III
THE ADVENTURERS
The Greek world, like the English, was largely the creation of adventurous men. To follow in their track would be in itself a literary adventure of the most fascinating and entirely relevant to our subject, the conflict of the Greek and the Barbarian. Unfortunately for our delight the adventurers did not often write down their experiences; or if they did, their accounts have for the most part disappeared. There was a certain Pytheas of Massalia, that is Marseille, who about the time of Alexander the Great sailed up the eastern coast of England and discovered Scotland, and wrote a book about it afterwards. We should like to read that book; if only to see what he said about Scotland. But his account is lost, and we should hardly know about him at all, if it were not for a brief reference in the geographer Strabo. Pytheas seems to have got as far as the Orkney or even the Shetland Islands—one German sends him on a Polar expedition—and had something to say about a mysterious “Thule.” He remarked on the extraordinary length of the summer days in these northern latitudes, thereby provoking his fellow-countrymen to regard him as “extremely mendacious” (Ψευδίστατος).
Long before the time of Pytheas one Skylax of Karyanda in Asia Minor—a Greek or half-Greek—was sent by King Darius to explore the mouths of the Indus, that “second of all the rivers which produced crocodiles.” He sailed down a river “towards the dawn and the risings of the sun into the sea and through the sea westward,” circumnavigating India. What river was that? Whatever river it was, he accomplished a wonderful thing. Skylax also wrote a book, apparently, on this voyage. There exist fragments of his Voyage Round the Parts Without the Pillars of Heracles. His Indian narrative might be the worst written volume in the world, but it could not fail to excite the imagination in every sentence. Sailing along a river of crocodiles in a Greek galley in the reign of Darius the King!
Skylax was an Ionian or an Ionized Carian; and this reminds us that Ionia produced the first adventurers. There went to the making of that colony a great commingling of races. The first settlers may actually have come from Crete bringing with them what they could of the dazzling Cretan civilization. Many certainly came from Greece, which had enjoyed a civilization derived from Crete. No doubt the colonists had to accept help from any quarter and adopt dubious fugitives from Dorianized Hellas and “natives”—Carians, Lydians, Leleges and the like, who had learned to speak a kind of Greek—and marry native wives, who had not even learned to do that, and who would not eat with their husbands, and persisted in a number of other irrational and unsympathetic customs. But it is possible to believe that some memory of the ancient lore was long preserved, and in particular a knowledge [(Note 47)]of the sea-routes the Cretan ships had followed. I have argued elsewhere in this sense, venturing the suggestion that the Greek colonial empire (which started from Ionia) began in an effort to re-establish the great trading system which had its centre in early Crete. Excavators keep on discovering signs of Cretan—“Minoan” or “Mycenaean”—influences in the very places to which the Greek colonists came; and it looks as if they came because they knew the way.
The Ionian cities were nearly all maritime, and this in the fullest sense that the word suggests. The relation of Miletus, for example, to the Aegean did not less effectually mould the character of that state than the Adriatic moulded Venice. Therefore to understand Ionia we must approach her from the sea. She early discovered that this was her element. From Miletus harbour, from the shell-reddened beach of Erythrae, from Samos, from Chios, from Phokaia her ships ventured yearly farther, seeking (if we are right) to recover the old trade-connexions so long severed by the Invasions; to recover the old and, if possible, to pick up new. Ionian seamen became famous for their skill and hardihood. Not merely in the Aegean, but also in remoter waters, it soon became a common thing to see a little wooden many-oared vessel, a great eye painted on either bow (to let her see her way, of course), a touch of rouge on her cheeks; her sail set or her rowers rowing to the music of one that played on a flute. Her burden would be (for a guess) wine and olive oil and black-figured pottery, with a quantity of the glittering rubbish with which traders have always cheated natives—for the chief an embroidered belt or a woollen [(Note 48)]garment dyed as red as possible, for his wife a bronze mirror or a necklace of glorious beads. Having reached her destination and done good business, the ship would leave behind one or two of the crew with instructions to collect and store the products of the country against her return next spring. If all went well and the natives did not suddenly attack and exterminate the foreign devils in their midst, the storehouses would increase and the settlers with them, until at last the factory seemed important enough to undergo the solemn ceremony of “foundation” (Oikismos) and to be called a “colony” (Apoikia). Normally the “foundation” meant a great influx of new settlers, and from it the colony dated its official existence. But it might have had a struggling unofficial existence quite a long time before. More likely than not it had. These settlements at the sea-ends of trade-routes are immemorially old.
Let me quote an anecdote from Herodotus. He is engaged in relating the saga of the founding of Cyrene by certain men of the Aegean island Thera, and at a point in his narrative he says of these Theraeans:
In their wanderings they came to Crete and namely to the city of Itanos. There they meet a man that was a seller of purple, whose name was Korôbios; who said that he had been caught in a tempest and carried to Libya, even to the island of Platea, which is part of Libya. This man they persuaded to go with them to Thera, giving him money; and from Thera men sailed to view the land, being few in number as for the first time. But when Korôbios had guided them to this Isle Platea, they leave him there with provision for certain months, and themselves set sail with all speed to report concerning the island to the Theraeans. Now when they did not return in the time agreed upon, Korôbios was left with nothing. But then a ship of Samos that was voyaging to Egypt put in at this Platea; and when the master of the ship, whose name was Kolaios, and the other Samians had heard the whole tale from Korôbios, they left him a year’s food, and themselves put off from the isle, being eager to make Egypt. However, they were driven from their course by a wind out of the east. And passing out through the Pillars of Heracles they arrived at Tartessos, the wind never ceasing to blow. Thus were they marvellously led to this market, which at that time was untouched, so that these men won the greatest profit in merchandise of all Greeks of whom we surely know.
It would be easy to write a long commentary on that story. I might invite the reader to share my admiration of an art which makes you see so much in so little. You see the lonely man on his desert island of sand and scrub, with no companions but the wild goats (if goats there were) and the sea-birds fishing among the breakers. You picture his despair as he watches his store of victuals coming to an end, with no sign of his returning shipmates; his extravagant joy when he descries a Greek vessel; the astonishment of the strangers at the sight of this Crusoe; his bursting eagerness to tell them “the whole tale”; the departure of the Samians and the belated reappearance of the Theraeans; the face of Korôbios as he goes down to meet them, thinking of the things he will say. But the point I wish more particularly to make is the significance for history of the story. Desiring to learn what [(Note 50)]they can of the commercial possibilities of the Cyrenaica, the Theraeans come to Crete, and not only to Crete, but to that part of it where there still dwelt in the eastern corner of the long island a remnant of Eteocretans, that is “Cretans of Pure Blood,” descendants of the “Minoan” Cretans, who had been such famous traders and mariners. Itanos, where Korôbios lived, was an Eteocretan town. It has been excavated and has revealed material evidence of “Minoan” culture. That the ships of Minos visited Cyrenaica any one would conjecture who looked at a map. Ethnographers and archæologists adduce arguments of their own pointing to the same conclusion. Where the Greek town of Cyrene later grew up was the end of a caravan-route of unknown age from the Oasis of Siwah to the Mediterranean. Was not trade done there by the Minoans long before it was reconstituted as a “colony” of the Theraeans? Might not some knowledge of this African market and the sea-road thither linger on among the ruined and hunted Eteocretans?