The history of the round shield, the use of buckles and brooches, the custom of cremating the dead, and the distribution of iron in Europe, Asia, and Africa, seem to Professor Ridgeway to point still more sharply to a theory that these features of Greek civilisation previously existed in central Europe and were brought thence into Greece. A study of the dialect in which the Homeric poems are written indicates that the language and metre belonged to the earlier race, the Pelasgians, whom the Achæans conquered. The earliest Greeks spoke an Aryan or Indo-Germanic language of which the Arcadian dialect was the purest remnant, since the Achæans and Dorians never conquered Arcadia. The introduction of labialism into the Greek, Ridgeway believes to be a proof of the Celtic origin of the invaders who accepted, as conquerors usually do, the language of the conquered and yet modified it. “Labialism” is the changing of a hard consonant as “k” into a lip-consonant as “p”—as the older Greek word for horse was “hikkos,” which became “hippos.” The result, then, of Ridgeway’s erudite research is his belief that “the Achæans were a Celtic tribe who made their way into Greece,” and for this theory he asserts that “archæology, tradition, and language are all in harmony.”
The original source of this migration,—for it was rather migration than an invasion,—seems to have been in the northwest of the Balkan peninsula. Some extraordinary pressure must have been brought to bear on the Greeks by the Illyrians who may themselves have been forced out of their own homes by some unrecorded power. At the same time the people then living in Macedonia and Thrace were dispossessed and shoved into Phrygia and the regions of Troy in Asia Minor. The possession of Greece by the Greeks was doubtless very gradual and the Peloponnesus was the last to be visited, possibly by boat across the Corinthian Gulf. In some places the new-comers were doubtless compelled to fight, elsewhere they drifted in almost unnoticed and gradually asserted a sway. The new-comers imposed their speech eventually on the older people, but as usual they must have been themselves largely influenced by the older civilisation in the matter of customs and conditions.[a]
EARLY CONDITIONS AND MOVEMENTS
In the Pelasgic period we find the ancient Greeks in a primitive, but not really barbaric condition. There are settled peoples engaged in agriculture, as well as half nomadic pastoral tribes. The latter form, for a long time, a very unstable element of the population, ever ready under pressure of circumstances to leave their old homes and fight for new ones, bearing disturbance and anarchy into the civilised districts.
The life of these peasants and shepherds was very simple and patriarchal. The ox and the horse were known to them, and drew their wagons and their ploughs; the principal source of their wealth consisted in great herds of swine, sheep, and cattle. Fishermen already navigated the numerous arms of the seas that indented the land. Public life had perfectly patriarchal forms. “Kings” were to be found everywhere as ruling heads of the numerous small tribes. Religion appeared essentially as a cult of the mighty forces of nature. The deities were worshipped without temples and images, and were appealed to with prayers, with both bloody and bloodless sacrifices,—at the head Zeus, the god of the sky; at his side Dione, the goddess of earth, who, however, was early replaced by the figure of Hera; Demeter, the earth mother, the patron of agriculture and of settled life; Hestia, the patron of the hearth fire and the altar fire; Hermes, the swift messenger of heaven, driver of the clouds and guardian of the herds; Poseidon, the god of the waters; and the chthonic [i.e. subterranean] divinity Aidoneus or Hades. The art of prophecy was developed early; the oracle of Dodona in Epirus was universally known.
We know not how long the ancient Greeks remained in the quiet Pelasgic conditions. But we can distinguish the causes that produced the internal movement and mighty ferment, from which the chivalrous nation of the Achæans finally came. Most important were the influences of the highly developed civilisation of the Orient upon the youthful, gifted Greek nation. The Phœnicians were the principal bearers of this influence. They had occupied many of the islands of the Ægean, and had planted colonies even on the mainland, as at Thebes and Acrocorinthus. The merchants exchanged the products of Phœnician and Babylonian industry for wool, hides, and slaves. They worked the copper mines of Cyprus and Argolis and the gold mines of Thasos and Thrace, but obtained even greater wealth from the purple shellfish of the Grecian waters.
For about a century the Phœnicians exerted a strong pressure on the coasts of Greece, and they left considerable traces in Grecian mythology and civilisation. The gifted Greeks, who in all periods of their history were quick to profit by foreign example, were deeply impressed by the superior civilisation of the Phœnicians. The activity and skill of the men of Sidon in navigation and fortification had a very permanent effect. For a long time the Greeks made the Phœnicians their masters in architecture, mining, and engineering; later they received from them the alphabet and the Babylonian system of weights and measures. The industry and the artistic skill of the Greeks also began to practice on the models brought into the land by the Sidonians.
Internal dissensions, raids of the rude pastoral tribes upon the settled peoples of the lowlands and the coast, and feuds between the nomads themselves, were, doubtless, also a powerful factor in the transition from the peaceful patriarchism of Pelasgic times to the more stirring and warlike period that followed. The necessity of protecting person and property from bold raiders by sea and land led to the erection of fortresses, massive walls of rough stones piled upon one another and held together only by the law of gravity. The best example of such “Cyclopean” remains is the well-preserved citadel of Tiryns in Argolis. Here on a hill only fifty feet high, the top of which is nine hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide, a wall without towers follows the edge of the rock. With an apparent thickness of twenty-five feet the real wall, as it appears to-day, cannot be estimated at more than fifteen feet. On each side of this run covered passages or galleries. By degrees the Greeks learned from Phœnician models to construct these fortresses better and finally to make real citadels of them. Little city communities were gradually formed at the foot of the hill, but until far into the Hellenic period the upper city, the “acropolis” remained the more important. Here were the sanctuaries and the council chamber, the residence of the king and often also the houses of the nobility.
The military nobility, the ancient Greek chivalry, also originated in pre-historic times. In the storms of the new time the patriarchal chieftains developed into powerful military princes who everywhere forced the “Pelasgian” peasant to keep his sling or his sword, his lance or his javelin, always at hand. A class of lords also arose, consisting of families that supported themselves rather by the trade of arms than by the pursuit of agriculture. This new nobility, which gradually grew to great numerical strength, held a very important position down to the days of democracy.
This transition period was subsequently called by the Hellenes the Heroic Age. The myths and legends which the memory of the Greek tribes and their poets preserved of this period have a varied character. On the one hand, heroic figures are repeatedly developed from the local names or the surnames of divinities, or the mythical history of a god is transferred to a human being. On the other hand, this imaginative people loved to concentrate its historical recollections and to load the deeds and experiences of whole tribes and epochs upon one or another heroic personality, whose cycle of legends in the course of further development underwent new colourings and extensions through the mixture of fresh elements. This is the way in which the legends of Hercules and Theseus, of the Argonauts and the “Seven against Thebes” grew up. The most glorious poetical illumination is cast upon the alleged greatest deed of pre-Hellenic times, the ten years’ war waged by nearly the whole body of Achæan heroes against the Teucrian Troy or Ilion.