It was more than a thousand years after the Pyramids had been built that Crete reached her Golden Age. When Knossos was destroyed, the centres of civilization on the mainland, such as Mycenae and Tiryns, became of greater importance, and life was lived as Homer has described it. All this was the Greece of the Heroic Age, the Greece to which the Greeks of the later historical times looked back as to something that lay far behind them.
Nearly two thousand years ago the site of Mycenae was just as it had remained until the excavations of Schliemann, and in the second century A.D. a Greek poet sang of Mycenae:
The cities of the hero-age thine eyes may seek in vain,
Save where some wrecks of ruin still break the level plain.
So once I saw Mycenae, the ill-starred, a barren height
Too bleak for goats to pasture—the goat-herds point the site.
And as I passed a greybeard said: "Here used to stand of old
A city built by giants and passing rich in gold."[[3]]
Even to the Greeks of historical times there was a great gap between the return of the heroes from Troy and the beginnings of their own historic Greece. That gap has not yet been entirely filled up; it is even now a more shadowy and misty period to us than the Age of the Heroes, but it was during these mysterious centuries that there were wanderings among the peoples, that restlessness and disturbance spoken of by the Egyptians. It was a dark period in the history of Greece. Wandering tribes, tall and fair men, came from out the forests of the north, over the mountains and through the passes into Greece. Others came from the East. Some again came by sea, driven out from their island homes by invaders. There was fighting and slaying and taking of prisoners. The old civilization was broken down, but slowly something new arose in its place. There were enemies on all sides, but gradually those who were left of the conquered made terms with the conquerors; they abandoned their old language and adopted that of the newcomers, and they dwelt together, and were known as Greeks. The older civilizations had done their work and had perished. The time had come for the mind of man to make greater advances than he had ever before dreamed of, and in the land of Greece this period begins with the coming of the Greeks.
[[1]] Odyssey, XVII.
[[2]] Odyssey, VII.
[[3]] Alpheus, translated by Sir Rennell Rodd in Love, Worship and Death.