The Historians' History of the World 03

The singers of the epic poems as well as their hearers were as yet wholly unconscious of the gap separating mythology from history. To them the Trojan War, the march of the Seven against Thebes, the wanderings of Ulysses and Menelaus, were historical realities and they believed just as firmly that Achilles, Diomedes, Agamemnon, and all the other heroes once really lived, as the Swiss until recently believed in the reality of their Tell and Winkelried. Indeed until the fourth century hardly any one in Greece dared to question the truth of these things. Even so critical a person as Thucydides is still wholly under the influence of epic tradition, so much so that he gives a statistical report of the strength of Agamemnon’s army and tries to answer the question as to how such masses of people could have been supported during the ten years’ siege of Troy.

But the world which the epic described belonged to an immeasurably distant past. The people of that time were much stronger than those “who live to-day”; the gods still used to descend upon the earth and did not consider it beneath them to generate sons with mortal women. In comparison with that great by-gone age, the present and that which oral tradition told of the immediate past seemed wholly without interest; and if the epic did occasionally seize upon historical recollections, the events were put back into the heroic age and became inseparably mingled with mythical occurrences. As to how the present had grown out of this heroic past, the poets and their contemporaries had not yet begun to ask.

The time came, however, when this question was put. People wanted to know why the Greece of historical times looked so different from Homer’s Greece; why for example Homer knows of no Thessaly; why he has Achæans instead of Dorians living in Argolis; why, according to him, descendants of Pelops instead of those of Hercules sit upon the thrones of Argos and Sparta. It is the first awakening of the historical sense which finds expression in such questions. The answer, however, was already given with the question. It was clear that the Grecian tribes must have changed their abodes to a great extent after the Trojan War; Hellas must have been shaken by a real migration of peoples. But this single fact was not sufficient. People wanted to know the impelling cause of the migrations, and the particular circumstances under which they took place. The answer was not difficult for a people endowed with such a facility for speculation.

The very lack of colour in such accounts would be a sufficient proof for the fact that we are not dealing here with pure speculation, not with real tradition. Thus hardly anything more is told of the immigration of the Thessalians into the river basin of the Peneus beyond the bald fact, and that was sufficient to explain why Homer’s “Pelasgian Argos” was called Thessaly in historic times. Of course the incomers must have had a leader, consequently Thessalus, the eponymic hero of the people, was placed at their head, a point in the story which of itself is sufficient to stamp the whole narrative as a late invention. The Thessalians also must have come from somewhere; but since Homer already places the races south of Thermopylæ in the homes they actually occupied in history, and since they could not make a Grecian tribe immigrate from Thrace or Illyria, there was nothing else to do but to place the original home of the conquerors in Epirus. This was all the more plausible as the name Thessaly is really closely connected with Thessaliotis, the region about Pharsalia and Cierium on the borders of Epirus, and first spread from here to other parts of the country.