The Life of Greece Read online

  Glossary of Foreign Words

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Pronouncing and Biographical Index

  List of Illustrations

  (Illustration Section follows page 334)

  FIG. 1. Hygiaea, Goddess of Health

  FIG. 2. The Cup-Bearer

  FIG. 3. The “Snake Goddess”

  FIG. 4. Wall Fresco and “Throne of Minos”

  FIG. 5. A Cup from Vaphio

  FIG. 6. Mask of “Agamemnon”

  FIG. 7. Warrior, from temple of Aphaea at Aegina

  FIG. 8. Theater of Epidaurus

  FIG. 9. Temple of Poseidon

  FIG. 10. A Krater Vase, with Athena and Heracles

  FIG. 11. The Portland Vase

  FIG. 12. The François Vase

  FIG. 13. A Kore, or Maiden

  FIG. 14. The “Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo”

  FIG. 15. Pericles

  FIG. 16. Epicurus

  FIG. 17. Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes

  FIG. 18. “Birth of Aphrodite”

  FIG. 19. “Ludovisi Throne,” right base

  FIG. 20. “Ludovisi Throne,” left base

  FIG. 21. The Diadumenos

  FIG. 22. Apollo Sauroctonos

  FIG. 23. The Discus Thrower

  FIG. 24. The “Dreaming Athena”

  FIG. 25. The Rape of the Lapith Bride

  FIG. 26. Stela of Damasistrate

  FIG. 27. Heracles and Atlas

  FIG. 28. Nike Fixing Her Sandal

  FIG. 29. Propylaea and temple of Nike Apteros

  FIG. 30. The Charioteer of Delphi

  FIG. 31. A Caryatid from the Erechtheum

  FIG. 32. The Parthenon

  FIG. 33. Goddesses and “Iris”

  FIG. 34. “Cecrops and Daughter”

  FIG. 35. Horsemen, from the West Frieze of the Parthenon

  FIG. 36. Sophocles

  FIG. 37. Demosthenes

  FIG. 38. A Tanagra Statuette

  FIG. 39. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

  FIG. 40. Relief from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

  FIG. 41. The “Aphrodite of Cnidus”

  FIG. 42. The Nike of Paeonius

  FIG. 43. The Hermes of Praxiteles

  FIG. 44. Head of Praxiteles’ Hermes

  FIG. 45. The Doryphoros of Polycleitus

  FIG. 46. Head of Meleager

  FIG. 47. Head of a Girl

  FIG. 48. The Apoxyomenos

  FIG. 49. The Raging (or Dancing) Maenad

  FIG. 50. A Daughter of Niobe

  FIG. 51. The Aphrodite of Cyrene

  FIG. 52. The Demeter of Cnidus

  FIG. 53. Altar of Zeus at Pergamum

  FIG. 54. Frieze from the Altar of Zeus at Pergamum

  FIG. 55. The Battle of Issus

  FIG. 56. The Laocoön

  FIG. 57. The Farnese Bull

  FIG. 58. The “Alexander” Sarcophagus

  FIG. 59. The Aphrodite of Melos

  FIG. 60. The Venus de’ Medici

  FIG. 61. The “Victory of Samothrace”

  FIG. 62. Hellenistic Portrait Head

  FIG. 63. The “Old Market Woman”

  FIG. 64. The Prize Fighter

  Maps of the Hellenistic World, Ancient Greece and the Aegean, and Ancient Italy and Sicily will be found on the inside covers.

  BOOK I

  AEGEAN PRELUDE

  3500–1000 B.C.

  CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK I

  NOTES: All dates are approximate. Individuals are placed at their time of flourishing, which is assumed to be about forty years after their birth; their dates of birth and death, where possible, are given in the index. Dates of rulers are for their reigns. A question mark before an entry indicates a date given only by Greek tradition.

  B.C. 9000:

  Neolithic Age in Crete

  3400-3000:

  Early Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, I

  3400-2100:

  Neolithic Age in Thessaly

  3400-1200:

  Bronze Age in Crete

  3000-2600:

  Early Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, II

  3000:

  Copper mined in Cyprus

  2870:

  First known settlement at Troy

  2600-2350:

  Early Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, III

  2350-2100:

  Middle Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, I

  2200-1200:

  Bronze Age in Cyprus

  2100-1950:

  Middle Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, II; first series of Cretan palaces

  2100-1600:

  Chalcolithic Age in Thessaly

  1950-1600:

  Middle Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, III

  1900:

  Destruction of first series of Cretan palaces

  1600-1500:

  Late Minoan, Helladic (Mycenaean), Cycladic, I; second series of Cretan palaces

  1600-1200:

  Bronze Age in Thessaly

  1582:

  ? Foundation of Athens by Cecrops

  1500-1400:

  Late Minoan, Helladic (Mycenaean), Cycladic, II

  1450-1400:

  Destruction of second series of Cretan palaces

  1433:

  ? Deucalion and the Flood

  1400-1200:

  Late Minoan, Helladic (Mycenaean), Cycladic, III; palaces of Tiryns and Mycenae

  1313:

  ? Foundation of Thebes by Cadmus

  1300-1100:

  Age of Achaean domination in Greece

  1283:

  ? Coming of Pelops into Elis

  1261-1209:

  ? Heracles

  1250:

  Theseus at Athens; Oedipus at Thebes; Minos and Daedalus at Cnossus

  1250-1183:

  “Sixth city” of Troy; age of the Homeric heroes

  1225:

  ? Voyage of the Argonauts

  1213:

  ? War of the Seven against Thebes

  1200:

  ? Accession of Agamemnon

  1192-1183:

  ? Siege of Troy

  1176:

  ? Accession of Orestes

  1104:

  ? Dorian invasion of Greece

  CHAPTER I

  Crete

  I. THE MEDITERRANEAN

  AS we enter the fairest of all waters, leaving behind us the Atlantic and Gibraltar, we pass at once into the arena of Greek history. “Like frogs around a pond,” said Plato, “we have settled down upon the shores of this sea.”1 Even on these distant coasts the Greeks founded precarious, barbarian-bound colonies many centuries before Christ: at Hemeroscopium and Ampurias in Spain, at Marseilles and Nice in France, and almost everywhere in southern Italy and Sicily. Greek colonists established prosperous towns at Cyrene in northern Africa, and at Naucratis in the delta of the Nile; their restless enterprise stirred the islands of the Aegean and the coasts of Asia Minor then as in our century; all along the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea they built towns and cities for their farventuring trade. Mainland Greece was but a small part of the ancient Greek world.

  Why was it that the second group of historic civilizations took form on the Mediterranean, as the first had grown up along the rivers of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, as the third would flourish on the Atlantic, and as the fourth may appear on the shores of the Pacific? Was it the better climate of the lands washed by the Mediterranean? There, then as now,2 winter rains nourished the earth, and moderate frosts stimulated men; there, almost all the year round, one might live an open-air life under a warm but not enervating sun. And yet the surface of the Mediterranean coasts and islands is nowhere so rich as the alluvial valleys of the Ganges, the Indus, the Tigris, the Euphrates, or the Nile; the summer’s drought may begin too soon or last too long; and everywhere a rocky basis lurks under the thin crust of the dusty earth. The temperate north and the tropic south are both more fertile than these historic lands where patient peasants, weary of coax
ing the soil, more and more abandoned tillage to grow olives and the vine. And at any moment, along one or another of a hundred faults, earthquakes might split the ground beneath men’s feet, and frighten them into a fitful piety. Climate did not draw civilization to Greece; probably it has never made a civilization anywhere.

  What drew men into the Aegean was its islands. The islands were beautiful; even a worried mariner must have been moved by the changing colors of those shadowed hills that rose like temples out of the reflecting sea. Today there are few sights lovelier on the globe; and sailing the Aegean, one begins to understand why the men who peopled those coasts and isles came to love them almost more than life, and, like Socrates, thought exile bitterer than death. But further, the mariner was pleased to find that these island jewels were strewn in all directions, and at such short intervals that his ship, whether going between east and west or between north and south, would never be more than forty miles from land. And since the islands, like the mainland ranges, were the mountaintops of a once continuous territory that had been gradually submerged by a pertinacious sea,3 some welcome peak always greeted the outlook’s eye, and served as a beacon to ships that had as yet no compass to guide them. Again, the movements of wind and water conspired to help the sailor reach his goal. A strong central current flowed from the Black Sea into the Aegean, and countercurrents flowed northward along the coasts; while the northeasterly etesian winds blew regularly in the summer to help back to their southern ports the ships that had gone to fetch grain, fish, and furs from the Euxine Sea.* Fog was rare in the Mediterranean, and the unfailing sunshine so varied the coastal winds that at almost any harbor, from spring to autumn, one might be carried out by a morning, and brought back by an evening, breeze.

  In these propitious waters the acquisitive Phoenicians and the amphibious Greeks developed the art and science of navigation. Here they built ships for the most part larger or faster, and yet more easily handled, than any that had yet sailed the Mediterranean. Slowly, despite pirates and harassing uncertainties, the water routes from Europe and Africa into Asia—through Cyprus, Sidon, and Tyre, or through the Aegean and the Black Sea—became cheaper than the long land routes, arduous and perilous, that had carried so much of the commerce of Egypt and the Near East. Trade took new lines, multiplied new populations, and created new wealth. Egypt, then Mesopotamia, then Persia withered; Phoenicia deposited an empire of cities along the African coast, in Sicily, and in Spain; and Greece blossomed like a watered rose.

  II. THE REDISCOVERY OF CRETE

  “There is a land called Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair, rich land, begirt with water; and therein are many men past counting, and ninety cities.”4 When Homer sang these lines, perhaps in the ninth century before our era,* Greece had almost forgotten, though the poet had not, that the island whose wealth seemed to him even then so great had once been wealthier still; that it had held sway with a powerful fleet over most of the Aegean and part of mainland Greece; and that it had developed, a thousand years before the siege of Troy, one of the most artistic civilizations in history. Probably it was this Aegean culture—as ancient to him as he is to us—that Homer recalled when he spoke of a Golden Age in which men had been more civilized, and life more refined, than in his own disordered time.

  The rediscovery of that lost civilization is one of the major achievements of modern archeology. Here was an island twenty times larger than the largest of the Cyclades, pleasant in climate, varied in the products of its fields and once richly wooded hills, and strategically placed, for trade or war, midway between Phoenicia and Italy, between Egypt and Greece. Aristotle had pointed out how excellent this situation was, and how “it had enabled Minos to acquire the empire of the Aegean.”5 But the story of Minos, accepted as fact by all classical writers, was rejected as legend by modern scholars; and until sixty years ago it was the custom to suppose, with Grote, that the history of civilization in the Aegean had begun with the Dorian invasion, or the Olympic games. Then in A.D. 1878 a Cretan merchant, appropriately named Minos Kalokairinos, unearthed some strange antiquities on a hillside south of Candia.† The great Schliemann, who had but lately resurrected Mycenae and Troy, visited the site in 1886, announced his conviction that it covered the remains of the ancient Cnossus, and opened negotiations with the owner of the land so that excavations might begin at once. But the owner haggled and tried to cheat; and Schliemann, who had been a merchant before becoming an archeologist, withdrew in anger, losing a golden chance to add another civilization to history. A few years later he died.6

  In 1893 a British archeologist, Dr. Arthur Evans, bought in Athens a number of milkstones from Greek women who had worn them as amulets. He was curious about the hieroglyphics engraved upon them, which no scholar could read. Tracing the stones to Crete, he secured passage thither, and wandered about the island picking up examples of what he believed to be ancient Cretan writing. In 1895 he purchased a part, and in 1900 the remainder, of the site that Schliemann and the French School at Athens had identified with Cnossus; and in nine weeks of that spring, digging feverishly with one hundred and fifty men, he exhumed the richest treasure of modern historical research—the palace of Minos. Nothing yet known from antiquity could equal the vastness of this complicated structure, to all appearances identical with the almost endless Labyrinth so famous in old Greek tales of Minos, Daedalus, Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. In these and other ruins, as if to confirm Evans’ intuition, thousands of seals and clay tablets were found, bearing characters like those that had set him upon the trail. The fires that had destroyed the palaces of Cnossus had preserved these tablets, whose undeciphered pictographs and scripts still conceal the early story of the Aegean.*

  Students from many countries now hurried to Crete. While Evans was working at Cnossus, a group of resolute Italians—Halbherr, Pernier, Savignoni, Paribeni—unearthed at Hagia Triada (Holy Trinity) a sarcophagus painted with illuminating scenes from Cretan life, and uncovered at Phaestus a palace only less extensive than that of the Cnossus kings. Meanwhile two Americans, Seager and Mrs. Hawes, made discoveries at Vasiliki, Mochlos, and Gournia; the British—Hogarth, Bosanquet, Dawkins, Myres—explored Palaikastro, Psychro, and Zakro; the Cretans themselves became interested, and Xanthoudidis and Hatzidakis dug up ancient residences, grottoes, and tombs at Arkalochori, Tylissus, Koumasa, and Chamaizi. Half the nations of Europe united under the flag of science in the very generation in which their statesmen were preparing for war.

  How was all this material to be classified—these palaces, paintings, statues, seals, vases, metals, tablets, and reliefs?—to what period of the past were they to be assigned? Precariously, but with increasing corroboration as research went on and knowledge grew, Evans dated the relics according to the depth of their strata, the gradation of styles in the pottery, and the agreement of Cretan finds, in form or motive, with like objects exhumed in lands or deposits whose chronology was approximately known. Digging down patiently beneath Cnossus, he found himself stopped, some forty-three feet below the surface, by the virgin rock. The lower half of the excavated area was occupied by remains characteristic of the Neolithic Age—primitive forms of handmade pottery with simple linear ornament, spindle whorls for spinning and weaving, fat-buttocked goddesses of painted steatite or clay, tools and weapons of polished stone, but nothing in copper or bronze.* Classifying the pottery, and correlating the remains with those of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, Evans divided the post-neolithic and prehistoric culture of Crete into three ages—Early, Middle, and Late Minoan—and each of these into three periods.†

  The first or lowest appearance of copper in the strata represents for us, through a kind of archeological shorthand, the slow rise of a new civilization out of the neolithic stage. By the end of the Early Minoan Age the Cretans learn to mix copper with tin, and the Bronze Age begins. In Middle Minoan I the earliest palaces occur: the princes of Cnossus, Phaestus, and Mallia build for themselves luxurious dwellings with countless rooms, sp
acious storehouses, specialized workshops, altars and temples, and great drainage conduits that startle the arrogant Occidental eye. Pottery takes on a manycolored brilliance, walls are enlivened with charming frescoes, and a form of linear script evolves out of the hieroglyphics of the preceding age. Then, at the close of Middle Minoan II, some strange catastrophe writes its cynical record into the strata; the palace of Cnossus is laid low as if by a convulsion of the earth, or perhaps by an attack from Phaestus, whose palace for a time is spared. But a little later a like destruction falls upon Phaestus, Mochlos, Gournia, Palaikastro, and many other cities in the island; the pottery is covered with ashes, the great jars in the storerooms are filled with debris. Middle Minoan III is a period of comparative stagnation, in which, perhaps, the southeastern Mediterranean world is long disordered by the Hyksos conquest of Egypt.9

  In the late Minoan Age everything begins again. Humanity, patient under every cataclysm, renews its hope, takes courage, and builds once more. New and finer palaces rise at Cnossus, Phaestus, Tylissus, Hagia Triada, and Gournia. The lordly spread, the five-storied height, the luxurious decoration of these princely residences suggest such wealth as Greece would not know till Pericles. Theaters are erected in the palace courts, and gladiatorial spectacles of men and women in deadly combat with animals amuse gentlemen and ladies whose aristocratic faces, quietly alert, still live for us on the bright frescoes of the resurrected walls. Wants are multiplied, tastes are refined, literature flourishes; a thousand industries graciously permit the poor to prosper by supplying comforts and delicacies to the rich. The halls of the king are noisy with scribes taking inventories of goods distributed or received; with artists making statuary, paintings, pottery, or reliefs; with high officials conducting conferences, hearing judicial appeals, or dispatching papers stamped with their finely wrought seals; while waspwaisted princes and jeweled duchesses, alluringly décolleté, crowd to a royal feast served on tables shining with bronze and gold. The sixteenth and fifteenth centuries before our era are the zenith of Aegean civilization, the classic and golden age of Crete.