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
[Illustration: Fig. 1.--Warrior Vase in black steatite.
Fig. 2.--Fragment of Silver Vase.
Plate 11.]
spirits, these Northerners looked up to a heaven above, where a Zeus
very much like Odin ruled the skies with his thunderbolt amid a family
of warlike gods and goddesses, who delighted in the smoke of burnt
offerings. When their heroes died their bodies were burnt on the pyre
and their souls departed to the Isles of the Blessed, an earthly
Valhalla of feasting and fighting. The Ægean race had at the same time
worshipped the powers of reproductive Nature in female guise, and
inheritance went through females. The Northerners were brave and strong,
chaste and law-abiding. With them the father was unquestioned head of
the household, but the mother was free and honoured. The Northman was an
infantry soldier, free in his right as a warrior, the Southerner a
sailor with a quick intelligence, a gift for commerce, and a passion for
art and beauty. The Northman had one art only, the music of the harp.
The Southerner was more truly religious--that is to say, he felt the
mystery of the unseen and the thrills of devotion; the natural world
that appealed to him so strongly showed itself to his mind under the
forms of mysticism. The Northerner was far too much of a moralist and
theologian to be an ecstatic devotee. The Southerner had fire and
genius, the Northerner had caution and self-control. The Northman was
fair-haired, tall, and short-headed, the Southron dark-haired, short of
stature, and long in the skull.
In the fusion of these two streams, each of which had so much to give
and so much to receive, lies one secret of the Hellenic people. It would
seem that the Northmen came as invaders, not merely as immigrants, into
the desirable southern peninsulas. They came as warriors, and took wives
of the old race, so that the resulting mixture partook of the qualities
of both. But, as usual in such cases, climate and environment gradually
told, and the type reverted in long course of time to its original
characteristics. For a little while in the fifth century there was a
perfect amalgam, and we have a people bold in arms, clean in morality,
and skilful in 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
[Illustration: Plate 12.--The François Vase.
_Alinari._]
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.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
“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.
[Illustration: Marriage Procession. From a Pyxis in the British
Museum]
“On it also he wrought a vineyard heavy-laden with grapes,
beautifully wrought in gold. Up above were the black bunches, and
the vineyard was set with silver poles throughout; round it he
drove a trench of _kuanos_ and a wall of tin; a single causeway led
to it whereby the pickers walked when they gathered in the vintage.
Maids and merry bachelors were carrying the honey-sweet fruit in
woven baskets, and in the midst a boy played a lovely tune on a
high-pitched lyre, singing thereto with his dainty voice a sweet
dirge of Linus, while the rest kept time with stamping of feet and
leaping and song and shrieking.
“On it he made a herd of straight-horned oxen. The cows were
fashioned of gold and tin; lowing they passed from the midden to
the pasture by a plashing river by a shivering reed-bed. Four
cowherds of gold marched along with the kine, and nine white-footed
dogs followed them. But among the foremost kine two dreadful lions
were holding a deep-voiced bull. He was being dragged away
bellowing loudly, but the dogs and the hinds were after him. The
two lions had torn the hide of the great bull, and were greedily
devouring the entrails and the dark blood, while the cowherds
vainly spurred on the swift hounds. But they, forsooth, instead of
biting the lions, kept turning back; they would run up close to
bark at them and then flee away.
“On it the far-famed Cripple made a sheepfold in a fair valley, a
big fold of white sheep, and steadings and huts and roofed-in pens.
“On it the far-famed Cripple fashioned a dance like that which
Dædalus of old wrought in broad Cnossos for Ariadne of the lovely
tresses. Therein youths and maidens costly to woo were dancing,
holding one another by the wrist. Some of the maids had fine linen
veils, and some had well-woven tunics with faint gloss of oil. Yea,
they had fair garlands on their heads, and the men had golden
swords hanging from silver baldrics. Sometimes they would trip it
lightly on tiptoes, as when a potter sits and tries the wheel that
fits between his hands to see whether it will run. But sometimes
they advanced in lines towards one another, and a great company
stood round the lovely dance delighted, and among them a holy bard
sang to his lyre, and among the dancers two tumblers led the
measure, twirling in the midst.
“And on it he put the great might of the River Ocean along the edge
of the rim of the closely wrought shield.
“So then when he had fashioned a great and mighty shield he
fashioned also a hauberk brighter than the beam of fire, and he
fashioned him a strong helmet, fitting the temples, richly dight,
and on it put a crest, and he made him greaves of pliant tin.”
I trust that the reader may be able to catch some glimpse of the picture
even through the bald prose of translation. We are now in Europe for
certain. It might be in Dorsetshire or Bavaria or Auvergne or Tuscany
that these women come to their doors to watch the weddings go past,
these honest ploughmen drain their beakers, and these weary harvesters
look forward to the harvest supper. To this day you may see the peasants
of Greece dancing in rings and lines, with agile acrobats to lead them,
just as they danced on the shield of Achilles. History goes on its
pompous way, leaving the peasant unaltered and the ways of country life
unchanged.
KINGS AND GODS
The poet even here, not wholly oblivious of the courtly circles to whom
he was singing, has, indeed, brought in a “king.” But it is a poor sort
of Basileus who stands there among the clods rejoicing in his heart. He
and his ancestral sceptre cut rather a foolish figure among
“The reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley.”
The truth is, of course, that he’s a king in buckram. He is only a
country squire with a pedigree, dressed up as a Basileus to suit the
convention of the epic. Such too are the “kings” of the Odyssey. There
the story requires that Odysseus shall be King of Ithaca and that his
faithful wife shall be maintaining his throne in his absence. But the
poet or poets were so little accustomed to the ways of kings that they
constantly forget the political importance of Penelope and speak as if
it were only a question of the jointure of a comely widow. Eumæus the
swineherd extols the wealth of Odysseus by saying that no other in
Ithaca had so much. They were already in the habit of regarding the
market-place as the political focus of the State. So in the town of
Scheria “King” Alcinous goes forth daily to the council with the twelve
other “renowned kings.” Odysseus their visitor prays that this “king”
and his “queen” may be so blessed by the gods that they may leave to
their children “the substance in their halls, and whatever dues of
honour the people have rendered unto him.” And the “princess” goes out
in a mule-cart with the washing. On the stage of the epic the king is,
of course, a great and mighty ruler. We are often reminded how fearful
is the wrath of kings. The king says, according to a quotation of
Aristotle’s, that he has power of life and death. He gives away cities
that do not belong to him. He inherits “his sceptre and his dooms” from
Zeus and a long line of ancestors. But he cannot live up to these
exalted pretensions. He debates policy in the market-place with the
other kings (who are often called elders by mistake, though they are
young and lusty as an eagle), and matters are settled by the acclamation
of the masses. It is the orator who sways the crowds. By occasional
slips of the tongue these divine kings are spoken of as a greedy class,
just as they are in Hesiod. As for the “dooms” that they receive by
inspiration from Zeus, they make no practical use of them. Justice, as
we saw on our Shield, is really administered by the elders in the agora.
A careless line of the Odyssey tells of “the hour when a man rises from
the assembly and goes home to supper, a man who judges the many quarrels
of the young men that go to him for judgment.” There is no single
example of a king acting as judge in Homer, and though the king pretends
to give away cities he sometimes humbly accepts the gift of an acre or
two from the citizens for services rendered. There is, indeed, one
celebrated passage of the Iliad where monarchy is apparently extolled;
but the attentive reader will discern that it is in the language not of
primitive patriarchal conditions, but of a partisan of aristocracy or
tyranny rebuking the presumption of radical demagogy. It is in the
second book of the Iliad. Agamemnon had bidden the Greeks prepare for
flight from Troy. It was only a ruse to try their temper, but it
succeeded all too well, for the people hastily took him at his word. Now
Odysseus is bidden by the goddess Athena to hurry down and stop them.
“He went to meet Agamemnon, son of Atreus, and took from him his
ancestral sceptre, ever indestructible, wherewith he went down to
the ships of the brazen-shirted Achæans. Whensoever he met a king
or man of mark, him he would approach and check with soft words.
‘Sir, it befits not to terrify thee like a coward; nay, sit thee
down, and make the rest of the host sit also, for thou knowest not
yet the mind of the son of Atreus. Now he is but trying the sons of
the Achæans; soon he will smite them, and mighty is the wrath of
god-nurtured kings. Honour is his from Zeus, the Zeus of counsel
loves him.’
“But when he saw a man of the people shouting, him he would smite
with his sceptre and chide with a word. ‘Sir, sit quiet and hear
the speech of others, who are better than thou. Thou art unwarlike
and cowardly, thou art of no account in war or in council. We
cannot all be kings here, we Achæans; many-lordship is not good.
Let one be lord, one king, to whomsoever the son of Kronos of
crooked counsel has given the sceptre and the dooms that he may be
king among them.’
“Thus he went through the host, lording it; and they hurried back
to the meeting-place from their ships and tents with a noise as
when a wave of the thundering sea crasheth on the mighty shore and
the deep resounds.
“The others then sat down and took place on the benches, but
Thersites alone still brawled with unmeasured words. He who was
full of disorderly speech for idle and unseemly striving against
kings.
“He was the ugliest man that came to Troy. He was bandy-legged and
lame, and his two shoulders were humped and cramped upon his
breast. Above, his head was peaked, and a scanty stubble sprouted
upon it. He was the bitterest foe to Achilles and to Odysseus, and
ever they were chiding him. Then too he cried out shrill words of
reproach against divine Agamemnon. But the Achæans were horribly
wroth with him, and hated him in their hearts....
“Thus he spake reviling Agamemnon, the shepherd of the people. But
divine Odysseus quickly stood beside him, and scowling rebuked him
with a grievous word. ‘Thersites, heedless of speech, shrill ranter
that thou art, be still and dare not alone to strive with kings,
for I say that there is no creature worse than thou, of all that
came with the sons of Atreus to Ilium.’ ...