TEMPLES. ALTARS. RITUAL. PURIFICATION

[1]Frazer,Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 105.

[2]Helbig in Roscher,s.v. Minos, ii. 2. 3000. On this matter there is much controversy.

[3]See several examples in Evans, "Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Worship."J. H. S., vol. xxi.

[4]Ibid.p. 108.

[5]Frazer,Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 121.

[6]Evans,ut sup. p. 108.

[7]Pausanias, iv. 33.

[8]Evans, p. 164, fig. 44.

[9]See "The Asiatic or Winged Artemis." by M. S. Thompson.J. H. S., vol. xxix. pt. ii. pp. 286-308.

[10]Cults of the Greek States, vol. ii. p. 427.

[11]Iliad, xiv. p. 203.

[12]Iliad, ii. 550, 551.

[13]Leaf,Iliad, vi. 130.

[14]Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii.

[15]Ibid. ut supra.

[16]Catalogue, Book ii. 844-850.

[17]Iliad, x. 434-441.

[18]Strabo, x. 3. 470; fragment 25. Miss Harrison,Prolegomena, p. 375.

[19]Iliad, xx. 21.

[20]The distinction here made between "religion" and "mythology" is made merely for the sake of convenience. We may readily be told that the belief in a good God is as mythical as the tales about bad gods. But the belief in a just, wise, and loving heavenly Father, the source and sanction of ethics, represents one mood, and leads to one set of results in conduct; while the belief in wicked and buffooning gods represents another aspect of human thought, and leads to very different results, mainly to the bewilderment of late historic Greek thinkers.

[21]Iliad, iii. 279, 280.

[22]xix. 259, 260.

[23]Iliad, ix. 502-512.

[24]For a variety of theories, see Leaf, Notes toIliad, iii. 278, xix. 262. Quite possibly the formula of the oath is a survival from a stage of belief more archaic than the ordinary Homeric conception of Hades.

[25]Odyssey, i. 263.

[26]iii. 48.

[27]vi. 180-185.

[28]vii. 165.

[29]xiii. 202.

[30]Odyssey, xiv. 82-84.

[31]Iliad, xvi. 516. Prayer of Glaucus to Apollo.

[32]Cf.Miracles de Madame de Sainte Catherine de Fierbois, a chapel register of miracles in the Hundred Years' War.

[33]Hdt. i. 66.

[34]i. 67.

[35]v. 67.

[36]SeeR. G. E. p. 128, note 3; and, for other instances, pp. 180-190.

[37]v. 333-335.

Homeric religion is so advanced that we cannot expect to learn from it anything about the earliest origins, or to illustrate it from what we know of the most primitive forms of belief (it would be absurd to look in Homer for any trace of totemism or exogamy). Yet Homeric religion is so farnaïfand fresh, in that it is not the work of a priestly caste; its services have not been elaborated by the mummeries of interested medicine-men. As for sacrifice itself, it were superfluous to quote passages in which sacrifice pleases the gods, and is counted to men for righteousness. But it appears that the Olympians valued sacrifice rather as a proof that men were mindful of them, and wished to stand well in their eyes, than for any good they got from the smoke and savour. They had their own nectar and ambrosia.

There were priests and there were prophets, but the State was decidedly "Erastian." The Commander-in-chief superintended sacrifices in the general interest, where the welfare of the host was concerned, and individuals sought the favour of the gods by sacrifices offered at their own expense. These were most elaborate after a theophany, or visit from a visible and friendly god, as when Athene sat at meat with Nestor in his house at Pylos. The rite is minutely described: the household of Nestor and the crew of Telemachus are summoned, the cow is driven up from the meadow; the goldsmith brings his tools: seats are set out, woodis collected, water for hand-washing is brought; Nestor provides gold to gild the horns of the victim, and make it seem splendid in the eyes of the goddess. The son of Nestor, Thrasymedes, holds the axe; Perseus has the vessel into which its blood fell,—whether to avoid making a mess, or because the ground must not be ceremonially polluted by the gore. But of ceremonial pollution of any kind, Homer is ignorant. He says nothing suggestive of a sacramental theory of the blood as apt "to pollute the earth or even cry for vengeance."[1]

Nestor, then, does the rite of hand-washing and scattering barley grain: Thrasymedes hamstrings the cow, which falls; and the women raise a cry, not a wail of sympathy as among the Todas in India. (It may be a cry of joyful vengeance. Odysseus forbids Eurycleia to raise this cry (ὀλυλύξαι) over the blood of the dead wooers.[2]) "Theὀλυλυγήwas a joyful cry, uttered by women, especially at the moment of the consummation of a sacrifice."[3]Pisistratus then slaughters the victim; "the black blood flowed from it, and the life left the bones." The limbs are carved, fat is laid on them; the flesh is roasted, cut up, and put on spits; then follows the feast.[4]The same rites are practised on solemn occasions in time of war and in a hostile country, when a whole hecatomb is sent with Chryseis to Chryses, priest of Apollo.[5]We do not hear in this case of the gilding of the horns of the victims,—there were too many of them,—but Diomede promises a sacrifice of a heifer with gilded horns to Athene, before setting forth to slay the sleeping Thracians in the Trojan camp.[6]Sacrifice may be offered in atemple, or at an altar in the open air. Twelve kine are sacrificed in the Trojan temple of Athene,[7]but a temple could not accommodate a hecatomb.

An army in the field has no temples, and does sacrifice in the open air; indeed, even where temples exist there are abundant altars in the open air; for example, where Hector did sacrifice, "amid the crests of many-folded Ida," and at other times on the city height.[8]

Temples are not often mentioned in the Epics, where the host usually worships under the sky, and has no temples of its own; or Odysseus is wandering "in fairy lands forlorn." An army on the march or in the trenches would build no temples, nor would Odysseus find them among cannibals. But that fairy isle, Phaeacia, had its temples of the gods built by the first settler, Nausithous.[9]Altars at the siege of Troy are set up in the field, as at Orleans during the two solemn masses on the day of the raising of the siege (May 8, 1429). The Gods have their groves, whether a temple was in each of them or not. Originally it is probable that caves, as at Delos, or the Dictaean cave of Crete, or gorges, as at Delphi, were the sacred places; but Homer knows the stone threshold of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and the wealth of offerings within,[10]where Agamemnon consulted the Oracle.[11]The priest, Chryses, had "roofed a shrine" for Apollo.[12]Apollo, in Troy, had a temple, with a greatadyton; and Athene's temple had a sacred seated image of thegoddess.[13]Athene also in Athens[14]went to the temple of Erechtheus. Given the circumstances of the heroes in both Epics, an army in the field, a wanderer in unknown lands, the rare mention of temples is no proof that, when they appear, they mark "late" passages, while the altars in the open air mark "early" passages: moreover, hecatombs could not be slain in temples, nor could a large army be accommodated in the house of a god. When the Achaeans were sacrificing several hecatombs at once to Zeus, in Aulis, they naturally could not do so in a temple, but under a fair plane tree, by a clear running stream.[15]

In the symbolical sacrifices that sanctioned the taking of oaths, the rite was extremely simple. Agamemnon cuts the hair from the lambs' heads, utters the appeal to Zeus and all powers to bear witness, then cuts the throats of the victims, and libation of wine is made. Priam carries the dead lambs away in his chariot; but when a boar is the victim, in the oath of Agamemnon to Achilles, it is thrown into the sea.[16]We see no sacrifice within the temple of a city except that in association with which Theano, a married priestess of a maiden goddess, lays a robe on the knees of Athene, while the attendant ladies raise theὀλoλυγή.[17]

In peace, as in war, Homer's people are free fromthe lower superstitions, if we except the belief in augury and the omens from the flight of birds. Hector's famous phrase, "one omen is best, to fight for our own country," would have shocked most of the Generals of Republican Rome. A phantasm of the dead, as we saw, may appear only in a dream or a "border-land case," to a man in bed, if the dead man has not been cremated. The boding visions of the second-sighted man in theOdyssey, the shroud of mist about the bodies of the doomed Wooers, may indicate a superstitious belief—to those who do not believe in second sight! The fairies of Homer, nymphs of mountain and well, wood and sea, are creatures of poetry, rather than of superstition; they are fair and frail, but their kisses, unlike those of their kindred from Argyll to the Pacific, are not fatal.

Homer knows nothing of taboos. That the Achaeans "let their hair grow long" is true enough, but does not suggest that they were under a vow not to cut it till they took Troy.[18]The representations of men in many works of Aegean art, such as the gold cups of Vaphio, show them wearing clustering love-locks that fall beneath the shoulder. We might as well accuse the Spartans and the Cavaliers as the Achaeans of wearing love-locks because of a vow. That the Achaeans were tabooed from love during the siege is a fact entirely unknown to their poet. "To every man a damsel or two" is his version, and the heroes couch with their fair captives; while Agamemnon takes a solemn oath that he has never done so with Briseis, and Thetis advises Achilles to rejoice in love. A goddess would not advise the breach of a religious vow of continence.[19]

To the folklorist it is almost annoying to find, in so ancient a poet, so little of the seamy side of folklore.But the later poets of Greece apply it very abundantly: it was rampant in their temple-rites and temple-legends. Homer speaks of no witches, of no incantations save the song for the staunching of the blood of Odysseus, when his thigh had been gored by the boar. The belief in such staunching is still common in Cumberland and in Ireland, as it was when Jeanne d'Arc refused to let the charm be sung over her arrow wound at Orleans.

Magic done for the good of the crops, as in the Eleusinian and other mysteries, does not appear in the Epics. A good king has good luck, under him all things prosper; but the idea of sacrificing an unlucky king, or any other human being, would have surprised the poet. In all such matters he is on another plane than the authors of the Ionian epics, whose tales of constant human sacrifices are perhaps adapted fromMärchen(where cannibalism is the horror) rather than inspired by veridical traditions. The great rite which Homer ignores, and which the pre-Achaean population probably, and certainly all post-Homeric Greece from the eighth century to the arrival of Christianity held in most regard, was the purification of manslayers by the blood of beasts. Achilles in the Cyclic poems is purified by Odysseus after the slaying of Thersites; Apollo is purified after the slaying of the dragon of Delphi.

But "the whole idea of pollution as a consequence of wrong-doing is foreign to Homer," says Mr. Monro.[20]When the house of Odysseus is cleansed of the blood of the slain Wooers, and when, on restoring Chryseis, Agamemnon "bade the folk purify themselves, so they purified themselves, and cast the defilements into the sea, and did sacrifice to Apollo,"[21]the pollution is mere physical filth of house and camp. There is no idea of magical riddance from either sin or danger at the hands of a pursuing ghost. Eustathius, bishop of Thessalonica, remarks, in his Homeric commentary, "on the cardinaldifference between the religion of Homer and that of later (and earlier) Greece...."[22]It would have been safer to discriminate between Homeric religion on one hand, and Ionian, Attic, and historic Greek religion on the other.

The idea at the root of the purification of a man-slayer by a bath of blood is not, I think, that his sin is being removed by the "sympathetic magic" of new blood, but that the swine's blood poured over him throws the avenging ghost of his victim off his scent, confusing the trail; or that the angry ghost accepts the pig's blood washed from the slayer as atonement. Plato says that the myth held that the ghost of the victim communicates its own uneasy emotions to the slayer, telepathically.[23]Scores of savage and one or two Hellenic practices aim at actually disarming or mutilating the avenging ghost, by binding or dismembering the corpse which he tenanted. Homer believes that, a man once burned and buried, his ghost is confined, powerless, to Hades. Hence his Achaeans neither worship the dead nor practise purification to avoid avenging ghosts. These rites are Ionic, Attic, and, in historic Greece, are Hellenic, also Asiatic. They make an insuperable barrier between Homeric and Ionian religion.

It is certain that among the Ionians of the seventh century B.C. a mystic purification from blood-guilt was the usual practice. Herodotus tells us that it was, in the sixth century, the practice of the Phrygians, Lydians, and, in his own day, of the Hellenes. "The manner of cleansing among the Lydians is the same, almost, as that which the Hellenes use."[24]3 Aeschylus informs us that the blood of swine was employed in purification.[25]The purifier, in historic Greece, "washed off the blood from the suppliant who is being purified, and, havingstirred up the washing, poured it into a trench to the west of the tomb."[26]

Possibly the Ionians had adopted, in Asia, the Oriental idea of pollution and the Oriental mode of cleansing. Homer not only ignores, but knows not these things. Nor, I think, do we find purification in early Celtic and Teutonic and Scandinavian "saga."

We have more light on the method of purification from works of art. On an Apulian vase, Apollo holds a little pig above the head of the polluted matricide, Orestes, with one hand, in the other he grasps a long bough of laurel, which in Roman lustrations had a purifying effect. Melampus, on a Greek cameo, purifies the daughter of Proetus in the same fashion.[27]

There is a singular case in which later tradition introduced purification where Homer says nothing about it. InOdyssey, xxi. 1-41, the poet explains how Odysseus came to possess the Bow of Eurytus. When he was but a lad he was sent to recover certain sheep stolen by men of Messenia. He met Iphitus, son of Eurytus, of Oechalia, looking for his lost mares and mules, and Iphitus presented him with the Bow. Thence Iphitus went to the house of Heracles in Tiryns, and there was murdered by his host.

Now we know at first hand, from Nestor himself(Iliad, xi. 685-692), that Heracles, before Nestor's first feat of arms, had attacked his family in Pylos, and that out of Nestor's twelve brothers he alone had escaped. "For the mighty Heracles had come and oppressed us, in former years, and all our best men were slain. For twelve sons were we of noble Neleus, whereof I alone was left, and all the others perished," but Neleus survived.

This feud of Heracles was a famous theme; the legend included the fairy story of Periclymenus, brother of Nestor. Poseidon had given him the gift of taking all sorts of shapes, but when he settled on the chariot of Heracles in the shape of a bee, Athene pointed out the bee to Heracles, who shot it. InIliad, v. 393, we learn that Heracles once wounded Hades and Hera. The later Pylians conceived Nestor's wounding of Hades to have occurred at their town, when the hero attacked the household of Neleus. Nestor, in the passage quoted, says nothing about the help of Hades on this occasion, but Dione (v. 397) says that Heracles wounded Hades ἐν πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι, "in Pylos among the dead." Aristarchus took this to meanin the gate, in the country of the dead.The incident would be part of the journey of Heracles to hell, to bring back "the dog" Cerberus. On this showing Homer is not saying that Hades fought vainly against Heracles in his raid on Nestor's town. But Homer never elsewhere uses pylos for "a gate."

The affair is confusing, but later legend associated Heracles's feud against Neleus with the rites of purification. Nestor does not tell us, but the Venetian scholiast on his speech does tell us that Neleus had refused to purify Heracles for the murder of Iphitus, his guest, under trust.[28]

Was the Homeric poet of Nestor's speech (xi. 693) ignorant of this "cause of wrath," and is it a later invention after the custom of purification came in; or did Homer "expurgate" a rite which he found in pre-Achaean tradition?

The certain fact is that the society for which theIliadandOdysseywas composed did not practise the sanguinary rite, and took no interest in it. In Mr. Ridgeway's theory, Heracles is not Achaean, he is Pelasgic. If, then, the poet, whether Achaean or, in Mr. Ridgeway's view, a Pelasgian minstrel of an Achaean lord, adopted Heracles from Pelasgian legend, and if that legend spoke of purification, the poet ignored it, as a thing not in the manners of his Achaean audience.

[1]Mr. Murray takes this view,R. G. E. p. 64; but there is no trace of such ideas in Homer.

[2]Odyssey, xxii. 407-416.

[3]Monro, Note toOdyssey, xxii. 408.

[4]Odyssey, iii. 420-472.

[5]Iliad, i. 447-468.

[6]Iliad, x. 291-294. Mr. Murray compares Nestor's "timid, religious, almost tender sacrifice of the ox" with "the habitual sacrifices of the Iliad," which "seem like the massacres of a slaughter-house, followed by the gorging of pirates." In his opinion Nestor's cow was a kind of member of the family, "the common blood running in the veins of all," while the alien cattle at Troy are not the most distant relations of the invaders (R. G. E.pp. 59-65). Homer knows nothing of these ideas, as we see; all depends on the degree of solemnity and on the occasion of the sacrifice. If it be solemn, the same rites are used in Troyland during war as in Pylos during peace.

[7]Iliad, vi. 308-310.

[8]xxii. 170-172.

[9]Odyssey, vi. 10.

[10]Iliad, ix. 404.

[11]Odyssey, viii. 79-81.

[12]Iliad, i. 39.

[13]Iliad, v. 445-448, vi. 297-310.

[14]Od. vii. 81.

[15]Ibid. ii. 305, 306. Mr. Murray supposes that the author of Iliad, i. 39, is later than the author of Iliad, i. 446 ff. The "earlier" poet of i. 446 makes Chryses sacrifice many oxen in the open air. The "later" author of i. 39 makes Chryses talk of roofing a temple. "The writer of that line did not observe that in his original there had been no temple, only an altar. To him an altar implied a temple, so he took the temple for granted" (R. G. E.p. 150). By such devices is the Iliad torn into tatters, later and earlier. Surely a god may have a temple, though the slaughter of hundreds of oxen is not carried on within its walls!

[16]Iliad, iii. 292-310, xix. 250-268.

[17]Ibid. vi. 297-301. Mr. Leaf remarks that "it is needless to seek for Athenian inspiration" in this passage.

[18]R. G. E.p. 123, for another view.

[19]SeeR. G. E.pp. 123, 124, for the religious vow of celibacy.

[20]Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 362.

[21]Iliad, i. 311-316.

[22]Miss Harrison,Proleg. Greek Rel. p. 29.

[23]Laws, ix. 865.

[24]Hdt. i. 35.

[25]Eumenides, 273.

[26]Proleg. Greek Religion, 59, 60, quoting Athenaeus, ix. 78, 409 E, who cites two writers on Athenian rites, Kleidemus and Doritheus. Miss Harrison supposes that the ghost drinks the blood of the slain animal, washed off the body of the slayer, in place of the slayer's blood.

[27]Frazer,Pausanius, vol. iii pp. 278, 593.

While the ancients believed that the Homeric poems were composed in the Greek settlements on the Asian coast, and brought from Ionia to Hellas, modern critics often hold that the earliest lays were made in Greece, but that ourIliadandOdysseycontain a large percentage of much later Ionian work. In these circumstances it is natural to ask,Who were the Ionians? a point on which Homer throws no light. The Ionian name is not mentioned in the Catalogue any more than the Aeolian and Dorian names, and "the tunic-trailing Iaones" only appear inIliad, xiii. 685, where they are very hard pressed in defending the part of the Achaean wall where it was lowest, near the ships of Aias and the dead Protesilaus. They are brigaded with Locrian light-armed archers, the Boeotians, Phthians, and Epeians of Elis, and "the picked men of the Athenians," whose leaders are Menestheus, king of Athens, as in the Catalogue, and three others. Thus the Ionians appear to be equivalent to the Athenians. The epithet "chiton-trailers" occurs but this once in Homer, and, of course, is inappropriate to the warlike occasion: the Ionians of the seventh century certainly wore the short tightcypassis, not the chiton, when actively engaged. In the Ionian hymn to Apollo the Ionians are "chiton-trailers," but the occasion is a public festival.

The whole passage, according to Mr. Leaf, is "very probably an Attic interpolation, with the object of giving respectable antiquity to the hegemony of Athens over the Ionian tribes"; but, as the Ionians of Asia were proud of their connection with Athens, and far from proud, says Herodotus, of the name Ionian,theyare as likely as the Athenians to have added the lines. In short, the Ionian name, like the Dorian and the Aeolian names, never occurs in theIliad; while the Athenian king, Menestheus, never draws sword or throws spear in the poem. It will be observed that, when he does mention Athenian leaders, Menestheus the king, Bias, Stichios, and Pheidas, Homer does not, as is his custom, assign to any one of them a divine ancestor, nor even name the father of any one of them, except Petoos, father of Menestheus. He tells no anecdote about any of them. In the Catalogue (ii. 546-551) the Athenians alone appear as worshippers of dead men, though in Mycenaean pre-Homeric Greece this rite was certainly part of religion, as also in historic Greece, and in Attica it has an uninterrupted record. It is not inconceivable, though by no means certain, that the Athenians interpolated their own mention in the Catalogue, with the very few allusions to their king, Menestheus; but except for these, the epics almost ignore Attica, ignore the Ionians, and, to learn anything of their early history, we must turn to other sources.

By the time of Pausanias (post-Christian) and much earlier, for Euripides wrote a play against the myth, and it was current in the time of Herodotus, the Athenians and Ionians had arranged for themselves a fabulous genealogy. Their purpose was to connect themselves with the supposed most genuine prehistoric Hellenes, namely, those of Achilles's realm in Hellas, part of the kingdom of Peleus, in south-west Thessaly.

In precisely the same way the Scottish makers of fabulous genealogy connected the Stewart kings,—really Fitz Alans, with the Dalriadic Royal House of the Scoti from Ireland (descendants of the Scythian princess, Scota), who invaded Argyll about 500 A.D. The name of these Scoti of Ireland had finally been given to the whole country north of Tweed and Esk, and so its kings must beEteoscoti, genuine Scots.

The Athenian and Ionian genealogists worked on the same principles. Their heroes are as apocryphal as Princess Scota of Scythia, and their genealogies vary with the motives of each genealogist. They believed that they were "Pelasgians," that they did not originally bear the name which was by their time prepotent, "Hellenes," and was applied to all Greeks; but, in the fable given by Pausanias they hitched themselves thus on to the Hellenes and Achaioi whom Achilles led from Thessaly. To the seacoast on the south of the Corinthian gulf, theAigialosor "sea-board" (held by Agamemnon in the Catalogue) came Xuthus, son of Hellen, out of Thessaly; being expelled, after Hellen's death, by his brothers. He had first fled to Athens, which in all these fabrications represents herself as not originally Hellenic or Achaean, but as the constant asylum of all distressed Achaean princes; Theban, like Oedipous, or Eleian, like the descendants of Nestor, and Orestes, having here Homeric warrant (Odyssey,iii. 306). We have a parallel in the continuous efforts of Highland genealogists, at one period, to claim descent from Normans who came north out of England and married the heiresses of the Celtic chiefs; as the Campbells (Crooked-Mouths) claimed descent from a Norman "De Campo Bello," or Beauchamp.

On these lines, then, the Hellene from Thessaly, Xuthus, married at Athens the heiress of the king, the daughter of Erechtheus; and had two sons, Achaeus and Ion. Thus the Achaeans of south-west Thessaly have a little of Athenian blood, for Achaeus went back to Thessaly and reigned there; and theIonians of Athens are mixed up with the sons of Hellen in a more roundabout way. Ion, son of Xuthus, son of Hellen, was domiciled in theAigialos, the south coast of the Corinthian gulf, because his father, Xuthus, had been driven thither from Athens, and reigned there. Ion succeeded to the throne of theAigialos, but was buried in Attica, having died there while in command of an Athenian army. His seacoast subjects on the southern seaboard of the Corinthian gulf, originally "Pelasgians," but now called after him "Ionians," were thus in relations with Attica, and they migrated thither in a body, when they were driven from home by the Achaeans whom the Dorian invaders had expelled from their seats in the southern and western Peloponnese. The Ionians, so far, appear as a pre-Achaean people of the northern coast of Peloponnesus, Hellenic only through their Royal House, that of Ion; and later settled in Attica, among a people also pre-Hellenic in origin.

Attica later offered an asylum to the Neleidae, descendants of Nestor, who, like the Fitz Alan Stewarts in Scotland, obtained the throne of the country in which they settled. When a son of Codrus, the last of these Neleid kings of Athens, led a colony from Attica to the Asian coast, the most part of the Attic emigrants were Ionians settled in Attica, not Athenians, though some Athenians accompanied them; and the Royal contingent, starting from Athens, settled at Miletus.[1]

Thus, in this legend, the people of Attica, in the main, are not Hellenic, not Achaean in origin, but are connected with the Thessalian Hellenes and Achaioi by Royal marriages; while, though not in origin Ionians, they are intermingled, both in Attica and in the Asian settlements, with that seacoast people, themselves only Achaean through the grandson of Hellen, Ion, their king.

Historic Greek inquirers understood the matter in that way, and we must first examine their "Pelasgian" theories.

With theories ancient or modern, fantastic or scientific, or both scientific and fantastic, about "Pelasgians" and other "races" in the prehistoric south of Europe; with deductions from place-names in Greece, the isles, and the Asian coasts; with speculations about "Aryans" and "non-Aryans," long-headed and short-headed, dark-haired and light-haired peoples, I have nothing to do. We have not statistics of pigmentation in prehistoric or in historic Greece, or craniological statistics. We cannot translate certain fourth century inscriptions from Crete, written in Greek characters, bat in a language which, though not improbably "Indo-European," must have been to Greeks as unintelligible as to ourselves. We cannot even read the characters of Minoan writing. The much manipulated legends of movements of peoples which reach us in Greek books vary enormously, as Pausanias says, from each other, and are no more historical than the Irish legends of the migrations of the Scots from Scythia to Scotland by way of Athens, Egypt, and Spain. My sole object is to make intelligible the version of their own origin which the Athenians and Ionians offered, and to show that they did, in some moods, draw a distinction between their own ancestors and Homer's Hellenes and Achaeans. Therewasa distinction, in tradition, religion, rites, and customs, but there may have been no great difference in blood and language.

One thing, then, is certain, the Athenians and Ionians admitted that they were Hellenic in race and speech merely through slight contact with Achaeans. Attica was never "Achaeanised" in religion, burial rites, and other ritual. Attica was never conquered by Achaeans, she stood apart. Now this claim to be a region apart, conquered neither by Achaeans norDorians, is certainly supported by the fact that the traditions and legends of Attica stand widely remote in all respects from the ancient Achaean legends in Homer, and in Theban and Minyan and Aetolian "saga," or bardic traditions.[2]The traditions of the Ionians in Asia, again, are connected with those of Attica rather than with the Achaean saga, although the Ionians of Asia were not, and were known not to be, by any means of solely Attic descent. This is confessed.

Returning to the Ionians of Asia, and their account of themselves given in the time of Herodotus, we find that it agrees with the fabulous genealogies already studied. The Ionians claimed to have in-habited twelve cities of what, in the time of Herodotus, was called "Achaia," theAigialosin the northern Peloponnese;—that they were driven thence to Attica by Achaeans, fugitives from the Dorians in other parts of Peloponnese, is asserted by Herodotus. Ionians were also, of old,in Boeotia, neighbours of the "Cadmeians," and some of the Cadmeians were admitted, on conditions, to Athenian citizenship.[3]

It thus appears that the people later called, in Asia, "Ionians," had been dwellers on the coasts of Boeotia and Attica, as well as on the northern Peloponnese. That they were then and there known as "Ionians" it would be difficult to prove. Homer has nothing to say of the Ionians as a peculiar people in the Peloponnesus or Boeotia. Of their twelve Peloponnesian cities, the Catalogue gives Orneai, Pellênê, Aigeira, and Helikê to Agamemnon.[4]

If Homer really knew any people called Ionians at all, they were Athenian. Meanwhile the people of the Ionian name in Asia were, according to Herodotus, "a mixed multitude," including members of the communities known to Homer as Abantes of Euboea, with forty ships, Phocians, even Arcadians, Cretans, and many others. All these could only be lumped together as "Ionians" after their settlement in Asia, and their alliance with the Ionian colonists from Attica.

If the so-called Ionian emigrants were thus mixed, and if some of them possessed Achaean lays or legends, and at first practised only the rites mentioned by Homer, such as cremation and cairn-burial, it would appear that the pre-Hellenic element among these settlers in Asia overpowered the other elements, or that the Cyclic poets of Ionia were mainly of pre-Hellenic origin. Their poems, at all events, are in harmony with Attic ideas and usages, not with Homer's statements: and, as we shall show, the Ionian poets cannot have tampered much with our Homer, for the two Epics never admit the Ionian manners which are copiously illustrated by the Ionian poets of the Trojan war, the Cyclics.

According to Thucydides as well as Herodotus, the so-called Ionian migration was a movement of mixed peoples. The leading men of various Achaean regions had found an asylum in Attica during the troubles caused by the Dorian incursions, and "so greatly increased the number of inhabitants that Attica became incapable of containing them, and was at last obliged to send colonies to Ionia."[5]

We are thus on almost historic ground when we believe that the settlers in Ionia, though their tendency was to claim Athenian connections, were "a mixed multitude" from many States, mainly of the seacoasts; and it is natural to suppose that they intermarried with Carians at Miletus, as Herodotus says that they also didwith Lycians, and other Asiatic civilised peoples. Though alien religions might be accepted by the settlers, these beliefs would be Hellenised, as usual; and the Olympian Poseidon, the Homeric sea-god, patronised the Ionian league of cities.

We really have no historical evidence for the earliest conditions of Ionian life in Asia. Mr. Murray supposes the early settlers to have lost all "tribal obligations," all "old laws," and even "household and family life." "It looks as if the ancestors of the Ionians had in the extreme stress of their migrations lost hold upon their Achaean traditions." But the Ionians had noAchaeantraditions to lose! They built walls to their new cities, and inside the wall a man "could take breath. He could become for a time a man again, instead of a frightened beast." A terrible picture is drawn of the sufferings and ferocious cruelties of the invaders, who, however, remain orthodox in religion after all, and confident in "the manifest help of Zeus and Apollo."[6]This is not the condition of frightened beasts. In fact, they were not in that terror-stricken condition when they were able to build walls.

No doubt there was a great deal of rough work; though, as shall be shown, judging from the art of the Dipylon, the Attic colonists were highly civilised men, with large ships, and everything handsome about them, who could make well-organised short voyages, with abundance of stores. Nor, when they landed, were they, like the early Puritans of New England, in a country of naked savages. Lycians and Carians, in Homer, are as much civilised as the Achaeans: a Carian woman was not a bloodthirsty squaw.

It is not to late legends, but to archaeology, that we must look for information: "on archaeology fell, and falls, the burden of proof in this inquiry."[7]

First, as to the culture of the mainland which thecolonists left; we do know through excavations at Sparta something aboutDoriancivilisation there as early as the ninth century B.C., and it is probable that the Ionians in Europe were rather in advance of than behind the contemporary Dorians in the arts of life. The precinct of Artemis Orthia at Sparta has been excavated, and yields "remains of a temple in crude brick with wooden frame-work ... this structure the discoverers" (members of the British School of Athens) "refer to the ninth century B.C." A similar temple "has appeared also in Hellenic Asia, at Neandria in the Aeolic Troad."

Near the Orthian temple was "a great Altar of Sacrifice, whose orientation was the same."[8]

Homer's men, we saw, usually sacrifice hecatombs outside of the temple, though twelve kine are sacrificedinthe temple of the Trojan Athena.

The votive objects found in this Spartan precinct of the ninth century were pottery in the Geometric, post-Aegean style, with ivory plaques, at least as large as an ordinary playing card, covering the safety pin of thefibula. The earliest designs incised on these plaques of ivory "repeat in more than one case Aegean motives" (such as the goddess holding a bird in each hand); the style is touched with Mesopotamian influences, but more deeply by the art of the Bronze Age in the area of the Danube. The "double coil" or "pair of spectacles" shape of fibula-cover, familiar in the Danubian region, also occurs.[9]

Such being the art in the new home of the Dorian invaders, we expect to find art rather better than worse among the Ionians at Attica at the same period—the ninth century B.C., which is doubtless much later than the central period of the Ionian migration to Asia. The tombs of Spata in Attica, and the treasure from Aegina in the British Museum, are taken as relics of the late "Sub-Aegean" art of, say, the tenth to ninth centuries.The ivories of Sparta "suggest some art of West Asia": the Aegina objects in gold are partly "Aegean" survivals, partly show unmistakable Egyptian influence passed through an Oriental medium. The well-known gold cup of Aegina, with its rosette and four spirals, has a parallel from one of the rich royal tombs of the Mycenaean acropolis: there are also, as at Mycenae, many thin round plaques of gold, probably sewn originally on robes. The rings bear no signets: one is in the form of a buckler, like a reduced Mycenaean figure-of-eight shield, inlaid with blue glass paste. The figure of a man or god holding a water-fowl in each hand, and wearing a loin-cloth, is of a modified Egyptian character. The date of the objects is placed between the tenth and ninth centuries.[10]

Probably the Ionian emigrants from the mainland near Aegina left behind them some, and probably they took with them other craftsmen capable of executing such work in gold as we have described. But they also left in Attica the potters who, about the ninth to eighth centuries, B.C., covered the great vases, which did duty for headstones in the cemetery of the Dipylon, with geometric ornament and barbaric representations of life. It was no barbarian life that they knew, crudely as they designed it. The people of Athens, as the vases prove, had four-horse chariots; had large ships manned by many oarsmen, and furnished with a submerged sharp ram. The warriors in the chariots wore shields slung by baldrics: in form they were circular, in other cases they exaggerated, in much smaller dimensions, the features of the Aegean figure-of-eight shield, or were smaller forms of the Aegean oblong shield. Here and there a spearman holds in front of him an oval shieldby the handle. The swords are straight short swords, worn at right angles to the waist, not heavy Homeric swords, slung by a baldric from the shoulder. In somecases, however, heavy leaf-shaped blades are used, both for cut and thrust.

The people had great spectacular funerals. The body of the dead lay on a bier in the house, while men, women, and children, mere skeleton figures, plucked out their hair with both hands. Then the body was borne in a chariot to the grave (it was seldom cremated), and a procession of charioteers followed.

The swords and spears were of iron, none had richly adorned hilts of ivory and gold.

The gold work of the period, chiefly stamped on thin bands, was not quite so crude as that of the potter with his triangle reversed for a body, the monstrous thighs and calves of his men, their bird-shaped inhuman faces,—all of them remote from the Aegean art, and apparently of northern origin. The artists in gold work were in advance of the vase-painters, whose horses usually have a thing like a fish for head, set on a neck like a serpent.

The Attic region, towards the end of the Ionian migration, thus presents the decay of Aegean and the bloom of geometric decoration, and of barbaric, probably northern design. None the less the life depicted so barbarously was no barbaric life. Bad as is the art, you see that the life is Hellenic.

At the same time the Dipylon life is wholly un-Homeric. The manner of burial, the huge vases in place of the cairn and pillar, the metal of the weapons, iron, their want of adornment, the size, shape, and mode of carrying the sword, the tearing out of their own hair by mourners, the size of the shields, and even the dress of the women who, in my opinion, wear skirts, not chitons, are all of a nature unknown to the Epics. Poets of the Dipylon age could never have preserved the uniform Homeric descriptions of details totally unlike what they saw in actual existence.

About the relics of the earliest Ionian settlementsin Asia, archaeology now knows something. The excavations of Mr. Hogarth on the earliest site of the Ionian temple of Artemis at Ephesus (700 B.C.?), revealed thousands of votive offerings in gold, ivory, bone, paste, crystal, and other materials. These had been "carefully laid between the slabs for some hieratic purpose," probably under the central statue of the goddess. Mr. Hogarth dates the deposit at about 700 B.C., "some two centuries after the traditional landing of the colonists."

That date tells us little about the condition of the settlers at the time of landing (we can only guess as to whether they had almost ceased to be human at that moment), but many objects may be heirlooms of earlier date; "in any case the elaborate execution and design of the Ionian documents, notably the trinkets and jewels in electrum, imply a long previous evolution of skilled craft"; and there are indications "that this Primitive treasure was, in the main, made at Ephesus itself." This is proved by the presence of goldsmiths' refuse in the temple. The treasure has many analogies with that of Enkomi (Cyprus) in the British Museum, which is of the period of the re-occupation of the palace of Cnossos in Crete (dated about 1400), and is therefore of the close of the age of bronze. The Ephesian treasure has also many points of close analogy with the later Aegean remains at Mycenae and Sparta in Attica. There are the gold jewels meant to be sewn on to the robes; there are the clear crystals so common in the ancient graves of the Mycenaean acropolis; the familiar double axe of Crete is still a decorative motive; we find, as on the Lion Gate of Mycenae, two animals opposed in heraldic fashion, and fibulae decorated with Baltic amber, also the "spectacles" fibula-cover in ivory, common as far north as Bosnia.

The general result of the archaeological evidence for early Ionia is to show, in early Ionian work, the Aegean element stronger, and the Danubian or centralEuropean element less strong, than in contemporary Attica of the Dipylon period. In Attica of 1000-800 B.C. there was the mixture of new northern and of old Aegean blood and civilisation; but, says Mr. Hogarth, "the Aegean element was, I conceive, relatively very much more numerous and potent in the Ionian land,"—in Asia,—"although, to a very large extent, not indigenous there." The Ionians, as far as archaeology shows, were more Aegean than the people whom they left behind in Attica.

Thus the evidence, so far, is in favour of the mass of Ionian emigrants having been of the older people,—whether we call it "Pelasgian of the coast lands," or by any other name,—and of the older prae-Dipylon school of art. "The first departure," says Mr. Hogarth, "may have been due to the Achaean influx into Greece," though the later Dorian influx may have presented a more powerful motive; for, by the Greek story, the Achaeans driven from Argos and Laconia thrust the Ionians out of the Peloponnesus. The archaeological evidence does not go back far enough to enable us to estimate exactly the state of the Ionians when they first landed in Asia. We only know that, some two centuries later, their art was much more in the Aegean than in the Dipylon manner, and had been so for long. They must have rapidly recovered from their perfect oblivion of their ancient laws, rites, beliefs, and traditions.

Mr. Hogarth concludes: "Note that the date thus assigned" (for the Greek migration, a prolonged movement) "fits with the indications in Homer. The Epics, it has often been remarked, show not only no knowledge of a Hellenic Asia, but also none of a Dorian conquest of Peloponnesus. They were probably anterior in original composition to the establishment of both these states of things," of Greeks in Asia, Dorians in Peloponnesus.[11]

Now archaeology dates the Ephesian finds, which, in the main, are still "Aegean" in character, during the very age when, according to general opinion, the Ionian Cyclic Epics were composed. The early Cyclic poems are usually dated about 770-730 B.C., when the Ephesian treasure was being made.[12]Ionian art at Ephesus, and at that date, was much more Aegean than the contemporary art in Attica. There is thus a fair presumption that the Aegean element, Hellenised, was a strong element in the Ionian population; and we are to demonstrate that the Ionian Epics, though dealing with Achaean themes, abound in non-Achaean traits of life and religion; in the traits which Mr. Murray assigns to "the conquered races,"[13]apparently meaning the pre-Achaean Aegean inhabitants of Greece. These traits are undeniably non-Homeric, and the question must be faced, if the Ionian poets of the eighth and seventh centuries are profuse in such matter, in the Cyclics; and if they also added a great mass to theIliadand theOdysseyat the same period, why did they keep their favourite themes out of theIliadandOdyssey? This question we study in "The Ionian Cyclic Poems"; but first we must prove that, whether the people of Attica and the Ionians were apart in "race" from the Hellenes and Achaioi or not,they certainly stood originally apart from and out of the cycle of Achaean traditions. The Ionians and Attic tragedians were reduced to inventing new legends and new points of contact between themselves and the Achaeans.

Language or Languages of Prehistoric Greece.—I have abjured all attempts to discern the truth about races and languages in prehistoric Greece. The two main theories appear to be that of the Greek speculators from the seventh century onwards, and that of Mr. Ridgeway.

According to the Greeks, who varied among themselves, the original population of prehistoric Greece was, at least mainly, "Pelasgian." Among the Pelasgians came a more cultivated people, the "Hellenes," in contact with whom the "Pelasgians" developed into "Hellenes" in language and culture. Granting an influx of Achaeans or Hellenes among the pre-existing population which enjoyed the Aegean civilisation, there is no doubt that this population, if spoken of by Greeks as "Pelasgian," was much more advanced in material culture than the Achaeans. This is proved absolutely by excavations in Crete, Greece, and the isles.

On this point, then, that the Achaeans and Hellenes were more civilised than the pre-existing "Pelasgians," the Greek thinkers were certainly in the wrong. But what about language? Was Herodotus right in holding that the "Pelasgians" spoke a "barbarous" language, and learned Greek from the Hellenes? He admits that he could not speak with any certainty about the language of the Pelasgians. But he infers from the speech of actually contemporary Pelasgians, for example, at Creston in Thrace, and at Placia and Scylace on the Hellespont, "and, in short, of any other of the cities which have dropped the name, but are in fact Pelasgian," that "the Pelasgians spoke a barbarous language" (Herodotus, i. 56-58).

If so, unconquered Attica and unconquered mountainous Arcadia must have spoken, in early times, "a barbarous language," and exchanged it for the Hellenic, though with the Hellenes they were, according tothemselves, but slightly in contact. When we consider the pertinacity of parts of Wales, Ireland, and the western Highlands in clinging to Cymric and Gaelic, this theory of Herodotus seems highly improbable.

Mr. Ridgeway, on the other hand, holding that the Achaeans were "a Celtic tribe" who passed from Epirus into Thessaly, concludes thattheirlanguage was what the Hellenes of history would have called "barbarous"; that they adopted the speech, Greek, of the Pelasgians among whom they settled, and that the Homeric poems descend from the lays of Pelasgian minstrels, who sang in Greek of the exploits of Achaeans who were Celtic, but became merged in a Greek-speaking Pelasgic population (Early Age of Greece, vol. i. p. 648). If so, the minstrels had entirely absorbed the non-Pelasgian customs and ideas, absence of ghosts, and hero-worship, of pollution, and ritual purification, and human sacrifice, and the professed Olympian religion of their Achaean lords.

To the objection that, if Homer's poetic Pelasgian predecessors had the good Greek, no Pelasgians known to Herodotus spoke it, Mr. Ridgeway can reply that "the Greeks considered Phrygians and Thracians to be barbarous, though both spoke languages akin to Greek; so that, although Herodotus thought the languages of Scylace and Placia" (and ofallcities which were, in fact, Pelasgian) "barbarous, this does not prove that it was not closely cognate to Greek" (Early Age of Greece, vol. i. p. 146).

Yes, but why had the language of the Pelasgian minstrels of the Achaean lords, which was excellent Greek, become in the time of Herodotus the language which, to him, was barbarous? I understand Mr. Ridgeway to answer this question by saying that "there is no difficulty in supposing that certain Pelasgians long settled in Etruria, whither they had come from Thessaly, may have again emigrated" (out of Etruria) "from some external or internal cause, and settled in various spots around the Aegean, some of them going to Athens, and later to Lemnos." See Herodotus, ii. 50, 51, for Pelasgians who, when the Athenians "were just beginning to count as Hellenes," settled for a while in Attica. For this fact Herodotus cites Hecataeus. These new-come Pelasgians were unruly,and were banished to Lemnos (Hdt. vi. 137). They later came back to raid Brauron in Attica (Hdt. vi. 138). Let these much-wandering Pelasgians return to Thrace, or, at least, let the Pelasgians whom Herodotus knew in Thrace (and all Pelasgians wherever he knew them) have strolled from Thessaly to Etruria in Italy, and back again to the Aegean, and north to Thrace, and it is certain that their original language, Greek (likejouras derived fromdies), must have beendiablement changé en route, and quite unrecognisable as Greek by Herodotus (see Ridgeway, vol. i. pp. 144-146, and p. 244; also "Who were the Romans?"Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. iii.).

On the whole Pelasgian question, the most valuable analysis of the evidence, such as it is, appears to me to be that of Mr. Myres in theJournal of the Hellenic Society, vol. xxvii.

My only conclusion is that, whoever the Achaeans may have been, and whatever their language, and whoever the pre-existing population may have been, and whatever their language, the Achaeans imported a new, lofty, andbrief-livedset of ideas, customs, a new tone and taste. At the same time, Mr. Ridgeway's arguments in favour of his theory that the pre-Achaean population of Greece spoke Greek, have my assent for what it is worth, though I do not think that the evidence for the hypothesis of Dionysius of Halicarnassus that Thessalian Pelasgians went to Etruria, and that their descendants came back to the Aegean, has valid historical evidence.

Back to Index Next