Mycenæ enters the story, for though much earlier objects dating from the
Stone Ages have been found both at Mycenæ and Troy, the best Mycenæan
work is contemporary with the “Late Minoan” of Crete. The weapons now
are swords of bronze. As for the designs of pottery, whereas in the last
period they were generally drawn in white upon a dark ground, they are
now drawn in red or brown upon a light ground. They are still
naturalistic, and in the best specimens the artists have achieved the
highest triumph of vase-painting, namely, to apply the artistic forms of
Nature to serve their purpose, subordinating her as she ought (being a
female) to be subordinated. Observe how the murex shells are used along
with conventional patterns and how the light and shade are massed à la
Beardsley. It seems probable that the early painter selected those
natural forms, such as the octopus, the shell, and the star-fish, which
most nearly resembled the geometric patterns used by his predecessors.
The shapes are now extremely graceful. These pointed pitchers were used
as we see in the famous frieze of the Cupbearer, to serve the wine.
There is generally a hole in the base to strain it. Drinking vessels
were often of that fairest of Attic shapes known as the kylix. We
notice how marine objects predominate in the natural forms selected.
That alone might have given us a hint to look for an island as the
centre of this art.
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: Cuttle-fish Kylix]
[Illustration: Clay Seal Impression: Pugilist]
There is something here for every one. The sportsman will observe the
methods of pugilism indicated on the gems, admiring the muscular
development and the free action of the Cnossian prize-fighter. He seems
to have neglected his “guard,” but then he was separated by a barrier
from his opponent. Or we may study the laws of bull-baiting as practised
at Cnossos, noting the agility with which toreadors, male and female,
leap over the animal’s head. The milliner may study the latest modes of
to-day on the fashion-plates of the eighteenth century before Christ.
She will find the flounced petticoat of yesterday, the narrow waist,
the bodice cut extremely décolletée, the high coiffure of to-morrow, the
Medici collar, the zouave jacket. She will see hats which Mr. Myres
considers “unparalleled,” some flat like the mode of 1902, others with
turned-up brims and roses underneath like that of to-day.
The plumber too will find a paradise in Cnossos. There are lavatories,
sinks, sewers, and man-holes. Let me quote Professor Burrows: “The main
drain, which had its sides coated with cement, was over 3 feet high, and
nearly 2 feet broad, so that a man could easily move along it; and the
smaller stone shafts that discharged into it are still in position.
Farther north we have preserved to us some of the terra-cotta pipes that
served for connections. Each of them was about 2½ feet long, with a
diameter that was about 6 inches at the broad end, and narrowed to less
than 4 inches at the mouth, where it fitted into the broad end of the
next pipe. Jamming was carefully prevented by a stop-ridge that ran
round the outside of each narrow end a few inches from the mouth, while
the inside of the butt, or broader end, was provided with a raised
collar that enabled it to bear the pressure of the next pipe’s
stop-ridge, and gave an extra hold for the cement that bound the two
pipes together.” Let no cultivated reader despise these details. There
is no truer sign of civilisation and culture than good sanitation. It
goes with refined senses and orderly habits. A good drain implies as
much as a beautiful statue. And let it be remembered that the world did
not reach the Minoan standard of cleanliness again until the great
English sanitary movement of the late nineteenth century.
THE MAINLAND PALACES
Though there is so much to interest the architect in Cnossos, and though
the finest ashlar masonry is to be found there, the ordinary student of
ancient building will probably prefer to go for his examples, as of old,
to the contemporary
[Illustration: Plate 7. BULL’S HEAD: LIFE-SIZE RELIEF IN PAINTED STUCCO.
CNOSSOS, CRETE.]
[Illustration: Citadel of Tiryns]
palaces of Mycenæ and Tiryns. In Cnossos there was little or no
fortification--another proof that the Minoan empire rested safe behind
wooden walls. But on the mainland we have two magnificent fortresses and
citadels, so well preserved and so cleverly excavated by Schliemann and
Tsountas that the untrained eye can take in at a glance the essential
features of the architecture. At Tiryns the builder has taken the
fullest advantage of the natural strength of his position. The top of
the hill has been levelled and the summit encircled with a gigantic wall
seldom less than fifteen feet thick. In the wall there are galleries
opening internally upon a series of magazines. Along it at intervals
there are massive watch-towers. One such screens each of the gateways.
The main gate on the east side is approached by a long ascending ramp,
which is exposed all the way to attack from the wall that towers above.
To reach the postern-gate on the west you had also to climb a long
flight of steps. The hill-top, which is more than 900 feet long,
consists of a lower plateau to the north, on which no traces of building
have been found, possibly because there were only wooden erections there
for the soldiers, or possibly because it was left bare as a place of
refuge for the cattle. The higher plateau to the south contains the
palace, with its great pillared megaron, or hall. In this there is a
circular central hearth. Close behind is the hall of the women, with
sleeping-chambers at hand, and a strong treasury partly built into the
wall. There is an elaborate bathroom, with drain-pipes and water-supply,
hot and cold, a little to the west of the megaron. The three inner
courts are sumptuously paved with mosaic, and the walls were covered
with frescoes. It appears that the buildings on the summit of the hill
were all of a palatial description, and the conclusion is that the
commons lived in the plain below, governed and protected by their
citadel. Tiryns lies on the flank of the plain of Argos, and within a
few miles of the sea. As this one small plain included also the other
ancient fortresses of Mycenæ and Argos, the dominions of this king must
have been very small. It has been plausibly suggested that these
citadels principally existed to command the highways leading to the
Isthmus of Corinth.
At Mycenæ the fortification work is similar. Our view of the Lion
Gate[8] will give some idea of the massive, Cyclopean masonry. The great
relief itself is clearly a heraldic device; some such grouping of
animals is constantly seen upon seals and gems, and the lion (or
lioness?) has always been a royal beast. But, heraldic though it be,
this enormous group is far from lifeless conventionality. Some scholars
believe that the pillar between the animals is a proof of the
much-discussed pillar-worship of prehistoric Greece.
[Illustration: Beehive Tomb: Section]
But the most interesting of the Mycenæan remains are undoubtedly the
tombs. In the city itself there is a circular enclosure surrounded by a
double series of paving-stones set into the ground on edge, thus forming
a ring of shaft graves whose purpose was plainly shown by the objects
and bones found in them. Down in the plain below were found other
burying-places, also circular, but of a later date and much more
striking. These subterranean “beehive” tombs have been found elsewhere
in Greece, but nowhere of such splendour. It was one of these which
Schliemann proclaimed to be the tomb of Agamemnon. Like the pyramids in
Egypt, it contains an inner chamber, which forms the actual grave,
outside it a circular “tholos,” probably a shrine for the cult of the
departed, and a long “dromos,” or inclined approach. The tholos is of
great interest to architects as providing a forerunner of the dome. But
it is not built on the principle of the arch, with wedge-shaped masses
and a keystone. This dome is contrived by laying ever-narrowing circles
of masonry one upon the other concentrically, the interior being
smoothed, plastered, and richly decorated. It is thought that the
bee-hive shape reproduces the primitive bell-tent, for the tombs of the
dead are generally copied from the abodes of the living. Such splendour
in the tomb, such careful concealing of the dead underground in an inner
chamber, unquestionably proves ancestor-worship.
The sixth city at Troy was of much the same style and date as these;
larger, indeed, than all, and with its houses radiating from the centre
like the spokes of a wheel. On the Athenian Acropolis too there are
traces of a similar prehistoric settlement. We are probably to imagine
the face of the Greek world in the second millennium B.C. as dotted with
these citadel palaces.
Mycenæ has yielded many interesting treasures of a minor sort. It was
especially rich in gold, and we notice with great interest the masks of
thin gold laid upon the faces of the dead. Nor has Crete yet produced
any object in gold to rival the famous pair of cups[9] found at Vaphio,
in Laconia. These are of gold repoussé, and their designs of wild and
tame cattle are incomparably living and natural. But Sir Arthur Evans is
probably justified both on grounds of style and subject in claiming
these superb treasures as exports from Crete. The palm-tree betrays a
Southern origin. In Mycenæ, too, were found the finely inlaid
dagger-blades[10] which give us a picture of the men and weapons of the
Mycenæan or Late Minoan ages of Ægean culture. The men, we observe, are
armed with long spears and huge figure-of-eight shields composed of
wickerwork covered with bull’s hide and pinched in at the “waist” so as
to encircle the body and provide a hand-grip. The warriors wear no
clothing but
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: Cretan Cup of Degenerate Style.]
And what came of it all? Somewhere, it would seem, about 1400 B.C.
Cnossos underwent its final catastrophe. The palace was sacked and
burnt, the ateliers of its brilliant artists were destroyed, and the
artists themselves slain or scattered. So the centre of illumination was
darkened for the whole Ægean world. Elsewhere Ægean civilisation
continued perhaps for two centuries more, and in Cnossos itself there is
yet another period when the palace sites were partially reoccupied by a
few stragglers of the old artistic race. But with the fall of his patron
the inspiration of the craftsman vanishes, degeneration rapidly sets in.
Even in the designs of the vases the bold, naturalistic drawing
deteriorates into lazy formulæ, the brilliance of the glaze grows dull,
the colours are flat and muddy. A good deal of Mycenæan art is of this
decadent type, and a good deal more of it has been found in the
neighbouring sites of Crete.
Among the relics of this period are objects which betray the cause of
the downfall--weapons of iron. The Bronze Ages are passing away before
the superior metal, as the Stone Ages had yielded to the Bronze.
THE MAKERS OF ÆGEAN ART
It now becomes our duty to sum up this wonderful world of archæology and
to consider its bearings on the history and art of later Greece.
Unfortunately many problems arise at this point for which at present the
archæologists cannot agree to offer a solution. Who were these Ægean
folk? Were they of Indo-European stock and language? We have already
agreed, I think, that they represent a primitive stratum of population
which originally spread all over the south of Europe and the basin of
the Mediterranean. The Cupbearer may indicate their physique, black
curly hair, straight nose, long skull; and I, for one, decline to
believe that this fine fellow is a Semite or Phœnician, as has been
suggested. We know that these people were extraordinarily gifted,
especially in the sense of form, and that they were capable of very
rapid development. May we not believe that one and the same stock has
lain at the base of the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean from
prehistoric times until to-day, much as it has been crossed and
conquered and oppressed? And was their language Greek? That is a
question that we cannot answer for certain, since no one has yet been
able to interpret their handwriting. I see no reason to dispute
Professor Ridgeway’s argument that as the stock prevailed through
several waves of conquest from the north, so the language survived
without material change, just as Italian prevailed through the Lombard
conquest of North Italy. Of course nationalities were more mixed in
Crete and Cyprus than on the mainland of Greece. It can but be an
opinion delivered in the consciousness of many counteracting arguments,
but I believe that the people whose culture we have been describing were
essentially the same as we know in historic times, and of course
Indo-Europeans.
From the historian’s point of view it is important to observe that
civilisation in Europe began, as in Asia, under the fostering care of
autocracy in palace workshops. It was bound
[Illustration: Plate 9.--Vaphio Cups.]
to be so. All the archæological indications point to a strong and
tyrannical form of monarchy of the Oriental type. Those Cyclopean walls
were built by slave labour. The common folk and soldiers are represented
as almost naked. It was a commercial empire too. Those rows and rows of
store-rooms, with their huge jars, formed the bank and treasury. Very
probably the clay tablets will be found to contain, not prehistoric
sonnets, but merely lists and inventories of stores and tribute.
We must not be carried too far by our wonder at this unexpected
revelation of prehistoric culture. The later Greeks never reached such a
standard as these people in writing or in engineering or in
fortification or in many of the handicrafts. They could never have
represented the forms of Nature with the same realism. That is true, but
there is something wanting in the prehistoric Ægean art which only
classical Greece could give to the world. There is little ἢθος in Ægean
art, little nobility, though much beauty, no ethical ideal. How that
missing something was supplied and whence it came we shall see in the
next chapter.
Another question arises: How far was this culture original? How much
does it owe to Assyria, Egypt, and Phœnicia? Much, but not everything.
The drainage system of the palace has its original in Assyria, and some
think that the laws of Minos were derived from the code of Khammurabi.
The faience comes from Egypt; so do many of the lotus and lily patterns
of the vases. Crete was bound to be greatly indebted to Egypt. As for
Phœnicians, they are carriers and traders, but no one has yet proved
that they could initiate in anything--except, perhaps, religion. But
what Crete borrowed it transformed, and, as I believe, Europeanised; it
rejected deliberately the Oriental tendencies to conventional stylistic
imitation.
A word remains to be said about religion. In classical Greece, as
everybody knows, there was a prevailing cult of state gods and
goddesses, an anthropomorphic Olympian family, Zeus, Hera, Athena,
Artemis, Apollo, and the rest of them. But recent students of religion
have pointed out that side by side with the public worship of celestial
deities there was a more mysterious but more real devotion to a quite
different form of religion, a cult of Nature goddesses, with mystical
rites whose origin was more than half forgotten. To this class belong
the Mysteries of Eleusis, to name the most famous example, and it is
seen in the many-breasted “Diana of the Ephesians.” Now Professor
Ridgeway has long taught that this naturalistic worship was probably a
survival from the prehistoric ages of Greece. It is at its strongest in
Arcadia, the untouched primitive part of Greece. He calls it the
religion of the Southern mother, retained in spite of the Northern
father who would have his Zeus-Odin worshipped in public. The
discoveries in Crete have confirmed this theory, and thrown some light
on the naturalistic worship of later times. The principal deity of Crete
was a Nature goddess, generally represented as adorned with snakes.[11]
She was worshipped with orgiastic rites, ecstatic dances, shaking of
rattles, ornately robed priests, and emblematical processions. Along
with this worship, and probably older, as the aniconic precedes the
iconic stage of religion, there are many signs of aniconic fetishes,
pillar-worship, axe-worship, tree-worship, and even cross-worship. The
monster forms of bull-men, dog-men, snake-men may be only heraldic
signs, or they may indicate a worship of monsters such as prevailed in
Egypt. Certainly there was worship of the entombed ancestor. We can see
that the artistic people of prehistoric Greece were very near to the
earth after all.
[Illustration: Clay Seal Impression with Cruciform Symbol, from Temple
Repository, Cnossos]
[Illustration: Plate 10.--Inlaid Dagger Blades.]
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.
[Illustration: Warrior Stelé from Mycenæ]
This is not all fancy: the Bronze Age is history, as we have seen; so is
the Iron Age. What then of the age between, the Age of Heroes? It comes
in awkwardly, for it disturbs the poet’s picture of degeneration. But it
has to be inserted in deference to the beliefs of Hesiod’s audience.
Hesiod is more or less consciously writing a Bible for the Greeks--that
is, putting their religious customs into literary form. This is his
concession to hero-worship or ancestor-worship. The Heroic Age of
Demigods, the milieu of Homeric poems and Attic tragedy, is not
historical, and it is vain to make it so.