[48:2] Evelyn Abbott, History of Greece, i. 158 seqq. I cannot but suspect that the account of the diet of the Homeric chiefs—great meals of roast meat, and no fish—is a piece of deliberate archaism, which contradicts all we know of any historical Greeks from the earliest to the present days. The Greeks were probably never a meat-eating race, and even the early athletes trained on cheese (cf. my Rambles and Studies, p. 290). The poets knew all about fishing, for it appears in a simile, and yet in no case does fish, the great delicacy of Attic days, appear upon a Homeric table.
[50:1] Holm gives a very ingenious solution of the difficulty, which is, I think, quite original. He thinks that the Æolic and Ionic settlers who were driven out by the Dorian immigration carried with them recollections and traditions of the splendour of the pre-Doric Mycenæ, Orchomenos, &c. In Asia Minor they sang of these old glories, clothing the old kings and heroes of the land, and the cities they had left, in the dress and manners of the Ionia of their own day. Thus their picture is true traditionally, for we know that the palaces of Greece were in the places they describe; their pictures of manners were also true, in another sense, of the society in which they actually lived.
[51:1] When once composed, they could be easily enough remembered by trained guilds of reciters. It is therefore the composition, and the transmission as large unities, which imply, in my opinion, that use of writing which the poets avoid attributing to the society they depict as one of the past. If we could determine the date of the first fluent use of writing in Ionia, I think we could also determine the date of the creation of the Iliad as an artistic whole. At the same time I think it right to caution the reader, that he need not assume lapidary inscriptions to mark the first stage. This has been very justly pointed out by Mr. E. Abbott, and it is here most important; for we have no extant inscription on stone which can be surely attributed to a date earlier than 600 B.C., and I am convinced that had such use of writing been in common use earlier, we should long since have found evidence of it. Probably the first writing seen and learned by the Greeks was that of the Phœnician traders, who kept their accounts either on papyrus or perhaps on wood. Thus the Iliad may have been composed with the aid of writing, and yet there may have been no contemporary records on stone.
CHAPTER III.
Theoretical Chronology.
Transition to early history.
The Asiatic colonies.
§ 27. We may now pass from so-called legend to so-called early history. All students, from Thucydides downward, have held that shortly after the state of things described in Homer, important invasions and consequent dislocations of population began throughout Greece, so that what meets us in the dawn of sober history differs widely from what Homer describes. These various movements have their mythical name,—the return of the Heracleidæ; and their quasi-historical,—the invasion of Bœotia and Phocis by the Thessalians, and the invasion and conquest of Peloponnesus by the Dorian mountaineers. The pressure so produced drove waves of settlers to Asia Minor, where the coasts and islands were covered with Greek cities,—Æolian, Ionian, and Dorian. But these cities always claimed to be colonies from Greece, and told of mythical founders who led them to the East.