Problems in Greek history Part 7

[Sidenote: Degrees in this stage.]

The earliest and rudest of these remains are not in Greece, but at the island of Santorin, under the lava, and in the fort of Ilion (Troy) excavated by Dr. Schliemann[71:1]. The more developed, both in architectural skill and in ornamental designs, are in Argolis (Mycenae, Tiryns) and in Attica (Spata, Menidi). As I have already mentioned, this civilization does not appear to be the same as that of the epic poems, and the verdict of the learned declares that it dates from a long anterior epoch. What occurred in Greece between the epoch of this curious pre-h.e.l.lenic and, partially at least, imported culture, and the age of Homer, none of us can as yet do more than guess[71:2]. But the fact that the popular poetry chose for the scenes of its adventures the very sites of this pre-historic culture, seems to show that the importance of Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns either lasted down to the 'epic'

time, or was so recent as to hold the popular imagination.

[Sidenote: Probably not so old as is often supposed.]

[Sidenote: Mr. Petrie's evidence.]

On the whole, therefore, I am disposed to consider these pre-historic splendours as not so extravagantly old,--surviving, perhaps, till 1000 B.C.; though of course the Trojan remains may be far older than the Mycenaean. Duncker, in his very careful discussion[72:1], thinks the end of this period came about 1100 B.C. I look upon this, in an author who is always liberal with his figures, as a substantial agreement with me, but I can now add a remarkable corroboration. Mr. Flinders Petrie, coming fresh from a prolonged and scientific study of Egyptian art-remains, has examined with care the pre-historic collections in Greece, and has established[72:2] (1) a very early and widespread communication between the peoples of the aegean and Egypt; (2) a close similarity, both in materials and workmans.h.i.+p, between the Mycenaean ornaments and the Egyptian of about 1200-1000 B.C. The Egyptian pottery, &c., from dynasties earlier or later than this epoch show marked contrasts, and are easily to be distinguished. At the same time, I protest against making the _rudeness_ of pottery in itself, without any corroboration, a proof of great antiquity. For there is such a thing as neo-barbarism, especially in pottery; and moreover, simple people will go on for a thousand years making their plain household utensils in the same form and with the same decoration.

[Sidenote: The epic stage.]

[Sidenote: The earliest historical stage.]

-- 33. As regards the second stage, or 'epic age,' I have already, in my _Greek Literature_, shown ample reasons for not dating it very early; and further researches since made rather confirm this view. The personages described seem to belong to the ninth century before Christ; but it was gone before the poets brought together their work into the famous epics which were the opening of Greek literature. The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ therefore seem to me to describe the second, then already bygone, stage of Greek history, which was certainly separated by a gap from the third. This last begins with the contemporary allusions of the earliest lyric poets, Archilochus, Callinus, Tyrtaeus,--none of whom were earlier than 700 B.C., and who more probably lived from 660 B.C.

onward[73:1].

According to the theory of the Greeks, which is not yet extinct, three centuries separated this real history from the epic period, when the Trojan heroes and their singers lived; and even among recent critics there are some who wish to place the composition of the _Iliad_ as far back as 900 B.C.

[Sidenote: The gap between Homer and Archilochus.]

[Sidenote: Old lists suspicious, and often fabricated.]

[Sidenote: No chronology of the eighth century B.C. to be trusted.]

I do not believe in so huge a gap in Greek literature. It seems to me impossible that the stream of original epic should have dried up long before Archilochus arose towards the middle of the seventh century B.C.

And here it is that the moderns have been deceived by the elaborate construction of four centuries of history made by the Greeks to fill the void between the events of the _Iliad_ and the events of the earliest history. In the seventh century we have contemporary allusions to Gyges, king of Lydia, known to us from a.s.syrian inscriptions; we have yearly archons at Athens, and a series of priestesses at Argos; presently we have historical colonies and many other real evidences on which to rely.

But before 700 B.C. it is not so. Some stray facts remained, as when Tyrtaeus tells us that he fought in the second Messenian war, and that the first had been waged by the grandfathers of his fellow-soldiers[74:1]. The double kings.h.i.+p of Sparta was there, though I am at a loss to know how we can trust a list of names coming down from a time when writing was not known[74:2]. Nay, we have even distinct examples of fabricated lists. h.e.l.lanicus wrote concerning the list of the priestesses at Argos,--in after days a recognized standard for fixing events. But this list reached back far beyond the Trojan war, as it started with Io, paramour of Zeus. The name of the priestess marking the date of the war was solemnly set down. The lists of the Spartan kings came straight down from Heracles. Again, at Halicarna.s.sus has been found a list on stone of twenty-seven priests, starting from Telamon, son of Poseidon, and bringing back the founding of the city to 1174 B.C.[75:1] The tail of this list also was historical; the beginning must have been deliberately manufactured! From such data the early history of Greece was constructed[75:2]. Lycurgus is a half-mythical figure, and probably represents the wisdom of several lawgivers. But however individual cases may be judged, in chronology all the early dates are to be mistrusted, and to reconstruct the Greece of the eighth century B.C.

requires as much combination and as much imagination as to construct a real account of the Homeric age. I am convinced that two capital features in the usual Greek histories of the eighth century, the reign of Pheidon and the colonization of Sicily, belong, not to that century, but to the next.

[Sidenote: Cases of real antiquity.]

Let not the reader imagine that he finds in me one of those who delight in reducing the antiquity of history, and who advocate the more recent date in every controversy. There are nations whose culture seems to be undervalued in duration; to me, for example, those arguments are most convincing[76:1] which place the great Sphinx at the Pyramids in an epoch before any written records, even in Egypt, so that it remains a monument of sculptured art many thousand years before the Christian era.

But the Greeks were mere children in ancient history, and they knew it[76:2].

FOOTNOTES:

[54:1] Printed in C. Muller's _Geographi Graeci_.

[55:1] We shall soon come to a similar instance in Xenophon's _Anabasis_.

[55:2] The Greek name is [Greek: logopoioi], seldom [Greek: logographoi], which usually means a speech-writer. Cf. below, -- 31, a pa.s.sage from Clinton which also applies here.

[57:1] The solitary exception is Sir G. c.o.x, whose _History of Greece_ has found little favour, in spite of its originality. He will not set down any date earlier than 660 B.C. as worthy of acceptance; and I think he is right. But he also rides the solar theory of the myths to death, and so repels his reader at the very outset of his work.

[58:1] The arguments of Busolt (G. G. i. 86) which I had intended to discuss, will be antiquated by the appearance of his 2nd edition, which is now in the press, and which discusses the prehistoric conditions by the light of evidence which has accrued since the first publication of his important work. But for the printers' strike (November, 1891) I should probably have been able to quote his revised and amended views.

Holm's appears to me a reasonable view. After stating that Apollodorus (ii. 7), Diodorus (4, 33), Plato (_Legg._ iii. 6, 7), and Isocrates (_Archidam._ 119) are all at variance, he adds (i. 181): 'One of these is just as historical as the other; the current traditions are not better than the accounts of Plato and of Isocrates; they are all mere tales (_Sagen_) which can neither be proved or refuted.' Here we have the att.i.tude of Grote, pure and simple, but applied to a quasi-historical period.

[59:1] Will it be believed that E. Curtius paraphrases this remark ([Greek: ap' oudenos hormomenon anankaiou pros pistin]) by 'zuerst wissenschaftlich bearbeitet von Hippias'?

[59:2] It is an axiom, to which I shall revert, that all sceptics have their credulous side; and so we find that Mr. Evelyn Abbott, a learned and able man, who will not accept anything as real fact from the Homeric poems, takes with childish faith the list in Eusebius, and tells us that there we can read the names of the actual victors from 776 B.C. to 221 A.D.! (_History of Greece_, i. 246.) And he adds, with charming _navete_, that the alleged fact of one thousand years' record of foot-races 'would be incredible if it were not true. But it is true,'

etc. That a critical historian should tell us these things dogmatically, without touching upon any of the difficulties involved, can only be accounted for by the theory that he was following some authority he respected, such as Duncker, without thinking the matter out for himself.

[60:1] I notice that older scholars, such as Newton, in his _Chronology_, and Mitford, show quite a wholesome scepticism concerning Pheidon's date, which they are disposed to bring down even lower than Curtius proposes.

[60:2] _E. g._ Duncker, Abbott, Duruy, Busolt (i. 140) with the recent literature cited, Holm (i. 256).

[61:1] The reader may consult a long list of tracts on the credibility of Ephorus, and the accuracy with which our extant Greek authors cited him, with the general conclusions to be inferred, in Busolt (i. 97 and elsewhere) or Holm (i. 11-15).

[62:1] Though the Return of the Heracleids was placed by Eratosthenes in 1104 B.C., older authorities, just as competent, placed it later. Thus Isocrates, in three of his orations, delivered 366-342 B.C., repeats that the Dorians had now been four hundred years in Peloponnesus.

Applying this round number, we obtain 1066-1042 for the Return of the Heracleids. The tenth generation, according to Greek counting, down from this date for Temenus, would give us 760-730 B.C. This may be the very computation by which the dates of Archias and Pheidon were fixed.

Duncker (i. 139) thinks the Dorians cannot have come before 1000 B.C. If he reasoned like a Greek, and held Pheidon to be the tenth Temenid, he would straightway put him below 700 B.C.

[64:1] The last has given a summary of the arguments in his _History_, pp. 224, 241, and in the _Rhein. Museum_ for 1885, pp. 461 _seq._

[64:2] That Hippys of Rhegium lived during the Persian Wars, and wrote [Greek: Sikelika], is stated by Suidas only and without any evidence.

[65:1] _Arch._ i. 12.

[65:2] Diod. xii. 71. I now repeat these facts, which I had urged long ago, from the recent summary of Busolt (_op. cit._ p. 224).

[67:1] It is the treaty which he professes to give verbatim in v. 47, with which the reader may compare the actual, though somewhat mutilated text in C. I. A. i. Suppl. 46{b}.

[67:2] Cf. above, -- 29.

[68:1] The excerpt alluding to Polybius (printed in his text as vi. 2, 2) merely a.s.serts that in the book of Aristodemus of Elis it was stated that no victors were recorded till the twenty-eighth Olympiad, when Corbus the Elean won and was recorded as the first victor; from which time the Olympiads were then reckoned. Aristotle is reported to have called Lycurgus the founder (fr. 490). Aristodemus was later than Hippias (cf. above, p. 58); and still _it is to his book, and not to old registers_, that the Greek writers refer. The recurrence of the 28th as an improper Olympiad shows that this number had some important place in the whole discussion. I think it likely that Corbus really belonged to the twenty-eighth after 776, and not to that year. The oldest actual record of a victor which Pausanias could find was from Ol. 33, and this he describes as of extraordinary antiquity. Other details are given in the Appendix.

[69:1] _Fasti h.e.l.l._, vol. ii. p. vii.

[69:2] Cf. above, -- 30, note.

[71:1] I incline, with Mr. Bent, to place the remains of Santorin before those of Hissarlik, even though they may be in some respects superior in development. As is obvious, the culture of one place need not keep pace with that of another. But the total disappearance from the legends of any mention of the eruption which must have disturbed the whole aegean Sea, compared with the living memories of Troy, is to me a proof that the latter and its destruction must be far more recent than the former.

Mr. E. Abbott, who refers to Bent's _Cyclades_, is disposed to the other view (_History of Greece_, i. 43); and so are Duruy (vol. i. chap. ii. -- 1) and Holm.

[71:2] Many writers put the Dorian immigration and the resulting changes of population, and emigration to Asia Minor, in the gap.

[72:1] i. 131. Busolt, as he informs me, now agrees with this view.

[72:2] In two remarkable articles (_h.e.l.lenic Journal_ for 1890 and 1891).

[73:1] The date of Archilochus, the earliest of the historical figures among Greek poets, used to be fixed about 709 B.C. The researches of Gelzer, _Das Zeitalter des Gyges_, make it certain that this date is wrong, and must be reduced to at least 670 B.C.; for Archilochus names Gyges in an extant fragment, and Gyges appears on a cuneiform inscription as the va.s.sal of an a.s.syrian king whose time is determinable. Moreover, an eclipse which Archilochus mentions seems to be that in April, 647 B.C., which was total at Thasos, where the poet spent his later years. Even the conservative Duncker (vol. ii. p. 175, English ed.) adopts these arguments. Nevertheless, some recent histories still acquiesce in the exploded date!

[74:1] The connected history was, however, not set down then, but by a late epic poet, Rhia.n.u.s, and a late prose historian, Myron, both of whom Pausanias, who gives us what we now know of these wars, criticises severely, saying that the prose author is the worse of these bad or incomplete authorities (Pausanias, iv. 6), since he conflicts with Tyrtaeus. How modern historians in the face of this pa.s.sage can set down fixed dates for these wars, beginning with 785 B.C., pa.s.ses my comprehension.

[74:2] It is perhaps the most extraordinary fact in the results of the excavations pointed out to me by Mr. Sayce, that in none of the early Greek tombs or treasures discovered have we a single specimen of early writing, though both Egyptians and Phnicians, who supplied so much to them, must have been long familiar with that art. The author of the Sixth Book of the Iliad refers once to writing as a strange or mysterious thing, and yet on a folded tablet, which could not have been used at the origin of writing, or indeed till far later times.