The Historians' History of the World 03

Achæan ascendency is so marked that the Achæan name prevails even where that stock forms but an inconsiderable element of the population. Notably this is true of Laconia, where the rare occurrence of the beehive tomb goes to show that the pre-Dorian inhabitants were mostly descended from the older stock, which we have encountered at Tiryns and at Orchomenos.d

FOOTNOTES

[3] [Reprinted, by permission of the publishers, from the article “Mycenæan Civilisation,” by D. G. Hogarth, in the New Volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Copyright, 1902, by The Encyclopædia Britannica Company.]

[4] Helbig,f Die Italiker in der Pœbene, p. 11; cf. Pigorinig in Atti dell’ Accad. dei Lincei, viii. 265 ff.

[5] This is not gainsaying the Phrygian extraction of the Pelopid line. “The true Phrygians were closely akin to the Greeks, quite as closely akin as the later Macedonians. We may fairly class the Pelopidæ as Achæan.” (Percy Gardner,e New Chapters of Greek History, p. 84.)

Restoration of a Mycenæan Palace

CHAPTER III. THE HEROIC AGE

[ca. 1400-1200 B.C.]

In thinking of the mythical period with its citations of fables about gods and goddesses galore and heroes unnumbered, one is apt to become the victim of a mental mirage. One can hardly escape imagining the period in question thus veiled in mystery and peopled with half mythical and altogether mystical figures as really having been a time when men and women lived an idyllic life. As one contemplates the period he intuitively falls into a day-dream in which there dance before him light-robed artistic figures moving in arcadian bowers, tenanted by nymphs and satyrs and centaurs. But when one awakes to a practical view he recognises of course that all this is an illusion. Reason tells him that this was a mythical age, simply because the people were not sufficiently civilised to make permanent historical records. They were half barbarians, living as pastoral peoples everywhere live, striving for food against wild beasts, protecting their herds, cultivating the soil, fighting their enemies. And yet, in a sense, their life was idyllic. Heroic elements were not altogether lacking; the men were trained athletes, whose developed muscles were a joy to look upon, and no doubt the women, despite a certain coarseness, shared something of that figure. Then the people themselves believed in the gods and nymphs and satyrs and centaurs of which we dream, and so in a sense their world was peopled with them: in a sense they did dwell in Arcady. Still one cannot disguise the fact that it was an Arcady which no modern, placed under similar restrictions, would care to enter.

In that early day writing was an unknown art in Hellas, and so the people as they emerged from their time of semi-civilisation brought with them no specific tangible records of the life of that period, but only fables and traditions to take the place of sober historical records. To the people themselves these fables and traditions bore, for a long time at any rate, a stamp of veritable truth. Even the most extravagant of their narratives of gods and godlike heroes were believed as implicitly, no doubt, by the major part of the people even at a comparatively late historical period, as we to-day believe the stories of an Alexander, a Cæsar, or a Napoleon. As time went on these fables became even more intimately fixed in the minds of the people through becoming embalmed in the verses of the poet and the lines of the tragedian. Here and there, to be sure, there was a man who questioned the authenticity of these tales as recitals of fact, but we may well believe that the generality of people, even of the most cultured class, preferred throughout the entire period of antiquity to accept the myths at their face value. Not only so, but for many generations later, throughout the period sometimes spoken of as the “Age of Faith” of the western world, a somewhat similar estimate was put upon the Greek myths as recited by the classical authors. Even after the growth of scepticism and the development of the scientific spirit rendered the acceptance of the myths as recitals of fact impossible, for a long time it seemed little less than a sacrilege to think of severing them altogether from the realm of fact.

THE VALUE OF THE MYTHS