PAGE
PREFACE[9]
THE AWAKENING[13]
KEEPING THE PASS[32]
THE ADVENTURERS[45]
ELEUTHERIA[82]
SOPHROSYNE[105]
GODS AND TITANS[122]
CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC[147]
NOTES[205]
INDEX[213]

GREEKS AND BARBARIANS

I
THE AWAKENING

It began in Ionia. It may in truth have been a reawakening. But if this be so (and it is entirely probable), it was after so long and deep a slumber that scarcely even dreams were remembered. The Ionians used to say that they remembered coming from Greece, long ago, about a thousand years before Christ—as we reckon it—driven from their ancient home on the Peloponnesian coast of the Corinthian Gulf by “Dorians” out of the North. They fled to Athens, which carried them in her ships across the Aegean to that middle portion of the eastern shore which came to be known as Ionia. For this reason they were in historical times accounted (by the Athenians at least) “colonists of the Athenians.” Nobody in antiquity appears seriously to have disputed this account of the Ionians. There may be considerable truth in it; and if not, the Ionians were pretty good at disputing. The Athenians belonged to that race. But if you questioned the Ionians further and asked them about their origins in prehistoric Greece, you had to be content with the Topsy-like answer that the first [(Note 14)]Ionians grew out of the ground. They were Autochthones, Earth-Children. The critical Thucydides puts it this way: he says the same stock has always inhabited Attica. People in his time could remember when old Athenian gentlemen used to wear their hair done up in a top-knot fastened by a golden pin in the form of a cicala—because the cicala also is an Earth-Child.

Of course in historical times the Ionians were Greeks. But they may not always have been Greeks. Herodotus apparently thinks they were not. He says they learned to speak Greek from their Dorian conquerors. The natural inference from this would be that they were of a different racial stock. Herodotus, however, is nearly as fond of a hypothesis as Mr. Shandy, and it is quite possible that he is here labouring an argument (which in turn may have been mere Dorian propaganda), that the only pure-blooded Hellenes were the Dorian tribes, who admittedly came on the scene much later than the Ionians. In fact the Ionians may have been simply an earlier wave of a great invasion of Greek-speakers which came to an end with the Dorians. We do not know, and Herodotus did not know. The Ionians themselves did not know. There are two possibilities. Either they were an indigenous people who became Hellenized (as Herodotus supposes), or they were a folk of Hellenic affinities who were long settled in Greece in the midst of a still earlier population. What of that? Only this, that we have suddenly discovered a great deal about this prehistoric Aegean population, above all that it had developed a civilization which seems almost too brilliant to be true. Now if [(Note 15)]the fugitives who escaped to Ionia were a fragment of this race, or even were aliens who had only imbibed a portion of its culture, the awakening which came so long after may have been in fact a reawakening.

Archæologists, digging in the sites of old Ionian cities, have discovered evidence that the early settlers possessed something of the Aegean culture. The crown and centre of that culture was the island of Crete, and there existed some dim traditions of Cretans landing in Ionia; only then it was probably not called Ionia. This, and some other considerations, have prompted the suggestion that the Ionians really came from Crete. But it seems more in accordance with the evidence to suppose that the main body of them came from Greece proper, where they had learned the “Mycenaean” culture, which was the gift of Crete. The calamitous Dorians wrecked that wonderful heritage, but for some time at least the settlers in their new “Ionian” home would remember how to fashion a pot fairly and chant their traditional lays. Then, it would seem, they all but forgot; little wonder, when you consider how dire was their plight. Yet even in that uneasy sleep into which they fell of a recrudescent barbarism the Ionians remembered something as in a dream; and it became the most beautiful dream in the world, for it is Homer.

Now let us appeal to history. The history of Ionia is a drama in little of what afterwards happened on a wider stage in Greece.