Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

The blended prehistoric civilization, with its epochs checked off in centuries or millennia, and, thanks to the archæologists, to-day rapidly emerging throughout the Greek world in Attica, Bœotia, Asia Minor, the islands and the Peloponnesus, has received not unnaturally, if prematurely, the general name “Mycenæan” from the great royal tombs and smaller graves and the strong walls of Mycenæ and from the rich and amazing treasure recovered from the graves excavated within the Gateway of the Lions. Accumulating evidence has indicated the insufficiency of the term to include both the art and the architecture. Successive periods and various origins must yet be disentangled. But Mycenæ and Tiryns, as being the most impressive in their entirety, continue to represent this prehistoric civilization to the majority of visitors, and the term “Mycenæan” may serve until some happier names are suggested to distinguish at once between the home-bred and the imported.

On the borderland between mere shadowy tradition and an approximately exact chronology two events seemed to the Greeks themselves of preëminent importance and were referred by them to the twelfth century B. C.—the Fall of Troy, and the Return of the Heracleidæ, or the Dorian conquest, as we should now describe this movement. Although Thucydides states that “in the eightieth year after the Trojan War the Dorians, led by the Heracleidæ, conquered the Peloponnesus,” it may be found necessary to assume a much longer interval, especially if we allow for a series of Dorian conquests.

The Dorians were one of the Greek clans pushed down from further north into central Greece in prehistoric times. They have left, as the memorial of this period, their name attached to little Doris wedged in between Parnassus and Mount Œta. When they were impelled to move still further south, whether by external pressure or the desire to send out colonies, the Achæans already held the land approach to the Peloponnesus and also the littoral of Achæa on the opposite side of the Corinthian Gulf. They were thus forced to take to the sea, and the Dorian settlements in Crete, Thera, Melos, and Asia Minor seem to have been followed by Dorian invasions of the Peloponnesus from the south and east, especially in Laconia and Argolis. In Laconia the invaders established themselves as conquerors and retained their own character almost unchanged, while in Argolis they amalgamated with the people already in possession. In readjusting pedigrees it was more agreeable to native pride to assume that these invaders were themselves of good old Peloponnesian stock, rather than foreign Dorians, and incidentally to localize the spreading fame of Heracles. Both of these objects were provided for in Argolis when Heracles proved to be of the Perseid line, the original and most distinguished Argive dynasty. Under his grandchildren the invaders merely came back to their own. Thus the Dorian invasions came to be described by the senseless and confusing name of the Return of the Heracleidæ. With this event is perhaps to be associated the sudden destruction of Mycenæ and Tiryns by fire and the reinstatement of Argos and the Larisa citadel as supreme.

By way of acquiring the chief poet as well as the chief hero of Greece, Argos claimed, with other cities, to be the birthplace of Homer—an echo, doubtless, of the dimly remembered sagas of Achæan Argos in Thessaly. In reality, Argolis, like other Dorian cantons, contributed more subject matter for poets than poetry itself. Yet it was not wholly parasitical. It partially balanced the Dorian debt by sending to Athens two poet-musicians whose activity cannot be justly appraised from the meagre fragments that have come down to us. The Dorian contributions to music must be kept in mind. The Argives, we are told, furnished many of the famous musicians of Greece.

From Hermione on the southern shore of the peninsula came Lasus, who, as a theoretical and practical musician, did much to develop the dithyramb. He was the teacher of Pindar and, under the cultivated tyrant Hipparchus, was a rival of Simonides in Athens. The other poet, Pratinas, came from Phlius, geographically within the northwestern corner of Argolis, although the independent Phliasians long maintained their autonomy. The city lay in green meadowlands high among the mountains on the grassy banks of the Sicyonian Asopus which, according to local belief, was generated by the Carian Meander coming under the sea to link the two sides of the Ægean together, as the Alpheus, on the other side, united Sicily to the mother land. Although Pratinas was inevitably drawn by the lure of the intellectual to live at Athens, he stands out as a Dorian poet. He is known as the first writer of the satyr dramas, one of which it was for a while the custom to add to the trilogy of tragedies, and he competed even with Æschylus.

The literature of Ionian Athens lacked one element which developed among the Æolians and Dorians. The more independent life of Dorian women called forth two poetesses in the Peloponnesus. One of these lived at Sicyon. This city, lying on the Asopus, which comes tumbling down through the deep ravine from Phlius, early became Dorian. Once included in the widespread kingdom of the Agamemnon of tradition, it was now independent, now dependent on Argos or on Sparta. With the mountains of the Peloponnesus around it and the Corinthian Gulf and Parnassus in front, it is beautiful for situation. Its rich treasure-houses were among the notable sights at Delphi and Olympia, and it was famous for its schools of painting and of sculpture. Here Praxilla, the Dorian poetess par excellence, lived in the fifth century B. C. The fame of her dithyrambs, a few fragments of which have reached us, survived her, and she was deemed worthy of a bronze statue by Lysippus, a later compatriot.

In aristocratic Argos itself another woman, Telesilla, was honoured both as a writer of choral hymns for maidens and as a heroine in war. Pausanias adds to the Herodotean account of the Argive men massacred by the Spartans in Hera’s grove the story of how Telesilla manned the walls with old men, boys, and slaves, and then drew up the Argive women for actual conflict with the Spartans and repulsed them, partly by stout fighting, partly by the shame inspired in them by the thought of contending with women. Pausanias saw, furthermore, a carved relief representing the warrior poetess, her scrolls scattered at her feet as she gazes at a helmet which she is about to put on.

Kydias, also from Hermione the home of Lasus, wrote, in the first half of the fifth century, love songs highly esteemed by Plato.

The Argolid contains more than a dozen places prominent in Greek literature and in history. Among the northern mountains were Phlius, Cleonæ, and Nemea; overlooking or on the Argive Gulf were Mycenæ, the Heræum, Argos and the Larisa acropolis, Midea, Tiryns, Nauplia, and Lerna; on the eastern coast of Akte, the old name for the promontory that with other parts merged its name in that of Argos, were Epidaurus, Troezen, and Calauria, with Hermione on the south coast; and on the west side of the gulf was the narrow strip of land, Cynuria, bone of contention between Sparta and the Wolf of Argos. Of all these places the famous group on the Argive Gulf, together with Epidaurus, is most easily accessible from Athens, and travellers who cannot go farther afield may gain from this brief excursion in the Argolid an adequate impression both of its prehistoric interest and of its natural beauties.

Herodotus, in leading up to his account of the Persian War, selects as the origin of the rivalry between the Orient and Greece the rape by Phœnicians of Io, daughter of Inachus, the personified Argive river. This was doubtless a typical scene on the shores of the Mediterranean. The seamen landed and “undid their corded bales;” the native women crowded about the bargain counter at the vessel’s stern; it was easy for the sailors to seize the handsomest and, launching their vessel, to bear them away. The Phœnicians, however, were merely an episode, and the early “Outlanders” came into the Argolid over the northern mountains.