Problems in Greek history Part 5

This it is which makes any systematic artificiality to my mind most improbable. The difference between the learned epic of a really reflective age and the _Iliad_ is ill.u.s.trated by comparing with it the _Argonautics_ of Apollonius Rhodius, a great poet in his way, but unmistakably and lamentably artificial. I agree, therefore, with Thirlwall, that the Homeric poets described an age not very different from that in which they lived, and that the reason why widely varying societies, such as the democratic Athenian, or the modern European, can appreciate these pictures, is that they are not artificially constructed, but adapted from a real experience, drawn from very human nature, and reflecting permanent human pa.s.sions[50:1]. The most unreal thing in the poems is of course their theology; and yet this became in after days perhaps more real than the rest by its universal adoption among the Greeks as the authoritative account of their G.o.ds.

[Sidenote: but only generally true;]

-- 26. The Homeric poems therefore give us a general picture of the state of the Greeks at a time shortly before the dawn of history; for such poems could hardly be composed and held together without writing, and when writing becomes diffused, history begins[51:1]. Still, the poets lived in an age not controlled by criticism, or subject to the verifications of study. Hence they could deal loosely with particulars, omit details that suited them not, and describe places poetically rather than topographically. So it is that the Catalogue of the s.h.i.+ps will not agree with the rest; and in many other cases there is evidence that the lays brought together were not weeded of their mutual inconsistencies, or compelled to conform strictly to the final plan.

[Sidenote: and therefore variously judged by various minds.]

It is therefore certain that according as critics lay stress on the great consistency of character and feeling in these poems, they will, as Mr. Gladstone does, exaggerate their historical value, and set them down as almost sober history. When the other spirit prevails, and we attend to the many flaws in plot and inconsistencies of detail, we shall have acute scholars, like Mr. Evelyn Abbott, denying that either the a.s.sertions or the omissions in the poems are evidence worth anything for any historical purpose. Yet even such sceptics will not refrain from drawing pictures of Greek life from these false and treacherous epics.

FOOTNOTES:

[30:1] Cf. his early chapters, especially i. pp. 43 _sq._ Busolt's 2nd edition, now in the press, contains an exhaustive a.n.a.lysis of all the recent discoveries.

[31:1] The main causes of invented legends are: first, the glorification of national heroes; secondly, the desire of chronographers to obtain synchronisms, and make the heroes of one place contemporaneous with, and related to, those of another. In the former case it is generally an older or better known story which is transferred to the new case, with more or less modification; in the latter there may be deliberate fraud, as Holm has argued. Of all old Greek legend the chronology is the most suspicious part, because this has been invented in comparatively late times, and by learned men, not by, but for, the people.

[32:1] A fine specimen is the pedigree of the Ptolemies direct from Dionysus and Heracles, given by the historian Satyrus. Cf. C. Muller, _Fragg. Histor. Graec._, iii. 165. The substance of it is as follows: From Dionysus and Althea was born Dejanira, from her and Heracles, Hyllus, and from him in direct descent Kleodaos, Aristomachas, Temenos, Keisos, Mason, Thestios, Akoos, Aristodamidas, Karanos, Knos, Turimmas, Perdikkas, Philippos, Aerope, Alketas, Amyntas, Balakros, Meleager, Arsinoe. From her Lagus, Ptolemy Soter, &c., down to Philopator, the then reigning king. Hence, he adds, were derived the names of the _demes_ in the Dionysiac _phyle_ at Alexandria, viz. Dejaniris, Ariadnis, &c.

Here is a most instructive fabrication.

[33:1] Cf. Mommsen, R. G. i. 466-8.

[35:1] We have not a few instances in Greek polities--Megara, Borysthenes, Calymnos occur to me--where there still existed in late days magisterial [Greek: basileis] and even [Greek: monarchoi]. Cf.

_Bull. de Corr. h.e.l.l._ viii. 30; ix. 286.

[36:1] _Hist. of Greece_, chap. ii. sect. 3.

[36:2] Holm (G. G. i. 125) admits this motive for the Germans: 'Im Grunde leugnet man phonizische Siedelungen in Griechenland besonders deswegen, weil man nicht will, da.s.s die Griechen jenen Leuten Wichtiges verdanken'--that is to Semites. He himself a.s.serts early contacts, and thinks their influence upon Greece but trifling.

The general body of opinion in Germany seems to agree with what I have cited from Duruy in the text. The words just quoted may serve to put the English reader upon his guard against the _subjective_ tone of many of the most learned modern studies on Greek history.

[37:1] On this cf. Adler's remarkable preface to Schliemann's _Tiryns_.

[39:1] Cf. my _Prolegomena to Ancient History_, Longmans, 1872. A _reductio ad absurdum_ which attained serious attention, in spite of its patent jocoseness, appeared in an early number of the Dublin University _Kottabos_.

[39:2] Accordingly, some use was made of the exceptional and alarming phenomena, such as thunder-storms and eclipses, to supply a more reasonable and adequate cause for the violent transitions from terror and grief to joy, which the theory demanded. But it was the regular daily phenomena which figured in the leading _role_ of the comparative mythologers.

[40:1] _A History of Greek Cla.s.sical Literature_ (3rd ed.), Macmillan, 1891. The history of K. O. Muller has since been re-edited and supplemented by Heitz, but in a very different style.

[42:1] Duruy, in speaking of the controversy as to the site (is it Hissarlik, or Bunarbaschi?), says that even this will never be settled, in spite of the striking discoveries by which Dr. Schliemann has shown that Hissarlik was a prehistoric city, and the total absence of any evidence for a city upon the other site. And Duruy is probably right, because on these matters writers are too often pedants, who, if once committed to a theory, will not accept the most convincing evidence that they have been mistaken. They seem to think the chief merit of a scholar is to maintain an outward show of impeccability, and therefore hold the candid confession of a mistake to be not honourable, but disgraceful.

Duruy himself inclines to follow E. Curtius, who holds the wrong opinion. Holm (i. 96) sees clearly that in the light of Schliemann's discoveries there can hardly remain a doubt that Hissarlik was the site which the Homeric poets had in view, though their details may be inaccurate. This conclusion would have been universally accepted, had not certain scholars pledged themselves to the other site.

[43:1] It has since been treated in a separate form by Professor Jebb.

The third edition of my _Greek Literature_, being still more recent (1891), gives additional material.

[46:1] _Das Homerische Epos aus den Denkmalern erlautert_, 1884.

[47:1] Probably a generation will pa.s.s away before it is appreciated; or it may soon pa.s.s into oblivion, to be rediscovered by some future thinker. All the newer histories agree in disapproving it, but chiefly on the authority of the philologers. Most of these are committed, both by tradition and by their own special researches, to the theory of a _natural mixture_ of dialects at Smyrna, the border town of aeolic and Ionic settlements.

[47:2] I understand that Mr. W. Leaf, one of the highest English authorities, agrees generally with Fick on this problem. On the other hand, the Provost of Oriel, as he informs me, does not see his way to accept it.

[48:1] Thus at the end of a famous epigram on Thermopylae composed in Laconian Greek, and reformed into literary language, [Greek: chiliades tetores] remained, because [Greek: tessares] would not scan. Fick has now applied his theory to the early Lyric poets, and even printed a revised text of most of them in _Bezzenberger's Beitrage_, xi, xiii, and xiv, &c. I have criticised the newer developments of his theory in the third ed. of my _Greek Literature_.

[48:2] Evelyn Abbott, _History of Greece_, i. 158 _seqq._ I cannot but suspect that the account of the diet of the Homeric chiefs--great meals of roast meat, and no fish--is a piece of deliberate archaism, which contradicts all we know of any historical Greeks from the earliest to the present days. The Greeks were probably never a meat-eating race, and even the early athletes trained on cheese (cf. my _Rambles and Studies_, p. 290). The poets knew all about fis.h.i.+ng, for it appears in a simile, and yet in no case does fish, the great delicacy of Attic days, appear upon a Homeric table.

[50:1] Holm gives a very ingenious solution of the difficulty, which is, I think, quite original. He thinks that the aeolic and Ionic settlers who were driven out by the Dorian immigration carried with them recollections and traditions of the splendour of the pre-Doric Mycenae, Orchomenos, &c. In Asia Minor they sang of these old glories, clothing the old kings and heroes of the land, and the cities they had left, in the dress and manners of the Ionia of their own day. Thus their picture is true traditionally, for we know that the palaces of Greece were in the places they describe; their pictures of manners were also true, in another sense, of the society in which they actually lived.

[51:1] When once composed, they could be easily enough _remembered_ by trained guilds of reciters. It is therefore the composition, and the transmission as large unities, which imply, in my opinion, that use of writing which the poets avoid attributing to the society they depict as one of the past. If we could determine the date of the first fluent use of writing in Ionia, I think we could also determine the date of the creation of the _Iliad_ as an artistic whole. At the same time I think it right to caution the reader, that he need not a.s.sume lapidary inscriptions to mark the first stage. This has been very justly pointed out by Mr. E. Abbott, and it is here most important; for we have no extant inscription on stone which can be surely attributed to a date earlier than 600 B.C., and I am convinced that had such use of writing been in common use earlier, we should long since have found evidence of it. Probably the first writing seen and learned by the Greeks was that of the Phnician traders, who kept their accounts either on papyrus or perhaps on wood. Thus the _Iliad_ may have been composed with the aid of writing, and yet there may have been no contemporary records on stone.

CHAPTER III.

THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY.

[Sidenote: Transition to early history.]

[Sidenote: The Asiatic colonies.]

-- 27. We may now pa.s.s from so-called legend to so-called early history.

All students, from Thucydides downward, have held that shortly after the state of things described in Homer, important invasions and consequent dislocations of population began throughout Greece, so that what meets us in the dawn of sober history differs widely from what Homer describes. These various movements have their mythical name,--the return of the Heracleidae; and their quasi-historical,--the invasion of Botia and Phocis by the Thessalians, and the invasion and conquest of Peloponnesus by the Dorian mountaineers. The pressure so produced drove waves of settlers to Asia Minor, where the coasts and islands were covered with Greek cities,--aeolian, Ionian, and Dorian. But these cities always claimed to be colonies from Greece, and told of mythical founders who led them to the East.

[Sidenote: Late authorities for the details.]

We have no early account of these Asiatic settlements. Their traditions were not apparently discussed critically till the time of Ephorus, the pupil of Isocrates, who lived close to Alexandrian days; and we know part of what he said from quotations in Strabo and from the account given, rather irrelevantly, by Pausanias in the book on Achaia in his _Tour_, which was not composed till our second century. The metrical geography attributed to Scymnus of Chios[54:1] gives us some additional facts; but on the whole we may say that our account of all this early history is derived from late and very theoretical antiquarians. They did not hesitate to put these events into the tenth or eleventh century before Christ, but on what kind of evidence we shall presently discuss.

From the Asiatic settlements and from the rich cities in Euba (Chalcis and Eretria) went out more colonies to the coasts of Thrace and the Black Sea; but these are placed at such reasonable dates, in the seventh century, that we must be disposed to give them easier credence.

[Sidenote: The colonization of the West.]

-- 28. Intermediate between these two waves of colonization, both in date and in credibility of details, come the famous settlements in Sicily, of which a brief account is given by Thucydides at the opening of his sixth book; and it is no doubt the apparent precision of this account, and the general accuracy of the author, which has made this colonization of Sicily and Southern Italy one of the early portions of Greek history most readily accepted by even the newest sceptics. It is quite extraordinary how the general seriousness and the literary skill of an author may make even practised critics believe anything he chooses to say[55:1].

[Sidenote: The original authority.]

Any one who reads with care the account of Thucydides will see that he cannot possibly be writing from his own knowledge or research, but from some older and far worse authority,--doubtless one of the chroniclers[55:2] or story-tellers who gathered, most uncritically, the early legends of various portions of the Greek world. It has long since been suggested, and with the strongest probability, that Thucydides'

authority was the Syracusan Antiochus, who compiled the early annals of Sicily with the evident intention of enhancing the glory of his native city.

On what principles did these chroniclers proceed?

[Sidenote: What was n.o.bility in early Greece?]

[Sidenote: Macedonian kings.]

[Sidenote: Romans.]