Homer's men, we saw, usually sacrifice hecatombs outside of the temple, though twelve kine are sacrificed in the temple of the Trojan Athena.
The votive objects found in this Spartan precinct of the ninth century were pottery in the Geometric, post-Aegean style, with ivory plaques, at least as large as an ordinary playing card, covering the safety pin of the fibula. The earliest designs incised on these plaques of ivory "repeat in more than one case Aegean motives" (such as the goddess holding a bird in each hand); the style is touched with Mesopotamian influences, but more deeply by the art of the Bronze Age in the area of the Danube. The "double coil" or "pair of spectacles" shape of fibula-cover, familiar in the Danubian region, also occurs.[9]
Such being the art in the new home of the Dorian invaders, we expect to find art rather better than worse among the Ionians at Attica at the same period—the ninth century B.C., which is doubtless much later than the central period of the Ionian migration to Asia. The tombs of Spata in Attica, and the treasure from Aegina in the British Museum, are taken as relics of the late "Sub-Aegean" art of, say, the tenth to ninth centuries. The ivories of Sparta "suggest some art of West Asia": the Aegina objects in gold are partly "Aegean" survivals, partly show unmistakable Egyptian influence passed through an Oriental medium. The well-known gold cup of Aegina, with its rosette and four spirals, has a parallel from one of the rich royal tombs of the Mycenaean acropolis: there are also, as at Mycenae, many thin round plaques of gold, probably sewn originally on robes. The rings bear no signets: one is in the form of a buckler, like a reduced Mycenaean figure-of-eight shield, inlaid with blue glass paste. The figure of a man or god holding a water-fowl in each hand, and wearing a loin-cloth, is of a modified Egyptian character. The date of the objects is placed between the tenth and ninth centuries.[10]
Probably the Ionian emigrants from the mainland near Aegina left behind them some, and probably they took with them other craftsmen capable of executing such work in gold as we have described. But they also left in Attica the potters who, about the ninth to eighth centuries, B.C., covered the great vases, which did duty for headstones in the cemetery of the Dipylon, with geometric ornament and barbaric representations of life. It was no barbarian life that they knew, crudely as they designed it. The people of Athens, as the vases prove, had four-horse chariots; had large ships manned by many oarsmen, and furnished with a submerged sharp ram. The warriors in the chariots wore shields slung by baldrics: in form they were circular, in other cases they exaggerated, in much smaller dimensions, the features of the Aegean figure-of-eight shield, or were smaller forms of the Aegean oblong shield. Here and there a spearman holds in front of him an oval shield by the handle. The swords are straight short swords, worn at right angles to the waist, not heavy Homeric swords, slung by a baldric from the shoulder. In some cases, however, heavy leaf-shaped blades are used, both for cut and thrust.
The people had great spectacular funerals. The body of the dead lay on a bier in the house, while men, women, and children, mere skeleton figures, plucked out their hair with both hands. Then the body was borne in a chariot to the grave (it was seldom cremated), and a procession of charioteers followed.
The swords and spears were of iron, none had richly adorned hilts of ivory and gold.
The gold work of the period, chiefly stamped on thin bands, was not quite so crude as that of the potter with his triangle reversed for a body, the monstrous thighs and calves of his men, their bird-shaped inhuman faces,—all of them remote from the Aegean art, and apparently of northern origin. The artists in gold work were in advance of the vase-painters, whose horses usually have a thing like a fish for head, set on a neck like a serpent.
The Attic region, towards the end of the Ionian migration, thus presents the decay of Aegean and the bloom of geometric decoration, and of barbaric, probably northern design. None the less the life depicted so barbarously was no barbaric life. Bad as is the art, you see that the life is Hellenic.
At the same time the Dipylon life is wholly un-Homeric. The manner of burial, the huge vases in place of the cairn and pillar, the metal of the weapons, iron, their want of adornment, the size, shape, and mode of carrying the sword, the tearing out of their own hair by mourners, the size of the shields, and even the dress of the women who, in my opinion, wear skirts, not chitons, are all of a nature unknown to the Epics. Poets of the Dipylon age could never have preserved the uniform Homeric descriptions of details totally unlike what they saw in actual existence.
About the relics of the earliest Ionian settlements in Asia, archaeology now knows something. The excavations of Mr. Hogarth on the earliest site of the Ionian temple of Artemis at Ephesus (700 B.C.?), revealed thousands of votive offerings in gold, ivory, bone, paste, crystal, and other materials. These had been "carefully laid between the slabs for some hieratic purpose," probably under the central statue of the goddess. Mr. Hogarth dates the deposit at about 700 B.C., "some two centuries after the traditional landing of the colonists."