Uniform with this Volume

THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME:

A Survey of Roman Culture and Civilisation. By J. C. Stobart, M.A. With about 200 Illustrations in Colour, Gravure, Collotype, Half-tone and Line.

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 1912.

An Illustrated Prospectus will be published in due course.

THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE

Aphrodite of Melos

Mansell & Co. Photo. Emory Walker Ph

THE GLORY THAT WAS
GREECE

A Survey of Hellenic Culture
& Civilisation: by
J. C. Stobart, M.A.
LATE LECTURER IN HISTORY
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

LONDON
SIDGWICK & JACKSON LTD.
3 Adam Street, Adelphi
1911
All rights reserved
Printed by
BALLANTYNE & COMPANY LTD
AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
Tavistock Street Covent Garden
London

PREFACE

With the progress of research, classical scholarship tends more and more towards narrower fields of specialisation. Real students are now like miners working underground each in his own shaft, buried far away from sight or ear-shot of the public, so that they even begin to lose touch with one another. This makes an occasional survey of the whole field of operations not only necessary for interested onlookers, whether they happen to be shareholders or not, but also serviceable to the scholars themselves. The task of furnishing it, however, is not an easy one. No man nowadays can be as fully equipped in archæology, history, and literary criticism as were great writers of general history in the last century like George Grote and Theodor Mommsen. We are driven, therefore, to one of two courses: either to compile encyclopædic works by various writers under slight editorial control, or else to sacrifice detail and attempt in a much less ambitious spirit to present a panorama of the whole territory from an individual point of view. The former plan is constantly producing valuable storehouses of information to be used for purposes of reference. But they tend to grow in bulk and compression, until, like the monumental “Paully-Wissowa,” they are nothing but colossal dictionaries.

The writer who attempts the second plan will, of course, be inviting criticism at a thousand points. He is compelled to deal in large generalisations, and to tread upon innumerable toes with every step he takes. Every fact he chronicles is the subject of a monograph, every opinion he hazards may run counter to somebody’s life-work. He will often have to neglect the latest theory and sometimes he is unaware of the latest discovery. The best that he can hope for is that his archæology may satisfy the historians and his history the archæologists. My only claim to the right of undertaking such a task is that circumstances have so directed my studies that they have been almost equally divided between the three main branches—archæology, history, and literature. I have experienced the extraordinary sense of illumination which one feels on turning from linguistic study to the examination of objective antiquity on the actual soil of the classical countries, and then the added interest with which realities are invested by the literary records of history.

It is by another title that the writer of a book like this makes his appeal to the general reading public. He must feel such a love of Greece and of things Hellenic that he is led by it into missionary enthusiasm. The Greek language has now, probably for ever, lost its place in the curriculum of secondary education for the greater part of our people. Whether this is to be deplored is beyond the question; it is, at any rate, inevitable. But there has always been a genuinely cultivated public to whom Greek was unknown, and it is undoubtedly very much larger in this generation. To them, though Greek is unknown Greece need not be wholly sealed. But their point of view will be different from that of the professional philologist. They will not care for the details of the siege of Platæa merely because Thucydides described it; they will be much less likely to overrate the importance of that narrow strip of time which scholars select out of Greek history as the “classical period.” Greek art will make the strongest appeal to them, and Greek thought, so far as it can be communicated by description. They will be interested in social life and private antiquities rather than in diplomatic intrigues and constitutional subtleties. My object is to present a general and vivid picture of ancient Greek culture. I recognise that the brush and camera will tell of the glory of Greece far more eloquently than I can. My text is intended to explain the pictures by showing the sort of people and the state of mind that produced them. Some history, some politics, some religion and philosophy must be included for that purpose. The result will be a history of Greece with statues and poems taking the place of wars and treaties.

This volume is fortunate in the moment of its appearance, for it is now possible for the first time to illustrate the prehistoric culture of Greece in a worthy manner, and to attempt, at any rate, to link it up historically with the classical periods. Both the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and the British Museum have recently added to their collections magnificent and faithful models of the artistic treasures of Crete and Mycenæ. These I have been allowed to reproduce in colour (Plates 5 and 7) by kind permission of Sir A. J. Evans. I must also acknowledge my obligation to the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass., U.S.A., for permission to reproduce photographs of the lately discovered reliefs from the “Ludovisi Throne,” which have not as yet been adequately reproduced anywhere (Plate [32]); to the Committee of the British School at Athens, through the kind offices of the Secretary, Mr. John Penoyre, for permission to use many of the illustrations of Cretan objects that have appeared in their Annual; to Mr. John Murray, for the use of the block representing the “Cupbearer Fresco” (Plate [6]) and the illustration on p. 27 from Schliemann’s “Tiryns”; to the Cambridge University Press for a similar accommodation in respect of the illustration (p. 37) from Professor Ridgeway’s “Early Age of Greece”; and to M. Ernest Leroux, of Paris, for courteously permitting a reproduction to be made from a plate in MM. Reinach and Hamdy Bey’s sumptuous work, “Une Nécropole Royale à Sidon.” The authorities of the Greek and Roman and of the Coin and Medal Departments of the British Museum have also allowed many subjects to be reproduced; while I have gratefully to record the fact that the task of illustrating this book has been materially lightened by the co-operation of Messrs. W. A. Mansell & Co. I must thank Mr. Robert Whitelaw and his publishers, Messrs. Longmans, for permission to quote from the former’s translation of Sophocles, and finally I must acknowledge my debt to Mr. Arnold Gomme for much assistance in the correction of the proofs of this book.

J. C. S.

Mycenæan Gems ([see p. 23])

CONTENTS

NOTE
The cameo on the front cover of this volume is from a
jasper intaglio, at Vienna, of the bust of Athena
Parthenos, signed by Aspasios.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

INTRODUCTION

αἰ δὲ τεαὶ ξώουσιν ἀηδόνες ᾖσιν ὁ πάντων
ἁρπακτὴρ Ἀῒδης οὐκ ἐπὶ χεῖρα βαλεῖ
Callimachus.

“Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.”

Hellenism

REECE” and “Greek” mean different things to different people. To the man in the street, if he exists, they stand for something proverbially remote and obscure, as dead as Queen Anne, as heavy as the British Museum. To the average finished product of Higher Education in England they recall those dog-eared text-books and grammars which he put away with much relief when he left school; they waft back to him the strangely close atmosphere of the classical form-room. The historian, of course, will inform us that all Western civilisation has Greece for its mother and nurse, and that unless we know something about her our knowledge of the past must be built upon sand. That is true: only nobody cares very much what historians say, for they deal with the past, and the past is dead and disgusting. To some cultured folk who have read Swinburne (but not Plato) the notion of the Greeks presents a world of happy pagans, children of nature, without any tiresome ideas of morality or self-control, sometimes making pretty poems and statues, but generally basking in the sun without much on. There are also countless earnest students of the Bible who remember what St. Paul said about those Greeks who thought the Cross foolishness and those Athenians who were always wanting to hear something new. St. Paul forgot that “the Cross” was a typical Stoic paradox. Then there are a vast number of people who do not distinguish between “Greek” and “classical.” By “classics” they understand certain tyrannous conventions and stilted affectations against which every free-minded soul longs to rebel. They distinguish the classical element in Milton and Keats as responsible for all that is dull and far-fetched and unnatural. Classicism repels many people of excellent taste, and Greek art is apt to fall under the same condemnation. It is only in the last generation that scholars have been able to distinguish between the true Greek and the false mist of classicism which surrounds it. Till then everybody had to look at the Greeks through Roman and Renaissance spectacles, confounding Pallas with Minerva and thinking of Greek art as represented by the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön. We are now able, thanks to the labours of scholars and archæologists, to see the Greeks as they were, perfectly direct, simple, natural, and reasonable, quite as antagonistic to classicism as Manet and Debussy themselves.

Lastly, there are a few elderly people who have survived the atmosphere of “the classics,” and yet cherish the idea of Greece as something almost holy in its tremendous power of inspiration. These are the people who are actually pleased when a fragment of Menander is unearthed in an Egyptian rubbish-heap, or a fisherman fishing for sponges off Cape Matapan finds entangled in his net three-quarters of a bronze idol. And they are not all schoolmasters either. Some of them spend their time and money in digging the soil of Greece under a blazing Mediterranean sun. Some of them haunt the auction-rooms and run up a fragment of pottery, or a marble head without a nose, to figures that seem quite absurd when you look at the shabby clothes of the bidders. They talk of Greece as if it were in the same latitude as Heaven, not Naples. The strange thing about them is that though they evidently feel the love of old Greece burning like a flame in their hearts, they find their ideas on the subject quite incommunicable. Let us hope they end their days peacefully in retreats with classical façades, like the Bethlehem Hospital.

Admitting something of this weakness, it is my aim here to try and throw some fresh light upon the secret of that people’s greatness, and to look at the Greeks not as the defunct producers of antique curios, but, if I can, as Keats looked at them, believing what he said of Beauty, that

“It will never
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

It cannot be done by studying their history only. Their history must be full of battles, in which they were only moderately great, and petty quarrels, to which they were immoderately prone. Their literature, which presents the greatest bulk of varied excellence of any literature in the world, must be considered. But as it can only reach us through the watery medium of translation we must supplement it by studying also their statues and temples, their coins, vases, and pictures. Even that will not be sufficient for people who are not artists, because the sensible Philistine part of the world knows, as the Greeks knew, that a man may draw and fiddle and be a scoundrel. Therefore we must look also at their laws and governments, their ceremonies and amusements, their philosophy and religion, to see whether they knew how to live like gentlemen and freemen. If we can keep our eyes open to all these sides of their activity and watch them in the germ and bud, we ought to get near to understanding their power as a living source of inspiration to artists and thinkers. Lovers of the classics are very apt to remind us of the Renaissance as testifying the power of Greek thought to awaken and inspire men’s minds. Historically they are right, for it is a fact which ought to be emphasised. But when they go on to argue that if we forget the classics we ourselves shall need a fresh Renaissance they are making a prophecy which seems to me to be very doubtful. I believe that our art and literature has by this time absorbed and assimilated what Greece had to teach, and that our roots are so entwined with the soil of Greek culture that we can never lose the taste of it as long as books are read and pictures painted. We are, in fact, living on the legacy of Greece, and we may, if we please, forget the testatrix.

My claim for the study of Hellenism would not be founded on history. I would urge the need of constant reference to some fixed canon in matters of taste, some standard of the beautiful which shall be beyond question or criticism; all the more because we are living in eager, restless times of constant experiment and veering fashions. Whatever may be the philosophical basis of æsthetics, it is undeniable that a large part of our idea of beauty rests upon habit. Hellas provides a thousand objects which seventy-five generations of people have agreed to call beautiful and which no person outside a madhouse has ever thought ugly. The proper use of true classics is not to regard them as fetishes which must be slavishly worshipped, as the French dramatists worshipped the imaginary unities of Aristotle, but to keep them for a compass in the cross-currents of fashion. By them you may know what is permanent and essential from what is showy and exciting.

That Greek work is peculiarly suited to this purpose is partly due, no doubt, to the winnowing of centuries of time, but partly also to its own intrinsic qualities. For one thing, all the best Greek work was done, not to please private tastes, but in a serious spirit of religion to honour the god of the city; that prevents it from being trivial or meretricious. Secondly, it is not romantic; and that renders it a very desirable antidote to modern extravagances. Thirdly, it is idealistic; that gives it a force and permanence which things designed only for the pleasure of the moment must generally lack. With all these high merits, it might remain very dull, if it had not the charm and grace of youth perfectly fearless, and serving a religion which largely consisted in health and beauty.

The Land and its People

A glance at the physical map of Greece shows you the sort of country which forms the setting of our picture. You see its long and complicated coast-line, its intricate system of rugged hills, and the broken strings of islands which they fling off into the sea in every direction. On the map it recalls the features of Scotland or Norway. It hangs like a jewel on a pendant from the south of Europe into the Mediterranean Sea. Like its sister peninsulas of Italy and Spain it has high mountains to the north of it; but the Balkans do not, as do the Alps and Pyrenees, present the form of a sheer rampart against Northern invaders. On the contrary, the main axis of the hills lies in the same direction as the peninsula itself, with a north-west and south-east trend, so that on both coasts there are ancient trade routes into the country; but on both sides they have to traverse passes which offer a fair chance of easy defence.

The historian, wise after the event, deduces that the history of such a country must lie upon the sea. It is a sheltered, hospitable sea, with chains of islands like stepping-stones inviting the timid mariner of early times to venture across it. You can sail from Greece to Asia without ever losing sight of land. On the west it is not so. Greece and Italy turn their backs upon one another. Their neighbouring coasts are the harbourless ones. So Greece looks east and Italy west, in history as well as geography. The natural affinities of Greece are with Asia Minor and Egypt.

A sea-going people will be an adventurous people in thought as well as action. The Greeks themselves fully realised this. When Themistocles was urging his fellow-Athenians to build a great fleet and take to the sea in earnest, opposition came from the conservatives, who feared the political influence of a “nautical mob” with radical and impious tendencies. The type of solid conservative was the heavy-armed land soldier. So in Greek history the inland city of Sparta stands for tradition, discipline, and stability, while the mariners of Athens are progressive, turbulent, inquiring idealists.

This sea will also invite commerce if the Greeks have anything to sell. It does not look as if they will have much. A few valleys and small plains are fertile enough to feed their own proprietors, but as regards corn and food-stuffs Greece will have to be an importer, not an exporter. In history we find great issues hanging on the sea-routes by which corn came in from the Black Sea. Wine and olive oil are the only things that Nature allowed Greece to export. As for minerals, Athens is rich in her silver-mines, and gold is to be found in Thrace under Mount Pangæus. But if Greece is to grow rich it will have to be through the skill of her incomparable craftsmen and the shield and spear of her hoplites.[1]

The map will help to explain another feature of her history. Although at first sight the peninsula looks as if it possessed a geographical unity, yet a second glance shows that Nature has split it up into numberless small plains and valleys divided from one another by sea and mountain. Such a country, as we see in Wales, Switzerland, and Scotland, encourages a polity of clans and cantons, each jealous of its neighbour over the hill, and each cherishing a fierce local patriotism. Nature, moreover, has provided each plain with its natural citadel. Greece and Italy are both rich in these self-made fortresses. The traveller in Italy is familiar with the low hills or spurs of mountains, each crowned with the white walls of some ancient city. If ever geography made

FIG. 1. THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS

FIG. 2. THE CITADEL OF CORINTH

Plate I

English Photo Co., Athens

history, it was where those flat-topped hills with precipitous sides, such as the Acropolis of Athens and Acrocorinthus,[2] invited man to build his fortress and his shrine upon their summit. Then, perched safely on the hill-top and ringed with her wall, the city was able to develop her peculiar civilisation even in troubled times while the rest of the world was still immersed in warfare and barbarism. The farmer spends the summer in the plain below for sowing and reaping, the mariner puts out from harbour, the soldier marches out for a summer campaign, but the city is their home, their refuge, and the centre of their patriotism. We must not overrate the importance of this natural cause. Even the plains of Greece, such as Thessaly and Bœotia, never developed a unity. There too the citadel and the city-state prevailed. Geography is seldom more than a contributory cause, shaping and assisting historical tendencies, but in this case it is impossible to resist the belief that in Italy and Greece the hill-top invited the wall and the wall enabled the civilisation of the city-state to rise and flourish long in advance of the rest of Europe.

Greece enjoys a wonderful climate. The summer sun is hot, but morning and evening bring refreshing breezes from the sea. The rain average is low and regular, snow is almost unknown in the valleys. Hence there is a peculiar dry brightness in the atmosphere which seems to annihilate distance. The traveller is struck with the small scale of Greek geography. The Corinthian Gulf, for instance, which he remembers to have been the scene of famous sea-battles in history, looks as if you could throw a stone across it. From your hotel window in Athens you can see hill-tops in the heart of the Peloponnese. Doubtless this clearness of the atmosphere encouraged the use of colour and the plastic arts for outdoor decoration. Even to-day the ruined buildings of the Athenian citadel shine across to the eyes of the seafarers five miles away at the Peiræus. Time has mellowed their marble columns to a rich amber, but in old days they blazed with colour and gilding. In that radiant sea-air the Greeks of old learnt to see things clearly. They could live, as the Greeks still live, a simple, temperate life. Wine and bread, with a relish of olives or pickled fish, satisfied the bodily needs of the richest. The climate invited an open-air life, as it still does. To-day, as of old, the Greek loves to meet his neighbours in the market square and talk eternally over all things both in heaven and earth. Though the blood of Greece has suffered many admixtures, and though Greece has had to submit to centuries of conquest by many masters and oppressors, her racial character is little changed in some respects. The Greek is still restless, talkative, subtle and inquisitive, eager for liberty without the sense of discipline which liberty requires, contemptuous of strangers and jealous of his neighbour. In commerce, when he has the chance, his quick and supple brain still makes him the prince of traders. Honesty and stability have always been qualities which he is quicker to admire than to practise. Courage, national pride, intellectual self-restraint, and creative genius have undoubtedly suffered under the Turkish domination. But the friends of modern Greece believe that a few generations of liberty will restore these qualities which were so eminent in her ancestors and that her future may rival her past. Not in the field of action, perhaps. We must never forget, when we praise the artistic and intellectual genius of Greece, that she alone rolled back the tide of Persian conquest at Marathon and Salamis, or that Greek troops under Alexander marched victoriously over half the known world. But it is not in the field of action that her greatness lies. She won battles by superior discipline, superior strategy, and superior armour. As soon as she had to meet a race of born soldiers, in the Romans, she easily succumbed. Her methods of fighting were always defensive in the main. Historians have often gone astray in devoting too much attention to her wars and battles.

Plate II. OLYMPIA: VALLEY OF THE ALPHEUS

Alinari

The great defect of the climate of modern Greece is the malaria which haunts her plains and lowlands in early autumn. This is partly the effect and partly the cause of undrained and sparsely populated marsh-lands like those of Bœotia. It need not have been so in early Greek history. There must have been more agriculture and more trees in ancient than in modern Greece. An interesting and ingenious theory has lately been advanced which would trace the beginning of malaria in Greece to the fourth century. Its effect is seen in the loss of vigour which begins in that period and the rapid shrinkage of population which marks the beginning of the downfall in that and the succeeding century. In Italy the same theory has even better attestation, for the Roman Campagna which to-day lies desolate and fever-stricken was once the site of populous cities and the scene of agricultural activity.

The scenery of Greece is singularly impressive. Folded away among the hills there are, indeed, some lovely wooded valleys,[3] like Tempe, but in general it is a treeless country, and the eye enjoys, in summer at least, a pure harmony of brown hills with deep blue sea and sky. The sea is indigo, almost purple, and the traveller quickly sees the justice of Homer’s epithet of “wine-dark.” Those brown hills make a lovely background for the play of light and shade. Dawn and sunset touch them with warmer colours, and the plain of Attica is seen “violet-crowned” by the famous heights of Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes. The ancient Greek talked little of scenery, but he saw a nereid in every pool, a dryad under every oak, and heard the pipe of Pan in the caves of his limestone hills. He placed the choir of Muses on Mount Helicon, and, looking up to the snowy summit of Olympus, he peopled it with calm, benignant deities.

In this beautiful land lived the happy and glorious people whose culture we are now to study. Some modernists, indeed, smitten with the megalomania of to-day, profess to despise a history written on so small a scale. Truly Athens was a small state at the largest. Her little empire had a yearly revenue of about £100,000. It is doubtful whether Sparta ever had much more than ten thousand free citizens. In military matters, it must be confessed, the importance attached by historians to miniature fleets and pigmy armies, with a ridiculously small casualty list, does strike the reader with a sense of disproportion. But for the politician it is especially instructive to see his problems worked out upon a small scale, with the issues comparatively simple and the results plainly visible. The task of combining liberty with order is in essentials the same for a state of ten thousand citizens as for one of forty millions. And in the realms of philosophy and art considerations of size do not affect us, except to make us marvel that these tiny states could do so much.

To a great extent we may find the key to the Greek character in her favourite proverb, “No excess,” in which are expressed her favourite virtues of Aidōs and Sophrosune, reverence and self-restraint. “Know thyself” was the motto inscribed over her principal shrine. Know and rely upon thine own powers, know and regard thine own limitations. It was such a maxim as this which enabled the Greeks to reach their goal of perfection even in the sphere of art, where perfection is proverbially impossible. They were bold in prospecting and experimenting, until they found what they deemed to be the right way, and when they had found it they followed it through to its conclusion. Eccentricity they hated like poison. Though they were such great originators, they cared nothing for the modern fetish of originality.

In politics also they looked for a definite goal and travelled courageously along to find it. Herein they met with disastrous failures which are full of teaching for us. But they reached, it may be said, the utmost possibility of the city-state. The city-state was, as we have seen, probably evolved by natural survival from the physical conditions of the country. Being established, it entailed certain definite consequences. It involved a much closer bond of social union than any modern

Plate III. THE VALE OF TEMPE

English Photo Co., Athens

territorial state. Its citizens felt the unity and exclusiveness of a club or school. A much larger share of public rights and duties naturally fell upon them. They looked upon their city as a company of unlimited liability in which each individual citizen was a shareholder. They expected their city to feed and amuse them. They expected to divide the plunder when she made conquests, as they were certain to share the consequences if she was defeated. Every full citizen of proper age was naturally bound to fight personally in the ranks, and from that duty his rights as a citizen followed logically. He must naturally be consulted about peace and war, and must have a voice in foreign policy. Also, if he was to be a competent soldier he must undergo proper education and training for it. There will be little privacy inside the walls of a city-state; the arts and crafts will be under public patronage. Inequalities will become hatefully apparent.

But for us, an imperial people, who have inherited a vast and scattered dominion which somehow or other has got to be managed and governed, the chief interest will centre in the question of how these city-states acquired and administered their empires. Above all it is to Athens and perhaps Rome alone that we can look for historical answers to the great riddle for which we cannot yet boast of having discovered a solution—whether democracy can govern an empire.

In Greek history alone we have at least three examples of empires. Athens and Sparta both proceeded to acquire empire by the road of alliance and hegemony, Athens being naval and democratic, Sparta aristocratic and military. Both were despotic, and both failed disastrously for different reasons. Then we have the career of Alexander the Great and his short-lived but important empire, a career providing a type for Cæsar and Napoleon, an empire founded on mere conquest.

Lastly, on the same small canvas we have a momentous phase of the eternal and still-continuing conflict between East and West and their respective habits of civilisation. These pages will describe the aggression and repulse of the East.

I
ÆGEAN CIVILISATION

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona.
Horace.

A New Chapter of History

T is the misfortune of historians to be liable to attacks at both extremities. On the one hand time is continually adding postscripts to their “Finis,” and on the other hand the archæologist is constantly making them tear up and rewrite their first chapters. In Greek history especially the spade has proved mightier than the pen. We are now only certain that the first page of any Greek history written ten years ago must be defective; we are not yet quite sure what to put in its place. Any moment, it seems, the explorer may turn up something which will make a difference of a thousand years or so in our earliest chronology. There are in the Cretan museum scores of clay tablets inscribed with an unknown writing which only await an interpreter to confound and illuminate us all. Forty years ago eminent writers like Gladstone and Freeman were still looking to Homer for their ideas of the primitive European and his civilisation. Strange indeed were the results that followed. In politics we were to believe that the earliest Greeks settled their affairs at a public meeting where elders and princes made persuasive speeches, and radicalism, though not unknown, was sternly discouraged. A benevolent monarchy, hereditary in the male line, was supposed by Sir Henry Maine to be the form of government common to primitive Europe and modern England. Literature was believed to have begun with elaborate epic poems written in hexameters of exquisite variety and extreme subtlety. The primitive woman was believed to have been the object of chivalrous and romantic esteem. Strangest of all, religion in this primitive world was held to have included the cheerful bantering of anthropomorphic gods and goddesses. We were to suppose that the European began by laughing at his gods and ended by worshipping them.

Tablet of Cretan Linear Script, from Cnossos

Then in the seventies came the redoubtable Dr. Schliemann, most erudite of sappers, and dug into the hill at Hissarlik to see if he could find the bones of Hector and the ruins of Troy. Troy he found in abundance, five Troys, at least, one on the top of another. He called the second from the bottom the city of Priam, and then he crossed over with his spades and picks to look for what might be left of Agamemnon at Mycenæ. Sure enough, he presently startled the learned world by a telegram to the King of Greece saying that he had found the tomb of Agamemnon. Quite certainly he had found some very important things—things, as we shall soon see, far more interesting and valuable to history than if they had belonged, as Schliemann thought, to the King of all the Greeks. But the point is that for many years to come all the excavators who worked on Greek soil started with the false belief that Homer was the beginning of all things and that their discoveries were illustrating Homer. We now know that the excavations at Mycenæ and the poems of Homer represent two entirely different civilisations, neither of them primitive. We are now in a position to throw the beginnings of European culture in the Mediterranean basin centuries—nay, whole millenniums—farther back than our fathers’ wildest dreams could carry them. The history of European civilisation is no longer a traceable progression from Homer to Tennyson or from Odysseus to Captain Peary, but a long cycle of rising and decaying cultures with periods of darkness intervening. For this revolution in our ideas the responsible weapon is the humble but veracious spade.

Crete, the Doorstep of Europe

We are to picture the primitive tribes of the world as continually moving under the double pressure of the wolf in their bellies and the enemy at their backs—moving, in the main, north and west, as climatic conditions relented before them. So long as they were in this nomadic stage little progress could be made in civilisation; tents must form their houses, and their goods could be only such trifles of necessary pots and pans as they could carry. But when the moving tribe reached the sea it was compelled to halt and settle. Thus it is that civilisation begins in the oases of the desert, on the north coasts of Africa, and in the isles of Greece. Settled by force, and to some degree protected by nature, they could begin to accumulate possessions, and to improve them with art. They could begin to build houses, and develop morals and polities.

Thus geography has made it exceedingly probable that Crete will play a momentous part in the earliest history of Europe. That island lies like a doorstep at the threshold of Europe. If civilisation was to rise with the sun in the East, out of the extremely ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylon, by way of those earliest carriers to the world’s markets, the Phœnicians of Tyre and Sidon, clearly this island of Crete would be their stepping-stone to Europe. Thus we reason, knowing it to be the truth. But we should never have learnt the truth from literature. In Homer, for example, Crete is of little importance. It was famous for its “ninety cities” and its mixed nationalities, and it was known as the former realm of Minos. There, too, the father of all craftsmen, Dædalus, had fashioned a wondrous dancing-place. But we might almost gather from the pages of Homer that it was a land whose glory had departed already. And that is the truth. Outside Homer, Crete, though insignificant in history, takes a much more important place in mythology and legend. For religion Crete was the birthplace of Zeus, the king of the gods. In the history of law-making it plays a very important part, for Minos of Crete was said to be the first law-giver, and he was placed as the judge of the dead by later mythology. In religion it produced Epimenides, the early exorcist, and in music Thaletas. Then many ancient historians give us a tradition of early naval empires in Greek waters. Thalassocracies they were called, and that of Crete stands at the head of the list. Finally, those fortunate Englishmen whose introduction to Greece has come through the wonderful “Heroes” of Charles Kingsley know the story of the Cretan labyrinth and that fearsome beast the Minotaur. They know the story of Theseus: how the Athenians of the earliest times had to send tribute every year of their fairest youths and maidens to King Minos of Crete, until one year the prince Theseus besought old Ægeus, his royal father, to let him go among the number in order to stop this cruel sacrifice; how he went at last, and how the Cretan princess, Ariadne, loved him and gave him a weapon and a clue to the labyrinth, and how he slew the dreadful monster and deserted his princess and returned home; but how he forgot also to hoist the signal of his safety, so that the old king, seeing black sails to his ship, cast himself headlong from the rock in his misery, and gave a name to the Ægean Sea. In old days we read it as a beautiful Greek romance; now we think it very likely that the Athenians in early days did have to pay tribute—

septena quotannis
corpora natorum

—to the empire of Minos. Sir Arthur Evans, the explorer of Cnossos, thinks that he has discovered the labyrinth, and perhaps even the Minotaur, in his excavations at Cnossos. Anyhow, he has discovered a civilisation previously almost unknown to history. As these new discoveries centre in Crete, the excavators have naturally taken Crete as the fount and origin of it all, and call their new old world “Minoan,” just as the followers of Dr. Schliemann called their discoveries “Mycenæan.” The two cultures are not distinct; Mycenæan objects mainly represent one or two of the later stages of Minoan culture. But as similar objects have been found in many parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, and as it is just possible (though not very probable) that even more wonderful discoveries of a similar kind may be made elsewhere, and as the relation of Minos to these earliest periods is by no means established, we had better be cautious and adopt the most general name of those which have been applied to this culture and call it “Ægean,” or “Pre-Achæan,” or “Bronze Age.” We may quite fairly use one name for all this world of prehistoric civilisation before Homer, although it covers an enormous space of time and may be divided into many distinct chapters or phases; because, after all, there is a clear line of ancestry between the earliest of the art forms and the latest, indicating that the artists were of the same blood, however many times their cities might be destroyed and their works buried under the soil. It is so distinct, so continuous, and so widely distributed that we are safe in believing that it was the work of one people spread all over the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean. Ægean civilisation has been found in Crete, on the coasts of Asia Minor, on the mainland of Greece, in Egyptian tombs, in Sicily, on the coast of Italy, at Torcello near Venice, at Bologna, and in Spain. Etruscan art seems to be essentially akin to it. Cyprus has long been known as a centre of Ægean civilisation, and is at the present moment yielding fresh treasures to the archæologist. But nowhere has it been discovered in such perfect continuity and splendour as in Crete.

It is the custom among archæologists to divide early culture into periods, according to the weapons in use. Accordingly we say that the Ægean periods extend from the Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age, meaning that the earliest of these Ægean potsherds are found in conjunction with polished flint weapons and tools, while along with the latest we find a few rare pieces of iron, but mostly bronze of a very high finish and workmanship. Such finds are dated very roughly by the level at which they lie, because it is a curious but certain fact that the level of ground once built over is constantly rising through accretions of dust and débris. Anyhow, it will be clear to every one that when, as at Troy and Cnossos, we find a series of buildings each superimposed upon the ruins of another, we can trace the history of such a site from early to late with certainty. Sometimes it is possible also to get a date by examining foreign objects found on the same site, such as gems bearing the cartouche or sign-royal of Egyptian kings. Only we must bear in mind that such little objects are easily displaced and often preserved for many centuries, so that great care must be used in taking them as evidence. Also, serious conflicts are still going on between the Egyptologists, and their dates are by no means ascertained facts at present.

Progress of Ægean Culture

I have said that the prehistoric culture revealed by the excavations in Crete and elsewhere forms a continuous and progressive history from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. Sir Arthur Evans, indeed, has divided his discoveries into nine periods, from “Early Minoan I.” to “Late Minoan III.” Without being quite so precise, let us attempt to sketch a history of “prehistoric” civilisation on Greek soil, taking Crete as the centre of influence.

Black Vase from Cyprus

“Neolithic man” in Crete, though his weapons and tools were but polished stones, and far as he was behind his Neolithic brothers of Central Europe, had already begun to design patterns upon his pottery. Like Nature abhorring a vacuum, he traced zigzags, triangles, and chevrons upon the plastic clay, scratching or pricking lines and dots with a point of bone or stone, and sometimes filling the holes and scratches with white gypsum to show up the pattern. The body of his vases was generally black and shiny. Bucchero nero, as the Italian archæologists call it, is found in the Neolithic strata all over Southern Europe.

Plan of Neolithic House

His house was generally of mud and wattles, but there are some examples of stone-built houses on a rectangular plan. In Thessaly, where Neolithic culture survived right through the flourishing periods of art in Crete and Mycenæ, they have even found Neolithic houses with three rooms and the sockets for wooden pillars. Caves were still used as dwellings, and there is also a round type of hut, derived, no doubt, from the still more primitive tent of skin and wickerwork. Of the religion of the Late Stone Age we know nothing, except that they buried their dead with care in tombs resembling their

Plate IV.—ASSYRIAN RELIEF: KING ASSUR-NASIR-PAL (9TH CENTURY B.C.) Mansell & Co.

dwelling-places. Archæology has a rough method of assigning dates by allowing about a thousand years for every three feet of deposited earth; on this reckoning we may date the Neolithic period in Crete anywhere before 4000 B.C.

Then gradually comes the beginning of the Bronze Age. All civilisation may be regarded as a progress in tools and weapons. Nowhere is the history of Europe traced with a clearer pen than in its armouries. As the guns of Crécy foretold the passing of chivalry, so the discovery of that alloy of copper and tin, which produced a metal soft enough to mould and hard enough to work with, meant a step forward for civilisation. At first, of course, bronze is rare and costly; it is confined to short dagger-blades and spear-points. Along with the earliest bronze we find an advance in the pottery, paint used to trace the patterns, though the designs are still those of dot and line; experiments are being made with colours and glazes. In experiment is the germ of progress; the conventional artists of the East imitate and sometimes improve their models, but they seldom make experiments. In Assyria and Egypt they have produced wonderful and beautiful works of art.[4] But with them art is ornament; there is no ideal, no striving to get nearer to the truth of things. The Oriental sculptor soon loses touch with Nature, and as his technique advances learns only the language of convention.

So in the forms and designs of the pottery we watch a steady upward march, the progress growing faster as the standard of achievement rises. Curves and circles take the place of zigzags and triangles. The potter plays tricks with the colour of his clay, daubs it with red, burns it in patches. In these strata we begin to find imitations of the human form, rude images or “idols,” possibly the votive offerings which represent the worshipper in substitution for human sacrifice. These become conventionalised, as everything connected with religion tends to do, into queer fiddle-shaped, goggle-eyed figures. All the Cretan artists insisted on the waist to a degree which would seem to the modern shop-girl an exaggeration. Even in Egypt the small waist was regarded as a characteristic of the Keftiu—the men from the Isles of the Sea. The broad shoulders of the men no doubt are intended to symbolise strength. Along with vases and “idols” are found seals whose emblems show traces of the influence of Egypt under the Sixth Dynasty (? 2540 B.C.).

Terra-cotta Figure, from Petsofà

Now we take a great upward leap into the “Middle Minoan” periods of Sir Arthur Evans. Here we find the earliest writing of Europe, clay tablets inscribed with a pictographic script. The clay figures are extremely elaborate presentments of the costume of the day; and a highly elaborate costume it is. Colour is freely employed on idols and pottery. The patterns pass into spirals, and occasionally there is direct imitation of Nature—goats, beetles, and (as the classical Greeks would say) other birds.

Terra-cotta Idol, from Troy

Now we are among the earlier palaces of Cnossos. Each period now seems to have ended with a disaster, after which art rose again triumphantly above the ruins, to begin where it had left off before the invader came to destroy the palace and shrines of its patrons. Here we find the “Kamáres” ware, a style of pottery to which we can perhaps for the first time apply honest expressions of admiration. It is often as thin as eggshell china. Its shapes are extremely varied and graceful; among them the precise form of the modern tea-cup is common, and beautiful dishes for

Votive Terra-cotta, from Petsofà. (Full size)

offerings which resemble the modern épergne. A lustrous black glaze generally forms the background; on it designs are painted in matt colours, white, red, and sometimes yellow. The designs are still chiefly conventional patterns of stripes and spirals. The potter’s wheel is by now in common use, as we see from the greater symmetry and accuracy of the lines. It is suggested that this ware in its thinness and its patterns was inspired by metalwork. It must not be forgotten that the archæologist only finds what the looting pirate has despised. The gold and the bronze have been taken and only the humble potsherds left.

Kamáres Cup

Kamáres “Hole-mouthed” Jar

In the stage we have been describing the general colour effect of the vase was the artist’s first consideration. Presently (after another catastrophe) a new spirit begins to appear, the desire to imitate the forms of Nature. With increasing naturalism the potter reverts to simpler colours, despairing, it would seem, of the attempt to reproduce the colours of his models. Neither greens nor blues could be managed in earthenware. Fortunately, however, a new material is discovered which serves the purpose. This is a kind of faience or porcelain. The idea was imported from Egypt, but a native factory was set up in the palace of Cnossos, and we even find the steatite moulds by which the patterns were impressed. The naturalism is extremely skilful and effective. One of the most beautiful examples is illustrated.[5] It is the favourite motive of an animal suckling her young, constantly found as a heraldic type on coins and seals. Here it is evidently drawn from a direct study of Nature, so living is the pose, so faithful is the expression of

Fig. 1. Snake Goddess.

Fig. 2. Wild Goat and Young.

Plate 5. FAÏENCE FROM THE TEMPLE REPOSITORY OF THE SECOND PALACE, CNOSSOS, CRETE.

the muscles. It is probably a failing of archæologists to see religion everywhere they go. It is certain that the suckling motive was in after times associated with the worship of maternal deities such as Hera. It is certain also that the prehistoric Cretan did worship powers of fecundity in human and animal form. But we need not transform this she-goat into a goddess. I much prefer to be sure that this prehistoric Cretan loved and studied the wild creatures of his native hills and his native blue sea. Art and Nature are hand in hand now on vases and gems also. We have seal types bearing wolves’ heads, owls and shells, scenes from the boxing-ring and the bull-ring. The writing has progressed from mere pictographs to a linear script. It is astonishing to find the Cretan of 1911 B.C. writing, as we write to-day, with pen and ink.

We pass on to the “Late Minoan” periods, the ages of masterpiece. Here Mycenæ enters the story, for though much earlier objects dating from the Stone Ages have been found both at Mycenæ and Troy, the best Mycenæan work is contemporary with the “Late Minoan” of Crete. The weapons now are swords of bronze. As for the designs of pottery, whereas in the last period they were generally drawn in white upon a dark ground, they are now drawn in red or brown upon a light ground. They are still naturalistic, and in the best specimens the artists have achieved the highest triumph of vase-painting, namely, to apply the artistic forms of Nature to serve their purpose, subordinating her as she ought (being a female) to be subordinated. Observe how the murex shells are used along with conventional patterns and how the light and shade are massed à la Beardsley. It seems probable that the early painter selected those natural forms, such as the octopus, the shell, and the star-fish, which most nearly resembled the geometric patterns used by his predecessors.

The shapes are now extremely graceful. These pointed pitchers were used as we see in the famous frieze of the Cupbearer, to serve the wine. There is generally a hole in the base to strain it. Drinking vessels were often of that fairest of Attic shapes known as the kylix. We notice how marine objects predominate in the natural forms selected. That alone might have given us a hint to look for an island as the centre of this art.

Cretan Filler

Now comes the great period of prehistoric architecture, of which we find examples in the palaces of Cnossos, Mycenæ, and Tiryns. What cranes were used to hoist these great masses into position we do not know. We cannot guess what tools were used for cutting and boring the solid stone as it was cut into the gigantic steatite wine-casks or the monolithic columns or the limestone reliefs. We can only marvel at them as we marvel at the Sphinx and the Pyramids. At Cnossos there were magnificent halls, decorated with painted frescoes of wonderful craftsmanship or stone carvings in high and low relief. There was a great hall of audience in particular, shaped like a Roman basilica or an early Christian church, a building so utterly out of its age that architects are amazed when it is placed in the second millennium before Christ. There is a throne, of what every one would have called Gothic design. Of the rest of the architectural marvels of these “Minoan” palaces, their upper stories, their light-wells, their double staircases, of the bull-ring and wrestling-ring, with its royal box, of the water-gate, and the engineering skill which overcame the slope down to the river, of the magazines and store-rooms, with their Aladdin’s jars still standing where King Minos’ storekeepers placed them, of the Queen’s Chamber and the Hall of the Distaffs and of the Royal Villa—of these things let the architects and Sir Arthur Evans relate. It would need pages of ground-plans to exhibit them, for after

Plate VI. THE “CUP-BEARER” FRESCO

all the palaces of Crete are little more than ground-plans to the layman, and ground-plans are dreary things. Sir Arthur Evans, indeed, believes that it was the intricacy of these miles of ruined foundations which provided the later Greeks with their legend of the Labyrinth. The frescoes are truly marvellous, whether we consider the glorious youth called the Cupbearer,[6] with his dark curly head and perfect Greek profile, or the vividly natural bull’s head in stucco.[7] Among the wonders is the veritable board on which King Minos played backgammon according to the prehistoric rules of that respectable game. It is of gold and silver, of ivory and crystal and “kuanos”—a board fit for a thalassocrat.

Cuttle-fish Kylix

Clay Seal Impression: Pugilist

There is something here for every one. The sportsman will observe the methods of pugilism indicated on the gems, admiring the muscular development and the free action of the Cnossian prize-fighter. He seems to have neglected his “guard,” but then he was separated by a barrier from his opponent. Or we may study the laws of bull-baiting as practised at Cnossos, noting the agility with which toreadors, male and female, leap over the animal’s head. The milliner may study the latest modes of to-day on the fashion-plates of the eighteenth century before Christ. She will find the flounced petticoat of yesterday, the narrow waist, the bodice cut extremely décolletée, the high coiffure of to-morrow, the Medici collar, the zouave jacket. She will see hats which Mr. Myres considers “unparalleled,” some flat like the mode of 1902, others with turned-up brims and roses underneath like that of to-day.

The plumber too will find a paradise in Cnossos. There are lavatories, sinks, sewers, and man-holes. Let me quote Professor Burrows: “The main drain, which had its sides coated with cement, was over 3 feet high, and nearly 2 feet broad, so that a man could easily move along it; and the smaller stone shafts that discharged into it are still in position. Farther north we have preserved to us some of the terra-cotta pipes that served for connections. Each of them was about 2½ feet long, with a diameter that was about 6 inches at the broad end, and narrowed to less than 4 inches at the mouth, where it fitted into the broad end of the next pipe. Jamming was carefully prevented by a stop-ridge that ran round the outside of each narrow end a few inches from the mouth, while the inside of the butt, or broader end, was provided with a raised collar that enabled it to bear the pressure of the next pipe’s stop-ridge, and gave an extra hold for the cement that bound the two pipes together.” Let no cultivated reader despise these details. There is no truer sign of civilisation and culture than good sanitation. It goes with refined senses and orderly habits. A good drain implies as much as a beautiful statue. And let it be remembered that the world did not reach the Minoan standard of cleanliness again until the great English sanitary movement of the late nineteenth century.

The Mainland Palaces

Though there is so much to interest the architect in Cnossos, and though the finest ashlar masonry is to be found there, the ordinary student of ancient building will probably prefer to go for his examples, as of old, to the contemporary

Plate 7. BULL’S HEAD: LIFE-SIZE RELIEF IN PAINTED STUCCO. CNOSSOS, CRETE.

Citadel of Tiryns

palaces of Mycenæ and Tiryns. In Cnossos there was little or no fortification—another proof that the Minoan empire rested safe behind wooden walls. But on the mainland we have two magnificent fortresses and citadels, so well preserved and so cleverly excavated by Schliemann and Tsountas that the untrained eye can take in at a glance the essential features of the architecture. At Tiryns the builder has taken the fullest advantage of the natural strength of his position. The top of the hill has been levelled and the summit encircled with a gigantic wall seldom less than fifteen feet thick. In the wall there are galleries opening internally upon a series of magazines. Along it at intervals there are massive watch-towers. One such screens each of the gateways. The main gate on the east side is approached by a long ascending ramp, which is exposed all the way to attack from the wall that towers above. To reach the postern-gate on the west you had also to climb a long flight of steps. The hill-top, which is more than 900 feet long, consists of a lower plateau to the north, on which no traces of building have been found, possibly because there were only wooden erections there for the soldiers, or possibly because it was left bare as a place of refuge for the cattle. The higher plateau to the south contains the palace, with its great pillared megaron, or hall. In this there is a circular central hearth. Close behind is the hall of the women, with sleeping-chambers at hand, and a strong treasury partly built into the wall. There is an elaborate bathroom, with drain-pipes and water-supply, hot and cold, a little to the west of the megaron. The three inner courts are sumptuously paved with mosaic, and the walls were covered with frescoes. It appears that the buildings on the summit of the hill were all of a palatial description, and the conclusion is that the commons lived in the plain below, governed and protected by their citadel. Tiryns lies on the flank of the plain of Argos, and within a few miles of the sea. As this one small plain included also the other ancient fortresses of Mycenæ and Argos, the dominions of this king must have been very small. It has been plausibly suggested that these citadels principally existed to command the highways leading to the Isthmus of Corinth.

At Mycenæ the fortification work is similar. Our view of the Lion Gate[8] will give some idea of the massive, Cyclopean masonry. The great relief itself is clearly a heraldic device; some such grouping of animals is constantly seen upon seals and gems, and the lion (or lioness?) has always been a royal beast. But, heraldic though it be, this enormous group is far from lifeless conventionality. Some scholars believe that the pillar between the animals is a proof of the much-discussed pillar-worship of prehistoric Greece.

Beehive Tomb: Section

But the most interesting of the Mycenæan remains are undoubtedly the tombs. In the city itself there is a circular enclosure surrounded by a double series of paving-stones set into the ground on edge, thus forming a ring of shaft graves whose purpose was plainly shown by the objects and bones found in them. Down in the plain below were found other burying-places, also circular, but of a later date and much more striking. These subterranean “beehive” tombs have been found elsewhere in Greece, but nowhere of such splendour. It was one of these which Schliemann proclaimed to be the tomb of Agamemnon. Like the pyramids in Egypt, it contains an inner chamber, which forms the actual grave, outside it a circular “tholos,” probably a shrine for the cult of the departed, and a long “dromos,” or inclined approach. The tholos is of great interest to architects as providing a forerunner of the dome. But it is not built on the principle of the arch, with wedge-shaped masses and a keystone. This dome is contrived by laying ever-narrowing circles of masonry one upon the other concentrically, the interior being smoothed, plastered, and richly decorated. It is thought that the bee-hive shape reproduces the primitive bell-tent, for the tombs of the dead are generally copied from the abodes of the living. Such splendour in the tomb, such careful concealing of the dead underground in an inner chamber, unquestionably proves ancestor-worship.

The sixth city at Troy was of much the same style and date as these; larger, indeed, than all, and with its houses radiating from the centre like the spokes of a wheel. On the Athenian Acropolis too there are traces of a similar prehistoric settlement. We are probably to imagine the face of the Greek world in the second millennium B.C. as dotted with these citadel palaces.

Mycenæ has yielded many interesting treasures of a minor sort. It was especially rich in gold, and we notice with great interest the masks of thin gold laid upon the faces of the dead. Nor has Crete yet produced any object in gold to rival the famous pair of cups[9] found at Vaphio, in Laconia. These are of gold repoussé, and their designs of wild and tame cattle are incomparably living and natural. But Sir Arthur Evans is probably justified both on grounds of style and subject in claiming these superb treasures as exports from Crete. The palm-tree betrays a Southern origin. In Mycenæ, too, were found the finely inlaid dagger-blades[10] which give us a picture of the men and weapons of the Mycenæan or Late Minoan ages of Ægean culture. The men, we observe, are armed with long spears and huge figure-of-eight shields composed of wickerwork covered with bull’s hide and pinched in at the “waist” so as to encircle the body and provide a hand-grip. The warriors wear no clothing but

Plate VIII. THE LION GATE, MYCENÆ

English Photo Co., Athens

breeches or loin-cloths, and in this they resemble the men of the Cretan frescoes and gems.

Cretan Cup of Degenerate Style.

And what came of it all? Somewhere, it would seem, about 1400 B.C. Cnossos underwent its final catastrophe. The palace was sacked and burnt, the ateliers of its brilliant artists were destroyed, and the artists themselves slain or scattered. So the centre of illumination was darkened for the whole Ægean world. Elsewhere Ægean civilisation continued perhaps for two centuries more, and in Cnossos itself there is yet another period when the palace sites were partially reoccupied by a few stragglers of the old artistic race. But with the fall of his patron the inspiration of the craftsman vanishes, degeneration rapidly sets in. Even in the designs of the vases the bold, naturalistic drawing deteriorates into lazy formulæ, the brilliance of the glaze grows dull, the colours are flat and muddy. A good deal of Mycenæan art is of this decadent type, and a good deal more of it has been found in the neighbouring sites of Crete.

Among the relics of this period are objects which betray the cause of the downfall—weapons of iron. The Bronze Ages are passing away before the superior metal, as the Stone Ages had yielded to the Bronze.

The Makers of Ægean Art

It now becomes our duty to sum up this wonderful world of archæology and to consider its bearings on the history and art of later Greece. Unfortunately many problems arise at this point for which at present the archæologists cannot agree to offer a solution. Who were these Ægean folk? Were they of Indo-European stock and language? We have already agreed, I think, that they represent a primitive stratum of population which originally spread all over the south of Europe and the basin of the Mediterranean. The Cupbearer may indicate their physique, black curly hair, straight nose, long skull; and I, for one, decline to believe that this fine fellow is a Semite or Phœnician, as has been suggested. We know that these people were extraordinarily gifted, especially in the sense of form, and that they were capable of very rapid development. May we not believe that one and the same stock has lain at the base of the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean from prehistoric times until to-day, much as it has been crossed and conquered and oppressed? And was their language Greek? That is a question that we cannot answer for certain, since no one has yet been able to interpret their handwriting. I see no reason to dispute Professor Ridgeway’s argument that as the stock prevailed through several waves of conquest from the north, so the language survived without material change, just as Italian prevailed through the Lombard conquest of North Italy. Of course nationalities were more mixed in Crete and Cyprus than on the mainland of Greece. It can but be an opinion delivered in the consciousness of many counteracting arguments, but I believe that the people whose culture we have been describing were essentially the same as we know in historic times, and of course Indo-Europeans.

From the historian’s point of view it is important to observe that civilisation in Europe began, as in Asia, under the fostering care of autocracy in palace workshops. It was bound

Plate 9.—Vaphio Cups.

to be so. All the archæological indications point to a strong and tyrannical form of monarchy of the Oriental type. Those Cyclopean walls were built by slave labour. The common folk and soldiers are represented as almost naked. It was a commercial empire too. Those rows and rows of store-rooms, with their huge jars, formed the bank and treasury. Very probably the clay tablets will be found to contain, not prehistoric sonnets, but merely lists and inventories of stores and tribute.

We must not be carried too far by our wonder at this unexpected revelation of prehistoric culture. The later Greeks never reached such a standard as these people in writing or in engineering or in fortification or in many of the handicrafts. They could never have represented the forms of Nature with the same realism. That is true, but there is something wanting in the prehistoric Ægean art which only classical Greece could give to the world. There is little ἢθος in Ægean art, little nobility, though much beauty, no ethical ideal. How that missing something was supplied and whence it came we shall see in the next chapter.

Another question arises: How far was this culture original? How much does it owe to Assyria, Egypt, and Phœnicia? Much, but not everything. The drainage system of the palace has its original in Assyria, and some think that the laws of Minos were derived from the code of Khammurabi. The faience comes from Egypt; so do many of the lotus and lily patterns of the vases. Crete was bound to be greatly indebted to Egypt. As for Phœnicians, they are carriers and traders, but no one has yet proved that they could initiate in anything—except, perhaps, religion. But what Crete borrowed it transformed, and, as I believe, Europeanised; it rejected deliberately the Oriental tendencies to conventional stylistic imitation.

A word remains to be said about religion. In classical Greece, as everybody knows, there was a prevailing cult of state gods and goddesses, an anthropomorphic Olympian family, Zeus, Hera, Athena, Artemis, Apollo, and the rest of them. But recent students of religion have pointed out that side by side with the public worship of celestial deities there was a more mysterious but more real devotion to a quite different form of religion, a cult of Nature goddesses, with mystical rites whose origin was more than half forgotten. To this class belong the Mysteries of Eleusis, to name the most famous example, and it is seen in the many-breasted “Diana of the Ephesians.” Now Professor Ridgeway has long taught that this naturalistic worship was probably a survival from the prehistoric ages of Greece. It is at its strongest in Arcadia, the untouched primitive part of Greece. He calls it the religion of the Southern mother, retained in spite of the Northern father who would have his Zeus-Odin worshipped in public. The discoveries in Crete have confirmed this theory, and thrown some light on the naturalistic worship of later times. The principal deity of Crete was a Nature goddess, generally represented as adorned with snakes.[11] She was worshipped with orgiastic rites, ecstatic dances, shaking of rattles, ornately robed priests, and emblematical processions. Along with this worship, and probably older, as the aniconic precedes the iconic stage of religion, there are many signs of aniconic fetishes, pillar-worship, axe-worship, tree-worship, and even cross-worship. The monster forms of bull-men, dog-men, snake-men may be only heraldic signs, or they may indicate a worship of monsters such as prevailed in Egypt. Certainly there was worship of the entombed ancestor. We can see that the artistic people of prehistoric Greece were very near to the earth after all.

Clay Seal Impression with Cruciform Symbol, from Temple Repository, Cnossos

Plate 10.—Inlaid Dagger Blades.

II
THE HEROIC AGE

ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται
ἡμίθεοι
Hesiod.

The Northern Invaders

N stepping out of Crete into Homer we are leaving a material world of artists for a literary world of heroes. Incidentally it may be mentioned that we are stepping over three or four centuries without any history. These have rightly been called the Dark Ages, for the analogy between these prehistoric Dark Ages and those of history is singularly close. The Cnossian empire fell before the barbarians, though in this case the last scenes must have taken place at sea. Thus the stability and order of life in the Ægean was broken up and the lamp of culture flickered out. Some sparks of it struggled on, to burn up again with even greater brilliance in the classical period. But some of the crafts perished entirely, such as the faience and the gypsum or stucco reliefs. The writing seems to have perished and been reinvented or reimported later on. The use of weights and money perished for a time out of the Greek world. These things were closely bound up with a flourishing commerce, and now the sea became unsafe for commerce. Sculpture had to begin again from the beginning, and though the shapes of pottery in some cases seem to survive right through, yet the designs suffer an extraordinary degradation and barbarisation before they begin again to be admirable. The same cause operated here as after the fall of Rome. The world was being remade, new peoples were coming upon the scene; there was a long period of Wandering of the Nations, with no Christian missionaries to mitigate their barbarism—or to chronicle their progress. It is a period without any history, and not all the imaginative reconstructions of poetical professors can really throw much light upon it. The Egyptians of about 1200 B.C. observed that there was unrest among the Isles of the Sea, and that is all, so far as we can read the stones.

The invaders are not to be thought of as a single tribe or a single movement. More like our early Danish invaders, they began gradually and continued slowly. The culture of the Ægean declined rather than ceased, surviving longer in the hill-fortresses of the mainland than in unfortified Cnossos. But sooner or later destruction came to Mycenæ and Tiryns and Troy, so that people of alien civilisation came and built inferior houses among the ruins of the palaces or sheltered themselves like the jackals and owls of Isaiah among the Cyclopean masses. In one case they plastered over an old Mycenæan gravestone and drew their own clumsy picture upon it (see [p. 37]). No wonder that legends arose about the magical race of Cyclopes who built so amazingly, and no wonder that the Greeks of later time put their Golden Age into the past instead of the future. The poet Hesiod, writing probably in the seventh century B.C., divided the history of the world into five ages of deterioration. First come the Golden and Silver Ages of virtue, both, of course, purely ideal. Then comes the Bronze Age, mighty and strong. “Of bronze were their vessels, of bronze their houses, with tools of bronze they worked: dark iron was not yet.” At last they passed away, and then came a fourth generation on the procreant earth, “a generation juster and better, the divine race of Heroes, who are called demigods. Cruel war and the stern cry of battle destroyed them, some as they strove for the flocks of Œdipus at Thebes, and some when they had been led on shipboard over the great gulf of the sea to Troy for the sake of Helen with her lovely tresses.” Then these too went hence “to dwell in the Isles of the Blessed by the deep-surging Ocean, like happy heroes, and the fertile earth yields them honey-sweet harvest thrice a year.” But, alas for the poet, he is doomed to live among the fifth race, the Men of Iron.

Warrior Stelé from Mycenæ

This is not all fancy: the Bronze Age is history, as we have seen; so is the Iron Age. What then of the age between, the Age of Heroes? It comes in awkwardly, for it disturbs the poet’s picture of degeneration. But it has to be inserted in deference to the beliefs of Hesiod’s audience. Hesiod is more or less consciously writing a Bible for the Greeks—that is, putting their religious customs into literary form. This is his concession to hero-worship or ancestor-worship. The Heroic Age of Demigods, the milieu of Homeric poems and Attic tragedy, is not historical, and it is vain to make it so.

The men of Iron came in from the North in wave after wave of conquest. There were Achæans, Thessalians, and finally Dorians. The process began in earnest, perhaps, with the fall of the Minoan empire, which Professor Burrows assigns to a date between 1414 and 1380 B.C. The Dorians, who were the last-comers, are generally supposed to have been coming in between 1100 and 1000 B.C. Dr. Ridgeway has proved the Northern origin of these various invaders by consideration of their remains, which he has traced back to Central Europe. They were armed with long iron swords, iron-pointed spears, they carried round shields with a central boss, and were dressed in a full panoply of bronze armour, helmet with crest and plume, hauberk of mail, greaves on their legs, and a studded belt of bronze and leather. Underneath they wore a tunic or chiton, which they fastened on the shoulder with a fibula, or safety-pin brooch. They rode to battle in chariots. Thus they differ in every essential from the people of the Ægean culture, whose warriors wore nothing but a loin-cloth or short breeches, and had no armour but a huge figure-of-eight or oblong shield made of wicker and leather, who fought mainly with slings and arrows, who scarcely knew the horse, whose women were dressed in petticoats with flounces and sometimes in tight-fitting bodices narrow at the waist, needing no pin or brooch to fasten them. The Ægean warriors are so depicted on their monuments.[12] Some hints as to their religious beliefs we can gather from their different customs of disposing of the dead. For whereas the Ægean race had preserved their dead carefully underground in shafts and domes, pouring in libations of wine or blood to feed their hungry ghosts in a dark lower world, crowded with powerful

Fig. 1.—Warrior Vase in black steatite.

Fig. 2.—Fragment of Silver Vase.

Plate 11.

spirits, these Northerners looked up to a heaven above, where a Zeus very much like Odin ruled the skies with his thunderbolt amid a family of warlike gods and goddesses, who delighted in the smoke of burnt offerings. When their heroes died their bodies were burnt on the pyre and their souls departed to the Isles of the Blessed, an earthly Valhalla of feasting and fighting. The Ægean race had at the same time worshipped the powers of reproductive Nature in female guise, and inheritance went through females. The Northerners were brave and strong, chaste and law-abiding. With them the father was unquestioned head of the household, but the mother was free and honoured. The Northman was an infantry soldier, free in his right as a warrior, the Southerner a sailor with a quick intelligence, a gift for commerce, and a passion for art and beauty. The Northman had one art only, the music of the harp. The Southerner was more truly religious—that is to say, he felt the mystery of the unseen and the thrills of devotion; the natural world that appealed to him so strongly showed itself to his mind under the forms of mysticism. The Northerner was far too much of a moralist and theologian to be an ecstatic devotee. The Southerner had fire and genius, the Northerner had caution and self-control. The Northman was fair-haired, tall, and short-headed, the Southron dark-haired, short of stature, and long in the skull.

In the fusion of these two streams, each of which had so much to give and so much to receive, lies one secret of the Hellenic people. It would seem that the Northmen came as invaders, not merely as immigrants, into the desirable southern peninsulas. They came as warriors, and took wives of the old race, so that the resulting mixture partook of the qualities of both. But, as usual in such cases, climate and environment gradually told, and the type reverted in long course of time to its original characteristics. For a little while in the fifth century there was a perfect amalgam, and we have a people bold in arms, clean in morality, and skilful in high idealistic art. But soon the virile element decays, vigour declines into indolence, idealism into mere sensuous grace and charm, so that while the Greeks never ceased to be incomparable craftsmen and subtle thinkers, the nobler elements which made them artists and originators in all departments of intellect gradually failed them.

These generalisations are supported by the history of their two foremost peoples. The Athenians and Ionians always claimed to be sons of the soil—that is, to have received but a slight intermixture of Northern blood; hence they provide the artists, the traders, and the sailors of Greece. The Spartans, on the other hand, belonged to the Dorian race, the last-comers, and probably the farthest-comers, or the most northerly, of all the invading peoples. They show us the power of discipline, they are the land-warriors, they honour old age, and they do not seclude their women. But as foreigners in an alien land they are the first to decay, and their fall is far more sudden and complete. They give us no art but music and lyric song. From this fact too we get light upon the political conditions of Greece. We see why the prevailing polity of Greece, except in Athens and the Ionian States, was aristocracy or oligarchy. It explains the religion of Greece, the strange mixture of celestial anthropomorphism with chthonic animism. In a sense, too, some such fusion of races represents the whole history of Europe. Again and again in history the vigorous races have descended upon the cultured ones, and the fusion has generally produced great results until the native element prevailed. Such was very probably the secret of Roman greatness. We ourselves in our fusion of Celt and Saxon have a similar ethnic history.

Homer and the Achæans

One of these Northern tribes, the Achæans, are the people commemorated in the epics which go under the name of Homer. Although, as I have said, they had an Olympian hierarchy of gods, their real devotion was given to heroes—that is, to deified ancestors of the tribe, whose graves, real or imaginary, were the scene of sacrifices and libations. One such hero was Agamemnon, who was worshipped at Sparta and elsewhere. Another was Achilles, who had the centre of his cult in Phthiotis. Their valorous deeds were doubtless commemorated in ancient lays. But our Homer is not a collection of ballads or folk-songs. It is a literary product of such finish and perfection as to postulate centuries of experiment in the literary art and the intervention of individual genius of the very highest order. We are forced to believe in the existence of a real Homer who set himself, as Hesiod did in a different sphere, to collect the praises of the heroes and to fashion them into immortal verse, grouping the various heroes into one Panhellenic army under the leadership of Agamemnon in a great expedition, probably an echo of real history, against the city of Troy. But it is equally certain that our Iliad and Odyssey are not the untouched composition of a single brain. Not only is the story of the Iliad far too incoherent—warriors killed in one book, fighting cheerfully in the next, a huge wall and fosse round the Greek camp appearing and disappearing unaccountably; not only is the original plot of the Wrath of Achilles forgotten and obscured in later books; not only is the Odyssey in style and diction visibly later than the main part of the Iliad; but it is possible to trace a progressive variation in customs and ideas, with subsequent interpolation and expurgation, throughout. Both epics seem to have been translated out of an original Æolic version into Ionic Greek. And it must not be forgotten that the ancients applied the term “Homer” to a vast body of epic matter of which our Iliad and Odyssey are only a part. We are forced to conclude that many successive generations of bards had worked over the original nucleus. These Homeridæ, or “sons of Homer,” must have included several men of genius among their number, but they were all trained in a noble school. They were, as has been said, hymning the praises of their patrons’ heroic ancestors—that is, they were Æolians telling the story of traditional Achæan heroes, for the Achæans when driven out of their homes by the Dorian invaders bore the name of Æolians when they migrated to the northern coasts of Asia Minor. Probably the earliest Homer was writing in a consciously antiquarian spirit about heroes long ago; certainly the later writers were deliberately archaising and submitting to an epic convention. Thus the Dorians, except for a single oversight, are studiously ignored; writing, coined money, and sculpture are avoided. Habits of ancient barbarism like human sacrifice, poisoned arrows, and the ill-treatment of the dead have been carefully expunged, though the sharp eye of modern criticism can detect the traces of expurgation. Although the heroes certainly belonged to the Iron Age, they are conventionally represented as “smiting with the bronze,” though iron is often mentioned also. All the named heroes, being somebody’s tribal god and somebody’s ancestor, have to receive the title of king, although in the Iliad they are but captains in Agamemnon’s army. Possibly the earliest Homer lived under a patriarchal monarchy; certainly, as we shall see, the authors of the later parts were familiar with oligarchy or aristocracy. The tradition is probably true which says that Homer was not edited in our “authorised” version until the tyranny of Peisistratus at Athens in the sixth century.

It follows that we are not to take the epic story as representing a chapter of the real history of the Achæans in Greece. If we attempted to do so we should constantly be betrayed by the deliberate archaisms of the epic convention. The utmost use to which historians can put their Homer is to take the unconscious background of the poems as picturing the sort of civilisation with which writers of the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries were familiar. It is almost our only evidence for that period.

The Shield of Achilles

The description of the shield of Achilles in the eighteenth book of the Iliad may be selected as a typical piece of

Plate 12.—The François Vase.

Alinari.

unconscious background. It gives us a picture of Greek life which must be natural, since neither dramatic nor religious motives interfere to distort it. The writer is clearly describing a round shield with parallel bands of ornament such as we see in the “geometric” style of art (cf. p. 56). The pictures are conceived as inlaid in various metals, gold, tin, silver, and “kuanos,” or blue glass. For the style in which the ornamentation is conceived we may compare the François Vase[13] or the Chest of Kypselus as it is described by Pausanias. But obviously an idealising poet in describing such objects of art permits his imagination to excel anything that he has ever seen or heard of. Besides, it was wrought by the lame god Hephæstus, and the gods do not make armour such as you can buy at the shop.

“First he made a shield great and mighty, decorating it in every part, and round it he threw a bright, threefold, gleaming rim, and a silver baldric therefrom. There were five folds of the shield, and on it he set many designs with skilful craftsmanship.

“On it he wrought earth and sky and sea, and an unwearied sun and a waxing moon, and on it were all the signs wherewith heaven is crowned, the Pleiades and the Hyades and the might of Orion, and the Bear, which they surname the Wain, which revolves in the same place and watches Orion, and alone has no part in the baths of Ocean.

“And on it he put two cities of mortal men, two fair cities. In one there were marriages and feasts. They were carrying the brides from their chambers through the city with gleaming torches, and loud rose the marriage-songs. The musicians were playing, and among them the flutes and lyres made their music. The women stood admiring, every one at her porch; and the people were crowded in the market-place. There a strife had arisen: two suitors were striving about the price of a man slain. One claimed to have paid in full, and he was appealing to the people, but the other refused to take anything. So both had hurried to have trial before an umpire. Crowds of backers stood around each to cheer them on, and there were the heralds keeping the crowd in order. The old men sat upon polished stones in a holy circle with staves of loud-voiced heralds in their hands. With these they would arise in turn to give their judgments. There in the midst lay two talents of gold to give to the man who should speak the most righteous sentence of them all.

“But round the other city two armies of warriors bright in mail were set. And there was a division of counsel among them whether to destroy it utterly or to divide up into two shares all the store that the lovely citadel contained. The besieged would not yet yield, but were arming in secret for an ambush. Their dear wives and innocent children stood upon the wall to guard it, and in their company were the men of age. So the warriors were marching out, and there were their leaders, Ares and Pallas Athene, golden both with golden raiment, both fair and tall, armed like gods, a conspicuous pair, for the hosts about them were smaller. But when they came to the place where they had decided to make the ambush, in a riverbed, where there was a watering-place for every beast, they sat down there wrapped in their shiny bronze. Then some way off two scouts of the army were posted to watch when they might see sheep and oxen with curling horns. And there were beasts moving along, with two herdsmen following that took their pleasure with pan-pipes, for they suspected no guile. But their enemy who had watched them leapt upon them, and swiftly began to hew about the herds of kine and fair fleeces of white sheep, and they slew the shepherds also. But the besiegers, when they heard the din of battle rising among the kine, from their seats before the tribunes leapt upon high-stepping horses to pursue, and swiftly they approached. Taking rank there by the banks of the river, they fought and smote one another with bronze-tipped spears, and Strife mingled with them, and Kudoimos the lover of groaning, and ruinous Fate was there taking one man freshly wounded and another without a wound and another already dead and dragging them away by the feet in the noise of battle, and her robe about her shoulders was dappled with the blood of men. So living men also mingled and fought and dragged away the bodies of their dead comrades.

“Also he wrought thereon a soft fallow, a fat ploughland, a broad field of three ploughings. Many ploughmen were driving their teams up and down in it. And whenever they came to the baulk of the field at the end of their turn a man came forward with a cup of honey-sweet wine in his hands and proffered it. So they kept wheeling among the ridges, anxious to reach the baulk of the deep fallow, which grew dark behind them, and, gold though it was, looked as if it had been ploughed, so very wondrous was the craft.

Marriage Procession. From a Pyxis in the British Museum

“There too he put a princely demesne, wherein hired labourers were reaping with sharp sickles in their hands, some swathes were falling thick and fast to earth along the furrow, and the binders were tying others in bands. There stood the three binders close at hand, and behind ran the gleaner-boys carrying the corn in armfuls and busy in attendance. A king with his sceptre stood in silence among them on the furrow rejoicing in his heart. Some way off heralds were laying a feast under an oak-tree. They had sacrificed a great ox and were busy with it, while the women were scattering white barley meal in plenty for the harvesters’ supper.

“On it also he wrought a vineyard heavy-laden with grapes, beautifully wrought in gold. Up above were the black bunches, and the vineyard was set with silver poles throughout; round it he drove a trench of kuanos and a wall of tin; a single causeway led to it whereby the pickers walked when they gathered in the vintage. Maids and merry bachelors were carrying the honey-sweet fruit in woven baskets, and in the midst a boy played a lovely tune on a high-pitched lyre, singing thereto with his dainty voice a sweet dirge of Linus, while the rest kept time with stamping of feet and leaping and song and shrieking.

“On it he made a herd of straight-horned oxen. The cows were fashioned of gold and tin; lowing they passed from the midden to the pasture by a plashing river by a shivering reed-bed. Four cowherds of gold marched along with the kine, and nine white-footed dogs followed them. But among the foremost kine two dreadful lions were holding a deep-voiced bull. He was being dragged away bellowing loudly, but the dogs and the hinds were after him. The two lions had torn the hide of the great bull, and were greedily devouring the entrails and the dark blood, while the cowherds vainly spurred on the swift hounds. But they, forsooth, instead of biting the lions, kept turning back; they would run up close to bark at them and then flee away.

“On it the far-famed Cripple made a sheepfold in a fair valley, a big fold of white sheep, and steadings and huts and roofed-in pens.

“On it the far-famed Cripple fashioned a dance like that which Dædalus of old wrought in broad Cnossos for Ariadne of the lovely tresses. Therein youths and maidens costly to woo were dancing, holding one another by the wrist. Some of the maids had fine linen veils, and some had well-woven tunics with faint gloss of oil. Yea, they had fair garlands on their heads, and the men had golden swords hanging from silver baldrics. Sometimes they would trip it lightly on tiptoes, as when a potter sits and tries the wheel that fits between his hands to see whether it will run. But sometimes they advanced in lines towards one another, and a great company stood round the lovely dance delighted, and among them a holy bard sang to his lyre, and among the dancers two tumblers led the measure, twirling in the midst.

“And on it he put the great might of the River Ocean along the edge of the rim of the closely wrought shield.

“So then when he had fashioned a great and mighty shield he fashioned also a hauberk brighter than the beam of fire, and he fashioned him a strong helmet, fitting the temples, richly dight, and on it put a crest, and he made him greaves of pliant tin.”

I trust that the reader may be able to catch some glimpse of the picture even through the bald prose of translation. We are now in Europe for certain. It might be in Dorsetshire or Bavaria or Auvergne or Tuscany that these women come to their doors to watch the weddings go past, these honest ploughmen drain their beakers, and these weary harvesters look forward to the harvest supper. To this day you may see the peasants of Greece dancing in rings and lines, with agile acrobats to lead them, just as they danced on the shield of Achilles. History goes on its pompous way, leaving the peasant unaltered and the ways of country life unchanged.

Kings and Gods

The poet even here, not wholly oblivious of the courtly circles to whom he was singing, has, indeed, brought in a “king.” But it is a poor sort of Basileus who stands there among the clods rejoicing in his heart. He and his ancestral sceptre cut rather a foolish figure among

“The reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley.”

The truth is, of course, that he’s a king in buckram. He is only a country squire with a pedigree, dressed up as a Basileus to suit the convention of the epic. Such too are the “kings” of the Odyssey. There the story requires that Odysseus shall be King of Ithaca and that his faithful wife shall be maintaining his throne in his absence. But the poet or poets were so little accustomed to the ways of kings that they constantly forget the political importance of Penelope and speak as if it were only a question of the jointure of a comely widow. Eumæus the swineherd extols the wealth of Odysseus by saying that no other in Ithaca had so much. They were already in the habit of regarding the market-place as the political focus of the State. So in the town of Scheria “King” Alcinous goes forth daily to the council with the twelve other “renowned kings.” Odysseus their visitor prays that this “king” and his “queen” may be so blessed by the gods that they may leave to their children “the substance in their halls, and whatever dues of honour the people have rendered unto him.” And the “princess” goes out in a mule-cart with the washing. On the stage of the epic the king is, of course, a great and mighty ruler. We are often reminded how fearful is the wrath of kings. The king says, according to a quotation of Aristotle’s, that he has power of life and death. He gives away cities that do not belong to him. He inherits “his sceptre and his dooms” from Zeus and a long line of ancestors. But he cannot live up to these exalted pretensions. He debates policy in the market-place with the other kings (who are often called elders by mistake, though they are young and lusty as an eagle), and matters are settled by the acclamation of the masses. It is the orator who sways the crowds. By occasional slips of the tongue these divine kings are spoken of as a greedy class, just as they are in Hesiod. As for the “dooms” that they receive by inspiration from Zeus, they make no practical use of them. Justice, as we saw on our Shield, is really administered by the elders in the agora. A careless line of the Odyssey tells of “the hour when a man rises from the assembly and goes home to supper, a man who judges the many quarrels of the young men that go to him for judgment.” There is no single example of a king acting as judge in Homer, and though the king pretends to give away cities he sometimes humbly accepts the gift of an acre or two from the citizens for services rendered. There is, indeed, one celebrated passage of the Iliad where monarchy is apparently extolled; but the attentive reader will discern that it is in the language not of primitive patriarchal conditions, but of a partisan of aristocracy or tyranny rebuking the presumption of radical demagogy. It is in the second book of the Iliad. Agamemnon had bidden the Greeks prepare for flight from Troy. It was only a ruse to try their temper, but it succeeded all too well, for the people hastily took him at his word. Now Odysseus is bidden by the goddess Athena to hurry down and stop them.

“He went to meet Agamemnon, son of Atreus, and took from him his ancestral sceptre, ever indestructible, wherewith he went down to the ships of the brazen-shirted Achæans. Whensoever he met a king or man of mark, him he would approach and check with soft words. ‘Sir, it befits not to terrify thee like a coward; nay, sit thee down, and make the rest of the host sit also, for thou knowest not yet the mind of the son of Atreus. Now he is but trying the sons of the Achæans; soon he will smite them, and mighty is the wrath of god-nurtured kings. Honour is his from Zeus, the Zeus of counsel loves him.’

“But when he saw a man of the people shouting, him he would smite with his sceptre and chide with a word. ‘Sir, sit quiet and hear the speech of others, who are better than thou. Thou art unwarlike and cowardly, thou art of no account in war or in council. We cannot all be kings here, we Achæans; many-lordship is not good. Let one be lord, one king, to whomsoever the son of Kronos of crooked counsel has given the sceptre and the dooms that he may be king among them.’

“Thus he went through the host, lording it; and they hurried back to the meeting-place from their ships and tents with a noise as when a wave of the thundering sea crasheth on the mighty shore and the deep resounds.

“The others then sat down and took place on the benches, but Thersites alone still brawled with unmeasured words. He who was full of disorderly speech for idle and unseemly striving against kings.

“He was the ugliest man that came to Troy. He was bandy-legged and lame, and his two shoulders were humped and cramped upon his breast. Above, his head was peaked, and a scanty stubble sprouted upon it. He was the bitterest foe to Achilles and to Odysseus, and ever they were chiding him. Then too he cried out shrill words of reproach against divine Agamemnon. But the Achæans were horribly wroth with him, and hated him in their hearts....

“Thus he spake reviling Agamemnon, the shepherd of the people. But divine Odysseus quickly stood beside him, and scowling rebuked him with a grievous word. ‘Thersites, heedless of speech, shrill ranter that thou art, be still and dare not alone to strive with kings, for I say that there is no creature worse than thou, of all that came with the sons of Atreus to Ilium.’ ...

“Thus he spake, and smote him with his sceptre on the midriff and the shoulders. But he hunched himself up and a big tear fell from him, and a blood-red weal rose up from his back under the golden sceptre. So he sat down and trembled, looked helpless, and wiped away a tear in his pain, and they, for all their anger, laughed sweetly at him. And thus a man would say, looking at his neighbour, ‘Lo, now! Verily Odysseus hath done a thousand good deeds both in discovering good counsel and in leading the battle, but now this is far his best deed among the Argives, in that he hath checked this word-spattering maker of mischief from his rantings. Never again, I ween, will his ambitious heart stir him up to revile kings with words of reproof.’”

Thersites is not a product of simple undeveloped monarchy; the poet who drew this portrait had seen the mob-orator in his native agora. Thersites, it has been said, is the only private in the army. He is the only man who is named without a patronymic. And yet modern research has shown that even Thersites had an ancient cultus as a demigod in Sparta. So true is it that all the figures of the epic stage are figures of tribal ancestor-worship.

That is why the real gods come so badly out of the epics. They are the only immoral people in Homer; they cheat and lie, they smack and squabble. Perhaps we do not expect much decency from Zeus or Aphrodite, but even the stately Hera herself alternates between the crafty courtesan and the scolding fish-wife. And yet Homer is the “Bible of the Greeks”! Herodotus said, and said truly, that it was Hesiod and Homer who assigned to the gods their names, distributed their honours and functions, and settled their appearance and characteristics. In after-times Homer was the universal primer of education. It is extremely probable that Homer and Hesiod selected certain deities out of a vast number for special honour as members of the Olympian family. Why in the world, then, did not Homer honour them? Various explanations have been given. The old explanation was that this is the naive expression of primitive anthropomorphism, which makes gods in the likeness of men, enlarging the human vices as well as the virtues. But no one who really studies Homer can believe in a theory which makes him simple and childlike. Homer’s ridicule of the gods is not the unsophisticated laughter of a child or a savage. It is to be noticed that it is only some of the gods who come badly out of the Homeric theology. No figure could be lovelier than that of the sea-goddess, Thetis, or more dignified than Pallas Athene, or more ethereal than Iris, the ambassadress of heaven. Professor Ridgeway’s belief that Homer was written by a bard of the old race honouring his Achæan masters might explain the mordant raillery of Northern gods like Zeus and Hera. But then Aphrodite, who is the worst treated of all, would seem to be actually the Nature-goddess of Crete, ever accompanied with doves in Cretan art. It is just the Ægean naturalism which is excluded from Homeric religion. There is nothing to connect even Iris with the rainbow. My own explanation would be that hero-worship is Homer’s main concern. So many of his heroes claim descent from Zeus by so many mothers that Zeus cannot be endowed with monogamic morality. The gods can look after themselves; it is the heroes who require the assistance of the bard. I believe, too, in Professor Gilbert Murray’s suggestion that in these passages of impiety we have the intervention of the later Ionic spirit of rationalism. As such passages are widely diffused over the Iliad we should have to place the composition of a considerable part of it so late as the eighth and seventh century before Christ. But as we have seen that the political background of Homer is in the main a scene of aristocracy, precisely such as we have in the seventh-century poet Hesiod, there is no real objection to a late dating.

Once you abandon the absurd belief in Homer’s “primitive simplicity” and admit, what is now certain, that the epic poets could consciously archaise their story, omitting all reference to events and customs which seemed to them too modern to fit in with the divine race of heroes, just as Malory does with the Arthurian knights, there is no objection to believing that large parts of Homer were written in the eighth century. Of course, there are much older traditions and older fragments of epic poetry embedded in our Iliad and Odyssey. No real violence is done to ancient tradition by bringing these poems down to the verge of historical times, for Homer and Hesiod were generally regarded as contemporaries in antiquity. All the civilisation depicted in Homer is far closer to that of historical Greece than to that of the Ægean excavations. Take the armour for another example. Although, as has been said, the heroes generally “smite with the bronze” and their shields are sometimes “like a tower” and “reaching to the feet” and “girding the body,” as on the monuments of Mycenæ and Crete, yet in the ordinary thought of the poets the swords are undoubtedly of iron, since the cut is commoner than the thrust and you do not cut with a sword of bronze, and the shields are “circular,” “equal every way,” “bossed,” and “like the moon.” Sometimes, as in the case of the shield of Achilles, or the shield of Agamemnon, they are adorned with a blazon. In fact, the Homeric warrior is dressed and equipped exactly like the hoplite of Greek history. As regards his methods of fighting, the epic convention naturally requires a series of duels in order to show the individual prowess of the heroes; and, indeed, the various episodes of the Iliad are labelled as “The Prowess of Diomede,” “The Prowess of Menelaus,” and so forth. But at the back of the poet’s mind there constantly appears an ordinary Greek combat between two lines of warriors. Agamemnon once divides the host up into companies, tribe with tribe and brotherhood with brotherhood. Finally, by placing Homer late, in the flourishing culture of Æolis and Ionia, we avoid the absurdity of supposing that a literary form so exquisite and elaborate as the epic should have sprung out of nothing in times of violent unrest, of invasions, migrations, and ceaseless strife. A priori any one would say that lyric poetry must precede epic, as it has done in England. Greek tradition places Orpheus, the father of lyric song, before Homer. There would be nothing surprising in placing the early elegiac poetry on the same chronological level as the earliest hexameters. That the ordinary forms of lyric verse already existed in Homeric times we can see, if we read the poems attentively. The boy sings his vintage song of the death of Linus. At the burial of Hector there are bards to sing dirges. There is reference to the Hymenæus, or wedding-song. There were banquet songs too: in the First Iliad they sing all day long over their cups. Bards like Demodocus sing of the loves of the gods. Thus there is ample evidence that all the common forms of Greek lyric poetry preceded the epic, and that Homer did not spring into existence ready-made out of the void. Still less did the Achæan invaders from the cold North import a finished literary form of composition into the civilised peninsulas of the Mediterranean.

Art of the Epic Period

And now the question arises as to what sort of art we are to match with the poetry of Homer. It was the desire to give some literary equivalent for the glorious art of Mycenæ and Cnossos which led Schliemann and his school to equate it with Homer. Doubtless prehistoric Crete had its literature. But that has all perished, unless the undecipherable written tablets should chance to yield us something. We must realise that great literature can coexist with crude art. There is no great art in England to correspond with Shakespeare, Milton, or Shelley. Language being the easiest medium of artistic expression, literature commonly develops earlier than the graphic or plastic arts. We must therefore be prepared for the shock of finding that Homer belongs to the same period as a very ugly and inartistic decorative style on the vases and most rudimentary and primitive forms of statuary. The pages of Homer do not really lead us to expect anything else. Sculpture is scarcely mentioned in Homer. There is only one temple statue, and that is the statue of Athena at Troy, of which we are told that the Trojan women used to lay a richly embroidered robe upon its knees. We are probably, then, to conceive a rude seated figure of wood or stone such as we find at the earliest stages of Greek sculpture. Their roughness and rudeness might be mitigated by coverings of embroidery. At Branchidæ, near Miletus, a whole series of such figures was discovered, dedicated with writing of about 550 B.C.; but we can easily believe that such a type might persist for more than a century. It is believed that this type of statue has been evolved from the throne, for it appears certain that empty thrones were worshipped before iconic deities were carved. One can see also that it is only lately derived from a technique of wood, so flat are the planes of its surface. The goddess belongs to the chair rather than the chair to the goddess.

Beyond this there are some obviously imaginary figures in Homer, such as the golden torch-bearers in the fairyland of Phæacia, but nothing that we can call sculpture. Also there are many minor “objects of virtue,” such as the drinking-cup of Nestor and the brooch of Odysseus, some of which may be matched by the relics of the Mycenæan tombs; but of course cups and jewels of gold were still preserved from the older civilisation, and notably enough such objects are always accounted for: either Hephæstus has wrought them, or they have been handed down as heirlooms, or brought by the Sidonians over the sea. Homer does not take his art for granted. He uses the potter’s wheel in similes, but the only

Seated Statue from Branchidæ

art he really describes is that of tapestry-weaving, the domestic art carried on by all his ladies. Thus Helen employs herself at Troy in weaving figures of warriors into her web, and Andromache weaves flowers into hers. What pattern Penelope wove into her everlasting shroud is known only to those who know what song the sirens sang. Appropriate to this prominence of the textile art is the style of ornamentation described, as we have read, upon the shield of Achilles. For these parallel bands of picture-writing

Geometric Vase

which were in the poet’s mind when he depicted the shield are known to us in the pottery of the seventh and sixth centuries. It is called by modern archæologists the Geometric style, because the whole body of the vase is divided into bands and panels by strips of zigzag ornament. An early phase of the Geometric style is specially named after the Dipylon Gate at Athens, because huge vases of a certain type were found in great numbers in the ancient cemetery of Athens in that neighbourhood. The subject of these vases is generally funereal. We see the body laid out upon the bier and the mourners indicating their grief by laying their hands upon their heads. The figures are rendered in conventional diagrams. To my taste they are almost repulsive. Not only is the drawing of the figures careless and clumsy, but the spirit of the whole thing is ugly. The fidgety nerves of the artist trying to fill every corner with some sort of scrawl, scraping meaningless emblems even between the legs of his horses, wearies the eye of the spectator. His designs have no sort of correspondence with the form of his material, any more than the modern house-decorator’s friezes and dados properly belong to the four flat surfaces of his walls. The vital qualities of good Greek art are self-control, the subordination of the artist to his work, and the perfect adaptation of the artistic form to the subject under treatment. The Dipylon Style does violence to all these canons of good taste. There must be an explanation.

It is easy to see that the ornamentation of a Dipylon vase is borrowed from an alien technique. Pottery never required the artist to divide his field up into parallel bands with borders and fringes. It is clearly from needlework, embroidery, or tapestry that this style is borrowed. You can see the stitches and the threads in many of the patterns. Primitive tapestry is necessarily linear, geometrical, and rectangular.

Now the whole thing becomes clear. Greece is dominated by a masculine race of warriors inartistic by ancestral tradition. Music they have always loved. They are generous patrons to the bard who sings the praises of their ancestors. They like a prettily designed brooch or golden cup. But there are no patrons for the other arts. While their lords are fighting hard and drinking deep the women are perpetually at their looms. The only arts that flourish are the textile arts, and they are largely modelled on Asiatic imported fabrics. The potter is a wretched, despised slave, probably of the old race. He has lost all his manhood and most of his taste, he gets no encouragement to make his cheap pots beautiful, and he has no models for design except the patterns of tapestry or metalwork. All the beautiful earthenware of Cnossos and Kamàres is broken or buried under the ground.

Yet even the Dipylon style gradually improved. While still retaining its Geometric character, vase-painting improves in drawing and colour, until in early Attic work like the famous François vase[14] we reach designs of considerable beauty. Here the horse becomes the favourite animal type. When the potters advance far enough they begin to deal with scenes of heroic legend and mythology, carefully labelling their heroes with their names. The Gorgon, which often figures in Homer, as on the shield of Agamemnon and the ægis of Athene, begins to be an art type in the Dipylon period; so do the sphinx and griffin, which, curiously enough, do not appear in our Homer.

The Hero’s Home

In Crete art dwelt in palaces; in classical Greece it haunted the market-place and the temple. For the present art is confined to the home. If we may judge by the charming “interior” pictures which Homer most skilfully introduces as a counterfoil to the everlasting clash of arms in the Iliad, domestic life was at its richest and best in the age of the epics. Every one has been struck with the dignified and important part played by women in Homer, contrasted with their seclusion and neglect in historical Greece. No one but Shakespeare has given us so charming a series of feminine portraits as Andromache, Helen, Penelope, Nausicaa, Thetis, and Calypso. The ingenious Samuel Butler actually attempted to prove that the Odyssey was written by a woman, so sympathetic is the poet’s insight into the feminine point of view. But the same is equally true of the Iliad; and, indeed, the respect for women becomes part of the heroic tradition even in Attic tragedy, so that the audience in the theatre of Athens must have seen the heroines on their stage acting with a freedom and treated with a deference which was quite alien to their own homes.

But even at this, its highest point, the domesticity of Greek life falls far short of modern ideas, and the dignity of the heroes’ wives is somewhat illusory. Possibly the inconsistencies are due once more to the many hands and many successive generations which have had their part in building up the epic. Certainly, for monogamists, the matrimonial ideas of the heroes are far from exclusive. Agamemnon announces his intention of taking Chryseis home, for he likes her better than his dear wife Clytæmnestra, and makes no secret of the position she is to occupy. He does actually take Cassandra home to his wife. In the Odyssey, too, we get a hint of arrangements decidedly Oriental in what Penelope says about her son and the fifty handmaidens. Again, there is a singular contrast between the tender conjugal devotion of Hector and Andromache, or Odysseus and Penelope, and the extraordinary callousness sometimes indicated with regard to feminine charms. It is often remarked as an instance of Homer’s subtlety that he nowhere describes the beauty of Helen, whose face

“Launched a thousand ships
And shook the topmost towers of Ilium,”

only indicating it by making the old men of Troy look at her as she walks past and say to one another, “No wonder that the Greeks and Trojans should suffer pain so long for such a woman. Her countenance is wondrous like the immortal goddesses.” These traditions of the power of love and beauty must belong to the original epic story; for the whole plot of the Iliad, so far as it has a plot, turns on the beauty of Helen, as the whole plot of the Odyssey depends on the love of Odysseus for his wife and the constancy of Penelope. Thus both epics have a basis which might be the foundation of modern romantic fiction. Nevertheless, the spirit of romance is as completely absent from Homer as it is from all true Greek art and literature. Though Agamemnon is very angry at losing Chryseis he has no love for her. Odysseus simply gets tired of the lovely nymph Calypso, and parts from the charming Nausicaa without a pang. Such shocks as these are constantly in store for the modern reader, who is fed upon romance in the nursery.

If we look at the houses in which the domestic scenes of Homer are set we shall find that they are of a simplicity in strong contrast with the elaborate palaces of Crete or Tiryns; and this in spite of the obvious intention of the bard to depict them on a scale of heroic magnificence. They are mainly built of wood. The palace of Paris consists of three parts—thalamos, dōma, and aule. The thalamos is the private part of the house, and contains the marriage-bed of the royal couple. The dōma, or megaron, is the public hall for meals and receptions. The aule is the court with colonnades surrounding it. Priam had a large family: fifty sons slept with their wives in fifty thalamoi of polished stone built outside his court, while his daughters slept with their husbands in twelve roofed chambers within the court. The palace of Odysseus is more elaborate, and is so intended, for the disguised wanderer says: “Verily, this is the fair house of Odysseus, and easily may it be known and distinguished even among many. For there is building beyond building, and the court of the house is cunningly wrought with a wall and copings, and there are well-fitting double doors.” Standing outside the front door he can perceive by the smell of roast meat that there is a banquet going on. No great magnificence here. In front of the “well-fitting doors” there is a heap of manure, with an aged hound asleep upon it (a similar dung-heap, it may be remarked, graces the court of the palace of Priam in Troy City). Inside the doors there is the megaron, where the banquet is going on. Odysseus sits down on the ashen threshold, leaning against a pillar of cypress wood, specially commended for its straightness. Telemachus takes a lump of meat, “as much as his two hands can grasp,” and a whole loaf out of the fair basket, and Odysseus (who is disguised as a beggar) devours it on his dirty wallet as he sits on the threshold. This threshold under the portico of the hall is the regular meeting-place of beggars, and it is there that strangers are put to sleep. Within the hall there is an upper chamber where Penelope sleeps and lives with her maidens. The wooers set up three braziers in the hall to give them light, and heap them with wood and pine-brands; consequently the hall is so full of smoke that the weapons have to be removed to a storeroom to keep them useful. Odysseus, sleeping in the “prodomos” of the hall, can hear a remark made by one of the twelve grinding-women who have their hand-mills in the house next door. Under the same echoing colonnade where Odysseus sleeps goats and cattle are tethered by day. The walls of the hall itself are of wood, the ceiling is of wood, and the floor is of stamped earth, for it is cleaned with a spade, and fires are raked out of the braziers on to the floor. As for the bridal chamber, Odysseus had built it himself with stone, and it contained a marvellous bed wrought by the hero out of a living olive-tree. Finally, there was a rather obscure postern-gate set high in the wall of the hall above a stone threshold, and opening on to an open gallery. Thus the feature of the house of Odysseus is that it is of two stories; otherwise it consists, as usual, of three parts—hall, court, and chamber.

Our learned archæologists have been setting their intellects to the task of making these Homeric houses fit in with the palaces of Mycenæ and Tiryns, but they have found it hard work. They have had to admit that the palace of Odysseus is a good deal simpler than the meanest of the Ægean palaces. And yet our poet has deliberately advertised it as something out of the common. Does not that betray singular poverty of imagination? He could not even make his heroic domiciles as splendid as the actual buildings in which he sang his lays. What should we think of a novelist who professed to write about duchesses and described them as sitting in sumptuous front parlours? Of course we know the explanation. It is hopeless to attempt to synchronise the Homeric age with the ages of Ægean palaces. Homer lived in an altogether lower civilisation as regards wealth and comfort. Just as we saw that his “kings” were only country squires, so his “palaces” are no more than farmhouses, with all their picturesque squalor and simplicity. Dirt and magnificence may go hand in hand, as in our own mediæval halls, but in the Homeric civilisation the magnificence is only in the poet’s heart. His material surroundings are fitly typified by the Dipylon vases.

Hesiod’s World

Hesiod is the Cinderella of Greek poets, neglected alike by editors and schoolboys. And yet once he stood on a level with Homer. He is in reality the complement of Homer, and no picture of the Greek Middle Ages can be complete without him. The Parian Marble sets Hesiod thirty years earlier than Homer, Herodotus places them both about 850-800 B.C. Hesiod’s principal works are two, the “Works and Days” and the “Generations of Gods” or “Theogony.” The “Works and Days” is generally supposed to be a treatise on husbandry, but it seems to be in origin a letter of remonstrance to a wicked brother, Persis, who had ousted Hesiod from his property. The letter is embroidered freely with morals, maxims, and examples from mythology. Persis is exhorted to practise industry and good farming, for which some proverbial hints are given. But the main purport of this curious jumble is the reiteration of complaints against the “bribe-devouring kings”—always in the plural—who have given a corrupt judgment against the poet on his brother’s lawsuit. No one pretends to see real monarchy or anything but oligarchy in Hesiod, yet his rulers are called βασιλεῖς, just as are Homer’s. The “Works and Days” contains also the earliest versions of two most famous legends which together make up the Greek story of creation, the story of how Prometheus stole fire from heaven and the story of Pandora, the Eve of Greek mythology. The chief interest for modern readers lies in a very quaint and curious list of taboos and some personal reminiscences which form, I suppose, the oldest piece of autobiography in existence. He has already described seafaring as a very disagreeable business, to be avoided if possible; he now advises his brother to “wait for a seasonable sailing day, and when it comes, then drag down thy swift ship to the sea, and have a fit cargo stowed away on it, that thou mayest return home with profit; even as my father and thine, most witless Persis, used to make voyages for an honest living. Once he came even to this country, after a long voyage in a black ship from Cyme, in Æolis, turning not from rich resources and prosperity, but from dire poverty, which Zeus gives to men. And he dwelt near Helicon in this beggarly hamlet of Ascra—Ascra, vile in winter, uncomfortable in summer, and good never at all. But do thou, my Persis, be seasonable in all thy doings, but above all in seafaring praise a small ship, but put thy cargo in a great one. The freight will be greater and the profit greater if the winds keep off their dreadful storms. Whenever thou turnest thy rash heart to trade, wishing to escape debt and joyless famine, I will show thee the limits of the thundering main without being skilled at all in seafaring or in ships, for I have never sailed the broad sea in a ship except when I crossed to Eubœa from Aulis, where the Achæans in times long past were storm-bound when they gathered a mighty host from holy Hellas for Troy of the fair women. There did I take passage for Chalcis to try for the prizes of wise Amphidamas” (i.e. prizes offered at his funeral games), “the many well-prepared prizes which his lordly sons offered. There I boast to have won the prize for the hymn, and brought home a tripod with handles which I set up to the Muses of Helicon where first they taught me to be a clear-voiced bard. So little trial have I made of well-caulked ships, but still I shall declare the mind of Zeus who bears the ægis, for the Muses have taught me to sing a hymn without bounds.”

Coin of Croton, showing Tripod

Quaint old Hesiod! How like the literary man of all ages! He has never been to sea except on the channel ferry, but in virtue of his literary gifts he is competent to instruct other landsmen in navigation. So by help of the Muses he declares the mind of Zeus—“Never put to sea in a storm!”

Well, this is the reverse of Homer’s medal: the god-nurtured kings frankly revealed as corrupt nobles, the unrelenting toil on the stony farm, the perilous commercial enterprises in small unseaworthy ships, the emigrant returning home to Bœotia in poverty from his Eldorado in Æolis, the superstition, and the pessimism.

Ship of Odysseus. From a Vase

III
THE AGES OF TRANSITION

οὐ μὴν οὐδ’ ὑπαρχόντων τούτων ἁπάντων ἤδη πόλις,
ἀλλ’ ἡ τοῦ εὖ ζῆν κοινωνία.—Aristotle.

The Coming of Apollo

E bringeth to men and women cures for their grievous sicknesses, he giveth the harp, and he granteth the Muse to whomsoever he will; he ruleth his oracular shrine, bringing peace and lawful order into our hearts; he stablished the descendants of Heracles and Ægimius in Lacedæmon and Argos and most holy Pylos.” Such is the Theban poet’s summary of the attributes of the Dorian god. Healing, harp-music and lyric poetry, discipline fostered by the Delphic oracle, and the Dorian government of Sparta, Argos, and Messenia—these are the gifts of Apollo to Greece. There is nothing here to connect him with Nature-worship. He is not even connected with light or sun.

We have already seen something of the earliest strata of religious beliefs on Greek soil. The Ægean worship was principally “aniconic fetishism”—that is, the worship of inanimate, possibly symbolical, objects, such as stones, pillars, crosses, axes, horns, and trees. Then there were animal deities, possibly totemistic in origin, such as the snake-goddess, the dove-goddess, and the bull-man, or Minotaur, powers mainly representing fecundity. There was certainly also ghost-worship; for the dead in the tholos tombs were certainly honoured by sacrifices, and very likely by human sacrifices at first. There seem to have been no temples at all in these stages of religion; it was rather a system of private local cults in great and bewildering variety. But it is certain that the Ægean peoples had developed some wholly anthropomorphic deities before the end. Some of the regular Olympian deities of historical Greece seem to belong partially, and some wholly, to this earlier civilisation. Poseidon, the sea-god, Hermes, the Arcadian shepherd-god, and Demeter or Mother Earth, are of the latter class, with mysterious forms like the Fates, the Curses, the Harpies, and the Sirens. But there was little exclusiveness about ancient religion; new deities are quite readily accepted into polytheistic systems, though in some cases there was a protracted struggle to keep them out. Hesiod remarks that the deities have many names for a single shape, and often a double name reveals assimilation, such as Phœbus Apollo or Pallas Athene. In most cases, indeed, the great name of an Olympian god covers a host of minor deities with varying and sometimes quite opposite attributes. Thus the national Zeus has swallowed up countless local heroes, as when the Laconians worshipped Zeus Agamemnon.

All these processes of change are reflected in mythology. It would seem as if mythologists, or, as we should say, expert theologians, set out to reconcile the people to new forms of worship by inventing delightful stories to account for the change. Homer and Hesiod were doing precisely that sort of work. For example, the introduction of the Northern Zeus was effected by means of a curious myth. It was agreed that he had not always been King of Heaven; formerly his old father Cronos had ruled, he whose wife was the earth. Zeus was born in Crete—that is, he was attached to

Plate XIII. HERMES KRIOPHOROS: (THE LAMB-CARRIER)