The Historians' History of the World 03

Now that we find in Greece, five or six centuries earlier than the poems, a people in all probability hailing from the same region whence came the ancestors of the Homeric Greeks, with the same ignorance of, or contempt for, a fish diet, and building their huts on piles like the primitive Italians whose earthworks further appear to have set the copy for the Tirynthian galleries—can we doubt that this people sprung from the same root with the historic Greeks and their kinsmen of Italy? The conclusion appears so natural and so logical, that it must require very serious and solid objections to shake it. But, instead of that, our study of Mycenæan manners and institutions—both civil and religious—affords strong confirmation. In the matter of dress we find the historical Greeks the heirs of the Mycenæans, and the armour of the Homeric heroes—when we get behind the epic glamour of it—differs little from what we know in the Mycenæan monuments.

While our knowledge of Mycenæan religion is vague at the best, and we must recognise in the dove-idols and dove-temples the insignia of an imported Aphrodite-cult, we have beyond a reasonable doubt also to recognise a genuine Hellenic divinity with her historical attributes clearly foreshadowed in Artemis. Again, while the Homeric Greeks themselves are not presented to us as worshippers of the dead after the custom avouched by the altar-pits of Mycenæ and Tiryns, we do find in the poems an echo at least of this cult, and among the later Hellenes it resumes the power of a living belief. So, though Homer seems to know cremation only, and this has been taken for full proof that the Mycenæans were not Greeks, the traces of embalming in the poems clearly point to an earlier custom of simple burial as we find it uniformly attested by the Mycenæan tombs. And, here, again, historical Greece reverts to the earlier way. In Greece proper, at least in Attica, the dead were not burned,—not even in the age of the Dipylon vases,—and yet the Athenians of that day were Greeks. So, among the earlier Italians, burial was the only mode of dealing with the dead, and the usage was so rooted in their habits that even after cremation was introduced some member of the body (e.g., a finger) was always cut off and buried intact. We need not repeat what we have elsewhere said of the funeral banquet, the immolation of victims, the burning of raiment—all bearing on the same conclusion and cumulating the evidence that the Greeks of Homer, and so of the historic age, are the lineal heirs of Mycenæan culture.

If the proof of descent on these lines is strong, it is strengthened yet more by all we can make out regarding the political and social organisation. That monarchy was the Mycenæan form of government is sufficiently attested by the strong castles, each taken up in large part by a single princely mansion. But “the rule of one man” is too universal in early times to be a criterion of race. Far more significant is the evidence we have for a clan-system such as we afterwards find in full bloom among the Hellenes.

The clan, as we know it in historic times, and especially in Attica, was a factor of prime importance in civil, social, and religious life. It was composed of families which claim to be, and for the most part actually were, descended from a common ancestor. These originally lived together in clan-villages—of which we have clear reminiscences in the clan-names of certain Attic demes, as Boutadai, Perithoidai, Skanbonidai. Not only did the clan form a village by itself, but it held and cultivated its land in common. It built the clan-village on the clan-estate; and as the clansmen dwelt together in life, so in death they were not divided. Each clan had its burial-place in its own little territory, and there at the tomb it kept up the worship of its dead, and especially of its hero-founder.

That the Mycenæans lived under a like clan-system, the excavation of the tombs of the lower town has shown conclusively. The town was composed of villages more or less removed from one another, each the seat of a clan. We have no means of determining whether the land was held and tilled in common, but we do know that by each village lay the common clan-cemetery—a group of eight, ten, or more tombs, obviously answering to the number of families or branches of the clan. In the construction of the tombs, and in the offerings contained, we note at once differences between different cemeteries and uniformity in the tombs of the same group. The richest cemeteries lie nearer the acropolis, as the stronger clans would naturally dwell nearer the king. Thus, for its population, Mycenæ covered a large area, but its limits were not sharply defined, and the transition from the citadel centre to the open country was not abrupt. The villages were linked together by graveyards, gardens and fields, highways and squares; thus the open settlement was indeed a πόλις εὐρυάγυια—a town of broad ways.