The Historians' History of the World 03

“It is in the lands of Thessaly and Epirus that we first dimly descry the Greeks busy at the task for which destiny had chosen them, of creating and shaping the thought and civilisation of Europe. The oak wood of Dodona in Epirus is the earliest sanctuary, whereof we have any knowledge, of their supreme god, Zeus, the dweller of the sky. Thessaly has associations which still appeal intimately to men of European birth. The first Greek settlers in Thessaly were the Achæans; and in the plain of Argos, and in the mountains which gird it about, they fashioned legends which were to sink deeply into the imagination of Europe. We know that when the Greek conquerors came down to the coast of the Ægean they found a material civilisation more advanced than their own; and it was so chanced that we know more of this civilisation than we know of the conquerors before they came under its influence.

“In Greece as in the other two great peninsulas of the Mediterranean, we find, before the invader of Aryan speech entered in and took possession, a white folk not speaking an Aryan tongue. Corresponding to the Iberians in Spain and Gaul, to the Ligurians in Italy, we find in Greece a race which was also spread over the islands of the Ægean and along the coast of Asia Minor. The men of this primeval race gave to many a hill and rock the name which was to abide with it forever. Corinth and Tiryns, Parnassus and Olympus, Arne and Larissa, are names which the Greeks received from the peoples whom they dispossessed. But this Ægean race, as we may call it for want of a common name, had developed, before the coming of the Greek, a civilisation of which we have only very lately come to know. This civilisation went hand in hand with an active trade, which in the third millennium spread its influence far beyond the borders of the Ægean, as far at least as the Danube and the Nile, and received in return gifts from all quarters of the world. The Ægean peoples therefore plied a busy trade by sea, and their maritime intercourse with the African continent can be traced back to even earlier times, since at the very beginning of Egyptian history we find in Egypt obsidian, which can have come only from the Ægean isles. The most notable remains of this civilisation have been found at Troy, in the little island of Amorgos, and in the great island of Crete.

“The conquest of the Greek peninsula by the Greeks lies a long way behind recorded history, and the Greeks themselves, when they began to reflect on their own past, had completely forgotten what their remote ancestors had done ages and ages before.

“The invaders spoke an Aryan speech, but it does not follow that they all came of Aryan stock. There was, indeed, an Aryan element among them, and some of them were descendants of men of Aryan race who had originally taught them their language and brought them some Aryan institutions and Aryan deities. But the infusion of the Aryan blood was probably small; and in describing the Greeks, as well as any other of the races who speak sister tongues, we must be careful to call them men of Aryan speech, and not men of Aryan stock.c”

Perhaps the very latest view of sterling authority is that of Professor William Ridgeway,d who, after marshalling a vast amount of argument and induction based upon the extant and newly discovered relics of early Grecian civilisations, sums up his theories briefly and definitely. He accepts the existence of a “Pelasgian” race, which many have scouted, and credits it with the art-work and commerce revealed at Mycenæ and elsewhere and called “Mycenæan.” This was a dark-skinned (or melanochroöus) race which “had dwelt in Greece from a remote antiquity and had at all times, in spite of conquests, remained a chief element in the population of all Greece, whilst in Arcadia and Attica it had never been subjugated.” The Mycenæan civilisation had its origin, he believes, in the mainland of Greece and spread thence outwards to the isles of the Ægean, Crete, Egypt, and north to the Euxine. This Mycenæan era differs widely from the Homeric,—as in the treatment of the dead, and in the use of metals,—and preceded the Homeric by a great distance, the Mycenæan period belonging to the Bronze Age, the Homeric to the Iron Age.