Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep’d in brine;
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young light-hearted Masters of the waves....
These young, light-hearted masters were called Greeks, or Hellenes; they migrated southwards in a series of waves, the first of which contained two tribes known as the Achaians and Danaans. These were followed and overtaken at a later date by the Dorians, and subsequently again by the Attic Greeks. We still make use of some of the experiences undergone by these tribes, and of the characteristics which they developed, in order to express more exactly our own inner experiences. Through the channel of words and myths which have come down to us from that time, the great poet who sang to the Achaians and Danaans of the exploits of their ancestors has given us many metaphors and images—special little reservoirs of feeling which we could not have created for ourselves. Most people, for instance, like to be called Trojans; stentorian and pander are from the names of characters in his poems, and nectar and ambrosial from the food and drink consumed by his gods. Speech was a more miraculous and rhythmical thing to the Achaians than it is to us to-day, and whether or no the Gaelic bard is cognate with the Greek ‘phrazein’, to ‘speak’, there is no doubt that ‘epos’, the ‘word’, had its other meaning of ‘poem’. Long afterwards the adjective ‘epikos’ came to be applied especially to lofty compositions such as those of the great poet himself. Accordingly, in the European war the special correspondent could often find no more vivid expression for his sense of the vastness and grandeur of the catastrophe he was recording than to call up by the word epic vague memories of Homer’s gods and heroes.
A single timid reference to ‘awful signs’,[6] together with the absence of any ordinary word for ‘writing’, suggests that Homer’s Achaians did not know how to write, and that his two long poems of twenty-four books each had to be memorized from beginning to end by that class of professional reciters from which our word rhapsody is derived. The actual text of the Iliad and Odyssey gives us a vivid and majestic picture of early, but not the earliest, Aryan culture. Of their author, in so far as there was one particular author, we know very little except that he was probably blind. It was the common thing for the bards who were to be found among all the Aryan races, and survived as ‘Minstrels’ into the Middle Ages, to be blind; and Homer’s own blindness, apart from a reference to it, has been deduced by some from a preponderance in his poems of “audile” epithets, such as the clanging arrow and the loud-sounding sea. It may be mentioned that the Slavs once called their bards ‘sliepac’, a word which also meant ‘blind’.
The Dorians who followed soon divided into two main groups with their centres in Laconia and Attica respectively. The notorious taciturnity of the inhabitants of Laconia has given us laconic, and we are referring to their rigid ideas on infant welfare when we speak of a ‘spartan mother’, for Sparta was the capital of Laconia.
But it was in Attica, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. that the Hellenic culture reached its finest flower. We use the word Attic[7] to describe a peculiarly finished work of art or an exquisite literary style. No wonder. In the city state of Athens, for the first time among the Aryans, there began to grow up something which an educated man of to-day would be willing to recognize as a civilization. In that clear air of a marvellous political freedom—a social atmosphere which could have condensed from none but Aryan moral ideas—the matured, age-old wisdom of Egypt and the East was absorbed by these youngsters and transformed in a few hundred years into a science, an art, and a philosophy of their own which have never been wholly surpassed. Consequently, the names of many things which we regard as the very hall-marks of a cultured society can be traced back to the Attic dialect of this period, and no farther. Academy, school, history, philosophy, logic, grammar, poetry, rhythm, harmony, melody, music, are all from Greek words which were in common use in Athens, and the lasting influence of her sublime dramatic tradition is indicated by the great words, chorus, comedy, drama, theatre, and tragedy, and the lesser catastrophe, episode, prologue, and protagonist, all of which draw their meanings from the originality and inspiration of the great Athenian dramatists.
Meanwhile another branch of the Aryan family had found its way into Italy, and there, in the eighth century before our era, had founded the city of Rome. It is noticeable that the pitch darkness in which the early doings of all the Aryans are lost often seems to flash into a spark of myth or legend at those moments when they come into contact with other races. It is just such a spark which, in the famous story of the rape of the Sabine women, lights up for us one of the early shocks of encounter between these Italiot Aryans and the older inhabitants of Italy.
Most people know a little about the subsequent history of these Italiots. The republic which they founded at Rome transformed itself into an empire that extended its bounds until they were coterminous with the civilized world—an empire of Europe and part of Asia which retained its real authority over men’s persons until the fifth century A.D., and its authority, as an idea, over their minds and actions down to that day at the beginning of the last century when Bonaparte first styled himself “Emperor of the French”. There is, in fact, scarcely a word in our language expressing even remotely the notion of “authority”, which does not come to us from the Latin: authority, chief, command, control, dictator, dominion, empire, government, master, officer, rule, subordinate, are some of them; and it is significant that the two Greek words which we use to express the same idea are despot and tyrant. Both these terms have a definite stigma attaching to them, and are employed very much more often by the foes of authority than by her friends. The Greeks were not the nation to establish a world-empire. They would have combined to bury Caesar, not to praise him; and from another point of view the odious sybarite is good proof that they were not the stuff of which colonists are made. The English lord and king, on the other hand, retain about them a hint of the possibility of affection. It is a mark of affection when sailors drop the Latin captain and adopt the Dutch skipper, just as it is when landsmen substitute for Latin manager the Old High German boss. And lastly, when we wish to suggest a peculiar blend of dignity and chill self-consciousness, we use the name of the most remarkable of all the Roman emperors.