The Mainland Palaces

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 (9THCENTURY 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 4000B.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 insistedon 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 (? 2540B.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.

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 1911B.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 fairestof 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 petticoatof 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.

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 kingmust 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 millenniumB.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, MYCENÆEnglish Photo Co., Athens

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 1400B.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.

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 Olympianfamily, 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.

ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονταιἡμίθεοιHesiod.

IN 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 thedesigns 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 1200B.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 (seep. 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 centuryB.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,heis 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 theGreeks—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 1380B.C.The Dorians, who were the last-comers, are generally supposed to have been coming in between 1100 and 1000B.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.

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 highidealistic 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.

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

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