Part 1 (2/2)

The first and second instalments of this ghastly tribute had already been paid; but when the time of the third tribute was drawing nigh, the predestined deliverer of Athens appeared in the person of the hero Theseus. Theseus was the unacknowledged son of King aegeus and the Princess Aithra of Tr?zen. He had been brought up by his mother at Tr?zen, and on arriving at early manhood had set out to make his way to the Court of aegeus and secure acknowledgment as the rightful son of the Athenian King. The legend tells how on his way to Athens he cleared the lands through which he journeyed of the pests which had infested them. Sinnis, the pine-bender, who tied his miserable victims to the tops of two pine-trees bent towards one another and then allowed the trees to spring back, the young hero dealt with as he had dealt with others; Kerkuon, the wrestler, was slain by him in a wrestling bout; Procrustes, who enticed travellers to his house and made them fit his bed, stretching the short upon the rack and lopping the limbs of the over-tall, had his own measure meted to him; and various other plagues of society were abated by the young hero. Not long after his arrival at Athens and acknowledgment by his father, the time came round when the Minoan heralds should come to Athens to claim the victims for the Minotaur. Seeing the grief that prevailed in the city, and the anger of the people against his father, aegeus, whom they accounted the cause of their misfortune, Theseus determined that, if possible, he would make an end of this humiliation and misery, and accordingly offered himself as one of the seven youths who were to be devoted to the Minotaur. aegeus was loth to part with his newly-found son, but at length he consented to the venture; and it was agreed that if Theseus succeeded in vanquis.h.i.+ng the Minotaur and bringing back his comrades in safety, he should hoist white sails on his returning galley instead of the black ones which she had always borne in token of her melancholy mission.

So at length the sorrowful s.h.i.+p came to the harbour in the bay below broad Knossos where Minos reigned, and when the King had viewed his captives they were cast into prison to await their dreadful doom. But fair-haired Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, had marked Theseus as he stood before the King, and love to him had risen up in her heart, and pity at the thought of his fate; and so by night she came to his dungeon, and when she could not persuade him to save himself by flight, because that he had sworn to kill the Minotaur and save his companions, she gave him a clue of thread by which he might be able to retrace his way through all the dark and winding pa.s.sages of the Labyrinth, and a sword wherewith to deal with the Minotaur when he encountered him. So Theseus was led away by the guards, and put into the Labyrinth to meet his fate; and he went on, with the clue which he had fastened to his arm unwinding itself as he pa.s.sed through pa.s.sage after pa.s.sage, until at last he met the dreadful monster; and there, in the depths of the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, who had slain so many, was himself slain. Then Theseus and his companions escaped, taking Ariadne with them, and fled to their black s.h.i.+p, and set sail for Attica again; and landing for awhile in the island of Naxos, Ariadne there became the hero's wife. But she never came to Athens with Theseus, but was either deserted by him in Naxos, or, as some say, was taken from him there by force. So, without her, Theseus sailed again for Athens. But in their excitement at the hope of seeing once more the home they had thought to have looked their last upon, he and his companions forgot to hoist the white sail; and old aegeus, straining his eyes on Sunium day after day for the returning s.h.i.+p, saw her at last come back black-winged as he had feared; and in his grief he fell, or cast himself, into the sea, and so died, and thus the sea is called the aegean to this day. Another tradition, recorded by the poet Bacchylides, tells how Theseus, at the challenge of Minos, descended to the palace of Amphitrite below the sea, and brought back with him the ring, 'the splendour of gold,' which the King had thrown into the deep.

So runs the great story which links Minos and Crete with the favourite hero of Athens. But other legends, not so famous nor so romantic, carry on the story of the great Cretan King to a miserable close. Daedalus, his famous artificer, was also an Athenian, and the most cunning of all men. To him was ascribed the invention of the plumb-line and the auger, the wedge and the level; and it was he who first set masts in s.h.i.+ps and bent sails upon them. But having slain, through jealousy, his nephew Perdix, who promised to excel him in skill, he was forced to flee from Athens, and so came to the Court of Minos.

For the Cretan King he wrought many wonderful works, rearing for him the Labyrinth, and the Choros, or dancing-ground, which, as Homer tells us, he 'wrought in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne.'

But for his share in the great crime of Pasiphae Minos hated him, and shut him up in the Labyrinth which he himself had made. Then Daedalus made wings for himself and his son Icarus, and fastened them with wax, and together the two flew from their prison-house high above the pursuit of the King's warfleet. But Icarus flew too near the sun, and the wax that fastened his wings melted, and he fell into the sea. So Daedalus alone came safely to Sicily, and was there hospitably received by King Kokalos of Kamikos, for whom, as for Minos, he executed many marvellous works. Then Minos, still thirsting for revenge, sailed with his fleet for Kamikos, to demand the surrender of Daedalus; and Kokalos, affecting willingness to give up the fugitive, received Minos with seeming friends.h.i.+p, and ordered the bath to be prepared for his royal guest. But the three daughters of the Sicilian King, eager to protect Daedalus, drowned the Cretan in the bath, and so he perished miserably. And many of the men who had sailed with him remained in Sicily, and founded there a town which they named Minoa, in memory of their murdered King.

[Ill.u.s.tration II: (1) THE RAMP, TROY, SECOND CITY (_p_. 38)

(2) THE CIRCLE GRAVES, MYCENae (_p_. 43)]

Herodotus has preserved for us another echo of the story of Minos in the shape of the reasons which led the Cretans to refuse aid to the rest of the Greeks during the Persian invasion. The Delphian oracle, which they consulted at this crisis, suggested to them that they had known enough of the misery caused by foreign expeditions.

'Fools, you complain of all the woes that Minos in his anger sent you, for aiding Menelaus, because they would not a.s.sist you in avenging his death at Kamikos, and yet you a.s.sisted them in avenging a woman who was carried off from Sparta by a barbarian.' In commentary on this saying Herodotus gives the explanation which was given to him by the inhabitants of Praesos, in Crete. After the death of Minos, the Cretans, with a great armada, invaded Sicily, and besieged Kamikos ineffectually for five years; but finding themselves unable to continue the siege, and being driven ash.o.r.e on the Italian coast during their retreat, they founded there the city of Hyria.

Crete, being thus left desolate, was repeopled by other tribes, 'especially the Grecians'; and in the third generation after the death of Minos the new Cretan people sent a contingent to help Agamemnon in the Trojan War, as a punishment for which famine and pestilence fell on them, and the island was depopulated a second time, so that the Cretans of the time of the Persian invasion are the third race to inhabit the island. In this tradition we may see a distorted reflection of the various vicissitudes which, as we shall see later, appear to have befallen the Minoan kingdom, and of the incursions which, after the fall of Knossos, gradually changed the character of the island population.

Such, then, are the most familiar of the legends and traditions a.s.sociated with prehistoric Crete. Some of these, touching on the personality of Minos and his relations.h.i.+p with Zeus, have their own significance in connection with the little that is known of the Minoan religion, and will fall to be discussed later from that point of view. The famous story of Theseus and the Minotaur, though it, too, may have its connection with the religious conceptions which gather round the name of Minos, seems at first sight to move entirely in the realm of pure romance. Yet the conviction of its reality was very strong with the Athenians, and was indeed expressed in a ceremony which held its own to a late stage in Athenian history.

The s.h.i.+p in which Theseus was said to pave made his voyage was preserved with the utmost care till at least the beginning of the third century B.C., her timbers being constantly 'so pieced and new-framed with strong plank that it afforded an example to the philosophers in their disputations concerning the ident.i.ty of things that are changed by growth, some contending that it was the same, and others that it was not.' It was this galley, or the vessel which tradition affirmed to be the galley of Theseus, which was sent every year from Athens to Delos with solemn sacrifices and specially nominated envoys. One of her voyages has become for ever memorable owing to the fact that the death of Socrates was postponed for thirty days because of the galley's absence; for so great was the reverence in which this annual ceremony was held that during the time of her voyage the city was obliged to abstain from all acts carrying with them public impurity, so that it was not lawful to put a condemned man to death until the galley returned. The mere fact of such a tradition as that of the galley is at least presumptive evidence that some historic ground lay behind a belief so persistent, however the story may have been added to and adorned with supernatural details by later imagination; and it is difficult to see how Grote, on the very threshold of recounting the Athenians'

conviction about the s.h.i.+p, and their solemn sacrificial use of her, should pause to reaffirm his unbelief in the existence of any historic ground for the main feature of the legend--the tribute of human victims paid by Athens to Crete.

[Ill.u.s.tration III: WALL OF SIXTH CITY, TROY (_p_. 41)]

Later Athenian writers of a rationalizing turn endeavoured to bring down the n.o.ble old legend to the level of the commonplace by transforming the Minotaur into a mere general or famous athlete named Taurus, whom Theseus vanquished in Crete. But the rationalistic version never found much favour, and the Athenian potter was always sure of a market for his vases with pictures of the bull-headed Minotaur falling to the sword of the national hero. No more fortunate has been the German attempt to resolve the story of Minos and the Minotaur, the Labyrinth and Pasiphae, into a clumsy solar myth.

The whole legend of the Minotaur, on this theory, was connected with the wors.h.i.+p of the heavenly host. The Minotaur was the Sun; Pasiphae, 'the very bright one,' wife of Minos, was the Moon; and the Labyrinth was the tower on whose walls the astronomers of the day traced the wanderings of the heavenly bodies, 'an image of the starry heaven, with its infinitely winding paths, in which, nevertheless, the sun and moon so surely move about.' Among rationalizing explanations this must surely hold the palm for c.u.mbrousness and complexity, and we may be thankful that the explorer's spade has demolished it along with other theories, and given back to us, as we shall see, at least the elements of a romance such as that which was so dear to the Athenian public.

CHAPTER II

THE HOMERIC CIVILIZATION

Between the Greece of such legends as those which we have been considering and the Greece of the earliest historic period there has always been a great gulf of darkness. On the one side a land of seemingly fabulous Kings and heroes and monsters, of fabulous palaces and cities; on the other side. Greece as we know it in the infant stages of its development, with a totally different state of society, a totally different organization and culture; and in the interval no one could say how many generations, concerning which, and their conditions and developments, there was nothing but blank ignorance. So that it seemed as though the marvellous fabric of Greek civilization as we know it were indeed something unexampled, rising almost at once out of nothing to its height of splendour, as the walls of Ilium were fabled to have risen beneath the hands of their divine builders. Indeed, a certain section of students seemed rather to glory in the fact of this seeming isolation of Greek culture, and to deem it little short of profanity to seek any pre-existing sources for it. 'The fathering of the Greek on the pre-existing profane cultures has been scouted by perfervid h.e.l.lenists in terms which implied that they hold it little else than impiety. Allowing no causation more earthly than vague local influences of air and light, mountain and sea, they would have h.e.l.lenism born into the world by a miracle of generation, like its own Athena from the head of Zeus.'[*] But a great civilization can never be accounted for in this miraculous fas.h.i.+on. The origins of even Egyptian culture have begun to yield themselves to patient research, and it is not permissible to believe that the Greek nation was born in a day into its great inheritance, or that it derived nothing from earlier ages and races.

[Footnote *: D. G. Hogarth, 'Ionia and the East,' p. 21.]

Indeed, the supreme monument of the matchless literature of h.e.l.las bore witness to the fact that, prior to the beginnings of Greek history, there had existed on Greek soil a civilization of a very high type, differing from, in some respects even superior to, that which succeeded it, but manifestly refusing to be left out of consideration in any attempt to describe the beginnings of Greek culture. The Homeric poems shone like a beacon light across the dark gulf which separated the h.e.l.las of myth from the h.e.l.las of history, testifying to a splendour that had been before the darkness, and prophesying of a splendour that should be when the darkness had pa.s.sed. But the very brilliance of their pictures and the magnificence of the society with which they dealt only added to the complication of the question, and emphasized the difficulty of deriving the culture of historic Greece by legitimate filiation from a past which seemed to have no connection and no community of character with it. For the Homeric civilization was not a different stage of development of that same civilization which appears when the first beginnings of what we are accustomed to call h.e.l.lenism are presented to us; it was totally diverse, and in many respects more complex and more splendid.

From the eighth century onwards we are on moderately safe ground when dealing with the history of h.e.l.las and its culture. We know something of the actual facts of its history, literary and political.

The chronicles of the more important cities are known with a definiteness fairly comparable to what we might expect at such a stage of development. But the Homeric poems take us away from all that into a world in which a totally different state of things prevails. The very geography is not that of the historical h.e.l.lenic period. The names that are familiar to us as those of the chief Greek cities and states are of comparatively minor importance in the Homeric world; Athens is mentioned, but not with any prominence; Corinth is merely a dependency of its neighbour Mycenae; Sparta only ranks along with other towns of Laconia; Delphi and Olympia have not yet a.s.sumed anything like the place which they afterwards occupy as religious centres during the historic period. The chief cities of h.e.l.las are Mycenae, Tiryns, and Orchomenos. Crete, although its chiefs, Idomeneus and Meriones, are only of secondary rank among the heroes of the Iliad, is obviously one of the most important of Grecian lands. It sends eighty s.h.i.+ps to the Achaean fleet at Troy, it is described both in the Iliad and the Odyssey as being very populous (a hundred cities, Iliad II.; ninety cities, Odyssey XIX.), and to its capital, Knossos, alone among Greek cities does Homer apply the epithet 'great.' All which offers a striking contrast to the comparative insignificance of the towns of the Argolid in later Greek history, and to the uninfluential part played by Crete.

The centres of power, then, in the Homeric story are widely different from those of the historic period. The same divergence from later realities is manifest when we come to look at the social organization contemplated in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Homeric state of society is, in some respects, rude enough. Piracy, for instance, is recognized as, if not a laudable, at all events a quite ordinary method of gaining a livelihood. 'Who are you?' says Nestor to Telemachus. 'Whence do you come? Are you engaged in trade, or do you rove at adventure as sea-robbers who wander at hazard of their lives, bringing bane to strangers?' The same question is addressed to Odysseus by Polyphemus, and was plainly the first thing thought of when a seafaring stranger was encountered. As among the Highlanders and Borderers of Scotland, cattle-lifting was looked upon as a perfectly respectable form of employment, and stolen cattle were considered a quite proper gift for a prospective bridegroom to offer to his father-in-law. The power of the strong hand was, in most respects, supreme, and the rights of a tribe or a city were respected more on account of the ability of its men to defend them than because of any moral obligation. 'We will sack a town for you,'

says Menelaus to Telemachus, as an inducement to him to settle in Laconia.

Along with this primitive rudeness goes, on the other hand, a strongly aristocratic const.i.tution of society. The great leaders and chiefs, the long-haired Achaeans, are absolutely separated from the common people, not in rank only, but to all appearance in race. They are a superior caste, and of a different breed. Even to their King their subjection is not much more than nominal, and he has to be very careful of offending their susceptibilities or wounding their sense of their own importance, while their treatment of the commons beneath them is sufficiently disdainful. Though the commons are summoned sometimes to the Council, their function there is merely a pa.s.sive one; they are called to hear what has been determined, and to approve of it, if they so desire, but in no case have they any alternative to accepting it, even should they disapprove. Altogether the superiority of the Achaean n.o.bles, and the haughtiness with which they bear themselves, is such as to suggest that they hold the position, not of tribal chieftains ruling over clansmen of the same stock as themselves, but of a separate and conquering race holding dominion over, and using the services of, the vanquished, much after the manner of the Norman lords.h.i.+p in Sicily.

All this is sufficiently different from the state of things during the historic period. It is not an undeveloped condition of the same society that is in contemplation; it is a totally distinct social organization. With regard to the position of woman, the facts are even more remarkable, for if the Homeric picture be a true one, historic h.e.l.las, instead of representing an advance upon the prehistoric age, presents a distinct retrogression. In the Homeric poems woman occupies a position, not only important, but even comparable in many respects to that held by her in modern life. She is not secluded from sight and kept in the background, as in later h.e.l.lenic society; on the contrary, she mixes freely with the other s.e.x in private and in public, and is uniformly depicted as exercising a very strong, and generally beneficent, influence.

The very names of Andromache, Penelope, Nausicaa, stand as types of all that is purest and sweetest in womanhood. The fact that a wife is purchased by bride-gifts does not militate against the respect in which she is held or the regard which is paid to her rights. The contrast between this state of affairs and that prevailing in later Greek society is sufficiently marked to render comment unnecessary.

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