HISTORY OF THE GREEKS
I. THE PRE-HISTORIC PERIOD

I. THE PRE-HISTORIC PERIOD.—This period includes the mythical accounts of the origin of the Greeks, the Trojan war, the more certain story of the excavations, and the establishment of the peculiar Greek institutions under the so-called rule of the half-mythical kings. Down to the time of the Trojan war very considerable progress had already been made, and civilization among the Greeks had received its first important impulse. The oracles at Delphi and Dodona had been established; the mysteries at Eleusis; the four sacred games; the court of Areopagus at Athens; and the celebrated Amphictyonic Council. The arts and sciences likewise received considerable attention. Letters had been introduced by Cadmus. The accounts of the siege of Thebes and that of Troy show that progress had been made in the various arts pertaining to war, but the history of the period as a whole exhibits that singular mixture of barbarism with cultivation, of savage customs with chivalrous adventures, which marks what is called an heroic age.

According to the Greek historians, the earliest inhabitants of Hellas were the so-called Pelasgians, but the information afforded by the ancients on the subject is scant and vague.[3] For our knowledge of the inhabitants and civilization of prehistoric Greece, we are therefore dependent on the more certain witness of the excavations, which, in recent years, have yielded very important results.

[3] Many of the early myths and legends, as narrated by Homer and preserved by Hesiod (in his Theogony), were gathered into somewhat systematic form to explain the genealogy of the Hellenic tribes, their subdivisions, and the origin of the Greek cities. The foundation of Athens, for example, was ascribed to Cecrops, regarded by some as a native of Egypt; he is said to have introduced into Attica the arts of civilized life, and from him the Acropolis was first called Cecropia. Argos was believed to have been founded by another Egyptian, named Danaus, who fled to Greece with his fifty daughters, and who was elected by the people as their king, and from whom some of the Greeks received the name of Danaï. Thebes, in Bœotia, looked to Cadmus, a Phœnician, as its founder; he was believed to have brought into Greece the art of writing, and from him the citadel of Thebes received the name of Cadmea. The Peloponnesus was said to have been settled by, and to have received its name from Pelops, a man from Phrygia in Asia; he became the king of Mycenæ, and was the father of Atreus, and the grandfather of Agamemnon and Menelaus; chieftains in the Trojan war. Such traditions as these show that the early Greeks had some notion of their dependence upon the Eastern nations.

Legends of Early National Exploits.—The legends are not only grouped about particular places and individual heroes, but have for their subjects national deeds, marked by courage and fortitude.

One of these stories describes the so-called “Argonautic expedition”—an adventurous voyage of fifty heroes, who set sail from Bœotia under the leadership of Jason, in the ship Argo, for the purpose of recovering a “golden fleece” which had been carried away to Colchis, a far distant land on the shores of the Euxine.

Another legend—the “Seven against Thebes”—narrates the tragic story of Œdipus, who unwittingly slew his own father and married his own mother and was banished from Thebes for his crimes, after having been made king; and whose sons quarreled for the vacant throne, one of them with the aid of other chieftains making war upon his native city.

But the most famous of the legendary stories of Greece was that which described the Trojan war—the military expedition of the Greeks to Troy, in order to rescue Helen, who was the beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and who had been stolen away by Paris, son of the Trojan king. The details of this story—the wrath of Achilles, the battles of the Greeks and the Trojans, the destruction of Troy, and the return of the Grecian heroes—are the subject of the great epic poems ascribed to Homer. All these legends, whether derived from a foreign source, or produced upon native soil, received the impress of the Greek mind. They form one of the legacies from the prehistoric age, and reveal some of the features of the early Greek character.

THE MINOAN AGE