Part 5

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.

II

THE HEROIC AGE

ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται ἡμίθεοι HESIOD.

THE NORTHERN INVADERS

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 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.

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

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

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.

“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.