannot and must not be given up, and fortunately they need not. The view which Grote and the host of his followers maintained, practically solves the problem for the historian. He may retain the legend and gain from it the fullest measure of imaginative satisfaction; he may draw from it inferences of the greatest value as to the mental status of the Greek people at the time when the legends were crystallised into their final form; he may even believe that, in the main, the legends have been built upon a substructure of historical fact, and he may leave to specialists the controversy as to the exact relations which this substructure bears to the finished whole, content to accept the decision of the greatest critical historians of Greece that this question is insoluble.

From the period of myth pure and simple when the gods and goddesses themselves roved the earth achieving miracles, taking various shapes, slaying pythons, titans, and other monsters, and exercising their amorous fancies among the men and women of earth--from this period we come to the semi-historical time of the activity of the demi-gods and the men who, superior to the ordinary clay, were called Heroes.

The term “Heroic Age” has passed into general use with the historian as applying to the period of Grecian history immediately preceding and including the Trojan wars. As there are very few reliable documents at hand relating to this period--there were none at all until recently--it is clear that this age is in reality only the latter part of that mythical period to which we have just referred. Recent historians tend to treat it much more sceptically than did the historians of an earlier epoch; some are even disposed practically to ignore it. But the term has passed far too generally into use to be altogether abandoned; and, indeed, it is not desirable that it should be quite given up, for, however vague the details of the history it connotes, it is after all the shadowy record of a real epoch of history. We shall, perhaps, do best, therefore, to view it through the eyes of a distinguished historian of an earlier generation, remembering only that what is here narrated is still only half history--that is to say, history only half emerged from the realm of legend.[a]

The real limits of this period cannot be exactly defined; but still, so far as its traditions admit of anything like a chronological connection, its duration may be estimated at six generations, or about two hundred years.[6] The history of the heroic age is the history of the most celebrated persons belonging to this class, who, in the language of poetry, are called heroes. The term “hero” is of doubtful origin, though it was clearly a title of honour; but in the poems of Homer, it is applied not only to the chiefs, but also to their followers. In later times its use was narrowed, and in some degree altered; it was restricted to persons, whether of the Heroic or of after ages, who were believed to be endowed with a superhuman, though not a divine, nature, and who were honoured with sacred rites, and were imagined to have the power of dispensing good or evil to their worshippers; and it was gradually combined with the notion of prodigious strength and gigantic stature. Here however we have only to do with the heroes as men. The history of their age is filled with their wars, expeditions, and adventures; and this is the great mine from which the materials of the Greek poetry were almost entirely drawn. But the richer a period is in poetical materials, the more difficult it usually is to extract from it any that are fit for the use of the historian; and this is especially true in the present instance. We must content ourselves with touching on some which appear most worthy of notice, either from their celebrity, or for the light they throw on the general character of the period, or their connection, real or supposed, with subsequent historical events.

THE EXPLOITS OF PERSEUS

We must pass very hastily over the exploits of Bellerophon and Perseus, and we mention them only for the sake of one remark. The scene of their principal adventures is laid out of Greece, in the East. The former, whose father Glaucus is the son of Sisyphus, having chanced to stain his hands with the blood of a kinsman, flies to Argos, where he excites the jealousy of Prœtus, and is sent by him to Lycia, the country where Prœtus himself had been hospitably entertained in his exile. It is in the adjacent regions of Asia that the Corinthian hero proves his valour by vanquishing ferocious tribes and terrible monsters. Perseus too has been sent over the sea by his grandfather Acrisius, and his achievements follow the same direction, but take a wider range; he is carried along the coasts of Syria to Egypt, where Herodotus heard of him from the priests, and into the unknown lands of the South. There can be no doubt that these fables owed many of their leading features to the Argive colonies which were planted at a later period in Rhodes, and on the southwest coast of Asia. But still it is not improbable that the connection implied by them between Argolis and the nearest parts of Asia may not be wholly without foundation. We proceed however to a much more celebrated name, on which we must dwell a little longer--that of Hercules.

THE LABOURS OF HERCULES

It has been a subject of long dispute, whether Hercules was a real or a purely fictitious personage; but it seems clear that the question, according to the sense in which it is understood, may admit of two contrary answers, both equally true. When we survey the whole mass of the actions ascribed to him, we find that they fall under two classes. The one carries us back into the infancy of society, when it is engaged in its first struggles with nature for existence and security: we see him cleaving rocks, turning the course of rivers, opening or stopping the subterraneous outlets of lakes, clearing the earth of noxious animals, and, in a word, by his single arm effecting works which properly belong to the united labours of a young community. The other class exhibits a state of things comparatively settled and mature, when the first victory has been gained, and the contest is now between one tribe and another, for possession or dominion; we see him maintaining the cause of the weak against the strong, of the innocent against the oppressor, punishing wrong, and robbery, and sacrilege, subduing tyrants, exterminating his enemies, and bestowing kingdoms on his friends. It would be futile to inquire, who the person was to whom deeds of the former kind were attributed; but it is an interesting question, whether the first conception of such a being was formed in the mind of the Greeks by their own unassisted imagination, or was suggested to them by a different people.

It is sufficient to throw a single glance at the fabulous adventures called the “labours” of Hercules, to be convinced that a part of them at least belongs to the Phœnicians, and their wandering god, in whose honour they built temples in all their principal settlements along the coast of the Mediterranean. To him must be attributed all the journeys of Hercules round the shores of western Europe, which did not become known to the Greeks for many centuries after they had been explored by the Phœnician navigators. The number to which those labours are confined by the legend, is evidently an astronomical period, and thus itself points to the course of the sun which the Phœnician god represented. The event which closes the career of the Greek hero, who rises to immortality from the flames of the pile on which he lays himself, is a prominent feature in the same Eastern mythology, and may therefore be safely considered as borrowed from it. All these tales may indeed be regarded as additions made at a late period to the Greek legend, after it had sprung up independently at home. But it is at least a remarkable coincidence, that the birth of Hercules is assigned to the city of Cadmus; and the great works ascribed to him, so far as they were really accomplished by human labour, may seem to correspond better with the art and industry of the Phœnicians, than with the skill and power of a less civilised race. But in whatever way the origin of the name and idea of Hercules may be explained, he appears, without any ambiguity, as a Greek hero; and here it may reasonably be asked, whether all or any part of the adventures they describe, really happened to a single person, who either properly bore the name of Hercules, or received it as a title of honour.

We must briefly mention the manner in which these adventures are linked together in the common story. Amphitryon, the reputed father of Hercules, was the son of Alcæus, who is named first among the children born to Perseus at Mycenæ. The hero’s mother, Alcmene, was the daughter of Electryon, another son of Perseus, who had succeeded to the kingdom. In his reign, the Taphians, a piratical people who inhabited the islands called Echinades, near the mouth of the Achelous, landed in Argolis, and carried off the king’s herds. While Electryon was preparing to avenge himself by invading their land, after he had committed his kingdom and his daughter to the charge of Amphitryon, a chance like that which caused the death of Acrisius stained the hands of the nephew with his uncle’s blood. Sthenelus, a third son of Perseus, laid hold of this pretext to force Amphitryon and Alcmene to quit the country, and they took refuge in Thebes: thus it happened that Hercules, though an Argive by descent, and, by his mortal parentage, legitimate heir to the throne of Mycenæ, was, as to his birthplace, a Theban. Hence Bœotia is the scene of his youthful exploits: bred up among the herdsmen of Cithæron, like Cyrus and Romulus, he delivers Thespiæ from the lion which made havoc among its cattle. He then frees Thebes from the yoke of its more powerful neighbour, Orchomenos: and here we find something which has more the look of a historical tradition, though it is no less poetical in its form. The king of Orchomenos had been killed, in the sanctuary of Poseidon at Onchestus, by a Theban. His successor, Erginus, imposes a tribute on Thebes; but Hercules mutilates his heralds when they come to exact it, and then marching against Orchomenos, slays Erginus, and forces the Minyans to pay twice the tribute which they had hitherto received. According to a Theban legend, it was on this occasion that he stopped the subterraneous outlet of the Cephisus, and thus formed the lake which covered the greater part of the plain of Orchomenos. In the meanwhile Sthenelus had been succeeded by his son Eurystheus, the destined enemy of Hercules and his race, at whose command the hero undertakes his labours. This voluntary subjection of the rightful prince to the weak and timid usurper is represented as an expiation, ordained by the Delphic oracle, for a fit of frenzy, in which Hercules had destroyed his wife and children.

This, as a poetical or religious fiction, is very happily conceived; but when we are seeking for a historical thread to connect the Bœotian legends of Hercules with those of the Peloponnesus, it must be set entirely aside; and yet it is not only the oldest form of the story, but no other has hitherto been found or devised to fill its place with a greater appearance of probability. The supposed right of Hercules to the throne of Mycenæ was, as we shall see, the ground on which the Dorians, some generations later, claimed the dominion of Peloponnesus. Yet, in any other than a poetical view, his enmity to Eurystheus is utterly inconsistent with the exploits ascribed to him in the peninsula. It is also remarkable, that while the adventures which he undertakes at the bidding of his rival are prodigious and supernatural, belonging to the first of the two classes above distinguished, he is described as during the same period engaged in expeditions which are only accidentally connected with these marvellous labours, and which, if they stood alone, might be taken for traditional facts. In these he appears in the light of an independent prince, and a powerful conqueror. He leads an army against Augeas, king of Elis, and having slain him, bestows his kingdom on one of his sons, who had condemned his father’s injustice. So he invades Pylus to avenge an insult which he had received from Neleus, and puts him to death, with all his children, except Nestor, who was absent, or had escaped to Gerenia. Again he carries his conquering arms into Laconia, where he exterminates the family of the king Hippocoön, and places Tyndareus on the throne. Here, if anywhere in the legend of Hercules, we might seem to be reading an account of real events. Yet who can believe, that while he was overthrowing these hostile dynasties, and giving away sceptres, he suffered himself to be excluded from his own kingdom?

It was the fate of Hercules to be incessantly forced into dangerous and arduous enterprises; and hence every part of Greece is in its turn the scene of his achievements. Thus we have already seen him, in Thessaly, the ally of the Dorians, laying the foundation of a perpetual union between the people and his own descendants, as if he had either abandoned all hope of recovering the crown of Mycenæ, or had foreseen that his posterity would require the aid of the Dorians for that purpose. In Ætolia too he appears as a friend and a protector of the royal house, and fights its battles against the Thesprotians of Epirus. These perpetual wanderings, these successive alliances with so many different races, excite no surprise, so long as we view them in a poetical light, as issuing out of one source, the implacable hate with which Juno persecutes the son of Jove. They may also be understood as real events, if they are supposed to have been perfectly independent of each other, and connected only by being referred to one fabulous name. But when the poetical motive is rejected, it seems impossible to frame any rational scheme according to which they may be regarded as incidents in the life of one man, unless we imagine Hercules, in the purest spirit of knight-errantry, sallying forth in quest of adventures, without any definite object, or any impulse but that of disinterested benevolence. It will be safer, after rejecting those features in the legend which manifestly belong to Eastern religions, to distinguish the Theban Hercules from the Dorian, and the Peloponnesian hero. In the story of each some historical fragments have most probably been preserved, and perhaps least disfigured in the Theban and Dorian legends. In those of Peloponnesus it is difficult to say to what extent their original form may not have been distorted from political motives. If we might place any reliance on them, we should be inclined to conjecture that they contain traces of the struggles by which the kingdom of Mycenæ attained to that influence over the rest of the peninsula, which is attributed to it by Homer, and which we shall have occasion to notice when we come to speak of the Trojan war.

THE FEATS OF THESEUS

The name of Hercules immediately suggests that of Theseus, according to the mythical chronology his younger contemporary, and only second to him in renown. It was not without reason that Theseus was said to have given rise to the proverb, another Hercules; for not only is there a strong resemblance between them in many particular features, but it also seems clear that Theseus was to Attica what Hercules was to the rest of Greece, and that his career likewise represents the events of a period which cannot have been exactly measured by any human life, and probably includes many centuries. His legend is chiefly interesting to us, so far as it may be regarded as a poetical outline of the early history of Attica [where it will be recounted in detail].

The legend of his Cretan expedition most probably preserves some genuine historical recollections. But the only fact which appears to be plainly indicated by it, is a temporary connection between Crete and Attica. Whether this intercourse was grounded solely on religion, or was the result of a partial dominion exercised by Crete over Athens, it would be useless to inquire; and still less can we pretend to determine the nature of the Athenian tribute, or that of the Cretan worship to which it related. That part of the legend which belongs to Naxos and Delos was probably introduced after these islands were occupied by the Ionians. A part is assigned in these traditions to Minos, who is represented by the general voice of antiquity as having raised Crete to a higher degree of prosperity and power than it ever reached at any subsequent period [and whom we shall also discuss later in connection with Cretan history].

THE SEVEN AGAINST THEBES

Our plan obliges us to pass over a great number of wars, expeditions, and achievements of these ages, which were highly celebrated in heroic song, not because we deem them to contain less of historical reality than others which we mention, but because they appear not to have been attended with any important or lasting consequences. We might otherwise have been induced to notice the quarrel which divided the royal house of Thebes, and led to a series of wars between Thebes and Argos, which terminated in the destruction of the former city, and the temporary expulsion of the Cadmeans, its ancient inhabitants. Hercules and Theseus undertook their adventures either alone, or with the aid of a single comrade; but in these Theban wars we find a union of seven chiefs; and such confederacies appear to have become frequent in the latter part of the heroic age. So a numerous band of heroes was combined in the enterprise, which, whatever may have been its real nature, became renowned as the chase of the Calydonian boar. Plassman[f] suspects that this was in reality a military expedition against some of the savage Ætolian tribes, and that the name of one of them (the Aperantii) suggested the legend. We proceed to speak of two expeditions much more celebrated, conducted like these by a league of independent chieftains, but directed, not to any part of Greece, but against distant lands; we mean the voyage of the Argonauts, and the siege of Troy, which will conclude our review of the mythical period of Grecian history.

THE ARGONAUTS

The Argonautic expedition, when viewed in the light in which it has usually been considered, is an event which a critical historian, if he feels himself compelled to believe it, may think it his duty to notice, but which he is glad to pass rapidly over as a perplexing and unprofitable riddle. For even when the ancient legend has been pared down into a historical form, and its marvellous and poetical features have been all effaced, so that nothing is left but what may appear to belong to its pith and substance, it becomes indeed dry and meagre enough, but not much more intelligible than before. It relates an adventure, incomprehensible in its design, astonishing in its execution, connected with no conceivable cause, and with no sensible effect. The narrative, reduced to the shape in which it has often been thought worthy of a place in history, runs as follows:

In the generation before the Trojan war, Jason, a young Thessalian prince, had incurred the jealousy of his kinsman Pelias, who reigned at Iolcus. The crafty king encouraged the adventurous youth to embark in a maritime expedition full of difficulty and danger. It was to be directed to a point far beyond the most remote which Greek navigation had hitherto reached in the same quarter; to the eastern corner of the sea, so celebrated in ancient times for the ferocity of the barbarians inhabiting its coasts, that it was commonly supposed to have derived from them the name of “Axenus,” the inhospitable, before it acquired the opposite name of the “Euxine,” from the civilisation which was at length introduced by Greek settlers. Here, in the land of the Colchians, lay the goal, because this contained the prize, from which the voyage has been frequently called the adventure of the golden fleece. Jason having built a vessel of uncommon size,--in more precise terms, the first 50-oared galley his countrymen had ever launched,--and having manned it with a band of heroes, who assembled from various parts of Greece to share the glory of the enterprise, sailed to Colchis, where he not only succeeded in the principal object of his expedition, whatever this may have been, but carried off Medea, the daughter of the Colchian king, Æetes.

Though this is an artificial statement, framed to reconcile the main incidents of a wonderful story with nature and probability, it still contains many points which can scarcely be explained or believed. It carries us back to a period when navigation was in its infancy among the Greeks; yet their first essay at maritime discovery is supposed at once to have reached the extreme limit, which was long after attained by the adventurers who gradually explored the same formidable sea, and gained a footing on its coasts. The success of the undertaking however is not so surprising as the project itself; for this implies a previous knowledge of the country to be explored, which it is very difficult to account for. But the end proposed is still more mysterious; and indeed can only be explained with the aid of a conjecture. Such an explanation was attempted by some of the later writers among the ancients, who perceived that the whole story turned on the Golden Fleece, the supposed motive of the voyage, and that this feature had not a sufficiently historical appearance. But the mountain torrents of Colchis were said to sweep down particles of gold, which the natives used to detain by fleeces dipped in the streams.

This report suggested a mode of translating the fable into historical language. It was conjectured that the Argonauts had been attracted by the metallic treasures of the country, and that the Golden Fleece was a poetical description of the process which they had observed, or perhaps had practised: an interpretation certainly more ingenious, or at least less absurd, than those by which Diodorus transforms the fire-breathing bulls which Jason was said to have yoked at the bidding of Æetes, into a band of Taurians, who guarded the fleece, and the sleepless dragon which watched over it, into their commander Draco; but yet not more satisfactory; for it explains a casual, immaterial circumstance, while it leaves the essential point in the legend wholly untouched. The epithet “golden,” to which it relates, is merely poetical and ornamental, and signified nothing more as to the nature of the fleece than the epithets white or purple, which were also applied to it by early poets. According to the original and genuine tradition, the fleece was a sacred relic, and its importance arose entirely out of its connection with the tragical story of Phrixus, the main feature of which is the human sacrifice which the gods had required from the house of Athamas. His son Phrixus either offered himself, or was selected through the artifices of his stepmother Ino, as the victim; but at the critical moment, as he stood before the altar, the marvellous ram was sent for his deliverance, and transported him over the sea, according to the received account, to Colchis, where Phrixus, on his arrival, sacrificed the ram to Jupiter, as the god who had favoured his escape; the fleece was nailed to an oak in the grove of Mars, where it was kept by Æetes as a sacred treasure, or palladium.

But the tradition must have had a historical foundation in some real voyages and adventures, without which it could scarcely have arisen at all, and could never have become so generally current as to be little inferior in celebrity to the tale of Troy itself. If however the fleece had no existence but in popular belief, the land where it was to be sought was a circumstance of no moment. In the earlier form of the legend, it might not have been named at all, but only have been described as the distant, the unknown, land; and after it had been named, it might have been made to vary with the gradual enlargement of geographical information. But in this case the voyage of the Argonauts can no longer be considered as an isolated adventure, for which no adequate motive is left; but must be regarded, like the expedition of the Tyrian Hercules, as representing a succession of enterprises, which may have been the employment of several generations. And this is perfectly consistent with the manner in which the adventurers are most properly described. They are Minyans; a branch of the Greek nation, whose attention was very early drawn by their situation, not perhaps without some influence from the example and intercourse of the Phœnicians, to maritime pursuits. The form which the legend assumed was probably determined by the course of their earliest naval expeditions. They were naturally attracted towards the northeast, first by the islands that lay before the entrance of the Hellespont, and then by the shores of the Propontis and its two straits. Their successive colonies, or spots signalised either by hostilities or peaceful transactions with the natives, would become the landing-places of the Argonauts. That such a colony existed at Lemnos, seems unquestionable; though it does not follow that Euneus, the son of Jason, who is described in the Iliad as reigning there during the siege of Troy, was a historical personage.

If however it should be asked, in what light the hero and heroine of the legend are to be viewed on this hypothesis, it must be answered that both are most probably purely ideal personages, connected with the religion of the people to whose poetry they belong. Jason was perhaps no other than the Samothracian god or hero Jasion, whose name was sometimes written in the same manner, the favourite of Demeter, as his namesake was of Hera, and the protector of mariners as the Thessalian hero was the chief of the Argonauts. Medea seems to have been originally another form of Hera herself, and to have descended, by a common transition, from the rank of a goddess into that of a heroine, when an epithet had been mistaken for a distinct name. We have already seen that the Corinthian tradition claimed her as belonging properly to Corinth, one of the principal seats of the Minyan race. The tragical scenes which rendered her stay there so celebrated were commemorated by religious rites, which continued to be observed until the city was destroyed by the Romans. According to the local legend, she had not murdered her children; they had been killed by the Corinthians; and the public guilt was expiated by annual sacrifices offered to Hera, in whose temple fourteen boys, chosen every twelve-month from noble families, were appointed to spend a year in all the ceremonies of solemn mourning. But we cannot here pursue this part of the subject any further. The historical side of the legend seems to exhibit an opening intercourse between the opposite shores of the Ægean. If however it was begun by the northern Greeks, it was probably not long confined to them, but was early shared by those of the Peloponnesus. It would be inconsistent with the piratical habits of the early navigators, to suppose that this intercourse was always of a friendly nature; and it may therefore not have been without a real ground, that the Argonautic expedition was sometimes represented as the occasion of the first conflict between the Greeks and Trojans. We therefore pass by a natural transition out of the mythical circle we have just been tracing, into that of the Trojan war, and the light in which we have viewed the one may serve to guide us in forming a judgment on the historical import of the other.

We have already seen in what manner Eurystheus, the son of Sthenelus, had usurped the inheritance which belonged of right to Hercules, as the legitimate representative of Perseus. Sthenelus had reserved Mycenæ and Tiryns for himself; but he had bestowed the neighbouring town of Midea on Atreus and Thyestes, the sons of Pelops, and uncles of Eurystheus. On the death of Hercules, Eurystheus pursued his orphan children from one place of refuge to another, until they found an asylum in Attica. Theseus refused to surrender them, and Eurystheus then invaded Attica in person; but his army was routed, and he himself slain by Hyllus, the eldest son of Hercules, in his flight through the isthmus. Atreus succeeded to the throne of his nephew, whose children had been all cut off in this disastrous expedition; and thus, when his sceptre descended to his son Agamemnon, it conveyed the sovereignty of an ample realm. While the house of Pelops was here enriched with the spoils of Hercules, it enjoyed the fruits of his triumphant valour in another quarter. He had bestowed Laconia on Tyndareus, the father of Helen; and when Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, had been preferred to all the other suitors of this beautiful princess, Tyndareus resigned his dominions to his son-in-law. In the meanwhile a flourishing state had risen up on the eastern side of the Hellespont. Its capital, Troy, had been taken by Hercules, with the assistance of Telamon, son of Æacus, but had been restored to Priam, the son of its conquered king, Laomedon, who reigned there in peace and prosperity over a number of little tribes, until his son Paris, attracted to Laconia by the fame of Helen’s beauty, abused the hospitality of Menelaus by carrying off his queen in his absence. All the chiefs of Greece combined their forces, under the command of Agamemnon, to avenge this outrage, and sailed with a great armament to Troy.[c] Their enterprise, famous for all time as the Trojan War, stands quite by itself in interest and importance among the traditions of the Heroic Age, and demands exceptional treatment here.

THE TROJAN WAR

Historic criticism is almost a pendulum in its motion. Nowhere has this been more vividly seen than in the attitude of prominent historians toward the Trojan War and the poetical chronicle of it known as Homer’s Iliad. Scholarly belief has passed through all imaginable grades of opinion ranging between a flat denial that there was ever such a place as Troy, such a war as the Trojan, or such a man as Homer, to an acceptance of them all with an unquestioning credulity matching that of the early Greeks.

It was textual criticism, the deadly work of the critical scalpel in the verbal form of the poems that first destroyed the good standing of the Homeric legend. It is the revivifying work of the pickaxe and shovel in the actual ground as wielded by the excavator and archæologist that have brought back the repute of Homer. A few years ago and a Gladstone arguing for the reality of a Homer and of an Homeric epic was dismissed by the professor as an old-fashioned ignoramus. To-day almost the same terms are applied to those who cling to the fashion of yesterday and claim that the Trojan War and Homer himself are myths. In the new swing of the pendulum, however, the cautious will still avoid extremes.

What has already been said about the status of Greek myth applies in the main to the Homeric poems. They are legends doubtless with some measure of historical foundation, but they cannot be accepted by the critical student of to-day as historical narratives in the narrow sense. But the Homeric poems have an interest of quite another kind which gives them a place apart among the legends of antiquity. This interest centres about the personality of the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. From the earliest historic periods of Grecian life the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey was unquestionably ascribed to a poet named Homer. If doubts ever arose in the mind of any sceptical or critical person as to the reality of Homer, such doubts were quite submerged by the popular verdict. It was not generally claimed that Homer himself had written the works ascribed to him,--it was long held, indeed, that he must have lived at a period prior to the introduction of writing into Greece,--but that the person whom tradition loved to speak of as the blind bard had invented and recited his narratives in toto, and that these, memorised by others, had been brought down through succeeding generations until they were finally given permanence in writing, were accepted as the most unequivocal of historical facts.

But in the latter half of the 18th century, these supposed historical facts began to be called in question, Wolf[k] leading the van and holding all scholarship in terror of his name for nearly a century. Critical students of Homer were struck with numerous anomalies in his writings that seemed to them inconsistent with the idea that the Iliad and Odyssey had been composed at one time and by one person. To cite but a single illustration, it was noted that the various parts of these poems were not all written in the same dialect, and it seemed highly improbable that any one person should have employed different dialects in a single composition. Such a suggestion as this naturally led to bitter controversies--controversies which have by no means altogether subsided after the lapse of a century.[a] Later scholarship denies the “stratification of language” in the poems.[b] But the controversy did not confine itself to the mere question whether such a person as Homer had lived and written, it came presently to involve also the subject of the Homeric poems, in particular, of the Iliad.

Certain details aside, the Trojan War had been looked upon as an historical event, quite as fully credited by the modern historian as it had been by Alexander when he stopped to offer sacrifices at the site of Troy. But now the iconoclastic movement being under way there was a school of students who openly maintained that the whole recital, by whomsoever written, was nothing but a fable which the historian must utterly discard. It was even questioned whether such a place as Troy had ever existed. Such a scepticism as this seemed, naturally enough, a clear sacrilege to a large body of scholars, but for several generations no successful efforts were made to meet it with any weapons more tangible than words. Then came a champion of the historical verity of the Homeric narrative who set to work to prove his case in the most practical way. Curiously enough the man who thus championed the cause of the closet scholars and poets and visionaries was himself a practical man of affairs, no less experienced and no less successful in dealing with the affairs of an everyday business than had been the man from whom the iconoclastic movement had gained its chief support. This man was also a German, Heinrich Schliemann.[l]

Having amassed a fortune, the income from which was more than sufficient for all his needs, he retired from active business and devoted the remainder of his life to a self-imposed task, which had been an ambition with him all his life, the search, namely, for the site of Ancient Troy. How well he succeeded all the world knows. But in opposition to the opinions of many scholars he selected the hill of Hissarlik as the site of ancient Ilium, and his excavations there soon demonstrated that at least it had been the site not of one alone but of at least seven different cities in antiquity--one being built above the ruins of another at long intervals of time. One of these cities, the sixth from the top,--or to put it otherwise, the most ancient but one,--was, he became firmly convinced, Ilium itself.

The story of his achievements cannot be told here in detail, and it is necessary to point the warning that Dr. Schliemann’s excavations--wonderful as are their results--do not, perhaps, when critically viewed, demonstrate quite so much as might at first sight appear. There is, indeed, a high degree of probability that the city which he excavated was really the one intended in the Homeric descriptions, but it must be clear to any one who scrutinises the matter somewhat closely, that this fact goes but a little way towards substantiating the Homeric narrative as a whole. The city of Ilium may have existed without giving rise to any such series of events as that narrated in the Iliad. Dr. Schliemann himself was led to realise this fact, and to modify somewhat in later years the exact tenor of some of his more enthusiastic earlier views, yet the fact remains that the excavations at Hissarlik must be reckoned with by whoever in future discusses the status of the Homeric story.

This is not the place to enter into a statement of the multitudinous phases scepticism has taken in dealing with the Trojan legend. The story, whether pure fancy, as some have thought it, or a dramatised and romantic version of actual history, is indispensable to any chronicle of Greece or of Grecian influence.[a] Taking Homer as a basis, it may be outlined as follows:

The Town of Troy

The origin of Dardanus, founder of the Trojan state, has been very variously related; but the testimony of Homer to the utter uncertainty of his birth and native country, delivered in the terms that he was the son of Jupiter, may seem best entitled to belief. Thus however it appears that the Greeks not unwillingly acknowledged consanguinity with the Trojans; for many, indeed most, of the Grecian heroes also claimed their descent from Jupiter. It is moreover remarkable that, among the many genealogies which Homer has transmitted, none is traced so far into antiquity as that of the royal family of Troy. Dardanus was ancestor in the sixth degree to Hector, and may thus have lived from a hundred and fifty to two hundred years before that hero. On one of the many ridges projecting from the foot of the lofty mountain of Ida in the northwestern part of Asia Minor, he founded a town, or perhaps rather a castle, which from his own name was called Dardania.

The situation commanded the narrow but highly fruitful plain, watered by the streams of Simois and Scamander, and stretching from the roots of Ida to the Hellespont northward, and the Ægean Sea westward. His son Erichthonius, who succeeded him in the sovereignty of this territory, had the reputation of being the richest man of his age. Much of his wealth seems to have been derived from a large stock of brood mares, to the number, according to the poet, of three thousand, which the fertility of his soil enabled him to maintain, and which by his care and judgment in the choice of stallions produced a breed of horses superior to any of the surrounding countries. Tros, son of Erichthonius, probably extended, or in some other way improved, the territory of Dardania; since the appellation by which it was known to posterity was derived from his name. With the riches the population of the state of course increased. Ilus, son of Tros, therefore, venturing to move his residence from the mountain, founded, on a rising ground beneath, that celebrated city called from his name Ilion [or Ilium], but more familiarly known in modern languages by the name of Troy, derived from his father.

Twice before that war which Homer has made so famous Troy is said to have been taken and plundered: and for its second capture by Hercules, in the reign of Laomedon, son of Ilus, we have Homer’s authority. The government however revived, and still advanced in power and splendour. Laomedon after his misfortune fortified the city in a manner so superior to what was common in his age that the walls of Troy were said to be a work of the gods. Under his son Priam, the Trojan state was very flourishing and of considerable extent; containing, under the name of Phrygia, the country afterwards called Troas, together with both shores of the Hellespont and the large and fertile island of Lesbos.

A frequent communication, sometimes friendly, but oftener hostile, was maintained between the eastern and western coasts of the Ægean Sea; each being an object of piracy more than of commerce to the inhabitants of the opposite country. Cattle and slaves constituting the principal riches of the times, men, women, and children, together with swine, sheep, goats, oxen, and horses, were principal objects of plunder. But scarcely was any crime more common than rapes; and it seems to have been a kind of fashion, in consequence of which the leaders of piratical expeditions gratified their vanity in the highest degree when they could carry off a lady of superior rank. How usual these outrages were among the Greeks, may be gathered from the condition said to have been exacted by Tyndareus, king of Sparta, father of the celebrated Helen, from the chieftains who came to ask his daughter in marriage; he required of all, as a preliminary, to bind themselves by solemn oaths that, should she be stolen, they would assist with their utmost power to recover her. This tradition, with many other stories of Grecian rapes, on whatsoever founded, indicates with certainty the opinion of the later Greeks, among whom they were popular, concerning the manners of their ancestors. But it does not follow that the Greeks were more vicious than other people equally unhabituated to constant, vigorous, and well-regulated exertions of law and government. Equal licentiousness but a few centuries ago prevailed throughout western Europe. Hence those gloomy habitations of the ancient nobility, which excite the wonder of the traveller, particularly in the southern parts, where, in the midst of the finest countries, he often finds them in situations so very inconvenient and uncomfortable, except for what was then the one great object, security, that now the houseless peasant will scarcely go to them for shelter. From the licentiousness were derived the manners, and even the virtues, of the times; and hence knight-errantry with its whimsical consequences.

Paris and Helen

The expedition of Paris, son of Priam king of Troy, into Greece, appears to have been a marauding adventure, such as was then usual. It is said indeed that he was received very hospitably, and entertained very kindly, by Menelaus king of Sparta. But this also was consonant to the spirit of the times; for hospitality has always been the virtue of barbarous ages: it is at this day no less characteristical of the wild Arabs than their spirit of robbery; and in the Scottish highlands we know robbery and hospitality flourished together till very lately. Hospitality indeed will be generally found in different ages and countries very nearly in proportion to the need of it; that is, in proportion to the deficiency of jurisprudence, and the weakness of government. Paris concluded his visit at Sparta with carrying off Helen, wife of Menelaus, together with a considerable treasure: and whether this was effected by fraud, or as some have supposed, by open violence, it is probable enough that as Herodotus relates, it was first concerted, and afterward supported, in revenge for some similar injury done by the Greeks to the Trojans.

An outrage however so grossly injurious to one of the greatest princes of Greece, especially if attended with a breach of the rights of hospitality, might not unreasonably be urged as a cause requiring the united revenge of all the Grecian chieftains. But there were other motives to engage them in the quarrel. The hope of returning laden with the spoil of the richer provinces of Asia was a strong incentive to leaders poor at home, and bred to rapine. The authority and influence of Agamemnon, king of Argos, brother of Menelaus, were also weighty. The spirit of the age, his own temper, the extent of his power, the natural desire of exerting it on a splendid occasion, would all incite this prince eagerly to adopt his brother’s quarrel. He is besides represented by character qualified to create and command a powerful league; ambitious, active, brave, generous, humane; vain indeed and haughty, sometimes to his own injury; yet commonly repressing those hurtful qualities, and watchful to cultivate popularity. Under this leader all the Grecian chieftains from the end of Peloponnesus to the end of Thessaly, together with Idomeneus from Crete, and other commanders from some of the smaller islands, assembled at Aulis, a seaport of Bœotia. The Acarnanians alone, separated from the rest of Greece by lofty mountains and a sea at that time little navigated, had no share in the expedition.

The Siege of Troy

A story acquired celebrity in aftertimes, that, the fleet being long detained at Aulis by contrary winds, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia as a propitiatory offering to obtain from the gods a safe and speedy passage to the Trojan coast. To the credit of his character however it is added that he submitted to this abominable cruelty with extreme reluctance, compelled by the clamours of the army, who were persuaded that the gods required the victim; nor were there wanting those who asserted that by a humane fraud the princess was at last saved, under favour of a report that a fawn was miraculously sent by the goddess Diana to be sacrificed in her stead. Indeed the story, though of such fame, and so warranted by early authorities, that some notice of it seemed requisite, wants, it must be confessed, wholly the best authentication for matters of that very early age; for neither Homer, though he enumerates Agamemnon’s daughters, nor Hesiod, who not only mentions the assembling of the Grecian forces under his command at Aulis, but specifies their detentions by bad weather, has left one word about so remarkable an event as this sacrifice.

The fleet at length had a prosperous voyage. It consisted of about twelve hundred open vessels, each carrying from fifty to a hundred and twenty men. The number of men in the whole armament, computed from the mean of those two numbers mentioned by Homer as the complement of different ships, would be something more than a hundred thousand; and Thucydides, whose opinion is of the highest authority, has reckoned this within the bounds of probability; though a poet, he adds, would go to the utmost of current reports. The army, landing on the Trojan coast, was immediately so superior to the enemy as to oblige them to seek shelter within the city walls: but here the operations were at a stand. The hazards to which unfortified and solitary dwellings were exposed from pirates and freebooters had driven the more peaceable of mankind to assemble in towns for mutual security. To erect lofty walls around those towns for defence was then an obvious resource, requiring little more than labour for the execution. More thought, more art, more experience were necessary for forcing the rudest fortification, if defended with vigilance and courage. But the Trojan walls were singularly strong: Agamemnon’s army could make no impression upon them. He was therefore reduced to the method most common for ages after, of turning the siege into a blockade, and patiently waiting till want of necessaries should force the enemy to quit their shelter. But neither did the policy of the times amount by many degrees to the art of subsisting so numerous an army for any length of time, nor would the revenues of Greece have been equal to it with more knowledge, nor indeed would the state of things have admitted it, scarcely with any wealth, or by any means. For in countries without commerce, the people providing for their own wants only, supplies cannot be found equal to the maintenance of a superadded army. No sooner therefore did the Trojans shut themselves within their walls than the Greeks were obliged to give their principal attention to the means of subsisting their numerous forces. The common method of the times was to ravage the adjacent countries; and this was immediately put in practice. But such a resource soon destroys itself. To have therefore a more permanent and certain supply, a part of their army was sent to cultivate the vales of the Thracian Chersonesus, then abandoned by the inhabitants on account of the frequent and destructive incursions of the wild people who occupied the interior of that continent.

Large bodies being thus detached from the army, the remainder scarcely sufficed to deter the Trojans from taking the field again, and could not prevent succour and supplies from being carried into the town. Thus the siege was protracted to the enormous length of ten years. It was probably their success in marauding marches and pirating voyages that induced the Greeks to persevere so long. Achilles is said to have plundered no less than twelve maritime and eleven inland towns. Lesbos, then under the dominion of the monarch of Troy, was among his conquests; and the women of that island were apportioned to the victorious army as a part of the booty. But these circumstances alarming all neighbouring people contributed to procure numerous and powerful allies to the Trojans. Not only the Asiatic states, to a great extent eastward and southward, sent auxiliary troops, but also the European, westward, as far as the Pæonians of that country about the river Axius, which afterwards became Macedonia.

At length, in the tenth year of the war, after great exertions of valour and the slaughter of numbers on both sides, among whom were many of the highest rank, Troy yielded to its fate. Yet was it not then overcome by open force; stratagem is reported by Homer; fraud and treachery have been supposed by later writers. It was, however, taken and plundered: the venerable monarch was slain: the queen and her daughters, together with only one son remaining of a very numerous male progeny, were led into captivity. According to some, the city was totally destroyed, and the survivors of the people so dispersed that their very name was from that time lost. But the tradition supported by better authority, and in no small degree by that of Homer himself, whose words upon the occasion seem indeed scarcely doubtful, is, that Æneas and his posterity reigned over the Trojan country and people for some generations; the seat of government however being removed from Troy to Scepsis: and Xenophon has marked his respect for this tradition, ascribing the final ruin of the Trojan state and name to that following inundation of Greeks called the Æolic emigration.

Agamemnon’s Sad Home-coming

Agamemnon, we are told, triumphed over Troy; and the historical evidence to the fact is large. But the Grecian poets themselves universally acknowledge that it was a dear-bought, a mournful triumph. Few of the princes, who survived to partake of it, had any enjoyment of their hard-earned glory in their native country. None expecting that the war would detain them so long from home, had made due provision for the regular administration of their affairs during such an absence. It is indeed probable that the utmost wisdom and forethought would have been unequal to the purpose. For, in the half-formed governments of those days, the constant presence of the prince as supreme regulator was necessary towards keeping the whole from running presently into utter confusion. Seditions and revolutions accordingly remain recorded almost as numerous as the cities of Greece. Many of the princes on their return were compelled to embark again with their adherents, to seek settlements in distant countries. A more tragical fate awaited Agamemnon. His queen, Clytemnestra, having given her affection to his kinsman Ægisthus, concurred in a plot against her husband, and the unfortunate monarch on his return to Argos was assassinated; those of his friends who escaped the massacre were compelled to fly with his son Orestes; and, so strong was the party which their long possession of the government had enabled the conspirators to form, the usurper obtained complete possession of the throne. Orestes found refuge at Athens; where alone among the Grecian states there seems to have been then a constitution capable of bearing both the absence and the return of the army and its commander without any essential derangement.

Such were the Trojan war and its consequences, according to the best of the unconnected and defective accounts remaining, among which those of Homer have always held the first rank. In modern times, as we have seen, the authority of the great poet as an historian has been more questioned. It is of highest importance to the history of the early ages that it should have its due weight; and it may therefore be proper to mention here some of the circumstances which principally establish its authority; others will occur hereafter. It should be observed then that in Homer’s age poets were the only historians; whence, though it does not at all follow that poets would so adhere to certain truth as not to introduce ornament, yet it necessarily follows that veracity in historical narration would make a large share of a poet’s merit in public opinion, a circumstance which the common use of written records and prose histories instantly and totally altered. The probability and the very remarkable consistency of Homer’s historical anecdotes, variously dispersed as they are among his poetical details and embellishments, form a second and powerful testimony. Indeed, the connection and the clearness of Grecian history, through the very early times of which Homer has treated, appear very extraordinary when compared with the darkness and uncertainty that begin in the instant of our losing his guidance, and continue through ages.[h]

CHARACTER AND SPIRIT OF THE HEROIC AGE

In the tales of Grecian mythology a great difference is apparent between the earlier and later centuries of the heroic age. They show us a considerable progress in culture during the course of the period. The legends of Perseus, Hercules, and Theseus, or of the battle of the Lapithæ and Centauri, depict the early Greeks as a half wild race tormented by fierce animals, robbers, and tyrants. Giants, fearful snakes, and other monsters, also adventures in the nether world, often appear in these legends, and the Grecians seem to be engaged in a battle with the wildness of nature and with their own crudity. The same land appears utterly different in the legends and poems of the Trojan war and the other events of the later heroic age. In these legends the manners of the Greeks are represented as friendlier and more peaceful, and, with a few exceptions, we find no more real miracles, but everything points to a quieter time and a more orderly state of affairs.

We have a poetical, yet essentially faithful, description of these last centuries in the Iliad and Odyssey, the two oldest extant Grecian literary works. Both poems are, besides the recital of a part of the heroic legends, a true picture of the customs, the conquering spirit, and the domestic as well as public life of the Greeks at the time of the Trojan war and immediately after it. The Grecians at that time do not seem to have been a very numerous people. They lived in small states, with central cities in active intercourse with one another, not differing much in their ways of life, customs, and language. They were a rustic, warlike race, who rejoiced in simple customs and led a happy existence under a friendly sky. The similarity of religion, language, and customs made the Greeks of that time, as it were, members of a great organism, holding together although divided into many tribes and states. At the end of the heroic age some of the tribes were brought even closer together by near relationship and by means of temples and feasts in common. But the link that held them all together had not as yet become a clear conviction; therefore, so far there was no joint name for the Greek nation.

Agriculture and cattle raising were the principal occupations of the people. Besides this they had few industries. Other sources of wealth were the chase, fishing, and war. The agriculture consisted of corn and wine-growing and horticulture. The ox was the draught animal, donkeys and mules were used for transport, horses were but seldom used for riding, but they drew the chariots in time of war. The herds consisted principally of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. Slaves were used for the lower work. These were purchased from sea-robbers, obtained in victorious wars, or born in the house. They had a knowledge of navigation, although their ships generally had no decks, and were worked more by means of oars than sails. There was no commerce on a large scale; war and piracy served instead as a means of obtaining riches. Many metals were known; they used iron, the working of which was still difficult. Coinage was not used at all, or, at all events, very little. Weaving was the work of women; the best woven stuffs, however, were obtained from the Phœnicians, who were the reigning commercial people of the Grecian seas. They made various kinds of arms, which were in part of artistic workmanship, ornaments and vessels of metal, ivory, clay, and wood. The descriptions of these objects show that the taste for plastic art, that is, the representation of beautiful forms, was already awakened among them. They possessed further a knowledge of architecture; towns and villages are mentioned, also walls with towers and gates. The houses of princes were built of stone; they contained large and lofty rooms, as well as gardens and halls.

Caste was unknown to the Grecians. The people in the heroic age, to be sure, consisted of nobles and commons, but the latter took part in all public affairs of importance, and the privileges of the former did not rest upon their birth alone; an acquisition of great strength, bravery, and adroitness was also necessary--virtues which are accessible to all. The difference between the two classes was, therefore, not grounded, like the oriental establishment of caste, on superstition and deception, but on the belief that certain families possessed bodily strength and warlike abilities, and were therefore appointed by the gods as protectors of the country; that their only right to superiority over others lay in their actual greater capacity for ruling and fighting.

The system of government was aristocratic monarchy, supported by the personal feelings and co-operative opinions of all free men. The state was thus merely a warlike assembly of vigorous men, consisting of nobles and freemen, having a leader at their head. The latter was bound to follow the decisions of the nobility, and in important affairs had to ask the consent of the people.

The king was only the first of the nobility, and the only rights he possessed which were not shared by them was that of commander in battle and high priest. Therefore, if he wished to excel others as real ruler, everything depended on his personality; he had to surpass others in riches, bodily strength, bravery, discernment, and experience. The king brought the sacrifice to the gods for the totality and directed the religious ceremonies. He also sat in judgment, but mostly in company with experienced old men from the nobility, being really arbitrator and protector of the weak against the strong; for if no plaintiff appeared there was no trial at the public judgment-seat. It was the king’s duty to offer hospitality to the ambassadors of other states and to be hospitable to strangers generally. His revenues consisted only of the voluntary donations of his subjects, of a larger share in the spoils of war, and of the produce of certain lands assigned to him. The only signs of his royalty were the sceptre and the herald that went before him. He took the first place at all assemblies and feasts, and at the sacrificial repasts he received a double helping of food and drink. He was addressed in terms of veneration, but otherwise one associated with him as with any other noble, and there was no trace of the oriental forms of homage towards kings among the ancient Greeks.

The nobility was composed of men of certain families to whom especial strength and dexterity were attributed as hereditary prerogatives; they sought to keep these up by means of knightly practices and to prove them on the battle-field. As has already been said, they took part in the government of the country. The common people or free citizens of the second class were assembled on all important occasions, to give their votes for peace or war, or any other matter of importance. The assemblies of the people described in the Iliad and Odyssey show the same general participation in public affairs and that lively activity which later reached such a high development in the Grecian republics. Beside this, at that time bravery and strength showed what every man was worth, and still more than mere bodily strength, experience, eloquence, and a judicious insight into life and its circumstances brought to any one honour and importance.

In time of war the decision depended more upon the bravery of the kings and nobles than upon the fighting of the people, who arranged themselves in close masses on the battle-field. The chiefs were not trained to be generals or leaders, but rather brave and skilled fighters. Swiftness in running, strength and certainty in throw, and skill in wrestling as in the use of arms, of the lance and the sword, were the most important items. Every leader had his own chariot, with a young companion by his side to hold the reins, while he himself fought with a javelin. The fortifications of the towns consisted of a trench and a wall with towers. As yet they had no knowledge of how to conduct a siege. They knew of no implement which would serve in the taking of a town.

Music and poetry played an important part in the lives of these warlike people. These were inseparable from their meals, their feasts, and military expeditions. The lyre, the flute, and the pipe were the musical instruments in the heroic age; the trumpet was not used until the end of that time. Flute and pipe were the instruments of shepherds and peasants. The lyre, on the other hand, was played by poets and singers and even by many of the kings and nobles, and always served as the accompaniment of songs. The subjects of their songs were the deeds of living or past heroes. There were singers or bards who composed these songs and sang them while men stood round to listen and these bards were held in great esteem.

Religion and politics were closely connected; but there was no trace of a priesthood with predominant influence. The king was the director of sacrifices, the presence of a priest not being required. There already existed, to be sure, besides the ancient oracle of Dodona, the oracle of Delphi in Phocis, which became so celebrated at a later period; but neither had any great influence in the heroic age. On the other hand, there were so-called soothsayers, who were supposed to possess much wisdom and at the same time a kind of association with the gods. For this reason they were consulted, so as to foretell the results of important undertakings, and to discover the cause of general misfortunes as well as a means of removing them.

The most renowned of these men were Orpheus, who played the part of prophet in the expedition of the Argonauts; Amphiaraus, who joined the expedition of the Seven against Thebes in the same character; Tiresias, who was the prophet of the Thebans both at that time and in the war of the Epigoni; and lastly Calchas, the soothsayer of the Greeks in the Trojan war. Even these men had no influence to be compared with the oriental priesthood.

They were really only looked upon as pacifiers of the outraged godhead and as advisers; their soothsayings were not always respected, and when their prophecies were unsatisfactory they had to face the anger of those in power.

The religious belief of the heroic age was the origin of the later national religion. It sprang probably from various sources. Therefore it cannot be distinguished by any special belief like that of the Indians and Egyptians. The religion of the Greeks was never a perfected system and therefore not free from contradictions, especially as oriental conceptions were introduced into it from ancient times. The Grecians of this time believed heaven, or rather the summit of the towering Mount Olympus, to be inhabited by beings, like the earth; they imagined that these beings resembled human beings in appearance and inner nature, but with the difference that they ascribed to them invisibility, greater strength, freedom from the barriers of mortality, and a powerful influence over earthly things. The life of the gods, according to the representation of the heroic age, only differed from that of men in the fact that it had a more beautiful colouring and higher pleasures. They therefore looked upon the gods as personal beings and had that form of religion known as anthropomorphism, the essential characteristic of which is the belief that the gods resemble men. But joined in an inexplicable manner with this view, was the idea that the gods were at the same time natural phenomena and powers of nature. For instance Zeus, the king and ruler in the kingdom of the gods, was also regarded as the god of the atmosphere; Apollo of the sun; Poseidon the god of the sea; and the woods, wells, valleys, and hills were believed to be inhabited by divine beings called nymphs.

The king offered sacrifice for the people and every father for his house and family. The religious ceremonies consisted chiefly of sacrifices and prayers. There were but few temples, but on the other hand every town had a piece of land set apart, on which there was an altar. They did not feel bound to these holy places for the worship of the gods, but often built an altar on some spot in the open field for prayer and sacrifice. The sacrifice consisted in burning some pieces of flesh to the gods and the pouring of wine into the fire; while the rest was consumed at a general and merry feast. Even the appointed religious feast days had quite a festive colouring: they feasted, drank, joked, held tournaments, and listened while bards sang of the deeds of heroes. There was no trace to be found among the religious ceremonies of the heroic Greeks of that wild, intoxicating character which generally existed at the feasts of the oriental people.

This was how the character of the later Grecian heroic age was formed. They were a vigorous people, with warlike tastes and simple customs, living under a mild heaven. All took part in public affairs, all were free, and, in spite of a certain inequality among them, they were all connected; and divided by no great contrasts in education, the community felt no kind of oppression. The limited population of the country and the possession of slaves permitted a careless and merry way of life. Rough work was unknown to the greater part of the populace. They exercised their bodies and steeled their strength with warlike undertakings, hunting, practice with arms, and wrestling. Their mental intelligence was directed to higher things through religious customs and soothsayers, and developed rapidly by means of the merry association of the nobility, frequent consultations about public affairs, and mutual military expeditions; and, above all, by means of the poetical stories related by the bards, who put into pleasant form what all felt, and were the real teachers of a higher mental culture; and lastly by means of the elevating power of music.

The Greek, under his bright heaven, looked upon life in the kind sunlight of the upper world as a real life; but that of the lower regions seemed to him, even if he obtained the greatest honours, and reigned like Achilles “over the entire dead as king,” only a sombre picture as compared with the upper world: he loved life and did not throw it ostentatiously away, where there was no necessity. He did not look upon flying from a stronger foe as disgrace; swiftness of foot was regarded by him as a heroic merit, like cunning and a mighty arm.[d]

GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

If we endeavour to ascertain the extent of Homer’s geographical knowledge, we find ourselves almost confined to Greece and the Ægean. Beyond this circle all is foreign and obscure: and the looseness with which he describes the more distant regions, especially when contrasted with his accurate delineation of those which were familiar to him, indicates that as to the others he was mostly left to depend on vague rumours, which he might mould at his pleasure. In the catalogue indeed of the Trojan auxiliaries, which probably comprises all the information which the Greeks had acquired concerning that part of the world at the time it was composed, the names of several nations in the interior of Asia Minor are enumerated. The remotest are probably the Halizonians of Alyba, whose country may, as Strabo supposes, be that of the Chaldeans on the Euxine. On the southern side of the peninsula the Lycians appear as a very distant race, whose land is therefore a fit scene for fabulous adventures: on its confines are the haunts of the monstrous Chimæra, and the territory of the Amazons: farther eastward the mountains of the fierce Solymi, from which Poseidon, on his return from the Ethiopians, descries the bark of Ulysses sailing on the western sea. These Ethiopians are placed by the poet at the extremity of the earth; but as they are visited by Menelaus in the course of his wanderings, they must be supposed to reach across to the shores of the inner sea, and to border on the Phœnicians. Ulysses describes a voyage which he performed in five days, from Crete to Egypt: and the Taphians, though they inhabit the western side of Greece, are represented as engaged in piratical adventures on the coast of Phœnicia. But as to Egypt, it seems clear that the poet’s information was confined to what he had heard of a river Ægyptus, and a great city called Thebes.

On the western side of Europe, the compass of his knowledge seems to be bounded by a few points not very far distant from the coast of Greece. The northern part of the Adriatic he appears to have considered as a vast open sea. Farther westward, Sicily and the southern extremity of Italy are represented as the limits of all ordinary navigation. Beyond lies a vast sea, which spreads to the very confines of nature and space. Sicily itself, at least its more remote parts, is inhabited by various races of gigantic cannibals: whether, at the same time, any of the tribes who really preceded the Greeks in the occupation of the island were known to be settled on the eastern side, is not certain, though the Sicels and Sicania are mentioned in the Odyssey. Italy, as well as Greece, appears, according to the poet’s notions, to be bounded on the north by a formidable waste of waters.

When we proceed to inquire how the imagination of the people filled up the void of its experience, and determined the form of the unknown world, we find that the rudeness of its conceptions corresponds to the scantiness of its information. The part of the earth exposed to the beams of the sun was undoubtedly considered, not as a spherical, but as a plane surface, only varied by its heights and hollows; and, as little can it be doubted, that the form of this surface was determined by that of the visible horizon. The whole orb is girt by the ocean, not a larger sea, but a deep river, which, circulating with constant but gentle flux, separates the world of light and life from the realms of darkness, dreams, and death. No feature in the Homeric chart is more distinctly prominent than this: hence the divine artist terminates the shield of Achilles with a circular stripe, representing “the mighty strength of the river Ocean,” and all the epithets which the poet applies to it are such as belong exclusively to a river. Homer describes all the other rivers, all springs and wells, and the salt main itself, as issuing from the ocean stream, which might be supposed to feed them by subterraneous channels. Still it is very difficult to form a clear conception of this river, or to say how the poet supposed it to be bounded. Ulysses passes into it from the western sea; but whether the point at which he enters is a mouth or opening, or the two waters are only separated by an invisible line, admits of much doubt. On the farther side however is land: but a land of darkness, which the sun cannot pierce, a land of Cimmerians, the realm of Hades, inhabited by the shades of the departed, and by the family of dreams. As to the other dimensions of the earth, the poet affords us no information, and it would be difficult to decide whether a cylinder or a cone approaches nearest to the figure which he may have assigned to it: and as little does he intimate in what manner he conceives it to be supported. But within it was hollowed another vast receptacle for departed spirits, perhaps the proper abode of Hades. Beneath this, and as far below the earth as heaven was above it, lay the still more murky pit of Tartarus, secured by its iron gates and brazen floor, the dungeon reserved by Jupiter for his implacable enemies.

Some of the epithets which Homer applies to the heaven, seem to imply that he considered it as a solid vault of metal. But it is not necessary to construe these epithets so literally, nor to draw any such inference from his description of Atlas, who “holds the lofty pillars which keep earth and heaven asunder.” Yet it would seem, from the manner in which the height of heaven is compared with the depth of Tartarus, that the region of light was thought to have certain bounds. The summit of the Thessalian Olympus was regarded as the highest point on the earth, and it is not always carefully distinguished from the aerian regions above. The idea of a seat of the gods,--perhaps derived from a more ancient tradition, in which it was not attached to any geographical site,--seems to be indistinctly blended in the poet’s mind with that of a real mountain. Hence Hephæstus, when hurled from the threshold of Jupiter’s palace, falls “from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve,” before he drops on Lemnos; and Jupiter speaks of suspending the earth by a chain from the top of Olympus.

NAVIGATION AND ASTRONOMY

A wider compass of geographical knowledge, and more enlarged views of nature, would scarcely have been consistent with the state of navigation and commerce which the Homeric poems represent. The poet expresses the common feelings of an age when the voyages of the Greeks were mostly confined to the Ægean. The vessels of the heroes, and probably of the poet’s contemporaries, were slender half-decked boats: according to the calculation of Thucydides, who seems to suspect exaggeration, the largest contained one hundred and twenty men, the greatest number of rowers mentioned in the catalogue: but we find twenty rowers spoken of as a usual complement of a good ship. The mast was movable, and was only hoisted to take advantage of a fair wind, and at the end of a day’s voyage was again deposited in its appropriate receptacle. In the day-time, the Greek mariner commonly followed the windings of the coasts, or shot across from headland to headland, or from isle to isle: at night his vessel was usually put into port, or hauled up on the beach; for though on clear nights he might prosecute his voyage as well as by day, yet should the sky be overcast his course was inevitably lost. Engagements at sea are never mentioned by Homer, though he so frequently alludes to piratical excursions. They were probably of rare occurrence: but as they must sometimes have been inevitable, the galleys were provided with long poles for such occasions. The approach of winter put a stop to all ordinary navigation. Hesiod fixes the time for laying up the merchant ship, covering it with stones, taking out the rigging, and hanging the rudder up by the fire. According to him, the fair season lasts only fifty days: some indeed venture earlier to sea, but a prudent man will not then trust his substance to the waves.

The practical astronomy of the early Greeks consisted of a few observations on the heavenly bodies, the appearances of which were most conspicuously connected with the common occupations of life. The succession of light and darkness, the recurring phases of the moon, and the vicissitude of the seasons, presented three regular periods of time, which, though all equally forced on the attention, were not all marked with equal distinctness by sensible limits. From the first, and down to the age of Solon, the Greeks seem to have measured their months in the natural way, by the interval between one appearance of the new moon and the next. Hence, their months were of unequal duration; yet they might be described in round numbers as consisting of thirty days. It was soon observed that the revolutions of the moon were far from affording an exact measure of the apparent annual revolution of the sun, and that if this were taken to be equal to twelve of the former, the seasons would pass in succession through all the months of the year. This in itself would have been no evil, and would have occasioned no disturbance in the business of life. Seen under the Greek sky, the stars were scarcely less conspicuous objects than the moon itself: some of the most striking groups were early observed and named, and served, by their risings and settings, to regulate the labours of the husbandman and the adventures of the seaman.

COMMERCE AND THE ARTS

Commerce appears in Homer’s descriptions to be familiar enough to the Greeks of the heroic age, but not to be held in great esteem. Yet in the Odyssey we find the goddess, who assumes the person of a Taphian chief, professing that she is on her way to Temesa with a cargo of iron to be exchanged for copper: and in the Iliad, Jason’s son, the prince of Lemnos, appears to carry on an active traffic with the Greeks before Troy. He sends a number of ships freighted with wine, for which the purchasers pay, some in copper, some in iron, some in hides, some in cattle, some in slaves. Of the use of money the poet gives no hint, either in this description or elsewhere. He speaks of the precious metals only as commodities, the value of which was in all cases determined by weight. The Odyssey represents Phœnician traders as regularly frequenting the Greek ports; but as Phœnician slaves are sometimes brought to Greece, so the Phœnicians do not scruple, even where they are received as friendly merchants, to carry away Greek children into slavery.

The general impression which the Homeric pictures of society leave on the reader is, that many of the useful arts,--that is, those subservient to the animal wants or enjoyments of life,--had already reached such a stage of refinement as enabled the affluent to live, not merely in rude plenty, but in a considerable degree of luxury and splendour. The dwellings, furniture, clothing, armour, and other such property of the chiefs, are commonly described as magnificent, costly, and elegant, both as to the materials and workmanship. We are struck, not only by the apparent profusion of the precious metals and other rare and dazzling objects in the houses of the great, but by the skill and ingenuity which seem to be exerted in working them up into convenient and graceful forms. Great caution, however, is evidently necessary in drawing inferences from these descriptions as to the state of the arts in the heroic ages. The poet has treasures at his disposal which, as they cost him nothing, he may scatter with an unsparing hand. The shield made by Hephæstus for Achilles cannot be considered as a specimen of the progress of art, since it is not only the work of a god, but is fabricated on an extraordinary occasion, to excite the admiration of men. It is clear that the poet attributes a superiority to several Eastern nations, more especially to the Phœnicians, not only in wealth, but in knowledge and skill, that, compared with their progress, the arts of Greece seem to be in their infancy. The description of a Phœnician vessel, which comes to a Greek island freighted with trinkets, and of the manner in which a lady of the highest rank, and her servants, handle and gaze on one of the foreign ornaments, present the image of such a commerce as Europeans carry on with the islanders of the South Sea. It looks as if articles of this kind, at least, were eagerly coveted, and that there were no means of procuring them at home.

It is possible that Homer’s pictures of the heroic style of living may be too highly coloured, but there is reason to believe that they were drawn from the life. He may have been somewhat too lavish of the precious metals; but some of the others, particularly copper, were perhaps more abundant than in later times; beside copper and iron, we find steel and tin, which the Phœnicians appear already to have brought from the west of Europe, frequently mentioned. There can be no doubt that the industry of the Greeks had long been employed on these materials. We may therefore readily believe that, even in the heroic times, the works of Greek artisans already bore the stamp of the national genius. In some important points, the truth of Homer’s descriptions has been confirmed by monuments, brought to light within our own memory, of an architecture which was most probably contemporary with the events which he celebrated. The remains of Mycenæ and other ancient cities seem sufficiently to attest the fidelity with which he has represented the general character of that magnificence which the heroic chieftains loved to display. On the other hand, the same poems afford several strong indications that, though in the age which they describe such arts were, perhaps, rapidly advancing, they cannot then have been so long familiar to the Greeks as to be very commonly practised; and that a skilful artificer was rarely found, and was consequently viewed with great admiration, and occupied a high rank in society. Thus, the craft of the carpenter appears to be exceedingly honourable. He is classed with the soothsayer, the physician, and the bard, and like them is frequently sent for from a distance. The son of a person eminent in this craft is not mixed with the crowd on the field of battle, but comes forward among the most distinguished warriors. And as in itself it seems to confer a sort of nobility, so it is practised by the most illustrious chiefs. Ulysses is represented as a very skilful carpenter. He not only builds the boat in which he leaves the island of Calypso, but in his own palace carves a singular bedstead out of the trunk of a tree, which he inlays with gold, silver, and ivory. Another chief, Epeus, was celebrated as the builder of the wooden horse in which the heroes were concealed at the taking of Troy. The goddess Athene was held to preside over this, as over all manual arts, and to favour those who excelled in it with her inspiring counsels.

The chances of war give occasion, as might be expected, for frequent allusions to the healing art. The Greek army contains two chiefs who have inherited consummate skill in this art from their father Æsculapius; and Achilles has been so well instructed in it by Chiron, that Patroclus, to whom he has imparted his knowledge, is able to supply their place. But the processes described in this and other cases show that these might often be the least danger from the treatment of the most unpractised hands. The operation of extracting a weapon from the wound, with a knife, seems not to have been considered as one which demanded peculiar skill; the science of the physician was chiefly displayed in the application of medicinal herbs, by which he stanched the blood, and eased the pain. When Ulysses has been gored by a wild boar, his friends first bind up the hurt, and then use a charm for stopping the flow of blood. The healing art, such as it was, was frequently and successfully practised by the women.

We have already seen that several of the arts which originally ministered only to physical wants, had been so far refined before the time of Homer, that their productions gratified the sense of beauty, and served for ornament as well as for use. Hence our curiosity is awakened to inquire to what extent those arts, which became in later times the highest glory of Greece, in which she yet stands unrivalled, were cultivated in the same period. Unfortunately, the information which the poet affords on this subject is so scanty and obscure, as to leave room on many points for a wide difference of opinion. If we begin with his own art, of which his own poetry is the most ancient specimen extant, we find several hints of its earlier condition. It was held in the highest honour among the heroes. The bard is one of those persons whom men send for to very distant parts; his presence is welcome at every feast; it seems as if one was attached to the service of every great family, and treated with an almost religious respect; Agamemnon, when he sets out on the expedition to Troy, reposes the most important of all trusts in the bard whom he leaves at home. It would even seem as if poetry and music were thought fit to form part of a princely education; for Achilles is found amusing himself with singing, while he touches the same instrument with which the bards constantly accompany their strains. The general character of this heroic poetry is also distinctly marked; it is of the narrative kind, and its subjects are drawn from the exploits or adventures of renowned men. Each song is described as a short extemporaneous effusion, but yet seems to have been rounded into a little whole, such as to satisfy the hearer’s immediate curiosity.

The Graphic Arts

An interesting and difficult question presents itself, as to the degree in which Homer and his contemporaries were conversant with the imitative arts, and particularly with representations of the human form. We find such representations, on a small scale, frequently described. The garment woven by Helen contained a number of battle scenes; as one presented by Penelope to Ulysses was embroidered with a picture of a chase, wrought with gold threads. The shield of Achilles was divided into compartments exhibiting many complicated groups of figures: and though this was a masterpiece of Hephæstus, it would lead us to believe that the poet must have seen many less elaborate and difficult works of a like nature. But throughout the Homeric poems there occurs only one distinct allusion to a statue, as a work of human art. The robe which the Trojan queen offers to Athene in her temple, is placed by the priestess on the knees of the goddess, who was therefore represented in a sitting posture. Even this, it may be said, proves nothing as to the Greeks. They can only be admitted as additional indications that the poet was not a stranger to such objects.

To pictures, or the art of painting, properly so called, the poet makes no allusion, though he speaks of the colouring of ivory, as an art in which the Carian and Mæonian women excelled. It must, however, be considered that there is only one passage in which he expressly mentions any kind of delineation, and there in a very obscure manner, though he has described so many works which imply a previous design.[c]

THE ART OF WAR

The art of war is among the arts of necessity, which all people, the rudest equally and the most polished, must cultivate, or ruin will follow the neglect. The circumstances of Greece were in some respects peculiarly favourable to the improvement of this art. Divided into little states, the capital of each, with the greater part of the territory, generally within a day’s march of several neighbouring states which might be enemies and seldom were thoroughly to be trusted as friends, while from the establishment of slavery arose everywhere perpetual danger of a domestic foe, it was of peculiar necessity both for every individual to be a soldier, and for the community to pay unremitting attention to military affairs. Accordingly we find that so early as Homer’s time the Greeks had improved considerably upon that tumultuary warfare alone known to many barbarous nations, who yet have prided themselves in the practice of war for successive centuries. Several terms used by the poet, together with his descriptions of marches, indicate that orders of battle were in his time regularly formed in rank and file. Steadiness in the soldier, that foundation of all those powers which distinguish an army from a mob, and which to this day forms the highest praise of the best troops, we find in great perfection in the Iliad. “The Grecian phalanges,” says the poet, “marched in close order, the leaders directing each his own band. The rest were mute: insomuch that you would say in so great a multitude there was no voice. Such was the silence with which they respectfully watched for the word of command from their officers.”

Considering the deficiency of iron, the Grecian troops appear to have been very well armed both for offence and defence. Their defensive armour consisted of a helmet, a breastplate, and greaves, all of brass, and a shield, commonly of bull’s hide, but often strengthened with brass. The breastplate appears to have met the belt, which was a considerable defence to the belly and groin, and with an appendant skirt guarded also the thighs. All together covered the forepart of the soldier from the throat to the ankle; and the shield was a superadded protection for every part. The bulk of the Grecian troops were infantry thus heavily armed, and formed in close order many ranks deep. Any body formed in ranks and files, close and deep, without regard to a specific number of either ranks or files, was generally termed a phalanx. But the Locrians, under Oïlean Ajax, were all light-armed: bows were their principal weapons; and they never engaged in close fight.

Riding on horseback was yet little practised, though it appears to have been not unknown. Some centuries, however, passed before it was generally applied in Greece to military purposes; the mountainous ruggedness of the country preventing any extensive use of cavalry, except among the Thessalians, whose territory was a large plain. But in the Homeric armies no chief was without his chariot, drawn generally by two, sometimes by three horses; and these chariots of war make a principal figure in Homer’s battles. Nestor, forming the army for action, composes the first line of chariots only. In the second he places that part of the infantry in which he has least confidence; and then forms a third line, or reserve, of the most approved troops. It seems extraordinary that chariots should have been so extensively used in war as we find they were in the early ages. In the wide plains of Asia, indeed, we may account for their introduction, as we may give them credit for utility: but how they should become so general among the inhabitants of rocky, mountainous Greece, how the distant Britons should arrive at that surprising perfection in the use of them which they possessed when the Roman legions first invaded this island, especially as the same mode of fighting was little if at all practised among the Gauls and Germans, is less obvious to conjecture.

The combat of the chiefs, so repeatedly described by Homer, advancing to engage singly in front of their line of battle, is apt to strike a modern reader with an appearance of absurdity perhaps much beyond the reality. Before the use of fire-arms, that practice was not uncommon when the art of war was at its greatest perfection. In Cæsar’s Commentaries we have a very particular account of an advanced combat, in which, not generals indeed, but two centurions of his army engaged. The Grecian chiefs of the heroic age, like the knights of the times of chivalry, had armour apparently very superior to that of the common soldiers; which, with the skill acquired by assiduous practice amid unbounded leisure, might enable them to obviate much of the seeming danger of such skirmishes. Nor might the effect be unimportant. Like the sharp-shooters of modern days, a few men of superior strength, activity, and skill, superior also by the excellence of their defensive armour, might prepare a victory by creating disorder in the close array of the enemy’s phalanx. They threw their weighty javelins from a distance, while none dared advance to meet them but chiefs equally well-armed with themselves: and from the soldiers in the ranks they had little to fear; because, in that close order, the dart could not be thrown with any advantage. Occasionally, indeed, we find some person of inferior name advancing to throw his javelin at a chief occupied against some other, but retreating again immediately into the ranks: a resource not disdained by the greatest heroes when danger pressed. Hector himself, having thrown his javelin ineffectually at Ajax, retires toward his phalanx, but is overtaken by a stone of enormous weight, which brings him to the ground. If from the death or wounds of chiefs, or slaughter in the foremost rank of soldiers, any confusion arose in the phalanx, the shock of the enemy’s phalanx, advancing in perfect order, must be irresistible.

Another practice common in Homer’s time is by no means equally defensible, but on the contrary marks great barbarism; that of stopping in the heat of action to strip the slain. Often this paltry passion for possessing the spoil of the enemy superseded all other, even the most important and most deeply interesting objects of battle. The poet himself was not unaware of the danger and inconveniency of the practice, and seems even to have aimed at a reformation of it. We find indeed in Homer’s warfare a remarkable mixture of barbarism with regularity. Though the art of forming an army in phalanx was known and commonly practised, yet the business of a general, in directing its operations, was lost in the passion, or we may call it fashion, of the great men to signalise themselves by acts of personal courage and skill in arms. Achilles and Hector, the first heroes of the Iliad, excel only in the character of fighting soldiers: as generals and directors of the war, they are inferior to many. Excepting indeed in the single circumstance of forming the army in order of battle, so far from the general, we scarcely ever discover even the officer among Homer’s heroes. It is not till most of the principal Grecian leaders are disabled for the duty of soldiers that at length they so far take upon themselves that of officers as to endeavour to restore order among their broken phalanges.

We might, however, yet more wonder at another deficiency in Homer’s art of war, were it not still universal throughout those rich and populous countries where mankind was first civilised. Even among the Turks, who, far as they have spread over the finest part of Europe, retain pertinaciously every defect of their ancient Asiatic customs, the easy and apparently obvious precaution of posting and relieving sentries, so essential to the safety of armies, has never obtained. When, in the ill turn of the Grecian affairs, constant readiness for defence became more especially necessary, it is mentioned as an instance of soldiership in the active Diomedes, that he slept on his arms without his tent: but no kind of watch was kept; all his men were at the same time asleep around him: and the other leaders were yet less prepared against surprise. A guard indeed selected from the army was set, in the manner of a modern grand-guard or out-post; but though commanded by two officers high both in rank and reputation, yet the commander-in-chief expresses his fear that, overcome with fatigue, the whole might fall asleep and totally forget their duty. The Trojans, who at the same time, after their success, slept on the field of battle, had no guard appointed by authority, but depended wholly upon the interest which every one had in preventing a surprise; “They exhorted one another to be watchful,” says the poet. But the allies all slept; and he subjoins the reason, “For they had no children or wives at hand.” However, though Homer does not expressly blame the defect, or propose a remedy, yet he gives, in the surprise of Rhesus, an instance of the disasters to which armies are exposed by intermission of watching, that might admonish his fellow-countrymen to improve their practice.

The Greeks, and equally the Trojans and their allies, encamped with great regularity; and fortified, if in danger of an attack from a superior enemy. Indeed Homer ascribes no superiority in the art of war, or even in personal courage, to his fellow-countrymen. Even those inland Asiatics, afterwards so unwarlike, are put by him upon a level with the bravest people. Tents, like those now in use, seem to have been a late invention. The ancients, on desultory expeditions, and in marching through a country, slept with no shelter but their cloaks; as our light troops often carry none but a blanket--a practice which Bonaparte extended to his whole army, thereby providing a speedy and miserable death for thousands in his retreat from Russia. When the ancients remained long on a spot they hutted. Achilles’ tent or hut was built of fir, and thatched with reeds; and it seems to have had several apartments.[h]

TREATMENT OF ORPHANS, CRIMINALS, AND SLAVES

There are two special veins of estimable sentiment, on which it may be interesting to contrast heroic and historical Greece, and which exhibit the latter as an improvement on the former, not less in the affections than in the intellect.

The law of Athens was peculiarly watchful and provident with respect both to the persons and the property of orphan minors; but the description given in the Iliad of the utter and hopeless destitution of the orphan boy, despoiled of his paternal inheritance and abandoned by all the friends of his father, whom he urgently supplicates, and who all harshly cast him off, is one of the most pathetic morsels in the whole poem. In reference again to the treatment of the dead body of an enemy, we find all the Greek chiefs who come near (not to mention the conduct of Achilles himself) piercing with their spears the corpse of the slain Hector, while some of them even pass disgusting taunts upon it. We may add, from the lost epics, the mutilation of the dead bodies of Paris and Deiphobus by the hand of Menelaus. But at the time of the Persian invasion, it was regarded as unworthy of a right-minded Greek to maltreat in any way the dead body of an enemy, even where such a deed might seem to be justified on the plea of retaliation.

The different manner of dealing with homicide presents a third test, perhaps more striking yet, of the change in Grecian feelings and manners during the three centuries preceding the Persian invasion. That which the murderer in the Homeric times had to dread, was, not public prosecution and punishment, but the personal vengeance of the kinsmen and friends of the deceased, who were stimulated by the keenest impulses of honour and obligation to avenge the deed, and were considered by the public as specially privileged to do so. To escape from this danger, he is obliged to flee the country, unless he can prevail upon the incensed kinsmen to accept of a valuable payment (we must not speak of coined money, in the days of Homer) as satisfaction for their slain comrade. They may, if they please, decline the offer, and persist in their right of revenge; but if they accept, they are bound to leave the offender unmolested, and he accordingly remains at home without further consequences. The chiefs in agora do not seem to interfere, except to insure payment of the stipulated sum.

In historical Athens, this right of private revenge was discountenanced and put out of sight, even so early as the Draconian legislation, and at last restricted to a few extreme and special cases; while the murderer came to be considered, first as having sinned against the gods, next as having deeply injured the society, and thus at once as requiring absolution and deserving punishment. On the first of these two grounds, he is interdicted from the agora and from all holy places, as well as from public functions, even while yet untried and simply a suspected person; for if this were not done, the wrath of the gods would manifest itself in bad crops and other national calamities. On the second ground, he is tried before the council of Areopagus, and if found guilty, is condemned to death, or perhaps to disfranchisement and banishment. The idea of a propitiatory payment to the relatives of the deceased has ceased altogether to be admitted: it is the protection of society which dictates, and the force of society which inflicts, a measure of punishment calculated to deter for the future.

The society of legendary Greece includes, besides the chiefs, the general mass of freemen (λαοὶ), among whom stand out by special names certain professional men, such as the carpenter, the smith, the leather-dresser, the leech, the prophet, the bard, and the fisherman. We have no means of appreciating their condition. Though lots of arable land were assigned in special property to individuals, with boundaries both carefully marked and jealously watched, yet the larger proportion of surface was devoted to pasture. Cattle formed both the chief item in the substance of a wealthy man, the chief means of making payments, and the common ground of quarrels--bread and meat, in large quantities, being the constant food of every one. The estates of the owners were tilled, and their cattle tended, mostly by bought slaves, but to a certain degree also by poor freemen called thetes, working for hire and for stated periods. The principal slaves, who were entrusted with the care of large herds of oxen, swine, or goats, were of necessity men worthy of confidence, their duties placing them away from their master’s immediate eye. They had other slaves subordinate to them, and appear to have been well-treated: the deep and unshaken attachment of Eumæus the swineherd and Philœtius the neatherd to the family and affairs of the absent Ulysses, is among the most interesting points in the ancient epic. Slavery was a calamity, which in that period of insecurity might befall any one: the chief who conducted a freebooting expedition, if he succeeded, brought back with him a numerous troop of slaves, as many as he could seize--if he failed, became very likely a slave himself: so that the slave was often by birth of equal dignity with his master--Eumæus was himself the son of a chief, conveyed away when a child by his nurse, and sold by Phœnician kidnappers to Laertes. A slave of this character, if he conducted himself well, might often expect to be enfranchised by his master and placed in an independent holding.

On the whole, the slavery of legendary Greece does not present itself as existing under a peculiarly harsh form, especially if we consider that all the classes of society were then very much upon a level in point of taste, sentiment, and instruction. In the absence of legal security or an effective social sanction, it is probable that the condition of a slave under an average master, may have been as good as that of the free Thete. The class of slaves whose lot appears to have been the most pitiable were the females--more numerous than the males, and performing the principal work in the interior of the house. Not only do they seem to have been more harshly treated than the males, but they were charged with the hardest and most exhausting labour which the establishment of a Greek chief required; they brought in water from the spring, and turned by hand the house-mills, which ground the large quantity of flour consumed in his family. This oppressive task was performed generally by female slaves, in historical as well as in legendary Greece. Spinning and weaving was the constant occupation of women, whether free or slave, of every rank and station; all the garments worn both by men and women were fashioned at home, and Helen as well as Penelope is expert and assiduous at the occupation. The daughters of Celeus at Eleusis go to the well with their basins for water, and Nausicaa, daughter of Alcinous, joins her female slaves in the business of washing her garments in the river. If we are obliged to point out the fierceness and insecurity of an early society, we may at the same time note with pleasure its characteristic simplicity of manners: Rebecca, Rachel, and the daughters of Jethro, in the early Mosaic narrative, as well as the wife of the native Macedonian chief (with whom the Temenid Perdiccas, ancestor of Philip and Alexander, first took service on retiring from Argos), baking her own cakes on the hearth, exhibit a parallel in this respect to the Homeric pictures.

We obtain no particulars respecting either the common freemen generally, or the particular class of them called thetes. These latter, engaged for special jobs, or at the harvest and other busy seasons of field labour, seem to have given their labour in exchange for board and clothing: they are mentioned in the same line with the slaves, and were (as has been just observed) probably on the whole little better off. The condition of a poor freeman in those days, without a lot of land of his own, going about from one temporary job to another, and having no powerful family and no social authority to look up to for protection, must have been sufficiently miserable. When Eumæus indulged his expectation of being manumitted by his masters, he thought at the same time that they would give him a wife, a house, and a lot of land near to themselves; without which collateral advantages simple manumission might perhaps have been no improvement in his condition. To be thete in the service of a very poor farmer is selected by Achilles as the maximum of human hardship.[b]

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

The Trojan war gives a great shock to Greece and hurls it for the first time against Asia. Herodotus saw very well in this war, still mixed with fables, but certain in its principal events and in its issue, the first act of this long struggle between Greece and Asia, which will have for end the expedition of Alexander.

The Eastern armies are richer, the habits more slack, the spirit less active and less enterprising. Greece already lived its own life, it was conscious of itself and practised in its own centre that military and intellectual activity of which the Trojan War was the first development.

Marriage is no longer, as in the East, a sale, where the woman is considered as a thing; an exchange of presents between the two families seems to indicate a certain equality between the husband and wife. The legitimate wife, in this society where the scourge of polygamy has not passed, has a dignity and influence unknown in Greece. Penelope is the companion of Ulysses. The nobleness of her sorrow, her authority, are signs of the new destiny of women. The wife of Alcinous rules the domestic affairs. Helen herself, after her return to family life, will come and sit down, free and respected by the hearth of her spouse. Lastly, Andromache is the true companion of Hector, and seems worthy of sharing in all his fortune. But the woman is still far from being the equal of man. Favourite slaves frequently take from her her influence, and slavery, which the chances of war can bring down on the noblest, vilifies her at every instant. That tripod, given to a victor in a contest, is worth twelve oxen. We see the princes Iphitus and Ulysses, labourers and shepherds, Anchises, who is shepherd and hunter. The shield of Achilles shows us a king harvesting. Neleus gives his daughter in marriage for a flock; Andromache herself takes care of Hector’s horses; and Nausicaa, at a later and more civilised period than the Odyssey, is depicted to us washing the linen of the royal family.

The guest almost makes part of the family; it is the gods who send him, a touching and wholesome belief in that time of brigandage and of difficult communications. You are going to spurn this guest; take care! perhaps it is Jupiter himself. How many times have the gods not come thus to try mortals? Also hospitality formed a sacred link which united, in the most distant tribes, those who had received it to those who had given it. This gave rise to duties of gratitude and friendship that nothing could efface, and which kept their sway even to the encounters on the battle-field. Glaucus and Diomedes met in the midst of the conflict and exchanged weapons, which they would have a horror of staining with the blood of a guest. It is not in vain that Hercules and Theseus travelled over Greece, punishing the violators of hospitality. There were no castes in the Grecian society, but slavery from the most ancient times, with the right of life and death for sanction. War was the most ordinary cause of servitude. The enemy spared became the slave of the victor; it is thus that Briseis fell to the power of Achilles. There was no town taken without slaves, and the inhabitants formed part of the booty. Hector predicted slavery for his wife and his sons, and depicts Andromache as fetching water from the fountain, and spinning wool in the house of a Greek. The carrying off of children by pirates, who made a regular trade of them, already maintained slavery; it is thus that Eumæus was sold at Ithaca. This custom of taking away children from the inhabitants of the coasts, lasted as long as the ancient world. The Greek comedy, and after it Roman comedy, made of this carrying off the most ordinary source of their intrigues. But if servitude was already rooted in Greek civilisation, it was at least then singularly softened by the simplicity of the customs, and above all by the rural and agricultural life, which brought together in common works master and slave.

Poetry was already a fashion in these rising societies, and in the middle of these hard wars the pleasures of the mind had their place. The warriors, seated in circles, listened with an eagerness, full of patience, to the interminable recitals of the ædes or singers. Competitions of music and religious poetry are already instituted in the small towns, which call the rising art to their ceremonies. These poetries were sung with the accompaniment of the lyre, and there was no king who had not his singer. Agamemnon treated his with honour, and in leaving, entrusted to him his wife and his treasures. This religious and heroic poetry preceded Homer, who found established rules and fixed types. As to the beauty of this primitive poetry, it must be judged by the immortal creations of its most illustrious representative. Certainly there were not many Homers, but he was not the only poet, and the imposing simplicity of his poetry could not be a unique fact in this age of chanted legends. Art and sciences were in infancy, but the curiosity and admiration that the poets testify for the still imperfect work of the artists, and for the fabulous tales of travellers, remind us that we see at its beginning the most industrious and the most inventive race of antiquity.[i]

FOOTNOTES

[6] [This estimate must not be taken too literally. The “Heroic Age” is more a racial memory than a chronological epoch.]

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