No temples are mentioned by Homer, nor by any early writer; but the funereal rites celebrated in honour of Patroclus, as described in the XXIII. Book of the Iliad, and the mounds still existing on the Plains of Troy, testify to the character of the people whose manners and customs he was describing, and would alone be sufficient to convince us that, except in their tombs, we should find little to commemorate their previous existence.
The subject is interesting, and deserves far more attention than has hitherto been bestowed upon it, and more space than can be devoted to it here. Not only is this art the art of people who warred before Troy, but our knowledge of it reveals to us a secret which otherwise might for ever have remained a mystery. The religion of the Homeric poems is essentially Anthropic and Ancestral—in other words, of Turanian origin, with hardly a trace of Aryan feeling running through it. When we know that the same was the case with the arts of those days, we feel that it could not well be otherwise; but what most excites our wonder is the power of the poet, whose song, describing the manners and feelings of an extinct race, was so beautiful as to cause its adoption as a gospel by a people of another race, tincturing their religion to the latest hour of their existence.
We have very little means of knowing how long this style of art lasted in Greece. The treasury built by Myron king of Sicyon at Olympia about 650 B.C. seems to have been of this style, in so far as we can judge of it by the description of Pausanias.[[130]] It consisted of two chambers, one ornamented in the Doric, one in the Ionic style, not apparently with pillars, but with that kind of decoration which appears at that period to have been recognised as peculiar to each. But the entire decorations seem to have been of brass, the weight of metal employed being recorded in an inscription on the building. The earliest example of a Doric temple that we know of—that of Corinth—would appear to belong to very nearly the same age, so that the 7th century B.C. may probably be taken as the period when the old Turanian form of Pelasgic art gave way before the sterner and more perfect creations of a purer Hellenic design. Perhaps it might be more correct to say that the Hellenic history of Greece commenced with the Olympiads (B.C. 776), but before that kingdom bloomed into perfection an older civilisation had passed away, leaving little beyond a few tombs and works of public utility as records of its prior existence. It left, however, an undying influence which can be traced through every subsequent stage of Grecian history, which gave form to that wonderful artistic development of art, the principal if not the only cause of the unrivalled degree of perfection to which it subsequently attained.
133. Plan of the Acropolis at Athens.
A. Propylæa. B. Temple of Niké Apteros. C. Parthenon. D. Erechtheium. E. Foundations of old Temple of Athena, sixth century B.C.
CHAPTER II.
HELLENIC GREECE.
HISTORY OF THE ORDERS.
The culminating period of the Pelasgic civilisation of Greece was at the time of the war with Troy—the last great military event of that age, and the one which seems to have closed the long and intimate connection of the Greek Pelasgians with their cognate races in Asia.
Sixty years later the irruption of the Thessalians, and twenty years after that event the return of the Heracleidæ, closed, in a political sense, that chapter in history, and gave rise to what may be styled the Hellenic civilisation, which proved the great and true glory of Greece.