I. THE PRE-HISTORIC PERIOD.--This period includes the mythical
accounts of the origin of the Greeks, the Trojan war, the more
certain story of the excavations, and the establishment of the
peculiar Greek institutions under the so-called rule of the
half-mythical kings. Down to the time of the Trojan war very
considerable progress had already been made, and civilization among
the Greeks had received its first important impulse. The oracles at
Delphi and Dodona had been established; the mysteries at Eleusis;
the four sacred games; the court of Areopagus at Athens; and the
celebrated Amphictyonic Council. The arts and sciences likewise
received considerable attention. Letters had been introduced by
Cadmus. The accounts of the siege of Thebes and that of Troy show
that progress had been made in the various arts pertaining to war,
but the history of the period as a whole exhibits that singular
mixture of barbarism with cultivation, of savage customs with
chivalrous adventures, which marks what is called an _heroic age_.
According to the Greek historians, the earliest inhabitants of Hellas
were the so-called Pelasgians, but the information afforded by the
ancients on the subject is scant and vague.[3] For our knowledge of the
inhabitants and civilization of prehistoric Greece, we are therefore
dependent on the more certain witness of the excavations, which, in
recent years, have yielded very important results.
[3] Many of the early myths and legends, as narrated by Homer and
preserved by Hesiod (in his Theogony), were gathered into somewhat
systematic form to explain the genealogy of the Hellenic tribes,
their subdivisions, and the origin of the Greek cities. The
foundation of Athens, for example, was ascribed to Cecrops, regarded
by some as a native of Egypt; he is said to have introduced into
Attica the arts of civilized life, and from him the Acropolis was
first called Cecropia. Argos was believed to have been founded by
another Egyptian, named Danaus, who fled to Greece with his fifty
daughters, and who was elected by the people as their king, and from
whom some of the Greeks received the name of Danaï. Thebes, in
Bœotia, looked to Cadmus, a Phœnician, as its founder; he was
believed to have brought into Greece the art of writing, and from
him the citadel of Thebes received the name of Cadmea. The
Peloponnesus was said to have been settled by, and to have received
its name from Pelops, a man from Phrygia in Asia; he became the king
of Mycenæ, and was the father of Atreus, and the grandfather of
Agamemnon and Menelaus; chieftains in the Trojan war. Such
traditions as these show that the early Greeks had some notion of
their dependence upon the Eastern nations.
LEGENDS OF EARLY NATIONAL EXPLOITS.--The legends are not only
grouped about particular places and individual heroes, but have for
their subjects national deeds, marked by courage and fortitude.
One of these stories describes the so-called “Argonautic
expedition”--an adventurous voyage of fifty heroes, who set sail
from Bœotia under the leadership of Jason, in the ship Argo, for the
purpose of recovering a “golden fleece” which had been carried away
to Colchis, a far distant land on the shores of the Euxine.
Another legend--the “Seven against Thebes”--narrates the tragic
story of Œdipus, who unwittingly slew his own father and married his
own mother and was banished from Thebes for his crimes, after having
been made king; and whose sons quarreled for the vacant throne, one
of them with the aid of other chieftains making war upon his native
city.
But the most famous of the legendary stories of Greece was that
which described the Trojan war--the military expedition of the
Greeks to Troy, in order to rescue Helen, who was the beautiful wife
of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and who had been stolen away by Paris,
son of the Trojan king. The details of this story--the wrath of
Achilles, the battles of the Greeks and the Trojans, the destruction
of Troy, and the return of the Grecian heroes--are the subject of
the great epic poems ascribed to Homer. All these legends, whether
derived from a foreign source, or produced upon native soil,
received the impress of the Greek mind. They form one of the
legacies from the prehistoric age, and reveal some of the features
of the early Greek character.