The Northern Invaders
N 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.
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.
The men of Iron came in from the North in wave after wave of conquest. 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
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.