CHAPTER IV. THE TRANSITION TO SECURE HISTORY
BELOCH’S VIEW OF THE CONVENTIONAL PRIMITIVE HISTORY[7]
[ca. 1200-800 B.C.]
The singers of the epic poems as well as their hearers were as yet wholly unconscious of the gap separating mythology from history. To them the Trojan War, the march of the Seven against Thebes, the wanderings of Ulysses and Menelaus, were historical realities and they believed just as firmly that Achilles, Diomedes, Agamemnon, and all the other heroes once really lived, as the Swiss until recently believed in the reality of their Tell and Winkelried. Indeed until the fourth century hardly any one in Greece dared to question the truth of these things. Even so critical a person as Thucydides is still wholly under the influence of epic tradition, so much so that he gives a statistical report of the strength of Agamemnon’s army and tries to answer the question as to how such masses of people could have been supported during the ten years’ siege of Troy.
But the world which the epic described belonged to an immeasurably distant past. The people of that time were much stronger than those “who live to-day”; the gods still used to descend upon the earth and did not consider it beneath them to generate sons with mortal women. In comparison with that great by-gone age, the present and that which oral tradition told of the immediate past seemed wholly without interest; and if the epic did occasionally seize upon historical recollections, the events were put back into the heroic age and became inseparably mingled with mythical occurrences. As to how the present had grown out of this heroic past, the poets and their contemporaries had not yet begun to ask.
The time came, however, when this question was put. People wanted to know why the Greece of historical times looked so different from Homer’s Greece; why for example Homer knows of no Thessaly; why he has Achæans instead of Dorians living in Argolis; why, according to him, descendants of Pelops instead of those of Hercules sit upon the thrones of Argos and Sparta. It is the first awakening of the historical sense which finds expression in such questions. The answer, however, was already given with the question. It was clear that the Grecian tribes must have changed their abodes to a great extent after the Trojan War; Hellas must have been shaken by a real migration of peoples. But this single fact was not sufficient. People wanted to know the impelling cause of the migrations, and the particular circumstances under which they took place. The answer was not difficult for a people endowed with such a facility for speculation.
The very lack of colour in such accounts would be a sufficient proof for the fact that we are not dealing here with pure speculation, not with real tradition. Thus hardly anything more is told of the immigration of the Thessalians into the river basin of the Peneus beyond the bald fact, and that was sufficient to explain why Homer’s “Pelasgian Argos” was called Thessaly in historic times. Of course the incomers must have had a leader, consequently Thessalus, the eponymic hero of the people, was placed at their head, a point in the story which of itself is sufficient to stamp the whole narrative as a late invention. The Thessalians also must have come from somewhere; but since Homer already places the races south of Thermopylæ in the homes they actually occupied in history, and since they could not make a Grecian tribe immigrate from Thrace or Illyria, there was nothing else to do but to place the original home of the conquerors in Epirus. This was all the more plausible as the name Thessaly is really closely connected with Thessaliotis, the region about Pharsalia and Cierium on the borders of Epirus, and first spread from here to other parts of the country.
Even more characteristic perhaps is the account of the migration of the Bœotians. According to Homer, Cadmeans lived in Thebes, Minyæ in Orchomenos. Hence it followed that the Bœotians must have immigrated after the Trojan War, like the Thessalians. But a great many Thessalian names of places and religious practices occur in Bœotia. Hence nothing was more simple than to make the Bœotians immigrate from Thessaly, thus at the same time explaining what had become of the original inhabitants of Thessaly after the influx of Thessalians. To be sure this original population, as represented by the serfs (penestai) of the Thessalian nobles, presented a very different appearance; still these two views could very well be combined: one needed only to suppose that one part of the former population of the region had fallen into bondage, and that the other had emigrated. Moreover, Homer already mentions Bœotians in the region which they occupied in historic times. That made the further supposition necessary that a part of the people had already settled in Bœotia before the Trojan War; or else the opposite hypothesis was made, that the Bœotians had been driven out of Bœotia after the Trojan War by the Pelasgians and Thracians, and had returned thither after several generations. We see plainly from this example how all such suppositions were dependent on the epic poems.
The migration of the Eleans is a similar case. Elis is an old district name, consequently no Eleans can ever have existed outside of Elis. But Homer mentions the Epeans as being inhabitants of the country; consequently it was stated that the Eleans did not enter the Peloponnesus until after the Trojan War, and that they came from Ætolia, where Oxylus, the mythical ancestor of the Elean royal house, was also worshipped as a hero. According to an opposite version Ætolia was settled by emigrants from Elis; and these two views were then combined, and the Eleans were made first to move to Ætolia and then, after ten generations, to move back again. As a matter of fact the Homeric Epeans are nothing else than the inhabitants of Epea in Triphylia, whose name was extended to include the inhabitants of the surrounding districts, like the name of the neighbouring Pylians, since the knowledge of the Ionic rhapsodists concerning the western part of the Peloponnesus is very scanty.
Further, since Homer knows of no Dorians in the Peloponnesus, it was clear that the peoples inhabiting Argolis and Laconia in historic times could have come in only after the Trojan War; it remained only to discover from whence. This was not difficult; there was in the middle part of Greece, between Œta and Parnassus, a small mountainous district whose inhabitants were called Dorians, quite like the Grecian colonists on the Carian coast. This is not at all remarkable, since in a widely extended linguistic territory the same local names must necessarily recur in different places, as may be seen from any topographical dictionary. Such homonyms by no means prove an especially close relationship between the inhabitants of such localities; in the formation of Greek racial tradition, however, they have played an important part.
The home of the Dorians was in this way established. People now wanted to know the reason which had led them to seek new abodes so far away. In close connection with this was the question as to how the descendants of Hercules had come to reign over Argos, Sparta, and Messene. The answer was given by the tradition of the return of the Heraclidæ. Hercules, it was related, had belonged to the royal family of Argos, but had been robbed of his rights to the throne and had died in exile; his sons, or grandsons as was stated later for chronological reasons, had made good their rights with the aid of the Dorians and had also established the claims which Hercules had to dominion over Laconia and Messenia. The regained lands were divided under the three brothers Temenus, Cresphontes, and Aristodemus, or between the twin sons of the latter, Procles and Eurysthenes. This was a tradition which could be put to admirable political use. Supported by this title, Argos could claim the hegemony over the whole of Argolis; Sparta could justify the subjection of the small cities of Laconia and Messenia. That was why this tradition, once come into existence, was quickly circulated and officially recognised.
But the mention of Messenia shows that we are here dealing with a comparatively recent stage in the growth of tradition, since this region could not be claimed as a heritage by the Heraclidæ until after the Spartan conquest between the eighth and seventh centuries.
Also the eponymi of the Spartan royal dynasties of Agis and Eurypon have no place in the tradition of the Doric migrations; a sure sign that they were first connected with Hercules artificially. And Temenus, from whom the Argive kings traced their descent, was, according to the Arcadian myth,—no doubt taken from Argos,—the son of Pelasgus, of Phegeus, or of the Argolian hero Phoroneus. It was also related that Temenus had been brought up by Hera—the goddess of the Argolian land. He was thus an old Argive hero who originally had nothing whatever to do with Hercules. Just as little was known about the Doric migration on the island of Cos at the time when the genealogy of its ruling dynasty was written, since the latter is not traced back to Temenus, but directly to Hercules through his son Thessalus. And anyway Hercules, as we have seen, is not a “Doric” divinity at all, but a Bœotian, whose cult was extended to the neighbouring countries of Bœotia, only after the colonisation of Asia Minor. The tradition concerning the return of the Heraclidæ is thus seen to have come into existence long after the immigration of the Dorians into the Peloponnesus, with which it is inseparably connected. This tradition is first mentioned by Tyrtæus towards the end of the seventh century and in the epic poem Ægimios, ascribed to Hesiod, which may have been written at the same time, or a little later. That was the period when the Homeric poems became popular in European Greece; both Tyrtæus and Hesiod are wholly under their influence. Moreover it is clear that an immigration of Dorians from middle Greece into the Peloponnesus could be talked of only after the Doric name had been carried from the colonies of Asia Minor to the west coast of the Ægean Sea, which did not happen until post-Homeric times. In the same way the legend of the Thessalian migration could have grown up only after the inhabitants of the Peneus river basin had become conscious of their racial unity and had begun to designate themselves by the common name of Thessalians. This must have taken place early in the eighth or seventh centuries, since, as has already been stated, Homer is not as yet acquainted with this name, whereas the latest part of the Iliad, the catalogue of ships, mentions the eponymic hero of the people. Finally, the dependence of all these legendary migrations upon the epic poems is shown by the fact that they are connected only with regions which in Homer had a different population than in historic times. The Arcadians and Athenians, on the other hand, who already in Homer are found in the same districts they occupied in later times, considered themselves autochthonous. Thus we see that Homer had not only given the Greeks their gods, as Herodotus says, but their ancient history also. We, however, do not need to be told that traditions which did not grow up until the eighth or seventh century are entirely worthless as helping to an understanding of conditions in Greece at a time preceding the colonisation of Asia Minor.
After all this the question as to the internal evidence of the truth of these traditions is really superfluous. Even a well-invented myth is yet by no means history. Here, however, we are asked to believe the most improbable things. The Doris on the Œta is a wild mountain valley, measuring scarcely two hundred square kilometers in area, which could not have contained more than a few thousand inhabitants, since farming and grazing formed their sole means of support. In Homer’s time the eastern Locrians were still so lightly armed that they were wholly unfitted for fighting with the hoplites at close range; the Dorians who lived farther inland than these Locrians cannot have been much further advanced several centuries earlier. And a few hundreds or even thousands of such poorly armed soldiers are to have conquered the old highly civilised districts of the Peloponnesus with their numerous strongholds, and the superior armour of their inhabitants? The very idea is an absurdity. No more can we understand why the Dorians should have migrated precisely to Argolis, and Laconia, and even to Messenia—places situated so far from their home. The legend does indeed give a satisfactory answer to this question, but anyone who cannot recognise Hercules, with his sons and grandsons, as historical characters, is obliged to find some other motive for the migration of the Dorians.
In other respects, also, there is absolutely no proof to support the supposition of a migration of peoples upon the Grecian peninsula. The “Mycenæan” civilisation was not, as has been supposed, suddenly destroyed by an incursion of uncivilised tribes, but was gradually merged into the civilisation of the classic period. Even Attica, in connection with which there is no tradition of a migration, had its period of Mycenæan culture. The so-called “Doric” institutions are limited to Crete and Laconia, and in the latter country they are not older than the Spartan conquest in the eighth century; hence they have nothing whatever to do with the Doric migration. In the same way the serfdom of the Thessalian peasants may very well have been the result of an economic development, like the colonia during the Roman empire or serfdom in Germany after the end of the Middle Ages. Also the differentiation of the Grecian dialects came about, as we saw, after the colonisation of Asia Minor, and hence should not be traced back to the migrations which took place within the Grecian peninsula at some time preceding this period. And, in any case, after the Dorians settled in the Peloponnesus they must have adopted the dialect of the original inhabitants of the country, who were so far superior to them in numbers and civilisation; just as no one doubts that the Thessalians did the same after their immigration into the Peneus river basin. A “religion of the Doric race,” however, exists only in the imagination of modern scholars; Hercules himself, the ancestral god of the Dorians, is of Bœotian origin. Finally, it is extremely doubtful if the Argives and Laconians were any more closely related to each other than to the other Grecian tribes—the so-called Doric Phyleans, at least, have until now been traced only in Argolis and in the Argolian colonies. But even if a closer relationship did exist between the two neighbouring tribes, it would by no means necessarily follow that the Argo-Laconian people first immigrated into the Peloponnesus at a time when the eastern part of the peninsula had already reached a comparatively high grade of civilisation. There is indeed no question but that the Peloponnesus got its Hellenic population from the north, that is directly from middle Greece; and it is very probable that, even after the Peloponnesus was already in the possession of the Greeks, tribal displacements still took place in Greece. But they occurred in so remote a period that they have left no distinguishable trace, even in tradition. If the Greeks of Asia Minor remembered only the bare fact of their immigration, how could a tradition have been maintained of tribal wanderings which took place long before this colonisation? It is an idle task to try to discover the direction of these migrations or the more particular circumstances under which they took place.
Hence it is a picture of the imagination which, since Herodotus,
e has been accepted as primitive Grecian history. But the problem which gave rise to the traditions of mythical migrations still remains for us to solve—the question as to why the epics present us with a different picture of the distribution of Grecian tribes, from that found in historic times. The answer to-day will naturally be different from the one given two thousand years ago.
The epic poem designates Agamemnon’s followers, and indeed all the Greeks before Troy, as Argives, Achæans, or Danaans—terms which are used wholly synonymously even in the oldest parts of the Iliad. Now we know that not only in Homeric times, but already centuries earlier, before the colonisation of Crete and Asia Minor, Argolis was inhabited by the same people that we find there in historic times. It would not of itself be impossible to suppose that this people, who afterwards had no common tribal name, should have called themselves Achæans or Danaans, in prehistoric times, although it would be difficult to understand how this tribal name could have been lost. But as a matter of fact a tribe called Danaan never did exist. Danaus is an old Argive hero who is said to have transformed the waterless Argos into a well-watered country; his daughters, the Danaides, are water nymphs; Danæ also, the mother of the solar hero Perseus, and herself a goddess, cannot be separated from Danaus. The Danaans, accordingly, are the “people of Danaus”; they belong like him to tradition, and have been transposed from heaven to earth like the Cadmeans and Minyæ to whom we shall return later on. The name Achæan, however, was applied in historic times to the inhabitants of the northern coast of the Peloponnesus and of the south of Thessaly, and it is hardly probable that it should have been more widely spread in historic times. Agamemnon seems rather, according to the oldest tradition, to have been a Thessalian prince, like Achilles, who continued to be regarded as such. At the time, however, when the epic was being formed in Ionia, the Peloponnesian Argos outshone all other parts of the Grecian peninsula, and the poets in consequence were obliged to transpose the governmental seat of the powerful ruler from Thessaly to the Peloponnesus. His Achæans of course migrated with him.
Since, now, in Homer the name Achæan includes all the Grecian tribes under Agamemnon’s command, it could no longer be used to designate the inhabitants of one single region. Consequently in the epic the name Achaia is not used for the northern coast of the Peloponnesus, but this region is simply called “coast-land,” or Ægialea. This then gave rise to the tradition—if we still call such combinations tradition—that the Achæans who were driven out of Laconia by the Dorians had settled in Ægialea and given their name to the country. Ionians were said to have lived there previously, a theory which was supported by the existence of a sanctuary of the Heliconian Poseidon on the promontory of Mycale.
Furthermore Homer mentions various peoples upon the Grecian peninsula and the surrounding islands, which in historic times no longer existed there; for example, the Abantes, who appear in the catalogue of ships as inhabitants of Eubœa, whereas in the rest of the Iliad they are not localised. It is possible that there has here been a preservation of the old tribal name of the Eubœans, which later must have been lost; but it is also just as possible, and more probable, that the Abantes had originally nothing whatever to do with Eubœa, but that they were the inhabitants of Abæ in Phocis, whose name then, for the sake of some theory, was transferred to the neighbouring island. The Caucones according to the Telemachus must have dwelt in the western part of the Peloponnesus, not far from Pylus, whereas the Iliad calls them allies of the Trojans; and in reality even in historic times Caucones are said to have been found on the Paphlagonian coast. The name was thus evidently transferred from Asia Minor to the Peloponnesus, for which the river Caucon near Dyme in Achaia may have given a reason. A comparatively late part of the Iliad tells of a war between the Curetes and the inhabitants of Calydon in Ætolia. In Hesiod, on the other hand, the Curetes are divine beings, related to the nymphs and satyrs. They appear also as beneficent dæmons in the Cretan folk-lore; they are said to have taught mankind all sorts of useful arts and also to have brought up the infant Zeus. They belong thus to mythology, not to history. They were probably located in Ætolia only because there was a mountain there called Curion; and as a matter of course it was said that they had immigrated from Crete. Since on the Ætolian coast at the foot of the Curion there was a city called Chalcis, they were further transferred to the Eubœan Chalcis.
There are also other cases in pre-Homeric times of mythical people having been transposed from heaven to earth—thus the Danaans of whom we have already spoken; furthermore, the Lapithæ, who are said to have lived in the northern part of Thessaly at the foot of Olympus and Ossa. Their close association with the centaurs leaves no doubt that they, like the latter, belong to the realm of mythology. Closely related to them are the Phlegyæ. The Iliad gives us a picture of Ares, as he advances to battle in their ranks, but leaves their dwelling-place indefinite; later authorities placed it in Thessaly or in the valley of the Bœotian Cephisus. Coronis, the mother of Æsculapius, belonged to this tribe; also Ixion, who laid violent hands on Hera. Finally, the Phlegyæ are said to have burned the Delphic temple and in punishment therefor were destroyed by Apollo by lightning and an earthquake. The Minyæ also belong to this circle. They compose the crew of the ship Argo, which goes into the distant sun-land of the east to bring back from thence the Golden Fleece; the daughter of their tribal hero, Minyas, is Persephone, and no further proof is necessary to show that he himself is a god and his people mythical. Afterwards when the starting-point of the Argonauts was localised in the Pagasæan Gulf, the Minyæ also became a Thessalian race; from there, like their relatives the Phlegyæ, they were brought over to Bœotia, where Orchomenos in Homer is called “Minyean.” And since the Iliad furthermore mentions a river Minyos in the later Triphylia, the Minyæ were placed there also.
The Pelasgians play a much more important part in the conventional primitive history of Greece than the last-mentioned peoples. Throughout antiquity their name is connected with the western part of the great Thessalian plain, the “Pelasgic Argos” of Homer, the Pelasgiotis of historic times. The Iliad speaks of the Pelasgians, famed for their spears, who lived far from Troy in broad-furrowed Larissa, and probably intends thereby the Thessalian capital. Thessalian Achilles prays to the Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona before the departure of his friend Patroclus. But the Iliad as yet knows nothing of Pelasgian inhabitants of Dodona; on the contrary the catalogue of ships reckons this sacred city as belonging to the territory of the Ænianes and Perrhæbi, and it is Hesiod who first makes the temple to have been founded by Pelasgians. Elsewhere Pelasgians are mentioned by Homer only in Crete.
Otherwise the later accounts. Wherever within the circle of the Ægean Sea the name of Larissa occurs, there Pelasgians are said to have lived—in the Peloponnesian Argos, in Æolis of Asia Minor, on the island of Lesbos, on the Cayster near Ephesus. It is possibly for this reason that the Odyssey places Pelasgians in Crete, since there, also, there was a Larissæan field near Hierapytna, and Gortyn is said to have been called Larissa in ancient times. From Argos the Pelasgians also became woven into the myths of the neighbouring Arcadia, the ancestral hero of which, Lycaon, is called by Hesiod a son of Pelasgus.
Pelasgians were said to have lived once in Attica also. The wall which defended the approach to the citadel of Athens bore the name Pelargicon, and as no one knew what that meant, it was said that it had been corrupted out of Pelasgicon and that the citadel had been built by Pelasgians. These Pelasgians were then said to have been driven out by the Athenians and to have migrated to Lemnos. Why they went precisely to this place we do not know, nor why these Lemnian Pelasgians were called Tyrrhenians. Homer places the Sinties, that is a Thracian tribe, in Lemnos. Remnants of the original inhabitants of the island, who were driven out by the Athenians in about the year 500 B.C., were, a hundred years later, still living on the peninsula of Athos and on the Propontis near Placia and Scylace; they had preserved their old language, which was different from the Greek.
In consequence of this and similar traditions, the theory was brought forward in the sixth century that the Hellenes had been preceded in Greece by a Pelasgic race. Since, however, some of the Grecian tribes, as the Arcadians and Athenians, considered themselves to be autochthonous, there was nothing for it but to call the Pelasgians the ancestors of the later Hellenes, and so the whole change was reduced to one of name only. This to be sure was in contradiction of the statements of Homer, who names the Pelasgians among the allies of Troy, and hence evidently considered them to be racially antagonistic to the Greeks. The genealogists and historians of antiquity never got around this contradiction, which was indeed inexplicable with the means at their command.
Moreover, even if a Pelasgian people ever had existed in the wide extent attributed to them by tradition, the Greeks of antiquity would no more have conceived of them as being a single nation, than they themselves became conscious of their national unity before the eighth century; they would have designated the several Pelasgian tribes by different names. This alone shows that we are not dealing here with real historical tradition, quite apart from the fact that there is no historical tradition from the time preceding the colonisation of Asia Minor. Here also it is a question of mere theorising, and the theories already presuppose the existence of the Iliad and Odyssey, even to their later songs, so that they cannot be older than the seventh or sixth century. Historically the Pelasgians can be traced only in Thessaly. Pelasgiotis is thus equivalent to Pelasgia, just as Thessaliotis is equivalent to Thessalia and Elimiotis to Elimea. The Pelasgiots, however, of historic times were of Grecian origin and we have not the slightest reason to suppose that the same was not true of prehistoric times. Indeed the Thessalian plain in all probability is the place in which the Hellenes first made permanent settlements.
A similar position to that of the Pelasgians is occupied by the Leleges in tradition. Homer speaks of them as inhabiting Pedasus in southern Troy and even Alcæus calls Antandrus, situated in this region, a Lelegean town. Later comers regarded the Leleges as the original inhabitants of Caria, where there was also a Pedasus; even in the Hellenistic period they were said to have formed a clan of serfs in this region, like the Heliots in Sparta. Old fortresses and tombstones, concerning the origin of which nothing was known, were ascribed to the Leleges, just as we speak of “Pelasgian” walls. It was also supposed that the whole Ionian coast and the islands near it were once inhabited by these people. It was natural to suppose a similar relationship for European Greece and here also to let a Lelegean population precede the Hellenic. Supports for this theory were found in a number of local names, such as Physcus and Larymna in Locris, Abæ in Phocis, Pedasus in Messenia, which occur in an identical or similar form in Caria. One of the two citadels of Megara was called Caria; and Zeus Carios was worshipped in various parts of Greece. Accordingly, Leleges or Carians were said to have lived in all these places. The supposition that the southern part of the Hellenic peninsula was occupied by a Carian population in a pre-Grecian period has, as we have seen, a great deal in its favour; only we should avoid trying to discover historical tradition in late suppositions, since Homer still knows nothing of all these myths and Hesiod is the first to make Locrus rule over the Leleges.
Nor does Homer know anything of Thracians outside of their historic abodes to the north of the Ægean Sea. Later tradition places them in Phocian Daulis and in Bœotia on the Helicon. The most direct cause for this was probably furnished by the race of Thracidæ, which attained a prominent position in Delphi and which had probably spread into other Phocian cities as well; another reason was the name of the Daulian king, Tereus, which had a Thracian sound, and lastly, the cult of the Muses which had a home on the Helicon, as also on Olympus in Thracian Pieria. Mysteries were connected with this cult even at a comparatively early period, as is shown by the legends of Orpheus and Musæus. Hence Eumolpus, the mythical founder of the Eleusinian mysteries, was held to be a Thracian; his very name shows that he is connected with the worship of the Muses, even if he were not expressly said to be the son of Musæus. The historic value of this tradition is thus sufficiently demonstrated.
There were also traditions of immigrations from the Orient into Greece. These were based in part upon solar myths, which have given rise to similar legends among the most widely separated peoples; they also reflect the consciousness that the rudiments of a higher civilisation were brought to the Greeks from the East. In the form in which we have them, these myths are without exception late formations, which presuppose close relations between Greece and the old civilisations of Asia and Egypt. In Homer, accordingly, there is no trace of them.
Thus Pelops is said to have come from Lydia or Phrygia to the peninsula which has since borne his name. One might be tempted to regard him as the eponymic hero of the Peloponnesus; but Pelopia was also the name of a daughter of Pelias or of Niobe, and of the mother of Cycnus, a son of Ares. Pelops’ mother also is Euryanassa, a daughter of Dione; his paternal grandfather is Xanthus (the “shining one”); two of his sons are called Chrysippus and Alcathous. These names leave no doubt as to the fact that Pelops was originally a solar hero; hence also the story of his contest with Œnomaus for the possession of Hippodamia. The name Peloponnesus, which is also unknown to Homer, means accordingly “Island of the sun-god”; Helios, as is well known, had a celebrated temple at the most extreme southern point of the peninsula, on the promontory of Tænarum. Thus Pelops, originally, was not materially different from Hercules, who for the most part has crowded him out of cult and tradition; just as the genealogy of the Peloponnesian dynasties was traced back to Pelops in ancient times and to Hercules at a later period. Nevertheless Pelops has at least kept the first place in Olympia.
The tradition of the immigration of Danaus from Egypt is closely connected with the legend of the wanderings of Io, which could not have taken on its present form until after Egypt was opened up to the Hellenes, that is not before the end of the seventh century. The legend concerning the Egyptian origin of the old Attic national hero Cecrops grew up much later in the fourth or third century, and never attained general recognition.
We have already seen how Phœnix and his brother Cadmus became Phœnicians. Accordingly Phœnix’s daughter, or according to a later myth his sister, Europa, was carried off by Zeus from Phœnicia to Crete, where she gave birth to Minos. This alone makes it clear that Minos had nothing whatever to do with the Phœnicians, but is a good Grecian god, as are also Phœnix, Cadmus, Europa, his wife Pasiphaë (the “all enlightening”), his daughter Phædra (the “beaming”), and Ariadne the wife of Dionysus. Minos, also, afterwards fell to the rank of a hero; already in Homer he appears as the king of Knossos, and later the Cretans trace their laws back to him. The name Minoa occurs frequently in the islands and on the coast of the Ægean Sea; also in Crete itself, and in Amorgos, Siphnos, and on the coast of Megaris. Hence the conclusion was drawn that Minos had ruled in all these places and must therefore have been a great sea-king, whose dominion extended over the whole of the Cyclades and in fact over the whole Ægean Sea. But in Sicily there was also a Minoa, a daughter city of the Megarian colony of Selinus, and doubtless named after the small island of Minoa near the Nisæan Megara. Thus the tradition arose that Minos had proceeded to Sicily and there found his death. Since Selinus was founded in the year 650 B.C., this myth cannot have come into existence before the sixth century.
At the beginning of the fifth century all these traditions were combined, and connected; on the one hand, with the myths which formed the substance of the epic poems; on the other, with the oldest historic recollections. The genealogies of the heroes as given in part by Homer and more completely by Hesiod served as a chronological basis. At the beginning were placed the Pelasgians, then the immigrations from the east, of Danaus, Pelops, Cadmus, and others. Then followed the expedition of the Argonauts, the march of the Seven against Thebes, the Trojan War, and whatever else of similar nature was related in the epics. Next came the age of the great migrations; first the incursion of the Thessalians into the plains of the Peneus, and the Bœotian migration caused thereby, then the march of the Dorians and their allies, the Eleans, into the Peloponnesus, which was followed by the colonisation of the islands and of the western coast of Asia Minor.
Thus was gained the misleading appearance of a pragmatic history of Grecian antiquity; and although even in ancient times occasional critical doubts were not wanting, this system as a whole was accepted by the Greeks as historical truth.[c]
FOOTNOTES
[7] [Reproduced by permission from his Griechische Geschichte. The subject here treated is one on which the authorities are by no means agreed. Other views are presented in a subsequent chapter.]
