[CHAPTER III]
INVENTION IN GREECE
Our brief survey has thus far carried us over the lands of Egypt, China and western Asia; lands so far removed from us in distance, and inhabited by people so far removed from us in time and character, that they seem to belong almost to another world. But we now are coming to a country which, though its history goes back many centuries before the Christian era, was a country of Europe and inhabited by a people who seem near. The Greeks who overran what we now call Greece, probably about 1500 B. C., took possession of a civilization exceedingly high, which the inhabitants of the mainland and the Ægean Islands had received from the East, through the Phœnicians, who brought it in their ships. This civilization the Ægean islanders, especially the Cretans, had developed and improved, particularly in creations of beauty and works of art. The Greeks created a still higher civilization, and transmitted it to us. The influence of Greek civilization we see on every hand:—in our language, in our daily life, and especially in our ideas of art, literature and philosophy.
That a civilization so high and beautiful should have been attained, could hardly have been brought about without the presence of great imagination among the Greeks, and the exercise of considerable invention. The presence of both imagination and invention are evidenced in every page of the early history of Greece, in the stirring stories of her heroes, and in the conception and development of her government. Compared with the stories of ancient Greece, the stories of the childhood of every other country seem unimaginative and tame. The stories of early Greece still live and still have the power to charm. The Iliad and Odyssey are in the first rank of the great poems even now; and the story of Helen and the siege of Troy is as full of life and color as any that we know.
Two Cretan Vases
An interesting legend characteristic of the inventiveness of the ancient Greeks was that of the large wooden horse in which a hundred brave warriors concealed themselves, and were drawn within the walls of Troy by the Trojans themselves, who had been induced to do this by an ingenious story, invented to deceive them. Whether the legend is true or not does not affect the fact that invention was needed and employed to create the legend in the one case, or to cause the incident in the other case.
The prehistoric age of Greece was filled with myths of so much beauty, interest and originality, that the Greek mythology is more read, even now, than any other. It formed also the basis of the later mythology of the Romans.
It may be noted here that mere imagination is not a quality of very high importance, unless it be associated with constructiveness. In fact, imagination is evidenced more by savage and barbarous peoples than by the civilized; as it is also by children and women than by men. Imagination by itself, untrained and undirected, while it is unquestionably an attribute of the mind, is not one of reason, in the sense that it does not necessarily employ the reasoning faculties. In fact, the imagination, unless trained and well-directed, may lead us to the absurdest performances, in defiance of the suggestions of reason. Using the word imagination in this sense, Shakespeare said—